A Thousand Pardons (7 page)

T
HE FOREMAN ON HIS RANCH had called a meeting, just to grab the opportunity to update him on a few things while he was actually there: fencing problems, impending visits from the state D of A and from Immigration, a boundary dispute with the rancher to their south which was complete bullshit but would require hiring a surveyor to make go away. Nothing too far out of the ordinary, just himself and the foreman and two hands whose names he didn’t know, and it had all taken place very informally right there on the hacienda after breakfast. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than forty minutes. Still, it left a bad feeling in him, a rebellious or claustrophobic feeling, which only seemed to tighten its hold inside him as the otherwise empty day went on; he could tell it was the kind of upset that wasn’t going to go away on its own, that he was going to have to take some step to snuff it out. A meeting! On the ranch! What had he bought this place for, if not to get away from the world of meetings? He tried some yoga, and he tried reading some Basho translations his new small press was going to publish, but his concentration was shot, and when the afternoon was half done he got in the truck and raised some dust driving down the long, straight road to the front gate. Something mutinous rose up in him at the thought of the security cameras whose lenses took him in as he approached that gate, even though at some earlier meeting he had signed off on their installation. Near the fencing along the berm, he passed the foreman, whose name, impossibly, was Colt; tall and straight in the saddle, Colt looked down at the truck and touched his hat, and it was possible to be contemptuous and jealous of him at the same time.

Five hundred yards beyond the gate was the crossroads; instead of turning left, toward town and the airstrip, he turned right, where he never went, where he imagined it was all but unmapped and a man could be alone with himself and clear his head. And it was like a moonscape for a while, just the cracked road and the scrub and the mountains, but after about ten miles he saw a sign for a bar; frowning, he decelerated onto the gravel and parked. As it turned out, it was truly a great bar—dark, no TV, nothing but ranch hands and day workers, silent except for the pool table—and he might have settled in for longer, but he hadn’t gotten halfway through the beer that followed his third shot before somebody recognized him. The dumb fucking hick leaned one elbow on the bar and stared right at his face like he was staring at a face on a billboard. “Holy shit,” the hick said. He gave the guy a smile that was like slapping a book shut, threw a twenty on the bar, and got into the truck again. There was still a ways to drive, apparently, in order to get outside of where he was.

With the windows down, the noise and the heat were tremendous, but still he saw and felt his cellphone convulsing across the front seat beside him. He hadn’t even realized he’d brought it along. He thought for a moment about throwing it out the window, but then somebody would find it and figure out who it belonged to, and then that was a shitstorm of a whole other sort. He tucked the phone in his shirt pocket so he wouldn’t have to see it anymore.

In the next bar it started vibrating again, right over his heart. He took it out and flipped it open and looked at the text on the screen: Hamilton? Where R U? It was from someone named Katie, which didn’t ring a bell. He asked the bartender to pour another shot and leave the bottle. They actually still did that out here. They did it in L.A. too, but then at the end of the night some guy came up to you and handed you a bill for a thousand dollars. When the phone went off again—the bar was so quiet you could hear it buzz in his pocket—he answered.

“Hamilton? This is Katie Marcus from Event Horizon—we’re handling the PR for
A Time of Mourning
? I don’t know if you remember, but we met on the set at one point?”

“Of course I remember,” Hamilton said. Hollywood was carpeted with young, borderline-attractive, overeager, callow young women like he imagined this Katie to be—on the set, at the studio, in your agent’s office, working at the club or in the restaurant or any other business of any description that you might have reason to go into—and he could not tell one of them from another. But that didn’t mean you shouldn’t conduct yourself like a gentleman.

“Really?” Katie said. “Wow. Well, I’m calling just to remind you that you have that interview with
The New York Times
this afternoon. You got our reminders about that, right?”

She had such a young voice. They got younger and younger. “Remind me again?” Hamilton said.

“The
Times
wanted to talk to you for a profile they’re doing of Kevin.” Kevin Ortiz was the director of the last film Hamilton had shot. A movie was over, to him, on the day shooting wrapped and he could fly out to the ranch and slowly slip out of character; it was always a surprise to him when a few months or a year later the whole thing came back to life in the form of something strangers could buy tickets to see, and everyone wanted to talk about it all over again, expecting him to remember it, never knowing how much had gone into the effort to leave it behind in the first place. But Kevin he remembered. Kevin was a brilliant young artist, and a great running buddy. He would not have been at all out of place in this bar. “We told the
Times
they could have just five minutes on the phone with you, just to talk about what it was like to work with him. I don’t know if you remember, but we cleared this all with you, and you said it was okay, which we really appreciate. It should really help the film out a lot. But if you’ve changed your mind about it, we can—”

“No, Katie, that’s fine.” The bartender was walking toward him. “What time does it start?”

“It actually was scheduled for an hour ago? But we can work around whatever you want to do.”

“I’m sorry about that, Katie,” Hamilton said. The bartender stopped in front of him. “Just have the guy call me any time.”

“Well, we don’t do it that way, because we try hard not to give out
your cell number. So we left it that you would call him. Do you have a pen?”

“Do you have a pen?” Hamilton asked the scowling bartender, who handed him a pencil. He wrote down the New York phone number on his shirtsleeve, hung up, and smiled apologetically as he handed the pencil back.

“We don’t allow those conversations in here,” the bartender said, pointing to Hamilton’s phone. The man’s ring finger was bent at a bizarre angle; Hamilton had seen an injury like that on a football player once. His skin was cracked like leather. Beautiful, Hamilton thought. To wear your life like that.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I didn’t see the sign.”

“Ain’t no sign,” said the bartender.

So Hamilton decided he’d better do the interview itself in the truck. Two more shots first: just to show there were no hard feelings, he shared a third one with the bartender, who drank it solemnly and did not so much as touch his hat. Hamilton could feel himself imitating the man’s slow gait as he squinted against the brutal sunlight in the parking lot. He got the truck up to speed, looked down at his sleeve, and dialed the number.

“Hamilton!” the nasal East Coast voice said. “So glad to catch you. Thank you so much for taking the time. First of all, I loved the film, I thought you were amazing in it. Where are you right now?”

Hamilton looked out the window. He didn’t really know. He’d never driven this far north of the ranch; also, that last drink with the bartender had opened a door, and he felt his mood shifting. Suddenly he had an idea. “I’m in upstate New York,” he said. “Visiting family.”

“Really? That’s cool. Are you—can I ask you—are you in a car right now? Because I’m having a little trouble hearing you.”

“Oh, right,” Hamilton said. “Hold on a second.” He rolled up the driver’s-side window, then leaned across the cab to roll up the other one, which didn’t quite necessitate letting go of the wheel but did mean that there were a few seconds when he was stretched too low across the seat to see over the dashboard. He felt and then heard the tires drift off the macadam, but he straightened up and steered back
onto the road. Nothing out here but scrub anyway. No other cars. You might drift off the road and go for half a mile before you hit anything tall enough to break your axle. “Better?” Hamilton said. His voice sounded way too loud, now that the cab was quiet.

“Much,” said the voice. “So I don’t actually need to take up a lot of your time—I just wanted to ask a question or two about what it was like working with Kevin Ortiz. It’s his first film, he’s a good deal younger than you. Did you ever sense any—”

“Kevin is a fucking genius,” Hamilton said.

The voice laughed. “No doubt,” it said. “But in the beginning, were there maybe—”

“Why did you laugh, man?” Hamilton said.

“Sorry?”

“When I said he was a genius. Why did you laugh at that?”

Sometimes Hamilton hated who he was to other people, but other times there was a kind of mercenary advantage in it; and he could tell that the change in the tone of his own voice had put the fear into this pasty, smug fuck from
The New York Times
, who had never taken a risk, who had never put himself on the line to try to birth something true into this world. “I apologize,” the voice said quietly. “I—well, truth be told, I laughed because I guess I thought you were kidding. I misunderstood.”

“Why would I kid about something like that? About genius. About art. Do you think these things are a joke to me?” The sun was just singeing the top of the range; light pooled all along the uneven horizon. In another few minutes it would start to get dark and the temperature would fall faster than a stranger to this landscape might think possible.

“No, Hamilton, I don’t. That’s certainly not your reputation. Again, I apologize. It was nervous laughter, really, because I was nervous about getting to talk to you at all. What do you say we just hit reset, so to speak, and start over?”

“Maybe these things are a joke to you,” Hamilton said. There were no lights out here, no cars coming in either direction. On some level he’d known all along—ever since that meeting with the ranch foreman,
anyway—that today would end like this; still, he was bathed in shame, so much so that he heard a little catch in his own voice. “Kevin is a rare soul, man. An old soul. Still, he’s just a kid, and it kills me to think of what’s going to happen to him, people like you, all the pressure on him, pressure if the movie is a flop but even more pressure if it’s a hit, you know? He is totally faithful to the moment, to the process, he gave me everything, every single thing I needed to be who I needed to be when I was in that particular space. You follow what I’m saying?”

“Not all of it,” the voice said, “but you know what? Really all I needed was one usable quote, and I’m sure I’ve got that, so—”

“Nobody understands a guy like Kevin. Nobody understands what’s required. You are so vulnerable when you put yourself in the hands of a director. You never know what you’re buying into. You have this place you need to get to, like I was talking about, a place that’s both inside yourself and somewhere far away from yourself, and you need his help to do it, but he could be anybody, you know? You hold hands and jump off this cliff together, and only after you’ve jumped, only when you’re plummeting through the air, do you get to turn and look at this guy you’re holding hands with and say, ‘Hey, not for nothing, but who the fuck
are
you?’ ”

The truck had slowed way down, so much so that he thought maybe he was out of gas, but no, there was still a quarter of a tank. He had to close one eye to read the gauge. That last shot with the bartender—he thought it was one; he remembered one—that was the Eticket shot, the one there was no coming back from until probably tomorrow. That bartender hated him. It was right there on his face. Maybe Hamilton should have punched him in that face instead of buying him a drink, even if it meant getting his ass kicked. Sometimes it was worth it to get your ass kicked.
Ain’t no sign
. Didn’t that hayseed, Marlboro Man–looking motherfucker even know who he was?

He drifted to a stop on the side of the road. His foot just wasn’t applying any pressure anymore. He cut the engine but left the headlights on; he couldn’t see one foot past them. He lowered his window and listened to the dark desert. It sounded like a riot.

“Hamilton?” the voice was saying. “Hamilton? You still there?”

And just then—it was as perfect as if he’d scripted it—a coyote split the darkness wide open with a long, soulful howl.

“Jesus Christ!” said the voice. “Are you okay? I thought you said you were in upstate New York!”

Hamilton smiled and snapped the phone shut. His consciousness was separating like the stages of a rocket, and he saw that he was probably not going to remember any of this tomorrow, not how lucid and how reborn he felt right now, not even how he got here; he often blacked out when he drank like this. What a shame. Not being able to recall it meant he would only have to go off in search of it again. He lay down across the front seat; it was cold now, but the air was so amazing there was no question of rolling up the windows. Besides, somebody would come looking for him. They were probably out looking for him already.

SHE’D LAID EYES ON MICHAEL AARON for the first time four days ago, at Harvey’s funeral: scruff-bearded, balding, a little doughier than a young man his age should have been—in most respects, she had to admit, a considerably less charismatic figure than his proud father had led her to expect—but her heart went out to him anyway because of the way he had to carry the burden of mourning all by himself. Harvey had no other family, save for a sister with Alzheimer’s who was in a home and had forgotten her brother’s face many years ago. And Michael had no wife, no girlfriend, no partner if he was gay, which he might have been for all Helen knew. He was the Aaron family. He shook every hand, accepted every kiss, listened to every story, and Helen’s stomach clenched whenever the crowd around him parted enough to let her see the panic in his face, the fear of making some religious or social gaffe or not recognizing some name the speaker would have expected him to know. All, presumably, while trying to make sense of the loss of his father, and of his own new status as an orphan. One day that will be Sara, Helen caught herself thinking; she had a kind of guilty oversensitivity to the lot of the only child. All that afternoon she had wanted to cross the synagogue, and then the reception room in the
basement of the synagogue, to talk to him, to try to help him out in some unobtrusively kind way, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.