On Location

by Elizabeth Sims

  Rowe introduced himself as Tom Webber from Beverly Hills.

  "I'm putting together a pied-à-terre for my boss, who bought a place in"—he named the Harrises' building—"and I'm just getting my feet wet in Seattle." He laughed ruefully, gesturing at his fine shoes. The assistant, whose name was Adrian, smiled with respectful sympathy. He had already given Rowe the onceover and noticed everything. "And," Rowe went on, "I just unpacked a crate and went aaaahhh!" He threw a hand up as if reeling from an evil jack-in-the-box.

  Adrian snickered in anticipation.

  Rowe said, "And I find three pieces I didn't even remember he had—two Anna Kottlers and one dusty old Gene Delwaukee! Right in my face."

  Adrian suggested coffee and asked Rowe to sit.

  "So," said Rowe, sliding himself onto a smooth leather couch and accepting the Danish-type cup and saucer offered, "I'm in the area picking up swatches and business cards, and I saw your sign and thought I'd drop in." Rowe gave a vague description of the "Delwaukee" painting. "I like to give him good advice. What would you think of him selling it?" He furrowed his brow, peeping at Adrian over his cup rim. "Or should it be the other two? None of them, take my word for it, will work at all in the new place."

  Before Adrian had a chance to respond, Rowe went on, "He's coming in tomorrow night for a few nights, and he's going to ask me where's the best place to go for drinks in Seattle, and I'm afraid I'm quite helpless!"

  Adrian smiled and began to speak, but Rowe added, "I'm not talking about leather clubs, mind you; I'm talking about a real place where all the best people go." He cocked his head, waiting, half smile.

  "Oh, take him to Mijimi," said Adrian expertly. "It's right downtown, but it's not downtowny, you know. They used to have the place filled with art glass..." He paused, eyebrow raised, and Rowe interjected, "I hate art glass!"

  "I know," said Adrian warmly. "Ugh, it's so all over the place here—but thankfully it changed hands, and they've totally redone it, and it's fantastic. The drinks are perfect, and—"

  "But what about the clientele?" Rowe demanded.

  "—and I was about to say, everybody in the know goes there. The right people. The top people." Adrian's eyes sparkled a deep, unnatural blue.

  "The ones who donate to the opera, not things like Peruvian peasants?"

  "Yes. Yes!"

  "But not too many of them?"

  "Oh no, just the right amount."

  Rowe flicked a pretend bead of sweat from his brow and winked. "Thanks."

  The two gay men sat together in friendship.

  "So I'm thinking about that Delwaukee," said Rowe. "Does your firm have any recent history auctioning them?"

  "Oh, yes." Adrian rolled his eyes.

  Seeming not to notice, Rowe asked, "For a good price? I mean, you did well?"

  "Ha. Yes and no. I mean, the winning bid for the last one was fantastic; it—"

  "Don't disclose the number to me! I don't want to get you in trouble."

  "No, no, of course. But, oh, if you only knew the—" Adrian stopped himself, and Rowe nodded in somber approval. But Adrian found a way to go on. "Well, in fact, a neighbor of...well, one of your boss's new—uh, well, suffice it to say, not all auctions have happy endings!"

  Rowe clutched Adrian's arm. "Oh? What happened?"

  Adrian wriggled with pleasure. "Well, it had nothing to do with the Delwaukee per se; it's just that it never ceases to amaze me how some of the very top people don't pay their bills!"

  "Oh, my God. Wait. You said a neighbor...my boss—one of my boss's new neighbors?"

  Adrian looked at Rowe in silent affirmation.

  "Oh, my God," said Rowe. "I was there! I was in their home! I know who you're talking about! I've seen their Delwaukee! A neighbor of my boss? Here in Seattle?"

  "I can't say names!"

  "Oh, God, you don't have to! His head is like an eggplant! She's a pygmy who thinks she's Edith Piaf!"

  Adrian screamed with laughter. "Yeesss! Oh, my God, you're right, his head is just like an eggplant, and she is exactly a cut-rate Edith Piaf, that is hilarious! Aaaahhh!"

  "Aaaahhh! I've seen that very painting; they had us over for coffee! They did nothing but brag about it! You mean their check bounced?"

  "Those people's check bounced higher than Giselle Isleworth's hair!"

  "Oh, my God. I saw her on Broadway."

  "Which show? Kickin' It to the Kittens?"

  "Yes!"

  "I have her autograph."

  Rowe laughed. "You win, you win!"

  "They let him send a van for that painting before they ran his check. It's not like he was some unknown guy in town, you know. Would you believe he's trying to work out an installment plan? After the fact!"

  As Rowe strolled to his car, he thought about acting. Before meeting Rita, he hadn't paid much attention to his little charades and impersonations, the tricks he used to pull people off their guard. He would have called it bluffing, not acting. A simple wad of hundreds was Rowe's preferred method of gaining information, and with certain individuals in certain subcultures it worked impeccably.

  But at times he did have to pretend. She had pointed out to him just how much make-believe he used, and how good he was: posing as this or that to win somebody's confidence. Doing these pretend things came naturally to him; he didn't really feel he worked at it. Knowing Rita had deepened his understanding of it.

  He sighed.

  He allowed his heart to dwell on Rita the woman. Rowe supposed that when most men think of the woman they love, they start with the face, then the main guy-attractants, breasts and butt. But when he thought of Rita, he thought of the small of her back. Yes, the part of a woman's back well below the bra line, where the ridge of the spine dives into pliant flesh.

  In Rita's case, her fitness made that flesh firm, the muscles smooth, not hard—and she had just enough body fat that the two muscle groups, left and right, were like heavenly small cushions curving narrower and narrower until they came to that mysterious, wonderful place where you could again see a little bump of spine before the flare of her hips began, then the 3-D curve of her buttocks.

  His breath caught just thinking about the drama of Rita's backside. A place where so many lines of the body come together.

  He felt deeply mournful. Ridiculously. Although he knew he could wait out his whole life for her if either of them had been in a prison cell, such was not the case. He really ought to move on. Common sense said so. A flat loss. No sugar coating.

  Nothing to take away from it but painfully happy memories.

  Chapter 11 – Camp It

  Petey ran ahead, halted dramatically, focused his telescope, and called, "I think there's dinosaurs in these woods!" His voice almost burbled, it was raining so hard.

  Thanks to Daniel, we were prepared for this curious weather.

  Petey wore a wide-brimmed waterproof hat that Daniel had bought for him on the road, and he'd zipped himself into his weather-tight secret-agent jacket (lots of cool pockets) his dad had given him two Christmases ago. It had been so big then he couldn't wear it, but he'd grown into it and now it fit perfectly. He wore his little jogging pants and leather sneakers. In that getup, with that brown waxed canvas hat with its chin strap, he looked like a little mountain man.

  By way of helping us decide what to bring, Daniel had simply said, "It's gonna be more challenging than you think."

  I kept expecting thunder and lightning, but this was no front moving through; this was simply a weather system that had decided to park here, and like a Greyhound bus, it wasn't moving until it was damned ready.

  All our feet were damp, but that was about the worst of it. Daniel and I wore good parkas with sweaters underneath.

  Because Daniel had left even his Smoky Mountain accent behind when he came to Los Angeles from North Carolina, I kept forgetting his roots. His mountain instincts had led us up a rutted road, which the Porsche was barely able to negotiate.

  "Forest Service road," Daniel had mu
ttered. "Pretty old. Been a while since they last graded it." He steered skillfully.

  "I'm surprised how wide it is anyway," I remarked.

  "Well, this is second growth here, mostly, believe it or not. They had to get some tremendous wagons through here to harvest what they cut a hundred years ago."

  "This is second growth?"

  "Yeah, I'm seeing some pretty awesome stumps in there."

  It was true. As big as the trees around us were—two or three feet in diameter at the base—the moss-covered, rotting stumps among them were even wider, five, six, eight feet across.

  Daniel had stopped when the road became too rough to risk the car.

  "From the map," he said, "it looks like the origins of the Harkett River are somewhere above us. If Lance wanted pretty photographs, I bet he might have headed up this way." He smoothed a crease in the map. "Looks like a little lake off to the east, too."

  Up to this point we'd been traveling roughly northeast from the town and the main highway. Shortly after we left the market and garage, the two-lane road crossed the Harkett River on a low trestle bridge. The river tossed and foamed just a foot below the Porsche's tires.

  "Wow!" said Petey. "I like bridges."

  "Me too," said Daniel. "We'll have to do a bungee jump from one someday."

  "What's that?" Petey's innocent little voice.

  "Daniel," I murmured.

  "Well," Daniel began, "you find yourself a big tall bridge, and you get yourself this special long cord, elastic cord, you see, and—"

  "Look at that big eagle!" I shouted, pointing through the windshield.

  "Where?" cried Petey.

  "There, over there! Oh, he flew. We have to keep a sharp eye out for more; they're the size of pterodactyls in these parts."

  "Yeah?"

  Daniel coughed and did not resume his graphic description of bungee jumping but launched into the story of the most interesting summer job he'd ever had, when he helped a college professor put together the partial skeleton of an allosaurus the professor had dug up in South Dakota. Petey was spellbound. I guess all this biomass was getting him off pirates and back into dinosaurs. You work with what you got, as Gramma Gladys used to say.

  Although en route here I'd pictured myself simply running headlong into the woods hollering for my sister, the reality, the vastness, of the terrain sobered me up to listening to Daniel and trying to follow his plan as he developed it. Looking back, I realize he was mostly trying to keep me focused on clear goals. Make camp. See that Petey eats something. Show him how to take a whizz in the woods and how to kick a cathole with his sneaker.

  Once we stopped to make camp, that little car turned out to be a clownmobile, with two small tents spilling out, a little cookstove, and a tarp to cook beneath. Case of freeze-dried stews and vegetables to supplement the groceries I'd bought.

  We had searched in an upward-slanting vector (that's the best I can describe it) all Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday, and today, Thursday, we had decided to aim toward the lake, on a more or less descending route.

  Daniel thought Lance and Gina might have taken a different road in.

  "Then why don't we—"

  "Because if they're lost they're not going to be with their car. The car isn't all that relevant to us right now. I grant you, it'd be good if we could find the car first and start there, but we could spend a week looking for it. And they won't be with it. For all we know, it's just ahead of where we had to stop, but in all this rain there's no such thing as fresh tire tracks."

  Now, as we hiked, I occasionally called out in a lighthearted voice, "Gina! Lance!" As if my voice could carry more than twenty yards in this denseness of vegetation and atmosphere. My cell reception had conked out somewhere near the grocery store and GB's Garage.

  Petey, totally undaunted by the rain, kept seeing dinosaurs, pterodactyls (my fault), and other forest monsters. "It was a giant—thing!—that was like a giant—squirrel—with horns! It ran really fast, you guys missed it."

  "Now, were they horns or tusks?" Daniel queried earnestly. "Because if it had tusks, that species is much more dangerous than—"

  "Tusks! He had tusks!"

  "All right, then. Keep your wits about you and carry on."

  I loved Daniel so much. He trudged doggedly along. I watched him for a minute, appreciating him. His face, with its high forehead and slightly dented temples, wasn't the standard pretty-guy Hollywood mug; his face sort of roamed the borderlands between lady-killer leading man and off-center-looking character actor. A compelling face, which, I guess I'm trying to say, could go either way.

  Level ground was scarce in these parts. The forest ebbed and flowed around us as we moved through it, the treetops sometimes towering entirely out of sight in the hovering mist.

  The Eskimos, everybody knows, had invented dozens of words for snow, depending on its condition, and I thought that the natives of this region must have correspondingly done the same for rain. It misted, or it showered, or it poured or it lashed, or it abated briefly so that a wind could come and make the trees shake themselves off (onto you). Nut-sized drops that hammered your shoulders.

  "I think we're on a trail," I remarked. "Is this a trail?"

  We'd been finding fairly easy walking for the past few minutes.

  "No, Rita," said Daniel slowly. "This is an overgrown two-track."

  "Hey!" Petey yelled from ahead. "Hey!"

  "Some new dino species, no doubt," Daniel murmured.

  A mother can tell the difference in pitch, timbre, and intensity between a dozen "Hey!'s" that sound identical to ordinary humans. "No, he's found something."

  Furthermore, I could tell by his "Hey!" that Petey had found neither Gina nor Lance nor an ice-cream stand staffed by friendly pirates. But it was something.

  We followed his voice to a break in the scrub.

  My son was standing with his hands on his hips, fearlessly gaping at something much taller than he was, much bigger and heavier. It hulked shaggily in the relatively bright clearing.

  I gasped.

  There were others.

  Perhaps six or eight of them—one much bigger than the rest. Beyond them I could see a wider clearing—no trees or even scrub: a great big hole in the land.

  A lake. Cabins. Their flat fronts consisted of two small windows flanking a door with a tongue of moss-covered steps going up to it.

  Daniel said, "An old fishing camp, I guess. Must be good fishing in that lake, huh? Trout, I guess."

  The cabins really did look more like mangy buffalo than buildings.

  Ferns grew everywhere thigh high.

  "Gina!" I called hopefully. "Lance!"

  Daniel looked at me and his face said, You don't have to do that just for show; obviously they're not here.

  No one was.

  Except us.

  Then it hit me: "This is the place in the pictures! That Kenner showed me on his phone! They were here!"

  Yes, I recognized it now: the eating pavilion, the chin-up bar from which Lance had hung upside down for a photo taken by Gina. For some reason the lake had not been depicted.

  "Oh! Hey!" I called, dashing idiotically this way and that. "Hey! Hey Gina! Hey Lance!"

  "Hey!" Petey echoed. "Hey, Aunt Gina! Hey, Lance!"

  "They're not here," said Daniel patiently, taking my arm. "Why don't you rest a minute?"

  Petey scampered around indefatigably. The relatively gigantic clear space afforded by the lake—such long distances to see across—got him using his spyglass in almost an ecstasy. He ran to the pebbled beach and watched the rain fall on the water. The water was incredibly clear; you could see rocks and snags on the bottom as it descended from the waterline for a long way. He scanned his spyglass back and forth.

  Then he seized a rusted two-wheeled barrow, tried to pull it behind him like a rickshaw, but a wheel fell off. Something fascinated him in the intensity of the still-brilliant red paint on its underside, and he got his pad and colored pencils from his daypack
to draw it.

  "But," said Daniel, "let's see if they've left a note or anything."

  The sky paled and the rain eased a bit as Daniel and I inspected the camp.

  We found nothing in the cabins but bare wooden bunks and lots of dead flies. A bathhouse and a mess hall and the semi-collapsed pavilion, plus a stone fire pit.

  Daniel made out a decayed sign over the mess hall that said: CAMP—something illegible—IT.

  "'Camp It,'" he read.

  Below that, the sign said: WHERE BOYS BECO, and there the sign looked like it had been chewed off by an angry bear or, perhaps, a tusked squirrel.

  "Oh yeah," I remembered, "the animatronic laundry pile at the grocery store told me the name of this camp, Skee-wit-wit or something. Yeah, this is the old boys' camp Lance and Kenner talked about."

  "I was realizing it probably wasn't a guys' fishing camp; the urinal trough isn't very high."

  "Oh."

  "You know, that wasn't a very nice thing to say about a sincere fan of yours."

  "Don't start with me."

  He laughed.

  Petey came running up. "Mom, what'm I gonna do? I forgot my pencil sharpener!"

  "Here, honey." I opened my Girl Scout knife as Petey handed over his brown-umber pencil, its little lead flat to its cone of cedar. Whittling the wood, I said, "This is how they sharpened their pencils in olden times."

  Petey watched closely. "I want my own knife."

  "Well, soon enough, honey."

  After Petey dashed off, Daniel said, "Well, you'd think if Lance and Gina had stumbled upon this and needed shelter, they'd have stayed."

  "Yeah."

  "That's a good sign."

  "It is?" They could be dead somewhere.

  "Rita." Daniel took my arm and turned me to him. Beneath the dripping bill of his parka hood, his blue eyes shone with kindness. "The sheriff was probably right, you know. They're OK somewhere."

  I gazed across the lake.

  A fish jumped, its silver body curving clear of the water. Was it rising to catch prey on the surface? Or leaping in panic to evade a larger predator moving in from the depths?