The Edge of the Gulf (25 page)
Read The Edge of the Gulf Online
Authors: Hadley Hury
Libby would keep the door open as much as possible.
The woman in the room across the hall from Charlie’s had improved sufficiently to be moved off the intensive care floor at noon.
The new admission, a surprisingly healthy-looking man of forty, would lie as quietly as he could during the early evening, passing the hours watching television, and then, through the long early morning, he would simply rest in the darkness with half-opened lids. An older man who might be the patient’s father would be in evidence throughout the night, his chair facing the open door, working crossword puzzles, stretching from time to time in the hall. Never more than a matter of feet from the door to Charlie’s room.
They were Faraday’s best security people.
As evening closed around the cottage, Hudson and Camilla grew silent, exhausted from talking, from thinking, from feeling. Camilla had stopped at her house in Seagrove on their way back and picked up some things, and walked now down the long hall toward the great room in loose cotton pants and shirt, drying her hair. Hudson stood at the butcher block table, tossing a salad.
“I just can’t believe it,” she said. “They can get back in the house day after tomorrow?”
“Saturday. That’s what Fentry said he’d heard when I talked with him just now.”
He had called to let Fentry and Victor know that he would be going back at six in the morning. Perhaps they’d like to skip a shift and get some more sleep. Both declined.
“Apparently they plan to have finished doing all those forensic, fingerprinting, whatever things they do.”
“It’s been four days,” Camilla murmured. “It seems like it could be four hours, or maybe even four years. But, somehow, not four days.”
“No.”
“I hate it. Their going into that house.”
“Yeah, I know, although I also hate having them here.”
They drank a little wine. In near silence, they poked at the salad and the tenderloin that one of the 26-A waiters had dropped off on his way home.
***
At eight-forty-five, they decided to call Rogers, their burly, jocular ATF contact and coordinator with the local investigators. He arrived in less than an hour with South Walton County homicide detective Fields, a slim, muscular, very beautiful African-American woman.
“How’s Mr. Brompton?” Rogers asked. Since he’d first shown up at the house, Hudson had admired Rogers’ ability to juggle punctilious shrewdness and down-home warmth.
“We think we have more reason for hope.”
Thirty minutes later, they had laid out their concerns, and waited watchfully as Rogers sipped his coffee and then balanced it in the saucer on his very solid thigh with the exacting care of a large and muscular man who does sometimes risky work that calls for delicacy. As if in keeping with the relentless torrent of unlikely events, Olive lay draped over one of his shoes. “Oh, yeah, they see me coming. We have two at home.” It was a picture, Hudson thought, of grace under pressure.
“Interesting. Very, very. Anything we can call evidence? Something we can see, touch, taste, smell?” He interrupted himself, “…not that this doesn’t smell.”
“Nothing,” said Hudson.
“That’s one of the reasons we debated whether to call you,” said Camilla.
“And the other?” asked Fields.
“We think they’ll make their move on their shift tomorrow night,” said Hudson. “Charlie’s improving by the hour. If they can’t finish the job tomorrow night they may never have a feasible chance. And we, we have…”
He couldn’t believe he was saying this. How would they? “We have a plan. And we’re afraid that if you were to call them in for questioning, we’d never get proof.”
Rogers reared back, putting his coffee aside on the table, and clasped his hands together almost in glee. He rocked on the edge of the chair, looking as though Hudson had just shared a good joke, and let out a little snort of a laugh. “You two are pretty resourceful.”
He looked over at Fields. “This is good, you know?”
Fields tried to sustain a note of cool professionalism. “Do you think your friend, Ms. Lee, is in any danger tonight? Or Mr. Brompton himself?”
“No,” said Hudson. “They may be desperate to finish the job but these people are very far from uncontrollably crazy.”
“We’ve made a point of letting them think that they’ll be alone with him tomorrow night,” said Camilla. “That Hudson and Libby and I all have conflicts we can’t do anything about.”
“Tonight,” said Hudson, “we have someone else keeping a discreet eye on Libby and on the room.”
Rogers stood, gingerly lifting Olive to the sofa. She looked at him with disgruntlement but surprisingly little outrage. He walked over toward the door, his hand rubbing the back of his football player’s neck. He came back and sat on the ottoman, his huge knees bulging in his khakis.
“Boy, oh boy! This is something. I don’t know, I just don’t know….” He shook his head slowly, looking at the floor.
“Well, neither do we, but we feel we know enough to trust our instincts.”
Rogers looked at his colleague. “Officer Fields, what do you think about all this?”
“I think we’re both going to have to pass this information on, of course. But I also think that, as of this moment, we have absolutely nothing concrete to work with, nothing but supposition, and no evident tie to Lukerson or any other party or parties.” She sipped her coffee, looking at Hudson and Camilla. She turned to Rogers.
“And I also see two smart people here who want a friend who may have been lucky once not be put to the test twice. Let’s hear this plan.”
***
Rogers and Fields left just before eleven.
Hudson and Camilla sat facing one another in the chairs by the hearth. Moon lay not nearby but sprawled in front of the door in a well-mannered indication that he hoped no more strangers would come and go, at least for awhile.
“I guess we can trust them?” she asked.
“Yeah. They want to see what happens tomorrow night as much as we do. I believe they’ll do what they said. File a cursory report on our conversation tonight but not do anything about interviewing them again until day after tomorrow. Even if we’re wrong and nothing happens tomorrow night, they’re not going to jump to conclusions or show their hand. They’re not suppressing information, much less evidence.”
The phone rang. It was Libby calling to report that Charlie had regained consciousness for about thirty seconds around eight o’clock and for nearly a minute two hours later.
Chaz got on the phone briefly to second the good news and then gave it back to Libby.
***
“He sounds excited,” said Hudson.
“Oh, yes.”
“But there’s a very fine line between sounding excited and sounding scared.”
“I think so, too.” He could see Libby smiling at Chaz and Sydney. “Yes, he seems to be…more and more.”
“Are you okay? Are the guys there across the hall?”
“They sure are. Chaz just went down to get a bite to eat, and Sydney’s watching Nightline and I just gave Charlie a shave and think I’ll do some more reading. We’re all just fine. How about you?”
“You’ll be there ’til they leave around five-thirty?”
“Sure will.”
“Then if we don’t hear otherwise from you we’ll be there at six. I’m meeting Tim Faraday in his office. I tried to talk Victor and Fentry out of their shifts but they want to be there. Camilla’s going to let them in on what’s going on.”
“Sounds great. Good night, Hudson.”
***
Hudson poured some wine and asked, “How about a little quiet music?”
“Please. I think there’s nothing else we can really do right now. And my brain is shutting down.”
“Mine’s trying to. But part of it’s there, you know? With Charlie.”
She nodded. “That’s something I’ve had to work on. For years. And every time I think I’m making progress something comes along to cause me to wonder.”
“A divided mind?”
“Or spirit, or whatever the case may be. I believed I was doing the right thing, but now I think I lived too long in my marriage after it had already died. I became too adept at compartmentalizing my thoughts and feelings.”
“I know.” He paused and smiled at her. “But I don’t think we should beat ourselves up about it too much. Sometimes we have to do that to survive.”
“I would think you’ve had to.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But you’re going to survive.”
“So it would seem. I mean
yes
.”
They sat and sipped their wine and listened for awhile to the faint, comforting sounds of Stephane Grapelli’s jazz violin.
“Does this make you
angry
?” she asked. “I mean—beyond Charlie—does this make you angry somehow about your own life?”
“How would you know that?”
“Because
I
am. I find that I’m suddenly very angry not only about Charlie but about being distracted by this nightmare from my own life. It reminds me too much of the old days. And feeling angry makes me feel selfish.”
“About what?”
“About not letting my life fragment again. About being afraid that life is something that’s going on somewhere else, over there, not…”
“Not here?”
“Yes.”
She paused and smiled wearily at him. “Sorry. It’s the exhaustion talking. I think we’re just so saturated right now with a lack of trust that I’m afraid even to trust myself.”
“I think you
should
trust yourself. You like truth even when it’s not easy. If what you mean is that you feel you don’t have time for sorrow and for death, then, yes, you’re absolutely right. I’m angry, too. I don’t want to be forced to realize, to consider on a recurring basis, that I’m fragile, vulnerable, hanging by a thread. I want to be able to believe that I’m not really a dead man trying to fool himself and other people.”
He paused. “Yeah, I’m angry, too. I want to do my work and enjoy my friends. And if part of what you meant is that we seem to have begun a new friendship and now all this has gotten in the way…”
They both leaned forward and reached out their hands to one another. It felt awkward to him at first, but because they had all been holding Charlie’s hands so much among themselves these past few days, not as awkward as it might have.
“We’ll just have to keep a place…clear.”
After a minute or so, they let go, and settled back in their respective chairs.
But the air felt somewhat lighter.
***
They could hardly hold their eyes open but, like children on a parents’ night out, were determined to savor for as long as they could their sense of space, their impromptu moment of independence. The small oasis of music and wine and affection they had created.
Hudson had worked away at a crossword puzzle and Camilla had leafed through a
Gourmet
at a leisurely pace. When she put it aside, she asked, “Would you mind letting me read one of your reviews?”
“No. Not if you’d like.”
“I would like.”
He went to the desk and flipped through some hard copies, his brow furrowed, trying to decide what to offer.
She could see what he was doing. “You mean they aren’t all perfect?”
He laughed. “Of course they are, but some are more perfect than others.”
“And this is an example of your releasing yourself from rigidity, of relaxing fully into the here and now?”
“Oh, all right.
Here.
Just take one.” He went over to her with a review in each hand.
She closed her eyes. “Caution to the winds,” she said, and pointed to one.
She looked more relaxed than he seen her in a week. Hudson looked down, and a shadow of hesitancy crossed his face.
“In a way, you’ve already heard some of this one earlier today….”
Us vs. Them
American History X
tries to reveal the enemy within
Tony Kaye’s feature film debut earns a large A for Effort.
American History X
seeks to give a human face to a momentous issue, the renascence of white supremacist hatred, by approaching its subject not on an abstract socio-political level, but as psychological drama. Like the startling black swastika tattooed on his chest, the character of young Derek Vinyard (played beautifully by Edward Norton) is an emblematic embodiment of the causes and effects of neo-Nazism. The film follows the arc of his attraction to the movement and the consequences for his family, particularly his younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong).
American History X
is Kaye’s and screenwriter David McKenna’s attempt, a much-needed and honorable one, to bring large audiences face to face with what they may perceive on a daily basis as marginal, unconnected news stories. In the end,
American History X
is somewhat oversimplified and superficial, but not to the degree that it should be avoided; it is thoughtful, provocative, and moving, and Norton’s performance is further indication of a considerable screen talent in the making.
Kaye, most famously a director of commercials, is also cinematographer, and the film’s opening sequence is one of the most evocative of the year thus far, a gray, monochromatic vista of ragged clouds and surf along a deserted beach. The tone of the film is immediately, almost viscerally established; the seductive, haunting beauty is pervaded with a sinister foreboding (and the troubled strings of Anne Dudley’s score). At the end of the sequence, Kaye’s deep-focus longshots zoom in toward a few structures perched uneasily under the lowering sky at the far end of the shore, and the sense that we may have just looked from the window of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” where “ignorant armies clash by night,” suddenly gives way, and we find ourselves in southern California. It is a southern California not of the sun and oranges, of surfboards and movie star enclaves like Malibu, but of Venice Beach, an ethnically mixed community of Los Angeles; other than the boardwalk, it could be an urban neighborhood of almost any American city. An adolescent boy, in voiceover, observes: “It used to be really cool, a great place to live. Then the Hispanics and the black gangs started moving in from South Central, and everything went to hell…”
Kaye employs an interesting narrative frame for the story. Danny’s principal (Avery Brooks), alarmed by Danny’s evolving ideology, has forced him to write a paper tracing the impacts of his older brother Derek’s attitudes and activities on his life. With the use of flashbacks that eventually come abreast of the story’s present tense, Danny relates the salient points of the family history, its decline from the middle-middle to lower-middle class, of Derek’s adoption of skinhead values and his emergent leadership, and of the night when Derek kills two black men outside the Vinyard home. Derek goes to prison for three years. Danny becomes fully involved in the skinhead scene. As he begins his paper, his brother is released. Danny is deeply conflicted when Derek tells him that he is leaving “all that hate bullshit” behind, that he disavows his previous beliefs, and that he wants Danny out, too. The cautionary denouement of
American History X
is tragic and chilling.
Edward Norton is one of our more intriguing new film actors. As he showed in the 1996 thriller
Primal Fear
, he is as adroit at purveying eccentricity and extremity as he is the ordinariness of the guy-next-door. His relation to the camera is of the rare sort that can make a good actor a star. He can project the modest, gee-whiz, Everyman quality of a Jimmy Stewart or a Tom Hanks, and in the next moment, his face can take on the veiled, troubled intensity of Montgomery Clift, or the galvanizing intensity of the young Peter O’Toole. Though thwarted by the character’s underscripted transformation, his work here is memorable. Furlong is effective, too, evoking the adolescent Danny’s drifting, yearning search for something in which to believe; and Beverly D’Angelo has a few very powerful scenes as their mother.
The film’s reach far exceeds its grasp. The very best aspects of this psychological investigation of right-wing domestic terrorism happen also to be its very worst aspects. Expectations are raised with heady frequency only to languish unfulfilled. This film wants essentially to examine the banality of evil and the effects of paranoia, but certain elements of the story are jarringly contrived, and we are never taken below the surface of the breeding grounds of hatred. As a character study of Derek as an individual,
American History X
doesn’t go deep enough, nor is it quite emblematic enough as an investigation of how Dereks—intelligently articulate, sensitive, murderous—are formed. (His father, a fireman, was killed in the line of duty in a drug-ridden tenement in a black neighborhood. Not all of the folks turning to anti-government militias, skinhead rallies, and Internet-nurtured hate groups are propelled there by such highly specific events.) The film’s glancing treatment is maddeningly equal opportunity: NRAers can leave the theatre thinking it was about the evils of “big government” and liberal civil libertarians will feel assured it was about the dangerous organizational and psychological links between ultra-rightist religious demagogues, politicians, media, militias, and domestic terrorists. The only message the film purports to get across is that we should get over being so chronically quick to content ourselves with the idea of the single shooter, the lone ranger, the “mad” man—which message it then spends two hours neutralizing with its own ironic demographics appeasement policy.
Of course, the rumors of “vast right-wing conspiracies” are, as any sentient and objectively informed citizen knows, truer now than ever, but for all its good intentions of shedding light,
American History X,
like Mark Pellington’s recent suspense effort,
Arlington Road
, starring Jeff Bridges, and so many others before it, simply proves instead that there’s another conspiracy also in need of exposure: that of Hollywood producers who keep insisting that Americans are incapable of watching a movie and thinking at the same time.
Films remain to be made that force us finally to confront the frighteningly demoralizing complexities of race in America and the fact that much of the Us vs. Them fear and hatred in our society—whether racial, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-intellectual—is engendered, or at least abetted for political purposes, not by the more obvious fringe dwellers, but by those in church pulpits and legislatures, and, more recently and perhaps most frighteningly, even by major news networks, who wrap themselves loud and long in the most insidious forms of demagogic religion and patriotism.