10

I WOKE, WARM AS TOAST, INTO GRAY LIGHT. INSTEAD OF HAVING Joe’s overcoat over me, I had Elmo’s sheepskin. No one was in the car, but the motor was running and the top was up—the fact that the heater was on accounted for my warmth.

I peered out the window and saw my three traveling companions lined up by the side of a very empty road, relieving themselves. Winfield was drinking beer, even as he pissed. With their backs to me, I was reminded of the three monkeys. Then Elmo and Winfield, almost simultaneously, made the funny little hunching motion that men make when they’re stuffing themselves back in their pants. Joe continued to stand. There was an empty martini shaker on the floorboards near my feet.

Elmo spotted me watching, and looked abashed. They stood outside the car, shivering, until Joe came up and they all got in.

“Well, we done embarrassed ourselves before breakfast,” Elmo said. Winfield said nothing—evidently he was not at his most cheerful. Joe didn’t look so good either, although his condition was more ambiguous than Winfield’s. Winfield looked like he was going to be sick for several hours.

“Good morning,” I said. “Where are we?”

“Smurr,” Winfield said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Smurr,” he said again. “Fucking Smurr.”

“Don’t talk to Winfield this early,” Elmo said. “It’s a waste of breath. His brain won’t come back on for three, four hours yet.”

“Fucking lie,” Winfield said. “She asked me where we were and I told her. It ain’t my fault she don’t know about Smurr, Arizona.”

“Let me out again,” Joe said. “I shouldn’t have got back in.”

They let him out and he went off behind the car to be sick.

“Uncle Joe can still drink,” Elmo said. “If I drank that much gin it’d render me impotent for a month.”

“Malt liquor would render you impotent,” Winfield said.

Elmo grinned. “He’s always been a sour companion in the morning,” he said.

By the time Joe got back to the car, looking weak but relieved, the grayness had receded and the desert cleared and darkened just slightly, as the sky became light. It was as if someone were focusing the universe: first a gray blur, then an almost momentary darkening of the land in relation to the sky, then a beautiful clarity as light flowed down from the sky to the earth. Soon we could see the road stretching before us for many miles, through the still desert. The sunless sky had the brightness of ice. Then it turned deep orange at its lower rim.

“Well, no S.W.A.T. team, at least,” Elmo said.

“Give ’em time,” Winfield said. “Abe ain’t figured out he’s been robbed yet. It’s only five a.m. The question is, Where do we want to be four or five hours from now?”

“Poor question,” Elmo said. “Starting from Smurr, there’s no place I can get to in five hours that I want to be.”

Listening to them was like listening to old married people talk. They had been buddies for so long that they had their own codes.

“Ol’ Winfield’s paranoid,” Elmo said. “He’s wrote too much TV, He thinks we ought to skitter off into Mexico. This road we’re on—which I only pulled off on so we’d have a private place to piss and puke and whatever—goes right down into Sonoita, which is one place the S.W.A.T. team don’t go. Then we can bounce around in Sonora and Chihuahua for three or four days, and if we don’t die of dysentery or get caught in a dope war, we could sort of back into Texas somewhere around El Paso.”

“I don’t want to bounce for three or four days,” Joe said. “I say that frankly. I’m game for just about anything but bouncing.”

“Well, I just thought we might take the scenic route,” Winfield said. “I was hoping to see some Mexican villages and broaden my mind or something.”

“I’ll let you out and you can hitchhike,” Elmo said. “I ain’t eager to go into Mexico in my pink car—some big pusher might see us and covet it. Or else you’d buy some dope and we’d all get caught.”

“Being in a Mexican jail wouldn’t be much worse than working for Sergio,” Winfield said. “I’m scared of that crazy fucker. Last time we worked for him he almost shot me, remember? He was showing off his damn six-guns.”

“Maybe we oughta all go to Italy,” Elmo said. “Joe and Jill could serve as our intermediaries. Hell, Joe knows Sergio’s style as well as we do.”

“I bet I do,” Joe said. “I bet I do.”

He had taken to repeating every statement he made—a small habit, but for some reason irritating to me. I don’t know why, but after loving him for years everything he did sort of irritated me. I had made him my model in matters of spirit, and then he lost his spirit, leaving me without a model, more or less. Elmo and Winfield led such sloppy lives that I couldn’t use them as a standard, although I did like the way they complemented one another. When one was down, the other could be counted on to be up. They were sometimes both up, but never both down. That’s how friends should be, I felt.

“Well, if we ain’t going to Mexico, let’s at least go someplace before I have to get out and piss again,” Winfield said.

“We could go visit my son,” I said. “He’s somewhere near Albuquerque.”

“Too far north,” Elmo said. “Besides, why would you want to get an innocent child involved with a gang of international film pirates?”

We drove all day, through Tucson and on into New Mexico, the men taking turns driving. Even Joe took a turn driving. He tied a little checked neckerchief around his throat and settled into the Cadillac as if he had been driving them all his life, although he had driven nothing except a small Morgan for as long as I’d known him.

Elmo and Winfield reminisced about the women they had loved and lost, and all three men drank beer continuously, all day. I mostly kept quiet and watched the undulating desert slip behind us. It seemed endless and monotonous. The men were solicitous of me, but even so, I felt a little left out, almost an interloper, despite being the cause of the trip. At times I wished I could be present but invisible, so I could hear what they really had to say about women—what they would say about them to one another if no woman was present to hear. My sense was that they would all reveal their fright, and perhaps their hostility to the creatures who had the power to frighten them.

Perhaps I was just being conventional again, to imagine that they were either frightened or hostile. Maybe they were neither: just sort of puzzled. I spent the day in an odd kind of reverie, watching the desert, keeping kind of half tuned in to the men’s conversation and at the same time staying kind of half tuned out. When it warmed up, Elmo put the top down, and then at midday had to put it up again because the sun was so bright. In the afternoon, with the sun just edging downward, we drove across a barren, horrid part of New Mexico, a country without the purity of real desert but not fertile either.

Always, from girlhood, I had shaped futures with my mind, sculpting them as a sculptor shapes clay. Events always altered the imaginary shapes I made, but not totally. Enough of my construct survived that I could at least recognize it.

Now, suddenly, time was all around me, like the desert and the sky. It was flat, too, empty of ridges and mountains, valleys. When I looked down the road ahead, nothing at all came to mind.

“I think I went wrong,” I said, startling everyone. It startled me too—I had thought out loud.

“Exactly the way I feel,” Winfield said. “I went wrong, too. In my case it happened over in Rome, when I let myself get dependent on that expensive German beer. Thangs ain’t been the same since.”

Joe was looking a little tired. But when he caught me looking at him he smiled and it was really a friendly smile, not apologetically friendly, as he had been so often of late.

“You shouldn’t have deserted your craft,” he said. “Just because you’ve slopped around with movie crews for a long time doesn’t mean you really know how to make movies.”

“Nobody really knows how to make movies,” Elmo said. “It’s a matter of hoping the right accidents will happen.”

“Jill was meant to draw,” Joe said.

“I don’t know why you say that,” I said. “I drew for years and I wasn’t really that good. I was just okay. Every time I saw a great drawing it made me feel like a dilettante.”

“Craft, I said,” he insisted. “Craft, not art. Art happens like love, but craft is loyalty, like marriage. To do it good is what’s necessary, and that’s all that’s necessary. Maybe a few times in your life you get lucky and do it better than good, but that’s irrelevant. Loyalty is what’s necessary, if you want to get something good out of the union.”

“Heavy words,” Elmo said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but I sort of did. And he was sort of right. I dimly remembered what a clean satisfaction I used to feel when I did a good drawing. For a few years that feeling had been one of the mainstays of my life, and it irritated me unreasonably that Joe would continue to remind me of it.

“Maybe I got tired of being limited,” I said. “Maybe I needed to try something else, so as not to be so limited.”

He didn’t answer. In fact, no one spoke, and I began to feel sad and oppressed. Part of it was the endless, dusty, toneless land we were driving across: how had I got trapped in it? The mere sight of it made me want to cry, as did my sense of being alone and without a future. I felt inexplicably, irrationally bitter toward Joe. He was my oldest and dearest friend, and yet I didn’t feel that we were friends any more. My silly love affair had distanced us, though for no good reason. I felt he shouldn’t have let it. It seemed a betrayal, and the longer the men were silent and I was left to contemplate the emptiness and the sky, the closer to tears I felt, yet I held back, knowing how badly men react to tears. If I cried, they’d probably throw me out of the car at the next town. Anyway, I didn’t want to cry until I could be in private.

Even though all three men in the car had always been extremely considerate and generous in their dealings with me, I still felt they were my enemies. They didn’t understand what needed to be understood, and I couldn’t count on them just to be one way. I missed Owen. He wasn’t generous or considerate, and he didn’t understand anything, but I could count on him to be a particular way. The men I counted on for complex things were too complex themselves. Right then, when it must have been obvious to them that I was unhappy and needed someone to talk to me, they were about as talkative as three clams. We must have driven thirty miles without a word being uttered.

Finally I couldn’t help it. The landscape and the silence made me feel too lonely. I started to cry. All the men looked aghast, just as I had known they would, so I pulled Joe’s coat over my head, in order to cry in private. After I had cried for a while I felt a great deal better. I couldn’t see the saddening desert or the empty sky, and I felt protected and relieved. I knew the men were suffering, because I could hear them making meaningless conversation in stilted, awkward tones, but if they were suffering, that was fine with me. Let them suffer. They all had poor records with women, as far as I was concerned: they were far too content to sit around reliving the loves of the past—that kind of laziness. I stayed under the coat, partly for revenge and partly because I felt cozy. I had had too much space around me all day. I grew up with seascapes and little California hills, and I wasn’t used to being a pinpoint in the universe.

When I came out, after twenty minutes or so, things were much nicer. The sun was beginning to set, spreading layers of color along the rims of the horizon for what seemed like hundreds of miles. All the men tried to ignore the fact that I had risen again. They sort of cut their eyes my way and went on talking somberly of baseball.

“All I’ve got to say is I’m glad I’m not married to any of you,” I said cheerfully. “What a bunch of lowbrows. I never want to hear another word about baseball, okay?”

They were so relieved they all became drunk, on accumulated beer.

“Like having sixteen cobras loose in the car, having a cryin’ woman,” Winfield said. “Now I remember why I run away from home so many times.”

The next thing I knew I was being made to drive. Joe got very drunk and began to pontificate, repeating each pontification two or three times, but I was tolerant. My fit was over and it was fun to drive a pink Cadillac and watch the sunset. By the time the sun was gone and the sky darkening, we were on the outskirts of El Paso.

“It’s Texas, womb of my youth an’ Winfield’s too,” Elmo said.

Now that we had safely skirted Mexico, nothing would do but that we go there. I was about to drive the Cadillac across the international bridge when Joe remembered the stolen film in the trunk. We had all forgotten about it. After some dispute, we parked the Cadillac and walked across the bridge. There was hardly any water in the river, just a lot of brown sand with a silver ribbon running through it. Elmo climbed up on the bridge and pretended he was planning a suicide leap, although it was only about thirty feet down. Some Mexican guards watched him without interest.

“There’s not a whole lot of regard for human life in this part of the country,” he said when we got him to come down. He was quite drunk.

“Hell,” he said. “Those guards were gonna let me jump. Last time I tried to throw myself in the Tiber fifty Italians started praying to the saints.”

Overhead, the sky had turned a rich purple. Finally we came to Mexico and walked along the street whose pavement was so full of holes it looked like someone had attacked it with a giant paper-punch.

We found a restaurant, and I tried not to drink because it was apparent that I was going to have to drive. The others drank margaritas like they were soda pop. Elmo said we should eat quail, and before I could think, an immense platter of them arrived. He had ordered two dozen, as if they were oysters. They were very good, but I kept thinking of little birds, running around the desert.

During the meal I decided not to go back to Hollywood. They would never trust me now, anyway. Maybe I’d draw, like Joe wanted me to. Or maybe I’d go to Europe. If there was a pull, that was it. Carl, my second husband, now a producer, didn’t hate me, at least. He had a new, even younger wife, and if he felt secure, he might be generous, decide we were old friends, and give me a job on a picture, just enough so I could live. I wanted to hear Italian voices—the quiet Spanish of the waiters made me nostalgic. Maybe I could have a room in an umber building and sit and sketch clothes on clotheslines and gray piazzas and old women in black dresses holding hands.

Of course it had been silly to steal the film. It might as well go back, even if I didn’t. Sherry couldn’t totally ruin it, any more than I could make it a masterpiece. If it were shown, some of the good work that Anna had done, and Zack and some of the others, would be seen and admired so they could get other jobs. That was the real point. Anna needed to keep acting or she would just get fat or marry somebody awful, and Zack needed to keep working, too. Otherwise he’d just sit around and take dope.

After we ate the twenty-four quails Elmo and Winfield wandered off to see if they could find a whorehouse, and Joe and I stayed in the restaurant and bickered. I don’t know why we bickered—it was all we could seem to do any more. Maybe we had idealized one another for too long, I don’t know. Now the idealizations had sort of worn through, so we bickered. He drank brandy and got drunker, and finally the other two came back, looking sheepish, although I doubt they really did anything. I went ahead by myself across the bridge, and the three of them shambled after me.

Elmo stayed awake just long enough to guide me through El Paso, and then I had three sleeping drunks and a long road ahead of me. I had toyed with the idea of getting off at the airport and flying somewhere, but once the men went to sleep and weren’t able to stimulate my hostility, I didn’t feel like stopping. I had never driven such a powerful car, and the sense of speed and power it conveyed was exhilarating. The road was spotted with red taillights, mostly of trucks, and the sky overhead was filled with white stars. The road was four lane, so I didn’t have to worry about traffic. It was like I was on a small freeway, crossing a vast desert.

The place where Elmo told me I had to turn in order to get to Austin was 120 miles away, so I got in the fast lane, feeling reckless, and let the big car fly. The trucks were big slow troglodytes, compared to me. I left them behind me in strings. By the time I had really settled into the thrill of the speed, and stopped worrying about collisions and traffic cops, I had covered the 120 miles to Elmo’s turnoff. A mountain loomed behind the turnoff, with a thin white moon just over its crest. The new road seemed lonelier and more endless than the one I had been on. Behind me, the trucks didn’t even sniff at it. They lumbered on past, like elephants in a circus parade.

The stars were white all night. I only had to stop twice, at little towns, for gas at all-night gas stations. Both times Winfield grunted, rolled out, went to pee, and came back, without having really opened his eyes. Elmo and Joe slept on. I felt a bit of tiredness in my shoulders and neck, but not much. I was temporarily in love with the night and the speed. Only the land near the road seemed really dark. The sky was pale with moonlight, and I could see dark ridges far across the white plateau. Several times I saw deer and, now and then, far off, the light from some lonely house. How amazing, to live so far from anything! What were the people in those isolated houses doing, with the lights still on in the middle of the night? I had no idea what kind of people would live in such emptiness—possibly people who were even stranger than Elmo and Winfield and Joe and myself.

The car ran all night, without complaint, its engine quiet and tireless. I seemed cut off from consciousness, absorbed by the curving, sometimes dipping road, and the pale light and the speed. Occasionally one of the men would grunt, wheeze, snore a little. When it began to get light I was sorry, for the first light was not as lovely as the moonlight. The land and the sky were the color of gray flannel. Then Elmo, who was in the front seat with me, began to thrash around uncomfortably. Suddenly he began to try and get the window open, and as soon as he did he hung himself out it and began to vomit. I braked gently, but before I got stopped he was through being sick.

“Couldn’t keep down my quail,” he said glumly, staring at the impending sunrise. It was just beginning to burn the horizon ahead and to deepen the blue of the upper sky. The men all woke up and began to groan from the fullness of their bladders, so I stopped at a small town called Roosevelt and took a walk by a little river while they attended to themselves. When I meandered back, thirty minutes later, they were all looking worried.

“Thought you’d left us to the tender mercies of the S.W.A.T. team,” Winfield said when I came up.

“They ain’t no harsher than the mercies of West Texas,” Elmo said. “We’re purt near the womb of my youth. This here’s about the cervix. Let’s get some breakfast to weigh us down. I feel kinda light on my feet, from all that tequila.”

We ate breakfast in a small cafe, and were stared at by cowboys, and indeed by everyone who came into the cafe.

“If this is the womb of your youth, you must be illegitimate,” Joe said. “I don’t think they cotton to our kind.”

“They better not sass me,” Winfield said. “Dreaming about my first wife always makes me mean. It might take a good fight to get the spleen out of my system.”

After breakfast we lazed around for a while, sitting on the banks of the cold little river until it was time for the post office to open. We had unanimously decided to mail back the film.

The postmistress was a rawboned woman who looked at the cans of film with no particular surprise.

“We ain’t never had a show here,” she said as she considered her instruction book. “Too close to Junction. Folks here don’t feel like they’re going no place unless they can drive a few miles.”

After some research she advised us to send the film back by bus, which we did across the street at the grocery store that doubled as a bus station. Later that morning, from just outside of Austin, I called the studio and told Wanda, Abe’s secretary, what time to have the film picked up at the bus station.

“Stolen film?” she said. “Who stole any film? I don’t know anything about it. Abe’s been gone, you know. He got married. It’s his honeymoon he’s gone on. Not too much has been happening around here. You mean you stole the film?

“That’s the funniest thing I ever heard of,” she said when I confirmed that I had. “Maybe we just won’t tell Abe. I don’t think we ought to confuse him, so soon after his wedding.”

“Who would marry Abe?” I asked.

“Dunno, think she was from Vegas,” Wanda said, and took another call.