Dog Beach (9 page)

“Yeah, I guess,” she said.

“After I finish the movie, maybe I leave.”

“And go where?”

“I don't know. Depends.”

“On what?”

“How movie does.” And then, he said, almost sheepishly, “Maybe sequel, I don't know.”

Dutch burst out laughing. “Sequel?
Dude
. You're not going to be able to walk again after this movie.”

Louie grew quiet with that thought. His hip was killing him, lending credence to her point.

“How about you?” he said finally.

“What about me?”

“Where will you go?”

Dutch grew quiet, blew out some cigarette smoke like it didn't matter, and she didn't care.

“You go back home,” Louie said. “Marry cowboy.”

Dutch looked at him over the rims of her nicked-up shades and managed a smile. “You marrying me off? Who's going to drive you everywhere?”

Louie was counting money now, sealing it in an envelope. “Be right back,” he said.

When he limped down the sidewalk and entered the little law office, she shook her head and scoffed a laugh. “Sequel. Jesus.”

Since the two took up together, over a year ago now, she'd been driving him to this sad, little strip mall whenever he scored some cash. He'd always do the same thing: count off some bills, put them in an envelope, seal it, and go inside for about twenty minutes. She stopped asking him about it because he never answered. She just figured it was to wire alimony to his two ex-wives, the bane of his existence that he sometimes called “the Two-Headed Dragon.”

He had a daughter in Hong Kong, he told her once, but one of the dragons had poisoned the child's mind against him. Called him a womanizer, a drinker, a reckless, crazy motherfucker. Dutch always laughed to herself when he'd throw his arms up at that accusation as if it hardly stood to reason. The guy must have been a handful in his younger days; shit, he was an
armful
now
. But driving him in and out of gags gave her a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Maybe Louie did need her, like she said, but she needed him, too. Not that she'd ever tell him that.

When he got back in the car, he was handling a hot slice of pizza from the joint next to the law office. He gently handed it to her and settled into his seat. “Let's go. Back to Dog House.”

•    •    •

The next few days of shooting went so well Troy was nearly giddy. The movie was snowballing, production feeding off the breakneck pace of the script itself.
Run, Lola, Run
was proving an apt reference. Durbin, looking at forty-five minutes of cut footage, joked that it should be called
House of Flying
Red Bull.

With less than twelve days till his
Slash
deadline, Troy got the e-mail he was waiting for. Representatives from the Chinese company were in Los Angeles and eager to meet. They had a full dance card, they said, with a lot of big meetings with American producers, but they would meet Troy at any time, even late at night if necessary. They also asked, quite shyly, if it was possible to meet Louie Mo. They would buy breakfast or dinner at a very nice place. Troy suggested tea at the Coffee Bean, the one on PCH, right up the road from Dog Beach.

When Troy told Louie and asked him to come, the stuntman grew edgy. “This is American movie,” he said, pointing a disciplinary finger. “Why now you are bringing in Chinese money?”

“Louie, man, co-prod is how it gets done these days. This is huge.”

“I don't go. I don't like these kind of people.”

Troy could almost understand; stuntmen weren't the personality types who gave good sit-downs, or suffered suits gladly. Troy would do the honors, keep his star behind the scenes and on a pedestal.

So, at five minutes to nine on an overcast Friday, he threw on a leather jacket he hadn't worn since New York, put on his shades, and drove his tiny Mini-Cooper up the beach.

The four Chinese businessmen were already there, ritualistically punctual and sitting around an outdoor table with tall cups of tea. Troy approached the table, looking every bit the young American film rebel. Handshakes, smiles, and Troy's overwrought bow made the rounds.

The guy who seemed to be in charge, the one with a headful of choppy layers and tiny, expensive sunglasses, gestured for Troy to sit first. Ordering an iced mocha with a double shot, Troy tried not to look too nervous. Truth was, he loved these kinds of meetings. They brought out a surge of energy that, with four swallows of strong coffee, spiked his enthusiasm high. He would try not to talk too fast, but he did anyway, mentioning the names of the film titles associated with Cine World.

“You speak good Chinese,” said the one with the feathered hair. The other three all smiled, laughed, and expressed a kind of amazement over Troy's command of Mandarin.

“Only movie titles,” he said. “And certain kung fu moves.”

“Kung fu,” laughed the stout one in the red tie. He did a clichéd attempt at a martial arts pose and laughed some more. They all seemed genuinely appreciative and amused that Troy even knew the term “kung fu.”

After conveying their interest in the YouTube teaser and the “good taste story” and the inspired concept of relaunching an old-school stuntman in the new era of action film, the one with the layered hairdo removed his shades. His right eye stopped Troy dead. It resembled a tiger eye marble, amber and striped through with black. It seemed to gaze wall-eyed at the traffic on PCH while the other eye, handsome black, glinted at the young American. “My boss very much desires to meet Louie Mo,” he said in an educated British accent. “He is at American Film Market today, but perhaps later.”

With two formal hands he presented a business card to Troy. “That's my card, the hotel name is on the reverse. Quite near the airport.”

“LAX,” said the stout one, whose English was not as good, let alone refined, but his laughter made him likable. When Troy tried to redirect the conversation back to the chain of movie theaters in China, and the potential for a distribution deal, the one with the glass marble eye kept finding a way to bring it back to his boss's keen desire to meet the star. “These things make him happy. He likes to meet the stars. It makes his—”

“Confidence,” the stout one said. “Gives him the confidence, you know, for the investment.”

“Got it,” Troy said. “But my actor is in character and he just can't meet right now.”

The looks around the table fell moody. Their boss must really take his star-fucking seriously, Troy mused.

“You will ask Mr. Louie Mo again?” Tiger Eye said.

“I'll try.”

“My boss is in meetings all day. If you bring Louie to LAX hotel tonight, everything will be simpatico. We shall make the deal.”

“You'll make the deal? Without seeing a cut?”

“My boss has already seen it,” Tiger Eye said, lightly touching a finger to his temple. “In here. Good mind. Good mind for movies.” This seemed to trigger laughter too, and Troy laughed along.

“I hear you,” he said. “These days, it's not ‘What's the story?' it's ‘What's the poster?'”

The Chinese laughed even harder, but Troy didn't really think they got the joke. Finally, it was good-byes and handshakes and Troy bowing again. The stout one found Troy's bow quite respectful, so he patted the young man's shoulder. Then, like a playful uncle at a picnic, he broke into that mock kung fu stance again. Everyone laughed as they went to their cars.

Driving south past Moonshadows, Troy noticed that the Chinese team's vehicle, a rented Lexus, had followed him out into the racetrack flow of PCH traffic. He felt oddly responsible for them, like they were his foreign guests, so he kept watching in the rearview to make sure they were okay.

When he pulled over to find a parking place at Dog Beach, they, too, slowed down, a dangerous maneuver on Highway 1. Horns blared, but the silver Lexus hovered and Troy could see three of the four, craning and looking toward where he had parked. Troy honked and waved. About one hundred yards north, one of the Chinese finally wriggled an arm out his window and waved good-bye, all smiles, like an overeager tourist.

Troy sat for a moment, drumming the wheel and feeling hopeful. He was going to have to drop the hammer on Louie Mo. The dude was going to have to suck it up and take a ride to the airport, sit around a bad Holiday Inn with the boss, and speak Chinese. The upside was huge.

•    •    •

Back at Dog House, Dutch came out of the bathroom, found Louie sitting in his favorite shabby-chic chair, and said, “Come on, man, don't tell me this.”

“Tell you what?”

“You peeing blood?”

“Why?”

“Just answer me.”

Louie grew sullen for a beat. “Bruising the kidney. From Lau Kar-Leung movie. Long time ago.”

“Jesus,” Dutch said. “You should go to the ER.”

When Louie waved her off, she sniffed. “Stubborn bastard. You shouldn't be doing this.”

“Last one.”

“Yeah, last one. Don't let this kid kill you.”

“What do we shoot tomorrow? Fight? Or big dialogue?”

“How do I know? I think this guy's making it up as he goes.” As she started for the porch, Louie got up, tried not to grimace.

“Hey,” he said, removing a fold of cash from his pocket. He peeled off several one-hundred-dollar bills.

Dutch looked at him, confused. He had already given her three grand in cash from his advance, said it was for her driving and for all the gas. “What's this?”

“Find the football.”

“The what?”

“I can't sleep. Bad dreams, the man chasing me. Wants the football.”

“That why you've been looking over your shoulder, like someone's on our ass?”

“Go find it. Bring to him, to the boathouse. Give it back to him.”

“You're serious.”

Louie looked her in the eye until she took the cash. Troy entered from the back porch, tossed his bomber jacket on the couch with a flair of triumph. “Met with China.”

Louie studied him, waiting for more.

“They want to make a distribution deal, based on the teaser.”

“I don't know about that kind of business.”

“Louie. All you have to do is go with me and meet the boss—”

“I told you no,” he said, pressing Troy like he did when he first jumped him in the house and ordered him to pay his boss. “You understand me? I don't meet these kind of fucking people.”

“Then I won't get the fucking deal.”

“Then you don't get fucking deal. Fuck you, Troy.”

Dutch shook her head at the calamity, at the blood she had seen in the toilet, at the whole crazy arrangement. “I'm out of here,” she said, and she was.

“Louie, listen—”

“No,
you
listen to me. I have two divorce in Hong Kong. Too many wife, they chase me. Lawyers, too. They look everywhere for me. Why you put the trailer on the YouTube?”

“Louie, this movie is going global. Viral. Your name is going to be out there, you have to deal, dude. This is your time in the sun.”

“I don't go meet the Chinese business.”

“Okay. Forget it, man. I'll keep them warm.” The words were barely off his tongue when he got an idea. He'd send a fruit basket to their room at the Holiday Inn, with compliments of Louie Mo.

“What we shoot tomorrow? Action? Or big dialogue?”

“Running.”

“Running?”

“I get in Dutch's trunk with the Steadicam and shoot you running. T-Rich matches your sneakers and Durbin shoots second unit, so I can cut in close-ups. We're almost there, man.”

Running,
thought Louie Mo.
Always running.
Troy's movie was beginning to feel like a reality program.
The Louie Mo Show
. Maybe he should never have come back to this house on the beach, this place so full of young, ridiculous dreaming.

15

RADAR LOVE

Dutch was driving back from Thousand Oaks at night, feeling oddly alone. She had gone to the baseball card dealer and offered to buy back the Super Bowl game ball. The dealer, a fish-eyed midget with bad skin, told her that he had sold it at a convention in San Diego almost two weeks ago, then he tried to push a rare Jason Banazak rookie card on her. What'd he take her for? she said. A fan of that Neanderthal rapist? Well, why the Christ did she want to buy the signed football, the midget parried. She didn't answer, just walked out, saying nothing.

Two doors down, she spotted a liquor store but walked away from it. A foot from her car, she changed her mind, went back to buy a bottle of Grey Goose. In the parking lot, she mixed a hefty portion in her water bottle with orange juice, poked a straw in, and drove off, sipping. A few emotional songs on the radio—“Rolling in the Deep”
by Adele was one—and she felt herself going into that dangerous place of missing what once was. She switched from FM to CD and played her favorite ramp-up song, hoping to override her feelings.

I've been drivin' all night

My hand's wet on the wheel;

There's a voice in my head

that drives my heel . . .

Three years back, she was driving stunts for just about every production that came into Santa Fe. If it happened to be a Western, she stunt-doubled any female scripted into a saddle, but it was mostly driving for Everett Cook's bunch, the stunt unit nicknamed Team Extreme. Everett had worked with her dad, the much-respected precision driver Billy Wayne Dupree, one of the few stunt guys pulling down six figures a year. Dutch grew up around it, Daddy's little stuntgirl. After two daughters, Billy Wayne had hoped for a boy on the third go, but out came Debbie. He made her his boy just the same, and she loved it.

By the time she was eighteen, they were calling her Dutch and she was arguably the best driver on his team; she had a rep for being as tough and daring as her father, the man who had leapt off the cliff in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, although she could never remember if he had doubled Redford or Newman. He was gone now—dead from hard living—so she couldn't ask him. The stunt work had made him drink, and drinking made him ill. Illness put him out of work, which made him drink harder and die. That's when Dutch started drinking too. Tight-roping out onto that dangerous slope of alcohol that her father had dare-deviled and lost to.

It was on the set of an indie drama that she hooked up with a young wrangler named Keefe. By the end of the three-month shoot, they were talking marriage; Keefe had a dream of getting out of the movie biz, swearing off booze, and buying a small ranch. He thought she should get out too, while the going was good. Picture it, he said: the two of them spending their mornings making the hay rounds in the truck, drinking their coffees, and checking on newborn foals. It sounded idyllic to her, and boring as hell. He was waiting for her to get back to him on the marriage thing when the tragedy happened.

She'd been out late, slamming shooters with the stuntboys and nearly missed morning call. They had all been telling stories about her dad and it got her emotional, drinking hard. She should have called in drunk, but that would have marked her forever. She tried to sober up, suck it up, drink black coffee all the way to the set in Gallisteo. When she heard that they were switching the stunt schedule and putting her Box 90 up first, she had felt a little panic, but she manned up. “Man up, little girl,” Daddy used to say if he caught her second-guessing herself. She'd been doing drift-reverse 180s in her sleep since she was a teenager. She was Billy Wayne's hot pistol of a daughter; she peed diesel fuel, as the boys liked to joke.

Some on the set would go on to say that it was the stuntman on the dirt bike who fucked up the timing; most knew it was her. The guy, thirty-six with a pregnant wife, got hammered by the truck she was driving, slid under it, and traveled with the skid for a hundred yards before she even realized he was not on the other side, ramping onto the desert as scripted.

He was dead.

Dutch was fired. Fined. Blackballed from the drivers' association and tied up for months in criminal investigations and hearings. Every time she'd walk into the San Marcos Feed Bin now—her beloved Sunday-morning breakfast haunt—some wrangler or stunt guy would be in there and give her that look, even as they made nice. She had killed one of the fraternity, had shown up impaired. She had broken the sacred law that her father had upheld his whole storied career. Dutch had become a kind of leper chick, driving the lonely stretches between Santa Fe and Lamy, always followed by the ghost of a guy on a dirt bike. And always Keefe in his F-150, telling her to let it go and marry him, dang it.

Then came Louie Mo. All because Jen the makeup artist took mercy on her and invited her out to L.A. to chill. Didn't help that Crazy Jen was a party beast, the little house in Laurel Canyon always full of booze and blow. Jen had an older girlfriend who brought a guy over one night, a Chinese guy she'd worked with on a show long ago in Thailand. He was in town looking for movie work, she'd said. He was a quiet man, Louie, but after margaritas and weed, Dutch got him to open up about his stunt history. They traded stories all night and she found him to be hilarious, kind of sweet, and darkly mysterious. At one point, some buff actor dude had gotten a little out of hand with Jen. Louie had quietly followed the guy out onto the porch, moving in that youthful step, fluid as a cat. When he returned, everyone said, “Where'd that asshole Josh go?”

“In the car,” Louie said.

It wasn't until the next morning that they'd discover the guy had been put through the windshield of his own Toyota, was sleeping off a beating and a hangover. Louie never said anything about it. He came in, sat brooding in a corner, and said he wanted to go home. But the costumer he had come with had left with Charles, and the displaced Hong Kong stuntman found himself buzzed and stranded in the Canyon.

Dutch drove him to Monterey Park—a long-ass haul during which they shared more stunt stories, lies, and easy silences—and they'd been a tandem ever since. It was the guys who sold blow to Jen who eventually made a loan shark gig available to the unemployed Louie Mo. A guy with fight skills could make a few bucks in any town. Louie just needed some wheels.

Feeling the vodka now, Dutch had that urge to put the hammer down. She was working the 405 South like the Daytona Speedway, deep in the zone. Maybe she'd just keep driving. Jump on the 1 with a few grand in her purse, head up the coast to Big Sur, maybe swing up through Calgary, find a real job where no one knew her name. Or maybe swing out and down, head back to Santa Fe, go look up Keefe. Better yet, she considered, she could just drive straight into the northbound traffic and call it a life. She kicked her sandal off.
Do it, Dutch,
she told herself.

We got a thing that's called radar love;

We got a line in the sky.

We got a thing that's called radar love . . .

But then she thought of Louie Mo, making his stupid movie with the film geek kid, looking happier than she'd ever seen him—even if he was more physically broken than she'd ever remembered; he was pissing blood now, for Christ's sake.

She turned the wheels on the Chevy and got off at the Canyon exit, slowly, headed for Crazy Jen's place. She felt a little pride in not driving any farther with vodka in her blood. That was, at least, something. She'd finish off her Grey Goose and crash responsibly in her back room, sleep in; Troy was shooting nights for the next two days and she wasn't needed at the wheel until Thursday. Needed at the wheel; that was something too.