Robert Stone - Children of Light

As Gordon went out the doctor’s hands were pressed together in benediction.

In the air-conditioned gloom of their trailer, the Drogues, father and son, watched a videotape of the last take. It was Lu Anne on the trolley, a continuous medium-close shot. Eric Hueffer and Lise Rennberg, Drogue’s Swedish cutter, watched with them. They sat in a semicircle on folding metal chairs.

“We have some very nice cutaways for this if you need them,” she told the director.

“Neat,” young Walter Drogue said, and switched on an indirect light over his desk.

“Walter,” Eric Hueffer said good-humoredly, “just so you don’t think I’m a complete nut, could I offer my arguments for a fourteen-millimeter lens in that scene? Or the next one?”

“Interesting idea, Eric.”

“Well, jeez,” Hueffer said, “you dismissed it out of hand an hour ago.”

“Did I?” Walter asked. “How rash of me. Of course we could use a fourteen there, Eric. But we’d need painted backdrops instead of the trees. Do you think we could work that out?”

“Come on, Walter,” Eric said.

Lise Rennberg smiled sedately.

“Maybe we could use footage from Caligari , huh, Eric? To show that the character’s at the end of her tether?”

“Obviously I was wrong,” Hueffer said, and got out of his chair. He was a tall young man, almost a head taller than Walter Drogue junior, and his height compelled him to stoop when he stood in the trailer.

“Don’t even think about it,” young Drogue said.

When they were alone the Drogues ran the videotape over again.

“Man,” young Drogue said, watching the screen, “that’s what I call inhabited space.”

Old Drogue reached out and stopped the tape, freezing the frame.

“You had her crying?”

“She cried. I thought I’d keep it.” He turned to his father. “You don’t like it?”

“I like it but something bothers me.”

He started the tape over again, stopping it about where he had before, on very nearly the same frame.

“Something,” old Drogue said softly, and shook his head.

“What’s the trouble?” young Walter asked. “You want it shot through a fourteen too?”

“You’re very hard on that young man,” Drogue senior told his son. “He’s efficient. He’s enthusiastic. I mean … a fourteen-millimeter — it’s off the wall but you can see how he’s thinking. He comes out of the schools.”

“So do I,” Drogue junior said.

“Maybe if your name was Hueffer you’d be his A.D., huh? Then he could be sarcastic to you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” his son told him. “You don’t know what it was like. You can’t.”

“If your name was such a burden,” old Drogue said, “you should have changed it.”

“I was Walter Drogue the Less.”

“Tough shit,” the old man said.

“And I was never allowed to be as much of a fool as fucking Hueffer.”

“Stop picking on him,” old Drogue said. “You’re lucky to have him. He could go all the way, that kid.”

“His day will come,” young Drogue said.

“Will that be good news for him?”

“He’ll get his own picture. Little by little things will get out of hand. He’ll try weird shit — like spooky lenses. He’ll try to do everything himself. Presently they’ll smell his blood. They’ll sabotage him and laugh at him behind his back. His actors will panic. His big opportunity will turn to shit before his eyes. He’ll be afraid to show his nose on his own set.”

“Well,” the old man said, “that’s how movies get made. Myself, I’m too superstitious to wish disaster on my own assistants.”

“It’s not my wish. It’s inevitable. It’s the kind of guy he is.”

Drogue senior started the tape again. He and his son watched Lu Anne take her ride.

“I could watch that for twenty seconds, couldn’t you?” young Drogue asked. “Do most of the ride in one continuous medium-close, then maybe cut away to her point of view?”

“Why did you have her cry?”

“Hell, she was crying. Why not?”

“It looks out of character.”

“Only to us.”

“What do you mean?” old Drogue demanded. “It’s her cracking up.”

“For Christ’s sake, Dad, don’t you think I know that? It’ll play just fine.”

“Ever try to edit around somebody going bananas? You end up as crazy as them.”

“Well, I have two options, don’t I? I can make her not be crazy. Or I can get the picture completed with her as she is. Which do you recommend?”

“She has a way of being crazy,” old Drogue said, “that photographs pretty well.”

“Right,” his son said.

“Some do, some don’t.”

“She does. Ever since her old man started packing, her energy level out there has been a hundred and twenty percent.”

“She could do a complete flip. She has before.”

“Then I guess I fly in Kurlander or nourish her with my blood or something.”

“You don’t have too far to go.”

“I have some of Walker’s literary scenes to do up in L.A. Some important interiors. I need her coherent for that.” They watched the trolley tape run to its completion. “I’ll have Walker down here. I’ve got that peckerhead novelist to keep amused. If I can get her through this weekend, I can get her the rest of the way.”

“Good luck,” the old man said.

They went out into the afternoon; young Drogue looked at the sky. Overhead the sky had cleared and the wind had slackened. The storm hung on the horizon out to sea, a distant menace.

Hueffer and Toby Blakely had discovered a tarantula hiding in the shade of the trolley’s undercarriage and were tormenting it with a stick.

“They can jump really well,” Drogue told his men. Hueffer got to his feet.

“I was raised with tarantulas,” Blakely said. “Learned to love ’em.”

“I think maybe you’re right about the rain, Eric.”

“You thinking about shooting Lee’s walk tonight?” Blakely said.

“I’m thinking if it doesn’t rain we better do it. We’ll never get a better match and it could be pissing buckets tomorrow.”

“I’ll go on record,” Hueffer said. “Beautiful sunset tonight. Indicating chubasco in the morning. A day and a half of solid rain.”

“You predict weather on my set, you better be right,” Drogue said. “I have vast powers of evil. I don’t like bad predictions.”

“I think he’s right,” Blakely said. “If it was my money I’d pay the overtime and keep everybody out. Be better than looking at the rain tomorrow.”

“I’ll talk to Lu Anne,” Drogue said to Hueffer. “And since we have the producer here we can consult with him. Which is always fun.”

He looked down and discovered the tarantula approaching the tip of his Tony Lama boot. “You fuckers better be right,” he told them. He raised his foot, brought it down on the creature and mashed it into the sandy ground. “Or else.”

Blakely looked at him evenly. “That’ll just make it rain, boss.”

He and Drogue watched the young assistant director set out purposefully in search of Axelrod, the unit manager.

“You like that kid?” Drogue asked his photographer.

“Yeah,” Blakely said. “I kind of like him. Don’t you?”

Drogue had begun to scrape the hairy remnants of spider leg and thorax from the bottom of his boot and onto the edge of the trolley.

“Don’t you think he has a certain assholish quality?”

Blakely stood looking into the director’s eyes for several seconds.

“Maybe,” he said at length.

Drogue nodded affably. “I kind of like him too.”

Lu Anne was having her hair combed out as Vera Ricutti folded the last of Edna Pontellier’s cotton dresses, putting the pins in a cardboard box.