John Shirley - Wetbones (10 page)

Jeff was silent for a minute or two. Then he said,

"I did some time when I was a kid too . . ."

Prentice nodded. His eyes had settled on Jeff's carphone. "Can I use your phone?"

"Sure. It's got kind of a crackly signal, but go for it, man."

"Thanks." Prentice took the phone off the cellular unit just under the dashboard and punched his agent's number.

Buddy kept him on hold for five minutes, but Prentice had nothing else to do as the car crawled toward the exit still a quarter mile away. Prentice glanced at Jeff . . .

And was surprised, and then not so surprised, to see that Jeff was crying. Silently crying; his bony cheeks coursing with tears. Thinking about his brother. Prentice looked away, gazed at the tract homes and
Denny's
restaurants and
Macdonalds
and
Burger Kings,
their toylike roofs visible down below the guard rail of the freeway. He tried to give Jeff some privacy, that way.

Finally he got Buddy on the line, shouting through the brassy pipe of the speaker phone. Buddy didn't palter with amenities. "Hey, Tom. How ya doin'. Say, I spoke to Athwright and he says he's giving your project 'serious consideration'. I don't know what that means except it's better than 'don't waste my time with that kind of shit' which is what he said about the last guy I sent over. But there's no guarantees. You know what you should do, if you want a break, dontcha? I mean, studios don't buy treatments much, they don't commission scripts too often anymore, nowdays they like to see that finished script. So they can make you rewrite it ten thousand times. But you know what I mean - a spec script, man -"

"Hey, I'm working on that." Which was a lie. Prentice had started half a dozen scripts but nothing came together in his head. It was like a locomotive with no steam pressure, it just wouldn't go, and he told himself
If I get the money for a commission I'll be motivated, I'll be financially relieved too, that'll loosen up the inspiration . . . I need the money first
 . . . Some part of himself knowing he was making excuses. "But listen Buddy, it's still possible to get some money out front for, you know, people with a track record. I had a couple of misfires but I proved I can do it, I'm a Player, man, and if we act as if I'm not a Player then
they
'll think I'm not."

"Look - a spec script gets you a
lot more money
. That's the bottom line."

"Like I said, I'm working on it. But that could take months. And in the meantime I need an advance. I got bills to pay."

"Well - I'm working on that. So. How ya doin', holdin' up okay? About Amy I mean. You feel okay?"

"Yeah I'm okay - uh -"

"Good, great, I'll call you if anything firms up, Okay? Ciao -"

"Buddy! Take a breath, pull your finger back from that button for one second. Listen - I'm not just whining here. I need some work." He was aware, on some level, that he was saying this partly for Jeff's benefit. In the hopes that Jeff would pull some strings somewhere. Jeff was connected. "I mean: I really need work. Starting with an advance."

A moment of static. Some of Buddy's reply lost in interference. " - think, you're not? I tell you what - just to pay some bills - I do have something. You willing to do a slasher movie? This is not Guild work, you

understand, it's kind of under the board, you'd get maybe ten grand -"

"Are you serious?"

"I know it's piddly shit but hey if you need cash that badly, well . . . just to fill in, you could do it and forget about it. Do it under a pseudonym. It's going right to video - it's a made-for-video slasher film, see. It's called
Class Cut-Up
."

"Cute." Prentice thought about it for about five seconds. Decided he'd rather go back to bartending. But he didn't want to fling the one effort Buddy had made for him back in the guy's face . . . "Let me sleep on that, okay, Buddy? And if anything else comes up"

"I'll get back to you. I got another call here -"

"Take it. Ciao."

Prentice hung up the phone. It seemed he was going to be twisting slowly in the wind of Arthwright's whim.

Anyway, they'd reached the exit. That was a start.

But when they drove down onto the surface street, major street repairs were going on, complete with ear battering jackhammers and backhoes jetting clouds of blue smoke. The traffic down here was even worse.

Near Malibu, California

Mitch was at the bottom of a swimming pool. An old concrete swimming pool filled with water so green it was almost black.

For some reason, he could breathe in here, under water.

Something big was shaking and quivering over in that green obsidian corner. The big shaking thing was coming closer to him now. A cloud of wiggling things.
Worms
.

Wriggling worms, glinting in the faint light from above. Closing around him. When he inhaled, he sucked them wriggling into his throat, trickling and slithering into his bronchial tubes, squirming with a kind of funnybone pain inside his lungs . . .

Worms in his lungs!

He thrashed about, trying to gag them up.

He fell off the bed with a bruising thump. Felt the hardwood floor under his hands. A swatch of bedclothes against his cheek. He'd been dreaming. In bed. The hospital. He was . . .

. . . not in the hospital, he saw, now, as he got painfully onto his knees.

He was raw with pain; grinding his teeth with the punishment that came every time he moved. As he looked around.

It was a room he'd never seen before. It was dark, and the colours of the room seemed to shift one into another when he didn't look directly at them. Old wallpaper, peeling in the comer; a pattern of hook-shapes alternating with drooping rosebuds. Could be this was where the hallucination of the worms had come from; a pattern in the wallpaper.

He had a sense, though, for a fleeting moment, that the cloud of wrigglers was there, just out of his line of sight, poised and sensitive to him. Then he shook himself, and the hallucination was gone.

The room had an old brass bed. A four poster, with scratch marks around their metal posts, near the mattress. There was one door.

He moved painfully to the door. He had laughed at old men, who moved the way he moved.
I won't laugh anymore
, he prayed,
if that's what this punishment's for
. He tried the brass knob of the old-fashioned darkwood

door. Locked in two places; at the old skeleton-key lock and, he could feel, when he rattled the door, that there was a padlock on the outside, high up on the door.

He felt like crying, but he was incapable of it. It would take too much strength to cry. He took a deep breath. Told himself, it's okay, it's all right.

He sniffed the air. There was a cloying smell; a rotting flower stink. As if the rosebuds in the wallpaper were rotting.

There was also - somehow a function of the cloying stink of rotting petals - laughter, from somewhere; sticky, shrivelled laughter, and foreign-sounding music, sort of Arab and sort of Oriental and sort of American. Played on what sounded like a malfunctioning stereo.

The noise came through the room's single window. A big bay window all veiny with shadows and fragmented with light. It made him think of a biology class where he'd dissected a lizard and the teacher had him hold its bellyskin up to the light and you could see all the veins picked out in a rosy glow . . .

Roses. Big fat ones, he saw, as he hobbled up to the window. He'd never seen roses this big before. And the veiny shadows were made by thick rose vines, some as big around as his wrist, and all dinosaur-spiny with large thorns.

The window was nailed shut.

Bending to peer through a clear patch of window glass - and through a little rosebush cave of green and red - he could see, below, people moving twitchily across a twilit terrace strewn with trash. Most of them walked alone. Others stood singly in the shadows at the edge of the terrace. There was a big stone barbecue glowing with coals; on the grill were steaks, but they'd been allowed to curl and blacken. No one seemed to be

eating. A woman moved erratically onto the flagstones, then stopped in the middle of the terrace, hunched over a little, hugging herself. Her shoulders began to shake. The others seemed to ignore her. Something fell from her hands: a large green wine bottle. It broke on the stones, splashing red wine and shards of green bottleglass. Then the woman collapsed, failing almost straight down, as if someone had kicked her knees from behind. She lay in a huddle. Still no one moved to help her, though a couple of people shuffled by, within a few feet of her. They didn't even look over at her.

After a few moments, the Handy Man came out onto the terrace, bent down, put his hands under her armpits, hoisted her upright. Strong guy for being so small. She got her footing, and he led her away. She seemed perfectly sure-footed now. (What was that music? Where was it from?)

The Handy Man, Mitch thought. The little dude from the hospital. Recognition brought back some memories, just flashes, images from a badly edited video: Darkness parting long enough to see out the window of a car, driving through a gate that rolled automatically aside. A black security guard holding a couple of snarling dogs back by their collars. A circular driveway. A big house. A wheelchair. The smell of roses and stale liquor. Another, smaller house. An old stone horse trough, and a stone jockey with a rusty iron ring in his hand. The hulk of a Mercedes, rusting on blocks in an overgrown yard to one side of the little house. Voices. Sobbing laughter. Darkness closing again.

The gate. Remembering the gate again he saw it was black metal, ornate along the top, with - painted in gold leaf - crossed skeleton keys as the centerpiece of the scrollwork.

Double keys. The Doublekey Ranch.

Down below, the music was suddenly switched off. A few seconds of silence, then raucous, jeering laughter. Then more silence. Then the sound of a dog barking. The dog yelped - and made a series of terrified, excruciating high pitched yips, and then that was silenced, too.

There were other voices, from the hall. A low, deep voice, whose resonance Mitch knew before he recognized the voice itself It was the More Man. Mitch moved as fast as he could bear to, crossed the room, pressed an ear to the door. "This one doesn't party, we cultivate him in-board. Give him a . . ."

Give him what? Something inaudible. Had it been "bedpan"?

The More Man went on, "In a month or two he . . ." Inaudible. But knowing with a sinking, plunging certainty, that the More Man was talking about him, about Mitch. "No, no, he's not going to be . . ." Couldn't hear it. ". . . doesn't matter too much but he could surprise us. Pair him with the . . ."
Couldn't hear
. A murmur of someone, maybe the Handy Man, replying to the More Man. And then the More Man's voice: ". . . unless that asshole Ephram comes back . . ." Lost. The sound lost. Then: ''. . . won't be looking for him, there's no need to -" He broke off speaking, suddenly.

He was aware of Mitch listening. Mitch backed away from the door.

Oh no oh no, said a scared little kid in Mitch's head. Just some part of Mitch himself going: Oh no, oh no, oh no.

Mitch told the little kid,
It's okay, I'm getting out of here. I'll get out
. But it was exactly like trying to comfort

a small child when the house is burning down around him. The kid was smart enough to know . . .

The More Man had lied, Mitch knew, with magnifying glass lucidity. The More Man had lied always and all along, about trading the body-play time for favours in the music business, for being here a little while and then going free.

Free? There was no way he was ever going to let Mitch go, never, not ever . . .

It was dark outside, when Mitch woke up again. He didn't remember lying down, or going to sleep.

Someone was at the door. He could hear them messing with the locks. He thought of waiting by the door, rushing whoever it was, knocking them down, sprinting for the stairs.

But just sitting up hurt like a bitch.

If raw hamburger could feel, he thought, it'd feel like this. I did this to myself, Mitch thought, looking at his arms. I cut myself.

He had to tell that to himself, again and again, to be able to think about it at all. It just didn't seem real.

The door opened, and the Handy Man came in, carrying a plastic tray holding a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a sponge, bandages.

Bandy-legged and puppet-faced, the Handy Man. Smelling of hot dog grease and creosote. He ignored Mitch's rasped questions, whistling rather loudly and tunelessly as if to blot up anything Mitch said, and lay him back on the bed, bathing his wounds with foaming hydrogen peroxide. He smiled as, with nail-less hands, he bandaged Mitch, and smiled as he gathered up his supplies and left. "See you in the hot tub," the Handy Man said.

He didn't lock the door behind him. Mitch stared at the door, slightly ajar, hope rising like a feeble dog in his chest, and then the More Man came walking in, and the dog died.

"Hi Sam," Mitch said. Trying.

"Howdy Mitch," the More Man said. Mitch always thought of Sam Denver as the More Man. That's what the kids called him, on the street. The More Man was carrying a wooden tray containing a bowl of sprouts, wheatgrass and tomatoes. A few grainy looking vitamins lying beside the ceramic bowl. A wooden fork. A ceramic cup of what was probably carrot juice.

The More Man was a tanned, muscular man wearing a white linen jacket over a blazingly colourful tie-dyed t-shirt. Linen pants, white canvas shoes, no socks. He had a slight suggestion of wattles, a lot of lines around his foggy blue eyes, his collar-length, swept back blond hair receding a little. But he seemed to move about on a wave of youthful energy.

Mitch knew the More Man wasn't armed and he knew that didn't matter.

"Wheatgrass, Mitch," the More Man said, in his boyish, hearty voice. "Wheatgrass!" There was a sense of distraction about the voice as if the speaker was not really listening to himself, despite the heartiness. ''Wheatgrass cleanses the blood, rebuilds the cells, revitalizes the chakras, energizes and feeds! Not too much, just enough, with a little alfalfa, some nice tomatoes. My dear Lord, Mitch, you're going to be shakin' the bacon and dancin' on air in no time!"