George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (19 page)

Yet two hands appear on the railing of the deck of the Clubs Lair. Then two more, and two more after that, and Jamal Norwood knows that Drummer Boy is here, all seven and a half feet of tattooed attitude. Why?

“It’s all part of the game, Stuntman.”

“It’s against the rules.”

“The only rule is, there are no rules.”

Jamal, aka Stuntman, can take Drummer Boy—more precisely, can take whatever Drummer dishes—if he had any desire to endure bounceback so soon after the last
American Hero
challenge. Instead he tries to rise from the deck chair to retreat. But he is paralyzed, as if he has just slammed into concrete from a great height.

Drummer Boy passes by, his footsteps heavy on the cedar deck.

Then Jamal hears the buzzing, sees the greenish cloud in his peripheral vision. Hive is attacking, too. This must be some joke attack, some mystery challenge, Hearts against Clubs, with the Discards thrown in for good measure. Jamal tries to turn, to see the cameras, but is still frozen.

Hive’s voice speaks from the cloud. “We’re not after you,
Stuntman. We want him.” Weird; Jamal didn’t know Hive could
talk
in this mode.

Jamal can already feel the fluttering at his back—Brave Hawk swooping overhead from behind, like a bird of prey.

Or, rather, prey itself. Hive’s cloud envelopes him, forcing the winged Apache to flutter to a stop… long enough for Drummer to grab him with his upper arms, hold him fast with the middle pair, and start jabbing him with the lower. Brave Hawk struggles, but no one can stand up to a Drummer Boy solo, especially with Hive swarming and stinging. Jamal hears the crunch and crack of broken bones, the agonized groans.
Why is this happening? Where are the goddamn producers?

Miraculously, even though he is blinded by his own blood, his ribs visibly broken, Brave Hawk frees himself, unleashing a kick that staggers even the giant Drummer Boy. The winged Apache climbs up the railing of the deck, about to launch himself across the arroyo when he staggers and falls forward.

A bloodied baseball rolls to Jamal’s chair. “Got him!” Curveball, the snot-nosed kid whose only talent is throwing things, smirks at the edge of the deck. “Hey, Stuntman, you used to play ball—catch this!” Curveball raises her arm, about to fire again. But Jamal can’t move! Curveball’s arm whips forward and the deadly ball fills his vision.

“You’re going down, Stuntman.”

Jamal blinks.
There is no ball.
No invasion by rogue members of Hearts. Just Brave Hawk standing to his left, his fake wings obscuring the sun rising over the Santa Monica Mountains.

A stupid bounceback dream.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” Jamal doesn’t like Brave Hawk. He would have enjoyed seeing him beaten up by Drummer Boy and Hive, his head crushed by a superhot Curveball missile.

“Look at yourself. How long have you been out here?”

“Since last night.”

“When there’s a perfectly good bed inside. Bad sign, my friend.”

Jamal could easily explain bounceback, the need for his body to thrash itself back into shape after being crushed by a safe that had become the object of an underwater tug-of-war between two aces. Not only would he have torn up the bed, he would have literally been bouncing off the walls. Tough on the room, even tougher on the rest of the Clubs who were trying to recover from their lackluster performance.

No, it was better for Jamal Norwood to bounceback in the open, even if it meant chills, bug bites, and hallucinatory dreams.

“What’s this?” Brave Hawk bends to pick up a paperback dropped next to Jamal’s chair.
“Helter Skelter?”
Clearly the Apache has never heard the title. “You’re sulking out here, killing time reading. Going. Down.”

Jamal stands for the first time in hours. Stretches. It feels so good it’s almost orgasmic. “So let me go. Why do you care?”

“A, I’m your teammate. So I need you.” One of the many things Jamal finds annoying about Brave Hawk is his tendency to state the obvious—and to break it into handy categories, as if his listeners were terminally stupid. “B, I have a proposal.”

“A,” Jamal says, knowing Brave Hawk will miss the sarcasm, “our team is one bad challenge from being broken into spare parts. We are not competitive, so get used to it. And B, I can’t imagine what kind of proposal would interest me.” To make sure Brave Hawk notes his indifference, Jamal searches for the large drinking glass he left under the chair. Bounce-back always leaves him thirsty.

“We need to team up.”

There’s the glass. Empty.

Now Jamal sees that the ever-present camera crew of three, led by crazy Art the producer, with silent Diaz the operator, has followed Brave Hawk onto the deck. All of them are yawning, resentful of the early call. “You guys need a beverage?”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Art says, flapping his hands nervously. Jamal has already noted Art’s terror at any violation of the fourth wall—the entirely fictitious notion that these wild
cards are really conspiring, flirting, or fighting together unobserved. “Just pretend we’re not here.”

“Too late, Art,” Jamal says. But he turns back to Brave Hawk and tries to act. God knows he’s had practice. But now the brave Apache has everyone on hold while he talks on his cell phone.

The Clubs Lair sits near the spine of Mulholland Drive, surrounded by dry pines and junipers that in this hot, dry season require nothing more than a discarded match and the kiss of the Santa Ana winds to explode into flame. It hasn’t happened here, yet some part of Los Angeles is on fire. Jamal can smell the smoke in the air. He coughs frequently. The pages of the paperback book blur as his eyes water.

Bounceback complete, he could go back inside the house. But he would rather bear discomfort here on the hardwood deck than share space with the other Clubs at this moment—not to mention the camera crews.

Besides, he is an L.A. native: the curves, drops, and hidden mansions of Mulholland are as familiar and comforting as well-worn sneakers. He knows, for example, that the A frame to the west belongs to a notorious Hollywood detective named after a dead musician. That the estate below him—its pool still shadowed by the hills—was where a former governor used to party with pool boys while publicly dating female rock stars.

For all its rugged beauty, the setting is anything but peaceful: the smoke, the glare, the accumulation of irritants can make the most easygoing man turn violent.

Brave Hawk finishes his call. “My girlfriend,” he announces, as if Jamal could possibly care. “She’s been reading everything and sees other alliances being formed. She says
we
need to team up, too.”

“Wise up, Cochise. All this game strategy stuff is that asshole Berman doing some ’viral promotion.’” Michael Berman is the network executive for
American Hero.
Jamal has seen the Armani-clad dungeon master lurking at every audition, prep meeting, challenge announcement… seldom speaking, but clearly more in charge than the actual producers. “And what is ‘everything’? Is she seeing who’s going to
win? What the next challenge is going to be? If your gal pal has that, let me know.”

Brave Hawk is persistent. “You think because you work in Hollywood, you know everything, but you don’t, Stuntman. You and I—” here Brave Hawk makes a completely fruity gesture of clasped hands “—we could be an awesome team!”

Jamal sees a nugget of truth in this—at least in the concept of teaming up against the other Clubs. But with this creature who looks like a John Ford Indian with wings? “Why me? Did Holy Roller already turn you down?”

This is all the encouragement Brave Hawk needs. He leaps up on the railing of the deck. “I never asked him! And it wouldn’t work—not as well as Stuntman and Brave Hawk. We’re two of a kind, man!”

Whenever Jamal hears that kind of talk from Brave Hawk, the pleasant images of his evisceration reappear. “We’re both breathing. We both got talked into this project. I don’t see what else we have in common.”

Voices behind him signal the emergence of Jade Blossom and Diver from the house, both indecently perky and girly at this hour—and dressed for a swim. Diver might as well not exist—Jamal only sees Jade, her eyes, the way she moves. Her mouth. He has become infatuated with her mouth, the way her lower lip slides forward whenever she is about to speak.

Which she does, calling to Jamal, “What are you two doing over there? Scheming?” She and Diver start laughing, flirting with the camera team. It’s all a big joke. Nevertheless, Jamal wishes Jade would approach him.
They
would make a great team.

“Think about it, Stuntman,” Brave Hawk says, insistently. “We’re both people of color…”

Jamal almost laughs out loud. People of
color?
Jamal is dark enough and has always known he was tagged as “black,” but Brave Hawk? His wild card aside, Brave Hawk is no more ethnic in appearance than an Italian American. “And do what? Call ourselves
The Red and the Black?”
Jamal has read the novel; he knows without asking that Brave Hawk has never heard of Stendahl.

In fact, Brave Hawk loves the phrase, jabbing his finger at
Jamal like a fourth-grade teacher whose student just finished the multiplication tables. “That’s the idea. Make these producers and judges think twice before they vote us off.”

“You mean play the race card, you and me.”

“Everyone else is using what they’ve got. Those girls are giggling and snuggling up to the judges and camera crews. Have you seen the way Curveball’s been flirting with John Fortune? Rosa and Tiffani are even worse, and Pop Tart…”

Jamal doesn’t want to admit it, but Brave Hawk is correct. He’s sure he’s seen Pop Tart having the kind of intimate conversations only lovers have… with Digger Downs. “Why shouldn’t we use the tools God gave us?” Brave Hawk says.

But Jamal can already hear his father, Big Bill Norwood, the pro ballplayer, sneering. “The baseball doesn’t care what color you are. Can you hit or not? That’s all.” He’s heard that all his life—and unlike some of the pronouncements Big Bill has made—believes it. He knows he’s put in the “black” category, but he can’t honestly say it’s held him back.

“Wouldn’t we be smarter to just win the fucking challenges?”

“Yeah, how is that working for us?”

Jamal barely manages to get the words through his teeth. “I just don’t see how you and I singing ‘Kumbaya’ is supposed to stop the bleeding.”

Brave Hawk looks over his left wing at the crew—he is the worst actor Jamal has ever seen, and he’s seen some bad ones—while slipping his right wing over Jamal. Even though the wings are an illusion, Jamal still feels enveloped in a smelly, scratchy blanket. “We agree not to vote each other off, for one thing. And if we find ourselves—oh, hell, trapped underwater or buried in quicksand—we share the oxygen tank.”

Jamal can’t believe that the Apache ace believes what he’s saying. “I tell you what, Brave Hawk. I will absolutely cross-my-heart promise not to club you over the fucking head with the tank. That’s the best I can do.” He slips out from under the protective wing. “Grow up, Cochise.”

As Jamal walks away, his legs finally working, he hears Brave Hawk say, “You’ll be the next one out, Stuntman.”

Jamal can’t resist. Right in front of Art and the camera crew, he pivots. “If it means getting away from you, sign me up.”

For a moment Brave Hawk doesn’t react. Then, strangely, he bursts out laughing. He actually claps his hands together, like a happy infant. “Outstanding! God
damn
, Stuntman, you’re good!” Then Brave Hawk looks past Jamal to the camera crew. “Did you guys get that?”

“Yeah,” Art says, “but don’t point us out, okay?”

“As long as you got it,” Brave Hawk says, striding across the deck, daring to slap Jamal on the back. “Just another heated, interpersonal, real-life moment for the viewers of
American Hero
, right?”

“You suck, Brave Hawk.”

For an instant, the Apache looks wounded. “The offer was genuine, Stuntman. I just made use of your rejection for the good of the show.”

And now Jamal
really
wants to kill him.

What troubles him most is the realization that Brave Hawk is essentially correct: Stuntman has no offensive weapons, no arrows in the old quiver. He can only be reactive.

Another reason to be bitter about what happened to him.

He still remembers the night his wild card turned—far out in the Valley, so far out that the hills were rising again. It was the spring of his senior year at USC, where he was majoring in film and television. Part of the experience there was to work on everyone’s student project. Who knew the pimply twenty-year-old serving as director might turn out to be the next Bryan Singer, and your ticket to a career on his crew.

The other goal was to become the first Jamal Norwood—a Denzel Washington or Will Smith for the twenty-first century. And when Nic Deladrier asked him to play the badass joker in his student film, Jamal knew—just knew—it was the first step. Deladrier was not only the most skilled of all the senior year directors, he was ambitious as hell. He had friends in the business, an uncle working at Endeavour… this student
film would be shown at festivals, and Jamal Norwood’s name and face would be known throughout that strata of the business where young assistants and junior agents share bodily fluids, job recommendations, and gossip.