The Collection

Matt pressed the Pause/Freeze button on the remote and the image stopped in midframe. Dean and the gang stared, unmoving, at the long piece of metal suspended in the clear blue sky. Matt hit the Frame Advance button and the tire iron, very slowly, began to fall. He stopped the image just before the camera shifted to another angle.

'See. Right there. Right in those bushes.'

I shook my head. 'This is stupid.'

'No, it's not. Hell, if we can find it, we'll make a fortune. Do you know how much shit like that goes for?'

Matt had taped Rebel Without a Cause the night before and was now trying to convince me that we should dig through the bushes down the hill from the Griffith Park Ob­servatory, looking for the lug wrench Dean threw in the film.

'Okay,' he said. 'Think about it logically. How many people know that that scene was filmed at Griffith Park? Only Southern Californians, right?'

'That narrows it down to two or three million.'

'Yeah, but how many of them do you think ever tried this?'

'Lots.'

'You're crazy.'

'Look, after he died, fans scoured the country trying to find any scrap of memorabilia they could. They were selling napkins he'd touched.'

'You really think people went scrambling through the bushes trying to find that piece of metal?'

'Yes, I do.'

'Well, I don't. I think it's still there, rusting into the ground.'

'Fine. Go look for it. No one's stopping you.'

'You know I don't like to drive into Hollywood by my­self.' He turned off the VCR. 'All you have to do is give me moral support. Just go with me. I'll do all the work. And if I find it, we'll go fifty-fifty.' 'No deal.' 'Come on.'

'Are you deaf or just dumb? The answer is no.' He smiled, suddenly thinking of something. 'We could invite the girls. You know, make a day of it: check out the observatory, have a little picnic ...'

It sounded good, I had to admit. Steph had been after me for the past few weeks to take her someplace new and ex­citing and creative instead of doing the same old dinner-and-a-movie routine, and this might fit the bill.

'All right,' I agreed. 'But I'm not helping you dig. And if you get arrested for vandalism or something, I don't know you.'

Matt grinned. 'What a pal.'

He left the room to call Julie, and I picked up the remote and changed the channel to MTV.

He returned a few moments later. 'She can't go. Her grandpa's coming out from St. Louis this weekend and she has to be there.' 'Well-' I began.

'You promised.' He knelt before the couch in a pose of mock supplication. 'I won't bother you. You won't even no­tice I'm there. I'll just look through the bushes by myself and you two can do whatever your little hearts desire. All you have to do is drive me there and back.'

I laughed. 'You're really serious about this, aren't you?' 'It's a great idea. Even if someone has thought of this be­fore-which I doubt-I don't think they spent an entire day searching through the bushes to follow up on it.'

'You may be right,' I told him.

I called Stephanie from his apartment, but she said she couldn't make it either. Finals were coming up and she had some serious studying to do. She'd lost too much reading time already on account of me.

'That's fine,' Matt said. 'It'll be me and you.'

'I'm just driving,' I told him. 'I'm not going to waste my time following you through the bushes.'

'I know,' he said.

We stood in the small parking lot just below the observa­tory, looking over the low stone wall, in the same spot Dean had stood some forty years before. Matt was carefully study­ing a map he had drawn, trying to figure out exactly where the tire iron had landed. He walked three paces back from the wall and pretended to throw something over the edge. His eyes followed an arc, focusing finally on a copse of high bushes halfway down the hill. He pointed. 'That's it. That's where it is.'

I nodded.

'Remember that spot. Remember the landmarks next to those plants. We're going to have to recognize it from the bottom.'

I nodded again. 'Sure.'

He laughed, a half-parody of a greedy cackle. 'We're gonna be rich.'

'Yeah. Right.'

He made a note on his map. 'Come on. Let's go.'

We walked back up to the main parking lot in front of the observatory and drove down the winding road which led to the park below. We paid the dollar toll, splitting it, and pulled into a spot next to the playground.

Matt looked up the side of the hill, then down at his map.

'The way I figure it, we go straight from here, turn left maybe thirty yards in, and keep going up until we hit the big palm tree.'

'Right.'

We got out of the car, unloaded our shovels from the trunk, looked around to make sure no one was watching us, and hurried into the brush.

I really had intended not to help him, but I'd had to change my tune. What was I going to do? Sit in the car all day while he went traipsing off into the woods? Besides, it might be fun. And we might actually find something. He kept talking as we climbed, and I must admit, his ex­citement was catching. He was so sure of himself, so confi­ dent in his calculations, and I found myself thinking that, yeah, maybe we were the first people ever to search for this thing.

'I'm sure the movie people didn't collect it afterward,' he said, hopping a small sticker bush. 'You think they'd waste their time digging through acres of brush looking for a cheap, crummy little piece of metal?' He had a point.

We climbed for over an hour. In the car, we'd made it to the top of the hill in five or ten minutes. But walking ... that was another story. I'd read somewhere that Griffith Park covered several square miles, and I could easily believe it.

By the time we reached Matt's palm tree, we were both exhausted.

We stopped and sat under the tree for a moment. 'Why the hell didn't we bring a canteen?' I asked. 'How could we be so fucking stupid?'

Matt was consulting his map. 'Only a little farther. Maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes. A half hour at the most.'

I groaned. 'A half hour?'

He stood, brushing dead leaves off the seat of his pants. 'Let's go. The sooner we get there, the sooner we'll be fin­ished.'

'What if it's not even the right place?'

'It's the right place. I went over that videotape twenty times.'

I forced myself to stand. 'All right. Move out.'

It figured. The area where Matt thought the tire iron had landed was surrounded by thick, nearly impenetrable bushes, many of then covered with thorns. We jumped over some, slid under others, and a few we just waded through. My shirt and pants now had holes ripped in them.

'You owe me,' I said, as we traversed a particularly dif­ficult stretch of ground. I stepped over a monstrous science fiction-looking beetle. 'You owe me big time.'

He laughed. 'I hear you.' He grabbed a low tree branch above his head and swung over several entangled manzanita bushes. I followed suit.

'Shit!'

I heard his cry before I landed. I miscalculated, fell on my side, then stood, brushing off dirt.

We were in a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by a natural wall of vegetation. In the middle of the clearing stood a makeshift wooden shed.

And on the shed wall, carefully painted in white block letters was a single word: