Her eyes were on his scar.
He said, “You’re not responsible.”
She blinked.
He touched his arm. “Not for that, I mean. I’d show you the bruise that’s got your name on it but I don’t know you well enough yet.”
She said, “That one looks pretty bad.”
“Happened a long time ago.”
“I don’t think I want to know how.”
“I was driving an Olds 88 and firing a machine gun out the window. Somebody shot the car with a rocket. I think it was a rocket. I’m not sure. It blew up.”
She stared at him, waiting for the truth, then gave a burst of polite laugh, which faded fast. “A machine gun.”
“An Uzi, I think.” Pellam frowned and thought hard. “No, a MAC-10.”
He nodded again. Right, a MAC-10. And a rocket. And a terrier that looked a little like a poodle. He didn’t have amnesia. He looked at her. What was her name again?
“A MAC-10,” he repeated.
She stared a moment more. She handed him a white plastic bag with handles on it. “Present,” she said. Her cheeks were red and Pellam loved that. As much as he loved freckles he loved blushing women even more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a pretty woman blushing. In L.A., all women were like Trudie; genetically incapable of it.
He opened the bag. The present wasn’t wrapped but there was a bow on the box. A new Polaroid camera.
“What happened to the old one?” he asked.
“It got kind of mashed.”
He laughed. “You didn’t have to. The company’ll pay for it.”
She smiled cautiously, maybe not sure whether he meant her insurance company or his film company. What he’d meant was his company but then he figured it was all going on her tab anyway—camera, the veterinarian’s bill and a little moolah for pain and suffering (the eggplant bruise would look great in court and now, thanks to her, he had a new toy to immortalize it with). He said, “Thanks.”
He fiddled with the square, sleek camera, not sure what else to say. He loaded it then held the camera up suddenly and took a picture of her. She blinked and for an instant got a nervous look, as if she suspected him of gathering evidence.
Bzzzzt.
He loved that sound.
But he just looked at the picture as it developed—not quite in focus, tilted, washed out; her lids were half closed. He handed the picture to her.
“What—?”
Pellam shrugged. “A present. You can frame it.”
She looked at the square. “It’s awful.” Then she put it into her purse and looked up at the wall, at an eye chart that must’ve been thirty or forty years old. She was squinting slightly and he wondered if she was giving herself an informal exam or whether she was appraising its value, picturing it in her tastefully paneled dining room she’d share with a husband rich enough to buy her the Hope Diamond’s cousin for her petite finger.
She asked, “You’re the man making movies?”
“Nope. I just look for locations that the studio decides they don’t like.”
“Just like me,” she said. “I show houses to people who don’t buy them.”
So, not a housewife. A businesswoman person. Watch it, Pellam. Middle America ain’t the same as when you left. Patronize at your own risk.
She said, “What kind of movie is it?”
“An artsy movie,” he said.
“Big Mountain Studios. They’re famous.”
“Sort of famous,” Pellam said. “How did you know the name?”
“You had this permit in the window of your trailer thing. Your Winnebago.”
Pellam nodded. Wondering when—and why—she’d checked out the camper.
“When will they start shooting?”
“Three weeks, give or take.”
Meg nodded. “Guess you’ve got lots of people asking about getting a part.”
“Some, sure. They think it’d be an adventure. You want a part? I’d be—”
“Are you asking me?” She blinked in surprise.
He didn’t like women who couldn’t tell when he was joking.
“Everybody wants to be in movies,” Pellam said, not looking at her directly, but studying her reflection in a round wall mirror. “Everybody wants to be rich. Everybody wants to be young. Everybody wants to be thin.”
She—
Meg
he remembered her name (MAC-10, rocket, terrier, call Trudie, Meg, Meg, Meg)—she swallowed whatever she was going to say and instead offered: “I’ve got a son.” Saying that seemed to make her more comfortable, established some boundaries.
Yo, men, secure the perimeter.
Pellam was getting
tired of the visit. He had his present, she had her son and her husband’s massive rings. Now he wanted her to leave. Meg said, “He’d love to be in a movie.”
“You don’t want him to be.” Pellam said in a tone that said he knew.
“I don’t know. He’s really into California. We went to Universal Studios last year. He loved it. I did too.”
“Universal Studios isn’t Hollywood. Except in the most general of senses.”
Meg said, “You have any kids?” Now her eyes did the heart–finger scan.
“Nope,” he said.
A pause. “I think it’d be tough to have a job like yours and have kids.”
“It would, true.”
“Or,” she said, “be married.”
“Also true.”
“So, you’re not?”
“Divorced.”
Meg nodded. He wondered if she was storing this information and, if so, in what kind of file.
“So, you just drive around and look for places to shoot movies?”
He thought for a moment and decided that described his life about as succinctly as anybody’d ever done. “Yep.”
A luxuriant silence.
She handed him a piece of paper. “That’s my insurance agent.”
He put the slip on the bedside table, next to the bedpan.
“My husband told me not to say anything to you. . . . But, I had to come by.”
(“John, cops and insurance companies they’re going to eat up your words like M&M’s. Don’t say a goddamn syllable to the cannibals, got it?”)
He told her, “These things happen.”
“I hit a patch of leaves. I wasn’t expecting to see somebody in the middle of the street.”
He said, “You’ve acted, haven’t you?”
She laughed in surprise. “No. I did some modeling. Just for a year. How could you tell?”
He said, “The way you carry yourself. . . . I don’t know. Just an impression.”
He felt she wanted to warm up, but was keeping the tone conversational. She continued, “I lived in Manhattan for a while. I did some fashion work. But I was too short to get good assignments. I didn’t like it anyway.” She folded her arm across her chest and looked for the door, seemed relieved that it was only six feet away. “Why are you asking me these questions?”
“I always like to find out from the locals about locations I’m scouting. It’s—”
“Locals?” She tromped hard on the frown, but some of it escaped.
He said, “I get the feeling you’ve lived here long enough to give me an idea of what Cleary’s really like.”
Meg was grimacing. Whatever was behind the visit—Pellam didn’t have a clue what that might be—wasn’t working out. On cue, she looked at her watch. “I should go. There’s someone covering for me at the office.”
“When I get out of here—they’re paroling me tomorrow—let me buy you lunch.”
“No, I—”
“Not to worry,” Pellam said. “I’ll drive.”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. I’ve got a lot going on. I’m very busy.”
“People are busy in Cleary?”
Okay, it was a little over the line with that one. He’d forgotten you have to be real careful when you hit people in their hometowns. Especially if you’re from one that’s a thousand times bigger than theirs. But come on, country folk, you gotta have a sense of humor.
She bristled. “Yes, people are busy in Cleary. There’s more to this town than people like you’ll ever see—”
“There, perfect,” Pellam announced.
She frowned.
“Keep talking. You’re giving me a feel for the place. That’s just what I’m looking for.”
“I should go.”
He said, “No, you shouldn’t.”
“Anyway, I’m not a local. I’ve only lived here for—”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. . . .” Pellam was feeling perverse (hell, why not? She’d run him over). “Ten years.”
Her eyes flared. “What makes you think I’ve lived here that long?”
In for a penny, in for a pound.
“The makeup, the hair, the clothes—”
“What’s wrong with—?” Her voice was high, indignant.
“Nothing. You just asked me—”
“Never mind.” Meg unfolded her arms and walked to the door.
Pellam asked, “So when can we get together?”
“The word
never
comes to mind.” She stepped through the doorway, gripping the knob hard then
must’ve decided she shouldn’t be slamming clinic doors and closed it silently. A second later it opened and she said to him, “And for your information, I’ve lived here for five years, not ten.”
The door closed again, harder this time.
Ah, she’ll be back.
Pellam heard her low heels tapping on the linoleum, then the grind of the front door and then nothing.
She’ll be back. She’s on her way now.
A car started.
She’ll be back.
He heard a car strew gravel as it hit the road, then the whine of gears.
Okay, maybe not.
BZZZZT.
Marty stuffed the moist square of the Polaroid into his pocket and squinted as he looked at a bald spot on the small mountain across a ravine. Acid rain’d eaten away at a lot of the greenery. It didn’t look good at all. By the time Marty’d gone to college, schools were offering degrees in the environment. Marty could recognize acid rain.
He took four pictures, numbered them and slipped them into his pocket. All location scouts he knew used Polaroids, but Marty was an amateur photographer and would’ve preferred to use his old Nikkormat 35mm. The variation in the lenses—wide-angle, telephoto—would give a better idea of what the scenery and locations looked like through the Panaflex movie camera. But the studio paid his salary and the studio said ’Roids.
So ’Roids were what they were going to get.
Marty wanted to be a cinematographer eventually. He knew cameras. He liked the murmuring gears and heavy, oil-scented parts that fit together so well. He liked the perfectly ground disks of the Schneider lenses, set into their royal-blue velvet carrying cases. He liked the portable Arriflex 35mm cameras, which cameramen would carry around on sets like rocket launchers. He liked the robotic contraption of Steadicams.
He figured a couple more years of location scouting, then it would be about time for his break (a unit director would call out, “Holy Mother, the director of photography’s on a bender—you, kid, get behind the Panaflex. Roll, roll, roll . . .”). Until that happened, however, being a location scout would do. Especially being a location scout for John Pellam, where you tended to get a week of experience in the movie business for every day you worked.
Marty wandered back down the hill toward the rented Tempo.
Get the feel.
Marty worked hard at trying to get the feel. Pellam made him read the scripts over and over. Scripts are a bitch to read but he kept at it. Pellam would question him about a story. You gotta get the feel for it, he’d say.
The feel . . . that was the extra ten percent that Pellam—for all his bullshit and fire-me-if-you-want attitude—was always talking about. The extra ten percent that Pellam delivered. This was the essential lesson Marty had learned from John Pellam.
The day was getting hot. The sun was out. Marty looked at his watch. There were still thirteen locations he had to find but sun like this was too good to miss. Beer break. Marty went to the trunk of the car and took out a Miller. He opened it. He sat on the rear bumper as he flipped through the script for
Shallow Grave.
He unbuttoned his shirt and let the sunlight fall on his tanned, skinny chest.
He liked sitting in the sun and drinking beer. He liked the country, liked the blond dry grass that hissed when he walked through it. When he was in California he usually stayed in a condo in Van Nuys, but he preferred to travel because there were no seasons in L.A. He loved fall. He wondered if there were more jobs for cinematographers in New York than in L.A.
He wondered—
The bullet hit the back of the car with a huge ringing slap a full second before he heard the rolling boom of the rifle shot. Marty jumped up, eyes wide, dropping the script, the camera and his beer. White, malty foam shot out of the gold can.
“Christ,” he whispered as terror and relief oozed through his legs. All he could do was stare, open-mouthed, at the hole in the car, remembering a newspaper story about a woman who was killed by a gunshot from several miles away, a hunting accident. “Christ.”
He thought: that’d been four feet to the right. . . .
The second shot, which he never heard, wasn’t four feet to the right at all. It hit the gas tank pretty much dead center.
You could hear, as if on a sound track, a huge whoosh, as the flaming ball spread twenty feet in all directions.
And, as the Ford burned into black metal, you could hear the honking of geese and swans, fleeing with their imperfect memory of the terrible explosion.
AT FIRST, PELLAM
thought the tragedy was his.
Leukemia. A tumor. Hodgkin’s.
I’m sorry, sir. The X ray showed something else.
The doctor opened the door slowly. Pellam looked at the man’s face and knew something bad was coming. The man sure had the technique down. Pellam had used it himself. When his father had died he’d been elected to break the news to a lot of people. He let the downcast eyes and endless loop of a sigh explain to them that terrible news was impending, before he said a word. The telepathic message of tragedy did a lot of the work for him.
Pellam saw this same expression in the eyes of the strong, young vet of a doctor, pausing in the doorway, looking at Pellam as if he were gazing at the last few seconds of his patient’s good health.
“Evening,” Pellam said.
Then he saw the deputy, a young man, similar in build to the doctor, baby-faced, crewcut, and he thought—his first fleeting thought—someone had stolen the camper. But their eyes explained too much. And at that moment, Pellam understood.