FSF, August-September 2009

by Spilogale, Inc

  "Take a card,” Phil added, flipping one across the table. “While we talk, we better look busy."

  "Hit me,” said JJ, without glancing at the seven-spot. “Sounds like you really got to know her, she told you all that. Hit me again."

  "That was after I begun to poke her. We met over this exact table and I seen right away she was too much woman for a needle-dick like old man Rapp. Well, you know how some women babble when you screw ‘em."

  As a matter of fact, JJ didn't. But he did know cards—front and back. “Hit me,” he said again and again until he had seven-six-trey-deuce. “One more time."

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah.” Phil hit him with another deuce.

  "Son of a bitch,” he said with dawning respect. “Five Card Charlie. If we was playin', you'da won."

  "Ah do it almost every time,” said JJ. “That's why they banned me. Look, Phil, there's no percentage for me turning you in. But since Ah can't gamble no more, Ah need the money. So you figure out a way to get it, every damn penny, or you in deep shitsky, son."

  He slid off the stool, thinking, That'll make the bastard sweat. Hickey was still among the missing, so JJ wandered outside and stood on the deck where he could watch the gangway, just in case Phil tried to run for it. In the parking lot he could see the rent-a-cop sitting on a folding chair, asleep in the shadow of a big SUV. He was wondering whether to go and wake him up, when a soft voice spoke in his ear.

  "We gonna walk,” said Phil, “around the deck to the other side. When we get there, you gonna gimme that ring."

  JJ did not need ESP to know the nature of the hard object jabbing his ribs. “You can't shoot me out here in public,” he protested as they moved to the starboard side of the Shore-Win. “Somebody'll hear you."

  "A gambler wouldn't hear nothing if I shot the guys both sides of him,” Phil said. “That's how they are. And the house staff, they all watching the players and each other. Now gimme the goddamn ring. I'm on break, so I don't have all day."

  JJ twisted the ring, pretending it was tight on his finger. He was trying to read Phil's mind, trying to find out whether the dealer actually would kill him right out here in the sight of God and everybody. What he picked up was only the threatening phrase crab cage.

  He looked for help and found none. The lake stretched away, glimmering, to a leaden horizon. He wished he'd waited for Hickey. He wished he'd recognized that Phil had nothing to lose by killing him. He wished he'd gone to see the country when he had the chance. Squinching his eyes shut, JJ pulled off the ring, ready to throw it into shallow water where the FBI might be able to find it again. He knew Phil would shoot him if he did, but JJ had a strong feeling that for him, death was—so to speak—in the cards anyway.

  Then he heard a dull sound, like whump! The dealer staggered, sagged against him, slipped to the deck. The gun clattered on the boards. JJ took an enormous breath. Hickey at last! The Federal Bureau of Investigation! The U.S. Cavalry! Weak with relief, he spun around.

  Sarah Rapp was standing there beside an aged black man—leather face, blue chauffeur's uniform, billed cap over cottony hair—who was holding a tire iron and gazing down at the man sprawled on the deck.

  "See how you like having a concussion, sucker,” said William Wood.

  * * * *

  After handing Phil and the ring over to Hickey, JJ and his two saviors rode back to Bougalou in the Rapps’ big new SUV, headed for Sheriff Chew's office to make formal statements. Sarah revealed they'd encounter the bigamist Marsha there, because she was under arrest.

  "How'd you know she was in on it?” asked JJ. “And hey, how'd you find me?"

  "The same way you found me,” replied Sarah. “I never liked Marsha. You know how girls usually are about stepmothers, especially stepmothers with big bazooms. And when I was lying in that box thinking, suddenly it came to me that she was back of it all. I've always had a little ESP, not like yours, but there in the dark it started really developing because that was the only way I could reach the outside world. Today I found Marsha in her walk-in closet packing her bags, and I knew right off she was just about to run. So I locked her in and called the sheriff and told him to come and arrest her."

  "And he did what you told him to?"

  "He always does what the Rapps tell him to,” Sarah answered with cool self-assurance. “Marsha was screaming and banging on the closet door, so I lied and said I'd let her out if she told me who the man with the duck feet was, and she said he was a blackjack dealer at the Shore-Win. Suddenly I had this feeling that you were walking right into terrible danger from the same man, so I left her in the closet still screaming and called William and we took off without waiting for the law. You know, Mr. JJ, back when you saved my life, I fell in love with you."

  "You did?"

  "It's the most tremendous experience of my life, up to now, anyway. Tell me, how old are you?"

  He looked uneasily at the Lolita seated beside him. Her dark eyes were luminous, intense, and he had no difficulty at all in seeing the steely willfulness that lay behind them. He mumbled, “Twenty-four."

  "We won't be able to marry for a while,” she said thoughtfully. “But in six years I'll be eighteen and you'll be, um, thirty. That's really old. But it's okay, I like older men. So we'll get married then, and have a bunch of children."

  JJ croaked, “Children??"

  "It's our duty to the gene pool,” Sarah informed him. “I got the idea from the Sci Fi Channel. I mean, how many people can there be with a gift like ours? I think it'll be terribly interesting to breed a super race, don't you?"

  "Uh—"

  "Daddy won't like it, of course,” she went on, musing. “He'll want me to marry some dreary old lawyer or doctor or something. But if he makes trouble I'll just remind him how he married Marsha off the Internet for her big bazoom and almost got me killed. That ought to shut him up."

  Solemnly she took JJ's hand and held it with both of hers. “I could marry at sixteen with Daddy's permission, but I don't think we ought to rush into things, do you? I'll probably be quite silly then, because of all the hormones, and you're too mature to like that. Anyway, I want to have some sexual experience before I marry, and I think boys my own age will be fine for learning the ropes. Virginity is so silly, don't you think? I mean, once you're nubile."

  Even through his shock, JJ heard William chuckle, up in the driver's seat. Apparently Sarah's managing ways were an old story to him. For the rest of the journey they rode in silence, with Sarah's firm, strong young hands holding JJ's limp one.

  At the sheriff's office, a final surprise awaited them. Glowering like a giant enraged Foo Dog, Sheriff Russell Chew informed them that Marsha had escaped. “Ah sent that ass—that butt—'scuse me, Miss Rapp. Ah sent Wade Garmish to pick her up, and near as Ah can figure, she conned him into runnin’ off with her instead."

  "Interpol will track them down,” promised Hickey, bustling in. His prisoner was safely in the grip of several of his larger colleagues, ready to face both local and federal charges whenever he woke up from the bashing William had given him.

  "You feds can have first crack at them kidnappers,” growled Big Russ, “just so's Ah git Wade all to myself. There's a little thing they used to do in China Ah want to try on him. It's kind of like waterboarding, only slower, and it hurts more."

  Out in the parking lot, among the police cruisers, Sarah told JJ au revoir. William had the SUV purring and sat at the wheel, waiting for her.

  "Good-bye for now, JJ,” she said, skipping the mister for the first time and giving him a chaste peck on the cheek. “I have to go to my ballet class. I'm supposed to get up en pointe today, and it's hard but terribly exciting. Just remember our plans for the future, and don't go wasting yourself on other women in the meantime. I wouldn't like that a bit."

  When they'd gone, JJ stood looking after them for a long, long time. Wait six years for a bossy pre-teen to grow up, so he could spend the rest of his life begetting and rearing paranormal children?
In a daze he set off walking toward the Ox-Bow Trailer Park. Then he began to run.

  * * * *

  Two weeks later, JJ sat down in his dust-caked Winnebago in a mobile-home park outside Flagstaff, Arizona, to write a note to Sarah. It worried him that he'd left without saying good-bye, and he didn't want her to grieve for him.

  Dear Sarah, he wrote, crossed that out and wrote Dear Miss Rapp, crossed that out, chose a new piece of notepaper and wrote, Dear Miss Sarah, I am alright and hope you are alright too. I am seeing the country for the first time and there is sure a lot of it. I hope you enjoy learning to toe dance as it is a nice thing for nice young ladies to be able to do. Personally I have never been sure which foot of mine is the left one, ha ha. I hope you grow up and meet a nice young doctor or lawyer and marry him. As for me, I have met a nice young lady name of Vera and we will get married in Reno. Wishing you all the best always I am, Sincerely yours, Jimmy John (JJ) Link.

  He walked down to the gate of the mobile-home park and dropped the letter into a mailbox. It was a splendid evening, with a vast desert moon rising in a fluorescent sky. For a time he lingered, feeling vaguely romantic and a bit lost. He decided to phone Daddy as soon as he had a permanent address and ask him to send the Bulletin, so he could follow Sarah's doings on the Society Page and return to Bougalou once she was safely wed. Traveling was educational, but he'd come to realize he was basically a homebody.

  He felt good, having a plan. Tomorrow he'd visit an Indian casino to replenish his money supply, but as for tonight—well, tonight he had a date with Vera. Smiling, he turned and headed back to the Winnebago.

  Three days later, Sarah read JJ's note while William was driving her to the riding stable where Empress, her favorite mare, awaited her.

  "He thinks!" was all she said before crumpling the note and throwing it out the window. William knew that tone of voice and said nothing, but drove on in silence, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  Department: FILMS by Lucius Shepard

  SWATCHMEN

  About a hundred years ago, a considerable degree of controversy attended the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Fellow composer Camille Saint-Saëns was so offended by the use of the bassoon in the ballet's opening bars that he stormed from the theater. A portion of the audience became inflamed by the use of discords, boos contended with cheers, and the arguments between the work's detractors and supporters soon escalated into fistfights and, eventually, a full-blown riot. A century later, Watchmen opened on almost four thousand screens across the United States, a movie with the potential to provoke a controversy relating to similar minutiae, sending legions of fans of the Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons graphic novel on which it was based rushing to their computer keyboards to complain about this or that omission, to tear their cyber-hair and declare a fatwah on director Zack Snyder. Go to YouTube, for instance, and you will find thousands of such people debating the use of each song in the soundtrack. To compare Stravinsky's masterpiece with either Snyder's film or its source material may seem excessive, but Watchmen was chosen as one of the Greatest One Hundred Novels in English from 1923 to 2005 by no less persuasive an entity than Time magazine, and while this might be seen as the Time-Warner corporation throwing the geeks a bone, it seems to warrant an elevation in the way we look at the film.

  Watchmen opens with a credit sequence marvelous for its economy, a photomontage that establishes the alternate world of 1985 in which the movie is set, a world in the grasp of an apparently endless Nixon presidency that is on the verge of nuclear Armageddon; a world in which a group of masked superhero vigilantes called the Minutemen appeared in the late Thirties/early Forties, to fight injustice, later replaced by a younger group of superheroes known as the Watchmen; a world in which JFK was assassinated by one of their number, the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a full-blown crypto-Nazi thug, and in which the U.S. won the Vietnam War with a crucial assist from fellow Watchman, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a physicist transformed by a lab accident into a blue post-human with godlike powers and six-pack abs who goes on incessantly about feeling disengaged from everyone, and babbles some garbage about time and how nothing ever ends (I worried for a while he was speaking about the movie), and wanders around naked on Mars, in Antarctica, and elsewhere with his tackle box on full display; a world in which, for reasons left unstated, masked superhero vigilantism has been declared illegal and, forbidden from practicing their avocation, many Watchmen have lives that travel a downward spiral. Unfortunately, this sequence also provides a foretaste of one of the film's grievous flaws, beginning each section of the photomontage with a freeze frame that gives the impression you are looking at waxworks in a museum (this feeling of visiting the Watchmen Museum is further enhanced by having actors playing ‘80s icons—Nixon, Lee Iacocca, Andy Warhol, Ted Koppel, etc.—do cameos in horrid wigs and prosthetics).

  The story proper kicks off with the murder of the Comedian by a mysterious masked assassin. The Comedian was not what you'd call a nice guy (in addition to shooting JFK, he blew away his pregnant Vietnamese girlfriend, attempted to rape the original Silk Spectre, and espoused fascism, as do others in the group), but the creepy, rat-like presence of Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a sociopath who has stayed true to his calling and refuses to knuckle under to the laws making vigilantism illegal, and whose journal entries comprise the film's voiceover, perceives the murder to be an attack on all the Watchmen and decides to investigate. It's at this point that the movie goes astray, becoming for much of its remaining two-hours-plus a tedious, soap opera-ish compilation of back stories leavened here and there with a dash of ultra-violence. Absent the layers of information (for instance—Rorschach's mask was made from the fabric of a dress made for Kitty Genovese, one she never picked up) and the sidebar stories that Moore crammed into a sequence of twelve comic books, material in which the core issue of Watchmen was embedded, i.e., our relation to comics, why we read them, what they are, et al.... Absent that, it all comes across as bleak silliness.

  Of course this is partly Moore's fault.

  Despite the insistence made by some that pop culture be taken seriously as high art, Watchmen remains a superhero comic (if it were something else, it would not serve its author's purpose), and as such, its vision of history and its take on human relationships are adolescent and simplistic, and its profundities are merely quasi-profound; its themes, variously interpreted as everything from political satire to the death of the hero, are essentially a juvenile nihilism embroidered with masked musclemen and their melon-breasted mamas. It seems the work of a precocious sophomore whose reading of philosophy ended with Nietzsche and whose literary obsessions (Jack Kirby, Raymond Chandler, and so on) have produced an absurdly pretentious style of noir, a style that has since proliferated and that I've come to call the It's-Always-Raining-Where-I'm-Drinking (high) school of creativity, usually defined by rundown urban settings rife with graffiti and rainy streets awash with obsessed loners and women in tight and/or revealing clothing. Labeling it one of the great novels of our era doesn't change the fact that you could probably make a list of a hundred better novels written by authors whose surnames start with the letter Z. It's a seminal work in the comic book field, a genre-expanding work, but the genre it expands, superhero comics, targets a demographic composed mainly of adolescents and adults clinging to their adolescence (I make no implicit judgment here—I'm clinging like all get-out to mine), a vast percentage of whom are prevented by an R rating from seeing the movie.

  Jackie Earle Haley makes an impression as Rorschach (since he's the most violent character, Snyder pays him special attentiveness), but otherwise the acting ranges from the awful to bland. Bland is embodied by the relationship between Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), who wears a Batman-like costume and is as shy as Clark Kent, and the va-va-voomish Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman, whose thespic skills will someday soon land her a gig on one of those has-been reality shows like The Surreal Life or
Celebrity Apprentice). Their romance is consummated aboard Nite Owl's airship while Leonard Cohen wheezes out “Hallelujah” for hopefully the last time ever on-screen and Ms. Akerman displays a talent for flaring her buttocks. Who most embodies Bad? Well, it's so hard to choose, but I'd go with Matthew Goode, who plays Adrian Veidt and his alter ego Ozymandias, the world's smartest man. Of course Goode isn't afforded much of a chance to put his smarts on display by the script, which—though as faithful as possible to the comic book—gives him and the rest of the characters short shrift. A character as integral to the outcome of the story as Veidt, however, should have had more screen time. It doesn't help that Goode plays him like a refugee from a 1920s British stage production of a play about polite society, Auntie Mim's dissolute and distracted nephew wandering about the ruins of a party where he has drunk one too many champagne cocktails and performed some unspeakable indiscretion, wearing costumes (notably a purplish number accessorized by a gold Roman headband-type thingey) that would suggest he's on his way to becoming the world's smartest cross-dresser.

  I bet you've heard the phrase “the visionary director, Zack Snyder” in the avalanche of TV commercials that preceded the film's opening. Well, it's apparent that “visionary director” is the new “soulless hack.” What Watchmen needed was a director who could reinvent the comic, not just transpose it, and Snyder is best known for his faithful reproduction of Frank Miller's art in 300, something he also does in Watchmen, replicating frame after frame of Dave Gibbons's work. His slick slow motion, jump-cutting style is inappropriate to the über-gritty feel Moore and Gibbons brought to their down-and-almost-out alt-America. He appears far more interested in the action sequences than in the characters and thus the pacing of the film feels erratic, with long stretches of snooze-inducing dialog between men and women you're unable to care about punctuated by severed limbs and slo-mo bullet strikes and scenes like the one in which the relentlessly grim Rorschach tracks a pedophile to his lair, discovers the man's dogs fighting over the bones of his tiny victim, and proceeds to slam a meat cleaver over and over into the perp's skull. None of this has the least emotional impact. When millions die in a nuclear exchange, we're so disconnected from the reality of the event that we feel nothing of the human tragedy and only are engaged by the special effect.