God of Speed

by Luke Davies

  I’d better break with the Cary Grant reduction plan, and have another shot. Did I think that already? We’ll start the Cary plan tomorrow, when everything is fresh.

  The memos don’t come from a perfect place. They are more a response to a world gone wrong. I used to see them as blueprints of the inside of me, of my soul. Manifestations of my focus, which I know you admire so greatly. They were meant to protect me. But perhaps they can’t tell the whole story. Which is why it is so good to see you, Jack.

  THE FIRST AND THE LAST

  WHEN JACK COMES I will say, Did you have a good nap? I’m sure I did. I will tell him the most important events, in appropriate sequence, and even the unhappy endings. I feel so much better myself. It was good to talk about Lake Mead. Did I talk about it already? To think about talking about it, anyway. It is so easy to forget where I was.

  I saw Yvonne Shubert for the last time a few years after that New Year’s Eve. My fifty-third birthday: Christmas Eve in 1958. I had not seen her for some time; she had flown the coop after the shooting accident in which Johnny Rand killed himself. I had taken a turn for the worse, I mean the world was just that much harder to deal with, I mean retreat was more necessary, I had upped the medications, I just needed to lie away from everything for a year or so, and the lawsuits with TWA were looming. Yet my thoughts turned to Yvonne’s purity, to what I had sullied; to chances I had missed. I tried to contact her again. She had changed. She had moved on! She had no interest in seeing me. At first she didn’t return my calls. She was reluctant. She resisted. I was offended. After all I had done for her. At last I got her on the other end of the line. She told me I was not the man she had thought I was. How disappointed in me she was. How untruthful I had been. How duplicitous. I was shocked and hurt. I wanted to see her, just to put things right. The truth is, given her resistance, I wanted her back again.

  So I convinced her to come and visit me. She said, All right, but just this once, to say goodbye properly. I thought I could change her mind when she arrived. I thought we could be like we once were.

  Perhaps I did have problems by now. Because perhaps I’d forgotten to dress, perhaps by now I was starting to take less care of myself. It was all relative. In heaven they don’t wear clothes. It was a matter of priorities. In the grand scheme, how important was cutting one’s hair?

  I was trouserless. I was underwearless. I was wearing a shirt. It was unbuttoned. I am trying to paint you a picture. We had been naked together many times before. So why did she now take offence? I couldn’t say. I can’t speak for her. I don’t have access. I was lying on the bed. She took me by surprise. I was quite medicated. I mean, I knew she was coming. It’s just that, I didn’t know what state I’d be in. But they let her into the room and she positively shrieked.

  Oh, Howard. Cover yourself!

  Perhaps I was being provocative. It’s all a little hazy now, what is it, Jack, nearly two decades ago—how does that happen? So I pulled the sheet up to my chest.

  Yvonne, I said.

  That’s better, she said.

  Well now that Johnny’s dead, we’ve cleared the air.

  And she walked straight up to me and slapped me once, a real stinger.

  How can you be so cruel! she screamed.

  I took her wrist and rose up, buoyed by codeine and a sudden surge of anger. I slapped her. She slapped me back again. This was too much! I felt suddenly very old and entirely impotent. I was frightened and filled with adrenalin. She was young and beautiful, she was gloriously strong. I was old, thin of lip, weak of heart, slow of vein, shipwrecked of soul. And I knew in an instant: I could not keep up anymore.

  I only wanted to talk to her. She was pummeling me. She was incoherent. I fled from that bed. I retreated into the bathroom and locked the door. I could feel my heart screeching. I could hear my breath, the hysterical wheezing of my fear.

  Now Yvonne—now Yvonne, I stuttered. Now Yvonne—

  But she was gone already. The door slammed. And then there was only Bill Gay’s voice at the bathroom door.

  Mr. Hughes? Mr. Hughes? Everything all right in there?

  And I composed myself. Because for what did dignity count, if not in its presence on the battlefield, if not in our dealings with the minions, the Mormons, the men of good cheer?

  She was the last of all the women. Perhaps I will have told Jack that already. Perhaps it will be clear. The very last. I had expended all my energy. I had scattered myself far and wide. What a beautiful century it had been. Aside from this sense that something was missing, that I’d done something terribly wrong, or rather, had not been present to do something terribly right, for which, Jack, I apologize to you, here and now, or whenever the hell you arrive from downstairs, on behalf of everyone.

  That’s not quite right. No, you need to accept my apology, on behalf of everyone. That’s more like it.

  Forgive me. Forgive me. In 1923 a redhead prostitute, she must have been no more than seventeen, came to me in my room at the Vista del Arroyo. That grand shock, the ecstatic strangeness of her disrobing, created perhaps a template for all of the future. Fifty years have glowed red! That girl was dumb as dogshit and I loved her for that night. And Yvonne Shubert was the last.

  Well, except for silly Jean Peters, as I said. But who’s counting the wives?

  I COULD NOT WORK OUT THE

  SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

  SURELY HE’S AWAKE soon. Because I certainly feel that I could begin now, what with morning approaching and all. I feel that it’s been a very productive rehearsal period, and that second time around, when I get the words out, it will all come out right, everything in its position, each memory dropping softly into place, and I will have nothing to fear, from beast or person or thing. The words will flow out. Each penthouse fortress I have lived in is an echo of the original cave and I am no different from anyone else in that all I ever wanted was protection from the cold.

  Lake Mead was deep and dark, a bowl of cobalt from three thousand feet. I always loved approaching airfields, that sense of space unfolded into a gash, that lack of obstacles. But landing a seaplane on water was entirely different. One felt one was moving, if things did not go well, from one transparent medium into another only slightly more dense. And things did not go well for me on May 16, 1943 as we took her down on that part of the lake known as the Vegas Gulch. We were testing my Sikorsky amphibian, it was a high-pressure day, we were under scrutiny from the Civil Aeronautics Agency—they’d sent two flyers up with me—my engineers Dick Felt and Gene Blandford were there, too, and the cockpit seemed too crowded, like my tender brain that day, I needed a coffee, I had been up all night with Ava Gardner at the Desert Inn in Vegas, things were not so right with the world, this was the wind-up, the clockwork coiling before my long retreat from the, from the, the what is it, the multihued complexities of life. It was a lovely cloudless day. I had landed the Sikorsky on the lake so many times as we ran through all the modifications, it should have been a formality. But I was so distracted by the blood in my brain and a sense of impending suffocation that I didn’t notice the ground crew hadn’t loaded the tail ballast. Because we were all so rushed, not just specifically that day but the whole of the century has moved awfully fast for me. I hate it when those talks get serious with women. I hate it when they (the women, not the talks) gently lead you to see the inconsistency of your position(s). I hate it when they (the women and the talks) make you feel flatness, nothing but flatness. Ava Gardner was like some eastern deity, forbearing of my uncertainties, patient with all my quirks. She never pressured, never created dramas, other than the Drama of the Bronze Bell. She gave me all the room I needed. (What went always unspoken was that this meant room for other women.) It may be why I saw her for longer than most of the others. But in her infinite kindness, deep in the night in that artificial city in the desert in Nevada, she led me somehow effortlessly to the self-imposed question, What is wrong with me? It is just an awful blackness to be there. It is worse than the worst gold d
igger trying her tricks and plying her skills, all things you can deal with, all things tradeable for sex. It is nowhere near that. It is Ava saying, Howard, you are so troubled, I can hardly bear to be near you for too long. It is realizing that Ava actually liked my company—but only for a while. That she actually liked me. Yikes. Because God knows I hated to be alone with myself.

  What on earth is the matter with you, she said, propped up on her elbow, looking down on me in bed.

  Ava, it’s just the CAA. You know what I think about these government men.

  She sighed and lay back down and turned away. I know you’re not answering the question, she said.

  We can take this somewhere, Howard, she said. We really can. We can take it somewhere.

  I felt a bad headache coming on. My sweet, I said. I’ll do the test-flight. Then when I come back tonight, we can talk about where we can take it.

  But, of course, my whole life was a test-flight. And where had it taken me, exactly? With the women, I mean. So I was dark and troubled on that bright day. Because I knew that either we would have that conversation, and I would consequently lose all practical interest in her; or we wouldn’t have it, because I would avoid it, and she would lose interest in me. So Lake Mead was to be a turning point day, even without the accident. Not to mention these government officials, I felt them in the cockpit like little dogs yapping and nipping at my heels, their thoughts of me unkind, their own intentions black. Yes, yes, maybe I was a little angry, a lesson I should have learned, for all our sakes, after the ’28 crash during the Hell’s Angels shoot, maybe I was descending just a little too fast, but maybe I merely wanted the flight to be over, to get back to the Desert Inn, to pull the blinds and be with Ava, for the succor, for the comfort, forget all that exhausting talk. Merely to lie, to nestle inside or beside her. And sleep.

  Instead, I was tired and I was angry, not necessarily in that order, and the circumstances were unforgiving. The lake was like black marble. Not a ripple on the water. I came in hard and steep and tried to level and adjust. The pontoons touched the surface. Eighty, seventy-five, seventy miles an hour. I braked the great propellers gently. Or perhaps not gently enough. We flipped forward abruptly to the waiting surface. A flash of darkness. The windshield shattered inward. A rush of water. We seemed to catapult. The sky arced by. The screech of metal tearing. We hit the water again. Behind me a man screamed. I clung to the controls, my seatbelt somehow holding me in place. We cartwheeled again, weightless but into impending doom. We flipped. Metal stripped backwards from the plane. The left wing snapped around in front of us. Then the cabin broke open as the giant propeller sliced right through the nose and headed straight for me. Here it comes again, I thought. But then the propeller Catherine-wheeled into our little space and sliced into Dick Felt’s head, instead; I saw brain come away. A blade caught Ceco Cline beneath the arm; he lifted up as if pinioned to a paddlewheel, arched backward through the cabin, and slammed down into the lake where the cabin floor had been. Then the blade was not there. The plane sank all around us. The water churned. I could not see for the blood in my eyes. I could not work out the sequence of events. I could not work out how to take my hands off the controls and unlatch my seatbelt. The water rose to my shins. I could not clear my head for the screams of Van Rosenberg. Dick’s brains bubbled in the chaos. What had I done? I’d killed them all! Van Rosenberg unlatched me and pushed me out through the side window, which was now facing upward as the plane began to disappear. I stepped into the water.

  I had fucked it up again.

  We struggled as the weight of our clothes pulled us down. The plane was nothing now but the burps and bubbles it surrendered from its descent. I could barely breathe for the cold. Van Rosenberg clung to Blandford who held up Dick Felt who moaned and gurgled, coughing water in his delirium. The plane was gone, Ceco Cline gone. There was nothing now but the shore so far away. If I were to die I wanted to lie with Ava one more time. Then a rescue boat came churning into my vision to deliver us from evil.

  I can still see the grain of the planking on the deck of the boat where, pale and numb and on all fours like a dog, I heaved up a bellyful of that cold Lake Mead water.

  The others went to hospital. Dick Felt died. I sat in the airport office with my engineer, Glen Odekirk. He bandaged the gash on my head. After a while I noticed how much blood was on my wet clothes. Some of it must have been Dick’s. Perhaps I became hysterical. The main thing was I had to buy a change of clothes from the first store we could find. The other main thing was to get back to Ava. But I wouldn’t be able to stay there long. My plans had all been shattered on the lake. When I left Las Vegas and Ava that morning there existed in the world the possibility that something inside me may have changed forever: that I might have settled down, that one specific woman might have been as good as any other, that it was all just a matter of making a decision, that you couldn’t keep searching forever, that suddenly all the other women in the world would have represented nothing, no need, no compulsion, to me, and that Ava would hold me in her arms. And suddenly all my tension would leave, like the birds flying off from the tree.

  But the crash was a way of putting me in my place. I had to control the damage. I had to get back to Los Angeles. Talk to Dick Felt’s widow. Deal with the Cline family. Pay the money. Pay the money. The enquiry would have to say mechanical failure. But never pilot error. Pay the money. I had to wash the blood away. Read the signs. Cool it with Ava. Switch yet again to Faith Domergue. Simpler parameters.

  There was so much money, and so much sky, but it was hard getting the balances and sequences just right.

  THE PHYSICAL BODY

  A FUNNY THING happened recently, Jack. Just a few weeks ago, and apropos of nothing. I became aware that for many years what I’ve been lacking is any kind of … well, physical body. I’m entirely abstract, stretched on hooks through space. The codeine widens everything. Even one’s understanding. Even the understanding that the codeine widens everything.

  NICARAGUA, DECEMBER 23, 1972

  ALL THESE YEARS, Jack, I thought that death would be the punishment for my sins. Managua made me reconsider. You might be wondering what we were even doing there; it was our last place of residence before we high-tailed it here to London, six months ago. My tax-free status in Vancouver had only lasted until September ’72, so after that we packed up camp and went to Nicaragua, a place more open-armed than Canada, more flexible in its attitudes on how to welcome … how to welcome and treat its distinguished visitors. I didn’t entirely like the constant upheavals of our travels, but I had to do it for the sake of my money, which had feelings, too, after all. (It didn’t like the idea of being separated from me too permanently! Ha ha!) I liked that President Somoza had sent an official police escort when we first arrived, because Managua was such an ugly ruin of a city that you wanted the trip from the airport to the hotel to be as quick as possible. Automotive air-conditioning: now there’s a wonderful invention. Somoza’s police escort: now there was some gentlemanly conduct. The Intercontinental loomed into view, enormous and stepped like a Mayan temple. We moved into the penthouse, the Mormons and me.

  It was a gray city on the edge of a sulfurous lake that smelled of five decades of raw sewage, a jerry-built shambles of adobe and raw plaster, stretching for mile after gray-dust mile. Even the electricity lines seemed to sag in the heat. Scalloped lines of black volcanoes glowered on the horizon. By day Managua suffocated in an auburn cloak of petrochemical fog; you could stare straight at the sun and not squint. At night it sweltered beneath a yellow moon. But nobody had told us that the whole city trembled at the delicate intersection of three adjoining tectonic faults. Nobody told us that Nicaraguan reality was so porous.

  I was watching Goldfinger on the Barcalounger in the darkened penthouse of the Managua Intercontinental when the earthquake hit. The first sign was that the image went out of focus, and I was ready to shout for a Mormon to come and adjust the damned machine when the second shock cut in, and t
hen everything cascaded and blurred. I was as brave as a Boy Scout that night! The screen shuddered. The wall lurched wildly back and forth. The light fitting flailed like a metronome. The bed stuttered awkwardly toward the bathroom door. I thought in those first instants that someone in the next room was moving furniture too roughly. Someone who was going to pay dearly for this outrage. I noted the sudden sound of breaking glass. The room kept shaking. A Mormon drunkenly crouched toward me. But since when do Mormons drink? A speaker fell from its stand. Goldfinger jumped from its spool and snaked across the room. And then the very building roared.

  And I knew in a flash and with great clarity that I was experiencing an earthquake, and there was no one to blame, I was simply the victim of geology, and I would have to be brave.

  The movement died. The room was in disarray. The spools on the projector loudly whirred. Four Mormons were fussing around me.

  Don’t panic, I said, it’s only an earthquake. If you make it through the first jolt you’re okay.

  Mr. Hughes, no injuries? Everything all right?

  I could set the example. I was wonderfully calm. I was a leader again. I was responding to the unexpected.

  Then a low growl entered the room, and the walls vibrated. The men spread their legs and arms in alarm. It was greatly amusing to see them out of their depths while I remained horizontal and free of all worry. Good men, good men all of them. All these years we’ve spent together, it’s a shame we’ve never really gotten to know one another. The humming died away. Then once again the walls began to shudder, and I felt the ticking of doubt. I reached to the bedside table for my little medication box. I held it to my chest. All this took place in less than a minute but it was a very long minute indeed.

  In the next twenty minutes there were thirteen aftershocks. The phones were down. There were sirens beginning to cry out all over the city. At first I wanted to stay in the hotel and continue in my role as Fearless Leader. The worst was surely over. But the light outside the window grew more orange, until the whole sky started to glow, and the Mormons told me there were fires spreading across the city. Perhaps indeed we needed to reappraise the situation. It had been a long time since we hadn’t had a contingency plan. Earthquake? My good Lord. But clutching the medicine I felt fine, a self-sufficient man, ready to travel at the drop of a hat, speaking of which, where was my fedora? The Mormons would know.