While I Disappear

by Edward Wright

  They rode in silence all the way back to the Dust Bowl. But as Mad Crow pulled up next to the Cadillac and he and his niece got out, she exploded at him.

  “You make me sick!” she shrieked at him, the neon light painting eerie colors on the Caddy’s white finish and garish pinto hide upholstery. “I hate working for you. And I hate you.”

  “You’re a cartoon Indian,” he yelled back at her. “You’re right out of the funny papers. You’ve got no pride. Wonder why people look down on us, laugh at us? Just look at yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m supposed to be like you?” Her sarcasm was venomous. “Dress like some kind of wild west show? Pretend I’m still acting in cheap movies? I don’t know if you’ve looked at any of them lately, but all you ever did was tag along after him.” She indicated Horn. “I suppose you’re proud of that.”

  “I did my work,” he said grimly. “And I built a life out here. And when your mother asked me to take you in....”

  “I don’t want your charity,” she yelled. “If this is what it’s like to be Indian, I’ll just be white, thank you very—”

  He hit her before she could finish, slapping her face with his big open hand, and the sound was sharp and loud in the parking lot, even over the music coming from inside.

  Cassie gasped and sucked in air, and in the next moment dissolved in breathless sobs. Horn helped her into the Caddy’s passenger seat, and moments later Mad Crow, his face set in stone, drove off.

  * * *

  Horn got in the Ford and began driving home, crossing the Valley southbound until he struck the pass over the Santa Monica Mountains, which led him to the ocean. He turned up the coast until he came to the road that cut inland and wound several miles up Culebra Canyon to his place. It was a long drive, and he could find no listenable music on the radio, so he focused on his thoughts.

  He felt sorry for Cassie, sorry she had no clear idea of the world where she belonged. All of us have problems, he thought. But most of us know who we are from the day we’re born. We either accept who we are or we run from it, but at least we know it, and we draw in the knowledge with our mother’s milk. Cassie doesn’t even know that much.

  Mad Crow might be thinking of kicking her out, Horn speculated, and Cassie wasn’t likely to want to go back to that little South Dakota town, back to the dirt roads and the shabby homes and the junked cars, now that she had had a taste of L.A. He tried to imagine her adrift in this sprawling city, with its bright sun and dark shadows, its noisy streets and its quiet open spaces. Its temptations and contradictions. The thought made him uneasy. Cassie was wily and tough, but she was no match for this place.

  And suddenly he thought of Rose Galen. Another lost soul. Once, he recalled, he had been the lost one and she had been his guide. Mad Crow was right: Whatever success he had attained was partly her doing.

  But during the shooting of Smoke on theMountain, he was still aware of how inadequate he must seem to the others around him—Rose, Mad Crow, and the technicians on the film crew, who had seen cowboy actors come and go over the years. At times, the director, a decent but harried man, looked ready to trade in Horn for the first ranch hand with a clean shirt and a good profile who rode up and volunteered.

  Rose’s work ended on the next to last day of shooting. When they wrapped that day, she caught up with him. “Feel like going for a ride?” she asked. They mounted their horses, and he led the way across the Medallion Ranch, over a low range of hills and into an adjoining valley where no film crews were working. Rose had made off with some extra ham sandwiches and two bottles of soda pop from the lunch wagon. Horn unsaddled the horses to let them graze and spread his bedroll on the grass. They sat there, ate and talked.

  “You don’t think much of yourself, do you?” she said.

  “No,” he said around a mouthful of sandwich, shaking his head emphatically.

  “Well, why are you doing this?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said wonderingly. “I just fell into it. A year ago I was pumping gas and wiping windshields out in Santa Monica, and on weekends I looked after horses on a ranch out in Chatsworth. One day I was giving a riding lesson to this guy. Turned out he was some kind of producer. He asked me if I wanted to pick up some extra money doing bit parts in westerns. I said sure. Six months later the same guy asked me if I wanted to star in—”

  She laughed delightedly. “‘Do you want to be a movie star?’ That’s the question we all want to be asked, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. Did they say that to you too?”

  “Something like that.” The smile left her face, and she seemed far away. “A long time ago.”

  “But I’m no good, Rose. I know that now. I’m tired of embarrassing everybody.”

  “Listen to me.” She sat forward on the bedroll and fixed him with her gaze. “You’re right, you’re not a very good actor. Not yet. Maybe you’ll never be a great actor. But you’ve got something, John Ray. Something the camera likes. I can see it, even if you don’t. All you need to do is identify it and use it.”

  “I appreciate all your help. But—”

  “I won’t be able to help you after today. But you won’t need me anymore. All you need is the self-confidence to stand up in front of the camera, say your lines, and know that there’s something in you that comes across, something the audience likes. You don’t have to be glib, like some of these guys. You don’t have to be good with the girls, or good with a guitar, God help us. All you have to do is be honest.”

  He gave her a crooked grin. The sun was down, and the valley floor had gone from bronze to pink to gray. The grass had lost whatever warmth it had absorbed from the sun. “You’re really something,” he said. “Have you got a guy?”

  “No, and I don’t particularly want one. But—” She looked up at the darkening sky. “Can you see the stars out here?”

  “A million or so. You’re out in the country now.”

  “That’s nice. Well, I was about to say I’d like to sleep here under the stars with you tonight, if you don’t mind.”

  Her words stunned him, but not for long. He hobbled the horses, cleared a spot on the ground, and spread her bedroll next to his. They made love, hungrily and hurriedly, even before the stars came out. Then they lay side by side.

  “Thank you for that,” he said.

  “Thankyou.”

  “I suppose I was a little—”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll go slower next time. And better.”

  They were silent for a while, listening to the crickets and the night birds and the occasional sounds of the horses shifting their weight in the grass nearby. Then she said, “I’m jealous of you, John Ray.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’ve got it all ahead of you. You have an appetite for life, and when the choices come your way, I think you’ll choose the right things.”

  He laughed softly. “Listen to you, the experienced old lady. You sound like you’ve really been around. What about the choices you get to make?”

  “I think I made mine very early,” she said, her words so faint he had to strain to hear. “And the ones I have left are mostly unimportant ones.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Look,” she said, pointing. “Here they come.” He looked, and there was a faint spray of stars all over the inverted bowl of the sky. They seemed to brighten as he watched.

  “What’s the worst thing anyone can do?” she asked, and her voice had such a dreamlike quality she might have been addressing the question to the sky, or to herself.

  “Well,” he said, “my daddy is a preacher. He would probably say the worst thing you can do, after denying God, is to take a life.”

  “Isn’t that funny?” she said, turning toward him. “Your daddy must be a very smart man. I’d say the same thing. Taking a life.”

  “Rose, what—”

  “Shhh.” She put a finger on his lips and rolled closer to him, her other hand suddenly busy. “We have some unfinished bu
siness.”

  In the midst of what followed, he found the presence of mind to reflect, for just a second: She was right. It is better the second time. Much better.

  He awoke groggily a few hours later. It was still dark. She had saddled her horse and was kneeling by him. “Don’t get up,” she said quietly. “I have to leave. You sleep for a while.” She touched his cheek and was gone.

  For over ten years.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Horn slept late, then drove down the canyon road to a diner on Pacific Coast Highway, where he sat at the counter and ate ham and eggs. The door of the diner was open, and he could smell the ocean and hear the cars on the highway and, beyond the road, the sound of the surf.

  Back at his place, he started on a long-planned job, clearing weeds along the road that led up to the estate. Later, he thought, he might head over to Westwood and make the collection for the Indian. He worked for two hours, stooped over as he stuffed weeds into a big canvas bag he dragged up the road behind him. By eleven, he had made his way almost up to the grounds of the estate. Tired and sweaty, he ran a hot bath in the battered, claw-footed tub that took up most of his small bathroom and soaked for a while, then made a salami sandwich, opened an RC, and sat on the porch to eat.

  As he sat there, the thought of visiting the professor with the foolproof poker system began to seem less important. Instead, he went inside, looked up a number, and dialed it.

  “Hello, Dex. It’s John Ray Horn.”

  “John Ray. How you been?”

  “Not bad. I didn’t know if you had the same number—or if I’d find you at home today. Haven’t they put you out to pasture yet?”

  Dexter Diggs laughed. “To stud, you mean? That’d be the life. Hell, I can’t afford to retire. No, they’ve decided they’re going to kill me instead, with all the aggravation. I finished shooting one on Friday. Evelyn’s going to have me underfoot for a couple of weeks, then I start shooting another one—something about stolen atomic secrets.”

  “Sounds pretty exciting.”

  There was no response. After an awkward silence, the other man said, “I got nothing for you, John Ray.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Work. Aren’t you calling about—”

  “I don’t need a job, Dex. And if I did, I’d know better than to try to come back to Medallion anyway.”

  “All right, then.” Diggs sounded relieved. “You know, the last time you came around, that day we were shooting out at the ranch, Junior almost had a heart attack when he saw you. Started yelling about calling the police, getting you thrown off the property. And you almost cost me my job just for talking to you.”

  “I know, Dex. Sorry—except about the heart attack. Listen, here’s why I called: You remember Rose Galen?”

  A silence, and Horn could almost hear him reaching back a decade for the memory. Then: “Sure. Smoke on the Mountain, right?”

  “That’s it. I want to ask you about her. Who hired her, where she came from, what happened to her later.”

  “Well, I hired her. I mean, I recommended her for the movie.”

  “How come?”

  “I knew her. I’d worked with her before.”

  “What happened to her? After we finished?”

  “I don’t know,” Diggs said. “I lost track of her. One thing I know: She never worked in the business after that. Have you heard anything?”

  “I’ve seen her, Dex. Just the other night. It was in a bar downtown, and she was…well, she was not in good shape.”

  “Damn.” The word came out quietly. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m just trying to find out what happened. You said you worked with her before. When was that, and where?”

  Diggs took his time answering. Finally he chuckled and said, “You were a nice guy, John Ray, and we turned out some good shoot-em-ups together. But I sometimes forget how little you knew about things. Remember that time we were driving down Hollywood Boulevard and I pointed out John Barrymore coming out of Musso and Frank? And you said, ‘Who’s John Barrymore?’ ”

  “All right, Dex. I know who he is now.”

  “But you didn’t then. See, even though you were an actor—”

  “I know a few people who’d argue with you about that.”

  “Maybe so. At least the studio called you one. You worked in Hollywood, but you were pretty ignorant about what went on in this town before you showed up. Let me ask you this: When you met Rose, that day she walked onto the set, you knew nothing about her?”

  “No,” Horn said with irritation. “What the hell are you getting at?”

  “I’m going to answer your question,” Diggs said with some satisfaction. “But in my own way.”

  “Come on, Dex….”

  “No, I’m going to give you the long answer, not the short one. You’ll have to come over here for it. How’s Saturday night, about seven? It’s Evelyn’s bridge night, but we’ll see what’s in the fridge.” Diggs paused. “You going to talk to her again?”

  “I don’t know. But I think I’m going to try.”

  “Say hello for me. And tell her I’d like to see her sometime.”

  * * *

  It was close to one o’clock when Horn parked the Ford across the street from Rose Galen’s rooming house and got out. On his side of the street stood more rooming houses interrupted by a junk-strewn vacant lot, like a gap in a row of old and yellowing teeth. Through the gap he could look out beyond the east rim of the hill and across much of downtown, where the last of the morning haze was burning off. The pointed-top City Hall dominated the skyline, an ersatz Babylonian transplant looming over this newest and most American of cities.

  Below sleepy Bunker Hill the noise of traffic hummed away, and the smell of exhaust worked its way up the steep streets. Downtown was dirty, he knew, and the smoke from cars was foul, but he didn’t always mind. Years earlier, when he had come here as a refugee from the hill country of the South, Los Angeles had taken him in with no questions. He had embraced the raw young city, with its fast pace and bustling streets, and even today the lung-biting smell of cars on the road both repelled and excited him.

  He went up the worn steps of Rose’s rooming house to the spacious front porch, which had once been a shade of white but now was a mottled gray. A woman, not Rose, sat on the porch swing. Inside, he found the manager’s office, a converted room with a Dutch door, top half open. The manager was short, round, and balding.

  “Rose Galen?”

  “Third floor, south front,” the man said, barely glancing at Horn.

  The stairs squeaked, and the air in the stairway was close and still and bore the smell of years of boiled cabbage and beans and other dishes he’d rather not know about. On the third floor, he knocked at her door but got no answer.

  Retracing his steps, he stood on the porch, considering asking the manager if he knew her whereabouts.

  “Who you looking for?” It was the woman on the swing. He walked over. She was tiny, almost birdlike, swaddled in a heavy coat buttoned up to her neck. Her feet stopped well short of the planking, and she gently rocked the swing back and forth on its two heavy, rusting chains. She could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy.

  “Rose Galen,” he said. “Do you know her?”

  “Rosie? Sure. She lives right over me.” Her voice was tiny as she was, and animated. He had a quick image of a small animal in one of the cartoons shown before a movie. A mouse, a rabbit. “Who are you?”

  “I’m an old friend. Do you know where she is?”

  “Yeah.” The little woman smiled open-mouthed, as if enjoying a secret joke. She had not visited a dentist lately. “You sure you’re not a bill collector?”

  “No,” he said. At least not today.

  “What’s your name?”

  “John Ray Horn.”

  “I’m Madge. You got a cigarette, John Ray?”

  “I usually roll my own,” he said. “You probably—”

  “I don�
�t mind,” she said, patting the seat of the swing next to her. “My late husband, Earl, used to do that, all through hard times, until the war came along and we could get regular work. I got used to smoking handmades.”

  He sat next to her and dug into his shirt pocket for a pack of papers and his pouch of Bull Durham. He laid a paper into the hollow formed by the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, delicately shaped it into a trough, carefully sprinkled the tobacco into the trough, and smoothed it with his index finger. He closed the pouch by yanking the string with his teeth and pocketed it. Then, with two quick motions, he licked the edge of the paper and rolled the bundle into a tight little cigarette, which he offered her.

  “You do that real nice,” she said, leaning over to accept a light. “Just like Earl did.” She sucked the smoke in greedily, then coughed lightly. “Going to kill me, if a dozen other things don’t first.”

  “About Rose?”

  She eyed him appraisingly. “Well, if you were a good friend, you’d know where she was, ’cause she goes there most every day.”

  “We go way back,” he said. “It’s just that I haven’t seen her for a long time.”

  “You the guy who walked her over here the other night?”

  “Uh, that’s right. How do you know about that?”

  “Not much happens around here I don’t know about. I’ve lived here longer than anybody, even the manager. During the war, I was the one made sure everybody kept their blackout curtains closed.”

  “That’s a big job,” he said. He waited.

  She took another drag, burning up half of what remained. “Anybody who can roll a good smoke can’t be all bad,” she said finally. “Besides, I could see right away you’re not the gray man. You don’t look anything like him.”

  “Who’s the gray man?”

  “Just somebody we’ve noticed hanging around. She’s down at the Anchor. You know where that is?”

  “On Main Street?”

  She nodded. “She goes there to help out with the noon meal.”

  “Thanks, Madge.”

  * * *

  He drove over to First Street and down the steep hill to the fortress-like newspaper building that housed the Times and the Mirror, then passed City Hall, towering smooth and white, on his left. After turning onto Main, he parked and began walking south.