The Hollywood Liberal

©

The 01-2008 Serialization

It was six in the evening when Healey and Patrick headed back toward their home, Miguel following. But at halfway up the Keys the father drove toward the ocean and entered a parking area adjacent to the beach. Miguel passed them and parked some 30 spaces over.

Shortly thereafter Healey and Patrick appeared dressed in swimsuits and shoes, carrying beach towels. They walked to the beach, and Patrick raced to the waves that were large and breaking against the sand shore.

Miguel was dressed in Columbia pants and shirt. The pants had zippers mid-trouser and on a whim, he unzipped the bottom half and left the parked car. He walked barefoot some 50 yards from where Patrick and Healey had stopped.

Then he noticed the sign: “Beware of Riptides.”

He looked to where Patrick was swimming some 20 yards off the shore, bouncing in the waves, shouting at Healey to join him. But Healey had already taken out his book and was reading.

It wasn’t until both he and Miguel looked up some five minutes later that they saw Patrick flailing, being pulled under and out by the undertow.

Healey bounded up and raced to the water as Patrick went under again. Ten yards out Healey dove, coming up moments later with Patrick, who was flailing and wrestling. It was clear to Miguel that the undertow was taking them both out now.

In a huge effort Healey pushed Patrick toward a sandbar, going under as he did. He surfaced once more and again lifted and shoved Patrick up and toward the sandbar before being pulled under.

Miguel didn’t realize that he was in the water until he was breaststroking in powerful pulls to where the man had gone under. Miguel was not sure why he was racing to save the man. Because his orders were to kill him publicly as an example or because he felt something for the man, the father of the son.

Then he reached the man as he came up for what surely what would have been one last gasp of air, his strength exhausted. He would be towed under for good.

Miguel grasped the man from behind, looking to see Patrick semi-standing, puking up saltwater. He pulled the man to the surface and began swimming them both south along the shoreline, half moving with the outgoing current of the riptides and half moving them toward a sandbar some 50 yards farther south.

“Stop struggling. Kick your feet,” he told the man. The man calmed and complied.

Some five minutes later he pulled both of them upon the sandbar as a belated lifeguard came racing to their rescue. Behind him, the son followed, accompanied by some others who had seen the rescue.

The lifeguard and another man pulled Healey ashore and began giving him mouth-to-mouth respiration. Soon the man was gushing out saltwater. He and Patrick had been saved.

When the group looked for the rescuer, he was gone from sight.

That night Healey knew something about himself. He had died. He had succumbed to a likely death under the sea. From whence he believed all life had come; where he wished to be when death called. And that he was not afraid.

The other thing he knew about himself that day was that he had unselfishly saved his son. Not one moment in his rescue of Patrick did he think of himself. The selflessness came to him as a spiritual revelation. He’d never thought of himself that way.

He also knew that a stranger had saved his life. Like a spirit force that’d come from nowhere and then disappeared into nowhere. It seemed unreal. Healey began to believe that he owed his life to something beyond his own definition. He became a more humble man.

—

Miguel spent the night alone. Troubled by what he had done. It wasn’t the money. He had more than enough. Perhaps it was the contract: the fact that he held resentment toward The Patron. He knew the man had lied. Clearly Smythe would not have undertaken the filming without his master’s approval. No, there was something else bothering him.

—

In the late afternoon Miguel rented an outboard, with two motors. One powerful Mercury and a small five-horse power for trolling. He told the rental people he was going out overnight fishing and would return in a day or two. He cruised south over the flats parallel to the key. Stopped and swam for a while, then moved further south until he was a quarter mile offshore from the property where Healey lived. He anchored, dawned snorkel and fins and began swimming on the surface and just underwater. To anyone who noticed, he was just another snorkel-diver enjoying the sand flats.

As the sun sank he came back aboard. He watched as the various houses along the shore were lit with their interior and exterior lighting. When he was satisfied he could identify the location, he started the outboard and headed out to sea. An hour later he headed back with running lights lit. When he was within a quarter of a mile of the property, he cut the running lights, mounted the small horsepower and began almost silently to land. When he was a hundred yards offshore he cut the engine, dropped into the water and began towing the skiff towards shore. At a pine covered unpopulated point north of Healey’s place he beached the boat and waited. The wind moved through the trees creating the only sound that could be heard, that and the soft crash of the small waves on the coral rock shore. Dressed in divers boots, black swim trunks and top he moved along the shore passing two houses, one occupied by a couple having dinner in their dining room but oblivious to his presence, another, unoccupied adjacent to that of Healey.

Miguel crossed the ground and moved through the palms and pines. The house was lit throughout with only a spotlight shining on the rear drive and Healey’s car. Quietly he moved alongside the house. He could hear the voices of Patrick and Healey. They were arguing.

“I don’t want to play that. Its lame,” Patrick said. “I want to play Crazy Train.”

“Listen it may be ‘lame’ but what you need to get something: this is a talent contest being judged by both ‘hip’ kids and ‘lame’ adults. You need to satisfy both tastes if you want to win. And playing that combination of Malaguena and Stairway to Heaven will do that. Besides, it’s an incredibly good fucking arrangement. That shows that not only you can play, but also create. It will blow them away.”

“Its lame dad and I don’t want to play it.”

“I don’t ask much of you do I, when it comes to your music. Do I?”

“No.”

“And I am the parent aren’t I who pays for your lessons, aren’t I?’

“Yeah.”

“Then I want you to do this for me. I know what I am talking about.”

Miguel looked up through the window. The look on Patrick’s face was a combination of defiance, sulk and juvenile hopelessness.

“But why? Ozzie is great and he’s very successful. Randy Rhoads was the best fucking guitar player in the world. Better than Hendrix.”

“Hey, I don’t want to hear that word out of your mouth. And that’s lame. No one is better than Hendrix.”

“Is too,” Patrick countered. “Hendrix started all of this, but Van Halen has taken it to a whole other level.”

Healey was silent for a moment. Miguel watched his face. The man exhaled.

“Listen son, you don’t understand something. You are great. You have the ability to become as good as you want, a very talented, creative guitarist. Everyone knows that. But what you don’t get yet is that all of that will not make a living for you.

“I am a talented writer, a very good poet and I can’t pay the fucking bills with what I write. You know that. Every fucking month it’s a battle just to pay the basics.”

Miguel watched the man’s face. There was something there that brought memories up from the forgotten. He squatted slowly back beneath the window.

“I love you and what I am trying to get you to do is something I never did: persist, learn your craft, practice your art and be smart enough to use it both to create anything you want and be able to make a living at it. Malaguena is a classic loved by everyone who hears it. Your version of it will fucking grab everyone – blend that with Stairway and you will blow them away.

Miguel rose and watched Healey move to Patrick and put his arms around him.

“You know I encourage everything you do. Do this and you’ll have a winner. Do it for me, OK?”

Patrick hugged his dad back. “OK.”

Miguel felt vertigo, then an emptiness he had forgotten. The last day he had seen his father leave for war. He sank to his knees in the coral sand.

He heard Healey, “Now go call your mother and remind her of your concert.”

Patrick said “OK” and went to his room. Miguel moved slowly down the outside to just under Patrick’s open window.

“Hi mom,” he heard Patrick say. … “Si. … Deseo recordarle sobre mi concierto el la noche de sábado, el papa insiste el juego Malaguena de I, él dice que es más popular entre usted vieja gente.”

Patrick laughed. He’d just told his mother of his father’s request to satisfy ‘the old people.’

Miguel was surprised to hear the Spanish. It was something the intelligence given him left out. Patrick hung up, picked up his guitar and began playing.

Miguel moved around the house underneath Healey’s office window. Healey was on the phone.

“Listen, I do not just care about his music. Why do you always do this? I care about his grades, but it’s his music that gives him self-esteem and it’s the one thing he has always focused on…”

“God damnit, I know college is important. Talking to you has never changed. But college is years away, his life is right now… I do go over his homework with him…

“Why is it that you always want to take the one thing that he excels at and gives him joy? You remind me of your mother! … Hello. Hello. Shit.” He heard the phone being slammed down.

That night he emailed The Agent: Where was Patrick’s mother’s place of origin.

The Agent’s return email read: “Just north east outskirts of San Jose. Community of Guadalupe. Very poor.” The Agent sent a copy of the mother’s picture via attachment. She was one of Costa Rica’s beautiful women.

Miguel shook his head at the coincidences in his life. His adopted home was on the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, on the mountain bluffs above the coastal village of Montezuma. The coincidence furthered the growing sense of conflict he felt.

—

Miguel entered the filled school auditorium that Saturday night, against his own best judgment. Against his entire professional training. He dressed for the occasion with a disguise of beard, mustache and glasses with smoke-colored lenses, light sports coat, khakis and sneakers. He looked the middle class gent he pretended to be.

He saw Healey sitting on the first aisle on the left side. Then he recognized the mother sitting two rows back.

The pupil usher looked over the crowd and saw a seat. It was in the fourth row left, far closer to the front than he wished but to have declined would seem odd. Miguel followed the student usher to the seat. He was ensconced between an overweight man and his wife and a family of three kids and their parents.

He nodded to both and hid behind his tinted glasses.

Finally after a team of female classical dancers, a hip hop kid without accompaniment who roused the passion of the other kids, Patrick and his band came on stage.

Patrick set upon a stool as his band of three stood behind him. He began slow melodic entry into Malaguena. There was not a sound in the room. He moved into a flurry of fingers and rhythmic pulses that filled the room. There was passion, light and color coming from the speakers. You could almost see Spanish dancers whirling.

At one point Patrick’s head came up eyes closed from the guitar. He struck the closing chords, his eyes opened and it seemed he looked directly into the eyes and brain of Miguel. Miguel felt as if he had been recognized for the evil merchant he was.

And then the transition. Patrick struck the first note of Stairway to Heaven and the band members turned and moved to their instruments of guitar, keyboard and drums.

The music exploded following the rocking route Zeppelin had created. There were shouts and whistling as the band moved through the song. When Patrick finished his solo the crowd rose in applause.

When they finished the audience saluted with a standing ovation. Patrick and the band won first place.

—

That night Miguel received a call from The Agent.

“What’s the hold up – this has to be done now. Do you not understand that you have seriously compromised us already? The consequences will just get worse. Do your job.”

Miguel simply said, “It’ll be done in two days,” and hung up.

He went to the Tuesday night reading determined to execute his contract. He disciplined himself not to think of Patrick. He thought only of the procedures necessary to kill Healey. He was once again dressed as he was at Patrick’s contest.

At the store he peered through the windows. Healey sat on a stool centered between the rows holding some seventy five to one hundred people. All that Miguel need do was to step in the store, pretend to seek a seat, give everyone who noticed him the opportunity to focus back on the reading, pull his weapon and shoot Healey between the eyes, turn and flee. That simple.

When he stepped inside it all went as he thought. Except when he reached inside to his shoulder-holstered weapon his hand was slick with sweat. That had never happened before. He was suddenly visited by a torn sense of … of what? He wasn’t sure. But his hand shook.

He quickly turned back outside. There was no relief, the facial disguise keeping the fresh air from cooling his heated face.

He looked back through the windows. The sight line remained clear. He mentally practiced it again: one step through the door, pause as if looking for a seat, wait for attention to return to Healey, step to center aisle, pull weapon and kill him.

He lit a cigarette. A trick he sometimes used to stuff feelings. Calming. Now resolved, he stepped back in.

Healey’s head was down. He was reading:

“In that moment, he looked at me.

I saw the goodness of me in his eyes.

I saw love, uncompromised.

I saw a hero yet unsullied by flaw

I saw the man I always wanted to be

Reflected in the mirror was he in me.”

Miguel whirled and exited the room. He remembered Patrick’s eyes. He quickly began walking down the semi-darkened street tearing off the mustache, beard and false eyebrows, flinging them into the gutter. He tossed the fake glasses over a bougainvillea hedge.

He entered his car and drove from where Healey continued to read.

There were images that’d come to him as he prepared to kill Healey. As the poet’s words entered his ears. They were of the last time he’d seen his father. Being held in the air, his father’s eyes looking into his; his huge, white smile engulfing him. His father’s eyes filled with love and pride.

That night for the first time in a long time he got drunk.

At three in the morning he was sitting in the damp grass at the foot of his mother’s gravesite looking at her picture framed in the new seven foot tall carved ornate cross that he’d purchased some years before.

‘So what do I do mother? Do I kill the father of this boy as they killed the father of your son? We never talked about that did we momma? That they took him to that fucking jungle and killed the father of your son. Do you remember how I cried when the officers came to tell you poppy was dead? How it killed me. And you too?

‘So mommy, what do I do? Can I kill this father and know that I will kill Patrick too? Just as they killed Patrick in me. Do I?’

There was no response and Miguel drank some more. Slowly he began to sink into the grass at the foot of her cross.

‘I don’t think so mommy.’

He took one more bleary-eyed look at her picture before his eyes closed.

The last image he saw before passing out however, was of Smythe sniffing.

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