Joe pooh-poohed my worries. “I know those men,” he said. “They’re resourceful. They’ll lie their way out of it when the shit hits the fan.”
We all fell silent as we drove back to my house. It was strange to have actually done something criminal and yet feel nothing. Up to the last minute it had seemed like a joke that probably wouldn’t happen. Now it was done, and what made it the more strange was that I didn’t really feel driven by an impulse to vengeance, not against Sherry or anybody, nor did I feel like the film was something of my own that I had to defend. Even before it was finished I had lost most of my feeling for the film—Wynkyn’s death and my trouble with Owen had destroyed the passion of involvement I ordinarily would have had. If I had tried to tell a lawyer why I had just stolen a film, I wouldn’t have really known what to say.
We changed cars at my house, and as we swung onto the Hollywood Freeway and sped past downtown L.A. and out toward San Bernardino and the desert, I felt momentarily euphoric. We were going at last. Everyone’s spirits lifted. Elmo drove, his big hat cocked over one ear, and Winfield devoted his energies to popping the tops off beer cans and quaffing their contents. Even Joe had come alive. He sloshed his martini shaker from time to time, to see if there was any left. It must have been level full when we started, because there was a lot left. He leaned forward in his seat and talked to the boys about baseball. It was a side of all of them that I had never been invited to see. They managed to have a very serious conversation about baseball, with the Cadillac doing at least ninety on the San Bernardino Freeway.
Once the glow of L.A. faded behind us, I began to feel sleepy. I crawled under Joe’s green overcoat and lay resting, my eyes still open. I saw the sign for Riverside and remembered all the times Owen and I had come this way at night. But there was no ache in the memory—no ache anywhere. I got cold, but none of the men seemed to feel it, and anyway I didn’t want the top up because with it down I could lie back with my head against the leather seat and see the stars, thin little points all over the sky. It was interesting, how the men had suddenly forgotten everything but baseball—and how serious their voices were, well modulated, even scholarly. Joe looked at me fondly from time to time. He was happy, very happy, that we had included him, but his mind was on the conversation. I wouldn’t have had it otherwise. I snuggled closer to him, under his overcoat, and went to sleep.
10
I WOKE, WARM AS TOAST, INTO GRAY LIGHT. INSTEAD OF HAVING Joe’s overcoat over me, I had Elmo’s sheepskin. No one was in the car, but the motor was running and the top was up—the fact that the heater was on accounted for my warmth.
I peered out the window and saw my three traveling companions lined up by the side of a very empty road, relieving themselves. Winfield was drinking beer, even as he pissed. With their backs to me, I was reminded of the three monkeys. Then Elmo and Winfield, almost simultaneously, made the funny little hunching motion that men make when they’re stuffing themselves back in their pants. Joe continued to stand. There was an empty martini shaker on the floorboards near my feet.
Elmo spotted me watching, and looked abashed. They stood outside the car, shivering, until Joe came up and they all got in.
“Well, we done embarrassed ourselves before breakfast,” Elmo said. Winfield said nothing—evidently he was not at his most cheerful. Joe didn’t look so good either, although his condition was more ambiguous than Winfield’s. Winfield looked like he was going to be sick for several hours.
“Good morning,” I said. “Where are we?”
“Smurr,” Winfield said.
“Beg pardon?”
“Smurr,” he said again. “Fucking Smurr.”
“Don’t talk to Winfield this early,” Elmo said. “It’s a waste of breath. His brain won’t come back on for three, four hours yet.”
“Fucking lie,” Winfield said. “She asked me where we were and I told her. It ain’t my fault she don’t know about Smurr, Arizona.”
“Let me out again,” Joe said. “I shouldn’t have got back in.”
They let him out and he went off behind the car to be sick.
“Uncle Joe can still drink,” Elmo said. “If I drank that much gin it’d render me impotent for a month.”
“Malt liquor would render you impotent,” Winfield said.
Elmo grinned. “He’s always been a sour companion in the morning,” he said.
By the time Joe got back to the car, looking weak but relieved, the grayness had receded and the desert cleared and darkened just slightly, as the sky became light. It was as if someone were focusing the universe: first a gray blur, then an almost momentary darkening of the land in relation to the sky, then a beautiful clarity as light flowed down from the sky to the earth. Soon we could see the road stretching before us for many miles, through the still desert. The sunless sky had the brightness of ice. Then it turned deep orange at its lower rim.
“Well, no S.W.A.T. team, at least,” Elmo said.
“Give ’em time,” Winfield said. “Abe ain’t figured out he’s been robbed yet. It’s only five a.m. The question is, Where do we want to be four or five hours from now?”
“Poor question,” Elmo said. “Starting from Smurr, there’s no place I can get to in five hours that I want to be.”
Listening to them was like listening to old married people talk. They had been buddies for so long that they had their own codes.
“Ol’ Winfield’s paranoid,” Elmo said. “He’s wrote too much TV, He thinks we ought to skitter off into Mexico. This road we’re on—which I only pulled off on so we’d have a private place to piss and puke and whatever—goes right down into Sonoita, which is one place the S.W.A.T. team don’t go. Then we can bounce around in Sonora and Chihuahua for three or four days, and if we don’t die of dysentery or get caught in a dope war, we could sort of back into Texas somewhere around El Paso.”
“I don’t want to bounce for three or four days,” Joe said. “I say that frankly. I’m game for just about anything but bouncing.”
“Well, I just thought we might take the scenic route,” Winfield said. “I was hoping to see some Mexican villages and broaden my mind or something.”
“I’ll let you out and you can hitchhike,” Elmo said. “I ain’t eager to go into Mexico in my pink car—some big pusher might see us and covet it. Or else you’d buy some dope and we’d all get caught.”
“Being in a Mexican jail wouldn’t be much worse than working for Sergio,” Winfield said. “I’m scared of that crazy fucker. Last time we worked for him he almost shot me, remember? He was showing off his damn six-guns.”
“Maybe we oughta all go to Italy,” Elmo said. “Joe and Jill could serve as our intermediaries. Hell, Joe knows Sergio’s style as well as we do.”
“I bet I do,” Joe said. “I bet I do.”
He had taken to repeating every statement he made—a small habit, but for some reason irritating to me. I don’t know why, but after loving him for years everything he did sort of irritated me. I had made him my model in matters of spirit, and then he lost his spirit, leaving me without a model, more or less. Elmo and Winfield led such sloppy lives that I couldn’t use them as a standard, although I did like the way they complemented one another. When one was down, the other could be counted on to be up. They were sometimes both up, but never both down. That’s how friends should be, I felt.
“Well, if we ain’t going to Mexico, let’s at least go someplace before I have to get out and piss again,” Winfield said.
“We could go visit my son,” I said. “He’s somewhere near Albuquerque.”
“Too far north,” Elmo said. “Besides, why would you want to get an innocent child involved with a gang of international film pirates?”
We drove all day, through Tucson and on into New Mexico, the men taking turns driving. Even Joe took a turn driving. He tied a little checked neckerchief around his throat and settled into the Cadillac as if he had been driving them all his life, although he had driven nothing except a sma
ll Morgan for as long as I’d known him.
Elmo and Winfield reminisced about the women they had loved and lost, and all three men drank beer continuously, all day. I mostly kept quiet and watched the undulating desert slip behind us. It seemed endless and monotonous. The men were solicitous of me, but even so, I felt a little left out, almost an interloper, despite being the cause of the trip. At times I wished I could be present but invisible, so I could hear what they really had to say about women—what they would say about them to one another if no woman was present to hear. My sense was that they would all reveal their fright, and perhaps their hostility to the creatures who had the power to frighten them.
Perhaps I was just being conventional again, to imagine that they were either frightened or hostile. Maybe they were neither: just sort of puzzled. I spent the day in an odd kind of reverie, watching the desert, keeping kind of half tuned in to the men’s conversation and at the same time staying kind of half tuned out. When it warmed up, Elmo put the top down, and then at midday had to put it up again because the sun was so bright. In the afternoon, with the sun just edging downward, we drove across a barren, horrid part of New Mexico, a country without the purity of real desert but not fertile either.
Always, from girlhood, I had shaped futures with my mind, sculpting them as a sculptor shapes clay. Events always altered the imaginary shapes I made, but not totally. Enough of my construct survived that I could at least recognize it.
Now, suddenly, time was all around me, like the desert and the sky. It was flat, too, empty of ridges and mountains, valleys. When I looked down the road ahead, nothing at all came to mind.
“I think I went wrong,” I said, startling everyone. It startled me too—I had thought out loud.
“Exactly the way I feel,” Winfield said. “I went wrong, too. In my case it happened over in Rome, when I let myself get dependent on that expensive German beer. Thangs ain’t been the same since.”
Joe was looking a little tired. But when he caught me looking at him he smiled and it was really a friendly smile, not apologetically friendly, as he had been so often of late.
“You shouldn’t have deserted your craft,” he said. “Just because you’ve slopped around with movie crews for a long time doesn’t mean you really know how to make movies.”
“Nobody really knows how to make movies,” Elmo said. “It’s a matter of hoping the right accidents will happen.”
“Jill was meant to draw,” Joe said.
“I don’t know why you say that,” I said. “I drew for years and I wasn’t really that good. I was just okay. Every time I saw a great drawing it made me feel like a dilettante.”
“Craft, I said,” he insisted. “Craft, not art. Art happens like love, but craft is loyalty, like marriage. To do it good is what’s necessary, and that’s all that’s necessary. Maybe a few times in your life you get lucky and do it better than good, but that’s irrelevant. Loyalty is what’s necessary, if you want to get something good out of the union.”
“Heavy words,” Elmo said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but I sort of did. And he was sort of right. I dimly remembered what a clean satisfaction I used to feel when I did a good drawing. For a few years that feeling had been one of the mainstays of my life, and it irritated me unreasonably that Joe would continue to remind me of it.
“Maybe I got tired of being limited,” I said. “Maybe I needed to try something else, so as not to be so limited.”
He didn’t answer. In fact, no one spoke, and I began to feel sad and oppressed. Part of it was the endless, dusty, toneless land we were driving across: how had I got trapped in it? The mere sight of it made me want to cry, as did my sense of being alone and without a future. I felt inexplicably, irrationally bitter toward Joe. He was my oldest and dearest friend, and yet I didn’t feel that we were friends any more. My silly love affair had distanced us, though for no good reason. I felt he shouldn’t have let it. It seemed a betrayal, and the longer the men were silent and I was left to contemplate the emptiness and the sky, the closer to tears I felt, yet I held back, knowing how badly men react to tears. If I cried, they’d probably throw me out of the car at the next town. Anyway, I didn’t want to cry until I could be in private.
Even though all three men in the car had always been extremely considerate and generous in their dealings with me, I still felt they were my enemies. They didn’t understand what needed to be understood, and I couldn’t count on them just to be one way. I missed Owen. He wasn’t generous or considerate, and he didn’t understand anything, but I could count on him to be a particular way. The men I counted on for complex things were too complex themselves. Right then, when it must have been obvious to them that I was unhappy and needed someone to talk to me, they were about as talkative as three clams. We must have driven thirty miles without a word being uttered.
Finally I couldn’t help it. The landscape and the silence made me feel too lonely. I started to cry. All the men looked aghast, just as I had known they would, so I pulled Joe’s coat over my head, in order to cry in private. After I had cried for a while I felt a great deal better. I couldn’t see the saddening desert or the empty sky, and I felt protected and relieved. I knew the men were suffering, because I could hear them making meaningless conversation in stilted, awkward tones, but if they were suffering, that was fine with me. Let them suffer. They all had poor records with women, as far as I was concerned: they were far too content to sit around reliving the loves of the past—that kind of laziness. I stayed under the coat, partly for revenge and partly because I felt cozy. I had had too much space around me all day. I grew up with seascapes and little California hills, and I wasn’t used to being a pinpoint in the universe.
When I came out, after twenty minutes or so, things were much nicer. The sun was beginning to set, spreading layers of color along the rims of the horizon for what seemed like hundreds of miles. All the men tried to ignore the fact that I had risen again. They sort of cut their eyes my way and went on talking somberly of baseball.
“All I’ve got to say is I’m glad I’m not married to any of you,” I said cheerfully. “What a bunch of lowbrows. I never want to hear another word about baseball, okay?”
They were so relieved they all became drunk, on accumulated beer.
“Like having sixteen cobras loose in the car, having a cryin’ woman,” Winfield said. “Now I remember why I run away from home so many times.”
The next thing I knew I was being made to drive. Joe got very drunk and began to pontificate, repeating each pontification two or three times, but I was tolerant. My fit was over and it was fun to drive a pink Cadillac and watch the sunset. By the time the sun was gone and the sky darkening, we were on the outskirts of El Paso.
“It’s Texas, womb of my youth an’ Winfield’s too,” Elmo said.
Now that we had safely skirted Mexico, nothing would do but that we go there. I was about to drive the Cadillac across the international bridge when Joe remembered the stolen film in the trunk. We had all forgotten about it. After some dispute, we parked the Cadillac and walked across the bridge. There was hardly any water in the river, just a lot of brown sand with a silver ribbon running through it. Elmo climbed up on the bridge and pretended he was planning a suicide leap, although it was only about thirty feet down. Some Mexican guards watched him without interest.
“There’s not a whole lot of regard for human life in this part of the country,” he said when we got him to come down. He was quite drunk.
“Hell,” he said. “Those guards were gonna let me jump. Last time I tried to throw myself in the Tiber fifty Italians started praying to the saints.”
Overhead, the sky had turned a rich purple. Finally we came to Mexico and walked along the street whose pavement was so full of holes it looked like someone had attacked it with a giant paper-punch.
We found a restaurant, and I tried not to drink because it was apparent that I was going to have to drive. The others
drank margaritas like they were soda pop. Elmo said we should eat quail, and before I could think, an immense platter of them arrived. He had ordered two dozen, as if they were oysters. They were very good, but I kept thinking of little birds, running around the desert.
During the meal I decided not to go back to Hollywood. They would never trust me now, anyway. Maybe I’d draw, like Joe wanted me to. Or maybe I’d go to Europe. If there was a pull, that was it. Carl, my second husband, now a producer, didn’t hate me, at least. He had a new, even younger wife, and if he felt secure, he might be generous, decide we were old friends, and give me a job on a picture, just enough so I could live. I wanted to hear Italian voices—the quiet Spanish of the waiters made me nostalgic. Maybe I could have a room in an umber building and sit and sketch clothes on clotheslines and gray piazzas and old women in black dresses holding hands.
Of course it had been silly to steal the film. It might as well go back, even if I didn’t. Sherry couldn’t totally ruin it, any more than I could make it a masterpiece. If it were shown, some of the good work that Anna had done, and Zack and some of the others, would be seen and admired so they could get other jobs. That was the real point. Anna needed to keep acting or she would just get fat or marry somebody awful, and Zack needed to keep working, too. Otherwise he’d just sit around and take dope.
After we ate the twenty-four quails Elmo and Winfield wandered off to see if they could find a whorehouse, and Joe and I stayed in the restaurant and bickered. I don’t know why we bickered—it was all we could seem to do any more. Maybe we had idealized one another for too long, I don’t know. Now the idealizations had sort of worn through, so we bickered. He drank brandy and got drunker, and finally the other two came back, looking sheepish, although I doubt they really did anything. I went ahead by myself across the bridge, and the three of them shambled after me.
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