In the Beauty of the Lilies (51 page)

“There are some other problems.” The big cleft-chin state trooper, moving closer with rather menacing baby steps, said, “Neighbors on both sides been complaining they hear gunshots from dawn on, some of them, from the sound, from automatic repeaters. You know those aren’t legal.”

“We got a right to target practice,” Zebulun said, giggling without meaning to. “It’s set up in the canyon, where there’s only rocks around.” He loved his guns with a truly feeble-minded love. He and Luke and Jonas had fierce target-practice competitions; Esau had surprised himself, taking a ten-pound Kalashnikov into his grip one day, by being not a bad shot himself. You keep steady and squint and squeeze.
Two hundred yards away, a can jumps, a piece of old crockery explodes. Magic. Quick and neat as a computer key.

Blushing behind his beard at the sweep of the attempted deception (but the tingling of his skin signalling that at least he was alive; he was playing the game of life), Esau punched some more keys and swirled his mouse around and clicked it and produced a screen listing their guns, the number of the permit for each neatly aligned beside. “There’s our armaments,” he lied. “Less than a gun per man, and all standard single-shot hunting and sport weapons. Look,” he told the state cop, and smoothly turned to widen his plea to the other two agents of Gog. “You don’t want a legal hornet’s nest. There are constitutional issues here—freedom of religion, right to bear arms—that really resonate in this part of the U.S. Is this still a free country or not? Sure, our theology isn’t your standard Sunday-school disposable generic brand. We try to take the Bible at its word. True and Actual Faith—we try to live by the literal Word of the Lord. This is un-American? What are you telling me? We want to be left alone. Is this un-American? I say it’s
real
American. You heard the Big Man. He said, O.K., you’re bigger than we are. When the Day of Reckoning comes, we’ll see who’s bigger, but for now, O.K., sure, you win. We’ll give you our school-age children. We’ll catch up on our taxes. But don’t push. I’m reasonable, Zeb’s reasonable, but our Big Man here is very sincere. You’ve seen him, you’ve heard him talk. Human life to him is just a phase we’re in. A preliminary phase. If he tells us,
Die
, we gladly will. That’s our advantage over you guys. We see life in proportion, in relation to the last things, the ultimate things, whereas to most people—I don’t say
you
, necessarily—it’s something to cling to no matter what the price. Most people are afraid to die, and that acts as a stumbling block. They’re not
free
. We’re
not afraid. We’re
free
. We know that no matter what happens we’re going to be saved. Isn’t that right, Zeb?”

“That’s right. Jesse’s going to save us.”

“He
has
saved us, brother,” Esau gently corrected. “We’re beyond harm. We’re living already in the light of the Temple above. ‘Whosoever will save his life shall lose it’—you folks know the verse?”

The deputy and social worker nodded; the beefy state trooper took one of his aggressive baby steps and said, “Hey, give us a break. We’ve all heard preaching in our lives. This is a Tuesday morning.”

“You see,” Esau concluded patiently, “you of the world are still trying to save your lives, that’s why you’re losing them. Look. I’m not naïve. I’ve lived in the world. I’ve tasted its pleasures right down to the bitter, bitter dregs. I’ve done dope. I’ve done women. They leave you worse off than you were before. I have nothing left to lose. Neither does Zeb. This is a delicate situation, is all I’m saying. You come in here with your six-shooters and your summonses and legal crap, you might get more back than you bargained for. I’m not talking for myself, I’m talking for our Big Man. The Lord’s righteousness is like unto dynamite—don’t play with it.”

“You threatening us?” the state cop asked. “Let’s not forget, buddy, the government’s got some dynamite of its own.”

Esau shrugged. It was as when, back in Hollywood, trying to put together a package, he did his best to sell a tableful of bankers on a project, and without their saying a word he could feel resistance rising, the atmosphere congealing. He backed off a bit. “Tact,” he said. “I’m asking that you folks show some tact. What laws are we breaking?”

“There’s been a lot of talk in town about polygamy,” the social worker said.

Esau said, “Mr. Jesse Smith is married to nobody. He is a legal bachelor, as am I. The married couples here are married only once at a time. More than that, we have a Constitutional right to privacy.”

“Maybe less than you think,” the state cop said. “There’s laws protecting minors. There’s laws against perversions.”

Esau looked at the half-tolerant deputy and winked. “Yes, and there’s laws against ripping the tag off a pillow,” he said.

He sometimes remembered a night back in 1984, when one more package of which he had been a minor but salaried part had not been bought by the banks and collapsed, and he had given himself the satisfaction in parting of telling the faggy would-be director what a phony pretentious prima donna he was, and he had gone on with some geek who wanted to become his dope dealer over to some newly opened club in the Valley with a lot of these identical fascist surfer types with great tans and studded leather vests and close-cropped blond hair standing around staring like bit parts from
Blade Runner
, zombies invading from the super-queer cool future. Clark had had four vodka-and-oranges and done some lines in the men’s room and not only was his stomach upset and empty but his septum itched and burned hellishly and whenever he blew his nose he got blood. The Olympics were all over television that summer and a woman was running for Vice-President; cases of AIDS were adding up and so were the bodies of starved children in Ethiopia; the first black Miss America resigned because of some old nude photographs in
Penthouse
and Jim Fixx dropped dead while jogging; a fired security guard armed with three guns walked into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro and killed twenty, including a number of children. That was the ten
o’clock news, which Clark watched in his room. Downstairs Mom was entertaining a portly shadowy man with his temples grayed as if air-brushed. Coming into the house, Clark was invited to sit with them, and was too stoned and spooked to resist; any company was better than facing himself alone in his room. He could tell from the smell in the air, an extra dab of perfume, a musky whiff of excitement, that Mom was putting out her heat for this guy, who looked to Clark not much younger than his grandfather.

“Dear, do say hello to Mr. Wentworth. Mr. Wentworth comes from Boston and is part of the new management team Coca-Cola is installing at Columbia.” They had got back from dinner somewhere; Mom was wearing a clingy loose crackly pajama outfit of lime-green silk, with red-strapped stiletto heels that clung to her narrow tan feet like bright little traps; she kept crossing her legs and swinging her ankles, to show how thin they were. Clark had often heard her say that, having seen her mother balloon up, she would never tolerate an extra ounce on her own body, and she had stuck to it, with diets and a treadmill and weights to keep the arm flab off; she weighed no more than she had at eighteen but the weight was brittle, and her face after her most recent lift and lid job looked pulled, as if by wires hidden under her hair, which was dyed rust-color and cut in a sleek short Isabella Rossellini–style tousle. She was telling the man in his smoke-gray suit about the old days at Columbia: “Harry was a
dear
to me, though I know a lot of people hated him. He could be crude and inconsiderate, it was true, but I think a lot of the dislike was simple jealousy; he was so much more clever than the studio mafia in general. They were ragpickers, most of them, or the sons of ragpickers, whereas Harry’s father had at least been a tailor. He had brought the company up from absolute Poverty Row, doing
these pathetic Hall Room Boys two-reelers—one time on his yacht he
regaled
me with how they would save money by using short-ends of film bought from Paramount and Universal and painting
both
sides of the scenery and even, you won’t believe this, making up only one side of the actress’s face if she was going to be shot in profile during that scene—up from being this kind of penny-pinching sweatshop—the original name was Cohn-Brandt-Cohn or CBC and people called them Corned Beef and Cabbage and so Harry, who was a snob really and like most snobs terribly easily hurt, grandly called it Columbia—up to all those Academy awards for Capra and then of course Hayworth and
Eternity
and
River Kwai
and so on. The year after he died was the very first year the studio went into the red. This at a time when all the majors were
deep
in the red. After that, of course, it was the British productions,
Lawrence
and so on, and to give her her due Streisand that carried it, kept it alive, all through the Seventies. Oh, yes, you’re going to say
Easy Rider
and
Bob and Carol and Ted
and whoever the other one was, but these weren’t exactly the bread-and-butter kind of pictures, were they? They lost a fortune, I know, on a ridiculous musical remake of
Lost Horizon
, one of my
very
favorite pictures when I was a girl. I watched the original again on video the other week and really it
was
absurd, I had to admit, these tatty sets and the backdrops so obviously painted. A girl doesn’t see any of that. But Clark. You must tell us about yourself. What fun did you have this evening? How did the pitch for your little romantic comedy go?”

“It didn’t. It’s
fini
. I quit. I told Don what a shit he was.”

“I’m sure he was
so
glad to hear it. From such an expert on shits as you.”

Mr. Wentworth fussily cleared his throat and said, “Young fellow, would you like a drink?” His face was round and clean
and closed, with red flecks of actinic damage on the cheekbones; he knew a thing or two, his small eyes told you, in a not especially friendly fashion. They were an intense deep blue, like the glass in certain old-fashioned medicine bottles. He had a dry, squeezed-nose way of talking; Clark supposed that was a New England accent. To Clark his suit was sending out vibrations: the gray wasn’t exactly one shade or another, and a kind of ultra-violet shimmer came off it, in waves. Maybe all these qualities were in Clark’s head, like Vaseline on the lens when the picture goes misty.

“Thanks, sir, but honestly I’m afraid I might throw up.”

His mother stared at him, to see if he needed to have his stomach pumped. She hadn’t worked for a year, and he knew it drove her crazy. Her last role had been as an astronaut’s mother; they had given her big also-featuring billing but couldn’t write enough new lines to make it more than a cameo. She had been offered Eleanor Roosevelt, with fake teeth of course, in a four-part TV docudrama about the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, and she had gone into a rage at being offered a part so old. When he did the math in his head it wasn’t so far off. Among movie people Clark’s age she was a joke, a relic still walking and talking like something at Disneyland. They confused her generation with that of Myrna Loy, when in fact she was a well-preserved fifty-four, still capable of vamping as he could see. “Then perhaps you’d like to go up to your room, darling,” she said. “There are all sorts of messages Conchita and I have been writing down for you. You must be lending your friends money again, though I
beg
you not to. As Mr. Wentworth was very amusingly telling me, all Hollywood is going on lean-mean rations. So your friends must suffer along with the rest of us.”

As he made his way up the stairs, he heard her continuing,
in that breathless accentless onrushing voice she had been taught, “Now they have these terribly high hopes for this thing called
Ghostbusters
but from all that
I
hear it’s just another brawl with those
Saturday Night Live
juveniles, who become utterly
charmless
on the big screen.”

In his room Clark looked out the window at the lights of Los Angeles receding in their checkerboard from West Hollywood south to Inglewood and the clump of lit skyscrapers downtown and beyond to a thin dissolve of oceanic blackness under a sky that didn’t look like a sky, it was so full of reflected light the stars were drowned, rubbed out, but for the multicolor winking planes slanting in to the airport. He remembered how in Delaware in the fall the stars got bigger after first frost, big as blue plums above the defoliating trees, but those days were rubbed out, too. School days, Golden Rule days. He felt hungry but couldn’t think of any food that wouldn’t make him sicker. He looked over the messages but Mom was right, it was all people who wanted something, nobody who had anything to give him. The eleven o’clock news disgusted and saddened him, especially the hungry healthy way the two talking heads gobbled it off the TelePrompTers and spat it out, their mouths moving like busy little parasites attached to their faces. The world as entertainer fell flat some days. He used his room as a place to come in the morning to change clothes. He hadn’t slept here for two nights. One night he had spent in a girl’s bedroom with her mother and her boyfriend grinding away right on the other side of the wall, and the next he had crashed over in Simi somewhere with some guys he had picked up at The Ginger Man.

In the drawer of his bedside table he found a half-smoked joint and a porno video he had been watching and got bored with. He put the roach in his mouth and lit it and put the video
in the VCR and clicked it to play. He turned off all the lights so there was just the red glow moving back and forth to his lips and the rectangular jiggling glow of the TV screen and the lights of Los Angeles at his side like those of a giant runway receding on a screaming takeoff. The pot began to mollify his sense of recent injury and the action on the video switched from the mistress of the mansion doing it with two African-American burglars who had bound and blindfolded her to belowstairs, where the maid and the young long-haired butler were getting it on. The brunette maid in her black-and-white mini maid’s uniform, which came off to reveal red garters, was lithe and nimble-tongued and seemed to be getting into it, her ass perched up on the hard kitchen counter, having her brunette pussy eaten out. She kept on her little lace cap and lace choker. She reminded him of someone, the quick avid elastic way she moved and flared her nostrils in supposed ecstasy and rolled her eyes back into her skull so mostly white showed. His mother. His mother when young, before he was born, when her hair was dark. This supposed French maid even had an upper lip like Mom, puffed up and like a bent pillow, so when the camera came in close on her tipped-back face while her pussy was being eaten its flesh formed two sides with the lower lip of a black triangle so full of saliva a momentary bubble formed that you could see the camera lights reflected in. Of course it wasn’t his mother but it could have been twenty-five years ago. When she was pregnant with him: the thought made him queasy.