Gay Place (59 page)

There was that old Mexican.

There —

He pulled himself off the bed and felt his way across the darkened room in the trailer house to answer the knocking at the door. Vicki was standing there — he could see Sarah’s face across the narrow entrance way looking out at them from her bedroom — and next to Vicki was Shavers, holding the hand of a little brown-haired girl, and next to her was a good-looking young man wearing a miner’s helmet.

T
HE LIGHTS OF THE
location camp had vanished behind a silver dune. the four of them — Jay, Sarah, Vicki and the little girl — followed the young man with the flashlight on his head.

“The idea,” Greg Calhoun was saying, “is that you pot ’em while they got their mind on other things. They’re out here rutting around, trying to make babies — this is the season; I’ve been reading up — and you let ’em have it with the light and then the gun. Bing-Bang!”

“A nice way to die,” Sarah said. She was closest to Greg Calhoun. Jay and Vicki flanked the little girl.

“Only way to die,” Greg said. “In a last, thumping flourish.”

“If you can time it for the morning papers, it would be pretty good,” Jay said.

“It’s not perverse enough,” Sarah said. “That sort of thing happens every day. You need something grotesque to really expire in the grand manner these days.”

“You could catch him with a bed full of jackrabbits,” Vicki said. “That’s grand — that’s absolutely —”

“Where are the jackrabbits?” Victoria Anne said, tugging at her parents’ arms. “You smell ’em yet, Gregory? I wanna smell the jackrabbits.”

They wandered between sandhills and baked arroyos, with the little girl breaking loose now and then and running a short distance ahead to wait for the others. No one could be sure how far they had walked. The sky was enormous and all around them; the world seemed infinitely remote.

Sarah was beginning to tire. There was sand in her shoes, and the first flush of excitement she had felt in the night air had faded. Now there was only a dull ache in the calves of her legs. She began to perspire slightly in the fresh dress. She looked at Vicki, who seemed carried along by a boundless vitality. Vicki had her hair piled on top of her head, and there was a glow of moisture along her shoulders and the back of her neck; but she did not slacken her pace.

“Couldn’t we stop and wait for the rabbits to come to us?” Sarah finally said.

“No sport in that,” Greg Calhoun said. “You’ve got to keep pushing ahead, going out to meet the rabbit on his own terms.”

“What exactly does that entai —”

“Hey!” All of them stopped suddenly, half off balance in amazement. No one was ever sure afterwards just how many rabbits stood petrified in the dim light from the miner’s helmet. There seemed at least a half dozen staring at them, tense and blind-eyed. Victoria Anne squealed with delight and then she screamed and could not stop screaming, even after Greg Calhoun’s arm came down and the dust the bullets kicked up had settled and the explosions echoed across the desert floor.

“Missed! Missed them all!” Vicki exulted. Jay had hold of Victoria Anne and was trying to pull her to him, but she kept breaking away and standing a few feet off, her fists clenched, screaming at the darkened sky. “I think we’d better head back,” he said. He finally got the little girl next to him, and she subsided.

“I can’t go back now,” Greg said. “By God I’ve stood the charge of a jackrabbit and now it’s in my blood.”

“I’m going to take her back,” Jay said. “It’s late anyhow.” Sarah started to join him, but Vicki took the little girl’s hand and said something about bedtime. Then Sarah knew she would have to remain behind with Greg Calhoun. She regarded the prospect with a mixture of exhaustion and unaccountable relief. All day long she had felt herself pushing along toward the darkness, certain there would be something to be faced in the evening with Jay. She had wanted to tell him she understood what it was he had been trying to tell her. The compulsion was still there, but now it somehow filled her with dread. The massive effort necessary to re-establish communication intimidated her, and besides, it did not seem the time or place. Perhaps she could talk with him later in the evening. Perhaps there was some reverberating truth she could get from Gregory Calhoun. She stood quietly beside the young man as Jay, Vicki and the little girl moved away toward the camp.

Greg Calhoun turned to her. “I’m glad you stayed behind,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been any fun without somebody to play the game with.” She was nearly his height, and he did not have far to move, bending toward her, his hands held behind his back, not touching her anywhere until his lips brushed hers. There had been only his nice face coming at her and the faint smell of whiskey and cigarettes on his breath. It had not been much of a kiss, but the nearly nothingness of it left her trembling.

Greg Calhoun sat down abruptly in the sand. He was right at her feet and he stared through her legs at the open country. It was as if he were talking to himself. “We’ll have a party,” he said. “We’ll have a picnic with refreshments. We’ll all get drunk and bury our heads in the sand.” He produced a pocket flask and held it up toward her.

“What is it?” She bent down and unscrewed the top.

“Brandy. Cognac. Try it … You like it we’ll send out for a case.”

They sat crosslegged in the sand, passing the flask back and forth. After a time they lay back in the sand side by side and stared up at the sky. The trembling in her legs had moved into her chest; she wished terribly that he would touch her and knew she would scream out like the half-terrified little girl if he did.

She was finally able to talk.

“Tell me about your work,” she said.

“Very serious. Very serious about my work. Shavers is serious about his — Vicki’s serious about hers. We’re all dedicated artists except me because I really am.”

“Really are what?”

“Making a great deal of money and taken seriously by the critics. It’s tremendous, it’s nothing like it was on television, it’s — It’s something seeing your face looking like a slice of rare roast beef, magnified as big as hell on the screen like a goddam Navy blimp …”

“I’ve never seen any of your pictures.”

“I’ve only made two. This one’s the third, and it’s going to be a bitch — one of the worst in modern times. And I wish I had a stake in it because they’re going to clean up.”

He rolled over on his stomach and lay next to her, and she thought Oh my god and remembered all the clichés about her heart thumping in her ears, and then he kissed her again, very lightly on the lips.

“Do you like this? Zis nice party?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you trembling?”

“I’m terrified.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been that way all day.”

“Even before I came? Perhaps in anticipation of — No.”

“It’s just all this … A kind of nightmare. Vicki’s part of it I suppose.”

“Ah! What I’ve always maintained. She affects women the same way. I knew it.”

“She’s the real thing.”

“Yes she is. The real honest-to-God thing. That poor guy.”

“Who?”

“Jay.”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to make love?” He was lying on his side looking into her face, and she had been so absorbed in the conversation that her response was nearly automatic.

“Someday,” she said. Then she pulled herself back into the crosslegged sitting position and began to laugh.

“That’s a marvelous answer,” the young man said. “Best I’ve ever had!”

“What I mean is … I … Well someday, sure.”

“But not with me. Tonight.”

She was still laughing. It was partly some kind of hysterical release from the awful images that had been in her mind most of the day. The actor had done this for her, and now she bent down and kissed him. She pulled back and said, “We could sit out here and neck.”

“Yes we could. We will. But what about the other? I’m fascinated.”

“Well there’s the sand, and …”

“Wonderful!”

“… and I don’t know how.”

“No! I don’t believe it.”

“Well it’s true.”

“You could learn … You could —”

“This is no place to learn.”

“You’re right. Let’s have a drink. I’ll drink to your sweet and blessed … Your … You’re a remarkable woman, Miss Sarah, and you’ll always carry a little piece of my heart.”

They stood and stretched and brushed the sand off their clothes and began the long walk back, arm in arm. She was glad she had stayed behind with Gregory Calhoun. She felt somehow cleansed; the experience had been a kind of absolution, and outside the trailer house she was able to enjoy the sweetness of her young body against his, the two of them together in the evening air.

Presently she entered the trailer house. And now, she thought, now would be the time to talk with Jay, bringing herself to him all whole and honest and lovely. There would be no horror now at the thought of his hands against her boiling skin. She could explain it all to him, really, for the first time. She bathed her face quickly with a damp towel and hurried to his door at the other end of the trailer house. When there was no response to her knock, the fear coming to her already, she opened the door and switched on the light to survey the empty room.

She stood there for a moment, agonized, and then moved to a window where she looked out across the punished expanse of desert grass at the other trailer. There was no light showing at either end. Perhaps he had gone for a walk; possibly he and Hoot Gibson had — There was the Governor’s trailer. She left his room and stepped outside, all the promise vanished from the moment when she had stood there only minutes before. She rounded the corner and saw the Governor’s trailer was dark. There was a light showing in the empty mess tent and in Greg’s trailer, and as she stood there watching, Greg’s room went dark.

Back inside she lay in her bed listening for Jay’s approach. She fell asleep still listening and then came awake suddenly an hour later. She examined her watch and pulled herself from the covers to look once again at Jay’s empty room. This was how he said it was; she remembered now: the pictures coming at her, just as it must have been for him, the grotesques in all their grisly detail, the sights and sounds and smells of it, carousing through her heart and head. There seemed no escape. She thought briefly of going outside and waking Greg Calhoun, but then she could tell herself there was nothing more he could give her, scarcely anything she could even now accept.

A
LL THE WAY BACK
there had been no real communication between the two of them. Whatever needed to be said was conveyed indirectly through the child, who walked in the middle, holding on to their hands, providing the only tangible connective. It was astonishing, Jay thought, what little adjustment was necessary on both their parts to bring their conversational needs down to the level of the child’s. All that had gone before between them had been articulated in a kind of child’s talk anyhow, and there seemed no good reason why they could not have gone on through life together remarking about the blueness of the sky, the vastness of the day, inquiring if either of them needed to use the potty.

They talked through the child on the way back to the camp, avoiding the shadows of the dunes, attempting to guide each other toward the level spaces where the moonlight shone. Soon he had to carry the little girl; she fell fast asleep clinging to his shoulder and there was not much said between them after that. They concentrated on the walk through the packed sand, absorbed in the simple and immediate need of getting from one place to another, hay-foot straw-foot, over the dunes and away from the shadows and toward the camp. Absorbed in these mechanics, it was some time before Jay realized they were lost.

It suddenly came to him that they had been walking too long a time, a time all out of proportion to the period during which the original party of five had sought and found the rabbits. He looked at his watch and knew that by now they should be well past the camp; beyond, away, to the side or in back of it — there was no way to determine. He stopped on a little rise and shifted the child to his other shoulder.

“We’re lost,” he said.

“What? Are you joking?”

“No. We’re lost. I don’t know where we are.” This last admission reverberated in his head. This sudden acute responsibility seemed unfair. He had got them lost, and now it was up to him to get them back home safely again. Arthur Fenstemaker was nowhere around to instruct him; there was no one to call, no help from any source.

“Well what do we do?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Which direction were we away from the camp?”

“West … A little southwest, maybe.”

“Can’t you look at the stars or something and tell which way we’ve been heading? What about the North Star?”

“I wouldn’t be able to find the North Star — I can’t remember the last time I looked at stars. If I found it even, I’m not sure it’s always in the north.”

Vicki flopped down in the sand, stretched her long legs and kicked off her sandals.

“We’re really lost, then?”

“Yes.”

“I like it. I’m glad we’re lost. I wish Victoria Anne weren’t here, of course. But I like being lost with you.”

“Really?” He had tried for a note of impatience.

“Yes. I want to be lost with you. I want to be lost
in
you … Do you like that? I think it’s from a line I had.”

Jay looked about in all directions, attempting to get some kind of bearing from the mountains. But only the larger ranges were visible against the purple sky. He finally selected a course he was not at all sure about and set the perspective of the mountaintops in his mind to avoid the possibility of moving in circles.

“Do you want to rest some more?”

“I’m enjoying it. I’m not tired, really. I’m just enjoying it.”

“We’d better get started.”

They moved off again in the direction Jay had chosen. He needed to keep his eyes on the mountains, but occasionally he would slip back into the numbing absorption of every step. Vicki did not falter or weaken or speak out against him. Several times she offered to relieve him of the burden of the child. There were pauses, mounting in frequency, in which he shifted the little girl from one shoulder to another. After half an hour he began to think seriously of spending the night in the dunes.