Bedlam and Other Stories (2 page)

“Course,” the driver said, “ain't that hard to wrestle an alligator.”

“That's what I heard,” Garbeau said. “Just have to stay clear of the tail.”

The driver nodded seriously. Hartley racked his brains for some joke to break up this insane conversation. In the end he could only tug on his dogtags and say directly, harshly: “Look, I don't want to be a tourist. All right? You guys are filming my
life
down there. That's what I want to see.”

Garbeau had lit her own joint by now. With the artificial smell of the air conditioning, the car stank.

“You told your wife,” she said, “today you'd be a tourist. You told her that last
night
you were out watching us shoot.”

Hartley filled his lungs with more smoke.

Noon. He was farther out of his head for noon, Hartley realized, than at any time in the last dozen years. When they pulled onto a public beach above West Palm, he sat in the shade with his elbows hooked over his knees. Slowly the sand irritated the white scars on his lower back.

His trouble was, when he complained it came out like a wisecrack. Garbeau and the driver had treated that entire business of the Town Halls as if it had been some kind of joke. And now Garbeau came and said he sounded like a little kid. She sat beside Hartley, gulping down a fried-clam lunch with doped-up speed. There were good reasons for his being here, she said. Her company had brought him down so that he'd serve as Special Advisor on a television docu-drama. They were filming the story of his escape from prison camp and his flight, alone, back to his own position in the winter of 1967-68. Garbeau's company was trying to tell a simple human story without political overtones, a story of one man's struggle to survive that would be truly meaningful for real people everywhere. Hartley tried saying he'd heard this speech before. But Garbeau only laughed.

“Look,” Hartley said, “if I'm just going to be doing the tourist bit, Claire should be here.”

This time Garbeau's laughter had an edge. Something confidential; it made his groin tingle. Mildly, she pointed out that his wife Claire would be down no later than next week. Hartley had to look away. Claire and he had talked it over for three nights running and each time they'd reached the same decision. One parent should remain with the kids while they took their exams.

“Good reasons,” Garbeau said, finishing an enormous milkshake. “All very good reasons. So don't be a crybaby. It's high tide and I'm going in to body-surf.”

He sat watching her. When Garbeau stood up after riding her first wave in, the three patches of her wet string bikini came at him like a rose thrust in his face. Hartley had always thought he'd be a success at adultery. Or at least, he'd thought so since the Army had started sending him out on local publicity assignments. Sitting round with media types and New England pols, he'd been impressed by how much better in shape he was than most married men. Put Hartley in a T-shirt and jeans, and he'd look like everybody's lippy teenage grease monkey. This at thirty-two. Plus, the first joke out of his mouth and the women would start asking him, my my Captain Hartley, is that the way a soldier talks? What does the Army do when it finds out the truth about you?

It was the war-hero business. He'd always known it gave him an advantage. Only last night, at the hotel bar, he'd pressed the advantage home.

“I'm
so
glad you're here with us,” Garbeau had told him. This was after dinner. “You make our story true to
life
.”

They'd eaten Chinese. Beforehand, she'd shared a couple joints with him, and ever since they'd been drinking rum. During dinner he'd been able to keep her talking either about high school, where she'd been a year behind Hartley and his wife, or about how she'd gone from St. Johnsbury to Hollywood. But now Garbeau had wanted to talk about the war.

“Hartley, God,” she'd said. “How could you go through what you did and not wind up, just, an
empty shell
of a human being?”

“Well”—Hartley had grinned—“I wrote a song about you.”

She hadn't seen he was joking. She'd lifted her eyes to him, almond French-Canadian eyes Hartley had thought were beautiful since the age of fourteen. Over her rum, Garbeau's expression was still all piety.

“Oh, on your
guitar
?”

Piety, piety, piety. Everyone was always so impressed that he'd had a guitar with him in the prison camp. Hartley had long ago stopped bothering to point out that it wasn't
his
guitar. You couldn't do a recon up Hill 1338 carrying a guitar. The guitar had belonged originally to one of the Dak To support personnel, a P.O. boy who'd gotten picked up during a convoy hit. The boy had died under torture.

“That's right.” Hartley had grinned again, forcing it wider. “I wrote a song just for you. I called it, ‘For Ronnie G.'”

She'd smiled back uncertainly.

“No,” he'd gone on, “no, that's not true. I called it ‘For V.G.' So no one there would know who I meant.”

After that it had been as simple as Hartley had expected it would be. He believed he understood the psychology at work. Since the woman had allowed herself to come so close already, since she'd already made herself vulnerable, Hartley needed only to jiggle that first impression the least bit. To demonstrate the fun they could have with a shared trust. Then the interest in him would turn special. Any number of times, he'd seen the signals change in a woman's look. But only here in Florida had he pressed beyond a look, beyond the surreptitious gropings and prolonged good-night kisses he'd gotten once or twice before.

In Garbeau's room, however, things hadn't been nearly so cut and dried. At the first snort of her cocaine Hartley had thought he'd turn inside out. He'd made fists in his pants pockets. Watching her undress, with every button and snap he'd suffered another nightmare about how he might perform and what it might do to him. When she'd turned and seen the bulges in his pockets, she'd made a funny moue. And his guts had gone blank. If she hadn't knelt to unlace his boots, unbuckle his belt, they wouldn't have come off. Meantime Hartley had heard himself saying the most childish things. He'd told her that this past April he'd run the Marathon in under three hours. He'd told her how many situps he could do. Never in his life had he sounded like such a fake. And so, soon, even the delicious slippery movement of Garbeau's pelvis, even the lecherous wisdom of her small features—so all of it had become for Hartley a trial. He'd thought:
Hey, I was just kidding around
.

Nonetheless he'd performed. And after calling his wife he'd gone through it again this morning, with more zip and cocaine. Then they'd set off on this tourist ramble along the coast, ending up here, where he sat and itched while Garbeau ate like a fiend and then ran into the surf. Now she was waving her arms at him, oddly. Hartley shifted and felt his scars irritate him in different places. Yes oddly. Garbeau seemed just able to keep her head above water, though it couldn't have been more than hip-deep where she was. Hartley squinted and saw her panicky eyes, the forced and painful shape of her mouth.

The lifeguard had started clambering down from his high seat. But Hartley beat him easily. The soldier was at the water's edge while the lifeguard was still getting his board. Hartley got Garbeau around the breasts. She had her knees tucked up tight and he cradled her in two arms, carrying her well above the waterline.

“In my life,” he said a few minutes later, “I've been in three places. I've been in Vermont, I've been in Vietnam, and I've been in the Army.”

An old joke. She didn't smile.

“But to see someone actually get a stomach cramp,” he said, “I had to come to Florida.”

Now she smiled. Faintly. She lay on her side with her hands on her stomach.

“You owe me one, Ronnie.” The point came out just right, dealt from strength. Handed down like an order. “Take me and show me what you're doing with my life.”

The shooting site was lit up incredibly. The brightness of the lamps and reflectors seemed that much more ferocious against the Everglades swamp growth and the heavy sundown colors, a spectacular purple gloom. Hartley, looking at the sky reflected in the swamp water, was reminded of the pads on animal paws. They'd set up practically at the water's edge. Then Hartley saw the actor playing Hartley, a lean kid he recognized from a TV series set in the 1950's. He remembered once getting upset at a reference to underground papers on the program. That was a lie; they didn't have underground papers in the 1950's. Hartley stared at the actor. The kid's face—he was staring back—had been so painted up that in the spotlights it glimmered like the surface of the swamp. Hartley studied the fatigues, the P HARTLEY tag over the chest pocket. He envied the actor his paratrooper boots, muddied and scuffed all day to get the proper effect.

But something was very wrong, something absolutely off. The smell of the place. Hartley started to move away from the lights, filling his nose with a falseness that would never show on television. This scene they were shooting now was supposed to take place in the prison camp, but it smelled like jungle. The air here gave the impression of continual ripening, the heady effect of violent blossoms. Whereas in the prison camp it had reeked without end of decay, of clotted water and smoke. Hartley still became edgy whenever someone doused his barbecue coals at the end of a summer party. And here, in the Everglades, a man at least could find that odor from the marrow of a carcass. Hartley moved farther from the lights, towards the purple shimmer of the pool. The ground sank beneath his beach sandals; he felt mud between his toes. Yes here at least a man found the genuine shit. Uprooted tendrils of ancient trees stank as they died. Reptiles prowled the muck.

Garbeau called him back to the shooting site. In one hand she held a clipboard and despite her bikini she looked all business again. Hartley returned slowly, savoring the atmosphere. He stopped as soon as he saw what they were doing. The actor who played Hartley sat wrapped in a blanket. He held a guitar. Around him settled three other actors: a muscular black, an urban Hispanic type, and a Midwestern-looking blonde. The four were huddled around a small campfire.

“This is the Christmas scene,” Garbeau said. “I thought it would give you a good idea what we're up to.”

The actor who played Hartley called for some help with his makeup. He said the blanket and the fire were making him sweat too much.

“What about the
fan
?” Garbeau shouted.

“A campfire?” Hartley was asking quietly, beside her. “No way we could ever have a campfire.”

“If we use the fan,” a man with another clipboard shouted, “we'll have to boost the footage back at the shop.”

“It wasn't that kind of camp,” Hartley almost whispered.

“Well so?” Garbeau shouted. “So what's the hangup? We got the montage to patch in anyway. Let's
get
it.”

A fan came on, making Hartley's shirt billow.

“It was windy back there in wintertime, right?” She spoke to Hartley now, her voice back to normal.

“Are you kidding me?” Right away he felt ashamed of his weak tone. He tried for something harsher: “You might as well have these guys roasting marshmallows.”

Garbeau looked at him a while, her suggestive eyes level. She drew herself up so the lines of her body were emphasized. Hartley suffered an asexual pang, a cramp in his chest.

“This particular scene,” Garbeau said carefully, “may not be perfect in terms of actual experience. We may not get an exact one-to-one correlation with the facts. But the scene will echo the
feelings
of real people in trouble, everywhere.”

Nobody else looked Hartley's way. They made a big, unnecessary production of riffling through the notes on their clipboards.

“This is just not, not right,” Hartley managed finally over his chest cramp. “Camp was freaky, it was
hard
.”

“We know that. We understand.”

“Understand? Understand? Look, you think those drugs you have are anything?”

“Easy, Hartley—”

“Camp made those drugs look like the Sunday funnies. Camp was—every
minute
you realized there were more terrible things inside you!”

“I'll play it that way,” the actor playing Hartley called from beside the fire. “Don't worry man, I'll do it right.”

“Hey, pretty boy,
I'll
do it right!” Hartley shouted. “I'll do it right on your
face
!”

“Easy Hartley” Garbeau put her hand under his shirt. “Easy, easy.”

“Check out that anger,” the actor was saying to the group round the fire. “That anger is
great
. That's what I've got to have.”

“
Quiet
,” Garbeau said. “I'll handle this.”

“I understand,” the actor said.

An odd sound moved through the shooting crew, a kind of chuckle.

“Hartley, please,” Garbeau said in another voice, “think of the story. A man, alone, far from his loved ones. Think of it. He's forced to take whatever help, whatever small comfort he can get, from others as lost and miserable as himself.”

Her hand continued to hold him at bay.

“You really believe this garbage, don't you?” he said at last. “This whole pack of lies—you set it up.”

Garbeau just laughed. “Hartley, come on. We've had some fun, these last couple days. All right.” She spoke so mildly, like a lover. “We've had some good times. But this is serious business. Think of it, please. A man, alone and lost and miserable. He huddles together with others like him, seeking protection from the winter wind. And then that man lifts his head and sings the true feelings. He sings what we all share.”

Hartley had to look away. He cast his eyes over the metal angles of the cameras, the whiteness of cue cards and notes on clipboards, the gloomy backdrop of a swamp that now seemed miles and miles distant. He saw two other women he hadn't noticed earlier. He saw a cherry-red van and a driver smelling what looked like an orchid. There were so many in the shooting crew, so many watching him. Finally Hartley looked at the actor playing Hartley. With a start, a flinch he couldn't suppress, he saw that the kid was grinning.
Grinning
. In fact the glimmery tones of the actor's face were stretched so wide and lewdly that all at once there was no room left for doubt. Everyone here knew what Hartley and Garbeau had been doing.