Snap, Crackle, and Pop, he thought now as he took a sip of his second cold beer. Manny, Moe, and Flapjack. Larry, Moe, and Culero. Sukie had called people culero sometimes—it meant, roughly, coward.
He picked up his spoon and dipped it into the hot menudo. Even the steam from it, sharp with garlic and onion and cilantro, was strengthening; in a few minutes he had eaten it all, chewed up every white rectangle of tripe and mopped up the last of the red, beefy broth with tortillas.
He wiped his forehead with the paper napkin and waved the second emptied bottle of beer at the waiter. He put it down and shook a cigarette out of the pack, and as he struck a match he noticed that the tin ashtray on the table had a crude felt-pen drawing of a skull in the dish of it, with, carefully lettered around the rim, the words L.A. CIGAR TOO TRAGICAL.
It was a palindrome—L.A. cigar both ways, with toot in the middle.
Startled an instant in advance, he dropped the burning match onto the drawn skull, and the ashtray glared for a moment with a silent puff of flame, as if someone had previously poured a film of high-proof brandy into it.
The flame was out instantly, and the faint whiff of…bacon?…was gone as soon as Sullivan caught a trace of it.
Suddenly he was nervous—but a moment later all that happened was that a car alarm started up in the lot behind the bar. Beep…beep…beep…He smiled wryly Que culero, he thought—but his hand was almost twitching with impatience for the third beer.
Then the bartender began clanging a spoon against a glass between the beats of the car horn: beep-clang-beep-clang-beep…
For a moment it was the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore…and with that the memories of his father had caught him.
You couldn’t count on motors, their father had told Sukie and Pete a hundred times, sitting over chili sizes at Ptomaine Tommy’s down on Broadway, or in line for the Cyclone Racer roller coaster way out at the Pike in Long Beach, or just driving the new Studebaker up Mulholland Drive along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains to Topanga Canyon and back. The camera had to be cranked at a steady speed even when you were crouched on a platform bolted to the front of a car spinning out around a turn, or on a boat in the Bering Sea when it was so cold that the oil in the camera was near to freezing solid. Some guys tried to use the second hand of a watch to keep rolling that foot of film per second, but Karl Brown told me the trick of humming the Anvil Chorus in your head—if you got that tune really tromping, they could swing you on a sling in a high wind from the top of a twenty-story building and you’d still have that crank turning sixteen frames a second as steady as a metronome in somebody’s parlor.
Their father had been Arthur Patrick Sullivan—known as A.P. or “Apie,” apparently because he liked to do feats of strength and had hair growing thickly on the backs of his shoulders—and he had started in the movie business in 1915, working as a cameraman and film technician in Cecil B. DeMille’s barn at Vine and Selma in Hollywood. His bosses in those early days had been DeMille, Jesse Lasky, and Samuel Goldfish, who was soon to change his name to Goldwyn—but the infant movie business was chaotic, and Apie Sullivan had eventually become a producer and director at 20th Century Fox. For a cresting decade or so he had made feature films with stars like Tyrone Power and Don Ameche and Alice Faye; but it had been obvious to the twins that he had been happiest in the days before sound stages and artificial set lighting. They’d say “We’re losing the light” when the sun would start to set, he had often told the twins, but that was Griffith’s magic hour, that hour when the sun was just over the trees, and the buildings and the actors would be lit from the side with that gold glow.
The 1920s had been their father’s magic hour.
By the time the twins were born, in 1952, the old man had been on his third marriage, had subsided into doing documentaries and freelance editing, and was supplementing his income by buying and selling real estate out in Riverside and Orange County; but he had never moved out of the old Spanish-style house in Brentwood, and he had sometimes hung out at the Hillcrest Country Club with Danny Kaye and George Jessel, and had been proud that he could still occasionally get jobs in show business for the children of various old friends.
The waiter brought the third Coors Light, and Pete took a long sip from the neck of the bottle. Drinking in the morning, he thought.
Beth, as Sukie had been known until college, had always claimed to remember their mother, who died a year after the twins birth. Pete had never believed her.
When the twins were seven, their father had got engaged to be married again. Kelley Keith had been thirty-three years old to their fathers sixty-one, but she was a genuine actress, having had a few supporting roles in films like We’re Not Married and Vampire Over London, and the twins had been impressed with her contemporary career as they had never been with their father’s old movies. And she had been slim and blond with a chipmunk overbite and laugh-crinkled eyes, and Pete had been desperate not to let Beth know that he had fallen in love—he was certain—with their stepmother-to-be.
The four of them had seemed, to the twins at least, to do everything together—wading in the tide pools at Morro Bay to find tiny octopuses and to nervously stick their bare toes into the clustered grasping fingers of sea anemones, hiking through the pine woods around their father’s cabin in Lake Arrowhead, having grand lunches at the giant-hat-shaped Brown Derby on Wilshire….Their father always ordered raw oysters and steak tartare, and kept promising the twins that they’d be getting new brothers and sisters before too long.
The wedding was held in April of 1959, at St. Alban’s Church on Hilgard. Sukie—Elizabeth—had been sulking for weeks and refused to be the flower girl, and in the end it had been Shirley Temple’s little girl, Lori Black, who carried the bouquet of lilacs. The reception was at Chasen’s, and Pete could still remember Andy Devine raucously singing “At the Codfish Ball.”
And then, one afternoon that summer, their father and his new bride had driven out to Venice Beach for a picnic. The twins had not been along for this outing. Their white-haired father had reportedly gone swimming, doing his always-self-consciously-athletic “Australian Crawl” way out past the surf line, and he had apparently gotten a stomach cramp. And he had drowned.
Pete tilted the bottle up for another slug of cold beer.
After their father’s death, Kelley Keith had just disappeared. She had simply packed up all her belongings and moved, and no one had been able to say where to.
Story of my life, Pete Sullivan thought now with no particular bitterness. Later he’d heard a rumor that she had gone to Mexico with a lot of their father’s money. Then he’d heard that she had got in a car crash down there and died.
And so the twins had been put into the first of what was to be a succession of foster homes. And eventually there had been Hollywood High, and City College and no money, and then the jobs with deLarava.
DeLarava probably has the license number of my van, Sullivan thought now as he swirled the last inch of beer in the bottle. Could she somehow have the cops looking for it?