“I hated them for taking it all away from me. Taking away my life, really.”
“Billy. Please,” Sammy Cash said.
“There was talk about The Giving being my swan song, some kind of ultimate homage to the great art of film. Piss on that. What I was giving them, all of them-Hollywood, the studios, newcomer merchants who went about buying up everything in sight-was the finger. Fuckers didn’t even have enough sense to know it. Swallow this, I was telling them. Take this wad of crap and stuff it right back up where it came from.”
“It’s all right, Billy. All that’s long in the past. We’re fine now, aren’t we? We have a good life.” Sammy Cash looked from Lonnie’s face to mine. “Don’t you think you’ve upset him enough?”
“We never liked one another much, Gordie,” Henry Lee said, “and you probably don’t believe this, but I’ve always appreciated what you’ve done for my brother, your devotion to him.”
Then, turning to Lonnie and me: “After Billy’s troubles-”
“Troubles?” I said.
“A breakdown. He was in the hospital for almost a year. When he came out, I bought this house for him, set everything up so he’d be safe the rest of his life, never want for anything.”
“Your brother cares for you a lot,” the sheriff said. “So does Sammy.”
Billy nodded.
“Did you ever meet a man by the name of Carl Hazelwood, Billy?” I asked.
No response this time. I thought of all those movies about submarines cutting engines and playing dead, hoping to stay off sonar.
“He’d been trying to get in touch with you. Carl’s a great fan of yours, Billy. Maybe your top fan. He understood what you were doing, what you’d accomplished. He wanted desperately to talk to you about the films you made, tell you how important they’d been to him.”
“I-” Billy began. Even the drink was dry when he tried for refuge there. Foundering, lost, he looked about. At Sammy’s face. Out the window. At these familiar walls.
“Others did everything they could to keep him away from you, Billy. But he wasn’t going to be stopped. It was that important to him. You were that important to him.”
Lonnie’s gaze turned to Henry Lee.
“You knew about this all along.”
He nodded. “Boy showed up at my door one night. Hadn’t bathed for a month or two. Mumbling and twitching. Said he was looking for the man who’d made The Giving. What was I supposed to do? What would you do? I had to protect Billy. I told him-Carl Hazelwood, as we later learned-that I didn’t know any such person. Told him to go away. Okay, sorry to have bothered you, sir, he said. But he didn’t go away. Far from it. I’d catch glimpses of him scuttling behind the garage, slipping off into the woods.”
“He’d seen more than enough movies to know about stakeouts,” Lonnie said. “And despite your disavowals, he knew you were connected with Billy, if not precisely what the relationship was. Knew he had only to keep watch.”
“And go through my mail.”
“That’s how he found his way to Billy.”
“Enough,” Sammy Cash said. “ Enough, goddamn it.”
“Did you talk to Carl Hazelwood, Billy?”
His eyes wandered about, settled on Sammy, who shook his head. Billy nodded. “Nice young man.”
“Yes. Yes, he was.”
“Told me people were still watching my films, still talking about them. I had no idea. He only came that one time. I asked him to dinner the next night, insisted on cooking, though Sammy usually does all that. Baked bass, a salad of couscous and goat cheese. Put out the good china, chilled two bottles of white. We waited almost two hours, but he never showed.”
Billy’s eyes came up and went from face to face.
“Sammy-”
“I’m sorry,” Sammy Cash said. He held a handgun. “This has to be over now. Billy’s suffered enough.”
“What you have there’s a twenty-two,” Lonnie said. “Shoot someone with that, you’re likely to make them mad.” He stood and, hand extended, stepped forward. The gun barked. Bubbles of blood spotted his lips.
“Son of a bitch,” Lonnie said.
Chapter Thirty-six
The second shot had struck Billy square in the neck-transecting his trachea, though we didn’t know that at the time. I don’t think Sammy Cash even intended to fire. When he saw what he’d done, not knowing even the half of it, his hand fell onto his lap and he sat immobile, tears in his eyes like chandeliers in empty ballrooms. For the moment Lonnie seemed okay, down but not out. I’d pulled Billy from the chair onto the floor, felt for a carotid. Thinking with amazement how much blood a body holds, how much blood it gives up, and how quickly. Billy wasn’t breathing. Pinching his nose, hyperextending his neck, I stacked in three quick breaths and checked again. Still no pulse, no respiration. I began compressions. When next I looked up, Lonnie had been there by me, counting. He’d do the breaths, turn aside to spit blood or cough as I did compressions. Three, four minutes in, he folded, gasping. That’s when I put the mayor to work. Need your help over here, I said. Now.
A middle-aged man in badly faded purple scrubs walked through automatic doors into the waiting room and spoke briefly with the volunteer at the desk before coming towards me. “Mr. Turner?” Fatigue sat heavily in his eyes. “You’re with Sheriff Bates, right?”
I nodded.
“He’s going to be okay. The bullet barely nicked an upper lobe. Of his lung, that is. Simple enough to deal with. Blood loss, shock to the system, that’s a different thing, that’s what’s on the boards now. Take some time for full recovery, I’m afraid.”
“And Billy Roark?”
“The other GSW? What, you’re with him, too?”
“I’ve been working with Sheriff Bates on a murder case. It’s all connected.”
“I see…” He looked at the window, at a gurney being pushed along the hallway upon which lay an oxygen tank, electronic monitors, IV pumps and the deformed body of a young girl, then back at me. “Mr. Roark expired over an hour ago.” He told me about the trachea, just like you’d hack a garden hose in two, how, despite our best efforts at the scene, Roark had gone too long without oxygen. His heart stopped twice in ER. The second time, they failed to restart it. “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”
“Strange as it may seem looking about that house, the way Bill and Sammy were together, they were only partners. Close partners, but never lovers. Sometimes it was almost as though they were a single being. For years. How can things come apart so quickly?”
“I’m sorry, Mayor.”
“Lonnie’s going to be all right, they say.”
“He’ll be out of commission for a while. Back on the job soon enough.”
“Good. That’s good. I should have spoken up. I didn’t know. I suspected. Most of all-”
“Most of all you hoped your brother hadn’t done it.”
“I didn’t want to lose him.”
“I understand.”
“Or for him to lose himself again-which is more or less what happened that other time. Before he went to the hospital, I mean. He seemed fine. A little quiet. Then he just… floated away. He’d always been a dynamo, five or six projects going at once. The breakdown, or the drugs, or the electroshock, they changed him. He came back. But he’d become this meek, sweet man-the one you met.”
All that he said, about his movie giving them the finger, Sammy Cash told me. That wasn’t true. He was trying to make a good movie. In his mind, I think, a great movie. Something he’d be remembered for. After years of churning them out, ambition, real ambition, had overtaken him.
Did he succeed?
Hard to say. All we know for sure is that he never made another one – because he did exactly what he wanted with that one, or because he realized that really was the best he could do? Ambition is a strange rider. Sometimes the horse it picks can’t carry it.
Our house? he suddenly said.
Yes.
The decorating’s mine. Everything else in our life is Billy. You have no idea how much I did for him. Everything. He was so sweet… . That man, Hazelwood, should never have come. After he left, Billy was agitated. There’s nothing to stop me, he kept saying over and over, I could go back, I could work again. The look in his eye was a terrible thing. Hazelwood had told me where he was staying. I went there and tried to talk to him. Told him if he truly cared about Billy he’d leave him alone, but he wouldn’t listen. What else could I do? I had to stop him. I couldn’t let Billy be hurt again. And now… Now I’ve made Billy immortal, just a little, haven’t I? No one will ever forget how Hazelwood died. And whenever they think of that, they’ll remember Billy’s movie.