“Thanks,” Kenyon said, and began to shuffle away.
Dunne sat and watched him go. He thought he understood why Kenyon had wanted off at that corner. There was a bar up the street.
When he saw Kenyon enter its doors, Dunne pulled the Testarossa out into traffic, and drove over to West Hollywood, where he dropped the car off at a rental agency, paid the fee, and got into his own 1986 Ford Escort. He drove a few blocks to the small apartment he shared with an actress, parked the car, climbed the stairs. The door was unlocked, which meant that she was home.
“Where were you?” she asked, not looking up from a script she was studying. “Bob called.”
Bob was Dunne’s agent. “Yeah?”
“The studio turned down your script.”
“I know.” He tossed the manuscript box full of empty sheets of paper on the couch.
“You know?” She looked up now, saw how he was dressed.
“I ran into one of their D-girls jogging this morning.”
“Oh Christ . . .”
“What?”
“Christ, you did it again, didn’t you?”
“Come on, Greta – ”
“We can’t afford it, Rick! A goddam Jag again? Or a Mercedes this time? And where’d you go for lunch? Morton’s? La Dome?”
“Nicky Blair’s.”
“Nicky . . . Christ, you’re a sick fucker sometimes, you know that?”
“I need this, Greta.”
“Need it? Need to fuck people that way?”
“How I stay sane, baby. We all have ways to deal with disappointment. No matter how bad things get, I know that there are people worse off than me.”
“And that makes it okay.”
“Yeah, that makes it so I can keep going. So I can crank out another flying-glass script and maybe someday Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis will drive their cars through the windows I made up. I need this. I need to know that at least I’m not at the bottom.”
She looked at him for a long time, enraged, and he wondered again why she didn’t leave him. But she didn’t, and that was enough. Finally she turned away angrily, concentrated on her script again.
“You ought to see it,” he said softly.
She didn’t say a word.
“When I start filling in details, when it starts to dawn on them that hey, that’s not me you’re talking about, and finally when they’re sure, when they know, when their face falls so far you swear you can hear their jaw hit the table like in a Tex Avery cartoon.”
She kept reading her script, turned a page with a sharp snap of paper.
“It’s not as good as selling a script,” he said, “but it’s better than a lot of things. It’s better than coming.”
He didn’t wait to watch her cry. Instead he went into the bedroom, walked to the desk, sat down, turned on his computer, and brought up the word processing program from the hard disk. He retrieved the file named COMEBACK, and the list came up on the monitor, white letters on a blue background.
The list was long. There were hundreds of names of writers, performers, directors, all of whom had seen little work since the first time the gods had blessed them, then left them behind for fresher faces, newer talents. Paul Kenyon’s name was at the top, along with the words, “TRAIL DUST/1953/J. Stewart/A. Mann/AAN.” He blocked the line and moved it down to the bottom of the list, thinking that by the time he came to him again, Kenyon would be ready once more. Hope springs eternal in the town of dreams, Dunne thought, and so does despair and humiliation.
Then he closed COMEBACK, and opened the file of a spec screenplay he had nearly finished. He felt like working now. The disappointment was gone. He was whole again, ready to write.
A little while later he thought of the two names Kenyon had mentioned, Dan Duryea and Jeanne Crain. He hadn’t heard about either of them in a very long time, and wondered if they were still alive. He would have to check. If they were, they just might be interested in a comeback.
S.P. SOMTOW
Darker Angels
S.P. SOMTOW (aka Somtow Sucharitkul) was born in Bangkok and educated at Eton and St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. His grandfather, whose two sisters were both married to King Rama VI of Siam, was the proud possessor of a small harem, and the author currently commutes between his homes in Bangkok and Los Angeles.
An avant-garde composer, screenwriter/director (The Laughing Dead and Ill Met By Moonlight) and the author of around thirty genre novels (Vampire Junction, Valentine, Moon Dance etc.), his most recent book is Jasmine Nights, a mainstream novel set in mid-1960s Thailand, published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton.
ONE DAY there’ll be historians who can name all the battles and number the dead. They’ll study the tactics of the generals and they’ll see it all clear as crystal, like they was watching with the eyes of the angels.
But it warn’t like that for me. I can’t for the life of me put a name to one blame battle we fought. I had no time to number the dead nor could I see them clearly through the haze of red that swam before my eyes. And when the gore-drenched mist settled into dew, when the dead became visible in their stinking, wormy multitudes, I still could not tell one from another: it was a very sea of torsos, heads, and twisted limbs; the dead was wrapped around one another so close and intimate they was like lovers; didn’t matter no more iffen they was ours or theirs.
I do not recollect what made me stay behind. Could be it was losing my last shinplaster on the cockroach races. Could have been the coffee which warn’t real coffee at all but parched acorns roasted with bacon fat and ground up with a touch of chicory. Could be it was that my shoes was so wore out from marching that every step I took was like walking acrosst a field of brimstone.
More likely it was just because I was a running away kind of a boy. Running was in my blood. My pa and me, we done our share of running, and I reckon that even after I done run away from him and gone to war, the running fever was still inside of me and couldn’t be let go.
And then, after I lagged behind, I knowed that if I went back they’d shoot me dead, and if they shot me, why then I’d go straight on to the everlasting fire, because we was fighting to protect the laws of God. I just warn’t ready for Hell yet, not after a mere fourteen years on this mortal earth.
That’s why I was tarrying amongst the dead, and that’s how I come to meet the old darkie that used to work down at the Anderson place.
The sun was about setting and the place was right rank, because the carrion had had the whole day to bloat up and rot and to call out for the birds and the worms and the flies. But it felt good to walk on dead people because they was softer on my wounded feet. The bodies stretched acrosst a shallow creek and all the way up to the edge of a wood. I didn’t know where I was nor where I was going. There warn’t much light remaining and I wanted to get somewhere, anywhere, before nightfall. It was getting cold. I took a jacket off of one dead man and a pair of new boots from another, but I couldn’t get the boots on past them open sores.
You might think it a sin to steal from the dead, but the dead don’t have no use for gold and silver. There was scant daylight left for me to rifle through their pockets looking for coins. Warn’t much in the way of money on that battlefield. It’s usually only us poor folks which gets killed in battle.
It was slippery work wading through the corpses, keeping an eye for something shiny amongst the ripped-up torsos and the sightless heads and the coiling guts. I was near choking to death from the reek of it, and the coat I stole warn’t much proof against the cold. I was hungry and I had no notion of where to find provender. And the mist was coming back, and I thought to myself, I’ll just take myself a few more coppers and then I’ll cross over into the wood and build me a shelter and mayhap a fire. Won’t nobody see me, thin as a sapling, quiet as a shadow.
So I started to wade over the creek, which warn’t no trouble because there was plenty of bodies to use as stepping stones. I was halfway acrosst when I spotted the old nigger under a cotton-wood tree, in a
circle which was clear of carrion. He had a little fire going and something a-roasting over it. I could hear the crackling above the buzz of the flies, and I could smell the cooking fat somewhere behind the stench of putrefying men.
I moved nearer to where he sat. I was blame near fainting by then and ready to kill a body for my supper. He was squatting with his arms around his knees and he was a-rocking back and forth and I thought I could hear him crooning some song to himself, like a lullaby, in a language more kin to French than nigger-talk. Odd thing was, I had heard the song before. Mayhap my momma done sung it to me onc’t, for she was born out Louisiana way. The more I listened, the less I was fixing to kill the old man.
He was old, all right. As I crept closer, I seen he warn’t no threat to me. I still couldn’t see his face, because he was turned away from me and looking straight into the setting sun. But I could see he was withered and white-haired and black as the coming night, and seemed like he couldn’t even hear me approaching, for he never pricked up his ears though I stood nary a yard or two behind his back, in the shadow of the cottonwood.
That was when he said to me, never looking back, “Why, bonjour, Marse Jimmy Lee; I never did think I’d look upon you face again.”
And then he turned, and I knew him by the black patch over his right eye.
Lord, it was strange to see him there, in the middle of the valley of the dead. It had been ten years since my pa and me gone up to the Anderson place. Warn’t never any call to go back, since it burned to the ground a week after, and old man Anderson died, and his slaves was all sold.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked him. “I was but four years old last time you laid eyes on me.”
“Your daddy still a itinerant preacher, Marse Jimmy Lee?” he says.
“I reckon,” said I, for I warn’t about ready to tell him the truth yet. “I ain’t with my pa no more.”
“You was always a running away sort of a boy,” he said, and offered me a piece of what he was roasting.
“What is it?”
“I don’t reckon I ought to tell you.”
“I’ve had possum before. I’ve had field rat. I’m no stranger to strange flesh.” I took a bite of the meat and it was right tasty. But I hadn’t had solid food for two days, and soon I was a heaving all over the nearest corpse.
He went back to his crooning song, and I remembered then that I had heard it last from his own lips, that day Pa shot Momma in the back because she wanted to go with the Choctaw farmer. I can’t say I blamed her, because leastways the man was a landowner and had four slaves besides. Pa let her pack her bags and walk halfway acrosst the bridge afore he blew her to kingdom come. Then he took my hand and set me up on his horse and took me to the Anderson place, and when I started to squall, he slapped me in the face until it were purple and black, saying, between his blows, “She don’t deserve your tears. She is a woman taken in adultery; such a woman should be stoned to death, according to the scriptures; a bullet were too good for her. I have exercised my rights according to the law, and iffen I hear one more sob out of you, I shall take a hickory to you, for he who spareth the rod loveth not his child.” And he drained a flask of bug juice and burped, I did not hear the name of Mary Cox from his lips again for ten long years.
Pa was not a ordained minister, but plantation folks reckoned him book-learned enough to preach to their darkies, which is what he done every Sunday, a different estate each week, then luncheon with the master and mistress of the house or sometimes, if they was particular about eating with white trash, then in the kitchen amongst the house niggers. The niggers called him the Reverend Cox, but to the white folks he was just Cox, or Bug Juice Cox, or Blame-Fuckster Cox, or wretched, pitiable Cox so low that his wife done left him for a Injun.
At the Anderson place he preached in a barn, and he took for his subject adultery; and as there was no one to notice, I stole away to a field and sat me down in a thicket of sugar cane and hollered and carried on like the end of the world was nigh, and me just four years old.
Then it was that I heard the selfsame song I was hearing now, and I looked up and saw this ancient nigger with a patch over one eye, and he says to me, “Oh, honey, it be a terrible thing to be without a mother.” I remember the smell of him, a pungent smell like fresh crushed herbs. “I still remembers the day my mamman was took from me. Oh, do not grieve alone, white child.”
“How’d you come to lose that eye?”
“It the price of knowledge, honey,” he said softly.
Choking back my sobs, a mite embarrassed because someone had seen me in my loneliness, I said to him, “You shouldn’t be here. You should be in that barn listening to my father’s preaching, lessen you want to get yourself a whupping.”
He smiled sadly and said, “They done given up on whupping old Joseph.”
I said, “Is your momma dead too, Joseph?”
“Yes. She be dead, oh, nigh on sixty year now. She died in the revolution.”
“Oh, come,” I said, “even I know that the revolution was almost a hundred years ago, and I know you ain’t that old, because a white man’s time is threescore years and ten, and a nigger’s time is shorter still.” Now I wasn’t comprehending anything I was saying; this was all things I heard my pa say, over and over again, in his sermons.
“Oh,” said old Joseph, “I ain’t talking about the white man’s revolution, but the colored folks’ revolt which happened on a island name of Haiti. The French, they tortured my mamman, but she wouldn’t betray her friends, so they killed her and sold me to a slaver, and the ship set sail one day before independence; so sixty years after my kinfolk was set free, I’s still in bondage in a foreign country.”
I knew that niggers was always full of stories about magic and distant countries, and they couldn’t always see truth from fantasy; my daddy told me that truth is a hard, solid thing to us white folks, as easy to grasp as a stone or a horseshoe, but to them it was slippery, it was like a phantom. That was why I didn’t take exception to the old man’s lies. I just sat there quietly, listening to the music of his voice, and it soothed me and seemed like it helped to salve the pain I was feeling, for pretty soon when I thought of Momma lying on the bridge choking on her own blood, I felt I could remember the things I loved about her too, like the way she called my name, the way her nipples tasted on my lips, for she had lost my newborn sister and she was bursting with milk and she would sometimes let me suckle, for all that I was four years old.
And then I was crying again, but this time they was healing tears.
Then old Joseph, he said, “You listen to me, Marse Jimmy Lee. I ain’t always gone be with you when you needs to open up your heart.” Now this surprised me, because I didn’t recollect telling him none of what was going through my mind. “I’s gone give you a gift,” he said, and he pulls out a bottle from his sleeve, a vial, only a inch high, and in that bottle was a doll that was woven out of cornstalks. It were cunningly wrought, for the head of the doll was bigger than the neck of the bottle, and it must have taken somebody many hours to make, and somebody with keen eyesight at that. “Now this be a problem doll. It can listen to you when no man will listen. It a powerful magic from the island where I was born.”
He held it out to me and it made me smile, for I had oftentimes been told that darkies are simple people and believe in all kinds of magic. I clutched it in my hands, but mayhap he saw the disbelief in my face, for he said to me with the utmost gravity, “Do not mock this magic, white child. Among the colored people which still fears the old gods, they calls me a boungan, a man of power.”
“The old gods?” I said.
“Shangó,” he said, and he done a curious sort of a genuflecting hop when he said the name. “Obatala; Ogun; Babalu Ayé. . . .”
The names churned round and round in my head as I stared into his good eye. I don’t recollect what followed next or how my pa found me. But everything else I remembered just as though the ten years that followed, the years of wande
ring, Pa’s worsening cruelty and drunkenness, hadn’t never even happened.
It was as though I had circled back to that same place and time. Only instead of the burning sunlight of that summer’s day there was the gathering cold and the night. Instead of the tall cane sticky with syrup, we was keeping company with the slain. And I warn’t a child no more, although I warn’t a man yet, neither.
“The poupée I give you,” old Joseph said as I sat myself down beside him, “does you still got it?”
“My pa found it the next day. He said he didn’t want no hoodoo devil dolls in his house. He done smashed it and throwed it in the fire, and then he done wore me out with his hickory.”
“And you a soldier now.”
“I run away.”
“Lordy, honey, you a sight to see. Old Joseph don’t got no more dolls for you now. Old Joseph got no time for he be making dolls. There be a monstrous magic abroad now in this universe. This magic it the onliest reason old Joseph still living in this world. Old Joseph hears the magic summoning him. Old Joseph be stay behind to hear what the magic it have to tell him.”
Like a fool, I thought him simple when I heard him speak of magic. It made me smile. It was the first time I had smiled in many months. I smiled to keep from crying, for weeping ill becomes a man of fourteen years who has carried his rifle into battle to defend his country.
“You poor lost child,” said Joseph, “you should be awaking up mornings to the song of the larks, not the whistle of miniés nor the thunder of cannon. You at the end of the road now, ain’t nowhere left for you to go; that’s why us has been called here to this valley of the shadow of death. It was written from the moment we met, Marse Jimmy Lee. Ten years I wandered alone in the wilderness. Now the darker angels has sent you to me.”
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