by Various
Levi walked in a ways, far enough that the noise of Cooper’s was just a drone, no louder than the cicadas and the frogs, found an old loblolly pine stump, and sat down to breathe the stink out of his lungs and gather his thoughts.
But his thoughts all bounced around between Jo and Mae and his mama and Jimmy Lee and the white man—whoever he was—that was his daddy, and suddenly Levi was doubled over, vomiting a stream of warm Orange Nehi. When he was emptied out, his throat raw and sour, he took three chest-spreading breaths, as if he had just returned to the surface after a long, deep dive.
He wiped his mouth with his shirttail and started to sit again when he heard a thump, somewhere off in the darkness behind him and then another, off to his right. Levi vomited again, though this time nothing came up but thin bile.
When they learned about the Apalachicola woods in class, a boy named Emmit said that he knew for gospel that a wild creature lived in the swamps far back into this forest, hair all over his body, bigger even than a Skunk Ape. It smelled of rotting meat and howled when it was hungry—for human blood. Emmit was dumber than a bag of hammers, but his daddy was a hunter, and knew as much about this part of the world as any man, so Levi thought there was likely some truth to the tale.
After what he’d seen and heard tonight, he didn’t know what he believed any more.
Levi began to walk back toward the road when, deep in the darkness far behind him, something howled, long and low, raising every hair on Levi’s body and putting his feet in a mood for some serious running.
He crashed through the underbrush, feeling a tug on his shirt, then a ripping sound, but he didn’t care about his clothes, not one bit. He ran faster, his sneakers crunching over twigs and stirring up leaves, making enough noise to scare the devil himself—he hoped—and headed for the lighted bulk of Cooper’s Big House.
He finally stumbled around the corner, and leaped back just in time to avoid being splattered by a fat man pissing against the cinderblocks.
“Well, hey there, Jackie Robinson,” said Henry the taxicab driver, zipping up. “You a runner too, now?”
“Nossir.” Levi gulped air, trying to loosen up a stitch in his side. “Can you take me home?” He’d had enough of the grown-up world and wanted to be back in his own bed more than anything he could remember wanting. “Please?” He heard his voice crack with the pleading.
“Sorry, son,” the cabbie said. “I got paying fares leaving this joint for the next three hours, going all over the county. But it’s a nice night for a walk, a strong boy like you.”
“Yessir,” Levi said, his shoulders sagging. “Thanks anyway.”
As Levi walked home, keeping to the shoulder of the road and the edge of the woods, he slowly tore his number 78 into tiny pieces that he dropped behind him like a trail of breadcrumbs in a story. Bad luck? Maybe. But the farther he got from Cooper’s, the luckier he felt.
* * *
The sun was barely above the horizon when Levi trudged up the long winding driveway. Almost home. At the Springs, at least. Home was where he’d catch holy hell, but not just yet. He cut into the woods and walked straight to the lagoon, shedding clothes as he went, some of the Big House stink falling behind with each piece. He emerged a few yards from the diving tower.
That was where he had always stopped, as a child, at the edge of the swimming area restricted to tourists, where water creatures that looked like him were forbidden. But in the dawn of a new day, Levi Williams stood on the grass, naked as the day he was born, and fear of Mr. Ball and his laws—or his mama and her rules—fell away like the dried-up used skin of a canebrake rattler.
He put one foot onto the concrete steps of the tower, then another, and then he was climbing up and around and up again until he stood at the very edge of the topmost platform, thirty feet above the springs. Levi stopped there, watching the pale light play across the surface of the water, feeling a little ball of fierceness grow inside him. This was his water, as much as anyone’s.
Levi took a deep breath—one, two, three—and launched himself into space, diving hands-first into the deepest part of Wakulla Springs. Water roaring in his ears, he plunged twenty, thirty feet down, thirty-five, until his natural buoyancy took over and he began to rise again. The exhaustion of a long night disappeared and he pushed the water behind him with easy strokes, propelling himself forward, a school of gar disintegrating in a thousand directions as he swam through it.
He swam underwater, coming up for air at two-minute intervals, moving to the far side of the lagoon, unnoticed by the film crew beginning to set up for the day’s shoot. His head barely breaking the surface, Levi watched from afar as Winnie encrusted Ricou’s long, lean body with Beastie scales. He watched from afar as Ricou joked with her and with a blonde Weeki Watchee girl, a stunt double in a high-cut white swimsuit, who donned a black wig just before she jumped into the water. He watched from afar as the crew lowered the camera into place, as Ricou and the stand-in lazily swam into position.
Then: Action.
Levi dived deep again, down to a rock ledge, holding on with his toes, and looked up. Silhouetted against the sun, the girl in the white swimsuit swam on the surface. Beneath her swam the Beastie, mirroring her movements. And now beyond them—unseen by either swimmers or cameras—swam Levi, matching Ricou kick for kick, stroke for stroke.
When the girl straightened, rested one foot against her opposite knee, and turned a lazy cartwheel, the Beastie backed off, watching her from a thicket of underwater ferns. Levi watched him watching.
Now the girl hung suspended in the clear water, her head above the surface, her long legs slowly scissoring. The Beastie swam up close, stretching a clawed hand out for her feet without ever quite touching her. Across the lagoon, Levi reached for both of them.
The layer of cooler water beneath him seemed tangible, something Levi could almost stand on. He hung there, feet slowly churning, as if riding a unicycle through molasses. His arms floated upward, and he held his right hand in a reverse C, as if framing a picture, and the Beastie seemed to swim right into Levi’s palm.
If the cameramen turned around, trained the lens in Levi’s direction, he would be captured in their machine, like the egret on the lobby wall. Would he be recognized? At this distance, would he even look human? Maybe, if only for a few seconds, they’d mistake him for some fabulous swimming creature: the legendary fish-boy of Wakulla Springs.
But the two frogmen on either side of the twin camera were focused on the latex monster and did not maneuver in his direction. Unnoticed and unbound, Levi Williams just treaded water, out of the range of capture, and after a moment’s hesitation, regretfully lowered his hand, freeing the Beastie to swim on toward the girl, toward the light.
3.
Monkey Business
Isbel was so tired she could barely sit up. She’d been working on the last section of her senior thesis for two solid days, running on caffeine and Snickers bars from the vending machine. At four on a Thursday afternoon, she sat on the La Brea bus, almost nodding off as it crawled through rush-hour traffic, jerking upright every time they hit a pothole, which in that part of Los Angeles was at least once a block.
She wished she could just call Mr. Gleckman and cancel, but the fact was, two of her studio sources had backed out at the last minute, and this was her final chance to add some really original material to bolster the library research she’d been doing since the beginning of the semester. The kind of initiative that looked good on grad school applications.
Her thesis, “An Examination of Reel vs. Real Post-Colonialism: Tarzan Movies and Imaginary Geography,” was tailored to her double major in Film and the newly established Ethnic Studies department at UCLA. It was the culmination of months of work—and years of day-dreaming.
Saginaw, Michigan, her hometown, was not the sort of place anyone made a movie about. Her parents had both worked the day shift at the GM plant, so she’d been on her own after school. Her only babysitter was a man named Captain M
uddy, who hosted two hours of old black-and-white movies on the local TV station. Isbel watched them all—the Three Stooges, Lash LaRue and his bullwhip, parades of stiff-legged men in monster and robot suits—but she fell completely under the spell of Tarzan the first time she saw him swing through the trees. She wanted nothing more than to escape her small gray city for the paradise of the jungle and the mysterious escarpment beyond which always lay treasure.
After two years at Michigan State, she had transferred to UCLA, and was thrilled to discover that the films’ principals were still alive. She’d been trying for more than a year to get an interview—on the phone, in person, she didn’t care. She’d written to the publicity departments at MGM and RKO and gotten form letters in return. She sent off queries to Johnny Weissmuller’s agent, but he never replied. Maureen O’Sullivan’s agent hung up on her when she called. Johnny Sheffield no longer needed an agent, and two weeks ago she’d actually managed to talk to him directly—at least for the thirty seconds it took for him to tell her to buzz off.
Isbel had a transcription of that phone conversation. It consisted entirely, on the part of the no-longer boyish “Boy,” of: Hello? Yes, that’s me. and You’ve got to be kidding. Not a chance. She doubted that was even enough for a footnote, much less the highlight of her paper.
Cheeta was all she had left.
At least Mr. Gleckman claimed his chimp was Cheeta. “Sure, he’s the real deal. Did all the Tarzan movies,” he’d said on the phone. “In the first two, he was just the other ape’s understudy, but they promoted him for Tarzan Escapes. That was 1936, and he’s worked steady ever since. Weissmuller, Bela Lugosi, Ed Wynn—all the biggies.” It sounded like a sales pitch, composed and rehearsed, but Isbel was desperate.
“You want an interview?” Mr. Gleckman had asked after ten minutes of reciting the monkey’s credentials. “Yes, please.”
“He’s a performer, no free shows. A hundred bucks?”
“I can get it,” Isbel said. She’d hung up the phone before she could be sensible and change her mind, then gone to the bank, gutting her account, leaving just enough for groceries—if she ate mac and cheese until Thanksgiving.
The bus lumbered north on Sepulveda as Isbel fingered the five bills in the pocket of her jeans and shifted the knapsack on her knees. The snoring fat man next to her flopped a meaty arm in her direction. Draped across his lap was a copy of the Times. POLICE: LABIANCA, TATE SLAYINGS UNRELATED. Oh, that’s reassuring, Isbel thought. Two different maniacs roaming the city. She sighed, watched the fast-food landscape slide past, and stroked the fringe of her purple buckskin vest, a nervous habit she was trying to break.
The address Mr. Gleckman had given her was right on the border of Encino and Tarzana, which seemed almost prophetic. She alighted with a wobble, her right leg all pins and needles, and looked at the piece of paper where she’d scribbled the address. 807-C Ventura Blvd. She looked up and down the street, seeing nothing but gas stations and vacant lots, then noticed a sign for Shady Glen Mobile Home Estates half a block down.
A trailer park? Really? Cheeta was a movie star. All right, it was a long time ago, and he was a chimp, but still. Maybe he’d spent his savings on bananas. Isbel laughed out loud, hearing the giddiness of exhaustion, and wanted nothing more than to go back to her dorm, crawl under the covers, and sleep for a week. This was a terrible idea. What had she been thinking?
She headed toward the sign.
Beyond a peeling stucco arch she saw rows and rows of neatly identical aluminum-sided trailers. Fifty feet to her right was a fenced-in, open-air pool. A very tan muscular guy in T-shirt and sweats was sifting blue crystals into the water amid a swirl of orange hoses, a panel truck backed up to the pool gate. The guy looked up and nodded.
Isbel took a few steps toward him and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey, do you know how I find number 807?”
“Those are the 500s.” He pointed to her left. “The 800s are three rows over.”
“Thanks.” She turned and peered at the oversized house numbers, which seemed to go in and out of focus. She blinked, rubbing her eyes, and wished she’d at least gotten another cup of coffee before she got on the bus. Too late now. She found 807-C and stepped onto the astroturfed porch of a trailer with a wrought-iron sign that said GLECKMAN. She rang the bell, and chimes echoed inside, playing a tinny version of “Hooray for Hollywood.”
The door was opened by a homely little man with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a spectacularly unconvincing dark brown toupee. It looked like a cutout from a set of bad paper dolls.
“Mr. Gleckman?”
“I got all the Watchtowers I need,” he said. “And I’m down to one good crap a week, so whatever it is you’re selling, it’s not going to help.” He started to shut the door.
“I’m Isbel Hartsoe. From UCLA? We spoke on the phone about an interview?” He was so short she was eye-to-eye with him, and she was only five-three, even in her clogs.
He took his hand off the doorknob. “Oh, yeah. How about that? You actually showed up. You’re a credit to your generation,” he said, reaching out and damply shaking her hand. “Call me Mort. I’m only Mr. Gleckman to the landlord and the IRS.” He opened the door wider. “I guess I didn’t recognize you. You sounded white on the phone.”
Isbel stopped halfway across the threshold. “Excuse me?”
“Hey, hey. I got nothing against Negroes. Negroes, Jews, we’re in this shit together, right? Someone told me once I sounded Irish on the phone. Me, Irish! Must have been back when I was drinking.”
“I’m Cuban-American, Mr. Gleckman.”
“Mort, please. So, you from Miami?”
“Michigan.” Isbel took a deep breath. “May I come in?”
“Sure, sure. You got the, uh, interview fee?” Isbel ignored the voice in her head that told her none of this was looking promising, and pulled the folded bills from her pocket. Mort riffled them with a tobacco-stained thumb and nodded his head before inserting them into a battered wallet.
“That doesn’t seem very professional,” Isbel said, as he led her into a narrow hallway, “charging for an interview.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “Sweetheart, that’s what professional means,” he said. “If no money changes hands, it’s just amateur night.” He slid a flimsy door open and gestured her inside. “And Cheeta’s been a pro since before you were born.”
Isbel stepped into an oppressively over-cluttered room about twelve feet square. Heavy dark furniture covered a poison-green shag rug that smelled like smoke and wet dog and a faintly acrid odor she didn’t want to think about. The walls were striped with sunlight from the venetian blinds, and encrusted with framed black-and-white photos: Men in cowboy hats. Tuxedoed saxophonists. Women wearing piles of fruit. The thermostat was cranked up high.
“The living room suite was my mother’s,” Mort said, following her glance. “Quality stuff.” He thumped the back of a chintz-covered armchair. “Let me move those.” The chair, the coffee table, the couch—every horizontal surface—was stacked with paint-spattered canvases. He cleared off the armchair, regarded the purple-and-orange stained upholstery, and covered it with a folded newspaper. “There. Sit.”
Isbel noticed a spattered easel. “Do you paint?” she asked, lowering herself gingerly onto the paper.
“Nah. It’s all Cheeta’s.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he’s a regular Picasso. But cheaper. Only a hundred bucks a picture. Two for one-fifty. You know Tony Curtis? He bought five. I could give you a student discount maybe?”
“I don’t think—”
“We’ll talk later.” Mort turned and whistled, three sharp notes.
A series of panting hoots issued from behind another sliding door on the far side of the room, and then Cheeta appeared.
Isbel’s mouth opened in surprise. Chimps looked so small and cute on television, but this thing was grizzled and leathery and almost as big as she was. Cheeta’s face was whiskered and gray
, and he was dressed just like Mort—white shirt, suspenders, brown pants pulled up to mid-chest—with the addition of a purple beret worn at a rakish angle. He held a palette in one hand, a brush in the other. He stopped, his large brown eyes regarding her with keen disinterest, like an old roué in a Paris bar, then hooted again.
“Isbel, meet Cheeta,” Mort said. “Cheeta, meet Isbel.”
The chimp curled his lips back, revealing huge yellow teeth. He pointed at Mort and hooted louder.
“Yes, I know. Cocktail time. Hold your horses. We’ve got company.” Mort turned to Isbel. “Excuse me for just a moment.” He stepped over to a side table and poured a squat glass full of what looked like whiskey.
Isbel stared.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Mort said. “It’s not for me. I’ve been on the wagon for years. But the big fella got a taste for Jim Beam, back in the day, and if he doesn’t get his afternoon nip, well, let’s just say things can get ugly.” He put the glass down next to Cheeta’s easel and produced a cigar from his vest pocket, lighting it with a flourish.
“I hope that’s for you,” Isbel said, although the idea of smoke added to the warm miasma of the room made her stomach knot.
“What can I say? Actors, they’re not exactly known for clean living.” Mort handed the cigar to the chimp, who switched the paintbrush to his bare right foot, took a long sloppy puff, and farted.
“And a good day to you, too,” Mort replied. He and Cheeta both laughed loudly, Mort holding his stomach, the chimp hooting and flailing his hands. A gob of green pigment hit the lampshade and clung there. Mort fanned the air and made a face. “You get used to it. He’s mostly vegetarian. All that roughage. And he’s old, what can I say? Don’t write that part down.”
Isbel looked at her notepad and pen, unaware that she had pulled them out of her knapsack. “All right.” She turned to a blank page and cleared her throat, getting down to business. “So, Mr. Gleckman. How did you—”