Orchard Grove

by Vincent Zandri

  “Just your luck, huh?” I said. “You move all the way to the east coast to start a new life and you land right smack next door to Hollywood in all its glory. Must be serendipity.”

  I wasn’t about to tell him my scriptwriting career was just about non-existent these days. That was between me and the God of Tinseltown.

  “Listen, Hollywood,” he said. “Lana was just about to fix me some eggs and bacon, weren’t you Lana? Maybe you’d like some, Hollywood. Or let me guess. You probably eat egg whites and kale. And hey, I can show you my gun collection. You like guns don’t you, Hollywood?”

  “Gun collection?”

  “Fifty pieces. Each and every one of them in perfect working order, including an original Colt .45 Model 1911, official army issue. How’s about them apples?”

  “I’d love to see it,” I lied.

  “You must have people who shoot other people with guns in your scripts, Hollywood.”

  “Sure.”

  “But I can bet you dollars to dicks you don’t get it right. None of you writer types get it right when it comes to guns. You call a revolver an automatic, and a pistol a machinegun, and you always forget to thumb off the safety because you don’t know it’s there to begin with… You can’t help but fuck it all up.”

  “John, please,” Lana once more scolded.

  Releasing my coffee cup, I stole a quick look at my wristwatch as if I had some place important to be other than back to my bedroom window.

  “Jeeze, look at the time. I really gotta go. My typewriter gets upset when I ignore her.” Awkwardly, I pulled myself up and out of my chair with the use of my crutches. Then, to Lana, “Nice meeting you, Lana. Thanks for the coffee.” Turning back to Cavitto, I once more offered my hand. “Nice meeting you too, Detective. Thanks for the firearms advice. Let’s hope we never have to do business together. Cop to criminal.”

  Once more he took the hand in his, squeezed it hard. A little too hard so that I not only felt the tension of his tight grip, but his sausage thick fingers proceeded to crush my more mild-mannered digits. Glancing down at out interlocked hands, I could also make out the purple veins that shot out of the skin on the back of his hand.

  “You’d have to commit murder for that to happen, Hollywood,” he said.

  My eyes shifted to Lana. She caught my gaze but then quickly turned away. It might have been warm and sunny out. Hot even. But something cold and unsettling coursed through every vein and capillary in my body, as if I’d been injected with ice-blue Freon.

  “You don’t plan on murdering anybody, now do you, Hollywood?” John went on. “Let’s hope you save that shit for the movies.”

  He released his grip and I greedily took back my hand. But somehow, I still felt his hand wrapped around my own.

  “Murder is easy when you do it only for the big screen,” I said with a smile. “If you know what you’re doing.”

  “Well, let me assure you,” he said. “There’s nothing funny about murder. Because you see, Hollywood, a dead man looks really fucking dead when he’s dead. Understand?”

  “Somerset Maugham,” I said. “Modified, of course.”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, shocked he was be able to quote the great British author of The Razor’s Edge, but not surprised he had no idea. “Welcome to Orchard Grove and if there’s anything I can do to help you settle into the neighborhood, please don’t hesitate to come calling.”

  Cattivo pursed his lips, ground his teeth.

  Lana tossed me a smile and quick wave befitting of a professional Orchard Grove soccer mom. A scantily clad one, I should say. She then turned and began to stare off toward the back of the property and the narrow stand of woods. It was as if she spotted something in the pines or beyond the pines. Something that wasn’t there at all but was instead, in her head.

  Turning, I began hobbling across the Cattivo’s deck in the direction of the gate. I couldn’t get the hell away from there fast enough. Correction… I couldn’t get the hell away from the detective fast enough.

  “Oh and, Hollywood,” he called out just as I was about to lift the metal latch on the gate.

  I stopped. Leaning myself atop my crutches, I turned to face him. “What is it?”

  “Since that little marijuana patch just happens to be located on the opposite side of your fence,” he said with a smile and a wink of his eye, “I’m going to pretend it doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Is this the hard-ass cop talking?” I said. “Or the concerned neighbor?”

  He said, “You haven’t met the hard-ass cop yet.”

  A wave of panic swept up and down my body. Now I knew what Lana might have been looking at, even if it was hidden from view, behind my privacy fence.

  I pasted a smile on my face, however false.

  “I wouldn’t know about any pot garden,” I said. “I never go back there for anything and I never touch the stuff. Bad for the lungs.”

  He let loose with a belly laugh that I thought for sure would pop the buttons on his shirt.

  “Good answer,” he said. Then, bringing his index finger and thumb to pursed lips, he made like he was inhaling off a fat joint. “Smoke a little for me, Hollywood.”

  I turned back to the gate, lifted the latch.

  “Nice to see us getting off on the right foot,” I said as I opened the gate, stuck my surgically raw foot through the opening. But either Cattivo didn’t hear me, or maybe he was just pretending not to hear me, like some washed up actor in a cheap B movie.

  Back inside my house, I immediately went to the bedroom window, looked out onto my new neighbor’s back deck. Lana was no longer there. But within seconds she suddenly reappeared, this time with a can of beer in her hand. She set it down in front of her husband who immediately picked it up with the same meaty fist that nearly crushed mine twice in just a few short minutes, and by the looks of it, drained half of it in one sitting.

  I took a quick look at the time. It wasn’t yet noon, but I supposed it had to be noon somewhere in the world. When Cattivo sat his beer can back down again onto the table, some of the white foam jumped out of the opening. Lana shook her head in what I took to be disgust. That’s when they began to argue.

  I couldn’t really hear what they were saying through the glass, so I had to concentrate as hard as possible on their lips, which wasn’t easy either because John was facing the backyard, making it impossible for me to see his mouth unless he happened to turn in my direction. I could make out Lana’s mouth okay, but she didn’t seem to be saying a whole lot.

  In the meantime, if I were to shift my line of sight to the right, I was able to make out the black, unmarked GMC Suburban that occupied the Cattivo driveway. Big mysterious Carl was planted behind the wheel. He was smoking a cigarette while speaking with someone on his smartphone, which I guessed to be an iPhone. His goateed face looked tight and unhappy. Maybe he hated coming here while his partner, and from what I could gather, department superior, drank on duty. While he argued with his wife. Maybe the only reason Carl came to Orchard Grove at all was because he had to come here. Or maybe, like me, he took advantage of every opportunity, no matter how small, to get a look at Lana.

  Reaching out, I slowly slid the window open just enough for me to make out the Cattivo’s angry voices. Did it without their noticing. In my mind, I was imagining their exchange as if I were reading it off a script I’d typed up only minutes ago.

  JOHN

  You’re starting in again, aren’t you?

  LANA (exhaling, frustrated)

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, John.

  JOHN

  We’re not here one month and already you’re getting cozy with the guy next door. What’s his name, Hollywood. A screenwriter for Christ’s sakes. I feel like we’re back in Santa Monica and you’re fucking some waiter who’s convinced he’s gonna be the next George fucking Clooney.

  JOHN (raising his voice)

  And what the fuck is
going on with Carl? I see the way you two look at one another. You fucking him too? My partner?

  LANA (folding her arms)

  I’m going to ignore that thing about Carl, because that’s insane. As for Ethan, I invited him over for a cup of coffee after I saw him feeding his birds. And please stop calling him Hollywood. It’s demeaning.

  JOHN (laughing)

  What? You serious? He feeds the birds? You can’t be serious. Hollywood the fruitcake. Maybe I don’t have anything to worry about.

  LANA

  He’s not gay, and I think you can see he’s not gay.

  JOHN

  Okay, then I don’t want you having coffee with him.

  LANA

  What’s the harm in coffee?

  JOHN

  Dressed like that? You’re half naked, woman.

  LANA

  We’re all adults here.

  JOHN

  That’s what scares me.

  LANA

  He’s a nice man, who takes care of a pair of robins nesting on his back deck, and who also claims to be happily married. Nice to see a sensitive man in action for a change.

  JOHN

  No one’s happily married. I’ll believe it when I see it.

  For some reason they decided to stop tossing verbal jabs and instead turn in unison toward my house. Maybe a glint of sun shone off my watch-face or even the whites of my eyes. Whatever the case, my immediate reaction was to duck down, as if John had drawn his weapon and fired it at my head. But with my bad foot, the response was delayed just long enough so that I’m certain they caught me spying on them. In fact, for a split second, two sets of blue eyes met my own brown eyes.

  As I rolled over on the floor, pressing my back up against the wall beside the foot of the empty bed, I could only pretend that they never saw me, and that the glare from the almost high-noon sun would have prevented their seeing my face through the glass.

  I sat there listening, but hearing nothing.

  After some long tense beats, I used the crutches to pick myself back up. From there I went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, found a cold beer, and popped it open. I drank it right there, propped up on the aluminum crutches while standing inside the open refrigerator door, feeling the cold mechanical insides cooling down overheated skin. Like I said, it had to be noon somewhere on God’s earth. What was this? My fourth drink of the day? Who the hell was I to judge John Cattivo?

  For a brief moment, I considered drinking a second beer, but I knew it would lead to a third and a fourth and then more whiskey chasers. What I really wanted was to head back over to Lana’s as soon as John went back to work. But that would be one hell of a bad idea. And of course, the more I drank, the more my inhibitions would melt away like an ice cube left out on the blacktop. It was important to stay in control.

  Cattivo might have been a gun-carrying cop who’d made a vow to serve and protect, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me if he caught me in the act with his woman. Shoot me, then make it appear to be self-defense. Who would a judge believe in the end? A cop with a stellar record or a loser of a scriptwriter who drank too much and maintained a pot patch in his backyard?

  Then came the sound of the Suburban starting up. Shutting the refrigerator door, I quickly hobbled back into the master bedroom, went to the window. Standing a few feet away from the glass pane, I shifted my line of sight to the front of the Cattivo property and saw Carl backing out of the driveway, so that the only vehicle left parked on the macadam was Lana’s convertible. I had to strain my neck to see it, but when the unmarked Suburban was fully backed out onto the street, Carl thrust the transmission into drive and peeled out, burning rubber. It was an unusual sound for sleepy Orchard Grove, but then, John and Lana were not the usual Orchard Grove couple. Not by a long shot.

  As time went on over the course of the next couple of days, I would discover just how dangerously unusual they truly were.

  For the moment anyway, Orchard Grove was cop free. I made my way back out onto the deck, past the robin’s nest, and then out the west-side fence gate. Following the wooden fence all the way down to the woods, I bushwhacked the short distance to my pot patch. While balancing myself with my crutches, I squatted and harvested several fistfuls of fresh bud. Maybe it would be a bad idea to drink my day away, but a little smoke might be just the right medicine for calming both my nerves and tempering my ever growing obsession for Lana. And what the hell, there had been times in the past where smoking a little bud stirred up my creative juices. Was it possible I might actually write something today?

  Time would tell.

  Transporting it back to the house, I rolled a thin joint of the green weed then set the rest out onto the counter beside the sink to dry. When it was ready, Susan could sell it to some of the student teachers at her preschool for a thousand bucks or so, providing us with enough under-the-table cash to keep the bank at bay for the time being.

  Firing up the joint I took a careful toke and prepared for the throat burn that always accompanied smoking green pot. But this was powerful stuff, and after this morning’s adventure, I needed something to calm me down before I tried to write.

  After a few short minutes, I felt the pot going to work on my nervous system and, for the time being anyway, I felt all the little creative creatures form front and center inside my brain. A writer far more famous than me once said, we are all we are ever going to be at the present moment in time. At present, I was a scriptwriter who was not writing because a woman had moved in next door. And that woman was dominating not only all my attention, but also all my emotions. My life had become worthless. I was a slave, locked inside a cell that contained three bedrooms plus one and a half baths. Lana made me feel special again. Alive. Young. Virile. But then, maybe after meeting her husband and the danger he posed, the obsession would take a back seat to my writing, even if for only a little while.

  Sitting myself down at the typewriter, I leaned the crutches against the table beside me, easy access, and then I placed a fresh sheet of white paper into the spool. For a beat, I stared at the white paper hoping that suddenly, I would somehow hear the familiar clickety-clack of typewriter keys and magically see words appear on the page.

  But today my luck was bad. Thus far anyway.

  The muse wasn’t there for me or, at the very least, she was being stubborn. I felt empty inside. I had no story to tell at a time when I was desperate for one. As I sat there staring at the stark whiteness of the page, I not only felt like the words wouldn’t come, I felt exhausted at the thought of writing anything.

  Back when Susan and I first met, nothing could have been further from the truth. I was newly divorced from my then wife of ten years and had just moved from Hollywood to upstate New York and a one bedroom apartment in the north end of downtown Albany. Up to that point in my life, I’d been lucky. I’d moved to LA fresh out of writing school to stake my claim and at thirty-four years old, managed to nab some gross deals on a few big budget films right out of the gate. I was making more money in a single month than my dad was making in a single year running his dry cleaning business. But it all went bad in the worst kind of clichéd way possible when my wife started sleeping with her personal trainer… a situation that was so common in West Hollywood as to be considered an almost right of passage.

  Naturally we divorced, but when it comes to right-is-right in the California divorce courts, it doesn’t really matter who beds down with whom since it’s usually the one who has the most money who pays. In my case anyway, my wife’s lawyer was able to prove she gave up her best years to support her down and out scriptwriter husband while he struggled through writing school, full-time. When I showed up in court drunk as a skunk and, at the same time, threatened to kick said lawyer in the nuts (that is, when they weren’t stuffed in her mouth), the female judge saw fit to award my ex not the standard fifty percent of my estate but seventy-five, plus ninety-percent of the gross points I retained for the perpetual video sales of my films. Sh
e then ordered me behind bars for ninety days on behalf of making a mockery of her court.

  Not my finest hour.

  In the end, no studios would touch me after that incident and what money I had left, I wasted on lawyers, booze, and a plane ticket back east so that by the time I met Susan at a local west-end gin mill called Ralphs, my fortune had dwindled to a fraction of its former glory. But what I did still possess was relative youth and ambition, and no one… not my ex, not a black-robed judge, not the money changers at the big Hollywood studios… were going to prevent me from pulling myself back up from my bootstraps and making another three or four million.

  That’s pretty much the way I put it to Susan not long after I slipped onto the stool beside her at the otherwise empty bar. She was a few years younger than me, not yet thirty. She had shoulder-length black hair and a tall, but not skinny build that I found sexy and attractive. Her jeans had tears in the knees and fit her snuggly, accentuating a perfect heart-shaped bottom. She wore a white V-neck T-shirt that showed off enough of her breasts to keep me interested long after the first couple of drinks were history. Although she was still in grad school to become a certified kindergarten teacher, she told me she’d always been fascinated with screenwriting and, of course she loved the movies. Would I perhaps be interested in giving her some writing lessons?

  “I’ll pay,” she said, shooting me a smile and a wink.

  “How?” I said, winking back at her.

  “Money of course, silly.”

  That’s when I suggested she pay me in another way.

  Her face beamed with big brown eyes and perfect luscious lips.