Shallow Graves

The funeral had been near the intersection they were passing through just then. Avenue of the Stars.
    “I talked to that exec producer.”
    Trudie liked that, shortening words and slinging them around. Exec, photog, res, as in Make a res at a restaurant.
    “Yeah?” he asked brightly.
    “He was like beside himself.”
    “Yeah?” Pellam couldn’t remember exactly which exec she was talking about, or why he was, or should be, beside himself. They drove in silence, through that brilliant light, California light, that seems to bring out some essential radiation from the grass and trees. It gets right in your face, like a beautiful, obnoxious teenage girl. From behind his sunglasses Pellam watched the scenery. And the cars—a thousand German cars, it seemed—moving opposite, toward Hollywood.
    “Won’t be back for a while, huh?”
    “Probably not.”
    Trudie didn’t answer, just squeezed his knee. She turned the radio up. They were in Beverly Hills; sentiment didn’t exist.
    “So,” she said. “You sure you want to do this?”
    “Yep,” he said and didn’t add anything else.
    Ten silent minutes later she dropped him at the airport. He didn’t want or expect her to get out. They kissed like siblings and the only clues to the deepest moments of their on-again, off-again year together was a shallow shaking of her head and the sad, mystified smile she lapsed into from time to time.
    “Call me sometime,” she said.
    Pellam promised that he would.
    He handed his suitcase to the curbside check-in attendant, and when he turned back, Trudie was gone.
    JOHN PELLAM SAT on a hundred-year-old gravestone, looking out over this upstate New York valley, filled with trees gone to vibrant yellow red. The sun had just disappeared under a row of clouds and the beautiful scenery had taken on an ominous nature.
    Adding to which was the man moving slowly, solemnly forward. He was dressed in minister’s black garb. When he was twenty feet away from an open grave, the man paused and closed his eyes, as if finding strength from somewhere, then he opened a Bible.
    He started forward once more.
    Pellam rose from the cold stone and squinted at the furtive approach.
    Suddenly motion on the ground nearby. The manreared back in surprise and stumbled over a low tombstone. “Jesus Christ,” he called, dropping the Bible.
    “What?” came a booming voice from a loudspeaker.
    “It attacked me!” the man called, standing up and brushing grass from his slacks.
    The electronic voice of God yelled, “Cut it, cut! What the hell happened?”
    The field filled with people. The crew walked around from behind the Panaflex camera, Makeup went to work on the actor’s face. He called, “A squirrel . . . he attacked me!”
    A stuntman grabbed his jacket and leapt into the graveyard, crying, “Toro, toro!”
    “Hilarious,” the director called sarcastically through the loudspeaker.
    Pellam walked away from the gravestone and sat down in an old green-plaid lawn chair next to his Winnebago. He said, “You cold? You want to go inside?”
    Meg Torrens squeezed his hand and said, “No, I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
    “I want a continuous shot,” the director sighed and walked back to the camera. Somebody from Wardrobe was rolling up the actor’s cuffs so they wouldn’t get dark from the moisture on the grass. The continuity girl began making notes of his position when the wild animal had attacked and the location of all the cameras and backgrounds.
    “What’s the take?”
    “That’ll be eight,” someone called.
    “Jesus. And we’ll lose the light in ten minutes. What’s the weather supposed to be tomorrow?”
    “Rain.”
    “Jesus.”
    Pellam and Meg watched the crew in the field. He said, “That’s the movies for you. Do it over and over then you wait for a while and do it again.”
    But Sam at least was enjoying himself, even if he would have preferred a space wars flick or something with machine-gunning robots over some stupid love story called To Sleep in a Shallow Grave. Mostly, it was the huge, complicated camera that he loved.
    “Wow,” he’d say to Pellam. “It’s like a spaceship.” And Pellam got the okay from the director of photography to put him in the operator’s seat for a few minutes.
    Alan Lefkowitz ducked out of his honey wagon and trooped toward the director. He was wearing his play clothes, his on-set clothes—chinos and a red-and-white striped shirt (Pellam told Meg, “That’s what