Dog Beach: A Novel by John Fusco

Author:John Fusco [Fusco, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2014-09-08T12:00:00+00:00

15

RADAR LOVE

Dutch was driving back from Thousand Oaks at night, feeling oddly alone. She had gone to the baseball card dealer and offered to buy back the Super Bowl game ball. The dealer, a fish-eyed midget with bad skin, told her that he had sold it at a convention in San Diego almost two weeks ago, then he tried to push a rare Jason Banazak rookie card on her. What’d he take her for? she said. A fan of that Neanderthal rapist? Well, why the Christ did she want to buy the signed football, the midget parried. She didn’t answer, just walked out, saying nothing.

Two doors down, she spotted a liquor store but walked away from it. A foot from her car, she changed her mind, went back to buy a bottle of Grey Goose. In the parking lot, she mixed a hefty portion in her water bottle with orange juice, poked a straw in, and drove off, sipping. A few emotional songs on the radio—“Rolling in the Deep” by Adele was one—and she felt herself going into that dangerous place of missing what once was. She switched from FM to CD and played her favorite ramp-up song, hoping to override her feelings.

I’ve been drivin’ all night

My hand’s wet on the wheel;

There’s a voice in my head

that drives my heel . . .

Three years back, she was driving stunts for just about every production that came into Santa Fe. If it happened to be a Western, she stunt-doubled any female scripted into a saddle, but it was mostly driving for Everett Cook’s bunch, the stunt unit nicknamed Team Extreme. Everett had worked with her dad, the much-respected precision driver Billy Wayne Dupree, one of the few stunt guys pulling down six figures a year. Dutch grew up around it, Daddy’s little stuntgirl. After two daughters, Billy Wayne had hoped for a boy on the third go, but out came Debbie. He made her his boy just the same, and she loved it.

By the time she was eighteen, they were calling her Dutch and she was arguably the best driver on his team; she had a rep for being as tough and daring as her father, the man who had leapt off the cliff in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, although she could never remember if he had doubled Redford or Newman. He was gone now—dead from hard living—so she couldn’t ask him. The stunt work had made him drink, and drinking made him ill. Illness put him out of work, which made him drink harder and die. That’s when Dutch started drinking too. Tight-roping out onto that dangerous slope of alcohol that her father had dare-deviled and lost to.

It was on the set of an indie drama that she hooked up with a young wrangler named Keefe. By the end of the three-month shoot, they were talking marriage; Keefe had a dream of getting out of the movie biz, swearing off booze, and buying a small ranch. He thought she should get out too, while the going was good.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.