He looked back at Fort Wilderness. Lawford and Davis continued to sing, the crowd was still cheering, no one seemed to have any idea they had left.
“Okay,” Violet said as she stepped into the boat. “Thank you.”
He looked at her, hoping she was still the same good-natured kid he’d met some Christmases ago given that she’d been through God only knew what since running away from home. Margaret was going to be so happy, so relieved, so grateful, he thought. He slid the vessel off the banks and into the water, stepped in, knelt, found an oar, and began paddling.
“How do we get out?” she asked. They were cloaked in the night as Charlie guided them through the imitation Missouri, but he gently whispered, “Shh,” as he clutched the oar. She nodded. She got it.
With Tom Sawyer Island on their left, he paddled past a dock, a small forest, and keelboats on their right. A sign announced FOWLER’S HARBOR and beyond that stood a structure that advertised NEW ORLEANS SQUARE. If they kept paddling to the left on the circular river, they would soon be back at the Mark Twain Steamboat area, which teemed with activity, so Charlie figured New Orleans was a better route. He put some muscle into his stroke to land on the banks in front of him.
“We’re getting off here?” Violet asked.
“Think so,” he said. The canoe skidded onto the muddy shore and Charlie began pulling the boat all the way onto land so Violet could climb out. But suddenly he felt a sharp whack on the back of his head, and everything went black.
The bullet ricocheted off a large rock maybe a foot from Margaret. She ducked, gasped, then turned and ran down the mountain. Her pursuer fired another shot. Margaret heard it whiz by her head; she felt the wind of it. She ducked again and started zigzagging down the hill.
A minute passed. She skidded behind a bush then stole a look uphill. No one was there. It was quiet and still. The Hollywood sign stood indifferent to the drama.
She stood and once again heard the crack of the gun. She turned and ran, straining her eyes to see the path in front of her. Her run down the mountain took on a pattern: hop-jump-skid, hop-jump-skid. Her thoughts drifted to Charlie, wherever he was, then Violet, then she remembered Charlotte. God. Charlotte. She’d put the dead woman out of her mind as she raced to find the hidden trove of evidence, but Margaret couldn’t believe she’d been murdered. What secrets would be worth killing someone to preserve?
Hop-jump-skid…
Lord Almighty, she wanted to see Charlie. She needed his help in rescuing her friend, of course, but it was much more than that, she realized.
She loved Charlie at his best, and when he was at his worst she was mad at him for not being who she knew he could be. She’d been too hard on him, she decided, confronted as she was now with finality, with mortality. Perhaps she too readily compared him to the dashing, brilliant Columbia senior she’d met in the stacks that romantic winter night in 1941. Maybe she’d had a vision of the man he would become and was struggling with the chasm between that man and the reality of Charlie at forty-one, shell-shocked, booze on his breath, still unsure of how to negotiate his finely tuned sense of black and white on a planet of grays.
Yes, he was, of course, making stupid mistakes, ones that maybe seemed small in the context of the Rat Pack bacchanalia but were nonetheless out of character. There remained so much in Charlie that was good—not just his virtue, but his tenderness with Lucy and Dwight, his kindness to her mother, his devotion to her. Margaret would help him. The fundamental issue she had, she knew, was not with her partner; it was with their enemies, those who sought the erosion of standards and fundamental decency. The American way of life was built on the honor system, but that depended on all the players having a sense of honor. Others might not, but Charlie did, and that was all that mattered, truly. Yet both of them had become so focused on the minutiae of day-to-day decisions and slights, they were blind to the overall wonder of their lives.
Hop-jump-skid…
She stopped to catch her breath and turned to look up the mountain. There was nothing but the letters, illuminated by both the floodlights and the pinkish-orange light preceding the rising sun to the east, past the reservoir. The shooter and Sheryl Ann were both gone. Before her, the glittering grid of Hollywood and the sprawl of Los Angeles, Inglewood, Compton, Lakewood, Torrance. And beyond that, the inky black where the Pacific rumbled. She would run to the bottom of the hill, get into her car, and go find Charlie. He would help her, she would help him, and they would defeat the nefarious forces that once again had found them and were trying to destroy them. She would do whatever she needed to get him back to full strength. They had no choice; she had no choice.
As Charlie rolled over, he caught a glimpse of the imprint his face had made in the muddy bank of the fake river; it looked like the death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte. He tried to sit up, but a foot suddenly came at his chin. Charlie jerked away and the kick bruised his shoulder.
When Charlie had told John Wayne about his hand-to-hand training at Fort Benning, he meant every word of it. He’d learned to fight dirty, to kill or be killed. His instructor, Master Sergeant Tom Ladzinski, would repeatedly say, “Fuck the Marquess of Queensberry” while demonstrating how to rip out a man’s throat. Ladzinski destroyed the idea that men should put up their dukes and instead showed them how to tap into the viciousness within themselves.
Charlie was older and slower on the banks of Disneyland’s sham Missouri than
