“Why?” Susan had responded that night at Giuseppe’s. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for. I made the choices that brought me here.”
“You’re not responsible for Jimmie’s death, or for Brian’s,” a therapist I’d briefly engaged back in Memphis told me. “You know that as well as I do. So why are you apologizing? More to the point, why are you here?”
“ Then’s ancient history,” Lonnie said. “Might as well be the Peloponnesian Wars, Penelope’s suitors. Sure they’re important, sure they matter. Meanwhile your coffee’s getting cold and the warm-blooded person you’re supposed to be having dinner with is waiting for you.’’
Meanwhile, as well, two videocassettes had arrived via Fed Ex from a specialty store in California. I’d been alerted to their presence by a phone call from Mel Goldman. One purported to be a rough cut of The Giving, the other a weird documentary sort of thing put together by some precocious high-school kid in the Midwest, incorporating clips from BR’s films and Sammy Cash’s appearances elsewhere. The latter was heavy on science fiction, gangster and prison films, including episodes from a fourteen-part serial about a blind man who, “to bring the slate to balance,” had been given supernatural powers by “the Queen of Morning.” Since I didn’t have credit cards, Lonnie let me use his to order copies. The vendor tacked on a healthy fee for express delivery.
I had to borrow a TV and VCR too, from Val this time, but once I had them, those tapes ran continuously. I’d wander out to the kitchen to make a sandwich or brew coffee, return in time to see the blind man lift his cane to halt a school bus as it skewed towards a cliff; step out onto the porch for air and back through the screen door to images of gigantic Sammy Cash, victim of an atomic blast, on a picnic with minuscule nurse-girlfriend Carla; take a brief turn through the woods and come back to that strange beginning of The Giving.
It’s the crucifixion, the killing, everyone talks about, and the image is a strong one-even if it makes little sense in light of the rest of the movie. In fact, that salutary scene appears to have been added at the last moment. Perhaps when funds were exhausted? When the movie had to be brought to some kind of end, at any rate. By contrast, the early part of the film fairly drips with atmosphere, connection, portent. A man walks down the streets of a city. To either side, almost off camera, we glimpse what life is like for most of those who live here. Dark-eyed, ragged children stand in alley shadows waiting. Women in doorways open blouses to exhibit wilted breasts. Sleepers, or perhaps they are only bodies, lie alongside buildings and in ditches running with excrement. Dogs drink from the ditches and eat from the bodies. Carrion birds wheel above, waiting their turn.
The man sees or registers little of any of this. For him it’s daily life. He has purpose, a destination, sweeps through it all. Farther along he passes the window of an apartment behind whose bars a couple sits having afternoon tea and watching TV. The sound track, which to this point has consisted solely of footsteps, growls and horrible slurpings, now echoes the TV inside.
In breaking news, the territory’s governor vows to pursue reelection from his prison cell. “I did nothing wrong,” he declaimed in today’s press conference, shortly before asking reporters for cigarettes…
… On the international front, fifty thousand ground troops were put ashore on Ayatollah Beach around noon today. The invasion force, which was supposed to have struck at dawn, had been given inaccurate coordinates.
The man is, as it turns out, a detective. He goes into a bar.
“What can I do for you, friend?” the guy behind the bar says. Hair missing from his head is made up for by that growing out of nose and ears.
“Scotch. Whatever’s cheap.”
The barkeep pours. “Then you’ve come to the right place. It’s all cheap.”
Friend grabs hold of the barkeep’s wrist.
“Hey, no problem. I can leave the bottle.”
“Ice Lady been in today?”
“Who?”
“Cowboy?”
There’s a long hold, these two guys with eyes locked as the world, such as it’s become, goes on behind and beyond. A young woman in jeans and T-shirt hacked off well above the navel dances alone. Sharp points of her breasts come into focus and the barkeep pours a new Scotch just as we cut to another, seemingly unrelated scene. Then another.
Did these disparate, disjunctive scenes comprise a movie, comprise even the bare outline of one? Were the abrupt cuts and sudden changes (as though the film had constantly to reinvent itself) in fact part of some inchoate aesthetic weave, ultimately unrealized-or simply what happened when some kid in Iowa fancifully patched together snippets and snatches of film?
Finally, the rough cut of The Giving and the documentary were birds of a feather. Neither made much sense narratively, both failed to provide much by way of vertical motion while attempting to camouflage this with horizontal busyness. They were jottings, notes, scrapbooks, diary entries, letters to the editor, casual conversation, junk sculpture.
Two things about them stuck, though.
In the documentary, from internal evidence of the films, much was made of twin theses that BR had to be a southerner, and that the films were in fact collaborations between the director and Sammy Cash.
Then the other.
I came back from the kitchen with new ice in a glass of freshly poured, very old Scotch. I’d started the cassette of The Giving again before I left; as I reentered the room, credits were running. Ordinarily I’d have paid no attention. Until the movie began in earnest, I wasn’t really watching. But a glance brought me up short with the glass halfway to my face, staring at the screen.
Listed as producer was H. L. “Bubba” Sims.
Chapter Thirty-four
“It was maybe nine years back, driest season we’d had in a long time. You could sit out on the porch listening to limbs crack and fall, shingles on roofs curl in the heat. Fires had started up in the woods just east and started moving in. Oaks, elms, pines, they all went up like flares. Thought sure we were gonna have to evacuate the town.
“There was this kid over to the funeral home had been there seventy, eighty years, everyone’d taken to calling him Mojo. He’d fallen, jumped or got pushed from a train. Presented with a bill for $108, The family said, ‘You all can keep him.’ So he got kept, mummified, coffin leaning up in the corner of the back room. Funeral home was sold, Mojo went with it. Poker players’d drag him out each week for luck, prop him up by the table.
“But when it looked like the town was going under, they decided Mojo had to be given a proper burial. Been waiting since 1920, mind you. But they dragged him out, found a clear spot and put him under.
“The fire was maybe four miles outside town when the rains started up. They went on for a week or more. Everything was sodden. Afterwards they never could find where they’d put Mojo in the ground. Old Man Lanningham claimed he hadn’t won a hand of poker since.”
Lonnie grinned at me across the top of his coffee mug.
“Don’t know why I’m remembering that now.”
June called the night before, he’d told me. She was on her way home. That son of a bitch was history.
“So, what do we do about this?” Lonnie said.
“I was thinking the best thing’d be to go out to the house.”
“Without calling ahead.”
“Yes.”
“Henry Lee won’t much like that.”
I shrugged.
“Here I thought no one could keep secrets in a town this size, and Henry Lee turns out to be a Hollywood wheel.”
“A small one. Something on the order of a training wheel-if I’m right.”
Lonnie levered the mug onto his desk and stood in a single motion, fishing out keys.
“No sense putting it off, then.”
Mayor Sims answered the door in a bathrobe.
“Like to get an early start, do you, Henry Lee?”