I Don't Know How the Story Ends

by J. B. Cheaney

  Though he never turned his head, one side of Sam’s mouth went up. “Monkeys are nothing but trouble.”

  “See?” Ranger waved a hand. “You girls are perfectly safe. Sam’s the level-headed side of this partnership. He keeps me from getting too carried away.”

  “Huh,” came from across the aisle. “If only.”

  • • •

  We got off at the last stop and parceled out our equipment. Sam carried the camera, Ranger the tripod and film canister, I a satchel with makeup and costume items, and Sylvie a piece of heavy cardboard covered with tinfoil, which Ranger called a “reflector.” A block down from the streetcar stop, we turned onto a sandy path. Dwellings were few and far between; the last one we passed was a shabby, white cottage with a peeling picket fence.

  “Dead empty, near as I can tell,” Ranger called over his shoulder. “I’m planning to use it for exterior shots.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked after several more yards of the path growing steadily steeper.

  “Place called Daisy Dell,” he answered.

  The name certainly sounded flowerish, but what met our eyes, after we’d struggled up the path, was a huge slope-sided bowl of cactus and sage, with boulders big enough to hide any number of outlaws waiting their chance to pop up and fire away.

  “We’ll set up over here by the woods,” Ranger announced, marching toward a scruffy little stand of pine and juniper.

  While he tramped into the “woods” with Sylvie, Sam leveled his tripod and opened his carpetbag. “What kind of camera is it?” I asked.

  “A moving-picture camera.”

  I folded my arms patiently. “What make? Eastman Kodak? Bell & Howell? Burke & James?”

  “Kodak only makes still cameras,” he said, heaving a squarish wooden case to the tripod and lining up the anchor bolts. But he seemed to regard me with a little more respect for knowing those names. “This is a Prestwich, Model 14. British made.”

  “Does it belong to you?”

  “B’longs to my dad. Jimmy Service.” He paused and added with obvious pride, “Best cameraman in the business.”

  “And he’s letting you borrow it?”

  “Um.” He seemed very intent on the lens, opening it to peer through and blowing off a speck of dust. “Yeah.”

  “But how do you develop the film? Where do you get the chemicals and the hypo fixer?”

  He was so surprised he almost opened his eyes all the way. “You know about that?”

  “My father—who’s serving his country right now as a field surgeon in France—is an amateur photographer. I help him in the darkroom.” Though in fact, I didn’t help him much. I liked watching the picture emerge on the print paper but could barely tolerate the smell. “It takes a lot of chemicals to develop a roll of still pictures. How do you manage a whole reel of motion-picture film?”

  Sam snapped the lens shut. “It ain’t easy.”

  Ranger called from across a clearing where he’d been pacing off distances and kicking away branches. “Ready, Sam?”

  Unfortunately for me, the most interesting part of the day had already passed.

  Imagine being dropped into a wilderness where the few people you see keep calling upon you to do things that make little sense, while carrying on conversations entirely over your head. Even Sylvie was getting enough of “No, move closer… Now back… Let’s have that scream again—but not so loud! Put your arm around her, Isobel… Comfort. You know, ‘There, there’ and all that. Now cry… C’mon, Sylvie, you did it before.”

  By noon the sun was beating down like a vengeful god and everybody was a bit snappish. When Sam said, “Film’s out,” in the middle of another stroll through the wooded glade, Ranger threw up his hands like the frustrated artist he supposed himself to be. We trooped down the path in a bedraggled mood, and once on the streetcar, Sylvie slumped against my shoulder and dropped off to sleep.

  “Sam and I have to develop the film and look it over,” Ranger told me. “Tell Buzzy I’ll be home in time for supper.”

  “Don’t I get to see the film?” I asked. That was the only thing I was looking forward to after this long, long morning.

  “We’ll arrange that later.”

  “What’s to arrange?”

  He rolled his eyes. “It’s like this. Saturday afternoon is the only time that part of the Vitagraph lot is empty. The janitor lets us in, in exchange for a few Cuban cigars. Sam can get in at night sometimes, but not me, unless I sneak out. So Saturday afternoon is the only time we can both count on working together, and we have to work fast. You girls would just be in the way. Savvy?”

  I did, but when the boys got off the bus without a backward glance, I stuck out my tongue at them.

  Sylvie was cranky when I woke her to change streetcar lines and whiny when we reached our stop. She sounded like I felt, but as we trudged up the long drive to the hacienda, Aunt Buzzy’s sleek, gray auto swept alongside and paused, motor purring. The door opened and her voice pealed, “Hop aboard, you weary souls!”

  Gratefully we squeezed in beside her and Mother. They both looked flushed and startled, as though happily surprised. Mother especially. She took off her straw hat to tuck loose strands of her hair back over her ears. “We’ve had an adventure!”

  “We did too!” Sylvie replied. “We were up in—”

  “What kind of adventure?” I interrupted.

  “The Hollywood kind,” Aunt Buzzy said, laughing. “We were just motoring home from a sedate luncheon at the Plaza with Mrs. Armitage and her stuffy friends. I asked Masaji to take the southern route so we could see the orange groves in bloom. Coming up on the intersection at Seventh and Vine, I noticed an auto that looked like Celia Travers’s, and I told Masaji to step on it because I didn’t want her to wave me down and bend our ears for two hours about her latest gardening triumph. But when we hit the intersection, I barely had time to notice that it wasn’t Celia after all before we were spinning around in a maelstrom!”

  “What’s a maelstrom?” Sylvie inquired.

  “Like a whirlpool, dear—just a figure of speech.” Mother’s voice was calm, but her eyes sparkled with something I might have called manic glee if I didn’t know her better. “We had sped right into a Keystone Cops picture!”

  “Yes, and Mack himself was there, and he got the whole thing on film.”

  Masaji parked the car in front of the hacienda and got out to open doors for us, his lips tight and face pale. As we went into the house, Aunt Buzzy supplied the details. Mr. Sennett, chief director of Mack Sennett Comedies, had actually greased the intersection to add a comic touch to a chase scene. He had posted a watchman down the road to warn unwary travelers, but the watchman wasn’t minding his business, or else Masaji had not noticed him. When Aunt Buzzy ordered him to speed up, he did—with results, everyone agreed, that could have been tragic. But they weren’t, and everyone seemed just fine.

  It was the kind of thing that would have made Mother quite livid if it happened in Seattle. But it was also the kind of thing that didn’t happen in Seattle. It was a Hollywood thing. And in Hollywood, Mother was not quite the same person.

  “Of course,” she remarked while putting her hat away, “Mr. Sennett apologized profusely, but there was no harm done.”

  “No harm done” was not what she’d said when Sylvie had tobogganed her red wagon down a hill and barely missed smashing into an ice delivery truck.

  “Mack offered us a personally guided tour of the lot,” Aunt Buzzy added. “And we may just take him up on it in a few days. If the film develops well—or however they put it—we may end up on the silver screen in a Keystone Cops picture!”

  Mother raised her eyebrows but did not deny it. Both ladies then disappeared into the east wing to change their clothes.

  Belatedly I searched the palm-leaf mail tray for a letter from France. But there was
no overseas postmark among the bills and cards. Had Mother even looked?

  Chapter 6

  Interiors

  “Cut!” Ranger yelled a few days later. “What’s wrong with you girls? When I say fear, I want fear!”

  I sighed; even Sylvie sighed. Sam straightened up from his camera crouch and opened the lens, then squirted a puff of air inside with a rubber syringe—his habit after every take, to blow dust off the film.

  “It looked okay to me. We don’t have that much film stock to waste,” he said.

  “I know. But I’m not getting what I want. And I didn’t like the angle much either.” As Ranger paced up and down, two fingers pressed against his brow in a way that signaled Genius at work, I grabbed Sylvie’s hand to keep her from rubbing at the makeup—really just flour dusted over a thin coat of lard. It made us look like we’d blundered out of our untimely graves, but Ranger insisted: “The film makes you too dark, especially in the shade.” Shade and light were two of the things that had to be worked out, which was the reason we met earlier in the morning this time, before blazing noon made us glare in the sun and disappear in shadow.

  Sam yawned hugely and leaned an elbow on the tripod. Morning was not his best time; Ranger told me he often slept until noon, which gave him less than an hour to get to his job at Keystone, where he ran errands and cleaned up sets until seven. Did he go to school? I’d asked. Not since he was fourteen, Ranger had replied enviously.

  “I’ve got it!” Ranger cried now. “Instead of just standing here under the tree, you girls go down the path—see where that stump is? Go to the stump and then back into the trees so we can’t see you. When I holler, step out on the path and start walking toward the camera, not too fast. I’ll talk you down. Savvy?”

  For an answer, I put a hand on Sylvie’s neck and marched her up the path toward the aforementioned stump. Behind me Sam muttered, “You’re going to have to make up your mind because—”

  “I know!” Ranger muttered back snappishly. “But who’s paying for the film?”

  That must be why he was always cash poor, I thought. We kept marching, and when Ranger called, “Now disappear!” I pulled Sylvie off the path with me.

  “How much longer?” she whined.

  “Just until Mr. Art decides his muse is done for the day.”

  “Who’s Mr. Art?”

  “Don’t touch the makeup! We’ll just have to slap it back on. Don’t forget, you’re the one who wanted to be in a picture.”

  “I already was in a picture, and we didn’t even get to see it.”

  “That’s because we’re just decoration.”

  “What’s that over there?” Sylvie asked, pointing through the trees, at the very moment Ranger yelled, “Now!”

  I got a firm grip on her hand, whispering, “Ask me later. Let’s get this right, or we’ll have to do it again and again and again.”

  “Look scared!” Ranger called, as we emerged from behind the trees. I didn’t see him, but of course Sam was at the end of the path, turning the camera crank at a steady pace, counting under his breath for every full turn: one one hundred, two one hundred…

  A high-pitched scream from the bushes made me almost jump out of my skin. Sylvie clutched me in a suffocating grip. “What was that?”

  “Good, Sylvie!” came Ranger’s voice from the brush on our right. “Look in the other direction now. Isobel, you’re jumpy. You’ve been hearing noises—Arrrrrgh!” He made a gurgling noise in his throat. “It might be a mountain lion or a bear!”

  “But I saw it,” Sylvie said to him. “It looked like—”

  “Stop looking this way! I’m not here! Squeeze close to Isobel!”

  “Talk to me if you have to talk,” I murmured.

  She answered, just as murmury, “Back in the trees. It looked like—”

  “Put your arm around her, Iz!” Ranger commanded, keeping pace with us. “You’re trying to be brave, but these noises are getting to you. Like this one: Arrooooo!” I pulled Sylvie closer, barely keeping a straight face. “Bully! As you come closer, let the camera see your eyes get wider—no, not too fast! A little at a time. And your mouth like an O. Closer…closer…ready… Cut!”

  By then, my eyes were as wide as they could go without falling out. Sam emerged from behind the camera, almost smiling. “Looked good, except the kid kept talking to you.”

  “Yep, I thought that might have blown it. Let’s do it again.”

  My hands flew up in exasperation, which freed Sylvie to dash back up the path. While the boys engaged in camera talk, I sulked, staring at Sam’s cap, which he always turned backward while shooting so the bill did not bump up against the viewfinder. Very practical, but I thought it looked silly. Like so much else in the moving-picture business. They were coming to some sort of agreement (I could tell by the voices, not the words), when Sylvie screamed from the woods: “Come look! Come look!”

  When she lets loose like that, it can mean she’s just excited or she’s being mauled by a very large animal, so I took off at a gallop with the boys close behind. What we found, after crashing through the brush and wire, was Sylvie doing a clog dance on the floor of an abandoned shack. It was about the size of an auto garage, with one door and two windows, a wall missing and the roof partly caved.

  “See?” Sylvie crowed. “I’m in a show!”

  I sagged, gulping for breath. “Is that all? I thought you were being killed.”

  Ranger stared, then smiled, then walked all the way around the pitiful structure, his smile broadening. Finally he burst out, “Look at it!” as though we hadn’t been.

  Sam sounded equally awestruck. “Wonder who owns it.”

  “Nobody! Or nobody who cares. See how it’s falling in? All we’d have to do is pull down the roof—”

  “Take the broken glass out of the windows—”

  “Replace a few boards on the floor—”

  “Clear the brush away—”

  “For what?” I broke in. “Are we going into the real estate business too?”

  Ranger turned to me, his dark eyes fairly crackling. “Don’t you see? It’s perfect for interior shots. We haven’t been able to put any of the story inside because we had no place to shoot it.”

  “Can’t you use a room in your house?”

  “No, no, no. Not enough light. Light’s the problem. You remember that Western we watched them shooting last week?” I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t tell Sam how I’d interrupted the scene. “That’s how interiors have to be shot, in a house with no roof and one wall missing—just like that.” He stabbed a finger at the building, giddy with glee.

  “Unless you have kliegs,” Sam said. When I looked at him, he added, “Klieg lights.”

  “You can’t ‘borrow’ any of those?” I asked, not really joking.

  “Lenders have their limits, girlie.”

  Ranger meanwhile had taken another turn around the house with Sylvie clinging to him and asking what we were going to do next. “This is bully. We can use the wood from the roof to build furniture. A bed, a table—”

  “Pictures on the wall?” Sam suggested.

  “I suppose,” I said slowly, “if you could tack up another kind of wall cover, like a sheet or something, you could use this for more than one…um…interior.”

  The boys looked at each other, possibilities multiplying like lice. “A store!” Ranger shouted.

  “A saloon?” Sam offered.

  “A church—”

  “A barn—”

  “A railroad station,” Ranger concluded reverently. “How’s this for a scene? We go down to Culver City station and set up the camera to look down the track. You shoot the train coming in. We see Isobel step off the passenger coach—”

  “Me, too!” Sylvie clamored.

  “Isobel and Sylvie step off the passenger coach. Then we see them go in
to the station. Next scene, that door opens”—he pointed to the door in the center back wall of the shack—“and they’re inside!”

  What we would do once inside the station, or why we were on the train in the first place, were sensible questions that it did not occur to me to ask. Because for the first time, I was beginning to catch a ray of Ranger’s shining vision. We could go anywhere on the streetcar route and shoot anything, and by cutting and splicing the film, we could make it look like this little house was part of that same place, even though it was miles away.

  Motorcars and flying machines were supposed to be annihilating time and space, but film could actually do that. Or create the illusion anyway. Like in the well-known fable, I was plodding up to the starting line, a poky tortoise to those eager hares. But if Ranger and Sam had a long start on me, I was at least heading in the same direction.

  When they stopped for breath, I said, “Hadn’t we better get started?”

  • • •

  When the three of us returned home, much later in the day than we’d said, Aunt Buzzy threw up her hands. “Where on earth have you been? I was almost ready to call the police.”

  She didn’t look all that disturbed; more like she thought she should be worried but couldn’t quite work up to it. Ranger said, “We’ve been building a playhouse over in Daisy Dell.”

  That line suited our looks if not our ages, for even though I’d tried to keep Sylvie and myself reasonably tidy while clearing away brush and boards, those nails seemed to reach out and grab us. We were more than a little grubby, and Sylvie had managed to get two rips in her dress, which I’d hoped to sew up before anyone noticed.

  “All the way over to Daisy Dell?” remarked Aunt Buzzy in surprise. “That’s a wasteland. What on earth brought you—”

  “Where’s Mother?” I interrupted. This was the first time since our arrival that Mother wasn’t stuck to her sister like a Siamese twin.