Rune walked along the Hudson, staring at the olive-drab shadows stretching outward into the rippled texture of the water. Seagulls stood on one leg and hunched against the cool morning breeze.
After all, didn't Einstein get kicked out of school for failing math? Didn't Churchill fail government?
They went on to show everybody.
The difference was, though, that they had a second chance.
So that was it: no distributor. And no money for editing, voice-overs, titles, sound track…
Rune had thirty hours of unedited tape whose value would go to zero in about six months-the time when the world would stop caring about Shelly Lowe's death.
She went home to her houseboat and stacked up all the tape cassettes on her shelf, tossed the script on top of them and walked into the kitchen.
She spent the afternoon sipping herbal tea as she sat on the deck, browsing through some of her books. One that she settled on, for some reason, was her old copy of Dante'sInferno.
Wondering why that volume-not the one about purgatory or the one about paradise-was the best-seller.
Wondering about the levels of hell people descend to.
Mostly she meant Tommy as she thought this. But there were others, too.
Danny Traub, who, even if he donated money to a good cause, was a son of a bitch who liked to hurt women.
Michael Schmidt, who thought he was God and destroyed a fine actress's chance for no good reason.
Arthur Tucker, who stole Shelly's play after she'd died.
Rune wondered why descent seems the natural tendency, why it's so much harder to go upward, the way Shelly was trying to do. Like there's some huge gravity of darkness.
She liked that, gravityof darkness, and she wrote it down in her notebook, thinking she wished she had a script to use the phrase in.
If she hadn't died would Shelly ever have climbed out of the Underworld like Eurydice?
Rune dozed and woke at sunset, the orange disk squeezing into the earth over the Jersey flatlands, rippling in the angle of the dense atmosphere. She stretched and took a shower, and ate a cheese sandwich for dinner.
Afterward, she walked to a pay phone and called Sam Healy.
"I got fired." She told him the story.
"Oh, no. I'm sorry."
"My one regret is that we didn't ship it to the networks," she joked. "Can you imagine? Lusty Cousins on an ad during prime time? Boy, would that've been wholly audacious."
"You need any money?"
"Aw, this is no big deal. I get fired all the time. I think I get fired more often than people hire me. Probably doesn't work that way but it seems so."
"Well, you want to go out and get drunk?"
"Naw, I've got plans," she said. "Let's make it tomorrow."
"Fair enough. My treat."
They hung up and Rune took a couple dollars in quarters out of her pocket, called directory assistance.
She needed most of the coins. It took her quite a while to find a dance school that promised to make her an expert Texas two-stepper in just one night.
The place didn't exactly live up to that promise. It took a while to convince them she wasn't interested in signing up for a series of Latin dances or the "Chic to Chic" Fred and Ginger special.
But after the lessons got under way she picked up the moves pretty fast and she figured she could hold her own. The next night she surprised Healy by showing up at his place in a gingham skirt and blue blouse.
"I look like Raggedy Ann. I'll never be able to show myself south of Bleecker Street-I hope you're happy."
They went to his Texas club again and danced for a couple hours, Rune impressing the hell out of him with what she'd learned. Then an amateur caller got on stage and started an impromptu square dance.
"Enough is enough," Rune said. They sat down and started working on a plate of baby back ribs.
At eleven a couple of cops Healy knew came in and in a half hour the place was so crowded that they all left and went to another bar, a dive of a place on Greenwich Avenue. She expected them to talk about guns and dead criminals and bloodstains but they were just normal people who argued about the mayor and Washington and movies.
She had a great time and forgot they were cops until one time there was a truck backfire out on the street and three of them (Sam wasn't one) half-reached for their hips, then a second later, when they understood it was just a truck, dropped their hands, never missing a beat of the conversation and not laughing about what they'd done.
But that made Rune think of Tommy and that reminded her of Nicole and the evening went sour. She was happy to get home and into bed.
The next day she applied for unemployment at the office on Sixth Avenue, where she knew most of the clerks by name. The lines weren't long-she took that as a barometer reading of a good economy. She was out by noon.
Over the next week she saw Healy three times. She sensed he wanted to see her more but one of her mother's warnings was about men on the rebound. And getting too involved with anolder man on the rebound didn't seem real wise at all.
Still, she missed him and on Thursday when she called she got a pleasing jolt when he said, "Tomorrow's my day off, how about we go-"
"Blow things up?"
"I was going to say, have a picnic someplace."
"Oh, yeah! I'd love to get out of the city. The streets smell like wet dogs and it's supposed to hit ninety-seven. The only thing is I've got this interview at a restaurant."
He said, "You're making a movie about a restaurant?"
"Sam, I'm applying for a job as a waitress."
"Postpone it for a day. We'll get out of the city."
"You're twisting my arm."
"I'll call you tomorrow with details."
"I haven't said yes."
"Tomorrow."
He hung up.
"Yes," she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Kent was a small town in Putnam County, sixty-seven miles north of New York City, near the Connecticut state line. The population was 3,700.
The town hadn't changed much since the day it was incorporated in 1798. It was too far from New York or Albany or Hartford for commuters, though a few people drove to and from Poughkeepsie for work at Vassar. The residents mostly made their money from farming and tourism and the staples of small-town economics: insurance, real estate and building trades.
Travel books about the area generally didn't mention Kent. The MobilGuide gave the restaurant in the Travel-lodge near the Interstate a couple of stars. The Farming Museum got mentioned. So did a spring flower festival. It was a quiet place.
Outside of the small downtown, about a mile from the last of the seven Protestant churches in Kent, was an old rock quarry. The huge pit did double duty: a Saturday night hangout for teenage boys who had either dates or six-packs of Bud, and an informal shooting range during the day. This afternoon, three men stood at a disintegrating wooden board that served as a table for bench-resting rifles and for holding ammo and targets and extra magazines.
All three were in the NRA-accepted standing firing position-right foot back, parallel to the target, left forward and pointed downrange. They were tall men with shortcut hair sprayed into place. Two of the men had graying hair and were thin. The other, a younger man with black hair, had a beer belly, though his legs were thin and his shoulders broad. They all wore light-colored shoes, light slacks (two pink and one gray) and short-sleeved dress shirts with ties kept in place with a tack or bar. In the shirt pocket of the fatter man was a plastic pen-and-pencil caddy.
They all wore teardrop-shaped shooting sunglasses tinted yellow and made out of impact-resistant glass. In their ears were flesh-colored earplugs.
One thin man and the fat man held Kalashnikov assault rifles, whose clips they had just finished emptying at paper targets 150 feet away. They rested the guns on the ground, muzzles up, and began picking up the empty brass cartridges, which they would reload themselves on the weekend.
The third man held a square, ungainly Israeli Uzi, which he fired in two-second bursts. The muzzle ended in a ten-inch sound suppressor, and the gun made a sound like a hushed chain saw.