The Dead Republic (12 page)

I gasped and laughed. I was living.

I crept under palm trees, behind the lines of studio bungalows. I peered through blinds, for photographs of cowboys and their leading ladies. I found plenty but none of them were Ford’s. I jemmied locks and remembered how to get past window glass. I sat at desks and read scripts and script notes. I read in the dark. I looked for Ford in the lines. I resisted temptation; I added no notes of my own. I read all the hard men and war heroes, bad girls and heroines. But Ford wasn’t directing any of them.

It stopped mattering, because every night I read. I learnt the codes and shortcuts. I knew what a script looked like now. I knew the layout and the language. I sat in the cave under Cecil B. DeMille’s desk and read every script in his Paramount bungalow, using a torch I’d bought on the way.

I heard the key. The door opened.

I walked out, past the woman who’d opened it. I was carrying the waste bin.

—Grand morning, I said, the new janitor, in good suit and fedora.

—Yes, said the woman.

I dumped the rubbish behind a bush and brought the bin back in. I put it back beside her desk. She hadn’t moved.

—See you tomorrow, I said.

I broke into Ford’s house. I stood in the hall and knew he wasn’t there. I looked in the hidden rooms. I looked for scripts -
Rio Grande
,
The Quiet Man
- but I found nothing.

I kept moving. It was the best time I’d lived in years. I was awake and younger. Over walls and fences, through wooden and cast-iron doors.
Singin’ in the Rain
,
High Noon
. I read them all; I prowled the sets. I fed the horses and pissed in the water tank. Gene Kelly never knew what rained on him while he was singing. I roamed all night and slept through the days.

—Mister Smart.

I left Bill at the door. He followed me in.

—Ready? he said.

—For what?

—Mister Ford wants to talk with you, said Bill.

—Is that right?

—Yes, said Bill.

—Grand, I said.

—All set? he said.

And I told him.

—No.

He was shocked, then anxious and annoyed.

—You won’t come?

—No.

—What do I tell Mister Ford? he said.

—It’s up to you.

—You won’t meet him?

—I didn’t say that.

—Should I come back tomorrow?

—Fair enough.

—Tomorrow morning?

—Grand.

He walked to the door.

—Goodbye, Mister Smart, he said.

—Good luck, I said, and followed him to the door. He stopped and looked back. We could hear a fight going on, a few rooms away. A serious one - things breaking, angry people grunting quietly. Bill looked at me. He was hunting for reassurance, something solid to tell Ford. He shrugged and walked away. I watched him till he turned the corner to the elevator. I heard it start; the cables groaned as they pulled it to him.

I shut the door.

 

 

 

I was wide awake, alert. Trained killer - I never slept. Before, in the old days, I’d woken straight into every escape or confrontation. Nothing had been unexpected.

I was ready. I didn’t move.

I couldn’t hear anything beyond or beneath the usual. Early, pre-dawn morning - all the expected sounds. The corridor outside was empty. The hotel’s clients were fast asleep or dead.

The crack on the head came before the grunt. Hands were on me, heavy on my head and shoulder. The hands had weight but the knocks to my head weren’t meant to kill or even hurt me. One hand pressed my face hard into the pillow. Things seemed to squirm and shift inside it, right against my skin and eye. I tried to push against the weight. I got my head up, but I knew it: I was being let move, an inch or two. There was enough power there to push me down, to smother me or even break my neck.

—The leg on, Mister Smart?

My face went back down into the pillow. Harder this time, longer - I was losing.

The leg was beside the bed. The sheet was off me; he’d have seen I wasn’t wearing it.

That was what drained everything out of me. The sight of myself, what he must have been looking at. The old man, naked, the meatless arse; the old insect, one of the legs pulled off.

—Ready to get up?

I nodded - I tried to.

—Okay?

I nodded again. I could turn now.

—Sorry, Mister Smart, he said.

I covered myself with the sheet, for his sake and my own.

—Just following orders, Bill, yeah?

—No, he said.—Nobody told me to do this.

—Then what the fuck are you up to?

This time he really hurt me. He swung his open hand from right across the room; the crack filled the place. I hit the floor, between the bed and wall. I’d landed on the wooden leg.

—Put it on, he said.

He watched me carefully; he stayed close. I stopped holding the leg like a club, and I saw his feet shift slightly. But he wasn’t giving me room. I wasn’t going to get him now.

He watched me strap it on. He watched me get the clothes on. He moved, just enough. He stayed right with me.

—Why? I asked him.

I put my notebook into one of my jacket pockets. I remembered the fedora and I put it on.

—There’s just so much a man should have to take, he said. I was ready to go.

—I don’t mind taking the orders, he said.—It suits me fine. Mister Ford is a good man.

I looked at him. Not for the first time, I’d underestimated a man. I’d never fuckin’ learn.

—But you, he said.—Calling you Mister Smart don’t come natural. Let’s go.

He didn’t touch me. He didn’t have to. I moved; I did what he wanted me to. But he stood in my way.

—You’re shit, he said.—Like me.

There was no aggression in what he said, and he wasn’t trying to provoke me. That was what made it frightening. He believed what he’d said.

—I’m sorry, I said.

—Yeah.

 

 

 

—You have a passport? said Ford.

—No.

—You had one when you came here.

—It wasn’t mine, I told him.—And I threw it in the Hudson.

—We’ll get you a passport, said Ford.—You American now? I didn’t know.

—I don’t want a passport.

It wasn’t the same desert. It was the whole world, a vast land all around me, but still, it looked smaller than Monument Valley. The fort looked like the same one, a flimsy thing, picked up and dropped there. The walls were too low to stop anything. In fact, there was only one wall.There was a long line of army tents, brighter versions of the ones I’d seen in the migrant camps during the Depression years. There were trees here, a few of them, that made long vein-like shadows across the dust. We were in Utah, somewhere - the Moab. Somewhere I’d probably been through before.

—I’m just back, he said.

I said nothing.

—From Ireland, he said.—I was looking at some locations.

—The place is full of locations.

I hadn’t been going to talk or get sucked in. But the mention of Ireland had been enough; the mouth had opened and the shite spilled out.

—Point is, he said.—I couldn’t get there without my passport. Meta?

—Here.

She was under the same big hat.

—Let’s get Henry photographed, he said.—And, Jesus. Is he Irish or American?

—I’ll look into it, she said.

—He might even be Mexican, said Ford.

—He might have to be, she said.—If we need his passport any time soon.

—We do.

—Leave it with me, she said, but she stayed where she was, sitting just behind us.

(I found out later, I was American. There were no records in Dublin; I’d never existed.)

—So, said Ford.—We’re on the home stretch. We have the finance, and Duke and Maureen.

—What about Fonda?

—Too poker-assed to be a convincing Irishman. We just need the script. You ready?

—For what?

—The work.

—I’ve been hanging around for three years, I told him.

I’d worked it out in the station wagon; it was still an angry shock.

—So you’re ready, is my guess.

I stood up. I wasn’t doing it again, listening to him force my life into
The Quiet Man
. The chair was the trap. I could feel it, on my back.
Henry Smart - Writer
. The words were glue, already drying. But I’d seen scripts now; I’d read a few. I hadn’t written a word and I hadn’t seen a line being written.

—Sit down, said Ford.

—No.

—Then listen.

—No, I said.—You listen.

And he did. He lifted his hat and looked at me as I spoke.

I told him I’d read
The Quiet Man
and that there hadn’t been a sentence that I’d felt was mine. I told him I wouldn’t give him bits of my life to make his picture a bit less of a travesty. I told him more and I think I spoke for hours.

I was ready to walk and I didn’t care if I walked deeper in or out of the desert.

—You win, he said.

—What d’you mean?

—We’ll make it your way.

I knew enough by now. In the world of Ford there was only one way, and it would never be mine or anyone else’s.

He stood up now. There was no tension in his body.

—I’m sorry, he said.

Then he lifted his hand and slapped the words away.

—I understand, he said.—You’ve been hanging around. But that’s not it. I know.

He shrugged.

—But, he said,—we got the finance.

I stepped back.

He was messing again, the salesman, the barker. But he saw me move and he slumped again, became a smaller man than me.

—Listen, he said.—I have the finance. I used
The Quiet Man
to get it. That’s the package. And Duke, and Maureen. Now I have it. From that prick, Herb Yates. Took the fucker back to Ireland, showed him the cottage I almost starved in before I took the boat. Believed it myself. We were both crying. But I got it. And now I can do what I want. We’ll be in Galway. He’ll be in L.A. He’ll scream down the phone when he sees the dailies but the dailies he’s looking at will be three or four days late. We’ll be finished before he knows what he’s paid for.

He sat down again.

—So, tell me about the wedding.

 

 

 

I heard the typewriter; I watched it. I spoke, and saw the words being thumped across the page.

Meta Sterne had added a card table to the pile of things she carried everywhere. And the typewriter, a slick, low Underwood - she carried that too. I saw her walk across the parade ground and I remembered Winnie Carney, James Connolly’s secretary, as she marched with the Citizen Army in 1916, down Abbey Street to the G.P.O., with her huge typewriter and a Webley revolver nearly as long as her leg.

We turned our backs on every set, and wrote.

I must have looked the part. I stood up as I talked. I paced the Utah desert.

—Where’s Collins?

—His office.

—Boring.

—It’s guarded.

—Okay.

—He’s always ready to run.

—Great.

COLLINS

This might be a no-come-back job, Sean.

 

SEAN

I’m in.

 

COLLINS

Good man yourself.

 

—Where’s the office?

—Bachelor’s Walk. The quays. Overlooking the river.

—Those little Guinness boats, right? Army tenders skidding, braking. The boots, the Tans - we hear them land and run.

—We got out over the roof, once.

—That’s a new scene. Who’s on the roof? Heads down. On the hunkers. Collins, Seán.

—And Jack.

—Seán says something.

—I don’t remember.

—It’s a fucking story. Come on, come on. You’re on the roof. In mortal danger. We’ll make it night. Searchlights, crisscrossing there. Three good men on the roof, escaping from the might of the fucking Empire. Steep. Loose slates, all that. And you say—

 

SEAN

Grand night for a walk, lads.

 

COLLINS

It surely is.

 

I heard the deep tap of the Underwood keys bounce off the mesa walls and come right back over our hats. I saw the words dig their way down the page. I sat when a clean page was being pulled into the machine, or when Ford was up directing the film going on behind us. I turned the chair and sometimes watched.

Wayne and Maureen were good together; I could see that from where I sat. Wayne, like the last time I’d seen him, was made to look older than he actually was. And she, in the film, was a woman with a grown-up son, a gawky kid who’d enlisted and ended up in his father’s regiment. Maureen and Wayne played two people who’d met decades before but they looked at each other like the blood roaring through them was still a surprise.

The local Mormons were objecting, Ford told me. Half the extras were threatening to walk out of the fort.

—I guess that’s the catch with that particular creed, he said.—You can have yourself a house full of wives, but you can’t want to fuck any of them. Has to be a duty.

—Sounds like Ireland, I said.

—Not the part where that woman comes from.

He was talking about Maureen.

—Dublin’s different, I said, although I didn’t know if I meant it.

—Dublin, he said.—See, that’s a problem.

I should have listened.

—Dublin doesn’t really count, he said.—Folks just didn’t get
The Informer
back then. Because it was set in the city. It wasn’t Irish. Dubliners aren’t really Irish. They’re scum.