Cactus Garden

by Ward, Robert

  She said, “To you, Jack, humanity is broken down into two classes, cops and germs, which makes you and your holy brethren on the force more narrow, vain, and self-involved than anybody in show business could ever be.”

  Jack said nothing to that. Why talk about it, when mostly it was the truth? He had his ego, and he loved-hated his own world, and there wasn’t much room for anything else.

  Still, it wasn’t the way he wanted to be.

  Some nights, as he lay in his bed, looking at the hallucinatory lights of Hollywood below him, he thought of his mother, Ruth Ann, of her slim California-girl figure, her love of dancing, her piano playing, her ability to make anything grow (ice plants and bougainvillea and birds-of-paradise) in their back garden in Laurel Canyon. Jack could remember nights, sitting on the high steps that led down to the balloon-and-lantern-strung deck, watching his dad and mom cha-cha as Bobby Darin wailed “Mack the Knife” through the towering eucalyptus trees—his mother gracefully making the steps, his dad lumbering happily after her; the other cops and their wives laughing, joining in.

  He had watched them and listened and felt that the world was a good place.

  Then his mother got sick. Cancer, the doctors whispered. Don’t tell the boy, his relatives said, as if he couldn’t hear them, as if he didn’t know they were lying when he asked them how she was. How he hated them all, his father, his uncles, even Zampas, as they all furtively looked away and said she was doing much much better. Not to worry, son. She’ll be fine.

  Six months later it was over. Jack was fifteen, and when they laid her in the ground, he expected to feel crushed. Instead, he felt nothing at all. That year he became a star halfback on the school football team, was popular with girls, and a good student. Sometimes in his room at night he would put on the old Sinatra records his mother had loved and talk to her. He’d say, “I’m handling it really well, Mom. See that? I’m fine. Don’t worry, Mom. Okay?”

  The funny thing was, he thought now, he had actually believed it for a while. But there was something else too, something deeper than grief. It was a realization that true goodness and real happiness had the duration of a cha-cha record or the brief bloom of a plant.

  And these were feelings, he knew now, that he never got over. Certainly becoming a cop did nothing to dispel them.

  But even if it was true, he didn’t want to be a cynic. He was tired of being tough, being the fastest, the hippest, the wildest. Deep down he hated his own act. It was killing him, he sometimes thought, faster than the job ever could.

  The problem was he had gotten too good at the act. What could he replace it with?

  Was he supposed to get married and go live in the Valley? Hang out at barbecues? Little League games? That didn’t make it for him, no matter how appealing it might seem at midnight, alone in the Chateau.

  Or should he be like C.J., invent a mythical good place (Orange County, for Chrissakes?) where he’d feel like a normal citizen. No, he hadn’t found it yet, hadn’t found who he might be when he wasn’t being a cop. So for now, maybe it was better to live here at the Chateau with the other shadow people. Live here in his third-floor one-bedroom apartment with latticed windows that gave the place the strange feeling of a boardinghouse in a movie about the Alps—a little like Heidi Becomes a Junkie.

  Still, it was almost like home, and a residual benefit of the place was that the other residents were so far-out, they made Jack feel mainstream. Besides Riley, there were Ona and Rita, two model/actress/hookers who lived on the first floor and were given to walking naked in the hotel’s little walled-in bonsai garden. And there was Katsu, a Japanese performance artist, who drained himself of blood by using leeches on his wrists now and then in order to rid himself of poisonous toxins. He urged Jack to do likewise and even offered to take Jack to meet his “dear friend and mentor, the Leech Man.” Jack graciously declined. Up on the fifth floor was Jack’s favorite citizen in the hotel, Anton LeRoy, who introduced himself as “once a great Hollywood director, now forced by fortune to ply the skin-flick trade.” This was one show business person Jack could warm to. Just looking at his list of hit films made Jack smile with affection: Star Whores, Thelma Eats Louise, and his latest low-rent masterpiece, Forest Hump.

  But even as funky and congenial as the place was, there were still nights when he missed having someone to care for, nights when he walked the floors staring down at the tortured palms on Hollywood Boulevard. Then there were the nights he did fall into a restless sleep but suffered cold blue nightmares of Jose Benvenides, nights he dreamed of the bust that went wrong last year in the Trail’s End Motel in Tucson, a bust that ended with Jose Benvenides pulling a .44 magnum from under his black Armani sport coat, pointing its barrel (magnified a thousand times in the dream until it seemed as big as a nineteenth-century cannon) at Jack’s head, laughing as he squeezed the trigger, and Jack felt his soul already floating from his bullet-ridden corpse.

  And then came the real shock—the gun had misfired. And without quite knowing how he did it, Jack was on him, clawing at Jose’s face, rolling over the linoleum floor, smashing into the end table with the fake Frederic Remington cowboy lamps and into the cockroach-infested bed, knocking down the painting of the lonely pastel Apache at his sacred burial ground.

  Then, there was a flash of light, a blurt of sound, and Jose Benvenides’s left jaw flew away from his shattered, bloody nose. Improbably, it was Jack who was alive. Alive and haunted—he dreamed about it three nights a week for the first six months. He would wake up screaming, covered with cold, clammy sweat. Jose Benvenides was dead … not him. He was alive, so why was he still shaking, waking up in the middle of the night, certain that he’d seen somebody flashing by his bedroom door?

  Welcome to life on the edge, Elaine. Do you want it? Can you dig it?

  Still, for all their problems, on nights like these, he wished he had her to hold again—her or somebody, anybody. He would fantasize about his imaginary lover, somebody hip and funny who would understand his hang-ups and who would make him laugh.

  Somebody like Charlotte Rae Wingate.

  He’d been thinking of her constantly since their wild meeting in front of Mann’s Chinese, thinking of not only her skin and her breasts, her hair and her eyes, but the way she turned a phrase, the way he didn’t have to finish a sentence because he knew she had already gotten it. Throw in the danger of being attracted to what he could never have and she became irresistible.

  The night before the trip up to Tahoe from Burbank, Jack dreamed that Charlotte Rae and he were having sex in the men’s room of the plane. The dream was so vivid that he could nearly taste her, and when he awoke, he felt an aching in his loins. God, he wanted her, more than he’d wanted anyone else in years. As it turned out, the flight to Tahoe was intense, but not because of sex. Rather, L.A. had one of its infrequent summer downpours. Booming thunder and streaks of cancerous yellow lightning crashed around the plane. Charlotte Rae sat next to Wingate, nestled her head in his shoulder, and barely looked up once during the entire flight. Jack sat across the aisle from them, alone with his Sports Illustrated. Sweat dripped down his arms, and he felt like bailing. It was funny. Put him in a room with five gun-and-knife-toting dope dealers who would cut his heart out for a laugh and he was fine, but cram him into an airplane and toss in a few doses of thunder and lightning and he felt like a panicky kid. To keep sane, Jack read an article by a sports psychiatrist named Dr. Arnie Mazur, who explained in excruciating detail why greater numbers of professional athletes were suffering from clinical depression. (“They often feel unworthy of the great sums of money they earn,” the good doctor wrote.)

  Jack shook his head and wondered what it would be like to have a shot at that kind of depression. He thought of what C.J. had told him just two days ago. He couldn’t afford to send his son to a decent private school and the one in his neighborhood had recently become a target for drug dealers. Only two days earlier a twelve-year-old had asked Calvin’s boy, Demetrius, if he’d li
ke to make a little extra comic-book money by dealing speed. Calvin had sent two local cops over, who busted the kid and scared him into giving up his dealer—a twenty-year-old, out-of-work house painter, who cooked up crank at his “vacation trailer” in Palmdale. When the cops busted the trailer, they found something else out there too, bones, the bones of a thirteen-year-old runaway kid.

  “That coulda been my kid,” C.J. had said.

  That was the world cops lived in; they couldn’t afford the gated neighborhoods like Bel Air, but they were expected to lay down their lives for people who wouldn’t dream of “lunching” with them. Yeah, Jack thought he could handle quite a few unworthy feelings to make the kind of money Shaquille O’Neal was pulling down.

  He lurched in his seat as the plane rocked and felt his stomach heave again. Let the drug dealers come in droves, just get him off this fucking model airplane.

  Jack stood in the light rain, watching a skycap throw his bag into the back of Wingate’s trendy silver-gray off-road vehicle. He started to get into the backseat, but Charlotte Rae beat him to the door and quickly climbed inside.

  “I have a headache, cowboy,” she said, trying for a light witty tone. But Jack heard something else in it. The fear again. On the plane he had chalked up her depressed mood to flight anxiety, but this was something else, and he felt troubled by it.

  “You ride up here with me,” Wingate said, smiling.

  Jack shrugged and climbed in.

  “Fasten that seat belt, son, ‘cause you’re in for a ride.” Jack looked at him curiously, but Wingate only smiled and sat silently behind the wheel.

  “Just waiting for traffic to thin out,” he said.

  Buddy adjusted the seat and gripped the wheel.

  “I know what you are thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking, that ole Buddy’s one of them typical businessman assholes got himself an off-road vehicle when the only place he ever visits is the fucking Seven-Eleven.”

  Jack gave a noncommittal smile but said nothing.

  “Well, I got me a little surprise for you. This here vehicle is called a Typhoon, and it’s altogether another breed of monster. She only looks like the other suburbo wagons, which is the whole beauty of it. You check this out. First, I place my left foot down on the brake real hard. Now I push my right foot down on the gas, crush that baby down like so, see what I mean?”

  Jack nodded. And reflexively gripped the armrest hard with his right hand.

  “Very impressive,” he said.

  “Yeah? Well, impress this!” Wingate said.

  He suddenly lifted his left foot off the brake, simultaneously leaving his right foot tromped full bore down on the accelerator, and the Typhoon tore out of the parking lot as though it had been slung from some cosmic slingshot. Wingate could barely control the vehicle as it skidded, slid, and rocketed past the two other cars in the right lane.

  “Son of a bitch,” Jack said, his stomach churning.

  “Buddy, watch out!” Charlotte Rae screamed.

  Just a few feet ahead of them were two wealthy Indian women dressed in saris, purple snow parkas, and bright red snow boots. Jack watched in horror as they screamed and threw up their hands, paralyzed with fear. By sheer luck, the Typhoon passed a half inch to the right of them. Buddy gave a wild cowboy yell, as the Typhoon skidded madly up on a grass plot and then snaked back off of it, nearly colliding with a Shell gas tanker. From behind him, Jack heard Charlotte Rae scream again, “Buddy, you goddamned maniac! Stop this car, now!”

  That was all; Jack had had enough. He reached over and grabbed the wheel from Wingate. “ ‘Sum bitch, what you doing, boy?”

  “You crazy bastard,” Jack said. “Hit the fucking brakes, now!”

  He was yelling now, furious, yet at the same time he was trying to stay in character. Wingate was obviously testing him to see how much he’d put up with.

  “Listen to me, Buddy,” Jack said, after he had successfully steered the car to the side of the road. “I don’t care how you treat the guys who work for you, but you don’t fuck with me like that. You hear me, partner? Thanks for the trip, but I’m outta here.”

  He opened the door, slid off his seat belt, and stepped onto the curb.

  “Hey, now wait a second,” Wingate gasped. “I was just having a little fun.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jack said. “You were having fun, but I wasn’t. Flip open the trunk, and I’ll get my bags.”

  “No, Jack, don’t …” Charlotte Rae said.

  But Jack didn’t meet her eyes.

  “Give me my bags, Wingate, before I pull you out of the car and stuff you up your own asshole. Comprende, Buddy?”

  Wingate’s little mouth fell open, like a trapdoor with a broken hinge.

  “Boy, you got a hard bark on you, talking to me like that.”

  “Open the back, Buddy,” Jack said. “Don’t make me start counting.”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Buddy Wingate said, opening his palms. “What do you want me to do, give you a hump job or something? Look, I’m sorry, okay. It was a dumb move, and I can see how you maybe wouldn’t dig it. Come on, pal, you get back in here. I’m real sorry. I mean it now.”

  Jack felt a silent thrill pass through him like a shadow. His little gamble had paid off. Wingate had tried to intimidate him, but Jack turned it around on him. For now, he had the upper hand.

  Silently, as though he was still mightily pissed, he climbed up the step and got back inside.

  He’d let Wingate thaw him out, but slowly, by degrees.

  They climbed into the mountains, and Jack looked out the windows at the great Douglas firs, the drooping pine trees, and the massive black rocks that lay by the side of the curving road. Up here the sky itself was bluer, the air crisp and clear, and Jack felt himself relax a little.

  Wingate turned the car into a dirt road, and they began to climb through the trees and over washed-out potholes two feet wide.

  Then they came to a gate, and Wingate got out and unlocked it.

  “Welcome to my hideaway,” he said, as he got back in the Typhoon.

  Though Jack was probably overwhelmed by the natural beauty of Buddy Wingate’s luxurious Tahoe retreat, he didn’t have a chance to say so. Wingate used up all the available oxygen having the reaction for both of them.

  “You ever see such a place?” Buddy said. “Bet you thought this old country boy was gonna have one of them glass-and-beam deals. But I wanted something that felt like early Americana. Same as with my commercials. Got to be vintage or I jest can’t handle it. We’re talking natural beauty, wraparound front porch for jest sitting and thinking, movie-set floaty clouds, and piss-yourself-you’re-so-happy fucking trees. You hear what I’m saying, Jack?”

  “I just bet Jack got it,” Charlotte Rae said.

  Buddy shot her a look, but Jack quietly intervened.

  “The place is Fantasy Island, Buddy. Really.”

  Wingate gave him a forty-karat smile, and they drove up the gravel road to the house.

  Inside, the cabin was surprisingly tastefully decorated in a rustic style, complete with rocking chairs and a straight-back oak dining room set. There were braided circular rugs and a magnificent stone fireplace.

  “See all this?” Buddy said. “This here is real American, which is why I like it.”

  “The truth is,” Charlotte Rae said, smiling with affection, “that I had to practically kill him to get him to keep it like this. Buddy wanted to put razorback hogs all over the walls.”

  “That’s ‘cause I’m an ole razorback from Arkansas,” Buddy said. “You ever hear ‘em call the hogs, Jack?”

  “No,” Jack said. “I must have missed it.”

  “Buddy,” Charlotte Rae said with a grimace.

  “Shush, now,” Wingate said. “If calling the hogs is good enough for Bubba Bill, it’s good enough for you, baby. Here we go!”

  He got into a quaint little stoop, thrust his belly out, and cupped his hands to his mouth. Charlotte Rae put her hands over her
ears.

  “Ooooooooooh Peeeeeg!” he screamed at a decibel level designed to smash china. “Sooooooooooieeeeeeeeee!!”

  Jack stood in stunned disbelief. Wingate finished and smiled happily.

  “Damn, does a man good to get it out. Down in Little Rock, they say ole Bubba did that every time him and one his concubabes met at the No-Tell Motel.”

  “Classy people that they are,” Charlotte Rae said. “Let’s all get changed and take Jack for a hike up to Echo Lake. That’s how I relax.”

  “Nah. You two go ahead,” Buddy said, walking toward the antique telephone that hung from the dining room wall. “I got a little business I got to take care of. Just get back before dark, ‘cause I got reservations for us down at Harrah’s.”

  “Oh, Buddy, do we have to on the first night?” Charlotte Rae said.

  “Hell, yes. I come up here to unwind. It’s going to be fun. You gamble much, Jack?”

  “Not for me,” Jack said. “I leave it to the pros.”

  “Good,” Buddy said. “Shows you’re a smart man. Gambling’s for suckers, I know it. But hell, a man has to have some vices.”

  Wingate winked at Jack, and Jack felt a kind of twisting in his stomach. It suddenly occurred to him that this was going to be harder undercover than he had anticipated, not because of any great immediate danger to himself, but because he had a desire to stick Wingate’s oversized head into a trash can. If you could like a guy at least on some level, it made it easier to play.

  “Come on,” Charlotte Rae said. “Grab your bag, and I’ll show you up to your room.”

  Wingate winked at him, and Jack picked up his bag and followed her, trying not to look too hard at her body as she moved like a dancer in front of him up the steps.