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discussion ever got that far.
In cases where the plan did not involve turning him over to the cops, he often varied his answer
downward. No one as far back as he could remember had ever doubted him if he said he was sixteen. If
he said he was seventeen, they sometimes still doubted, believing him to be certainly younger than that.
To the truck driver he was riding with when he reached Albuquerque, Pat had said he was sixteen. The
truck driver had then responded with: "First time away from home, huh?"
"Yeah."
"I got a long drive ahead. We'll keep going all night," said the driver, and squeezed Pat's thigh, and
smiled.
It was still early afternoon. Pat smiled back and made no protest about the hand on his leg. The driver
was surprised and chagrined when just a little later, at a truck stop near the junction of Interstates 40 and
25 Pat announced that he was getting out, for good.
"Hey. What the hell. I thought ya wanted to go to California."
Still smiling, Pat slid down from the cab to stand on the sunstroked pavement. He stretched. Mountains
whose name he had never learned, though he had come through this way going east or west so many
times, rose barrenly a few miles to the east. He had chosen a good place for his announcement; a truck
stop surrounded by a city, with a fair number of people about. The jilted trucker was not going to be able
to do anything, or even to argue very much.
"Hey. Kid."
Pat did not even turn, but simply walked away. His feeling for Annie had altered suddenly. West was no
longer the right direction. Now she had to be somewhere to his right, somewhere to the north of here. He
could tell that she was out of walking distance still, but now she was no longer anything like a full day's
drive away.
Interstate 25 going north out of Albuquerque was a new route to Pat. But one highway was not all that
different from another; he was really at home on them all. Hiking the shoulder now, going up an entry
ramp toward the northward traffic flow, Pat felt a certain relief. Not only at leaving that particular trucker
behind sadistic tendencies there, experienced instinct whispered but at not having to go on to
Arizona, which was the next state west.
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There had been a bad scene out there in Phoenix, once. Real bad. Pat couldn't remember it consciously.
But the stink of it still came up to conscious memory, like something dead and too shallowly buried. A
warning: Don't dig here.
Pat topped the entrance ramp and kept on moving, hiking, looking over his left shoulder at a burst of
speeding cars that passed him. Like an accomplished athlete or an old actor going into an old routine, he
only needed to use half his attention in trying to flag a ride. Meanwhile he could use the other half on the
question of what he ought to do when he reached Annie.
He could tell where she was, in a general way that seemed to get more particular the closer he got to
her. But he couldn't tell what she was doing. For all he knew, she might be home, reconciled with her
parents; or maybe in some other situation that she wouldn't be anxious to leave, just to hit the road again
with Pat. So he ought to have some kind of hopeful proposition ready for her, something really attractive
to suggest.
He would talk about what else? getting her into movies of some kind. Every girl liked that idea, and
Annie was quite good-looking enough to make it credible. In fact, now that he thought of it . . .
Now that he thought about it, making movies with Annie was suddenly the one thing Pat wanted
desperately to do.
Sure. Of course. There would be some way. Why not? Almost forgetting to work at picking up a ride,
Pat hiked excitedly along the shoulder. The mountains to his right were forgotten, as was the intermittent
roar of traffic at his left elbow. He would find Annie, and they would go off somewhere and make films,
and everything in his whole screwed-up life might fall into the right place for once.
He remembered now how he had been talking with her in Chicago once, and she had been fascinated by
some of the stories of movie-making that he'd had to tell. She seemed to understand that he was telling
her the truth . . . or maybe it wasn't in Chicago. Somewhere. Shehad been with him somewhere else,
before Chicago, now that he came to think of it. Or was it after?
Somewhere else. A place he didn't want to think about right now. But she had liked him, and it had been
so good, that special way that they'd made love . . .
A movie with Annie in it was certainly a great idea, and if he wasn't crazy he would have thought of it
before now. Could he really do it? Could he really at last straighten out his own life that much? The idea,
when put in those terms, scared him a little.
He knew he could handle the movie itself, if he ever got the chance. He would pick up Annie, and they
would go somewhere where he could get a job with some filmmaker. Maybe even right here in New
Mexico. There were bound to be people here somewhere making films, and some of them had probably
heard about Pat from people out on the Coast. When you were good, word got around.
Porn was by far the easiest kind of work to find, for Pat at least. Particularly when they found out that he
was ready, willing, and able to double as an actor. He did well in front of the camera as well as behind it,
though acting or performing of any kind wasn't really what he liked to do. His androgynous good looks
were in demand, for straight, gay, or free-style porn. There was only one kind of thing he'd never
touched, and never would. So he took part in the filmed sex smiling like the madman he sometimes was,
faking the sex as much as possible, meanwhile continuing to keep himself happy by thinking how he
would do the lights and the camera work and time everything differently if he were put in charge. Of
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course there was a dreary sameness in all porn, or almost all. But there were an infinite number of ways
to disguise the sameness, if you knew what you were doing. Pat never doubted that he did.
But very rarely had he ever been allowed to take charge, to show what he could really do, though
sometimes his suggestions on specific points were taken, by filmmakers who were always gratified with
the results. The equipment and the space had always belonged to someone else. Nowhere, as far as he
knew, was there a complete film of any kind that he had made. Once he had been allowed to take
complete charge, at some real madman's house in Mexico. And once, another time, in this mansion with
giant roof beams they had been going to let him take over, but . . .
. . . something had happened. And now here he was, hiking north on Interstate 25 and trying once more
not to think about Phoenix. Today for some reason was a day for struggling with that problem. Maybe
just because this was the first time he had returned to the Southwest since . . .
. . . someone had brought him into that rich guy's mansion out there, someone promising what they called
a party. And Pat had thought he understood what that entailed . . .
His thought recoiled now, twisting, from a half-vision of blood. The memory faded, like a dying dream,
almost as quickly as it had come. It left behind it no new knowledge, only a wash of sick fear. What he
couldn't stand was the fear that that time he had been maneuvered into working on a snuff film. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]