Wetbones (Authorized Edition)

1
* * * *

Los Angeles, California, 1990

They slid her into view, opening a long aluminum drawer on small, well-oiled rollers. The sterile room was so cold he could see his breath--a little cloud steaming out over her, dissipating, pluming again, vanishing.

She was under a plastic wrapper, like something in a supermarket meat department. The morgue orderly peeled the plastic wrapper back so Prentice could see her face; her torso down to the sternum. Blue gray. Wasted. That's the word the doctor had used. The wasting of her.

She looks like a fucking mummy, Prentice thought.

Less than a day dead, and she looked like a mummy, gray skin clinging to her skull, sharply outlining her jawbone, her collarbone, her ribs. Her eyes--it was as if someone had plucked out her eyes and replaced them with peeled grapes. Lips skinned back, flat and blue, exposing her teeth in a grimace. Gums receded so you could see the roots of her teeth. Long, thick white scars braided her right arm, ropelike scar tissue that pinched the sections of flesh together, and a jagged reddish-white scar bisected her right breast, just missing the shriveled blue nipple.

Self-mutilation, the doctor had said. The body was barely recognizable as Amy, but there was the grinning-bat tattoo above her left breast, a breast flattened, now, to an old woman's droopy pouch.

Ever so faintly, he could smell her.

Acid splashed up into his esophagus. "Okay," he rasped, and the orderly slammed the drawer shut with a clang.

Prentice wanted to belt the guy for not showing more respect, but it would have been absurd. Respect? Life and death had already shown Amy their full contempt.

Prentice turned and walked out, looking for the L.A. sunlight.
* * * *

Hollywood, California

"Listen," Buddy was saying wearily, "I've been pitching you heavily to Arthwright, telling him you're not one of these Hollywood hacks, Tom, you're a screenwriter. An A writer fuh Chris'sakes. This guy is special, I'm telling him. He hears that stuff a lot from agents, how's he supposed to know it's true for Tom Prentice? You don't show up, he's gonna think you're a flake."

"Look--if you'd seen her--" Prentice began, his knuckles white on the hotel phone. He was sitting tensely on the edge of the hotel bed.

"She was all..." He broke off, not knowing how to explain it in a way that wouldn't make him seem, yes, flaky. A whiner. Buddy was his agent, not his therapist.

"I know how you feel," Buddy told him. "But you can't cancel on Arthwright. Isn't done. Especially not you and not now."

Buddy's telephone voice had a distant cave-echo quality that meant he was using his speaker phone. He almost always used the speaker; fussing around his office, scribbling notes and signing papers or maybe mixing a drink while he yelled across the room at the phone's remote mike.

"I don't want to cancel," Prentice said. "I want to postpone."

"It's the same. He isn't gonna have time for you whenever you're damn ready."

"Come on, Buddy. He'd understand if you told him about Amy--"

"He'd understand, but that doesn't mean he'd find time for you later on. You know? He'd promise--but would he do it? Not very fucking likely."

Prentice nodded to himself. In the back of Arthwright's shriveled little producer's heart, the son of a bitch would feel that appointments with him should be more important than anything else in your life. Including grieving for the dead who, after all, were not consulted in movie marketing surveys.

And, really, Prentice had known what his agent would say about canceling the meeting. He knew Buddy, though he'd only actually met him twice, both face-to-face meetings quite brief. Prentice had told himself he was going to cancel the meeting anyway. But now, pressing the phone against the side of his head so hard it hurt, Prentice felt the shaky feeling that meant he was weakening, was probably going to give in. Especially not you and not now, Buddy had said. Like putting a rubber stamp on Prentice's forehead: He was on the Out List. He had to get back in. It was just too good a gig to lose. He couldn't handle the humiliation of going back to the only other work he knew how to do. Bartender. Maybe end up serving a cocktail to Arthwright. "Well Hi, Tom...Prentice? Right, how are ya, doin' a little moonlighting from scripting huh? Hell, Tom, I may be in here washing dishes or something myself if I don't jumpstart a deal here. We'll have to talk sometime. Ummm--I'll have a margarita and this lovely young lady here takes, I think, a tequila sunrise? Great. Thanks Tom. So anyway, Sondra..."

"Tell me something, Buddy," Prentice said, venting some steam. "How do people get to be on the Out List in this town anyway, huh? There are all these guys, they write films that make no god damn money, they get no critical recognition, but they still get contracts. Half the time the picture doesn't even get made. Just because they had something produced once? Then I write one bomb and I'm supposedly on the Out List. How's that happen, huh?"

"Look, don't get pissed at me, how the fuck do I know, Tom? It's pure caprice, right? It's gossip or something, probably. Some guys, when things go sour, they don't get talked about, they don't get blamed. Some do. I don't know. Maybe it's because you're out of town until now, you're not here networking, you didn't make Warner's season-opener party, you're not at the Golden Globe receptions, people notice who's there and who isn't--"

"I tried to rearrange my schedule so I could fly out for the Globes reception, but I had this thing--"

"Prioritize, Tom, you know? Got to prioritize. You've got to be here hustling close to the bone, schmooz anytime you can, keep the relationships going so people stay loyal. They're always looking for somebody to backbite. If you're not around, it's your back that gets bitten..."

"Okay, okay, you're right. I'm here now. But Buddy when I saw Amy's body today--" His voice broke. He swallowed, and got the masculinity back into it. "The guy said she lost fifty pounds in two days. Without liposuction, without surgery, and it wasn't losing blood and it wasn't losing water weight. It was--It was just her."

"Fifty fucking pounds in two days? Bullshit! Somebody screwed up, clerical error in the hospital records, you know? Couldn't have been that much. She lost some weight, well--the woman wasted herself on drugs, you know that--" A double peep in the background as Buddy's secretary informed him someone was on the line for him. "Just a minute, Tom. Lemme--" A couple of dry clicks. Static. Another click. "Tom? I gotta go here, I've got to call somebody back...But uh...Well, hey, about Amy: She was probably doing crack or crystal or something. You can't feel responsible."

"She was my wife, Buddy, dammit."

"Not for years, not really. You were divorced, and let me tell you, I know--my therapist, he put me onto this: the secret is, you got to let go. Let go of resentment, responsibility, after a divorce. Just write the checks and write it off." Again, the background peeps of Buddy's secretary, letting him know he had another call. This time there were three peeps, a signal that let Buddy know it was someone important, a key client or a major player. Prentice knew Buddy's phone habits the way another man knows his partner's facial expressions. "Hey," Buddy was saying, "I got to take that, Tom. Look, show up for Arthwright. Pitch him. Then do your grieving, what have you. Work is therapy. And you can't afford not to take that meeting. Got to go--"

"Buddy--"

Click. Buzz. Gone.

Prentice banged the phone down on the receiver. Pitch Arthwright, then do your grieving, what have you.

"What have you?" he muttered. "Christ."

Prioritize, Tom, prioritize.

Prentice stood up. Wobbled for a moment on his legs as the circulation shivered painfully back into them.

He put on his sunglasses, thinking: Go ahead, get self righteous about the way people were in L.A. But you know you're relieved Buddy talked you into going to the meeting...

Amy. Was there someone he should inform? Her dad had abandoned the family when she was little. Her mother was dead. Cirrhosis. Her brother was a biker somewhere. Where, was anyone's guess. Prentice could call his own parents, but they'd never liked Amy, they'd been glad when she'd left him. His mom had bugged him about finalizing, getting a divorce, settling down with "someone more stable. God knows, you need someone more stable."

He looked at the paper sack that held Amy's effects. Now he knew why she'd sent his last two checks back; why she'd burned her bridges with him. She'd been getting money somewhere else. Even a Gold Card. The card was in the sack, along with her wallet, a gold chain ankle bracelet, an address book. No addresses in the address book, just cryptic scribbles and two phone numbers. It was like her: she kept most of her addresses on little scraps of paper in her wallet. Used to drive him crazy. He was fanatically methodical about addresses. Rolodexes, black leather-bound planners. Now he even had an electronic address book that looked like a calculator.

If he didn't click with Arthwright, he might have to hock that calculator soon. Prentice looked once more at the detritus of Amy's passing on the bed. Like the nest of a dead pheasant found in the tall grasses after the hunter's downed the bird. Nothing left but a handful of feathers and dead grass.

He went downstairs, jangling his hotel and rental car keys together in his hand.