Children of Light (12 page)

Lu Anne smiled, lowered her head and put a finger across her lips.

“Lee?” It was the voice of the writer, Lowndes. “Your car is here.”

She stood up and went out; meeting his eyes, her own gaze faltered and he saw it.

At the door, Billy Bly, the stuntman, was waiting for her with the driver. Seeing each other, they both blushed.

“Hi,” he said, and glanced quickly at Lowndes behind her. “They told me to ride over with you. See if there was anything you wanted.”

“Just your good company, Brother Bly,” she said. She introduced him to Lowndes; they got in the hosed-down Lincoln that would carry them to the set.

Looking out the car window as they approached the sea, she was struck by the uncanny light. The sky seemed to threaten a storm out of season.

“You look fine, Lu Anne,” Bill Bly said. She laughed. They had sent him out as her protector, replacing Jack Best. A heavy-handed touch, she thought.

“I
am
fine, Billy,” she told him. She was aware of Lowndes, a watching darkness on the seat beside her. “I
am.
”

A
round twelve, Walker pulled off the freeway in Del Mar and drove to a drugstore on the coast to telephone Shelley.

“Everybody’s thrilled,” she told him. “They think it would really be great. In other words, they’ll put up with you for a day or two but don’t push it.”

“I will be their guest, will I not?”

“Yes, Gordon. You will.”

“That’s what you said they’d do.”

“People don’t always do what I say they’ll do. Very often, though.”

“Doesn’t that make you feel good?”

“No, shitty. It’s depressing. How do you want to travel?”

“I’m driving.”

“Is that wise?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“
Buen viaje
, Gord. Don’t get sick.”

He was about to hang up when Al Keochakian came on.

“Smart guy,” Al said.

“Take it easy,” Walker said. He was afraid of Keochakian’s anger and afraid of his own.

“I’m taking it easy, Gordon. I want to tell you something Shelley said to me. She’s off the line.”

“Don’t get pissed at her. I asked her to set it up.”

“Of course you did. And she owes you her job here.”

“What are you going to do, fire her, for Christ’s sake? Why are you so hysterical about this?”

“I would never fire Shelley, Gordon. She’ll grow old in my service. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you what she said about you.”

“If it’s something I should hear I’ll hear it from her.”

“She said, ‘He’s dying, Al.’ That’s what she said to me this morning. ‘He’s really going to die.’ ”

Walker felt the sudden sweat under his arms and on his palm that held the telephone. A charge of fear exploded beneath his heart, like the fear that had seized him at the mirror the morning before.

“You malicious son of a bitch,” he said to Keochakian. “You’re cursing me.”

“You think so?”

“I understand you now. I don’t know why I didn’t before.”

“What I’m trying to make you understand,” Keochakian said, “is that you’re very sick. Your life is in danger.”

“I don’t believe that motivation,” Walker said. “I heard the satisfaction in your voice.”

For a few moments there was silence. When Keochakian spoke again his voice was tremulous.

“You are sick, man. Physically and mentally you’re sick. You have
me on the phone here … in this unprofessional way … we are arguing like a couple of faggots here. I won’t stand for it.”

“Al,” Walker said, laughing, “go fuck yourself. You’re fired.”

He stayed on the line until he heard Keochakian hang up. Then, deliberately, he replaced his own receiver. His insides churning with fear and anger, he pulled recklessly out into the coast road traffic, forcing the southbound lanes to a squealing halt. Pursued by obscenities and shouts of outrage, he headed for I-5 and the border.

I
n their oversized custom-built trailer a short distance from the setup, the Drogues, father and son, watched a young woman in turn-of-the-century costume ride a horse-drawn trolley car on a video screen. The woman was Joy McIntyre, Lu Anne’s Australian stand-in. The vehicle was moving against a dimly perceived woodland background; Joy held tight to the standee pole, her hands clutching both the pole and her folded parasol.

“Pretty kid,” old Drogue said.

“Looka the way she holds the parasol,” Walter Drogue the younger said. “She thinks she’s on the bus to Kangaroo Springs.”

“A proletarian reflex,” the old man said. “And a cute ass. I think she’s endearing.”

“The more I look at her,” young Drogue said, “the more I realize we have a true original here. I mean, you get the McIntyre touch. You get McIntyrisms. Like there was Lubitsch, there was Von Sternberg, now there’s McIntyre.”

“Maybe there’s something there, eh? Maybe nature didn’t intend her for just an extra.”

Young Drogue blew his nose on a Kleenex.

“Nature intended her for a water spaniel. She can’t name the days of the week.”

They watched pretty Joy, her jaw set, grimly hang on.

“Kind of a phallic pole,” Drogue junior said.

“You know,” old man Drogue intoned, “we had an extra once—they called him Freddy the Fag. He was six-eight, three hundred pounds, and he had Gloria Swanson’s moves. One time we’re making a Western—big saloon fight scene, roulette wheels flying, guys crashing through balconies—and Freddy walks up a flight of stairs like he’s on his way to get a bouquet from Bert Parks. Next take, the A.D. says, ‘Freddy, for Christ’s sake, can’t you walk up those stairs like a man?’ Freddy turns around and says, ‘If you want me to play character parts you’ll have to pay me for it.’ ”

On the screen, Joy’s trolley swung past a line of wooden structures and rolled on through a grove of live oaks.

“She should sit,” the old man croaked. “The stance is passive.”

“It’s comical,” his son said. “It’s a comic composition. It won’t do.”

He kicked open the trailer door and stepped out into the strangely turned Mexican light, calling for his assistant.

“Eric!”

In a few moments Eric Hueffer, the A.D., rounded the edge of the trailer.

“Yeah, boss.”

“Let’s take her around again sitting down. I mean, Christ, she’s holding the parasol wrong. It doesn’t feel right.”

“Right,” Hueffer said. “Toby was wondering about the light on her face under that hat. She had her head down.”

They were walking toward the camera setup, Hueffer and young Drogue in step, the old man a few steps behind. As they approached, they heard Joy McIntyre begin to sing.

“And it was grand,” she sang in an antipodean quaver,

“Just to stand

With his hand holding mine

To the end of the li-i-i-ne.”

“How come you let her hold the parasol like that?” young Drogue asked Hueffer.

“I thought it was natural.”

“I want to watch her go around again on the tape. I want her sitting up straight, with her head up. I want the parasol in one hand, touching the floor. With her other hand she can hold the pole. Maybe. Well see.”

“Lee’s here,” Hueffer told his director.

“Well, I’ll talk to her now. We’ll watch the shot again while she gets into costume.” He watched his assistant walk back toward the setup. “Eric!”

The A.D. turned, squinting.

“Anybody heard anything about Walker?”

“He’s supposed to be coming down,” Hueffer said, “but he wasn’t on the plane with Charlie.”

“Good,” Walter said. “The guy’s bad luck,” he told his father.

“He’s a contentious drunk and that’s never
good
luck. Charlie—with his reporters and writers—he doesn’t know what’s good for his picture. In my day we’d have either kept a guy like Walker off the set or we’d have kept him busy with rewrites. Don’t you think he might upset Verger?”

“I think Lu Anne might extend with him around,” the younger Drogue said. “It’s a calculated risk. Anyway, I don’t want to fight with Charlie over it.”

“Give him to Lowndes,” old Drogue said. “Give them each other.”

L
u Anne sat in front with the driver, Lowndes and Bill Bly in the back seat. The big stuntman’s presence had a subduing effect on Lowndes. It was a presence that was straightforward and physical and created about itself an atmosphere unsympathetic to leading questions and intimidation. Lu Anne was glad to have him along. They drove in silence over a dusty road lined with giant eucalyptus. On the way they passed Jack Best trudging flat-footed through the dust. When
the driver slowed for him, he waved them on. Best’s face was red and he appeared to be talking to himself.

“Is he all right?” Lowndes asked Lu Anne.

“He’s fine,” Bill Bly told him.

At the end of the road was the great laager of trailers and light trucks that marked the borders of the Grand Isle set.

In the center of an enormous clearing stood a grove of live oaks that had been trucked in from the Tamaulipas coast. They stood beside this alien shore looking as natural, as firmly rooted and grave in authority as the ancient trees of her home place, garlanded, like those, in beards of Spanish moss. The open ground between the grove and the beach was covered in anthemis vines that seemed to bear the same white and yellow flowers as Lu Anne’s native camomile but lacked the apple fragrance. This air was too thin, she thought, to bear the scents of home.

Getting out of the car, she stood and looked over the scene. In the strange light it had a sinister magic. Dongan Lowndes came and stood beside her. Bly stayed in the car with the door open.

“Thanks, Billy,” she said. He closed the door and was driven away.

“Weird, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Make you feel funny?”

“They always do,” she said, “these tricks. I think I like it. I think it puts me in the working vein.”

In the center of it all, beside the thickest oak, stood a small antique trolley, looking a bit like a San Francisco cable car. The trolley rested on a narrow-gauge track that ran a long parabolic route between the oak grove and a row of bathhouses at the edge of the dunes. Two handsome chestnut horses were harnessed to the car. An elderly, ebony-skinned man, wearing a period derby and a faded, collarless striped cotton shirt, sat on the driver’s platform. Joy McIntyre swung loosely from the trolley bar, grasping it one-handed. She was wearing an exact replica of the Gibson girl costume that Lu Anne herself would wear for the scene.

“Hi, Joy,” Lu Anne called. “Hi, Joe Gates.”

“I’m Judy Garland,” Joy said happily. She leaned forward from the bar, balancing on the edge of the trolley, waved and displayed the eagerest and most brightly toothed of Judy Garland smiles. “When you have a costume, you can be Judy Garland too.”

Joe Gates half turned in his buckboard and tugged on the bell cord beside him.

“Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings,” he sang to them, in flatted hipster tones.

“Joe Gates was actually in
Meet Me in St. Louis
,” Joy said. “Right, Joe?”

“Naw,” Joe Gates said. “That was another man.”

Camera crew were struggling to mount the Panaflex aboard the trolley and keep it fixed in place. Joe Gates climbed down from his perch and one of the Mexican grips took up the team’s bridle. Lu Anne turned and saw young Walter Drogue approaching.

Lowndes, standing next to her, was holding her copy of the script. She took it from him quickly but not before Drogue saw.

“Don’t read the script, Lowndes,” Drogue said. “You’ll spoil the end for yourself. I mean, give us a chance, huh?”

“I want to see what one looks like,” Lowndes told the director. “I wanted to read what she wrote in it.”

“I understand,” Drogue said smoothly. “Now if you’d like to watch—and I’m sure you would—you could get a fine view from the back of that pickup behind the camera.”

He directed Lowndes’s attention to a red Ford truck near the clearing.

Lowndes ignored him.

“Work well,” he told Lu Anne. She smiled at him as he walked away, a smile she knew would encourage his quickening attentions. She had no particular idea why she had done it.

“Work well?” Drogue demanded. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”

Lu Anne helped herself to another stick of sugarless gum.

“I know his type, Walter. He’s what a former husband of mine would call a moldy fig.”

“And you have a weakness for that type?”

She shrugged. “I’m indifferent. I believe that type has a weakness for me.”

Drogue stared at her. “What former husband?”

“Oh,” Lu Anne said, “the clarinet player.”

He took her by the arm and they walked together toward the trolley.

“Look at this light,” he said. “What does it do for you?”

“It makes me sad,” she said.

“Come on,” he told her, affecting an excited tremolo, “this is El Greco light. It’s holy.”

She looked at the sky, hoping to catch his excitement. It looked to her like late-summer weather at home. Edna, she thought, would know the oppression of that yellow-gray dog end of summer light. But the air was different where they were. It was the West, and not old Pierre Pelican land. Even in famished Baja there was an edge of hope to the air.

“We’ve just done Joe Gates on his buckboard,” Drogue said. “Atmospheric, sinister as shit. I mean,” he said, “the dude’s been a millionaire half his life. Give him his cue and he’ll give you three hundred years of servitude and lonesome roads.”

Lu Anne smiled for him.

“Joe was in
Salt of the Earth
, you know that? Dad brought him in. He played the Black Worker, or as they used to say, the Negro Worker, and let me tell you, the Negro Worker was bad! This big young hulk of a guy—huge pecs, chest like a fucking draft horse. He didn’t give a shit about blacklists, he was rich in real estate.”

Toby Blakely, the cinematographer, walked up to join them.

“Turned out,” Drogue went on, “they never even noticed him in
Salt.
He worked through the whole decade. He played weepy singing convicts on death row, he played old wimpy butlers, the whole shtick. But you should have seen him as the Negro Worker.”