Death Is a Lonely Business Read online

  I moved toward the cages. My hunch was right.

  At the bottom of the first cage I saw papyrus from the Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1926.

  HIROHITO ASCENDS THRONE

  The young monarch, twenty-seven,

  this afternoon …

  I moved to the next cage and blinked. Memories of high school days flooded me with their fears.

  ADDIS ABABA BOMBED

  Mussolini claims triumph.

  Haile Selassie protests....

  I shut my eyes and turned from that lost year. That long ago the feathers had stopped rustling and the warblers had ceased. I stood by the bed and the withered discard there. I heard myself say:

  “You ever listen Sunday mornings to the ‘Rocky Mountain Canary-Seed Hour’—?”

  “With an organist that played and a studioful of canaries that sang along!” the old woman cried with a delight that rejuvenated her flesh and reared her head. Her eyes flickered like broken glass. “‘When It’s Springtime in the Rockies’!”

  “‘Sweet Sue.’ ‘My Blue Heaven,’” I said.

  “Oh, weren’t the birds fine!?”

  “Fine.” I had been nine then and tried to figure how in hell the birds could follow the music so well. “I once told my mom the birdcages must have been lined with dime-store songsheets.”

  “You sound like a sensitive child.” The old woman’s head sank, exhausted, and she shut her eyes. “They don’t make them that way any more.”

  They never did, I thought.

  “But,” she whispered, “you didn’t really come see me about the canaries—?”

  “No,” I admitted. “It’s about that old man who rents from you—”

  “He’s dead.”

  Before I could speak, she went on, calmly, “I haven’t heard him in the downstairs kitchen since early yesterday. Last night, the silence told me. When you opened the door down there just now, I knew it was someone come to tell me all that’s bad.”

  I’m sorry.

  “Don’t be. I never saw him save at Christmas. The lady next door takes care of me, comes and rearranges me twice a day, and puts out the food. So he’s gone, is he? Did you know him well? Will there be a funeral? There’s fifty cents there on the bureau. Buy him a little bouquet.”

  There was no money on the bureau. There was no bureau. I pretended that there was and pocketed some nonexistent money.

  “You just come back in six months,” she whispered. “I’ll be well again. And the canaries will be on sale, and … you keep looking at the door! Must you go?”

  “Yes’m,” I said, guiltily. “May I suggest—your front door’s unlocked.”

  “Why, what in the world would anyone want with an old thing like me?” She lifted her head a final time.

  Her eyes flashed. Her face ached with something beating behind the flesh to pull free.

  “No one’ll ever come into this house, up those stairs,” she cried.

  Her voice faded like a radio station beyond the hills. She was slowly tuning herself out as her eyelids lowered.

  My God, I thought, she wants someone to come up and do her a dreadful favor!

  Not me! I thought.

  Her eyes sprang wide. Had I said it aloud?

  “No,” she said, looking deep into my face. “You’re not him.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who stands outside my door. Every night.” She sighed. “But he never comes in. Why doesn’t he?”

  She stopped like a clock. She still breathed, but she was waiting for me to go away.

  I glanced over my shoulder.

  The wind moved dust in the doorway like a mist, like someone waiting. The thing, the man, whatever, who came every night and stood in the hall.

  I was in the way.

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  Silence.

  I should have stayed, had tea, dinner, breakfast with her. But you can’t protect all of the people in all of the places all of the time, can you?

  I waited at the door.

  Goodbye.

  Did she moan this in her old sleep? I only knew that her breath pushed me away.

  Going downstairs I realized I still didn’t know the name of the old man who had drowned in a lion cage with a handful of train ticket confetti uncelebrated in each pocket.

  I found his room. But that didn’t help.

  His name wouldn’t be there, any more than he was.

  Things are good at their beginnings. But how rarely in the history of men and small towns or big cities is the ending good.

  Then, things fall apart. Things turn to fat. Things sprawl. The time gets out of joint. The milk sours. By night the wires on the high poles tell evil tales in the dripping mist. The water in the canals goes blind with scum. Flint, struck, gives no spark. Women, touched, give no warmth.

  Summer is suddenly over.

  Winter snows in your hidden bones.

  Then it is time for the wall.

  The wall of a little room, that is, where the shudders of the big red trains go by like nightmares turning you on your cold steel bed in the trembled basement of the Not So Royal Lost Canary Apartments, where the numbers have fallen off the front portico, and the street sign at the corner has been twisted north to east so that people, if they ever came to find you, would turn away forever on the wrong boulevard.

  But meanwhile there’s mat wall near your bed to be read with your watered eyes or reached out to and never touched, it is too far away and too deep and too empty.

  I knew that once I found the old man’s room, I would find that wall.

  And I did.

  The door, like all the doors in the house, was unlocked, waiting for wind or fog or some pale stranger to step in.

  I stepped. I hesitated. Maybe I expected to find the old man’s X-ray imprint spread out there on his empty cot. His place, like the canary lady’s upstairs, looked like late in the day of a garage sale—for a nickel or a dime, everything had been stolen away.

  There wasn’t even a toothbrush on the floor, or soap, or a washrag. The old man must have bathed in the sea once a day, brushed his teeth with seaweed each noon, washed his only shirt in the salt tide and lain beside it on the dunes while it dried, if and when the sun came out.

  I moved forward like a deep sea diver. When you know someone is dead, his abandoned air holds back every motion you make, even your breathing.

  I gasped.

  I had guessed wrong.

  For there his name was, on the wall. I almost fell, leaning down to squint.

  Over and over, his name was repeated, scrabbled on the plaster on the far side of his cot. Over and over, as if fearful of senility or oblivion, terrified at waking some dawn to find himself nameless, over and over he had scratched with a nicotine-stained fingernail.

  William. And then Willie. And the Will. And beneath the three. Bill.

  And then, again, again, again.

  Smith. Smith. Smith. Smith.

  And under that, William Smith.

  And, Smith, W.

  His multiplication table swam in and out of focus as I stared, for it was all the nights I ever dreaded to see somewhere up ahead in the dark ages of my future. Me, in 1999, alone, and my fingernail making mice-sound graffiti on plaster....

  “My God,” I whispered. “Wait!”

  The cot squealed like a cat touched in its sleep. I put my full weight down and probed with my fingerprints over the plaster. There were more words there. A message, a hint, a clue?

  I remembered some boyhood magic where you had pals write quotes on pads and then tear off the quotes. But you took the pads out of the room and rubbed a soft pencil across the hidden indentation left on the blank pages and brought forth the words.

  Now, I did just that. I found and rubbed the flat lead of my pencil gently across the wall surface. The nail scratches illusioned themselves forth, here a mouth, there an eye; shapes, forms, bits of an old man’s half-dreams:

  Four a.m. and no sleep.

&nb
sp; And below that, a ghostly plea:

  Please, God—sleep!

  And a dawn despair:

  Christ.

  But then, at last, something that snapped my knees as I crouched lower. For here were these words:

  He’s standing in the hall again.

  But that was me, I thought, outside the old woman’s room five minutes ago, upstairs. That was me, outside this empty room, a moment ago. And …

  Last night. In the dark rain, on the train. And the great railcar bucking the curves and groaning its wooden slats and shivering its tarnished brass as someone unseen swayed in the aisle behind me and mourned the funeral train’s passage.

  He’s standing in the hall again.

  He stood in the aisle on the train.

  No, no. Too much!

  It was no crime, was it, to stand in a train aisle moaning, or stand here in the hall, simply looking at a door and letting an old man know of your being there just with your silence?

  Yes, but what if one night whoever it was came into the room?

  And brought his lonely business with him?

  I looked at the graffiti, as faint and faded as the canaries-for-sale sign in the window outside. I backed off, pulling away from that terrible sentence of loneliness and despair.

  Outside in the hall, I stood feeling the air, trying to guess if another man had stood here again and again in the last month, with the bones showing behind his face.

  I wanted to whirl and shout upstairs to rattle the empty birdcages, “If that man comes back, sweet Jesus! Call me!”

  How? I saw an empty telephone stand nearby and a stack of Yellow Pages from 1933 under it.

  Yell from your window, then!

  But who would hear the sound of her voice like an old key turned in a rusted lock?

  I’ll come and stand guard, I thought. Why?

  Because the dead sea-bottom mummy, that old autumn woman lying in funeral bandages up there, was praying for a cold wind to drift up the stairs.

  Lock all the doors! I thought.

  But when I tried to shut the front door, it wouldn’t close.

  And I could hear the cold wind, still whispering in.

  I ran a ways and then slowed down and stopped, heading toward the police station.

  Because the dead canaries had begun to rustle their dry wings just behind my ears.

  They wanted out. Only I could save them.

  And because I sensed, around me, the quiet waters rising in the Nile silt which would flow to erase ancient Nikotris, the Pharaoh’s two-thousand-year-old daughter.

  Only I could stop the dark Nile from sanding her away downstream.

  I ran to my Underwood Standard typewriter.

  I typed and saved the birds, I typed and saved the old dry bones.

  Feeling guilty but triumphant, triumphant but guilty, I rolled them out of the platen and laid them out flat in the bottom of my birdcage-sandstone river-bottom novel box where they sang only when you read the words and whispered only when you turned the page.

  Then, bright with salvation, I went away.

  I headed for the police station filled with grand fancies, wild ideas, incredible clues, possible puzzles, evident solutions.

  Arriving, I felt I was the finest acrobat performing on the highest trapeze suspended from the greatest balloon.

  Little did I realize that Detective Lieutenant Elmo Crumley was armed with long needles and an air rifle.

  He was coming out the front door of the station as I arrived. Something about my face must have warned him I was about to explode my notions, fancies, concepts, and clues all over him. He made a premature gesture of wiping his face, almost ducked back inside, and came warily down the walk as if approaching a landmine.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Aren’t citizens supposed to show up if they can solve a murder?”

  “Where do you see murders?” Crumley eyed the landscape, and sure enough there were none. “Next subject?”

  “You don’t want to hear what I have to say?”

  “I’ve heard it all before.” Crumley brushed by me and headed for his car parked at the curb. “Every time anyone drops dead of a heart attack or trips over his shoelaces in Venice, there’s someone there the next day to tell me, sixteen to the dozen, how to solve the stopped heart or retie the shoelaces. You’ve got the heart-attack shoelace look about you, and I didn’t sleep last night.”

  He kept going and I ran after, for he was doing the Harry Truman 120-steps-to-the-minute march.

  He heard me coming and called over his shoulder, ‘Tell you what, young Papa Hemingway—”

  “You know what I do for a living?”

  “Everyone in Venice knows. Every time you got a story in Dime Detective or Flynn’s Detective, the whole town hears you yelling down at the liquor store newsrack, pointing at the magazines.”

  “Oh,” I said, the last of the hot air going out of my balloon. Grounded, I stood across the car from Crumley, biting my lower lip.

  Crumley saw this and got a look of paternal guilt.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he sighed.

  “What?”

  “You know the one thing that gripes my gut about amateur detectives?” said Crumley.

  “I’m not an amateur detective, I’m a professional writer with big antennae that work!”

  “So you’re a grasshopper who knows how to type,” said Crumley, and waited for my wince to die. “But if you’d been around Venice and my office and the morgue as many years as I have, you’d know that every vagrant who wanders by or any drunk who stumbles in is full of theories, evidence, revelations enough to fill a Bible and sink a Baptist Sunday-outing picnic boat. If we listened to every maundering preacher who fell through the jail doors half the world would be under suspicion, one third under arrest, and the rest fried or hanged. That being so, why should I listen to some young scribe who hasn’t even begun to make his name in literary history”—again my wince, again he waited—“who just because he finds a lion cage full of accidental drowning thinks he has stumbled on Crime and Punishment and feels like Raskolnikov’s son. End of speech. Respond.”

  “You know Raskolnikov?” I said, in amaze.

  “Almost before you were born. But that doesn’t buy horseflakes. Plead your case.”

  “I’m a writer, I know more about feelings than you do.”

  “Balls. I’m a detective, I know more about facts than you do. You afraid a fact will confuse you?”

  “I—”

  “Tell me this, kiddo. Anything ever happen to you in your life?”

  “Anything?”

  “Yeah, I mean anything. Big, in between, small. Anything. Like sickness, rape, death, war, revolution, murder.”

  “My mother and father died—”

  “Peacefully?”

  “Yes. But I had an uncle shot in a holdup once—”

  “You see him shot?”

  “No, but—”

  “Well, that don’t count, unless you see. I mean, you ever find anything like men in lion cages ever before?”

  “No,” I said at last.

  “Well, there you have it. You’re still in shock. You don’t know what life is. I was born and raised in the morgue. This is the first real touch of marble slab you ever had. So why don’t you quiet down and go away.”

  He heard his own voice getting much too loud, shook his head, and said, “No, why don’t I quiet down and go away.”

  Which he did. He opened the car door, jumped in, and before I could reinflate my balloon, was gone.

  Cursing, I slammed into a telephone booth, dropped a dime in the slot, and called across five miles of Los Angeles. When someone picked up at the other end I heard a radio playing “La Raspa,” a door slammed, a toilet flushed, but I could feel the sunlight that I needed, waiting there.

  The lady, living in a tenement on the corner of Temple and Figueroa, nervous at the phone she held in her hand, at last cleared her throat and said:

  “Qu
é?”

  “Mrs. Gutierrez!” I shouted. I stopped, and started over. “Mrs. Gutierrez, this is the Crazy.”

  “Oh!” she gasped, and then laughed. “Sí, sí! You want to talk to Fannie?”

  “No, no, just a few yells. Will you yell down, please, Mrs. Gutierrez?”

  “I yell.”

  I heard her move. I heard the entire ramshackle, rickety tenement lean. Someday, a blackbird would land on the roof and the whole thing would go. I heard a small Chihuahua tap-dance on the linoleum after her, built like a bull bumblebee and barking.

  I heard the tenement outer porch door open as Mrs. Gutierrez stepped out onto the third floor and leaned to call down through the sunshine at the second floor.

  “Aai, Fannie! Aai! It’s the Crazy.”

  I called into my end, ‘Tell her I need to come visit!”

  Mrs. Gutierrez waited. I could hear the second-floor porch creak, as if a vast captain had rolled out onto its plankings to survey the world.

  “Aai, Fannie, the Crazy needs to visit!”

  A long silence. A voice sprang sweetly through the air above the tenement yard. I could not make out the words.

  “Tell her I need Tosca!”

  “Tosca!” Mrs. Gutierrez yelled down into the yard.

  A long silence.

  The whole tenement leaned again, the other way, like the earth turning in its noon slumbers.

  The strains of the first act of Tosca moved up around Mrs. Gutierrez. She spoke.

  “Fannie says—”

  “I hear the music, Mrs. Gutierrez. That means “Yes’!”

  I hung up. At the same instant, a hundred thousand tons of salt water fell on the shore, a few yards away, with exquisite timing. I nodded at God’s precision.

  Making sure I had twenty cents in my pocket, I ran for the next train.

  She was immense.

  Her real name was Cora Smith, but she called herself Fannie Florianna, and no one ever called her otherwise. And I had known her, years ago, when I lived in the tenement, and stayed in touch with her after I moved out to the sea.

  Fannie was so huge that she never slept lying down. Day and night she sat in a large-sized captain’s chair fixed to the deck of her tenement apartment, with bruise marks and dents in the linoleum which her great weight had riveted there. She moved as little as possible, her breath churning in her lungs and throat as she sailed toward the door, and squeezed out to cross the hall to the narrow water-closet confines where she feared she might be ignominiously trapped one day. “My God,” she often said, “wouldn’t it be awful if we had to get the fire department to pry me out of there.” And then back to her chair and her radio and her phonograph and, only a beckon away, a refrigerator filled with ice cream and butter and mayonnaise and all the wrong foods in the wrong amounts. She was always eating and always listening. Next to the refrigerator were bookshelves with no books, only thousands of recordings of Caruso and Galli-Curci and Swarthout and the rest. When the last songs were sung and the last record hissed to a stop at midnight, Fannie sank into herself, like an elephant shot with darkness. Her great bones settled in her vast flesh. Her round face was a moon watching over the vast territorial imperatives of her body. Propped up with pillows, her breath escaped and sucked back, escaped again, fearful of the avalanche that might happen if somehow she lay back too far, and her weight smothered her, her flesh engulfed and crushed her lungs, and put out her voice and light forever. She never spoke of it, but once when someone asked why there was no bed in her room, her eyes burned with a fearful light, and beds were never mentioned again. Fat, as Murderer, was always with her. She slept in her mountain, afraid, and woke in the morning glad for one more night gone, having made it through.