by Zack Parsons
“What are you talking about?”
He shook the octagon at me, and it rattled.
“Paramount sends runners all the time to pull reels from their vault. They take them to screenings for production, for bigwigs, for actors staying in hotels. If anybody at the Paramount vault asks, you just name some celebrity and a hotel and tell them you’re taking the reels there. It’s not like they check. And nobody is going to care about some old Rex Rawhide picture.”
“You’re a peach.” I grabbed him and planted a kiss on his balding head.
“Get your germs off of me. Go on, I hope you find this waitress murderer or whatever. And you owe me.”
“I still owe you from last time,” I said on my way out the door.
“You owe me double!” Nicky shouted through the closing door, but I pretended not to hear him.
I never liked Melrose Avenue. No, that wasn’t quite fair. Melrose Avenue had good parts, like the half block closed to fix the sewer, and where it disappeared into the ocean. Those were good bits. It was otherwise a long row of ugly commercial properties, studio warehouses, hokey hotels, and service stations trying to sell over-priced gasoline with discounts on new tires.
Melrose was the place to be if you wanted a dent pounded out of your car door with a mallet or if you wanted a hooker to find you floating facedown in the pool of a motel with a rodeo theme. Even the palm trees looked worn and tawdry.
Urchins were selling oranges and boxes of matches to the crowds. Some were waving the nickel fold-out cartoon maps to the private Valhallas of a hundred Hollywood demigods. Each time the traffic slowed, the children assaulted the cars with solicitations of “Hey, mister!” and “Please, señor!” They thronged the sunburned tourists slumming it at the discount movie houses and museums of Hollywood oddities. Families coughing up their dimes for second-run bikini films and ladling their fingers over Ronald Colman’s false beards from Kismet.
The white-collar fraternities of business-trippers from the aircraft plants and military contractors and Bishop’s towering ugliness out in San Pedro came to Melrose for the girls. Buy me a drink, mister? A ginger ale and lime and a crumpled tissue in the telephone booth; the skeleton outline of a sex story ten times better when repeated over fried fish at a Cleveland Kiwanis.
The Paramount vault was a dominant feature of Melrose. A big, ugly slab topped by massive industrial AC units. It was a windowless tomb with a white granite facade. There was a small visitors’ entrance and several beige loading doors designed to accommodate trolley carts of film reels. The lot was enclosed by a wrought-iron gate and a studio security post. I bribed the guard with a dollar and a promise that I “won’t touch nothing.”
Getting into the building was easy; getting into the film archives required a little more patience. The upper floors of the vault housed prop storage and various offices for lesser Paramount executives. The real business was underground, in subterranean vaults kept cool and breezy by the humming air conditioners on the roof. Descending the stairs into the dim corridors was like entering a chilled, Dantesque grotto of nitrocellulose and acetate. Explosive chemical smells permeated the air.
A pair of chatty dames fortified within a cashiers’ cage were the gatekeepers of this pit. I watched them for a while. Kept my distance and observed. They were smart and sarcastic and gave everyone who came through a hard time. Except for the guys coming and going in the blue jackets and gray baseball caps and white gloves. The couriers Nicky had told me about. They all had the octagonal cans like me. Some of them had carts stacked high with the canisters.
I followed one departing with a trolley cart of film reels.
“Where’s that going?” I asked.
I tried to read the handwritten labels on the canisters. A Foreign Affair, something with Hillbilly in the title, Streets of Laredo, and a few others with the labels turned away.
“I’m taking these over to a private party at the Chateau Marmont. Why?”
“Sell me your hat and coat.”
“No way, buddy,” said the runner. “This is a honey gig.”
I emptied the salad out of my wallet and waved it at him. He shed the jacket and passed it over. The hat was warm and damp with the sweat of his brow. I wheeled one of the unused trolley carts into the vault’s waiting area and approached the cage.
The two women watched me through the brass bars of their cage. One was an imperious pile of hair and jewelry, conscripting Elizabeth Arden to shave twenty extra years down to ten. Her younger coworker had a pretty, doll-like face, but her head was too small for her long, slender neck so that she reminded me of a marshmallow on the end of a dowel.
“Well, here’s my favorite part of the day,” I said, stopping short of the door into the vault. “How are you two beautiful ladies doing?”
They melted. Guess they didn’t get a lot of runners who looked like that movie star pilot who was just in the paper for dying in the shower. They made me take the hat off so they could get a better look. They couldn’t remember his name. The older woman, Flo, even offered to tape up one of the cuts on my head. I let her. Saved me the trouble. When she finished, I was buzzed through without any trouble.
A short ramp opened into the airship-hangar immensity of the vault. Suck of pressure at the door. Tangible future histories in row upon row of stacked film cans. They were organized by year and alphabetically within years. The lighting was very low to avoid damaging the film. Electric lanterns were available near the ramp. I clipped one to the metal rim of my trolley cart.
I could hear the reel couriers and projectionists searching the underground library, seeking obscure films to hand-deliver or ship off across the country to a specialty screening. They were like Christmas ghosts: shuffling and muttering and never revealing themselves except as lights beaming through the stacks of film canisters.
Recent, popular movies occupied entire rows with surplus reels in metal cans. The originals were stored in plastic cases and labeled ORIGINAL or RAW.
I spent a long time shuffling around in the dark, searching for the Rex Rawhide serials, before I realized that non-Paramount films, including the American Pictures reels, were kept in a separate section. There was the feel of a slum to that area. The rows weren’t straight, and I could hear water dripping somewhere. And whispers. The shelves were cheaply made from metal rods and Peg-Board and leaned as though decaying into one another. Toppled stacks of reels filled the shelves and in some cases spilled out onto the floor.
I abandoned the trolley in the center aisle and unclipped the light to go searching the narrow, haphazard aisles of shelves. The overhead lights flickered and buzzed and were entirely inadequate. I discovered that the Rex Rawhide serials were in a mess. The film cans were placed out of sequence and jumbled up with nearby film reels. I sorted through dozens of titles and misplaced reels from Red Ranger serials and a series of educational films called Reds: The Threat Within. Canisters broke open and spilled their contents at my feet.
I bent down to pick up the ribbons of film, and as I did, I heard the rush of the ocean. It was distant but distinct. I strained to hear it better, and the sound was gone.
I laboriously spooled the film back onto its reel and returned it to its canister. As I stood to place it back on the shelf, something moved on the other side. It was only a pale blur seen through the peg holes of one of the dilapidated shelves. It was so fast and quiet, I only glimpsed it as it departed. A hunched, pale man or a dog, maybe, loose in the stacks of reels.
“Wait,” I said, and I chased after it, stumbling over a stack of fashion films.
It was faster but seemed to pause in hiding and wait for me to catch up, then spring around a corner or disappear down a row where the lights had failed. I never got a good look at it, but I could see the shine of its eyes in the dark as it observed my lame pursuit.
I wheezed and sputtered in my infirmity. My bruised muscles ached, and I could feel the stones in my lungs worse than I had in days. I kept going. My shoes splashed
through filthy water that stung my ankles. The floor was fractured up ahead, the two halves forming a triangular trough that was filled with the water drizzling down from overhead pipes and conduits. There was very little light at all. Just the flickering beam of my lantern and the soft blue glow of distant sunlight reflected off hundreds of metallic surfaces.
I had it cornered. I could see its outline in the darkness, back against one of the stone walls of the vault’s foundation. Its huge eyes glistened in the shadows. Who had let this animal in here?
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
“Click-click-click,” it answered.
There was a seared deadness to the air. Maybe one of the AC units had caught fire? I wasn’t thinking rationally about things. I was stifled and struggling to breathe.
“Click-click-click,” it said again.
“Shh, I’m not—”
It charged out of the darkness with great speed, and at the terrible sight of it I felt the sand of my bravery scatter. It was no dog. It was a haunted, pale creature of nightmare flesh, but real and close enough to touch. It stood upon its overarticulated hind legs and was nearly as tall as my throat. It was naked and man-shaped and pale white, almost chalky. Its hairless head and flattened snout reminded me of a fish or a frog. No, it was familiar to me. I had seen the head before. Its huge blue eyes bulged from either side and focused on me with clear menace. The skeletal forelimbs were folded up against its body, sharp, bony spurs above its fingers like those of a mantis.
Spears. I suddenly saw the living head as I remembered it: decaying on a spear in the Indian village long ago. This was one of the denizens of that hellish place.
As it came for me, it opened its mouth and bared clattering plated jaws. It launched its spurred limbs out, spearing them for my heart. I hollered and turned away, felt them pass close by as I careened into one of the shelves and knocked canisters of film and bones and rotted bits showering into the watery trough.
I could hear it splashing toward me. I tried to turn, but I was caught up in the Sargasso of old film reels and leathery dead things. I tripped and slid down a stone column. Burning-cold water saturated the legs of my pants. The beast was right over top of me, and I was at its mercy. I closed my eyes and waited to die.
“Are you all right?”
I looked at my chest. Not a mark. I was sprawled against a shelf, sagged so low that I was nearly sitting upon the pile of overturned film reels.
“Buddy, are you okay?”
The man asking was dressed in the costume of one of the couriers. He was unshaved, his face crumpled by time and bushy eyebrows swallowing up his dark brown eyes. He reached a hand down and helped me to my feet.
“I’m all right,” I said, though my heart still hammered a ragged tattoo within my breast.
I stood up straight and attempted to regain my bearings. I was still in the aisle of the Rex Rawhide serials. I’d made a mess of those anti-Communist films, but otherwise I seemed fine. There was no dog, no ocean sound, not even dripping water. I’d evidently dreamed up the whole scenario.
“What are you looking for?” asked the old man.
“Uh.” I reached into my pocket for my black book and read off the name. “Rex Rawhide. ‘El Camino de la Muerte.’”
The old man nodded. He stepped over the spilled reels and examined the shelves.
“You’re in the right place,” he said. “Should be ... right ...”
He leaned down, trailing his finger over the film reels.
“Well, right here.” The old man tapped his finger on empty shelving. “Someone checked it out. You’re going to have to arrange a delivery.”
“It’s not there?”
“No, not even any copies. Happens all the time. But”—he groaned as he crouched down in the aisle—”they sometimes keep raw copies down here. And ... yep ... here you go ... this what you need?”
The old man handed me a sagging cardboard box labeled EL CAMINO DE LA MUERTE and stamped RAW. It was heavy and filled with original film reels. Some segments of film were just a few dozen frames on a small reel or a paper bag containing a few frames.
“Might just be,” I said, hefting the box.
“Royal Radio Pictures was one of the originals making serials,” said the old man. “Used to have one called Mystery Patrol. Soldiers fighting ghosts and vampires. Took my son to them when he was about this tall.”
The old man held a hand up around his waist.
“That was a long time before Rex Rawhide. They were all silent pictures back then, long before Bishop sold Royal Radio.”
“What? Harlan Bishop?”
“Sure,” he said. “Between wars he was making serials and movies, but he sold all that off in, oh, I think it was ’38 or ’39. You can probably figure it out just by looking at the dates on the cans. Wherever this section stops is when he sold it to Paramount.”
“Is there somewhere in here that I can watch this stuff?” I shook the box. “I need to make sure it’s the right picture.”
The old man showed me to a projection room. It was a table, a couple of chairs, and a projector aimed at a white wall used by the couriers to check unreliable reels.
“Take your time,” he said, and he gave me a pat on the shoulder. “And take it easy.”
Alone in the small projection room I attempted to screen the many reels and bits of footage. I have always struggled with technology more complicated than a hand grenade, and this projector gave me fits. I ruined several pieces of film before I got the hang of it, but at last I sat and watched the flickering images and heard the voices on the tinny speaker.
There was no sequence to the clips, and the sound was imperfect or missing on many of the reels. Couldn’t really piece together what was happening in the story. Something about cattle rustlers and a mine, a schoolteacher who was sweet on Rex, but that was about it. I never liked Westerns for the way they tried to conjure a time I clearly remembered. Everyone was too clean and happy. Arrows always landed in armpits.
The lantern-jawed actor playing Rex Rawhide seemed to struggle with his lines, and the scenes with sound often ended with an exasperated shout from the director to cut. At one point Rex’s Indian guy Friday, Kakakshi, played by a white actor in makeup, engaged in a long argument with Rex. I wished that bit had sound so I could hear them stripping the bark off each other.
I sorted through bits and pieces of footage, half scenes, construction of sets, monkeyshines by the cast and crew, and stunts gone wrong. I was bored with the process by the time I came across a piece of footage featuring Isabella Webber as the Red Rogue.
My pulse quickened at the sight of her, riding high in the saddle on the back of a galloping paint. She was lean and beautiful, dressed as Nicky had described, between bathing beauty and cowgirl, her face partly hidden by a mask. I watched her rope an outlaw and leap from her saddle to tie him up. She was so agile and strong, the horseback riding was certainly hers, though the leaping might have been a stunt woman’s. I’m easily fooled by film tricks. The footage cut before it went to close-up.
It was a long while before I found another piece of footage with her in it. My sides ached, and my bandaged and taped hand throbbed painfully with each beat of my heart. I finally thought to hold my electric lantern beneath the film to see the frames so I didn’t waste the time mounting each reel to see what it was. I passed the lantern beneath the leading frames of a short reel, and her face appeared, close-up, translucent and smiling. Just the sight of her in that tiny thumbnail frame was enough for me.
I fumbled to get the reel mounted on the projector. She wasn’t wearing her mask, and her features were clearly those of Holly Webber. Of Annie Groves. She was taller and slimmer than either, particularly less curvaceous than her daughter, but the face was so similar to both that the effect was the same on me. I’m a man, and men don’t swoon, especially not a Marine, but when your heart’s been yearning for a certain gal for seventy-five years and then you see her in
motion on a film reel, well, it has an effect.
I sat back in the chair and lit a cigarette. There was no audio; it was footage from behind the scenes. Isabella was standing in a rocky desert talking to someone off frame. Her horse was tied up behind her. She was laughing, and her smile made me smile. Big white teeth. She started to walk out of frame, and the camera swiveled to follow her.
Isabella wrapped her arms around the shoulders of a man. Harlan Bishop. It had to be. He was dressed in a fine suit, but his back was to the camera. I begged for him to turn around. To prove what I’d known deep down all along. Each touch inflamed more anger. His face against her neck, making her laugh. His hands on the curve of her back as she waved for the camera operator to look away.
I was so seized by anger, I reached to the projector to switch it off or roll it back, but I stopped. As the cameraman was panning the frame away from the blushing Isabella, her amorous friend finally turned. He looked straight into the camera, straight at me, and he had the face of Warren Groves.
The dam of my anger for Harlan Bishop was suddenly emptied into my fists. Here was the evil left hand of our existence, some lowdown Warren Groves running his fingers down the back of the woman each of us loved.
The camera panned away, to the horse and beyond, to two little girls playing in the desert. Their backs were turned. One had red hair, and the other was a blonde.
I hardly noticed they were there at all. The reel unspooled and clapped mechanically against the projector. I stared at the white wall for a long time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“So when did you emerge?” asked Ethan Bishop, his hair unruly in the convertible’s wind.
“Thirty-four,” I shouted back.
“Good year. I—Father—took care of Sinclair that year. Could have used a man like you for that. I hear you work clean. Well, it was a real bloodbath at the hotel. Men and women both. It had to be done, of course—couldn’t have California taking over the factories. “