Inside Straight

Brave Hawk is persistent. "You think because you work in Hollywood, you know everything, but you don't, Stuntman. You and I—" here Brave Hawk makes a completely fruity gesture of clasped hands "—we could be an awesome team!"

Jamal sees a nugget of truth in this—at least in the concept of teaming up against the other Clubs. But with this creature who looks like a John Ford Indian with wings? "Why me? Did Holy Roller already turn you down?"

This is all the encouragement Brave Hawk needs. He leaps up on the railing of the deck. "I never asked him! And it wouldn't work—not as well as Stuntman and Brave Hawk. We're two of a kind, man!"

Whenever Jamal hears that kind of talk from Brave Hawk, the pleasant images of his evisceration reappear. "We're both breathing. We both got talked into this project. I don't see what else we have in common."

Voices behind him signal the emergence of Jade Blossom and Diver from the house, both indecently perky and girly at this hour—and dressed for a swim. Diver might as well not exist—Jamal only sees Jade, her eyes, the way she moves. Her mouth. He has become infatuated with her mouth, the way her lower lip slides forward whenever she is about to speak.

Which she does, calling to Jamal, "What are you two doing over there? Scheming?" She and Diver start laughing, flirting with the camera team. It's all a big joke. Nevertheless, Jamal wishes Jade would approach him. They would make a great team.

"Think about it, Stuntman," Brave Hawk says, insistently. "We're both people of color . . ."

Jamal almost laughs out loud. People of color? Jamal is dark enough and has always known he was tagged as "black," but Brave Hawk? His wild card aside, Brave Hawk is no more ethnic in appearance than an Italian American. "And do what? Call ourselves The Red and the Black?" Jamal has read the novel; he knows without asking that Brave Hawk has never heard of Stendahl.

In fact, Brave Hawk loves the phrase, jabbing his finger at Jamal like a fourth-grade teacher whose student just finished the multiplication tables. "That's the idea. Make these producers and judges think twice before they vote us off."

"You mean play the race card, you and me."

"Everyone else is using what they've got. Those girls are giggling and snuggling up to the judges and camera crews. Have you seen the way Curveball's been flirting with John Fortune? Rosa and Tiffani are even worse, and Pop Tart . . ."

Jamal doesn't want to admit it, but Brave Hawk is correct. He's sure he's seen Pop Tart having the kind of intimate conversations only lovers have . . . with Digger Downs. "Why shouldn't we use the tools God gave us?" Brave Hawk says.

But Jamal can already hear his father, Big Bill Norwood, the pro ballplayer, sneering. "The baseball doesn't care what color you are. Can you hit or not? That's all." He's heard that all his life—and unlike some of the pronouncements Big Bill has made—believes it. He knows he's put in the "black" category, but he can't honestly say it's held him back.

"Wouldn't we be smarter to just win the fucking challenges?"

"Yeah, how is that working for us?"

Jamal barely manages to get the words through his teeth. "I just don't see how you and I singing 'Kumbaya' is supposed to stop the bleeding."

Brave Hawk looks over his left wing at the crew—he is the worst actor Jamal has ever seen, and he's seen some bad ones—while slipping his right wing over Jamal. Even though the wings are an illusion, Jamal still feels enveloped in a smelly, scratchy blanket. "We agree not to vote each other off, for one thing. And if we find ourselves—oh, hell, trapped underwater or buried in quicksand—we share the oxygen tank."

Jamal can't believe that the Apache ace believes what he's saying. "I tell you what, Brave Hawk. I will absolutely cross-my-heart promise not to club you over the fucking head with the tank. That's the best I can do." He slips out from under the protective wing. "Grow up, Cochise."

As Jamal walks away, his legs finally working, he hears Brave Hawk say, "You'll be the next one out, Stuntman."

Jamal can't resist. Right in front of Art and the camera crew, he pivots. "If it means getting away from you, sign me up."

For a moment Brave Hawk doesn't react. Then, strangely, he bursts out laughing. He actually claps his hands together, like a happy infant. "Outstanding! God damn, Stuntman, you're good!" Then Brave Hawk looks past Jamal to the camera crew. "Did you guys get that?"

"Yeah," Art says, "but don't point us out, okay?"

"As long as you got it," Brave Hawk says, striding across the deck, daring to slap Jamal on the back. "Just another heated, interpersonal, real-life moment for the viewers of American Hero, right?"

"You suck, Brave Hawk."

For an instant, the Apache looks wounded. "The offer was genuine, Stuntman. I just made use of your rejection for the good of the show."

And now Jamal really wants to kill him.

What troubles him most is the realization that Brave Hawk is essentially correct: Stuntman has no offensive weapons, no arrows in the old quiver. He can only be reactive.

Another reason to be bitter about what happened to him.

He still remembers the night his wild card turned—far out in the Valley, so far out that the hills were rising again. It was the spring of his senior year at USC, where he was majoring in film and television. Part of the experience there was to work on everyone's student project. Who knew the pimply twenty-year-old serving as director might turn out to be the next Bryan Singer, and your ticket to a career on his crew.

The other goal was to become the first Jamal Norwood—a Denzel Washington or Will Smith for the twenty-first century. And when Nic Deladrier asked him to play the badass joker in his student film, Jamal knew—just knew—it was the first step. Deladrier was not only the most skilled of all the senior year directors, he was ambitious as hell. He had friends in the business, an uncle working at Endeavour . . . this student film would be shown at festivals, and Jamal Norwood's name and face would be known throughout that strata of the business where young assistants and junior agents share bodily fluids, job recommendations, and gossip.

The script called for Jamal, dressed in a leather outfit and mask as Derek Knight—wealthy amateur astronomer who, in the 1940s, discovered the approaching Takisian ship and tried to warn a skeptical America—to leap from the top of a water tank that had been painted the same color as the alien ship.

The team had built a platform covered with foam rubber six feet below Jamal's launch point—out of frame. Jamal had practiced the leap four times, twice in daylight. He was ready to do it for Deladrier's camera.

But as often happened in southern California in the spring, it had rained that day. Not just rained Seattle-style, but poured torrentially, like a typhoon. The surface of the tower was too slick for Jamal's boots. When he made the leap, he slipped—and missed the platform.

The water tower was on a hillside. The drop to the base of the hill was, Jamal later learned, over a hundred feet. The base was jagged rock—not that he hit directly, he slammed into several tree branches before cartwheeling onto the rocks.

What he remembered was the confusion of slipping, reaching for the platform—the horrified look on Deladrier's face as the director flew upward from Jamal's point of view.

That was followed by the roller-coaster moment of freefall—no panic, just disbelief.

Then a blinding, gasping impact, like being hit by a speeding truck. Shock mercifully suppressed the pain for a few moments. Long enough for Jamal to realize he had fallen ten stories onto the rocks and was still alive.

He couldn't be certain. He was blind, deaf, without feeling in his arms and legs. For an eternally terrible moment he thought this was death.

But then his vision returned, at least to where he could see the flash-lights of rescuers searching for him. As the roaring in his ears died down, like the temporary damage from a heavy metal concert, he heard voices, boots crunching on brush.