1947

It’s day 43 on the set of “The Builders” and Richard Lawrence is no longer just the producer.  He’s doing everybody’s job.  He designed the night club and now he’s rehearsing the dancers.  The director whines, “The last time I saw the Apache dance was in a Clara Bow film.”

The bar has been built to Richard’s specifications and, at his insistence, stocked with real liquor.  The grip department is drinking very good scotch from their coffee cups.  Carter takes a long pull and glares at this manic intrusion on his world.  “The Builders” is his 110th film.  He’s been on a film set for most of his waking hours over the last 17 years.   He started out running reels across the lot.  Now he’s Johnson’s top man.  On the next picture, he’ll be key grip.

The actors are gathered in the center of the sound-stage, leads and bit-characters both, in costume and full make-up.  Richard paces before them.  “You actors, listen to me.  Each line you deliver, each gesture, each exhalation must come from your core.  It must come directly from that space inside you that determines who you are, and how you relate to the world. ”  Richard chain smokes.  He chews on a pencil between puffs.  “And always remember the following.  Remember as you deliver these lines of mine, remember that they are mine!  I am paying for this entire film.  The studios will line up to distribute it when I finish.  But until then, it belongs to me.”  He spots an errant cable and coils it around and around in his hands.  “Each of you is a tool which I use to tell my story.  It is your nature to be a tool as it is my nature to use you.  And because you are a tool, each line, each gesture, each breath you take is in service of this story I am telling.  Imagine a pyramid like the pharaohs built.  The shape is the story.  The pinnacle is the idea.  You are the stones.”

Carter believes in the film-making process. He believes in the hierarchy of the set.  He believes in the division of labor.  He’s heard enough.  He balls his fists and stamps towards this asshole.

Richard pitches into the air.  He lands on his back and shakes, convulsing.

Carter stops dead.  He’s still 10 feet away.

He stares at his hands.

The Story So Far

1889

The stove smokes.  A long time has passed since it has been lit.  Sunday and Arango sit cross-legged on a hand-woven rug with a diamond pattern.  The old man pours beads of many colors and sizes from a leather bag.  They land in a formless pile between them.

Arango picks out a blue bead and threads it onto a long piece of string.  He passes it to his daughter.  Sunday threads a silver one and passes it back.  The string moves silently between them in this way until Arango asks, “Shall I tell you the story of how the Coyote tricked the wind?”

Sunday nods.

“Coyote was wandering in the desert and he came to a great lake.  Coyote was lazy and didn’t want to travel so far around the lake, so he said to the Water, ‘Water, why don’t you move aside so that I can cross here?’  Well, Water was lazy too, so she said, ‘No, no. You must walk around, Coyote.’  Coyote looked at the long trail around the lake and said, ‘You must move to one side or maybe to the other and I will walk across.’  But still Water would not move.  So Coyote called to his friend the Wind and he whispered in his ear.  ‘Do you hear what Water says?  She brags that she is stronger than you.  She tells the world that you cannot make her move.’  Wind was angry and he blew and he blew at the water.  But Water would not move so Wind blew some more.  And as he blew, the air grew very hot and soon the Water boiled and soon it disappears completely.  Coyote was very happy and he crosses the lake.  But half-way across, he got very, very thirsty and there was no water.  This is how we got the Santana winds, which still blow hot when the Wind is angry.  And this is how Coyote came to die of thirst at the bottom of a lake.”

Sunday starts.  The pile of beads is gone and between Arango’s nimble fingers shines a finished necklace.

He gently places it around her neck.

The Story So Far

1970

No sleep.  Just cold.  The only thing that dawn brings to the table is light.

My right leg is twisted under me.  The left is between some rocks the size of refrigerators.  Both legs hurt but I won’t know if they’re broken until I stand up.  I can’t imagine that ever happening.

Yet I’m suddenly upright, staring into a very angry face.  Crew-cut.  Vietnam tan.  I’m in his close-up.  “You’re Jay James.  I’ve been looking for you.  You killed my sister. ”

The sun crests over the cliff, the one I fell from last night, just as he knocks me to the ground again.

Sleep please.

The Story So Far

1970

The ancient cat emerges from beneath the bed just before midnight.  Josey strokes its coarse fur in the flickering light of a lamp.  The search party returns.  They stomp their cold feet, their shoulders sag and they shuffle off to bed.  Her grandfather stops at her doorway only long enough to shake his head.

The older woman is there.  “Would you like me to stay with you?”  Josey nods.

—————————————

She is suddenly awake.  Candace sleeps on the stuffed chair.

She steps into the hallway, following the muffled sound.  She walks silently through the darkened house, through the foyer with its collection of boots and snowshoes, through the living room decorated in hanging Navajo rugs and antlers, past the modern kitchen, to a door tucked in a corner.

She opens the door and peers up a steep, dark stairway.  Light sneaks from the bottom of a closed door at the top.

Something is moving in there.  It wheezes.  It rattles.

This Ends the Fifth Cycle of  BURNT

The Story So Far

1947

The wooden handle plunges into the detonator.   Nothing happens.

The director shouts, “Cut!”  Richard shouts louder, “No, again!”

The actors rein their horses in the riverbed.   Are the cameras still rolling?  Should they ride?

“Cut!”  “No, again, AGAIN!”

The TNT sparks this time and the temporary dam explodes.   The water floods the channel, catching the two dozen riders unprepared.  They wash downstream, towards the already completed concrete walls of the LA River.

Lotus grips her prayer book.  She closes her eyes and imagines the worst.  Hooves struggle for purchase in the muddy river bottom, only to find hard cement.  Limbs become tangled and break.  Riders submerge and drown.  Carcasses of man and beast bash against the unforgiving walls and wash inland past city buildings.

She opens her eyes and it’s all true.  A boot breaks the surface.  A thin stream of diluted blood.

She tosses the damn book into the river. Followed by the tiny crucifix that Sister gave her on her deathbed.

“Roll!  Roll!  Roll!” cries the man she should have killed already.

The Story So Far

1889

Arango opens the door to the baby’s room.  A thin layer of sand covers the floor.  It covers the crib.  A mural grows from the nearest wall like a vine, stretching into the dark room.

“Your mother,” Arango whispers.  “Before you were born.”

Sunday’s candle follows the narrative — a woman in the window of a log cabin — a handsome man in a silver saddle — a dark shadow with a black hat and scarf — lovers entwined — the shadow shrinking before a glowing sunburst — a map of the trail south — the smiling man and woman holding hands, the glow now coming from the woman’s belly…

The chalk paintings abruptly halt.  Sunday knows why.  She imagines the pictures.  The woman dead — the crib empty — the shadow escaping with the baby into the desert.

Arango quietly weeps.  Sunday takes his hand.  She gives him some chalk.

The Story So Far

1970

There are eight of us in the riding party, or, as Lucas calls us, “the posse.”  The rest have paid for the privilege.  I don’t know the exact amount, but I’m sure it’s six figures.  This buys you a week on a bunk at the ranch, one-on-one sessions with Lucas, and special “self-discovery journeys” like this one.

Another perk is the playful banter, the non-stop berating.  “C’mon, you city folk, stand up in them stirrups.  Give those nags their head.”  He whips the horses and their riders into a charging frenzy.

I count a surgeon, a banker, a couple of developers, a couple of Wall Street types.  Not an accomplished rider among them.  And none of them ready for a hard gallop on a narrow mountain path alongside a deep gorge.

Candace, who owns a chain of movie theaters, is in real trouble.  She’s lost her reins and clings to her saddle horn, her feet flying free of the stirrups.  My father is nowhere.  I drive my mount alongside, between her and the gorge.  I’m pulling on her horse’s mantle when I hear the SNAP!

Somehow I stay in my saddle.  But the saddle plummets into the gorge and I plummet with it.

The Story So Far

1947

Lotus is alone with Richard.  She can hear the doctor talking to Lady outside the door.  He’s telling her that they can’t move Richard, that he has serious respiratory problems.  He’ll have to stay in this little hut in the desert until he gets better or stops breathing.

She has a pillow.  It’s going to be easy to kill him.  And justified.  She knows who she is now.

Over the last year, she’s pieced together the whole story.  She was born to Dora and Clay Lawrence in 1923, one of a pair of twins.  Her sister died a few days later.  Dora was distraught, sick with grief.  Clay thought Dora would kill the other baby, that she would kill Lotus.  Clay fled with the baby.  Over the next week, he was beaten, burnt, and shot.  He hung himself in prison.

How did this happen?  Richard arranged it.  He wanted Dora for himself, a queen for his growing empire.  But he didn’t want a daughter.  He’d known how to manipulate his brother since they were little boys.  He simply set him in motion.

Now it’s twenty-four years later and she works for Richard.  Dora has a new name now.  Everyone calls her “Lady”.  Lady knows Lotus is her daughter but continues to pretend she’s just a nurse.  Richard doesn’t suspect a thing.

She finds a photo in Richard’s wallet.  She’s never seen her father.  The photo is old, but there is something else.  She rubs the crusty substance on its surface.  It’s spit.  It’s been spit upon over and over for many years.  Dried, flaked and spit upon again.

Such hate.  But somehow she has survived.   Somehow she is in this room.  There must be a purpose and the purpose is clear.  To kill this monster.  For her father, for herself, for any one who might be destroyed by Richard in the future.

She places the pillow over his face.

She curses God.  She curses the church that took her in.  The church that saved her life.

If only he were awake.  If only he were praying for his eternal soul.  Then she could do it.

She turns away.

The Story So Far

1970

Lucas closes the door to his private study.  When ‘the great man’ is angry, his language climbs right over the top, getting damn near Shakespearean.  “What atrocity must I have committed in a past life?  Did I routinely kick cripples down stone stairs?  Did I take a torch to a crowded cathedral?”

“My exploits aren’t nearly as notorious as you want to believe.”

“It’s your very nature that is my curse.  The terrible fact is this — within you dwell two elements which should be at war but instead are married: your intelligence and your attraction to the lowest of mankind.  It is this twisted nature which led you to throw away your education, your life, everything, for these pigs!  And further horrors — you continue to lie with these pigs, to wallow in their filth, to drag your daughter to their festivals and their gatherings, their full retreats from civilization.”

I’m completely honest with him.  “When I joined the commune, I committed to living by some good ideas.  They’re still good ideas.  But they got twisted together with some very bad ideas by some very weak people.  I knew all this years ago.  I wanted to leave, to start over somewhere with my wife and my daughter.  But Phoebe wouldn’t leave that life.  She was ill, she was confused, she ran away.  So, I followed.  I searched for her for four years.

“For four years, I followed her trail through the decaying movement.  For four years, the failure of these good ideas were in my face, a constant reminder of my mistake and the mistake of history.  These laughing, prancing fools, celebrating the failure of their revolution, underlining every rotten turn they took.  It did horrible things to me.  And I, in turn, did horrible things to them.

“So hold your tongue, old man, these years have been punishment enough.”

My father surprises me by wrapping me in a bear hug.  I don’t know what he means by it.  But I want to be forgiven so badly that I sink into it.

The Story So Far

1889

Sunday dismounts into the deserted streets of Los Rios.  A door on an adobe hangs off its hinges.  She pushes on it, revealing a bed where an hombre once slept, an hombre who later traveled north and got hung up on the gallows by the man who called himself her father.  There’s the crib where a madre lay her nina – both left to die in the desert by that same man.

The identical story is repeated all down the street.  Los Rios is a ghost town.

And Arango is a ghost.  He sits outside his sun-bleached hacienda with the caved-in roof, looking just as collapsed and drained of color.

He unfolds himself and stands.  He shrugs and beckons the girl inside.  As he leads her to a chair and brings her a warm glass of milk, he passes a mirror and catches his reflection for the first time in…how long?  A long time.

So his first question surprises her.  “When did I get so old?”

The Story So Far