Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels

by Michael Libling

  “Old dogs, they take one look at you, Mom, and can’t believe their good luck,” I said.

  She hugged me, kissed me, declared it was the nicest thing I’d ever said to her.

  Had my picture in the paper.

  Was famous.

  Annie’s parents insisted I sit with them at the funeral. Mrs. Barker said, “Of all the boys she knew, she always said Gus was the nearest and dearest to her.”

  Susan Burgess, Diana Klieg, and Bonnie Priddy sat with us, too. “How are you doing?” they asked me each in turn and I made sure they saw I wasn’t doing well. And I wasn’t, not at all.

  The Barkers struggled through the service. They fell to pieces when the priest quoted Annie’s last words and my part in his being able to share them. “‘There!’ our dear Anne said, her 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 pastor singled me out. “Thank you, Leo, for extracting the sweet from the bitter.” I could have been their son the way the Barkers held onto me. I cried then. Let it all out.

  Mr. Barker said, “You’ve got ten angels watching over you now, Gus.”

  Had my picture in the paper.

  Was famous.

  For four weeks. Five, tops.

  That photo of me. I looked at it once. Once was enough.

  Sixth Reel

  One

  The exit effect

  Helmut Swartz parlayed his Dance Studio earnings into the Marquee, taking over from Bert Levin. He rejigged the sign to Dottie’s Marquee Café. Few knew who Dottie was, by then, and the rest took no note.

  Mom attended the grand opening and reported, “He doesn’t know anything about running a restaurant.”

  Helmut remarried not long after. An Arthur Murray dance student half his age. His bride was said to be unhappy about the name choice and the Dottie’s came down. Mom never went back.

  I got through high school. Did well enough. Teachers cut me some slack.

  Wasn’t sure what I’d do next, until Mr. and Mrs. Barker handed me $3,000 for college. The money had been set aside for Annie. “It’s what she would have wanted,” they assured me.

  I got into Queen’s in Kingston. Sympathy and my survivor status compensated for mediocre marks. Maybe, too, Mr. Malbasic had pulled some strings.

  In October of my sophomore year, I made my way to the school’s Miller Museum and saw firsthand the meteorite Jack had found when he was eight. Should anyone yet wonder, and with the statute of limitations expired, let it be known I am the prick who stole the bronze plaque that bore Jack’s name.

  I graduated university without flying colours. A BA in Balls All.

  Spent time in Toronto, North Bay, Thunder Bay, Saskatoon, Kelowna. Worked as a stringer for the papers. Had a piece picked up by Time Magazine once. Canadian edition. With a byline, yet. Thought it would be my springboard to the Big Time. The States. I ended up writing ad copy for radio stations.

  Two failed marriages. No need to repeat.

  Settled in Winnipeg, mosquitoes and shitty winters my sackcloth and ashes of choice.

  Iris Lebel disappeared in the spring of 1967. It was said Mr. Blackhurst had willed her a tidy sum of money and she had signed an offer to purchase a property on Creighton Farms. “A sunny room for sewing,” she had told the realtor. It was in the model home the last of Iris was seen.

  In 1971, when Tompkins Street was being dug up for the installation of new sewers, an eight-year-old boy found the sweetheart bracelet Iris had given Simon. The Record did a story on the kid and another on the history of the RCAF and sweetheart bracelets.

  Harvey L. Malbasic, Dufferin’s longest-serving principal, died in 1990 at the age of ninety-one. His daughter found him on the floor of his bedroom. He appeared to have choked to death. A great horned owl lay on the floor at his side, a gaping hole in its feathery face, where a big yellow glass eye should have been.

  It was said, as well, that Mr. Malbasic’s daughter buried him with his strap.

  Excluding the great horned owl with the missing eye, I do not know what became of the entirety of Dufferin’s taxidermy. Remnants used to be found in the small museum housed in the old police station at King and Division. But they so creeped out the staff, the surviving pieces were exiled to the Nature Centre at Presqu’ile Provincial Park near Brighton.

  When Bert Levin sold the house on Queen Street and moved into the Gilbert Hotel, he took down the newspaper clippings and packed up the finds Jack had rated X and N, and put them into storage. The Lone Ranger and Tonto bookends, too. I do not know what happened to any of it after that.

  Bert tossed out everything else, including the books. Most would have duplicated what I already had, anyhow. But there are a few I would have liked.

  Steven Truscott, that kid who I feared I’d become, had his sentence commuted to life in 1960. He was paroled in 1969. In 2007 he was acquitted of the murder of Lynne Harper, though there are many in Clinton, Ontario, who would tell you to this day Steven was guilty as charged.

  There is a sequence in The Black Ace where a newspaperman believes he is close to solving the string of gruesome murders. He tracks his prime suspect to an airfield and confronts him with the evidence. Fists fly. A chase ensues. The newspaperman runs into a spinning propeller. And The Black Ace lives to rip another day.

  In 1972, Bryan McGrath ran into a spinning propeller, too. The Record milked it for a week. He was one of their own, you understand.

  JAMES CAGNEY TAKES LIFE OF OUTDOORS COLUMNIST

  Yeah, the Cagney line threw me, too—another bit of Trenton’s secret history.

  In the early days of WWII, Warner Brothers’ Captains of the Clouds was shot at the town’s RCAF base. The star was Jimmy Cagney. The thirtieth anniversary of the movie’s release was coming up and McGrath was aiming to make a story of it. That’s what brought him to the base and his face into the tail rotor of a helicopter.

  He should have known better. He’d worked on The Black Ace, don’t forget.

  The Record printed McGrath’s title for the story he never got to write:

  TRENTON’S BRUSH WITH HOLLYWOOD GREATNESS

  McGrath’s obituary made no mention of his screenwriting days.

  Two

  Like a castle in Scotland or something

  Evie August (Evangeline August on IMDb) died on New Year’s Day 1988 and left me Captain Ahab’s dream house. The lawyer tracked me down in Winnipeg and, well, you know the rest. (And no, I never saw the Pfizer rep from the train again.)

  He shook my hand and ushered me into his office. “I remember your mother with great fondness. She was quite the saleslady in her day. Certainly brought out the best in my wife, God bless her.”

  “She brought out the best in everybody,” I said.

  “And you, why Winnipeg? Quite a change from Trenton, I imagine.”

  “I’m kind of in a rush,” I said.

  He opened the folder on his desk and read aloud what was required to be read. “The only proviso, you watch the movie, answer three questions to verify you did and, following that, done deal. The property and all its movables are transferred to you. There’s a vintage Chris Craft you have got to see to believe.”

  “And if I want to get rid of any of it? Sell or whatever?”

  “Abide by the terms and it’s yours free and clear, Mr. Berry.”

  “This movie I need to watch, what’s it called, again?”

  “Ah, let me see now . . . one sec here . . .” He shuffled the papers. “Ah, yes, Boy Girl Boy. Never heard of it myself.”

  “Me, neither,” I said.

  I could have taken the highway and back roads. Would’ve been simpler, safer, saner. For old time’s sake I took the Quinte.

  I maneuvered the Tempo down the boat ramp and onto the frozen bay, past the oval cleared for skating, and out toward the fishing shanties, the cars and pickups parked alongside. Fishermen waved, extending the suicidal stranger their bl
essings as he glided between the markers to the point of no return. The chains on the rental’s tires mocked my progress, the ghost of Jacob Marley hitched to my fortunes, Jack and Annie accompanying on celestial tambourines.

  Snow drifted in spots, streaking and swirling across the surface of the ice, white snakes chasing their own tails.

  As arranged, the caretaker waited on shore. He warmed himself by an old steel trash can filled with flames. A Ski-Doo was parked nearby.

  I coasted around the rocky outcrop that poked defiantly through the ice, remembering how we’d overshot it all those years before. I anchored the Tempo where the floating dock would be in warmer weather.

  The caretaker offered me a roasted marshmallow. “You must have one huge horseshoe up your ass,” he said. “Out in the middle there, it’s been looking mighty thin of late, in spite of the cold. Figgered it was fifty-fifty you’d make it.”

  Shit. The guy was Alan Allen. Double Fucking Al. He didn’t recognize me and I wanted to keep it that way.

  The marshmallow was delicious and he obliged me with a second.

  “Fit as a fiddle, she was. One day to the next.” He snapped his gloved fingers. “Never a peep ’bout any kin. All these years at her beck ’n’ call, to come up empty . . . Just my luck, I says to the wife. Just my luck.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “But not all that sorry, eh, chief?”

  I opened my wallet and offered him the forty dollars the lawyer said he’d agreed on.

  “Eighty,” he said. “Promised me eighty.”

  He’d be leaving me with five. I didn’t argue, dug out the extra forty. “The keys?”

  “You work all them years . . . Miss August this and Miss August that . . . and yes, Miss August and thank you, Miss August . . . and you’re looking lovely today, Miss August . . . and what do you get? Could’ve had my way with her. Should’ve had my way with her. Right to the end, she had something.”

  “The keys. Please.”

  He dropped the keys into the snow at my feet. “Damn, I wish the bay had taken you under. Me and the missus, we prayed for it.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  He saddled up his Ski-Doo and buzzed off helter-skelter down the shore.

  I turned up the path. He’d cleared only so far. The gate was open, small mercy, and I trudged the final fifty feet, ankle-high boots and knee-deep snow.

  Three

  Boy Girl Boy

  I did not take a coat from the rack. I had my own.

  “Welcome to Norman’s Icebox,” she said.

  The 35mm reel of Boy Girl Boy was waiting for me in the projector.

  I searched for notes, an explanation, found only detailed instructions on the operation of the projectors—there were three—and the care and storage of nitrate film.

  I got right to it, dimmed the lights, flicked the switch, and took a seat, front row. What did I have to lose?

  A year after Evie’s death, a local writer, Peggy Dymond Leavey, published a book about Trenton, The Movie Years. For the record, they went from 1917 to 1934. Among the productions was Carry On Sergeant!, the costliest silent film ever made in Canada.

  In 1992, the town erected a historical marker where the studios once stood. Should you be in the area, look for the stone obelisk on Film Street, a couple of blocks up from Hanna Park, where I found the metal box and intertitles, just sitting there. Anybody could have seen it.

  Hollywood North, the existence of the studios, was not so secret anymore. But this was as far as it went. In a spiritual sense, perhaps the passing of Evie August had set the memories free. Selected memories, of course. There were so many bigger secrets by then.

  Boy Girl Boy was no Battleship Potemkin, no Ben-Hur. The plot had to have been stale even by 1920s standards.

  7:30 7 BOY GIRL BOY—Silent

  A classic love triangle, in which two childhood friends find themselves at odds over the pretty girl they both covet.

  I wasn’t entirely clear on why Evie had wanted me to watch it. Until the closing minutes.

  A moonlit night. A rickety rowboat in the middle of a quiet lake.

  The boy, Tom, sits with the girl, Sally, at the bow. His lips are at her ear. Her fingers are in his hair.

  Facing them, looking on from the stern, is the younger boy, Henry. His hands are wound tight around the oars as he propels the small boat through the waters.

  There is no missing Henry’s rage. In his face. In his posture. In the intertitle.

  Henry can contain himself no longer. He wrenches an oar from its rowlock, lurches to his feet, and swings at Tom. Sally sees, eyes wide with terror, lunges to intercept the blow, and takes the brunt. She crumples onto the bottom boards of the rowboat. And as Tom leaps to help her, Henry swings the oar once more, connects with Tom’s head, pulls back, pauses. He flips the oar end to end, shifts his grip, and rams it into the chest of his staggered opponent. Again and again and again. Until Tom lies as stock-still as Sally.

  Henry blinks sudden awareness, comprehends the magnitude of his crime. Buries his face in his hands. Trembles. Cries. Panics. Thinks. Thinks. Thinks.

  He rows closer to shore, amid the rocky shoals.

  He cradles Sally, kisses her limp hair, drags her to the side, lifts her up, over, and into the water. Just then, Tom regains consciousness. He and Henry struggle. The boat capsizes and into the drink they go.

  At dawn, two fishermen happen upon Henry. He clings to a rock, the oar yet within his grasp. He sobs.

  They wrap him in a blanket, pour him hot coffee from a Thermos, and do their best to console the grief-stricken survivor.

  The oar drifts away. Slowly.

  It was dark when I emerged from Norman’s Icebox. I had to feel my way along the passageway before I found a light switch.

  I dialled the lawyer. He asked me the three questions.

  What were the names of the two boys and the girl?

  Who goes into the water first?

  What floats within reach of the boy’s hand when the fishermen find him?

  I hesitated with the last. Why am I doing this?

  “Congratulations, Mr. Berry. Enjoy your inheritance.”

  Four

  A satisfying ending

  Nitrate film is disastrously unstable. It can decompose and combust if handled or stored without extreme caution. Mr. Blackhurst had salvaged thirty-two films, stowed each in ventilated containers and fireproof vaults, and maintained the ideal temperature and humidity. Evie had respected his legacy. So have I.

  Since 1988, I have come and gone. Three times a year. One- or two-day visits, never more. Hunkered down in the icebox.

  My favourite remains The Black Ace. Did I tell you how the commander of the Trenton air force base was convicted of rape and murder in 2010? Go ahead. Look it up. I was beginning to wonder if it might never happen.

  Bryan McGrath, incidentally, had writing credits on eight of the films. My mother taught me never to speak ill of the dead, but I have to agree with Mr. Blackhurst: “Bryan was a mediocre and malodorous screen scribe.”

  I watched Boy Girl Boy only the one time. Forwards, that is. Backwards, I lost count. It made no difference. None that I have found. But then I never was much good at knowing where to look. As for the other films, you wouldn’t believe how often. Even the rotten ones, including those penned by McGrath.

  Trenton may thank me some day, but don’t hold your breath. The town remains mired in the here and now. The history they don’t tell you will always be greater than the history they do.

  Last night, I hauled the films from their vaults, stacked the forty-seven intertitles beside them.

  This morning, I shut down the cooling system and turned the heat way up. You’ll find what’s left of me, if anything, in my seat in the front row, Jack to my right, Annie one over.

  I leave these pages in my car in the hopes they will be found. I saw somebody do this in a movie once.

  Notes

  Portions of this book were p
reviously published in the November/December 2014 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  The lines of poetry on pages 28 and 315 are from “In Flanders Fields” by Canadian poet Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, first published in Punch Magazine on December 8, 1915.

  The DOs AND DON’Ts quoted on page 34 are from The Hardy Boys’ Detective Handbook by Franklin W. Dixon in consultation with Captain D.A. Spina. (1959). Grosset & Dunlap, New York, NY.

  The verse quoted on page 37 and 194 is from the movie The Wolf Man (1941), written by the legendary Curt Siodmak and produced by Universal Pictures. The words were originally spoken by Maria Ouspenskaya in the role of “Maleva, the Gyspsy Fortune Teller.”

  “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star . . .” on page 161 is from the classic Texaco commercial that first aired circa 1962. It came from the New York City advertising agency of Benton & Bowles and was written by musician Roy Eaton.

  The poetry recited by Mr. McGrath on page 165 is excerpted from “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service, first published in 1907 in his collection, Songs of a Sourdough.

  The poetry Gus describes as “reeling ominously through my skittish brain” on page 188 is excerpted from “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by Robert W. Service, first published in 1907 in his collection, Songs of a Sourdough.

  The verse Annie recites on page 225 is from “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes, first published in 1906 in Blackwoods Magazine, Edinburgh, Scotland.