John Shirley - Wetbones Read online

  "You're back with Donald, aren't you?"

  "And you think that's bad, right, because he's a black man."

  "Hell no, not because he's a black man, because he's a fucking crack addict, Aleutia, and he's got you back on the shit."

  She broke down, then, and he put his arm around her and patted her. She said she was sorry, she knew it was hurting the baby, but she just found herself at the rock-house at five in morning, looking for Donald.

  "You were looking for the cocaine, girl, you know? At least as much as Donald."

  "So I'm a fucking addict. I didn't ask to be no addict."

  I hear you. I was - I'm an addict too." He hadn't done dope of any kind in years but you were supposed to never talk about being an addict in the past tense, because that led to complacency, and somewhere inside, the addict was waiting for complacency. "I've been

  there. People who say, 'It's your fault because you started and you should have known better', those people are full of shit. We all had a direction in our life, a momentum, see, that carried us into addiction. Your stepdad raping you, your Mom beating you up because your stepdad raped you - the shit you went through goes on and on. You felt like you had to hit the streets. I can see that. But once we know what's happening, we can take responsibility and get the fuck off the streets, Aleutia. You know?"

  She shook her head. Shivering. She was having a strong craving now, he knew. A spooncall. Or, in her case, a pipecall. She put her hand to her mouth and he could imagine a crack stem, the glass coke-smoking pipe, in her fingers.

  Looking at her, he saw a little girl. Not much older than his own kid. It made him ache with worry about Constance. He thought: I'd better call the cops, tell them Constance is missing . . .

  No. He knew what they'd say: It hadn't been long enough. Give her time. And if they picked her up when nothing was wrong she'd be so mad at him . . .

  He forced himself to concentrate on Aleutia. "Look, Aleutia - you had a cocaine relapse, that's all. It's easy to do. We haven't had a chance to talk much and there's some stuff - Listen, Crack gets you two ways. One, getting off is a way of escaping from all the shit, right? Addictive personalities. We've talked about that. Second - and this is important, Aleutia - it gets to you neurologically. Meaning it messes with your brain chemistry. It pushes your brain-buttons, so to speak. You ever see that film of the white rat that's got a wire running into its brain? The rat pushes a button to stimulate the pleasure centre of the brain and it becomes this little

  furry button pushin' machine. That's all it can do, it doesn't eat or sleep, it just pushes that fucking button till it dies, girl. It reprogrammed itself that way."

  "Oh God, that's fucked up." Her face crumpling. "What're you saying, we're like robots? Programming and shit?" Tears streaking her makeup.

  "Only up to a point. You get trapped. Neurologically trapped."

  "It's like a fucking roach motel," she said miserably, reaching for a clean tissue.

  He nodded, thinking about the baby in her belly: trapped in the trapped. He took a deep breath. "But if you get off the shit, and give yourself a whole new system of rewards, well, eventually, you can get free. It takes time for the brain to get normal. And holding on till then takes help from outside the trap. What you need to do, maybe, is think about going to a halfway house. Inpatient recovery home. For six months, say . . ."

  Aleutia just shook her head. After a moment she said, "Can I smoke a cigarette?"

  Before he could answer, the phone rang. Aleutia was startled as he lunged at it. "Yeah?"

  "Mr. Garner? This is Terry. Um - her car's there. But I swear - Constance's just not at this mall. And all the stores are closed now . . ."

  Ephram was sitting in his living room at the desk, writing in his journal. The old fashioned rolltop was the only piece of furniture in the room, except for the LA-Z-Boy recliner by the CD player. He was listening to Franz Schubert.

  Ephram wrote in his journal to soothe himself, after the irritation of his labours over Megan's body.

  He wrote, 'For 18 July 199 -':

  . . . found that the large wire clippers worked very well to remove her fingertips, and I disposed of the fingertips quite confidently off a pier, finger food for the crabs, ha ha. Disposed of the clippers off the pier also.

  The body presented another problem. The sea cannot be trusted with a cadaver. As planned, tied it to the underside of a train. This had to be carefully timed in order to avoid discovery of the body by railroad workers before the train should begin its work. All went well, thank the Spirit. The train dragged the body a goodly distance, face down on the cinders, making shreds of the face and many other identification details and of course providing a reasonable explanation for the death, if no coroner chooses to look too closely. After the ropes broke, it dropped the body. I removed the ropes. Some drugged girl wandering across a railroad yard . . . I of course used the blowtorch to remove body hair . . . Perhaps a full incinerator would be ideal after all and when I find another wealthy subject I will shore up my bank account and look into the purchase of an incinerator big enough to do the job . . . After disposing of Twenty-six I traced Twenty-seven by her pscent, ha ha, finding her outside one of those dreadful arcades at the Southshore Mall . . .

  Garner almost collapsed with relief when he saw Constance coming up the sidewalk. He didn't think about the odd, drifty way she was walking, didn't think about it consciously at first, till she came into the kitchen with

  him. Then he was hit by one incongruity after another.

  ''Where's your necklace?" She was never without that tacky gold-letter necklace that spelled out her name.

  "Hm?" She looked at him from the other side of a fog bank. "Um - I don't know." Indifferent. Normally she'd have run around like a decapitated chicken, looking for the necklace.

  She looked tired, too. She didn't smell like crack smoke or pot, but . . . all the other signs were there. She was wobbly on her feet. Not meeting his eyes. Distancing. Indifference to what used to be important to her.

  How could it happen so fast? It just didn't happen that way overnight.

  "What is it, hon?" he said gently. "Was it cocaine or what?"

  "What do you mean?" Her voice dreamily monotone. Normally she would have said, Da-ad! I'm sure! Gross!

  "Where's the car, Constance? I didn't see it outside."

  "Car?" She blinked. Twice. "Oh. God. I left it at the mall. I'm sorry." She smiled distantly. "Happiness comes in places you never expect, didn't you say that once, Dad?"

  "Uh - yeah."

  "You were right. I would never expect . . . a guy like . . ." She shut her mouth. Rather abruptly.

  "A guy like who, Constance? Hon - did someone give you drugs?"

  "No." Soft-spoken conviction. Convincing understatement.

  "You fall in love?" That was a kind of drugging. "Falling in love" released hormones, endorphins, made you feel drugged. He knew it was grasping at straws but he grasped at it anyway.

  "Sort of."

  "Sort of? Who with? Some guy you met at the mall?"

  "Yeah. His name's . . . Michael. And he's leaving town." And I can't stand to stay around this summer without him. So . . ." Suddenly she got all chirpy, sitting up straight and beaming at him as she asked it, as if to say, How could you say no, Dad? "Could I go visit his family in Los Angeles? They'll chaperone us."

  She was explaining, all this with uncharacteristic verbal clarity. Maybe it was just an infatuation drunkenness, after all.

  "This is pretty sudden," he said. "Can't I meet this guy before you take trips with his family? I mean, you only met him yourself today, sweetie."

  "Um - sometime. You can meet him sometime. I better go pick up the car, okay?"

  "I'll go with you," Garner said, watching for her reaction. She frowned, but didn't argue.

  They went. They took the last bus and picked up the car. It looked abandoned in the midst of the vast parking lot. In silence, they drove home. Garner cooked dinner; she ate h
er food mechanically but thoroughly. She continued to deny any drug use; quite convincingly, though with a weird detachment. Normally an accusation of that sort would have made her first outraged and then sulky.

  She went up to her room, to go to bed early.

  Garner finally dropped off to sleep about three a.m. He woke at six, knowing something was wrong.

  Knowing, with a cold-sweat certainty, that Constance had gone.

  2

  Los Angeles, a Day Earlier

  Prentice drove the rented Tercel down Sunset to Highland, made his way to Barham, bypassing the freeway where sunlight lanced off the thick metallic flow of traffic. He followed the curving road through the hills, past condos and ranch homes, and down into Burbank. His eyes burned as he drove into the valley. The palm trees looked gray as dead skin here.

  Arthwright had a development deal with Sunrise Studios and they gave him a little bungalow office on the old studio lot. Sunrise had bought the lot from MGM; somebody else had recently bought Sunrise, Prentice had forgotten who. A soft drink company or an oil company. Or possibly a soft drink company owned by an oil company which was maybe owned by a plastics conglomerate. The Security guard at the gate's little Checkpoint Charlie - a black guy in cop-style mirrored sunglasses - scanned a clipboard list to be sure Prentice really did have an appointment with Arthwright, then directed him to Parking Area F.

  "F for full," Prentice muttered, looking at the rows of Porsches and Jags. There was only one empty space,

  where the tarmac was stenciled LOU KENSON. The erstwhile star had lost his deal with Sunrise and was now on the actor's Out List. Kenson could be relied on not to show up to claim his parking place and Prentice was on the verge of being late. He took Kenson's place, but with a twinge: thinking maybe it was bad luck

  You could be as rational as a mathematician, but working the film industry you eventually came to believe in good and bad luck.

  Prentice got out of the car and looked around. The studio looked like a series of overlarge warehouses and overgrown barns with oversized doors. The sunwashed buildings were old, mostly dull green, their paint peeling. On the other side of the lot, just visible between the interior-shoot buildings, there were a few generic tenement-facades, false fronts used for shooting generic inner-city street scenes in generic cop movies.

  Prentice glanced at his watch, hurried out onto the little studio road. He found Building E and Zack Arthwright's office.

  Arthwright could have had a spacious suite in the big mirrorglass skyscraper that Sunrise had built adjacent to the old studio, but he affected the air of a Colden Era traditionalist - 'Arthwright Pictures' was printed on the door - and he stuck to the old-fashioned office bungalows with their wonky air conditioners and cracked green walls.

  This particular air conditioner was working too well, and noisily, thrumming rheumily to itself from a corner window behind a secretary who probably no longer heard it. The room was almost refrigerator cold, making Prentice think of the morgue. Amy in the file drawer. He'd worked hard at not thinking about that and he'd almost succeeded for half an hour.

  Arthwright's secretary was busty but otherwise scissor-thin; gold mascara around eyes glamoured by blue-tinted contact-lenses.

  She had a gold streak in her feathered blue black hair and a New Age crystal on a gold chain around her slender neck.

  "Hi, I'm Tom Prentice . . ."

  She glanced up from her work station with a brief but professionally sunny smile. "Go right on in, Tom, he's expecting you."

  Tom, she said, though she'd never met him before. Fake intimacy. Welcome back to Hollywood.

  Arthwright was, of course, using a speaker phone. He sat tilted back in a swivel chair with his faded black cowboy boots on his antique, leather inset desk, his brown leather suit jacket buttoned up in the excessive air conditioning. His long, curly brown hair was tied with rawhide strips into a small ponytail; his sharp-featured boyish face didn't tan very well, so his nose and cheeks were always a little burned. Lines at the corners of his eyes, and the beginning of a double chin, told the truth: he was no more the enfant terrible journalists had made him out to be just a few years before. But he was hot with a string of hits, taking first and third place in the Summer Box Office, rentals going strong on the new release. Everyone wanted into see him, everyone had a pitch for him, and Buddy probably had to use up a favour to get Prentice the meeting.

  Prentice felt like he had been smuggled in, like a spy. The Spy Who Came In From The Out List, he thought.

  Arthwright winked, gestured at a chair. Prentice sat stiffly, trying not to be obvious about wiping his damp palms on his jeans.

  It was wrong to be here.

  "If your client doesn't want to deal, he doesn't want to deal," Arthwright was telling the phone, not missing a beat. "I'm not going to give him control. Whenever I give up creative control the damn thing just doesn't work. He can have an extra fifty out front. That's the best I can do."

  Prentice was embarrassed. Made to wait out a negotiation carried on in front of him as if he weren't there. But in fact part of it was probably Arthwright flashing power at Prentice. It didn't matter that Prentice was a relative nonentity. The demonstration would be something Arthwright did compulsively.

  Prentice tried to look interested in the office decorations. Framed movie posters on the walls, going back fifteen years to some of Arthwright's earliest: The Hellmakers, an old Lou Kenson western vehicle; The Grafters, the expose that had given Arthwright a veneer of respectability; Warm Knife, his mega hit thriller. The teaser read: Keep the knife under the pillow. It'll be warmer that way . . .

  Prentice stared at the poster for Warm Knife. Thinking: We're a sick bunch of flickers, all of us.

  "Creative control stays right here," Arthwright was telling the speaker phone. Turned sideways from Prentice, looking as if he were talking to the air; like Jimmy Stewart talking to Harvey. "If I need to, I can get Hagerstein. She's damn good."

  Arthwright took his long legs down and spun his swivel chair around once, in an absently playful way, as he waited for the ultimatum to sink in.

  "Zack, get real" A crackly female voice on the speaker phone. That'd be Doll Bechtman, Jeff Teitelbaum's agent. Prentice and Jeff had gone to NYU

  Film School together; had chased girls and made pretentious 16 millimeter student films together. Prentice decided he was going to have to look Jeff up.

  Evidently Arthwright was arguing with Doll Bechtman about Jeff. Prentice had met Doll once; a middle-aged woman with a look like Betty Crocker and a style like Roy Cohn. A barracuda, Jeff called her gleefully. The tougher she was, the better he liked it. It appeared she'd met her match in Arthwright. But she kept on: "I'm telling you, Jeff has good instincts. This Hagerstein woman cannot write an action picture. It'd be a joke."

  Jeff, Prentice mused. Arthwright was fucking Jeff Teitelbaum out of creative control on a movie? So what else was new.

  'Then tell Jeff to compromise a little, work with us, Doll. Look, I got someone here. You talk to Jeff."

  "I'll get back."

  "Sure, okay."

  Arthwright swivelled to the phone and hit the disconnect. He cocked his head impishly, grinned at Prentice, and said, "Tom. Long time no see."

  "Yeah. I've been holing up in New York." Prentice had only met Arthwright once, briefly. Arthwright probably didn't really remember the occasion.

  Prentice toyed with the idea of asking what Sunrise had cooking with Jeff. But, even though he was undoubtedly supposed to hear Arthwright throwing his weight around on the phone negotiation, he wasn't really supposed to listen to the details. He didn't need to ask, anyway, when he thought, about it. Arthwright was co-producing A Cop Named Dagger II for Sunrise; Jeff had conceived and written the first A Cop Named Dagger picture. Chances were, he was supposed to do

  the screenplay again but was holding out for creative control. Something few writers got till they became a "hyphenate" - writer-director, a writer-producer. Usually he ha
d to be a Player, a guy who could command points of the gross profits. Jeff wasn't there yet.

  Why the hell did Jeff want to hold out for creative control over an action picture? But come to think of it, Jeff thought action pictures could be high art.

  Arthwright checked out his watch, and said, "Glad to see you back in town. What have you got for me?"

  Arthwright wanted the pitch now. It was do or die. "What I've got is . . ." Prentice spread his hands - and then stepped off the cliff into space. ". . . a comedy with a strong drama backbone, a twist on buddy pictures." He could see Arthwright's eyes glazing already. Another buddy picture. Prentice went on hurriedly, "A lady cop walks a beat in San Francisco. She walks it alone, in a tough neighbourhood. One day she gets a new partner - a rookie, a kid who ignores her eight years on the force and thinks he's hot shit, compared to her, because she's a woman and he can't take a woman seriously as a street cop. The humour'll come naturally. She's going to learn he's not the asshole he seems, deep down; he's going to learn she's a good cop and that he's got a lot to learn."

  It sounded stupid to Prentice in his own ears, just now. It sounded vague and fatuous.

  "Uh huh." Arthwright managed to seem half interested. "Might be a little predictable. Familiar."

  Come on, you son of a bitch, Prentice thought. All your fucking movies are predictable. Out loud he said, "It's a question of how it'll be carried off. They're on foot, they're part of the neighbourhood, and walking a beat is different to being in a cruiser, gives them a

  feeling of family with the people' they protect. And there'll be some plot twists. I've got an outline right now, hasn't got all the plot points but it's basically there. I see it as having the appeal of Alien Nation - only it's funnier, and it's men and women. Men and women are alien to one another when they're thrust into this kind of situation. We play it for laughs." Alien Nation? A pretty dumb comparison. Get your shit together, Prentice!