The Collection

by Bentley Little

  They got out of the car, and he doused the front seat with lighter fluid.

  "What are you doing?" Lydia demanded. "That's our car! We need it! We'll never get out of here without it!"

  "We'll get out." He lit a match and threw it onto the front seat. The cloth seat covers went up in a whoosh of flame, and the papers on the street, obviously agitated, whirled in incoherent frenzy, widening the circle around them.

  Josh grabbed his wife's hand again, and they started back toward the gas station. Dust blew into their eyes, stinging. They were halfway there when he saw a car coming along the highway toward them. "A car!" he said excitedly. He moved quickly to the center line and waved his arms back and forth in the classic distress signal.

  The car came closer.

  "Help!" he yelled. "Help!"

  The car sped by, honking its horn.

  "Asshole!" Josh yelled in frustration, holding up his middle finger. "Goddamn son of a bitch-"

  Lydia put a restraining hand on his arm. "Come on, let's go to the gas station. Maybe that old man can help us."

  "He can't even help himself. If he could, he wouldn't still be here."

  "There will be other cars. This is a major highway. Someone's bound to stop."

  "If we create a disaster," Josh said, nodding. He smiled grimly. "Let's go."

  The gas station was empty. They searched the office, the garage, the men's and women's bathrooms, but there was no sign of the attendant. It was now nearly five, and though nei­ther of them said anything, they both realized that it would soon be dark. Although the highway itself was clear save for a few stray pieces of windblown trash, the desert surround­ing the gas station was covered with papers and was grow­ing more crowded by the minute.

  "What are we going to do?" Lydia asked.

  Josh unhooked the hose from one of the gas pumps. "Start a fire."

  "What if-?"

  "Don't worry," he said.

  He pressed down on the handle of the nozzle and poured gas all over the dirt and cement surrounding the two pumps. He stopped pumping and handed her the matchbox, saving a handful of matches for himself. "Go up to the road and tell me when you see a car coming. If anything starts moving to­ward you, use the lighter fluid and torch it."

  She started to say something but saw the look of almost fanatic determination on his face and decided against it. She moved slowly across the pavement toward the highway.

  Josh continued to pump gas onto the ground, soaking the entire area around the pumps. The hose was not very long, but he moved as close to the building itself as he could and watered the cement with it. The papers surrounding the gas station swirled crazily, frenetically. "A car!" Lydia shouted. "A car!" Josh dropped the hose, ran toward the edge of his gas pool, and struck a match on the pavement. It caught, then sputtered out in the wind. "A car!" Lydia screamed.

  He struck another match, dropping it, and the ground ex­ploded in a rush of fire, singeing his face. He ran toward Lydiar feeling the heat against his back, and the second he reached the edge of the highway, there was a thunderous ex­plosion as the pumps blew. The ground shook once, and a moment later pieces of metal fell from the sky. A small hot chunk landed next to Josh's foot and another near Lydia, but none of the fragments touched them.

  "Come on!" Josh ran into the highway. The car was not coming from the north but from the south, and he stood in the middle of the northbound lane, waving his arms, franti­cally pointing toward the burning gas station.

  The car pulled to a stop a yard or so in front of them. A middle-aged man with graying black hair and a mustache stuck his head out the window. "What happened?"

  "Explosion!" Josh said as he and Lydia ran forward. "We

  need to get help!"

  "Hop in fast," the man ordered. "My wife's going to have a baby, and we don't have time to waste."

  They got into the backseat of the car. Looking out the window as the car took off, Josh saw angry papers swarm­ing over the spot where they had stood. Others flew around the spiraling smoke which billowed up from the fire.

  He hoped the whole damn town burned down. Josh reached for Lydia's hand, held it, smiled. But she was frowning, looking forward. In the front seat, the man and his wife were silent. The man was concentrating on the road. His wife, next to him, was bundled beneath a heavy blanket, though the temperature in the un-air-conditioned car was so warm it was almost stifling. "You're going to have a baby?" Lydia asked.

  "Yes, she is." ;

  "Where's the hospital?"

  "Phoenix."

  "But isn't Tucson closer?"

  The man didn't answer.

  Lydia scooted forward on the seat. "Mrs.-" she began.

  "She's asleep." The man's voice was sharp, too sharp, and Lydia moved back, chastened.

  Josh's heart gave a warning leap in his chest. Sitting next to the window, directly behind the passenger seat, he had a perfect view of the space between the wife's seat and the door, and he craned forward to get a better look. His mus­cles tensed as he saw the sleeve hanging off the edge of the seat beneath the blanket, saw the fingers of gum wrappers, the packed tissue paper palm.

  But he said nothing, only held Lydia's hand tighter.

  "Hope we make it in time," the driver said.

  "Yeah," Josh agreed. He looked at Lydia, his mouth dry. The car sped through the desert toward Phoenix.

  The Idol

  As teenagers, every time we watched Rebel Without a Cause, my brother would invariably suggest that we look for James Dean's lug wrench. We lived in South­ern California, so we knew that the scene in which Dean goes on a field trip, has an altercation with one of his classmates, and throws a lug wrench over the side of a wall into some bushes was filmed at Griffith Park Observatory. It must still be there, my brother al­ways argued. The people who made the movie didn't hike down the hillside and go rummaging through the bushes for it after they filmed that scene. What did lug wrenches cost back then? A buck?

  He can't have been the only one to come up with this plan, I thought. A lot of people must have thought the same thing over the years.

  But what kind of people were they?

  "There! Did you see it?" Matt stopped the VCR and re­wound the tape for a second. "Watch carefully."

  James Dean, cooler than cool in his red jacket, backed away from the group of young toughs. "I don't want any trouble," he said. Realizing that the tire iron in his hand could be construed as a weapon, he cocked his arm and hurled it over the cliff.

  Matt pressed the Pause/Freeze button on the remote and the image stopped in midframe. Dean and the gang stared, unmoving, at the long piece of metal suspended in the clear blue sky. Matt hit the Frame Advance button and the tire iron, very slowly, began to fall. He stopped the image just before the camera shifted to another angle.

  "See. Right there. Right in those bushes."

  I shook my head. "This is stupid."

  "No, it's not. Hell, if we can find it, we'll make a fortune. Do you know how much shit like that goes for?"

  Matt had taped Rebel Without a Cause the night before and was now trying to convince me that we should dig through the bushes down the hill from the Griffith Park Ob­servatory, looking for the lug wrench Dean threw in the film.

  "Okay," he said. "Think about it logically. How many people know that that scene was filmed at Griffith Park? Only Southern Californians, right?"

  "That narrows it down to two or three million."

  "Yeah, but how many of them do you think ever tried this?"

  "Lots."

  "You're crazy."

  "Look, after he died, fans scoured the country trying to find any scrap of memorabilia they could. They were selling napkins he'd touched."

  "You really think people went scrambling through the bushes trying to find that piece of metal?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Well, I don't. I think it's still there, rusting into the ground."

  "Fine. Go look for it. No one's stopping you."

 
; "You know I don't like to drive into Hollywood by my­self." He turned off the VCR. "All you have to do is give me moral support. Just go with me. I'll do all the work. And if I find it, we'll go fifty-fifty." "No deal." "Come on."

  "Are you deaf or just dumb? The answer is no." He smiled, suddenly thinking of something. "We could invite the girls. You know, make a day of it: check out the observatory, have a little picnic ..."

  It sounded good, I had to admit. Steph had been after me for the past few weeks to take her someplace new and ex­citing and creative instead of doing the same old dinner-and-a-movie routine, and this might fit the bill.

  "All right," I agreed. "But I'm not helping you dig. And if you get arrested for vandalism or something, I don't know you."

  Matt grinned. "What a pal."

  He left the room to call Julie, and I picked up the remote and changed the channel to MTV.

  He returned a few moments later. "She can't go. Her grandpa's coming out from St. Louis this weekend and she has to be there." "Well-" I began.

  "You promised." He knelt before the couch in a pose of mock supplication. "I won't bother you. You won't even no­tice I'm there. I'll just look through the bushes by myself and you two can do whatever your little hearts desire. All you have to do is drive me there and back."

  I laughed. "You're really serious about this, aren't you?" "It's a great idea. Even if someone has thought of this be­fore-which I doubt-I don't think they spent an entire day searching through the bushes to follow up on it."

  "You may be right," I told him.

  I called Stephanie from his apartment, but she said she couldn't make it either. Finals were coming up and she had some serious studying to do. She'd lost too much reading time already on account of me.

  "That's fine," Matt said. "It'll be me and you."

  "I'm just driving," I told him. "I'm not going to waste my time following you through the bushes."

  "I know," he said.

  We stood in the small parking lot just below the observa­tory, looking over the low stone wall, in the same spot Dean had stood some forty years before. Matt was carefully study­ing a map he had drawn, trying to figure out exactly where the tire iron had landed. He walked three paces back from the wall and pretended to throw something over the edge. His eyes followed an arc, focusing finally on a copse of high bushes halfway down the hill. He pointed. "That's it. That's where it is."

  I nodded.

  "Remember that spot. Remember the landmarks next to those plants. We're going to have to recognize it from the bottom."

  I nodded again. "Sure."

  He laughed, a half-parody of a greedy cackle. "We're gonna be rich."

  "Yeah. Right."

  He made a note on his map. "Come on. Let's go."

  We walked back up to the main parking lot in front of the observatory and drove down the winding road which led to the park below. We paid the dollar toll, splitting it, and pulled into a spot next to the playground.

  Matt looked up the side of the hill, then down at his map.

  "The way I figure it, we go straight from here, turn left maybe thirty yards in, and keep going up until we hit the big palm tree."

  "Right."

  We got out of the car, unloaded our shovels from the trunk, looked around to make sure no one was watching us, and hurried into the brush.

  I really had intended not to help him, but I'd had to change my tune. What was I going to do? Sit in the car all day while he went traipsing off into the woods? Besides, it might be fun. And we might actually find something. He kept talking as we climbed, and I must admit, his ex­citement was catching. He was so sure of himself, so confi­dent in his calculations, and I found myself thinking that, yeah, maybe we were the first people ever to search for this thing.

  "I'm sure the movie people didn't collect it afterward," he said, hopping a small sticker bush. "You think they'd waste their time digging through acres of brush looking for a cheap, crummy little piece of metal?" He had a point.

  We climbed for over an hour. In the car, we'd made it to the top of the hill in five or ten minutes. But walking ... that was another story. I'd read somewhere that Griffith Park covered several square miles, and I could easily believe it.

  By the time we reached Matt's palm tree, we were both exhausted.

  We stopped and sat under the tree for a moment. "Why the hell didn't we bring a canteen?" I asked. "How could we be so fucking stupid?"

  Matt was consulting his map. "Only a little farther. Maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes. A half hour at the most."

  I groaned. "A half hour?"

  He stood, brushing dead leaves off the seat of his pants. "Let's go. The sooner we get there, the sooner we'll be fin­ished."

  "What if it's not even the right place?"

  "It's the right place. I went over that videotape twenty times."

  I forced myself to stand. "All right. Move out."

  It figured. The area where Matt thought the tire iron had landed was surrounded by thick, nearly impenetrable bushes, many of then covered with thorns. We jumped over some, slid under others, and a few we just waded through. My shirt and pants now had holes ripped in them.

  "You owe me," I said, as we traversed a particularly dif­ficult stretch of ground. I stepped over a monstrous science fiction-looking beetle. "You owe me big time."

  He laughed. "I hear you." He grabbed a low tree branch above his head and swung over several entangled manzanita bushes. I followed suit.

  "Shit!"

  I heard his cry before I landed. I miscalculated, fell on my side, then stood, brushing off dirt.

  We were in a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by a natural wall of vegetation. In the middle of the clearing stood a makeshift wooden shed.

  And on the shed wall, carefully painted in white block letters was a single word:

  GIANT

  "They found it. The fuckers found it." Matt dropped his shovel. He looked as though he had just been punched in the gut. "I thought for sure we'd be the first ones here."

  I didn't want to rub it in, but I had told him so. "I warned you," I said.

  He stood in silence, unmoving.

  I looked over at the shed, at the white-lettered word- GIANT-and though it was hot out and I was sweating, I felt suddenly cold. There was something about the small crude structure, about its very existence, that seemed creepy, that made me want to jump back over the wall of bushes and head straight down the hill to the car. The fanatic interest and posthumous adulation that surrounded people like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis had always dis­turbed me, had always made me feel slightly uncomfortable, and the shed before me increased that feeling tenfold. This was not part of a museum or a collection, this was some sort of... shrine.

  And the fact that it was obviously homemade, that it was in the middle of nowhere, hidden in an impossible-to-get-to location, intensified my concern.

  I did not want to meet up with the fanatic who had put this together.

  Matt still stood silently, staring at the shed.

  I feigned a bravery I did not feel. "Let's check it out," I said. "Let's see what's in there."

  "Okay." He nodded tiredly. "Might as well."

  We walked across the short grass covering the clearing and stepped through the open doorway. After the morning brightness outside, it took our eyes a moment to adjust to the

  darkness.

  Matt's eyes made the transition first. "Jesus . . ." he

  breathed.

  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs were pasted onto the walls of the shed. The pictures were of women, some young, some middle-aged, some old.

  All of them were naked.

  They were in various poses, and at the bottom of each photo was a signature.

  But that was not all.

  In the center of the room, embedded in a large square chunk of stone, was the tire iron. The tire iron Dean had thrown. The bottom half of the tool, with its curved chisel end, was sunk deep into
the rock. The top half, with its rounded wrench end, stuck straight up. The metal was im­maculately polished and showed not a hint of rust.

  Obviously someone had been taking care of it.

  The chill I'd felt outside returned, magnified.

  "Jesus," Matt whispered again. He walked into the center of the room and gingerly fingered the tire iron. "What the hell is this?"

  I tried to keep my voice light. "It's what you've been hunting for all morning."

  "I know that, dickmeat. I mean, what's this” He ges­tured around the room.

  I shook my head. I had no answer.

  He climbed on top of the stone slab and straddled the tire iron. Using both hands, he attempted to pull it out. His face turned red with the effort, the veins on his neck and arms bulged, but the tool would not move.

  "You know what this reminds me of?" I asked.

  "What?"

  "The Sword in the Stone.' You know how all those knights tried for years to pull the sword out of the stone but no one could? And then Arthur pulled it out and became king of England?"

  "Yeah."

  "Maybe if you pull this out, you'll be the next James Dean."

  "If I pull it out, we'll both be rich." He strained again, trying to loosen the unmoving piece of metal. He reached down for his shovel and started chipping at the base of the

  tool.

  I watched him for a moment, then let my gaze wander back over the photos on the wall.

  The nude photos.

  I turned. Before me, level with my eyes, was a photo­graph of a gorgeous redhead lying on a bed, spread-eagled. Her breasts were small but the nipples were gigantic. Her pubic hair proved that the red hair on her head was natural. The-name scrawled across the bottom of the picture was Kim something.

  The photograph next to that was taken from behind. A large bald vagina and a small pink anus were clearly visible between the two spread cheeks of the woman's buttocks. Not as visible was her face, blurred in the background and looking out from between her legs. Her name was Debbie.

  Next to that was a picture of Julie.

  I stared at the photo for a moment, unable to believe what I was seeing, unwilling to believe what I was seeing. Julie, Matt's girlfriend, was standing, her arms at her sides, her legs spread apart, smiling at the camera.