The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Not so quick, asshole, the boss says.

  Stanley ignores him, lifts Claudio to his feet.

  I wan’ go home, Claudio says. Sick.

  Listen, the boss says, clapping a hand on Stanley’s shoulder. We saw the little con you were running tonight. Tell your friend to drop his drunk act. We need to have a discussion.

  Stanley doesn’t shrug the hand off, doesn’t stop moving either. From the way these goons carry themselves, Stanley figures they’ve all seen The Blackboard Jungle maybe a dozen times apiece, but he keeps the smirk off his face for now. Yeah? Stanley says. So discuss.

  You know who we are, buddy?

  Stanley swivels to face him. Should I? he says.

  You damn well should. We’re Shoreline Dogs.

  Stanley gives the guy a slow up-and-down. Shoreline Dogs, he says.

  That’s right. This is our turf. Nobody operates here without our say-so. What was your take tonight?

  Stanley looks away, shrugs. Twenty, he says.

  Bullshit.

  So what’s your cut?

  Our cut is all of it, jerkoff. You didn’t ask permission. If you’re gonna work the boardwalk it’s half your take from now on. Turn out your goddamn pockets.

  Bafoom, Claudio says, sagging against Stanley. Need bafroom.

  Stanley stares evenly at the boss. Then he shifts his focus over the guy’s shoulder to the rest of the gang, two blocks away, closing in. What if I tell you to go climb up your thumb? he says.

  Well, then I guess we’re gonna have to pound you. Right now, and again every time we see you. You and your faggot friend.

  Yeah, the whitehaired kid says, pushing in close, breathing on Stanley’s neck. We don’t tolerate fags around here.

  He’s got a little extra sparkle in his voice, like this is a favorite subject with him, but that’s fine: Stanley knows how to play this now. Okay, chum, he says. But I’m keeping a couple of bucks. My buddy and me ain’t had a meal today.

  Stanley reaches into his jeans, palms the dollar, turns the pocket out. Then he tips Claudio toward the gluesniffer, and Claudio drapes over him, moaning. Stanley loads up his fist with sand from the other pocket, fakes a switch, and holds the dollar bill out to the boss with his left. A few grains leak between his fingers, but nobody sees.

  The rest’s in my sock, Stanley says. He lifts his foot to the bench.

  The boss reaches for the bill, then stops, wary. Hold it, jack, he’s saying.

  The whitehaired kid has just spotted his pals up the block; he’s raising an arm, opening his mouth. Stanley slings the sand in the boss’s eyes, throws himself backward off the bench, and elbows Whitey in the face. His funny-bone connects just under the kid’s nose, which starts spurting; Stanley’s arm goes tingly. The boss is digging into his motorcycle jacket for a knife, swinging blind: his hand ruffles Stanley’s hair. Stanley pops a crouch—just like his dad taught him—and kicks the guy in the balls. He can hear shouts now from up the block, sandy boots scraping wooden planks.

  Claudio has come to life, punching the gluesniffer in the breadbasket; now he’s got the doubled-over kid stiffarmed, holding him off by the head. The two of them are drifting across the boardwalk, orbiting each other like a binary star. Stanley drops his shoulder and knocks the gluesniffer on his ass. Go, he yells at Claudio. Go go go go go.

  Claudio’s wearing a perplexed look as Stanley runs past him—he hasn’t seen the real trouble coming—but his longer legs and easy stride catch him up in a hurry. Stanley sticks to the boardwalk, dodging people, zigzagging whenever he comes to a cross-street to try to fake a turn. The hooligans are way back, but closing in. Claudio could blow them off with no problem—his great-grandmother was a pureblood Indian from some tribe famous for its runners, or so he says, though he barely looks Mexican, never mind Indian—but Stanley’s not so quick. The rubber soles on his new Pedwins speed him up, but he can already feel blisters rising on his heels. The faces of pedestrians flash by like funhouse images: shocked, angry, laughing. For once in his life Stanley half hopes they’ll run across a cop.

  But there are no cops, and now the greasers are barking. At first it’s only a couple of them, but soon they’re all doing it: a rhythmic chorus of low woofs and frantic yaps, in and out of sync, echoing down the colonnade. It’s a typical smalltime JD stunt, corny and dumb, but a worm of genuine fear still crawls down Stanley’s spine to his tailbone, and puts extra spring into his step.

  At the stopsign at Pacific Stanley bears left into the intersection and starts running down the middle of the street. Cars roll past him on both sides, in opposite directions. Motorists scream at him. Somebody honks. Claudio’s gotten gummed up on the sidewalk, surprised by Stanley’s sudden move to the center. Stanley glances back to make sure he’s catching up, and when he turns forward again, there’s the hotrodder’s girl, just ahead to his left, her teeth bared, her finger pointing, standing in the passenger seat of a hopped-up Model A like a charioteer. He hears the driver-side door open as he barrels by, then the hotrodder’s voice. Hey! the hotrodder says. Hey you!

  Stanley hits the brakes, spins, jogs back a few steps, waiting for Claudio, who’s still sprinting along the sidewalk. The hotrodder is in the middle of the street, waving an empty bottle by its neck, illuminated from below by the headlights of the Nash stopped behind his roadster. Farther back, Stanley sees the dark shapes of Shoreline Dogs under the hanging streetlamps, outlined against shop windows. One of them gets stuck behind the hotrodder’s open door, scrambles around it cursing, and the hotrodder swats him in the shoulder with the empty bottle. The driver of the Nash is trying to back up.

  Stanley and Claudio run through a grassy traffic circle, across a parking lot, aiming themselves toward whatever pockets of darkness they can find. They make a right, then a left. The wide street ahead is all residential: small weathered bungalows, sagging porches with steel-pipe railings. The waterlogged air traps the city lights, and the sky glows seaweed-green; Stanley can see shaggy crowns of palmtrees figured against it, and the derricks of the oilfield maybe a quarter-mile farther on. There’s no sound coming from behind now except the drone of distant traffic. Stanley slows down, lightheaded, to get his bearings.

  Who was making that noise? Claudio says. He’s not even winded.

  The guys chasing us. Who do you think?

  Claudio looks at him. But they were lying on the ground, he says.

  Not those guys, shit-for-brains. The ten hoods coming right behind ’em. You didn’t see ’em?

  Claudio wrinkles his brow, takes a skeptical look over his shoulder. What hoods? he says.

  The avenue is joined by a smaller street just ahead, and Stanley checks the streetsign in the corner lot: Cordova Court, running into Rialto Avenue. They’re only a block off Windward, but the neighborhood feels different, quieter. Maybe half of the nearby houses are lit up inside, some by the haunted flicker of television screens. Cool jazz plays on a hi-fi somewhere to the right. Through an open window, Stanley hears a woman laugh softly.

  That was a real nice move, by the way, Stanley says. Grabbing that thug by the head. That was pretty slick.

  You liked my move?

  No, Stanley says. That was what you call sarcasm. Buddy, we are gonna have to do something to toughen you up.

  Claudio’s opening his mouth to object when a scuffle of shoes comes from behind them, and then a voice, wordless and half-human, baying like a bluetick coonhound, like hounds in movies bay. Stanley and Claudio turn and run across the untended lawns, Stanley’s vision tunneling and going white, his footfalls hollow in his ears, like he’s hearing them through an empty coffeecan. Cordova angles to the right, but Stanley continues straight ahead toward a dark and sagging cottage, grabbing Claudio’s sleeve to make him follow, casting a glance backward to see whether the Dogs have made the corner yet. They haven’t.

  To the left of the bungalow there’s a low wooden fence, the rotting slats strung together with wire, and Stanley jumps it, catches his foot, and
lands facefirst in a weedy garden; his knees sink into loose earth, and a cedar trellis crunches under his shoulder. Behind him, Claudio hops the fence like an antelope, lands gracefully, and Stanley grabs his feet and brings him down, too.

  Another howl comes from the street: the Dogs drawing close; he can’t tell how many. He scrambles on top of Claudio, puts fingers across his lips. Soon he can hear the Dogs in nearby yards, whispering back and forth. Claudio’s chest rises and falls evenly. Stanley’s own ragged breath and pistoning heart beat against it in raucous counterpoint.

  The porchlight of the house next door comes on, deepening the shadows in the garden, lighting up two Dogs as they slink past a patchy boxwood hedge. A door creaks, and then a man’s voice: Who’s out there?

  The bushes crash as the Dogs retreat. Stanley knows they’ll be in the clear now if they can just lie low for a few minutes. He lets out a long breath to calm himself. When he fills his lungs again, the air is a cloud of odors he knows at once but cannot yet sort out or identify: rosemary, horseradish, garlic, mint, lemon verbena, tomato vine, the plants crushed under their fallen bodies. In the absence of words, Stanley’s mind retrieves a succession of kitchens—his grandmother frying latkes, his mother cubing lamb, the simmering cauldron of red sauce made by a neighbor woman whose name is lost to him—and beneath all these, his grandfather’s hands, tearing bitter herbs for Passover. It’s as if this plot of disturbed earth a continent’s breadth from his birthplace has recognized him, acknowledged him. Welcome, it says. We have been waiting so long.

  Stanley is filled with such joy and such certainty that he has to bite hard on Claudio’s lapel to keep himself from laughing, from screaming. Claudio’s black eyes widen in shock, but he makes no sound. He places a smooth palm on Stanley’s cheek, runs it through his tangled hair, and brings his head to rest in the pocket above his collarbone. Claudio’s neck is warm beneath his forehead, sticky with mist. Stanley draws closer to him, and they lie that way for what seems like many hours, long past the time they know it’s safe to rise.

  17

  The next week brings rain that drowns what’s left of February and flushes out the waterfront streets. Stanley and Claudio spend the days huddled under blankets in their storefront lair, reading to stave off boredom, books and magazines propped against the hillock of their tangled legs. Claudio works through a stack of glossies that Stanley stole for him from a newsstand on Market Street—Photoplay, Modern Screen, Movie Mirror—scanning them as if in search of clues. He speaks up now and then to report a discovery. The talent agent of Tab Hunter is the same as that of Rock Hudson, he says. Also that of Rory Calhoun. I believe the names of these men are not their true names.

  Stanley reads The Mirror Thief. It’s a book of poems, but it tells a story: an alchemist and spy called Crivano steals an enchanted mirror, and is pursued by his enemies through the streets of a haunted city. Stanley long ago stopped paying the story any mind. He’s come to regard it as a fillip at best, at worst as a device meant to conceal the book’s true purpose, the powerful secret it contains. Nothing, he’s quite certain, could be so obscure by accident.

  As he reads, his eyes graze each poem’s lines like a needle over an LP’s grooves, atomizing them into letters, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he’s looking for is a key: a gap in the book’s mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings—reading sideways, reading upsidedown, reading whitespace instead of text—but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. The usual suspects.

  On the book’s second printed page—a poetic narrative by Adrian Welles, Seshat Books, Los Angeles, copyright 1954—is a brief inscription: a message from whoever gave it away to the person they gave it to, somebody called Alan. Stanley’s never been able to make out what the fiercely slanted handwriting says; one word looks like salad, another naked. He’s long since given up on deciphering it. Above the message, Adrian Welles’s printed name has been struck through with a curving slash of black ink. Stanley used to flip to this page and wonder why somebody would cross the name out like that, but lately he doesn’t think about it at all.

  Sometimes he’ll close his eyes and close the book, balancing its spine on the mounts of his palm. He’ll picture a dark figure—Welles, Crivano, himself—slinking through the streets outside, cloaked in a slicker and a dripping hat, in pursuit of some unfathomable objective: a void errant in the blurred landscape. Stanley will hold this image as long as he can, until other concerns encroach—what if Welles has left this place? what if he’s dead?—and then he’ll let the book fall open and he’ll read the first line his eyes fall on, hoping it will contain a clue as to where he should go, what he should do next. Stanley knows there’s no real logic to this practice—or, rather, that the logic is the book’s logic, not the world’s—but this is as it should be. The point where the book and the world intersect is exactly what he’s looking for.

  Sometimes a line offers clear direction: I seek you in constant carnival, masked Crivano, along the waterline. More often not: Omphale’s husband has rendered his judgment! You sully your hands with occult burrowing, but the goldmaker’s shame still whispers from the reeds! Sometimes a passage seizes his attention for no reason he can name—

  Aqua alta: Crivano’s feet

  fuse with those of his watery double.

  Look not upon your confederates,

  the knaves hung from the columns!

  Two-headed, in two worlds,

  your facedown likeness

  finds his silent image in the sea.

  —and lures him in, propelling him to the final page, the final lines. 17 February 1953, followed by two names: this town, this state. The map that guided him here.

  Whenever Stanley and Claudio become bored with reading, bored with each other and themselves, they go to the movies. The first-run theaters in Santa Monica are the best place to see the lush and earnest melodramas that Claudio favors, but Stanley prefers the Fox on Lincoln: it’s nearby, half the price, and its B-grade westerns and horror movies are more suited to his taste.

  But the Fox isn’t safe in the rain. Stanley and Claudio visit it a few days after their run-in with the Dogs, crossing Abbot Kinney and Electric, following Fourth to Vernon, seeking shelter under the crowns of eucalypts and rubber trees, still soaked to the skin by the time they spot the theater’s neon sign. Stanley shivers in his seat as the first reel begins, distracted as always by the projector’s machinegun stutter, the quick drip of images splashed on the screen.

  It’s a monster movie: a volcano releases giant scorpions from their underground lair, and they attack Mexico City. Stanley picked this one because it has lots of Mexican actors in it that Claudio probably knows; also, he wants to see how the scorpions work. He doesn’t generally have much patience for sitting in theaters, but giant movie monsters like the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth and the dinosaur in The Beast of Hollow Mountain fascinate him. The first time he saw one—it was Mighty Joe Young at the Lido on Fordham Road; Stanley was eight years old; his father had left him there while meeting a girlfriend around the block—he’d understood immediately how it was done, could sense the invisible hands reaching between the frames to imbue the figures with life, and he knew he’d discovered something important, a small secret that opened onto bigger secrets. The trick wasn’t in the fake monsters, or even in the riffling spool of film, but right there in his own head the whole time. The eye that tricked itself.

  This movie begins with a corny fake-newsreel opening—stock footage of volcanoes—and then the two heroes take the stage: a wisecracking American geologist and his handsome Mexican sidekick. Stanley finds himself drawn in by their cool daring and easy banter, and for a while he’s caught up in the story, because after all aren’t he and Claudio just like these guys? Two explorers in a dangerous land, with only each other to fall back on? Stanley half-wishes the movie could go like this forever: the men t
aking turns at the Jeep’s wheel, passing gnarled jungles and smoldering ridges under the weird light of an ash-laden sky; the killer scorpions always sensed but never named, never visible, and the whole landscape vivid and mysterious in their uncast shadows.

  Soon, of course, the leading lady shows up—followed by the inevitable little kid with a dog, acting cute and making trouble—and Stanley’s interest gutters. Things don’t get any better when the scorpions finally make the scene. They look pretty good at first, creepy and realistic, but the filmmakers don’t have much footage, so they keep repeating shots: one goofy closeup of a popeyed scorpion head drooling poison ooze gets reused so many times that Stanley loses count. The producers must have run out of money or something, because by the last reel they’re not even using models half the time, just a black scorpion silhouette laid over shots of Mexicans panicking in the streets.

  Stanley’s barely even watching the movie—he’s trying to remember if the guy playing the American geologist is the same guy who played the geologist in The Day the World Ended, and wondering whether this is a coincidence, or if maybe the actor has some geological expertise in real life—when a lit cigarette stings him in the back of the neck. He slaps his skin and turns around, but no one’s behind him. As he scans the half-empty theater, shielding his swelling pupils from the bright screen, a second butt strikes his seatback and sends a spritz of orange sparks past his arm, and now he can see them: six Dogs, seated across the aisle a few rows back. Whitey’s hair glows in the projector’s pulse, but Stanley can’t make out any faces. Some have their dirty All-Stars propped on the seats in front of them, and they’re all smoking or lighting up, readying their next broadside.

  Stanley swats Claudio’s knee and jerks a thumb, and the two of them walk to the front, cross below the screen, and exit the theater in the opposite corner. They wait in the lobby long enough to see whether the Dogs will follow them out of the movie; they do, but evidently aren’t carrying enough of a grudge to give chase in the rain. Stanley blinks drops from his eyes, looks over his shoulder as he waits for a break in traffic: the Dogs huddled under the marquee, vague and shapeless through the downpour, clouding the air before them with their spoiled breath.