Some of the gents, particularly the Southerners, didn’t approve of his referring to the white boy as his manservant. In their opinion, if he wanted a servant he ought to have hired himself a nigger. Their displeasure, however, was somewhat alleviated when the Englishman complained that the boy refused to shave him, brush his clothes, or black his boots. The gentlemen told him this wasn’t England. In America, niggers came in only one colour – black. The Englishman said that if this was democracy, it was outrageous.
The boy, however, did condescend to keep his employer’s hunting gear in good order. Most afternoons he could be found sitting outside their cabin surrounded by the Englishman’s armoury, sharpening knives and hatchets, cleaning and oiling the Colt pistol, the Winchester, the Henry, the Sharps breechloading buffalo gun, the Westly Richards tiger gun. The frock coats were mightily intrigued by this latter example of British gunsmithing. As the boy worked, the gun-fanciers clustered around him and loudly debated the merits and demerits of the two-foot-long.65-calibre barrel, of the one-ounce ball it fired, of the ingenious spring which regulated the trigger pull.
One week out from Sioux City, Dawe propped this cannon on the railing of the second deck, drew a bead on a lone bull buffalo a hundred yards distant on a cutbank overhanging the Missouri and fired a shot that spun the Englishman on the deck boards like a dust devil. The smoke cleared. The bull stood on the promontory, motionless as a statue on a pediment. Limey marksmanship and Limey guns were hooted. Then, suddenly, in mid-hoot, the buffalo crumpled up like brown butcher paper balled in an invisible hand, pitched headlong over the cutbank, ploughed down the slope in a fanfare of uprooted willow and bounding stones, sliding to rest in the shallows of the river, a hole over its heart big enough to put your fist in. As one of the gents said later, “You shoot a tiger with that, the only way you going to get you a tiger rug is hold a quilting bee and stitch the bitty pieces together again.” With one shot the Englishman vaulted from curiosity to celebrity. Someone even reversed policy and bought him a drink that night.
The Yankton proceeded upriver, slow and unstately. Often she ran aground and had to “grasshopper” herself off sandbars with short bursts of power to the stern wheel and winches attached to long spars planted in the muck on either side of the bows. There were other delays. High winds forced her to lay up. The boiler burned through and had to be repaired. A deck hand fell overboard and drowned; his corpse had to be retrieved and buried. Ten days out from Sioux City, a herd of buffalo turned the channel black and bellowing and solid, so solid a man could have walked from bank to bank, using their backs as stepping stones. Passengers broke out guns and whisky and soon the Yankton was cloaked in shifting clouds of blue gun-smoke, lit with orange muzzle-flashes like a painting of the battle of Trafalgar. The gents on the hurricane deck poured fire down into the river, levering their Winchesters like pump handles, ejected casings making brass rainbows as they arced into the air. Some of the great beasts passed so close to the boat that men in steerage hung over the rails, touching the muzzles of their rifles to their humps as they fired. Dozens of the dead spun in the grip of the current, streaming tributary blood, the wounded roaring as they were sucked downstream. Hunters ran frenziedly from starboard to port, struggling for one last shot, whooping and swearing and jostling for vantage, throwing spent rifles to the deck and drawing revolvers which they emptied into the dark, struggling mass. And all the while, a prospector pranced about the deck, sawing “Dixie” on a fiddle, as the bodies swept by, like sandbars torn loose from their moorings.
The further the boat journeyed up the river and the closer it drew to its ultimate destination, the more vexing delays became for those on board. Frequent halts were made to take on fuel, either at the yards of “woodhawks” or, between stations, to land parties to cut wood. When men were landed, the captain saw to it that they were accompanied by an armed guard for fear of hostiles, a guard for which the Englishman always volunteered himself and his manservant. Once ashore, the Indian-fighting gents who had blown hard on the hurricane deck about the scalps they had lifted turned uneasy, bickering about whose turn it was to deploy himself as a lonesome lookout on the fringes of the cottonwood groves. Dawe’s sweet-tempered and smooth-as-butter manner sawed on their nerves, seemed a reproach to the ants scurrying in their pants. They put it down to his ignorance of the kind of devious, heartless, sneaking, despicable, dirty foes Indians were. It grated on them the way he talked, booming his way through the willows with that plummy, toney voice, like he was bugling for Peigans, trumpeting them in for the kill. He made everyone edgy, everyone, that is, except the skinny kid beside him who had no other handle than “the Englishman’s boy.” No one had troubled to ask this boy his name, and if they had, an answer was no certainty. The Englishman might have known it, but nobody ever heard him use it. Dawe just called him “boy.”
Dawe’s boy had the gaunt, cadaverous look of the rural poor, of the runt who has sucked the hind tit, who has been whupped with horse-halters and stove-wood, anything hard and hurting that came to hand. His anthracite eyes did his talking for him. They said: Expect no quarter. Give none. He owned a face white and cold as a well-digger’s ass. He didn’t string more than five words together at a time and no one could place his accent. He was seventeen but looked fifteen, stunted by a diet of bread and lard and strong tea. Everyone took him for a runaway from some hard-scrabble, heartbreak farm. Out West, his kind were thick as ticks on a dog.
He made quite a sight armed with the Englishman’s fine guns, a lethal scarecrow with pearl-handled Colt revolver tucked into the pocket of a patched jacket, chased Winchester cradled in his arms, a bandolier of cartridges draped over his shoulder. He walked with a hunter’s tread in his rotten boots, heel-toe, heel-toe, alone through the drifted leaves, the budding trees, deeper into the thickets, the voices behind him starting to shimmer and blend with the ringing of the axes, the rasp of the saws. When he found a suitable tree, he climbed, Winchester tied around his neck with a leather thong, light and nimble and easy, stepping higher and higher up the branch-rungs, up to his roost in the last bough stout enough to support him. There he clung, swaying in the wind, scanning the dun plains heaving themselves off into the distance, watching for Assiniboine, Sioux, Peigan. There he clung, smiling. He had heard one of the fancy men ask the Englishman why he had brought the kid ashore. Could he shoot? Because unless the Englishman knew he could shoot, there was no point bringing him. “I don’t know if he can shoot,” Dawe had said. “But I do know he’ll stand and fight.”
The Englishman’s boy wasn’t a smiler. Even with the moon standing brave and blue between the funnels of the Yankton, the hard prairie stars glittering ice-chips, the boat rocking in the ebb and lull of the water, he did not treat himself to a smile, especially not when dancing. The quality liked niggers and white trash like him to grin when entertaining. “Fly them heels, boy!” they shouted. He flew them. But he handed around no smiles. From the waist up he was rigor mortis, plank-stiff, arms nailed to his sides, poker-faced. But below, the greasy pant legs flapped and bucked, the skinny legs jerked and twitched, the boots drummed the deck boards louder and louder. “Buck and wing!” the women cried, and the coins, white as frost, began to skip and bounce about the blurry boots. Around and around he spun, showing himself to the whole encroaching circle like a damn hurdy-gurdy girl, cutting licks and capers on the deck, faster and faster, outracing the wheeze of the mouth organ, the scrape of the fiddle, outracing the faces looming dizzily at him against a background of dark water, dark sky, faces glaring white-hot in the light of kerosene lamps.
Fill your eyes, you sons of bitches. Throw your money. This poor whoreson’s a-dancing on your grave. Believe it.
Hung there suspended between a desert sky and a desert earth, ears humming with wind, alert and predatory as a hawk, he smiled. The Englishman knew him if nobody else did.
4
I have a face and a name. With these, my pursuit of Shorty McAdoo can begin. But the first busi
ness I have to take care of the morning after my meeting with Chance is my mother. I telephone the director of the Mount of Olives Rest Home and order her moved to a larger room, one with plenty of sun and plenty of windows she can spend her time cleaning. Thanks to the miraculous doubling of my salary, I can afford to do it.
My mother had a hard life and one of the hardest things in it was my father. Because he was a labourer in railroad construction, we saw almost nothing of him from the time the frost went out of the ground until it went back into it. That suited me just fine, but in the winters we paid for it, having a lantern-jawed bully to contend with day after day, the three of us trapped in a cramped apartment where my mother and I went around on tiptoe so as not to provoke him. The only time I ever saw his hardness shaken was when he was drunk. Then he would sometimes go terribly maudlin, cry and beg for forgiveness after he hit my mother, or take me up on his knee, rub my face raw with a two-day growth and blubber about my lameness.
At last, one winter when I was ten, he neglected to come home to Saskatoon for the winter. We had been abandoned. My mother took this very badly; worry about money always made her desperate. She took work cleaning houses and we stumbled along from one financial disaster to another, often rescued by municipal relief, or church charities. All this took its toll, and during the next four years her behaviour became increasingly erratic and odd. Often, when she should have been at work, I would come home from school to find her lying despondent on the couch, all the curtains in the apartment drawn, the place cloaked in stale darkness. If I talked to her, she wouldn’t answer; if I coaxed her to eat, she refused. I began to spend more and more time away from home, mostly in the public library where it was warm and the old-maid librarian treated me kindly. In the beginning, I read biographies of poor boys who had made good like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie, seeking to discover the key to the money that would rescue her. But in time, like her I too lost hope, and as an escape turned to reading Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.A. Henty.
By the time I turned fourteen, the writing was on the wall. My mother was no longer remotely capable of holding a job and I quit school to help support us. I started as a stock and delivery boy in a grocery, gradually working my way up to clerk. I liked school and resented leaving, but my despair was not total. Queen Victoria had not been dead so very long then, and the nineteenth century had wrapped a warm muffler of sentiment around the hearts of school-marms, Dickens having made cripples touching and lovable. I hated those female teachers whose faces went sweetly vacuous and temporizingly benign when they turned to me. Although they didn’t mean them to, those looks thrust me on the outside. Outside became a state of mind. Maybe that’s what Chance’s intuition detected in me, that, and a sense of grievance. Because of Chance, for the first time in my life I felt myself gratefully moving to the centre of something important, admitted to an inner circle.
In 1914 war broke out. If a bum leg ever had a silver lining, my luck was that being crippled preserved me from the slaughter in Flanders, probably saved my life. There seemed to be no luck that could save my mother. With every year that passed, her condition worsened, apathy and depression now alternating with periods of wild, frantic activity. Returning from work, I would find all the furniture in the flat piled in the middle of the floor while she “house-cleaned,” scrubbing everything in sight with a crazy, fixed determination. One day I came home to discover the building in an uproar; she had let herself into a neighbour’s unlocked apartment and “house-cleaned” that, too, going so far as to burn some of Mrs. Kenzie’s dirty laundry in a barrel out back. The police were called, she was brought before a magistrate, and committed to the North Battleford Hospital for the Insane.
A year later, I left Saskatchewan, the doctors telling me her case was hopeless. On my final visit, as she sat on a ward surrounded by forty other female lunatics, she asked one thing of her son. To buy her a new dress so if I happened to lose the memory of her face I would be able to pick her out by her clothing the next time I visited.
I headed for the States in the winter of 1919, hungry for a future. For the next couple of years I drifted around the Pacific Northwest doing odd jobs, the longest of which was working on a weekly newspaper in a small town in Washington. Then The Sentinel went under and I hit the road again, making my way to Los Angeles. It was there that Rachel Gold tossed me a life jacket. I was living in the YMCA and limiting myself to one meal a day, bacon and eggs, the cheapest hot meal on the lunch-counter menu, when a woman climbed up on a stool beside me and struck up a conversation about the book I was reading, Jack London’s The Iron Heel. That in itself was unusual; back in those days, even in the Babylon which the American public presumed Los Angeles to be, women didn’t strike up conversations with strange men. It wasn’t long before I learned just how unusual a woman Rachel Gold was. She was the first “new” woman I had ever met, a woman on the pattern of Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker, wittily cynical, tough, intellectual, and very pretty. She came right out and asked what I thought of the book, a novel that predicted the destruction of the labour movement and a takeover of the United States government by a fascist organization. I said I found it farfetched. In seconds, she was contradicting me, squirming restlessly on the counter stool, tugging and twisting fistfuls of her lacquer-black hair, cut short in the Clara Bow style, looking like a woman trying to shake, to wring ideas out of her brain. I didn’t argue, only laughed and shrugged. Who else did I read? she wanted to know. What did I think of Mencken? In minutes, we found common ground in an admiration for Dreiser and Norris. As she talked she radiated a kind of alertness, an electricity that made it impossible to take your eyes off her. She was small, quick in speech and gesture; her dark brown eyes were quick too, flashing her judgements a split-second before she spoke them. She was vulgar and funny; she made me laugh. Of Dreiser she said, “He’s the greatest American novelist not writing in English.” She mentioned her second husband, “A guy,” she said, “who always looked good spending somebody else’s money at the race-track.” She had no conception of privacy and when she asked me what I did, her charm prompted me to tell her the truth. I said I was out of work. At the end of an hour, she butted out her last cigarette, hopped down off the stool, and thrust a tiny white hand at me. “Rachel Gold,” she said. I gave her my name and we shook hands. She wanted to know where I was staying; I told her. “Well, be seeing you,” she said as she swung out of the lunch room, a little woman of five feet, owner of bewitching hips.
The next morning there was a note for me at the desk of the YMCA with an address – if I was interested in a job. This is how I became a junior scenarist at Zenith Pictures. As impossible as it sounds, things like this happened in Hollywood in those days. The whole business was shaking down into what it was to become, and while it did, everything was provisional, raw, sketchy. Plumbers like Fatty Arbuckle and laundresses like Mabel Normand became overnight stars. People learned on the job; there were no such things as qualifications, except knowing somebody. The person I knew – scarcely knew – was Rachel Gold, a scriptwriter who I had no idea was as respected, as sought-after in Hollywood as Elinor Glyn, Frances Marion, and Anita Loos, women who then wielded more power behind the scenes than any women in Hollywood have since.
On Rachel Gold’s say-so I got hired. But as she said, “Around here you get one kick at the cat and you better hit it square in the ass, or you’ll be out of here tomorrow.” I became a protégé of hers, an unofficial assistant. It is often said of men that they divide women into virgins and whores and I believe Rachel Gold did something similar with men; to her they were either mensches or gigolos. A mensch was a man you could talk to but wouldn’t sleep with, and a gigolo was a man you could sleep with but wouldn’t want to talk to. Her first husband, a Jewish optometrist, whom she had married when she was seventeen, was a mensch. Her second husband, a Gentile from South Carolina, the man who impressively and caddishly decorated race-tracks and gambling dens, had been a gigolo.
In Rachel’s eyes, I definitely fell into the mensch category and that made it possible for her to work with me. A lot of my time was spent vetting books for her scenarios, horrifically bad melodramas she couldn’t bring herself to read. If I said a novel had potential, then she would read it. The rest of my time I wrote titles, the cards flashed onscreen to help the audience follow the plot of the movie. My first day in the writing department Rachel Gold gave me her crash course in the art of scenario-writing, delivered in the Menckenian rhetoric she often affected when talking about the movie business and the Booboisie it catered to. “There is only one principle of successful comedy-writing – Kick Authority in the Ass,” she declared. “When the Posterior of Power is clutched in agony, all the little people from Mobile to Minneapolis are convulsed with hilarity. So kick him, My Little Truth Seeker, kick him.” On writing subtitles for the historical epics then in vogue, her advice was, “For anything prior to 1600, be it Babylon or Tudor England, crib the King James version of the Bible. This satisfies the nose-pickers in Chattanooga who can read, although sometimes they get confused and believe they’re conning the word of God, which can later lead to confusion in tent meetings. For American historical costume dramas, the Declaration of Independence is an unfailing model for the speech of the quality. When it comes to frontier gibberish I merely reproduce the kitchen-table conversation of the relatives of my former husband. The Gentile one.”
“The true test of any scenario,” Rachel was fond of saying, “is to read it to a cameraman. Cameramen are invariably Irish and invariably drunk. If they can grasp the plot, the moral, the theme of your simple tale through an alcoholic haze, you can be assured you have struck the proper intellectual level. If one of these sons of the Emerald Isle happens to weep upon hearing your masterpiece, what can I say except – El Dorado! A word to the wise. Never consult a story editor about your script. Story editors are people who once harboured higher literary ambitions – such as writing fiction for one of the better women’s magazines. A house divided against itself cannot stand, Vincent, and story editors are cracked from top to bottom, conscience-stricken souls who berate themselves for selling out for a mess of pottage. They are whores who delude themselves they only lent their cherries, not irretrievably lost them. I, on the other hand, know exactly who popped me, when, where, and for how much.”
The Englishman’s Boy Page 4