Eve's Men

by Newton Thornburg

  Saying nothing, she pushed his hand away.

  “So you don’t want us to even talk with Jolly?” Charley asked.

  “I don’t give a shit. You can talk to the little fag all you want. Just be sure you keep your buns tight and don’t bend over. Now, Eve, she can wear a microskirt and walk on all fours, and no one will notice.”

  Eve sighed. “I’ve seen the future, and I don’t think it works.”

  “Hey, it never did.” Brian seemed pleased at the thought.

  Their food was served and the three of them lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, dictated mostly by Brian’s intransigence. Ever since Charley first saw him at the courthouse—the first time in three years—he had been trying to get a handle on him, understand just what was going on inside his little brother’s handsome head. When he last saw him, after Kim Sanders’ death, Brian had looked terrible, even emaciated, despite his muscular build, presumably because he was still a heavy drug user. Now, though, he was clear-eyed, tanned, and ten or fifteen pounds heavier, all of it hard. Like Charley, he had a few gray hairs, but they in no way diminished his look of youthful strength and health.

  His mind-set, though, was a different matter. As in the past, he could be charming one moment and insufferable the next. In the courtroom and later in the clerk’s office, he at various times had been angry, conciliatory, sarcastic, and pleasant. Later, riding home in Charley’s car, he was rude to Eve and made no mention of Charley’s largesse in giving him the buyout payment early and making his entire bail. On the way, he stopped off at the bank where the check had been cleared and went in alone, whether to cash the forty-five thousand or deposit it or buy certified checks with it, Charley had no idea. And he gathered that Eve didn’t know either.

  After that, Brian’s only concern seemed to be getting back to the motel and into the pool as fast as he could. All else was unimportant. And now there was this stone wall he had thrown up in front of them, his refusal to let anyone even try to save his ass. It made Charley wonder why he had bothered to come out to Colorado in the first place. It would have been so much easier just to have wired the money. And that probably was what he would have done, had it not been Eve who phoned him. Even though he had never met her, her voice for some reason had reached him, pulled him. At the moment, though, she wasn’t reaching anybody. Silent, she sat there looking irritable and unhappy.

  Feeling vaguely dispirited, Charley gazed out over the large room at the tables arranged in three tiered rows leading up from the curving expanse of windows. The patrons for the most part appeared to be tourists, family groups more interested in the view than in the food, which Charley found reasonably good if unreasonably overpriced. Up on the second tier, he suddenly noticed a young blond woman staring straight at him. As their eyes met, she flashed an oddly eager smile and he smiled uneasily back at her, wondering if the object of her happiness was someone behind him. But at his response, she smiled even wider, lighting up the table where she sat with an older man, a hawk-faced wiry little guy wearing a string tie and a satin cowboy shirt. Immediately the girl got to her feet and pulled the man after her, jabbering encouragement as she led him down the two stairs to the first tier. And once she was in full view and coming toward him, Charley saw that her long hair and gleaming teeth were but a small part of her equipment, that she had in fact the kind of figure seldom seen outside the gatefolds of men’s magazines. Like the man with her, she was wearing cowboy boots and jeans. Only in her case the denim appeared to have been lacquered on, as did her checkered shirt.

  As she reached the table, Charley pushed back his chair, preparing to get up and introduce himself, when the girl’s attention suddenly focused on Brian, who till now had been sitting with his back to her.

  “Hey, you’re Brian Poole, right?” she said, still beaming. “We saw you on TV just this noon, and yesterday we checked out the set you totaled, me and two other girls. Boy, was that ever somethin’. My name’s Belinda Einhorn and this here’s my big brother Chester. He’s a real cowboy. Come here from Oklahoma just to check on his baby sister, din’t ya, Chester?”

  By then Brian had gotten to his feet. He shook hands with both of the Einhorns and introduced Eve and Charley. And though the girl smiled warmly, Charley doubted that she even saw them, such was her excitement at meeting the notorious Brian Poole in the flesh. Charley expected Brian to bring the encounter to a close then, even if it required a touch of coolness, but his brother did no such thing. Smiling back at the girl, he let her run on to her heart’s content, explaining that she had been a snow bunny in Aspen for the winter and recently had landed a job as an extra in Miss Colorado. Her character was supposed to be having a drink with a boyfriend in the local saloon when “the actor who plays you causes a ruckus and gets booted out the door.

  “Only there ain’t no more saloon for you to get booted out of!” she went on, laughing. “Not since you showed up with that bulldozer of yours!”

  Brian then quietly volunteered that he was going to be at the Purple Sage that evening. “And if y’all can make it,” he said, “we’d be happy to see you.”

  “Can we!” the girl gushed. “Oh, you bet we can! Wild horses couldn’t keep us away! Right, Chester?”

  The brother all this time had been standing slightly behind her, rocking up and down on the pointed toes of his tiny boots and grinding his fist into his hand. In his seamed and sunken cheek a muscle tightened and relaxed, like a secondary heart.

  “Oh sure,” he said. “You bet. Belinda and me, we’d be proud.”

  When they were gone, Eve gave Brian a withering look. “If y’all can make it,” she mimed. “Jesus, you are some piece of work, you know that?”

  Brian grinned sheepishly. “I know. I’m so ashamed I could cry.”

  Out the window, Charley watched the odd couple get into a shiny red pickup and drive off. In the back window there was a rack of guns.

  Back at the motel, there was a message for Eve to call Rick Walters. Charley followed her and Brian into their room and listened while she phoned. She got Rick immediately, but for the most part just sat there listening to what he had to say. She wrote down directions to Jolly’s place, then thanked Rick and said good-bye.

  Hanging up, she gave Brian a challenging look. “Jolly has agreed to see us, like right now. So the ball’s in your court. What’s it going to be—prison or maybe eat a little crow?”

  Brian shrugged. “What good would it do? I’m not going to kiss his ass, and he’s not going to let me off the hook.”

  Eve looked at Charley for help, and he did what he could.

  “Look, I’ve come a pretty long way to help you, right?” he said to Brian.

  “I realize that.”

  “And your bail wasn’t peanuts, you know.”

  “I never said it was.”

  “All right. So now I want you to do this for us. And for yourself.”

  “Charley, it won’t do any good.”

  “I don’t care. I want you to do it.”

  Even then, Charley wouldn’t have been surprised if Brian still refused. Finally, though, he shrugged assent.

  “All right, okay,” he said. “I’ll go with you—just so you two can find out what these people are like. You don’t deal with Jolly, you just bend over and take your medicine.”

  “So we’ll find that out.”

  “You sure as hell will.”

  They went in Brian’s pickup truck, a late-model Chevy Silverado that rattled as if he had driven it off-road all the way from California. They turned off the freeway just south of the Air Force Academy and worked their way up into the foothills, past a past a middle-class housing development and back into gravel road country where there were a few withered pines as well as chaparral hugging the rocky terrain. The few houses in this area were costly and modern, built almost like pueblos into the steep grade. At the top was Jolly’s place, a handsome structure of glass, moss rock, and redwood, with a broad wraparound deck overlooking half of Colorado as w
ell as a patio and a small swimming pool under construction. To get to the house they had to fork left past a lane that led down to a narrow, pine-covered shelf.

  “I understand they were out scouting locations when Jolly saw this place,” Eve said. “Wasn’t even for sale, but he still managed to buy it, I guess in case he ever happens to be in Colorado.”

  “The poor bastard.” Brian pulled in and parked next to a Mercedes.

  A uniformed security guard came out to meet them. “You Brian Poole?” he asked.

  “In the flesh.”

  The man asked them to stay with the truck for a few minutes. “Mr. Walters said he’d be out to brief you soon.”

  Brian laughed. “Brief! What the hell is this, a military operation? The Air Academy gonna attack, are they?”

  “I’m just telling you what I was told,” the man said.

  Eve smiled and said there was no problem, that they would be happy to wait for Mr. Walters.

  As the guard went back into the house, Charley asked what Walters’ job was.

  “He’s one of Jolly’s angels,” Brian said. “Or at least that’s what the crew calls them. It seems Jolly has a long history of hiring pretty young fags as his personal assistants. New movie, new angel.”

  “Not true anymore,” Eve corrected. “Rick’s been his assistant for years. Last movie he got an assistant director credit. He’s really a very nice guy.”

  “A really very nice person,” Brian said. “You’ll just love him, Charley.”

  They had gotten out of the truck by then, and Charley was surprised at how cold the air was here in the shadow of the mountains. Above them the few remaining clouds were turning red and golden, though the city itself, lying below and to the east, was still awash in sunlight. In the outskirts a treeless plain rose gradually toward the dark green area called Black Forest, where Brian had done his demolition work. Straight north of where they stood was the Air Force Academy, also deep in shadow except for the sawtooth spires of its famed chapel, which blazed in the gloom like a row of burning pines. Even as Charley stood looking out at the academy, a line of small aircraft came crawling in from the north and began to expel bodies one by one, tiny black missiles that hurtled earthward for three or four seconds before sprouting parachutes, gaudy flowers that floated down into the mountains’ shadow and finally onto the blue-gray ground.

  Directly in front of them a hillside of huge sandstone boulders dropped toward the piney shelf they had seen from the road. Brian picked up a stone and hurled it down into the trees.

  “Sure is nice up here,” he said. “I guess it pays pretty good, slandering people, turning their lives into shit.”

  At that point, two men came out of the house carrying large flat leather cases and got into the Mercedes. They were wearing blue pin-striped suits and garish Hawaiian ties. As they drove off, a handsome young blond man came out onto the deck and signaled to Eve.

  “He can see you now,” he said. “Just you and the brother, that’s all.”

  Eve looked over at Brian, and he shrugged with annoyance.

  “Go ahead,” he told her. “What difference does it make?”

  “You’ll be all right here?”

  “Of course I’ll be all right. Jesus Christ.”

  On their way over to the house, Eve leaned close to Charley. “Let’s just forget what he said at the restaurant. Keeping him out of prison, that’s what matters. So let’s not hold back with Jolly.”

  As they started up the outside stairway, the security guard came out of the house again and took a position at the foot of the stairs, evidently to make sure that Brian didn’t follow them. Waiting on the deck, Rick smiled warmly as Eve introduced him and Charley.

  “God, it’s cold out here!” he said, shivering. “The sun goes down and you just freeze your buns off.”

  He led them around the corner and through a sliding glass door into a huge room with floor-to-ceiling windows running across the entire front wall. At one end of the room, a gaunt, nut-brown man in his fifties sat at a large table dictating to a stenographer, an elderly blonde with the drum-tight, mummified kind of face created by plastic surgeons.

  When he broke off, Jolly looked up at his visitors over a pair of rimless glasses. Dark, close-set eyes and a large nose and mouth gave him a sagacious, vulpine look, somewhat undone by what Brian called his slave-boy wig, but which in point of fact looked more like the mop of a cinematic mad scientist. He was wearing sandals, threadbare denim shorts, and a safari shirt hanging half open, exposing his hairy chest.

  “Damian, this is Eve Sherman and Charles Poole,” Rick said. “Damian Jolly, Elizabeth English, Brad Huntley.”

  Until that moment Charley hadn’t notice the other young man sitting off to the side in a wingback chair, legs curled under him as he stroked a Siamese cat that didn’t purr. Apparently another of Jolly’s angels, the youth looked more like a shaven Mephistopheles, dark and mean, with a masterly sneer.

  Jolly nodded but failed to say hello or that he was pleased to meet anyone. He did gesture for Eve and Charley to sit down, however, and they did so, in two of four chairs arrayed in front of the director’s table-desk. Jolly took his time getting out a cigarette and lighting it with a kitchen match, which he then extinguished by waving it languidly back and forth. Through the smoke, he regarded his visitors.

  “Let me see if I have this straight,” he said. “You two are Brian Poole’s brother and girlfriend, and you’re here to see if you can get me to drop the charges against him. I’m told you have some sort of offer to make in this regard.”

  Charley looked at Eve, expecting her to present their ideas since she was the one who knew Rick and had contacted him. But she indicated for Charley to go ahead.

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “First, though, I want to tell you that Brian is genuinely sorry for what he’s done. He himself thinks of it now as a kind of prolonged temporary insanity, if there could be such a thing.”

  Jolly grinned. “Must be something new, uh?”

  “Something going around,” said the one called Brad, and Miss English tittered.

  “I realize it’s a contradiction,” Charley went on. “An oxymoron. But it just could be right in this instance. Eve tells me that Brian hasn’t been himself for some time.”

  “What is it you do?” Jolly asked.

  “I’m a real estate broker in Chicago. The south suburbs actually.”

  “Come out here to save your brother’s ass, did you?”

  “If I can.”

  “Well, family ties are a good thing. I’m a strong believer in family.”

  “That’s good to hear.” Charley figured he could be as inane as the next man.

  “Poole,” Jolly said. “What is that, English?”

  “Or Scottish.”

  The director grinned. “So’s Jolly—English, I mean. Only thing is I ain’t got one drop of limey blood. Hundred percent dago, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, now you do. Real name is Giolli, G-I-O-L-L-I. But my old man changed it out of shame because the family was all mobbed up, part of the Gambinos in New York. It’s true, I ain’t shittin’ you. Most of my cousins and uncles are wiseguys, would you believe it? Always wanting to help me out too. ‘Just say the word, Dominic,’ that’s what they call me. Yeah, sure—I say the word and someone gets smoked, I’d probably wind up in the joint right along with my goombah relatives. Good cooks, though. They got cholesterol counts you would not believe.”

  In response to this trove of information, Charley forced a smile, wondering whether the director was trying to threaten Brian. “Now that you mention it, you do look Italian,” he said.

  Jolly laughed. “No shit! You bet I do. Another dago director—just what Hollywood needed, right?”

  “Afraid I don’t know Hollywood.”

  “No, of course not. Why should you?” Jolly stubbed out his cigarette. “So let’s get down to it. Just what are you offering?”


  “Well, first, as I said, Brian regrets what he did. And he’s prepared to make a public statement to that effect, an apology both to you and the studio.”

  “I hope that ain’t all.”

  “It isn’t. The main part is, well, Brian still feels that the movie—or at least the script he’s read—doesn’t really tell his story, his side of things. So our idea was that when the movie comes out, and if he still feels this way, he could make the rounds of the talk shows and discuss the movie from his perspective.”

  Jolly grinned again. “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. As I understand it, when a movie opens, any publicity is good to have. Even controversy.”

  “Well, there’s controversy, and then there’s controversy, right? The wrong kind ain’t gonna help anybody.”

  “He’d be talking about the movie.”

  Jolly looked at Rick. “What do you think? He goes around bad-mouthing the movie—you think it’d hurt us or help us?”

  “It’s a hard call,” Rick said. “I don’t know.”

  Jolly’s other angel had no such qualms.

  “Damian, the man’s a psycho. He could make a public apology one day and shoot you the next. I wouldn’t trust him. He belongs in a cage.”

  The director clucked his tongue. “Now, we don’t want to be too harsh, Brad. At the same time, you do have a point.” He turned back to Charley and Eve. “What was it you called it—a case of prolonged temporary insanity? Well, who’s to say it won’t continue to be prolonged? What if, when your brother finally sees the movie, he goes berserk again and starts bulldozing theaters or Christ knows what else? What do we do then?”

  This time it was Eve who answered, saying that she was with Brian almost constantly and that she would guarantee he would not cause any more trouble. “He’s himself again,” she said. “He really is. He knows he’s made a total ass of himself and that he’ll have to pay a price for it. A price he’ll never want to pay again.”