Open Water (23 page)

“Give me a break.”

“Federico, I hardly knew ye.”

“Green, green is my valley.”

“You’re set for life as long as it rises.”

“Look, this was brainy stuff. It was 3-D. Like he said, they shoot it twice. They move the camera on a slide bar. They get two exposures sixty-five millimeters apart. It’s all scientific. Showalter’s got state-of-the-art equipment. That paint gun, that’s one of those survival-game weapons. Looked pretty real.”

“It was real, all right. It was a real mess. Are you happy with yourself?”

“Shit. The hours are good.”

“What about Miss Ingersoll. What is she like?”

“She would have been good. We’ll never know.”

“Tell me, you could do it in front of the camera, come home, and still look it in the eye?” Willis had a straight face.

“Money makes it numb and happy.”

“Tell the truth. You don’t mind that guy?”

Fritz told him, “Gene is all right. He’s not mental or anything. Some of these porn kings are criminal. Like last week, we saw a film where they had this big roll of flypaper.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. That stuff could rip your skin off. That
stuff could tear the lace curtain right off its rod. It was some kind of torture textile. They had these boys right on a big sheet of it.”

“You’re kidding? Flypaper?”

“There are some weird people on the planet,” Fritz said, calming down.

“Showalter wanted you to recline naked on a sheet of flypaper?”

“Never. I’m telling you, Gene isn’t so bad. Only once, he had a piece of rawhide. A long stick of rawhide like you would feed to a dog. Rawhide has flex, it snaps. Gene started smacking my ass. He wanted my ass to look bright and rosy.”

“Shit. Well, did it get rosy?”

Fritz braked hard for a car that was just creeping. They were going fifty and the truck skated in tight swerves side to side until they twirled a half donut on the gravel shoulder. Fritz pushed it back into gear and merged again with the traffic. He didn’t miss a beat.

Willis took another breath. He said, “You’re crazy to model in the first place. Next it might be that noose business. You’ve heard of that?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“What if they forget to loosen the rope in time. That could step right over the line into manslaughter. That would be a nice snapshot.”

“You don’t have to tell me. It’s in the papers. Their shorts around their ankles.”

“How about this idea? We collect these birds and see what we can do with them.”

“Interesting revision,” Fritz told Willis.

“Why should we be the middleman?”

“We don’t have to negotiate with Fall River?”

“Every time we go in there it’s
Let’s Make a Deal.
Curtain number one, curtain number two. Fuck that.”

“All right. We’ll face that bridge another time.”

“Look, you aren’t listening. We burned that bridge. Fritz? It’s torched, you get it?”

“What happened to you?” the woman asked Willis. One side of his shirt was blood red where the stain had expanded above his breast pocket.

“Your ex shot me with one of his expensive squirt guns.”

“An accident?” she said.

“He sighted the shot.”

“From him, that’s a compliment,” she said.

“I figured it was,” he told her.

She was dressed in white leather jeans, like a go-go ghost from
Shindig.
She showed them through the first floor of her big half-furnished ranch and into a chilly pool house in the back. Vapor lifted from the heated lanes, giving the space a forlorn mist.

“I keep them out here by the pool. Maybe you could just drown them.”

Willis studied the large cage. It was empty except for a huge whiskey barrel.

“That’s their next box,” she told him. Her words alarmed the occupants and one bird emerged from the barrel. The bird faced Willis, a creature so vibrant and showy it couldn’t possibly exist outside of dreams. A dazzling blue parrot, over three feet in length. Its ultramarine feathers
were the intense color of bridesmaid chiffon; its long azure tail extended below its perch like crisp first-place ribbons. Willis had never seen anything like it. The bird’s feathers were not an earthly tone, and when the second bird emerged from the barrel, the blue aura was multiplied, creating a small expanse of heaven.

But when Willis reached into the cage to transfer the birds to a carton, one of the macaws bit his hand. The bite drew blood.

“Shit. It’s wild. Showalter didn’t say these were carnivorous.”

Fritz looked at Willis’s hand. In the fleshy web between his thumb and forefinger there was a peculiar incomplete triangle, a beak imprint, bleeding. Willis sucked the wound clean.

“She has three hundred pounds of biting pressure per square inch,” the woman said.

Willis looked at the woman.

“That’s more than I have,” she said. She grinned at Willis.

He smiled in return, his dimple fat as a rosehip.

Willis could see that the divorcée might be walking some kind of high wire between the past and present. She left the room and came back with a plate of tuna salad sandwiches. “My guests didn’t show up,” she said. “There’s a ton of these.”

Fritz looked at the plate and chose a fat square.

Willis declined, rubbing the blood from his lips with the cuff of his jacket. He picked up a plush velour towel from a pool chair and wrapped it around his right hand. Then he put his plastered arm into the cage and started batting the birds with his cast until one of them was subdued and he pulled it through the door and slammed it into a box. He
went after the mean one three times again. The macaw pecked at his plaster cast, leaving powdery gouges. Willis decided it wasn’t worth it.

“Don’t give up,” she said.

Willis reached into the cage again.

Fritz said, “I don’t know, sweetheart. That one there is like a lobster.”

“Don’t call me that,” Willis said.

“What?”

“Don’t call me sweetheart.” Willis pulled his arm out of the cage and let his eyes rest on Fritz until Fritz acknowledged his warning. He walked around the cage in a mock contest with the parrot. It turned to face him at every corner.

“If you don’t take it, I’ll have to shoot it,” the woman said.

The longer they waited there, the more this woman was leaking out her feelings.

She told Willis, “You’re taking her mate, you know. Maybe she’ll die of heartbreak.”

“Can that happen to it? Heartbreak?”

“It never happened to you?” she said.

Willis couldn’t help smiling at her tough remark. He said, “So, I have the male here, and the
mean
one is the female?

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, that sounds natural.”

“The female is worth more because she’s the egg layer, but either way, you lose half what they’re worth when you break the pair—”

An alarm system suddenly erupted with a brutally loud horn. Willis stood up. He looked around the room.

“Is that your security system? Sounds like a steamship.”

“It’s the wind. The wind has been triggering it. They put sensors on the panes. The glass vibrates in the wind and sets it off. It’s nobody. It’s like a joke. They’re supposed to come out and fix it today. We had an appointment before lunch.”

Willis understood the plate of sandwiches. They were for the electricians. He went over to the woman and picked up the platter. He lifted a fluffy taupe-colored square and he pressed it into his mouth with the heel of his hand. He chewed it. It had a rich, cold taste.

The woman’s eyes opened wide, but they adjusted. She let one side of her mouth curl higher than the other side.

They left Fairfield with the single macaw. Willis was driving the truck, testing its acceleration. “Not bad for such a boxy shape,” he said. He was feeling better heading east again. He started singing. Rosemary Clooney’s moment in the sun.
“Come on to my house—my house—I’ll give you my wage and a bird in a cage—”

Fritz went in the back of the truck and cut a hole in the carton with his knife. He peered at the bird. “It looks freaked,” Fritz said.

“Of course it’s freaked. Anything this fucking beautiful is doomed. To begin with, it’s on the wrong continent. It’s in exactly the
wrong world.
How would that feel to you?”

“That would be a bad feeling.”

“What turn of luck do you think it’s having?”

They drove into Fall River to pick up Rennie’s car. Willis called Showalter from a pay phone two blocks away from his house.

“I’ve got one bird, singular,” Willis told Showalter.

“I know. She called me to say you couldn’t manage the other bird.”

“That other one wasn’t user-friendly,” Willis said.

Showalter said, “And how about her? How was she acting?”

Willis said, “She was perfectly reasonable.”

“Reasonable? By whose definition?” Showalter said.

“You had to be there,” Willis said. “Listen. I’m making a change in plans. I’ll let you know exactly what I need when I figure it out.” He hung up the phone.

Willis waited for Fritz to start the sedan. Fritz pulled away from the curb and Willis tailgaited in the InstyPrint truck. He lay on the horn as they rolled past Showalter’s big place. They rode hopscotch all the way back to Newport. When they arrived at Easton Way, Rennie had not yet returned from Château-sur-Mer. Willis lifted the weathered two-by-four that sashed the double doors of Rennie’s shack. He parked the InstyPrint truck inside the tight interior. He took the carton with the macaw over to Holly’s porch, and when she didn’t answer the door, he got her key from Nicole’s pegboard and walked right inside.

H
olly rinsed the fishy saucers and left them on the drain board. She helped Rennie upstairs. Rennie said she wanted a nap, but Holly recognized the symptoms of a physical collapse. Rennie got into her bed and tried to cross her arms, but her arms were too weak and they fell to her sides. Holly tucked her in and placed a glass of water on the end table. Plain tap water didn’t seem like enough. Holly wondered if she should get Rennie some Gatorade. Gatorade had electrolytes. What exactly these electrolytes did, Holly didn’t understand, but Rennie seemed like a candidate. Finally, she left Rennie and walked over to the duplex. Willis was waiting on the porch.

“Where have you been all week?” she said.

He told her, “Lost without you.”

He had said the right thing, but she pretended to ignore it. She asked him again, “What have you been up to?” Willis was much taller than she was, she had to lift her face.

She liked the sensation.

A few weeks earlier, she wouldn’t have liked it at all.

She checked her accelerating thoughts. After one week, her desire was distilled into a toxic elixir. She felt its poison inebriation. She didn’t like his brush-off for a week; she had
even begun to think it was for the best, it was a stay of execution, but maybe something important had happened. She was ready to hear it.

Willis looked overly alert. He was smiling, then he relaxed his mouth. He smiled again. It was something ridiculous. He looked like a child elected by his ball team to report a broken window. “God. What is it?” she asked him.