A Graveyard for Lunatics cm-2 Page 11

  No books remained, no pictures, no desk, no paper in the trash can. Even the toilet roll in the bathroom had been stripped. The medicine cabinet was Mother Hubbardbare. No shoes under the bed. No bed. No typewriter. Empty closets. No dinosaurs. No dinosaur drawings.

  Hours before, the apartment had been vacuumed, scrubbed, then polished with a high-quality wax.

  A fury of rage had fired the sound stage to bring down his Babylon, Assyria, Abu Simbel.

  A fury of cleanliness here had snorted up the last dust of memory, the merest breath of life.

  “My God, it’s awful, isn’t it?” The voice spoke behind me.

  A young man stood in the door. He was wearing a painter’s smock, much used, and his fingers were smudged with color, as was the left side of his face. His hair looked uncombed and his eyes had a kind of animal wildness, like a creature who works in the dark and only on occasion comes out at dawn.

  “You better not stay here. They might come back.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “I know you, yes? Roy’s friend— Tom—”

  “Shipway. Better get out. They were crazy. Come on.”

  I followed Tom Shipway out of the empty apartment.

  He unlocked his own door with two sets of keys. “Ready? Set! Go!”

  I jumped in.

  He slammed the door and lay against it. “The landlady! I can’t let her see!”

  “See?!” I looked around.

  We were in Captain Nemo’s undersea apartments, his submarine cabins and engine rooms.

  “Good God!” I cried.

  Tom Shipway beamed. “Nice, huh?”

  “Nice, hell, it’s incredible!”

  “I knew you’d like it. Roy gave me your stories. Mars. Atlantis. And that thing you wrote on Jules Verne. Great, huh?”

  He waved and I walked and saw and touched. The great red-velvet-covered Victorian chairs, brass-studded and locked to the ship’s floor. The brass periscope shining down out of the ceiling. The huge fluted pipe organ, center stage. And just beyond, a window that had been converted into an oval submarine porthole, beyond which swam tropical fish of various sizes and colors.

  “Look!” said Tom Shipway. “Go on!”

  I bent to peer into the periscope.

  “It works!” I said. “We’re under water! Or it seems! Did you do all this? You’re a genius.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does— does your landlady know you’ve done this to her apartment?”

  “If she did, she’d kill me. I’ve never let her in.”

  Shipway touched a button on the wall.

  Shadows stirred beyond in the green sea.

  A projection of a giant spider loomed, gesticulating.

  “The Squid! Nemo’s antagonist! I’m stunned!”

  “Well, sure! Sit down. What’s going on? Where’s Roy? Why did those bums come in like dingos and leave like hyenas?”

  “Roy? Oh, yeah.” The weight of it knocked me back. I sat down, heavily. “Jesus, yes. Roy. What happened here last night?”

  Shipway moved around the room quietly, imitating what he remembered.

  “You ever see Rick Orsatti sneaking around L.A. years ago? The racketeer?”

  “He ran with a gang—”

  “Yeah. Once, years ago, at twilight, downtown, coming out of an alley, I saw six guys dressed in black, one guy leading them, and they moved like fancy rats dressed in leather or silk, all funeral-colored, and their hair oiled back, and their faces pasty white. No, otters is more like it, black weasels. Silent, slithering, snakelike, dangerous, hostile, like black clouds smoking out a chimney. Well, that was last night. I smelled a perfume so strong it came under the door.”

  Doc Phillips!

  “—and I looked out and these big black sewer rats were easing down the hall carrying files, dinosaurs, pictures, busts, statues, photographs. They stared at me from the sides of their little eyes. I shut the door and watched through the peekhole as they ran by on black rubber sneakers. I could hear them prowling for half an hour. Then the whispers stopped. I opened the door to an empty hall and a big tidal wave of that damn cologne. Did those guys kill Roy?”

  I twitched. “What made you say that?”

  “They looked like undertakers, is all. And if they killed off Roy’s apartment, well, why not undertake Roy? Hey,” Shipway stopped, looking in my face. “I didn’t mean—but, well, is Roy—?”

  “Dead? Yes. No. Maybe. Someone as alive as Roy just can’t die!”

  I told him about Stage 13, the ruined cities, the hanged body.

  “Roy wouldn’t do that.”

  “Maybe someone did it to him.”

  “Roy wouldn’t hold still for any sons-of-bitches. Hell.” And a tear rolled out of one of Tom Shipway’s eyes. “I know Roy! He helped me build my first sub. There!”

  On the wall was a miniature Nautilus, some thirty inches long, a high school art student’s dream.

  “Roy can’t be dead, can he?!”

  Then a telephone rang somewhere in Nemo’s undersea cabins.

  Shipway picked up a large mollusc shell. I laughed, then stopped laughing.

  “Yes?” he said into the phone, and then, “Who is this?”

  I all but knocked the phone from his hand. I yelled into it; a shout to life. I listened to someone breathing, far away.

  “Roy!”

  Click. Silence. Hummmmm.

  I jiggled the receiver wildly, gasping.

  “Roy?” said Shipway.

  “His breathing.”

  “Damn! You can’t tell breathing! Where from?”

  I banged the phone down and stood over it, eyes shut. Then I grabbed it again and tried to dial the wrong end of the mollusc. “How does this damn thing work?” I yelled.

  “Who you calling?”

  “A taxi.”

  “To go where? I’ll take you!”

  “Illinois, dammit, Green Town!”

  “That’s two thousand miles away!”

  “Then,” I said, dazed, putting the seashell down, “we’d better get going.”

  29

  Tom Shipway dropped me at the studio.

  I ran down through Green Town just after two. The whole town was freshly painted white, waiting for me to come knocking at doors or peering through lace-curtained windows. Flower pollen sifted on the wind as I turned up the sidewalk of my long-gone grandparents’ home. Birds flew off the roof as I mounted the stairs.

  Tears welled in my eyes as I knocked on the stained-glass front door.

  There was a long silence. I realized that I had done the wrong thing. Boys, when they call boys to play, don’t knock on doors. I backed off down in the yard, found a small pebble, and threw it hard up against the side of the house.

  Silence. The house stood quietly in the November sunlight.

  “What?” I asked the high window. “Really dead?”

  And then the front door opened. A shadow stood there, looking out.

  “Is it!” I yelled. I stumbled across the porch as the screen door opened. I yelled again, “Is it?” and fell into Elmo Crumley’s arms.

  “Yeah,” he said, holding on. “If it’s me you’re looking for.”

  I made inarticulate sounds as he pulled me in and shut the door.

  “Hey, take it easy.” He shook my elbows.

  I could hardly see him through the steam on my glasses. “What’re you doing here?”

  “You told me. Stroll around, look, then meet you here, right? No, you don’t remember. Christ, what in hell you got in this place that’s decent?”

  Crumley rummaged the fridge and brought me a peanut butter cookie and a glass of milk. I sat there, chewing and swallowing and saying, over and over, “Thanks for coming.”

  “Shut up,” said Crumley. “I can see you’re a wreck. What in hell do we do next? Pretend everything’s okay. Nobody knows you saw Roy’s body, or what you thought was his body, right? What’s your schedule?”

  “I’m supposed to report in on a new project righ
t now. I’ve been transferred. No more Beast film. I’m working with Fritz and Jesus.”

  Crumley laughed. “That’s what they ought to title the film. You want me to prowl some more like a damn tourist?”

  “Find him, Crumley. If I let myself really believe Roy was gone I’d go nuts! If Roy’s not dead, he’s hiding out, scared. You got to scare him even more, to get him out of hiding before he’s really damn well killed for good. Or, or—he’s really dead right now, so someone killed him, yes? He wouldn’t hang himself, ever. So his murderer is here, also. So find the murderer. The guy who destroyed the clay head of the Beast, smashed the red clay skull, then stumbled on Roy and hoisted him up to die. Either way, Crumley, find Roy before he’s killed. Or, if Roy’s dead, find his damned murderer.”

  “That’s some helluva choice.”

  “Try some autograph-collector agencies, yes? Maybe one of them would know Clarence, his last name, his address. Clarence. And then try the Brown Derby. That maitre d’ won’t talk to guys like me. He must know who the Beast is. Between him and Clarence we can solve the murder, or the murder that might happen any minute!”

  “At least these are leads.” Crumley lowered his voice, hoping to get me to lower mine.

  “Look,” I said. “This place is lived in since yesterday. There’s litter neither of us tossed when Roy and I worked here together.” I opened the miniature-fridge door. “Candy bars. Who else would put chocolate in a fridge?”

  “You!” Crumley snorted.

  I had to laugh. I shut the fridge door.

  “Yeah, hell, me. But he said he’d hide out. Maybe, just maybe he did. Well?”

  “Okay.” Crumley stepped to the screen door. “What do I look for?”

  “A big gangling six-foot-three whooping crane with long arms and long skinny fingers and a big hawk nose, getting bald early, and ties that don’t go with his shirts and shirts that don’t go with his pants and—” I stopped.

  “Sorry I asked.” Crumley handed me a handkerchief. “Blow.”

  30

  A minute later, I headed out of upper Illinois country away from my grandparents’ house.

  On the way, I passed Stage 13. It was triple-locked and sealed. Standing there, I imagined what it must have been like for Roy, going in to find some maniac had destroyed his reasons for living.

  Roy, I thought, come back, build more beautiful Beasts, live forever.

  Just then, a phalanx of Roman troops ran by, double-time, counting cadence, laughing. They flowed swiftly, a bright river of gold-and-crimson-plumed helmets. Caesar’s guard never looked better, moved faster. As they ran, my eye caught the last guardsman in flight. His great long legs jerked. His elbows flapped. And what looked to be a hawk’s beak plowed the wind. I gave a muted cry.

  The troops rushed around a corner.

  I ran to the intersection.

  Roy?! I thought.

  But I could not yell and let people know an idiot hid and ran amongst them.

  “Damn fool,” I said weakly. “Dumb,” I muttered, going in the commissary door.

  “Stupid,” I said to Fritz, who sat drinking six cups of coffee at the table where he held his conferences.

  “Enough flattery!” he cried. “Sit! Our first problem is Judas Iscariot is being cut out of our film!”

  “Judas!? Has he been fired?”

  “Last I heard he was down in La Jolla soused and hang-gliding.”

  “Ohmigod.”

  And then I really exploded. Great earthquakes of hilarity burst from my lungs.

  I saw Judas hang-glide the salt winds, Roy in the Roman phalanx running, myself drenched by rain as the body fell from the wall, and again Judas, high above La Jolla, drunk on wind, flying.

  My barking laugh alarmed Fritz. Thinking me choked on my own bewildered upchuck, he pounded my back.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I gasped. “Everything!”

  The last of my cries faded.

  Christ himself had arrived, his robes rustling.

  “Oh, Herod Antipas,” he said to Fritz, “you summoned me to trial?”

  The actor, as tall as an El Greco painting, and as haunted by sulfurous lightning and storm clouds, which shifted in his pale flesh, slowly sank into a chair, without looking to see if it was there. His sitting was an act of faith. When his invisible body touched, he smiled with pride at the accuracy of his aim.

  A waitress instantly placed before him a small plate of salmon with no sauce and a tumbler of red wine.

  J. C., eyes closed, chewed one bite of fish.

  “Old director, new writer,” he said at last. “You have called me to confer on the Bible? Ask. I know it all.”

  “Thank God, someone does,” said Fritz. “Most of our film was shot overseas by a hyperflatulent director who couldn’t get it up with an erector set. Maggie Botwin’s in Projection Room 4. Be there in one hour,” he signaled me with his monocle, “to see the whole shipwreck. Christ walked on water, but how about deep shit? J. C., pour sweet oil in this boy’s unholy ear.” He touched my shoulder. “And you, child, solve the problem of the missing Judas, write an ending for the film that will stop the mobs from rioting to get their money back.”

  A door slammed.

  And I was alone, scrutinized by J.C.’s blue-skies-over-Jerusalem stare.

  Calmly he chewed his fish.

  “I can see,” he said, “you’re wondering why I’m here. I am the Christian. Me? I’m an old shoe. Comfortable with Moses, Mahomet, and the Prophets. I don’t think about it, I am it.”

  “Have you always been Christ then?”

  J. C. saw I was sincere and chewed some more. “Am I Christ? Well, it’s like putting on a comfortable robe for life, never having to dress up, always at ease. When I look down at my stigmata, I think yes. When I don’t shave mornings, my beard is an affirmation. I can’t imagine any other life. Oh, years ago, of course, I was curious.” He chewed another bite. “Tried everything. Went to the Reverend Violet Greener on Crenshaw Boulevard. The Agabeg Temple?”

  “I been there!”

  “Great showmen, eh? Seances, tambourines. Never took. Been to Norvell. He still around?”

  “Sure! With his big blinky cow eyes and his pretty boyfriends begging cash in tambourines?”

  “You sound like me’t Astrology? Numerology? Holy Rollers? That’s fun.”

  “Been to Holy Rollers, also.”

  “Like their mud wrestling, talking in tongues?”

  “Yeah! But how about the Negro Baptist Church, Central Avenue? Hall Johnson choir jumps and sings Sundays. Earthquakes!”

  “Hell, boy, you dog my stepsl How come you been all those places?”

  “Wanted answers!”

  “You read the Talmud? Koran?”

  “They came too late in my life.”

  “Let me tell you what really came late—”

  I snorted. “The Book of Mormon!?”

  “Holy mackerel, right!”

  “I was in a Mormon little-theatre group when I was twenty. The Angel Moroni put me to sleep!”

  J. C. roared and slapped his stigmata.

  “Boring! How about Aimee Semple McPherson!?”

  “High school friends dared me to run up on stage to be ‘saved.’ I ran and knelt. She slapped her hand on my head. Lord, save the sinner, she cried. Glory, Hallelujah! I staggered down and fell into my friends’ arms!”

  “Hell,” said J. C. “Aimee saved me twice! Then they buried her. Summer of ’44? In that big bronze coffin? Took sixteen horses and a bulldozer to lug it up that graveyard hill. Boy, Aimee grew fake wings, natural-like. I still visit her temple for old nostalgia’s sake. God, I miss her. She touched me like Jesus, in Pentecostal trimmings. What a lark!”

  “And now here you are,” I said, “full-time Christ at Maximus. Since the golden days with Arbuthnot.”

  “Arbuthnot?” J. C.’s face darkened with memory. He shoved back his plate. “Come now. Test me. Ask! Old Testament. New.”

/>   “The book of Ruth.”

  He recited two minutes of Ruth.

  “Ecclesiastes?”

  “I’ll do the whole thing!” And he did.

  “John?”

  “Great stuff! The Last Supper after the Last Supper!”

  “What?” I said, incredulous.

  “Forgetful Christian! The Last Supper was not the Last Supper. It was the Penultimate Supper! Days after the Crucifixion and entombment, Simon called Peter, on the Sea of Tiberias with the other disciples, experienced the miracle of the fishes. On shore, they witnessed a pale illumination. Approaching, they saw a man standing by a spread of burning charcoals and fish. They spoke to the man and knew it was Christ, who gestured and said, ‘Take of these fish and feed thy brethren. Take of my message and move through the cities of the world and preach therein forgiveness of sin.’

  “I’ll be damned,” I whispered.

  “Delightful, yes?” said J. C. “The Penultimate Supper first, the da Vinci supper, and then the Final Final Last Last Supper of fish baked on the charcoal bed on the sands near the Sea of Tiberias after which Christ departed to stay on forever in their blood, hearts, minds, and souls. Finis.”

  J. C. bowed his head, then added: “Go rewrite the books, but especially John! Not mine to give, only yours to take! Out, before I rescind my blessing!”

  “Have you blessed me?”

  “All the while we talked, son. All the while. Go.”

  31

  I stuck my head in Projection Room 4 and said, “Where’s Judas?”

  “That’s the password!” cried Fritz Wong. “Here are three martinis! Drink!”

  “I hate martinis. And anyway, first, I got to get this out of my system. Miss Botwin,” I said.

  “Maggie,” she said, quietly amused, her camera in her lap.

  “I’ve heard about you for years, admired you a lifetime. I just have to say I’m glad for this chance to work—”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, kindly. “But you’re wrong. I’m no genius. I’m— what do you call those things skate across ponds looking for insects?”

  “Water striders?”

  “Water striders! You’d think the damn bugs would sink, but they move on a thin film on top of the water. Surface tension. They distribute their weight, stretch out their arms and legs so they never break the film. Well, if that isn’t me, what is? I just distribute my weight, stretch out all fours, so I don’t break the film I skate on. I haven’t sunk from sight yet. But I’m not the best and it’s no miracle, just plain dumb early-on luck. Now thanks for the compliment, young man, put your chin back up, and do as Fritz commands. The martinis. You’ll soon see, I’ve worked no wonders on what comes next.” She turned her slender profile to call quietly toward the projection room. “Jimmy? Now.”