Death Is a Lonely Business (12 page)

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 steam shovel 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.

By the time I reached the Venice Cinema, the fog, impatient, had already gone in.

Mr. Shapeshade's old Venice Cinema was special because it was the last of a series of night riverboats, afloat on the edge of the tide, anywhere in the world.

The front part of the cinema was on the concrete walk that leads from Venice down toward Ocean Park and Santa Monica.

The back half of it stuck out on the pier so that its rear end was over the water.

I stood in front of the movie house at this late hour of the day, glanced up at the marquee, and gasped.

There were no films listed. Only one huge two-foot-high word.

GOODBYE.

It was like being stabbed in the stomach.

I stepped forward to the ticket booth.

Shapeshade was there smiling at me with manic good will as he waved.

"Goodbye?" I said, mournfully.

"Sure!" Shapeshade laughed. "Ta-ta, toodle-oo. Farewell. And it's free! Go in! Any friend of Douglas Fairbanks, Thomas Meighan, Milton Sills, and Charles Ray is a friend of mine."

I melted at the names from my childhood; people I had seen flickering on ancient screens when I was two, three, four on my mother's knee in a cool movie house in northern Illinois before the bad rice came and we steamed west in an old beat-up Kissel, ahead of the Okies, my dad looking for a twelve-buck-a-week job.

"I
can't
go in, Mr. Shapeshade."

"Look at the boy who won't!" Shapeshade threw his hands to the heavens and rolled his eyeballs like Stromboli, irritated by Pinocchio and itching to cut his strings. "Why not?"

"When I come out of movies in daylight, I get depressed. Nothing's right."

"So where's the sun?" cried Shapeshade. "By the time you exit, it's night!"

"Anyway, I wanted to ask you about three nights ago," I said. "Did you by any chance see that old ticket office man, Bill, Willy, William Smith, waiting out front here that night?"

"I yelled at him, yes. What happened to your head? I said. Did a grizzly bear claw your wig off? I said. His hair was a laugh riot. So who took a lawnmower to him? Demon Cal?"

"Yeah. Did you see someone meet William Smith and take him away?"

"I got busy. All of a sudden, six people came for tickets, six! When I looked around, Mr. Smith, Willie, was gone. Why?"

My shoulders sank. My frustration must have shown in my face. Shapeshade quickened with sympathy and enunciated his Sen-Sen breath through the ticket booth's glass speak-hole.

"Guess who's inside on the big 1922 moth-hole-sieved silver screen? Fairbanks!
The Black Pirate.
Gish!
Broken Blossoms.
Lon Chancy!
Phantom of the Opera.
Who was greater?"

"Lord, Mr. Shapeshade, those are all silent."

"So? Where were you in 1928 you didn't notice? The more talkie the less movie!
Statues,
they played. Mouths moved and your feet went to sleep. So, these last nights, silence, hmm?

Quiet, yes? Silence and gestures forty feet across and scowls and leers twenty feet high. Quiet phantoms. Mum's-the-word pirates. Gargoyles and hunchbacks who talked in winds and rains and let the organ speak for them, eh? Plenty of seats. Go."

He thumped his brass ticket key.

The machine stuck a nice fresh orange ticket out at me.

"Yes." I took the ticket and looked into the face of this old man who hadn't been out in sun for forty years, who loved films madly, and would rather read
Silver Screen
than the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
His eyes were gently mad with his love of old faces on yesterday's posters.

"Is Shapeshade your real name?" I said, at last.

"It means a house like this where shades are shaped and all shapes are shadows. You got a better name?"

"No, sir, Mr. Shapeshade." And I hadn't.

"What…" I started to ask.

But Shapeshade guessed with relish. "What happens to
me
tomorrow when they knock my movie house down! Say, not to worry! I got protection! So have my films, all three hundred of them up in the booth now, but soon, down the beach one mile south, the basement there where I go run films and laugh."

"Constance Rattigan!" I cried. "I've often seen that funny light flickering in her basement window or up in her front parlor, late nights. Was that
you?"

"Who else?" beamed Shapeshade. "For years now, when I finish here I just foxtrot along the shore with twenty pounds of film under each arm. Sleeps all day, Constance does, watches films and eats popcorn with me all night, that's Rattigan, and we sit and hold hands like two crazy kids, and rob the film vaults, and cry sometimes so much we can't see to rewind the spools."

I looked out at the beach beyond the cinema front and could not help but see Mr. Shapeshade jogging the surf in the dark, toting popcorn and Mary Pickford, Holloway Suckers and Tom Mix, on his way to that ancient queen to be her subservient lover of multifold darks and lights that sprocketed the dream screen with just as many sunrises as sunsets.

And then Shapeshade watching just before dawn as Constance Rattigan, so the rumors said, ran naked to leap into the cold salt waves and rise with healthfood seaweeds in her straight white teeth and regally braiding her hair, while Shape-shade limped home in the rising sun, drunk on remembrance, mumming and humming the drones of the mighty Wurlitzer in his marrow, soul, heart, and happy mouth.

"Listen." He leaned forward like Ernest Thesiger in the dim halls of
The Old Dark House
or as Dr. Praetorius looming in
Bride of Frankenstein.
"Inside, go up behind the screen, have you ever? No. Climb up on stage in the night behind the screen. What an experience! Like being in Caligari's lopsided chambers. You'll thank me forever."

I shook his hand and stared.

"My gosh," I cried, "that hand of yours. Isn't that the paw that slid out of the dark behind the library bookshelves in
The Cat and the Canary
to grab and vanish the lawyer before he could read the will?"

Shapeshade stared down at his hand cradled in mine, and beamed.

"Aren't you a nice boy?" he said.

"I try, Mr. Shapeshade," I said. "I try."

Inside, I blundered down the aisle until I felt my way to the brass rail and half-flopped up the proscenium steps onto an always-midnight stage to duck behind the screen and look at the great ghosts.

And ghosts they were, the tall, pale, and black-eyed shadow phantoms of time, twisted like white taffy from the slanted angle at which I saw them, gesturing and mouthing in the silence, waiting for the organ music, which had not yet begun.

And there in swift clip after chop after clip was Fairbanks with an askew face and Gish wax-melting down the screen, and Fattie Arbuckle thinned from this sideview and knocking his starved head against the top of the frame and slithering off into the dark while I stood feeling the tide move under the floor, the pier, the theater which foundered in swarming waters, now tilting and creaking and shivering, with the smell of salt coming up through the boards and more pictures, white as cream, dark as ink, blinking across the screen as the theater lifted like a bellows and sank down exhaling like a bellows, and me sunk with it.

Just then, the organ exploded.

It was like that moment a few hours ago when the great unseen steamliner had plunged to strike the pier.

The theater careened, heaved up, and fell as if on a roller-coastal tide.

The organ shouted and brayed and ricocheted a Bach prelude so that dust flew off the ancient chandeliers, the curtains stirred restlessly like funeral gowns, and myself behind the screen reaching out to hold on to something but terrified that something might touch back.

Above me, the pale images ached and gibbered their mouths and the Phantom strode down the stairs at the Paris Opera in his white-skull mask and plumed hat, even as Shape-shade, a moment before, must have strode down the dark aisle to rattle and chime the brass rings holding the short curtain around the organ, and seat himself like Destiny and Doom to spider the keys and shut his eyes and gape his mouth to let Bach out.

Afraid to look behind, I stared out past the thirty-foot phantoms at an audience unseen, riveted in place, shuddering with music, drawn by terrible images, lifted and then jolted down by the night tide under the theater deck.

Among all those pale faces, fixing their eyes upon the flickering past, was he there? The mourner on the train, the pacer along the canal rim, the leaver of three-in-the-morning rains, was that his face over here, or that one over there? Colorless moons trembling in the dark, a cluster of souls in front, another back halfway, fifty, sixty people, dreadful suspects on yet another fog excursion rushing to collide with nightmare and sink with no sound, only the great suck of the sea going back for reinforcements.

Among all these night travelers, which was he, I wondered, and what could I shout to panic him up the aisles, with me in wild pursuit?

The giant skull smiled from the screen, the lovers fled to the Opera roof, the Phantom pursued to unfurl his cape and overhear their fearful love-talk and grin; the organ shrieked, the theater bucked and heaved with heavy waters celebrating sea burials should the planks gape and drop us down through.

My eyes raced from dimly upturned face to face, and up, up, to the little window of the projectionist's booth, where a section of brow and a maniac eye peered down at the delicious dooms painted on the screen in geysers of light and dark.

Poe's raven eye.

Or rather, Shrank!

Tarot card reader, psychologist, phrenologist, numerologist, and . . .

Film projectionist.

Someone had to run the film while Shapeshade clawed the organ in paroxysms of delight. Most nights, the old man ran from ticket booth to projection room to organ, bouncing off each like a manic boy disguised as rambling man.

But now…?

Who else for a late night menu of hunchbacks, striding skeletons, and hairy paws snatching moon-pearls from a sleeping woman's neck?