Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (7 page)
Read Dream Factories and Radio Pictures Online
Authors: Howard Waldrop
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Essays & Correspondence, #Essays, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #short stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #TV; Movie; Video Game Adaptations
Alfred took a deep breath, calmed himself. He was lightly armed, having only a five-shot .32 revolver in his holster and a poniard in a sheath on his hip. He would have felt almost naked except for the excruciatingly heavy but comforting weapon slung across his shoulders.
It was a double-barreled Greener 4-bore Rhino Express which could fire a 130-gram bullet at 1200 meters per second. Jarry had decided that if he
had
to kill Norpois, he might as well wipe him off the face of the earth.
He carried four extra rounds in a bandolier; they weighed more than a kilo in all.
He was confident in his weapons, in himself, in his high-wheeler. He had oiled it the night before, polished it until it shone. After all, it was the insulted party, not him, not Dreyfus.
He sighed, then leaned out and dropped the lead-weighted green handkerchief as the signal he was starting down. He had his ordinary over his shoulder opposite the Greener and had his foot on the first step before he heard the weighted handkerchief ricocheting on its way down off the curved leg of the Tower.
B. The Duel
He was out of breath before he passed the locked apartment which Gustave Eiffel had built for himself during the last phase of construction of the Tower, and which he sometimes used when aerodynamic experiments were being done on the drop-tube which ran down the exact center of the Tower.
Down around the steps he clanged, his bike brushing against the spiral railing. It was good he was not subject to vertigo. He could imagine Norpois’ easy stroll to the west leg, where he would be casually walking up the broad stairs to the first level platform with four restaurants, arcades and booths, and its entry to the stilled second set of elevators. (Those between the ground and first level were the normal counterweighted kind; hydraulic ones to the second—American Otis had had to set up a dummy French corporation to win the contract—no one in France had the technology, and the charter forbade foreign manufacture; and tracked ones to the third—passengers had to change halfway up, as no elevator could be made to go from roughly 70° to 90° halfway up its rise.)
Panting mightily, Jarry reached the third platform, less than a third of the way down. Only 590 more steps down to sure and certain ambush. The rifle, cartridges, and high-wheeler were grinding weights on his back. Gritting his teeth, he started down the steep steps with landings every few dozen meters.
* * *
His footsteps rang like gongs on the iron treads. He could see the tops of the booths on the second level, the iron framework of the Tower extending all around him like a huge narrow cage.
Norpois would be waiting at one of the corners, ready to fire at either set of stairs. (Of course, he probably already knew which set Jarry was using, oh devious man, or it was possible he was truly evil and was waiting on the first level. It would be just like a right-wing nationalist Catholic safety-bicycle rider to do that.)
Fifteen steps up from the second level, in one smooth motion, Jarry put the ordinary down, mounted it holding immobile the pedals with his feet, swung the Rhino Express off his shoulder, and rode the last crashing steps down, holding back, then pedaling furiously as his giant wheel hit the floor.
He expected shots at any second as he swerved toward a closed souvenir booth: He swung his back wheel up and around behind him holding still, changing direction, the drainpipe barrels of the 4-bore resting on the handlebars.
Over at the corner of another booth the front wheel and handlebar of Norpois’ bicycle stuck out.
With one motion Jarry brought the Greener to his cheek. We shall shoot the front end off his bicycle—without that he cannot be mounted and fire; ergo, he cannot duel; therefore, we have won; he is disgraced.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Jarry fired one barrel—the recoil sent him skidding backwards two meters. The forks of the crocodile went away—Fortune’s smiling face wavered through the air like the phases of the Moon. The handlebars stuck in the side of another booth six meters away.
Jarry hung onto his fragile balance, waiting for Norpois to tumble forward or stagger bleeding with bicycle shrapnel from behind the booth.
He heard a noise behind him; at the corner of his eye he saw Norpois standing beside one of the planted trees—he had to have been there all along—with a look of grim satisfaction on his face.
Then the grenade landed directly between the great front and small back wheels of Jarry’s bicycle.
C. High Above the City
He never felt the explosion, just a wave of heat and a flash that blinded him momentarily. There was a carnival ride sensation, a loopy feeling in his stomach. Something touched his hand; he grabbed it. Something tugged at his leg. He clenched his toes together.
His vision cleared.
He hung by one hand from the guardrail. He dangled over Paris. His rifle was gone. His clothes smelt of powder and burning hair. He looked down. The weight on his legs was his ordinary, looking the worse for wear. The rim of the huge front wheel had caught on the toe of his cycling shoe. He cupped the toe of the other one through the spokes.
His hand was losing its grip.
He reached down with the other for his pistol. The holster was still there, split up the middle, empty.
Norpois’ head appeared above him, looking down, then his gun hand with a large automatic in it, pointing at Jarry’s eyes.
“There are rules, Monsieur,” said Jarry. He was trying to reach up with the other hand but something seemed to be wrong with it.
“Get with the coming century, dwarf,” said Norpois, flipping the pistol into the air, catching it by the barrel. He brought the butt down hard on Jarry’s fingers.
The second time the pain was almost too much. Once more and Alfred knew he would let go, fall, be dead.
“One request. Save our noble vehicle,” said Jarry, looking into the journalist’s eyes. There was a clang off somewhere on the second level.
Norpois’ grin became sardonic. “You die. So does your crummy bike.”
There was a small pop. A thin line of red, like a streak of paint slung off the end of a brush, stood out from Norpois’ nose, went over Jarry’s shoulder.
Norpois raised his automatic, then wavered, let go of it. It bounced off Alfred’s useless arm, clanged once on the way down.
Norpois, still staring into Jarry’s eyes, leaned over the railing and disappeared behind his head. There was silence for a few seconds, then:
Pif-Paf! Quel Bruit!
The sound of the body bouncing off the ironworks went on for longer than seemed possible.
Far away on the second level was the sound of footsteps running downstairs.
Painfully, Jarry got his left arm up next to his right, got the fingers closed, began pulling himself up off the side of the Eiffel Tower, bringing his mangled high-wheeler with him.
D. Code Duello
A small crowd had gathered, besides those concerned. Norpois’ second was over by the body, with the police. There would of course be damages to pay for. Jarry carried his ordinary and the Greener, which he had found miraculously lying on the floor of the second level.
Proust came forward to shake Alfred’s hand. Jarry gave him the rifle and ordinary, but continued to walk past him. Several others stepped forward, but Jarry continued on, nodding.
He went to Pablo. Pablo had on a long cloak and was eating an egg sandwich. His eyes would not meet Alfred’s.
Jarry stepped in front of him. Pablo tried to move away without meeting his gaze. Alfred reached inside the cloak, felt around, ignoring the Webley strapped at Pablo’s waist.
He found what he was looking for, pulled it out. It was the single-shot .22. Jarry sniffed the barrel as Pablo tried to turn away, working at his sandwich.
“Asshole,” said Jarry, handing it back.
XIX. Fin de Cyclé
T
HE BELLS WERE STILL RINGING
in the New Century.
Satie had given up composing and had gone back to school to learn music at the age of thirty-eight. Rousseau still exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, and was now married for the second time. Proust had locked himself away in a room he'd had lined with cork and was working on a never-ending novel. Méliès was still out at Montreuil, making films about trips to the Moon and the Bureau of Incoherent Geography. Pablo was painting; but so much blue; blue here, blue there, azure, cerulean, Prussian. Dreyfus was now a commandant.
Jarry lived in a shack over the Seine which stood on four supports. He called it Our Suitable Tripod.
There was noise, noise everywhere. There were few bicycles, and all those were safeties. He had not seen another ordinary in months. He looked over where his repaired one stood in the middle of the small room. His owl and one of his crows perched on the handlebars.
The noise was deafening—the sound of bells, of crowds, sharp reports of fireworks. Above all, those of motor-cycles and motor-cars.
He looked back out the window. There was a new sound, a dark flash against the bright moonlit sky. A bat-shape went over, buzzing, trailing laughter and gunshots, the pilot banking over the River. Far up the Seine, the Tower stood, bathed in floodlights, glorying in its blue, red, and white paint for the coming Exposition.
A zeppelin droned overhead, electric lights on the side spelling out the name of a hair pomade. The bat-shaped plane whizzed under it in near-collision.
Someone gunned a motor-cycle beneath his tiny window. Jarry reached back into the room, brought out his fowling piece filled with rock salt and fired a great tongue of flame into the night below. After a scream, the noise of the motor-cycle raced away.
He drank from a glass filled with brandy, ether, and red ink. He took one more look around, buffeted by the noise from all quarters and a motor launch on the River. He said a word to the night before slamming the window and returning to his work on the next Ubu play.
The word was
“merde!”
Introduction: Flatfeet!
I
HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT THE GENESIS
of this story twice, now, once for
Going Home Again
, my last collection (and while I’m at it, Shuan Tan’s illustration for this story was wonderful—two feet propped up on a desk, candlestick, telephone, calendar on the wall opened to July. Tan was
maybe
eighteen when he illustrated the book . . .), and again in my first column, “Crimea River” in
Eidolon Magazine
in 1998, which was more or less a literary mash note to Constance Willis’ story “In the Late Cretaceous,” many of the effects of which I was trying for when I wrote this.
So I won’t go through all
that
again. (When I wrote this one, it was October of 1994.) Where it started: I was reading a book on the first Red Scare, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the nationwide roundup of anarchists and socialists in 1920, and I suddenly realized it would have been done by guys like these . . .
Voilà!
Hollywood is Hollywood because of an attempted American monopoly in 1910. Movies were being made in New Jersey, Philly, Long Island; all along the East Coast and Chicago. About 1910, all the people who owned major patents, and several production companies, got together and formed the Motion Picture Patents Company and said:
Anybody
who doesn’t pay us for cameras, projectors, movies, etc., will be sued for patent infringement. It was an attempt to control the motion-picture business from raw film stock to the exhibition of the films. (A reverse Join-or-Die movement.)
If
you paid them, you could make movies; if you didn’t, they’d hound you to the ends of the earth.
Well, almost. It was the last straw for small independent film companies, fed up with crooked distributors, conniving theater owners, sharpies and crooks—and the crummy East Coast weather that only let them shoot 150 days a year. (Arc lights were just coming in—most studios shot outdoors, or in glass-roofed buildings where you had to depend on sunlight—film wasn’t fast enough for low light levels yet.)
The independents took off West. It could have been anywhere. (See “
The Passing of the Western
” later for another take on
that
.) As chance would have it, they ended up near Los Angeles—sunshine, cheap (at the time) real estate, plenty of people not doing much of anything. There was a thriving theater scene; vaudeville talent came through often. And, as chance would have it further, a small community (and Dry thirteen years before the rest of the country) called, by that time, Hollywood (and Culver City and Burbank, named for a guy who raised sweet potatoes . . .).
Things weren’t easy at first. Cecil B. DeMille, in his autobiography, talks about having to wear a couple of pistols on his horseback ride each morning from town out to the lot where he was making
The Squaw Man
, because the Patents people hired guys to take potshots at the renegade filmmakers.
It took till the 1930s to finally kill film production on the East Coast—
Coconuts
(1929) and
Animal Crackers
(1930) with the Marxes were filmed on Long Island in the daytime while Harpo, Groucho, Chico, and Zeppo were in plays at night—even though the courts had ruled the MPPCo. was a Trust, and therefore illegal, by about 1915, ending
that
threat.
So it was, in trying to make millions, the MPPCo. did itself out of billions, and instead of having the thriving metropoli of the East as the centers of motion-picture production in the U.S.—and soon the world—they handed it, unconsciously, but with malice aforethought, to a sleepy crossroads on the edge of nowhere, and made its name stand for motion pictures for all time.
Flatfeet!
1912
C
APTAIN TEEHEEZAL TURNED HIS HORSE
down toward the station house just as the Pacific Electric streetcar clanged to a stop at the intersection of Sunset and Ivar.
It was just 7:00
A.M.
so only three people got off at the stop. Unless they worked at one of the new moving-picture factories a little further out in the valley, there was no reason for someone from the city to be in the town of Wilcox before the stores opened.
The motorman twisted his handle, there were sparks from the overhead wire, and the streetcar belled off down the narrow tracks. Teeheezal watched it recede, with the official sign
No Shooting Rabbits from the Rear Platform
over the back door.
“G’hup, Pear,” he said to his horse. It paid no attention and walked at the same speed.
By and by he got to the police station. Patrolman Rube was out watering the zinnias that grew to each side of the porch. Teeheezal handed him the reins to his horse.
“What’s up, Rube?”
“Not much, Cap’n,” he said. “Shoulda been here yesterday. Sgt. Fatty brought by two steelhead and a Coho salmon he caught, right where Pye Creek empties into the L.A. River. Big as your leg, all three of ’em. Took up the whole back of his wagon.”
“I mean police business, Rube.”
“Oh.” The patrolman lifted his domed helmet and scratched. “Not that I know of.”
“Well, anybody in the cells?”
“Uh, lessee . . .”
“I’ll talk to the sergeant,” said Teeheezal. “Make sure my horse stays in his stall.”
“Sure thing, Captain.” He led it around back.
The captain looked around at the quiet streets. In the small park across from the station, with its few benches and small artesian fountain, was the big sign
No Spooning by order of Wilcox P.D.
Up toward the northeast the sun was coming full up over the hills.
* * *
Sgt. Hank wasn’t at his big high desk. Teeheezal heard him banging around in the squad room to the left. The captain spun the blotter book around.
There was one entry:
Sat. 11:20
P.M.
Jimson H. Friendless, actor, of Los Angeles city, D&D. Slept off, cell 2. Released Sunday 3:00
P.M.
Arr. off. Patrolmen Buster and Chester.
Sgt. Hank came in. “Oh, hello Chief.”
“Where’d this offense take place?” He tapped the book.
“The Blondeau Tavern . . . uh, Station,” said the sergeant.
“Oh.” That was just inside his jurisdiction, but since the Wilcox village council had passed a local ordinance against the consumption and sale of alcohol, there had been few arrests.
“He probably got tanked somewhere in L.A. and got lost on the way home,” said Sgt. Hank. “Say, you hear about them fish Sgt. Fatty brought in?”
“Yes, I did.” He glared at Sgt. Hank.
“Oh. Okay. Oh, there’s a postal card that came in the Saturday mail from Captain Angus for us all. I left it on your desk.”
“Tell me if any big trouble happens,” said Teeheezal. He went into the office and closed his door. Behind his desk was a big wicker rocking chair he’d had the village buy for him when he took the job early in the year. He sat down in it, took off his flat-billed cap, and put on his reading glasses.
Angus had been the captain before him for twenty-two years; he’d retired and left to see some of the world. (He’d been one of the two original constables when Colonel Wilcox laid out the planned residential village.) Teeheezal had never met the man.
He picked up the card—a view of Le Havre, France, from the docks. Teeheezal turned it over. It had a Canadian postmark, and one half had the address: The Boys in Blue, Police HQ, Wilcox, Calif. U.S.A. The message read:
Well, took a boat. You might have read about it. Had a snowball fight on deck while waiting to get into the lifeboats. The flares sure were pretty. We were much overloaded by the time we were picked up. (Last time I take a boat named for some of the minor Greek godlings.) Will write again soon.
—Angus
PS: Pretty good dance band.
Teeheezal looked through the rest of the mail; wanted posters for guys three thousand miles away, something from the attorney general of California, a couple of flyers for political races that had nothing to do with the village of Wilcox.
The captain put his feet up on his desk, made sure they were nowhere near the kerosene lamp or the big red bellpull wired to the squad room, placed his glasses in their cases, arranged his Farmer John tuft beard to one side, clasped his fingers across his chest, and began to snore.
* * *
The murder happened at the house of one of the curators, across the street from the museum.
Patrolman Buster woke the captain up at his home at 4:00
A.M.
The Los Angeles County coroner was already there when Teeheezal arrived on his horse.
The door of the house had been broken down. The man had been strangled and then thrown back behind the bed where it lay twisted with one foot out the open windowsill.
“Found him just like that, the neighbors did,” said Patrolman Buster. “Heard the ruckus, but by the time they got dressed and got here, whoever did it was gone.”
Teeheezal glanced out the broken door. The front of the museum across the way was lit with electric lighting.
“Hmmm,” said the coroner, around the smoke from his El Cubano cigar. “They’s dust all over this guy’s py-jamas.” He looked around. “Part of a print on the bedroom doorjamb, and a spot on the floor.”
Patrolman Buster said, “Hey! One on the front door. Looks like somebody popped it with a dirty towel.”
The captain went back out on the front porch. He knelt down on the lawn, feeling with his hands.
He spoke to the crowd that had gathered out front. “Who’s a neighbor here?” A man stepped out, waved. “He water his yard last night?”
“Yeah, just after he got off work.”
Teeheezal went to the street and lay down.
“Buster, look here.” The patrolman flopped down beside him. “There’s some lighter dust on the gravel, see it?” Buster nodded his thin face. “Look over there, see?”
“Looks like mud, Chief.” They crawled to the right to get another angle, jumped up, looking at the doorway of the museum.
“Let’s get this place open,” said the chief.
* * *
“I was just coming over; they called me about Fielding’s death, when your ruffians came barging in,” said the museum director, whose name was Carter Lord. “There was no need to rush me so.” He had on suit pants but a pajama top and a dressing gown.
“Shake a leg, pops,” said Patrolman Buster.
There was a sign on the wall near the entrance:
The Treasures of Pharaoh Rut-en-tut-en, April 20–June 13.
The doors were steel; there were two locks Lord had to open. On the inside was a long push bar that operated them both.
“Don’t touch anything, but tell me if something’s out o’ place,” said Teeheezal.
Lord used a handkerchief to turn on the light switches.
He told them the layout of the place and the patrolmen took off in all directions.
There were display cases everywhere, and ostrich-looking fans, a bunch of gaudy boxes, things that looked like coffins. On the walls were paintings of people wearing diapers, standing sideways. At one end of the hall was a big upright wooden case. Patrolman Buster pointed out two dabs of mud just inside the door, a couple of feet apart. Then another a little further on, leading toward the back, then nothing.
Teeheezal looked around at all the shiny jewelry. “Rich guy?” he asked.
“Priceless,” said Carter Lord. “Tomb goods, buried with him for the afterlife. The richest find yet in Egypt. We were very lucky to acquire it.”
“How come you gettin’ it?”
“We’re a small, but a growing museum. It was our expedition—the best untampered tomb. Though there were skeletons in the outer corridors, and the outside seal had been broken, I’m told. Grave robbers had broken in but evidently got no further.”
“How come?”
“Who knows?” asked Lord. “We’re dealing with four thousand five hundred years.”
Patrolman Buster whistled.
Teeheezal walked to the back. Inside the upright case was the gray swaddled shape of a man, twisted, his arms across his chest, one eye closed, a deep open hole where the other had been. Miles of gray curling bandages went round and round and round him, making him look like a cartoon patient in a lost hospital.
“This the guy?”
“Oh, heavens no,” said Carter Lord. “The Pharaoh Rut-en-tut-en’s mummy is on loan to the Field Museum in Chicago for study. This is probably some priest or minor noble who was buried for some reason with him. There were no markings on this case,” he said, knocking on the plain wooden case. “The pharaoh was in that nested three-box sarcophagus over there.”
Teeheezal leaned closer. He reached down and touched the left foot of the thing. “Please don’t touch that,” said Carter Lord.
The patrolmen returned from their search of the building. “Nobody here but us
gendarmerie
,” said Patrolman Rube.
“C’mere, Rube,” said Teeheezal. “Reach down and touch this foot.”
Rube looked into the box, jerked back. “Cripes! What an ugly! Which foot?”
“Both.”
He did. “So?”
“One of them feel wet?”
Rube scratched his head. “I’m not sure.”
“I asked you to
please
not touch that,” said Carter Lord. “You’re dealing with very fragile, irreplaceable things here.”
“He’s conducting a murder investigation here, bub,” said Patrolman Mack.
“I understand that. But nothing here has committed murder, at least not for the last four thousand five hundred years. I’ll have to ask that you desist.”
Teeheezal looked at the face of the thing again. It looked back at him with a deep open hole where one eye had been, the other closed. Just—
The hair on Teeheezal’s neck stood up. “Go get the emergency gun from the wagon,” said the chief, not taking his eyes off the thing in the case.
“I’ll have to
insist
that you leave
now!
” said Carter Lord.
Teeheezal reached over and pulled up a settee with oxhorn arms on it and sat down, facing the thing. He continued to stare at it. Somebody put the big heavy revolver in his hand.
“All you, go outside, except Rube. Rube, keep the door open so you can see me. Nobody do anything until I say so.”
“That’s the last straw!” said Carter Lord. “Who do I call to get you to cease and desist?”
“Take him where he can call the mayor, Buster.”
Teeheezal stared and stared. The dead empty socket looked back at him. Nothing moved in the museum, for a long, long time. The revolver grew heavier and heavier. The chief’s eyes watered. The empty socket stared back, the arms lay motionless across the twisted chest. Teeheezal stared.
“Rube!” he said after a long time. He heard the patrolman jerk awake.
“Yeah, Chief?”
“What do you think?”
“Well, I think about now, Captain, that they’ve got the mayor all agitated, and a coupla aldermen, and five, maybe ten minutes ago somebody’s gonna have figured out that though the murder happened in Wilcox, right now you’re sitting in Los Angeles.”
Without taking his eyes from the thing, Teeheezal asked, “Are you funnin’ me?”
“I never fun about murder, Chief.”
* * *
Three carloads of Los Angeles Police came around the corner on six wheels. They slammed to a stop, the noise of the hand-cranked sirens dying on the night. By now the crowd outside the place had grown to a couple of hundred.
What greeted the eyes of the Los Angeles Police was the Wilcox police wagon with its four horses in harness, most of the force, a crowd, and a small fire on the museum lawn across the street from the murder house.
Two legs were sticking sideways out of the fire. The wrappings flamed against the early morning light. Sparks rose up and swirled.
The chief of the Los Angeles Police Department walked up to where the captain poked at the fire with the butt end of a spear. Carter Lord and the Wilcox mayor and a Los Angeles city councilman trailed behind the L.A. chief.
“Hello, Bob,” said Teeheezal.
With a pop and a flash of cinders, the legs fell the rest of the way into the fire, and the wrappings roared up to nothingness.
“Teeheezal! What the hell do you think you’re doing!? Going out of your jurisdiction, no notification. It looks like you’re burning up Los Angeles City property here! Why didn’t you call us?”
“Didn’t have time, Bob,” said Teeheezal. “I was in hot pursuit.”
They all stood watching until the fire was out; then all climbed into their cars and wagons and drove away. The crowd dispersed, leaving Carter Lord in his dressing gown. With a sigh, he turned and went into the museum.
1913
I
F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HAD SEASONS,
this would have been another late spring.
Teeheezal was at his desk, reading a letter from his niece Katje from back in Pennsylvania, where all his family but him had been for six generations.
There was a knock on his door. “What? What?” he yelled.
Patrolman Al stuck his head in. “Another card from Captain Angus. The sergeant said to give it to you.”
He handed it to Teeheezal and left swiftly. Patrolman Al had once been a circus acrobat, and the circus folded in Los Angeles city two years ago. He was a short thin wiry man, one of Teeheezal’s few smooth-shaven patrolmen.
The card was a view of the Eiffel Tower, had a Paris postmark, with the usual address on the back right side. On the left:
Well, went to the Ballet last night. You would of thought someone spit on the French flag. Russians jumpin’ around like Kansas City fools, frogs punching each other out, women sticking umbrellas up guys’ snouts. I been to a rodeo, a country fair, six picnics, and I have seen the Elephant, but this was pretty much the stupidest display of art appreciation I ever saw. Will write again soon.
—Angus
PS: Ooh-lah-lah!
“Hmmph!” said Teeheezal. He got up and went out into the desk area. Sergeant Hank had a stack of picture frames on his desk corner. He was over at the wall under the pictures of the mayor and the village aldermen. He had a hammer and was marking five spots for nails on the plaster with the stub of a carpenter’s pencil.