Bloody River Blues

the bearded man in jeans and green T-shirt who leaned against a reflector stand, his red eyes dancing pensively around the room. Tony Sloan paced over the spent machine-gun cartridges. He was shaking his head.
    The man in brown sat up, wiped blood off his nose, and said, “Come on, Tony. It works.”
    “Cut,” came the shout from behind the camera.
    The bloody actress jumped to her feet and slapped her sticky palms on her hips. “Oh, Christ,” she muttered viciously.
    Sloan stepped closer to the carnage, surveying it. He spat out “It doesn’t ‘work.’ ”
    The machine gunner pulled cotton out of his ears and said, “What’s he say?”
    The actress grimaced. “He says it doesn’t work.”
    The killer shrugged.
    Sloan motioned to Danny the script writer and the assistant director, a young blond woman in her earlythirties. The three of them huddled in the corner of the room, while wardrobe and grips spread out onto the set, cleaning up. “We gotta shoot it outside,” Sloan said.
    The assistant director’s golden ponytail swaggered as she nodded vigorous approval.
    “Outside?” Danny sighed. According to the Writer’s Guild contract, he was paid a great deal of money every time he revised Missouri River Blues. The fun of making that money, however, had long ago worn off.
    “It’s not, you know, dynamic enough,” Sloan mused. “We need a sense of motion. They should be moving . I think it’s important that they move .”
    Danny pulled his earplugs out. “If you remember the book and if you remember the shooting script, they escaped. I didn’t kill them in the first place.”
    The director said, “No, no, no, I don’t mean that. They’ve got to die. I just think they should get killed outside. You know, like it suggests they’re that much closer to freedom. Remember Ross’s fear.”
    “Fear of the lock-down,” the assistant director recited, shaking her stern blond ponytail. It was impossible to tell if she was speaking with reverence or sarcasm.
    Danny wound his own ponytail, the color of a raven’s wings, around stubby fingers, then touched from his cheek a fleck of red cardboard from the blank machine-gun shells. He looked as exhausted as Sloan. “Tell me what you want, Tony. You want them dead, I’ll make them dead. You want them dead outside, I’ll make them dead outside. Just tell me.”
    The director shouted, “Pellam? Shit, did he leave?”
    Pellam, who had not been wearing earplugs but had been sitting on the front hall stairs thirty feet away from the shooting, stood up and walked into the living room. He dodged bits of pottery and glass and stepped over two arms assistants in protective gear who were removing several of the explosive gunshot-impact squibs that had failed to detonate.
    Sloan asked him, “What about a road?”
    “Why do you want a road?”
    “I’d like them to die on a road,” Sloan said. “Or at least near a road.”
    The actress in pedal pushers said, “I don’t want to get shot again. It’s loud and it’s messy and I don’t like it.”
    “You’ve got to die,” Sloan said. “Quit complaining about it.”
    With a bloody finger she pointed to the cartridge of film the assistant photographer was pulling off the Panaflex camera. “I’m dead. It’s in the can.”
    The director stared at the ground. “What I’d like is to find a road going through woods. No, a field. A big field. Maybe beside a school or something. Ross and Dehlia are planning one last heist. But it’s an ambush. The Pinkerton guys stand up in the window suddenly, out of the blue—”
    Pellam began to say something.
    “Will you stop with that Bonnie and Clyde shit already, Pellam?” Sloan snapped. “This’ll be different. Everybody thinks they’re going to get shot—I mean, the audience is thinking Bonnie and Clyde. They’re thinking they’ve seen this before. But uh-uh. Here, the kids get away. Maybe the guns don’t go off and—”
    Danny said, “ Neither of the guns go off? There are two agents.”
    “Well, one gun jams and the other guy misses.”
    “So now you want them to live?” Danny asked brightly.
    “No, no, no. I want them to escape then get killed, maybe in a freak accident. I’ve got it! They drive into a train.”
    The actress said, “If I don’t get shot again I don’t mind.”
    Pellam said, “Somebody else did a train crash ending. Who was it? That’s very seventies. Elliott Gould might’ve driven a car into a train once. Or Donald