Against the Day (206 page)

“You remember your old sweetie
Encarnación,” Lake over her shoulder, heading out of the room.

“Nice
tits, got strangled out in Santa Monica,” Deuce rooting in the icebox, “still dead
’s far as I know.”

   
“See,
that’s the thing—” Lew began.

   
“Who
told you to bother us?” Deuce popping a beerbottle cap for emphasis.

   
“Just
routine. Long list of names.”

   
“So
you’re a dick.”

   
“All
day.”

“I ain’t sure I even fucked her, them
Mexican spitfires, too much work, don’t you think?”

“So it was like you’d only see her at
a distance once in a while? Mass of writhing bodies kind of thing?”

   
“There
you go.”

“Mind if I ask,” Lew nodding in what
he hoped was not an offensive way at the firearm under Deuce’s jacket, which he
had not removed, “what line of work you’re in, Mr. Kindred?”

“Security, same ’s yourself.” Lew
kept his eyebrows amiably elevated till Deuce added, “Up at Consequential
Pictures.”

   
“Interesting
work, I’ll bet.”

“Be pleasant enough if it wasn’t for
crazy Anarchists trying to start unions every time a man’s back is turned.”

   
“Sure
can’t have that.”

“They want unions up in Frisco it’s
no sweat off our balls,” said Deuce, “but down here, ever since ’em mick
bastards bombed the
Times,
it’s been open shop, and we aim to keep it
that way.”

   
“Standards
to maintain.”

   
“You
got it.”

   
“Purity.”

Drawing
from Deuce a displeased squint. “You havin a little fun here, Mr. Basnight? If
you’re lookin for real sport, get out there in the darkness of night with ’em
dago dynamiters all around you. See if that’s up your alley.”

   
“Get
a lot of them in the picture business, do you?”

   
“Don’t
like ’at tone of voice, mister.”

   
“Only
one I got. Maybe what you really want to do is direct?”

Mistake. There was Deuce out with his
pistol, damn little fiveshot and all the chambers Lew could see were full. He’d
had a long day, but from the rage in Deuce’s face it might not be going to last
much longer.

“Yeahp and the scenario goes, he
forced his way into my home, officer, made advances to my wife, all I did was
act in selfdefense.”

   
“Well
now Mr. Kindred if I did anything to—”

   
“Mr.
В.? Everything O.K.?”

   
“What
in the hayull?” Deuce rolling off of his seat and under the table.

   
It
was Shalimar, and she had remembered to bring the tommy gun.

   
“Just
likes to check up on me,” Lew said, “hasn’t shot at anybody for, oh for a week
anyway.”

   
“Now,
dearest, there was that one only yesterday out in Culver City.”

   
“Oh
but snookums, she was running so fast you missed her by a mile.”

   
“I’ll
just let you two, um . . .” Deuce crawling away out onto the patio.

All he’d dropped
in for
really was a beer
and a quick shave, and soon enough he was off again, to whatever his
smoothfaced evening held. Lake didn’t know anymore. She had a baloney sandwich
for supper and tried to get something on the radio and then went to the window
and sat and waited for the light to drain away over the vast basin hammered all
day into a heated quiescence much like her own. She had stopped believing quite
so much in cause and effect, having begun to find that what most people took
for some continuous reality, one morning paper to the next, had never existed.
Often these days she couldn’t tell if something was a dream into which she had
drifted, or one from which she had just awakened and might not return to. So
through the terrible cloudlessness of the long afternoons she passed among
dreams, and placed her wagers at the Universal Dream Casino as to which of them
should bring her through, and which lead her irreversibly astray.

On
the other hand Deuce, when he was in the house, tended to scream a lot. At
first Lake took it all literally if not personally, then for years she ignored
it, and finally it had occurred to her that in his own way, Deuce must be
trying to awaken from his life.

One
night he passed from one dream he’d never remember into the middle of another
which had been going on all night, a dark swirl of opium haunts, leering
foreigners, girls in abbreviated underwear, jazz music full of jangling Chinese
fourths. Something exhausting and bloody he came up to close as he dared, and
then it was like it was posted. He knew if he went any further he’d be
destroyed.

He
thought about “getting up” and trying to find somebody to explain what was
going on. But he had to be careful because he didn’t know if he was still
dreaming. There was a woman lying next to him who seemed to be dead. He was
alone with a corpse, and understood that he had to’ve been involved, somehow,
even if it was only having failed to prevent what had happened to her. There
was blood everywhere, some of it was still wet.

Each
time he forced himself to turn and look at her face to see if he knew her, he
got distracted. He could hear voices, an inquiry already under way, somewhere
in the dwelling, a cylindrical piece of modern Hollywood architecture maybe
fifty foot across, three or four stories high, wood floor, a staircase
spiraling up the inside of the round stone wall, all the way up, into the dust
and shadows where the roof should’ve been except instead there was a big
skylight, with the early light coming through it a dusty rose color.

At first the investigators, some
dedicated cadre of Californian youth, only wanted to ask him “a few questions.”
They never identified themselves by name, or said who they were working for,
didn’t wear uniforms or carry badges or commissions, but there was no doubting
their sincerity. Behind their unshakable politeness Deuce could see they had
him figured for the guilty party—hell, so did he. But, not about to run
him in just yet, they took their time, followed this routine of their own, this
procedure. Without saying it in so many words, they let him know that the body
he’d woken up next to wasn’t the only one.

“I’m a deputized officer,” he kept
trying to tell them, but his tongue and vocal cords froze and when he went
looking for his deputy’s star he couldn’t find it.

Every time one of them smiled at him
he went cold with fear. They shone with a sinister brilliance, like the
highamperage arc lamps in the studios, while from somewhere invisible, running
them, outside the edges of the dream, flowed perhaps unlimited power.

As the questioning got more and more
complicated, it was no longer about the crime, the penalty, regrets Deuce might
feel, sympathy for the victims—it had come down to his own need to keep
his connection with the crime, still unnamed, from ever being revealed. Is how
bad it must have been. But there was no way he could ask them for that. And for
all he knew the whole town was in on it already. Waiting.

Where were the L.A. police? He
listened, hope fading, for sirens, unmuffled motorcycles. Sooner or later a
real engine sound in the street would bring this deliverance, and he would find
himself released into the pallid shadows and indifferent custody of the day.

Lake has dreamed
more than once of a journey north,
always to the same subarctic city and a chill eternal rain. By longstanding
custom, young girls of the town borrow babies from mothers, in order to play at
birth and

parenthood. Their own fertility is so profound that sometimes
thinking about a penis is all it takes to get pregnant. So they play their
everautumnal

days away pretending family life. The mothers get some free
time, the babies love it.

Running through the town is a great
icy river. Sometimes it freezes solid, sometimes it is crowded with miniature
icebergs rushing along at terrifying speed among waves often high as those of
the sea. There is an uncertainty prevailing here between the worlds above and
below the surface of the water. A party of explorers are heading upriver and
Lake, joining them, must leave behind a lover or husband, perhaps Deuce, with
another woman, for whom he might easily leave her for good
. . . .
When it comes time to return, it’s
no longer possible to go back the way they came, and they must detour, day
after day, through a great frozen swamp, each moment that passes increasing the
chances that he will no longer be in town, that this time he has left her for
another
. . .
there is no one to
confide in, the rest of the party are indifferent, they have the details of
their mission to preoccupy them
. . .
sleekly
aloof in some foulweather gear of black oiled tincloth, incapable of sympathy
or indeed any human recognition, they ignore her
. . .
at last she manages to return to the city, and he is still
there. The rivalry has all been illusion, they are lovers as ever
. . . .
Hallelujah.

She wakes briefly. Rain or wind, a
sudden light, Deuce in from what he never speaks about, some business, she
thinks, up in the hills
. . . .
The
depth of the hour resumes, the darkness and the wind once again moving the
branches of the pepper tree in the yard as she slips back again to the northern
journey, the gray town now fearful over a child found trapped beneath the ice
. . .
somehow there are no tools or
machinery to break through, the ice must be laboriously melted away with rock
salt, brought out onto the frozen surface by convoys of dogsleds
. . .
day and night the work goes on, the
child clearly visible through the melting ice, face up, blurred and waiting,
serenely accusatory. . . at last lifted free, though perhaps it is too late
now, for she seems very still
. . .
medical
specialists go to work, vigils are set up outside her home
. . .
churches are filled with townspeople
in prayer.

Lake is brought back from a wordless,
timeless distraction, perhaps a dream within the dream, forever unrecoverable,
into resurrection—the pealing city, the joyous population, shafts of
light the color of chrome steel descending on the streets, a gliding view from
a high angle, mindfully interrupted for a scene in which the child is reunited
with her parents, then resumed to accompany a hymn for choir and orchestra, at
first in a minor mode but soon expanding to a major refrain, half a dozen
perfect notes, remaining with Lake as she surfaced into the first oblique
application of sunlight across the flatlands, an announcement of intention, of
weight slowly to increase beyond endurance . . .

Deuce hadn’t come in all night.
Whatever she expected, or didn’t expect from the day, he would not hear it from
her. Once she thought they had chosen, together, to resist all penance at the
hands of others. To reserve to themselves alone what lay ahead, the dark
exceptional fate. Instead she was alone with the sort of recurring dream a
longsuffering movie heroine would expect to wake from to find herself pregnant
at last.

A day or two
later
, Lew went up to
Carefree Court. The hour was advanced, the light failing, the air heated by the
Santa Ana wind. Palm trees rattled briskly, and the rats in their nests up
there hung on for dear life. Lew approached through a twilit courtyard lined
with tileroofed bungalows, stucco archways, and the green of shrubbery
deepening as the light went. He could hear sounds of glassware and
conversation.

From the swimming pool came sounds of
liquid recreation—feminine squeals, deep singlereed utterances from high
and low divingboards. The festivities here this evening were not limited to any
one bungalow. Lew chose the nearest, went through the formality of ringing the
doorbell, but after waiting a while just walked in, and nobody noticed.

It was a gathering impossible at
first to read, even for an old L.A. hand like Lew—society ladies in
flapperrejected outfits from Hamburger’s basement, real flappers in extras’
costumes—Hebrew headdresses, bellydancing outfits, bare feet and sandals—in
from shooting some biblical extravaganza, sugar daddies tattered and unshaven
as street beggars, freeloaders in bespoke suits and sunglasses though the sun
had set, Negroes and Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies, faces Lew recognized
from mug shots, faces that might also have recognized him from tickets long
cold he didn’t want to be reminded of, and here they were eating enchiladas and
hot dogs, drinking orange juice and tequila, smoking corktip cigarettes,
screaming in each others’ faces, displaying scars and tattoos, recalling aloud
felonies imagined or planned but seldom committed, cursing Republicans, cursing
police federal state and local, cursing the larger corporate trusts, and Lew
slowly began to get a handle, for weren’t these just the folks that once long
ago he’d spent his life chasing, them and their cousins city and country?
through brush and up creekbeds and down frozen slaughterhouse alleyways caked
with the fat and blood of generations of cattle, worn out his shoes pair after
pair until finally seeing the great point, and recognizing in the same instant
the ongoing crime that had been his own life—and for achieving this
selfclarity, at that time and place a mortal sin, got himself just as
unambiguously dynamited.