The Mirror Thief (15 page)

—and lures him in, propelling him to the final page, the final lines.
17 February 1953
, followed by two names: this town, this state. The map that guided him here.

Whenever Stanley and Claudio become bored with reading, bored with each other and themselves, they go to the movies. The first-run theaters in Santa Monica are the best place to see the lush and earnest melodramas that Claudio favors, but Stanley prefers the Fox on Lincoln: it’s nearby, half the price, and its B-grade westerns and horror movies are more suited to his taste.

But the Fox isn’t safe in the rain. Stanley and Claudio visit it a few days after their run-in with the Dogs, crossing Abbot Kinney and Electric, following Fourth to Vernon, seeking shelter under the crowns of eucalypts and rubber trees, still soaked to the skin by the time they spot the theater’s neon sign. Stanley shivers in his seat as the first reel begins, distracted as always by the projector’s machinegun stutter, the quick drip of images splashed on the screen.

It’s a monster movie: a volcano releases giant scorpions from their underground lair, and they attack Mexico City. Stanley picked this one because it has lots of Mexican actors in it that Claudio probably knows; also, he wants to see how the scorpions work. He doesn’t generally have much patience for sitting in theaters, but giant movie monsters like the Ymir in
20 Million Miles to Earth
and the dinosaur in
The Beast of Hollow Mountain
fascinate him. The first time he saw one—it was
Mighty Joe Young
at the Lido on Fordham Road; Stanley was eight years old; his father had left him there while meeting a girlfriend around the block—he’d understood immediately how it was done, could sense the invisible hands reaching between the frames to imbue the figures with life, and he knew he’d discovered something important, a small secret that opened onto bigger secrets. The trick wasn’t in the fake monsters, or even in the riffling spool of film, but right there in his own head the whole time. The eye that tricked itself.

This movie begins with a corny fake-newsreel opening—stock footage of volcanoes—and then the two heroes take the stage: a wisecracking American geologist and his handsome Mexican sidekick. Stanley finds himself drawn in by their cool daring and easy banter, and for a while he’s caught up in the story, because after all aren’t he and Claudio just like these guys? Two explorers in a dangerous land, with only each other to fall
back on? Stanley half-wishes the movie could go like this forever: the men taking turns at the Jeep’s wheel, passing gnarled jungles and smoldering ridges under the weird light of an ash-laden sky; the killer scorpions always sensed but never named, never visible, and the whole landscape vivid and mysterious in their uncast shadows.

Soon, of course, the leading lady shows up—followed by the inevitable little kid with a dog, acting cute and making trouble—and Stanley’s interest gutters. Things don’t get any better when the scorpions finally make the scene. They look pretty good at first, creepy and realistic, but the filmmakers don’t have much footage, so they keep repeating shots: one goofy closeup of a popeyed scorpion head drooling poison ooze gets reused so many times that Stanley loses count. The producers must have run out of money or something, because by the last reel they’re not even using models half the time, just a black scorpion silhouette laid over shots of Mexicans panicking in the streets.

Stanley’s barely even watching the movie—he’s trying to remember if the guy playing the American geologist is the same guy who played the geologist in
The Day the World Ended
, and wondering whether this is a coincidence, or if maybe the actor has some geological expertise in real life—when a lit cigarette stings him in the back of the neck. He slaps his skin and turns around, but no one’s behind him. As he scans the half-empty theater, shielding his swelling pupils from the bright screen, a second butt strikes his seatback and sends a spritz of orange sparks past his arm, and now he can see them: six Dogs, seated across the aisle a few rows back. Whitey’s hair glows in the projector’s pulse, but Stanley can’t make out any faces. Some have their dirty All-Stars propped on the seats in front of them, and they’re all smoking or lighting up, readying their next broadside.

Stanley swats Claudio’s knee and jerks a thumb, and the two of them walk to the front, cross below the screen, and exit the theater in the opposite corner. They wait in the lobby long enough to see whether the Dogs will follow them out of the movie; they do, but evidently aren’t carrying enough of a grudge to give chase in the rain. Stanley blinks drops from his eyes, looks over his shoulder as he waits for a break in traffic: the Dogs
huddled under the marquee, vague and shapeless through the downpour, clouding the air before them with their spoiled breath.

From this day forward, Claudio says, I believe that we should see films only in Santa Monica.

He’s naked now, candlelit from below, standing tiptoe in the backroom of the shop on Horizon. Stanley has strung a length of twine between two wallmounts with a midshipman’s hitch; Claudio is draping his soaked clothes over it. Stanley leans in a corner, peevish and aroused, wrapped in his father’s Army blanket: his cock chafes against the rough fabric. Don’t let those jokers rattle your cage, he says. Today was just bad luck. Back in the neighborhood, that’s what we always did in bad weather—we saw bad movies. I should’ve figured those punks would be hanging around the Fox.

They will give us more trouble.

I don’t think so. We made ’em mad the other day, but we made ’em look pretty silly, too. If we steer clear, they’ll let us alone.

How will we do your con? How will we get money?

Money? Stanley laughs and shakes his head, like he’s talking to a child. Money’s the biggest con of all, chum. It’s only good for making more money. Anything you can pay for, you can steal.

Claudio gives him a skeptical look, wipes his damp palms across his hollow stomach.

What’s the matter? Stanley says. If you don’t believe me, just name something. Anything you want, I’ll be back here with it in less than an hour. I’ll get you two of ’em. Go on and try me.

You will be caught.

I ain’t gonna get caught. C’mon, what do you want? A watch? A fancy watch? I’ll get us a couple of fancy watches. A matching pair.

You should not even go outdoors in the daylight. You need your hair to be cut. You look like a criminal.

Like hell I do, Stanley says. I look like an honest American boy. He pats his matted curls with an involuntary hand.

You look like a monkey. A dirty American monkey.

Claudio grins slyly, steps forward. He tugs a handful of Stanley’s hair; the blanket slips. Stanley flails at Claudio’s arm, shoves him away, pulls him back in, wriggling.

It’s another two days before the rain blows through, by which time Stanley has grown stir-crazy, desperate to wander. He walks Claudio to the traffic circle through the cool morning air, sharing a stolen breakfast of Twinkies and oranges. The bus to Santa Monica pulls up as they arrive; Claudio shoves what’s left of his fruit into Stanley’s sticky fingers and runs ahead. He turns and smiles once he’s crossed Main, and Stanley smiles back. The fleeting dialogue of their faces across the busy street conveys many things, trust not foremost among them. Claudio vanishes behind the coach, reappears in shadow through its windows, settles into a seat. Stanley watches the kid’s sharp-nosed profile—eclipsed by the irregular beat of passengers in the aisle, cars on the street—until the bus rolls away.

He walks back to the oceanfront and crosses the boardwalk to the beach, swallowing the last of the luminous orange wedges, sucking his fingertips clean. He breaks the rind into bits and pitches it to a group of seagulls running in the swash; the gulls take the pieces, fly with them, and drop them into the waves, where other gulls swoop at them in turn. Aerated, the ocean is sky-blue, opaque, dotted with pulses of silver. A row of white surf breaks two hundred feet out, cracking like a heavy whip, hollowing a brief cavern in the foam. Its dyspeptic growl echoes down the waterfront.

Stanley wipes his mouth and smells the citrus oil on his hands, thinking of the winter harvest in Riverside. That first week of work he probably ate his weight in fruit: sweet clementines, brilliant valencias, navel oranges bigger than bocce balls. Last month, after he and Claudio snuck away from the groves and hitched a ride into Los Angeles from a Fuller Brush man, they both swore they’d never touch citrus again. Now they find themselves craving it.

Stanley met Claudio on a mixed picking crew. He didn’t like him much at first. The kid seemed too smooth for harvest work, too cagey, no more born to it than Stanley was himself. Stanley made him out to be on the run from trouble, or maybe just slumming: a prodigal outcast from
some mansion on some hill. He also figured Claudio for a sandbagger, feigning ineptitude to duck the worst work, certain his job was secure since the crew boss spoke no Spanish and needed him to translate. They ignored each other at first. But the whites on the crew were all older than Stanley, closemouthed, and the Mexicans seemed to steer clear of Claudio. Eventually the two began to talk.

Stanley never asked questions, so Claudio’s story came out slowly, in no special order. The youngest of thirteen by two mothers, he’d grown up comfortable and invisible in a big house outside Hermosillo. His father was a famous general—he’d fought Pancho Villa at Calaya, the Cristeros in Jalisco—and his brothers left home to become lawyers, bankers, statesmen. Claudio spent his days in the cinema in town, learning English from Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, raising his small hands to hide the subtitles. He grew older, made quiet plans to travel north. Claudio told Stanley these stories as they worked, whispered them at night in the bunkhouse, and later, when they slipped into the dark groves to plot escape under moon-silvered citrus leaves, Stanley lay still and watched Claudio’s lips move until he no longer understood anything at all.

He likes Claudio a lot. He’s not sick of having him around. At idle times on his long cross-country drift he’s often wished he had somebody to share his adventures—somebody who’d listen to him, who’d believe the stories he tells himself about himself—and then this oddball Mexican kid came along and seemed to fit the bill. And it’s been great, having a partner. It’s made things possible that otherwise wouldn’t be.

But there are also things that Stanley wants to do alone.

When the rind is gone and the gulls are scattered, Stanley takes a deep breath and turns back toward the boardwalk. The late-morning sun is high over the city: buildings and streetlamps and palmtrees angle their shadows at him, marking channels in the sand, and the storefronts are blacked-out beneath their porticos. Stanley checks the signs over the arcades as he draws closer: Chop Suey, St. Mark’s Hotel, Center Drug Co. On the corner of Market Street, blue and red stripes coil around a white column; he smoothes his frizzed hair as he passes it by.

Beachfront characters are out enjoying the weather—an old lady in an opera coat, stooped under her parasol; a bearded man in paint-spattered chinos, chasing two laughing women across the sand; a stout burgher walking an ugly dog, singing to it in a strange language—but Stanley pays them all little mind. He broadcasts his attention among the buildings, mindful of shapes and textures, of the attitude of sunlight on walls and streets. Patterns catch his eye, then slip into the background: rows of lancet windows, bricks emerging from stucco, mascarons grinning atop cast-iron columns. There’s an absence here that he’s training himself to see, something he can only glimpse sidelong, as if by accident. It’s bound up with the past, with the lapsed grandeur of this place, but even that is insubstantial, a shadow cast by the thing itself, flickering behind the scrim of years like the ghost of a ghost.

This is Welles’s city, so named in the book—which makes it Crivano’s city, too, as much as any earthly city can be. Stanley will learn to move through it as Crivano would: silent, catlike, on the balls of his feet. Unhidden yet unseen. Whenever his path clears, he shuts his eyes to walk a few blind steps, imagining the feel of cobblestones under soft boots, of a slender blade at his hip, of a black cape fanning his ankles, billowing in the night air. The night itself another cloak. He’s not sure how he came to have so clear a picture of Crivano; in the book, Welles never really says what he looks like. It occurs to Stanley that he could gotten this idea from someplace else: from Stewart Granger in
Scaramouche
, maybe, or even from a corny Zorro movie that he saw when he was a kid. He opens his eyes, blinks and winces in the sun, corrects his course.

Ahead is a cluster of old Bridgo parlors, some boarded up, some converted to penny arcades. Young men’s voices inside. The frantic chime of pinball machines. He’d like to go in, play a few balls—he’s good at it—but Dogs will be nearby, and he’s not quite ready for another scrap. He hasn’t yet settled on a strategy with those guys. He’ll go to war if he has to; he’d probably only need to take two or three of them out before the others would fold. But he’d have to hurt those two or three pretty bad—hospital bad, maybe graveyard bad—for the rest to take him seriously, and he’s not
sure he wants the trouble that would come with that. For now he’ll just steer clear and lie low.

He crosses the Speedway and heads inland, past dilapidated shops and orange brick apartments. The avenues are rain-washed, weirdly bright, laid out for inspection. The usual boardwalk sidestreet smells—fried food, spilled liquor, puke and piss—are erased, but this just uncovers the subtler ripe-fruit and rotten-egg odors of the oilfield. Past Abbot Kinney the buildings fall away, opening space for weedy lawns fenced by splintered pickets, gardens bordered by railroad ties. Flowers and green leaves are everywhere, even this early in the year: myrtle and boxwood, bottlebrush and oleander, jasmine and clematis on trellised porches, cosmos and hollyhocks at fencerows. The plants are long-stemmed, unsteady in the sandy soil, slouching against clapboard with scapegrace charm, ready to take ruthless advantage of any kindness shown to them.