Shallow Graves Read online

"Oh, I love the sound of your voice. Marry me."

  "It's perfect."

  "Talk to me, Johnny, talk to me. We got pressure, hombre. I'm talking righteous pressure, dig?"

  Pellam wondered where you learned producer-speak. Maybe it was at UCLA. He winked at Marty then said into the phone, "Lefkowitz's going to go hog wild. The dawn shots'll be so beautiful… Desert for miles around. I mean, you cannot see a goddamn tree, I mean, see one, unless you look west, then you'd need a telephoto, and-"

  "Desert?"

  "Then there's this little shack… You can't shoot inside-"

  From the other end of the line: the silence of the universe's outer reaches. Then: "Shack?"

  Pellam continued, "-but don't worry. There is a corral. Oh, and I thought you could move some of the interiors out there. The scene where-"

  "You ragging me, John."

  Pellam sounded hurt. "Ragging you? No, when I say it's perfect, it's perfect. I wouldn't-"

  "You're ragging me."

  Marty shouted, "Tell him about the arroyos."

  "Oh, yeah, the arroyos. You know the scene where the Comanches are sneaking up on the cabin?"

  "John, not funny."

  Pellam said, "What do you mean?"

  "It's not a Western."

  "What do you mean it's not a Western?" There was a pause, while Pellam pretended to examine the script. "What do you call Arizona in 1876?"

  "You'reinArizona?" The voice was a tenor car alarm. "Theysentyouthewrongscript?"

  Pellam said, "Uh…"

  He tried. But he couldn't keep it in a second longer. Marty, who'd heard the assistant producer's cry, had lowered his head to the counter and was shaking uncontrollably. Pellam joined him.

  "You goddamn son of a bitch, Pellam," the A.P. muttered.

  Pellam rocked against the side of the phone stall, immobilized with laughter, trying to catch his breath. "Sorry," he gasped.

  "That… is… not… funny."

  Though there was considerable evidence to the contrary. Pellam finally caught his breath then looked at Marty. He lost it again, quivering with laughter. After he'd calmed, Pellam managed to say, "We're in a place called Cleary. Upstate New York. It looks good. I think it'll be perfect. We've got 27 out of 51 setups but we did the principal-shoot first so it's mostly just background and establishing shots we've got left. We'll finish the snaps and get you the report in a couple days."

  He paused for a moment then said, "I've been looking at the script. Can I talk you into a few changes?"

  "No way. It's carved in stone." Now the A.P. was laughing too, an indulgent chuckle, just to show he was a good sport and now it was time to put the joshing aside and give straight answers. "You mean it, John? It looks good?"

  "It's-"

  "We can't wait any longer. The big man's gonna have my balls for breakfast if we don't move fast. What were you going to say?"

  "When?"

  "Just now. I interrupted you."

  "Just, it's a good town. It'll work." He recited slowly, "Chill out, man."

  "Haw, haw."

  Pellam said, "I'm gonna be serious for a minute."

  "We're listening, dear."

  "The script. You're not going to like this but I've been doing some doctoring, and-"

  "I don't like, I don't dislike. I ignore."

  "The story needs a little help."

  "Forget about it. Lefty'll cut your balls off too, you even mention it."

  Pellam remembered another Hollywoodism. "The thing is, it's a good property; it's not a great property."

  "But it's Lefkowitz's property."

  "Your loss," Pellam said.

  "No, my ass."

  "Okay. I tried… Oh, before I go I should mention…"

  "What? Problem?"

  "Not really a problem, I don't think. It's just finding the airfield's been tougher than we thought."

  "The-"

  "Marty and I are flying to London tomorrow. We'll be in Dover by five."

  "Dover?"

  "That's London time."

  "What airfield?"

  "You know, the paratrooper scene…"

  "John, you're a prick, anybody ever tell you that?" He hung up.

  He joined Marty and said, "No sense of humor."

  Marty began working on the cake again.

  A half hour later the rain had slowed to a fine mist and the thunderstorm had passed. The granny-dress woman, after a couple soulful glances at Pellam, was back at the salt mine-the way she phrased it to the waitress, who was herself hard at work adoring Marty.

  "Let's roll," Pellam said. The men stood.

  "Bye-ee," she called.

  "See you later," Marty said. "Thanks for the fine service."

  "Anytime," she said.

  When the door closed behind them Pellam whispered, "Anytime, anyplace, any way you want it, lover doll."

  "Pellam, it's not my fault I'm a stud."

  "She wants you, boy. She wants you to be the father of her children. All twelve of them. Look at you, rosy cheeked, cute as a button. Oh, she'll be dreaming about you tonight."

  "Hang it up, Pellam."

  "Maybe," Pellam said seriously, "you should think about settling down here. Get yourself a NAPA franchise, wear a CAT hat to cover up that thinning hairline of yours, join the Elks…"

  "You should talk, old man. That other lady checking you out in there reminded me a lot of my mother."

  "They're the most experienced."

  "They-"

  Both Marty and Pellam stopped short, twenty feet in front of the camper.

  "Jesus," Marty asked. "Wait. What is that?"

  Pellam was surprised the boy couldn't figure it out but then he guessed it was like those optical illusions in science books, the ones that some people see right away and others you've got to explain it to them.

  This one seemed pretty clear to Pellam. On the side of the camper, in black spray paint, were crude images of the mounds of two graves with crosses stuck in them. Scrawled beneath them was that word again. Goodbye.

  "Oh," Marty whispered, getting it at last. "Damn."

  They walked closer, then around the camper, expecting some more damage, but, no, there was none-just the artwork. They looked around the street. Deserted.

  "Who was it, those kids we saw before?"

  "Maybe," Pellam said.

  They stood for a moment looking at the crude, feathery lines of the bad drawings. Pellam started up Main Street.

  "Where're you going?" Marty asked.

  "Buy us some turpentine and steel wool. Can't go driving around looking like an ad for a funeral home."

  2

  Pellam said to Janine, the granny-dress woman, "You'd think they'd come up with some more money for that. It's going to represent something, it ought to have a little class."

  He was looking at the tiny, overpainted black cannon, donated to the town by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It didn't seem capable of lobbing a shell more than ten feet. They sat in the town square, where he'd been sitting, marking Polaroids, when she walked past casually and sat on the bench next to his. He'd smelled minty tea-what she'd been drinking yesterday in Marge's diner-and when he'd looked up she'd smiled at him. He'd scooted over four feet of bumpy wood and they'd struck up a conversation.

  "Maybe it's valuable," Janine now said. "Looks can be deceiving."

  Pellam liked her outfit today better than what she'd worn yesterday: a long skirt, boots, a big bulky-knit sweater. Her hair-in the sun you could see some red-was still parted in the middle. She was an easy forty, looking older straight-on, though she probably wasn't. That happened to a lot of these poor flower children; maybe they're limber and they live a long time, but sun and fresh air can do harsh things to your skin.

  "Where's your boyish partner, with the cute little tush, the one who's probably a year or two under my limit?"

  "He rented a car and went out to the hinterland, checking out some parks. We've got a lot of scenes left, so we split the troops."
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br />   She asked, "What company you work for?"

  "Called Big Mountain Studios."

  "Didn't they do Night Players! And Ganges… Oh, that was a great film. Did you go to India for that one?"

  Pellam shook his head.

  "Wow, do you know William Hurt? You ever meet him?"

  "Saw him once in a restaurant."

  "How about Willem Dafoe? Glenn Close?"

  "No and no." Pellam's eyes were scanning the downtown, which almost shimmered in the heat. It was eleven a.m. The temperature was up by twenty degrees over yesterday. Indian Summer.

  "Tell me about the film you're working on now."

  "We don't like to give too much away."

  She socked him playfully on the arm. "Excuse me? I mean, excuse me? I'm a spy? Like I'm going to sell the story to MGM?"

  Pellam said, "It's called To Sleep in a Shallow Grave."

  "Wild. Love the title. Who's in it?"

  "It's not cast yet." It wasn't for location scouts to give away too much.

  She said, "Come on now. I don't believe you." She tilted her head coyly and her hair fell straight across her face, leaving only her eyes exposed-like a veiled Islamic woman. "Give me a clue."

  "A few supporting actors you couldn't possibly know." He sipped his coffee.

  They always liked details. Who in Hollywood was playing musical beds. Which actresses had had implants. Who hit their wives. Or their husbands. Who liked boys. Who had orgies in Beverly Hills.

  Some people even wanted to know about the films themselves.

  He said, "It's about a woman who comes back to her home town for her father's funeral. But she finds out that he might not have been her father after all and maybe he killed the man who was her real father. It takes place in the fifties, a small town called Bolt's Crossing."

  He stood up. She watched him toss the coffee carton into a trash basket painted with tulips, and she scolded, "You drink too much of that. Caffeine. Yuck. Don't you have trouble sleeping?"

  "Which way's the cemetery? I want to get some more 'Roids."

  "Some?…"

  "Polaroids."

  "Follow me." They turned east. As they walked along the road, Janine said, "Tell me more about the film."

  "That's it for now."

  She gave him a pout with her full lips. "Maybe I won't be your guide if you're not nice to me."

  "Aw, I need a guide. I may never get back to civilization without one."

  She grimaced dramatically and waved her arm around downtown. "Bad news, Charlie. This is civilization. It don't get no better than this."

  They walked for a half hour and found themselves in the cemetery.

  His reaction to the place was the same as on the day they'd arrived in Cleary, the day Marty had spotted the cemetery from the highway; it was perfect for the film. Tall black trees bordering a small clearing in which battered tombstones tilted at exotic angles. No big monuments, no mausoleums. Just hunks of stone, spilling right out of the forest.

  Pellam pulled the camera out of his pocket, took three or four pictures. The cemetery was filled with an odd, shadowy light, which seemed to come from the underbelly of the low wispy clouds. The light accentuated contrasts: bark was blacker than in bright sun, grass and milkweed stalks paler, stone more bleached; it was white like old bones. Many of the tombstones were badly eroded. Pellam and Janine wove through the grass, toward the woods. A rusty barbed-wire fence of taut strands separated the cemetery from the underbrush.

  Wait… What was that? Pellam stopped suddenly, stared into the trees. He was sure someone was watching him, but as he stepped to one side, the voyeur, if it was anybody at all, vanished.

  Janine said, "All I'll say is, if it has Redford or Newman in it and you don't tell me I'll never speak to you again."

  "It doesn't."

  "I saw Butch Cassidy twelve times. I only saw Let It Be eight.

  "Were you at Woodstock?"

  She smiled, surprised. "Yeah, were you?"

  "No. But I wanted to go. Tell me about the cemetery."

  "What's to tell? Dead people buried here."

  "What sort of dead people? Rich, poor, smugglers, farmers?"

  She couldn't quite get a handle on what he was asking. "You mean, like what does it say about the history of the town?"

  Pellam was looking at a grave.

  Adam Gottlieb

  1846-1899

  A sailor on your ocean, Lord.

  He said, "Man missed the century. Bummer. Yeah, that's basically it. The history of the place, the atmosphere."

  She danced over a grave, girlish. "Can you imagine what Cleary was like a hundred years ago? Probably only five, six hundred people here, if that."

  He snapped several Polaroids.

  Janine took his arm and hooked it through hers. He felt the heavy pressure of her breast against his elbow. He wondered what her chest looked like. Was it dotted with freckles? Pellam really liked freckles.

  They walked for a few minutes. He said, "I don't see any recent tombstones."

  "Is that bad?"

  "No. I'm just curious."

  Janine said, "There's a new cemetery outside of town. But that's not the answer. The answer is that nobody ever dies in Cleary. They're dead already."

  She now grew serious and started playing with the top of her tea carton. "First, there's something I have to tell you. I'm sort of married." She looked up. "But we're separated. We still groove okay, my old man and me, but it's not like on a physical level, you know? He's living with a bimbo runs a motorcycle repair shop near Fishkill. Her husband split too. He comes back now and then but mostly he's split."

  Pellam tried to sort it out. There were two husbands, was that it? One of them kept coming back? To who?

  Janine said, "Just want the facts out, you know. Like, in case you heard something… Well, you know how it is." She was looking at him. He felt the weight of her eyes on him, as heavy as her breasts. A response was in order.

  "Sure do," he said.

  This seemed to satisfy her. She kicked at some leaves. Pellam hoped she didn't want to go for a leaf fight. There was nothing worse than somebody on the threshold of middle age going zany.

  "Tell me about Hollywood. The parties are pretty wild, huh?"

  "I don't go to Hollywood very often."

  "Isn't that where the studio's at?"

  "Century City."

  "Where's that?"

  "Now it's office buildings. It used to be the Twentieth Century Fox back lot."

  "How 'bout that! Super."

  They walked back to the town square. Pellam reloaded his camera. He looked up. From three different windows, faces were staring at him. They looked away quickly. One woman paraded her six-year-old daughter past. The woman pushed the girl forward. "This is Josey," she said. Pellam grinned at the girl and kept walking.

  The word had spread into all the nooks of Cleary. Somebody was going to make a Movie. David Lynch, Lawrence Kasdan, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts had all been sighted. It would have a cast of thousands. They needed extras. They needed stuntmen. There'd be tickets to Hollywood. Union contracts. Line up for your fifteen minutes of fame.

  None of the hoverers had actually asked for a part yet but Pellam was getting a hell of a lot of silent auditions.

  "What does everybody do for entertainment around here," he asked, "when they're not trying to get a role in a movie?"

  "We all have great fun robbing tourists blind. You sticking around till Saturday?"

  "Maybe."

  "Wait till you see it then. It's leaf season. Hundreds of cars, everybody gawking at trees like they were mandalas. Totally far out. They spend an incredible amount of money. I had a tea shop for a few years before the jewelry thing took off. I'd charge two dollars for a scone. A granola muffin was two and a quarter… They paid without blinking."

  "What do you all do when you're not ripping off the turistas?

  She paused to consider. "Socializing. Me and my friends usually
get together and hang out. Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly. Rent movies a lot. There are carnivals, parades, Future Farmers of America. Down home, middle America. The workers-I tend to think of it in terms of class; I was a Marxist once-they go in for raising kids, Kiwanis, pancake breakfasts, turkey shoots, church in any one of a number of interchangeable Protestant denominations. But we're very tolerant-both Jewish families in town are well liked."

  They walked for a few minutes more. Pellam glanced at her; she was preoccupied, thinking of something that would summarize. "It's a hard place to be single."

  He let that sit for a thick moment then said, "The film's got a dark side to it, violence in a small town. Any of that?"

  "Oh, yeah. A lot of domestic stuff. Last year a man took a shotgun and killed his family. They found him at home, watching Wheel of Fortune with the bodies all around him. Then the police found a couple guys from New York City murdered not far from downtown."

  "What happened?"

  "Nobody's sure. They were just businessmen. Looked like robbery but who knows? Then you have your assorted drownings, car wrecks, hunting accidents. A lot of those."

  Pellam took more Polaroids. "Look, they call it Main Street. Great."

  "Yeah, they do. I never thought about it. Outa sight."

  He paused, looked across the street into the window of the Dutchess Realty Company. The morning light fell on the storefront glass and he thought somebody else was staring at him, a blond woman. But she wasn't like the other supplicants; there was something intense and troubling about the way she studied him.

  Then he decided he was just being paranoid.

  He looked away, then back. The blond voyeur was no longer there. Just like the imagined spy in the forest overlooking the cemetery. Maybe imagined.

  Janine said, "I've gotta open the store now but, you want, sometime I can show you the only building that survived the Great Fire of 1912."

  "Love to see it."

  "You mean that?"

  "Sure do," Pellam said.

  No, we'll split the worm…

  Pellam was walking down a side street in Cleary. The red-covered script was in his hand. He made notations, he shot 'Roids.

  No, John, really… I insist.

  He was thinking about the assignment in Mexico last month.

  He and Marty had found a great jungle outside of Puerto Vallarta and after the principal photography had started, the two men had hung around and drunk mescal with the crew and watched the director waste eighty thousand feet of film (shot through a Softar filter so the flick would have that smoky soft look of a Nike or IBM commercial). The story had something to do with forgers and Swiss businessmen and skinny dark-haired women who resembled Trudie, a woman Pellam occasionally dated in L.A. (Damn, he'd forgotten to call her. It had been five days. I've gotta call. I'm going to. Definitely.)