South by Southeast (4 page)

A part of his what?
Escobar's eyes were feasting on the young women on his set, and I'd heard rumors that he and Brittany had late-night rehearsals. Call me a hypocrite, but Chela's past made me want to keep her far away from show business. I knew how easy it would be for her to slip into her old habits. “It's cold in that house,” I said. “Put on some jeans.”

“You said everybody's wearing bikinis.”

“I hear them complaining. The AC's too high.” I was lying, and poorly.

Chela ignored me, climbing into my rented red Grand Prix. She'd barely listened to me before she was eighteen, but now she'd dropped the charade entirely. It was hard for me to get indignant over a story I'd spun out of thin air.

“Okay,” I said. “Just don't run shivering to me.”

I was already sorry I'd brought Chela to Miami.

But not as sorry as I would be.

I would never let anyone shoot a movie in my house, period. Every day on the set, I wondered what the owners had been thinking when they said, “Sure, come trash my mansion.”

A cracked floor tile here. A crushed flower bed there. No one went out of their way to be destructive, but it just takes too many people and cameras and generators and miles of cable to make a movie. The wide circular cobbled driveway glistened with at least fifty cars parked around the fountain. A crushed Coke can carelessly kicked into the rock garden was only the day's first offense. I picked up the can to dispose of properly. Some people have no respect.

The house was like an Italian palace, with a stately 1920s quality that Escobar was in love with. The patio, overlooking the bay, had fans with blades as wide as palm fronds, spinning lazily above
the cast and crew as they finished the last of their muffins, bagels, and fruit cups from catering and prepared to shoot the morning's scene.

Chela's eyes were wide and excited at the sheer number of hard-bodied extras assembled before enough cameras to shoot the moon launch. It takes a village, all right.

“Who's starring in this?” Chela asked me.

“Trust me, nobody you'd know.”

Chela grinned. “Good. You never want big stars in a horror movie. No offense.”

“Why not?”

Chela looked up at me as if I was crazy. “Hel-lo? 'Cause they suck, that's why.”

“Johnny Depp was in the original
Nightmare on Elm Street
. Kevin Bacon was in
Friday the Thirteenth
.”

“Don't count. At the time, they were nobodies.”

I chuckled, sipping from my latte. “You sound like you've got it all mapped out.”

“B and I came up with Horror Movie Rules.”

Poor Bernard had been left behind in L.A., and I was afraid he'd been forgotten. The boy had transformed Chela from street to geek. “Let's hear them,” I said.

“One, no big stars. Two, it has to be rated R. PG-13 horror is a waste of film.”

“Not a problem in this one.”
Freaknik
would be lucky to get past the MPAA, considering the nudity and incest themes between the leads, who played a brother and sister. Just the thought of their scenes together made my skin crawl.

“Three, absolutely no CGI monsters. CGI's great for talking animals, but it isn't scary. Too fake. You always know the monster isn't real.”

A laugh rumbled behind us. I knew the voice, but his laughter was rare.

“
Fantástico
,” Gustavo Escobar said. “A visionary. Where was she when I was fighting the studio suits? Who is this thoughtful young lady, Tennyson?” Escobar took off his round-framed black sunglasses to peer at Chela more closely.

Chela's face turned deep crimson, and she moved closer to me, nearly hiding. Her shyness pleased me; once upon a time, Chela had been anything but shy.

“Gus, this is my daughter, Chela,” I said before she could speak. “She's in high school.”

The word
daughter
was fudging. I'd been raising Chela since she was fourteen, but her birth mother had refused to sign the adoption paperwork when I tracked her down, and we'd never made it official after Chela's eighteenth birthday. As a recent graduate, Chela probably wanted to stomp on my foot for saying she was in high school, but Escobar's presence mesmerized her. His aura made both men and women stare. Escobar carried himself as if he harbored the wisdom of the world.

He leaned close to Chela's face and spoke to her with a storyteller's voice. “No big stars,
sí
. The bigger they are, the fewer chances they take. A PG-13 rating only announces to the world that you won't make them uncomfortable. CGI monsters? As the lovely one says, they're merely shadows on the wall. No substance. Only makeup and prosthetics will frighten us. But you forgot one rule.”

“What?” Chela said.

Escobar winked at me. “A black man must die, preferably first,” he said. “Preferably to save a white female of child-bearing age—the most valued member of our society. This sacrifice gives viewers a pang of loss and foreboding. Politically incorrect for a time, yes, but an important statement in our culture. Remember what Kubrick did in
The Shining
.”

How could I forget? I'd read Stephen King's novel, so I was surprised when poor Scatman Crothers caught an ax in his chest as soon as he walked through the door. Didn't happen that way in
the book. Kubrick and Escobar apparently shared the same philosophy.

“The Sacrificial Negro,” I said blandly.

Escobar's eyes lit up. “
Exactamente!
Rule Number Four.”

While Chela giggled, I almost missed Escobar's gaze flickering to her chest. At least he had the courtesy to pretend he wasn't checking her out in front of me.

“Kubrick broke the first rule,” I corrected him. “Jack Nicholson. A-list star.”

“Everyone knew Nicholson was crazy, so it worked,
mijo,
” Escobar said, shrugging. Then he pinched my cheek like a child's before walking away.

Escobar's novelty had worn off. Good thing he moved on, because my muscles were stone. I have little tolerance for a man putting his hands on me, and he was too close to my age to use the Spanish term for “my son,”
mijo
. I almost told Escobar that
Freaknik
wouldn't shine
The Shining
's shoes.

“Ten?” Chela whispered. “That was the coolest effing conversation I've ever had in my life.”
Effing
was her boyfriend's contribution to Chela's vocabulary, since he rarely used profanity. She pulled out her cell phone. “I have to text B . . .”

I knew that feeling, having something to share and the right person to share it with. April was the first person I told anything I was willing to tell. April would hear about Escobar's little monologue, too. Later.

The pool churned with extras, and long rows of reclining beach loungers transformed the patio from a home to a hotel. I was costumed in Geek Chic: khaki shorts, leather sandals, and a loose short-sleeved, button-down shirt, with the requisite tortoiseshell glasses. My character is on a working vacation when the outbreak hits, conveniently in place to try to explain the epidemiology before he falls victim to an infected party girl's enhanced pheromones.

Four women lay in a row on loungers, all of them topless, but
there was so much nudity on the set that most people walked past them without a glance. We had their chests memorized.

“Classy stuff, Ten,” Chela said, gazing at the display.

“Told you it was nothing to get excited about. Just a paycheck.”

Gustavo was in his director's perch inside the car of the crane that would help him oversee the high shot he wanted, as if he were shooting
Citizen Kane
. I could have made three movies for what the studio had given Escobar. The crane was still on ground level as Escobar huddled close to Brittany, ostensibly with last-minute instructions as he swept his arm across the crowd scene to illustrate his vision.

“Gus, what's the holdup?” a woman said, elbowing her way past the huddled crew to the crane car. “Do you want to get stuck with noon lighting again?”

Louise Cannon, Escobar's technical adviser, was also a producer and one of the few people on the set who talked to him with no fear of consequences. She was slightly younger than Escobar, probably in her mid-thirties. She had raven hair and dark eyes, but she was a
gringa
from Fort Lauderdale who had met Escobar in film school after a stint as a cop. I research the folks I work with, since it pays to know about the people who know you. She'd parlayed her forensics work into a steady stream of film and TV consulting gigs.

“Why don't you do your job and leave me to mine?” Escobar snapped.

“These girls are waiting out here naked while you're taking your time,” she said.

An uneasy hush came over the set, and Chela gawked at Cannon. Escobar had a temper. I'd seen it on display in his shouting matches with his assistant director, but he only smirked at Louise with pursed lips and waved his hand to scatter the cast and crew to their posts.

“Cuidate,”
he told Brittany gently, kissing both of her cheeks. Escobar muttered a few unflattering things about Cannon beyond
her hearing. Another gesture, and his crane whirred, rising high above the patio. Everyone assumed Escobar was screwing his lead, but I'd put my money on Cannon. There was more to them than their public arguments.

“I want to be
her,
” Chela whispered to me, nodding toward Cannon.

“I'll introduce you,” I said, distracted, as I ferried Chela off to the fence that separated onlookers from the cast. The crowd beyond the fence was mostly teenagers and service workers. Locals. I wanted Chela stashed somewhere safely in view while I was working. I didn't want to look up to find her sunbathing topless because she was invited to make her film debut.

“Behave yourself,” I told Chela, wagging my finger.

“What am I, six years old? Bite me.”

Strangers might not have understood what Chela and I meant to each other, but every barb from her concealed a history. As April reminded me, I'd rescued a precious soul from the edge of the world. We'd all been disappointed when her birth mother robbed me of my gift to Chela before her eighteenth birthday—“Told you she was a loser bitch,” she had said with a shrug, hiding the depths of her true feelings—and I'd sacrificed a lot to track the woman down. But I could adopt Chela much more easily now, if she would let me.

“As soon as we get home, you're signing those papers,” I told her.

“Not if you lie and tell anybody else I'm still in high school.”

“Just do it for me. And Dad. He wants you to have his name.”

Dad was her soft spot. Chela had been raised by an ailing grandmother until she was eleven, and she'd loved Dad when there'd hardly been anything left of him. Chela shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, which we both knew meant yes.

The last thing I heard before the camera started rolling was Chela's excited squeal after a young woman called her name.

ONLY ONE PERSON
called her “Che-LAAA,” with the accent on the end, drawing her name out like a song a boy band would sing. Chela hadn't heard the voice in years, but she knew it like yesterday, out of time and place and yet so
right
. She turned around, wondering if Maria was only a ghost bumping around in her head, but then she saw Maria angling her bone-thin shoulders as she slipped toward her through the crowd like a fish. “I do not believe this shit,” Maria was saying. “It's you!”

They both screamed so loudly that a guy from the movie crew glared and waved at them, but it was hard to be quiet as they hugged. Most of the memories they shared were bad, but once upon a time, she and Maria had been each other's only clean harbor in an ocean of filth. Maria no longer wore bubble-gum lip gloss or cheap knockoff Chanel swiped from Walgreens, one flirting with the cashier while the other stuffed her purse, but Chela could smell those old days on Maria.