Loser's Town (7 page)

He pulled the BMW into the drive, got out and opened the rickety two-car garage, then parked next to his pickup truck. It was a refurbished 1958 Chevy Apache shortbed, which he would have far preferred to drive than the BMW, a car that struck him as pretentious but was what Coren leased for his agents. Coren’s reasoning was that a BMW was familiar enough not to be much noticed in LA but hip enough to allow his people to fit in. As far as Spandau was concerned it was a goddamn large and hot kraut car that he wasn’t allowed to smoke in.

Spandau himself was of German extraction, his father a butcher coming from Düsseldorf just after the war, and he thought perhaps the car reminded him of his father. Dark, cold and aloof. The old man used to beat him with a wide strip of military webbing, and Spandau always suspected it was some romantic vestige of his military service defending the Reich. Spandau once asked him if he’d been a Nazi and old Horst knocked him across the room. In the shop the old man hacked angrily all day at carcasses of meat, as if they were Jews, homos or gypsies, and came home to drink schnapps and terrorize his wife and children. Katrina, his daughter, two years younger than David, he never beat, but merely slashed with invective. Something in his German genes that wouldn’t let him hit a woman made it alright to reduce them to emotional rubble, dismember them as surely and deeply as the flesh he worked with. Whenever someone praised the BMW as a ‘fine piece of German engineering’ Spandau recalled his father’s
own ruthless efficiency at carving meat and human beings. But in the end that too was the road to madness. In the end, it was just a car.

Spandau had stopped at the market, and now he balanced the bag of groceries in the crook of his arm as he pulled shut the garage door. No fancy electronic openers for him. It was a hot day and the back of his white dress shirt was soaked underneath the thin Armani jacket. Inside the house it was cool and dark; he’d pulled the shades and left the air-conditioner on. It was a relief to be inside, safe, quiet, private. He missed Dee but in truth it felt good to come home like this, to shut the world out, not to hear anyone talking.

Delia had left him the year before. It had been an amicable divorce – if a divorce could ever be called such – and he did not contest it. He had long seen it coming, they both had. The marriage had been fine during the stunt work, because she understood that, it was what her father did too. Then Spandau had that run of bad luck where too many bones got broken in a single year, and Spandau had hit that producer.

A broken hip and arm and collarbone in the span of ten months were bad enough, but Spandau had lost his temper on the set one day and clocked a Suit with a nice, crisp short one to the chin. The Suit cracked several expensive dental crowns and summoned his attorney. The attorney threatened to sue the stunt coordinator, Beau, who owned the company and was also Dee’s father. Beau chewed
Spandau out but would have fought for him and lost his ass in the process. Beau refused to fire him. Rather than jeopardize Beau, Spandau appeased the Suit by quitting. He sat home for three months, drinking through most afternoons toward the last. Then Coren had come through with the detective job, and Spandau found out he was good at it, and it required the injury of hardly any body parts.

It was the detective work that had ruined the marriage. Dee didn’t care how much he drank and caroused, what he damaged, who he punched out. Hell, she was Beau McCauley’s daughter and she was used to all that. What she wasn’t used to was the change that came over Spandau, and how readily he took to a job that she found morally offensive. On one early job, Spandau had been required to befriend a man, a personal manager suspected of ‘misappropriating’ some of his client’s money.

The client was a bitch-goddess of a TV star, a pneumatic peroxide blonde with a body like Barbie and a mind like J. Paul Getty. She worked the manager like a dog, paid him a minimal amount of kibble, and thoroughly enjoyed humiliating him in front of whoever happened to be around. The manager put up with it but took his revenge by siphoning small amounts of her money into an account in Nevada. It wasn’t much, the man just wanted to pay off a little cabin at Tahoe, where he went to fish and relax whenever he could escape the clutches of his boss, which wasn’t often. Spandau arranged to meet him in Tahoe, they went fishing together, became pals.

One drunken dusk while sitting in his johnboat and fishing for bass, the man confessed the whole thing to Spandau. He explained how he’d been draining the money little by little for over a year, hardly enough to notice, so that he could finish paying off this place and have somewhere to live when he quit working for Queen Titzilla, which he planned to do within the next few months. The way he told the story to Spandau, you could see he felt there was nothing wrong in what he was doing. To him the actions were justified and he felt no guilt about it. Titzilla overworked and humiliated him, so he extracted an amount from her he felt was fair, and that was that. It wasn’t like she’d miss it. She was loaded and owned real estate up the wazoo. But of course she did miss it. She said she began to suspect him when he quit looking hurt whenever she insulted him. She said it was cheaper to hire a detective than to audit her books, which she wasn’t keen to draw attention to anyway. Spandau helped the poor drunken fool off the lake and back to his small cabin, put him to bed, called Titzilla and told her the whole story.

Dee found this appalling, and was surprised that Spandau didn’t. How could he betray a friend, someone who liked and trusted him? Spandau didn’t see it that way. He felt no qualms at all, not a trace of guilt. He tried to make his position clear to her, but it was useless. The man was a crook, Spandau explained. Spandau had been hired to catch him. He did. End of story. But for Dee, friendship and family were sacred. You didn’t betray a friend, no
matter what, especially if there was even a remote justification for his act. You just didn’t.

‘But he’s not my friend,’ pleaded Spandau. ‘He’s a thief.’

‘But you told him you were his friend!’ she accused. ‘You made him feel safe, you let him think he could trust you. And then you used it against him.’

There was nothing Spandau could say. Her whole argument seemed irrational to him. But the case had opened up a rift between them, an unbridgeable chasm. He suspected there was something more at stake, that something else was going on, but he couldn’t grasp what it was. The incident struck some hidden weakness in their relationship.

It wasn’t until Dee had been gone for a few weeks, when Spandau had time to sit and obsessively go over each and every marital fuck-up, that he suspected he had an answer.

Dee herself had pointed it out once, early on. Spandau had told her about his father. About the beatings, the verbal abuse, the coldness and cruelty. How he and his sister and his mother became close because of it. How that closeness excluded everyone else, how it isolated them from friends and confidences, but made bearable the daily mortification that old Horst inflicted.

It was possible, David understood, to watch someone you love be abused and to say nothing to defend them, because that was simply the way of things. You accepted, you let the pain and humiliation ride through you like cold wind through a hole, and you made up for it later by doling out the tenderness you’d kept hidden.

This had meant nothing to Spandau when he told it to her, except for the embarrassment of coming from such a home, such a father. Dee had tears in her eyes. Spandau made fun of her, but truthfully could think of nothing he’d said that should move anyone to tears.

And this, said Dee, was exactly why she was crying. That he had no idea how tragic it was.

That was the word she’d used: tragic. Dee’s upbringing had been boisterous but loving. Beau might get shitfaced after a night out with the boys, but otherwise he was a model husband and father. Two sons and a daughter adored him, as he adored them. He’d raised his voice often enough but had never been malicious and never, never struck any of them. Dee had grown up so loved that she was in college before she realized what a privilege that was.

She thanked David for telling her, and said it explained some things.

Like what? Spandau asked.

Like your ability to distance yourself when you feel threatened, Dee told him. Your ability to turn inside yourself, like a hedgehog.

David said he had no idea what she was talking about, and she wouldn’t discuss it anymore.

The fault lay in their concept of family and loyalty. Dee had grown up expansive in her love, in her trust, in her loyalties. For Spandau, life was like rowing in a very small boat, and you were either in the boat or out of the boat.

If you were out of the boat, how long you could tread
water was up to you. He loved his mother, his sister, he loved Dee and Beau. A tiny crew for a tiny yacht. The rest of the world wasn’t his problem. You protected like a tiger those closest to you and to hell with everyone else; there wasn’t even time to be sorry.

Had this been what ruined his marriage? He thought it might be.

The destruction was as simple, perhaps, as the difference between happy families and miserable ones. They approached the world differently, and perhaps even loved differently. For Spandau, the world was something to be mistrusted except for those proven and close to you. For Dee, the world was to be loved and embraced.

The tragedy was, that was why Spandau loved her. Because she was so much unlike him.

Spandau understood that he had wanted Dee to make him a better person. He hoped that he would become more like her. Instead, he had remained the same. As much as they had loved each other, as much as they still loved each other, she had not changed him. He was incapable of change and that was why she was gone, and why he was so good at the profession of betrayal.

They were married for five years. She was a teacher. She taught second grade at a school in the Valley. There were moments, days even, of enormous happiness. Happiness that for Spandau brought a guilt with it, a sense that it was too good to be true, that it was (at least for him) unearned.

The marriage was never bad, though sometimes hard.

At the beginning of the fourth year Beau had died. A heart attack at seventy. Beau McCauley was as healthy as one of the horses he’d wrangled all his life. He was the sort of man who was supposed to live forever. A character bigger than life, for whom the normal rules of mortality could not apply. His death opened a great hole in all their lives.

It was hardest on Dee, Beau’s little girl. Her brothers came for the funeral but could not remain. They were far-flung, one living in France and the other in New York, both with families of their own. Beau’s wife Mary, a tough old bird, was left to honcho the ranch in Ojai with the help of a Mexican family who’d been with them for years. Dee had practically lived out there the last couple of summers, helping with the stock, the intricacies of ranch bookkeeping, and just keeping Mary company. Spandau came out when he could.

It was no surprise when she told him she wanted to move back to the ranch full time. They lived apart for a year without divorcing, then she said she thought it best to make it official. Spandau wondered about another man but no one appeared, at least not until now.

Maybe Dee wanted to release Spandau to chase other women. It was only after the divorce papers were signed, within the last year in fact, that Spandau could look at anyone else. Even now it was awkward. He didn’t expect to find another Dee.

He didn’t, in fact, expect to find anyone at all and he preferred it that way. The divorce papers were signed and
when it was clear she wasn’t coming back, Spandau bought her half of the house. There was nothing else they owned. She took the Toyota 4-Runner. Spandau kept the Apache and most of the furniture.

Spandau took the groceries into the kitchen and sat the bag on the table and put them away. It wasn’t quite two o’clock. He made a sandwich and ate it quickly, bachelor-style, over the sink. He went into his office to check his messages.

The second bedroom was to have been a baby’s nursery. Now it was what Dee called ‘the Gene Autry Room’. It started out simply as an office where Spandau did his accounts and wrote his reports for Coren. Gradually it became a depository for memorabilia, mementos and photos of movies he’d worked on and rodeos he’d competed in. The occasional trophy from some dinky local rodeo – usually for roping, since Spandau stayed on a horse, as Beau told him once, like his ass was coated with Teflon.

When Dee moved out, the never so latent cowboy in him took over completely. Navaho rugs, Native American totems, Mexican blankets draped over an old sofa and a saddle-leather chair, his favorite spot. His collection of books on Western Americana in a glass bookcase. Some antique guns hanging on pegs on one wall. A large poster of Sitting Bull on the wall behind his wooden desk chair, the desk itself an old roll-top that needed three men to wedge it into the room.

It was a museum to a time long gone, as the few friends invited quickly pointed out. The only concessions to the twentieth century – which, like Evelyn Waugh, Spandau believed to be a huge mistake – were the answering machine and the laptop computer, tucked away in a corner out of eyeshot. Spandau was more at home here than anywhere in the world. He whiled away many a long and lonely night in his easy chair, smoking a pipe, sipping Wild Turkey and reading books on the American West.

There were no surprises on the answering machine. Pookie reminded him, in that Marilyn Monroe voice she affected over the phone, that Coren wanted his mileage sheets. A friend from Utah, a genuine cowboy, drunk and bored, called to say he was coming to LA soon and wanted to know if Spandau knew any available starlets.

Dee had called. She wanted to know if Spandau was still coming out to the ranch that afternoon. Spandau replayed her voice several times, coasting the familiar drop and rise of his heart.

He pulled off the Armani and dressed quickly in jeans, a work shirt and an old pair of boots. It was like shedding a false skin in exchange for his true one. He felt his life become lighter. He opened the garage and after a few attempts cranked up the Apache. It hadn’t been driven in weeks. He backed it out and shut the garage. He sat in the truck in the driveway, relishing the feel of it. He’d restored the truck to its original state, right down to the baby-blue and white paint job and the functioning AM radio. With
three speeds and six cylinders, it wasn’t a hellcat on the road, and drove like what it was, a work truck. On the bench seat next to him were a banged-up straw Stetson and a baseball cap advertising the Red Pecker Bar & Grill. He put on the baseball cap.