Shallow Graves

and stiff laundry pinned and drying on long lines.
    Three days, driving through mist and fog and yellow storms of September leaves and plenty of outright rain.
    Marty looked out the window. He didn’t speak for five minutes. Pellam, thinking: Silence is platinum.
    Marty said, “Know what this reminds me of?”
    The boy had a mind that ranged like a hungry crow; Pellam couldn’t even guess.
    “I was an assistant on Echoes of War,” he continued.
    This was a sixty-three-million-dollar Vietnam Warmovie that Pellam had no desire to scout for, now had no desire to see in the theaters, and knew he wouldn’t rent when it came to Tower Video in L.A.
    Marty said, “For some reason they didn’t shoot in Asia?”
    “That’s a question?”
    “No. I’m telling you.”
    Pellam said, “It sounded like you were asking me.”
    “No. They decided not to shoot in Asia.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s not important. They just didn’t.”
    “Got it,” Pellam said.
    “They shot it in England, in Cornwall.” Marty’s head swung sideways, the grin spreading into his big, oval face. Pellam liked enthusiasm. But enthusiasm went with people that talked a lot. You can’t have everything. “Man, did you know they have palm trees in England? I couldn’t believe it. Palm trees. . . . Anyway, the set designer made this totally incredible Army base, mortar holes and everything. And we’d get up at five a.m. to shoot and I’d get this weird feeling. I mean, I knew I was in England, and I knew it was just a movie. But all the actors were in costume—uniforms—sleeping in foxholes and eating rations. That’s what the director wanted. I tell you, man, standing around, I felt totally . . . queasy.” He considered if this was the right word. He decided it was and repeated it. “Queasy. That’s what I feel like now.”
    He fell silent.
    Pellam had worked on several war movies but at this moment, none of those came to mind. What he was thinking of now was rosettes of broken glass on the side window of the camper, a day after they’darrived in the area here. Winnebago makes strong windows and it had taken a real good throw to get the bottle through the glass. The note inside had read: “Goodbye.” The camper’d been subjected to all kinds of creative destruction over the years but nothing so ambiguously disturbing. Pellam noticed the vandals had had the foresight not to pitch the message through the windshield; they wanted to make sure the Winnebago would have an unobstructed view when it drove out of town.
    He also noticed the missile had been a bottle, not a rock, and could as easily have held gasoline as a carefully lettered note.
    That’s what John Pellam was thinking of now. Not stunts, not war movies, not ominous dawns in tropical England.
    “Getting cold,” Marty said.
    Pellam reached for the heater on the dash and turned it up two notches. They smelled the wet, rubbery scent of the warm air filling the cab.
    On the floor Pellam’s boot crunched several pieces of shattered window glass. He kicked them aside.
    Goodbye . . .
    DOWNTOWN CLEARY WASN’T much.
    Two laundromats, a Chase branch, a local bank. Two bars outfitted by the same prop department. A dozen antique stores, their windows crammed with tea tables, presidential campaign buttons, sconces, trivets, tinware, scraps of faded rugs, elegant Victorian tools. There were two real estate brokerage storefronts, a music store specializing in marching-band instruments, a hardware store. The tea shop—a little,hobbity place—did a bang-up business selling muffins laced with fiber and granola and honey.
    An old wood-floored five-and-dime. A couple of drugstores, one with a lunch counter right out of the fifties, so authentic a set designer couldn’t have done better. Several houses had been turned into small businesses. Crystalmere—Original Jewelry Designs by Janine. Scotch Imports, Shetland Wool Our Speciality.
    Two teenage boys, large, with scrubbed faces and pick-a-fight grins, stood outside the hardware store, under an awning, shirts open over their beefy chests, acting like the brisk wind was nothing. One of them lifted his middle finger to the passing camper.
    “Assholes,” Marty said.
    The locals were friendlier in Mexico, where Marty and Pellam had been last month, though that may have had something to do with the exchange rate; U.S. currency makes for a great deal of international brotherhood and understanding.
    Pellam shrugged.
    Marty’s