Movie Stars

by Jack Pendarvis

“My stomach is upset.”

  “Well, you ate beans twice yesterday. Plus you are in a period of transition.”

  Taco Foot

  TWO MEN, HARRIS AND BURNS, MET FOR LUNCH.

  Harris had a baby. He brought the baby to lunch.

  Burns saw Harris getting out of the Harris family minivan. Harris had to put the baby on the ground for a moment, in its little car seat. Burns walked over to say hi. In the meantime, a woman happened to be parking her car next to Harris’s. Her mouth was very wide open. As if she were laughing with eagerness to kill the baby.

  Harris picked up the baby in plenty of time.

  It seemed to Burns, who did not have a baby, that babies were in constant and horrific danger. But he had noticed that people with babies, such as Harris, were nonchalant about it.

  Harris and Burns went inside and stood in line. It was a good taco place, where you had to stand in line to order.

  The cashier asked whether they were babysitting today.

  Harris said that he babysat every day, by which he meant that this was his baby, and he took care of it every day.

  Burns and Harris were not young men. Say their average age was forty-six. They didn’t comport or groom themselves like respectable gentlemen of that age. They were unemployed. One had brown hair and one’s hair was somewhat lighter than brown. They were ugly.

  They poured their own sweet tea from the nozzles of big zinc urns and sat down at a table and waited for their tacos. Harris balanced the little car seat in a chair. He had to turn the chair sideways to balance the baby in its car seat properly.

  Burns said to Harris, in reference to the curious cashier, “I should have told her the baby has two daddies. That would have been funny.”

  The tacos came and the men began to eat the tacos.

  The baby put its foot in its mouth.

  “Look at that,” said Burns. “Your baby thinks its foot is a taco.”

  “Her foot,” said Harris.

  “What?” said Burns. Then Burns said to the baby, “Well, well, well. Do you think your foot is a taco? I’m going to call you Taco Foot.”

  Burns said to Harris, “From now on I’m going to call your baby Taco Foot. You should put a little soft taco shell on your baby’s foot. Old Taco Foot. You should dress up your baby like a taco for Halloween. That would make a good costume. You should decorate old Taco Foot with lettuce and tomato. Isn’t that right, Taco Foot?”

  “I’m getting sick of you,” said Harris.

  “When you’ve wasted your life, part of you is like, ‘Gosh, that’s terrible.’ And part of you is like, ‘Oh well. I guess I should have thought of this sooner,’” said Burns.

  “You probably haven’t wasted your life,” said Harris.

  “You had a baby,” said Burns. “That’s supposed to be a pretty good setup by all accounts.”

  “It’s not bad,” said Harris.

  “Let me be frank,” said Burns. “I asked you to lunch today because I’m in love with your wife.”

  “When did this happen?” said Harris. “I ought to take this bottle of hot sauce and pour it in your eyes.”

  Was Harris joking? It was hard to tell.

  Burns wasn’t joking.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Burns. “I’m not going to tell her. I’m never going to tell her. I’m going to walk around with a broken heart.”

  “Congratulations,” said Harris.

  “Once she was nursing old Taco Foot at a party and I didn’t even realize it. I was just standing there talking to her. And then Taco Foot’s head slid off, didn’t it, Taco Foot? I saw everything. Marcie looked all red and ruddy, like she had been out in the sun.”

  “Marcie’s tits are not red,” said Harris.

  “Healthful,” said Burns. “They had a healthful look to them. Don’t use such crude language in reference to your incredible wife.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” said Harris.

  “Well, I’ll see you later,” said Burns. He wiped his mouth on a napkin. “Sorry to spring this on you. Now I feel awkward.”

  Burns was sitting at a red light when the minivan attacked him. Harris was bumping Burns’s little car from behind, trying to push him into oncoming traffic. Burns looked in the rearview mirror and saw Harris’s mad face but not Taco Foot, who was probably strapped safely into place.

  Burns answered his phone.

  “You twat,” said Harris’s voice. “This is what you get.”

  “We can’t be punished for our thoughts,” said Burns.

  “Oh yes we can,” said Harris.

  Tornado

  WHEN JAMES DROVE HIS CAR INTO THE TORNADO, HE THOUGHT OF the huge window with French shutters by their bed. In the morning, when they undid the shutters, there stood the biggest camellia bush they’d ever seen growing out of control, it almost filled the whole window, squashed up against the glass like an eager beast. The haunted camellia bush. The witch’s fingers. They said a lot of silly things back then. Whenever they’d get a big storm or a strong wind the camellia would make a clawing noise at night against the window—a horrible, squeaky clawing sound, which, as he drove helplessly into the tornado, he remembered in perfect detail.

  He remembered asking her whether they had a can of that Italian wedding soup he liked. She said, “Look in the cabinet.” He said, “I’m too tired to look in the cabinet.” One time she said, “I don’t want to talk about the things that haunt me.” And he was like, “Good. Jesus! Let’s don’t.” Looking back on it, maybe she had wanted to talk about the things that haunted her.

  Detective

  “HOW MUCH DO YOU CHARGE?” GRANGER SAID.

  “For what?” she said.

  “To follow a guy.”

  “What kind of guy?”

  “A guy like Cowboy Bob.”

  “What’s the angle?”

  “I just want to know everything he does, everything he says.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “See, I stopped doing things at some point. I don’t do things. In writing, the preference is for characters who do things. I want to turn Cowboy Bob into a character. As a character, Cowboy Bob will appeal to a certain demographic. In particular, I trust, the distaff side, who form a much more active readership than their male counterparts, according to respected surveys.”

  “You want me to follow somebody around so you can make pages out of him. That the gist?”

  “Sure. You provide the raw material of a life, I fashion it into art. In addition to your fee, I’ll thank you in the acknowledgments section.”

  “What about Cowboy Bob? You plan on thanking him? In your little acknowledgments section?”

  “That doesn’t seem wise. This would be strictly between us. You and me. A professional arrangement. I assume you have some sort of confidentiality clause in your contract?”

  “I’m no rat, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “By the way, my last acknowledgements section wasn’t ‘little.’ It was over thirty pages long. I’m thorough, and I think you’ll find I’m grateful in a perceptive and extremely flattering way.”

  “So you’re going to basically take this guy’s life without his permission and crap all over it.”

  “Oh, he’d never know. Not in a million years. See, by the time it hits the page…see, what we writers do is…well, I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.”

  “You spin straw into gold.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Some poor schmuck should feel lucky to be immortalized by you.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t know, but sure. The great part is, it works equally well if his glamorous bad-boy persona is all a sham and he spends his free time reading The Bridges of Madison County out loud to his comatose grandmother. I want to get that straight right up front. You don’t have to worry if the material doesn’t seem exciting enough to you. That’s where the power of fiction comes in.”

  “I spent some of my childhood near Portland, Oregon. My grandmother mad
e pickles in the washing machine.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So is that yours now? That part of my life?”

  “It’s already filed away up here.”

  “I want to be my granny. That’s my goal.”

  “You want to make pickles in the washing machine?”

  “I don’t have a washing machine.”

  “You could do it at the laundromat.”

  “You know, I’ve always wanted to dye clothes at the laundromat. But I don’t have the balls.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “How do I know you’re not a weirdo?” she asked.

  Granger didn’t answer. He was a weirdo!

  Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction

  THEY GOT DOWN TO THE BUSINESS OF DICE. PUFFER AND BRICK TOOK most of Laurel’s money. They tried to be nice and let her win some back, but she didn’t want their charity.

  Hurt couldn’t focus on the game, which was called ace-four twenty-four and played with a worn leather cup. He had watched the men playing it at the bar on multiple occasions, but it remained obscure to him. His mind went away. He thought about writing on the bar napkin but recalled the look that Brick had given him over that habit in the past. And rightfully so. There was something trashy about trying to capture other people on a napkin, or on any kind of paper. Sometimes he was experimenting, writing little stories that would fit on a napkin. But most of the time he was a jackal, stealing people’s biz. “Very fly,” Laurel had said about something, and it seemed sweetly antiquated. He had to jot it down.

  While the rest of them played dice at the bar, Hurt tried to stop doodling the blurbs he thought he might get (“Sweeping”) and concentrate on the holes in the outline of his multigenerational domestic literary novel. What had really happened to Mr. Timberlake’s late wife? Hurt had assumed a lingering cancer. But what if the son, Skunk, were to blame for his mother’s death? That was always a winner. Forgot his humble place as a craftsman of pie catalogs, became ambitious, tragically so, wrote about his mother on a napkin. And what, suicide? That earnest cliché?

  Hurt remembered some women’s butts he had seen on TV. Why? There had been a suicide on the show. His brain was trying to tell him something.

  They were characters on a space show and whenever they went marching up the ramp into their spaceship you could see their butts.

  Their pants were tight but gave the impression of being sturdy, accurate, and functional, as though the special-effects team had researched them. You thought, yes, those are what space pants will really look like in the future, made of silver car upholstery. These pants are necessary for their well-being and survival in the subzero wastes of outer space. It is a coincidence how you can see the outlines of their butts.

  It was a universal joy, looking at the butts of hot ladies in space-suits. People had been doing it since the dawn of entertainment.

  Hurt got the notion that Skunk’s mother had been a calendar model in the late 1960s, a pinup in astronaut gear, cocking a big ray gun against a cheesy, wrinkled backdrop of the moon. A calendar called Hot Ladies of Outer Space. No, Hot Ladies of Science Fiction. It could be a book title, one of those book titles that promises something other than what the book delivers to teach readers a valuable lesson. Hurt could be one of those dudes who goes slumming in genre fiction to universal acclaim.

  Interesting to have a fat loser like Skunk, who probably spends all his time on the computer looking up images of hot ladies in space-suits with the “safe search” option turned off, discover that his revered mother had been one of those very ladies.

  When did “hot” become a synonym for “sexy”? Every word he ever chose reminded him of how much he didn’t know and was too tired to find out. Sexy Ladies of Science Fiction.

  His pen was poised, doing nothing over the napkin. Hurt wasn’t going to remember any of this when he got home.

  Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction. Would have sounded classier, more respectable to the ears of the time.

  It was a problem, marrying a leggy international beauty to a meek little priss like Mr. Timberlake. Or was it kind of perfect?

  Mr. Timberlake lived in Hurt’s house, and by extension in a town like Hurt’s town. There would be a chemical plant slowly poisoning the surrounding areas: huge pipes through which they blast a scent like magnolia that covers the town and makes everyone feel relaxed. It’s to cover up the acrid stench of fatal chemicals.

  It would be a perfect place for the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction calendar tour. The headquarters of the chemical company are in Rome. The Italian chemical company is one of the sponsors of the calendar—the sponsor. They are sending the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction on a tour of all their chemical plants for publicity. Hurt’s novel would span the globe. “A globe-spanning tour de force,” he jotted.

  What kind of job would a gentleman like Mr. Timberlake have at a chemical plant?

  He might have been a research chemist who now in his retirement maintains a small personal laboratory in a back shed. There he creates the most refined soaps the world has ever known and gives them out on special occasions. He never sells them.

  Mr. Timberlake has a superior sense of smell. This gives him a reason to sit in his dilapidated lawn chair, soaking his feet, staring at nothing, smelling all the many smells of nature in their many combinations, smells so subtle that no one else can discern them, and he translates them into soaps that the layman can enjoy—soaps that hint at the smells only Mr. Timberlake can smell, soaps that represent the nearest we will ever come to experiencing the world through Mr. Timberlake’s extraordinary nose. He considers everything to be nature, including diesel fumes. His ideas are so advanced that he seems like a crackpot to many, including his resentful and belittling son Skunk.

  What does it say about the relationship that Mr. Timberlake has given his son such a nickname? Or that Skunk has given it to himself, in defiance?

  The soaps of Mr. Timberlake are ethereal. They dissolve like the skirls of foam on the shore.

  What was a skirl?

  Look up skirls when you get home, Hurt.

  Everybody Hurt knew had a nice phone, the kind you could sit in a bar like this and look up skirls on.

  Not Hurt.

  Hurt had a bar napkin. Hurt had bupkis.

  Bar napkins were supposed to make you feel like Hemingway or Picasso.

  The soaps of Mr. Timberlake can barely withstand a single dampening. It’s like washing your hands with a frigging moonbeam.

  Skunk spends all his time losing money on internet gambling. Some bad men come to him.

  Your father’s recipes are worth a fortune. We want to analyze them so we can make the soaps last longer. (This is strictly against Mr. Timberlake’s elegantly expressed philosophy of soaps.)

  All Skunk has to do is distract his father while the bad men use bolt cutters on the shed door.

  But then something goes horribly wrong. So the dust jacket would say.

  Hurt felt that this version of Mr. Timberlake was becoming too brilliant and grandiose. Mr. Timberlake was no wizard. And who was that lousy son of King Arthur? The one in black armor? That wasn’t Skunk, no sir. Skunk didn’t have the black metallic heart of a usurper. Mordred.

  Forget the magical soap that makes your dreams come true. It put Hurt in mind of that awful movie where Dustin Hoffman was a benevolent gnome who owned a shop where all the toys came to life.

  Dustin Hoffman would be great as Mr. Timberlake in the movie version, though. “Hoffman returns to form in this sure-to-be-timeless classic.”

  He wrote MALE SECRETARY on the napkin and everyone was too busy shooting dice to notice. Hurt tried to remember why he shouldn’t be writing on the napkin, which brought him back to his original idea. How had Skunk inadvertently caused his mother’s death by writing on a napkin?

  There was the tontine angle. Hurt had wanted to write about a tontine ever since he had encountered the concept on an episode of The Simpsons in 1996.
r />   Forty years ago, all twelve Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction made an appearance in the lobby of a swank Miami hotel. They laughingly hid an antique brooch under a three-foot-tall cylindrical ashtray filled with immaculate sand. The last surviving DLOSF will come back and claim it.

  Now all of them are gone except Sally Silver and her best friend, her friend who never left the business, her rich and glamorous friend who lives high on the hog as the hostess of a literary salon and occasionally plays faded old beauties in somber independent dramas about Alzheimer’s disease. If Sally Silver hadn’t ditched it all for Mr. Timberlake, this might have been her life! But she is not jealous. It has been so long since she has seen her old friend. A trip to Miami will be just the thing to revive both of their spirits, for of course the old movie star with all her attainments and glory has secret troubles of her own.

  Skunk volunteers to chauffer. When they reach the old movie star’s house (she lives somewhere on the way to Miami, wherever rich people have country estates between Mississippi and Miami) they get a surprise: a third Dazzling Lady is still alive after all—a tart-tongued old alky who was Sally Silver’s sworn enemy in the olden days. Now she’s a sassy granny who wears mascara and tells it like it is!

  A terrible car crash on the way to pick up the object of the tontine. It is Skunk’s fault. He has been writing about his mother on a napkin. She is offended and Skunk is banned from the car. So he leaves her. Or she leaves him. They part. She takes over. But she’s too old and blind to drive.

  If Skunk hadn’t written on that napkin, he would have been driving, and his mother would be alive today, etc.

  What about the napkin is so offensive?

  What would this woman—whose model name was Sally Silver—find offensive?

  Before we can know, she needs a history.

  She needs to give up the life of an international model for Mr. Timberlake.

  Why?

  Mr. Timberlake does something gallant that attracts her attention. He takes up for her. He is presented as a contrast to her avaricious manager.