The Angel's Cut (8 page)

Flora caught Millie's eye and nodded, then continued to take stock of the crowd. It seemed that this was the way she could best cope—by keeping her eyes moving from face to face.

Flora hated public gatherings as thoroughly as she loved her house at the end of the street and edge of a waste ground, and her cramped and dark cutting room. Crowds made her uncomfortable. She'd been that way since her accident. Yet, as she stood through the service, forced to contemplate this particular crowd, Flora suddenly realised what it was about crowds that she didn't like. The mass of faces forced her to search for one face, one in particular. And it wasn't the face of the man in the coffin that Flora found herself looking out for. No—she was looking for the face of another old boyfriend, the man who had touched his cigarette to the hem of her grass skirt. Flora suddenly understood that, for years, she'd had her eye out for John Weber. Not because the sight of him would make her fearful—after all, John had been an even-tempered man, often drunk and silly, but only once to devastating effect. At the time of her accident Flora hadn't even realised who it was who'd set her skirt on fire. John hadn't visited her in the hospital, and she hadn't seen him since. She had no idea where he was now, or how he'd paid for what he'd done to her. She remembered that there had been a charge considered, assault, later downgraded to a misdemeanour. In the hospital there was once a bitter exchange over her bed between her friend Avril and Conrad Cole about what John Weber deserved. Flora had a vague memory of the argument, of Avril's tears and Cole's vehemence. But after that no one mentioned the man in her presence again.

Standing over the coffin of the man she'd most cared for and thinking about the man who had hurt her most, Flora
began to feel that there was something curiously wrong with her life. Something odd, and misshapen. Her injury and her burden of pain couldn't entirely account for her sense of having holes in her story. It was as though her life had a bad director and an inexperienced cameraman, a combination that always meant a lack of ‘coverage' of the film's scenes. If a scene was badly covered, filmed in too few takes, then an editor might find herself with too little film to work with. Poor coverage meant that it was hard to make a story make sense, or flow. At that moment, at Gil's graveside, Flora's story didn't make sense to her—even with this soundtrack, from
The Book of Common Prayer
. She should know where the man who maimed her was, and what had become of him.

Flora stared at Gil's coffin and saw her own face and other faces reflected on the curve of the casket's lacquered lid, all stretched and draped like a sheet of soft, pale pastry.

The service ended. The sexton and another man operated a mechanism that winched the coffin down into the grave. A hymn was sung. The crowd thinned and reformed around the chief mourners.

Flora went back down to Jimmy Chan's car—she'd come with him. She took her bags from the back seat. Her handbag, and the canvas satchel holding a can of film. Flora waited while cars filled, and pulled out, and drove away, and the throng by the grave thinned further. She kept her eye on Crow, who took his mother's and father's arms and escorted them to their car, leaving them in the care of his wife and sister.

Jimmy came back to his car and Flora thanked him for the lift and told him she'd take the trolley home. Then she went to intercept Crow, who was standing looking after his departing relatives, perched on the kerb, his big feet in his stiff shoes seesawing, like a twelve-year-old playing with the possibility of a fall. Flora said his name and he turned to her, startled, and stepped off the kerb. She took his hand and he stooped to kiss her cheek.

‘I know your film's in trouble,' she said, but didn't say that Gil had detailed its trouble when he came to see her the night before he was killed. Flora didn't know whether Crow knew about Myra's affair. If not she didn't want to be the one to tell him.

‘I've lost my whole second unit,' Crow said. ‘The way things are now it won't be released. The studio is patching every film it has with dialogue. They even have title-writers on it—writing terrible stuff.'

Flora handed Crow her bag. He took it, puzzled, then when he felt the shape of the canister through the cloth his eyes widened.

Flora said, ‘Altogether there's six minutes in there. Dog fighting footage, all solid stuff, but nothing really distinguished. You can cut it in with what you have.'

‘Cole doesn't know anything about this, I'm guessing.'

‘No,' Flora said. ‘It's up to you what to do with it, Connie.'

‘Thank you,' Crow said. He took her hand again and they stood together for a time, holding hands and standing at an angle to one another as if leaving an opening, an invitation
for some other person to join them. Above them the pepper tree puffed up like a bird letting air in under its feathers.

Crow said, ‘Myra is at San Simeon with her buddy Marian. I'm going up there to establish the facts about her “tenuous health”. I guess I'm hoping for the sort of good news the studio won't necessarily like. Anyway, I want to talk to her before the studio offers her a doctor and “a simple solution”. I don't know how she's feeling. She and Gil were in trouble.'

‘Yes, I know,' Flora said. ‘So do you really think she's pregnant?'

Crow shrugged, said, ‘Come and see me sometime soon,' and released her hand.

Flora went down toward the cemetery gates, walking along the now broken line of cars. She saw Millie ahead of her and called out. Millie stopped and they stood with their hat brims touching while Flora lit a cigarette from the fiery tip of Millie's.

Flora said, ‘What do you say to a trip down to Brawley? I'm working only one day in five. Cole's re-shooting every scene with the girl in it.'

‘Yeah, I heard he sacked Miss Jensen.'

‘He had to. It turned out that when she opened her mouth she sounded like a cow lost in a mossy tunnel. He's got someone else, someone much better.'

‘He's burning celluloid while he learns,' Millie said. Then, ‘I'd like to go, Flora, but I won't have my stake till I'm finished for Crow. I promised myself never to touch my savings.'

Flora remembered that Millie was saving up to establish her Coloured flight school. She said, ‘I'll stake you. After all, you do the flying.'

They reached Millie's car and Flora saw who was in it.

‘This is Xas,' said Millie. ‘It's short for exasperating. Xas, this is my friend Flora.' Millie leaned on her car door and frowned at Flora, her forehead puckered into four perfectly even ripples. ‘I don't know how long my stunt is postponed, or even if Crow is still wants me to do it. I didn't think I should ask him today.'

Xas was watching Millie. He looked as though he were waiting for something—patient and placid.

‘Crow wants me to crash a plane,' Millie said, to Flora. ‘I've done that kind of thing before, often. But I don't want to.'

‘I can understand that,' Flora said.

‘I could do it,' Xas said, as if this was what he had been waiting for.

‘You might get hurt, sweetie,' Millie said.

‘No,' Xas said. Then, ‘Only if I meet another angel in the air.'

Flora frowned at him. She said, ‘So is that what you think happened? Gil and the rest of them “met an angel in the air”?'

‘No,' Xas said, thoughtful. ‘I wasn't thinking about that.'

‘He's very religious,' Millie said.

Flora raised an eyebrow. She remembered Xas tucking his shirt-tails back into his flight togs, which struck her as a rather unusual religious observance. She asked him, ‘When you dropped the Fokker back at Mines Field, why didn't you tell me Gil had been killed?'

‘I didn't know you knew him.'

‘You didn't even mention an accident.'

‘I didn't know you knew
any
of them. Cities are so big now I've stopped expecting people to know one another.'

‘So you two have met already?' Millie sounded disappointed.

‘Millie,' Xas said, ‘I'd gladly do the stunt and—'

‘Don't!' Millie warned.

‘—give you the money.' He began by sounding eager then, suddenly, impatient. ‘I'm so sick of having to pretend to have feelings about money. And I don't mean that doing the stunt for you is a way for me to show that I don't care about it, because I don't care about showing anything either.'

‘You're raving,' Millie said, fond. ‘Honey, stunts are my livelihood. I can't afford to be afraid. So, I'll wear a diaper and do the damn stunt. But—sweetheart—are you broke?'

Xas turned out his pockets. He had a thin stack of bills, limp and sandwiched together as though they been soaked and dried. ‘The jazz clubs and rollercoasters have just about cleaned me out,' he said.

Flora said, ‘Do you have enough to get us drunk?'

‘Says Flora, with conciliatory self-interest.' Xas smiled at her. ‘I think I have enough.'

‘So—you two
have
met?' Millie wanted to hear where and how.

‘At Mines,' said Flora.

‘Over Cole,' said Xas. ‘Flora had Cole's bow tie.'

‘And Xas had Cole's attention,' said Flora. ‘Briefly.'

Millie said, ‘Why are you fighting?'

They said together, ‘We're not.'

But they were, Flora thought. It wasn't just that he had an annoying manner, or that, at any moment, she expected to get an even more annoying explanation for his annoying manner—like, for instance, that he wrote poetry or was a devotee of Aimee Semple McPherson. Something like that, something he was proud of, and thought distinguished him from the masses. His otherworldliness irritated her. And it wasn't even consistent. In fact, it was just inconsistent enough for Flora to imagine that perhaps it wasn't an affectation. Perhaps he was simple, not a fake. Whatever—he
was
hugely exasperating. But Flora realised that some of her irritation was made up of tension. It was as if, although she expected nothing from Xas, she sensed that he somehow had the ability to cause her a sudden, serious,
personal
disappointment.

She could see him clearly now, at least. She had him in focus as she hadn't in Cole's hangar where what she could see was distorted by her expectations. She could see how he looked—white skin, dark blue eyes, a purplish sheen on his thick, close cut black hair. He looked like a star, glowing in his own key light.

Millie opened the back door of her car. She began to run through a list of places they could go to shut themselves up all day and drink. Flora knew that Millie would understand that she wouldn't want to talk about Gil. Millie wouldn't want to either; she'd lost too many flying friends over the years and, in that profession, the form was not to dwell on their losses. Millie would want her company—Flora
knew—but silence on that subject. She wondered how many of the eight men Millie had known well. More than Flora, and possibly Millie knew one or two nearly as well as Flora had known Gil. But they wouldn't talk about it. And somehow it helped that the other stunt pilot—Xas—hadn't known any of them, had returned the Fokker but not carried the news, and had sat in the car during the service.

Flora climbed into the back seat.

Three hours later Millie got up from their table saying, ‘I'm going to break formation. I'm going to waggle my wings and peel off. Okay?' She left.

After a few minutes Flora made a suggestion. ‘Shall we go to the movies?'

‘We,' said Xas, musing.

‘Was that “yes” in French?'

‘No, it was “we”. But,
yes
, let us go to the movies.'

They came out late and stood for a time on a patch of pavement studded with glossy stars of polished, dropped chewing gum. Then the lights on the canopy went out, followed by the light in the ticket booth. Xas waited to see which way Flora would turn, and when she came out of her daze and started walking he went with her.

They had seen newsreels, Movietone footage with narration. They had watched shorts, all silent. And they had seen two features by a German working in America.

As Xas walked he thought about a scene in one film. It took place at night, on a lake, after a storm. A boat had gone
down and people were searching the lake. A man leaning out from the bow of one boat, a lantern in his hand, spotted a bundle of cut reeds, a crude buoyancy device, collapsed and coming apart, afloat on otherwise empty black water.

Like poetry, stories and novels and plays, film proved to Xas that more often than not people saw as he saw, and felt as he felt. He thought about the film, and remembered Hell, its corrosive air and light, its ceaselessly milling shadows—a motion wearying to the eye and brain. He remembered how the fallen angels would shut themselves away and read, how they built all the time, like wasps, mixing mortar and shaping stones and piling them one upon another to make more rooms to house the books, to make shade and seclusion to house themselves in order to read the books. Lucifer's palace was a library, a repository of copies of every work ever copied, from papyrus scrolls, through vellum, to paper and leather, paper and cloth. The fallen angels would read the books before they dried out and crumbled. And they remembered what they read—for angels never forget anything. But in Heaven, where everyone was in bliss, even fierce archangels in fierce bliss, no one read.

As Xas walked with Flora he wondered whether films, like books, found their way into Hell. Films were copied for distribution, so might. But, Xas wondered, without a projector, how would his brothers watch one?

He was thinking about all this, to the point where he began to feel that it was his responsibility to find out what the situation was, when Flora McLeod saved him from his
thoughts. She said she was sorry he'd seen
The Four Devils
in that version. ‘That was its second release. With sound.' She sighed. ‘You see—the silent version is a grown-up film. It's fluid and mature, and it trusts its storytelling. For instance, Charles isn't late because he's hit by a car—that's such an expedient bit of plotting! In the silent version he makes a choice. He chooses the slinky siren over the heroine—or at least a final night with the siren, one last bout of bewitched lovemaking.'