“I don’t care about any of that,” Wesley said. “I was reacting to something else.”
Evelyn sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees while Wesley took off his shirt and sat down next to her on an aluminum beach chair. His skin was shockingly pale next to hers, hanging loose and old from his ribs, never to be firm again.
“I might go to New York,” he said, looking out over the railing toward the parallel line of the horizon. “There’s private financing available for the Indian film, at least according to my agent. Perhaps you want to stay here or go on a trip. Maybe Yucatán or Guatemala. You haven’t seen any of the Aztec stuff. “
“You don’t want me with you,” she said flatly.
He avoided her eyes and she stood up and walked over to the edge of the deck. Then she bent down and picked up the tape deck where the Beach Boys were singing “Fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy takes the T-bird away!” and hurled it over the cliff where it shattered on the rocks below. When she turned to face him, her eyes were openly angry. He had never seen her lose control this way and he watched her closely, grateful for the small rush of anxiety that had awakened inside him, for the hint, however slight, that the wall surrounding his heart might have a few expanding cracks in it.
“I don’t want you involved in my internal melodramas,” he said, trying to provoke her even more.
But she didn’t back down. “You use dead or alive like a club. Maybe there’s something simple that you’ve forgotten.”
“Are you telling me to shit or get off the pot?”
“I’m telling you that when you married me you didn’t know whether you could go on. That’s what you said then; that you had had this heart attack, that you were burned out and had outlived yourself. I thought you took me with you because you knew I would help you when your time came.”
She watched him now, because she had never talked to him like this. She expected him to turn away and he did, but then he turned back to her, his eyes strangely moist and alive.
“What was in the deal for you when you took up with me?” he asked.
“I would have taken any deal to get out of Labrador, not that you’re just any deal. I was thirty and I thought I was in my slot forever. The most I could hope for was a trip to St. John’s or Labrador City. I never told you I was going to marry someone else. Way before you found me. When you asked me to go with you I had to go. He understood, but if he had run into you he would have killed you. You know how those boys from Goose Bay are.”
“Do you have regrets?” he asked.
“Not too many, most of the time. He married someone else and went to Sudbury to work in the mines. I thought I loved him. That’s something else I learned I don’t know anything about.”
“Would you come to Labrador with me?”
“Probably.”
“Because you owe me?”
“I suppose.”
He sighed. His legs hurt and his feet were cold and he was very tired. Evelyn leaned over and rested her head on his lap.
“Did you read Walker’s script?” he asked.
“Yes, and then I gave it to Sam and he read it. He says Walker’s off the deep end and you’re crazy to indulge him.”
“What do you think?”
“I’d like to know what comes next.”
He shut his eyes, but before he could fall asleep she had helped him into the bedroom. Lying naked on the bed, he felt her lips wander softly over his weary and aching body and then her fingers massaged the soles of his feet until he slept. She lay beside him for a long time before she dressed and took a taxi into town, where she spent the afternoon shopping for a new tape deck and finishing what she had begun with the Frenchman from Mexico City.
15
AFTER A.D. had dressed Walker’s wound and they had gotten stoned enough to sleep for a few hours, they drove down off the high mountain plateau in the early morning light and headed north toward Salt Lake City, where they stopped at a Holiday Inn on the outside of town. A.D. ordered a few drinks from room service and checked Walker’s wound again, bathing and hovering over him like an anxious nurse, so much so that Walker finally yelled that he wanted to sleep. A.D. sighed, tucking him in once more before he went outside for a walk alongside the state highway that shot like a smoky arrow into the heart of the city. He was filled with terror that he might have been trying to kill Walker. He had always managed to abuse or self-destruct his own ambitions as if a stubborn force inside him was determined not to let him ever switch tracks or hustle a new deal. Walking around the front of a newly built supermarket, he knelt down on the asphalt behind several produce trucks and vowed then and there not to blow this opportunity or betray himself, no matter what. When he returned to the motel Walker was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed fully dressed.
“Let’s head for Nevada,” Walker said. “We have a few thousand to play with. Maybe we’ll get lucky and walk away from movieland.”
“No way,” A.D. said with sudden vehemence. “The only way you’re going to walk away from movieland is when we complete the deal.”
“Let’s just get to Nevada,” Walker repeated, hobbling for the door.
In three hours they had crossed through the shimmering white hallucinations of the Great Salt Lake Desert and pulled into the parking lot of the Red Garter Casino, a few hundred yards across the state line. After they had checked into a room, they went directly to the tables. They played steadily and morosely, oblivious of time, occasionally passing each other without expression as they changed tables or took a break in the brightly lit twenty-four-hour luncheonette. Once Walker stepped outside to smell the cool desert air. It was night and above him a hundred-and-fifty-foot red, white, and blue cowboy pointed a finger toward the action, signaling “This Is the Place” to a convoy of four Mack trucks groaning in from the desert. The parking lot was alive with cowboys and Indians and Winnebagos from every state. Walker felt an urge to join a herd of tourists filing into a Greyhound bus after an hour’s pit stop in front of the slot machines. He had enough money. He could get off after a few hundred miles, maybe in Oregon. Rent a little house, phone it in to the old man simple and straight, just the facts about Clem. But of course he went back inside. He lost steadily and when he was down to his last two hundred dollars he went back to the room and tried to sleep.
A.D., on the other hand, was on a roll. He had moved around the room, stopping here and there, shooting a little craps, dropping a hundred, winning two, not doing anything at roulette, breaking even at blackjack. Then he got reckless and bored at roulette and hit a couple of straight numbers and he was a grand up. He changed from five- to twenty-five- to fifty-dollar chips and kept on playing. He lost and then he won and won again, big, twenty one-hundred-dollar chips on number twenty-three. It was as if the hand of God had reached down and dropped a gold chip on his lap. He was up fourteen grand. He decided to keep four for himself and give the rest to Walker as payment for the next installment of the script, making himself the producer. He would have Walker sign a paper saying all three of them owned the script equally. This was his move. He would have half a script credit along with the producer’s credit, and if Wesley pulled out they could take it to a younger director more able to deal with action. Because if there was one thing A.D. felt the script needed it was action. Or another character. If there was another person along, another girl perhaps, a friend of Lacey’s that Jim could fall in love with, then sex would be better and more complicated and there would be more angles. Later he would deal with all of that. For now he would just shine it on.