THEY ALLOWED SOME OF the tourists and ranch hands through the front gate to witness the picture-taking; they let through as many as were needed to provide an audience for the ceremonies. The crowd followed Vicki and the Governor, watching their movements as if the two of them were high priests, gathering round one of the balsa wood oil derricks in the beginning and then moving on to the preposterously bright green lawn of the gingerbread house. The mansion was authentic and convincing in every detail, like a wondrously well-engineered replica, an outsized child’s toy put together between desert sandfaults.
Jay followed the crowds, keeping at a distance, standing just close enough to watch Vicki and the Governor move through their routine with the easy and stoic assurance of those long impaled by the public gaze, striking their poses, shifting to good sides, smiles coming on and vanishing again as the photographers requested. Jay asked himself if he exaggerated and got his answer: Yes, ’deed I do exaggerate; I am exaggerated, overblown; all my life, front and back, magnified and foreshortened, my papier mâché visions sullied by balsa wood and vegetable dye. He stood a short distance away from Vicki and the Governor and stared in wonder. They were not quite people, those two. They were a little hard to believe; each of them heightened by special technicolor effects.
Fenstemaker was a handsome contemporary figure, but his appearance evoked for Jay the memories of a tinted matinee idol found in the picture frame department of a dime store. His face was unlined and beautifully tanned, and his expensive white teeth, whiter even than the movie director’s, were emphatically, unimaginably regular. And Vicki no longer seemed quite real. She had not been so altogether perfect when he had married her. Now she seemed the product of an expensive engineering process. Basic research. American ingenuity. Both of them — Vicki and the Governor — had undergone refurbishments to make them as close as possible to physical perfection. But the technicians who labored over their willing remnants — the surgeons and dentists and hair stylists and masseurs and manicurists — had demonstrated something less than consummate skill; had never quite got them put together again. They were hardly people, these two, but synthetic equivalents, albeit a pair of comely and brightly packaged ones.
The picture-taking was nearly ended, and Hoot Gibson stood beside Jay, sucking on a piece of ice. Sarah and Mrs. Fenstemaker had returned to the cool interior of the trailer house.
“Look here!” Hoot Gibson said. “Look over here!”
Hoot Gibson pointed to the flatbed of a truck parked nearby, stacked with desert brush. “You know what that is?” Hoot Gibson said. “It’s tumbleweed.”
Jay nodded thoughtfully. Yes, it certainly was tumbleweed, he said. No denying it.
“Tumbleweed,” Hoot Gibson repeated. “Imported. Brought all the way here from Burbank, California. Ain’t no tumbleweed out here — ain’t nothin’ left out here after the drought — so they brought their own goddam tumbleweed … An’ you know what else?”
“What else?” Jay said.
“It don’t tumble,” Hoot Gibson said, overjoyed. “Even when there’s a good wind. It just don’t tumble. So they brought out some big blowers — big ’lectric fans — to make the tumbleweed tumble when they shoot the moom pitcher.”
Jay felt a little better. He smiled at Hoot Gibson and Hoot Gibson smiled back, vastly pleased. The photographers were putting away their equipment and the crowds were being led back behind the wire fence. The Governor, Vicki and Edmund Shavers approached. Hoot Gibson left immediately to get the limousine started and the air-conditioning primed. Arthur Fenstemaker, perspiring, mumbling a vague exhortation from the Old Testament, shook hands gravely with the actress and the director. He turned to Jay.
“Everything ready?” he said.
Jay nodded. The four of them began walking toward the trailer house. Fenstemaker paused midway, his eyes fastened on an ancient, finely polished touring car parked under a dusty, flapping tent.
“It’s the Dusenberg,” Vicki explained. “It’s the one I drive in the picture. I love it. In fact, I’m going for a ride right now — before we begin shooting. You join me?” She looked at the Governor and then at Jay and Edmund Shavers. “Anyone?”
Fenstemaker hesitated; he mopped his face and smiled. He appeared to have been visited by a new surge of vitality.
“Come on, Governor,” Vicki coaxed. “I’ll show you around in the car.”
Fenstemaker followed Vicki toward the Dusenberg. He stopped midway and called back: “Jay, you and Hoot Gibson get the drinkin’ equipment and come with us.”
Vicki had the motor running when Jay and Hoot Gibson arrived with the whiskey and ice. The Governor sat in front alongside Vicki, looking as if he were on the verge of discovery. Shavers called to them: “Be careful with that car, Vic! We can’t afford to let anything happen to it. Or to you. Or to the Governor, especially.”
“Don’t worry ’bout thing,” Vicki yelled. The Dusenberg shuddered as she raced the engine.
“We’re shooting in forty minutes!”
“Plenty time!” Vicki called out. “Here we go … Flappers and sad birds!” The big car started off, lurching across the open fields.
Jay and Hoot Gibson sat in back and tried to hold the whiskey bottles steady. They poured drinks for the four of them and passed the tumblers around. The Governor raised his in a toast, and Vicki laughed and looked wonderful, her white hair streaming out behind in the wind. Jay could not imagine her motives, but every delay, every weakening of Fenstemaker’s determination to leave, brought Jay closer to the moment he might see his daughter. He did not know when she would arrive; he could not begin to hope for so much time; he could only live from one interruption to the next, hoping they would somehow manage to stay on till Annie appeared. Vicki pulled a scarf round her head and raised her voice above the drone of the engine: “We’ll drive down to the Mexican village. Not the one we built, but the real one — over this way on the back road.”
Fenstemaker nodded and smiled and finished his drink. He passed his glass back for another. Jay sat on the hot cushions, gazing at the fold of mountains miles away. Hoot Gibson took over the mixing. They banged along the dirt road, turned down a stretch of macadam and off again to the right, leaving the pavement for a second time and heading toward the rising foothills. Hoot Gibson was kept busy with the drinks. They all had another round.
“You got to stay after this stuff, honey,” the Governor said to Vicki. “Otherwise, the ice melts. You got to toss it down fast.”
“I wish we had gin,” Vicki said. “You like gin?”
“Ah, yes,” the Governor said, rolling his eyes. He could not abide gin.
“Gin and rose petals,” Vicki said. “You ever had gin and rose petals?”
“Never the pleasure,” Fenstemaker said, tossing down his whiskey, cold.
“Gin and rose petals,” Vicki repeated. “And champagne splits at breakfast!” She turned and looked back. “You remember, Jay-Jay?”
Jay nodded and looked off toward the mountains. The reminder was like an old debt caught up with him.
“Where was all this?” Fenstemaker said.
“College,” Vicki said. “Freshman year. Never known anything so glamorous as gin and rose petals and champagne splits for breakfast. Jay was president of the student body, and I was seventeen years old. Seventeen! First-class seduction — ranked with the best … my lost sweet innocence …”
Jay sat in the back seat, smiling to himself, Scotch whiskey splashing down his shirtfront, wondering if he had ever succeeded in violating anyone. Sweet innocence. It was what he missed most in life and wanted more than anything to recapture — and he wondered if it really ever had existed for the two of them, even in the beginning. He could not remember Vicki as she had been then, but he was certain it was not so much innocence that defined her as a dumb-struck happy acceptance of life’s infinite possibilities.
Fenstemaker turned and looked at him, his big face gleaming in the sun. “What you do to Miss Vicki, Jay?” he said. “How come you ruined this little lady?”
Jay spread his palms, balancing the drink in his lap. “We were both helpless,” he said. “Trapped in the cruel vise of the System.”
“Whut’s all that ’bout vice?” Hoot Gibson said.
“Vise … Vise,” Jay said.
“Hoot Gibson and I had some good times together at college,” the Governor said. “But we never had any champagne for breakfast. Only a little jug of sour mash whiskey now and then.” An expression of vague melancholy came on his face. He raised his glass. “Gimmie a little of the Scripture, Hoot Gibson,” he said.
Hoot Gibson smiled blandly. “Mah virgins an’ mah young men,” he said, “are fallen by the sword.”
“We are all stricken in years,” the Governor said.
They passed round the whiskey again.
Jay tried to think about Vicki as she had been several years before. He could remember the college clearly, but he was unable to put together a convincing picture of Vicki. There had been too many conflicting images risen in the interval. It had not looked much like a college. In the moonlight, in the cold of an open car, approaching it from a distance, moving across the wild countryside, you could have mistaken it for a great, shapeless circus that had somehow broken down on the edge of the city. Once, years before, it might have looked like a college — there was still a thin, defeated frieze of ivy on some of the older buildings. Huge stone amalgams of what was identified as Spanish-Grecian had risen from the cotton fields, alongside the Gothic imitations of the past, and later still there were the hutments and the frame and tarpaper lecture halls. It had become a sprawling, gerrymandered maze of dull brick, stucco and yellow pine, suggesting the decline of a painted harlot in her middle years. Though in the cold of an open car with Vicki at his side, approaching the campus on a winter morning at mid-century, riding through the quiet, tree-lined streets, past the feeble expanse of grass along the Mall and the stone gargoyles out front of the Main Building, it had seemed an altogether lovely place.
“They were serving gin and rose petals at this party,” Vicki said. “I remember once Jay and I had to drive to the other county to buy more gin — and on the way back stopping at a florist shop and waking the owner and ordering more rose petals.”
Jay tried to remember a time when they were uncorrupted. Once, farther south, they had parked on a levee, across the river from the Mexican whoretown, and kissed for a long while. There was that old Mexican. He remembered the Mexican, crawling out of a mud hut to relieve himself, and the way he jumped in the headlights of the car.
“We were married by a one-legged justice of the peace,” Vicki said. “What you’d call a ceremony of quiet and dignified simplicity.”
The heat was awful on the desert road, but Vicki’s sweet drunken laughter had them all feeling better. Hoot Gibson lay back in the leather cushions, grinning at everyone. The Governor had a beatific smile on his face.
“Ah feel relaxed and beautiful,” Hoot Gibson said.
“We’ve been gone nearly an hour,” Jay said. “Did Mr. Shavers say something about —”
“There it is up ahead!” Vicki yelled.
The old Dusenberg had topped a rise and now they all strained in their seats to catch sight of the village lying between the hummocky sandhills.