Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  “Look at this,” said Morgan, the next morning.

  It was a handwritten note.

  I know your show is full of commies. My brother-in-law told me you have commie actors. Thank God for people like Senator McCarthy who will run you rats out of this land of Liberty and Freedom.

  Signed,

  A Real American

  “Put it in the circular file,” said Bill.

  “I’ll keep it,” said Morgan. “Who are they talking about?”

  “You tell me. I’m not old enough to be a communist.”

  “Could it be true?” asked Morgan.

  “Don’t tell me you’re listening to all that crap, too?”

  “There’s been a couple of newsletters coming around, with names of people on it. I know some of them; they give money to the NAACP and ACLU. Otherwise they live in big houses and drive big cars and order their servants around like Daddy Warbucks. But then, I don’t know all the names on the lists.”

  “Is anybody we ever hired on any of the lists?”

  “Not as such,” said Morgan.

  “Well, then?”

  “Well, then,” said Morgan, and picked up a production schedule. “Well, then, nothing, I guess, Bill.”

  “Good,” said Bill. He picked up the letter from Morgan’s desk, wadded it into a ball, and drop-kicked it into the wastebasket.

  The hungover Montgomery Clift reeled by on his way to the Friday performance of the disaster of a play he was in. Bill waved, but Clift didn’t notice; his eyes were fixed on some far distant promontory fifty miles up the Hudson, if they were working at all. Clift had been one intense, conflicted, messed-up individual when Bill had first met him. Then he had gone off to Hollywood and discovered sex and booze and drugs and brought them with him back to Broadway.

  Ahead of Bill was the hotel where the congressmen and lawyers waited.

  Counsel (Mr. Eclept): Now that you have taken the oath, give your full name and age for the record.

  S: Major William Spacer. I’m twenty-one years old.

  E: No, sir. Not your stage name.

  S: Major William Spacer. That’s my real name.

  Congressman Beenz: You mean Major Spacer isn’t just the show name?

  S: Well, sir, it is and it isn’t . . . Most people just think we gave me a promotion over Captain Video.

  Congressman Rice: How was it you were named Major?

  S: You would have had to have asked my parents that; unfortunately they’re deceased. I have an aunt in Kansas who might be able to shed some light . . .

  * * *

  S: That’s not the way it’s done, Congressman.

  B: You mean you just can’t fly out to the Big Dipper, once you’re in space?

  S: Well, you can, but they’re . . . they’re light years apart. They . . . they appear to us as The Big Dipper because we’re looking at them from Earth.

  R: I’m not sure I understand, either.

  S: It . . . it’s like that place in . . . Vermont, New Hampshire, one of those. North of here, anyway. You come around that turn in Rt 9A or whatever, and there’s Abraham Lincoln, the head, the hair, the beard. It’s so real you stop. Then you drive down the road a couple hundred yards, and the beard’s a plum thicket on a meadow, and the hair’s pine trees on a hill, and the nose is on one mountain, but the rest of the face is on another. It only looks like Lincoln from that one spot in the road. That’s why the Big Dipper looks that way from Earth.

  B: I do not know how we got off on this . . .

  S: I’m trying to answer your questions here, sir.

  E: Perhaps we should get to the substantive matters here . . .

  S: All I’ve noticed, counsel, is that all the people who turn up as witnesses and accusers at these things seem to have names out of old W.C. Fields’ movies, names like R. Waldo Chubb and F. Clement Bozo.

  E: I believe you’re referring to Mr. Clubb and Mr. Bozell?

  S: I’m busy, Mr. Eclept; I only get to glance at newspapers. I’m concerned with the future, not what’s happening right this minute.

  B: So are we, young man. That’s why we’re trying to root out any communist influence in the broadcast industry, so there won’t be any in the future.

  R: We can’t stress that too forcefully.

  S: Well, I can’t think of a single communist space pirate we’ve ever portrayed on the show. It takes place in the 21st Century, Congressman. So I guess we share the same future. Besides, last time I looked, piracy was a capitalist invention. . . .

  S: That’s why we never have stories set further than Mars or Venus, Congressman. Most of the show takes place in near-space, or on the Moon. We try to keep the science accurate. That’s why there’s always a segment with me or Sam—that’s Samuel J. Shorts, the other writer on the show—by the way, he’s called “Uncle Sam” Spacer—telling kids about the future, and what it’ll be like to grow up in the wonderful years of the 21st Century.

  B: If we don’t blow ourselves up first.

  R: You mean if some foreign power doesn’t try to blow us up first.

  S: Well, we’ve talked about the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Food preservation. Atomic-powered airplanes and cars. Nuclear fusion as a source of energy too cheap to meter.

  E: Is it true you broadcast a show about a world government?

  S: Not in the science segment, that I recall.

  E: No. I mean the story, the entertainment part.

  S: We’ve been on the air three months, that’s nearly sixty shows. Let me think . . .

  E: A source has told us there’s a world government on the show.

  S: Oh. It’s a worlds’ government, counsel. It’s the United States of Space. We assume there won’t be just one state on Mars, or the Moon, or Venus, and that they’ll have to come to the central government to settle their disputes. We have that on the Moon.

  R: They have to go to the Moon to settle a dispute between Mars and the United States?

  S: No, no. That would be like France suing Wisconsin. . . .

  B: “. . . and other red channels.” And that’s a direct quote.

  S: Congressman, I created the show; I act in it; I write either half the scripts, or one-half of each script, whichever way it works out that week. I do this five days a week, supposedly for fifty weeks a year—we’ll see if I make it that long. I’ve given the day-to-day operations, all the merchandising negotiations to my partner, James B. Morgan. We have a small cast with only a few recurring characters, and except for the occasional Martian bad guy, or Lunar owl-hoot, they’re all known to me. I never ask anybody about their politics or religion. All I want to know is whether they can memorize lines quick, and act in a tight set, under time pressure, live, with a camera stuck in their ear. The only thing red we have anything to do with is Mars. And it isn’t channels; it’s canals. . . .

  S: . . . I have no knowledge of any. I’ll tell you what, right now, Congressman, I’ll bet my show on it. You come up with any on the cast and crew, I’ll withdraw the show.

  B: We’ll hold you to that, young man.

  R: I want to thank you for appearing for this deposition today, and for being so forthcoming with us, Mr. Spacer.

  B: I agree.

  R: You are excused.

  There was one reporter waiting outside in the hallway, besides the government goon keeping everyone out.

  The reporter was the old kind, press card stuck in his hat, right out of The Front Page.

  “Got any statement, Mr. Spacer?”

  “Well, as you know, I can’t talk about what I said till the investigation’s concluded. They asked me questions. I answered them as best as I could.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “I’m sure you can figure that out. You’ve
seen the televised hearings?”

  “What were they trying to find out?” asked the reporter.

  “I’m not sure . . .” said Bill.

  The government goon smiled. When he and the reporter parted ways in the lobby, Bill was surprised that it was already summer twilight. He must have been in there five or six hours. . . . He took off for the studio, to find out what kind of disaster the broadcast with Zach Glass had been.

  Bill wiggled his toes in his socks, including the stump of the little one on the right foot, a souvenir from a Boy Scout hatchet-throwing contest gone wrong back when he was twelve.

  He was typing while he watched Blues By Bargy on TV. Saturday night noise came from outside.

  Then the transmission was interrupted with a PLEASE STAND BY notice. Douglas Edwards came on with a special bulletin, which he ripped out of the chundering teletype machine at his right elbow.

  He said there were as yet unconfirmed reports that North Korean Armed Forces had crossed into South Korea. President Truman, who was on a weekend trip to his home in Independence, Missouri, had not been reached by CBS for a comment. Then he said they would be interrupting regularly scheduled programming if there were further developments.

  Then they went back to Blues by Bargy.

  “Look,” said Phil. “James, you gotta get those rehearsing assholes outta here, I mean, out of here, earlier. When I came in Saturday to set up, I found they used all the drop-pipes for their show. I had to make them move a quarter of their stuff. They said they needed them all. I told ’em to put wheels on their stuff like we’re having to do with most of ours, but we still need some pipes to drop in the exteriors, and to mask the sets off. And they’re hanging around with their girlfriends and boyfriends, while I’m trying to set up marks.”

  It was Sunday, the start of their week at the Ziegfeld Roof. They were to block out Monday’s and Tuesday’s shows, rehearse them, and do the run-through and technical for Monday’s broadcast.

  “I’ll talk to their stage manager,” said Morgan. “Believe me, moving here gripes me as much as it does you. Where’s Elizabeth?”

  “Here,” said Elizabeth Regine, coming out of the dressing room in her rehearsal Neptuna outfit. “I couldn’t believe this place when I got here.”

  “Believe it, baby,” said Phil. “We’ve got to make do.” He looked at his watch. “Bill, I think the script may be a little long, just looking at it.”

  “Same as always. Twenty-four pages.”

  “Yeah, but you got suspense stuff in there. That’s thirty seconds each. Be thinking about it while we’re blocking it.”

  “You’re the director, Phil.”

  “That’s what you and James pay me for.” He looked over at the stage crew. “No!” he said. “Right one, left one, right one,” he moved his hands.

  “That’s what they are,” said the foreman.

  “No, you got left, right, left.”

  The guy, Harvey, joined him to look at the wheeled sets. “Left,” he pointed to the rocket interior. “Right,” the command room on the Moon. “Left,” the foreground scenery and the rocket fin for the Mars scenes.

  “And from whence does the rest of the Mars set drop in?” asked Phil.

  “Right. Oh, merde!” said Harve.

  “And they’re the best crew on television,” said Phil, as the stagehands ratcheted the scenery around. “They really are,” he said, turning back to Bill and Morgan. “That way we stay on the rocket interior, and you leave, run behind the middle set, and step down onto Mars, while the spacephone chatters away. Also, you’ll be out of breath, so it’ll sound like you just climbed down fifty feet of ladder. . . .”

  It was seven when they finished the blocking, two rehearsals, and the run-through of the first show of the week. Phil was right, the script was one minute and fifty-three seconds long.

  Bill looked at the camera ramp. “I still want to do something with that,” he said, “while we’ve got it.”

  “Wednesday,” said Phil.

  “Why Wednesday?”

  “You got a blast-off scene. We do it from the front. We get the scenery guy to build a nose view of the ship. Red Mars background behind. Like the ship from above. You and Neptuna stand behind it, looking out the cockpit. You count down. Harvey hits the CO2 extinguisher behind you for rocket smoke. I get Harry or Fred to run at you with the camera as fast as he can, from way back there. Just before he collides, we cut to the telecine chain for the commercial.”

  “Marry me,” said Bill.

  “Some other time,” said Phil. “Everybody back at 4:00 p.m. tomorrow. Everything’s set. Don’t touch a goddamn thing before you leave.”

  Toast of the Town, hosted by Ed Sullivan, was on TV.

  Señor Wences was having a three-way conversation with Johnny (which was his left hand rested on top of a doll body); Pedro, the head in the cigar box; and a stagehand who was down behind a crate, supposedly fixing a loose board with a hammer.

  Halfway through the act, two stagehands came out, picked up the crate, showing it was empty, and walked off, leaving a bare stage.

  “Look. Look!” said Johnny, turning his fist-head on the body that way. “There was not a man there.”

  “There was no man there?” asked Wences.

  “No,” said Johnny. “There was not a man there.”

  “What do you t’ink, Pedro?” asked Wences, opening the box with his right hand.

  “S’awright,” said Pedro. The box snapped shut.

  “Come in here,” said Morgan from the door of his makeshift office, as Bill came into the theater.

  Sam was in a chair, crying.

  Morgan’s face was set, as Bill had never seen before. “Tell him what you just told me.”

  “I can’t,” Sam wailed. “What am I gonna do? I’m forty years old!”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that back in 1931.”

  “What the hell is going on? Sam! Sam? Talk to me.”

  “Oh, Bill,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Somebody. One of you. Start making sense. Right now,” said Bill.

  “Mr. Sam Shorts, here, seems to have been a commie bagman during the Depression.”

  “Say it ain’t so, Sam,” said Bill.

  Sam looked at him. Tears started down his face again.

  “There’s your answer,” said Morgan, running his hands through his hair and looking for something to throw.

  “I was young,” said Sam. “I was so hungry. I swore I’d never be that hungry again. I was too proud for the bread line, a guy offered me a job, if you can call it that, moving some office stuff. Then as a sort of messenger. Between his office and other places. Delivering stuff. I thought it was some sort of bookie joint or numbers running, or money laundering, or the bootleg. Something illegal, sure . . . but . . . but . . . I didn’t . . . didn’t . . .”

  “What? What!”

  “I didn’t think it was anything un-American!” said Sam, crying again.

  “Morgan. Tell me what he told you.”

  “He was a bagman, a messenger between United Front stuff the Feds know about and some they probably don’t. He did it for about three years.”

  “Four,” said Sam, trying to control himself.

  “Great,” continued Morgan. “Four years, on and off. Then somebody pissed him off and he walked away.”

  “Just because they were reds,” said Sam, “didn’t make ’em good bosses.”

  Bill hated himself for asking; he thought of Parnell Thomas and McCarthy.

  “Did you sign anything?”

  “I may have. I signed a lot of stuff to get paid.”

  “Under your real name?”

  “I guess so. Some, anyway.”

  “Guess what name they ha
d him use sometime?” asked Morgan.

  “I don’t want to,” said Bill.

  “George Crosley.”

  “That was one of the names Whittaker Chambers used!” said Bill.

  “They weren’t the most inventive guys in the world,” said Morgan.

  “I knew. I knew the jig would be up when I watched the Hiss thing,” said Sam. “When I heard that name. Then nothing happened. I guess I thought nothing would . . .”

  “How could you do this to me?!!” yelled Bill.

  “You? You were a one-year-old! I didn’t know you! It wasn’t personal, Bill. You either, Morgan.”

  “You know I put my show on the line in the deposition, don’t you?”

  “Not till Morgan told me.” Sam began to cry again.

  “What brought on this sudden cleansing, now, twenty years later?” asked Bill.

  “There was another letter,” said Morgan. “This time naming a name, not the right one, but it won’t take anybody long to figure that one out. Also that they were calling the Feds. I was looking at it, and looking glum, when Sam comes in. He asks what’s up; I asked him if he knew anybody by the name of the guy in the letter, and he went off like the Hindenburg. A wet Hindenburg.”

  Sam was crying again.

  Bill’s shoulders slumped.

  “Okay, Morgan. Call everybody together. I’ll talk to them. Sam, quit it. Quit it. You’re still a great writer. Buck up. We’ll get through this. Nothing’s happened yet. . . .”

  Live. The pressure’s on, like always. Everybody’s a pro here, even with this world falling apart. Harry and Fred on the cameras, Phil up in the booth, Morgan with him, Sam out there where the audience would be, going through the scripts for Thursday and Friday like nothing’s happened.