The Lost Expert, page 25
NEWSCASTER (V.O.)
And it’s official, reclusive millionaire Harold Allan and his Maverick Party have won the election. The country has given him the mandate for change that he’s been asking for. The eccentric, reclusive businessman who has kept his face shrouded throughout the campaign and whom many considered too divisive to win a general election has been elected the next president. The people have spoken.
WILLA (V.O.)
Where ya been, finder man?
The Lost Expert sways on his feet.
RABBI (V.O.)
There is no evil! There is only God!
CUT TO
The thugs beating him, the only sound their grunts and the rhythmic thud of their boots against his ribs.
CUT TO
His mother, face down in the water, slowly being dragged out of the swamp.
CUT TO
A purse sinking.
CUT TO
A baby gazing straight ahead, wide-eyed and passive. A shrill scream.
CUT TO
The Lost Expert’s eyes shoot open.
EXT. A SHACK ON THE EDGE OF THE WOODS — NIGHT
THE LOST EXPERT stands at the edge of the woods, considering an old cabin of weathered grey wood sitting in front of a dark tributary. Creeper vines climb the walls. Moss and fungi grow out of its flat roof. Behind the shack flows the slow-moving river.
NEWSCASTER (V.O.)
Thousands have gathered here, outside the ghetto gates, to celebrate Allan’s victory.
CROWD (V.O.)
Build the wall! Build the wall!
The Lost Expert, on the edge of the clearing, breathes through a hand loosely pressed to his mouth and nose as the hazy smoke swirls around the shack then consumes it.
INT. SWAMPLAND SHACK — NIGHT
The door creaks loudly. Something small and black runs across the mottled floor and disappears. The Lost Expert steps in. The floorboards groan. In the centre of the shack’s single room is a charred, broken stool that someone used to build a fire. Three crushed tins of beer lie in a corner along with the shattered glass of a smashed bottle of bourbon. A ladder missing several rungs leads up to a dark loft.
EXT. HIGHWAY — NIGHT (FLASHBACK — 1903)
BOY LOST EXPERT, alone in the back of a police car, driving along the highway.
INT. SWAMPLAND SHACK — NIGHT (1928)
A wet groan from the dark loft. THE LOST EXPERT staggers against the wall and catches himself.
CUT TO
A baby.
CUT TO
A white purse, slowly sinking.
RABBI (V.O.)
(laughing uproariously)
He’s an orphan!
CUT TO
The Lost Expert climbs the ladder, his muddy boots bending the warped rungs.
INT. SWAMPLAND SHACK LOFT — DEAD OF NIGHT
In the granular dark of the loft, THE LOST EXPERT can just make out the shape of a person lying on his side on a dirty mattress. The Lost Expert drops to his knees beside the mattress. He rolls the figure onto his back.
THE LOST EXPERT
You!
GEORGE JASON PAULSON, eyes fluttering, blood crusted in the corners of his mouth, tries to speak. His words are indecipherable, a sinkhole gurgle.
THE LOST EXPERT
Where is he? Tell me! Tell me where he is!
George Jason Paulson mouths sounds. Pink foam burbles from his nostrils. He groans piteously, and one hand flutters to his belly before dropping back down to the dirty mattress. George Jason Paulson has a knife protruding from his stomach.
THE LOST EXPERT
Did he do this? Where is he? Where are the girls?
GEORGE JASON PAULSON
Urgggulls …
THE LOST EXPERT
Tell me! Tell me, goddamn it!
GEORGE JASON PAULSON
(laughs)
Grrrllllssss!
The laugh turns into a sunken rattle. George Jason Paulson dies. The Lost Expert backs shakily away from the mattress. He trips over something behind him and falls. Scrambling to his knees, he comes face to face with WILLA. Her withered throat is slashed, her dead eyes open in recrimination. Outside: the flash of fresh fire followed by thick new smoke.
Section 20
THE WAVES WERE SMALL and persistent, churning against the wide beach and retreating in a foamy surf of sand. Chris stood close enough to feel the frigid spray on his bare feet. He looked down and saw that the cuffs of his designer trousers were getting wet. He took another step toward the Great Lake. The cold didn’t bother him. He was drawn to it. It was a clear start to the evening. Chris imagined it as something he might see down south, dusk in the Keys, the low sun a hanging orange fruit against a wide sky, shaded streaks of light blue. His mind, too, was clear. He didn’t need pills.
He thought of his mother. He’d talked to her a few days ago. He’d told her that the shoot was moving to Florida. She’d been so excited for him, he’d thought it was true. One day, he’d said to her, they would go together. He imagined them, reclining on lounge chairs, sipping drinks festooned with umbrellas and pineapple chunks.
A sea of sand away, Alison stood, first toying with a lock of her long hair, then fingering the single strand of pearls that lay against her soft throat.
If he could just tell her. The lies scrubbed off by the choppy green waves of Lake Ontario, tenacious like teeth and just as terrible. Sean Penn in Sweet and Lowdown, begging for a forgiveness he could never allow himself. “I made a mistake! I made a mistake!”
Alison put a hand on his arm, surprising him. “Thomson. We should go.”
The ocean. He’d never seen it. He couldn’t tell her that. He took her hand and stepped forward, pulling her to the edge of the surf.
“Who knew?” he said. “Who knew Toronto had beaches?” He knew, of course.
“Thomson.” She gently extracted herself. “Come on — you’re getting all wet.”
He was up to his ankles now. The sun hung in pregnant pause at the exact point where the lake reached the horizon. You can really see it, Chris thought. The curve of the earth, the way everything goes around and around and around.
In past his belt, the water cold and wonderful against his crotch and his belly. The waves kept coming, though smaller now, surprisingly gentle. How far could he go? A large bird crossed the sky in front of him, then turned and crossed back again. It flew low, heavy and awkward — a pelican. A seagull, actually, a sky rat on patrol for a floating French fry. The ugly grey-white bird cast him a scornful glance. Chris thought of Little Scarface, his bright, sunken eyes. Where was he? Nearby, Chris was sure. Here. There. He could be anywhere.
Did you tell them?
“Thomson? Come out now!”
Another step forward. The bird ascended, flapping out of sight. Alison’s voice was distant, barely audible over the sound of the water and the wind. Once upon a time, Chris had been afraid — afraid of going under, of not being able to see what lurked on the bottom. Now he knew. Underwater, everything was calm. Surprisingly, he’d liked the feeling, liked the strange way the movie set’s tap-water swamp had clung to his skin, so different from the glacier lakes he and Krunk had swum in up north, those deep, freezing ice-age reservoirs, the water slicking off him, the sky shifting from sunny clear to grey cold in the time it took him to clamber in and out.
Chris breathed deeply, his shirt pillowing. He’d call his mom more. He’d call her every day. He was someone else now. We’ve all lost people, Chris thought. It’s what happens. The Lost Expert. He’d lost his mother. He kept trying to get her back. But he couldn’t, really. That’s the thing. Even if he somehow found her, or whoever killed her, he wouldn’t get her back.
“Thomson!”
He turned to the beach and waved at Alison to reassure her. Alison had put on mirrored sunglasses, one-way windows reflecting Lake Ontario’s expanse. She folded her arms against her torso. It was cold, getting colder. Another of those crazy-eyed seagulls pecking at something bundled up in a wad of rotting kelp. “Woo!” Chris yelled, falling backward into the cold froth. “My own private Idaho!”
THEY SAT TOGETHER ON the beach, a blanket from the trunk of the town car draped around his shoulders. The day was ending. The sun had dropped below the surface of the lake, and grey sky tinged with the city’s waking glow loomed behind them. Nighttime, Chris thought uneasily. He resisted the persistent urge to turn away from the water and inspect the quickly shrouding darkness beyond the boardwalk path. What did Laurie always say? “Stay in the moment. Try to relax.”
“This is so great. It’s like the ocean! I love the ocean! What about you?” Chris asked emphatically, turning to Alison. “Do you like it?”
“Me?” Alison seemed surprised he’d asked. “It scares me, I guess. I mean, I grew up in Vermont, so I never really — Snow was more our thing. Me and my brother, we spent all our time building snow forts in the woods near our house.”
“That must have been fun.”
“It was.”
“And your brother? Is he still —”
“Yup, still there. He and his partner, they have three kids and the farm, they make cheese and maple syrup and keep bees.”
“That sounds great.”
“It’s a lot of work, but he loves it.”
“Do you visit?”
“I do, when I have the chance.”
“Do you think you’ll move back one day?”
“Oh, definitely. I never thought I’d end up in L.A.” Alison laughed in that way people do when they’re looking at the choices they’ve made with a kind of rueful amazement.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean.”
Alison’s tone changed. “Thomson.” She took a deep breath. “I need to tell you something.”
Instinctively, he avoided her big brown scrutinizing eyes. He looked over her, distracted, scanning the boardwalk and the road beyond. Where was he? When will you tell them?
Alison continued. “Whatever happens with — all this, I don’t want there to be any more secrets between us.”
At the word secrets, Chris’s heart started pounding. He gathered a handful of wet sand in his fist and squeezed, grains grinding under his fingernails.
“Alison —”
“Thomson. I know what you’ve been doing. Look.”
She dug into her handbag and pulled it out. His battered old leather wallet, peeling at the edges and swollen in the middle as if waterlogged then dried: a birthday gift from his mom when he’d turned twenty-two.
He took the wallet from her and held it in his hands. The old wallet, much heavier than it should have been, a fossil turned to rock. Sweat broke out on his upper lip. Once upon a time, it had been a game. Catch Me If You Can, DiCaprio dapper in a pilot’s cap. He wiped at his face with his bare arm.
Alison, half smiling at him, the cat who ate the canary.
“Look inside, Thomson.”
Reluctantly, he flipped it open. His driver’s licence. His Revue Cinema loyalty card. His ScotiaBank entry-level Visa.
Alison took the wallet back and slipped out his green Ontario health card. “You even have one of these,” she said wonderingly. “One of these health thingies.”
They both pondered the extracted card as if beguiled. Chris suppressed a Krunk rant: Good for free medical anywhere in the true north strong and free! Comes complete with passport-style picture for identification by the petty bourgeois bureaucracy! Bonus points: a rare middle finger to Canada’s southern neighbour’s preference for leaving the poor with few if any defences against state-enabled corporate predation!
“Christopher Hutchins. Nice name. It suits you. Oh, and look, I see you made yourself … younger.”
Her tone was playful, affectionate.
“Alison. I can — let me —”
“It’s okay.” She leaned in close, scrutinizing him. He felt her breath on his cheek. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“You won’t?”
“I get it. The pressure and everything. The need to escape.”
He found himself nodding, too relieved to speak.
She kissed him, gently at first, then with increasing passion. He kissed her back.
“I should have told you.”
“Yes, you should have. Christopher.”
A light behind them. Chris stiffened. A car passing, its headlights just visible.
Alison didn’t notice. She laid her head on his shoulder and sighed.
PART FIVE
Section 21
STUMBLING INTO THE SPARE, gleaming kitchen, he discovered it was just after 6:30 a.m. California time, which, he ponderously calculated, made it around 9:30 a.m. in Toronto. It was a veritable sleep-in for the former breakfast waiter Chris. Still, he felt heavy and exhausted. They had landed at LAX late the previous night. “Welcome home,” the flight attendants had chorused as he disembarked. Home, he kept thinking. It had all been so simple. Just like jovially telling Alison he’d “misplaced” his passport. Within hours he’d been at the U.S. consulate. He’d signed some documents and autographed whatever anyone asked him to autograph. He had no idea what Thomson Holmes’s signature looked like. Apparently, no one else did, either. Finally, after a series of poses — Thomson Holmes shaking hands with the Consul General, her assistant, her assistant’s assistant, and so on and so forth — they’d issued him a temporary passport. Handshakes all around. A few more pictures. Alison, standing to the side observing the proceedings through tired eyes and a tight, worried smile, touching his arm. He knew the drill. It was time to go. Time to go home.
Home. He hadn’t even been sure how he’d get into it. His house. Was he supposed to have a key? But his usual driver, whom Chris had been surprised to find welcoming him at arrivals, punched in a security code that opened a gate, then did the same to the front door. He’d stumbled into unfamiliar sheets, beaten down by what he didn’t know.
Chris opened a chrome refrigerator built into a tiled wall. It was empty. No neighbour entrusted with a spare key had popped by to stock it up with milk and fruit and juice after his long absence. Did he even have neighbours? He shivered, exposed in the refrigerator’s pale light. He looked down past his Thomson Holmes paisley boxers to his thighs, pale and goose-bumped; still visibly his despite the best efforts of his brassy trainers. But he was home. Or, at least, he’d arrived at what passed for home to one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world. It was a home devoid of the characteristics the word typically evoked: no family snapshots, framed treasures, tchotchkes on the mantel, ugly ties shoved into the back of a drawer. Here, the slate walls were empty. Did Holmes take it all with him? Or was he just like this? A bizarre inversion, the superstar black hole, the man himself not particularly notable, slightly above average height, sporting a physique one step below aggressively muscled, intellect average, little to no evidence of a complex interior life. But that was the mystery, wasn’t it? This blank slate, this dwarfed star, capable of lighting up screens with a boyish energy that never seemed to dissipate no matter how many times it was diluted.
Chris padded down the hall, heading to the bedroom. He felt stodgy, drugged. Maybe he’d sleep for a few more hours. But the brightness of the living room caught his eye. Still on autopilot, he entered the room and stopped, stunned. The room was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling window framing a slow decline saturated in sunshine. The view was of a long slope of rocky outcroppings swathed in straw-like grass. Here and there, scrappy beige bushes pushed spiked leaves out of clustered mounds of sandy soil. And amidst it all, barely visible through stunted trees with green leaves tinged rust, were the bits and backs of other houses, cubist designs made to look like they were clinging to the rocky embankment for dear life.
Standing there, Chris thought about Krunk again, how he talked about it, how he centred his life around it. Hollywood, L.A., the movies. “It was in Hollywood,” he’d begin with a snarled erasure of the perennial once upon a time. “Hollywood.” Krunk’s voice in Chris’s head like a never-ending book on tape.
Hollywood, where set builder Marion Morrison got his big break, the mongrel Irish-American director Raoul Walsh spying him manfully dragging a couch across a soundstage. Krunk, lecturing his sparse late-night audience, urging them to picture it: the long, stretched face and dark, foreboding stare of actor-turned-director Walsh — the quintessential assassin, Chris remembered Krunk calling him. He played John Wilkes Booth not once but twice. Then a shift to directing, an insatiable hunger turned to the nascent craft of filmmaking. Eagerly, some might even say desperately, he set upon the young, strapping stagehand. “And who might you be,” he demanded, not even trying to hide his vampiric need.
“Marion Morrison,” the wide-eyed country boy answered, his naked ambition as plainly visible as the empty, sprawling plains whence he hailed.
Walsh hurriedly rebranded him. “John Wayne,” he pronounced, trying it out. “Introducing John Wayne.”
Wayne was to star in The Big Trail, Walsh’s directorial debut, a film, as Krunk enthused sardonically, “dedicated to the brave men and women who planted civilization in the wilderness and courage in the blood of their children.” It was an epic, an odyssey of wagon trains and manifest destiny. “The first wide-screen movie ever shot,” Krunk proudly announced, as if he’d had a hand in its monumental, if ultimately ill-fated, creation.
