Free Skinflick by Joseph Hansen

or Washington or someplace? You’ve seen those fake movies, haven’t you? Bad, grainy, eight-millimeter shots of some naked guy with a lot of hair and beard tromping through the underbrush? They don’t have sound but you can hear the grunts?”
    “He didn’t grunt his name for you?”
    “He was very paranoid. No names.” She clasped the empty tray to her chest with crossed arms. “He hung onto that book like this, wouldn’t let anybody see the cover, only her picture. He didn’t want questions, just answers: where was she. A week later he was back. It was sad. He’d lost the book. It figured. Charleen was dumb but she’d wised up a little here. He was childish. Naturally somebody ripped him off. He was lucky they left him his undershorts. He cried about the book, really cried, like a little kid. It was the only picture of Charleen he owned.” She looked past Dave, frowned and nodded. “I’ve got to pick up an order. Look, I’m sorry I forgot before.”
    “One more second,” Dave said. “Have you seen him lately? Big Foot?”
    “No, it’s been, what, two weeks? He was frantic. About the book. Thought he might have left it here. He hadn’t.” She tried to go inside. Dave stepped between her and the door.
    “You never saw her with him? He didn’t find her?”
    “There are nine million people in this town. How could he find her? He was lost, himself.” She tried to edge around him. “Look, I have to—”
    “What about Spence Odum? Did you see her with him?”
    “What’s a Spence Odum?”
    “A movie producer. You get film people in here.”
    “Did he tell you he was a producer?” she said. “They lie a lot, you know.”
    “A poster told me,” Dave said. “In Charleen’s apartment. Over her bed. He makes the kind of movies she might just luck into.”
    “I don’t get told people’s names much.” A shout came from the dusky sunset room. “Sorry—I have to go,” she said, and this time he let her.
    Kids with soft-drink cans sat on the hood and trunk of the Triumph where he’d left it, halfway up the hill. Skate boarders curvetted past him. He didn’t speak to the kids. When he stopped and took out keys, they got off the car.

8
    T HE SKY STILL HELD leftover daylight but when he tilted the Triumph up Horseshoe Canyon Trail the trees made it night. Big brown supermarket sacks crowded the passenger seat. He had to juggle with his knees to get a grip on them all. Slapped at by branches, he blundered through the dark to the cookhouse. He had to set the sacks down to unlock the door. Then it took him a while to find the light switch. The bulb that answered it was weak. He brought in the sacks and set them on a sink counter of cracked white tile that Amanda had already condemned.
    She’d condemned the cabinets too—of greasy, varnished pine, none of the doors willing to stay shut. The stove and refrigerator, chipped white enamel, were probably good for another ten years, but she wanted him to have new ones. He wondered what color she would choose—copper, cinnabar, heliotrope? He emptied the sacks, stocked cupboards and refrigerator, where the bulb was out but the air was cold. He’d bought a plastic bag of ice cubes. He unwrapped a squat drink glass—he’d picked up six at the supermarket—dropped ice into it, and built a martini.
    He left it to chill, crossed the uneven terra-cotta-tiled courtyard under beams from which vines hung in reaching tendrils, drooping big white trumpet flowers, to the third building, where fencing masks and foils rusted on knotty-pine walls. His stereo components sat on the dusty floor. He’d plugged them in and strung them together the day he hauled them up here from the rooms he’d shared with Doug above the gallery. Now he took the top album of the handiest stack and, without reading what it was, set the record on the turntable and started it going. The Mozart clarinet quintet. He turned up the volume, left the door open, and went back to the kitchen,