Pacific (9780802194800)

by Drury, Tom

  “We’re meeting some friends of mine,” said Eamon. “How do you feel about drugs?”

  “I’ve done grass,” said Micah.

  “We say ‘weed.’ Interesting.”

  “Well, we say ‘weed’ too. I don’t know why I said ‘grass.’”

  “Six of one.”

  “It didn’t do anything. I thought I was smoking it wrong.”

  “It’s not all good.”

  Eamon led Micah down a grass path between white wooden fences. A few horses stood stoic in the pastures and others could be heard knocking about in stalls. A husky with white eyes barked in a friendly way and lay down panting.

  The three friends of Eamon sat peacefully on the front steps of a little house. With crescent eyes and thick black braids, Charlotte looked like one of the girls in the Boston Persuasion shoe commercials. Thea’s small face shone in the twilight. Curtis’s hair lay dense across his forehead, the color of wheat.

  “This is my stepbrother Micah,” said Eamon. “Son of Joan Gower.”

  “And Tiny Darling,” said Micah.

  “Your father’s name is Tiny Darling?” said Thea. “That’s fantastic.”

  “Well, his name is Charles, really,” said Micah modestly. “Only my mom called him that.”

  “Micah’s from the Middle West,” said Eamon.

  Charlotte was wearing multicolored necklaces of glass beads, and she took one off and put it on Micah.

  “Welcome to Southern California,” she said.

  They walked beside the house and made themselves comfortable in lawn chairs. Curtis had a backpack, from which he took a translucent red bong, a gallon of distilled water, and a glassine bag of dried leaves.

  “This strain is called King Scout,” he said. “It’s a short high and kind of intense. It grows on the sides of mountains in a cool climate. Very hard to get.”

  “We’re not the drug culture,” said Charlotte. “Cocaine we would never do. Meth we would never do.”

  “Vision drugs, as opposed to metabolism drugs,” said Thea, and the others agreed.

  “You don’t have to, Micah,” said Eamon.

  “They say you can do old drugs with new people, and new drugs with old people, but not new drugs with new people,” said Thea.

  Curtis prepared the bong. “It’s not one size fits all,” he said. “You shouldn’t enter into it with fear. That I agree with.”

  “I’m not afraid,” said Micah.

  “I’ll be his copilot,” said Charlotte.

  Joan and Rob had a late supper at a restaurant on West Sunset. She had the Caesar salad, and he had macaroni and cheese baked in a ceramic dish, and they split a bottle of wine.

  The soft orange lighting and sexy pictures on the wall made Joan think of sex. She imagined the people in the pictures coming to life after closing time, drifting down to get it on.

  “What are you thinking about?” said Rob.

  “I’m going to audition for a movie,” said Joan. “It’s called The Powder Horn, about Davy Crockett.”

  “What’s the part?”

  “Ann Flowers.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “When Davy Crockett was fifteen, he made this canoe trip across a river in a winter storm, because no ferryman would take him. His boat was swamped, and he was freezing, and when he did get across he had to walk three miles before he found a house. Ann Flowers is the daughter of that house. The canoe story is true, but Ann is made up. So they gave him some liquor to warm him up, and he and Ann Flowers ended up sharing a bed.”

  “With all that follows.”

  “No. That’s what’s different. They just lie on their sides looking at each other, far into the night.”

  “How old is she?”

  “His age. Somebody else will play her then.”

  “Where do you come in?”

  “Thirty some years go by, right? Davy Crockett gets into politics, wins, loses, goes to the Alamo, all the things he does. And after the Alamo he shows up at Ann Flowers’s cabin, and they spend the night together again. It’s bittersweet, because their lives have gone by, and in the morning he’s gone.”

  “The older role can be the better one,” said Rob. “But I thought Davy Crockett died at the Alamo.”

  “He did. It’s his spirit that visits Ann, but she doesn’t know that till he’s gone. A friend says, Hey, did you hear what happened at the Alamo? So now she doesn’t know what to think, having slept with a ghost or whatever he was. And when she goes back to her little cabin, what do you think she finds?”

  “A powder horn.”

  “Yes. And ‘clutches to breast’ and up music and roll credits.”

  “And this is getting made?”

  “They’ve got financing,” said Joan. “They just need a bridge loan. Or a mezzanine loan. Some kind of loan that sounds like architecture. I was thinking I would get into movies so I would have more time for Micah.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Eamon took him to see Charlotte Mann’s horse.”

  Rob waved for the check. “What is a powder horn?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  A transparent blue screen had unscrolled before Micah’s eyes. The screen was cracked like a mosaic, with beads of light pulsing along infinite pathways. On the other side of all this disturbance were his new friends, small and geometrical in appearance.

  Then Micah looked at the sky and found that the stars were connected by the lines in the screen, as if he had been born and brought here to make this discovery.

  “Is it happening?” said Charlotte.

  “There are lines between the stars,” said Micah.

  “Are you okay? Look at me.”

  Charlotte leaned close. Her forehead was damp, and he reached out to brush back a lock of hair that had escaped her braids.

  “You have perfect eyebrows,” he said. “I wish I had a mirror so I could show you.”

  She closed her eyes, and with the tip of her finger she wiped her eyelids dry, first one, then the other.

  “Once I saw a man on a street corner,” she said. “At La Brea and Third. He had his little boy on his back in a carrier. And the boy had wooden train cars, one in each hand, and he was driving them around on his father’s shoulders as they walked.”

  Eamon shuffled around in the dust, looking at his bare feet, with a shoe on each hand. “I got a lemon one time and it had a phone number on it,” he said. “So I called the number and this lady answered and I asked why her phone number was written on a lemon, and she said it shouldn’t be, I should just throw the lemon away and forget I ever saw it. So I said I would and in a few minutes she called back and asked where I was going to throw it away, and I said what, and she said the lemon, and I said probably a trash can, and she said that wasn’t good, because someone might see it and think here is a perfectly good lemon going to waste and they might pick it up and call her like I did. So I said well where do you want me to throw it and she thought for a minute and said where are you now, and I told her I was on Franklin by the Magic Castle and she said don’t go anywhere, so I waited and in about twenty minutes this little green Lotus pulls up and the woman rolled the window down and she said do you have the lemon and I said yeah and gave it to her and she gave me twenty dollars and drove away.”

  They laughed. The dog began to bark, and a noise came down from the sky. A helicopter flew sideways over the hills, its light coming and going, a pure silvery beam touching the ground, as if the helicopter were walking on stilts.

  “What’s that about?” said Micah.

  “No one really knows,” said Curtis.

  “I used to think they were looking for criminals,” said Thea. “But they do it so often that I don’t think that anymore.”

  “Ma
ybe they’re bored,” said Eamon. “Just fucking around till quitting time.”

  “They’re like the night watchman in a Russian story,” said Charlotte. “Checking the doors of the midnight village to make sure they’re locked.”

  “I lived in that village,” said Micah.

  Then a man in corduroy jacket and white cowboy hat rode down from the stables in a golf cart, the husky and two yellow Labs trotting behind. The dogs found them first and licked their faces while the man stopped the golf cart.

  “That’s Angel,” whispered Charlotte to Micah. “The owner.”

  “What’s going on here?” he said. “I have the television on, and I can hear the noise you’re making all the way up the hill.”

  “We’re sorry, Angel,” said Charlotte. “We’ll be quiet. We’re leaving now.”

  The driver of the golf cart looked at each of them in turn, touched the brim of his hat, turned the cart around, and drove back to the stables, escorted by the dogs.

  “Now Angel’s mad at me,” said Charlotte.

  “I want that golf cart,” said Thea.

  From the horse farm, they went to the beach in Santa Monica, where they bought hamburgers and french fries and sat on a ­blanket on the sand, eating and listening to the sound of the ocean.

  When Micah got home he hung the beads Charlotte had given him on the photograph of Tiny, Lyris, and the goat.

  The next day Joan was at an auto salvage yard off Mission Road shooting Forensic Mystic. Most of the autos seemed beyond salvaging. They were twisted and sliced, mangled and melted, and the yard workers had stacked them into neat mounds like city blocks with paths running between.

  The yard made the highway system seem like the work of an evil god. Joan sat in a mallard-green canvas chair beneath a parasol.

  In this scene she would throw away a knife that had been used in a murder. Her character, Sister Mia, would debate whether to turn it in to the police. That was her conflict. Everyone must have an arc and a conflict.

  Joan strolled the junkyard path, slapping the knife blade on her thigh. An athletic brunette walked backward, Steadicam strapped on her body. Then they laid dolly tracks and filmed Joan’s walk from the side.

  She flung knife after knife into a mountain of wrecked cars. The prop master had knives to spare. Joan wondered if archaeologists would find the knives someday and deduce that people had fought over the cars.

  At lunchtime she got an orange from the food tables and walked to the fringe of the salvage yard, where she could see the Los Angeles River and the skyline across the way.

  She held the orange in her hands, tearing the rind with her teeth. A dark ribbon of water moved slowly down the trough of the riverbed. She thought she would soon be written out of the show.

  The knife toss was Joan’s last scene of the day. She drove home and made lunch for Micah, who was just getting up. He sat at the dining room table, head wet from the shower, scratching his arms.

  “How were the horses?” said Joan.

  “We didn’t get to see them. We had to leave the farm because we were laughing too much.”

  “Well, at least you had a good time.”

  “Then we went to the ocean.”

  “What did you think?”

  Micah took a bite of the sandwich Joan had made. “It felt like I belonged there,” he said.

  She came over and touched his wet hair. “Doesn’t it? I know just what you mean. Though I worried when you were out so late.”

  “You don’t have to, Mom. I’m not seven anymore.”

  “I know you’re not,” said Joan.

  It was true in some ways—she’d forgotten that he was alive all this time and not waiting for her to return to begin again.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

  “Because you left?”

  “It must have seemed selfish.”

  “I thought you were in trouble,” said Micah. “I didn’t think that it was something you did to someone.”

  “To you,” said Joan. “That’s who it was done to.”

  “Sometimes I pretended you broke the law and didn’t want to bring it down on us. Like you robbed a bank or something.”

  Joan laughed. “I should have.”

  “You wore a blue bandanna to hide your face and the newspapers called you the Blue Bandit. All the bank tellers were afraid that you might be heading their way.”

  “Oh Micah,” said Joan. “I hope I haven’t hurt you too much.”

  She felt good to be reminded of the little boy he had been. He seemed real to her for the first time since she’d seen him again in the doorway of Tiny’s house.

  Joan went to North Hollywood to read for the role of the older Ann Flowers in The Powder Horn. Five men sat on one side of a table, and Joan stood on the other, with a brass bed and chair on her side of the room.

  “We love what you’re doing in Mystic Forensic,” said the director.

  “Forensic Mystic,” said Joan.

  “Of course.”

  “Everyone does that.”

  “We’d like to go over the scene in the cabin. Do you need a script?”

  “I know the part.”

  “Night. Crockett knocks, you rise, you open door. And the line is yours.”

  “Good evening,” said Joan.

  An associate producer read Davy Crockett’s lines.

  “Evening, miss.”

  “Are you lost?”

  “Yes, that sounds accurate. I crossed the New River in a storm. They said wait for the ferryman but I wouldn’t listen.”

  “The New River is two hundred miles from here.”

  “It might be another time I’m thinking of.”

  “David?”

  “And you’re Ann.”

  “Come in, man. Get by the fire.”

  “I could use whiskey if you got it.”

  “This is as it was before.”

  “You’re hardly any older, Ann. I can still see those eyes under the rafters.”

  “Why have you come?”

  “I don’t know. I thought that I would get out all right because, you know, that’s what I do. But I’m nothing now.”

  “You’re here.”

  “In a manner. Did you get married, Ann? Have a family and all?”

  “I never did. I suppose I had my suitors. But that night, when you came to our place, you were so cold. Just a boy. It got into my heart somehow. And kind of stayed there.”

  “That must be it.”

  “Must be what?”

  “Why here. Why you.”

  “Hush, David. Drink your drink. We have all night for talking.”

  Joan was in tears. She never had trouble finding the emotions in the words.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said the director.

  “Now, there is some nudity,” said the associate producer.

  “I know.”

  “Could you undress?”

  Joan stepped out of her shoes, unbuttoned her dress, slipped it off her shoulders, and let it fall. She raised her arms, hands cupped as if holding mourning doves that would fly away on violet wings.

  They were writing notes. “Now Joan, if you could lie on the bed?”

  Of course. The bed wasn’t there for the fun of it. She crossed the room and lay down, closed her eyes, and pretended she heard rain on rooftops.

  She hadn’t worked her body into this shape to be ashamed before filmmakers. She was the dream that troubled their sleep, lying ageless as they grew older and older.

  Joan opened her eyes. The men had gathered around the bed with anxious eyes as if visiting a sick friend.

  “Thank you, Joan,” the director said. “I find myself still lost in you
r reading. We will be in touch.”

  Joan put her clothes on, shook hands with everyone, and left a manila envelope with her résumé and head shot. She rode down in an elevator with cheap golden walls.

  “I certainly hope I get that part,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JACK SNOW, the artifacts dealer Dan had been hired to investigate, first came to Grouse County in the winter, fresh out of the federal prison at Lons Ferry, North Dakota, where he’d served federal months for embezzling money from a credit union. He’d had gambling debts. They were not considered a mitigating factor.

  FCI Lons Ferry was a cold stone fortress bound by rules, exercise, seniority, the call-out sheet. Prohibited acts ranged from killing to conference calls to kissing.

  Jack didn’t mind prison as much as he thought he would. You could wear your hair any way you wanted so long as you didn’t carve words or figures into it. The barbershop was closed for maintenance on Mondays.

  In prison Jack met a man known as Andy from Omaha, with whom he played chess on Wednesdays and Fridays in the yard or the library. Andy gave up knights for bishops any time and took oppressive command of the diagonals. He was serving a long stretch for buying and selling figurines and pottery stolen from excavations around the world.

  “I’ve found the error in my practice,” he said one time.

  “What’s that?” said Jack.

  “You take something, somebody will be looking for it. Whereas, a fake, see, nobody’s looking for a fake.”

  “They don’t know there is one.”

  Andy pinned Jack’s rook to his king. “Bam,” he said.

  Andy’s work sounded exotic and lucrative compared with robbing the returns of retirees, and he gave Jack a number to call when Jack got out of Lons Ferry. The man who answered the phone told him to find some out-of-the-way place and rent a warehouse.

  Having little money, Jack tried staying with people he knew in Stone City. The first turned him down after a few minutes of unfriendly conversation. He lived in a yellow ranch house on an empty hill west of the city—no grove, no outbuildings—and Jack was not disappointed when it didn’t work out.

  So then he stayed with the other friend, who had a small and neatly kept brick house on New Hampshire Street in town. That lasted till summer, when they argued over a canoe.