Buddy Cooper Finds a Way

by Neil O'Boyle Connelly

  “They won’t be happy about tomorrow,” Alix says. “Everybody says the asteroid’s passing. Folks were hoping for the day off.”

  “We’re not in the happy business,” Quinn says. “We’re in the entertainment business.”

  Trevor nods his approval.

  Hardy helps Paul up. “C’mon, sir. I’ll take you home. You’ll be OK. I can make some soup on my stove.” The two of them shuffle off stage.

  Trevor looks down at his sopping clothes and at Quinn. “There’s a shower back at the office. And wardrobe’s got to have something that’ll fit.”

  “Marna will be fine with Brook,” Alix tells Quinn, who seems more concerned with his suspenders.

  “What about you?” Trevor asks her.

  She looks away from me. “I’ll run lines with Cooper. The locker-room scene?”

  She wants to be alone with me.

  Trevor drums his fingers across his chin, calculating.

  “I could use the practice,” I say.

  “Very exciting,” Trevor concludes, clapping his hands once. “Tomorrow has to run smoothly. We’ll be back in twenty, thirty minutes tops. Until then, you two run lines. Get sharp.”

  Alix and I say nothing, don’t even look at one another as Trevor and Quinn walk together to Trevor’s golf cart and climb in. They drive down past Studio B, heading back for wardrobe in the Brady Building. We simply stand there watching the backs of their heads until it’s clear neither one plans on looking back.

  Ten minutes later, we’re standing outside a studio that has no letter, as if this particular location is ultra secret. Alix has led me beyond Studio B, to this farthest edge of the ReelWorld property, away from the crew and the extras, to a place where even outside we already feel isolated. Now, she’s flipping keys on a huge ring. Standing behind her, I focus on the peachy fuzz on the back of her neck, displayed these days for everyone to see but once a mystery hidden by her long hair, reserved only for me. Inside this windowless building, we’ll reveal ourselves to each other. She’ll tell me the truth about how she felt yesterday at the lake, and we’ll confess the truth about all our feelings. And when we walk away from here later, Alix will be ready to be my wife once more.

  One of the keys clicks and she pushes open the door. It’s pitch-black inside, no way to know what’s in there, but when Alix steps in I follow her without thinking twice. The door swings shut and we are dropped into total darkness, the kind that only comes in caves and nightmares. “This way,” Alix says, and her hand slides into mine. Her fingers feel soft and warm.

  Taking tiny steps, I am led around a few obstacles, what could be folding chairs. From outside I could tell this building is much smaller than the gigantic Studio B, but in here, even in the darkness, I feel almost claustrophobic. Our breathing echoes off the corrugated metal walls. “Step up,” Alix says, and I follow her onto a rise. She stops.

  I picture a bed with pink ruffled pillows, some scene from a soft-core porn that ReelWorld is filming to make ends meet. From just in front of Alix, there’s a series of clicking noises, one of which I swear sounds like a deadbolt being secured. A dull red glow rises just above me, and the words RED ALERT pulse from a sign on the wall. Low pipes crisscross the ceiling. Black metal walls curve over us with video monitors and glowing dials, and there’s something in the floor that looks like a manhole cover with a crank on it. The ceiling crowds in over us, but only halfway, like the shell of the world’s tiniest amphitheater. Empty cameras and director’s chairs sit on the edge of the low light, waiting for the action to begin. Alix walks to a swivel chair in the center of the bridge and takes a seat. “Welcome to the future,” she explains. “It’s the year 2084.”

  “Standard Star Trek setup,” I say, “with some bad attitude from Aliens or Blade Runner thrown in. What planet are we headed for?”

  From Kirk’s seat, Alix answers. “Actually we’re onboard a nuclear submarine. The LOP Windcatcher, captained by Patrick Swayze.”

  I find an empty chair beneath her, where Chekhov would navigate from, and take a load off. “Is he dancing in this one and falling in love, or using that lame karate and falling in love?”

  “Fighting World War V and falling in love. His mission is to investigate the mysterious disappearance of another sub. The League of Peace thinks the Russians sank it, or maybe the Alaskans.”

  I spin my chair, which squeaks. “I’m surprised Swayze would sign on for a low budget sci-fi. Steel Dawn was a mess.”

  Alix explains, “We’re letting him direct.”

  “Right,” I say. “So let me guess. He’s falling in love with the daughter of the enemy captain?”

  Al shakes her head. “Mermaid queen. The missing sub isn’t missing. The crew is living the high life in an underwater metropolis with a race of sexy mermaids in need of men.”

  “Sounds like heaven,” I say skeptically. Here’s one thing I’m sure of: Beware any scenario that involves utopian cultures.

  “It’s awfully close, until Swayze shows up on page seventeen. After he and the queen go ga-ga, the Alaskans appear with their own nuclear subs and testosteroned sailors. At that point, things kind of fall apart in paradise.”

  “That’s the way these things go,” I say, not really thinking. But we both hear the words and fall silent, aware of the sudden extra weight. I swivel away from her in my squeaky chair, face the navigating console in front of me, a TV screen and the usual sci-fi keyboards and viewscreens. I run my fingers across the topographical map on display, a series of ripple drawings detailing the canyons and valleys, the unexplorable abysses that score the ocean floor.

  From behind me, Alix says, “You always liked this stuff in the good old days. I just thought …” She doesn’t finish, but I can tell she’s staring at the back of my head.

  “The good old days,” I repeat. What I’m wondering is if they built a captain’s quarters—with a cot that could hold us both—and if they built it close by.

  I swivel back around in my chair to face Alix. Behind her, the RED ALERT glows crimson onto her soft cheeks. When I try to hold eye contact she looks down, fiddles with the arm pad like she’s checking in with Scotty about restoring warp drive. I stand up, quick enough to send my chair spinning behind me, and step to the captain—settle my hand on hers—and say, “Al.”

  She rotates away from my touch and gets to her feet. For a moment she just stands like that with her back to me, then she walks around to Sulu’s chair up front and repositions herself. She unrolls some pages from her back pocket. “Maybe we need to look over the script. That would be a good idea, I think. For us to just run some lines.”

  “Sure, fine,” I say, worried that she’s about to spook and run for cover. I step back down to Chekhov’s chair next to her. She lays the pages out on the console between us, where there’s just enough light to read by. We’re side by side like two lost travelers in a car late at night, reading from the same map on the dashboard.

  Things have taken a turn toward the tense, so I back off. “This is quite a story. You weren’t kidding about that whole ‘massaging the truth’ stuff.”

  “Quinn and Trevor worked hard on it.”

  “Did you do any of the writing?”

  Alix shakes her head. “Some polishing maybe. Let’s look at that locker-room scene.”

  She flips some pages, smooths out the script when she reaches the right spot. “I’ll be Hardy,” she says. “You be you.”

  I look at the top of the page, see again how they’ve renamed me for Under the Gun. “Whose brainstorm was it,” I ask, “to change me from the Terror to the Savior?”

  She hesitates, half shrugs. “Quinn’s, I think. Maybe Trevor’s.” The truth, crystal clear to me, is that this was Alix’s idea.

  The scene she’s picked takes place right after we meet Marna out front. Here in the locker room, Hardy and I prepare for our match. Alix’s finger points at the Savior’s opening line and I read it: “It sure is strange to be teamed up with you after our long grudg
e, Hardy.”

  Alix reads Hardy’s line: “I like the idea of being your partner. I think we work well together.”

  I stop, take a breath, keep my eyes on the page, and then read, “Me too, pal.”

  “Because I always have respected you,” Alix reads. “I have always admired how you handle yourself. You are a real class act.”

  I read, “Listen, all that stuff I said in the old days, when we were opponents, you know, about how much I hated your guts. Those were just words.”

  Alix reads, “Well, you didn’t have to always say them with such feeling.”

  I lift my eyes from the page. “That part’s good. Makes us sound like real friends.”

  “We are friends,” Alix says. Her face is inches from mine. “I mean, you and Hardy are real friends. But we’re friends too, Coop. Not that we’re not friends. You’re reading real fine. How about your next line?”

  Our hands are side by side on the console. Alix is wearing shorts, and I can see the bare flesh of her knee. I go on with the script. “You know, even when we were opponents, I never felt like we were enemies. I felt a bond between us. The bond of true warriors.”

  “I know what you mean. It is something hard to explain to normal people, to folks outside this world.”

  “Most people do not understand that,” I read, “the kind of trust that can develop in these situations.”

  Alix reads, “Can I trust you with a secret?” And I know what she wants to tell me, that she loves me still and wants me back, that we’re going to pick up our happy life right at the scene where our original script took a wrong turn. That secretly, she wants Trevor gone as much as I do.

  “Absolutely,” I answer, with a word from the script I recognize as genuinely mine.

  “I am afraid of something,” she reads.

  “That’s really good,” I say. “That’s almost exactly what Hardy said.”

  Alix turns from the script. She studies my face before asking, “Are you starting to remember, Coop?”

  “No. It’s just.” I think. “Hardy was telling me how accurate this part was. He remembers it all.”

  Her eyes linger on mine.

  I point to the script. “Let’s get back to your secret, huh?” The stage directions after Hardy tells me he’s afraid have him handing me a note, a death threat he supposedly found in his locker. The script calls for me to read it out loud, so I do: “R.I.P. Hardy Apple-seed, the American Dream. Death to all Dreamers.”

  “I just do not understand,” Alix reads. “This just don’t seem right.”

  “Some people,” I read, “have a hard time believing in dreams.”

  “That’s awful,” Alix reads. “Dreams is what makes life worth living. Imagine if that poor girl in the wheelchair couldn’t dream of making a birthday wish. Imagine if we were just stuck with life as it is. Imagine what would happen to a person who didn’t have nothing good to hope for. He’d be awful sad.”

  “Worse than that,” I read, pretending to hold up the death threat. “He’d be deadly.”

  In the script, we fade to a commercial, then open midmatch inside the wrestling arena. But here, on the bridge of a futuristic nuclear submarine, Alix and I can only fall silent once again. I’m aware of her breathing—it’s uneven and heavy. I lift my eyes and see her, still looking down at the script on the console even though the scene is over.

  As if I’m reading my next line, I say, “What would happen, if Trevor were gone?”

  Alix raises her face into the glow of the red-alert sign. She says nothing. I see us three minutes in the future, spread across this console, making love on delicate instruments. I reach across the slim space between us and settle my palm on her bare knee, flesh on flesh. “Don’t you ever think about me? About what could have been?”

  She rests her hand on mine, a warm burn. “Of course I do, Coop. Of course I do.” With a gentle squeeze, she lifts my hand away from her leg. “But whatever it could have been, it wasn’t. You need to understand that things between us didn’t happen the way they were supposed to. Nothing did.”

  I pull my hand back and crack my elbow on the metal armrest of my chair. “The way they were supposed to? What does that mean exactly? Really, I’d like to know what that means.”

  “It means what it means, Coop. It means we had dreams and dreams. But that’s all they ever were, you know? Maybe we wanted too much. God, I wish you remembered.”

  “I don’t have to remember. I was at the lake yesterday. We were a family. You lied for us.”

  Her head shakes. “I didn’t lie for us. I lied for Brook.”

  “Yeah right,” I say. “Just like the night of the damn dance benefit. You don’t care about me at all. I’m just your ex-husband and nothing else.”

  “Of course I care about you, Coop,” Alix starts, but then something registers in her eyes. She tilts her head and repeats, “The dance benefit.”

  “You bet,” I say. “I remember the parking lot security guard. And how you said you were doing that for Brook.”

  “I was. I did. For Brook. Wait. So you remember all this?”

  “Everything,” I answer. “I remember Thursdays. You care to explain those away too? You screw me for our daughter’s sake?”

  Alix’s hand is hardly a flash, the pain in my cheek a quick sting of heat. It turns my face, and I focus for a second at the metal hatch in the floor. I hear a sniffle. When I lift my face again, no tears are settled in her eyes. “Goddamn you, Buddy Cooper.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “What do you want to hear, Coop? That I come by Thursdays because I feel sorry for you? I do. That I come by because it feels good to me? It does.”

  She stands up. Sagging and tired, I rest my arms on my knees. The bullet wound throbs. My eyes fall again to that manhole cover, and I wish I could somehow crawl into the bowels of this fake ship. “Don’t go,” I say.

  From above me, Alix huffs. “So you remember everything? That’s where we are now?”

  “Pretty much,” I say.

  “You’ve been faking all along. Even for you, this is amazing.”

  Her legs disappear from in front of me, and I hear her footsteps clacking back the way we came. I turn to look and when she opens the door to the outside I can see that night’s coming on, but before she can step into it, I call out. “Alix. Please. Pretend for a second that I really don’t remember. Pretend that I don’t know why what happened happened. And tell me. Just tell me why.”

  She stands in the doorway, a dark silhouette against a dark back-drop. Like a closing curtain the door cuts her off from my view, and I’m left alone. My head hangs, and I’m wondering just how things went so wrong so fast from what I had planned. So I sit in the silent darkness, hoping, waiting for someone to step out from behind a wall and yell, “Cut.” To give me another chance at this scene I’ve rehearsed so many times.

  -----

  Somebody in Charge. Bullhorns and Bulletproof Vests.

  Bacchus Seeks Absolution. Winston Seeks Salvation.

  Our Hero Seeks Revelation.

  Navigating crosstown traffic, I let everybody pass me. Even the school buses and the student drivers cruise smoothly by in the left-hand lanes. My shoulder is stiff from all the excitement at the lake yesterday, so I’m having a hard time shifting, and over and over I find myself floating in neutral, engine racing but no sign of acceleration. I don’t think about Alix and where she is, if she’s crying behind Studio B or sitting down with Brook, explaining that Daddy has had another break with reality. I don’t imagine her seeking out Trevor in the Brady Building, laughing at my fake amnesia before making love on his executive director’s desk. Instead I focus on WAOK, where the talk show host expresses doubt about what NASA and the president have said. He warns listeners that the asteroid’s arrival was foretold by Nostradamus. Catholic churches have confessional lines running out the doors. There’s a rumor that Pierre Trudeau and a thousand of Canada’s elite have locked themselves in an enormous undergro
und vault. Not everyone, it appears, is convinced we’ll come through this OK.

  Driving down Market, I’m mentally counting the Bud Lights in my fridge, flipping through the TV Guide in my head, calculating how many drinks I’d need before calling Alix. Or Rhonda. But when I make the left into the alley, I find blue lights flashing from the tops of emergency vehicles two blocks in, between my home and the Salvation Station. A gang of neighborhood kids jogs down the alley like they’re on their way to the circus or the county fair. So I crank the Ford to the side and park, approach the scene of the crime on foot with everybody else.

  I join a crowd, about three dozen thick, spilling into the shadow of my deck. We’re fenced back from the Salvation Station by a few wooden police barriers and two members of Wilmington’s finest, a good-sized guy and a tiny lady. Both cops wear these hip Elvis Costello glasses, black and square, and I decide they must be a couple. The guy paces with his arms out and says, “Nothing to see here. You people can move along.” On the grounds of the crumbled church behind him are the following nothings-to-see: an ambulance, a fire truck, a police cruiser, two battered yellow bulldozers, a crane topped by a wrecking ball, a pickup with City of Wilmington insignia on the door and a brick in its tinted windshield, and a large black police van with a snarling boar’s head painted on the side. Beneath the head are the words W.A.R.T. HOGS: WILMINGTON ACTION RESPONSE TEAM. Three “hogs,” men in black uniforms with assault rifles, have taken up positions around the van. I scan the rooftops and mark four snipers, including one behind the chimney on my house. Sitting on the brick above him is a squirrel, tail curled, watching the show.

  At center stage of all this stands Lieutenant Tyrelli, the bronze-skinned cop who asked me questions back in the hospital. Staring at the Salvation Station before him, he’s wearing a bulletproof vest and holding a black bullhorn.

  A man in the back of the crowd has a little boy, maybe three, perched on his shoulders. “Hey,” I say. “What’s the deal?”

  “Don’t know exactly,” the father says. “We were heading downtown and heard there was trouble so we thought we’d check it out. Seems that—”