THAT WAS
the first installment that was read, first by Evelyn as she sat by the empty pool of the Hotel Ambassador in Durango, Mexico, then later that night by her again, reading the pages to Wesley as he lay face down on the bed of their suite in a blue silk robe, a cold towel over the back of his head.
“At least he didn’t make them from Boston or New York,” Wesley said, having listened to most of it.
Evelyn placed the pages on the bedside table and stretched out next to him. She was almost the same height and she was naked except for a black T-shirt with
Mountain Gold
stenciled across the chest in gold letters. Raising one slender yet muscled leg in a right angle to the bed she let it slowly come to rest over the back of his thigh, noticing through the silk robe how shrunken and hollow his buttocks had become. She still desired him sometimes although they rarely made love, and when they did it was nearly always the same: lying on his back, his head propped up by a pillow, he would watch her as she slowly seduced his tired cock into arousal. Often he would be soft at first and she would hold him with both hands, licking and sucking and placing him up between her strong pointed breasts and as he grew hard she would rise up and settle over him, letting him slowly enter into her, making an offering of control as she waited, barely moving, until he swelled even and she could begin to move. Rather than reach out for her own pleasure, she would curl back toward him and fold into herself as he softly directed her, whispering and touching her and finally having her lean away from him so that he could watch her ass and because he loved her dark broad back and the strength in her neck and shoulders and it was sometimes then that he remembered why he had married her.
Only now there was no response from underneath the towel or silk robe.
“I don’t think it’s too bad,” she said. “Sloppy and weird because it’s so intense, but it seems like a story.”
“It isn’t good or bad. It isn’t anything.”
She could feel a coiled tension leaking out of him, like the red message light on the phone that had been blinking on and off for the past hour, and she moved off the bed and slipped into a pair of white slacks and shirt.
“You started it, didn’t you?” she asked. “I mean with that strange man, A.D. Ballou. Pulling him into a project with Walker.”
“I didn’t start it,” he said abruptly. “It came oozing up like the snout of some swamp animal. I simply lassoed the opportunity.”
“I don’t understand why you’re drawn to him, to people like A.D. Ballou.”
“Because he still believes in change, no matter what the price. It’s the American way, in case you haven’t noticed. Besides, Walker needs a connection to that kind of malignant hustle to get back on his feet, to find the courage to tell me his tale. The boy is off his feed, and I don’t want him looking to me for nourishment. That way we’d both go hungry.”
“Maybe that’s true about Walker. I wouldn’t know what he needs. But didn’t you believe in change when you married me?”
“Not really. I was more attracted to your romantic belief that you could change through me. I found it touching and painfully nostalgic. It made me want to protect you, to expose you to change but not the illusion of it.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re looking to change again. At my expense. For protecting you too well.”
He stood up and, letting the towel drop to the floor, went into the sitting room.
He didn’t recognize the two men sitting stiffly on the couch. One wore a mottled array of buckskin and furs, an otter cap pulled over the top of his gaunt face, a long jagged scar across his cheek. The other man was older, with a twisted white beard and baggy pants held up by rope suspenders.
“You asked to see us about a wardrobe check,” the older man said.
“What scene?” Wesley asked.
“In the saloon where we ask Pancho Villa if he’ll hire us as mercenaries.”
“What happens?” Wesley asked, pouring himself a shot of tequila.
“Pancho Villa shoots Hank,” Scarface said. “After we tell him our credentials and ask where we can get laid.”
“Why does Hank get shot?”
“Pancho Villa tells me that I’ve lost my courage,” Hank said. “He says that I’m too old and cynical to be of any use and he just pulls out his pistol and shoots me.”
Wesley took the script from the older man and looked at the pages where his lines were underlined in red. He tore out the pages and handed the script back.
“I think we’ll just go out to the set and shoot the fucking thing,” he said.
“You mean shoot the scene now?” Hank said.
“Right now. On the set,” Wesley said and walked into the bedroom.
“I want to get it over with,” he said to Evelyn.
“Get what over with?” she asked, thinking that he meant get himself over with.
“The film. The whole thing. Are you ready to hit the road?”
“Where to?”
“Who cares where to,” he said angrily. “Are you ready to hit the road?”
“Wesley, ever since I’ve known you we’ve been on the road.”
“Well, do you want to get off the road?”
“Yes. I would like to get off the road.”
“Good.”
He called the second unit cameraman and told him to meet him on the set with a 16mm camera and the sound man. Then he called the Mexican actor playing Pancho Villa and told him they were shooting the saloon scene and to be out there as well.
“But it is ten o’clock, Señor Hardin,” the actor said, his speech slowed by a combination of booze, Quaaludes, and sex.
“Bring her along, too,” Wesley said and hung up.
He pulled on whatever was closest — red sweat pants, maroon loafers, Hawaiian shirt.
“
Por los bandidos
,” he said, slipping a .38 revolver into his belt.
In the hotel lobby Wesley came across a few more actors and some of the crew and told them to hire taxis out to the set and the studio would pick up the tab. He said that if they wanted to bring anyone else out that would be okay too. Then he called the production manager and told him he was going to shoot a scene and to round up the usual suspects. The production manager said that Wesley was going too far, that he couldn’t cover for him in any way if he pulled a stunt like that. Chalmers had flown down from the studio three hours before and was already kicking everyone’s ass and he wanted a meeting with Wesley at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow to discuss the very real possibility that Wesley might not be in sufficient command of himself to go on and that they were fully prepared to send another director down and even had one picked out. Wesley said that he was open to discussing everything, that he felt in firm control, and that he was even considering the production manager as a possible coproducer for his next film which was going to take place in India and in view of the difficulties involved would really be more of a producer’s picture than a director’s.
In the El Presidente bar, Wesley and Evelyn had three quick shots of tequila with the prop man, who was sitting with an aspiring actress from Mexico City making ends meet, so to speak, as a paid weekend companion. He asked the prop man, an old-timer and a millionaire from all he had stolen from Wesley’s films, to meet him on the set with a case of booze and anything else that would encourage altered states of behavior. The prop man said with tears in his eyes that he would pull out all the props as this might be the last scene the “old man” would ever be allowed to shoot. Just to prove or to underline his gratitude and loyalty he pressed a silver bullet full of pharmaceutical cocaine into Wesley’s palm and kissed him on the lips.
On the street Wesley interrupted a four-man mariachi band serenading a Greyhound bus full of German tourists, offering them each one hundred dollars American to come out to the set and play.
“Say no more,
jefe
,” said the trumpet player. “We are yours forever.”
Then Wesley and Evelyn and the two actors who had been in his suite for a wardrobe check drove north twenty miles to the set, a collection of nineteenth-century houses and false fronts lining both sides of a dusty main street complete with saloon, hotel, and jail. A few Mexican families lived in and maintained the town, moving from house to house as each movie company came through and tore apart and rebuilt everything according to the dictates of their script or the inclinations of the director.
A single streetlight was on when they drove up in front of the saloon, the guard waving a tired salute toward Wesley as he stepped out of the car.
“
Por la revolución
,” Wesley said, handing the guard a bottle of tequila and striding past him.
The saloon was half complete, being in the middle of a transformation from the lobby of a Mexico City whorehouse to a border town cantina with crude wooden tables, low smoke-blackened ceiling, and a bar where several jars held live tarantulas and the curled form of a diamondback rattlesnake. Wesley took a table at the far end, facing the swinging doors. Pouring half the pharmaceutical coke on the table, he fashioned six rough lines, snorting them up with a rolled peso note and handing the note to Evelyn.
“You are my life,” he whispered, kissing her on the ear.
“Is that why you are trying to end it?”
“Not end, precisely, to come to terms with, to slowly dissolve, perhaps.”
“Why not just cut to black,” she said, inhaling the rest of the coke.
“Why not, indeed.”
He peered at the two mountain men who had taken up positions at the end of the bar. “Good boys,” he said. “Solid boys who can hit the mark.”
“You intimidate me when you’re like this,” she said.
“I’ve never been like this,” he said, looking past her as the swinging doors opened and five of the crew came in, standing awkwardly just inside the door. The sound man walked over to find out what was going on.
“I’m going to try for another point of view,” Wesley said. “A Nagra would be best because I might want to drift around the room with the sixteen. If you can’t go small, then set up the best you can.”
“Is this a test?” the cameraman asked, sullen about the whole thing.
“It’s not a test,” Wesley said sharply, the sudden rush from the cocaine, a substance he rarely used, making him raw and impatient. “And it’s not a rehearsal. I just want to take a quick slant away from the story for a while. If that’s okay with you?”
“I don’t care one way or the other,” the sound man said and walked away.
“I’m going to get someone to drive me back to the hotel,” Evelyn said.
“Stay.
Please
,” he implored her, motioning to a grip standing nearby.
“Set up a minimal amount of light,” he told the grip, swinging his attention back to Evelyn: “I want you to be in this.”
“In what?”
“This footage. Tonight.”
“Why?”
“Why? Do I have to know why? Because I need you to be here.”
She nodded, retreating into the refuge of her own silence, a gesture that in the first days of their relationship Wesley had been drawn to, even obsessed by, as if he had recognized in her sudden withdrawals the raw stoicism of his own family, the internal solitudes of that dark land he had run so far from and lately had felt such a pull toward. Only now he felt Evelyn’s silence as an abrupt refusal to comment or participate on any level and he took it as a rejection.
The prop man entered, followed by two Mexicans carrying a case of liquor and bags of potato chips and fried chicken. Behind them trailed three local whores dressed in brightly flowered print dresses, snapping their fingers and trying to get stoned or drunk as quickly as possible. Everything was flat and stale and awkward.
Wesley stood up and walked over to meet the second unit cameraman coming into the saloon with the mariachi band.
“Are you set up?” Wesley asked.
“I can shoot right now,” the cameraman said, setting down an equipment case and taking out a 16mm camera.
“I don’t want you to think about the script,” Wesley said.
“I would prefer that,” the cameraman said. He was young and unhealthy and obnoxiously alert, moving around in his safari jacket as if on a combat mission.
“Pan across the bar to my wife sitting at that back table,” Wesley directed. “Then move with me up to the table as I sit down, give me a brief two shot, and then it’s all on her, no matter what she says.”
As they moved toward the table, the mariachi band broke into “La Cama de Piedra” and one of the whores in a loud abrasive voice translated the lines to the prop man: “I have a stone bed and a stone pillow. The muchacho who lives with me has to be true
. . . .
”
Evelyn watched them come, despair clouding her dark eyes.
“I don’t like this, Wesley,” she said as he slid into a chair beside her.
“What don’t you like?” he asked.
She looked at him, her eyes suddenly flat and hard, wanting to hurt him for the first time. “I don’t like your fear. I don’t mind your rage but I don’t like your fear. It makes me despise you.”
“What do you think about this film?” he asked.
“I think this film is pathetic and I think the way you’re trying to do yourself in is bullshit.”