At the top of the stairs he stood like Lord Carnarvon outside Tutankhamen’s waiting tomb, for a long moment. Then he went in. I thought I heard the ghosts of old birds rustling and peering. I thought I heard a mummy whisper, rising from river dusts. But that was the old Muse in me, anxious for startlements.
What I heard was Crumley pacing the milkweed silt on the old woman’s floor, which muffled his tread. A birdcage gave a metallic bell sound; he had touched it. Then what I heard was him bending over to lend an ear to a wind of time that moved from a dry and aching mouth.
And what I heard finally was the sound of the name on the wall whispered once, twice, three times, as if the old canary woman were reading the Egyptian hieroglyphs, symbol by symbol.
When Crumley came back down he was carrying the anvils in his stomach, and his face was tired.
“I’m getting out of this business,” he said.
I waited.
“Hirohito ascends throne.” He quoted the old newsprint he had just seen at the bottom of the cage.
“Addis Ababa?” I said.
“Was it really that long ago?”
“Now you’ve seen it all,” I said. “What’s your conclusion?”
“What conclusion should I have?”
“Didn’t you read it in her face? Didn’t you see?”
“What?”
“She’s next.”
“What?”
“It’s all there, in her eyes. She knows about the man who stands in the hall. He’s been up to her room, also, but hasn’t gone in. She’s simply waiting, and praying for him. I’m cold all over, and can’t get warm.”
“Just because you were right about the trolley ticket punchout junk, and found his place and I.D.’d the man, doesn’t make you Tarot Card Champ of the Week. You’re cold all over? I’m cold all over. Your hunch and my chill buys no dog food for a dead dog.”
“If you don’t post a guard here, she’ll be dead in two days.”
“If we posted guards over everybody who’s going to be dead in two days, we’d have no more police. You want me to go tell the captain what to do with his men? He’d throw me downstairs and throw my badge after me. Look, she’s nobody. I hate to say that. But that’s the way the law runs. If she were somebody, maybe we’d post…”
“I’ll do it myself, then.”
“Think what you just said. You got to eat sometime, or sleep. You can’t be here and you know it. The first time you run for a hotdog is when he, him, who, whomever, if he exists, will come in, make her sneeze, and she’s gone. There was never any man here. It was only an old hairball blowing by in the night. The old guy heard it first. Mrs. Canary hears it now.”
Crumley stared up the long, dark stairs toward the place of no birdsong, no springtime in the Rockies, no bad organist playing for his tiny yellow friends in some lost year.
“Give me time to think, kid,” he said.
“And let you be an accessory to murder?”
“There you go again!” Crumley yanked the door so it screamed on its hinges. “How come I spend half my time almost liking you and the rest being mad as hell?”
“Do I do that to you?” I said.
But he was gone.
Crumley did not call for twenty-four hours.
Grinding my teeth into a fine powder, I primed my Underwood and steamrollered Crumley into the platen.
“Speak!” I typed.
“How come,” Crumley responded, typing from somewhere inside my amazing machine, “I spend half my time almost liking you and the rest being mad as hell?”
Then the machine typed, “I’ll telephone you on the day the old canary lady dies.”
It’s obvious that years back I had pasted two gummed labels on my Underwood. One read: OFFICIAL OUIJA BOARD. The other, in large letters: DON’T THINK.
I didn’t. I just let the old Ouija board bang and clatter.
“How soon do we work together on this problem?”
“You,” responded Crumley in my fingertips, “are the problem!”
“Will you become a character in my novel?”
“I already am.”
“Then help me.”
“Fat chance.”
“Damn!”
I tore the page out of the machine.
Just then, my private phone rang.
It seemed it took me ten miles of running to get there, thinking,
Peg!
All the women in my life have been librarians, teachers, writers, or booksellers. Peg was at least three of those, but she was far away now, and it terrified me.
She had been all summer in Mexico, finishing studies in Spanish literature, learning the language, traveling on trains with mean peons or busses with happy pigs, writing me love-scorched letters from Tamazunchale or bored ones from Acapulco where the sun was too bright and the gigolos not bright enough; not for her anyway, friend to Henry James and consultant to Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. She carried a lunch-bucket full of books everywhere. I often thought she ate the brothers Goncourt like high tea sandwiches in the late afternoons.
Peg.
Once a week she called from somewhere lost in the church-towns or big cities, just come up out of the mummy catacombs at Guanajuato or gasping after a climb down Teotihuacan, and we listened to each other’s heartbeats for three short minutes and said the same dumb things to each other over and over and over; the sort of litany that sounds fine no matter how long or often you say it.
Each week, when the call came, the sun blazed over the phone booth.
Each week, when the talk stopped, the sun died and the fog arose. I wanted to run pull the covers over my head. Instead, I punched my typewriter into bad poems, or wrote a tale about a Martian wife who, lovesick, dreams that an earthman drops from the sky to take her away, and gets shot for his trouble.
Some weeks, as poor as I was, we pulled the old telephone operator, calling from Mexico City, would ask for me.
“Who?” I would say, “What was that again? Operator,” would hear Peg sigh, far away. The more I talked nonsense, the longer I was on the line.
“Just a moment, operator, let me get that again. The operator repeated my name. “Wait, let me see if he’s here. Who’s calling? And Peg’s voice, swiftly, would respond from two thousand miles off. “Tell him it’s Peg! Peg.”
And I would pretend to go away and return. “He’s not here. Call back in an hour.” “An hour…” echoed Peg. And click, buzz, hum, she was gone.
Helped into the booth and yanked the phone off the hook.
“Yes?” I yelled.
But it wasn’t Peg.
Silence.
“Who is this?” I said.
Silence. But someone was there, not two thousand miles away, but very near. And the reception was so clear, I could hear the air move in the nostrils and mouth of the quiet one at the other end.
“Well?” I said. Silence. And the sound that waiting makes on a telephone line. Whoever it was had his mouth open, close to the receiver.
Whisper. Whisper.
Jesus God, I thought, this can’t be a heavy-breather calling me in a phone booth. People don’t call phone booths! No one knows this is my private office.
Silence. Breath. Silence. Breath.
I swear that cool air whispered from the receiver and froze my ear.
“No, thanks,” I said.
And hung up.
I was halfway across the street, jogging with my eyes shut, when I heard the phone ring again.
I stood in the middle of the street, staring back at the phone, afraid to go touch it, afraid of the breathing.
But the longer I stood there in danger of being run down, the more the phone sounded like a funeral phone calling from a burial ground with bad telegram news. I had to go pick up the receiver.
“She’s still alive,” said a voice.
“Peg?” I yelled.
“Take it easy,” said Elmo Crumley.
I fell against the side of the booth, fighting for breath, relieved but angry.
“Did you call a moment ago?” I gasped. “How’d you know this number?”
“Everyone in the whole goddamn town’s heard that phone ring and seen you jumping for it.”
“Who’s alive?”
“The canary lady. Checked her late last night…”
“That was last night.”
“That’s not why I’m calling, damn it. Get over to my place late this afternoon. I might just rip your skin off.”
“Why?”
“Three o’clock in the morning, what were you doing standing outside my house?”
“Me!”
“You better have a good alibi, by God. I don’t like being spooked. I’ll be home around five. If you talk fast you get maybe a beer. If you bat an eye, I kick ass.”
“Crumley!” I yelled.
“Be there.” And he hung up.
I walked slowly back toward my front door.
The phone rang again.
Peg!
Or the man with cold ice in his breath?
Or Crumley being mean?
I banged the door open, jumped in, slammed it, and then, with excruciating patience, rolled a fresh white sheet of Elmo Crumley into my Underwood and forced him to say only nice things to me.
Ten thousand tons of fog poured over Venice and touched at my windows and came in under the cracks in the door.
Every time it is a damp drear November in my soul I know it is high time to go from the sea again, and let someone cut my hair.
There is a thing in haircutting that assuages the blood and calms the heart and makes the nerves serene.
Beyond that, I heard the old man stumbling out of the morgue in the back of my mind, wailing, “My God, who gave him that awful haircut?”
Cal, of course, had done that awful job. So I had several reasons to go visit. Cal, the worst barber in Venice, maybe the world, but cheap, called across the tidal waves of fog, waiting with his dull scissors, brandishing his Bumblebee Electric clippers that shocked and stunned poor writers and innocent
