Eve's Men

by Newton Thornburg

  “That makes sense,” Jolly conceded. “To me anyway, and apparently to you. But then we don’t go around bulldozing other people’s property, do we? No, I think the only answer is to have the man himself in here, so we can judge for ourselves, see with our own eyes whether Mr. Brian Poole can be trusted to behave like a human being.”

  Rick apparently had known all along that Brian was to be invited in, for he was already at the door. As he went out on the deck and called down to Brian, Jolly lit another cigarette, with the same ritual as before. Eve lit up too, while Miss English sat stiffly in her chair, doodling along the edge of her steno pad. Angel Brad dumped the cat onto the floor and stood up, fondly regarding his muscular arms and flat gut. Charley absently looked about the room, a living room in normal times, but crowded now with the stuff of commerce: boxes of advertising and posters and leaning bulletin boards full of lists and drawings, one portraying the block of ersatz buildings Brian had leveled. As Charley thought about how much its rebuilding would cost, Rick came back into the room, followed by Brian and the security guard. Charley was relieved to see that Brian appeared cool and relaxed instead of combative.

  The security guard moved on around Jolly’s desk to take up a position facing Brian, and Charley was amazed to see the man unbutton the flap on his holster. It was so negligible a detail that Charley almost missed it, yet now he had a hard time taking his eyes off the thing, for it told him more clearly than anything else how Jolly viewed his brother.

  “Well, I’m here,” Brian said to the director. “So what’s the deal? Am I to kiss your ass on David Letterman, or what?”

  Jolly put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “As a matter of fact, that’s not such a bad idea. But even then, I’d keep wondering what happens next. There I’d be, with my pants down. What do I do if you whip out a chainsaw?”

  “I think I can promise you,” Brian said. “No chainsaws.”

  “And what about bulldozing?”

  “That too. No more bulldozing.”

  “And we’d have your word on that?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Ah yes, the word of Brian Poole.” For a time Jolly just sat there looking at Brian as if he were studying an abstract sculpture. Then, smiling crookedly, the director went on. “Your brother here seems to think you’d be amenable to doing the talk shows when the movie comes out—kind of plugging it through criticism, I guess. Tell me, is that your idea or his?”

  Brian laughed softly. “Well, I can tell you it sure as hell ain’t mine. I know just what your lousy, lying movie’s gonna say—that Kim was a pathetic, washed-up drug fiend and I was the rotten bastard who made her that way. Am I wrong?”

  Jolly smiled thinly. “So that’s how you’d go about plugging the movie, uh?”

  “What else? It’s gonna be just another piece of shit like all your other shit, isn’t it? I’d rather piss on it than plug it.”

  Jolly’s ruddy face now was almost crimson. He looked at Charley. “This your idea of a joke, Mr. Poole?”

  Seeing that Brian was already heading for the door, Charley got up too. “No, not at all,” he said. “I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

  He and Eve then followed Brian outside. But Jolly evidently felt that the scene was not over yet. As the three of them went down the stairs, the director and Brad came charging out onto the deck.

  “Fuck you, Poole!” Jolly bellowed. “You dumb fuckin’ bulldozer! You tink I do business wid a asshole psycho like you, you got shit for brains! Fongula tutta familia, you fuckin’ asshole! You fuckin’ bulldozer! It’s da slammer for you!”

  In his rage Jolly seemed to have forgotten how to form the th sound. And all the time he was yelling, he kept up a frantic semaphore of Italian obscenity, one moment stabbing down at them the horns of the cuckold—his pinky and index finger rising from his fist—and the next moment smacking the crook of his arm and shaking a cupped hand at them, a gesture whose precise meaning Charley never had known, other than that its sender was in a lousy mood.

  As the three of them drove away, Eve gave Brian a despairing look. “Well, you sure cooked his goose, didn’t you?”

  Brian made no response. And Charley knew from long experience that this would not be a good time to remonstrate with his brother. So he tried to make light of the incident.

  “All I have to say is fongula tutta familia, you fucking bulldozer.”

  But Brian did not even smile as he sped down the winding gravel road.

  Chapter Three

  Country and western bars were anathema to Eve. She loathed the music, she loathed the decor, and for the most part, she loathed the patrons too, Okie-Californians who tortured the language and strutted around in their cowboy duds as if they had just come in off the range instead of the late shift at the local Wal-Mart. The Purple Sage was not an exception. A huge, barn-like structure, it had a long, antique wooden bar and brass spittoons and a mechanical bull that stood neglected in an alcove. On the sawdusted dance floor a dozen or so couples moved to the energetic music of a five-piece band whose members looked to Eve suspiciously like acid rockers masquerading as country folk. Whatever their true stripe, they were so implacably loud that she was grateful for the high vaulted ceiling—actually the underside of the roof—which, with the rafters below, broke up or at least absorbed a few decibels of the din.

  Still, the only way Brian and his new hick friends could make themselves heard was by shouting at each other across the Formica tabletop of the back booth Eve had insisted on, as far from the band as she could get. Though Brian was not a great fan of cowboy bars either, he had heard that the Miss Colorado crew had turned this one into something of a hangout, and he wanted to learn what the status of the movie was, whether the cast had left town, whether the set was being rebuilt, just what was going on. Why he wanted to know these things, Eve didn’t even want to think about. It was too depressing.

  Though she saw a number of movie people there—crew members mostly—Brian had no time to watch for them, not with the Einhorn siblings feeding on him so avidly. The more time Eve spent with them, the more they seemed like a loony stage mother and her tongue-tied offspring. Neither of them had changed clothes from that afternoon, nor unfortunately did their personalities show any alteration. Belinda was still unspeakably ebullient and sexy, a frightening cross between Marilyn Monroe and Rosie O’Donnell. Her enthusiasm was such that Eve halfway expected one of her straining breasts to pop a button at any moment, hopefully blinding the brother, who was so tense he looked as if he might snap a bone just sitting there, gripping his mug of beer in both hands, like a strangler.

  Belinda didn’t seem able to get over the fact that she was sitting in the same booth with the man who had lived with Kim Sanders—actually lived with a superstar! And she kept trying to pump Brian about Kim, for some reason oblivious to the fact that he had just committed a felony to protect the late superstar’s privacy, as well as his own. What was Kim really like? the girl asked. Was she really such a hard case? Did she really do heroin as well as coke? Was her great hit song, Miss Colorado, really about herself? Was that who she really was?

  Brian either ignored the girl’s questions or slipped past them through misdirection, such as, “Well, who knows what anybody’s really like, underneath it all?” The only question he answered honestly was about the star’s last hit song—now the movie title.

  “No, she was never Miss Colorado herself, just a runner-up. And her life afterwards wasn’t all downhill, was it? The girl in the song is simply someone Kim made up, another country music loser. And that wasn’t Kim, no matter what Hollywood seems to think.”

  At that point Chester managed to croak out a few words. “I liked that song. I like country music. It’s the only kind, I say.”

  Eve imagined that Belinda knew full well why Brian had invited her and Chester to join them, simply because Brian was a man and therefore would want to get her into bed as fast as possible. Naturally the girl would w
ant to cooperate, if for no other reason than the high she would get later on, telling her snow-bunny friends all about it, how it was, fucking the man who had fucked Kim Sanders. And, lucky girl, she of course would have no idea that Brian was merely using her to humiliate Eve and offend Charley and debase himself, all in one fell swoop.

  It was an old habit of his when he had failed at something, when he was really down, when he truly loathed himself. Then nothing would do but to dive right into the nearest cesspool and revel there, give those who loved him irrefutable reason to stop loving him. So Eve wasn’t finding it easy, sitting across from the bounteous Belinda, trying not to be too unpleasant. After all, the girl was just doing what nature intended for her to do, doggedly persisting in her gaudy little mating dance until she eventually wound up many times a mother, fat and pregnant and plain. Eve could hardly wait.

  Occasionally Eve would glance over at the front entrance to see if Charley had arrived. After dinner, he’d said he had to go back to his room to phone his wife and his son, who was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. Though Brian had given him directions to the Purple Sage, Charley intimated that he might not even show up.

  “Remember, I’m old and stodgy,” he’d said. “And I don’t even own a pair of cowboy boots.”

  Eve was of two minds about his coming. On the one hand, she figured the table could certainly use his cool, wry voice, the gentle humor of an actual grownup. Then too she couldn’t deny that later on it would be nice to have his shoulder to cry on. More than that, though, she simply did not want Charley to see her humiliation at his brother’s hands. And it surprised her a little, how strongly she felt about this, considering that she had known the man for only a day. But then he was Brian’s brother, and she imagined it was only natural not to want your quasi-in-laws to see you put down and humiliated.

  So, later, when she finally saw him coming through the front door, she felt a pang of disappointment. At the same time, she found herself smiling at him, all the way across the room.

  Instead of squeezing into the booth next to Brian, Charley scared up a chair and sat down between the two couples, figuring everyone would be more comfortable that way. He was not surprised to find Belinda Einhorn and her brother still looking like day and night. Though Chester appeared old enough to be the girl’s father, he deferred to her as if he were her shy little boy. And when she smiled or laughed, it seemed almost as if she got her energy from him, drawing down on his meager wattage so she could burn all the brighter. Yet Charley knew better than to dismiss the little man out of hand, having visited his mother’s Ozark relatives often enough to recognize Chester’s type, the kind of man who beat the wife and kids and cooed to his hounds, the kind of man who spoke softly and carried great big guns in his pickup.

  At the same time, Charley could see that Eve was not in the least impressed with the Einhorns. Though she was probably doing her best to appear sociable, smiling politely when Belinda would cut loose with laughter or some wide-eyed comment meant to be funny, Charley could see the frost in her eyes.

  She was wearing jeans, boots, and a black sleeveless jersey. Her hair, thick and dark, looked a lovely mess, hanging about her face. Listening to Belinda’s careless chatter, Charley wondered how the girl could be so oblivious of Eve, so unintimidated by her. And the obvious answer—that the girl was simply too thick to notice the other’s coolness or even her striking beauty—somehow it didn’t quite wash. Most of the time Belinda seemed content to play the sexy airhead, but every now and then a glimmer of keener intelligence would show through, like gold in a back molar.

  Finally, trying to include her brother in the conversation, she said something about ranching, which resulted in Brian telling Chester about his own experiences as a greenhorn cowboy on a Texas ranch after his return from Vietnam.

  “My boss was this big old Swede, probably the nicest guy I ever worked for. I remember one time he was patiently sitting on the corral rollin’ cigarettes while I kept tryin’ to rope this one maverick calf. Finally I got fed up and tackled the little beast. But even then I think it took me a good ten minutes to hog-tie it.”

  Chester looked as if he really wanted to laugh at the story but couldn’t quite bring it off, the muscles in his hollowed face being too stiff for such a task. But Belinda more than made up for his failure, smiling along and laughing loudly at the end.

  Charley broke in then, asking Chester about his own ranch. “Where’d you say it was—Missouri?”

  “Yep, the southwest corner. Hell, if we’d a mind to, we could prackly spit on Arkansas and Oklahoma—if a body’d want to waste the spit, that is.”

  Talking about his ranch seemed to relax the man and for a time he became almost garrulous. The family had two whole sections of “mighty fair grassland,” he said. And they were currently running almost two hundred “mama cows” on it, which meant that it had to carry almost five hundred head in the summer. His father and uncle used to run the spread, but they were both “purty crippled up” now, his daddy having been trampled by a bull while Uncle Harlan lost an arm in a hay baler.

  “But the ranch, it’s jest business,” he said. “T’aint my real work.”

  “Oh, what is, then?” Eve asked.

  “Politics.”

  Belinda looked up at the rafters. “Oh boy, here we go,” she said.

  Chester scowled at her. “We ain’t goin’ nowheres, Miss Smart-mouth. I jest told ’em what my real work is, that’s all.”

  “Politics as in Democrat and Republican?” Brian asked.

  “Naa, jest the opposite. No party at all. It’s doin’ away with guvmint. All guvmint. That’s what I’m after.”

  Eve was lighting a cigarette. “Like the Libertarians?”

  “No, not like them at all. They’s just gabbers, that bunch. Anyways, if yer fer real agin guvmint, ya don’t organize. Ya do things fer yerself. Ya go yer own way.”

  Belinda laughed. “Yeah, the Chester Einhorn party.”

  “Politics is jest pertectin’ yer propity and freedom,” Chester said. “That’s all it is.”

  “And you think one man can do all that, by himself?” Brian asked, innocence incarnate, as if he had not started out the day being charged with two felonies for doing just what Chester recommended: taking the law into his own hands.

  Looking down at his tiny, gnarled hands clutching the beer mug, Chester grinned slightly, a secretive, gleeful grin. “Oh, they’s ways,” he allowed. “They’s always ways.”

  “Like what?” Eve asked.

  The little man paused like an actor before answering, obviously relishing these moments in the spotlight. “Like guns,” he said. “They’s always guns.”

  During the silence that followed this pronouncement, Damian Jolly’s assistant, Rick Walters, stopped by the table, resplendent in a Russian peasant blouse and Indian jewelry. No one introduced him to the Einhorns and he in turn totally ignored them.

  “I just wanted to tell you how terribly sorry I am about this afternoon,” he said. “When I invited you up to Damian’s place, I thought there was a good possibility of compromise. I’m sorry how it all worked out.”

  Eve smiled at him. “So are we, Rick. But we appreciate your help. We really do.”

  Rick shook his head. “Jolly and that Italian temper of his … things can get out of hand pretty fast.”

  “Well, we don’t blame you, Rick. We know none of it was your fault.”

  Brian looked at Eve. “Is that a fact? It sure is great to find out how we feel about everything.”

  Like a silent movie queen, Rick pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. “Oh, the noise in here, it’s simply dreadful. It really is. Well, I must be off. I’ll see you another time. Bye-bye.”

  With that, he turned and made his way through the tables and across the dance floor to the far side of the room, where he joined an elegant young couple at the bar. Leaning toward them, he said something that made them laugh out loud, though inaudibly, in the din of the P
urple Sage.

  Chester was looking as if he had tasted something sour. “Jest what in hell was that anyway?”

  “One of the movie director’s fag assistants,” Brian told him.

  “Ain’t none of that kind out our way,” the little cowboy said. “We jest don’t tolerate it.”

  Belinda laughed. “The truth is they just don’t stick around. McDonald County ain’t exactly San Francisco, you know.”

  “And thank the Lord for that.” Evidently satisfied with getting in the last word with his little sister, Chester decided to take his leave. Scooting out of the booth, he tipped his cowboy hat and shuffled backwards. “Well, it’s been a real pleasure meetin’ y’all,” he said. “But I ain’t one fer late hours. You jest git outa the habit on a ranch, ya know, gittin’ up at five ever’ mornin’. Anyways, I got me a real comfy room over to the Motel Six. So I’ll jest leave Belinda here with y’all, and I be seein’ ya, okay?”

  Getting up himself, Brian shook the little man’s hand and clapped him on the back and joked that he himself was one “rancher” who had never quite made it out of bed at five in the morning. Nodding solemnly, Chester turned and walked off, hunching his narrow shoulders as though against a biting winter wind.

  “Well, now it’s my turn,” Eve said, sliding out before Brian could sit back down. “I’ve got a very large headache, and I was thinking you might want to give me a lift home, Charley.” Smiling at Belinda, she explained why this was necessary. “Brian has to stay so he can talk business with some movie people. Isn’t that right, Brian?”

  “That’s a fact.”

  Eve gave Charley a commiserating smile. “So I’m afraid you’re stuck with me, Charley.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “It’s past my bedtime anyway.”

  “Yes, we’re just going to have to leave these two in each other’s capable hands. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”