by James Sallis
Actually, I later learned, it wasn’t milk but something called a milk punch compounded of bourbon, milk and sugar. Easy on the ulcers, he’d tell me.
“Bubba!” this apparition said, blinking at the light. “What an absolutely marvelous surprise!” Heavy stress on marvelous, tiptoe pauses before and after. “And you’ve brought friends!”
“How’s it going, Billy?”
“Please do come in. Come in, come in. All of you.”
Ushered into a lavender living room, we stood there like de-bused campers uncertain what was expected of us. Purple vases, cobalt pitchers and violet-hued glasses sat about. Still-life paintings featuring bowls of fruit and fresh game, in the classical style but obviously new, hung on two walls. Above a mauve leather couch, the massive photograph of an erect penis, blown up to such point and such graininess as to become almost abstract, took pride of place above a mauve leather couch. On the opposite wall hung a poster of women’s vaginas, like exotic fruit.
“We have company?” a voice piped from above.
“Henry Lee. And friends.”
“Oh.” Disappointment audible in the voice.
“What can I get you all? Perhaps some champagne? Always a couple bottles chilling in the fridge. One never knows who might drop by, what possibilities for celebration the day could bring. Or mimosas! We’ve a sack of some of the biggest, juiciest oranges you’re likely to see. From last weekend’s farmer’s market on the square?”
“Billy, this is Sheriff Bates. Mr. Turner’s a detective down from Memphis.”
“Oh, I love Memphis.”
“I know you do.”
“Good to meet you, Billy,” Lonnie said.
Our eyes met, Billy’s and mine, and we shook hands. His was surprisingly warm, his grip firm.
“Coffee sounds good,” Lonnie went on, “if it’s not too much trouble. Little early for anything else, for me.”
“We have that. Coffee. Out in the kitchen somewhere.”
He’d set his milk punch on a polished ebony table just inside the door, African origin from the look of it, in order to embrace Sims. Now he looked longingly towards it. So far away. He went to the base of the stairs and called weakly upwards: “Help!”
“Be right down.”
“Sit, sit,” our host said. “We don’t often get company.”
Lonnie glanced at Sims, who nodded.
“Something I need to ask you, Mr. Sims.”
“Actually it’s Roark. Henry Lee and I had different fathers. But please call me Billy.”
“Billy, then. You used to direct movies, right?”
“That was a long time ago. All the sweet silly birds of our youth, surely they’ve flown by now. Mine have, at any rate. Yours?”
Lonnie smiled. “Occasionally they still come home to roost. When they do, I try to make sure they get fed.”
“Good for you. Speaking of which: I haven’t served you all yet, have I? I really should attend to that.” After gazing out the window for a moment, he went on. “It was a much smaller world back then. Everything was simpler. You had this feeling anything was possible—anything at all. I think I fancied myself a modern Shakespeare, half-owner of the Globe and running it, directing and acting in the very plays I wrote. I could do it all, create my own world. Create and inhabit it.”
“He hasn’t seen or thought of those movies in years. They have nothing to do with who he is now. You should not be bringing this in here, into our home. You know that, Henry.”
All our heads turned to the source of the voice.
Sammy Cash stood at the foot of the stairs.
Chapter Thirty-Five
HE WORE LOOSE KHAKI SLACKS, a pink oxford-cloth shirt from which the left collar button was missing, oxblood loafers, possibly Italian, without socks.
“Billy’s offered refreshments, I assume?”
“He did. But then he kind of got off track.”
“He does that. I won’t say it’s good to see you, Henry, it never is. Who are these people you’ve brought?”
“I’m the sheriff who answers to Henry Lee,” Lonnie said. “Mr. Turner here is a consultant, helping me with an investigation. No reason you’d know this, but someone’s driven murder right up on our steps and parked it there.”
“In which case you should be off doing your job.”
Lonnie glanced down at sockless feet, up to the missing button.
“I appreciate the fact this is your home, sir,” he said, “and that I’m an intruder here.”
Cash nodded.
“What you have to appreciate is that this is a murder investigation. Statutes give me a lot of latitude. Take me about eight seconds flat, for instance, to have you down on that polished wood floor in cuffs.”
“Lonnie, surely—”
“You shut the fuck up too, Henry. Obstruction of justice’s a big door. Don’t make me open it.”
“Oh dear,” Billy said.
Lonnie sat beside him on the mauve couch. He’d snagged the milk punch on the way, and handed it to him. “I agree completely. Now.” He looked from face to face. Mayor Sims, Billy Roark, the man we only knew as Sammy Cash. “Who’s going to tell me what happened?”
BILLY ROARK was fourteen years older than Henry Lee, out of the house and gone by the time Henry Lee was coming up, but always a role model—for that very reason if for no other. Because he’d reached escape velocity, you see, escaped the drag of the town they’d both grown up in, left behind the broken, near-mute mother and the fathers, gentle but long absent in Billy’s case, violent in Henry Lee’s. Billy Roark had gone up to Memphis at age nineteen and bluffed his way into selling furniture at Lowenstein’s. Third day on the job he sold a houseful of it, a whole goddamn houseful, prime quality all, to an older, balding man and a magnificently stacked young blond. A runner was sent to the bank with the check and came back to report it was good. “I could use a man like you,” the customer told him. A week later Billy found himself in a bright red Fairlane, coursing between El Paso and Dallas, flogging movies to drive-ins and main-street theaters with names like Malco and Paramount. He was a natural, able to turn on a dime, become whatever the customer seemed to expect of him. Theatre owners loved him and took whatever he had to offer. Soon a Cadillac replaced the Fairlane—a used Cadillac, and one day in of all places Fate, Texas, Pop. 1400, it broke down. Not much to do in Fate. He had breakfast at Mindy’s Diner, lunch there a few hours later. Then he found himself at the Palace watching a film about a woman’s prison. Jesus, he thought, this is what I’ve been selling? It was awful. He sat there watching, running numbers in his head. Obviously he was at the wrong end of the business. By six P.M., when he drove out of Fate with a new distributor cap and fuel pump, into a blood-red sunset, he’d blocked out what he was going to do. He found a place he could rent cameras, lights, the whole works, then some kids at a local college who’d been doing stage plays and figured how different could it be. Talked his current girlfriend, Sally Ann of the dirigible, gravity-defying breasts, into starring. Then over a weekend in a motel in New Braunfels, cartons of cigarettes, bags of hamburgers and bottles of Scotch ever to hand, not to mention Sally Ann, he roughed out a script. Devil Women of Mars. And it had, by God, everything. Scenes of small-town American life. Long shots of empty Arizona sky. Suspense. A message. Cleavage. Butts pushed up intriguingly by high-heel silver boots. When Billy drove out of New Braunfels that Monday, hungover in a borrowed car since he’d sold the Cad to get money for equipment rental, Sally Ann snoozing beside him, he was a new man. Everyone on his route, El Paso, Las Cruces, Midland-Odessa, Midlothian, Cockrel Hill, Duncanville, signed up for Devil Women of Mars. That next weekend, in an abandoned aircraft hangar outside Fort Worth, they shot the thing.
“It holds up, even now,” Sammy Cash said. “I’m the guy who fills the gas tank when the kids pull into the Spur station. I see this thing in the back of the pickup and start backing away. Audience never sees it, all they have to go on is my reaction. The gas nozzle falls out. One of the kid
s goes to light a cigarette. I was in the first one he made, I was in the last one. He is a genius, you know.”
Billy started cranking them out like no one had seen. He’d take a motel room for the weekend and emerge with a script, shoot the thing Monday through Wednesday, edit it that night and the next day, have it to the processors by late Thursday, out in the world the following week. Science fiction, horror, crime movies, prison films, teen exploitation. Sally Ann never appeared onscreen, nor remained long in Billy’s life, after Devil Women of Mars. Most of the actors were amateurs, lured away from college and community-theatre productions or from porn films for a day or two, Sammy Cash (real name Gordie Ratliff) being the exception. He’d had small parts in several low-end Hollywood movies and proudly carried a Screen Actors Guild card. But when the guild found out he’d appeared in a nonunion film and busted him, he decided right then and there that their gentlemen’s agreement was over. Never paid the fine, never looked back. And never again used any other name than Sammy Cash.
“It was as though the experience liberated him,” Billy Roark said. “Before, he’d been a good journeyman, always dependable, you knew he’d show up on time, stay however long he was needed, get the job done. But then Sammy just . . . flowered. Soon everyone wanted him. Film after film— all of my own, those of half a dozen other filmmakers as well—he was brilliant, stone brilliant. Whatever the part.”
All but imperceptibly at first, though, things began changing. TV became a six-hundred-pound linebacker flattening the opposition, providing, free and in one’s own home, what B and lesser movies could provide only cheaply. Locally owned movie houses disappeared or were bought up by chains who in turn found themselves forced to bid high on upcoming Hollywood product and then, scrambling to meet expenses, to block bookings in every possible theatre. Meanwhile, costs of film, equipment rental and essential facilities such as editing studios increased astronomically. A few filmmakers held on. Till the bitter end. ...
“AND BY OUR TOENAILS,” Billy Roark said. “Those days won’t ever come again.” He looked up. “Did we ever get you drinks? No? We really should do that. I’m afraid we’re a bit out of practice vis-à-vis entertaining.”
“He doesn’t like to talk about all that,” Sammy Cash said. “Rarely thinks much about it anymore.”
The sadness in his companion’s eyes belied him even before Billy spoke.
“I hated them for taking it all away from me. Taking away my life, really.”
“Billy. Please,” Sammy Cash said.
“There was talk about The Giving being my swan song, some kind of ultimate homage to the great art of film. Piss on that. What I was giving them, all of them—Hollywood, the studios, newcomer merchants who went about buying up everything in sight—was the finger. Fuckers didn’t even have enough sense to know it. Swallow this, I was telling them. Take this wad of crap and stuff it right back up where it came from.”
“It’s all right, Billy. All that’s long in the past. We’re fine now, aren’t we? We have a good life.” Sammy Cash looked from Lonnie’s face to mine. “Don’t you think you’ve upset him enough?”
“We never liked one another much, Gordie,” Henry Lee said, “and you probably don’t believe this, but I’ve always appreciated what you’ve done for my brother, your devotion to him.”
Then, turning to Lonnie and me: “After Billy’s troubles—”
“Troubles?” I said.
“A breakdown. He was in the hospital for almost a year. When he came out, I bought this house for him, set everything up so he’d be safe the rest of his life, never want for anything.”
“Your brother cares for you a lot,” the sheriff said. “So does Sammy.”
Billy nodded.
“Did you ever meet a man by the name of Carl Hazel-wood, Billy?” I asked.
No response this time. I thought of all those movies about submarines cutting engines and playing dead, hoping to stay off sonar.
“He’d been trying to get in touch with you. Carl’s a great fan of yours, Billy. Maybe your top fan. He understood what you were doing, what you’d accomplished. He wanted desperately to talk to you about the films you made, tell you how important they’d been to him.”
“I—” Billy began. Even the drink was dry when he tried for refuge there. Foundering, lost, he looked about. At Sammy’s face. Out the window. At these familiar walls.
“Others did everything they could to keep him away from you, Billy. But he wasn’t going to be stopped. It was that important to him. You were that important to him.”
Lonnie’s gaze turned to Henry Lee.
“You knew about this all along.”
He nodded. “Boy showed up at my door one night. Hadn’t bathed for a month or two. Mumbling and twitching. Said he was looking for the man who’d made The Giving. What was I supposed to do? What would you do? I had to protect Billy. I told him—Carl Hazelwood, as we later learned—that I didn’t know any such person. Told him to go away. Okay, sorry to have bothered you, sir, he said. But he didn’t go away. Far from it. I’d catch glimpses of him scuttling behind the garage, slipping off into the woods.”
“He’d seen more than enough movies to know about stakeouts,” Lonnie said. “And despite your disavowals, he knew you were connected with Billy, if not precisely what the relationship was. Knew he had only to keep watch.”
“And go through my mail.”
“That’s how he found his way to Billy.”
“Enough,” Sammy Cash said. “Enough, goddamn it.”
“Did you talk to Carl Hazelwood, Billy?”
His eyes wandered about, settled on Sammy, who shook his head. Billy nodded. “Nice young man.”
“Yes. Yes, he was.”
“Told me people were still watching my films, still talking about them. I had no idea. He only came that one time. I asked him to dinner the next night, insisted on cooking, though Sammy usually does all that. Baked bass, a salad of couscous and goat cheese. Put out the good china, chilled two bottles of white. We waited almost two hours, but he never showed.”
Billy’s eyes came up and went from face to face.
“Sammy—”
“I’m sorry,” Sammy Cash said. He held a handgun. “This has to be over now. Billy’s suffered enough.”
“What you have there’s a twenty-two,” Lonnie said. “Shoot someone with that, you’re likely to make them mad.” He stood and, hand extended, stepped forward. The gun barked. Bubbles of blood spotted his lips.
“Son of a bitch,” Lonnie said.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE SECOND SHOT had struck Billy square in the neck—transecting his trachea, though we didn’t know that at the time. I don’t think Sammy Cash even intended to fire. When he saw what he’d done, not knowing even the half of it, his hand fell onto his lap and he sat immobile, tears in his eyes like chandeliers in empty ballrooms. For the moment Lonnie seemed okay: down but not out. I’d pulled Billy from the chair onto the floor, felt for a carotid. Thinking with amazement how much blood a body holds, how much blood it gives up, and how quickly. Billy wasn’t breathing. Pinching his nose, hyperextending his neck, I stacked in three quick breaths and checked again. Still no pulse, no respiration. I began compressions. When next I looked up, Lonnie had been there by me, counting. He’d do the breaths, turn aside to spit blood or cough as I did compressions. Three, four minutes in, he folded, gasping. That’s when I put the mayor to work. Need your help over here, I said. Now.
A middle-aged man in badly faded purple scrubs walked through automatic doors into the waiting room and spoke briefly with the volunteer at the desk before coming towards me. “Mr. Turner?” Fatigue sat heavily in his eyes. “You’re with Sheriff Bates, right?”
I nodded.
“He’s going to be okay. The bullet barely nicked an upper lobe. Of his lung, that is. Simple enough to deal with. Blood loss, shock to the system, that’s a different thing, that’s what’s on the boards now. Take some time for full recovery, I’m
afraid.”
“And Billy Roark?”
“The other GSW? What, you’re with him, too?”
“I’ve been working with Sheriff Bates on a murder case. It’s all connected.”
“I see. . . .” He looked at the window, at a gurney being pushed along the hallway upon which lay an oxygen tank, electronic monitors, IV pumps and the deformed body of a young girl, then back at me. “Mr. Roark expired over an hour ago.” He told me about the trachea, just like you’d hack a garden hose in two, how, despite our best efforts at the scene, Roark had gone too long without oxygen. His heart stopped twice in ER. The second time, they failed to restart it. “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”
“STRANGE AS IT MAY SEEM looking about that house, the way Bill and Sammy were together, they were only partners. Close partners, but never lovers. Sometimes it was almost as though they were a single being. For years. How can things come apart so quickly?”
“I’m sorry, Mayor.”
“Lonnie’s going to be all right, they say.”
“He’ll be out of commission for a while. Back on the job soon enough.”
“Good. That’s good. I should have spoken up. I didn’t know. I suspected. Most of all—”
“Most of all you hoped your brother hadn’t done it.”
“I didn’t want to lose him.”
“I understand.”
“Or for him to lose himself again—which is more or less what happened that other time. Before he went to the hospital, I mean. He seemed fine. A little quiet. Then he just . . . floated away. He’d always been a dynamo, five or six projects going at once. The breakdown, or the drugs, or the electroshock, they changed him. He came back. But he’d become this meek, sweet man—the one you met.”
All that he said, about his movie giving them the finger, Sammy Cash told me. That wasn’t true. He was trying to make a good movie. In his mind, I think, a great movie. Something he’d be remembered for. After years of churning them out, ambition, real ambition, had overtaken him.