Migrators (12 page)

“You didn’t want to eat it?”

“No,” Joe said. “Not with those teeth.”

“Wash your hands over the side,” Alan said.

After they cleaned up, they left the poles sitting in the boat. It seemed that one fish apiece was their limit. Instead of starting up the motor, Alan just used the paddle to keep them in the middle of the stream. The gentle current moved them slowly back downstream.

“So you understand what I was saying about humanity earlier, Joe?” Alan asked.
 

“I guess.”

“I’m saying that even when your anger calls and you feel like you have to do something or you’ll explode—that’s when it’s most important to exercise control. You can’t be simple, like the fish. We live in a society with rules. It’s how we get along without killing each other. It’s what makes us civilized.”

“I know,” Joe said. “I get it.”

“Good,” Alan said.

They started to take the last turn. Alan saw their little dock off in the distance.

“But that’s only true for humans, right?” Joe asked.

“No, Joe. You have to treat animals humanely too. You wouldn’t mistreat a puppy just because it wasn’t human,” Alan said.

“But if something is evil it doesn’t count, right?” Joe asked. “People in movies are always fighting things that are evil. It’s okay to kill evil things.”

Alan shook his head as he spoke. “No. No, Joe. What are you talking about?”

“We can’t let evil things get us. We have to fight them, right? We have to kill them?” Joe asked.

“Joe, no. We’re not going to kill anything. It’s not up to us to decide who’s evil. Do you understand?”

Joe nodded.

“Say it—tell me you understand, Joe,” Alan said.

“I understand.”

O
CTOBER
7

A
LAN
LET
himself in through the garage. Bob’s mudroom serviced as a temporary laundry room and kitchen. Alan poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot sitting on top of the dryer. He opened the door to the room that used to be the kitchen.

“Still fighting it?” Alan asked.

Bob looked up from the floor and smiled. He was on his knees over in the corner.

“I can’t let it go,” Bob said. “I’ve been using this.” He held up a metal spatula.

Alan laughed. There was a spot in the corner where they couldn’t quite reach. It was gunked up with some kind of adhesive and until they cleaned it out, they couldn’t get the cabinets to sit correctly in the corner. Alan was a proponent of cutting back the corner of the cabinet until it sat flat, but Bob wanted the floor perfect. That wasn’t the focus of the day though. Today they were putting in the new plumbing for the bathroom. Alan was excited—plumbing was something he’d always wanted to learn.

Bob dropped the spatula and dusted off his hands as he stood up. He grabbed his own coffee cup and led the way to the basement. He had lights set up in a circle, pointing up into the hole where he’d removed all the ceiling tiles.
 

“These pipes here are going to pull back to here,” Bob said, pointing up at the copper. “And we have to extend these supply lines over to there.”

“Wait, isn’t that where the toilet is going? Why do you need both hot and cold over to there?”

“That toilet tank sweats in the summer. The cold water from the well makes condensation form on the outside of the tank and then mold grows on the wall. I thought if I put in a mixing valve, I could add some hot water when the tank fills. That way it won’t be too cold,” Bob said.

“Sounds wasteful,” Alan said.
 

“If the new owners don’t want it, they can turn the mixing valve all the way to cold. At least they’ll have the option,” Bob said.

Alan nodded. He worked as Bob’s assistant that morning, mostly handing him tools and asking a couple of questions. Bob was good at giving brief explanations of what he was doing. As Bob fired up his torch and heated the copper, he made conversation.

“So what did you do before you moved up here? You said you’re a photographer?” Bob asked.

“Yeah,” Alan said. “I did mostly freelance stuff, and some assignments.”

“Arty stuff or gritty?”

“Gritty,” Alan said.

Bob nodded.

“Battlefields, conflicts, riots, Congress—you know, feel-good stuff. It was dangerous sometimes. There’s nothing more unstable than a politician.”

Bob laughed.

“Seriously though—it got to the point where I couldn’t justify it. I saw some of my colleagues get unlucky and I figured I couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t fair to Joe and Liz, you know? She makes a good enough living that neither of us should have to risk our lives.”

Bob hissed as hot flux sputtered and hit his arm.

“You should be wearing safety glasses,” Bob said.

Alan dug in the pouch of his sweatshirt and pulled some out.

“But you still do photography?” Bob asked.

“Yes and no. I’ve been trying to get something going with nature shots. It’s a hard transition. When I’m shooting a riot, I know where I want to stand. I know what the shot should look like automatically and I move with the flow. I’m trying to take a picture of a tree and I just can’t get the feel of it. Everything’s so static and you could get it from any angle. I can’t find the movement of it. You know what I mean?”

“Not really, no,” Bob said.

“But you’re a movie director, right? You create visual art.”

“I work
with
visual artists,” Bob said. “My role is a little more humble than that. I’m like the drive shaft that connects the engine to all the moving parts. I keep lists and make sure we have enough footage to cover the script. If we miss something, I’m the guy who figures out if we need to reshoot or if we can cobble something together from what we’ve got.”

“Like an editor?” Alan asked.

“I’m like what the print world calls an editor, yes. Some directors visualize the whole thing. I’m more of a manager.”

Bob moved on to the next joint. Alan had already cleaned up the ends and brushed on the flux. Bob just needed to heat it up and add the solder, sweating the copper to fuse the metal.

“What kind of movies do you do?”

“I’ve done a couple of features you might have seen,” Bob said. “Did you see
Lingering Doubt
or
Nevercome
?”

“I saw
Doubt
with my wife. That was one of yours?”

Bob nodded. He squinted as he tested the heat of the joint with his solder.

“That was a pretty good movie. Didn’t you win an award for that?”

“Nominated.”

“Still—that’s pretty amazing. I had no idea that was you. Shouldn’t you be off making millions directing huge movies? What the hell are you doing here cleaning up your ex-brother-in-law’s shitty house?”

“I’m waiting on a couple of projects. You might be surprised at how little money an Academy nominated director earns. You spend so long between lucrative gigs and then as soon as you work on something non-commercial, it’s like they all think you’re not interested in making money. I’m lucky I can afford the copper we’re putting in.” He popped up his glasses to inspect the solder with his naked eye. “That should do it for these joints.”

“How long do you wait before you test it with water pressure?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try it out sometime before I put the new floor in,” Bob said. “Let’s take a break. My neck is killing me.”

Through the back door they passed under the deck to where Bob had a couple of rocks set up like little seats. They faced down the hill through the woods. There was nothing to look at, but it was serene and quiet. A cold fall damp had settled on the scattered orange leaves.

“I love the smell of this place,” Bob said.

“I was thinking the same thing the other day. It’s comforting somehow. You go outside and you just feel more at ease.”

“Reminds me of Thanksgiving and Christmas—holidays when you stay inside with family.”

“Where you from originally?” Alan asked.
 

“Ohio,” Bob said. “Right near the border with West Virginia. We used to go over to Pittsburgh all the time as soon as I was old enough to drive. That was where I really grew up.”

“Did you like it?”

“I guess,” Bob said. “That’s where we filmed
Nevercome
. Pittsburgh, I mean.”

“I didn’t see that one.”

“Not many people did. I held my ground and got in a fight with the studio. They recut it and left a lot of the good stuff out of the movie. If you take a plot like that and cut it down to ninety minutes, the audience has no chance of being entertained. It’s hard to tell what’s even going on.”

Alan watched a leaf making its way to the ground. A breeze caught it and it swirled in a tight spiral.

“What was the fight about?” Alan asked.

Bob didn’t answer. Alan glanced over and saw Bob scrubbing his face with his hands. Bob breathed out and hunched over.

“I took on that movie so I could shoot one particular scene. They wanted to cut it. We were in the middle of that battle when the actress from the scene died. You remember when I said that the female lead of my personal project passed away?”

“Yeah,” Alan said. Bob didn’t seem so much sad as exhausted by the topic.

“She was the lead in my personal project, but she was just a cameo in
Nevercome
. Her scene was crucial to me.”

Bob looked wearied by the topic, but he also looked like he had more that he needed to say. Alan debated letting it drop. His curiosity won.

“How come?” Alan asked.

“I had this concept. I worked on it for almost twenty years, can you believe that? Twenty years of work—I should have known how fragile it was. It’s foolish to count on anything that takes more than two months to develop and yet you have to keep pounding your head against walls for years to get anything done. You have to keep tap dancing because the floor is always shifting. It’s a shitty business to be in.”

“So what was the project?” Alan asked.

“Let me see if I can boil this down. You’ve seen movies that rely heavily on childhood flashbacks?”

“Of course,” Alan said.

“They always suffer from the same problems—it’s tough to make the old footage feel authentic, and it’s tough to cast look-alike child actors to play your leads.”

Alan nodded.
 

“It’s been done well a few times, but if you’ve got big names they usually come with unique looks. There’s only one George Clooney. They’re not making a whole lot of kids who look authentically like a small version of him. I got the idea to start from the other side. As soon as I had some money, I put together a research team. We started looking for parents who were likely to raise a movie star.”

Alan burst out with a startled laugh. Bob was clearly serious, but the concept was ludicrous.

“How?” Alan asked with an incredulous chuckle.

“Maybe not as hard as you think. Good-looking parents who already have one good-looking smart kid. The younger sibling has a chance of being attractive and outgoing. We filmed a ton of babies with their parents and played the odds. A bunch of that footage was shot for a movie called
Summary of Hugh
. It was one of my first films. A few years later we did a movie called
Getaway River Drop
.”

“I saw it. That movie was great.”

“Thank you. You remember the kids?”

“Those kids living in the cabins with their parents?”

“Yeah. That was the second piece of the puzzle. We used the same kids again. They were a couple of years older by that point,” Bob said.

“They weren’t a big part of the plot,” Alan said.

“No, not of that movie. I shot some extra footage that didn’t make it into the final cut though. I just snuck it into the schedule here and there. It’s tough to do with kid actors—the rules are strict on how much they can work—but we squeezed in enough to make it work. I had the footage from
Hugh
and
Getaway
and I squirreled it away, waiting to see which of the kids would go into acting.”

“I see—you started with a whole bunch of babies with
Summary of Hugh
and then put some of them into
Getaway River Drop
also?”

“Right, exactly. Some of the babies didn’t go into acting. A couple got too fat. We just let the process weed them down and cast whomever was left. That’s how I got the kids for
Cry Under
. It was a limited release indie about preteens who grow up in an abandoned amusement park. Really dark.”

“So you use the same kids over and over again in your movies. That’s pretty cool. Gives them a continuity I guess.”

“It’s more than that. Like I said, we used these films to shoot other scenes that weren’t meant for release. The whole point is, I’ve been filming this other movie that takes place over decades. I don’t have to try reproduce authentic settings and technology from fifteen years ago because I actually filmed the scenes fifteen years ago. And I don’t have to find look-alike actors, because I’ve been using the same actors the whole time.”

“Wow. What’s the other movie about?”

“It’s scrapped now, but it was going to be about actors who grow up in the industry and then become movie stars,” Bob said.

“That’s amazing.”

“Everything was going to plan. In fact, it was turning out better than my highest hopes. Hope was legitimately on her way to becoming one of the most popular actresses of her generation. Nigel’s career is just starting to take off, but I think he’s on his way also.”

“Hope?”

“When we first filmed her as a baby, her name was Hope Sanders. She changed her name to Ophelia Saunders about five years ago.”

Alan stood up from his rock. He braced his hands against his knees and hunched over. He turned to Bob with his mouth hanging open. “Ophelia Saunders? Ophelia Saunders was your female lead? She’s so famous.”

“She was,” Bob nodded. “She was.”

Alan felt a familiar mix of emotions at the mention of Ophelia’s name. He suspected that he shared the feeling with middle-aged men dating back to the invention of arousal. Ophelia had been gorgeous and magnetic. She had been the definition of sex, but she’d also been much closer to Joe’s age than his own. It was wrong to have such lust for a young woman who’d been born after he’d graduated from college. That was a fact. His libido disagreed.