The phone rang and he leapt out of his skin. “H-hello?”
“It’s me, Harry.” It was Ellen. “Everything’s under control. Everything’s alright.”
A wave of blessed relief washed over him. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” said Ellen. “Art’s still in the freezer. Undisturbed, as far as I can see.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“And no one was in the house?”
“No. There’re some plates in the kitchen sink. That’s all I can see.”
“Just Bernardo, in other words.”
“That’s what I think. Don’t worry, Harry. The only thing that went sour is Art dying on us early. And we’ve dealt with that as best we can. And we’re not doing a bad thing. How long did Art have anyway? We didn’t give him that heart attack. That’s been on the way for years and years.”
“I guess so.”
“I know so. And tonight, you know what happens tonight?”
“What happens?”
“An infarction. It’s time for an infarction.”
Ellen, Bobby, and Eileen, back from the desert, looked down on the body of Art Lewis. They’d tried to push it out of the freezer but it wouldn’t move.
“Imagine that,” said Bobby to Eileen, “your dear husband is stuck to the floor.”
“Shut up, Bobby.” Eileen loathed him.
Bobby got down on one knee. The body was stuck at the heels, the head, the hands. “What we need is hot water and a spatula, maybe one of those thin pizza-spade things.” He looked into the kitchen. “This place’ll have everything.”
It did have everything. Just like he thought. The hot water did most of the work. Then they dragged the body to the middle of the kitchen floor.
“We’ve got to lay him out exactly as you found him.” Ellen looked at her sister. “Exactly.”
“Why does it fucking matter?” Eileen flared, nervous. Fucking Ellen had to control everything.
“So any trauma experienced in the fall will be reflected in the way they’ll find him.” Ellen looked at her imbecile sister. Anybody could be a nurse. All you needed was a pulse.
“Well, you saw. He was flat on his back. Arms out.”
“Alright. Let’s get a story together.” Ellen considered the corpse. “Uh, he comes down from upstairs, he goes to the refrigerator, he gets dizzy, he falls backwards. That’s where Eileen finds him.”
Eileen had a better idea. “Why don’t we roll him down the stairs? So he lands naturally?”
“Because I don’t want to carry him up the stairs, you moron. Do you?”
“No.”
“Then shut up and let me do the thinking.”
“Yeah,” added Bobby.
“Shut up, Bobby.” Eileen hated everyone.
Bobby grinned. “And he wouldn’t roll naturally, Eileen, you cluck. He’s frozen like a bowling pin.”
“SHUT UP, Bobby.”
“Both of you shut up.” Ellen would kill them both. Slowly. What was fate telling her when, in the moment of supreme crisis, she found two halfwits by her side?
Then Bobby noticed an odd thing. In the pushing and shoving, one of Lewis’s blue, heelless slippers had come off. Bobby pointed to Lewis’s left foot. “What the fuck is that?”
Ellen didn’t see. “What are you talking about?”
Bobby stared. Yes. He was looking at concentric rings of pink and white. “Fucker’s missing a toe.”
Unquestionably, to all, it was gone.
“When did that happen?” asked Eileen.
Bobby shook his head. “After he was dead, you clam. You don’t have exposed bone on your body.”
Ellen stared, thinking. “Bernardo quit this morning.”
Bobby nodded. “There’s your man.”
“Who’s your man?” Eileen whined, fists clenched.
Finally everything was arranged as well as it could be. Art’s limbs, still frozen, resisted natural placement. That would take time. They stuffed Art’s pajamas with paper towels, which looked odd and puffy. But the purpose was to absorb any moisture defrosting would produce. It would be strange for a corpse to be found in wet pajamas. In his own kitchen.
Bobby looked down on the rich, legally alive, dead man. “How long will it take him to thaw out?”
“A couple of days,” said Eileen, back on familiar medical ground. “At room temperature.”
Bobby nodded. “Sure. Like any other two hundred and thirty-five pound Thanksgiving turkey.”
This was Eileen’s last straw. “Ellen, would you make him shut up, please? Please?”
Ellen stamped her foot. “Both of you assholes shut up.”
“Sorry,” said Bobby, “I didn’t mean Thanksgiving turkey.”
“Apology accepted,” said Eileen, in the spirit of peace.
“I meant Christmas turkey.” Bobby grinned, triumphant.
“BOTH OF YOU ASSHOLES SHUT UP.”
Bobby shrugged extravagently. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to speak ill of Eileen’s poor, mutilated husband. But what about the medical examiner? How does he not notice the toe that isn’t there?”
“He doesn’t notice because we appoint our own medical examiner.” Yes, thought Ellen. The good man had already been chosen.
“You can do that?”
Ellen nodded. “Harry can.”
Eileen’s head was spinning. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on? Who can do what?”
“Shut up, Eileen.” Bobby and Ellen spoke at the same time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Did You Know Mr. Lewis?
Pussy swept up the hair, rinsed out the big sink, disinfected the waist-high, stainless-steel stand-alone platform where Dr. Peach’s patients were clipped, cleaned, and groomed. Then she walked up Abbot Kinney to get a taco.
In the furthest reaches of her imagination she had never entertained pet care as an occupation. In fact, she had laughed with Violet and Wendy and the other girls at the Zebra Club about the world’s most pitiful profession: mobile dog grooming. Yuck.
I just see one of those trucks and I sneeze.
The tacos carnitas at Abbot’s were pretty good and the onion rings, if you ate them quickly and sparingly, were good, too.
Working for Dr. Peach was one of the most normal jobs she’d ever had. And the funny part of it was the animals, they wanted to be clean. You could see that they felt better. Carried their newly fluffed-out tails higher. Not like they walked in, head down, embarrassed, all matted and dumpy. Their eyes got all sparky, you could see, when she was finished. They wanted to thank her. And she would rub that little groove high on their noses, between their eyes. And they would roll their shoulders around, try to smile.
She paid the Mexican girl, started back down the street. Some big, dirty slob was selling incense in front of that expensive dress place. The slob looked her up and down, then smiled with some screwed-up teeth. “How ’bout some Pondicherry Pine, lassie?” He had some bullshit Jamaican accent. “Or some Montego Sweet Cedar?”
You gotta be kidding, dude. She had long ago learned to judge a man’s character quickly. In three seconds flat. She stopped, raised her sunglasses, delivered her summation. “Fuck off, loser.”
She walked back to Cat & Dog.
“Were those fish tacos great or what?” inquired Dr. Peach.
“Fantastic,” said Puss, slipping into her smock.
And so the afternoon had begun, one hour gliding into the next, to the hum of newsradio. She looked into the deep, wise brown eyes of Jaboc, a very large German shepherd, and played with his ears while Dr. Peach fiddled and probed in the rear. It was amazing what an animal would accept at his hands.
“You’ve got quite a way with animals, Miss Grafton.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Dr. Peach peeled off his gloves. “Don’t call me doctor anymore. My name is Clark.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” She giggled. “I mean Clark.”
“And what do I call
you, Miss Grafton? Besides Miss Grafton. Which I’ll happily continue if you wish.”
“Uh . . .” Color had come to her face. “. . . call me Pu—uh, Penelope.”
Clark smiled. “I’ve always loved that name.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” There was a pause. “I mean Clark.” They both had laughed again.
Then she became aware of the radio.
“This just in to KFWB. Developer Art Lewis, married just five days go, has apparently died of a heart attack.”
Suddenly her eyes were full and she couldn’t see.
Dr. Peach watched her. “I’m sorry, Penelope. Did you know Mr. Lewis?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Bella da Costa Greene
I’d met Nedra at a club on Pico, east of La Cienega. It was called the Mint. It had a nice bar running down the starboard side, with the requisite mirrors for observing your fellow drinkers. Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection.
But I wasn’t there to drink. I was there to see Delta Freight. They were friends of mine, currently a blues band.
Naturally, I distrusted white blues. The blues was a mysterious entity. The structure was deceptively simple, accessible enough for many thousands of musicians to conclude that yes, they could do that, too.
But the artistry inherent in the work of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, Little Walter, Freddie King, B.B. King, Albert King, Jimmy Reed, Jimi Hendrix, that artistry was exceedingly difficult to quantify. And more difficult to reproduce. Suffice to say they knew what to leave in, and, more important, what to leave out.
I had been among the multitude who had concluded I could do that, too. The I-IV-V. Then I heard a Jimmy Reed tune.
I walk the streets at night, baby
I got nothin’ else to do
With sudden shame I recalled the unfortunates I had pitied in my travels, watching them trudge slowly over downtown streets at two in the morning. Where the fuck were they going?
They were walking, that’s what.
So, white blues. White blues, with rare exceptions, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter, and a few others, maybe Kenny Wayne Shepherd, came hand in hand with cultural imperialism. The natives had stumbled on something interesting, let us improve and exploit it. Let us expand it, refine it, remodel it, substitute cleverer chords, and play it better. And longer. Much longer.
The result was blooze. A windy cacophony that started in the middle and ended in the middle. When someone begged them to stop. A little went a very long way.
Meanwhile, the original purveyors looked on in stoic silence. Thus, I had no substantial hopes for Delta Freight.
But while they were setting up, a tall, black girl took the stage with a piano player. She was introduced as Nedra. She reached for the microphone and pulled it close.
Nedra’s voice was not large but it cut me to the quick. Slightly sandy, yet precise and inventive, she stated simple truths simply, in a manner that drew me right in.
Is that all there is?
She sang one song then reclaimed her seat at the bar. Our eyes met in the mirror. Impelled by a force that overwhelmed my natural wretchedness in the presence of beauty, I went over and sat beside her.
She was dressed plainly, no rings on her fingers. “Yes?” she said.
“I’m Dick Henry,” I said. “And that was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.” I looked into her brown eyes. “I don’t know what to say next, because I’m not very smart, but I wanted to tell you that while I still could.”
She looked at me solemnly and then a delighted peal of melodious laughter burst forth and suddenly we were very present to one another.
Delta Freight took that exact moment to mount the attack. “What the fuck, LOS ANGELES,” bellowed the tattooed, bandannaed lead singer at the top of his lungs, adjusting his basket. “We’re gonna do a blues forya.”
I had three seconds to talk to Nedra or have our unique moment blown away forever. I grabbed her hand. “Let’s go get some Chinese food.”
Nedra looked over at Delta Freight. “Okay.”
On the downbeat we hustled through the black curtain into the cool and quiet of nighttime Pico Boulevard.
“They’ll never know we’re gone,” I said, acknowledging our conspiracy.
Nedra laughed again.
“So, where do you want to go, Dick?”
“Ah Fong’s.”
Where we danced.
Nedra and I didn’t ask a lot of questions, we just drifted in a golden haze. She loved words and so did I, and we reveled in our exchange. Even though she knew many more of them. I was twenty-seven years old, recently discharged from the nuclear Navy, honorably. She was twenty-four, had graduated from an Ivy League college on scholarship. I always felt on tiptoes in her company; she was smarter, better educated.
The fact that she came to care about me amazed and astounded me. I couldn’t believe my luck. It had to be karma, because I’d done nothing in this present life to deserve her. I felt exalted, felt that the future had indeed been loosed. I could end up someplace incomprehensible to the ordinary creature I had been just weeks ago.
Physically, we partook of an incendiary mutual desire. I wanted to be in her, through her, of her. I couldn’t get enough. We couldn’t get enough. Together we went out into the world possessed of the most delicious of secrets—that we had ascended to Olympian heights, that we traveled and traversed where others could not. Where others could not imagine.
Sweetest of all things was her nickname for me. She demanded my whole name: Richard Hudson Henry, then thought about it. I’m going to call you Hud, she said.
Like Paul Newman. I loved it. And I loved her. And I informed her of the fact, fervently, ten times a day.
Did she love me? Yes. How do I know? Because she told me only once. Just once. Once. I love you, Hud.
From today’s vantage point, I see that various, unquestioned assumptions of mine had imperceptibly hardened into certitude. That fact that our relationship had been constructed from the outside in, exoskeletonary, rather than from the inside out, made it fragile, made it susceptible to shock. And when that shock happened, in due course, there was no structure inside to bear the weight. But I knew none of that.
Johnnie Cochran has gone on to say that everything in America is about race. I wouldn’t have believed it back then and now I don’t want to believe it. But it isn’t for me to say. All I knew was that I had never, to my knowledge, allowed race to be a point of distinction in my personal affairs. Men were men. It was the content of character that was important.
Nedra’s affection had raised myself in my own view. Perhaps I was capable of higher things. Shortcuthood, as a vocation, lay undefined before me, not yet a real choice. Maybe I would go back to school. Learn to write. Explore geology. Or anthropology.
Nedra was a writer. Determined to break Hollywood wide open. I had no doubt she would. One day I brought her a fascinating story I’d come across.
Bella da Costa Greene had been hired in 1905 to be J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian. Her job expanded greatly with her demonstrated capability. She worked the rest of her life for Morgan and his family and was rumored to have been the great man’s mistress. What made the story unique was Miss da Costa’s race. She was black. But because of her beauty and education and light complexion, she had conducted her professional life as a white woman.
I brought this story to Nedra. “If you leave out the black-tragedy aspect of this, I think it would make a great movie.”
Nedra hesitated. “The black-tragedy aspect? What’s that?”
“What I meant was, if you just stuck to her story, a woman normally assumed to be powerless possessing a huge and usable power, that would make a good movie. What she did with that power.”
“And the black-tragedy aspect?”
The ground had grown unstable beneath my feet but I didn’t know it. “That would be slavery, Jim Crow stuff, stuff that happened, but stuff that would change the
pure power of this story. Of course, that all happened. But what I’m saying—”
Nedra had slowly pushed herself up from her seat at the kitchen table. Her face terrified me.
“You white people,” she hissed, bitterness dripping from every syllable, directed at me. “You white people. You white people don’t know a thing about us. You don’t know a thing about us. But we have to know you. We have to know everything about you. What you really mean when you say this, what you really mean when you say that . . .”
What Nedra said after that I don’t remember. I can’t remember. But it came on and on, a horrifying, hidden, supperating wound lanced. I stood naked in the torrent. After a while I numbly realized I couldn’t listen to any more. I found my way down her wooden stairs and walked out under the California sun. I was scalded, scorched.
Disconnected portions of her words floated through my mind, setting phantom dialogue adrift.
You know us but we don’t know you, Nedra? Maybe I do know nothing. I’ll give you that. But how can you claim to know me if you don’t realize my ignorance? That there’re things I just don’t know? How would I know the depths of the pain you swallow with your daily bread? How would I know? How could I know? But how could you, brilliant as you are, flaming torch to my candle, how could you just assume I did know? How could you assume I knew and didn’t care? How could you? How could you, dear?
I’d read Douglass and Du Bois and Malcolm X at her urging. I knew of chattel, I knew of people with no last names, of families ripped viciously asunder, I knew of murder and mayhem, I knew of the artificial hierarchy of house and field, and the terrible price of impudence. Impudence. A condition found anywhere an overseer might glance on a bad morning.
I knew a lot of facts, but in the end, though, I didn’t know shit.
Nedra and I were ruined.
Blind mutual forgiveness is the only answer. The fault may be mine, in the larger sense, but the problem is ours. And that’s asking more of others than of me. But what else could be the solution? If there is one. What was done was wrong. How do we go back? A country built on the free labor of unfree men? Yes. That’s what happened. But how to settle things now? We need a Solomon. I’m just the Shortcut Man.
Tribulations of the Shortcut Man Page 14