Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  Either way, she didn’t care. She had no plans to read it. She avoided doing anything on recommendation, out of a dread of disagreeing. She already had a Walden of her own, should she ever be so inclined. It was bound in calfskin, stamped in gold, and sat on its proper shelf with several others of its kind. One of these days, she thought as they crossed from the garden onto the hill, she would have to go pick out a classic and read it cover to cover. The change of pace would do her good. But she had to do it on her own, with a book nobody bothered with. Walden was simply not her style.

  They walked single file on the upper trail. The rose and yellow rockets of the setting sun were on the wane, bathing the whole of the canyon Arctic purple. Up ahead, a half-dozen men were clustered on the hilltop. They looked a bit like a scouting party. Most were only undertaker’s men, but, seeing twice as many as she planned on, Vivien stopped to wonder what the union rules were. How many did you need to dig a simple grave? To put to rest one modest urn of ashes, she would have thought a single man with a shovel was enough. Somehow, this many meant trouble.

  As the three from Steepside came along the ridge, the party at the grave cast their eyes down, glancing at the ground as if embarrassed. All but the perky minister, who pattered up to Vivien and took her by the hand. Closely followed by Maxim Brearley, red-eyed and just finished drinking, who clasped her other hand in both of his, as if he planned to play the devil’s advocate. Together, they led her forward. They murmured a string of platitudes till she thought she was going to scream. They brought her up to the brink of the pit before they let her go.

  She stared down in. It looked like someone planned to sink a fence post. Then she turned her eyes on all these strangers. For an instant, she thought she would turn and run, but Artie came up close behind and squeezed her by the shoulders. She let out her breath and relaxed a bit. As the minister started to speak, she focused across at Max, who stood on the opposite edge. She couldn’t remember inviting him, but decided to let it pass. Since Jasper had no blood relations, Max could act the long-lost cousin. Besides, he’d directed Jasper first and last. If he hadn’t had the brains to put his star in khaki pants, they never would have gotten past the werewolf stage. His presence here today was more or less inevitable.

  But who the hell did the rector think he was? Did he think they were having auditions? Given as he was to a phony British clip, he was clearly schooled in a God that wore a coat and tie. And he gave it extra resonance today, since the death at hand was sorely lacking in decorum. He’d picked the wrong crowd to try it on. The more he gave it like a speech, the more did Vivien, Artie, and Carl look off and shift their feet. They probably couldn’t have pooled among them a whole hour spent on their knees in the last ten years. By the time he asked them all to join him—“Brethren, let us pray”—he didn’t stand a chance.

  The violent gold and broken glow of the sky was dwindling down. All along the crater of the canyon, the brush and grasses deepened into gray, as if the source of the night was shadows rising out of the ground. One by one, as Vivien watched, the listeners looked away to the landscape. Two lines into the Lord’s Prayer, the minister must have known he was fated to go it alone. Abruptly, the high-toned manner and Richard Burton rhythm dropped. His voice got very thin. The mourners and workers had banded together. They gazed in all directions, sweeping the hills in the falling twilight, a deaf ear turned to the pieties. It was better than hymns and the ringing of bells.

  She was free at last. She could be as bored and tearless as she wished. Nobody here was out to pin her down. The class of officials who’d overrun her life, massed all week like cops at a car wreck, had no power now to make her take it hard. The busy crew from ABC, shooting it all from the roof, reduced her to three or four inches high and could not read her mood. The Cinemascope dimensions of the scene were on her side. Then too, she was the only woman. The others all had to act like men and keep their feelings private. And they didn’t lock eyes with a woman like her, in any case—for fear of triggering coolness that would ice their very hearts.

  She had come to say goodbye and nothing else, and so she said it. She didn’t tart it up with proper feeling. She had managed, eight years running, not to care what Jasper did in bed, or wonder who he made it with. They were none of each other’s business, Jasper Cokes and Vivien. And they owed it to the boundaries they’d fought for, somehow to keep things in their places. One goodbye was all the moment needed. That and a windy hillside.

  Vivien looked up. At first, she thought she must have spoken it aloud. Though the rector droned along entirely unaware, a look of confusion had passed like a chill among the men around Jasper’s grave. Everyone stared straight at her. They saw she was a renegade. Then, suddenly, Carl and Artie, standing beside her left and right, broke from the circle and ran. She realized what they’d all been looking at was going on behind her back. She spun around, thinking: Let it be something grand.

  But it was nothing, really. There was someone there in the path, about twenty yards down the hill. A couple of Steepside guards had closed around him. Though they made a wall like a football huddle, she saw they were roughing him up a bit. It was all that pent-up guardsmanship. All week they’d been deprived of criminal trespass. None of the fans had climbed the fence, and the burglar class instinctively stayed clear of so much raw activity. Thus, this overcurious man, whoever he was, was the very first live one they’d tracked down.

  Vivien ran to catch up with Carl and Artie. The cameras on the roof had pulled away from the crest of the hill, to train themselves on this new scene. All at once she understood—seeing the way it would be from here on in—that now, with Jasper dead, it was she alone being trespassed on. The show of force was in her name. As she came up level with the incident, she felt strangely helpless. Carl and Artie had joined the ring around the man inside. She couldn’t see a thing. Luckily, she was only skin and bones. She saw a space and ducked between two fullbacks, worming in before they knew what hit them.

  She came up into the midst of pushing and angry questions. A finger poked her in the side. She had to catch at the intruder, just to keep her balance. He was hunched in his charcoal suit, shielding his gonads, but he put out a hand and caught her. Suddenly, they were arm in arm. The oafish guards, a beat behind in reflex, watched it happen and shrank away, as if to make them room. After all, it was the boss who’d just popped in.

  “Are you a friend of Jasper’s?” Vivien asked. Dispensing with preliminary matters—how he got in and what he was after. He had the look of a loner.

  “No,” said Greg. “Harry Dawes.”

  “Oh,” she replied, a trifle faintly. She hoped it sounded something like an apology.

  “What do you want?” demanded Artie, grabbing him up by both lapels.

  “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. His plans had somehow slipped away. He told the truth for the hell of it. “I figured this was the only place where the whole thing might make sense.” He fixed her with a penetrating look. “You know what I mean?”

  “Artie, let him go.”

  She saw him struggle to give a name to something odd about her eyes. In fact, she hadn’t a clue what he meant. For his part, he felt as if he’d been misinformed by the flat of a thousand photographs. He went on talking a moment more, but made no attempt to appease the men who threatened him. He let all present danger slip his mind, so drawn was he to the mischief playing in her glance. Could a person be that self-contained? Even at a time like this?

  He said: “It’s just two people dying, right? The same as anyone else.” He tried not to put any pressure on her arm. He figured she’d been squeezed till she was black and blue. “All I’m trying to do is see it plain. Without the bullshit.”

  “You’ll have to go,” said Artie coldly.

  The guards closed in a second time, still eager to do it by force. But Carl had had a chance to mull the implications over. He was ready as ever to turn the screw. “It’s not that simple,” he put in dryly, overruling Art
ie. “If we don’t press charges now, this sort of thing will never end.”

  “Later,” she said dismissively. “Now that he’s here, he might as well wish Jasper luck.”

  And she led him away like an honored guest. She didn’t agree at all that it was just two people dying, but she liked a man to generalize. This candor and right-mindedness were just the thing they needed here, to stand against the rain of hollow pieties. For the rest, she meant what she said about “later.” He would have to talk his way out of it himself, once she left him again to his own devices. She had no room for someone new. Besides, she figured he must have an alibi, or friends who owed him a favor. A person took care of himself. That was her number one rule.

  “You aren’t, by any chance, the other widow, are you?”

  She ventured this as gently as she could, but it must have come out pretty hard. She felt a sudden spasm twitching in his arm. It seemed he wouldn’t answer. She had plainly over reached. It was only that she wanted someone feeling just as she was—nothing—and here she thought she’d found her man at last. A case of misreading the moody glint in his eye as a mirror image. For all she knew, he was something a good deal simpler—Harry’s brother, or his agent even. Full of tears, if you scratched the surface. Not the same as her at all. And yet she wasn’t sorry that she’d taken up his case. As they walked uphill to the grave again, the Steepside forces neutralized and trailing in their wake, she saw that the minister was most put out by the interruption. All around him, the funeral crew was visibly buoyed by the outcome of the scuffle. So at least she could console herself with this: She’d turned the mood of the moment on its head.

  “Not exactly,” Greg said slowly—at a loss to know why he was lying. “We were friends,” he said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Of course,” she said. They were only a few feet off from the grave. The minister lifted his prayer book and took a deep breath. Vivien let go of Greg’s arm, but she leaned up close and whispered one last thing. “By the way,” she said, “thanks for the book.”

  He was supposed to beg her pardon and pretend she’d mixed him up with someone else. He wasn’t meant to show his cards just yet. If he blew it now, Sid and Edna would have his ass. He turned and looked in her eyes again. He heard the minister call on God. And he whispered back: “Don’t mention it.”

  chapter 3

  EDNA TEMPLE WAS FORTY-FIVE when she waitressed her last meal, in a bar and grill in Shiner, Texas. She woke one morning and decided it was Hollywood or bust. With nary a backward look, she hitched a ride west with a strawberry trucker who took out the fare in trade. Though she harbored no illusions of making a go as a movie star, she figured there was lots of room a little lower down. In any case, she’d wasted all the time she had for wasting.

  Within a week of her arrival in L.A., she’d set up shop in the concrete court of Graumann’s Chinese Theater, about a foot and a half from Lassie’s paw print. She sold hand-drawn maps of the stars’ homes—with actual X’s, as if it were Treasure Island. The maps themselves were completely out of date, since nobody lived for long in any one place. She copied her information off the more commercial version sold in liquor stores along the Strip. But the crudeness of her handiwork had a certain air of authenticity about it. She looked like she had the latest dope. Besides—as she would have been first to tell you—in a thing like this, it was all in how you pitched it.

  She understood exactly what the tourists traveled out here for. They wanted a personal nod—a glimpse of somebody very big or, failing that, a peek at where the famous hung their hats. The good people of Cedar Rapids were lost in Beverly Hills. They could not get a table for lunch, for love or money, and they couldn’t so much as go to the cleaner’s without being valet-parked. The way they kept their windows rolled, they acted as if it was breaking the law to drive up and down the boxwood streets. Which is why Edna manned her little booth in a down-home style, after the manner in which she sold brownies at the Shiner Baptist Fair. The out-of-towners knew right off whose side she was on.

  In ten years, her maps grew more and more skilled—and even more eccentric. She took to listing certain houses with their pedigree of scandals, all done up in medallions. She sketched in palms and bathing beauties, to give the whole a bit more color. Between 1956 and 1969, her price hiked up from fifty cents to $3.98, the latter figure verbally discounted anywhere up to a dollar. She became such a fixture that the L.A.P.D. stopped turning her out.

  In the end, she might have parlayed it into a proper job at Rand McNally, but she developed an allergy to the desert sun. She would blow up with hives and prickle and wheeze. Hats didn’t do her a bit of good. At fifty-eight, she found herself banished to nights and early mornings. Her Marco Polo skit was over. She would have gone mad with cabin fever if it hadn’t been for Sid.

  Sid Sheehan was a spinner of yarns. In the beginning, out on the street in the thick of the Great Depression, he did odd jobs to get by. When Pittsburgh started to cramp his style, he packed his tools and rode the rails in search of the last frontier. At the end of the line, in Hollywood, he discovered there were people quite content to have a thing done slapdash, as long as they got the week’s gossip thrown in. From the wives of studio craftsmen to the actors waiting at home for the phone to ring, there was always someone who couldn’t put up a shelf. Sid’s stories never had any basis in fact. It was his casting that gave them the ring of truth. Somehow, a good bit of dirt about this or that star proved L.A. was just another town—as small as those his customers had safely left behind.

  “What do you hear about Marion Davies?” one of his homebody types would ask as he squeegeed a plate-glass window. And he always knew where he left off, since the serial form was his specialty. He’d fashion a little scandal up at Hearst Castle—say, a midnight swim in the Neptune pool that got out of hand. He’d leave his tales unfinished—hints of incest, hints of drugs—to keep them coming back for more. He was plasterer, paperhanger, chimney sweep, pool boy. But it was cliffhanger endings that made Sid indispensable.

  The bourbon finally took its toll in blood-blue thumbs and dizzy spells. Slapdash evolved into worse-off-fixed-than-broken. Though he had come to be as picturesque as a knife grinder out of Dickens, people stopped answering doors when he made his rounds of the neighborhood. They couldn’t risk the mess. Besides, after a certain point, one didn’t need a journeyman for gossip. By the end of the sixties, gossip was in the very air one breathed. The age of the tinker was past.

  So he stumbled into cemetery work. He was standing at Tyrone Power’s place, one winter afternoon at Hollywood Memorial, when a tourist asked him if he was related. “Oh, sure,” he said, off the top of his head, “I was the one drove his car.” And he followed it up with a patch of the great man’s love affairs, his hunting trips and all-night drunks. At the end he asked for a small donation, to put a little green around the tomb. “He deserves a bit better than weeds and dried-up grass,” Sid said reproachfully as they started to fish their pockets.

  Though he tried them all from time to time, he seemed to do his most creative work with Ty. On a good day, he could take in fifty or sixty dollars. Unfortunately, he was scarcely three years into this new career when he started to suffer from tremors and spells. He lost the power to thread a proper narrative. People still cocked their ears and listened, but soon it became apparent he didn’t know what he was talking about. For all his poignant details, this old man was an out-and-out liar.

  Between them, Sid and Edna made Hollywood work for the little guy. Being as how they’d put out such good products, they should have been able to live off their residuals. Fate derailed them both too soon. There came the day when they couldn’t afford a cup of coffee to get them going. Groggy and down for the count, they met by chance in the Cherokee Nile, at the door to the manager’s office. Both had been drawn by a card in the window, announcing a cozy apartment that went for eighty dollars a month. A classic case of the “cute meet.”

  They couldn’t agre
e who’d seen it first. They swapped some verbal abuse and finally roused the manager—who pegged them as a couple right away. Then they all trooped down to the basement, where they walked through a warren of rooms that was clustered about the boilers, all shot through with pipes. Cozy was putting it mildly. If they hadn’t been so broke, they never would have agreed to it. But, having lived alone so long, they’d both forgotten how to shout and carry on. Edna could feel her sinuses clear. The buzz stopped buzzing in Sid’s temples. It must have dawned on both of them how simple things could be, if only they had someone else to take it out on.

  For the next ten years, they pooled their welfare checks. They scrapped like kids, saw three or four movies a week, and never for a minute fell in love. Nothing much happened, one way or another, except they survived. Until, one summer day, with the blinds drawn against the midday dazzle, Edna Temple came across a minuscule notice, buried at the back of Modern Screen. Pictures for sale, it looked like. Hard to tell why anyone would want them for two dollars apiece, unless they were frontal nudes. What struck her was the return address: the corner of Franklin and Cherokee, apartment 11D.

  She waited in the foyer, close by the mailboxes, all day long till Greg came down. She confronted him with the evidence, then stuck with him, talking nonstop, all the way back to his apartment. Greg could only nod and dumbly shake his head, so appalled was he to be confronted in the flesh by an actual fan. To gain time, he showed her the stacks and stacks of photographs in his dining room. Then he gave her a Cary Grant, by way of a little souvenir, and pushed her toward the door.