Wild Cards XVI: Deuces Down

by Michael Cassutt

  There was a moan from across the room. Mueller was coming to, which Bob did not want to allow. “Time for your second helping.” He brought the pistol butt on forcefully down onto Mueller’s head with a stinging whack. Bob looked down at Earle. Rich boy’s eyes were still shot through with fear.

  Croyd swooped back into the room and clapped his hand over Breton Earle’s mouth. “Don’t bite, or I’ll bite you back.” Croyd bared his sizable yellow fangs. The message got though. Earle didn’t even whimper as he was carried out into the open air.

  Bob waited an uncomfortably long time. Mueller was beginning to make a lot of noise and there must be other people searching through the darkness of the home. Croyd dropped back into the room just as Bob’s paranoia was beginning to bloom.

  “You cut the power.” Bob said.

  Croyd grabbed him under the armpits. “Leave it to Mr. Village Idiot to state the obvious.” Bob felt a rush of air as they rocketed into the warm night. The sense of being airborne was magical and slightly scary, given Croyd’s unusual nature.

  They landed far from the house, by Carlotta and Earle, whose hands were bound behind his back with Carlotta’s bra. Bob gave her an accusatory look.

  “We had to use something,” she explained. “Or he might have run off.”

  “When I took it off, I couldn’t really see that much, but we may have to rectify that later, as part of my payment.” Croyd kissed his fingertips.

  “Please leave me alone. I’ll give you money.” Earle was enough of himself to try to strike a bargain.

  Croyd laughed. “I’ve got business with Mr. Earle. So we’ll have to figure out a way to get you two back to the city. I’ll bet neither one of you can hot-wire a car.”

  “Figures.” He flew over to a nearby sedan and opened its driver’s side door. A few moments later the engine turned over and the headlights came on. Bob grabbed Earle by the collar and led him over to the car. Carlotta was ahead of him. She was from Iowa, so she actually knew how to drive.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Bob handed Earle over to Croyd.

  “Please. You can’t just kill me.” Earle looked from face to face. “I didn’t hurt anybody.”

  “Rich boy and I have a date with the Atlantic Ocean.” Croyd slapped Earle hard on the back. “He’s going to do some motivational swimming.”

  “No, I don’t swim well at all,” Earle protested.

  “I’ll meet you at your club later, and you can pay me then. What I did tonight falls under the bonus clause, just in case you didn’t know.” Croyd flew up with Earle and was quickly lost in the darkness. The screams of protest from Earle faded quickly. Bob got into the passenger side of the vehicle and shut the door.

  “You know how to get us home?”

  “Watch me,” Carlotta said. Bob turned on the radio when they hit the main highway. The version of “Night on Bald Mountain” from Saturday Night Fever was playing. He drifted off to thoughts of a white-suited Croyd dancing with Carlotta.

  The comfort of seeing the New York skyline lighting the horizon vanished when they finally made it back to the club. They’d ditched the car just north of Jokertown, taken the subway up, and been greeted with a burned-out building surrounded by yellow police tape. Bob walked to the center of what once had been his club, still-warm ashes crunching under his feet. Carlotta walked quietly behind him for a few moments, then gave him a hug.

  “What to you think Mickey and Judy would do?”

  “You’d have to hit me with your deuce to make me laugh now.” Bob crouched and picked up a handful of burned rubble.

  They stood there silently for a few minutes, ignoring the people on the street, the cars, and the other sounds of the city. With a rush of leathery wings, Croyd dropped down next to them.

  “No riots around here. Maybe a parting shot from Earle’s goons.” Croyd shook his horned head sympathetically.

  “I won’t be able to pay you until tomorrow,” Bob said. “I can go to the bank and get the money.”

  “Good. If not, I’ll have to kill you.” Croyd tangled his fingers in Carlotta’s hair. “Or take it out in trade.”

  Carlotta laughed.

  “I know that laugh,” Bob said. “You’re out of luck where she’s concerned.”

  “Tomorrow,” Croyd said, and he was gone.

  Bob had paid Croyd off handsomely, and Croyd had suggested the he and Carlotta get out of New York and adopt new identities. Croyd had plenty of useful tips on creating another persona that would be undetectable by the authorities or people like Earle. Croyd didn’t much care for Earle and remarked that the millionaire peed better than he swam.

  After settling with the insurance company, Bob and Carlotta hit the road, with her at the wheel, of course. Driving was one thing he’d promised he was going to learn how to do. He didn’t know where they were going to end up, but he wanted to get away from New York for good. They stopped off to visit his parents on the way out and were now headed to Iowa to see hers. He wondered if he could tolerate that much homespun Americana. After Carlotta had demonstrated to him the benefits of “long-term possibilities” he was ready to try.

  The sun was coming up across the plains when they entered her home state.

  “How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a light bulb,” she asked.

  “Only one, if the right person asks.”

  Carlotta smiled at that. “Want to hear some new ‘knock-knock’ jokes?”

  To Bob’s surprise, he actually did.

  A FACE FOR THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

  By Melinda M. Snodgrass

  Dust filtered down from the rafters, shaken loose by the grips who scurried like a tribe of apes along the ancient wood catwalks. It glittered and spun gold in the bright work lights. Bradley Finn stared mesmerized at the spinning motes and wished he’d spent less of the night drinking Tequila Sunrises down in Santa Monica.

  Finn and the rest of the Myth Patrol were perched on a fabricated cliff. Below them sat the deck of the Argo. The nat actors, including the stars of Jason and the Argonauts, David Soul and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were back in their trailers sipping Evian and keeping cool. The excuse for keeping the jokers was that they were hard to light, and the D.P. wanted another crack at it.

  Finn sighed and tried to find a more comfortable position on his platform, which wasn’t easy since he was a pony-sized centaur. The action called for him to rear. He wasn’t relishing the prospect. The wood didn’t offer much traction for his hooves, and he’d left his rubber booties at home. Not that Roger Corman was going to let him wear booties in the shot.

  So Bradley figured he was going to pitch backwards off the platform, fall twelve feet to the floor, break his back, and end up with a little wheeled cart so he could drag his back legs. There were five jokers in the cast, but the E.M.T. wasn’t certified in joker medicine. Finn knew. He’d checked. Which meant he’d probably be dealing with any injuries to the Myth Patrol—unless he was the myth who was down.

  It was a sweltering August day in southern California, and he could feel damp on the palomino hide along his flanks. The stink of rancid make-up, stale coffee and donuts just added to his joy. The big air conditioning unit on the roof of Sound Stage 17 came to life with a grind and a rumble that shook more dust out of the rafters.

  Clops looked up from his copy of Variety. His single eye was magnified to the size of a goose egg behind the fold-down lens which was mounted on an old fashioned surgeon’s headband. It was tough to be an actor when you were that near sighted.

  Of course Clops had other disadvantages—like being seven feet tall, and having only one eye in the center of his forehead. Finn thought.

  “You realize that dust may have been around when Mary Pickford was a star,” the cyclops said.

  “I don’t think Pickford was ever at Warner’s,” Goathead responded.

  “Hmbruza #** muffel wanda,” said Cleo. She was lying on her stomach while one of the snakes which sprouted from her head gave her a nec
k massage. Cleo, whose full name was Cleopatra Reza, was Turkish, didn’t speak a word of English, but never let that stop her. She commented on everything. The other jokers just agreed with her, and so far none of the men had gotten slapped.

  When Finn had first been introduced all he could think was that her parents must have hated her. It would have been like naming me Seabiscuit, Finn had thought, and why Cleopatra and not Medusa? Clops thought it was because Cleopatra had died from the bite of an asp, and because Cleo was breathtakingly beautiful while Medusa was so hideous that she turned men to stone. Finn had to admit that Cleo was very beautiful—if you could ignore the tangle of snakes growing out of her head.

  “You know what I mean. This is historic. This sound stage was built in 1927,” Clops said.

  “Yeah, well, I wish we were on a new sound stage with real air conditioning that we didn’t have to turn off for every shot,” Goat-head groused. Goathead was your basic asshole who never missed an opportunity to trash anything and everybody. Finn just wished he wouldn’t cut at Clops, who was a gentle soul and completely star-struck. Clops had left his Kansas home at seventeen and headed west determined to be a star. Except he was seven feet tall, and had one eye.

  Finn quashed the thought and glared at Goathead, hoping the other joker would correctly interpret the look as a stop pissing on Clops’s birthday cake. Apparently he did, for Goathead muttered that he was hungover, which for Goathead amounted to an apology. Cleo rattled off another of her incomprehensible comments.

  The D.P. threw the lights, and there was a magnificent geyser of sparks from one transformer. Firemen rushed forward with extinguishers, but the sparks were all she wrote.

  “Shit!”

  “Fuck!”

  “Hell.”

  “Damn!”

  The curses rose from all over the stage, erupting from the D.P., the First A.D., the director’s assistant, and Goathead. Finn got the assistant’s attention. “Mary, can we please take a break?” Finn pleaded.

  “Sure, go ahead. Nick, when do you want the Myths back?” she shouted at the D.P.

  “Give me an hour.”

  Clops just climbed down the front of the plaster cliff. It wasn’t that far for him. He then reached back up and, handling her as if she were made of spun glass, he lifted Cleo to the floor. She gave him her thousand watt smile. If only it weren’t snakes, Finn thought, and sighed.

  Finn and Goathead had a ramp off the back of the cliff. Their hooves rang hollowly on the wood, and Finn felt the ramp sag under his weight. His stomach was suddenly too light, and heading for the back of his throat. Finn froze, waiting or the ramp to break. After a moment where nothing happened, Bradley resumed his cautious descent.

  Once Finn was safely on the floor he trotted over to the craft services table. His stomach had been too off for breakfast and now he was starving. He surveyed the array. M & M’s, stale donuts, Oreoes, peanut butter, jelly and bread. A jar of pretzels. Corman was known for being a tightwad. Finn decided to head over to sound stage 23 where his dad was shooting The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Finn Senior kept an elaborate spread, but of course he was making a twelve million dollar extravaganza staring Grace Kelly and Warren Beatty, not a cheesy B action movie.

  Finn slipped out the stage door, into the hazy but intense California sunshine. The white walls of the stages loomed like breakers on either side of the street. He kicked it into a lope, and went clattering past Teamsters tossing around footballs, (he got the usual calls of Hi Ho Silver, which was annoying because he was a palomino) past stars in their golf carts and lines of Star Waggons parked against the sides of the street. Spinning red lights indicated they were shooting on the various stages. There were a lot of lights. The movie business was booming.

  He waited in front of his dad’s stage until the light went out so he could enter the set. Pulling open the door, he stepped into a Victorian drawing room complete with dark wood, red velvet and innumerable knick knacks on every available surface. Grace Kelly, looking like a swaying calla lily in her white gown, was gliding off the set. Stan Whitehorn-Humphries, dapper in his bow tie and tweed jacket, was blotting her make-up as she walked.

  She passed close by Finn, and he caught a scent of sweat under the perfume. It was somehow comforting to know that someone that beautiful was still human enough to perspire. Kelly stopped. Finn gaped at her. Stan, a smile lurking beneath the brush of his white mustache, gave a nod, and Finn realized his pony’s ass was blocking the door. Muttering an apology, he swung his hindquarters out of the way. Kelly glided out, and Stan gave him a wink.

  “You’ve just seen an example of what they mean by ‘stunningly beautiful’,” Finn said to the elderly make-up artist.

  “She is quite remarkable, isn’t she?” Stan gazed for an instant at the closed door as if conjuring a picture of the star. “So who did your make-up? You look dead.” Fifty years in Hollywood hadn’t blunted his upper-class British accent. Of course it was an affectation after all this time, but no one cared. It was part of the legend of Stan Whitehorn-Humphries.

  “I’m supposed to look scary,” Finn said.

  “Sorry, dead. Come over to the trailer after you get a bite and sup, and I’ll touch you up.” Whitehorn-Humprhies walked away before Finn could thank him.

  Finn cut through the set, admiring the design. Next week the production was scheduled to move to England for the exteriors. Finn would love to go along, but he badly needed to replenish his bank account before the fall semester. He glanced over to where his father was discussing the setup for the next shot, and briefly wished his dad had been the typical Hollywood parent—just throw money at your kids and hope they don’t embarrass you. But G. Benton Finn had clung to his mid-western roots, and believed his kid appreciated what he had to work for and disdained what he hadn’t. He would pay for Bradley’s medical school tuition, but if his son wanted to live away from home he had to swing it himself.

  Finn stepped delicately over the snaking wires and cords, and got a glimpse of the craft service table. He broke into a smile. From here he could see salmon, cream cheese, bagels, fresh fruit, and an assortment of pastries and cookies. There was a gaggle of nat starlets gathered around the table. Two blondes, a redhead and a brunette. The taffeta dresses hissed and crackled as they moved, and they were showing a lot of bosom for Victorians. Still, with bosoms like that you didn’t want to hide them. These girls were stunners.

  Finn briefly wondered if his father had ever availed himself of the casting couch. A moment’s consideration, and Finn decided that Finn Senior probably had, but mom had sense enough to look the other way. There were a lot of temptations and vices in Tinsel Town. You picked the ones you could tolerate and lived with them.

  “I looked it up, she was born in ’28,” one girl was saying, as Finn stepped over the final power cord.

  “That means she’s. . . .” The brunette’s brow furrowed.

  “Fifty-two,” said one of the blondes. She was tinier then her companions, and she reminded Finn of the figure in a music box, perfect in every detail. Then he got a look at her eyes.

  A figurine constructed out of hard glass, he thought, as he waited for them to react to him. Jokers, even rich ones, learned to gauge a nat’s reaction before approaching too close.

  “She’s got to be an ace,” mumbled the brunette around a mouthful of cookie.

  “It’s illegal for them to be in professional sports,” said the redhead. “They should have done that in Hollywood.”

  “Then Golden Boy couldn’t have had a career,” objected the zaftig blonde.

  “Another good argument for banning wild cards,” murmured the petite blonde dryly. Finn swallowed a chuckle. This girl was quick.

  “Kelly’s never said she’s an ace,” offered the brunette.

  “Never said she isn’t,” countered the redhead.

  “There’s a blood test that will tell if you’ve got the wild card,” mused the gimlet eyed blonde, almost to herself

  The re
dhead picked a shrimp out of the melting ice and savagely chewed her way to the tail. “You’d think she’d want to move on.” The girl bit off the words with the same force she had shown to the shrimp.

  Again the tiny blonde answered. “Why? Why would she? She’s been a star for thirty years. Every major role has been hers. Why quit?”

  “So some of us could have a chance,” said the brunette.

  “I wouldn’t do it,” said the gimlet eyed blonde.

  “Yeah, but we all know you’d kill your mother for a part,” shot back the brunette.

  The blonde gave her a look that clearly said, And what’s your point?

  This time Finn couldn’t hold back the laugh. That did get their attention. The brunette and the zaftig blonde looked disgusted and walked hurriedly away. The redhead gave him a nervous smile, then made a show of checking the brooch watch which was part of her costume and hurried away. The tiny blonde held her ground.

  He grabbed a plate and started loading up. “I’m sure you believed that watch really worked,” remarked the blonde.

  Finn lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “Hey, at least she pretended to have an excuse.”

  “You’re Mr. Finn’s son, aren’t you?”

  “The one and only.”

  “I’m Tanya.”

  Finn shook the proffered hand. “I’m Bradley Finn. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Well, I better go and walk off some of this,” she indicated the table“. . . spread.”

  “It’s really hot out there. It’s not so bad when you’re down by the beach. I was at Santa Monica last night, and it wasn’t bad. It’s always worse in the valley. I’m a native Angelino and we know to avoid the valley.” Finn realized he was babbling. He tried to bite back the inane flow, only to have the worst of the inanities escape. “So, where do you live?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Bradley, I’ve got the right area code and an acceptable Beverly Hills address. The casting directors call.”