Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

“What don’t you like?” he asked.

She looked at him, her eyes suddenly flat and hard, wanting to hurt him for the first time. “I don’t like your fear. I don’t mind your rage but I don’t like your fear. It makes me despise you.”

“What do you think about this film?” he asked.

“I think this film is pathetic and I think the way you’re trying to do yourself in is bullshit.”

The camera held on her as she walked away, through the door and into the street, and then panned back with the drunken arrival of one of the Mexican drivers dressed as Pancho Villa as he walked up to Wesley to find out what was going on.

EVELYN walked down the street, the sad trumpet from the mariachi band following her as she went through the false front of a bank and out onto an open field. She realized that she was very drunk and sat down at the end of the field on a pile of flat rocks. In front of her a patch of light spilled over the littered yard of an adobe house. She must have dozed off, for she was startled by a hand pulling on her shirt. A small girl, naked and solemn, stared at her with round black eyes. Evelyn made no effort to speak or smile and just sat on the pile of rocks. A trickle of urine ran down between the girl’s legs. Behind her an old woman appeared in the doorway of the house, her thin Indian frame covered with a gray Civil War jacket several sizes too big for her. The girl ran back inside the house and Evelyn looked directly into the woman’s ancient eyes. The old woman said something in Spanish, giving a slight almost imperceptible shrug toward the house, and Evelyn followed her inside.

A large room was divided by a wall of canvas stretched across a clothesline. Two men sat at a table playing dominoes. One she recognized as a local wrangler who also doubled as one of Pancho Villa’s men, a role he had no trouble qualifying for with his full black mustache and heavy-lidded eyes. The other man, wearing a Boston Red Sox jacket and a battered gray Stetson set low over a thin copper-colored face, was one of the stuntmen that Wesley had brought down from L.A.

The old woman sat down on a double bed in the corner, next to a plump woman in a Japanese housecoat nursing a baby and watching a game show on TV which she never took her eyes from.

“ Indio ,” the old woman said, pointing to Evelyn standing in the doorway.

The wrangler pushed out a chair from the table for her to sit on. “She thinks you’re Indian.”

“I’m half Eskimo.”

The wrangler explained that to the old woman in Spanish, who fired back a reply, which he translated: “She says there’s thousands of Mexican Indians playing baseball in the States so why shouldn’t some of your Indians come down here and play?”

The wrangler poured Evelyn a shot of bourbon from a half-empty bottle on the table, which she drank quickly. The room was warm with a thin layer of smoke underneath the ceiling from a leaky open fireplace, and there was the smell of dogs and cooking oil and baby urine that made her feel connected to another room at another time.

“Wes is shooting a scene,” she said, wanting to say something to blunt the force of this unwanted nostalgia. “Pancho Villa in the saloon.”

The wrangler stood up. “No one told me they were shooting Pancho Villa in the saloon.”

“No one told anyone anything,” Evelyn said. “It’s a free-for-all scene and it doesn’t matter.”

“I have two lines in that scene,” the wrangler said. “ ‘I don’t mind killing him’ and ‘To hell with the revolution. Let’s go for the gold.’ ”

Evelyn watched him put on his hat and go, knowing that she should leave with him.

The stuntman looked at her with cold black eyes. “At least Wes is going out with his boots on.”

“I guess,” she said.

The stuntman poured himself another drink, then filled her glass as well. “I’ll tell you one thing, Mrs. Hardin. There’s no way in hell I’m going over and watch the old bastard pull the plug on himself.”

“I know what you mean,” Evelyn said, watching the stuntman pour himself another drink. He seemed slightly crazy but somehow in control.

“Of course I’d sign on for him again even though he fired me day before last. You understand he likes to fire me. Fired me one time in North Dakota and once in Hong Kong. I get a load on and bust up something or somebody and he fires me. But he takes me back. I think he has a weakness for half-breeds.”

“I’m a breed,” Evelyn said. “And I think he has a weakness for me, but I don’t know if I want to go back.”

“Oh, hell, of course you’re going back,” he said impatiently. “You can’t leave a man like Wes Hardin when he’s down.”

“It seems as good a time as any,” Evelyn said, wondering if she meant it.

“You’re Canadian?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I suppose you married him to get out of town. Hell, I don’t blame you. I know what Canada is like. I broke a foot up in Calgary in a car stunt.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“See it through anyway. Who cares where anyone is from or what it was like? I’m part French and Moroccan and it’s never done a damn thing for me.”

His face was flushed from the booze and confessions of mixed blood, and Evelyn found him violently handsome. He sat there pouting, his lower lip feminine and full, his eyes staring past her, focused on some inner turbulence. She knew she was getting sloppy, but it was as if she had to run her own parallel course to Wesley’s, to step across her own boundaries while he was breaking up his.

“In some secret way I know you more than I know Wes,” she lied.

“Because we’re both breeds?”

“Because neither of us makes plans and Wes has to have a plan or he’ll die.”

“Maybe that’s why he’s so shaky. He’s run out of plans.”

“Maybe.”

“He has more fear than we do. You can smell it on him.”

“You have fear and I can smell it on you.”

He looked at her with great care. “What am I afraid of?”

“Of me, for one thing,” she said softly, smiling at him.

He didn’t answer. Behind him, the woman in the Japanese housecoat changed channels.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he said finally. “I’m afraid of Wes.”

“Maybe it’s time you broke that one.”

She stood up, dizzy from the booze and the smoke and the dull knowledge that she had gone too far with him.

“I’m going for a ride,” she said. “I love my husband.”

“I don’t know about love,” he said, wanting to hurt her.

She leaned on the table looking down at him and then abruptly left.

He stood up as though drugged and followed her out the door where she stumbled over a twisted pile of bailing wire.

Reaching out to steady her, his hand brushed across her breast. She gasped, leaning against him, and it was then that he knew just what it was she wanted done with her.

They walked silently across the field and down the back end of the street, past the false plywood fronts of the town. Suddenly she was unable to go on. Shouts and trumpet blast washed over them from the saloon and then receded. They were standing next to the jail in the shadows of an overhead balcony. She let him pull her to him, his mouth finding hers in a surprisingly gentle and tentative kiss and then she abruptly turned and walked into the jail.

The ground floor was full of lighting equipment and she picked her way through piles of cables and generators and up a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor, his footsteps following behind. Moonlight fell through a barred window outlining a sheriff’s office with a rolltop desk and a rifle case. Two cells, their doors open, occupied the rear. She went directly into one of the cells, bare except for a single cot.