Shot on Location (2 page)

The script, Harry reported, was fine, but he couldn’t sell it upstairs with so little plot development. “If you could work up two or three more episodes,” he said, “I think we might get it off the ground.”

Brad went back to the typewriter, turned in three more scripts within three weeks, and then went on location in Arizona and tried not to think about the series because thinking about it was a good way to develop ulcers at an early age. All things considered, he was doing well—making enough to send something back to his mother every month, keep up the payments on the two-year-old replacement for the seven-year-old Ford, and build up a bank account to three thousand dollars. The only real problem was convincing the draft board that he was the sole support of his mother, and hoping they wouldn’t find out about her job at the Country Club back in Iowa. The situation in Vietnam was getting worse, and Brad preferred being a paid supernumerary on the screen than an unpaid hero in the jungle. Rhoda, ever the advocate of survival over integrity, suggested that he move into one of the larger units and share it with a queer as civilian status insurance, but Brad had his limitations.

When Harry finally reported that he couldn’t get backing for the series, but that he believed in it enough to film a pilot himself if he could raise the scratch, Brad volunteered his three thousand dollars for a starter and got an I.O.U. from Harry scrawled on his personal office memo paper. Even if lying was the name of the game, nobody could live without believing something, and Brad believed Harry Avery and was willing to sweat out the wait with him, however long it took.

And then it was late November and President Kennedy made a fence-mending visit to Dallas, after which nothing was the same for anyone anywhere. Brad wrote a long Christmas letter to his mother and enlisted in the army, which seemed the logical thing for an all-American boy named Omar Bradley Smith to do. He signed over the Ford to Rhoda, who was making enough now to keep up the payments, and left his meagre possessions stashed in her garage. “It will be all over in a few months,” he said, which is what every man has always said about every war, and then he was flown to Vietnam and reality set in.

Two years later Brad was sent to a Rest and Relaxation centre and saw a crowd of soldiers laughing it up in front of the TV set. He grabbed a beer and sat down to watch the fun and quickly lost his sense of humour. Rhoda was on the screen—Rhoda playing the lady rancher harassed and romanced by a trio of renegade cowboys known as
The Bandits
. It was his story line and his characters, and he spent the next two weeks catching up on what had been happening back in the States.
The Bandits
was produced by Harry Avery and starred a new personality, Rhona Brent. It was the top rated show of the season for two years, and Rhona Brent had received an Emmy for her role as Prudence. During the next long months, until his discharge, he caught the show whenever possible. Halfway through the third season Prudence was killed by a fall from a horse, and the gossips speculated that she had retired to raise a family, because she was now Mrs. Harry Avery. They had to be wrong because, early in their relationship, Rhona had confided that she had an abortion the year before she met Charley, and was butchered inside in a way that made it impossible for her to conceive. He said nothing to anyone about the series, but he did write to Harry and never received an answer.

Brad’s mother died while Brad was still overseas. Finally, he was returned Stateside and discharged from the army. He had gone in a buck private and come out a P.F.C. He had a few battle ribbons, one slight scar over his right eyebrow where he had been grazed by a Vietcong sniper, and his termination pay. He was a hero at last, in a world that had stopped believing in heroes.

As soon as his discharge was final, Brad returned to the site of Rhona’s bungalow court and found that it had been replaced by a hi-rise apartment complex where rents started at 300 dollars and went higher than the penthouse. He located Harry’s new office on the Strip and never got beyond the pleasant but evasive receptionist. Mr. Avery was in Europe. Mrs. Avery was in Europe. Nobody knew when they would return. Brad then contacted a lawyer who examined the I.O.U., noted that it was neither dated nor witnessed and quoted a retainer’s fee which made Brad decide to shelve the matter until he could meet Harry face to face. By that time his termination pay was almost gone and his old studio contacts were lost. Through the U.S.E.S. he got a job parking cars at a Beverly Hills office complex and there he met Estelle Vance, who was an extremely smart fifty, traded her Cadillacs at twenty thousand miles and operated a highly successful real estate business. She needed a salesman and Brad needed a job. She coached him through the licencing period and practically gave him his first sale, with enough commission to buy some suits that didn’t look like 1964, pay cash for a used Mustang and take a furnished bachelor flat in a stylish new Mediterranean type apartment building in West Hollywood. It was a much better life than parking cars or picking up bit parts in TV westerns, but Brad was restless. Immobilization didn’t come with a piece of paper. He picked up a passport and toyed with the idea of taking a construction job abroad. The army had taught him a lot about machinery and communications, and he had a low tolerance for being charming with people like the retired Wittenbergs from Kenosha, who had already consumed two weeks of his young life trying to decide if a fifty-unit apartment building in Santa Monica was the investment they really wanted for the golden years. Entertaining the Wittenbergs in the notable spas on the Strip, a sales approach recommended by Estelle Vance, had left him exhausted and awakening with Rhona on his mind was like rubbing salt in an old wound. He had once calculated that Harry was now a millionaire several times over, and that it had all started with his own idea so that at least a quarter of that amount should be in the bank account of Omar Bradley Smith. It was a depressing calculation that he tried to keep out of his mind, but the subconscious wasn’t easy to boss around.

He went into the bathroom, took a bromide and changed into bathing trunks. Outside the sliding glass doors, that led to the private patio of his apartment, was a huge swimming pool usually unoccupied at 9 a.m. He vaulted the wrought-iron guard rail, sprinted across the decking and plunged into the pool. It was one of those rare clear days in the city. The sky above was almost as blue as the pool, and the caress of the water and the warmth of the sun reminded him that his body was whole: he had two strong arms, two good legs and firm flesh that hadn’t been blasted away by bomb fragments or so seered by napalm that, unlike many of the once young men who had come back from Vietnam, he wasn’t prepared to spend the rest of his life hiding in a veterans’ hospital because he was too ashamed to go home with a featureless face. He had his health and his youth. He was poor but he was alive. He swam with sure, strong strokes to the opposite side of the pool and emerged on to the decking. A Mr. Atlas he was not. In his celluloid cowboy days, one director had referred to him as the poor man’s Jimmy Stewart, which wasn’t too flattering when all he wanted was to be the rich man’s Brad Smith. But he was reasonably attractive, and the pounds he had added in Vietnam, all muscle, gave him the confident feeling that he had nothing to fear from appearing in public wearing only swimming trunks and a smile.

He had been alone in the pool, but he wasn’t alone on the decking. Two of the distaff occupants of the complex were sunning themselves poolside. One was blonde—slightly reminiscent of Rhona—who wore a tiny pink bikini and stretched voluptuously, full length on a foam rubber pad. The other, a brunette, wore a white chenille jacket over her suit and was studying a formidable looking text. Brad had noticed the pair on other mornings, and made a mental note to cultivate the bookish one. The blonde might be more fun, but it would be nice to have the company of a woman with whom he could talk. A bright beach towel was spread on the vacant chair beside her. He picked it up and swabbed his face and shoulders.

The girl on the foam rubber pad raised her head. “Hey,” she protested, “that’s my towel!”

“Thanks,” Brad said, and tossed it back on the chair.

It was all right for an opener. The brunette had looked up from the book and smiled at him. He would get back to that later. Now he crossed the pool decking to the glass doors leading into the lobby of the complex, ignored the “No Bare Feet” sign and went inside. A pleasant red-head of about thirty-five was on duty at the reception desk. He asked for his mail. She gave it to him and he asked for a dime for the paper-vending machine.

“You owe me for three papers already this week,” she chided, “and I’m all out of dimes. All I have are quarters—”

“And that’s exactly what I need,” Brad said. “Thanks. Put it on my bill.”

He plucked the quarter from her hesitating hand and stepped into the recreation room, where a coffee machine dispensed a cup of hot black and a dime in change. The dime went into the paper vender and he was then ready to return to the pool area and a chair far enough away from the two girls to avoid overhearing the blonde’s description of her latest session in nude group therapy and close enough to keep the brunette in view. He glanced at his mail: two throwaways and a credit card billing and an unexpected windfall—a reproduction fee from a long forgotten script he had written for a now defunct radio series. The cheque was for almost six hundred dollars. It gave a bright sparkle to the morning, and he thought of asking the brunette to have dinner with him, at the Century Plaza, because a first impression was always important. He tucked the letter with the cheque and the bill under the belt of his trunks and picked up the newspaper to look at the obituary columns. It wasn’t a morbid act. It was one of the tricks of the trade that Estelle had taught him.

“People die and leave estates to be settled. Check out the obits every day. You’ll be surprised how many leads you pick up.”

And so this was breakfast: a cup of coffee and the obituary column—but Brad didn’t get that far this morning, because a late bulletin on the front page magnetized his attention and sent time spinning backwards again.

Somewhere in Europe. Of course that bland receptionist at Harry’s office had known all the time where to reach him. But now nobody knew where to find Harry Avery, and that left Rhona sitting alone in an Athens hotel, possibly a widow, with all Harry’s money and nobody to protect her from the scavengers who would move in when she was most vulnerable. More important at the moment, she was the only person, aside from Harry, who knew the origin of
The Bandits;
she was the only person who knew what had happened to the carbons of the scripts he had left in the garage of her now-extinct bungalow court. Brad’s coffee turned cold while he thought about it. He wasn’t superstitious and he didn’t consider himself psychic; but he had survived the jungle by instinct and hunches, and instinct was giving him strong vibrations now. It seemed strange that he had awakened thinking of Rhona. Strange how the unexpected cheque came in the mail. Strange how there was just one woman he could never get out of his mind.

Instinct was followed by impulse. Brad looked at his wrist watch. It was after nine now and Estelle, always the first one in every morning, would be at her office. He left the newspaper in the chair, chucked the coffee into a trash can and skirted the pool taking the long way back to his apartment. Once inside, he called the office. Estelle answered.

“I have a three o’clock appointment with the Wittenbergs this afternoon that I won’t be able to keep,” he told her. “I’ve got to see a doctor. My malaria’s come back.”

“I didn’t know you ever had malaria,” Estelle said.

“I did—and the only way to check it is to lie low for a few days. I’ll be in Monday if I can.”

“But the Wittenbergs—”

“Tell them
I
have to reconsider the deal.”

It was done. By the time he hung up the telephone, Brad knew he would go all the way. He turned on the radio to see if there was any additional information on Harry’s missing plane, on the nine-thirty news. He dressed while the newscaster repeated the story in the paper and then left the apartment. He drove to the bank, arriving as it opened, and cashed the windfall cheque. The next stop was an “adult” book store on Santa Monica Boulevard where another survivor of Vietnam continued to survive, by catering to a reading public with an I.Q. of 55 and under, and operating a cut-rate charter flight travel agency on the side. He had nothing on a direct flight to Athens for three days, but there was a cancellation on the 12.50 flight to London where Brad could catch a BEA for the final leg of the journey. That left just two and a half hours to pack a bag and get to L.A. International. Moving fast meant less time for thinking. There would be time for that in flight. He needed a story for Rhona. He could tell her that he was the London representative of an American business firm and had picked up the news about Harry on the BBC. Flying down to see if he could be of service from that city would seem more logical than an impulsive flight from Los Angeles. He wanted her to think he was settled and well situated—not just another ex-G.I. on the loose.

Once the plane was in the air, he had no misgivings. It was good to be mobilized again. The irony of man’s lot was that the brain worked better under pressure. He felt more alive than he had since he was under fire, and it didn’t matter if he never saw the Wittenbergs again. After several hours of flight he relaxed and went to sleep. He dreamed about the girls at the swimming pool, but now it was the blonde who held his attention as she got up from the lounging pad and walked towards him, and it seemed natural that she had become Rhona with her strange, waif-like smile.