Popcorn

Chapter Sixteen

Bruce swung round and recoiled. In doing so he dug an elbow into Brooke’s stomach. She yelped in pain. Despite the terror of the situation she could not help but protest: ‘Be careful, for Christ’s sake.’

Bruce didn’t apologize – he was too surprised, too scared. He allowed himself a momentary crumb of hope. ‘Brooke, do you know this guy? Is this part of your joke thing?’ But even as he said it, he knew that this was no joke.

‘I do not know this man, Bruce.’ Brooke’s voice betrayed her status as his partner in terror.

Neither she nor Bruce could think of anything more to say. The three of them just stared at each other. Wayne brought the gun down from his shoulder so that it hung casually from his hand, pointing towards the luxurious rug. He had a pistol stuck in the waistband of his jeans and another machinegun slung across his back; he also had a huge hunting knife at his belt. So heavily armed was he that it would not have surprised a casual observer to be told that he had a hand grenade clamped between his buttocks, a bazooka lodged behind his ear and the nuclear button hidden in the holdall he carried in his nongun hand.

Wayne took a step towards the couch and, leaning over, stared hard at Bruce. He put his face right into Bruce’s, drinking in every detail at extremely close quarters. Bruce held his ground, but he had never in his life felt so uncomfortable or so intimidated.

After what seemed like a whole minute (which it was), Wayne whistled slowly, as if unable to believe what he saw.

‘I don’t believe this. I do not befuckin’lieve this! SheeeeIT!’ Wayne exclaimed, shouting the final expletive as he turned away from Bruce in his wonderment. ‘I mean I knew it was the right house n’ all on account of the scripts and stuff in your bathroom, but I still can’t believe it… I am actually here, I am actually meeting Bruce Delamitri. Bruce Delafuckin’mitri. The man! I am talking about the fuckin’ MAN here!’

He dropped the holdall and shook Bruce’s hand hard. Bruce was still sitting half on top of Brooke, so all three of them shook slightly with the force of it. ‘I can not tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you, sir. Scout!’ Wayne shouted. ‘C’mon in here and say Hi. Oh yes, this is a real thrill, sir. This is awesome. Scout, get your dumb ass in here right now! Don’t make me come get you, now!’

Scout appeared nervously in the doorway. Her hair was tousled at the back from having just had sex, her cotton print dress gaped open a little at her breast from hurried dressing. Her bare toes were twitching again at the carpet, still unused as they were to such a luxurious sensation. There was a pistol at her hip, a huge pistol, a Magnum or something like that. It seemed to have been chosen deliberately to accentuate the smallness and birdlike, girlish quality of her body. Scout also carried a machinegun, hanging from her hand as a little girl might hold a teddy bear. If she was trying to look like an innocent but sexy, childlike but womanly, vulnerable but dangerous, slightly imbalanced cutie pie, she was succeeding. If she wasn’t trying, she was a natural.

She stared at Brooke and Bruce with what seemed to be something approaching awe. It was almost as if she was more scared of them than they were of her. This was naturally not the case, but that was how it looked. Her big eyes were sad and troubled, and there was a hesitant, almost ingratiating, smile on her lips. She wanted them to like her. She raised a hand and nervously tried to arrange her hair.

‘Hi!’ She giggled nervously, embarrassedly even, as if she knew she’d been naughty but hoped they were pleased to see her anyway.

Bruce and Brooke could only stare.

‘C’mon in, hon. Join the party.’ Wayne was as brash and confident as Scout seemed reserved. She stayed where she was, rubbing one bare foot nervously against the opposite calf.

‘We messed up your sheets some,’ she said, ‘but you know, with modern detergents there shouldn’t be any problem.’

Wayne did not feel that this was the right note to strike. You do not introduce yourself to your new hosts by owning up to having just stained their sheets. ‘It don’t matter about no sheets, sugar. We can buy more sheets. This is Bruce Delamitri. You are looking at the man here. The man.’

Wayne gestured flamboyantly towards Bruce. He seemed to mean it friendly enough, but since the hand with which he gestured was holding a gun it was something of an alarming movement nevertheless.

Seeing Bruce recoil in terror, Scout hastened to reassure him. ‘ Wayne ’s a real big fan of your pictures, Mr Delamitri. He saw you on Coffee Time USA with Oliver and Dale yesterday, and he’s seen all your movies dozens of times… Me too, I like them for sure, but Wayne, he just loves them.’

‘Hey, Scout, quit it. I’ll bet Mr Delamitri gets real tired of people telling him all that stuff.’

A glimmer of something which, if not hope, was at least a positive and coherent thought crossed Bruce’s mind. There was a great deal in Wayne and Scout’s behaviour that Bruce recognized, that he had dealt with before. They were basically acting like a couple of fans, Scout shuffling her bare feet and casting shy sidelong glances at Brooke, while Wayne stood with his head held high in a ‘Hey, I know you’re famous but you’re just a regular guy like me’ pose. Bruce had met these couples a thousand times. The girl is all embarrassed, while the guy struts up to you and says, ‘I guess you really hate being bothered,’ and then proceeds to bother you. As if by ‘being bothered’ the guy means Bruce would hate to be bothered by schmucks and assholes, not by regular guys like himself. Bruce’s work had always attracted these chippy, arrogant male fans, the sort of person who asks for an autograph and then says, ‘You can have mine if you want,’ adding with a sneer, ‘Except you wouldn’t want it, would you, because I’m not famous, I suppose.’ As if Bruce had gone out and become a celebrity simply in order to score a cheap and easy point over a person who is clearly his equal if not a slightly better person than himself.

Oh yes, Bruce knew Wayne ’s tone of arrogant approbation; he had found the same thing in his face many times. What he was not used to was finding it heavily armed and having broken into his house.

‘Do you want money?’ Bruce found a voice of sorts. ‘I have money, about two thousand dollars in cash, and there’s some jewellery…’

Wayne raised one booted foot on to the coffee table and leant his weight upon his knee, bending towards Bruce, his boot crushing the residue of the white powder that Brooke had placed upon it. It would have made a good closeup for one of Bruce’s ironic moments, symbolizing virile, honest mayhem kicking aside pretentious decadence.

‘Mr Delamitri… May I call you Bruce?’

Bruce nodded. He hoped the nod was firm and dignified, politely showing that he was following events closely and considering his options. In fact he nodded like a toy dog on the rear shelf of a family saloon, a panicky movement which suggested that Wayne could call Bruce anusbreath if he wished, so long as Wayne refrained from killing him.

‘Bruce, we don’t want no money. We got money, we got more money than we can spend, and we don’t spend nothing anyway because we steal all our stuff. We just came around to visit with you. Is that OK? If we visit with you? How about we all sit down? Maybe we could have us a drink? Would that be OK? I like bourbon and Scout here’ll take anything sweet.’

Wayne stepped back to the couch opposite the one on which Bruce and Brooke still sat, and collapsed casually on to it. Scout joined him, but with none of his showy confidence. She perched on the edge of the cushion, as if anxious to show that she did not wish to intrude or be the cause of any inconvenience. Bruce got up and went to his drinks cabinet, leaving Brooke alone on the couch. She had been half lying on it since being disturbed in midembrace, and she seized the opportunity to sit upright and adjust her clothing. Brooke, like Scout, was barefoot and Bruce had been on the point of liberating her bosom from her dress when they were interrupted. She put her shoes back on and did her best to cover herself up. A highly revealing evening dress is not the most comfortable garment in which to confront armed intruders.

There was an embarrassed pause. Nobody knew what to say. Socially the situation could not have been more difficult.

Scout turned to Brooke in an effort to make polite conversation. She felt, perhaps rightly, that though she was a guest, the burden of social responsibility lay at least partly with her. ‘You’re Brooke Daniels aren’t you?’

It was like two people forced into conversation in a doctor’s waitingroom. Brooke’s face twitched in a reply of sorts; she was clearly in no mood for smalltalk.

‘Yes, you are,’ Scout continued. ‘I’d know you anytime from all the magazines you’ve been in… Vogue and Esquire and Vanity Fair… I love all that stuff, it’s so glamorous and nice… I’ve been in a magazine too…’

‘Sure, Scout, America ’s Most Wanted.’ Wayne laughed and slapped Scout’s thigh.

‘It’s a magazine! Isn’t it Brooke?… Brooke? It’s a magazine, isn’t it? America’s Most Wanted is a magazine, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it’s a magazine.’ Brooke’s throat was so dry she was surprised that the words came out.

‘Of course it’s a magazine, and I was in it and you said I looked cute, Wayne.’

‘You always look cute, honey. Don’t need no magazine to prove that.’

Bruce brought Wayne his bourbon. He had agonized over how much to pour. A lot? A little? Would Wayne be a violent drunk or a mellow one? If shitfaced, would Wayne start singing ‘Danny Boy’ and collapse, weeping, on Bruce’s shoulder, swearing they would be buddies for ever? Or would he puke up on his boots and spray the room with bullets? Bruce had eventually opted for rather a short measure, which he had attempted to pad out with ice. Wayne knocked it back in one, but to Bruce’s relief did not immediately ask for another.

‘Hear what I said, Bruce? I said Scout here’s cute enough for any damn magazine, and I’m right, ain’t I?

Bruce didn’t answer, preferring to make another attempt to establish Wayne ’s agenda. ‘Look… if you don’t want cash, I have a customized Lamborghini parked right outside and-’

‘Bruce, I don’t want your damn car.’ Wayne ’s voice was calm but suddenly sinister. He addressed his reply to the ice in the bottom of his glass. ‘Matter of fact, I got a car.’

‘I see.’

‘An American fuckin’ car. Made in the motor city USfuckin’A, out of sweat and American steel’ – Wayne ’s voice began to rise – ‘not some fuckin’ wop, faggot, greaseballbuilt pile of tin shit for queers! A Lamborghini! Bruce, I am surprised at you. When you drive a foreign car you are driving over American jobs.’

Bruce was silent. It did not seem the right time to discuss the relative merits of free trade and protectionism. He gave Scout her drink, thankful to have a diversion, even such a small one.

‘This is crème de menthe,’ he said. ‘It’s sweet.’

‘I love cocktails.’

Bruce returned to the drinks cabinet and collected two small bourbons for himself and Brooke. He sat down beside her on the couch, sipping at his; she did not touch hers.

Again an uncomfortable silence descended. Having so completely misfired with his last attempt, Bruce was reluctant to have another go at establishing what these lunatics wanted. Brooke had nothing to contribute either. It fell once more to Wayne and Scout to keep the nervous, desultory conversation going.

‘Why’d you do that Playboy spread, Brooke?’ Wayne asked. ‘I mean, I ain’t saying it wasn’t beautiful, because it was, but hell, I wouldn’t never let Scout do a thing like that. I’d kill her first, and Hugh fuckin’ Hefner too.’

‘Oh, come on now, Wayne,’ said Scout coyly. ‘As if anyone would ever want to see me in Playboy magazine!’

She was clearly fishing for compliments. Bruce wondered about attempting to ingratiate himself by assuring her that she was certainly centrefold material. He was glad he didn’t.

‘Sure they would, honey,’ Wayne said. ‘Oh yes they would. Excepting I wouldn’t let you do it, on account of the fact that my rule is that if a man even looks at you with lust in his eyes, I have to kill him. So if you was to be in Playboy I’d have to kill just about half the men in the United States.’

‘You’re getting there anyway, honey!’ Wayne and Scout laughed at this.

Wayne turned to Bruce as if to explain some small private joke. ‘Scout’s exaggerating of course, Bruce. Why, I bet I haven’t killed more than forty or fifty people.’

Again an embarrassed moment, as Scout’s laughter died away into silence.

‘So why’d you do it, Brooke?’ Wayne returned to his theme. ‘I’d really like to know.’

Brooke could only stare. It would have taken a less astute judge of character than she to have failed to notice that Wayne was unpredictable. She had noticed the traces of bruising on Scout’s leg where Wayne ’s marauding hand had pulled away her thin cotton skirt a little. Brooke decided that the more desirable of two deeply undesirable choices was to say nothing. Scout spoke for her. She knew the answer; she had read it in a magazine.

‘Brooke did it, Wayne, because being an incontrol woman does not mean denying one’s sensuality. Isn’t that what you said, Brooke? I read that.’

Brooke nodded.

‘She didn’t do it for men, Wayne, no matter what you and your barroom pals might think,’ Scout scolded. ‘She did it for herself because she is proud of her body and proud to be beautiful and there is nothing wrong or dirty in celebrating that. In fact, it’s an assertive thing to do, a feminist thing to do.’

Scout finished her little speech and turned, smiling, to Brooke, clearly hoping to have won her approval.

‘That’s right, um… Scout, it’s all those things.’

Wayne got up and helped himself to another drink. ‘Well, I guess that makes me feel a whole lot better about jerking off in the john over it, Brooke. I must confess, I never realized I was doing such a fine and empowering thing.’

Scout looked as though she wanted to die with embarrassment. But before she could apologize to Brooke, Wayne pressed on. ‘I want to ask Brooke something now, Scout, and I don’t want you getting mad at me. OK?’

‘Well, it depends on what you ask her, Wayne.’

‘What I want to ask is how’d those girls in Playboy magazine get their hair the way they do? It always looks so damn perfect.’

Brooke managed to steady her voice. ‘Well… you know, I guess it’s just a question of styling really. They use a lot of mousse and they backlight it and sometimes they put in extensions…’

‘Brooke, I do not mean that kind of hair.’

Scout’s pale skin blushed a deep red. She could not believe what her boyfriend was asking – and them guests in someone else’s house and all.

‘ Wayne!’ She punched his ribs.

‘Well I want to know!’ Wayne protested. ‘Ain’t never going to get a better chance to find out. I mean we tried shaving yours, didn’t we, sugar, and you just ended up like some kind of damn Mohican with a rash!’

Mortified, Scout turned to Brooke. ‘I am truly sorry, Brooke I-’

Wayne was not going to drop it. This was clearly a subject that had always bothered him. ‘But in Playboy magazine those girls just have a little tuft, like that was all that ever grew. It don’t look shaved or nothing. These are adult women, not little girls, but all they got’s a tiny little tuft. How’d they do that?’

Strangely, the turn the conversation had taken was no less embarrassing for the terrifying circumstances under which it was being conducted.

Scout stared at the carpet, clearly wishing that she could crawl under it and hide. Brooke simply did not know where to look. She tried to stare straight at Wayne to show she wasn’t scared, but unfortunately she was and so she didn’t have the nerve. She couldn’t look at Bruce – she had nothing to say to him, even with her eyes. In the end she leant back on the huge couch and looked at the ceiling. Between the two of them, Scout and Brooke had the room covered from top to bottom.

‘I said, how’d they do it Brooke?’ Wayne repeated, his voice hardening.

‘Well, Wayne one has a stylist.’

This was one of the funniest things Wayne had ever heard. ‘A stylist! A pussy hair stylist! Now that would be one hell of an occupation! Yes sir, I guess I could get to like that kind of work!’

‘ Wayne that is enough!’ Scout was mortified.

But Wayne did not care. In his opinion he was mining a rich comic seam. ‘Oh, yes, sir! I’d work weekends and all the overtime the boss’d give me. I’d be saying, “Can I shampoo that for you madam? And how about I massage in a little conditioner?” I’d work hard and get me my own salon… There’d be a whole row of women sitting reading magazines with little hair driers on their-’

‘I am not listening to this any more!’ Scout grabbed two cushions, held them to her ears and began to scream. ‘Aaaaaaahhhh!’

‘Oh come on, honey,’ Wayne pleaded through Scout’s shouting and his tears of laughter. ‘You cannot deny that the notion of a snatch stylist is hillfuckin’larious. I mean, would they talk to their clients while they worked? Say, “How was your vacation, ma’m?” and…’

But the more Wayne talked the more Scout screamed, adding drumming feet to her efforts to block out his comic monologue. The mad cacophony was enough to jerk Bruce out of the lethargy of terror. He strode across the room and plucked an internal phone from its bracket on the wall.

‘What you doing, boss?’ Wayne enquired, still smiling at his own wit.

‘I’m calling my security guard. He’s in the lodge at the gate. If you leave now, he won’t hurt you but if you harm us, he’ll kill you.’

‘He’ll kill me? Well ho, fuckin’ ho.’

Wayne levelled his gun at Bruce. For a moment Bruce believed his hour had come.

‘Bang!’ said Wayne, who was still in a merry mood. ‘You give that guard a call, Bruce. Yes sir. If it makes you feel better, you give that of boy a call.’

Bruce punched the button on the intercom and awaited a response. Scout took the opportunity to apologize to Brooke. She was still mortified over Wayne ’s comments.

‘Brooke, I am so sorry that Wayne has gotten to prying into your personal stuff. He does not understand that a woman likes to keep her special private places special and private.’

Bruce punched the button on the wall again. He was getting no reply. Wayne looked up from the gun with which he was still playing.

‘He ain’t answering you, Mr Delamitri. Maybe he can’t hear you… Here, let’s see if we can’t get him a little closer to the phone.’

Wayne and Scout were sitting together on the couch. The holdall he had been carrying when he entered was on the floor between his feet. Wayne reached his hand down into the bag.

If Bruce had been shooting the scene, he would probably have started on a two shot of Wayne and Scout, then taken a closeup on Wayne ’s hand and panned down with it as it disappeared into the bag. Perhaps he would then have covered himself in the edit by picking up a reaction shot from Scout, who knew what was in the bag; then back to Wayne ’s hand as it emerged from the bag pulling a severed head by the hair.

But Bruce was not shooting the scene. He was in it and his heart nearly stopped. He had to clutch at the wall to keep from fainting.

Brooke opened her mouth to scream but scarcely a sound came, only a rasping gasp, dry and painful. She felt as if in a dream, paralysed by a complete and immovable fear.

Wayne raised the head and held it next to his own.

It would have made another lovely two shot. The grotesque, blooddrained, deathhead and the handsome, grinning young face beside it.

‘Surprise!’ Wayne said, and he laughed.

There was a sheepish grin on Scout’s face too. Half pleased with the major effect her boyfriend was having, half apologetic and embarrassed, aware that they had done a very bad thing.

Wayne got up, still holding the head by the hair, and carried it across the room to where Bruce was standing. Bruce gasped and recoiled, backing himself against the wall, almost as if trying to force himself through it.

‘Huh huh huh.’ Bruce tried to speak but it was as much as he could do to draw breath. He still held the intercom phone in his hand, although so lifeless was his grip it was surprising that the phone had not fallen. Wayne took it from Bruce’s numbed grasp and held it up to the ear of the severed head.

‘Hallo! Hallo!’ Wayne shouted. ‘Oh Mr Security Guard!… He don’t hear so good, does he, Bruce?’

Wayne let the phone drop and held the head up so that its face was in front of his own, so close that their noses were almost touching.

‘Hey! You hear me?’ Wayne shouted into the dead face at the top of his voice. ‘The guy who pays your salary wants to talk to you, you fuckin’ jerk!’

The head swung about on its hair. Wayne turned its face away from his in disgust.

‘How much did you pay this guy, Mr Delamitri? Was he expensive? Because if he was you are being ripped off, Bruce my friend. He wasn’t worth shit as a guard. He just sat there in his hut with his big dog and we crept up behind him and killed him.’

Scout looked across at Brooke. ‘We didn’t kill the dog.’

The little caravanpark store in the redwood forest turned blue then red then blue again then red.

There was no particular call for the police car to be so garishly illuminated as it pulled up outside the shop. It was scarcely dawn yet and there had been no other traffic on the gravel road leading through the woods from the Interstate. Cops, however, will be cops. The few guests slumbering in the darkened trailers were lucky they hadn’t turned on the siren.

Astonishingly, it was the storekeeper himself who had raised the alarm. Wayne had shot him only once and that had been in the shoulder. The force of the impact had spun the victim back through the open door and into the parlour behind, and Wayne could not be bothered climbing over the counter to finish the job.

The storekeeper was lucky. Such is the terrible damage done by modern weapons that even a shoulder wound can be deadly. The man’s flesh, however, was old and weak and put up little resistance to the bullet as it passed through his body. In fact, the projectile had caused nearly as little damage on its exit as it had on its entry. Nevertheless, there had been considerable loss of blood, and the old man, who lived alone, had lain semiconscious on the floor in front of the television for several hours before summoning the strength to crawl to the phone. The telerecord of the Oscars ceremony had been playing throughout, and the old man’s troubled dreams and hallucinations had been further disturbed by talk of legs of fire.

While waiting for the arrival of the ambulance (which did deploy its siren and woke everybody up), the police questioned the storekeeper. They soon realized that he was another victim of the celebrated Mall Murderers, who were clearly no longer restricting their activities to malls.

‘A young man and a scrawny kid of a girl,’ one of the officers said into his radio. ‘Same description as at that motel this morning… All they took was some Jack Daniels, some cigarettes and some pretzels… oh yeah, and one of those maps of the movie stars’ homes… I don’t know why. Maybe they wanted to go visit Bruce Delamitri and congratulate him on his Oscar.’