Bradshaw would thus get Edison. And Edison could monitor Bradshaw’s body during the long nights aboard the boat, so that Bradshaw himself could sleep, and dream—just as Kootie had been able to sleep while the old ghost walked and spoke and looked out for him.
I’ve never eaten a ghost, Bradshaw thought; well, why would I, none of the average run of ghosts could responsibly watch the store while I slept. But Thomas Edison could.
Thomas Edison is probably the only ghost that I’d do this to get, he thought, and certainly the only very powerful one I’ll ever get a shot at; the only one that could let me safely dream. I wouldn’t…sell my soul, ever, except for this. It’s God’s fault, really, for putting this within my reach.
He remembered the boy saying, I wont be any trouble, mister.
Bradshaw stood over the snoring boy, staring at the pulse under his ear; and then he looked down at his right hand, which was gripping the steak knife.
For the first time since his death in 1975, his hand was trembling.
HUNCHING ALONG through the shadows under Paramount Studios’ corrugated aluminum back wall that was streaked with rust stains and gap-toothed with broken windows, Sullivan thought of the broad sunny lanes and parking lots and white monolithic soundstages on the other side. When he had last been on the Paramount lot, in about 1980, there had even been a dirt-paved street of Old West buildings under a vast open-air mural of a blue sky.
“We made a hundred and four pictures there in 1915,” said his father’s tiny voice in his ear, “back when it was Lasky, DeMille, and Goldfish in charge, and we’d moved everything here from the barn at Vine and Selma. Sixteen frames a second, the old Lumiere standard. Now because of sound reproduction it’s twenty-four frames a second, ninety feet a minute, and nobody needs to know how to read in order to see a movie, and the purity of the silent silver faces is gone. For us, the graveyard extends all the way south to Melrose.”
Sullivan glanced back through the trees toward the Douglas Fairbanks lake. “Keep your voice down, Dad.”
“Keep your voice down,” whispered Elizalde, who of course couldn’t hear what his father was saying.
Gravestones stood in thickly clustered ranks outside the Beth Olam Mausoleum, and Sullivan felt as though he and Elizalde and his father were hiding behind a crowd. The shadowy human-shaped figures that stood among the stones seemed to be facing away almost vigilantly, as though guarding Arthur Patrick Sullivan’s retreat, and the multitudinous bass humming was louder.
“You got a lot of friends here, Dad?” Pete Sullivan whispered.
“Oh, sure,” said the voice in his ear. “Go up to the doors there, and rap shave-and-a-haircut.”
“Just a sec,” Sullivan told Elizalde, and then he sprinted up the steps to the locked door of the mausoleum and rapped on the glass: knock, knock, knock-knock, knock
From inside came the answering knock, knock.
Elizalde was smiling and shaking her head as he rejoined her and they began walking north along the broad straight lane; receding perspective made the curbs seem to converge in the distance, and on the blue hills above the implicit intersection point stood once again the familiar white letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign. Why, Sullivan thought, can’t I get away from it?
“It’s a gravestone, too,” said Sullivan’s father.
For a minute they trudged along in silence through the gathering twilight. A couple of cars were parked ahead, and real people were opening the doors and climbing in; Sullivan no longer felt that he and Elizalde were conspicuous intruders.
As they walked up to Bradshaw’s car Sullivan thought he heard laughter in the remote distance, but there was no triumph anymore in the cawing; and, from some radio or tape player a bit closer, he heard the opening notes of Al Jolson’s “California Here I Come.”
I been away from you a long time…Sullivan thought.
They climbed in and closed the doors gently. Sullivan started the engine, and as they drove out onto Santa Monica Boulevard and turned right, making oncoming cars swerve because of the way the Nova’s skewed front end seemed to be about to cross the divider line, Sullivan said, impulsively, “Dad, I don’t know if you knew it or not, but I didn’t swim out, to help you.”
Elizalde was looking out the window at the Chinese restaurant they were passing.
“I knew it,” buzzed the gnat in his ear. “And we both know it wouldn’t have done any good if you had swum out, and we both know that isn’t an excuse you’ll look at.”
Sullivan hiked up a pack of Marlboros from the side pocket of his jacket and bit one cigarette out of it. “Did Sukie—Elizabeth—tell you that Kelley Keith is gunning for you?”
“I knew she’d be waiting for me. So I came ashore hidden inside a sea monster. Grounded and damped to a flat magnetic line.”
Sullivan pushed in the cigarette-lighter knob. “What…brings you to town?” he asked, unable to keep the defensive flippancy out of his tone. He didn’t look at Elizalde.
“Why, I got a free ticket to the coast,” droned the gnat’s voice, possibly trying to imitate Sullivan’s tone, “and I thought I’d look you kids up.” The voice was silent, then said, “A big one was switched on here, and all of us were sympathetically excited by it. I came out of the ocean, after God knows how long; to find that the broken stragglers of Elizabeth had joined me, and that you had never—” The voice lapsed again.
“Had never what, Dad?” Sullivan asked softly, looking almost across Elizalde to see where he was going through the windshield. “Stopped running? Away from the surf, that would be, Angelica.” His smile was stiff. “I didn’t want to look back, that’s for sure. ‘I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Dusk: Be soon,’ remember that, Dad? Francis Thompson poem. I’ve always tried to…what, to have nothing permanent, leave nothing behind that would, like, hang around. I always hated things to be…etched in stone.”
“Uh,” said Elizalde hesitantly, “I think the car’s on fire.”
Smoke was trickling, then billowing, from the slots on the top of the dashboard. “Shit,” said Sullivan—he snatched the cigarette lighter out of its slot, and blinked for a moment at the flaming, gummy wad on the end of it; then he gripped the wheel with his free fingers while he cranked down the driver’s-side window with his left hand, and he pitched the burning thing out onto the street: “That was the cigarette lighter, wasn’t it?” he asked angrily.
Elizalde bent over to look at the still-smoking ring in the dashboard. “Yes,” she said. “No—it’s a cigar lighter. Wait a minute—altogether it says, L.A.CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL. What the hell does that mean?”
Sullivan waved caramel-reeking smoke away from his face, and he was remembering the tin ashtray that had briefly burst into flame at Los Tres Jesuses on Wednesday morning. “Let’s remember to ask Nicky.”
“Freeway coming up,” said Elizalde.
AND SO, thought Nicholas Bradshaw as he tucked the still-clean knife back in the kitchen drawer, I don’t get the renewal, I don’t get a rebirth. I have heard the candy-colored clowns they call the sandmen singing each to each—I do not think that they will sing to me.