Shallow Graves

Pellam had been on plenty of sets, too many, he’d decided years ago, and so he hung out mostly in the one bar in town, which was filled not with roustabouts, like the crew in the opening scenes of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but with urban Americans on seven-night, six-day packages. Pellam avoided them like the local water and spent his time with a senior gaffer, an old bearded guy, who had two intense loves—one was antique generators and the other was emaciated brunettes.
    The latter Pellam shared with him—the love for, not the Gold’s Gym’d bodies themselves, since he was among the caste of mere hirelings. Oh, a pert little assistant from wardrobe or makeup might make herself available to Pellam but any woman whose name was on a Screen Actors Guild contract was off-limits to the likes of location scouts and electricians.
    In two weeks, the men had polished off bottle after bottle of greasy liquor, in which agave worms floated like astronauts spacewalking. They shared the worms. The last one they cut in half with Pellam’s Buck knife and dropped into the last shot of the granular, smoky drink. The gaffer swore it had hallucinogenic effects and muttered some mumbo jumbo as he tossed back the shot.
    Pellam told him he was crazy and didn’t feel anything but extremely drunk.
    The movie stank but Pellam’d had a good time. For Christsake, it was Mexico. How could you lose?The final scenes ( final scenes? Hell, the whole movie) involved more explosives and machine guns than acting but Pellam was happy to watch the liquor in the bottles sink toward the fat worms and listen to the explosive charges, which were so much quieter in real life than in the final cut of a film itself, after the sound effects were added.
    Whump whump whump.
    After a while, things got boring in paradise and Pellam, who maybe didn’t smile a whole lot and whose eyelids didn’t grow as wide as Marty’s but who loved pranks, came up with some good ones. On that Mexican trip, he got a lot of mileage out of stuffed Gila monsters and latex rattlesnakes. The best was when he talked a stuntman into hanging from boots bolted to the ceiling of the director’s hotel room. When the director, stoned on some powerful ganja, walked into the room, the stuntman shouted, “Man, you’re on the fucking ceiling! How do you do that?” The director stared at him in shock, frozen like James Arness in the big ice cube in the original version of The Thing. The stuntman began to pass out, both from laughter and blood to the brain. Pellam recorded it on videotape and planned to send the tape to selected friends as Christmas presents.
    Pellam got away with a lot. Location scouting is to the film business what Switzerland is to war. Whatever cataclysm, betrayals and victories occur in boardrooms and on sets and casting couches, nobody has much of an opinion about scouts. Producers are thieves, actors are brain damaged, cinematographers are artistes, the trades are gorillas. Everybody hates the writers.
    But location scouts, they’re cowboys.
    They deliver then they’re gone.
    That, or they sit on the sidelines drinking mescal, picking up script girls and trying to pick up actresses, and then they’re gone. Nobody thinks twice about them. Pellam had had other jobs in film, and no jobs other than in film, but scouting was the only one he’d kept at for more than a couple years.
    Mexico last month. Georgia last week.
    Now, Cleary, New York. With rosy-cheeked blonde-bait Marty. With a busty former hippie. With a hundred squares of slick Polaroid pictures. With a cemetery.
    With some people who weren’t too happy to have him in town.
    Goodbye . . .
    He paused on a small road that led to what looked like a town park. It might have been private property, though; the lots in Cleary were massive. He thought about his place on Beverly Glen, whose lot line you could measure in inches and not end up with an unwieldy number. Pellam stopped and gazed at the property, at the huge robin’s-egg-blue colonial in the middle of the beautiful yard. So, it wasn’t a park at all. It was a residence. And it was for sale. The sign was stuck in the front yard.
    Pellam wondered what it was like to own a house this big in a town this small. He counted windows. The place must have six or seven bedrooms. He didn’t know five people he’d want sleeping in his house. Not all at the same time.
    He started across the road. What would a house like this cost?
    What was the