Scar Flowers (9 page)

The picnic benches were empty, and the steam-table trays had been taken away. A shadow had crept under the awning, almost made it to his table. Twenty minutes had passed.

Nadia was gone.

Friday, June 2, 7:15 p.m. Day 10 of shooting.

Simon hunched over his laptop in the trailer. The living space was five paces long, not including the
bed. Props and sketches hung overhead—a gun, a rubber monster mask, blueprints of the set—and the closet groaned with papers and costume samples. Coffee from his evening work sessions stained the buff-colored carpet and blond cabinets, and a limp filter full of soaked black grounds perched on the trash can.

He should be marking out tomorrow’s shots. Instead he replayed this afternoon’s encounter with Nadia, how he had slipped into another world just like wading into the ocean. Had he wanted to go under, as she had said, or had he just wanted to follow her wherever she led? Someplace warm and deep, lined with her voice.

Why would a fight choreographer know hypnosis? She had certainly made enemies quickly. John the second-unit director still insisted that she did not know what she was doing. But her work with Karen and Victor had been good, though that scene had not been technically demanding.

Simon
wrote a list on a yellow legal pad—
Paul Jonas, fight choreography, martial arts, ballet teacher, hypnosis
—then put a question mark after Paul’s name.

The phone rang.

“Someone tried to get on the lot to see you,” said Gunnar. “Security has him. He said he was a packer, but they didn’t find any weapons. Should we get rid of him?”

Simon paused the video he had been running on his laptop. “Tom Kazaan’s here? He’s a good friend of mine
. Let him in. Tell security to treat him like a suit, not a thief.”
No weapons found—hoorah for them.

Ten minutes later
, Gunnar knocked on the door. With him was a dark-skinned man in black motorcycle leathers who wore his waist-length hair in thick dreadlocks, tied back from his face with a torn strip of denim. A curved yellow bit of ivory hung from a thong around his neck, and he carried a plastic garbage bag tucked under his arm.

“Hey, Cob
b.” The giant grinned at Simon, showing a gap at the edge of his smile where a tooth was missing (“Grizzly bear swapped me his claw for it,” was his favorite explanation). Kazaan was almost as wide as he was tall; beside him, Gunnar looked frail.

“Tom! What’re you doing here? You ridin’ that old pan
-head?”

“Yep. Put my hog on the
Seattle ferry and took a run down I-5.”

“Cob
b?” Gunnar put his cell phone away.

“Gunnar, this is Tom Kazaan, my old friend from
Alaska.”

The first assistant director put away his phone to shake Tom’s hand.

“Cobbler and I go way back, to high-school days.” Tom spoke with what he referred to as an indigenous lilt, a cadence similar to a Canadian accent. “He was the prettiest shoe-gazing Goth boy you ever saw, right down to the eyeliner. When he wasn’t puking his way through summers on the slime line at the cannery, he was stickin’ a camera in everyone’s face.”

“Let’s not talk about what we used to call you.” Simon grinned as he held the trailer door open for his guest to enter.

“Don’t make no difference to me. I still answer to Packer.” The trailer groaned as Tom climbed the stairs.

“
Six a.m. call tomorrow,” said Simon to Gunnar. “Can you also make sure someone checks the suspension on this trailer? After lunch.”

By the time he closed the door, Tom had seated himself on the
bed, the only space large enough for him.

“Good to see you,” said Simon and clasped
his friend’s hand for a moment in an arm-wrestling grip. “I dunno why you stay up north in that narrow-minded burg.”

Tom’s leathers creaked as he brushed dust from his sleeves. Smudges of windborne grit dusted his face. “You tend to forget the good times. And you could call my greeting here a bit narrow-minded. They threatened a body-cavity search but didn’t make good on it.”

“I get the same thing unless I’m holding my megaphone on the set.” Simon crouched to pull two beers from the refrigerator. He handed one over and sat at the table, where Tom had set the garbage bag. “What’s it been, since Christmas that I saw you? I thought you said only losers and poseurs would be caught dead in L.A.”

“
You said that. I’m gonna go crabbing in the Bering this winter, but until then I’m headed back up to Frisco for a while. See the sights.”

“What sights? Another one of your sailors?”

“A strapping Aleut brave. Met him fishing for halibut. A one hundred-percent seafaring man, down to the anchor tattooed on his ass.” Tom took a long drink and surveyed the inside of the trailer. “You must be working hard, ’cause you look like shit. You a big Hollywood asshole yet?”

“What’d you bring me?” asked Simon.

“Open it.” Tom drank while Simon ripped the strapping tape off the plastic garbage bag and pulled it open. “Your folks are freakin’ out since they couldn’t get ahold of you on your birthday last month. Your Ma knew I was coming down, so I toted this for her. Your Métis women are bullies; she made me trap porcupines last fall so she could make this for you.”

“Thanks, man.
Hollywood’s a long way south of SF.”

From Eva? He pulled a bundle wrapped in tissue paper out of the box. It was a jacket with hand-cut
fringe and porcupine quillwork shields at the shoulders and the middle of the yoke in back. Deerskin, a rich tan, thick but soft. The lower edge of the garment was untrimmed hide, and the animal’s tail hung down in the back.

His mother had started working leather back when she and his father separated. Simon lived with his father in the white part of town then, except for the occasional weekend or summer; it was Henry and Eva Mercer’s amicable agreement when they stopped living together. His parents never used the words “separated” or “divorced,” and Simon found out a few years ago that they were still married. Probably because his mother, in spite of everything she was told, feared
that she would be sent back home to British Columbia otherwise. Neither one had so much as admitted to dating anyone until he and his brother were in college—the story was that they were just living apart.

During his visit to her cabin one fall weekend when he was in grade school, Eva used a sharpened pumice stone from the drugstore to
scrape the hides, fly-studded and stinking, that her Aleut friends brought her. A curing skin, twisted and weighted with a stone, always hung from a tree branch in her front yard or lay tacked to a hide stretcher on the patio. Often she sat by the cast iron stove stitching hand-dyed quill beads.

The jacket draped heavy in his hands, pungent with the smell of
woodsmoke and new hide. Like something alive. Nothing could be more wrong for him to wear here, in this life he had made. “The white world is all me-me-me,” Eva’s voice chided him. “It will eat you if you let it.” He set the jacket down on the kitchen table, smoothed the collar.

The last time he
went home to Skagway, the town struck him as small and gray, the restored turn-of-the-century one-story buildings a wan imitation of a movie set. The people he grew up with had not known what to say to him, nor he to them.

Arrogant
: that was what they thought. They were right. All he had ever wanted was to escape that dead-end world.

“This is my mother’s way of reminding me
I’m supposed to make a blockbuster version of
The Trail of Tears
,” said Simon. “Now that I’m a big Hollywood asshole.” He folded the coat back into the box and pushed it under the table with his foot.

“
‘Do what thou wilt shall be the extent of the law.’ Uncle Aleister Crowley.” Tom drained his beer. “I’m not here to change your mind. Just makin’ a delivery.”

“I know.” Simon looked out the window. “I’m making the film I want to make right now. I always do.”

“That why you stopped answering your phone?”

Simon turned the beer bottle so the label faced h
im. Each drink was a crapshoot: would this be the one that triggered a sick-ness in his blood? Most relatives on his mother’s side were alcoholics.
His uncles and cousins could make up the cast of a
just say no
after-school special: car wrecks, broken marriages, trouble with the law. His brother Sean’s strategy was to never touch a drop, to never take the chance.

A patch of pink light bounced in through the window and slid up the wall. Simon peered through the blinds at two workmen carrying a mirror that had caught the sunset.

Tom pulled his head to one side and then pushed it in the opposite direction until
his vertebrae popped. He sat forward and nodded at Simon’s computer, paused on the blurred image of a blond woman’s profile. “That what you’re workin’ on?”

“I’m trying to figure out
how to shoot this bit. So I took some video today at rehearsal.” Simon resumed the playback, and the foreground image resolved into Karen, with Nadia and Victor in the background. Nadia’s mouth moved, but the sound was turned off. She drew her index finger under Victor’s nose, then nodded. As Nadia spoke, the actor reached up to grab her wrist, and she jabbed the fingers of her free hand at his throat so that his chin tilted up toward the ceiling. The picture tilted and bobbed.

“You
’re no cameraman,” said Tom. “Is that your leading lady? The redhead?”

The redhead. The one with the elegant wardrobe and scant film
resume. No way in hell was she Paul Jonas’s girlfriend.

“No,” said Simon. “The blonde. Karen.” He turned off the video and opened a
leather pouch at his belt to press a button, and the screen filled with an image of the trailer’s interior. Simon turned to look at his friend, and the screen displayed a tracking shot of cupboards and closets that stopped on Tom’s face.

Tom squinted at his own features staring back at him from the computer. “What the hell you doin’?” he asked. “Filming me?”

Simon took his baseball cap off and unhooked one end of a thin, clear plastic tube from behind his ear. The other end disap-peared into his hair and down the back of his neck, into his shirt.

“Fiber optics.
People are more relaxed when I’m not stickin’ a camera in their faces.” He pulled a digital camera from the pouch at his belt. The other end of the plastic tube was hooked to it. “The best stories are happening off-camera on this shoot, which means there’s something I’m not doing right. Maybe this will help me figure it out.”

“You can’t spy on people, Cob
b. Bad juju. They’ll end up with power over you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s big Indian wisdom. For another beer, I’ll tell you.”

“More Tlingit bullshit, you mean.” Simon reached into the refrigerator and passed a bottle to Tom. “I can’t find the missing element to bring this film together. It’s here somewhere, but it’s not showing up onscreen. I’ll do what I have to to find it. Even spy.”

People might betray trust, but the camera did not lie.
Not often enough, anyway.

“You sure your unknown element doesn’t have red hair? Or blond?”

Simon turned his bottle cap on its back on the table and spun it. “You remember that?” he asked. “The unknown element?”

“I remember
you left Skagway looking for it. You made a speech to me and all. After you got caught filming Moira Pearson through her bedroom window.”

Simon snorted and peeled the label off his bottle of beer.

“So how long have you known this sailor?” he asked. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but you’ve never left home for anyone before.”

“This one’s got me, Cob
b. Kept sayin’ he was straight. Two months after he takes off for Cali, he sends me a letter, and here I am. Still don’t know if he’ll talk to me when I find him. Mama always said that when you want something, the best offer-ing to make the universe is harmony. Just call me Johnny Rainbowseed.”

“I thought you learned to stop chasing guys who don’t play for your team.”

“You flatter yourself. I like ’em better looking than you.” He belched and sat up, with a creak and jingle from his jacket. “Everyone’s a free agent when it comes to playin’ ball. I played for your team once.”

“When was this?”

“High school. Gloria Standing Bear. Tolo night, she got me drunk on her daddy’s whiskey.”

“You never said. No shit?”

“Shit. Why would I have said?”

Simon tilted his chair back and propped his feet against the table. “You still raise hell at the Black Gull with the
Juneau II
crew?” he asked.

“Every chance I get.”

“Does your mama still let—”

“I can still kick your ass, white boy. Don’t forget that.”

“Don’t let my family hear you call me that.”

“
I’m a queer black Indian from the rez. I can call you anything, you white imperialist motherfucker.”

Simon laughed and
tipped his head back to take another draught.

“
What’s your excuse?” said Tom. “You still haven’t said why you look like last week’s bait.”