I drove north across the river,8 on into Pasadena, through Pasadena and almost at once I was in orange groves. The tumbling rain was solid white spray in the headlights. The windshield wiper could hardly keep the glass clear enough to see through. But not even the drenched darkness could hide the flawless lines of the orange trees wheeling away like endless spokes into the night.9
Cars passed with a tearing hiss and a wave of dirty spray. The highway jerked through a little town that was all packing houses and sheds, and railway sidings nuzzling them. The groves thinned out and dropped away to the south and the road climbed and it was cold and to the north the black foothills crouched closer and sent a bitter wind whipping down their flanks. Then faintly out of the dark two yellow vapor lights glowed high up in the air and a neon sign between them said: “Welcome to Realito.”10
Frame houses were spaced far back from a wide main street, then a sudden knot of stores, the lights of a drugstore behind fogged glass, the fly-cluster of cars in front of the movie theater, a dark bank on a corner with a clock sticking out over the sidewalk and a group of people standing in the rain looking at its windows, as if they were some kind of a show. I went on. Empty fields closed in again.11
Fate stage-managed the whole thing.12 Beyond Realito, just about a mile beyond, the highway took a curve and the rain fooled me and I went too close to the shoulder. My right front tire let go with an angry hiss. Before I could stop the right rear went with it. I jammed the car to a stop, half on the pavement, half on the shoulder, got out and flashed a spotlight around. I had two flats and one spare. The flat butt of a heavy galvanized tack stared at me from the front tire.
The edge of the pavement was littered with them.13 They had been swept off, but not far enough off.
I snapped the flash off and stood there breathing rain and looking up a side road at a yellow light. It seemed to come from a skylight. The skylight could belong to a garage, the garage could be run by a man named Art Huck, and there could be a frame house next door to it. I tucked my chin down in my collar and started towards it, then went back to unstrap the license holder from the steering post and put it in my pocket. I leaned lower under the wheel. Behind a weighted flap, directly under my right leg as I sat in the car, there was a hidden compartment. There were two guns in it. One belonged to Eddie Mars’ boy Lanny and one belonged to me. I took Lanny’s. It would have had more practice than mine.14 I stuck it nose down in an inside pocket and started up the side road.
The garage was a hundred yards from the highway. It showed the highway a blank side wall. I played the flash on it quickly. “Art Huck—Auto Repairs and Painting.” I chuckled, then Harry Jones’ face rose up in front of me, and I stopped chuckling.15 The garage doors were shut, but there was an edge of light under them and a thread of light where the halves met. I went on past. The frame house was there, light in two front windows, shades down. It was set well back from the road, behind a thin clump of trees. A car stood on the gravel drive in front. It was dark, indistinct, but it would be a brown coupe and it would belong to Mr. Canino. It squatted there peacefully in front of the narrow wooden porch.
He would let her take it out for a spin once in a while, and sit beside her, probably with a gun handy. The girl Rusty Regan ought to have married, that Eddie Mars couldn’t keep, the girl that hadn’t run away with Regan. Nice Mr. Canino.
I trudged back to the garage and banged on the wooden door with the butt of my flash. There was a hung instant of silence, as heavy as thunder. The light inside went out. I stood there grinning and licking the rain off my lip. I clicked the spot on the middle of the doors. I grinned at the circle of white. I was where I wanted to be.16
A voice spoke through the door, a surly voice: “What you want?”
“Open up. I’ve got two flats back on the highway and only one spare. I need help.”
“Sorry, mister. We’re closed up. Realito’s a mile west.17 Better try there.”
I didn’t like that. I kicked the door hard. I kept on kicking it. Another voice made itself heard, a purring voice, like a small dynamo behind a wall. I liked this voice. It said: “A wise guy,18 huh? Open up, Art.”
A bolt squealed and half of the door bent inward. My flash burned briefly on a gaunt face. Then something that glittered swept down and knocked the flash out of my hand. A gun had peaked at me. I dropped low where the flash burned on the wet ground and picked it up.
The surly voice said: “Kill that spot, bo.19 Folks get hurt that way.”
I snapped the flash off and straightened. Light went on inside the garage, outlined a tall man in coveralls. He backed away from the open door and kept a gun leveled at me.
“Step inside and shut the door, stranger. We’ll see what we can do.”
I stepped inside, and shut the door behind my back. I looked at the gaunt man, but not at the other man who was shadowy over by a workbench, silent.20 The breath of the garage was sweet and sinister with the smell of hot pyroxylin paint.21
“Ain’t you got no sense?” the gaunt man chided me. “A bank job was pulled at Realito this noon.”
“Pardon,” I said, remembering the people staring at the bank in the rain. “I didn’t pull it. I’m a stranger here.”
“Well, there was,” he said morosely. “Some say it was a couple of punk kids and they got ’em cornered back here in the hills.”
“It’s a nice night for hiding,” I said. “I suppose they threw tacks out. I got some of them. I thought you just needed the business.”
“You didn’t ever get socked in the kisser, did you?”22 the gaunt man asked me briefly.
“Not by anybody your weight.”23
The purring voice from over in the shadows said: “Cut out the heavy menace, Art. This guy’s in a jam. You run a garage, don’t you?”
“Thanks,” I said, and didn’t look at him even then.
“Okey, okey,” the man in the coveralls grumbled. He tucked his gun through a flap in his clothes and bit a knuckle, staring at me moodily over it. The smell of the pyroxylin paint was as sickening as ether. Over in the corner, under a drop light, there was a big new-looking sedan with a paint gun lying on its fender.24
I looked at the man by the workbench now. He was short and thick-bodied with strong shoulders. He had a cool face and cool dark eyes. He wore a belted brown suede raincoat that was heavily spotted with rain. His brown hat was tilted rakishly.25 He leaned his back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way.
He moved his dark eyes up and down slowly and then glanced at his fingernails one by one, holding them up against the light and studying them with care, as Hollywood has taught it should be done.26 He spoke around a cigarette.
“Got two flats, huh? That’s tough. They swept them tacks, I thought.”
“I skidded a little on the curve.”
“Stranger in town you said?”
“Traveling through. On the way to L.A. How far is it?”
“Forty miles. Seems longer this weather. Where from, stranger?”
“Santa Rosa.”27
“Come the long way, eh? Tahoe and Lone Pine?”
“Not Tahoe. Reno and Carson City.”
“Still the long way.”28 A fleeting smile curved his lips.
“Any law against it?” I asked him.
“Huh? No, sure not. Guess you think we’re nosey. Just on account of that heist back there. Take a jack and get his flats, Art.”
“I’m busy,” the gaunt man growled. “I’ve got work to do. I got this spray job. And it’s raining, you might have noticed.”
The man in brown said pleasantly: “Too damp for a good spray job, Art. Get moving.”
I said: “They’re front and rear, on the right side. You could use the spare for one spot, if you’re busy.”
“Take two jacks, Art,” the brown man said.
“Now, listen—” Art began to bluster.
The brown man moved his eyes, looked at Art with a soft quiet-eyed stare, lowered them again almost shyly. He didn’t speak. Art rocked as if a gust of wind had hit him.29 He stamped over to the corner and put a rubber coat over his coveralls, a sou’wester on his head.30 He grabbed a socket wrench and a hand jack and wheeled a dolly jack over to the doors.
He went out silently, leaving the door yawning. The rain blustered in. The man in brown strolled over and shut it and strolled back to the workbench and put his hips exactly where they had been before. I could have taken him then.31 We were alone. He didn’t know who I was. He looked at me lightly and threw his cigarette on the cement floor and stamped on it without looking down.
“I bet you could use a drink,” he said. “Wet the inside and even up.” He reached a bottle from the workbench behind him and set it on the edge and set two glasses beside it. He poured a stiff jolt into each and held one out.
Walking like a dummy I went over and took it. The memory of the rain was still cold on my face. The smell of hot paint drugged the close air of the garage.32
“That Art,” the brown man said. “He’s like all mechanics. Always got his face in a job he ought to have done last week. Business trip?”
I sniffed my drink delicately. It had the right smell. I watched him drink some of his before I swallowed mine. I rolled it around on my tongue. There was no cyanide in it. I emptied the little glass and put it down beside him and moved away.
“Partly,” I said. I walked over to the half-painted sedan with the big metal paint gun lying along its fender. The rain hit the flat roof hard. Art was out in it, cursing.
The brown man looked at the big car. “Just a panel job, to start with,” he said casually, his purring voice still softer from the drink. “But the guy had dough and his driver needed a few bucks. You know the racket.”
I said: “There’s only one that’s older.” My lips felt dry. I didn’t want to talk. I lit a cigarette. I wanted my tires fixed. The minutes passed on tiptoe. The brown man and I were two strangers chance-met, looking at each other across a little dead man named Harry Jones.33 Only the brown man didn’t know that yet.
Feet crunched outside and the door was pushed open. The light hit pencils of rain and made silver wires of them. Art trundled two muddy flats in sullenly, kicked the door shut, let one of the flats fall over on its side. He looked at me savagely.
“You sure pick spots for a jack to stand on,” he snarled.
The brown man laughed and took a rolled cylinder of nickels out of his pocket and tossed it up and down on the palm of his hand.34
“Don’t crab so much,” he said dryly. “Fix those flats.”
“I’m fixin’ them, ain’t I?”
“Well, don’t make a song about it.”35
“Yah!” Art peeled his rubber coat and sou’wester off and threw them away from him. He heaved one tire up on a spreader and tore the rim loose viciously. He had the tube out and cold-patched in nothing flat. Still scowling, he strode over to the wall beside me and grabbed an air hose, put enough air into the tube to give it body and let the nozzle of the air hose smack against the whitewashed wall.
I stood watching the roll of wrapped coins dance in Canino’s hand. The moment of crouched intensity had left me.36 I turned my head and watched the gaunt mechanic beside me toss the air-stiffened tube up and catch it with his hands wide, one on each side of the tube. He looked it over sourly, glanced at a big galvanized tub of dirty water in the corner and grunted.
The teamwork must have been very nice. I saw no signal, no glance of meaning, no gesture that might have a special import. The gaunt man had the stiffened tube high in the air, staring at it. He half turned his body, took one long quick step, and slammed it down over my head and shoulders, a perfect ringer.
He jumped behind me and leaned hard on the rubber. His weight dragged on my chest, pinned my upper arms tight to my sides. I could move my hands, but I couldn’t reach the gun in my pocket.
The brown man came almost dancing towards me across the floor. His hand tightened over the roll of nickels. He came up to me without sound, without expression. I bent forward and tried to heave Art off his feet.
The fist with the weighted tube inside it went through my spread hands like a stone through a cloud of dust.37 I had the stunned moment of shock when the lights danced and the visible world went out of focus but was still there. He hit me again. There was no sensation in my head. The bright glare got brighter. There was nothing but hard aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope. Then there was nothing bright or wriggling, just darkness and emptiness and a rushing wind and a falling as of great trees.38
1. Echoes of The Great Gatsby (1925), with its famous, beckoning green light hinting at an unattainable dream. Here the dream is tawdry and morally bankrupt. (Chandler admired Fitzgerald. Maureen Corrigan reads Gatsby as a hard-boiled novel in her brilliant So We Read On [2014]). As for the dark, dripping city, in The Little Sister, Marlowe will sigh,
I used to like this town. A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.
Chandler himself called it “a grotesque and impossible place for a human being to live in.” But he also found it impossible not to live there. Having once said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he found himself creatively dry when he moved south to La Jolla: “I know what is the matter with my writing or not writing. I’ve lost any affinity for my background….Los Angeles is no longer my city and La Jolla is nothing but climate and a lot of meaningless chi-chi.”
2. Of all the deaths in the novel, this one might be the most poetic.
3. Foothill Boulevard runs northeast to southwest alongside what is now the 210 (or Foothill) Freeway beneath the San Gabriel Mountains.
Foothill Boulevard (courtesy of Loren Latker, Shamus Town Collection)
4. The citrus belt extended from Pasadena to San Bernardino, at the foot of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountain ranges. Chandler is juggling Southern California geography a bit, as well as a couple of vowels. The real town of Rialto lies just west of San Bernardino, about sixty miles east of Los Angeles (rather than the forty noted on this page). Chandler also moves the cyanide plant here from its actual location to the south. A pointed juxtaposition: industrial poison and citrus groves; oranges and cyanide. Now we know where Canino got the stuff that killed Harry Jones.
Orange groves, Southern California
“WELCOME TO REALITO”: FROM “THE CURTAIN”
Starting here, through the first half of Chapter Thirty, the novel draws extensively from Chandler’s 1936 short story “The Curtain.” Part Six of “The Curtain,” below, forms the backbone of Marlowe’s drive to Realito.
At about 8 o’clock two yellow vapor lamps glowed high up in the rain and a dim stencil sign strung across the highway read: “Welcome to Realito.”
Frame houses on the main street, a sudden knot of stores, the lights of the corner drugstore behind fog glass, a flying-cluster of cars in front of a tiny movie palace, and a dark bank on another corner, with a knot of men standing in front of it in the rain. That was Realito. I went on. Empty fields closed in again.
This was past the orange country; nothing but the empty fields in the
crouched foothills, and the rain.
It was a smart mile, more like three, before I spotted a side road and a faint light on it, as if from behind drawn blinds in a house. Just at that moment my left front tire let go with an angry hiss. That was cute. Then the right rear let go the same way.
I stopped almost exactly at the intersection. Very cute indeed. I got out, turned my raincoat up a little higher, unshipped the flash, and looked at a flock of heavy galvanized tacks with heads as big as dimes. The flat shiny butt of one of them blinked at me from my tire.
Two flats and one spare. I tucked my chin down and started towards the faint light up the side road.
5. hot car drop: A place stolen cars can be stashed and worked on so they can be sold.
6. In the 1946 movie: “Your kind always does.” Here, it’s moral; in the movie, moralizing.
7. Shades of the Last Supper, or perhaps a prisoner’s last meal.
8. The Los Angeles River.
9. In keeping with Chandler’s “noirization” of the sunny symbol of California’s healthiness and abundance, the orange trees wheel Marlowe deeper into the night.
10. Marlowe crosses the border to the scene of his own showdown with death.
11. Note the descriptions of distance, removing Marlowe from what he sees: houses far back, lights behind fogged glass, dark corners, empty fields, and people standing as if onstage or on-screen.
12. Most immediately because of the bank robbery that Marlowe will soon learn about, but this portentous fatalism will flow through multiple surprising channels as the action of the novel mounts. In this channel, a gesture toward the fated action of classical tragedy. Fate hangs gloomily over the realm in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur as well. Here, however, it’s different: fate may stage-manage, but it is Marlowe’s actions that will determine the outcome.
The Annotated Big Sleep Page 34
