Читать книгу Death is a Lonely Business - Рэй Брэдбери, Ray Bradbury Philip K. Dick Isaac Asimov - Страница 6

Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad. It had fog almost every night and along the shore the moaning of the oil well machinery and the slap of dark water in the canals and the hiss of sand against the windows of your house when the wind came up and sang among the open places and along the empty walks.

Those were the days when the Venice pier was falling apart and dying in the sea and you could find there the bones of a vast dinosaur, the rollercoaster, being covered by the shifting tides.

At the end of one long canal you could find old circus wagons that had been rolled and dumped, and in the cages, at midnight, if you looked, things lived—fish and crayfish moving with the tide; and it was all the circuses of time somehow gone to doom and rusting away.

And there was a loud avalanche of big red trolley car that rushed toward the sea every half-hour and at midnight skirled the curve and threw sparks on the high wires and rolled away with a moan which was like the dead turning in their sleep, as if the trolleys and the lonely men who swayed steering them knew that in another year they would be gone, the tracks covered with concrete and tar and the high spider-wire collected on rolls and spirited away.

And it was in that time, in one of those lonely years when the fogs never ended and the winds never stopped their laments, that riding the old red trolley, the high-bucketing thunder, one night I met up with Death’s friend and didn’t know it.

It was a raining night, with me reading a book in the back of the old, whining, roaring railcar on its way from one empty confetti-tossed transfer station to the next. Just me and the Dig, aching wooden car and the conductor up front slamming the brass controls and easing the brakes and letting out the hell-steam when needed.

And the man down the aisle who somehow had got there without my noticing.

I became aware of him finally because of him swaying, swaying, standing there behind me for a long time, as if undecided because there were forty empty seats and late at night it is hard with so much emptiness to decide which one to take. But finally I heard him sit and I knew he was there because I could smell him like the tidelands coming in across the fields. On top of the smell of his clothes, there was the odor of too much drink taken in too little time.

I did not look back at him. I learned long ago, looking only encourages.

I shut my eyes and kept my head firmly turned away. It didn’t work.

“Oh,” the man moaned.

I could feel him strain forward in his seat. I felt his hot breath on my neck. I held on to my knees and sank away.

“Oh,” he moaned, even louder. It was like someone falling off a cliff, asking to be saved, or someone swimming far out in the storm, wanting to be seen.

“Ah!”

It was raining hard now as the big red trolley bucketed across a midnight stretch of meadow-grass and the rain banged the windows, drenching away the sight of open fields. We sailed through Culver City without seeing the film studio and ran on, the great car heaving, the floorboard whining underfoot, the empty seats creaking, the train whistle screaming.

And a blast of terrible air from behind me as the unseen man cried, “Death!”

The train whistle cut across his voice so he had to start over.

“Death—”

Another whistle.

“Death,” said the voice behind me, “is a lonely business.”

I thought he might weep. I stared ahead at the flashing rain that rushed to meet us. The train slowed. The man rose up in a fury of demand, as if he might beat at me if I didn’t listen and at last turn. He wanted to be seen. He wished to drown me in his need. I felt his hands stretch out, and whether as fists or claws, to rake or beat me, I could not guess. I clutched the seat in front of me. His voice exploded.

“Oh, death!”

The train braked to a halt.

Go on, I thought, finish it!

“Is a lonely business!” he said, in a dreadful whisper, and moved away.

I heard the back door open. At last I turned.

The car was empty. The man had gone, taking his funeral with him. I heard gravel crunching on the path outside the train.

The unseen man was muttering out there to himself as the doors banged shut. I could still hear him through the window. Something about the grave. Something about the grave. Something about the lonely.

The train jerked and roared away through the long grass and the storm.

I threw the window up to lean out and stare back into wet darkness.

If there was a city back there, and people, or one man and his terrible sadness, I could not see, nor hear.

The train was headed for the ocean.

I had this awful feeling it would plunge in.

I slammed the window down and sat, shivering.

I had to remind myself all the rest of the way, you’re only twenty-seven. You don’t drink. But …

I had a drink, anyway.

Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them, I found a last-stand saloon, empty save for a bartender in love with Hopalong Cassidy on late night TV.

“One double vodka, please.”

I was astounded at my voice. Why was I drinking? For courage to call my girlfriend; Peg, two thousand miles away in Mexico City? To tell her that I was all right? But nothing had happened to me, had it?

Nothing but a train ride and cold rain and a dreadful voice behind me, exhaling vapors of fear. But I dreaded going back to my apartment bed, which was as empty as an icebox abandoned by the Okies on the way west.

The only thing emptier was my Great American Novelist’s bank account in an old Roman temple bank building on the edge of the sea, about to be washed away in the next recession. The tellers waited in rowboats every morning, while the manager drowned himself in the nearest bar. I rarely saw any of them. With only an occasional sale to a pulp detective magazine, there was no cash to deposit. So …

I drank my vodka. I winced.

“Jesus,” said the bartender, “you look like you never had booze before!”

“I never did.”

“You look horrible.”

“I feel horrible. You ever think something awful is going to happen, but you don’t know what?”

“It’s called the heebie-jeebies.”

I swallowed more vodka and shivered.

“No, no. Something really terrible, closing in on you, is what I mean.”

The bartender looked over my shoulder as if he saw the ghost of the man on the train there.

“Did you bring it in with you?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not here.”

“But,” I said, “he spoke to me—one of the Furies.”

“Furies?”

“I didn’t see his face. God, I feel worse now. Good night.”

“Lay off the booze!”

But I was out the door and peering in all directions to catch the thing that was waiting for me. Which way home, so as not to meet up with darkness? I chose.

And knowing it was the wrong choice, I hurried along the dark rim of the old canal toward the drowned circus wagons.

How the lion cages got in the canal no one knew. For that matter, no one seemed to remember how the canals had gotten there in the middle of an old town somehow fallen to seed, the seeds rustling against the doors every night along with the sand and bits of seaweed and unravelings of tobacco from cigarettes tossed along the strand-shore as far back as 1910.

But there they were, the canals and, at the end of one, a dark green and oil scummed waterway, the ancient circus wagons and cages, flaking their white enamel and gold paint and rusting their thick bars.

A long time before, in the early Twenties, these cages had probably rolled by like bright summer storms with animals prowling them, lions opening their mouths to exhale hot meat breaths. Teams of white horses had dragged their pomp through Venice and across the fields long before MGM put up its false fronts and made a new kind of circus that would live forever on bits of film.

Now all that remained of the old parade had ended here. Some of the cage wagons stood upright in the deep waters of the canal, others were tilted flat over on their sides and buried in the tides that revealed them some dawns or covered them some midnights. Fish swarmed in and out of the bars. By day small boys came and danced about on the huge lost islands of steel and wood and sometimes popped inside and shook the bars and roared.

But now, long after midnight with the last trolley gone to destinations north along the empty sands, the canals lapped their black waters and sucked at the cages like old women sucking their empty gums.

I came running, head down against the rain which suddenly cleared and stopped. The moon broke through a rift of darkness like a great eye watching me. I walked on mirrors which showed me the same moon and clouds. I walked on the sky beneath, and—something happened....

From somewhere a block or so away, a tidal surge of salt water came rolling black and smooth between the canal banks. Somewhere a sandbar had broken and let the sea in. And here the dark waters came. The tide reached a small overpass bridge at the same moment I reached the center.

The water hissed about the old lion cages.

I quickened. I seized the rail of the bridge.

For in one cage, directly below me, a dim phosphorescence bumped the inside of the bars.

A hand gestured from within the cage.

Some old lion-tamer, gone to sleep, had just wakened to find himself in a strange place.

An arm outstretched within the cage, behind the bars, languidly. The lion-tamer was coming full awake.

The water fell and rose again.

And a ghost pressed to the bars.

Bent over the rail, I could not believe.

But now the spirit-light took shape. Not only a hand, an arm, but an entire body sagged and loosely gesticulated, like an immense marionette, trapped in iron.

A pale face, with empty eyes which took light from the moon, and showed nothing else, was there like a silver mask.

Then the tide shrugged and sank. The body vanished.

Somewhere inside my head, the vast trolley rounded a curve of rusted track, chocked brakes, threw sparks, screamed to a halt as somewhere an unseen man jolted out those words with every run, jump, rush.

“Death—is a lonely—business.”

No.

The tide rose again in a gesture like a stance remembered from some other night.

And the ghost shape rose again within the cage.

It was a dead man wanting out.

Somebody gave a terrible yell.

I knew it was me, when a dozen lights flashed on in the little houses along the rim of the dark canal.

“All right, stand back, stand back!”

More cars were arriving, more police, more lights going on, more people wandering out in their bathrobes, stunned with sleep, to stand with me, stunned with more than sleep. We looked like a mob of miserable clowns abandoned on the bridge, looking down at our drowned circus.

I stood shivering, staring at the cage, thinking, why didn’t I look back? Why didn’t I see that man who knew all about the man down there in the circus wagon?

My God, I thought, what if the man on the train had actually shoved this dead man into the cage?

Proof? None. All I had was five words repeated on a night train an hour after midnight. All I had was rain dripping on the high wire repeating those words. All I had was the way the cold water came like death along the canal to wash the cages and go back out colder than when it had arrived.

More strange clowns came out of the old bungalows.

“All right, folks, it’s three in the morning. Clear away!”

It had begun to rain again, and the police when they had arrived had looked at me as if to say, why didn’t you mind your own business? or wait until morning and phone it in, anonymous?

One of the policemen stood on the edge of the canal in a pair of black swim trunks, looking at the water with distaste. His body was white from not having been in the sun for a long while. He stood watching the tide move into the cage and lift the sleeper there, beckoning. A face showed behind the bars. The face was so gone-far-off-away it was sad. There was a terrible wrenching in my chest. I had to back off, because I heard the first trembling cough of grief start up in my throat.

And then the white flesh of the policeman cut the water. He sank.

I thought he had drowned, too. The rain fell on the oily surface of the canal.

And then the officer appeared, inside the cage, his face to the bars, gagging.

It shocked me, for I thought it was the dead man come there for a last in-sucked gasp of life.

A moment later, I saw the swimmer thrashing out of the far side of the cage, pulling a long ghost shape like a funeral streamer of pale seaweed.

Someone was mourning. Dear Jesus, it can’t be me!

They had the body out on the canal bank now, and the swimmer was toweling himself. The lights were blinking off in the patrol cars. Three policemen bent over the body with flashlights, talking in low voices.

“—I’d say about twenty-four hours.”

“—Where’s the coroner?”

“—Phone’s off the hook. Tom went to get him.”

“Any wallet—I.D.?”

“He’s clean. Probably a transient.”

They started turning the pockets inside out.

“No, not a transient,” I said, and stopped.

One of the policemen had turned to flash his light in my face. With great curiosity he examined my eyes, and heard the sounds buried in my throat.

“You know him?”

“No.”

“Then why—?”

“Why am I feeling lousy? Because. He’s dead, forever. Christ. And I found him.”

My mind jumped.

On a brighter summer day years back I had rounded a corner to find a man sprawled under a braked car. The driver was leaping from the car to stand over the body. I stepped forward, then stopped.

Something pink lay on the sidewalk near my shoe.

I remembered it from some high school laboratory vat. A lonely bit of brain tissue.

A woman, passing, a stranger, stood for a long time staring at the body under the car. Then she did an impulsive thing she could not have anticipated. She bent slowly to kneel by the body. She patted his shoulder, touched him gently as if to say, oh there, there, there, oh, oh—there.

“Was he—killed?” I heard myself say.

The policeman turned. “What made you say that?”

“How would, I mean, how would he get in that cage—underwater—if someone didn’t—stuff him there?”

The flashlight switched on again and touched over my face like a doctor’s hand, probing for symptoms.

“You the one who phoned the call in?”

“No.” I shivered. “I’m the one who yelled and made all the lights come on.”

“Hey,” someone whispered.

A plainclothes detective, short, balding, kneeled by the body and turned out the coat pockets. From them tumbled wads and clots of what looked like wet snowflakes, papier-mâché.

“What in hell’s that?” someone said.

I know, I thought, but didn’t say.

My hand trembling, I bent near the detective to pick up some of the wet paper mash. He was busy emptying the other pockets of more of the junk. I kept some of it in my palm and, as I rose, shoved it in my pocket, as the detective glanced up.

“You’re soaked,” he said. “Give your name and address to that officer over there and get home. Dry off.”

It was beginning to rain again and I was shivering. I turned, gave the officer my name and address, and hurried away toward my apartment.

I had jogged along for about a block when a car pulled up and the door swung open. The short detective with the balding head blinked out at me.

“Christ, you look awful,” he said.

“Someone else said that to me, just an hour ago.”

“Get in.”

“I only live another block—”

“Get in!”

I climbed in, shuddering, and he drove me the last two blocks to my thirty-dollar-a-month, stale, crackerbox flat. I almost fell, getting out, I was so weak with trembling.

“Crumley,” said the detective. “Elmo Crumley. Call me when you figure out what that paper junk is you stuck in your pocket.”

I started guiltily. My hand went to that pocket. I nodded. “Sure.”

“And stop worrying and looking sick,” said Crumley. “He wasn’t anybody—.” He stopped, ashamed of what he had said, and ducked his head to start over.

“Why do I think he was somebody?” I said. “When I remember who, I’ll call.”

I stood frozen. I was afraid more terrible things were waiting just behind me. When I opened my apartment door, would black canal waters flood out?

“Jump!” and Elmo Crumley slammed his door.

His car was just two dots of red light going away in a fresh downpour that beat my eyelids shut.

I glanced across the street at the gas station phone booth which I used as my office to call editors who never phoned back. I rummaged my pockets for change, thinking, I’ll call Mexico City, wake Peg, reverse the charges, tell her about the cage, the man, and—Christ—scare her to death!

Listen to the detective, I thought.

Jump.

I was shaking so violently now that I couldn’t get the damn key in the lock.

Rain followed me inside.

Inside, waiting for me was …

An empty twenty-by-twenty studio apartment with a body-damaged sofa, a bookcase with fourteen books in it and lots of waiting space, an easy chair bought on the cheap from Goodwill Industries, a Sears, Roebuck unpainted pinewood desk with an unoiled 1934 Underwood Standard typewriter on it, as big as a player piano and as loud as wooden clogs on a carpetless floor.

In the typewriter was an anticipatory sheet of paper. In a wood box on one side was my collected literary output, all in one stack. There were copies of Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and Black Mask, each of which had paid me thirty or forty dollars per story. On the other side was another wooden box, waiting to be filled with manuscript. In it was a single page of a book that refused to begin.

UNTITLED NOVEL.

With my name under that. And the date, July 1, 1949.

Which was three months ago.

I shivered, stripped down, toweled myself off, got into a bathrobe, and came back to stand staring at my desk.

I touched the typewriter, wondering if it was a lost friend or a man or a mean mistress.

Somewhere back a few weeks it had made noises vaguely resembling the Muse. Now, more often than not, I sat at the damned machine as if someone had cut my hands off at the wrists. Three or four times a day I sat here and was victimized by literary heaves. Nothing came. Or if it did, it wound up on the floor in hairballs I swept up every night. I was going through that long desert known as Dry Spell, Arizona.

It had a lot to do with Peg so far away among all those catacomb mummies in Mexico, and my being lonely, and no sun in Venice for the three months, only mist and then fog and then rain and then fog and mist again. I wound myself up in cold cotton batting each midnight, and rolled out all fungus at dawn. My pillow was moist every morning, but I didn’t know what I had dreamed to salt it that way.

I looked out the window at that telephone, which I listened for all day every day, which never rang offering to bank my splendid novel if I could finish it last year.

I saw my fingers moving on the typewriter keys, fumbling. I thought they looked like the hands of the dead stranger in the cage, dangled out in the water moving like sea anemones, or like the hands, unseen, of the man behind me tonight on the train.

Both men gestured.

Slowly, slowly, I sat down.

Something thumped within my chest like someone bumping into the bars of an abandoned cage.

Someone breathed on my neck …

I had to make both of them go away. I had to do something to quiet them so I could sleep.

A sound came out of my throat as if I were about to be sick. But I didn’t throw up.

Instead, my fingers began to type, x-ing out the UNTITLED NOVEL until it was gone.

Then I went down a space and saw these words begin to jolt out on the paper:

DEATH and then IS A and then LONELY and then, at last, BUSINESS.

I grimaced wildly at the title, gasped, and didn’t stop typing for an hour, until I got the storm-lightning train rolled away in the rain and let the lion cage fill with black sea water which poured forth and set the dead man free....

Down and through my arms, along my hands, and out my cold fingertips onto the page.

In a flood, the darkness came.

I laughed, glad for its arrival.

And fell into bed.

As I tried to sleep, I began sneezing and sneezing and lay miserably using up a box of Kleenex, feeling the cold would never end.

During the night the fog thickened, and way out in the bay somewhere sunk and lost, a foghorn blew and blew again. It sounded like a great sea beast long dead and heading for its own grave away from shore, mourning along the way, with no one to care or follow.

During the night a wind moved in my apartment window and stirred the typed pages of my novel on the desk. I heard the paper whisper like the waters in the canal, like the breath on my neck, and at last I slept.

I awoke late to a blaze of sun. I sneezed my way to the door and flung it wide to step out into a blow of daylight so fierce it made me want to live forever, and so ashamed of the thought I wanted, like Ahab, to strike the sun. Instead I dressed quickly. My clothes from last night were still damp. I put on tennis shorts and a jacket, then turned the pockets of my damp coat out to find the clot of papier-mâché that had fallen from the dead man’s suit only a few hours ago.

I touched the pieces with my fingernail, exhaling. I knew what they were. But I wasn’t ready to face up to it yet.

I am not a runner. But I ran …

Away from the canal, the cage, the voice talking darkness on the tram, away from my room and the fresh pages waiting to be read which had started to say it all, but I did not want to read them yet. I just ran blindly south on the beach.

Into Lost World country.

I slowed at last to stare at the forenoon feedings of strange mechanical beasts.

Oil wells. Oil pumps.

These great pterodactyls, I said to friends, had arrived by air, early in the century, gliding in late nights to build their nests. Startled, the shore people woke to hear the pumping sounds of vast hungers. People sat up in bed wakened by the creak, rustle, stir of skeletal shapes, the heave of earthbound, featherless wings rising, falling like primeval breaths at three a.m. Their smell, like time, blew along toe shore, from an age before caves or the men who hid in caves, the smell of jungles falling to be buried in earth and ripening to oil.

I ran through this forest of brontosauri, imagining triceratops, and the picket-fence stegosaurus, treading black syrups, sinking in tar. Their laments echoed from the shore, where the surf tossed back their ancient thunders.

I ran past the little white cottages that came later to nest among the monsters, and the canals that had been dug and filled to mirror the bright skies of 1910 when the white gondolas sailed on clean tides and bridges strung with firefly lightbulbs promised future promenades that arrived like overnight ballet troupes and ran away never to return after the war. And the dark beasts just went on sucking the sand while the gondolas sank, taking the last of some party’s laughter with them.

Some people stayed on, of course, hidden in shacks or locked in some few Mediterranean villas thrown in for architectural irony.

Running, I came to a full halt. I would have to turn back in a moment and go find that papier-mâché mulch and then go seek the name of its lost and dead owner.

But for now, one of the Mediterranean palaces, as blazing white as a full moon come to stay upon the sands, stood before me.

“Constance Rattigan,” I whispered. “Can you come out and play?’

It was, in fact, a fiery white Arabian Moorish fortress facing; the sea and daring the tides to come in and pull it down. It had minarets and turrets and blue and white tiles tilted precariously on the sand-shelves no more than one hundred feet from where the curious waves bowed to do obeisance, where the gulls circled down for a chance look, and where I stood now taking root.

“Constance Rattigan.”

But no one came out.

Alone and special in this thunder-lizard territory, this palace guarded that special cinema queen.

A light burned in one tower window all night and all day. I had never seen it not on. Was she there now?

Yes!

For the quickest shadow had crossed the window, as if someone had come to stare down at me and gone away, like a moth.

I stood remembering.

Hers had been a swift year in the Twenties, with a quick drop down the mine shaft into the film vaults. Her director, old newsprint said, had found her in bed with the studio hairdresser, and cut Constance Rattigan’s leg muscles with a knife so she would no longer be able to walk the way he loved. Then he had fled to swim straight west toward China. Constance Rattigan was never seen again. If she could walk no one knew.

God, I heard myself whisper.

I sensed that she had ventured forth in my world late nights and knew people I knew. There were breaths of near meetings between us.

Go, I thought, bang the brass lion knocker on her shorefront door.

No. I shook my head. I was afraid that only a black-and-white film ectoplasm might answer.

You do not really want to meet your special love, you only want to dream that some night she’ll step out and walk, with her footprints vanishing on the sand as the wind follows, to your apartment where she’ll tap on your window and enter to unspool her spirit-light in long creeks of film on your ceiling.

Constance, dear Rattigan, I thought, run out! Jump in that big white Duesenberg parked bright and fiery in the sand, rev the motor, wave, and motor me away south to Coronado, down the sunlit coast!

No one revved a motor, no one waved, no one took me south to sun, away from that foghorn that buried itself at sea.

So I backed off, surprised to find salt water up over my tennis shoes, turned to walk back toward cold rain in cages, the greatest writer in the world, but no one knew, just me.

I had the moist confetti, the papier-mâché mulch, in my jacket pocket, when I stepped into the one place where I knew that I had to go.

It was where the old men gathered.

It was a small, dim shop facing the railway tracks where candy, cigarettes, and magazines were sold and tickets for the big red trolley cars that rushed from L.A. to the sea.

The tobacco-shed-smelling place was run by two nicotine-stained brothers who were always sniveling and bickering at each other like old maids. On a bench to one side, ignoring the arguments like crowds at a boring tennis match, a nest of old men stayed by the hour and the day, lying upward about their ages. One said he was eighty-two. Another bragged that he was ninety. A third said ninety-four. It changed from week to week, as each misremembered last month’s lie.

And if you listened, as the big iron trains rolled by, you could hear the rust flake off the old men’s bones and snow through their bloodstreams to shimmer for a moment in their dying gaze as they settled for long hours between sentences and tried to recall the subject they had started on at noon and might finish off at midnight, when the two brothers, bickering, shut up shop and went away sniveling to their bachelor beds.

Where the old men lived, nobody knew. Every night, after the brothers grouched off into the dark, the old men dispersed like tumbleweeds, blown every which way in the salt wind.

I stepped into the eternal dusk of the place and stood staring at the bench where the old men had sat since the beginning of time.

There was an empty place between the old men. Where there had always been four, now there were only three, and I could tell from their faces that something was wrong.

I looked at their feet, which were surrounded by not only scatterings of cigar ash, but a gentle snowfall of strange little paper-punchouts, the confetti from hundreds of trolley line tickets in various L and X and M shapes.

I took my hand out of my pocket and compared the now almost dried soggy mess with the snow on the floor. I bent and picked some of it up and let it sift from my fingers, an alphabet down the air.

I looked at the empty place on the bench.

“Where’s that old gent—?” I stopped.

For the old men were staring at me as if I had fired a gun at their silence. Besides, their look said, I wasn’t dressed right for a funeral.

One of the oldest lit his pipe and at last, puffing it, muttered, “He’ll be along. Always does.”

But the other two stirred uncomfortably, their faces shadowed.

“Where,” I dared to say, “does he live?”

The old man stopped puffing. “Who wants to know?”

“Me,” I said. “You know me. I’ve come in here for years.”

The old men glanced at each other, nervously.

“It’s urgent,” I said.

The old man stirred a final time.

“Canaries,” murmured the oldest man.

“What?”

“Canary lady.” His pipe had gone out. He lit it again, his eyes troubled. “But don’t bother him. He’s all right. He’s not sick. He’ll be along.”

He was protesting too much, which made the other old men writhe slowly, secretly, on the bench.

“His name—?” I asked.

That was a mistake. Not to know his name! My God, everyone knew that! The old men glared at me.

I flushed and backed off.

“Canary lady,” I said, and ran out the door to be almost killed by an arriving Venice Short Line train thirty feet from the shop door.

“Jackass!” cried the motorman, leaning out and waving his fist.

“Canary lady!” I yelled, stupidly, shaking my fist to show I was alive.

And stumbled off to find her.

I knew her address from the sign in her window.

canaries for sale.

Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.

There is hardly an old house with unwashed curtains which does not sport a sign in the window.

1927 NASH. REASONABLE. REAR.

Or

BRASS BED, HARDLY USED. CHEAP. UPSTAIRS.

Walking, one thinks, which side of the bed was used, and how long on both sides, and how long on both sides, and how long never again, twenty, thirty years ago?

Or VIOLINS, GUITARS, MANDOLINS.

And in the window ancient instruments strung not with wire or cat-gut but spiderwebs, and inside an old man crouched over a workbench shaping wood, his head always turned away from the light, his hands moving; someone left over from the year when the gondolas were stranded in backyards to become flower planters.

How long since he had sold a violin or guitar?

Knock at the door, the window. The old man goes on cutting and sandpapering, his face, his shoulders shaking. Is he laughing because you tap and he pretends not to hear?

You pass a window with a final sign.

ROOM WITH A VIEW.

The room looks over the sea. But for ten years no one has ever been up there. The sea might as well not exist.

I turned a final corner and what I was searching for was there.

It hung in the sunbrowned window, its fragile letters drawn in weathered lead pencil, as faint as lemon juice that had burned itself out, self-erased, oh God, some fifty years ago!

canaries for sale.

Yes, someone half a century ago had licked a pencil tip, lettered the cardboard and hung it to age, fixed with flypaper adhesive tape, and gone upstairs to tea in rooms where dust lacquered the banister in gums, choked the lightbulbs so they burned with an Oriental light; where pillows were balls of lint and shadows hung in closets from empty racks.

canaries for sale.

I did not knock. Years before, out of mindless curiosity, I had tried, and, feeling foolish, gone away.

I turned the ancient doorknob. The door glided in. The downstairs was empty. There was no furniture in any of the rooms. I called up through the dusty sunlight.

“Anyone home?”

I thought I heard an attic-whisper:

“… no one.”

Flies lay dead in the windows. A few moths that had died the summer of 1929 dusted their wings on the front screens.

Somewhere far above, where ancient Rapunzel-without-hair was lost in her tower, a single feather fell and touched the air:

“… yes?”

A mouse sighed in the dark rafters:

“… come in.”

I pushed the inner door wider. It gave with a great, grinding shriek. I had a feeling that it had been left unoiled so that anyone entering unannounced would be given away by rusty hinges.

A moth tapped at a dead lightbulb in the upper hall.

“… up here....”

I stepped up toward twilight at noon, past mirrors that were turned to the wall. No glass could see me coming. No glass would see me go....

“… yes?” A whisper.

I hesitated by the door at the top of the stairs. Perhaps I expected to look in and find a giant canary, stretched out on a carpet of dust, songless, capable only of heart murmurs for talk.

I stepped in.

I heard a gasp.

In the middle of an empty room stood a bed on which, eyes shut, mouth faintly breathing, lay an old woman.

Archaeopteryx, I thought.

I did. I really did.

I had seen such bones in a museum, the fragile reptilian wings of that lost and extinct bird, the shape of it touched on sandstone in etchings that might have been made by some Egyptian priest.

This bed, and its contents, was like the silt of a river that runs shallow. Traced now in its quiet flow was a jackstraw litter of chaff and thin skeleton.

She lay flat and strewn out so delicately I could not believe it was a living creature, but only a fossil undisturbed by eternity’s tread.

“Yes?” The tiny yellowed head just above the coverlet opened its eyes. Tiny shards of light blinked at me.

“Canaries?” I heard myself say. “The sign in your window? The birds?”

“Oh,” the old woman sighed. “… Dear.”

She had forgotten. Perhaps she hadn’t been downstairs in years. And I was the first, perhaps, to come upstairs in a thousand days.

“Oh,” she whispered, “that was long ago. Canaries. Yes. I had some lovely ones.

“1920,” again in the whisper. “1930—1931—.” Her voice faded. The years stopped there.

Just the other morn. Just the other noon.

“They used to sing, my lands, how they sang. But no one ever came to buy. Why? I never sold one.”

I glanced around. There was a birdcage in the far north corner of the room, and two more half-hidden in a closet.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “I must have forgotten to take that sign out of my window....”

I moved toward the cages. My hunch was right.

At the bottom of the first cage I saw papyrus from the Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1926.

HIROHITO ASCENDS THRONE

The young monarch, twenty-seven,

this afternoon …

I moved to the next cage and blinked. Memories of high school days flooded me with their fears.

ADDIS ABABA BOMBED

Mussolini claims triumph.

Haile Selassie protests....

I shut my eyes and turned from that lost year. That long ago the feathers had stopped rustling and the warblers had ceased. I stood by the bed and the withered discard there. I heard myself say:

“You ever listen Sunday mornings to the ‘Rocky Mountain Canary-Seed Hour’—?”

“With an organist that played and a studioful of canaries that sang along!” the old woman cried with a delight that rejuvenated her flesh and reared her head. Her eyes flickered like broken glass. “‘When It’s Springtime in the Rockies’!”

“‘Sweet Sue.’ ‘My Blue Heaven,’” I said.

“Oh, weren’t the birds fine!?”

“Fine.” I had been nine then and tried to figure how in hell the birds could follow the music so well. “I once told my mom the birdcages must have been lined with dime-store songsheets.”

“You sound like a sensitive child.” The old woman’s head sank, exhausted, and she shut her eyes. “They don’t make them that way any more.”

They never did, I thought.

“But,” she whispered, “you didn’t really come see me about the canaries—?”

“No,” I admitted. “It’s about that old man who rents from you—”

“He’s dead.”

Before I could speak, she went on, calmly, “I haven’t heard him in the downstairs kitchen since early yesterday. Last night, the silence told me. When you opened the door down there just now, I knew it was someone come to tell me all that’s bad.”

I’m sorry.

“Don’t be. I never saw him save at Christmas. The lady next door takes care of me, comes and rearranges me twice a day, and puts out the food. So he’s gone, is he? Did you know him well? Will there be a funeral? There’s fifty cents there on the bureau. Buy him a little bouquet.”

There was no money on the bureau. There was no bureau. I pretended that there was and pocketed some nonexistent money.

“You just come back in six months,” she whispered. “I’ll be well again. And the canaries will be on sale, and … you keep looking at the door! Must you go?”

“Yes’m,” I said, guiltily. “May I suggest—your front door’s unlocked.”

“Why, what in the world would anyone want with an old thing like me?” She lifted her head a final time.

Her eyes flashed. Her face ached with something beating behind the flesh to pull free.

“No one’ll ever come into this house, up those stairs,” she cried.

Her voice faded like a radio station beyond the hills. She was slowly tuning herself out as her eyelids lowered.

My God, I thought, she wants someone to come up and do her a dreadful favor!

Not me! I thought.

Her eyes sprang wide. Had I said it aloud?

“No,” she said, looking deep into my face. “You’re not him.”

“Who?”

“The one who stands outside my door. Every night.” She sighed. “But he never comes in. Why doesn’t he?”

She stopped like a clock. She still breathed, but she was waiting for me to go away.

I glanced over my shoulder.

The wind moved dust in the doorway like a mist, like someone waiting. The thing, the man, whatever, who came every night and stood in the hall.

I was in the way.

“Goodbye,” I said.

Silence.

I should have stayed, had tea, dinner, breakfast with her. But you can’t protect all of the people in all of the places all of the time, can you?

I waited at the door.

Goodbye.

Did she moan this in her old sleep? I only knew that her breath pushed me away.

Going downstairs I realized I still didn’t know the name of the old man who had drowned in a lion cage with a handful of train ticket confetti uncelebrated in each pocket.

I found his room. But that didn’t help.

His name wouldn’t be there, any more than he was.

Things are good at their beginnings. But how rarely in the history of men and small towns or big cities is the ending good.

Then, things fall apart. Things turn to fat. Things sprawl. The time gets out of joint. The milk sours. By night the wires on the high poles tell evil tales in the dripping mist. The water in the canals goes blind with scum. Flint, struck, gives no spark. Women, touched, give no warmth.

Summer is suddenly over.

Winter snows in your hidden bones.

Then it is time for the wall.

The wall of a little room, that is, where the shudders of the big red trains go by like nightmares turning you on your cold steel bed in the trembled basement of the Not So Royal Lost Canary Apartments, where the numbers have fallen off the front portico, and the street sign at the corner has been twisted north to east so that people, if they ever came to find you, would turn away forever on the wrong boulevard.

But meanwhile there’s mat wall near your bed to be read with your watered eyes or reached out to and never touched, it is too far away and too deep and too empty.

I knew that once I found the old man’s room, I would find that wall.

And I did.

The door, like all the doors in the house, was unlocked, waiting for wind or fog or some pale stranger to step in.

I stepped. I hesitated. Maybe I expected to find the old man’s X-ray imprint spread out there on his empty cot. His place, like the canary lady’s upstairs, looked like late in the day of a garage sale—for a nickel or a dime, everything had been stolen away.

There wasn’t even a toothbrush on the floor, or soap, or a washrag. The old man must have bathed in the sea once a day, brushed his teeth with seaweed each noon, washed his only shirt in the salt tide and lain beside it on the dunes while it dried, if and when the sun came out.

I moved forward like a deep sea diver. When you know someone is dead, his abandoned air holds back every motion you make, even your breathing.

I gasped.

I had guessed wrong.

For there his name was, on the wall. I almost fell, leaning down to squint.

Over and over, his name was repeated, scrabbled on the plaster on the far side of his cot. Over and over, as if fearful of senility or oblivion, terrified at waking some dawn to find himself nameless, over and over he had scratched with a nicotine-stained fingernail.

William. And then Willie. And the Will. And beneath the three. Bill.

And then, again, again, again.

Smith. Smith. Smith. Smith.

And under that, William Smith.

And, Smith, W.

His multiplication table swam in and out of focus as I stared, for it was all the nights I ever dreaded to see somewhere up ahead in the dark ages of my future. Me, in 1999, alone, and my fingernail making mice-sound graffiti on plaster....

“My God,” I whispered. “Wait!”

The cot squealed like a cat touched in its sleep. I put my full weight down and probed with my fingerprints over the plaster. There were more words there. A message, a hint, a clue?

I remembered some boyhood magic where you had pals write quotes on pads and then tear off the quotes. But you took the pads out of the room and rubbed a soft pencil across the hidden indentation left on the blank pages and brought forth the words.

Now, I did just that. I found and rubbed the flat lead of my pencil gently across the wall surface. The nail scratches illusioned themselves forth, here a mouth, there an eye; shapes, forms, bits of an old man’s half-dreams:

Four a.m. and no sleep.

And below that, a ghostly plea:

Please, God—sleep!

And a dawn despair:

Christ.

But then, at last, something that snapped my knees as I crouched lower. For here were these words:

He’s standing in the hall again.

But that was me, I thought, outside the old woman’s room five minutes ago, upstairs. That was me, outside this empty room, a moment ago. And …

Last night. In the dark rain, on the train. And the great railcar bucking the curves and groaning its wooden slats and shivering its tarnished brass as someone unseen swayed in the aisle behind me and mourned the funeral train’s passage.

He’s standing in the hall again.

He stood in the aisle on the train.

No, no. Too much!

It was no crime, was it, to stand in a train aisle moaning, or stand here in the hall, simply looking at a door and letting an old man know of your being there just with your silence?

Yes, but what if one night whoever it was came into the room?

And brought his lonely business with him?

I looked at the graffiti, as faint and faded as the canaries-for-sale sign in the window outside. I backed off, pulling away from that terrible sentence of loneliness and despair.

Outside in the hall, I stood feeling the air, trying to guess if another man had stood here again and again in the last month, with the bones showing behind his face.

I wanted to whirl and shout upstairs to rattle the empty birdcages, “If that man comes back, sweet Jesus! Call me!”

How? I saw an empty telephone stand nearby and a stack of Yellow Pages from 1933 under it.

Yell from your window, then!

But who would hear the sound of her voice like an old key turned in a rusted lock?

I’ll come and stand guard, I thought. Why?

Because the dead sea-bottom mummy, that old autumn woman lying in funeral bandages up there, was praying for a cold wind to drift up the stairs.

Lock all the doors! I thought.

But when I tried to shut the front door, it wouldn’t close.

And I could hear the cold wind, still whispering in.

I ran a ways and then slowed down and stopped, heading toward the police station.

Because the dead canaries had begun to rustle their dry wings just behind my ears.

They wanted out. Only I could save them.

And because I sensed, around me, the quiet waters rising in the Nile silt which would flow to erase ancient Nikotris, the Pharaoh’s two-thousand-year-old daughter.

Only I could stop the dark Nile from sanding her away downstream.

I ran to my Underwood Standard typewriter.

I typed and saved the birds, I typed and saved the old dry bones.

Feeling guilty but triumphant, triumphant but guilty, I rolled them out of the platen and laid them out flat in the bottom of my birdcage-sandstone river-bottom novel box where they sang only when you read the words and whispered only when you turned the page.

Then, bright with salvation, I went away.

I headed for the police station filled with grand fancies, wild ideas, incredible clues, possible puzzles, evident solutions.

Arriving, I felt I was the finest acrobat performing on the highest trapeze suspended from the greatest balloon.

Little did I realize that Detective Lieutenant Elmo Crumley was armed with long needles and an air rifle.

He was coming out the front door of the station as I arrived. Something about my face must have warned him I was about to explode my notions, fancies, concepts, and clues all over him. He made a premature gesture of wiping his face, almost ducked back inside, and came warily down the walk as if approaching a landmine.

“What are you doing here?”

“Aren’t citizens supposed to show up if they can solve a murder?”

“Where do you see murders?” Crumley eyed the landscape, and sure enough there were none. “Next subject?”

“You don’t want to hear what I have to say?”

“I’ve heard it all before.” Crumley brushed by me and headed for his car parked at the curb. “Every time anyone drops dead of a heart attack or trips over his shoelaces in Venice, there’s someone there the next day to tell me, sixteen to the dozen, how to solve the stopped heart or retie the shoelaces. You’ve got the heart-attack shoelace look about you, and I didn’t sleep last night.”

He kept going and I ran after, for he was doing the Harry Truman 120-steps-to-the-minute march.

He heard me coming and called over his shoulder, ‘Tell you what, young Papa Hemingway—”

“You know what I do for a living?”

“Everyone in Venice knows. Every time you got a story in Dime Detective or Flynn’s Detective, the whole town hears you yelling down at the liquor store newsrack, pointing at the magazines.”

“Oh,” I said, the last of the hot air going out of my balloon. Grounded, I stood across the car from Crumley, biting my lower lip.

Crumley saw this and got a look of paternal guilt.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he sighed.

“What?”

“You know the one thing that gripes my gut about amateur detectives?” said Crumley.

“I’m not an amateur detective, I’m a professional writer with big antennae that work!”

“So you’re a grasshopper who knows how to type,” said Crumley, and waited for my wince to die. “But if you’d been around Venice and my office and the morgue as many years as I have, you’d know that every vagrant who wanders by or any drunk who stumbles in is full of theories, evidence, revelations enough to fill a Bible and sink a Baptist Sunday-outing picnic boat. If we listened to every maundering preacher who fell through the jail doors half the world would be under suspicion, one third under arrest, and the rest fried or hanged. That being so, why should I listen to some young scribe who hasn’t even begun to make his name in literary history”—again my wince, again he waited—“who just because he finds a lion cage full of accidental drowning thinks he has stumbled on Crime and Punishment and feels like Raskolnikov’s son. End of speech. Respond.”

“You know Raskolnikov?” I said, in amaze.

“Almost before you were born. But that doesn’t buy horseflakes. Plead your case.”

“I’m a writer, I know more about feelings than you do.”

“Balls. I’m a detective, I know more about facts than you do. You afraid a fact will confuse you?”

“I—”

“Tell me this, kiddo. Anything ever happen to you in your life?”

“Anything?”

“Yeah, I mean anything. Big, in between, small. Anything. Like sickness, rape, death, war, revolution, murder.”

“My mother and father died—”

“Peacefully?”

“Yes. But I had an uncle shot in a holdup once—”

“You see him shot?”

“No, but—”

“Well, that don’t count, unless you see. I mean, you ever find anything like men in lion cages ever before?”

“No,” I said at last.

“Well, there you have it. You’re still in shock. You don’t know what life is. I was born and raised in the morgue. This is the first real touch of marble slab you ever had. So why don’t you quiet down and go away.”

He heard his own voice getting much too loud, shook his head, and said, “No, why don’t I quiet down and go away.”

Which he did. He opened the car door, jumped in, and before I could reinflate my balloon, was gone.

Cursing, I slammed into a telephone booth, dropped a dime in the slot, and called across five miles of Los Angeles. When someone picked up at the other end I heard a radio playing “La Raspa,” a door slammed, a toilet flushed, but I could feel the sunlight that I needed, waiting there.

The lady, living in a tenement on the corner of Temple and Figueroa, nervous at the phone she held in her hand, at last cleared her throat and said:

“Qué?”

“Mrs. Gutierrez!” I shouted. I stopped, and started over. “Mrs. Gutierrez, this is the Crazy.”

“Oh!” she gasped, and then laughed. “Sí, sí! You want to talk to Fannie?”

“No, no, just a few yells. Will you yell down, please, Mrs. Gutierrez?”

“I yell.”

I heard her move. I heard the entire ramshackle, rickety tenement lean. Someday, a blackbird would land on the roof and the whole thing would go. I heard a small Chihuahua tap-dance on the linoleum after her, built like a bull bumblebee and barking.

I heard the tenement outer porch door open as Mrs. Gutierrez stepped out onto the third floor and leaned to call down through the sunshine at the second floor.

“Aai, Fannie! Aai! It’s the Crazy.”

I called into my end, ‘Tell her I need to come visit!”

Mrs. Gutierrez waited. I could hear the second-floor porch creak, as if a vast captain had rolled out onto its plankings to survey the world.

“Aai, Fannie, the Crazy needs to visit!”

A long silence. A voice sprang sweetly through the air above the tenement yard. I could not make out the words.

“Tell her I need Tosca!”

“Tosca!” Mrs. Gutierrez yelled down into the yard.

A long silence.

The whole tenement leaned again, the other way, like the earth turning in its noon slumbers.

The strains of the first act of Tosca moved up around Mrs. Gutierrez. She spoke.

“Fannie says—”

“I hear the music, Mrs. Gutierrez. That means “Yes’!”

I hung up. At the same instant, a hundred thousand tons of salt water fell on the shore, a few yards away, with exquisite timing. I nodded at God’s precision.

Making sure I had twenty cents in my pocket, I ran for the next train.

She was immense.

Her real name was Cora Smith, but she called herself Fannie Florianna, and no one ever called her otherwise. And I had known her, years ago, when I lived in the tenement, and stayed in touch with her after I moved out to the sea.

Fannie was so huge that she never slept lying down. Day and night she sat in a large-sized captain’s chair fixed to the deck of her tenement apartment, with bruise marks and dents in the linoleum which her great weight had riveted there. She moved as little as possible, her breath churning in her lungs and throat as she sailed toward the door, and squeezed out to cross the hall to the narrow water-closet confines where she feared she might be ignominiously trapped one day. “My God,” she often said, “wouldn’t it be awful if we had to get the fire department to pry me out of there.” And then back to her chair and her radio and her phonograph and, only a beckon away, a refrigerator filled with ice cream and butter and mayonnaise and all the wrong foods in the wrong amounts. She was always eating and always listening. Next to the refrigerator were bookshelves with no books, only thousands of recordings of Caruso and Galli-Curci and Swarthout and the rest. When the last songs were sung and the last record hissed to a stop at midnight, Fannie sank into herself, like an elephant shot with darkness. Her great bones settled in her vast flesh. Her round face was a moon watching over the vast territorial imperatives of her body. Propped up with pillows, her breath escaped and sucked back, escaped again, fearful of the avalanche that might happen if somehow she lay back too far, and her weight smothered her, her flesh engulfed and crushed her lungs, and put out her voice and light forever. She never spoke of it, but once when someone asked why there was no bed in her room, her eyes burned with a fearful light, and beds were never mentioned again. Fat, as Murderer, was always with her. She slept in her mountain, afraid, and woke in the morning glad for one more night gone, having made it through.

A piano box waited in the alley below the tenement.

“Mine,” said Fannie. “The day I die, bring the piano box up, tuck me in, hoist me down. Mine. Oh, and while you’re at it, there’s a dear soul, hand me that mayonnaise jar and that big spoon.”

I stood at the front door of the tenement, listening.

Her voice flowed down through the halls. It started out as pure as a stream of fresh mountain water and cascaded through the second to the first and then along the hall. I could almost drink her singing, it was that clear.

Fannie.

As I climbed up the first-floor steps she trilled a few lines from La Traviata. As I moved on the second flight, pausing, eyes shut, to listen, Madame Butterfly sang welcome to the bright ship in the harbor and the lieutenant in his whites.

It was the voice of a slender Japanese maiden on a hill on a spring afternoon. There was a picture of that maid, aged seventeen, on a table near the window leading out onto the second-floor tenement porch. The girl weighed 120 pounds at most, but that was a long time ago. It was their voice that pulled me up through the old stairwell—a promise of brightness to come.

I knew that when I got to the door, the singing would stop.

“Fannie,” I’d say. “I heard someone singing up here just now.”

“Did you?”

“Something from Butterfly.”

“How strange. I wonder who it could have been?”

We had played that game for years, talked music, discussed symphony/ballet/opera, listened to it on radios, played it on her old Edison crank-up phono, but never, never once in three thousand days, had Fannie ever sung when I was in the room with her.

But today was different.

As I reached the second floor her singing stopped. But she must have been thinking, planning. Maybe she had glanced out and seen the way I walked along the street. Maybe she read my skeleton through my flesh. Maybe my voice, calling far across town on the phone (impossible) had brought the sadness of the night and the rain with it. Anyway, a mighty intuition heaved itself aware in Fannie Florianna’s summer bulk. She was ready with surprises.

I stood at her door, listening.

Creaks as of an immense ship blundering through tides. A great conscience stirred there.

A soft hissing: the phonograph!

I tapped on the door.

“Fannie;” I called. “The Crazy is here.”

“Voilà!”

She opened the door to a thunderclap of music. Great lady, she had put the shaved wooden needle on the hissing record, then surged to the door, held the knob, waiting. At the whisk of the baton down, she had flung the door wide. Puccini flooded out, gathered round, pulled me in. Fannie Florianna helped.

It was the first side of Tosca. Fannie planted me in a rickety chair, lifted my empty paw, put a glass of good wine in it. “I don’t drink, Fannie.”

“Nonsense. Look at your face. Drink!” She surged around like those wondrous hippos turned light as milkweed in Fantasia, and sank like a terribly strange bed upon her helpless chair.

By the end of the record I was crying.

“There, there,” whispered Fannie, refilling my glass. “There, there.”

“I always cry at Puccini, Fannie.”

“Yes, dear man, but not so hard.”

“Not so hard, true.” I drank half of the second glass. It was a 1938 St. Emilion from a good vineyard, brought and left by one of Fannie’s rich friends who came clear across town for good talk, long laughs, better times for both, no matter whose income was higher. I had seen some of Toscanini’s relatives going up the stairs one night, and waited. I had seen Lawrence Tibbett coming down, once, and we had nodded, passing. They always brought the best bottles with their talk, and they always left smiling. The center of the world can be anywhere. Here it was on the second floor of a tenement on the wrong side of L.A.

I wiped tears on my jacket cuff.

“Tell me,” said the great fat lady.

“I found a dead man, Fannie. And no one will listen to me about it!”

“My God.” Her round face got rounder as her mouth opened, her eyes went wide, then softened to commiseration. “Poor boy. Who?”

“It was one of those nice old men who sit in the ticket office down at the Venice Short Line stop, been sitting there since Billy Sunday thumped the Bible and William Jennings Bryan made his Cross of Gold speech. I’ve seen them there since I was a kid. Four old men. You felt they’d be there forever, glued to the wooden benches. I don’t think I ever saw one of them up and around. They were there all day, all week, all year, smoking pipes or cigars, and talking politics thirteen to the dozen and deciding what to do with the country. When I was fifteen one of them looked at me and said, ‘You going to grow up and change the world only for the best, boy?’ ‘Yes, sir!’ I said. ‘I think you’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Won’t he, gents?’ ‘Yes,’ they all said, and smiled at me. The old man who asked me that, he’s the one I found in the lion cage last night.”

“In the cage?”

“Under water, in the canal.”

“This calls for one more side of Tosca.”

Fannie was an avalanche getting up, a tide flowing to the machine, a mighty force cranking the windup arm, and God’s whisper putting the needle down on a new surface.

As the music rose, she came back into her chair like a ghost ship, regal and pale, quiet and concerned.

“I know one reason why you’re taking this so hard,” she said. “Peg. She still in Mexico, studying?”

“Been gone three months. Might as well be three years,” I said. “Christ, I’m lonely.”

“And vulnerable,” said Fannie. “Shouldn’t you call her?”

“Christ, Fannie, I can’t afford. And I don’t want to reverse the charges. I’ll just have to hope she’ll phone me in the next day or so.”

“Poor boy. Sick with love.”

“Sick with death. The awful thing is, Fannie, I didn’t even know that old man’s name! And isn’t that a shame?”

The second side of Tosca really did it. I sat there, head down, with the tears running off the tip of my nose into the wine.

“You’ve ruined your St. Emilion,” said Fannie gently, when the record ended.

“Now I’m mad,” I said.

“Why?” Fannie, standing, like a great pomegranate mother, by the phonograph, sharpened a new needle and found a happier record. “Why?”

“Someone killed him, Fannie. Someone stuffed him in that cage. There was no other way for him to have gotten in.”

“Oh, dear,” she murmured.

“When I was twelve, one of my uncles back east was shot in a holdup late at night, in his car. At his funeral, my brother and I vowed we’d find the murderer and do him in. But he’s still in the world somewhere. And that was a long time back in another town. This time, it’s here. Whoever drowned the old man lives within a few blocks of me in Venice. And when I find him—”

“You’ll turn him over to the police.” Fannie leaned forward in one massive but tender motion. “You’ll feel better after a good sleep.”

Then she read my face.

“No,” she said at my funeral, “you won’t feel better. Well, go on. Be the fool all men are. God, what lives we women lead, watching the fools kill each other and the killers loll the killers, and us over on the sidelines yelling stop and nobody listening. Can’t you hear me, love?”

She put another record on and let the needle down like a loving lass to the grooves, and came surging over to touch my cheek with her great pink chrysanthemum fingers.

“Oh, please, do be careful. I don’t like Venice. Not enough streetlights. And those damned oil wells pumping all night long, no letup, with a case of the moans.”

“Venice won’t get me, Fannie, or whatever it is wandering around Venice.”

Standing in halls, waiting, I thought, outside old men’s and old women’s doors.

Fannie became a giant glacier standing over me.

She must have seen my face again, where everything was given away, nothing hidden. Instinctively, she glanced at her own door, as if a shadow had passed outside. Her intuition stunned me.

“Whatever you do”—her voice was lost deep down in hundreds of pounds of suddenly haunted flesh—“don’t bring it here.”

“Death isn’t a thing you can bring with you, Fannie.”

“Oh, yes it is. Scrape your feet before coming in downstairs. Do you have money to get your suit dry-cleaned? I’ll give you some. Shine your shoes. Brush your teeth. Don’t ever look back. Eyes can kill. If you look at someone, and they see you want to be killed, they tag alone. Come here, dear boy, but wash up first and look straight ahead.”

“Horsefeathers, Fannie, and hogwash. That won’t keep death away and you know it. Anyway, I wouldn’t bring anything here to you but me; lots of years, Fannie, and love.”

That melted the snow in the Himalayas.

She turned in a slow carousel motion. Suddenly we both heard the music that had long since started on the hissing record.

Carmen.

Fannie Florianna sank her fingers into her bosom and seized forth a black-lace fan, flitted it to full blossom, flirted it before her suddenly flamenco eyes, shut her lashes demurely, and let her lost voice spring forth reborn, fresh as cool mountain water, young as I had felt only last week.

She sang. And as she sang, she moved.

It was like watching the heavy curtain lift daintily high at the Metropolitan to be draped around the Rock of Gibraltar and whirled at the gesturings of a maniac conductor who knew how to electrify elephant ballets and call spirit-spout white whales from the deeps.

By the end of the first song, I was crying again.

This time, with laughter.

Only later did I think to myself, my God. For the first time. In her room. She sang.

For me!

Downstairs, it was afternoon.

I stood in the sunlit street, swaying, savoring the aftertaste of the wine, looking up at the second floor of the tenement.

The strains sounded of the song of farewell; the leave-taking of Butterfly by her young lieutenant, all in white, sailing away.

Fannie loomed on her porch, looking down at me, her little rosebud mouth smiling sadly, the young girl trapped in her round harvest-moon face, letting the music behind her speak our friendship and my leave-taking for now.

Seeing her there made me think of Constance Rattigan locked away in her Moorish fort by the sea. I wanted to call up and ask about the similarity.

But Fannie waved. I could only wave back.

I was ready for Venice in clear weather now.

Little balding man who doesn’t look like a detective—Elmo Crumley, I thought, here I come!

But all I did was loiter in front of the Venice Police Station feeling like a gutless wonder.

I couldn’t decide whether Crumley was Beauty or the Beast inside there.

Such indecision made me ache out on the sidewalk until someone who looked like Crumley glanced out of an upstairs jail window.

I fled.

The thought of him opening his mouth like a blowtorch to scorch the peach fuzz on my cheeks made my heart fall over like a prune.

Christ, I thought, when will I face up to him at last to unload all the dark wonders that are collecting like tombstone dust in my manuscript box? When?

Soon.

During the night, it happened.

A small rainstorm arrived out front of my apartment about two in the morning.

Stupid! I thought, in bed, listening. A small rainstorm? How small? Three feet wide, six feet tall, all just in one spot? Rain drenching my doormat, falling nowhere else, and then, quickly, gone!

Hell!

I leaped to yank the door wide.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The stars were bright, with no mist, no fog. There was no way for rain to get there.

Yet there was a pool of water by my door.

And a set of footprints arriving, pointed toward me, and another set, barefoot, going away.

I must have stood there for a full ten seconds until I exploded. “Now, hold on!”

Someone had stood there, wet, for half a minute, almost ready to knock, wondering if I was awake, and then walked off to the sea.

No. I blinked. Not to the sea. The sea was on my right, to the west.

These naked footprints went to my left, east.

I followed them.

I ran as if I could catch up with the miniature storm.

Until I reached the canal.

Where the footprints stopped at the rim—

Jesus!

I stared down at the oily waters.

I could see where someone had climbed out and walked along the midnight street to my place, and then run back, the strides were bigger, to—

Dive in?

God, who would swim in those filthy waters?

Someone who didn’t care, never worried about disease? Someone who loved night arrivals and dark departures for the hell, the fun, or the death of it?

I edged along the canal bank, adjusting my eyes, watchful to see if anything broke the black surface.

The tide went away and came back, surging through a lock that had rusted open. A herd of small seals drifted by, but it was only kelp going nowhere.

“You still there?” I whispered. “What did you come for? Why to my place?”

I sucked air and held it.

For in a hollowed-out concrete cache, under a small cement bunker, on the far side of a rickety bridge …

I thought I saw a greasy fringe of hair rise, and then an oiled brow. Eyes stared back at me. It could have been a sea-otter or a dog or a black porpoise somehow strayed and lost in the canal.

The head stayed for a long moment, half out of water.

And I remembered a thing I had read as a boy leafing African novels. About crocodiles that infested the subterranean caves under the rims of Congo riverbanks. The beasts sank down and never came up. Submerged, they slid to hide up inside the secret bank itself, waiting for someone foolish enough to swim by. Then the reptiles squirmed out of their underwater dens to feed.

Was I staring at a similar beast? Someone who loved night tides, who hid in caches under the banks to rise and step softly to leave rain where he walked?

I watched the dark head in the water. It watched me, with gleaming eyes.

No. That can’t be a man!

I shivered. I jumped forward, as one jumps toward a horror to make it vanish, to scare spiders, rats, snakes away. Not bravery but fear made me stomp.

The dark head sank. The water rippled.

The head did not rise again.

Shuddering, I walked back along the trail of dark rain that had come to visit my doorstep.

The small pool of water was still there on my sill.

I bent and plucked up a small mound of seaweed from the middle of the pool.

Only then did I discover I had run to and from the canal dressed only in my jockey shorts.

I gasped, glanced swiftly around. The street was empty. I leaped in to slam the door.

Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll go shake my fists at Elmo Crumley.

In my right fist, a handful of trolley ticket dust.

In my left, a clump of moist seaweed.

But not at the police station!

Jails, like hospitals, sank me to my knees in a faint.

Crumley’s home was somewhere.

Shaking my fists. I’d find it.

For about 150 days a year in Venice, the sun doesn’t show through the mist until noon.

For some sixty days a year the sun doesn’t come out of the fog until it’s ready to go down in the west, around four or five o’clock.

For some forty days it doesn’t come out at all.

The rest of the time, if you’re lucky, the sun rises, as it does for the rest of Los Angeles and California, at five-thirty or six in the morning and stays all day.

It’s the forty- or sixty-day cycles that drip in the soul and make the riflemen clean their guns. Old ladies buy rat poison on the twelfth day of no sun. But on the thirteenth day, when they are about to arsenic their morning tea, the sun rises wondering what everyone is so upset about, and the old ladies feed the rats down by the canal, and lean back to their brandy.

During the forty-day cycles, the foghorn lost somewhere out in the bay sounds over and over again, and never stops, until you feel the people in the local graveyard beginning to stir. Or, late at night, when the foghorn gets going, some variety of amphibious beast rises in your id and swims toward land. It is swimming somewhere yearning, maybe only for sun. All the smart animals have gone south. You are left stranded on a cold dune with an empty typewriter, an abandoned bank account, and a half-warm bed. You expect the submersible beast to rise some night while you sleep. To get rid of him you get up at three a.m. and write a story about him, but don’t send it out to any magazines for years because you are afraid. Not Death, but Rejection in Venice is what Thomas Mann should have written about.

All this being true, or imagined, the wise man lives as far inland as possible. The Venice police jurisdiction ends as does the fog at about Lincoln Avenue.

There, at the very rim of official and bad weather territory, was a garden I had seen only once or twice.

If there was a house in the garden it was not visible. It was so surrounded by bushes, trees, tropical shrubs, palm fronds, bulrushes, and papyrus that you had to cut your way in with a reaper. There was no sidewalk, only a beaten path. A bungalow was in there, all right, sinking into a chin-high field of uncut grass, but so far away from the street it looked like an elephant foundering in a tar pit, soon to be gone forever. There was no mailbox out front. The mailman must have just tossed the mail in and beat it before something sprang out of the jungle to get him.

From this green place came the smell of oranges and apricots in season. And what wasn’t orange or apricot was cactus or epiphyllum or night-blooming jasmine. No lawnmower ever sounded here. No scythe ever whispered. No fog ever came. On the boundary of Venice’s damp eternal twilight, the bungalow survived amid lemons that glowed like Christmas tree lights all winter long.

And on occasion, walking by, you thought you heard okapi rushing and thumping a Serengeti Plain in there, or great sunset clouds of flamingos startled up and wheeling in pure fire.

And in that place, wise about the weather, and dedicated to the preservation of his eternally sunburned soul, lived a man some forty-four years old, with a balding head and a raspy voice, whose business, when he moved toward the sea and breathed the fog, was bruised customs, broken laws, and the occasional death that could be murder.

Elmo Crumley.

And I found him and his house because a series of people had listened to my queries, nodded, and pointed directions.

Everyone agreed that every late afternoon, the short detective ambled into that green jungle territory and disappeared amid the sounds of hippos rising and flamingos in descent.

What should I do? I thought. Stand on the edge of his wild country and shout his name?

But Crumley shouted first.

“Jesus Christ, is that you?”

He was coming out of his jungle compound and trekking along the weedpath, just as I arrived at his front gate.

“It’s me.”

As the detective trailblazed his own uncut path, I thought I heard the sounds I had always imagined as I passed: Thompson’s gazelles on the leap, crossword-puzzle zebras panicked just beyond me, plus a smell of golden pee on the wind—lions.

“Seems to me,” groused Crumley, “we played this scene yesterday. You come to apologize? You got stuff to say that’s louder and funnier?”

“If you’d stop moving and listen,” I said.

“Your voice carries, I’ll say that. Lady I know, three blocks from where you found the body, said because of your yell that night, her cats still haven’t come home. Okay, I’m standing here. And?”

With every one of his words, my fists had jammed deeper into my sports jacket pockets. Somehow, I couldn’t pull them out. Head ducked, eyes averted, I tried to get my breath.

Crumley glanced at his wristwatch.

“There was a man behind me on the train that night,” I cried, suddenly. “He was the one stuffed the old gentleman in the lion cage.”

“Keep your voice down. How do you know?”

My fists worked in my pockets squeezing. “I could feel his hands stretched out behind me. I could feel his fingers working, pleading. He wanted me to turn and see him! Don’t all killers want to be found out?”

“That’s what dime-store psychologists say. Why didn’t you look at him?”

“You don’t make eye contact with drunks. They come sit and breathe on you.”

“Right.” Crumley allowed himself a touch of curiosity. He took out a tobacco pouch and paper and started rolling a cigarette, deliberately not looking at me. “And?”

“You should’ve heard his voice. You’d believe if you’d heard. My God, it was like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, from the bottom of the grave, crying out, remember me! But more than that—see me, know me, arrest me!”

Crumley lit his cigarette and peered at me through the smoke.

“His voice aged me ten years in a few seconds,” I said. “I’ve never been so sure of my feelings in my life!”

“Everybody in the world has feelings.” Crumley examined his cigarette as if he couldn’t decide whether he liked it or not. “Everyone’s grandma writes Wheaties jingles and hums them until you want to kick the barley-malt out of the old crone. Songwriters, poets, amateur detectives, every damn fool thinks he’s all three. You know what you remind me of, son? That mob of idiots that swarmed after Alexander Pope waving their poems, novels, and essays, asking for advice, until Pope ran mad and wrote his ‘Essay on Criticism.’”

“You know Alexander Pope?”

Crumley gave an aggrieved sigh, tossed down his cigarette, stepped on it.

“You think all detectives are gumshoes with glue between their ears? Yeah, Pope, for Christ’s sake. I read him under the sheets late nights so my folks wouldn’t think I was queer. Now, get out of the way.”

“You mean all this is for nothing,” I cried. “You’re not going to try to save the old man?”

I blushed, hearing what I had said.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” said Crumley, patiently.

He looked off along the street, as if he could see all the way to my apartment and the desk and the typewriter standing there.

“You’ve latched on to a good thing, or you think you have. So you run fevers. You want to get on that big red streetcar and ride back some night and catch that drunk and haul him in, but if you do, he won’t be there, or if he is, not the same guy, or you won’t know him. So right now, you’ve got bloody fingernails from beating your typewriter, and the stuffs coming good, as Hemingway says, and your intuition is growing long antennae that are ever so sensitive. That, and pigs’ knuckles, buys me no sauerkraut!”

He started off around the front of his car in a replay of yesterday’s disaster.

“Oh, no you don’t!” I yelled. “Not again. You know what you are? Jealous!”

Crumley’s head almost came off his shoulders. He whirled.

“I’m what?”

I almost saw his fingers reach for a gun that wasn’t there.

“And, and, and—” I floundered. “You—you’re never going to make it!”

My insolence staggered him. His head swiveled to stare at me over the top of his car.

“Make what?” he said.

“Whatever it is you want to do, you—won’t—do—it.”

I jolted to a full stop, astounded. I couldn’t remember ever having yelled like this at anyone. In school, I had been the prize custard. Every time some teacher slammed her jaws, my crust fell. But now—

“Unless you learn,” I said, lamely, feeling my face fill up with hot color, “to—ah—listen to your stomach and not your head.”

“Norman Rockwell’s Philosophical Advice for Wayward Sleuths.” Crumley leaned against his car as if it were the only thing in the world that held him up. A laugh burst from his mouth, which he capped with his palm, and he said, muffled, “Continue.”

“You don’t want to hear.”

“Kid, I haven’t had a laugh in days.”

My mouth gummed itself shut. I closed my eyes.

“Go on,” said Crumley, with a gentler tone.

“It’s just,” I said, slowly, “I learned years ago that the harder I thought, the worse my work got. Everyone thinks you have to go around thinking all the time. No, I go around feeling and put it down and feel again and write that down and, at the end of the day, think about it. Thinking comes later.”

There was a curious light in Crumley’s face. He tilted his head now this way to look at me, and then tilted it the other way, like a monkey in the zoo staring out through the bars and wondering what the hell that beast is there outside.

Then, without a word, or another laugh or smile, he simply slid into the front seat of his car, calmly turned on the ignition, softly pressed the gas, and slowly, slowly drove away.

About twenty yards down the line, he braked the car, thought for a moment, backed up, and leaned over to look at me and yelled:

“Jesus H. Christ! Proof! God damn it. Proof.”

Which made me yank my right hand out of my jacket pocket so fast it almost tore the cloth.

I held my fist out at last and opened my trembling fingers.

“There!” I said. “You know what that is? No. Do I know what it is? Yes. Do I know who the old man is? Yes. Do you know his name? No!”

Crumley put his head down on his crossed arms on the steering wheel. He sighed. “Okay, let’s have it.”

“These,” I said, staring at the junk in my palm, “are little A’s and small B’s and tiny C’s. Alphabets, letters, punched out of trolley paper transfers. Because you drive a car, you haven’t seen any of this stuff for years. Because all I do, since I got off my rollerskates, is walk or take trains, I’m up to my armpits in these punchouts!”

Crumley lifted his head, slowly, not wanting to seem curious or eager.

I said, “This one old man, down at the trolley station, was always cramming his pockets with these. He’d throw this confetti on folks on New Year’s Eve, or sometimes in July and yell Happy Fourth! When I saw you turn that poor old guy’s pockets inside out I knew it had to be him. Now what do you say?”

There was a long silence.

“Shit.” Crumley seemed to be praying to himself, his eyes shut, as mine had been only a minute ago. “God help me. Get in”

“What?”

“Get in, God damn it. You’re going to prove what you just said. You think I’m an idiot?”

“Yes. I mean—no.” I yanked the door open, struggling with my left fist in my left pocket. “I got this other stuff, seaweed, left by my door last night and—”

“Shut up and handle the map.”

The car leaped forward.

I jumped in just in time to enjoy whiplash.

Elmo Crumley and I stepped into the tobacco smells of an eternally attic day.

Crumley stared at the empty space between the old men who leaned like dry wicker chairs against each other.

Crumley moved forward to hold out his hand and show them the dry-caked alphabet confetti.

The old men had had two days now to think about the empty seat between them.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” one of them whispered.

“If a cop,” murmured one of them, blinking at the mulch in his palm, “shows me something like that, it’s gotta come from Willy’s pockets. You want me to come identify Turn?”

The other two old men leaned away from this one who spoke, as if he had said something unclean.

Crumley nodded.

The old man shoved his cane under his trembling hands and hoisted himself up. Crumley tried to help, but the fiery look the old man shot him moved him away.

“Stand aside!”

The old man battered the hardwood floor with his cane, as if punishing it for the bad news, and was out the door.

We followed him out into that mist and fog and rain where God’s light had just failed in Venice, southern California.

We walked into the morgue with a man eighty-two years old, but when we came out he was one hundred and ten, and could no longer use his cane. The fire was gone from his eyes, so he didn’t even beat us off as we tried to help him out to the car and he was mourning over and over, “My God, who gave him that awful haircut? When did that happen?” He babbled because he needed to talk nonsense. “Did you do that to him?” he cried to no one. “Who did that? Who?”

I know, I thought, but didn’t tell, as we got him out of the car and back to sit in his own place on that cold bench where the other old men waited, pretending not to notice our return, their eyes on the ceiling or the floor, waiting until we were gone so they could decide whether to stay away from the stranger their old friend had become or move closer to keep him warm.

Crumley and I were very quiet as we drove back to the as-good-as-empty canaries-for-sale house.

I stood outside the door while Crumley went in to look at the blank walls of the old man’s room and look at the names, the names, the names, William, Willy, Will, Bill. Smith. Smith. Smith, fingernail-scratched there in the plaster, making himself immortal.

When he came out, Crumley stood blinking back into the terribly empty room.

“Christ,” he murmured.

“Did you read the words on the wall?”

“All of them.” Crumley looked around and was dismayed to find himself outside the door staring in. “ ‘He’s standing in the hall.’ Who stood here?” Crumley turned to measure me. “Was it you?”

“You know it wasn’t,” I said, edging back.

“I could arrest you for breaking and entering, I suppose.”

“And you won’t do that,” I said, nervously. “The door, all the doors, have been open for years. Anyone could come in. Someone did.”

Crumley glanced back into the silent room.

“How do I know you didn’t scratch those words on that wall with your own damned fingernail, just to get my hair up and make me believe your cockamamie theory?”

“The writing on the wall is wobbly; an old man’s scribble.”

“You could have thought of that, and imitated an old man’s scrawl.”

“Could have done, but didn’t do. My God, what do you need to convince you?”

“More than gooseflesh on my neck, I’ll tell you that.”

“Then,” I said, my hands back in my pockets again, making fists, the seaweed still hidden but waiting, “the rest is upstairs. Go up. Look. Come down. Tell me what you see.”

Crumley tilted his head to give me one of those monkey looks, then sighed and went up, like an old shoe salesman carrying an anvil in each hand.

At the top of the stairs he stood like Lord Carnarvon outside Tutankhamen’s waiting tomb, for a long moment. Then he went in. I thought I heard the ghosts of old birds rustling and peering. I thought I heard a mummy whisper, rising from river dusts. But that was the old Muse in me, anxious for startlements.

What I heard was Crumley pacing the milkweed silt on the old woman’s floor, which muffled his tread. A birdcage gave a metallic bell sound; he had touched it. Then what I heard was him bending over to lend an ear to a wind of time that moved from a dry and aching mouth.

And what I heard finally was the sound of the name on the wall whispered once, twice, three times, as if the old canary woman were reading the Egyptian hieroglyphs, symbol by symbol.

When Crumley came back down he was carrying the anvils in his stomach, and his face was tired.

“I’m getting out of this business,” he said.

I waited.

“Hirohito ascends throne.” He quoted the old newsprint he had just seen at the bottom of the cage.

“Addis Ababa?” I said.

“Was it really that long ago?”

“Now you’ve seen it all,” I said. ^“What’s your conclusion?”

“What conclusion should I have?”

“Didn’t you read it in her face? Didn’t you see?”

“What?”

“She’s next.”

“What?”

“It’s all there, in her eyes. She knows about the man who stands in the hall. He’s been up to her room, also, but hasn’t gone in. She’s simply waiting, and praying for him. I’m cold all over, and can’t get warm.”

“Just because you were right about the trolley ticket punchout junk, and found his place and I.D.’d the man, doesn’t make you Tarot Card Champ of the Week. You’re cold all over? I’m cold all over. Your hunch and my chill buys no dog food for a dead dog.”

“If you don’t post a guard here, she’ll be dead in two days.”

“If we posted guards over everybody who’s going to be dead in two days, we’d have no more police. You want me to go tell the captain what to do with his men? He’d throw me downstairs and throw my badge after me. Look, she’s nobody. I hate to say that. But that’s the way the law runs. If she were somebody, maybe we’d post—”

“I’ll do it myself, then.”

“Think what you just said. You got to eat sometime, or sleep. You can’t be here and you know it. The first time you run for a hotdog is when he, him, who, whomever, if he exists, will come in, make her sneeze, and she’s gone. There was never any man here. It was only an old hairball blowing by in the night. The old guy heard it first. Mrs. Canary hears it now.”

Crumley stared up the long, dark stairs toward the place of no birdsong, no springtime in the Rockies, no bad organist playing for his tiny yellow friends in some lost year.

“Give me time to think, kid,” he said.

“And let you be an accessory to murder?”

“There you go again!” Crumley yanked the door so it screamed on its hinges. “How come I spend half my time almost liking you and the rest being mad as hell?”

“Do I do that to you?” I said.

But he was gone.

Crumley did not call for twenty-four hours.

Grinding my teeth into a fine powder, I primed my Underwood and steamrollered Crumley into the platen.

“Speak!” I typed.

“How come,” Crumley responded, typing from somewhere inside my amazing machine, “I spend half my time almost liking you and the rest being mad as hell?”

Then the machine typed, “I’ll telephone you on the day the old canary lady dies.”

It’s obvious that years back I had pasted two gummed labels on my Underwood. One read: OFFICIAL OUIJA BOARD. The other, in large letters: DON’T THINK.

I didn’t. I just let the old Ouija board bang and clatter.

“How soon do we work together on this problem?”

“You,” responded Crumley in my fingertips, “are the problem!”

“Will you become a character in my novel?”

“I already am.”

“Then help me.”

“Fat chance.”

“Damn!”

I tore the page out of the machine.

Just then, my private phone rang.

It seemed it took me ten miles of running to get there, thinking, Peg!

All the women in my life have been librarians, teachers, writers, or booksellers. Peg was at least three of those, but she was far away now, and it terrified me.

She had been all summer in Mexico, finishing studies in Spanish literature, learning the language, traveling on trains with mean peons or buses with happy pigs, writing me love-scorched letters from Tamazunchale or bored ones from Acapulco where the sun was too bright and the gigolos not bright enough; not for her anyway, friend to Henry James and consultant to Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. She carried a lunchbucket full of books everywhere. I often thought she ate the brothers Goncourt like high tea sandwiches in the late afternoons.

Peg.

Once a week she called from somewhere lost in the church-towns or big cities, just come up out of the mummy catacombs at Guanajuato or gasping after a climb down Teotihuacán, and we listened to each other’s heartbeats for three short minutes and said the same dumb things to each other over and over and over; the sort of litany that sounds fine no matter how long or often you say it.

Each week, when the call came, the sun blazed over the phone booth.

Each week, when the talk stopped, the sun died and the fog arose. I wanted to run pull the covers over my head. Instead, I punched my typewriter into bad poems, or wrote a tale about a Martian wife who, lovesick, dreams that an earthman drops from the sky to take her away, and gets shot for his trouble.

Peg.

Some weeks, as poor as I was, we pulled the old telephone tricks.

The operator, calling from Mexico City, would ask for me by name.

“Who?” I would say. “What was that again? Operator, speak up?”

I would hear Peg sigh, far away. The more I talked nonsense, the longer I was on the line.

“Just a moment, operator, let me get that again.”

The operator repeated my name.

“Wait—let me see if he’s here. Who’s calling?”

And Peg’s voice, swiftly, would respond from two thousand miles off. “Tell him it’s Peg! Peg.”

And I would pretend to go away and return.

“He’s not here. Call back in an hour.”

“An hour—” echoed Peg.

And click, buzz, hum, she was gone.

Peg.

I leaped into the booth and yanked the phone off the hook.

“Yes?” I yelled.

But it wasn’t Peg.

Silence.

“Who is this?” I said.

Silence. But someone was there, not two thousand miles away, but very near. And the reception was so clear, I could hear the air move in the nostrils and mouth of the quiet one at the other end.

“Well?” I said.

Silence. And the sound that waiting makes on a telephone line. Whoever it was had his mouth open, close to the receiver. Whisper. Whisper.

Jesus God, I thought, this can’t be a heavy-breather calling me in a phone booth. People don’t call phone booths! No one knows this is my private office.

Silence. Breath. Silence. Breath.

I swear that cool air whispered from the receiver and froze my ear.

“No, thanks,” I said.

And hung up.

I was halfway across the street, jogging with my eyes shut, when I heard the phone ring again.

I stood in the middle of the street, staring back at the phone, afraid to go touch it, afraid of the breathing.

But the longer I stood there in danger of being run down, the more the phone sounded like a funeral phone calling from a burial ground with bad telegram news. I had to go pick up the receiver.

“She’s still alive,” said a voice.

“Peg?” I yelled.

“Take it easy,” said Elmo Crumley.

I fell against the side of the booth, fighting for breath, relieved but angry.

“Did you call a moment ago?” I gasped. “How’d you know this number?”

“Everyone in the whole goddamn town’s heard that phone ring and seen you jumping for it.”

“Who’s alive?”

“The canary lady,. Checked her late last night—”

“That was last night.”

“That’s not why I’m calling, damn it. Get over to my place late this afternoon. I might just rip your skin off.”

“Why?”

“Three o’clock in the morning, what were you doing standing outside my house?”

“Me!”

“You better have a good alibi, by God. I don’t like being spooked. I’ll be home around five. If you talk fast you get maybe a beer. If you bat an eye, I kick ass.”

“Crumley!” I yelled.

“Be there.” And he hung up.

I walked slowly back toward my front door.

The phone rang again.

Peg!

Or the man with cold ice in his breath?

Or Crumley being mean?

I banged the door open, jumped in, slammed it, and then, with excruciating patience, rolled a fresh white sheet of Elmo Crumley into my Underwood and forced him to say only nice things to me.

Ten thousand tons of fog poured over Venice and touched at my windows and came in under the cracks in the door.

Every time it is a damp drear November in my soul I know it is high time to go from the sea again, and let someone cut my hair.

There is a thing in haircutting that assuages the blood and calms the heart and makes the nerves serene.

Beyond that, I heard the old man stumbling out of the morgue in the back of my mind, wailing, “My God, who gave him that awful haircut?”

Cal, of course, had done that awful job. So I had several reasons to go visit. Cal, the worst barber in Venice, maybe the world, but cheap, called across the tidal waves of fog, waiting with his dull scissors, brandishing his Bumblebee Electric clippers that shocked and stunned poor writers and innocent customers who wandered in.

Cal, I thought. Snip away the darkness.

Short in front. So I can see.

Short on the sides. So I can hear.

Short in back. So I can feel things creeping up on me.

Short!

But I didn’t make it to Cal’s, just then.

As I stepped out of my apartment into the fog, a parade of great dark elephants went by on Windward Avenue. Which is to say a pavane of black trucks with huge cranes and immense pile-pullers on the back. They were in full thunder, and heading for the pier to knock it down, or begin to knock it down. The rumors had been afloat for months. And now the day was here. Or tomorrow morning at the latest.

I had more of the day to wait to go see Crumley.

And Cal was not exactly the greatest lure in the world.

The elephants lumbered and groaned their machineries and shook the pavement, on their way to devour the fun house and the horses on the carousel.

Feeling like an old Russian writer, madly in love with killing winter and blizzards on the move, what could I do but follow?

By the time I got to the pier, half the trucks had lumbered down on the sand to move out toward the tides and catch the Junk that would be tossed over the railings. The others had headed out toward China on the rotting planks, sawdusting the wooden mulch on the way.

I followed, sneezing and using Kleenex. I should be home lying with my cold, but the thought of going to bed with so many fog and mist and rain thoughts slogged me on.

I stood amazed at my own blindness, hallway down the length of the pier, wondering at all the people here I had seen but never known. Half of the games were nailed shut with freshcut pine planks. A few stayed open, waiting for the bad weather to come in and toss hoops or knock milk bottles down. Outside half a dozen stalls, the young men who looked old or the old men who looked older stood watching those trucks growling out on the sea end of the pier, getting ready to tooth and nail sixty years of past time.

I looked around, realizing I had rarely seen behind the dropped flat doors or the rolled-down and battened canvasses.

I had the feeling again of being followed and spun about.

A big plume of fog came along the pier, ignored me, and passed on.

So much for premonition.

Here, halfway to the sea, there was a small dark shack that I had passed for at least ten years without seeing the window-shades up.

Today, for the first time, the shade were raised.

I looked in.

My God, I thought. There’s a whole library there.

I walked swiftly over, wondering how many similar libraries were hidden away on the pier or lost in the old alleys of Venice.

I stood by the window, remembering nights when I had seen a light behind the shade and a shadow-hand turning pages in an invisible book, and heard a voice whispering the words, declaiming poetries, philosophizing on a dark universe. It had always sounded like a writer with second thoughts or an actor slipping downhill into a ghost repertory, Lear with two extra sets of mean daughters and only half the wits.

But now, at noon this day, the shades were up. Inside, a small light still burned in a room empty of occupants but filled with a desk, a chair, and an old-fashioned but huge leather couch. Around the couch, on all sides, towering to the ceiling, were cliffs and towers and parapets of books. There must have been a thousand of them, crammed and shoved up to the ceiling.

I stepped back and looked at the signs I had seen but not seen around and above the shack door.

TAROT CARDS. But the print was faded.

The next sign down read PALMISTRY.

The third one, in block letters, was PHRENOLOGY.

And beneath, HANDWRITING ANALYSIS.

And to one side, HYPNOTISM.

I sidled closer to the door, for there was a very small business card thumbtacked just above the doorknob.

I read the name of the shack’s owner:

A. L. SHRANK.

And underneath the name, in pencil not quite so faint as canaries for sale, these words:

Practicing Psychologist.

A sextuple-threat man.

I put my ear to the door and listened.

In there, between precipice shelves of dusty books, did I hear Sigmund Freud whispering a penis is only a penis, but a good cigar is a smoke? Hamlet dying and taking everyone along? Virginia Woolf, like drowned Ophelia, stretched out to dry on that couch, telling her sad tale? Tarot cards being shuffled? Heads being felt like cantaloupes? Pens scratching?

“Let’s peek” I said.

Again, I stared through the window, but all I saw was the empty couch with the outline of many bodies in its middle. It was the only bed. Nights, A. L. Shrank slept there. Days, did strangers lie there, holding on to their insides as if they were broken glass? I could not believe.

But the books were the things that fascinated me. They not only brimmed the shelves but filled the bathtub which I could glimpse through a half-open door to one side. There was no kitchen. If there had been, the icebox would have been filled, no doubt, with copies of Peary at the North Pole or Byrd Alone in Antarctica. A. L. Shrank, it was obvious, bathed in the sea, like many others here, and had his banquets at Herman’s Hot-dogs, down the way.

But it was not so much the presence of nine hundred or a thousand books, as it was their titles, their subjects, their incredible dark and doomed and awful names.

On the high, always midnight shelves stood Thomas Hardy in all his gloom next to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which leaned on dread Nietzsche and hopeless Schopenhauer cheek by jowl with The Anatomy of Melancholy, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Freud, the tragedies of Shakespeare (no comedies visible), the Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Spengler’s Decline of the West … and on and on....