While I Disappear

by Edward Wright

  “Poor Joseph. Poor girl, too. I know what it’s like to be young and pretty and on the loose in L.A.” Rose shook her head. “What’s her name?”

  “Cassie. Cassie Montag.”

  “That doesn’t sound like an Indian name.”

  “Not all Indian names do. But Cassie happens to be half white.”

  “I know what this town can do to people, especially young girls,” she said wryly. “Maybe I should have a talk with her.”

  “Thanks, anyway, Rose.” He looked uncomfortable.

  She inclined her head slightly, regarding him. “What’s the matter? Oh, I get it.” Her expression hardened. “I’m such a mess, I’m not entitled to give advice to anyone, is that it? Well, that’s not very kind of you, John Ray. Or very fair.”

  When he said nothing, she sat back in her chair, eyes still boring in. After a while, her face softened, and she smiled. “It was nice to see the two of you together, just like the old days. Of course, Joseph didn’t recognize the old dame across the room either. Looked right past me, just like you did the first time.”

  “Well, I guess we can be proud of the Indian,” Horn said. “He’s made something of himself. Runs a card parlor out in an unincorporated part of the county, and I help out.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “The Mad Crow Casino.”

  “Sounds pretty grand.”

  “It’s not really. Just some poker tables and a roulette wheel and a few other things. But Joseph likes running a business, along with all the attention that goes with it.”

  She seemed to be studying the tea in her cup, suddenly quiet. “I know,” he said. “You’re wondering how it feels for Sierra Lane, the big cowboy hero, to be working for the Indian who used to follow him around in all those movies. But you’re too polite to ask. Well, I don’t exactly feel wonderful about it. But it’s a job, and Joseph’s a friend, and I’m glad to have it.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “You’re right, I was wondering, and it’s none of my business.” She got up suddenly. “Thank you for the tea. You don’t need to walk me back. Goodbye, John Ray.”

  Quickly laying some money on the table, Horn followed her out. The sidewalk was busy with people, most of them orientals, heading for nearby shops and grocery stores and outdoor food stalls.

  “Wait.” He caught up with her and took her sleeve. As they stopped, Horn was bumped from behind by a baby carriage propelled by a young Japanese woman. The baby boy leaned out, arms waving, and Rose reached down and allowed him to curl his tiny hand around her index finger. She smiled at the baby as the mother steered around them.

  “Dammit, Rose.” She looked up at him, her face impassive, as he searched for something to say. “Do you have a telephone?”

  “A pay phone,” she replied. “In the hall, under the stairs.”

  Fumbling in his pocket, he came up with the meal ticket from the mission, then the stub of a pencil. He handed them to her, and she wrote down the number as he went on talking.

  “Joseph and I were together last night, and he said I owed you for some of the good things that happened to me in the movies.”

  “Well, that was nice of him,” she said.

  “He was right,” Horn said. “I never got a chance to thank you for it. Look….” He plowed ahead, knowing he sounded foolish but not caring if he did. “Something went wrong for you, and you don’t want to talk about it. Well, I’ve got secrets too.” He took a deep breath. “In the war, I folded up. I’ve never told anybody. I spent months in a hospital while they tried to figure out what was wrong. They finally called it battle fatigue and discharged me. Everybody thought I came home some kind of hero, like Sierra Lane would have done. But I want you to know the truth. So, whatever secrets you have….”

  “Did you kill anyone in the war?” she asked, her gaze elsewhere.

  “Yes.”

  “Was it self-defense?”

  “I guess you could call it that,” he said. “We always called it that. Look, Rose…. Whatever you tell me about yourself, chances are I’ve done something worse.”

  They stood there for a moment amid the noise and stream of pedestrians, the smell of cooked food and fresh produce drifting out of open doors.

  She looked up at him and shook her head slightly, as if silently willing him to know that there were things he could never understand.

  “Have you?” she asked. Then she turned and left him there on the sidewalk.

  * * *

  He drove back to his cabin. For a couple of hours he weeded some more along the driveway, this time making it all the way up to the burned-out estate. Once there, where the ground evened out, he used a scythe to cut them down, swinging the blade in broad, easy strokes, hearing the satisfying snick, seeing the weeds topple and lie down in bunches, like soldiers mowed down by machine-gun fire as they marched across a field in precise formation. He had last performed this chore just a few weeks ago. But the owner, a real estate speculator, liked to show prospective buyers around on short notice and had instructed Horn to keep the grounds from becoming overgrown.

  In the early evening, he grilled a pork steak for his supper. Then he took a quick bath and changed into clean clothes. When collecting, he always tried to dress well—suit, tie, hat, and fresh shirt.

  The drive into Westwood took about half an hour. The neighborhood was a prosperous little enclave around the University of California campus. He found the professor’s address on a quiet side street of small but well-tended homes. The house was vaguely Spanish in design, a popular look ever since the 1920s.

  A youngish, pleasant-faced woman in an apron opened the door and, after some hesitation, called her husband. Henry Otis was younger than Horn had expected, somewhere in his mid-thirties and almost boyish-looking, clean-shaven and wearing wire-rimmed spectacles. Otis showed Horn into a kind of study and closed the door.

  “You’re from Joseph Mad Crow?” the man asked.

  “That’s right. I need to collect what you owe.”

  “Well, I’d have preferred a phone call first,” Otis said. “We’re just about to have dinner.”

  “I apologize,” Horn said. “If I can just collect the amount, I’ll be gone and won’t bother you anymore.”

  “Coming into a man’s house, in front of his wife,” the man said resentfully. “Did your employer think I wasn’t going to pay him? Is this the way you always work?”

  “I do whatever I need to do,” Horn told him, trying to keep his tone friendly. “As for your wife, I didn’t tell her anything. And no, Mad Crow didn’t think you’d try to welsh. He just doesn’t want you to take on more debt than you can handle. He wants you to keep coming to the casino, but he’s not going to extend you any more credit.”

  “Well….” Otis sat at his desk, moved some papers around a little longer than necessary, then wrote out a check and handed it to Horn. “Is that the amount?”

  “That’s it.” Horn folded the check and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Thank you, professor.”

  “You don’t have to call me that,” Otis said. “I’m just an instructor.”

  Horn looked around the room and noted that it was decorated in a western motif, with a painting of a roundup on one wall, a set of polished longhorns over the desk, and a handsome, tooled-leather saddle on a stand in a corner.

  “Do you ride?” he asked.

  “I do,” the man said, still a little stiff but no longer quite so angry. “There’s a group of us who teach at UCLA. We like to rent horses and take them up into the hills. We call ourselves the Riders of the Purple Sage—you know, after the Zane Grey book. It’s our little—” He stopped, staring at Horn. “Good Lord,” he said. “I know you. You made those movies with Mad Crow. You’re Sierra Lane.”

  “John Ray Horn, actually.”

  “You look different now,” the man said, looking Horn up and down. “Sometimes, for fun, we take our wives and girlfriends to that theater on Hollywood Boulevard that shows westerns—”

 
“The Hitching Post,” Horn said.

  “That’s right. We’re usually the oldest people in the theater. We carry on just like the kids. I guess it’s our way of getting away from the academic life, which can be pretty stuffy. Some of us have our favorite cowboys. One friend of mine, in the biology department, decided that Johnny Mack Brown is the best. Another likes the Durango Kid. I seem to recall you got somebody’s vote too.”

  They stood at the front door. Inside, Horn could hear Otis’ wife finishing up in the kitchen, and he thought he could smell grilled fish.

  “I’ll go now,” he said.

  “So, this job of yours,” Otis said, looking beyond him, out into the street. “Do you ever have to get tough? That’s the way I think of people who collect gambling money. Tough guys. I mean, suppose I’d told you to get out of my house? What would you have done? Hit me? Broken one of my fingers? Maybe threatened my wife?”

  “Come on,” Horn said.

  “Oh, hell,” Otis said. “Why should I lie to you? I was the one who said Sierra Lane was the best of them all. You see, even though it was just the movies and acting and all that, still I thought you were pretty damned heroic. And I came back from the war thinking that heroes were very hard to find. But still worth looking for….

  “And here you are, walking into my house to collect a gambling debt. Isn’t that funny?” Otis smiled a little sadly, his eyes cold behind the glasses, and Horn knew what was coming. He was halfway down the sidewalk when he heard the man’s parting words.

  “I wonder if you’re ashamed of yourself.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Horn was in a sour mood by the time he got home. In the small, curtained-off kitchen, he reached into the cupboard for his bottle of Evan Williams and poured a generous swig into a large glass. He sat on the front porch staring into the dark that was the canyon, listening to the small night sounds, waiting for Henry Otis’ bespectacled face to take shape out there in the void. When it did, it wore a familiar expression, one Horn had come to dread—disappointed expectations, thinly veiled contempt. Sipping at his drink, he softly cursed all those who expected things of him, especially those who walked out of cowboy movies confusing the real person with the screen image.

  That hero business, that was just make-believe, he said to the face in the dark. All I wanted to do was work at a good job, make some money. I always knew the difference between me and Sierra Lane. If you don’t, that’s your problem.

  Otis’ face dissolved into Rose Galen’s, and to his surprise he almost cursed her too. Even Rose, with all her problems, had shown a trace of pity when she regarded him and what he’d become. She’s got no room to pity me, he thought.

  But his other memories of her soon crowded out the anger, and he remembered his talk with Dexter Diggs. Her old director wanted to see her again, and he had forgotten to mention it to her.

  Picking up the receiver of the telephone by his sofa bed, he fished out the meal ticket and dialed her number. After several rings, a man answered, and Horn asked for Rose.

  “If she’s here, I’ll tell her you called,” the man said. Horn thought he recognized the manager’s voice.

  “Can’t you take a look?”

  “She’s two floors up,” the man said impatiently. “We don’t like to tie up the phone.”

  Horn grudgingly left his number and hung up. His watch told him that it was after ten, and he wondered if Rose had gone down the hill to the bars on Broadway. But a few minutes later he heard her voice.

  “Hello, there,” she said. He could tell she was drunk.

  “How are you doing, Rose?”

  “I’m doing… I’m just marvelous.” She drew the words out slowly, languorously, as if examining each one before letting go of it. “I’ve been sitting with a friend, and we’re having a wonderful time.” She giggled. “Wish you could be here. Except you have a way of interrupting a girl when she’s drinking.”

  “I hope it’s not that character we saw you with the other night.”

  “And what if it is?” She tried a teasing tone, but it lay heavy.

  “I mean it, Rose. He’s a dangerous man—”

  “Oh, I know all about him. Don’t be such a policeman,” she said. “If you must know, he’s not the one. No, this is a new friend, a very nice new friend.” She sounded pleased with herself, as if she knew something he didn’t. “You’d have no objection.”

  He felt a wave of anger toward her, for being a lush, for not being the Rose he wanted to remember. But he tried to suppress it. “Listen,” he said. “You can get back to him. I just wanted to ask if I can see you tomorrow and if I can bring someone along. Do you remember Dexter Diggs?”

  She repeated the name, giving it three distinct syllables.

  “You remember Dex. He directed us together. And he worked with you a long time ago.”

  “Oh,” she said faintly. “Dex.”

  “I’ll see if he can come over tomorrow night, all right?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t want him to see me.” It was almost a whisper.

  “Dammit, Rose, I’ve seen you.”

  “I didn’t want you to. Now that you have, I can’t do anything about it. But I don’t have to see Dex. And I won’t. Now you’ll have to excuse me, while I…disappear.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said almost playfully. “It’s just a line from a song. You’re way too serious sometimes, you know that?”

  He made a sound of frustration, trying to think of another approach. Almost in desperation, he said, “You know, I remember you.”

  All he could hear on the line were the faint sounds of the rooming house. It was almost as if she were holding her breath. “Remember what?” she said finally.

  “How important you were to me.” He began speaking quickly, to overpower her denials. “I remember two things. The way you turned this dumb-ass country boy into something resembling an actor and gave him a chance at a career.” She made a dismissive sound, but he went on. “And I remember that night I saw you for the last time. With everything that’s gone wrong in my life, I’d just about forgotten that night. But not anymore.

  “I’m not Sierra Lane, and I can’t rescue anybody. I’m just a guy who never got a chance to say thank you. For all of it.”

  Another long pause, and then she spoke: “Well, if you’d like to come calling tomorrow night, come right ahead. No Dex. Just you.”

  “Fine.”

  “I remember you too,” she said in a small voice, and hung up.

  * * *

  He spent the next morning doing chores around the property. As he took a break for a midday meal, Harry Flye, the owner, drove up in his big Chrysler with a couple who had come to look at the Aguilar estate. Unlocking the gate, Flye steered the car up the rutted driveway past the caretaker’s cabin and on up the hill. Although Horn stood there regarding them, Flye didn’t acknowledge him. The two men had a scratchy relationship based strictly on mutual need. Flye, an inveterate penny-pincher, needed an employee who would work hard for no wages, and he knew that Horn was grateful to have a place where he could live rent-free.

  Too bad I’m not wearing my hat,Horn thought. I could take it off and hold it in both hands, ducking my head just a little to show him respect.

  In the afternoon, he cleaned up and drove out to Mad Crow’s card parlor to deliver the money he had collected from Henry Otis and to get his cut. The place sat on what before the war had been a rural road, its only neighbor a gas station a hundred yards away. Now, with Los Angeles filling in around its edges and pushing outward into farmland, the road had grown busier, with a cafe and a roadhouse and a scattering of little homes nearby.

  The casino itself, which the Indian had built while he was still on the payroll at Medallion Pictures, resembled an oversize barn. It was painted white, with a red roof, a few small windows, and a flickering neon sign over the door that read Mad Crow Casino. The inside
was mostly one big, high-ceilinged room, with offices for Mad Crow and his secretary upstairs and storage rooms in the back. When Horn entered, the place was quiet, not due to open for a couple of hours. The Indian was at the bar, conducting a liquor inventory with a couple of his employees.

  “How you doing?” he muttered distractedly to Horn. The bar glittered with bottles lined up neatly in twin ranks. The place smelled of ammonia as one of his workers wiped down the glass shelves and the mirrored wall behind them. His mind clearly elsewhere, Mad Crow took the check, extracted a small roll of bills from his pocket, and peeled off an amount for Horn.

  “Lula!” he bellowed for his secretary. “I need those invoices!” He looked around. “Where the hell is she?”

  “You’re busy,” Horn said. “I’ll just—”

  “No, uh….” Mad Crow’s eyes focused on Horn. “Oh, shit. Stick around. Got my mind on other things, that’s all.” He leaned back against the bar and exhaled heavily. “It’s Cassie.”

  Horn made a face. “What is it this time?”

  “She took off from work last night without telling me. I wasn’t paying attention. One of the boys told me she got a call from somebody and up and left.”

  “Steal your Caddy again?”

  “No. I’ve been letting her use the Chevy. But I think she lifted one of the bottles from the bar.” He looked disgusted. “Now she’s stealing from me. And she probably ran off to be with that Mexican boy.”

  “You don’t know where she went.”

  “I know she came home late last night, drunk on my liquor, and slept ‘til noon. And I don’t know if she’s going to bother to show up for work tonight.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to quit playing wet nurse, that’s what.” He slammed the edge of the bar with the heels of both hands, as if to make the thought go away, and focused on Horn again. “So now that you’re flush, you going out to spend some of it?”