Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

A large-boned gray-haired woman in a faded campaign jacket and loose-fitting khaki pants came around the side of the house, shading her eyes from the slant of the evening sun.

“You boys look to have enjoyed yourselves,” she said as Walker and A.D. staggered out of the truck. She looked at Walker, shaking her head. “You must be Wes Hardin’s lost and found son. Last I set eyes on you was that ski film up in Idaho.”

She helped A.D. inside the house and into a bedroom off the high-beamed living room while Caleb led Walker into an adjoining room.

A.D. slept through the night and the next day and when he woke again the house was silent around him. Sitting up, he thought his eye distinguished a shade of darkness, and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he fumbled for the light. It was true, vague forms swam before him. He rose from the bed and made his way toward where he thought the door should be. It was there, and gaining confidence he stepped into the other room, realizing he was no longer in the hospital. He crouched on all fours and tried to crawl back to where he had come from, but the wall met his advance and he sat back, trying to regain his composure.

A growling form hurled itself against him, knocking him over. He cried out, swinging blindly, but the dog, rather than closing his fangs around him, licked his body with a rough tongue. He stood up and felt his way around the room, past a stone fireplace, a floor lamp, and a table and chairs, the dog padding alongside him. Finally he found the piano. He sank heavily onto the stool as if before a refuge and his long ringed fingers stretched out lightly over the keys and he came alive again. “Just an old road man,” he improvised, finding a few simple chords. “One eye lost / one deal made / not knowin’ the cost / what’s been played. . ” He played the beginnings of a few old tunes, but mostly he was content to sit there.

“Jesus, I thought you were Caleb.” Walker stood at the side of the piano looking down at A.D.’s naked figure hunched over the keyboard, at the pale gray skin that had never experienced direct sunlight.

“Your daddy pay us any coin yet?” A.D. asked.

“A grand each, the rest to come as we have pages.”

“Well, this is your hustle,” A.D. said. “You set up the deal with your daddy so you must know what he wants.”

“I suppose,” Walker said.

“And India is the hook,” A.D. went on.

They stood and sat together in silence while A.D.’s fingers stroked the piano keys. Then Walker helped A.D. to his room and then went to bed, listening to the night sounds outside and wondering if he would or even could find a form to tell what he had to tell or if the form had somehow found him.

IN THE days that followed Walker took short walks to the edge of the meadow and beyond, sitting in the cool depths of a spruce forest or following a winding brook as it descended the mountain through groves of quaking aspen and willow trees. Mostly he kept to himself, Caleb having gone to Denver to buy a horse and A.D. content to play the piano, sometimes singing with Amelia, Caleb’s wife, who would stand beside him, a bottle of Johnny Walker on the back of the piano, belting out blues and old ballads in a high hoarse voice. A.D. and Walker encountered each other only at the evening meal, an event that Amelia produced with enthusiasm, baking breads and pies and putting on the table an enormous spread of vegetables and freshly butchered meat. Walker avoided the meat, but his entire body seemed to respond to everything else, and almost immediately he began to put on weight.

One day Walker came upon a clearing on the southern face of the mountain. Sitting on a slab of granite under a hard blue sky, he gazed out over the distance and for a moment experienced calm and even joy before such a desolate and remote horizon. But his mood was eclipsed by overwhelming rage, a thick choking bile rising within at the thought of his father and the deal struck between them. Let him die in his own way, he thought, in his own time. And it was at that moment of absolute refusal that Walker did, in fact, give in to his father, an image of his sister appearing before him as he had come to imagine and invent her, standing in the clear piercing light of Namche Bazaar, the snow peaks of the Mahalangur Range behind her, a patched purple shawl over her thin shoulders, her round head shaved to a bristle, her dirt-encrusted hands methodically moving over a string of prayer beads.

That evening Walker went to his room and didn’t come out for three days. Refusing all food and drinking steadily from Caleb’s stash of Johnny Walker, he lay in bed and watched TV while listening to the radio, from the earliest soap to the late, late show. Sometimes he watched with the sound off, other times with the radio on or the image off and the sound on. On the afternoon of the fourth day, A.D. entered Walker’s room. Walker was lying on the bed in his Jockey shorts watching a game show.

“Are you dead or alive or what?” A.D. asked.

“I want to move around for a while.”

“We don’t have any pages so we don’t have any bread so we can’t move around.”

“You’re right,” Walker agreed.

A.D. sighed. “I could help grease it along and we could take it easy and build up a stake and then go our own ways, but if you can’t get to it. . ”

“I appreciate your lack of hope,” Walker said and he meant it. “But I’ve thought about the story and we can probably shovel enough pages together to get a first payment and then we’ll buy a van.”

“A van?”

“There’s someone I want to see in Albany.”

“Well, there’s someone I want to see in L.A., more than one, in fact. Like my lawyer.”

“As you pointed out,” Walker said, “it’s my story so it’s got to be my drift.”

“Whatever,” A.D. said, wondering how long it would be possible to ride on this particular track.

Walker handed him a bottle of Johnny Walker and turned the sound down on the TV, leaving on the image. Then he lay back and shut his eyes. A.D. turned on the tape recorder that Wesley had given him and the tape was almost halfway through before Walker managed to begin.

WE CUT FROM BLACK. . to a husband and wife, she in their king-sized bed, he in his pajama bottoms walking around. Agitated. No. Scratch that. Move it forward. They’re in this same elegant room, their bags are packed and they’re about to leave. They’re in their early thirties, healthy, a little straight, she more than he perhaps but she’s a real knockout, blond, uptight, but strangely erotic. We’ll call them Jim and Lacey and they’ve been married for five years and Jim works for his father in the auto industry where he’s a vice-president. It’s old money, Grosse Pointe money, and that’s where they are now, in the bedroom of their summer house on Lake Michigan, one of three houses on Jim’s father’s estate, the other two houses belonging to his father and sister, we’ll call her by my own sister’s name, Clementine, for a natural hook. . There’s tension in their bedroom as there has been for several months and once more Lacey almost desperately pleads that she doesn’t want to go searching for some weird sister-in-law who went off to India to study the sitar and who hasn’t been heard from in eight months. She doesn’t need that kind of a trip. She needs to find something to do, a job, an identity, something for herself. Jim is wired and impatient and says angrily that if she doesn’t come with him it will end their marriage, that they no longer communicate with each other and that they need an adventure like this to hold them together; not only that, but his father, Pete, or Pistol Pete Rankin as he’s known in the industry for his quick moves with women and failing corporations, is very likely dying and has every right to want to see his daughter again, not to mention the fact that Clementine might be in some kind of terrible trouble. Lacey closes her eyes and says, almost in tears, that he is a manipulating control freak who will stop at nothing to get his way, not even emotional blackmail. Jim, very tight-lipped and vicious, tells her that she is a cold withholding cunt. . She slaps him and he holds her wrists, forcing her to the floor. “Yes, I’ll go,” she says through clenched teeth as he looms over her, causing her pain. “You prick, you fucking bastard, yes,” as he begins to make love and she opens up to him, wanting him, hating him, “yes, oh yes”. . and so on as we. .