Shallow Graves

2

Pellam said to Janine, the granny-dress woman, "You'd think they'd come up with some more money for that. It's going to represent something, it ought to have a little class."

He was looking at the tiny, overpainted black cannon, donated to the town by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It didn't seem capable of lobbing a shell more than ten feet. They sat in the town square, where he'd been sitting, marking Polaroids, when she walked past casually and sat on the bench next to his. He'd smelled minty tea-what she'd been drinking yesterday in Marge's diner-and when he'd looked up she'd smiled at him. He'd scooted over four feet of bumpy wood and they'd struck up a conversation.

"Maybe it's valuable," Janine now said. "Looks can be deceiving."

Pellam liked her outfit today better than what she'd worn yesterday: a long skirt, boots, a big bulky-knit sweater. Her hair-in the sun you could see some red-was still parted in the middle. She was an easy forty, looking older straight-on, though she probably wasn't. That happened to a lot of these poor flower children; maybe they're limber and they live a long time, but sun and fresh air can do harsh things to your skin.

"Where's your boyish partner, with the cute little tush, the one who's probably a year or two under my limit?"

"He rented a car and went out to the hinterland, checking out some parks. We've got a lot of scenes left, so we split the troops."

She asked, "What company you work for?"

"Called Big Mountain Studios."

"Didn't they do Night Players! And Ganges… Oh, that was a great film. Did you go to India for that one?"

Pellam shook his head.

"Wow, do you know William Hurt? You ever meet him?"

"Saw him once in a restaurant."

"How about Willem Dafoe? Glenn Close?"

"No and no." Pellam's eyes were scanning the downtown, which almost shimmered in the heat. It was eleven a.m. The temperature was up by twenty degrees over yesterday. Indian Summer.

"Tell me about the film you're working on now."

"We don't like to give too much away."

She socked him playfully on the arm. "Excuse me? I mean, excuse me? I'm a spy? Like I'm going to sell the story to MGM?"

Pellam said, "It's called To Sleep in a Shallow Grave."

"Wild. Love the title. Who's in it?"

"It's not cast yet." It wasn't for location scouts to give away too much.

She said, "Come on now. I don't believe you." She tilted her head coyly and her hair fell straight across her face, leaving only her eyes exposed-like a veiled Islamic woman. "Give me a clue."

"A few supporting actors you couldn't possibly know." He sipped his coffee.

They always liked details. Who in Hollywood was playing musical beds. Which actresses had had implants. Who hit their wives. Or their husbands. Who liked boys. Who had orgies in Beverly Hills.

Some people even wanted to know about the films themselves.

He said, "It's about a woman who comes back to her home town for her father's funeral. But she finds out that he might not have been her father after all and maybe he killed the man who was her real father. It takes place in the fifties, a small town called Bolt's Crossing."

He stood up. She watched him toss the coffee carton into a trash basket painted with tulips, and she scolded, "You drink too much of that. Caffeine. Yuck. Don't you have trouble sleeping?"

"Which way's the cemetery? I want to get some more 'Roids."

"Some?…"

"Polaroids."

"Follow me." They turned east. As they walked along the road, Janine said, "Tell me more about the film."

"That's it for now."

She gave him a pout with her full lips. "Maybe I won't be your guide if you're not nice to me."

"Aw, I need a guide. I may never get back to civilization without one."

She grimaced dramatically and waved her arm around downtown. "Bad news, Charlie. This is civilization. It don't get no better than this."

They walked for a half hour and found themselves in the cemetery.

His reaction to the place was the same as on the day they'd arrived in Cleary, the day Marty had spotted the cemetery from the highway; it was perfect for the film. Tall black trees bordering a small clearing in which battered tombstones tilted at exotic angles. No big monuments, no mausoleums. Just hunks of stone, spilling right out of the forest.

Pellam pulled the camera out of his pocket, took three or four pictures. The cemetery was filled with an odd, shadowy light, which seemed to come from the underbelly of the low wispy clouds. The light accentuated contrasts: bark was blacker than in bright sun, grass and milkweed stalks paler, stone more bleached; it was white like old bones. Many of the tombstones were badly eroded. Pellam and Janine wove through the grass, toward the woods. A rusty barbed-wire fence of taut strands separated the cemetery from the underbrush.

Wait… What was that? Pellam stopped suddenly, stared into the trees. He was sure someone was watching him, but as he stepped to one side, the voyeur, if it was anybody at all, vanished.

Janine said, "All I'll say is, if it has Redford or Newman in it and you don't tell me I'll never speak to you again."

"It doesn't."

"I saw Butch Cassidy twelve times. I only saw Let It Be eight.

"Were you at Woodstock?"

She smiled, surprised. "Yeah, were you?"

"No. But I wanted to go. Tell me about the cemetery."

"What's to tell? Dead people buried here."

"What sort of dead people? Rich, poor, smugglers, farmers?"

She couldn't quite get a handle on what he was asking. "You mean, like what does it say about the history of the town?"

Pellam was looking at a grave.

Adam Gottlieb

1846-1899

A sailor on your ocean, Lord.

He said, "Man missed the century. Bummer. Yeah, that's basically it. The history of the place, the atmosphere."

She danced over a grave, girlish. "Can you imagine what Cleary was like a hundred years ago? Probably only five, six hundred people here, if that."

He snapped several Polaroids.

Janine took his arm and hooked it through hers. He felt the heavy pressure of her breast against his elbow. He wondered what her chest looked like. Was it dotted with freckles? Pellam really liked freckles.

They walked for a few minutes. He said, "I don't see any recent tombstones."

"Is that bad?"

"No. I'm just curious."

Janine said, "There's a new cemetery outside of town. But that's not the answer. The answer is that nobody ever dies in Cleary. They're dead already."

She now grew serious and started playing with the top of her tea carton. "First, there's something I have to tell you. I'm sort of married." She looked up. "But we're separated. We still groove okay, my old man and me, but it's not like on a physical level, you know? He's living with a bimbo runs a motorcycle repair shop near Fishkill. Her husband split too. He comes back now and then but mostly he's split."

Pellam tried to sort it out. There were two husbands, was that it? One of them kept coming back? To who?

Janine said, "Just want the facts out, you know. Like, in case you heard something… Well, you know how it is." She was looking at him. He felt the weight of her eyes on him, as heavy as her breasts. A response was in order.

"Sure do," he said.

This seemed to satisfy her. She kicked at some leaves. Pellam hoped she didn't want to go for a leaf fight. There was nothing worse than somebody on the threshold of middle age going zany.

"Tell me about Hollywood. The parties are pretty wild, huh?"

"I don't go to Hollywood very often."

"Isn't that where the studio's at?"

"Century City."

"Where's that?"

"Now it's office buildings. It used to be the Twentieth Century Fox back lot."

"How 'bout that! Super."

They walked back to the town square. Pellam reloaded his camera. He looked up. From three different windows, faces were staring at him. They looked away quickly. One woman paraded her six-year-old daughter past. The woman pushed the girl forward. "This is Josey," she said. Pellam grinned at the girl and kept walking.

The word had spread into all the nooks of Cleary. Somebody was going to make a Movie. David Lynch, Lawrence Kasdan, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts had all been sighted. It would have a cast of thousands. They needed extras. They needed stuntmen. There'd be tickets to Hollywood. Union contracts. Line up for your fifteen minutes of fame.

None of the hoverers had actually asked for a part yet but Pellam was getting a hell of a lot of silent auditions.

"What does everybody do for entertainment around here," he asked, "when they're not trying to get a role in a movie?"

"We all have great fun robbing tourists blind. You sticking around till Saturday?"

"Maybe."

"Wait till you see it then. It's leaf season. Hundreds of cars, everybody gawking at trees like they were mandalas. Totally far out. They spend an incredible amount of money. I had a tea shop for a few years before the jewelry thing took off. I'd charge two dollars for a scone. A granola muffin was two and a quarter… They paid without blinking."

"What do you all do when you're not ripping off the turistas?

She paused to consider. "Socializing. Me and my friends usually get together and hang out. Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly. Rent movies a lot. There are carnivals, parades, Future Farmers of America. Down home, middle America. The workers-I tend to think of it in terms of class; I was a Marxist once-they go in for raising kids, Kiwanis, pancake breakfasts, turkey shoots, church in any one of a number of interchangeable Protestant denominations. But we're very tolerant-both Jewish families in town are well liked."

They walked for a few minutes more. Pellam glanced at her; she was preoccupied, thinking of something that would summarize. "It's a hard place to be single."

He let that sit for a thick moment then said, "The film's got a dark side to it, violence in a small town. Any of that?"

"Oh, yeah. A lot of domestic stuff. Last year a man took a shotgun and killed his family. They found him at home, watching Wheel of Fortune with the bodies all around him. Then the police found a couple guys from New York City murdered not far from downtown."

"What happened?"

"Nobody's sure. They were just businessmen. Looked like robbery but who knows? Then you have your assorted drownings, car wrecks, hunting accidents. A lot of those."

Pellam took more Polaroids. "Look, they call it Main Street. Great."

"Yeah, they do. I never thought about it. Outa sight."

He paused, looked across the street into the window of the Dutchess Realty Company. The morning light fell on the storefront glass and he thought somebody else was staring at him, a blond woman. But she wasn't like the other supplicants; there was something intense and troubling about the way she studied him.

Then he decided he was just being paranoid.

He looked away, then back. The blond voyeur was no longer there. Just like the imagined spy in the forest overlooking the cemetery. Maybe imagined.

Janine said, "I've gotta open the store now but, you want, sometime I can show you the only building that survived the Great Fire of 1912."

"Love to see it."

"You mean that?"

"Sure do," Pellam said.

No, we'll split the worm…

Pellam was walking down a side street in Cleary. The red-covered script was in his hand. He made notations, he shot 'Roids.

No, John, really… I insist.

He was thinking about the assignment in Mexico last month.

He and Marty had found a great jungle outside of Puerto Vallarta and after the principal photography had started, the two men had hung around and drunk mescal with the crew and watched the director waste eighty thousand feet of film (shot through a Softar filter so the flick would have that smoky soft look of a Nike or IBM commercial). The story had something to do with forgers and Swiss businessmen and skinny dark-haired women who resembled Trudie, a woman Pellam occasionally dated in L.A. (Damn, he'd forgotten to call her. It had been five days. I've gotta call. I'm going to. Definitely.)

In Mexico, Marty had spent time looking over the director of photography's shoulder-the boy wanted to be a DP himself one day. Pellam had been on plenty of sets, too many, he'd decided years ago, and so he hung out mostly in the one bar in town, which was filled not with roustabouts, like the crew in the opening scenes of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but with urban Americans on seven-night, six-day packages. Pellam avoided them like the local water and spent his time with a senior gaffer, an old bearded guy, who had two intense loves-one was antique generators and the other was emaciated brunettes.

The latter Pellam shared with him-the love for, not the Gold's Gym'd bodies themselves, since he was among the caste of mere hirelings. Oh, a pert little assistant from wardrobe or makeup might make herself available to Pellam but any woman whose name was on a Screen Actors Guild contract was off limits to the likes of location scouts and electricians.

In two weeks, the men had polished off bottle after bottle of greasy liquor, in which agave worms floated like astronauts spacewalking. They shared the worms. The last one they cut in half with Pellam's buck knife and dropped into the last shot of the granular, smoky drink. The gaffer swore it had hallucinogenic effects and muttered some mumbo jumbo as he tossed back the shot.

Pellam told him he was crazy and didn't feel anything but extremely drunk.

The movie stank but Pellam'd had a good time. For Christ-sake, it was Mexico. How could you lose? The final scenes (final scenes? Hell, the whole movie) involved more explosives and machine guns than acting but Pellam was happy to watch the liquor in the bottles sink toward the fat worms and listen to the explosive charges, which were so much quieter in real life than in the final cut of a film itself, after the sound effects were added.

Whump whump whump.

After a while, things got boring in paradise and Pellam, who maybe didn't smile a whole lot and whose eyelids didn't grow as wide as Marty's but who loved pranks, came up with some good ones. On that Mexican trip, he got a lot of mileage out of stuffed Gila monsters and latex rattlesnakes. The best was when he talked a stunt man into hanging from boots bolted to the ceiling of the director's hotel room. When the director, stoned on some powerful ganja, walked into the room, the stunt man shouted, "Man, you're on the fucking ceiling! How do you do that?" The director stared at him in shock, frozen like James Arness in the big ice cube in the original version of The Thing. The stuntman began to pass out, both from laughter and blood to the brain. Pellam recorded it on videotape and planned to send the tape to selected friends as Christmas presents.

Pellam got away with a lot. Location scouting is to the film busines what Switzerland is to war. Whatever cataclysm, betrayals and victories occur in boardrooms and on sets and casting couches, nobody has much of an opinion about scouts. Producers are thieves, actors are brain damaged, cinematographers are artistes, the trades are gorillas. Everybody hates the writers.

But location scouts, they're cowboys.

They deliver then they're gone.

That, or they sat on the sidelines drinking mescal, picking up script girls and trying to pick up actresses, and then they're gone. Nobody thinks twice about them. Pellam had had other jobs in film, and no jobs other than in film, but scouting was the only one he'd kept at for more than a couple years.

Mexico last month. Georgia last week.

Now, Cleary, New York. With clear-cheeked blonde-bait Marty. With a busty former hippie. With a hundred squares of slick Polaroid pictures. With a cemetery.

With some people who weren't too happy to have him in town.

Goodbye…

He paused on a small road that led to what looked like a town park. It might have been private property, though; the lots in Cleary were massive. He thought about his place on Beverly Glen, whose lot line you could measure in inches and not end up with an unwieldy number. Pellam stopped and gazed at the property, at the huge robin's-egg-blue colonial in the middle of the beautiful yard. So, it wasn't a park at all. It was a residence. And it was for sale. The sign was stuck in the front yard.

Pellam wondered what it was like to own a house this big in a town this small. He counted windows. The place must have six or seven bedrooms. He didn't know five people he'd want sleeping in his house. Not all at the same time.

He started across the road. What would a house like this cost?

What was the backyard like?

He never found out.

Pellam was halfway across the road when a small gray car crested the hill, hit a patch of leaves slick as spilled oil and skidded hard. He tried to dance out of its path but a part of the car-some piece of resonant sheet metal-caught him square on the thigh.

John Pellam saw:

A sea of leaves, mostly yellow, rising to the sky. A flare of sunlight on glass. A huge oak tree spinning, the blue house turning upside down, caught in a tornado. Then someone swung the curb at him, and everything disappeared in a burst of dirty light.