Not so hard ghostwriting in the voice of a ghost.
They all looked at me as I reentered the library. I patted the Abominable Snowman on the belly and resumed my appointed seat, ready to let Jimmy have another go at me. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails would have been a happier prospect.
They were still looking at me as Leslie came in. “Something I ate, perhaps. An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of underdone potato. More of gravy than of grave. Do let’s continue with the show.” All but Leslie continued to stare at me, touched by astonishment. Ah, of what good are literary allusions in the Land of Functional Illiterates, close to the borders of the Kingdom of the Blind?
But we continued.
The videotape began playing again, and once” again we were in this library, weeks ago, only a moment after Bran had identified Jimmy as Jimmy and caused me to lose a perfectly lovely breakfast from DuPar’s Farmhouse. The tall, thin black woman I didn’t recognize now spoke, as the camera came in on her.
“My name is Eusona Parker, and I have been Mr. Crowstairs’s housekeeper for eighteen, going on nineteen years; and that’s him sitting right there; and don’t nobody try to say he’s not in his sound mind and body ‘cause I have known him all these years and he’ s just as sharp and clean and neat as a pin as he’s ever been. Is that what I’m supposed to say?”
No wonder I didn’t recognize her. Eusona Parker had lost about eighty pounds.
Every Wednesday. That was Eusona’s day. I’d only seen her half a dozen times through the years, when I was in Los Angeles and visiting Jimmy. But if anyone knew his state of health, it was Ms. Parker. She had been more of a true mother to Jimmy than his own natural mother. What I remembered best about her was the “hearing aid.”
She had a memory that should have been on display in the Smithsonian. It might be three or four years between our seeing each other; but when I’d come out of the blue guest room searching for coffee early on a Wednesday morning during one of my visits, there would be Eusona, dusting Jimmy’s vast, endless hoard of tchotchkes; and she’d look up and grin as if I’d been there uninterruptedly for years, and she’d say, “Good morning, Larry, sleep good?” And I’d scream at her, “Hello, Eusona, how are you?” And she’d answer, “Doin’ just fine, Larry; water’s still hot.” And I’d scream, “Thanks, Eusona.”
The reason I screamed was that she wore a hearing aid. One of those little button things shoved into her ear, the cord trailing down to disappear into the capacious pocket of her wraparound apron where the shape of the battery pack bulged.
And we went on that way, amiably, until one time she stopped me in the back corridor leading to the greenhouse, took me by the hand like a small boy who’s been caught eating worms in the schoolyard, and she said, “Mr. Bedloe, why do you always scream at me?”
She never called Jimmy “Mr. Crowstairs” unless he was behaving badly or living with a woman who left globs of mascara on the mirror in the bathroom, and she never called me anything but Larry unless I had left my bed unmade. Ms. Parker made it clear she was a housekeeper, not a maid; and if I slept in it, I ought to make it when I got out of it. “Mr. Bedloe” was her way of politely saying pay close attention now, asshole.
“Why, uh, I’m sorry, Eusona,” I said, terribly embarrassed as one can only be embarrassed when one has been caught staring at the empty place between eyes and mouth where a leper’s nose has fallen off. “I was speaking loudly because I wanted you to hear me.”
“Well, I’m not hard of hearin’, dear.”
That dear of hers: butter would not have melted in her mouth. I’ve never understood what that meant, it never made sense to me, butter not melting. Whatever it meant, it’s what that dear was all about. The dear you use when you say, “No, dear, the round hole is for the round peg.”
“You’re not?”
“No, Mr. Bedloe, dear, I’m not hard of hearing.”
Mr. Bedloe and dear.
“But you wear a hearing aid. “
“Mistuh Bedloe, this is not a hearing aid.” And she pulled the earphone of the transistor radio in her apron, out of her ear and, faintly, like fairy trumpets, I heard the tinny sound of Steve Garvey batting the brains out of the Cardinals’ relief pitcher, bottom of the seventh, two out, a man on third.
All that went through my head as Kenneth L. Gross said, “Yes, Miss Parker, that’s all you have to do, is identify Mr. Crowstairs.”
“That’s him. I said it.”
“Thank you, Miss Parker.”
“Neat as a pin, everything right in place; always been like that, eighteen going on nineteen years.”
“Thank you, Miss Parker.”
“You’re welcome, dear.”
Then Missy identified him; then Jimmy as testator stated the date and stated that the will being made on that date took precedence over all other wills previously made by him, including any that might be found written in cuneiform on stone tablets by gas station attendants roaming in the Nevada deserts.
Then the roundelay went like this:
Kenny: Are you executing this document or prepared to execute this document with a complete satisfaction on your Pal. that it says what you wish it to say, and that you understand it in its entirety?
Jimmy: Affirmative. And it should be noted for the record that the last person to marry a duck lived four hundred years ago.
Kenny: Choke. Are you prepared to execute this document and accordingly state for the record, in my presence and in the presence of witnesses, that in so doing you are not acting under duress, undue influence, or under the influence of any drug or other substance that may impair your mental capacity?
Jimmy: I had a Coca-Cola about half an hour ago, does that count?
Kenny: No sir, it does not. Please!
Jimmy: Are you sure, Kenny? I mean, if you take a piece of raw meat and you put it in a glass of Coke and leave it overnight it comes out looking like something from a James Bond movie. You know, all those little piranha bubbles ill there, they could chew the shit out of your brain cells.
Kenny: It doesn’t count, damn it!
Jimmy: Then how about all the stuff I put up my nose just before we started filming?
Kenny: Aaaargh!
Jimmy: Okay, okay, take it easy. I’m just clowning. I don’t use dope, you know that. Everybody knows it. I couldn’t possibly write the crap I write if I was ripped. Having my nostrils Tefloned was just for a lark, you know that.
The attorney laid his head down on his arms and pounded the tabletop with his fist. It was pathetic what Jimmy was doing to this poor soul. We all looked around in the semidark but Kenneth L. Gross was back there in the shadows, no doubt chewing through the bit of his pipe.
On the screen Jimmy was being upbraided by his three witnesses. They whipped him into a semblance of probity and urged Kenny Gross to resume the proceedings.
The attorney said, “Therefore, in my presence and in the presence of the witnesses, God help us, is it your wish that you now execute the document and that we sign the document as witnesses thereto?”
Client responded in the affirmative.
“I will then ask, Mr. Crowstairs, that you now initial each and every page in the lower right-hand corner…”
“I’m left-handed.”
“Then do it in the lower left-hand corner but for God’s sake initial the damned thing already!” He was shouting; it seemed to quell Jimmy. He started initialing. Gross went on weakly, “Up to but not including the signature page. For your information and for the record, this is being done so that no pages can be substituted in the future into this document.”
He was standing now, over Jimmy’s right shoulder, behind him, turning the pages to verify each one was properly initialed (and possibly to insure that Jimmy didn’t sign Herman Melville or Frederick VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg).
It went on that way without hindrance. Jimmy had clearly grown bored with the activity and even bored with the
japery that had made the proceedings minimally tolerable. Jimmy reached the signature page and filled in the location of execution of the will, then the date, and then he signed it. Then each of the witnesses signed location, date and name. The latter two added their place of residence. The will was returned to Gross, who asked if Jimmy wanted the will kept in the attorney’s vault and a conformed copy provided to Jimmy, or if the client wanted to keep the original with a conformed copy in Gross’s possession. Jimmy waved a hand negligently. “You keep it; send me a copy.”
Gross said he would do so and, painfully aware that the juice was running out of the presentation, said, “For the record, the witnesses need not be present during any videotaping portion which is about to occur and the only people who will be present will be myself, Mr. Crowstairs, and the two camera persons.”
Yo-ho-ho. Here we go. Up there on the screen Missy, Bran and Eusona Parker rose, walked out of camera range and damned certainly out of the room, and Gross turned to Jimmy and said, “Mr. Crowstairs, if you wish, you may say some words to your beneficiaries or for that matter, to anyone who may have been excluded by you under your last will which we have just executed.”
He placed what was obviously a seating diagram of this room as Jimmy had planned it to be arranged on the desk in front of Jimmy, got up, and backed out of camera range. Now all we had on the screen was Jimmy sitting behind his desk, hands folded demurely, staring out at us, looking right to left as if he really could see us, back there four months ago when he had known for certain that he would live forever.
He looked first at SylviaTheCunt, then at me, then at Leslie, then at Bran who was seeing and hearing this for the first time—which may have been why he hadn’t attended the burial ceremonies—and finally, at my right but Jimmy’s extreme left, Missy. She hadn’t spoken all day.
But I’d make book she knew what was coming.
Jimmy stared at us, and we stared back at him. He kept us waiting. I don’t know what the others wanted—vindication, protestations of love, vast wealth, security for their twilight years, remorse, the slam bang of gin and vermouth, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings—but all I wanted was to be turned loose. Tempest-tossed, righteous card-carrying wretched refuse, I merely yearned to breathe free. To sever the bond with Jimmy. I heard a sound. I’ll tell you what that sound sounded like:
On July 28, 1945, a foggy Saturday on the East Coast, Army Air Forces Lt. Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr. took off from Bedford, Massachusetts in a B-25 light bomber for La Guardia. Field in New York. A few minutes after 10:00 A. M. Lt. Col. Smith crashed his two-engine bomber into the north side of the Empire State Building at the level of the 78th and 79th floors.
On the 75th floor of the Empire State Building an office worker who had come in to do some extra work over the weekend heard a sound. A terrifying, ominous, hurtling-toward-him sound. He looked out the window to see, emerging from the fog, ten tons of screaming airplane rushing toward him at 225 m.p.h.
I sat staring, waiting for Jimmy to speak to us from beyond the grave. I heard a sound, rushing toward me out of the fog at 225 m.p.h.
This is how Jimmy died.
The story was in all the papers.
It was pried loose, finally, from one of the three culeros they pulled out of the other wreck. All three of them lived; one of them lost his left leg; one of them has no teeth. But that was Jimmy, not the crash.
Appropriately enough it was Halloween. That’s Bradbury’s favorite holiday; and it’s mine, and it was Jimmy’s. It was last week.
Jimmy had spent the evening at a party thrown by one of the two married couples who had been inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes at the burial ceremonies. Huck and Carol Barkin. She’s an architect, he’s a writer. They were very close to Jimmy.
Around midnight Jimmy had left. He’d only had a couple of glasses of wine, perfectly sober and, in fact, had been drinking Perrier since ten o ‘ clock. That figures in the story.
He took a cold quart bottle of Perrier with him when he left, swigging it straight from the mouth to his mouth in the car. Then he realized he was almost out of gas, probably couldn’t make it back to the Valley and the ancestral manse, went looking for an open station on a holiday, near midnight, in Los Angeles where odd-even allocation is taken seriously.
He found a serve-yourself that was open, but they wouldn’t let him fill up because it was an odd-numbered day and he had license plates that ended in an even number. So he pulled off to one side and waited for the clock to run past midnight when it would be the next day and he could get pumped up.
I wasn’t there, no one was there in his head, but I know what he was like, and from the story the culeros told, it had to have happened like this. And even if it didn’t let’s see how well we can get inside the characters, let’s see how fluidly we can carry the action, let’s see if we can plumb the intricate motivations. This is called sensitive, creative writing; full of heat, Jimmy; pulling the plow, Jimmy; getting the powerhouse up to peak efficiency.
What we need is a good opening, a tough literary hook.
Kerch Crowstairs slumped behind the wheel of the Rolls Corniche, listening to the second movement, the Allegro appassionato, of Brahms’s Concerto in B-flat major. In the chopped and channeled Chevy beside him the raucous clatter of the Eagles banged uneasy counterpoint…
No, too esoteric. Not Hammett enough.
How about this:
He was distracted. Thinking about the past, the future, indefinite times and opportunities passing too fast for analysis. Under him the Rolls hummed softly, waiting for the light to change. Beside him three Chicanos in a decked Chevy raced their motor. Drag for pink slips, mister?
No, too diffuse. Not enough oomph.
I can’t do it, Jimmy. I can’t write like you! I can talk and think in your voice, because I can hear you… I’ve always had phonographic recall. But I can’t put it down in your bloodthirsty Visigoth way.
What happened was…
He filled the tank. He drove back out onto the street. He was listening to the classical music on KFAC-FM. He was smoking his pipe. He was sitting at the light, waiting for it to change, simply enjoying the cool night air and the pleasant music and the smoke rising from the pipe. The empty Perrier bottle lay on the passenger seat. A car pulled up beside him in the left lane. Someone spoke in the night. He was caught up in the gentle feel of the music washing over him, the sense of ease and leisure. He was relaxed. For once, he wasn’t on, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t hyper. He was feeling good; and he paid no attention to the voice. But it spoke again, louder, coarser, directed at him. He looked across. Two young men, late teens, maybe early twenties, in the front seat. Another one in the back seat, looked asleep. The kid closest to him yelled again. “Hey! Cabrón! What’re you smokin’ in the pipe?” The’ light changed. He took off. At the next light they raced up, gunned the motor, closer to his lane now. “Hey, man, de dónde? I ast you what the fuck you smokin’ in the pipe?” He stared ahead. He didn’t want any hassles. God, don’t these lights change? “Hey, mamador, you gonna answer me or I’m gonna come over there an ‘ whip your ass?” He lOOked at them. If Rich Garza or Pano Del Rio were here, they’d have just the right words to back these clowns off. But he was alone. “I’m smoking Essence of Asshole,” he said: “I’m smokin’ your mama.” And the light changed, and he hit it. They ran up his tailpipe to the next light. Jesus, how many lights are there before the freeway? As he screeched to a halt the one on the passenger side jumped out and came across to grab him. He dumped it into reverse, backed up three feet, threw open the door and knocked the silly sonofabitch flat on his ass. Then he took off through the just-changing light. Behind him the passenger was climbing back aboard as the driver decked it. They caught him at the next light and he thought about going straight through: the freeway was one street up. But now the adrenalin was pumping. He stopped at the light and grabbed the empty Perrier bottle. When the passenger got to his window he swung the
bottle in his left hand with a flat, scythelike movement and busted out the guy’s teeth, emptied his mouth and sent him careening backward into the Chevy. Then he went through the light, turned sharp left, ran down the side street to the freeway entrance, hit the ramp doing sixty and was on the San Diego before the driver could load his buddy back into the trashwagon. ¡Huo de la chingada!
They caught him just beyond the interchange of the San Diego and Santa Monica freeways. He was in the fast lane, the number one next to the divider. He was doing seventy-five. The Chevy came up on the right and the berserk latino swung it over hard; lock to lock, maybe not—but hard. The Rolls took it just behind the door, slewed into the cyclone fence, scraped along throwing sparks back in a fan, then shot ahead as Jimmy floored the Corniche. ¡Puto pendejo!
Doing ninety, he cut out of the number one lane, slanted across the second, third and fourth lanes, and ran away. The Chevy caught up on the grade leading through the saddle of the hills to the Valley. The culeros rear-ended him. Hard; once twice three times. Jimmy braked, speeded up, cut in and out, but the Chevy was hot, it ran him down like a bulldogger. ¡Vatos locos!
Two miles before the Mulholland offramp the cholos said aw, fuck it, and decided to boom him. They came up in the number three, doing ninety-five, went ahead by two car-lengths and slant-drove across his bow. Jimmy stood on the brake but it didn’t count. They impacted at eighty-five, the Corniche went in hard on the right front, ricocheted, spun out and went over the side. The Rolls hit the berm, dropped and began to somersault. The Chevy was horizontal across the three and four lanes, caught a centerpunch from a long-distance moving van, lifted, went tail-over onto its roof, sliding across the shoulder, followed Jimmy over the side two hundred yards beyond him and came to rest against a low hillside.