by Tim Powers
After some time she had convinced herself that the hands of the clock on the wall did move, but she had been wearily sure that they moved with supernatural slowness. Without believing it very much at all, she had played with the thought that she had died on the bus, that the jolt that had waked her up as they’d been passing through Victorville had been a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and everything she had experienced since that moment was only after-death hallucination; in that case yesterday’s eerie sensation of momentarily anticipating events had probably been pre-stroke phenomena. This fluorescently bright bus station boarding area, with its cage-chairs and its chrome-and-tile restrooms and its jarringly jaunty posters of rocketing buses, would be the antechamber of Hell. This night would never end, and eventually she would defeatedly join one of the crowds of departing families and go away with them to whatever lightless tenements and government-project housing Hell consisted of. (She could offer her apologies to Frank Rocha in discorporate person.)
But now, standing by the glass doors that faced Seventh, she could see that the sodium-yellow-stained blackness of the sky had begun to glow a deep blue in the east; white lights shone now in the liquor store across the street—presumably the employees were preparing for the dawn rush—and a couple of the hotel-room windows above the store were luminous amber rectangles. Los Angeles was wearily getting up, she thought, shambling to the bathroom, lip-smacking the false teeth into place, strapping on the prosthetic limbs …
A whisper of cool breeze breathed between the aluminum doorframes into the stale atmosphere of the bus station, and somehow even down here south of Beverly and west of the L.A. River, it carried a scent of newly opened morning glories.
The day, the staring Western day, is born, she thought. Awake, for morning in the bowl of night/ has fired the shot that puts the stars to flight.
She jumped, and then the public-address speakers snapped on to announce another departure.
With a rueful sigh she abandoned the notion that she was dead. Another few cups of vending-machine coffee, and then it would be time to start walking.
Lobsters and crabs had begun crawling out of the Venice Beach surf at dawn.
Under the brightening tangerine and spun-metal sky, the streets were still in dimness, and for a silent few moments at six-thirty a ripple of deeper shadows stepped across the uneven city blocks as the streetlights sensed the approaching day and one by one winked out. NO PARKING signs had kept the curbs of Main and Pacific clear all night, but on the side streets, and in the tiny dirt lots between houses, cars sat parked at whatever crooked angles had let them fit, and motorcycles leaned on their kickstands right up against walls and fence posts and car fenders.
On the rust-streaked walls of the old buildings, the little iron diamonds of earthquake-reinforcement bolts studded the old stucco. The painted Corinthian columns of the porticoed shop fronts facing Windward Avenue were faded in the half-light, and the littered expanse of the street was empty except for an occasional shapeless figure trudging along or stolidly pushing a trash-filled shopping cart. Occasional early-morning joggers, always flanked by at least one bounding dog, scuffed down the middle of the street toward the open lots facing the narrow lane that was Ocean Front Walk.
The lots were ringed with empty metal-pipe frameworks and cages that would be occupied with vendors’ booths later in the morning, and the only color in the scene now was the vividly shaded and highlighted graffiti that was gradually engulfing the once-red Dumpsters lined up against the building walls.
Out past the stark volleyball poles and the cement bike trails was the open beach, not taking clear footprints now but showing clearly the sharp broken-star prints of bird feet and the crumble-edged footprints of joggers who had been out when the dew had still clung to the sand.
The waves were low and the blue ocean stretched out to the brightening horizon, undimmed by any fog. A jet rising steeply into the sky from LAX to the south was a dark splinter, with a point of white light at the wingtip shining as bright as Venus in the dawn sky. Fishing boats moved past in the middle distance as silently and slowly as the minute hand of a watch, and a fat pelican bobbed on the waves a hundred yards offshore.
And crabs and lobsters were climbing over the sprawled and trailing piles of coppery kelp. Seagulls shouted and glided low over the spectacle, their cries ringing emptily in the chilly air, and sandpipers swiveled their pencil beaks and high-stepped away along the surf edge. A shaggy golden retriever and a Great Dane had stopped to bark at the armored animals who had come clambering and antennae-waving up the sand, and the owners of the dogs stopped to peer and back away. More lobsters and crabs were tumbling up in the low waves, and the ones who had come out first were already up above the flat brown dampness and were floundering in the dry sand. A John Deere tractor had been chugging up the beach from the direction of the pier and the lifeguard headquarters, dragging a leveler across the night-randomized dunes and gullies, but the driver had put the engine into neutral and let the tires drag to a halt when he noticed the leggy exodus.
Then a wave began to mount, out on the face of the water.
It was a green hump against the horizon, rather than a line, more like the bow-swell of an invisible tanker aiming to make landfall here than a wave rolling in to crash indiscriminately along the whole length of the Santa Monica Bay coastline. Only when the pelican was lifted on it, and squawked and spread his wings at his sudden elevation, did the people on the beach look up, and then they hastily moved back up the flat beach toward the gray monolith of the Recreation Center.
The tall green swell grew taller, seeming to gather up all the visible water as it swept silently toward the shore. As the wave crested, and finally began to break apart into spray at the curling top edge and roaringly exhale as it leaned forward against the resistance of the air, a long form was visible rolling inside the solid water—and when the wave boomingly crashed on the sand, surged far up the slope in hissing foam and then was sucked away back to the receding sea, a big steely thing had been left behind on the brown, bubbling sand.
It shifted and settled, and then didn’t move.
It was a fish. That much was agreed upon by the half-dozen people who timidly approached after the thing had lain inert on the sand for a full minute and no further big waves gathered out at sea—but the fish was twenty or thirty feet long and as thick as a thigh-high stack of mattresses, and its body and head were covered with bony plates rather than scales. No one in the knot of spectators could even guess what species it might be. It appeared to be dead, but it looked so like some monster from the pages of an illustrated book on the Cretaceous period that no one approached the thing within twenty feet. Even the dogs stayed away from it, and made do with bounding away to bark busily at the fleeing lobsters and crabs.
For a while, water leaked out of the fish’s blunt face from between its open, armored jaws, but now there was no motion at all to the creature.
An old woman in a parka stared for a while, then backed away from the big and vaguely repulsive spectacle. “I’ll go get someone,” she said querulously. “A lifeguard, or someone.”
“Yeah,” called a young man. “Maybe he can do CPR on it.”
Up the slope, on the dry sand closer to the sidewalks and the handball courts and the sea-facing row of shops and cafes and blocky old apartment buildings, the panicky crabs and lobsters were turning in disoriented circles and waving their claws in the air.
BOOK TWO
GET A LIFE
Father got a lot of amusement out of lighting firecrackers, throwing them at our bare feet and making us dance when they exploded. He had it all his way one Fourth. After that we ganged up and made him take off his own shoes and stockings and do his dancing on the lawn while we three lighted firecrackers at his feet.
—Charles Edison,
The New York Times, September 26, 1926
CHAPTER 12
“And what does it live on?”
“Weak tea with cream in it.”
A new difficulty came into Alice’s head. “Supposing it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.
“Then it would die, of course.”
“But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.
“It always happens,” said the Gnat.
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
THE SKY WAS STILL pale with dawn when Solomon Shadroe turned his old gray Chevy Nova left from Ocean Boulevard onto Twenty-First Place and immediately turned left again into the parking lot of his apartment building. From long practice he was able to do the maneuver smoothly, in spite of the car’s rear end swinging out wide. The locator pins holding the rear axle to the springs had broken off long ago, and so the rear axle was no longer parallel to the front one; when driving straight ahead down a straight lane, the car was always at an angle to the center line, like a planing blade moving along a level board.
The three-story building dated from the 1920s, and had once been a hospital. The rooms were mismatched in size, and over the years he had cut out new windows and doors, laid two new floors across the elevator shaft to make three closets, and hung new partitions or torn old ones out, so no styles matched and no hallway and few rooms had the same flooring from one end to the other; but rents were low, and the place was shaded with big old untrimmed palm and carob trees, and the peeling stucco front was largely covered with purple-flowering bougainvillea. Any tenants that stayed long, and he had some who had been here for a decade or more, were the sort that would generally do their own repairs; the old-timers called the place Solville, and seemed to take obscure pride in having weathered countless roof leaks, power failures, and stern inspections by the city.
Shadroe parked on his customary patch of oil-stained dirt, clambered out of the old car, and limped ponderously to his office, pausing to crouch and pick up the newspaper in front of the door.
Inside, he turned on the old black-and-white TV set. While it warmed up he listened to the birds in the trees outside his office window—the mockingbirds seemed to be shrilling cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, and the doves were softly saying Curaçao, Curaçao, Curaçao.
Curaçao was some orange-flavored liqueur, he believed. He couldn’t recall ever having drunk any, and it probably wouldn’t complement a cheeseburger, but for a moment he envied all the people who had the option of choosing that breakfast, and who would be able to taste it.
He sighed, picked up a cellophane bag, and shook half-a-dozen Eat-’Em-&-Weep balls—red-hot cinnamon jawbreaker candies—into a coffeepot, filled it with water from the faucet he had piped in last year, and put it on a hot plate to brew; then he lowered his considerable bulk into his easy chair and unfolded the newspaper.
The front section he read cursorily—Ross Perot was back in the presidential race, claiming that he had only dropped out three months ago because Bush’s people were supposedly planning to wreck his daughter’s wedding; “Electrified Rail Lines Would Energize Edison’s Profits”; a Bel-Air couple named Parganas had been found tortured and killed in their home, and police were searching for their son, whose name Shadroe didn’t bother to puzzle out but seemed to be something like Patootie, poor kid; country singer Roger Miller had died at fifty-six—that was too bad, Shadroe had met him a few times in the sixties, and he’d seemed like a nice guy. He was about to toss it and pick up the Metro section when he noticed something in a little box on the front page:
FANS SEARCHING FOR “SPOOKY” FROM OLD SITCOM
Attention Baby-Boomers! It worked for Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver and Gilligan’s Island, didn’t it?
Plans are afoot for another reunion show!
Led by independent television producer Loretta deLarava, fans of the situation comedy Ghost of a Chance, which ran from 1955 to 1960 on CBS, are searching for the only elusive—and, some would say, the only indispensable—actor from the old show. They’ve been unable to locate Nicky Bradshaw, who played Spooky, the teenage ghost whose madcap antics kept the dull-witted Johnson family hopping. In the thirty-two years since the show’s cancellation, the “Spooky” character has taken a place in pop mythology comparable to “Eddie Haskell” (Ken Osmond, Leave it to Beaver), “Aunt Bee” (Frances Bavier, The Andy Griffith Show) and “Hop Sing” (Victor Sen Yung, Bonanza).
Bradshaw, godson to the late filmmaker Arthur Patrick Sullivan, had been a child actor before Ghost of a Chance propelled him into millions of American living rooms, but he left showbiz in the mid 1960s to become an attorney. He disappeared in 1975, apparently under the cloud of some minor legal infractions on which he was due to be arraigned.
The police have had no luck in locating Bradshaw, but deLarava is certain that Spooky’s many fans can succeed where the law can’t! deLarava wants to assure Bradshaw that most of the charges (all having to do with receiving stolen goods—for shame, Spooky!) have been dropped, and that his salary for doing the Ghost of a Chance Reunion Show will easily offset all lingering penalties. And—she adds with a twinkle in her eye—who knows? This reunion show just might develop into a whole new series!
There was also the telephone number of a Find Spooky hotline.
Solomon Shadroe put down the front section of the paper and, with a steady hand, poured some of his Eat-’Em-&-Weep tea into a coffee cup. The dissolved candies gave the stuff the bright red color of transmission fluid. After a long sip he chewed up a couple of fresh ones out of the bag. The jawbreakers, and the tea he brewed from them, were all he had eaten and drunk for seventeen years. He never turned on the light when he went to the bathroom here, nor in the head on his boat.
Heavy footsteps clumped overhead, letting him know that Johanna was up. He reached across the table for his long-handled broom and, squinting upward to find an undented section of the plaster, thumped the end of the broom against the ceiling. Faintly he heard her yell some acknowledgment.
He put the broom down and fished a little flat can of Goudie Scottish snuff out of a pile of receipts on the desk. He twisted the cap until the holes in the rim were lined up, then shook some of the brown powder onto the back of his hand and effortfully snorted it up his nose. He couldn’t smell or taste the stuff anymore, of course, but it was still a comforting habit.
He glanced at the three stuffed pigs he had set up on the empty bookshelves in here. They weren’t burping right now, at least.
Can she find me, he thought. I live on water … but she lives right over there on the Queen Mary. I make Johanna do all the shopping, and anyway deLarava wouldn’t be likely to recognize me these days. And she’d have a hard time tracking me—when I do drive, my car always points off to the left of wherever I’m really going. Still, I’d better take some measures. It would be hard at my age and in my condition to find another slip for the boat, and it’d probably be impossible ever again to get out to the Hollywood Cemetery and visit the old man’s grave—though even now I don’t dare sweep the dust and leaves off the marker.
When the knock came at the door he clomped his uninjured foot twice on the floor, and Johanna let herself in.
Shadroe inhaled. “Draw me a bath, sweetie,” he said levelly, “and put ice in it.” Again he drew air into his lungs. “Today I gotta start re-wiring the units, and then I think I’ll re-pipe the downstairs ones so the water’s going north instead of south.” His voice had gone reedy, and he paused to take in more air. “If I can find the ladder, I think I’ll rearrange all the TV antennas later in the week.”
Johanna brushed back her long black hair. “What for you wanna do that, lover?” The seams of her orange leotards had burst at the hips, and she scratched at a bulge of tattooed skin. “After the painting men the other month—your tenants are gonna go crazy.”
“Tell ’em… tell ’em November rent’s on me. They’ve put up with worse.” Gasp. “As to why—look at this.” He bent down with a grunt and picked up the front section of the paper. “Here,” he whispered, pointing out the article. “I need to change the hydrau
lic and electromagnetic …” Gasp. “… fingerprint of this place again.”
She read it slowly, moving her lips. “Oh, baby!” she finally said in dismay. She crossed to his chair and knelt and hugged him. He patted her hair three times and then let his hand drop. “Why can’t she forget about you?”
“I’m the only one,” he said patiently, “who knows who she is.”
“Couldn’t you … blackmail her? Say you’ve put the eddivence in a box in a bank, and if you die the noosepapers will get it?”
“—I suppose,” said Shadroe, staring at the dark TV screen. It was set on CBS, channel 2, with the brightness turned all the way down to blessedly featureless black. “But nobody thought it was … murder, even at the time.” He yawned so widely that pink tears ran down his gray cheeks. “What I should do,” he went on, “is go to her office when she’s there”—he paused to inhale again—“and then take a nap in the waiting room.”
“Oh, baby, no! All those innocent people!”
Too exhausted to speak anymore, Shadroe just waved his hand dismissingly.
CHAPTER 13
“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
IF YOU FOLLOW THE Long Beach Freeway south from the 405, the old woman thought, you’re behind L.A.’s scenes. To your left is a scattered line of bowing tan grasshoppers that are oil-well pumping units, with the machined-straight Los Angeles River beyond, and to your right, train tracks parallel you across a narrow expanse of scrub-brush dirt. High-voltage cables are strung from the points of big steel asterisks atop the power poles, and the fenced-in yards beyond the tracks are crowded with unmoored boxcars. It’s all just supply, with no dressing-up. Even when the freeway breaks up and you’re on Harbor Scenic Drive, the lanes are scary with roaring trucks pulling big semitrailers, and the horizon to your right is clawed with the skeletal towers of the quayside cranes. The air smells of crude oil, though by now you can probably see the ocean.