Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  “I would have said goodbye, you know, if I wasn’t coming back.”

  Though she had no knack for friends, she and Artie were something close. By dint of their lives’ geography, they’d passed eight years in the same house, and neither one with a job in the outside world. Of the four of them, they were the two who most often had nothing to do, and they tended to do it together. Over the years, they’d logged a thousand hours of ordinary things. Walking half the night in the streets of foreign capitals, while Carl and Jasper hustled distribution rights. Or sitting on hotel terraces, sipping the local water, saying whatever came into their heads. They’d done a lot of getting by, and in the end they lived by a kind of shorthand.

  “I miss you, too, whenever I go away,” she said. She saw she owed him proof of what had survived between them. “I used to want to take you with me, only Jasper always seemed to need you here. We should have done it anyway. It might have made you famous.”

  “No,” he said reproachfully, “don’t say that. Some people are better off left in the background.” He had to keep his back to her to speak about himself. The horses were footing a tricky bit of slope, so all their eyes were on the trail. “You don’t want to crowd the people up front,” he went on in a rueful way. “You and I would never have talked the way we have. Not out there.” He nodded down the canyon and over the dam. “I’m sorry, Viv.”

  “About what?”

  “I just couldn’t keep him from being alone.”

  They were coming up to a length of level ground. The horses would break to a trot for a hundred yards along the water, on a beach of broken stones. They had, perhaps, a couple of minutes more before they could not hear above the beat of hooves. Five minutes after that, they would lay out breakfast on a jut of land in the reservoir—shaded by an orange tree the rising water hadn’t ever reached. They must have known there were certain things they would only say today, at this one moment. That is really all she needed—just to know there wasn’t time to waste.

  “You thought I left? Is that what you thought? Let me tell you something, Artie. This whole last year, I’d look at Jasper and start to think: What if you stay and he pulls you down? So I took off. I had to get away from it. But listen: I would have come back. Jasper knew that. God damn it, I was on my way.”

  Though she hoped it would answer the question he said she was avoiding, she couldn’t be certain now she knew what the question was. When she spoke again, her voice was a good deal smaller.

  “Did Jasper say I left him?”

  “Yes. But I told him he was wrong.”

  They must have used up half their time, just letting that sink in. She supposed that Artie knew he was staying on at Steepside. He lived there, didn’t he? Why, therefore, did they talk as if things between them were in the past tense? They acted as if it wouldn’t work straight on. The pretext had been removed. Perhaps they’d gone on too long devoid of ulterior motive, without a word like friend or lover to neatly wrap them up. Perhaps they couldn’t make it all alone.

  “Well, maybe he was right,” she said, as if Jasper’s guess was as good as hers. “I suppose I never got used to his fans. They’re too damn loyal. Mine don’t love me at all.”

  “He used to love them back,” said Artie. “But that stopped too. He didn’t love anyone anymore.”

  They were two steps short of the straightaway. Artie’s fat-assed mare slid down the last few feet and scrabbled forward. Vivien called out louder than she liked, for fear he would get away before she got it right.

  “Except for Harry Dawes,” she said.

  “No, no,” protested Artie, “not even him.” The horse shot off along the stony track. The rest of what he said he had to shout out over his shoulder. “I already told you,” Artie bellowed, sending an echo round the canyon, “Harry Dawes was just a fantasy.” The name repeated again and again, till it didn’t mean a thing. Just then, she reached the flats herself. She hurried along in Artie’s wake. He shouted one last time: “There was no Harry Dawes.”

  And that was the way they left it.

  It was eight years past that Jasper Cokes arrived in the town that made him, straight out of two years in the army. Passed out cold in the bed of the truck he’d driven east from Cleveland years before, when he left to go to college in Vermont. He woke up squinting at the morning sun, just as they made the downhill turn off the freeway and passed the Hollywood Bowl. Hung over on Napa red, he wasn’t in much of a mood, but he liked the palms and the stucco right off. He rapped his knuckles on the rear window, as if to knock on wood.

  Up front in the cab were his college pals—Carl Dana and Art Balducci, mismatched as a two-man stand-up team—and much too busy arguing maps to turn around just now. And anyway, Jasper’s first impressions were not of any real consequence, not to what they were after. The master plan for this career had been in motion all the while Jasper was stationed in Thailand, refining his taste to higher and higher grades of hash. The three of them had made their deal the night they graduated college: They would make a star of Jasper Cokes. They had their contacts all set up. It seemed what Jasper mostly had to do was let it happen.

  There were two things on their side. They had no contingency plan at all, in case they didn’t strike gold. They’d left fate no alternative. And they weren’t too proud to do shit-work, either, if that was the only way. The rest was purely matters of timing. You had Vietnam on the one side, the desireless life of the street on the other, and so, for a brief time, every displaced adolescent didn’t burn to be a movie star. Jasper and his cronies were the sort of investors who meant to get rich quick in the classic way. With the market down, they bought in big.

  They gave the people the same old thing, but more so. In a year that was frantic for any diversion, Jasper scored in a part nobody wanted. It was a werewolf picture unredeemed by fear. The monsters looked benign as pandas. But every fifteen minutes, Jasper Cokes took his shirt off. Just at the climax, water swamped his yellow rubber rescue craft. For half a minute, he wore a pair of khaki pants onscreen, all wringing wet and steamy. It was clear he hadn’t a thing on underneath. You could practically tell he wasn’t circumcised. A blushing nun with nothing to compare it to would have had to admit it was awfully big.

  On the strength of bookings in Southern drive-ins alone, Carl got a foot in at every studio—billing Jasper as the athlete type, but neglecting to mention the sport. It didn’t much matter. To put his first million in the bank, Jasper squirmed in and out of half a dozen uniforms. He was linebacker, shortstop, three-meter diver, and middleweight champ. With an obligatory scene in the showers every time he came off the field. Conventional wisdom had it that you could only get away with khaki pants the first time. After Night of the Howling Teens—which the industry privately called the first mass-distributed six-inch tool—nobody ever got another chance to check out Jasper’s best equipment. From that point on, they kept the focus mainly on his face. The rest of him was more or less a dream.

  For three days after he died, Jasper was all the local news that mattered. It was rumored that he left a hundred million—in itself a lot to reckon with—but what was more, the press had found out how it divvied up. By the terms of the ancient contract, twenty percent had always gone to Carl. Five more went to Artie. All the rest was Jasper’s. It stayed that way through eight long years of paperwork. There were pitchmen who swore they could make him better money, if he’d only get rid of his old school ties. But the terms remained as immutable as the set of relations among them. The roles they played for the media seemed like they were written in according to the percentages. Any star worth his salt required a fast-talk front man, as well as a dumb palooka to shoulder the way through crowds. In any case, death didn’t change the cut of the money. Carl and Artie got twenty and five of every dollar that Jasper left.

  The human-interest angle, meanwhile, did not hesitate to go baroque. A has-been starlet, Jenny Sutton, swore she talked to Jasper just before he died. He was woozy with barbiturates, all
right, but he didn’t sound anywhere near the edge. She further seemed to intimate that she and Jasper were getting it on, but then, she hadn’t had a part in years. In another late development, the Miami-based Legion of Fans was suing, though it wasn’t certain whom. They had information that an unidentified wino was shipped from the city morgue to the crematorium—where he showed up a few hours later as Jasper Cokes’s ashes. Jasper’s body, the rumor went, had been removed to a secret place. He was only in a coma. A team of doctors had flown in from Houston to monitor all his vital signs.

  Jasper would have loved it. As a man who came from nowhere, he applauded the drive of those who liked to tie themselves to a good story. It was only common sense to try to parlay one’s connections. You got a name, you dropped it. Let them have their sliver of limelight, all those various types who swore they knew the real Jasper Cokes. His barber at Universal, second-string hit for the Jersey mob, dabbed at his swollen eyes with a hanky, telling how down-to-earth he was. Lou Messina, the owner-trainer at Union Gym, who once rubbed Jasper down—in a scene that must have ended up in a curl on the cutting room floor—talked as if he’d brought his man to competition form. Then a woman emerged who said she was his layer-on of hands. By some odd quirk of UPI, a picture of her surfaced in a hundred different papers—long-fingered like a witch, in yards and yards of black, the lace shawl at her shoulders very like a tablecloth. Vivien had never heard of her.

  But frankly, who was counting? In all of these assurances of kinship, no one made a move to separate what was true from wishful thinking. The strangers and tradesmen and tellers of tales had only the nicest things to say when they remembered Jasper Cokes. Nicer things than anyone thought at Steepside anymore. In the press accounts, such sentiments were banked about the casket, rather after the manner of floral arrangements. All of which was fine, except they couldn’t last.

  Greg and Sid and Edna didn’t know what to make of it. Whatever prior claim they might have had on Harry Dawes was rendered moot by a flood of eye-witness reports. In a day or so, there wasn’t anyone who hadn’t seen the short main street of Turner’s Falls. The grocer where the kid had worked his high school summers reminisced at length. The track coach put his two cents in. The rector and the milkman. It seemed as if there were dozens who knew him better than Greg did. He couldn’t think of a folksy detail he could peddle. The coverage swept right by him, stopping off at the Cherokee Nile just long enough to show it was a fleabag.

  As it happened, they were most uneasy allies. They found they had to go back a step before they could even start. They were stuck with all the things they’d put off saying. Greg came up from Harry’s place, the Walden in his pocket, and spilled the whole thing out as best he could—lapsing for half an hour into helpless despair. But it turned out Sid and Edna had some losses of their own. Though they’d never given the slightest hint, it turned out they’d been tight with Harry Dawes for weeks and weeks. He’d let them have the smalltown treatment that made him so beloved in Turner’s Falls. Doing them little favors. Never too busy to talk. He drew out all the story of their lives. You couldn’t really blame them wanting to give him something in return.

  Even so, they nearly didn’t bring it up, so certain were they Greg would savage them for meddling. But they couldn’t stand pretending anymore. In a halting way, they admitted as how it was they who set him up. “There’s a brainy guy on the eleventh floor, you ought to get to know him.” After that, they stood apart and waited. Edna kept up Harry’s spirits, feeding him wedges of carrot cake with a side of herbal tea. He came back quite dispirited, it seemed, when he ran into Greg in the foyer by the mailbox. Till the very last minute, apparently, he was certain Greg had looked straight through him.

  “When we saw it was finally going to happen,” Edna said cautiously, “the two of us bowed out. It wasn’t really our affair.”

  Whose was it, then? Just who had had the thing with whom? It looked like Harry wasn’t innocent at all. Not if he plotted Greg’s seduction with the likes of Edna Temple, who thought of innocence in anyone over eighteen as a sort of emotional disorder. Any other time, the three of them would have surely broken off relations over something as big as this. That they worked out a truce instead was tribute to a passion for the fixing of priorities. To clear the name of Harry Dawes, they let their crossed connections bring them close. They didn’t go to bed that night till they were all agreed what crime it was. If they meant to bring a murderer to earth, they had to stick together.

  So he probably wondered what he was doing all alone, at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning, walking across the canyon in a charcoal three-piece suit. Sid and Edna had let him off at the western end of the reservoir. Then they streaked away in the rented car—no time to lose, at an hourly rate—and left him to his own devices. He felt like a lonely terrorist dropped behind enemy lines. He had not been provided with a ticket home. He scanned the top of the hills as he skirted along the water’s edge, in case they had a lookout posted. He was enough of a fatalist to know they’d pin him down eventually, but he hoped to get inside, at least, before the hammer fell.

  Because he kept one eye on Steepside, he saw the two figures on horseback the moment they came through the gate. He ducked in the bushes and waited them out—elbows and knees in the damp earth, and a colony of potato bugs bumping about in their armor not two inches from his nose. When at last the two riders crossed his path, he pulled in his head like a turtle and winced at the fall of every hoof. As they passed three feet from where he lay, he held there steady as a canyon snake. He was crouched at the bottom of the incline where the horses shifted gears and sped away. And he only heard the one remark he was doomed to misconstrue.

  “There was no Harry Dawes,” he heard the rider shout.

  A moment later, he scrambled up out of the sage. He watched them put some distance down along the straightaway, as he flicked at the mud on the knees of his suit.

  Then he turned once more to the uphill climb. In a matter of seconds, he was striding up the switchbacks. He was out of view from above by now, but knew he had to get off the trail. They used it as a getaway.

  So that, he thought, was Vivien Willis Cokes. He wasn’t sure when he first glimpsed her, high on the hill above him. Now that he’d watched her ride away, he realized she was smaller than they made her look in photographs. She had the looseness in her limbs of a girl ten years younger. As faultlessly dressed for a morning’s ride as Vogue could ever wish. And something else: If they told her Harry Dawes didn’t exist, if that was the way they solved it, then she must live in a sort of cocoon.

  He stepped off the trail to the bare wet hillside. His feet went sliding, on account of his cordovan wingtips, and he had to grab hold of the sagebrush so as to scramble up to firmer ground. He hopped from rock to rock and clumped through patches of knee-high grass. He tried not to clutter his mind with too much thinking ahead. He had not climbed anything other than stairs since he was twelve years old. He just kept going, till he came up over a rise and saw the beams and cantilevered bays looming above him on the heights, where Steepside rode the hilltop like a ship.

  He sat on a boulder and wiped his brow. From his left vest pocket he took out a Hershey bar. Edna had stocked him with energy, nuts and raisins and candy, so his spirits wouldn’t flag halfway. He tore it open and bit it in two. Then he looked about at the great green crater of the canyon, as if to get his bearings. It only took a second to pick her out, far below on a jut of land beneath a shady tree. She was breaking bread with a cowboy. Behind them on the trail, the horses cropped at the hillside sweets.

  He didn’t know quite what to make of the other-world arrangements Vivien’s set went in for. How could she possibly understand, this woman who slipped by crowds on horseback? She was used to the sealed-off upper floors of good hotels. She drove the streets with a motorcycle escort. How would he ever make her see that Jasper Cokes, the night he died, was utterly defenseless? She seemed to have a moat around her wide as all this empty
space.

  He smacked his fingers and pressed on. As he closed the gap between him and Steepside, he stayed clear of the plate-glass reaches and the outdoor stairs and decks. Looking out for something more modest, he made for a small-windowed room on the lowest level. He flattened his nose against the glass to check it out. It was sparely furnished and quite deserted—the last and least of the guest rooms, maybe, or else the minimal quarters of a chauffeur and a maid. He eased the window open, craned an ear till he heard no sound, and slipped inside like a stowaway.

  Then straight to the bathroom to fix his tie and brush the canyon off his clothes. He put a comb through his hair, gargled with a dollop of Crest, and spot-checked the state of his winter complexion. He stopped short of using the aftershave on the sink. By the time he crossed the room and peered around the door along the hall, he was ready for a sit-down dinner.

  “If anyone asks,” Sid had coached him the night before, “you say you’re with the funeral. You’ll see. The pros steer clear of each other, once they got a death going.”

  He couldn’t be sure exactly where things led, but he was game to try. He walked the length of the hall, to the foot of a circular stair. He half expected to look up into the barrel of a gun being trained on him over the banister. But there was nothing there, nor the sound of voices as he mounted. He came out into an emptiness that seemed to mirror the gray light rolling off the reservoir below. The room was long and narrow, open to the canyon—a set of bays glazed with floor-to-ceiling leaded panes, here and there shot through with a disk of blue or blood red. He’d seen it in a dozen glossy layouts over the years. This did not prevent his jaw from dropping open on the spot.

  For Steepside was afflicted with a schizophrenic split, so that only this, the western half, had been done by Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1937, Abner Willis had put the hilltop site and a seven-figure trust at the architect’s disposal. Then he went off to Europe where, carried away by all the bargains, he sent back odds and ends of things that he trusted Wright would incorporate into the grand design. A coffered medieval ceiling torn from a monks’ refectory. A paneled room from Paris. Frescoes and flower-carved balconies, dolphin-linteled doors—all of which were going to require a master feat of engineering. All of which Wright took a dutiful look at, leafing it through like the day’s junk mail, before he ordered it put into storage.