Mendoza in Hollywood (17 page)

“Yes, I can,” she said. “I have no money at all, señor. My husband works on the big rancho, and the man who owns it lets us stay here in return. We never have any money.”

“But—but my good woman, how do you live?” he said.

She waved a hand at the acorns, at the venison jerky drying on the fence, at the neatly woven baskets of pinole meal.

“Come on, Oscar,” I said.

“Uh, well. If you ever
should
obtain hard currency, I’m sure a thrifty housewife such as yourself will invest it in the wisest possible way,” Oscar gabbled. “And may I present you with a complimentary volume of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley? I trust you’ll remember me, señora, when you require the finest in home furnishings. Good day.”

“Thank you. Good day,” she said, staring at the little book in its bright pasteboard binding. Oscar leaped into the seat, and we rocketed off.

“
Shelley
!” I asked.

“That was my low point, my absolute nadir,” Oscar groaned. “Dear Lord, what possessed me? It was her need, you know, her utter need. It seduced me. I must supply where I see demand. It’s a compulsion. Other operatives would be content with simply gathering valuable anthropological data or ferreting out hitherto unrecorded ethnographical statistics. I must be
more
. I must be the genuine article. That’s my problem: my standards are too high.”

“Well, it’s not like you’re a failure,” I said helpfully. “You’re doing great work for the Company.”

“For Dr. Zeus, I’ll grant you. But what about the worthy gentlemen at the Acme and Criterion Companies? Mere mortal merchants, say you; yet I believe in complete commitment, absolute fulfillment of all responsibilities, be they ever so trivial.” He shook the reins with noble determination. “Giddap, Amelia! To the next customer.”

But worse was yet to come.

Farther down the road, in a green clearing beside a still-bubbling spring, we saw a fine adobe and garden. The walls were freshly plastered, the window frames painted, and a tall paling fence warned trespassers away from the yard, where cabbages were growing in precise lines and peach and plum trees stood to attention.

“Now, look at that,” said Oscar, laying down the reins in admiration. “Look at the industry and thrift evident in that pleasant scene. Surely this is the residence of a wage-earning individual. And his
spouse. Prudent housewifery is in every line of that garden plot. I can taste that New England boiled dinner now.”

“Those are awfully big dogs,” I observed. They sat alert, one on either side of the door, watching us silently. I hadn’t the slightest doubt that if Oscar so much as put his foot inside the gate, they’d tear it off.

“Hem, you’re right. Well, let’s not repeat my previous error.” Oscar got down and went around to the back, where he drew out a pan and a long wooden spoon. He commenced to beat out a brisk tattoo on the pan, looking hopefully at the house. The dogs pricked up their ears but made no move.

“Good day! Hello there! Is there anyone at home?” he called. The door opened, and a woman looked out.

Whoops
. I transmitted to Oscar.
She’s an Anglo. Off-limits for your pie safe
.

He faltered only a moment in his disappointment. “Well, good morning, there, ma’am!” he said in English. “I wonder if you’d be interested in any of the superior merchandise I have to offer?”

“
Nein
,” she said, and he shot me a look of triumph.

“You are German, madam?” he said in a close approximation of her regional accent. “From Bavaria, yes?”

“You, too?” Wonderingly she emerged from the house and came a little way toward him. “In this foreign land?”

“Many years now, but I assure you it is so. How pleasant it is to hear a cultivated voice again! Come now, my dear, I have many things here that you may need, though you may never have considered that in such a lawless and unimproved country they could be obtained. Come, see what I have to offer to you.” Oscar put his hand on the latch, and the two dogs instantly sprang to their feet, growling. She shushed them and came a little closer, peering at us. He might have been a countryman, but he was still a peddler.

“Have you the polish with which to clean silver?” she said.

“Yes,
natürlich
! And I have additionally stove blacking, laundry bluing, wash powders, and these very fine clothespins that have a
patent pending for the superior spring mechanism that they employ. Consider, here, the little figures of china bisque, very sweet, the little doves billing and cooing and the little shepherd boy playing love songs with his flute. And this pan for the baking of cakes, with the hearts printed in the bottom so as to make the design upon the finished cake, wouldn’t you like to have this?”

“No,” she said. “Just the polish for silver, thank you.”

“Ah, but, my dear! Here is your silver polish, to be sure, but behold! Printed music for performance on the piano, the spinet, or the organ. And confections also, barley-sugar sticks in the flavors of apple, blackcurrant, or strawberry. And see what fine things I have for sewing.”

“Thank you, no. How much for the silver polish?”

“Five cents American.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly but fished in her apron pocket and paid him. He handed her the silver polish, and she turned to go. He nearly made a desperate lunge over the fence, which the dogs were only too happy to have him do.

“But, dear lady!” he screamed at her back. “See, here, this thing which you will find is an absolute necessity in this wild and dirty country. It is the Pie Safe Patented Criterion Brassbound.” He flung wide the panel, revealing it in all its glory. “It keeps the bread loaves and the rolls from going stale. It keeps the mice, the rats, the insects from invading the pastries. You of all people would want such furniture for the kitchen that you bake in.”

The woman turned and followed his gesture with her eyes. For a moment they were warm and approving. “Ah, yes,” she agreed, nodding her head. “I do not know what I would do without the one I have.”

“You have such a one?” Oscar asked, going pale.

“
Natürlich
, there in my kitchen inside the house. But mine is bigger than that, and bound not in brass but in nickel that is plated with silver. And it has not pineapples upon it but the design of pheasants.”
She looked closer, critically. “Also, yours does not have the egg timer or the barometer built into the cabinet, as mine has.”

Immortal or not, I thought he’d keel over dead right there on the spot. She realized she’d dealt him some sort of near-fatal blow, though, because she hastened with a kindly word: “All the same, it is a very good pie safe, and you will certainly sell it to somebody. I have no need of it, however. Good day, my dear sir.”

Well, I couldn’t laugh, he looked so stricken when he crawled up on the seat beside me. We drove away in silence. About halfway back to La Nopalera, he drew a deep breath and said, “I’d be obliged to you, Mendoza, if you wouldn’t mention this mortifying occasion to the others.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. I had no wish to gloat. The day’s outing had been successful for me; I had got a couple of good specimens not only on the drive out but also on the way back, I scored a previously unclassified member of the
Celastraceae
, some exotic low-elevation form of
Euonymus
by the look of it. Happy me.

I
COULDN’T GET THOSE
green canyons out of my mind. Accessing topographical data, I decided that Laurel Canyon, with its drastic range in elevations, had the best chance of mutation-yielding microclimates and diversified habitats. I was intrigued, also, by the blue-hazard notations on every reference to the area I encountered.

“I thought I’d stroll over to Laurel Canyon today,” I said, one morning at breakfast, casually.

Porfirio choked on his coffee and glared at me.

“Are you nuts?” he said. “That’s a blue-hazard precinct, dummy.”

“So my files tell me, but I’ve never encountered one before. It’s just a kind of energy sink, right? A locus of natural unnaturalness in the landscape?” I was a little taken aback by his reaction.

“You could say that,” he growled, mopping spilled coffee from his chin with one hand. “It’s just the biggest damn one on the continent, that’s all.”

“Oh,” I said. “Does that mean I can’t go there?”

“Not alone, you can’t, you of all people, and not without the right field gear. What the hell do you want there, anyway?”

“Well . . . it has all those steep isolated canyons and drastic heights and depths. There are probably a lot of rare endemic species of plants growing there. I’d be stupid not to look for them. And what do you mean, me of all people?”

He looked over uneasily at Einar, who was grooming Marcus, and at Juan Bautista, who was watching him. “Okay,” he said in a lower voice, not answering my question. “I guess there’s stuff back up in there worth collecting at that. But you’re going to take the following precautions, understand? Now listen carefully . . .”

Two hours later:

“God, I feel stupid,” I moaned to Einar as we approached the canyon on horseback. “What if mortals see us?”

“We shoot ’em,” he said glumly. I hoped he was joking. We were wearing absurd-looking helmets with Crome filter lenses and a lot of other cunning little mechanisms built into them with no consideration for style or convenience. We wore gauntlets full of wiring and large, ugly, and ill-fitting boots with circuitry patterns on the outside. Things like Batman’s utility belt were cinched about our waists. To make matters worse, we were tethered each to the other by a long silver line. If one of our horses startled and bolted, somebody would be dragged.

“We look like extras in a cheap science-fiction film,” I complained.

“In a damned expensive science-fiction film,” Einar retorted. “You know how much it cost to make this stuff, here in 1862? And these are the only sets of this gear in the continental U.S. at this time. They were made just so we could go into Laurel Canyon, if we had to. So enjoy the fantasy. Tell yourself we’re explorers on a forbidden planet or something.”

“It can’t be
that
weird, no matter what Porfirio says,” I muttered. But as we came to the entrance of the canyon, I fell silent.

I saw a narrow passage between soaring walls of granite, thinly grown with whatever little plants could cling to their vertical surfaces. The way in followed a creek bed through which water was still cascading down. From the wreckage of broken trees and from the high-water mark on the cliff faces, you knew that this was no place to stand during the winter floods. Water must come thundering down that channel like cannon fire. A dramatic scene, with the leaning dead cottonwoods and the majestic atmosphere, the mountains impossibly
high on either side. A little trail led into the canyon, a sandy embankment on the left-hand side above the water, and disappeared into dark trees.

Einar unslung his shotgun and cocked it. Cautiously we rode in.

“Now, remember,” said Einar, “don’t scan. Every conditioned reflex and instinct you’ve got is telling you to, but don’t. Let the helmet do it for you. If you try, yourself, you’re going to pick up data you won’t believe.”

“This is nuts,” I said, as my horse picked its way timidly. “How are mortals going to live here? But they are, aren’t they? And this is right in the heart of Hollywood.”

“I know,” he said. “They just . . .become part of the strangeness. Raymond Chandler wrote about it in his Philip Marlowe stories, but he didn’t tell half of what he knew. There’ll be a murder that happens right up
there”
—he pointed up a nearly vertical slope—”that he writes about in
The Big Sleep
. But it doesn’t happen the way he says, it never makes the papers, and it’s never solved, either. The guy isn’t a pornography dealer, he’s a high-ranking member of a hermetic brotherhood. There’s a brilliant flash and a scream, all right, and a naked girl and some ancient earrings with a curse on them. The curse doesn’t make it into the book, but a lot of the other details do.”

“How lurid,” I said, and then started, because I heard a sound I shouldn’t have heard in that place, not for another half century at least. I turned my head to stare down the trail behind us. I knew that sound from cinema: the rattle of an internal combustion engine, the rush of displaced air as something sped toward us, but I had no visual input at all. Forgetting myself, I scanned, and
knew
there was something approaching. In my desperation I yanked up the Crome screen visor so I could see with my eyes.

“Mistake,” Einar gasped. He was right. Without my visor the place lit up, every tree, rock, shrub, and blade of grass outlined in blue neon. The automobile was lit up like that too, a 1913 Avions Voisin, a lovely, elegant thing except for being glowing blue, slightly transparent, and a little out of place in 1862. Einar leaned over and got a firm
grip on my horse’s reins, or I’d have been away from there in an instant. The car zoomed up, till I was right between its bug-eyed headlights, and I got a clear glimpse of the hood ornament in the shape of a rearing cobra.

With a crackle of static the car whooshed through me and on, up the canyon. My mouth was open. Einar managed to reach out and click my visor down. Visual references were once again normal.