The trolley car ran late. He did not sleep well. He urinates a lot. He paces a lot. He mooches two pre-rolls from a Texas cowhand who keeps talking about what a nancy the casting director in the jodhpurs is. The smoke, as always, makes him cough. But it helps calm him. The “nervous condition” being something he’s always suffered from.
For two hours, waiting for the casting director to call him, he wanders the ranch, looks at the rope corral, the ranch house, the two hundred yards of train track meant to simulate miles of train track. There’s even a replica of the engine from the Great Northern standing there. Everything is hot, dusty. He urinates a lot.
Around ten he sees Rex Swanson.
Rex is taller than he expected and more handsome. Dressed in a white Stetson, white Western shirt with blue pearl buttons, white sheepskin vest and matching chaps, and enough rouge and lipstick to make him look womanly. Rex has just arrived, being dispatched from the back of a limousine long enough to house thirty people. He is instantly surrounded, and in the tone of everybody about him there is a note of supplication.
Please Rex this.
Please Rex that.
Please Rex.
Rex please.
Just before lunch he sees his chance.
He has drifted over to a small stage where a painted backdrop depicts the interior of a railroad car.
It is here that Rex, in character, holds up the rich passengers, a kerchief over his face, twin silver Peacemakers shining in his hands. He demands their money, gold, jewelry.
A camera rolls; an always-angry director shouts obscenities through a megaphone. Everybody, particularly the casting director, looks nervous.
His father knocking a baseball to him. His father bouncing him on his knee. His father driving the three of them — how good it felt to be the-three-of-them, mother son father — in the buggy to Sunday church. Then his father happening to be on the train that day/so waxen in the coffin/pennies on his eyes—
He moves now.
Past the director who is already shouting at him.
Past the actors who play the passengers.
Right up to Rex himself.
“You killed my father,” he hears himself say, jerking the Navy Colt from his waistband. “Thirty-seven years ago in Morgan County, Missouri!”
Rex, frantic, shouts to somebody. “Lenny! My God, it’s that lunatic who’s been writing me letters all these years!”
“But I know who you really are. You’re really Jesse!” he says, fear gone once again, pure excitement now.
Rex — now it’s his turn to be the supplicant — says, “I’m an actor from New Jersey. I only play Jesse James in these pictures! I only play him!”
But he has come a long ways, fifteen hundred miles and forty-one years, for this moment.
He starts firing.
It takes him three bullets, but he gets it done, he does what Robert Ford only supposedly did. He kills Jesse James.
Then he turns to answer the fire of the cowboys who are now shooting at him.
He smiles. The way that special breed of men in the nickelodeons always do.
The gunslingers.
Nightmare Child
Judging by reader mail, the single most popular piece I’ve ever written was the prologue to an otherwise forgettable programmer called NIGHTMARE CHILD, a novel I wrote as Daniel Ransom (most of the Ransoms are, in fact, forgettable programmers). Three college instructors wrote to ask me questions about it. They were using it in their writing courses and wondered just how I’d come to write it. And the twenty or so readers who wrote me right after publication all seemed to agree that here were two people you genuinely loved to hate. I remember the two days I worked on this, how I laughed out loud at several points, and then how I suddenly stopped, and felt a little sad, recognizing at the last that there was more than a little bit of me in both characters.
Deep into the steamy August afternoon they drove, Jeff with his allergies, Mindy with her menstrual cramps.
The little girl was not fortunate enough to be up front with the BMW’s air conditioning blowing and festive rock music playing on the tape deck. No, nine-year-old Jenny lay inside a four-foot wooden box in the trunk. She had been blindfolded, her mouth taped shut, and her wrists bound together with clothesline cord. Inside the box it was dark. Inside the box it was one hundred six degrees above zero.
“You think we should check her?”
“Jeff, will you relax?”
“She could’ve worked her way loose or something.”
“And then what? She’s in the trunk, for God’s sake. Where’s she going to go?”
By now the red BMW was climbing up into the steep clay cliffs and rough timberland above Silver Lake. Tourists were everywhere, plump in gaudy vacation clothes as they broiled in the sun along the side of the road, bug-eyed in dark glasses, packed into the station wagons and campers that zipped by in the opposite lane.
Jeff was careful to drive fifty-five. Please, God, don't let me get stopped for anything now. Not now.
“I should never have started that diet yesterday,” Mindy said. “Not with my period and all. But I guess I needed to.”
“Oh, honey, you know I like you fine the way you are.”
“Dr. Goldberg said I needed to lose twenty-five pounds.”
“Did you ever see Dr. Goldberg’s wife?”
“No. Have you?”
Jeff nodded. Blond, he was one of those handsome men who would appear boyish well into his fifties. He was thirty-seven. “A blimp.”
“His wife’s a blimp?”
“Absolutely.”
Dark, fat Mindy slapped the dashboard. “Then where does he get off telling me I need to lose twenty-five pounds?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He wants to tell his own wife that she needs to lose twenty-five pounds, but he doesn’t have the nerve so he takes it out on you.”
“Oh, Jeff, thanks. I really needed to hear that. I’ve only had seven hundred calories since yesterday. Now I can eat something.”
“Eating sensibly. That’s the key, Mindy. Eating sensibly.”
After another quarter-mile, Mindy said, “Do you suppose we could hit a DQ? There’s one about a mile outside the park. I wouldn’t get a big one. Just a dinky one. A real dinky one.” Mindy always called Dairy Queen “DQ,” and whenever she used the word “dinky” she illustrated it by putting her right forefinger and thumb about a tenth of an inch apart to show that “dinky” meant nearly infinitesimal. “Huh? Could we?”
“Sure,” Jeff said. “Why not? A dinky one wouldn’t hurt anything.”
In the sunlight the white DQ was blinding. Kids with stuff all over their faces tugged tirelessly on the tired arms of parents, wanting permission to pee or play or get another cone.
As Jeff aimed the BMW into a parking place, Mindy said, “Did you really see Dr. Goldberg’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At the supermarket one day.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“She was with him.”
“You don’t have to lie to spare my feelings.”
“Now, honey.”
“Really. You don’t. If you think I’m fat just say so and I’ll go right back on that diet.”
“Honey. Please.”
“Really. I will.”
“You’re not fat. And I love you.”
“And you really did see Dr. Goldberg’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“And she was a blimp?”