Complete Stories (72 page)

“Look, Dina,” said Carlo cruelly. He held up one of the nachos they were eating. “Look in the cheese sauce. See those little flecks? How the light glints on them? It’s like tiny insect wings. I wonder if…if maybe…“

Dina’s mouth made a compulsive tic-like twist as she shoved the food off the table. “Winged ants,” she compulsively muttered in a low deep voice quite unlike her girlish speaking voice. “Winged ants get outta here.” She rose to her feet and stalked stiff-legged out of the Taco Patio.

“Where you going? Hey! Wait up, Dina, where you going?”

“Away from you,” snarled Dina, but she waited for Carlo to catch up with her.

“I been thinking about where we can sleep, Dina,” said Carlo. “With my truck gone. Let’s panhandle for awhile so’s I can get a bottle and then I’ll take you to this new bunk I know of.”

“Is it the shelter?”

“No, man, it’s casual. It’s Sally Durban’s old house. The house is wide open because the windows are out and they’re still re—re—”

“Rehabilitating it,” said Dina. “Yeah.” She put herself in the path of a passerby. “Spare change, mister? Can you spare some change?”

The man shook his head and tried to go on his way, but Dina was persistent. “It’s me and my husband, sir, we just got into town and we’re looking for work. The church shelter is full up tonight. See, I’m pregnant and he don’t speak English.” She paused and rubbed the back of her hand against her eyes, still tagging after the guy. “Please please help us, sir. If you don’t have change, a dollar will do. Or if you got any jobs need doing—I mean, in trade for food or shelter.”

That did it. He shoved a wadded single in her hand.

“God bless you, sir!”

“Gracias,” added Carlo.

In a half hour, they had enough for a bottle of Night Train, three Slim Jims and a pack of Basic Menthol. They walked away from the lights along the gently curved streets that followed the edge of the sea.

“Who was Sally Durban?” asked Dina. “I don’t remember.”

“Aging speedfreak, big old house, right on the cliffs? Remember, she jumped off her deck at dawn a couple of years ago? Speed kills—too true. Sally was in with Andy Warhol in the Seventies; she was in one of his movies called
Surf Boy
. I told you about her.”

Dina shrugged. “I sort of remember. Andy Warhol the artist. We were talking about him the other day. You saw something on TV. You said Andy was your hero. Didn’t you tell me you actually saw
Surf Boy
?”

“I saw it at Sally Durban’s house. She used to play it all the time, over and over and over. Like, it was all she had left from her glory days. She’d have young surfers in there, tryin’ to make it with them. I partied with her the night before she died, matter of fact. I’d heard about the scene, and I told her I was a surfer too. It was a good party. Sally threw down a whole ounce of crank. Yaaar.” No cars were around, so Carlo unscrewed the cap of the Night Train and took a good slug. Dina lit a Basic Menthol.

“You ever surf, Carlo?”

“Sure, baby, you know I do. You can’t grow up here and not surf. Maybe I’ll get a board this summer. I’ll teach you how to surf too. Yeah. We’ll lay out in the sun and get healthy.”

“I liked it better in the desert,” Dina said. “Except that the ants were there.”

“The beach is the place for a skanky sister like you, Dina. Salt-water kills infections. You can live forever on the beach.”

Dina answered him with a sneeze that ended in a deep, barking cough that went on and on.

The Sally Durban house sat on an iceplant-covered cliff above the ocean, its seaward decks cantilevered out over the void. The house had stood empty since her death. A developer had bought it cheap and started to fix it up, but then he’d gone broke, leaving the deserted house open to the night, with nothing but plastic sheeting covering the busted-out windows. The plastic flapped unpleasantly in the cold wind, flapped like the wings of the angel of death, flapped like a shroud wanting to twine itself around and around Dina’s face. “Durban” was like “turban” was like wrapped around your head.

“I don’t wanna go in there, Carlo.”

“It’s okay. Come on. There’s none of your ants in there.”

“They’re not
my
ants!”

“I swear it’s safe.”

Dina put her arms up across her face and let Carlo lead her in. There seemed to be voices in the house. Or were there?

“Is anyone else here, Carlo?”

“Might be. We’re not the only free spirits in Surf City, baby.”

But, no, they found no other life in the house, and the sounds like voices were only the barks of seals out on a rock in the sea. The house was cluttered; Sally Durban had left her estate in such a confused mess that not even all of her personal belongings had ever been removed, though by now most of the stuff had been stolen or vandalized. Carlo and Dina found their way to a windowless room downstairs.

“This will be the warmest,” said Carlo. “And nobody can see us in here.” They ate their Slim Jims, Carlo drank some more of the wine, and Dina chain-smoked Basic Menthols. Dina didn’t drink alcohol, which was one of the best things about her as far as Carlo was concerned. It was too big a hassle to have a woman fighting you over drinks all the time. It wasn’t worth having a girlfriend like that. By way of evening things out, Carlo didn’t smoke.

The wind keened, the surf crashed and the seals barked. Whenever Dina lit another cigarette, Carlo would look at her face in the flare of the matches. She looked young and pretty. If it hadn’t been for the throbbing in his head, he would have put a move on her. But there was still half a bottle of wine.

“Why would somebody have a windowless room in a house with an ocean view?” Dina wondered.

“This was Sally Durban’s movie room,” said Carlo. “Give me the matches.”

“Don’t burn ‘em all.”

“Okay. Now look. I think—” Carlo lit a match and held it high. One end of the room had a little hole in the wall with a door next to it. “Yeah. She kept the projector in there, with
Surf Boy
on it. That’s the door into the projection room.”

“Maybe the film and projector are still in there,” said Dina. “I’d like to see it. I ain’t seen a movie in two, three years, Carlo. They got ants in those big theaters, you know.”

“No ants in here, Dina.”

“Go on and see if the movie’s still there!” said Dina.

“Dina, if it had been, somebody would of ripped it off long ago.”

“How do you know? Go see. I got a feeling.”

“No.”

“Come on, Carlo. Do this for me.”

Carlo struggled to his feet and tugged at the knob of the projection room door. It was locked and it wouldn’t open.

“Kick it in, Carlo!”

He tried a kick, but he caught the angle wrong and fell over onto his side.

“Fuck that. I could hurt myself.”

“You let me down again, Carlo,” Dina said miserably, in the dark.

Carlo was trying to think of an answer, one that would make him feel better for failing the small mission, when he saw something sticking out of a pile of junk in the corner, something yellow and shapely nestled in the debris. Dina was inhaling hard on her cigarette; it gave an orange glow. He got to his knees and crawled over. “Light another match,” he said, and shoved his hand into the pile. It was carpet scraps and broken glass and wood chips and tangled wire, but there was something else in there as well.

“Holy shit,” he said. Under his fingers, a waxy surface, rough as sandpaper. He hauled it out in the brief flare of light, and held it toward Dina.

“A candle,” she said. “Great.”

She held the match toward the wick, but Carlo jerked the candle away. “What’re you doing?”

“It’s a candle! I’m gonna light it!”

“No way, Dina—this isn’t no ordinary candle. This is—I know this candle!”

The match went out.

“Light another one, I gotta see it,” said Carlo.

“Not unless you’re gonna light that candle.”

“You don’t understand—this is Andy’s candle. Andy Warhol’s. It’s probably worth a fortune. It was Sally’s treasure. I can’t believe it’s here.”

“Who’d take it? It’s just an old sandcandle.”

“But if we could prove it…we could sell it to a museum or something.”

“How’re you going to do that unless you light it and get a look at it?”

“Shit…okay. Light it, then. It’s big enough, we’ll only burn a little.”

“You sure?”

“Fuck, just go ahead, all right?”

Dina struck another match, touched it to the wick, and a warm glow spread around the candle. It was cast from lime-green wax in the shape of a cauldron with three stumpy little legs and a single central wick. Tiny shells, fragments of abalone and mussel, were pressed into the sides, making a border. Carlo held it up, examining the bottom and sides.

“Did he sign it?” Dina asked.

“Doesn’t look like it. But people know—they’d remember, old friends of Sally Durban’s. She told everybody about this candle. She, uh…” But then he started to remember how everybody at that party, the last one she’d thrown, how they’d really doubted everything she said. Old Sally Durban was sort of a joke to the kids; all they cared about was the drugs she spread around. Andy Warhol wasn’t a name that meant much to them

Carlo was the exception; he was an artist. He idolized Andy, and was one of the few people eager to watch the endless hours of Surf Boy. Sally had shown him the candle, knowing it would mean something to him, handling it like some kind of Holy Grail, though it was just the most ordinary sort of sandcandle and there was no way to distinguish it from any number of other sandcandles.

Carlo himself had made sandcandles when he was a kid, on the hot beach in the summer. Surf City locals held a huge candlemaking party every August, boiling up enormous aluminum vats of paraffin over firepits dug in the sand, stirring the bubbling white sludge with oars. You’d dig a hole in the sand, poke little protrusions for legs, line the mold with seaweed and shells and stones, like Andy had. You’d tie the wick to a bit of driftwood and lay the driftwood across the hole with the wick dangling into the mold. Then you’d borrow a ladle from the man who tended the wax pots; you’d scoop up as much wax as the ladle held, add a few drops of coloring and maybe even scent, then run fast across the sand before the molten liquid cooled, to pour it in your little mold. Then you waited, waited interminably, afraid to touch it, to mar the smooth waxy surface; sometimes you waited an hour, just to be safe. And when you finally dared, you dug your hands in around the candle, and lifted it out, and all the loose sand fell away, leaving just the shape you’d created, cast in colored wax, the sides embedded with sand and shells.

It was hard to finally burn a sandcandle, to see someone’s unique art sizzle up into smoke. Right now the wax on Andy Warhol’s sandcandle was melting into a widening pool around the base of the wick, making Carlo panic. The candle had never been lit at all until tonight. He felt a weird queasiness, a kind of regret, at the thought that he was burning Andy Warhol’s sandcandle; and then a similar sense of loss at the realization that he would never be able to prove what it was. What a pipedream, to think a museum would ever believe his story; to think this might be auctioned off by Sotheby’s for a million bucks.

“Nice light,” Dina said. “Andy Warhol’s sandcandle.”

Her words cooled his spirit, somehow. “Yeah,” he said. “It is nice.”

The light, not the candle, was the main thing, wasn’t it? Would Andy have wanted Sally Durban to keep the candle forever, or would he have wanted her to burn it?

Dina took the candle, carefully, as if she knew everything going through Carlo’s head. She set it on the ledge of the little window where the projector beam used to come through.

It’s a big candle
, Carlo thought calmly.
It won’t hurt to burn it for just a little while. The light is nice.

He tapped the wall beneath the projector hole. “Come here, Dina. Bring the wine.” She lay down beside him, under the candle. They watched it shine on the other wall, the glow swaying up and down, back and forth, as if they were riding a ship.

“Yeah,” he said. “This is good. Snuggle up, baby, it’s getting cold. All right.”

They were watching the wall as the candle began to flicker, that rhythmic strobing that candles sometimes get, a pulse so deep and regular that it could trigger an epileptic fit. Carlo glanced over and saw Dina spacing out, with her glassy eyes fixed on the wall. He turned to see what she was looking at.

In the dark there, with the muffled noises of the stormy ocean night, with the wine and the schizophrenia, Carlo and Dina did start to see the movie, yes,
Surf Boy
was playing on the wall; that was the flicker. In black and white, the cliffs of Surf City. Surf Boy coming out of the water looking like Carlo, but healthy. And well-fed Surf Girl right there with him, looking like a shimmering silver Dina.

“Yaaar,” said Carlo.

Then the picture cut to an airplane landing at Kennedy. Carlo and Dina were in a cab, with Carlo telling the driver, “Take us to Andy Warhol’s Factory.”

The cabby jerked into traffic, and the whole sky seemed to pulse and dance like a flame. And now Surf Boy Carlo and Surf Girl Dina were getting out of the cab on a city street, on 231 East 47
^th
Street according to the streetsign in the background and to the numbers on the buildings. Carlo handed the cabbie a spectral twenty.

As they walked towards the building, a man in black shades, leather pants and coat came out and looked at them as if he knew them. And why shouldn’t he? He was Andy’s cameraman, Gerard Malanga, and Carlo and Dina were Surf Boy and Surf Girl, superstars of one of Andy’s underground Pop classic films.

“It’s five flights up,” said Malanga, holding the door open to let them in before he walked off down the dirty boulevard.

Carlo and Dina went on in. The elevator was an open cage, a freight elevator.

“I ain’t getting in there,” said Dina. “The shaft’s gonna be full of flying ants.”

“No it isn’t, Dina. We don’t wanna walk no five flights. Come the hell on.”

They got into the clanking groaning elevator and rode it up to the fifth floor. On the way some weird shit happened to their images. Like down at street level they’d been Surf Boy and Surf Girl with only a sketchy resemblance to Carlo and Dina. But now each floor going up was like two years of hard street-time, and their bodies were shriveling and catching back up. By the time they got to the fifth floor, they looked their realtime Surf City ghost-house selves.