FOR SOME GODDAMN REASON, MILTON BREN HAD AN EXTRAORDINARY AMOUNT OF INFORMATION ABOUT ERROL FLYNN. SOMETHING ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR TRIP TO CATALINA HAD ACTIVATED HIS INTEREST, AND SO WHENEVER THE CONVERSATION FLAGGED—AND THIS WAS PARTICULARLY TRUE WHEN THEY ALL GOT LOADED—MILTON WOULD BRING UP SOME LITTLE
known fact of Flynn’s life. It was the oddest thing, but Duke thought he knew what Milton was up to. Milton couldn’t stop thinking about an actor whom he admired while he enjoyed the lavish hospitality of an actor whom he didn’t.
Pointing off the stern of the Wild Goose—Duke’s 136-foot converted minesweeper—Milton went on. Pilar, Duke’s wife, hung on every word. “He used to moor the Sirocco in that cove over there, and they’d set up a canopy on the beach for their parties. Errol liked to walk on hot coals and have all sorts of wild contests—things he’d learned how to do when he was a youngster in Tasmania. People say they were orgies, but if they were, the only one who ever got anything was Flynn. Compared to him, the rest of his friends were practically eunuchs.”
Duke’s head was too full of Flynn facts, and he steadied himself on the railing as he walked toward the bow. Claire had already gone to sleep, so there was no one left to talk with but Pilar and Milton. Okay, that was okay, he tried to convince himself, but he nearly fell into a deck chair, his brain was so full of horseshit and tequila. He wasn’t supposed to be alone on his own ship unless he wanted to be. He stared at the island in hopes that something there might interest his eyes and therefore shut off his brain. Catalina before him was like a cluster of perfectly shaped breasts. The blue hills were calm as the sea beneath them, and the sky was black like harsh coffee with bits of bright star poking through it. Duke thought about coffee because he couldn’t bear to think about breasts. A breast would make him sick, but coffee made him comfortable. Black coffee in the morning was like drinking from the core of the earth, like sustaining yourself with the deepest secret that God could keep from man.
Surrendering to his fatigue and drunkenness, he decided to sit down in the deck chair that had nearly tripped him. He remembered what Orson Welles had said about Pappy Ford. “John Ford knows what the earth is made of.” What a beautiful thing to say, Duke thought, but thinking it distracted him from sitting down and he missed the chair, clipping the arm and bringing it down sideways with him onto the deck. Even as he began to understand that he was falling, he could still wish that someone had spoken so beautifully about himself.
Actually, the deck was sort of comfortable. He watched the island sideways as it gently rose and fell above his new vertical horizon. He made his right arm into a pillow and lay there for what seemed like a long time. The breasts were now upright, like a woman standing, and the sky was like a thick black curtain—embroidered with stars—that she was drawing toward her body. He had been lucky, he knew, in that the most beautiful women he could imagine always became his wife. He wondered now if he could marry an island.
He had to get up and pee.
He pushed himself up from the deck and set the deck chair straight before he sat down in it. Now that he was upright again, the hills no longer looked like breasts but like circus tents, and he could still hear Milton’s voice, all the way around the side of the Wild Goose, loudly declaiming his Hollywood history lesson to Pilar, who, as a little Peruvian girl, had loved Errol Flynn and was rapt with Milton’s stories. “They had mock sea battles,” Milton said. “Can you fucking believe that?” For his part, Duke could imagine what a pretty boat the Sirocco must have been. For all his drunkenness and arrogance, Flynn had been a real sailor, the way Ford had been a real sailor, the way Duke was just a big boy from the desert who loved the sea more than anything, and that was different from being a sailor. The Wild Goose would never be a sailboat. The Wild Goose was a converted minesweeper.
Milton said, “Around the campfire, he’d tell long, complicated stories about being in the slave trade when he was a kid in New Guinea. Can you beat that? They didn’t call it slavery, but then, they never do. He would rent whole tribes from their chieftains, and then sell the lease to another tribe. Sounds like he was preparing himself for the movies, doesn’t it? Sounds like he was preparing himself to become a movie star.”
A movie star? What the fuck did Milton know about being a movie star? Duke wished that Errol Flynn were here so that they could both tell Milton about being a movie star. Duke didn’t mind signing autographs, he didn’t mind being watched and photographed—in fact, he loved that part—but he minded being analyzed as though he were dead. He tried to be reasonable about his public statements, he tried to contribute to the nation, but there were times when he just wanted to stir things up, to release a torrent of vital energy that wasn’t meant to change things so much as to remind everyone that Duke Wayne was still alive.
He stood up and sat down again. There was a deliciousness about his full bladder that he hadn’t accounted for until he started taking steps to relieve it. He wanted to sit here and think for just another full moment before he visited the head. He wanted to follow one more thought down into his boozy nighttime consciousness. There was something there, and he wouldn’t be able to get after it if he walked away from this spot or allowed anything to leave his body.
He shifted his ass along the chair and that relieved some of the pressure; maybe he didn’t have to pee as badly as he thought.
When was the first time he realized that he had failed? It was after Ward Bond had died, when the whole world was painted with his grief. Duke had finished directing The Alamo, and he was waiting for the first industry reviews when he read what John Ford had said about the movie. Ford, in a fancy bit of public opinion fucking, said that it was “the most important motion picture ever made.” What was he trying to do? Duke wondered as the sky grew a shade blacker with some dense clouds that had wandered in from L.A. Was he trying to hurt me in some obscure way that only an asshole like Ford could understand? The movie hadn’t been anywhere near as good as that—he felt like a fucking genius because he’d been able to finish it at all—and it would have been nicer of the old man to just say as much, to say, for example, “John Wayne is a first-rate director and I’m proud to have worked with him.” Or: “Wayne has done a better job of capturing the Western experience than all but a handful of men.” And then he wouldn’t have been left to wonder how much Ford was lying, which was what he was wondering right now. He had wanted to speak some great truth about the nation, but he had failed. Ford made movies that spoke the truth about the nation as an aside.
“Someone just saw a picture of him, I guess,” Milton continued. “That’s right. I think it was some documentary about New Guinea, and Flynn was the brave jungle guide. He did a few plays in London, but it didn’t take long for Hollywood to scoop him up. He probably still had his tan from New Guinea when he did Captain Blood.”
What the fuck did he know about it? Duke thought. There was so much work between being a young man and being an old man, so many years of pissing yourself away and not knowing what for, and then one day they wake you up to tell you you’re a star, and you still feel like you pissed away so much of yourself getting there. Work and success were not connected as far as he could tell. Work was what he did to distract himself while other, more painful processes took place within him. Because the work was always either horrible or wonderful and had nothing to do with how much he was getting paid or how many people were watching him. It made him wonder about the pressure that a great man like Ford must have been under. He still wanted to know what Ford was thinking when he said those words. Ford’s feelings for him had always been equal parts hatred and love, but Duke didn’t mind the hatred because there was so much love. Of course, Duke thanked him at the time—there was nothing to do but thank him—yet there was still so much he didn’t understand. Maybe there was less to understand than he thought. Pappy Ford’s head was full of hell. But he behaved better than any man Duke knew who was half as wretched.
When it was all over, when everyone he knew was as dead as Ward Bond and John Ford, what would any of them get credit for? He’d grown so accustomed to this view of Catalina, after all his trips to this little bay beside the isthmus, that he probably didn’t see it anymore unless he was stumbling drunk or driven to poetic distraction by Milton’s inane ramblings. Maybe this moment was the only one he would ever get points for: holding his piss long enough to spend a few extra minutes staring at a beautiful island.
He shifted in his chair again, but this time it did no good—the pressure against his bladder was painful and he would not be able to resist much longer.
What was he looking at anyway? He could no longer hear Milton, and he hoped this meant he had decided to kill himself and spare Duke any more bullshit for the rest of the trip. He was looking at three now-cloudless hills, which seemed to him the essence of all that was beautiful about his Southern California. They reminded him of their sisters, the Coast Ranges on the other side of the channel, and they were radiantly brown. How could something be “radiantly brown”? His first wife’s hair had been “radiantly brown.” His youngest son’s skin in the summertime was “radiantly brown.” The sunset, tinted by the smog, could sometimes be “radiantly brown.” Words that didn’t belong together were always together. Right now, for example, his need to urinate was “pleasantly painful.” He was “morbidly enthusiastic” about the rest of his life.
He thought hard about this. Maybe everything that seemed divided was really connected, not just words but EVERYTHING. These hills were connected under the channel to the hills near his home. The water that rocked him now was the same water that had rocked him forty years ago when he spent his first weekend on John Ford’s sailboat. The hills were one with the hills. The water was one with the water. And his own life, which seemed so divided from everyone else’s, was really just a version of the same big life, the same big earth, the same big sea. Maybe that’s what Orson Welles meant when he was talking about Ford. Maybe Ford knew this. Maybe that’s what Ford meant when he was talking about Wayne. There wasn’t one film, there was all film. There wasn’t one man, there were all men. As he continued to stare at the island, he started to get a boner, which rose and illuminated his whole body until he could feel himself radiantly brown, too. Maybe he could fuck an island? Maybe he had reached a point in his career where anything was possible. He wanted to believe it—God, he wanted to believe it. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The hills were still there: radiant, alluring, vulnerable, wanting him. In the foreground, there were only a few other boats attending the hills, and they seemed almost religious in the way they didn’t crowd or dismay the island itself. Above, the sky was thicker with stars than Duke had ever seen it.
His moment had arrived. If God was watching, Duke was certain that this was the moment of his election. Whatever shitty things he had done in his life, he had been forgiven them for the virtue of this single perception. The island was beautiful and he saw it as beautiful. Maybe for this moment, and in this exact way, he was the only person who saw it. The dark radiance of the hills was now his radiance, too. He stood up from the chair and began to walk carefully toward the head.
His muscles ached and he still really had to pee, but he felt happy and completed.
As he followed the curve of the bulkhead, he began to hear Milton again. Some miracle of acoustics and water and ship’s metal had baffled the sound long enough for Duke to have his moment of redemption. He was going to heaven after all, and soon he would have the empty bladder of an angel. He was grateful to Milton for driving him into the wilderness of his own boat, and he resolved that he would give him a gift when he got the chance. Milton also seemed to have reached some final chapter of his story.
“And for a while he just sailed off the coast of Spain—or between Portugal and Spain, maybe—and thought about how much he’d like to pay off his back taxes, and thought about how much he missed his friends, and tried to swim more and drink less and give his buckshot liver time to resurrect itself, but I think he knew in his heart that the great party he’d had was almost over, that most of what he’d loved and lived for was in some other part of the world which he would never see again. I think he must have been pretty resigned to it, or at least that’s the way it seems from the writing he did at the time. I think he must have been, in his own Errol Flynnish way, happy.”
He could hear Pilar chirp and laugh and clap her hands. She wouldn’t fake enthusiasm over such things, and so Duke had to believe she had enjoyed the story. In his heart, he was glad she’d been entertained.
Pilar laughed until she saw Duke lumbering up the passageway toward them. Milton flipped his cigarette into the water and smiled like a man who probably never had to pee this badly in his life, like a man who didn’t have the cojones to drink that deeply of his experience. Oh hell, Duke thought, someday he’ll have his moment, too. That’s why he couldn’t stop talking about Flynn—he admired the kind of life he wasn’t capable of living. Milton was sad because he hadn’t yet sat in the darkness and watched an island fill with the radiance of God’s grace. Duke’s bladder was as big as the world. His own cojones were heavy enough to break buildings. He gently nudged Pilar aside before he unzipped his trousers and relieved himself entirely on Milton’s blue deck shoes.
Duke loved the world, and the world loved Duke. Milton Bren didn’t say another word about Errol Flynn for the rest of the trip.