The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  From this day forward, Claudio says, I believe that we should see films only in Santa Monica.

  He’s naked now, candlelit from below, standing tiptoe in the backroom of the shop on Horizon. Stanley has strung a length of twine between two wallmounts with a midshipman’s hitch; Claudio is draping his soaked clothes over it. Stanley leans in a corner, peevish and aroused, wrapped in his father’s Army blanket: his cock chafes against the rough fabric. Don’t let those jokers rattle your cage, he says. Today was just bad luck. Back in the neighborhood, that’s what we always did in bad weather—we saw bad movies. I should’ve figured those punks would be hanging around the Fox.

  They will give us more trouble.

  I don’t think so. We made ’em mad the other day, but we made ’em look pretty silly, too. If we steer clear, they’ll let us alone.

  How will we do your con? How will we get money?

  Money? Stanley laughs and shakes his head, like he’s talking to a child. Money’s the biggest con of all, chum. It’s only good for making more money. Anything you can pay for, you can steal.

  Claudio gives him a skeptical look, wipes his damp palms across his hollow stomach.

  What’s the matter? Stanley says. If you don’t believe me, just name something. Anything you want, I’ll be back here with it in less than an hour. I’ll get you two of ’em. Go on and try me.

  You will be caught.

  I ain’t gonna get caught. C’mon, what do you want? A watch? A fancy watch? I’ll get us a couple of fancy watches. A matching pair.

  You should not even go outdoors in the daylight. You need your hair to be cut. You look like a criminal.

  Like hell I do, Stanley says. I look like an honest American boy. He pats his matted curls with an involuntary hand.

  You look like a monkey. A dirty American monkey.

  Claudio grins slyly, steps forward. He tugs a handful of Stanley’s hair; the blanket slips. Stanley flails at Claudio’s arm, shoves him away, pulls him back in, wriggling.

  It’s another two days before the rain blows through, by which time Stanley has grown stir-crazy, desperate to wander. He walks Claudio to the traffic circle through the cool morning air, sharing a stolen breakfast of Twinkies and oranges. The bus to Santa Monica pulls up as they arrive; Claudio shoves what’s left of his fruit into Stanley’s sticky fingers and runs ahead. He turns and smiles once he’s crossed Main, and Stanley smiles back. The fleeting dialogue of their faces across the busy street conveys many things, trust not foremost among them. Claudio vanishes behind the coach, reappears in shadow through its windows, settles into a seat. Stanley watches the kid’s sharp-nosed profile—eclipsed by the irregular beat of passengers in the aisle, cars on the street—until the bus rolls away.

  He walks back to the oceanfront and crosses the boardwalk to the beach, swallowing the last of the luminous orange wedges, sucking his fingertips clean. He breaks the rind into bits and pitches it to a group of seagulls running in the swash; the gulls take the pieces, fly with them, and drop them into the waves, where other gulls swoop at them in turn. Aerated, the ocean is sky-blue, opaque, dotted with pulses of silver. A row of white surf breaks two hundred feet out, cracking like a heavy whip, hollowing a brief cavern in the foam. Its dyspeptic growl echoes down the waterfront.

  Stanley wipes his mouth and smells the citrus oil on his hands, thinking of the winter harvest in Riverside. That first week of work he probably ate his weight in fruit: sweet clementines, brilliant valencias, navel oranges bigger than bocce balls. Last month, after he and Claudio snuck away from the groves and hitched a ride into Los Angeles from a Fuller Brush man, they both swore they’d never touch citrus again. Now they find themselves craving it.

  Stanley met Claudio on a mixed picking crew. He didn’t like him much at first. The kid seemed too smooth for harvest work, too cagey, no more born to it than Stanley was himself. Stanley made him out to be on the run from trouble, or maybe just slumming: a prodigal outcast from some mansion on some hill. He also figured Claudio for a sandbagger, feigning ineptitude to duck the worst work, certain his job was secure since the crew boss spoke no Spanish and needed him to translate. They ignored each other at first. But the whites on the crew were all older than Stanley, closemouthed, and the Mexicans seemed to steer clear of Claudio. Eventually the two began to talk.

  Stanley never asked questions, so Claudio’s story came out slowly, in no special order. The youngest of thirteen by two mothers, he’d grown up comfortable and invisible in a big house outside Hermosillo. His father was a famous general—he’d fought Pancho Villa at Calaya, the Cristeros in Jalisco—and his brothers left home to become lawyers, bankers, statesmen. Claudio spent his days in the cinema in town, learning English from Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, raising his small hands to hide the subtitles. He grew older, made quiet plans to travel north. Claudio told Stanley these stories as they worked, whispered them at night in the bunkhouse, and later, when they slipped into the dark groves to plot escape under moon-silvered citrus leaves, Stanley lay still and watched Claudio’s lips move until he no longer understood anything at all.

  He likes Claudio a lot. He’s not sick of having him around. At idle times on his long cross-country drift he’s often wished he had somebody to share his adventures—somebody who’d listen to him, who’d believe the stories he tells himself about himself—and then this oddball Mexican kid came along and seemed to fit the bill. And it’s been great, having a partner. It’s made things possible that otherwise wouldn’t be.

  But there are also things that Stanley wants to do alone.

  When the rind is gone and the gulls are scattered, Stanley takes a deep breath and turns back toward the boardwalk. The late-morning sun is high over the city: buildings and streetlamps and palmtrees angle their shadows at him, marking channels in the sand, and the storefronts are blacked-out beneath their porticos. Stanley checks the signs over the arcades as he draws closer: Chop Suey, St. Mark’s Hotel, Center Drug Co. On the corner of Market Street, blue and red stripes coil around a white column; he smoothes his frizzed hair as he passes it by.

  Beachfront characters are out enjoying the weather—an old lady in an opera coat, stooped under her parasol; a bearded man in paint-spattered chinos, chasing two laughing women across the sand; a stout burgher walking an ugly dog, singing to it in a strange language—but Stanley pays them all little mind. He broadcasts his attention among the buildings, mindful of shapes and textures, of the attitude of sunlight on walls and streets. Patterns catch his eye, then slip into the background: rows of lancet windows, bricks emerging from stucco, mascarons grinning atop cast-iron columns. There’s an absence here that he’s training himself to see, something he can only glimpse sidelong, as if by accident. It’s bound up with the past, with the lapsed grandeur of this place, but even that is insubstantial, a shadow cast by the thing itself, flickering behind the scrim of years like the ghost of a ghost.

  This is Welles’s city, so named in the book—which makes it Crivano’s city, too, as much as any earthly city can be. Stanley will learn to move through it as Crivano would: silent, catlike, on the balls of his feet. Unhidden yet unseen. Whenever his path clears, he shuts his eyes to walk a few blind steps, imagining the feel of cobblestones under soft boots, of a slender blade at his hip, of a black cape fanning his ankles, billowing in the night air. The night itself another cloak. He’s not sure how he came to have so clear a picture of Crivano; in the book, Welles never really says what he looks like. It occurs to Stanley that he could gotten this idea from someplace else: from Stewart Granger in Scaramouche, maybe, or even from a corny Zorro movie that he saw when he was a kid. He opens his eyes, blinks and winces in the sun, corrects his course.

  Ahead is a cluster of old Bridgo parlors, some boarded up, some converted to penny arcades. Young men’s voices inside. The frantic chime of pinball machines. He’d like to go in, play a few balls—he’s good at it—but Dogs will be nearby, and he’s not quite ready for another scrap. He has
n’t yet settled on a strategy with those guys. He’ll go to war if he has to; he’d probably only need to take two or three of them out before the others would fold. But he’d have to hurt those two or three pretty bad—hospital bad, maybe graveyard bad—for the rest to take him seriously, and he’s not sure he wants the trouble that would come with that. For now he’ll just steer clear and lie low.

  He crosses the Speedway and heads inland, past dilapidated shops and orange brick apartments. The avenues are rain-washed, weirdly bright, laid out for inspection. The usual boardwalk sidestreet smells—fried food, spilled liquor, puke and piss—are erased, but this just uncovers the subtler ripe-fruit and rotten-egg odors of the oilfield. Past Abbot Kinney the buildings fall away, opening space for weedy lawns fenced by splintered pickets, gardens bordered by railroad ties. Flowers and green leaves are everywhere, even this early in the year: myrtle and boxwood, bottlebrush and oleander, jasmine and clematis on trellised porches, cosmos and hollyhocks at fencerows. The plants are long-stemmed, unsteady in the sandy soil, slouching against clapboard with scapegrace charm, ready to take ruthless advantage of any kindness shown to them.

  Across the street, a geriatric with a shaggy white mane pushes an old-fashioned gang mower over a tiny lawn; damp grass clumps at his sandaled feet. He stares at Stanley, his eyes reduced to flecks by his spectacles’ thick lenses. Stanley looks away.

  He has no means of recognizing Welles. He could pass him on the street—maybe he already has—and he’d have no idea. This is obvious, but it’s hard for Stanley to keep in mind. In his daydreams he always knows Welles by sight: their paths cross, their eyes lock, Stanley catches the impish and ironical expression on the older man’s face and knows him immediately. He always imagines that Welles recognizes him, too. As a confederate. As the boy he has been looking for.

  Stanley knows that this is childish. He needs to start asking around, and he’s not sure of the best way to go about it. He’s got good front going now—not an easy thing to maintain—and the idea of becoming more visible bothers him. Aside from running grifts and hustling occasional work, he hasn’t had any real traffic with the squarejohn world in years. These people—walking their dogs, mowing their lawns, going about their ordinary business—seem almost like a different species.

  As Stanley thinks this, he can hear his father’s voice saying it, and he smiles. Remembering his dad seated in the kitchen of the apartment on Division, in full dress uniform, sipping buttermilk. Everybody else—his grandfather, his uncle, his mother, Stanley himself—was standing, and nobody else spoke. Stanley kept staring at the decorations on his dad’s chest: the Pacific Campaign Medal, the Bronze Star. They flapped against his olive tunic every time he laughed. Later he let Stanley drag his new fieldpack partway to the Bedford Ave station, then tipped him a palmful of mercury dimes. Get out of there quick as you can, he said. Those fuckers will bleed you dry.

  By the time the Red Chinese finally killed his father, as he’d promised they would, Stanley was living in the apartment like a cockroach, sneaking in whenever he needed food or shelter, creeping out again to forage. He thought this at the time: a cockroach. The idea made him proud. A year after that, when his grandfather died and his mother stopped speaking forever, Stanley quit coming home at all.

  The house ahead on his right is entirely overgrown by bougainvillea: only a slumped porch and a pair of dormers still hold off the emerald leaves and vermillion bracts. Stanley’s thrilled to see a building obliterated like this in the midst of a city. Something moves in the vine-snared yard—a cat—and now he can see several, maybe a dozen. One emaciated gray persian watches from the porch, so thin it seems to lack a body, to be nothing but yellow eyes and a snarl of fur.

  Stanley walks on. The ocean recedes behind him. He thinks about the cats, and about the anonymous neighborhood houses. About Welles. About Crivano. About black scorpions, and hidden watchers in dense jungles.

  He comes to a dead stop on the sidewalk. Barber shop, he thinks.

  18

  When the bus from Santa Monica pulls up two hours later, Stanley is waiting at the curb, the combat unit from his father’s fieldpack dangling from his fingers. He catches Claudio as he’s stepping from the door, shoves him back inside, and climbs in after him, paying the fare, shrugging into a seat. Stolen sardine cans in the pack scrape together as he settles it in his lap. We’re going to Hollywood, Stanley says.

  Claudio stands in the aisle, slackjawed, then puts out a hand to touch Stanley’s fresh buzzcut. Your hair, he says.

  Stanley catches him by the wrist, jerks him into the seat. Knock it off, he says. Did you hear what I just told you? Hollywood, chum.

  You look like a soldier, Claudio says.

  As the bus rolls south to the end of its route and swings north again, Stanley fills Claudio in on what the barber told him. Adrian Welles, it turns out, is now mixed up with the movies: writing, sometimes even directing them. A big production of his just finished filming nearby—right along the boardwalk, in fact—and now he’s in Hollywood editing it. It had a bunch of big stars in it, Stanley says. Even I knew some of the names. This could be your big break, kid.

  Claudio’s trying to seem cool and appraising, but Stanley can see the gooseflesh on his forearms. With what studio is he contracted? he asks.

  Universal Pictures, I think, is what the guy told me.

  I do not believe that the headquarters of Universal-International are in Hollywood, Claudio says. I believe they are outside the city. Do we know how to find this place?

  Sure we do, Stanley says. How tough can it be?

  They transfer at Santa Monica Boulevard and ride inland, past the boxy white spire of the Mormon Temple, past the Fox Studios and the Country Club, across the Beverly Hills town line. Stanley still can’t figure how anybody can call this place a city. To him, it’s like a real city got cut to pieces and dropped from a plane: tall buildings litter the valley in no real order, and streets and shops and houses stretch between them like a fungus. Every time Stanley thinks they’re downtown, they’re not.

  At Wilshire they swap seats. Claudio takes the window to watch for famous faces in passing Rolls-Royces and Corvettes; Stanley slouches and half-listens to Claudio’s commentary while he thinks about what to do next. He should be glad to have a solid lead on Welles, but this feels wrong, and he’s not sure why. It’s not that he doubts what the barber told him—the guy had no percentage in putting him off the trail—it’s just that none of it fits with the image of Welles in his head. That scares him a little. The movies, for crying out loud! Stanley feels betrayed, but can’t justify it. The idea that Welles didn’t so much misrepresent himself in his book as somehow avoid representing himself at all leaves him queasy.

  After half an hour of pointless wandering, Claudio gets directions from a Mexican valet at the Sunset Tower—talking to the guy a lot longer than seems necessary—and leads Stanley to a spot where they can catch the Number 22 up Highland into the hills. They stroll the boulevard while they wait. Stanley points out details on the old theaters’ weird façades: thick columns and pharaoh heads on the Egyptian, Moorish battlements on the El Capitan. Claudio listens, nods, but keeps glancing nervously at the white letters on the hillside to the north, as if he expects them to evaporate in the gathering haze.

  When they reach Grauman’s Chinese, Claudio gives a start, mutters something in Spanish, and dashes into its patchwork forecourt. Stanley follows at a skeptical distance as Claudio scans the pavement in a half-stoop, like he’s looking for dropped coins. Stanley sees handprints and footprints in the cement, left when it was poured, with names and messages scrawled around them. For a moment he thinks of a sidewalk back home in City Park: G G + V C gouged into its setting surface, alongside the winged imprints of mapleseeds. Then he starts to read the writing at his feet, and he slows to a stop.

  Carmen Miranda. Janet Gaynor. Eddie Cantor. Here’s looking at you, Sid. Mary Pickford. Ginger Rogers. Fred Astaire. The parallel furrows of Sonja
Henie’s skates. To Sid, Tillykke, Always. Harold Lloyd’s doodled spectacles. Loretta Young. Tyrone Power. To Sid—Following in my father’s footsteps. As Stanley steps over each section of pavement, he imagines the moment it was made: moviestars laughing in a fusillade of flashbulbs, waving their dirty hands. Kids playing in the mud. So this, he thinks, is what it means to be famous.

  He turns to make a snide comment, but the look on Claudio’s face brings him up short. The kid’s expression is so transparent, so supersaturated with longing and awe, that Stanley immediately cracks up laughing. He has to sit down for a minute—next to the hoofprints of Champion, Gene Autry’s trusty horse—to catch his breath.

  The 22 makes a brief stop at the white shell of the Hollywood Bowl before climbing the dry hillside and dropping them near the entrance of Universal City Studios. Stanley expects a steady stream of cars from the other direction—showbiz footsoldiers knocking off work—but nothing’s coming in or out of the gates. One look at the guard’s booth convinces him that this is a waste of time, but he and Claudio stroll up anyway.

  Excuse me, Stanley says. I’m here to see Adrian Welles.

  The guard is a flat-nosed man with deeply lined skin. He marks his place in his Herman Wouk novel with a pencil from behind his ear and looks at Stanley and Claudio. His eyes are blue, sharp, devoid of judgment. Adrian Welles, he says.

  That’s right.

  I don’t think I know him, the guard says. Where does he keep his office?

  He’s editing a movie here. He’s a writer. And a director.

  The guard shakes his head slowly. He’s not one of ours, he says. Maybe he hired out one of the cutting rooms?