Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  Finally the pressure relaxed and they were pushed upward, flung ahead, speed increasing as they swung toward the hillside. Challis couldn’t estimate air speed, but the tops of the fir trees were flickering darkly thirty feet below as they grabbed for enough height to keep them alive. It took forever. Where, where was the top of the mountain? At the next glance the treetops seemed closer, and then he heard a cry from the cockpit: “We ain’t gonna make it, Charlie … we ain’t gonna make it.”

  The last thing he saw before turning himself into a huddled ball wedged as tightly as possible between the seats was the guard’s gray face, turned toward him, mouth open in a soundless scream, eyes round like black pinpoints of terror.

  The sound of the engines cut out.

  The weight of the plane whisked them through the first few treetops, but in a matter of three or four seconds they began plowing into heavy branchwork and thicker trunks, and the wings flickered away like large silver birds and the fuselage tipped sideways, seemed to roll glidingly down the dense green boughs slowly, bouncing almost softly. Perhaps the feeling of gentleness was entirely in Challis’ head: the evidence, which included the decapitation of the leathery-skinned pilot by the sheared glass of the windshield, the breaking of the copilot’s neck, the fatal concussing of the guard, who bounced around the cabin’s interior like a puppet whose master was suffering a conniption fit, and the strangulation of the doped prisoner, who somehow slid down through his seat belt until it caught him under the chin and wrung his neck—the evidence gave no indication of gentleness.

  When the rolling had stopped, Challis was cramped, upside down, and his own blood was running out of his nose. One leg had been bent unnaturally against the metal seat back, his trouser leg was torn, there was blood smeared across his kneecap, and the knuckles of both hands were scraped raw against metal which might otherwise have done even more damage to his head. Without really considering what had just happened, he used all his strength to lever himself out of the upside-down awkwardness. He saw the corpses of the guard and the other prisoner, smelled the flight fuel, which was undoubtedly leaking from ruptured lines, and reached out to steady himself. He missed whatever he had been reaching for and fell, lightheaded and in shock, forward onto what had been the ceiling of the cabin and was now the floor. Face to face with the strangled prisoner, whose tongue and eyeballs were ruptured and bleeding and protruding, he fainted.

  2

  GOLDIE ROTH HAD NEVER REALLY grown up, which was both good and bad. Good, because she remembered her childhood in remarkably acute detail, due in large part, Challis had always presumed, to the fact that she had never entirely left it. She remembered the parties at which her famous mother and powerful father had presided, with an eye and ear for literal recall which is common among the young. For instance, her grandfather, Solomon Roth, came more fully to life in her wicked little recollections than he ever quite seemed in real life; and she had a sure hand at literary caricature when it came to describing Solomon Roth’s famous employees.

  When she finally put together a novel—which was widely held to be a public exorcising of her own private demons—it dealt with her coming of age at “Bella Donna,” the unfortunate name of the Bel Air mansion where they all lived and which was destroyed in a famous fire. It was not exactly a loving portrait of those years, and one rather good review was headlined, “Slow Poison by Tincture of Bella Donna.” It sold very well on the West Coast and appeared fleetingly on The New York Times’s best-seller list. The paperback edition eventually brought in nearly half a million dollars, and that was as far as her literary career went. But she was finally independent of the family—that is, her father, Aaron Roth—which was just as well, because her welcome in Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and the other prominent outposts of the film community, while never very warm, was effectively worn out. A lot of people were put out about what she had written, particularly those individuals making appearances in the novel’s pages under funny names but always with the right initials. Those most irritated were sometimes heard to gloat that Goldie never appeared at the Bel Air Country Club following the book’s publication, a minor triumph, however, since she had never appeared there before the book’s publication, either. But, still, she was a kind of outcast in her own country. She was no longer welcome at many private homes where she had once been a regular decoration, and for a time Seraglio, the new postfire mansion, was off-limits, as well. Solomon Roth had fought to rescind her banishment and, as always, had finally prevailed. But it had all been quite an ordeal, though vastly amusing to Goldie, who was in her mid-twenties and really didn’t give a shit.

  So maybe it wasn’t good that she remembered everything. It depended on your point of view, which, Challis reasoned, made it just like everything else in life. From his point of view, at least when he first met her, it was good. Her unfettered lifestyle, her irreverence and wit—however childish and rude—at the expense of the show-business Establishment turned him on: he was introduced to her at Aaron and Kay’s annual Fourth of July holocaust shortly before the storm accompanying publication broke. He had won his Oscar a couple of years before for a film Aaron Roth had personally produced. When he tore himself away from his typewriter on the Fourth of July, he was working on an adaptation of Kipling’s The Light That Failed, for which Aaron and Maximus were paying him $250,000. It was never produced but he got into Goldie’s pants that first night, a turn of events which reinforced his basic belief that life is composed of a little of this and a little of that.

  In addition to her natural sense of the absurd and a wonderfully dirty mouth, there was something else very good about Goldie—the way she looked. Challis was reminiscent in those days of a charming character from a George Axelrod comedy, vaguely mid-thirtyish, polished loafers and baggy cashmere sweaters, a tendency to drink too much and to be rather funny when he did; Goldie was in the full flush of her yellow-and-brown California-girl look then, and it hadn’t begun to go stale and come apart like aging hollandaise, the way that particularly delectable look so frequently, so horribly did. Seeing her for the first time, coming off the tennis court with her legs and arms and hair all honey-colored and her mouth jutting in a pout that was going to become awfully familiar, he was a dead duck. It was her manner, too: childish, spoiled, capricious, given an attractive texture by extremes of enthusiasm, high spirits, and anger. You didn’t fall in love with a creature like Goldie Roth. You wanted her as a trophy. There was one immutable truth about the prototype; it was the key to their allure, the cause of their undoing, and it never seemed to change: they liked being trophies. What they wanted was a man feeling lucky and proud to have somehow reached the pinnacle and gotten one of these rare and wonderful and doomed birds of passage for himself. But when the trophy developed a patch of tarnish here and some wine-and-cigarette breath there, when every six months or so brought a deposit of cellulite or some goddamn thing that required hugely expensive treatments by the latest European seer, when suddenly the trophy sat awhile on the shelf … why, then they wondered what it was about them that had become so unlovable. They forgot that they had defined the rules. The process never seemed to change. Challis had seen it happen a hundred times among people he knew. But watching this particular girl, with all the unimaginable tarnish and rust and nastiness just out of sight over the Beverly Hills, all Challis knew was that this blond, tan, tennis-playing trophy was exactly the trophy he’d been looking for.

  Later, when they had been married awhile, he looked up from his typewriter and saw her lying naked in the sun on the deck of their beach house. She had white plastic globes where her eyes should have been and her belly kept tensing, then relaxing, tensing, relaxing. She was doing vaginal isometrics, which were all the rage that year, or so she informed him, and that was when it was getting on toward the bad part. Staying a child was becoming very hard work and the returns were diminishing. It wasn’t enough for her that she looked fine, tawny, lean: she knew by then that being a child of nature and impulse was wearis
ome, for Challis, for herself, for anybody who knew her. Yet she was lost looking for what role she was going to play next, now that she was over thirty.

  Challis sipped his gin and tonic, listened to the crashing surf, squinted at the sunshine hitting the Malibu stretch of ocean and glaring nervously off a million waves and eddies. You could go blind watching the sunlight on the water, reflecting like an infinity of mirrors. Somebody famous ran past on the beach and waved at him, a sheepdog floundering happily behind, getting his feet wet in the surf. Goldie was listening to a rock radio station, her naked stomach and fingers jerking to the beat. At one time, a time he could barely remember, he’d have gone crazy at the sight of that expanse of brown flesh and curly hair. Beside her on the wooden deck a can of diet soda lay on its side where she’d knocked it over, the liquid staining the towel. He had a habit of looking at such scenes, any scenes really, and thinking about where the camera should be placed. Sometimes it made him angry because it removed him from reality; other times it kept him from cracking up.

  Challis looked at his typewriter and the half-filled sheet of yellow foolscap. He looked at the television set, where the Dodgers were beating the Cardinals and Vin Scully was quoting Aeschylus and Euripides. His glass of gin and tonic—the sixth in this series, by actual count—was sweating like a fat umpire in the St. Louis sun. Goldie turned over, lay on her belly, spread her legs, and began flexing her ass. Challis frowned. He wondered who was sleeping with her these days. One of his friends? Maybe somebody right here in the Colony … it would be a nice humiliating touch at parties, and she rather liked humiliating touches. The thing was, did he care anymore? He didn’t think so. And he wouldn’t care until the last liquor store had sold its last bottle of gin, to paraphrase Margo Channing à la Joe Mankiewicz. And the next thing was, so far as he was concerned, what exactly did he care about anymore?

  He stared at the Oscar, which was at the moment using its great marble base to hold down a ratty, slowly growing, marked-up stack of yellow paper.

  “Well,” he said to the Oscar. “What?”

  Oscar didn’t give a fig, as they used to say in olden days when Cornell Wilde and Tony Curtis and Donald Crisp had kept the surly barons in order.

  Five years further on, the body of Goldie was at his feet. She wore a heavy sweater with a thick rolled turtleneck. No pants. A tank watch with the sapphire on the winding stem: was he crazy? Why else catalog these details while his wife cashed in her chips, bought the farm, shuffled off this—ah, let’s see, on the floor a Vuitton address book swept off the desk as she had clawed the air, grabbed at the last strands of life. All the Rodeo Drive loot scattered across the remains of poor, bitchy old Goldie. … The honey-streaked hair with undiminished thickness and sheen and heft: blood caked; her skull battered in, a fury of hatred and frustration; and the Oscar smeared with her blood and hair. … The statuette replaced on the desk, gazing down sightlessly at the murdered woman. A trophy used to kill another trophy.

  Challis saw the flash of the Oscar reflecting the firelight, slicing through the air again and again as it must have done, Goldie going down, the base of the statuette smashing through the skull’s shell, spraying blood and the brains, pounding bits of bone into the slippery gray matter. He saw it, he heard the awful wet sound, and he woke up screaming. …

  He opened his eyes, winced as a coughing fit racked his stiff, snow-covered body. Somehow he’d gotten out of the wreckage. Unlike the movies, there had been no fire, no exploding fuel tanks, despite the odor he recognized, and he was alive, in one piece. He lay in the mud and snow, the afternoon sky effectively blotted out by the dark trees and mist. He looked at his watch. Only an hour before, he’d been standing in the hangar, waiting.

  Moving gingerly, he got up and walked back to the battered fuselage, which had acquired the sad look of a broken toy under a gigantic Christmas tree. He looked in past the broken glass of the windshield. Snow had blown in. The two bodies were white with it. He wasn’t quite sure of what he was seeing, then realized he was staring into the raw stump where the pilot’s head had been. Gagging, he staggered back, slipped in the icy mud, and fell down. He shook his head, clearing the image away. A clump of wet, heavy snow fell off the boughs above him, slid down, and glanced off his shoulder. He stood up, stumbled away into the trees.

  He woke up again lying against a tree trunk. The cold was eating at him. He was so stiff that he assumed for a moment that he was freezing. His leg pained him, and his head, where it had struck the side window glass, was tender to the touch, throbbed mightily. The sky was finally visible, a dirty late-afternoon gray with snow blowing steadily from every direction at once. He wondered, almost objectively, how he was going to keep from freezing to death during the night. Leaning back against the tree, he swept his eyes out across the valley. The snow obscured details, but he saw far below him the ribbon of black road, which seemed flat from his perspective but which was in fact working its way up the mountainside. Nothing moved anywhere in his field of vision, nothing but the ceaseless shifting snow. He closed his eyes, but what he saw frightened him: the Oscar, gleaming brightly, flashing through the air, chopping again and again, growing a dripping coat of blood on its base. …

  He came to again. Darkness was lowering across the valley like the final curtain on a bad play, and he knew he was going to die. He was alone on the side of the mountain and the snow was deepening all around him. When he opened his mouth to take a deep breath, he heard his snow-caked beard crack like breaking glass. His brain was still ticking over … Warren Beatty dying in the snow at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Challis decided he was going to die wishing he’d written a movie that fine. Christ, he knew it was the end for sure—he heard voices. High, piping voices getting closer, the heavenly choir. So, this was it, they came piping and they led you away, just like Frank Capra had always sort of hinted they would. …

  ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

  All mimsy were the borogroves,

  And the momeraths outgrabe …

  The voices were coming closer. Challis smiled, felt his beard crack again. The subconscious was such a peculiar place, he mused quite calmly. He would never have guessed that his dying hallucination would have been of “Jabberwocky.” My God, his life could have flashed before his eyes, but instead, from a burying place deep in the heaped-over mounds of childhood, the Lewis Carroll poem had worked its way back to the surface. Then, much to his own surprise, he began to wonder, when would the processional of his life, the long march past, the final review, begin? Come to think of it, he’d always counted on that final view of who and what he’d been, the last chance to wave a cheery farewell to the young man, and before that the boy that he’d once been. As the sound of the voices came closer, he decided that the least he could do was stand up and meet his fate while foursquare, a beamish boy on his own two feet. Well, he could have used a drink, but … He slid up the tree trunk, the snow drifting off his shoulders. His eyelashes were stuck together with snow and his mustache was frozen solid like a brush made of ice, weighing ten pounds. Spooky business, dying, but his spirits had actually lightened a good deal. He was beginning to feel rather silly. And he began walking toward the piping, chanting voices. Which was when he stepped over the edge of a small cliff and tumbled through the bracken and snow and brambles onto a frozen, muddy pathway edging narrowly along the mountainside.

  Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  The Jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  By God, they were getting closer still. He peered out from inside his head, through the bars of his eyelashes. He rubbed at the snot dripping from his nose, laughed, and felt his beard crack again. Ice cut into his face, and he stopped laughing. He stood up slowly, feeling a sharp pain in his side. His leg hurt and his head hurt. As long as he had the symptoms, he wished he were drunk. When was all the hurting going to stop?

  Beware the Jubjub bird and shun

  The frumious
Bandersnatch!

  He took a few faltering steps and caught his breath.

  Good Lord, but they were small!

  Somehow—aside from all that dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin bullshit—he’d always assumed that angels were, well, big. Majestic, magnificent, terrific wingspread and all … of course, Capra had seen them as sort of cuddly old men, chummy and good-natured and hesitant. Anyway, it didn’t matter, because that had been the movies and this was something else and he’d have to break that habit—this was real life, dying and angel visitation, hallucinatory or not. But they were so small, these funny looking little creatures, brightly colored, puffy parkas where there should have been those long creamy robes, and they weren’t flying or floating … they were staggering along and looking down at the path, and the lead angel couldn’t have been more than four feet high!

  Challis drew himself up to his full six feet and began to say something. “Hey there!”

  The first angel’s eyes widened. The mouth fell open. Snow blew thickly between Challis and the angel.

  “Bandersnatch!” the angel shrieked. “The Bandersnatch!” Then he turned tail and ran smack into the following angels.

  Challis scowled and fell face forward in the mud and snow, dead to the world and feeling no pain.

  3

  CHALLIS HAD TAKEN A SOMEWHAT earlier flight than he’d planned. Being summoned to an Australian location to doctor somebody else’s screenplay had taken its toll both physically and mentally. For a week he’d tried to put some life into the stoic, stalwart characters drawn from a wooden best-selling novel: he’d given them verbal habits, physical twitches, taken a tuck here and there, restructured the second half of the story. He turned a solemn, boring sermon into a rather base caricature and picked up fifty thousand in the process. Somebody from the studio had suggested that he might want screen credit. A bad joke? No, the man had been well-intentioned, and Challis had politely declined. The director, a mature hell-raiser of seventy, had insisted on getting drunk every night in Challis’ hotel room. “Challis,” he kept saying, “they don’t understand me, they never have. First, I was, I still am, a writer … don’t ask me how I got into the goddamn director’s chair—I don’t know. Any asshole from a sheep station in the outback can direct a picture. But they’ve forgotten I’m a writer. Now, let me tell you how this piece of shit should play, never forgetting we’ve got a couple of talking bogies for actors.” The week had taken a considerable toll, all right, and Challis had stopped off in Fiji for a couple of days to dry out. But he’d wanted to get home. He’d wanted to see Goldie, and he’d wanted to be sober.