by Paul Monette
“Viv—what’s wrong?” called out the director.
She and Greg were already at the door. They pushed it hard and swung it back. She couldn’t stand the sound of Brearley whining. She thought she’d scream if she heard another before they were safe outside.
“Hey,” Max shouted, “are you sick or something?”
They flung the door shut behind and ran. The running was all their own idea, since nobody else came bursting out. They weren’t being trailed at all. But the sped-up pace must have made them think they would save some time at the other end. As if they needed every second they could get. They flew back down the corridor and thundered up the stairs. Then across to the leather-bound study and out the French doors into the night. The Japanese plums were all in bloom as they streaked along the garden alley that led to the redwood tub.
They’d arrived at the scene of the crime at last.
No doubt they would have been quick to deny they’d done so by design—though there wasn’t a soul still left in the story who’d have let it go at that. They panted and leaned against the trees to recover. The night made not the slightest move to rush them along or hunt them down. They had more right to be here now than anyone. If the irony proved to be more than they could bear, they could always say the convenient thing, that the other had taken the lead and tricked them into coming out. But it wasn’t so at all. They’d agreed, somehow, without saying a word, to follow this circle end to end. The deal was fifty-fifty.
“Max,” he gasped, as he sat on the rim of the tub to gulp in air. “It’s Max.”
She was just as out of breath as he, but she knew she couldn’t let it go without a fight. She slumped down beside him, demanding shrilly: “But what about Carl?”
“Him too. Max killed them all.”
“But how?” she cried—reaching over to grip his arm, as if to keep from falling back.
It wasn’t a cool detective’s question. She didn’t care what the weapons and tricks and setups were, nor how the thing was masterminded. She was saying “How?” to something more—to the whole chaotic round of fate that dogged these men till they tore themselves to bits. She’d always supposed she lived at the center of Jasper’s life. All the high-strung apparatus of his dream, and everyone who crossed along it, came within the borders of a country she owned half of. Till now, there were some few things she was sure of.
So how could this be? Maxim Brearley was nobody, wasn’t he? Just an oily man they worked with—neither here nor there. She couldn’t think where he and Jasper had ever found the time to work up so much violence and passion. How did it ever get started, and she not know it at all?
“There were four men lost in the blizzard,” said Greg. He ticked them off on his fingers. “Jasper. Artie. Gary Barlow. And one other guy who got frostbite. Remember? The guy who lost four toes? That’s him.”
“Max?” she asked, as if she kept forgetting. “Max was at Carbon Mountain?”
“Goddam right,” he said forcefully. It was all old-hat to him, it seemed, who’d been over this ground with Artie inch by inch since Monday night. “The reason we never turned him up is he was a year behind. He wasn’t even in the club. But Barlow, see, was his lover—which is probably why they let him go on the river trip. It’s just a guess. Artie can’t remember how he happened to be there.”
She realized he didn’t know half what he wanted. He had only the barest bones of the truth.
“I still don’t see what it’s got to do with killing Jasper now,” she said.
“He always thought it was Jasper’s fault,” he replied, as he trailed a hand in the water. He gazed down in as if he meant to read the depths like tea leaves. “In his mind, Barlow was murdered.”
How, they couldn’t say. Perhaps Max saw Jasper steal an extra ration. Or Jasper worked it out so Barlow got the thinnest bag to sleep in. Who could say, in the snow and dark, what minor shift in the huddle—four men clinging to keep from freezing—might send one of them over the edge? Artie swore they were all shut up in a kind of coma the whole night through. He didn’t see how anyone could have noticed much of anything. But Max must have got it into his head that Jasper had placed himself above the group. In a word, he had oversurvived—and killed the man beside him in the process.
“The thing is,” Greg went on, “he never said a thing—not then or ever.”
He simply let them take his toes off, gritted his teeth, and came out of the hospital barely limping. Tough in a way that boys admired, so the others all figured he’d put the pain behind him. He nursed it all these years, till it went off like a bomb.
“But how do you know?” she persisted. It sounded, for all the world, like a lousy movie.
“Figured it out,” said Greg with a shrug.
Artie and Carl had suspected something for months—throughout the shoot of The Broken Trail. They saw that Max and Jasper were on the edge of something irreversible. That once they went ahead and jumped, they’d never make it out alive—not both of them, at any rate. But neither one would speak of it. Whenever Artie tried to bring it up, Jasper dropped a deeper drug and swam away to sea. As the last day loomed for The Broken Trail, Artie could almost feel the air go chill, as before a storm. The duel was only hours away.
So he summoned Carl home from New York, and they tried one final time. On April third, from one to five, they begged the boss to get out of town. The horror was plain in his face. He shook like someone who couldn’t get warm. But still he denied there was anything there. He fired them both summarily and swore to call his lawyer. Ordered them off the grounds, in fact, though the house was practically theirs as much as his. Then he slammed the door to his room on the roof and placed a call to Bermuda.
Vivien listened soberly, fixing her eyes on a yellowish star that gleamed quite low in the southern sky. She could not name it, for love or money.
“What about all those stories?” she asked quietly—though she harbored little hope that the version she knew had survived. It was so indelibly etched in her mind, she could have sworn there were photographs. Jasper and Artie and Carl, arriving in a pickup fresh from nowhere. The frontal assault on Hollywood, and the lucky break that struck them rich. The story told over and over, till it had the effect of historical truth.
“That was just hype” Greg said with a certain force, as he shook his hand dry in the cool night air.
Well, of course it was. How odd that she, who had heard every lie in the book embroidered with her name, should have ever believed a word of it.
“The first thing they did when they got out here was call up Max,” Greg said. “He’d already put in two years waiting around, and he finally had a foot in the door. Some bullshit job at Fox, where he followed this goof around and kissed his ass. But at least he had a few connections.” He looked her in the eye with an irony whose roots went deeper than the case at hand. “They couldn’t have done it alone, you know. Nobody ever does.”
So the four of them worked together, at first. How was it, she thought, that none of them brought up the past? It was as if they thought it would be unmanly to cry over all their losses in Vermont. They pooled their assets and hustled in relays till they clinched the deal for the werewolf picture. But they kept their distance otherwise. Max wasn’t part of the magic circle.
It may have been just a fluke of luck, but overnight they were launched. Suddenly, Max and Jasper had no further need for each other. By the time they started granting interviews, they’d each come up with a separate yarn to explain their arrival at the top. By Jasper’s account, he and his trusty pals hit Hollywood like sailors on a shore leave. And because they stuck together, all for one and one for all, they won their way to their wildest dreams. Maxim Brearley—scion of a humidification engineer in Tulsa—let it be thought that he grew up riding after foxes. Max had a thing for gentry. Once he got rich, he lived with a checklist, building sets to wander through.
“I know that part,” said Vivien, as if to cut Greg off. She stood up abruptly and p
ut a few feet between them. She’d always known that Max was just a pocketbook aristocrat. He’d made himself up out of whole cloth. Yet somehow, that was the very thing she found redeeming. Like Jasper, he shaped the world as he went.
“Go on to Harry Dawes,” she said.
“Ah well,” replied Greg, in a voice that was weary of ambiguities, “that was just bad timing. He hitched a ride down Sunset, and he got picked up by a guy who was out to cast a part. He needed a kid who was new in town.” He shrugged at the rigs of fate. “There’s thousands of them out there. They all get screwed, before they’re through.”
It seemed she had nothing to add. She set off down the garden as if she could no longer abide these games of chance. Or perhaps she saw no need to linger at a death scene that was done with. However it was, Greg had to scramble to catch up. As he fell into step, he could tell she was suffering no excess of sentiment. Anger, perhaps, but nothing more. She turned and blurted out, as if to let him know how hard the road she traveled was:
“It’s not enough.”
“What do you want?”
“Why would he want to kill Carl?” she demanded. This was a mere for-instance. She had a hundred more.
“Well, as it turns out,” he said, “that’s your fault.”
One almost would have thought he meant to make her flinch. To see if the harder edge was real.
“Artie and Carl would have dropped it,” he said. “Jasper knew what was coming, didn’t he? He could have shot first. When Max dropped by with his hitchhiker friend, he should never have asked them in. A duel’s a duel—you let the enemy pour the wine, you better plan on a long night’s sleep.”
She started walking again, but not so fast as to shut him out. She let him keep pace on the mossy path, as she willed herself to be satisfied. She had no other option. At the canyon end of the garden, they reached the moon gate. They waited a moment more before going on. The intricate lattice of the double door glimmered like a hieroglyph. Flanked by a night-bloom jasmine left and right, it stood like a final boundary, with the bottomless well of the night beyond.
“Now, it happens I don’t agree,” said Greg. “You got an innocent victim here—Harry Dawes. The laws of the duel no longer apply.”
Men’s rules, she thought. Women did not play games like this. Yet she understood, deep down, that Jasper must have done the thing that Max believed him guilty of. Ten winters ago, in the teeth of a northeast wind, Jasper went too far. Whatever it was—a sliver of greed, a single word—it had cankered inside him like a crime. There was never a question of his getting off free. In the end, he must have listened for Max’s step on the stair behind.
She knew all this without ever asking. Jasper had lived with a sin in his blood, like a taint of tropical fever that made him weak from time to time. Out of focus and half asleep, as if he were under water. Vivien felt it the day she met him. He gave you the sense that he longed to beg your pardon—to break away from the moment at hand and hurry back to something still unfinished. It lived in a windowless room, where he never let anyone in.
“Why me?” she asked, in a neutral tone. “What did I do?”
“You went and pinned the murder on him,” Greg replied. Then he rattled the next part off like moves on a chessboard. “Carl goes straight to Max, of course. And Max sees right away how to lock up his alibi. If Carl should die by his own hand, it only goes to prove the widow Cokes’s case.”
At “widow,” he pointed a finger at her. He held it steady and cocked his thumb.
“Bang,” he said. “Carl’s dead.”
“What are they doing down there?” she asked.
“In the screening room? Well, I guess you could call it murder one.”
“But how?”
“Okay—it’s got to look like a heart attack, right?” This part wasn’t as hard as he expected, not at all. Just tell it step by step, he thought. “First, Artie saps him and knocks him out. There’ll be a bruise, but you can’t have everything. Artie says he can make it look like he cracked his head when he fell. Then a pillow across his face—like this—and you press down hard. Six minutes, I think we decided. A simple asphyxiation. Nothing grand.”
She put a hand up to the gate, lifted the dolphin latch, and pushed back half the moon. She stepped over the foot-high threshold, holding the door as she went, so he could follow. As he came out onto the wilder slope, he was shocked by the whip of the wind, blowing ten miles in from the sea like the motive force of another story. The garden hedge had kept the weather moderate and still.
But what was more than that, there was nothing between them, all of a sudden. He found they had to walk single file as she set off up the zigzag path. So he had no clue what she thought of it all. It wouldn’t do her a bit of good to protest the act itself. Six minutes was so far gone as to be the distant past. Maxim Brearley was over with. Greg braced himself for a cry of disapproval, even so. In the last few weeks, he’d gotten used to Vivien Cokes the humanist, who lived in a cloud of high ideals. She could afford to, after all.
Yet he had to give her this: She appeared to be a more persistent moralist than he. A force like justice, one could argue, wasn’t something done in the dark like a bloody mugging. In theory Greg agreed. But the hunger for revenge was too far gone to settle here for reason. Vivien’s air of civilization was doubtless high as ancient Greece. The lilac dress she wore tonight billowed about her like a dream. When she turned to speak, on the spine of the hill, he expected a dose of principles Euclidean in shape.
“Why?” she accused him fiercely. “Why didn’t you include me?”
The sting of betrayal was in her voice. He saw with a pang of hindsight how it must have seemed. It was all a complete misunderstanding—but so what? There was nobody giving points for good intentions. Not this late in the game.
“But don’t you see,” Greg pleaded, calling through the wind without a word prepared, “we wanted you to be innocent.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said helplessly. Oh, shit, there must be a reason. “I suppose we wanted to do it for you.”
“Well, I won’t be treated like that,” she bellowed angrily, coming close. She beat with the flat of one hand against his chest, like somebody knocking on a door. He didn’t try to duck. The ache was deeper down than all this surface tension. He knew she wasn’t out to pitch him off the mountain.
“Like what?” he shouted, when the last blow landed.
“Like a fucking princess!”
Hollering this like a curse, she turned and strode away. He sprinted along in her wake and tried to backtrack all at once—glad for the chance to storm about, but reeling with a sense of vast miscalculation. He had only tried to protect her from the blood-cold will of the others. She didn’t have any idea what the nicest people were capable of.
But he saw what she meant, that he had no right. It wouldn’t happen again. He’d treat her the same as the rest, if she liked. He stuck close to her heels as they climbed the ridge. For a moment, he seemed about to seize her—as if he would make her stop to hear a proper apology. Except—couldn’t she see that a fortune big as a minor Rothschild’s led to a certain set of assumptions? The cover of every magazine in the free world didn’t pick you up for being the same as everyone else.
It was all well and good to read Thoreau. A man like that was a genuine creature of equals—democratic in all his commerce. Two feet on the ground when he made a deal, and two feet off when he looked at sunsets. But could you really get away with it in the back seat of a Rolls? Where did Vivien ever get the idea she was plain?
By the time they crested the next rise, they were going so fast it was almost a chase. Then all of a sudden she stopped without warning, right in the path. He collided against her and stepped back shaken. When he saw they’d arrived at the grave, a few feet off on the bare hillside, he felt strangely dizzy and turned around. He hadn’t assumed they were going somewhere.
It was more of a grave than ever, in fact, on a
ccount of the limestone slab. Salt-white, shaped in the classic way—an inverted U—it glowed on the brow of the night country. Poignant by virtue of having been fashioned by hand. Three feet high and half as wide, with lettering etched across it. If it hadn’t been set so straight in the earth, if an end had sunken in and pitched it at a tilt, it would have looked as dead and gone as the naked west itself—like a grave in an old churchyard in Yuma. He wondered if she’d ordered it before or since the trip back east. How did she get it up so quick?
“Everyone’s always dying,” Vivien said. Even here, the oddest sort of irony still played about the edges of her voice.
Greg could see that he wasn’t keeping up. The statement he’d struggled to find the words for, about who had excluded whom, was already over and done with. She wasn’t mad at him anymore. Now that they’d taken to roaming the night, the stakes were a good deal higher. This was death itself out here, black-hearted as a thief. It stood in command of the heights as it always had—cold as ice, its eyes the whole horizon.
“But everyone loses people,” Greg retorted. As if to say the whole world understood a thing like this, because they’d been there.
“No—some don’t,” she noted with some dispassion.
Perhaps he had never met up with the type—who wouldn’t allow a living soul within ten feet, so as not to have to risk the ending.
“Can you see what it says?” she asked.
“Not from here,” he said. But he made no move to crouch and have a look, assuming she wanted to say it aloud.
“‘Jasper Cokes,’” she recited dryly, “‘Cut down in his 33rd year.’ The rest’s a quote, but you have to see it written.”
She realized then—with an eye on the wind that riffled the chaparral, the piercing curves of the quiet hills against the ink-dark sky—how the world was perfect in its way. The Buddhist said that happiness was nothing. What you felt was the feel of absence: The engine of human suffering stopped to catch its breath sometimes.
What Vivien felt was nothing so precarious as that. The silence had fallen at last in the upstairs rooms of the clamorous heart. The killer was killed. The curse was off. The hundred different pains that kept a body down—tics, chills, toothache, twinges, gouges, strain—seemed to have vanished on the spot.
