Night Film

12

I followed Hopper up the stairs of a dingy Ludlow Street walk-up and into his apartment, #3B. Slinging his gray coat over a beach chair, he disappeared into a back bedroom — there didn’t seem to be anything in there except a mattress on the floor — leaving me by the front door.

The place was tiny, with the woozy, stale air of a flophouse.

The sagging green couch along the far wall was covered with an old blue comforter where someone had recently crashed — maybe literally. In a plate on the coffee table there was an outbreak of cigarette butts; next to that, rolling papers, a packet of Golden Virginia tobacco, an open package of Chips Ahoy! a mangled copy of Interview, some emaciated starlet on the cover. His green HAS-BEEN T-shirt from last night was flung on the floor along with a white sweatshirt and some other clothes. (As if to expressly avoid this pile, a woman’s pair of black pantyhose clung for dear life to the back of the other beach chair.) A girl had kissed one wall while wearing black lipstick. An acoustic guitar was propped in the corner beside an old hiker’s backpack, the faded red nylon covered with handwriting.

I stepped over to read some of it: If this gets lost return it with all contents to Hopper C. Cole, 90 Todd Street, Mission, South Dakota 57555.

Hopper Cole from South Dakota. He was a hell of a long way from home.

Scribbled above that, beside a woman named Jade’s 310 phone number and a hand-drawn Egyptian eye, were the words: “But now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it’s heading my way. Sometimes I grow so tired. But I know I’ve got one thing I got to do. Ramble on.”

So he was a Led Zeppelin fan.

Hopper emerged from the bedroom carrying a manila envelope. With a wary glance, he handed it to me.

It was addressed to: HOPPER COLE, 165 LUDLOW STREET, 3B—the address scribbled in all caps in black permanent marker. It had been stamped and mailed from New York, NY, on October 10 of this year. I recognized it as the last day Ashley Cordova had been seen alive by the girl in the Four Seasons coat check. The return address featured no name, reading simply 9 MOTT STREET—the address of the warehouse where Ashley’s body had been found.

Surprised, I looked at Hopper, but he said nothing, only watched me intently, as if it were some sort of test.

I pulled out what was inside. It was a stuffed monkey, old, with matted brown fur, stitching coming out of its eyes, a red felt mouth half gone, its neck limp, probably from some child’s hand clamped around it. The whole thing was encrusted with dried red mud.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’ve never seen it before?” he asked.

“No. Whose is it?”

“No clue.” He moved away, yanking aside the blue comforter and sitting on the couch.

“Who sent it?”

“She did.”

“Ashley.”

He nodded and then, hunching forward, grabbed the package of rolling papers off the table, pulled one out.

“Why?” I asked.

“Some kinda sick joke.”

“Then you were friends with her.”

“Not exactly,” he said, reaching across the table for his gray coat, fumbling in the pockets for the pack of Marlboros. “Not friends. More like acquaintances. But even that’s a stretch.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

He sat back down, tapping out a cigarette. “Camp.”

“Camp?”

“Yeah.”

“What camp?”

“Six Silver Lakes Wilderness Therapy in Utah.” He glanced at me, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he began to dissect the cigarette, peeling the filter away from the paper. “You’ve heard of this first-class institution.”

“No.”

“Then you’re missing out. If you have kids, I highly recommend it. Especially if you want your kid to grow up to be a great American maniac.”

I didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “You met Ashley there?”

He nodded.

“When?”

“I was seventeen. She was, like, sixteen. Summer of ’03.”

That made Hopper twenty-five.

“It’s one of these juvenile therapy scams,” he went on, sprinkling a pinch of the Golden Virginia tobacco along the rolling paper. “They advertise help for your troubled teen by staring at the stars and singing ‘Kumbaya.’ Instead, it’s a bunch of bearded nutjobs left in charge of some of the craziest kids I’ve ever seen in my life — bulimics, nymphos, cutters trying to saw their wrists with the plastic spoons from lunch. You wouldn’t believe the shit that went on.” He shook his head. “Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of wilderness. They needed reincarnation. To die and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking weed. That’d be preferable to the agony they were in just by being alive.”

He said this with such pissed-off defiance, I gathered he wasn’t talking about any of the campers but about himself. I stepped around the white sweatshirt on the floor to one of the beach chairs — the one with pantyhose climbing up the back — and sat down.

“Who knows where they found the counselors,” Hopper went on, tucking the filter into the end, leaning down to lick the paper. “Rikers Island, probably. There was this one fat Asian kid, Orlando? They tortured him. He was some kind of born-again Baptist, so he was always talking about Jesus. They made him go without eating. Kid had never gone ten minutes without a Twinkie in his life. He couldn’t keep up, got heat stroke. Still, they kept telling him to find his inner strength, ask God for help. God was busy. Didn’t have anything for him. The whole thing was Lord of the Flies on steroids. I still get nightmares.”

“Why were you there?” I asked.

He sat back against the couch, amused. He stuck the hand-rolled cigarette into the side of his mouth, lighting it. He inhaled, wincing, and exhaled in a long stream of smoke.

“My uncle,” he said, stretching his legs out. “I’d been traveling with my mom in South America for this missionary cult shit she was into. I ran the fuck away. My uncle lives in New Mexico. Hired some goon to track me down. I was crashing at a friend’s in Atlanta. One morning I’m eating Cheerios. This brown van pulls up. If the Grim Reaper had wheels it’d be this thing. No windows except two in the back door, behind which you just knew some innocent kid had been kidnapped and, like, decapitated. Next thing I know I’m in the back with a male nurse.” He shook his head. “If that dude was a licensed nurse, I’m a fucking congressman.”

He paused to take another drag of his cigarette.

“They took me to base camp in Springdale. Zion National Park. You train there for two weeks with your fellow fucked-up campers, making Native American dream catchers and learning how to scrub a toilet with your spit—real vital life skills, you know. Then the group sets off on a ten-week trek through the wilderness, camping at six different lakes. With every lake you’re supposed to be inching closer to God and self-worth, only the reality is you’re inching closer to becoming a psychopath ’cuz of all the mind-fucking shit you’ve been exposed to.”

“And Ashley was one of the campers,” I said.

He nodded.

“Why was she there?”

“No clue. That was the big mystery. She didn’t show up till the day we were setting out on the ten-week hike. The night before, counselors announced there was a last-minute arrival. Everyone was pissed because that meant whoever it was had been able to bypass basic training, which made Full Metal Jacket look like Sesame Street.” He paused, shaking his head, then, eyeing me, he smiled faintly. “When we saw her though, we were down.”

“Why?”

He gazed at the table. “She was hot.”

He seemed on the verge of adding something, but instead leaned forward, ashing the cigarette.

“Who dropped her off?” I asked.

He looked up at me. “Don’t know. Next morning, breakfast, she was just there. Sitting by herself at one of the picnic tables in the corner, eating a piece of cornbread. She was all packed and ready to go, red bandanna in her hair. The rest of us were totally disorganized. Running around like deranged chickens to get ready. Finally we left.”

“And you introduced yourself,” I suggested.

He shook his head, tapping the cigarette on a plate. “Nope. She kept to herself. Obviously, everyone knew who her father was and that she was the little girl from To Breathe with Kings, so people were all over her. But she iced everyone out, said nothing beyond yes, no.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t like she was sulking. She just wasn’t into making friends. Pretty soon there was resentment, especially from the girls, about all the get-outta-jail-free cards she got from the counselors. Every night around the campfire we had to wax poetic about all the shit we’d done to end up there. Burglary. Suicide attempts. Drugs. The rap sheets of some of these kids, longer than War and Peace. Ash never had to say a thing. They’d skip over her, no explanation. The only clue was this ACE bandage on her hand, which she had when she first arrived. Couple of weeks into the hike she took it off and there was a bad burn mark. She never said what it was from.”

I was surprised to hear this. That very burn mark, along with her foot tattoo, were mentioned in the missing-person’s report as her only identifiable markings.

“Two days into the hike we made a bet,” Hopper continued. “First kid to sustain a conversation with Ashley that lasted longer than fifteen minutes would get the two hits of ecstasy one of the kids from L.A., Joshua, had smuggled in taped into the hollow shoelace tip of his hiking boot.” He tilted his head back, quickly exhaling smoke at the ceiling. “I decided to hold back, get my game together, let the others jihad themselves. And they did. Ashley blew them all off. One by one.”

“Until you,” I said.

It was easy to imagine: two gorgeous teenagers finding each other in the wilderness of adolescence, two orchids blooming in a desert.

“Just the opposite, actually,” he said. “She blew me off, too.”

I stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “About a week after everyone else had crashed and burned, I made my move. Ashley always walked in the back, so I did. I asked where she was from. She said New York. After that it was just one-word replies and a nod. I struck out.”

He stubbed the cigarette out on the coffee table and tossed it on top of the other butts, sitting back against the couch.

“Ashley didn’t say anything to anyone for ten weeks?” I asked.

“Well, she did. But nothing more than the bare bones of conversation. Everyone broke down at some point, had their fifteen-minute Shawshank Redemption where they howled at the sky. The hiking, the counselors, voyeuristic fucks, they made you dredge up all this shit from your past. Everyone broke. Half of it was real and half of it was to get them off your back. Everyone took their Oscar-nominated turn, howling about parents, how all they wanted was to be loved. Except Ashley. She never cried, never complained. Not once.”

“Did she ever mention her family?”

“No.”

“What about her father?”

“Nothing. She was like the Sphinx. That’s what we called her.”

“So that was it?” I asked.

He shook his head, clearing his throat. “Three weeks into the hike, Orlando, the fat Asian kid, was a mess. He was so sunburned he had blisters all over his face, which the counselors dealt with by handing him a bottle of calamine lotion. Crusty pink shit all over his face, crying all the time, he looked like a leper. So one night Joshua slips him one of the pills of X, a gift, you know, to lift his spirits. He must have taken it when we started out the next morning, because at nine A.M. suddenly Orlando was out of his goddamn mind, hugging people, telling them they were beautiful, eyes dilated, shuffling his feet like he was John Travolta in a twist contest. At one point we lost him, had to backtrack, and found him twirling around a field, smiling at the sky. Hawk Feather, the head counselor, went apeshit.”

“Hawk Feather?” I repeated.

He smirked. “The counselors insisted we address each other with Native American tribe names even though most of us were white, fat, and about as of the earth as a Big Mac. Hawk Feather, one a’ these tightly wound Christian assholes, he hauled Orlando away, demanding to know what he was on and where he got the drugs. Orlando was so ripped all he did was laugh and say, ‘It’s just a little Tylenol,’ over and over. ‘It’s just Tylenol.’ ”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Hopper smiled, too, though the amusement quickly left his face.

“That night, everyone was scared shitless,” he went on, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “We didn’t want to know what Hawk Feather was gonna do to Orlando or the rest of us on his mission to find out who’d smuggled in the X. That night, Hawk Feather announces if someone doesn’t come forward to explain who brought the ecstasy he was gonna make our lives hell. Everyone was scared. No one said a word. But I knew it was just a matter of time before someone ratted out Joshua. Suddenly, though, this low voice announces, ‘It was me.’ We all turn around. No one could believe it.”

He fell silent, still amazed, even now.

“It was Ashley,” I said, when he didn’t continue.

He glanced at me, his face solemn. “Yeah. At first, Hawk Feather didn’t believe her. She’d had all this preferential treatment. But then she produces the second pill of X, which somehow she stole from Joshua’s hiking boot. She says she’ll accept whatever punishment he had in mind.” He shook his head. “Hawk Feather went ballistic. He grabbed her, hauled her away from the campsite. He ended up taking her to some far-off site in the middle of nowhere and made her sleep there by herself in just her sleeping bag, totally alone. She wasn’t allowed to come back in the morning till he went and got her.”

“No one challenged this guy?” I asked. “What about the other counselors?”

He shrugged. “They were afraid of him. We were beyond civilization. It was like laws didn’t exist.” He reached forward and snatched the pack of Marlboros off the table, tapping out another cigarette.

“The other part of her punishment was putting up all of our tents and collecting firewood. We weren’t allowed to help. When she was slow, Hawk Feather would scream at her. She’d just stare him down with this look on her face, like she couldn’t care less, like she was so much stronger than him, which only made him more pissed. Finally, he let up. One of the other counselors warned him he was going too far. So, after the seven nights of sleeping on her own, she was allowed to join the rest of us at the campsite.”

He smiled, an unreadable look on his face. He then shook his head and lit the cigarette, exhaling.

“The first night she’s back we all wake up at three in the morning because Hawk Feather is screaming like he’s being stabbed. He runs out of his tent in nothing but his underwear, this fat fuck stammering like a child, crying that there’s a rattlesnake in his sleeping bag. Everyone thought it was a joke, that he’d had a nightmare. But one of the female counselors, Four Crows, she went and got it, unzipped it right in front of us, shaking it out. Sure enough, a rattlesnake, five feet long, fell onto the ground and whipped right across the campsite, disappearing into the dark. Hawk Feather, white as a sheet, about to piss his pants, turned and stared right at Ashley. And she stared back. He didn’t say a fuckin’ word, but I know he believed she put it in there. We all did.”

He fell silent for a moment, gazing out into the room.

“After that, he left us alone. And Orlando?” He paused, swallowing. “He made it. His sunburn healed. He stopped crying. He became, like, this hero.” He sniffed, wiping his nose. “When we finally made it back to base camp, we were supposed to have one night all together where we held hands and marveled at our accomplishments — which was more like thanking God we hadn’t died. ’cause that was the thing, the whole time, death was a possibility. Like, it was always waiting for us beyond the rocks. And the person that prevented it was Ashley.”

I couldn’t see his expression — he was now staring at the floor, hair in his eyes. “About an hour before dinner,” he went on, “I looked out the cabin window and saw her climbing into a black SUV. She was leaving early. I was disappointed. I’d wanted to try and talk to her. But it was too late. A driver collected her stuff, put it in the back, and they drove off. It was the last time I saw her.”

He lifted his head, staring at me challengingly, yet saying nothing.

“You never heard from her again?”

He shook his head, pointing the cigarette at the envelope in my hand.

“Not until that.”

“How do you know she sent it?”

“It’s her handwriting. And the return address is where …” He shrugged. “I thought she was messing with my head. I broke in a couple of nights ago, wondering if there was some kind of message or sign in there. But I haven’t found anything.”

I held up the monkey. “What’s the significance?”

“I’ve never seen it before. I told you.” He stubbed out his cigarette.

“You have no theory as to why she’d send it?”

He glared at me. “I was kinda hoping you would. You’re the reporter.”

The red mud encrusting the stuffed animal looked like the kind found out west, certainly throughout Utah, which made me wonder if perhaps it had belonged to one of the kids at the camp — maybe Hopper himself. But he looked more apt to carry around a worn-out copy of On the Road as a security blanket.

It was helpful, his insight into Ashley’s character. It had allowed her to come briefly into focus, revealing her to be a kind of ferocious avenging angel, a persona entirely in keeping with the way she played music. I couldn’t fathom why she mailed Hopper the monkey on the day she died — if it had been she.

Hopper appeared to have fallen into an irritated mood, slumped way down on the couch, arms crossed, his faded white T-shirt — gifford’s famous ice cream, it read — twisted around him. He reminded me of a teenage hitchhiker I’d once met in El Paso; we were the only two at a diner counter at the crack of dawn. After we got to talking, swapping stories, he said goodbye, hitching a ride with the driver of a BP oil truck. Later, I got up to pay my bill only to realize he’d stolen my wallet. Never trust a charismatic drifter.

“Maybe there’s something inside,” I said, turning the stuffed animal over. I took out my switchblade, cutting an incision down the back of the monkey. I pulled out the stuffing, yellowed and crusty, feeling around the inside. There was nothing.

I realized my cell was buzzing, the number a 407 area code.

“Hello?”

“May I please speak to Mr. Scott McGrath?”

It was a woman, her voice crisp and musical.

“This is he.”

“It’s Nora Halliday. From the coat check? I’m at Forty-fifth and Eleventh Avenue. The Pom Pom Diner. Can you come? We need to talk.”

“Forty-fifth and Eleventh. Give me fifteen minutes.”

“Okay.” She hung up. Shaking my head, I stood up.

“Who was that?” Hopper asked me.

“A coat-check girl, last person to see Ashley alive. Yesterday she nearly had me arrested. Today? She wants to talk. I have to go. In the meantime, I’ll hold on to the monkey.”

“That’s okay.” He snatched it back, giving me a wary look, before shoving it back into the envelope and disappearing with the package into the bedroom.

“Thanks for your time,” I called over my shoulder. “I’ll be in touch if I hear anything.” But suddenly Hopper was slipping out into the hall right behind me, shrugging on his gray coat.

“Cool,” he said. He locked the door and took off down the stairs.

“Where are you off to?”

“Forty-fifth and Eleventh. Gotta go meet a coat-check girl.”

As his footsteps echoed through the stairwell, I berated myself for mentioning where I was headed. I worked solo, always had.

But then — I started down the stairs — maybe it wasn’t such a terrible idea to team up with him, this once. There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women. And in my experience with that thorny subject — which included decades of trial and error, throwing out countless years’ worth of shoddy results (Cynthia), the sad realization I’d never be a leader in the field, just another middling scientist — they really had only one identifiable constant: Around guys like Hopper, icebergs turned to puddles.

“Fine,” I shouted. “But I’m doing the talking.”