The Bright Spot Read online

  With Dumfries dead, at least the feds quietly let the case against the pool guys fall apart and tossed them back into their shattered lives. They would’ve been better off convicted. They could’ve written a book. Now they were just bums.

  Once my keepers figured out I wasn’t going to change my story, recruit ’ware workers to murder diners in posh restaurants, or talk to the press, they just let me go. They continued to watch me, I’m sure, probably kept us all under permanent surveillance to see what might turn up. Wally would have someone to talk to over breakfast for the rest of his life.

  Murphy, looking pretty good with the weight he’d lost, was in a room just down the hall. He told me how he used the clues I gave him to get himself kidnapped by Dumfries: “The feds left an easy trail. I figured the limo for a rental. No agency’s going to own something like that. There’s only a handful of high-end limo rentals. It was a slow weekend. A guy answering Salvador’s description rented two limos for that morning using the name of Robert Zork.”

  “Zork?”

  “Zork. The guy with him fit the description of your limo driver. He later returned one of the vehicles, saying the other one had crashed. He flashed a badge and told the limo’s owner the feds would make good, which they hadn’t, of course, so he was more than glad to cooperate with me. He showed me his GPS records on the allegedly crashed limo. Its location when the GPS quit working turned out to be the old diner, where it used to be anyway. The whole building’s empty, has been for a while. I figured Dumfries had to be using the car. About then I got your message about Williamsburg and asked the locals there to keep an eye out. He hadn’t even changed the tags. I collared him down at the marina. I was reading him his rights when he asked me some weird question or other. Next thing I know I’m waking up in the hospital.”

  I told Lu if she ever did ’ware she would die, and made her promise she never would—a promise she’d already made to Bea. I didn’t tell her the rest of it. I couldn’t take the chance she might want to break her promises and save the world. I knew that was wrong, but it was an easy decision. Could I live without her? No. Next question? It didn’t matter.

  I told Lu the same story I told everyone else. The man was looney tunes. You can forget all about James Allen Dumfries.

  His funeral in the rain on the news looked like a spook convention; Jean Brand, bereaved widow in the foreground, was the only one crying. The son and daughter flanking her were absolutely stone-faced. It was like I could hear her, insisting, No one believed in him like I did. He said so. He said so!

  Must be true, then.

  Me, I believed in him like I believed in hell. He was what he was.

  Meanwhile, we’d missed at least three weeks’ work on BG and the Indian Nation. Fortunately, Suzanne slipped us the surveillance video from the Susan Constant abduction as her way of apologizing for failing to protect me—Dumfries had her piloting the helicopter, actually. It was great stuff. With BG at the tiller and a ghost crew stolen from the future (you had to hand it to Wally), we were able to milk that for half a dozen episodes, while we played catch-up with the rest of the plot.

  The yehakin just didn’t feel right, according to Wally, so we produced Buck’s sweat-lodge scene in the crew’s bus with the help of The Ironoclastic Hysterians (the band after Los Refugios), a few pounds of hamburger, various flashlights, and bonfires of cheap incense. It took all day, but Buck was a real trouper, and somehow the scene worked. Even I liked it. The crew was now thinking about redoing the bus’s interior in rattan since they couldn’t get the incense smell out.

  The switch to BG and the Indian Nation hadn’t hurt our numbers, but hadn’t helped them either. They were doing just okay, maybe good enough to stick around, maybe not—we’d flattened, as Brenda put it.

  Then we got the kind of break you wait a whole lifetime for.

  An outfit called the Christian Soldiers, based in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and headed up by a nutcase calling himself Gabriel, as in blows his horn, denounced BG and the Indian Nation as immoral, unpatriotic, satanic, the list goes on and on—all leading up to the conclusion Gabriel always reached: The End of Days is at hand; better send money, honey, or meet me down at the motel.

  At the height of his tirade against BG, he got particularly cranked up over the depravity of Buck’s sweat-lodge scene and ran a clip from it glossed with liberal doses of Revelations and his own wacko tracts. Gabriel had a big fringy audience—everybody from the psychotically devout paramilitary types, to college kids who liked to make fun of him, to lonely women who found his muscular certainty sexy and longed to be filled with celestial fire. Enough people, in other words, so that what he denounced was news, especially if it came with good visuals. And Buck was the best. The newsies loved the sweat-lodge scene. For a while there, you saw more of Buck’s mug than the President’s. Every comedian needed a few Buck jokes. By the end of the month, Buck’s bug-eyed communion with the Great Earth Spirit was the cover of Time. The headline read “The Numbers of the Beast!” Brenda’s terminal practically fried itself crunching them.

  Buck was a star.

  This changed things.

  Unfortunately for me and Lu, our characters quickly faded to the periphery, like those older-generation Vulcans on Star Trek or the first-season succubae on Lucky Lucifer, on call but forgotten. The show was getting too serious for our slapstick ways. Satire was out; wisdom was in. Before you knew it, Buck had a book coming out, a compilation of Wally’s fortune cookie aphorisms called Patriot-isms that was destined to become an instant classic, with a promotional budget big enough to get him elected President, if only he met the age requirements. Success didn’t go to his head, however. He was still the same old Buck, only busier, jetting around the world. We walked down some mighty fine alleys, he and I, security lurking at a discreet distance. I still picked up after him myself. It was a matter of principle.

  Without anybody ever asking us, Lu and I soon found our names in the show’s credits under “Buck’s Handlers.” Our salaries rose accordingly. I later wrote a book about our experiences called Ipso Factoids, but nobody bought it, in spite of a glowing blurb on the jacket from Patriot himself.

  Stan and Dee fared better. BG and Princess Galatea were given a wisdom makeover as well. With an Eastern dog, a Western princess, and a guy who’d been dug up out of the churchyard, esoterica was pretty well covered on all fronts. The show was essentially Lassie, Come Om:

  Come quick, Patriot! Timmy’s chi just fell down the well!

  Perhaps that is his journey, Squashblossom.

  You can see where Victor and the She-Creature didn’t exactly blend.

  We would’ve looked for other work, but being Buck’s handlers was pretty much a full-time job. In addition to keeping him healthy and happy and on time, we personally answered all his correspondence. Lu made me answer all the ones asking for advice. You’d be amazed at the things people will ask a talking dog. I made him a witty correspondent, had him explain that his phony accent on the show was only a role, that actually he spoke in a French baritone. His advice was always the same: Be yourself, and if that doesn’t work, act like somebody better. No one sued.

  There was one last bit of unfinished business that nagged at me ever since I saw Jean Brand crying at her husband’s funeral. We were on Buck’s book tour and calling it a honeymoon when we passed through the city. I called her up and told her I was the last person to see Jim alive, and I had a matter I wished to discuss with her.

  It took her a moment to get over hearing my voice—his voice. “I’ve been expecting your call,” she said softly. Maybe she had, which was all the more reason we should talk. I didn’t want her looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life. With all that yoga she might live forever. I took along a copy of Patriot-isms as a peace offering. It’s small enough to fit in a coat pocket or on a toilet tank.

  Bus connections were better to the old money, some of whom still preferred to employ the old-fashioned servants who could think and
talk and steal and gossip and ride the bus. I could afford to take a cab, a limo if I wanted, but I spent too much time riding around in cars these days, so I took the bus. If anybody knew or minded I was a famous dog handler, they didn’t let on.

  After our last gloomy conversation, I’d pressed for a daytime meeting. Otherwise I would’ve brought along a miner’s helmet or a candelabra. She suggested the library. She looked good, in a smart white suit—what people wore on ocean cruises, she informed me, modeling, flirting, actually. She didn’t look a day over seventy.

  She accepted the book graciously. She insisted I select a volume from her excellent selection of drama. She planned to sell it off, she claimed, when she returned from her cruise. I chose a vintage paperback of You Can’t Take It with You in a collector’s plastic bag and thanked her profusely. By this time we’d avoided the subject of her husband for about as long as either one of us could stand.

  “I understand that you had an encounter with Jim,” she said.

  “That I did.”

  “And was he mad as a hatter?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “As I suspected.”

  “All along?”

  She shook her head, a little scared of that idea. I wasn’t crazy about it myself. “No, it was all the pressures after the war. All the demands made upon him. His senseless, relentless guilt.”

  “His heartbreak?” I suggested.

  She laughed her Hepburn laugh again. That’s where I’d seen the suit before, The Philadelphia Story. “You would be very much mistaken, Mr. Bainbridge, if you think he suffered greatly over the end of our marriage.”

  “Nick, please. That’s not what I was referring to.”

  Our eyes met. Now she knew why I’d come. Maybe she was wondering how much it would cost her, but I don’t think so. She liked me. If only Jim had been more like me.

  “Would you like some sherry?” she asked. “And almonds. I love the two together, don’t you? They’re behind you.” She pointed to a small table where a crystal decanter of sherry and a dish of almonds waited. Sure, why not? I poured and spooned and dished and fussed. And we sipped and nibbled and chitted and chatted. Any moment we would start talking about T. S. Eliot or Bob Dylan. Stalling until she had enough sherry in her to say, “When you say ‘heartbreak,’ you mean that woman, don’t you?”

  “Galatea Ritsa.”

  “That wasn’t her real name, you know. She didn’t even know her own name. I was here the night they dreamed it up, when he brought her here. For Edmund it was a great moral crusade, but for Jim it seemed just another puzzle he could solve brilliantly. She would be the medium, the clay to be molded and fired. She sat over there, read books all night, hardly said a word. She was a beautiful thing. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. I suppose I knew then that he would fall in love with her. That was the only time I ever saw her.”

  Not quite, but I didn’t quibble. I knew what she meant. “You never drove an SUV, did you?”

  “I didn’t care for them.”

  “That’s why Ed told the cops that the car that hit Galatea was an SUV.”

  Our eyes met. “Yes.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I had come home from a meeting with government agents. They had shown me images of Jim with that woman. I don’t suppose I have to tell you what sort of images. They thought I would tell them things, betray him. I didn’t. But that didn’t mean I was ... unaffected. I was sitting in the car outside, gathering my nerve to go in, when Ed came running out of the house, completely hysterical, and saw me there. He told me Jim planned to run off with her, that he was leaving us both. It was the only time we ever openly acknowledged the state of affairs that existed between us.

  “I took off. I had previously followed them to their assignations, followed her to the apartment where he put her up, always remaining at some distance. I don’t know what I thought I was accomplishing. Until I saw those images, I’d managed to convince myself my jealous fears were just that, and not to be acted upon.

  “I pulled into the parking lot for her apartment, the motor still running, it was only moments, and there she was. She’d come out to jog along the road overlooking the river. I let her get out of sight around the bend, counted to ten, and stepped on the gas.” She relived the moment, flinched when machine hit flesh. She’d relived the moment many times. She took a deep breath.

  “Ed had followed me, afraid of what I might do. He got me away when he was too late to stop it, went back and called the police, claimed to be a witness, told them it was a man in an SUV. He did it for Jim, I suppose. To protect him. He did everything for Jim.”

  There’d been entirely too much of that going around. “That’s pretty much the way I had it figured. There was no real investigation at the time. Officially, she was already dead before you met her. I came out here to tell you I don’t plan to set the record straight. I don’t see what purpose it would serve.”

  “Did Jim know who did it?”

  She was desperate for me to say yes. That would be her small vindication. He knew. He spoke her name. But I hadn’t played Marlow for nothing. The truth might be too terrible altogether, but hey, it’s all you’ve got. “He thought Ed did it. That’s why he killed him.”

  “Of course. Ed would be the passionate one, wouldn’t he? Since Jim never felt any passion for me, he couldn’t imagine I would be the one to fly into a jealous rage. You should’ve seen his grief afterwards. He was inconsolable. All those years, I told myself his lack of passion had nothing to do with me, then to see ...” Her voice trailed off as we drifted around the bend, and the past finally seemed to be behind us.

  “I understand,” I said. “But I don’t think his feelings had anything to do with her either, no matter how beautiful she was. Want to know what he told me? ‘I made her.’ The only thing James Dumfries was ever passionate about was himself.”

  “You’re wrong about him.”

  “I knew you’d say that. But you know I’m right. You’ll come around. Have a great cruise, Ms. Brand. And be sure to steer clear of the Congo. You look great, by the way.”

  “Jean, please.”

  I kissed her cheek. “Bon voyage, Jean.”

  RISE AND SHINE

  23

  And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an a fection for it, for it was the o f-spring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.

  —MARY SHELLEY, INTRODUCTION TO 1831 EDITION OF Frankenstein

  NOBODY LIVES FOREVER. DOGS ESPECIALLY. BUCK caught a respiratory ailment at the height of his career that took him out in a matter of days. He was twelve, which I guess is a respectable run for a dog, but it didn’t seem near long enough for such a good-hearted creature. Lu and I were devastated. I had no idea you could grieve so hard for a dog. ReCreation had cloned Bucks, a whole stable of them, which they promptly deployed, but we never had anything to do with them. Buck was Buck. There will never be another. Even if Ipso Factos are now a registered breed with the AKC. “Exceptionally intelligent,” I read of them recently, “prone to respiratory infections, should avoid air travel.” They didn’t even mention the lapdog gene.

  As much as we missed Buck, Lu and I were glad to get back into acting. Lu found a niche as a rich bitch (as she herself liked to put it) in any number of guises, from sci-fi aristocrat of the Aldebrian Empire (one of Wally’s) to a cattle baron’s shrewish widow in the Western revival that finally rode into town. She did a great turn as Miss Havisham in an uneven remake of Great Expectations that got lousy distribution. She did drug commercials, joking she’d finally given in and started dealing. They never liked me for those things. I could gaze hopefully at the horizon as well as the next guy, but my hear
t wasn’t in it.

  I had other work, though. I did a little bit of everything, but not much of anything worthwhile except a cheating gambler who gets shot between the eyes fourteen minutes in. It opens with me shuffling the cards, talking fast. They’re my fourteen minutes, best thing in the virtual. I expected a flood of calls from other directors dying to bump off Bainbridge in their own distinctive styles, but none ever came.

  Then I did a town drunk who witnesses a murder and inexplicably drops out of the plot, a couple of kindly interchangeable grandfathers (Gramps and Popsy), a lifer in the laundry giving the young hothead who didn’t do it a little advice on getting along in the big house that’s laughably out-of-date, and a stupid centurion arresting Our Lord, the idea being, the youthful director explained, that if he busted God, he must be a real dummy. I’d read for Judas, but they thought I was too old. You’re only as old as you feel, I said, but they weren’t going for it. I would’ve pointed out their Jesus was well into his fifties, not counting the face work, but I needed the money too badly. “How stupid do you want this centurion?” I asked. Very stupid. You got it. The old Jesus worked out okay, by the way. It made sense that a thirty-three-year-old messiah might put on a few extra decades before all was said and done.

  I looked for smarter roles and ended up getting typed as the explainy scientist, like a particularly painful stretch of Jeff Goldblum’s career, but I resisted that undertow, even if it meant doing instructional virtuals for power tools, where at least the lines made sense. A router didn’t have to go faster than light. Sci-fi bullshit generally did have to go by at least that fast to make it sound even vaguely plausible. When we reach Alpha Centauri, we can talk. Till then, spare me the starships.

  Listen to me. I’d jump on any one of those roles now, of course. Beggars can’t be choosers. Pleaders either. I prayed a couple of times, though I never liked it. I couldn’t find my audience. It didn’t work. Because pretty soon all the work started drying up. You could watch it happening, but you couldn’t stop it, like all those swamps shriveling up in Florida, leaving the bleached bones of golf communities like balls buried in the sand.