“I suppose so.”
“Say, you didn’t start anything, did you?” I asks.
“I got a lawyer, but he can’t do anything until day after tomorrow. Judge Evarts went fishing over the Fourth. He’s down on the banks.”
“Then that’s all right. Day after tomorrow that whale will be history. If you really want to get even with that guy, you stick around till tomorrow and watch what happens. If that don’t hand you a laugh, nothing will.”
She walked back to the pool with me to get some things she left. When we got there, Mort was in the office with Mike Halligan, the Chief of Police, and Dr. Kruger, the Health Commissioner, and a guy named Ed Ayres, that’s executive secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. When we opened the door, Ayres was pounding the desk with his fist, and we started to back out, but Mort grabbed us and pulled us in. “Just the ones I wanted to see,” he says, and introduced us all around. “Miss Dixon is my diver,” he says. “I wouldn’t be keeping her if I was to have a whale in the pool tomorrow, would I?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Morton,” she says. “I’ll have to cancel the rest of my engagement, I’m afraid; my ladder got broken today, and I can’t work without it.”
“Oh, we can get you a new ladder.”
“Keep talking, Morton,” says Ayres. “We’re listening.”
Then Mort turned to me. “Dave, these guys don’t seem to believe me when I tell them we’re pulling the whale out tonight. Maybe if you’ll tell them, they’ll feel better. I guess you’re about ready to start, aren’t you?” And he kept giving me the wink.
He might just as well have winked at a stone. “I told you, Mort. I’m through with whales.”
“Just what I thought,” says Ayres. “You’ve been stringing us all the time.”
But Dr. Kruger shut him off. “Now get this, Morton,” he says; “the minute that whale dies, I’m going to act, and I’m going to act quick. I could act now on the basis of that mess you’ve got back there, but you say you’re going to clean that up, so we’ll give you a chance. But the minute he dies, I act, and my advice to you is: put him out of the way and get him out of there first.”
“But how do I get him out of there? It took a whole ship’s derrick to get him in and I’ve got no derrick. I don’t know how to move a whale.”
“Neither do I. You should have thought of that when you brought him in there. But I know how to bury a whale, and if I have to put a steam shovel in and bury him right in your pool, that’s just what I’m going to do. And how much you can collect from the city,—if anything,—I wouldn’t like to say.”
Mort turned to me once more, and he had tears in his eyes. “Dave! You’re the only one can do it when nobody can do it.”
“I told you, Mort.”
“Ha, ha, ha, ha!” says the girl, so loud everybody jumped. “Isn’t this charming!”
They all stood up. Then there came a knock on the door, and in stepped a young guy with a grin on his face. “Mr. William K. Morton?”
Nobody said anything.
“I found him,” he says to the girl. “I had to run clear out to the Banks, but I found the Judge. Some speedboat I got.”
Still nobody said anything. He seemed to think I was the one he was looking for, because he came over to me with a legal paper that had a dollar bill folded in it. I could see her name and mine at the top of it. Mort grabbed. “So,” he says, as he saw what it was, “you stabbed me in the back, the both of you! I’m on the spot, and you stabbed me in the back.”
I felt pretty bad. I knew Mort always gave himself the best of everything, and I hadn’t meant to stab him in the back, but he was on the spot, all right, and I didn’t like how I looked. But before I could say anything, he jumped up and began to wave the paper around. “Nolo contendere!” he yells at the top of his lungs. “Nolo contendere!”
“What?” says the boy.
“You’re claiming a share of the whale for them, aren’t you? I got to show cause in court, haven’t I? Well, I don’t do it, see? I don’t defend this. It’s their whale and they do what they please with it!”
“Oh, no, you don’t!” says the girl, and grabs for the paper.
“Oh, yes, I do!”
He ran over to the window-sill, wrote something on the paper, signed it, ran back to the boy and shoved it in his pocket. “There you are, Mr. Lawyer Man with the fast speedboat. There it is, in writing. The whale is all theirs.”
He put on his hat and opened the door. “So long, everybody. So long, Mr. Commissioner. Dave’ll move your whale for you. So long, Dave—hope you have a nice time over the Fourth.”
He was almost out, but he turned and tipped his hat to her. “Har, har, har!” he says. “Isn’t this charming!”
They pinned it on me, and after they all left, I tore into her so hard I almost socked her. I think I would have socked her, only she cracked up and burst out crying. And then, so dog-tired I could hardly lift one foot after the other, I started out on my heavy night’s work. I heard of paying for a dead horse; but believe me, a dead horse is nothing compared with a dead whale. I had to find the roustabouts. I had to start them cleaning out that mess in the pool. I had to find my guy with the trailer. I had to get more rope, and more planks, to loll the trailer down in the pool with, so I could float the whale again. I had to get dynamite to kill the whale with. You can’t get dynamite without a permit, and I had to go get a permit. I had to dig up six beer-kegs, to float the whale with when we started out to sea, because a whale don’t float when he dies; he sinks. I had to find a guy with a power-boat, to tow him with. Every one of those people had to be routed out of bed, and the money they wanted was awful and I was writing checks till it made me sick—and my money this time, not Mort’s. It was a gray, gray dawn when I finally loaded my gang on the trailer, and started down to the pool with them.
When I got inside, the girl was lying on the side of the pool, in a bathing-suit, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun come up.
“Well,” I says, “is he dead yet?”
“Oh, no. I fed him.”
“You what?”
“I fed him.”
I went over and looked in the pool, then, and it was only about a third full, but there was the whale, hanging over the intake, letting it tickle his belly where it was coming in, and showing more pep than he had since we got him.
“Are you trying to kid me?”
“No. I ran the water out, and then when he stranded down here under the springboard, I made a little dam of sand and canvas around him, and fed him.”
“What did you feed him? If you don’t mind my asking!”
“Milk.”
She waved her hand, and I saw there were fifty or sixty milk-cans piled up at one side. “You mean to say that thing drinks milk?”
“Anybody but an ignoramus would know a baby whale drinks milk. It took all the money I had, and I had an awful time getting it, but he took it. He gurgled and made a lot of noise, and had a fine time.”
“And you mean he’s not going to die?”
“Of course not. Look at him. Isn’t he cute? I just love him.”
I went out, sent my gang home, came back, and sat down. I thought of Mort. I thought of all those thousands of people that were due that day. I thought of the paper that said he was all ours. I could feel the grin spreading all over my face. I went over and held out my hand.
“Mabel, I guess we got a whale.”
“I guess we have—and a certain young man gets what’s coming to him at last.”
Well, he was a wow. When Ayres got it through his head the whale wasn’t going to die, he rushed posters to all Eastern cities by plane, and the morning papers were full of how we caught him; and by afternoon we had a mob. We had to rope off a place and run them through in batches. It was the only way we could clear the pool, else they would have stayed and looked at him all day. Then at night, she thought of a stunt that made him a bigger draw than ever. She cut the overhead lights, and turned on the underwater
lights, and he was a sight to see. The only trouble was, the lights scared him to death, and he wore himself out running around the pool and bumping the sides, so the way we did was turn the lights on for one minute every fifteen minutes. That way we would clear a batch out, give the whale a rest, and then turn on the lights when another batch was in.
Midnight we closed down, turned off all lights, and counted up. We had taken in $48,384, and if there had been any way to handle the people, we would have taken in a lot more. About one o’clock, after we had shaken hands about twenty times, and started to run the water out to have him ready when the milk-train got in, we looked around, and there was Mort, standing there looking at him.
“He didn’t die,” I says. “Mabel fed him.”
“So I see.”
I went over and cut on the lights. All of a sudden that little gray lump out there in the water was a great blue shadow, and then it began to move. It would flit this way and that way, not like anything swimming, but like some big bat that was flying. Pretty soon it went up to the far end, turned, and came straight down the pool. And boy, if you ever saw a man’s eyes pop out, Mort’s did when that big train came at him, hit the end of the pool so hard you could feel the ground shake, washed a big wave of water over the gutter, then turned and began to flit around again.
I cut the lights. “Funny thing about that whale,” I says, and sat down beside her on one of the benches and nudged her. “He was a gift. We got a paper that says he’s all ours. We sure do appreciate that.”
He sat down on another bench, and I kept it up. I harpooned him with some of the best cracks I ever thought up, if I do say it myself. “Yeah,” he said after a while, “he’s all yours, and I wish you both good luck. I hope you’re happy, and get all the breaks.”
“Would you mind telling me what you mean by that?” she says in a strained kind of voice.
“Oh, it’s easy enough to see what’s been going on. I didn’t get it at first, but I do now. You and Dave, you make a team. You get along all right. Well, you got my whale. You got each other. It’s all right. I wish you luck.”
“Oh.”
“A shill in an amusement park! A bally for a swimming-pool. A diving Venus.” He stood up so he was sneering down at her. “And then that wasn’t enough for you. You had to get yourself a whale. Believe me, if you weren’t plenty low before, you’re plenty low now.”
“I think you better take your whale back.” She stood up and tried to go past him. He wouldn’t let her.
“Oh, no. I don’t take him back.”
“Let me go. You’ve been nagging me all week because I wasn’t a trouper—because I was a punk amateur. And then, when I try to be a trouper, when I save your whale for you—Let me go!”
“Yeah? Well, now you’re going to hear some more. I had them break that guy for you. I smashed your ladder on purpose. If I had a whale in my pool, you weren’t going to dive in any other pool, see? Well, that was yesterday. Now you can dive in any pool you want. You and Dave, you can go get yourself a flea circus. Or maybe a boxing kangaroo—”
I clipped him on the jaw then, and that stopped it. But before he could even pick himself up, where he went down, she ran to the pool. “Something’s wrong,” she says. “He hasn’t been up!”
I jumped for the lights. The whale was down there with one fluke over the outlet, where it was running out, held there by suction, and fighting like mad to get clear.
“Quick, close it!”
I screwed down the valve, but it didn’t clear him. There was a vacuum there, and it held him, like he was riveted. “Oh, he’s drowning,” she says, and grabbed the bar we used to turn the valves with. She went right overboard in her white dress and let the bar pull her down, head-first. She stuck it under his fluke, gave it a kick with her feet to drive it in, then pulled her feet down and lifted. Up he came, and began to blow like a drowning man would.
She let the bar go, came up, and began to talk to him. “Poor little thing,” she says. “Away from his mamma, and nobody to play with, and in a terrible place where awful things happen to him. I wish we could take him back where he came from, so he could be happy once more.”
“Let’s do it,” I says to her. “I believe I can do it.”
“Would you, Dave?” she says.
And then it happened, like a slow movie. The whale was in the corner all the time, watching her in the middle of the pool. He didn’t seem to mind her much, but then he dived and started to go past her. She opened her legs for a scissors kick that would take her out of the way. He changed his mind and turned back, and his tail came up slow. She kicked slow. And she kicked right into this piece of net that was still hanging on his tail. She was flung up in the air, and whirled down under, and it made you sick to think what she would look like if she got slammed against the side.
Mort started to run almost before it happened. He grabbed a fire-ax. He smashed the underwater lights in one corner, and about ten of them went out. The whale made for the dark place, and he and the ax hit at the same time. Mort drove the spike into his head up to the wood, and he never even moved. I went overboard and pulled her clear, and Mort lifted her out.
“I didn’t mean it,” he says. “I didn’t mean any of it. If only you’re not killed!”
“I’m all right,” she says. “Did you kill him?”
“I had to.”
She pulled him down and kissed him, and then looked in the pool. We all looked. And then, brother, we saw death. The big blue shadow was there, perfectly still. Then it began to tip. One fluke went down. It began to sink, in a kind of a slow circle. And then, when it got below the lights, it turned from blue to gray, and settled, awfully small, on the bottom. It was like we had seen his soul pass out of him …
The sun was coming up when we got the kegs loose and watched the waves close over him.
“Some whale,” says Mort.
“Yeah,” I says, “some whale.”
She just put her head on Mort’s shoulder and began to cry.
(Redbook, April 1934)
Come-Back
THIS IS HOW KENNELLY came back; and if I don’t tell it the way he tells it, all I got to say is that he don’t tell it. He is always so busy explaining how dumb Hapgood was, that he never gets to the lion part; but the lion had a lot more to do with it than Hapgood had, so why talk about a heel that it would be better all around if you could just forget him? I will put in about the lion, and not say any more about Happy than I have to. Maybe you read about the lion in the papers, but they got it all mixed up, so it will not hurt any if I tell the straight of it, once for all; and then you will know why you haven’t got a Silver-throated Cowboy any more, but have Mowgli the Untamed; and if I’ve got to take one or the other, I’ll take Mowgli at that, because he is not all the time singing about love among the cows.
Kennelly hit the skids when Silver died. He was all right up until then. He had plenty of work in straight Westerns, singing his songs in between the shooting, and he had a bank-account, a ranch and a future. But then Happy figured they better bury the horse in a big way. Happy is Kennelly’s agent. He is the worst agent in Hollywood; and brother, to be the worst agent in Hollywood, you’ve got to be bad. I mean you’ve got to be so bad that no man in his sober senses could really believe it. So he bought a lot in a cemetery, got a permit from the Health Department, dressed twelve bums up as cowgirls, and had them throw roses in the grave, had Kennelly sing “Home on the Range,” and a bugler blow taps. The papers took plenty of it, and so did the news-reels; and by the end of the week Silver was the deadest horse this side of Tombstone, Arizona.
And then they woke up that the burial was Silver’s but the funeral was Kennelly’s. The kids had loved Silver, and they cried plenty over all that stuff that Happy thought up; but after it was over, they wouldn’t have any horse in his place, and they wouldn’t have Kennelly. When they saw how his great heart was broke over Silver, they couldn’t understand why it didn’t stay broke; and there didn’t
seem to be any way to tell them that even if his heart was broke, he had to eat. They just wouldn’t have any more to do with him. If Silver had died quiet, and another white horse named Silver had trotted out in his place, they would never have known the difference, and Silver would have stayed young like Chester Gump does—and fact of the matter like any other white horse in Hollywood does.
But trust Happy on a thing like that. Happy is the boy that one time invited eight big shots, from all the main studios, to fly down to Caliente with him and see the races, and then when they were in the plane, he phoned the airport he couldn’t come, so they had to ante up for the plane themselves; and then come to find out, the pilot didn’t have a border permit, so he set them down in San Diego, and they spent the afternoon watching the gobs paint the anchor of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington. A guy that can get himself in Dutch with every studio in town, all at one crack, has got talent, you’ve got to hand him that; and a little thing like a horse, he can handle that with one hand and light a cigarette with the other.
Well, by the end of a year Kennelly was through. He didn’t have any bank-account; he didn’t have any ranch; and he didn’t have any future. He wasn’t but twenty-seven years old, but he was already just a fragrant memory.
So then was when Happy got the idea for the party. What a party has got to do with a comeback, is something I can’t figure out; but any agent can figure it out, and it has got so now that all the big blow-outs are given by agents, and you can’t tell whether the agents are running the business or the business is running the agents; and whichever one wins, it is probably no great loss. So Happy put out bids for the party, and it was to be at his place up near Malibu—of course not right at Malibu Beach, you understand. Malibu Beach is run by a guy by the name of Art A. Jones, that gets the money the first of every month—and he gets it, don’t make any mistake about that. So of course that wouldn’t suit Happy very well, and his place is in the hills right above Malibu, so he can get his mail at Malibu and say he lives there. It was to be one of those Sunday night things they put in the fan magazines, and the stars were to be there, and the shots—and not having any other word for it, we can call it entertainment.
Career in C Major: And Other Fiction Page 11