Bloody River Blues

would all at once rise and begin to laugh and talk as if they were not dead at all but had merely been lulled into a light sleep by the glorious peace of an unseasonably warm afternoon.
    AFTER HOURS OF cruising up and down the riverbanks of the Wide Missouri and the Big Muddy, Pellam at last found the field that would be the site of Ross and Dehlia’s catastrophic last heist.
    Driving and stopping, then driving on, he had been close to giving up hope. State parks, private yards, railroad easements, pastoral grass rolling toward the water, boggy grassland, long stretches of revetments of crushed gray and black rock. Nothing that would work for the film.
    Sitting on the camper’s dashboard was a note from the key grip, pleading for a location within twenty-four hours, and sitting in the seat beside him was the reclining figure of Nina Sassower. Pellam, forcing himself to ignore both, had turned a bend, driven through a stand of dense oak and maple and braked the camper to a squealing halt.
    “I think this is it.”
    The field was a lush five acres defined by dense rows of trees, just starting to color—some leaves would have to be spray-painted or draped with greennetting. (The film was set in June.) A church facade would have to be constructed. (Sloan’s wish to have the shoot-out involve schoolchildren had given way to his slightly more tasteful burst of inspiration—the innocent victims would be churchgoers.) But those were the only necessary modifications.
    The grass was high. An asphalt road stretched timidly between the field and the riverbank, which was a ten-foot-high stone incline that dipped into the soupy water of the Missouri River.
    He stepped outside and took two dozen Polaroids, then returned to the cab. He started the camper’s engine and sped back toward town.
    “Why,” Nina asked with curiosity, “is that field any different than the other ones? Because there’s less junk?”
    “Uhm,” he began and decided he couldn’t explain.
    “I mean, it is a nice field and all,” she said quickly, perhaps taking his silence as disappointment at her reaction.
    Pellam noticed that Nina’s interest in film had grown considerably. Perhaps this was due to her employment. She was by all reports an excellent makeup artist. Perhaps it was also due to her reading Pellam’s copy of the final revised shooting script for Missouri River Blues . It looked like a student’s end-of-term notebook, stuffed with smudged, limp sheets—all different colors, indicating the various drafts of Danny’s rewrites. It required diligent shuffling to proceed from start to finish. But the script had held her interest all afternoon.
    And, more than that, had even brought her to tears.
    Driving in silence, heading back to Maddox, Pellam glanced at her again, noting her damp eyes.
    She closed the script. “I’m sorry. It’s so sad.”
    John Pellam had not cried for a long time and he could not remember the last time he had cried watching a movie. Nina looked ahead, unseeing, at the road. “I lost a relative not too long ago.”
    Pellam muttered condolences. “Who was it?” he asked.
    Lost in thought, she had not heard his question and he repeated it.
    “An aunt. She was elderly, but . . . A car accident.” Her voice faded.
    Danny’s new ending was a slow-motion angle of Ross’s Packard tumbling into the river.
    “After she died, I had this urge . . . no, not an urge, this need to put what I felt into words.”
    People tended to share things with Pellam and to confess secrets to him. It happened everywhere he went, it happened at the unlikeliest of times. He supposed this was because he was always just passing through. They could unburden themselves and then he would vanish, their confidences safe.
    “I looked through some of my books and I found a poem. ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.’ It’s funny about old-time poetry, isn’t it? I mean, it was all stiff and formal, but I could understand it.”
    “It’s a nice poem.” Pellam knew the poet was Dylan Thomas. He couldn’t remember a word of the poem.
    Pellam let the traffic lights guide him. He was lost, but he figured that the stoplights would be densercloser to downtown Maddox, where he could get his bearings. He steered toward the red and green and yellow.
    “Did you read it at her funeral?”
    “Yes. I was surprised, it went well. Real well. I thought I’d cry and spoil it. But I didn’t. Have you ever done that? Read something at a