The Kind One

by Tom Epperson

  We were still in the Mitsouko-smelling car, heading north on La Brea.

  “Twenty-five,” I was pleased to be able to say.

  “Me too. Think you’ll live to be thirty?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it.” I thought about it. “I guess so.”

  “I think I’ll be real lucky if I live to be thirty. I don’t think the odds are in my favor at all.”

  “That’s just plain dumb. Why would you say that?”

  Darla shrugged. La Brea crossed Franklin then ran up a little hill and ended right in front of Bud’s house. I stopped the car. Usually someone was around to open the gate, but I didn’t see anybody.

  I tooted the horn, and someone came running.

  Chapter 9

  “SO YOU DON’T remember a thing,” said Dulwich.

  “Not before about ten months ago,” I said. “They told me a bunch of guys jumped me in Ocean Park, and one of them hit me in the head with a lead pipe. But all I remember is waking up in a hospital and seeing a nurse putting some flowers in a vase. And I said: ‘Those are beautiful flowers,’ and she gave me this big smile and said: ‘Weeellll…welcome back, honey!’”

  “Do you know why you were beaten?”

  “No. Nobody knows who the guys were. My wallet was missing. Maybe they just wanted to rob me. Or maybe they knew me. Maybe they wanted to get even with me for something.”

  “Who took care of you afterwards? Do you have family members here?”

  “The guys I work with. They took care of me.”

  “The guys at the…what was the name…the Los Angeles Projects Corporation.”

  I nodded. I sipped my tea. It was in a delicate cup that had a red and blue oriental dragon twisting around it.

  We were in Dulwich’s living room. Aubrey Joyce smiled musingly at us from his perch atop the cabinet radio. There were some tasty little sugary cookies on a saucer on the coffee table. Next to the saucer was a book, lying open and facedown: Is China Mad? by Baron Auxion de Ruffe.

  “You ever hear of Bud Seitz?” I said.

  “The hoodlum?”

  “I guess so. That’s who I work for.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah.”

  Dulwich looked at me with interest as he nibbled on a cookie.

  “I sunk a ship once.”

  Dulwich looked surprised. “An entire ship?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just you?”

  “No, me and some of the boys. It was a gambling ship. The Monfalcone.”

  “Oh, I remember that. It was about four years ago, wasn’t it? It went down near Long Beach.”

  “Right.”

  “But I remember it being an accident. An inebriated cook, a fire in the galley, something of that sort.”

  “It was no accident. It was a heist job and a sink job. ’Cause Bud had a beef with the owner.”

  “Is it tea time, old chap?”

  We looked toward the door. Sophie Gubler was standing there, peering in through the screen, her hands cupped around her eyes to block out the sunshine.

  “It is indeed,” said Dulwich. “Would you like to join us?”

  Sophie came in and eyed the coffee table. “I’ll join you in cookies,” she said, and took one.

  “Why aren’t you in school?” said Dulwich.

  “It’s summer, dummy. School’s over.” She took another cookie while still chewing on the first one. “Well, is it?”

  “Is what what?”

  “Is China mad?”

  “The whole world’s mad.”

  “You shouldn’t put a book down like that. It’s terrible for it. It’ll break its back.”

  “You’re quite right.” Dulwich picked the book up, turned down the corner of a page, and closed it.

  “You shouldn’t bend a page like that—”

  “Oh, that’s enough. Be quiet.”

  Sophie looked at me for the first time.

  “Hi, Danny.”

  “Hi, Sophie. How are you today?”

  “Fine.” She plucked at her dress. She suddenly seemed a little shy. She turned back to Dulwich. “Where’s Tinker Bell?”

  “The last confirmed Tinker Bell sighting was on the foot of my bed, where she was observed to be taking one of her not infrequent catnaps.”

  “Can I go see her?”

  “Of course.”

  Dulwich waited till Sophie disappeared into his bedroom, then said softly: “Poor girl. She loves animals, but that beastly mother of hers won’t let her have a pet.”

  I’d seen her mother a few times in the courtyard, usually hearing her first, clicking quickly down the sidewalk on her very high high heels. She wasn’t much older than me. She was pretty in a trampy way, with wiggling hips and platinum blonde hair obviously out of a bottle. Her name was Lois.

  “I don’t know why Mrs. Dean puts up with her behavior,” Dulwich sighed.

  “What kind of behavior?”

  “Well, she’s had a succession of male ‘houseguests,’ each more unsavory than the last. She introduces them as ‘my cousin Joe’ or ‘my uncle Roy’ or ‘Mr. Ritter, an old family friend.’ And then in the middle of the night one hears an ungodly yowling and yodeling emanating from her bedroom as she and Mr. Ritter talk over old times. I consider myself the least prudish of men, but really! It’s hardly a proper environment in which to raise a child.”

  Sophie walked back in, looked at us suspiciously. “Were you talking about me?”

  “Not at all,” said Dulwich. “How was Tinker?”

  “Still asleep. Her whiskers were twitching. She’s probably dreaming about catching birds.” Sophie turned to me. “Mrs. Dean hates her. She feeds the birds, and Tinker hides in the bushes then runs out and tries to catch them.”

  “Does catch them, sometimes. I like our feathered friends as much as Mrs. Dean does; however, she obviously hasn’t read Darwin, and understands nothing about the survival of the fittest and the balance of nature and so forth. She actually suggested once that I give Tinker away. I replied: ‘Mrs. Dean, with all due respect, I suggest that you go climb a tree.’”

  Sophie giggled. “Think about it. Think about Mrs. Dean climbing a tree.”

  “I’ve had a sudden inspiration,” Dulwich said.

  “What?” said Sophie.

  “There’s a new Clark Gable picture playing. Who would like to go?”

  “Oh, I would, I would!” said Sophie, bouncing up and down.

  “Danny?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can we go in your car?” asked Sophie.

  “Fine by me.”

  “Have you seen Danny’s car?” she said to Dulwich. “It’s a doozie!”

  “Oh really? I thought it was a Packard.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s dumb.”

  “But Sophie,” said Dulwich, “you should go ask your mother for permission.”

  “She’s at work. But she wouldn’t care. She likes it when I’m not around.”

  Dulwich rose from his chair. “Then let us heed the words of the Persian sage: ‘Up! Up! Only a little life is left, the road before you is long, and you are immersed in illusion!’”

  The movie theater was on Wilshire and Western. Fortified with popcorn, candy, and icy cups of soda, we walked across crackling peanut shells to our seats.

  Claudette Colbert played this rich girl engaged to marry this rich guy, but he was a jerk, and so she ran away. She was in Miami, and she took the night train to New York. And it became this big national story for some reason, and Clark Gable was a newspaper reporter, and she left the train and got on a bus and Clark Gable was there except he didn’t tell her he was a reporter. And then they started to fall in love, and then everybody on the bus started singing “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” and it was funny: at night I’d lie awake for hours dying to go to sleep but I couldn’t, but during the day I’d find myself falling asleep when I didn’t want to, and I fell asleep now.

  I dreamed about
Doc Travis and Doc Travis. The monkey and the man. We were driving in my car, on a road that ran through the desert. Nobody said anything, but everybody was happy. Then Sophie elbowed me in the ribs.

  “Hey, wake up, you big boob, you’re snoring!”

  “Sorry.”

  I don’t know what happened while I was asleep, but Claudette Colbert was in New York now and was about to marry the jerk again, but then Clark Gable showed up, and there’d been some kind of misunderstanding between them, but her rich father, who you didn’t like too much before but now started to like, saw that Clark Gable was a fine fellow and a perfect husband for his daughter, and so Clark and Claudette ended up together, not that you’d ever really doubted that they would.

  It was a good movie, what I saw of it. We walked down Western afterwards, and we started singing that trapeze song. Like I said, I was really happy when I was driving with Darla to the Hottentot Hut, but I was drunk then, and I was sober now, and I was just about as happy.

  We went in a drugstore and sat down at the soda fountain. The skinny young sodajerk’s face was covered with jerkblossoms. He made us three chocolate sodas. They were fifteen cents apiece. Dulwich tried to pay, but I wouldn’t let him.

  “But it’s not fair, Danny, you’ve been paying for everything.”

  I shrugged as I peeled a twenty off my roll. I was aware of Sophie looking at all the dough with big eyes. “You can get it next time,” I said.

  Truth was, I was flush these days. The day after we went to Redondo Beach Bud summoned me over to his booth at the Peacock Club. He handed me an envelope and said: “Your cut for your cut.”

  “Huh?”

  “Twenty-five percent. For cutting the cards.”

  There were twenty-five hundred-dollar bills in the envelope. He was watching my face and smiling.

  “Gee, Bud,” I said, “you didn’t need to do this.”

  “You deserve it. The sky’s the limit, kid.”

  The sky’s the limit. For some limping guy who couldn’t sleep except when he shouldn’t and usually had a headache and couldn’t tell you his middle name. I basically just didn’t get it. Didn’t get Bud Seitz, didn’t get myself, didn’t get how I could ever have sunk a ship.

  “Here’s your change,” said the sodajerk. I left fifty-five cents on the counter. His red infected face lifted in a grateful grin. “Oh, thank you very much, sir.”

  “Want your cherry?” said Sophie to me. I shook my head. She plucked the cherry off the whipped cream and popped it in her mouth, then turned to Dulwich. “Want your cherry?”

  “Yes, darling, but I believe you want it more.”

  “Thank you so much, dah-ling.”

  Sophie was a plain little girl, but there was something about her that made you think she might someday be a pretty woman. She had brown eyes, a small snub nose, a longish face. Her mouth was wide and kind of drooped down at the corners like she was used to frowning but when she smiled it was a great smile. Her hair was short, brown, and straight, and fell over her forehead to nearly her eyebrows. There were eleven freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks. She was wearing a yellow-and-white-striped dress that wasn’t very new or clean and hung down loosely over her bony, angular body. But her shoes did look new: shiny black mary janes worn over sagging white socks.

  She mumbled through a full mouth: “I’m catching the night train to New York. Who wants to come with me?”

  “I’ve lived in New York,” said Dulwich, “and have no wish to return.”

  “What did you do in New York?” I said.

  “Oh, I did a bit of scribbling. Mainly for a silly little publication named Top Hat.”

  “You’re a writer?”

  “A scribbler. And then I came here to scribble for the movies.”

  “You write for the movies?” said Sophie skeptically, as though he’d claimed he flew back and forth to the moon every day.

  “Oh, that’s all in the past. It’s not as easy as it looks. Although one of my scenarios was actually produced. The Doctor of Devil’s Island, it was called. It was hysterically funny, but unfortunately it was a drama. I wrote it under the nom de plume ‘John Ross.’ Secrecy was necessary, since my mother would never have approved of my writing for the moving pictures.” He spooned some ice cream into his mouth, and groaned. “I believe I need to have my stomach pumped.”

  It was late in the day as we drove back home in my shining yellow Packard. Sophie sat between Dulwich and me. “Watch me wave like a queen,” she said. She put on a kind but remote smile, and waved her hand in a slow arc of three or four inches at the pedestrians on Western Avenue.

  We walked up the seven steps and between the dwarf orange trees whose ripening fruit glowed in the deepening dusk. Music and light were coming out of Sophie’s bungalow, the third one on the left.

  “Mother’s home,” she said in a flat voice, then turned to Dulwich and me. “Thanks for taking me to the movies. I had a nice time.”

  “It was our pleasure, Sophie,” said Dulwich.

  We watched her walk inside. We could hear Lois Gubler laughing like a jackass at something, then some guy laughing back, then the music got louder.

  Dulwich invited me in for some whiskey.

  I settled down on the sofa. Dulwich turned on the radio to a live classical music broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl.

  After several sips I closed my eyes, and felt my brain pleasantly baking in the warm dry heat of the whiskey.

  “Plenum opus Dei,” said Dulwich.

  I opened my eyes and looked at him. “The full work of God,” he said.

  I continued to observe him blankly.

  “Everything comes from God, or nothing comes from God. Everything is random, or nothing is random.”

  “Are you sozzled?”

  He laughed. He was sitting in his easy chair. He’d put on his many-colored silk jacket and his slippers with the golden tassels on them. His cat was in his lap, and he was stroking her, and smoking a pipe.

  My eyes wandered over to the painting. “She looks like Darla,” I said of the girl on the cliff.

  “Who’s Darla?”

  “Bud Seitz’s girlfriend. I’m her bodyguard.”

  He looked at me awhile through the drifting smoke.

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  “Oh well. I’ve been known to fall in love with inappropriate people myself.” He looked at the painting. “Aubrey painted that, you know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, he was quite talented. And the girl there is his fiancée. Edith Wick. It was his last gift to her. He was barking mad in love with Edith. I thought her a rather routine sort of girl, but you know how love transfigures its object. At any rate, after he died, she couldn’t stand to have it around so she gave it to me. And then she couldn’t marry another fellow fast enough.”

  We lapsed back into silence. My brain baked, the cat purred, the smoke floated. His pipe kept going out, and he kept relighting it. Finally I said: “Your smoke smells funny.”

  “That’s probably because of the nature of what I’m smoking.”

  “What is it? Marijuana?”

  “Opium. Like a puff?”

  “No thanks.”

  “It’s one of the bad habits I acquired in Mesopotamia, during the war. I spent a good part of it as a prisoner of Johnny Turk, and it wasn’t terribly fun. But I befriended one of the guards, a very sweet and gentle boy named Harutiun. I called him Harry. He actually wasn’t a Turk, but an Armenian. Since the Turks were massacring the Armenians at the time, life was a bit awkward for him. His captain was not a bad sort, and was protecting him, but I shudder when I think of the fate that may have finally befallen him.

  “Ah, the Turks, Danny. Quite a people they are. Once I saw them punish a young Arab boy for stealing a horse. They nailed horseshoes to the soles of his feet. Then they tied a rope around his
neck, and made him walk around and around a stake in the ground for days, till they tired of their sport and shot him.

  “As I said, Harry and I became friends, and he shared his opium with me. He was well educated, and spoke English. He had a mystic bent. We used to argue about whether men had souls, and if so, did they exist before birth, or did God just create them as needed, like a cook popping a new batch of cookies in the oven? And what about donkeys? And if God knew the future, how could we possibly have free will?”

  Dulwich gave me a wry smile, and said: “Confessions of an English opium smoker.” He was silent awhile, contentedly petting his cat and puffing on his pipe. And then he closed his eyes, and quoted some poem from memory:

  “Pierce thy heart to find the key;

  With thee take

  Only what none else would keep:

  Learn to dream when thou dost wake,

  Learn to wake when thou dost sleep…”

  Chapter 10

  DICK PRETTIE AND I rolled east on Route 66 past rabbit ranches and poultry farms, and through vast orange and lemon and avocado orchards, the trees whipping by in ruler-straight lines that made you dizzy to look at. Dick was reading the paper while I drove.

  “Fucking Yankees won again,” said Dick.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Huh?”

  “In Los Angeles. How long have I lived here?”

  He turned the page of the paper without looking up. “Beats me.”

  “Well, how long have you known me then?”

  Dick shrugged. “I don’t know. Three years maybe?”

  “Somebody told me the Monfalcone sank four years ago. So you must’ve known me at least that long.”

  Dick put down the newspaper, lit up a cigarette. “I’ll take your word for it. I’m no good with dates. I can’t hardly remember when my own fucking birthday is.”

  “What was I like then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean was I the same kind of guy as I am now?”

  Dick sat silently and smoked.

  “Dick?”

  “I’m thinking. I’m trying to remember.”

  “Where did I live? Did I have a girlfriend? What did I do when I wasn’t working?”