Mendoza in Hollywood (Company) Page 9

  “Now I wonder, Your Highness, if you’d be interested in purchasing a certain item I have here—and I’ve only the one, you see, you won’t find its like this side of the Rockies, but you being royalty and all, I’d like to offer you first crack at it. Step this way if you please, Your Highness, and I’ll give you a private viewing.”

  She followed his outstretched hand around to the other side of the wagon, where he opened up the panel and revealed the Criterion Patented Brassbound Pie Safe.

  “You see here?” His face was shining with desperate hope. “Your eye, trained as it is in discernment and accustomed as it is to superior craftsmanship, your eye will surely appreciate the magnificence of this prime household appurtenance. Note the panels of polished rosewood. Note the decorative brass figuring: pineapples, the ancient symbol of abundance and hospitality. Now, I don’t pretend that this is any match for the fine kitchen furniture they’ve got in your country, but I’ll tell you plainly, Your Highness, that this is positively the finest the U. S. of A. has to offer, and no other lady in all of southern California has the like. Now, down east where I come from, the wives of millionaires would pay as much as twenty-five dollars for the likes of this—if they could get it! And of course out here, where everything has to be brought by ship, it’s worth a lot more. Yet to you, Highness, to you I’ll offer exclusive ownership for a mere token sum of eleven dollars—why, that won’t even cover the shipping and handling—and the priceless privilege of numbering royalty among my customers.” My God, he was actually getting down on one knee. “What do you say, eh? Shall I take it down for you?”

  Ooo, he’d come so close. She’d been transfixed, listening with mouth half open, fascinated. But she didn’t have that kind of money. She wrinkled her freckled nose in slightly disdainful regret.

  “I think not, at the present time,” she said. “Spirit guides advise that stars are not presently auspicious for buying furniture. Perhaps later, when vibrations are better.”

  He looked so crestfallen that she hastened to add, “Yet you may use my name. Yes, you may say truthfully that you are purveyor to Royal House of Rodiamantikoff.” She swept past him to return to her shack. “In exile,” she said, just before crossing the threshold. “Good day, mister. You are excused from the royal presence.”

  “Well, you’ve made thirty-eight cents so far,” I said to Oscar as I helped him close up the panels on the wagon.

  “Be-elzebub!” he said, grabbing his buggy whip. “I nearly had her, do you realize that? She saw it, she wanted it, she could envision its rich cabinetry making that dreary hovel a refined and gracious retreat. Nothing was lacking but money!”

  “Well, that’s always the way it is with mortals, isn’t it?” I climbed up to my seat. “And think of the footage you got of her. Genuine California eccentric, wherever she’s supposed to have been born. She’s one for the archives, all right. But you know what? She’s a gringa. If you sold it to her, you’d still lose the bet.”

  “I think not,” he retorted grimly. “She says she’s a refugee from a foreign land, and would any true gentleman impute falsehood to a lady? No sir, if Her Highness says she’s not an American, I’ll take her at her word.”

  A bullet came whining out of nowhere, drifting in to clip the top off a young oak tree nearby. Oscar whipped out a pistol and fired off three furious shots at the unseen gunman.

  “I’ll prevail, I say!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? I’ll sell the darned thing! I say I will, by thunder!”

  But he didn’t, at least not on that day’s rounds, and he was dull and taciturn—taciturn for him—by the time we returned to the inn that evening. He accepted his plate of grilled beef, tortillas, and frijoles from Porfirio and retired early.

  Even though I was eager to get the mulberry samples to my processing credenza, I lingered over the food, because it was particularly good that evening, the beef fiery from a red chile marinade, the frijoles especially creamy, the tortillas unusually redolent of earth and corn and rain. I was still sitting in the clearing when Porfirio rose to his feet, stared off into the canyon and the night, turning his head for a better signal scan, and announced:

  “Stranger approaching on horseback. Mortal male. Emotionally excited.” He had a gun in either hand before he finished speaking, and Juan Bautista rose in haste to carry Erich von Stroheim indoors out of harm’s way. The bird had got too big to button out of sight inside his shirt, though it kept trying to climb into its old refuge in times of stress. It croaked in protest as Juan Bautista passed Einar, who was emerging from the house with a loaded shotgun.

  “Company, chief?” said Einar, cocking his weapon.

  “Maybe,” said Porfirio, though as the mortal drew nearer, we could tell that the excitement registering on the night air was the harmless, pleasurable kind: anticipatory, nonviolent. When he finally rode into the light of our fire, the mortal saw no weapons of any kind in evidence. Porfirio took a few steps toward him, hands outstretched in a peaceable gesture.

  “You come for a room, señor? But we have no empty beds tonight. Bad luck, eh? Perhaps you’ll ride on to Garnier’s? Plenty of room there.”

  “Thanks, but that ain’t why I’m here,” the mortal said politely. “I come to see a lady, mister. Met her at the Bella Union. Said her name was Marthy, and she lived hereabouts. You wouldn’t know where a man could find her, would you?”

  “Ah. Marthy,” said Porfirio, just as Imarte herself came sweeping to the door of the adobe, magnificent in her Love’s Purple Passion negligee. She paused there in the doorway, holding up an oil lamp like one of those fancy figures that lift a lighting fixture on a newel post.

  “Why, who is it at this time of night?” she said throatily.

  “It’s only me, Miss Marthy,” said the stranger, dismounting and tying his reins to our hitching post. He stepped forward out of the shadows, hat in hand. “Only me, and perhaps you remember my name? Cyrus Jackson, ma’am. We met at the Bella Union, and you was so kind as to listen to my troubles.”

  “Why, to be sure,” she cooed, “the very interesting man who hunted Apache scalps for bounty.” She threw us all an arch glance as if to say, See what a trophy I bagged? “How well I remember your thrilling tales of adventure in old San Antonio! But what brings you here, sir, at this unaccustomed hour?”

  He blushed. “Why, ma’am, I hope not to give offense—I sort of thought that you might receive callers after sundown, your trade being what it is. And, you know, I wasn’t at my best when last we met—but I’m sober now, and I did remember that you was so taken with my recollections, that I wondered if you mightn’t like to hear about when I was down in Nicaragua in ’56.”

  “You rode with Walker in Nicaragua?” Her eyes lit up. She surged forward, bosom first, and placed a coy hand on his arm. “Why, sir, how fascinating! I wonder if you’d be so kind as to share the treasure of your eyewitness memories with an interested listener? In my private chamber, of course.”

  “Aw, ma’am, I’d be . . .” Words failed him, or perhaps they just couldn’t make it through the barrier of his enormous foolish grin. He let himself be led by the arm into the house. Staring after Imarte, Porfirio shook his head.

  “Anthropologists,” Einar muttered in agreement.

  MORE BOXES ARRIVED on the next stage, and Einar ran off gleefully to his room with them. The next edition of the film festival featured hours of Charlie Chaplin, of Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand. We sat in our finery in the dressed-up room and played Hollywood premiere again, sipping gin martinis and crunching on popcorn as the silver light flickered and Einar read the titles aloud in his master of ceremonies voice.

  Now and then there were a few frames of a landscape we recognized: a smooth-backed elevation with a single line of trees, or a dirt road ascending a steep canyon, or tiny toylike frame houses perched high on the sides of hills and wide empty country all around them. Such a raw new place Hollywood would be, and how unlike the chaparral wilderness we inhabited. For, just as Einar
had told me, it would be an eastern Yankee settlement in that time: there were the clapboard houses and the shop fronts and the front porches. It looked like any little town in Connecticut or Maryland, save that it sprawled over endless rolling hills. Edendale, Sunset Park, Lankershim, Burbank, the names to assure new arrivals they were back home and not in some barren wild place where coyotes trotted down the streets at night.

  I didn’t enjoy the comedies, as a whole, because so much heartache went with them. That world didn’t even exist yet, that innocent place, and it was already lost. Those comedians weren’t yet in their mothers’ wombs, but their fates were known. It was hard to watch pretty Mabel and not look for the icy vivacity of cocaine, hard to watch Fatty hide his face in comic shame, knowing the doom one rowdy party would bring on him. Chaplin wasn’t so bad; you knew he’d get off relatively easy for a mortal: long life, fame, lots of family—also scandal, disgrace, exile, quarrels. But the comedians were nearly as immortal as we were, and we gave them our applause.

  THE DAYS GOT LONGER, and the green hills silvered and then went to gold. The wildflowers vanished as though somebody had rolled up the magic carpet and whisked it away, except for a few bright orange poppies that decorated the edges of roads. The heat of summer browned everything else. Even the eight-foot-tall thickets of wild mustard, which had bloomed in an electric Day-Glo yellow you could see for miles, went to brown; and the country took on a dry, businesslike look. The arriving and departing stages traveled in a permanent cloud of white dust.

  The dust got everywhere. It covered every surface in the inn, and you shook it out of your blankets at night, and it greeted you in a fine sediment at the bottom of your morning coffee. The low-hanging branches of the oak trees, heavy with leaves, were thick with it, and dewy morning cobwebs in the grass looked like little brown rags by nightfall, they’d collected so much dust. And what had happened to all those burbling rills and freshets that had been so picturesque a couple of months earlier? Dry and dead; and in their places bone-dry trackways of sand and gravel, or deep piles of dead sycamore leaves. The cicadas started up a drone about 0700 hours in the morning, when the day would begin to heat up, and they rang in your ears like fever until sundown, when the crickets started up their song in the cool of the shadows.

  No way you could have mistaken the place for England now, not a sight or sound or smell that was anything but Californian. You might think my specter would leave me alone now, and in truth I had no more gasping visitations that made Porfirio stare at me suspiciously the next morning; but the darkness was still there, beating like a sullen heart when I was alone in my room. I woke up one morning and realized I’d give anything for a breath of sea air.

  “So, what’s it like at San Pedro?” I said to Porfirio at breakfast.

  “San Pedro?” He frowned. “Muddy. Used to be dangerous in the old days. It’s not so bad now that Banning’s running the place.”

  “It’s the local seaport, right? Any chance Einar could take me down there for a visit, if he’s going that way? I haven’t seen a good-sized body of water in months.”

  Porfirio shrugged. “We’ve got some cargo due to come in. I’ve been meaning to send him down to the warehouses to see if it’s arrived yet. You want to go with him? Nothing growing down there that I know of, though.”

  Einar, when approached on the subject, thought a day at the beach sounded like a great idea, so he busied himself hitching up the horses while I packed my collecting gear. In the midst of our preparations, Juan Bautista came out of the lean-to he shared with Erich von Stroheim, rubbing his eyes.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Field trip to San Pedro,” Einar said, giving me a hand up to the seat.

  “The beach?” His eyes widened. “Can I come too? I haven’t been swimming anywhere since I’ve been here!”

  “San Pedro isn’t exactly surf city, man,” Einar said. “But if you want to come, sure. What will you do with Erich, though?”

  “Oh,” Juan Bautista said, turning guilty eyes to the condor, who had come staggering out after him. He wasn’t a mature bird yet, according to Juan, but he was enormous. “I don’t guess he should come. The seagulls might scare him. But I’ve never left him alone before. . . . Would you mind watching him for me?” He looked hopefully at Porfirio, who was just sitting down with his six-shooter, preparing to clean it.

  Porfirio looked about as enthusiastic as one might expect. “Look, I’ve got work to do,” he told the kid. “Put him in a cage for the day. I’ll see to it he gets food and water.”

  Juan Bautista ran off to shoo the bird back to his room. Einar and I waited, listening to the croaks of protest as Erich von Stroheim was coerced into the aviary Juan had built for him. A moment later, Juan came running out with his towel and a short broad plank, planed smooth and rounded off at the corners. Behind him we heard a plaintive scream.

  “Okay!” he said breathlessly, vaulting up into the back of the wagon. There was another scream, louder than the first.

  “Is he gonna be all right?” asked Einar, releasing the brake and starting us down the canyon.

  “Yes. He’s just never been alone for very long,” Juan said, turning around to get comfortable. Another scream rang out on the still morning air, echoing off the canyon walls. We could still hear the condor when we turned onto the road, and in fact the sound of his outrage carried for a good mile out into the plain.

  “I hope he doesn’t do that the whole time we’re gone,” I said, looking over my shoulder as the foothills receded into the distance behind us.

  “Nah. He’ll settle down and sleep. He likes to take a nap every morning,” said Juan Bautista with confidence. I looked at Einar, who shrugged. We rolled on.

  The sea was a lot farther than it had looked from the ridge above the Hollywood Bowl site. It took us five hours, rumbling along in the wagon, though Einar informed me that Banning could do it in two and a half in one of his Concords.

  “Bully for him,” I snarled, retreating even farther into the shade of my hat. Juan Bautista had set his piece of plank on his head and made a little tent for himself by draping his towel over it. He sat in the relative cool, humming a little tune.

  “Yeah, that’s the way to go, if you don’t have freight to pick up. Banning’s got regular stagecoach service from L.A. to the coast. Another few years, and there’ll even be a railroad,” Einar said. “Not that that does us much good now, of course.”

  Ahead of us, the sun on the summer sea lit up the sky, and Catalina Island hovered out there like a lovely cool mirage, blue and eternally remote. Just when I thought I couldn’t take another mile of this wasteland (I’d thought Porfirio was kidding when he said nothing grew down here), we rolled up a little hill and over the top, and there it was: San Pedro Harbor.

  Except it wasn’t a harbor, yet, of course. It was a vast expanse of tidal mudflat, stretching away to shallow water and a distant line of white breakers. Hell, there wasn’t even any sand.

  But there was sea air, at least, if a bit swampy, and there was a little stream flowing through willows, blessedly green after all those parched miles.

  “Surf’s up, dudes!” crooned Einar. “Check it out!”

  Juan Bautista obediently scrambled about and sat up to stare. He gave a cry of disappointment. “Where’s the water?”

  “Hey, this is Los Angeles! No water in the rivers, no water in the sea. No, seriously, access your Richard Henry Dana. This is the worst harbor on the coast right now. Tide flats are so shallow, cargo ships have to anchor way the hell out there and send in longboats to unload. Amazingly inconvenient. But see that big house being built over there?” Einar pointed to a vast edifice being framed about a mile inland. “That’s the place Phineas Banning’s building for himself. See those wharves? They’re the latest step in his big plan to make this the next world port for shipping. Way off there”—he swung his arm around—”is the old San Pedro landing. Nobody lives there now but some fishermen. And see that island?
That’s Dead Man’s Island. First recorded murder mystery of L.A., or so I’m told. Dead guy buried there is supposed to have been a British ship’s captain, poisoned by somebody when he put in here to pick up a cargo of hides. Who slipped him the fatal glass of sherry? Nobody knows.”

  “Where’s Malibu?” asked Juan Bautista, craning his neck, as if that would make yellow sands and clean surf appear.

  “North of here. Nothing much there now either, kid. Nobody even goes there, except when a cow slips down a ledge and has to be retrieved from the rocks. Honest, it’s just a little trail between the cliffs and the sand, and when we get earthquakes, it isn’t even that.”

  “Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment,” I quoted.

  “I want to go surfing,” said Juan Bautista sadly.

  So we drove down the hill and took him as far out across the mud flats as we could without getting the wagon bogged down, and left him to walk out to the waves while we went over to the shipping warehouses.

  I got down and walked to stretch my legs while Einar negotiated with the warehouse foreman, one of our paid mortals, a fisherman named Souza. It turned out that we did actually have goods to pick up: a box of printed materials for Porfirio and two crates for Oscar from the Acme Manufacturing Company of Boston, Massachusetts.

  When everything had been signed for and Señor Souza had helped us load it all into the wagon, we drove out again, edging along the tidal flats as far as we dared before proceeding the rest of the way on foot. The mud was heavy clay, hard to walk through.

  “That is the sea out there, yes?” I said, shading my eyes with my hand, peering ahead. “Not a special effect?”

  “Just a little farther now,” said Einar, swatting at midges. And sure enough, after we’d clambered over some slimy rocks and past a wrecked whaleboat, there were bright combers and surf breaking on rocks and even clean brown sand. Juan Bautista seemed to have got some surfing in, to judge by his piled clothing and his wet hair. But he was sitting in his drawers on the sand as we approached, cradling something in his bare arms. A big unsightly something. As we neared, it struggled and flapped.