“Take off the cuffs, Henri. I'm not a flight risk.”
He opened the small fridge beside him, and I saw that it was stocked with water, Gatorade, some packaged food. He took out two bottles of water, put one on the table in front of me.
“Say we work about eight hours a day, we'll be here for about five days -”
“Where's here?”
“Joshua Tree. This campsite is closed for road repairs, but the electric hookup works,” Henri told me.
Joshua Tree National Park is eight hundred thousand acres of desert wilderness, miles of nothing but yucca and brush and rock formations in all directions. The high views are said to be spectacular, but normal folk don't camp here in the white heat of high summer. I didn't understand people who came here at all.
“In case you think you can get out of here,” Henri said, “let me save you the trouble. This is Alcatraz, desert-style. This trailer is sitting on a sea of sand. Daytime temperatures can climb to a hundred and twenty. Even if you got out at night, the sun would fry you before you reached a road. So, please, and I mean this sincerely, stay put.”
“Five days, huh?”
“You'll be back in L.A. for the weekend. Scout's honor.”
“Okay. So how about it?”
I held out my hands, and Henri took off the cuffs. Then he removed the cinch around my legs and unshackled me.
Chapter 80
I rubbed my wrists, stood up, drank down a bottle of cold water in one continuous swallow, those small pleasures giving me a boost of unexpected optimism. I thought about Leonard Zagami's enthusiasm. I imagined dusty old writing dreams coming true for me.
“Okay, let's do this,” I said.
Henri and I set up the awning against the side of the trailer, put out a couple of folding chairs and a card table in the thin strip of shade. With the trailer door open, cool air tickling our necks, we got down to business.
I showed Henri the contract, explained that Raven-Wofford would only make payments to the writer. I would pay Henri.
“Payments are made in installments,” I told him. “The first third is due on signing. The second payment comes on acceptance of the manuscript, and the final payment is due on publication.”
“Not a bad life insurance policy for you,” Henri said. He smiled brightly.
“Standard terms,” I said to Henri, “to protect the publisher from writers crashing in the middle of the project.”
We discussed our split, a laughably one-sided negotiation.
“It's my book, right?” Henri said, “and your name's going on it. That's worth more than money, Ben.”
“So why don't I just work for free?” I said.
Henri smiled, said, “Got a pen?”
I handed one over, and Henri signed his nom de jour on the dotted lines, gave me the number of his bank account in Zurich.
I put the contract away, and Henri ran an electric cord out from the trailer. I booted up my laptop, turned on my tape recorder, gave it a sound test.
I said, “Ready to start?”
Henri said, “I'm going to tell you everything you need to know to write this book, but I'm not going to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, understand?”
“It's your story, Henri. Tell it however you want.”
Henri leaned back in his canvas chair, folded his hands over his tight gut, and began at the beginning.
“I grew up in the sticks, a little farming town on the edge of nothing. My parents had a chicken farm, and I was their only child. They had a crappy marriage. My father drank. He beat my mother. He beat me. She beat me, and she also took some shots at him.”
Henri described the creaking four-room farmhouse, his room in the attic over his parents' bedroom.
“There was a crack between two floorboards,” he told me. “I couldn't actually see their bed, but I could see shadows, and I could hear what they were doing. Sex and violence. Every night. I slept over that.”
Henri described the three long chicken houses – and how at the age of six, his father put him in charge of killing chickens the old-fashioned way, decapitation with an axe on a wooden block.
“I did my chores like a good boy. I went to school. I went to church. I did what I was told and tried to duck the blows. My father not only clocked me regularly, but he also humiliated me.
“My mom. I forgive her. But for years I had a recurring dream about killing them both. In the dream, I pinned their heads to that old stump in the chicken yard, swung the axe, and watched their headless bodies run.
“For a while after I woke up from that dream, I'd think it was true. That I'd really done it.”
Henri turned to me.
“Life went on. Can you picture me, Ben? Cute little kid with an axe in my hand, my overalls soaked with blood?”
“I can see you. It's a sad story, Henri. But it sounds like a good place to start the book.”
Henri shook his head. “I've got a better place.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
Henri hunched over his knees and clasped his hands. He said, “I would start the movie of my life at the summer fair. The scene would center on me and a beautiful blond girl named Lorna.”
Chapter 81
I constantly checked the recorder, saw that the wheels were slowly turning.
A dry breeze blew across the sands, and a lizard ran across my shoe. Henri raked both hands through his hair, and he seemed nervous, agitated. I hadn't seen this kind of fidgety behavior in him before. It made me nervous, too.
“Please set the scene, Henri. This was a county fair?”
“You could call it that. Agriculture and animals were on one side of the main path. Carnival rides and food were on the other. No breadcrumbs, Ben. This could have happened outside Wengen or Chipping Camden or Cowpat, Arkansas.
“Don't worry about where it was. Just see the bright lights on the fairgrounds, the happy people, and the serious animal competitions. Business deals were at stake here, people's farms and their futures.
“I was fourteen,” he continued. “My parents were showing exotic chickens in the fowl tent. It was getting late, and my father told me to get the truck from the private lot for exhibitor's vehicles, upfield from the fairgrounds.
“On the way, I cut through one of the food pavilions and I saw Lorna selling baked goods,” he said.
“Lorna was my age and was in my class at school. She was blond, a little shy. She carried her books in front of her chest, so you couldn't see her breasts. But you could see them anyway. There was nothing about Lorna I didn't want.”
I nodded, and Henri went on with his story.
“That day I remember she was wearing a lot of blue. Made her hair look even more blond, and when I said hi to her, she seemed glad to see me. Asked me if I wanted to get something to eat at the fairgrounds.
“I knew my father would kill me when I didn't come back with the truck, but I was willing to take the beating, that's how crazy I was about that beautiful girl.”
Henri described buying Lorna a cookie and said that they'd gone on a ride together, that she'd grabbed his hand when the roller coaster made its swooping descent.
“All the while I felt a wild kind of tenderness toward this girl. After the ride,” Henri said, “another boy came over, Craig somebody. He was a couple of years older. He looked right past me and told Lorna that he had tickets to the Ferris wheel, that it was unreal how the fairgrounds looked with the stars coming out and everything lit up down below.
“Lorna said, 'Oh, I'd love to do that,' and she turned to me, and said, 'You don't mind, do you?' and she took off with this guy.
“Well, I did mind, Ben.
“I watched them go, and then I went to get the truck and my beating. It was dark up in that lot, but I found my dad's truck next to a livestock trailer.
“Standing outside the trailer was another girl I knew from school, Molly, and she had a couple of calves with show ribbons on their halters. She was trying to load them into the trailer, but they wouldn't go.