Death Is a Lonely Business (32 page)

Henry leaned out of the taxicab, staring at nothing. I fell getting in the cab. "You still with me?"

"If I ain't," said Henry, "where am I? Speak to the driver." I spoke. We went.

The taxicab rolled to a stop with its windows down. Henry leaned forward, his face like the prow of a dark ship. He sniffed.

"Ain't been here since childhood. That smell's the ocean.

That other smell, rotten? The pier. This where you live, scribe?"

"The Great American Novelist? Sure."

"I hope your novels smell better than this."

"If I live, maybe. Can we keep the cab waiting, Henry?"

Henry licked his thumb, peeled off three twenty-dollar bills, held them over the front seat of the cab.

 
"That keep you from being nervous, son?" "That," the cab driver took the money, "will buy you midnight."

"It'll all be over by then," said Henry. "Child, you know what you're doing?"

Before I could answer, a wave came in under the pier. "Sounds like the New York subway," said Henry. "Don't let it run over you."

We left the cab waiting at the foot of the Venice pier. I tried to steer Henry along in the night.

"Don't need no steering," said Henry. "Just warn me on wires, ropes, or loose bricks is all. But I got a nervous elbow, don't like touching."

I let him walk proudly on.

"Wait here," I said. "Step back about three feet. There, you can't be seen. When I come back I'll just say one word, 'Henry,' and then you tell me what you smell, okay? And then just turn and go to the cab."

"I can still hear the motor running, sure."

"Tell the taxi to take you to the Venice Police Station. Ask for Elmo Crumley. If he's not there, have them call his home. He's to come here with you, fast as possible, once we get the whole thing rolling. That is,
if
it rolls. Maybe we won't use your nose tonight, after all."

"I hope I do. I brought my cane to hit that guy. You let me hit him, once?"

I hesitated. "Once," I said. "You okay, Henry?"

"Br'er Fox, he lie low."

Feeling like Br'er Rabbit, I walked away.

It was the elephants' graveyard, the pier at night, all dark bones and a lid of fog over it and the sea rushing in to bury, reveal, and bury again.

I picked my way along past the shops and shoebox apartments and shut poker parlors, noting, on my way, various phones here or there, standing in their unlit caskets, waiting to be taken away tomorrow or next week.

I walked out along the plankings, over the sighs and rustles and stirs of moist and dry wood. The whole structure creaked and heaved like a sinking ship, as I passed red warning flags and signs which read DANGER, as I stepped over strung chains and found myself as far as I could go, at the edge of the pier, looking back at all the nailed-shut doors and rolled-down-and-pinned canvas fronts.

I slid into the last phone booth, rummaged my pockets, cursing until I found the nickels Henry had given me. I dropped one in the phone slot and dialed the number given me by the
Janus
editor.

"Four, five, five, five," I whispered, and waited.

At this moment, the frayed strap on my Mickey Mouse wristwatch broke. The watch fell to the booth floor. Cursing, I picked it up, and shoved it on the shelf under the phone. Then, listened. Far off, I could hear the phone ringing at the other end.

I let my receiver drop and hang. I stepped out of the booth and stood listening, eyes shut. At first there was only one great roll of surf traveling under my feet, shaking the timbers. It passed. At last, straining, I could hear.

Far down at the halfway point on the pier, a phone rang.

Coincidence? I thought. Phones ring everywhere all the time. But this phone, a hundred yards away, now, had I dialed its number?

Half in, half out of the booth, I grabbed the receiver and planted it back on its hook.

Far off in the windy darkness, that other phone stopped ringing.

Which still proved nothing.

I dropped my nickel back in and redialed.

A deep breath and . . .

That telephone in its glass coffin, half a light-year away, started ringing again.

It made me jump and hurt in my chest. I felt my eyes widen and my breath suck in cold.

I let the phone ring. I stood out of my booth, waiting for someone off there in the night to run from the alleys or out of the damp canvas or from behind the old Knock the Milk Bottles game. Someone, like me, would have to answer. Someone who, like myself, jumped up at two in the morning to run in the rain and talk to the sunlight in Mexico City where life still walked and lived and seemed never to die. Someone. . . .

The whole pier stayed dark. No shack windows lit. No canvasses whispered. The phone rang. The surf wandered under the boards, looking for someone, anyone, to answer. The phone rang. It rang. I wanted to run answer the damn thing myself, just to shut it up.

Jesus, I thought. Get your nickel back. Get . . .

Then it happened.

A crack of light appeared swiftly and went out. Something stirred down there, across from that telephone. The phone rang. The phone rang. And someone stood in the shadows listening to it, tentatively. I saw a whiteness turn and knew that whoever it was was looking along the pier, fearful, careful, searching.

I froze.

The phone rang. At last the shadow moved, the face turned back, listening. The phone rang. The shadow suddenly ran.

I leaped back into my booth and grabbed the receiver just in time.

Click.

On the far end, I heard breathing. Then, at last, a man's voice said,

"Yes?"

Oh, my God! I thought. It's the same. The voice I heard an hour ago, in Hollywood.

Someone who loved you, long ago.

I must have said it aloud.

There was a long pause, a wait, an in-sucked gasp from the far end of the line.

"Yes?"

It shot me through the ear, then the heart.

I know that voice now, I thought.

"Oh, Christ," I said hoarsely, "it's you!"

That must have shot him through the head. I heard him seize in a great storm of breath and blast it out.

"Damn you," he cried. "Damn you to hell."

He didn't hang up. He just let the red-hot telephone drop, bang, dance on its hangman's noose. I heard his footsteps rush away.

By the time I got out of the booth, the pier was empty in all directions. Where the brief light had been was dark. Only bits of old newspaper blew along the plankings as I forced myself to walk, not run, the hundred long yards to that other phone. I found it dangling and tapping the cold glass of the booth.

I picked it up and listened.

I could hear my ten-dollar Mickey Mouse watch ticking at the other end, back in that other phone booth, a hundred miles away.

If I was lucky and alive, I'd go save the Mouse.

I hung up this telephone and turned, staring at all the little buildings, shacks, shop fronts, shut-down games, wondering if I would do something crazy now.

I did.

I walked about seventy feet to a small shop front and stood in front of it, listening. Someone was in there, moving around, perhaps shoving himself into street clothes in the dark. I heard rustles and someone whispering angrily to himself, someone talking under his breath, telling him where to find socks, where shoes, and where, where the damn tie? Or maybe it was just the tide under the pier, making up lies no one could ever check.

The muttering stopped. He must have felt me outside the door. I heard footsteps move. I fell backward, clumsily, realizing my hands were empty. I hadn't even thought to bring Henry's cane as weapon.

The door opened with savage swiftness.

I stared.

Crazily, I saw two things at once.

Beyond, on a small table in half-light, a stack of yellow and brown and red Clark Bar and Nestle's Crunch and Power House wrappers.

And then . . .

The small shadow, the little man himself, staring out at me with stunned eyes, as if wakened from a forty-year sleep.

A. L. Shrank, in person.

Tarot card reader, phrenologist, dime-store psychiatrist, day- and nighttime psychologist, astrologer, Zen / Freudian / Jungian numerologist, and full Life Failure stood there, buttoning his shirt with mindless fingers, trying to see me with eyes that were either fixed by some drug or shocked numb by my inept bravado.

"Damn you to hell," he said, quietly, again.

And then added, with some quick sort of impromptu quiver of a smile,

"Come in."

"No," I whispered. Then I said it louder. "No. You come out."

The wind was blowing the wrong way, or perhaps the right way, this time. My God, I thought, cringing back, then holding my ground. All those other days, how did the wind blow? How could I not have noticed? Because, I thought, oh damn simple fact: I had had a head cold for a solid ten days. No nose at all. No nose.

Oh, Henry, I thought, you and your always lifted, always curious beak, connected to all that bright awareness within. Oh, smart Henry crossing an unseen street at nine of an evening, and sniffing the unwashed shirt and the unlaundered underclothes as Death marched by the other way.

I looked at Shrank and felt my nostrils wince. Sweat, the first smell of defeat. Urine, the next smell of hatred. Then, what mixtures? Onion sandwiches, unbrushed teeth, the scent of self-destruction. It came like a storm cloud, full flood, from the man. I might have been standing on an empty shore with a ninety-foot tidal wave poised to crush me, for the sick fear I suddenly knew. My mouth baked dry even as sweat broke on my body.

"Come in," said A. L. Shrank again, uncertainly.

There was a moment when I thought he might suck backward like a crayfish. But then he saw my glance at the phone booth directly across from his shop, and my second glance down the pier to the phone at the far end where my Mickey Mouse watch ticked, and he
knew.
Before he could speak again, I called into the shadows.

"Henry?"

Dark stirred in dark. I felt Henry's shoes scrape as his voice called back, warm and easy, "Yes?"

Shrank's eyes jerked from me to where Henry's voice stirred the shadows.

At last I was able to say:

"Armpits?"

Henry took a deep breath and let it out.

"Armpits," he said.

I nodded. "You know what to do."

"I hear the meter running," said Henry.

From the corners of my eyes, I saw him walking away, then stop and throw his hand up.

Shrank flinched. So did I. Henry's cane sailed through the air to land with a sharp clatter on the planks.

"You might need that," said Henry.

Shrank and I stood staring at the weapon on the pier.

The sound of the taxi driving off jerked me forward. I grabbed the cane and held it to my chest, as if it might really work against knives or guns.

Shrank looked at the vanishing lights of the taxi, far off.

"What in hell was that all about?" he said.

Behind him, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Spengler and Kafka all leaned on their mad elbows, sank in their dusts, and whispered, yes, what was
that
all about?

"Wait’ll I get my shoes." He vanished.

"Don't get anything else," I cried.

That made him laugh a choking laugh.

"What would I get?" he called, unseen, rummaging around. In the door he showed me a shoe in each hand. "No guns. No knives." He shoved them on, but didn't lace them.

I couldn't believe what happened next. The clouds, over Venice, decided to pull back, revealing a full moon.

Both of us looked up at it, trying to decide if it was bad or good, and for which of us?

Shrank's gaze wandered to the shoreline and along the pier.

"He wept like anything to see such quantities of sand," he said. Then hearing himself he snorted softly. "Come oysters, said the carpenter, and took them close in hand. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the golden strand."

He began to walk. I stayed. "Aren't you going to lock your door?"

Shrank gave the merest nodding glance over his shoulder at the books clustered like vultures with their black feathers and dusty golden stares, waiting on shelves for the touch that gave life. In invisible choirs, they sang forth wild tunes I should have heard long days ago. My eye ran and reran the stacks.

My God, why hadn't I truly seen?

That dreadful escarpment inhabited by dooms, that lineup of failures, that literary Apocalypse of wars, squalors, diseases, pestilences, depressions, that downfall of nightmares, that pit of deliriums and mazes from which mad mice and insane rats never found light or made exit. That police lineup of degenerates and epileptics dancing the rims of shelved library cliffs with teams replacing teams of nausea and revulsion waiting in the higher darkness.