Americana

  I had some frightening dreams that night and in the morning one image in particular stayed with me, a blue bus moving down a highway in the desert, and the picture was so clear in my mind that I might still have been asleep and dreaming, that flash of bright blue metal across the lionskin desert. For the first time in my life I could be certain that I dreamed in color. I don’t know why but this cheered me tremendously.

  After breakfast Kyrie said it was time for him to be moving on. We drove him the three or four blocks to Howley Road and parked in front of Buster’s. We had a last cup of coffee in the back of the camper.

  “I’m dedicating this walk to my buddy Art Levy,” Kyrie said. “We were mailboys together in the Justice Department. A bunch of lawyers there started a motorcycle club. Eventually they let clerical workers and even mailboys join up. Art bought a stripped-down Harley secondhand and got into the club. They all wore real weird outfits—bandannas, army tunics, safari jackets, combat boots, leggings, football jerseys, cowhide vests. Lawyers and others. The Justice Department. I came into the office one morning and one of them came over to me and said Art got snuffed. I didn’t know what he meant. He said he got snuffed by a fire engine. He ran into a fire engine and got a fractured skull and all kinds of massive internal injuries. He died the same night. So I tell everybody that helps me that I’m dedicating this walk to the memory of my buddy Art Levy, who gave up his life in an unequal encounter with tremendous contemporary forces.”

  “What will you do when you get to California?” Sullivan said.

  “Learn how to play this guitar.”

  We got out of the camper and stood together on Howley Road. It was a black morning, cool and blowing and smelling of storm. Dirt blew up from the untended lots of the three or four houses on the road and the traffic light swung on its lanyard. Kyrie smiled and kissed each of us goodbye. Then he walked down the road, guitar and knapsack, a distinctly neo-Chaplinesque finale, and the wind filled his shirt and nearly knocked him over. We tried to find a good reason for not leaving the camper exactly where it was; nobody could come up with anything and we got back inside. Pike lifted a bottle out of his seaman’s bag. It started to rain then, a steady plastic murmur above our heads. Pike told us about the cougar, its speed, cunning and resourcefulness, how it could broad-jump thirty-five to forty feet, thus comparing favorably with the impala although the latter got all the publicity, and he told us about the animal’s great energy, quoting a recorded case in which a single mountain lion had killed 192 sheep in one night. Later that day I trotted halfway across town in the rain in order to do some work at the library. At night I sat alone in the front of the camper, listening to the insects. I felt an urge to leave that place, to go roaring onto a long straight expressway into the West; to forget the film and what it was beginning to mean to me; to face mountains and deserts; to smash my likeness, prism of all my images, and become finally a man who lives by his own power and smell. In Venice I had met an elderly gentleman at the American Express office. We were standing in line to cash traveler’s checks. I commented on what a fine sunny day it was.

  “Know what we call this weather back in Pima County, Arizona?” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Rain,” he said. “We call it rain.”

  He winked at me and proceeded to the counter. The black cats of Venice slumbered in the alleys. Of Italy, its wet sun and white tablecloths, coconut slices being sprinkled in the markets, sinister knife-blade priests everywhere. I went to Florence then and Meredith pointed at the stones and shouted how stupendous. Then, alone, down to rusty dead Roma, German tourists saluting each other, everyone waiting for Fellini to come skipping along the Via Veneto in clownface and opera cape, trailed by virgins, camels, nubians, publicity men. Through it all an idea had haunted me, a vision of mesas and buttes, the cut of the dry winds, long cool shadows and horses’ faces hung on fences, Navahos tending their sheep, the stitched earth of Arizona. We call it rain. But I made the mistake of staying on Howley Road.

  I woke in the middle of the night and smelled chocolate pudding, a thick rich gripping smell. Then I thought of my mother’s blue apron, the old chipped stove, so terribly real, the blue apron with the flowers, the way she stood there stirring the pudding, her hand a small limp triumph of continuity and grace, an assertion of order in the universe. In the morning I loaded the camera.

  9

  The illusion of motion was barely relevant. Perhaps it wasn’t a movie I was creating so much as a scroll, a delicate bit of papyrus that feared discovery. Veterans of the film industry would swear the whole thing pre-dated Edison’s kinetoscope. My answer to them is simple. It takes centuries to invent the primitive.

  * * *

  Glenn Yost opened the door. His long tired head leaned to the left and the crazed eye flared. I imagined that in some green diamond-shaped pasture of his mind the bases were loaded and a big eager rookie was striding to the plate, man-mountain with heavy lumber, a golden eater of cereal. Glenn lived in a two-story white frame house on a street of very old houses, almost all white, several needing paint. He led me downstairs to the basement, where his son was sprawled in a corner watching a Kirk Douglas western on TV.

  “The wife is using the big set,” Glenn said. “I thought we’d be quieter down here but I see the creature beat us to it.”

  “The All-Seeing Eye,” Bud said.

  “It’s fine with me. I wanted to talk to Bud anyway.”

  “Let’s sit down.”

  “What do you do for a living, Glenn?”

  “I’m partners in a lumber yard.”

  “How’s business?”

  “Retirement’s not exactly looming on the horizon.”

  “That’s really neither here not there. My question I mean. I was just being polite, leading into the real subject of my visit. Which is: would you be at all interested in appearing in the thing I plan to shoot in this area in the next week or so? It wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours of your time. All you have to do is read some lines before the camera. Actually read from a script, a piece of paper. No memory work, no preparation. Just showing up and reading. I know it doesn’t sound like the most intriguing thing in the world, especially since I can’t pay you a dime, but you wouldn’t be losing more than a couple of hours’ time and maybe you’d have some fun. I know one thing. You’d be doing me a tremendous, a really great favor. Bud, how old are you?”

  “Be sixteen in three months.”

  “You too,” I said. “A couple of hours.”

  “I don’t know anything about reading lines,” Glenn said.

  “Everything out of your mouth is a line,” Bud said. “You never mean anything. He never means anything. He tells people he was in the submarine paratroopers during the war. They used to bail out of submarines. They’d drop up instead of down.”

  “All right, wise ass.”

  “How old are you, Glenn, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I guess I’m forty-seven.”

  “Aside from jumping out of submarines, did you actually serve in World War II?”

  “He was in the Bataan death march,” Bud said.

  Glenn went upstairs for some beer and then we watched the movie until it ended about an hour later. I loved the landscapes, the sense of near equation called forth by man and space, the cowboy facing silent hills; there it was, the true subject of film, space itself, how to arrange it and people it, time hung in a desert window, how to win out over sand and bone. (It’s just a cowboy picture, I reminded myself.) Owney Pine came down the stairs then, short and slightly bowlegged, ample in his width, roundhead, crewcut, ferrying across the floor now and docking with a bump, belly opening and automobiles pouring out.

  * * *

  In the morning I took my camera over to the hotel and told the desk clerk I wanted the same room, indefinitely this time. Traces of a sneeze lingered in his mustache. He looked at my camera, wondered whether or not to comment, and then simply pushed the key across the
desk.

  Upstairs I set the camera on the bed and sat in a chair looking at it. I blew on the tips of my fingers. I unbuttoned each shirtcuff and rolled the sleeves tightly to a point one inch below my elbows. I moved my shoulders back and forth, trying to loosen the muscles. I took out my keychain and cleaned my fingernails with the mailbox key. I blew on the knuckle of the index finger of my right hand. With the other hand I juggled my testicles until they were comfortable. Then I expelled air three times through my nose.

  Austin Wakely showed up precisely on time. He was wearing, as directed, a pair of brown shoes, army-issue and spit-shined, and fresh clean summer khakis. Pants and shirt had come from the wardrobe room at McCompex; the shoes were borrowed. Austin asked ten or twelve questions, only two of which I answered—that there was no plot to this thing, that I’d be shooting in black and white all the way. The answers upset him only slightly less than the non-answers had.

  “Granted I don’t know much about it,” he said, “but there doesn’t seem to be enough light in here.”

  “I want it natural. I brought along some high-watt bulbs. We’ll use those and pray we don’t blow a fuse. I think we’ll make that floor lamp the key light. This whole thing is what is known in some circles as inspired amateurism. Today’s little task is pretty simple, a sort of signature that could be used as both beginning and end. When we start using sound I’ll give you the words as far in advance as possible. That means twenty-four hours at most. I hope you’ll be able to read my handwriting.”

  “I’ll read it.”

  “Now listen,” I said.

  I gave him final instructions, changed the light bulbs and then set the film rating and f.p.s. dial. I adjusted the eyepiece. Austin cleared his throat although he had no lines to speak. He was standing with his back to a full-length mirror, facing directly into the camera. I moved him slightly to one side. I used a single camera position and shot straight on from the foot of the bed for about twenty seconds, a popular commercial length.

  When we were done it became clear that Austin’s mood had changed. He talked enthusiastically of the film and his unknown role in it. His image had been placed in the time bank and this was sufficient cause for elation. For the first time since I’d met him, I felt myself gaining the edge. There would have to be no subtle bloodshed, no long campaign to dominate another individual. I had the camera and that was enough.

  * * *

  After he’d gone I took a shower and then asked the voice at the switchboard to get me the network.

  “I’m naked,” I said.

  “How exciting. Who’s with you?”

  “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”

  “Lucky them,” Binky said. “I didn’t think you’d call again so soon.”

  “How old is Harris Hodge?”

  “David, he’s twenty-six. Don’t get mad. He looks older.”

  “Okay, how’s Ted Warburton?”

  “He collapsed at his desk and had to be rushed to the hospital.”

  “You already told me that, goddamn it, and I think you used exactly those words. When did you become a recorded announcement? I want to know if there’s been any word from the hospital.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask around.”

  “Hasn’t Weede tried to get in touch with Mrs. Warburton?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, find out. Next time you’re in bed with Weede, ask him if he’s tried to get in touch with Mrs. Warburton. Use exactly those words. Do you think you can do that for me, Binky?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So am I, David. I feel terrible about Ted Warburton. I really do. If you want, I can find out what hospital he’s in and you can call him.”

  “No, don’t do that. If Ted’s really bad I’d just as soon not talk to him. I can’t stand talking to people who are really bad. Just find out how he is and I’ll call you next week.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said about Weede.”

  “It’s okay. Everybody knows anyway. When you said you were with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, did that mean you’re in Utah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Utah’s right above Arizona.”

  “Is it?” I said.

  “So you’ll be on location any day now.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Everybody’s very excited about the project.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “Are you really naked?”

  “Starkers.”

  “I’m sorry about Harris Hodge.”

  I thought of asking Binky to switch my call to Tana Elk-bridge’s phone. But then she would suspect that Tana and I were having an affair and since Tana was married this was not a good idea. Of course I could have given her Tana’s extension, not telling her who the number belonged to, but she would have been able to find out simply by going through the network directory. It was better not to take chances. When Binky and I were finished talking I hung up and then had the voice call the network all over again. I asked for Tana Elkbridge. Her boss answered. I hung up immediately. Then I called Meredith at her office.