Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights (33 page)

Working in India is difficult. The travel is hard, even with all the money and support in the world. Margaret seemed more tired than usual.

I called Jon. I’d given pretty darn good phone sex when I had the chance. He seemed genuinely touched, so to speak. I told him I might start a sideline as a call center; really go Indian. He thought I should give that a pass and just come home and work through my issues with him and a garter belt.

“Hi,” I said. “We’re going to be out of touch for a week. I wanted to hear your voice.”

“How’s it going there?”

“Good. We’re ahead of schedule. Margaret is still way off, but she’s soldiering on. How about with you?”

“It’s fine. The usual. It’s getting on to a quieter time for us.”

“How’s the housing project coming?”

“We hired a designer who can’t hear.”

“I saw the problem in your pictures. He’s doing some kind of Tommy Bahama thing for your little huts. It looks spendy.”

“Tommy’s not going anywhere. We’re already fighting the cost uptick dealing with round rooms.”

“Did you get my suggestion about floating the service modules rather than going custom?”

“Yeah, thanks. We’re pushing the pencil on that now. It looks good.”

“You want a little talking too before I go out with the tribesmen?”

“Not now, Jesus, I’m at work. That last time was unbelievable. It took days to clear my head of the Coochie Goddess.”

“Could you hear me laughing?”

“I couldn’t hear anything. I’m pretty sure I was deaf at that point. All systems were focused elsewhere. It didn’t even throw me off when you added in her goat consort. I don’t want to think about where you learned to talk like that.”

“I’ve never talked like that in my life. It’s something about you.”

Okay, so shoot me. But I didn’t have to throw coochie out with the bath water. Coochie was mine. And I did add the goat. If I had to start completely over I’d never get past square one.

”Call me when you get back to civilization,” he said. “And leave the nice Indian men alone out there.”

“You remember that?”

“Trying not to.”

“I miss playing with you, Jon. You doing okay?”

“I tell myself you’re away at war.”

“I kind of am. The usual broken promise stuff is going on around me. There’s going to be some public confessing and drink throwing when we get home. Not for us though.”

“Nope, we’re good.”

“Are you going to have a bachelor party?”

“Why would I?”

“I thought guys do that, last chance.”

“I’m not going to prison. I wouldn’t marry you if I needed a last chance.”

“I guess this whole shoot is like a last chance.”

I could hear my crazy insecurity bouncing around in space. I didn’t even know where it was coming from.

“What’s going on H?” he asked. “You okay?”

“I don’t know, I think so. I don’t know where that came from. I’m worried about Margaret. I have a bad feeling about it, but no one else is worried. I think this is just starting to wear on me. We’re all getting really tired; you can see it in everyone’s eyes. A lot of people are sick. People are getting skinny with parasites. Tempers are short.”

“We’re all worried now that we’re moving into an area with a lot of Dengue Fever. They’re haranguing us about using the mosquito repellant they’re passing out. They want us to wear special clothes they’re shipping over. No way. It’s all stiff slimy safari gear soaked in toxins. Nobody’s shooting at us, but it’s like being at war.”

“How much longer?”

“Two months. We move to Varanasi after this. The story is going to play out on the banks of the Ganges. Tell me news. How’s Chana?”

“She broke up with her boyfriend. I’m not sure the new one is an improvement.”

“Oh, Dad. Is anyone going to be okay with you?”

“I doubt it. She wants to visit you there.”

“That’s probably not a good idea unless you come too. I’d love to show her the country, but I don’t have a minute to spare. And I don’t want her to get sick.”

“You know I’d like to, especially hearing you like this, but I still need to take her for a few interviews on the mainland.”

“Next time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Though I hope it will be a while before we do this again.”

“Me too. I miss you, Jon. I miss you in a way I don’t quite understand. It was like I filled up on you and now it’s almost spent. It’s like even my vivid imagination is going dull.”

“I don’t like to hear that. We’ll see each other soon.”

“I know.”

“Hannah, I don’t want to raise kids alone.”

“I’m not sure I want kids.”

“I know, and that’s fine too. It’s just been on my mind.”

“I can’t think about that now.”

“No. We’ll talk about it when you get home.”

“My brother actually ran a background check on you.”

He started laughing. “Anything I should know?”

“What about the high school pot thing?”

He laughed harder. “I was going five miles an hour in a twenty-five. Dead giveaway. How’d he get that? I was underage, it’s supposed to be sealed.”

“Nothing is beyond his reach.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. What about you? What would I find if I dug into your past?”

“Nothing. I’m as pure as the driven snow.”

“You mean you never got caught? Or your brother went in and deleted everything?”

“No need for deleting. Anyway, most of the stuff I did wasn’t against the law law, it was against the laws of good judgment. I was always worried I’d worry my mother. I don’t think she was ever worried about me. Figure that one out.”

“Get some rest,” he said. “I’m worried about you.”

I had a small cottage at the ranch. A magnificent horse was standing around waiting for his close up. He kept sticking his head in the window to say hello. I pinched some carrots from the mess area for him.

Our lunches were delivered in tiffin boxes, but we ate dinner around a huge bonfire. Besides a few lanterns and a bare bulb in the communal washroom, it was the only light in the middle of the desert. A group of hill people came down and played music around the fire and smoked herbs, then melted back into the hills. It was melancholy and reminded me of Hawaii. I even danced with one of the women; it wasn’t that different from the hula. Women all over the world pop their hips while men watch. She came back one night and painted the backs of my hands with swirling and intricate patterns in henna. Next time I would do a better job on Mom’s hands, if she needed a reminder.

A group of local camel drivers arrived early with a mad assortment of camels in different camel outfits. I added some glitter and gold to their regalia, but basically they were good to go. Each had a heavy net blanket that served as ladder and stirrup. The saddles were wood and let me tell you, not easy on a girl. Going downhill on a wood saddle was the first time I’d thought of Steve in months, and not fondly. My camel was named Juli. She was polite, no spitting. Margaret and Ed went with the Director by car out to the lake where we were shooting. I rode Juli. We stopped for lunch in the middle of nowhere while the camels rested in the shade; I could imagine the place as unchanged.

Our Director was no nonsense. She seemed to sense the flagging energy in the crew, though she seemed as fresh as day one. She could bark orders with the best of them, but mostly she was quiet and everyone still worked hard to please her.

I watched Margaret and Ed walk down the dusty road we had come in on, hand in hand. She had tied on a big straw hat with a scarf, her baggy white pants and shoulder scarf flapped gently in the breeze. He wore a straw hat with his man pajamas and dusty feet in sandals. They looked more British interloper than Indian. They looked the most settled together that I could remember.

We went back and forth to the location every day. Ed was making chapati by hand by the end of day three. After all the dusty army movement, wooden saddles, and sleeping in stifling hot cottages smelling of hay and horse manure, we only had one skirmish left to knock off before we were done.

We got our last shot in that golden hour as the sun was setting. Fortunately the Director was satisfied. The sun only sets once a day. There’s nothing like waiting for sunsets and weather to push a crew to the edge. It’s right behind trying to get animals to perform. Which is right behind working with children. I thought of Jon trying to get people fed in peace with peeing and puking children and a refrigerator banging crew. He’d fit right in on location. He might even think it was easier. Too bad Chana hadn’t ratted us out; he could work with me.

We packed up our debris and made our way back to camp in the darkness under a sky bowl of stars. My sure-footed Juli knew her way in the dark.

It was quite a shock to wander out of the desert to the news that a massive earthquake had hit Los Angeles while we were lounging by an oasis. There was very little news, but it had been big. Not Japan big, but the biggest so far, a long hard shaker. Those of us who lived in Los Angeles knew the stories would be wildly confused and inflated in the first days. We were all worried beyond speaking for our beloveds.

I had no way of reaching Karin. She was home alone with the kids while Oscar was in New Orleans on a picture. We counted hours on our fingers and toes, trying to figure out what we had been doing while they were going through the terrifying shaking when the earth reminds you it’s still a work in progress. It had happened on a Friday night about 9:00 p.m. I hoped everyone was home together and not sitting in a movie theater in panic with collapsing plaster and falling fixtures. I knew my place was okay; I was on bedrock. During the last big quake it had hardly moved while refrigerators flipped over in Studio City, just down the hill. Karin’s neighborhood was on pretty solid ground. I sent up a prayer for those three.

They decided to move everyone back to Udaipur that night. No one could stand the idea of being so far removed from information. We had only flashlights and headlights to pack up under the stars. The motor homes made their noisy exit. Margaret and Ed went back with the Director.

The rest of us waited for the cars in near silence, under the same moon that would go look in on our loved ones in just a few hours. The cars finally came. It took an hour to get back to town and another half hour to get back to our base. Communication lines were jammed. We would get more information from CNN India than we would if we were home.

Ed and Margaret were watching on an old black and white set in the owner’s apartment. They were holding hands. Their children and grandchildren lived in L.A.

The news was pure chaos. CNN was repeating itself like an old piece of film slapping at the end of a reel. Natural gas pipelines had exploded in a line of flames the length of the Sierras to the north. People were in the street milling in some areas; in others it looked like nothing had happened. They showed the same fire hydrants spouting like geysers; the same collapsed overpasses, and the same phone videos of shelves emptying in the same grocery stores. They showed the same people over and over. They didn’t show anyone we loved. No one had been able to get through yet, forget the internet. We would simply have to wait. Like waiting for news from any disaster, even in wired in times, the people in Los Angeles were cut off and on their own.

“Let’s go to bed,” said Ed. “We can try to sleep. We’re going to need our energy tomorrow.”

I stopped in the kitchen and got a pot of chai. I soaked in a hot bath to loosen the dirt ground into every nook and cranny after a week of desert camping.

Ed and Margaret were on the terrace having tea when I got up the next morning. They’d been to the production office and had managed to reach their children. All was not well. Their daughter had been in bed reading when an armoire flipped over onto her. Her nose was broken, and the old mirror in the door had shattered cutting her face very badly. She had a concussion. They would not release her from the hospital, even though she had to sleep in the hall because it was so over-crowded. Her husband had been reaching for her and had gotten slammed in the shoulder by the same armoire. It dislocated his shoulder and broke his arm in two places. The doctors said he’d saved his wife’s life by being there to take the hit first. It had prevented the armoire from shoving her nose into her brain.

Their two children were staying with neighbors while their parents were in the hospital. Their son and his family had gotten through without harm, but they lived hours of buckled roads away and hadn’t been able to get up to get the kids, or to help out. Margaret and Ed’s house was intact. They had already decided that Ed would fly home as soon as he could get a flight out. He would take care of their daughter and family.

I took a tuk-tuk over to the production office and waited for my turn. I got through to Karin on the third try; they were all fine. They’d been home playing Hangman with a young girl in Bulgaria. She offered to help Ed and Margaret’s family until Ed got home. Her production was shut down until further notice.

She said the guys renting my place had called to see if I had been in touch. A tingle of worry ran up my spine, I hoped the glass doors had survived.

“What did they have to say?” I said. “I bet the pool was like one of those wave machines.”

“The pool is there,” she said. “They were having a pool party. A real bacchanal I gather; they were all naked. The waves actually tossed a few of the guys out, but the house blew up.”

“The house blew up?”

Every eyeball in the room bulged wildly at me. The guys had a fire going, the stove pulled away from the wall, the gas line broke and the whole thing blew. The big prow roof toppled into the pool and looked like a sunken ship. My god. I couldn’t call up what I’d lost. At least I’d brought my pearls with me, no idea why. In India, if it’s not gold it doesn’t count.

“My home is gone?” I said. “How can that be? It was on bedrock.”

“Gas doesn’t care about bedrock,” she said. “Sparky is gone too, the fence caught fire and took her with it. I thought you were moving to Hawaii.”

“Well yeah, but I was counting on my place in L.A. if I’m going to work.”