by SK Dyment
“NO! I don’t want anyone to see me,” Rudy touches B.F.’s hand on the wheel for emphasis. “B.F.,” says Rudy in his irresistibly conspiratorial way, “these men will think we’re lovers.”
“Get out of my truck!” B.F. roars. He then accelerates so that Rudy cannot.
Rudy lowers his voice until it is almost a whisper. “Don’t give them something to talk about,” Rudy tells him. “Do you know what they do to strangers around here?” It is in the familiar subversive style he reserves for B.F. that always makes B.F. feel he is part of an endless well of inherited masculine brains.
Probably not much, Rudy thinks, looking out at the gravel and trees speeding past him. There is a long silence. It is interrupted when each man clears his throat and adjusts his bass-tone EQs.
Finally, B.F. explodes. “You bastard!” Instead of taking a slug at Rudy, he takes a slug of liquor from the thermos he has by his side. “Why did you have to dress like a cocksucker in the first place? Why? You’re not a…”
“No, I’m not, I just like to wear fine suits,” says Rudy. To B.F., this answer opens up the topic of how various races of women dress, B.F.’s personal preferences in this regard, and, finally, the wider social problem of whores in general which he expounds on for over an hour. Then he switches to his favourite topic, how the poor and disabled populate cities with no care for what they are doing to the gene pool. Rudy opens his window and is relieved by a blast of fresh air that replaces the smell of B.F.’s conversation. Rudy realizes that B.F. reminds him a little bit of himself, of something unforgivable that he could become. His loathing magnifies.
“What the hell are you doing? Do you have a problem? The air conditioner.…”
Just when he thinks he can stand no more and has noticed B.F. is drunk enough to drive into the trees, the truck turns up a logging road and comes to a neck-whipping stop. They have arrived and there is no one for miles. B.F. Has carried in a thousand pounds of extra gear and a cocktail lounge of alcoholic drinks in the cab. B.F. also carries hunting gadgets of every type, including animal urine and skunky odours to mask the smell of his own body. Rudy has travelled with nothing but a light pack and a change of clothes.
The two spend the afternoon prowling a deer trail, B.F., shaking his plastic antlers, grunt-snorting his way through the scrub and slugging at his thermos, convinced he can drive out curious bucks. He stumbles through the brush, shouting, “Come on, ya horny motherfuckers!” and circles the place where a group of does are nervously listening for his movements and disappearing back into the woods.
There is no moment for B.F. where he realizes that Rudy, his right-hand man, the one he had grown to trust, has betrayed him. There is only the appearance of a white-tailed buck, which B.F. sends Rudy to flush through the woods. It is a bad hunting method, always dangerous to anyone who is not firing the gun. Rudy hesitates, B.F. calling him a sorry-ass pussy. Rudy is certain he is drunk, although not as drunk as B.F., who has rambled off to drive the deer toward Rudy. The animal that is running from him is spectacular. B.F. has understated the deer’s magnificence. It wears antlers that spread out the length of a man. It is imposing and, despite a harassed look and the catcalls of B.F., it has a fine-tuned sense of the intuitive in the gaze it lays on Rudy, an intimate perception exchanged between two strangers. That is the way they always appear; first there is nothing, and suddenly, there they are, right in front of you, staring at you, not believing that at this moment of grace you would shatter the silence and shoot. Drunken Rudy fires. b.f. falls. The white-tailed buck with the five-foot rack hops away, his majesty intact. Rudy gathers all evidence that he has been anywhere on the scene, arranges B.F.’s gun in such a way as to make it look like he has shot himself, and then hikes in horror from the mountain terrain.
Before nightfall, he shoots a rabbit, recovers the bullet shell, and eats it half-cooked, allowing the blood to run down his face and into the stubble of his new beard. He buries the carcass, washes up in a stream, changes into casual clothes. He walks through the night, consults his pack compass, consults the stars, allows himself to slide slowly back into being Rudy, as he wonders who he is truly to others, now that he is not the man B.F. thought he was in his wildest dreams. It was an accident, but he knows it wasn’t. Feeling drained by the enormity of his puzzle, and pulled by the crisis of who he is, feeling overpowered by the charade he still has before him, he walks to the lights of the city.
At the edge of town, he cleans up his appearance, squirts eye drops onto his retina, shaves all but a small moustache. He buys a popular baseball cap, drags it through a patch of grease, and catches a taxi to the nearest airport. By lunchtime the next day he is a clean-shaven man in a six-hundred dollar suit, discussing a development concept in front of twenty company men at a board meeting in New York. Near the close of the meeting, he is met by a beautiful woman who gushes on as the men trail out of the room, praising Rudy for the very good time they have been enjoying these last few days together in Manhattan. She is highly professional; he has used her many times before. She likes Rudy. She may be in love with Rudy. He is the best thing that has ever happened to her, and most importantly, she will fib for him anytime. To both of them, she is his New York girlfriend, the only one he sees. They are very public together, and all her other regulars are very private about their affairs because they are married with wives. She has classic, regular features. Rudy has already researched her; none of her other clients are men he will ever encounter in his business. Besides, her business is none of theirs. He is not a nosy type, but the other men at the New York office are gossiping about her and teasing him when the news arrives that B.F. has gone missing.
Rudy suggests that the last time he talked with B.F., he sounded depressed and talked about going alone to the woods, but no one had taken it seriously. The meeting is hastily concluded, a press release mourning B.F. arranged, and Rudy flies back to Vancouver, pours himself a drink in his studio, and watches the gulls circling over the Pacific. Inside the dark, quiet calm of him, he crouches like a heartbroken, shitkicked girl he once threw out of his apartment, and he waits for the sounds of police.
14.
VESPA IS HOLDING HANDS with Jackie, walking along the soft dirt road where Ben used to race his bikes. Jackie feels the smoothness between her fingers, then finds the grip unmistakably muscular. Vespa has short dark brown hair that is of similar softness to Ben’s tight curls. They are leaving dusty footprints behind them; and Jackie is feeling a great wave of joy. Vespa has shown her a way of walking so that her sneaker marks look like a truck track in the dirt.
“Do you think anyone will fall for it?”
“I don’t know. They do look realistic.” They admire the trail they are leaving behind them.
“Where’d you and Wanda first meet each other, anyway?” Vespa asks her.
Jackie does not want to tell Vespa that she and Wanda first met in jail.
“I could ask you the same question,” she answers instead.
There is a silence, then Vespa smiles graciously and appears to give in, as if she knows what Jackie thinks she is hiding. Overhead, trees throw down sunlight in small, moving vignettes.
“I told you. I met her in Vancouver, around Christmas. Way before my brother was even on the scene. He was a boyhood friend of Rudy, and he encouraged him to come out West. Then, for a while, there were four of us. Once she met Ben, after she met you even, then she took him away again, back to Toronto.”
“That’s where I met her. I was raised in Vancouver, but I moved East.”
“Why?”
Jackie thinks about it. “The same as Wanda, I guess. Business.”
“You sure are a hard nut to crack. What about what Wanda told me?”
“And what did she tell you?”
“Jail. She was busted for escorting, the same stupid line of work she got me into, and there you were.”
“Maybe it’s true.”<
br />
“She was in awe of you. A beautiful girl with disconnected raven hair, overalls, hot-looking. Knew how to fix everything.”
“‘Hot-looking?’ Doesn’t that imply some sort of checking out? I mean, ‘hot-looking,’ that’s checking somebody out. I thought Wanda was straight, pious, religious…”
“She is preoccupied with Saints and Catholic ideas. Ben likes it, so she cultivates it. I loathe it. I think that’s why she cuts it out when I’m around. But you are in her hot Saint category, as far as I can tell.”
“Was she always like this?” Jackie asks weakly.
“We have friction, to be certain. But she’s not what you think she is. You’ll see. She’s tough that one. Wanda was like a mother to me, at one time. A street mother.”
Vespa points to a meadow beyond the road, and they clamber over an old fence, thistles snagging their pant-legs.
“Are she and Ben the same age?”
“They are only days apart. I think that’s why she was able to bring him back out of that coma. They have some sort of spirit bond.”
Vespa smiles. Jackie wonders if Vespa felt a spirit bond with Wanda, too.
“Tell me about the street mother thing.”
“Easy. Everyone was talking about home and no one seemed to have one. We heard about a girl showing movies on the walls inside of the big warehouse down the street. When I walked in, it was completely empty, maybe thirty thousand square feet of space, wide open like the prairie. Or like a winter lake. Wanda had a film projector and chips and flowers set out on old ironing boards. There must have been a dozen of those standing around, Old ironing boards was all the furniture there was. I loved it. And so, instead of hopping to the next party, we sat down on the floor and decided to stick around.”
“There were no chairs, only ironing boards?”
“Yeah, that was all. The place had been quite a sweatshop, which made Wanda’s main movie of the night a perfect pick. Here we were in this enormous space where people had worked as slaves, and then she showed us the American restoration of the 1927 German movie, Metropolis. Have you seen this film?”
“Does it have robots in it?”
“A robot is the star!”
Jackie nods her head. “It’s about four hours long. A silent film. There is a worker uprising, and a man who controls the workers and owns all of the machines falls in love with a girl who is a robot replica of the woman behind the revolt.”
“No,” says Vespa. “The American edit is eighty-three minutes long. With subtitles. Freder was never in love with the robot. He was in love with Maria, the real girl….”
“We must have seen different things in the different versions.”
“Perhaps,” Vespa looks thoughtful. “But it’s much better now. It has sound. It has a little colour. Freddie Mercury has a song in it. Pat Benatar has a song in it. And with the spectacular constructivist images, set to this pessimistic vision of the future, it’s a classic statement of the punk aesthetic. And it meant so much to us at the time.”
“I have almost everything recorded by Freddie Mercury. I love Freddie Mercury. Take me to the American version,” says Jackie, squeezing Vespa’s hands. She peers into her eyes.
“Sure, I’ll take you to the movies,” Vespa tells her. She laughs and kisses her on the mouth. Jackie is dreamy.
“‘Love Kills,’ ‘Fat Bottomed Girls,’ ‘We Are Champions,’ come on, and the guy’s named after a car….”
“Mercury is both a planet and a car….”
Jackie sighs. “I know, I know. It’s not like I have never slept under the stars at night. Many planets are named after cars.”
Vespa wonders if Jackie has ever slept under the stars with anybody else. She thinks not. Jackie’s hair begins to prickle as she feels Vespa staring.
Her friend smiles. “That film, that party, it meant so much to us at that time. All of us in that community, about to get kicked out on our butts. Wanda was fascinated by aesthetics. Even then, when she was very young.”
“Doesn’t that movie have a man with one hand?”
“Rotwang has only one hand. Like Wanda, actually. He is the man who falls from a cathedral. He is chasing Freder, and real Maria, right after they burn the robot at the stake.”
“That was sad.”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he was trying to kill Maria. That’s why he fell.”
“No, no, it was sad when they burned the robot.”
“The mob didn’t know any better,” says Vespa in a delicate way.
“It still made working people look stupid. And poor Rotwang. They built such a beautiful robot, and then boom!”
“I guess I never thought of it that way.”
“I’ll take you to the four-hour original!” says Jackie with shining eyes.
“Let’s go to the re-edit first.”
“So, did you and Wanda share a landlord as well?”
“Yes, but Wanda worked as a flower girl later than late. That was why I had never met her before, even though we lived only a few blocks away, because she was out every evening, and then slept into the afternoon. She kept a gun by her bed, a real gun, along with a few other things she had locked away inside a small sleeping room she had built out of drywall. It was all torn down a few weeks after the party. The rest of the time I think she roamed around the warehouse, which was being emptied and then prepared to become condo space and studios for the very rich. Her rent jumped from forty cents a square foot to twenty-two dollars.” Vespa raises a brow at Jackie.
“Wanda built the room herself? So, she had both hands then.”
“No,” says Vespa. “She had a prosthetic hand, even then. Rudy went in, into her room later, and we started to talk, and that’s how we got to know her. How did you get to know her?”
“In jail,” says Jackie, trapped. She looks closely at her friend. “How come you always say, ‘we?’”
“I was hanging around with a little crook named Rudy. Interesting how we met our landlord.” She tells Jackie about the night they had heard the steam clock chime thirteen times, and how they had run through the streets shaking their rattles, accepting an offered wallet from a terrified man with combed-over hair.
“It didn’t end there. It turned out the next morning he was our mutual landlord. He had been stumbling home a few blocks away, too drunk to recognize us, but we recognized his name on documents in the wallet and had to return it to him. Very awkward.”
“Did Rudy often rob people?”
“I don’t think so. It was because we were shaking rattles. He hid the wallet in a nook near a switch plate to keep it safe and the next day, he arranged for a friend to give the wallet back. For Chrissakes, Wanda loved him. We all loved him. I don’t know if he took the money out first or not, but Rudy moved on. He moved on and he moved up, never looked back, and then the business world took our friend.”
“So, a crook’s reflexes, but a human heart!” Jackie is privately searching through her memories to see if she can turn up any mention of a man named Rudy. She turns to Vespa. “You should hang out with honest people,” she tells her, and kisses her new friend gently on the mouth.
“Well, I hang out with you, don’t I?” asks Vespa, the question hanging a moment too long. The part of Jackie that changed in prison stirs within her.
“You hang with me, so why don’t we go somewhere truly fun for a change?”
“Like a romantic vacay?”
“Exactly!”
“What’s better than here?” asks Vespa.
“Nowhere is better, and everywhere is perfect, when I’m with you,”answers Jackie, “it’s just…”
“Just what?”
“Don’t you want to experience New York?”
15.
THE POLICE ARE in Rudy’s New York office, going
through his things. Rudy’s lawyer is with them, a company lawyer who is watching that nothing is meddled with, while Rudy sits in his studio, sipping herbal tea and eating sushi. They are apologetic; they are simply going through the steps. Because B.F. had made special arrangements that placed Rudy in his position should something happen to B.F., now that something has happened, Rudy is seen to have motive. The position Rudy finds himself in is not face down, with his arm around a deer-shooting rifle lying inches away. This is how B.F. was found, as a family of skunks paraded past him in horror, and many prize white-tailed deer, including the buck with the superlative rack, stepped silently in their pussy-ass way over his form.
The position Rudy finds himself in is as head of the company, information that has now been released to B.F. Turner’s consortium by a series of digits, which have been given to four of B.F.’s lawyers and that have been combined to open his safe. It is nothing Rudy could have known, and B.F.’s documents state that he did not want Rudy to know as this would have changed the dynamic of his power role and contradict his tested and true managerial style. His lawyers have already remarked, how could Rudy have had motive to dispose of B.F. since he had no idea that his friend, his boss, had made these provisions.
But, evidence that Rudy was in B.F.’s four-by-four has been collected by the police. This is fine, though. There are many witnesses that saw Rudy being hurried into B.F.’s car and driven to lunches at private clubs in the few days before the week of his disappearance. They also saw B.F. driving around in the lux Silverado, and parking it in the garage under their offices, next to the car. Rudy admits that he has been in the cab of the truck. The fact that the fatal bullet was fired from a gun of the same type and make as B.F.’s, and that the bullet is in fact one of B.F.’s own, scored on the end in the same way all the other bullets he was carrying in a bullet bag on his person were scored, seemed to close the case for many of the small-town investigators that had first arrived on the scene. It was announced in the papers that police were ruling out foul play, something Rudy read carefully before rolling the paper into a ball and firing it into a seagrass basket beside his desk.
