Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  He was wearing some of his old clothes and looked out of place in the booth. He thought most northern people overdressed anyway, even kids going to school. I mean, like they were all ready for church or Uncle Fred’s funeral.

  He hadn’t been recognized yet, and wouldn’t be. He always looked like a twenty-year-old garage mechanic on a coffee break.

  * * *

  Bud and Lou swerved to avoid a snowdrift. They had turned onto the giant highway a few miles back and had it almost to themselves. Ice glistened everywhere in the late afternoon sun, blindingly. Soon the sun would fall and it would become pitch black outside.

  “How much further is it, Bud?” asked Lou. His stomach was growling.

  “I don’t know. It’s around here somewhere. I’m just following what’s-his-name’s orders.”

  “Why doesn’t he give better orders, Bud?”

  “Because he never worked for Universal.”

  * * *

  Stan and Ollie did not know what was happening when the doors of the moving van opened and carpets started dropping off the tops of the racks.

  Then the van slammed into another vehicle. They felt it through the sides of the truck.

  The driver was already out. He was walking toward a small truck with two men in it.

  Stan and Ollie climbed out of the back of the Mayflower truck and saw who the other two were.

  The four regarded each other, and the truck driver surveyed the damage to the carpets, which was minor.

  They helped him load the truck back up; then Stan and Ollie climbed in the small van with Bud and Lou.

  “I wonder what Quackenbush is up to now?” asked Bud, as he scrunched himself up with the others. With Lou and Ollie taking up so much room, he and Stan had to share a space hardly big enough for a lap dog. Somehow, they managed.

  “I really don’t know,” said Ollie. “He seems quite intent on keeping this thing from happening.”

  “But, why us, Bud?” asked Lou. “We been good boys since . . . well, we been good boys. He could have sent so many others.”

  “That’s quite all right with me,” said Stanley. “He didn’t seem to want just anybody for this.”

  “I don’t know about you two, but Lou and I were sent from Peoria. That’s a long way. What’s this guy got against us?”

  “Well, there’s actually no telling,” said Stanley. “Ollie and I have been traveling all day, haven’t we, Ollie?”

  “Quite right, Stanley.”

  “But what I don’t get,” said Bud, working at his pencil-thin mustache, “is that I remember when all this happened the first time.”

  “So do I,” said Stanley.

  “But not us two,” said Lou, indicating Ollie and himself, and trying to keep the truck on the road.

  “Well, that’s because you two had . . . had . . . left before them. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that he sent us back here to . . . Come to think of it, I don’t understand, either.”

  “Or me,” said Lou.

  “Quackenbush moves in mysterious ways,” said Bud.

  “Right you are,” said Stan.

  “Mmmm Mmmmm Mmmmm,” said Ollie.

  * * *

  By the time they saw they were in the air they also realized the pilot wasn’t aboard.

  Leonard was still stuck upside down in the forward cockpit. Arthur managed to fly the plane straight while his brother crawled out and sat upright.

  Looping and swirling, they flew on through the late afternoon toward Cedar Oaks.

  * * *

  The line started forming in front of the doors of the civic auditorium at five, though it was still bitterly cold.

  The manager looked outside at 5:15. It was just dark, and there must be a hundred and fifty kids out there already, tickets in hand. He hadn’t been at the sound rehearsal and hadn’t seen the performers. All he knew was what he heard about them: They were the hottest rock and roll musicians since Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.

  * * *

  The show went on at 7:00 P.M. as advertised, and it was a complete sellout. The crowd was ready, and when Rip Dover introduced the Champagnes, the people yelled and screamed even at their tired doo-wah act.

  Then came Wailon, and they were polite for him, except that they kept yelling “Rock ’n’ roll! Rock ’n’ roll!” and he kept singing “Young Love” and the like.

  Then other acts, then Val Ritchie, who jogged his way through several standards and launched into “Los Niños.” He tore the place apart. They wouldn’t let him go, they were dancing in the aisles. He did “Los Niños” until he was hoarse. They dropped the spots on him, finally, and the kids quit screaming. It got quiet. Then there was the sound of a mike being turned on and a voice, greasy in the magnificence, filled the hall:

  “Helloooooooooooo, baby!”

  * * *

  It was long past dark, and the truck swerved down the road, the forms of Stan, Ollie, Bud, and Lou illuminated by the dome light. Bud had a map unfolded in front of the windshield and Ollie’s arms were in Lou’s way.

  “It’s here somewhere,” said Bud. “I know it’s here somewhere!”

  Overhead was the whining, droning sound of an old aeroplane, sometimes close to the ground, sometimes far above. Every once in a while was a yell of “Watch-a yourself! Watch-a where you go!” and a whonk whonk.

  The truck below passed a sign which said:

  WELCOME TO CEDAR OAKS

  Speed Limit 30 MPH

  * * *

  After The Large Charge hung up the telephone receiver, and they let him offstage to thunderous ovation, the back curtain parted and there were Donny Bottoms and the Mosquitoes.

  And the first song they sang was “Dottie,” the song Bottoms had written for his wife while they were still high school sweethearts. Then “Roller Coaster Days” and “Miss America” and all his classics. And the crowd went crazy and . . .

  * * *

  The truck roared in the snowy, jampacked parking lot of the auditorium, skidded sideways, wiped out a ’57 cherry-red Merc, and punched out the moon window of a T-Bird. The cops on parking lot duty ran toward the wreck.

  Halfway there, they jumped under other cars to get away from the noise.

  The noise was that of an airplane going to crash very soon, very close.

  At the last second, the sound stopped.

  The cops looked up.

  An old biplane was sitting still in a parking space in the lot, its propeller still spinning. Two guys in funny clothes were climbing down from it, one whistling and honking to the other, who was trying to get a pointy hat off his ears.

  The doors of the truck which had crashed opened, and four guys tumbled out all over each other.

  They ran toward the auditorium, and the two from the plane saw them and whistled and ran toward them. They joined halfway across the lot, the six of them, and ran toward the civic hall.

  The police were running for them like a berserk football team and then . . .

  * * *

  The auditorium doors were thrown open by the ushers, lances of light gleamed out on the snow and parked cars, and the mob spilled out onto the concrete and snow, laughing, yelling, pushing, shoving in an effort to get home.

  The six running figures melted into the oncoming throng, the police right behind them.

  Above the cop whistles and the mob noise was an occasional “Ollie, oh, Ollie!” or “Hey, Bud! Hey, Bud!” or whonk whonk and . . .

  * * *

  The six made it into the auditorium as the maintenance men were turning out the lights, and they ran up to the manager’s office and inside.

  The thin manager was watching TV. He looked up to the six and thought it must be some sort of a publicity stunt.

  On TV came the theme music of “You Bet Your Duck.”

  “It’s-a Quackenbush!” said Leonard.

  The TV show host looked up from his rostrum. “Hi, folks. And tonight what’s the secret woids?” Here a large merganser puppet flopped do
wn and the audience applauded. The show host turned the word card around and lifted his eyebrows, looked at the screen and said:

  “That’s right. Tonight, the woids are Inexorable Fate. I knew I should’ve hired someone else. You guys are too late.”

  Then he turned to the announcer and asked, “George, who’s our first guest?” as the duck was pulled back overhead on its strings.

  The six men tore from the office and out to the parking lot, through the last of the mob. Stan, Ollie, Bud, and Lou jumped in the truck which a wrecker attendant was just connecting to a winch, right under the nose of the astonished police chief.

  Arthur and Leonard, whistling and yelling, jumped in the plane, backed it out, and took off after circling the crowded parking lot. They rose into the air to many a loud scream.

  The truck and plane headed for the airport.

  * * *

  The crowd was milling about the airport fence. Inside the barrier, musicians waited to get aboard a DC-3, their instrument cases scattered about the concourse.

  The truck with four men in it crashed through the fence, strewing wire and posts to the sides.

  It twisted around on its wheels, skidded sideways, almost hitting the musicians, and came to a halt. The four looked like the Keystone Firemen as they climbed out.

  There was a roar in the air, and the biplane came out of the runway lights, landed, and taxied to a stop less than an inch from the nose of the passenger plane.

  “We not-a too late! We not-a too late!” yelled Leonard, as he climbed down. “Arthur, get tough with-a that plane. Don’t let it take off!”

  Arthur climbed to the front of the crop duster and repeated the facial expressions he’d gone through earlier with the pilot. This time at the frightened pilot of the DC-3, through the windshield.

  Leonard, Bud, Lou, Stan, and Ollie ran to the musicians and found Wailon.

  “Where’s Bottoms?” asked Bud.

  “Huh?” asked Jimmy Wailon, still a little distraught by the skidding truck and the aeroplane. “Bottoms? Bottoms left on the first plane.”

  “The first plane?” asked Ollie. “The first aeroplane?”

  “Uh, yeah. Simpson and Ritchie were already on. Donny wanted to wait for this one, but I gave him my seat. I’m waiting for someone.” He looked at them; they had not moved. “I gave him my seat on the first plane,” he said. Then he looked them over in the dim lights. “You friends of his?”

  “No,” said Stanley, “but I’m sure we’ll be seeing him again very soon.”

  Overhead, the plane which had taken off a few minutes before circled and headed northwest for Alaska.

  They listened to it fade in the distance.

  Whonk went Arthur.

  * * *

  They drove back through the dark February night, all six of them jammed into the seat and the small back compartment. After they heard the news for the first time, they turned the radio down and talked about the old days.

  “This fellow Quackenbush,” asked Ollie. “Is he in the habit of doing things such as this?”

  “Ah, the Boss? There’s-a no tellin’ what the boss man willa do!”

  “He must not be a nice man,” said Lou.

  “Oh, he’s probably all right,” said Bud. “He just has a mind like a producer.”

  “A contradiction in terms,” said Stanley.

  “You’re so right,” said Ollie.

  * * *

  “Pardon me,” said the hitchhiker for whom they stopped. “Could you fellows find it in your hearts to give me a ride? I feel a bit weary after the affairs of the day, and should like to nestle in the arms of Morpheus for a short while.”

  “Sure,” said Lou. “Hop in.”

  “Ah yes,” said the rotund hitchhiker in the beaver hat. “Been chasing about the interior of this state all day. Some fool errand, yes indeed. Reminds me of the time on safari in Afghanistan . . .” He looked at the six men, leaned forward, tapping a deck of cards with his gloved hands. “Would any of you gentlemen be interested in a little game of chance?”

  “No thanks,” said Bud. “You wouldn’t like the way I play.”

  * * *

  They drove through the night. They didn’t need to stop for the next hitchhiker, because they knew him. They saw him in the headlights, on the railroad tracks beside the road. He was kicking a broken-down locomotive. He came down the embankment, stood beside the road as they bore down on him.

  He was dressed in a straw hat, a vest, and a pair of tight pants. He wore the same countenance all the time, a great stone face.

  The truck came roaring down on him, and was even with him, and was almost by, when he reached out with one hand and grabbed the back door handle and with the other clamped his straw hat to his head.

  His feet flew up off the pavement and for a second he was parallel to the ground; then he pulled himself into the spare tire holder and curled up asleep.

  He had never changed expression.

  * * *

  Over the hill went the eight men, some of them talking, some dozing, toward the dawn. Just before the truck went out of sight there was a sound, so high, so thin it did not carry well.

  It went honk honk.

  Introduction: The Passing of the Western

  WHEN I INTRODUCED THIS in Night of the Cooters, I did a long riff on how the structure of the story drove George R. R. Martin bananas when he heard me read it. I won’t tell that again.

  This was written for Joe Lansdale and Pat Lobrutto’s Razored Saddles, the cowpunk anthology.

  There was, as I said, something going on in all the genre fictions in the mid-1980s—mysteries, comic books, SF, Westerns—everything was reexamining itself (except Fantasy, which seemed to be chasing itself up its retrograde butthole, then and now). Part of this was, I think, burnout on the part of the third-and-fourth generation that had been raised on the stuff and was now creating it. Like they all of a suddink (as Popeye would say) stopped and said: Why are we doing it this way? To what end? And they started doing it differently.

  There is no genre so standardized as the Western, written or filmed. From The Great Train Robbery on, there were “Jersey Westerns”; because of the MPPCo. moviemaking itself moved West, where the scenery and the light were free. Méliès sent his brother to set up Star Films U.S. in San Antonio: product—Westerns. There were formula plots, seven or eight of them. The standard was the Jacobean Revenger Plot on horseback, except for the sheepherder/rancher sodbuster/rancher ones. (The old joke: Dog limps into town with a gunbelt slung around his middle. Sheriff says, “Where you goin’, boy?” Dog says, “I’m lookin’ for the feller that shot my paw.”)

  And once again it took a European—this time a Brit, Kim Newman, to tell us what was there all the time: that what was going on in American society was reflected in the Western’s treatment of the cattle baron. In the ’20s he was a kindly figure whose daughter the go-getter cowboy would marry; in the Depression, he was Capitalism Rampant; in the early ’40s a benevolent, patriotic FDR figure; in the late ’40s and ’50s a psychotic madman torn apart by dissension on and off the ranch. . . .

  You started getting strangely written Westerns in the 1980s (after the genre died on television—quick! Name the last regularly broadcast Western before they came back?—Kung Fu!). So-called cowpunk—from cyberpunk in SF to splatterpunk in horror to cowpunk, all lit-crit phrases—was both part and cause. Among the truly swell practitioners were Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett Jr., who loved the Western and wanted to do something new with it. Kenneth Oakley’s Season of Bloody Weather opens with Doc Holliday coughing up part of a lung in a hotel washbasin. There was so much new excitement that the late Chad Oliver wrote the two books he’d been threatening to for twenty-five years, Broken Eagle and The Cannibal Owl. (In novels, Joe’s The Magic Wagon is the true exemplar.)

  I don’t look like the Western kind of guy to most folks, but don’t let that fool you. Joe said he’d have an anthology soon, would I do a story, I said sure. A few months la
ter Joe called me and said, “Where’s the story?”

  I’d been thinking about Westerns, and what would have happened if things had been a little different. I’d been reading film criticism all my reading life, and there were a couple of people I wanted to, you know, pay homage to, which will be pretty easy to figure out once you start reading this.

  Indeedy, things were happening in the Western in the 1980s. I was glad to be a small part of it.

  The Passing of the Western

  FROM FILM REVIEW WORLD, APRIL 1972:

  A few months ago, we sensed something in the national psyche, a time for reevaluation, and began to put together this special issue of Film Review World devoted to that interesting, almost forgotten art form, the American Western movie.

  The genre flourished between 1910 and the late 1930s, went into its decline in the 1940s (while the country was recovering from The Big Recession, and due perhaps more to actual physical problems such as the trouble of finding suitable locations, and to the sudden popularity of costume dramas, religious spectacles, and operettas). There was some renewed interest in the late 1940s, then virtually nothing for the next twenty years.

  Now that some Europeans (and some far less likely people) have discovered something vital in the form, and have made a few examples of the genre (along with their usual output of historical epics and heavy dramas), we felt it was time for a retrospective of what was for a while a uniquely American art form, dealing as they did with national westward expansion and the taming of a whole continent.

  We were originally going to concentrate on the masters of the form, but no sooner had we assigned articles and begun the search for stills to illustrate them than we ran across (in the course of reviewing books in the field and because we occasionally house-sit with our twelve-year-old nephew) no less than three articles dealing in part with a little-known (but well-remembered by those who saw them) series of Westerns made between 1935 and 1938 by the Metropolitan-Goldfish-Mayer Studios. Admittedly, the last article appeared in a magazine aimed specifically at teenagers with no knowledge of American film industry history (or anything else for that matter), edited by a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of film and an absolutely abominable writing style—who has nevertheless delved into movie arcana in his attempt to fill the voracious editorial maw of the six magazines he edits (from his still-and-poster-laden Boise garage) for a not-so-nice guy in Richmond.