Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  “I can see that Mrs. Nay didn’t finish the story, Mr. Blackwood. There was more about Linda than you know. She could be like two different people. But I don’t have to tell you about the doubleness of life, do I, Mr. Blackwood?”

  “You don’t, Mr. Bruder.”

  “You of all people should know what that means.”

  “Indeed, indeed.” But then Blackwood wondered what Bruder was referring to. As far as Blackwood knew, no one in California knew of him as anything but a singular man; the name Andy Blackmann hadn’t been uttered since that night in the cottage at the edge of the tiny Maine college, when Edith had delivered her news and gripped his collar and cried, You still love me, don’t you, Mr. Blackmann!

  “How is it, Mr. Bruder, that you came to own the ranch?” said Blackwood.

  “Why are you so eager to know?”

  “This is a significant purchase, and I feel I have the right to know of any”—and here Blackwood’s voice found its lowest register—“ghosts.”

  “You are right, Mr. Blackwood,” Bruder said softly. “I am sorry. There are ghosts. And no matter what I do, they won’t go away.”

  The man had grown so morose so quickly that Blackwood felt everything turning his way. Another question pressed upon him. “How did the girl first come to Pasadena?”

  “I asked her.”

  “You asked her?”

  Bruder paused. He touched the coral around his throat and bit his lip, drawing blood, a teardrop of garnet bubbling up and then catching in the corner of his mouth. Once again Blackwood had the impression that Bruder, lost in his dreams, was traveling to another world, or being visited by one. At last Blackwood had discovered Bruder’s weakness. Blackwood would involve the girl when he opened his negotiations for the Pasadena. And just as the idea took shape and form—the notion that Linda Stamp could help things along even after she was dead—Bruder said, “I asked her to come to Pasadena to be with me.”

  “Did you own the ranch then?”

  “It wasn’t mine, but it was slated to become mine.”

  “How is that, Mr. Bruder?”

  “I shall tell you. Are you in a hurry?” His face had gone pale in a peaceful way.

  Blackwood said he wasn’t.

  “We were talking about the war. I was telling you about 1918. I was on the front with Willis Poore.”

  “The second Willis Poore?”

  “Yes, of course,” Bruder snapped. “If you listen, the pieces will fall into place.” Then: “We were together at Saint-Mihiel, along the Meuse. We were both in Motor Mechanics Company 17, First Regiment.”

  “Mechanics?”

  “It wasn’t what it might sound like today, Mr. Blackwood. This was the first time the automobile was taken into battle. We were much more strategic than you’d think. There is a purpose to everything I’m telling you,” said Bruder. “I’m telling you for a reason. I’m answering your question.”

  Blackwood knew he would have to indulge Bruder. Selling property can stir up sentiment in even the most hard-hearted, and Blackwood understood that there was something about his round, chipper face that had caused many men and women to tell a final tale before signing a contract. Mrs. Nay had hinted that Bruder had something to say, but no one to say it to, and Blackwood was not surprised that Bruder had chosen him.

  “Of course, by the time we arrived,” Bruder began, “the front had been in stalemate for years. Up the Meuse, at Verdun, there’d been the terrible battle in 1916, four hundred thousand dead and no ground gained. By 1918, the French were weary, the Germans were drowning in influenza. I sometimes think America won the war simply by showing up.”

  Bruder explained that the front was a network of trenches, from Nieuport winding down across Europe to the foothills of the Vosges, near the village of Bonfol. The wire ran from the North Sea to the Alps in the shape of a backward S. Blackwood wondered what this had to do with the Rancho Pasadena, but he told himself to be patient.

  Bruder turned in his chair, as if the pain were wearing him down by the minute. “Saint-Mihiel is at the edge of a forest of beech trees, and several streams and small hills rise to form the heights of the Meuse. There the medieval forts, although battered, still stood in the summer of 1918. This part of the front had been deemed passive, Mr. Blackwood, although nothing upon our arrival suggested that. The no-man’s-land between the trenches was a landscape of craters, craters within craters, and craters that had blown apart previous craters. There were two lines of trenches, two miles apart, but the front here, like everywhere, had the feeling of the infinite and the interminable.”

  Blackwood leaned forward; he was falling under the spell of Bruder’s voice, and he nearly felt himself disappear.

  “One fine summer afternoon, one of those days when the sky is lavender at dusk, Company 17 drove the forty-odd miles from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun along the supply road known as ‘La Voie sacrée.’ Willis Poore and I were not in the same platoon, so I was surprised to find myself sitting next to him in the back of a truck on a bench scarcely six inches deep. The truck bed was so overcrowded that his left thigh and my right one pressed together for the entire afternoon, and by nightfall our legs were still next to each other, as if they had become a pair, and it was then that Willis Poore and I became a pair in actuality. The truck followed the road along the front to the mountains, and every ten miles or so it would slow and the captain would point to two men and throw them into the forest. As the summer moon rose, the truck slowed and Willis and I found ourselves next in line to jump out. We landed in a ditch of tallgrass, and I was lying on top of Willis and he was coughing from the dust and the truck’s exhaust and he had a dazed look to him, as if he were still in disbelief that he was in France and being asked to fight a war. He asked me what we were supposed to do now, and the question came in the same voice that I imagined he used when asking his butler what was for dinner.

  “You see, even at this point, Willis Poore did not recognize me. Nor did he think to ask me where I was from. If he had, he would have learned that I was a fellow Pasadenan. From one of the other soldiers I already knew that Willis thought I was from Mexico and wondered what I was doing in the American army. They say the army can change a man, but what they don’t tell you is that the army can also make a man reveal his truest nature, especially if that nature is an ugly one. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “We found ourselves in a dry ditch along a road cutting through the forest. Before we’d left Bar-le-Duc, every other man had been told the nature of our mission—a safety precaution—and I knew why we were there but Willis did not. He shouted, as if to test his voice against the trees, and the forest replied in kind, as did an owl, whose long hoooo caused Willis’s eyes to widen with fear. Only then did Willis think to ask my name. I told him. When he introduced himself as Willis Poore, I said, ‘I know.’ Willis was the uncurious type, and it did not occur to him to ask how I knew his name. If he had, I would have told him. If he had asked, I would have told him everything.

  “I had been informed in advance that where we were dumped would at first appear desolate, but that we would find a tiny road hidden behind a mound of branch and shrub. The moon and a crudely drawn map led me to the road, but when I stepped into the forest, Willis called from the ditch, ‘Where are you going, soldier?’ I told him that our mission was down the road, but it was clear that Willis didn’t want to enter the forest at night. As I cleared the branches and located the two tire tracks in the dirt, it became even more clear that Willis didn’t want to be left alone. He shouted at me to wait for him, and soon enough he was at my side again. We marched down a road that was barely a road, more like a path curving between tree trunks and boulders. ‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ Willis kept asking. ‘Maybe we should camp right here and wait for daybreak.’

  “What I knew that Willis did not was that nearby, in the forest, sat one of the Allies’ secret motor depots, where trucks and light whippet tanks with engine trouble were hauled. We marched
no more than half a mile on that warm August night, Willis thinking this was a fine time to inform me that he came from the Rancho Pasadena. ‘I inherited it outright,’ he said proudly, but Willis did not tell me a single thing about himself that I didn’t already know. What I have never understood about Pasadena—and I suppose it’s no different than any other community in this regard—is why certain people remain unaware of the gossip they fuel. Nearly everyone takes pleasure in speculating about the sins of the powerful, but the powerful seem to believe that people only enjoy discussing their virtues. Willis Poore was living proof of this.

  “After our short march, we arrived at a clearing. There were four or five trucks parked with their hoods flung up, and a little two-bay garage attached to a small barrack, no more than a cabin. The depot looked both busy and abandoned, and once I had lit a kerosene lamp I explained to Willis why we were there. ‘We’re fixing engines,’ I said, peering into the barrack, where there were two bunks side by side separated by a tin crucifix nailed to the wall. ‘This is home, soldier.’

  “At this point, Company 17 had been in France for most of the summer. Before arriving in the forest, we’d been at the front, in the chalk-lands of Artois, where we had to make camp in a trench floored with duckboard plank and with bunks shelved into the chalky walls. That was where Willis made a name for himself, swapping oranges for his place in the trench raids. So, despite the depot’s eerie isolation, you can imagine the pleasure this camp brought to Willis’s face. He found the water barrel, wiped down his brow and throat, unrolled one of the cot mattresses, and hopped into bed. It was the first time in months that his pillow wasn’t caked in dirt. ‘Night, soldier,’ he said, sighing like a settling dog. I remained outside, staying awake with a cigarette.

  “Willis wasn’t asleep for more than ten minutes when a slow rumble rose in the forest. It was a terrible sound of clacking iron and steel. As it approached, the ground shook and the trees trembled and Willis leapt out of bed and came to my side and whispered like a child, ‘What is that?’ I didn’t know either, so we took up our rifles and hid behind a truck with a missing front grille and waited. Willis had stripped to his shorts and there had been no time for him to pull on his pants and now, although the night was warm, he was shaking. I’m sure people have told you how slight he was. Well, Willis was even slighter then—a boy, really, not a single hair on his chest. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t frightened too, for I knew that my companion would be of no use in fighting back a German raid. The rumbling continued until it was so loud that it consumed the forest. I held my eye on the road, expecting a German A7V to lumber into camp at any minute. I was prepared to face the tank with the Iron Crosses painted on its side and the cannons aimed at us. I shouted to Willis that we could take anything, but he couldn’t hear me and he kept saying ‘What? What’d you say?’ and then all of a sudden out of the forest rattled a rickety Tin Lizzie painted camouflage-green. Two American boys no older than twenty were driving the Model T, and when they saw us they stood up on the seats and said, ‘Do you think you can fix ’er?’

  “And that was how we spent the month of August. At nightfall the trucks and the cars drove in or were towed by horse into our camp, and we worked under the hoods until dawn. To my surprise, Willis turned out to be good with the wrench and knowledgeable of the carburetor. Within a week, we had earned a reputation as one of the best depots along that part of the front, and the cars lined up through the forest each night. By six in the morning, the depot’s visitors were gone and we had the day to sleep or read or splash thigh-deep in the stream that ran through the forest. It was a hot summer with almost no rain, and some days Willis would lie on the table outside the garage stripped down to nothing and bathe his body in the sun, his rump turned up like a little ham browning in an oven.

  “Although we worked and slept alongside each other, we didn’t talk much, so a couple of days passed before Willis said, ‘Say, Bruder, did you know that orphan in Pasadena? El Brunito? Something about you reminds me of him. He was a bad kid, they say. Once he dropped an ice block on the delivery boy. He isn’t by chance any relation to you?’ Sometimes people are called stupid unfairly, but not in this case. It wasn’t until I told Willis Poore that little El Brunito and I were one and the same that the pieces fell into place in his small mind. You should have seen him. A face frightened and frozen, as if prepared by the taxidermist. He said, ‘I thought El Brunito didn’t speak English. I heard that you had half a brain. They must’ve gotten it wrong about you. You’re not as bad as all that.’ That is exactly what he said, unembarrassed by his misunderstanding and for some reason holding me to blame for it. As you can guess, we spoke even less after that, and the only time thereafter that any sort of camaraderie existed between us was when Willis and I pushed our faces beneath the same hood to inspect a burst valve.

  “The ancient poet said long before I, ‘That war is an evil is something that we all know.’ It does not matter the century, nor the skirmish. Yet war can produce good too, bravery and honor, although less of it than you might guess. Nonetheless, I found much less than bravery and honor in the form of Willis Poore.

  “September came but the summer heat remained, as did the steady nighttime traffic of trucks and ambulances and light tanks, although occasionally a thirteen-ton Schneider-Creusot rumbled into the depot complaining of an oil leak. The soldiers brought good news and bad, and occasionally a soldier would return two or three times and a friendship would strike up between him and Willis and me—for everyone else thought us an inseparable pair. It troubled Willis much more than I when one of these soldiers with whom we had bartered cigarettes and whiskey for a new rubber belt failed to return to the depot and word of his death reached us instead, usually accompanied by the vivid details of a shrapnel decapitation or the gagging asphyxiation brought on by the green-cross gas. Willis would quake when he heard the stories, and his eyes would fill with tears, but I was always convinced that he was not disturbed on behalf of the dead soldier but merely frightened for himself.

  “As I was saying, in September the summer continued and so did the war and then the Americans began the battle to retake the village of Saint-Mihiel. We knew this because one night not a single truck turned up and Willis and I waited silently on our cots until dawn. No one came and no word, and at first Willis took this as a good sign. But the next night was the same as the previous, not a single broken-down truck, although the sky was illuminated by shelling, and the thunder of the German long-range gun that the doughboys called ‘Big Bertha’ clanged above our heads. The war was nearby, and each hour it seemed to be getting closer, and just before dawn we heard something approaching. We drew our rifles, and just at the moment when the night sky cracked with morning yellow, a spindly International MW truck pulled into the clearing. The truck’s tires were missing several of their sixteen spokes, and there wasn’t a seat—the driver was standing behind the wheel. And when he pulled the truck’s brake, Willis stood up and waved, calling, ‘Engine trouble, soldier?’

  “But this particular private was having more than engine trouble, I’m afraid. Upon cutting the ignition the young man, who appeared rather orderly from our defensive position behind the water barrel, fell limply from the truck to the ground. We ran to help him and found him on his back, a bleeding hole in his side, and his eyes already glassy and dead. This set off poor Willis, who broke into a fit of tears. He spent the day crying and cursing both me and the war, declaring nearly everything in his life unfair. It was a pitiable sight, but after a few hours of it, with the shelling continuing overhead, he became more annoying than pathetic, and I told him to shut up or leave the depot. I saw it then: the child’s panic flickering in his eye, that desperate look of hunting for a mother’s breast. I poured him some whiskey and brought the cup to his lips and made sure he got enough down to twist his tongue. I was tired of listening to Willis Poore.

  “You must remember that we were alone in the forest, and that almost three days had passed since
word had come about the war’s progress. We did not know if France was falling or if Germany was relinquishing territory. We did not know if the gray-clad soldiers would arrive to execute us or if a new truckload of doughboys would turn up to tell us it was time to return to California. We knew nothing other than the fact of the mounting shelling and the very real sense that the heavy guns had been turned our way. Great explosions erupted in the forest, and it was easy for me, and even easier for Willis, to imagine a shell cratering a tract of woodland the size of the depot’s clearing. Willis made the suggestion—rather bold it seemed at the time—that we abandon the depot and escape. We weren’t far from the Swiss border—two or three days by foot, as best we could tell—and he offered a plan of running from tree to tree all the way to the mountains. He went on to say that he knew a water spa in Montreux where we could rent rooms and sit out the rest of the war along the shores of Lac Léman. He was nearly delirious as he described the fresh perch served in lemon butter on the spa’s terrace. Needless to say, I told him that he would have to flee to Switzerland alone, a prospect I was certain he would find more frightening than dying in my arms.

  “By nightfall it was clear there was nothing to do but wait. We hadn’t slept in more than two days, and we thought it best to lie down on the cots. I said to him that it might not be so bad to be executed in our sleep—which might sound cowardly to you now, as you sit here in the great comfort of peace, but in the reality of war a fast and painless death does offer its own enticements, even to a man like me. Under the bright stars of gunfire we went to sleep and I passed into a heavy dream, although even to this day I cannot recall what it was about. This has vexed me since that September night in 1918, for I am sure that I was dreaming about something portentous and prescient. At some point in the middle of the night I found Willis’s cot empty. I still do not know whether it was in my dream that I pondered the empty cot—where had he gone?—or if in fact I was awake. But I lay there, both awake and not. From my pillow I could see through the barrack’s door into the yard, and a figure came slowly into focus. He was a silhouette and he was busy with a large tin can, haphazardly dumping water or some other liquid. Again, I did not rise, for I cannot tell you if I was awake or asleep, although I firmly believe I was both at the same time, which might sound unlikely but isn’t. I watched the figure, who I gradually realized was Willis, continue with his dumping, and I could hear a distinct sound of water spilling onto hard dirt or being thrown against the door of a truck. Willis moved about on his toes in a clumsy effort to maintain silence. He would pour the contents of the tin can upon the side of the garage and then refill the can inside and then continue with his dousing and refilling. It came to me like that, little by little, until at last my mind lit up and I was more awake than I had ever been in my life. I realized that Willis was splashing the depot with petroleum, and I leapt from the cot and ran into the yard. For a second or two I couldn’t find him. The shelling had stopped, leaving the night black. There was no moon, as if it too had been shot down, and I peered around. And just as I thought that perhaps I had been dreaming, I saw Willis crouching deep within the trees, lighting the kerosene lamp. He stood and swung his arm and was about to toss the lamp into the gasoline-drenched truck yard when he saw me. This caused him to hesitate, and as we both well know, you and I, a moment’s hesitation can change the course of events forever; for then something miraculous occurred before my eyes. Willis had performed his work sloppily, and petroleum must have soaked its way up his sleeve, and suddenly, with both his eyes and mine aghast, we watched a flame shoot up his hand and sleeve, across his shoulder and up the nape of his neck. Neither of us could believe it. His oily uniform and his greasy flesh were burning like pigskin over a flame. He stood motionless with shock, his arm extended and on fire.