“No, he dropped us off and went in to work.”
“On a Sunday?”
“He owns his own yard.”
It was as good a set-up for a punch line as he had ever heard, and he paused, searching for just the right one… and then it came to him that making wisecracks about Dean’s choice of work to Dean’s wife in front of Dean’s five-year-old might be ill-advised, and never mind that he and Harriet had once been best friends and the royal couple of the Die Laughing Comedy Collective their senior year in high school. Bobby said, “He does? Good for him.”
“I like the big gross tear in your face,” the little kid said, pointing at Bobby’s brow. Bobby had a nasty scalp wound, the skin laid open to the lumpy bone. “Didn’t you think the guy who made us into dead people was cool?”
Bobby had actually been a little creeped out by Tom Savini, who kept referring to an open book of autopsy photographs while applying Bobby’s makeup. The people in those pictures, with their maimed flesh and slack unhappy faces, were really dead, not getting up later to have a cup of coffee at the craft services table. Savini studied their wounds with a quiet appreciation, the same as any painter surveying the subject of his art.
But Bobby could see what the kid meant about how he was cool. With his black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, black beard, and memorable eyebrows—thick black eyebrows that arched sharply upward, like Dr. Spock or Bela Lugosi—he looked like a death metal rock god.
Someone was clapping their hands. Bobby glanced around. The director, George Romero, stood close to the bottom of the escalators, a bearish man well over six feet tall, with a thick brown beard. Bobby had noticed that many of the men working on the crew had beards. A lot of them had shoulder length hair too, and wore army-navy castoffs and motorcycle boots like Savini, so that they resembled a band of counterculture revolutionaries.
Bobby and Harriet and little Bob gathered with the other extras to hear what Romero had to say. He had a booming confident voice and when he grinned his cheeks dimpled, visible in spite of the beard. He asked if anyone present knew anything about making movies. A few people, Bobby included, raised their hands. Romero said thank God someone in this place does, and everyone laughed. He said he wanted to welcome them all to the world of big-budget Hollywood film-making, and everyone laughed at that too, because George Romero only made pictures in Pennsylvania, and everyone knew Dawn of the Dead was lower than low budget, it was a half-step above no-budget. He said he was grateful to them all for coming out today, and that for ten hours of grueling work, which would test them body and soul, they would be paid in cash, a sum so colossal he dare not say the number aloud, he could only show it. He held aloft a dollar bill, and there was more laughter. Then Tom Savini, up on the second floor, leaned over the railing, and shouted, “Don’t laugh, that’s more than most of us are getting paid to work on this turkey.”
“Lots of people are in this film as a labor of love,” George Romero said. “Tom is in it because he likes squirting pus on people.” Some in the crowd moaned. “Fake pus! Fake pus!” Romero cried.
“You hope it was fake pus,” Savini intoned from somewhere above, but he was already moving away from the railing, out of sight.
More laughter. Bobby knew a thing or two about comic patter, and had a suspicion that this bit of the speech was rehearsed, and had been issued just this way, more than once.
Romero talked for a while about the plot. The recently dead were coming back to life; they liked to eat people; in the face of the crisis the government had collapsed; four young heroes had sought shelter in this mall. Bobby’s attention wandered, and he found himself looking down at the other Bobby, at Harriet’s boy. Little Bob had a long, solemn face, dark chocolate eyes and lots of thick black hair, limp and disheveled. In fact, the kid bore a passing resemblance to Bobby himself, who also had brown eyes, a slim face, and a thick untidy mass of black hair on his head.
Bobby wondered if Dean looked like him. The thought made his blood race strangely. What if Dean dropped in to see how Harriet and little Bobby were doing, and the man turned out to be his exact twin? The thought was so alarming it made him feel briefly weak—but then he remembered he was made-up like a corpse, blue-face, scalp wound. Even if they looked exactly alike they wouldn’t look anything alike.
Romero delivered some final instructions on how to walk like a zombie—he demonstrated by allowing his eyes to roll back in his head and his face to go slack—and then promised they’d be ready to roll on the first shot in a few minutes.
Harriet pivoted on her heel, turned to face him, her fist on her hip, eyelids fluttering theatrically. He turned at the same time, and they almost bumped into each other. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. They were standing too close to each other, and the unexpected physical proximity seemed to throw her. He didn’t know what to say either, all thought suddenly wiped from his mind. She laughed, and shook her head, a reaction that struck him as artificial, an expression of anxiety, not happiness.
“Let’s set, pardner,” she said. He remembered that when a skit wasn’t going well, and she got rattled, she sometimes slipped into a big drawling John Wayne impersonation on stage, a nervous habit he had hated then and that he found, in this moment, endearing.
“Are we going to have something to do soon?” little Bob asked.
“Soon,” she said. “Why don’t you practice being a zombie? Go on, lurch around for a while.”
Bobby and Harriet sat down at the edge of the fountain again. Her hands were small, bony fists on her thighs. She stared into her lap, her eyes blank, gaze directed inward. She was digging the toes of one bare foot into the toes of the other again.
He spoke. One of them had to say something.
“I can’t believe you’re married and you have a kid!” he said, in the same tone of happy astonishment he reserved for friends who had just told him they had been cast in a part he himself had auditioned for. “I love this kid you’re dragging around with you. He’s so cute. But then, who can resist a little kid who looks half-rotted?”
She seemed to come back from wherever she had been, smiled at him—almost shyly.
He went on, “And you better be ready to tell me everything about this Dean guy.”
“He’s coming by later. He’s going to take us out to lunch. You should come.”
“That could be fun!” Bobby cried, and made a mental note to take his enthusiasm down a notch.
“He can be really shy the first time he meets someone, so don’t expect too much.”
Bobby waved a hand in the air: pish-posh. “It’s going to be great. We’ll have lots to talk about. I’ve always been fascinated with lumber yards and—plywood.”
This was taking a chance, joshing her about the husband he didn’t know. But she smirked and said:
“Everything you ever wanted to know about two-by-fours but were afraid to ask.”
And for a moment they were both smiling, a little foolishly, knees almost touching. They had never really figured out how to talk to each other. They were always half-on-stage, trying to use whatever the other person said to set up the next punch-line. That much, anyway, hadn’t changed.
“God I can’t believe running into you here,” she said. “I’ve wondered about you. I’ve thought about you a lot.”