by Bret Lott
Hurrah, he whispered and felt the warm wet of tears sudden upon him, and he closed his eyes, blinked at these tears to rid himself of them because he didn’t want to be seen crying in this car full of tramps, but also because crying seemed not the way at all to begin the story, this flicker show of his life.
Then he smiled, because here it came to him, perfect and unbidden and true all at once, the way his story would genuinely begin, the way—of course!—it had to begin!
He saw the intertitle that would begin this all, saw the brilliant white letters curlicued and strong up on the silver screen, saw the words that would introduce the audience to this story of a boy with a momma couldn’t give a damn about him, a daddy gone to live in a shack, a dead brother who loved him, and a million brothers and sisters who couldn’t remember his name, and how this boy ran away one night, jumped onboard a train outside his little hometown and rode the rails west to find fortune and fame in the flickers.
He looked at the open boxcar door, this silver screen that revealed the opening shot of the flicker of his life, and saw stars shimmer above the trees.
He closed his eyes, let roll the words:
Our story begins…
2
Six days later he watched one man kill another.
Here had been the tired man huddled across the campfire from him, his eyes to the burning scraps of wood the dozen or so of them were gathered round, all of them waiting for the next freight train to start up out of Albuquerque, and the next ride they could grab to wherever that ride might take them.
And though the man’s eyes weren’t crossed, he wore a donkey-tail mustache just the same, and Earl let himself imagine the man was that slapstick Ben Turpin. Here was Ben Turpin, right out of Hogan’s Alley or Steel Preferred, same bushy mustache, same skinny face, sitting at a campfire outside Albuquerque, waiting for a train.
Six days gone, when all he’d planned was three or four for the ride out to Hollywood. But he’d taken off on the wrong line out of Dallas, ended up sleeping two nights in Tulsa before hitching on a line back into Texas. Only now he was headed the right way. The only way mattered: west.
He’d been looking in the fire himself, thinking on food, of course. The sandwiches had only lasted two days, and the two dollars was mostly gone for food in Tulsa and yet again in Dallas. He’d lost the pillowcase with his clothes and Frank’s yellow tie when he’d jumped on the train south out of Tulsa. And of course the magazines and their pictures of the studios were in there, and now he’d have no idea what to look for when he arrived.
But it was losing the tie that was the worst of it—he’d kept the fact he even had it a secret from everybody in the house for the last eight years, had taken it from Frank’s drawer even before they’d laid him out and dressed him for the burial.
He looked from the fire to Ben Turpin huddled across from him. He saw the man’s shoes, the sole pulled away from the toe on one of them, the leather sole itself separated into two flaps all the world like tongues one on top of the other. Almost like Charlie Chaplin’s shoes. The man’s battered hat sat nearly flush on his head, knees drawn up to his chest, his skinny arms held tight around his bony legs, same again as Ben Turpin, and Earl smiled.
Then the flicker show continued on: here came up from the dark just behind Ben Turpin a man who looked all the world like Montagu Love himself, straight out of The Ancient Highway: the shaggy sideburns and greasy skin of the villainous logger Hurd all sweaty and heavy there in the cabin and eyeing Billie Dove, the dark-eyed Canadian beauty whose land Hurd wants to steal away.
Then here, now, Montagu Love lifted high above Ben Turpin’s head a bottle Earl hadn’t seen him holding, and for a moment it seemed he were watching all this on a screen, himself settled deep into a red velvet chair in a field of red velvet chairs, all of it lived out to the music the old woman played on the piano down beneath the screen, her eyes sometimes to the sheet music before her, but more often looking up to the story above her, to what Earl and everyone else in the house had to know was the pageantry, the mystery, the suspense of a life bigger and better and just beyond their own small lives.
Some nights, after he’d come home from sneaking out to the flickers, he dreamt he was with Little Mary, and he could feel her ringlets brush against his chest; or sometimes it was Vilma Bánky, the silver of her hair, the silk of her nightclothes as he clutched her in his arms same as Ronald Colman in The Night of Love, her frightened of him but wanting him all the same, and here would be Vilma’s or Mary’s or any of a dozen starlets’ smile in his dreams, her fingertips to his chin, her lips and cheeks too close, too close, the thin tendrils of her hair down her cheeks just touching him, and then he’d wake with a shot to find himself in the dark of the house on Blackbourn. Still in Hawkins, Texas, in a room with four of his six brothers, in the next room four of his five sisters, the all of them littered about their rooms like the Foreign Legion in Beau Geste, himself Colman again, this time to the desert rabble around him.
Here he would wake: Hawkins, Texas. As far from Hollywood as he could possibly be.
On those nights he looked out the window of the room, and watched the night sky out there, the stars lined up same as ever, the same line of trees off in the distance on the slow march away for the logging he knew soon enough he’d call his own life. He could see in the gray and black out there a scattering of houses, all dark as his own, all peopled with lives as empty and pointless as his own, fields either growing thick with cotton or stubbled over, waiting for the next year, and the next, while everywhere else in Texas, it seemed, people were getting rich off the oil, even in cities close as Tyler.
But it wasn’t the rich of oil he wanted. Not even that. He was fourteen, and on these nights, he saw the possibility of his life, of the road it might take were he brave enough to walk it, same as the hero of The Ancient Highway, the rugged and handsome Jack Holt, who battled Montagu Love fist to fist in that cabin up in Canada, all to save Billie Dove.
He saw himself on the screen, while beneath him music played.
And now, at a campfire outside Albuquerque, Montagu Love brought down hard the bottle on the battered hat Ben Turpin wore, and here was the flicker show: Ben Turpin’s eyes opened wide with the explosion of glass, those eyes crossed deeper than Earl’d ever seen Ben Turpin’s crossed, while out the corner of his mouth popped the tip of his tongue. His arms let go his legs, and he seemed to spill out of himself of a sudden, a balled-up rag doll shaken out loose in vaudeville abandon.
Earl laughed, let out a hard shock of sound to the silence of the other men around him, and he glanced at them an instant, both to left and to right.
They were already up, each man at the campfire with his eyes to Montagu Love, all of them tensed, he could see, ready for whatever might come next, though Earl had no clear idea.
Ben Turpin’s hat slipped from his head, fell to his lap, Montagu Love still above him, hair down in his eyes for the force of the swing. He held the jagged end of the bottle in his hand, him half-turned from them all for the swing down and through. His eyes were to Ben Turpin’s head, and Earl let himself look, finally, at the center of everything around this campfire.
The tired man’s scalp lay open from just above his left eye straight back to beyond what Earl could see, the skull revealed beneath it smashed flat and in shards.
Then a runnel of blood, black against the white of the man’s forehead, trailed down and into the man’s left eye, still open, still crossed like the other, as though he were focused on a fly perched at the bridge of his nose.
That was when his tongue lolled all the way out, and the man slumped full to the ground, slowly, as though he meant to play it that way.
Earl stood, his eyes carried by the purposeful feel of the way the man fell to the ground, the move more liquid than bone and flesh, to see what it looked like: Ben Turpin coldcocked with a bottle by Montagu Love.
He looked, saw in the light from the fire that Ben Turpin’s arms lay at his si
des now, his legs out long and thin as they would ever be, but still. He couldn’t see the man’s scalp from this angle, or the way the skull had pushed flat into him. But here was that one eye filled with blood, both of them still open and crossed, his tongue out even farther and touching now the ground beside his face, and here now too, in the dirt above Turpin’s head, was pooling black blood, no longer a line of it running down into his face, but flowing free out the top.
Ben Turpin shivered head to toe, one quick and quiet bolt of lightning through him so that he seemed almost to lift from the ground.
But soon as it came upon him the shiver stopped, and Earl heard a deep and full and dark trembling of breath from the man, a kind of ancient escape of sound, as though the sound itself were seeable, a cloud out of him, or a tumble free of stone, and the man was dead.
Earl knew it, and only then. He’d heard this sound before, knew it in the instant it settled in his ears for the truth of what it was.
But there was another sound now, colder and darker, low and growing, as though the breath the dead man had given out were taken in by the ground itself, soaked into its heart same as the blood was soaking down and in to stain this piece of earth with the death of a man.
He looked up at the killer. He wasn’t Montagu Love now, but a man with a broken bottle, at his feet a man he’d killed.
He was looking at Earl, and slowly lifted the bottle up, pointed it at him.
Here was the dark sound, and Earl thought it his blood running through him same as he heard in his ears of a night, staring up at stars out his window while everyone else in the house breathed in sleep.
But this blood in him was black, he knew, for the low pitch of sound it made in him. Black, thick as oil: a dead man’s blood.
The killer took a breath, his arm out straight now and lined up like a gun, his eyes, the drunken wet shine of them in the firelight, lined up with the broken edge of glass like a sight on a barrel.
“You!” the man shouted over the low and growing tremble, and Earl felt through him a piece of the lightning that’d shot through the dead man, felt his skin prickle over with just that single word.
He felt his feet move beneath him, take one step back, and another.
But the killer moved with him step for step, the bottle still out and at him. “You!” he shouted again. “You were with him!” his words slow and thick, strands of his hair still down into his eyes, the fire beside him now. “You stole it!” he shouted.
Earl took in a breath of his own, opened his mouth to speak a denial—he’d never seen the man before, hadn’t stolen anything—but nothing came, and now he felt a hard pull at his shoulder, and he turned, saw the face of an old man close beside him, the old man’s eyes open wide, a crushed hat same as the dead man’s on his head. His shoulders were hunched up, his mouth moving with words in and through and around this low tremble of black blood in Earl, the old man’s face too close to Earl’s, and he saw in the firelight a glimpse of crumbled teeth, saw wrinkles deep-set beside the man’s eyes, the gristle of a beard that was no beard, but an old man gone unshaven too long.
The old man was saying something, Earl knew, though he could not hear him for the slow thunder that seemed to swallow them all with its dark and depth, and Earl finally turned his head full, saw behind them both the railbed, saw dimly in the light off the fire the freight train they were all waiting for, a dull monster unbidden and welcome at once, lumbering and swift and full of itself for the way, like always, it moved past them all with no care for what lay here.
A train, westbound. Here was the sound, that black blood through him.
The old man pulled even harder at Earl now, his eyes shooting to the fire and back to Earl, to the fire and back again.
“Boy,” he shouted full out, the whisper gone, “you want to hobo this train, you got to go now!”
He let his eyes go once more to behind them and the fire, and Earl looked back too, saw there beside the fire the killer on the ground, passed out, his arm out straight and still with the bottle in it, stretched out on the ground.
And just beyond him the dead man.
Earl turned, the old man already five yards ahead of him and running, a hitch in his leg, his arms up like chicken wings. Beyond him moved the train, and Earl saw men scrambling up the gravel bed, running alongside the train, still slow enough to climb on for its being out of the station only a mile or so back, the all of them reaching up to black squares of open doors, pale hands reaching out to hoist them aboard like every time he’d climbed on so far.
Earl was running too, passed already the old man, who’d taken off his hat and held it in his hand, and here was the cinder and gravel, the hulk of the boxcar beside him, and the pale angel hands come once more from the dark inside to reach for his own held out to them, and he took one, felt the pull of someone he did not know up and onto the hard wooden floor of the boxcar.
Still on his stomach, he turned, reached out to the old man right there, right there, slowing down now, it seemed, in one hand still that hat, the other hand up now, and Earl and another man grabbed hold hard of the old man’s arms, one arm each, and hauled him into the boxcar and beside them, the all of them letting out of a sudden huge breaths and drawing them back in just as hard, and there came from within the depths of the boxcar a kind of laughter, deep and quiet and more like the tumble free of stones the tired man’s last breath out had sounded like than Earl wanted to hear.
Laughter, yet again, this time at the three of them there on their backs on the rough wood floor of a boxcar.
He was on a train once more, but inside him now a death—a murder—more inside him than any tilt of the head a forsaken woman at a piano might make, and more inside him than any dream of blond ringlets or soft full lips.
He’d seen it.
Here was laughter, quiet as death, solid as death.
He’d watched his older brother Frank die, there in the bedroom in Hawkins he’d watched stars from. He’d died of the influenza when Earl was only six and a child inside a room he wasn’t allowed in. But Frank had been his protector, the oldest brother, older than Earl by eleven years. Between them were Wilda and Curtis and Buster, Barney and Raymond and Chilton and Mildred and Connie May; three more came after Earl: Pearl and Thelma and Helen, three girl babies that cawed and mewled and messed such that Earl might not even be alive for the word or touch he got from Momma and Daddy.
It was Frank who’d taken to him, Frank the one to fork up a pork chop to lay on Earl’s plate at dinner when the mob of children began the war for food, Frank the one to lift him up and into the wagon when they rode into Gladewater or Mineola in the fight for who would sit where every trip ever was.
For those small gifts—for, finally, the attention he was given in a family too full of family—Earl had climbed in the window to their room from outside, a gray morning cool and wet with rain as he slipped from the front room and the cluster of family there, aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters all knotted and fretting, his momma chief among them, though his daddy was there too, in from the woods.
There had stood his momma at the center of everything with her apron in her hands and wringing it, wringing it, as though she might expel from it the sickness in her oldest son like water from a wet rag. He’d seen her grow old, he believed, in just the five days Frank had been down with the ’flu: her brown hair, though wound in the same tight bun at the nape of her neck, had gone grayer than he’d ever noticed, her green eyes, it seemed to Earl, grown just as gray behind her spectacles, wrinkles beside them suddenly upon her, and across her brow, and beside her mouth. Even her hands as she wrung the apron were the hands of an older lady, he believed. Someone else’s hands.
Hovering behind and beside her was his daddy, his hair white for as long as Earl remembered, but him even more quiet than he always was, a cigarette tense at his lips drawn thin, no words at all out of him while kin touched his shoulder, whispered to him, fretted and fretted.
Earl would
not be missed, he knew. If he ever had been, or ever would be. And so he’d gone out to the porch and down the front steps, carefully made his way alongside the house, rain down on him, until he stood beneath the open window, felt with his fingertips for the windowsill, and jumped once, twice, three times before he was high enough to hook his arm over the sill. He struggled up, his shoes searching for purchase on the white clapboard siding and then finding it, and he rolled into the room, and sat up.
Frank lay in his bed, quilt pulled tight to his chin, his black hair matted with fever, his thin mustache even thinner, it seemed, for the pale of his face.
His eyes were open wide, Earl could see, at the surprise of a little brother suddenly with him.
But more than surprise, Earl saw too. There was more to the startled shine of his eyes than that, and Earl had known even then, in that instant of his brother’s eyes on his own, it was fear he saw.
Earl still sat on the floor, legs out in front of him, and he wondered what there was for him to do, now that he had stolen inside a sickroom, outside the door beside Frank’s bed his momma, and her two sisters over from Gladewater, and most of the children. And his daddy. The whole world out there, and here only Earl and Frank.
And so Earl leaned forward between his knees, tucked his head down and rolled forward on himself, did a somersault on the bedroom floor, in himself now that fearful surprise he’d seen on his brother’s face, but in him too his desire for something else from Frank, something he might be able to give Earl before he died.
Because Earl knew he would die. His momma’d spoken it in broken tones last night once the boys were sent to bed on the sleeping porch, Frank left alone in their room. She’d cried it to Daddy, the two of them in their own room, their window not but a few feet from where Earl lay in a sheet, the midsummer air too thick to let in sleep for any of them. He lay there in the heat and thick, and imagined his momma and daddy the way they always were at night: Momma’s hair down in twin braids, her spectacles off and tucked into a handkerchief and set on the dresser, his father in his nightshirt and smoking his last cigarette of the day.