Beautiful Ruins

“Thank you,” said Pelle.

Pasquale went to check on Dee Moray. As his aunt had said, she was still asleep, oblivious even to the gunshot that had ended the little skirmish.

When Pasquale came back down, Gualfredo was leaning against the piazza wall. He spoke softly to Pasquale, his eyes still on Lugo’s gun. “This is a big mistake you’ve made, Tursi. You understand this, no? A very big mistake.”

Pasquale said nothing.

“You understand I will come back. And my guns will not be fired by old fishermen.”

Pasquale could do nothing but give the bastard Gualfredo his coolest stare until, finally, Gualfredo looked away.

A few minutes later, Gualfredo and the limping Pelle started back down the hill for their boat, Lugo accompanying them as if they were old friends, holding the rifle in his arms like a long, ski

On the hotel balcony, Pasquale poured the old man a glass of wine.

Lugo the Promiscuous War Hero drank the wine in one long gulp and then looked over at Alvis Bender, whose contribution to the fight had been so minimal. “Liberatore,” he said with a whiff of sarcasm—Liberator. Alvis Bender simply nodded. It had never before occurred to Pasquale, but an entire generation of men had been defined by the war, his father, too, and yet they rarely talked about it with one another. Pasquale had always thought of the war as one big thing, but he’d heard Alvis talk about his war as if everyone served in a separate war, a million different wars for a million people.

“What did you say to Gualfredo?” Pasquale asked Lugo.

Lugo looked back from Alvis Bender over his shoulder, toward the shore. “I told Gualfredo that I knew he had a reputation as a hard man, but the next time he came to Porto Vergogna I would shoot out his legs and while he lay squirming on the beach I would pull down his pants, shove my garden stick up his fat asshole, and pull the trigger. I told him the last second of his miserable life would be spent feeling his own shit come out the top of his head.”

Neither Pasquale nor Alvis Bender could think of a thing to say. They watched old Lugo finish his wine, set the glass on the table, and walk back to his wife. She gently took the rifle from him and he disappeared into his little house.

18

Front Man

Recently

Sandpoint, Idaho

At 11:14 A.M., the doomed Deane Party departs LAX on the first leg of its epic journey, taking up an entire first-class row on the Virgin Airlines direct flight to Seattle. In 2A, Michael Deane stares out his window and fantasizes this actress looking exactly as she did fifty years ago (and himself, too), imagines her forgiving him instantly (Water under the bridge, darling). In 2B, Claire Silver glances up occasionally from the excised opening chapter of Michael Deane’s memoir in whispered awe (No way . . . Richard Burton’s kid?). The story is so matter-of-factly disturbing that it should instantly seal her decision to take the cult museum job, but her repulsion gives way to compulsion, then curiosity, and she flips the typewritten pages faster and faster, oblivious to the fact that Shane Wheeler is casually tossing unsubtle negotiating gambits across the aisle from 2C (I don’t know; maybe I should shop Do

But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos—we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs—four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon—but true quests aren’t measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant—sail for Asia and stumble on America—and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

In the Emerald City the tragic Deane Party changes planes, Shane ever so casually mentioning that the ground they’ve covered so far in just over two hours would’ve taken William Eddy months to travel.

“And we haven’t even had to eat anyone,” Michael Deane says, and then adds, more ominously than he intends, “yet.”

For the final leg they pack into a commuter prop-job, a toothpaste tube of returning college freshmen and regional sales associates. It’s a mercifully brief flight: ten minutes taxiing, ten minutes climbing over a bread-knife set of mountains, ten more over a grooved desert, another ten over patchwork farmland, then a curtain of clouds parts and they bank over a stubby, pine-ringed city. At three thousand feet, the pilot sleepily and prematurely welcomes them to Spokane, Washington, ground temperature fifty-four.

Wheels on the ground, Claire notes that six of her eight cell-phone calls and text messages are from Daryl, who has now gone thirty-six hours without talking to his girlfriend and finally suspects something is amiss. The first text reads R U mad. The second, Is it the strippers. Claire puts her phone away without reading the rest.

They straggle from the Jetway through a tidy, bright airport that looks like a clean bus station, past electronic ads for Indian casinos, photos of streams and old brick buildings, and signs welcoming them to something called “the Inland Northwest.” They make a strange group: old Pasquale in a dark suit and hat, with a cane, like he’s slipped from a black-and-white movie; Michael Deane looking like a different time-travel experiment, a shuffling, baby-faced grandpa; Shane, now worried that he’s overplayed his hand, constantly riffling his hair, muttering apropos of nothing: “I’ve got other ideas, too.” Only Claire has weathered the journey well, and this reminds Shane of William Eddy’s Forlorn Hope: it was those women, too, who made the passage with some of their strength intact.

Outside, the afternoon sky is chalky, air crackling. No sign of the city they flew over, just trees and basalt stumps surrounding airport parking garages.

Michael’s man Emmett has a private investigator waiting for them, a thin balding man in his fifties leaning on a dirty Ford Expedition. He’s wearing a heavy coat over a suit jacket and holding a sign that doesn’t inspire much confidence: MICHAEL DUNN.

They approach and Claire asks, “Michael Deane?”

“About the old actress, yeah?” The investigator barely looks at Michael’s strange face—as if he’s been warned not to stare. He introduces himself as Alan, retired cop and private investigator. He opens the doors for them and loads their bags. Claire slides in back between Michael and Pasquale and Shane jumps in front next to the investigator.