ON PRIVATE LAND just inside the Utah border, Desmond had constructed an environment meant to replicate nineteenth-century Indian territory and a stretch of the Cimarron River just north of the Texas Panhandle. He had diverted a stream and brought in water tanks and lined a gulley with vinyl and layered it with gravel, then placed a solitary horseman five hundred yards from the improvised riverbank.
Wexler was standing next to me. “This scene is going to cost the boys in Jersey over fifty grand. I hope they enjoy it.”
“Pardon?” I said.
“It’s the last scene in the picture, although we’re only a third into the story. The guy who wrote the book says it’s the best scene he ever wrote, and the last line in the scene is the best line he ever wrote. I bet our Jersey friends would love that.”
“Who are your Jersey friends?”
“Not the Four Seasons,” he answered.
The rider was a tall and lanky boy who looked no older than fifteen. His horse was a chestnut, sixteen hands, with a blond tail and mane. Desmond was talking to the camera personnel; then he flapped a yellow flag above his head. Through a pair of binoculars, I saw the boy lean forward and pour it on, bent low over the withers, his legs straight out, whipping the horse with the reins, his hat flying on a cord. The sun was low and red in the sky, the boy riding straight out of it like a blackened cipher escaping a molten planet. Two leather mail pouches were strung from his back, arrows embedded in them up to the shaft.
“The scene is about the Pony Express?” I said.
“On one level,” Wexler said. “But actually, it’s about the search for the Grail.”
I looked at him.
“Don’t worry if you’re confused,” he said. “Probably no one else will get it, either. Particularly that lovely bunch of gangsters on the Jersey Shore.”
“It’s an allegory?”
“Nothing is an allegory for Desmond. He hears the horns blowing along the road to Roncesvalles. Worse than I.”
The rider went hell for breakfast across the stream, the horse laboring, its neck dark with sweat, water splashing and gravel clacking.
“Cut!” Desmond said. “Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!”
After the boy dismounted, Desmond hugged him in a full-body press. I felt embarrassed for the boy. “Where’d you learn to ride?” Desmond said.
“Here’bouts,” the boy said, his face visibly burning.
“Well, you’re awfully fine,” Des said. “Get yourself a cold drink. I want to talk with you later. With your parents. You’re going somewhere, kid.”
That was Desmond’s great gift. He made people feel good about themselves, and he didn’t do it out of pride or compulsion or weakness or defensiveness or a desire to feel powerful and in control of others. He used his own success to validate what was best in the people around him. But there is a caveat implied in the last statement. The people who surrounded him were not simply employees, they were acolytes, and I suspected Bailey was about to become one of them. For that reason alone, I felt a growing resentment, one that was petty and demeaning.
“What’d you think, Dave?” Desmond said.
“That young fellow is impressive,” I replied.
“Come on, you’re a smart man. What do you think of us, tattered bunch that we are, talking trash about Crusader knights and trying to sell it to an audience that wants a fucking video game?”
“What do I know?”
Bailey Ribbons was standing thirty feet away, dressed like a fashionable pioneer woman. I had not spoken to her yet.
“What do you think of that scene, Bailey?” Wexler asked.
“I think it’s all grand,” she said. She walked toward us. Her hem went to the tops of her feet. Her frilly white blouse was buttoned at the throat, her hair piled on her head. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Dave?”
“You have to forgive me. I was hesitant to speak on the set.”
“You’re surprised to see me here?” she asked.
“If I’d known you were coming, I wouldn’t have asked Helen for some vacation days. She’s shorthanded now.”
“It wasn’t my intention to inconvenience anyone,” she said.