junction box. I hoped the ground wasn’t frozen, because I needed to yank the cable out a ways. I yanked, and yanked some more, and it finally pulled out a few inches. I cut it way down next to the ground, then put tape over both snipped ends, and taped them back together so that a casual glance, or even a less than casual tug, might not reveal that the black cable had been cut, and shoved the cable back into the ground and shaped snow around it a little, so it wouldn’t looked messed with. I probably needn’t have bothered: my footsteps had been following me in the snow, but more snow was coming down and the wind blowing it all around anyway, so in fifteen minutes all the tracks would be erased and/or covered.
The wire-cutters and tape and each glove I tossed, one at a time, over toward the shed. The snow would cover them, too.
I was getting cold again.
Time to go in.
14
The snow and wind were ganging up on me behind my back and there was nowhere to hide: I was on a porch of sorts, a landing, but it was very much open-air. I’d found several ways in, but this was obviously the main entrance-big double doors facing the parking lot-and I knocked on one of the twin slabs of thick dark wood and it drank up the sound and I knocked again, harder this time, hard enough for my knuckles to feel it, which considering how numb they were from the cold was pretty hard.
I didn’t have long to wait.
My insistent knocking got me an almost immediate answer: the door opened a crack and a sliver of face peeked out at me, in annoyance, or maybe fear. Maybe both. In the sliver of face was an eye, a large round slightly bloodshot eye. Above the eye was a scraggly pale blond eyebrow. Also in the sliver of face was a piece of lip. Above the piece of lip I could see a piece of mustache. Scraggly pale blond mustache.
“We’re busy in here,” he said.
It sounded silly to me then, and it sounds silly to me now, but that’s what he said.
“We’re freezing out here,” I said.
“We?” he said.
“The editorial ‘we,’” I said. “And I can turn that into a pun, if you want to spell it o-u-i.”
“What?”
“I’m with Oui magazine. They sent me here to do a piece on the film you’re shooting.”
“What?”
“Some people at Lake Geneva, at the Playboy Club, called the office and said somebody ought to come over and do a piece on the fuck film you’re shooting. I’m the some- body they sent.”
“It’s snowing.”
“Out here it’s snowing. It’s probably nice weather, in where you are.”
“Smart-ass.”
“Look, can I come in? It wasn’t snowing when I left Chica- go, can I help it I got caught in this shit? Let me in. It’s cold.”
“Freeze your nuts off, smart ass. See if I give a shit.”
“Are you Castile? You aren’t Castile. Get Castile.”
He thought about it a while. I could tell he was thinking because the big bloodshot eye blinked a couple times.
“Wait here, smart-ass,” he said.
“You talked me into it.”
The door closed, and a cold few minutes passed before it opened again. All the way this time.
Castile was standing there, outlined by intense light coming from somewhere deep in the place, standing hands on hips, looking cocky as hell, smiling. I recognized him from a picture that had accompanied the girlie magazine interview. He had puffy, styled red hair and goggle type glasses with light brown tinted glass. His jeans were fashionably faded, his short-sleeve sweatshirt black with the word DIRECTOR in white letters across the chest. Around his waist was a heavy black belt bulging with square packets; this was a battery belt, giving the wearer a power supply to operate a portable camera. This I found out later, but at the moment it reminded me of the heavy belts they advertise for women to wear around the house to lose weight.
Not that Castile needed to lose any weight: he was a small man, slender, short, but his slightly manic smile spoke of energy. Lots of it. He looked about twenty-five but was older, probably early thirties. He reminded me of Mickey Rooney at the point in his life when he was starting to look wrong for the Andy Hardy role.
I got a good chance to study him like this, because he was waiting for me to say something, and I didn’t.
Snow was starting to collect on Castile’s DIRECTOR sweatshirt and he seemed to be getting tired of smiling or maybe the cold was getting to him. Maybe he just wanted to get me inside so he could shut the door. At any rate, he finally broke the ice, so to speak.
He said, “What’s your name?”
“Jack Murphy,” I said.
“Never heard of you.”
“If you had, I wouldn’t have landed an assignment like this.”
“True enough,” Castile said, adjusting his smile to one side of his face.
I stood for a while and watched the snow collect on him, like heavy dandruff.
“Well,” he said. Irritation starting to show, but the smile constant. “Don’t just stand there. Come on in. You’re putting me behind schedule enough as it is… though with this shitty snow storm it doesn’t really matter. In, in, in.”
I went in.
15
The inside of the lodge was, like the outside, an odd mix of modern and rustic: rough, unpainted barnwood again, with thick shag rust-color carpeting that looked warm and lush and was about as easy to walk across as the Okefenokee Swamp; brown and white furniture set here and there, made out of plastic mostly, transparent tables, a white cylindrical chair with a seat scooped out and filled with a brown and white striped cushion, a chair that pleased neither the eye nor, I guessed, the ass; paintings, designy geometric shapes of white and brown and occa- sionally orange in shiny metal frames, out of place and proud of it, against the barnwood walls.
The entry area had a rather low ceiling, with an open stairway disappearing into it, over on the right, and another on the left, but soon this room opened out into another, larger area, the ceiling suddenly very high: the central section of the building, a good-size room’s worth, was a shaft that rose to a skylight, which was stuck up among open beams and currently letting in nothing but darkness, thanks to the snow piled on top.
It was as if the building had been cored like an apple, leaving each of the other three floors exposed and incomplete, a skeletal framework of balcony around each floor, where rooms stood curiously open-faced, fronted by two fairly widespread wooden posts joined by a skeletal railing, though each room had a tan shade, a curtain of canvas or something, that could be pulled down to close off the nonexistent front wall of the room, some of the rooms closed off in that manner now, while others gaped like missing teeth in the grinning skeletal mouths of each floor.
The effect of all this-balconies, stairways, open beams, open rooms-was one of spaciousness but, again, only added to that odd combination of modem and rustic, a projection of coldness, despite the pursuit of warmth.
Speaking of which, warm was definitely not the word for the climate in there, and as I followed Castile toward a brightly lit but still indistinct area ahead, a seeming contradiction to the lodge’s otherwise subdued lighting, I said, “Isn’t the furnace working, or what?”
