Max Collins - Quarry's cut

He described briefly the filming of the porno flick here at the lodge, how the first fleet of actors had left the day before, and how Janet Stein had left in the afternoon, just before the rest of them got snowed in, and then he went into Waddsworth’s fall, and how he, Castile, had reacted to it.

“I was sure he’d been murdered,” Castile said, “by whoever it was that’d been hired to murder me. I just… knew… that the paid killer that Meyers had hired was in this lodge… to kill me… maybe to kill everyone in the lodge, now that we were snowbound… and my wife, when I went back to my room and told her, about Waddsworth’s death, and what I thought it could mean, she tried to convince me it could’ve been an accident, or the result of an argument between those three faggots upstairs… but I couldn’t buy it. I knew… after all those paranoid months… that this was it.. that the attempt would be made tonight.

“Of the four of us left in the lodge…” And here he paused to give me a look, emphasizing that he had left Janet and me out, in his tally of the number of people present. “… my wife and I made two, and that left only Harry Belcher, a cameraman from Chicago, and his young ‘friend’ Richie Hudson. Harry was the older man, the more physically tough of the two, Richie being an ineffectual type… so obviously Harry seemed the more likely of the two, to make a living by violence. Another possibility was that the two men were in on it together… they lived together, lovers is what they were… perhaps they were in business, too, or at least knew each other’s business.

“So I made an excuse to my wife, about hearing a noise in the hall, and I took my gun and went to Harry’s room. He was in bed… Richie wasn’t there… Richie had his own room, but that had been for appearance’s sake, and I’d expected them to be together… had been ready to confront the both of them, threaten them with the gun, make them tell me, make them admit who they really were… or anyway who Harry was… I wasn’t completely convinced that little fag Richie was a part of it, though I couldn’t risk taking a chance he wasn’t.

“He… Harry… was sitting on the side of his bed… lights on… he was holding his head in, his hands. He looked up at me, and I showed him the gun, and didn’t have a word out before he’d jumped at me.

“It wasn’t supposed to go like that… I was to supposed to hold the gun on him and he would tell what I needed to hear and then.. I don’t know what… then, maybe, I would have killed him. I hadn’t thought it through that far… I was just acting out of reflex, doing what I thought I needed to survive.

“And now, Jesus! I was fighting. A man so much stronger than me it was ridiculous… if he’d thought to hit me, just use his fist on me, he’d have had me. But he didn’t. We just sort of wrestled. He was concentrating on the gun I had… trying to twist it out my hand… so we wrestled, rolled around on the floor like a couple of kids roughhousing.

“That’s when Richie came in. He must’ve been next door, or maybe he was off alone someplace pouting about what happened to Waddsworth.. but anyway he came in, and made a sound, like he’d been hit in the stomach, air rushing out… I could see him out of the corner of my eye, standing there waving his arms in the air, like he’d spotted somebody drowning and he didn’t know how to swim and couldn’t do anything about it… and then he sort of ran off, toward the bathroom and he came back with the straight razor.

“He stood over us, Harry and me, and in a shaky voice told me to drop the gun. Somehow that struck me funny, not that I took time to laugh about it, but here was this skinny little faggot spouting a cliched line out of an old western: ‘Drop the gun.’ It just seemed absurd to me. The whole thing seemed absurd.

“But of course I did as he said. And Harry let up on me, stood away from me, and I got up from off the floor, but as I did, I kicked out, at Richie’s legs, and there was a sort of a struggle, just me and Richie this time, while Harry looked on helplessly, and I ended up with the razor.

“Harry was almost to where I’d dropped the gun… he almost had time to pick it up… but he saw me… he saw the razor… and didn’t do it. He just backed up. They both backed up. And this weird thing happened… this kind of surge went through me. All the wrestling, scuffling… that sort of thing isn’t like anything I’d ever be involved with… but it had me confused… it also… I was, in a weird way, excited by it, and I did something that had no thinking to it at all: I lunged at Harry, like a fucking lion-tamer, and he backed up some more, toward the doorway… and he almost lost his footing, but not quite, not even when I lashed out with the razor and caught him across the throat… he just sort of reached up and touched where he’d been cut, with both his hands, and stumbled out of there, walking somehow, don’t ask me how…

“And Richie, Richie was running… I don’t know why he didn’t scream. Maybe he was too scared to… but he ran, ran down the stairs, out of the house, and I caught him outside, and he was crying, just blubbering, and he made me mad, for some reason, he just made me mad, made my head throb for a second, and my face felt hot, cold as it was out there, and me not in a coat… and suddenly I was… it was happening, but I was watching it happen. I was detached, somehow, distant and close at the same time, doing and watching, and you know something funny? I didn’t get any blood on me… not when I lashed out and cut Harry, not when I took Richie in the shed and cut his throat. There was a lot of blood, but none of it got on me… not until my wife.”

And here he paused again and his eyes were watery and his voice was wavery, like poor TV reception.

“She put up with a lot from me, Millie did. She did a lot for me. She even stayed by me, when she found out about those snuff things I handled… the idea of them, it sickened her. She was really… very sensitive. She wasn’t tough enough for this business… she.. you have to be willing to do whatever you have to.”

He stopped. He began to cry. He didn’t make any noise as he did; that part he held in. But the tears flowed, and after a while I kicked him a little and he went on.

“She gave me money… financed me, my career… it was all her doing. She fucked people on the screen, for me, because I asked her to. She’d do anything for me. She believed in me. She wasn’t any angel… I mean, she was in it for herself, too… wanted a career in aboveground movies, wanted to be a real star… and that was going to be a problem for me. I needed to leave all my ties to the porno industry behind, and she was going to be something of an embarrassment, expecting parts in the post-porno films I’d make. She knew things about me… about things I’d done, to get ahead in the business… the snuff films, for instance… that meant I couldn’t get her out of my life, a divorce was out of the question. Very soon our marriage would’ve turned into a sort of blackmail situation… she was capable of that Still… I liked her. I did. She was important to me… do anything for me… but this.. this was too much… she couldn’t couldn’t… I couldn’t.. ”

He stopped again. Took in a couple breaths. He wasn’t crying any more.

“She knew I’d killed Harry. It wasn’t hard for her to figure out. She told me she knew. I didn’t deny it. I told what I’d done and I told her about Richie. I said I was sorry but that it had just… happened… that things had just… got out of hand. She just looked at me. I told her no one would ever have to know I’d done it.. we could cover it up somehow, I said, I knew we could…

“And she started beating on me with her fists. She’d been very quiet till now, that surface calm that hysteria hides behind sometimes, and she just… attacked me, but she was saying things, not screaming, almost whispering… not this, she said, not murder, not that… and she said this is exactly what she said, hitting me