Bloody River Blues

funeral?”
    Pellam thought back to the most recent memorial service he might have been a featured speaker at. It had been seven years ago in Santa Monica. The deceased had been his closest friend the actor Tommy Bernstein. Pellam had not attended the service.
    She didn’t say anything more and they drove in silence for ten minutes, then cruised into downtown Maddox. He parked, with the engine still running, near Tony Sloan’s trailer. Sloan would be at the three-monitor Kem editing machine now, reviewing work prints. He would not tolerate being disturbed. Pellam left the Polaroids and a brief location report with Sloan’s poor, jittery, ponytailed assistant director and returned to the camper. They drove along Main Street and parked beside a small grocery store. Wishing to change the relentlessly somber mood, he said suddenly, “Watermelon. Let’s get some watermelon.”
    “In October?”
    “Sometimes you just get this craving. Come on.”
    Inside a small grocery store he bought a plastic container of chunks of watermelon.
    “It’s not real red,” she said.
    Pellam asked the salesgirl, “Where do you get watermelon in October?”
    “Oh, from up north.”
    Pellam said to Nina, “It’s Eskimo watermelon.”
    “Farmers’ Market,” the girl said, pointing in a direction he assumed must be north.
    Pellam asked for two forks and napkins.
    Outside, they walked up the street spitting seeds into their hands and sticking them into the dirt in the big concrete planters along the street.
    “Next year,” Nina said, “we’ll have to come back and harvest the crop.”
    Pellam didn’t really think about Nina in terms of next year. But then again, who knew?
    A dark car cruised past slowly and Pellam had the vague impression of eyes staring at him. The fork stopped halfway to his mouth and he watched the car as it sped up and continued on.
    They wandered out of downtown.
    Nina stopped and stared in the window of a store that sold shoes encrusted with costume jewelry—stones, glitter, fake gold. Why on earth would anyone in Maddox buy a pair of shoes like this?
    “Wicked Witch of the North,” he said.
    Nina said, “It was the West.”
    Maybe she does like movies after all.
    “Oh,” Pellam said. “I only like the tornado scene.”
    “When I was a little girl, I used to think it was ‘wicker’ witch. We had a wicker patio set. I wouldn’t sit in it. I thought it, I don’t know, was made out of witches.”
    Pellam smiled. She took his arm and brushed her cheek against his shoulder.
    “I finally outgrew it. I still don’t like wicker, though. You get splinters in your butt.”
    He said, “You look good when you smile.”
    Which seemed to be just the words to deflate it. But she brought a facsimile back to her mouth and said, “Thank you.”
    That was when they found the factory.
    Pellam noticed a redbrick building set back a long ways from the road. The grounds were filled with overgrown trees, brush, and rampant kudzu so thick you could only see the top of the tall, square building. It had high, gracefully arched windows decorated with iron grillwork. The setting sun was visible through them and lit the interior with broad shafts of ruddy illumination.
    Pellam started up the path. Nina followed.
    The Maddox Machinery and Die Company had been abandoned for years. The building had an odd regalness about it, something castlelike, complete with parapets and a dip in the surrounding ground that was probably a collapsed septic system but could pass for a moat. The bottom six or seven feet of the outer walls were marked with halfhearted graffiti, and the metal door was thickly posted with several generations of No Trespassing signs. Metal Art Deco designs, in the shape of lilies and vines and the company’s name, were set in concrete around the door.
    Nina walked up silently behind him. She looked up at the facade. “What a neat old building.”
    Pellam tried the front door. The lock was long broken though the double wooden panels were chained. He pushed inward as far as he could, separating them by two feet, then he worked his way inside underneath the chain.
    “Do you think you should?” Nina asked as his boot vanished into the doorway. She timidly followed.
    Inside, Pellam paused on the oak floor, worn wavy by years of workers’ boots and hand trucks. To the right were the darkened factory offices. Banisters and windows were done in streamlined aluminum, and in faded murals muscular laborers towered