Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

He and I were eating hotdogs and skylarking on what a good life it would be to follow the horses from track to track around the country as part of a nomadic community of gamblers, when I sensed a commotion at the end of our row. It was the Old Man pushing his way down toward us, not excusing himself or waiting for people to sit back or draw in their feet, but grinding shoe tips and banging knees as he bulled his way through. He was obviously in high spirits. A small red mark on his forehead was the only reminder of the shooting incident a few days earlier, which unaccountably seemed to have disappeared from history.

  “You know what they say,” he gave a significant look at the three of us before wedging his body between Val and Jack. “Horse sense is the thing a horse has that keeps it from betting on people.”

  He whispered something to Val, who looked straight ahead, sitting stoically in the lockup he created, unable to rise and see the horses forming for the next race or follow their progress around the track. She was clenching her fists so tightly that her fingernails dug divots into her palms.

  After the third race, the Old Man stood up and looked around the grandstand. Something up behind us caught his eye, and he bent over Val and snatched her opera glasses off her lap. As he adjusted the focus, his features hardened. I followed his stare and saw in miniature what he saw enlarged—Solomon Geist looking right back through binoculars of his own. The Draco brothers hovered over him one row up and Emile Beaufort sat beside him with a fawning smile on his outlandish face.

  The Old Man stiffened and went into battle mode, dropping the binoculars and practically running down our row and then hustling up the stairs. I asked Val for the glasses and watched as he snarled a few words to Geist and then, his face engorged with rage, stabbed an index finger repeatedly into Beaufort’s chest like a stiletto. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I heard his yell and saw the Sicilian twins move into the aisle to quarantine him. Geist nodded at a nearby security guard, who rushed over to take Big Joe by the elbow and escort him down the stairs and out of the grandstand.

  “What the hell was that all about?” I asked Jack, who had also been watching the spectacle.

  “We probably don’t want to know,” he replied.

  Val disappeared into herself. As we left the track, she told us without elaboration that she would be staying alone at her apartment again that night.

  Jack’s editor in New York called the next morning and asked him to get on the train up to San Francisco and do a puff piece on the formal opening of the United Nations. He was worried about what would happen in his absence and tried to find an excuse not to go. But the editor insisted and Jack gave in, after grousing about the headline that had been decided on in advance: “October 29, 1945—A Date That Will Live in Dignity.”

  When I picked him up at Union Station late the following afternoon, he seemed somewhat rehabilitated after a day off from Val. He had handwritten his story on the train and told me to drive to the Los Angeles Examiner’s office on Broadway and Eleventh so he could go in and charm some secretary into typing the piece for him and then dictating it to New York.

  A half hour later he came back to the car saying, “Mission accomplished.” He told me to slide over so he could drive. “The work day is over. Let’s cruise.”

  We were continuing down Broadway when a tentative drizzle started to smear the dirt on the windshield. The sky darkened and a sudden deluge pelted the car’s hood and overwhelmed the wipers. After a couple of minutes the downpour ended just as suddenly as it began and an intense sun reappeared, causing the streets to steam.

  “Jesus H!” Jack raised a middle finger when the car in front of us braked for no apparent reason and we had to swerve into the oncoming lane to avoid rear-ending it. “The idea of rain in sunny Southern California is too much for these people, even when it’s quickly over.”

  Once we were embedded in traffic again, I noticed that he kept checking the rearview mirror every few seconds.

  “Is the guy you flipped off chasing us?”

  “No, not him, someone else,” he answered slowly.

  I turned, expecting to see Fortunato’s black Buick, but it was a white Chevy ragtop. It stayed with us when Jack stepped on the gas, turned onto Eighth, flashed by the baroque revival Tower Theatre and then climbed up the hill, past clusters of down-and-outers standing in front of seedy residential hotels.

  “This is where one of these deadbeats staggers drunkenly into the street and we hit him and then all the others drag us out of the car and beat us to death,” Jack said grimly.

  I thought he would run the red light at Wilson, but he slammed on the brakes at the last minute to keep from hitting cars entering the intersection from our right and left.

  The Chevy convertible came up alongside us. Jack started to sink down into the seat, but then saw that it was Clive Selkirk.

  “How’s it hanging?” Selkirk asked after reaching over to roll down his passenger-side window

  “To the left and at my knees,” Jack gave the standard naval response.

  Selkirk managed a laugh even though he looked drawn and jumpy.

  “I was at the Examiner getting an ad I tried to put in the paper rejected. I saw you come out and tried to catch up, but you were too quick for me. So I decided to tail you so you’d see what it feels like.”

  “You’re followed?” Jack asked.

  “Constantly,” Selkirk had to yell to be heard over the Zephyr’s twelve idling cylinders. “You still interested in the labor war?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Is it still going on?”

  “Hot and heavy. There are some new developments.”

  “Is one of them that your side is losing?”

  “They think they’ve got me surrounded,” Selkirk gave a big smile that failed to convince, “but they’ve got another think coming.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The people who know what I’m saying before I say it and know where I’m going before I get in the car. They’re on me day and night.”

  “Beaufort,” I said, but Jack didn’t hear me above the traffic noise.

  “We should talk,” he said, extending his hand to brush his fingertips with Selkirk’s.

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Okay. Be careful.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ve still got some cards to play. You should look out for yourself, though. They’ve got you in their viewfinder too.”

  The signal had changed and horns were honking behind us. Selkirk slid back to his steering wheel and took off ahead of us.

  Jack’s question—Who’s “they”?—was left hanging in his exhaust.

  NINETEEN

  I woke earlier than I wanted to the next morning and lay on the sofa for a long time. Seagulls were floating on updrafts outside the bay window, folding their wings at the top of their rise, dropping like dive bombers, then floating up again. I got up to investigate, and saw seven or eight gulls down on the beach harrying the corpse of a flounder-like fish that had washed up during the night. They had drilled a ragged hole in its side and were waddling around it like curious old men. Every now and then, one of them would stop to hammer at the cavity in the fish, coming away with a smear of purple gut on its beak.

  I went outside and shooed them off, toed a hole in the sand, covered the fish for a decent burial, and then took off down the beach. I was alone except for a boy with an empty newspaper delivery bag over his shoulders incongruously smoking a pipe whose pungent latakia smell hit me from fifteen feet away.

  When I got back, Jack was up and bustling, in a hopeful mood because Val had agreed to a lunch date when we dropped her off in Toluca Lake after the races. He had taken a long bath and put on cream-colored slacks, a Hawaiian shirt and blue deck shoes; his hair was shiny with Brylcreem.

  Just as he was about to leave, the phone rang. I watched his features wilt as he listened, said a few imploring words and then despairingly set the receiver in the cradle.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “She
said she has to cancel because she claims Talbert decided on the spur of the moment to shoot some additional exteriors in San Pedro.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  His eyes bored into me. “You know when a woman’s lying. It comes off her like a bad smell. Maybe she has someone else.” Then he added, “Maybe I should find someone too.”

  “Wouldn’t be hard.”

  But then he seemed to deflate: “No, this is not one of those problems you can fuck your way out of.”

  After pretending to read the headlines of the Times for a couple of minutes, he said, “It’s too quiet. Let’s get out of here.”

  We’d driven into Hollywood so often in the past few weeks that the Zephyr seemed to know the way. As we passed Westwood, we saw several zombies and werewolves, one miniature UCLA football player, and a nurse holding the hand of a fat little chef in a toque and starched apron—all of them walking along Sunset.

  “It’s Halloween,” I said.

  “Trick or treat,” Jack shot the kids a grim look.

  About a mile further down Sunset, I asked where we were going.

  “Around,” he said curtly.

  “Around where?”

  “Around to the places Val likes to go.”

  “Maybe she’s actually in San Pedro today like she said.”

  He gave me a “Yeah, right,” look.

  We stopped first at the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was next to a storage lot that Warners had bought from United Artists a few weeks earlier and Val sometimes went there because one of the counter men made her real espresso.

  The cafe wasn’t open yet, so we drove up to Pickwick’s Bookstore. Jack knew that Val browsed there for hours at a time and had charmed the owner, Louis Epstein, into locating copies of novels in Italian by Silone and other of her favorite authors.

  “Needle in a haystack time,” I said when he returned shaking his head after scouring the store.

  “Yeah, this is really stupid,” he agreed. “We might as well go back home and start counting the grains of sand on the beach.”

  We headed back down Sunset, but when we got to Fairfax he turned left on a whim. “Since we’re close, we might as well make a pass through Farmer’s Market. She likes it there. Says it reminds her of the mercatos at home.”

  Normally he would have stopped to give the fruit a squeeze and banter with the vendors, many of them still in overalls after offloading their produce at dawn, but he walked ahead of me without paying attention. Leaving the stalls, we approached the picnic area and saw Val sitting at a table with Temple Rose.

  Val was running a forefinger back and forth over her lower lip. Her mascara had melted and streaked under her eyes, making her look like a forlorn mime. She looked away apprehensively when she saw us.

  Temple tried to cover for her by waving with false gaiety: “Come and have some iced tea with us. We’re sharing a Waldorf salad.”

  Jack sat next to Val, but they seemed to be in different geographies. Temple nervously tried to fill the distance between them by launching into a comic account of how one of her girls had recently spent an evening with a very drunk Dana Andrews that ended with the actor halfway passed out at the intersection of Wilshire and La Brea.

  “Shirley props him up against a lamp post to keep his face from being introduced to the sidewalk and then gets ready to leave. But Andrews suddenly comes to life and calls out to her, ‘Will you wait a minute so I can tell a joke?’ Shirley says okay. It takes him a second to get his mouth working and then he says, ‘So what does it mean when you remember the color of a girl’s eyes after the first date?’ Shirley says, ‘I don’t know, what?’ Then Andrews says, ‘That she’s got small tits.’”

  Temple ended the story with a hopeful look, but Jack didn’t even crack a smile, and I suppressed a laugh out of loyalty to him. We all fell into silence.

  Jack watched Val, waiting for her to say something. Finally he stood up: “Guess we’ll head home.”

  “Temple and I are going shopping,” Val said without looking at him.

  “I guess they cancelled the shoot in San Pedro.”

  She examined her hands as if they were foreign objects. “I guess they did.”

  Val showed up later that afternoon, knocking instead of just coming in, as if not sure she was still welcome. Her eyes were dilated and her skin was flushed; the rapid concussion of her heartbeat agitated the sheerness of her blouse at her neck.

  “Temple tells me about Clifton’s Cafeteria,” she said disjointedly. “You have heard of it? She says it is a very big place and you can choose only the things you like to eat. There is a waterfall on the outside and inside it looks like many different things at once.”

  “Sounds like our kind of place,” I said under my breath, no longer knowing what to expect from her.

  “Can we go there?” She spoke hesitantly, prepared for a rejection.

  “Of course,” Jack said, also prepared for the worst.

  She spent nearly an hour in the bedroom getting ready, but still looked improvised when she finally came out—eyes so heavily made up that they seemed to be dark pits; lipstick bleeding outside her lip lines; no earrings or other ornamentation. She was bundled bizarrely in a trench coat although the evening was not chilly.

  Jack asked her if she was cold.

  “I am dressed the way I feel inside,” she responded enigmatically.

  As I drove to downtown LA, the two of them made the uncomfortably polite conversation of strangers sitting next to each other on a bus.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Jack said, gesturing for me to park on Hill Street.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  He pointed at the boarding area for the Angels Flight funicular, built at the turn of the century to carry the elite between their mansions on the hill and the downtown level below. “They call this the world’s shortest railway.”

  Val became animated as we took a seat in the angled cab of the bright orange car. It lurched upward and she started loudly singing “Funiculì, Funiculà.”

  When Jack shushed her, she was injured. “But this is a song about a funicular,” she said. “When my brother Franco and I are young children and we still live in Naples we sing it when we go up the funicular to Vomero. People sometimes give us coins.”

  We exited on Olive Street and Val hurried ahead, going south past Pershing Square and across Sixth Street. When we caught up with her, she was staring in wonder at Clifton’s façade, a three-story waterfall bordered by neon geysers and jungle foliage.

  During the Depression, Clifton’s had been known as “the Cafeteria of the Golden Rule” because its quixotic founder, Clifford Clinton, required diners to pay only what they could afford for the food they took. He soon opened another cafeteria on Broadway nearby, with an equally whimsical interior. Once he reluctantly started trying to turn a profit, he built a chain that would become a Southern California institution.

  The inside of Clifton’s was like an eccentric’s warehouse. Val was entranced by the dioramas of the tropics, mountains, and deserts; the redwoods reaching up to the ceiling; the collection of statues and busts; the dried plants under bell jars, and taxidermized animals everywhere, including an entire village of prairie dogs listening intently for intruders.

  We took our turkey and roast beef plates to a table near a life-sized sculpture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane near a mural showing Jerusalem in the middle distance. It was a testament to the extravagant eclecticism of the place that it seemed no more incongruous than anything else.

  As Jack and I were eating, Val arranged the salt and pepper shakers, sugar dispenser, napkin holder and her water glass into a defensive perimeter in front of her plate. The tormented spot on her left arm now oozed bloody plasma.

  She stared at the sculpture: “The best thing he said was that death comes like a thief in the night, so we must always be on guard.”

  Her heightened state gave her such control of the moment that it was like
watching a performance.

  “I believe in heaven,” she said, shifting her gaze to Jack. “But I believe in what you will think is a peculiar way. I believe that we are in heaven right now—in this place and this time. Right at this moment. God created this heaven for us with all its evil and all its goodness. It is a rich and complicated place. We meet some people who are angels and others who are demons. The demons are very persistent. It is possible that God allows them too much power. They destroy the hope and joy He creates.”

  She kept talking in this manner, not bothering to make transitions between subjects and not expecting a response, after we’d left the restaurant and were walking back to the Angels Flight. She seemed to be relinquishing her hold on idiomatic English.

  At one point, she put a hand on Jack’s arm to stop him and came so close that their noses almost touched. “I am so afraid for losing you,” she said, and then was off again so quickly that we had to double-step to catch up.

  On the other side of Olive we saw a couple of bums yelling at each other in an escalating drunken argument. Both had watch caps pulled down over their heads and were dressed in so many layers of torn clothing that they looked like mummies. Soon they were taking slow-motion swings at each other.

  “Friday night fights,” Jack laughed.

  Val had stopped, and he took her arm to keep her walking. But she shook him off and stood there, focused on the combat. We all became aware that the smaller of the two bums was a woman.

  At first it was like a pillow fight with both of them throwing soft roundhouse punches that either didn’t land or didn’t hurt. But then the man finally struck the woman with a hard right cross that made a thocking sound on her jaw and sent her down so hard that she skittered along the sidewalk on her backside.

  Val bolted across the street, ignoring an oncoming car that had to swerve wildly to keep from hitting her. She aimed herself at the male bum like a defensive back, knocking him down and falling on top, then slapping at his head and face impotently with both hands.

  “You cannot do this! There is no justice in this!”