We all looked in his direction: another Englishman without much grasp of the demands of the freak show genre, you might think.
“Yeah?” Motorhead Phil said.
“I’m what you need,” said Barry.
This sounded incomprehensible, if not downright nuts, but Motorhead Phil and his crew were more trusting and accepting than I was. They gathered round once more.
“Go on,” Motorhead Phil said to Barry.
“All right, I will,” said Barry dramatically.
Unlike me, he welcomed the attention that was now coming his way, positively basked in it.
“Well,” he said, “I think Ian’s got a point, and he’s not wrong, but he’s only half right. He hasn’t gone far enough. We’ll go further. We’ll go all the way. We’ll go too far. We’ll do what he says, gradually make the line of Beetles longer and longer, but the thing is, I’ll be in the line. Me. We’ll get somebody to push my car so I’m in there with the other wrecked Beetles. And I’ll be the last car in the line. I’ll be stuck there. I’ll be unable to start the car, unable to get away, unable to get out of the door. At risk. If Leezza screws up and doesn’t make the full distance she’ll land right on top of me. And I’ll be killed. A blaze of glory. A show stopper. Death with dignity. It’ll be a real crowd pleaser.”
To me this sounded at least as bad as the mountain lion idea, but Motorhead Phil, for one, seemed to like the sound of it.
“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I can see it’s got something going for it. Thrills, spills, the sense of imminent death, a fat self-loathing guy in a Volkswagen Beetle; it might work. But I still think it needs something else.”
He thought hard, and as he thought he pulled just as hard on a jump-cable that was attached to his left nipple.
“How about this?” Motorhead Phil said. “Every show, every night, the line gets longer, so the jump gets longer too, so Barry’s chances of survival get less and less. However great Little Miss Ballistic here is, sooner or later she’s going to screw up and come crashing down to earth, so then she’s guaranteed to squash the fat bastard. No offence, Barry.”
“None taken, Phil,” said Barry.
I felt a certain duty to be offended on Barry’s behalf.
“Yeah, that’s it,” said Motorhead Phil. “I like it. It’s got an inevitability about it. Let’s do it.”
The others agreed with him, and obviously there was no arguing about the matter of inevitability, but I couldn’t see that necessarily meant it was a good idea.
“Are you really sure about this, Barry?” I asked.
“Of course I am. You know, when I first came to this country I always used to drive like a nutcase,” he said. “I went too fast, I overtook on blind spots, went round corners on two wheels. I didn’t care. But I had a charmed life. I never had a crash. I never spun off the road. A cop pulled me over in South Dakota once, asked me if I had a death wish. I said I did. But it didn’t do me any good. Wishing’s not enough.
“So then I started eating myself to death, and that’s going all right, I suppose, but it’s a slow business. I’m sure I’ve got sky-high blood pressure and that my cholesterol’s through the roof, and probably I’ve got a fatty liver and of course I don’t do any exercise so my muscles are all wasting away. But I’m still alive. And really it’s a miserable business, believe me. A Volkswagen Beetle that drops out of the sky with a beautiful woman in it and puts me out of my misery. What could be better? Who wouldn’t want that?”
I turned to Motorhead Phil. I knew he wasn’t exactly the voice of reason here, but as the guy in charge of the show I thought that, if nothing else, he might be dissuaded by legal considerations.
“Won’t this be like murder?” I said.
“Murder cum suicide I’d call it,” said Motorhead Phil. “But we’ll get Barry to sign some papers absolving us of responsibility, and it’s not like he’s got any family who are going to sue us. And even if they did, we’ve got no money, so no way are we worth suing.”
So it all came down to Leezza. She’d been silent until now, and I took her silence as disapproval, as resistance. I didn’t think she could be seriously considering this homicidal variation on her stunt. She was a sane, sensible, scientific sort of a woman, wasn’t she? Surely she’d find this whole idea offensive if not downright wicked. What did I know?
“Are you all right with this, Leezza?” Motorhead Phil asked her.
“If you are and Barry is, then sure,” she said, with all the casualness in the world.
And that was that. It was confirmed that everybody, with the possible exception of me, was all right with it. Motorhead Phil slapped a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“Yeah, you did well, Ian,” he said. “For a college boy.”
It seemed he now meant the term as a genuine compliment, though a stunt that threatened, indeed eventually promised, the death of a fat man in a Beetle wasn’t something I was all that keen to take credit for. And in any case, I thought it might still never happen. Perhaps everyone would sleep on it, feel differently in the morning and have second thoughts: maybe common sense would prevail. Who was I trying to kid?
One small consolation was that I didn’t think I’d be around to see it. This was my swansong. I reckoned my days of hanging around the movie set, and therefore my days in Fontinella, were all but over. I had a movie director who wanted to kill me. I knew I wasn’t welcome on the set. I needed to get out of there. I didn’t even want to go back to my trailer, even though it was too late to leave now. Leezza noticed my reluctance.
“You can sleep here if you want to,” she said.
It was a very nice offer, and perhaps not a wholly unexpected one. It had been a strange day, the sort that brings people together. Leezza and I had definitely bonded in the course of it. I assumed that I was being invited to spend the night with her, but I was wrong about that too.
She pointed to the distant line of non-running Beetles parked in the centre of the speedway.
“Pick a Beetle,” she said. “Any Beetle.”
Eighteen
It wasn’t the first time I’d spent a night sleeping alone in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle and I suspected it wouldn’t be my last, but I was certainly glad that it was a rare and passing condition. It brought home the true unpleasantness, maybe even the horror, of Barry’s self-inflicted plight. I could see perfectly well how living in a Volkswagen Beetle full time, being in there all day every day, sleeping there every night, being unable to get out, could drive you to despair and beyond.
I didn’t get much sleep, so I was awake very early next morning, when it was barely light. That suited me. Now was the time for me to slink back to the Idle Palms trailer park, which I did. My plan was simple. I’d go back there and gather up my stuff. Then I’d find some way of departing — a taxi, a bus, a girl in a Corvette who wasn’t afraid to pick up hitchhikers. Yeah, right. If the worst came to the worst, I’d walk out of there. Then I’d find my way to a car-rental office; even Fontinella must have such things, surely. Then I’d get myself a car and spend a few days driving around and staying in cool old motels, eating in retro-style diners, living the English tourist’s American dream.
Fortunately there wasn’t much going on around Idle Palms as yet. The new security guard on the gate was in place, and he recognised me from the day before and waved me in with a sanctimonious and disapproving shake of his head. What had they all been saying and thinking about me in my absence?
I went into my trailer. Packing up my few belongings would take no more than a couple of minutes. There was nobody in the trailer park to whom I needed or wanted to say goodbye. A clean, easy, impersonal departure was all that was required. However, as I hunted around for my dirty socks and clean T-shirts I heard stirrings outside the trailer: voices, the sound of machinery being wheeled around and then a car arriving, Josh Martin’s Porsche. I took all this as bad news.