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  “Yes, Mr. Katz.”

  “This is a fine restaurant,” he said. “Until nine, ten months ago, I’d never been to Tucson. Tried eating all over the city, there’s a fantastic Jewish deli up on Fort Lowell, but too much mediocre Mexican food here. New Mexico, now, why is their Mexican food so much better than anything you can get in Arizona? Don’t ask me about the movie until I get some more scotch.”

  I ladled some vinaigrette onto the greens, ate instead of talking. Through the open glass doors, I saw Dominique come up the stairs from the bar. I finished the salad as he realized the oyster fork was gone, settled for twizzling the scotch around the ice cubes for a full minute before he tucked into it with large mouthfuls and a grin after each swallow.

  “Look at me,” he said. “I’m Miami Beach. Got a lime green polo shirt, avocado green slacks, tasseled Cole-Haan loafers, and stretch hose. I’m seventy-seven years old and all I want to do is eat my medium-rare filet. When it comes.”

  “How long have you been Vincent’s manager?”

  Elbows anchored, the gesture.

  “Since just before Billy. Thirty years or so. I’m not going to have any more scotch, my wife’ll kill me, my stomach’ll kill me. Where’s that filet?”

  “Mr. Katz.”

  “Please. Marvin, okay?”

  “Okay. Vincent seems thrilled with this new movie.”

  For the first time, he narrowed his eyelids to half mast, saw me take in the change in his attention. He rapped his knuckles on the white tablecloth. “Back in my poker group, we had this one guy, youngish, he’d been to Atlantic City, he’d been up and down the coast to the Indian casinos, he watched World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel. We played nickel, dime, quarter, dollar raise once a night. This guy, always looking for tells. You know from tells?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. You’ve got my attention. Until the filet gets here.”

  “Vincent is going to make a new version of Man of the West.”

  “Vincent thinks he’s going to make this movie.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Movies cost money.”

  “Mr. Katz, that’s, uh, you’re slipping around my question.”

  “So he gave you the whole spiel? From after I left? About how he’s going to be Gary Cooper?”

  “I liked that movie once,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen it. If the money ever falls into place, then, maybe I’ll rent a videocassette.”

  “Money?”

  “Look, Miss Winslow.”

  “Laura.”

  “Laura. What do you know about making a movie?”

  “I just watch them. I don’t know, I read People magazine. I get DVDs with those commentaries by the director or actor or screenwriter.”

  “But you never heard a producer talk about movies?”

  “No.”

  “It’s all money.”

  Behind him, Dominique drifted close with a large platter and a folding wooden tray. Snapping the tray open, she set down the platter, removed an anodized aluminum cover from the plate.

  “Ah,” Katz said. “Time to eat.” Dominique laid a steak knife next to his spoon and set the plate in front of him. A spiraled, entwined tower of daikon radish rose above the small serving of green beans and carrots, next to swirled garlic mashed potatoes. “You’re not going to go away, are you.” Not a question as he sliced off a strip of the filet and quartered it, spearing a piece with his fork.

  “Just a few questions.”

  “I’m gonna eat this right now. If I grunt, that means yes.”

  “Vincent’s having money problems with this new movie?” He chewed the first piece, forked another. “It’s not about money?”

  “It’s always about money.”

  “Does he have enough to make this movie?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  “You’ll excuse me, I’m eating the filet while it’s more than warm, I’ve got to talk while I’m chewing?”

  “I’ll settle for that, sure.”

  “In the movies, money means all kinds of different things. Desire to make a movie? Everybody wants to make a movie. So, first. Option a script? Money. Get a studio to commit? Different kind of money. Money is just like ducks in a row, but you gotta work all the ducks at the same time. These days, comes down to who’s playing the leads. Got to have a current box-office earner for leads.”

  “Vincent hasn’t made a movie in a long time. Does he have any box office?”

  “Called the Q factor. A rating system, how well you’re known. Vincent? Nobody remembers him.”

  “Last night, he wanted to show me the interior sets.”

  “Oh, he’s got money for that?”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “First I heard.”

  “Mr. Katz. I really don’t want to bother you.”

  “So? Don’t.”

  “But…if money’s not the problem, what is?”

  “You don’t know from nothing about movies. Money.” He grinned around his mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Hollywood is the prototypical American business. Everybody wants to make a profit. Movie with a leading actor whose last film was thirty years before? Maybe. If…if the actor takes a supporting role and the lead goes to a name.”

  “But Vincent said he was playing the lead.”

  “Yeah. Well. They’re looking at Costner, I think there’s a solid offer out to Scott Glenn, not the same Q factor, but established. How well do you know this movie that Vincent’s trying to make?”

  “I just watched it again this morning.”

  “Gary Cooper’s the lead, he is the man of the West. Lee J. Cobb, playing Dock Tobin, second lead.” Katz pointed a speared green bean at me, nodding. “I don’t understand.”

  “With Vincent playing Gary Cooper, the movie’ll never happen. Guarantee five to ten million up front to somebody with box-office clout, maybe.”

  “So we’re finally talking about the real money?”

  “Which Vincent says is coming in.”

  “How?”

  “I get 25 percent of what Vincent gets, that’s the whole baby, that’s what motivates us both, eh, all right, so I’m a leech, all middlemen are leeches, you know, realtors, agents, lawyers, put us between two parties to settle out the money. Vincent says the money is coming in. Me? This southern Arizona, I like the heat, I always like heat, loosens up my arthritis, old story with old people. But I like humidity. I live in Florida. Where I’m going tomorrow.”

  Dominique appeared at my left side.

  “Are you still working on the salad?”

  “The lady’s not having anything else,” Katz said. Dominique smiled, took my salad plate and left. “Working. Where the hell did that come from, are you still working? Why don’t they just say, Are you finished? Are you finished?”

  “There’s a Sean Connery movie,” I said.

  “Miss Winslow, enough already with movies.”

  “Outland.”

  “High Noon, right? On some planet?”

  “One scene where he sees one of the meth pushers on a video monitor, he takes after the guy, chases him all over the space station and into the kitchen, the guy has this reddish plastic bag, looks like a silicone breast implant, except it’s red. They fight, the guy throws the implant into a bubbling cauldron and without hesitating Connery sticks an arm into the cauldron and pulls out the package.”

  “Ever hear of a log line?”

  “No.”

  “The complete Hollywood concept. Pitch a movie in one sentence. Outland? Perfect log line. High Noon on a space station. So. You’re a dog with a bone,” Katz said. “Did I give you the right bone?”

  “I’ll look into it,” I said. “Thanks. If I understand this right, Vincent thinks he’s playing the lead, but he’s not. Vincent does not know this. Vincent is raising money on his own, like an indie studio. Has he raised enough money?” Katz shook his head. “How much more money does he need?” Katz shook
his head again. “So, Vincent has to keep raising money until somebody tells him the truth, that his movie will never be made until he’s got enough money to interest Hollywood.”

  “You’re almost there.”

  “Almost…where? Ah! If this movie gets made, would Vincent be cast?”

  “Dock Tobin.”

  “The Lee J. Cobb part? He’s a crazy old man.”

  “So now you got it,” Katz said. “So now, I can eat the rest of this?”

  “And Ruby?”

  “Oy. Some cockamamie ghost town, he keeps wanting to take me down there, show me the locations. I tell him, you build the set, you get a line producer, you get the money, then maybe I’ll come visit the location sets.”

  “You don’t think they exist?”

  “What do I know?”

  “The warehouse? Here in Tucson, with the interior sets?”

  “Haven’t seen it. This filet’s cooling down. We done here?”

  “Enjoy,” I said, standing. “Keep it working. Oh. The lemon juice, stunning the oysters. John Malkovich says that in The Killing Fields. I really don’t know if they’re alive.”

  34

  I once loved to drive long, empty miles to nowhere.

  More a man’s thing, a middle-age thing, buy a new Porsche or Miata or BMW and take it out for a hundred miles after work, work out the aggressions and stresses and try to solve the mysteries. But I loved it. My last wonderful ride, five years ago, away from Cheyenne, Wyoming, from the famous rodeo where for the first time in my life I shot somebody.

  So many things remained forever unknown after that time. So much life, gone and untraceable before I moved to Arizona. At that moment, only a few things were certain to me. I am the half-Hopi woman Kauwanyauma. Butterfly Revealing Wings of Beauty. I had forty-seven dollars in my pocket, a full tank of gas in a rental car I abandoned somewhere across the southern Wyoming border, at which time all I possessed was an unwrapped packet of cheese and peanut butter crackers, a twenty-ounce bottle of Diet Coke, a change of clothing, two pictures of my dead father, the memory of a lover’s hand on my face, and a magnificent hug from a young friend to warm my spirit.

  What more did I need at that time?

  One thing about high-speed highway driving. There are these metal thingies, sticking up half an inch or so along the dashes marking the middle of the road. Every other dash had these thingies, so if you drifted too far to the center, your tires would strike them and make a soft bopbopbopbop sound, almost like a soft swish with a wire brush on a drum. I liked to time my moves across the middle line so my tires avoided the metal thingies. I was really good at it.

  Another thing in Arizona, somebody had stuck blue metal reflector bumps in lanes, not in the exact middle, but offset to the right, as though somebody in the statehouse had once decided that drivers would learn to line up their cars to the right of the lane, at least, I couldn’t think of any other explanation.

  When I drove, I collected signs, but today I’d seen only two of my favorites, both of them on I-10 while still in Tucson.

  WE BUY UGLY HOUSES

  Whatever does that mean? Who’s to say if your house is ugly? Maybe it’s all you can afford, maybe it’s a rich person’s Spanish or mock-Greek monstrosity.

  At least the other sign was plain enough.

  JUNQUE FOR JESUS

  DONATE YOUR OLD CAR

  According to my AAA map, I had two ways to drive into Ruby. Either drive almost to Nogales, turning west on Rio Rico, or turning at Amado and on to Arivaca, then heading southeast. Both choices put me on the same road, marked in black dashes, some of it with squiggles that could only mean mountain switchbacks.

  At Amado I made my choice, exiting quickly cutting across traffic, a horn blowing from some senior driver a hundred feet behind me but startled. I swung around the access road, turned left near the Longhorn, and headed into Arivaca. I knew this road, I’d been on it once before, this time I wouldn’t stop at Sara’s bakery for jalapeno muffins, I’d just push on.

  From the front, the Longhorn diner looks like a cow skull with these fake long horns out either side. I think Paul McCartney used a photo of it on one of his Wings albums, I wasn’t really sure, except with the new addition jutting out from one side it looked half like the rowdy cowboy bar it used to be and a freeway restaurant.

  The Arivaca road dipped into a huge wash near the Mile 19 marker, swirls of dried sand across the road from a flash flood just a few days old. Instinctively, I looked to the south, saw black clouds roiling up from the border although drifting west of me. With monsoons, anything could happen, especially on gravel roads like the one my map showed from Arivaca to Ruby. I drove as fast as the curving road allowed, but when I came to the rest area at the Mile 3 marker, the road sloping down into Arivaca, the black clouds covered the entire southern horizon.

  My cell rang and I pulled to a stop in the rest area, next to a white Border Patrol Jeep marked by a green line across each side, two men in the Jeep swiveling to stare out tinted windows at me.

  “Laura,” Alex said. “Bingos…bingos.” Her voice fading in and out.

  “Say again?”

  “We found another…in the name of Leon Begay…Tucson…Houston area, near…university.”

  “Alex, you’re fading out.” And gone, the signal bars on my cell dropping off one at a time. I was out of range.

  I barely noticed Arivaca, slowing by the old army post and the adobe ruins of Teresa Celaya’s house, stopping only once for a crowd of partygoers near La Gitana, one of two bars in the community. Turning south at the T-junction outside Arivaca, my Cherokee shuddered as the automatic four-wheel-drive started kicking in. My map overestimated the road quality, what I’d hoped was a solid roadbed consisted of packed gravel and caliche over dirt, and I’d not gone more than three miles when the flooded washes started frequently. Driving as fast as I dared, the Cherokee bouncing on washboard surfaces, I finally had to get into crawler gear to pass through a wash covered with six inches of water.

  Slithering through the next nine miles, crawling through three more washes with higher and higher water, off-road I saw what had to be the old Oro Blanco stage station and a small cemetery. Four miles to go to the Ruby gate, rain spitting here and there but no steady downpour. Ahead of me the lightning veined the entire southwest horizon, occasional thunder loud enough to rumble over the noise of my tires spitting gravel and chunks of dirt. And finally, Ruby.

  Locked away behind an iron-barred gate!

  I couldn’t get inside the ghost town, a sign showing me the phone number I’d have to call to arrange a tour. I drove a mile past, U-turned at a dry shoulder, headed back at crawl speed, looking for any signs of a movie set. Not finding any, I began looking for a way to get completely off-road, pushing the Cherokee across the desert and skirting the gated road into Ruby. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Past Ruby again.

  Nothing. Lightning flashed all around the Cherokee, splitting a huge mesquite tree just off the road, most of the trunk teetering across the road, I stomped on the accelerator, taking a huge risk, leapt ahead on the road as the trunk fell in slow motion just as heavy rain deluged my car and the road, restricting visibility to less than a hundred feet.

  I drove steadily back to Arivaca, not daring to try the mountain roads since that would take me directly into the buffeting monsoon winds at their worst. After an hour I passed again through Oro Blanco and almost immediately came to a heavily flooded wash, water gushing across the road, carrying small debris. I didn’t stop, just slowed and nudged the Cherokee into the water, reaching the middle of the wash with water almost over my hubcaps, impatient to get out of the stream I goosed the gas and the forward motion set up a bow wave that splashed over and up under the hood so that even though I was going through shallower water I still had ten feet to get to the gravel on the other side and just then the engine stopped, all power off, my brakes not working, the Cherokee slewing half sideways, taking all my strength to wrestle the
steering wheel around enough so that my momentum carried me out of the water. I set the hand brake, trembling, shifted into Park, ground the starter motor three times before it caught and the engine purred.

  Half a mile later, another flooded wash, this time thirty feet across, water pouring farther out to edges of the road on either side. I realized it was hopeless, backed up to higher ground, turned off the engine, and sat in the steamy closed Cherokee, sweat rolling everywhere on my body, substantial rain striking the roof and hood, the noise almost intolerable, a thousand small jackhammers drilling into the car, inside my head, the noise and humidity finally pushing me near panic and for three years I’d worked so hard on surviving panic and anxiety attacks, I wasn’t going to give in, so I started the engine, cranked the aircon to full roar and tuned in the single station available on FM radio, somewhere in Mexico and playing a lilting polka and three women longing for their corazón.

  Her car horn woke me up. I rolled down the window and looked out.

  Almost sunset. The rain had stopped, the monsoon had moved on, but clouds blotted out most of the remaining sunlight. At some point I must have turned off the engine, I couldn’t remember when. Across the wash, an ancient Land Rover, an older woman in shorts and a Betty Boop–decorated muumuu pulling a cable from the winch on the Land Rover’s front bumper.

  “I’m coming across,” she shouted.

  I got out of the Cherokee. “Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll drive it.”

  “No you won’t. Water’s too high, it’ll flood your engine.”

  She turned on the winch motor, pulled the cable across her shoulder, gloved hands clutching the cable hook as she strode into the water. Halfway across, the water splashing up to her belly button, she grinned, bent toward me and kept coming with the cable.

  “Drive down to the edge,” she said. “We’ll hook you up there.”

  I moved the Cherokee into an inch or two of water, set the gear shift in Neutral, engine still on.

  “Hiya,” she said, grinning, dropping the cable and extending both hands. “Whatcha doing stuck out here, girl?”