Fun With Problems (13 page)

He opened the berries with difficulty and took out the butter, milk and eggs. He broke an egg onto the Teflon surface of the frying pan. Looking at the yolk under the kitchen light, he saw that there was a bright blood spot in the center of it. This was mildly disturbing to such a perfectionist as Leroy and he tried to remember what it might signify. Perhaps, he thought, the egg was not fresh. Or the opposite. He stood reflected in his kitchen window against the black night outside, seeing his own blank face. A flash of lightning lit the rock landscape outside, revealing the aspens, the plastic flag at the top of one tree. He sipped his wine, put the pan aside and dialed Ilena's number in San Anselmo.

"Allo, Leroy," Ilena said in her husky voice when she heard who it was. "How may I serve you, my kink?"

"I miss you," Leroy told her. "Why didn't you come with me?"

"Aha. Your punishment,
cheri.
"

"Punishment for what?" He smiled wanly at his reflection. "I've been good."

"Good? Ho ho. A good one."

"No, really. Come up, get a morning plane to Rock City. Get one tonight. I'll get you picked up."

"Naah," she said in a vulgar comic voice. He hated her speaking that way. "Naah," she said. "No fuckink way."

Leroy suspected Ilena might be drunk. She had a drinking problem.

"But why, sweetheart? Don't you love your king?"

"Naah," she said.

"Come on."

"Come on," she mimicked. "
Come on.
Leroy, you're a noodle, eh?"

"Please come."

"Naah."

"I'm opening your caperberries. Thinking of you."

She laughed charmingly. "Don't be so stupid. You make me pissed off."

"If you don't come," Leroy said, "I'll make you sorry."

"Ya? I don't think so. How about: Fuck yourself, dollink."

"Listen," Leroy said, trying to change the subject. "I
broke an egg into the pan to cook your berries. There's a red spot in the yolk. What about that?"

She gave a soft canine yip. "Break other egg."

Leroy reached for a second egg and broke it. It also had a red spot in the yolk.

"A red spot," he told her. "Honestly."

"Yes? No shit? Whoa."

"What?"

"Break next egg. Egg next to it."

Leroy did. There was a red spot. He told her so.

"Somebody playing a joke on you, boss. Like the jokes you like. Put-on, pain-in-the-ass jokes you like."

"I thought you liked my jokes, Ilena."

"Naah."

"You always laugh at them."

"Tell your name for me," she said.

"Oh," he said, trying a laugh. "It's harmless." His nickname for her was Strangepussy. Harmless. But who could have told her?

"I laugh when you put-on somebody else," Ilena said. "You too, when someone hurts. You're cruel motherfucker."

"When did you decide this?"

"Lewis tells me."

Lewis was a business associate of whom Leroy had had enough.

"Lewis! He told you? That nitwit?"

"You think? Screw you! Hey, kink, what looks like? The red spot?"

"It's just red."

"Look like skull, no? Tiny skull."

"I don't see a skull."

"Yes!" she insisted bad-humoredly. "You will see. Ask your other girlfriends. Ask Ludmilla, the gypsy."

"Ludmilla's not a gypsy," Leroy said.

"Fuck she ain't. You cheating
cul.
You get what you deserve. Your money is cursed. Your house. Your dick. Skull in the eggs. You will see."

Leroy cleared his throat. "Please, Ilena."

She cursed in her language and hung up.

Holding his silent phone, he looked out of his dark kitchen window again and saw the face of the fugitive Alan Ladd, the ape's face, the tiny eyes. Smiling. And what to call his mouth? Disapproving. A homicidally disapproving mouth. But it was only a vision, imagination. Alan Ladd, his crushed face, his tiny eyes. Alan Ladd was at the wheel of some murder victim's car, perhaps driving on a transcontinental superhighway, otherwise driving a back road in the woods, prowling. Prowling for victims. Beside Alan Ladd a dog was seated, an exquisitely trained pooch, a mechanical dog actually, its teeth honed and gleaming. Maybe Alan and his dog were seeking out a lonely house in the woods marked by a filthy plastic banner.

But there was nothing in the window. The thought was a worm of the brain. Leroy's phantom, the torment of a too busy man dedicated to his work.

"I can and will make life sweet," Leroy said aloud. As frightening as losers are, he thought, I am more. I have the high ground.

He went into the part of his den that served as a library. Lightning flashed beyond the glass wall, thunder boomed in the rock. There was still no rain. On Leroy's reading table was the two-volume
Oxford English Dictionary.
It stood beside Bartlett's
Familiar Quotations,
whose citations he used to crush underlings. The dictionary came equipped with a magnifying sheet that could be applied to the page to make the small print more readily legible. Leroy picked up the sheet and took it into the kitchen. He had not turned the stove on, so the eggs sat coldly in their pan, complacently three-eyed in the light, innocent as unborn Cyclopean babes. Leroy set his magnifying sheet on the pan's rim.

Yes, he saw. The spots might be skulls. They were elongated, cephalic, with inward curves that might mark cheekbones. The tops were rounded, maybe cranial. There were two tiny rounded darker marks against the blood red that might represent eyes, little rectangles that could stand for teeth. A hollowed snout.

Blood spots, though, not portents, nothing intentional. Whether random biology or a poisoner's mark, Ilena had made them appear as they did. Out of secret hatred or jealousy, out of the sheer evil of the weak, which he had seen often enough. As so often with the helpless and self-deluding, she had turned the strength of the strong against her betters. The tactic of sly inferiors: to set his mind against itself in a lonely place. All day, he realized, he had been thinking negative thoughts. Was it something fated, a test of confidence to be proved, as though there were some superforce that ruled strength, constantly sorting out the chosen, making them risk their gifts and qualities against the little strategies of the lame? Was there some kind of supernaturalism in the law of survival?

Leroy decided that it did not matter to him. Even if all the forces of the eternal loser were able to combine against his superior mind, people like himself had to prevail. Because morality was functional. To be strong was to be hard, to laugh at punks who never dreamed of taking the first step toward getting what they wanted, who never knew. Never knew except to resent and set petty traps.

Oh, and they hated being called by the names they chose for themselves by virtue of their own absurdity. And their humor was frail; they hated the jokes that required them to act out their foolishness and impotence. They had to live the reality that the elected provided for them. In their sheepy droves they hated Leroy and his like.

Angry, he burst out onto the patio. In his rage he brought his hand down hard on his metal outdoor breakfast table, again and again. While his legato echoed on the wall, he heard a faint but curious sound. Looking up, he saw a dark brown shape. It stayed in place without motion. In a moment, the overhead lights above his pool cast two glowing lights on the lower extension of the thing. What glowed was a pair of bright yellow eyes. It was a cat, coiled, about to spring.

Somehow Leroy managed to leap into the pool. His plunge took him below the surface for a second, and as he fought to clear his vision he made himself hope that he had imagined the thing. But then he saw the panther in the very place he had been standing. It was trembling, regarding him from the far edge of time. Its face was skull-like.

Immediately the big cat moved around to the other side of the pool so that it waited behind him. He turned, treading water, fighting for breath. Floating in the middle of the pool was a large red and green beach ball. He put his arms
around it to stay afloat, but it seemed to be drifting toward the side of the pool where the cat waited. Leroy came so close that the cat reached out over the water and, as Leroy watched, a pair of claws the size of kitchen knives shot out from its paw's black pads. The cat growled what sounded to him like a command to despair. Leroy, hanging on to his buoyant toy, saw something dreadful that he recognized in the animal grin and extended fangs. Unrelenting confidence. Dead certainty.

Leroy clung to the merry beach ball. The harder he clung to it, the more it seemed to drift toward the panther's reach. Batted by an almost casual thrust of the cat's claw, the ball began to spin in his slippery embrace. The cat was circling the pool, tense but assured as any mere animal could be, feinting, reversing ground. At play. Leroy began to scream for help. His breath was failing, but on each inhalation he clung harder to the whirling ball.

Overhead the stars had come out, the Milky Way. Leroy thought it might be a trail, a way out. All at once from somewhere in the canyon he heard a voice, one he thought he remembered. He called to it for help with all the breath he could summon until he realized that the voice was singing.

"I'm drowning in the lowland, low land low."

The song was one he knew. It was the voice of Dongo. Dongo singing a song in the canyon.

"Drowning in the lowland sea."

Leroy, spinning with the beach ball, began to sing along.

I
FIRST MET LUCY AT
a movie premiere at Grauman's about midway between the death of Elvis Presley and the rise of Bill Clinton. Attending was a gesture of support for the director, who happened to be a friend of mine. The film's distributors had made a halfhearted lurch toward an old-style Grauman's opening, breaking out a hastily dyed red carpet. A couple of searchlights swept the murky night sky over downtown Hollywood. By then these occasions were exhausted flickers of the past, so there were none of the much-parodied rituals some of us watched in black-and-white newsreels at the corner Bijou. No more flashbulbs or narrators with society lockjaw telling us what the talent was wearing. Neither simpering interviewers nor doomed starlets walking the walk. The camera flashes and the demented fans crowding the velvet rope were all memories. Hollywood Boulevard was even rattier then than it is now. The only people around the marquee that night were frightenedlooking Japanese tourists and bright-eyed street freaks with slack smiles.

The picture was no good. It was the forced sequel to a 1960s hit with a plot cribbed from a John Ford movie of the fifties. It featured two very old actors, revered figures from the time of legend, and the point of it was the old dears' opportunity to recycle their best beloved shtick. The withered couple and their more agile doubles shuffled through outdoor adventures and a heartwarming geriatric romance stapled to some bits of fossil western. Attempts had been made to make it all contemporary with winks and nods and brain-dead ironizing.

The audience consisted mainly of people who were there on assignment, out of politeness, or from fear. There were also members of the moviegoing public, admitted by coupons available through the homes-of-celebrities tours and at the cashier counters of cheap restaurants. Raven-haired Lucy, with her throaty voice and dark-eyed Armenian fire, was in the picture briefly, as an Apache maid. I later learned she was not in the theater to take pleasure in the picture or even in her own performance. She had come in the service of romance, her own, involving an alcoholic, Heathcliffish British actor, the movie's villain.

Heathcliff had made Lucy crazy that night by escorting his handsome and chic wife, suddenly reunited with her husband and relocated from London. It seemed that the sight of them had stricken Lucy physically; when I saw her sitting alone a few seats down from me she was cringing tearfully in the darks and lights from the screen.

My first impulse was to leave her alone in her distress. I was certainly not impelled to a hypocritical display of concern. But it was one of those bells; I was unattached, still single, due to leave town in a week. Maybe I'd had a drink or smoked a joint before the appalling show. Anyway, I moved one seat toward her.

"Nice scenery," I said.

She looked at me in a flash of the Big Sky Country's exterior daylight, removing her stylish glasses to dab at her tears and sitting upright in her seat.

"Oh, thanks."

Her tone was predictably one of annoyed sarcasm, but I chose not to interpret it as the blowing off she intended. Sometimes you can parse a hasty word in the semidark and I decided not to be discouraged, at least not so quickly. I realized then that she had some connection with the picture on the screen. An actress, a production girl?

In those days, I was confident to the point of arrogance. I assumed I was growing more confident with time. How could I know that the more you knew the more troubled and cautious you became, that introspection cut your speed and endurance? We watched for a while and she shifted in her seat and touched her hair. I interpreted these as favorable portents and moved over to a place one seat away from her. At that distance I recognized her among the film's cast. Scarcely a minute later onscreen, Brion Pritchard, her real-life deceiver, callously gunned down her character, the Apache soubrette. I watched her witness the tearjerky frames of her own death scene. She appeared unmoved, stoical and grim.

"Good job," I said.

Lucy fidgeted, turned to me and spoke in a stage whisper that must have been audible three rows away.

"She sucked!" Lucy declared, distancing herself from the performance and turning such scorn on the hapless young indigen that I winced.

"So let's go," I suggested.

Lucy was reluctant to go, afraid of being spotted by our mutual friend the director, who had also produced the film. She expected to look to him for employment before long. However, she seemed to find being hit on a consolation. It was the first glimpse I had of her exhausting impulsiveness.

We sneaked out in a crouch like two stealthy movie Indians, under cover of a darkness dimly lighted by a day-for-night sequence. The two stars onscreen told each other their sad backstories by a campfire. Their characters had the leisure to chat because Apaches never attacked at night.