The Smack

by RICHARD LANGE

  “You do what you want,” Petty said.

  Carrie sighed and glanced at her watch. “What I want is coffee,” she said.

  Six hours later Petty was sitting in a small waiting room near where the operation was taking place. A nurse had promised that the surgeon would stop in and give him an update after the procedure. He’d spent the morning shuttling between the waiting room and the cafeteria, trying to avoid Carrie. She and Hug had kept their distance. The table they set up housekeeping at in the cafeteria was as far from his as they could get, and Carrie hadn’t said a word to him when she occasionally poked her head into the waiting room. The one time he’d ventured outside for fresh air, Hug was smoking across the street, but the big man acted like he hadn’t seen him.

  Petty stared up at a TV on the wall. A family had been gathered here earlier, Korean, anxious for updates about a relative, but they’d disappeared when Petty came back from a trip to the restroom. The TV was tuned to a news channel, and Petty watched the same ten seconds of footage of a plane crash in Russia he’d been watching all day: a slow pan over smoking wreckage, a soldier pointing at a suitcase lying in a snowy field, a woman crying in an airport.

  Sam’s surgeon stepped through the door. Petty scrambled to his feet.

  “She’s out of surgery, and everything went fine,” the surgeon said. “We removed as much of the tumor as we could, and now we’ll have it analyzed to see what we’re dealing with.”

  “How long will that take?” Petty said.

  “A couple of days,” the surgeon said. “She’ll spend tonight in the ICU. You can look in on her there, if you make it quick.”

  A few minutes later a nurse buzzed Petty into a dimly lit cave filled with the sounds of chirping monitors and hissing ventilators. Patients’ vital signs flashed like stock prices on an array of screens above the nurses’ station. Sam lay on a bed in an alcove partitioned off from the rest of the room by a curtain. Her eyes were closed, and her head was wrapped in bandages.

  “She’s pretty sleepy,” the nurse said. “She’s been through a lot.”

  Petty touched Sam’s hand. She showed no outward reaction, but when he moved his fingers over hers, a reading on the monitor next to her bed jumped from fifty to fifty-two. Petty took this as a message from a long way off that she knew he was there.

  He left the hospital without seeing Carrie again, had no idea if she and Hug were still around. Back at the motel he ate a sandwich Tinafey had waiting for him, called his mom to fill her in on Sam’s condition, then lay down on the bed.

  “Come here,” he said to Tinafey.

  She got in behind him, her chest to his back, and curved her body to his. With her fingers swirling lightly in his hair, he was asleep in no time.

  Beck was in his usual spot at Musso & Frank. The place was dead, so he was telling jokes to the bartender, and the bartender was a good enough bartender, a smart enough bartender, to pretend he hadn’t heard them before.

  “So she goes, ‘Oh, shit, I left my baby on the bus!’”

  “On the bus. Ha!”

  Beck was wearing a black polo shirt and a tweed golf cap. He feigned shock when he saw Petty and Tinafey come in, then smiled and waved.

  “Memphis,” he said. “Looking good, girl.”

  Tinafey sat beside him; Petty stayed standing.

  “So you two are still in town,” Beck said.

  “Things keep coming up,” Petty said.

  “Well, if you’ve got to be stuck somewhere, this isn’t so terrible. What are we drinking?”

  Petty ordered Scotch, Tinafey had red wine, and Beck got himself another martini. He was tipsy, and Petty was glad to see it. Only two tables in the restaurant had diners at them. The waiters and busboys were gathered at the end of the bar. They talked among themselves, one guy showing another something on his phone.

  Beck kidded with Tinafey about her saying last time that she wanted to be an actress. Petty hadn’t planned to bring her along tonight, but while he was getting ready she decided she wanted to come, saying she needed to get away from the motel for a while. Petty gave in quickly, thinking a pretty girl might be just the thing to grease the skids with Beck. He even hinted that he wouldn’t mind if she flirted with the guy a bit, played up to him some.

  “How many auditions have you booked?” Beck said to her. “I bet you’ve got agents stopping you on the street.”

  “Not exactly,” Tinafey said. “You need to hook me up with your friends.”

  “All my friends are perverts,” Beck said.

  “I can handle perverts,” Tinafey said.

  “Maybe so,” Beck said. “But I don’t want any trouble with this guy.” He squeezed Petty’s shoulder. “Did he tell you I’m giving him acting lessons?”

  “You gotta teach me, too,” Tinafey said. “I’m better than him.”

  “Better looking, that’s for sure,” Beck said.

  The drinks arrived. Petty took a sip of his and said, “I’m glad we bumped into you. I’ve got something to ask you.”

  “Go on,” Beck said.

  “I was wondering how much you get for a part.”

  “That depends,” Beck said. “Is it a feature? TV? A commercial? A day’s work or a week’s? How big’s the part? The union’s got different rates for everything.”

  “A day,” Petty said. “A couple hours.”

  “Did somebody offer you something?”

  “No,” Petty said. “I’m offering you something.”

  “Sorry,” Beck said. “I don’t do porn. Anymore.” He chuckled at his own joke and bit into one of the olives from his drink. “Better watch out for this dude,” he said to Tinafey out of the corner of his mouth.

  “A couple of hours,” Petty said again. “How much?”

  “You’re making a film?” Beck said.

  “Two hours of your time. Give me a figure.”

  Beck chewed on his toothpick and thought this over.

  “A thousand bucks,” he finally said.

  “I’ll give you ten thousand,” Petty said.

  Beck took the toothpick out of his mouth.

  “Great,” he said. “But what the hell are you up to?”

  A pack of barhoppers all wearing the same T-shirt swept in off the Boulevard and bellied up two deep to order drinks. Petty didn’t want to have to yell over them to be heard.

  “Not here,” he said to Beck. “Let’s go to your place.”

  Petty and Tinafey followed Beck’s Jag up into the hills. One of Beck’s taillights was out. Petty made a mental note to tell him about it. Tinafey marveled at the houses they passed—the castle, the casbah, the glass box ablaze. The views at the top knocked her out. She gasped at every glittering expanse and begged Petty to pull over so she could take a picture.

  “Later,” he said. “On the way down.”

  The gate to the property had been fixed since last time and opened on its own. They parked between the main house and Beck’s apartment above the garage. Beck had hung a scraggly string of Christmas lights on his deck, tiny bulbs that twinkled in the cold, clear night. He led them up the stairs. He had a slight limp Petty hadn’t noticed before. It made sense; the guy was older than he looked.

  “The queen bee’s still out of town,” he said over his shoulder, “so we can howl at the moon if we feel like it.”

  “Howl at the moon,” Tinafey said. “You’re so crazy.”

  “Good crazy, though,” Beck said. “Good crazy, right?”

  While he was in the kitchen fetching drinks, Tinafey gawked at the photo of him and his ex-wife on the wall. “Hold on,” she said. “You were married to Mimi Bird?”

  “For ten—uhh…very special years,” Beck said.

  “And she lives in that house out there?”

  “When she’s around.”

  “Oh. My. God,” Tinafey said. “I love Mimi Bird.” She circled the living room, examining the other photos. “Is this Morgan Freeman?” she called out.

  “Nice guy,” Beck sai
d. He came back into the room and handed Tinafey a glass of wine and Petty a beer. He’d poured himself a tumbler of Stoli. “A very sweet man.”

  They got down to business, seated at the dining-room table under a low-hanging lamp that pinned their shadows to the floor. Petty first sketched out, without going into detail, what he wanted Beck to do, just to see if he’d be up for it.

  “You’ll go to a house and pick up a couple of bags,” he said. “Bags of money that have been hidden in the garage.”

  “Bags of money the guy who owns the house doesn’t know are there,” Beck said.

  “That’s right,” Petty said.

  “How am I supposed to get on the property?” Beck said. “You said the owner never leaves.”

  “You’ll pretend to be a cop,” Petty said.

  “Pretend to be a cop?” Beck said.

  Petty got up and grabbed the Hollywood & Vice prop gun and badge off the bookshelf and brought them back to the table.

  “‘Knock, knock,’” he said. “‘Detective Blackburn, LAPD.’ Just like in the movie. The only difference is, there’s no camera.”

  “The only difference is, this is for real,” Beck said.

  They’d work up a story, Petty explained, write it out like a script if Beck wanted, go over it until it was perfect. Something that would throw a scare into Tony’s uncle and make him eager to cooperate.

  “It doesn’t have to be too elaborate,” Petty said. “A cop with a badge and a gun showing up at his door’ll be enough. He’s not gonna question that, look for trouble.”

  Beck wanted more information. Whose house was it? Whose money? Why couldn’t Petty pick it up himself? Petty used the same dodge he’d used with Tony: the less you know, the better. What sealed the deal was Petty dropping five grand on the table up front. When Beck reached out to touch the bills, Petty knew he had him.

  “And just so you know,” Petty said, “you’re the good guy in this thing.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” Beck said. “Good guys are boring.”

  They celebrated coming to an agreement with another round of drinks. Tinafey asked Beck about acting lessons, wanted to know if you needed a high school diploma to take them.

  “High school?” Beck said. “I barely made it out of sixth grade. If actors had to be book smart, Hollywood would dry up and blow away.”

  “Show her something,” Petty said. “Like you did me.”

  “Nah,” Beck said. “Some other time.”

  He didn’t mean it; he just wanted to be asked twice.

  “Come on,” Petty said.

  “Show me,” Tinafey said. She reached out and squeezed Beck’s leg, giving him her biggest smile.

  “Oh, all right,” Beck said. “A little somethin’ somethin’.”

  He carried a chair into the living room and had Tinafey sit in it. Petty moved to the couch to watch.

  “The first thing you have to learn to do is relax,” Beck said. “You can’t act if you’re tensed up. That’s like trying to do math in your head while lifting a piano. Seven times forty-three—you can’t do it. In the same way, when your muscles are tense, your emotions can’t get through, and you won’t be able to communicate them to an audience.”

  Beck stood next to Tinafey and put a finger to each of her temples. “These are two of your major stress points,” he said. “When there’s tension here, you unconsciously wrinkle your forehead, and you don’t want that. You want to be in complete control of everything your face does. So relax these spots. Let all the tension flow out of them.”

  He moved a finger to the bridge of her nose, between her eyes. “Here’s another problem spot. If there’s tension here, you’ll blink too much and put a furrow right where I’m pressing. To relax this one, all you have to do is close your eyes halfway, like you’re about to fall asleep. Hold that while letting all the tension flow out of the area.”

  He then placed his fingers on either side of Tinafey’s nose and dragged them down past her mouth to her chin. “These muscles are a real problem,” he said. “They control the mouth, so they’re always ready to go to work, which means they’re always tense. Do this…” He let his face go slack so that his cheeks sagged and his mouth hung open. He looked like a drunk roused from a nap on the bar. Tinafey followed his lead.

  “Let the skin dangle,” Beck said. “Pretend there are no muscles in there at all.”

  Tinafey giggled. She tried to stop herself but couldn’t.

  “That’s fine,” Beck said. “Go ahead and laugh. Laughing releases tension, too.”

  “I did good, right?” Tinafey said.

  “You did great,” Beck said. “Of course, that’s only the basics. In class you learn to relax your whole body. Back, shoulders, arms, wrists, hands, fingers.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then you learn to control all those parts, to use them.”

  “Show me more.”

  “That’s enough for now.”

  “Why you keep makin’ me beg?”

  “It’s better that way.”

  “Come on, baby, show me something else.”

  “Okay,” Beck said. “One more quick thing.”

  He walked back to the table and got the holster and badge. He buckled the holster over his shirt and stuck the badge on his belt. Tinafey sat next to Petty on the couch. He put his arm around her, but she didn’t even notice, focused as she was on Beck.

  Beck closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. His spine straightened, and his shoulders went back. He opened his eyes and knocked on an imaginary door.

  Someone answered, and Beck started talking nonsense. “Goo goo” and “Ga ga.” He greeted the person who opened the door, introduced himself, and explained why he was there, all in baby talk. Petty could follow it, though, by watching Beck’s facial expressions and gestures. He knew exactly what the dude was doing: acting out the visit to Tony’s uncle, rehearsing how it might go.

  The performance lasted a few minutes. Beck coaxed, Beck threatened, Beck cajoled, then he stepped across the imaginary threshold, patting Tony’s uncle on the back as he did so. Tinafey clapped when he turned to them and bowed to signal that the show was over.

  “That’s a Strasberg exercise,” he said. “You take something from your life or a scene from a play and act it out in gibberish. It divorces your actions from the words you’re saying and the clichéd movements attached to those words.”

  “That was great,” Tinafey said. She held out her arm. “I got bumps watchin’ you.”

  “Hey!” Beck said. “That’s the best review I’ve had in years.”

  He and Tinafey got to talking about one of his movies, and Petty knew it could continue all night—the stories, the drinking. Any other time, that would have been fine, but he needed Beck to be in shape for tomorrow. Tinafey groaned when he said they should get going.

  “Hold on,” Beck said. “Let me take you to see the queen bee’s Oscar.”

  Petty saw the excitement on Tinafey’s face and resigned himself to spending a few more minutes in Beck’s thrall. Beck sloshed more Stoli into his glass while laying down the rules for the excursion. No touching, no wandering off, no pictures.

  “The wrong person sees your selfie, and I’m on the street,” he said.

  Petty and Tinafey followed him down the stairs and across the yard to the main house. Their trail was visible even in the darkness, marked by where their feet had knocked the early dew off the grass. The imposing wooden front door of the house was crisscrossed with wrought-iron straps. Beck told them the door had come from a church in Mexico and had cost twenty thousand dollars. He told them his wife called the house El Casa de Sueños, the House of Dreams.

  Tinafey clutched Petty’s arm and shivered. It felt like they were breaking into the place. Beck squinted, trying to find the right key on his ring. He had to put down his drink and get eye level with the dead bolt to slip it in.

  As soon as the door opened he hurried to the blinking alarm panel and entered
the code to disarm it. He turned on a light in the two-story entryway. A wide staircase curved up to the second floor. Somber seascapes, all in frothy gold frames, lined the walls.

  “She collects storms,” Beck said, gesturing at the paintings.

  He led them into the living room. Heavy wooden furniture, Saltillo tile floors, Navajo rugs. A massive fireplace gaped like an open mouth, and an array of awards gleamed on its mantel, a special bank of lights shining down on them. Gold statuettes, crystal obelisks, engraved plaques. In the center was the Oscar.

  They approached it like it was baby Jesus in the manger. Petty almost stopped Beck when he reached for it, worried the man was drunk enough to do something stupid. But so what if he did? It was his house. Had been, anyway.

  ACADEMY AWARD

  TO

  MIMI BIRD

  BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN

  ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

  “UNCIVIL WAR”

  2002

  Beck read the tag screwed to the base out loud and handed the statuette to Tinafey. She gazed at it for a few seconds, then acted like she was going to put it in her purse.

  “Hey, now,” Beck said.

  “What?” Tinafey said, feigning innocence. She lifted the statuette to her lips and kissed it. “That’s gotta be good luck,” she said.

  Beck showed them Mimi’s Emmy, too, and a medal from President Bush. He told them she was a Republican but didn’t want anyone to know. He said she argued out loud with her dead mother when she was blotto and only showered once a week if she could get away with it. He wanted to take them upstairs to see her closet, claimed it was bigger than the house he’d grown up in, but Petty told him no, some other time, they had to go.

  “You’re right,” Beck said. “It’s a closet. Fucking shoes, fucking dresses. I’m too sensitive, I know.”

  He walked them out to the car and asked if either of them had a cigarette. Petty told him to get some sleep.

  “I’ve got pills for that,” Beck said. “Soon as you split.”

  They left him standing in the driveway, staring up at the big house. It was lit by the spotlights in the yard, like it was someplace where something important had happened. Petty wondered if it bothered Beck to live in its shadow, if he ever dreamed of watching it burn.