Dunc went back to the car. Suddenly he was crying, swiping the back of his hand across his face like a little kid. He hadn’t cried when his grandpa had died, and he’d really loved that old man. But this... Ned... Artis...
He should go to the cops and... And what? Raffetto had killed Artis — but he had no proof. He had nobody to fight for, nothing to hang on to. Ned and Artis were both gone. So was Carny Largo, but Raffetto was still out there looking for Dunc.
Like Pepe, it was time for him to leave this town.
Fifty miles west of Vegas he was stopped at a barricade across the state line. Uniformed men asked him if he was carrying any fresh fruit into California. The question was so bizarre he started to laugh, but it choked into a sob. They waved him on without noticing.
At Baker, a little town in the desert, he stopped at an all-night gas station with a café attached. He wasn’t hungry, then wolfed down everything in sight. Back outside, he saw the black desert night was awash with stars, felt the cold desert air. Sage was acrid in his nostrils. Just a few weeks ago he had been going toward Vegas on a night like this, hopes high and excitement surging. Now...
God, what would his nightmares be like from now on?
He got his gear out of the trunk of the car and opened the glove box as Ned had told him. In it was the title slip to Grey Ghost Two, signed over to him. Ned must have done it yesterday, before the bout, after Artis had told him about the fix.
Even then the big fighter had known what he was going to do — and had known he wasn’t going to make it to California.
Four
An Angel in the Smog
Chapter Eighteen
Three weeks had passed. The blond man hulking over Dunc snarled, “Ve haff vays uff makink you talk!”
“Never!” croaked Dunc.
He was chest-deep in the half-dug grave, shirtless, almost black from the pitiless California sun; sweat rolled off his naked torso. When he drove his shovel into the dirt, in his mind Hent slashed the shovel down to cut the turtle in half.
Dunc unobtrusively picked up a dirt clod as big as his head and held it at arm’s length. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy...”
“Vat nonsense are you tellink me?” roared the blond man.
“It’s from Hamlet — the gravedigger scene in Act Five.”
“But it’s not from a movie! You lose!”
“Olivier did a film version four or five years ago.”
“Oh yeah! I remember. Jean Simmons in a nightgown.”
“Except she killed herself.” To his earthen skull, Dunc said. “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that...” But the clod wore the dead face of Artis. He threw it from him. “You win, Gus. I buy the beer tonight.”
Gus Trabert, another Notre Darner, was staying the summer at his uncle’s big old sprawling white frame house in Eagle Rock. He’d offered Dunc a place to stay, maybe a job; while waiting for it, at Dunc’s suggestion, they dug graves at nearby Forest Lawn.
Dunc struck the shovel in the dirt, upright, put his hands on the edge of the opening, kipped up easily, turning in midair to land sitting on the edge with his legs dangling into the hole.
“Gimme the water and start digging.”
Gus handed him the wet-sided canvas water bag, sat down beside him. He was taller than Dunc by half a head, but not as beefy of arms, chest, or shoulders. Blue eyes, blond hair. His people were from northern Italy.
“Friday,” he said. “The eagle shits tonight.”
Only five minutes to quitting time. They covered the grave with plywood, at a hose bib halfway down the slope sloshed the dust off their arms and chests and cleaned the shovels.
“Uncle Ben heard anything yet?” Gus’s uncle had heavy connections with the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese.
“I bet he’ll have the word tonight.”
These six hundred fantasyland acres of death were brilliant green, dazzling with flowers; in the distance, buildings gleamed like the Emerald City of Oz. Tomorrow the place would be full of tourists and people paying their respects; children would romp through Lullaby Land where dead children were buried amid hearts of living flowers and gingerbread castles with stone turrets.
“Why’d you want to work in a place like this?” asked Gus.
“I read a novel about it at Notre Dame. The Loved One.”
Uncle Ben was out watering the lawn, a tall leathery man with thin features and dark hair with gray wings swept back over his ears. During the 1936 Berlin Olympics he had taken bronze in the breast-stroke. He turned the hose on them.
“You two bums are in luck!” he yelled. “You start work Monday out at the San Fernando Mission’s new seminary complex!”
Thoroughly drenched, they fled into the kitchen. Aunt Pearl was mincing onions, tears glinting on her plump cheeks despite a slice of bread between her teeth to stop the fumes.
She made shooing gestures, a housewife driving chickens from her kitchen. “You’re soaking wet! Go on, get out of here!”
Grandma Trabert had lived in this house as bride, wife, and widow for fifty years, now spent most of her time in what once had been her sewing room. She was dwarfed by her huge leather armchair in front of the TV with its bunny ears and round eight-inch screen. A gun went off on the TV.
“Just the facts, ma’am,” said Gus.
“What day is it today?” asked Grandma in her sweet old lady’s voice as stern dum-de-dum-dum theme music came up.
“Friday, Grandma Trabert,” said Dunc.
“Joe Friday,” snickered Gus too softly for Grandma to hear.
A man wearing a cap with a star on it was holding a gas hose in his hand and urging his viewers to use Texaco Sky Chief gasoline with Petrox for maximum power plus engine protection.
“No, no, dear. The date.”
“The twenty-fourth. Of July.”
“Oh, boys, how exciting! Only two days to St. Anne’s Day. My patron saint! We’ll have such a good time! Don’t oversleep! I want you to hear the music at High Mass, Gus — you too, Dunc. The choir is so wonderful since Mr. Spinelli came to us.”
Gus winked at Dunc over her head. “Sure thing, Grandma.”
Actually Gus wanted to try and get into the pants of a trailer park gal out at the beach who belonged to a cult called the Seven Priests of Melchizedek. The priest, Gus said, would be great for Dunc’s notebook. He hadn’t written a word since Vegas.
Grandma Trabert called after them over the television, “I’m going to start praying right now that you boys don’t have to work with a bunch of niggers and spics out there at the mission.”
A huge Dutch windmill marked Van de Kamps bakery at the corner of Fletcher and San Fernando; if you wanted to eat inside on a Friday night, you stood in line for an hour. They preferred the drive-in; it had been one of the world’s first after the war, and featured young pretty carhops in tight clothes.
A teenage brunette took their orders. As they watched her backside twitch busily away, Gus said, “Paint a ‘W’ on each cheek, when she bends over — WOW!”
She returned with trays she hooked over the insides of their open windows and braced against the doors below. They munched cheeseburgers and fries and slurped chocolate malts.
Dunc had to talk with Pepe about that last terrible night; he sure couldn’t talk to Gus about it. So he said, “I met a piano player in Vegas who said he’d be playing on the Sunset Strip. Let’s go try to find him.”