By the time he landed, the mob was looking for other crewmen to swarm. Jack was out of his head. He dropped his parachute and looked to spend his other seven bullets on German townspeople. He plucked an old man off his navigator. That mob scattered. It was too late for his buddy.
Jack sought out another mob in this potato field. Most of his crewmates had landed before him. Out of reach. He could only find a couple of townspeople nearby. One kid gathered a handful of rocks and threw them at Jack. He dropped to his knee and shot the kid. And that was the last one. He didn’t know where the mob went. He only knew it was away from him.
Jack ran back to his navigator and took his bailout kit. He found a compass inside. All he knew was that safety was several hundred miles of occupied territory to the north and west. He’d have to find a way across a channel or a sea, too.
There was also the matter of the town he’d just bombed, sitting immediately between where he was and where he wanted to go.
Jack headed for the cover of some woods south of the potato field. No one seemed to pursue. He threaded through the trees for a couple of hours until he found a bombed-out schoolhouse. He went inside.
Not much remained. A few torn books, splintered desks, about a third of the floor. If there’d been kids inside when it was bombed, their corpses had been removed. Everything of any value had been removed. All that was left was Jack and some rats. And his realization: I am the one who dropped the bombs on these towns. Sure, there was a whole plane and a whole war effort, but on Jack’s bomber, there was only one guy who took aim and dropped the bombs. Jack. Just like there was only one guy in the crew willing to keep shooting to stay alive.
The weight suddenly settled on his shoulders. He’d killed four human beings that day. One woman. Two kids. One elderly man. No soldiers. No one with guns. More than that, he’d killed everyone his bomb landed on in that small German city right before he parachuted down into it. Him. Jack Chesley, the grubby kid from Meridian Street. When the time came to kill, he was the killer.
Oh, Christ.
Jack curled up into the corner of the schoolhouse and wallowed. He stayed there for two days, not eating, not drinking, barely moving, crushed under the weight of his actions. If not for the overwhelming thirst that became more painful than his conscience, he may have let himself die there.
Now Jack threw whiskey at that thirst and wallowed again. How many days did he lie around his parents’ house? Four? Five? How many times did the phone ring? Christ, it seemed to be going every time he snapped back awake. Would he let himself die in these bottles of whiskey? Maybe this time, yes.
Only Gertie didn’t let that happen. She showed up at the front door on the fourth or fifth morning, banging and calling for Jack. He had to weigh his options—he’d crawled inside this bottle so that he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, and Gertie was someone. Talking with people would be difficult. Even Gertie. But all that door banging hurt his head more than the prospect of ending his bender did. He pushed the armchairs out of the foyer and opened the door. Gertie took one look at him and said, “What a mess.”
Jack stepped aside and invited her in. “I need to pick up around here.”
“I’m not talking about the house. I’m talking about you. Jesus, Jackie, I’ve known urchins to crawl out of a ditch looking better than you do. And you stink, too.”
Jack looked down at the front of the T-shirt he’d been wearing for days. Was that…? Yep. That was crusted vomit on his chest, right where it would’ve dripped down from his chin. Jack looked lower. At least he had pants on.
Gertie said, “Pull yourself together. I need you.”
“What for?”
“We’re shooting a gangster picture, and we need an extra. A yegg. You’re just ugly enough.”
Jack rubbed his stubble. “Should I keep the beard?”
Gertie laughed. “You look too awful for movies, Jack. Clean yourself.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “You have ten minutes to shit, shower, and shave. I’ll make coffee.”
Jack abided.
They arrived at the studio at eight o’clock on the dot. After the triple S and coffee and a quick egg sandwich from an automat, Jack felt something like a human, even if he was still drunk from his brannigan and dressed like a clown. He’d been sleeping in his best pair of slacks during the bender. His other suit had been sliced into strips at the Oxnard brothel. His only remaining choices were in his father’s closet. The old man had carried around forty pounds that Jack hadn’t yet packed on. Couple his natural leanness with two years in a POW camp and another year not trusting anything he ate and four days of a whiskey diet, and Jack was turning into a beanpole. The old man’s pants had been flat across the waist, but once Jack pulled the belt tight, they looked pleated. He could’ve smuggled watermelons under the shirt. The jacket fit all right across the shoulders, then ballooned out. The whole ensemble came across like a reverse zoot.
First thing Gertie did once they hit the soundstage was holler over to the wardrobe girl. “Ethel, this is Jack,” she said. “Put him in something decent. Pinstripes, if you have it.” She lowered her voice. “And if he could walk off the lot wearing it today, all the better.”
Ethel winked and led Jack by the hand to a nest of portable garment racks. She pulled two of the racks into an L that blocked off the rest of the soundstage. “You got on clean underwear?” she asked. Jack nodded. “Good,” she said. “Strip down to it.”
Jack slid out of his jacket. Ethel stepped forward, grabbed his shirt in the middle, and pulled it apart. Buttons flew everywhere. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said. “I’m just in a hurry. I got seven other lugs like you to dress this morning.” She took out a measuring tape and ran it along Jack’s arms and torso. She nodded. “The pants you’ll take off yourself.”
Jack worked his belt loose. Ethel dug through a rack of suits until she came across a forty-two long of dark blue gabardine. No pinstripes, but double-breasted and wide shouldered. Matching pants. “You wouldn’t be Jack Chesley, would you?”
Jack dropped his pants. The still, soundstage air was cool against the hair of his thighs. “I am.”
Ethel tossed the jacket and pants across a rolling bureau. She turned to the shirts, flicking her hands across a row of white, cotton numbers. “I knew your widow.”
“Wilma?”
Ethel’s fingers stopped moving. She lowered her brow and glared at Jack. “Were there others?”
Something about that look and question made Jack aware that he was standing on a huge warehouse floor wearing only his T-shirt, boxers, and a fallen pair of black socks. He glanced over the garment racks for Gertie. She was on the other side of the soundstage, passing around the day’s shooting scripts. Jack said, “Nope. Just Wilma.”
Ethel smiled. “She was a hoot, that gal. I could tell you stories, but you probably don’t want to hear them.”
Ethel pushed a dress shirt against Jack’s chest. He slid into it while she ran a tape along his inseam. “I’d love to hear your stories,” he said.
Ethel tossed the blue, double-breasted jacket to him. Jack pulled it on. Even without the mirror, he could tell he looked smart. Ethel measured the inseam of the pants on her bureau. She marked them with chalk, dug a pin cushion out of a drawer, and folded up the cuffs. She pinned them in place. “Later, maybe. I don’t even have enough time to hem these rags for you.” You can get someone to sew them after the shoot.” She tossed the pants to Jack.
Jack caught them, turned them around in his hand. Hemming was no big deal. He’d grown up poor. When she’d been alive, his mom had been some swell’s domestic, which meant she didn’t do any of the domestic stuff at home. He’d learned how to do for himself. “You got an extra needle and thread? I can take care of this.”
Ethel dug both out of the bureau and handed them to him. “Knock yourself out.” And, in the same kind of low-voice move that Gertie pulled before, she added, “By the smell of things, you might need a nip or two to get through this sh
oot. Talk to Hayles. He’s always holding.”
Jack pasted on a sheepish smile. He took the needle and thread and retired to a wooden folding chair in a corner of the soundstage. Not a bad setup. He could check out the whole scene from this vantage point: the burly guys toting cameras onto hulking tripods, the furniture movers pushing desks and couches and sometimes whole walls wherever the pretty boy told them to put them, the dolls glowing in their makeup chairs, the lugs glowering in theirs, the barking to-and-fro of it all. The stale air, the growing clouds of smoke on the high ceilings, the buzz of voices threatening to escalate to a roar: it all gave the place a ringside feel. Jack sat in the one and only cheap seat, socks sagging, legs bare, boxers catching occasional gusts from a fan or an open door, his needle and thread making his cuffs jake.
He was almost sorry to finish the work and have to fold himself back into the picture.
At least there was a food table piled with donuts and coffee. He met Roderick Hayles there. Hayles had been in pictures since Jack was in diapers, and the wear was getting the worst of him. From a distance, he still looked like a leading man. Get closer and details told another story. He had ridges running into his eyes too deep to cover with makeup. His nose seemed to be growing its own little red bulb of burst blood vessels. His teeth were the kind that sleep in a glass at night. He still had posture like his spine was made of a flagpole, and he kept his chin up literally, and his deep voice vibrated every letter in every word he spoke. The combination of tatters from a hard life and manners from a Pasadena childhood made him seem all the more aristocratic. Not typically Jack’s kind of guy, but when Jack caught Hayles sneaking a little whiskey into his coffee, Jack slid his own mug close. Hayles splashed a shot Jack’s way and offered a sideways smile. They tapped mugs. The morning got rolling.
Gertie caught up to both of them and led them onto the set. It was decorated like a dingy office. Cheap brown wallpaper in a fleur-de-lis pattern covered the three walls. A dented metal filing cabinet leaned against the left wall. A fake window hung on the back wall. It opened to a painting of downtown Los Angeles. A splintered pine desk stood in front of the window. It was battered enough to match the filing cabinet and wallpaper. A frayed chintz loveseat sat against the right wall. Striped linoleum covered the floor, with a dusty area rug on top, in front of the desk, where chairs normally would’ve been.
A kid in overalls taped Xs onto the floor in two spots in front of the filing cabinet and beside the rug. Gertie told Jack and Hayles to stand on these. Jack looked for a place to stash his coffee. “You can keep it for now,” Hayles told him. “This is just lighting.”
The kid taped another X on the area rug. A short, lean carpenter stood on the X. Hayles said to him, “What’s the matter? Fillmore’s too big to stand in his own light?”
The carpenter shrugged. Jack asked, “Who’s Fillmore?”
Hayles laughed, raised his coffee to Jack. “I like you, kid. Who’s Fillmore? I only wish he were around to hear that.”
Jack let it lie. He was enough of a detective to gather that Fillmore was the guy who’d be standing on that spot once the shooting started. Hayles apparently didn’t like him. Fillmore probably thought himself a big star. Jack doubted Fillmore was much of anything. Gertie typically worked B pictures. And the title of this picture, No Good from a Corpse, was as B as they come.
A man in a tweed suit approached Jack and Hayles. He said to Hayles, “You know the score?” Hayles nodded. The man handed Jack a skinny .22. A Browning, maybe. From the weight of it, it was unloaded. Jack turned it over. The clip had been ejected. The man said, “Roderick’s playing Beauvais. You’re playing the yegg what gets dropped. I’ll be Clive. Got it?”
“Got it,” Jack said.
“Good,” the man said. “You’ll listen to Beauvais and Clive jaw for a while. You can look at either one of them while they’re talking.” He pointed at a camera placed near the right wall. “Don’t look at that camera.” He pointed behind Jack. “Don’t block that camera.”
Two cameras? Jack reckoned Gertie was moving up in the world.
The man kept instructing Jack. He explained that, when Beauvais said, “That’s enough,” Jack was to step forward and jab the gun at Clive’s chest. Clive would slap the gun out of his hand and take a poke at Jack’s chin. Jack would drop from the punch and lay there while the actors played out the rest of the scene. Jack nodded. Easy enough.
The man looked to someone standing by the cameras. “Lighting good?”
“It’s good, boss.”
The man told the carpenter to scat. He stood on the X and said to Jack, “Give it a try.”
Jack set his coffee down behind his X. He stepped toward the man and poked the gun in his chest. The man slapped it out. Jack let go of the gun and turned with the slap. The man threw a punch in the general direction of Jack’s chin. Jack acted like he’d been hit and fell. The man helped him back up. “Looks like you got it, kid,” he said.
“Easy as pie, Mr. Fillmore,” Jack said.
The man said, “I ain’t Fillmore, dipshit. Fillmore’s Clive once we get rolling.” He looked at Gertie. “Where’d you get the rube?”
Gertie said, “Did he take a punch and drop?”
“Yeah,” the man said.
“Then what the fuck are you bitching about?”
The man shrugged and walked away.
Hayles picked up Jack’s coffee and handed it back to him. Jack finished the cup. Hayles said, “You really don’t know who Tom Fillmore is, do you?”
Jack shook his head.
“Where have you been these past four years?”
“Overseas,” Jack said. “Mostly in a German POW camp. We didn’t get any movies over there.”
“Wow.” Hayles bowed slightly with his head the way a king might acknowledge a knight’s return from the battlefield in a historical epic. “What does one do in a POW camp for four years?”
“It was only two,” Jack said.
Hayles laughed. “Only two?”
“And I learned this.” Jack raised his right eyebrow while keeping the rest of his face perfectly still. Then he lowered the right eyebrow and raised the left one. Then he led his two eyebrows in a little waltz: right, right, left; right, right, left. He wiggled both ears, then only the right ear, then only the left, then another waltz.
Hayles watched the whole performance with his jaw slightly agape. When Jack finished, he said, “Now that’s talent.”
Jack and Hayles chatted while the rest of the crew hustled around them, getting everything square. At one point, Gertie stopped by to make sure Hayles knew his new lines. “Like I wrote them myself,” he said. He reached out to tap Gertie’s ass as she walked away. Jack casually swung his arm down and blocked Hayles’s grope.
When Gertie was out of earshot, Hayles asked, “You know her?”
“I do.”
“Did you know her sister?”
This surprised Jack. “Her sister?”
“Sure,” Hayles said. “She had a twin. A real dynamo. Dead now for a couple years, but I bet that ass of hers still hasn’t quit.”
Jack froze his face muscles into a blank expression. Inside, a war raged between his desire to slug Hayles and his need to find out all he could about Wilma. Hayles didn’t seem to notice at all. He told the story of running up to a little clip joint in Oxnard, an all-in-one kind of place. You could get your dirty pictures and dirty films and whores and doms and whatever you needed. He said Wilma had been there back in the spring of ’43. She’d done a performance for a stag party he was at. It was mostly naked ukulele songs. But she kept drinking with the fellows and danced for a song or two playing on the Victrola. She either drank too much or someone slipped her something. Before too long, she was passed out and the guys lined up to run a train on her. “I got to go first, on account of being in pictures,” Hayles explained. “And she was such a sweet young thing I didn’t let any of the other guys have a turn. I stayed with her, slept right by her side that n
ight. In the morning, she was gone. I drove up to Oxnard every day that week looking for her. It’s not a short drive.”
Jack cleared his throat. “It isn’t.”
“She split that joint, but you better believe I found her when she got back down here.”
Jack both wanted to ask more and couldn’t. He wiggled his empty cup. Hayles told him to bring it close. Jack did. Hayles used one side of his coat to hide the cup from prying eyes and poured Jack three fingers of scotch. Vat 69. Jack recognized the burn as it went down. This is a soundstage, he told himself. Play it like it’s all a movie. Act like you can get through this.
A new guy broke into the scene. He had flecks of gray on his temple and a chin carved in marble and the kind of eyes you don’t want looking at your wife, ever. Okay, Jack thought. This is a movie star. Two cameras and a guy who looks like this? This ain’t no B picture.
The director called everyone into place. Hayles and Fillmore stepped off their Xs. The kid peeled them up from the floor. Jack stepped back and the kid took his X, too. Someone yelled, “Rolling.” Another man with a clapper stood in front of the three men, called out the scene and the take, and clapped the wood. Hayles and Fillmore argued about some business. Jack watched them like he would any conversation. Hayles said, “That’s enough.” Jack stepped forward with the gun. Fillmore swung at the gun with the wrong hand and barely touched Jack. Jack let the gun drop. Fillmore threw a sorry excuse for a punch at Jack’s neck. Jack let the tap drop him.
The director yelled cut and started cussing. “For Christ’s fucking sake, Fillmore. Are you a little girl playing patty cake on the schoolyard? What the fuck is this, you little pillow biter?”
He went on for so long that Jack felt bad for Fillmore. He felt responsible. He said, “It’s my fault, sir.” He put the pistol in Fillmore’s right hand. “I expected him to swing at me with his right hand, like this.” Jack demonstrated. “So that he’d push the gun away from his body, not toward it. That way, my head would follow the gun and he could take a poke at my exposed jaw with his left hand.” Jack slowly mimed the actions.
Dead Extra Page 12
