“Duh? How else would they throw the roses?”
She cants her head up and cuts those green eyes toward mine. “You’ve never been in a theater, have you?”
“A drive-in. And, ah—”
She rolls back to flat. “We’ll let you usher, work security. In no time at all, you’ll be crew, then who knows, a bit part, the chorus …”
“Don’t I own part of the theater?”
“Yes.” She pats at my hand, avoiding the pistol. “But where we’re headed, it’s talent and effort only. No plastic surgeons or American Idol auditions. The Lost Boys Theater Company is the province of hopes and dreams, not crocodiles.”
“Thespians … I’ll be next door at the Seven Spanish Angels. Build three or four apartments; play the blues with the old guys rap doesn’t care about. You can come over after the show.”
Arleen turns all the way over, mouth tight against the pain, and pulls herself up to my face. She flutters eyes that would stop traffic in Ireland, then kisses me just once. “I’d whore to keep you in microphones.” She kisses me again, this time with her hands in my hair. “We’ll build your bar first. I’ll train the waitresses.”
“Who trains the owner?”
“Is he handsome? Does he have a really big thing for me?”
I stare, soaking it in for as long as I can. “Yeah, he does. Always has.”
She smiles like she has for twenty-nine years on those nights I’d let it go that far, like Jenny did in Forrest Gump when she finally came home for good.
Car engine. We both roll off. I stand with my pistol. Arleen steps back. The headlights cut; it’s a pickup truck, old but sturdy. Two men exit, tanned or brown, sweat-stained, rancher hats and T-shirts. They see my gun and me, but not Arleen. The drivers says, “Hola,” then continues in Spanish.
“English. This is America.”
The driver blinks, confused, then looks across the fender to the other man. He chins at me, asking, “Roberto Vargas Ruiz?”
My mother’s family name is Ruiz. I nod, hand tightening on the Glock Hahn gave me. “You are?”
In Spanish he says, “Not a man who wishes to be insulted.”
He has workingman’s hands and today is a workday. I ask his name. “Cómo se llama?”
“Renaldo Ruiz Peña.” In Spanish he adds, “We flew a thousand kilometers from Guadalajara, then drove three hundred from Ciudad Acuña to be here. To do your mother’s memory this favor.”
I belt the Glock and offer my hand. In Spanish I say, “My apologies, señor. Thank you for coming. And thank you for honoring my mother.”
He nods. “The family knew your brother, but not you. We understand being away from us is your choosing.” He shakes my hand anyway. His passenger steps around the fender and does the same. The driver says, “We must go, the sun rises early for the farmers and the border patrol.” He points west in the darkness.
“My Spanish isn’t so good. Can we speak English?”
He nods.
“Only one of us is going. Take her to Villamar like we agreed, okay?”
He glances past me.
“Get her settled, talk to the pilots at Concepción de Buenos Aires, you go with her when she flies to—”
A hand jerks my shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere alone.”
Arleen glares. I wince at Renaldo Ruiz Peña. “Con permiso, señor.” Arleen follows me twenty feet back under the lean-to roof. She stops at the two suitcases, shoulders back. “Doesn’t matter what you know that I don’t, you and I are driving, walking, or swimming across that border. You’re the first man I’ve ever slept with because I wanted to. Think about that. I was just happy for five whole hours. I’m not ready to quit and neither are you.”
I show her the phone.
“I knew it was Moens. I don’t care what she said, promised, or threatened. To hell with the Korean mafia, the Japanese—”
“It’s not Moens, it’s the U.S. attorney. If I surrender, Merica leaves 1269 and … everyone else out of her ‘terrorism’ run for governor.”
“No.” Arleen shakes her head. “You’re not going back. We’ll find another way. We have money; we’ll buy your friends a way out. They can come live with us on our island, in Cuba, South Africa, wherever.”
“I fit too well. My friends are just accomplices.”
“Señor Vargas?”
I hold up my hand again. “Un momento, señor.”
Arleen shifts so she’s between Renaldo Ruiz Peña and me. “No, Bobby. No way. You’re not going.”
I try to hug her; she shoves me back. “No.”
“Jason and Buff are my family. If I’d let them hang, then I’d let you hang.” Gray light hints on the distant horizon. “You’ve seen an awful lot of promises go bad, and so have I. You’d wonder about me, about us. This way, if I make it back, you’ll never have to wonder. Every night, for the rest of your life, you’ll be safe.” I wait for her agreement. “C’mon. That’s worth the risk, isn’t it?”
“No.” She glares, a lioness rising to protect a cub. “Hundred percent they’ll bury you in some version of Guantánamo Bay for the rest of our lives. This will be it, Bobby—three days, five hours—and a goodbye at the border.” Headshake. “No. Absolutely not.”
I try to clutch her shoulders and she knocks my hands away.
“Arleen, c’mon, you think I want to go back? Where could we go after a U.S. attorney classifies me or you as a terrorist? Our part of the world doesn’t have Pakistan and Afghanistan. The CIA or the FBI will have me, us, in a month. My gang team still gets jammed, everyone loses but the bad guys.”
“It’s not your turn, Bobby. The Brennans and the Vargases have paid enough dues. We get more than three days.”
“Señor Vargas, the sunrise, we must go.”
“Lo siento. Un momento mas.” I turn to Arleen. “Here’s the plan—”
“I know the plan, I listened to you put it together in Iowa and Oklahoma—we get in the truck with these gentlemen. They sneak us across the river, then drive us twelve hundred kilometers south into the Michoacán mountains. From your mother’s hometown we fly private across Mexico’s southern border into Panama where we buy a case of champagne and sunblock, hide in Casco Viejo, sort ourselves out for Africa or some uncharted island paradise, hire a boat to sail there, and live happily ever after.”
“Going back is just an interim stop.”
“Yep. For somebody else.”
“Señor Vargas—”
Arleen grabs me, and walks us toward him. “We’re coming.”
I stop and she spins into my face.
“Do you love me, Bobby? You love the concept of us? Twenty-nine years later we make it out of the Four Corners; we beat the system, the odds, the goddamn horror memories of Eighteenth and Laflin. Tell me you love me, us, the goddamn concept enough to let us win one goddamn time.”
“Will you listen? Stop being a star for one minute?”
Glare.
I touch her shoulder. “Sorry; I didn’t mean that. Listen, okay? All the vials have been recovered, so there’s no current threat. Furukawa and all the politicians they’ve bought over the years don’t want publicity. Chicago wants the Olympics—when all the negotiating is done, Merica wants to be governor, the CIA’s deal with Hahn and her ilk isn’t something Langley wants to talk about, and no one wants me defending myself daily in the media—”
“Double-cross the U.S. attorney, Wall Street, and the biggest fundraisers of both political parties … screw them over and win? That’s the Moens plan?”
“Spin, that’s all. You’re in the movies. Think Taxi Driver—the guy’s a nutcase who circumstance casts as the hero instead of the presidential assassin he is. This spin’s no different, and it saves the Herald if they push it. Moens already has most of our story in the Four Corners for her ‘MONSTER’ exposé, and now she has a worldwide scoop on a second World Trade Center attack that she’ll say you and I stopped. If I come back, Hahn will anonymously help Moens and me if we
don’t name her in my testimony and the articles.”
Arleen steps back, doesn’t want to hear any of it.
“It’s a long shot, but it could work. We win, forever, not just a couple more days till they find us. Neverland, Arleen, where we swing on the porch hammock, not hide in the basement. And I can do it.”
I grab one bag of money and toss it in the truck. Arleen watches. Then I pay my uncle for the trip and promise a substantial bonus when Arleen calls me from Panama. My uncle and I shake hands; he slides in behind the wheel, fires the engine, and his friend jumps in the pickup’s bed.
The passenger door hangs open, me next to it, Arleen Crista Brennan ten feet away. “Arleen, if you don’t go now, our chances are zero.” I chin at the sunrise coming in a few minutes.
Arleen stares for ten long seconds, then shuts her eyes in submission and pushes strawberry blond hair behind her ear. “Bye, Bobby.”
“No. I’ll do this, I will.”
Her shoulders relax, both hands rest limp on her hips.
“I will. I’ll be there.”
Arleen nods small. “I forgot that three days ago I was bleeding to death under a marquee with someone else’s name on it, forgot that when we drove away I quit begging people to want me and my dreams. But I guess I begged so many and for so long it’s hard to stop.” She walks past me and pats my hip as she does, slides into the truck, and closes the door. “Wendy had to leave, had to grow up—that’s the part we never talked about.”
My uncle drops the truck in gear, and that fast, after twenty-nine years, three nights, and five hours, Arleen Crista Brennan is gone.
EPILOGUE
ARLEEN CRISTA BRENNAN
I come here once a year. At exactly this time. And lay the unbound pages on this table. I come here thinking I’ll write the ending to The Four Corners, but I haven’t.
Beyond the iron railing, the sun drops slow into an icy South Atlantic; the harbor’s saltwater air and today’s catch of rock cod drift upland in the wood-fire smoke. Gusts ruffle my hair and the yellowwood trees. A winter gale’s coming, but then there’s always a gale coming at the Cape—took me two winters to get used to wearing sweaters in July, to having the seasons backward. Becoming someone else wasn’t as difficult; except for a few hours five years ago on the Mexican border, I’ve always been someone else.
Thunder rumbles behind Hout Bay’s Constantia Mountains. And who’s to say which plans work out and which don’t? Some plans are fairy tales from the beginning, the only thing they can do is fall apart.
Was being a valued, successful actress a fairy tale? Was for me, is for most of us aspirants, more of a Pentecostal walk through the fire than a career. If you’re still alive after the fire walk, you don’t exit cleansed, just charred; but if you’re willful to a fault, and tough, and lucky to have options other than old photographs and an apron, you find another dream when the actress dream dies, another dream that can save you.
You shoot for happiness instead of bright lights and marquees, however happiness might come. And then when some form of happiness is so close you can actually believe it’s your turn—it crashes at the Mexican border. Then you come here—out of hiding twice a year, stand on this high, seafront patio with two bodyguards from Pretoria, and wait. It’s risky and childish and melodramatic, but it’s what you have, what Norma Desmond had.
Because on any given day—ten thousand miles across that stormy ocean—Bobby Vargas could walk out of a special U.S. military prison and into a federal courtroom that frees him and forces a trial. Political winds change; Japanese campaign contributions fall out of favor. Fear of all things dark stops winning elections, selling NRA memberships, and anointing TV demigods.
If that day comes, and relentless Korean mob bosses magically quit believing we have their $20 million, Bobby Vargas will walk between these empty, windblown tables, Fender guitar case in hand. And I’ll be here. It could happen—he was sitting in the L7 after twenty-nine years. What are the odds of that? Forrest and Jenny found each other in the thousands at the Lincoln Memorial.
For more nights on my pillow than I’d care to admit, I’ve watched Bobby walk across this patio. I blink, not believing it’s finally him—the boy who promised to save me from the Four Corners and did—I run into his arms, his lips on mine, his hands in my hair, the same kind, beautiful hands that drew on my stoop. It’s good, better than what Tennessee Williams could write.
Sometimes it’s the night after, Bobby and I are smiling like little kids, sharing one of these cliff-side two-tops, the candle barricaded from the wind, our hands gripped soft under the table. Just us out here, the whole world our vista. We sip Castle beers that taste sweet like his mouth, talk about Cape Town and Hout Bay while the South Atlantic’s twenty-foot waves crash below us, talk about how our dreams ended up so far away in Africa.
But they are our dreams and we finally have them; that’s how I’ve written it, how J. M. Barrie would’ve written it had he known about Bobby Vargas, Coleen, and me. J. M. would write that Coleen was Wendy, the girl who went back long ago to grow up and show us the way here, then Bobby and I flew and flew and flew till we found each other again, found our Neverland at the far end of the world.
When I cleared customs into Namibia’s Restricted Area, the first thing I bought was the case of champagne and sunblock. Call them a talisman; I was angry and hurt and bought them anyway. Both are stored upstairs in the small apartment I keep over the bar. The Seven Spanish Angels. A handsome Afrikaner runs it for me, a rugged gentleman I shared a bed with briefly last year, before he and I realized that my heart and head were elsewhere, or gone altogether. I keep Tharien Thompson’s photo on the wall as well; a rave review in the Cape Times for her performance in Streetcar. Like Julie McCoy’s famous faces and their photos in the L7, Tharien stumbled into the Seven Spanish Angels once and signed hers. They love her here.
Watch check. Low clouds top the mountain and spill toward the bay. Might want to go inside and tell the staff I’m in town. With the time difference, in three minutes it will be five years since I got in that dusty pickup with Bobby’s extended family. That part of the plan worked—not perfect, and not without a few scary moments, but it worked. Made me think hard about family, why some people have it and many don’t. Other than Coleen, the families I built were wastelands. Bobby has two sets, neither one a wasteland—the Mexicans who saved me, and the gang cops and city he saved. Some people are like that; they look for the light until it finds them.
I wonder if there’s light in Bobby’s cell, what it’s like to be a hero, the price you pay when the crimes of a brother can’t go unrepented. I didn’t know it then, but I do now—Bobby went back to save me, to buy the Brennan sisters a pass at a life we’d never had. Just like he promised he would.
My fingertips trace the play I’ve written—we’ve written, using my hand.
An Alfa sedan passes slower than it should and I reset the SIG Sauer under my jacket. The Korean mafia is a world organization with a strong element in Nigeria and South Africa, but I had connections here via the ex-military couple who kept me at the L.A. youth home. All alone in Panama, they seemed like my best option—hell, my only option. Carel Roos of CTC Security eyes the Alpha, hand inside his jacket. Carel and one of his Afrikaners travel with me when I come down here through Port Nolloth from the Restricted Area. Out in the open I’m a much easier target. I’ve heard Bobby and I are both worth mid-six digits, but it has to be alive.
Thunder rumbles closer behind me, one of the daily storms that batter the end of the African continent. More than anything, I wanted Bobby and I and Coleen to win one time. I wanted to deserve the light, wanted to hold hands with it, with a man who wasn’t my father or a director or a casting agent. Just a man who loved me, a boy in a window whose promise that we would fly away kept me alive through a lifetime of dark.
Carel Roos nods not to worry about the Alfa, then steps back to his spot on the stairway wall. His shoulders flatten against the cut granite,
as does the sole of one shoe. He turns to the Seven Spanish Angels’ arched front door and a black girl exiting toward me. Stephanie smiles at him, then hands me an envelope. “From America.” She points inside at the bartender opening up. “Étienne thinks it might be for you.”
The envelope’s addressed to Blanche DuBois, c/o the Seven Spanish Angels Bar, Hout Bay, South Africa; then the postmark—Michoacán, Villamar, Mexico. The Ruiz-Peñas know the Seven Spanish Angels and the name Blanche DuBois should there ever be a reason … I check Carel, then Chapman’s Peak Drive, heart adding beats, fear of contact, the price on my head. I draw the SIG Sauer. Carel stiffens, eyes on me, the patio, the road. He draws his pistol, sends his man back inside the bar, then up into the apartment.
Nothing. No Korean kidnap team.
Exhale. Swallow. Bobby Vargas is dead: that’s what is inside this envelope.
I belt my pistol and open the envelope, all the emotion I thought was dead rushing at me. Inside is a newspaper clipping from the Chicago Herald dated six weeks ago and nothing else. The clipping recounts the successful business dealings of Furukawa Industries and its CEO, Dr. Hitoshi Ota. The last paragraph mentions a Chicago ex-policeman, Roberto “Bobby” Vargas. Concern has been expressed by a spokesman for Furukawa because the terrorism charges against Bobby Vargas have been dropped, and pending a trial for the murder of Danny Vacco, Bobby Vargas has been released but did not appear at his pretrial hearing.
Wind flutters the clipping; I grab it back before I lose it to the South Atlantic. On the back is an outline … a heart, like the chalk ones we drew on my stoop. Inside the heart, tiny letters read: Forrest & Jenny.
Stephanie says, “Hand delivered,” and points across the road.
DEDICATION
SIMON LIPSKAR–JASON KAUFMAN
Publishing is a tough business, not densely populated by individuals on whom it pays to rely, especially if you intend to say what you mean and cash a second check. Simon Lipskar has stood with me through one fire after another and never done anything other than exactly what he said. This novel is at Doubleday, the top of the mountain, for one reason: Simon Lipskar. The reason it stayed there is Jason Kaufman.
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