Skyscape (33 page)

He had told Bishop that evening, just before he had called Margaret, to prepare to wake early and “be ready to deal with a problem,” a phrase Bishop had recognized from long ago. “Anything you want,” the pilot had said. But at that time Patterson hadn't been sure. He was just making contingency plans. You never knew what you might discover.

But now Patterson knew.

Patterson's bedroom window had a deep sill where one could sit and observe the pool. That is what he did, looking out upon the dark garden, the aloes and the papyrus silhouetted against the rippling pool.

He unzipped an old-fashioned doctor's bag, his own personal pharmacy. He loved the black leather, and imagined the sort of country doc who would have carried such a case in bygone days, all bedside manner and mustard plasters, in those years before it was understood that everything was chemistry, molecules linked to each other like so much playground equipment.

He selected a hypodermic, but hesitated on the choice for the work that had to be done. He gave it some thought. Sodium pentothal was the chemical he believed would be most reliable. It had worked before, and it would work again, although there was a nice sodium pentobarbital that would do almost as well. This, on top of the medication Loretta Lee had already swallowed, would keep her quiet for a long time.

Patterson had wanted more than to attend the dying, clip the tumor from its hold, stitch the shocking lips of the wound. He had wanted the spirit to exist and be free, he had wanted to ennoble what was left when illusion and pain and ignorance faded, and the self was left with so little covering.

Loretta Lee was a threat. He stood over her in the bedroom. She had that fallen, sweet look people so often take on when they sleep. He stroked her hip. When the needle went in she opened one eye, and opened her mouth like someone about to whisper an affectionate secret.

An hour before dawn Patterson left the big house. He hurried through the desert dark toward the garage. The stars above had weight, the moon so sharply cut out of the dark and its own unripened half, that Patterson had to pause and take it all in.

There was a large padlock on the garage. The lock would not release. The garage was one of those built to handle luxury cars of an earlier time, cars that never arrived, because this oasis was too far out into the Mojave. The road linking Owl Springs to state highway 127 was never built. The dream cost too much, the glamour not worth the very great trouble of having every cube of sugar and every loaf of bread flown in from Victorville.

When he finally got the lock off, the garage door was heavy. It had to be dragged, sliding, scraping. It made a squealing, animal sound as he pushed the heavy door all the way open.

God, it was quiet out here.

The door of the Range Rover opened, and then shut with a loud
chunk
. The ignition whined. The engine fired with a rumble. The air was so clean that the smell of the super-unleaded exhaust was enough to make him cough. He released the brake, nudged the accelerator.

He let the vehicle roll down across the apron of the landing strip, and did not turn on the headlights until he was well away from the house. There was no one to watch, no one to notice, but still he was careful.

It was cool enough this time of night for him to roll down the window and smell the dry air, the stone and empty atmosphere of desert. The big all-terrain tires popped and crunched over the stones, quartz geodes, agates, chunks that glittered in the moonlight.

He turned on the headlights and was immediately sorry. The stones ahead of him were too bright, and the rest of the desert too dark. He drove off across the rise and rubble of the land.

It was time to visit Paul Angevin.

36

It was a hard drive.

That didn't bother Patterson. In fact, it was reassuring.

You had to have a lot of sympathy for poor Paul. Bishop had flown him all the way out to Owl Springs for a discreet meeting. Patterson had hinted at compromise. It was the putative Golden Rule of the business:
Hey, we'll work something out
.

There was a predawn glow in the sky. Sometimes the tires slipped, slid to one side. Sometimes they bounded over a barrier of rock so rugged that Patterson was certain that the tires would be ripped to rags.

Patterson had always enjoyed a feel for machinery, the way some people have a rapport with animals. Engines had always been coaxed to life at his touch, and even the most stiff-handling Ford had proved adequate with his hand at the wheel. He had never been afraid to fly. An airplane was a machine, and machines were an extension of Patterson's body—of his will.

So he took a certain pleasure in the drive. The wheel fought him, and he had to hang on, downshifting, and manhandle the Range Rover, even with its power steering.

At last he reached the spill of yellow rock.

If he left the engine running it might overheat by the time he returned, he reasoned. It was a moment of intuitive assessment. An engine, like a human body, is a tiny universe of heat. He listened to the breathy power of the pistons and turned off the ignition.

The silence was a shock.

It always was. The senses knew such absolute quiet was impossible. The engine made cooling, ticking sounds. The sun was still below the horizon, but the pebbles and pores of the rock were gaining further definition, sharpening into a landscape, the light seeming to come from inside the land, not from the sky.

He took a swig from the canteen, and slung it over his shoulder. There was a landmark that guided him, a place in a cliff that looked torn and yellow, mustard-brown, a sharp, naked gash in the stone. This gnarled mineral spilled from the slope all the way to his feet, caramel, butterscotch, molten sulphur alternating as he hiked up the gradual slope.

Anything was possible. The trouble was: some of the things that were possible were bad. His father had once nearly killed a man on the set, a flat, hard-baked stretch of Death Valley being filmed as a backdrop to a scene in which Buck Patterson took a slug in one arm, reeled, and squeezed off a shot from the hip, the sort of aim that cinema skeptics all over the world knew was impossibly difficult.

But this Colt Peacemaker had a speck of lead residue from target practice. The wound had been tiny, but nearly mortal. The actor recovered, not due to ready medical help—there was none for miles. The fragment was small, the aorta wall just thick enough. Even so, recovery had taken six weeks.

The incident had impressed Buck Patterson into being sure that, no matter how heated the drama being portrayed, he never really took aim at anyone. He always fired wide, or into the air above the villain's head. And it had shaken his son to discover that play, the rowdy and sometimes tiresome theatrics of movie-making, could kill.

It was a long walk.

It wasn't hot yet, but so dry each breath made him feel parched. The ground was growing brighter, glowing from within. There was a wind, a light stirring from the east, and at times like this Patterson had the impression that the rising sun itself was compelling the atmosphere forward, driving it ahead of its approach.

Maybe he's not there.

Maybe something has come along to move him, a coyote, or the wind.

Permanence was a law here, more absolute than gravity. A can of Dinty Moore stew would lose its color, the paper label bleached ash-white where the sun fell on it, but the can itself would be a rustless star glittering in the grit for decades. Many times Patterson had seen a gleaming pinpoint become, on his approach, the metal butt of a shotgun shell, or the single staring lens of a broken pair of sunglasses.

This far out there was no sign of litter. In the predawn sky overhead there was a tatter of contrail, otherwise this was a world before any human deed, before the first tool had been chipped out of the first flint quarry. Lifeless as the Martian surface, the place was not even a
place
. It was timeless, as the years before a man's birth are timeless.

Patterson trudged through the emptiness, certain that something would be altered. Christ, he knew whole careers that had grown, flowered, withered in five years.

It had been nearly that long since he had visited the place. Bishop had been capable, knowing exactly where to leave him. Bishop had noted the distance on the odometer, marked the bearing on the compass, and memorized the site so that when Patterson asked him one night what it had looked like Bishop could tell him exactly, and give him the instructions it took to guide him there.

The fact was that Patterson had half-expected a man of Angevin's tenacity and stubbornness to walk out of the desert, all the way back to Owl Springs.

It could have happened. Patterson had never actually done any real, hands-on harm. It was Paul's own fault. Paul could have survived if only he had not panicked or suffered the sort of bad luck that seems inevitable only after it has actually fallen. The past is closed, locked-in, set. The future is open, airy, all-capable.

He can't still be there.

He was.

Paul's head and shoulders were silhouetted against the cheesy yellow of the rock. There was the shirt, the same ridiculous Hawaiian flowered shirt and the same khaki pants, a baggy style with many extra snap pockets, a fashion that had passed out of favor in the last couple of years. The same silly Converse high-tops, a fifty-five-year-old man dressed up like a teenager. One of the shoes was unlaced.

It was a relief to see that Paul was still in his place, and it was good to see how hard it was to find him, here in a cleft between two rocks.

“I just had to drop by,” said Patterson. He hadn't meant it to sound so offhand. His education and general experience had not given him the vocabulary for an occasion like this. Patterson was accustomed to hearing seasoned executives respond to astounding news as though the entire society had learned English from Saturday morning cartoons.

Paul grinned, his eyes squinted shut.

Patterson remembered well the words Bishop used when he reported back.
I found the peckerwood about ten yards from where I left him
. There was the green plastic canteen, there was the backpack that had, at one time, held trail mix and Fig Newtons, all a man would need to eke out a few more hours in the desert, if only he had not sprained an ankle.

“You wouldn't have made it anyway, Paul. That little canteen would replace maybe an hour's worth of sweat. You were always going to end up like this.”

It was touching. The love he still felt for Paul shut him up and made him want to do something to help this human driftwood.

Paul stayed where he was, a leather Buddha. And beautiful in a way, as Paul had not been in life, shriveled to purity.

You shoot a guy up with sodium pentothal and you pack him into the back of a Jeep and have your right-hand man find a nice little place in the Eastern Mojave, and this is just about a guarantee. Your guy will be a fossil in twenty-four hours. It was almost good to know, one of those iron laws—death, taxes, sunlight.

“You wouldn't believe it,” said Patterson. “But I actually miss you. You were wrong, but you cared about things, and a lot of people don't care about very much.”

Because, thought Patterson, I'm not a monster. You were the monster, trying to keep me from doing my good work. Just as now there were people getting in the way of the painting, the work that would be the absolute vindication of his career. Did Freud ever get a chance to work with Matisse? Did Jung ever work with Joyce? Did any other psychotherapist's work ever result in an unquestioned masterpiece?

“I wish you could see how wrong you were,” said Patterson to his old friend.

This was still a good place. Still a secret place. There was plenty of room for another person, right here beside Paul.

37

Bishop was waiting for him by the Ryan S-T. The low-winged aircraft had open fore and aft cockpits, and streamlined wheel pants, and in the morning light the silver-doped wings were dazzling. Bishop had the log in his hands, noting the work he had just completed on the vintage plane.

The sun was bright. Both of them carried the weight of it into the shadow of the hangar.

Bishop took off his aviator sunglasses, his eyes steady, querying.
Tell me what you need me to do
.

“You know how much I depend on you,” said Patterson.

You killed a friend in a bar, one punch, a cracked skull. The law forgave you because your opponent had been holding a Marine-surplus combat knife. But you could not forgive yourself. Only I could show you how to do that
.

Patterson looked off toward the desert. He made a show of having so much that he could say.

“Who is it?” asked Bishop.

Patterson shook his head.

“Just tell me who it is and I'll take care of it.”

Patterson put a hand on the pilot's shoulder.
Where would I be without you?

“Anything,” said Bishop.

Like before, when Bishop had even arranged for fishing gear to wash up at Punta Bandera, just south of Tijuana on the Baja coast. Paul had suffered from so many disorders it didn't take much imagination to see him having a heart spasm and turning into fish bait. That was what people said—
Not a surprise to me
.

Paul had waited too late to criticize the show, waited until it had begun, waited until Patterson had been changed by the power.

“Nobody's going to lay a hand on you,” said Bishop.

It was a surprise to see Loretta Lee by the pool.

It was a surprise, and it was irritating. Her feet were dangling in the water, and she had twin smudges under each eye. She looked awful, hair lank, her tan yellow-green overnight.

“Up so early?” said Patterson.

“You shouldn't have done that,” she said. “You should have trusted me. You think I can't keep my mouth shut.”

“What a shame to see you feeling so bad.”

She had that slack-jawed stare Patterson had seen in junkies. She could still talk; it would take a lot to keep Loretta Lee from talking. “I know what's wrong with me.”