Shallow Graves

was crying again. Her hair was pasted to her cheeks; she pulled it angrily away. “You didn’t have to say it. What the hell did you expect people to think? Here you come, with your van and your camera, studying the town, talking to people, getting to know everyone . . . Getting to know some of them very well. You don’t understand the power you’ve got. You don’t understand how desperate people are. Desperate to get out of places like Cleary. And what do they do? They spill their guts to you and you betray them. Why? In the name of what? What word is sacred toyou, Pellam? Art? In the name of Art? Film? Money? How do you justify taking people’s lives and making a movie out of them?”
    He stood up and reached out for her. She shook his arms away. “You just can’t drop into someone’s life, take what you want, then leave.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She stood up. Walked to the door then stopped. Waiting for something. Neither of them knew what should come next.
    “I thought . . .” Janine’s voice faded and she stepped outside, closing the metal door softly behind her.
    Pellam sighed. He picked up the screenplay binder then bent to the floor and gathered the pages, one by one.
    DRIVING DOWN MAIN Street, Pellam passed a grocery store and parked, bought a bottle of chardonnay and walked back outside. He looked up and down the street for Janine. No sign of her. And what would he tell her if he saw her? There was no answer for that.
    He looked up the street at an approaching car, an American GT of some kind, maybe ten years old, its rear end jacked high. It came bubbling down the street. The driver parked in front of the Cedar Tap and gunned the engine into a sexy growl before he shut it off. He got out and walked into the bar. Pellam walked over to the car, looked inside.
    He returned to the Winnebago, fired it up and drove slowly out of town. He rolled both windows down and felt the cool air fill the cockpit.
    HE IS DRIVING fast in a fast car. A Porsche. A Hun car, because in L.A. you must have a German car. It’s not as easy as that, though. You also have to ignore the fact that a German car is the kind to have and it must seem as if you’re the first person on the West Coast to think about owning one. Pellam’s is black. He drives it hard, with the passion of someone who loves speed though not necessarily the machinery that allows the car to drive fast. Whenever anybody says, “Shit, the Germans make good cars,” he always looks surprised, as if they’d just caught on to his secret.
    They are going into the desert, Tommy Bernstein and him.
    “Thomaso,” Pellam shouts over the huge slipstream. “You’re going to lose your hat.”
    And the man does, reaching up too late to keep the stiff, three-hundred-dollar, curly-brimmed cowboy hat from sailing into the hundred-mile-an-hour slipstream.
    “Shit, Pellam, turn around.”
    Pellam only whoops loudly and speeds up.
    Tommy doesn’t seem to mind. Somehow, it would be wrong to stop the little black car. There is an urgency, a sense of mission. Tommy shouts something about the hat and illegal aliens. Pellam nods.
    The sun is a plate of hot pressure above them. The wind, which makes their ears ache, is hot.
    Los Angeles is behind them. Ahead is nothing but desert.
    “John, give me some!” Tommy shouts. He repeats this twice before Pellam hears and four times before he chooses to answer.
    “Please!” A moaning wail, a sound that the wind takes and instantly makes vanish.
    Pellam tosses the salt shaker underhand. The wind plays hell with the trajectory, but Tommy catches it in desperate, fumbling grabs.
    “Not funny.”
    “Improves your reflexes.”
    Tommy was trying to snort. “Too fast, I can’t—”
    Pellam hits the clutch and brake. The car skids and fishtails. When they slow to sixty Tommy can snort the coke. He gives the high sign. Pellam accelerates and refuses the offered shaker.
    Pellam feels philosophical. He shouts, “You think the desert’s minimal, right? Bullshit. It isn’t. It’s goddamn complex. Complex like a, you know, a crystal. Like the way colors spread under a microscope. Remember those science films in high school?”
    “Yeah,” Tommy shouts. “About gonads and seeds and ovum.” He is grinning like the dirty little boy he likes to portray though he is clearly considering Pellam’s comment. In fact he is considering it desperately. Pellam wishes he hadn’t spoken.
    Tommy suffers from terminally ill confidence.