Mendoza in Hollywood (4 page)

Now, señors, I think some of the reason for my subsequent lamentable behavior is evident right here in the next scene. I hung up my oilskins and shrugged into dry clothes, meditating smugly to myself that it didn’t take much to make me happy nowadays. I was an old hand now, wasn’t I? A couple of tamales and a dry place to put up my feet and read a novel were enough. I could make my own space anywhere they posted me, as a good operative should. Wisdom at last. Perhaps I’d attained enlightenment after tramping through that beautiful desolation all these years collecting specimens alone. Certainly I had equilibrium.

Well. Where pride flaunts such scarlet banners, blares such brazen trumpets, you know what follows.

I had turned in early, after walking up on the ridge above the house to get a feel for the land, making friends with the oak trees, exploring the rooms of the coaching inn, chatting a little more with my fellow operatives (the male ones anyway) most amiably and normally. I had endured a few hands of gin rummy with Juan Bautista and an hour or so of anecdotes from Oscar about his mortal customers before I excused myself on the grounds that I’d been conscious for forty-eight hours and needed some alpha waves badly. And so I retired to my spartan room, pleased with myself. I’d done well for my first day back among people, I thought. I ought to be able to handle this posting just fine.

Maybe it was having an actual bed to lie down in that did it. See, I’d got out of the habit of sleeping like mortals, all those years in the mountains. I know, we’re not supposed to do it—but it’s so convenient just to lean into a tree limb or an angle of rock and fugue out for a couple of days, especially when you’re on your own schedule. You have no idea how restful it can be. You just sort of tune in to the patterns moving in the tree or the rock, and you forget you even exist.

One feels so vulnerable, undressing and getting into a bed. It summons
up memories. The memory that it summoned was not one I wanted. I lay in the dark listening to the rain drip, to the wind sigh in the oak leaves. Because of the downpour, there were no coyotes howling, so you didn’t necessarily know you were in California. With just the wind and the rain, it might have been anywhere. It might have been England.

Then I thought it had to be England, because my door was opening and there was green and sunlight beyond, that wet sunlight and drowningly intense green of an English garden. And
he
was there, standing in the doorway and looking at me. So tall, he had to bend to look into my narrow little room, and his black scholar’s robe trailed in the lush summer grass. He was smiling, smiling at me in the old way, and held out his hand to me.

“
Talitha koum
,” he said, in that voice I’d have leaped out of a grave for. “Up and haste my love, my dove, my beautiful and come, for now is winter gone and rain departed and past!”

Who was he, señors? My martyr, who do you think? Nicholas Harpole, the mortal man with whom I fell in love when I was a young operative who should have known better. He died on April 1, 1555. This was either a dream or a haunting.

A haunting, I think.

I was so glad to get up and run to him where he waited in that doorway, to quit my dark cold room and run into the summer garden. Time must have turned backward, because there I was in my peach-colored gown with all the petticoats and my placketed bodice and stiff sleeves, and my hair falling loose. I never braided it back then, I was too vain. I leaped into his arms, and he made a little pleased chortling noise in his throat, and we were kissing, staggering backward and bumping into the orange tree, so his scholar’s biretta was knocked forward over his eyes. I pushed it back, and we kissed and kissed, and oh the taste of his mouth and the scrape of stubble under his jaw and the hungry noises he made, I hadn’t forgotten one detail in three centuries of trying desperately to forget.

We kissed until we were blind and gasping and his breeches
needed to be unfastened, so I did it for him, and he pulled his long shirt up and out and freed himself, and I hadn’t forgotten one detail about
that
either. Nor had I forgotten what to do next: one didn’t just grab the front of one’s skirt and haul it up, no, that was sluttish, one gathered it at the two sides as though one were going to sit down, and one lifted it in a discreet and genteel manner just far enough for the purpose. No bloomers, no underwear at all, only my fine-woven stockings gartered at the knee, and he was bending down to gather me up in his big fine hands and lift me against him.

Every detail was perfect and exact, the rustle of my gathered petticoats, the texture of his clean linen shirt and woolen doublet under my cheek, and how they smelled with the full hot sun on them releasing the scent of washing soap, and the green feverish privet-fragrance of the garden at high summer. I had my arms around his shoulders, my face pressed into the side of his neck, and a trickle of his sweat came coursing down as he labored, and I kissed the sweat away. And how we strove there together, in our mutual delight, as he growled his pleasure and I felt the vibration of it in his throat, and how soundly we knocked the trunk of the orange tree, until golden fruit fell all around us in a shower.

Oh, I thought, jackpot, surely that’s a favorable omen. And as we rested, sobbing for breath, I felt a little stab. We both looked down, surprised. Protruding from my heart was the haft of a bodkin, and my heart’s blood was welling out around it like a cut pomegranate. I laughed, joyous, incredulous, and he laughed with me. We both knew what this meant: I was free of the world now, I could stay in that garden with him eternally. Impossibly, wonderfully, my weary heart had stopped beating.

But I was slipping somehow, he was losing his hold, and the pain became terrible as I opened my eyes into darkness and felt the chill, heard the rain.

I hadn’t gone through the doorway to him after all.

It took a long moment of struggling for air to be able to voice my
agony. I wasn’t loud, even so; but within seconds I heard hurrying feet crunching through the oak leaves.

Mendoza
?

Go away!

He wouldn’t go away. The door opened, and Porfirio looked in on me, all concern, a black silhouette against blacker night. Good God, I thought, what’s he got that gun for?

You okay
?

Yes! Don’t you ever have bad dreams
? I transmitted. He looked at me in irresolution a moment before nodding and shutting the door.

I guess, señors, if I were somebody else, I might have called him back and begged some kind of physical comfort as a favor, that I might not lie alone there in the dark. But I was and regretfully am myself, and I was not alone. The dark thundered around me like a palpable presence, and I belonged to it.

Next morning, Porfirio didn’t mention the disturbance, and neither did I. I ran a diagnostic on myself, but everything tested out normal.

For the first couple of weeks that I lived at that stagecoach inn, there were no stagecoaches at all, and precious few travelers, because the roads were in no condition for going anywhere. This situation didn’t improve much the whole time I was there, in part because Butterfield had decided to cancel its stage lines to California for the duration of the American Civil War, which left its rival Phineas Banning with a lot of territory to cover all by himself.

At about the point where there were no dead trees left to float down the canyons and you thought all the topsoil had washed out to sea, the rain stopped. The sun came out! And abruptly we were living in a paradise. The hills were green and purple and silver with sagebrush, the grazing land was brilliant lime-green with good grass, and everywhere there were banks of wildflowers. I stepped out under the dripping oak trees and looked up at the puffy white clouds in the blue sky. What a fine place, I thought. What a
beautiful
place.
Murder? Robbery? Social dysfunction? Surely not in sunny southern California.

I was humming Rodrigo’s
Concierto de Aranjuez
(first movement) as I went indoors to collect my field kit. Temperate belt, here I come! My ghost had not returned to haunt me, and my work was waiting. Who knew what botanic anomalies lay there waiting to be discovered?

But when I shouldered my pack and emerged from my quarters, Porfirio looked up from the cookfire he had just got going. “Where are you off to?” he asked with a frown.

“I thought I’d go get some work done at last, now that the rain’s let up.” I gestured at the enchanting sky.

“Not alone, you’re not. Not over in that neck of the woods.” He shook his head decisively. “Too many damn bandits. Wait until Einar gets up. He’ll go with you.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, almost too surprised to be annoyed. “I’ve been on my own in California for years. I’ve outrun bears, Indians, and every one of the Joaquins. I worked in San Luis Obispo, where they hang so many outlaws, there’s a gallows at the end of every street. I don’t need an escort, thank you very much.”

“It’s different down here,” he said, and something about his tone made me slip off my pack and find a dry place to wait as he got a pot of coffee brewing. Presently Einar came out, hopping on one booted foot as he pulled the other boot on.

“Hey, folks,” he said. “Sunlight, huh? I guess I’ll go out looking for a coyote or two today.”

“You can go out with Mendoza,” Porfirio said.

“Sure.” He grinned at me. “You want the Grand Hollywood tour? Show you where the homes of the stars will be.”

“I hope there’s something useful growing there,” I said grumpily. “And did I hear you say you were collecting
coyotes
?”

“Uh-huh.” He poured a mug of coffee and handed it to me. “Don’t laugh. The particular subspecies in this area will disappear after a couple of centuries. First they’ll crossbreed with settler’s dogs.
Then they’ll crossbreed with wolves that escape from the zoo during a riot—that’s during the dark ages of L.A.—and they’ll get so huge and vicious, they’ll start eating street beggars when the winters are bad.”

“Jesus.” I shivered, looking up at the sky. It was such an innocent shade of blue.

“But these little guys we have now are real sweet,” he told me seriously, sipping his own coffee. “Sort of foxy. Nothing to worry about. Not like when I go after a bear.”

“Bears?”

“California brown bears, like the one on the flag,” he said. “They’re already on the way out. Last known survivor in California will be shot right here, or actually out there”—he pointed down the canyon—”in 1912. Then they’re extincto. Supposedly. They take some catching!”

“I can imagine.” I looked into the bottom of my graniteware cup. “Tell me, are we likely to encounter any bears today?”

“Only if we’re lucky,” Einar said. “Since you have other work to do, I thought we’d keep things simple for now.”

“Wonderful.”

After a breakfast of velvety frijoles and steak rolled in tortillas, we saddled up and went to explore. Einar wore fearsome-looking bandoliers and a pair of shotguns, one behind either shoulder, like samurai swords. He showed me a trail that led through the back of the canyon and up a series of switchbacks to the top of the ridge. We followed the rimrock above the foothills, and down below us the plains swept out to the east, where there were big white snowy mountains, and south and west, where beyond the sprawl of adobes that was Los Angeles the land terminated in the blue line of the sea. Paler blue and farther out, lay a floating mountain.

“Is that an island?” I asked, squinting at it.

“Catalina,” Einar said. “Location shots for
Mutiny on the Bounty, Treasure Island
, and a couple of versions of
Rain
, to name but a few. And check this out.” He leaned over in his saddle, pointing into a steep valley to our left. “Know what that is, down there? Hollywood Bowl!
Imagine a big white half shell right there, with a reflecting pool in front of it, and a fan of seats sweeping up and up, rows and rows of pearly gray wooden benches, and thousands of screaming girls filling the amphitheater. Right down there is where the Beatles will perform. I’ve been up here at night, alone, and I swear to God I can hear them.”

I stared down, impressed, though all I could see was a wilderness of sagebrush and toyon holly. “That’s when, the 1960s? Only a century off. Where’s the Hollywood sign?”

“Look across there.” He pointed east, where a red mountain thrust up against the sky like a rippled wall. “Under the crest. It’ll say
Hollywoodland
first, for the real estate park below it, and then when the last four letters fall off, they won’t be replaced. There’ll be two sister signs as well, for a couple of other developments, one down on that lower ridge that’ll say
Bryn Mawr
and one over here that says
Outpost
, but they won’t last long, and nobody will remember they were ever there. Neat, huh?”

“You certainly know the area,” I said. We urged our horses on, and they continued to pick their way down the trail. “What are you going to do when it finally starts to happen, though? You’re a zoologist. Dr. Z isn’t likely to keep you here once the bears and the coyotes are gone.”

“I have a double discipline,” he said. “Programmed for zoology
and
cinema. I can stabilize a silver-nitrate print with one hand and do a genetic assay on a musk ox with the other. I’ve been in the field for millennia, though, so all my experience is with animals. Reindeer, caribou, wolves, those guys. The wheels of time roll swift around, though! When this assignment’s up, I’m off to Menlo Park and then on to Melies in France. I’ll be in on film from the beginning. I just hope Dr. Zeus sends me back here once the industry’s up and running. Wouldn’t that be swell?”

We both heard the shot, a little
pow
from somewhere down in the canyon to our right, and in a tiny fragment of time the bullet came zipping up through the bushes at us. We were off our horses and flat on the earth by then, however.

“Aw, shit,” Einar said. He unslung one of the rifles and pointed it in the direction of our assailant; then he went into hyperfunction, firing and reloading faster than a mortal eye could have followed, sending a volley into the canyon below that cut a swath through the pretty purple sage. The echo boomed off the opposite ridge like thunder on Judgment Day. The mortal must have wondered what war zone he’d stumbled into, but he didn’t wonder it for long; as I scanned, I felt his vital signs flutter and fade out.