A Fistful of Collars (15 page)

Then came a big surprise. She turned to Bernie and said, “You’re a doll.”

“Uh,” said Bernie.

“Be just a minute,” she said, waving her hands in a strange kind of way. “Song Yi’s almost done.”

“Huh?”

“She comes to do my nails.”

“Huh?”

Leda backed inside and closed the door.

Bernie looked at me. I looked at Bernie. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

Wow! He knew I was thinking of crossing the lawn and marking the bushes on the other side? But that was Bernie: just when you thought he was done amazing you, he did it again. As for whatever he’d asked me not to do, it was like one of those feathery little clouds you see sometimes, high high up, and the next time you look: nothing but clear blue skies.

“In fact,” he went on, “I was thinking the same thing.”

An absolute stunner. Bernie and I were going to cross Leda’s lawn and mark those bushes together? Had anything like that ever happened? I actually did remember something of the kind, maybe in an alley behind a biker bar in Rio Vacio, but it was all too vague, and before it got clearer, the door opened and out came Leda and Charlie, followed by a dark-haired woman carrying a pink sort of tool kit. Not to worry: those bushes weren’t going anywhere. And then . . . and then I had the most amazing thought of my life: given time, we could fill up the aquifer, me and Bernie, side by side. And didn’t we have all the time in the world?

“So nice to meet you,” Leda said, taking Thad Perry’s hand and not letting go. “I’m a big big fan, your biggest. Huge.”

“Thanks,” said Thad, looking at something over her shoulder. “‘ppreciate it.”

“And this is my son, Charlie. Say hello to Mr. Perry, Charlie.”

Bernie’s eyes have a way of—how to put it? Narrowing? Hooding? I give up. But the point is, I think it happens when he’s starting not to like what’s going down, and at that moment Charlie’s eyes were doing it. He looked like a little Bernie. What a kid.

“Uh,” said Charlie.

“Hey,” said Thad Perry, glancing down at Charlie. Across the set—we were back on the movie set, this time not a bar in the Old West but a campfire under an enormous saguaro that some landscape dudes couldn’t get to stand straight—Lars Karlsbaad was glancing at Charlie, too. Then Nan, glasses perched up on top of her head, listening to something in her earphone—I could hear it, actually, a man saying “get him on his goddamn mark”—was whispering in Thad’s ear, and he tugged his hand free and moved away.

Not long after that, we were sitting under an awning not far from the saguaro, me, Bernie, Charlie, Leda. “What’s the scene about, Bernie?” she said. “I’m so excited!”

Bernie leafed through the script. “Is this where the shaman—”

“Kina Molenta? She’s gorgeous!”

“—starts changing the history of the west or some bull—”

“Shh,” Leda said.

Thad Perry came in, cowboy hat pushed back on his head. He sat down in front of the fire. Hey! His knees cracked, just like Bernie’s mom’s. Then a woman entered and sat near him. I didn’t get a good look at her, on account of a big distraction from the get-go, namely—was it possible?—this wolf head she had perched on her own head. From Leda came one of those quick little in-breaths humans sometimes do. Her eyes were wide; Bernie and Charlie were both in that narrow and hooded mode.

A huge camera came rolling up on a kind of train track, Lars Karlsbaad and the camera dude sitting behind it. Lars walked up to the campfire.

“Kina, looking like a dream,” he said. “How were the Maldives?”

The woman shrugged.

“Excellent,” said Lars, puffing on his cigar, hands balled into fists behind his back. “Comfortable with this scene?”

“Except for this fucking wolf head,” said Kina. “It itches like a bastard.”

Lars turned to the woman with the clipboard, standing off to the side. “I thought you took care of that,” he said.

“This is the replacement, Lars,” said the woman. “She tried it out and said it was—”

Lars made a chopping gesture, kind of quick and nasty. The woman went silent. He turned to Kina. “Sorry, love, we’ll get it fixed by tomorrow—I give my word—but do you think you can soldier through today? It’s a very short scene.”

“Soldier through?” said Kina.

“Possibly a Europeanism,” said Lars. “Sorry. Merely a way of saying—”

“Tough it out,” Thad said.

Kina turned to Thad. They exchanged a look, not just unfriendly, more like they hated each other.

“All set then?” Lars said. “In this scene, Lolotea first sees—but subtle, subtle—that Croomer may be unlike the other white men, not a monster. At first, you both stare into the fire, possibly remembering the horror of the day. Then you, Kina, slowly turn and gaze at his profile. Questions?”

“His left profile?” said Kina.

“Why, yes, with the way you’re sitting,” Lars said.

Kina shrugged again. She was a great shrugger, sending messages I never wanted coming in my direction.

“Something wrong with my left profile?” Thad said.

“No, no,” said Lars. “What a thought—agreed, Kina?”

She was silent. Behind his back, the knuckles of Lars’s fists were white as bone and getting whiter. A crazy idea popped into my mind; I won’t describe it. Lars turned to the woman with the clipboard. “For this shot we will clear the set.”

“Right away, Lars.” The woman with the clipboard faced us. “All nonessential personnel please clear the set.”

Nonessential meant what, again? Right around then I gave up on understanding the movie business. The best thing about it was the buffet table set up near the trailers. I had some experience with buffet tables, and this one was aces. No time to go into aces now—and this card sharp name of Doc Sloman, now breaking rocks in the hot sun—on account, for example, of the steak tips, which Charlie was slipping me under the table.

“Set to go?” said Bernie.

“Oh, no,” Leda said. “I’m having a blast. So’s Charlie.” She turned to him. “Right?”

Charlie said something, impossible for me to understand with his mouth full like that.

“That was so interesting,” Leda said.

“Yeah?” said Bernie.

“Like how they had to show the horror of the day on their faces. What do you think the horror was?”

“This stupid massacre in the script,” Bernie said.

“Why stupid?” said Leda, sipping her white wine. What was this? They were kind of getting along, having a human conversation with no bad feelings around the edges?

“The weaponry’s all wrong, for one thing. And the Apaches would never—”

Leda laid a hand on Bernie’s arm to shush him. Bernie didn’t like that, gave her an annoyed look. We were back to normal. Meanwhile, Lars was coming toward the buffet table, actually right in our direction, sweat dampening his shirt in the armpits. I always watched for that.

Lars stopped in front of us. “Hello . . . Bennie, is it?”

“Bernie,” said Bernie.

“Nice to see you back on the set,” Lars said. “Always welcome. And this is?”

“My, uh, ex-wife,” Bernie said. “Leda.”

“What a coincidence!” Lars said. “I had a wife named Leda, too.”

“Really?” said Leda.

What was going on? Something about two Ledas? My mind shrank away from the thought. Always a surprisingly nice feeling when my mind did that: I had one of those minds that was on my side, if you know what I mean, which I actually don’t.

“And this is your son?” said Lars, turning to Charlie.

“Yes,” said Bernie and Leda at the exact same time.

“Hello, Charlie,” Lars said.

Charlie, working on a brownie, nodded his head a bit.

“Charlie?” Leda said. “Can you—”

“Like movies, Charlie?” Lars said.

Charlie stopped chewing for a moment. “Some,” he said.

Lars laughed, a surprisingly squeaky laugh that caught me by surprise and which I was in no hurry to hear again. “For example?” he said.

“
Fight Club
,” Charlie said.

“What?” said Leda.

“Just the first few minutes,” Bernie said. “Inadvertently. The moment I—”

“Do you think you might like being in a movie?” Lars said.

He was looking right at Charlie, but for some reason Leda answered. “Me?” she said, her face starting to pinken.

“You?” Lars said, and pink went red on Leda’s face. “I was referring to Charlie. We have one nonspeaking youngster role still uncast. Your son looks the part.”

“No way,” Bernie said.

Leda turned to him, her complexion recovering real fast. Leda was strong inside, no doubt about that. “Bernie?” she said. “A moment?”

She pulled him aside, her fingernails, now a deep and shining red, digging into his arm. They spoke in low voices—most of the talking done by Leda, something about being provincial, completely lost on me—and in the meantime Lars grabbed a whole slice of pie off the buffet table and gobbled it down.

Bernie and Leda returned. “We’ve decided,” Leda said, “that it’s up to Charlie.”

“Very sensible,” said Lars, crumbs falling from his lips. I licked them up, not so much because of liking pie, more because that’s what you do when a crumb opportunity arises.

“Charlie, sweetheart,” said Leda, “would you like to be in a real movie?”

“Do I get paid?” Charlie said.

There was a moment of silence. Then they all started laughing, except for Charlie, who didn’t seem to get the joke. Neither did I. What was so funny? Being in a movie was a kind of work, right? It was important to get paid for work, an area where we’d slipped up in the past at the Little Detective Agency, part of the
reason—along with the Hawaiian pants, now filling our self-storage in South Pedroia, and the tin futures play, gone bad on account of an earthquake in Bolivia—that our finances were such a mess.

Leda was the first to stop laughing.

Then Lars. “Scale,” he said.

Then Bernie.

That night we packed the twisted-up bike back in the Porsche and drove over to Vista City. The streetlights on North Coursin Street were out again, and the crime scene house was dark, but lights shone in the house across the street, where Bernie had questioned the mother and her little girl. What had come of that? I looked forward to doing it again.

We parked and walked across the hard-packed dirt yard. The front door opened and out came a man carrying a vacuum cleaner. He stopped and said, “No dogs.” Or something like that: he had a huge wad of gum in his mouth.

“We don’t need to come in,” Bernie said. “I just want to find out where to return Nino’s bike.”

“Huh?” said the man. “You’re not the one who wanted to see the place?”

“Not following you,” Bernie said, which made two of us, but I didn’t worry. We’d catch up: we always did.

“It’s for rent,” the man said. “Very reasonable.”

“You’re the landlord?”

“Yup.”

“Where are the people who lived here?” Bernie said. “The woman and her daughter.”

“Cleared out,” said the landlord.

“Where to?”

“Back to Mexico, most likely. They’re all doin’ it these days—didn’t turn out to be the paradise they had in mind.”

Bernie nodded, a short little nod. Some of his nods meant nothing; this one meant he was starting not to like the landlord dude.

“How long have you owned the building?” he said.

“Awhile,” said the landlord.

“Know much about the place across the street?”

“Nope.”

“A man was killed there.”

“Heard somethin’ about it.”

“He had a son named Nino, lives with his mother. We’ve got Nino’s bike in the car. Any idea where we could find him?”

“Nope.”

“Ever run into anyone named Ramon around here?”

“Nope.”

“He might have a dog called Outlaw.”

The landlord stopped chewing his gum for a moment.

“Ring a bell?” Bernie said.

“Nope.” His jaws started up again.

“Would a C-note refresh your memory?”

“Nope. Anything else I can he’p you with?”

Suzie called when we were almost home.

“I remembered where I heard about Thad Perry and the Valley,” she said. “Carla told me.”

“Yeah?” said Bernie.

Carla? I knew Carla, a friend of Suzie’s at the
Tribune
, and one of those humans who was fond of me and my kind, even made sure to always carry a little something in her purse. I waited for Bernie to whip us around in a quick U-turn.

“. . . called her,” Suzie was saying. “She’s on assignment, back in the morning.”

“Thanks.”

“Bernie? You sound tired.”

“I’m not,” he said.

But once we were inside, he fell asleep with his clothes on. I lay down on the floor at the foot of the bed and listened to him breathe.

L
ookin’ good,” Carla said. “So glossy.”

“Thanks,” said Bernie. Bernie always looked good, of course—and even better today on account of the deep sleep he’d had, breathing slow and even, the darkness under his eyes all gone and the zigzag in his forehead hardly showing at all—but glossy? I didn’t see it.

“And that tail,” Carla went on, “you could power the whole city off it.”

“He likes getting patted,” Bernie said.

They were talking about me?

“Sure you do, you beautiful boy,” said Carla.

Yes, me. How nice.

Carla gave me one more pat. She was glossy, too, at least her hair, and also had smooth skin the color of coffee the way Rick drank it—with lots of cream—skin that today was smelling of grapefruit soap. We’d met Carla downtown, in the little park across from city hall. The morning sun shone brightly on the white columns of the building, making all the details, like the chipped paint and the bird droppings, so clear. What a day this was going to be!

“Working on a story?” Bernie said.

“Zoning reform,” Carla said.

“Gonna happen?”

“Soon, no. In our lifetime, yes.” She checked her watch. “Starts in ten minutes, Bernie. What’s up?”

Bernie got going on one of those stories with lots of twists and turns, something about Suzie and Thad Perry and the Valley, not easy to follow. I preferred a very short story with no twists and turns—only my opinion—and besides, right under the next bench, on which a drooling old guy with a paper bag drink between his knees was zonked out . . . could it really be? Yes! A half-eaten hot dog with ketchup and relish, still in the bun. Humans: how often they threw food away! I just didn’t understand, and neither did those shiny black ants, some of them getting their tiny legs stuck in the ketchup. I made short work of the hot dog—don’t get me started on that strange name—ants and all. Ketchup and relish: a nice combination, and pretty unusual. Didn’t relish usually go with mustard? My head practically spun with fascinating thoughts about hot dogs and all the things you could put on them. I drifted back over to Bernie and Carla.