While I Disappear

by Edward Wright

  She shook her head. “Never saw either one of them before tonight,” she said. “But they seemed nice enough, and they had money to spend. And if a gentleman wants to buy a lady a drink—” She waved one hand gracefully in the air, an almost theatrical gesture. “The lady doesn’t ask to see his pedigree.” Her voice was a soft alto, slightly amused. It hinted at breeding, and it didn’t go with her almost threadbare appearance.

  “Well, I’m sorry for all the ruckus,” he said. “Can I buy you another one of those before I go?”

  “You don’t remember me, do you, John Ray?”

  “What?”

  She looked up at him, and he studied her. There was something about her features, but they wouldn’t coalesce into a name or even a memory.

  “I can see you don’t,” she went on, her words carefully spoken but slightly slurred. She took a big swallow of her drink, and Horn could see that it was already mostly gone. He guessed that it was not her first of the evening. “You probably don’t remember rescuing me from that stampede—all the yelling and shooting, and horses running around. I know it was only a movie, but I wasn’t used to horses, and I suppose I was afraid. And you saved me from them, just like it said in the script.”

  He lowered himself into the seat opposite her as she went on. “I had a funny thought right after Joseph hit the man with the chair. I remembered another scene—it was in a bank or a lawyer’s office, something like that—when someone hit you with a chair, and it broke into a hundred pieces.” She took a deep breath, as if the memory required too much effort. “But that was one of those trick chairs, wasn’t it? Just a movie trick. I’ll bet you’ve forgotten that too.”

  What the hell? He found himself staring at her. A memory was taking shape. Not yet a name, but a memory....

  She polished off the drink with one long swig and put the glass down heavily. “Something bad happened to you,” she said thickly. “I saw it in the paper a long time ago. Something bad. Well, something happened to me too.”

  “What happened to you?” As his mind worked to retrieve the memory, a face swam into view, a beautiful face, and the name was somewhere behind it, coming to the surface.

  But the memory didn’t match the face across the table, and something in his own expression—disappointment, or maybe even pity—gave him away.

  “None of your business.” She looked at him fiercely. “Stop staring at me. I’m sorry I said anything. No, you can’t buy me another drink. Why don’t you just get out of here?”

  Mumbling a goodbye that sounded like an apology, he left the bar. Across the street, he leaned in the window of the car.

  “Where’s your Caddy?” he asked.

  “A block away,” Mad Crow said. “It’s a lot more comfortable than this heap of yours, so let’s go pick it up. Time to celebrate. We’re off to the drive-in for a burger and a malt.” Cassie sat in the back, looking idly out the window.

  “You better go on,” Horn told him. “I’m sticking around for a while.”

  “What are you talking about? If you want a drink, I know a dozen bars better than—”

  “Listen, that woman in there. She knows both of us.”

  “What?”

  “I know. It sounds crazy, but she worked on one of our pictures. Just one, and it was years ago. She mentioned a stampede.... Wait a minute.”

  He snapped his fingers. “It’s Rose. I’ll be damned. Rose Galen.”

  “You’re out of your mind, John Ray.”

  “It’s her. I’m going back to talk to her. You go on.” He sprinted across the street, entered the bar, and looked around.

  She was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As Horn approached, the bartender gave him a look. “Let me guess,” the man said. “You’ve come back to buy a round for the house. On account of you and your friend’s jackass behavior.” He had a military-style crewcut and wore a crisp white shirt and bow tie, and one rolled-up sleeve revealed a Devil Dogs tattoo on his left forearm.

  “I’m afraid I can’t afford that,” Horn said, putting on what he hoped was an ingratiating grin. “But I’m obliged to you for letting things wind down the way they did, without calling in outside help.”

  The man shrugged. “I don’t usually need outside help.”

  “I can believe that,” Horn said. He slid two singles anchored by a silver dollar across the bar. “This is for your trouble. And because I need to ask you about the lady who came in with those two men.”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Maybe.” The bartender seemed suddenly wary. He hadn’t touched the money. “What’s it about?”

  “She said she knew me, and I didn’t remember her at first. Now I do, and I just want to talk to her.”

  “She didn’t sound to me like she wanted to talk to you,” the bartender said. “Told you to get lost, the way I remember it.” The man leaned back on the counter behind him, arms folded. Horn had a sudden thought: He’s trying to protect her.

  “Look,” he said. “I remember her name is Rose. I knew her years ago. It’s kind of embarrassing, you know? Not to recognize her at first. She was a little mad at me, but I promise you I just want to talk to her, ask her what she’s been up to all these years.”

  It sounded feeble, but the bartender seemed to relax. Finally he said, “Most people around here call her Rosie.”

  “Does she come here a lot?”

  “I guess, yeah. I give her credit sometimes, make sure she isn’t bothered.”

  “Do you know any other places she likes to go?”

  “Not really.”

  “Any idea where she lives?”

  “Somewhere up on Bunker Hill, in one of the rooming houses.” The bartender picked up the bills and the big coin and looked at Horn closely. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  Over the man’s shoulder, near the big mirror behind the bar, Horn could see a handful of framed and autographed celebrity photos, the kind often found in bars and eateries around L.A. One of them was a character actor who had a name less familiar than his face. Another photo was of Johnny Mack Brown, complete with Stetson and horse.

  If you like the westerns, you just might know me, Horn thought. My rowdy friend too. But aloud he said simply, “I doubt it.”

  The man shrugged and went over to take an order from the waitress. Then he stopped and came back, as if remembering something.

  “I hope I don’t find out you bothered her,” he said.

  “I won’t bother her,” Horn assured him. “I don’t want to rile the U.S. Marines.” He pointed to the tattoo. “Pacific?”

  “Yeah, a few of those islands,” the bartender said. “You in too?”

  “Army,” Horn said. “Italy.” He started to add something, but he felt the old wave of shame wash over him, shame that had kept him from talking to anyone about his time in the war. The bartender turned away again, and Horn left.

  He rounded a corner and cut over to Hill Street, where he turned north. It was almost eleven, and there was less foot traffic along this street than on Broadway, and almost no neon. The rain was little more than mist now, but his raincoat did little to keep out the January night air. He took long strides, and it wasn’t long before he spotted her up ahead.

  She walked a little unsteadily on her high heels, head down, her posture suggesting that she was hugging herself to stay warm. Up ahead to the left was Angels Flight, the short and steep cable railway that carried people up to Bunker Hill. When she reached it, she stopped at the big stone arch that framed the fare booth. That was where he caught up with her as she fumbled in her change purse.

  He glanced at the fare sign above. “Two, please,” he said to the woman behind the glass as he stepped forward, placing a dime on the worn counter.

  Rose Galen looked up questioningly, hand still in her purse, then recognized him. Her expression hardened.

  “Mind if I ride with you?” he asked her.

  “It’s a free country
.”

  “Good.” They passed inside to join the half-dozen passengers waiting for the next car, then stood there awkwardly.

  “Smoke on the Mountain,” he said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “That was the name. Over ten years ago, and it was only my second movie, which means you were only my second leading lady. I’m sorry I didn’t remember you, Rose. It was just—”

  “Just that I’ve changed so much,” she said, looking him in the eye defiantly. “How do they say it? The years haven’t been kind to her. Isn’t that right?”

  As he tried to frame an answer, one of the two orange and black cable cars arrived, slowly descending to the pad. They stepped aboard with the others and sat across from each other, the wooden floor sharply tilted but the seats angled so that each passenger sat level. After a few moments the car lurched mildly and began its slow climb.

  Horn looked around. In contrast to the crowds on Broadway, the people on the car seemed to belong to another L.A., one that was older, more tired, and less prosperous. He took in the scuffed shoes and worn clothes. One man, unshaven, held a paper bag in which the top of a newly purchased bottle of liquor was just visible.

  “You know what they call these two cable cars?” Rose Galen asked him abruptly. Across the narrow aisle, he could smell the liquor on her breath.

  “Ah, no.”

  “You must not get up the hill much.”

  “It’s been a while,” he said. “I don’t have much reason to go up there.”

  “Not many do,” she said. “Just those of us who live there. They call the cars Sinai and Olivet. They’re named after mountains in the Bible.” As before, she spoke with the careful enunciation of those who know that heavy drinking can make them stumble over words. “We’re riding on Sinai. When they built this thing a long time ago, Bunker Hill was where the rich folks lived in the big houses, and riding the cable car up there must have seemed like a trip to Heaven.” She laughed harshly as her right hand twisted and released the fabric of her skirt, over and over. “It’s not that kind of a place anymore.”

  In the unforgiving overhead lights, he got his first good look at her. Time had not been kind to her, it was true, and no one would call her beautiful today. Those years showed in the lines around her eyes and mouth and the twin furrows between her brows. Her hair, once a rich brown, was now half gray and spilled carelessly out from under her hat. And although his emerging memory of her included a sense of serenity, what he saw now was tight-wound tension, characterized by the repetitive, unconscious motion of her right hand half-buried in her skirt.

  But as he looked, he began to discern the Rose he remembered, the woman he’d known in that brief time before she disappeared. Even though some drinkers get bloated, she appeared to be still trim within those baggy clothes. And although her hair was no longer dark, a lock of it hung over one eye in a way that seemed familiar to him. The full lower lip remained, as did the direct, brown-eyed gaze. Best of all, he had seen those eyes flash at him with anger tonight, telling him life had not dulled all her responses.

  The humming cable car and its tired passengers faded, and for a few seconds he saw a young woman in a loud western shirt, a kerchief knotted around her neck, sitting astride a skittish mount. Like a camera, his memory moved in for a close-up as she worked the reins, grinning broadly and making a joke about her own horsemanship. He heard himself laugh along with her.

  Then the scene shifted to a quieter place, and the memory took on a different emotion, one summoned up from a deeper level, a feeling he hadn’t touched in a long time. In his mind, he reached out for her....

  An old woman in the car was seized with a coughing fit, dragging Horn back to the present. He realized Rose was looking at him warily, almost suspiciously, and he felt as if he had been caught in something shameful.

  He had questions for her. But he didn’t know if he could get past the barrier of booze. Horn himself liked to drink and even had been known to overindulge when the occasion demanded, but he hated habitual drunks, those who let alcohol take them over. He suspected the feeling originated with his father’s sermons against the evils of drinking. Horn had spent much of his adult life fleeing the memory of the Reverend John Jacob Horn, but the old man had a way of surprising him even today, of infiltrating his thinking, of ambushing him with his convictions, his absolute certitude on questions of good and evil. Horn knew, of course, that there was no such thing as absolute good or evil but only those slippery regions in between. Except in that sleepless time before dawn, when he sometimes lay awake, heard the faint thunder of his father’s voice, and wondered....

  “We’re here,” Rose said as the car gently stopped at the top of the incline. They stepped off with the others, and a moment later he stood with her, looking around at Bunker Hill.

  The years had not been kind to the hill either. Early in the century, the city’s merchant princes had built their grand homes up here, tall Victorians and Italianates and Gothic revival showcases with turrets and gables and balustrades and ornate detail hand-carved into the wood. Three and sometimes four stories they stood, with servants’ quarters in the upper levels. Proudly their owners looked down on the raw young city from high on their hill, and they sent their servants down by cable car to do business and buy goods and then return by the route of the angels. It must have been a good life, Horn reflected.

  But it lasted less than half a century. By the end of the war, the merchant princes and their descendants had fled the heart of the city, and their homes had begun to decay. Looking around, Horn could see that the once-dense blocks were now pocked with vacant lots here and there. The homes that remained had been converted into rooming houses, shabby and in need of paint. In place of a single wealthy family, most of them now housed a whole collection of the down and out.

  The rain had stopped. They stood on a street lit only by streetlamps. The tall houses loomed up on either side, with dim lights visible behind window shades.

  “Not exactly Heaven, is it?” Rose said. Something caught in her throat, and she coughed repeatedly.

  Horn turned and looked behind them, where the downtown lay ablaze, the lights of its streets and buildings reflected from a layer of angry, gray, low-lying clouds. “It’s not Heaven down below either, Rose,” he said. “I live there, and I should know.”

  She gestured down the street to the right, and they began walking. “So you’re a philosopher now,” she said almost playfully. “When I met you, you were pretending to be a cowboy. And I was impersonating an actress. We made an odd pair, didn’t we?”

  “You were good,” he said forcefully. “Don’t shortchange yourself. I learned a few things from you. I couldn’t understand what you were doing in that no-count little B-movie. You were better than any actress I ever worked with, before or since.”

  “Well, golly,” she said in exaggerated modesty. “Listen to you. I’m all—”

  “I never found out what became of you,” he said suddenly. “You just disappeared at the end of shooting. Why did—”

  “We have arrived,” she said, gesturing grandly. The old house had little of its grandeur left. It still bore all its architectural flourishes, but it seemed to have settled onto its foundation like an elderly woman who can no longer hold herself erect. The hand-painted sign over the porch read: Rook House. Week or Month.

  “This is where I leave you,” she said. “Time for some beauty rest.”

  “What happened, Rose?”

  “All you and I have are a few memories, and I don’t enjoy most of my memories,” she said, patting him tentatively on the arm. “Goodbye, John Ray.”

  * * *

  As usual, the birdcalls woke him just after first light. Walking into the curtained-off alcove that functioned as a kitchen, he found he was out of both bread and eggs. Even though he was already hungry, he took the time to make a batch of drop biscuits, then fried up some bacon to go with a couple of them. There was just enough buttermilk left from the b
iscuits for him to enjoy with his breakfast. He ate out on his front porch, listening to the morning sounds of the canyon. Each day, he found, went a little better if he could start and finish it by spending some time on his porch.

  It wasn’t much of a porch, or much of a house either. The place was just a cabin, made of wood and stone, originally intended to house the caretaker of the old Aguilar estate. It sat a hundred feet above the road that marked the floor of Culebra Canyon, and beside the cabin a gravel road wound up a steep, wooded hillside to the estate itself, up on the ridge that formed the western rim of the canyon.

  The buildings on the ridge had burned down long ago, and the estate was now a blackened ruin. But its current owner, while deciding what to do with the property, allowed Horn to live in the cabin rent-free in exchange for caretaker duties.

  Today those duties focused on a crumbling wall, just off the road, that marked the lower edge of the property. After breakfast, Horn turned on the hose by the cabin and ran some water in a wheelbarrow, then mixed in some cement with a shovel. Wheeling the mixture down the slope, he went to work on the rock-and-cement wall. Wherever he found a loose stone, he pried it out with a crowbar, troweled some cement into the cavity, then re-seated the rock. Periodically he freshened the cement mixture from a jug of water he kept nearby.

  The day was perfect, one of those crisp, sunny, blustery winter days that periodically visited there. Horn wore a light cotton jacket. When his work placed him in a sunny patch, he quickly warmed, but as soon as he moved into the shade, it turned chilly. From the wall, he could glimpse stretches of the asphalt road below, but there was no traffic on it, nor was there usually, since the cutoff to the Aguilar estate was the last side road before the canyon dead-ended. Horn’s nearest neighbor was a half-mile away.

  Los Angeles, his home off and on for more than a decade, had not always been good to him. But along with its many unkindnesses, it offered a geography of a thousand choices. Last night he had seen Rose’s world, a place where worn-out people lived too close together. Horn had made his own choice. He lived almost as far away from civilization as one could get and still say he lived in the L.A. area. He liked it that way.