Low Angles
A Stoney Winston Mystery
by
Jim Stinson


Low Angles
Copyright 2012 by Jim Stinson
ISBN 9781476110506
Published at Smashwords, 2012
ISBN: 9781476110516
Corrected and reformatted text, August, 2012
(Hard cover edition originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986.)

Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Ah, the romantic, primitive 1980s! No Internet, Facebook, or Twitter. Telephones tied to the wall. Music on vinyl or flimsy cassettes - and don’t even start on the fashions! Hollywood wandered in the desert between the lush studio days that were gone and our flush modern times full of cable and Netflix. Work for film people was scarce in those days, and Stoney Winston just barely scraped by. If the 1980s were romantic, Stoney was far too busy surviving to notice.... 
Chapter 1
Our own little Jackie Coogan shifted from foot to foot in the shadows just beyond the lit kitchen set, basking in the attentions of the makeup girl, the property master, and the teacher dispatched by the Los Angeles Unified School District to ensure that his thirst for knowledge was slaked even while performing in this soap commercial.
“Lift your face, honey.” The boy obeyed the makeup girl reluctantly, since he was three years older than he looked and his eye level was perfect for inspecting her chest.
He favored her with a melting gaze - one of his better models. “Not too much powder.” His incipient baritone would put him out of business in about six months.
“And keep his front curls high; we don’t want a shadow on his eyes.” His mother hovered too, skinny and tight as a banjo.
As production manager, I hadn’t much to do now that the shoot was almost over, so I wandered toward the sound stage door, winding around Century stands, director’s chairs, lights, and foam cups full of cigarette butts pickled in coffee. As I ambled into the corridor, the massive door thunked behind me like the hatch of a walk-in meat locker.
 Ken Simmons, the commercial’s producer, visible through the doorway of the lounge he was using as an office, clamped a phone receiver between chin and shoulder and waved me in. He mimed “be just a minute” and resumed his conversation.
“What’s so bad about them?” Pause. “Alan, dailies are hard to judge without experience. They looked okay to....” Pause. “Well....” Longer pause. “Well, Alan, I hear what you’re saying, but....” Very long pause.
I collected two half-donuts and my tenth foam cup of coffee from a side table and sat down to watch Ken through a foreground of Italian loafers propped on the table. Even Ken’s soles looked glossy, as if he shined them nightly. He dresses for the Polo Lounge in the perpetual hope that one day he will be big enough to do business there.
But not quite yet: “Alan, where am I going to get the budget for that?”
Ken is fifty, with a body that looks forty and eyes that no longer admit their age or very much else. While he listened, he smoothed his curly black beard with a rubber oval set with stubby teeth, like the pad that holds bathroom soap.
“If you want to pay for it, you got it; it’s your money. I’ll find someone.” He looked at me as he said this. “Talk to you later, Alan.”
He hung up, sighing, and pulled his feet off the table. “Got a sec, Stoney?”
“More like an hour, unless Fauntleroy decides to learn his lines.”
“Can’t the kid read cards?”
“Not in a tight two-shot; his eyelook’s wrong.”
Ken sighed again, then glanced at the phone as if his recent caller were somehow inside it. “Know Alan Greystoke?”
“If his nickname’s Tarzan.”
“Yeah, he did change it from something else. Alan’s got a lot of money from, well, someplace and he likes to play with business ventures.”
I dunked a donut, which disintegrated in the coffee.
“Import-export, mail order houses, things like that. Now he’s backing a movie. I packaged it for him.”
“And he doesn’t like the dailies he’s seeing.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s seeing, but yeah, he doesn’t like them.”
“What’s he want you to do, fire the director?”
Ken stood up, shaking his head impatiently. “He says he wants to help her.”
“Help. Her.”
“Name’s Diane LaMotta - out of New York, I think.”
“I don’t know her.”
“You wouldn’t; it’s her first feature. Anyway, Alan wants someone to go up there and bail her out.”
“Where’s up there?”
“In the San Gabriel mountains about an hour away.” He parked his eighty dollar pants on the front edge of the table. “Want to take a shot at it?”
Did I want to walk into the middle of a production, tackle an unknown director, work twenty four hours a day on a nickel budget to finish a fire sale picture? Masochism is not among my many vices. “Let’s just say my enthusiasm knows bounds.”
“It’s seven-fifty a week for three weeks.”
Visions of rent money danced in my head. “All right; for twenty-two-fifty I’ll fake it.”
“Thanks, Stoney. I don’t like it either, but Alan calls the shots.”
I nodded.
“And keep out of trouble, right?” When I repeated the nod, Ken opened his anorexic briefcase, the type that proclaims its owner too important to carry anything thicker than a bank book. “You better run down and see him. Here’s his office address and oh, here’s your check for today’s shoot.”
“‘Preciate it. I hope you’ll call me again, Ken.”
“Don’t get greedy.” He flashed his hey-just-kidding smile. Ken never makes a joke without scoring underneath. We’ve been friends for years, but he’s the one who gives the work and I’m the one who takes it. Occasionally he likes to remind me.
On my way out, I strolled up the hallway, guessing the identities of the “stars” hanging there in 8x10 frames; each actor posed with the eager, chubby owner of the little studio; each print inked with showbiz greetings. To my pal Jack. Best regards to fabulous Jack.  Snappy clothes three decades old and faces as forgotten as a dead bookie’s. Jack too had gone to his Reward one day during the fourth race at Santa Anita, and now they all hung together in the perpetual fluorescent glare of the hallway, a necropolis of Hollywood also-rans.
But who was I to criticize? Stoney Winston: failed actor and unsold writer, marginal freelance editor, production manager, and even director if the film was safely short, cheap, and trivial. I’d never worked in a big studio like Warners or Universal and never seen a budget over two hundred thousand. It’s hard to be more also-ran than that.
* * * *
Half an hour later I was chugging south on the San Gabriel Freeway in my antique Beetle, the latest partner in my perverse affair with Volkswagen. This ‘63 bug is really a step up from my ‘75 Rabbit because it seldom breaks and when it does, I can fix it.
The uncertain glory of an April day, even down here in the industrial flats: bright lemon sun splashing on factories and warehouses, rim-lighting oil tanks, glazing the wall of the flood control channel like egg on an endless tan bread loaf. No helping the palms, though: reluctant little smog-shot fronds high in the air, as if the trees had thought, “After all that sweat to get up here, I guess I oughtta sprout something.”
My nicotine city. So different from gray Bristol and the green English valleys around it. They grow greener in my memory every year - sixteen, to date since me mum divorced my sergeant major father and took her teenage boy to California. If I went back to England now, I’d be just another tripping Yank, homogenized by half a lifetime in the true cultural heart of America, L.A., God help us all. Suddenly film making in the green April mountains seemed seductive.
Greystoke’s office was in Downey, a little town impacted in L.A. that might have lent its name to the fabric softener: a fuzzy, bland jumble of light industry, hopeful commerce, and middling homes. The one-story stucco building labeled “A.G. Enterprises” could have housed a job printer, a maternity shop, or an employment agency; and over the years it probably had.
Now it commenced with a reception area done up in the plastic Gay Nineties decor favored by pizza parlors. Greystoke’s secretary, a slim girl with a button nose and delicate hands, announced me on the ‘com line and, after the usual California custom, offered coffee, which I refused. She had the ambivalent manner of some modern, pretty women: offended if you ogled and resentful if you didn’t. She fiddled at her desk as if she hadn’t much to do, while I inspected the carpet.
The office door was opened by a slender man not five feet tall, in a business suit he must have bought at a shop for preteen executives. “He’ll see you now.”
As I entered, the tiny man stepped aside and seemed to disappear. Alan Greystoke stood behind a desk the size of a plywood panel and over three feet high. It hid him from the chest down, and when he marched around it to shake my hand I saw why: Greystoke was only two inches taller than his assistant.
“Sit down - not that chair, this one.” The chair was scaled to fit the assistant and I perched my gangling six feet-two on it like an adult visiting a kindergarten.
Greystoke posed with arms akimbo, doing George C. Scott doing Patton; but the stance pushed his padded jacket upward until it separated from his body like a camel’s hair cuirass. It spoiled the effect.
“Stoney Winston, huh? Should I know you?”
“Nobody else does.”
“Give you a tip: never run yourself down. You want people to hear, you make a noise. Shannon! Get him a drink.” He strutted toward his desk as spectral Shannon coalesced beside me.
“Coke is fine.”
Shannon’s fluty alto matched his looks: “We’ve got some Pepsi.” He disappeared at his master’s wave.
Greystoke climbed into an executive chair raised to where he looked normal behind his desk, lit a cigarette from a gold desk box, and struck a magisterial pose. “I want you to listen; when you work for me, you listen, because I got a lotta things to do and I never say things twice. Clear? Okay: I got a two million dollar picture up there.”
“Ken said he had two hundred thousand.”
“I said listen. Yeah, but that’s just the cash. Know what points are? You do. Okay. I got a big nut to make on this one, so I got to have a winner, and that’s exactly what I’m gonna have.” He spoke in a harsh tenor, as if pushing authority into his voice by main force. “Simmons talked me into this director. No credits, no rep; but okay, she did some PBS shit - American Playhouse or something. It put me to sleep, but it had class, and this picture has to have class because it’s my picture.”
“What’s it about?”
“Outlaw motorcycle creeps.”
Shannon appeared with a glass of cola and a neat pink party napkin. I nodded thanks.
Greystoke blinked his popping lizard eyes and shot his cuffs. The links were diamonds set in gold. “Now how is that class? It isn’t; it’s box office. The class comes from the way we handle it. That’s why I went with this bimbo director. Are you starting to get it? Okay, they ship the film down every day and I look at the dailies and I don’t like what I’m seeing.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m seeing the class but not the box office. Pretty pictures with nothin’ goin’ on. You follow? Okay, then you see what I want you to do: go up there and goose the picture. Get me more action stuff.”
“Is the shoot on schedule?”
“Who knows schedule? They keep sending film, but does it add up to a movie? How the hell should I know? You make movies; I make money. That’s your division of labor, right? That’s efficient.”
And in my case, typical. “Mr. Greystoke, I can’t walk in on a production without clear authority.”
“You’re working for me; I’m clear authority.”
“You can’t do it that way.”
“You’re telling me what I can do?”
“Of course not, but you want me to ghost-direct that film.”
“Yeah, that’s the word.”
“The director won’t accept that unless you tell her. You’ll have to put it in writing.”
Greystoke looked annoyed at being told he had to do something, but he saw the logic of it and nodded. “Write the letter. Dictate it to Kimberley outside. She’ll fix it up and I’ll sign it. You take it up there.”
“And Ken Simmons ought to phone her too.”
“I’ll take care of it.” Having regained the initiative, he looked pleased again. “Now you want to know about money.”
“Ken said seven-fifty a week for three weeks.”
“I’ll do better: I’m giving you that plus four points.” 
Oh joy: four percent of profits in an industry where “profits” are defined by the most acrobatic accounting this side of the Pentagon. No one would ever see a penny.
“Shannon’s got your contract and your first week.” He waved a hand like a monarch bestowing a largess. “In advance.”
My plans for supper hotdogs switched to steak. “Can I have a script to study?”
“Shannon: get a script. You’ll like it. I got it cheap but I, uh, fixed it up some. You’ll see.”
“Have you looked at dailies today?”
“Not ‘til six o’clock at the lab. Meet us there. Get details from Shannon.”
“I’ll drive to the location tomorrow. Where are they shooting?”
“Near Bouquet Canyon, up back of Newhall. Shannon will show you on the map. He drives me. Kimberley!” The secretary entered as if she’d been lurking behind the door. “Take a letter from this guy. Shannon, give him his contract and the money. And show him where the hell to go.”
As I hauled myself up to adult height and started for the door, Greystoke yelled at his tiny assistant: “Shannon, wash that glass up when you’re done out there.”
* * * *
I roared homeward through the ozone, boxed by eighteen wheelers: a silver and burgundy Peterbilt tractor climbing my tail pipes, front view blocked by a furniture van bearing a bumper sticker from L.A.’s best fast food chain:
IN ‘N’ OUT BURGER
abridged, by local custom, to
IN ‘N’ OUT URGE
A shower, early supper - hotdogs after all - then down to the little Hollywood film lab that was processing Greystoke’s footage.
I slumped in a screening room seat, Shannon to the left of me, Greystoke to the right of me, peering over the seat backs at yesterday’s rushes of Cycles from Hell.
 Actually, it was good stuff: strong compositions, energetic truck shots, good actor blocking. Hard to judge performance, since Greystoke watched the dailies before the sound was synced, but the footage moved crisply.
At the start of the final shot, the actors paused and looked off-screen; then a striking woman with a dark tan and auburn hair in flying pigtails ran into the frame. She adjusted the position of one actor, then turned to look at the camera. Her deep eyes were a cool gray, the eyes of a hyper-intelligent cat. Her lips formed what looked like “Okay” then she loped out of the frame and the action began.
Greystoke rasped, “That’s her.”
There was nothing the matter with the footage and the woman I had glimpsed looked smart, decisive, and in control. So what was Greystoke worried about?
When the lights came up, I studied the empty seat backs while the wannabe mogul studied me.
Finally, he lost patience. “See what I mean?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
Greystoke wagged pudgy hands as he searched for words, then gave up. “I don’t like it.”
Something funny here. “Is the footage really the problem, or is there something else?”
Greystoke looked affronted. “What else? The only problem’s right there.” He stabbed a stubby arm at the now blank screen. “It’s... blah; it’s....” The phrase he wanted finally surfaced: “It’s got no balls.” He looked pleased with this critical insight.
I pushed my luck: “So the production’s going smoothly?”
His irritation burst into full bloom: “Who knows? I’m not paying you to worry about production, understand? You go up there and make me an action picture!”
“Why are you worried about how the picture’s going?” At first I couldn’t place the voice; then I realized that Shannon had actually volunteered a sentence. He’d been invisible again.
“There’s nothing obviously wrong with these dailies. So what is the problem?”
Greystoke looked at me, at Shannon, at me again. Then his lizard eyelids flickered, as if in embarrassment. “Like I said, you make movies; I don’t, understand? I got a lot tied up in this, an’ speaking frankly, I don’t know what I’m lookin’ at. Is it a movie or what? Know what I mean?”
 “Then you want me to see if the footage will make a good film.” Greystoke jerked his head up and down. “I can do that better in a cutting room. Why don’t I start putting it together?”
Shannon surprised me again: “Because we need some eyes up there.”
Greystoke and Shannon were “we”? Interesting. “Okay, then. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
Greystoke resumed the helm: “You better. And starting tomorrow, I want balls!”
An ambiguous statement, considering.
Chapter 2
Clear, lemony light again this morning, under the hard blue dome of an April sky - the same breathtaking weather that a sadistic God bestows on every Rose Parade, to taunt the TV viewers in Vermont. The San Gabriel mountains tumbled beside me along the freeway, their dumpy, slag heap contours softened by a fresh coat of green.
I was roaring northwestward in the Beetle toward a tiny mountain village - a flyspeck on the map northeast of Newhall which was now playing host to the production of Cycles from Hell.
The film’s story was old enough to grow mushrooms on:
Framed by crooked citizens, charismatic biker returns from slammer to lead outlaw gang in wreaking vengeance on town. After crowd-pleasing pillage and rapine, evil villagers are punished, bikers ride into sunset, charismatic leader achieves mythic death and ascends to sit at right hand of Harley-Davidson - or something.
While the Beetle struggled into the foothills, I revolved the trite plot in my mind as if studying a rock; but I could find no place to cut - no angles that would turn it into a gem. If you try to carve a clinker, you just get a smaller clinker.
Winding vaguely north down the perilous two lane road, I took in the mountains looming left and right, eucalypti breaking the sunshine into hot shards and cool splotches. A hairpin curve around a knoll, then a short, rolling valley infested with a hamlet announced by a rusty, bullet-plugged sign: Calisher Rotary, Wednesday Noon, Riverview Motel.
Slowing to thirty, I rolled past the motel on the right, a dirt crossroad, a trailer park full of giant metal slugs, and a meadow; then the stores on my left gave out and I spotted a dust cloud rising behind them. The buzz of motorcycle engines drifted in.
Must be that dirt road. I turned around, drove south through the village, then west on rutted clay toward the dust and insect cycle drone. An even smaller track branched to the right and disappeared over the lip of a depression. I parked and walked in.
It was the town dump, a great clay bowl half filled with bedsprings, boxes, jalopies, appliances, great mounds of cardboard subsiding into compost and at the far side, the tinny clutter of a movie company. The camera and reflectors were aimed to my right, so I trudged leftward to avoid them, around the rim and down among the happy crew of Cycles from Hell.
I found a bargain basement shoot: a venerable Arriflex 35BL camera with a ten-to-one Angenieux zoom lens atop a fluid pan head atop an Italian spider dolly. Three or four banks of quartz lights, so they had a generator someplace, but mostly square reflectors on tubing stands. A few director’s chairs with patent umbrellas clamped to their arms. It seemed that I’d wandered through a time warp into a film school of the seventies.
Cast members lounged under a canvas shade that also shielded a table sagging under coffee urn, water dispenser, and the usual donuts, rebaking in the desert heat. Several vans and cars and a sprawl of Harley-Davidson bikes under their own shade canopy.
People clustered in distinct groups: scruffy bikers in leather and denim uniforms, crew in baseball caps and work boots, many sporting cute T-shirts (Electricians Are Juicier. Edith Head Gave Great Costume) cast members in makeup with tissue buffers tucked into their collars.
A grip carrying hammer, spirit level, and a handful of wooden wedges was truing up the dolly tracks: checking them with the level, tapping wedges beneath the low spots, double-checking. The assistant cameraman fussed with the Arri: removing the lens and blowing out the film gate with a syringe, adjusting the clamped umbrella to shade the film magazine.
Diane LaMotta stood in the meager shadow of a grip truck, flipping pages of her script and peering at it through reading glasses. She held sunglasses by one earpiece, in her mouth.
As I approached, the unabashed male in me took automatic inventory: thick hiking boots and short red socks, brown legs whose sleek lines were only slightly marred by knobby knees, khaki walking shorts, and seersucker shirt of the kind displayed in preppie catalogs. Overall: a lanky frame set off by pleasant local ripenesses. Strong hands with short nails and a plastic K-Mart watch on one wrist. Thick pigtails, colored Clairol auburn, pulled her hair defiantly off slightly oversized ears.
“Ms. LaMotta? I’m Stoney Winston.” In close-up, she was perhaps as old as thirty about two years younger than I am.
She looked up and down my six-foot-two as if making a similar survey, checking out my short brown hair, Roman nose with chin to match, and a frame that didn’t exactly strain the fabric of my polo shirt and jeans. I recalled that my third-best sneakers were tatty, but stopped myself from glancing down at them.
She looked me in the eye again. “You didn’t waste any time.” Her large gray eyes were as hostile as her tone.
“Greystoke said to be here this morning. How’s it going?”
“Just dandy until a minute ago.” She snapped the script shut and clamped it in a protective armpit. “So how do we play it? Do you throw me off the set or just whisper orders in my ear?”
“Not necessarily either.”
“Shall we cut the crap? Greystoke sent you to take over the picture. Simmons’s phone call made that clear.” She had the kind of husky voice that could purr when happy. Now, however, it carried an abrasive rasp.
“I don’t work for Simmons, and Greystoke told me to do whatever was needed.”
“Whatever was...” She turned away toward the grip truck and addressed it grimly: “I’m not going to play this game.”
“Ms. LaMotta, I don’t like this any better than you do.”
She swung back to look at me. “I’ll just bet.” We held a four-second staring competition, then she whipped off the reading glasses and put on her shades. “What did you have to do to Greystoke to grease in here?”
“This isn’t going to help a tough situation.”
“Then unmake the situation: get your ass in gear and get out; leave me the hell alone.” She opened the script at random and pretended to study it. I thought of reminding her to put on her reading glasses, but suppressed the impulse.
“We both know I’m not going to do that.”
“Then any time you feel like taking over, you come and announce it to everybody.” Her voice rose: “And if you get up the courage to do that, which I doubt, I’m going to tell you and everybody else just what I think of little suck-up no-talent creeps who stab people in the back. In the meantime, stay the hell out of my sight.”
People fifty feet away were turning to look. “Can we talk about this quietly?”
She paused, pulled her mouth into a straight line, then moved close until the six-inch difference in our heights forced her to look up at my face. “Maybe we can. Start with some answers: who is trying to close down this movie?”
“How so?”
“Give me a break!” She took a deep breath and lowered her voice again. “All right, one: Simmons is the producer but he’s never even showed up. Two: the bikers turn out to be amateurs who never acted in their lives. Three: the D.P. is bombed half the time and the key grip does nothing but argue with me, and four: the production manager walked out yesterday.”
“Why?”
“‘Problems,’ he said. ‘Delays. Poor cooperation.’’’
“Anything more specific?”
“Isn’t that funny? He was somewhat evasive about details.” Her growl turned bitter: “I have three more weeks to shoot eight weeks’ worth of stuff. Twenty-five people to wrangle, and no production manager.”
“I’m replacing him.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”
I started to say “I’m only supposed...”
But she exploded. “Why are you giving me this shit?”
I could understand her anger but her abrasiveness was growing tiresome. “Why don’t you try listening for a minute?”
“Why don’t you go fuck a hot Harley tail pipe!”
With this quaint topical allusion, Diane LaMotta loped away toward the waiting camera.
“That’s what you call your basic New York mouth.” The familiar gravel baritone came from above and behind. As I turned, the grip truck passenger door opened to disgorge Stogie Rucker in the flesh, about 270 pounds of it. “Good to seeya, Winston, howya been?” Stogie rolled forward, impeccable in starched yellow sport shirt and tan slacks belted just south of his solar plexus, where his girth is a foot less than at mid-paunch. It keeps his pants up. At five feet-six, Stogie resembles a weather balloon with a big white moustache.
He relit his dinky trademark cigar with a vintage Zippo and shook my hand. “So you’re taking over.”
“Just helping. Front office thinks there’s trouble here.”
“They’re right, for a change.”
“What’s happening?”
“The usual: twenty-hour days; crappy equipment; four weeks to shoot a whole goddam feature; nonunion crew. Like I said, the usual.”
“You’re union: I. A.”
“And I ain’t even here, am I? But things get slow sometimes you know how it is. Gotta keep myself in bourbon and cigars.”
“I know the feeling. You the key grip?” He nodded shortly. “Any problems with the director?”
Stogie spat precisely ten inches from his gleaming Hush Puppies - he could shoot films in a colliery and not get smudged - and gazed off toward the camera. “Myself, I think she knows her business. She works fast and she don’t ask me for unrealistic stuff.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know how it is: some directors want a hundred yards of track for one goddam shot. Then they want a hundred more at right angles. Not her. She calls for track and then builds half a day’s setups on it. That kinda thing.”
“She thinks someone’s screwing her movie.”
Stogie chortled. “Ever know a director who didn’t?”
“So it’s just her paranoia?”
He bestowed slightly more attention on his cigar butt than it seemed to warrant. “Probably.”
“But not definitely?”
After a shrug that did interesting things to his belt line, Stogie gazed off toward the crew and camera. “Ya get a feeling, you see what I mean? Like things just ain’t gettin’ done. Ah, who knows?”
“How about the crew?”
“What about ‘em?”
“Taking orders from a woman.”
“My boys take orders from me.”
“And you?”
Stogie measured the horizon through gold aviator bifocals, smoothing his thick silver mane. Then he sighed. “Everything changes. Got to, I guess. Hell, I don’t know - today there’s nothing but pussies. Everyone’s a pussy.”
“I think she’d resent that.”
He spat again, disgusted. “Naw, I mean pussy pussies; men, broads makes no difference. Not like the old days.” Then, as if embarrassed by this sneak attack of nostalgia, he grunted and stepped on his cigar butt. “Break’s over, I guess.”
Stogie waddled toward the crew, pulling a crushed trucker’s cap from his belt and settling it on his head.
* * * *
I spent the rest of the morning watching the shoot, then mingled with the crew at lunch. I knew a couple of them and they confirmed Stogie: it was the usual ultra-low-budget shoot: long days full of two-take setups and desperate improvisations.
Sean Parker had the lead: a beautiful hunk with an ego as big as his shoulders and the brain of a gerbil. He’d done a TV series until cocaine made him too unreliable to hire.
The bikers had been recruited from a local club, “The Crossbones,” and they had little to do in the film but roar around and raise hell, which they managed with authentic banality. Greasy, thuggish men and sallow women, they said little for the national gene pool.
They were kept in line, more or less, by one Pits Caudle, a stocky man of fifty with a face moon-cratered by ancient acne, who translated the director’s instructions into biker argot and saw to it that his scabrous troops carried them out.
Shooting resumed after lunch, with Diane LaMotta in six places at once, spotting the camera, blocking actors, checking makeup.
Her energy was impressive, as I’d already discovered. She would approve the lens and angle, rehearse the cast, talk the bikers through their background roles, order a take, consult the cameraman, order another, break the setup, and move decisively to the next one - usually at a half trot.
The crew seemed willing enough but slow, and the fat, balding cameraman displayed a telltale lethargy following a lunchtime disappearance. Diane had said he was drunk half the time. All in all, she was pushing forward, but she couldn’t keep this up without a production manager.
The sequence they were shooting covered the biker hero’s return from jail to a gang whose interim mentor was ungracious about restoring the post to his predecessor. Now they were jousting for it on bikes in the arena of the dump, swinging castoff lumber lances and torturing their howling metal mounts. Pits Caudle was the stunt coordinator, which seemed a dangerous idea, considering his evident ignorance of movie stunt work.
I made myself inconspicuous behind Diane LaMotta, who was instructing the leading man. “Now he chases you up this dead-end slot, Sean, and you see it’s too narrow to turn in. You’ve lost your two-by-four and you’re trapped. You’re in the foreground. You look around, see him coming down on you, look ahead. We cut in a shot of this plywood panel on the trash pile there see, it’s like a ramp. It’s that or nothing, so you gun the bike and roar out of frame.”
“Then what?”
“Then your stunt double shoots the ramp.”
“No way, lady. The people pay to see me do that shit. It’s only three or four feet anyway.”
“I can’t risk that. Now let’s rehearse.”
Mr. Wonderful caught her by the arm: “Look, girlie, you don’t tell me what I do and what I don’t. I’m going to start where he breaks my two-by-four. He swings; I swerve around him; then I make a clean approach and climb the ramp. All one shot.”
“No.”
“Then I walk. Here, hold up the bike.” He flipped it at her so that she caught three hundred pounds of off-balance motorcycle and staggered as she fought to keep it upright. The leading man strolled away, but not so fast that she couldn’t recall him.
LaMotta stared after him venomously, then checked her watch; squinted at the sun. “Okay; your way.” She stood back and let the cycle drop.
Sean looked foolish as he tried to wrestle the bike up from the ground, while the crew swiftly positioned the camera to catch the action and then follow Sean over the plywood ramp. They read the light, threw some foreground fill from a reflector, and got ready to slate.
LaMotta crouched umpire-style behind the camera. “Places, people. Slate in.”
The assistant cameraman spelled “27A 1" on his slate with lettered pieces of cloth tape while the property master handed Sean a duplicate of the two-by-four stud broken in the previous shot. The opposing biker gunned his motorcycle and skidded into his start position.
“Roll.”
“Speed,” from the sound man.
“Mark it.”
“Twenty-seven apple, take 1.” Clack!
“Give me some dust.” A grip threw a double handful of dirt at the rear wheel of Sean’s bike, filling the air with dust.
“Action.”
The two knights revved their big Harley-Davidsons and snarled across the pocky clay, waving their wooden studs in clumsy left-handed arcs, since their right hands were needed for their handlebar throttles. The two-by-fours connected and Sean’s snapped in half, as the property master had prepared it to do.
Fat Stogie tapped the dolly grip and the camera eased down its track toward the spot from which it would cover Sean’s launch.
The bikers skidded around to face each other, revved again, and resumed the combat. As Sean’s rival swung his stud, the star veered out of range, came back on course, howled past the camera in a cloud of choking dust, screeched up the plywood panel, and sailed out of sight over the trash pile.
“Shiiiiiiit!” Then a metallic racket like an avalanche of milk cans.
“Cut!”
I scrambled up the trash midden and stood looking down the other side. Two fifty-five-gallon drums were rolling to a stop, a third trembled on its side, and mighty Sean Parker lay half under his toppled cycle, screaming with pain.
The company swarmed around both sides of the trash pile, led by a skinny biker in a Willie Nelson headband: “My hog! You totaled it!”
“Get it off me!”
“You asshole, look at the fork. Look at the front wheel, Jesus!”
“Get it off!”
Four pairs of hands lifted the cycle and Sean sat up, still screaming. He clutched at his leg, which had suddenly acquired an extra, wrong-way knee.
He’d obviously landed on the fifty-five-gallon drums, which was intriguing, to put it mildly. The drums hadn’t been out there five minutes ago when I’d come around the back of the pile to avoid LaMotta’s eye. The crew had cleared Sean’s landing area and leveled the ground to give his tires traction. But in the minutes while everyone was preoccupied on the other side of the trash pile, somebody had set Sean up for a broken leg - or worse.
And Sean, of course, was the star: the irreplaceable center of a full week’s footage. Without him, Diane LaMotta was out of business.
She watched impassively from the edge of the crowd as volunteers carted off the fallen knight, then threw both arms up in a “why me?” gesture, swiveled on her heel, and stalked away.
Chapter 3
I left the dump and drove around the dusty little valley to get the lay of the land while I sorted out the day’s events. And because I think better out loud, I was sharing my perplexity, as I often do while driving, with an imaginary guest. This afternoon it was Orson Welles in the passenger seat, as the Beetle’s list to starboard attested.
He gathered his night-black coat about him - a considerable project - and scowled at his surroundings. “Must we have all this air? I’m being blown away.”
“Beetles can’t take crosswinds, I assure you. Anything sufficient to blow you away would put the whole car in a ditch. The air is my defense against your cigar.”
Welles unplugged a Churchillian corona and inspected it fondly. “I need my cigar for glowering. You cannot glower properly around a naked hole in your face.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’m not surprised.” He stared at me, his eyes hot plums in a hairy pudding. “In one minute you have dispensed three fat jokes and maligned my cigar. With what am I to be favored next?”
“Are you always this crabby?”
A grunt, then: “I do not suffer fools gladly; and at present, my suffering threatens to be intense. Now are we to continue this persiflage, or do you have something to discuss?”
“I can’t decide what’s happening with this film.”
“The usual.” He reinstalled his cheroot and talked around it, without perceptible loss of resonance. “There is some malignant cosmic force that does not want films completed. Trust my word; I know it well.” The intensity of his speech dislodged a cigar ash, which traveled majestically down his front like a boulder rolling down an alp.
“Today’s ‘accident’ wasn’t cosmic malevolence; it was sabotage.”
A chuckle like distant tumbling thunder, then: “The Malign Will works in mysterious ways.”
“Maybe. Or maybe the real problem is Diane. Her personality doesn’t beg for cooperation.”
Complacently: “Artists have their little quirks.”
“Still, I don’t want to take her film away.”
Welles’s voice softened. “I sympathize. I remember what they did to Ambersons.” Then the organ tones deepened with bitterness. “But, my pusillanimous friend, that is film making: as dirty as any business but prostitution. And as the whore perhaps remembers love, the director may remember art. The shame in both memories is similar.”
“This script is not reminiscent of art.”
“Then stuff the script and make the film you want to make.”
“How do I explain that to Greystoke?”
Reaching beneath his coat, Welles withdrew a pack of cards and fanned it with one hand. Every card showing was red. He shuffled the deck with negligent grace and fanned it again. Now all the cards were black. “Like that.”
“I don’t quite see...”
“And neither does anyone else. Your ignorant employer is watching the dailies shot-by-shot, and, like most producers, he lacks the brains to assemble them in his head.” Thick fingers flew again as Welles shuffled and fanned the deck. Now red and black were alternated. “By the time the film is cut, it will be too late to change, and you will have exalted utter shit to the level of harmless trash.”
“Some achievement.”
“You do the best you can with what you’ve got. I based my whole career on that.” Welles made a couple of passes with his hands and the cards disappeared. “And now I fancy some dinner.”
“Two hours early?”
“Close enough, and I’m feeling a bit peckish; so with your kind permission, I’ll conclude our little chat.”
With a theatrical pop and a puff of smoke, the immense magician vanished, leaving his huge voice floating like the rumble of a passing storm: “Whatever you must turn your hand to, Winston, be a pro!” The voice cross-faded into engine noise, but a satanic trace of ozone lingered in the car.
At that point, the metropolis of Calisher jiggled into view: a string of seedy structures offering gas, provisions, and car repairs. A gray cat limped in the dusty street as if the sunshine hurt its feet.
The Riverview Motel would be that musty stucco building on the left, though what river it viewed was unclear. Its faded sign said NO in brave neon, but vacancy was a remnant of broken tubing. It was owned by the bikers’ club, which had rented it to the film company for the duration. The club seemed to own half the town too: the stores and houses used as sets, the bikers’ Harleys even the ramshackle vans pressed into service for hauling, dressing rooms, and makeup.
As the Beetle wheezed obediently up the gravel driveway I inspected my home for the next three weeks with pardonable foreboding.
* * * *
Sitting in the dank motel cubicle I’d inherited from the departed production manager, I fought to digest the wieners and beans laid on for the company’s supper in the motel coffee shop a defunct enterprise revived temporarily for this production. The whole motel was swarming with cast and crew, sharing the musty bedrooms in couples that recombined nightly, as film folk tend to do.
Firing up my trusty Mac to do some writing, I opened my word processor and started typing:
Cycles From Hell
Revised Synopsis
It had come to me during dinner - an epiphany brought on by rancid hotdogs - that the departure of Sean to Newhall Hospital was a blessing: without the cliché biker hero, I could take the script in a different direction: make the protagonist a thoughtful slob, a walking oxymoron to stand the plot on its ear.
And I knew just the slob to bring it off - if I could convince Greystoke and if I could get through Diane LaMotta’s instant dislike of me, dislike that was admittedly mutual.
Half an hour of frenzied typing and retyping, two minutes while my little printer spat pages at me, then off to beard the lioness.
Hard, clear mountain air with a starry sparkle that recalled what people breathed before cars, as I left my seedy chamber at the back of the motel, circled the peeling building, and knocked on the door that Stogie had pointed out to me after dinner.
“Who is it?” Diane’s throaty voice was weary.
“Stoney Winston.”
“Bringing my pink slip?”
“I’d like to talk about your movie.”
“Oh, now that it’s dead, it’s my movie again.”
“It’s not dead at all.” Silence. “Can I explain?”
A beat, then Diane opened the door and stood there, hands on hips. She’d changed to jeans and button-down shirt, under a light windbreaker.
“Fast. I’m busy packing.”
“May I come in?” She cocked an eyebrow. “You can leave the door open.”
“Your sense of humor’s just as winning as the rest of you.” She wheeled around and stalked over to a table strewn with shooting breakdowns and a planning board full of colored strips. Her thick hair hung loose around her shoulders.
I sat on the swaybacked bed eight feet away. “I don’t exactly fly around your flame either. But that’s not the point.”
She flounced onto the chair beside the table and struck a pose of exaggerated interest. “But you’re going to enlighten me.”
“Diane....” This woman had a genius for abrading me. I groped for self control and tried again: “Give me five minutes and I’ll go.”
“The clock is running.”
I tried to keep my dislike out of my face and voice. “I was ordered to do what’s necessary to help the picture. Based on today’s shoot and the rushes I saw, the direction needs no help whatever.”
Diane addressed an imaginary listener across the table: “First we soften her up.”
“Please. I have no intention of directing, ghost-directing, criticizing, or offering helpful suggestions. You’re the director.”
“And what’s the price?”
I ignored that. “But you can’t run the shoot at the same time. Since I’m officially your new production manager, I’ll run it. I’ll organize the daily schedule, wrangle the crew, honcho the shoot.”
“I know what has to be shot.”
“I know you know it. I’m talking about the scut work. You tell me what you want to do and I’ll run around and set it up for you. That way, you can focus on directing.”
She looked at the planning litter on her table as if the offer was not unattractive. “You have experience?”
I spared her my tedious credit list. “Stogie can get twice as much out of his crew I’ve seen him do it before. As for camera, I can go around the fat lush in charge. You’re picking all the setups anyway and the lighting’s simple.”
She shrugged. “With our equipment it has to be.”
“I can work with the gaffer; he’s a good man.”
Diane’s mouth tightened again. “You mean, he’s a man.”
“I work with women all the time.”
“Oh? Rescuing fair maidens is your specialty?”
Enough was enough; my voice went dry: “You’re only middling fair, I’d say, and whether you’re a maiden is your business.”
She flushed under her dark tan. “The clock’s still running.”
“The other problem is the script.”
“Just full of insights, aren’t you?”
“The structure creaks, the dialogue has moss on it, and the emphasis is skewed. I can fix all that.”
She consulted the cracked ceiling: “I should have guessed. And how many scripts have you sold?”
“Look at my rewrite and make your own decision. It won’t cost anything.”
She flicked a hand at the planning board on the table. “Do you know the kind of schedule we’re on?”
“I have word processing and a fast printer.”
She sat still and looked through me, considering the plan. Finally, she stood up. “All right, it might be worth a try.” Then her sour look returned. “Except for one small thing.”
I nodded. “Sean.”
“Oh, you got that far. He’s in a hip cast for two months, kaput; and I have a week’s film in the can with him at the center of it.”
“I’ll write him out.”
“Great! Then the rest of the gang can just mill around for seven reels.” She pulled a thin brown cigarette out of a pack and lit it with a paper match. But now her anger seemed directed more at the situation than at me.
“Look: your footage is all from the first part of the picture.”
“We didn’t shoot in sequence, but yeah, it’s roughly chronological.”
“Then we keep the plot the same until the rebel biker meets an unexpected death.”
“And then, the lady asked, breathlessly?” Despite the snide addition, I heard a thread of hope in her tone.
“And then we make a different film.”
“Why?”
“Diane, I can’t believe you like this kind of crap.”
“It’s a start.”
“It’s also mindless garbage.”
She had the grace to look embarrassed. “Okay, what’s your idea?”
I showed her the outline I’d bashed out on my Mac. The gist of it was that the gang is taken over by its biggest, ugliest specimen. He tries to honor the dead leader’s wish for vengeance on the villagers, but when he encounters them as individuals, he hasn’t the heart for it.
“Then why’s he a biker in the first place?”
“Because he’s a fat, hairy, messy slob. Bikers are the only people who value that. Did you know they hold contests for the best beer belly?”
Diane looked skeptical. “How does this pussycat reveal his true nature?”
“He falls in love.”
“Aw shucks.”
“A plain woman; thirty-five - Hallie Sykes’s part. She sees something in him, so she treats him decently.”
“She’s queer for hairy, messy slobs.”
I shook my head. “Not at all, but he thinks she loves him. So when the bikers start tearing up the village, he turns against them and drives them out of town. But when he starts to show his feelings for the woman, she gets uneasy. After all, he’s still a slob.”
“So she rejects him kindly but finally.”
“He’s an embarrassment to her and a vague sort of threat.”
Diane nodded thoughtfully: “Well, that’s a little better.”
“At the end of the film, he’s left in limbo: no longer part of his subculture, but still unaccepted in the mainstream.”
Diane looked at me without seeing me; then focused on my face. “Most of it isn’t too original.”
“True, but any story reduced to a hundred words is unoriginal. There just aren’t that many basic plots.”
“Anyway, it’s an improvement.”
“And you can still get all the action Greystoke wants without exploiting the violence.”
“Possibly.”
“And what about the women? Bikers are among the worst pigs around. Are their women really slaves or do they have their own kind of power? It could be fun to work out.”
She stared past my shoulder, her face full of ideas. “Okay, but you haven’t directed these bozos and I have. Who have we got to play it?”
“Nathaniel Hawthorne Fenster.”
“Who?”
“Scuzzy Fenster: three hundred pounds of gentle scholar who pays his rent by playing heavies. He’s sensitive, talented, experienced, and very bright. And the sight of him in costume would make Attila wet his pants.”
“Can we get him?”
“Without him, the film’s a dead loss. Greystoke will have to agree to it.”
Diane walked briskly to the still-open door. “Then let’s get on it.”
“Jawohl, mein Führer.” But my tone was mild.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
I nodded, pleasantly, I hoped.
As I started past her out the door, Diane said, “Uh...” and then stopped. I waited. “What was your first name again?”
“Stoney.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Spenser Churchill Winston, but don’t ask me to explain.”
She paused for several beats, then looked at me. “Can you see to it?”
“I’ll get on the phone.”
A nod. “Okay; thanks, um, Stoney.” She shut the door behind me. 
* * * *
Staring at a K-Mart seascape above my motel room bed, I placed my second call to L.A. The first had been surprisingly easy. I’d told Greystoke that his star was hors de combat and recommended Fenster to replace him. All he’d said was “As long as I don’t pay twice, what’s the difference?” When I’d ventured that I would need to make some, ah, trifling adjustments to the script, he’d shown no interest. I arranged for Shannon to phone Simmons and tell him about the new developments.
Now my second call was answered: “Hello?”
“Nathaniel Fenster, this is the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“Spare me your gentile mythology, Winston; how are you?”
“The question, Scuzzy, is how are you? Poor, I trust.”
“Teaching afterschool Hebrew in Burbank. What do you think?”
“Splendid. How would you like a lead?”
“Not another bike picture?” 
“Yes, but the lead; the starring role.”
“All is vanity and a vexation of the spirit.”
“When did you switch to the King James Version? Listen: there isn’t much money, friend, but it’s a fat part.”
“Well that’s typecasting; tell me about it.” I read him my outline, filling out his character as attractively as possible. When I finished, the phone was silent.
“What do you think?”
“Kind of a cliché, Limey. Beauty and the Beast is old.” 
“It’s what we can do with it what you can do.”
“When do we start?”
“Yesterday, as usual. Can you drive up in the morning?”
“Okay.”
“And come in costume. I can’t sell you if you look your saintly self.”
“I know what to do.”
I filled in the details, gave him directions, thanked him, and rang off. What a treat to work again with Fenster, who looks like a living garbage scow and radiates sheer goodness in great psychic waves.
* * * *
I didn’t emerge until ten the next morning, after six hours’ sleep and two more spent cranking out scenes to retrofit the Scuzzy character into sequences already filmed; so I arrived at the shoot just in time to see a 1966 Rambler make its feeble way into the parking area.
I put enough diaphragm under my voice so it would carry: “That will be our new leading man.” People stopped and turned to watch as the Rambler door squeaked open and a figure emerged, heavy enough so that the car rose perceptibly on its springs.
It was Scuzzy Fenster in full drag: greasy curls snaking to his vast shoulders, black beard sprouting wildly from nose to chest, great hairy belly bulging naked under a studded leather vest and over a four-inch death’s head belt buckle, blue jeans strained by sequoia thighs, leather wristlets like mastiff collars. As he thudded forward in his size fifteen boots, you could almost feel the ground shake.
When he glanced in my direction, I inclined my head toward Diane LaMotta beside me. He lumbered up until his six and one half feet towered over both of us and cocked his hands on his hips so that biceps boiled in his arms.
“I’m Fenster.” His voice was a perfect fit: a dismaying thunder from a burning bush.
Diane studied him in silence for a long moment, then: “You pass.” She thrust out an abrupt hand and I flinched involuntarily at what his paw could do to it.
“Thank you.” Scuzzy relaxed into a wide grin, unveiling three gold teeth in the process, and benign vibrations washed the company. Several people exhaled audibly. “Are you the director?”
“Diane LaMotta. Do they really call you Scuzzy to your face?”
Another Gargantuan smile as he gently shook her hand: “If the shoe fits...”
“Stoney says you do Old Testament.” She looked at the bangle hanging from his fireplug neck: “Do you usually wear that swastika?”
“A role’s a role. I’d play Hitler if I looked the part.”
“I don’t want it in my film.”
Scuzzy snapped the quarter-inch chain as negligently as if stripping a Band-Aid. “I’m going to like it here.”
I shook hands too. “Scuzz, you’re working right away, so I need to get you ready. Makeup’s behind that truck over there.”
As Scuzzy rumbled off, Diane looked after the moving mountain, wearing the first happy expression I’d seen on her. “Not too much pancake, Stoney; I love the broken veins on his nose.”
* * * *
They spent the day reshooting reaction shots to include Scuzzy, then staged Sean’s “death” by rebuilding the trash midden on the lip of a thirty-foot hole a mile away. They dressed the gully with Sean’s bike, now more spectacularly “wrecked” by the property master, and took shots of a facedown double in Sean’s costume. Cut to match the footage of Sean’s suborbital flight, the new scene would appear to be in the same location as the old.
They could get along without me, so I spent the day clacketing out the new script on my Mac. To save time, I wrote just a scenario and key dialogue, trusting Diane and Scuzzy at least, to flesh it out.
* * * *
My role as replacement production manager had been accepted without comment, so I wasn’t surprised when the assistant cameraman hunted me up, late in the day. He was a bright, slender Korean kid and usually chipper as a scrub jay, but now his face was sick: “I just got a call from the lab: half of yesterday’s footage is ruined.”
“Which half, Lee?”
“The early stuff: moving shots of the gang riding along. They said it was light-struck - like someone opened the cans.”
“Hm.”
“That can’t be!” Like most assistant cameramen, he was a fanatic about protecting his film. “I put every roll in a black plastic bag and taped it shut. Taped every can too.”
“What about your changing bag?” A cameraman loads film in a sealed, multilayered sack, like a black straitjacket with sleeves, into which he thrusts his arms from the outside a tiny, portable darkroom.
“I left a test strip in it for an hour; it developed clear.”
“So the bag’s okay. Could the lab have done it?”
He shrugged miserably. “They’re as good as the big guys.”
“Not your fault.” He brightened somewhat. “We reshot those scenes anyway to include Fenster. But keep it quiet.”
He nodded gratefully and trudged toward the waiting camera.
First ambulating oil drums and then spoiled footage, and both happened on the same day.
More sabotage.
Chapter 4
Trudging through the dust and weeds at the edge of the highway toward the Riverview Motel and another bout with its evening cuisine - linoleum hamburgers maybe, or pork and beans in which the “pork” was a local improvisation. After all, small vermin swarmed around the village, just asking for it.
The town itself looked like an abandoned back lot set: shanties stumbling out of plumb, rusty flivvers decomposing in hardpan yards, gas station attendant snoozing under a single bulb, exhausted by the day’s three sales. Twilight in downtown Calisher at the end of a long day’s shoot.
Diane peered around in the dying light. “I wish we had summer sunshine.”
“It goes fast in April.” When the daylight had dropped below the lens’ widest aperture, we’d moved in blue-filtered quartz lights and shot close-ups for an hour in faked sunlight, the flaccid cameraman grumbling at his meter, as cameramen do.
A lengthy pause full of crickets and crunching footsteps.
“Your new scenes look pretty good, Stoney.”
“Not bad for a tyro.”
“All right, plain good.”
“Sorry; I’m just tired.”
“Tell me about it.”
The motel’s sputtering neon NO was a hundred yards ahead when a squat figure detached itself from the shadow of the motorcycle repair shop and swaggered into the road: Pits Caudle, shaved head gleaming in the cross-light.
“Hey you, Winston! We gotta talk.” Even shouting, Pits achieved the truculent mumble that bikers affect for civilians.
Diane muttered, “Godzilla speaks.” In fact, he wasn’t all that scary, despite the warlord whiskers, the tattoos, and the smoked granny glasses that would make navigation hazardous in this light. Like an actor subtly miscast, Pits Caudle could not quite make his costume believable.
“What’s up, Doc?”
“Huh?” He sensed a put-on but couldn’t identify it, so he marshaled his troops and continued: “Whattabout this new crap? What I mean is it gonna take longer?”
We kept walking. “I hope not.”
“I don’t care.” Left behind, he trotted after us. “I mean, yer payin’ by the day.”
“Yes?”
When I declined his serve, he was forced to grope after his own thought. A pause, then, “Well, I gotta know. I mean, what if somebody wants the motel?”
“For what, a lepers’ convention?”
“Huh?”
Diane shot me a warning look and asked in a reasonable tone, “What’s the problem, Pits?”
He addressed me as if she didn’t exist: “We got books ta keep: motel, coffee shop, extras, drivers, scooters - the whole shot.”
“What do the bikes rent for?”
“Depends.” But he looked as if he didn’t know.
“I mean, one motorcycle for one day. How much?”
“Well... Molly writes it up, y’know. I leave it to her; she’s my ol’ lady. I mean like I manage.”
I said, “Just barely.”
Another dirty look from Diane, then she tried again with Pits: “We’ll wrap the exteriors first. That way, we don’t have to keep renting the bikes.”
“No way; it’s a package deal.” Again, he looked only at me.
“What kind of package deal?”
“Everything’s for the whole...” the term eluded him “...thing.”
“The duration of the shoot?”
“Duration, yeah. That’s the deal.”
“Who made the deal?”
“Greystoke guy.” Thoughts appeared on Caudle’s face like light bulbs in cartoons: “Hey: you talk to him, right?”
“I’m the production manager.”
As he nodded, the cross-light raked the craters in his face. “Okay, then Molly’ll give ya the bills. You give them to him.”
“How have you done it up to now?”
“She... I mean, I dint yet; it’s only a week so far. He’s spose ta get a bill every week. That’s the deal.”
“Fair enough.”
“Right. Okay, I got work to do.”
As he turned, Diane stepped in front of him and forced him to look at her. “How about getting us some better food?”
He stared at her, blinking, then: “Talk to Molly; she does it. Dumb bitch never could cook.”
Diane kept her voice even: “I’ll tell her you said so.”
“Not even good fer humpin’. If she wasn’t my, like, secatary, I’d dump her.” He held Diane’s eye for an insolent beat, then swaggered away toward the bike shop.
“The bastard.” She said it quietly.
“I know, but I shouldn’t have given him a hard time.”
“Me either.” She paused to look around the dreary street, then spoke softly to the evening: “How on earth did I get here?”
“I wondered.”
A long pause, and then her reply seemed tangential: “You know what I like best? The mechanics. I was always good with machines. Even in grade school, I used to run the projector for the teacher.” A contemptuous snort. “She could thread a bobbin on a Singer slant-needle but she wouldn’t lace up a Bell and Howell.”
I kept an encouraging silence.
Diane sighed. “I wanted to be a cameraman, but no way. They said a woman was too small to hand-hold.” Bitter silence.
A flight wing of mosquitoes had their gun sights on us. When I smashed one against my forehead, my fingers came away bloody. “Come on, they’ll drain us dry.”
Diane looked vaguely into the shadows. “Who will?”
* * * *
At five o’clock the next morning, the rising sun was blasting through my motel window, artfully placed to aim it like a key light at my face. I cursed myself for forgetting to throw the bedspread over the window rod, from which the curtains had long since vanished.
Usually I run on full automatic until I’ve had three cups of coffee, but today I’d awakened spinning with shoot logistics and ideas for scenes. Writing and managing at the same time were getting to be too much.
Bang! bang!! bang!!! on my flimsy door. “It’s Lee, Stoney.” I pulled on jeans and let him in.
“The camera’s gone.” His normally calm face was stiff with worry. “I looked everywhere.”
“Grip truck?”
“Grip truck, camera truck, utility truck, wardrobe. I went to yesterday’s setups and looked.”
“Ask around?” He shook his head. “No spare?”
“On this shoot? We don’t even have a sawed-off.” He meant the smaller tripod used for lower camera angles.
“Case too?”
“Case and camera. The mag case is here and the film magazines are in it.”
“Okay, you wake up Scuzzy; I’ll get Diane. Be in the coffee shop in ten minutes.” He turned to go. “Keep it to yourself.”
Crunching through the gravel to Diane’s room on the front side of the motel, I shivered in the mountain dawn. She answered my knock, bare under a short, homely robe, lush hair a dark waterfall over her shoulders. She looked very young in the morning light, like a sleepy child padding to breakfast in her jammies.
But the cat behind her eyes awoke at once: “The camera’s lost?”
“I don’t think so. Coffee shop in five minutes. I’ll explain.”
She shut the door as I trotted toward the rank coffee shop adjacent the motel office.
* * * *
Scuzzy puffed in like the morning train and just as big, apparently wearing his unmade bed, but then he always looks like that. He filled two mugs from the coffee urn, slopped them down before him on the table, and sat beside Lee. They stared at me, the mountain and the molehill, Yang and Yin.
The screen door banged as Diane clomped over to the coffee in her hiking boots. She bent over the spigot with a grace that few tall women achieve, then crossed to sit beside me. Somehow, she’d had time to braid her hair.
I didn’t want the assistant cameraman to hear the discussion: “Lee, how about going through the trucks once more just to be sure.”
“Okay.” But he shook his head doubtfully as he left.
“Diane, you said someone was screwing the picture.”
“I was just mad.”
“I knew you were, but someone put those oil drums in Sean’s path, and half of that day’s footage was ruined.”
“What?”
I shook my head. “We reshot the stuff. Anyway, now the camera’s gone.”
Scuzzy drained one mug. “Maybe Lee misplaced it.”
“He’d sooner lose his honorable father. You know A.C.s: they guard their gear like mother ducks. No, not Lee.”
Diane frowned into her coffee: “Maybe they stole it to sell.”
“A twenty year old Arri?”
Scuzzy spoke with rabbinical weight: “A provocative discussion, but out of place. What do we do?”
“Scuzzy, take a bike out to yesterday’s area and comb the place. Diane, you pick a sequence that’ll need rehearsal. Lots of it.”
“Why?”
“I’ll get on the horn and find another camera. If you keep people busy ‘til it gets here, they won’t notice anything.”
Diane opened her mouth as if to ask, why the cover-up? Then she nodded. Scuzzy slurped his second mug and expanded to full height, knocking over his chair. He ignored it. The three of us surged out the door and then split up like planes deploying for a dogfight.
* * * *
We reconvened an hour later in Diane’s room, since the coffee shop was now full of cast and crew, yawning over cornflakes.
I saw that Fenster was distinctly bowlegged, which gave him the profile of a huge extracted molar. “What’s the matter, Scuzzy?”
“My stupidity: I picked one of the Funny Bikes: no shocks at all and no seat springs. Like to kill me.”
“You probably gave as good as you got; I bet you warped its frame.”
Scuzzy grimaced ho-ho-funny as he eased onto the bed, which sank eight inches. “No camera, though.”
Diane glanced up from her script pages: “You went over the rock pile?”
“Did everything but move it stone by stone.”
“I’ve got a long scene at the mud hole location. It’ll take a while to rehearse. Say, did we make the mud hole?”
I nodded. “Stogie’s boys dammed the creek last night. We’ll have plenty of goo.”
“And makeup?”
“She made a whole bucket full of ‘mud.’ I told her last night too.”
Diane looked at me a moment as if she wanted to say something; then she just smiled.
I checked my watch. “And Ken Simmons will bring a camera here by nine.”
“What did you tell him?”
I shrugged. “That we couldn’t find the camera. He wasn’t ecstatic. He’s even less thrilled about driving up here. But I found an Arri at Fricsay Rentals, and that’s the main thing.”
Scuzzy frowned. “They’re a crummy outfit.”
“And we have a crummy budget. Just pray it works.”
Diane remembered her earlier question: “Stoney, why are we covering this up?”
“Company morale is lousy enough. Why tell people we’re being sabotaged?”
Scuzzy intoned, “A hedge about wisdom is silence.” Diane and I stared at him. “Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, who died a martyr.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“In his ninety-sixth year.”
We looked appreciative of this deft exit.
* * * *
Stripped to their panties, two biker maidens battled in the mud of the Calisher “river,” grappling, shrieking, slipping in the ooze. What had started as a fight was dissolving into hijinks, and now the shrieks were childish laughter.
Scuzzy sat watching on the bank, bracketed by slack-jawed bikers - proprietors of the sopping wrestlers. His stare switched from oaf to oaf as they guzzled Coors and yelled advice.
“Grab her tits; grab her tits!”
“What tits, man?” They roared at this repartee.
Scuzzy’s rumpled visage clouded. He looked at the girls; frowned; then rose to his impressive height, decision in his face.
“And cut! Print both one and two. Set up for the pullback shot.” Pigtails flapping, Diane loped over to the next setup. “Can we use the dolly, Stogie?”
The key grip, pristine in all this slop, waddled to the camera position and squinted at the mud. “Goddam ground’s too soft.” Stogie relit his cigar.
“Then put it on sticks; we’ll zoom.”
Lee nodded and ran for the tripod. In two minutes he’d planted the legs, whirled off the wing nut screwing the pan head to the dolly, replaced the whole unit on the tripod, and leveled it with the built-in ball and bubbles. “Camera ready.”
Ken Simmons and I watched from the sidelines, below the temporary dam that had backed up the puny “river” to make a mud hole. “Thank God you brought the camera, Ken.” He looked around the glade for a place to sit as I groped for diplomacy and, as usual, failed: “Now I need another favor.”
Simmons whisked a finger across a log and inspected it. “Not if it means more money.” The log was too dirty for his Rodeo Drive pants.
“No, it’s your time. You’ve got to stay up here and take over.”
His slate eyes widened. “The hell I do!”
“I can’t rewrite a whole script if I have to manage production. Without a script, we have nothing to shoot; but without a working producer, we’ll never get it shot. We need you.”
He moved his face into a splotchy shadow. “I’ve got other things to do.”
“Ken, you are the producer. This comes first.”
“I don’t need you to tell me.” His quiet tone carried a distant warning.
“No you don’t.” I watched the cast rehearse as I sought a persuasive line. “You’ve always been a pro, as long as I’ve known you.” He nodded, mollified. “But you see how dicey it is up here.”
“I know the situation.” Simmons’ face relaxed and he moved closer. “Look, Stoney, we’ve got a lose-lose proposition, face it. The script is too bad to fix, the budget’s ten percent of what we need, and the backer’s just playing with himself.” He grinned sympathetically. “You can’t change it, so just lay back and enjoy it.” Almost an afterthought: “You’re making twenty-two-fifty.”
I resented that: “And what are you making?”
Simmons’ steely tone returned: “I’m doing a job with what I’ve got. If Greystoke wants to spend the money, it’s not my problem.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. But this can be a really good picture - if we pull it off.”
Ken looked at me with sad affection, my elegant Sancho Panza. “All right, I’ll stay a week.”
“Hope I can finish the rewrite.”
He smoothed his curly beard. “One week.”
Diane stood by the camera. “Now everybody: one take only, ‘cause this is going to wipe us out.”
One of the slime-coated girls yelled, “Makeup!” which drew a big laugh.
“Quiet, people. Slate in.” The camera started; slate clacked. “And action!”
Scuzzy, in tight three-shot, grabbed the backs of the two bikers’ belts and lofted them into the swamp as Lee zoomed out to hold the action. The bikers flailed into the mud facedown, staggered up choking, and thrashed toward the opposite bank. Scuzzy beamed down at the two girls, who howled with mirth.
As the bikers turned murderously, Scuzzy pinched his nostrils in a dainty grip, pounded down the slope, launched his bulk, and, majestic as the Hindenburg, sailed into the water, backside first. A brown tsunami raced across the mud hole and knocked the bikers flat.
The girls embraced Scuzzy, who now resembled a chocolate-covered whale, and the three cavorted happily under the poisonous glares of the dripping bikers. The scene ended as Scuzzy swept up a girl in each thick arm and carried them tenderly up the bank. They kissed him. Cut.
The company broke into applause.
Diane sounded happy: “Close-ups quick, before that stuff cakes.”
Ken Simmons looked bemused. “That wasn’t in the script.”
“It was and wasn’t. It started as a mud wrestling scene - gratuitous skin and sadism. We changed it to show Scuzzy’s shifting values.”
He shook his head doubtfully. “I hope shifting values go over in Texas drive-ins.”
“We may do better than that.”
Ken’s answering look was unfathomable.
We started back around the slough - Ken taking picky, loafer-saving steps while I considered more arguments to keep him here. “The fact is, there’s something else.” I told him about the sabotage. “Someone wants to shut us down, Ken. I need time to find out why.”
He looked worried. “I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t really know what’s going on with this production.” He stared off through the eucalyptus trunks. “I pay cast, crew, equipment rentals. Everything else goes to Greystoke. Maybe he’s playing some kind of game.” Ken looked at me. “But if he is, I don’t want to know.”
“See no evil?”
He shook his head patiently. “Look, suppose some guy buys my car to use in robbing a bank. If I didn’t know that, then I sold the car in good faith. But if I did know, then I might be an accessory.”
I stopped to watch the crew prepare a setup. “Anyway, I’ll do some checking.”
“You can be awful naive for your age.” He shook his head and smiled. “All right, I’ll stick around.”
“For as long as it takes?”
A softhearted sigh: “Yeah.”
* * * *
Determined not to exploit the girls’ nudity, Diane was personally applying makeup ‘mud’ to plaster over their stimulating parts. “Okay, let that dry; we’ll spray it just before the take. How’s it look, Stoney?”
Realizing just in time that she meant the sequence, I shifted my gaze before she caught me. “It’s going to be hilarious.”
She nodded, wiping her hands with a paper towel. “It makes the point. How’d you do with Simmons?”
“He’ll take over as P.M.”
“For the whole shoot?” I nodded.
Diane lit a skinny brown cigarette. “A new camera, a terrific scene, and a production manager.” She put out a hand as if to touch my forearm, then stopped halfway. “Not a bad day’s work, pardner.”
My cowpoke voice: “No ma’am.”
* * * *
For all Diane’s efforts, the biker belles displayed a consciousness deplorably unraised. Now they were teasing Fenster as they waited for a take: lissome Tracy tickling his ear while dark chubby Gail rubber-stamped his stomach with her chest, printing twin bull’s-eyes of fresh mud. Scuzzy’s face suggested that he bore these little trials without great strain.
But the two biker boyos were not amused. Scuzzy’s film character had just humiliated them, and not being actors, they had trouble telling fiction from reality. It didn’t help that Gail and Tracy were their real-life old ladies, or that the pretty makeup girl was now slapping the two men with handfuls of touchup slime. Their biker nicknames were Crabs and Chains.
Crabs was a thick five-six and dressed mainly in his own hair, which sprouted everywhere with a weed-like disregard for proper place. The handle “Crabs” commemorated his unconscious habit of tugging at his crotch. Chains was six feet-three, a shambling tangle of limbs and clanking necklaces dangling sentimental charms: skulls and guns and tiny cans of motor oil.
Suddenly Chains had had enough: “Cut out that shit.” He shoved the makeup girl hard enough to slop goo on her bare legs and strode belligerently toward Fenster. “Turn her loose.”
Gail buried her plump face in Scuzzy’s chest and giggled. Scuzzy raised his arms to show who was clasping whom.
Crabs moved in to back his partner up: “Turn her loose, asshole.”
 Scuzzy gazed down with the indifference of a tyrannosaur viewing two inedible shrubs. He sighed.
“Let him go, bitch!” Now Chains was screaming. 
Crabs looked up at Scuzzy’s face, his own face showing second thoughts. He scratched his groin.
But Gail was unabashed: “Hey Chains, lighten up, okay?”
The biker grabbed her shoulder and tried to jerk her free; then Scuzzy’s massive paw closed on his wrist. The biker froze.
Scuzzy’s gargoyle face turned cold and his genial waves clicked off as abruptly as a radio. Perhaps this shrub was tasty after all. Scuzzy’s knuckles whitened. Chains’ face followed suit. Scuzzy looked at the hand still gripping Gail’s shoulder. Chains looked too. Scuzzy looked at Chains. Chains dropped his eyes and released his grip.
Instantly, Scuzzy resumed his benign broadcast and the frozen company relaxed. Diane moved in smartly to divert attention: “Okay, we’re ready for the next shot.”
Chains ignored her, staring murderously at Fenster: “You made a mistake, asshole. Yer big enough, but you ain’t a bro, and you got no bros behind you.”
“Come on, people: places.”
Chains continued his strained whisper: “Yer no biker; just a wannabe. Remember when we come for you.”
Scuzzy looked about as agitated as a boulder. He patted the girls, shooed them off, and lumbered away.
Smart Diane divided the opposition by throwing an arm around Crabs and leading him to his place in the mud hole. Oblivious of the ooze, she waded thigh-deep in slime, chatting him up in a low, private voice. Crabs looked pleased at this attention and Chains, deprived of audience, moved off in a face-saving strut.
Ken Simmons stared at his retreating back. “Mighty quiet out here.”
I completed the cliché: “Too quiet.”
Chapter 5
Baloney alfresco as the company broke for lunch: draped on rocks, perched on logs, squatting in the dappled dots of shade. The riverbed was cool and green and the spring rains had filled the stream to its two-foot maximum width. People pursued suntans, sleep, and Frisbees, in that order.
Scuzzy Fenster sat against a log, consuming lunch with prim good manners: cold cuts for six and a cubic foot of potato salad. He licked his thumb, then wiped it with a napkin.
I snitched a sweaty piece of Spam. “I wouldn’t take those bozos lightly, Scuzz.”
“Know what this is?” He sneered into his paper cup. “Kool-Aid.”
“Are you listening?”
“About ten gallons of water per package. Feh!”
“They don’t dare fight you by themselves, but they have friends.”
He raked his steel wool beard with dainty fingers.
“How will you protect yourself?”
“Say little, do much, and look cheerfully upon all men. Rabbi Shammai.”
“And how long did he last?”
“Cut off in his prime at eighty.”
“Hm.” I tried another tack: “When did you grow this big?”
Indifferently: “Time out of mind.”
I chewed on rubber lunch meat, rounding up my thoughts. “I think you’ve lost the instinct for caution. Most of us are physically threatened from time to time, and the fright we feel is salutary. But not you; no one would dare.”
His look asked, so?
“So you never get the feeling that tells you to watch out.”
He studied this with scholarly detachment, as if it were a sacred text. “Could be.”
“Be careful, Scuzzy.”
“Mmph.” He inhaled the final pint of salad.
I struggled upright, hands full of napkin, cup, and droopy paper plate. “Guess I better get people going.”
Scuzzy smiled and nodded, calm as Buddha. When he wraps himself in nonjudgmental silence, he simply won’t be talked to.
Nonetheless I gave it one more try: “The little arrow fells the mighty moose.” Scuzzy raised a shaggy eyebrow. “Rabbi Winston.”
Magic Hour: the early evening time when shadows deepen, hilltops glow, the sky shimmers, and the air resonates with complicated light - Eastman color heaven. A frantic time for a film company, who may rehearse several different setups without shooting so they can get them all in the can at Magic Hour.
Ken Simmons had slid smoothly into managing, though half-absorbed in cherishing his pants, and Crabs and Chains were contenting themselves with dark looks, like grade school bullies threatening playground reprisals.
In my new script for the scene we were shooting, Hallie Sykes, in jeans and flannel shirt, emerges timidly from her ratty clapboard gas station to serve a fearsome band of bikers who have thundered in, shrouded in their own traveling dust cloud. Terrified, she irritates her hairy customers with her clumsiness in trying to pump their gas. Seeing her fear, Scuzzy takes over, filling every tank without resetting the pump; then paying the total from a wad of filthy bills. The biker boys and girls spread out toward rest rooms and pop machine, leaving Hallie and Scuzzy at the pump.
The warm light was kind to Hallie’s pretty, fading face. “Thanks for the help.” Scuzzy nodded, his eyes opaque. “Where ya goin’?”
Scuzzy shrugged. “Out fer a putt.” He peered up the highway, scratching his paunch. “How far to town?”
She mimicked his shrug. “This is it.”
Edgy silence.
She almost looked at him: “Wanna soda? S’on me.”
“Gotta brew?”
The flat lines were just a carrier frequency for the actors’ silent broadcasts: Hallie remembered a beer in the office fridge, worried about admitting this hairy monster, decided what the hell - and every thought paraded through her eyes.
She looked Godzilla in the face: “Maybe inside.” She turned and trudged toward the office.
Scuzzy watched her sturdy form retreat, his eyes as eloquent as hers: was she offering a beer? Herself? Why him? Who cared? He thudded after her. The door spring sang, the door whacked shut.
“Cut! Beautiful!” Diane turned to the crew: “Close-ups on the double.”
Scuzzy burst out the door with Hallie slung in a fireman’s carry, doing Olive Oyl upside down into his back: “Oooh, put me down, you great beast!”
Scuzzy did Bluto: “Har-har-har!”
As the crew hustled lights and camera, I wandered over to the trucks corralled in the adjacent field, sweeping the terrain like a strolling beat cop. It’s a production manager’s habit.
A small female figure was bouncing toward me through the twilight, lugging something square. She drew closer. Something square and white. She stopped two yards away. Square and white with metal edging: a camera case.
She set it down, then tugged at her pink elastic boob tube, a cylindrical thorax cozy favored by biker ladies. It either held you up or vice versa, depending on your architecture, which in her case was substantial, and impressively engineered for its weight.
“Yer Stoney, ain’t you?” I nodded. She twitched her plump right arm as if undecided about whether to shake hands. “I’m Molly: Pits Caudle’s ol’ lady?”
I couldn’t help smiling: “Molly Caudle?”
When she grinned back, a missing incisor gave her the appearance of a tramp at a costume party. “Molly’s just my handle - real name’s Alice.” She shook frizzed honey hair out of her face. “I found this; looks like yours.”
The Arriflex squatted in the box with the ugly German beauty of a fifties Porsche. “Where was it?”
“Y’know the rock pile where you were yesterday?” She waved a brown hand in its direction. “There’s this kinda gully little gully and this box was in it.”
“How’d you find it?”
“Pits left his shirt over there.” A sigh: “Seems like I pick up after him all over town.” Squatting, she peered into the case. “Is it important?”
“I’ll say; it’s our camera.” I closed the case and patted it.
“Then yer real lucky.” As we stood up together, a wave of Basic Female washed over me. Molly’s face was a jumble of incongruities: bump-bridged Roman nose dividing kewpie cheeks; cheerful lines around candid button eyes - a lived-in face with a gap-toothed, schoolgirl grin.
Her voice was also young and perky, with a strong echo of Oklahoma: “Whatcha do round here?”
“Right now I’m rewriting the script.”
“You a writer?” Her interest sounded genuine. “Did I read anything of yours?”
“The probability is minimal.”
Molly mimed being impressed. “You sure sound like a writer.” I smiled away my pomposity. “How things going?”
“Much better now.”
“That’s good. It’s fun havin’ you here - movie crew an’ all - nothin’ else happens.”
“You live here?”
“If you call it that.” Slight defensiveness: “I mean, we git out; ride into Newhall; over to San Berdoo; up the coast.” She looked around, wrinkling her big nose. “But this is it.”
“Do you farm or work in a store or what?”
“Ol lady’s a fulltime job. ‘Sides, Pits runs the club.”
“The Crossbones?”
“Yeah, and I hep. Like a maybe social director.”
I suppressed a smile at the image of Molly organizing biker tea dances in her short shorts and boob-tube.
Her sharp look said she’d sensed my thought. With dignity: “An’ I keep the books. Speakin’ a which, here.” She plucked an envelope from a pocket in her shorts. “Pits said you give the bills to Greystoke.”
“From now on.” I took the envelope.
“I hope it’s right, I never done a movie before.”
“I’ll check it. Thanks.”
She stood a moment as if wanting to extend the conversation. I thought about this musky, well-upholstered lady with her dumb/wise face and direct manner. Then I thought about her surly old man and his ugly minions. I picked up the case. “It’s getting too dark to shoot.”
Molly looked at me.
“I should go back.”
“Why? I mean, if you can’t shoot.”
“Well... to supervise the wrap.” Pointing to the camera: “I’d hate to lose something else.”
Molly nodded. We looked at each other some more. “What do you do after dinner?”
Um. “Write new scenes; stare at moldy walls; go to bed early.”
She grinned. “Me too, ‘cept for the writin’ part. Pits don’t sleep at home, nights.”
With a casual sincerity I didn’t feel: “You and Pits drop over.”
“He’s mostly busy.” Molly smiled, as if to say, you know; and I know you know.
She jogged away in the growing darkness, short, full-hipped, and swinging loose. Her nasal twang floated back: “See ya.”
I shook my head as if coming out of a trance. What was it about Molly? Her cheerful, contradictory face perhaps. Or more likely, her exuberant female upholstery. It reminded me of Sally, my equally abundant landlady. I loved Sally and she’d seemed to feel the same; but now she was on loan to the Seattle office of her computer firm. Three months, they’d said, but then it stretched to six. Sally called less often now, and when she did, she spoke increasingly of great opportunities in Seattle.
Molly didn’t quite budge my loyalty to Sally, but after six months of disuse, the glands will have their say.
The motel coffee shop was Truck Stop Traditional: counter and stools, plastic booths and tables, walls of dirty, rusticated wood, hung with light-up beer promotions and one intriguing touch: a framed blueprint, professionally drafted, showing elevation, plan, and isometric views of a cheeseburger. The dinner buffet was laid out in greasy crocks on the counter, behind which Molly toiled over a can opener, her round face streaming sweat.
Bikers commanded the biggest booths and crew preempted others, leaving cast and management to eat at scattered tables in the center. Absorbed in a battered Testament, Scuzzy packed away his stew indifferently, while Ken, Diane, and I stared queasily at ours.
Diane pointed at her plate and looked toward the counter: “Did you talk to Caudle’s old lady, Stoney?”
“Only about the camera.”
“She’s just got to do better with the food.” Diane pushed her plate away.
Simmons put down his spoon. “I’ll take the other camera back tomorrow.”
I shook my head: “Let’s keep it, Ken.”
“For the whole shoot? That’s too expensive.”
“We need it. With a second camera we can shoot the action scenes a lot faster.”
“We can’t afford the luxury.”
Diane helped me out: “Ken, we need that camera.”
“You need it but I have to pay for it.” He held up neat pink hands: “Okay, okay I better tell the D.P. He has to decide who operates it.” Another of Ken’s two-edged jokes: “Or should I hire extra crew as well?” Smiling, he rose and walked over to the booth where the fat cameraman was peering at his plate.
Diane watched him go. “He’s angry.”
“He has to watch the budget; it’s his job.”
“I mean angry all the time down underneath.”
“Just his way, I guess. He’s good though; I’ve worked with him many times. Thanks for jumping in there; it helped.”
“The old teamwork.” But her joking reply carried something extra. Diane looked at me uncertainly; then her eyes shifted to a point behind me.
A hand descended on my shoulder. “Howja like the mystery meat?” Molly loomed above me in her pink tube, flashing her snaggly grin.
“Diane, you know Molly?”
Diane returned Molly’s smile. “I guess it’s not your fault, but this food is impossible.”
Molly nodded cheerfully. “Me, I wouldn’t eat it.” Molly scrubbed her face and shoulders with a dish towel while I worried, from my seated perspective, about Spandex fatigue.
“Why can’t we get better food?”
“I know: you should see the shit Pits buys to fix.”
I craned up at her: “He buys it?”
“Uh-huh, an’ I never was much of a cook, but he won’t hire one.” She shook her frizzy head. “I could talk to him...” a rueful smile “...but I don’t think he’d care none.”
Diane’s look traveled from Molly’s face to the hand still parking on my shoulder. Her pleasant expression drained away.
I said quickly, “I’ll talk to him.”
“He might be in the trailer now.” Molly stood back, inviting me to rise.
In fact, Pits was in a nearby booth, guffawing with his pals. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She shrugged and bounced away.
Diane watched her out the door, her face expressionless. “She seems friendly.”
“I guess.” I hoped that didn’t sound too offhand.
Diane looked up a second time as a tenor whine floated down in a bubble of fumes: “How come you dint ask me about the camera?”
I turned to confront the swaying paunch of our boozy cameraman, whom the crew had nicknamed Saturated Fats. He peered down with the concentration of a gunner sighting from a rolling ship. “How come?”
“Hi, Fred; sit down.”
Diane jumped up to free her seat and fat Fred descended with due care. “I mean, who’s in charge of the cameras anyway?”
“My fault, Fred; but Ken was going to take it back and I had to talk him out of it.”
“Who’s... who’s gon’ operate it?”
“I know you’ll think of something.”
“You can’t make that kinda decision. That’s my kinda decision.”
Evidently, he wanted an argument. “Let’s work it out tomorrow.”
“You can keep it but I’m not using it.”
I stood up. “Tomorrow, Fred.”
His voice rose as we walked away: “And that’s my final word!”
* * * *
Diane looked pensive as we strolled across the dingy parking area toward her room. Another silent mountain night, the hills theatrical silhouettes in front of an inky canvas sky pricked with backlit pin holes. I kept the silence.
She stopped to scan the Milky Way, which is never visible in town. “I wonder what’s with Fred.”
“Insecure about his authority. Drunk too, as usual.”
“I don’t know.” A long pause. “Where does Lee keep the cameras?”
“Locked in the camera truck.”
“And who else has a key?”
“Fred, of course. But why would Fred hide a camera?”
She sighed. “No reason. But nothing else makes sense either. Still, I wish we could replace him. He’s slow, he’s uncooperative...”
“And he’s a drunk; I know.”
When we paused again at her door, Diane looked tired in the harsh downlight of the yellow bulb. She stared at her key as if forgetting what it opened. “Seven a.m. call?”
“So Ken said. Why don’t you start with tight shots - give the sun a chance to get higher.”
Sharply: “Are you telling me what to shoot?”
“Get some rest, Diane.”
“You better believe it.”
“Good night.” She ignored me, fumbling with the lock. I started toward my room.
I was twenty feet away when her voice floated after me: “Thanks, Stoney.” Her tone carried an olive branch.
* * * *
I was sitting at the improvised work table in my room, under the glare of its one floor lamp, a piece of wrought-iron kitsch whose flaking parchment shade directed half the light sideways in my eyes. I removed Molly’s invoice from its grubby envelope and spread it for review.
Very competent: neat ranks of line items marching down a column four pages long: trucks, motorcycles, biker extras, location rentals, city fees, construction costs, costume and prop rentals, security, stunt doubles, rooms, meals itemized minutely, on and on. The entries were in ballpoint on an accountant’s worksheet, but the items were properly organized and each was expressed in standard production language. A tidy, thorough job.
I picked an entry at random. Let’s see: meal service for twenty-five people for seven days at $150 per person per day equals $26,250.
Wait a minute: twenty-six thousand dollars for food? For spoiled stew and rancid wienies? For Kool-Aid? What else was here?
Motel rooms for the same people and the same seven days: $21,875. That’s $125 a night for this flea bag and mostly two to a room. Trucks at four hundred a day; motorcycles at six; four thousand bucks to rent that gas station?
Every item was similar: inflated by a factor of ten, and the total for the week came to four hundred thousand dollars and change.
I stared blankly at the pale green pages while the crickets competed outside my dirty window. What was going on?
Chapter 6
I scuffed through the gravel in crisp darkness toward the clot of shaggy heads silhouetted in the coffee shop window, shaggy except for Pits Caudle’s lone bald dome. His honking laugh floated out the screen door, which smacked shut behind me when I entered. The laughter leaked away as I approached the booth, but the six bikers grinned as if I’d missed a joke at my expense. They huddled over the single table lamp like trolls around a fire, surrounded by beer cans and marijuana fumes.
“Evening, gents.”
Pits wagged a hand to greet this visitor to his cave. Crabs took the cue and nodded. Chains and the others stared at their Coors.
“Got a second, Pits?”
“Got nothin’ but firsts.” This riposte was duly appreciated by his boys. “Whaddya want?”
“Just a couple questions about the accounts?”
“I told ya, Molly does ‘em. Ask her.” His tone was faintly defensive.
“I’m sure she’s gone by now.”
“TV.” I looked a question. “Watchin’ TV.” To his audience: “All she does, dumb bitch.” They nodded.
“Okay, guess I’ll catch her tomorrow.”
Indifferent shrug: “She’s in the trailer: silver Airstream - first one inside the gate.”
“Tomorrow’s soon enough.”
Another shrug said suit yourself. Pits whispered something to Crabs, who nodded, snorting.
Crabs echoed, “Dumb bitch,” and pulled a virgin six-pack into view. The trolls closed ranks around their brew.
* * * *
In the parking lot, I listened to the breeze hissing through the eucalyptus trees in the stream bed and the evergreens higher up the slopes. Here on the desert side of the hills, the land unloads its heat soon after dark. I shivered. A car hummed past on the highway, headed north, its sound diminishing to nothing.
I thought about the invoice, about those manly chaps in the coffee shop, about Molly watching TV in her trailer. I wondered why Pits was so casual about my visiting her at nine o’clock. Then I rambled down the driveway to the road, turned right, and without really thinking, headed for the trailer park two hundred yards away.
The Airstream was a fat silver sausage on wheels, blocked up at each end by patent jacks and surrounded with the little fences, beds, and ornaments by which trailer folk assert their permanence. I climbed two wooden steps and knocked.
A pause and then Molly opened the door, tugging a blue tube top into place, as if she’d been half-dressed. She smiled, applied a final downward twitch that opened a cavernous cleavage, and fluffed her perm frizzed hair with both hands. “Well howdy.”
“Hi, Molly. Pits said you might be here.”
She sneered at the surrounding trailers. “Naw, I’m at the movies in our beautiful mall. Come on.”
“Thanks.” She held the door so that I brushed her on my way past.
The trailer was cleverly laid out: a bed across the far end, then a tiny bath, the cooking area, a dwarf table with tub armchairs, and a couch opposite the door, which Molly shut smartly behind me. The walls were hung with bike and biker photographs and posters touting cycle rallies. The TV set displayed a trophy cup surmounted by a little silver bike. On the TV screen, Charles Nelson Reilly stripped off his horn rims and hissed, “Mrs. Muir? Mrs. Muir, there is no ghost in this house!” Out here, all she could get was reruns of reruns.
I pulled out the invoice. “I wanted to check some items on your bill.”
“Well, I’ll try. Siddown.” She tapped a remote control and Charles Nelson Reilly vanished.
“In general, they look a bit high.”
“Hey, yer too big for this tin can. Siddown.” She plumped herself onto the couch. “Which ones?”
I joined her. “I’m afraid all of them.”
“You want a drink? I got white wine.”
“Thanks, that’s fine.”
She bounced over to the bar-size fridge and extracted a jug of Chablis. “I keep some wine around ‘cause Pits don’t drink it.” She poured two generous glassfuls, replaced the cork, slapped it down with a palm, then whacked her round stomach with exactly the same gesture. “‘Sides, beer puts a big belly on me.” She stood above me with the drinks. “Would you believe ‘til I was about fifteen, I was a real skinny thang.” As I watched her sit, I guessed her age at twenty-five.
I spread out the sheets. “How did you figure these charges?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then where’d they come from?”
“Pits give ‘em to me on a list.”
“What list?”
“Here: I’ll show ya.” Bounding up again, she strode over to a small cupboard below the sink, removed a legal size folder, brought it back, and sat down - a little nearer now.
The folder contained preprinted budget worksheets, the kind available in pads from Hollywood stationers. The dollar amounts were inked in a neat strong hand. “Where’d Pits get this?”
“Headquarters.”
“And where’d they get it?”
“Look, you know how the club works? We’re a chapter in the national deal - the organization?” She had the southern trick of inflecting a statement as a question. “They got maybe four, five thousand members all over.”
“Like Hell’s Angels.”
She made a face of comic disapproval: “Bite yer tongue, mister but yeah, like them.” Molly gulped some wine. “Okay, this movie deal come through national. Pits and me just run it ‘cause we live here and our club owns a lotta stuff around.”
“The motel?”
“Uh-huh, only it’s worth about as much as tits on a bull since the freeway went in. We run the bike shop, the gas station, own some houses.”
I looked through the remaining pages. “And the national headquarters sent you these sheets. Why didn’t you just give them to me?”
She sighed. “Copying’s a pain and that’s for sure; I gotta double-check each line. But they said save the originals.” She shrugged and smiled.
“Where is ‘headquarters’?”
“Above San Fernando. Guy who runs it name of Harry Dike. His handle’s Bull.”
I had to grin: “Come on.”
“I know: Like ‘Molly Caudle.’ Never did see the joke myself, but it’s how we do it: everbody got to have a handle. How’s yer wine?” She put her hand on my glass, touching mine. The hand was dry and warm.
“Just great. And that’s all you know about the books?”
“That’s it.” Molly leaned back and wrapped her arms above her head. “How long you been in movies?”
“Six or seven years, but I’m not in them.”
“Well whatever.” She sat upright again. “Bet it’s fun: always new places an’ movie stars an’ all.”
“Not for me; I’m pretty small potatoes.”
Molly patted my knee. “You’ll git there. I watched you bust yer butt today. You work hard.”
We sipped in silence for a moment, then Molly continued with a certain doggedness. “Must be hard on yer family, you away all the time.”
“I’m by myself.”
She flashed her gap-toothed grin. “That heps.”
Another charged pause, then I said, brilliantly, “I better get some sleep.”
Molly gazed at me with candid button eyes: “You afraid of me or don’t ya like girls?”
“I thought you were spoken for.”
She snorted. “Pits don’t care.” Bitterly: “I mean he. Don’t. Care. I tol ya he’s never home.”
“Why do you stay together then?”
Molly looked as if she were trying to think of a reason; then she shrugged. “Habit, I guess.”
I smiled. “I do like you. You’re very direct.”
Another open-faced grin: “My daddy said the same. He called me bullhead Alice.”
“But I’m afraid you’re just bored and I’m a novelty.”
She sat up and leaned closer, staring at me fixedly. “Maybe, but there’s twenny-five novelties in town right now - fifteen if y’only count the boys.”
“Why did you notice me?”
“Yer sorta cute, in a funny kinda way.” She thought a moment. “An’ you talk to me like a real person.”
I smiled.
“But mainly ‘cause you noticed me.”
And I thought I’d been so cool.
“Didn’t ya?”
Her sloppy luxuriance was seductive and her out-front candor even more so. I could do no less than match it: “I did indeed.”
“Some men think I’m sexy.”
“Including me.”
“Then whatsa problem?”
The problem was Sally, and it was private, so I improvised instead: “You said I treated you as a real person. I’d like to work on that part first.”
Lame and phony, but Molly answered with a sweet smile.
I stood up. “Let’s talk some more tomorrow.”
Molly jumped up so quickly that her blue tube almost remained seated. She didn’t bother to heave it up and it lingered a tantalizing inch from full disclosure. “Okay, get yer sleep, straight arrow.” But another infectious grin took off the edge.
As we walked the two small steps to the door I thought of something. “Can you do me a favor?”
“I been offerin.’”
“See if you can find out how headquarters figures the invoices.”
“Sure. I’ll ask Bull next time he calls.” She pecked me sideways on the cheek, but the childlike effect was overruled by the swell of warm breast against my arm. “You take it easy, hear?”
“You too.”
A last slow grin: “Don’t worry about me.”
I popped out of the cramped trailer like a claustrophobe quitting a phone booth, with the eerie feeling I get on returning to the world after an intense, engrossing movie. Hosing down my brain with cold night air, I listened to the rural silence that half soothes and half unnerves us city folk.
* * * *
Ten minutes later, with invoice in hand, I knocked on Diane LaMotta’s peeling door. She appeared in bedtime uniform: shortie robe around her long body, loose hair feathered by hairbrush static so that the lamp behind her lit it like a nimbus.
“Did I get you up? Sorry, but it’s important.”
“That important?”
“Afraid so. Mind if I come in?”
She brought a hand up as if to grasp the neckline of her robe, then checked herself. She stepped back, shrugging.
I walked into the musty room and sat on the bed. “I’ve just been to see Molly.”
Her tone was dry: “I recognized the Eau de Woolworth. “
“Strictly business.” But I heard the defensiveness in my voice. I proffered the green ledger sheets. “Here: take a look at this invoice.”
Diane skimmed the pages and then frowned, returned to the first sheet, and started reading carefully. She sank onto the bed beside me, her face marching steadily from surprise through incredulity to anger. “It’s outrageous.”
“That’s right, and this bill’s for just one week.” She looked up, puzzled. “Four weeks at the same rates add up to nearly two million dollars.”
“Impossible.” Diane whacked the invoice down on the bed.
“There it is, all itemized. Ken said he had two hundred thousand production cash for lights, camera, grip equipment and salaries too. What does that tell you?”
“The location costs are way out of proportion.” She stared into space, making little negative head wags while the tacky floor lamp rim-lighted her severe profile.
I tried an idea I’d been developing: “This may be bad form, but I think we all better tell each other what Greystoke’s paying us. I’m getting seven-fifty a week, plus four points.”
Forgetting the short robe, she pulled her long legs up on the bed, tailor fashion, and said bitterly, “I might have known: I get the same four points, plus five hundred.”
“And the others?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know: everybody made their own deal with Greystoke.”
“First thing tomorrow, I’ll poll the cast and crew.”
“What for?”
“You and I each have four percent of the film’s profits. What if the others have similar points?”
“You’re leaving me behind.”
“Movies like this don’t make much profit - not on the ledgers anyway. After postproduction, release prints, promotion, distribution, they often show a paper loss - though somehow, some way, the producers often do very nicely.” I inhaled her subtle scent, which was decidedly not Eau de Woolworth. “And if Greystoke has a two million negative cost, that’s a guaranteed loss. The profit points will be worthless, and that means nobody will get paid more than a fraction of scale.”
Her bitter tone deepened: “They hired me to direct because they didn’t care about the film.” Small lines appeared around her mouth and she blinked rapidly.
Unsure of how to offer comfort, I took refuge in a lame joke: “I hate to see a grown man cry.”
Diane looked at me steadily while two tears leaked down her tan cheeks. “I guess that was well-meant, but I hope it’s not the best you can do.”
This evening was a wall-to-wall triumph in human relations. “I’m sorry; I did mean well.”
“It’s all right.” She suddenly seemed embarrassed. Looking down, she noticed her dishabille and put her legs down, then made a determined effort at smiling. “Okay, let’s drink and make up.”
“Were we fighting?”
“Oh Stoney!” Diane broke into a bemused chuckle. Shaking her head, she rose and walked to a cooler in one corner of the room. “How about rum and diet soda?”
“In this joint, it’s perfect.”
I admired her rangy grace and offhand deftness as she poured Bacardi into mismatched tumblers, added ice, popped a can, and topped the glasses with cola.
She sat on the bed beside me. “To the cinema.” We clinked glasses and drank. Comfortable silence. I tasted artificial sweetener and scraped my tongue on the roof of my mouth.
Diane looked at me and for the first time, her face lacked its usual wariness. “How’d you get in this racket?”
“I was an English major at UCLA. Took one course in the Motion Picture Division, then another, and then another.”
“That’s how addicts start.”
We sipped our chemical tonics.
I asked her the same question: “You?”
“My dad’s a big contractor in New Jersey. He paid for my preppie lessons: Emma Willard School, Wellesley - the whole shot.” She smiled at the memory of her young self.
“That’s why your rough talk doesn’t play: you’re too uptown.”
“Then I went to New York to work in Media.” Another smile. “We really called it ‘Media’ with a capital. I fell in love with a guy at NYU helped him make his thesis film. Nice enough guy but a user. I worked my ass off for him.”
“Until?”
“I enrolled too. Turned out I made films better than he did. Threatened the hell out of him.” She looked at her glass as if phrasing her next sentence. “So when it came time to help with my film, he faded out.”
“Most everyone does.”
“I guess.” She drained her glass. “Okay, Stoney, no more fights.” She smiled at me. “Believe it or not, I appreciate what you’ve done. This mess would have collapsed without you.”
“Maybe not.”
“Yes it would.” After a pause, she continued quietly, “Perhaps that’s it: I can’t stand needing help.”
“A nodt uncommon neurosis, Fräulein.”
A quick, surprising grin. “You trying to get me on a couch?”
In her long, limber way, Diane was as provocative as plump Molly. Bad dog, Winston. Sit! Stay!
No, better go. I got off the bed just a little too fast and set my glass on her table. “Get some sleep, Diane. We’ll sort this invoice out tomorrow.”
Her smile turned wry.”I like the diplomatic ‘we.’“
“You know you are one contentious lady.”
“Don’t ‘lady’ me, buster.” But somehow our wrangling had turned genial.
For the second time, I sucked in lungfuls of cold night air, in lieu of a stinging shower. My loyalty to absent Sally was unshakably intact.
Wasn’t it?
Chapter 7
The skinny old-timer called Thirsty perched on a bar stool like an ancient spider, smacking toothless gums between swigs of Budweiser as he inflicted conversation on the bartender. “They’re out there, all right; I seen ‘em in the medder, down ta the crick. Mean sumbitches ever one.” He pushed his bulb-topped beer glass forward. “Agin.”
The bartender looked gray and dim, as if he needed dusting. “You paying?”
“Course I’m payin’, ain’t I? You dint give no credit since the gold rush.” Thirsty scraped a denim sleeve across his three-day beard while the bartender pumped suds into the glass. “But I ain’t payin’ fer foam.” The bartender spilled a token slop of froth and poured more beer. “Steal a man’s teeth if ya got aholt a them.” Thirsty slapped coins on the bar.
“You don’t got no teeth.”
“See what I mean?” Thirsty smacked the bar in triumph at proving his point. He stuck a twiggy finger in the foam and watched it settle. “One a them got to be the biggest sumbitch I ever did see. He looks like a bear wearin’ goggles.” The bartender was not visibly impressed. “And I’ll tell ya fer free gratis: they’re gonna tear this place up some - the whole damn town. I heard ‘em.” He drained his glass and tabled it with a bang. “And all you smart sumbitches are gonna deserve it - ever bit!”
Thirsty eased his carcass off the bar stool and shuffled off with evil satisfaction.
The bartender watched him out the door with a face as dead as old meat, then reached behind him and lifted the receiver of the bar telephone.
“Cut and print it!” Diane beamed at her grizzled player. “One-take Thurston rides again. Okay, relight for the close-up.”
The crew bustled with lights and camera as Thurston Frye sank down next to me at a table in the coffee shop, which we had dressed this morning for the bar set. He sighed, fumbled in his jeans, and produced a pair of dentures.
“Nice scene, Thursty.” His nickname was the same as his character name, only spelled with a U.
When Thurston inserted the dentures, his face changed as if the store teeth contained a new personality in ROM. Peevish lines lifted into crinkles and intelligence switched on behind his faded eyes.
“You must lay on some beer, dear boy; that tea-dyed seltzer is simply not on.” Unlike me, Thurston had arrived in America too recently to lose his posh accent. And why should he, having previously acquired it, with some pain, in exchange for his native Liverpudlian?
“I’ll cable Bass.”
He twinkled genially. “Splendid!” Applying tortoiseshell half-glasses to his mottled nose, he inspected today’s script pages, hot from my printer. “How does this rustic person say ‘motorcycle’?”
“Moder sickle.”
“Motah sickle.”
“With a ‘d’ and a Yank R.”
He practiced it, looking doubtful. “I sound at best, like Benny Hill.” A sour smile. “But who will give a damn?”
“How so?”
“Come off it. This enterprise is doomed; just look about you.”
“Why did you sign on?”
“My bank account and Guild permit expired in each other’s arms. This non-Guild job will pay my passage home.”
“Maybe.”
He peered over his reading glasses. “An ominous note, I must say.”
“I’m worried about salaries. Forgive me, but could I ask what arrangements you made with Greystoke?”
Thurston hesitated briefly, then replied with heavy dignity, “Three hundred dollars a week.”
“And profit points?”
“Two.” He sighed. “For what they’re worth.”
“Seen any cash yet?”
“It is to laugh.”
“No one else has either.”
Thurston half concealed a flash of distress.
“What will you do if you don’t get paid?”
“Place my faith in Micawber’s Law: Something Will Turn up.”
“Amen, brother.”
“And if not, one applies to a Bullocks department store, where the proper tone is appreciated in Gents’ Furnishings.” Rising, he put on a floorwalker’s devastating sneer.
Diane called “Ready for the close-up,” and Thurston Frye, late of the Royal Academy, the National Theatre, and the BBC, pocketed his specs and teeth and shuffled into the lights as if he had just hitched his burro outside.
Thursty confirmed what I’d already learned from Lee, Diane, Stogie Rucker, and the rest of the cast and crew. A bit of finger math revealed that the average salary was one-fourth minimum union scale and the personnel together owned more than 100 percentage points of the picture.
I couldn’t complain; my pay was fair, if hardly princely. But why would the others work at rates that made them conspirators in their own exploitation? For experience and credit like Diane and Lee, for rent or carfare like Scuzzy and Thurston, or simply for the indescribable pleasure of making movies.
To an outsider, film making is deeply disappointing. People seem to sit endlessly, wander vaguely, gossip in corners, fiddle with things. Nothing happens. The outsider sees a film set the way a non-gambler sees a casino: as an obscure, complex enterprise full of zombies incomprehensibly obsessed.
But the zombies themselves are fully alive only when they’re there, and they will sacrifice anything to be there. So we’ll always have a few scabby productions like Bikers from Hell, as long as union rules and creditors can be evaded.
And if this film turned any kind of profit, the cast and crew, who owned more than all of it, might just get a few dollars each. But our film would never make a dime - not with location costs of two million dollars. The peons would end up with nothing, so that somebody could play games.
But what kind of games?
* * * *
“Ken!”
At my yell, Ken Simmons stopped backing his golden Mercedes coupe out of its parking slot and waited while I hustled off the coffee shop step and across the motel drive.
His power window glided down in unctuous silence. “How’s the scene going?”
“Thurston’s a wonder. Can we talk a minute?”
“Hop in; I have to run to town.”
The door latch snickered like the tumblers in a safe and I climbed into a taffy leather seat that must have been the fate of a whole cow. Ken’s window whispered shut and the champagne-colored car rolled imperiously down the driveway as if daring dust to touch it.
We turned north through Calisher, evading a dog and two bikers who timed their stroll across the road to slow us to a crawl, then headed downhill toward the distant desert.
“Ken, have you seen any bills from the Crossbones club?”
He shook his head. “They go direct to Greystoke.” Half silhouetted against the window, Ken’s profile looked like a cameo of a Roman politician.
“Molly gave one to me. Comes to over four hundred K.”
The car slowed and then picked up again. “For just one week?”
“Something else: you said Greystoke was giving away the store. Well he is: over 100 percent.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked around. And there’s almost no cash up front. Far as I can tell, I’m the only one who’s getting decent money.”
A shrug. “I told you, I didn’t make the deals.”
“You think Greystoke will pay the invoice?”
A pause, during which Ken swept the Mercedes through an S-turn and up a short grade. The tachometer hardly hiccupped. “I guess he has to.”
“Why would he agree to those insane rates? He may not know production, but he isn’t that stupid.”
Ken appeared to ponder while he did some fancy driving, then replied as if he were winging it in a story conference. “Suppose... suppose he isn’t paying? Suppose he just wants the bills to make an audit trail? He spends two hundred K cash but he shows two mil in costs. That’s a nice tax loss.”
We hummed along in silence as the evergreens gave way to scrub, the hills subsided into topographical mumbles, and the light evolved from mountain sparks to desert flames. Ken tapped one of the twenty-odd buttons on the dash and the air filled with soft rock goo.
I tried my new idea: “We own more than all the profits from a film that can’t possibly make any. If that film isn’t released, there’s no profit to account for.”
Ken nodded as he considered this. “And no inflated charges to explain.”
“So maybe Greystoke got someone to move an oil drum; open a film can; hide a camera.”
Mildly: “That’s taking it too far.”
“Then how come he hired me to help a director who didn’t need help?  How come I’m the only one getting seven-fifty cash?”
“All right, how come?”
“Maybe I’m part of the sabotage: I’m supposed to move in here and grab the shoot. That alienates the company, sends the film off in all directions, and loses time.”
“What about your seven-fifty?” His tone said he was humoring me.
“It adds to the resentment: Hotshot Winston’s getting real money.”
Ken chortled. “Come on!”
“Think about it: Greystoke didn’t mind losing Sean; didn’t worry about casting Scuzzy as a romantic lead; didn’t even care about my rewriting even though I’ve never sold a script. He wants the picture to fail.”
Ken thought a moment, then shook his head. “Zero Mostel tried that in The Producers.”
“No. Mostel produced the most outrageously awful play he could find. Greystoke’s smarter: he wants to fail plausibly. A few little accidents, a few bad decisions, then it’s ‘sorry guys, but we tried.’”
Another silence while I studied the Mercedes’ austere dashboard, wondering why Ken had spent a fortune for a car with an interior styled by Cotton Mather. Then I remembered: like most of his possessions, he leased it.
* * * *
When we returned to Calisher, I helped Diane wrap the bar scenes and then retreated to my grungy cell and phoned Greystoke to set up a meeting.
His secretary, however, proved less pliant than she’d looked. No, Mr. Greystoke was not in; no, she would not say where to find him; no, he did not give out his home address or phone; have a nice day. You too, Kimberley.
When I sought out Simmons, he too confessed that he communicated with Greystoke only at the office. With no other sources, I’d have to hit Kimberley again, at an angle oblique enough to distract her from her duty. As I strolled back to my room, I began to develop an idea.
I once edited a film in a cubicle back-to-back with another cutting room in which some poor sod was assembling twelve hours of filmed lectures by an Indian holy man who had come to America to exploit P.T. Barnum’s law. In six weeks of listening to mahatma filtered through wallboard, I had honed the music hall dialect I was about to try on Greystoke’s secretary.
I dialed her again, imagining a bath towel turban on my head. After a brisk electronic cadenza, the phone was picked up. “A.G. Enterprises this is Kimberley.”
“Miss Kimberley, I am Mr. Satyajit Bannarjee speaking here.”
“Who?”
“Bannarjee.”
“I didn’t....”
“Bannar like a very wide flag you see, plus j, e, e.”
“Bannarjee.”
“Beautifully correct. Could I please become connected to Mr. Greystoke?”
“He’s left for the day.”
I eased some agitation into my tone: “And I have misplaced the time and created a most distressful situation.”
“Uh, who are you with, Mr. Bannarjee?”
“I am quite alone except for my driver.”
“I meant....”
“But how am I to deliver the merchandise to Mr. Greystoke?”
“Merchandise?”
More agitation now: “How do I do that, Miss Kimberley?”
“Well, you could bring it in and leave it.”
“My goodness no! This must be placed in the hands personally of Mr. Greystoke.”
“He’ll be in tomorrow.”
“And I’ll be in too - in Bombay! I am flying tonight on Pan American number six-two-two at eight p.m. exactly gate six! This is terrible you see.”
Uncertainty in her voice now: “What is the merchandise?”
“I am completely not at liberty to disclose its nature.” With hushed portentousness: “Suffice it that these are very special importations connected with Mr. Greystoke’s private interests.”
A doubtful pause, then: “I can give you his home phone.”
Add two teaspoons of oil: “You are the picture of generosity though of course I cannot see you. Can you also give directions?”
Faintly bewildered. “For the phone?”
“My driver is like myself an Indian person and becomes quickly lost in your great city.” Sternly: “I am displeased with him.”
More confused now: “I don’t know....”
Quickly before she recovered: “I beg you Miss Kimberley to help a person in distress. Mr. Greystoke will be quite furious with the whole caboodle of us yourself included.”
A resigned sigh. “Where are you now?”
I named a fictional location and she talked me from it, freeway by freeway, turn by turn, block by block to an address in Silverlake. “Big gate on the west side; just go on up the hill.”
“My most gracious thanks Miss Kimberley for your exhaustive gazetteer. I must relinquish this telephone now or additional coins will be demanded. Bye-bye!”
“Have a nice day.” She sounded slightly stunned.
I unwound my mental turban with contrite apologies to the Indian subcontinent, but it had flustered Kimberley enough to wheedle directions from her.
Out into the gathering twilight and across the gravel to my Volkswagen, which was quietly lowering the tone of the neighborhood. The Beetle crouched beside Ken’s Mercedes like a leper begging from a lord, its dusty license labeling it BUMBLE. I eased my door open to avoid dinging the Mercedes’ blond satin haunch, reflecting that Ken’s license should say BARBIE.
Then off to Greystoke Manor in L.A.
Chapter 8
Buzzing southward through the spring twilight like an evening insect, en route to Silverlake, five minutes west of downtown L.A. Ghostly factories loomed along the Golden State Freeway as another ghostly black mass coalesced in the passenger seat, removed its bowler, and patted its fat brow with a hanky in one fat paw: Kasper Gutman, looking remarkably like Sidney Greenstreet.
He inspected the Beetle with greasy benevolence, then beamed in my direction and whispered asthmatically. “A man of simple needs, simply satisfied. I like that, Sir.” He flapped the dashboard with his hanky.
“It runs.”
“A man of trenchancy and pith.” Gutman’s eyes irised down to happy slits and his famous closed-mouth chortle burbled upward: “Hmhhmh.” The little eyes turned shrewd: “And are you content with it?”
“I’m never content.”
“I’m glad of that, Sir; upon my soul, I’m glad.” He slapped his black serge knee and his thick thigh wobbled. “I distrust contented men; they keep their wants a secret.”
“No secret about mine.”
“Forthrightness, Sir! That’s the ticket.” He collapsed three chins in a happy nod. “Hmhhmhhmh. That’s the best way.”
“Coming from you, fat man, that’s a riot.”
“A sense of humor too; capital! I like that in a man.” The burring voice acquired an edge: “But don’t attempt Bogart, Sir; you haven’t the panache. You do me better, much better; hmhhmh. We’re soul mates, Sir, if you want my opinion.”
“We’re not, but I do: how should I handle Greystoke?”
“Greystoke: a man after my own heart.”
“Exactly.”
“Your little joke, Mr. Winston, yes I see. Hmhhmh!” He considered the matter, fanning his pink baby face with his hat. “Well, Sir, you need an angle.”
“Why?”
“To men of affairs like Greystoke and myself, everyone has an angle.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Dear me, Sir, I trust I haven’t overrated your perspicacity. Greystoke will automatically assume that you have an angle.” A complacent smile. “You cannot prate of justice for your crew; justice is an angle he mistrusts. It will only make him suspicious.”
“Any suggestions?”
Gutman replaced the tubby bowler, risking his coat seams in the process. “Greed, Sir; that’s your line: financial self-interest. Greystoke understands that; Greystoke is comfortable with that.” He accordioned his chins again as if regarding Greystoke with avuncular affection.
“So I tell him I want cash or else I blow the whistle.”
Sharply: “Come come Sir, no! Threats of exposure will only goad him to unpleasant reprisals.”
“Then I just want cash?”
“You confirm my belief that honesty is a refuge of the obtuse.” Gutman groped into the ether somewhere and plucked out a glass of whiskey and a siphon. He irrigated the liquor with ponderous care, squirting just enough soda to christen it. “Let me lead you by the hand, Sir: if you demand cash, he will simply pay you off and the others will be none the better for it. Your very good health.” He sipped his Scotch with elevated pinky. “But suppose their betterment were a source of profit for yourself?”
“Doing well by doing good.”
“Hmhhmhhmh, by gad, Sir, you restore my faith in you! Precisely: suppose you represent that cast and crew will pay you a percentage of whatever you obtain for them.”
“Say, ten percent.”
He sneered at such petty larceny. “Twenty has more the ring of verisimilitude.”
“So I pretend I’m extorting money from the crew.”
Gutman eyed his glass as if deciding whether to steal it. “Why pretend? It’s honest pay for honest service.” His piggy eyes reviewed my seedy outfit: “And your prosperity is evidently marginal. No harm there.”
“Yes there is, but you wouldn’t see it.”
His mouth flattened to a sour line. “As you please; but if you won’t heed that advice, heed this: perfect your Bogart, Sir.” The bulging black suit was growing dim. “In your own persona you could not intimidate a sheep!”
With a last fat smile and buttery chuckle, Gutman/ Greenstreet vanished into thin air, which thickened appreciably at his passing.
* * * *
Silverlake is old by L.A. standards, a suburb built when commuting was by streetcar and the adjacent city was literally “downtown.” It clings to hills conceding nothing to San Francisco, a grid of streets cascading down the slopes and swooping up again in cheerful disregard of the terrain. The homes are shingled bungalows and Spanish fantasies and, occasionally, the curving rails and target windows of Ocean Liner Moderne.
Silverlake and Echo Park next door are sacred ground to people of my faith, and as I chugged down Glendale Avenue between them, past the brooding Tom Mix mansion, now besieged by condos, past the remnant of the Keystone Studio I could sense the shades of Stan and Ollie rising in the twilight to muscle their piano up the nearby stairs, while Ben Turpin lurked in ambush at the top, hefting ghostly pies.
Right on Sunset Boulevard, right again on Micheltorena, up a hill that left the Beetle wheezing, and into a serpentine driveway guarded by an iron gate: Fort Greystoke.
 The gloomy house was a typical twenties mansion: Catalogue Georgian festooned with Palladian riffs like an old maid dressed as a hooker. Its tan facade was stucco scored to mimic sandstone block. I passed under a tacked-on Selznick Revival portico and pushed the button by the great front door.
A long pause and then the glimmer through the fanlight brightened half an f-stop at a time as someone switched on lights while he approached. The door swung open.
“Mr. Bannarjee, I presume?” The tenor was as distinctive as the small silhouette.
“Hello, Shannon.”
“Kimberley called of course, so I expected someone though I couldn’t imagine who.” He inspected me like a butler dealing with a grocer who had missed the tradesman’s entrance.
“Greystoke available?”
Impassively: “Probably not.”
“I need to see him on business.”
“You know where the office is.”
“This isn’t office business. May I come in?” When I stepped forward I towered over him by fourteen inches.
Shannon didn’t budge. “Why don’t I just relay your message?”
If I had to, I could push him away like a doorstop. “Don’t make me take advantage, Shannon.”
Stepping back without alarm, he touched a pocket of his blue velour robe. “You might be surprised.” I saw no telltale bulge there but then you only see them in movies.
“All right, my message: I have a Crossbones invoice and I’ve figured it out.”
A long silence while I peered vainly at his silhouetted head. The head nodded.
“I’ll wait for an answer.”
Another nod and the elfin silhouette shut the door on me.
Standing on the darkened porch, I reflected that Shannon had just said more in thirty seconds then I’d heard him speak in the hour I’d spent with him. In fact, his whole behavior seemed subtly different: no more a timid shadow but a solid, confident presence.
The door reopened. “He’ll give you five minutes.”
I almost said what I thought of such largess, but held my tongue and followed him into a front hallway scaled like a palace and dominated by an oak staircase as tasteless as it was massive. We trudged through ranks of dim and empty rooms with twelve-foot ceilings. No wonder Greystoke bought this house: here everyone was just as small as he.
We found him playing baron in his living room, a thick-beamed barn hung with musty trophies from a studio prop house. A fake log fire blasted behind a mantelpiece half the size of a theater proscenium, its hearth defended by an honest-to-god grizzly bear rug.
Greystoke was similarly bedizened, in a quilted smoking jacket with shawl lapels, and clutching a lead-crystal glass. The overall effect was comic.
“Winston, right?” as if groping for the name of this minor retainer. I refrained from tugging on my forelock. “Whaddya want?”
“Hello, Alan.”
He frowned at his first name. “What’s so important you gotta drive ninety goddam miles?”
“Forty, but it’s important.”
“Siddown.” I didn’t. Uneasy silence. “Wanna drink?”
“Scotch and water, please.”
Greystoke looked at Shannon, who was being slowly ingested by a fat plush armchair. Shannon shrugged slightly as if to say, so get him his Scotch. I considered this reaction while Greystoke fumbled at a bar cart of incongruous chrome.
“Thank you.”
“Drink fast; I don’t like business in my house. Now talk.”
Instead I sank into an overripe sofa, grateful that this absurd room at least permitted full-scale furniture. I sipped my Scotch. “Much better.” Another time-consuming sip while Greystoke visibly fumed.
Finally, he strutted over to the fireplace, planted himself on the grizzly rug, and struck his Patton pose. “Okay, Winston, get to the point. I got a lot to do and I don’t like my home life screwed up. Understand? Okay, now say it short and sweet.”
I gave him my best bored gaze. “Stop playing Napoleon, Alan.”
I had thought that turning purple was a literary conceit, but Greystoke proved me wrong. “I don’t need this.” He snapped his head toward the plush armchair. “Shannon!”
But Shannon was looking at me with calm speculation. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.
Greystoke stared at him, stared at the grizzly bear, stared at me and for the first time, he appeared uncertain. “Is this gonna take time?”
 “Some.” I looked at Shannon over the top of my Scotch.
Greystoke sucked in a deep breath, as if willing himself to retake the initiative. “Shannon, go put the tape thing on.”
Shannon’s elfin face flashed annoyance and he struck a milquetoast husband attitude: “Whatever you say, Sweetie-face.”
He extracted himself from the innards of the chair and left the room.
Greystoke seemed embarrassed. “I hate to miss a game, so I told Shannon to tape it, understand? Okay, you follow basketball? Great game.”
He seemed to want to wait for Shannon but I wouldn’t let him: “Your invoice for one week’s location services comes to over four hundred thousand dollars. You going to pay it?”
He seemed caught off-guard. “That’s my business.”
“It’s ten times what it should be.”
Some of his bluster returned: “I told you I don’t say things twice, understand?”
“All right, it’s your business. But it’s my business too.” Shannon glided back in and I waited until he had remounted his man-eating chair. “I have four profit points. If your books show four hundred thousand dollars a week in location costs, there won’t be any profit and I won’t get anything.”
“That’s business.” He almost smiled as he said it.
“No, it’s not; it’s tax fraud.”
“Watch yourself.”
“Right now, I’m watching you. Watching you run a lot of phony charges through your books to fake a paper loss.”
Shannon’s piping tenor: “What is it you want, Winston?”
I raised a hand to show I’d get there in due course. “That isn’t all: you don’t want this picture released, so you’re sabotaging it.”
Greystoke mimed surprise better than I’d expected. “I’m sabotaging it.” He shook his head. “How do you like that, Shannon, I’m sabotaging it.” Back to me: “So how am I sabotaging it?”
As I told them, Shannon asked quick questions about details, while Greystoke gaped at me stupidly. When I’d finished, he stared at the grizzly some more, then glanced at Shannon, who jerked his head sideways.
Greystoke got the message: “Lemme speak to Shannon, okay? We’ll just be a minute.”
Shannon nodded okay, and the two of them hiked toward a corner under moose heads and regimental banners, looking like Munchkins in somebody’s castle.
They spoke inaudibly for several seconds, Shannon doing most of the talking, then retraced their fifty-foot journey to my end of the room. 
Shannon pulled up a straight chair that wouldn’t eat him and climbed onto it. Despite his countertenor voice, his tone carried authority: “We’re listening.”
“All right. I don’t know what games you’re playing and I don’t think they’re my business.”
A slight smile. “We’re in perfect agreement so far.”
“But your games put Sean Parker in hospital.”
“Not my games.”
“Then Greystoke’s.”
Shannon shrugged, then sat quietly waiting. Perched on his chair, he seemed like a faintly uncanny apparition, with neat short hair and a small, pink, tight-shut mouth. His body looked twelve, his face looked forty, and he gazed out of opaque gray eyes with the patience of great age. I waited too.
After a minute or so, Shannon clasped his small hands. “What makes you think we want to sabotage the film?”
“If it never gets released, people won’t question why there aren’t any profits.”
Shannon’s smile carried a hint of condescension. “You don’t know much about taxes, Winston, but I do: I’m an accountant. Books are books to the IRS, and they’re the people we have to deal with whether the film makes money or not.”
“You admit you’re padding expenses?”
His face admitted nothing. “In fact, the more the film makes, the better for us. The feds look hard at obvious tax loss schemes. It’s much better to show a little profit.”
Greystoke checked in at last: “Besides, I got my name on that picture and I don’t put my name on losers, understand?”
For no reason, I thought of the blank title page of the old script. “Alan, did you write this movie?”
He gazed coyly at the floor. “Well... yeah, sort of. I paid some guy to help a little. Anyway, it’s my story.” His pride sounded genuine, if grotesquely misplaced.
I looked at Shannon thoughtfully. “Can you tell me flatly that you two have nothing to do with the sabotage?”
“Absolutely. And I find it disturbing. If we have a serious accident, we’ll get official attention.”
“And that’s bad news.” Greystoke stood beside Shannon, impatient to recapture the center of attention. “Look, let’s cut the bullshit. Okay, we got something going; so what do you care? You’re getting paid.”
“Sure, and my four points are almost as good as Confederate money. You’re playing your games at my expense.”
“No problem. I told you I take care of my people, understand? Okay, I’m tearing up your contract and I’m giving you a thousand cash for each point.”
“That’s a start.”
“Whaddya mean start? Nobody holds me up, Winston.”
“I mean I have another idea: tear up everybody’s contract and pay all of us union scale in cash.”
Greystoke began “Not a cha...” when Shannon waved him off and looked at me. “What do you care about the other people?”
“Not much, but they sent me to negotiate. If they get cash, then I get twenty percent.”
My hosts exchanged glances, relieved at finally having me pegged. Greystoke shook his head, grinning. “Nice try, Winston.”
I shrugged, realizing that I must now ignore Gutman’s caution against threats. “All right, I think the IRS gives rewards. You know: information leading to arrest and conviction, etc.”
Greystoke said, “We give prizes too for that, but you wouldn’t like em, okay?”
My bored look again: “Uh-huh, well if you’re going to take me for a ride, you better rent a bus. Some other people saw that invoice.”
“Who? How many?”
I focused on Shannon. “Look, I don’t care what you’re doing. I want my pay to be fair, my crew cooperative and something extra for my trouble. That’s all.”
Shannon stared with his old man’s eyes. “That’s all until the show’s over; then the IRS still offers that reward.”
“True, but I’m after something else.” He looked wary. “No, it doesn’t cost extra. This is my first produced screenplay. It’s also my friend’s first starring role and my girl...” I pretended to stumble and recover, “...the director’s first feature.”
Greystoke’s face said what the hell does that mean?
Intently: “It means nothing to you, but those credits are what we live for. I want my name out there.” Greystoke opened his mouth and then closed it at Shannon’s signal to continue. “If the feds attach the film, it won’t get out. No release, no credits for us.”
Shannon shook his head, smiling. “That’s not logical. If you pull the plug because we won’t pay, the film won’t get out anyway.”
I mirrored his head shake. “I want the credit but I need the money. I can’t eat credits.”
Silence.
I gave it one last shot: “That’s it, I guess. If you pay us decent salaries, we’ll finish the film, take the credit, and mind our own business. I don’t bleed for the IRS.”
Shannon stared at me. “What about the sabotage? That worries me.”
“I’m working on it. I’ve one or two other ideas.”
Shannon stared some more.
Greystoke cleared his throat and looked at his mute “assistant.” “Whaddya think?”
Shannon gazed at me without expression. “If it keeps things quiet, it’s worth the price.”
Greystoke nodded reluctantly and my neck and shoulder muscles came unstuck. I produced backdated union contracts, which my Mac had spit out in quantity, complete with names and rates. As a production manager, I keep several boilerplate contracts for just such contingencies. Greystoke signed them, between outbursts at the figures. He grudgingly promised to drive up the following morning with back pay in cash.
Then he drew himself up to his full five-foot-two and fanned the papers in his fist. “You’re costing me a lot of money, Winston.”
“It’s all deductible.”
“It better be worth it, understand?”
“You’ll get your picture now.”
“Yeah.” He held the contracts as if reluctant to part with them. “Listen, whadja mean about your credit? How much did you rewrite?”
“Oh, uh, little stuff to fit Fenster in.”
He nodded doubtfully. “But it’s still my picture, okay?” He handed me the contracts. “Shannon! Show him out!” He wheeled around and strutted from the room.
Shannon walked me to the door, quiet as the ghostly rooms we passed through; but when I turned on the porch to say goodnight, his at-home persona resurfaced. “Winston, you made a promise.”
“Yes.”
“You ought to know: there’s more to this.”
“Like sabotage?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t know what’s going on there. I mean other things.”
I waited for him to tell me, but Shannon only stared. “You better keep that promise.”
He shut the massive door.
Chapter 9
Another crisp April morning full of puffy clouds and Zephyr’s sweete breeth and smale foweles maken melodye to screw up sound recording.
“Son of a bitch, cut!” Diane looked at the sound man, hoping against hope. He shook his head.
She glared at the ceiling of the gas station office as if she could see the scrub jays dog-fighting above the roof. “Let’s try it again. Take four right away.”
Key grip Stogie Rucker, resplendent in a rainbow shirt that enhanced his resemblance to a beach ball, consulted quietly with the property master, then waddled to the door. “Wait for my signal.”
“What signal?”
Stogie left without replying, and we huddled in the hot little office as if listening for the end of an air raid.
A deafening explosion rattled the windows and shook the plank floor. Stogie puffed in, smoking pistol in hand, and cocked an ear to indicate the silence. He smiled complacently around his cigar.
Diane looked pained. “You didn’t...?”
Stogie shook his head. “Blanks: big sonsabitches.” He returned the starter’s pistol to the property master. “You got maybe ten minutes before the birds recover.”
 Hallie Sykes and Scuzzy toed their chalk marks while Lee ran his tape from a hook at the camera’s film plane to Scuzzy’s knobby nose, an easy target. Stogie went outside again and I followed.
I found him soaking up the sun as only old men can do. “Thanks for helping, Stogie.”
He shrugged it off. “How we doin’?”
“The end of the second week today and almost up to schedule.”
He nodded. “I gotta hand it to her.” He gazed down the road without expression. “And the poor little girl’s gonna break her heart.”
I was about to comment on this male condescension when a ghost as fat as Stogie whispered in my ear: Angle, Sir, hmhhmh; don’t forget his angle.
“How do you mean, Stogie?”
He inspected the wet end of his cigar, then dropped it on the asphalt. “It’s fallin’ apart, kid. Too long in this goddam dump; too much work; too little money.” He shook his head with a genuine regret. “She can’t keep it goin.’”
“Would you help her if you could?”
He nodded, still staring down the road as if expecting someone. “I like her; she got balls.” From Stogie, it was an innocent compliment.
“Okay, then first the good news: we got Greystoke to change the contracts. Everyone gets union scale.”
Stogie forgot to look bored. “I.A.?”
“I.A. and SAG - retroactive.”
“No kiddin.’” He turned shrewd little eyes on me. “And who got this outta Greystoke?”
“Well, we did.”
Stogie’s chuckle bubbled out. “We, huh? Kid, there may be hope for you.” An even longer chuckle. “Scale. God damn!” He grinned up at me with almost paternal pride.
“Now the bad news: the money won’t do it by itself. We have to turn the people around.”
He unwrapped a new cigar. “Yeah, everybody’s pretty down.”
“So when Diane announces this, I need you to speak up.” He frowned. “You’re the senior member, Stogie; they’ll follow your lead.”
He almost concealed his pleasure at the compliment. “Locker room time, huh? Win one for the Gipper.” He clicked his rickety Zippo and puffed on the fresh cigar. “I dunno.”
I hoped Diane would forgive me: “For that poor little girl, Stogie.”
He looked at me blankly, then glanced up at the phone wires overhead. “Goddam birds are starting.” Stogie hiked his pup-tent pants and waddled back inside.
* * * *
In the tiny gas station office, Hallie Sykes opened the ancient, grease-smudged refrigerator and peered inside. “Yeah, two beers left. Bud okay?”
Lumbering forward to accept his brew, Scuzzy blundered into a festoon of fan belts hanging from the low ceiling. An off-screen grip yanked a length of nylon monofilament to pull a stack of air filter cartons, empty for this gag, down on Scuzzy’s head. He stood sheepishly in the midst of his disaster.
Hallie tried to keep from grinning, but her eyes crinkled and her mouth twitched.
Scuzzy was starting to grin too when all the lights went out.
“Cut! What happened?”
The gaffer wiggled twist lock plugs. “Lost our juice. I’ll check the jenny.” He went out.
Diane sighed and lit a brown cigarette. “Okay, take a break.”
I went out into the sunshine, to find Molly Caudle bouncing toward me with a paper grocery sack. “Hi, Stoney.” Today she wore the obverse of her usual tube: a T-shirt cut high enough to reveal four silky inches of plump tan midriff. A legend undulated across the shirt’s convexities: CONTENTS MAY SETTLE, but they hadn’t started yet.
She grinned. “Brung you something.”
“What?”
“Lunch.” She proffered the sack. “I feel real bad about the food, you know? So I uh, made this at home. Wanna share it with me?”
“Thanks, but it might not look good: special treatment for the production manager.”
She dismissed these scruples. “Naw. I know a nice place to eat. Nobody’ll see us.” Her grin suggested what else we could do in such seclusion.
I was half ready to give in to temptation when the gaffer appeared around a corner of the gas station, looking angry. “Generator’s shot; frozen solid.”
Pits Caudle scuttled into view behind him, wiping his hands on a rag. No, not his hands; he was cleaning a threaded metal plug.
He held it out. “Oil sump plug. Some asshole left it off.”
“My boys wouldn’t do that!” The gaffer’s name was Alf, which evoked the image of a Manchester pub keeper; but in films, “gaffer” means head electrician, for reasons long forgotten, and thick-chested Alfonso Gonzales did not look very English - especially with his bandito moustache.
“What happened, Alf?”
“The oil drained out and the jenny ran dry til it seized up.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I’m no engine mechanic.”
Pits saw a chance to preen: “I am. That there’s a big diesel, right? Strong suckers. If it ran long enough to freeze, it prolly threw a rod.”
“In other words, it’s shot. How could it happen, Alf?”
Pits rushed in again: “Sometimes you don’t screw the drain plug tight, you know? So ya run it and the plug like jiggles out.”
“Vibrates.”
“At’s it.” Pits delivered this with the gravity of a consulting physician.
“So we don’t have any lights.”
Gonzales’ face tightened at this implication of negligence. He crossed beefy arms and stared at the ground. “God. Damn. Sonava. Bitch!” He stomped away toward the gas station office.
“How come you’re here, Pits?”
“Whaddya mean? I’m managing, same as always.”
“Out by the generator?”
“Where ya want me to be, in that dinky office? I was out here and I heard it stop, so I went to look.” He cocked thick fists on his hips, like an Okie Mussolini. “Just take care a your side, willya?” Caudle strutted off toward the parked trucks.
Heard it stop, did he? That generator was far enough away to be inaudible to a microphone that picked up squabbling jays through a ceiling roof. And Pits knew all about diesel generators. As Lieutenant Spock would say, fascinating.
I found Diane by the grease rack in the little service bay, pretending to study her script, her face a mask sustained by willpower. “What news, Stoney?”
“Generator’s gone bye-bye.”
“Oh God.” She took off her reading glasses and pressed her eyes with thumb and forefinger.
“Now listen: go back to your room, wash your face, then come to the coffee shop. I’ll get everyone there.”
Wearily: “What for?”
“You’re going to tell them about the money.”
“Why me? You’re the one who got it for them.”
“But I don’t need their loyalty. You do, so you’re going to pull a miracle out of your hat.”
“That’s phony and manipulative.”
“You ever manipulate an actor?”
“Sure, but that’s directing.”
“It’s all directing. Think about it.”
* * * *
Plenary session time in the sleazy coffee shop: Stogie in his personal smoke screen, surrounding a counter stool with his vast behind, his grips ranged around him. Then Alf and his electricians, the sound recordist and his boom man - actually a woman - the silent prop man, the makeup girl who doubled as wardrobe, and the placid, middle-aged script girl. Fat Fred the cameraman monopolized a table, while Lee, nominally his assistant, stood as far from him as possible.
The other tables were filled by Scuzzy, Hallie, Thurston, the bartender, and a walleyed actor who played one of the bikers. Pits and Molly Caudle were the only real bikers present. Ken Simmons and I leaned against the wall.
Over twenty in all, lounging with feigned indifference but filling the air with a palpable smog of discouragement.
Alf addressed himself to me: “What’s next?”
“We’ll think of something.” Looks and murmurs signaled sure you will.
The cameraman spoke with bleary truculence, from either a hangover or an early start on today’s libations. “How do I shoot interiors without a generator?”
Alf cut in defensively. “We did not screw up that generator.”
I raised pacific hands, “I know, I know.”
A grip said, “What’re we here for?”
“Meeting with the director.” More disgruntled rumbles.
A long pause queasy with tension. People glanced at one another, whispered, smoked in silence. Flies parked on the counter runway, ready to scramble at the first siren smell of lunch.
The screen door flapped as Diane loped in, freshened up and full of energy. She reached the center of the room in four long-legged strides, reviewed her troops, and managed a seemingly genuine smile. “I’ve got some news.”
“Whoopee.” The grip who’d said it looked abashed when Stogie turned his glare on him.
Diane ignored this. “We’ve, ah...” She caught my eye and I shook my head slightly. She started over. “I talked to the producer; told him it was too much.”
“Too much what?” This time, Stogie led the grip aside and whispered to him. The grip remained standing when Stogie resumed his stool.
“You’re giving two hundred percent, every one of you, but you can’t keep it up in these conditions. So I talked him into tearing up your contracts and writing new ones.” Faces alert now, though suspicious. “From now on, you get union scale, in cash. Stoney, you want to pass them out?”
I distributed the contracts signed by Greystoke and the crew chiefs skimmed them with practiced eyes. Alf nodded. “They look okay.” Diane resumed: “More good news: those contracts are dated from the start of production. The new pay is retroactive.”
A few nods and smiles as people looked first at the papers and then one another.
“We can’t change these rotten conditions, but we can at least make it worth your while.”
The sound man piped up diffidently, “But we never saw any money from the old contracts.”
Diane nodded. “I know, so Greystoke’s coming up himself.”
An anonymous voice said, “Your check is in the mail,” and raised a sour laugh.
Diane smiled sympathetically. “No, he’ll be here today.”
The cameraman struggled to his feet. “We still can’t shoot interiors without the goddam generator.” Exhausted by this eloquence, he wobbled down again.
Then Stogie Rucker, Master Sergeant, 82nd airborne Division, Ret., heaved off his stool, pushed his gaudy bulk into the center of the room, and peeled and lit his trademark with slow care. His aviator glasses swept the company. “Some a you guys been around almost as long as me; most not. But we all know the way it is. Front office does business; above-the-line talent does art - so they tell me - and we just do our job.”
The pause of a practiced rhetorician.
“Half the time they try and screw you, so you gotta protect yourself: give ‘em what they pay for and no more. That’s fair.” He waddled back and forth, pretending to think out loud. “As of now, they’re paying full freight. So as of now, we oughta get our ass in gear.”
A voice began, “Wait’ll we see a pay...” but Stogie rode him down.
“Tell ya somethin’ else: I watched a lotta directors, some of them turkeys and some a the best, and this broad - no offense, Diane - is gonna be one a the best.”
Trapped between reactions to the label and the praise, Diane said nothing.
“So the money’s okay, the people’re okay, and I feel it’s worth my best shot. That’s all.” Stogie wheeled majestically and followed his cigar back to the counter while the American equivalent of hear-hear rumbled through the room.
To top it off, the Lone Ranger and Tonto chose that moment to roll up the driveway in their Lincoln town car and park, taking two spaces, out front. The screen door whacked the wall as Greystoke swept in imperiously, trailed by Shannon in three-piece pinstripes and lugging an attaché case that next to him looked like a three-suiter. He remained by the door as Greystoke strutted into the center of the room, wearing his cliché camel’s hair overcoat like a cape.
“Hello LaMotta, hello Simmons; okay Winston, Caudle said everybody was up here waiting for me.”
“Not exactly waiting...”
“Whatever. Listen up everybody ‘cause I got good news: as of today, I’m tearing up your contracts and writing brand new ones for union scale.” He grinned, hands on hips. Everyone was doing II Duce today. “Whaddya think of that?”
Stogie’s tired drawl: “We know.”
“What?”
“Miss LaMotta told us.” Stogie lightly underlined the “miss.”
“Oh.” Greystoke looked crestfallen, then rebounded as he thought of something else. “Okay, but what’s a contract without the cash to back it up, understand? So I figured, okay you people are doing a real good job for me and I always take care of my people. Winston’ll tell ya.”
I nodded solemnly.
“Right. Clear out that booth there ‘cause it’s payday. Shannon!” Greystoke enthroned himself in the booth with Shannon and the attaché case. The case was full of cash.
“Okay, sign your contract and give it back to me. Who’s first? The order don’t make any difference.” The cast and crew began lining up.
Diane and I stood against the wall, watching the company brighten up like a landscape after a summer storm except for Saturated Fats, who was heading for us as purposefully as his condition permitted. For the last two days, he’d been thoroughly sloshed before lunch.
“What’s up, Fred?”
“You know what’s up: damn generator’s up.”
“We’ll replace it.”
“And what’ll we do ‘til then?”
I waved at Alf, who joined us by the wall. “Have we enough house current to finish close-ups in the office?”
Alf nodded. “If we keep ‘em tight.”
Fat Fred turned on his gaffer: “I’ll make those decisions.”
“Okay then, we’ll move the rest of the scene outside; doesn’t matter where we play it.”
“Where you get off, Winston?”
“Take it easy, Fred.”
“Y’ mean take it easy? I’m the d’rector of cinemat....” Wisely, he gave up on the word. “I’m in charge.”
I’d seen this coming for days, but I still regretted it. I turned to the gaffer: “Alf, can you light this show?”
A shrug. “What I been doing.”
“Diane, can you operate an Arri?” She nodded, faintly puzzled. “Okay Fred: get in line, get your pay, and then I’m afraid you’d better leave the shoot.”
“What!”
“You’re through. You’re a luxury we simply can’t afford.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Want to be cinematographer, Alf?” A negligent nod, but I knew he’d kill for that screen credit.
“Then get some money from Ken to cover repairs and send someone into town to swap the generator.” Alf nodded and hustled off.
Fred’s sweaty face had turned anxious. “What about me?”
“I’m sorry Fred, sorry for your troubles - whatever they might be. But you’re not doing your job and we don’t have the time to carry you.”
He looked at Diane, who only shook her head and said softly, “You better get in line, Fred.”
He turned without a word and wove away.
“Thanks, Stoney. I’ve wanted to do that for two weeks.” Diane stared at Fred’s retreating back. “Where was he this morning?”
“Still thinking about the locked camera truck?” A nod. “I don’t know, but it couldn’t hurt to get him off the shoot.”
We strolled out into the sunshine. Diane inhaled a lung-full of pine smells and grinned at the flaking motel. “I could almost get to like it here.”
“Mm-hmh.”
“Don’t funk, Stoney; you had to do that. Look: we’re on schedule, we’re getting great footage, we got the camera problem solved and you got everyone their money.” She studied me a moment as we wandered toward the river. “Be honest: why did you want me to pretend I got the money?”
“The director has to be a... holy father, thirty-third degree exalted Pooh Bah – and I don’t know what - but he has to have intense loyalty. It’s almost mystic. Without that loyalty, the most you can get from people is competence.”
A regretful nod. “I know that.”
“You’re an out-of-towner, a first-timer, and a female. Three strikes.”
“I try not to be female.”
“Now there’s a losing battle.”
Diane’s eyes softened.
“So I thought the money thing would even your odds.”
“Thank you.”
Ambling through sunshine-spattered trees full of birds whose quarrels were no longer an annoyance. The tiny river burped and chuckled like a baby. I couldn’t help enjoying Diane, watching her energy and lanky grace as she hopped along the river rocks. Her floppy pigtails made her look eleven, but only from the neck up.
“Stoney, I was thinking.”
“Uh huh?”
“Seemed like Stogie jumped in right on cue. You didn’t prime him, did you?”
“I told him about the contracts.”
She stopped, her face tightening. “The old boy league again.”
“Diane...”
“Talk about your mystic loyalty! You set me up. Big strong man got to help the poor little girl.”
She was close enough to Stogie’s phrase to make me wince inside. “I didn’t set you up.”
“From now on, I’ll make my own loyalty, thank you.”
This was pointless. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”
“Where you going?”
“Pits was hanging around that generator. I want to talk to Molly.”
“Don’t stumble; she’ll be under you before you hit the ground.”
I blinked in surprise. That seemed gratuitous and snide, even considering Diane’s anger.
* * * *
“I must say, you make a professional corned beef sandwich.”
Molly wiggled her shoulder blades against the river bank grass. “I always get itches where I can’t scratch.” She looked up at me around her beaky Roman nose. “Like it, huh?”
“Tasty.” I was lolling with my back against a eucalyptus trunk. “Where’d you get the cream soda?”
Molly opened her mouth, paused for thought, then giggled. “Same as the sandwich: deli down ta Desert Haven. You know I can’t cook none. Thought if I took the store paper off I could fool ya; but I cannot tell a lie.”
“And you cannot buy New York cream soda in a supermarket.”
Molly showed her missing tooth in a grin. “See? Yer too smart anyway.” She wrapped her arms behind her head, lifting her midget T-shirt above the bottoms of her breasts, tan as her plump midriff. “That’s what I like about you.”
“And now I know you suntan topless, but not in a bathing suit.”
She flicked a glance downward, then up at me. “Aw, that’s easy: you can see my boobs.”
I batted a gnat. “And the tan line on your thigh matches your shorts. Elementary, my dear Molly.”
She stared up at the bulging April clouds. “That’s how you look at me, huh?”
“It’s not easy when you lounge around like that.”
She sat up and fluffed her frizzy hair. “So why keep it up?”
“Because a body like yours tends to preoccupy, and I’m still working on the you inside it.”
“The me inside.” She smiled as if she liked the concept. “Still, if you don’t wanna get preoccupied, whadja come out here for?”
“Company.” In fact, I wanted information. Pits’ connection with the generator was suspicious and Pits worked for the Crossbones national headquarters - for the man Molly said was called Bull Dike. But however negative Molly felt about Pits, I didn’t want her to sense my interest in him.
“Yer idea a company include talkin’?”
“Sorry, Molly; I’m just kind of worried.”
She grinned. “Preoccupied?”
“With script problems. I’m not getting the bikers right.”
“They seem okay to me.”
“I mean the way they think.”
A snort. “That’s cause they don’t.” Molly’s raucous laugh involved her whole body, which bounced enticingly.
“I need to meet some more of them. How big’s the San Fernando club?”
“Hundreds, I guess, but they don’t all live there.”
I kept it casual. “Where is the club?”
“Vaca Street, north of town; bike shop next to a topless joint.”
“That where Dike hangs out?”
A shrug. “Maybe. He’s hard to find sometimes. Okay if I lie down, or are you gonna git all preoccupied again?”
“You like that word.”
“Say a word three times and y’own it.” Lying back, Molly unzipped the fly of her short-shorts and peeled them to bikini level. Her plumpness and tight skin made her look as sleek as a sea lion.
She saw my look. “Gotcha!”
I had to grin. “Sure did. The outside you is five star triple-A. I’ve got to get to work, Molly.”
“You do that.” Molly grinned back and wriggled her shorts even lower.
Chapter 10
Roaring down the Golden State Freeway in Beetle Bumble, grateful for the afternoon breeze that added no-cost air conditioning to my car. Ten minutes more to San Fernando, which the Crossbones Club had rewarded with their national headquarters.
The little town was named for the local Spanish mission, which honored the blessed memory of King Fernando III of Castile, whose pious ferocity toward infidels had purchased sainthood from a grateful Church.
“The Valley” sprawls in baking anonymity: lumber yards and corrugated warehouses, stucco stores and dusty office blocks, trailer parks and seedy tracts of scabby tan ranchitos. Empty eight-lane boulevards diminish into heat mirages and even in April, the cruel light blasts walls and streets and weeds and even people into an eerie sun-dazed stasis.
In the endless Valley, no street under five miles long is worth the name, and Vaca threatened to prolong itself until it trickled out in foothills to the north. I chugged along it doggedly, scanning stores, factories, warehouses, and vacant lots for a motorcycle shop and a topless bar.
* * * *
The bar facade was a jumble of signs lettered as if by free association:
IT’S LUSTY POOL GORGEOUS DANCERS DRAFT BEER XXX-RATED IT’S FUN NO ADMITTANCE IF WEARING COLORS.
And on top:

BLACK PUSSY CAFE.

A black interior except for the backlit bar, a hanging pool table lamp, and a low, raised platform bathed by spotlights gelled dirty Pink. On this small stage a stringy woman, naked except for spike heels, sleepwalked through a routine as formal as kabuki. The rock fad of the week thundered from huge studio monitors hung above on chains, but her pinched, up-hollow face stayed as blank as if she’d finally been deafened by her work.
The bartender was half invisible in the murk. “Yeah?”
“Draft.”
The rock tune quit without concluding, as they seem to do, and the girl stood patient as a cow until a few customers had begrudged her three claps each. Then moving quickly for a change, she strode forward, swooped at the dollars wrapped by ringside critics on the low stage railing, and disappeared through drapes in back. The silence was like a drink of ice water.
The stage lights brightened enough to let me see the bartender. “Is Bull Dike around? Pits Caudle sent me.”
He glanced over at the pool table. “Tats!” When the two players looked up, he jerked his head and they walked over, cues in hand. “He’s looking for Bull.”
“Tats” was obviously the vulture-nosed party in Iron Boy overalls, his shirtless back and arms dressed entirely in tattoos: swastikas, naked girls, Chinese dragons, and a motorcycle splitting a skull with the legend, Death Is Certain, Life is Not.
His large hairy buddy affected a black beret covered with pins and medals, and drugstore cowboy chaps with HARLEY-DAVIDSON tooled into the leather. An immense bulge of fat stretched his T-shirt into the approved biker beer gut that renders its macho owner weirdly pregnant.
Tats stared at me, then looked at his porcine pal. “We know’m, Pancho?” He pronounced it Spanish-style, and “Pauncho” was indeed the perfect handle. The fat man shook his head.
Tats stared at me again. “Who are you?”
I repeated what I’d told the bartender, who by now was at the end of the bar, caressing a gooseneck P. A. mike: “And now, bros, how ‘bout a real warm welcome for our own country queen, righteous Princess Daisy!”
Pancho grinned, showing a mouth like an elephant graveyard. “Daisy! Bodacious!” He turned to watch the stage.
Tats made a victory sign at the bartender, who responded with two beers. He looked over his bottle neck, reviewing my skinny six-foot-two from bourgeois haircut to golf shirt to jeans to cheapo sneakers. A sneer. “Pits don’t work with assholes.”
I suppressed the obvious rebuttal.
The speakers rattled record stylus static and then a Nashville tune blared out, the shocking pink spotlights dimmed, and a little woman in a vast blonde wig parted the curtains. She swiveled forward in denim shorts, snapping fingers to the beat and bouncing breasts in an under-qualified bandanna halter.
I tried again: “Where can I find Bull Dike?”
“You can’t.”
Keeping my voice pleasant: “He does come in here, doesn’t he?”
“Maybe, but you don’t get it: you don’t come in here.”
The dancer locked and unlocked one pink knee to the music while the customers gaped at this strange cartoon of femininity: petite arms and legs attached to an almost portly trunk with oversize equipment bulging everywhere. She looked like a tribal fetish.
Tats shifted the pool cue from hand to hand like a hood in a Warner B-movie. “‘S here’s our place. No cagers, no assholes, no pretty boys in tennis shoes.”
Pancho whooped “Go Daisy!” and the dancer grinned and raised a cowboy hat just big enough to fit her nine-gallon wig. She dropped her eyes to the customer below her.
Tats rapped my scrimshaw belt buckle with the end of the cue. “Most of all, no fags.” To Pancho: “Tell’m what we do to fags.”
“Huh? Oh yeah, fags. We stick pool cues up their ass.” Pancho turned back toward Daisy.
I picked up my beer and started toward a stage-side table.
“Don’t go ‘way, faggot.”
“Mind if I watch?” I made it to the table and took the leftmost of three chairs. Tats and Pancho followed.
Daisy popped her waistband snap and peeled the denim in slow motion, unveiling the unexpected bonus of a tattooed daisy, bent forward, halfway up its stalk, by her sudden curve of stomach.
Tats sat on the right-hand chair and Pancho collapsed in the third seat, behind the table. Now visible in the spill from the pink stage spots, he waved to Daisy. She grinned and started toward us, leaving the shorts behind her on the stage.
Tats leaned across the table. “Let’s go play faggot pool.”
I half rose, but Tats grabbed my right wrist and dragged me down. His fist was like a handcuff.
Squatting in front of Tats, Daisy began to tease him.
He ignored her. “Pancho, we need a place to play faggot pool. Go see if the garage is empty.”
“When it’s over.” Pancho’s gaze never left the dancer.
Daisy pouted at Tats. “S’matter, baby, got a headache?”
Tats only had eyes for me.
Daisy rose and stood before Pancho. Pursing red lips at him, she undid the bandanna halter and let her breasts swing free.
Pancho beamed at her with pleasure. “I don’t got no headache.”
She looked at him and grinned. Kneeling in front of our table, she lifted her breasts. Absurdly radiant, Pancho bumbled to his feet, leaned across the tiny table, and pushed his hairy face toward her cleavage. The other customers laughed and whistled, and Tats was forced to release my arm.
I stood up as casually as possible.
Tats yelled, “Pancho, sit the fuck down!”
Too late: I grabbed Pancho’s upright pool cue with my left hand while shoving downward with my right. Unbalanced by the stretch across the table, he crashed forward like a stricken bison. Daisy squeaked with surprise.
I caught her hand and yanked her forward and Daisy tumbled harmlessly off the stage onto the mattress of Pancho’s fat back.
As Tats jumped up, I swung the pool cue in a wobbly left-handed sweep still good enough to catch him on the cheek and nose. He stumbled backward roaring, tangled in his chair, went down.
Looking around: thick bartender heading to block the door. No good. Restrooms? Little windows, maybe barred. Customers immobile. Daisy sitting up, struggling to right her top-heavy wig. Tats thrashing to his feet, streaming blood and beer.
Up on the stage, stumbling on the railing; through the curtains; glancing around: no obvious exit. Dimmer on the wall beneath a sign: SPOTS. Spinning the dimmer knob; yells from out front as the stage lights died. Through the only door: grubby little kitchen; fat cook reading his paper on a tilted chair; comic surprise as I racketed through his pans.
Double doors with crash bars. These Doors to Remain Unlocked During Business Hours. Praying for law-abiding management. Hitting the right door. Latched, and the impact almost winded me; but the left door swung me out into the blinding afternoon.
Pelting up the alley past the open motorcycle garage and out onto the hot street. Fumbling for car keys, I pounded toward the patient Beetle thirty yards away, as the bartender, Pancho, and Tats exploded through the front curtains of the bar.
Key in the lock, door open, into the driver’s seat checking the right door lock, starting the engine.
The posse reached the Beetle as the engine coughed and caught. Tats grabbed at the door handle. The ‘63 VW lacks a left inside lock, so Tats yanked the door wide open. Into first, gun it, pop the clutch. Tats’s steel fist grabbed my shirt. As I gathered speed, he hopped on the running board. Bad move: Beetle running boards are tin and mine was rotted by more than twenty years’ exposure. It fell off the car and so did Tats, clutching half my polo shirt. Seven ninety-five shot to hell.
I watched him in the mirror as he bounced along the street, tumbled to a stop, rolled over, and sat up. The bartender was running to help him and Pancho was stomping the starter of a parked Harley. That didn’t look good.
Left turn; two blocks west; left again; then south along a wide and empty boulevard, looking for a place to get lost.
There it was: a shopping center anchored by a K-Mart. I swung into the lot, cruised until I found a section thick with cars, and parked the VW beside a baroque van big enough to mask the Beetle’s high roofline from the street.
Oboy. I sat there in the fading yellow light shaking and sweating, picking at the remnants of my ruined shirt.
Now what? The shirt could be replaced and K-Mart was just my price range but what about President Dike?
A big-throated bike roared by, invisible beyond the parked cars. Impossible to tell if it was Pancho.
Then an idea popped up. I left the car, scanned the lot for foe, and scuttled into K-Mart.
The shirt counters were served by a middle-aged Mexican American woman with a gentle face. The corpse of my shirt surprised her into Spanish: “¿Que paso?”
I summoned a grin. “Touch football in the parking lot. Got a little rough.”
A snort at loco Anglos who play football on parking lots in April yet. “I guess you need a shirt.”
“I guess I do. And is there a pay phone?”
“In back, next to Automotive.”
Not too specific. In these neighborhoods, “Automotive” takes up half the store.
* * * *
After phoning Scuzzy, I spent an hour trapped in K-Mart: stereos, motor oil, calculators, sneakers. ATTENTION K-MART SHOPPERS! Maternity clothes, roasted nuts, trash cans, pliers, Pampers, plastic pools, popcorn.
I killed time with a burger and Coke in the coffee shop, then made my way toward the entrance.
“Hold it!” The young security guard looked as if he read Soldier of Fortune and daydreamed of the Hitler Jugend.
“The shirt?” A tight-lipped nod. I pulled the sales slip from my new breast pocket.
He was scowling at the slip when Scuzzy Fenster thudded through the automatic front doors and spotted me. He rumbled up in full biker regalia, like a leather tank. “This man giving trouble, Sergeant?”
The guard wheeled on him, encountered Scuzzy’s wishbone, blinked, tilted up to frame Scuzzy’s face, blinked again. “You addressing me?”
Scuzzy raised a benedictory arm the size of a small tree: “Seek no intimacy with the ruling powers. Rabbi Shemaiah.” He coiled the arm around my shoulder. “I’ll take over, Colonel; he’s quite harmless but it is time for his lithium.” Suspicion and relief contended on the guard’s pink face as Scuzzy bustled me out the door.
He grinned: “Speak softly but carry a big self.”
“Rabbi Roosevelt. Thanks for coming, Scuzz. What’re you driving?”
“Behold.” We stopped beside a customized Harley Electra Glide: 1300 cc engine, kandy-flake paint, longhorn handlebars plus about 200 lights, reflectors, and doodads.
“Glad it has a pillion seat.”
Scuzzy slapped his beer keg butt: “And shocks, praise heaven. Hop on.”
“You know the drill?”
“You told me on the phone: I scare the illustrated man into telling where the boss is hanging out.”
He straddled the bike with a mighty leg and I climbed on behind. I hated to think what his weight would do to a kick starter, but Scuzzy fiddled with something in front of him and the cycle cleared its throat and purred.
I gave him the address. “And take it easy: I haven’t much to grab back here.”
“Not to worry.”
A neck-snapping launch, a tight slalom among car-bound shoppers, hard right at the entrance, and across heavy traffic to the far-left lane. Slamming into Scuzzy’s mountain back as we skidded to a stop for a red light; then a left turn, two quick blocks, left again on Vaca, and roaring through the twilight to the Black Pussy Cafe, where Scuzzy put the Harley into a controlled skid that left us perfectly aligned with the other parked bikes.
“Not to worry, he says.”
Scuzzy locked the bike. “Surprise them: you go first.”
“Okay. Let’s do Lennie and George; that way, you don’t have to know anything.”
Scuzzy nodded.
Shading my eyes from the lights on the bar facade, I strolled through the greasy curtains. This time, I could see a dozen customers at tables, a new dancer on the platform, and my playmates in position at the pool table.
I took a stool at the bar, ordered a beer, and watched idly as the bartender oozed down to the other end to signal Tats and Pancho.
In due course a bulky form filled the space on either side of me and Tats said “Hey, Pancho, he just can’t keep away from faggot pool.”
I looked at them in the bar mirror. “Evening, gents.”
Both my arms were grabbed; but then their reflections froze as gargantuan hands descended on their necks and Scuzzy’s near-subsonic thunder rumbled forth: “Hi, guys.” Their own hands fell away from me.
“Gentlemen, meet a fellow bro.” I used Scuzzy’s film character name: “His handle’s Ton.”
Pancho gaped at the Volcanic image looming in the mirror. “It fits.”
“Short for ‘Megaton.’ Want to meet my friend, Tats?”
“Go piss up a rope.” But suddenly he needed to clear his throat.
Scuzzy said “Aww...” like a disappointed child.
My soothing voice: “No no, they like you, Ton; they’re just a little... crusty. Let’s all go over to the pool table and get acquainted.”
I rose and Scuzzy jacked up their necks, forcing them to follow or risk three inches of swift, unwanted growth. Repeatedly they tried to wrench away, but Scuzzy just pretended not to notice. As we made a stately progress toward the rear I smiled at the dancer, another stringy country girl in heels and little else, and she waved back.
When we reached the cone of yellow light, Scuzzy spun the boys around, grabbed Tats by the overall bib and Pancho by his beard, and sat them on the pool table.
I smiled, doing Jack Nicholson: “Now boys, Ton here is real anxious to meet Bull Dike.”
Scuzzy: “Yeah.”
“The trouble is, Ton can’t find him anywhere.”
“Yeah, uh, no.”
“And Ton felt you guys would like to help.”
“Yeah.” With each amen, Scuzzy bounced them where they sat.
Teary from the tension on his beard, Pancho gripped Scuzzy’s paw in two hands. “All I know, he went away.”
Scuzzy: “Aww...”
Pancho’s voice skipped up half an octave: “I dunno where. Tats knows.”
“Fuck you,” from Tats.
“Aww...” Suddenly reversing thrust, Scuzzy shoved Tats’s solar plexus so hard that he slammed back on the pool table. His head thudded on the slate.
“You can’t...”
“Aww...” and Scuzzy slammed him again. The whole bar was staring now, the bartender frozen and the dancer looking on as if with secret satisfaction. The huge speakers magnified the sound of the record stylus grinding down an inner groove.
“Hey Tats, the thing is, we’re disturbing folks. Now you can be polite or we can all go outside and leave the folks in peace. Ton, the boys here mentioned an empty garage nearby.”
“Yeah?” Taking the idea as an order, Scuzzy lifted Tats and Pancho and started for the door, dragging the bikers like feed sacks.
“Shitawright. He’s up at Fender airstrip - in the hangar.”
“Bring them back, Ton. Where’s that?”
“Off the old Sierra Highway. You wanna lemme go?”
“All in good time. Now listen, Tats. Uh, Ton, do I have Tats’s attention?”
SLAM! “Yeah.”
“Thank you. Tats, you’re a nice cooperative guy, but something tells me, when we leave here you’re going to phone Bull Dike.”
“Aww...”
“No, Ton, it’s okay. Tats, you tell Bull we’re coming up there clean and open. All we want is help with Caudle’s problem. No muscle; no hassle. Got that?” A surly nod. “Real fine, Tats; now how about you good buddies walk us to the door.”
Scuzzy re-executed the spin-and-grab maneuver and we all paraded past the smiling dancer, the rapt customers, and the frozen bartender to the front door, where I turned to address the audience. “Sorry for the fuss, folks. Y’all have a good night now. Okay, Ton.”
Another spin, then Scuzzy sent the bikers staggering forward into the nearest table as I ducked out.
He caught me up at the Harley. “Old Sierra Highway, Stoney?”
“Not without a jacket on that bike; it’s too cold. Let’s go back to the Beetle.”
“Yeah.”
“I must say, Scuzz, you’re great at learning lines.”
He made a face. “Violence, though, is still a problem for me.” 
Chapter 11
Driving Beetle Bumble up the freeway in the dark, I watched Scuzzy handle the immense Harley as if it were a ten-speed bike. As he faded, glowed, and faded in my feeble headlights, I reflected that his engine was bigger than my car’s. Awesome to the max, as the natives used to say.
We returned to the motel, where I fetched a heavy jacket, briefed Scuzzy on his next role, and located the airstrip on my auto Club map. Then I mounted the pillion of Scuzzy’s dragon, regretting that I didn’t believe in rosaries or something.
Swooping gracefully along roads like Moebius strips, lit only by stars and the Harley’s wobbling headlight, we surged toward Fender Airstrip. Scuzzy’s mighty back offered perfect wind protection, little forward vision, and no handhold. It was like riding behind a Barcalounger. I clamped my knees and tried not to think about it.
Scuzzy had no trouble being heard over the wind and motor: “That’s about eight miles.”
“The airstrip road’s on the right.”
“What?”
“ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE ROAD!
A dirt track in fact; rutted, twisted, mined with vicious pebbles. The Harley howled and rumbled with Scuzzy’s constant shifting and the trail swerved so sharply in the blackness that we often slowed to nearly walking speed. After a mile that took almost ten minutes, dim lights appeared, the road straightened out, and we rolled onto a long and level field.
Fender Airstrip was a minimal flat spot in the remote hills, perfect for self-effacing farmers flying to market with recreational crops. A tarmac runway without lights, a shuttered office, and a pair of fuel pumps. The place looked deserted and even the flaccid windsock seemed to have punched out for the day. A distant glow picked out the round-roofed hangar down near one end of the runway.
Scuzzy stopped at the head of the asphalt quarter mile between office and hangar. “How do we show we’re friendly?”
“Stop in the light, get off, and wait.”
“Elegantly simple.”
“Mm hm, but you’d better get into character.”
“The Pirate King; right.”
We chugged sedately into the security lights around the hangar, dismounted, and Scuzzy flipped the massive bike up on its stand with a negligent twitch. Then he cut loose with his natural bullhorn: “Dike? It’s Megaton and Stoney. Gotta talk about some hassles up at Calisher.”
Silence.
“Bull? Check us out, man.”
A muzzy baritone from the shadows: “I don’t know you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Stand still; Weevil’s comin’ out.”
A pause, then a slightly blacker rectangle opened on the hangar’s end wall and a rat-faced little man scuttled into the PAR lights. Scuzzy cocked fists on hips and I imitated him. Sidling crabwise to keep us both in view, the little man crept close enough to pat us down, with special care for our pant legs, beneath which bikers snuggle knives in hidden pouches. Then he backed off and, still eyeing us, waved an arm.
Another shadow slipped out of the black doorway and limped slowly into the light. “What kinda hassles?” Just a backlit silhouette at first: cowboy hat with side brims pinned to the crown, the obligatory hair, and a slender, knotty-looking body.
Scuzzy started around him.
“Where you going?”
“To where you catch the light. I don’t talk to no ghosts.”
Bull turned. “Okay?” The cross-light raked a middle-aged face with a nose once flattened and never quite fixed, above waxed mustachios and a parody VanDike beard. His eyes blinked behind glasses from the fifties with clear plastic frames. He looked middling drunk.
Scuzzy nodded. “Now how ‘bout some Crossbones hospitality for a visiting bro?”
“What kind?”
“A place to park my ass and whatever you’re drinking. A toilet too; them twisties ridin’ in here like to shook the piss outta me.”
“Kill a bush.”
Scuzzy gazed at him, then urinated on the ground two feet from Dike’s shiny boots.
Dike waited out this ritual without expression, then slowly grinned. “Okay, come on. What’s his handle?”
“Stoney.”
“He ain’t a bro.”
“He’s okay.”
Dike turned and limped unsteadily toward the opening, a man-sized cutout in the huge corrugated hangar door. We followed and Weevil scuttled behind.
The interior was a murky vault full of abstract shadows: wheels and wings and disembodied tails backlit by the yellow splash of a hanging light at the opposite end. We wove among the aircraft - Dike especially - to an improvised living area: bed, Formica table, and four chairs. Dike plopped down in one, Weevil slithered into its opposite, and Scuzzy and I claimed the others.
Ignoring me, Dike studied Scuzzy, squinting to focus. “Whaddya want?”
“Little conversation.”
Dike looked around disgustedly. “I wouldn’t mind. Know how long I been holed up here? Seventeen days. Seventeen days with Weevil’s cookin’ and no ass and not even TV reception.”
“Little vacation?”
“L’il... business problem with some boys from Colombia.”
Automatically, Scuzzy quoted, “A greedy eye puts a man out of the world. Rabbi Joshua.” I shook my head at him.
Dike stared at Scuzzy.”What?”
“Rabbi Joshua.”
“That’s, like scripture?”
“It’s from the Talmud.”
“No kiddin! Hey, you Jewish?”
“Is it important?”
Dike’s grin was sincere, if boozy. “Me too. We must be the only ones.”
Scuzzy’s characterization was slipping: “Oh, there’s a scattered few.”
“No, no, no: the only bros; the only righteous Harley-humping Jewish bros. How come you know Scripture?”
Patiently: “The Talmud. I study it.”
Despite his scholarship, I thought Scuzzy’s Judaism was about as pervasive as my Methodism. Culturally, we come to be Californians first, clerks or cops or lifeguards second, and ethnics last. Whether it takes three years or three generations, the process is patiently inexorable.
“No shit? My uncle use to say that stuff. Know any more?”
Scuzzy glanced at me, caught my nod, considered. “There is no man who does not have his hour and no thing that does not have its place. Rabbi Ben Azzai.”
Dike produced a sentimental sigh. “Beautiful. How’d you get to be a bro?”
“I like the freedom.”
“Yeah!” Dike grabbed a bottle on the table and poured a hefty dram into a filthy tumbler. He pushed it toward Scuzzy, who eyed it doubtfully. “Go ahead; that’s Jack Daniel’s.”
Scuzzy raised the glass, hesitated, glanced in my direction, looked unhappy, drained the glass. Dike watched, then downed his own with a flourish. He smiled and shook his head. “Hm; takes me back.” Whether he meant the quotation or the whiskey was unclear.
Dike grabbed the glass from Scuzzy’s reluctant fist and refilled it. “So how come you an’ this civilian come to see me in the dark?”
“Stoney’s the production manager on the movie up in Calisher. I’ll let him tell it.”
Dike turned and looked at me with mild contempt. He listened without expression as I inventoried the suspicious “accidents,” concluding with, “And every time, Pits Caudle was hanging around.”
No response.
“Pits works for you.”
Boozy blankness.
“So what’s your reaction?”
A long, squinty stare, then: “Bullshit.”
I tried a direct attack: “Your invoices are all faked. Greystoke’s running them through his books at face value and paying you ten cents on the dollar.”
“Bull.... Shit.” Weevil giggled at the boss’s eloquence.
Scuzzy raised an eyebrow and I nodded.
He folded his arms on the table and leaned his ursine head into the light. “Bull, my friend, this guy is not a bro.”
“Obvious.”
“Obvious. Just look at him.”
“Do I hafta?”
Scuzzy roared at this thigh-slapper and his laughter caromed off the arcing walls in corrugated echoes. Dike grinned at his success and poured a drink. He saluted Scuzzy and knocked it back.
Scuzzy looked dismayed but followed suit. “There, Bull, you see a cager. A classical tight-ass cager.” Dike refilled both gasses “But Bull, the Rabbi Hillel said, Do not pass judgment on your comrade until you have stood where he is.”
“Beautiful.”
Scuzzy added Dolby to his already awesome voice: “And the Rabbi Yose Bar Judah of Kefar commented, Don’t look at the bottle, but what’s in it. There are new bottles full of old wine and old bottles that don’t even have new wine.”
Dike inspected the whiskey bottle reverently: “Wow.” He drained his glass again, then looked at Scuzzy, who gestured be my guest. While Dike was pouring, Scuzzy glanced at me and I mouthed “Pirate King,” to warn him that his character was slipping again. 
He nodded. “Now, Bull, this here civilian ain’t a bad guy.”
Dike bobbed his head in solemn comprehension: “When you stand where he is.”
“You got it; and all he wants is to make his little movie and go away.”
“Go away.”
“But someone, Bull, is jerking Stoney around. And that ain’t our way. The bros are baaaad, Bull, but we ain’t sneaky.”
“That ain’t righteous.”
“Correcto! So what’s the story?”
Dike’s look wavered between the two of us. He shook his head. “I dunno.”
“You can tell me, Bull. I mean, how many are there like us?”
“Bros?”
“Like you an’ me, Bull; how many?”
“Just you an’ me.”
“Just you and me, Babe.” Scuzzy raised his glass and Dike mimicked him. They drank.”So what’s the story?”
“What’s yer handle again?”
“Call me Ton.”
“Okay Ton, this clown don’t know shit.”
“Right.”
“I mean about them bills. Greystoke is paying us one hunnert cents on the dollar.”
“No!”
“Better believe it Ton: hunnert percent.”
“Mighty steep, Bull; how come he’s payin’?”
“Who can figure? But he’s payin’. Know how much that comes to?”
Scuzzy looked wise: “Big dough.”
“Millions, Ton; that’s what, millions.”
“Wow.” With admiration: “You sure know how to work ‘em over.”
“You ‘preciate that.” Dike’s gratitude produced another round of drinks. Neither I nor Weevil had been offered a drop. “Okay now with that kinda bucks, why would I screw it up with pissant accidents?”
“You gotta point there, Bull.” Scuzzy placed a mighty hand on the biker’s forearm. “So you are telling me, bro to bro, that Greystoke is paying those invoices?”
“We are fuckin’ cleaning up.”
Scuzzy shook his head in amazement. “Making out like bandits.” He appeared to have a sudden thought: “But Bull, I gotta problem: if you ain’t screwing the movie, who is?”
Dike considered this with fuddled care, then: “Maybe some sicko - I dunno. But I tell ya, Ton, it ain’t us!”
“Bros ain’t sneaky.”
“Right.”
“Okay now Bull, I’m calling on the honor of the Crossbones.”
“Right.”
“These civilians don’t want trouble. They don’t care about you or Greystoke. They just wanna do the job, take the dough, and run.”
A passing sneer in my direction: “Run.”
“So you sing your song, they sing their song, and nobody bothers no one.”
“Wow! Who said that?”
“Me. That a promise, Bull?”
“On my honor.”
“I can see why you’re the jefe, Bull.”
Puffing at the compliment, Dike slugged his drink. He pushed the bottle over. “Go ahead.”
Scuzzy rose with a regretful smile. “Long putt down the hill, Bull; time to motivate.”
“Damn, yer the first bro I seen in seventeen days. Just one more.”
“Hang in there, Bull.” Really into character by now, Scuzzy staggered slightly as he turned.
Dike peered up at this wobbly mountain. “One thing: how come you study all that old Talmud stuff?”
“The Rabban Gamaliel said, It’s righteous to study the Torah and be a bro at the same time, because working on both of them keeps your head straight.”
“Beautiful! Did the Rabbi really say that?”
“In his quaint Talmudic way, well, approximately.”
“Sonsabitches knew everything.”
* * * *
I was soon careering down the mountain with five hundred pounds of steel beneath me and three hundred pounds of Scuzz in front, clearly the worse for wear. “Hey, take it easy!”
“Have you any consumption of what eight ounces of whiskey does to my system?”
“Don’t turn your head to talk, Scuzz; in fact, don’t talk.”
“My size is no help, y’know; it’s my metabolism.”
“Brakes!” Squealing, wobbling, skidding. “Too much brakes.”
“Humiliating.”
“You drank in a good cause. Curve!”
“I shouldn’t be driving.”
“Want me to?”
“Hah! You trying to ride this bike sober’s worse than me drunk.”
“Another curve!”
“Yeah, two a them!”
* * * *
Sitting with Diane by the feeble river, I dropped a pebble in a little side pool and watched the new moon shatter. “The whole expedition was a waste of time.”
Seated against a tree trunk, Diane propped elbows on long Levi thighs and watched the river. “You never know until you try.”
Trite but true. “And we’re worse off than before. I believe Bull Dike: the Crossbones have no reason to sabotage us.”
“Then who?”
“Exactly. And why did Dike say Greystoke was paying full freight when Greystoke all but admitted the invoices were phony?”
“You’re tired.”
“A day full of sound and fury.”
“Yeah, yeah, signifying nothing.” Diane wrapped an arm around my shoulder and gave it an encouraging squeeze. She seemed to have forgotten her earlier anger and tonight I felt a novel sense of ease and warmth.
Diane leaned back against the tree. “A great day for me though; shot fifteen pages. I haven’t felt so good since we started.”
“After twenty miles on Scuzzy’s bike, I feel like an old milkshake.”
“Poor baby.” She gripped both shoulders this time and pulled me down sideways so my cheek rested on her thigh. I rotated onto my back and watched the stars fandancing behind the eucalyptus leaves. The night was unusually warm for April.
Diane draped an almost protective arm across my chest. “They’re like a different crew now. Everybody hustles.” A chuckle. “Even Stogie.”
“That must be a sight to see.”
A silence while we monitored the night. The notch of her thigh was warm beneath my neck and her breathing brushed my cheek with denim stomach. I was thinking: tomorrow’s Sunday; we could sleep in. How does she sleep with all that hair? Would she braid it up again, afterward?
“What are you thinking about, Stoney?”
“Just relaxing.”
“No you’re not. Your eyes are moving like wide-awake R.E.M.”
“Hm.”
“Then what are you seeing?”
Pause. “Double convex foreground colored plaid. A cave beneath because you’re missing a button.”
“Hey.”
“Too dark to see in.” I shifted my gaze upward. “Too close to focus anyway.”
“What else?”
“A tan escarpment; that’s your jaw. Two small nostrils. And your ears stick out.”
“Smooth, Winston.”
“Big cat’s eyes with wicked lashes.”
“Oh bull; you can’t see lashes in this light.”
“I’m remembering.”
“What else do you remember?”
“Pigtails. Fingers making drinks. The way your hip cocks left and your spine arcs right when you peer over the cameraman’s shoulder.”
“No more; I’m operating it now.”
“Yes, how’d it go?”
“No problem.” Another pause. “Funny how different men and women are.”
This insight didn’t call for comment.
“I’ve noticed how your eyes catch everything. Your strange orphan speech that doesn’t belong anywhere.”
“It was British, years ago.”
“Is that it? Hm.” She glanced down again. “Now what are you thinking?”
“How to hit on you. The moment seems right and neither of us is talking about what we’re thinking about. But what’s the right move?”
“Whatever it is, it isn’t talk. Let’s just say good night, Stoney.” She pushed me gently off and stood erect, brushing her jeans. “Thank God tomorrow’s off.”
“Maybe we could do something.”
Diane shook her head. “I have a week of scenes to plan. Take care.” She rustled off through fallen eucalyptus leaves.
Whatever it is, it isn’t talk.
I’ll just keep that in mind.
Chapter 12
One day off is worse than none at all, especially for a film crew prone to bibulation and eventually just prone. They wore their heads with wary care this morning, wincing and glaring as if the Monday sunshine were a personal affront.
Diane loped about as always, to the general disgust, preparing a shot in front of the seedy cabin rented to play Hallie Sykes’s home. “Not too much fill, Alf.”
The gaffer-turned-cameraman peered at the cabin porch, screwing his eyes almost shut to simulate the contrast range of color film. “Any more shadow and you’ll lose it for TV.” He offered her the contrast viewing glass that he never used himself, relying on his Spectra meter and his eyeballs.
Diane refused the smoky monocle: “You’re the boss there.”
Pleased by her acknowledgment, Alfonso tilted a foil-coated reflector about 1.003 millimeters, effecting a light change visible only to him and to Eastman color negative film Type 5247.
“Lights are set.”
“Let’s make one.” Diane stretched out on the ground to look at the porch and yard through the camera, which was mounted on a high-hat, a stubby metal stool bolted to a plywood plate on the ground and secured with sandbags. “Places.” She unlocked the pan head and grabbed the handle while Lee knelt beside her to pull focus. Behind the camera, Hallie stood beside a makeshift platform on which Crabs and Chains crouched in readiness. Three other bikers took positions farther back.
The camera rolled, the shot was slated, and Diane called action.
Hallie Sykes ran into the shot from frame-right, juggling purse and grocery bags. She turned and looked above the camera, evidently terrified; then spun about and stumbled toward the shack, shedding groceries heedlessly. On her porch, she dropped both bags, wrenched the door open, disappeared, and slammed it.
Cued by me, the three bikers charged after her. Then Crabs and Chains leapt off their platform and dropped into the frame three feet ahead of the low camera. They pounded up on the porch, helped the other bikers ram the door, and stormed inside. One second, two seconds, three seconds the camera kept rolling while Hallie’s voice screamed and pleaded. Eight seconds, nine, ten: more thumps and screams and sounds of smacking fists, while the implacable camera stared at the empty scene.
At my next cue, a leonine Harley growl faded up as Scuzzy roared into frame, skidded to a stop before the cabin, jumped off, and surged onto the porch and through the door. The abandoned cycle toppled over and bounced in the dust.
“Cut!” Diane was beaming. “Not too shabby, kids.” She jumped up, dusting her hands together. “How was timing?”
I checked the script girl’s stopwatch. “Thirty-one seconds and change. Looked good.”
“You should have seen it: when the grocery bag broke, an orange rolled right into the foreground, big as a moon. Then Crabs squashed it when he landed in the frame. You couldn’t have staged that. Beautiful! Okay, let’s go inside.”
Sooner said than done, since the shack’s porch was two miles away from its interior: a set improvised in an empty warehouse back of Calisher’s only store. In films, the opposite sides of a wall need not belong to the same wall.
* * * *
By the time we reached the shabby wooden warehouse, Stogie and his boys had moved in the dolly and grip equipment and Alf’s crew had rigged lights from the overhead beams. Lee started fitting the camera atop the dolly while Alf strolled about staring at his meter and muttering commands like “Gimme a half-double,” which, to his crew at least, made perfect sense.
The set used a corner of the warehouse: twenty feet of one wooden wall and fifteen feet of the other. Since the warehouse walls were really twice that long, the ends of the set area were indicated by “returns,” movable false walls abutting the real ones at right angles. Framing off their outer edges, the camera would never disclose that these fake walls were only eight feet wide, and the movie audience would use them unconsciously to complete the third and fourth sides of the “room.”
We could have shot in the actual cabin interior, which the set closely resembled, but the warehouse electrical service was hefty enough for movie lights, the beams were high enough to hide them, and the wide floor beyond the set provided room to work.
Besides, the free-for-all Diane was staging threatened to be hard on the decor. After covering Scuzzy’s entrance, she was now shooting a wide shot in which the five bikers, holding Hallie Sykes, begin their mutiny.
Off camera, Scuzzy repeated a line from the previous setup: “Let her go, man!”
The evil-looking biker holding Hallie was named Balls  short for “Eyeballs,” because of a Jack Elam cast in one eye. “When I get ready.” He was played by Tony Carghill, a professional recruited because none of the actual bikers could speak a line.
Flatly:”Yer ready.”
Balls glanced at his cohorts and drew evident confidence from their resentful looks. “I’m ready when I’m ready.”
Scuzzy’s off-camera voice turned dangerous. “Let her go.”
Instead, Balls leaned close to Hallie’s frightened face, puckered his sun-cracked lips, and made kissy-kissy popping noises on her cheek. He licked her skin with a tongue like squirming liver.
As Scuzzy lumbered into the shot, the two supporting bikers moved to the left, Crabs and Chains faded right, and Balls backed up, keeping his grip on Hallie.
“Cut! Let’s print that puppy!” Diane locked the pan head and left the camera. “Now we do the biggie.”
Because we hadn’t time or money to repair any major destruction, we could shoot the fight only once. Diane’s strategy for doing this was simple but risky: she would film the whole donnybrook in one continuous take, while I handheld the second camera, grabbing Ad-lib cover shots. She rehearsed the cast and crew until the choreography was perfect, while I lashed on a shoulder harness, a bandolier of camera batteries, and the backup Arriflex. Pits Caudle bustled about playing stunt gaffer and getting in the way, and Stogie briefed his team around the crab dolly. Ken Simmons moved here and there, coordinating the effort and helping out where needed, while protecting his natty clothing.
Diane explained what she wanted from me; then everyone rehearsed together, while Stogie personally crabbed the camera dolly back and forth and in and out with an ease that denied his age and bulk. At times like this a cast and crew are like a team in the Super Bowl, merging deep individual concentration with an almost psychic communication among the company - becoming, temporarily, a huge single organism.
The makeup girl powdered the cast, the slating ritual commenced, and then Diane called action from her perch upon the dolly.
Scuzzy slammed the edge of one hand on Balls’s shoulder muscle with a force that would have been crippling if he hadn’t faked it. Balls howled and relaxed his grip and Hallie wriggled away. Scuzzy picked the actor up and threw him across the room. Balls landed upside down on a sofa, slithered to the floor, and crawled, moaning, out of the scene. Down on the floor myself, I caught a pickup shot as he crept past my lens, his face a mask of feigned agony.
Then up, under my forty pounds of gear, and over toward the action, oozing along like Groucho Marx so that my flexing knees would act as shock absorbers to keep the picture steady.
By now the four remaining bikers had piled on Scuzzy from all directions: one clutching him around the knees, another hanging on his back with arms around his throat, while Crabs and Chains pummeled him at random. I hoped the bikers were pulling their punches. Even Scuzzy could get hurt.
The crab dolly rolled into the corner of my off-camera eye left open for just such information. I glided away to keep their frame clear; snatched a close-up of the biker biting Scuzzy’s knee.
Scuzzy cuffed the man away, then thundered backward into a wall. The biker on his back went “OOF!” let go, and crumpled to the floor. I focused on him as he rolled into my frame, recovered, and charged back into the melee. I blocked the impulse to follow him with my camera: it would be easier for the editor to match action if he cleared my frame completely. Hallie streaked past my lens the other way, running to hide behind the breakfast bar.
Back to the center ring, careful of the sound woman holding the black phallic foam-covered mike aloft on its long pole. Scuzzy plucked a biker off himself, hauled him to the splintered door (carried from the shack and re-hung here), and pitched him out. I framed the open doorway, catching the biker as he rolled to a stop, got up groggily, and staggered out of sight.
Then back again in time to catch Scuzzy banging the heads of Crabs and Chains like a pair of empty gourds. He let go of their hair and they sank out of my frame, while Scuzzy beamed and sweated like a happy blacksmith at his forge.
When the other biker charged again, Scuzzy caught him, picked him up, and heaved him in a great circle arc toward the corner of the room. I framed the shot in time to catch the biker landing on the TV set, then slumping backward into the corner so that the set pushed over forward and he slid down behind it to the floor. I followed the TV until it banged the planks and shattered, as the prop man had rigged it to. Nice shot! The biker was out cold - pretending, I hoped.
Scuzzy turned to check on Hallie, still behind the breakfast bar, while Diane’s camera framed him over Hallie’s shoulder. Scuzzy winked.
Then Chains appeared from nowhere behind him, swinging a motorcycle chain. It caught Scuzzy across the back, and he winced convincingly. As he turned, Crabs materialized, wielding a wicked sheath knife.
Chain? Sheath knife? they weren’t there during rehearsal.
Flailing the chain like a clumsy duelist, Chains backed Scuzzy into the breakfast bar, while Crabs circled him. I shifted to catch a shot of the knife sparkling in his fist. Scuzzy managed to grab the chain, but Chains yanked it free and blood ran from Scuzzy’s hand. Hallie screamed.
Scuzzy stared at his hand, then glanced up in time to spot Crabs feinting with the sheath knife. Accelerating at a rate impossible for his bulk, Scuzzy dodged, while the crab dolly shifted left to hold him in frame.
As Chains paused, seeking an opening, I caught his close-up: either he’d become an instant actor or Chains had murder in his eye. He charged out of my frame, the lethal weapon whistling around his head.
He snapped the chain forward and though Scuzzy jerked away, the final link raked across his front, slitting his denim vest and opening a foot-long cut across his belly. Hallie screamed again, and as Crabs stabbed downward, she leaned forward to push Scuzzy out of knife range.
The knife entered her upper arm. Hallie stared at it, horrified. Turning, Scuzzy saw it too, saw his streaming front, opened his bloody hand.
A calm like a hurricane eye wrapped the company. I could hear the Arri whirring beside my ear and the dolly whispering across the warehouse floor. I framed Scuzzy’s hand; his face; the knife; Hallie’s eyes; Scuzzy’s face again. All human expression was draining out of it, leaving behind a zombie calm.
Then Scuzzy Fenster went bananas: whirling, he grabbed Crabs’ wrist and slammed his hand on the breakfast bar, which crunched horribly. No, my lens found the Formica top intact; the crunch was twenty bones in Crabs’ right hand, suddenly changing to forty. I followed Crabs as he doubled over, holding his wrist and venting a breathy, whistling scream. He crumpled to the floor.
Chains charged again, whirling his weapon like a lariat. Ignoring the blow that flayed his denim back, Scuzzy moved inside the arc, seized a handful of Chains’ gold bangles, and smashed him in the nose with a fist like a twenty-pound sledge. Chains flailed back against the wall and sank to the floor, gushing red.
Scuzzy strode over, picked Chains up, and threw him out the door; then repeated the process with the shrieking Crabs, and the two bikers crawled out of sight beyond the doorway.
Scuzzy was at Hallie’s side, pressing a cigar-size thumb on an artery above her wound, in which the knife still trembled. I framed an insert of the hand and knife.
“Film runout.” Lee’s shaky voice broke the spell. People babbled, ran to look out the door, crowded around Hallie, who was white and calm as the makeup girl and Scuzzy sat her down.
“Cut,” said Diane, redundantly.
I sank down under my freight of gear, mechanically unstrapped the camera, and checked the film counter. The whole thing had taken less than four minutes.
* * * *
“Do you realize what we did, Stoney?” Diane lit a second brown cigarette from the stub of the first.
I was smoking one too, which I rarely do. “Almost killed some people.”
She shook her head, then stared at the garbage cans and propane tanks behind the Calisher store. “Not that - I mean, yes, we did; but not that. We kept rolling. We didn’t cut the shot.”
I could only nod.
“Hallie stabbed, Scuzzy bleeding like a pig, Crabs and Chains gone whacko and I didn’t stop it.”
“Nobody did.”
“What were we thinking? What in hell were we doing?”
Doing what cameramen do. When you put your eye to the finder and your finger on the shutter button, you become a recording robot. Screw the dying soldiers, the crushed crash victims, the blasted villagers, the burning baby. Get the footage. And that’s what we did.
“Diane, I’d better see to Scuzz and Hallie.”
“They’re taken care of. Sit down a minute; keep me company.”
I put an arm around her and we sat in the dusty sunshine, counting clouds, arranging dirt in little mounds, trying to think of nothing. Two or three times, Diane shuddered like a child who has cried herself to exhaustion.
Then she said in a small, reflective voice, “We did get some great footage though.”
“Priceless.”
We looked at each other and grinned with the joyful guilt of deviates reveling in their shared perversion.
Chapter 13
When we’d sorted through the wreckage, things didn’t look too bad. Scuzzy’s cuts were superficial - in fact, the hardening scab across his gut made him look even more piratical. Hallie’s wound was being cleaned and stitched in Newhall and she’d be back this afternoon.
The two biker bit players insisted that they had no beef with Scuzzy, that Crabs and Chains had acted on their own. Reviewing the fight, I believed them.
But Pits Caudle, amateur stunt gaffer, was nowhere to be found.
I was in the coffee shop, reworking the afternoon schedule around Hallie, when Molly bounced in, dressed in her usual shorts and another cutoff T-shirt whose admonition, DO NOT OVERINFLATE, she had clearly ignored.
“‘Chadoin’?”
“Hi, Molly. Working out the shoot for this afternoon.”
“Don’t count on Crabs an’ Chains; they took off.”
“I figured.”
“Down ta Newhall t’get Crabs’s hand fixed up. Took all their stuff too. They’re gone fer good.” Molly peered down at the schedule, using the opportunity to drop a plump hand on my shoulder. “Gonna mess you up?”
I shook my head. “We’re shooting more or less in order, so they were about through anyway.”
Afflicted with sudden myopia, Molly bent even closer, pushing a generous breast against my back. “Sure a lotta paperwork.”
“Mm-hmh; got another bill for us?”
“Dint recopy it yet; you’ll git it tomorrow. It’s about the same as the last one.”
“I figured that too. Seen Pits?”
“Sure; he’s over t’ the trailer. Tried to call Bull Dike, but Tats said he still ain’t around.”
“I’m not surprised.”
A pause, then: “I been workin’ on my tan agin.”
Another pause, while I tried not to think about her soft pink middle, now pinker for an hour’s broiling.
Molly looked around the coffee shop, sighing. “Guess I oughta start on supper. Big deal t’night: meatloaf. Figger I can’t screw up meatloaf - anyways, not too bad.” She wandered toward the kitchen area.
I gathered up my paperwork, meditating on Pits Caudle, who had arranged the fight and then disappeared immediately after his boys had tried to dismantle Scuzzy. Hm; maybe Scuzzy should return the favor.
* * * *
But Fenster wasn’t tickled by this notion. “You want me to run over to Pits’ trailer like a madman and rough him up? Oh, wonderful.” He sat on the bed in his little room, head in hands.
“Just put on an act, Scuzz, to scare him into talking.”
He stared at me bleakly and, I thought, a touch coldly. “Stoney, I’ll be frank: I don’t know what’s got into you lately, but it’s unattractive. You’ll say anything, do anything, manipulate people....” He shook his head. “You used to be a nice person.”
As I started to bristle, I reflected that Scuzzy is as fair and thoughtful as anyone I’ve known. I said quietly, “Go ahead.”
“Well, take me: I’m a large untidy man with a taste for scholarship - a combination I’ll admit is droll, to a degree. But you’re forgetting the ‘to a degree’ part.” Scuzzy was right; it was all too easy to see him as an oversize joke. “Also, you can’t just trot me out whenever you need a Goliath.”
“I didn’t mean it that way...”
“No, but you didn’t think about the implications either.”
“I guess I didn’t.”
“Today I broke a man’s hand into little pieces and threw another man on his neck.” He lifted tree trunk arms. “That’s what they tell me, anyhow; but then I wouldn’t know. I didn’t see or hear or feel anything from the time I saw the knife in Hallie’s arm until I felt the iodine running into my belly button. I could have killed someone.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“Who asked? You were busy gloating over your goddam fight footage.”
“True.”
“Films do things to you, my friend, ugly things. You must never want anything in this world so much. That’s sinful.” Scuzzy lowered his head into his hands again.
I stared at nothing through the grimy window, feeling the secret sniping pain of knowing he was right.
“I owe you an apology.”
“Okay.”
“You’re right about the film; it’s my obsession. And I have been inconsiderate with you. I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” A fleeting smile. “You’re forgiven; you may reenter the Pale.”
“I am sorry, Scuzz.”
“Don’t get sloppy, Limey.”
“And now I don’t know what to do. It is the film, but not the film alone. You said you almost killed someone. Exactly! And Sean could have broken his neck too, when he hit those oil drums. Whoever’s out to get this film is dirty enough, or maybe simply dumb enough to create lethal situations.”
Scuzzy nodded agreement.
“And that has to be stopped, film or no film.”
A more reluctant nod, since Scuzzy thought at least as fast as I did.
“The best candidate for dumb and dirty is Pits Caudle. Pits set up that fight and then he left the shoot. He was also around the generator, around the camera, around Sean’s bike accident.”
“Circumstantial.”
“So far, and I can’t get any more out of him. I have nothing to hold over his head and he’s too thick to reason with. The only thing he understands is force.”
“And I’m the force you’ve got.”
“That’s what it comes down to, yes.”
Scuzzy stared at his boots. “Okay, but this is the last time.”
“No more.”
“I really hate doing this.”
“I’ll still respect you afterward.”
He considered that carefully, then smiled. “Your contrition lasted all of thirty seconds.” He shook his head. “I can’t resist you, Stoney, but then I always was a sucker for children.”
Fenster heaved his carcass up and hiked his pants. “So how do we play it this time?”
* * * *
I pounded on the Airstream trailer door, authentically breathless because I’d prepared this role by running all the way to the trailer park. “Pits!” BOOMBOOMBOOM. “It’s Stoney, Pits. Is Scuzzy there?”
Pause.
“Pits? Emergency!”
His muffled voice:”What ‘mergency?”
“Scuzzy went crackers; he’s after you!” Pant, pant, pant.
“What?”
“Pits, I can’t control him.”
The little door whipped open. “Ta hell ya mean?” Pits Caudle stood in the opening, his cranium flecked with shaving cream.
“He thinks you set up Crabs and Chains to get him. Molly told him you were here.”
“That dummy; shit!” Then the situation sank in, like catsup slowly filling the neck of its bottle. “He’s like, pissed off?”
“Look: you stay inside. I’ll keep trying to find him. He might listen to me.”
“But I dint...”
“You going to argue with Scuzzy? Get inside!”
When he slammed the door, I jumped off the steps, turned hard right, flattened myself against the trailer, and waved. At my signal Scuzzy rumbled into view like a whole tank division, climbed the trailer steps, and thundered on the door, leaving dents in the aluminum. “Caudle! I know you’re in there. You son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you.” Careful pause. “CAUDLE!”
Silence.
“Okay, you bastard: one way or another!”
Scuzzy looked around and his eye lit on the patent jack beneath the trailer hitch in front. He grinned and started for it. Catching his idea, I scuttled along below the trailer windows, to the jacks supporting the opposite end.
Swinging a heroic leg, Scuzzy kicked out the front jack, but the well-balanced trailer sat level on its four central wheels. He analyzed the problem briefly, then dumped his three hundred pounds on the hitch. The Airstream tipped forward in a majestic arc, while I snatched away the suddenly freed rear jacks. Muffled creaks and tinkles from inside; then Pits’ “Hey!”
Standing where Scuzzy could see me, I mouthed “one, two, three!” AsScuzzy leaped abruptly off the hitch, I jumped on the rear bumper and the trailer seesawed toward me: Wham! More interior crashing and a frightened, “Hey, Jesus!”
I shouted at Scuzzy, raising my volume as if coming on-mike: “Scuzzy, don’t; it’s not Pits. We talked to Bull, remember? Scuzzy, don’t!”
“He set them up!”
“No he didn’t, believe me. He’ll tell you. Pits? Tell him.”
Silence.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“Listen to him, Scuzzy; give him a chance.” By now, we were both back at the door, tilted ten degrees off vertical. “Pits! He’ll listen to you; but you gotta tell him.”
A faint “Right” from inside.
Scuzzy launched a bellow at the door that must have sprung some rivets: “To my face, you bastard!” Wham! Pause. WHAM!! Pause. WHAM!!!
“Better open up, Pits.”
“You nuts?”
“Pits, look: you can calm him down. He just wants to hear it from you, Pits.” Silence. “Otherwise, he’ll pop this door like a beer tab and get you anyway.”
 A long pause, then the door clicked and opened. Tilted off level, it swung outward and banged the wall, as if no one was holding it. We squeezed through the door into a shambles of magazines, crockery, and fallen pictures strewn across the canted floor. It was like a third-class cabin on a sinking ship.
Pits cowered on the sofa, clinging to the uphill arm, the towel with which he’d wiped his head still dangling from one hand. He squinted up at Scuzzy as if wincing in advance. “I didn’t sic ‘em on you, honest!”
Scuzzy did his breath trick, tensing his diaphragm until his face flushed and his eyes popped like hardboiled eggs. “Nooooo you didn’t, you slime, and you didn’t break the generator or steal the camera or ruin the film or wrack up Sean.”
Pits turned to me, looking confused: “What? What the hell...?”
“You heard me.”
“What, is he nuts? What’s he talkin’ about?”
I addressed him like a mother to a very small child: “Look at Scuzzy, Pits.” He looked. “Does he look serious? Does he look angry?” A nod. “Do you remember what he did to Crabs and Chains?” Pits stared at Scuzzy. I’d never seen a bird hypnotized by a snake, but it must look very much like Pits. I continued in my mild Mommy tone: “Then cut the crap. We know you did these things, Pits; now: why did you do them?”
Still transfixed by Scuzzy:”I didn’t.”
Quick change of tone: “I don’t know, Scuzz; maybe you were right.”
“I was right.” He started slowly toward the figure clinging to the sinking couch.
“Wait! I swear it.” To me: “Why should I fuck up the show?”
“Because somebody told you to, Pits. Somebody like Bull Dike.”
“No way.”
Scuzzy started swinging a wrecking ball fist.
“Wait, Scuzz; give him a chance. Pits doesn’t rev very high and he takes a while to get up to speed.” I squatted in front of him so I could stare him in the face. “Now look at me, Pits, and listen real good: Dike is sending Greystoke phony bills.”
“What kinda phony?”
“Bills for ten times as much as things should cost.”
“I dunno what things should cost.”
That sounded honest; Pits was too dumb to play dumb. “Only Greystoke doesn’t pay them; just runs them through his books for tax losses. Now what you’re going to tell us is, why is Bull Dike screwing up the deal?”
“He ain’t.”
Stooping like an eagle, Scuzzy grabbed Pits by his denim jacket and hauled him erect.
Pits hooted, “Don’t! Look, I’ll prove it.”
“Back off, Scuzzy.”
“You’re too soft, Winston.”
“Scuzzy, back off!” He released Pits so abruptly that the biker bounced when he hit the sofa.
“Okay, prove it.”
Pits’ head swiveled as if he couldn’t decide whom to address. “Yer wrong: Greystoke’s payin’ every cent.”
“That’s Dike’s line too. No good.”
“You don’t unnerstand: he’s payin’ with our money.”
I paused a moment, then: “Explain.”
“The national club’s got a lotta dough in cash, right? I mean, you know how it is.”
“Dirty cash, from drug sales.”
“Well, like that. Okay, we gave it to Greystoke.”
“How much?”
“Two mil.”
Something funny there, but never mind for now: “Then what?”
“Then we charge him for this shithead movie an’ he pays the bills with our money.”
The scam was already clear to Scuzzy: “Only by check.”
“Yeah I mean I think; yeah.”
“What’s he get?”
He switched his look to me again. “Keeps ten percent.”
“And the Crossbones get a nice clean audit trail.”
“Huh?”
“Not bad, but who is sabotaging the film?”
“Huh?”
“Who is making these accidents?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. But look, it ain’t us. If we close down, Greystoke keeps the rest of our dough.”
It made more sense than anything else. I looked at Scuzzy and he nodded very slightly, then backed off to a less threatening distance. I turned to Pits again: “Don’t say anything about this.”
As the tension ebbed, Pits began to reassemble his bravado. “You too, Winston.”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed to the Crossbones patch on his jacket. “You screw us up and we don’t ferget. An’ there’s a lot of us all over everplace.”
“Come on, Scuzzy.”
“So I keep quiet and you keep quiet and everything...” but he couldn’t think of a finish “...keeps quiet.”
Outside again, we restored the trailer jacks, since Molly would have enough trouble cleaning up without working on a ten degree grade, then headed back toward the motel.
“What do you think, Scuzzy?”
“Sounds about right: The club launders two million dollars and Greystoke gets two hundred thousand for his trouble plus a movie.”
“It adds up. Four weeks at four hundred K is a million-six; plus Simmons’s production cash that’s one-point-eight. And ten percent for Greystoke makes two million.”
Scuzzy studied the dirt path for fifteen strides. “Yeah. But how do Greystoke’s books show where the money came from?”
“And if the bikers aren’t sabotaging the film, we’re right back at square one.”
He nodded.
We plodded along in sticky gloom.
“By the way, Scuzzy, thanks for helping.”
“Remember: that’s the last time I do the golem.”
“I promise. I’m retiring your jersey.”
* * * *
Lounging in the sweet meadow again, as if Diane and I were picking up the scene I’d blown two nights before. More clouds than stars tonight, but the air was warm and the rising ground behind us masked the dreary motel. The tiny river chortled by as always, and the mosquitoes had gone off duty. The world was briefly empty but for us.
Seated on the soft grass, Diane unzipped a little duffel bag. “I brought a treat.” She extracted her rum bottle, tumblers, a baggie full of ice, and a liter of cola.”Genuine Coke this time.”
“New, cherry, diet, or caffeine-free?”
“No, the old stuff.”
“Outstanding.” I accepted a Cuba Libre. “Great for digestion.”
“And we need all the help we can get. Molly must be sadistic. No one could cook that badly.”
The dinner, as usual, had been swill. “The meatloaf was okay.”
“What you could taste through all the spices.”
“You asked me for a second helping.”
Diane sipped her drink. “I had to eat something.” Pause. “And did you check the Brussels sprouts?”
“Definitely senior citizens.”
Longer pause. “Not that I’m hot for Brussels sprouts.”
“Do you have the feeling that we’re stretching this topic?”
She nodded. “Sort of vamping.”
“Sort of.” I leaned forward and kissed her.
“Careful!” Diane pulled away. As I blinked and tried to shift gears, she screwed her glass into the ground to make a coaster, then wrapped her arms around my neck. “Don’t waste the good stuff.”
Beneath its soon-discarded cotton cover, the astonishment of a slender woman’s back: satin skin with microscopic peach fuzz, a quarter inch or less of insulation, then a supple band of muscle guarding ribs spliced to the subtle undulations of the spine.
“Hee! Don’t do that.”
“Sorry. Uh, do what?”
“My ribs aren’t ticklish but my spine is.” With my ear against her throat, her husky voice reverberated in my head: “You ticklish?”
“Hadn’t noticed. Perhaps a survey?”
“Mmm, you’re bigger than I thought.”
“Forty long - I mean my suit size.”
Diane was tugging off my polo shirt. She licked the hollow of my collarbone, then toured my back with slender fingers. “You’re skinny.”
“So are you, in places.” The breeze was just cool enough to set off her warmth. “You smell of eucalyptus.”
“We’re rolling in it, dummy. The bark is scratchy.”
“Get on top.”
She kissed me again, her long hands holding my face. “What are you doing down there?”
“Working on a button; not sure whose.”
“Mine’s a snap.”
“Ah.” Click. “There. Want to wriggle a bit?”
Diane nipped my nose tip. “Why would I want to do that?”
“‘Cause I can’t get your shorts off with your weight on me.”
I was tossing the shorts toward the duffel when Diane stiffened. “Stoney.”
“Hm?”
“Wait.”
I paused. “What’s the matter?”
“Dunno. I... kind of nausea.” She rolled off me and sat up, a hand on her tan stomach.
“Diane....”
“I’m sorry, I...” Looking up, she caught my expression and her own face clouded over. “Oh Winston, don’t be an idiot!”
“What?”
“I really don’t feel good.” Her anger temporarily overcame her distress. “It’s not sex, stupid; it’s dinner.”
Diane hauled herself up and tottered to the stream, where she knelt and, beautiful as Psyche on her rock and just as naked, returned used meatloaf to the food chain.
* * * *
“Better?”
“No, just emptier. I still feel awful.” Diane shuddered briefly as I pulled her sheet and blanket up.
“The pill will help.”
“What is that stuff?”
“Tylenol with codeine. I got it for a wisdom tooth. Now sleep.”
She turned her head away. Her lush hair would be a rat’s nest in the morning, but getting her dressed, up the hill, undressed, and into bed had about finished both of us. Besides, I wasn’t sure how to braid hair.
I stood there looking down at her while concern and disappointment chased each other through my head; then wandered out. It’d been going so well - and I hadn’t thought of Sally even once.
Chapter 14
A body count at breakfast turned up three casualties: Diane, a grip, and one of the bikers - all flattened by food poisoning.
Ken Simmons squinted in the sunshine outside the coffee shop. “How serious?”
“Not too. They should be all right by tomorrow.” Diane was still woozy this morning, and even the thought of food sprang traps in her belly.
“But who’s going to run the show today?”
“I can do it. We need a bunch of outdoor pickups and establishing shots for interiors. Here: I made a list last night.”
Ken held my printout in the long arms of a man too vain for glasses. “Take a while to set these up.”
“That’s okay. I can use the time to check the new invoice. Molly said it arrived.”
Ken flashed his sour smile: “Flown in from Fender Airfield.”
“I guess. And I want to run to Newhall.”
“Okay. Be back about ten o’clock.” Ken ambled off in search of Stogie, studying my list.
“You goin’ inta town?”Molly stood behind me, frizzed hair yellow in the sunlight. She was nearly inside tube number one today, and still in her favorite shorts.
“I was just coming to find you. Can I borrow the invoice worksheets they sent?”
“Long’s ya give ‘em back. What for?”
“I thought I’d get a Xerox down in Newhall: save you the trouble of copying.”
“Okay; they’re in the trailer. Can I come inta town with ya? Pits’ll bring me back; he went in early.”
“Why not?”
I drove her in the Beetle to the trailer, where she fetched the invoice worksheets; then we headed down to Newhall.
Molly was quiet for several twisting miles, looking out the window or staring at her fingernails. She cleared her throat several times as if to begin speaking, but evidently changed her mind.
Finally, “They real sick?”
“Not feeling too swift, no.”
Silence.
“What do you think happened, Molly?”
A pre-confession sigh, then: “Musta been the second meatloaf. When I filled the first pan, I had some left over, an’ I recollected the hamburger I dint use up from before?”
“That was five days ago.”
“Yeah an’ that refrigerator don’t get real cold. Well, it smelled a tad ripe, but I figured with some extra spices....” Another sigh. “Anyways, I used it to fill out the other pan. Good thing I served it last; only a couple people wanted seconds.”
“Three, to be exact.”
“Aw don’t be mad, Stoney; I am so sorry.” She put a hand on my arm. “You know I can’t cook worth a rat’s ass. But Pits won’t git no one else.”
“Not your fault, I guess.”
“That’s why I’m goin’ inta town: git me a cookbook.”
Her sudden snaggly grin was irresistible. “Okay, Molly. Just stick to meat and potatoes.”
“If Pits ever lets me git real meat.”
We found a discount drugstore with a book rack and a copier; then went our separate ways.
* * * *
I was piloting Bumble back through Bouquet Canyon toward the Calisher turnoff as another ghostly visitor assembled in the car - not in swirling smoke like Orson Welles, not in Gutman’s coalescing Jell-O, but in a string of small, precise explosions. Pop: perfectly polished tan and white shoes below sedately clocked silk socks; pop: plump legs in tan pants with creases too sharp to touch; pop: a tubby trunk in waistcoat, crackling shirt, and natty jacket; pop: a pinkish, egg-shaped head with oiled gray hair, sharp eyes, and a moustache like two opposing check marks: Hercule Poirot cum Peter Ustinov.
He tipped a nod both courtly and reserved: “Bonjour.”
“The hat’s a nice touch.”
Poirot regarded the spotless panama in his plump, perfect hands. “My investigations revealed that your climate was subtropical.” He parked it on his knee and shrugged his eyebrows.
“Close enough, M. Poirot.”
The round face looked pained:”Please!”
“I know: Pwah-rrroh, puckering the lips as if to kiss.”
“Ah well, monsieur, it is pointless to correct your accent, which, because you are doing my voice, is temporarily identical to my own.” He tapped the pink egg: “Logic, mon ami.”
“The little gray cells at work.”
A polite sniff. “That phrase, I think, is somewhat stale.” His taffy baritone had a Gallic snap, like café au lait laced with cognac. “Besides, I am not without my modest vanity, monsieur, and I prefer to forget that the Poirot ratiocinations issue from a lump of meat.”
“Wherever they come from, I could use them.”
He folded his hands on the silver head of his walking stick. “Then let us commence.”
“About the sabotage....”
With a schoolmaster’s disapproval: “Slowly, my young friend, slowly. Let us begin with the invoice you received.” Raising one index finger, he tapped it smartly with the other, retaining the stick with his knees. “First: it was prepared on printed production forms.”
“Which people can buy.”
“But only if they know the few places where such specialties are sold. And what about the handwritten items? Every film has special costs that cannot be anticipated on a preprinted form. These must be entered by hand.”
“I know that.”
He ignored my testy tone. “These entries reveal a technical knowledge of the cinema.”
“Which Bull Dike doesn’t have.”
“And what about the charges, M. Winston?”
“Grossly inflated.”
“If you move every decimal point precisely one place to the left...” he mimed this action in midair with thumb and finger “...what is the result?”
“A reasonable charge.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“The charges are ten times too high.”
“You are thinking in circles, M. Winston. One selects the facts like jewels and builds a necklace of them, each in order.” I suppressed the thought that necklaces also go around in circles. “If precisely one-tenth of every charge is reasonable, then the mysterious accountant must know what reasonable charges are.”
“All right, whoever prepared that invoice is a pro.”
“Bon. Now let us consider....” Poirot broke off as I whipped the Beetle around a plodding dump truck, evaded an onrushing Fiat Spyder, and do-see-doed back to my proper lane.
“You were saying?”
Poirot’s strained look revealed his preference for cerebral excitements. “I think that country houses lend themselves better to protracted exposition.”
“Sorry.”
He dismissed it with a tiny shrug and resumed his sentence: “...the whereabouts of M. Dike.”
“He’s hiding out at Fender Airfield.”
“And who knows that?”
“Scuzzy and Diane.”
“Anyone else?”
“No, we agreed to keep it to ourselves.” But my head switched to instant replay: Flown in from Fender Airfield. “Ken Simmons?”
Poirot bestowed a patient smile. “Exactement.”
“But Ken’s not a crook.”
“Your nature is too trusting, mon ami; he is, after all, a film producer.” Poirot spoke the words in a tone suitable for pimps and heavy sauces.
“But why would Ken help Dike?”
“To fabricate accounts that would bear scrutiny, Dike and Greystoke would need production expertise. Such expertise would be worth a substantial price.”
I didn’t like this direction. “I’ve known Ken for years.”
“What is his fee for this photoplay?”
“He didn’t say. Come to think of it, he wouldn’t say.”
Poirot allowed a faint disdain to show. “You cannot deal with facts by ‘coming to think of them. You must observe, recall, connect everything!”
I wouldn’t believe it. “Purely circumstantial.”
His tone was sympathetic: “You have the proof beneath your very nose, my friend. You know his handwriting, n’est ce pas?”
“I’ve seen enough of it.”
“Then I should study those invoice worksheets.” Poirot began to disappear like the Cheshire Cat, pop: one section at a time.
“Wait a minute: when do you get to the sabotage?”
Pop: the portly tan pants were gone. “My brain can be no better than the facts you feed it.” Pop: only the elegant pink egg remained. “Until you have more facts about the sabotage, I can do nothing.”
A final tiny pop, as the plump detective vanished, leaving scents of starch and straw and gentlemen’s cologne.
* * * *
With characteristic enterprise, Ken Simmons had promoted himself the motel’s one “suite” a double-size room designed for traveling families. As I closed the door behind me, I noticed that someone had removed the unused beds and added matching draperies and bedspread and a comfortable chair. Bottles glinted on the kitchenette counter, soft sounds floated from a stereo, and to top it off, a determined ficus struggled upward from a tub below the window.
He glanced up from the production schedules on a long oak work table and snapped his little smile. “Leave the door open, will you? Kind of stuffy.”
“I think we’d better leave it closed.” Ken looked at me alertly. “You’ve seen these, of course.” I laid the invoice worksheets on his table.
“Well sure; you showed me last week’s invoice.”
“No, the worksheets.” He looked at them. “You’ve seen them because you filled them out to start with.”
“I don’t quite....”
“They’re in your handwriting, Ken. You’ve been supplying all these figures to the Crossbones.”
I waited for a reaction, but Simmons simply looked at me. “They told Molly to recopy them but they didn’t tell her why, so she knew no reason to conceal them from me.” I sat in a chair opposite. “You want to explain?”
“I don’t think so.” He picked the worksheets up and opened a drawer beneath the table.
“Those are copies, and I have last week’s too.”
Ken maintained a quiet, even tone: “These arrangements really don’t concern you, Stoney.”
“Mm-hmh, I’m just an innocent bystander.”
“That’s right.”
“I go along fat, dumb, and happy, while you help the bikers launder two million dollars in drug profits.”
His face admitted that that was about the size of it.
“I’m afraid I can’t, Ken. The sabotage is mixed up in this somewhere, and it’s getting out of hand. People could have died last night.”
He shrugged. “Don’t get so dramatic; it was just Molly’s cooking.”
“Maybe not. She said she used old meat in a second meatloaf but Diane never ate that. I know her second helping was from the first pan because I fetched it myself.”
“There’s no mad poisoner, Stoney. Trust me.”
“An unfortunate phrase, considering.”
His look said, What can I say?
I knew I couldn’t budge him. “All right, Ken, I’ll tell you what I intend. “I’m giving these worksheets to the feds. If I don’t and someone else gets hurt, it’ll be on my head forever.” I stood up.
“I think you ought to sit down a minute, Stoney.” Simmons’s voice was as quietly sincere as ever. I sat down. “It’s a shame about all this, and you do deserve an explanation, for two reasons: first because I really think you ought to reexamine your plans here and second, because we are old friends.”
Now it was my turn to show a poker face.
Simmons leaned forward, looking genuinely concerned. “You see, what we want to try for here is a win-win situation - you understand.”
I kept my counsel.
“First of all, no one can track the cash; no one. Greystoke shipped it offshore in a goddam crate or something, to Hong Kong or Macao or wherever. His import business agents there will use it for kickbacks, sweeteners - quiet things - and all in U.S. cash dollars. As a lump sum, it’ll never see the inside of any bank on earth.”
“Dike said Greystoke’s paying those invoices.”
“With his own money, Stoney: nice clean audited American profits, profits that won’t be taxed now because he’ll ‘lose’ them on this film.”
“And what do you get?” I asked. Simmons’s face closed down again. “I think you owe me that too.”
A pause and then he nodded. “I got a hundred K of the original cash and it won’t see a bank either. You can still buy a lot of things for cash.” He spread his hands. “So you see, the audit trail is perfect. There’s just no way to trace that money.”
“And nothing but my word that you said this. All right, your ‘win’ is obvious. Where’s my ‘win’?”
“Right. I think you know how biker clubs work. If you blow the whistle, you could lose the Crossbones two million bucks and get their boss locked up. And then four thousand bikers would put you on top of their list and keep you there as long as you lived.”
“I get the implications.”
“So you win by finishing the picture quietly, pocketing your money, and living a long, secure life.”
“Yeah. Okay, just one last thing, Ken: why? Are you gambling? Doing dope? Why?”
He looked at me as if I were a child too young to understand that I had asked an impolite question. “Just business, Stoney.” His tone was as mild as ever. “It’s simply a matter of business.”
As I stood up he added, “One more thing: I’m really sorry if you’re distressed by this, but I know you’re a professional and I can trust you to keep on delivering this show.”
In the context, his line was so bizarre that I could think of no reply.
* * * *
“Thursty, take your time and remember: this biker versus town thing is the most fun you’ve had in years. Okay, slate in.”
I squeezed the Arri’s trigger. “Rolling!”
“Speed.”
“Mark it.”
“Fifty-one Charlie, take two.” Clack!
“Action.”
Thurston Frye wobbled up en pointe to peek through the back window of the Calisher garage, his face washed by the quartz lights concealed inside. Without an 85 filter, the film would record these lights correctly, while the sun on Thursty’s back turned into bluish “moonshine.”
Thursty grinned and cackled to himself, delighted by what he seemed to see inside. Then he turned and took three sodden steps, remembered, returned, retrieved his bottle from the dirt below the window, and staggered off-screen in the left foreground.
Five seconds more of empty frame for the editor to play with, and: “Cut.”
Lee moved in to record the footage and Alf joined me at the camera. “Sun’s below the buildings, Stoney.”
“S’all right. That’s a wrap today, folks! Good take, Thursty.”
Alf bellowed “Save ‘em” and the lights inside shut off, Lee unscrewed the pan head from the dolly, and I wandered away, trying to remember if we’d covered everything.
I turned the corner of the garage and found myself face to face with Diane: barefoot, hair unbraided, face contorted, skin like unbaked dough. “Stoney! What the hell are you doing?”
“You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
“ANSWER ME!”
“Shooting pickups and establishing shots.”
She nodded incredulously, as if I’d confirmed that the world was ending. “Who said you could do that? Who?”
“We’re trying to keep on...”
“Did I give you permission? Did you so much as consult me?”
“You weren’t in consultable shape, Diane.”
She thrust a trembling finger at my face. “You shoot another foot of my film another fucking frame and you’re off this picture.”
“Diane, please listen to me...”
“No! This is my movie, understand?”
I tried to keep in mind that she felt lousy. “All right.”
She glanced around, forgetting that we were out of sight around the building. “Where’s the film?”
“Lee may have left for town with it.”
“Go after him no, never mind; we’ll just throw it out later. How could you do this, Stoney? I mean I thought maybe for once... maybe you....”
“Diane, I was trying to help.”
“Help!”The word became a wail and then Diane was sobbing with the heels of her hands on her jaw and her fingers over her eyes. “Don’t give me your help; don’t give me anything!” She wheeled and before I could stop her, raced up the road toward the motel. Fifty feet away, she turned and screamed, “Don’t do me any favors, Winston!”
Then she spun around again and vanished in the dusk.
* * * *
I spent the supper hour at the river, skipping stones and launching twiggy boats and swigging from a jug of Chenin Blanc. My anger at Diane had shrunk enough to look at. I admired her, liked her, by-god wanted her. But every time I reached toward her, she backed away.
I added a ship to my twig flotilla. Or maybe it was I who backed away, out of loyalty to my absent landlady - loyalty misplaced because she’d never asked for it.
Same problem with Molly, only worse, because she echoed Sally’s lush abundance.
Oblivious, I was walking through the river meadow, and by the time I noticed my surroundings again, I had somehow reached the river gate of Molly’s trailer court.
* * * *
Though Molly’s couch was an atrocity from Smilin’ Sammy’s Bars ‘n’ Stools ‘n’ Sofas, it was perfect for watching TV which proved that Sammy knew his customers as well as his apostrophes. I had squirmed among the floppy plush cushions until I was half supine, Chablis in hand, nodding over a disease-of-the-week movie: the heartbreak of obesity, I guessed, though that might have been Molly’s reception.
Molly was clattering at the trailer’s tiny sink, dressed in mini T-shirt number one and lemon shorts. She was freshly laundered and redolent of soap, her lush tan flesh more exuberant than ever.
“How come ya weren’t at dinner? Scared t’eat my cookin’ now?”
“Didn’t feel like it.” It had been eight o’clock when I’d wandered in. “Besides, you cooked me a dandy dinner. Thank you.”
“Anybody can’t cook ham ‘n’ eggs better shoot himself an’ git it over.” In fact, she’d served an omelet, gently spiced and soft, the way I like them.
She dried her hands, snapped off the sink light, and bounced over to the couch, slopping wine from her glass as she waved it at the TV. “What’s it about?”
“Fat, I think.”
“I don’t wanna see it.” But she plopped down on the couch, which billowed briefly. Feelin’ better?”
“Much.”
“More wine?”
“A little. Don’t want to fall asleep.”
“You’re jes relaxin.’” She refilled my glass. “You git so strung up about things.” Molly rolled toward me, draped an arm across my chest, and nudged into the space above my shoulder. She groped for the remote control and muted the sound.
“I like it jes quiet like this.”
“Mmmmm-hmh.”
Pause.
“I knowed you’d come around if I was patient.”
“Mmmm.”
“You think I’m proma skew us?”
After a moment to decode promiscuous, I hugged her shoulder gently. “No, I don’t. I think you have a lot of... warmth to give.”
“An’ no takers.” Her voice turned sour. “Ol Pits is off ridin’ up the coast for two days with the bros, per usual. Nothing’ gives him a hardon but a Harley saddle.”
“I don’t want to be spite for Pits, Molly.”
“Aw!” She sat upright and looked down at me, her pug face pink with irritation. “How in the world can you write movies an’ use big words an’ be so damn dumb?” She grabbed her T-shirt, stripped if off, cocked hands on hips, and stuck her chest out. “Do you read me, Stoney? Do you copy?”
I placed a palm on one large, shapely breast. “That’s a big ten-four, good buddy.”
Molly grinned.”Big enough, both of ‘em, but I never heard one called that before.”
* * * *
“Damn, you take long enough!”
“I, uh, hadn’t noticed any problem.”
Molly’s rowdy chuckle filled the trailer. “Not finishin,’ startin.’ But once you make yer mind up, you do okay.”
I lay on my back in an explosion of salmon plush, wondering if I was being damned with faint praise.
She leaned over me, supporting herself on her arms. From my angle, it was like gazing up at a ceiling by Rubens. “Whatcha thinkin’?”
“Recalling which ones are stalactites.”
“Stalactites. Stalac ...”
“Oh, don’t start that.” I pulled her down.
A warm, quiet interval.
“Why’n’t you stay here t’night.”
“Well...”
“I got clean sheets on the bed an’ Pits is gone for two whole days, thank God.”
“Mm. Tell me one thing: why do you stay with Pits if you feel that way?”
Molly lay still a moment, then: “‘Cause he’s dumb.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Our chapter of the club owns half this town. We got us maybe a hundred members from forty miles around. Thirty eight thousand dollars in the bank this week an’ now all this movie stuff.”
“I’m still lost.”
“Well who in hell you think runs all that, Pits?”
“Ahhh.”
“I do. I’m responsible. ‘n’ that means I’m worth something. Most ol’ ladies are nothin’ but slaves with a pair of legs and a warm hole between. I’m more.”
A silence while I digested this, then Molly burrowed into my neck and kissed it.”Stop thinkin’ so much; stay awhile.”
“All right, on one condition.”
“What?”
“If I’m going to move, you’ll have to get off me.”
She kissed me slowly.”We can trade places.”
When Molly eventually zapped the TV set she clicked off Johnny Carson. Time does fly when you’re having fun.
Chapter 15
I strode through the morning brightness toward my room, bursting with energy, wellbeing, and breakfast, which Molly had laid on in bulk. There is no feeling in life like waking to bird songs and crisp air and sunlight falling on a warm bed full of sweet female smells. The smells had evolved through toothpaste, bacon, toast, and coffee; then back to basic female at the door. When Molly had kissed me at the trailer entrance, I’d half expected her to hand me a briefcase and a list of city errands.
I arrived at my motel room to find a pink while-you-were-out push-pinned to the door: one Delmore Wong, and a number.
 “This is Desert Haven Post Office.”
“Delmore Wong, please.” What did I have at the post office?
“Delmore Wong speaking.”
“Stoney Winston, Mr. Wong, returning your call.”
“Oh yes, thank you, Mr. Winston. I wonder if you could meet me down here this morning.” The voice had a kind of genial precision, as if its owner were the Shriners Club bookkeeper.
“I’m shooting a film, Mr. Wong. What’s this about?”
“I know you are; that’s why I want to talk to you. I’m with the Internal Revenue Service.”
“I see.”
“Shall we say half an hour? I’d like to return to Los Angeles by lunch time.”
“Half an hour.”
* * * *
Downhill to Desert Haven, which the Beetle managed well enough; then half an hour in a post office cubicle borrowed for the morning by Delmore Wong of Internal Revenue. The topic of discussion was Alan Greystoke, and my answers to Wong’s polite inquiries had me dancing between the raindrops, as accountants like to say.
Speaking of which, dingy clouds were gathering as I struggled back uphill to Calisher and joined the company at the stream location. No matter: they cast a pearly softness on the woods that would photograph beautifully.
Stogie’s crew had converted the mud hole to a forest pool by draining it, letting the water wash it clean, laying a bottom of plastic sheeting, and filling it again. This time the camera would film from the opposite side, so that the background would look different and the audience would not suspect that they had seen this place before. As film makers say of Griffith Park, a tree’s a tree; a rock’s a rock.
Diane was supervising preparations in six places at once, apparently recovered. She was civil enough when I asked for a five minute conference, but not exactly chummy. We collected Scuzzy from makeup, hiked over to the deserted eating area, and sat at a plank picnic table. Scuzzy poured us coffee from a Thermos.
“I’ve just been grilled by a Mr. Wong of the IRS. They’re taking a lively interest in Greystoke’s finances.”
Diane’s sigh said, “Here we go again.” Scuzzy watched me quietly.
“They’ve been building a tax fraud case for some time - several years, he told me. Now they’re ready to move.”
Diane frowned.”Why was he grilling you?”
“To check out this production. I satisfied him that we were just hired hands.”
“What are they planning to do?”
“He was very cagey I guess they have to be but he hinted they were going to move in and seize everything.”
“Us included.”
“Yes.”
The flesh tightened around her eyes. “Something told me I wouldn’t be allowed to finish.”
Scuzzy said gently, “And neither will twenty-four other people.” Diane started to reply, then paused and looked at him thoughtfully.
“Maybe.” I took a sip of coffee. “You see, I told Wong about the invoices.”
“I thought that was dangerous.”
“I didn’t mention the drug money. I simply said the invoices were all inflated by a thousand percent. He drew his own conclusions fast enough.”
Diane’s mouth flattened. “So you told him the film was part of a tax fraud. That’s sure to kill the production.”
Scuzzy’s quiet rumble: “Wait a minute. How come, Stoney?”
“The IRS likes to build the cleanest case it can so an average jury can understand it. Right now, the Greystoke case is pretty esoteric I’ll bet you Shannon saw to that.”
Diane snorted.
“It wasn’t hard to convince Wong that these invoices would give them the clear-cut proof they want. But to get that proof, they’d have to hold off until Greystoke used the invoices for his tax return.”
Scuzzy asked, “When’s that?”
“Wong said Greystoke’s fiscal year ends June 30.”
“Giving us ample time to finish.”
“Including post production.”
“But that won’t work.” Diane shook her head impatiently. “Greystoke’s actually paying those invoices. So where’s the fraud?”
“The IRS doesn’t know that yet and officially, neither do we.”
As the implications sank in, Diane’s tense face relaxed, looked thoughtful, smiled. Then she hopped up with restored briskness. “We’d better tell Ken about this.”
Quickly: “No! I mean, the fewer people who have to conceal something the better. Let’s keep it to ourselves.”
Scuzzy shot me a funny look, but evidently decided to let this pass. He lumbered to his feet. “Okay. I got to go get beautiful.”
He thudded off toward makeup, leaving Diane and me looking at each other across the picnic table.
She studied me silently, as if sorting out her thoughts. Then: “You bailed us out again, didn’t you?”
“I guess - for now at least.”
“How many times is that?”
I shrugged.
Another pause as she followed her thoughts down a side road. “Getting a film to do is like finding a package with a million dollars in it. That much temptation isn’t fair.”
“Funny: Scuzzy said something similar.”
“About me?”
“No, me.”
A sharp look. “You think of this as your film?”
“No well, yes, I guess we all do, a little. That’s how this contraption keeps moving.”
We started slowly back toward the company, walking together in silence. Then Diane put a hand on my arm and stopped us. “I’m sorry about yesterday.”
“You were sick.”
“Going to give up Cuba Libres?”
“I hoped I wouldn’t have to.”
Her face was unusually gentle in the pearly light. “Okay.” Then a sudden shift: “We’d better move it if we want to stay ahead of the rain.”
* * * *
In the scene we were shooting, Scuzzy comes skulking through the woods to the pool, makes sure he’s alone, then strips, dumps himself in the water, and starts washing with the absurdly dainty soap we have watched him swipe from Hallie’s cabin.
Hallie has seen this too, so she follows him into the woods and confronts him, giggling, as he tries to conceal his naked vastness in the water. Their dialogue becomes almost domestic, and by the end of the scene, he’s sitting comfortably in shallow water while she reaches from the bank to scrub his back.
We’d had to move our operation because the little meadow where we usually camped was now in the picture. The opposite bank was too steep to work on, so lights and generator, grip equipment, props and makeup - everything and everyone was now below the temporary dam we’d built to fake the pool.
Diane had wanted striking angles for this sequence, so Lee was now peering over the dam from below it, his zoom lens almost level with the water. I’d hauled the second camera up the steep-side bank to get bird’s-eye shots of the two actors and the pool.
Diane and I were using walkie-talkies borrowed from Stogie’s grip box, since the production was too poor to rent them.
“You want me to roll straight through, Diane? Over.”
“Just grab a slate and then shoot some cover. Whatever looks good. Over.”
Thunder muttered in the distance.
“Better make one fast. Over.”
“If it rains, keep shooting. Out.”
And it did: a few fat, scattered drops that splashed the leaves and drew concentric circles on the water while Scuzz and Hallie played their scene and thunder grumbled overhead.
As always when I photographed, I gave myself directions: Wide shot while they’re talking...nice, nice... zoom in to her hands scrubbing his back... hm, thunder’s getting louder... get the suds on his shoulders... wow! that was a loud one.... frame a two-shot... thunder’s almost constant now; hope we don’t have to loop their dialogue... better check my footage counter...
Jesus!
I pulled away from the camera eyepiece in time to see a vast sprawl of green-brown water boiling down the little canyon at twenty miles an hour. Before I’d recovered enough to shout, it reached the pool, bowling Scuzzy over. Hallie yelled as the water smashed against her legs, throwing plumes of muddy turbulence.
I couldn’t wade the flood now and I was high enough for safety, so I did what cameramen do: kept rolling.
Hallie lost her footing and fell into the roiling river as Scuzzy spluttered to the surface. He saw her going down and grabbed her; then they both went under.
At that point our flimsy dam gave way and a ton of soupy water hit Lee, Diane, the dolly, and the crew beyond it, sweeping them away like twigs in a gutter. The sudden drop in the pool level exposed Scuzzy and Hallie, who slipped and flailed and stumbled toward the other bank. Hallie fell again and Scuzzy grabbed her, picked her up, and walked up to safety with her in his arms.
Shrubs and trash and rocks and little trees thrashed down the stream, scouring the banks and smashing the equipment. Reflectors floated off like silver leaves, the generator tipped on its side, the prop and makeup tables just disintegrated. People were flailing in the water, crawling up the far bank, clinging to trees.
And then it was gone.
The water level dropped, its speed diminished, and the roar that wasn’t thunder faded out. The widening meadow below the dam lay under a foot of water, but even that was ebbing visibly.
People were shouting and running as I carried the camera down the steep bank, forded the now-docile stream, sloshed my way to drier ground, and looked around.
Literally nothing was unscathed. Every piece of equipment appeared sodden and broken or gone completely. Cast and crew wandered aimlessly or sprawled where they had dropped.
Lee was stumbling toward me, drenched and filthy, carrying the camera, pan head and all. “Totaled! Look at it!” He held out the camera like a beloved pet a car had smashed.
“You all right, Lee?”
“It’s ruined.”
“People first, Lee.” He turned away. “Wait! Pull the mag and put it in a bucket of stream water.”
“What!?”
“You heard me. Fast!”
Lee nodded dumbly and trotted off with the camera.
Scuzzy and Hallie were up on the bank, Alf was helping crew members dig equipment out of the muck, and Stogie stared at his muddy pants with the comical shock of a drenched cat.
Diane was running around counting heads, oblivious of the brush cuts on her bare legs and the slime that coated her from pigtails to hiking boots.
“Everyone’s accounted for. Stoney, what was that?”
“Flash flood, I think. Very strange, though. You okay?”
She nodded absently. “What do you mean, strange?”
“It only lasted thirty seconds.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be sudden?”
“And where was the rain that made it? We’ve only had a few drops.”
A small figure caught my eye: Molly Caudle running awkwardly across the meadow, avoiding brush and fallen trees and trash that once was film equipment. Fifty feet away, she shouted, “Stoney! You okay?” and Diane shot me a sideways look.
She pulled up, panting. “My living God, what happened? Look at you! Look at all this! What is it?”
“Flash flood. We think.”
“Is everbody okay?”
“Cuts and bruises, but everyone is fine, Molly.”
“Oh, thank God.” She looked around. “But this is awful.”
Diane was also surveying the damage. Suddenly she paused and her face went white. “If everyone’s accounted for, what’s that?”
Fifty feet beyond her pointing finger, a pile of floating garbage bumped gently on a tree root. As we all trotted toward it, the pile became a human form and the form resolved itself into denim jeans and jacket and a shaved bald skull.
I said, “Wait,” and Diane grabbed Molly by the elbow. I waded in the water to the body, rolled it over...
...and dragged Pits Caudle up the bank.
I tried to drain him but little came out. Molly stood frozen as a figure in a dream.
Diane moved in, dropped to her knees, thrust a finger into Caudle’s slack mouth and pushed his tongue down. “Know CPR?”
I looked at Diane and we both shook our heads.
As if on cue, a black and white cruiser rolled up and a Sheriff’s deputy emerged, slogged across the field, and sized up the situation.
He checked Caudle. “Forget it.”
Molly turned away without a word.
The deputy addressed the company. “Case you’re interested, the little dam gave way up at Belle Haven.” He wagged an arm vaguely upstream.
Diane said, “What’s that?”
“Fancy tract they’re building up there. You know: ‘lakefront properties’, only the lake’s nothing but a crummy dammed-up gully. Supposed to be an earth fill dam, but it’s only half finished. Big hole in that sucker now.”
Diane’s voice was angry. “If it’s only half finished, why was there water in it?”
The deputy shrugged. “Only half full too.” He surveyed the wreckage. “Lucky for you.” He thought of something. “You got all your permits, I guess.”
I moved in. “I’ll get them for you. But shouldn’t we take care of him?”
He looked at Caudle’s body. Someone had covered the face with a soaking shirt. “Paramedics’ll be here in a minute.
Chapter 16
What seemed like half the county sheriff’s office had left with reams of notes and Caudle’s body and the preliminary conclusion that his death was accidental. The crew chiefs had delivered damage reports, and now Diane and I were moping in the coffee shop trying to decide if there were enough pieces to bother picking up.
She stared out the dusty window and asked without much curiosity, “Why did you send Lee to the lab with the magazine in a bucket of water?”
“Same thing happened in Hawaii years ago: camera fell in the ocean with half a day’s footage in it. So they brought it up, sealed the mag in sea water, and air-shipped it to the lab. It developed fine.”
“I don’t see how.”
“The emulsion was okay because the film never dried out. I saw that in American Cinematographer.” No response. “It was worth a shot.”
A sigh.”What good will it do us?”
“I’m afraid not much. The water got the camera, the lights, the generator, and all the sound equipment.”
“In short, we’re out of business.”
“It looks that way.”
Diane absently revolved a spoon in her coffee cup as she had been doing for the last five minutes: tack... tack ... tack... tack.... Bouncing through the window, the afternoon light modeled her thin-bridged nose, picked out the long fingers holding up her chin, and vanished in her deep cat’s eyes.
Tack... tack... tack....
“Diane, I’m sorry.”
Ten more revolutions while she studied the gravel outside, and then she addressed the driveway through the window: “I don’t know if I’m sorry or not. In a way, I deserved it.”
“Well...”
“It’s only a movie. Who said that?”
“Hitchcock.”
“But I acted like I was like creating Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice.”
I kept quiet.
“What’s worse, I thought that all our problems were a plot to abort my masterpiece.”
“Whatever the purpose, it was some kind of plot.”
“But not against me personally. I’m not that important.”
I chuckled. “On the one hand, no one is. On the other hand, yes you definitely are important.”
She looked at me and smiled. “Thanks for all your help, Stoney. You almost held it together.”
“And nobody can take away your accomplishment: You made a classy film.”
Her smile faded as she turned back to the window. “Three-fourths of one. That’s like making three-fourths of a baby.” Pause. “Well. Let me sit a minute, Stoney. I promise not to wallow in self-pity.”
I stood up, kissed her hair quickly, and walked out into the perversely cheerful light.
* * * *
As I wandered toward my room, the route began to stretch until it seemed I was making no headway at all, and I realized that my steps had slowed and shortened and then stopped completely outside Simmons’ door. I paused to finish a half-formed thought, then knocked.
“Yeah?”
When I entered, Simmons was standing among suitcases and hanging bags, talking on the phone. “No message; I’ll tell him when he arrives.” He hung up. “I tried to contact Alan but he and Shannon are already coming up here.” A wry look. “It’s payday.”
“Think he’ll refinance us?”
“Not a chance.”
“Don’t we have insurance?”
“Course not; you know what that costs.”
“Then we’ll have to find another source.”
Simmons looked at me sadly and shook his head. Returning to the closet, he removed a suit as perfect as a plastic casting and hung it in a garment bag. “What other source?”
“Ken Simmons.”
A sour smile. “I see today hasn’t killed your sense of humor.”
“It’s come pretty close, and I’m not joking now.” He paused long enough to flash an appraising look, then resumed his packing with studied care.
I perched on the edge of his oak worktable. “You’re going to refinance this shoot out of the hundred thousand you got from Greystoke.”
Simmons looked at me with sincere concern. “I understand your feelings Stoney, believe me.”
“Sorry; you’ve used that once too often.” I circled the worktable and sat in his leather chair. We stared at each other for most of a minute, though nothing appeared on Ken’s bland face.
Then, in a mildly derisive tone: “What’s this going to cost?”
“Camera, dolly, sound, lights, generator, grip equipment, props, makeup, wardrobe cleaning. You figure it.”
“That’s all?”
“While I think of it, a cook and cash for decent food.”
“Why not rent limos too?” He smiled at my naiveté. “You really think I’ll pay for all that?”
I kept my own face blank. “If you don’t, I’ll pull the plug on you and Greystoke.”
Simmons’s voice remained unchanged, but his face relaxed into a featureless mask. “I’d hate to have you take that risk, Stoney. The bikers know you found out about this.”
“Only the late Pits Caudle, and after today I think I can rely on his discretion.”
Simmons shook his head at my simplicity. “Oh, Stoney. All I have to do is tell Bull Dike.” He folded a perfectly packed bathroom kit.
“You’ve heard of Megaton.”
“Sure; that’s Fenster’s character.”
“And Dike’s beloved bro and drinking buddy. Suppose ol’ Ton tells Dike you pulled the plug?”
“Why would Dike believe him?”
“Because Ton’s both a bro and a landsman, while you and your Mercedes and your hundred dollar pants are precisely what Bull Dike despises.”
Simmons’s pale eyes were as opaque as marbles. “It won’t work.”
“I’ll take that chance. Will you?”
Ken shook his head. “Is the film worth that much to you?”
“That’s part of it. And I don’t like being used - especially by a friend.”
“You feel hurt, Stoney; I can relate to that.”
“Sure: I’m okay, you’re okay; win-win.” I stood up. “What’s your answer? I want to call the IRS before they close.”
Simmons stared at me in disbelief. “You know, I think you’d do it.” I walked to the door. For the first time, he raised his voice: “You’re a zealot, Winston. You’d cut off your nose to spite your face.”
“If it was cancerous.” He reddened. “What’s your answer?”
“What guarantee do I get?”
“If you refinance this shoot, I won’t volunteer anything about this.” Which was technically correct since Delmore Wong would doubtless seek me out, bearing coercive papers. “You have my word on that much.”
A long, long wait, then Simmons answered in a tired voice. “You know, Winston, I believe you, because you’re such a righteous prick.” For the first time, he let the anger reach his face - an ugly effect but it suited him. “Okay, I’ll have to do it. And thanks a lot, my pal.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, my pal, but it’s purely a matter of business.”
“I’ll tell you something, Winston: I could never stand your smartass so-called humor.”
“Uh-huh; oh, and I know you’re a professional, so you’ll continue to do your job.”
The gravel crunched outside as 250 pounds of Greystoke and Shannon arrived in six thousand pounds of town car.
“That will be the quartermaster. I’d better tell people he’s here.” Before Simmons could react I nipped out the door.
As I appeared on the drive, Greystoke rolled down the passenger window of the Lincoln and bellowed: “What’s it gonna cost me, Winston?”
“To do what?”
“Don’t dick around; they told me all about it.”
“Ah. We need to talk, Alan. Go park by the coffee shop; I’ll join you in a second.”
When I checked on Simmons through his open door, he was staring at a sports jacket, so I rejoined Greystoke at the coffee shop. “How about taking me for that ride?”
“Huh? Oh. Uh, get in back.”
“I don’t want to talk to your bald spot. Move over.” He looked at Shannon, who was driving. He nodded and Greystoke opened the door, raised the center arm rest, and shifted to make room. The door thunked shut impressively and we rolled down the drive.
* * * *
“Eighty thousand bucks!? No way. Now pay attention, Winston: this movie was financed up front, you understand?”
Shannon’s light voice was calm. “He means there’s no cash left to save it.” Shannon drove the big car deftly, though he’d raised the power seat so high that he needed blocks on the pedals. My own head hit the roof.
“I got important things ridin’ on this picture and it is now in the toilet and I am real unhappy, if you get me.”
“Suppose I made you happy.”
“And I don’t need your bullshit.”
Shannon’s voice was sharp: “Give him a chance, Alan. Go ahead, Winston.”
“I just got Simmons to refinance the shoot with his own money.”
Shannon kept his eyes on the road. “And why would he do that?”
“I held him up; threatened to reveal that he was writing those invoices.”
Greystoke stared up at me. “Howna hell you find that out?”
I pretended I hadn’t heard the question. “I told Simmons I’d go to the IRS if he didn’t come through. Of course he didn’t know I’d already made a deal with you to keep my mouth shut.”
Shannon said, “Yes, and what was our deal again exactly?”
“Exactly what I offered Simmons: I won’t volunteer anything about this.”
We rolled along in silence for a moment; then Greystoke nodded. “So what’s the story?”
“I think Simmons will come to you. He’ll say it’s to warn you about me, and then he’ll try to get that money out of you. But if you stonewall him, he’ll put your movie back in business, free of charge.”
“To what do we owe this favor?” Shannon’s tone was dry.
“No favor; I want to keep production going. I have two weeks’ pay to get plus twenty percent of the rest. That’s nearly six thousand bucks. And I still want my name on that picture. Which reminds me: How about letting me edit? I’m a good cutter and I know the film. I can do a faster job.”
Greystoke stared at me, then broke out a grin full of yellow teeth. “You know I halfway like you, Winston an’ you know why? You hustle. I can deal with you, understand?”
“Six weeks at union scale, okay?”
“Yeah. Right, Shannon, turn us around.” Without a pause, Shannon swerved onto the shoulder, wallowed through a half circle, and aimed the Lincoln back toward Calisher.
Greystoke was still grinning. “Back in business, huh? Well, well; lucka the Irish!” He was as Irish as Paddy’s penguin. “Hey! I almost fergot: lab did a rush job on that wet film. I dint believe it! Wall a water like the goddam Red Sea.”
“It was all right then?”
“Fantastic! Comes at ya like 3D.”
“And I figured out how to fit it in the story.”
He dismissed this nicety with a wave. “Whatever. Long as it’s in.”
“Too bad it doesn’t show Caudle drowning. Be a nice production value.”
Shannon raised an eyebrow but Greystoke remained oblivious. He burbled about his high-class movie all the way back to the motel.
* * * *
I was sitting in Molly’s trailer opposite a black woman with the dimensions of Mammy and the authority of Scarlet O’Hara. Mrs. Hildebrand was an investigator for the firm that had written the construction insurance on the Belle Haven Tract.
She consulted notes inked in a small, tight hand. “The skip loader was immediately below the hole in the dam. In clearing it, the crew found those sunglasses.” She pointed to the small heap of wreckage on the table.
“They’re Pits’ awright.” Molly still looked numb.
“Moreover, death was due to a heavy blow or blows. The body displayed multiple contusions and fractures, and there was no fluid in the lungs.”
I remembered that Pits’ lungs had been empty. “So you figure he opened a hole in the earth dam and then didn’t get out of the way.”
“That would be our position.”
“In any damage suits.”
A knowing smile, then Mrs. Hildebrand turned to Molly. “Why would he do such a thing, Mrs. Caudle?”
Molly looked at her resentfully. “Monk. Ms. Monk.”
“I see.” Her face said that irregular relationships were outside her professional venue.
Molly stared at the granny glasses as if trying to peer into the head that had worn them. “Maybe it was me an’... him.” She nodded in my direction.
“Ah.”
“We were uh, you know, an’ maybe Pits got mad. I mean, Stoney’s runnin’ that movie.”
Mrs. Hildebrand looked at me and I nodded. “I’m the production manager and Molly and I were involved, briefly.”
The investigator gathered her papers and the sunglasses. “In any case, our company has no liability for any damage occurring as a result of the flood.”
As she stood up, I stood with her: “And since Pits was a local resident and his action was unconnected with the film, neither do we.”
Mrs. Hildebrand did not rise to this bait. “Will you be here if we have any further questions?”
Molly shrugged.”No place else ta go.”
Mrs. Hildebrand nodded and, stepping as smartly as if she weighed one hundred pounds, marched out the little door and down the steps.
Molly went on staring at the table. “How could he be so dumb? Bustin’ a dam from the downhill side.” She shook her head in mournful disbelief.
I joined her on the salmon couch. “And where did he get that skip loader in the first place?”
“I dunno, sometimes they leave ‘em where they’re workin.’”
“But how’d he get it started?”
“Guess he coulda jumped it ‘specially an old one like that.” Molly stared into space as if imagining the event.
Time to change the subject. “Why’d you say that about us?”
She shook her head again. “I think maybe Dike ordered Pits to do it.”
“Why?”
“I surely don’t know. But if I told that lady and the Crossbones found out.... So I figgered if I gave her a different reason, she’d let it go.”
“Well, no harm done. But I’d still like to know why the Crossbones tried to sabotage the film.”
“No tellin.’ That Bull Dike’s a crazy man. I never trusted him.”
Silence.
“Would you like me to stick around a while?”
A wan smile. “You’re real sweet, Stoney. No, I guess I better think a spell - puzzle out what to do.”
“You have any money?”
“Are you kiddin’? But I got this trailer in my name - way Pits used ta ride when he got drunk, I made sure a that. An’ the ol’ pickup runs at least. I can always get work down ta Newhall.”
“I’m glad.” I stood up to go.
Molly rose as well. “One thing I’m good at is survivin.’”
“Oh I forgot: you don’t have to make the meals anymore. Simmons is hiring a cook.”
This time her smile was real, if wan. “I guess I oughta be relieved, but I’ll miss bein’ around all you movie stars.”
“We’ll be here a while.”
“Everthing’s ‘a while.’ Well, do me one favor, Stoney: just hang on a minute.”
Molly wrapped her arms around my neck, buried her face in my collar, and wept. I held her for several minutes, then sat her on the couch and got a Kleenex.
She waved me away, snuffling, so I kissed her head and left.
Chapter 17
Riding down the mountains through the chilly morning light in a ramshackle convoy of cars, vans, pickups, wheezing stake trucks, and a champagne Mercedes coupe driven by one very surly Kenneth Simmons.
His was the only sour face in the bunch. Alf and Lee were singing rowdy songs. Stogie, in his vintage Cadillac, chatted up the makeup girl and filled the car with smog. The sound man and woman bounced along happily in their four-wheeler, and the grips and juicers drove anything left that moved. As we rambled toward the Golden State Freeway, I pictured our wagon train in helicopter shot, with Earl Scruggs picking Foggy Mountain Breakdown on the sound track.
We branched to the 405, rolled down to Westwood, and parked in a row on Wilshire while Simmons and I made a visit to his high-rise condo and the others explained to intrigued policemen what this raffish circus was 1doing on the upscale side of town. Then I returned with Simmons, the crew chiefs pocketed cash disbursed from his newly bulging briefcase, and the crews lit out for Hollywood like a Mongol horde.
Simmons and I paid for the ruined equipment, leaving a trail of grateful, sleazy renters, who would file insurance claims anyway and pocket our cash. But in my line of work, I might need their cordiality and credit on my next job - or the one after that.
By noon, the briefcase was nearly empty, the trucks were full of shiny new equipment, and our rustbucket convoy was steaming north again, afloat on optimism and beer, which the grips had included in their shopping list.
I propped a Coke on the Mercedes’ floor and unwrapped a Tommy’s double chiliburger, at which Simmons looked even more distressed, if possible. “Don’t spill that crap on my leather seat.”
“It does look like that, but it tastes great.”
“Nitrates, sodium, God knows what.”
“Bad for the leather’s circulation.”
“I told you, Winston, I despise your so-called jokes. You got to Greystoke, didn’t you?”
“Been working with him for a week.”
Simmons shook his head in disbelief. “I guess I never figured you.”
That oversight was mutual.
After five minutes of silence, Simmons said, “Now I’ve spent that money to replace everything, how do I know you won’t tell someone later?”
“Because Greystoke would take it personally, and his reactions tend toward intemperance.”
“But how can I be sure?”
“What can I say?”
Another pause and then, “There’s no point in my staying now.”
“Why don’t you take off this afternoon? I can handle the shoot and we’ll both feel better without each other’s company.”
He nodded grimly.
“And by the way, leave your furnishings. I believe they came out of the budget.”
Simmons flashed a look of barely suppressed rage, then concentrated on his driving.
* * * *
Insects buzzed around the quartz lights trained on a rented skip loader and the pile of dirt towering above it. We were shooting night-for-night to conceal the fact that this same skip loader had spent the day faking an earth fill dam in the Calisher dump. In the afternoon, we had bootlegged cover footage of the actual broken dam, and now we were staging its “destruction.” I would intercut tonight’s scenes with the footage of our flood, which had been shot in stormy light that would pass for darkness when the lab shifted the color balance toward blue.
Fueled by their first good dinner in three weeks, Diane and the crew were hustling to make up a day’s work in one three-hour session. “One more time, and Merl, don’t raise the scoop until you see the signal.”
The skip loader’s owner nodded amiably, since he’d been well paid from Simmons’s briefcase and was enjoying his debut in what he called “moom pitchers.”
In the retake, Merl bit a heroic chunk out of the dam in long shot. Then we moved the skip loader under a contraption that Stogie’d improvised with the offhand brilliance expected of senior grips. Thurston Fry retrieved his costume from Merl, stashed his specs and teeth, and climbed aboard the big yellow machine.
After three rehearsals, we rolled the camera and slated the scene. Thurston, in medium shot, pretended to drive the skip loader, working three levers and four pedals furiously, though without the dimmest idea of what they did. It didn’t matter because the camera was trucking up and back, up and back, in sync with Thurston’s movements. On the screen it was the loader that would appear to move, especially when I’d laid in engine sound effects.
Thurston was muttering into his stubble. “Sumbitches done me once too often.” He looked behind him, worked the levers, and the purposely shaky camera backed away. “Show ever guddam one a them.” Forward again to a bumpy stop. He yanked a lever viciously, then pretended to watch the off-screen scoop lifting. Thursty cackled maniacally.
I dropped my arm and at the signal, two grips atop Stogie’s off-camera rig opened a sluice gate. One thousand gallons of dirty water roared down the sluice, smashed into Thursty from above, and swept him off his seat and out of frame onto a pile of plastic covered mattresses.
“Cut! Superb, folks!”
Rising from the mattresses, Thursty did Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion: “Unusual wedda we’re havin’, ain’t it?”
Though the impersonation was expert, the roar of appreciation was for his scene.
* * * *
Midnight Mozart on Simmons’s radio, a soft amber glow from his tasteful lights, the gentle embrace of his pillowy couch - comforts over which Diane and I were now asserting eminent domain.
I savored the Jim Beam I’d laid on, since rum and Coke seemed jinxed. “I thought you might move in here.”
“Or we could share.”
“If it works out.”
Diane giggled. “It better this time. This is getting ridiculous.”
“How nice. I’ve never heard you do that.”
“What?”
“Giggle.”
“Haven’t felt much like it. But now I think we’ll finish the picture. Did you see the crew work tonight?”
“I told you Stogie could do it.”
“I never saw anyone move as slow as Stogie and still get so much done.”
A pause, during which I pictured a crackling fireplace on the blank wall.
“Stoney, why’d you come up here in the first place really?”
“Greystoke was worried about the picture. He didn’t like the dailies.”
“What was wrong with them?”
“Nothing whatever; he’s an amateur. You and I can spot the four minutes of movie in twenty of dailies, but he couldn’t.”
Diane’s tone acquired a slight edge. “So he did hire you to take over.”
I looked at the cozy room and the elegant person lounging beside me, still in flapping button-down shirt and shorts though she’d shucked her hiking boots and socks to reveal delicate, blue-veined feet.
I couldn’t quite suppress a sigh. “Yes, Greystoke sent me to take over.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“After ten minutes it was evident that you knew your business, so the best way to do my job was to help you do yours.”
“But you could have got a directing credit.”
“Aw hell: for years I’ve been trying to get a feature directing job and failed. But if I ever do succeed, it won’t be by stealing someone else’s picture.”
“Then you’re in the wrong industry.”
“The thought has occurred to me, yes.”
After another hole in this drab discourse, Diane said in a curious tone, “Well, I’m glad we had this little chat.”
Here it came: goodbye and good luck.
“Now are we going to get it on or what?” And she moved in until our noses almost touched. I kissed her mouth, the rest of her flowed forward, and we wrapped each other up in the delirious, time-honored tangle.
We submerged, came up for air, sipped our drinks, and sank again, cooing and chortling and humming in each other’s mouths. Her fingers were warm and dry and all the angles in her body somehow melted.
We found each other’s shirt buttons.”Wait a minute.”
“No, you wait.”
“We’re getting in each other’s way, Diane.”
“Ladies first.”
“No fair: you have two layers to my one.”
“Not tonight, I don’t.”
“Mmm, you smell good.”
“You too. Ivory soap.”
“It was on special.”
“Oops. Don’t fall off, Stoney.”
“Bed.”
“I’ll say!”
“No, bed. The bed. You know, queen-size?”
“Good thinking.”
* * * *
Diane sat upright with the sheet around her knees, tending her waterfall of hair and smiling to herself while I lay watching from somewhere inside a happy torpor. She put down her brush and started a thick single braid. Somehow this homely preoccupation was even more stimulating than her suave tan body. Without losing her grip on the braid, she doubled and quadrupled a rubber band and snapped it over the end. Then she bounced down on her back, pulled up the sheet, and grinned at me.
I was grinning too as I turned out the one remaining light.
* * * *
Chains rushed toward Scuzzy, split into Chains and Crabs, coalesced into Pits Caudle, then dissolved into an avalanche of greasy water with Bull Dike surfing down its face on his Harley. The water swept me into the warehouse set, clinging to my Arri which was somehow floating, then receded, sucking the light after it. In the blackness, the warehouse door clicked open.
Hmmh! What time was it? My digital watch said after three. Diane lay warm and still beside me and the room walls were invisible in the darkness, except for the faint gray rectangle of the bathroom doorway.
And the widening vertical bar that was the night outside the slowly opening room door. A clot of shadows slipped into the room and the bar of light narrowed to blackness.
Footsteps: slow and quiet, but not exactly stealthy.
I found the knob of Diane’s bare hip with my left hand and gave it four quick pushes. When she stirred, I pressed urgently again and her body tensed under the sheet.
Rustling. Silence. Then my corner of the sheet lifted.
“You gonna pig this whole bed?” and Molly’s well-fleshed haunch crowded my side.
I rose on my right elbow and found the switch on the bedside lamp.
Molly’s puppy face grinned up at me, above the two plump fists that held the sheet to her chin. She lowered the sheet slowly to her hips, as if revealing the payoff of a magic trick. The rustlings in the dark had been her clothes.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi. Good thing you climbed in this side.”
“How come?” She squirmed against me.
“Because my side’s full.” Diane’s tone was just slightly too measured.
Molly jackknifed up and gaped past my shoulder. “Well gawddamn!” She flipped the sheet and blanket to the foot of the bed.
A small, detached part of me could see a full shot from a camera’s point of view. On the right, Diane sat up, moved her arms toward shielding her breasts, paused, dropped her hands toward her lap, then frowned defiantly and put both fists on her hips. On the left, oblivious of her own exuberant flesh, Molly stared at Diane, then looked at me with eyes like lit fuses.
And in between, the naked, skinny, supine shambles of Stoney Winston, utterly nonplused.
Diane glared at Molly. “What is this?”
“Looks like yer gittin’ plenty, Stoney.”
Diane trained her sights on me. “Are you sleeping with her?”
Molly dropped a proprietary hand on my shoulder. “Ta hell bidness is it a yours?”
Diane gestured at the bed. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“Course he was, whadja think?” To me: “Weren’t you?”
“Ah...”
Molly flicked my shoulder with the back of her hand. “Shut yer mouth. Why shouldn’t he?”
“What are you doing in here?”
Molly looked disgusted. “Takin’ a shower; what’s it look like?”
“How about leaving?”
“Why me? This ain’t yer room, ‘cordin’ ta my books.”
“It damn well is; you’re gouging us two hundred a night for it.”
“I’m not. I just copy what Simmons gives me.”
“When you’re not poisoning people.”
“Folks....”
Molly ignored me. “Jest some bad meat. I never said I could cook none.”
“You made me lose a whole day.”
Molly’s smile was smug. “Yer jest pissed cause Stoney got ta direct.”
Diane grabbed my other shoulder. “You told her that?”
“I didn’t put it quite...”
“God damn it, Winston; I should have trusted my instincts.” Diane grabbed the sheet end from the foot of the bed and pulled it up to her waist.
Molly rotated onto her knees and thrust her pug face toward Diane. “Instinks, instinks...”
“Molly, this isn’t the time...”
“Don’t you tell me what ta do! You were usin’ me!”
Diane swung her legs off the bed and reached for her robe, which had also materialized. “Join the club.”
“You too, huh?”
She wrapped herself in the robe. “Doesn’t it look that way?”
Molly stared at her for several beats, and then her face softened. “I surely can believe you.” She too got up, collected her shorts, and stepped into them. “Only two kinds, ya know: ones like Pits, too goddam dumb to do what ya tell ‘em...” Molly zipped the shorts viciously. “An’ ones like him, smart enough to know just how ta play ya.” She leaned toward me, hands on hips. “Preoccupied!” She struggled into her puny T-shirt.
Diane stared down contemptuously from her edge of the bed. “He played me well enough.” She crossed her arms like a policeman.
Molly shook her head regretfully. “Well you think about this: you an’ I are different as cats an’ dogs; but the same damn game worked on both of us.”
Diane nodded.
Molly sighed. “Well.” A pause, and then she looked at Diane without anger. “I’m real sorry it’s spoiled.” She cocked her head meaningfully. “You take care now.”
Diane nodded grimly, and Molly marched out the door.
After a moment of deadly silence, Diane strode over to the couch, stripped off her robe, and started dressing. “I’ll say this for you, Stoney: you’re the most complicated bastard I’ve known.”
I joined her and began dressing. “Whatever you think, you owe me five minutes.”
“Why?”
“Review the last two weeks.”
“Holding that over me?”
“It’s up to you.”
She stared at the shirt in her hands. “All right.”
“I didn’t really respond to Molly, though she made herself very clear. Then the other day an old friend named Simmons went sour on me and you blistered me for grabbing your place when all I wanted was to keep your damn picture on schedule.”
Diane’s wry face acknowledged this.
“So at the end of the day, I drowned my sorrows for a while first in chenin blanc and then in Molly.”
Diane’s face softened, but I wasn’t looking for forgiveness.
“At the same time, I don’t regret one very pleasant, peaceful night with Molly and I don’t think that night threatened our relationship. You and I didn’t have a relationship then any more than we seem to have now.”
Diane seemed about to speak.
But it was still my dime. “I have a few choice words for Molly too.” I walked to the door. “Be back in a few minutes. If you’d care to wait, you can tell me how we play it from here on.”
Diane nodded, still staring down at her shirt.
Defiantly, I took a last look at her heartbreaking breasts; and when I’d savored this small blessing, I left.
* * * *
The trailer lights were still on when I knocked. “What?”
“Stoney. May I come in?”
A very long pause, and then Molly admitted me. “Whaddya want?”
“I want you to get me a glass of wine and come sit on the couch.”
“We’re through talkin.’”
“Not quite. You still have to tell me why you sabotaged the film.”
Molly froze; then shook her head. “You are jest the limit.” But she turned toward the refrigerator.
I sat on the couch and glanced around. Molly had removed all the biker icons and the trailer looked strangely bare.
“You were hanging around when Sean broke his leg, but I can’t prove anything there. I can’t prove you opened a can of exposed film either.”
“Cause I dint.” She handed me the wine.
“But you found the Arriflex where three other people had searched without spotting a great big pure-white camera case.”
A shrug. “I know the area.” She bounced down on the other end of the couch.
“Right after the generator died, you showed up to assure me that you’d been way up here making me a lunch.”
“I already confessed: I bought the damn sanwich.”
“You told me Crabs and Chains went in to Newhall hospital, so you talked to them after they tried to maim Scuzzy.”
“Only after.”
“And you went on and on about your lousy cooking so sorry about the food poisoning. But the supper and breakfast you made me were strangely delicious.”
Molly only shrugged.
“You made a big point of Pits being up the coast someplace, the night before the dam broke.”
“Only because you were so chicken about stayin’ here.”
“You talked to the insurance lady as if you knew what Pits was doing at the dam - driving an ‘old’ skip loader. And tonight you said he was too dumb to follow orders.”
“Not my orders.”
“Just one more thing: a few minutes ago, you said you only copied the charges Simmons gave you. But you told me the bills came from Dike. You knew all about Simmons and the rest of it from the start.”
Another shrug.”I explained everything.”
“No, you explained each thing; that’s not the same. One at a time, your answers hold up; but all together, they don’t account for the obvious pattern.”
This time she didn’t bother to shrug.
“I think you’d better talk to me, Molly.”
“Why should I?”
“So I can decide whether to tell the police.”
Molly hesitated, and when she spoke her tone was not as confident. “What’ll they find?”
“You’d be surprised, once I show them the pattern.”
“Then why not call ‘em?”
“Because what you did was small potatoes except for Sean’s leg and Pits. And after all, Pits killed himself; you didn’t do it.”
“Then what do you want?”
“To see that nothing else happens to this film. If I have to bring the law in to do that, I will. But if you explain yourself, I might not have to.”
“Why do you care?”
“I like you very much. Maybe if you hadn’t tried so hard and I hadn’t been so tight-assed, things might have been different.”
Her face pulled up into a sad smile.
I took a sip of wine. “Tell me something: why were you so mad at me tonight? That doesn’t seem like you.”
Molly stared as if she simply couldn’t believe it.”How would you feel if you come sneakin’ inta somebody’s bed an’ found they was already preoccupied? I was mad ‘cause I felt like such a damn fool, is all.”
Molly looked at her glass, sipped, looked again, rotating it in plump fingers. “Okay, it’s real simple. Pits an’ Dike were up for president and Dike won. I mean, he bought it, understand? Pits shoulda had it - been workin’ fer the club fer years. But ol Dike come on mister big an’ throwed his weight around an’ money too, an’ he stole it away.”
“Then Dike thought up this movie to, uh, take care of some money, an’ he just gave two million of the club’s cash ta Greystoke. So I thought, what would the bros do ta Dike if he never got their money back?”
“Because the film shut down before Greystoke paid it.”
“Uh-huh. I figgered a little push here and a little shove there and you folks would give it up.”
“And the Crossbones would choose a new president.”
‘“At’s it.” She looked me straight in the eye. “I never meant nothin’ serious.”
“I believe that; but why take the trouble? You didn’t even like Pits.”
Her voice was full of bitter pride. “You ast me why I stayed with him. I ran him. No matter how he treated me in public, he done what I told him. If he won the election, then I got ta be the real president. Anything wrong with that?”
“Why did you want to run the Crossbones?”
“Five thousand members and three million bucks is why. Maybe no big deal ta rich movie folks like you, but not too bad for an Okie kid.”
“Not bad at all. Will you lay off the film now?”
A nod. “I promise.” She looked at me again. “No hard feelin’s?”
“No. And we’ll keep this in the family.” I rose and walked to the door.
Molly looked at me out of the wise old eyes in her round baby face. “You go on back to yer movie, cause that’s what yer really in love with. But you mind me: a movie don’t feel ya inside it, and it can’t love ya back.”
* * * *
Diane still sat on Simmons’s couch, still with her shirt in her hands, as if she hadn’t stirred in twenty minutes.
I sat down beside her. “The sabotage is over. It was Molly.”
A quiet moment, and when Diane raised her eyes, she didn’t seem to be thinking about Molly at all.
Chapter 18
Six weeks was a short time to edit a feature, but I knew the footage by heart, and there wasn’t all that much of it, since Diane had shot so economically. My slapdash script had worked somehow, and the film wasn’t exactly hurt by an almost lethal brawl and a spectacular flood. The film lab, which knew our credit rating to the penny, couldn’t figure out how we’d done it, and the picture’s reputation was already snaking through the Industry grapevine.
The natives stayed pacific up in Calisher, perhaps because Bull Dike had disappeared from his airstrip hideout - courtesy, I hoped, of his Colombian connection. During our last week of shooting, Molly sold the trailer and vanished. I’d warned her that things would soon get nasty, so I had no doubt that “Molly Caudle” had been shed like a snake’s skin and the original Bullhead Alice Monk was on the road somewhere in Pits’ old pickup. Vaya con Dios.
Greystoke had been cooperative, except to demand a thousand changes in the film, all of which I’d promised but not made. He never noticed.
Each morning, Diane and I had Bumbled downhill from my flat in Laurel Canyon to slave twelve hours over a hot Moviola. The collaboration had been smooth and the relationship as peaceful as our cactus personalities allowed.
And now I was sitting under pin spot down-lights, behind a console bristling with knobs and sliding gain controls, dubbing down the last reel of Megaton, formerly Cycles from Hell.
The portly sound technician repaved his bald crown with side-hair that the air conditioning persisted in displacing and lit his fourteenth Marlboro. He zeroed the huge footage counter beside the screen and rolled the final reel. The counter, projector, eight tracks, and a background sound loop all rumbled forward in lockstep.
For the next seven minutes he watched the screen with total concentration, dialing tracks up and down, following the footage counts I’d penciled onto long dubbing sheets, one for each track.
On the screen, Scuzzy rode his Harley up a hill toward the camera, stopped in the foreground, and turned to look behind him.
Far off at the bottom of the rise, Hallie Sykes struggled with the flood debris in her yard - all carefully placed by the property master.
Scuzzy watched her without expression.
Hallie finished her chore and disappeared inside.
Scuzzy’s face underwent a subtle transformation, and then he spoke his only ad lib in the picture: “As long as a man talks excessively with women, he brings evil down upon him.” He looked away.
The sound man scanned the dubbing sheet. “Why so much background there?”
I chuckled. “Had to clip the line. He originally added, ‘Rabbi Yose Ben Johanan.’” But, always a pro, Scuzzy had first turned his mouth off-camera.
Scuzzy revved the Harley more aggressively than necessary, roared out of frame...
... and dwindled down the snaky mountain road toward the next valley.
“No music here?”
“No, just FX.” The Harley’s throaty rumble dwindled too, and after a long-held shot, Scuzzy and his thunder disappeared. A moving line of crayon marked the fadeout, and then white end titles crawled silently up the black screen. I leaned toward the sound technician. “No sound under the titles. Want another run-through?”
He shook his head, depositing an inch of dead Marlboro on his console. “Let’s lay one down.” He reached for the intercom switch to order the reels reset.
“Hold it!” Greystoke’s rasping tenor made me jump. He’d come in unnoticed. “Who the hell is Spencer Winston?”
“That’s me, Alan; Stoney’s only a nickname.”
Greystoke poked an accusing finger at the title just crawling off the top of the screen. “Screenplay by Spencer Winston? Ta hell happened to me?”
“I wrote a new screenplay; didn’t you notice?”
“And who gave you permission?”
“You did. Watch the rest of the titles.”
Shannon cut off Greystoke’s protest. “He’s right, Alan; it’s a different movie.”
Fortunately, the titles were ending, and
Produced by Alan Greystoke
rolled past, and then
A GREYSTOKE PRODUCTION
crawled up to center screen, held for five seconds, and faded to black.
“You get the last two credits, Alan, and bigger type than anybody.”
“I dint approve that, understand?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“Well... I’ll let it go. Cost too much to change, get me?” Greystoke sketched a magnanimous gesture in the air and changed the subject. “Got some news: Corona Films signed to distribute: five hunnert prints to start.”
“Congratulations.”
“They want a summer release, okay?”
“The negative’s half cut and we’re locking up the track today.”
“Big ad campaign too. Hey: too bad you didn’t keep yer points. Coulda cleaned up.”
Reflecting that Delmore Wong of the IRS was poised to do some cleanup of his own, I didn’t regret my loss of profit points. I only hoped the film would get out before Greystoke’s taxes did.
Which reminded me: “You know, Alan, we should make a videotape copy.”
“What for?”
“For you, to show your friends at home.”
Greystoke thought, then beamed. “Hey, yeah; we got that machine, right? Yeah, go ahead; I like that.”
And with Greystoke footing the bill, Diane, Scuzzy and I could get cassettes of our work to show.
Greystoke turned to go. “Okay, wrap it up. Come see me tomorra for your last check.” And our new-fledged mogul swept out.
Shannon, however, remained. “We need to talk, Winston.”
“In the lounge.”
We stepped into the dreary waiting room next door and Shannon leaned against a table. “When do you drop the other shoe?”
“What shoe?”
“Come on. You think you have a hold on us. How do you plan to use it now?”
“Shannon, I have my money and my screen credit; I want nothing more to do with you.”
He looked at me appraisingly, then evidently decided I was telling the truth. His head shake was full of pity. “You’re a small-timer, Winston, and you always will be.”
“In your game, yes; but I’m not in your game.”
He shook his head again. “Everybody’s in my game, Winston; didn’t you notice?”
Shannon went the way of Greystoke, leaving me with the sour fear that he might be right, at that.
* * * *
I was parked with Diane in Beetle Bumble, chided by airport recordings: the red zone... is for loading... and unloading... of passengers only.
Diane discovered, for the sixteenth time, that her ticket was still there. “Don’t come in, Stoney. I hate departure gate goodbyes.”
“When will you be back?”
“Supposed to be a two month shooting schedule, but we’ve got exteriors in Pennsylvania.”
“Where it rains in summer. I remember rain.”
“You ought to try the East; learn all about weather.”
“Thank you, no; I grew up swimming in it. I’m glad about your new film, though.”
“When you’re hot, you’re hot.” But her tone was rueful.
“It’s been fun working with you.”
“Don’t say it in that past tense way.”
“It wasn’t meant like that.”
“I know.”
Diane looked at me as if she wanted to say something, but instead, she checked her ticket again. “Time to go.”
We embraced silently and then retrieved her luggage from the Beetle’s nooks and crannies. A last quick peck, as if she were just off to work for the day; then Diane disappeared into the terminal with lanky, elegant strides.
She didn’t look back.