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Gretchen removed her earbuds and paused her iPod. “I’m fine, Ms. Louviere,” she said.
“I could hear you hitting that bag all the way on the other side of the track. I didn’t know it was you.”
“I come here a couple of days a week,” Gretchen said. To occupy her hands, she rubbed her knuckles and the skinned places along her palms. Down below, she could see a heavyset man named Tim who had been crippled and whose speech had been permanently impaired in a motorcycle accident. He was known for his personal courage and his determination to be self-reliant. He was wheeling himself slowly across the basketball court.
“Would you like to go downstairs and have a glass of iced tea with me?” Felicity asked.
“I have to be somewhere.”
“I don’t blame you for not liking me, Ms. Horowitz. I do blame you for not giving me a chance.”
“Chance to do what?”
“Perhaps to explain some things. To apologize.”
“People are what they do, not what they say.”
“I see.”
“You’re married, Ms. Louviere. That fact won’t go away. My father wakes up every morning with his head in a vise.”
“I’m sorry.”
Gretchen tapped the speed bag with the flat of her fist and watched it swing back and forth on the swivel. “I’d better get back to my workout.”
“What are you listening to?”
“The Big Sky, by A. B. Guthrie.”
“That’s a grand book.”
Gretchen tapped again on the bag, hitting it in a slow rhythm on the second rebound. “Did you see Shane?”
“With Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur and Van Heflin.”
“Guthrie wrote the screenplay. It’s supposed to be the best western ever made. Except it’s not a western, it’s a Judeo-Greek tragedy. Shane doesn’t have a last or first name. He’s just Shane. He comes out of nowhere and never explains his origins. In the last scene, he disappears into a chain of mountains you can hardly see. Brandon deWilde played the little boy who runs after him and keeps shouting Shane’s name because he knows the Messiah has gone away. Nobody ever forgets that scene. I wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night.”
“Where did you learn all this?”
“At the movie theater. You know why the cattle barons in the film hate Shane? It’s because he doesn’t want or need what they have.”
Felicity’s eyes went away from Gretchen’s. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
“No, not at all. How did you know Jean Arthur and Van Heflin costarred with Alan Ladd?”
“I was a ticket taker at an art theater.”
“I’m doing my second documentary. My first one made Sundance. I think I might get enough financing from France to do a period film, an adaptation of a novel about Shiloh.”
“Why go to France for financing?”
“American producers are afraid to risk their money on historical pieces. Did you see Cold Mountain? It was one of the best films ever made about the Civil War, but it bombed. The rest of the world is fascinated with American history. We’re not.” Gretchen tapped the bag. “I’ve got to get back to my workout.”
“You’re an interesting woman, Ms. Horowitz.”
“Who played the role of Jack Wilson, the hired gun?” Gretchen asked.
“Jack Palance,” Felicity said.
