while he was finishing up with the editing
we met whenever we could
to continue work on the project we were developing
at fox a script about strip-mining
in appalachia
and i often stayed at his place up in stockbridge
where he pointed out the first
microwave tower i'd ever seen a grotesque
monument to progress
rising over some pasture land not
ten miles from his house
but it wasn't just the visual impact that bothered him
it was the waves
themselves which he concluded
were bombarding us daily
with their invisible rays and causing god knows
what sort of damage to our bodies
but what can we do
he mused where can we flee now
when there's only a token frontier left
but thank god
for national preserves like
the breaks which is pretty much the same as it was
when lewis and clark passed through
over two hundred years ago
and the only injured so far he said knock on wood
were some of the horses
one that drowned another that was
crippled up on tripwires
and a few that balked and got trampled on and had to be
put down after the stampede sequence which was
absolutely necessary he said
for the sake of realism and of course there was the predictable
hue and cry from the AHA
who added us to their unacceptable list creating
a brief distraction that the studio was able
to quash with
a sizeable donation but our biggest break
he said i said it then
and i'll say it now was how we managed to keep brando out of the fray
by feeding him
all that stuff i'd discovered
about microwaves
killing off whole herds of wild mustangs and who knows
maybe even susan hayward who supposedly
got her cancer from
the nuclear tests in nevada but i knew better
and when he started going through
the transcripts and reports especially some film clips of susan herself
marlon got really sentimental then saying
red's acting in i want to live
was one of the greatest performances
in the history of film
but there was something else too something he'd never told
anyone before that he was with her
only one night
but she had the most beautiful bush he'd ever seen
like she was on fire
and about to get burned alive


�2007 by James Lineberger