Manifesto for the Dead
Page 13
“I’ll be seeing you,” the cop said.
“Sure.”
Detective Orville Mann gave him his country boy smile. Then he tipped his hat, started his engine, and drove off into the twilight.
There was a story he had once yearned to write, but he had never done so. Fragments of the story were in everything he’d written but never in the right order, and never how he meant for them to be. He could blame people like Billy Miracle, or the publishing industry, or himself. He guessed, though, it was none of these.
The story had first occurred to him at the end of a long summer more than forty years before. He had been twenty-two years old, hitchhiking his way to Lincoln, Nebraska from the Texas oil fields, when he’d gotten stuck in a small town. Walking through the section of town with the old, substantial houses, he’d seen two young women on the front porch, sisters, he thought, because they looked something alike, even though one of them was beautiful and virginal, the other slack-jawed and hellish. He didn’t know how he looked to them, like danger, maybe, something exciting about to happen, unshaven and coarse. He had given them a little wave. One of them had waved back, and the other had smiled—the kind of smile someone gives when they’ve been molesting you in their dreams—and he had the distinct impression he could have strolled up the walkway into the lives of those women. He went on ahead to the corner, then turned back, his heart filled with desire. The sisters still sat there, in the dull Texas heat, their dresses damp with sweat, their hair curling and moist, but he saw now a man walking up the steps, a sampler case in his hand, and heard the sisters giggling, and he knew then he’d lost his opportunity. So instead he had kept going, hitching off to his first year at college, until one day he stood on the porch of his true love, holding a bunch of flowers. And that was the story Thompson had wanted to write, the story of that instant, of the young man standing on the porch with the flowers in his hand. The young man would be thinking about the girl inside, and he would remember those two sisters on that Texas porch, and meanwhile tiny no-see-um’s would be crawling over his skin, biting him to beat Jesus. He would hold red flowers in his hand and when she opened the door her face would seem suddenly strange to him, beautiful, yes, but ugly too, and he would want suddenly both to smother her with kisses and to hurt her in some horrible way, while behind her the door opened into the darkness of the house with its antique furniture and walls hung with the pictures of dead relatives in ruffles and high-collared shirts, waiting for him to join them.
Thompson had wanted for the story to be tender and devastating, a void into which the reader would fall, experiencing the gap, the empty space, his desire had created within him, and he wanted the story to have within it unexpressed all the streets he would ever wander and his own past boyness too, and his sainted mother and his lost father, and the girl he had left behind, all somehow there without being there, without even having been mentioned. That was the story he had wanted to write once and would never write, he realized, because after all what was anybody but a stranger on the street, afraid for himself and what was inside him, and when you looked back it was always too late, as you caught the dark shadow of yourself—a traveling salesman, a returning father, a god without mercy—climbing the stairs you had been too afraid to climb, walking inside the soft door of your heart, murdering your dreams with his charms, his good looks, his unstoppable tongue.
THIRTY-FIVE
The days passed. He did not go back to the Aztec Hotel. He stayed away from Musso’s. He did not drink (or he did not drink much), and he did not write. He thought sometimes of the girl buried by the freeway, and of the Oklahoman, and he sat in the small park across from the Hillcrest Arms and smoked his Pall Malls, taking the smoke deep into his lungs. There was something unfinished, he knew. Death was around the corner, but of course death always was. He should be hearing from his editor regarding the manuscript he’d written for Miracle. There was no movie deal anymore, even Countdown had lost interest, so full rights should be returning to him. Trouble was, everyone else had lost interest as well.
Alberta was still cool. She treated him with a politeness, a certain prim demeanor, as she moved about their shabby apartment. Even so, they found their own rhythm together. In the evening, the sun fell in long angles through the palms, and they would walk up the hill past all those houses with their gardenias and hydrangea and the birds of paradise growing on the other side of the picket fence. He’d see the women leaning over those fences, and hear the children playing, and the whole world would have that roseate glow. But there was always the other side too. Messages from the glowing tube in the corner, from the newspaper. Old women who had been knifed in their beds. Prowlers that crawled through windows. Bodies that washed ashore. Encyclopedia salesmen who came back in the middle of the night to steal children. And Thompson would lie beside Alberta thinking about those others. He felt at times she had to be thinking the same things as himself, but when he talked to her, she spoke in the same sort of Oklahoma platitudes she always spoke in. All we have is the here and now, honey, she would say. You know that. And there’s no moon like the harvest moon. Because, the wind, well, it always blows hardest just before the corn is ripe. Things like that. But when he reached to touch her, she still rolled away in bed.
All this while, he heard nothing from his publisher. He decided to call Hector Sally, his editor. “I love it,” Hector said, “there’s just a few little changes I’d like to see. Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you.”
Hector, though, did not call. When Thompson tried to contact him, the secretary said he was out. The next time, she told him he had left the firm. The new editor couldn’t find the manuscript.
“I love your writing, Jim,” said the new man. “I’m a big son-of-bitch fan, but I’m afraid it isn’t here.”
“What do you mean, it isn’t there?”
“I am afraid it’s lost.”
“Lost? It’s my only copy.”
“No carbon?”
“I’ve got fragments. Bits and pieces. But not the whole manuscript.”
“That’s a shame—but maybe you could fill in the gaps somehow. Of course, your time is valuable, I know, and our list for next fall, it’s pretty full. No guarantees, you understand.”
Thompson realized he was being given the kiss off. For some reason, he did not care. In a way, it was liberating. He didn’t have to worry about it anymore.
He told Alberta.
“I’m finished,” he said. “I give up.”
She brought him some collard greens she had made, and sat down pleasantly at the table beside him. She reached out and touched his thigh. He could smell that old cornfield now, as if it were right outside the window.
“Should we go do something this evening?” she asked.
“That would be nice.”
They went out for malts at a drive-in diner, and sat in the car. Girls in skates brought the food, and kids hung around running combs through their greased-up hair, as if they all lived in an earlier decade.
“Let’s take a drive,” she said.
They drove for hours. Down to Bunker Hill, then out to Santa Monica, along the Palisades, and back up through the Malibu canyons into the city, but at the end of it he was still not quite ready to go home, and neither was she, and so they drove up Whitley Terrace, and he pulled down the gravel road overlooking the freeway. Alberta wanted to get out and look at the Whitely Cross, and the lights of the cars rushing down towards Hollywood, so that’s what they did. After a while, they wandered over to the other side of the hill, Thompson could see the spot where the girl lay buried, he was pretty sure, down slope, below the eucalyptus, just off the trail. Weeds had started to grow over the site, and Thompson knew now it would be a long time before anyone found her body.
“I’m sorry,” he told Alberta.
“Why?”
“For everything. The rummy apartment. The crummy smell in the upholstery.”
She didn’t say anything.
�
�I can’t give it up.”
“What?”
“None of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was down on the Boulevard yesterday. I had a drink.”
“I know,” she said.
“I have an evil in my heart.”
“I know that, too.”
She leaned against him—accepting him again, as she had done in the past, the old circle spinning around, so it was her fingers reaching for his—then she kissed him, hard, and he felt a thrill within him, the old erection erecting, and she put a hand on his belt, and he looked her in the eyes, and there was a gleam that frightened him, and he remembered that hungry girl she had been, and how much she had surprised him with her ferocity.
Meanwhile, there was that other girl down there, still in her grave. Whatever her name was. The innocent one.
“What did you do with Lucille?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You saw her when she was here?”
“No.”
“You wanted to see her?”
He hesitated. “No,” he said.
She did not believe him. She was jealous, he guessed. Anyway he could see a gleam in her eyes, a hunger, and a little bit of anger too. They went home then, and though her anger was still there, she rolled sideways in the bed, pulling him towards her, and he felt the hot flush of the blood rising to his skin. He pulled up her nightgown, feeling her nakedness there, her stomach against his, and her breath heavy in his ear. As he touched her, he thought about the book he had written and how he might salvage what was left. He would call his editor. As he caressed her, in his mind, he had already made the call. He could hear his editor’s voice.
“What’s your idea?”
“I’ll use pieces of the old book, the parts I have left. And I’ll write another book around it. About an old man, in Los Angeles. He’s a crime writer, trying to write a story about his life. Except he doesn’t realize it until the last few pages, and by that time, well, he’s become character in his own book.” And the more he thought about it, the more the lines dissolved, between the living and the imagined, between those who called and those who were summoned. Because while it might be Lieutenant Mann’s job to separate good from evil, his own was quite the opposite.
“Sounds great, Jim.” It was a flat voice, full of irony. “What will you call it?”
Thompson hesitated. “Same title. Manifesto for the Dead.”
“Brilliant.”
Even as he spoke, he knew the new man was only humoring him, betting the manuscript would not be finished. That old Jim Thompson would kick the bucket, or otherwise disappear. And as he turned again towards his wife—both passionately involved and distant, separated from her even as he felt his erection growing and felt too the wild thrill of her flesh, as if their whole life had been building towards this instant—Thompson figured maybe the editor was correct. Maybe he would not write the book. He would not live. He felt himself already becoming a figure in someone else’s story, drifting over the border. If it wasn’t the Oklahoman who got him, it would be something else. A stroke. Congestive heart failure. A stranger slipping through the window and taking him in the middle of the night. He was joining that other world. Maybe he already had. Maybe he lay on his deathbed and this moment, now, was pure imagination. He was a figure in someone else’s dream. It didn’t matter. He was on top of Alberta, she was clasping him to her. He couldn’t help himself. He loved the moment of descent, he could not resist, and neither could his wife. There was fierceness in the air. Lust. Desire. Her body was skeletal, hideous, beautiful in its ugliness, homely and horrifying. He kept after her, and she was pulling him down into her, and he felt his heart pounding too heavily, the blood rushing to the head, and she was whispering in his ear, incomprehensible words, beckoning him closer, and that’s what he was doing, plunging into that forbidden darkness. Then more darkness, and figures moving there, and somewhere a border that once you crossed you did not come back. He knew before long he would slip over that border, into that blackness, and he would leave behind his own calligraphy, a dark looking-glass, for those who would follow him down.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Domenic Stansberry
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1199-0
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