Cal looked at it the same way I looked at my gas station office phone, and two thousand miles of silence and heavy breathing along the way. He shook his head.
“Why would I answer a phone when there’s nothing but bad news on it?” he said.
“Some days, you feel that way,” I said.
I pulled the apron from around my neck, slowly, and got up.
Automatically, Cal’s hand went palm out for my cash. When he saw his hand there, he cursed and dropped his hand, turned and banged the cash register.
Up jumped NO SALE.
I looked at myself in the mirror and almost barked like a seal at what I saw.
“It’s a great haircut, Cal,” I said.
“Git outa here.”
On the way out, I put my hand up to touch where the picture of Scott Joplin used to hang, playing great stuff with fingers like two bunches of big black bananas.
If Cal saw this, he didn’t say.
I slipped on some old hair, going out.
I walked until I found sunshine and Crumley’s buried-in-deep-grass bungalow.
I stood outside.
Crumley must have felt me there. He yanked the door open and said, “You doing that again?”
“I never did. I’m no good at being out scaring people at three o’clock in the morning,” I said.
He looked down at his left hand and shoved it at me.
There was a small clot of oily green seaweed on his palm, his clench marks in it.
I held out my hand, like someone trumping an ace, and opened my fingers.
My identical clump of seaweed, drier, and brittle, lay in my palm.
Crumley’s eyes moved from both our hands up to my eyes, my brow, my cheeks, my chin. He exhaled.
“Apricot pie, Halloween pumpkins, backyard tomatoes, late summer peaches, Santa Claus’s California son, you look like all of them. With a face like that how can I yell guilty?”
He dropped his hands and stood aside.
“You do like beer, don’t you?”
“Not much,” I said.
“Would you rather I fix you a chocolate malt?”
“Could you?”
“No, goddamn it. You’ll drink beer and like it. Get it in here.” He wandered off, shaking his head, and I came in and shut the door, feeling like a high school student come back to visit his tenth-grade teacher.
Crumley was standing in his parlor window blinking out at the dry dirt path I had wandered up a moment ago.
“Three o’clock, by God,” he muttered. “Three. Right out there. I heard someone weeping, how you figure that? Crying? Gave me the goosebumps. Sounded like a banshee woman. Hell. Let me look at your face again.”
I showed him my face.
“Jesus,” he said, “do you always blush that easily?”
“I can’t help it.”
“Christ, you could massacre half a Hindu village and still look like Peter Rabbit. What are you stuffed with?”
“Chocolate bars. And I keep six kinds of ice cream in my icebox, when I can afford it.”
“I bet you buy it instead of bread.”
I wanted to say no, but he would have caught the lie.
“Take a load off your feet and what kind of beer do you hate most? I got Budweiser which is awful, Budweiser which is dreadful, and Bud which is the worst. Take your pick. No, don’t. Allow me.” He ambled off to the kitchen and came back with two cans. “There’s still a little sun. Let’s get out of here.”
He led the way into his backyard.
I couldn’t believe Crumley’s garden.
“Why not?” He steered me out the back door of his bungalow, into a green and luscious illumination of thousands of plants, ivies, papyrus, birds of paradise, succulents, cacti. Crumley beamed. “Got six dozen different species of epiphyllum over there, that’s Iowa corn against the fence, that’s a plum tree, that’s apricot, that’s orange. Want to know why?”
“Everyone in the world needs two, three jobs,” I said, without hesitation. “One job isn’t enough, just as one life isn’t enough. I want to have a dozen of both.”
“Bull’s-eye. Doctors should dig ditches. Ditch-diggers ought to run kindergartens one day a week. Philosophers should wash dishes in a greasy spoon two nights out of ten. Mathematicians should blow whistles at high school gyms. Poets should drive trucks for a change of menu and police detectives…”
“Should own and operate the Garden of Eden,” I said, quietly.
“Jesus.” Crumley laughed and shook his head, and looked at the green seaweed he ground in his palm. “You’re a pain-in-the-ass know-it-all. You think you got me figured? Surprise!” He bent and twisted a garden valve. “Hark, as they used to say. Hist!”
A soft rain sprang up in brilliant blooms that touched all around Eden with whispers that said, Soft. Quiet. Serenity. Stay. Live forever.
I felt all my bones diminish in my flesh. Something like a dark skin fell from my back.
Crumley tilted his head to one side to study my face. “Well?”
I shrugged. “You see so much rot every week, you need this.”
“Trouble is, the guys over at the station won’t try anything like this. Sad, huh? To just be a cop and nothing else, forever? Christ, I’d kill myself. You know what, I wish I could bring all the rot I see every week here and use it for fertilizer. Boy, what roses I’d grow!”
“Or Venus flytraps,” I said.
He mused on that and nodded. “That earns you a beer.”
He led the way into his kitchen and I stood looking out at the rainforest, taking deep breaths of the cool air, but not able to smell it because of my cold.
“I’ve passed your place for years,” I said. “And wondered who could possibly live back in such a great homemade forest. Now that I’ve met you, I know it had to be you.”
Crumley had to stop himself from falling on the floor and writhing with joy at the compliment. He controlled himself and opened two really terrible beers, one of which I managed to sip.
“Can’t you make a better face than that?” he asked. “You really like malts better?”
“Yeah.” I took a bigger sip and it gave me courage to ask, “One thing. What am I doing here? You asked me over because of that stuff you found out front of your house, that seaweed? Now here I am surveying your jungle and drinking your bad beer. No longer a suspect?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Crumley swigged his own drink, and blinked at me. “If I thought you were any kind of mad lion-tamer cage-filler-upper, you’d have been in the toilet two days ago. You think I don’t know all about you?”
“There’s not much to know,” I said, sheepishly.
“Like hell there isn’t. Listen.” Crumley took another swig, shut his eyes, and read the details off the back of his eyelids.
“One block from your apartment’s a liquor store, and an ice cream parlor, and next to that a Chinese grocery. They all think you’re mad. The Nut, they call you. The Fool, on occasion. You talk loud and lots.
They hear. Every time you sell a story to Weird Tales or Astonishing Stories, it’s all over the pier because you open your window and yell. Christ. But the bottom line is, kid, they like you. You got no future, sure, they all agree, because who in hell is really going to go and land on the moon, when? Between now and the year 2000, will anyone give a damn about Mars? Only you, Flash Gordon. Only crazy nut you, Buck Rogers.”
I was blushing furiously, head down, half-angry and somewhat embarrassed but somehow pleased at all this attention. I had been called Flash and Buck often, but somehow when Crumley did it, it went right by without wounding.
Crumley opened his eyes, saw my blush, and said, “Now, cut that out.”
“Why would you have known all this about me, a long time before the old man was,” I stopped and changed it, “before he died?”
“I’m curious about everything.”
“Most people aren’t. I discovered that when I was fourteen. Everybody else gave up toys that year. I told my folks, no toys, no Christmas. So they kept on giving me toys every year. The other boys got shirts and ties. I took astronomy. Out of four thousand students in my high school there were only fifteen other boys and fourteen girls who looked at the sky with me. The rest were out running around the track and watching their feet. So, it follows that…”
I turned instinctively, for something had stirred in me. I found myself wandering across the kitchen.
“I got a hunch,” I said. “Could I…?”
“What?” said Crumley.
“You got a workroom here?”
“Sure. Why?” Crumley frowned with faint alarm.
That only made me push a bit harder. “Mind if I see?”
“Well…”
I moved in the direction toward which Crumley’s eyes had darted.
The room was right off the kitchen. It had once been a bedroom but now it was empty except for a desk, a chair, and a typewriter on the desk.
“I knew it,” I said.
I went to stand behind the chair and look at the machine which was not an old beat-up Underwood Standard, but a fairly new Corona with a fresh ribbon in it, and a stack of yellow sheets waiting to one side.
“That explains why you look at me the way you do,” I said. “Lord, yes, always tilting your head this way and that, scowling, narrowing your eyes!”
“Trying to X-ray that big head of yours, see if there’s a brain in there, and how it does what it does,” said Crumley, tilting his head now to the left, now to the right.
“Nobody knows how the brain works, not writers, no one. All I do is throw up every morning, clean up at noon.”
“Bullshit,” said Crumley, gently.
“Truth.”
I looked at the desk, which had
