You Play the Black & the Red Comes Up Up (8 page)

A PLOT COMES HOME TO ROOST

Q
uentin Genter came knocking at our door God knows what time it was in the morning. We woke up and Mamie kept him outside till she put on her new flowered beach pajamas.

Genter came in. He was dressed in his blue coat with pearl buttons and baggy white flannels and sandals. He had a young fellow with him named Charlie Liefson. I knew I'd seen this Liefson somewheres before. I tried to puzzle out where.

Mamie set up the drinks and Genter got talking. It was funny the way he talked. He talked a streak and he always made you laugh, and yet he seemed like he was always looking for something and was unhappy because he couldn't find it.

It was always hard to remember what he said. While he was talking you'd sit there and it would seem like he was saying the most important and magnificent and funniest things you'd ever heard. And then afterward you could hardly remember ten words he'd said.

He just kept that up and we sat there till we all felt pretty good. I knew Mamie was high, because she started acting up with this Charlie Liefson. She was like that. Sober, she was the properest person you would want to meet, but the minute she got high she would act up with any pair of pants that came along. She kept calling him "Handsome," but this Charlie Liefson never gave her a tumble. I almost got to laughing about it, and Genter was watching her too, and he'd keep smiling his
funny smile as if he knew some
thing none of the rest of us did.

Then he said, "Well, Richard, how's the scenario coming along?"

"What scenario?" I said. I'd forgotten all about it.

"The one about the man held for murder."

"Oh, that," I said. "I sort of never finished it."

"Oh, but you should," Genter said. "It's a piece of stark Americana. It's raw and vital. It's terrific."

"What scenario is it?" Mamie asked. "I never knew you were writing a movie scenario."

"Forget it," I said. "It was terrible."

"It wasn't," Genter said. "It was the realest story I'd heard in a long time. It was a pure primitive, not hogwash without guts like these Hollywood authors write."

"Why, what was it about, big boy?" Mamie said. "Tell me the plot."

"Oh, I've forgotten it," I said.

"Why, I remember it," Genter said. He was smiling and looking at Mamie and then at me. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes weren't. "It
was about a young American com
ing over the Mountains in a box car to California to find his wife in San Diego."

"That wasn't it," I said. I wanted to shut him up.

"Oh, pardon me," he said. "Of course not. How could I have mixed it up. It was about a holdup. That was it."

"Oh, a gangster story," Mamie said.

"No, a tragedy," Genter told her. "Brutal folklore, as fine as anything Shawn O'Casey or Joyce ever wrote, but indigenous to our own soil."

He was watching Mamie. She wasn't drinking now, but sitting on the bed, looking sort of blowsy-eyed and serious like a drunk does when he wants to be sober.

"It was about a man, hungry, exhausted from lack of sleep, a magnificent animal, puzzled and hurt by th
e outra
geous arrows of misfortune, just as a Muira bull stands baffled and stung by the first sharp agony of the
banderillas
that plunge into his aware body.

"Weary and with his somewhat handsome head bloodied by fate, he takes part in a fake holdup which a deceitful messenger wished to stage to rob his own employers. He waits at the appointed come
r, and the footsteps of the mes
senger come, shuttling warp and woof in the tapestry of life and death that is to be woven."

I sat listening. The way he was telling it made me feel goose-pimply. I felt worse listening to him tell it than I had when I was in the holdup.

"Oh, it's a hell of a story," I said. "Let's have another highball."

"No, big boy," Mamie said. She looked like a baby that had been crying. "I want to hear it. It's a good story."

I didn't want him to tell it, but another part of me wanted him to go on.

"There's the scherzo enactment with cupidity leering from behind the shadows," Genter whispered. "And then, we wheel tragedy forward, suddenly lumbering, like a cannon rolling over the boards of a stage. The police appear. Our hero runs. Shots are fired. The messenger feels a bullet tearing into his back, cutting like a white-hot knife over his kidneys, his colon, splintering bone, smashing and ripping all the quivering, feeling, agonized cells of his flesh. Then he isn't any more—only his body there and feet running, in the night.

"Our hero runs into a saloon and hides. Police run in. They arrest another man. They have several reasons for believing him guilty. He is to be hanged for murder.

"And there's our hero, the magnificent Muira bull with a soul flowering like an infinitely small blossom on the desert. How can he save himself and yet save the man in prison?"

He stopped and I didn't want to say anything.

"Well, what then?" Mamie said. She was sitting trying to balance her head straight.

"Well, what then?" Genter asked me.

"I didn't get any further," I said. "I couldn't figure it out so I didn't work any more on it."

"Ah, but that's a waste of life and effort and being," he said. "It is important. You must finish it. That's why I came down here. I waited and waited for you to finish it, but weeks go by and nothing happens. Life is racing past me. I'm getting old—I'm getting old! I can't wait! Even at the risk of spoiling the purity of design I must reach forward one lean, attenuated, white finger, and press the button that makes the current flow again.

He had been yelling in a whisper again, but then he stopped and looked at me like he was laughing. But only his mouth was laughing. His eyes were like he was being cut to little bits.

"Well, let's have another drink," he said. "We will beat down our crying, shouting cells, beat them down with alcohol, show them who is master."

"You mean, we'll get cockeyed?" Mamie asked him.

"Marvelous," he said. "You turn everything I say into the epitomized soul of wit."

We sat there, punishing the Scotch. I wanted us all to get fried. I wanted Mamie to get so boiled she wouldn't remember anything Genter had said. She looked too drunk to know what anything was all about.

I sat there pushing drinks into her and wishing Genter had kept his mouth shut and wondering if Mamie could have got suspicious.

Mamie was putting the old bee on Charlie Liefson but he wasn't giving her a tumble at all. I sat watching them and then I remembered where I
'd seen this mug. He was a life
guard down on the beach.

It's funny how when you're drunk you'll suddenly remember something you couldn't when you were sober.

The minute I thought that I got scared. I thought,
Suppose Mamie is the same way and remembers better when she is drunk
—
remembers all of a flash like I did without reasoning it out, remembers all that Genter said about my story?

Then I wished I'd kept her sober. I wanted to get them out of there. So I picked on Liefson, letting on I was sore he was fooling round with Mamie. I told him to get out. He put up an argument and the people in the other apartments began banging on the walls. Then I got really sore. I clipped him on the button and slung him out on the sidewalk.

Genter ran after him and went hopping up and down on the sidewalk and yelling real high at the top of his lungs, "It's Armageddon! It's Armageddon!"

I went up to bed, and soon I heard Gente
r talking to Lief
son, and then I heard his car in gear and driving away.

All I could do was lay there awake, wondering if Mamie knew the police wanted me for murder.

If I hadn't had a job I would have gone nuts. As it was I went around almost talking to myself. I began to think of beating it again.

I kept thinking that I couldn't beat it, because now Mamie had me on the spot. She had had the cops up and now they knew me by sight. If she was wise, maybe that was her way of saying that I'd better behave myself and stay put.

But I kept thinking that maybe it was chance. When Mamie was oiled she would take up with anyone she met, and maybe she'd just run into those two cops that way.

At home, I'd sit watching her, trying to figure out what she was thinking, but I couldn't ever get any edge on her.

Finally one day at the chutes I got it figured out. I had to find out. I would ask her what she thought of my movie plot. If she was wise to everything, she'd be sure to let on she'd forgotten it. She'd pretend she had been too drunk to remember. I was sure that was the right way to figure it.

The next morning, eating breakfast I said, "Say, what did you think of that movie plot of mine?"

She said, "The one that Genter was telling us?"

"Sure," I said. "That one."

"Why, I think it's a damn sight better than they've got in lots of movies," she said. "You ought to write it all out, big boy. You'd maybe make some money on it. They get big money for those plots."

That made me feel fine. She hadn't pretended that she had forgotten the plot. That meant she didn't suspect anything.

I began thinking what a chump I'd been, worrying like that. I decided to give up worrying and live longer.

I said to myself,
You've got a home and a job and this is a swell climate—and Mamie likes to cook, too. And you've got rid of all the money. What more do you want?

I couldn't answer myself on that.

THE NAKED MERMAID

I
t was after two in the morning and I was out at the end of the pier. All the people had gone hom
e and the conces
sions were closing down. It was quiet out there, except for the waves coming in. You could hear them going under the pier, hitting the pilings like a kid rattling a stick on a picket fence, only slower. I used to like to watch the waves at night. They were never the same.

I was looking down at them, rolling in to hit the end of the pier, when I saw a girl swimming. Only I didn't know it was a girl at first.

Sometimes people do swim at night, but I'd never seen anyone so far out. This girl was heading in from the ocean.

Sometimes I could see her, swimming a slow crawl, and then a roller would swell up and I couldn't see her for so long I'd think she'd gone under. Then I'd see her again.

I kept watching her and I could see she was tired. She was lifting her arms slow, but she kept crawling right on for the end of the pier.

I went down the steps to the little landing where the day- boats dock to take out the fishing parties, and I called to her. At first she didn't hear, but after a while she changed direction and came swimming steadily toward the landing.

I thought she'd never make it, she came on so slow. I could just see her arms coming out and over, steadily, and looking so white in the moonlight they'd sort of flash.

But she made it all right. Then she couldn't reach the platform because it was a good two feet above the water. I lay flat and reached down, and when a wave lifted her I grabbed her arms and pulled her up. When I got her up there I saw she had no clothes on at all.

Sometimes people do go in swimming naked for fun at night, but I couldn't figure this girl out. She didn't act like she was naked, but just sat on the edge of the platform with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. She sat there a while resting, then she moved her hands up and began running her fingers through her hair to lift it up. She didn't have any bathing-cap on, and her hair was long and black and hanging way down her back, wet and stuck together.

I said, "Where did you leave your clothes?" but she didn't say anything. It was just as if I wasn't there. She didn't seem to mind me being there. She began fluffing her hair out and running her fingers through it.

Finally I took off my coat and put it round her shoulders.

She looked up as if she'd seen me for the first time, and said, "Thank you." That was the first word she'd spoken. She looked at me, but she didn't pull the coat round her. I could see the water running down in drops from behind her ears, and onto her neck and shoulders and then down onto her breasts. The water drops went shining across her skin, and when they'd gone her skin was dry again. It was just like when I was bathing Dickie. She had the same kind of skin Dickie had.

I said to myself,
This is a hell of a note—you and a naked girl out here.

So I said, "Where did you come from?"

"Out there," she said. She pointed straight out to sea. I got a sort of shiver.

"Well, where are your clothes?" I said.

"Out there," she said. And she pointed again. She spoke like a nice girl—her voice was real soft, and I could tell she was well-educated. But it all sounded a little goofy.

"Do you often go swimming and leave your clothes out in the ocean?" I asked her.

"I had a nightgown on but it made me tired. It stuck to my legs and I had to take it off."

She didn't explain anything more.

"Do you live round here?" I said.

"I live way up on top of a mountain."

"Not out there in the ocean?" I asked.

"No, on a mountain," she said.

"What mountain?" I asked.

"At Palos Verdes," she said.

That stopped me. Palos Verdes is miles down the coast.

"Did you swim from Palos Verdes to here?"

"No. I started out there" she said. And she pointed out to the ocean again.

"From Catalina, you mean?"

"No," she said. "Out there."

When she pointed again the coat slipped off her shoulders, but she didn't grab it and put it on. She just sat there naked and didn't cover herself up, but the funn
y
thing was that it seemed all right.

"Well," I said finally. "You must be just a mermaid. But if anyone finds you here they'll think different. Aren't you cold?"

"Yes," she said. "I'm cold."

"Well, put the coat on, then," I said. I pulled the coat round here. "How do you think you're going to get home— with no clothes?"

"I don't know," she said.

"I could go to the house and get you some."

Then I kept thinking if I left her someone else might come and find her all naked like that. I didn't want to leave her with no clothes, not even for five minutes.

"Look," I said. "Put my clothes on."

I slipped off my pants, but she didn't look the other way. She just sat watching me. Then I took off my shirt.

"Stand up," I said.

She stood up, naked as the day she was born. I had to dress her like a baby. She just turned round and held out her arms backward for me to put the shirt on her. It was just like dressing Dickie.

She got into the pants, but we had to tie my belt in a knot because there wasn't any holes small enough. We had to turn the pants up at the bottom and roll the sleeves back on the coat. She looked like a scarecrow. I never knew my clothes were so big.

"I live right on the beach down there," I told her. "I'll just swim in. My underpants will make it look like I have swimming trunks on. You stay here and I'll get you something to wear."

She stood looking at me, so I dove in. The water wasn't too cold, once you got in. I swam round to the beach, and walked across the street, and went in the back way. Mamie was fast asleep, so I got dressed and grabbed a pair of Mamie's beach pajamas and went back.

But when I got there the girl wasn't there any more. I stood there on the platform, trying to figure it all out. It seemed as if I'd dreamed it—but I couldn't have.

I went home thinking,
You must have dreamed it.
But then I said,
Well, anyhow; you're a suit of clothes missing, and try and dream those back again.

I couldn't figure the whole thing out.