Slow Fade Read online

  He rode on, prodding the horse into a loping stride, his mood changing as the sun pushed over the horizon like a squashed tomato. He was shaking loose a bit, riding into open space, and fuck the rest. The acrid smell of the sage enveloped him, his mind slacking off as he rode into a dense forest of piñon and juniper. A twisted branch whipped against him, drawing blood across his forehead. But A.D. was so deep into the mythology of his ride that he accepted the pain as initiation, and riding back into the open again, he permitted the glory of the day to elevate him once more. The horse tested the reins, wanting to stretch out, and he let himself go the rest of the way as well, flat out if that was meant to be, and they galloped across the desert and then down along the banks of a stilled green river.

  A rifle shot broke the thunder of his ride. Then another.

  Heading straight toward him along the banks of the river galloped two runaway horses and their riders. It was an apparition that was never to leave A.D., one that he would visualize constantly, without warning, always in slow motion, the figures swaying toward him as if under water.

  As A.D.’s horse bucked up a steep hill, the first rider passed him, her long black hair flying out behind her as she hung grimly on to the horse’s mane, a look of amazed terror on her face.

  The second horse swerved up the hill, galloping neck and neck beside him, its rider rising high in the air over the saddle, his elongated arms and legs flopping about in total abandon. He managed to let out a yell and looked toward A.D., a sly smile on his pale emaciated face, as if some part of him was watching over the whole mad plunging ride, even as his body flew over the horse’s neck toward the ground.

  A.D.’s horse swerved again and ran straight back across the desert. More shots rang out followed by a line of horsemen appearing over the crest of a hill. It dimly occurred to him that they were Indians and that they were preparing to let fly a volley of arrows in his direction.

  A.D. saw the arrow quite clearly as it fell out of the brilliant blue sky and felt the unwavering surge of his horse riding forward to meet it. Then there was total blackness followed by oblivion.

  HE WOKE later — they were to tell him two days later — conscious only that his head was wrapped in bandages and that he was alive. When he woke again the darkness and pain remained. His hands traced the bandages over his eyes and the thought of being blind made him fade out once more, curling in on himself, whimpering and moaning like a small animal.

  Still later, he woke once more, screaming out.

  A hand lightly touched his wrist.

  “You’ve lost an eye,” a man’s voice said. “Your other eye will be all right except that it’s traumatized and you won’t be able to see out of it for a few weeks. It’s a kind of localized hysteria.”

  “Which eye is gone?”

  “The left.”

  “Are you the doctor?” A.D. asked.

  “Unfortunately, no. But I read your chart. I’m the last person you saw before you rode into that arrow. I’m Walker Hardin.”

  As if on instant replay, he saw again that mad puppetlike figure flying over the horse’s neck.

  “You crazy asshole,” A.D. said. “You almost killed me.”

  “It’s true.” Walker’s voice was soft and matter-of-fact. “You came close to dying.”

  The hand removed itself from A.D.’s wrist and he could hear Walker pouring a glass of water.

  “My horse spooked,” Walker explained. “And then Evelyn’s horse lost control. It was a spectacular ride.”

  “Fuck you and your horse and your spectacular ride,” A.D. said. “What about the Indians?”

  “They were Apaches about to scalp three mountain men.”

  The image enraged A.D. “There aren’t any mountain men in the desert,” he yelled.

  “They were on their way to Mexico to get laid.”

  His hand reached up to his blind eye. He didn’t care about any of this bullshit. One entire eye had been eliminated from his head and he wanted it back. He didn’t want a black patch or some piece of round glass. He wanted the cocksucker’s eye and he reached out for Walker. An eye for an eye.

  Walker took hold of A.D.’s clawing hand and lowered it down by his side. His grip was like a handcuff. “We all rode onto a movie set,” he said. “You spoiled the first shot of the day.”

  “You mean none of this is real?” A.D. asked.

  “The arrow must have been real.”

  “The arrow?”

  “Yes. The arrow.”

  “Well, I’m going to sue somebody,” A.D. said. “Half my vision is gone and somebody has to pay for that.”

  “How much do you think half your vision is worth?”

  “Worth? How do I know what an eye is worth? I won’t have any peripheral vision or depth of field. That’s a definite handicap.”

  Walker didn’t answer. A.D. thought he would ask for two million dollars to start with and then come down to a million, bottom line. The idea of losing an eye and gaining a sack of gold seemed like the deal of a lifetime.

  “You might have a hard time collecting from the movie people,” Walker said, as if he had been lurking outside A.D.’s mind. “Their lawyers are all on retainers and they have nothing to do but slow things up and fuck around with you. They also found some drugs in your pocket which they turned over to the sheriff.”

  A.D.’s hopes slid to the bottom as fast as they had streaked to the top.

  “As fate would have it, my father is the director of this miserable film,” Walker said. “He’ll certainly try and make a deal with you because making deals is how he goes about things. If I were you I would certainly listen to what he has to offer.”

  A.D. could hear Walker slowly and painfully shift around in his chair.

  “Are you badly smashed up?” he asked.

  “A broken shoulder and a few cracked ribs. Nothing that won’t heal.”

  “Who was the girl?” A.D. wanted to know. He was starting to drift off, but he didn’t want Walker to leave without knowing who the girl was.

  “My father’s wife” was the answer.

  “I’m freaked,” A.D. said.

  “What of?” Walker asked, his voice gentle and sad, coming from far away.

  “That I won’t make a deal,” A.D. whispered.

  “What kind of a deal?”

  “Any kind. A deal is a deal. I just want to keep moving the furniture around. I don’t want to be caught at home practicing scales.”

  He wasn’t making any sense. He wanted to say more about the deal and hear what Walker had to say, but words wouldn’t form and then it was too late and he was rolling back into painful sleep.

  WALKER remained next to A.D. while he slept, watching over him with somber gaze, listening to his shallow, constricted breathing. A pack of Marlboros lay on the night table. Using one hand because of his neck and shoulder wrap-around cast, he slowly opened the box and tapped out a cigarette. Lighting a match, he held the flame up to the cigarette in his mouth and inhaled deeply. He hadn’t smoked in five years, or perhaps it was longer, and the smoke made him dizzy and immediately caused his lungs to ache. But he had needed the violation somehow and he was glad as well for the steady pain in his shoulder, as if that raw focus might help him to review the past few chaotic days, even up to the obscure and perilous present.

  When his plane had landed at the L.A. airport a week ago after a seventeen-hour flight from Hong Kong, there had been about fifty minutes when Walker hadn’t known where or who he was. When the other passengers stood up to leave the plane, he stood up as well even though he had no idea where the line was going or even if there was a line. He moved forward because everyone else was moving forward, his mind seized with such sudden paralysis that only his body seemed capable of an act and then only if there was no need for a decision or a known direction. On the outside he looked odd as well, his tall, emaciated frame covered with a lemon-yellow Taiwanese silk suit three sizes too small for him, black alligator shoes with no socks, and a wild
confusion of blond hair falling to his shoulders. The customs official asked him three times to step forward and when he finally made the commitment it took Walker another few minutes to realize he had left the carry-on canvas bag containing his passport back on the plane. Another official, silver-haired and obviously of a higher rank, asked Walker please to follow him to a side room.

  As Walker entered the room, a short muscular man in mauve slacks and blue Lacoste tennis shirt offered him his hand.

  “Roger Woods,” he said. “Your father’s attorney. You’ll be out of here in no time.”

  “No time,” Walker said with a sigh and sat down on a chair. “But that’s the way I’ve been traveling. At least lately, that is.”

  Both the attorney and customs official took a closer look at Walker’s pale green eyes, but his disorientation was so extreme that it was impossible to tell if he was stoned or just one of the crazies that show up on Pan Am flights from the East. In any case, drugs or a mystical loss of faculties wasn’t the issue. Walker’s canvas bag appeared and was placed on a table. The silver-haired official spread out the contents with the objective detachment of a surgeon: white cotton pants, dirty underwear and socks, a Hindi-English dictionary, a John D. MacDonald paperback, a small clay statue of what looked to be a Buddha with a red hat on, a torn notebook, a faded Polaroid of Walker and a dazzling blond girl in a sarong standing arm in arm in front of the Grand Hotel in Calcutta, and finally the passport. The official thumbed through it with one hand, reading off the stamped litany:

  “India for quite some time I see, Nepal, Thailand twice, no, three times, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong. You are well traveled, Mr. Hardin.”

  “Well traveled, yes,” Walker agreed.

  “You were out of this country for two years and you’ve let your passport lapse for over a year. That is quite a serious oversight on your part. In different circumstances you would be in serious

  trouble.”

  “Unfortunately there are only these circumstances,” Walker said, as if they were in the middle of a serious discussion. “At least there are no other circumstances that I am aware of in this way, I mean.”

  The official scrutinized Walker to see if he was being a wise ass, but it was obvious from the way Walker was staring at one of the attorney’s blue Topsider sneakers that his mind was way off to the side of any kind of attitude.

  “Let’s just say for the sake of brevity that your father has a friend in a very high place,” the official said.

  “The President,” Walker said matter-of-factly.

  The room was silent, no one having wished that awesome title to be actually expressed.

  “Well, Wes Hardin and the President have certainly spent personal time together,” the attorney said, nodding to the official as he picked up Walker’s bag and gently guided him out of the room and down the long corridor to the baggage claim area.

  As they stood waiting for the bags, the familiar smell of ozone and car exhaust penetrated through the protective envelope that Walker had wrapped so firmly around himself. Staring outside the glass door at the passengers drifting through the smoky congested light, he began to recognize with every organ of his body, if not his stunned brain, the airless aura of the city, his city, and it was then that he finally let himself know that he was home.

  “You’ll fly out to Santa Fe tomorrow,” the attorney said. “The production secretary will drive you to your father’s home for the night. If you’ll give me your ticket, I’ll get the rest of your bags.”

  “I have no bags,” Walker said.

  “No bags,” the attorney repeated, as if that was information he couldn’t deal with.

  Walker followed the attorney as he pushed through the door into the slow flat air and walked over to a black BMW. The attorney opened the door and threw the canvas bag into the backseat, waiting for Walker to climb in. Shutting the door behind Walker, he reached down through the open window and squeezed his shoulder. “It’s damned good that you came home. It will make a difference to your father. He’s not in the best of shape.”

  The BMW pulled away from the curb into the flow of traffic heading for the San Diego Freeway, and for the first time Walker noticed the driver. She wore dark glasses over a thin sensual face and her black hair was pulled behind her into a bun. A professional, Walker thought. Like Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, although Lauren Bacall hadn’t really been professional or was he thinking of another movie? It had been a long time since he had thought of a movie at all but whoever she was like, she was certainly calm and contained, not saying anything or even looking at him.

  She drove past the freeway and turned north on La Brea. It was evening and there was a line of office buildings that hadn’t been there two years before reaching up into the smog and the dark shadows of the Hollywood Hills. He was almost sure they weren’t going toward his father’s house in Beverly Hills, and making a great effort that caused a slight stammer, he asked if his father had moved.

  “He still lives on Mulholland,” she said in a soft nonprofessional voice. “He wanted me to take you up to the Griffith Observatory before going home. He said that you might be spaced-out or disassociated or something and would need some time. He gave me a list of instructions for your reentry.”

  “I’m sure he did,” Walker said.

  The Griffith Observatory was where they had shot Rebel Without a Cause, a handle his father had often used on him and an association Walker was sure his father had been aware of when he dictated his list of reentry instructions. He became suddenly panicked when he couldn’t remember James Dean’s companion in the film.

  “Do you remember who the kid was in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean? He died at the end.”

  “Sal Mineo. They called him Plato. He was killed a while ago. In real life, that is. Some kind of fag drug scene.”

  They turned up the steep road to the observatory and pulled into the parking lot. Beneath them millions of lights shone through the gathering darkness like electric night flowers. Walker got out of the car and walked over to a bench. He felt slightly faint and sat for a while just concentrating on his diaphragm moving up and down. He had forgotten about the girl when she put her hands lightly on top of his head. It was a gesture that he was not prepared for and his thighs and arms began to tremble.

  “Why were you away so long?” she asked. “I didn’t even hear about you until a month ago.”

  “I don’t know, really. After a while it was too hard to get back.”

  “I always wanted to do that,” she said, sighing. “Just take off and fuckola movieola.”

  As her hands dropped to his shoulders, he shut his eyes. Surely she wasn’t doing what she seemed to be doing, her hands now rubbing against the back of his neck.

  “Are all of these moves on the reentry list?” he asked.

  “So far, yes.”

  “If they weren’t, would you do this anyway?”

  “If I wasn’t riding for the brand, I wouldn’t be here, if that’s what you mean.”

  And then it was too late as she dropped to her knees in front of the bench, her cheek rubbing against his protruding cock. He wanted with all his heart and soul to withdraw, to let his member defiantly wilt under her caress, a caress that was now involving her thumb and forefinger as she unzipped his fly. But it had been more than a year since he had had an erection much less an orgasm, and heart and soul were not enough to stop the throbbing swell within him. Oh, fuck his father, he thought, that he would have conceived of this scheme, this little hired bitch in front of him, kneeling under his distant direction, her mouth now wet and immense as it circled around him for the arranged Welcome Home, Son. A spurt was now beginning from his toes, shuddering up his trunk, and causing him nearly to lose consciousness as he came and came down to the last squeezed drop. Afterwards she drove him in silence back to his father’s house on Mulholland, a professional to the end and, as she nodded good night to him from the car, not without tenderness.

  A Mex
ican maid whom he didn’t recognize answered the door of the rambling Spanish Tudor house with its view of the San Fernando Valley which he avoided looking at as he followed her into the entrada and down the inlaid Provençal-tiled steps to the massive oak-beamed living room with its stone fireplace and Japanese and Eskimo artifacts hanging on the wall. It was clearly not the room for him to be in, and rather than accept the drink the maid was offering him he said he would prefer to go to his room. She informed him impassively that his room, the room that he had been raised in and always slept in when he visited was “no más,” the “señora” having taken it for herself. He followed the maid out a side door and around the side of the pool to a guest cottage he had never seen before.

  The two-room suite, with kitchenette and sauna, was clean and white with freshly cut roses on the dresser in a blue china vase. He sat down on the king-sized bed but immediately rose, feeling an overwhelming need to touch or smell something familiar. He stepped outside to the pool, a body of water he had no trouble remembering. But as he sat down on a deck chair, he discovered that even that familiar space had been rearranged.

  “Hi there,” spoke a robust English voice from the far side of the pool.

  Walker dimly made out a man’s head protruding from a bubbling Jacuzzi. The Jacuzzi, too, was new, as well as another guest cottage behind the end of the pool.

  “Just landing?” the man asked. “I detest that flight from New York, although the one over the pole from London is a thousand times more horrific.”