Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (4 page)

My own story is just a pale little riff. Cut-off heads were one of the tropes of ’50s science fiction, both written and filmed; perhaps “Headlife” is another, more sinister version of
The Illustrated Man
.

—Margaret Atwood

HEAVY

Jay Bonansinga

A
t one of the tallest buildings in Los Angeles the contractor arrives after dark. Riding the crystalline glass elevator up to the lavish, gleaming spires of the upper floors—where the law offices and consultants burn the midnight oil to finance their BMWs and alimony payments—the contractor finds Room 1201 and pauses.

He unsheathes his Browning nine-millimeter semiautomatic from its holster inside his sport coat. He calmly screws the silencer into the muzzle, checks the magazine, then moves his six-foot-six, 260-pound frame through the doorway and into the richly appointed outer office of Zuckerman Gold and Fishel Artist Management.

Over the bubbling fish tanks and frothing infinity fountain, the contractor hears the shrill voice of Marvin Zuckerman drifting out of his opulent inner office: “Morris, she happens to be a very talented young lady . . . and this offer is unacceptable, a disgrace, a dishonor to her fine . . .”

The contractor steps into Zuckerman’s inner sanctum, holding the Browning at his side like a parcel.

The agent raises one hand, as if to say
give me a second
, while continuing to chatter on his wireless headset: “Okay, so she’s had a few problems with Oxycontin . . . Morris, she has lower-back pain—”

“Excuse me,” the contractor interjects, squeezing the gun.

“Hold on a second, Morris.” Zuckerman looks up. “I had the pastrami on rye and the German potato salad, and I hope you left the mayo off this time because—”

“I’m going to need you to move away from the window,” the contractor says, now aiming the gun at the general vicinity of Zuckerman’s toupee.

The realization on Marvin Zuckerman’s face could be etched over a painting of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
, the way his mouth goes slack and his droopy, bloodshot eyes widen. The headset falls from his ear and clatters to the floor. “Who sent you? Was it Schacter at Universal?”

“Move. Away.”

“Was it because of the Tom Cruise disaster?”

“From. The. Window.”

As Zuckerman slowly rises, the spark of terror in his eyes kindles into something like inspiration, like the look of a rat suddenly faced with the prospects of gnawing off its leg to escape a trap. Somewhere deep in his primordial brain stirs his instinct—as innate as the migratory patterns—that
everything
is negotiable. “You’ve come to whack me, I understand that, but before you do, may I ask—if you’ll pardon my impertinence—have you ever done any acting? On film I’m talking about . . . Because what I’m seeing here—and you must understand, this
is
my business—is that you have something extraordinary in the way you carry yourself, and the way you handle that firearm, and if I may be so bold, I think you make Robert De Niro look like RuPaul—and forgive me for having a natural propensity for commerce, but I think I could make you a significant amount of money in this business they call show—but, of course, that would necessitate my not being whacked at this time, so I’m just throwing that out there.”

The pause that follows, as the contractor ponders the little toupee-wearing agent, feels longer to Zuckerman than it takes glaciers to cleave mountains.

“If you do not move away from the window,” the contractor finally explains with the grudging patience of a dog trainer, “I will relocate the back of your skull to that far wall over there with that nice Picasso.”

Marvin Zuckerman edges around the desk with hands raised and mouth working. “I have—I have a
daughter
—in Boca Raton, if I may be specific—she’s in H-Hebrew college—please, please—she’s studying to be a rabbi—a saint this girl—and if I may add at this juncture that I am also supporting a little boy in boarding school—he’s ADD and he’s got a—”

“Shut your face!” The contractor holds the business end of the Browning inches away from the hyperactive mouth of Marvin Zuckerman.

“I have money.” Zuckerman trembles now, his voice crumbling. “Not to be supercilious or presumptuous in any way, but I would like to add at this point that I have a ridiculous amount of—”

“QUIET!”

The bark of the contractor’s sandpaper basso profundo voice turns Zuckerman’s expression to jelly. All the false confidence, the used-car-dealer twinkle, the always-selling
alter kocker
schtick—all of it transforms into the look of a whipped basset hound. On Zuckerman’s face is now written the end of the universe.

“Aw Christ.” The contractor sighs, the gun wavering slightly. “Enough already.” He pulls the trigger, and a small flag on a tiny pin pops out of the Browning’s muzzle, which says
SURPRISE
on one side and
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
on the other.

T
hey come flooding into the office, the entire staff—even Mrs. Merryweather, the former receptionist with the cat’s-eye glasses and gallstones (whom Zuckerman had assumed was dead). Two surviving partners in golf pants and Rolexes, three junior agents, an anorexic secretary, a pair of slacker grad-student readers, an old lady with blue-rinse hair, and a six-figure-a-year accountant with a Percodan habit—this motley group could make an alarming racket.

They whoop and holler and sing “Happy Birthday” and break out the Dom Pérignon, and on a mail cart they roll in a cake in the shape of a tombstone with the inscription
HERE LIES HOLLYWOOD’S NUMBER ONE ASSHOLE,
and all the while everybody studiously pretends not to notice the evidence of post-traumatic stress on Zuckerman’s face.

Zuckerman considers surprise parties thinly veiled acts of passive-aggressiveness and hostility, and God knows there’s enough animosity around this place to wallpaper Bin Laden’s cave.

After an hour of tippling and off-key crooning and gossipmongering and chortling at bad jokes, Mrs. Merryweather is the one who finally broaches the subject. “You do realize that everyone got a huge kick out of the look on your puss at the end there,” she says to Zuckerman over by the potted ficus.

“Really had me going there,” Zuckerman concurs sourly. “Who’s the Golem, anyway?”

Zuckerman jerks his thumb at the leviathan in the J.C.Penney sport coat skulking all alone in the corner. The contractor stands there like a dime-store Indian, staring into his paper cup. Somewhere in his late sixties, the man has a face no mother could love, a road map of creases circumnavigating a pair of eyes like smoldering craters formed by meteors.

“Poor fella,” Mrs. Merryweather says. “Used to be somebody.”

“As for instance?”

“You’re in the picture business, Marvin, for God’s sake . . . don’t you recognize the man? They said you wouldn’t recognize him, but I didn’t believe it.”

“You want to give me a hint, or is this twenty questions?”

“1962?
New Jersey Nocturne
? Alan Ladd and Barbara Stanwyck mean anything to you?”

“Never saw it.”

“That gentleman over there is Haywood Allerton.”

The name rings no bells for Zuckerman. “And so?”

“Once upon a time, that man was the greatest heavy in Hollywood.”

With a shrug, staring at the giant with the ruined face, Zuckerman says, “What makes
him
a ‘poor fella’? I’m the guy got buffaloed.”

Mrs. Merryweather lowers her voice, as though imparting something unseemly. “Poor guy’s in stage four I’m told, pancreatic cancer, inoperable.”

Zuckerman thinks about this, sips his champagne, thinks about it some more, then decides to investigate further and walks over to the colossus.

“You got me,” Zuckerman says to the giant, with as much conviviality as he can muster. “Not since I read my pre-nup with my third wife have I been that petrified.”

All at once, as though by some stroke of magical alchemy, the giant’s face changes from its natural repose of sinister menace into a warm, open look of empathy—a transformation not unlike Godzilla pausing to help an old lady across the street. “I feel terrible about what I did, Mr. Zuckerman.”

“Don’t sweat it.”

“I will admit to you that I needed the money.”

Zuckerman waves his hand. “No harm done.”

“I wouldn’t harm a flea, Mr. Zuckerman; I have insurance issues is the thing.”

“Completely understandable,” Zuckerman assures the man. “I meant what I said, however, about your . . . unique style. Turns out, if I may be so bold as to pat myself on the back, I was correct in my assessment of your unique proclivities.”

Allerton looks down shyly, tries to stifle a smile jerking at the corners of his intimidating face. “I made a few pictures a long time ago,” he says, “but nobody wants an old tough guy no more.”

Zuckerman gets an idea. Maybe the idea comes because Zuckerman had found himself staring into the abyss that night. Maybe it comes because he had been thinking about God. But whatever the source, it strikes him right then as all his epiphanies do: in the scrotum, then traveling up the base of his spine to the core of his midbrain. It would not only be a challenge but would also perhaps be an opportunity for Zuckerman to do something outside the realm of lies, exploitation, greed, and deception that customarily govern his daily existence. Perhaps it would be an opportunity to atone, to get himself on track with the Torah, to fulfill a
mitzvah,
an act of kindness.

After a dramatic pause, Marvin Zuckerman says to the great monolith of an old man, “Maybe, if you will pardon my presumptuousness, you just haven’t had the right representation.”

I
f you went to the movies between 1960 and 1980, you most likely would have seen, at one point or another, the inimitable, craggy face of Haywood Allerton—still a relatively young man for much of this period, but ageless in his inchoate menace. Sometimes haunting the edges of great films and sometimes providing foils for cardboard heroes in, let us say,
less-
than-great films, Allerton, for one brief and shining moment, was the go-to heavy for all the studios, both major and minor.

His greatest role, perhaps, was as the redneck racist who roughs up Pam Greer in the blaxploitation classic
Honey Child
(Avco/Embassy, 1971). He also made his mark as the brain-damaged child murderer in Orson Welles’s little-seen noir
Coffin Not Included
(RKO, 1974). Allerton also chilled audiences in such diverse cinematic fare as
Monster Train
(Hammer, 1969),
Rumble in the Jungle
(New Line, 1976),
The Copperheads
(Universal, 1979), and
As the Eagle Flies
(AIP, 1980), the cult World War II actioner with Burt Reynolds and Twiggy.

Alas, in today’s Hollywood—a new frontier of digital downloads and flavors-of-the-millisecond viewed on handheld devices in bathroom stalls—a man of Allerton’s special qualities can barely land a hemorrhoid commercial. Evil is no longer essayed by the human face; it is created in the lab, through CGI and motion capture.

Over the next few weeks, Zuckerman stops counting all the doors slammed in his face. He will not give up, though—after all, this is a mission from God, a holy
mitzvah
—which leads to an interesting phenomenon: For the first time in his shallow, manipulative, contemptuous life, Marvin Zuckerman actually experiences something like real affection for another human being.

In the tradition of many great Hollywood heavies—Rondo Hatton, William Bendix, Margaret Hamilton, and Richard Widmark among them—Haywood Allerton is secretly a pussycat, a softie, a tender soul with nary a wicked thought in his head, and he begins to grow on Zuckerman. Complicating matters is the fact that the gentle giant is getting weaker and weaker by the day, the malignant cells erasing the man’s remaining time on earth faster than the nitrate fading from the celluloid of his old films.

Eventually Zuckerman feels compelled to maximize as many of the man’s waning days as possible, so the two mismatched chums become fixtures down at Molly Malone’s on Fairfax. They dine on mountains of corned beef and lox at Canter’s Deli. They go to the Hollywood Wax Museum, Chinatown, and Griffith Observatory, where Allerton, in a pique of excitement, names every star in the firmament after an old Hollywood heavy: Elisha Cook Jr., Charles Napier, Sydney Greenstreet, John Vernon, Jack Elam, Dub Taylor, Vernon Dent, and on and on and on.

The two of them also take to playing golf on Sundays at Zuckerman’s Beverly Hills club, spending the lazy hours trudging the fairways, talking, getting to know each other’s deepest ruminations and regrets. In fact, it is on one of these Sundays that everything changes for Zuckerman.

“That’s a honey of a shot,” Allerton says encouragingly from the edge of the eighteenth green. Of course it’s a lie. Zuckerman’s whiffed putt has just skirted the edge of the hole and has shot off into the sand.

“Tell me something, Haywood,” Zuckerman says, retrieving his ball from the trap. “You’re so . . .
not like
the heavies you played. Did you
enjoy
it—the glory days I’m talking about—all the villains?”

“You want to know the truth?” the grizzled old monolith replies as he limps over to his ball. Almost skin and bones now, he’s moving slower than usual today, the pain medication fighting a losing battle stanching the tide of agony seeping up through his innards. The putter looks like a chopstick in his gigantic gnarled hands as he towers shakily over the golf ball. “I
did
enjoy it, being the heavy, I
did
. It was almost like . . .” He pauses, thinking, staring downward, teetering, holding himself up as though the putter were a cane. “ . . . the guys I was playing were bad apples, sure, but they . . . they . . . I guess what I’m trying to say is, my favorite part was when they got their comeuppance . . . when they took their medicine. You know? They looked the good guy in the face, they always did that, and they accepted the . . . whattyacallit . . . the consequences. I don’t know why that was so important to me . . . I guess that’s the only part I almost kinda miss. Putting the . . . whattyacallit . . . the punctuation at the end of the picture.”