Shallow Graves (10 page)

He said, “No, not at all.”

“I brought you some dessert.”

“Dessert?”

“I remember you liked dessert. The cake at Marge’s? When you picked me up? On Monday?” Her eyebrows raised with every sentence.

“I remember, yeah.”

Picked her up?

“Terrible cake,” he added.

“Could’ve warned you. My desserts aren’t terrible.”

She unloaded the bag. Carefully wrapped in foil was a small package. Next came a thermos, two mugs, a jar of honey.

“Tea. Herbal tea. Rosehips and lemon grass. It’s very relaxing.” She opened the foil. “And brownies.”

“Ah, brownies.” Pellam looked at them closely.
Then he grinned. “Wait. Are those . . . ? They aren’t really, are they?”

“Uh-huh. They’re a little bitter but, hey, so’s peyote, right? They’re worth it, though. Man, I’ll tell you . . . It’s not as strong as a Thai stick, but then again you won’t wake up with a cough. You have a plate?”

He dug into the cabinet. “Plastic.”

“Shame on you. Disposable? What’d nature ever do to you?” Janine cut the brownies—she’d also brought a knife. He tried one. It tasted bitter and left bits of soggy vegetation in his mouth. The tea was awful but you needed it to wash the grass down.

“Honey?” She held up a jar.

“No.” He sipped the weed water. He glanced at the bottle of whisky. Was tempted. But he figured that Janine might feel that making liquor was an unnatural thing to do to plants.

“Really great,” he said. She’d already finished her piece of brownie. He chewed down the rest of his.

She looked at what he was typing. “You mind?” She pulled it forward and read intently. After a few minutes she gave another of her breathy, surprised laughs. “This is fantastic. It’s like poetry. Is this the way they write scripts?”

“It’s the way I write scripts.”

“I didn’t know you were a writer.”

“I write scripts that nobody reads, just like . . .” He stopped himself. He was going to say,
the way you sell houses that nobody buys.
Good line, wrong woman. “. . . everybody else in Hollywood.”

“I hear you. But aren’t you, like, fired?”

“It’s a crazy business out there,” he said without explaining further.

She read a few more portions. “Damn, Pellam. Poetry.”

“The movie’s good but it could be a lot better. Also, Guild scale for script doctoring is obscenely high.”

“Know what it reminds me of?”

Renoir? Fellini? David Lynch?

Pellam asked, “Who?”

“Kahlil Gibran.”

What?
He tried to smile. Wasn’t he that romance poet? Pellam hadn’t read him but he believed that they used his verses in Hallmark cards.

She looked at him wide-eyed. “I really, really mean that.”

“Well, thanks.”

“The descriptions are fantastic.”

He explained, “I think the setting in a film is another lead character. Setting a scene one place instead of another will produce a totally different movie. Like casting Denzel Washington in a lead versus Wesley Snipes. Same lines, same direction, but a different film.”

Kahlil Gibran?

“You write like this, why’re you just a location scout?”

“Just?”

“You know what I mean.”

He did know what she meant. “I like traveling around. I don’t like meetings. I don’t like California. I don’t own a suit—”

“That sounds like you’re reciting catechism.”

“In nomine Zanuck, et Goldwyn, et spiritus Warner.”

“Ha. There a message in this movie?”

“The advertising department will say it’s about betrayal and passion. Mostly, it’s a love story, I guess.”

She squinted and licked honey off her reddish finger. “You guess?”

“Love’s a funny thing to pin down.” Pellam broke off another piece of brownie. No buzz, no tiny people stuffing cotton in the crevices of his brain. He was disappointed.

She was surveying the inside of the camper again. She opened drawers and nodded. “You don’t mind, do you?” Fully prepared to keep going, he sensed, if he’d said that he did. But then she came to a cabinet and opened it. Started to pull out a couple of battered scrapbooks.

He was up fast and lifted them, gently and laughing, out of her hands.

“Oops, sorry,” she said, “I’m being nosey, huh?”

Pellam smiled and put the books away.

She looked at him for a moment. “You know, I was thinking about this today. You seem awfully familiar. There’s something about you. . . . Have I read anything about you?”

“Me?”

Janine shook her head. “Maybe,” she said seriously, “it was in a former life.”

He’d heard this one before.

Sometimes they said, “You and me, I think we’re soul mates.”

Sometimes they just said point-blank, “Can I come with you in the camper?”

Sometimes they never said anything but looked at him with hungry, hurting eyes. That was the hardest.

Pellam said, “Past lives, huh? Maybe you were a pioneer woman and I was a cowboy.” He told her the Wild Bill Hickok story.

“Holy shit, that’s terrific, Pellam, a gunslinger.”

“His name—I always have to set this straight—was James Butler Hickok. Not William.” He blinked and looked at the brownie. It seemed to be floating in the air. He broke off another piece and ate it. “Anyway, he was a . . .” His mind stopped working for a moment. He retrieved the end of his sentence. “. . . relative. I mean, an ancestor.”

Janine’s eyes danced with enthusiasm. She maneuvered her taut hips out of the booth and stood up. Where was she going? There weren’t many options in the camper. She asked, “He was the one with the Wild West show? With Annie Oakley?”

“No, no, no—that was
Buffalo
Bill. William Cody.
Wild
Bill was a gunfighter. Fast draw and all that. Just like in the movies. Buffalo Bill hired him for a while to be in the show but he wasn’t a very good entertainer. He was good at shooting people. That was about it. So maybe you knew Wild Bill in a former life.”

“Oh, but your former lives aren’t the same as your ancestors. But maybe you were a sheriff that Wild Bill killed and you came back—”

“He didn’t kill sheriffs. He was a scout and a federal marshal.”

“Okay, then an Indian warrior he killed. Or a cattle rustler. Maybe I was a squaw. And we’ve met a couple of times in the past . . .”

Pellam lost this train of thought completely. She had disappeared into the back of the camper. He heard her voice, muffled. “This is very comfortable.” Pellam heard the bedside light click on. “Cozy, you know.”

“I guess.” He was moving unsteadily toward her. He said, “Maybe I was the lover of the wife of the cattle rustler. . . .” Pellam stopped speaking.

Janine was lounging back. Pellam found he was staring at her breasts. She noticed his eyes and he said quickly, “Nice pin. You make it?” He pointed to a round moon face necklace made of sterling silver. It had a coy feminine face.

She leaned forward and held it out to him. He tried to focus on it. “It’s a bestseller at my store.” Then she frowned.

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, here I bring you brownies and tea, and you don’t even ask me to get comfortable.”

He clicked the bedside light out. The moonlight came in through the blinds and the cold illumination was almost as bright as the lamp. “Sorry. What can I do to make amends?”

“You can start by helping me off with my boots.”

She lifted her leg, and he took her calf, taut in the tight denim, in his left hand and gripped the heel of her boot. He looked down.

They were cowboy boots.

“
HOW MANY YOU
want?” Billy asked the boy.

Before he could answer, Bobby said, “Have four.”

“What’s your name again?” Billy asked.

“Ned. And sure, I’ll have four.”

The pancake somersaulted through the air like the bone in the movie
2001,
the bone that became a space station. What the pancake became, after Bobby maneuvered the plasticized Grand Union paper plate underneath it, adjusting for the trajectory, was just more of the boy’s breakfast—flapjacks, sausage, eggs and buttered toast.

“That was, you know, totally fresh,” the boy said, his eyes whipping up and down, replaying the flip. Billy nodded toward his brother and said, “Nobody flips ’em like Bobby.”

Another flip. Ned, a strapping high school senior, was having five pancakes, it turned out, not four.

Bobby looked shy and pleased about the good review of his talent. He didn’t say anything. He wiped his hands on his Kiwanis-supplied apron.

Billy and Bobby were twins. They were about the same size as the boy, a little under six feet and maybe a hundred eighty pounds. But less of them was muscle
than in the kid. They were thirty-five. They wore their dark hair similarly, Carnaby look: with long bangs. A fringe came over their ears in a slight curl. They shampooed with coal tar soap and always had a medicinal smell about them. Today, they wore brown. Bobby had on a white shirt because he’d volunteered to cook at the Kiwanis Breakfast. Billy, just hanging around and helping whoever needed help, wore a beige short-sleeved shirt printed with designs that looked like chain links.

“Whatsa time?” he asked the boy, who looked at a big, gleaming watch (birthday present, Billy thought).

“Almost eleven.”

“Near quitting time for us,” Bobby said. He scanned the site of the breakfast—the basement of the First Presbyterian Church of Cleary—and motioned to a nearby paper-tablecloth-covered card table. “Why don’t you sit over there. We’ll join you.”

“Well, sure,” Ned said, turning his round, red-scrubbed face to where they pointed.

Bobby made himself and his brother plates of pancakes and sausage, then plastered the stacks with smears of Parkay. He added a couple extra sausages to his and poured syrup on both plates.

He called across the room to Earl Gibson, the manager of Cleary Bank & Trust and president of the Kiwanis, and asked if it was okay for them to quit and have something to eat. And Earl came by, pumped their damp hands and said, “You bet.” Then he thanked them both for doing such a good job. “Whatsyer secret, Robert?”

Bobby winked at the boy and said, “What it is, they get aerated when I send ’em up.”

“He makes ’em good, Mr. Gibson,” Ned told Earl.

Billy said, “Aunt Gee-mima, watch yo black butt. My bro Bobby’s in town.”

They all laughed and the twins sat down with the boy.

The twins loved to volunteer. They were Little League coaches and they worked regularly at the Cleary Boys’ Club and the Future Farmers of America. Their favorite volunteering was for this, the Fall Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast, and the Jay-Cees summer barbecue and, though they weren’t married and had no children, the PTA’s regular potluck suppers (nothing beat the combo of food and volunteer work).

Ned was one of those teenagers that could talk easily with adults, especially adults like the twins, who knew sports and weren’t too geekish to tell an occasional Polack joke or one about girls’ periods or boobs. The boy’s rambling monologue was up and running by the time Billy and Bobby focused on it.

“Oh, man, I heard it was like totally awesome. Sid, he’s kinduva dweeb but, you know, he can be okay sometimes, he was driving by and seen the cloud.”

“Cloud?” Billy asked, eating a huge mouthful of pancakes.

“Yeah. Of smoke. He goes, ‘It was totally black.’ I thought he was a hatter, man, really. Like I go, ‘Excuse me, I mean, ex
cuse
me, but gas doesn’t burn black.’ But then I figured it must’ve been tires. You hear about that illegal dump over in Jersey? They had like a million tires there and they caught fire only nobody could put it out.”

“Missed that,” Bobby said. He frowned. “Did you hear about that?”

Billy said, “Didn’t hear about it.”

Ned continued. “So what it is I went by the park. Stan was there and he wouldn’t let us get too close. I mean, the body was gone and everything but the car—you should’ve seen it. Totally nuked. Awesome!”

Bobby said, “I didn’t hear about any car, what happened?”

Ned said, “The guy was freebasing or doing crack. And, man, it went up like an M80. Like what
is
free-basing?”

Bobby shrugged and finished his pancakes. He took half of one off his brother’s plate. “I don’t know.”

“What happened to the dude who was driving?” Bobby asked.

Ned said, “Torched. Like this sausage.” He grinned and held it up on a white plastic fork. He put the whole link in his mouth and chewed slowly.

“He was the guy from the movie company, right?”

Ned said, “Yeah, I guess that screws up the chance of ’em making a movie in Cleary. The other one’s still here, though. His buddy.”

Billy said, “I’d like to be in a movie.”

Ned said, “Yeah, both you guys together! I don’t think I ever saw twins in a movie.” He wiped up syrup with his finger and licked it off slowly. “I think it’d be totally fresh to be in a movie. Only, you know what bothers me?”

“No telling.”

“Well, think about it. In a love scene, okay? Some guy’s kissing Sharon Stone or Kim Basinger or some fox, he’s gotta have a hard-on, don’t you think?”

Bobby said, “You’d think.”

“Man, that’d be totally embarrassing. I’d try to
think about making a play at second or something but I bet I’d still get a hard-on. Oh, man, what if I
came
while I was kissing her, right in front of everybody? God, I’d die.”

The twins glanced at each other. Neither of them looked like they’d die under those circumstances.

Billy said, “I think it would’ve been fun, have a movie made here. Then go out to the mall, to the multiplex over in Osborne, and see Main Street up there on the screen.”

Ned said, “Oh, you know what’d be great? When they kiss on screen, you know, the girl’s gotta kiss you whether she thinks you’re a dweeb or not. It’s like in the script, so what I’d do is, I’m holding her and the director says, ‘Roll it’—”

“ ‘Action,’ ” Bobby offered.

“Yeah, right, ‘Action,’ and what I’d do is I’d tongue her so fast, bang, just like that! And she’d have to put up with it. She’d have to look like she enjoyed it.”