Chapter Seven:  The Call from Los Angeles

Desmond talked fast, in the specific vocabulary of an industry Localad had only ever encountered from a safe distance, in magazine profiles and the closing credits of films he’d half-watched. Words like options, purchase prices, backend participation, turnaround, first-look deals, and a director he described as "hot off two festival wins" who Localad had, in fact, heard of, which felt a little disorienting for him, a bit like finding out a stranger from a dream had a real address.

He talked about how rarely he read something that made him miss his exit on the highway, which was apparently what had happened three nights beforehand, somewhere north of Santa Barbara, book propped against the steering wheel at a red light.

And “Backend,” Localad quickly learned, referred neither to anatomy nor exits but to money that might exist later, provided several powerful people remained enthusiastic about a movie and an accountant failed to kill it.

"I don't option a lot of unpublished manuscripts," Desmond said. "It's not usually worth the risk. There's no buzz, no built-in audience, nothing to point to. But this one's different. This one, I think, is special. Jasmine's a star part. The Wound is the kind of high concept that markets itself in one sentence. And the ending..." he made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been something closer to relief, "nobody does that kind of ending anymore. Nobody has the nerve."

Then Desmond dropped a number.

Localad asked him to repeat it.

Desmond did.

Localad asked “how many zeroes?”

“Six figures,” Desmond said.

“Is one of the figures after the decimal point?”

“No.”

Localad remained seated on a box of paperbacks in the back room of a bookstore that owed the bank more money than he wanted to say out loud and he found he had no idea what to say back. He had spent twenty years wanting exactly one thing, for the story to matter to someone besides himself. And now that it apparently did, all he could produce was a series of small, useless sounds while Desmond talked some seriously massive numbers.

The stockroom smelled of cardboard, dust and financial resurrection but remained sufficiently silent while the good news dropped.

The numbers, when they finally arrived clearly enough for Localad to fully understand and appreciate them, were the kind that changed everything. An option payment up front, modest by industry standards, Desmond said apologetically, but real money by the characteristics of a man staring down a bank letter in a drawer. And behind it, contingent on the film actually being made, a considerably high purchase price that made Localad ask Desmond to repeat it, and then ask him to spell out the number of zeroes, because his brain had simply refused, the first time, to process what it was hearing.

"Six figures, plus merchandising royalties." Desmond confirmed. "Against your unpublished, un-agented, single-copy manuscript. I want to be clear with you, because I think you deserve someone being clear with you: this is an unusually good deal for a first-time, unrepresented writer. You should absolutely get a lawyer. You should probably get an agent too, honestly, given where this could finally go. But I wanted to call you myself, before your instincts told you to be suspicious of a stranger who drove off with your only copy of your book."

"I am suspicious," Localad admitted.

"Good. Stay that way. Get yourself a lawyer. A real one. Not your once removed cousin who once handled a fence dispute. But please, say yes."

“I don’t have a distant cousin who handled a fence dispute.”

“Excellent. You’re already ahead of most writers.”

He did not say yes that day. He said he needed to think about it, which was true, and he hung up the phone and sat on the box of paperbacks for a long time, staring at the shelf of new releases he hadn't finished unpacking, feeling the specific unsteadiness of a life about to turn a corner it had never once, in sixty-four years, come anywhere close to.

He told Marjory that night, finally, the whole strange story from the broken-down car to the number of zeroes, and she listened with her mouth slightly open, and when he finished, she didn't say anything about the money at all. She was busy trimming roses with the concentration of a surgeon operating on a particularly self-absorbed patient.

“A film producer wants to buy Purradise.”

“Good.”

Localad stopped. “Good?”

“You finished it,” she said instead. “The book. It’s real enough that a stranger drove off with it and couldn't put it down. He actually read it, and now he wants to spend an alarming amount of money on it because it affected him. That is traditionally considered good.”

"Marjory… You don’t seem at all surprised.”

“I’m surprised you let him read it.”

“He took it.”

“You let him take it.”

“Yes. I guess I did.”

Marjory placed the shears down.

“How much?”

He told her.

She sat.

This pleased him more than it should have.

"Listen, I know what the money means," she said. "I know what it could mean for the shop, for the bank, for all of it. But before any of that Localad, you actually did the thing. The thing you were too scared to do. And it was good enough to matter. Good for you."

He hadn't let himself feel that part yet, underneath the shock and the arithmetic and the frantic mental list of lawyers he didn't know how to find. He let himself feel it now, for just a small moment, in Marjory's kitchen, and it was, briefly, uncomplicated; pure, plain pride in a thing that he himself had made. 

It would be the last time, for a long while, that uncomplicated feeling came to him.

After a moment she said, “We need a lawyer.”

“We?”

“Don’t start.”

He finally hired a lawyer. An actual real lawyer, found through three phone calls and a recommendation from the town's one attorney, who commonly did wills, conveyancing and property disputes over fences and he admitted cheerfully that entertainment law was "not exactly my specialty, but I do know who to call."

Priya practised entertainment law in the city further inland. Her voice on the telephone was calm, exact and so free of wasted emotion that Localad imagined she could remove an appendix with punctuation alone.

“Do not sign anything,” she insisted.

“I haven’t.”

“Do not agree verbally.”

“I said I’d think.”

“Good. Thinking is still legally, largely under-protected, but we’ll just have to work with it.”

She read through the offer overnight.

“It’s unusually strong,” she said the next morning. “Which means that either Mr. Ferris truly believes in the material or he has recently sustained a terrible head injury.”

“He had car trouble.”

“That may be relevant.”

Priya Reyes read the contract Desmond's studio sent over and called Localad back within a day.

"It's a good deal," she said. "Better than good, for someone in your position. There are some things I want changed; reversion clauses, publishing rights, credit language and consultation, but the bones of it are solid. Desmond Ferris has a reputation for being straight with first-time writers. That's rarer than you'd think."

The negotiation took three weeks, most of it consisting of Localad signing things he only half-understood while Priya explained them to him over the phone in patient, plain language. Each clause she changed seemed tiny and quite meaningless, until she explained the future disasters it prevented.

Desmond accepted most of it.

And at the end of it all, there was a contract, and at the end of the contract there was a cheque, and the cheque, when it landed in the shop's account, was large enough to pay off the bank in full and still leave enough to make Priya raise her eyebrows slightly when she saw the final terms of the purchase price, contingent of course, on the film actually moving forward, which Desmond's studio had already confirmed it intended to begin within the month.

Localad paid the bank first. He did it the same day the option money cleared, standing at the local branch's one teller window with a cashier's cheque that felt, in his hand, both enormous and strangely light, and when the teller printed off the receipt showing the loan balance at zero, he had to leave the bank and stand outside for a minute or two before he trusted himself to competently move again.

Outside, he stood beneath the municipal clock, still seven minutes wrong, and he cried with such a quiet efficiency that nobody noticed. Except for Mr. Okafor.

Mr. Okafor moved over toward him. “Good news?” he asked.

“Yes, you could say.”

Mr. Okafor nodded. “Yep, sometimes that's often the hardest kind to handle.”

They stood together until Localad could breathe normally. Then Mr. Okafor looked at the bank receipt in Localad’s hand.

“Keep copies,” he said.

This was why he was the town’s ballast.

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