Amputation, page 13
While the mind of his headless head distracted him, Rod’s calculations of a textbook leap from horse to horse began to coalesce. Experience told him not to think too much; such an approach was always wrongheaded and often fatal. In the end, his body would know what to do …
In that last quarter mile, he flashed on almost being fired for leading Timothée on a stoned madcap moonlit tour of a steep dune in Abu Dhabi. 130Then, closing in on Al-Nakba, came the ragged breeze of a girl he took on a bareback ride when he was thirteen. He worked summers at a stable and stole a mare in the dark—always, the dark!—and her nervous titters turned to hysteria when the reins slipped from Rod’s hand and they juggernauted off the trail. She got thrown first, but Rod never let go. Hours later, stripping down for bed, he noticed that his underwear was wet (as it sometimes was in the mornings). He had never shared that with anyone, not even Sonata, though he would have told his great-grandma because she’d have understood what the discovery of a vaccine against fear might do to a person—
—near enough now to hear the stallion’s pneumatic respirations.
In those last few moments, he felt himself dissolving into the illustration he pinned to the wall of his room when he was young:
Pegasus and its white raptor wings.
He wanted to be Pegasus, the first stunt horse of Hollywood, nepo son of Poseidon—to fly across the sky and incite the dawn’s conflagration …
That was when he reached Al-Nakba, who seemed to deliberately slow his pace—as if acceding to fate, instructed by Poseidon himself.
The stuntman rose from the saddle and leapt, slipping perilously, then righting himself before the two became one.
* * *
Stephen
It would be a moment before the man was freed.
Anyway, the pilot had to wait for the winds to die down.
Maria had called her ex, the film star and former governor, who’d arranged for a trauma surgeon to be on the chopper—the same doc who brought Jeremy Renner back from the dead when the actor got crushed by a snowplow.
131 A paramedic ran IV lines. The comedian was severely dehydrated but his breathing wasn’t compromised. After the morphine, he opened his eyes and looked at the physician.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘We’ll get you out of here in no time.’
‘No time,’ Stephen repeated, with a smile. ‘What is your name, sir?’
‘Dr. Kennedy.’
Grinning, he said, ‘Well, as long as you’re not Dr. Trump. That would be a bridge too far.’
Arborists used wedges to ease the tension, stabilizing the trunk with blocks before beginning to saw on both ends. As the obstreperous blades bit into the wet-dry bark, the narcotized patient muttered, ‘I’m just a girl in a magic show.’
The dismantling of that section of tree was a laborious, delicate business, due to the careful gauging of weight transference and constant monitoring of the victim’s vitals. Finally, the Jekko mini-crane was victorious and the captor was no more.
They covered him in thermal blankets then raised him up flat and slid a stretcher underneath. The doctor put a rubber ball in his hand and told him to squeeze, a trick he’d learned while a surgical resident at UCLA in the nineties.
The crew that Stephen later called ‘my pallbearers’ carefully moved the gurney toward the helicopter. He was oblivious to the surrounding desolation. When he was secured inside, a paramedic touched his arm and talked loudly over the rotors.
‘You’re a very lucky man.’
‘I’m not entirely convinced,’ he smiled, then closed his eyes and vanished.
He could see his brothers up ahead.
He called out but they didn’t hear. At last, Peter turned and yelled, ‘Hurry, Stephen! Gollum said we’re almost there. Dad’s waiting!’ Stephen felt something in his right hand and clenched it.
132 The rubber ball felt hard as a diamond now.
He opened his hand and saw that it was a Palantir—Saruman’s seeing stone, his indestructible crystal. He looked into it and beheld a burning tree and the face of their father. ‘Bring it, Stephen!’ he beseeched. ‘Bring me the wedding ring!’
But what was this metal machine and why wasn’t his old friend Samwise Gamgee carrying him on his broad, strong back?
With superhuman effort, Stephen quickened his pace. Just ahead, Gollum scampered from rock to rock like a nightmarish Nijinsky. Strangely, he couldn’t remember the details of the creature’s face—but when it turned to stare incorrigibly into his eyes, the comedian gasped.
‘We wants it!’ said Gollum, gesturing at the necklace. ‘We needs it! Must have the Precious—’
The wind abated enough for the bird to take off.
As the fiery, warring Earth receded in a wall of noise and turbulence, he was transported at last to the Cracks of Doom.
There, his father rose like a phoenix from the wreckage of the airline.
‘You’ve come so far, son! It is time: let me have the ring.’
Stephen choked upon seeing him—the emotions were too strong—then got steely-eyed.
‘Father, I cannot. It’s mine, mine, mine!’
He was Gollum now.
* * *
Marjorie
She was on the phone with her old friend, who mentioned the stuntperson again. Marjorie didn’t know why she was so persistent but guessed it was probably because Betty had a crush on the fellow. She loved her cowboys. 133At the Malibu Cinema, she and her husband showed more westerns than comedies, dramas, or anything else.
‘If you think I’m going to chew the fat with some pratfalling cowpoke,’ said Marjorie, ‘you’re out of your skull. I can barely talk to you, Betty O’Meara, and that’s on the phone.’ They laughed then got disconnected.
She called back but the service was down.
All the cowboy talk made her think of horses, which led to a recollection, something the old woman hadn’t thought about in a long while.
At beach bonfires before the war, her father used to tell stories that his Havasupai blood brothers shared. One of them scared her to death—a Chumash tale about the tears of a dog. Papa said the Indians never dared touch a dog’s tears because if they did, they’d see the same terrible things the dog saw. So, one day, a man said he didn’t believe in such superstitions. ‘Well, why don’t you try it and see for yourself?’ Later that night, the disbeliever touched the tears of the family dog but instead of rubbing them on his own, rubbed them on the eyes of his daughter. That night, when the dog began to howl, she howled along in her sleep. Then she sat up in bed, hollow-eyed and horror-struck, shouting, ‘He is coming, he is coming!’ She died the next day without telling anyone what she had seen.
Her father told the same story over and over but when Marjorie began to ride, he replaced the tears of a dog with the tears of a horse. She was a bit of a daredevil and that worried him. He thought the precautionary tale might make her be more careful around the huge animals. He was a bit superstitious himself.
It was more than eighty years since she’d thought about this as well:
Alone with Rader’s open casket, she surreptitiously touched his eyes, even though they were closed. There were no tears, but she touched her own anyway, right after. She had no fear. She wanted to see what Rader could see.
A pounding at the door interrupted her mournful reverie.
When Alejandra answered, one of the guards barked, ‘Everybody out, out, out! The fire’s about to eat Serra alive, evacuation is mandatory!’
134 Alejandra and Marjorie had known the man for years.
‘But Mr. Jerry, there is no car!’
‘Where’s the lady of the house?’ he said impatiently.
‘Upstairs! She won’t go. I try to make her—’
‘You tell Marjorie Rindge to come down now or I’ll go up and carry her down!’
‘Mr. Jerry, we cannot walk very well!’ Alejandra was crying now.
He softened. ‘You’ll come with me. But there’s no time, Alejandra—hurry up and tell her!’
The old woman sat in the back of the patrol car like a petulant child, her face grimly fixed. She began to mutter but Alejandra couldn’t make out the words.
‘What is it, Miss Marjorie?’ she asked.
‘He is coming,’ she repeated.
Alejandra held her hand, partly to comfort, partly to assuage her fear that Marjorie would bolt from the car at first chance—which was exactly what she did as soon as they stopped in the long line of evacuees waiting to turn on PCH. The shocked housekeeper yelped as the old woman sprinted into the brush.
The harried guard leapt from the car as well and dove into the broken hedge, emerging a few minutes later in a sweat.
‘Goddammit! If she wants to die, that’s what she can do!’
The cars behind were honking as he jumped back in. The fire was close now. In the rearview, he saw the look of panic on the evacuees’ faces. Firetrucks wailed and trundled north and south, as if panicked themselves.
‘Dios mío! Dios mío!’ shouted Alejandra and sprang from the slow-moving car. There was no way she was going to leave the woman whom she loved.
Mr. Jerry shook his head, queasy with fright. ‘I am not going to fucking burn here,’ he said aloud, before steering into the ditch, shimmying 135around the cars in front of him, and heading north to Malibu Canyon Road. A colleague said you could still escape through Los Virgenes but that everything south was on fire.
Scraped by nettles and branches, Alejandra shouted, ‘Miss Marjorie! Miss Marjorie, come!’ By then, though, the old woman was already walking north on the highway. The guard gunned past without seeing her.
‘He is coming,’ she said, her face beatific.
As in a dream—which she was—Marjorie was suddenly in front of the Adamson House, where she had lived as a girl. It was a museum and national historical site now, run by docents. She’d been invited there many times, even to be honored, but steadfastly refused.
She crossed the highway and a horse charged toward her … was it him?
But there was no rider—it was only the jettisoned stable horse that had aimlessly galloped ahead after Rod vaulted from its saddle.
A fire engine loomed, yelping its siren, and the horse juked around her. She turned, disconsolate, watching it fade to black.
She thought she heard singing, and the pound-clap of hooves … another horse!
But this time, there was a rider …
He is here, he is here, he is—
Too late. Fatally upon her, the stuntman’s instinct assessed with lightning speed: she was tiny and he could do the thing he’d done before—the old school move he refined on the Costner movie not so long ago.
He reached down and slung her up.
As he lifted, Marjorie’s fingers inadvertently brushed the wet eyes of Al-Nakba and saw the same thing as the magnificent, celestial horse.
Rader.
At the moment of the old woman’s reunion, Sonata Alicia Serrano, mother of Sienna and partner to the trick rider, also breathed her last breath.
136
* * *
Esther
Once Al-Nakba and the other horses were secure, Rocky drove to Carpinteria but his wife wasn’t there. No traces or signs—no strewn clothes, no Estherian clutter of empty wine bottles, messy dishes and messier ashtrays, no legal pads with lists of manic to-dos.
In a frenzy, he raced back down PCH past Groom ’N Doom until reaching the Malibu Bluffs. From the slope, he saw the unimaginable: the entire coast glittering with fire like a PlayStation game. The car glid silently through Cross Creek but was stopped at Adamson House. Only first responders were allowed any farther.
Esther had told him not to stay over at the farm, but it was impossible to get to Shutters. The LEAF, rode hard and put away wet, forlornly returned to Groom ’N Dume. Two days later, he got the call that his missing wife was dead.
Rocky cut his ties with Finchie after the news broke that she was soliciting donations to her personal Venmo account for fire victims.
‘This is just me,’ she wrote on Facebook. ‘Boots on the ground. It was challenging enough getting dog food while being evacuated and I was at a safe place. So this is for people who have virtually nothing and have pets with basic needs.’
When he confronted her, she snarled, ‘You’re one of them now? The amends-killers?’ When he asked if she was still auditioning spokespersons for the Willis family, she hung up.
Months later, he wondered what projects Unsafe and Effective should pursue.
There was the remake of The Defiant Ones, with Susan Sarandon or Debra Winger as pro-Palestinian firebrands and Natalie Portman or Mila Kunis as 137the Israeli whose baby was one of the hostages. He should probably reach out to Ta-Nehisi to see if he was still interested in adapting The Message. It was important to honor Esther’s legacy and Rocky knew that like-minded others would have the strong desire to do the same. He wanted to make her proud.
But The Queen of Malibu soon rose to the top of Unsafe’s ‘slate.’ The project took on a messianic significance that humbled him. Rod Paisley saved Esther’s prize stud; they had both lost their partners; and the Rindge woman’s granddaughter—the series’ protagonist—more or less died in Rod’s arms. Something about all of it was prophetic, mythic. He was certain now that The Queen was the last piece of an amazing puzzle that destiny had laid at his feet.
As a film student at USC, he met the producer Mary Parent. Rocky and a few students hung out with her after she gave a talk and for some reason he mentioned being good friends with Dex Keaton. Mary said she was close to Dex and her mom. In the months that followed, she sort of took him under her wing (at least that’s how he thought of it). A few months after getting married, he invited Mary, Diane, and Dex to dinner at the Palisades house. Mary and Esther really hit it off. They went to a lot of fundraisers at Mary’s place in Laughlin Park. Cecil B. DeMille was a previous owner and Rocky thought that was very cool. Angelina Jolie lived right next door.
He popped a 4 mg Nicorette and cold-called her.
Mary said she was devastated by the news of Esther’s passing and profusely apologized for not having gotten in touch. ‘It was unforgivable, Rocky, and I’m so, so sorry.’ She said that her head hadn’t been on straight because apart from Laughlin becoming ‘a Four Seasons’ for all her friends who lost homes in the fire, her mother had been in and out of the hospital. ‘But that’s no excuse,’ she said. ‘That’s a bad friend. I was a bad friend, Rocky, and I beg your forgiveness.’
‘It’s okay, Mary, for real. It’s been a totally crazy time, like beyond. So hard for everyone.’
‘Harder for some than for others,’ she said, in solemn reference to his loss. ‘But that’s very gracious and I thank you—it lightens my heart.’ In earnest, she asked, ‘How are you, Rocky? Are you okay?’
138 ‘Doing pretty well. I mean, I miss her. I even miss her yelling at me!’ Mary laughed at the icebreaker. ‘It’s totally surreal but I think I’m doing okay.’
‘Is the bakery—is Esthergen still there?’
‘No.’
She seemed surprised. ‘I thought it was in Caruso’s place.’
‘Across the street. Have you been through the Village yet?’
‘I actually have an access pass but it’s just too heartbreaking. Can’t do it. Too soon.’
‘I get it.’
He decided that it was time, as Esther liked to say, to get down to brass tacks. Rocky said that he had a favor to ask then told her about a new friend, a stuntman, who’d become more like a brother. He went through the whole story—the business about Al-Nakba and the disoriented old woman on the highway—and spoke haltingly of the hero’s girlfriend and what happened at Tahitian Terrace. By the end, Mary was in tears.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I think I read something about this in the LA Times. You’re not talking about Rod Paisley, are you?’
‘You know him?’
‘Know him and love him. He was Timothée’s stunt double on Dune.’
‘Oh my God, I forgot you produced that!’
‘Gee, thanks, Rocky. Way to ask a favor!’ They laughed. ‘Rod is amazing—an absolutely amazing person and an amazing athlete but you already know that.’
‘So, Rod had this idea—before the fires and everything. He pitched me this incredible story about the origins of Malibu. It’s based on a bestselling book. But the more he talked, the more it felt to me like something perfect for Taylor Sheridan. I keep having this premonition, Mary, that if Rod and I could get in a room with Taylor, even on zoom, he would love it. He’d get it.’
‘Taylor doesn’t do zoom! Hates it.’
‘Haha. I guess that makes sense.’
‘Do you have an option? On the book?’
‘We couldn’t get it—I just found that out.’
139 ‘There’s ways to get around that,’ she said. ‘If he’s writing about things that are public record—stuff you can read on Wikipedia or wherever—newspaper archives—then you’re good to go. You don’t need his permission.’
‘My lawyer said the same thing! Do you know Taylor?’
‘I do.’ She paused, to mull. ‘Okay. Here’s the deal. Taylor’s fairly crazed right now—he’s in the middle of writing fifty scripts and I’m not even exaggerating. But he does owe me a favor. Long, boring story—not boring, but long.’ A voice interrupted. Mary shouted, ‘Gotta call her back!’ His stomach was tingling. The next words out of her mouth were, ‘I promise you, Rocky, I will make that happen.’
It was the very same thing he said to Rod after the AA meeting.
‘You’re serious?’
