Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  UNDER A NEUTRAL-COLORED SKY, WE STOOD IN THE STREAM. THE AIR, the coolness, alluded to but not felt, not by me, sucked all shadow. The light was even, dull but present, democratic, and Chaney whistled with the lit pipe in his teeth, his sweet smoke testament to his breathing. And I read back what I had written.

  My bare feet were in the stream with him, to the ankles. I could feel the tiny mouths of the trout nibble at the dead flesh of my heels and I nudged them forward, away, toward the actor’s drowned worm. But it was me they preferred.

  “The bastards aren’t biting,” Chaney complained.

  “Why don’t you try over where I’m standing?” It was what I imagined a good marriage would be, the comfort, the ease, the mutual respect, and that extra treasure of being able to create together. When I imagined sex, and I admit I did, there was always a bleed of Lucky’s face through his features. Lon’s confidence, his shoulders, and his athletic thighs perhaps. But Lucky’s eyes. And smile.

  We spent a week like this, eating outdoors (me surreptitiously disposing of my tiny chewed-up wads), walking in the evaporating pine mist of late morning, always talking, always challenging, me with my hard pad and pen and his slow mantra of “read it over again.” At night, by the snapping fire, he spoke of the system, of an artist’s place in it. How nothing was owed. That all must be earned, and this was the reason he’d refused to help his son follow in his footsteps.

  His natural mode of expression was gestural, the words floating like raw stuffs around him, waiting to be shaped by the clean and precise movements of his hands. Deaf parents, he would offer when my eyes were drawn to their rhythmic flailing. Was I the only one fortunate enough to know this?

  “To portray a role, you have to embody it. Pain is fleeting; film is forever.”

  THE MORNING OF OUR LAST DAY, CHANEY LIT HIS FIRST PIPE OF THE morning and tumbled into a coughing jag so violent he burst the blood vessels in both his eyes. Only after he spewed up two coffee cups of red did he let me call the ambulance. The truth was, Chaney had been in precarious health for many months. Metro had even suspended his contract with the caveat that if he showed significant improvement over the summer he could have his pick of projects.

  August. Hospital day.

  The actor had been vomiting up ever-deepening hues of sunset, the thin red of dawn, the heart blood of twilight. Chaney’s only son sat in a corner, a boy too tall to be a boy yet too awkward and untried to be anything else. He waited for his father’s end as hopelessly as he waited for his father’s love. I’d been summoned and I went. But I paused when I saw that broken boy. Chaney motioned again that I should come to him. And it was the only time I felt a pang of conflict for the great Mr. Chaney.

  “Kid,” he rasped in my ear. “Lend me some.”

  I bowed my head closer, not sure to what he eluded, ignited with shame by his son’s bleary gaze on my back. I smelled bleach, formaldehyde, the sour tobacco stink of his plastic breathing tube.

  “Lend me some,” he croaked. “Some of what you got.”

  His eyes were wide, peeled to youth, to behind youth. An infant left to the lions.

  “I need it. I need it now. Whatever made you the way you are, I need a little piece of your ever-ever after.”

  HIS COFFIN WAS DRAPED WITH AN AMERICAN FLAG, UNHEARD OF FOR A mere actor. Hollywood stopped in its paces, the whole town, for two minutes of silence. And I stood well outside the cortege of relatives and business associates and thought of his last words to me. Had he known what I was? Had he sought me out on mere pretense, hoping in our conversations about the minute habits of the undead that he might uncover some rare and practical gem of mine? Had he hoped I’d somehow save him? Hadn’t he known that even if I could, I loved him too much to ever do that?

  Hollywood never mourns for long.

  Phones ring again.

  And when mine rang it was a call from the wilds of the Malibu colony. A call from Browning himself.

  CHAPTER 31

  He sent a limo, of course. This was the standard first foray in any serious negotiation, but I was still unclear what he wanted of me. His call had been little more than a terse reintroduction and the time I could expect his car.

  The interior was a portable Schwab’s Pharmacy. Chrome racks held every confection then in commercial production: dimpled bags of Boston Baked Beans, Milk Maid Royals, nonpareils dusted with every color of sugared granule, licorice sticks stacked neatly as cords of timber, and that new confection, the one named after the inventor’s horse, Snickers. In a silver bucket ingeniously fitted to the inside of the door, several Moxie sodas, in all flavors, frosted in their bath of ice. But what caught my attention was the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit chocolate bar. Hadn’t such a confection provided Mutter with his freshman bout of American sweetness? I thought of him then, the back of his thick neck turned from me, alive and vital and living his own life. I sat back and wondered if the rumors about his girl being pregnant were true.

  Mr. Browning was never alone. He had a very real phobia of himself, I imagine. But people were of no real interest to him. Only their artifacts. Carnival banners were everywhere, hung from the hand-painted ceiling and the lip of the dark oak wainscoting, old sideshow canvases rolled and creased so many times the paint was mere ghostly traces. Delwood the Dog-Faced Boy. Cleo the Fish Girl. Rondo the Ineffable “It.” Is It Male or Female? You Decide.

  And canvas was not all. He had carnival punks from penny-ante shooting galleries, rigged coffins from tenth-rate magicians, a false-fronted Chinese treasure chest, a chess-playing mechanical harlequin with a dead man’s grin, two-headed babies yellowing in magnifying brine, prosthetic limbs, detachable noses, a plaster iron maiden lined with cracking rubber spikes. The man himself sat with his back to me, facing a sputtering fire. I could hear the crackle of crumpled paper and see the fire brighten as dry balls were tossed into it.

  I approached quietly, improving my view of him with each step until I could see a script in his lap, each page torn and tossed with focused efficiency. The script was Dracula; Property of Universal Pictures heading each page. He was barefoot, in striped pajama bottoms, a week’s worth of growth crowding his perennial mustache.

  “Mr. Browning,” I said.

  “Present,” he nearly yelled.

  “I’ve arrived, sir.”

  “Deducible. But is it a fact?”

  He turned to me. His eyes were nearly swollen shut. He sneezed and reached for a tumbler of amber liquid.

  “He would have been magnificent,” he said, taking a swallow of his drink. “Better than anything I ever did with him.”

  “Who?”

  “Lonny. Keep up, goose.”

  I moved to crouch by the fire, facing him, but he waved me away.

  “I prefer you in my periphery, sister,” he said. He poured himself another drink. “Have you read this shit they want me to ringmaster?”

  I crouched by the arm of his chair and peered over the torn pages in his lap. I recognized the text from my own research.

  “The Balderston. Yes.”

  “Broadway. Now they want respectable spooks.”

  He broke off here and I saw the child in the man, alone in the dark, the bogeyman express, terrified and alone. But I could not stomach it to reach out and touch him.

  “So what do you plan to do?”

  “Do? I told that kraut dwarf to shove it.”

  “So you’ve passed on the project?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I should do it. I kinda feel I owe it to Lonny.”

  “So you will?”

  “Christ. I’d rather swallow red-hot thumbtacks. I’d rather drink toilet water. I’d rather clip that little thing of skin under my tongue and gargle with saltpeter . . . but they got me.”

  “Contract?”

  “No. Me. They got me. The same way they got you. The way they got all of us. Glamour. Cheap, chintzy ten-for-a-penny glamour. All hooey. All goose shit. But we’d walk on bloody stumps just to be next to it.”

&n
bsp; He was right, of course, but still I was confused as to my function.

  “Mr. Browning, I’m not clear why you called for me.”

  “Not clear? It’s clear as mud, kid.”

  He got up then and strolled over to a gothic revivalist table piled with empty bottles and books. He tossed objects to the floor whose concussions were broken by the thick rug under his feet and found what he was looking for. A film can.

  “I watched this six times. Six. And every time it got better.”

  He tossed it to me and I scrambled to catch it. It was a print of Zipper, still with German titles.

  “That, sister, is a fucking masterpiece. I would have castrated myself with a rusty razor if I could have made a picture half as good. You hear me?”

  I felt a flutter as of real excitement, but nothing came to the surface. I was too out of practice with compliments. I managed a smile.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “No. Never. Genius never says thank you.”

  I felt a distinct chill in the air as that last comment hung there, cloaked as it was in envy, shame, and anger. I wanted to change the subject. Ground the conversation.

  “Who do they want in the lead?” I finally managed.

  “Well, if old Uncle Carl had his way, I’m sure he’d put a necromancer on payroll, raise his great-grandfather from the grave, and stick the old fucker in the cape and spats. Just to keep things in the family.” He slumped back into his chair and stared once again into the fire. “I don’t know. Paul Muni maybe? Who knows. I’m pushing for an unknown. But so did Sisyphus.”

  “Have you seen the Los Angeles production?”

  “What, with that Carpathian lingerie salesman, what’s his name?”

  “Bela Lugosi. And I hear he’s devastating in the role.”

  “No. Strictly nuts to that.”

  “So who?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’ll go to Lugosi. No choice. No marquee lead will touch this stinker with a pool cue.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a goddamned fairy story, that’s why. Strictly kid’s stuff.”

  “Are you quite sure of that Mr. Browning?” I felt more than vague propriety and was offended.

  “Nuts! It’s the goddamned twentieth century, kid. You think Joe and Jane Schmuck will part with real Yankee green to see a spook story?”

  “But the supernatural aspect is what gives it—”

  “Diapers! Strictly nursery time!”

  “Oh, Mr. Browning, if you only . . .” I stopped myself. But my anger was building.

  “Look, it’s a simple rewrite. Two Hungarian madmen escape from some Budapest nuthouse and are convinced they’re vampires. One won’t go in for the bloodsucking and so sticks to rats and vermin. The other guy, well, he likes his delusions straight. It’s the story of two con men, two shysters out for a little rub-a-dub and some high-class tail. It’s London After Midnight in gypsy-ville.”

  “No!” I almost yelled. “You will destroy it if you shyster it up, if you make this picture talk out the sides of its mouth!”

  “What?”

  “If you bothered to exhume yourself and spend some time out there on the streets, you’d see the last thing people want is what they know. They’ve got a bellyful of what they already know, Mr. Browning. Foreclosures, scams, huckster promises. It is you who must keep up. And it is not fantasy. Not fantastic at all. People want to believe there are such things. And they are wise to do so.”

  “Christ. You’re talkin’ like a tent show swami. You make this thing with the supernatural angle you’ll hear crickets.” His world was the con, the freak, the desperate. The downtrodden but very explainable world of the petty criminal.

  “Crickets? I’ll hear crickets, you say?” And before I knew what I was doing, I fumbled with the buttons of my blouse and thrust his filthy head to my smooth chest. “What do you hear in there, Mr. Browning? Crickets? Anything?”

  “Jesus! What the hell are you doing?”

  He struggled to pull away, but I held him fast.

  “Educating, Mr. Browning. You think you know all there is in nature’s basement? You haven’t scratched the surface. Listen!” He put his head slowly back to my chest, grinning stupidly, then looked up at me.

  “So no heartbeat. Big deal. Classic two-penny gaff. I knew a guy who could lift a truck with hooks through his eyelids.”

  “Lon wanted it this way,” I sputtered. “He understood the uncanny like you never could.”

  “Lon is dead, sister!” he spat. “Kaput! Blooey! Yesterday’s pot roast!” I was burning to make my point, desperate to shut his drunken, foul, unbelieving mouth. But what could I do? And if I did it, how would I go on, him knowing what I really was? What would happen to me? To Mutter?

  “What if I was to tell you you must make this picture as Lon imagined it,” I said as calmly as I could. “Not for his sake. Not for mine. But for yours. For one simple and unassailable reason. Because it’s true. It’s true, Mr. Browning! Such creatures do exist!”

  He smacked his lips and made a rude and very long-winded farting sound. “That’s what I’d say.” He giggled. “And shame on poor, miserable Mr. Chaney for wasting his last precious days being taken under by a low-down shit-heel like you!” That was it. Something snapped. And I thrust him away and reached for the closest sharp object I could find. It was a dagger-shaped letter opener and I plunged it deep into my chest.

  “Hey!”

  Browning screamed, leaping away from me, as I dragged the dull knife down the length of my torso, the skin tearing with the sound of old leather. Dull pink dust trickled from the wound as I reached my hands into the gash and pulled at the brittle bear trap of my split ribs.

  “Look, Mr. Browning. Fairy stories? Nursery rhymes?” The shriveled fist of my heart hung like late-harvest fruit on the withered stem of my arteries. “No, sir,” I said, taking his hand in mine and closing his stiff fingers over the desiccated organ. “Such things do exist!”

  An hour later, after the wound sealed and he had me open it again for a second, third, and fourth time, giggling each time with fiendish relish as the flesh reknit with a faint crackle, he finally got to the point of our meeting.

  “Lon said you’d make me change my mind,” he said. “He wasn’t kidding.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Uncle Carl looked as if he’d swallowed a live guppy. It was the only time I saw tears in Junior’s eyes. Of the small group of us who suffered through that first assembly, only one of us was grinning. That was Browning. And I think that had more to do with his luck at track than the nitrate offal cooling in the take-up reel of the projection booth. Apart from a few on-set visits, my influence was stridently banned from the picture. Still, I couldn’t help feeling more than partly responsible for the overheated wake we were all being forced to endure once the lights came up.

  “Put it on the road, Junior,” Uncle Carl finally said.

  “But, Pop.”

  “Put it on the one-nighter circuit, son. Let’s try to get back what we can out of it.”

  “But with a few edits . . .”

  “Gold leaf on sheep shit is still sheep shit, my son.” It was the only time I’d heard Uncle Carl curse.

  It went to midnight whoopee shows, where it played to houses packed with self-soiled bums and junkie whores too jittery to ply the streets. The highlight of its East Coast run was in New Haven, where a few rambunctious students released a flock of live bats in the theater. The local press, unaware the bats were a student prank, praised the studio for its creative publicity. To cover all bases, a silent version was even struck. But even that played to mostly empty houses.

  Then, somewhere in the Midwest, in some rinky second-run house, in a town with a greater population of cows than people, a strange thing happened. People began to line up.

  It started, as with all innovative American entertainment, with a religious backlash. The son or daughter of some Cotton Belt Methodist must have come home bug-eyed and salivating, mumbling
about the blood being the life. And when it was finally gleaned that the traumatized child was not reciting the Eucharist, an all-out crusade began. Reels of celluloid exploded in bonfires, effigies with straw widow’s peaks and flour-sack capes were torched at sporting events. Local pastors flooded the weak radio signals of rural communities, denouncing the “unwholesome and deviously satanic” allure of this new abomination from Tinseltown. It was Lugosi as a caped and coifed John the Baptist heralding, in spirit, what would be the first coming of rock and roll. The approbation of children makes things cool. Their parents’ dollars make them commodities. Shows that sold out at midnight would sell out for the first few showings of the next day. Lines wrapped around city squares, through cow pastures, over the low hills of Civil War battlefields.

  Then the conflagration came to the cities.

  And how did father and son thank those fat cherubs of solvency as they came triumphantly through the stucco gates of that San Fernando elysium? They dropped Browning’s contract.

  “But she was a hit,” I said, watching Browning sip his breakfast from a silver flask in a corner of the commissary.

  “She took too long to turn a buck,” he said, blinking. “And timing is the name of this fucking game, kiddo.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Back to Metro. I don’t think Sam will ever be done with me. Not until he can convince himself he actually understands one of my pictures.” But that wasn’t why he had agreed to meet me. He had other news. And he took his time getting to it. “At least you got something to look forward to,” he said, smirking. “I hear Junior’s putting a man-made-creature picture on deck. You heard about this? A man-made-monster picture. Sound familiar?”