Come Back Dead (11 page)

“I seem to remember that.”

“Are you Mr. Drury's advocate?”

I wasn't sure how much Gilbert had told her about our California troubles, so I held back. “I'm the guy who drives his station wagon. All I'm looking for is job security.”

“It's not all it's cracked up to be,” Linda said.

17

“So I talked my guardians in beautiful Cleveland into sending me to Europe alone. This was when I was scarcely old enough to have a driver's license. They were thinking of something along the lines of the old grand tour, maybe because that's the way I sold it to them. Take the left that's coming up, Scotty.”

“Huntington's straight ahead,” I said. It was the end of our first week of location scouting, and Drury had yet to find a town to double for Indianapolis in the twenties. Hank Shepard and I were taking turns driving the great man from one prospect to another while he rehearsed bits of his autobiography. At least that's what Drury did when I was on duty.

“Nevertheless, we'll turn,” he said. “You never get anywhere in this world taking the direct route. I rather like that line. Remember to quote it twenty years from now when you're interviewed about the time you spent wandering Indiana with Carson Drury.”

He said it in the self-mocking tone he adopted when Shepard wasn't around to provide sarcastic asides. The director and publicist's relationship had turned out to be more complicated than I'd guessed back in Hollywood. I was often reminded of an ancient Roman custom I'd read about in school, or maybe seen in a Cecil B. DeMille epic, the practice of having a slave ride in a conqueror's chariot during a triumphal parade to whisper in the hero's ear: “You're not the big shot you think you are.” When he was around, Shepard provided that service for Drury. When Shepard wasn't around, Drury did the whispering himself. In either case the service struck me as unnecessary. Drury was years past his most recent parade.

“Where was I?” he asked after I'd dutifully made the turn onto the more interesting, less recently paved road.

“On the grand tour.”

“No, that was only the dodge. I promised my keepers I'd see museums and opera houses, but instead I visited brothels and music halls. My tour was twice as broadening as the one I was supposed to be making, but it was also twice as expensive. I was broke by the time I reached Paris. Stone-broke for the first time in my life.”

The memory stopped him cold, which was easy enough to understand. His first experience with empty pockets was an important milestone for Drury, on the order of the first time Esther Williams had gotten wet. It was my chance to turn the radio on and find a ball game, but for once I was caught up in Drury's story.

“So what happened?”

“Oh. Well, I fell back on an honorable American tradition and joined the circus. The Banfi Family Circus, to be precise. It was as old and flea-bitten a troupe as you're imagining right now, but noble for all that. Noble
because
of that. The circus had the same kind of redeeming aura that turns the open sewers of Venice into a tourist attraction, an aura that's part decay and part romance. I often thought of that circus during the war years, wondering whether it was surviving Hitler. It consoled me to think that, as the circus had already survived Napoleon and the Kaiser, it could surely outlast a paperhanger.

“You had to be a Banfi to perform in the circus; it was some kind of union rule. So I became Carlo Banfi, juggler, tumbler, and first assistant to a knife thrower named Guido. He was training me to be a knife thrower, too, old Guido was, until I ran afoul of young Maria, his daughter.

“Stop the car, Scotty! Pull over and stop!”

There was no room to pull over. The road, which had turned to gravel, was barely wide enough to keep the ditch lilies on either side from depositing their pollen on the wagon's paint. So I stopped in the middle.

“What's the matter?”

“That tree, do you see it? The sycamore in the cornfield.”

“What about it?”

“I've seen several like that, not all sycamores, but trees left growing in the middle of fields of corn. Big, beautiful trees without any competitors to ruin their shapes. Why are they there? Were they left when the field was cleared? Have they grown up since? Why would a farmer let a tree grow up like that? It costs him ground he could plant, and the shade surely stunts part of his crop.”

“There's more to life than corn,” I said. “Maybe the farmer likes to look at the tree.”

“Could that be it?” Drury asked, every bit as convinced as he would have been if I'd told him the sycamore had sprung up overnight. “There may be more to you Hoosiers than meets the eye.”

We started off again. This time Drury resumed his story without a prompt. “Maria had a libido that made mine look middle-aged. And she worked for free. It was an altogether idyllic situation, which meant it couldn't last. Sure enough, we were discovered one balmy night in the circus hay wagon by none other than Guido himself. He wasn't carrying his cutlery, or I wouldn't be talking with you now, but I did have to resign my membership in the Family Banfi on short notice. I hotfooted it to the nearest American embassy and wired home for a boat ticket.

“Six months later I was playing Hamlet on Broadway. Two years after that I was in Hollywood. Since then I've been knifed in the back many times, but never, thank God, by Guido.”

I fell into thinking about Drury's most recent knifing. He did, too, or else he read my mind.

“What do you suppose Gilbert Traynor is really up to, Scotty? Was my original guess correct? Is he just rebelling against the old apron strings a little belatedly? Are we the equivalent of the Banfi Family Circus in his journey toward manhood? Or are we a curve-ball Gilbert is throwing his sister-in-law, the chairwoman of his company?”

“I don't know. Gilbert may not know himself.”

“Those are the most dangerous kind of people, the ones who don't know why they do what they do. Unfortunately, they're also the most common kind.”

It was another quote for my future interview, but I didn't write it down. “Are you thinking he won't come across with the money?”

“I'm not sure,” Drury said. “Gilbert doesn't seem to have any particular regard for money. It's a means to an end for him, not a thing in itself. That's the way I feel about the stuff. I've turned down any number of acting jobs over the years, which is to say, I've turned down a great deal of money. It would have been wiser by far to have taken the money, but I've never enjoyed acting in another man's film. I've never enjoyed jumping through someone else's hoops. I'm not enjoying it now.”

Huntington was yet another bust. As a consolation we got back to Riverbend relatively early in the day. Hank Shepard was asleep on the front porch, his stockinged feet propped on its railing. He didn't stir during the noisy process of unloading Drury's chair and the noisier process of unloading Drury. But when the rubber wheels of the wheelchair reached the worn wood of the porch, he opened his eyes.

“Damn, it's hot. Who'd have thought It'd be so hot so far north?”

“Scott and I have already discussed how broadening travel is, Hank. Maybe if you drank lemonade instead of beer, you'd feel peppier.”

Next to Shepard's chair was a galvanized steel tub in which floated the smooth, clear remains of a block of ice. Shepard looked at the tub and then at the empty bottles arranged around it.

“Those aren't all mine. Clark did his share.” He mopped his face with the handkerchief Drury offered and then hung the linen square from his shirt pocket to dry. “We had quite a chat. I put in a good word for you, Elliott, but Clark wasn't having any. I can't figure out how you got on his–no pun intended–bad side.”

Neither could I, but I was definitely there. The disfigured veteran had taken to Drury from the first and eventually to Shepard, but Clark and I had started slowly and then backed up.

The situation tickled Shepard. “Maybe it's those ex–movie star looks of yours, Elliott. Maybe Clark was a looker himself in the good old days.”

“How about the phone, Hank? Were there any calls?”

“Yeah, Carson, I forgot. Louie B. Mayer called. He wants to have you over for cocktails. Turns out he owns a farm near goddamn Fort Wayne. Or was it Muncie? Who the hell is going to call us here? Who even knows where here is?”

“That's fine with me,” Drury said. “We may have left our friends behind, but we've also left our troubles behind.”

Shepard wasn't listening. “The phone did ring once. It was for you, Elliott. Your grandmother called from Indianapolis. She said she was expecting you for Sunday dinner.”

“She did?”

“Yeah,” Shepard said. “She's frying a chicken and making the dessert you like, the banana pudding with the little vanilla cookies in it. I told her you'd grown. She should fry two chickens. You can bring us back the leftovers.”

“That's a good idea, Scotty. Take the wagon and drive down there Sunday. You've earned a break.”

“How about the rest of us Indians?” Shepard asked. “It's Friday night. What do you say we try out that guest membership Gilbert got us at the Toonerville Country Club? I'm ready for a big weekend.”

18

I'd gotten the day's only phone call, and I also received the evening's first visitor. I'd passed on Shepard's expedition to the Traynorville Country Club. I didn't want to hear all the Indiana jokes the place was bound to inspire, so I told Drury I wanted to call California and waved good-bye as the almost-sober Shepard drove him away.

In fact, I did plan to call Ella. I wanted to thank her for arranging my little dinner party on Sunday. I'd worked it out this way. She had somehow guessed or just known that I hadn't called my father, that I was waiting for the ideal moment to do it, a moment that had passed years before. To speed matters along, Ella had called my grandmother and spilled the news that I was in Indiana.

My desire to thank my wife was only one of my reasons for hanging around the farm. I was also hoping that Clark would stop by, looking for another chat. So I set myself up in a front porch rocking chair with my neglected pipe and worked on the wording of my opening line to Ella.

Clark never showed. Instead, just as the sun was beginning to set, a car came up the long drive. It was another Studebaker President Speedster, a solid black one this time. The coupé stopped at the foot of the front porch steps.

It took me a moment to connect the car's driver with the lady in crimson and gold I'd met at the Traynor manse. This evening Linda Traynor was wearing a simple white blouse and an A-line khaki skirt. Her long hair was also at ease. It had a reddish tint in the last of the natural light. Linda gave me a chance to take all that in by pausing next to the car to take in the sunset. It had turned out to be a beauty. Towering thunderheads had built up in the west. They'd been a dazzling white when I'd sat down, but now those canyons were a blue-gray foreground for the bloody afterglow.

“Thank God for sunsets and thunderstorms,” Linda said. “Without them, Indiana would be a frightening place to live.”

“Thunderstorms always made it more frightening for me,” I said.

“When they're on top of you, yes,” Linda said from the safe distance of the drive. “I don't like them then myself. But my office windows face the west. Sometimes I can see a really big storm when it isn't much closer than Illinois. I sit and watch it coming at me, filling the sky, making the plant and Traynorville look like one of the matchbox towns Annie and I used to build in the yard back home.

“A person needs the sense that there are bigger things out there. Bigger powers. Bigger concerns. If you live near the mountains or the sea, that lesson is always staring you in the face. It doesn't stare you in the face around here. Our horizon is the nearest row of trees. Nothing very awe inspiring about that. Nothing to contradict a sense of your own importance. So I say thank God for sunsets and storms.”

Delivered in her rural twang, the last line came out sounding like a call for an amen. I didn't add one, not feeling in an amen mood. According to Linda's theory, Los Angeles, stuck between the ocean and the mountains, should have been a little basin of mental health and well-ordered priorities. That hadn't been my experience.

It was my turn to speak, though, so I asked, “Who was this Annie you used to build towns with? Your sister?”

“No,” Linda said. “I never had a sister or a brother. Or even a close friend. Our farm was pretty isolated, so I made up a friend and named her Annie, after my mother.”

The admission made her sad. To distract her I said, “I didn't know Studebaker made a black Speedster. I thought they were all two-tone.”

“The production ones are. I asked for a black one. My widow's weeds, I guess.”

“Does everyone in your family drive a Studebaker?”

“Everyone in my family drives a tractor,” Linda said. “The Traynor family favors Studebakers because the Traynor Automobile Company provides a lot of their parts.”

“Gilbert told me about that. He said he'd rather build cars than parts.”

“He'd rather dream about building them.”

“At the moment I hope he's dreaming of making a movie.”

“I think he's dreaming even bigger than that,” Linda said. Instead of elaborating, she returned to the topic of business. “It was my idea to develop strong ties to Studebaker. Seemed like a wise move at the time, safe and secure. Now Studebaker is losing money, and my board is scared.”

“I hope we're not adding to your worries,” I said.

“Maybe your visit will help take them off my mind.” She ascended Drury's ramp, walking splay-footed in her flat shoes, like a girl. “Don't get up, Scotty. You look too comfortable. All you need is a knife and a piece of wood and you could whittle.”

“All I need is a knife,” I said, holding up my cold briar pipe.

“Don't carve up that pretty thing. It suits you.”

“That's what my wife thinks.” I said it thoughtlessly, but it came out sounding very calculated.

Linda stopped in her tracks a few feet from my chair and then leaned back against the porch railing. “Is Mr. Drury available?”

“No. He and Mr. Shepard are having dinner at the country club.”

“With my brother-in-law?”

“Not unless they ran into him by accident.”

She nodded. “We've kept him pretty busy this week at the plant. It's his punishment for taking a vacation. So you're here by yourself?”

It was a chance to mention my call to Ella, but I didn't want to hide behind her twice in the same conversation. “Clark's around someplace.”

“I wouldn't count on that. It's Friday night. Clark likes to have a drink or two on Fridays, usually at a little bar on the square named Augie's. Our locals may not be the most sensitive people in the world, but they clear a space for Clark. The ones who aren't sensitive know better than to tangle with him.”

“How well do you know Clark?”

“Nobody knows him well.”

We listened as the evening sounds of the farm slowly gave way to the night sounds, Linda leaning back and looking off to the west and me rocking and not whittling. I'd forgotten to switch on the porch light, and my guest slowly grew less distinct than her trim, white blouse. Just before she disappeared completely, I asked, “Can I take a message for Drury?”

“You might ask him if he knows an Eric Faris.”

I stood up. “I know Faris. He works for a Los Angeles land developer named Ralph Lockard.”

That checked for Linda. “Mr. Faris is here in Traynorville. He came by to see me today.”

“Why?”

“To sniff around, I think. And to make trouble for you boys. He said that his employer wanted to tell us, as a courtesy, what a risky proposition
The Imperial Albertsons
is. Mr. Lockard must be afraid that Mr. Drury might look like a gilt-edged bond to us simple country folk.”

“Did Faris explain Lockard's interest?”

“Suppose you do.”

When I didn't jump at the chance, she said, “I asked Mr. Faris about you, Scotty. About your relationship to Mr. Drury. He called you a Hollywood operative. That sounds romantic.”

“It's not,” I said. “I work for a firm called the Hollywood Security Agency.”

“As an investigator?”

“As a hand holder, usually.”

“I didn't think you were one of Mr. Drury's yes-men. Mr. Faris didn't tell me why Mr. Drury had hired you.”

“Lately it's been to push his chair around.” To keep her from pressing me for the truth, I answered her earlier question about Lockard's interest in
Albertsons
. I told her about Eden and the Alora Conservancy. Against the background of the black, humid Indiana night, the San Fernando Valley seemed remote and unlikely.

“Poor Mr. Drury,” she said when I'd finished. “Nobody seems to care about his movie–not even the people who are giving him money.”

“How about telling me Gilbert's angle?”

“I'll have to figure it out first. And I'll have to get to know you better.”

As a step in that direction, she leaned forward and kissed me. I saw the kiss coming from a long way off, like Linda's hypothetical thunderstorms, but I still managed to be standing there when it landed. I kept standing there as Linda descended to her car, her footsteps sounding lightly on the hollow stairs and then on the gravel.

“I also wanted to tell Mr. Drury something about my mother-in-law,” Linda said from the darkness. She opened the coupé's door, and its dome light lit the scene. “Marvella has to be in control.”

“So does Drury.”

“That could be interesting.” The dome light went out, and the engine came to life. Given the absence of mountains in Indiana, I was able to watch the car's taillights for quite some time.

When they finally disappeared, I entered the house, kicked a few things, and switched on a lamp. An old, dial-less telephone shared the table with the lamp, looking like Alexander Graham Bell's personal contribution to the Traynor collection. I spoke first with a local operator, who sounded impressed, and then with a long-distance specialist, who sounded bored, even after I'd given her a Los Angeles number.

While I waited, I sat down on a rickety settee with intricately carved woodwork. The carver had had a lot of walnut to work with but nothing particular to say. The result was a jumble of busy geometric patterns, like the tooling on Gene Autry's saddle. The whole room was a jumble. Across from my settee was a glass-fronted bookcase holding a collection of arrowheads and a desiccated hornet's nest. To the left of the case was a tall secretary, and to the right was a miniature pump organ. Framing the organ was a pair of spindly, ladder-backed chairs in search of a dining room table. Two large, oval portraits decorated the wall above the organ. They were early photographs, so early that the sitters hadn't learned yet from Hollywood that you should smile like a maniac when your picture is taken.

Ella came on the line, sounding farther away than California. Farther away than China. “Scotty?”

“How'd you guess?”

“I was hoping it would be you. I thought it might be.”

“Did you recognize my ring?”

“In a way. I had a feeling. It ran from the small of my back to the nape of my neck.”

While I pictured that familiar route and listened to her talk, my plan for grilling Ella over my family reunion slipped clean out of my mind. She told me that the kids had been mildly violent but not outright antisocial at a neighborhood birthday party and that she'd gotten a nibble on a screenplay she was finishing up. She said it all at shorthand speed, mindful of the cost of the call. With the last of her breath she said, “Your turn.”

“I miss you.”

“Is that the whole speech?”

“This may be a party line.”

“Thanks for the warning. Paddy called today to see how you were doing. He wanted to know if we'd heard from you.”

And why he hadn't. “Tell him he let one of Ralph Lockard's men slip through his fingers. He's out here with us, a guy named Eric Faris.”

“A goon?”

“A college kid, but Paddy should still know about it. And tell him the
Albertsons
negative is with us, too. Drury had Gilbert Traynor sneak it out.”

“If you called to put my mind at ease, you're doing a lousy job.”

“I called to hear your voice.” It was almost my signature line–I'd been using it since our early days together.

Ella recognized the wrap-up. “Be careful, Hoosier.”

“I haven't been a Hoosier for a long time.”

“That's true out here, but you may turn into someone else entirely in Indiana. Keep checking the mirror.”

“I will,” I said.