I put my hand out and down toward the bottom drawer on the left.
Crumley shook his head.
I shifted and reached over to touch the bottom drawer on the right.
Crumley nodded.
I pulled the drawer open, slowly.
Crumley exhaled.
There was a manuscript there in an open-top box. It looked to be about 150 to 200 pages, beginning on page one, with no title page.
“How long’s this been down here in the bottom drawer?” I asked. “Pardon.”
“It’s all right,” said Crumley. “Five years.”
“You’re going to finish it now,” I said.
“Like hell I am. Why?”
“Because I told you so. And I know.”
“Shut the drawer,” said Crumley.
“Not just yet.” I pulled out the chair, sat, and rolled a sheet of yellow paper into the machine.
I typed five words on one line and then shifted down and wrote three more words.
Crumley squinted over my shoulder and read them aloud, quietly.
“Death Is a Lonely Business.” He took a breath and finished it. “By Elmo Crumley.” He had to repeat it. “By Elmo Crumley, by God.”
“There.” I placed my new title page down on top of his waiting manuscript and slid the drawer shut. “That’s a gift. I’ll find another title for my book. Now, you’ll have to finish it.”
I rolled another sheet of paper into the machine and asked, “What was the number of the last page on the bottom of your manuscript?”
“One hundred sixty-two,” said Crumley.
I typed 163 and left the paper in the machine.
“There,” I said. “It’s waiting. Tomorrow morning you get out of bed, walk to the machine, no phone calls, no newspaper reading, don’t even go to the bathroom, sit down, type, and Elmo Crumley is immortal,”
“B.S.,” said Crumley, but ever so quietly.
“God promises. But you got to work.”
I got up and Crumley and I stood looking at his Corona as if it were the only child he would ever have.
“You giving me orders, kid?” said Crumley.
“No. Your brain is, if you’d just listen.”
Crumley backed off, walked into the kitchen, got some more beer. I waited by his desk until I heard the back screen door bang.
I found Crumley in his garden letting the whirlaround water-tosser cover his face with cooling raindrops, for the day was warm now and the sun out full here on the rim of fog country.
“What is it,” said Crumley, “forty stories you sold so far?”
“At thirty bucks apiece, yeah. The Rich Author.”
“You are rich. I stood down at the magazine rack at Abe’s Liquor yesterday and read that one you wrote about the man who finds he has a skeleton inside him and it scares hell out of him. Christ, it was a beaut. Where in hell do you get ideas like that?”
“I got a skeleton inside me,” I said.
“Most people never notice.” Crumley handed me a beer and watched me make yet another face. “The old man…”
“William Smith?”
“Yeah, William Smith, the autopsy report came in this morning. There was no water in his lungs.”
“That means he didn’t drown. That means he was killed up on the canal bank and shoved down into the cage after he was dead. That proves…”
“Don’t jump ahead of the train, you’ll get run down. And don’t say I told you so, or I’ll take that beer back.”
I offered him the beer, gladly. He nudged my hand aside.
“What have you done about the haircut?” I said.
“What haircut?”
“Mr. Smith had a really lousy haircut the afternoon before he died. His friend moaned about it at the morgue, remember? I knew only one really lousy barber could have done it.”
I told Crumley about Cal, the prizes promised William Smith, Myron’s Ballroom, Modesti’s, the big red train.
Crumley listened patiently, and said, “Flimsy.”
“It’s all we got,” I said. “You want me to check the Venice Cinema to see if they saw him out front the night he disappeared?”
“No,” said Crumley.
“You want me to check Modesti’s, the train, Myron’s Ballroom?”
“No,” said Crumley.
“What do you want me to do, then?”
“Stay out of it.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said Crumley, and stopped. He glanced at the back door of his house. “Anything happens to you, my goddamn novel never gets finished. Somebody’s got to read the damn thing, and I don’t know anybody else.”
“You forget,” I said. “Whoever stood outside your house last night stands outside mine already. I can’t let him do that, can I? I can’t go on being spooked by that guy who gave me the title I just typed on your machine. Can I?”
Crumley looked at my face and I could see his thinking was, apricot pie, banana cake, and strawberry ice cream.
“Just be careful,” he said, at last. “The old man may have slipped and knocked his head and was dead when he hit the water, which is why there was no water in his lungs.”
“And then he swam over and put himself in the cage. Sure.”
Crumley squinted at me, trying to guess my weight.
Silently, he went away into the jungle and was gone about a minute. I waited.
Then, far away, I heard an elephant trombone the wind. I turned slowly, into a drench of garden rain, listening. A lion, closer, opened his vast beehive valves and exhaled a killer swarm. A herd of antelopes and gazelles dusted by like a summer wind of sound, touching the dry earth, moving my heart to their run.
Crumley was suddenly on the path, smiling wildly, like a boy half-proud, half-ashamed of a madness unknown to all the world until now, this hour. He snorted and gestured two fresh beers up at six lilyhorn sound systems suspended like great dark flowers in the trees. From these, the antelopes, gazelles, and zebras circled our lives and protected us from the nameless beasts out beyond the bungalow fences. The elephant blew his nose once more and knocked my soul flat.
“African recordings,” said Crumley, unnecessarily.
“Swell,” I said. “Hey, what’s that?”
Ten thousand African flamingos airlifted from a bright freshwater lagoon back five thousand days ago when I was a high school kid and Martin and Osa Johnson were flying in from the wildebeest African trails to walk among us plain folks in California and tell great tales.
And then I remembered.
The day I was supposed to run full speed to hear Martin Johnson speak, he had been killed in a plane crash just outside L.A.
But right now, in Elmo Crumley’s jungle compound Eden retreat, there were Martin Johnson’s birds.
My heart went with them.
I looked at the sky and said, “What are you going to do, Crumley?”
“Nothing,” he said. “The old canary lady is going to live forever. You can bet on it.”
“I’m broke,” I said.
When the drowned people showed up later that day, it really spoiled the picnics all up and down the beach. People were indignant, packed their hampers, went home. Dogs that ran eagerly down to look at the strangers lying on the shore were called back by angry women or irritable men. Children were herded away and sent off with a reprimand, not to associate with such peculiar strangers ever again.
Drowning, after all, was a forbidden subject. Like sex, it was never discussed. It followed then that when a drowned person dared touch shore, he or she was persona non grata. Children might dash down to hold dark ceremonies in their minds, but the ladies who remained after the families had cringed off and gone away raised their parasols and turned their backs, as if someone with unruly breath had called from the surf.
Nothing in Emily Post could help the situation. Very simply the lost surfers had come without invite, permission, or warning and like unwanted relatives had to be hustled off to mysterious ice-houses inland, at a double dogtrot.
But no sooner was one surf-stranger gone than you heard the sandpiping children’s voices crying, “Look, Mommy, oh, look!”
“Git away! Get!”
And you heard the rush of feet running away from the still-warm landmines on the shore.
Walking back from Crumley’s I heard about the unwelcome visitors, the drowned ones,
I had hated to leave the sun which seemed to shine forever in Crumley’s orchard.
Reaching the sea was like touching another country. The fog came as if glad for all the bad shoreline news. The drownings had had nothing to do with police, night traumas, or dark surprises in canals that sucked their teeth all night. It was simply riptides.
The shore was empty now. But I had an even emptier feeling when I lifted my gaze to the old Venice pier.
“Bad rice!” I heard someone whisper. Me.
An old Chinese imprecation, shouted at the edges of crops to guarantee a good harvest against the devastation of the envious gods.
“Bad rice…”
For someone had at last stepped on the big snake.
Someone had stomped it down.
The rollercoaster was gone forever from the far end of the pier.
What was left of it now lay in the late day, like a great strewn jackstraws game. But only a big steam shovel was playing that game now, snorting, bending down to snap up the bones and find them good.
“When does the dying stop?” I had heard Cal say a few hours back.
With the empty pier-end ahead, its skeleton being flensed, and a tidal wave of fog storming toward shore, I felt a fusillade of cold darts in my back. I was being followed. I spun.
But it wasn’t me being pursued by nothing.
Across the street, I saw A. L. Shrank. He ran along, hands deep in overcoat pockets, head sunk in his dark collar, glancing back, like a rat before hounds.
God, I thought, now I know who he reminds me of.
Poe!
The famous photographs, the somber portraits of Edgar Allan with his vast milk-glass lampglow brow and brooding night-fire eyes and the
