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It was late Sunday evening when I turned off the state road and drove up the gravel lane toward his veranda. His lawn was blue-green with St. Augustine grass and smelled of chemical fertilizer and the water sprinklers twirling between the oak and pine trees. I could see him working out on a pair of parallel bars in the side yard, his bare arms and shoulders cording with muscle and vein, his skin painted with the sun's late red light through the cypresses on the bayou.
As always, Cisco was courteous and hospitable, but in a way that made you feel his behavior was learned rather than natural, a barrier rather than an invitation.
"Megan? No, she had to fly to New Orleans. Can I help you with something?" he said. Before I could answer, he said, "Come on inside. I need something cold. How do you guys live here in the summer?"
All the furniture in the living room was white, the floor covered with straw mats, blond, wood-bladed ceiling fans turning overhead. He stood shirtless and barefooted at a wet bar and filled a tall glass with crushed ice and collins mix and cherries. The hair on his stomach looked like flattened strands of red wire above the beltline of his yellow slacks.
"It was about an inmate in the parish prison, a guy named Cool Breeze Broussard," I said.
He drank from his glass, his eyes empty. "You want me to tell her something?" he asked.
"Maybe this guy was mistreated at the jail, but I think his real problem is with some mobbed-up dudes in New Orleans. Anyway, she can give me a call."
"Cool Breeze Broussard. That's quite a name."
"It might end up in one of your movies, huh?"
"You can't ever tell," he replied, and smiled.
On one wall were framed still shots from Cisco's films, and on a side wall photographs that were all milestones in Megan's career: a ragged ditch strewn with the bodies of civilians in Guatemala, African children whose emaciated faces were crawling with blowflies, French Legionnaires pinned down behind sandbags while mortar rounds geysered dirt above their heads.
But, oddly, the color photograph that had launched her career and had made Life magazine was located at the bottom corner of the collection. It had been shot in the opening of a storm drain that bled into the Mississippi just as an enormous black man, in New Orleans City Prison denims strung with sewage, had burst out of the darkness into the fresh air, his hands raised toward the sun, as though he were trying to pay tribute to its energy and power. But a round from a sharpshooter's rifle had torn through his throat, exiting in a bloody mist, twisting his mouth open like that of a man experiencing orgasm.
A second framed photograph showed five uniformed cops looking down at the body, which seemed shrunken and without personality in death. A smiling cr
ew-cropped man in civilian clothes was staring directly at the camera in the foreground, a red apple with a white hunk bitten out of it cupped in his palm.
"What are you thinking about?" Cisco asked.
"Seems like an inconspicuous place to put these," I said.
"The guy paid some hard dues. For Megan and me, both," he said.
"Both?"
"I was her assistant on that shot, inside the pipe when those cops decided he'd make good dog food. Look, you think Hollywood's the only meat market out there? The cops got citations. The black guy got to rape a sixteen-year-old white girl before he went out. I get to hang his picture on the wall of a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar house. The only person who didn't get a trade-off was the high school girl."
"I see. Well, I guess I'd better be going."
Through the French doors I saw a man of about fifty walk down the veranda in khaki shorts and slippers with his shirt unbuttoned on his concave chest. He sat down in a reclining chair with a magazine and lit a cigar.
"That's Billy Holtzner. You want to meet him?" Cisco said.
"Who?"
"When the Pope visited the studio about seven years ago, Billy asked him if he had a script. Wait here a minute."
I tried to stop him but it was too late. The rudeness of his having to ask permission for me to be introduced seemed to elude him. I saw him bend down toward the man named Holtzner and speak in a low voice, while Holtzner puffed on his cigar and looked at nothing. Then Cisco raised up and came back inside, turning up his palms awkwardly at his sides, his eyes askance with embarrassment.
"Billy's head is all tied up with a project right now. He's kind of intense when he's in preproduction." He tried to laugh.
"You're looking solid, Cisco."
"Orange juice and wheat germ and three-mile runs along the surf. It's the only life."
"Tell Megan I'm sorry I missed her."
"I apologize about Billy. He's a good guy. He's just eccentric."
