Shallow Graves

The actor had received one L.A. Film Critics’ award and one from Cannes, when he’d been courted and seduced by a big studio lot producer. The money was incredible, the movies worse than awful. His most recent, a critic wrote, could be stuffed and served at a Thanksgiving dinner for the population of the country. Tommy was trying to think of ways to redeem himself. “Don’t be desperate,” Pellam had told him. “This city don’t love desperate men.”
    But Tommy snatched up even that advice like a life preserver.
    Pellam drives in silence. A half hour later he notices a small road leading off the highway toward a huge rock eased out of the brush and dirty sand. He makes a fast turn and the car skids to a stop out of sight of the road.
    They climb out, stretch, pee against rocks.
    Tommy asks, “You bring the Geiger counter?”
    “What do we need that for?”
    “The fucking Army. They test atom bombs here.”
    “That’s New Mexico.”
    “Fucking no,” Tommy says. “Cruise missiles blasting sheep to hell and gone. I’m scared.” He looks around cautiously.
    Pellam says, “There’re no sheep here.”
    “What I’m saying! They’re dead. Got blasted into lamb chops. We’re in danger. Our kids’ll glow in the dark.”
    “Let’s go to work, hombre.”
    From the car they take two heavy garbage cans that ring with glass falling against itself. Pellam drags them toward the rock. There isn’t much shade though there will be in an hour or two. Tommy, now pissed about his hat, rubs suntan lotion on his face and thinning scalp, then pulls a large cooler from the car. This he plants in the sand near the big rise of rock. He returns and struggles to get two lawn chairs out of what pretends to be a backseat.
    “German cars, shit,” Tommy says. He drives a Chevy Impala.
    Pellam takes empty beer bottles out of the greenbags and sets them carefully on a ridge of dirt and sand about thirty feet away from where Tommy plants the lawn chairs. He surveys his handiwork then opens a pineapple-printed beach umbrella and sticks it into the ground between the chairs.
    Pellam finishes setting out the bottles. He calls, “How many pages?”
    Tommy flips through a plastic-bound manuscript. “One seventeen.”
    “Need one more.”
    Tommy pulls another bottle from the cooler, pops the lid with a church key and drinks it down. He tosses it to Pellam, who plants it at the end of the row.
    One hundred seventeen bottles.
    They sit in the chairs, facing the bottles. Tommy takes another snort from the shaker.
    He says, “Can I have the Python. Please?”
    From a large, battered attaché case, Pellam takes two pistols. He keeps the Ruger .44 for himself and hands Tommy the Colt. He places yellow-and-green boxes of shells between them.
    Each now has a copy of the script. On the title page: “Central Standard Time. By John Pellam and Tommy Bernstein.”
    They begin reading aloud and rewriting the script. They correct each other, changing dialogue, argue. Pellam is quieter and grimmer. Tommy is boisterous. He’ll shout, then stand and stalk around, sit again.
    When they finish eleven pages—the end of the first scene—they stuff cotton into their ears, load the pistols and with fifteen shots between them take turns disintegrating the first eleven bottles.
    The rules of their game.
    Tommy says, spinning the cylinder of his gun, “You remember that scene, what was it from? Some old jungle movie? Stewart Granger’s aiming at Deborah Kerr’s head? She’s scared, doesn’t know what’s going on. Then, blam! He wastes a boa constrictor right behind her. I always wanted to play that scene. Why don’t you go sit over next to the rocks, Pellam? They got snakes in the rocks.”
    “Yeah, hell with snakes,” Pellam says, pulling a beer from the cooler. “I always wanted to shoot me an actor.”
    They work until eleven that night, and blow the last three bottles apart in the headlights of the tiny German car surrounded by the sound of its bubbling exhaust. They are shivering and it takes ten rounds each to hit the last glistening bottle.
    “This fucking movie’s going to make us, Pellam!” Tommy shouts. “We’re going right to the top!” And he empties the gun into the night sky.
    THE HOUSE WAS completely quiet.
    Meg had a little time until Pellam would be back. She took her coffee and walked up the stairs. She paused, then sat on the landing for a long time, looking into the hall and those portions of the den and living