Stars Screaming (6 page)

“Hi.” Bonnie was standing in the kitchen doorway with her skirt off and her blouse unbuttoned to her waist. “So,” she said, reaching for the paper cup that Burk was holding, “do you want to hear the rest of the story?”

In the spring of 1942, Bonnie’s mother, Grace Simpson, took the Union Pacific railroad from Buchanan, Michigan, to Hollywood, California. And by the end of that same year, while her husband—a marine corporal—was crossing the Pacific on a troop carrier, she was acting in her first movie.

“My father never knew she was in a beauty contest or that she went to Hollywood or any of those things,” Bonnie said. She and Burk were sitting cross-legged on the bed, in their underwear. “My mom said he would’ve jumped ship if he knew she left me back home.”

Burk took a sip of scotch. “Yeah, that’s a pretty strange thing to do,” he said.

“Strange. I call it brave.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” Bonnie said. “Sometimes you gotta take some risks with your life. Like we’re doing now, Ray. Right?” Bonnie reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. Then she looked at him with unmistakable affection and said, “Let’s get under the covers.”

After they made love for the second time that night, Bonnie told Burk that her father was killed on the island of Corregidor shortly before her mother’s first movie was released in 1943. The day after the funeral, Grace Simpson took the Union Pacific back to Hollywood, where she made nine more movies, most of them B Westerns.

“They were just bit parts,” Bonnie said, as she slipped out of bed and stood naked by the window. “She never had more than a few lines. But for some reason she started to get this following among soldiers and sailors who were returning home from the war. She even started to get fan mail. And do you want to know what’s really strange? All of them said the same thing, that Mom reminded them of . . . of the girl they left behind.”

Quietly, Burk crossed the room and joined Bonnie by the window. “I came out to visit her in 1949,” Bonnie said, taking his hand, and she looked up at him with a small sad smile. “We were going to take a vacation together, but Max Rheingold wanted her to be in
The Crooked Man
, this gangster picture he was producing. He tried to fuck my mom,” she said matter-of-factly. “He tried to fuck her in his office when he interviewed her for the part. I was right there, sitting in a chair outside the door. I heard her scream and I ran inside and made him stop.”

“How?”

Bonnie hesitated before she answered. “I got between them,” she said. She pointed toward the hills. “Look, you can see the
H.
”

“The what?”

“The
H
in the Hollywood sign. See?” Bonnie took a step backward, and Burk’s erection nudged her hip.

“I see it,” Burk said. “I see it every day.”

Bonnie’s hand dropped down between his legs, and she began to stroke him gently with the tips of her fingers. “Do you believe me?” she whispered.

“What?”

“That stuff about my mom and Rheingold.”

“If you said it happened, then I guess it happened.”

“It happened,” Bonnie said positively, “just exactly like I told you.”

Burk laced his fingers around her waist and pulled her close. “Then tell me the rest,” he said.

“When I’m damn good and ready,” she said, and held his eyes for a long time. Then she smiled and led him back to the bed.

“Even though it was the biggest role she had ever been offered, Mom was so frightened of Rheingold she almost turned it down. Finally, a week before shooting started, Lindy Dolittle, the director and an old friend, convinced her to change her mind.”

Bonnie shifted her body on the bed so she could look straight into Burk’s eyes.

“The script called for the final shoot-out to take place at a remote mountain cabin, and we ended up going up to Big Bear Lake on location. There was all sorts of rough-and-tumble action that week, so Mom was doubled a lot, which was fine with me because that meant we could spend more time together. Some mornings we went hiking way up in the mountains, far away from the cast and crew. In the afternoon, if it was warm enough, we would sunbathe naked by a narrow stream that was hidden in a grove of pines. We never really talked about much, or if we did I don’t remember. Still, I don’t think I have ever felt as calm as I did then, lying next to her, staring up through the tree branches at the clouds floating across the sky.

“But one afternoon she woke up from a nap and told me about this dream she had. She said she was on the Union Pacific and she was coming out to Hollywood for the first time. It was night. They were passing through the Rockies. ‘I began to hear this sound,’ she said, like a child sobbing. At first I thought it was the wind whistling outside or the steam from the engine. But when we passed over the Colorado River into Arizona, these sounds I heard, these sounds of mourning, got louder and louder, and by the time we entered the California desert I began to hear this terrible pounding inside my skull. Finally the conductor came into the car, and I asked him what this awful noise was. He said it was the stars. They were grieving, he said. But when he got close to me I saw that he wasn’t the conductor at all. He was wearing the uniform of a marine corporal.’ He told my mom that the stars were crying for her, but if she turned around, he told her, by the time she passed back through the Red River Valley she wouldn’t hear the crying anymore. But she said she couldn’t
turn back because she was going out to Hollywood. Then you’ll have to get used to the sound,’ he told her, and he wished her good luck. As soon as he left the car my mom saw a light glowing in the distance, a light that grew brighter and brighter until she recognized it as the headlight of a locomotive heading in the opposite direction. But when she looked outside she saw no other tracks, just sagebrush and sand. Still, the train kept coming, phantomlike. Then with a flash it silently passed by, disappearing into the night, leaving behind the tumbleweeds blowing across the desert and the stars screaming in her ears. And then she woke up.”

After Bonnie finished speaking, Burk stared at her for what seemed like thirty seconds. The silence was broken by a telephone that started to ring in the apartment next door. It rang six times before it stopped.

“Pretty late to call someone,” Burk said.

“Maybe someone’s trying to call you at your house, Ray.”

“Maybe.”

The phone rang again, but this time just once.

“Ray?”

“Yeah?”

“I made up that story.”

Burk’s head was resting on Bonnie’s stomach. He kept quiet for a while, letting her words echo in the darkness, before he said, “Everything?”

“Just the dream part. That was mine. Not my mom’s.”

“But everything else—”

“Was true. Okay?”

“Okay,” Burk said, and he slid his tongue along the thick scar that bisected her lower abdomen. “Finish your story.”

“On the final day of shooting, Rheingold arrived on location in a long white limousine. I was sitting under a tree, holding a stray cat, when he called Dolittle over to discuss the final scene, a complicated sequence that would require split-second timing if they went for one take. ‘Don’t blow it,’ I heard Rheingold say to Dolittle. ‘Get it the first time.’ And then he glanced at me and said, ‘I want it to look real, so don’t double the girl.’ Dolittle told him there was no point in taking chances on the last day, that he could get everything he needed in close-ups, but Rheingold just shook his head and said, ‘Do it my way.’”

An alarm clock went off somewhere in the apartment building, and Burk started to hear a morning deejay begin to yak over the radio.

He closed his eyes, trying hard to concentrate on Bonnie’s story, even though he knew she was going to tell him something that he didn’t want to hear.

“In the script Mom was playing Elizabeth Springer, a young housewife who gets kidnapped during a small-town bank robbery. After the police show up and surround the cabin where the robbers are hiding, they were supposed to lob a tear-gas canister through a window to flush them out. The special-effects guy had rigged up this harmless smoke bomb, which was Mom’s cue to come running outside—followed, of course, by the bad guys. And that’s the way it was rehearsed all afternoon.

“But later that evening, when they did it for real, when the smoke bomb went off, the cabin roof exploded into the air and the sky turned as red as blood. Mom was not the first one out, but the last. I heard her screams before I saw the flames shooting up from her hair like ruby flares. The stuntmen all rushed forward, but when they ripped off her burning dress, charred strips of skin fell to the ground like pieces of dead bark . . . and she lay there burning to death right in front of my eyes.”

A week later, on the Sunday after her mother’s funeral, a man named Jack Rose drove Bonnie downtown to Union Station. Once more she had a ticket on the Union Pacific, but this time she was not riding home to Michigan. She was on her way to another city in the Midwest, Omaha, a city in Nebraska where her child would be born, in room 706 in the Hotel Sherwood.

“I had a boy,” she told Burk, “and I named him Bobby.”

Burk did not remember falling asleep, but when he opened his eyes there was a patch of cheerful midmorning sunlight where Bonnie’s tangled hair should have been. After a few moments—enough time to find his Marlboros and notice that her clothes were gone—he realized he was alone.

It was impossible for Burk to believe that Bonnie had suddenly disappeared forever, that he would never again touch her skin or feel her tongue fill his mouth. From the very first moment he saw her on the street, he felt connected to her in a way he didn’t understand. There was something in her wholesome but troubled features—the way she looked so deeply into his face, the chaos and pain buried behind her frantic eyes—that overpowered his mind and made his heart do a mad little dance.

“She probably went out for some groceries,” Burk decided, saying the words out loud to the four bare walls, but he was already feeling that awful ache of loneliness as he lit up the first of the ten cigarettes he would chain-smoke during the next two hours.

Later that afternoon, when he stepped outside the Argyle Manor, Burk was approached by two determined-looking men with thick chests and dark, quick eyes.

“Freeze,” one of the men said, cutting Burk off as he started toward his car. “Police. Put your hands in the air.”

In local news
,
an unidentified armed woman was shot and critically wounded this afternoon in Brentwood
,
outside the luxurious home of movie producer Max Rheingold. Although details at this time are sketchy
,
apparently the woman was riding a Starline Fantasy Tours bus when she suddenly pulled a .22-caliber pistol and ordered the driver to stop. She tried to force her way onto Mr. Rheingold’s property
,
which is located across the street from the estate owned by actor Henry Fonda.

Burk was listening to KNX All News 1070 as he drove west on the Ventura Freeway. He was on his way home after the police had questioned him for three hours.

“Tell them everything you know about this broad,” Gene had told Burk when he finally got through to him at the station. “These guys are good guys; I used to work with them. Tell them the truth and they’ll cut you loose.”

“I told them everything,” Burk said.

“They don’t believe you, Ray.”

“Then that’s too bad.”

Burk heard his brother take a deep breath on the other end of the phone. “Ray?” he said in a calm voice.

“Yeah?”

“They know you. Okay? They work undercover east of Vine and they see you around. Other people see you too. And they tell the cops.”

“They see me driving. That’s all I do.”

“Day after day? Hour after hour? What the fuck’s going on with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I just drive, Gene.”

“Is that it, Ray? You just drive. Is that why your ol’ lady is in the hospital with a broken jaw, your ass is in jail, and Louie cries himself to sleep—”

“’Bye, Gene.” Burk hung up the phone, and he told the police everything they wanted to know about Bonnie Simpson. He told them how they first met, and he described the sweet smell of her perfume and the slope of her shoulders as she leaned under the hood of his car. He even told them how her bones and muscles felt underneath his hands when her long, smooth legs were wrapped around his waist. He told them she was raped as a child, about the scar on her lower abdomen and the possibility of a child somewhere. He told them about her dream. About the stars and the sounds they made.