The Ravine

by Paul Quarrington

  But of all the westerns I have seen, the most significant is certainly The Bullet and the Cross.

  Like all of my important memories, it has a potency that has influenced the pocket of time that holds it, so I can remember that particular Saturday afternoon, even though in many ways it was no different from any other. I can remember, for example, what van der Glick was wearing as she stepped out of the elevator, which was a dress covered with clownish polka dots. Rainie would make these heartbreaking stabs at femininity; indeed, she still does. It’s not that she doesn’t possess a woman’s body now, and didn’t possess a girl’s body then. But clothes never seemed to fit her correctly, and the more girlish they were, the worse they would hang. So on this day she wore a dress, and knee socks although her legs were too thin to support them and they gathered in folds around her ankles. She’d also done something odd to her spectacles. The lenses were darkened, so that her eyes were obscured.

  “Are those new glasses?” I asked, although I knew they weren’t, since I recognized the rhinestone-encrusted wingtips.

  “Yes,” she lied.

  “We’re going to the movies!” said Jay. “Wanna come?”

  Jay asked Rainie every week if she wanted to come to the movies, even though we never did anything else. Rainie’s answer was likewise invariable.

  “Might as well.” She shrugged. “There’s fuck-all else to do.”

  Oh, she had a mouth on her. Still does. Rainie hosts a radio talk show these days, and her speech is peppered with beeps and whistles. She has had a series of careers, proceeding from straight journalism (she spent a few years in Russia as an official correspondent for one of Toronto’s dailies) to somewhat bizarre magazine reportage (when the female press were finally allowed inside the Maple Leafs’ locker room, for example, Rainie took it a step further, actually showering with the lads) to this radio show where she is paid, handsomely, to be cantankerous.

  The Bullet and the Cross was made in 1960 and the director’s name was given as Alan Smithee. What this means is that the real person (or persons) responsible for it were so embarrassed by the results that they chose this default accreditation. Any film bearing the name “Alan Smithee” is by definition bad, just so you can be on the lookout. Perhaps you knew this, but I’ll bet you’re surprised to discover that the practice dates back to the 1960s. I know I was, when I did this research a few years back. I think it’s possible that The Bullet and the Cross was the very first Alan Smithee movie.

  The writer of the screenplay didn’t hide behind a pseudonym. His identity is announced with some boldness, given that it contains even a middle name: Peter Paul Mendicott. Moreover, it is repeated on another title card: Based Upon the Novel by Peter Paul Mendicott. I have to tell you that I don’t remember this from that viewing so long ago, I know this because I have watched the movie a few times subsequently. I sought out and purchased what seems to be the only extant print of the film. I have screened it in private, renting whole movie theatres, which can be surprisingly affordable, especially if you want to watch something in the dead of night. Edward Milligan watched it with me one time. He fell asleep in the middle, but I should mention that we were both very stoned and drunk.

  Not that the film isn’t tedious. The story mostly concerns a lawman named Johnny Mungo, portrayed with mind-numbing inertia by someone named Mark Goode, who was semi-famous as a stock car driver. It may be baffling to you, the kind of productorial thinking that went into designing a vehicle for a stock car driver (I know, I’m sorry about that), but I have been in the business long enough to know the kind of twisted logic that exists. All it takes is someone half-crazy with a little bit of money, and bingo, you got a movie.

  The story is basically this: the town is bad, because of the evil and pervasive presence of a fellow named Black Chester Nipes. (He is not a black man, but owns that sobriquet because a gun backfired and the gunpowder stained his face. A nice touch, wholly preposterous.) Mungo comes to town, clears away all of the henchmen and riffraff and finally confronts Nipes himself. Mungo emerges victorious, soupy music fades up and that’s the end.

  Pretty unimaginative stuff, for the most part. By far the most interesting thing about the story, at least for me, is the secondary character Father White. He is a young, good-looking clergyman, singularly uncowed by Black Chester Nipes. As soon as he stepped onto the screen, I knew I wanted to be this man. It had something to do with the way he looked, because he had a raffish quality and, although I remain a little uncertain as to what that actually is, I’ve always wanted to possess it.

  About an hour into the story, there is a big fight in the town tavern (which is far nicer than the one Nipes hangs out in) and, through various plot machinations on the part of Mr. Mendicott, Father White is there. At one point during the brouhaha, a brace of henchmen approach the clergyman, obviously with mayhem on their minds. Rather than appearing afraid, Father White takes up his Bible and begins reading with intense concentration, concentration that is rewarded by the blossoming of a blissful smile. The henchmen are so intrigued with this that they lean in to see the passage in question, leaving their weapons hanging at their sides. Father White lashes out with the Good Book, snapping it shut on one of the thug’s nose. Then he grabs a whiskey bottle and rather impassively cold-cocks the other guy, dropping him like a sack of wet bricks. The man with the sore nose hightails it out of the barroom, a story contrivance I should have made more note of. I mean, even given the questionable logic and reality that permeated the Galaxy Odeon every week, there was nothing preventing the guy from simply lofting his side arm and drilling Father White a third eye. But I was too taken up with the laughter that sounded in the theatre to reflect on this. My, how the children laughed. Even Rainie van der Glick laughed.

  And then, at the end of the movie, when Black Chester Nipes and Johnny Mungo meet on the street for the traditional shootout, Nipes has Father White as a hostage. Nipes presses the barrel of his six-shooter into the clergyman’s temple and says, “Take another step, Mungo, and I’ll shoot the padre.” (A script editor might have found that dialogue unnecessary, but The Bullet and the Cross is full of such on-the-nose stuff.)

  What can Johnny Mungo do? Nothing. And indeed he does nothing. Mungo stands there and stares forward with a doltish expression on his face, which is how the actor Mark Goode portrayed most emotions.

  It is Father White who acts, reaching up, taking hold of Black Chester’s hand and squeezing. There is no attempt at screen realism here, no exploding skull or blood, but we children, all of us, gasped with terrible shock as the padre slumped to the ground. And then we began to weep.

  Not everybody in the theatre, but the three of us certainly, we erupted into blubbery tears. I knew we were not weeping for the clergyman’s huge self-sacrifice, not exclusively. We were weeping because this selfless act on his part (this bit of cheap melodrama, when you get right down to it, after which Mungo summarily shot Chester Nipes through the heart) allowed us to. We were weeping, finally, for our own rankerdom.

  In some strange way, I saw suddenly the trajectory of a man’s life, of my life; how, lacking the courage to do anything remotely close to what Father White had just done, I would end up wallowing in besotted loneliness.

  And here I am.

  “Hello?”

  “McQuigge here.”

  “Phil?”

  “Yeah, but do not call me Phil, because this is not a social call. How are you, anyway?”

  “First-rate.”

  “Okay, great, but never mind about that right now. I want to take issue with the phrase rose above the mediocrity of the material.”

  “I’m not with you, Phil.”

  “In the obituary. Ed Milligan’s obituary.”

  “Ah. Wrote that, did I?”

  “I think you even said consistently. Consistently rose above the mediocrity of the material.”

  “I see. And you’ve been brooding about it for all these months.”

  “No. Yes.”

/>   “And which aspect of the phrase in particular are you taking issue with, Phil? Milligan’s rising above or the mediocrity of the material?”

  “What do you think?”

  “For starters, I think you’re drunk. And I think your relationship with Milligan was complicated, that you resented his stardom. And lastly, I think you know that Padre was a mediocre program.”

  “Really.”

  “Don’t feel badly. Almost everything on television is mediocre.”

  “And what, precisely, is so mediocre about Padre?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s mediocre about it, Philip. Here’s the thing. The writing is actually quite good. Sometimes, especially when you’re writing it, there’s very good dialogue. Clever stuff. And I appreciate the plot twists, don’t think I don’t. Often I’m reminded of your man Serling.”

  “Oh, you and I have discussed Rod Serling?”

  “Philip. We came to blows in Banff whilst discussing Rod Serling. At least, you did.”

  “Ah, yes. Now I remember.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Carry on. You like a lot about Padre, despite which, it remains, in your view, mediocre.”

  “Here’s the thing. Sometimes the show seems like it was created and written by a prepubescent boy. And it’s not just that the women are either virtuous or slatternly. Although there is that. But the show exhibits a very immature, a very unexamined, world view. It’s a black-hat white-hat show, Philip. And you’re far more intelligent than that. Now, I know what you’re going to say, that it is mere entertainment. But that would be disingenuous on your part. The show purports to be dealing with questions of good and evil, and its failure to do so consigns it to the bin marked mediocre. Milligan—who was neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but managed, as we know, to be both in grand measure—at least shaded things slightly. Lent the proceedings some ambiguity. And in doing so rose above the mediocrity of the material.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Are you working on anything now, Philip? I could mention it in my column.”

  “Thanks, man, but I’m out of the television business.”

  7 | THE SITUATION

  I LIVE IN A BASEMENT APARTMENT, COMPRISING A KITCHENETTE, A bedroomette and a sittingroomette. I could afford more spacious lodgings; I did, after all, labour long in the fields of television, which my colleague William Beckett once described as a “river of money into which we must jump.” (Beckett was my Hermes into the land of television. He took great glee in, and I quote faithfully, “turning a promising young dramatist into a hack.” He didn’t know, because I never told him, that it was a land into which I’d always wanted to travel, having been seduced, at a very young age, when I heard those words, “You are entering another dimension of time and space.”) But my prospects of future income are very dim, so I rent this basement apartment, from a man who was once my employee. Michelangelo Barker was a junior writer on Padre. Every script Barker submitted I performed a page-one rewrite on, not that they were all that bad, and likely because they were much too good. Barker didn’t accept this well, and often, when I passed him in the hallway, he bristled with artistic indignation. “Stout lad,” I always thought.

  Michelangelo is an imposing figure, six foot seven or something. Much of his size is concentrated in his legs and feet; he seems always to be shot from a low angle. His head is small, encircled by a nap of golden hair, for he wears his hair buzzed short and has cultivated a moustacheless chinstrap for adornment. He wears tiny glasses, the lenses smaller than the glaring eyeballs they serve. Michelangelo lacks shoulders—God just forgot about them. He has a narrow chest, a belly created by a bad diet and endless video rentals, then those legs blast onto the scene, massive thighs, inhuman shins and monumental feet. So he was a hard man to sneak past, as he stood there sipping tea in the hallway outside the kitchen. He was in that position far more often than he was inside the closet I’d assigned him as an office.

  So I’d nod at him and he’d bristle, and sometimes I’d stop and say, “That was a great script. There were just a few little problems.”

  “Like what?” Michelangelo’s voice is very high-pitched and seems to come from someplace other than his mouth.

  “Well,” I say, “Padre knows that O’Grady is really the cattle thief because he compares the typewritten letters. But they didn’t have typewriters in 1880.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “They did?”

  “Certainly. Although they had not standardized the keyboard. Many preferred the Dvorak arrangement. Indeed, Mark Twain invested heavily in the Dvorak, and lost much. Ironically, the man who possesses the title of world’s fastest typist—and yes, it is a man, a soldier in point of fact—employs a Dvorak keyboard. Hmm.” He always adds those little hmms at the end of his sentences, impressed with whatever he’s just said.

  “Okay, fine, maybe they had typewriters in 1880, but they had like two, and it is just not an effective narrative device.”

  “I see. Fine.” Michelangelo Barker, like everyone else on staff, is paid, and paid well, to be deferential.

  Despite my past treatment of him, he is a very kind landlord. He is respectful of my privacy down there in his basement, although I suppose I send up enough sozzled ululations that he ’d be a fool not to be. He often effects home improvements on his own initiative, trying to make my life a little more comfy. Michelangelo can’t stand erect in the basement and is constantly bumping his head on the ceiling, which makes his handyman stuff all the more endearing.

  Barker is the only person, other than my children, who has ever been down in my basement. So it’s time to introduce the girls, even though you’ve missed them, I’ve dropped them off at their schools this morning, kissed them goodbye, and it will be a week or so before I see them again.

  Currer is twelve and Ellis is seven.

  I maintain that it is simply a linguistic anomaly that Currer is not a teenager, that there is no logical reason why we say “twelve” and not “two-teen.” Because she certainly acts like a teenager; she is withdrawn and a bit sullen (except with her friends) and takes an enormous amount of time to perform even the simplest task. Currer is not without sweetness; if there is trouble or sadness she is quick with a comforting hug and a whispered “I love you.” But left to her own devices, she would rather drift around the planet with earphones plugged in, dexterously manipulating the buttons on her portable music player, getting the machine to repeat favourite tracks and to avoid ones that fail to meet her standards. Her music of choice is, quite frankly, dreck, but this is an age-old generational battle, and needn’t be gotten into here. Currer does, I will say in her defence, adore the music of her Uncle Jay. We have gone to see Jay play on a few occasions, mostly when the owners of Birds of a Feather have ordered him to do matinees. Currer has sat stone-still for the entire performance, nursing a Coca-Cola, a look of rapture on her face.

  Ellis has been to those same matinees, of course. She is not enthralled by her uncle’s music, although on the few occasions when she knows the tune—“Over the Rainbow,” for example—she will sing along with ear-splitting enthusiasm. Curiously, seeing as many of the people in my family are musical—my mother had her grade eight piano and a lovely voice—Ellis appears to be singing-impaired. She hollers out notes at random, or with a profound attraction to quarter-tones. She is quite good, though, on the more showbizzy aspects of singing, twisting her body with rhythmic abandon and occasionally calling out, “Everybody!” When she does this, of course, everybody obediently joins in.

  Currer has a lovely voice, although she is loath to use it. Currer will sing—with Ellis’s encouragement—at bedtime, when our custom is to belt out a rousing version of “The Window.” I know, because I used to overhear it (standing outside the doorway with my heart banging inside my ribcage), that their mother sings them actual lullabies, quiet serenades, even the occasional hymn. So the girls are used to music after they’ve scurried under the sheets, although “The Windo
w” is hardly a peaceful air. I take up the banjo from its position in a shadowy corner and thrum out a few introductory changes. I don’t know how it is that I can play the banjo, but somewhere along the line I acquired a few chords and a rudimentary strumming technique. “The Window” is not that complicated a song, at any rate, and is boisterous enough to forgive all sorts of mispickings. I learned “The Window” from a record by a group named Troutfishing in America. It is a long song wherein a number of well-known nursery rhymes are recited, except that at the end of each there is the same sharp, stinging departure, which has to do with violent defenestration:

  Georgy Porgy, pudding’n’pie,

  Kissed the girls and made them cry.

  And when the boys came out to play,

  They threw him out the window.

  (everybody now)

  The window, the window, they threw him out the window…

  When the boys came out to play,

  They threw him out the window.

  Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard,

  To get her poor doggy a bone,

  But when she bent over, the doggy took over,

  And threw her out the window.

  (everybody now)

  The window, the window, he threw her out the

  window… etc.

  Currer sings with the tranquil intensity of a chorister; Ellis hollers like a drunken lumberjack in the advanced throes of cabin fever. She is so unmusical that I would suspect Ronnie of infidelity, except that Ellis is clearly my child; the tips of her little fingers are bent inward and her eyes are brown and very weak, so that she, too, is saddled with spectacles. Besides which, I don’t believe Ronnie was ever unfaithful during our marriage, so it’s unfair to raise the accusation even in jest. (Don’t think it has escaped my attention that Veronica has popped up twice in the past couple of paragraphs. She is certainly banging on the door of this narrative.) So I attribute Ellis’s lack of musicality to some genetic throwback. I will say this, though—Ellis can dance. She takes all sorts of lessons—ballet, jazz, tap and Scottish—competing in those disciplines that allow it (Scottish dancing is a highly competitive affair), performing whenever she gets the chance. She is a sturdily made little beast, with legs that would look more at home on a steroid-riddled sprinter. She inherited this tendency toward muscularity from her mother, Veronica, and I guess I can put this off no longer.