Bloody River Blues

part of the housing used in what would have been the third atomic bomb dropped in World War II.
    But these honors aside, Maddox was essentially a stillborn Detroit.
    Unlike Jefferson City, which sat genteel and majestic on gnarled stone bluffs above the Missouri, Maddox squatted on the river’s muddy banks just north of where the wide water was swallowed by the wider Mississippi. No malls, no downtown rehab, no landscaped condos.
    Maddox was now a town of about thirty thousand. The downtown was a gloomy array of pre-1950 retail stores and two-story office buildings, none of which was fully occupied. Outside of this grim core were two or three dozen factories, about half of them still working at varying degrees of capacity. Unemployment was at 28 percent, the town’s per capita income was among the lowest in Missouri, and alcoholism and crime were at record highs. The city was continually in and out of insolvency and the one fire company in town sometimes had to make heartbreaking decisions about which of two or three simultaneous blazes it was going to fight. Residents lived in decrepit housing projects and minuscule nineteenth-century bungalows hemmed in by neighbors and uncut grass and kudzu, amid yards decorated with doorless refrigerators, rusted tricycles, cardboard boxes. On every block were scorched circles, like primitive sacrifice sites, where trash—whose collection the city was often unable to undertake—was illegally burned.
    Maddox, Missouri, was a dark river beside the darker rust of storage tanks. Maddox was rats nosing boldly over greasy, indestructible U.S. centennial cobblestones, Maddox was wiry grass pushing through rotting wooden loading docks and BB craters in plate glass and collapsed grain elevators. Maddox was no more or less than what you saw just beyond the Welcome To sign on River Road: the skeleton of a rusted-out Chevy one-ton pickup not worth selling for scrap.
    But for John Pellam, Maddox was heaven.
    A month earlier, he had just finished scouting locations in Montana. He had been sitting outside of the Winnebago, his brown Noconas stretched out in frontof him and pointing more or less at the spot where George Armstrong Custer’s ego finally caught up with him. Pellam had been drinking beer when his cellular phone had started buzzing.
    He hadn’t more than answered it before the speaker was barraging him with a story about two young lovers who become robbers. A machine gun of facts, as if the caller and Pellam were resuming a conversation cut short minutes before by an ornery mobile phone. Pellam believed the name of the man with whom he was having this animated talk had passed his way a moment before, but he’d missed it in the onslaught of words.
    “Uh, who’s this again?”
    “Tony Sloan,” the surprised, staccato voice fired back.
    “Okay.” They had never met. Pellam knew Sloan, of course. But then, so did everyone who read Premiere or People or Newsweek . A former producer of TV commercials, he had directed last year’s Circuit Man, a computer sci-fi political thriller, a megahit that had snagged Oscars for best special effects and best sound and had grossed thirty-six million dollars its first weekend against a total budget of seventy-eight million.
    Pellam had seen the first two of Sloan’s films and none of the rest. He preferred not to work for directors like Tony Sloan—special-effects directors, he considered them, not people directors—but that day in Montana he had listened to the man with some interest, for two reasons. First: After his recent hit Sloan could write very large checks to those he hired and never be questioned by his studio. Second: Sloanwas explaining with a gravity surprising for a child of television that he wanted to make a movie with some meat on it. “Artistically, I want to expand. A Badlands tone, you know what I mean? Minimal. Essential.”
    Pellam had liked Badlands and his favorite films were minimal and essential. He felt he should hear Sloan out.
    “John, I’ve asked around. People say you been all over the country. They say you’re a walking site catalog.”
    Perhaps not. But Pellam did have many scrapbooks filled with Polaroid snaps of quirky, cinematic locales just right for the sort of feature film that Sloan was describing. Moreover, Sloan had less location experience than most directors because his flicks were usually soundstage setups and computer graphics transfers. To make his movie he’d need a solid location