This Location of Unknown Possibilities (13 page)

He tugged at the legs of his jeans and passed by Lora. Spillage: going full commando with low-hangers could be painful. “Oh, where's good coffee?” he asked.

“Working, Jake, working.”

Outside, Nicos sounded the horn at the impatient regular intervals of a New York City cabbie sent over from Central Casting. “You'd better run,” Lora said. “Christ, any minute now a representative of Oliver's finest might show up here waving a badge. Say hi to Nicos for me.
And Jake?”

“Yes?”

“I'm glad you're enjoying my Christmas present, really, and I know you like to smell pretty, but we could all live happier here with you applying one less splash of Terre in the morning.”

“Okay, ma'am.” Although firm, Lora's mothering was well intended.

“Talk to you soon.”

2
.

A
Red Bull canister fell and clattered on the asphalt as Jake swung open the door. He tossed it into the pick-up's empty bed. “Hey, Pig Pen,” he said, observing the litter—balled napkins and food wrappers lining the dash, empty energy drinks crowding the floor, and Styrofoam take-out strewn alongside water bottles on the bench seat. Nicos maintained the lustrous exterior of his vehicles with the anal-retentive standards of a military boot camp CO, but expressed a profound shift in philosophy for interiors. The weird split always struck Jake, who thought a mid-point between extremes seemed realistic, closer to cosmic balance; anyone comparing his desk and bedroom would notice matching tidiness levels.

“Hey, boss, you know me. I like to nest.” Nicos swept discards to the floor and patted the seat. “Okay princess, here's a safe place for your hairy Royal Doulton ass.”

Jake, bested by the subordinate's rapid-fire brain, slid into position without a reply. Nicos revved the engine.

“We ready to rock now?”

“Go.” Jake sniffed, relieved that the interior's air-conditioner blew away any stench from Nicos' putrefying snacks. As for the heavy smoker's residue, he'd just man up about that and hold his tongue. He unlocked the phone and tapped out a message to Lora: “Tell me again, why'd we hire this guy!?!”

A life-of-the-party personality, Nicos' compulsion to talk ballooned exponentially when he'd passed long hours alone. Jake calculated that the Location Manager must have been solitary overnight in a motel and likely granted minimal contact during breakfast despite firm efforts at the quick fix of chatting up the waitress or diners at nearby tables. Sharing the cab now would not be too different from circulating in a room of desperate speed-daters eager to spill as many words as possible in their three-minute allotment of “Let me tell you all about me,
please
.” Stalling for time was possible, Jake could see, but texting work missives could grab only a few moments of privacy.

Nicos's mouth switched on as he shifted out of Park. “The compound's not even ten kliks away, right,” he said, louder than necessary, “but the crash site is a fair bit of a haul. It's out of the way for sure, but I figure the pay off is worth it. You'll see.
It blew me away, that's for sure. A-f-ing-mazing, considering what we had to work with, anyway. It's not exactly the Himalayas out there—it's a fricking desert, well kind of a desert, technically the Osoyoos Arid Biotic Zone, whatever that means, but everyone says Okanagan Desert—so finding a sheer mountain face was no small feat. I mean, c'mon, Christ, talk about unreasonable expectations. Dunes woulda been a cinch. Even CGI woulda been easier, way easier.” Nicos turned to face Jake, drawing attention to the sloping Bob Hope nose—another incongruous item for slow-day office speculation. “But I lucked in anyway, chatted up these hippie wannabe dudes on longboards and they told me about this retired gravel pit that I would never a found by looking at any map. Sometimes I'm pretty impressed with myself. Yeah, it's a gift, that's all I can say.”

From past truck ride episodes, Jake was fully aware that Nicos could—and would—say much more. “Hold on a sec. I need to get this sent.” Jake tapped the glass, scanning old online profile messages and photos, and waited for Lora's reply. Being on location and away from city amenities always made his testosterone levels spike, he'd swear. Hormonal torment: maybe the herbal pill magic had begun kicking in, after all.

“So, you were saying there's nothing closer, eh?” Jake said, no longer able to ignore Nicos' swiveling head and quests for eye contact.

“You saw the pictures, right?” Nicos turned to Jake again, expression obscured by shuttered mountaineering sunglasses. “There's some hills with a few scattered rocks, yeah, but nothing epic as per orders.” Nicos flipped through a binder, steering with one hand. “Here it is. See, right, the list of requirements actually put in ‘grandeur' a couple of times, so that's what I looked for. Grandeur, Christ! And found, kinda sorta, you'll see.” He detached the copy of the email and thrust the sheet at Jake. “Anyway, the other option was way the hell over there in the sticks”—he thumbed southward—“and that would of pissed off everybody. All the talent pussy footing around and complaining would of been a sight, I gotta say. But the cost . . . killer. K-i-l-l-e-r. Not to mention the fact that we'd have to hire helicopters or a fleet of Humvees to access it. In no time we'd be hitting James Cameron territory with budget overruns. Hell to pay and all that, your head on a silver platter, the whole nine yards.”

“Right,” Jake sent a follow-up message: “The tide is rising.” He'd let Nicos spew it all out. Like a baby, Nicos would tire eventually and maybe hit some kind of equilibrium after a painful few minutes of squalling. That strategy also worked when Hurricane Lora approached.

Lora's text opened with a smile emoticon:
“With great power comes great responsibility. Reward him with a gold star and Good Luck!!! Rearranging YOUR schedule now so can't talk. ttyl biatch!!” Jake smiled. Schadenfreude: he would have typed the same.

Jake stared out the window while Nicos spoke, unconcerned about the failure to contribute. Nicos didn't expect an exchange of sentence for sentence reciprocity; a second body created the necessary illusion of conversation.

As the truck passed a barely there trailer park on a low sandy rise, Jake followed the abrupt change to greenery, a hand-planted oasis promising reassurance in an otherwise unwelcoming—though harshly striking—environment. In place of imposing barren rock outcrops and the invariable parched grass plains between them grew countless trees—vibrant, groomed, and healthy, a domesticated wilderness planted in fertile, easy-access grids. The layout appeared ingenious in its efficiency, but unlike the cold brutality of an auto plant, the orchards and their fluttering summer grace invited attention. Jake foresaw entranced drivers slowing and pulling over, eventually giving in to the desire to stroll around the luminous unthreatening forest, blithely setting aside the important lessons about the malevolence that awaits in stands of trees learned by Hansel and Gretel or those doomed kids in
The Blair Witch Project
. And that duo from the bible too.

Jake made a mental note to wander through a few rows before the shoot wrapped, ideally during the weak light at sunrise or sunset. A roadside sign—“U-pik fruit”—offered a handy solution to the trespassing problem.

“We're just about there,” Nicos said. “Behold,” sweeping across the view with an open palm, “the Djoun compound.
Well, in a minute. Hold on.”

Without signaling, Nicos swung off the highway and on to a narrow dirt road, swerving at a jackass speed that prompted a RV's angry horn blare and, for Jake, a short cinematic vignette of the lifted wheels that precede a tumbling crash, bloody wrecked bodies, a cloud of settling dust, spilling gas, and appalling final silence.

Jake leaned gamely with the truck's turn velocity—he'd heard Nicos' boasts about Dakar Rally-worthy off-roading expertise, but trusted his skill anyway. Curious about the pilot's shows of manly aggression over the past hour he figured he deserved an explanation. “You're testy today, man. Need to get laid or something?”

Nicos smiled widely. “Nah, it's the great outdoors. Brings out the animal in me, so I guess I'm testes. Get it?”

The homemade road mowed a line between two parcels of farmland.

A uniform green span of fruit trees fluttered visibly from Nicos' window, and on Jake's side the orchard spelled decimation, a flat expanse of plowed dry dirt clods and leafless wood carcasses. Errant partial rows of upturned stumps implied a work-in-progress; in the middle of the former orchard plot whole spiny trees had been dragged into one high pile that, Jake guessed, would soon be torched or fed into a chipper. The trees looked too puny for lumber.

“Disease?” Jake asked, thinking of the photograph of anthrax-infected livestock buried in shallow desert graves that Marilyn had suggested as a décor option for the fireplace wall. He'd felt better about the eerie industrial site photographed by the German couple, sterile metallic gloominess ultimately proving easier to come home to than decaying cattle with milky dead eyes.

“You'd think so, but no. I asked a guy here about that. When the time comes, they rip up the whole thing and plant new ones. It improves profit in the long run. I think orchard plots are like thoroughbreds. I mean they're super productive while they last, right, but they run out of juice quicker than a mongrel—or whatever they call non-thoroughbreds—so you put them out to pasture.”

Nicos slowed to a rolling stop to examine the wasteland, then pushed the pedal for a demonstration of pebble-spitting acceleration. The Red Bull clattered and bounced in the back. “Or they chop them down and burn them, as the case may be. It'll make for a wicked bonfire, like at Burning Man. And sometimes it's a market demand thing, they're not sentimental these guys: they get paid more for apples than for pears or something, so it's out with one and in with the other. That's why there's so many grapes everywhere now: city yuppies pay through the nose for Chardonnay, not apple juice. They're businessmen these farmers, so I guess optimal fruit production is key.”

“It's a long-term investment, I guess. You'd think trees would take years to grow to that size.”

“Yeah, but we're not up to speed on agribusiness, you know, so maybe there are new hybrids or something that grow really quickly like bamboo or those trees they've developed for toilet paper. Synthetic growth hormones maybe, chickens and cows are pumped full of 'em, so why not plants. Gene-splicing too. Mondo-sized trees in just six short months!
Sleeper
here we come.” Jake guessed that Nicos' veins flowed with the blood of a conspiracy theorist.

“I suppose so.” Jake hadn't heard about toilet paper trees, and he didn't ask. It would please Nicos to offer up another information session that began with “I read somewhere . . .”

As the truck reached the back end of the orchard the road widened into a yard of ankle high grass. Obscured by trees, the farmhouse to the left hinted at a spiritual closeness to the stucco mid-century rancher of the suburbs and confounded Jake's expectation of a gabled Walton family homestead in aged white. The old-time barn at the edge of the stump field butted a round-shouldered mound of mountainside; with a sagging profile, mullioned windows, and planking weathered a powdery grey, it stood ready for second unit crew exterior shots.

“That's great,” Jake said.

“Got it video-documented already and filed away. It's too country and western for us, right?”

“Right. Unless we get another script change.”

“Okay, here we are. Behold the Hebe family farm.”

Nicos slowed to wave at a lanky ball cap teen—Hebe Jr.?—inside the glassy cab of a yellow tractor. After a gentle right, he drove toward the barn and made a sudden left, where a dusty clot of weeds huddled. Jake hadn't noticed the gap between one hill and the next; the sun's glare on the identically hued humps of tall dry grass produced an optical illusion similar, he guessed, to snow blindness.

“How'd you find this place? More insider info from skateboarder hippies?”

“Nope, just old-fashioned footwork. Some luck too. I was driving toward town and noticed the stumps. I figured the farmer might be cash-strapped and open to an offer to lease the field. We could set up shop there and it'd be cheap for us, so what the hell. It wouldn't hurt to ask. Turns out there's more to the property than meets the eye.”

Nicos waved to the young woman who approached as the truck turned. The PA pointed Nicos toward a makeshift parking area—a shallow U of orange fluorescent tape—with expert traffic-cop gestures. Jake didn't recognize her; the vested newbie must have been okay'd by Lora.

“Who's she?”

“Loree, I think. Rory. Lottie, maybe. Something like that. She's got more tattoos that you and me put together, that's all I know. Showed up yesterday. Considering that she's been parked on her ass guarding an empty lot, she's doing alright.”

“Nice.”

“I heard that she's not into dick,” Nicos said. “A carpet muncher, get it?”

“Yeah, I figured that out when you said she's not into dick.”

The building crew was nowhere in sight. Jake scrutinized the rampart wall of the compound. From the distance it appeared fully prepped.
The caramel colour of the plaster contrasted nicely with the faded beige field on either side. Jake nodded: so far, so good.