Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels

by Michael Libling

  Despite my objections—“Cut it out! C’mon!”—and frequent elbows to Jack’s ribs, they kept at it till Annie dozed off during the third feature, slumbering serenely within the crook of the traitor’s arm.

  And wouldn’t you know, there was my best bud, fair-weather Jack, back on the job as if his tongue hadn’t been swabbing my oldest friend’s throat ten seconds before. Oh, I was seething. Still, I set aside our differences for the greater good, vague though it was.

  We watched. Fought sleep. Drowsed. Nudged one another awake. Pointed out familiar intertitles. And yeah, sure enough, the pieces came together. For me, anyhow.

  “Hey! Did you see—the cowboy in the white hat? At the end of the bar.”

  Jack straightened. “What about him?”

  “It’s him. Mr. Malbasic.”

  “No way.” He peered at the screen.

  “I’m telling you, it’s him. Same outfit he’s wearing in the picture on his office wall.”

  “It’s hard to tell,” he said, as hell broke loose in the Dry Gulch Saloon.

  “I’m telling you, it’s him.”

  “You say so . . .”

  Jack and Annie were back to making out when The Black Ace came on. Too bad, too, because the film was the best of the lot, Mr. Blackhurst’s self-described masterpiece.

  The hero was a one-time WWI flying ace who becomes a barnstormer. He’s got it made. Swell hair. Manly moustache. Winning smile. Super-sweet girlfriend. Adoring public. But when the clock strikes midnight, he dons his canvas flying helmet, adjusts the chin strap, lowers his goggles, and makes like Jack the Ripper.

  I didn’t have patience for all the credits, as brief as they were. Still, seeing N.K. Blackhurst as director on three gave me that pang of excitement you get when you know someone famous.

  His wasn’t the only credit to jump out, either.

  The Black Ace had Bryan D. McGrath down as Assistant to the Producer.

  And for The Black Ace, High Noon in Dry Gulch, and Night Fog, an Iris Nearing was credited for Costumes. I couldn’t say for certain she was Iris Lebel, too, but I couldn’t say she wasn’t.

  As for our infamous intertitles, I counted eleven sure hits and half as many good bets scattered among the five flicks. I knew the cards pretty much by rote by then, but the lack of a notepad to keep count and my occasional nodding off put my accuracy in doubt. You sit through a silent film marathon without a note of music and you tell me how long you stay awake.

  “Were you in any of them?” Annie asked Evie, after the lights had come up.

  “Not if you blinked, dear,” she said.

  “So, then, Hollywood North is for real,” Jack said. “Mr. Blackhurst did make movies in Trenton.”

  “Jesus, Jack, you think that’s all there was to this?” I said. “If you think that’s all Mr. Blackhurst wanted us to see, you weren’t watching.”

  “I was watching,” Jack lashed out. “I saw what I had to see.” Who was this guy, Jack the Blinder? Had his horniness for Annie zapped his brain? Had love smacked him stupid? Had McGrath’s guiltshit lament for Blackhurst dimmed his lights? How could he not put two and two together? The worst of it, he wasn’t done. “So why is Hollywood North a secret? I mean, all your movies . . . And Mr. McGrath, why’d he go nuts when we first brought him the title cards? And then you, that day?”

  I cut in before Evie could reply. “The disasters. Didn’t you see the disasters? The train derailment. The buildings blowing up. The plane crash. The tanker truck—”

  “So what? Find me a movie that doesn’t have a train going off the rails or a bridge falling down. The old ones especially, if it wasn’t a sword fight, that’s all they had going for them. Any idiot knows that. I’m right, aren’t I, Mrs. Blackhurst?”

  Evie came around to the front, gave Jack a hard stare. “You’re the boy who finds things.”

  Jack’s extra large smile wasn’t all that different from the Black Ace’s. “Jack, ma’am. Jack Levin.”

  “Well, Jack Levin, I have a question for you: Who do you think I am? The all-knowing windbag at the end of the story who ties the loose ends into a pretty little bundle and tells the good children to run along? Is that who I look like to you?”

  “No, Miss, it’s just—”

  “I showed you the films as Norman requested. Make of them what you will.”

  Annie was up and at the door of the Icebox. “Please, Jack. I need to get home.”

  “Only thing I don’t understand is why Mr. Blackhurst told us it was fear that killed Hollywood North. Fear of what? Horror movies?” Jack was scrambling, brain cells shooting out his ears. Man, it felt good to hold the upper hand for once.

  “It is late. Listen to your girlfriend, Jack Levin.”

  “I’d like to come back another time, if it’d be all right, Miss August.”

  Evie lowered her eyes as if to contain her thoughts, and abruptly ushered us through the heavy door, up the steps, and into the passageway.

  “. . . Like, you know, come back when we’re not so tired.”

  I dawdled by the coat rack as Jack played the fool. All he had to do was look in Evie’s face; he’d had his chance and he’d blown it.

  “It was very interesting, Miss. Thank you,” Annie said, and then, marching off, issued us her ultimatum. “I’m leaving without you.”

  “It was great,” Jack said, and chased after his girlfriend. “Thank you. See you.”

  Calamity and tragedy had underscored the films Mr. Blackhurst had lined up for us. Watching out for our intertitles during the screenings had taken concentration and, as I said, I missed a bunch. The no-brainer was the message Jack had failed to grasp.

  Not every accident or disaster in the movies struck home. A tornado. A mine cave-in. A dam busting. An earthquake. But, fact was, most struck too close to home.

  A train derailment.

  A bomb factory explosion (courtesy of a German saboteur).

  A yacht fire and sinking.

  A tanker truck blowing up.

  A big-top fire.

  A midair plane collision (a highlight of The Black Ace).

  A graveyard on the grounds of a mansion (The Black Ace again).

  A landslide above a sleepy village.

  A train annihilating a stalled bus.

  And thousands of drownings (most in The Deadly Waters of Nantes, a costume drama set in France).

  I waited till the door slammed shut behind Jack.

  “He had it backwards,” I said. “Maybe not the train wreck, because it was earlier, but the rest . . . The accidents happened in your movies first, before they happened for real. Before. That’s it, isn’t it? Your movies made the bad stuff happen.”

  “Your friends are waiting for you.”

  “People got scared. That’s why you stopped making them. That’s what killed Hollywood North.”

  She busied herself with the tassels of her scarf. “After you’ve passed through the gate, please lock it.” She handed me a key. “Leave it in place. I’ll retrieve it later.”

  My heart was beating, my breath short, felt like I was running for my life. “And it hasn’t stopped, has it? The bad stuff you filmed, some is still happening for real. And if it hasn’t, it’s coming. I’m right, aren’t I? Aren’t I, Miss August?”

  Her eyes met mine so unexpectedly, I turned my cheek, checked my neck for whiplash. “Which would you say comes first, the chicken or the egg?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Does film mirror life or does life mirror film?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Neither do I.”

  “But—”

  “You’re the one they call Gus.”

  “It’s not my real name.”

  “That’s okay. Evangeline August isn’t my real name.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Two complete strangers in a room, each known by their respective alias . . . Some might attach great significance to such coincidence.”

  “Robert Ripley would,” I sai
d, and it was the closest I would ever come to seeing her smile.

  “To me, there is only one real coincidence: That each and every person’s life is riddled with coincidence.”

  My brain was backfiring. “You’re saying the bad stuff in your movies and the bad stuff in Trenton are coincidences?”

  “Tell me, Gus, would you like to be famous?”

  “Huh? Like a movie star? Like when you told Mr. Blackhurst we were stars, Jack and me? Stars of what?”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “What?”

  “You know what you need to do, of course?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Something very good.”

  “What?”

  “Or something very bad.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “How odd. You profess to have a perfect grasp of everything else.”

  Fifteen

  The Brain Eaters

  I caught up with Jack and Annie at the gate.

  “Jack says you’ll show me the cards, now that your wild goose chase is finally over.”

  I threw up my hands. “You told her about them, Jack? You told her?”

  “What’s the big deal?” he said. “We know the truth now.”

  “You don’t know anything,” I said.

  “If you ask me,” Annie said, “you’ve been making mountains out of molehills.”

  “Oh, yeah? Did Jack also tell you Bryan McGrath threatened to kill you? Did he tell you that?”

  “What?” Annie said.

  “It wasn’t like that, Annie.”

  “Yeah, then what was it like, Jack? Why did we start walking her home from school, eh? Tell her that, Jack. We were watching out for you, Annie.”

  “You’re exaggerating, Gus.”

  “And you’re lying.”

  “I’m keeping things in perspective, man.”

  “I don’t think so. You don’t have any perspective. Not anymore you don’t.”

  “Just stop it, you two. Please. Just stop it.”

  “The Brain Eaters, man. They finally got to you.”

  “Grow up, Gus. Just grow up.”

  “And become more like you? No thanks.”

  “My dad is going to kill me,” Annie said. “Do you have any idea how late it is?”

  Sixteen

  How Jack and Annie drowned

  We were on the bay, minutes from the Barkers’ cottage. Annie was going to let us take the boat after dropping her ashore. Her anxiety was running high, speculating as to how her dad would punish her, so Jack and I were surprised when she cut the Evinrude, let the current have its way with us. She knew better than to stand, but you know how it was with Annie—when her spirit would thumb its nose at caution. “There!” she said, arms spread wide like she might hug the sky. “The stars. The stars. If you look—really, really look—you’ll see God in every one.”

  The rest happened fast. We hit a rock. Or something. My first thought was that Jesus had snatched Annie up to Heaven. Abracadabra, I swear. She was there and then she wasn’t. And Jack and me, we were jumping in after her. That’s when the boat capsized.

  I remembered nothing more.

  Annie’s father, Mr. Barker, and a friend of his found me in the morning, clinging to the hull. They wrapped me in a blanket, gave me coffee from a Thermos, asked me where Annie was.

  I didn’t know what to tell them. And when I did, I didn’t know how to tell them.

  I wept. “I tried to save them. God knows I tried.”

  “It’s okay, son. It’s okay. Easy, boy. Easy.”

  “Where were her angels?”

  “What?”

  “Her angels. Annie’s nine brother and sister angels. They were supposed to be watching out for her.”

  Seventeen

  My picture in the paper

  Bryan McGrath interviewed me in the hospital.

  “I know the truth,” I told him.

  He patted my shoulder. “The truth is exactly what I am going to give them, son.” He pretended we were talking about the same thing.

  Got my picture in the paper.

  Was famous.

  My newest fear was people pointing fingers. I had not forgotten Helmut Swartz, the rumours that dogged him after Dottie’s death. Or the dogfood baby’s mother, the whispers of her complicity, the pram filled with Gravy Train. I saw myself railroaded like that Steven Truscott kid.

  Steven lived in Clinton, Ontario, 225 miles west of Trenton, 60 miles northwest of Woodstock, where the fifteen-year-old girl was found buried alive in 1886.

  In June of 1959, when Steven was fourteen, he was arrested for the rape and murder of a school friend, twelve-year-old Lynne Harper. The evidence was weak and plenty of people believed him innocent. It didn’t help. Steven was sentenced to die by hanging, the youngest person in Canadian history to receive the death penalty.

  I confessed my fears to my mother. Water on my brain, I guess.

  A book about the case had been in the news since January. The Trial of Steven Truscott by Isabel LeBourdais. My mother had read it. Her boycott of Bert Levin and the Marquee had freed up reading time.

  “My poor, brave boy.” She broke down, cradled me in her arms. I didn’t fight it. “The lovely things Mr. McGrath wrote about you, how can you even think it? Everyone knows you did your best to save them.” Could’ve been Annie talking.

  For my homecoming, Mom bought me The Collected Poems of Robert Service. I didn’t tell her we had an older edition in Dad’s library. The book fell open to The Three Voices:

  The waves have a story to tell me,

  As I lie on the lonely beach;

  Chanting aloft in the pine-tops,

  The wind has a lesson to teach;

  But the stars sing an anthem of glory

  I cannot put into speech.

  I would have cried had I let myself.

  Got my picture in the paper.

  Was famous.

  I asked to see Mr. McGrath again. He’d redeemed himself in Mom’s eyes with the feature on me, though she wouldn’t let him inside. She left us on the back porch with lemonade and cookies.

  “I might have gone about it wrong with you kids,” McGrath said. “Sure, I can be rough around the edges, but I hope you see I was never out to hurt you or anyone. Only to save you from yourselves.”

  “But you did hurt people, the movies you and Mr. Blackhurst made . . .”

  “You got it wrong, son. Our movies were no different than movies anywhere. It’s the town. Something about this place . . . I can’t explain it. No one ever could. The only thing we were guilty of was providing the catalysts. Like the intertitles. You should’ve burned them when I asked.”

  “We did.”

  He snorted dismissively.

  “I swear,” I said.

  “A props master I used to work with, he’d joke how Trenton was built on a sacred burial ground for assistant directors.”

  “Others knew, then? Not just you and Mr. Blackhurst?”

  “What do you expect? Anybody who’d ever worked in Hollywood North knew. But it wasn’t anything you’d go and blab to the world. Some worried they’d be arrested for, I dunno—cinemacide or something. Others feared a padded cell. It was lose-lose. Nobody wanted to work here. Evie, Iris, Norm and me, but the others . . . New York. New Jersey. Hollywood. Some got out of the business. Most kept the story to themselves. And the few who did blab, well, you think anyone took them seriously? In time, Hollywood North was part of the movemaking lore, another apocryphal tale everybody wants to believe, but nobody does. Like Fatty Arbuckle’s Coke bottle or George Reeves jumping out a window to see if he could fly like Superman. The critics. The intellectuals. I laugh when I hear them pontificating, how movies mirror reality. Let them come to Trenton. Let them see how movies determine reality.”

  Who’d have thought? It wasn’t Evie August. It was Bryan McGrath. Hewas the character at the end of the story who filled in the holes. Or so I thought. And I pumped him for all he
was worth. “But the forgetting . . . How is it nobody talks about the accidents—nobody remembers?”

  “Well, they’re talking about you now, I tell you.”

  “I don’t mean me. You know what I’m saying.”

  “Tell me, son, you ever leave a movie, loving or hating what you saw, chatting it up with friends?”

  “Sure?”

  “In the moment, good or bad, that picture is important to you, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “But what about a month later? How many other movies have you seen in the interim? And that first picture, are you and your pals still chatting it up?”

  “Guess not. Well, maybe, sometimes.”

  “Sure. Of course. An occasional scene, a funny line, but the whole? Not likely. It’s the exit effect. There’s the fade-in. There’s the fade-out. Life works the same.”

  “Okay . . .” I leaned back, took a sip of lemonade. “I think.”

  “Tell me a tragedy that doesn’t diminish with time. Sure, it may rear its head in moments, wrestle itself into the foreground, but never for long. Loss is only forever in the beginning.”

  “The exit effect.”

  “Exactly. And today, son, you are quite the hero.”

  “All I did was—I didn’t drown.”

  “That’s all it takes, most often.”

  The mysteries weren’t so complicated, after all. I should have known. The Unexplained explained, never fails to be a letdown.

  Had my picture in the paper.

  Was famous.

  Mom’s Avon sales went through the roof. A hero in the family was good for business.

  Bert Levin joined his wife and daughters in Montreal for Jack’s funeral. He never returned.

  “Some losses are too great to bear alone,” Mom explained.

  “Will you miss him?” I said.

  “Not as much as you miss your poor, dear friends.”

  “What will you do now?” I said.

  She turned misty-eyed. “Perhaps I’ll find an old stray somewhere and let him follow me home. They tend to be more loyal.”