Hix swung his glasses in the direction of the new sound. “Ah, only a neighbor’s animal.”
The big Doberman was attached to a log chain on the other side of the high stone wall that surrounded the Marzloff setup.
The night kept getting colder and darker. In another few minutes Hix would make his careful approach. There was a sturdy drainpipe running up the side of the gray building. Having considerable confidence in his stuntman abilities, Hix was certain he could, under the cover of night, scale the seven-foot-high stone wall, then shinny up the pipe to reach the roof. He’d then, unobserved, snap some news-photo-quality shots of Dr. Marzloff reviving the corpse of Alex Stoner.
He’d turn the pictures over to his buddy at the
L.A. Times.
He might also give Johnny Whistler, who was easier to reach than Hedda or Louella, a call. True, Whistler had told him never to phone again with his pathetic attempts to get publicity for his mediocre fleapit movies. But this time he had an earthshaking scoop. The subsequent front-page stories would result in a hell of a lot of publicity for him. And for
I Waltzed with a Zombie.
“I bet,” he said as he rose to start his slow, careful approach to the re-animator’s lab, “we can hire Cole Porter or Irving Berlin to write
Zombie Waltz.
”
From up on the hillside the darn Doberman had seemed to be securely attached to a sturdy walnut tree at the backside of the stark white Art Deco house of Dr. Marzloff’s neighbor.
But just as Hix was scrambling over the stone wall around the sanitarium and realizing that his wall-climbing skills had somewhat diminished since he’d turned thirty, he heard a chain snapping and then became aware of an angry, growly sort of barking. It grew ever louder and closer in the overcast darkness of the night.
“Heel!” he ordered quietly over his shoulder. “Sit! Roll over! Play dead!” These were the only dog commands he could recall from the script he’d written for
Socko the Wonder Dog Goes to War
last autumn.
None of them made an impression on the angry Doberman. Snarling, he leaped for the climbing writer.
He managed to nip the heel of one of the strange shoes that Hix was pretty certain he’d bought down in Tijuana while hung over a few months ago. The dog took a hunk out of the orange-brown Mexican shoe, but Hix was not hurt.
Hix was able to pull himself to the top of the wall. He stretched out there for a moment, facedown, and caught his breath.
The dog continued to growl and jump down there in the darkness. Apparently everyone at the Marzloff establishment was too busy bringing the late Alex Stoner back to life to notice Hix’s less than silent arrival.
The thick drainpipe commenced producing metallic groans when Hix, panting as quietly as he was able, had managed to convey himself up roughly three quarters of its two-story length.
Over on the other side of the stone wall the surly Doberman was continuing to convey his annoyance with a lengthy series of angry barks.
Pausing to again catch his breath, the writer continued his ascent to the slanting roof and the illuminated skylight.
“You’re going to have to expand your exercise plan,” he advised himself as he labored upward. “Playing volleyball once a week with a gaggle of starlets in the Pentagram Pictures parking lot obviously isn’t sufficient.”
At long last—it took him nearly ten minutes according to the radium dial on his wristwatch—Hix reached his goal. Clutching the metal edge of the sturdy gutter, he pulled himself up on to the roof.
Sprawling flat, he inched his way over to the edge of the big skylight. Careful not to go sliding back down the incline of the roof, he prepared to take a look down into the lab/surgery.
“Hot dog!” he exclaimed internally upon noticing that one of the large glass panels in the skylight was propped open, thus allowing him to hear what was being said down below.
A voice that must belong to Dr. Marzloff was saying, in a thick accent that sounded like Akim Tamiroff or Gregory Ratoff on a bad day, “I am no longer optimistic, gentlemen.”
“He’s alive again,” pointed out the Paramount exec who’d conked Hix.
“True, but he’s passed away twice again since you delivered him here to me.”
“I’m not . . . really . . . feeling so . . . hot,” admitted Alex Stoner.
Risking a peek downward into the brightly lit room Hix saw the two large Paramount men standing close beside a white operating table, considerable concern showing on their faces.
Stretched out on the table, looking extremely pale and clad in a white hospital gown, was the late actor. He was groaning in his deep, actor’s voice.
The squat, thickset Marzloff had on a pale blue medical jacket and a stethoscope dangling around his neck. On his bald head he was wearing a voodoo headdress consisting chiefly of chicken feathers, cat fur, and rat tails. In his right hand he held a large hypodermic and in his left a maraca that had tiny skulls painted on it in bright red lacquer.
Stoner said, “Dying once . . . was bad enough . . . but dying three more . . . ”
“Four,” corrected the doctor.
The other executive said, “Look, Doc, we only need this guy for one more week and then it’s a wrap.”
“Don’t forget he has to dub a few pieces of dialogue,” reminded his colleague.
“We can always get Paul Frees to do that. He can imitate anybody’s voice.”
“Gentlemen, I very much fear he can’t be kept alive for longer than a few more minutes.”
“We could settle for
three
days.”
“Not even
three
hours. I’ve been able, as you know, to have some luck with an initial reanimation. But—”
“I have . . . a few . . . ” said Stoner, half sitting up on the table, shivering and shaking violently, “ . . . last words . . . I’d like to thank the Academy for . . . Aargh!” Falling back with a thud, he died for the fifth time.
“Holy Moley,” said Hix, reaching the borrowed camera out from under his sweater. Surreptitiously, he aimed it at what was going on down in the laboratory.
“C’mon,” ordered one of the executives. “Revive this guy again.”
“I do not believe it would be of any use.”
“Try it!”
Sighing, the doctor adjusted his chicken feather headpiece. “My exclusive blending of up-to-date medical expertise and ancient Haitian voodoo can only do so much.”
“Get going, Doc!”
After administering the shot in the hypodermic to a thin, pale arm of the dead actor, Marzloff began to dance around the body, shaking the maraca and chanting, “Damballah. Ioa. Damballah-Wedo. Gato Preto. Damballah.”
Hix, chuckling silently, clicked off shots. “What an expose this is going to be. I’ll be the darling of the press and . . . Oh, crap.”
He’d discovered he was swiftly sliding toward the edge of the sharply slanting roof.
Flipping over onto his back as he slid, Hix managed to stuff the big camera under his dark sweater and, at the same time, use his heels to try to brake his descent.
He succeeded with the camera, but he kept sliding ever closer to the drop.
Hix made a grab for the gutter edge as he went over. As he caught it, the jerking halt of his drop sent pain all across his shoulders and back. He hung two stories up for what seemed like more than a minute.
Then he caught hold of the drainpipe and went down to the ground, quite a bit faster than he’d gone up.
Limping, he scurried to the wall. After inhaling enthusiastically a few times, he got himself to the top. He lay stretched out on the stones. Nobody had noticed his departure.
Wheezing, as well as panting, Hix let himself down on the other side.
Waiting for him, silently, was the big mean-minded black and tan dog.
The next morning, the new secretary at his agent’s office pretended she didn’t know who Hix was. “Who?” she inquired in a voice that was both nasal and snide.
“
Hix.
Bernie’s most successful client.”
“Surely, you’re not John O’Hara.”
“Tell him that terrific idea we talked about has come to fruition. We’re all in the money.”
“I’ll try to contact Mr. Kupperman. Hix, was it?”
After three and a half long minutes Bernie came on the line. “Hix, how many times have I warned you about using profanity with my secretaries?”
“I merely stated my name.”
“She apparently though Hix was a dirty word.”
“A common mistake, yeah. But the purpose of my call is to alert you to dust off my brilliant
I Waltzed with a Zombie
treatment, Bernie.”
“Why in the heck would I do something like that?”
“Because I am on the brink of turning into an international celebrity due to my exposure of insidious zombie trafficking in Tinsel Town,” he announced. “I’ll be exposing a major Hollywood studio that’s featured a dead actor in a starring role in their latest Technicolor historical epic.”
“Baloney. How can you do that?”
“Soon as I sell my exclusive story to the
L.A. Times.
And possibly give it to my old pal Johnny Whistler, too.”
“What sort of proof do you have? Photographs would be nice.”
Hix hesitated. “I
had
a whole stewpot of great shots, Bernie,” he said. “Unfortunately my camera fell out of my sweater while I was running through a section of Santa Rita Beach.”
“Exercising, were you?”
“Well, actually, I was running for my life.”
“So why didn’t you pick up the camera?”
“The ferocious dog that was chasing me over hill and dale stopped to eat the camera. Or at least take a couple of hefty bites out of it,” he explained. “But I can still provide the press with a first-hand account of my witnessing a noted actor being resurrected. An attempted resurrection maybe, because I fell off the roof before—”
“Who was, according to you, being revived? And who was doing this?”
“The actor in question was none other than Alex Stoner, Paramount’s star of
The Holy Grail.
The first time this old ham died was back three months ago and they—”
His agent made an exasperated sound. “Don’t you read the newspapers, Hix? Don’t you listen to Johnny Whistler’s seven-thirty a.m. broadcast on Mutual?”
“I overslept because . . . why?”
“Alex Stoner didn’t die three months ago. He died last night of a massive heart attack,” Bernie told him. “Paramount Pictures announced that early this morning.”
“I fell off the roof too soon. Looks like they couldn’t revive him this time.”
“Actually, Hix, they’re burying him at Forest Lawn on Friday,” the agent informed him. “Paramount says they’ve got enough footage in the can to put
The Holy Grail
together.”
“
I Waltzed with a Zombie
is still a terrific idea.”
“Tell you what, I’ll try it on Monogram,” said Bernie. “I hear they’re thinking of doing some cheapie musicals. Maybe we can get six thousand dollars out of them. What say?”
Hix was silent for a moment. “Sure, give it a try, Bernie,” he said, and hung up.
Joy Kennedy-O’Neill
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
—Albert Camus,
The Plague
I’m driving to Houston when Def Leppard’s “Love Bites” comes on the radio. I have to pull over and watch my hands shake; it’s been years since anyone aired anything like that—no “Reality Bites,” no “Once Bitten Twice Shy”—although I suppose that playing the song is a sign that the nation is moving on. I sit in the car and tremble, feeling angry and nauseous.
Love bites, love bleeds, love lives, love dies . . .
After the epidemic, when a few radio stations had finally come back online, it was just news updates, dead lists, and static interrupted by the long silences of power outages. Then when some of the grids got stabilized it was “all Gershwin, all the time,” and then last year, when everyone was digging victory gardens to supplement rations, it was big band tunes. Swing, baby, swing. Pull ourselves up by bootstraps, brother. Moving on and moving up. I can hum “Jump, Jive, and Wail” in my sleep now.
When you wake up, will you walk out? It can’t be love if you throw it about . . .
I’m so shaky that I think about turning around for home, but the car has its entire gas ration in the tank and I really need to see an optometrist. I’m starting to squint and tear up when I teach, so my prescription has probably changed. The headaches are awful. They started soon after last year’s
Tres de Julio
celebration and feel like an elastic band is wrapping around my forehead, squeezing with every heartbeat. Cal has been kissing each eye when I get home. There are no more eye doctors in Lake Jackson but he said there are a few in the city who are taking appointments as best they can around the rolling blackouts. He even heard that Bausch and Lomb’s Argentina plant might be going online again, so there may be contact lenses soon.
I have to pull myself together. An hour’s drive is a luxury that I should be savoring; my calves have grown thick from bicycling to work. H-town’s skyline ahead of me is lovely under the blue summer sky. Of course, the Chase Tower’s top is still left ragged by an airliner’s crash; seeing its scarred bone-beams reminds me of 9/11 and a more innocent time. Back then we thought that three thousand Americans dying by terrorists’ hands was the most horrific thing we’d ever witnessed. We thought HIV and cancer and SARS were the big bogeymen in the closet. But now, with a planet missing nearly one-third of its population, our fears from the last decade seem glamorously bittersweet.
When you’re alone, do you let go?
A yellow butterfly is perched on top of a bullet-dented road sign. Things seem almost back to normal—there is no smoke on the horizon, the barricades have been removed, and grass and bluebonnets grow on the side of the road. There are birds singing, red-tailed hawks catching the thermals, and the buzzards are only devouring roadkill. It’s just a possum. Everything is fine.
So I pull back into the near empty lanes as the song ends and a Britney Spears tune comes on—whatever happened to her? Did she make it?—and I know I can’t handle these voices from the past,
my
past, so soon. I still need baby steps with Benny Goodman. And I’m thinking that I must be the last person in the world who is still having a problem getting over
it,
but when I walk into the optometrist’s dingy waiting room there are two cases of hysterical blindness waiting patiently for their names to be called.