Cross Country Murder Song (13 page)

The stranger was saying something to the girl, he was yelling, waving the gun around, someone's beeper was going off. The stranger looked at him, it was his beeper. He waved weakly, tried to form an apology for the interruption and then for a moment there was stillness between them, the stranger regarding him almost quizzically, his head cocked like a parakeet's. Then he calmly looked away, levelled his gun at the girl and fired, the world fragmenting suddenly in a smoky red cloud. He heard screaming, the sound of people running, more gunshots, he felt warm blood on his face; he heard another beep, he had a message.

He felt the familiar warmth of Kristal's lingering kiss, he felt the gooey imprint of gloss on his cheek, she whispered good luck before tracing a perfectly manicured, perfectly fake nail across his torso and then the director called out places, and then action. He saw their darting tongues at his dick like lizards tasting the condensation in the air; he felt the pulse emanating from his thighs, the room slowing down in time with its thick beat. A bluebottle making lazy zigzagging shapes in his peripheral vision. Then another silently hovering into view above Bunnie, moving in time with her bobbing head, shifting in space to stay an inch or so above her halo of peroxide hair. He leant forward to wave it away and she shot him a suspicious glance as his hand swept past her head. He tried sitting up, but Kristal pushed her hand flatly against his chest and laid her body against his, easing him back on to the bed. Bunnie, resolute, ran her tongue against him and squeezed his balls a little harder than she might have needed to. She feels slighted, he thought, she thinks I was trying to make her stop. There was no sensation, he was removed and remote, he studied the brass curves of the ornate lamp hanging overhead, the portrait of a woman he didn't know on the wall. She was smiling keenly, a laugh at her lips as if the painting had been copied from a photograph; the sea was behind her, sand at her feet. He thought about her at the beach, waving into the lens, smiling broadly before she turned and threw herself into the water and towards the horizon, strong, assured strokes breaking the waves. He wondered about the people who hired out their homes to the adult industry, he wondered about the rates, who cleaned up after them, did they come home to the pungent scent of sex and sodomy? The lamp was crawling with flies, the painting obscured, an occasional oil rendered eye appearing through the throng. He felt that the gaze was an admonishing one.

You didn't even know the girl at the bank, his agent said to him. People aren't going to hire a guy that, you know. He mimicked a firing pistol with his thumb and index finger. The problem is up here, said his doctor, tapping his forehead with a pencil. He sat there on the examination table, naked apart from his socks and a disposable tunic that wouldn't quite meet at the back. He swung his feet like a child; the leather top of the table was sticking to his bare legs. It's trauma, said the doctor, you suffered a terrible trauma, but there was nothing you could have done. He would have killed that girl whether you were there or not. Your beeper going off only delayed the inevitable. You're not to blame. He looked at his doctor and found he was slowly nodding.

The room had exploded after that first series of shots. The back of the stranger's too tight leather jacket punctured by bullets; his torso convulsing with the violent rhetoric of the barking guns. He held on to the counter as his body shook, that's where I hit my face he thought, running his tongue along the inside of his lip, it tasted salty, a tooth felt chipped. The dead weight of the stranger brought him slowly down. He bent at the middle like a folding chair and settled across him, his mask had ridden up a little and he could see that he had a moustache. He reached out and cradled his head, laying his hand along the cheek. Get back, someone said and then more urgently, get back, get back.

He sat home most nights, watching old friends and associates work their sticky magic on his TV set. There was Bunnie at her cheery best; legs taut, mouth in an everlasting O. His hand rummaged in his boxer shorts anticipating the twinge he had always felt in the company of his fellow actors. Sometimes he'd wake up, the cheerful Californian sun blazing across the valley, his bedroom lit in a soft orange light, his dick pushing against the cotton sheets, upright. But a piss would deflate it; a tentative caress would be enough to make it loll sadly to one side.

He drove around at nights, visiting the stores that stocked his films. He locked himself into a viewing booth once, the smell of cleaning fluid pinching at his nose, causing his eyes to water, and fed money into the slot and watched Dick Champ battle evil and rob graves as The Sexy Explorer. He was surprised and impressed by the production values, but not as much as he was by his insatiable desire, his eagerness to consume, his girth, the weight, the heart of him driven on, plunging in again and again.

He sat in the parking lot of the bank and watched the tellers leave for the night. He listened to the clicking of their heels, watched the muted colours of their pencil skirts diminishing with distance into the muggy twilight, their hair pinned up on their heads, loose strands brushing their shoulders. He thought about marrying one of them, but he'd tried dating again; receptionists, waitresses, lawyers, the outcome was always the same. Those who weren't repulsed by his past (conversely, there were some dates far too eager to relive it, some wanted to watch his films with him and would ask him to pass comment on the parade of blow jobs and girls; he was a DVD extra before such things existed) eventually couldn't reconcile themselves with it. When, ultimately, they got to the point of intimacy he couldn't rouse himself – the last time he'd had penetrative sex was with a Texan girl who called herself Red on the set of a film called One Trick Pony – they blamed themselves for not being cast in the porn starlet mould. But ordinary is what I want he'd said once in the gloom between night and the oncoming morning, reaching out and then he caught the girl's crumpled, trembling features in the dusky light and her wretchedness made him want to cry out. He held her until the day rose in a warm wave along his back and across his shoulders.

He felt his life becoming smaller and smaller, at least the bluebottles have stopped coming, he said out loud and quite alone. In his hands he cradled an old, neo-antique shotgun he'd bought three days before. Guns made him nervous, even replicas that he'd handled on set. He found himself admiring its long, steely barrels, the raised nub that constituted the sight. He'd hold it up, train it along the valley below, trace the line of a car in the distance and imagine himself picking off pedestrians and drivers alike, watching cars careening out of control, the shattering glass and wrench of steel silent and displaced this far away as if none of it were his fault, that his actions had no consequence. Not that this would have the range, he said, admiring the stock and shape of the gun. He broke it open, pushed two cartridges into the twin burnished tubes, closed it again and enjoyed the mechanism, the deft click. Then he put the end in his mouth, placing the butt on the floor. I was seventeen when I first came out here, he thought, I'll be thirty-three when I leave. He admired the barrels again; they were untiring, hard against his lips. There would be a spark, an ignition and then life and death in one fiery bloom. He tensed his back and closed his eyes and leant forward to depress the trigger to lead him from this world into the next. His hand scrabbled for the key to the exit and there was a moment in which bluebottles swirled and batted against the window and Death sat hunched across from him, his baleful gaze unmoving, the red of his eyes picked out in the black. Then the moment passed, the air was clear and he sat back, tears on his cheek, he looked along the length of the gun before realising with a sound that was caught somewhere between sobbing and laughter that he couldn't reach the trigger.

Down in the valley a car skidded out of control, people panicked and ran; someone was shooting at the highway.