Heartland

by Davis Bunn

  He did a slow three-sixty, trying to embed everything into his brain. He did not need to watch JayJay. Derek would do that for them both. What he needed was to get all of this down so tightly he could go back and make it live on the page.

  He came back around. And found Derek grinning at him. The camera was propped on the stump. Peter moved in so close their helmets clicked. “This is the first episode for next season!”

  “Now you’re thinking!” Derek pointed ahead. “Let’s change position so I can shoot them against the sun!”

  “What sun?”

  “Exactly!” Derek clambered to his feet. His legs were caked with the viscous mud. Ash speckled his coat. His face and hands were gray-black. His eyes were on fire. “Let’s go!”

  The wind caught them totally by surprise.

  One moment the four of them were wrestling just another branch across the line, with the mud clinging to their boots like red claws. The next, the world vanished.

  JayJay started coughing before his mind fully registered the change. The world was gone. At first he thought it must have been another of those giant choppers passing too close overhead, clamping the smoke to the earth. Only he could not hear the rotors’ deep thrumming. Yet the air was pushing down on them. Not from the north where the fire burned. Straight down. Compressing the air and the smoke to the earth. Blinding them. Making his lungs burn like he had taken a double helping of ash.

  The claxon added a ghostly panic to the invisible scene. The alarm whooped up and down the scale. But from which direction? The wind was as great an enemy as the fire. It made the noise come from all directions at once. It rammed the smoke and the flames down JayJay’s throat.

  JayJay dropped his hold on the branch. He tried to shout, but the words barely croaked from his throat. “Where’s my team?”

  If anything, the smoke grew even thicker. The sky overhead ate the sun completely. He heard coughing. He groped in the direction he thought the cough came from. His glove gripped another shoulder. JayJay flung his arms around the unseen figure. The man was almost his height, which meant it had to be Robbie. The way Robbie clung to him, JayJay knew he was not the only one who had panicked. Feeling the young man’s muscled strength beneath the jacket drew JayJay back from the brink.

  He stripped off his belt, reached around, and found Robbie’s arm. He planted one end of the belt into Robbie’s hand. He drew his helmet in tight to Robbie’s. “Don’t let go!”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Stoop down and hunt! One hand only!”

  JayJay found the body by stumbling over it. He had no idea whether it was Ahn or Minh. Only that the body was small and still except for tremors that did not quite form into full coughs.

  The chain saws and the bulldozers grew silent. The fire still roared at them from all sides. Other hoarse voices called out names and confusing directions. The claxon whooped and shrilled and offered no clearer a course than the fire.

  JayJay clearly heard Robbie croak, “I’ve found Ahn!”

  Which meant it was Minh that JayJay was slinging onto his shoulder. “One of you strip off your jacket!” He did not recognize his own voice. “Grab hold of the arms. Everybody stay together!”

  “Where is Minh?”

  “I’ve got her.”

  “Where do we go?”

  “I’m working on it.” JayJay shifted Minh so that she rode easier on his shoulder. At least it was the lightest of the team that had gone down. He squinted and looked straight up. Ash and burning cinders pelted his face. He blinked away the blinding tears and forced himself to keep staring at the unseen sky.

  A panic-stricken voice shrilled, “The flames! They’re coming! I can see them!

  ”

  “Hold hard there, brother. You ain’t burning yet.” Then it came. The one solid opening he had been waiting for. There and gone in a single frantic heartbeat. But enough for JayJay to get a sighting on the sun. But he also lost hold of his belt. “Where are you at!”

  A panicked voice tremored, “Here.”

  “Here don’t mean nothing in this soup. Follow my voice. Okay, I got you, no, don’t grab, I’m carrying somebody.”

  Ahn cried, “Minh!”

  “You stay calm too. I got your sister.” JayJay heard other voices calling with the authority of having made the same sighting as him. Which added to his confidence. “Everybody listen up! Grab hold of anybody you get within reach of, but only use your free hand! I spotted the sun. Okay, let’s move!”

  They had only gone about thirty paces when JayJay tripped over a coughing form and almost went down. Half turning, he called back, “Robbie!”

  “Yo.”

  “Grab my jacket. I need my other hand.” He scooped up the unseen figure. “You got to help me, mister. I’m too burdened down to bear your weight.”

  The guy tried his best. But he was coughing and hacking so hard he kept wanting to fold again. “Mister, you got to stay up, we don’t have that far to go.” Each word raked another furrow in his throat. JayJay hacked and came up dry. “Come on, keep walking, that’s it. We’re almost there.”

  But he wasn’t sure where “there” was until he recognized the hoarse female voice that had directed them off the trail and into the fire line. “Okay, y’all get ready. On my count, we’re all gonna shout together, ‘The trail is over here.’ Ready? One, two, three.”

  They didn’t make much of a dent, even calling together. But the news was caught by those closest and passed back. At JayJay’s command they did it again. Then other shadow figures were closing in. And JayJay was still holding a supine form. “Let’s go!”

  He took the trail at as close to a trot as his exhausted legs could manage, what with a body on one shoulder and his other arm supporting a coughing, stumbling man. The farther they moved down the trail, the more condensed became the crowd and the clearer the claxon. Finally they stumbled into the clearing. The smoke was marginally less dense back here, but only as a matter of degree.

  JayJay heard the paramedics shout, “Only those needing serious care. Everybody else stay back!” But he couldn’t for the life of him tell where the sound was coming from. The noise from the claxon masked all directions.

  Then a chopper flew over. For the very first time, the bellowing machine was a friend. The downdraft blasted away the smoke. The chopper hovered not over the clearing, but rather farther along the trail. It was soon joined by a second, and then a third. People poured in a constant filthy stream into the clearing. JayJay dropped the coughing man. To his amazement, JayJay recognized him as the guy from the studio. But JayJay didn’t have time to worry about that just then. The young woman on his shoulder was not moving.

  He humped his load over to the ambulance. The machine was surrounded by coughing, singed, supine forms. JayJay grabbed a passing medic, who wordlessly spun JayJay around. Ten seconds was all she gave him. Then she slapped a minibottle of oxygen into his hand and shouted in his ear, “Three mouth-to-mouths, then feed the oxygen and count to ten. Then repeat. Got that?”

  “You bet.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  JayJay lowered Minh to the ground, then had to push Ahn back before he could pinch Minh’s nose closed and do the three breaths. He fitted the nozzle over Minh’s face and twisted the handle. Counted to ten. The chopper noise was awful, but at least the smoke was reduced. Ahn was crouched on his sister’s other side. JayJay removed the mouthpiece and gave her another three breaths. Then back on the oxygen.

  Minh coughed. Her body convulsed. She opened her eyes.

  Ahn dropped back into the mud, covered his face, and sobbed.

  Robbie pounded JayJay’s shoulder and shouted something JayJay could not understand. JayJay looked over and mouthed one word. Water.

  Robbie vanished.

  Minh’s eyes teared up and streaked her face. She watched JayJay with gradually returning focus. Ahn recovered enough to take his sister’s hand. Beyond them, the guy JayJay had helped down the trail was turn
ing in a slow circle, coughing and shouting a name that might have been Derek.

  Robbie returned with an armload of water bottles. JayJay took a swallow, removed the oxygen breather, lifted Minh’s head, and helped her drink. He turned back to Robbie and gave him another one-word order. Towel. The kid left and returned in an instant. The cloth he held looked impossibly clean. JayJay accepted the cloth, then nodded toward the guy from the studio, who was searching the returning faces. Robbie understood. He walked over and handed the guy a water bottle. The guy looked dumbly at it, too shocked to understand at first. Then he was trembling and struggling to get the thing open. Robbie took the bottle back and unscrewed the top. The guy drank too fast and choked. Robbie patted his arm. Slow.

  JayJay used his teeth to strip off the glove not holding Minh’s head. He poured a little water onto the towel and used it to clean her face. Minh captured his hand. She didn’t try to speak. She just stared at him.

  The medic returned. She was a cute brunette with the lithe compactness of a serious athlete. She fitted the stethoscope to her ears, listened to Minh’s breathing, checked her eyes, kneaded her neck. She nodded and gave JayJay a thumbs-up. JayJay grinned his thanks.

  The medic’s head cocked to one side. She pointed at JayJay. The words were lost to the downdraft. But JayJay understood just the same. You’re really him.

  This moment was good enough for him to keep hold of his smile just the same.

  Peter finally spotted Derek when the exodus began. His legs went so weak he stumbled to his knees again. Then he was up and pushing through the crowd headed toward the buses and safety. “Are you all right?”

  Derek gave him a smoke-streaked grin. “All right? Man, this is fabulous.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “I got it all, Peter. Every second of JayJay Parsons and the rescue.” They let the crowd push them across the clearing and out toward the vehicles. Derek stripped the water bottle from Peter’s hand, drank hard, then poured the rest over his head. “I’ve been dreaming of doing that.”

  “Where were you?”

  “On top of a fire truck. I waved at you. But you were too busy being scared to see me.”

  Peter slugged his friend’s shoulder. “I thought you’d gone down!”

  “Yeah, I saw that too.” Derek grinned at his friend. “Nice to know you cared, man.”

  Suddenly Peter was laughing. It was crazy. But he couldn’t help it. Laughing and coughing and stumbling in his exhaustion. Giddy with relief and excitement. He had been there. And he had survived. The feeling was incredible. “Hey, don’t kid yourself. I was just worried about having to deliver the news to your wife.”

  “Whatever.” Noise from the claxon and the choppers gradually eased. Derek grabbed two more water bottles from a torn box. He passed one over. “My arms are two feet longer from hauling this camera around.”

  “Want me to take it?”

  “I won’t say no.”

  Peter was scarcely able to hold himself upright, but he took the extra weight anyway. He pointed to a bus up ahead. “There he goes.”

  “Yeah, I see.”

  JayJay turned in the process of climbing on board. The Oriental girl still clung limpetlike to his neck as he carried her into the bus. He spotted the pair and nodded at them. An easy gesture from one firefighter to another.

  Peter said, “He saved my life out there.”

  Derek could not stop grinning. “Yeah, I got that too.”

  Chapter 9

  We’re not talking about art. You want art, I know a good dealer down on Rodeo, he’ll show you a sketch by some dead French guy, you can shell out twenty thou and hang the thing on your bathroom wall. Forget art. We’re talking money here, Harry. The only kind of numbers that matter. Big ones.”

  Martin resisted the urge to reach for his cigarettes. He had already smoked four today, and he was due at some interminable dinner that night. He rarely went out to such LA functions. But tonight was special, an intimate dinner at the home of a film producer Martin actually admired. Not the man, of course, the man’s work. The man was merely a vehicle Martin intended to steer toward Martin’s dream. The same dream that had brought him here.

  “You know what my kind of art is, Harry? Art is a line at the box office. And that’s what Martin and I can produce for you. Art that sells in Kansas City. You’ve been in this business long enough to know that if you can’t sell it in KC, you’re dead. The land that Hollywood has forgotten for far too long. That’s what we intend to take back, Harry. With your help, we are going to reconquer America.”

  Milo Keplar was Centurion’s director of sales. Martin Allerby ran the studio with just two number twos, a director of production and Milo. Milo Keplar hated Centurion’s location with a passion that surpassed Martin’s. Milo referred to the San Bernardino Valley as Tombstone West. A place of buried dreams. A place to flee from at the first possible opportunity. Which is why they were here. To escape.

  Harry Solish was the unseen face of Hollywood. Only the top execs in the business even knew Harry Solish existed. At any one time, there were never more than five or six people like Harry Solish. They, as much as any other force operating within the film world, determined what got shown on the silver screens.

  Harry Solish was money. Big money. Enormous. So big the numbers did not matter. Only the power the money represented. If Harry Solish’s consortium green-lighted a picture, it got made. It was that simple.

  In any season, about ninety major features were green-lighted. A major these days was a film that cost sixty-five million and up. Add another third on top of that for marketing and distribution. Harry Solish and his group held pieces of as many as forty of these ninety feature films. Without Harry Solish’s approval, more than half of these would never have been made.

  Harry Solish was a product of modern science. His age was as big a secret as the names of the investors he represented. Martin Allerby guessed Solish’s age at somewhere between sixty and a hundred and forty. Harry Solish looked as perfectly groomed and lifeless as a guy wearing a coffin and his final suit. Even his voice held no sign of life.

  “Box office sales are down,” Harry Solish replied. “What do I want with a stake in a new studio?”

  “Not just any studio, Harry. A studio that is dedicated to producing a steady stream of hits.”

  “And the others aren’t?”

  “Sure, okay, yes. Of course they all want every film they make to strike gold. But look at the other things they count as important.” Milo gave no sign he was stressed. He was a small man with a flair for expensive suits and subtle gestures. Martin knew his family had fled Communist Romania, and Milo had sent himself through Dartmouth on government loans. Milo was rabidly American, and fervent about one thing above all else—Milo Keplar’s rise to the top of the Hollywood pile. Martin had no problem with Milo’s ambition. Milo was also loyal. Loyalty trumped almost anything in this business.

  Milo began counting points off his almost ladylike fingers. “Most studio execs want to be big with the critics on both coasts. They want attention on Oscar night. They want the top names. They want to do what is fashionable. They want to be leading-edge. But the Centurion Studios we intend to build will care about only one thing, Harry. Generating profit for our investors. A lot of profit.”

  Solish had been nipped and tucked so many times he did not have the spare skin on his neck to let him turn to where Martin sat beside him without swiveling his body. “You’ve been awfully quiet today, Martin.”

  Martin held to the party line he and Milo had worked out over the nineteen weeks it had taken to set up this meeting. Their spiel was centered upon the one point his spies had confirmed. “America’s middle-class core has been left behind in this postmodern craze for the dark and the dreary and the hopeless. The films of the forties and fifties represented classic storytelling. That’s what we want to bring back.”

  “And not just the films,” Milo said, retaking the lead. “We want to develop new
faces to match the new stories.”

  “And thus cut down the costs,” Martin added.

  “But also the box-office potential,” Solish countered.

  “Only at first, Harry. Only at first.” Milo’s only sign of nerves was the way he repeatedly ran one hand down the front of his woven silk tie. “And any face we bring in, we own. Just like in the old days. As the star’s name rises, they are associated only with our sorts of films. Sure, we can loan them out to other studios. But only on films where we have preapproved the script.”

  Solish looked from one man to the other, then supplied the line. “And taken a share of the profits.”

  Martin leaned back and breathed deep for the first time since entering Harry Solish’s home office. Not just drew in enough air to keep from passing out. Really breathed. “Not profits, Harry. A percentage of the gross.”

  Harry settled farther into the sofa and opened the prospectus. Harry Solish was famous for his year-round tan. People who knew Harry, or wished they knew him, spoke with awe about his Caribbean Island getaway. Not a home. A whole island. Harry had paid the fifty-seven million dollars with a check from his personal account. Six years on, the Beverly Hills realtor who had handled the deal was still recovering from the shock.

  Harry Solish worked from his home on the ninth green of the Bel Air Country Club. He had purchased the homes to each side, torn them both down, and put in a pool lined with limestone tiles embedded with prehistoric animals. Probably reminded Harry of all the careers he had made extinct by simply saying no. The pool house was six thousand square feet and neo-Gothic in design. It contained Harry’s office suite. Through wrought-iron glass doors facing the golf course, Martin watched a trio of self-satisfied men putt beneath a sunset-streaked sky. Martin would happily make a fourth, once Harry Solish signed on the dotted line.

  There was a knock on the door. The same assistant who had shown them in said, “Sorry to bother you, Harry.”