Pacific (9780802194800) Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn’t good, because someone might see it and think here is a perfectly good lemon going to waste and they might pick it up and call her like I did. So I said well where do you want me to throw it and she thought for a minute and said where are you now, and I told her I was on Franklin by the Magic Castle and she said don’t go anywhere, so I waited and in about twenty minutes this little green Lotus pulls up and the woman rolled the window down and she said do you have the lemon and I said yeah and gave it to her and she gave me twenty dollars and drove away.”
    They laughed. The dog began to bark, and a noise came down from the sky. A helicopter flew sideways over the hills, its light coming and going, a pure silvery beam touching the ground, as if the helicopter were walking on stilts.
    â€œWhat’s that about?” said Micah.
    â€œNo one really knows,” said Curtis.
    â€œI used to think they were looking for criminals,” said Thea. “But they do it so often that I don’t think that anymore.”
    â€œMaybe they’re bored,” said Eamon. “Just fucking around till quitting time.”
    â€œThey’re like the night watchman in a Russian story,” said Charlotte. “Checking the doors of the midnight village to make sure they’re locked.”
    â€œI lived in that village,” said Micah.
    Then a man in corduroy jacket and white cowboy hat rode down from the stables in a golf cart, the husky and two yellow Labs trotting behind. The dogs found them first and licked their faces while the man stopped the golf cart.
    â€œThat’s Angel,” whispered Charlotte to Micah. “The owner.”
    â€œWhat’s going on here?” he said. “I have the television on, and I can hear the noise you’re making all the way up the hill.”
    â€œWe’re sorry, Angel,” said Charlotte. “We’ll be quiet. We’re leaving now.”
    The driver of the golf cart looked at each of them in turn, touched the brim of his hat, turned the cart around, and drove back to the stables, escorted by the dogs.
    â€œNow Angel’s mad at me,” said Charlotte.
    â€œI want that golf cart,” said Thea.
    From the horse farm, they went to the beach in Santa Monica, where they bought hamburgers and french fries and sat on a ­blanket on the sand, eating and listening to the sound of the ocean.
    When Micah got home he hung the beads Charlotte had given him on the photograph ofTiny, Lyris, and the goat.
    The next day Joan was at an auto salvage yard off Mission Road shooting Forensic Mystic . Most of the autos seemed beyond salvaging. They were twisted and sliced, mangled and melted, and the yard workers had stacked them into neat mounds like city blocks with paths running between.
    The yard made the highway system seem like the work of an evil god. Joan sat in a mallard-green canvas chair beneath a parasol.
    In this scene she would throw away a knife that had been used in a murder. Her character, Sister Mia, would debate whether to turn it in to the police. That was her conflict. Everyone must have an arc and a conflict.
    Joan strolled the junkyard path, slapping the knife blade on her thigh. An athletic brunette walked backward, Steadicam strapped on her body. Then they laid dolly tracks and filmed Joan’s walk from the side.
    She flung knife after knife into a mountain of wrecked cars. The prop master had knives to spare. Joan wondered if archaeologists would find the knives someday and deduce that people had fought over the cars.
    At lunchtime she got an orange from the food tables and walked to the fringe of the salvage yard, where she could see the Los Angeles River and the skyline across the way.
    She held the orange in her hands, tearing the rind with her teeth. A dark ribbon of water moved slowly down the trough of the riverbed. She thought she would soon be written out of the show.
    The knife toss was Joan’s last