The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Read online

  The Accomplice

  Darryl Ponicsán

  The Accomplice

  The Stairway Press Edition, ©2015 Darryl Ponicsán

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-1-941071-15-1

  eBook ISBN 978-1-941071-16-8

  Also by Darryl Ponicsán

  The Stairway Press Collected Edition of The Last Detail and Cinderella Liberty

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  Foreword to…the new edition of The Accomplice by Darryl Ponicsán

  Having finished my novel, Cinderella Liberty, in the early months of 1972, I spent a couple days poolside in a hammock realizing we had run out of money and we were going to have to sell the house, quickly, to underwrite whatever came next. One option was to move to Paris or Barcelona, two cities in which I’d spent some time and where I knew we could live cheaply on the proceeds from the house with the pool.

  Then 20th Century-Fox bought the rights outright while still in manuscript and I was hired to adapt my own novel to film. By that time, the house had already sold and we were in a rental. Even though we were flush again, we stayed in the low-rent place and I vowed I would always live beneath my means, good advice for any artist.

  I spent the rest of 1972 and part of 1973 working on the screenplay, and might still be working on it if the Writers Guild hadn’t gone on strike.

  This is not an exaggeration.

  I have been working on a western for thirty-five years. I seem powerless to stop. Thanks to that strike, the movie finally went into production. I’d been working so long and intensely on that little movie that by the time I was cut loose, I was homesick for another novel. My writing arc, beginning when I was eighteen, was typical of the times: start with poetry, include short stories, learn to take the blows of rejection, support yourself by journalism, copywriting, or teaching while you make the leap to a literary novel, the most complex and demanding of all writing disciplines.

  Cinderella Liberty was my fourth published novel and my first screenplay. I did not know if I would ever write another script, but another novel was certain. Since my first one, The Last Detail, I was on a groundswell and never had writer’s block. As long as I showed up for work every morning, as my father always did to his auto parts store, something was bound to come, though I could never know if finally it would come a cropper.

  My first and fourth novels were based on my Navy experiences, and I was done with that subject. I wanted, with each new novel, to do something different, to repeat myself only in theme, not subject matter. (More recently, I stumbled into the mystery genre by the back door and wound up writing four books about a woman detective in Seattle but I did those under the pen name, Anne Argula.)

  So that was more or less the situation when I was contacted by the District Attorney of the cow county in which we lived, where everybody kind of had mutual acquaintances. He told me we were divided by only one degree of separation and wanted to know if I would meet with him about a case he once prosecuted. This is the sort of request fielded by any published writer, and should routinely be declined, not only because of possible legal risks but also for the preservation of his own precious time. We did, however, have something of a connection and the man was now retired and in poor health. I said I would meet him.

  The former prosecutor was recovering from a heart attack and appeared frail when I visited him at his home. He lived just long enough to read and approve of the published edition of The Accomplice. In that first meeting he told me he began his career as a defense attorney and became unsettled by how easy it was to win a case against the county. In reaction, he ran for district attorney and won, that election and every election for the rest of his career. His conviction rate was ninety-seven percent, and he had never lost a capital case. Every capital case he did win was followed in due time by an execution. He told me all of this flatly, without pride. Then he talked about the case.

  It involved an obsessive mother of a twenty-something educated and professional son. Their relationship, if not incestuous, was far from healthy or normal. In an act of rebellion the son impregnated and secretly married a local girl. When the mother learned about the betrayal she set about making her world right again. She had a sidekick, an old lady on the edge of senility, and together they hit the streets of their small city, first to slander the hapless girl and when that proved unsatisfying to enlist someone to kill her.

  The expression “…the banality of evil…” came to mind. I knew people who when they said, “I’m going to kill him!” other people didn’t believe them, and no one ever wound up dead. The mother he told me about was a character not unfamiliar to me. Growing up in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania I had my fair share of unfiltered hard scrabble women, dazed and manipulated sidekicks, and marginal men flattered by the offer of any kind of contract. As grim as it was the story was engaging, had a beginning, middle, and, oh, what an end, and it was not without irony. The problems in rendering it into a novel, however, were obvious, and perhaps never really overcome.

  I made no commitment during that meeting. The first decision a novelist has to make is where to stand in order to tell the story, made difficult in this case by the lack of any sympathetic characters. Yes, there was the victim, but she was off-stage for the most part, and I was reluctant to write a courtroom drama in which the DA is the hero. In my mind the DA was a minor character who added little to the emotional impact of the novel. As I read over the trial transcripts he gave me, I tried to talk myself out of going down this dark path.

  Did I really want to spend a year or more with these people? Still, I could not deny that there was something at the same time banal and unique and frightening at the core of this bizarre intersection of several lives. It reflected much of what I knew about life, and it would give me an opportunity to learn more of what I was still trying to understand about life. That would be human redemption, the underlying theme of my four previous books.

  I discovered in the transcripts a character the DA mentioned only in passing, a drifter in need of deferred mothering. He briefly fell into this mad mother’s web and, despite his misgivings over her strange behavior, liked being part of a family again. This rudderless, inarticulate Joe wanted very much to please her but his conscience would not let him take the ultimate step. Instead, he risked his freedom by going along far enough in the hope of defusing her. In reality, the character was easy to forget. The transcripts revealed nothing of who he was as a person. But I knew he was my kind of character, someone on which all of this could hang. In fact, it would really be his story, if I made it so.

  In The Last Detail I introduced William Buddusky, aka Billy Bad-Ass, and in my next book, Goldengrove, I introduced his brother, Ernie, a high school teacher. I thought I could create another Buddusky inspired by the unknown drifter in this real story. All three of the Buddusky boys, even with their short comings and bad decisions, were basically decent men, and this Buddusky might turn out to be the most interesting of the three. He had a lot to be justifiably ashamed of, but he was not a killer and he was
not an accomplice to murder. Everyone, including the District Attorney, told him that and advised him to get on with his life. The character I was creating in my mind, however, could never forgive himself. As I was trying to talk myself out of taking on this project, I was already working on the story. I had found a place to stand. This story would begin and end with Buddusky.

  I remembered two kids from my teens, both bruising football players. One was a gentle giant we called “Beef,” the other a bully known as “Bomba the Jungle Boy.” It was that kind of town. I couldn’t decide which name to appropriate for my character so I took both.

  My previous novels were written from my own life’s experiences. I was a stranger to the kind of deep research some novelists must undertake. On balance, The Accomplice did not require much research, but what it did involve was not easy. I did little research on the actual people involved—I would create my own versions of them—but I did follow their paths: where they lived, where they ate, where they solicited accomplices, and of course the scenes of the crimes. At each locale my imagination ran the video of what actually happened. For reasons of privacy, I looked for another city that could duplicate for fiction the actual locale. Colorado Springs seemed a likely choice. I went there and spent a few days making notes. I never went back.

  The District Attorney made it possible for me to have a guided tour of San Quentin prison, and I looked forward to that. Once there, I looked forward to getting on the other side of the walls again. The warden took me through the entire process of capital punishment, ending up inside the gas chamber. I stood behind one of the chairs and he behind the other, looking through the glass at where the witnesses would be, at the leather straps that would hold the condemn’s hands to the chair, to the openings through which the lethal gas would be released. He described the final moments of the process academically and we both fell silent. Not to be overly dramatic about it but it became hard to breathe in that capsule where so many condemned had breathed their last. Experts abound, but only the condemned know what it is like, and they are not talking. I turned my head toward the warden. He watched me in silence. I knew he was waiting for me to sit in one of the chairs. I chose not to.

  I had a rolling office in those days, a new Dodge camper van I bought with some of my movie money. Daily, I would take a thermos of coffee and my miniature Dobie named Vegas and drive to a spot with a beautiful view. It was, in fact, the actual panorama of Shangri-La that Frank Capra used for his 1937 film, Lost Horizon. There I would spend four or five hours a day for the next year writing in longhand what eventually became the book you are about to read.

  The book was published to good reviews and lukewarm sales. I’ve never had a best-seller. I don’t say this as a point of pride. I would love to have a best-seller. The connection I make with readers is usually strong but not widespread. It just works out that way.

  The Accomplice was optioned, as a vehicle for Lauren Bacall, by a producer-director-writer who worked on the project for a few years and then went on to something else, as did I: a biographical novel about Tom Mix (Tom Mix Died for Your Sins), a novel about my experiences working on a traveling 3-ring circus (The Ringmaster), a divorce, a furnished apartment in a beach town, a new wife, a new city, and several screenplays that never made it to film.

  My early success with movies misled me into believing it was easy. It took seven years after my first two movie releases to get another, Taps. After that, for the next thirty years, I was never without a screenwriting job. During that time the world of publishing as I knew it was changing, and not for the better. I was grateful to have established myself in a medium I had always loved. I mean, who doesn’t love the movies?

  The end seemed to come overnight. At a certain unspecified age, all but a very few screenwriters are taken out to the backlot and shot. We’ve seen it happen to others before us and we know it will happen to us and by the time it does, we’re ready for it. At least I was. From the beginning, I was in it but not of it. I’ve lived in Los Angeles but never as a screenwriter. During the course of my career I kept moving farther north, until I was holed up on a cold island in the Pacific Northwest. I never even heard the shot.

  Neither novelist nor screenwriter, I experienced a number of unsettling dreams. I was back in San Quentin and this time I took a seat. I would wake up wondering if in a previous life I had murdered someone. I imagined a cop coming to believe that he was a victim of a murder in a previous life. Wouldn’t he set about trying to solve his own murder? I thought it could be a great movie, but I went back to what brought me and wrote it as a novel. (Homicide My Own, nominated for an Edgar Award.) Three more mysteries followed. No one seemed to take notice of them, and I felt like a trespasser in the genre. I had, after all, gone into it in drag.

  I decided to quit writing. As a writer friend of mine once said, “I never took an oath.” This was right before he entered the drug trade.

  Creative work, however, is my life’s blood. I don’t play golf or tennis, I don’t fish or hunt, I don’t shop or drive fast cars. Given a week to fill, I have to create something out of nothing or go crazy. I dipped into a whole other well and pulled up the juices to paint and sculpt. I leased studio space and spent all my time there. During the next three years, I discovered that the same sensibilities that led me to writing could be used in painting and sculpture as well.

  There is a reason there are more artists in America than writers. It’s more fun. Imagine, working on your feet, loud music in the background, splashing, cutting, chiseling, visitors milling around, talking, laughing. Even with all its chemicals, painting is healthier than writing. Carving stone beats you up but not as thoroughly as a day spent sitting at a desk putting words together. I could honestly say I was happier. Who needed to write novels, let alone read them?

  A year ago, however, certain circumstances of my life revealed a paradox, which in turn suggested the start of a story, which cried for a cast of characters, characters that only I had. I couldn’t express a fraction of it in either a painting or a sculpture. Was it a struggle going back? Not much. I accepted that one perforce returns to that from which he cannot escape.

  I remember reading an essay by John O’Hara many years ago, when he was still alive. He was at the same time celebrating that the novel had survived the invention of radio and lamenting that “this new box” in the living room was a much bigger threat. Would enough people choose to read a novel over watching a television show to encourage novelists to keep going? His anxiety seems quaint now that the culture revolves around the internet, and universities are teaching the art of writing games, which may be poised to become the new literature.

  And yet here I am again, sitting at my desk, four or five hours a day, writing a novel that I might not be able to finish or that I might not be able to publish or that no one will read. Best part: I don’t care.

  —Darryl Ponicsán, Palm Springs, 2014

  ONE

  Noon, nearing the end of a long, steady summer of county fairs, and Beef Buddusky squats and peers into the mystery of the stalled carousel. The crescent wrench in his shaky hand slips off the nut and he skins his knuckles. He puts them in his mouth. The children on their unmoving mounts are ready to be cruel. One of the boys yells, “Stupid!”

  Without rising, Beef turns to say, “My mother didn’t raise no stupid kids. She drownded ‘­­­em.” He turns back to the gears and mumbles to himself, “And that was the day I learned to swim.”

  He pulls the pint of Kessler from the hip pocket of his greasy white coveralls and takes a long drink, hoping to quiet last night’s calliope, still in his ears, hoping to stop his stomach from following the ponies, up and down, round and round and round, “In the good old summertime, in the good old summertime...”

  Beef straightens up and looks at the frozen herd; the cowboys stare at him with contempt. “C’mon, mister, get it going, will you.”

  He is a passable hand at a number of trades: he can lay a leach line, he can roof a house,
he can even fry an egg if he has to. But he can’t work for a living, not with everybody hassling him every minute of the day.

  “Get it goin’ yourself, shitass,” he says, and he gives the works his heel, throwing the crescent wrench to the ground. He steps up to the platform and slaps a wooden rump. “So long, old paint.”

  Before he can step off, the thing starts up! He lurches and anchors himself, one hand on a tail, the other on a nose.

  But his mind is made up. This job has run its distance. He steps off the merry-go-round, his foot skims across the ground, and he lands on his back, raising around him a cloud of dust.

  Look at him lying there, stunned and blinking at the sun. Know that he is no longer a lumbering, oafish, ignorant follower of county fairs. Ah, but often he wishes he were.

  TWO

  Beef reenlisted in the ragtag army of young men who muster along the highway’s edge, dipping in and out of semi’s and half-tons and plain and fancy automobiles on their one-man missions to end despondency and rootlessness.

  Harold Buddusky, where it says Print Clearly, Harry to his father, but “Beef” since he was fifteen. On the tit until he was three, on a nipple bottle of milk or beer until he was five. Almost thirty, but still locked into a stage of adolescence, frequently betrayed by a glowing red pimple on his forehead, and an inability to articulate what he feels inside. Once a high school football player with a conspicuous talent for running over other high school football players, now grunting under the lard of his own dissipation.

  A southward Dodge picked him up in Fort Morgan, Colorado. The driver had just buried his brother and was returning home to Pueblo. Beef did not like the sound of the place.

  “I got no brothers,” he said, to make conversation, “...that I know of.”