Manifesto for the Dead (4 page)

“What news is that?”

“We don't have to move.”

“What do you mean?”

“I've got the deal all but made. With Miracle. It's a sure thing.”

He'd drunk too much. It was a tricky business, to maintain your balance. To walk the old beam. Too little, you got the shakes. Too much, and the whole world shook. He'd waltzed along pretty well for quite a while since his last tumble, two years ago, maybe three, but now that beam was narrowing down.

“Your sister called from Lincoln.”

Alberta got up angrily.

“What's the matter?”

“I broke a nail.”

That wasn't it. She'd broken a million nails. She was mad because they were leaving the penthouse. It all went back to that son of a bitch Lombard. If he hadn't scuttled me that first time around, I wouldn't be in this position now.

“Miracle's giving me two thousand.”

“It's not enough. We still have to move.”

“It will hold us over. Until something bigger.”

“Something bigger's not coming.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Why don't you have yourself a drink?”

“I haven't been drinking. I don't know how you could say something like that.”

“No. You haven't been drinking. I don't have two feet. And birds don't fly. I see how it is.”

For an instant, despite everything, he felt like murdering her. Pushing her off the cliff, into the gray Pacific.

“What did my sister want?”

He studied her face. Then he put his hand under her shift. In the old days, when they were younger, that would have been the end of it, they would have tumbled backwards onto the couch. Now the longer they sat there like that, his hands caressing her leg, the more still and quiet she became, until it seemed she was not breathing at all, and in that silence there was again that question she'd asked him the other day.

Why?

It wasn't just one question, but a million, and the answer seemed to rest in that space between her legs, where the light and dark were all mixed together.

She pushed his hand away.

“Your sister ran into that woman in Lincoln.”

“What woman?”

“Lucille Jones. It seems she's on her way out here.”

“To Los Angeles?”

“Convention business of some sort, she and her husband. They're staying at the Château, but Lucille, she's going to be there a few days, alone, before her husband comes out. At least that's the news from Franny.”

He felt Alberta studying him, seeing how he would take this. If there might be something in his face to give him away. She had her suspicions.

“Lucille's husband, he's a big success,” she said.

“What's he do?”

“A doctor of dentistry, you know that.”

“Makes plenty of money, I bet.”

“A fortune,” she said.

“Gives half to charity, the other half to the church, and still has enough left over to live like a prince.”

“You're just jealous.”

“No, it's the other way around,” said Thompson.

“What do I have to be jealous of?”

“Lussie married so well, and you, on the other hand …” He paused, feeling the knife in his heart, the pain a little more sharp, a little more sweet, because he had placed it there himself. He waited to see if she would pull the dagger out.

“Oh, I don't know about that,” she said. “My husband—he's the best known writer in Los Angeles. Famous as the dirt. Desert Sands, that's his name. Mister Goddamn Desert Sands.”

Thompson had had enough. He stomped out, taking the sweater with him, and also his flask of bourbon.

Outside, Thompson thought about the girl on Whitley Terrace, in the back of the Cadillac. He started to walk up the hill, feeling the same compulsion he'd felt earlier, but after a few steps he changed his mind. It would not be wise to go up there, and anyway gravity pulled a person down, not up. So he plummeted towards the Strip instead, to his little room and the typewriter on the table at the window. He didn't start to work, not right away. He wondered some more about the girl, and he drank. He drank until a white light filled his head. It was the black-out light, the light of nothingness. As it grew brighter, he remembered the sweater. He looked everywhere. On the closet floor, under the bed, in his dresser drawers. Maybe I stashed it on the hill, he thought. Or maybe … maybe something else … there is no sweater, no girl. I'm finally losing it, and she is just a figment of my imagination, another hieroglyphic in a line of hieroglyphics on the white and shimmering page.

EIGHT

It was a trap. The woman who picked me off the road, her name was Belle Lanier. She took me home and put me up in the spare bedroom, in her Daddy's house.

I took off my clothes and lay naked in the bed. I'd met her Daddy at dinner, and her little sister. The sister was a bit like Belle, only more wholesome, with big glasses, and a toothy smile. I touched myself, imagining both sisters at once. How, if I played things right, I could be their Daddy's right-hand man someday.

A plan was forming in my head.

Forget it boy, you ain't nothing but a small time con.

It was the voice again. Pops. The prison psychologist had told me not to mind him anymore. Said Pops was not real, no, only a voice in my head that I'd made up when I was a kid because I didn't have any dad of my own. Just all those men my mother used to bring around.

There was a knock on the door. Belle strolled in and sat on the bed. She wore a silk shift and a flower in her hair.

“My daddy's a rich man,” she said.

Then she straddled my leg, so the warm ugly part of her was against my knees. She put her hand on me down low, pressing her lips over mine. I struggled against her a little bit, but she wouldn't let me go. I thought of her sister, the wholesome one, so it was like they were both with me at once. Belle kept her hand where it was until finally I let loose with everything inside and made a noise like an animal grunting around in the dark. Her lips curled then, like I had just proved something she knew all along. Then she left and I lay alone, listening to those crickets outside, and the cicadas and the whip-poor-wills and the katydids, all making a noise like the sound of the Texas night whipping through the windwing as you go roaring down the road, afraid to keep on going, afraid to stop.

NINE

Thompson woke up in the Aztec Hotel. He felt better than he should feel—a little sore in the gut, a bit wobbly in the knees—but still well enough to find himself a copy of the morning paper. It was full of the usual grim business. Nothing about the girl in the Cadillac, though. If the police had found her corpse, the news of that discovery wasn't exactly shaking the town.

Everything will be all right, he told himself. Anyway, he had enough worries. Alberta for one. Money for another. He needed to finalize the deal with Billy Miracle; he needed a publisher.

He called his editor in New York, a young man by the name of Hector Sally.

“Who did you say you were?”

“Thompson. Jim.”

The secretary grunted, impressed as hell. Then she put him on hold for a million years. A hundred million. The Ice Age came and went. Dinosaurs prowled once more the tar pits at La Brea. On Sunset Boulevard, under the tattered awnings, the figures of the waking world and Thompson's imagination intermingled. Here was the Okie. Here, Billy Miracle. Here, the Texas drifter, high stepping out of the pages of his novel.

Hector picked up. “Jim! How are you doing?”

“I have a deal. It's a book package tied to a movie. I thought you might want to know.”

“Well, have your agent send me the manuscript.”

“Forget my agent.”

“We do have certain protocols, Jim.”

Thompson tried to explain the deal he had going with Billy Miracle.

“I don't know,” Hector said. “Your last book. Sales …”

“This has a tie-in already.”

Hector hemmed around. He was an Ivy League kid who liked to think he was editing real literature. Only his bosses wanted sales, and to get sales it meant thrillers and good-looking heroes and a host of women just waiting to spread their legs. Morality at the end, though. A hero with a sense of dignity. Affirmation. Bad guys punished and the sluts all murdered.

“Let me talk to marketing. I'll call you back.”

“You're not just saying that, are you, Hector?”

“I'm not that way.”

“I didn't think you were that way.”

“I'll call you.”

“You promise?”

“I said I would, didn't I?”

“The heart of every good story's a good character,” said Thompson.

“All right.”

“I think this can be an important book.”

“I'll talk to the folks upstairs.”

“Important,” he repeated, but Hector was gone.

Later, Thompson searched his hotel room again, looking for the sweater. What had happened last night, it had happened before. Time disappearing into light. A few minutes, maybe. Even a few hours. It was not just time that got lost. Objects, too. Usually, they would show up again. Where, though, when, he couldn't be sure.

He glanced up at the closet. On the high shelf, he had placed his father's gun, a stack of manuscript papers, clothes. Had he checked there?

Yes, last night, he was all but sure. He'd torn the place apart.

Franny was right, he told himself suddenly. She'd told him once: you made a mistake, all those years ago, marrying Alberta. He went now to the phone and dialed the Château. The operator put him through.

“Hello?”

It was her voice. A Midwestern accent. Eastern Nebraska, to be exact, the sound of a magpie disappearing into the bulrushes of the Platte River. It moved something in him, that innocuous voice of an older woman, past middle age. A voice you could can tomatoes with, you bet. It was Lussie, all right, but he couldn't respond. He was all tied up inside. All he could do was listen, his heart pounding. Then she rang off.

TEN

Musso's was a refuge, a second home. Not a perfect home, but good enough—cool and dark, away from the afternoon glare. That's where he was headed, again, walking along Hollywood Boulevard. The sun was bright and hot. It came at you with a white bounce, shimmering in the storefront windows. The light gleamed too in the passing windshields, and that gleam stayed in his eyes as he opened the door at last and pushed towards the bar. Musso's was dim and it took a while before his sight came back. He stood at the bar, sorting through shadows till his own face came clear—lips parted, white hair askew—in the mirror on the other side of the counter.

The bartender stood waiting.

“Whiskey,” Thompson said. “And a beer back.”

He had come to meet Billy Miracle, but he was not thinking about that now. He relinquished himself to memory. He bowed his head over the glass. The air conditioner was cool and for a minute he was back on the line, listening to Lussie's voice—the sound of apple cobbler, rosy cheeks, a dress fluttering up on a spring day—and in his reverie he was about to answer her, to say something into the phone.

He took a drink and let the moment pass.

Then he swiveled in his seat and noticed Michele Haze. She sat in a booth not far away, talking to a man. She wore white pumps and a white blouse. The man sat with his back to Thompson. He wore a cheap plaid shirt and slacks the color of coffee, and there seemed something familiar about him. In his gawkiness. In the way his feet splayed wide apart as he hunched insistently across the table.

Michele did not seem to be enjoying the man's company.

The man twisted in his seat, and Thompson caught him in profile. The buzz cut. The slack jaw. The hapless expression.

The Okie.

“I want my money,” he said, and jabbed a finger at the movie star.

It was the voice of the heartland again, the motor puttering idiotically down the long rows of green, except now there was a whine to it, something caught in the gears.

The Okie jerked up from the table, head bobbing, his body rising to its feet so quickly Thompson didn't have time to react. Their eyes met in the mirror. Thompson hid his face in his drink. He felt his heart constrict, he worried he might stroke and die—but the Okie did not come. Apparently he had not recognized him. Then the man was gone, pushing out the door and into the street, strutting furiously into that desert light.

After the Okie had left, Thompson approached Michele Haze. She was a beautiful woman, but you could see the impending wreckage in the faint lines that weathered out from her eyes. They were dark eyes, almost black, with the memory of innocence in them, however slight and slumber-headed.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine, Mr. Thompson. My agent usually filters them out, the nuts and wackos, but they can be persistent. Sometimes they track you on their own.”

Thompson did not know if he believed her explanation. She had recognized him, though, and he was pleased.

“You're here to meet Billy?”

“Yes,” he hesitated. “I got the impression, the other day, Billy was pitching the movie to Lombard.”

“Your impression was right.”

He saw her vulnerability. She knew better than he the kind of stories going around: how Lombard had dumped her for the younger woman. She shrugged, as if reading his thoughts, dismissing them. When she spoke again, he noticed the faintest slur.

“Because of who we are, Jack and I, our life gets public. Everybody knows our transgressions.”

Thompson didn't say anything. Though she looked right at him, when she spoke, he felt somehow as if he did not exist.

“And Jack, he's at the age where he wants light. Youth. But it's no different than the sort of thing that goes on with other couples. We've been through worse, and we've gotten back together.”