Sunset Limited Read Free Page A

eaves. Cisco and his friends, movie people like himself, came and went with the seasons, shooting ducks in the wetlands, fishing for tarpon and speckled trout in the Gulf. Their attitudes were those of people who used geographical areas and social cultures as playgrounds and nothing more. Their glittering lawn parties, which we saw only from the road through the myrtle bushes and azalea and banana trees that fringed his property, were the stuff of legend in our small sugarcane town along the Teche.
    I had never understood Cisco. He was tough, like his sister, and he had the same good looks they had both inherited from their father, but when his reddish-brown eyes settled on yours, he seemed to search inside your skin for something he wanted, perhaps coveted, yet couldn’t define. Then the moment would pass and his attention would wander away like a balloon on the breeze.
    He had dug irrigation ditches and worked the fruit orchards in the San Joaquin and had ended up in Hollywood as a road-wise, city-library-educated street kid who was dumbfounded when he discovered his handsome face and seminal prowess could earn him access to a movie lot, first as an extra, then as a stuntman.
    It wasn’t long before he realized he was not only braver than the actors whose deeds he performed but that he was more intelligent than most of them as well. He co-wrote scripts for five years, formed an independent production group with two Vietnam combat veterans, and put together a low-budget film on the lives of migrant farmworkers that won prizes in France and Italy.
    His next film opened in theaters all over the United States.
    Now Cisco had an office on Sunset Boulevard, a home in Pacific Palisades, and membership in that magic world where bougainvillea and ocean sun were just the token symbols of the health and riches that southern California could bestow on its own.
    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