Significant Others (20 page)
T
HIS YEAR, JIMMY CHAPPELL WAS TO PLAY A SISTER OF
Mercy in the Grove Play, an epic called “Solferino,” about the founding of the Red Cross. Another adventure in tedium, no doubt, but Booter showed up anyway, to keep peace with his old friend. Ten minutes before curtain time, he scaled the slope of the great outdoor stage and found Jimmy waiting in “the wings”—a bark-covered screen disguised as a redwood tree.
“Christ,” said Booter. “I hope you look better from down there.”
Jimmy’s wig and nurse’s cap, a single macabre unit, were hanging next to him on a nail. His few strands of real hair were matted and sweaty, and his white uniform was already streaked with makeup. “It’s all illusion,” said Jimmy.
“It better be,” said Booter. “What’s your first scene?”
“Well … I call for more tourniquets.”
“Is that all?”
Jimmy looked annoyed. “It’s a speech, Booter. It’s an important moment.”
“I’m sure it is.”
Jimmy plucked a cigaret from the pocket of his uniform and lit it with his lighter. He took a long drag, then said: “It gets more substantive later on.”
“What happens then?”
Jimmy smiled a little and tapped his cigaret. “I call for more plasma.”
Booter chuckled.
“It’s not my finest role,” said Jimmy.
“What the hell,” said Booter.
“I don’t care. It’s theater.” Jimmy gazed down on his fellow Bohemians, filing in to the log benches. “God, I love it.” He cast a pensive glance in Booter’s direction. “What the hell am I doing in real estate?”
“Making a damn good living,” said Booter.
“Yeah, I guess.”
A stage manager rushed past them with an armful of prop rifles. “Places, Jimmy. Two minutes.”
“O.K.,” said Jimmy.
“I’d better hightail it,” said Booter.
“Where are you sitting?”
“Toward the back. With Buck Vickers and the rest of that gang.”
“Well … stay if you want.”
“Here?”
“Sure. Keep me company. I sit right here most of the time.”
“Won’t they throw me out?”
Jimmy made a stern face. “I’ll raise hell if they do. I might not be the star of this extravaganza …”
Booter laughed. “You get a pretty good view up here.” He peered through a fist-sized hole in the bark screen. Below, a lilliputian stagehand scurried across the main stage, scattering bloodied bandages in preparation for battle. The audience in the redwood amphitheater spoke with a single voice, whiskey-charged and jovial.
The lights dimmed suddenly. The audience fell silent as the orchestra plunged into the overture.
“Too late now,” said Jimmy. “You’re stuck with me.”
“What the hell,” said Booter. As a matter of fact, he rather liked the idea of staying here in Jimmy’s lair—like a couple of schoolboys playing hooky in a secret tree house.
Jimmy snatched his nurse wig off the nail and plopped it onto his head. Squatting a little, he faced a triangle of broken mirror and made final adjustments. His face exuded the humorless concentration of a man devoted to his craft. He gave Booter a thumbs-up sign, then marched into the public eye, his jaw set with the now-or-never determination of a paratrooper.
A blue spotlight followed him as he descended the long switchback trail to the main stage. A fifty-voice chorus sang about the rigors of war, the nobility of dying. After two or three minutes of this, Jimmy confronted Hubert Watkins (who was dressed as a general) and recited a list of casualties, making a desperate but eloquent plea for sterile dressings.
He returned five minutes later, breathless from the climb. He leaned against the bark wall and slid to a sitting position. “Whew,” he said.
“Brilliant as usual,” said Booter.
“You’re not just saying that?”
“No. It was very moving.”
“Nobody laughed, at least.”
“No,” said Booter. “You could’ve heard a pin drop.”
Jimmy took off the wig and mopped his brow with a Kleenex. “Stupid ol’ Lonnie Muchmore missed two light cues.”
“Didn’t show,” said Booter.
“It didn’t?” Jimmy glanced up hopefully.
“Looked fine from here. The audience liked you.”
“Yeah,” said Jimmy, grinning. “They did, didn’t they?”
Jimmy’s plasma scene went without a hitch. Back in the wings again, he unwound with Booter. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I met George Bush.”
“Oh, yeah?”
The bewigged face smiled. “I guess you could say I met him. I peed on a tree next to him.”
Booter nodded soberly. “Congratulations.”
Jimmy laughed. “When I joined this outfit fifteen years ago, all I ever heard was: So-and-so peed on a tree next to Art Linkletter or John Mitchell….”
“Henry McKittrick peed on a tree next to J. Edgar Hoover.”
“There you go,” said Jimmy.
“You’re not really a Bohemian until you’ve peed on a tree next to somebody.”
“So there I was, answering the call of nature.” Jimmy spun his yarn with histrionic relish. “And I look over, and who’s standing there not five feet away but ol’ Number Two himself.”
“Doing number one,” said Booter.
Jimmy ignored this witticism. “Right, and I look at him big as life and say: ‘What’s the matter? Don’t they have toilets up at Mandalay?’” He laughed at his own joke, then began coughing violently.
“Take it easy,” said Booter. “You O.K.?”
Jimmy nodded, gasping. “Never better.” He hoisted himself to his feet. “I gotta change for the finale.”
“Another costume?”
“Well, there’s a different sash, at least. I put this red cross on the front of …” For a moment, it seemed he was considering something, then he fell back against the wall, clutching his chest.
“Jimmy, for God’s sake …” Booter lunged for him, but Jimmy collapsed into a heap on the floor, thrashing his legs about like an injured thoroughbred. “Jimmy, is there medicine? Where the hell is your …?”
Jimmy’s eyes looked up at him, blinking. Then he registered another jolt, groaning between clenched teeth, clamping his palm against the pain. In another instant, his body went slack again and there was no movement of any kind.
Booter knelt next to him. “Jimmy, damnit … don’t do this, ol’ man.” He checked Jimmy’s heart, his pulse. Nothing. “You’re gonna miss the big number, fella….”
Down below, the orchestra was piling strings upon trumpets upon drums, thundering toward the finale. Roman candles burst above the hillside in a festive facsimile of warfare. The chorus was singing angelically about the formation of the Geneva Convention.
The stage manager rushed up, out of breath. “Wake him up, will you? He’s missing his entrance.”
“No he’s not,” said Booter.
The stage manager looked exasperated and left, issuing orders to other nurses behind other trees. The music soared, the sky burned with pink phosphorescence, the forest reverberated with applause.
When it was over, Booter removed Jimmy’s wig and hung it back on its nail. Then he took a Kleenex and—slowly, meticulously—removed Jimmy’s lipstick. It wouldn’t do for him to look like this when they came to take him away.
W
REN WOKE AT EIGHT THIRTY-EIGHT WITH A
vague sense of being behind schedule. Her limousine from the city was due to arrive at ten, which left—what?—three hours or so before the departure of American Airlines flight 220 to Chicago. Her head was already cluttered with numbers again. The wilderness had lost its hold on her.
She ate a farewell breakfast on the porch, gazing down on the cruising vultures, the ancient forest, the diamond-bright landscape of bluest blues and greenest greens. She would miss it, she decided. She would miss the exquisite
texture
of being alone in such a place.
Rolando would be waiting for her at O’Hare—seven-fifteen Chicago time—overflowing with candy and wilted carnations, looking dear and out of it in a suit. She had welcomed this respite from his boundless energy, his excruciating attentiveness, the ardor which bordered on priapism. Now she couldn’t wait to be back. Her heart tap-danced at the thought of him.
After breakfast, she did the dishes for the last time, then dragged out her suitcases. She decided against packing a bird’s nest she had found in the woods, picturing how forlorn it would look amidst the chrome and whitewash of her loft. Vacations, she had learned, hardly ever survived transplanting.
As she gathered her loose receipts and paperbacks, she looked at Booter’s check and smiled. He had originally made it out for ten thousand, but she’d insisted that he change it. Five thousand, after all, had been his first offer, and there was no point in being greedy.
The phone rang. What now? Was her driver lost?
“Wren Douglas,” she purred, reassuming the mantle of an incorporated woman.
“It’s me,” came a weak voice. It was Booter, but he didn’t sound like himself.
“Oh, hi.”
“I have to see you again.”
“Are you O.K.?” she asked. “You sound like a truck just hit you.”
“Something has happened,” he said quietly, his voice drained of color. “I have to see you.”
“Booter, my flight is at one o’clock.”
“Cancel it. Please.”
“I can’t. There’s a driver coming from the city.”
“He can stay here overnight. I’ll pay for it.”
“Look,” she said, “if I flake out on my boyfriend one more time … What’s the problem, anyway? Tell me about it.”
“No,” he said quietly. “Not now.”
“Well, then, if …”
“I’ll pay you more, of course.”
That made her mad. “Damnit, Booter …”
“Well, what do I have to do?”
“Nothing,” she said wearily, resigning herself to another shouting match with Rolando. “If it’s really important …”
“You can catch the same flight tomorrow. Tell your driver he can stay at the Sonoma Mission Inn. It’s very nice. I have an account there. I’ll call ahead and arrange everything.”
“Well … O.K.”
“I’ll be there this afternoon.”
“When?”
“No later than three,” he said.
W
HEN SOMEONE DIED AT THE GROVE, THE NEWS
of it rumbled through the encampment like the drums of the Navajo. Jimmy’s death had been no different from the rest, electrifying Bohemia for a few uncertain hours until banality came along to put the horror in its place. Discussing it over breakfast fizzes the next morning, Jimmy’s campmates had spoken with a single voice: “He loved performing more than anything. He died a happy man.”
Booter knew better. He had been there. He had seen the look on Jimmy’s face. These fond farewells were too damn facile, if you asked him. When
he
went west, by God, he wanted serious mourning. If not weeping and wailing, at least a little gnashing of teeth.
Most of this occurred to him during Jimmy’s impromptu memorial service at Medicine Lodge, Father Paddy Starr officiating. Booter knew the priest only slightly (he was a member of Pig’n’ Whistle), but the fellow struck him as a little too swish for his own good.
“He was one of the greats,” Father Paddy told him afterwards.
“Yes,” said Booter.
“I loved him in that Egyptian thing.”
Booter nodded.
“I suppose his wife has been notified.”
“His wife is dead,” said Booter.
“Oh.” The cleric clucked sympathetically. “What about children?”
“I dunno,” said Booter, walking away. “I think there’s a son in the East.”
He downed two Scotches at the Medicine Lodge bar and walked back to Hillbillies by himself. On the way, he passed one of the Grove’s infamous “heart-attack phones.” Housed in their own miniature chalets, these infirmary hot lines had been installed for the sole purpose of saving lives.
Sometimes they did the job; sometimes they didn’t.
Bohemians made grim jokes about the phones, the worst of which Booter had heard from Jimmy.
Poor bastard, he thought, as he stumbled into the compound at Hillbillies. I know damn well you weren’t ready.
He had two more drinks at Hillbillies, but left shortly thereafter, finding the camaraderie oppressive. He walked down the river road past the Club House, then decided to forsake this eternal gloom for the sunshine of the riverbank.
The sentry at the guardhouse gave him a funny look. The old codger had always struck him as slightly impertinent.
“Havin’ a good mornin'?” he asked.
“Not particularly,” said Booter.
“Well … hope it gets better.”
Booter grunted at him and kept walking. He wondered where they had kept Jimmy overnight. Was there a morgue in the infirmary? The funeral people had arrived from the city this morning, so Jimmy must’ve stayed somewhere in the Grove, away from his brothers, alone in the dark….
He crossed the footbridge above the gorge leading down to the beach. Laughter drifted up from the water, but it sounded callous to him, disrespectful of the dead. Didn’t they know what had happened to Jimmy? Didn’t all of Bohemia know?
Descending the slope to the river, he checked out a canoe at the dock and padded it with one of the thin cotton mattresses they issued for sunbathing. Snug in this waterborne nest, he paddled away from the cruel mirth of the swimmers, intent upon solitude.
When he was fifty yards or so downriver, he pulled in his paddle and leaned back against the mattress. There was virtually no current, and the sun felt good against his skin. He thought of Wren for a moment, welcoming the comfort she could offer in only a matter of hours.
He took his flask from his hip pocket and wet his whistle. Where did that come from—wet your whistle? He had heard it all his life without actually stopping to think about it. Jimmy would know, damn him. Why wasn’t he here?
Jimmy would like this a lot. Jimmy was a real kid in a canoe. Naming all the birds, spinning yarns. He could tell his story about the narrow-gauge railway that ran along the river road in the 1890s … how the old-timers had come to the Grove using public transportation, starting with the Sausalito ferry, then taking the old Northwestern Pacific …
