Shallow Graves

without explaining further.
    She read a few more portions. “Damn, Pellam. Poetry.”
    “The movie’s good but it could be a lot better. Also, Guild scale for script doctoring is obscenely high.”
    “Know what it reminds me of?”
    Renoir? Fellini? David Lynch?
    Pellam asked, “Who?”
    “Kahlil Gibran.”
    What? He tried to smile. Wasn’t he that romance poet? Pellam hadn’t read him but he believed that they used his verses in Hallmark cards.
    She looked at him wide-eyed. “I really, really mean that.”
    “Well, thanks.”
    “The descriptions are fantastic.”
    He explained, “I think the setting in a film is another lead character. Setting a scene one place instead of another will produce a totally different movie. Like casting Denzel Washington in a lead versus Wesley Snipes. Same lines, same direction, but a different film.”
    Kahlil Gibran?
    “You write like this, why’re you just a location scout?”
    “Just?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    He did know what she meant. “I like traveling around. I don’t like meetings. I don’t like California. I don’t own a suit—”
    “That sounds like you’re reciting catechism.”
    “In nomine Zanuck, et Goldwyn, et spiritus Warner.”
    “Ha. There a message in this movie?”
    “The advertising department will say it’s about betrayal and passion. Mostly, it’s a love story, I guess.”
    She squinted and licked honey off her reddish finger. “You guess?”
    “Love’s a funny thing to pin down.” Pellam broke off another piece of brownie. No buzz, no tiny people stuffing cotton in the crevices of his brain. He was disappointed.
    She was surveying the inside of the camper again. She opened drawers and nodded. “You don’t mind, do you?” Fully prepared to keep going, he sensed, if he’d said that he did. But then she came to a cabinet and opened it. Started to pull out a couple of battered scrapbooks.
    He was up fast and lifted them, gently and laughing, out of her hands.
    “Oops, sorry,” she said, “I’m being nosey, huh?”
    Pellam smiled and put the books away.
    She looked at him for a moment. “You know, I was thinking about this today. You seem awfully familiar. There’s something about you. . . . Have I read anything about you?”
    “Me?”
    Janine shook her head. “Maybe,” she said seriously, “it was in a former life.”
    He’d heard this one before.
    Sometimes they said, “You and me, I think we’re soul mates.”
    Sometimes they just said point-blank, “Can I come with you in the camper?”
    Sometimes they never said anything but looked at him with hungry, hurting eyes. That was the hardest.
    Pellam said, “Past lives, huh? Maybe you were a pioneer woman and I was a cowboy.” He told her the Wild Bill Hickok story.
    “Holy shit, that’s terrific, Pellam, a gunslinger.”
    “His name—I always have to set this straight—was James Butler Hickok. Not William.” He blinked and looked at the brownie. It seemed to be floating in the air. He broke off another piece and ate it. “Anyway, he was a . . .” His mind stopped working for a moment. He retrieved the end of his sentence. “. . . relative. I mean, an ancestor.”
    Janine’s eyes danced with enthusiasm. She maneuvered her taut hips out of the booth and stood up. Where was she going? There weren’t many options in the camper. She asked, “He was the one with the Wild West show? With Annie Oakley?”
    “No, no, no—that was Buffalo Bill. William Cody. Wild Bill was a gunfighter. Fast draw and all that. Just like in the movies. Buffalo Bill hired him for a while to be in the show but he wasn’t a very good entertainer. He was good at shooting people. That was about it. So maybe you knew Wild Bill in a former life.”
    “Oh, but your former lives aren’t the same as your ancestors. But maybe you were a sheriff that Wild Bill killed and you came back—”
    “He didn’t kill sheriffs. He was a scout and a federal marshal.”
    “Okay, then an Indian warrior he killed. Or a cattle rustler. Maybe I was a squaw. And we’ve met a couple of times in the past . . .”
    Pellam lost this train of thought completely. She had disappeared into the back of the camper. He heard her voice, muffled. “This is very comfortable.” Pellam heard the bedside light click on. “Cozy, you know.”
    “I guess.” He was moving unsteadily toward her. He said, “Maybe I was the lover of the wife of the cattle rustler. . . .” Pellam stopped