Mendoza in Hollywood (12 page)

She bunched the fingers of one hand together and set them in the middle of her forehead, frowning thoughtfully. “One second, if you please,” she said. “I must consult spirit guides. Chief Running Deer! King Elisheazar! What you say, boys?”

In the silence that followed, I transmitted to Oscar:
So, is she nuts or a con artist
?

Your guess is as good as mine
, he replied.

“We will consider your wares,” she said at length, and stepped forth into the light of day. Behind her an evil-faced cat came to the doorway, peered out at us, and fled back inside. Oscar hastened to
open up the side of his wagon, displaying a gaudy splendor of ribbons, brass thimbles and scissors, pack thread, playing cards, cheaply bound books, and various items for personal grooming.

“There, now, Your Highness, what d’you think of this?” he said, as though he expected her breath to be taken away by the glory of it all. I decided they were both nuts and turned my attention to a nice little specimen of
Lupinus
lifting spires of blue and purple from the edge of an irrigation ditch. Her Royal Highness Rodiamantikoff fussed and sniffed at the items on display, remarking plaintively that these things were very shoddily made, not like wares in dear old Grumania-Starstein, and occasionally her two spirit guides threw in their two cents about the quality of this bottle of toilet water or that pair of silver-plated sugar nippers. Oscar just poured on the ingratiating charm, bowing and scraping as though she were standing there in her royal finery.

She’d decided on three yards of scarlet ribbon and a deck of playing cards, explaining that her mother had been a Gypsy and taught her to read the future with them—this, by the way, was why the evil conspirators had not wanted her to inherit the throne and stole the crown for the prime minister’s baseborn son Otto, who was the offspring of a chambermaid—when Chief Running Deer and King Elisheazar got into a fight over whether or not she should buy herself a peppermint stick. Chief Running Deer (she informed us) said she oughtn’t to deny herself such a small pleasure, poor exiled creature that she was, but King Elisheazar told him he was a savage without any breeding and it showed, because
everybody
knew that royalty didn’t buy themselves candy; such luxuries were given to them by loving subjects and by foreigners out of respect for the aura of rulership that hung about their persons despite unfortunate circumstances.

Oscar took the hint and presented her the peppermint stick with his compliments, which restored the good humor of the spirit guides, much to Her Highness’s relief, for it
so
embarrassed her when they went at it like that. She paid a whole thirty-five cents for the cards and the ribbon, delving into her skinny bosom for it, and I guess it was
more money than Oscar had made in days, because, encouraged by his success, he made so bold as to say:

“Now I wonder, Your Highness, if you’d be interested in purchasing a certain item I have here—and I’ve only the one, you see, you won’t find its like this side of the Rockies, but you being royalty and all, I’d like to offer you first crack at it. Step this way if you please, Your Highness, and I’ll give you a private viewing.”

She followed his outstretched hand around to the other side of the wagon, where he opened up the panel and revealed the Criterion Patented Brassbound Pie Safe.

“You see here?” His face was shining with desperate hope. “
Your
eye, trained as it is in discernment and accustomed as it is to superior craftsmanship,
your
eye will surely appreciate the magnificence of this prime household appurtenance. Note the panels of polished rosewood. Note the decorative brass figuring: pineapples, the ancient symbol of abundance and hospitality. Now, I don’t pretend that this is any match for the fine kitchen furniture they’ve got in your country, but I’ll tell you plainly, Your Highness, that this is positively the finest the U. S. of A. has to offer, and no other lady in all of southern California has the like. Now, down east where I come from, the wives of millionaires would pay as much as twenty-five dollars for the likes of this—
if
they could get it! And of course out here, where everything has to be brought by ship, it’s worth a lot more. Yet to you, Highness, to you I’ll offer exclusive ownership for a mere token sum of eleven dollars—why, that won’t even cover the shipping and handling—and the priceless privilege of numbering royalty among my customers.” My God, he was actually getting down on one knee. “What do you say, eh? Shall I take it down for you?”

Ooo, he’d come so close. She’d been transfixed, listening with mouth half open, fascinated. But she didn’t have that kind of money. She wrinkled her freckled nose in slightly disdainful regret.

“I think not, at the present time,” she said. “Spirit guides advise that stars are not presently auspicious for buying furniture. Perhaps later, when vibrations are better.”

He looked so crestfallen that she hastened to add, “Yet you may use my name. Yes, you may say truthfully that you are purveyor to Royal House of Rodiamantikoff.” She swept past him to return to her shack. “In exile,” she said, just before crossing the threshold. “Good day, mister. You are excused from the royal presence.”

“Well, you’ve made thirty-eight cents so far,” I said to Oscar as I helped him close up the panels on the wagon.

“Be-elzebub!” he said, grabbing his buggy whip. “I nearly had her, do you realize that? She saw it, she wanted it, she could envision its rich cabinetry making that dreary hovel a refined and gracious retreat. Nothing was lacking but
money!”

“Well, that’s always the way it is with mortals, isn’t it?” I climbed up to my seat. “And think of the footage you got of her. Genuine California eccentric, wherever she’s supposed to have been born. She’s one for the archives, all right. But you know what? She’s a gringa. If you sold it to her, you’d still lose the bet.”

“I think not,” he retorted grimly. “She says she’s a refugee from a foreign land, and would any true gentleman impute falsehood to a lady? No sir, if Her Highness says she’s not an American, I’ll take her at her word.”

A bullet came whining out of nowhere, drifting in to clip the top off a young oak tree nearby. Oscar whipped out a pistol and fired off three furious shots at the unseen gunman.

“I’ll prevail, I say!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? I’ll
sell
the darned thing! I say I will, by thunder!”

But he didn’t, at least not on that day’s rounds, and he was dull and taciturn—taciturn for him—by the time we returned to the inn that evening. He accepted his plate of grilled beef, tortillas, and frijoles from Porfirio and retired early.

Even though I was eager to get the mulberry samples to my processing credenza, I lingered over the food, because it was particularly good that evening, the beef fiery from a red chile marinade, the frijoles especially creamy, the tortillas unusually redolent of earth and
corn and rain. I was still sitting in the clearing when Porfirio rose to his feet, stared off into the canyon and the night, turning his head for a better signal scan, and announced:

“Stranger approaching on horseback. Mortal male. Emotionally excited.” He had a gun in either hand before he finished speaking, and Juan Bautista rose in haste to carry Erich von Stroheim indoors out of harm’s way. The bird had got too big to button out of sight inside his shirt, though it kept trying to climb into its old refuge in times of stress. It croaked in protest as Juan Bautista passed Einar, who was emerging from the house with a loaded shotgun.

“Company, chief?” said Einar, cocking his weapon.

“Maybe,” said Porfirio, though as the mortal drew nearer, we could tell that the excitement registering on the night air was the harmless, pleasurable kind: anticipatory, nonviolent. When he finally rode into the light of our fire, the mortal saw no weapons of any kind in evidence. Porfirio took a few steps toward him, hands outstretched in a peaceable gesture.

“You come for a room, señor? But we have no empty beds tonight. Bad luck, eh? Perhaps you’ll ride on to Garnier’s? Plenty of room there.”

“Thanks, but that ain’t why I’m here,” the mortal said politely. “I come to see a lady, mister. Met her at the Bella Union. Said her name was Marthy, and she lived hereabouts. You wouldn’t know where a man could find her, would you?”

“Ah. Marthy,” said Porfirio, just as Imarte herself came sweeping to the door of the adobe, magnificent in her Love’s Purple Passion negligee. She paused there in the doorway, holding up an oil lamp like one of those fancy figures that lift a lighting fixture on a newel post.

“Why, who is it at this time of night?” she said throatily.

“It’s only me, Miss Marthy,” said the stranger, dismounting and tying his reins to our hitching post. He stepped forward out of the shadows, hat in hand. “Only me, and perhaps you remember my name? Cyrus Jackson, ma’am. We met at the Bella Union, and you was so kind as to listen to my troubles.”

“Why, to be sure,” she cooed, “the
very
interesting man who hunted Apache scalps for bounty.” She threw us all an arch glance as if to say, See what a trophy I bagged? “How well I remember your thrilling tales of adventure in old San Antonio! But what brings you here, sir, at this unaccustomed hour?”

He blushed. “Why, ma’am, I hope not to give offense—I sort of thought that you might receive callers after sundown, your trade being what it is. And, you know, I wasn’t at my best when last we met—but I’m sober now, and I did remember that you was so taken with my recollections, that I wondered if you mightn’t like to hear about when I was down in Nicaragua in ’56.”

“You rode with Walker in Nicaragua?” Her eyes lit up. She surged forward, bosom first, and placed a coy hand on his arm. “Why, sir, how fascinating! I wonder if you’d be so kind as to share the treasure of your eyewitness memories with an interested listener? In my private chamber, of course.”

“Aw, ma’am, I’d be . . .” Words failed him, or perhaps they just couldn’t make it through the barrier of his enormous foolish grin. He let himself be led by the arm into the house. Staring after Imarte, Porfirio shook his head.

“
Anthropologists
,” Einar muttered in agreement.

M
ORE BOXES ARRIVED
on the next stage, and Einar ran off gleefully to his room with them. The next edition of the film festival featured hours of Charlie Chaplin, of Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand. We sat in our finery in the dressed-up room and played Hollywood premiere again, sipping gin martinis and crunching on popcorn as the silver light flickered and Einar read the titles aloud in his master of ceremonies voice.

Now and then there were a few frames of a landscape we recognized: a smooth-backed elevation with a single line of trees, or a dirt road ascending a steep canyon, or tiny toylike frame houses perched high on the sides of hills and wide empty country all around them. Such a raw new place Hollywood would be, and how unlike the chaparral wilderness we inhabited. For, just as Einar had told me, it would be an eastern Yankee settlement in that time: there were the clapboard houses and the shop fronts and the front porches. It looked like any little town in Connecticut or Maryland, save that it sprawled over endless rolling hills. Edendale, Sunset Park, Lankershim, Burbank, the names to assure new arrivals they were back home and not in some barren wild place where coyotes trotted down the streets at night.

I didn’t enjoy the comedies, as a whole, because so much heartache went with them. That world didn’t even exist yet, that innocent
place, and it was already lost. Those comedians weren’t yet in their mothers’ wombs, but their fates were known. It was hard to watch pretty Mabel and not look for the icy vivacity of cocaine, hard to watch Fatty hide his face in comic shame, knowing the doom one rowdy party would bring on him. Chaplin wasn’t so bad; you knew he’d get off relatively easy for a mortal: long life, fame, lots of family—also scandal, disgrace, exile, quarrels. But the comedians were nearly as immortal as we were, and we gave them our applause.

T
HE DAYS GOT LONGER
, and the green hills silvered and then went to gold. The wildflowers vanished as though somebody had rolled up the magic carpet and whisked it away, except for a few bright orange poppies that decorated the edges of roads. The heat of summer browned everything else. Even the eight-foot-tall thickets of wild mustard, which had bloomed in an electric Day-Glo yellow you could see for miles, went to brown; and the country took on a dry, businesslike look. The arriving and departing stages traveled in a permanent cloud of white dust.