Suspects

by David Thomson

  Candy came around and Skip slugged her and felt her up while she was out. But he hated touching broads, so he hit her some more. And then Joey got into it, and wasted Moe, the tie lady, just to show he was serious. In the end, Skip played it out fine. He got off for handing back the photos. The FBI snatched the Reds and Skip got Candy to pour his beers. But she went all gushy for love on him. So he sent her out to work—hostess in a restaurant (so the slut could eat)—and then the second week he lifted her wages while they was lovey-dovey. And that taught her.

  1954, beginning of the end, Skip McCoy arrested on the Seventh Avenue line. Twenty years for Skip. He laughs; this kid won’t break. Up in Sing Sing his mind started to go. That’s what they say—can’t see Skip is out-thinking them. They let him out in ’69. Skip still acting. He was simple by then, talking to himself. Losing his touch too, hands shaky. Hang in there, Skip! Died 1971, pneumonia, sleeping out. Never complained, though, not Skip. Happy thinking of the fine work he’d done. Champion.

  This trashy monologue creeps up on me, just from thinking of Skip’s snicker. I have been able to talk like movie people after one look at a picture. But I have had so little to say for myself. Even now I might slip upstairs to Mary Frances and be as gruff and as loved as Tracy in Adam’s Rib. But my sincerity went to the movies, leaving a bereft mimic behind.

  CORA PAPADAKIS

  Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946,

  directed by Tay Garnett; and Jessica Lange, 1981,

  directed by Bob Rafelson

  By the time she was fourteen, there wasn’t a man didn’t notice her. And almost before they knew it, or felt the new pressure in the air around them, she knew they were looking at her. Out in the street, she recognized the way they dawdled and maneuvered to get a clear view of her. She’d be headed for the store, and two guys half as far from it would suddenly see a butterfly on the ground, or something that they had to study, and she’d have to walk on past them with both of them crouched down admiring the butterfly and just happening to look up as she came by so they could imagine the airy glow under her dress. Cora put on an extra sway to make her skirts move.

  This was in Des Moines, Iowa, where she was born Cora Smith in 1913. Her mother was a cook at a hotel, and her father was a farm laborer. He was a big, handsome man, as dark as Cora but more tanned from being out in the sun so much. He was a quiet, resolute man until he understood how other men were studying Cora. Then he got angry and uneasy, and he sneered at his wife, who hadn’t let him sleep with her since the birth of Cora. She had been horrified by lovemaking and she turned all her attention to cooking for people she never met or knew. She grew fat, less from eating than from the idea of food and its steady company. Her husband went off every day on foot with a bottle of lemonade and a loaf of bread. But after Cora came of age he took wine instead, and he came home flushed and sour, too tired to play horseshoes.

  For Cora, her father felt like other men, except that he looked at her with bitterness. Several times he’d blunder in on her in the bathroom, or while she was putting on her stockings, and he’d scowl as if it had been her fault. So she got casual. She let him see her dressing a few times and she left her clothes around the house. The kindliness in her father had vanished. He was a stranger to her, but he seemed to hate her for causing the new distance.

  Cora was fifteen when she went all the way. She was itching to find out. There were boys in school who had felt her all over while they were kissing, and some who’d had their hands in her and even for a second or two their things. But she knew they were ignorant. She wanted someone older who could take all the worry away and teach her. There was a stockman on one of the farms, one where her father worked sometimes, a big man with hands as rough as bark. He’d watched her for a year, until one summer evening she went into a barn with him and got it all over with. He was a demon lover and she was like a soft pillow for him, or like an empty barrel tossed in the air on a bull’s horns. Cora got to be an expert that first time. She came five times before supper, every way he worked on her. She was soaked and battered and only wanted more.

  But the stockman got bored after that. She would try to cross his path, but he was never there; and once she saw him start a conversation with someone just to avoid meeting her. Cora couldn’t understand his caution. She’d have done it on Euclid Avenue at Sunday lunchtime if he’d wanted to. Yet he didn’t, so she hunted for others and got the worst reputation in the school. All this while, her father’s dark face took on a violent tinge, like smoke. Cora told him, “You’re sickening for something. Ought to see a doctor.”

  Then, in 1930, she entered a beauty contest for all the high schools in Iowa. Which she won, with Cora herself the only one surprised or pleased at that. The prize was a trip on the Chief to Hollywood. When she got there, there were photographers to take her picture, and they all whistled at her, which made her feel happy. She was given a screen test, and apparently the studio people liked her looks. But she had to say some lines and it felt peculiar saying these emotional things without feeling them. So they told her no use. She could have gone back home, she had the ticket. But she stayed and she got a job as a waitress in a hash house near the railroad station.

  It was a lousy job. The tips were small, and the men who came in thought they could wipe their hands on her. Some of them were good-looking, and she’d go with them to what they called parties but turned out to be her with two or three of them in a room with a lot of beer. Then one day a big guy came in, tanned like her father, and he told another guy off for feeling Cora’s leg.

  “You’re a gentleman,” she told him when she took his order.

  “Golly,” was all he said, big eyes stupid over her.

  So he asked her to marry him. Said he had a diner and a filling station, the Twin Oaks Tavern. He needed help there, and he surely liked her. His name was Nick Papadakis: he was Greek and his hair was like crude oil, heavy and shiny. What decided her was when he said his place was in the country, a long way away, in the hills. She missed the country, so she said, sure, she’d marry him, but she didn’t get off till six.

  At the Twin Oaks Tavern, she cooked, she served and she pumped gas when he was away. There was just him and the cat, and the cat was a better lover. Nick was the clumsiest man she’d ever met, full of shame and respect for his own size and her “tenderness.” Also people thought he was Mexican, and just because she had black hair they took it for granted she was too. She hadn’t gotten married to be a Mex.

  Then one day this bum came by, Frank Chambers, and he conned a meal out of Nick, and then as a topper Nick gives him a job helping out, mechanic and so on, which Frank says he’s expert at. That made Cora laugh, but when she saw Frank noticing her she felt glad he was staying and she got wet watching his mean black eyes. A few days later, they made it and it was the best yet. He was like an animal and he kept up with her good. He’d known what to do from the look in her eyes. Cora never liked to talk while she was doing it.

  He was all for them leaving, but Cora said what about the three years she’d put in? She said what was the point of going if it was only to another hash house? What then? he said. She never had to spell it out. He knew from her not having the words, and he was kissing her breasts all the time, working out how they’d kill Nick.

  Which they did, in a fake car accident. Only Frank had cracked the Greek’s skull first and they drove the car over a cliff. Then Frank messed her up so she’d look hurt too. Rip me, she told him. So he tore open her blouse from the throat to her stomach, and he slugged her in the face. She went down and looked at him and he jumped on her and fucked her once before the alarm. It was all neat, but the car went too far down the cliff, and with Frank pushing it he went too so Cora thought maybe he was dead.

  In the hospital, he signed a confession to this eagle lawyer, Katz, who then proceeded to get Cora off but wanted half the insurance because of the confession. What an operation. Just a look at them both and he’d known. Cora wouldn’t
have minded making it with Katz. And she felt sick that Frank had betrayed her at the first pressure.

  So they ran the tavern for a while, and business was good because people came by to get a look at the couple from the papers. But Frank stayed and he was good for her still. Then she got the telegram saying her mother was sick, so she went back to Des Moines and watched her mother die, with her father watching both of them. After she died, he told Cora how lonely he was going to be, and she said sure, she knew, and he cried and she had to comfort him, and then just the once they were in bed and he was amazing. She told him she was proud of him, and he should get remarried quick.

  Then Cora went back to California, and there was Frank to meet her, wide-eyed about her mother dying. She found out he’d been with a woman in a circus while she was away, and he was so miserable about it she wanted to laugh. It made her think he really loved her, and so they got married. There were a few weeks when it was fine, and she told him she was pregnant and he was chipper as a kid. They went to a beach up by Topanga, and it was all deserted. They swam and she thought, So, this is love—okay. But she strained herself: she could feel the load in her stomach shift. Frank got her in to shore, and carried her up the sand to the car. And he started to drive to Santa Monica on the coast road with all the curves and he was so worried that he never saw the truck coming.

  FRANK CHAMBERS

  John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946,

  directed by Tay Garnett; and Jack Nicholson, 1981,

  directed by Bob Rafelson

  At Slapout, in Oklahoma, where the two panhandles bang together in the wind and sun, in 1911, the birth of Frank Chambers. (How many different sentences are there to set down the facts of beginning?) He was illegitimate. His mother, Eileen, nineteen when he was born, worked in a hardware store, and lived in an upstairs room. A lot of men, Slapout people and some passing through, got to go up Eileen’s stairs, so Frank never bothered to wonder who his father was. But when he was a boy there were jokes that maybe it had been a nigger, which cut him hard because he didn’t want it said his mother would have gone with a black.

  His mother was a wild-eyed woman. She didn’t seem to know if there was a smudge on her face or a rip in her dress. And if she discovered it, she had a high, what-the-hell laugh that troubled a lot of people. She told Frank she didn’t know where she’d come from. When she was only a little girl, her parents had taken her to Oklahoma City and she’d gotten lost, as simple as that, and never found them. Nor they her. So she’d been put in an orphanage till she was sixteen, and all she’d known for sure was her name.

  As Frank grew up, his mother made a separate part of the room for him out of packing cases, so she could have company at night. Frank’s bedroom was dark and dry-smelling, and he kept a candle there to light when the wind was howling outside. His mother never treated him like a child. She would talk to him just as she did anyone else—offhandedly, laughing for no apparent reason, and quarrelsome with just the same suddenness. It made Frank alert, being with her. He never knew when she might whip her hand out and slap him, or draw him against her warm, shaking body. People in Slapout laughed at her, and they made out she was weird in the head.

  Once, when Frank was ten, he woke up in the middle of the night. There was burning in the packing-case wall. He cried out for his mother and got out of bed. The fire was creeping across the floor of the large room, like honey spreading. His mother was nowhere. He ran down the stairs out on the street, shouting for help. But it was late, and the wind had gotten up. The hardware store was gutted before the firemen came. There was old wood in the building, and a supply of kerosene in the basement.

  Frank watched the firemen, waiting for his mother. She never came, so the Moodys, the people who owned the store, took him to their place. Next day, it seemed Eileen had been out at a ranch all night. Frank couldn’t understand how the town reckoned she had started the fire. Just the same, she was sent to the asylum in Norman, and Frank was looked after by the Moodys, who built a new store. Twice a year they took him to see his mother, but the hospital was no good. In a year she didn’t know Frank, and she was scratching all the time.

  He stayed in Slapout till he was seventeen and all the Moodys saw was that he should work in the store all his life. So he went down into Texas, to Pampa, and for a year he hung out with a kid, Woody Guthrie. Frank played washboard while Woody sang and played guitar. They made a little money, and they knew some girls. But Frank got into fights with them. He never knew how, but all at once he’d punch at the woman and she’d look at him like he was a monster.

  So he took to the road in 1929 and became a regular bum. He passed through Bedford Falls in ’thirty-one and I gave him work painting the office. It was badly done; his lunch breaks got longer; and he didn’t put sheets down, so he ruined the floors with drops of paint. I had to talk to him, but he blamed the poor paint and the customers being in and out. That downright angered me and I told him, “Just remember, fellow, I never needed this painting done.”

  “Never needed it?”

  “Not really.”

  “I ain’t working for no idiot, then.” And he threw the brush on my desk.

  He hitched to Los Angeles and started to ride up and down the coast on freights. He would stop off, do a few days’ work, steal, get into the small jails on vagrancy charges, fight the rail police, pick fruit. He got hard and mean, hating the straight life of homes and jobs. He had a slingshot, and he liked to roam at night, find a window lit up, with a family inside, like an advertisement, and put a stone through the window.

  In 1933, he tried Mexico; he’d heard it was easier there. But it was hot, the food sickened him, and he never trusted Mexicans. He came back and hustled tourists in Los Robles. Then he got on a hay truck and rode as far as Twin Oaks before they threw him off.

  There was a diner and Frank tried the old free-lunch scam—some guy in a car who was to meet him and pay for the meal. But the dumb Greek served him enchiladas and swallowed the check. The guy even offered him a job, and Frank was trying not to laugh when he saw the woman in the kitchen. He wanted to work her face over then and there.

  Cora liked it that way. The Greek husband did nothing for her. The first time, Frank bit her lip and tasted blood like thick sweat. She was a treat, and he got tired for the first time in his life humping her. Frank wanted the Greek to notice and fight him; he wanted to split his stupid skull. So he didn’t need pushing when Cora walked around the idea.

  “I don’t care if I fry for it,” Frank told himself. “It’ll make trouble for them.” Them meant that straight world in painted houses. He ended up in the death house, not for putting the wrench through the Greek’s skull, but for killing Cora, faking a crash so she went through the screen and her blood fell on the hood like she was taking a leak. There was a priest in the prison, and Frank said for sure he hadn’t done it. Then Frank talked to another prisoner, who said it was his subconscious. There were two people in him. It made Frank shiver to think about that. Cora was the only one he’d ever liked as much as he wanted to rip into her.

  JIMMY DOYLE

  Robert De Niro in New York, New York, 1977,

  directed by Martin Scorsese

  “What sort of thing is that then?” asked Jimmy Doyle. He was eleven, but he had that Irish edge in the way he talked, like a chipped curbstone, that was never young.

  “That’s a saxophone,” said Martin Dougherty. “Tenor saxophone. You seen Billy today?”

  Jimmy whistled in perplexity, “Saxo—? What kinda name’s that? Billy Phelan?”

  “That’s the one. Named after Adolphe Sax. He invented it.”

  “Pretty thing.”

  “It has a glorious tone, too. Billy playing tonight?”

  “I reckon. So … do you use it?”

  “The saxophone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want it, Jimmy?”

  “I might. I might.”

  That’s how Jimmy Doyle got his first s
axophone. He was born in Albany in 1920, and this was in 1931, the first year Billy Phelan got a name for himself in Louie’s poolhall. Jimmy used to hang around Billy. He liked the snappy way he dressed and the way he got with the cue in his hands—like its long hard line was his gaze and his poking the balls this way and that was sorting out the world. Jimmy loved to sit on a high stool outside the light listening to the click of the balls: it was like tough talk jazzing away while pages of print bored the world.

  Jimmy wasn’t reading. It was a wonder, his teachers said, when he talked so well and when he could knock out any tune on a piano, the way some one-finger typists can race along. But Jimmy was afraid of the silence in reading, and he couldn’t see how the shapes on paper stood for things, not when any shout or tune made everyone look up, as if Billy’d just walked in for a match.

  After a couple of months with the saxophone, Martin Dougherty heard Jimmy playing. He said, “You should take lessons, Jim. You’re not bad.”

  “Lessons!” scoffed Jimmy. “I worked it out.”

  That was that. For better or worse, Jimmy puzzled out a way himself, or he gave up on a thing. He couldn’t sit still while anyone told him something for his own good. He learned to play well, but who knows if he might not have been better if he’d listened to Martin Dougherty?

  “Won’t be told,” said Martin.

  “Cold little fellow,” said Billy Phelan. “Watches me play, but never says a word.”

  “Because you’re better than he is,” said Martin.

  “Has a great respect for excellence, our Jim.”

  “Cut your throat if he could get it off you.”

  So Jimmy grew up proud, lonely and mean-tempered, a lean stick of a young man, hands full of the saxophone, like a priest holding a trollop—that’s what Martin said once, and Jimmy flashed him that shark’s grin, all teeth and hunger. But he got a job playing in a place on Clinton Avenue, in 1938, and they only threw him out because he played so hectic.