Bloody River Blues

THIRTEEN

This was not a place he would have chosen to be buried in. Philip Lombro would have preferred more variety: trees, hills, large rocks rising out of the ground like Stonehenge. But he decided this was a foolish thought. How could you have a cemetery with tree roots, uneven ground, stone? Cemeteries were like any other real estate; death had to be financially practical.

The cemetery outside of Maddox resembled the acreage around a prefab midwestern grade school. Beyond, he could see a development of pastel houses, all similarly styled. In each yard were two small maples, crowned with colored leaves- webby, like the sponge of HO-gauge trees in the scenery sets he bought for his nephews.

Lombro parked on the side of the cinder drive and got out of the Lincoln. He walked slowly through the trim grass. Several of the graves were caved in at the corners. He felt queasy as he looked down into these tiny, dark pits, and he wondered if with a flashlight one could see the coffins themselves. This terrified him. He hated this place and he was angry at his brother for buying plots here, instead of Mount Pleasant, where their parents were buried.

The day was milky-sunny and hot. Indian summer, he supposed, though he never knew exactly what that meant. Could it be a metaphor for the Indians' attempting a final assault after they had been conquered by the settlers? But that seemed too lofty and dark for such an innocent phrase. His feet bristled through lawn stubbly with crabgrass, and he noticed his shoes were dusty from disintegrating yellow leaves. He bent down and stroked the grass. It was unpleasantly tough; the stem of a dandelion was the only softness his fingers touched. He stood and continued toward the gravesite.

Lombro wore a dark suit and he was sweating. He would not take off his jacket. The dead, he believed, deserve all our respect.

The cemetery was not crowded. The hour was early, on a weekday, and only dedicated mourners were present. Two elderly women, locked arm in arm, stood nearby over an old grave, which was not marked by a monument but by a small, dark metal plate. Lombro remembered that every veteran was entitled to a marker like this and he wondered if the women were standing above a father who died in Verdun, a husband at Normandy, or a son at Da Nang.

When he arrived at the grave, he did not have the reaction he believed he would experience. He did not cry. He felt numb, hardly touched at all, the way a shy man freezes in front of a very beautiful woman. He looked down at the turned-over earth. He knew they used bulldozers to dump the dirt into the graves and he was glad he did not see any tread marks on the clayish earth. The gravestone was gray marble and polished so smooth, it reflected the dark, wilted flowers.

A breeze disturbed the green tissue enfolding the flowers that he held. He had forgotten they were in his hand. He set them on the dirt then decided the paper would shred in the rain and look bad. He pulled it off and stuffed it into his pocket.

He turned and walked back to his car. As he did, it occurred to him that all his life he had been a man who was not afraid to act. Being this way had made him very wealthy, a linchpin in his family, respected and-in certain circles-held in awe and fear. Yet now he believed that what he had done-killing Vincent Gaudia-had altered him. Altered him fundamentally. Not because it was violent but because it was an act beyond his world of experience. He had put in motion people and forces that were behaving in ways he could not control, in ways he could not even predict.

The gun that had fallen in the tile bathroom of Orsini's-Ralph Bales s gun-and had put the two men together had been the first link in a long, horrible chain reaction of those forces, which had the effect of making him feel small and powerless.

Lombro leaned against his car. The wind was gentle and filled with crackling, dry heat. Lombro saw Ralph Bales driving up the road now, his squat head through the gray glass of the car. Lombro reached into his pocket and pulled out the yellow envelope that contained fifty thousand dollars. He wanted the meeting to be over with as soon as possible.

He wished there were no witness.

He wished he had never met Ralph Bales.

But most of all Philip Lombro wished that the dead all around him, lying in their still beds of level, root-and rock-free earth, would all at once rise and begin to laugh and talk as if they were not dead at all but had merely been lulled into a light sleep by the glorious peace of an unseasonably warm afternoon.

After hours of cruising up and down the riverbanks of the Wide Missouri and the Big Muddy, Pellam at last found the field that would be the site of Ross and Dehlia's catastrophic last heist.

Driving and stopping, then driving on, he had been close to giving up hope. State parks, private yards, railroad easements, pastoral grass rolling toward the water, boggy grassland, long stretches of revetments of crushed gray and black rock.

Nothing that would work for the film.

Sitting on the campers dashboard was a note from the key grip, pleading for a location within twenty-four hours, and sitting in the seat beside him was the reclining figure of Nina Sassower. Pellam, forcing himself to ignore both, had turned a bend, driven through a stand of dense oak and maple and braked the camper to a squealing halt. '

"I think this is it."

The field was a lush five acres defined by dense rows of trees, just starting to color-some leaves would have to be spray-painted or draped with green netting. (The film was set in June.) A church facade would have to be constructed.

(Sloans wish to have the shoot-out involve schoolchildren had given way to his slightly more tasteful burst of inspiration- the innocent victims would be churchgoers.) But those were the only necessary modifications.

The grass was high. An asphalt road stretched timidly between the field and the riverbank, which was a ten-foot-high stone incline that dipped into the soupy water of the Missouri River.

He stepped outside and took two dozen Polaroids, then returned to the cab. He started the campers engine and sped back toward town.

"Why," Nina asked with curiosity, "is that field any different than the other ones? Because there's less junk?"

"Uhm," he began and decided he couldn't explain.

"I mean, it is a nice field and all," she said quickly, perhaps taking his silence as disappointment at her reaction.

Pellam noticed that Nina's interest in film had grown considerably. Perhaps this was due to her employment. She was by all reports an excellent makeup artist. Perhaps it was also due to her reading Pellam s copy of the final revised shooting script for Missouri River Blues. It looked like a student's end-of-term notebook, stuffed with smudged, limp sheets- all different colors, indicating the various drafts of Danny's rewrites. It required diligent shuffling to proceed from start to finish. But the script had held her interest all afternoon.

And, more than that, had even brought her to tears.

Driving in silence, heading back to Maddox, Pellam glanced at her again, noting her damp eyes.

She closed the script. "I'm sorry. It's so sad."

John Pellam had not cried for a long time and he could not remember the last time he had cried watching a movie. Nina looked ahead, unseeing, at the road. "I lost a relative not too long ago."

Pellam muttered condolences. "Who was it?" he asked.

Lost in thought, she had not heard his question and he repeated it.

"An aunt. She was elderly, but… A car accident."

Her voice faded.

Danny's new ending was a slow-motion angle of Ross's Packard tumbling into the river.

"After she died, I had this urge… no, not an urge, this need to put what I felt into words."

People tended to share things with Pellam and to confess secrets to him. It happened everywhere he went, it happened at the unlikeliest of times. He supposed this was because he was always just passing through. They could unburden themselves and then he would vanish, their confidences safe.

"I looked through some of my books and I found a poem. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. It's funny about poetry back then, isn't it? I mean, it was all stiff and formal, but I could understand it."

"It's a nice poem." Pellam knew the poet was Dylan Thomas. He couldn't remember a word of the poem. "

Pellam let the traffic -lights guide him. He was lost, but he figured that the stoplights would be denser closer to downtown Maddox, where he could get his bearings. He steered toward the red and green and yellow.

"Did you read it at her funeral?" "Yes. I was surprised, it went well. Real well. I thought I'd cry and spoil it. But I didn't. Have you ever done that? Read something at a funeral?"

Pellam thought back to the most recent memorial service he might have been a featured speaker at. It had been seven years ago in Santa Monica. The deceased had been his closest friend the actor Tommy Bernstein. Pellam had not attended the service.

She didn't say anything more and they drove in silence for ten minutes, then cruised into downtown Maddox. He parked, with the engine still running, near Tony Sloan's trailer, Sloan would be at the three-monitor Kem editing machine now, reviewing work prints. He would not tolerate being disturbed. Pellam left the Polaroids and a brief location report with Sloan's poor, jittery, ponytailed assistant director and returned to the camper. They drove along Main Street and parked beside a small grocery store. Wishing to change the relentlessly somber mood, he said suddenly, "Watermelon. Let's get some watermelon."

"In October?"

"Sometimes you just get this craving. Come on."

Inside a small grocery store he bought a plastic container of chunks of watermelon.

"It's not real red," she said.

Pellam asked the salesgirl, "Where do you get watermelon in October?"

"Oh, from up north."

Pellam said to Nina, "It's Eskimo watermelon."

"Farmers' Market," the girl said, pointing in a direction he assumed must be north.

Pellam asked for two forks and napkins.

Outside, they walked up the street spitting seeds into their hands and sticking them into the dirt in the big concrete planters along the street.

"Next year," Nina said, "we'll have to come back and harvest the crop."

Pellam didn't really think about Nina in terms of next year.

A dark car cruised past slowly and Pellam had the vague impression of eyes staring at him. The fork stopped halfway to his mouth and he watched the car as it sped up and continued on.

They wandered out of downtown.

Nina stopped and stared in the window of a store that sold shoes encrusted with costume jewelry- stones, glitter, fake gold. Why on earth would anyone in Maddox buy a pair of shoes like this?

"Wicked Witch of the North," he said.

Nina said, "It was the West."

Maybe she does like movies after all.

"Oh," Pellam said. "I only like the tornado scene."

"When I was a little girl, I used to think it was 'wicker' witch. We had a wicker patio set. I wouldn't sit in it. I thought it,

I don't know, was made out of witches."

Pellam smiled. She took his arm and brushed her cheek against his shoulder.

"I finally outgrew it. I' still don't like wicker, though. You get splinters in your butt."

He said, "You look good when you smile."

Which seemed to be just the words to deflate it. But she brought a facsimile back to her mouth and said, 'Thank you."

That was when they found the factory.

Pellam noticed a redbrick building set back a long ways from the road. The grounds were filled with overgrown trees, brush, and rampant kudzu so thick you could only see the top of the tall, square building. It had high, gracefully arched windows decorated with iron grillwork. The setting sun was visible through them and lit the interior with broad shafts of ruddy illumination.

Pellam started up the path. Nina followed.

The Maddox Machinery and Die Company had been abandoned for years. The building had an odd regalness about it, something castlelike, complete with parapets and a dip in the surrounding ground that was probably a collapsed septic system but could pass for a moat. The bottom six or seven feet of the outer walls were marked with halfhearted graffiti, and the metal door was thickly posted with several generations of No Trespassing signs. Metal Art Deco designs, in the shape of lilies and vines and the company's name were set in concrete around the door.

Nina walked up silently behind him. She looked up at the facade. "What a neat old building."

Pellam tried the front door. The lock was long broken though the double wooden panels were chained. He pushed inward as far as he could, separating them by two feet then he worked his way inside underneath the chain.

"Do you think you should?" Nina asked as his boot vanished into the doorway. She timidly followed.

Inside, Pellam paused on the oak floor, worn wavy by years of workers' boots and hand trucks. To the right were the darkened factory offices. Banisters and windows were done in streamlined aluminum, and in faded murals muscular laborers towered high above them. To the left through an arched doorway was a huge, cavernous space, now lit red by the intense sun glowing on the yellowed, greasy windows. The ceiling was nearly forty feet high.

Nina walked up behind Pellam.

"This is too good to pass up," he said. "I thought the field was all you needed." "This'd be for another film I've got in mind.

I'll get the Polaroid. Be right back."

After Pellam ducked out of the chained door Nina walked to the back wall, where she had seen in the shadows what she believed was an antique calendar and some other artifacts that might be worth swiping before the movie crews descended.

It was not a calendar, though, just a poster of the Bee Gees, which would have been dated circa 1975. She guessed some lads had used the building as a clubhouse years ago. She found an old, empty tin of cat food. A dozen beer bottles, burnt matches. Nina walked into a large, windowless office in which rested a piece of sleek green machinery like a huge sewing machine. She squinted into the darkness and poked around in drawers and cabinets for ten minutes. She found a beautiful antique orange crate but it was too big to get through the chained door.

Clouds suddenly obsdured the sun, leaving Nina in gray shadow. She felt a chill and, with it, a sense of uneasiness. She started walking quickly back to the front of the factory. She stopped. In the dust on the floor in front of her Nina could see her own footsteps, leading back to the poster and the machine room. And there were Pellams sharp-toed boot prints retreating through the arched front doorway.

She saw another set of prints too.

They disappeared into the back of the building, through the offices. They had been made very recently.

Nina gasped in fear and looked at the arched doorway, beyond which was the chained front door. One hundred feet away. And fifty or sixty of those feet led past darkened doorways.

"John?" she called.

There was no answer.

The panic zipped along her spine and seized the back of her neck. Tears popped into her eyes. Step by step, slowly, to keep the fear at bay, she started toward the door. Her jaw began to quiver.

Ten feet, fifteen. Twenty.

She heard a noise, perhaps a footstep.

"John?" The terrified echo of her own voice came back to her from three directions, and it seemed as if there were a trio of ghosts in the room, mocking her. The tears came more quickly. She forced herself with all her will to walk slowly.

Then Nina was almost at the front door arch. Beyond it she could see the glint of the chain on the door. This reassured her and the terror diminished. Pellam would be returning any minute.

She could-

The hand slipped around her mouth and held her firmly. She tasted tobacco and salt. Another arm curled around the chest and yanked her off her feet. The man threw her to the ground, the air knocked from her lungs. She uttered a painful moan. Her breath came in small gasps. Then he was kneeling beside her, his face very close to hers.