Beautiful Ruins (33 page)
But Gualfredo was an experienced fighter. Ducking Pasquale’s haymaker, he landed two straight, compact blows—one to Pasquale’s cheek, which burned, and the next to his ear, which caused a dull ringing and sent him reeling backward into the fallen Pelle. Realizing that his own furious adrenaline was a limited resource, Pasquale leaped back at Gualfredo’s sausage-packed frame, until he was inside those direct punches, swinging wildly himself, his own blows landing on Gualfredo’s head with deep melon
thunk
s and light slaps: wrists, fists, elbows—everything he had.
But then the big lamb-shank hand of Pelle landed on his hair and a second meaty hand fell on his back and he was dragged away, and for the first time it occurred to Pasquale that this might not go his way, that he’d likely need more than adrenaline and a broken cane to pull this off. Then even the adrenaline was gone, and Pasquale made a soft, whimpering noise like a crying child who has exhausted himself. And, like a steam shovel out of nowhere, Pelle slammed a fist into Pasquale’s gut, lifting him and dropping him flat to the ground, slumped over, not a molecule of air left anywhere in the world to breathe.
Big Pelle stood over him, a deep frown on his face, framed with the specks of Pasquale’s vision as he gasped and waited for the steam shovel to finish him off. Pasquale bent forward and scratched at the dirt below him, wondering why he couldn’t smell the sea air but knowing there would be no smelling as long as there was no air. Pelle made the slightest move toward him and then a shadow flashed across the sun and Pasquale looked up to see Alvis Bender fly from the rock wall onto the massive back of Pelle, who hesitated for a moment (he looked like a student with a guitar case strung over his shoulder) before reaching behind himself and tossing off the tall, thin American like a wet rag, sending him skittering across the rocky shore.
Pasquale tried to get to his feet now, but there was still no breath. Then Pelle took a step toward him, and three fantastic things occurred at once: there was an intimate
THUP
in front of him, and a big crack behind, and the big left foot of the giant Pelle burst forth in a red spout, the big man crying out and doubling over to grab his foot.
Wheezing for breath, Pasquale looked back over his left shoulder. Old Lugo was walking down the narrow trail toward them, still in his fish-cleaning slicks, pushing the bolt to send another cartridge into his rifle, a green branch hanging from the dirty barrel of his weapon, which he must have pulled from his wife’s garden. The rifle was raised to Gualfredo.
“I’d shoot your tiny pecker, Gualfredo, but my aim is not what it once was,” Lugo said. “But a blind man could hit that gut of yours.”
“The old man has shot me in my foot, Gualfredo,” said the giant Pelle matter-of-factly, formally.
In the next minute there was a fair bit of groaning and shuffling, and then someone let the air back in for Pasquale to breathe. Like children cleaning up a mess, the men seemed to fall back into a simple and rational order, of the sort that emerges when one person in a group is pointing a gun at some number of the others. Alvis Bender sat up, a large knot above his eye; Pasquale’s ear was still ringing; and Gualfredo was rubbing his sore head; but Pelle had gotten the worst of it, the bullet tearing through his foot.
Lugo looked at Pelle’s wound with some disappointment. “I shot at your feet to stop you,” he said. “I did not intend to hit you.”
“It was a difficult shot,” the giant said with some admiration.
The sun was just a smear on the horizon now and Valeria had come down from the hotel with a lantern. She told Pasquale that the American girl had slept through everything, that she must be exhausted. Then, as Lugo stood by with the rifle, Valeria cleaned Pelle’s wound and bandaged his foot tightly with a torn pillowcase and fishing twine, the big man wincing as she tied the wound off.
Alvis Bender seemed especially interested in Pelle’s injured foot, and he kept asking questions. Did it hurt? Did he think he could walk? What had it felt like?
“I saw many wounds in the war,” Valeria said, with strange tenderness for the giant who had come to muscle her nephew. “This one passed right through.” She readjusted the lantern and wiped the sweat from Pelle’s beer keg of a head. “You’ll be fine.”
“Thank you,” said Pelle.
Pasquale went to check on Dee Moray. As his aunt had said, she was still asleep, oblivious even to the gunshot that had ended the little skirmish.
When Pasquale came back down, Gualfredo was leaning against the piazza wall. He spoke softly to Pasquale, his eyes still on Lugo’s gun. “This is a big mistake you’ve made, Tursi. You understand this, no? A very big mistake.”
Pasquale said nothing.
“You understand I will come back. And my guns will not be fired by old fishermen.”
Pasquale could do nothing but give the bastard Gualfredo his coolest stare until, finally, Gualfredo looked away.
A few minutes later, Gualfredo and the limping Pelle started back down the hill for their boat, Lugo accompanying them as if they were old friends, holding the rifle in his arms like a long, skinny baby. At the water, old Lugo turned to Gualfredo, spoke a few sentences, pointed to the village, gestured with the rifle, and then walked back up the trail to the piazza, to where Pasquale and Alvis Bender sat recuperating. The boat fired up and Gualfredo and Pelle disappeared into the darkness.
On the hotel balcony, Pasquale poured the old man a glass of wine.
Lugo the Promiscuous War Hero drank the wine in one long gulp and then looked over at Alvis Bender, whose contribution to the fight had been so minimal.
“Liberatore,”
he said with a whiff of sarcasm—Liberator. Alvis Bender simply nodded. It had never before occurred to Pasquale, but an entire generation of men had been defined by the war, his father, too, and yet they rarely talked about it with one another. Pasquale had always thought of the war as one big thing, but he’d heard Alvis talk about
his war
as if everyone served in a separate war, a million different wars for a million people.
“What did you say to Gualfredo?” Pasquale asked Lugo.
Lugo looked back from Alvis Bender over his shoulder, toward the shore. “I told Gualfredo that I knew he had a reputation as a hard man, but the next time he came to Porto Vergogna I would shoot out his legs and while he lay squirming on the beach I would pull down his pants, shove my garden stick up his fat asshole, and pull the trigger. I told him the last second of his miserable life would be spent feeling his own shit come out the top of his head.”
Neither Pasquale nor Alvis Bender could think of a thing to say. They watched old Lugo finish his wine, set the glass on the table, and walk back to his wife. She gently took the rifle from him and he disappeared into his little house.
Front Man
Recently
Sandpoint, Idaho
A
t 11:14 A
.
M., the doomed Deane Party departs LAX on the first leg of its epic journey, taking up an entire first-class row on the Virgin Airlines direct flight to Seattle. In 2A, Michael Deane stares out his window and fantasizes this actress looking exactly as she did fifty years ago (and himself, too), imagines her forgiving him instantly (
Water under the bridge, darling
). In 2B, Claire Silver glances up occasionally from the excised opening chapter of Michael Deane’s memoir in whispered awe (
No way . . . Richard Burton’s kid?
). The story is so matter-of-factly disturbing that it should instantly seal her decision to take the cult museum job, but her repulsion gives way to compulsion, then curiosity, and she flips the typewritten pages faster and faster, oblivious to the fact that Shane Wheeler is casually tossing unsubtle negotiating gambits across the aisle from 2C (
I don’t know; maybe I should shop
Donner!
around . . .)
. Seeing Claire immersed in whatever document Michael Deane gave her, Shane begins to worry that it’s another script, perhaps one even more outlandish than his
Donner!
pitch, and quickly abandons his coy negotiating tactics. He turns away, to old Pasquale Tursi in 2D, makes polite conversation (
“È
sposato?”
Are you married?
“Sì, ma mia moglie è morta.”
Yes, but my wife is dead.
“Ah. Mi dispiace. Figli?”
I’m sorry. Any children?
“Sì, tre figli
e sei nipoti.”
Three children, six grandchildren). Talking about his family makes Pasquale feel embarrassed about the silly, old-man sentimentality of this late-life indulgence: acting like a lovesick boy off chasing some woman he knew for all of three days. Such folly.
But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos—we know what’s out there. It’s what
isn’t
that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs—four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon—but true quests aren’t measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant—sail for Asia and stumble on America—and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.
In the Emerald City the tragic Deane Party changes planes, Shane ever so casually mentioning that the ground they’ve covered so far in just over two hours would’ve taken William Eddy months to travel.
“And we haven’t even had to eat anyone,” Michael Deane says, and then adds, more ominously than he intends, “yet.”
For the final leg they pack into a commuter prop-job, a toothpaste tube of returning college freshmen and regional sales associates. It’s a mercifully brief flight: ten minutes taxiing, ten minutes climbing over a bread-knife set of mountains, ten more over a grooved desert, another ten over patchwork farmland, then a curtain of clouds parts and they bank over a stubby, pine-ringed city. At three thousand feet, the pilot sleepily and prematurely welcomes them to Spokane, Washington, ground temperature fifty-four.
Wheels on the ground, Claire notes that six of her eight cell-phone calls and text messages are from Daryl, who has now gone thirty-six hours without talking to his girlfriend and finally suspects something is amiss. The first text reads
R U mad.
The second,
Is it the strippers.
Claire puts her phone away without reading the rest.
They straggle from the Jetway through a tidy, bright airport that looks like a clean bus station, past electronic ads for Indian casinos, photos of streams and old brick buildings, and signs welcoming them to something called “the Inland Northwest.” They make a strange group: old Pasquale in a dark suit and hat, with a cane, like he’s slipped from a black-and-white movie; Michael Deane looking like a different time-travel experiment, a shuffling, baby-faced grandpa; Shane, now worried that he’s overplayed his hand, constantly riffling his hair, muttering apropos of nothing: “I’ve got other ideas, too.” Only Claire has weathered the journey well, and this reminds Shane of William Eddy’s Forlorn Hope: it was those women, too, who made the passage with some of their strength intact.
Outside, the afternoon sky is chalky, air crackling. No sign of the city they flew over, just trees and basalt stumps surrounding airport parking garages.
Michael’s man Emmett has a private investigator waiting for them, a thin balding man in his fifties leaning on a dirty Ford Expedition. He’s wearing a heavy coat over a suit jacket and holding a sign that doesn’t inspire much confidence:
MICHAEL DUNN
.
They approach and Claire asks, “Michael
Deane
?”
“About the old actress, yeah?” The investigator barely looks at Michael’s strange face—as if he’s been warned not to stare. He introduces himself as Alan, retired cop and private investigator. He opens the doors for them and loads their bags. Claire slides in back between Michael and Pasquale and Shane jumps in front next to the investigator.
Inside the SUV, Alan hands them a file. “I was told this was top-priority stuff. It’s pretty solid work for twenty-four hours, if I do say so myself.”
The file goes to the back and Claire takes charge of it, quickly flipping past a birth certificate and newspaper birth notice from Cle Elum, Washington. “You said she was about twenty in 1962,” the investigator says to Michael, whom he eyes in the rearview, “but her actual DOB is late ’39. No surprise there. Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers.”
Claire flips to the second page of the file—Michael looking over one shoulder, Pasquale the other—a photocopy of a 1956 yearbook page from Cle Elum High School. She’s easy to spot: the striking blonde with the oversized features of a born actress. Beside her, the two pages of senior class photos are a festival of black-rims and cowlicks, of beady eyes, jug ears, crew cuts, acne, and beehives. Even in black-and-white, Debra Moore fairly jumps, her eyes simply too big and too deep for this little school and little town. Beneath her photo: “DEBRA ‘DEE’ MOORE: Warrior Cheer Squad—3 years, Kittitas County Fair Princess, Musical Theater—3 years, Senior Showcase, Honors—2 years.” Each student has also chosen a famous quote (Lincoln, Whitman, Nightingale, Jesus), but Debra Moore’s quote is from Émile Zola:
I am here to live out loud
.
“She’s in Sandpoint now,” the investigator is saying. “Hour and a half away. Pretty drive. She runs a little theater up there. There’s a play tonight. I got you four tickets at will-call and four hotel rooms. I’ll drive you back tomorrow afternoon.” The SUV merges onto a freeway, descends a steep hill into Spokane: a downtown of low brick, stone, and glass buildings, pocked with billboards and surface parking lots, all of it loosely bisected by this freeway overpass.
They read as they ride, much of the file consisting of playbills and cast lists:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, put on by the University of Washington drama department in 1959, listing “Dee Anne Moore” as Helena. She pops in every photograph, as if everyone else is frozen flat in the 1950s and here, suddenly, is a modern, animated woman.
“She’s beautiful,” Claire says.
“Yes,” says Michael Deane over her right shoulder.
“Sì,”
says Pasquale over her left.
Theater reviews clipped from the
Seattle Times
and the
Post-Intelligencer
praise “Debra Moore” briefly in various stage roles in 1960 and 1961, the investigator’s yellow-highlighter pen framing “talented newcomer” and “the show-stopping Dee Moore.” Next come two photocopied
Seattle Times
articles from 1967, the first about a single-fatality car accident, the second an obituary for the driver, Alvis James Bender.
Before Claire can figure out the connection to Dee Moray, Pasquale takes the page, leans forward, and presses it into the hands of Shane Wheeler in the front seat. “This one? What is it?”
Shane reads the small obituary. Bender was a World War II army veteran and owner of a Chevrolet car dealership in North Seattle. He moved to Seattle in 1963, just four years before his death. He was survived by his parents in Madison, Wisconsin, a brother and sister, several nieces and nephews, his wife, Debra Bender, and their son, Pat Bender of Seattle.
“They were married,” Shane tells Pasquale. “
Sposati.
This was Dee Moray’s husband—
il marito. Morto, incidente di macchina
.”
Claire looks over. Pasquale has gone white. He asks when.
“Quando
?”
“Nel sessantasette.”
“Tutto questo è pazzesco,”
Pasquale mutters. This is all crazy. He says nothing more, just slumps back in his seat, hand rising slowly to his mouth. He seems to have no more interest in the file and he stares out the window at the strip-mall sprawl, much the way he stared out the window on the plane earlier.
Claire looks from Shane to Pasquale and back. “Did he expect her never to get married? Fifty years . . . that’s asking a lot.” Pasquale says nothing.
“Have you ever thought about a TV show where you fix people up with their old high school flames?” Shane asks Michael Deane, who ignores the question.
The next pages in the file are a 1970 graduation announcement from Seattle University (a bachelor’s degree in education and Italian), obituaries for Debra Moore’s parents, probate documents, tax forms for a house she sold in 1987. A much newer high school yearbook shows a 1976 black-and-white staff photo from Garfield High identifying her as “Mrs. Moore-Bender: Drama, Italian.” She seems to get more attractive in every photo, her face sharpening—or perhaps it’s just in comparison with other teachers, all those dull-eyed men in fat ties and uneven sideburns, lumpy women with close haircuts and cat’s-eye glasses. In the Drama Club photo she poses at the center of a mugging, expressive group of shaggy-haired students—a tulip in a field of weeds.
The next page in the file is another photocopied newspaper story, from the
Sandpoint Daily Bee
, circa 1999, saying that “Debra Moore, a respected drama teacher and community theater director from Seattle, is taking over as artistic director of Theater Arts Group of Northern Idaho,” that she “hopes to augment the usual slate of comedies and musicals with some original plays.”
The file concludes with a few pages about her son, Pasquale “Pat” Bender; these pages are broken into two categories—traffic and criminal charges (DUIs and possession charges, mostly) and newspaper and magazine stories about the various bands he fronted. Claire counts at least five—the Garys, Filigree Handpipe, Go with Dog, the Oncelers, and the Reticents, this last outfit the most successful, signed by the Seattle record label Sub Pop, for whom they produced three albums in the 1990s. Most of the stories are from small alternative newspapers, concert and album reviews, stories about the band having a CD release party or canceling a show, but there is also a capsule review from
Spin
, of a CD called
Manna
, a record the magazine gives two stars, alongside this description:
“ . . . when Pat Bender’s intense command of the stage translates to the studio, this Seattle trio can sound rich and playful. But too often on this effort, he sounds
uninterested, as if he showed up to the recording session wasted, or—worse for this cult favorite—sober.”
The last pages of the file are listings in the
Willamette Weekly
and
The Mercury
for Pat Bender’s solo shows in several clubs in the Portland area in 2007 and 2008, and a short piece from the
Scotsman
, a newspaper in Scotland, with a scathing review of something called
Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself!
And that’s it. They read different sheets from the file, trade them, and finally look up to find that they’re on the expanding edge of the city now, clusters of new houses cut into the slabs of basalt and heavy timber. To have a life reduced like that to some loose sheets of paper: it feels a little profane, a little exhilarating. The investigator is tapping a song on the steering wheel that only he hears. “Almost to the state line.”
The Deane Party’s epic trek is nearing its completion now, a single border left to cross—four unlikely travelers compelled along in a vehicle sparked on the gaseous fuel of spent life. They can cover sixty-seven miles in an hour, fifty years in a day, and the speed feels unnatural, untoward, and they look out their separate windows at the blurring sprawl of time, as for two miles, for nearly two minutes, they are quiet, until Shane Wheeler says, “Or what about a show about girls with anorexia?”
