“Then you try, Gus. You ask him the questions you think need answering.”
“I’m nobody to him. But Jack the Finder . . . Jack the Finder-outer . . . C’mon, man. What’s with you, all the hot and cold?”
“Everybody is nobody to him, these days. Can’t you see, he’s lost it?”
“No. You’re wrong. He hasn’t. He hasn’t, Jack.” I was calm, logical, and aware my brain might well have swapped places with Jack’s. “Blackhurst is an actor. He turns it on and he turns it off. He always has. He’s no different than he’s ever been.”
“Except fatter, older, balder.”
“Think about it. That day, when he told us about the movies he’d made, he was sharp as a tack. Until the lady in black stepped in. If not for her, I bet you we’d have had the whole story.”
“So what are you saying?”
“We sit him down, show him the cards again. Just you, me, and him. Right here.”
“Jesus,” Jack said, his look akin to sighting Jesus. But it sure as heck wasn’t Jesus.
McGrath had made his grand re-entrance, his stage the marina. Like the Cyclops lurching out of the cave and onto the beach in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. A sense of timing this good, you had to be born with it.
Six
Cyclops
The Record building was on Quinte, corner of Creswell, a lobotomized backstreet any normal town would have relegated to the fringes. Businesses were so shady here, legit storefronts would have killed business. The dock was a convenient escape route to Dundas and the east bank of the river for winos, drifters, resident ne’er-do-wells, and reporters who populated the area. Bryan McGrath was at the midpoint of the square.
Five seconds, no more. He did not speak. Did not gesture. Did nothing but stand and stare. And the fear Jack and I had believed we’d left behind came rushing back in demoralizing spades. McGrath’s impassivity reeked of a familiar and sickly menace.
I might as well have been pinned to his office wall again, his forearm pressed to my chest, his cigarette at my cheek. And the look on Jack’s face, I tell you, he was that kid at the table in the Marquee, the reporter’s wiry fingers clamped to his wrist, Frank Buck’s elephant gun between his eyes.
As quickly as the fear had filled us, the fear was gone. I can’t explain it, except to say those two terrified twerps were not us. Threaten me six thousand times, shame on you. Threaten me six thousand and one, shame on me.
“Still feeling brave?” Jack said, as we watched the skinny old prick slink off.
“More than ever,” I shot back, my backbone on short-term loan from every overeager, skin-crawling child actor who’d ever destroyed an otherwise good movie for me. “I’ve had enough. That guy, it’s like running in circles. One day we’re scared shitless, next we’re laughing him off. Once and for all, Jack, let’s end it.”
“Who’d have thought? You really do have guts.”
“We don’t show Blackhurst those cards again, we’ll hate ourselves forever.”
“Fear is a funny thing, eh?” Jack said, and my eyes glazed over in anticipation of another Jack Levin moment of reflection. “In the city, living in Montreal, you get accustomed to the sirens. Police cars. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Night and day. Death has lots of business and lots of choice there, so the odds work in your favour. But coming back here, small town, if the sirens aren’t coming for your neighbour, they’re coming for you.”
“You’re telling me you’re scared?”
“Always.”
“Like what we used to talk about, then. Something bad is going to get you. . . .”
“But before, when I lived here, I never felt it as much as I have since I’ve come back.”
“And whatever it is, you think it’ll be coming from McGrath?”
“You saw. The guy’s a stick in the wind. We could take him easy. It’s something else. Something I can’t put my finger on.”
Mr. De Grote, my biology teacher at Trenton High, had said the human body is composed of sixty percent water. He never said what the other forty percent was. My guess was apprehension.
Rare was the afternoon McGrath didn’t amble through the background of our foreground. Some days he’d torch us with the death rays of his eyes, other days he gave the impression he couldn’t care less. Little did he know the feeling was mutual. We exercised restraint, fought the urge to give him the finger, hurl epithets, exact revenge for all he’d put us through.
Canteen traffic slowed in the afternoons. I was restocking the chocolate bars when I heard Jack calling. He was down at dockside, pumping gas into a sleek twenty-seven-footer flying a U.S. flag. I hoped maybe Rod Serling had shown up. Or, more likely, knowing Jack, another all-American goddess sunning on a deck.
Jack pointed me toward the swing bridge and the voices raised in anger.
Holy frigging cow. Together again for the first time, Blackhurst and McGrath were going at it. Nose to nose and toe to toe, no small feat considering the difference in their sizes. Hardy versus Laurel. Red in the face. Gaskets blowing. Vessels bursting. Perspiration flying. Finger-wagging. Hand-waving. Fists-pumping.
We never did learn what they were arguing over. Didn’t matter. We’d procrastinated with the cards too long. The reality hit as we helped Mr. Blackhurst onto Evie III. His face 12-gauge red. With rats humping in his shirt pocket—you would have sworn that’s what it was—the Sturm und Drang of his stale-dated heart, blood sluicing to the path of least resistance.
“Tomorrow,” Jack said.
“Crack of dawn,” I said.
Seven
In a borough abustle with simpletons and sycophants
I pulled three cards from the library and slipped my random selections between the pages of yesterday’s Record. Habits born of fear die hardest.
I met Jack before sunrise under the maroon awning of the Gilbert Hotel, a three-story throwback to the glory days of rail. Spittoons in the lobby. Crushed velvet, brass, and mahogany. And guests soaked to the gills in whatever was their pleasure.
Bert Levin had sold the house on Queen the year before. Mom had offered to have him board with us, but he opted for a room in the Gilbert. Five nights out of seven he was sleeping with her, anyhow, so the room was mostly about propriety. When Jack came back, Bert squeezed a cot into the room. He also stopped sleeping with Mom.
“For God’s sake, Emily, I’m not hiding it from him. I told him we were seeing each other. And he was absolutely fine with it. Jack likes you. He likes Leo—or Gus as he calls him. But anything more between us right now, I’d be throwing it in the boy’s face. It’s only a couple of months, Em. C’mon. We cool it till September and pick up where we left off. Where’s the harm?”
My mother lit up six consecutive Du Mauriers and boycotted the Marquee and Bert. “It’s my decision,” she told me. “You’re free to do what you wish.” Mom’s independence had been a source of personal pride, especially as she climbed the Avon ladder. She’d given a good share of it up for Bert and was now determined to reclaim her losses. “If that man thinks he can come and go as he pleases, treat me like his little side dish, he’s in for a surprise. Oh, I’ll cool it till September, all right.”
The streets were quiet as Jack and I drifted toward the marina, cones of yellow from the streetlamps overhead, moths coming off nightshift. A wino asked if we knew where he might buy buttermilk. We told him we didn’t know. A cop car cruised by. The cop knew Jack from the Marquee, asked if the wino was giving us trouble. We told him he wasn’t. A black Lab snored in the entranceway of Woolworth’s. We tiptoed past.
To hear Evie III hum to life that morning was a relief, I tell you. And seeing Mr. Blackhurst come ashore surely added to it. He was in better shape than we’d expected in the aftermath of his set-to with McGrath. The old guy was exuberant in fact, babbling on about his beloved Evie IIIwith more than the usual rapture, entering the homestretch with his tip of the day for Jack and me. “Life, you’ll find, is infinitely simpler, your wife and mistress sharing the same
name.”
We thanked him as part of the routine, the lesson gleaned beside the point.
Our intention was to reintroduce him to the cards gradually, but Mr. Blackhurst had opened another door and we could not resist.
Jack kept it casual, tried not to pry. “Evie III, is she named after your wife, sir? The lady we saw in the dry cleaners. You remember?”
“The day we showed you the intertitles,” I said. “Alfred Hitchcock, you don’t like him, do you?”
He patted his hotdog bun, gave the dog a quarter spin. “Evangeline August. My Evie. She had the world at her feet, that girl. Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish—none shone brighter. And to think she gave it up to be with the likes of me.”
“She was a movie star, sir?”
He poofed, eyes magnified by three. “In a borough abustle with simpletons and sycophants, what else would she have been? Good Lord, an extra?”
“Sorry,” Jack said, and I mumbled a semblance of the same, unclear as to what we were apologizing for and where we ranked between simpleton and sycophant.
“You lads, of all people, should know. Does it not take one to know one? From the moment Evie laid eyes upon you she possessed nary an iota of doubt. ‘Stars,’ she called you. ‘Stars.’”
“Us? What?”
“Pardon, sir?”
“If you have it, lads, you have it.”
“I’m not sure we get it, sir,” Jack said. “If you could just expl—”
“Dear God, you inform me now, the denouement at hand? For Heaven’s sake, you have your roles. Am I your wet nurse? Follow the bloody script. And the girl? Where is the girl? Why isn’t the girl here?”
His last bite was rocket fuel, the speed he took off, his belly his nosecone. Like where was the real Mr. Blackhurst and who the hell had taken over his body?
The intertitles would have to wait another day.
Eight
The best job I ever had
You know those questions you hear in bars, when the small-talk peters out, before the quiet turns to disquiet? The one book you’d want if shipwrecked on a desert island? Your last meal before they fried you in the chair? The best job you ever had? All these years later, it is only the last I can answer without hesitation: Take away the lunacy that came after and you couldn’t beat the first three weeks of the summer of 1966. Hanging out with Jack, the give and take. I didn’t need to be me, free to hone the fantasy of a better me. You got guts, man. That’s what Jack had said. Said it twice. You got guts, man.
If only.
Nine
The day after Richard Speck
Jack had a theory as to the nature of Evil, how it manifested itself in vapours, windborne and guided by whim. “Trouble with Trenton,” he said, “the vapours linger.” He could be a dramatic son of a bitch. Half the time I’d wonder if half the stuff he said wasn’t swiped from movies and books.
But there was no denying the malignancy in the air. The day before, news had come from Chicago, 600 miles to the southwest, that the bodies of eight student nurses had been found, raped and stabbed and strangled in the dorm they shared. This is why the date sticks. July 15, 1966. And while Richard Speck would soon become the first mass killer to set up camp in my consciousness, Jack and I had a body of our own to contend with that morning.
“Gonna be a sticky one,” Mr. Blackhurst said, observing the sear of the sunrise. He would know, I thought. The red filled his face, rose from beneath his knotted tie and buttoned collar. Blackhurst was his old self, and less. The energy of the day before was absent, as was his daily pearl of wisdom.
His spirits lifted at the sight of the hotdog. The toasted bun. The zigzag of mustard.
“We’ve got something to show you, sir, if you don’t mind.” Jack steered him by the elbow to the picnic table. I dealt the cards onto the surface. Mr. Blackhurst stood, observed, chewed.
Jack said, “We’re hoping you’ll tell us more about your movie days.”
“Hollywood North,” I said.
Blackhurst’s jaw worked to the rhythm of a throaty purr. He hacked, and I figured hairball. He hacked again, and Jack leaned in. “You feeling okay, sir?”
The old man went Wolf Man on us, his face obliterated by mouth and snout. A chainsaw cough and a popgun pop. And a bloodied wad of bun and wiener shot onto his palm. He teetered, knees bent to bench, grim realization dawning, as if done in by sabotage—slivered bamboo or powdered Kryptonite. He reached across the table, his fingers worming up my arms, his flesh as grey and clammy as the concrete underfoot.
He clutched his armpit and his life dropped out from under him. He reversed like a Slinky from tabletop to bench to ground, flopped flat onto his back. His eyes rotated shut and, with the disconcerting hiss of a cross-country fart, the whole of him contracted.
We stood over him. Watching. Waiting. Hoping.
His eyes rotated open, a jackpot white.
It’s the one thing they never teach you in school, what to do with a dead body. Do you leave it? Touch it? Sit with it? And who do you call? And why weren’t there boxes on street corners?—Pull in Case of Death.
Jack ran to the Marquee to tell his dad.
I packed up the cards, hid them in the canteen behind packages of napkins, and returned to shoo away the flies.
It struck me then, Mr. Blackhurst had eaten his last hotdog. I wondered if I’d know when it came down to the final hotdog of my life. Wondered if anyone knows when they’re eating their last hotdog, outside of death row inmates who’d made it their last meal. Or vegetarians, of course, who could probably tell you the time, date, and place of theirs.
Two ants inspected Mr. Blackhurst’s last bite. I kicked the slimy wad of pink and white onto the crabgrass. A black Lab swooped in from somewhere, but a seagull beat him to it.
The Lab sniffed Mr. Blackhurst’s ear, licked an eye, the saliva bubbles on his lips. I grabbed the broom. “Get outta here,” I shouted. The dog yelped off and Mrs. Dahl-Packer came yelping up from dockside.
“What have you done to the poor man? You monstrous boy, what have you done?” She dropped to her knees, pounded Blackhurst’s chest, and stuck her mouth on top of his.
She kept going till we heard the sirens. “You’ve done it this time, haven’t you? Don’t think I won’t tell the authorities everything I know.”
“But what about you?” I said defiantly. “You French-kissed a dead man.”
Ten
The best thing that could have happened
The cops and ambulance guys got right to it, measuring, photographing, straight out of Rescue 8, despite the absence of anyone to rescue. Boaters crowded around, too, murmurs reserved, as they kept Jack and me hopping at the canteen with requests for coffee and grilled cinnamon buns. Our busiest morning to date.
“It’s our fault,” I said to Jack during a lull. “We killed him with the cards.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You saw him. He was sick before he got here. You don’t eat hotdogs for breakfast and expect to live forever.”
“The cards, Jack, I’m telling you, no different than King Tut’s tomb. You lay your eyes on ’em, you touch ’em, and you’re cursed.”
“You know what you’re saying, don’t you? Because that’d make us cursed, too.”
We told the police what they wanted to hear, omitting the details best kept to ourselves.
Mrs. Dahl-Packer spoke to them, too, pointing at me all the while.
They were wheeling Mr. Blackhurst into the ambulance when Bryan McGrath turned up. He peeled back the sheet for an I.D., snapped photos, and prodded the cops and ambulance attendants for quotes. He saved Jack and me for last.
He kept a professional distance, not what we’d come to expect from him. “Your eyewitness accounts are all I’m looking for, gentleman.”
Jack grabbed the broom as if he might whack the reporter, then brushed past him and started sweeping.
Mr. Blackhurst was the first person to die before my eyes. My first freshly dead body. Til
l now, I’d lived with and accepted accidental death. Slip in a public washroom, you die. Go fishing from a dam, you die. Play on a construction site, you die. But now Death had a new wrinkle: He could jump you at any time, no negligence required. I’d always frustrated Mom, how I kept stuff inside, reluctant to talk it through. While I wasn’t yet ready to bare my soul, I felt I had nothing to lose, and finally get my name in the paper to boot. “Well, he came by early, same as alw—”
“Cut to the chase, son,” McGrath said. “Dead is dead. All I need are his last words. You got one shot, make them good.”
I was eager to please, stuttered as I scrabbled for a clever parting line. Something up there with “Keep watching the skies” from The Thing or “To God, there is no zero—I still exist” from Shrinking Man. A quote to incorporate Blackhurst’s fatal hot dog perhaps. Then Jack cracked the broomstick on the picnic table and stole my limelight, yet again.
“‘I made movies.’ That’s what he said. ‘I made movies in Hollywood North.’ Mr. Blackhurst’s last words exactly.”
McGrath met the assertion with an exasperated sigh. He pocketed his notepad, his tone uncharacteristically conciliatory. “Let me tell you, Jack Levin, as sad as this day is, Norman Blackhurst’s passing is the best thing that could’ve happened to him. Best that could’ve happened to all of us. May he rest in peace. And may you boys—you and you—have the respect and common decency to let him.”
Jack wilted, his bravado dissipating. Guilt tugged at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Was he buying what McGrath was selling? Had he so easily forgotten what the man had put us through? For the second time this morning, I witnessed sudden death.
McGrath rested a grandfatherly hand on Jack’s shoulder and would have done the same to me had I allowed him. “Whatever you boys think, whatever you have been up to—and I know you have been—let the end be the end. A man is dead here. You understand the finality—the gravity. A human being same as you and me is dead here.” McGrath bowed his head. “‘Short days ago he lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and was loved, and now he is no more.’ Common decency, boys. Common decency.”
Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels Page 27