Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

“What are you talking about, something to do with pages, or what?”

“It doesn’t matter. I never pay too much attention to the actual script. If you want to use a cassette, that’s okay.”

“In other words,” A.D. said, making a stab for the bottom line, “you want me to make a connection with your son, file his story on what happened to. . it’s your daughter, right?. . and if a script happens, so much the better, it’s all a write-off anyway.”

“I want to make an investment in communication,” Wesley said, trying to smile at Evelyn despite lines of fatigue appearing like sudden squalls at the corners of his mouth and eyes. “Mine, yours, Walker’s. . Evelyn’s. I don’t have much time. I only have a few cartridges left in my chamber and I have to make each shot count.”

“It’ll cost you extra.” A.D. made one last effort to advance himself. “I’m not used to crossing from one medium to another.”

“Ten grand more for the script, to be divided between you and Walker, and another five for your services as companion and witness.”

Wesley stood up and kissed Evelyn on top of the head. “I’m late for a meeting but I expect to hear from you soon, A.D.”

“One more thing,” A.D. said, his mind beginning to drift. “Is this all bullshit or are you going to do this film?”

“Absolutely I am going to do this film. I can find private financing for a film in India. Renoir did one. Malle was over there. Even Rossellini did one.”

“I thought it was all bullshit,” A.D. said.

As Wesley left the room, A.D. reached out vaguely for Evelyn, for someone, and to his surprise he found his hand being allowed inside the warmth of hers. Falling asleep, he muttered an old Muddy Waters song: “ ‘I got a black bone, I got mojo too. I got John the conqueror root, I’m gonna mess with you. I’m gonna make you girls lead me by the hand. Then the world will know I’m the Hoochie Coochie Man.’ ”

EVELYN sat holding A.D.’s hand until he fell asleep. Then she went down the hall to Walker’s room. He was awake and looked up at her from the bed with distant eyes.

“That was a good ride,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry it ended badly for you.”

“My horse spooked,” he said. “And then I spooked.”

“Your father wanted to see you before he left but you were asleep. He’ll call from Mexico.”

“Mexico?”

“You didn’t know? He’ll shoot there for four weeks. In Durango. We leave tomorrow morning.”

They were silent while a nurse came in and gave him a pill. Evelyn sat not altogether contained in a black cotton shirt that hung loosely over her firm breasts, a simple necklace of bleached bone around her neck. When the nurse left the room she spoke again.

“Your father said just now that you and A.D. Ballou are going to write a screenplay for him to shoot in India.”

“How much is he going to pay?”

“Ten thousand, I think. Is it that important?”

“It’s a large consideration,” Walker said. “I mean, considering what he’s really asking for, what it really means. But don’t worry about India. No one in Hollywood is going to bankroll Wesley Hardin in India.”

“He says the film will happen.”

“He says everything will happen short of salvation, but in his black heart he only counts on ten percent.”

“He thinks he’s dying,” Evelyn said softly, looking at him directly so that Walker knew what she said was true. “The doctors can’t find anything wrong with him, but he’s losing weight and he just seems to be letting go of everything. I thought directing this Western would help because he hasn’t worked in over five years. But it hasn’t helped. It’s only made it worse.”

“It’s temporary,” Walker said, not prepared to accept the information and trying to fend off this recurring echo that no one anywhere had any time left. “He’s fallen apart before. It’s part of his myth that he can always rescue himself and everyone else around him.”

“I know,” she said absently.

“You met him in Labrador?” Walker asked.

“He was on a location trip.”

She walked unsteadily over to the window, raising it a crack and letting in a small shiver of air.

“I guess you can’t just tell him directly all you know about Clementine and be done with it?” she asked.

Walker didn’t answer and Evelyn sat down on the edge of the bed and then lay down on the floor. “I’m tired,” she said from the floor. “And a little stoned and I’m not used to being stoned. I’m used to being drunk. At least lately.”

Walker, from where he lay on the hospital bed, couldn’t see her and for a moment he even forgot she was there, until she spoke again:

“He’ll try and avoid whatever he has to avoid and then it might be too late. But I guess you know about that.”

“Yes,” Walker agreed. “I know about that. It runs in the family.”

“He doesn’t have much peace. I never thought he did, even when I first met him. But that’s what I needed then. I mean, the opposite of peace. As a way of cutting loose. I don’t know. I don’t know about any of it now, to tell you the truth.”

“I don’t either,” Walker said, only catching the end of what she was saying.

“But you set up the deal on India as much as Wesley did,” she went on as if talking to herself. “Well, that’s between you. I don’t know if it concerns me. I could ride out of here right now. I could get on a bus and go anywhere. But I wouldn’t go north. I don’t think I’d do that.”

Walker let himself fall asleep with a sudden rush. When he awoke later that afternoon, Evelyn was gone, which is what he had wished for when he closed his eyes.

THREE DAYS later Walker and a subdued A.D., wearing a black eye patch, left the hospital, and were driven northwest toward the Utah border by one Caleb Handy, an ancient ex-stuntman and now rancher who had been on most of Wesley Hardin’s films from the early thirties up to the present. A.D. had not been given official permission to leave the hospital. His good eye had not come around yet, and he was pinned to the dark rhythm of his ride on four Percodans, nodding in and out of Caleb’s long-winded raps as they all three sat in the cab of his three-quarter-ton AMC truck.

“Now, son, listen here,” Caleb was saying to Walker, squeezed in the middle. “Your daddy had an edge on him in those days. Don’t think he didn’t. He could slice the bullshit out of an actor and not even be on the set, that’s how hard he was. It was the ambition in him that gave him the juice for that kind of good hate that moves people off the dime. In those days he believed his mother lode would never dry up and he’d always be able to tap his source. Now he’s strip-mined himself, the same old moves and hand-me-down situations, the good stuff going into making a deal, but look here, son, I ain’t one to complain. I don’t give a damn what the show is, I never look at ’em and to tell the truth I don’t believe old Wes does either. . ”

Walker let him ramble on, drinking from the bottle of Wild Turkey they passed back and forth and staring out at the purple line of melancholy buttes, dust and red sand swirling around the truck from an approaching storm. They left the pavement and went straight across a sandstone mesa, brush and juniper on either side of the road, the A.C. turned all the way up to protect them from the fierce dry heat. As they climbed upward the desert gave way to scrub oak and stands of yellow pine. Even A.D. seemed to smell the growing sweetness in the air, yawning and snorting through his wretched dreams. Caleb shifted into four-wheel drive, the truck growling through a washout and over a narrower, rougher road. A hawk circled above them and a deer peered out from a clump of dogbane. Inching over a steep rise, they came upon a deep green meadow framed with straight stands of Douglas fir. A stream snaked its way across the meadow and hunches of cattle grazed on the tall dewy grass sprinkled with blue larkspur. On the far side of the meadow a large ramshackle house made from thick cedar logs stood on a slight knoll looking out across the mountain toward the southwest. To one side stood a barn, a bunkhouse, and several corrals.