Sullivan frowned. “Okay. I guess we’ll for sure be back before dark.”
Bradshaw nodded bleakly. “Leave a dollar in the ashtray for gas.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“It’s only the Red King snoring,” said Tweedledee.
“Come and look at him!” the brothers cried, and they each took one oj Alice’s hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping.
“Isn’t he a lovely sight?” said Tweedledum.
Alice couldn’t say honestly that he was.
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
THE cemetery in the late afternoon was full of ghosts, and at first Sullivan and Elizalde tried to avoid them.
Even before they parked Bradshaw’s goofy car, while they were still hardly past the office, they saw semitransparent figures clustered around the big white sculpture of a winged man sexually assaulting a woman. The smoky figures might have been attempting to stop the winged man, or help him subdue the woman, or just conceal the atrocity from the street.
Sullivan swore softly and looked for a place to park. The broad lawns he remembered out front along Santa Monica Boulevard were gone, those spaces now stacked full of shops—a Mexican market and a Chinese restaurant shouldering right up to the east side of the ivied stone buildings of the cemetery entrance, muffler and bodywork shops to the west—but there was still a sense of isolation here inside, in this silent, far-stretching landscape of old sycamores and palms and canted gravestones. Looking through Bradshaw’s windshield at the ghosts that could hold their shapes in this still air, Sullivan wished the noise and smoke and spastic motion of the boulevard could intrude their vital agitations here.
Elizalde had Houdini’s plaster right hand in her lap, and Sullivan was gripping the left one between his knees; the dried thumb was in his shirt pocket.
Past the ghosts was a crossroads, and he turned left onto the narrow paved lane and parked. “The lake’s ahead of us,” he said, hefting Houdini’s plaster hand. “Let’s walk up to it—the noise of the engine might spook him—” He winced at the unintended pun. “—and anyway, this car keeps looking like it’s in the process of running off onto the grass.”
Actually, he simply didn’t want to get there. His father’s ghost was to meet him? Would it be a translucent figure like the ones climbing on the statue?
I was only seven years old! he thought, with no conviction. It was thirty-three years ago! How can I—still—be to blame?
Still, he was profoundly sorry that he had let Elizalde talk him out of the preliminary drinks, and remotely glad that she was holding the gun.
“Okay.” Elizalde seemed subdued as she climbed out of the car, and the double slam of the doors rang hollowly in the quiet groves. “Do normal people see that crowd by the entrance?”
“No,” said Sullivan. “They’re just visible to specimens like you and me.”
Looking north, Sullivan could see the distant white letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign standing on the dark hills, and the words holy wood flickered through his mind. To the south across the stone-studded hillocky lawn, past the farthest palms, was the back wall of Paramount Studios, with the red Paramount logo visible on the water tower beyond the air-conditioning ducts.
“It’s…somewhere ahead of us,” said Sullivan, starting forward. He glanced to his left, remembering that Carl Switzer was buried right there by the road somewhere. Switzer had been “Alfalfa” in the old Our Gang comedies, and had been shot to death in January of ‘59. Alfalfa’s grave had been only five months old when Arthur Patrick Sullivan was buried, and the twins, big fans of the Our Gang shows, had found the still-bright marker while silently wandering around the grounds before their father’s graveside service. Neither of them had said anything as they had stared down at Switzer’s glassy-smooth stone marker. It had been obvious that anybody at all could die, at any time.
“This is very pretty,” said Elizalde, scuffing along next to him and holding Houdini’s plaster right hand like a flashlight.
“It’s morbid,” snapped Sullivan. “Burying a bunch of dead bodies, and putting a fancy marker over each one so the survivors will know where to go and cry. What if the markers got rearranged? You’d be weeping over some stranger. Not some stranger, even, some cast-off dead body of a stranger, like a pile of fingernail clippings or old shoes, or the dust from inside an electric razor. What’s the difference between coming out here to think about dead Uncle Irving, and thinking about him in your own living room? Okay, here you can sit on the grass and be only six feet above his inert old body. Would it be better if you could dig a hole, and sit only one foot above it?” He was shaking. “Everybody should be cremated, and the ashes should be tossed in the sea with no fanfare at all.”
“It’s a sign of respect,” said Elizalde angrily. “And it’s a real, tangible link. Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would we be if they had cremated Jesus?”
“I don’t know—we’d have the Ashtray of Turin.”
She swung Houdini’s plaster hand and hit Sullivan hard in the shoulder. One of the fingers flew off and bounced in the coarse green grass.
Sullivan had let out a sharp Hah! at the impact, and he sidestepped onto the grass to keep his balance. “Goddammit,” he whispered, rubbing his shoulder as he stepped back down to the asphalt, keeping away from her, “give me back the fucking .45, will you? If you go trying to make some theatrical gesture with that, you’ll kill someone.” He noticed the gap in the hand, and looked around until he spotted the finger. “Oh, good work,” he said, stepping across and bending to pick it up. “It didn’t half cost my dead sister and I any trouble to get hold of these things, go ahead and bust ’em up, by all means.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We can glue it. I’m tired, I didn’t mean it to be more than a tap. But you weren’t saying what you believed, just what you wished you believed—that dead people go away and stay away, canceled. Are these ghosts or not?”
He thought her question was rhetorical until she repeated it in an urgent whisper. Then he stopped fiddling with the plaster finger and looked ahead. “Uh,” he said, “my guess is ghosts.”
Three fat men in tuxedos were walking toward them, a hundred feet ahead, where the road was unpaved; the man in the middle had his arms around his companions’ shoulders, and they were all walking in step, but no dust at all was being kicked up, and their steps made no sounds in the still air. Their mouths gaped in wide, silent smiles.
“Let’s slant south, toward Paramount,” said Sullivan.
He and Elizalde set off diagonally across the grass to their right with a purposeful air.
The sun was low over the mausoleum along the distant Gower Street border of the cemetery—the shadows of the palm trees stretched for dozens of yards across the gold-glowing grass.
Griffith’s magic hour, Sullivan thought with a shiver.
Flat markers stippled the low luminous hills in meandering ranks, like stepping-stones, and some graves were bordered with ankle-high sections of scalloped pink concrete, and the interior space of these was consistently filled with broken white stones; a few, the graves of little children, had plastic dinosaurs and toy cars and miniature soldiers set up on the stones to make pitiful dioramas.
Mausoleums like ornate WPA powerhouse relay stations stood along the dirt road ahead of them, and the brassy sunlight shone on the wingless eagle atop the Harrison Gray Otis monument; Sullivan was sure that the eagle had had wings in 1959. The cypresses around them rustled in the gentle breeze and threw down dry leaves.
Sullivan and Elizalde had by now wandered into a marshy area, back by the corrugated-aluminum walls and broken windows of the Paramount buildings, that seemed to be all babies’ graves, the markers sunken and blurred with silt.
Houdini’s maimed hand was shaking in Elizalde’s fists. “We’ve passed those ghosts,” she whispered. “Let’s get to the lake.”
At that moment a wailing laugh erupted from somewhere far off among the trees and gravestones behind them. Elizalde’s free hand was cold and tight in Sullivan’s.
They hurried back to the dirt road, and over it, onto a descending slope of shadowed grass. Ahead of them was a long lake, with stone stairs at the north end and, at the south end, tall white pillars and a marble pedestal rising out of the dark water. A white sarcophagus lay on the pedestal.
“Douglas Fairbanks, Senior,” panted Sullivan as he and Elizalde hurried along the marge of the narrow lake.
Human shapes made out of dried leaves were dancing silently in the shadows of the stairs, and curled sections of dry palm fronds swam and bobbed their fibrous necks out on the dark face of the water.
“Just up the hill and across the next road,” Sullivan said, “is the other lake, the one my father—”
He couldn’t finish the sentence, and just pulled her along.