“B.D., are you there?” Bob could hear breathing but that was it.
“Yup. I was lost in thought.”
“Did you get together with the lovely Sandrine?”
“In a way. Do you believe in evolution?”
“Everyone does if you watched Planet of the Apes, but what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I was wondering if you could be descended from a bear rather than an ape?”
“I don’t think so but then science is not my long suit. Are we still on?”
“Yes. If it’s okay we move out at dawn. Sharon said that’s in a half-hour hereabouts.”
“Come up to the room and we’ll strategize. I’ll order breakfast.”
When B.D. washed the sleep from his face he was startled by his haircut and its bluish cast. All the more reason to own a fedora. That Sandrine was a real pill. His socks felt deeply the lack of the two fifties so he redistributed his three hundred seventy. At this rate blow jobs were going to get priced out of the range of the common man and inflation alone would insure marital fidelity, assuming you had a wife.
As an afterthought before getting into the car B.D. slid a crisp dollar under Sandrine’s door as a teasing tip, affording her one-third of a cup of coffee to meet the day which showed signs of a terminal smog alert. His eyes and nose itched like they did around a dump fire where tires were burning, but then perhaps it was the right kind of weather for the mission. The yellowish sky looked ominous and he ran a finger along his badly chapped lips remembering the source of the ailment. Frank had told him that before Native warriors entered battle they liked to say “Today is a good day to die,” but that seemed a bit much for the current situation. A modest injury would be appropriate but he didn’t want to bite the big one, as they say. Not that he wanted another go at the brunette bombshell Sandrine, at least not at that price. For a hundred bucks you could get by a whole winter month if you were careful. A couple of old World War II veterans at the tavern had told him that in war-torn Europe or Japan a fellow could get sex for a candy bar but that hadn’t seemed like an admirable transaction. The least you could do is fry up a chicken and make mashed potatoes for the poor girl, bake up an apple pudding with brown sugar and lots of butter.
Up in Bob’s room B.D. was impressed with the set-up in that there was a living room and two bedrooms with one full of books and used as a study. It hadn’t occurred to him that this was possible in a hotel. In the living room beside the table full of food there was a telescope on a tripod aimed down at the swimming pool. There was the question of if you wanted to see the ladies why not go down to the pool and take a look but Bob said, “It’s safer this way.” B.D. was a bit played out on women and focused the telescope on a flock of pale green parakeets in a flowering tree. He was disappointed when Bob didn’t know the name of the tree, also when Bob said that the hotel was trying to get rid of these lovely birds because they sometimes shit in flight on guests around the pool.
“What are they supposed to do? Birds don’t have toilets.” B.D. was irritated. These birds were as pretty as orioles.
“The manager thinks they’re doing it on purpose.”
“I hope so.” B.D. sat down at the amply laid table. The steak had now left quite a hole in his stomach.
“I ordered you country ham, country eggs, and country fried potatoes. The menu doesn’t say if the toast is country, maybe suburban.”
“I could use some gravy but I’m not complaining. Catsup will do.” B.D. fetched his Tabasco from a pocket and quickly learned that it burned his chapped lips. He speared a piece of Bob’s smoked salmon and judged it not bad. As a joke Bob had ordered B.D. a large glass of carrot juice which he poured in the toilet when Bob went to his bedroom to dress. The carrot juice wasn’t pretty in the swirling toilet any more than his hair had been the night before. At least Bob had been kind enough not to laugh at the blue haircut. Bob just said, “You’re in Rome and you have done as the Romans would.” When Bob came out of the bedroom he wore a nifty camo T-shirt under his Italian sport coat in honor of the mission.
“Sharon said that we keep trying to paint the world with our own colors when it already has its own,” B.D. said.
B.D. took one more look through the telescope, having noticed a non-birdlike movement beneath the parakeet tree. It was a woman in a white string bikini and adjusting the telescope he could see a hint of short hairs emerging from one of the greatest non-bran muffins in the kingdom. Bob took a peek and said that it was Nina Coldbread, the Italian television mogul, set to give her skin a good scorching. When Bob had offered her a villa for her company she had only yawned and burped, or so he said. While Bob looked overlong through the telescope B.D. sensed that he had been given an over-exposure to beauty, that in the Great North a lifetime could pass without seeing such a woman, and if it happened it would become a precious memory. Perhaps a man was better off if his experiences were more limited, and did not even include the velvet battering ram of the night before that made his face sore and tender. Perhaps the experience had knocked some sense into his head, perhaps not.
Bob became more than a little nervous when B.D. pulled their vehicle up to a security gate off Benedict Canyon, the address where Lone Marten was supposedly staying. Bob knew from some alcohol-suffused memory that it was the home of a studio honcho which would fill any screenwriter with fear but he couldn’t remember which one. He rattled off a list of studio names, then remembered Universal and was relieved because he had already burned his bridges there with a not very exciting project, Some Called It Tuesday, about the sexual adventurism of a Republican wife. Bob had B.D. hit the buzzer and when a voice asked, “May I help you” Bob yelled out, “We are of the people” and the huge gate magically opened. Bob told B.D. that the woman of the house was active in civil rights specializing in Natives. They drove through a brick-lined tunnel, the ultimate in security from God knows what, and emerged onto a large green sward in front of an English Tudor house. In the middle of the huge lawn but near the driveway a woman in a lilac peignoir was playing croquet with three obvious Natives, all with long black ponytails. Another man was sleeping beneath a pine tree.
“Irony scratches her tired ass. Redskins playing croquet,” Bob chuckled.
“Not really. The Ojibway invented croquet though they only used balls hand-carved from the boles of a diseased oak that had been struck by lightning.” Under pressure B.D.’s mind had become antic. He knew that the man beginning to sit up under the pine tree was none other than Lone Marten.
They got out of the car and the woman rushed over saying, “Bob, Bob, Bob, welcome aboard.” Bob flushed with pleasure that she remembered his name but then he realized she might not have a memory suffused in alcohol. They embraced as is the custom of the area and she made a bow to B.D. whom she took for a Native, but B.D., intent on his purpose, was already striding through the wickets toward Lone Marten. A large Lakota, at least that’s what it said on his T-shirt, stepped in B.D.’s path when Lone Marten screeched and began climbing the pine tree. B.D. eyed the Lakota’s general musculature, then looked over the big shoulders at Lone Marten still screeching up in the tree.
“I have no quarrel with you, chief. He stole my bearskin. At one time I was the best fistfighter in many counties. I haven’t forgotten it all.”
“He stole your bearskin?” The Lakota turned to stare at Lone Marten up in the tree, then back at B.D. “I saw the bearskin yesterday. I think he might have sold it.”
“My Uncle Delmore gave it to me. His was bear medicine and he gave it to me because after he moved south he had to go over to turtles.”
“We never got along with you Chippewa people which is putting it mildly, but times have changed. Even nowadays you can’t be stealing a man’s bear medicine.” The Lakota nodded and stepped aside, though by now everyone had followed B.D. to the pine tree. B.D. picked up a couple of croquet balls and hefted them, firing the first into Lone Marten’s ass which was hanging over a branch. Bob tried to grab B.D
.’s arm but without success. The Lakota and Bob explained the problem to the hostess who was wringing her hands in horror at male anger, something she had seen in her husband though in a more subdued form. She grasped B.D.’s arm as he was ready to fire the second croquet ball at Lone Marten’s head.
“Lone Marten, I can climb up and tear you out of that tree like a bear would!” he yelled, though he turned politely to the woman grasping his arm.
“Lone Marten sold the bearskin to Lloyd Bental at our fundraiser here yesterday. He’s going to donate half the proceeds to the cause. If that’s not good enough I can pay you for it.” She took the cellular from her gossamer waistband and shrieked, “My checkbook please.”
“No you can’t.” B.D. slumped to the ground with his face in his hands, not noticing that on hearing the name Lloyd Bental Bob had shrunk back, his face becoming as pale as dirty snow.
An impasse had been reached. The Lakota and the two other Natives sat down on the far side of the tree from B.D. and were eventually joined by the woman who assumed there was something sacramental going on and she should probably join in. Her maid came running with the checkbook and was shooed away. Meanwhile, Bob had returned to the car where to his dismay he could only find three little airline booze bottles. The very name Lloyd Bental, by far the most powerful producer-director in Hollywood, shrank all his blood tubes with fear. If you crossed Lloyd you’d never work in Hollywood again. No one had dared count how many writers had been sent back East with jellied brains and shriveled nuts.
Finally Brown Dog stood up, raised his chin, and stared hard up in the tree at Lone Marten who now felt like a fired writer sent back East. For the first time in his life Lone Marten knew he had gone too far. When the chance had come to sell the bearskin to the mogul he had known it was the wrong thing to do just as he knew it was wrong for poor dumb Brown Dog to let the fucking “wasichus” know the location of the graveyard. But then Lloyd Bental had been accompanied to the fund-raiser by two young actresses who had made Lone Marten’s skin steam and itch, not to speak of a roll of hundred-dollar bills that would choke a pig. White women and money, not to speak of drugs, had always wrung his smallish petty-criminal heart.
“Lone Marten, if you don’t help me get my bearskin back I’m going to track you down and tear out your heart.” With that not very ambiguous statement B.D. walked slowly back to the car, using a sleeve to wipe away his tears. The woman followed him to the car and asked where he was staying and when he said “Siam” she naturally thought of Yul Brynner and Anna. She patted Bob, who was a slobbering mess, through the window, and she really didn’t mind when B.D. did a U-turn in the yard, digging up long divots as he sped off. This was real emotion.
It was his darkest hour and his hands felt numb on the steering wheel. Traffic was tied up on Sunset due to an accident and B.D. felt poignantly the utter crush of civilization. An eighty-year-old Finn he had known well had flown out this way to see his son and had warned B.D. that “the world is filling up.” No shit. B.D. wanted to turn turtle like he did when he and Lone Marten had driven through the profound ugliness of Las Vegas, and where he simply raised his shirt collar and sank into its dark confines, preferring his own rank air.
It didn’t help that Bob was in his bibbety-babbety-boo state, blabbing away about Lloyd Bental’s seven Oscars, his hundreds of millions of dollars, his homes in Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, Palm Beach, Acapulco, his brownstone in Manhattan, his grand apartment in Paris, not to speak of the beach house in East Hampton. These details wavered B.D. a bit from the purity of his righteous anger wondering if the guy had the pipes drained to avoid freezing up when he moved from place to place and the way the fixtures within unused toilets tended to seize up. Then the phone rang interrupting Bob’s interior and exterior monologues and it was as if Bob didn’t recognize the phone so B.D. answered it. It was the croquet hostess who called to say that she had gotten in touch with Lloyd Bental but that he was unwilling to give up his rug which, even at the moment she had called, he was stretching out on because it made him feel spiritual. She had also phoned her husband, waking him up in London, but he was calling the head of the prop department of his studio and a bear rug would be delivered to the Siam. B.D. was on the verge of telling her to go fuck herself but a dimmish idea began to emerge so he only said, “Thank you, white woman, and let me say you looked good in that lilac gown.” Despite his anger at the time he had made a record of her attractiveness.
Meanwhile, Bob had continued rattling on and the upshot was that he could no longer help B.D. try to recover his bearskin because if he were caught crossing Lloyd Bental he would “never work in this town again.”
“You could work in Nebraska,” B.D. said lamely, eyeing the traffic congestion ahead for an escape route.
“He’d have me followed there, buddy. His vengeance is sure and swift. He even takes it out on animals. A few years ago, someone gave him a wolf hybrid as a pet. She shit on the floor as animals will do. Lloyd had her dyed solid pink and she expired from embarrassment. The Humane Society was called in but even they were frightened of Lloyd Bental. I’ve got a family to support, a sick wife and two sick kids. They need groceries and milk. I need to send home five hundred grand a year.”
“What about your promiscuous mother?” B.D. asked, without irony.
“Her too. She’s in her mid-seventies but she’s probably still hitting the streets. Mind you, my heart’s with you.”
“No car?” B.D. could see a life on foot returning. Walking anyway cleared the mind.
“No car. My car’s my trademark. Everyone in town knows my car, especially the cops. I could rent you one.” His voice trailed off into bleating.
When B.D. parked at the hotel Bob was racked with sobs of grief and fear. They embraced in front of the puzzled doorman and Bob stuffed some more money in B.D.’s pocket. He turned away as Bob tripped up the steps and walked kitty-corner over to the botanical gardens, needing a big dose of nature to gather his thoughts. A little dose would have to do.
B.D. hoofed it back to the Siam in an hour. In the garden there had been an Oriental in a white suit sitting by the carp pool and since he had his heart set on it B.D. sat there too. After about a half-hour of mutual silence the Oriental smiled and got up. They talked for a few minutes and B.D. learned that the guy was composing himself to do an eight-hour brain surgery on a little girl. B.D. wished him good luck, thinking of Rose’s little girl Berry, back home, whose head was severely cross-wired, which came from Rose’s heavy drinking when she was pregnant and now the condition was hopeless. All the way back to the Siam B.D. felt the peculiar, damp heaviness of homesickness swelling in him. He actually craved to get bitten by mosquitoes and freeze his ass off on one of those cold summer mornings when the wild huckleberry crop was in danger and he had gone out to pick a few to make pancakes. He always used way too many berries so the pancakes were a mess but, nevertheless, good. Afterward a beer would cut the sweetness of the maple syrup and then he’d take a stroll of a few hours or go fishing.
Back at the Siam he had a shower, throwing his fancy Hollywood clothes aside with disgust. It was time to return to the cool, level-headed humility of his janitor’s suit with the unknown Ted’s name on the pocket. With his ear to the wall he could hear Sandrine singing, certainly the most noteworthy experience he had had in town though the reviews were mixed. The view had anyway been wonderful despite the occasional intrusiveness of Vincent’s dour face between the smooth cheeks. He had barely finished a quart of the expensive water when there was a knock on the door. He took the precaution of peeking through the curtains and there stood Lone Marten holding a bearskin rug with a green felt liner. He opened the door and the rug looked even more pathetic than it had through the window with a slight cinnamon phase to the fur and rubber non-skid gizmos on the liner. It might not be possible but the skin looked like it belonged to a very gay bear.
“This car I borrowed cost a hundred thirty grand,” Lone Marten said, gesturing at the Merced
es convertible behind him.
“Tell it to someone who gives a shit.” It did occur to B.D. that the amount probably surpassed his lifetime income. “That bear rug looks like it came from the prop department at Universal.”
“How did you know?” Lone Marten looked quizzically at the rug in his arms.
“I have my ways.” He swiveled to see Sandrine peeking from her door wide-eyed.
“Lone Marten!” she exclaimed.
“Sandra, the French girl! How strange to see you in humble circumstances, including B.D.”
“Sandrine’s the name, kiddo. I bet you thought of fencing that car in Tijuana for a lot of bucks. I live here because it’s free rent. I can’t live with a man because you guys are the spawn of the devil, maybe worse.”
It turned out that her NBC exec boyfriend had taken her to the fund-raiser up Benedict where he had bid on some ersatz turquoise jewelry.
“Sandrine, darling, I need a pair of scissors.” Everyone seemed to use the word “darling” and he might as well join them. He took the bear rug into his room, intending to somehow sneak into Lloyd Bental’s house and switch the rug for his bearskin. He’d probably end up dying in a California prison but so what? Maybe they’d let him out in a couple of winters so he could go home and hear the delicious sound of crunching snow beneath his feet.
Sandrine and Lone Marten sat on the bed smoking a joint while B.D. cut loose the lining with the scissors. Lone Marten discussed several ways he might help B.D. get his bearskin back, including the highly creative way of blowing up the house with a ton of nitrogen fertilizer, some kerosene, and blasting caps. Sandrine yawned when she heard Bental’s name.