“Get that cocksucker out of here,” the one behind the movie camera growled. Before Carl knew what was happening, three men had dragged him out the door and put him in his car. “Now you wait here or she’s going to get hurt real bad,” one of them told him. He chewed on his cigar and watched shadows move back and forth behind the covered windows, tried to convince himself that everything was going to be all right. After all, it was the movie business, couldn’t be anything too serious go wrong. Two hours later, the front door opened and the same three men carried Sandy out to the car, tossed her in the backseat. One of them came around to the driver’s side and handed Carl twenty dollars. “This ain’t right,” Carl said. “The agreement was for two hundred.”
“Two hundred? Shit, she wasn’t worth ten. Once that big sonofabitch got it in her ass, she passed out and laid there like a dead fish.”
Carl turned and looked at Sandy lying on the seat. She was starting to come to a little. They had put her blouse on backward. “Bullshit,” he said. “I want to talk to them guys I made the deal with.”
“You mean Jerry and Ted? Hell, they left an hour ago,” the man said.
“I’ll call the law, that’s what I’ll do,” Carl said.
“No, you won’t,” the man said, shaking his head. Then he reached through the window and grabbed Carl by the throat and squeezed. “In fact, if you don’t quit your bitching and get the hell out of here, I’m going to take you back inside and turn ol’ Frankie loose on your chubby ass. Let him and Tojo make another hundred.” As the man walked back toward the house, Carl heard him say over his shoulder, “And don’t try bringing her back. She ain’t got what it takes for this business.”
The next morning, Carl went out and bought an ancient-looking Smith & Wesson .38 at a pawnshop with the twenty dollars the porno man had given him. “How do I know this thing even works?” he asked the pawnbroker.
“Follow me,” the man said. He took Carl into a back room and fired two bullets into a barrel filled with sawdust and old magazines. “They quit making this model in 1940 or thereabouts, but it’s still a damn good gun.”
He went back to the Blue Star Motel, where Sandy was soaking in a tub of hot water and Epsom salts. Showing her the gun, he swore that he was going to plug the two bastards who had set them up; but then he went down the street and sat on a bench in a park the rest of the day thinking about killing himself instead. Something broke in him that day. For the first time, he could see that his whole life added up to absolutely nothing. The only thing he knew how to do was work a camera, but who needed another fat guy with thin hair taking boring pictures of whiny, red-faced babies and sluts in their prom dresses and grim-faced married couples celebrating twenty-five years of misery? When he returned to their room that night, she was already asleep.
They headed back to Ohio the next afternoon. He drove and she sat on the pillows they had stolen from the motel room. He found that he had a hard time looking her in the eye, and they barely said two words to each other all the way across the desert and into Colorado. As they started up into the Rockies, the bleeding finally stopped and she told him that she would rather drive than sit there thinking about being raped by that midget’s doped-up slave while all those men cracked jokes about her. When she got behind the wheel, she lit a cigarette and turned the radio on. They were down to their last four dollars. A couple of hours later, they picked up a man smelling of gin thumbing his way back to his mother’s house in Omaha. He told them that he had lost everything, including his car, in a whorehouse—just a house trailer, really, with three broads working shifts, an aunt and her two nieces—out in the sand north of Reno. “Pussy,” the man said. “It’s always been a problem for me.”
“So it’s like some kind of sickness gets hold of you?” Carl said.
“Buddy, you sound like that head doctor I had to talk to one time.” They rode along in silence for a few minutes, then the man leaned forward and laid his arms casually on the top of the front seat. He offered them a drink from a flask, but neither of them were in the mood for a party. Carl opened up the dash to take the camera out. He was thinking that he might as well take some nature shots. Good chance he would never see these mountains again. “This your wife?” the man asked, after he scooted back again in his seat.
“Yeah,” Carl said.
“I’ll tell you what, friend. I don’t know what your situation is, but I’ll give you twenty bucks for a quickie with her. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I can last to Omaha.”
“That’s it,” Sandy said. She hit the brakes and flipped the turn signal on. “I’ve had my fill of motherfuckers like you.”
Carl glanced down at the pistol in the glove box half hid under a map. “Wait a minute,” he said to Sandy in a low voice. He turned and looked at the man, nice clothes, black hair, olive complexion, high cheekbones. A hint of cologne mixed with the smell of the gin. “I thought you lost all your money.”
“Well, I did, all I had anyway, but I called Mom when I got to Vegas. She wouldn’t buy me another set of wheels this time, but she did send me a few dollars to get home on. She’s good about stuff like that.”
“How about fifty?” Carl said. “You got that much?”
“Carl!” Sandy screeched. She was on the verge of telling him that he could get his fucking ass out, too, when she saw him slip the gun out of the dash. She turned her eyes back to the road and brought the car back up to cruising speed.
“Boy, I don’t know,” the man said, scratching his chin. “Sure, I got it, but fifty bucks oughta buy some fireworks, you know what I mean? You care to throw in some extras?”
“Sure, anything you want,” Carl said, his mouth turning dry as his heart started beating faster. “We’ll just have to find somewhere private to pull over.” He sucked in his gut and slid the gun down in his pants.
A week later, when he finally got up the nerve to develop the photographs he’d taken that day, Carl knew with the first glimpse, with a certainty that he had never felt before, that the beginning of his life’s work was staring back at him in that shallow pan of fixer. Though it hurt him to see Sandy once again with her arms wrapped around the whore hound’s neck in the throes of her first real orgasm, he knew he would never be able to stop. And the humiliation he had felt in California? He vowed that would never happen again. The next summer they went out on their first hunt.
The waitress waited until Carl lit the cigar, then asked, “So what do you do out there?”
“I’m a photographer. Movie stars mostly.”
“Really? You ever took any pictures of Tab Hunter?”
“No, can’t say that I have,” Carl said, “but I bet he’d be a nice one to work with.”
27
WITHIN A FEW DAYS, Carl was a regular at the White Cow. It felt good to be out among people again after spending so much of the winter holed up in the apartment. When the waitress asked him when he was heading back to California, he told her that he had decided to stay put for a while, take a break from all the Hollywood crap. One evening he was sitting at the counter when a couple of men who looked to be in their sixties pulled up in a long black El Dorado. They parked just a few feet from the front door and strutted inside. One was dressed in a Western outfit trimmed in sparkling sequins. His potbelly pushed against a belt buckle designed to look like a Winchester rifle, and he walked bowlegged, as if, Carl thought, he had either just gotten off a mighty wide horse or was hiding a cucumber up his ass. The other wore a dark blue suit, decorated across the front with various badges and patriotic ribbons, and a square VFW cap at a jaunty angle. Both of their faces were flushed red with strong drink and arrogance. Carl recognized the cowboy from the newspaper, a Republican loudmouth on the city council, always complaining at the monthly meetings about the degenerate, wide-open sex scene in the Meade city park. Though Carl had driven through there a hundred times at night, the hottest thing he’d ever encountered was a couple of gawky teenagers attempting a kiss in front of the little World War II memorial.