Death Is a Lonely Business Page 8

  He dropped his hands and stood aside.

  “You do like beer, don’t you?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Would you rather I fix you a chocolate malt?”

  “Could you?”

  “No, goddamn it. You’ll drink beer and like it. Get it in here.” He wandered off, shaking his head, and I came in and shut the door, feeling like a high school student come back to visit his tenth-grade teacher.

  Crumley was standing in his parlor window blinking out at the dry dirt path I had wandered up a moment ago.

  “Three o’clock, by God,” he muttered. “Three. Right out there. I heard someone weeping, how you figure that? Crying? Gave me the goosebumps. Sounded like a banshee woman. Hell. Let me look at your face again.”

  I showed him my face.

  “Jesus,” he said, “do you always blush that easily?”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Christ; you could massacre half a Hindu village and still look like Peter Rabbit. What are you stuffed with?”

  “Chocolate bars. And I keep six lands of ice cream in my icebox, when I can afford it.”

  “I bet you buy it instead of bread.”

  I wanted to say no, but he would have caught the lie.

  “Take a load off your feet and what kind of beer do you hate most? I got Budweiser which is awful, Budweiser which is dreadful, and Bud which is the worst. Take your pick. No, don’t. Allow me.” He ambled off to the kitchen and came back with two cans. “There’s still a little sun. Let’s get out of here.”

  He led the way into his backyard.

  I couldn’t believe Crumley’s garden.

  “Why not?” He steered me out the back door of his bungalow, into a green and luscious illumination of thousands of plants, ivies, papyrus, birds of paradise, succulents, cacti. Crumley beamed. “Got six dozen different species of epiphyllum over there, that’s Iowa corn against the fence, that’s a plum tree, that’s apricot, that’s orange. Want to know why?”

  “Everyone in the world needs two, three jobs,” I said, without hesitation. “One job isn’t enough, just as one life isn’t enough. I want to have a dozen of both.”

  “Bull’s-eye. Doctors should dig ditches. Ditchdiggers ought to run kindergartens one day a week. Philosophers should wash dishes in a greasy spoon two nights out of ten. Mathematicians should blow whistles at high school gyms. Poets should drive trucks for a change of menu and police detectives—”

  “Should own and operate the Garden of Eden,” I said, quietly.

  “Jesus.” Crumley laughed and shook his head, and looked at the green seaweed he ground in his palm. “You’re a pain-in-the-ass know-it-all. You think you got me figured? Surprise!” He bent and twisted a garden valve. “Hark, as they used to say. Hist!”

  A soft rain sprang up in brilliant blooms that touched all around Eden with whispers that said, Soft. Quiet. Serenity. Stay. Live forever.

  I felt all my bones diminish in my flesh. Something like a dark skin fell from my back.

  Crumley tilted his head to one side to study my face. “Well?”

  I shrugged. “You see so much rot every week, you need this.”

  “Trouble is, the guys over at the station won’t try anything like this. Sad, huh? To just be a cop and nothing else, forever? Christ, I’d kill myself. You know what—I wish I could bring all the rot I see every week here and use it for fertilizer. Boy, what roses I’d grow!”

  “Or Venus flytraps,” I said.

  He mused on that and nodded. “That earns you a beer.”

  He led the way into his kitchen and I stood looking out at the rainforest, taking deep breaths of the cool air, but not able to smell it because of my cold.

  “I’ve passed your place for years,” I said. “And wondered who could possibly live back in such a great homemade forest. Now that I’ve met you, I know it had to be you.”

  Crumley had to stop himself from falling on the floor and writhing with joy at the compliment. He controlled himself and opened two really terrible beers, one of which I managed to sip.

  “Can’t you make a better face than that?” he asked. “You really like malts better?”

  “Yeah.” I took a bigger sip and it gave me courage to ask, “One thing. What am I doing here? You asked me over because of that stuff you found out front of your house, that seaweed? Now here I am surveying your jungle and drinking your bad beer. No longer a suspect?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Crumley swigged his own drink, and blinked at me. “If I thought you were any land of mad lion-tamer cage-filler-upper, you’d have been in the toilet two days ago. You think I don’t know all about you?”

  “There’s not much to know,” I said, sheepishly.

  “Like hell there isn’t. Listen.” Crumley took another swig, shut his eyes, and read the details off the back of his eyelids. “One block from your apartment’s a liquor store, and an ice cream parlor, and next to that a Chinese grocery. They all think you’re mad. The Nut, they call you. The Fool, on occasion. You talk loud and lots. They hear. Every time you sell a story to Weird Tales or Astonishing Stories, it’s all over the pier because you open your window and yell. Christ. But the bottom line is, kid, they like you. You got no future, sure, they all agree, because who in hell is really going to go and land on the moon, when? Between now and the year 2000, will anyone give a damn about Mars? Only you, Flash Gordon. Only crazy nut you. Buck Rogers.”

  I was blushing furiously, head down, half-angry and somewhat embarrassed but somehow pleased at all this attention. I had been called Flash and Buck often, but somehow when Crumley did it, it went right by without wounding.

  Crumley opened his eyes, saw my blush, and said, “Now, cut that out.”

  “Why would you have known all this about me, a long time before the old man was”—I stopped and changed it—“before he died?”

  “I’m curious about everything.”

  “Most people aren’t. I discovered that when I was fourteen. Everybody else gave up toys that year. I told my folks, no toys, no Christmas. So they kept on giving me toys every year. The other boys got shirts and ties. I took astronomy. Out of four thousand students in my high school there were only fifteen other boys and fourteen girls who looked at the sky with me. The rest were out running around the track and watching their feet. So, it follows that—”

  I turned instinctively, for something had stirred in me. I found myself wandering across the kitchen.

  “I got a hunch,” I said. “Could I—?”

  “What?” said Crumley.

  “You got a workroom here?”

  “Sure. Why?” Crumley frowned with faint alarm.

  That only made me push a bit harder. “Mind if I see?”

  “Well—”

  I moved in the direction toward which Crumley’s eyes had darted.

  The room was right off the kitchen. It had once been a bedroom but now it was empty except for a desk, a chair, and a typewriter on the desk.

  “I knew it,” I said.

  I went to stand behind the chair and look at the machine which was not an old beat-up Underwood Standard, but a fairly new Corona with a fresh ribbon in it, and a stack of yellow sheets waiting to one side.

  “That explains why you look at me the way you do,” I said. “Lord, yes, always tilting your head this way and that, scowling, narrowing your eyes!”

  “Trying to X-ray that big head of yours, see if there’s a brain in there, and how it does what it does,” said Crumley, tilting his head now to the left, now to the right.

  “Nobody knows how the brain works, not writers, no one. All I do is throw up every morning, clean up at noon.”

  “Bullshit,” said Crumley, gently.

  “Truth.”

  I looked at the desk, which had three drawers on either side of the cubby.

  I put my hand out and down toward the bottom drawer on the left.

  Crumley shook his head.

  I shifted and reached over t
o touch the bottom drawer on the right.

  Crumley nodded.

  I pulled the drawer open, slowly.

  Crumley exhaled.

  There was a manuscript there in an open-top box. It looked to be about 150 to 200 pages, beginning on page one, with no title page.

  “How long’s this been down here in the bottom drawer?” I asked. “Pardon.”

  “It’s all right,” said Crumley. “Five years.”

  “You’re going to finish it now,” I said.

  “Like hell I am. Why?”

  “Because I told you so. And I know.”

  “Shut the drawer,” said Crumley.

  “Not just yet.” I pulled out the chair, sat, and rolled a sheet of yellow paper into the machine.

  I typed five words on one line and then shifted down and wrote three more words.

  Crumley squinted over my shoulder and read them aloud, quietly.

  “Death Is a Lonely Business.” He took a breath and finished it. “By Elmo Crumley” He had to repeat it. “By Elmo Crumley, by God.”

  “There.” I placed my new title page down on top of his waiting manuscript and slid the drawer shut. “That’s a gift. I’ll find another title for my book. Now, you’ll have to finish it.”

  I rolled another sheet of paper into the machine and asked, “What was the number of the last page on the bottom of your manuscript?”

  “One hundred sixty-two,” said Crumley.

  I typed 163 and left the paper in the machine.

  “There,” I said. “It’s waiting. Tomorrow morning you get out of bed, walk to the machine, no phone calls, no newspaper reading, don’t even go to the bathroom, sit down, type, and Elmo Crumley is immortal.”

  “B.S.,” said Crumley, but ever so quietly.

  “God promises. But you got to work.”

  I got up and Crumley and I stood looking at his Corona as if it were the only child he would ever have.

  “You giving me orders, kid?” said Crumley.

  “No. Your brain is, if you’d just listen.”

  Crumley backed off, walked into the kitchen, got some more beer. I waited by his desk until I heard the back screen door bang.

  I found Crumley in his garden letting the whirlaround water-tosser cover his face with cooling raindrops, for the day was warm now and the sun out full here on the rim of fog country.

  “What is it,” said Crumley, “forty stories you sold so far?”

  “At thirty bucks apiece, yeah. The Rich Author.”

  “You are rich. I stood down at the magazine rack at Abe’s Liquor yesterday and read that one you wrote about the man who finds he has a skeleton inside him and it scares hell out of him. Christ, it was a beaut. Where in hell do you get ideas like that?”

  “I got a skeleton inside me,” I said.

  “Most people never notice.” Crumley handed me a beer and watched me make yet another face. “The old man—”

  “William Smith?”

  “Yeah, William Smith, the autopsy report came in this morning. There was no water in his lungs.”

  “That means he didn’t drown. That means he was killed up on the canal bank and shoved down into the cage after he was dead. That proves—”

  “Don’t jump ahead of the train, you’ll get run down. And don’t say I told you so, or I’ll take that beer back.”

  I offered him the beer, gladly. He nudged my hand aside.

  “What have you done about the haircut?” I said.

  “What haircut?”

  “Mr. Smith had a really lousy haircut the afternoon before he died. His friend moaned about it at the morgue, remember? I knew only one really lousy barber could have done it.”

  I told Crumley about Cal, the prizes promised William Smith, Myron’s Ballroom, Modesti’s, the big red train.

  Crumley listened patiently, and said, “Flimsy.”

  “It’s all we got,” I said. “You want me to check the Venice Cinema to see if they saw him out front the night he disappeared?”

  “No,” said Crumley.

  “You want me to check Modesti’s, the train, Myron’s Ballroom?”

  “No,” said Crumley.

  “What do you want me to do, then?”

  “Stay out of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” said Crumley, and stopped. He glanced at the back door of his house. “Anything happens to you, my goddamn novel never gets finished. Somebody’s got to read the damn thing, and I don’t know anybody else.”

  “You forget,” I said. “Whoever stood outside your house last night stands outside mine already. I can’t let him do that, can I? I can’t go on being spooked by that guy who gave me the title I just typed on your machine. Can I?”

  Crumley looked at my face and I could see his thinking was, apricot pie, banana cake, and strawberry ice cream.

  “Just be careful,” he said, at last. “The old man may have slipped and knocked his head and was dead when he hit the water, which is why there was no water in his lungs.”

  “And then he swam over and put himself in the cage. Sure.”

  Crumley squinted at me, trying to guess my weight.

  Silently, he went away into the jungle and was gone about a minute. I waited.

  Then, far away, I heard an elephant trombone the wind. I turned slowly, into a drench of garden rain, listening. A lion, closer, opened his vast beehive valves and exhaled a killer swarm. A herd of antelopes and gazelles dusted by like a summer wind of sound, touching the dry earth, moving my heart to their run.

  Crumley was suddenly on the path, smiling wildly, like a boy half-proud, half-ashamed of a madness unknown to all the world until now, this hour. He snorted and gestured two fresh beers up at six lilyhorn sound systems suspended like great dark flowers in the trees. From these, the antelopes, gazelles, and zebras circled our lives and protected us from the nameless beasts out beyond the bungalow fences. The elephant blew his nose once more and knocked my soul flat.

  “African recordings,” said Crumley, unnecessarily.

  “Swell,” I said. “Hey, what’s that?”

  Ten thousand African flamingos airlifted from a bright freshwater lagoon back five thousand days ago when I was a high school kid and Martin and Osa Johnson were flying in from the wildebeest African trails to walk among us plain folks in California and tell great tales.

  And then I remembered.

  The day I was supposed to run full speed to hear Martin Johnson speak, he had been killed in a plane crash just outside L.A.

  But right now, in Elmo Crumley’s jungle compound Eden retreat, there were Martin Johnson’s birds.

  My heart went with them.

  I looked at the sky and said, “What are you going to do, Crumley?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “The old canary lady is going to live forever. You can bet on it.”

  “I’m broke,” I said.

  When the drowned people showed up later that day, it really spoiled the picnics all up and down the beach. People were indignant, packed their hampers, went home. Dogs that ran eagerly down to look at the strangers lying on the shore were called back by angry women or irritable men. Children were herded away and sent off with a reprimand, not to associate with such peculiar strangers ever again.

  Drowning, after all, was a forbidden subject. Like sex, it was never discussed. It followed then that when a drowned person dared touch shore, he or she was persona non grata. Children might dash down to hold dark ceremonies in their minds, but the ladies who remained after the families had cringed off and gone away raised their parasols and turned their backs, as if someone with unruly breath had called from the surf. Nothing in Emily Post could help the situation. Very simply the lost surfers had come without invite, permission, or warning and like unwanted relatives had to be hustled off to mysterious ice-houses inland, at a double dogtrot.

  But no sooner was one surf-stranger gone than you heard the sandpiping children’s voices crying, “Look, Mommy, oh, look!”

 
; “Git away! Get!”

  And you heard the rush of feet running away from the still-warm landmines on the shore.

  Walking back from Crumley’s I heard about the unwelcome visitors, the drowned ones.

  I had hated to leave the sun which seemed to shine forever in Crumley’s orchard.

  Reaching the sea was like touching another country. The fog came as if glad for all the bad shoreline news. The drownings had had nothing to do with police, night traumas, or dark surprises in canals that sucked their teeth all night. It was simply riptides.

  The shore was empty now. But I had an even emptier feeling when I lifted my gaze to the old Venice pier.

  “Bad rice!” I heard someone whisper. Me.

  An old Chinese imprecation, shouted at the edges of crops to guarantee a good harvest against the devastation of the envious gods.

  “Bad rice—”

  For someone had at last stepped on the big snake.

  Someone had stomped it down.

  The rollercoaster was gone forever from the far end of the pier.

  What was left of it now lay in the late day, like a great strewn jackstraws game. But only a big steamshovel was playing that game now, snorting, bending down to snap up the bones and find them good.

  “When does the dying stop?” I had heard Cal say a few hours back.

  With the empty pier-end ahead, its skeleton being flensed, and a tidal wave of fog storming toward shore, I felt a fusillade of cold darts in my back. I was being followed. I spun.

  But it wasn’t me being pursued by nothing.

  Across the street, I saw A. L. Shrank. He ran along, hands deep in overcoat pockets, head sunk in his dark collar, glancing back, like a rat before hounds.

  God, I thought, now I know who he reminds me of.

  Poe!

  The famous photographs, the somber portraits of Edgar Allan with his vast milk-glass lampglow brow and brooding night-fire eyes and the doomed and lost mouth buried under the dark moustache, his tie askew on his untidy collar, over his always convulsing and swallowing throat.

  Edgar Allan Poe.

  Poe ran. Shrank ran, glancing back at a swift fog with no shape.

  Christ, I thought, it’s after all of us.