“Don’t forget that rich yellow cream,” he reminds me. “A peach ain’t a peach without it has some cream.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Yes you will!” he shouts after me as I go out the door. “Yes you will!”
13
The Englishman’s boy sat with his rifle cradled across his knees, looking up at the night sky. It was a sight to ponder, those stars. They recalled to him planting time, trudging his daddy’s fields, tossing oats from the sack at his belt, the pale seed fanning and speckling the dark loam like the stars fanning and speckling the black nap of the sky. He gaped up at the seed of heaven, the wash of the Milky Way, the single stars winking the hard bitter fire of flint and steel; a crick stitched in his neck. The whole sky turning lazily in his skull, a slow reeling wheel of constellations, of shaking bands and belts of pulsing fire, of sparkly, pricking light.
Fire day and night, the searing flare of midday sun, the brilliant salty light of midnight stars, fire smouldering its way into him through his eyes, scorching him clean, empty. A clean country this, he admired the smell of it, nothing like the odour of the pigsty, the chicken run, the reek of corn souring in the bin, the stench of a hated brother’s shit greeting him when he jerked open the privy door of a morning back home. He was shut of all that now.
Here the scent of sage rose hot and aromatic under the pestle of a pounding sun, the fierce wind bearing hints of cured grass, of desiccated, medicinal-smelling earth. If a man opened his tobacco pouch ten yards off, the Englishman’s boy’s nose wrinkled, everything carried sharp on the cleanly air. Even buffalo chips burned with a tang he favoured over the gassy smell of coal.
But he had no fire now. Hardwick did not allow it. When the shadows surrounding the herd of horses began to play on his nerves and on his eyes, to shake and shudder, he lifted his gaze to the sky. When the sky began to move, to stir and swirl, he dropped it to the screen of darkness.
A fire would have been a comfort to look at.
Maybe it was just the Scotchman’s talk that had him spooked. He had begun to talk strange after he shot Hardwick’s bull buffalo. The Scotchman said this place was like the land of the old Bible Jews. Heat and sun, wind and emptiness, no nooks and crannies to hide a poor, creeping man. A clear view for the Almighty.
Most likely Scotty was afraid, knew he’d made a mistake trifling with Hardwick’s pleasure. When folks went scared, or off their heads, they’d been known to pile on the Bible talk. The Scotchman seemed to be a bit of both. All afternoon he rambled on about the wilderness, his words quick and breathy, forty days and forty nights, whispering preachments of a sledgehammer sun and anvil earth, sinner stretched suffering between the two, beaten and beaten until he broke and shattered like cold iron, or glowed red-hot with vision.
That was the way of the Bible Jews, the Scotchman said, and the red savages. Walk out into loneliness, let the wind tear at you, your tongue parch in your mouth, your belly squeeze around emptiness, until God came calling. The wild God of dreams and visions. “Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams,” he preachified. Prophecies hatched by the sun, promised in the Bible.
Voice dropping even lower, he said he had something to tell the Englishman’s boy, tell him because the boy hadn’t joined the Devil’s Sabbath either, hadn’t drank the foul cup of blood, eaten of the uncooked flesh. The Scotchman knew them for what they were, oh yes he did, the unholy ten. Staring at the smudgy red on their lips and chins he had seen them slowly change before his very eyes, their clothes rot and fall away, revealing raddled, poxy old women, Death’s bright lip rouge smeared on their sucking mouths. Rubbing the dripping meat back and forth between their legs, groaning, then lifting it to their grinning mouths, the communion bread of Satan, covered in a crawling blue green mould of flies. Feeding the evil heart through the evil mouth.
It made the Englishman’s boy cold to think of the look on the Scotchman’s face when he said that. It seemed he was changing, too, right before his very eyes. The Englishman’s boy hankered mightily after a fire. It was three hours to morning and the night’s chill was hammering cold steel nails into the marrow of his bones.
He wouldn’t have pulled this watch if Hardwick hadn’t seen him palavering with the Scotchman. Hardwick, savage as a meat-axe all day, nothing going to his satisfaction, needed to rake somebody. Vogle had failed to raise horse tracks, which meant the thieves hadn’t swung back to rendezvous as Tom had banked they would.
Tomorrow was the Milk River, the Medicine Line; beyond it, the English Queen’s country, no law, and a mighty congregation of Indians. If they didn’t find trace of the horses before the Milk, Hardwick meant to cross the river into Canada and ride north to the Cypress Hills. There was a plentiful crop of whisky posts in the hills, and for that reason the boys welcomed this plan like news of Christmas.
News of whisky didn’t set well with the Englishman’s boy. Bad luck and whisky made an evil potion. Killing that white horse was a bad-luck deed. He’d have cut and run, except he didn’t know where the hell to run to. Behind him in Benton was a stabbed publican, to the west of him a hornet’s nest of Blackfoot. He didn’t want to bump up against neither.
His eyes were telling lies again, the darkness shaping and changing. Out there in the belly of the night, the old blind white horse and whatever sat its back were stirring, the shadows parting and closing convulsively in the effort to give birth to this presence, to push this dead-white and terrifying thing, inch by inch, into his mind.
This ain’t no vision, he told himself, jerking his eyes up at the stars. Get yonder, second sight. Shake loose of me. I don’t hanker to be no Jew prophet. Hear me?
14
Shorty McAdoo has been dragging his feet, stonewalling for three days. Every night Fitz phones and shouts curses at me when I tell him I’ve got nothing usable yet. I try to get through to Chance on my own, to explain the situation, but can’t. Now I come home and find this note shoved under my apartment door.
Dearest Little Truth Seeker,
Rachel Gold demands you dance attendance upon her tonight. I shall collect you by taxi at eight o’clock. Dress: tuxedo and shoes. Shine the shoes. Since it is doubtful you own a flannel shoe-cloth, have recourse to the same dirty underwear with which it is rumoured you dry cocktail glasses. Apply polish, rub briskly. To shoes, not cocktail glasses. Comb your hair. Shave.
None of this is negotiable.
Yours,
Rachel
I am going to be questioned about Chance. There is no escaping Rachel Gold’s voracious curiosity. “Describe Mr. Chance using four and only four adjectives.” A parlour game of her invention. Four won’t cover the entire territory, she likes to say, but at least they tell you what you really think about someone. I try it now, while I dress. The four I come up with are obsessive, mystical, eccentric, ruthless. Only one of these adjectives really surprises me. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized I believed Chance was ruthless. The word doesn’t seem to fit a man so shy, but it won’t be dismissed either. Ruthless sticks.
These four adjectives lead me to the noun artist. Maybe Chance is an artist. Three of these characteristics – obsession, eccentricity, ruthlessness – earmark two of Hollywood’s greatest artists, Erich von Stroheim and D.W. Griffith. They are also slowly destroying them. Maybe Chance has the last two ingredients necessary to complete the great artist – mysticism and money.
By now I’m dressed in my shiny tux and my shiny shoes and it’s only seven-thirty. I decide to wait outside. It is a warm evening, the street mostly quiet because it is the supper hour. A few cars pass and a few would-be actresses slink by me on the sidewalk, their hipbones thrust out in the mannequin walk which is à la mode. You can imagine them carrying four-foot-long cigarette holders. Mine is a low-end show-biz neighbourhood of unsuccessful vaudevillians, of young men with sleek hair and pencil-thin moustaches, of dancers who undulate their bellies as extras in Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars, of violin players who s
aw background music to assist actors and actresses in summoning up the appropriate emotions for scenes of clamorous passion. Late at night my neighbourhood is a scene of strange comings and goings, of cars backfiring in the street at three a.m., of drunken cursing, of bottles breaking on the pavement, of women screaming.
A cab swings to the curb. I open the back door and slide in beside Rachel Gold. “How nice it is to be reunited with an old friend after such a very, very long time,” she says.
“Three weeks.”
She takes a compact out and starts working on herself, trying to obliterate the faint mist of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Only three weeks? My but how the time flies when one of us is having a good time.”
“Who says I’m having a good time?”
“You always had a good time working for me, didn’t you?”
Her skin is luminous ivory, her eyes almond-shaped, large, very green. The punch of these eyes had been diminished in black and white, but they still managed to win her several small parts in pictures before she decided to write movies rather than act in them. Tonight she wears a silk flapper dress striped in three varieties of green which causes the exact shade of her eyes to alter in sympathy every time she moves.
“Where to, lady?” the cabbie wants to know.
“Cocoanut Grove.”
“Oh, shit.” I put my head in my hands.
“Don’t be like that, Harry. We need to have a serious talk.” She lays her hand on my knee to demonstrate she means it. She shouldn’t do that.
“Right, pondering a stuffed monkey’s ass will turn anybody serious.” I hate the Cocoanut Grove. I hate the famous décor. When maitre d’ Jimmy Manos heard the rumour from Rudy Valentino that the studio was getting ready to pitch the artificial palms used during shooting of The Sheik, Manos snapped them up for his new nightclub. He added a further charming touch – stuffed monkeys that can be run up and down the palms on a string. The worst is when Manos invites male club-goers to “date” the monkeys. The drunken scramble for apes often leads to brawls. The Grove is famous for its punch-ups. The tradition began on opening night two years ago when Jimmy Manos personally cold-cocked two stars; sometimes the personnel of competing studios fight pitched battles on the dance floor.
I’ve only been there a couple of times with Rachel – I couldn’t get past the door on my own – but Jimmy Manos thinks Rachel looks splendid, exotic against the Moorish décor. Rachel is good-looking enough to get in even on a Tuesday night, which is the night to be seen at the Cocoanut Grove, the night when Pickford and Fairbanks, Bebe Daniels, Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Barbara La Marr, Chaplin, Ben Lyon, and Nita Naldi come out in force to judge the Charleston contests and provide wall-to-wall glamour.
But this is a Thursday, so there shouldn’t be too much difficulty in running me by the doorman. The cab pulls up to the Ambassador Hotel and Rachel sashays us into the Grove, gamine face powdered bedsheet white, black bobbed hair vibrating with energy, dynamo idling, the famous Gold electricity just a hum, occasional crackle, spark, as her hips twitch their way through the tables guided by Jimmy himself. Rachel prepared to run full throttle, sending high-voltage bursts clear through the scalp, that blue-black hair standing on end, screaming, Look out! Gold coming through!
Heads turn everywhere. She is beautiful.
The table is not the best – the Grove is full for a Thursday – but it’s private. Rachel pries open her purse and produces two flasks, one of martinis, one of brandy. “Do the honours, dear,” she says, and I pour drinks underneath the table. We stare out at the dance floor, all the pretty little things of both sexes cavorting like mad to dance music dominated by horns. Rachel tosses one leg over the other in a flash of silk stocking and starts it pumping up and down like the handle of a car jack. A hand flies up and grabs a hank of hair which she twists, tugs, tortures – a sure and deadly sign she has something she wants to get off her mind.
“What do you have to talk to me about, Rachel?”
She doesn’t take her eyes off the dancers. “Yesterday, one of the guys from payroll calls Donner to verify whether the cheque he’s cutting you is correct. It’s a big jump – from seventy-five dollars a week to a hundred and fifty dollars. He wants to know whether Donner authorized it. Donner says no, there must be some screw-up. An hour later payroll calls and says, “Sorry to have bothered you. The raise came from upstairs.” She unclutches the handful of hair, turns to me, takes a drink. “It started people in the writing department talking, Harry.”
“Talking about what?”
“They wonder how a title-writer gets his salary doubled. They ask themselves, What’s all that money for?”
“Maybe it’s none of their business what it’s for. Did you tell them that?”
“Some people say it’s snitch money.” She says this in a level voice, waits for an answer.
“Snitch money for what?”
“Some of the boys think you might be giving the names of anybody who talks union talk.” Rachel’s politics are vague, but they’re definitely what people call progressive.
“You’re the only person at Best Chance I’ve ever heard advocate a union. Do you think I sold you out?”
She leans across the table; the white face blazes in the candlelight. “No, I don’t, Harry. But I’m not the one who needs convincing. A lot of people find what’s going on with you strange. They’d like an explanation for it. Maybe you owe me an explanation because I’m your friend.”
“Maybe a friend ought to change her tone if she’s a friend. It sounds prosecutorial to me.”
“Gibson is the one with the theory that you’re selling out the union sympathizers. He says Fitz is always sniffing around about unions.”
“Gibson is a burned-out refugee from the old kerosene circuit -he’s got melodrama on the brain. I’ve got a job on a picture, nothing more.”
“I told them that. But all the stuff that’s happened in the last two or three years makes people very nervous. Hays. The morals clauses in contracts. Private dicks running all over Hollywood bribing housemaids, peeking in windows, reading mail for the studio bosses. The bosses have made up their minds about one thing – there aren’t going to be any more scandals. Arbuckle was just the tip of the iceberg. William Desmond Taylor gets murdered and half of Hollywood is suspected, big stars like Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand. Then the newspapers report Normand has a two-thousand-dollar-a-week cocaine habit. Zelda Crosby commits suicide. Dorothy Davenport has heroin-addict hubby Wally Reid locked up in the loonie bin and he dies in a padded cell. One disaster after another. Like Queen Victoria, the Great American Public is not amused; in Des Moines and Poughkeepsie they whisper Sodom and Gomorrah. Panic spreads among movie executives, they wring their hands, they sweat bullets. Does it bear thinking about? Your future, this beautiful industry which you built with your own two hands, this golden goose should be cooked by such irresponsible people? By these schmucks, these schickers, these pishers?” Rachel is rolling now, her hands are waving, her foot is going up and down so fast it’s become a tic. “Somebody save us! the moguls cry. We need a knight in shining armour! Find us a sanctimonious, two-faced little prick with a reputation pure as the driven snow! Enter Willie-Puller Hays, the man in charge of President Harding’s election campaign, former member of his illustrious cabinet, a shyster with his foot in the Washington door, a one-time legislator who can reassure men of influence, probity, and judgement there’s no need for government censorship – Let Willie pull that wire. And how well he does! Remember his famous statement that the potential of the movies for moral and educational influence is boundless, and it is our sacred duty to America’s youth to work in concert with their teachers and clergymen to make a wholesome impression on their minds?” Rachel sticks a forefinger in her mouth and mimes puking. “And the studio heads, Zukor and Loew and Fox and Goldwyn and Warner, they all nod their heads in grave unanimity. ‘That is so,’ they say. ‘Let us tenderly mould the minds of America’s
youth so that they spend their nickels on our pictures. But let us not lead them astray. If we must reveal to them the mysteries of the female body such as – tits - let Cecil B. DeMille be the man to do it, tastefully, in an uplifting religious picture such as The Ten Commandments. Tit-shaking in godless Egypt, that’s the ticket. Tit-shimmying, belly-dancing, and butt-waggling raised to a level both educational and moral. Educational in the sense that we can show how people who had the misfortune not to be Americans once lived in utter tit-shaking misery. Moral in that we can show how God is inclined to punish tit-shakers as ruthlessly as Will Hays himself. This is the message we must impart to America’s youth! No tit-shaking! No tit-ogling! Unless in a good cause! Such as the moral and educational one in which we are ourselves engaged to assist America’s clergy and teachers!’ ”
A waiter has arrived to take our order. He discreetly hovers, overawed by her vehemence. I signal to Rachel we have company. She hasn’t looked at the menu but knows what she wants. What we both want. “Two steaks. Rare. Lots of fried mushrooms. Asparagus.”
The waiter flees. Rachel resumes, calmer, quieter. “Hays is making everybody gun-shy. Right now the studios use private detectives to dig up possible scandal, but it’s only a short step before we’ll be squealing on one another. The Hearst papers may howl about the Red terror in Russia, but it won’t be long before the Hollywood terror will teach the Bolsheviks a lesson or two. Maybe the boys in the office think you’re informing on their private life to Chance.”
I lean back in my chair. “I’m not.” I wait to let the statement sink in. “Besides, Chance hates Will Hays as much as any of us.”
“This I believe,” says Rachel. “A studio head who hates Mr. Hays. Whom they own lock, stock, and barrel. Who is their paid policeman. Where did you get this unimpeachable information from? Who’s your source? Mildred in wardrobe?”
The Englishman’s Boy Page 14
