[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  As I sank down on the bed, I had to admit I fancied a road trip. The last few days had been crazy as Lindy had continued her drive to push me down every publicity avenue imaginable. The Face of People Search thing had opened even more doors for us, and we’d taken every opportunity we were offered. There was still no sign of Leon, though, but I tried to put that out of my mind. If I thought too much about why he wasn’t coming forward, I’d go mad, and after the week I’d just had, I hadn’t the energy for madness. Plus I’d been in Vegas for weeks now, and it was starting to suffocate me in more ways than just the cloying heat. Every fecker in the hotel knew who I was, what I was up to each day, who I was up to it with, where it would be when I was up to it – they knew bloody more about me than I did myself. And okay, Colm was a pain, but at least he was an indifferent one.

  It’s strange, you know. Everybody wants to be somebody these days, but if they got their wish, they mightn’t even like it. The taste I’d had of notoriety at home was nothing compared to what I was experiencing over here, and having dipped my toe in the madness that surrounds being a known face in the States, I was feeling an urge to retreat and keep the rest of my foot dry. A day away from it all might do me good. The other side of that argument though was that I would be all alone in the middle of the desert for a whole day with someone that I knew a big secret about. When I know a big secret about somebody and really shouldn’t say something about it, I always do. The odds of me getting through the day without letting what I knew slip in some way were slim, and then the rest of my time in Vegas with Colm would probably be unbearable. Maybe I’d be better off not going at all . . .

  It was much of a muchness, and whenever I find myself in the muchness zone, there’s only one thing for it. Time to take the scientific approach.

  There were three music channels on the hotel TV. There were also three news channels. I would close my eyes, pick up the remote, and fumble with the buttons until I turned on a channel. If it was a news channel, I wouldn’t go. If it was a music channel, I’d risk hanging out with the grouchball for the day. If it was any other type of channel, I would go to the next programme up until I hit either news or music.

  I turned the TV off with the remote, then threw it on the bed and closed my eyes. I fumbled for it and pressed the first button my finger came in contact with. Music flooded the room. I opened my eyes to see if it was music on a news channel. It wasn’t.

  It looked like it was time to set the alarm clock.

  As I got into bed, I had to admit that if I’d hit a news channel, I would have been slightly disappointed.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I had to laugh when I saw the cut of Colm the next morning in Reception. Every other man in the city was doubtless wearing the lightest pair of shorts they could get their sweaty hands on to help them cope with the heat, but Colm was wearing a pair of brown cords that he’d sheared at the knees to create a pair of makeshift shorts. He’d coupled it with a tight brown T-shirt though, and somehow he managed to pull off the look and make it trendy. As usual, he was getting a few admiring glances from passing ladies in micro-skirts – at a time when he deserved looks of disbelief. You had to hand it to him. Presence was a great thing – you got away with murder if you had it.

  He looked at his watch as I walked towards him. He was so engrossed in it that I knew he hadn’t spotted me yet. Next thing I knew, he had turned on his heel and was making his way to the front door of the lobby.

  “Colm!”

  “Oh. You’ve decided to come. I thought you weren’t, so I was just about to leave.”

  “I’m only . . .” I looked at my watch, “five minutes late!”

  He shrugged. “Eight o’clock is eight o’clock. Right, well, you’re here now, so let’s go get this car.”

  I sat down in the waiting area of the car-hire shop while Colm collected the car keys at the counter, relieved to have a few moments of air-con. It was early, but the dry heat was already at feverish proportions. I hoped this car he’d hired had a nice big sunroof to help circulate air in the car.

  Colm jangled a set of keys at me as he turned away from the counter. We walked outside towards the cars. I looked longingly around me at all of the amazing cars on the forecourt. This was my idea of heaven – not only were there the latest models of BMWs, Lexuses and Mercs, but a considerable portion of the forecourt was given over to classic convertible cars. I felt like a magnet was drawing me over towards the array of MGs, Triumphs and Buicks, and before I knew it, I was standing over beside them, identifying the model of each one. Colm could wait a few minutes, surely – it’d give him the opportunity to find his car and get it started.

  I examined each and every one, touching the bonnets adoringly. But then, as I lovingly laid my hands on an Alfa Romeo Spider, I looked up, only to see Colm sitting behind the wheel and staring at me in amusement.

  “Stop mauling my car, and get in, for the love of God.” He was smirking and looking very pleased with himself.

  “No way! This is your idea of a regular car-hire type of car, then?”

  “This is a ‘me’ car.”

  “If this is you, then I like you very much.” I jumped in, then sank back into my seat and inhaled the smell of the car, feeling deliriously happy. This day had started much better than I’d expected it to.

  We set off, heading down Tropicana Avenue and leaving the rush of the Strip behind. I reached for the map and other documentation that Colm had thrown on the dashboard. The dam was about thirty miles from Vegas, which was far too short a distance to travel in a car like this. I looked at the route – we would be passing by Henderson, one of Vegas’s best-known suburbs, and then Boulder City, before continuing up US 93 until we reached the dam.

  “I read about Boulder City before I came over here,” I said. “Do you know that gambling is prohibited there?”

  “Yeah, it was made illegal by the government in the 1930s, when they built Boulder City to accommodate the workers who were constructing the Hoover Dam. Alcohol was illegal too – the government, quite naturally, didn’t want anyone who’d been boozing and gambling all night in Vegas to be working on the dam. The residents of Boulder City were clean-living folks. The ideal employees.”

  “Alcohol was banned right up until 1969,” I said. “I bet they had one hell of a party there when that ban was overturned.”

  Colm started to sing about partying like it was 1969, to the tune of Prince’s ‘1999’. He hadn’t a note in his head, but that fact was rendered unremarkable by the sheer fact of his random singing. Colm wasn’t a random singer, not by a long shot.

  “What amuses me is that Nevada allows some legal prostitution, but a town that’s the throw of a poker chip away from Vegas prohibits gambling. It’s a funny old world.” There he was, talking away as if the random singing had never happened.

  I nodded very emphatically. “It sure is,” I said to the stranger that was evolving in the seat beside me.

  Colm talked more on the way to the dam than he’d done in all the time we’d spent together. He reminded me of an old bachelor who used to live near us years ago, Fred. After Fred’s brother died, the poor old man didn’t see many people from one day to the next, except on pension day. So whenever any of us did run into him, he’d keep talking and talking non-stop about absolutely anything that came into his mind while he had the opportunity of conversing with another human being. Colm meandered from run-of-the-mill chitter-chatter about the scenery to whether Catch bars were better than Toffee Crisps without me having the faintest idea how we’d gone from one topic to the next (ah, Topics – I’d prefer them to Catch bars and Toffee Crisps put together, personally), then on to talk about driving down Route 66, which he’d done alone a few summers ago. And yes, we were sharing the same car and the same journey and all that, but it wasn’t like being stuck in an elevator – we had options to ignore each other if we wanted to. A loud radio usually solved that issue for me whenever I’ve been in it before. But Colm was like a bath
unplugged, and it was strangely nice.

  “Going on this trip has been one of the things I’ve wanted to do since I came here,” he said as we got closer to the dam.

  “It’s definitely something we should see while we’re in Vegas,” I agreed. “We’re lucky – this whole thing is a nice little junket, all the same.”

  “Yeah, it is. It still doesn’t make up for the fact that I’m not in the job I want to be in, but it does help.”

  “How did you end up working for Éire TV?” I asked.

  “I was just back from a stint in Australia when someone I knew in Éire TV asked me if he could refer me for the job. He was looking for the referral fee if I got hired, of course – it wasn’t that he was all that concerned about me being in full-time employment – but it sounded like a decent enough job at the time.”

  “That was before they made you a jack of all trades, I presume?”

  He nodded. “It’s not just me – everyone in the company is doing several jobs now. There isn’t the budget there to hire more people. I’ve complained, of course, and threatened to go to HR, the whole hog – but they’re so smart about how they operate in Éire TV. They’ve make us sign role-related commitments, which means that in order to be deemed an effective worker in our positions, we have to meet a certain number of commitments for our jobs. If we don’t meet them, they can give us warnings, and ultimately fire us. And then, of course, they twist all of these new responsibilities into somehow coming under one of the commitments we’ve signed up to.”

  “But project management is a completely different job to being a cameraman! Are you even qualified to do that? And I don’t mean that in an offensive way, I’m just asking.”

  “Yes, I am. I’ve done a project-management course, but it was my fall-back plan in case I couldn’t get a job as a cameraman. Let’s face it, positions for cameramen – or people, whatever – aren’t exactly falling out of the sky like raindrops in the West of Ireland on a winter’s day. I certainly wasn’t planning on doing the two jobs at once, though.”

  “Sounds like tough going.”

  “It is, but what job isn’t these days?” He laughed. “Listen to me. All I need now is a pot-smoking hippy cap so that I can put it on and ask myself where it was along the way that I compromised on my dreams. I’d say you have a pretty rough time of it yourself with that old boot Isolde.”

  “Hey, don’t call my boss an old boot!”

  He frowned. “Loyalty to your boss? Has she brainwashed you?”

  “Loyalty? Oh God, no. Nothing like that. You just need to call her The Curtain.”

  And that kept the chat going until we neared the dam. When we got our first glimpse of Lake Mead, we both shut up. It was breathtaking, or would have been, if the heat hadn’t robbed the breath from us anyway. The thought of a reservoir of any kind didn’t conjure up the most picturesque of images for me, but Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US, changed that presumption. It was a mass of blue, a palette of navies, taupes, and turquoises, a reflection of the beautiful day we’d been lucky enough to experience. As we approached Hoover Dam, I was transfixed at how still the gleaming lake appeared as it sat behind the dam, extending as far as the eye could see.

  We pulled into a parking garage located near the dam’s visitor centre. It didn’t feel like we should be there already; the journey had flown by. And painlessly, at that, despite my reservations. Still though, the day was young – we were bound to have a row at some stage. It would almost be an anticlimax if we didn’t.

  The second we got out of the car, Colm was like a puppy unleashed after hours of being trapped in the boot. “Let’s go down to the bridge to get a good look at the dam!” He was practically jumping up and down as he tried to contain his excitement. For pure devilment, I slowed down as much as possible, then waited for the onslaught of abuse – but no, he was too busy gawking all around him to rise to the bait.

  “Pretty damn impressive, huh?”

  I groaned. “Have you been waiting all day to toss that line out?”

  “No. Just had a flash of inspiration there.”

  After ogling the dam from the vantage point of the overhead bridge for about twenty minutes, we went inside the visitor centre and bought our tickets for the tour, then made our way up to the first floor where we watched a film about the dam’s contribution to the development of the Western US back in the 1930s. More than 20,000 men were employed in the project that would control flooding and provide water for Southern California and the Southwest, at a time when the US was mired in the Great Depression. I’m no engineer, but it was pretty obvious that building the dam had been one hell of an engineering achievement to pull off. When the film was over, and Colm had scrutinised each and every map and photo on the entire floor, we moved up to the exhibit gallery on the next level. The inspection process began again in earnest here, as we pored over models of hydroelectric turbine generators and suchlike. We spent so long examining the exhibits that daylight hurt my eyes when we finally went up to the observation deck. While Colm examined a model of the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge, I went outside to admire the panorama of the dam, Lake Mead, the Colorado River and the Mojave desert. The expanse of empty desert space captivated me – the stillness, the immutability, the absolute freedom of it. You could stare at that panorama and feel, just for a few minutes, as if you didn’t have a single problem in the whole world. It felt good to escape from the thoughts that were always haunting me. I don’t know how long I stood there, hypnotised – it must have been a good fifteen minutes. I’d probably still be standing there if Colm hadn’t come outside to find me.

  “You okay?”

  I mentally shook myself out of my trance. “Yeah, of course.”

  “You looked like you had a lot on your mind.”

  “The whole Leon thing is starting to wear me down.” The words were out before I even knew I was going to say them.

  “Oh?”

  “Actually, forget I said anything. I don’t want to go there right now.”

  He shrugged. “Fair enough. I could live with taking in this view for a while myself anyway.”

  “Let’s do that, then.”

  We eventually walked back to the car, satisfied that we’d seen everything we could see and learned everything we could learn about the dam. I looked at my watch – it was only lunchtime. I didn’t fancy going back to Vegas yet. The memory of the panorama of the desert was fresh in my mind, and all I could think about was being in the middle of it . . .

  “Fancy a spin?” Colm must have read my thoughts.

  “Where to?”

  “Let’s just drive, and see where we end up.”

  “Okay.”

  We took the road that would eventually lead you to the Grand Canyon.

  “I was originally planning on doing a canyon trip after Hoover Dam and staying for the weekend,” Colm said, “but I thought it better not to risk it after that whole sickness thing. Pity, because I even had the hotel picked out – a really cool place called Crumbler’s Lodge. Before I go home though, I’m seeing the canyon, and that’s that.”

  And that was that with the chat too. Colm had obviously reached his talk quota for the day – he didn’t say a single word after that as we drove along. Strangely, it was a comfortable silence. Even the crazy 70s tunes that Colm had brought along for the trip seemed like perfect driving music. As we drove on, the vista became wilder and lonelier. It was perfect. I didn’t know how far Colm was planning on driving, but I didn’t care. It felt good to be getting further and further away from Vegas.

  I didn’t say a word for about half an hour, until something electrified me – something that wouldn’t be very exciting by most people’s standards, but it nearly made me jump out the window.

  “It’s a Joshua tree!”

  “Want me to pull up?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Andie, I was joking. It’s only a tree!”

  “But it’s the U2 tree! Pull over!”

 
Colm swerved the car off the highway. We parked on the hard shoulder, as close as possible to the tree. It was about thirty feet behind the rickety fencing that marked the boundary of desert territory. And though it was only a tree, spotting a real-life one felt to me like bumping into a pop star whose posters had been plastered on my bedroom walls for years as a teenager.

  We climbed over the fence and made our way towards it.

  When U2 released the album The Joshua Tree in 1987, I was too busy terrorising my brother, hiding buttons from my mother’s overflowing “To Be Sewed Back On” family-sized Cara matchbox in her brown-bread mix, and generally keeping myself too busy with the whole business of being a seven-year-old to take any notice. But when I fell in love with their 1993 album, Zooropa, it led to what would be described by some (i.e. my family, friends, the neighbours who complained about the soccer-pitch-sized U2 flag that I painstakingly patched together from scraps of material and hung from the roof of our house, people like that) as an obsession. Of course, I made it my business to get the back catalogue, learn every lyric, pore over the meaning of every word of every song, and adorn my walls with posters of the band and the album covers. Then, I developed a fascination with Joshua trees – well, it was a natural concomitant of being U2’s biggest fan ever, I suppose. (Of course, nobody had ever heard of them before I set my cap on them, oh no.) I scourged my mother to scour the library for books with information on the Joshuas, and she’d come home with the knuckles of her hands scraping the pavement with the weight of the bags of these big books she’d have dragged home for me. Then I’d disappear from the world for hours while I trawled through the books to see if there was anything I could learn from them. It was a great time for Adam, who I was still terrorising. When I eventually emerged from the cocoon of my bedroom, I’d be full of facts about the Joshers that I’d throw randomly into completely unrelated conversations.

  Like the following very typical episode that sprang to mind as I stared with Colm at the real-live Joshua tree.