Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  Richard pointed at Vale, who stood in his wet clothes, holding his wad of toilet paper.

  “I want him arrested,” Richard said.

  The cops shared a look. One of them shrugged. “We can do that, sir.”

  “Richard, no,” Brophy said with that death-rattle voice of his. He took his ice pack away from his mouth. “It’s not necessary.”

  Richard spat, “Bullshit it isn’t.”

  For Vale, any guilt and sorrow about Candice had been tucked away; he’d dreamt of hitting Brophy for years. Literally dreamt of it. His fantasy hadn’t included Brophy looking like he’d been pulled from a hospital bed, but an admittedly ugly part of him was still savagely happy he’d knocked the fucker down.

  “What are you even doing here, Jared?” Vale said. “What is he doing here, Richard? How could you invite this guy here? After everything?”

  Richard’s eyes settled on Vale with a terrible brightness. That stare just glittering with fury. A chilling grin. He snapped his fingers and pressed his hand to his forehead. “That’s right, I forgot I was supposed to have you okay who I invited to my fucking wife’s funeral. Sorry, Mike. I missed that memo.”

  “After all this guy did—”

  Richard took a step forward. “Listen to me, you fucking alcoholic waste—”

  “Sir,” one of the cops said, putting two fingertips of Richard’s elbow.

  Richard paused, exhaled. He bit his lip and then spoke in a measured, even tone, a voice positively cloying with condescension. Vale could imagine him using the same voice to some low-level office assistant who’d got Richard’s coffee wrong in the morning.

  “Listen to me, Mike. My wife is dead. Candice. Remember her? Her funeral is supposed to be taking place right now. Right this minute. And it’s being held up because I’m here. We’re all here. We shouldn’t be, but we are. And why are we here?”

  Vale pointed at Brophy. “This man—”

  “Why am I here, Mike?”

  “That contract ruined my life. It ruined my life.”

  Richard ignored him. “I’ll tell you why. I’m here because you came and fucked everything up. Because that’s what you do. That’s your whole schtick. You fuck everything up.” He threw his arms out. “Some guys do impressions, some guys can, I don’t know, make balloon animals. What sets Mike Vale apart? What’s his secret power? Oh, that’s right. He’s rolling chaos. It’s all about him. It always has been.”

  “Richard, please,” Brophy said, staring at the floor. “There’s no need. This is all ancient history.”

  “Not ancient enough!” Richard roared, and the cops traded glances again. “It’s not ancient enough, that’s pretty clear, since we’re here right now.”

  A policeman said, “Sir, please. Let’s keep this calm.”

  “I want this asshole arrested.”

  “I’m not going to be pressing charges, Richard,” Brophy said. He took his ice pack away and looked at each man in turn around the room. Even miserable Casper, who still hadn’t said a word.

  Vale sneered. “You’re just the great white knight, aren’t you, Jared? Coming to my rescue again, right?” He took a step forward, couldn’t help himself.

  A cop put a palm on his chest. “You just don’t know when to quit, do you? One more comment like that and you’re going to jail.”

  “Officer, really, it’s fine,” Brophy said. He held his ice pack at his knees, pressed into it—the packaging the same impossible blue as the pool outside—with his bony, withered fingers. “Mike,” he said, “whatever happened is in the past. Bygones and all that. I mean, I haven’t thought of you in years. It’s funny, because someone actually asked me at a party last week, ‘What do you think of Mike Vale?’” Brophy looked past the cops and out the window, as if lost in the memory. “I had to think about it. God’s honest truth. I had to think about the last time I remotely considered you. And that’s what I told him.”

  “You asshole.”

  “It’s true. I said, ‘Why, I haven’t thought about Mike Vale in years.’” He shrugged. “Not in years.”

  Vale leapt at him. Brophy fell back on the bed, his arms raised. One of the cops drove Vale to the floor and pepper-sprayed him. Everyone grappling and tumbling.

  Casper somehow wound up at the bottom of the dog pile and howled as he caught some pepper-spray as well. Limbs flailed. Grunts and curses. A vase fell, shattered. The floor was scattered with flowers, ceramic shards. Vale lay at the bottom of the pile, bellowing and thrashing, snot pouring out of his face. It was a sound an animal would make, high and then low. Someone broke wind during a flurry of exertion. One of the cops stepped on Vale’s hand during the disentanglement of limbs and broke two of his fingers. Then Vale’s scream went high and stayed that way.

  “Now we’re arresting you, dipshit,” the cop said, gasping.

  FRIDAY

  1

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  I went back once. In the life before this one, during my Bill Creswell days. I went back to France.

  It was 1960 and I flew from Brooklyn to Paris and from there took the train to Rouen. I was not surprised to find there were guided, Joan-specific tours in the city. I paid my money and stood among a clutch of other tourists and listened to the guide, a mousy woman with a faint, dusky mustache. Her earnestness charmed me; she loved Joan, anyone could see it.

  I seemed to be both the only American and the only single man among our group, the rest talkative housewives and restless husbands, bored children with rings of chocolate around their mouths.

  Every single adult was smoking, including the guide. Germans and Italians, most of them. The sky continually threatened rain and that at least felt familiar. I thought distractedly of fucking the guide, what that would be like, and the baselessness of it made clear to me that there would be no epiphany for me in Rouen.

  “Joan the Maid’s body was burned three times,” she said, “and her ashes were cast in the Seine. She was later martyred, of course, and the court proceedings leading up to her execution were rendered null in a new trial in 1456.”

  I stood at the back of our group. “And what of the executioner?” I called out, my hands cupped around my mouth. I couldn’t help it. An armada of beehives and flattops turned, frowning.

  Our guide’s eyebrows rose, lovely little caterpillars. “Joan’s executioner?” She smiled sadly. “Little is known of her executioner, actually. They were frequently drunkards or prisoners, as few citizens were willing to do such work.”

  Later that day I rented a car and drove to Moineau. My little village. I took the freeway, of course, a modern wonder, and got lost for a time. When I finally arrived, the sky was deepening to the color of a bruise and everything, of course, was different.

  There were few landmarks I recognized. What had I expected? Much of the place had been charred and ruined by battles between Allied and German forces decades before. Roads were paved in new routes, streetlights brightening everything.

  Our plot of land, as near as I could tell, had become nothing more than a clutch of brambles behind the cracked parking lot of a bakery. I found what may have been a stone pillar that was perhaps our chimney, or perhaps simply rubble deposited there during the war.

  I drove back to Rouen, dropped off the car, flew back to Paris. Then back to New York.

  It had always been unknowable, the Curse, and always would be.

  There would be no defining it. There would be no answer. The greatest fallacy: looking continually for an answer in things that are unanswerable.

  • • •

  Casper and I sat in the van across the street from Men’s Central Jail in downtown LA. It was nine in the morning and we drank coffee and watched the steady stream of men be discharged from the doors. It was like watching a high school let out, if all of the students were bedraggled, weary adults who squinted balefully at the sun and shook their heads at the weight of the previous night’s misdeeds, their coming futures. Casper’s eyes were still
red and swollen from the pepper spray.

  The police had let Vale hand off his keys to me. Casper and I had found a motel the day before, deciding to share a room again—finances were certainly a part of it, but there was also the simple fact that Casper seemed fragile in a way that neither Vale nor I were. He was a kid. I liked him. I wanted him to stick around.

  There had been little of note about our room save for the constellation of dead flies in the ceiling fixture and the fact that our neighbor was either watching pay-per-view porn at a hefty volume or had choreographed a sizeable orgy.

  But I’d charged my phone and after that managed to perform what little detective work I could manage in regards to Lyla. I called the To The Point With Jesse Pamona information line and after various transfers spoke to a studio representative. She told me what I’d already assumed: no, she could not give out any personal information about previous guests of the show. Such a thing, she said, would not only be dangerous, but glaringly illegal.

  No, she could not forward messages to previous guests of the show. No, she could not forward messages, or pass on anecdotes or prayers or threats or rhyming couplets to Ms. Pamona herself. These were all answered in the deathly chipper tone of someone who had fielded these questions countless times before.

  “What exactly can you do?” I said.

  In a bright and chipper voice, she said, “Well, sir, I can give you our website and email address, our time of airings in your region? I can give you our upcoming schedule of topics if you’d like to be considered for a guest spot on the show?”

  “But you can’t help me. You won’t give me the last names of either of the guests from that particular show?”

  As brightly as ever, she said, “Not a chance on earth,” and hung up on me.

  An hour later, we were watching a nature documentary—sharks and their ceaseless ministrations—when my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but it turned out to be Vale calling from jail. He’d be spending the night, he said, but would be getting released the next morning. He gave me the address of Men’s Central, and Casper shook his head, a wet towel over his eyes, as I listened and wrote the address down.

  “We’ll be there in the morning,” I said. Vale thanked me, sounding tired, wrung out. I wondered distractedly what kind of physical price he’d be paying for a full night without a drink. On the TV a great white burst through the rippled surface of the ocean, pink maw sluicing seawater and blood.

  So now, the next morning, nine a.m. Casper not looking so hot with his still-red eyes, the knot on his jaw. Personally, I’d slept well once the calisthenics next door had quieted down—we’d all just been run ragged.

  But it was all taking longer than I thought it would; I had to find Lyla, but things kept getting in the way. When had this sense of stupid loyalty to everyone cropped up inside me? There was the common feeling of expecting death at any minute—I was closer to it now than I’d been in centuries. I’d never made it this far along in the Curse.

  But I was focusing on the wrong things. Lyla’s trail was going cold. I had this allegiance to these two and it was throwing me off.

  Casper sat in the passenger seat. He blew on his coffee and frowned. “He’s flat-out crazy, Marvin. He’s nuts.”

  “I feel like I owe him,” I said, tapping something out on the steering wheel with my thumbs.

  Casper rolled his eyes at that. “You seriously do not owe that guy one thing, man.”

  “I just need to stick around for a bit. I can’t explain it.”

  “He’s got issues, Marvin. He’s a guy who gave us a ride, so what? That old guy had cancer or something, did you see him? And Vale just lays him out. What’s next, pushing kids in wheelchairs down stairs? You know what I mean? The guy gives Dunk a run for his money.”

  Casper was right. I knew it. In my mind, I’d left Vale and struck out on my own a half dozen times by then. And yet he’d been my portent, a sign when I needed one. When I wanted one, desperately. My one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

  That was the hassle about trying to divine symbols, about resolutely looking for answers in things: who was to say these roadblocks weren’t part of the journey itself?

  “There he is,” I said, raising my chin. Vale walked down the steps of the jail looking old and hunched over in his blood-dotted t-shirt. A wind came along that sent scraps of trash skittering down the street. His hair blew over his eyes, and God, he just looked like an old man.

  Casper pursed his lips and pulled his hat low over his eyes. He put his hand on the door handle. “Guys like Mike Vale and Dunk? They just keep running until they run out of room.”

  We both got out. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said through our open doors.

  The shrug of a resigned kid. “Guys like that just run until they’re cornered. I think it’d be real stupid of us if we’re there when it happened.”

  • • •

  “My hand’s killing me,” Vale said. It looked like it. The whole thing was wrapped in a lumpy bandage the size of a loaf of bread, a wedged metal splint poked out the end of it. “You guys got a cigarette?”

  “How you feeling?” Casper said. He was leaning against the side of the van with his arms crossed. Mike dipped his chin, gave him a flat, wordless stare.

  “About what I figured,” Casper said.

  Vale opened the sliding side door of the van, his bandaged hand curled to his chest. He lumbered in, clumsy and bearlike, and pushed his way through the boxes. He lay on his back, his arms on his chest, legs bent. Feet still on the pavement. His sigh was weary and drawn. His beer-gut mounded out of his shirt, and his forehead still looked like someone had dragged him along the road by his skull for a few blocks.

  “I want to go see Candice,” he said simply. “And then I want a drink.”

  Casper hooked an arm onto the roof of the van, leaned down. “Seriously? No thank you for either of us? We waited for you, man.”

  “Thank you,” Vale said dully, his eyes closed.

  Casper looked at him a moment longer, like he was expecting more. But there was nothing forthcoming from Vale. “I swear,” Casper said, “you and Dunk were probably conjoined twins or something. Two shitheads separated at birth.”

  2

  Culver City again.

  Holy Cross Cemetery was two hundred acres and within spitting distance of a half dozen movie studios. The parking lot was massive but reasonably empty that early in the morning.

  Vale slid the door open and stepped from the van like an old man, stiff and slow. His hand throbbed and there was the constant and maddening itch of his forehead as well.

  He’d spent half the night in the ER next to a hatchet-faced cop, waiting for his fingers to be X-rayed and splinted, and then he’d gone through booking. He’d been placed in various cells as he was processed, fingerprinted, interviewed by an EMS guy about his hand, the pepper spray. Twenty dudes in the holding cell with him and if anyone slept, he wasn’t one of them. Before they let him go, the releasing officer had told him some lawyer had talked to the prosecuting attorney and gotten the assault charges dropped.

  Brophy.

  One phone call from Brophy, and that had been that.

  The need for a drink was like some animal, nerve-deep thing way down inside him that yammered a single relentless note over and over again.

  The Holy Cross office was a whitewashed stucco building capped with a roof of red tiles. The sign on the door said it wouldn’t open up for another half an hour. Marvin and Casper offered to get coffee nearby while Vale wandered the grounds. He could not remember being this tired before, this heartsick.

  There were innumerable graves, some little more than flat marble slabs flush with the grass, while others had been carved from massive blocks of stone, voluminous marble-hewn crosses. Stone cherubs lounged pensively, chubby fists on chins. Robins hopped nervously on the ground and sang in tree limbs as he passed. Flowers dotted the sloping lines of gravestones, and for something to do, he went about r
ighting those bouquets that had been toppled. He leaned over and a wave of dizziness gripped him, shimmering black starbursts in his periphery. His hands were freezing. Thousands and thousands of graves here, just in this one place. All these interred bones. Just to think of it. Had they all been afraid to die? Terrified of it, like he was?

  Melville Wright. 1908–1978. Loving Husband & Father.

  Daniel Astor. 1919–2000. May Your Light Always Shine.

  Angela Parsons. 1944–1988. Beloved Mother.

  He found Bing Crosby’s grave and, near it, Bela Lugosi’s. He passed a funeral and gave it a wide berth, and later turned his face away as he walked past an old woman reading a book in a lawn chair in front of a grave.

  He saw, on a hill beyond, what may have been either a ghost or a man trying vainly to find a particular marker. And why not? There were two hundred acres here, so many square miles of the dead. It was one or the other.

  Inside the office there was a stack of brochures on the counter: Celebrity Graves! Find Famous Stars at Holy Cross Cemetery! Five Dollars! A white-haired woman stood behind the counter tapping on a keyboard. Her customer service instincts kicked in, but her face froze when she registered Vale’s appearance.

  He tried to give his most reassuring smile and rested his good hand on the countertop. “Hi there. My, uh, my ex-wife had services here yesterday.”

  She softened a little. “I’m sorry for your loss, sir.”

  “Thank you. Thanks. I wasn’t able to make it, but I was hoping you might be able to help me locate her gravesite.”

  “Certainly.” She turned to her computer. “We can do that. Her name?”

  “Candice Hessler.”

  The woman peered up from the computer and looked at Vale over the tops of her glasses. “You’re the husband,” she said archly.

  “Ex-husband.”

  She took her hands from the keyboard. “You’re the ex-husband of Candice Hessler. Candice Hessler, the writer. Just to be clear.”