Don't Speak to Strange Girls

by Whittington, Harry

  “Goodbye.”

  “Wait just a minute. Aren’t you even going to ask me anything about myself?”

  “No.”

  “You look better on the telephone even than on wide screen, Mr. S.”

  “Goodbye, Miss Stark.”

  “What you’ve got is a one-track mind.”

  “It’s been educational.”

  “I’ve got this big dictionary. We could go over a lot of words — and their meanings.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He heard her sigh. “Well. All right, honey. I’ll tell you what … Are you still there?”

  “For the moment.”

  “I’ll call you again later — sometime when you feel better.”

  She was gone, suddenly as she had materialized, a voice somewhere across that line. He saw it was a mild triumph of sorts for her, she had hung up on him, leaving something hanging, unfinished, something left unsettled between them.

  He sat there for a moment, then replaced the receiver.

  He glanced up, caught an unexpected glimpse of himself in a mirror. He was smiling. Using muscles, he thought, that he’d even forgotten he ever had.

  • • •

  Hoff and Shatner arrived about four that afternoon. Hoff was talking to Shatner about some way a man might divorce his own daughters, but when he saw Clay, he put his family out of his mind. Shatner had not been listening to Hoff except that part about divorce — it was impossible he knew to divorce an aged father, and yet, he told himself wryly, that relationship had just about had it. But Shatner, like Hoff, tensed slightly when he saw Clay sprawled in that damned lounge chair — looking as if he hadn’t moved since the last time they were here.

  Clay had not shaved, had not changed his slacks. He resented the way they were watching him, staring at him covertly every time he looked up.

  Kay Ringling came in at five. She was carrying the battered blue script of Man of the Desert. But she did not refer to it. She looked him over as if he were her only chick — and God help him, he was — looked at him as if he might have grown since the last time she saw him.

  Each of them was disappointed after inspecting him. This was evident in their faces.

  Hoff said, “We got a firm offer for forty acres of your valley property, Clay.”

  “I don’t believe he should sell,” Kay Ringling said before Clay could speak. He saw this was an old dialogue between them, and Hoff hoped to do two things by bringing it up here: go over Kay’s head, and bring Clay Stuart back to the world of the realistic.

  Hoff’s voice rode over Kay’s. “Taxes are eating at us. Taxes out there are not what they were when we invested in that property. And what was it when we bought it? An investment? Right. To sell when the time was good. We are paying for something that is a thousand times more valuable than when we bought it. Should we hold it forever?”

  “He’s held it this long,” Kay said. “Nothing is going to depress valley properties.”

  Hoff snorted. “I’ll bet you’re constipated, Ringling. You want to hold on to everything. Never want to let anything go.”

  “The state of my health is no concern of yours. Clay Stuart has never suffered yet taking my advice.”

  “This buyer. A big operator,” Hoff said. “He’s made us a firm offer. A price that makes me sick to think I’m passing up. He’s a man who is sincere. Well, he’s not sincere, but I’ve been dealing with him a long time. We play poker. I can tell when he is bluffing. He is not bluffing. He wants the property. He makes no pretense on this.”

  Shatner poured himself his third drink of I. W. Harper on the rocks, sloshing the whiskey around on the ice cubes. “Any calls, Clay?”

  Stuart glanced up, scowling mildly. “Why? What kind of calls? What do you mean?”

  “Hell. Anything. I was wondering if you were showing any interest in anything — the studio — anything like that.”

  “No,” Clay said. “Nothing like that.”

  • • •

  They had to leave Clay’s station wagon locked at the lower parking area. The road upward to the guide’s camp was a mule trail. “We might make it driving,” Shatner said, “but the engine would boil, might burn a bearing. What’s the sense? Who needs a car up there?”

  They packed their gear on their backs and carried the broken guns and fishing gear. Shatner had three long pulls at the fifth of bourbon while Clay locked the car.

  “Against the cold,” Shatner said. “Against a hex from my old man. He doesn’t like me to go off and stay overnight. And me, I’m afraid he’ll burn the place down while I’m gone.”

  “Heating pennies to toss to the kids.” Stuart said it for him.

  “You think I’m joking about that, don’t you? My old man throwing heated pennies out on the sidewalk for the neighborhood kids?”

  “You’ve been telling that same joke a long time.”

  “It’s no joke,” Shatner said. “Anything I tell you about my old man is no joke. Maybe I laugh. I hate to cry at my age. My age. You got any idea how old I am, Clay? No chicken. How old does that make my father? I was a child of his old age. I swear to you. How long is that old man going to live? With his little black cap he looks like a monkey now. I tell you. It’s punishment for my sins.”

  “You wouldn’t know what to do without him,” Clay said. “What would you have to talk about?”

  “God is my witness, you’re right.” Shatner nodded. “I yell at him. He yells at me. I talk scandalously about him to anybody who’ll listen … I tell you, Clay, I’d be all dead if anything happened to him.”

  He winced and cursed aloud, realizing what he had said. He plodded after Clay, wondering what he should say. He never wanted to hurt Clay because they were like brothers and he owed Clay one hell of a lot.

  Not a showman or head of any studio, that didn’t light Marc Shatner’s cigars for him if he hesitated, and nobody kidded Shatner. The town belonged to the agents, but he was the boy who had represented Clay Stuart, and Clay Stuart was the boy who had never made a turkey — damned few could say that, Jerry Lewis, Abbott & Costello — hell, even Garbo hadn’t always knocked them dead at the box offices.

  Shatner peddled flesh exclusively. He never represented writers any more because he’d painfully learned that nobody in Hollywood knew a writer’s name unless he’d won the Nobel prize last week — late last week. Nobody in Hollywood ever read anything except the analyses prepared by studio readers.

  Shatner got along well in all the studios, peddling his actors. The producers all liked him, and the ones who disliked him were quickest to invite him past their secretary. He sat on their desks, smoked their cigars, criticized their newest tailored suits, visited their homes, toyed with any of their wives who weren’t shaggy dogs, buffaloed them, bribed and blackmailed them — and was recognized by them as a successful agent, a top-flight man — and only he in the darkness of his own bedroom admitted it was because he represented one of the last of the super-stars, Clay Stuart, the boy who asked and got a quarter of a million per picture, plus a cut of the gross.

  Shatner plodded after Clay on the trail — a small man of boundless energy and self-esteem, and if he was not handsome, someone had neglected to inform him. What he had to sell in this racket was first himself, and he did this as a favor, giving you his smile and his personality at wholesale.

  He shrugged the pack up on his back. It was Ruth he’d never been able to sell. He had hated her and she’d disliked him — when she thought of him at all. It seemed somehow sacrilegious or something to hate her still. But this was the way he felt. She belonged in another world and though she never consciously demonstrated it, Shatner was always made strongly aware of it when he was in her presence.

  And the strange part of it was, he went to her, wagging his tail like a small wet dog, wanting to be friendly because Clay was marrying her. She’d gone to the best women’s college in the East — New England, he thought, without inquiring because it pleased him not to know for sure, and sh
e had absorbed all the predigested, prejudged, preweighed education that they heaped upon her like creamed-chicken on toast.

  To Shatner it seemed the most closed minds were those exposed to that advertised ultimate in culture, because they were told what to despise and they despised it, what to worship and they worshipped it. They learned everything, except to think independently. It amused him that it was forever products of these schools who set out to prove voluminously that Shakespeare never wrote the Shakespearean dramas and comedies: he couldn’t have because he hadn’t the education such work required; as living proof, they had the education, and they couldn’t do it. Shatner had long ago learned that some of the smartest cookies in show business — even today — were the men who knew all there was about show business, and couldn’t cross a street alone.

  Ruth’s attitude toward him always put him on the defensive, and this was foreign to him, and he despised her for it the first time; and he hadn’t forgotten and he hadn’t forgiven her. But the sickening part was, she hadn’t even realized he hated her and would not have cared if she had known.

  • • •

  The roadway was steep and rough with stones. Firs grew close along the road, but when they looked back they could see the pasture lands below them and the valley marked with orderly farms. They crossed a wooden bridge. The water beneath was the color of clay and turbulent on the smooth stones.

  “Good fishing up here,” Shatner said. “Funny you’ve never been up here before — all the fishing, hunting you’ve done. You sure you’ve never been up to Madden’s before?”

  “I told you.”

  “Well, come on, boy. Get in the mood. I told you this was going to be a fine trip. Different from anything you ever knew. You can fish if you want to. You can hunt if you want to. They got a guide for that. Or you can lay around the cabin. They got the guide’s wife for that.”

  “What are you talking about? I came up here to fish and hunt.”

  Shatner laughed, stumbling slightly on projecting stones. “Sure you did. But wait till you see her. I mean, she’s no Ava Gardner, but after you’ve been up here in this healthful mountain air, she’ll begin to look mighty attractive. And there is nothing — underline nothing — she will deny you.”

  “I thought you said she was the guide’s wife. What do you do with him?”

  Shatner laughed. “Oh, hell. Him? Listen, we send him out to check his traps, or something. One year I was up here with four guys from Universal. We got to drinking, and we got to looking at her and she got to squirming. You know what she did? She sent Madden all the way down the mountain for supplies. In the middle of the night, for God’s sake.”

  “And he went?”

  “I’m telling you. This is paradise up here. Nobody up here says no. Madden’s wife loves to drink. I brought along a few fifths for her. Give her a couple of drinks and she’s wild. Hell, she had a few drinks that night — and the only thing she was sorry about was there were just the five of us.”

  “Lord. I can’t see the guide taking that. He must suspect.”

  Shatner’s laugh rolled out through the forest. “Listen. Madden’s wife is a whore for the same reason her husband’s a guide. They like what they do. And if Madden objects? Hell. That’s his worry.”

  The sun was thrusting brokenly through the pines, entangled in shadows of distant peaks. The far hills were bare and bleak with the late sun on them. Through the trees they could see the black-shingled roof of the guide’s cabin. Shatner hurried, striding ahead.

  Madden’s wife was standing in the door, waiting for them. She remembered Shatner and greeted him warmly. She was an overblown woman in her middle thirties. Her complexion was very good, creamy and smooth. She had blue eyes that lay naked when she met a man’s gaze. There was something in the looks of her, the full hips, the full breasts, the naked eyes, a man got an emptiness in his loins looking at her, a quick hot yearning.

  They were inside the big main room of the cabin when Madden came in. The room was snug with a huge fieldstone fireplace along the north wall. Bear skins and deer hides were tacked on the rough walls, and gape-mouthed fish stared wide-eyed.

  Madden was carrying a load of firewood. He dropped it in a box and turned to greet them. Clay watched Madden’s face. Madden’s wife and Shatner were at the rough table testing one of the bottles of bourbon. Stuart saw the look of agony that flicked across Madden’s face. Madden was a slender man, less than medium height with sandy hair and a pale thin face that never tanned, no matter how many traps he checked.

  Shatner introduced Stuart to Madden and then forgot the guide. Madden told Clay he’d seen most of his pictures, and liked them because they didn’t look faked. “Some things you can’t fake,” Madden said. “The things in your pictures, Mr. Stuart, you make people believe. I try to see them all.”

  After her second drink, Madden’s wife wanted to dance. She and Shatner pushed the unpainted table against the wall, kicked a bear rug aside, turned up the radio.

  Madden’s wife giggled, her blue eyes grew bright. Her body jostled loosely under the cotton dress. Clay watched them a moment, then turned his back, stretching his legs before him. He stared into the roaring fire.

  He was aware of Madden in a rocker near him. Madden was staring at the fire, too. Clay could hear him sucking at his pipe, even above the crackling fire, even above the radio.

  “Come on, Clay!” Shatner yelled. “Mamie wants to dance with you. She wants to dance with a real live movie star.”

  Clay turned, grinning. He shook his head.

  “Come on. Let loose,” Shatner said. “Have fun.”

  Mamie laughed, leaning toward Clay’s chair. “What’s the matter with you, honey? Don’t you like girls?”

  “Don’t you like girls?” Shatner laughed.

  “You ain’t one of them fairy movie stars, are you?” Mamie said.

  “Yeah,” Shatner said. “Is that what’s the matter, Stuart? You one of them fairy movie actors?”

  • • •

  When Clay awoke the next morning he lay in bed feeling better than he had in years. There was a smell of fir in the chilled breeze, a smell of the snow that was above them.

  When he dressed and entered the big front door, Shatner and Mamie were having bourbon in their coffee. Mamie looked disheveled. She had not combed her hair, but there was an earthy beauty about her, and he remembered some lines, wasted in a shooting script he had read once: “There was this kind of latent danger in her that can be concealed in beauty — like lightning seen distantly beyond deep banks of thunderheads.” He felt he knew now what that writer had had in mind.

  Shatner looked haggard. He turned and yelled with laughter over his shoulder at Clay. “Did you waste your time sleeping last night, boy?”

  “You look like you could use some sleep.”

  “I look this way because I say the hell with sleep. I also look this way because the last time I was up here, there were five of us.” He went into a spasm of laughter, putting his arm about Mamie and pulling her down hard against him. “Hell, I’m outnumbered.”

  Mamie tried to pull her head up from Shatner’s lap but he held her there a moment longer. He jerked his head at Stuart signaling him to come on over and join the fun.

  “Where’s Madden?” Clay said, pretending to misunderstand.

  “Hell. Who knows? He was going out to check on a deer he spotted yesterday afternoon.”

  Clay shrugged into a mackinaw, hefted his rifle. “Reckon I’ll go along with him,” he said.

  Mamie pulled away from Shatner, stared at Stuart, frowning.

  “What’s the matter with him?” she said to Shatner.

  Shatner laughed. “Beats me. But then that’s always the trouble with hunting trips. Some damned fool always wants to hunt.”

  Clay met Madden as he was leaving the clearing. When Clay said he was going along, Madden scowled. Then he smiled and nodded. They didn’t talk much. They trailed a deer for more than three hours, going upward into
the hills. The air remained chilled, fresh with the scent of fir even as the sun rose and dried the dew on the aspens and spruce.

  They crossed a creek, climbing through the outcroppings of boulders. The pinon up here was stunted. They found signs of wild goats, once glimpsed a mountain lion prowling in the rocks above them. Madden told Clay to take a shot, but in that moment the lion leaped upward, like a shadow withdrawn, like a shadow that was never there.

  “Why don’t we start back?” Clay said. “I’ve done a lot of hunting in the Sierras. We’re not going to cross that buck now.”

  “No,” Madden said. “I reckon not.” He checked his wrist watch, glared into the sun a moment. “I reckon we can go back down there now, if you want to.”

  chapter five

  CLAY HEARD Kay Ringling walk into his library, coming quietly across the carpeting, and when he glanced up at her, impatience flared into his eyes.

  Kay saw the look in his face, but ignored it. She sat down beside him, her arms loaded with the accumulation of his untended business affairs.

  “Mother’s been getting some bad reports on her boy,” Kay said.

  “So? … What else is new?”

  “Don’t you like friends?”

  He shrugged. “What does that mean?”

  “Well? Do you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Yet — you’re throwing them away — with both hands … I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised though — that’s how you do everything.”

  Clay shrugged and after a moment she said, “You’ve either refused or ignored invitations from dozens of close friends — old friends.”

  “I don’t want to see them right now.”

  “Must you insult them?”

  “I guess so. I never learned to say no gracefully.”

  “I never knew you said no.” She smiled. “Until now. The Ballards — a dinner party. Planned with you in mind. Princess Otiz-Zerenski, she was nice to you in Vienna — when you didn’t know a soul. You haven’t gone near her since she’s been here. You won’t talk to her on the phone. She’s distressed. I told her you’d been out of town. I don’t think it helped much.” She waited, when he displayed no interest, she went on, “The Seyetts want you to a dinner party. They’ve invited a young woman from Philadelphia especially — ”