Slow Fade (4 page)

EVELYN
sat holding A.D.’s hand until he fell asleep. Then she went down the hall to Walker’s room. He was awake and looked up at her from the bed with distant eyes.

“That was a good ride,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry it ended badly for you.”

“My horse spooked,” he said. “And then I spooked.”

“Your father wanted to see you before he left but you were asleep. He’ll call from Mexico.”

“Mexico?”

“You didn’t know? He’ll shoot there for four weeks. In Durango. We leave tomorrow morning.”

They were silent while a nurse came in and gave him a pill. Evelyn sat not altogether contained in a black cotton shirt that hung loosely over her firm breasts, a simple necklace of bleached bone around her neck. When the nurse left the room she spoke again.

“Your father said just now that you and A.D. Ballou are going to write a screenplay for him to shoot in India.”

“How much is he going to pay?”

“Ten thousand, I think. Is it that important?”

“It’s a large consideration,” Walker said. “I mean, considering what he’s really asking for, what it really means. But don’t worry about India. No one in Hollywood is going to bankroll Wesley Hardin in India.”

“He says the film will happen.”

“He says everything will happen short of salvation, but in his black heart he only counts on ten percent.”

“He thinks he’s dying,” Evelyn said softly, looking at him directly so that Walker knew what she said was true. “The doctors can’t find anything wrong with him, but he’s losing weight and he just seems to be letting go of everything. I thought directing this Western would help because he hasn’t worked in over five years. But it hasn’t helped. It’s only made it worse.”

“It’s temporary,” Walker said, not prepared to accept the information and trying to fend off this recurring echo that no one anywhere had any time left. “He’s fallen apart before. It’s part of his myth that he can always rescue himself and everyone else around him.”

“I know,” she said absently.

“You met him in Labrador?” Walker asked.

“He was on a location trip.”

She walked unsteadily over to the window, raising it a crack and letting in a small shiver of air.

“I guess you can’t just tell him directly all you know about Clementine and be done with it?” she asked.

Walker didn’t answer and Evelyn sat down on the edge of the bed and then lay down on the floor. “I’m tired,” she said from the floor. “And a little stoned and I’m not used to being stoned. I’m used to being drunk. At least lately.”

Walker, from where he lay on the hospital bed, couldn’t see her and for a moment he even forgot she was there, until she spoke again:

“He’ll try and avoid whatever he has to avoid and then it might be too late. But I guess you know about that.”

“Yes,” Walker agreed. “I know about that. It runs in the family.”

“He doesn’t have much peace. I never thought he did, even when I first met him. But that’s what I needed then. I mean, the opposite of peace. As a way of cutting loose. I don’t know. I don’t know about any of it now, to tell you the truth.”

“I don’t either,” Walker said, only catching the end of what she was saying.

“But you set up the deal on India as much as Wesley did,” she went on as if talking to herself. “Well, that’s between you. I don’t know if it concerns me. I could ride out of here right now. I could get on a bus and go anywhere. But I wouldn’t go north. I don’t think I’d do that.”

Walker let himself fall asleep with a sudden rush. When he awoke later that afternoon, Evelyn was gone, which is what he had wished for when he closed his eyes.

THREE DAYS
later Walker and a subdued A.D., wearing a black eye patch, left the hospital, and were driven northwest toward the Utah border by one Caleb Handy, an ancient ex-stuntman and now rancher who had been on most of Wesley Hardin’s films from the early thirties up to the present. A.D. had not been given official permission to leave the hospital. His good eye had not come around yet, and he was pinned to the dark rhythm of his ride on four Percodans, nodding in and out of Caleb’s long-winded raps as they all three sat in the cab of his three-quarter-ton AMC truck.

“Now, son, listen here,” Caleb was saying to Walker, squeezed in the middle. “Your daddy had an edge on him in those days. Don’t think he didn’t. He could slice the bullshit out of an actor and not even be on the set, that’s how hard he was. It was the ambition in him that gave him the juice for that kind of good hate that moves people off the dime. In those days he believed his mother lode would never dry up and he’d always be able to tap his source. Now he’s strip-mined himself, the same old moves and hand-me-down situations, the good stuff going into making a deal, but look here, son, I ain’t one to complain. I don’t give a damn what the show is, I never look at ’em and to tell the truth I don’t believe old Wes does either
. . . .
”

Walker let him ramble on, drinking from the bottle of Wild Turkey they passed back and forth and staring out at the purple line of melancholy buttes, dust and red sand swirling around the truck from an approaching storm. They left the pavement and went straight across a sandstone mesa, brush and juniper on either side of the road, the A.C. turned all the way up to protect them from the fierce dry heat. As they climbed upward the desert gave way to scrub oak and stands of yellow pine. Even A.D. seemed to smell the growing sweetness in the air, yawning and snorting through his wretched dreams. Caleb shifted into four-wheel drive, the truck growling through a washout and over a narrower, rougher road. A hawk circled above them and a deer peered out from a clump of dogbane. Inching over a steep rise, they came upon a deep green meadow framed with straight stands of Douglas fir. A stream snaked its way across the meadow and hunches of cattle grazed on the tall dewy grass sprinkled with blue larkspur. On the far side of the meadow a large ramshackle house made from thick cedar logs stood on a slight knoll looking out across the mountain toward the southwest. To one side stood a barn, a bunkhouse, and several corrals.

A large-boned gray-haired woman in a faded campaign jacket and loose-fitting khaki pants came around the side of the house, shading her eyes from the slant of the evening sun.

“You boys look to have enjoyed yourselves,” she said as Walker and A.D. staggered out of the truck. She looked at Walker, shaking her head. “You must be Wes Hardin’s lost and found son. Last I set eyes on you was that ski film up in Idaho.”

She helped A.D. inside the house and into a bedroom off the high-beamed living room while Caleb led Walker into an adjoining room.

A.D. slept through the night and the next day and when he woke again the house was silent around him. Sitting up, he thought his eye distinguished a shade of darkness, and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he fumbled for the light. It was true, vague forms swam before him. He rose from the bed and made his way toward where he thought the door should be. It was there, and gaining confidence he stepped into the other room, realizing he was no longer in the hospital. He crouched on all fours and tried to crawl back to where he had come from, but the wall met his advance and he sat back, trying to regain his composure.

A growling form hurled itself against him, knocking him over. He cried out, swinging blindly, but the dog, rather than closing his fangs around him, licked his body with a rough tongue. He stood up and felt his way around the room, past a stone fireplace, a floor lamp, and a table and chairs, the dog padding alongside him. Finally he found the piano. He sank heavily onto the stool as if before a refuge and his long ringed fingers stretched out lightly over the keys and he came alive again. “Just an old road man,” he improvised, finding a few simple chords. “One eye lost / one deal made / not knowin’ the cost / what’s been played
. . . .
” He played the beginnings of a few old tunes, but mostly he was content to sit there.

“Jesus, I thought you were Caleb.” Walker stood at the side of the piano looking down at A.D.’s naked figure hunched over the keyboard, at the pale gray skin that had never experienced direct sunlight.

“Your daddy pay us any coin yet?” A.D. asked.

“A grand each, the rest to come as we have pages.”

“Well, this is your hustle,” A.D. said. “You set up the deal with your daddy so you must know what he wants.”

“I suppose,” Walker said.

“And India is the hook,” A.D. went on.

They stood and sat together in silence while A.D.’s fingers stroked the piano keys. Then Walker helped A.D. to his room and then went to bed, listening to the night sounds outside and wondering if he would or even could find a form to tell what he had to tell or if the form had somehow found him.

IN THE
days that followed Walker took short walks to the edge of the meadow and beyond, sitting in the cool depths of a spruce forest or following a winding brook as it descended the mountain through groves of quaking aspen and willow trees. Mostly he kept to himself, Caleb having gone to Denver to buy a horse and A.D. content to play the piano, sometimes singing with Amelia, Caleb’s wife, who would stand beside him, a bottle of Johnny Walker on the back of the piano, belting out blues and old ballads in a high hoarse voice. A.D. and Walker encountered each other only at the evening meal, an event that Amelia produced with enthusiasm, baking breads and pies and putting on the table an enormous spread of vegetables and freshly butchered meat. Walker avoided the meat, but his entire body seemed to respond to everything else, and almost immediately he began to put on weight.

One day Walker came upon a clearing on the southern face of the mountain. Sitting on a slab of granite under a hard blue sky, he gazed out over the distance and for a moment experienced calm and even joy before such a desolate and remote horizon. But his mood was eclipsed by overwhelming rage, a thick choking bile rising within at the thought of his father and the deal struck between them. Let him die in his own way, he thought, in his own time. And it was at that moment of absolute refusal that Walker did, in fact, give in to his father, an image of his sister appearing before him as he had come to imagine and invent her, standing in the clear piercing light of Namche Bazaar, the snow peaks of the Mahalangur Range behind her, a patched purple shawl over her thin shoulders, her round head shaved to a bristle, her dirt-encrusted hands methodically moving over a string of prayer beads.

That evening Walker went to his room and didn’t come out for three days. Refusing all food and drinking steadily from Caleb’s stash of Johnny Walker, he lay in bed and watched TV while listening to the radio, from the earliest soap to the late, late show. Sometimes he watched with the sound off, other times with the radio on or the image off and the sound on. On the afternoon of the fourth day, A.D. entered Walker’s room. Walker was lying on the bed in his Jockey shorts watching a game show.

“Are you dead or alive or what?” A.D. asked.

“I want to move around for a while.”

“We don’t have any pages so we don’t have any bread so we can’t move around.”

“You’re right,” Walker agreed.

A.D. sighed. “I could help grease it along and we could take it easy and build up a stake and then go our own ways, but if you can’t get to it
. . . ”

“I appreciate your lack of hope,” Walker said and he meant it. “But I’ve thought about the story and we can probably shovel enough pages together to get a first payment and then we’ll buy a van.”

“A van?”

“There’s someone I want to see in Albany.”

“Well, there’s someone I want to see in L.A., more than one, in fact. Like my lawyer.”

“As you pointed out,” Walker said, “it’s my story so it’s got to be my drift.”

“Whatever,” A.D. said, wondering how long it would be possible to ride on this particular track.

Walker handed him a bottle of Johnny Walker and turned the sound down on the TV, leaving on the image. Then he lay back and shut his eyes. A.D. turned on the tape recorder that Wesley had given him and the tape was almost halfway through before Walker managed to begin.

WE CUT FROM BLACK
. . .
to a husband and wife, she in their king-sized bed, he in his pajama bottoms walking around. Agitated. No. Scratch that. Move it forward. They’re in this same elegant room, their bags are packed and they’re about to leave. They’re in their early thirties, healthy, a little straight, she more than he perhaps but she’s a real knockout, blond, uptight, but strangely erotic. We’ll call them Jim and Lacey and they’ve been married for five years and Jim works for his father in the auto industry where he’s a vice-president. It’s old money, Grosse Pointe money, and that’s where they are now, in the bedroom of their summer house on Lake Michigan, one of three houses on Jim’s father’s estate, the other two houses belonging to his father and sister, we’ll call her by my own sister’s name, Clementine, for a natural hook
. . . .
There’s tension in their bedroom as there has been for several months and once more Lacey almost desperately pleads that she doesn’t want to go searching for some weird sister-in-law who went off to India to study the sitar and who hasn’t been heard from in eight months. She doesn’t need that kind of a trip. She needs to find something to do, a job, an identity, something for herself. Jim is wired and impatient and says angrily that if she doesn’t come with him it will end their marriage, that they no longer communicate with each other and that they need an adventure like this to hold them together; not only that, but his father, Pete, or Pistol Pete Rankin as he’s known in the industry for his quick moves with women and failing corporations, is very likely dying and has every right to want to see his daughter again, not to mention the fact that Clementine might be in some kind of terrible trouble. Lacey closes her eyes and says, almost in tears, that he is a manipulating control freak who will stop at nothing to get his way, not even emotional blackmail. Jim, very tight-lipped and vicious, tells her that she is a cold withholding cunt
. . . .
She slaps him and he holds her wrists, forcing her to the floor. “Yes, I’ll go,” she says through clenched teeth as he looms over her, causing her pain. “You prick, you fucking bastard, yes,” as he begins to make love and she opens up to him, wanting him, hating him, “yes, oh yes”
. . .
and so on as we
. . .

CUT TO FATHER AND SON
. . .
with Jim walking toward the family boathouse across a manicured lawn like a putting green while Pete Rankin is rowed to shore from his forty-eight-foot sloop. Stepping carefully onto the dock, P.R., as he is also known, is a prototype Captain of Industry: white-haired, barrel-chested, cold blue eyes, patrician nose; and yet on second glance there is something frail about him, frightened even, his voice hesitant, his eyes unfocused, distant
They walk into the boathouse where Pete pours them a drink from a pitcher of already mixed martinis waiting in the well-appointed bar
. . . .

THE INTERIOR
of the boathouse reflects as much if not more of the family tradition, at least from the male side of the lineage, than does the baronial nineteenth-century manor house that can be seen through a window, high on a hill overlooking the lake. Two single racing sculls lie neatly in their racks, oars crisscrossed above them. Handcrafted oak furniture, massive and imperial, stands before the stone fireplace, pictures of old Yale rowing teams over the mantel
. . .
“I talked to the Indian ambassador by phone a few hours ago,” Pete begins. “He still says that they haven’t been able to turn anything up, that there isn’t all that much one can do when someone disappears over there.”
. . .
“I still want to go,” Jim says
. . . .
“It’s foolish,” his father says. “We’ve hired top men. Professionals, and they’ll have a better chance of finding her than you or any other amateur.”
. . .
“I don’t think so.”
. . .
“How can you, in all conscience, say that?” The father is on the edge of anger but cannot, will not allow himself that emotion
. . . .
“Because I know her,” Jim says
. . . .
“At least wait until the board meeting, a month more won’t make that much of a difference. I need you here if we’re going to keep control of the firm.”
. . .
“She might need me there if she needs to keep control of her life.”
. . .
“Romantic rubbish,” the father says stiffly. “She’s probably off having an affair with someone and the mail got delayed. She’s never been known for keeping in touch.”
. . .
“I hope you’re right but I’m still going to go.”
. . .
“And you’re taking Lacey?”
. . .
“She’s my wife. She goes where I go.” The father pushes his son to the precipice. “When you come back you’ll have to face a few decisions.”
. . .
Then without a word, he leaves the boathouse and Jim watches him through the window as he walks up the long hill to the main house
. . .
and then we
CUT TO INDIA
. . . .