* * * *
By the time we reached the shabby wooden warehouse, Stogie and his boys had moved in the dolly and grip equipment and Alf’s crew had rigged lights from the overhead beams. Lee started fitting the camera atop the dolly while Alf strolled about staring at his meter and muttering commands like “Gimme a half-double,” which, to his crew at least, made perfect sense.
The set used a corner of the warehouse: twenty feet of one wooden wall and fifteen feet of the other. Since the warehouse walls were really twice that long, the ends of the set area were indicated by “returns,” movable false walls abutting the real ones at right angles. Framing off their outer edges, the camera would never disclose that these fake walls were only eight feet wide, and the movie audience would use them unconsciously to complete the third and fourth sides of the “room.”
We could have shot in the actual cabin interior, which the set closely resembled, but the warehouse electrical service was hefty enough for movie lights, the beams were high enough to hide them, and the wide floor beyond the set provided room to work.
Besides, the free-for-all Diane was staging threatened to be hard on the decor. After covering Scuzzy’s entrance, she was now shooting a wide shot in which the five bikers, holding Hallie Sykes, begin their mutiny.
Off camera, Scuzzy repeated a line from the previous setup: “Let her go, man!”
The evil-looking biker holding Hallie was named Balls short for “Eyeballs,” because of a Jack Elam cast in one eye. “When I get ready.” He was played by Tony Carghill, a professional recruited because none of the actual bikers could speak a line.
Flatly:”Yer ready.”
Balls glanced at his cohorts and drew evident confidence from their resentful looks. “I’m ready when I’m ready.”
Scuzzy’s off-camera voice turned dangerous. “Let her go.”
Instead, Balls leaned close to Hallie’s frightened face, puckered his sun-cracked lips, and made kissy-kissy popping noises on her cheek. He licked her skin with a tongue like squirming liver.
As Scuzzy lumbered into the shot, the two supporting bikers moved to the left, Crabs and Chains faded right, and Balls backed up, keeping his grip on Hallie.
“Cut! Let’s print that puppy!” Diane locked the pan head and left the camera. “Now we do the biggie.”
Because we hadn’t time or money to repair any major destruction, we could shoot the fight only once. Diane’s strategy for doing this was simple but risky: she would film the whole donnybrook in one continuous take, while I handheld the second camera, grabbing Ad-lib cover shots. She rehearsed the cast and crew until the choreography was perfect, while I lashed on a shoulder harness, a bandolier of camera batteries, and the backup Arriflex. Pits Caudle bustled about playing stunt gaffer and getting in the way, and Stogie briefed his team around the crab dolly. Ken Simmons moved here and there, coordinating the effort and helping out where needed, while protecting his natty clothing.
Diane explained what she wanted from me; then everyone rehearsed together, while Stogie personally crabbed the camera dolly back and forth and in and out with an ease that denied his age and bulk. At times like this a cast and crew are like a team in the Super Bowl, merging deep individual concentration with an almost psychic communication among the company - becoming, temporarily, a huge single organism.
The makeup girl powdered the cast, the slating ritual commenced, and then Diane called action from her perch upon the dolly.
Scuzzy slammed the edge of one hand on Balls’s shoulder muscle with a force that would have been crippling if he hadn’t faked it. Balls howled and relaxed his grip and Hallie wriggled away. Scuzzy picked the actor up and threw him across the room. Balls landed upside down on a sofa, slithered to the floor, and crawled, moaning, out of the scene. Down on the floor myself, I caught a pickup shot as he crept past my lens, his face a mask of feigned agony.
Then up, under my forty pounds of gear, and over toward the action, oozing along like Groucho Marx so that my flexing knees would act as shock absorbers to keep the picture steady.
By now the four remaining bikers had piled on Scuzzy from all directions: one clutching him around the knees, another hanging on his back with arms around his throat, while Crabs and Chains pummeled him at random. I hoped the bikers were pulling their punches. Even Scuzzy could get hurt.
The crab dolly rolled into the corner of my off-camera eye left open for just such information. I glided away to keep their frame clear; snatched a close-up of the biker biting Scuzzy’s knee.
Scuzzy cuffed the man away, then thundered backward into a wall. The biker on his back went “OOF!” let go, and crumpled to the floor. I focused on him as he rolled into my frame, recovered, and charged back into the melee. I blocked the impulse to follow him with my camera: it would be easier for the editor to match action if he cleared my frame completely. Hallie streaked past my lens the other way, running to hide behind the breakfast bar.
Back to the center ring, careful of the sound woman holding the black phallic foam-covered mike aloft on its long pole. Scuzzy plucked a biker off himself, hauled him to the splintered door (carried from the shack and re-hung here), and pitched him out. I framed the open doorway, catching the biker as he rolled to a stop, got up groggily, and staggered out of sight.
Then back again in time to catch Scuzzy banging the heads of Crabs and Chains like a pair of empty gourds. He let go of their hair and they sank out of my frame, while Scuzzy beamed and sweated like a happy blacksmith at his forge.
When the other biker charged again, Scuzzy caught him, picked him up, and heaved him in a great circle arc toward the corner of the room. I framed the shot in time to catch the biker landing on the TV set, then slumping backward into the corner so that the set pushed over forward and he slid down behind it to the floor. I followed the TV until it banged the planks and shattered, as the prop man had rigged it to. Nice shot! The biker was out cold - pretending, I hoped.
Scuzzy turned to check on Hallie, still behind the breakfast bar, while Diane’s camera framed him over Hallie’s shoulder. Scuzzy winked.
Then Chains appeared from nowhere behind him, swinging a motorcycle chain. It caught Scuzzy across the back, and he winced convincingly. As he turned, Crabs materialized, wielding a wicked sheath knife.
Chain? Sheath knife? they weren’t there during rehearsal.
Flailing the chain like a clumsy duelist, Chains backed Scuzzy into the breakfast bar, while Crabs circled him. I shifted to catch a shot of the knife sparkling in his fist. Scuzzy managed to grab the chain, but Chains yanked it free and blood ran from Scuzzy’s hand. Hallie screamed.
Scuzzy stared at his hand, then glanced up in time to spot Crabs feinting with the sheath knife. Accelerating at a rate impossible for his bulk, Scuzzy dodged, while the crab dolly shifted left to hold him in frame.
As Chains paused, seeking an opening, I caught his close-up: either he’d become an instant actor or Chains had murder in his eye. He charged out of my frame, the lethal weapon whistling around his head.
He snapped the chain forward and though Scuzzy jerked away, the final link raked across his front, slitting his denim vest and opening a foot-long cut across his belly. Hallie screamed again, and as Crabs stabbed downward, she leaned forward to push Scuzzy out of knife range.
The knife entered her upper arm. Hallie stared at it, horrified. Turning, Scuzzy saw it too, saw his streaming front, opened his bloody hand.
A calm like a hurricane eye wrapped the company. I could hear the Arri whirring beside my ear and the dolly whispering across the warehouse floor. I framed Scuzzy’s hand; his face; the knife; Hallie’s eyes; Scuzzy’s face again. All human expression was draining out of it, leaving behind a zombie calm.
Then Scuzzy Fenster went bananas: whirling, he grabbed Crabs’ wrist and slammed his hand on the breakfast bar, which crunched horribly. No, my lens found the Formica top intact; the crunch was twenty bones in Crabs’ right hand, suddenly changing to forty. I followed Crabs a
s he doubled over, holding his wrist and venting a breathy, whistling scream. He crumpled to the floor.
Chains charged again, whirling his weapon like a lariat. Ignoring the blow that flayed his denim back, Scuzzy moved inside the arc, seized a handful of Chains’ gold bangles, and smashed him in the nose with a fist like a twenty-pound sledge. Chains flailed back against the wall and sank to the floor, gushing red.
Scuzzy strode over, picked Chains up, and threw him out the door; then repeated the process with the shrieking Crabs, and the two bikers crawled out of sight beyond the doorway.
Scuzzy was at Hallie’s side, pressing a cigar-size thumb on an artery above her wound, in which the knife still trembled. I framed an insert of the hand and knife.
“Film runout.” Lee’s shaky voice broke the spell. People babbled, ran to look out the door, crowded around Hallie, who was white and calm as the makeup girl and Scuzzy sat her down.
“Cut,” said Diane, redundantly.
I sank down under my freight of gear, mechanically unstrapped the camera, and checked the film counter. The whole thing had taken less than four minutes.
* * * *
“Do you realize what we did, Stoney?” Diane lit a second brown cigarette from the stub of the first.
I was smoking one too, which I rarely do. “Almost killed some people.”
She shook her head, then stared at the garbage cans and propane tanks behind the Calisher store. “Not that - I mean, yes, we did; but not that. We kept rolling. We didn’t cut the shot.”
I could only nod.
“Hallie stabbed, Scuzzy bleeding like a pig, Crabs and Chains gone whacko and I didn’t stop it.”
“Nobody did.”
“What were we thinking? What in hell were we doing?”
Doing what cameramen do. When you put your eye to the finder and your finger on the shutter button, you become a recording robot. Screw the dying soldiers, the crushed crash victims, the blasted villagers, the burning baby. Get the footage. And that’s what we did.
“Diane, I’d better see to Scuzz and Hallie.”
“They’re taken care of. Sit down a minute; keep me company.”
I put an arm around her and we sat in the dusty sunshine, counting clouds, arranging dirt in little mounds, trying to think of nothing. Two or three times, Diane shuddered like a child who has cried herself to exhaustion.
Then she said in a small, reflective voice, “We did get some great footage though.”
“Priceless.”
We looked at each other and grinned with the joyful guilt of deviates reveling in their shared perversion.
Chapter 13
When we’d sorted through the wreckage, things didn’t look too bad. Scuzzy’s cuts were superficial - in fact, the hardening scab across his gut made him look even more piratical. Hallie’s wound was being cleaned and stitched in Newhall and she’d be back this afternoon.
The two biker bit players insisted that they had no beef with Scuzzy, that Crabs and Chains had acted on their own. Reviewing the fight, I believed them.
But Pits Caudle, amateur stunt gaffer, was nowhere to be found.
I was in the coffee shop, reworking the afternoon schedule around Hallie, when Molly bounced in, dressed in her usual shorts and another cutoff T-shirt whose admonition, DO NOT OVERINFLATE, she had clearly ignored.
“‘Chadoin’?”
“Hi, Molly. Working out the shoot for this afternoon.”
“Don’t count on Crabs an’ Chains; they took off.”
“I figured.”
“Down ta Newhall t’get Crabs’s hand fixed up. Took all their stuff too. They’re gone fer good.” Molly peered down at the schedule, using the opportunity to drop a plump hand on my shoulder. “Gonna mess you up?”
I shook my head. “We’re shooting more or less in order, so they were about through anyway.”
Afflicted with sudden myopia, Molly bent even closer, pushing a generous breast against my back. “Sure a lotta paperwork.”
“Mm-hmh; got another bill for us?”
“Dint recopy it yet; you’ll git it tomorrow. It’s about the same as the last one.”
“I figured that too. Seen Pits?”
“Sure; he’s over t’ the trailer. Tried to call Bull Dike, but Tats said he still ain’t around.”
“I’m not surprised.”
A pause, then: “I been workin’ on my tan agin.”
Another pause, while I tried not to think about her soft pink middle, now pinker for an hour’s broiling.
Molly looked around the coffee shop, sighing. “Guess I oughta start on supper. Big deal t’night: meatloaf. Figger I can’t screw up meatloaf - anyways, not too bad.” She wandered toward the kitchen area.
I gathered up my paperwork, meditating on Pits Caudle, who had arranged the fight and then disappeared immediately after his boys had tried to dismantle Scuzzy. Hm; maybe Scuzzy should return the favor.
* * * *
But Fenster wasn’t tickled by this notion. “You want me to run over to Pits’ trailer like a madman and rough him up? Oh, wonderful.” He sat on the bed in his little room, head in hands.
“Just put on an act, Scuzz, to scare him into talking.”
He stared at me bleakly and, I thought, a touch coldly. “Stoney, I’ll be frank: I don’t know what’s got into you lately, but it’s unattractive. You’ll say anything, do anything, manipulate people....” He shook his head. “You used to be a nice person.”
As I started to bristle, I reflected that Scuzzy is as fair and thoughtful as anyone I’ve known. I said quietly, “Go ahead.”
“Well, take me: I’m a large untidy man with a taste for scholarship - a combination I’ll admit is droll, to a degree. But you’re forgetting the ‘to a degree’ part.” Scuzzy was right; it was all too easy to see him as an oversize joke. “Also, you can’t just trot me out whenever you need a Goliath.”
“I didn’t mean it that way...”
“No, but you didn’t think about the implications either.”
“I guess I didn’t.”
“Today I broke a man’s hand into little pieces and threw another man on his neck.” He lifted tree trunk arms. “That’s what they tell me, anyhow; but then I wouldn’t know. I didn’t see or hear or feel anything from the time I saw the knife in Hallie’s arm until I felt the iodine running into my belly button. I could have killed someone.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“Who asked? You were busy gloating over your goddam fight footage.”
“True.”
“Films do things to you, my friend, ugly things. You must never want anything in this world so much. That’s sinful.” Scuzzy lowered his head into his hands again.
I stared at nothing through the grimy window, feeling the secret sniping pain of knowing he was right.
“I owe you an apology.”
“Okay.”
“You’re right about the film; it’s my obsession. And I have been inconsiderate with you. I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” A fleeting smile. “You’re forgiven; you may reenter the Pale.”
“I am sorry, Scuzz.”
“Don’t get sloppy, Limey.”
“And now I don’t know what to do. It is the film, but not the film alone. You said you almost killed someone. Exactly! And Sean could have broken his neck too, when he hit those oil drums. Whoever’s out to get this film is dirty enough, or maybe simply dumb enough to create lethal situations.”
Scuzzy nodded agreement.
“And that has to be stopped, film or no film.”
A more reluctant nod, since Scuzzy thought at least as fast as I did.
“The best candidate for dumb and dirty is Pits Caudle. Pits set up that fight and then he left the shoot. He was also around the generator, around the camera, around Sean’s bike accident.”
“Circumstantial.”
“So far, and I can’t get any more out of him. I have nothing to hold over his head and he’s too thick to reason
with. The only thing he understands is force.”
“And I’m the force you’ve got.”
“That’s what it comes down to, yes.”
Scuzzy stared at his boots. “Okay, but this is the last time.”
“No more.”
“I really hate doing this.”
“I’ll still respect you afterward.”
He considered that carefully, then smiled. “Your contrition lasted all of thirty seconds.” He shook his head. “I can’t resist you, Stoney, but then I always was a sucker for children.”
Fenster heaved his carcass up and hiked his pants. “So how do we play it this time?”
* * * *
I pounded on the Airstream trailer door, authentically breathless because I’d prepared this role by running all the way to the trailer park. “Pits!” BOOMBOOMBOOM. “It’s Stoney, Pits. Is Scuzzy there?”
Pause.
“Pits? Emergency!”
His muffled voice:”What ‘mergency?”
“Scuzzy went crackers; he’s after you!” Pant, pant, pant.
“What?”
“Pits, I can’t control him.”
The little door whipped open. “Ta hell ya mean?” Pits Caudle stood in the opening, his cranium flecked with shaving cream.
“He thinks you set up Crabs and Chains to get him. Molly told him you were here.”
“That dummy; shit!” Then the situation sank in, like catsup slowly filling the neck of its bottle. “He’s like, pissed off?”
“Look: you stay inside. I’ll keep trying to find him. He might listen to me.”
“But I dint...”
“You going to argue with Scuzzy? Get inside!”
When he slammed the door, I jumped off the steps, turned hard right, flattened myself against the trailer, and waved. At my signal Scuzzy rumbled into view like a whole tank division, climbed the trailer steps, and thundered on the door, leaving dents in the aluminum. “Caudle! I know you’re in there. You son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you.” Careful pause. “CAUDLE!”
Silence.
“Okay, you bastard: one way or another!”
Scuzzy looked around and his eye lit on the patent jack beneath the trailer hitch in front. He grinned and started for it. Catching his idea, I scuttled along below the trailer windows, to the jacks supporting the opposite end.
Swinging a heroic leg, Scuzzy kicked out the front jack, but the well-balanced trailer sat level on its four central wheels. He analyzed the problem briefly, then dumped his three hundred pounds on the hitch. The Airstream tipped forward in a majestic arc, while I snatched away the suddenly freed rear jacks. Muffled creaks and tinkles from inside; then Pits’ “Hey!”