Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  He walked toward the door, his steps slow and solemn and his wrists crossed at his waist as though he moved at the head of a procession. I stepped back to give him space, realizing as he neared that though he had seemed a large and physically imposing man while seated in the corner he stood no taller than I. The impression of size came from his weight, from the slow dignity of his movements, and his supreme poise. I could have clocked him before he reached the gun but I didn’t. I was too curious to know what he seemed only too willing to tell me. He swept a hand toward the door. “I’d like to show you something,” he said. “Would you control your dog, please?”

  He opened the door into his body like a shield. The Rott barked once and skittered to the side, uncertain of the danger. I stepped through the doorway and slapped the side of my leg, commanding him to heel. Sven waited until the dog sat at my feet and then, satisfied that he posed no risk, stepped from behind the safety of the door and walked a raked dirt path toward the rear of the base, each step carefully placed and ponderous as the beat of a kettle drum. He took no precautions to protect himself or to prevent me from running. Beyond the outbuildings rose a hump-shaped mound fronted by twin recessed doors.

  “How long did you know my sister?” I asked.

  “I’ve known Sharon off and on for just over fourteen years.”

  I thought about the timing of their relationship, said, “No.”

  “No what?”

  “Not Cassie.”

  “Are you asking whether or not she’s my daughter? You already know the answer. I saw it in your face, when I told you I knew Sharon.” He looked across his shoulder at me. In that dark night, eyes cloaked in sunglasses, he shouldn’t have been able to see anything. “I see it in your face right now.”

  “You’re the sperm bag,” I said.

  His feet scuffed against the dirt and his pace slowed as we neared the mound, which sloped above the surface of the ground as though designed to withstand a bomb blast.

  “That’s what she calls you,” I said. “What she calls her biological father. The sperm bag.” I wanted the words to wound him. “She doesn’t know it’s you.”

  “None of them know.” A silver key appeared between his fingers and he stuck a waist-high lock on the steel door and then second and third locks at the base and top. “The light switch is on the right.” He pushed the door open to a steel-grate landing and stairs descending into pitch-black. “Please be careful of your steps.”

  The landing rattled with the weight of my boots. The light switch glowed green beside the door. I flicked it up, igniting twin rows of dim amber lights not much brighter than the illumination strips in a darkened movie theater. The lights descended a stairwell lined in concrete. “None of them know what?” The clang of my boots on the metal stairs carried my question down the well to a space that sounded cavernous.

  “Why do you ask a question when you know the answer?” His voice sounded softly behind me, as softly as his steps on the stairs.

  “If I knew the answer I wouldn’t ask the question.”

  “You know the answer but you won’t admit it.”

  “If you’re trying to say something, just say it.”

  “I’m not trying to say anything. Instead, you’re trying to listen but you’re not yet tuned and so you improperly understand.”

  We stepped down to the next landing, the amber illumination strips dipping to another sharp-angled turn. “How much further down?”

  “Two more flights.” He laughed, soft and low. “To a place safe from nuclear attack and prying paparazzi.”

  “Eric is your son, your biological son.”

  “If you want to call it that, why not?”

  “And Luce?”

  He sighed more than spoke. Yes.

  “Did you tell them they were brother and sister?”

  “It’s implied in the teaching. Sexual contact between special disciples is forbidden.”

  “Didn’t work so well, did it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You can’t put teenagers together and not expect them to screw around. Look at Cassie and Jason. They’re inseparable and not in a healthy way for brother and sister. And what about Theresa and Sean? Did you tell them before they came out here or were you saving your special teaching for when it was too late to do any good?”

  “Theresa? Who is Theresa?”

  I glared over my shoulder. He pursed his lips and shook his head as though genuinely puzzled. “You mean the little girl from Indiana? The one who came out with Sean? The interloper?”

  “Sean is one of yours but she isn’t,” I guessed.

  “Sean is destined for greatness once he finds himself.”

  “Sean is destined for juvenile hall, but I’m sure you don’t care about that.” My boots rang against the final stair and settled on ground so solid I supposed it to be concrete, like the walls. “How can you possibly justify calling them your children? You abandoned them. They were raised by their mothers. And my sister wasn’t even capable of caring for her child. Cassie was being raised by foster parents. You gave these kids nothing except genetic material. And you stole from most of them the chance of having a real father.”

  “I didn’t grow up any differently,” he said. “And look at how I turned out.”

  “You turned out a monster,” I said. “Where are we?”

  “In the shrine.” His pale hand flicked toward a switch glowing green on the wall, fluttered as though about to throw on the lights, and fell back. “Conventional fatherhood was never my intention, but I didn’t abandon them. I planted the seed, let it germinate. When they were ready, I returned for them. And you’re wrong to say I’ve given them nothing. I’ve given them this.” His hand flicked forward again and this time struck the switch.

  Forty

  THE FIRST lights brightened gradually, scattered through a ceiling that vaulted fifty feet overhead, the increase in illumination like a breeze thinning the mists to a night shot through with stars. A spotlight flared to my right above a twenty-foot-tall portrait of Mary Pickford, depicted sitting on a bench, legs demurely crossed beneath a black satin dress, a single rope of pearls hanging white to her waist. She stared at the camera with a look both brave and unbearably sad, as though the one who took her photograph was slowly breaking her heart. As the spotlight’s intensity peaked another glowed to life on the wall to its left, illuminating the camel-humped crown of a cowboy hat and the grimly determined face of William S. Hart glowering above drawn six-guns. Then Harold Lloyd dangled from the minute hand of a town clock, Theda Bara vamped behind kohl-lined eyes, and Rudolph Valentino held a cigarette in profile, smoke flaring beneath eyes as heavily kohled as Theda Bara’s. A waist-high mahogany display case topped in glass fronted each portrait, the lights reflecting off the glass to hide the contents of each case behind a shield of glare.

  Sven strolled down the line of portraits and paused beneath one of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as the Thief of Bagdad, his head wrapped in a bandana as he scampered along a wall, grinning like the devil. “Families re-create themselves in their own images, I’ve found,” he said. “The children of violent, abusive fathers in turn beat their children. The children of the famous become famous themselves. Not always, of course, but the child of a movie star is much more likely to become a movie star than, say, the child of a class-three sex offender.” He pointed to the portrait looming above him. “It’s easy enough to see theatrical talent runs in families. The Fairbankses, the Barrymores, the Carradines, the Curtises, the Coppolas. Criminals beget criminals. Genius begets genius.” His head cocked to the side as though he watched me for some reaction. “Makes you think about your own family, doesn’t it?”

  “My mother was a hardworking, decent woman,” I said.

  “Your mother was beaten as a child. That’s why she chose your father. Because he beat her. But you already know that, don’t you?”

  Did I? Did I know that?

  “Sharon knew. She knew and she ran. Where did she
run? To men who beat her. They all beat her, except me. And where did you run?”

  “I didn’t run,” I said.

  “You killed a man, didn’t you? Put another into a coma, if the newspaper reports are correct. No, you’re not the type to run. You won’t allow anyone to beat you, not anymore. You’ll beat them instead. To death, if you have to.” His smile gleamed in the spotlight. “I haven’t been able to find out anything about your sex life. Don’t you have one?”

  I stepped up to the display case beneath the portrait of Valentino as the lights continued to flare one by one above the portraits of the stars, with those who had become cultural icons—Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, James Dean, and John Wayne—lighting up the far wall. “I’m not a breeder,” I said. The display case was shaped like a casket, a set of gray bones laid on red velvet beneath the glass. “And what are you re-creating? A family of con men and false prophets?”

  The reflection of his face appeared in the glass above Valentino’s bones. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

  “They’re just bones,” I said. “Not beautiful. Not ugly. Just dead.”

  He jerked his arm around the room, fully lit now in portraits and reliquaries from Mary Pickford to James Stewart. “The dead are beautiful. And powerful, when you know what to do with them. But you have to know what to do with them. You have to know how to work the magic. And that’s what runs through the veins of my family. The magic.” He reached beneath the case as though pushing a button, then slid back the glass top shielding the bones. “Fifty years ago two men and a woman intended to create a very special child, the incarnation of the spirit world. A moonchild.” His fingers wrapped a bone near the base of the reliquary. The bone was long and thick but still he gripped it tenderly, as though he held something as fragile as eggshell. “The man was a high priest of the Ordo Templis Orientis and the woman a volunteer. The two men chanted and conducted an intricate series of rituals for eleven days, and on the final day, the man and the woman engaged in a sacramental act of sex while the other man, the seer, guided all our spirits on the astral plane.”

  Three deep lines scored his forehead like red ink on parchment and the skin below his chin sagged to jowls. I guessed his age at mid-fifties. I asked, “Our spirits? You trying to tell me you were there, seeing this warped your poor little mind?”

  “It didn’t warp my mind, no. I was the star of the show. It formed my mind.” He lifted from the case the twin to the bone in his hand, long bones from the leg, Valentino’s left and right femur. “I was the one being conceived. My biological father was a disciple of the most powerful magician in the world, and the seer who guided us went on to create the most powerful new religion of the twentieth century.”

  “Scientology?”

  “I’m happy to hear you’re not completely ignorant.” He carefully positioned the bones into a V, the ball-and-socket heads at the base. “You might say that creating religions runs in the family.”

  I backed toward the center of the hall, framing in the eye of my mind a shot of Sven and his bones before the giant portrait of Valentino, the smoke from Valentino’s cigarette pluming above Sven’s head. “You’re a devotee of that English Satanist guy, what’s his name, Crowley?”

  “Would you like to see me triangulate the power of the stars?” The lines in his forehead creased bloodred with sudden concentration. He raised both bones high above his head, then as though struggling with terrible forces that threatened to cast him to the floor he crossed his trembling arms and brought both the bones down to his chest like ancient scepters. His stance steadied and he stood motionless for seconds, the spotlights mysteriously brightening to halo his head and shoulders. He tilted his head toward the ceiling and the drone that poured from him sounded barely human, as though he channeled vibrations from the depths of the earth, and whether caused by fear or a simple trick of theater the hall trembled beneath my feet. “All men shall be my slaves!” he chanted. “All women shall succumb to my charms! All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why! I and all my children shall be immortal!”

  Sometimes you go to the shot and sometimes the shot comes to you. When you have only one or two chances to get it right, you wait for the shot to come to you, and Sven bathed in light, the femurs of Valentino crossing his chest while their original owner looked on, wreathed in smoke like a demon, was the shot coming to me. I gripped the corner of a pack of Marlboros in the front breast pocket of my leather jacket, lifted free the fake flip-top to expose the lens, and pressed the shutter.

  “What in hell’s name are you doing?” Sven’s head snapped forward as he shouted, the change in angle casting his face into shadow.

  “Thought I’d have a smoke,” I said. “Do you mind?”

  “This is a shrine!” His shout shook the hall. “Would you pull out a pack of cigarettes in the Sistine Chapel? Would you smoke before the tomb of St. Francis?”

  I stepped back, pressed the shutter again.

  “Sorry, wasn’t thinking,” I said. “I’ll go outside and smoke.”

  I turned and walked toward the stairs.

  “I could shoot you for this blasphemy!”

  I glanced back over my shoulder. The bones of Valentino still crossed his chest. No actor likes to be walked out on midperformance, but he’d have to set one of the bones down to pull the gun and shoot me. “Your inferior mind is showing,” I said.

  He strode forward, his skin flushing slick and red. I thought he was going to brain me with Valentino’s femur. “I’m trying to make peace with you,” he said. “I brought you here to show you what we’ve created, what you can take part in, if you choose.”

  “Bones aren’t my thing,” I said.

  He stopped a few feet distant, said, “But celebrities are.”

  “Do you expect me to believe you had nothing to do with my sister’s death, with Luce’s murder, that you didn’t know Eric was going to take Theresa out to the desert and execute her, that he planned to firebomb my apartment?”

  He suddenly didn’t know what to do with the bones in his hands. He couldn’t continue to hold them across his chest, like King Tut preparing for the sarcophagus. He lowered first the left femur, then the right, until they dangled from his waist like skeletal images of his own legs. “True believers sometimes go to unwanted extremes, particularly in the early days of any religion,” he said. “But even so, Eric was not going to hurt that little girl. He planned to leave her out there to walk back, true, but what’s the worst that could have happened to her?” He shrugged and smiled. “A few blisters, that’s all.”

  “What about Stonewell? Is he a true believer?”

  “A recent convert.”

  “His brother, then.”

  “His brother has been very helpful.”

  I glanced around at the setup, said, “He’s your financial backer?”

  “Just one of many.” He stepped closer to me, close enough that I could smell the sweat on him. “Many rich and famous people believe in the sacramental power of celebrity relics and in my powers to tap them, more than you might imagine. Why fight me? You can become the photographer to the stars, if you wish. I can make that happen for you. No more hanging around the bushes, ambushing celebrities.” A drop of sweat sloped down his forehead and disappeared into the abyss behind his sunglasses. He swept his forearm across his brow, the bone in his hand flashing beneath the lights. “I’ve asked around. You’re a good photographer. Why be stuck on the outside when you can be inside? One phone call and I can set up photo shoots with a dozen movie stars. Why be an outcast when you can become a member of the club? You could be the next Bruce Webber or Richard Avedon. You could be shooting for Vanity Fair. I can make you into the next Annie Leibovitz!”

  “You can set me up with star-sanctioned photo ops?” That sounded like one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities people talk about—or a deal with the devil. “What do you want in return, that I get the paper to drop the story?”

  “I have something a little m
ore grand in mind.” He edged another half foot closer. “You’re really beautiful, you know that? You try to hide it because beauty attracts men, and relationships scare you because all you’ve ever known are lies and abuse. But you can’t hide, not from me. Your beauty is only a small part of your value. You have talent and courage. And something else. You have a certain darkness of the soul, just like me, just like all my children. You’re just what I’ve been waiting for all these years. A woman of determination and dark fire. A woman strong enough to share the vision. A woman wise and ambitious enough to make the vision her own.”

  “You want to make a deal with me?”

  “That and much more.” He edged another half foot closer, so close I could feel the heat of his breath on my neck. “I want to make love to you. Cosmic, triangulating love. I want to have children with you.”

  I kicked him in the source of so much trouble in the world, the source of a pack of kids let loose on the world like scavenger dogs, the source of my niece, yes, but also the source of my sister’s death and Luce’s life and death. His knees knocked together and the air vacuum-sealed in his lungs, but he didn’t go down, so I uppercut his gut just beneath his rib cage. The blow dropped him to his knees. I waited for him to reach for the pistol under his belt and knew if he did I’d make him eat it. I didn’t hate him. I just wanted him exposed for the demon he was. But he didn’t reach for the gun. A single tear tracked down his cheek. Maybe I’d broken his heart with his balls. I left him kneeling on the floor, ankles splayed out like broken wings.

  “You’re a loser,” he shouted when I neared the top the stairs. “You’re all losers. You and your whole fucking family!”

  I realized something when I shut the doors behind me.

  He was right.