The bar girl brought our martinis, and we went on from there.
Trial
Published in The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015).
It had rained in the canyon during the night. The world had the colored freshness of a butterfly just emerged from the chrysalis stage, and trembling in the sun. Actual butterflies danced in flight across free spaces of air or played a game of tag without any rules among the branches of the trees. At this height there were pines and giant firs among the planted eucalyptus trees.
I parked my car where I usually parked it, in the driveway of the Trumbull estate, just inside the gates. The posts, rather the gates had rusted and fallen from their hinges. Trumbull had died in Europe, and his country house stood empty since the war. It was one reason I visited the canyon: nobody lived there.
Until now, at least. The window of the stone gatehouse which overlooked the driveway had been broken the last time I’d seen it. Now it was patched with cardboard. Through a hole punched in the middle of the cardboard, bright emptiness watched me. A human eye’s bright emptiness.
“Hello.”
My voice was loud in the stillness. A jaybird erupted from a red-berried bush, sailed up to the limb of a tree and yelled back curses at me. A dozen chickadees flew out of the oak and settled in another, more remote. The door of the gatehouse creaked, and a man came out.
He wore faded jeans, a brown horsehide jacket, and a smile. He walked mechanically, as if his body was not at home in the world. The very sound of his feet on the gravel was harsh and clumsy. Perhaps he was used to pavements.
“Hello,” I said again.
He came right up to me without answering. I saw that his smile was not a greeting, or any kind of a smile that you could respond to. It was the stretched blind grimace of a man who hated the sun. His bright and empty eyes looked at me as if he hated me because I was under the sun.
But all he said was: “Bud, you can’t park here. This driveway is in use.”
“Who’s using it?”
He shrugged awkwardly. One of his hands was in his jacket pocket. His other arm hung stiff as a board at his side:
“I got no instructions to answer questions. The question is, what you think you’re doing here? This is private property, all the way down to the highway. You’re trespassing.”
“I know that. I knew the Trumbulls at one time. Miss Trumbull sold the property?”
“Looks like it, don’t it?”
“To you?”
“Not to me. Listen, bud, you admit you’re trespassing. Why don’t you beat it now?”
I was on the point of complying. I had no right there, though over the years I’d established what I thought of as squatter’s rights. But he said one word too many:
“Beat it before I get rough.”
The hair on the back of my neck hadn’t bristled since the war. I could feel it rise like iron filings magnetized by his smile.
Winnipeg, 1929
Published in The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015).
Editor’s Preface
Kenneth Millar, raised in Canada, moved to Southern California in 1946. There, for two and a half decades, under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald, he wrote books involving California detective Lew Archer – books that reached the bestseller lists in 1969.
Macdonald’s popular breakthrough coincided with a re-newed interest by Canadians in their heritage and identity, and a renaissance in Canadian letters. New voices from up north (Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Alice Munro) were being heard down in the States and around the world.
Ross Macdonald’s was a Canadian voice, too. Ken Millar though Lew Archer, like his author, looked at California through Canadian eyes. The Archer books were filled with Canadian references; some even had Canadian content.
In the 1970s, Millar yearned to write a book (whether fiction or nonfiction) that would deal explicitly with his Canadian background. He mulled an autobiographical family history that would trace the Millar roots from Galashiels, Scotland, to southern Ontario, to Southern California. He worked on a couple of novel plots set in or near Winnipeg in the 1920s, where he’d attended private school. Millar even considered having Lew Archer discover that the detective himself had been born in Canada.
Reluctance to deal in print with still-painful personal memories, many pressing distractions, and finally illness prevented Macdonald from writing any of those books.
Winnipeg, 1929 is two tantalizing fragments of one such work that might have been. Penned in ballpoint in one of Millar’s notebooks, these give a fictional glimpse – drawn closely from life – of a smart and vulnerable lad much like the young Ken Millar, who also journeyed alone by train to Manitoba in the 1920s, to be placed in the care of an aunt and uncle he’d never met.
I
The streetcar ride from the school to my aunt’s apartment on Broadway was like a journey from one planet to another, from Mars to Venus, say. The school was partly religious and partly military. Aunt Lola’s apartment was neither. There were pictures on the walls of her big dining room, not all of them reproductions, some of them nudes. Lola herself wore deep rich autumn colors most of the time. Most of the time her face had a cold look, as if she anticipated a hard and early winter. Once or twice in the short period I had been with her, her eyes had thawed and I could see the flickering heat behind them.
One of those times had occurred the week before, on the day I arrived in Winnipeg from the east. She was waiting for me when I stepped off the train. Uncle Ned took my solitary suitcase, and Aunt Lola put her arm around me. Then she held my face between her hands. Her eyes were dark and bright.
“You’re your father’s boy, aren’t you? Did you know your father’s coming to Winnipeg to see you?”
“No.”
“How long is it since you’ve seen your father?”
“I don’t remember, Aunt Lola.”
“Has it been so long?”
“I don’t remember.”
There was a squeak of protest in my voice. I tried to swallow it. Adults liked happy thoughts and smiling faces.
Lola slapped me lightly with her gloved hand. “Don’t keep repeating yourself. I heard you the first time. How old are you now?”
“Thirteen.”
She drew her face together in a grimace which made her look a little like a bulldog and made me wonder if she was in pain. “That’s an unlucky number, Robert. If anybody asks you, say you’re fourteen.”
“Even at school?”
“We’re not talking about school. We’re talking about when you’re with me. The number between twelve and fourteen has always brought me bad luck. Isn’t that right, Ned?”
“I guess so.”
“You know damn well so.”
Uncle Ned let out a short angry laugh. “I know that we were married in nineteen thirteen, if that’s what you’re talking about.”
“That isn’t funny,” she said.
Her voice was quiet, barely audible among the station noises. Its effect on Uncle Ned surprised me. He hung his head and looked down at the platform.
“I want you to take it back,” she said.
“There’s nothing to take back. I was thinking about my bad luck when they sent me over to France.”
Lola accepted his obscure apology, though it sounded far-fetched to me. I had had some experience of broken marriages, and it made me wonder what was happening to theirs. And I made a sudden inarticulate decision to avoid the middle ground between them if I could. This marriage was the kind of game that nobody won, but it fed like gang war on the spectators.