Mendoza in Hollywood (Company)

by Kage Baker

  The poker materialized in Einar’s hand, and Porfirio had one of his iron ladles, and the two of them began to rain blows on the pot, alternating like clockwork figures striking the hours. As they did so, Mr. Rubery went running for his life through the sagebrush, bounding up the hill behind the inn at really amazing speed, and vanished over the ridge. Mr. Jackson kept trying to get up, but the deafening noise was too much for him. He collapsed at last, stunned and nerveless. When he’d stopped twitching, Porfirio and Einar stopped hitting the pot. Porfirio took out a little medikit book and peeled off a trank patch, which he stuck on Mr. Jackson’s back, right where the shirttail had come out of the pants.

  “That’ll keep him out for twenty-four hours,” said Porfirio, shoving the book back in his coat pocket. I climbed down from my place on the hillside as Imarte came raging out of the inn, stark naked.

  “Is that miserable sot of a mortal finally finished with?” she said. “Mr. Rubery! Alfred, dear! Please don’t be alarmed. ’Tis safe to return, dear, the wretch has expired.”

  “I don’t think he can hear you,” I said. “He’s probably halfway to San Francisco by now.”

  She glared at me and swore an oath that would have made Cyrus the Persian blanch and cover his ears. “I CANNOT TOLERATE THESE WORKING CONDITIONS,” she screamed, then said, when the air had cleared and the little green bats had stopped flying out of her mouth, “Do you know the chance I’ve just lost? Do you know who that boy was?”

  “No, but I think he left his valise behind,” I said. “It’s in the kitchen cupboard behind the table.”

  “His valise!” She got an intense look in her eyes. “You’re sure?” She turned and went bouncing off to the kitchen, with never a backward glance at Mr. Jackson.

  We stood there in bemusement, until a snore from inside the frijole pot recalled us to our immediate problem.

  “So, uh, chief,” said Einar. “What do we do with this guy? The witness is gone. I guess he could just turn up dead in a ditch.”

  Porfirio made a sour face. “It’s not like he killed anybody. Not here, tonight, anyway. On the other hand, he really needs to go far, far away and never bother us again.”

  “Don’t kill him,” I found myself saying, to my surprise, because I’ve always thought mortals with the If I Can’t Have You Nobody Can Have You kind of obsession to be one of the lowest forms of life. “There must be a way to get him out of the picture without violence. We could shanghai him.”

  “An excellent suggestion,” Oscar said, popping up beside us. “An involuntary sea cruise is just the thing for him.”

  “It’s a long drive to San Pedro at this time of night,” Porfirio said, sighing as he took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair.

  “I’ll take him,” I offered, astonishing myself again. Why on earth was I sorry for this mortal?

  “And I’ll drive,” Oscar said. “I’ve done this before, you know. Plenty of nasty fellows shipped out of New Bedford feet first when they made a nuisance of themselves around the Company safe house there, let me tell you. It’s generally a humane and reliable way to dispose of unwanted mortals.”

  So Mr. Cyrus Jackson made his final exit from Hollywood at last, trussed and snoring in the back of Oscar’s cart, and I heard a numbing five hours of speculation on which assignment Oscar ought to choose as we rattled across the night plain toward the sea.

  In San Pedro, we circled warily around Banning’s turf and made for the fishermen’s huts on Rattlesnake Island, across from the old landing. Dark shacks on pilings, with a single lantern burning low and red—not a good place to find yourself at three in the morning. But Oscar drove straight up and hopped out unconcernedly.

  “I’ll fetch the blackguard. You go waken Señor Souza and make the arrangements.”

  I hated talking to mortals; but I crept up to the shack with the lantern and knocked timidly. After a long moment, the door was opened. I recognized the sleepy and unshaven face that peered out at me.

  “Souza? The doctor has work for you,” I said, using the standard phrase.

  His eyes widened, and he nodded. “One moment please, seriora,” he replied, and ducked back inside. He emerged a moment later, trousered and shod, just as Oscar came bustling up with Mr. Jackson draped across his shoulders.

  “Hello there,” Oscar said brightly, in Portuguese so perfect, you’d have sworn he was born in Lisbon. “Has my friend explained about the evil and desperate man I’m wearing?”

  Souza blinked and rubbed the bridge of his nose, just below his Company control implant. “No, señor. You’d like him drowned?”

  “Not at all. No, sir, we simply think he needs a change of air. Now, unless I’m much mistaken, that ship over yonder’s full of lumber. Is she going on a long voyage, by any chance?”

  Souza raised his eyes to the open sea, where a schooner rode at anchor. He grinned, white teeth distinct in the gloom. “Yes, señor, the Elg. She is bound for Norway with the tide. Two of her able-bodied seamen killed in a fight in Los Angeles, too, I hear. Very sad.”

  “And this is your boat moored over here, is it not?” Oscar strolled out along the rickety pier.

  “I am proud to say so, señor,” replied Souza, strolling beside him.

  “Capital.” Oscar shrugged off Mr. Jackson and dumped him into the bottom of the boat, where he lay moaning. Souza leaped in and untied the mooring rope. A moment later he was rowing steadily out through the darkness in the direction of the Elg.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Oscar said, adjusting his lapels and shooting his cuffs. “Faugh, what a smell of rye whiskey. This coat wants laundering, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Very much,” I agreed, and we climbed back into the cart and wheeled around to return to Hollywood.

  Oscar took up the conversation again as though it hadn’t been interrupted, and for the next five hours I gave my morose opinion in negatives or affirmatives on the merits of Hawaii over the Oklahoma Territories. Altogether it was an excellent thing for Cyrus Jackson that he wake up alive in a bunk on board the Elg, with no more Imarte to break his mortal heart for him.

  The red sun was well above the horizon by the time we got back, and still Oscar hadn’t made up his mind about where he wanted to be posted next. Nor had he decided by the time we saw him off, a week later. But Immortals don’t get choices very often in their eternal lives, and who could blame him for lingering over his decision?

  We did receive a holocard from him, later, though, all the way from sunny Molokai, and it may well be the last I ever see of that absurd little machine: pinkly sunburned, smiling and waving from the gondola of a hot-air balloon, the untamed world his oyster.

  UNFORTUNATELY, in the same Company communiqué that had contained Oscar’s commendation there was a memo of a less positive nature. It seemed that Juan Bautista’s quota of rescued birds hadn’t been met for several months in a row, though his budget allocation for maintenance had been exceeded to a remarkable degree.

  “I know, I know!” he groaned, sinking into a chair, which brought Erich von Stroheim down to eye level with us. “It’s not my fault, though. How am I supposed to go out and look for anything? I can’t leave John Barrymore alone for two minutes, and I have to take Erich every place I go. Marie’s the only one who’ll stay where I tell her to.”

  “I warned you about this, Juanito,” said Porfirio, shaking his head. “Didn’t I warn you about this? Now you don’t have a choice. You crate up the big birds and ship them off to HQ. They’ll be all right. What’s more important, you’ll be able to get back to your work.”

  Juan Bautista’s face went pale. “Please, just give me a little more time. I think I’m finally beginning to make some progress with John Barrymore. The microsurgery’s all healed up, and lately he’s even started to act like a normal bird sometimes. Please? One more month. As soon as the weather’s better, I swear I’ll send them away.”

  Porfirio leaned forward. “You don’t seem to get it. This is not me telling yo
u. This is Dr. Zeus officially telling you that you have screwed up. You’re not doing your job. That’s not acceptable, kid. You do understand that, don’t you? And it doesn’t take a lot of brains to figure out what your next move has to be, and you have brains to spare, thanks to Dr. Zeus. This is tough enough; don’t make it tougher.”

  “What if I was able to catch up on my quota?” said Juan Bautista. “I know I’ve fallen behind, but it’s not the birds’ fault. I’ll learn to manage my time better. I’ll bring my work up to speed, you’ll see. Couldn’t I keep them just another month, if I was able to do that? Would one more month make any difference, if I was able to make the Company happy?”

  This was too much for me. I had to slink out, so I didn’t catch the rest of the conversation; but I gathered that Porfirio gave in again, because no big birds were crated up or shipped off in the next few days. All the stock of songbirds and little owls went, though, tagged in their wicker cages; and Juan Bautista was admirably industrious for a whole day in front of his room, weaving new cages for the new stock he had sworn to bring in.

  Imarte was industrious, too. We never saw Alfred Rubery again, but he had left his valise behind. She spent days locked in her room with it, going over the contents in minute detail and making copies of what she found. We only saw her at mealtimes, and the transformation from whore to scribe was unsettling: inky fingers, disheveled hair, stained dressing gown. She looked radiantly happy, though, with whatever lode of cryptohistory she’d struck. I confess I was curious, but not curious enough to bring myself to ask her about it.

  And Einar was certainly industrious. Longhorns were going for ridiculously low prices now, and he was acquiring them every day and conducting cattle minidrives into Los Angeles. Porfirio was always busy, of course. The one advantage to the drought was that no roads washed out that winter, and now that the smallpox epidemic was tapering off, the stagecoaches were running regularly again. Banning seemed to be deferring maintenance on the coaches, though, or maybe his regular crew had died of the pox, because there were repairs to be made at our smithy nearly every day.

  I was the only one with nothing to do. Why was that, señors? There was nothing left for me to save. Everything that grew in the temperate belt had either been collected by me or grazed down to bare earth by starving cattle. There were no rarities left to find, unless I cared to venture into the Canyon of Lunacy again. But no prize on earth could have tempted me back into that place where I might glimpse the deadly city again, the future desolation.

  Now, you would think, wouldn’t you, that Dr. Zeus might give me a pat on the head and tell me to run along now, back to my beautiful green Ventana? I certainly thought so. I wasn’t expecting commendations or prizes, or even thanks for a job well done; but I did expect a new posting, and none came, though I checked the Company directives pouch every time Einar returned from Los Diablos. Bureaucratic willfulness, or some subtle punishment to make me work harder, to improve my attitude? Why was I being ignored, señors? Was it simply that nobody noticed that I was stranded there, unable to do the work I’d been programmed for, the work I needed? The work that kept my demon at bay?

  Or did the Company know? Did you know what would happen next? Did you know and sit there like God, silent, remorseless, useless? What happens if I sit here in silence, too? What if I never give you my all-important testimony, eh?

  But of course you couldn’t have known. You’re stuck here in 1863, just like me. I don’t imagine our masters up there in the future would tell you if they knew, either. No operative is ever told any personal detail of the Temporal Concordance. It’s forbidden to tell. Though Lewis tried . . . Will you punish him, too?

  More Theobromos? Well, thank you so very much. You damned well better anesthetize me now, if you want me to go on with this.

  SO THERE WE WERE, ALL happily going about our work except for me. I sat huddled in my room most days, wrapped in a blanket and viewing holos hour after hour. Not as much fun as old-style cinema, overall. There is a pleasant sense of camaraderie with the rest of the audience, watching cinema. You know: throwing popcorn at the flat screen and cheering and sharing moments of excitement, like when Luke Skywalker is shooting down the bad guys pursuing the Millennium Falcon, or any part of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  It’s true that a holo takes you right into the center of the action; but that illusion is not always a good thing. The leeches scene from The African Queen comes shudderingly to mind. Sunset Boulevard, too. Who the hell wants to get unbearably close to Norma Desmond’s scary eyes in that last scene? And let’s not even talk about Hitchcock’s films. Though it’s no better, really, in the films you want to be a part of, because you’re still isolated, you’re like a ghost. No amount of technological cleverness can make Sean Connery take you in his arms, and no Good Witch will ever take you by the hand and welcome you to Oz. They won’t see you, they won’t hear you, because their reality is complete and you are not a part of it.

  At last I gave it up and started following the war news again. Depressing, inconclusive, inaccurate, but at least it was really happening. I feel badly that it absorbed my attention so much. If it hadn’t, I might have noticed the noises in Juan Bautista’s room that awful day.

  Not that I could have done anything if I had, of course.

  You see, encouraged by the progress that John Barrymore seemed to be making, Juan had taken to leaving him shut in his room when he went out on his collecting trips. Erich von Stroheim he kept in Einar’s room, liberally dosed with bird dope of some kind, so the damn creature was quiet all day. He didn’t like to do it, of course, but the idea was that it was only temporary, until he caught up on his quota and reassured Dr. Zeus that he too was a good little machine.

  In my opinion he should have been doing this all along. It was no effort for Juan Bautista to catch birds: all he had to do was stand still, and the bloody things would light all over him. But he was seventeen! Sloppy and disorganized and stupid as youth will always be, no matter how cyberaugmented it’s made. Perhaps that was why he filled his room to the ceiling with flimsy woven cages full of the miserable cheeping little things, and left a psychotic predator in there with them while he went out each day to hunt for more.

  Do I have to tell you what happened, señors?

  It was as bad as you could imagine. I heard his wail of horror when he opened his door. I came stumbling from my room in time to see John Barrymore bouncing clumsily out into the clearing. Porfirio and Einar emerged from the house too, and stopped dead at the sight of the eagle.

  Not that he was covered with gore, or anything like that. Well, a little blood, and some few bright feathers from some little victim. He regained his composure and took a few paces sideways, cocking his head to stare at us in a puzzled way. But there was the most heartbroken sobbing from Juan Bautista’s room.

  The irony was that John Barrymore had been making progress. While he was sick and mad, he tried only to kill himself. It was when he began to heal that he felt the normal urge to do what predators do. But Juan Bautista was in no condition to appreciate this, as he emerged from his room with a little torn body in either hand.

  “You bastard,” he screamed. “How could you do this?”

  He ran at John Barrymore, who started and crouched in alarm. Then, with a wild flapping of wings, the big bird rose into the air and floated onto the roof of the inn. He looked down at us all, and we stood looking up at him with open mouths. Experimentally he beat his wings again, twice, three times, and we felt the rush of air in our faces as he nearly lifted off. Had the madness left any room for joy, when it vacated that narrow killer’s skull of his? What was in his flat blank eyes, when he beat his wings again with a noise like a stiff breeze filling canvas? I don’t know. In the next moment he leaned into the evening air and sailed away on spread wings, effortlessly, a long curve ascending. Up and up he went, high enough at last to catch the last light of the sun, and then he flew northward and was gone.

  Marie Dress
ier had survived; she had managed to get into the clutter under Juan Bautista’s bed and defend herself from there with her formidable old bill. And of course Erich von Stroheim was fine; he’d slept through it all in Einar’s room. But the boy who loved them had changed.

  Do you remember that terrible moment, señors, when the self-righteousness of your youth died? When all the stern warnings of your elders, ignored until the consequences abruptly came crashing down on your head, made you see in a flash that the warnings hadn’t been unfair or mean-spirited or blind, they’d been right? All along your elders had been trying to tell you about the black joke that is life, trying to help you and save you from pain. But you insisted on running straight into the trap, mocking them as you ran, to the agony that was irreversible and permanent, with no one to blame, finally, but yourself.

  It’s not good to see yourself in the mirror then. Juan Bautista was reflected in the eyes of every one of the little dead birds he had to clean out of his room.

  Next time Einar loaded up the wagon for the trip into Los Diablos, there were two big cages among his cargo. Marie sat patiently in hers, considering her new fate with a calculating eye; but Erich von Stroheim croaked and hissed with anxiety, trying to muscle through the wire mesh that kept him from Juan Bautista. When the wagon started up and he found himself rolling away from the boy, he started up the piercing scream we knew all too well. Juan Bautista just stood there, watching, his face like stone. It took a long time and a lot of distance for the screams to fade to silence.

  “It’s better this way, muchacho,” Porfirio said at last. “They’ll be safe, they’ll be happy, they’ll have great lives in the Company aviary.”