“Mitch Hilsten can be convincing as a fool or a villain or a weakling, Charlie. I’ve seen you consider me all those. I’ve seen it in your eyes. But the public won’t like to see that happen to the image they’ve invested part of themselves in. I’m the invincible hero. And that’s all I can be. Shit, I can’t even grow old.”
Charlie knew this happened to actors. She just didn’t want to believe it had happened to this one. Like giving up finally on Santa Claus when you’re a kid. “When I moved Libby to L.A. from New York, it was just the opposite. I had trouble adjusting and she took to it so fast I haven’t really known her since. It’s a paradise for snotty blondes out there.”
They should be sitting still and keeping still in whatever shade they could find and conserving energy. But she just kept following his wavering course like a goddamned squaw. She did not want to be alone out here.
Charlie heard herself go on to explain how Richard Morse came to offer her a job on the West Coast. She’d talked to him by phone from New York while working for Wesson Bradly Literary Agency, negotiating options for film rights on books his clients might be interested in—sometimes studios, usually actors looking for stories with possible starring roles from which they’d like to see scripts written for them.
An option tied up the property while a producer looked into financing and scripting possibilities. It paid the writer and his agent some pocket money to keep it off the market. Rarely did an option result in a film going into development and even more rarely showing up on the big screen or even television, but it all somehow added to the gambling allure and helped keep people like Charlie employed.
“Richard said one time on the phone that I had a voice like a gravel pit and it didn’t sound very literary and he just had to see what I looked like. Next time he came to New York, he took me out to dinner and explained that Congdon and Morse had come far enough up in the world to have its own literary agent. He didn’t feel qualified to judge screenwriters or to screen the literary properties coming his way. He needed someone with East Coast contacts in publishing in his office.
“He offered me the job and boy have I just found out what all it entails. He offered me the job and enough money to support us so we wouldn’t have to make up what I couldn’t live on by being a drag on Edwina. Libby and I joined the middle class. We were blessed with California sunshine, freeways, and debt. You won’t believe what Richard’s latest demand is though. Mitch?”
“Charlie, look,” he pointed to a really deep shade puddle and then headed for it. “I think we should stop and rest, don’t you?”
And the squaw carrying the jackets and Oreos and Swiss army knife and what water they had between them followed obediently. “I just don’t want to be alone right now, okay?”
“What? Oh, Charlie, I’m sorry. I’m still a little groggy. Feels like Scrag used an ax instead of a rock. Here, let me carry some of that. Christ, have you got a sunburn.”
They crawled into an abscess in a rock formation, not deep enough to be called an overhang, but offering blissful relief from the heat. Charlie’s feet had swollen again, which was probably not a good sign, but did help to keep her tire clogs on. Charlie’s hands were swollen, too, and sticky with sweat, a fine layer of grit coated her face, and more itchy bumps were forming. Those on her neck were along the big veins that ran close to the skin. Wonderful, some living thing too small to see was feasting on her blood.
“Do you think Scrag hit Gordon Cabot over the head with Edwina’s ax like he did you with a rock? Maybe Cabot wouldn’t give him a job.”
“Maybe it’s just me. Maybe even my friends are turning on me.” Mitch’s eyes were no longer crossing but he’d never looked less like a superstar. Dark patches puffed under bloodshot eyes, a scraggly beard was growing out dirty and uneven.
Still, Charlie could look at him and see Lawrence of Arabia deciding to do something heroic, romantic. She could swear she was looking at box office. Stereotypes do die hard. So do images.
They sat silent as the sun began to move down the buttes and rock ribs. One bird went, “Twee, twee, twee.” Another, “Toy-toy-toy, toy, toe-o-oy,” as if winding down. They sounded so small and delicate in this vast and brutal land.
Lawrence of Arabia began to cry.
“Oh, Mitch, oh please, not now, not here. I know you’re depressed. Who wouldn’t be? I mean, you’re bashed on the head and dirty and yucky and lost and hungry and thirsty and miserable.” Which is as good as it’s going to get if we don’t find the river or rescue planes don’t find us pretty fast. “But you can’t give up. I need you. The world needs you. Think of how many people would go into mourning in a minute if something happened to you. Mitch, you’re an institution.”
And boy, Charlie, do you sound like an agent.
“They’d mourn for the image. They don’t give a shit about me. They don’t know me.” Dirty tears cleaned streaks down his cheeks and disappeared in the stubble of his beard.
Before it was quite dark, he fell asleep beside her and she wrapped his sheepskin around him and snuggled up against him. She had no idea when he was demented by injury and fatigue, when he was acting, or when he was sincere. He could still be the murderer. But right now it didn’t matter. If she died out here, she didn’t want to be alone.
When the cold and dreaded discomfort prodded Charlie awake it was still deep night and moonlight and her one remaining contact lens had gone dry and brittle. And, like the night before, she was immediately aware of sneaky noises—large paws padding, the whoosh of wings and cries of small animals captured and carried aloft, the rustle of bushes, the slither of snakes … the electric lights on the horizon.
Chapter 29
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Don’t look down.”
“If I don’t look down I won’t know where to put my foot and I’ll fall,” Charlie said. “If I do, I’ll panic and fall anyway.”
“I’m right below you. I’ll place your feet as we go. Trust me, Charlie.”
“Why should I trust you? I never know when you’re acting. I don’t know that you haven’t murdered three people already. I don’t know that you’re not nuts after that blow to the head.”
She’d watched the lights blinking in the far-off night long enough to determine they didn’t move and then woke him up to point them out. He’d groaned and gone back to sleep. Charlie had slept little. Dawn erased the lights but Charlie knew where they were.
Mitch seemed back in control of himself this morning. They’d finished off their meager rations, and with half a canteen of water between them, set out to find that beckoning civilization.
And they’d arrived at this steep unending rock-strewn incline.
“You want me to go off and leave you here alone? That what you want, Charlie?”
“I want this whole scene to dissolve,” she whined, “and life to cut back to normal.”
But he gripped her ankle, pulling her foot down to the next foothold. Which also pulled her off balance, forcing her to release her handhold on the flaking rim of a tiny projection in the cliff and follow her foot. She found a tenacious weed to hang her hands on. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Very soon now there’s a nice wide ledge where we can stand and rest.”
Charlie made it to the ledge before the dry heaves racked her body. She was even too dry to sweat. She could feel her pores trying, in sympathy with her stomach.
“Charlie, look across the canyon or up at the sky. If you keep your eyes closed, you’ll get dizzy.”
Don’t patronize me, fella, you didn’t sound so brave yourself last night when you were crying in your beard.
But she opened her eyes. One focused on a blurry world. The other on something shiny wa-a-ay over on the other side of wherever they were.
“Oh, God.” Where they were was on an incredibly minute ledge.
“Don’t look down.” Mitch lifted her chin and thus her eyes.
The shiny thing glinted from across two canyo
ns but there was something familiar about the protrusion upon which it sat. She’d seen it from below while riding in Mitch’s Bronco to meet Lew’s plane. But then there’d been jet fighters darting across it. She’d be willing to bet she’d seen its lights last night too. “Mitch, that’s Dead Horse Point over there.”
“All those mesas look alike.”
“The one shaped like the bow of a ship with the metal roof or RV or whatever glinting back the sunlight.”
Mitch shielded his eyes and squinted across the canyon. “Looks more like a whole fleet of bows, all lined up in a row.”
But one of the rusty-red sandstone ships sailed ahead of the others. And it was the one with the metal glint.
“You know, you could be right,” he admitted after a second look. “Because there’s the APC holding ponds over there. Lines up about right.”
The ponds stood out crisply blue in the dun-colored landscape.
“There’d be water and help either place.”
All they had to do was get themselves down the rest of this cliff and across several miles of open sage, rock, scrub, full sun, and rattlesnakes to the edge of the canyon within a canyon. Then find a way down a thousand-foot cliff, cross a hundred-foot-wide river, climb another thousand-foot wall out of the river canyon. Then cross more open benchland and walk miles and miles to the APC plant or just a few to the thousand-foot wall of the outer canyon where there would at least be that Jeep road. Once on top of the mesa, if they didn’t get lost in the bush forest, they could cross it to the ranger station next to the campground.
And all without water, food, sun protection, a map, decent shoes, ropes, or a boat. Piece of cake.
Mitch scratched his scalp and gazed out at the prospect. “That river can get real shallow in places. But it’d be a long way.”
“Beats wandering aimlessly.” Charlie turned around to face her wall again.
There is something to be said for having a goal, even an impossible one. She didn’t look at the bottom of the canyon, only as far as to where Mitch was managing to find footing and handholds. They used the long string, meant to gather in the bottom of her discarded jacket, to bind her tire clogs to her ankles and the makeshift shoes actually fit in any toehold his boots did.
When they made it to the shelf, Charlie wished it were night again as she and Mitch started off across the open wasteland. There had been the shadow of the cliff overhang to protect their descent from the sun. Out here there was nothing.
Still, she was pretty proud of herself for making it down that cliff. They wouldn’t have to do the whole gig. A helicopter would swoop down and rescue them or a ranger would come along with a van filled with water by the gallon and ointment and sunglasses and stuff.
“Okay, so I don’t think you’re the murderer,” Charlie conceded at one point, and gave him back his pocketknife. He’d had ample opportunity to do her in accidentally. And it was getting heavy to lug around.
“Christ, after that night we had together, you still really thought—” He snorted disgust and proceeded off into the sage. “Women.”
“What, murderers don’t do sex?”
He stopped and turned on her again. “Is making love no more to you than ‘doing’ sex or lunch?”
“How the hell would I know? I’m in estrus.” When did love get into this? Probably his head wound talking.
“Sun’s getting to you,” the grimy superstar pronounced after peering into her eyes and feeling her forehead. He pulled off Charlie’s sweatshirt and tied it around her head.
From above it had looked like maybe a mile across the bench-land. Down here it felt more like twenty.
Their trudge had turned to a stagger by the time they reached the rim of the inner canyon. They hadn’t bothered to speak for what seemed hours.
Mitch stood swaying, looking for a place to descend. Finally, he lay on his stomach to look over the edge. “No way here,” he said. “You walk one direction, I’ll walk the other. Look for a crevice or deer trail, anything.”
This, of course, was hopeless, but it was doing something. Charlie knew they’d both run out of steam long ago and would soon have to give up. In some ways she already had. Like, she could no longer get worked up over Libby having to live with Edwina, over missing out on Edwina’s triumph over the sheriff, or not being able to get even with Richard Morse. She even managed to peek over the edge a couple of times as Mitch had ordered. What the hell.
His shout startled her so that she had to sit down fast to keep from toppling over into the abyss. In the glare of the sunlight it took her a moment to find him, on his stomach again leaning over the rim. “I think I’ve found a way down.”
Charlie figured he was hallucinating but started toward him on her hands and knees. The red bow of the ship that was the Point seemed no closer than it had when she’d spotted it from their meager shelf on the cliff above. It had been a worthy goal. Her goal now had shrunk to reaching Mitch. You do what you can.
Charlie lounged in the smooth hollow of a rock shaped like a hand, in a freshwater pool on the island of Kauai. The water washing over her naked body rocked it gently. On one side of her, a narrow waterfall rose out of sight behind the lush foliage of tropical trees and giant ferns. On the other, white foam and white gulls flecked the blue sea crashing against black lava rock, sending shimmery spray into humid air. She reached a languid hand toward the sweating glass of lemonade on the grass verge next to her. Her fingers were wrinkled from soaking so long.
“Charlie?”
“Go away.”
“There’s going to be water down there and shade.” Mitch sounded drunk. He fell to his knees a few yards away and motioned to her. She put her gritty sweatshirt back on to cover tender skin and crawled over to a crack in the earth, two feet wide where it opened on to the rim. A wonderfully cool breeze wafted up from it, carrying the scent of water.
“Hard telling if it’s passable all the way down. I’ll go first. If I get stuck, I’ll yell up to you not to start out.”
“Then what do I do?”
He was already out of sight down in the darkness, but his answer echoed up to her on an ominous, hollow note. “Then you can die up there alone, Charlie Greene.”
Chapter 30
Charlie decided she suffered from claustrophobia as well as acrophobia, even though she’d been able to see daylight out the canyon side of the fissure for most of the way. She’d squeezed through some places and slid down others but she hadn’t stuck in a narrows or fallen through a wide space. Yet.
She hadn’t waited for Mitch’s permission to enter this creepy shaft either. Charlie was not about to die up there alone.
But she felt awfully alone where she wedged now and it was a relief to hear Mitch’s swearing echo up between her legs. “Damn it, Charlie, you were supposed to wait. You’re kicking stuff down on me.”
She slid further into the narrow space, the pause offering her unwelcome opportunity to feel the stinging and prickling of all the abrasions on her sun-abused skin. She lay in a diagonal position with her knees propped against the opposite wall and her head turned toward the opening. There were pearly cloud puffs in the sky, but the sun still tortured the barren moonscape below. The cool draft through the shaft was absolute heaven in contrast.
A shout echoed up to her and she decided it was permission to continue. Charlie had no idea how long it took her to descend the rest of the way. She did know there was no way anyone could get back up this damn thing. Her jeans were torn and sweatshirt in shreds by the time she came sliding out of control on a curved rock slide as smooth and hard as polished marble. It deposited her on a rough floor of deep sand mixed with jagged pebbles.
Mitch Hilsten sprawled against a fluted wall. He raised the canteen to her in a toast. “Glad you could make it.”
And “make it, make it, make it” entered curves and swirls of pink, red, and lavender rock and returned to them as it might in a cathedral. Aeons ago, water had shaped a lovely grotto here, quiet and shel
tered. Soft, diffused sunlight reached them indirectly through several curved openings in the cliff high above the river as well as the opening off this chamber.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” the sorry-looking superstar croaked.
“There’re certainly worse places to die.”
He crawled over to offer her the canteen. “We’re not dead yet. Here, drink it all.”
There were only a couple of swallows left but she took them gratefully. Real people who lived in houses with faucets would never believe how wonderful just plain unflavored, uncarbonated water could be. “We can’t very well drink river water. This is downstream of uranium tailings at the mill.”
“It’s running half-mud this time of year. Wonder if we could make the Point by nightfall.”
“You go ahead, I’m staying here.” But she followed him to the narrow lip of the cavern that overlooked the river.
It was a good ways down to the water still, but getting there would be no problem. The bank sloped gently for such a perpendicular place, with a swath of mud and weeds covering it most of the way. Getting across the river would be another story.
They lay on their stomachs again, side by side, the lower halves of their bodies still inside the grotto. The river smelled of mud but just the dampness rising from it was pleasant after the aridness above.
“Not a bad place to die at all,” she said, feeling drowsy already.
“And Edwina kept telling everybody how tough you were. Charlie, we’re almost halfway there, you can’t give up now.”
“Edwina said I was tough?”
“‘Strong-willed and independent, she gets things done, my Charlie does.’” The actor beside her imitated Charlie’s mother without really trying to be exact, which would have failed, but by hinting and exaggerating at the same time. And so well, a vision of Edwina sitting gray and stooped and defeated in a jail cell flashed right up in front of her inner vision. “She said it with a great deal of pride, I thought.”
“She never said that. When did she tell you that?”