The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter Read Free Book Online

won’t,” I said. “What?”
    â€œI think we should dance on his grave,” Jim said. “Not as any kind of insult . . .”
    â€œI understand,” I said.
    â€œYou know, to kind of celebrate the number of graves Grandpa danced on in his time . . .”
    But I was already holding out my hands, and Jim took them, and lightly, while he hummed “The Hora,” we danced under the moon. There was nothing particularly appropriate about the music, it’s just what Jim came up with. He hummed it faster and faster, and we danced faster and faster until I got dizzy and fell down. I watched Jim finish the dance himself, his eyes shut, his hands up in the air, circling slowly around the grave and the apricot tree. He wasn’t singing “The Hora” anymore, it was just, “Ah-yah! Ahhh-yah! Ahh-yah!”
    Later we carried the shovels back up to the house, and Jim went in to bed and actually got some sleep while I sat up in the living room at the old wicker table by the windows, writing a letter to my cousin Harold, telling him what we had done and where Grandpa was buried. If he wanted, I would come back for a regular funeral, but the odd thing was, after me and Jim got back to Hollywood, Harold called me up and told me the family had had their own funeral down at the gravesite, which Harold and a couple of the other men had done a better job of covering up, and that nothing else was planned. That strange Okie tact again, maybe.

    JIM’S RENT-A-CAR was a little black bullet designed to go fast as hell for a couple of years and then fly apart. The next morning, somewhat after chickenfart, we packed ourselves into the car and headed down the mountain. I had stuck my note where they would find it. Jim had read it over breakfast coffee and approved. With seven hours’ sleep for three days, Jim had to do a little snorting to wake up properly, and I joined him. It was a bluesky day, warm and pleasant, running down the valley toward the Black Point cutoff. We didn’t talk or play the radio, Jim just drove and I looked at the view, which I didn’t normally get to do because usually I was behind the wheel. I did wonder if this wasn’t going to be my last trip down to Hollywood, but I didn’t bring the subject up. Jim knew my feelings and I knew his.
    After Black Point we ran along the side of a slough, the road itself up on a levee, as we headed west toward the Coast Range, where we would pick up 101. There were lots of cattails and reeds in the slough, plenty of redwing blackbirds and some long-legged, long-beaked white birds that could have been cranes or egrets or something, beautiful as hell, wading slowly through the shallow water. I just got glimpses of them as we whizzed by, Jim havingthe car up to sixty or seventy most of the time. The traffic was light this time of day, although we whipped around a few farmers’ trucks.
    â€œThis must be the last two-lane road in America,” Jim said.
    Just then a big white Chevy pickup truck whizzed past us barreling down the road, and I saw something funny:
    â€œWhat the hell they doing?” I said.
    Something sticking out the passenger side of the car, then I hear the snap! and see the white bird jerked away and over into the water, and we sped past the white bird in time to see a spreading stain of red on its feathers.
    â€œThey shot that bird!” I yelled at Jim. Another snapping sound, and looking ahead I could see that they had rifles out both sides. Jim speeded up.
    â€œPissants!” he yelled. The little black bullet car zoomed forward, almost breaking my neck.
    We pulled up next to the white Chevy. I rolled down my window and looked up into the cab of the truck, seeing the tip of the rifle and the straw cowboy hat, the mean, unformed dumb young country face behind the wheel. There were three of them in there, and I could see the punk next to the driver lift up, grinning with all his gums and