*
The chintz and antimacassars, the china figurines crowding the window-sills, all colors faded to pink, pale blue; photographs of the dead, slipped sideways in their mounts; the dining-room ‘kept for best’, cold as the tomb and never entered; the smell of wet ash, the gloom of gas-lamps.
*
After the five hours walking, he swam
till his legs were lightened,
his head clear from feeling nothing.
Brown pelicans, diving for fish:
like short-falling, graceless gannets.
There were clam-diggers on the foreshore,
some early yachts in the sweep of the bay
and he could see men fishing far out at the end of the pier
beyond the funfair and the dance-hall,
like the quays back east at Chéticamp, Inverness and Margaree,
down to Finlay Point and Mabou:
blue silhouettes at the edge,
still watchers of the moving sea.
*
The locals crumping through snow to see which boat had put in. The frozen harbor like a terrible accident: as if some ballroom’s chandeliers had fallen, leaving smashed shards of inch-thick ice: this impossible puzzle laid out as plate glass – a blank jigsaw with a million pieces.
*
The sea opened its arms to us, unconditionally. Welcoming us all to the deep, each to our own hole in the water.
*
The carnies are waking. They’ve been sleeping on benches,
or under the pier, and are moving around.
One wanders over, shoes too big for her feet,
home-made tattoos under a stained vest – grinning,
with no front teeth, lighting
one cigarette off another and saying:
‘It’s real quiet here, out of season. Real quiet.’
She looked back at the Big Dipper, the carousel, the Ferris wheel.
‘I had a good life, y’know? Home. Kids. A proper life.
I just slipped a bit.’
She examined the sand, closely.
‘I just slipped.’
*
He took a Red Car back.
The papers showed Mitchum, mopping out his cell.
*
He remembered the lieutenant with shell-shock, walking round and round in tight circles, throwing his head back, moving his hands like he was knitting.
The dying men watching, each marked on the forehead with an ‘M’, meaning they’d been dosed with morphine.
*
February on the island was the wolf-month, or the dead-month, which the sailors prayed would begin with a heavy storm and end in calm, with hope of spring – come in with the head of a serpent, go out with a peacock’s tail.
*
The next day: Pike
on some street corner, measuring the length of his spit.
Pushing back his flop of hair,
narrowing his eyes at the middle distance; swaggering, smirking.
A forest of tics.
Pike would go far:
the looks of John Dall in Rope,
the moral integrity of George Raft.
Pike snapping the lid of his Zippo, clicking it
up and down, up and down,
as if to illustrate his restless intelligence –
restlessness, at least, that he hadn’t, in the past hour,
put his foot on a new and higher rung of the ladder.
He sprawled on his chair,
unable to adequately contain his long legs
and huge clown-like shoes,
looking around for some fresh advantage:
click, click, click.
*
He caught up with new movies he’d missed since the fall:
the one Siodmak told him about, with the storm-drains –
He Walked by Night – and the one he’d watched being shot
in the 3rd Street Tunnel. It was Van Heflin he’d seen, and there he was
running right down the steps by the Hillcrest,
then along Clay Street under Angels Flight.
Criss Cross, though, was better still.
He’d shot all over Bunker Hill, in bright daylight, and one scene
right inside his own building: the lobby and stairwell; his own door.
That tune, ‘I’ll Remember April’, playing again.
Reminding him of what women are like:
‘You always have to do what’s best for yourself,’ she said,
‘You just don’t know what kind of world it is.’
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘I’ll know better next time.’
*
He took a drink that night: sat, dulled by beer, sharpened,
cut through by whiskey.
An inch of ash on his cigarette;
the beer-mat in shreds.
He saw the women, dressed and coiffured,
made-up like the dead,
practicing their expressions in the backbar mirror,
then trying them out on him.
He stood up, walked out of the frame.
He’d come to know, over time, to only watch
what women hide,
not what they show.
*
He’d go down Central, maybe:
see who was playing at the Last Word
or Club Alabam, or the Dunbar, or the Downbeat – where
one week in March he heard Dexter Gordon and Teddy Edwards,
Mingus with Buddy Collette –
or once at Lovejoy’s where he sat two tables from Art Tatum,
just watching his hands. Always alone at the piano, with a beer,
a cigarette in the ashtray, smoke
twisting up to the spotlight
tight as rope.
No one ever sat in. Not with Tatum.
And no one could follow him.
*
The paper for March 31st showed Mitchum released after sixty days. A much smaller piece, buried on the back page, wrote that Caleb Hill, a 28-year-old black chalk-miner from Wilkinson, Georgia, had been taken from the county jail the day before, and lynched. An unnamed local resident was quoted, explaining, ‘It’s just a Negro.’
*
He’d got to know more people at the Press –
who’d been there as long as the boss, and all from out east like him:
Templeton from Iowa’s an okay guy,
well-bred, sense of humor, smart,
and May Wood from Boston, the face of the paper.
Some said she’s a dyke, but he didn’t think so
and he liked her anyway – liked to make her laugh.
The rest were harder going.
The compositors and proof-readers
looked up at him with the eyes of ruminants: carefully,
without movement. If something required scrutiny
there was a slow, elaborate shift of the shoulders. The stare.
Rennert and Sherwood were his team, in their cheap suits,
three-day shirts and stained ties,
keeping him straight on the city:
the organized crime, the stoolies, bent cops and politicians,
the Mob bars, queer bars, the bars for Mexicans, Indians, Chinese,
the ninety-six clubs, hash-joints, card rooms, cathouses.
They knew the city from Griffith Park to the harbor at San Pedro,
from Pasadena to Malibu, Point Dume.
They smoked full-time, traded girls like baseball cards,
wore their hats tipped back,
had a bad word to say about everyone, told stories
even they didn’t believe.
And then there was Pike:
holding up the stacks of manuscript pages
and tapping them down on the desk to align them,
patting them straight at the top and the sides.
He looked around – stretching, spreading his knees wide –
made a noise in his throat,
then another; he was starting a new laugh.
*
He was used to his room at the Sunshine: walls
lined with brown paper, the all-night
fidget and fuss of the air-conditioning, the mice
scuttering in the ceiling space.
He’d bought a red geranium in a pot, for the table by the window.
The dust falls everywhere, filling the long sunbeams
with its gray sift; collecting in the glasses, the ice-trays,
so every drink swims with it. He could see it, when he held
his whiskey to the light, hanging there
and drifting to the bottom, where it didn’t matter anymore.
*
He met a girl one night in Los Amigos, young and beautiful.
Long black curls. Said her name was Gitana,
said she wanted the world.
She was new in town, so the next day they went walking
and he showed her his neighborhood, the trees in their fall colors,
all his favorite streets and houses around Grand
and Bunker Hill Avenue: the Castle, the Melrose,
the Brousseau house, the Heindel house, the Dome.
He waved to Mr Mellon, in the pharmacy, said hello
to the red-haired, one-armed newspaper man;
pointed out Dr Green’s surgery.
She shrugged, talked about Olivia de Havilland, Betty Grable,
Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy,
how she wanted to be like them: a star.
She was the loveliest thing. She was sixteen.
He told Sherwood about her the next day, in the car:
‘Of course she’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘She’s sixteen.
Everyone’s beautiful when they’re sixteen.’
*
One night, round Thanksgiving, the old lady downstairs
was standing at her door, holding a shoe-box.
‘Alfredo not well. He real bad this time.’
He saw a shriveled animal on its side,
a hamster perhaps, eyes like raisins.
*
He gave himself a cat for Christmas, just a dollar and a half,
black all over, more for company than killing:
Margarita Carmen Dolores;
Rita for short.
He loved watching her, decanting herself
in one pulse
from the window-ledge to the floor.
*
The paper said he could try out on movie reviews,
so he went to see Deadly Is the Female in the Cameo, or the Star,
one of those theaters next to the Arcade.
He thought about it all night. That long take
inside the getaway car: one shot that lasted three minutes easy
and was just real life, right there.
It made sense of some things, how you get caught up in stuff,
like the guns, when he says, ‘I feel good when I’m shooting them.
I feel awful good inside, like I’m somebody.’
But the guy can’t kill, and the woman wants to.
It’s his shame, in the end, his disgust – up against her desire.
He went back the next evening, and the night after that –
this time with Gitana. She kept lighting cigarettes,
looking around the theater, studying the audience.
She squeezed his arm at the credits;
said she preferred musicals, actually.
*
Valentine’s Day, and he was covering a boxing night
down at the Olympic, over on 18th & Grand.
Even he’d heard of Bolanos, out of Los Angeles
by way of Durango – the city’s favorite fighter –
and they were already booing the other guy, Art Aragon – slight,
showy, all dressed in gold: gold trunks, gold robe.
‘Alright, ladies and gentlemen, here we go: twelve rounds . . .’
Inside the din and darkness,
in this box of light, two men
trying to get out alive,
hit each other harder,
and the crowd, roaring
at the white cage,
the roped net holding
men, fighting,
in a stall, a stockade of harm, a cell –
a pin-point, spot-lit diorama.
*
From the table, he picked up the pink rose
he’d bought last week for Gitana.
It shattered in his hand.
*
There was the sharp
stink of disinfectant;
ash-barrels on fire,
throwing up flakes of light
by which he could see them:
rows of them, each face
creased with age and heavy use
and beginning to rub, to open
at the seams, like an old map.
‘Here we are,’ said Billy, under his breath.
‘I’ve told them about you, how you want to help –
how you want to tell their story.’
Clearing his throat, he steps into the light.
‘Evening, everyone. I’ve brought a friend.
A roll-call, gentlemen, if you please.’
From the blackness he saw their eyes open,
their red mouths as they spoke:
‘Redwood, private, 7th Reconnaissance.’
‘Frank Wight, corporal, 4th Cavalry.’
‘Briggs, private, 82nd Airborne.’
‘Pete Sherbrook, Brule, Wisconsin.’
‘Ruxton, private, 7th Field Artillery.’
‘Gibson, John, sergeant, 1st Infantry.’
‘Juan Suarez, Arizona.’
‘Thompson, Sam, master sergeant, 501st Parachute.’
‘Harford Hunt, private first class, 103rd Infantry.’
‘Eli Guckenheimer, private, 2nd Marines.’
‘Taylor, Edmund, 2nd Battalion, US Rangers.’
‘Jay Johnson, Tennessee.’
‘Earl Johnson, Alabama.’
‘Finch, seaman apprentice, USS Benham.’
‘Williams, Aaron, Mississippi.’
‘Rittenhouse, sergeant, 32nd Infantry.’
‘Johnny Red-Bird, El Dorado, Arkansas.’
‘George Stagg, private, 36th Armored.’
Their eyes closed again, and there was that sweet smell of rot
in the shifting shadows: a hand
reaching for a bottle; the flare of a struck match
disclosing one man’s shoe
split open like a pod,
showing a line of blackened toes.
Off to the side, he caught the bright, avid glance of the coyote
as it turned, limbering away.
* ‘So you want to write about the homeless?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Just here, in the city?’
‘No, sir. From what I read it’s bad all the way up the coast:
San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, eh.
But San Francisco worst of all.’
Overholt got up, stood staring out the window.
‘Well, it’s something I’d like the paper to address.
It’ll make a change from having to hear from Senator McCarthy
/> about all the Communists spying in the State Department.
I’m happy for you to work on it – putting together a story.
On your own time though, Walker – understand?
We need you on the Desk. Come back to me in a year.’
He looked round then, and smiled. ‘Okay: six months.’
He squinted, then, frowning:
‘You all right, Walker?
You seem mighty preoccupied for a young fella. Something wrong?’
‘I was in a war. I came back, and I’d lost my family.’
‘Dead?’
‘No. Just lost.’
*
Two years since he arrived at Union Station, and he was back:
needing to see how far he’d come
from the lanterns of Ferguson Alley.
He was sure it was here, and he walked and walked
but there was no alley, no Jerry’s Joynt,
and all of Chinatown had gone.
Where there had been streets, stairs and houses,
stores, restaurants, was bare ground,
cleared and graded: a construction site
that one day would become the Hollywood Freeway.
No ginger and cinnamon now, just dust.
*
In the morning, the city appears out of the night’s shadow, each building drawing its own darkness under it like a long skirt: head turned to face the first warmth of the sun.
Streets here go on for miles in a straight line, block after block, like stretches of highway, drawn up and parceled out by the maps of real estate and commerce.
I sometimes think about Gitana. Beautiful, of course, but she can’t see the depth of anything, just the surface. Going forward with her was hopeless. Like pushing holes in water.
May, 50
*
The new Widmark, Night and the City, had just opened
and was showing at the RKO Hillstreet on 8th: a bit out of the way,
but the Golden Gopher was across the street
so he had a couple drinks there and went over. Alone this time.
The credits rolled to hammering bells
and he saw another city he knew
emerging, looming across the water
through nightfall and a scrim of smog:
the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge,
Piccadilly Circus all lit up now
but the flow of buses and cars
slowed to a fogged dream, filled with sleepwalkers,
streamed ghosts.
Then cut,
to a high-angle shot of a man running,
chased across an open square of shadow and light: this
chessboard of fear, nightmare of traps,
an endless labyrinth of doors and passageways,
The Long Take Page 7