I Don't Know How the Story Ends (13 page)

“We'll get it this time.” Ranger's face wore a determined look that the fates would do well to heed. “Isobel, pick up that stick and give the dog a whack. Pretend you're trying to fight him off. Ready, Sylvie?”

He was right: we got it that time. I could only see bits of it, occupied as I was, but the bending, grabbing, catching, and sweeping looked smooth. Or it did up to the point where Ranger was galloping away with Sylvie. Without his glasses, he failed to see a rabbit leap up from behind a half-buried boulder. Sundance saw it and shied so violently his riders fell off.

I raced over to Sylvie, who had landed in a patch of clover and seemed no worse for wear. As I turned away from her, an object in the grass caught my attention: a pair of glasses, glaring at the sun, the lenses in place but shattered.

My nightmare blazed up before my eyes—the blasted field, the strewn bodies, the artillery fire flashing behind broken lenses. I staggered and made a horrible noise in the back of my throat like my breakfast was coming up.

Then a light pressure on my elbow, a breath on my cheek. “Are you okay?” Sam asked. I could only look at him, unable to shape a single word. The mere sight of Ranger's broken glasses had released a flood of dammed-up feeling I didn't even suspect was there. It felt like absolute terror.

“Ranger's hurt!” Sylvie yelled.

He was flat on his back next to the boulder, staring up at the sky. “I'm fine,” he insisted. “Just fine.” But he didn't move until Sam came over and pulled him up by the hand.

Ranger winced and put a hand to his head. “Do we have time to shoot the dog?”

Sam eyed him narrowly. “We already did that.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

“Are you sure you're all right?”

“Absolutely. Just a little dizzy for a minute.” He shook Sam's hand, holding it longer than he needed to. “Good day's work, old man. Now you'd better get that camera home and…whatever you're supposed to do with it.”

Sam packed up and hiked across the pasture, with a few backward glances. Ranger seemed all right as we rounded up the animals and started back to the stable. Then, at the corral gate, he stumbled against me. “Man-oh-man. It
hurts
.”

“Did you hit your head on that rock?” I asked sharply.

“I may have. I mean, I did. Just a knock. I mean a knot. Maybe both. Go open the sylvie door, Stable.”

“I'm Sylvie!” she protested.

“Right,” he said, swaying.

“I think we should call a doctor,” I said worriedly.

“Oh no. That won't be nessenary.”

“Won't be
what
?”

He frowned at me before gently keeling over at my feet.

Talmadge and Prospect

While I stayed with Ranger, fanning his face and calling his name—and slapping him when his eyes rolled back—Sylvie raced to the hacienda. A lifetime later (or so it seemed, though it was probably no more than ten minutes), Titus Bell came bounding over the pasture on his long legs, picked the boy up as though he were a bag of flour, and sped him to the hospital in the long, blue touring car, where it was determined that Ranger had suffered a mild concussion.

I was not allowed to see him until the next day, after he'd been released from the hospital and brought home in triumph.

For a boy with a knot on his head the size of a lemon, he seemed remarkably spry. I figured it was because he'd finally gotten his rescue scene. Anyone else might have said it was because he was propped up in comfort with Esperanza at his beck and call, a stack of Hardy Boys by his side, a cherry phosphate within easy reach, and a very relieved father who was promising to tan his backside as soon as he could stand up for it. I was pretty relieved myself, though I'd never admit it.

“‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,'” I quoted to him.

“So, what did you tell 'em?” he asked with a grin.

I grimaced in reply. “Just that you were giving us a riding demonstration, which we begged for. I couldn't explain the scout uniform, but fortunately nobody asked. Your father is furious with you, and my mother is furious with all of us, especially me, for encouraging you.”

“All worth it,” he assured me. “It's a terrific scene; I can feel it in my bones. But wait—” He sat up too fast, then whistled with pain, clutching his head. “You're not grounded, are you?”

“Mother hasn't said anything. But I should be. It was bad enough going along with your lies, but when I start telling them myself—”

He waved away my scruples. “Don't worry, it's all for a great cause.”

“Why don't you just tell them the
truth
?”

“I
will
. Soon as we're done, and we almost are. But I need you to do something. You know the old film of me on Sundance? It's stashed under the bed here. You need to get it to Sam tomorrow so he can cut it with the new.”

“Can't it wait until you deliver it yourself?”

“Don't know when I can.” He frowned, still gripping his forehead. “Pa could have me pinned down for a week. Saturday afternoon is the only time we can count on getting into the Vitagraph studio, and that's tomorrow. Please, Isobel? You're our only hope.”

As the reader may have guessed by now, I am a sucker for boys who look at me with dark pleading eyes and say I am their only hope. Especially if they've just suffered some injury to soul or body.

But how is a young lady to go traipsing around Los Angeles alone without raising any suspicions? By telling her mother she needs to shop for a birthday present for that selfsame mother, whose birthday was only two weeks off—no lie. Sylvie wanted to go, of course, but I told her she was needed to keep Ranger company. Fortunately she saw this as a high calling and didn't fuss too much. I saw it as exactly what he deserved.

• • •

Following Ranger's directions, I walked down the row of plain stucco buildings until I found the door marked
Editing
. Sam answered my shy knock. “Just in time.”

The room was close and stifling, in spite of the ceiling fan blades turning slowly over our warmish heads. Sam took the film canister from me and opened it right away, snapped the reel on the projector, and threaded it without a pause. “How's Ranger?”

“Perfectly fine,” I said. “Sharp as vinegar. You wouldn't think he had just escaped death by inches.”

Sam spun the take-up reel, smiling with one side of his mouth. “He's a funny kid.”

I agreed, but probably not for the same reasons. “How do you mean?”

“Pull that light cord, wouldja?” A beam of light shot from the projector as the room went dark. Several feet of film sputtered across the screen before Ranger appeared, loping along on the back of Sundance. “Look at him,” Sam remarked. “He's got his own horse, servants, a dad who hobnobs with the likes of Griffith and Joe Schenck. But he doesn't act rich.”

“How does he act?” I asked, curious.

Sam squinted at the screen, pursing his lips in concentration. “Hungry.”

He stopped the film with Ranger leaning forward, half standing in the stirrups. “Right there. Looks like he heard something. We'll put your call for help right there.” After slipping a piece of paper between layers of film, he continued turning the hand crank, more slowly.

“How long have you known him?”

“Met him at the St. Pat's parade on Broadway last spring. Seen him before though. He used to hang around here and at Fine Arts and Keystone too. Some of the cameramen and grips called him the Lot Lizard.” Sam paused the crank. “What made me notice him at the parade was he was trying to shoot it with a homemade camera.”

“A motion-picture camera?” I exclaimed. “He made it?”

“Yeah, from directions in
The Boy Mechanic
, I think. Just a tall wooden box with a reading glass for a lens and a reel that would hold about twenty feet of film. Less than a minute's worth. He hauled the camera back to an empty storefront and threw a black cloth over it to change the reels. You may have noticed he's not very mechanical. So I helped him a little, and we sort of struck up a conversation. As soon as he found out I had a real camera, one thing led to another.”

“Do you…like him?”

“Like him?” He stopped cranking and stuck in another marker. “Used to think he was a snot-nosed brat. But money doesn't go to his head—I like that. 'Course, it doesn't seem to go much to his pocket either. Or else he wouldn't be trying to make pictures with a homemade camera.”

“His father doesn't want to spoil him,” I said.

“Yeah, I've heard all about that. His grandpa got rich in the Gold Rush selling pancakes. Then he moved down here and bought a ranch. That's how Titus grew up, riding the range and all. He wants his kid to be tough like him.” Slowing the film just after Ranger cleared the ditch, Sam slipped in another paper and continued on. “Thing is, the kid's a lot tougher than he looks. And I've never known anybody so dead-set on getting his way.” On screen, Ranger fell off his horse again. “Can't ride worth a darn though. Light.”

That was a request. After pulling the cord, I noticed what I hadn't before: a long countertop down one side of the room and an overhead rod above it draped with strips of film in different lengths. The counter was not connected to the wall, so film could hang behind it all the way to the floor. The surface was littered with scissors, a knife, a glue pot, and bits of film. It was the first time I'd seen, with my own eyes, the fruits of our labor.

“How do you develop all this?”

“With difficulty.” He lifted the reel off the projector and brought it to the counter, where he snapped it to an upright bracket that allowed it to spin freely. Then he pulled up a high stool. “There's a darkroom next door. I take it in there and wrap the film around a square frame. Then dunk it in the developing tank—”

“But where do you get all the solution?” I interrupted. “It must be gallons!”

“Yep, about a hundred. I know a fella who works at night. We've got a deal. He usually lets me put a rack of our film in with the batch he's developing for Vitagraph. Ranger and me never have more than two racks at a time, so there's usually room. After it's developed, the film goes in a fixing tank, and that's where my part of the deal comes in.”

He paused to take a matchstick out of his pocket, which he stuck in his mouth. After a moment I prompted, “How so?”

“The film has to be washed off, and that's a messy job nobody likes. So the other fella goes home, and I wash all my film plus his. Then I have to wind it on a drying drum—looks kind of like a barrel—and keep rewinding it while it dries, so it won't pull up and break.”

No wonder he often slept late or looked like impending death when he met us for a morning shoot. “Why do you do all this, Sam?”

He shrugged.

“No, I mean it. It's a lot more than just dunking film and winding film and hauling equipment all over creation. Every time you take the camera out, you risk breaking it or getting caught, and what if your father catches you again?”

The pale eyes flickered at me like the edge of a blade. “It's worth that risk.”

“But
why
?”

Sam flipped a switch, and a square of thick, creamy glass on the countertop glowed with light. “Last time it paid off. Dad and me worked on something together, first time ever. He called me a chip off the old block. Might pay off again. Who knows?” He unrolled the film from the reel and scanned it across the light, studying the frames.

That was plainly all I'd get from him on the subject, but it was enough to chew on. Maybe the camera was the only common meeting ground Sam and his father could muster. I still didn't understand why they had to play their cat-and-mouse game with it, but maybe they didn't either.

“Are you cutting now? Could I watch you?”

Another shrug. “Suit yourself, girlie.”

“My name's Isobel.”

“So I hear.”

Just when I was starting to like him. Nevertheless I pulled up another stool and climbed on it, watching as he pulled the film through his fingers, forward and back, back and forward. His overlong hair fell over his sleepy eyes, and his thin lips pursed in concentration.

“Right there,” he muttered, picking up the scissors to cut bet-ween the frames. Then he laid the end of the cut film on a block, securing it on pins that exactly matched the sprocket holes.

He gently tugged a long section of film from the rack behind the counter. “This is you, yelling for help.”

Leaning forward eagerly, I could see my tiny image repeated in the frames marching across the square of light. Sam scraped the last frame with a knife and brushed it with glue. Working quickly, he laid the glued frame over the piece that was pinned on the block so their sprocket holes matched. Pressing down, he announced, “Now you're in the picture.”

I was intrigued in spite of myself. “Let me do one.”

“Looks easy, huh? Watch this.” He wound up most of the spliced film on a take-up reel by his elbow, then searched among the hanging strips for another section. “Here's a trick the old man showed me. This is the first take we did of you, same scene. You're standing in the same place so everything matches up. You can cut about one second of this film”—he paused to count twenty frames and pushed the scissors over to me—“and then you're going to paste it at the end of the shot. If we rolled the film real slow, we'd see a little jerk and then you doing exactly the same thing over again. But at projection speed, it goes by so fast nobody would notice.”

“Why do it then?” I was holding the end of film I'd just cut, absolutely fascinated.

“It makes a smoother shift from one angle to another. Action doesn't look so jerky. Here, you need to take this knife and scrape that end of the film—careful, not too hard. Just enough to get the emulsion off.” After scraping, I lightly applied the glue brush and lined up the ends on the splicing block.

The whole “rescue” episode went together like that, a bit here and a piece there, much of it in silence except for the scritch of the knife and the pulse of the overhead fan. We worked in the same murmury silence I remembered from Father's darkroom—otherwise known as the cellar—under the glow of his red lamp.

Father used glass plates taken with a folding camera, putting each through three trays of fluid. As he rocked the developing tank, shapes emerged: family portraits and reunions, street scenes, sunrises over Puget Sound. They were like frozen bits of time, snippets from the life we'd already lived.

But motion-picture film was something else entirely—something
un
frozen. Still pictures were the past, but film was, as Ranger always said, the future.

Sam straightened up and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “We're making tracks here. All that's left is shooting the dog.”

Glancing at the Seth Thomas clock on the wall behind me, I gasped. “It's been over an hour! How does Ranger sit still for this?”

“He doesn't much. I got more done with you in an hour than I could with him in a whole afternoon.”

He said it as a mere observation, not a compliment, but I felt complimented anyway. In fact, I glowed like a little candle. “I like cutting film. It's…it's like rearranging time! Suppose your life was on film, and you could cut any part you wanted or move the pieces around to tell a different story.”

“Um.” He nodded, as though the thought was not new to him.

“Where I would cut would be when Father decided to enlist. Perhaps he could struggle in a manly way with his decision before he decided not to go—but no, it would be better if there wasn't any war at all.”

“Cutting the war might be good.” The smiling side of his mouth was up again, even while his head stayed down, scanning frames of Bone.

Remembering my moment of hysteria when I'd seen Ranger's broken glasses on the grass made a little extra warmth rise to my face, and I wondered if he remembered it too. “What about you? What would you cut?”

In spite of his talky mood, I didn't expect him to answer. So imagine my surprise when, after only a little pause, he did: “I'd cut a puddle of grease on the deck of the
Jersey
Queen
.”

I laughed, then realized it wasn't meant for a joke. “I'm…sorry?”

He cleared his throat delicately—the self-conscious noise of someone who's stumbled upon an embarrassing scene. “Um… Back in Jersey, 'bout four years ago, my mother and sister and I—”