Fifty Grand

“You’re going to kill me. You’re going to murder me like you killed those others. I’m going to be dead. This is the last thing I’m ever going to see. I don’t even know where we are, I don’t even know where we are!”

“Wyoming.”

I sit down next to him on the ice. I turn his face so that he’s looking at me.

“Listen to me, Jack, that’s my friend Paco coming over to us. That kid has a jones for killing. He says he fought with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua when he was only a boy, and he was so good with the rifle that I think I believe him.”

“Wait a minute, I’m not going to-”

“Shut up. This is important. Paco’s going to come over here and he’s going to say: ‘No witnesses. This one too. I don’t care if he’s a big star. All of them in the lake. We gotta protect ourselves.’ ”

“What are you doing?” Paco yells. I look up. He’s not advancing at record speed. The ice is spooking him but we’ve got about five minutes here, tops.

Shit. This is not the way I thought it was going to be. Rushed. Bloody. Incompetent. This isn’t the kangaroo court of my imagination. Me remembering the good times and telling my dad’s killer what I’ve lost because of him, because of his drunken carelessness.

“It was you, Jack, you were driving the car, you were drunk. You knocked my father off the Old Boulder Road. You killed him.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying. Please don’t kill me,” Jack says, tears running off his eyelashes in his greatest-ever audition tape.

“I’m not going to kill you, Jack. I’m sick of this. I’m sick of all this.”

He’s looking at me with a desperate hope in his eyes. Can she really mean that? His cheeks vermillion. A green stain on his neck. His jeans soaked with piss.

“I want only one thing from you,” I tell him.

“What?”

“I want the truth, Jack. I want you to tell me what happened that night. The night you hit the Mex and Youkilis covered for you and said that you were in Malibu and had been there for days.”

“I wasn’t there, I don’t know-”

“Look, look over there at Paco. He’s coming. Now, I’m not going to kill you, but he’s going to want to and it’s going to be up to me to persuade him otherwise. You understand? You dig?”

“I understand.”

“Youkilis told me everything. Let me hear it in your words. And fast.”

“W-who are you?”

“I’m the daughter of the dead Mex. The anonymous fucking wetback that you killed and that your manager decided was worth fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand bucks. How much do you get for a picture?”

“It depends, sometimes I work for scale on a-”

“How much?”

He starts to shake.

“I got two million dollars for the last movie I made. I was third lead.”

“Two million dollars.”

“I didn’t see all of that, of course. Agent’s cut, manager’s cut, taxes. So really, when it all boils down-”

“And my father’s life was worth a measly fifty grand.”

In Havana fifty thousand could buy you out of a murder rap. You could become a general officer in the army for ten thousand. But here that was an insult.

“How many days did you work on that movie?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know, I-”

“Out with it.”

“Five-week shoot, I think.”

“So my father’s life was worth roughly one day’s work for you.”

“Well, you see, that’s what I was saying before-”

I click the hammer back on the 9mm to shut him up.

Let the silence hold you. I want you to sit with those details for a moment. A man’s life for a few hours’ work on a movie set.

Paco waves. “This thing is a fucking death trap,” he yells in Spanish.

“Yeah.”

“It’s cracking. Do you see it’s cracking?” he says.

“I see.”

Back to Jack. “Ok now. Tell me what happened that night.”

He closes his eyes, shakes his head. Sweat pouring from him.

“Speak.”

“I can’t,” he says.

“Why not?”

“I think if I tell you, you’ll kill me. You say you won’t kill me but I think you will.”

“Open your eyes. Look at me. Look at me!”

He opens his eyes, finds mine. I rid them of the red mist, the crazy, dark stuff from Santiago de Cuba, from New Mexico, from everywhere. I make them reveal what I am feeling right now. The calmness. The exhaustion.

“Can you see what I’m thinking? You gotta fucking trust me, I’m not going to kill you. Not now, not ever.”

“Ok,” he says. He fakes a grin, falters, blinks.

“Now speak, quick, before Paco comes.”

“It hadn’t been a good year. I was up for a Spirit Award, I didn’t get it. I’d never been nominated for anything major in my whole life, I never won anything in my life. But I got odds on that I would win that night. And they gave it to that bastard Jeremy Piven, who’s won everything. And then after that I lost a couple of big roles and then I was up for this movie Gunmetal and they said I had it in the bag and then those fuckers at Universal gave it to someone else.”

“The accident.”

“I lost the movie. But I didn’t go apeshit, not like in my twenties. Cool head. Paul was here. I flew to Vail on a charter. I went into town. Just for one drink. But they know me here and a couple of guys bought me drinks. I didn’t buy anything. I didn’t buy a drink the whole day. Nothing.”