Bloody River Blues Page 3

  The hammers pounded.

  He stood up and pulled on his jeans and a black T-shirt. He looked in the mirror. He'd slept in one position all night-on his stomach like a baby-and his black hair had gone spiky. Pellam smoothed it and rubbed at the welts that the crumpled sheet had left across his face. He went to see who was swinging hammers.

  "Hey, dude," Stile said, walking into the kitchen past him. "I was sent to collect you."

  Pellam put a kettle on. Stile stood beside the camper's tiny dining table, still covered with cards and Pellams meager winnings. He looked at the chili pot and tapped the black crust with his fingernail. He foraged in the miniature refrigerator. "You got zero food in here."

  "Why are you here?" Pellam mumbled.

  "Your phone. It's not turned on." Stile found an old bagel and broke it in half. He lifted the other half toward Pellam, who shook his head and dropped two spoonfuls of instant coffee into a Styrofoam cup. "Coffee?" he asked Stile.

  "Naw. I got my wheels. You can have the cycle back. It's in the trunk. There's a little teeny dent on the fender. Otherwise it's in perfect condition. Well, it's muddy. Well, the rack, too."

  Pellam poured water into the cup and sat heavily on the bench. Stile told him his hair was all spiky.

  "What are you doing here?" Pellam asked again as he smoothed his hair.

  "Tony needs you. He's like apoplectic-is that the right word?-and you shut your phone off."

  "Because I wanted to sleep later than seven o'clock."

  "I been up for an hour." Stile did tai chi at dawn. He ate the bagel thoughtfully. "You know, John, I got to admit I was a little curious why you're working for Tony."

  Pellam took three sips of scalding coffee. That was something about instant. It tasted terrible but it started hot and stayed hot. He rubbed his thumb and index finger together, designating money, in answer to Stile's question about Tony.

  Stiles grunt equaled a shrug, as if he suspected there was more to it. On the other hand, Stile was a senior union stuntman and even at the Screen Actors Guild's contract minimums, would be well paid. But he was also a stand-in for one of the leads, and because of this and because of his experience, his agent had negotiated an overscale contract. He understood all about the motives for being attached to a big-budget project.

  "Well, Herr Eisenstein has summoned you and I'm delivering the word." He finished the bagel.

  "He tell you what's up?"

  "He wants to blow up an oil refinery. For the final scene."

  "What?" Pellam rubbed his eyes.

  "I swear to God. He's going to build this mock-up of an old DC-7 and tow it behind a chopper, then-" Stile mimicked a plane diving into the stove "-Ka-boom…"

  Pellam shook his head. "He's out of… You son of a bitch. You eat a man's last bagel and you rag him all the while you're doing it and here it is not even dawn."

  Stile laughed. "Damn easy to pull your chain, Pellam. Up and at 'em. Rise and shine. Our master calls."

  ***

  Bell's Bide-A-Wee contained two tents, the Winnebago, which was parked in the row closest to the road, and a Ford Taurus, from whose trunk a yellow motorcycle protruded.

  The camper was surrounded by unoccupied spaces dotted with short galvanized steel pipes and junction boxes for utility hookups that stretched away toward the river like slots in a miniature drive-in movie theater.

  Stevie Flom had turned off River Road and driven a half block through a stretch of boarded-up one-and two-story houses and stores. He had started to park nose-out in an alley between two deserted shops. Ralph Bales had told him not to get fancy-just parallel park on the street and read the paper or something-only leave the engine running.

  Ralph Bales walked down to River Road. It was morning, but he saw lights on in the camper. Then he saw a man's silhouette walking around inside. Ralph Bales stepped into a phone booth, whose floor was covered with the tiny blue cubes from its four shattered windows. Three tall weeds grew up through this pile. He picked up the receiver with a Kleenex and pretended to talk while he studied the camper.

  He looked beyond the Winnebago to the river. This morning it looked different still-not silver-gray, not the golden shade of last night. Now the surface had a rusty sheen to it, mirroring a redness in the sky that came, Ralph Bales believed, from garbage pumped into the air by refineries outside of Wood River, across the Mississippi. The wind was steady and it bent grass and weeds on the riverbank but hardly lifted any ripples from the ruddy water, which plodded southward.

  Ralph Bales remembered a song that he hadn't thought of for years, a sound-track song from twenty-five years ago, the Byrds' closing number in Easy Rider. He heard the music in his head clearly but could not recall the lyrics, just snatches of words about a man wanting to be free, about a river flowing away from someplace, flowing to the sea…

  The door to the camper opened.

  Yep, it was him. The beer man, the witness. He was followed by a tall, gangly man with a droopy mustache. Together they stepped to the back of the Taurus and wrestled the motorcycle out of the trunk.

  The Colt appeared from under Ralph Bales's coat, and he looked around him slowly. A mile away, a semi downshifted with a silent belch of smoke. A flock of gray birds dotted past. In the middle of the muddy river a scarred and patchy tug fought its way upstream.

  The two men were talking, standing together over the cycle. The mustached man pointed to what looked like a dent in the mudguard, then he jiggled the chrome rack. The beer man shrugged, then wheeled the motorcycle toward the road.

  Ralph Bales was waiting for the friend to get in the Taurus and leave but then decided he should kill both of them. He lifted his Colt and rested the square notch of the sight on the beer man's chest. The silver truck approached. He lowered the gun.

  It roared past, engulfing the men in a swirl of papers and dust.

  Ralph Bales lifted the gun once more. The road was empty now. No trucks or cars. Nothing between him and his targets thirty feet away from the phone booth and its floor of shattered glass.

  THREE

  He climbed onto the battered, muddy yellow motorcycle and fired it up, then gunned the engine several times. Pulling on a black helmet, he popped the clutch suddenly and did a wheelie, scooting a precarious ten feet before the front tire descended again to the street. He skidded to a braking stop and returned to his mustached friend.

  Ralph Bales steadied the gun with his left palm and began to apply the nine pounds of pressure required to release the hammer.

  The beer man pulled on dark-framed sunglasses and zipped up his jacket-for one slow moment he sat up completely straight, perpendicular to Ralph Bales, offering a target that was impossible to miss.

  At this moment Ralph Bales lowered the gun.

  He squinted, watching the man sit forward and tap the bike into first gear with his toe. It skidded away on River Road with a ragged chain-saw roar of the punchy engine. His friend shouted at him and shook his fist, then leapt into the Taurus and, with a huge spume of dust and gravel, roared over the curb and chased the cycle down River Road, laying down thick tire marks.

  Ralph Bales eased the hammer down onto an empty cylinder and slipped the gun into his pocket. He looked up and down the road, then turned, jogging back into the murky shadows of the riverfront streets. He walked up to the Cadillac. He rapped on the driver's window.

  "Jesus, I didn't hear it!" Stevie shouted, tossing the paper in the backseat, the sheets separating and filling the car. He flipped the car into gear. "I didn't hear the shot, man!" He glanced through the rear window. "I didn't hear it!"

  Ralph Bales casually flicked his fingers toward Stevie.

  "Let's go!" the young man shouted again. "What do you mean? What are you doing?"

  "Move over," Ralph Bales mouthed.

  "What?" Stevie shouted.

  "I'll drive."

  Stevie looked back again, as if a dozen Missouri Highway Patrol cars were racing after him.

  Ralph Bales said, "Pu
t it in park."

  "What?"

  "Put the car in park and move over," he responded with exasperation. "I'll drive." He climbed in and signaled and made a careful, slow U-tum.

  "What happened?"

  "Have to wait."

  "You didn't do it?"

  "Excuse me?" Ralph Bales asked with mock astonishment. "You just said you didn't hear any shots."

  "Man! Scared the living crap out of me. I mean, bang, bang, bang, on the window. I thought you were a cop. What the hell happened?"

  Ralph Bales didn't answer for a moment. "There were a bunch of people around."

  "There were?" They now drove past the deserted campground. Stevie protested, "I don't see anybody."

  "You wanted me to do it right in front of a dozen witnesses?"

  Stevie swiveled around. "What was it, like a bus drove past or something?"

  "Yeah. It was like a bus."

  ***

  Samuel Clemens once stayed in the town of Maddox, Missouri, and supposedly wrote part of Tom Sawyer here. The Maddox Historical Society implied that the caverns outside of town were the true inspiration for Injun Joe's cave, despite evidence-and the assertion of a more credible tourist board (Hannibal, Missouri)-to the contrary. Other claims to fame were pretty sparse. In 1908 William Jennings Bryan gave a speech here (standing on a real soapbox to do so), and Maddox was cited by FDR in a Fireside Chat as an example of towns decimated by the Depression. One of the now defunct metalwork mills in town had the-distinction of fabricating part of the housing used in what would have been the third atomic bomb dropped in World War II.

  But these honors aside, Maddox was essentially a stillborn Detroit.

  Unlike Jefferson City, which sat genteel and majestic on gnarled stone bluffs above the Missouri, Maddox squatted on the rivers muddy banks just north of where the wide water was swallowed by the wider Mississippi. No malls, no downtown rehab, no landscaped condos.

  Maddox was now a town of about thirty thousand.

  The downtown was a gloomy array of pre-1950 retail stores and two-story office buildings, none of which was fully occupied. Outside of this grim core were two or three dozen factories, about half of them still working at varying degrees of capacity. Unemployment was at 28 percent, the town's per capita income was among the lowest in Missouri, and alcoholism and crime were at record highs. The city was continually in and out of insolvency and the one fire company in town sometimes had to make heartbreaking decisions about which of two or three simultaneous blazes it was going to fight. Residents lived in decrepit housing projects and minuscule nineteenth-century bungalows hemmed in by neighbors and uncut grass and kudzu, amid yards decorated with doorless refrigerators, rusted tricycles, cardboard boxes. On every block were scorched circles, like primitive sacrifice sites, where trash-whose collection the city was often unable to undertake-was illegally burned.

  Maddox, Missouri, was a dark river beside the darker rust of storage tanks. Maddox was rats nosing boldly over greasy, indestructible U.S. centennial cobblestones, Maddox was wiry grass pushing through rotting wooden loading docks and BB craters in plate glass and collapsed grain elevators. Maddox was no more or less than what you saw just beyond the

  Welcome To sign on River Road: the skeleton of a rusted-out Chevy one-ton pickup not worth selling for scrap.

  But for John Pellam, Maddox was heaven.

  A month earlier, he had just finished scouting locations in Montana. He had been sitting outside of the Winnebago, his brown Nokonas stretched out in front of him and pointing more or less at the spot where George Armstrong Ouster's ego finally caught up with him. Pellam had been drinking beer when his cellular phone had started buzzing.

  He hadn't more than answered it before the speaker was barraging him with a story about two young lovers who become robbers. A machine gun of facts, as if the caller and Pellam were resuming a conversation cut short minutes before by an ornery mobile phone. Pellam believed the name of the man with whom he was having this animated talk had passed his way a moment before, but he'd missed it in the onslaught of words.

  "Uh, who's this again?"

  'Tony Sloan," the surprised, staccato voice fired back.

  "Okay." They had never met. Pellam knew Sloan, of course. But then, so did everyone who read Premiere or People or Newsweek. A former producer of TV commercials, he had directed last year's Circuit Man, a computer sci-fi political thriller, a megahit that had snagged Oscars for best special effects and best sound and had grossed thirty-six million dollars its first weekend against a total budget of seventy-eight million.

  Pellam had seen the first two of Sloan's films and none of the rest. He preferred not to work for directors like Tony Sloan-special-effects directors, he considered them, not people directors-but that day in Montana he had listened to the man with some interest, for two reasons. First: After his recent hit Sloan could write very large checks to those he hired and never be questioned by his studio. Second: Sloan was explaining with a gravity surprising for a child of television that he wanted to make a movie with some meat on it. "Artistically, I want to expand. A Badlands tone, you know what I mean? Minimal. Essential."

  Pellam had liked Badlands and his favorite films were minimal and essential. He felt he should hear Sloan out.

  "John, I've asked around. People say you been all over the country. They say you're a walking site catalog."

  Perhaps not. But Pellam did have many scrapbooks filled with Polaroid snaps of quirky, cinematic locales just right for the sort of feature film that Sloan was describing. Moreover, Sloan had less location experience than most directors because his flicks were usually soundstage setups and computer graphics transfers. To make his movie he'd need a solid location manager.

  "Keep talking," Pellam said.

  "They're bank robbers," Sloan was explaining. "Young bank robbers. It's a vehicle-for like Aidan Quinn and Julia Roberts before she was Julia Roberts. I don't want to go with anybody who's been on the cover of People. Nobody bankable. It's got me scared, but I need to make this change. Between you and me I'm suffocating under the system. You know what I'm saying?"

  Pellam did and he told Sloan so.

  "They're not understood, this couple. They're angry, they're disaffected-"

  Listening to Sloan back then, Pellam had seen what he believed were the Black Hills. They weren't black at all, but were dark blue. They were very far away, but in the awesome, undisturbed sky towering above, they looked both regal and unsettling.

  "It sounds vaguely familiar, Tony."

  "I know, you're thinking Bonnie and Clyde," Sloan said.

  Ah, right. That was what Pellam had been thinking.

  "This's different," the director continued. "It's called Missouri River Blues. You hear about it? Orion was kicking it around a few years ago before it was belly-up time. These characters are real. They live and breathe. Dunaway and Beatty were… Dunaway and Beatty. What can I say? Good movie, one of my primal influences. But I'm going beyond it. Okay, Ross, that's the boyfriend, he's in prison and going crazy. He's going to loll himself. He can't take it anymore. We open on these incredible shots of a lock-down. That's when… See, in prison-"

  "When they close up the maximum-security cellblock for the night."

  "Right. How'd you know that?"

  'Tell me about the film, Tony."

  "I've got the DP working on a special micro lens. Angles on the insides of the locks and bars clanging shut. It's beautiful. So we get a sense of confinement. Everything closing around him. Well, Ross escapes, and he and Dehlia-"

  "Dehlia?" "'

  "… he and Dehlia drive around the countryside, robbing armored trucks mostly. They're highwaymen, modern highwaymen. Ross's driven by his fear of the lock-down. She's driven by the social convention that forces women to be homemakers. Claustrophobia. The script plays off the risk of freedom versus the fear of imprisonment. Which is worse? Prison with its security, freedom with its dangers?"

  "It sounds a lot like Bonnie and
Clyde."

  "No, no, the characters are all different. Also the freedom of love versus its confinement. Oh, and the kids're concerned about the environment." He added significantly, "This's the early fifties. They're concerned about A-bomb testing."

  "A-bombs," Pellam said. "That's very socially conscious." Sloan completely missed the irony and Pellam asked, "Set in Missouri, I presume?"

  "Medium-sized town," Sloan said. "The postwar boom has passed it by. That sort of town."

  "Bonnie and Clyde was set in Missouri," Pellam pointed out. "Part of it anyway."

  "It's not like Bonnie and Clyde," the director said icily.

  Pellam flipped through his mental Rolodex of locations he knew in the Midwest. "I did a job in Kansas a few years back.

  Small town on a river. How's Kansas?"

  "I want Missouri. The title, you know."

  Pellam asked, "Could you tell Kansas from Missouri?"

  "I grew up in Van Nuys. I can't tell Ohio from Colorado. But that's not the point. I want Missouri."

  "Got it."

  Sloan now paused. "The thing is, John, I've got some timing problems here."

  The tail of the sentence wagged silently.

  "Timing."

  "You know, I've had nothing but headaches with the project. You know the Time article about me? Last year?"

  "I missed it," Pellam said.

  "When they called me the 'High-tech Visionary'?"

  Pellam said that whatever they had called him, he'd still missed the article.

  "I mean, Sony or Disney would have written a check for the GNP of France if I'd made the sequel."

  Son of Circuit Man, Pellam thought, then reconsidered. He said, "Circuit Man Rewired."

  "Ha, John. Very good. Very funny. But Missouri River? It was a battle to get the green light. It's an action film, but it's a period action film, and it's an intelligent period action film. That scared people."