The Little Men

Keeping busy was the only balm. At work, it was easy, the crush of people, the noise and personality of the crew.

  Nights were when the bad thoughts came, and she knew she shouldn’t let them.

  In the past, she’d had those greasy-skinned roommates to drown out thinking. They all had rashes from cheap studio makeup and the clap from cheap studio men and beautiful figures like Penny’s own. And they never stopped talking, twirling their hair in curlers and licking their fingers to turn the magazine pages. But their chatter-chatter-chatter muffled all Penny’s thoughts. And the whole atmosphere— the thick muzz of Woolworth’s face powder and nylon nighties when they even shared a bed—made everything seem cheap and lively and dumb and easy and light.

  Here, in the bungalow, after leaving Mr. Flant and Benny to drift off into their applejack dreams, Penny had only herself. And the books.

  Late into the night, waiting for the lightspots to come, she found her eyes wouldn’t shut. They started twitching all the time, and maybe it was the night jasmine, or the beachburr.

  But she had the books. All those books, these beautiful, brittling books, books that made her feel things, made her long to go places and see things—the River Liffey and Paris, France.

  And then there were those in the wrappers, the brown paper soft at the creases, the white baker string slightly fraying.

  Her favorite was about a detective recovering stolen jewels from an unlikely hiding spot.

  But there was one that frightened her. About a farmer’s daughter who fell asleep each night on a bed of hay. And in the night, the hay came alive, poking and stabbing at her.

  It was supposed to be funny, but it gave Penny bad dreams.

  “Well, she was in love with Larry,” Mr. Flant said. “But she was not Larry’s kind.”

  Penny had been telling them how Mrs. Stahl had shown up at her door the night before, in worn satin pajamas and cold cream, to scold her for moving furniture around.

  “I don’t even know how she saw,” Penny said. “I just pushed the bed away from the wall.”

  She had lied, telling Mrs. Stahl she could hear the oven damper popping at night. She was afraid to tell her about the shadows and lights and other things that made no sense in daytime. Like the mice moving behind the wall on hindfeet, so agile she’d come to think of them as pixies, dwarves. Little men.

  “It’s not your place to move things,” Mrs. Stahl had said, quite loudly, and for a moment Penny thought the woman might cry.

  “That’s all his furniture, you know,” Benny said. “Larry’s. Down to the forks and spoons.”

  Penny felt her teeth rattle slightly in her mouth.

  “He gave her books she liked,” Benny added. “Stiff British stuff he teased her about. Charmed himself out of the rent for months.”

  “When he died she wailed around the courtyard for weeks,” Mr. Flant recalled. “She wanted to scatter the ashes into the canyon.”

  “But his people came instead,” Benny said. “Came on a train all the way from Carolina. A man and woman with cardboard suitcases packed with pimento sandwiches. They took the body home.”

  “They said Hollywood had killed him.”

  Benny shook his head, smiled that tobaccotoothed smile of his. “They always say that.”

  “You’re awfully pretty for a face-fixer,” one of the actors told her, fingers wagging beneath his long makeup bib.

  Penny only smiled, and scooted before the pinch came.

  It was a Western, so it was mostly men, whiskers, lip bristle, three-day beards filled with dust.

  Painting the girls’ faces was harder. They all had ideas of how they wanted it. They were hard girls, striving to get to Paramount, to MGM. Or started out there and hit the Republic rung on the long slide down. To Allied, AIP. Then studios no one ever heard of, operating out of some slick guy’s house in the Valley.

  They had bad teeth and head lice and some had smells on them when they came to the studio, like they hadn’t washed properly. The costume assistants always pinched their noses behind their backs.

  It was a rough town for pretty girls. The only place it was.

  Penny knew she had lost her shine long ago. Many men had rubbed it off, shimmy by shimmy.

  But it was just as well, and she’d just as soon be in the warpaint business. When it rubbed off the girls, she could just get out her brushes, her power puffs, and shine them up like new.

  As she tapped the powder pots, though, her mind would wander. She began thinking about Larry bounding through the backlots. Would he have come to Republic with his wares? Maybe. Would he have soft-soaped her, hoping her bosses might have a taste for T.S. Eliot or a French deck?

  By day, she imagined him as a charmer, a cheery, silver-tongued roué.

  But at night, back at the Canyon Arms, it was different.

  You see, sometimes she thought she could see him moving, room to room, his face pale, his trousers soiled. Drinking and crying over someone, something, whatever he’d lost that he was sure wasn’t ever coming back.

  There were sounds now. Sounds to go with the two a.m. lights, or the mice or whatever they were.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  At first, she thought she was only hearing the banana trees, brushing against the side of the bungalow. Peering out the window, the moon-filled courtyard, she couldn’t tell. The air looked very still.

  Maybe, she thought, it’s the fan palms outside the kitchen window, so much lush foliage everywhere, just the thing she’d loved, but now it seemed to be touching her constantly, closing in.

  And she didn’t like to go into the kitchen at night. The white tile glowed eerily, reminded her of something. The wide expanse of Mr. D.’s belly, his shirt pushed up, his watch chain hanging. The coaster of milk she left for the cat the morning she ran away from home. For Hollywood.

  The mouse traps never caught anything. Every morning, after the rumpled sleep and all the flits and flickers along the wall, she moved them to different places. She looked for signs.

  She never saw any.

  One night, three a.m., she knelt down on the floor, running her fingers along the baseboards. With her ear to the wall, she thought the tapping might be coming from inside. A tap-tap-tap. Or was it a tick-tick-tick?

  “I’ve never heard anything here,” Mr. Flant told her the following day, “but I take sedatives.”

  Benny wrinkled his brow. “Once, I saw pink elephants,” he offered. “You think that might be it?”

  Penny shook her head. “It’s making it hard to sleep.”

  “Dear,” Mr. Flant said, “would you like a little helper?”

  He held out his palm, pale and moist. In the center, a white pill shone.

  That night she slept impossibly deeply. So deeply she could barely move, her neck twisted and locked, her body hunched inside itself.

  Upon waking, she threw up in the waste basket.

  That evening, after work, she waited in the courtyard for Mrs. Stahl.

  Smoking cigarette after cigarette, Penny noticed things she hadn’t before. Some of the tiles in the courtyard were cracked, some missing. She hadn’t noticed that before. Or the chips and gouges on the sculpted lions on the center fountain, their mouths spouting only a trickle of acid green. The drain at the bottom of the fountain, clogged with crushed cigarette packs, a used contraceptive.

  Finally, she saw Mrs. Stahl saunter into view, a large picture hat wilting across her tiny head.

  “Mrs. Stahl,” she said, “have you ever had an exterminator come?”

  The woman stopped, her entire body still for a moment, her left hand finally rising to her face, brushing her hair back under her mustard-colored scarf.

  “I run a clean residence,” she said, voice low in the empty, sunlit courtyard. That courtyard, oleander and wisteria everywhere, bright and poisonous, like everything in this town.

  “I can hear something behind the wainscoting,” Penny replied. “Maybe mice, or maybe it’s baby possums caught in the wall between the bedr
oom and kitchen.”

  Mrs. Stahl looked at her. “Is it after you bake? It might be the dampers popping again.”

  “I’m not much of a cook. I haven’t even turned on the oven yet.”

  “That’s not true,” Mrs. Stahl said, lifting her chin triumphantly. “You had it on the other night.”

  “What?” Then Penny remembered. It had rained sheets and she’d used it to dry her dress. But it had been very late and she didn’t see how Mrs. Stahl could know. “Are you peeking in my windows?” she asked, voice tightening.

  “I saw the light. The oven door was open. You shouldn’t do that,” Mrs. Stahl said, shaking her head. “It’s very dangerous.”

  “You’re not the first landlord I caught peeping. I guess I need to close my curtains,” Penny said coolly. “But it’s not the oven damper I’m hearing each and every night. I’m telling you: there’s something inside my walls. Something in the kitchen.”

  Mrs. Stahl’s mouth seemed to quiver slightly, which emboldened Penny.

  “Do I need to get out the ball peen I found under the sink and tear a hole in the kitchen wall, Mrs. Stahl?”

  “Don’t you dare!” she said, clutching Penny’s wrist, her costume rings digging in. “Don’t you dare!”

  Penny felt the panic on her, the woman’s breaths coming in sputters. She insisted they both sit on the fountain edge.

  For a moment, they both just breathed, the apricot-perfumed air thick in Penny’s lungs.

  “Mrs. Stahl, I’m sorry. It’s just—I need to sleep.”

  Mrs. Stahl took a long breath, then her eyes narrowed again. “It’s those chinwags next door, isn’t it? They’ve been filling your ear with bile.”

  “What? Not about this, I—”

  “I had the kitchen cleaned thoroughly after it happened. I had it cleaned, the linoleum stripped out. I put up fresh wallpaper over every square inch after it happened. I covered everything with wallpaper.”

  “Is that where it happened?” Penny asked. “That poor man who died in Number Four? Larry?”

  But Mrs. Stahl couldn’t speak, or wouldn’t, breathing into her handkerchief, lilac silk, the small square over her mouth suctioning open and closed, open and closed.

  “He was very beautiful,” she finally whispered. “When they pulled him out of the oven, his face was the most exquisite red. Like a ripe, ripe cherry.”

  Knowing how it happened changed things. Penny had always imagined handsome, melancholy Larry walking around the apartment, turning gas jets on. Settling into that club chair in the living room. Or maybe settling in bed and slowly drifting from earth’s fine tethers.

  She wondered how she could ever use the oven now, or even look at it.

  It had to be the same one. That Magic Chef, which looked like the one from childhood, white porcelain and cast iron. Not like those new slabs, buttercup or mint green.

  The last tenant, Mr. Flant told her later, smelled gas all the time.

  “She said it gave her headaches,” he said. “Then one night she came here, her face white as snow. She said she’d just seen St. Agatha in the kitchen, with her bloody breasts.”

  “I … I don’t see anything like that,” Penny said.

  Back in the bungalow, trying to sleep, she began picturing herself the week before. How she’d left that oven door open, her fine, rainslicked dress draped over the rack. The truth was, she’d forgotten about it, only returning for it hours later.

  Walking to the closet now, she slid the dress from its hanger pressing it to her face. But she couldn’t smell anything.

  Mr. D. still had not returned her calls. The bank had charged her for the bounced check so she’d have to return the hat she’d bought, and rent was due again in two days.

  When all the other crew members were making their way to the commissary for lunch, Penny slipped away and splurged on cab fare to the studio.

  As she opened the door to his outer office, the receptionist was already on her feet and walking purposefully toward Penny.

  “Miss,” she said, nearly blocking Penny, “you’re going to have to leave. Mac shouldn’t have let you in downstairs.”

  “Why not? I’ve been here dozens of—”

  “You’re not on the appointment list, and that’s our system now, Miss.”

  “Does he have an appointment list now for that squeaking starlet sofa in there?” Penny asked, jerking her arm and pointing at the leather-padded door. A man with a thin moustache and a woman in a feathered hat looked up from their magazines.

  The receptionist was already on the phone. “Mac, I need you … Yes, that one.”

  “If he thinks he can just toss me out like street trade,” she said, marching over and thumping on Mr. D.’s door, “he’ll be very, very sorry.”

  Her knuckles made no noise in the soft leather. Nor did her fist.

  “Miss,” someone said. It was the security guard striding toward her.

  “I’m allowed to be here,” she insisted, her voice tight and high. “I did my time. I earned the right.”

  But the guard had his hand on her arm.

  Desperate, she looked down at the man and the woman waiting. Maybe she thought they would help. But why would they?

  The woman pretended to be absorbed in her Cinestar magazine.

  But the man smiled at her, hair oil gleaming. And winked.

  The next morning she woke bleary but determined. She would forget about Mr. D. She didn’t need his money. After all, she had a job, a good one.

  It was hot on the lot that afternoon, and none of the makeup crew could keep the dust off the faces. There were so many lines and creases on every face—you never think about it until you’re trying to make everything smooth.

  “Penny,” Gordon, the makeup supervisor said. She had the feeling he’d been watching her for several moments as she pressed the powder into the actor’s face, holding it still.

  “It’s so dusty,” she said, “so it’s taking a while.”

  He waited until she finished then, as the actor walked away, he leaned forward.

  “Everything all right, Pen?”

  He was looking at something—her neck, her chest.

  “What do you mean?” she said, setting the powder down.

  But he just kept looking at her.

  “Working on your carburetor, beautiful?” one of the grips said, as he walked by.

  “What? I …”

  Peggy turned to the makeup mirror. That was when she saw the long grease smear on her collarbone. And the line of black soot across her hairline too.

  “I don’t know,” Penny said, her voice sounding slow and sleepy. “I don’t have a car.”

  Then, it came to her: the dream she’d had in the early morning hours. That she was in the kitchen, checking on the oven damper. The squeak of the door on its hinges, and Mrs. Stahl outside the window, her eyes glowing like a wolf’s.

  “It was a dream,” she said, now. Or was it? Had she been sleepwalking the night before?

  Had she been in the kitchen … at the oven … in her sleep?

  “Penny,” Gordon said, looking at her squintily. “Penny, maybe you should go home.”

  It was so early, and Penny didn’t want to go back to Canyon Arms. She didn’t want to go inside Number Four, or walk past the kitchen, its cherry wallpaper lately giving her the feeling of blood spatters.

  Also, lately, she kept thinking she saw Mrs. Stahl peering at her between the wooden blinds as she watered the banana trees.

  Instead, she took the bus downtown to the big library on South Fifth. She had an idea.

  The librarian, a boy with a bowtie, helped her find the obituaries.

  She found three about Larry, but none had photos, which was disappointing.

  The one in the Mirror was the only with any detail, any texture.

  It mentioned that the body had been found by the “handsome proprietress, one Mrs. Herman Stahl,” who “fell to wailing” so loud it was heard all through the canyons, up the pro
montories and likely high into the mossed eaves of the Hollywood sign.

  “So what happened to Mrs. Stahl’s husband?” Penny asked when she saw Mr. Flant and Benny that night.

  “He died just a few months before Larry,” Benny said. “Bad heart, they say.”

  Mr. Flant raised one pale eyebrow. “She never spoke of him. Only of Larry.”

  “He told me once she watched him, Larry did,” Benny said. “She watched him through his bedroom blinds. While he made love.”

  Instantly, Penny knew this was true. She thought of herself in that same bed each night, the mattress so soft, its posts sometimes seeming to curl inward.

  Mrs. Stahl had insisted Penny move it back against the wall. Penny refused, but the next day she came home to find the woman moving it herself, her short arms spanning the mattress, her face pressed into its applique.

  Watching, Penny had felt like the Peeping Tom. It was so intimate.

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Mr. Flant said now. “There were rumors. Black Widow, or Old Maid.”

  “You can’t make someone put his head in the oven,” Benny said. “At least not for long. The gas’d get at you, too.”

  “True,” Mr. Flant said.

  “Maybe it didn’t happen at the oven,” Penny blurted. “She found the body. What if she just turned on the gas while he was sleeping?”

  “And dragged him in there, for the cops?”

  Mr. Flant and Benny looked at each other.

  “She’s very strong,” Penny said.

  Back in her bungalow, Penny sat just inside her bedroom window, waiting.

  Peering through the blinds, long after midnight, she finally saw her. Mrs. Stahl, walking along the edges of the courtyard.

  She was singing softly and her steps were uneven and Penny thought she might be tight, but it was hard to know.

  Penny was developing a theory.

  Picking up a book, she made herself stay awake until two.

  Then, slipping from bed, she tried to follow the flashes of light, the shadows.

  Bending down, she put her hand on the baseboards, as if she could touch those funny shapes, like mice on their haunches. Or tiny men, marching.

  “Something’s there!” she said out loud, her voice surprising her. “It’s in the walls.”