That afternoon Alafair asked if Clete and I wanted to take a trip to northern Arizona. Clete said he’d pass. I said, “Why not?”
I took four days’ vacation time and flew with her and Lou Wexler and Desmond Cormier in a Learjet to a tourist town on the edge of Monument Valley. Wexler slept, and Desmond was on his laptop most of the time, and Alafair and I played Monopoly. On several occasions, even when she was little, she and I had spent time in Hollywood with movie people we had met in Louisiana. We were always treated graciously, and I relearned an old lesson about judging. People in Hollywood are often egocentric, but nonetheless they dream and many of them are wedded to a perception of the world that they never share with others lest they be thought odd or eccentric or dishonest. Perhaps there’s a bit of the secular mystic in them. Not unlike Desmond’s.
I didn’t know how to read Lou Wexler. Certainly he was a fine-looking man, with his bronze skin and rugged profile and sun-bleached hair and wide shoulders that tapered to a twenty-eight-inch waist. Immediately upon arrival at our faux-Navajo hotel, he put on swim trunks and walked on his hands to the tip of the diving board, then did a somersault into the water. Although I suspected he was close to forty, there was hardly a blemish on his skin except for a ragged white scar where his kidney would have been. When others ordered drinks before supper on the terrace, he went behind the bar and fixed his own power shake and drank it foaming from the stainless steel container. I suspected he would be a formidable man in a confrontation, the kind of fellow who had fire in his belly.
He sat next to me at the table. People I didn’t know joined us. Several had obviously gotten an early start. North of us lay the vastness of the desert, the sky a seamless blue in the fading light, the sandstone buttes rising like castles from the mountain floor. Wexler glanced at my iced tea. “Looks like we’re two of a kind.”
“In what way?” I replied.
“Abstinence,” he said. “I can’t say it’s a virtue with me, though.”
“How’s that?”
“I never saw the attraction. More liability than asset. My father was on the grog all his life and asked for a bottle of porter on his deathbed.”
I didn’t reply.
“You’re a quiet one, sir,” he said.
Like most recovering drunks, I didn’t like to talk about alcohol or alcoholism with what we call earth people or flatlanders. “Call me Dave, please. What kind of movie are y’all making? How do you tie Arizona to Louisiana?”
“It’s an epic film about three generations in a legendary family,” he said. “Southerners who migrated to the frontier, then ruined the frontier the way they ruined everything else they got their hands on.”
“I take it you’re not a fan of manifest destiny.”
He loaded a taco chip with guacamole and put it into his mouth and studied Desmond at the end of the table, talking to two beautiful women. A silver bowl filled with water and floating tropical flowers was in front of Wexler. The crumbs from his taco chip fell into it.
“This film means a lot to Desmond,” he said. “In fact, it’s an obsession. He has seventy-five million dollars of other people’s money and thirty million of his own riding on it.”
“Who put up the seventy-five?” I asked.
“We used to soak the Japs until they figured out they were still paying for Pearl Harbor. The Arabs are a good source if you don’t think too hard about what they do in Saudi jails or to women who get out of line.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” I said.
“That’s because I don’t intend to.” He laughed.
“I saw your scar. You picked it up in Africa?”
“A fellow hooked me with a machete. I thought it was time to find a better line of work. So now I do this stuff. Desmond is a good one to work for. No nonsense. If you’re wired, you’re fired.”
“Why does he tolerate Antoine Butterworth?”
“He thinks Antoine’s an artist rather than a sadistic degenerate with his head up a woman’s dress.”
I looked around to see if anyone had heard him. If they had, they showed no sign. Wexler turned his face to a puff of cool air from the desert floor. “Tomorrow we’re shooting a remarkable scene. Probably few will take much heed of it, but if it works, it will be an extraordinary moment, the kind that brought to a close My Darling Clementine. It comes from the final scene of the novel that’s at the core of the script.”
It had been a while since I had read the book or books from which the film was adapted, so I had a hard time tracking his line of thought.
“Don’t pay attention to me, Mr. Robicheaux — I mean Dave,” he said. “I’m not a bad screenwriter, but I’m best at adapting the work of others. And like most producers, I’m great at calling up the caterer and taking wealthy bozos to lunch.”
He looked at the final rays of sun streaking across the desert floor, the pools of shadow at the base of the buttes, the dust rising like strings of smoke from the crests into the light. “It’s like staring into infinity, isn’t it? Desmond believes death lies on the other side of the horizon, where the earth drops off and the sky begins. I think he’s wrong. It’s not death that’s waiting out there. Not at all.”
The people who had gotten an early start were getting louder, their laughter cacophonous and disjointed. The evening air was suddenly cooler, the sandstone formations more lavender than red, more like tombstones than castles.
“If it’s not death, what is it?” I asked.
“Something unknowable.” His eyes were hollow, sightless, even though he was staring straight at me. “We drown in it. This is the omphalos, the center of it all. You were there, sir. You know what I’m talking about.”
“I was where?”
“You bloody well know what I mean. Where you see the realities and never tell anyone.”
I wondered if I was talking to a madman. Or someone who had been in the Garden. Or someone who shot up with hallucinogens.
“Sorry. After seven in the evening I develop logorrhea,” he said.
“You’re fine. I need to take a walk.”
“What about dinner?”
“I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have sciatica trouble sometimes.”
“I’ll come along,” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
“I see you walk with a purpose,” he said. “I can always tell a military man. You ever count cadence? It puts your blood to pumping, by God. Orwell said it. Maybe there’s something beautiful about war after all.”
Wrong, I thought. But why argue with those who are proud of their membership in the Herd?
At five-thirty a.m., I went down to breakfast inside the hotel restaurant and thought I was seeing an apparition at a table by a big glass window that gave onto the desert. Clete was wearing his powder blue sport coat and gray slacks and shined oxblood loafers, his porkpie hat crown-down on the tablecloth. He was surrounded by a stack of pancakes inserted with sausage patties, scrambled eggs, hash browns, a bowl of milk gravy, toast, coffee, a pitcher of cream, and a glass of tomato juice with an orange slice notched on the rim.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Thought I’d get out of town in case Helen wanted to chat about Hugo Tillinger. Maybe I’ll hike in the hills. Lose a few pounds.”
I sat down. “Are you up to something?”
“No, you got my word.”