Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

When Walker and A.D. found themselves awake at the same time, they ate, gambled for a few minutes, and drove down the road toward Las Vegas. It was night and the road was empty with calm humpbacked mountains on either side of them. After fifty miles of driving A.D. said, “I read the pages. Your old man is never going to go for that blow job. He’s had John Wayne and those other righteous old dudes riding through his flicks.”

“I owe him a blow job. He can do what he wants with it.”

“Well, that’s a family problem,” A.D. said. “And I never mess with family problems, not even my own.”

“We’ll red line the scene,” Walker said. “His films never get that close to sex, at least not the explicit kind.”

“Whatever you say, partner,” A.D. said, trying to promote his new image as skillful producer. “I don’t want to turn off your flow. I’m just telling you that the script doesn’t altogether play for me. If Jim and Lacey could take up with one of those weird hippies in the train and get themselves into a steamy triangle, then you’d have yourself a hook. I’d follow a hook like that into deep water, especially if you had two women on either side of the sandwich. And I’m not a deepwater man.”

“The main characters are pretty well set.”

“Does that mean you’re sticking to what went down over there? Because if you are, we might have trouble moving this one off the lot.”

“The facts have to be somewhere in the room or the old man won’t pay attention.”

“Herd them into the corner,” A.D. said. “Out of the story’s way.”

They stopped at a small hotel-casino in Ely, a run-down mining town halfway to Las Vegas. Over apple pie and coffee A.D. produced the contract for Walker to sign.

“You’re making your move,” Walker said, looking over the contract.

“It’s now or never,” A.D. said. “And I’m taking my inspiration from the now jar.”

“Who do you see in the middle of this triangle you’ve set up?” Walker asked. “Me, you, or the old man?”

“In a triangle there’s only a middle if you start to lose,” said A.D., who had no idea what he was really saying. “And that won’t happen.”

“I assume you’ve contacted a top lawyer?”

“Out of L.A. and on the case. The same one that’s suing your old man and the entire State of New Mexico. And you, too, now that I think of it.”

“I admire your gusto,” Walker said. “You might even make an acceptable producer. You’re certainly desperate and greedy enough. Of course, India will test you. India has been known to eat producers alive.”

“Finish the script and I’ll hire a rewrite man to switch it to Brazil.”

“Now you’re talking like a man I can trust,” Walker said. “A man who can get the job done, no matter what the sacrifice.”

“Look, Walker,” A.D. said in an effort to nail down his intentions once and for all. “I’ve been on the road and I’ve sniffed up other people’s exhaust. This is America. You’re allowed to change horses in midstream. That’s what the brochure says and that’s what I’m going to do. You’re my connection to some of that gold from the image bank, and I’m asking you: are you going to sign or not?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“A way back into the action. You’re out of touch, in case you haven’t noticed. But I’m your transformer. That’s a producer’s job.”

“How do you know I won’t phone in the information to the old man and have done with it? I mean, all he’s hanging in for is to find out about Clem.”

“You won’t do that. But if you do pull the plug on me, I’ll break half the bones in your body. I’m playing hardball now, Walker. Forget dreamball.”

“In that case, I’ll sign,” Walker said. He was enjoying A.D.’s intensity. “But if you’re the producer you shouldn’t get any more money from the old man. That’s for the writer.”

“That’s not the way it works,” said A.D., who had already lost more than half of the four thousand he had set aside for himself. “My money is supervising money. To see that you stay out of trouble and get the script done. Your old man knows that a man without product is only half a man. He wants to see you up on your feet and fully wrapped.”

Walker signed the contract and put the ten grand in his pocket.

They drove the rest of the way in silence, arriving in Las Vegas for breakfast and checking into Caesar’s Palace, a place they both knew too well. A.D. had played his share of gigs there in the past and Walker had wandered through on various lost weekends out of and away from Beverly Hills, mostly for championship fights and long bouts of compulsive fucking. After they had slept for a few hours, A.D. went off to the post office in the blazing sun to pick up the cashier’s check from Wesley, and Walker went to the casino.

Walker played recklessly, without paying much attention to the cards, and lost over two thousand dollars in an hour. He didn’t mind losing. In fact, more than a part of him was engaged in losing, and he played hundred-dollar chips without caution or design. It was 11 a.m. and there weren’t many people around and the air had been pumped full of oxygen so that there was more than enough to go around. Despite the ionized air the blackjack dealers were more mechanical and bored than usual, and Walker changed tables a few times, either for luck or because he didn’t like a dealer’s vibrations. As he was about to leave and quit playing altogether, a woman sat down next to him. Her fingers were elegant and Oriental, with long tapering fingernails and an absence of rings. He guessed that she was Chinese. When he finally looked at her face she was more complicated than that. She was Eurasian, and her flat opaque eyes reflected only weariness and the distant possibility of play for pay. She wore a black silk dress with a high neck and the usual slit on the side. A delicate survey of wrinkles was visible on her upper neck and around her eyes. But it was her utter fatigue that comforted Walker, as when she checked him out while lighting a cigarette, her eyes staring blankly through him, bored and unseeing. He forgot about her while he won and then lost a few hundred dollars, but when she got up to leave he followed in her wake, sitting next to her at another table. After she lost, he shoved a pile of chips toward her. They played anonymously until the cocktail waitress came around and he bought her a brandy and soda.

“What do you have in mind?” She tapped on the table for a card replacement.

“I thought we might spend some time together.”

As they got up to leave, a hand touched Walker’s shoulder. The hand was large and well manicured and belonged to a tall, distinguished man in horn-rimmed glasses and gray sideburns. He was dressed in a white tennis outfit and carried two racquets. Next to him was a smaller, rotund man and a thin blond girl with a perfectly shaped Revlon face. They, too, wore white tennis outfits.

“Walker Hardin. My God.” The man in the horn-rimmed glasses seemed genuinely shocked. “I thought you were in China or Korea or someplace.”

Walker nodded, trying to place the man’s face.

“Ben,” the man said, picking up on Walker’s disorientation. “Ben Copperthwaite. I was production manager on The Last Charge . You and your sister were in that scene on the river. Jesus, you must have been no more than eleven or twelve. An obnoxious brat. Remember? The boat tipped over. I’ll never forget it. Your old man flipped out and fired a busload of people.”

Walker didn’t remember but he said he did and they chatted for a while, Ben introducing his tennis partners with names Walker immediately forgot and Walker mumbling a reference to the exhausted woman standing next to him as “one of my Eastern business partners.”