Florida Heatwave (2 page)

“Does the rest of her look like Carlotta?”

“Yeah, only more so. And since Debbie ain’t famous, she ain’t got a rich old ugly boyfriend like Vince Carmichael chasing her around. A chump like you might have a chance with her. I think you’re gonna like this job. Feel free to thank me.”

I mumbled, “Thanks,” and hung up, but I didn’t mean it.

I looked out at an endless array of cypress trees dripping Spanish moss. They shaded an untamed river fed by Glitter Spring, a watery abyss that belched out about a trillion gallons of diamond-clear water every day. I’ve still never seen anything like that water. It was clear as air. You could shoot a movie through it, which is precisely why we were there.

The landscape here hadn’t changed since the dinosaurs walked. I could have written a blockbuster script about those dinosaurs. People would’ve been tossing their popcorn sky-high in happy horror. I knew I could do it, just like all those other people in Hollywood who were damn sure they could be actors or directors or … yeah … screenwriters. It just about killed me that Benny would only hire me for making monster makeup and smearing lipstick.

There were monsters out there in Glitter Spring, but they weren’t movie monsters in rubber suits. They were cold-blooded, muscle-bound killing machines covered in scaly black skin and armed with fearsome teeth. Once, after we’d finished shooting, I asked the boat captain to take me close to those natural monsters, thinking I might get makeup ideas for my next horror movie. I learned that thirty seconds spent staring into the passionless eyes of an alligator felt like thirty seconds too long.

This California boy didn’t feel safe in that primeval wasteland where pterodactyls would have felt right at home. I didn’t feel like thanking Benny for sending me there. Not one little bit.

“Can I get in the water, Johnny? Please? It’s awful hot.”

Nobody but Carlotta called John Plonsky “Johnny.” He’d been making low-budget monster flicks since Dracula was a boy, and he’d earned the respect of everyone in Hollywood except a few brainless starlets like this one.

Carlotta reached down into the water. Gathering a few drops in her cupped hand, she tried to dribble them across her front. I was too quick for her. I grabbed her wrist just in time to keep her from spoiling the pristine white bathing suit sheathing her perfect form. Every one of those drops would show on camera. In the time it took them to dry, Carlotta would start to sweat, and sweat stains are obvious on film.

The whole crew would be drawing their salaries while I escorted Carlotta to the hotel for a new suit and while I stood outside her dressing room, urging her to hurry. If Benny had foreseen this problem, there’d have been a clause in her contract requiring her to let me into the dressing room. I’m sure I could have poured her ample form into yet another tiny suit in a time-efficient manner.

Fortunately, I had brought way more bathing suits than I should have needed for this gig. (I’d worked with Carlotta before.) Otherwise, I’d have spent my days handwashing little scraps of white fabric, then waving them frantically in the muggy air till they dried.

She’d pulled this stunt once that day, already. John needed to shoot the sequence before she messed herself up again, and everybody knew it. I could see it on their faces as I hovered within arm’s reach, ready to stop her before she splashed river water on herself yet again.

We were all as hot as Carlotta. Hotter, actually, because we were wearing more clothes. If I let her mess up another bathing suit … well, one of these people just might shoot her.

“She can’t work under these conditions, John,” Carlotta’s manager Bradley barked, adjusting his Panama hat to shade his face better. Her boyfriend Vince, who was bankrolling the film, adjusted his own Panama hat, which was bigger, more finely woven, and obviously more expensive.

John gestured at his uncooperative star, but spoke to the men in her life. “I just need her to sit still long enough for Louise to snatch her off the boat. Then she can go fan herself in her dressing room. Debbie can do the rest of the scene.”

Louise and Debbie sat on the dock, chatting pleasantly about whatever it is that interests twenty-year-old girls. They were as blonde as Carlotta (whose real name was probably as plain as “Louise” or “Debbie”) and they were as shapely. Debbie, in particular, looked just like her. This was her job.

When Debbie was struggling underwater in the monster’s clutches, wet and half-dressed, moviegoers needed to believe they were watching Carlotta in mortal distress. Fortunately, Debbie was a very good actress. She could make you believe just about anything. In fact, she’d spent the last three weeks making me believe she was in love with me.

Louise, on the other hand, didn’t look like Carlotta, nor any other woman of my acquaintance. She was heavily muscled and six feet tall, but perfectly proportioned for her size. The other two girls made men want to hug them and squeeze them and stroke them and romance them. Louise made you want to worship her for the goddess that she was.

And what was Louise’s job on this movie set?

She was the monster.

When I told Benny that the monster needed no makeup artist, because the actor inside its rubber suit was completely invisible, I wasn’t lying. Louise was a local girl who’d learned to swim in this fast-moving river. She could plunge to the bottom of the mammoth spring, swimming against the rushing water with powerful kicks and strokes. And she looked like a river nymph all the while, with her golden hair streaming behind her and her golden-skinned body slipping through the water like a shimmering fish.

Louise was a hundred percent suited to be the monster star of this movie, and she worked cheap. The crew for this movie was a hundred percent male, except for Carlotta and Debbie, and we approved John’s decision to hire Louise a hundred percent. Actually, we thought he was a goddamn genius.

Lester Bond, owner of Glitter Spring and of the lodge perched on its rim, was a frustrated man. He’d bought the property with visions of a tourist attraction like Silver Springs. Hordes of paying customers, a fleet of glass-bottomed boats, hamburger stands, gator wrestling shows—if there was a Florida-tested method of separating Northerners from their money, Lester had hoped to build it on the shores of Glitter Spring.

Unfortunately, Lester wasn’t a genius. He’d neglected to check the highway system funneling tourists into Florida’s peninsula. Glitter Spring was just too far from a major tourist route, too far from an airport, too far from a decent-sized town. It was just too far from everything. When God made this jaw-dropping miracle of nature, He wasn’t thinking like a grasping, avaricious human being, so He’d failed to put His miracle in a convenient spot. Lester Bond had stopped going to church, because he was really angry at the Almighty about this oversight.

Because of its inconvenient location, Glitter Spring sat out in the woods looking beautiful, all by its lonesome, like an old maid in a small town where all the good men were taken. If the spring’s crystalline waters hadn’t been tailor-made for underwater filming, Lester would have been bankrupt long before I met him. Only the likes of Tarzan and Esther Williams had brought in enough money to keep Lester’s dream alive.

Evenings in the lobby of Lester’s hotel weren’t anything to write home about, especially when your home was Tinseltown. After dinner, we’d watch the dailies, and then Lester would turn up the lights. Air conditioning was a distant dream in 1940s Florida, so the lobby was gaspingly hot, even after dark. Still, we were young and we couldn’t conceive of going to bed early, so we cranked up the electric fans and played cards or charades or board games. Sometimes, we just drank.

Lester played piano. It would have been nice if someone had sung, but Carlotta wasn’t the kind of star with talents beyond looking good on camera. And she wasn’t the kind of star who tolerated anyone else in the limelight. So if Louise or Debbie or anyone else possessed any hidden musical talent, they never showed it.

On that last peaceful evening, we were playing cards. Bridge tables were scattered around the lobby, and we’d been playing long enough that everybody’d had a turn at being dummy … which meant that everybody had spent time away from the other players’ watchful eyes. Those who preferred drinking to cardplaying had wandered constantly to the bar and back, making their movements even more impossible to track. I believe that Carlotta and Louise went missing while the dailies were being screened, but there’s no way to know for sure.

It says something about my devotion to the game of bridge that I had to look around for my girlfriend when I learned that Carlotta was gone. Or maybe it says something about my devotion to my girlfriend. But our three weeks of passion had left me under the
impression
that I loved Debbie. Anyway, Debbie was across the room chatting with John about how she could act
and
do stunts, in case he needed somebody like that for his next picture. It’s fortunate for me that
she
didn’t disappear that evening, or I’d have been left with the guilt and embarrassment of knowing my girlfriend went missing right under my own nose. Vince wasn’t so lucky.

I’ll give Vince credit for being a better boyfriend than me. He’d been passed out on the sofa for hours, but he’d gone looking for his lady love immediately upon regaining consciousness. When he couldn’t find Carlotta in the hotel, he knew something was wrong. That city-bred woman would never have ventured out into the swamp alone.

Louise hadn’t yet found a boyfriend among the crew, astonishing as it may sound. The sheer size of her scared the heck out of most guys. I myself was taller than Louise by a good three inches, but she still scared me now and again. We’d been looking for Carlotta for an hour before anybody noticed that Louise was gone, too. I wasn’t sure how worried to be about big, strong, competent Louise, until I remembered the size of the alligators living on the far side of Glitter Spring. They could have swallowed that strapping girl alive.

“What could have happened?” Vince asked, his voice tinged by the kind of visceral, physical fear that didn’t often bother people in Hollywood. “They were here and now they’re just … not.”

Everyone’s eyes strayed to the black, leathery body of Ol’ Jack, the enormous one-eyed alligator that Lester had paid somebody to shoot and stuff and mount. Ol’ Jack dominated the spacious lobby, and his glass eyes glittered as if he knew how good humans tasted. In an instant, we ceased to be a convivial crowd of cardplaying drunks. In that instant, we began to be afraid.

When sudden death reaches out its monster hand, confusion descends. On that moonless night, both darkness and confusion were utterly complete.

As I’ve said, Lester’s resort was a million miles from nowhere, which explained its stunning commercial success. This meant there was no light beyond the bright windows of the hotel and the glittering stars overhead.

Lester was accustomed to this kind of darkness. We Hollywood folk were not. He flung open his utility closet and handed out lanterns and flashlights. The swamp was alight as we crisscrossed the countryside, calling out for Carlotta and Louise. If there was any clue to their whereabouts, it was invisible in the dark and we trampled it.

At every turn, my lantern reflected off the glowing green eyes of alligators lurking under palmettos or floating in still waters. The light seemed to keep them at bay. I wondered if Carlotta had brought a lantern with her. I would never have ventured into that wilderness without one, not even on the promise of a screenwriting contract.

Eventually, we found Louise. I found her, actually. She was perched high in a deerhunting stand, clutching a burned-out flashlight. She was weeping and she wouldn’t tell me why, but that magnificent Amazon body was unharmed.

Amazon or not, Louise was heartsore. I escorted her along the riverbank, with a gentlemanly arm around her waist. This did not endear me to Debbie. When she saw us coming, she slipped a ladylike hand into the crook of my other arm and clamped down hard on the soft flesh of my inner elbow. The two of us escorted Louise the rest of the way back.

Everyone was relieved to see Louise safe, but she was the only beautiful woman found in the swamps around Glitter Spring that evening. We all lay awake that night, wondering what had become of the biggest movie star for miles around.

At sunrise, Carlotta was still missing. The sheriff and his deputies were puttering around as if they knew what they were doing. John, on the other hand, was stumped.

“Do I keep filming? Or do I shut the movie down and send people home?” he asked me.

He’d asked those questions all night long, seeking guidance from the bigwigs in Hollywood. He got helpful answers like,
“No!!!
Don’t keep filming! You can’t keep spending money on a film that’s lost its star,” and, “Of course you gotta keep filming!! Do you know how much it’s
costing
us to keep that crew in Florida??”

John was an artist, even on a low budget. He’d had all night to develop a plan. “I’ve gotta presume Carlotta’s out in the swamp pouting and she’ll be back any minute, ready for her close-up. But if I’m wrong, I think I can save the movie. We shot the last of her close-ups yesterday. Debbie was going to do most of the remaining scenes, anyway. I might have to finesse a few shots … you know … put a hat on Debbie or shoot her from behind, but it should work.”

“Debbie’s gonna want a raise,” I said, because I was her boyfriend and I felt like I should look out for her.

“She’s already asked for it. Got it, too,” said John. It seemed that Debbie didn’t need her boyfriend all that much. Fortunately, I’ve always liked self-sufficient women.

At John’s instruction, we boarded the boat that took us out to the calm lagoon where much of the movie had already been filmed. The empty monster suit lay on the deck where the crew always left it. This had seemed like a strange way to treat an expensive prop until I stopped to think: Who, in the middle of the Florida swamp, was going to take it? And what could possibly hurt the thing? It was made of rubber.