But this was Showbiz and Louie was her baby. She gritted her teeth and recounted his adventures, embroidering shamelessly.
Midway through a riveting account of the Houdini seance during which Louie had performed his first chimney trick, the room's lights flickered, then dimmed.
A buzz of speculation interrupted Temple's tale. She looked around. Louie was nowhere to be seen, but of course there was a crowd of wall-to-wall people in the room.
On the Santa wall, a spotlight illuminated the painted hearth and mantel. Bells rang out, not deep-throated church bells, but the tin-selly jingle of horse-bridle bells. Poe's bells of "crystalline delight" that "tinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the icy air of night." Kind of reminded Temple of Yvette out for an evening on a New York sidewalk.
For a moment it did feel cooler in the room, then a bent, red-garbed figure came bounding out of the fireplace, his false basso laugh booming good cheer.
"Well! What a fine convention for Santa! And what a splendid tree. Shall we see who's been naughty and nice this year? Have you got a chair for these old bones . . . and a cup of cocoa and maybe a cookie?"
"Oh, yes, Santa," crooned the children, running to the buffet table to scoop up fistfuls of cookies.
Santa sprang, most lively, to the stuffed armchair positioned near the tree.
"Now, girls and boys, I need an elf, or maybe several, to bring me the booty under yonder tree, aye, my hearties?"
Temple blinked. The line had begun as if intoned in the biblical richness of John Huston being particularly hammy and had ended on a note of Long John Silver.
Amateur actors! She was surprised that a man as dignified and aristocratic as Brent Colby, Jr., had secreted so much ham under that French-bread baguette exterior of his.
She began to agree with his daughter Kendall that he was a remarkable man. Courageous enough to ignore the considerations of class and enter into business with men from blue- collar backgrounds: hard-working, bright men no doubt, but in the sixties, of which she realized she knew nothing, were such alliances that common? Maybe they were after the chasms in custom the Vietnam protests had created.
Hadn't a movie star whose image then wasn't much different from Savannah Ashleigh's now--Temple knew old movies, if nothing else--become a lightning rod for in-your-face Vietnam War protest? Jane Fonda, now a corporate wife.
Temple shook her head. She would need to read a lot of contemporary history books to understand the earliest of the three decades of her lifetime.
Meanwhile, the party went on without her, and Louie. Names were called, beguiling little elves handing out presents with childish self-importance--how nice that the kids were not just the getters, but the givers. Temple was jolted from her reverie only when her own name rang out. Shortly after, a waif in baggy red tights and a Rudolph the Reindeer jumper toddled up to offer her a package, after being directed all the way by helpful adults.
Temple opened the wrapping, aware of everybody watching for a few seconds ... Inside the signature-blue Tiffany box (that oddly insipid pale blue that verged on turquoise), she found a vermeil black-cat pin with emerald eyes.
She smiled a thank-you toward Santa on his homely throne. And saw something odd about his eyes behind a mask of good cheer and spirit-gum wrinkles, beneath cotton-batting eyebrows, eyes that held a nagging question in them that only she could answer . ..
What question could Brent Colby, Jr., have for her, a humble maybe-employee under consideration?
Another name was called, Savannah Ashleigh. Another tyke proffered a gift, another pin in the saccharine-blue box, age-old sign of elegance. Two cats, two sets of gemstone eyes winking topaz and aquamarine in the light.
And then, before the guests of honor could get their minds on current events, Santa was done. He sprang up, energy incarnate, red and white, larger than life, bluffer, heartier, to the fireplace.
"A Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"
Up Dancer, up Dasher! Up Donner and Blitzen and Louie and Vixen --.' The figure lifted stubby arms in the single spotlight, then vanished upward.
Spotlights brightened on the cardboard cutout of Santa and his eight reindeer atop the chimney, but they seemed what they were, cardboard, even Rudolph's rhythmically blinking nose.
For a moment, Temple knew the ache of a child who could no longer believe in Santa Claus, no matter what she held in her hand.
She looked around. Children were gazing up, to the pale sky of a whitewashed ceiling, believing in fairies, ready to clap for Tinkerbell. They expected Santa to emerge up top from the chimney and dash off behind his eight tiny reindeer.
The hearth spotlight dimmed and went out.
Above the cardboard Santa and sleigh and reindeer glowed an ever-increasing light.
"This," said Kendall's breathless voice beside Temple, "is when he appears at the chimney top, blends with the Santa in the sleigh, and then all the lights go out . . ."
But Santa never exited the chimney.
And the deer did not disappear in a triumphant flash of glitter strewn hooves.
And the children who had seen this before were silent as the night.
And the children who had not seen this before were puzzled, thinking something was missing.
And the adults who had seen this before were as still as death.
And the adults who had not seen this before were . . . worried.
Finally, before the lights had dimmed on the cardboard Santa in his cardboard sleigh drawn by his cardboard deer with one red-lit nose, something appeared at the chimney mouth.
This was no North Pole apparition, but a coal-black cat. Here he had stood before and here he stood now and yowled, long and loud, so that finally, someone ... everyone ... understood that something was very wrong.
And all the lights went out.
Chapter 16
Virgin Mary Blues
A baby-pink spotlight aimed a direct hit on the Blue Mermaid's tail fins, making her look more like a blue whale, or a '59 Cadillac.
The figure was huge, maybe twenty feet high. The Blue Mermaid had stylized curly yellow hair, and wore a strapless dress that resembled jersey more than scales. Matt recognized that it was exactly the shade of blue that George at the Gilded Lily had tried to describe.
Matt stared past the overblown figure into the starless night. Las Vegas outshone mere starlight. The sky showed no constellations, only a flat black velvet backdrop for the neon aurora borealis haloing the Strip.
He had recognized George's despised shade instantly: VMB. Virgin Mary Blue, a bright, cloying blue sweeter than denim and darker than baby blue. Mary, the Mother of God's, signature color, duplicated on millions of gilt-edged holy cards and thousands of plaster statues now relegated to church attics.
Sometime it shows up in strange places. An elderly devout Catholic usually of eastern European descent, will suddenly paint his entire house blue, or will slather VMB on the inside oi an upended claw-foot bathtub-shrine, place within a statue of the Virgin wearing VMB, and become the talk of the town.
Matt wondered what the paint-makers called the color.
This VMB blue, though, was chipped in places down to dirty white plaster. And if the Blue Mermaid was not a vamp in the modern style, like the bold women in assorted harnesses he'd recently seen pictured outside the sexually oriented businesses, she did remind him of Mae West. A larger-than-life female fertility idol, all dressed up with nowhere wet to go within four hundred miles, except Lake Mead.
Matt knew one thing: the man who painted this effigy sixty years ago had been Roman Catholic. Only Catholics like VMB, out of lifelong conditioning.
He passed the motel's vestigial front office, where a faint incandescent light gleamed and a scent of stale sweet-and-sour hung on like olfactory heartburn. He supposed he could ask after Effinger there, but what man who moved from casino to casino ahead of the jaw-breakers of the world would register under his own name?
And what if this man he held in his hand in a sk
etch he couldn't quite see in the dark, what if this man was only an Effinger look-alike? It happened. Maybe Effinger was really a-moldering in the grave, in whatever public three-by-six the city had dumped him. And, if not, which dead-end room here was his?
Matt stuck his hands, and the sketch, into the pockets of his faux sheepskin jacket and slowly toured the motel's interior U-shape. A sign by the office offered rooms by the day, the week or the month. That made the Blue Mermaid a next-door neighbor to a flophouse, one that bled the helpless, unwanted poor of enough money to pay for a far more decent rental unit in a better neighborhood. But they'd never be accepted there.
Few units had vehicles parked outside. Either the renters were out, or too broke for wheels in this mandatory-mobile society. The figured curtains in the quaint, narrow windows were all drawn as tight as their sagging folds would permit. Some were safety-pinned shut. Raucous voices rose as Matt passed, reaching that point of futility when they're too loud to understand. Once he whiffed the pungent sour breath of marijuana smoke. His shoe brushed something on the asphalt... a used hypodermic needle. Discarded condoms shone sickly pale among the blown-in refuse like stranded, dead jellyfish.
He knew about all these things as an academic knew about gin-drinking in eighteenth-century England. The Blue Ruin, gin was called then, and it mostly ruined the already discarded, the penniless, the poor. Why was it easier to consider impoverished people as one great unwashed mass, no capital letters necessary? The poor. Too large, undifferentiated and inhuman a problem to address. As "the rich" were too faceless to envy and overthrow, "the poor" were too vague to do anything for or about.
But the tenants at this motel under its mantle of Virgin Mary Blue weren't only unfortunates. Some were criminals. Molina could probably spot signs of a lot more than drugs and sex, were she here. Drugs and sex happened in the best of parishes nowadays, and priests weren't quite the unworldly shepherds that they had been a couple generations ago. If some priests and preachers had abused children in the recent past, they had done it in the Iron Age. Still, holy innocents had abounded in the good old days. Matt had known and admired many of them, who would be shocked and saddened by his presence here, by his purpose here.
And what was that purpose? If he found Effinger, he would find out. When he found Effinger, he would find himself.
In the dim light, he paused to jot down what numbers remained on the doors. Some rooms were obviously unrented. Some were just empty, occupants out, or only there for a couple of the twenty-four hours paid for. Some units sounded like whole slums in a bottle, fussing children, whining adults, whimpering animals competing with the scratchy blare of a television set tuned to some show as unhappily hyperactive as they were.
Matt settled against a dim doorway near the street with a view of the entire U. One thing. Effinger's western getup made him a silhouette to remember. Maybe another urban cowboy or two roomed here, but not a whole herd of them.
The night wasn't cold for a Chicago native, thirty-something degrees. He braced a hip against the doorjam, kept his hands in his empty pockets and blended into the ambience. He remembered glimpsing his face in the smoky bar mirrors. Why the mirrors, anyway? To see other people come in, or to make sure one's self was there?
He couldn't deny his outer aspect now, his conventional good looks. But what should he do about them? He recalled T.S. Elliot's famous poem about J. Alfred Prufrock, a man as indecisive as his era. Like Prufrock, Matt found himself dwelling on minor decisions more than major ones.
Should he do something different with his hair? Grow it longer, cut it shorter in the monk-cut so popular among the trendy but ignorant young punks? Spend his hundred bucks on a haircut rather than a bribe for a bartender in a sleazy joint? Should he buy motorcycle boots to go with the Hesketh Vampire? Maybe enroll in a photography class. Subscribe to a magazine, but which one? Go into group therapy? He had preached enough to Temple about group therapy, and there was one for ex-priests, called Corpus. The next word that came to mind nowadays was "delecti." And how should he accessorize his new red couch the length of Long Island?
In his old life, he had few personal choices. He worried about values, not minutiae.
What did he hope for from Effinger? Because, no matter how much young Matt still hated the man's guts, not-so-young Matt must still need something from him. Confirmation of his worthlessness? Whose? Effinger's or Matt's, the failed priest so unfit for a secular world? Closure. The truth.
Just plain revenge?
Matt winced as the cold sank into his bones, and wished for a boiler-maker. It didn't matter which part you drank first, he decided. They both would be bitter medicine.
Something shuffled over the refuse. Crushed aluminum cans scraped along the concrete. Papers hissed as they were scuffed along.
Matt's head drooped, his eyes were shut. He was the next thing to sleeping upright, but the sound had awakened a memory from the past. A fact seen and heard then, and not noted.
But now ... That loping walk, the hip, affected shuffle of a fifties high-school hoodlum with cleats on his shoes. Click, shuffle, click, click. Ducktail greased. Short T-shirt sleeves (and they were white message-less undershirts then) rolled around a soft cellophane-wrapped pack of Camel cigarettes. Jeans tight and sagging low. Engineer boots with cleats. Click, shuffle, clickety-click.
Matt could still hear Cliff Effinger coming home, no cleats in the seventies, but the gait always threatened cleats, moving past the living-room rug and then echoing dully on the pitted kitchen linoleum. Matt had stared at that linoleum a lot, a graphic tenement of little windows, a Mondrian pattern boiled down to its cheapest, ugliest incarnation, only Matt hadn't known Mondrian from Matisse then.
His head lifted. His breath held.
A figure shambled toward a dark door across the way.
It wore a hat.
Hats were still worn in the sixties, by some. Fedoras shaded Sinatra's lean and cunning cinematic face. Age had filled in Sinatra's hungry angles, softened his flesh into a moon of Dutch cheese, all runny and forgetful. Like Brando's godfather, about as benign as a tumor. Las Vegas had been his beat, he ran with the Rat Pack here. The mob ran Las Vegas then. Not now. But somebody was dumping dead men in the ceilings of major hotel-casinos. If not that old-time religion, who?
Maybe he should ask Effinger.
Matt lurched away from the wall like a drunk. His ankle had gone to sleep.
He had to stop and wait for the pins and needles to jab the bloodless flesh to life. Waiting on pins and needles. And above, the Blue Mermaid, watching in her saccharine-blue gown.
Blessed Virgin Mary, star of the sea. Matt moved slowly so he didn't shamble like the man he was following. It was all too easy to turn into what you hunted.
Effinger fumbled at a door midway up the U's opposite upright.
Holy Virgin Mary, rose of memory.
Matt was catching up. Quietly for a lame man.
The door creaked ajar.
Most Holy Virgin Mary, rose of forgetfulness.
A light weaker than a drink at the Gilded Lily pulsed on.
Blessed art thou.
The man in the Western hat pushed the door open farther, paused, lit a Cigarette. A spark cursed the darkness and went out.
Full of grace...
Smoke, acrid and pure nicotine.
Now and at the hour of our death...
The door was shutting, the room closing, the Bible falling shut, the confessional door unlocked but inescapable.
Matt's hand and foot wedged between door and frame.
"What?" someone asked irritably. "I don't owe you a thing."
Amen.
Matt was shutting the door behind him, searching for the light.
"Who the hell are you?"
"Who the hell are you?" Matt demanded in turn.
The face under the wide western shadow said nothing.
Matt took the hat off.
"You're crazy, man! You're on something. I ain't got no
dough, no way."
The voice was... not loud and roaring. Matt tilted his head to see the face at a different angle.
The skin wasn't so much wrinkled as scored. Too much sun and sin in Las Vegas.
And he seemed . . . shrunken. Small. So small.
"Oh, Lord! Holy shit! What're you doin' here? You're gone. You're as good as dead."
"I'm not dead, and I'm not as good as I used to be."
"Look. I was a prisoner in that damn town. Damn icebox. I hada get outta there, all right? I did, didn't I? Didn't I go? Like a lamb when you got ugly. What's your gripe after all this time? You're supposed to be in some Holy Roller place, wearin' black like a damn nun. You're not here. Naw. Can't be here. Who the hell are you?"
"Who do you think, Cliff?"
"That's not my name. I'm Clint Edwards. Got that?"
"Yeah, I got it."
Matt moved around the cramped room, turning on every light switch he could find. Under its tilted shade, the table lamp by the door had only a forty-watt bulb. A bathroom cubicle tiled in stained white shone sickly under a buzzing fluorescent bulb that flickered like a strobe light above the tiny mirrored medicine chest. The outer room boasted only one more light, whatever would leach from the screen of a battered black-and-white TV opposite the lumpy double bed.
Matt turned the TV on too, and turned up the sound knob, so the passionate late-movie voices argued in the room like real people. A woman crying and pleading. A man yelling. It sounded just like home.
"Whatcha doin', you goddamn little freak, always lookin' at me with those big googly eyes! Always watching me. I told you to keep that TV down or off! This is my place--"
"No, it was our place. And then you came."
"Why shouldn't I have? Your ma thought it was a-okay. Don't like that, do you, kid? Your ma wanted more than a squalling brat to look after. I fit in real good."
"Why aren't you dead?"
"What--? What the hell you talkin' about? You want me dead, is that it?"
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