Long Shot (7 page)

She looked off across the ghostly outline of the bowl of hills that cupped the canyon. It looked like a mountain lake tonight, with the desert vegetation high and green around it. The sage was heavy in the April air, and something white beside the trail had broken into bloom. By the time she reached the top, she was far ahead of the others. She did not linger to watch the night. She ducked and clung to the horse's neck so they could shortcut, coming in through the moon gate and along the length of the Japanese garden. She called out Jasper's groom from the stables, gave over the horse impatiently, and fled inside. It was simpler to be alone.

Harry Dawes was not what he ought to have been, and Carl and Artie knew it. They made a show of his being a zero. They wanted him half whore, half messianic crazy, so they could put the whole thing down to Jasper under pressure. Vivien had seen the type herself, wandering openmouthed on the upper terrace by the pool, the morning after. She had no idea where Jasper ran across them. They seemed to understand they'd be wise to get a good look while they could. Sometimes, she'd almost wanted to give them coffee. Then Artie would come and tap them on the arm and drive them off, while Jasper slept in until midafternoon. Ideally, Harry Dawes should have been that sort.

Vivien wasn't sure what she wanted him to be. From what she read, he was the Huck Finn of a small Wisconsin town that had lowered all its flags to half-staff and now stood waiting at the depot while the Willis Company shipped the body home, free of charge. The way it was being pitched in the tabloids, he'd announced to his widowed dad that he planned to spend his twenties finding out why the world didn't work. It was hard to see through shit like this, but Vivien had a built-in periscope from lifelong study of the pitch on her. He seemed quite nice, quite likable and real, this Harry Dawes of Turner's Falls, Wisconsin, son of a heavy-equipment man.

He only came to L.A., it seemed, to get to the harbor at Long Beach. He'd been on the road two years, and he thought it was time to sign on a freighter bound for the islands. But he got to L.A. and fell for the climate and the rootlessness, which matched his own exactly. He decided to give it a year—about seven months gone when he died.

Vivien didn't see how she could go along with the Steep-side line, which made him sound like a sullen drifter. The kid loved animals. He lived on books. She decided he would have been good for Jasper Cokes. As the week rolled on, as she paced her bedroom and took no calls, she brooded more and more about the boy from Turner's Falls. It was as if Harry Dawes could have told her why. Could have told her who to blame.

Artie rode sidekick Thursday morning. They left the house just after seven and resumed the downhill trail as if they'd stopped the night at an inn. It had rained for an hour before dawn, and the bushes on either side of the trail swagged against their legs and wet them to the skin. The pewter sky was bruised in the east with white, where the sun was coming through. Artie had packed sweet rolls and a Thermos in his saddlebags. He pointed down to the grassy spot by the water's edge where they would stop for breakfast. He must have thought she needed cheering up, because he kept on reassuring her. He seemed to have gotten the tears out of his system.

In fact, she was holding up all right. Not feeling much of anything. A suicide got what he wanted, after all. Her anger had somehow disappeared, like jet lag. Maybe, now that she saw what a fine man Harry Dawes turned out to be, the rage had no place else to go but Jasper. And she didn't want to take it out on him. So she played it numb and glassy-eyed, and waited out the run of other people's tears. This feeling next to nothing was almost second nature. It was part of her breeding, like the love of high prices.

“Artie,” she said, because she had to say
something
, “was Jasper scared of getting old?”

He was riding on the switchbacks just in front of her—burrheaded, musclebound, guileless, shy. He leaned forward and whispered into his horse's ear, and she thought at first he hadn't heard her. Then, when he straightened up and pranced ahead, she thought perhaps he didn't consider the question worth an answer. She decided she agreed. But then he turned around in his saddle and for a moment looked at her piercingly. It was just the way he used to look at Jasper on the set, as if to check out whether he had a part down pat.

“It was
being
old he would have hated,” Artie said. “But he wasn't the type to feel it yet.”

“That's not what Max is saying.”

“He never even had a hangover. Not once in sixteen years I knew him. Jasper
liked
the way he felt.”

“It's a funny way to kill yourself,” she said.

They stopped by tacit consent on either side of a hairpin angle, so they faced away onto different hills. She was a couple of feet above him, and she saw him backed by the canyon and the wide and leaden water. In his black shirt yoked with yellow thread, he was surely the only substantial cowboy for miles around. The frontier verities clung about his person, glinting like a sheriff's badge. Vivien made do very nicely drawing a blank with everyone else, but Artie seemed to require that she be present and accounted for. It was mildness a person couldn't ignore.

“Max makes out like he saw it coming, does he?” His own directness made his voice a trifle halting. “Like it's there in Jasper's face. Like some disease. That's bullshit, Viv.”

“But Artie, it
happened
.”

The spotted horse beneath her shivered with impatience, as if to say this wasn't the right approach at all. She knew that if she'd looked at Jasper's face herself, she wouldn't have seen a thing. But she wondered if it didn't expose some fundamental failure in her vision. Some loss of nerve in the face of love.

“I mean, it didn't come out of nowhere, right? A thing like this takes years.”

“It's this way,” Artie said. “He finally got too stoned.” Sounding, all of a sudden, as if it ought to be self-evident. Just two days since, he was choked and panicked to find out why. “I think they both got ripped and played it out like a fantasy. They probably thought they'd wake up after and be as good as new.”

As if it was only a movie.

The horses seemed to sense a sudden impasse here. They started forward, all on their own, as if to resolve it in physical motion. They sashayed down an incline. From the sandy ditch on the uphill side of the trail, a canyon hen and her chicks went scurrying under a bush. Vivien hadn't ridden here in years, and she was shocked to see how little it had changed. Nothing was ruined. Nothing gone.

When Jasper was in a picture—that is, when he wasn't on camera—he segued from one to another of the recreational drugs. It was as if he had to work up a state of reverie over the story he was starring in. An air of distraction went with him wherever he went, like a background instrumental. So you never knew, late at night when he talked nonstop and went out slumming, if he was playing some kind of game or only lost in the role of Jasper Cokes. Vivien saw what Artie meant. For a man wrapped up in a starring role, there was no telling where a game might lead when the night began to fight it out with the morning. You might get carried over it like a falls.

“When you went away, Viv, did you know you were coming back?”

“Of course,” she said—dismissing it even before she took it in, imagining they had turned to lighter matters. They plodded ahead. If Artie was right, it was only an accident. Jasper hadn't planned a thing. She wondered if this made her feel any less betrayed.

“Because I missed you, Viv,” he said. From the hunch of his overmuscled shoulders, she saw how it shied him to say it out straight. “See, I never would have stayed this long. Not for Jasper's sake. It got so he made me very sad. He didn't
mean
to, but like I told him, what's the point of protecting a man on the outside, if all the risks he takes are in his head?”

From the first, there were birds around them, lighting in the sagebrush whenever they stopped, and betting they'd break out the sweet rolls early. A few kept pace—a scatter of sparrows and a pair of jays—but now they bristled and squawked. They had to turn back. They were hilltop birds, and they had no range in the canyon.

“Did Jasper think I was gone for good?”

“It's the first time you ever left when he was shooting.”

“You're not answering my question.”

“I know. You're not answering mine.”

Somehow, she'd never gone out of her way to see what it was between Jasper and Artie. She supposed they must have been lovers once, long ago in college in Vermont. At the time, they must have been equally matched. But as Jasper's name got brighter, till they knew him in every town on earth that had electric lights, Artie's scope got narrower and narrower. He was chief valet and dialogue coach, as well as the unofficial final word on Jasper's look in a given scene. At night, with his stash of whites and blues, he was Jasper's last connection.

“I would have said goodbye, you know, if I wasn't coming back.”

Though she had no knack for friends, she and Artie were something close. By dint of their lives' geography, they'd passed eight years in the same house, and neither one with a job in the outside world. Of the four of them, they were the two who most often had nothing to do, and they tended to do it together. Over the years, they'd logged a thousand hours of ordinary things. Walking half the night in the streets of foreign capitals, while Carl and Jasper hustled distribution rights. Or sitting on hotel terraces, sipping the local water, saying whatever came into their heads. They'd done a lot of getting by, and in the end they lived by a kind of shorthand.

“I miss you, too, whenever I go away,” she said. She saw she owed him proof of what had survived between them. “I used to want to take you with me, only Jasper always seemed to need you here. We should have done it anyway. It might have made you famous.”

“No,” he said reproachfully, “don't say that. Some people are better off left in the background.” He had to keep his back to her to speak about himself. The horses were footing a tricky bit of slope, so all their eyes were on the trail. “You don't want to crowd the people up front,” he went on in a rueful way. “You and I would never have talked the way we have. Not out there.” He nodded down the canyon and over the dam. “I'm sorry, Viv.”

“About what?”

“I just couldn't keep him from being alone.”

They were coming up to a length of level ground. The horses would break to a trot for a hundred yards along the water, on a beach of broken stones. They had, perhaps, a couple of minutes more before they could not hear above the beat of hooves. Five minutes after that, they would lay out breakfast on a jut of land in the reservoir—shaded by an orange tree the rising water hadn't ever reached. They must have known there were certain things they would only say today, at this one moment. That is really all she needed—just to know there wasn't time to waste.

“You thought I left? Is that what you thought? Let me tell you something, Artie. This whole last year, I'd look at Jasper and start to think:
What if you stay and he pulls you down?
So I took off. I had to get away from it. But listen: I would have come back. Jasper knew that. God damn it, I was on my way.”

Though she hoped it would answer the question he said she was avoiding, she couldn't be certain now she knew what the question was. When she spoke again, her voice was a good deal smaller.

“Did Jasper say I left him?”

“Yes. But I told him he was wrong.”

They must have used up half their time, just letting that sink in. She supposed that Artie knew he was staying on at Steepside. He lived there, didn't he? Why, therefore, did they talk as if things between them were in the past tense? They acted as if it wouldn't work straight on. The pretext had been removed. Perhaps they'd gone on too long devoid of ulterior motive, without a word like
friend
or
lover
to neatly wrap them up. Perhaps they couldn't make it all alone.

“Well, maybe he was right,” she said, as if Jasper's guess was as good as hers. “I suppose I never got used to his fans. They're too damn loyal.
Mine
don't love me at all.”

“He used to love them back,” said Artie. “But that stopped too. He didn't love anyone anymore.”

They were two steps short of the straightaway. Artie's fat-assed mare slid down the last few feet and scrabbled forward. Vivien called out louder than she liked, for fear he would get away before she got it right.

“Except for Harry Dawes,” she said.

“No, no,” protested Artie, “not even him.” The horse shot off along the stony track. The rest of what he said he had to shout out over his shoulder. “I already told you,” Artie bellowed, sending an echo round the canyon, “Harry Dawes was just a fantasy.” The name repeated again and again, till it didn't mean a thing. Just then, she reached the flats herself. She hurried along in Artie's wake. He shouted one last time: “There
was
no Harry Dawes.”

And that was the way they left it.

It was eight years past that Jasper Cokes arrived in the town that made him, straight out of two years in the army. Passed out cold in the bed of the truck he'd driven east from Cleveland years before, when he left to go to college in Vermont. He woke up squinting at the morning sun, just as they made the downhill turn off the freeway and passed the Hollywood Bowl. Hung over on Napa red, he wasn't in much of a mood, but he liked the palms and the stucco right off. He rapped his knuckles on the rear window, as if to knock on wood.

Up front in the cab were his college pals—Carl Dana and Art Balducci, mismatched as a two-man stand-up team—and much too busy arguing maps to turn around just now. And anyway, Jasper's first impressions were not of any real consequence, not to what they were after. The master plan for this career had been in motion all the while Jasper was stationed in Thailand, refining his taste to higher and higher grades of hash. The three of them had made their deal the night they graduated college: They would make a star of Jasper Cokes. They had their contacts all set up. It seemed what Jasper mostly had to do was let it happen.