“Liar!” bursts out Wylie. He rounds on the gaping bystanders. “Don’t you believe him! This here’s Shorty McAdoo! I know him! Know him good as anything!”
“You’re mistaken,” Chance says. “Shorty McAdoo is dead and this man is an impostor.” For the first time he looks directly at Shorty. “Stand aside,” he says coolly, “let me pass.”
“Every day he waits at that gate for a word and you drive on by! He ain’t waiting no more!” Wylie screeches.
McAdoo grabs Wylie’s arm, pulling him up short. “You listen to me,” he says with urgency. “Take hold of yourself. I told you. This ain’t got nothing to do with you. I come for my say. That’s all – a say. I can do my own talking without help from you. Go home.”
“Once more,” says Chance. “Stand aside.”
McAdoo shakes his head. “You’ve had one walk over me. You ain’t going to get two. Not until I’m finished.”
Chance gives Fitz a sign and he slips between them. McAdoo runs his eyes up and down him. “So you’re the big dog.”
“That’s right.”
“Cock your leg and piss on somebody else,” says McAdoo and moves to step around him. As he does, Fitz grabs him by the lapels of the black suit, jerking him off his feet, shaking him, snapping the old white head back and forth in a blur. McAdoo kicks at him, battering the Irishman’s shins, boots thudding against fenceposts. That’s it. Flying head, flying feet, everything a blur.
Something cracks, hard and sharp like fracturing bone, and Fitz sways with the old man slumped unconscious in his fists. A woman screams, a long aria of terror. A thought lurches in my mind. He’s snapped the old man’s neck, like a dry brittle stick broken over a knee. But then Fitz’s eyes roll upward, trying to locate the source of his own death, the neat black hole drilled square in the middle of his forehead. He falls, a big tree axed, crashes to the carpet, dragging McAdoo down with him.
Wylie is walking forward jerkily, his arm held stiff and straight at shoulder height, my pistol on the end of it, pointed at Chance. I hear people running, feet pounding, there are more screams, shouts for the police, but they reach me from a far way off, a place divorced from this moment. A fine mist of smoke hovers under the awning; the thick oily smell of a discharged weapon startles my nostrils.
Chance stands, a prisoner in the dock awaiting judgement, his lips moving. What looks like prayer is really only Chance repeating, over and over, “Fitz, Fitz, Fitz, Fitz…”
“Wylie!” I scream, the name tearing my throat. Recognizing the voice, his face veers to me, the movement tortured. “Christ, Wylie, let him go,” I beg. “Don’t do it. Don’t.”
Pronouncing the last don’t, I understand Wylie is looking at me with cold hatred, that my own death is being debated in his slow, clumsy mind at this instant.
The wailing of a police siren saves me. Wylie swings his head to the sound, swings back to Chance, decision written on his face. “You-you-you ought to talked to him,” he says, stumbling over the words. “If you’d just only talked to him. We would been in Canada now. We would been in Canada… happy.”
Chance’s face wears the blank look it wore months ago at supper as he tore the bread, eating like an animal. When Wylie’s pistol rises up so do Chance’s arms, not in surrender, but in an extravagant gesture of welcome.
The bullet buckles him as if two strong hands from behind had ripped down hard on his shoulders. His legs give way, sinking him to his knees, a flower of blood spreading vivid petals on his starched shirt front. Wylie takes two steps forward, shoves the gun against his chest and fires, the flash scorching Chance’s linen.
By the time I reach Chance, Wylie has dropped the gun and is gazing at the rain as it drums down harder and harder, draping a silver blanket on either side of the awning, enclosing the four of us in a lonely tent. I hear its wild thrashing on the canvas roof and, underneath that, the keening of police sirens.
As I prop Chance’s head in my arms he snatches me by the nape of my neck, pulling my face within inches of his with a brutal, frantic strength.
“Harry?” he whispers.
I struggle to pull my face away from the dire mask confronting me, but the grip is unbreakable.
“Harry,” he gasps, “when we talked… you see… I could not bring myself to tell you everything.”
“What? What couldn’t you tell me?”
“The consequences of the truth.” His breath rasps short and quick in my face. “Artists… visionaries… they always find a way to kill us, Harry. Always.”
“Who?” I shout down at him. “Who are they?”
He is beyond speech. He makes a gesture to the wall of rain, to whomever, whatever, he imagines lurks behind it. The canvas rips, shreds in the wind with a wrenching, desolate sound as I watch his eyes darken, as he struggles for his last breath, as the open pit of his mouth slowly fills with blood, as the frothy pink liquid spills down my arm, marking me.
31
I end with a list of names as I began.
Shorty McAdoo, unconscious, was taken by ambulance to hospital. Six hours later, he slipped off the ward and disappeared. I never saw him again. Shorty on the run, just as he had been as a boy. Making for the Medicine Line. I like to believe he crossed it one last time.
Wylie hanged himself in jail. They buried him in the potter’s field Shorty and he had saved his brother from.
Two weeks after the premiere I said goodbye to Rachel at the train station. She had come to see my mother and me off to Saskatoon, our fares paid with the five-hundred-dollar cheque Chance had written me as a settling of accounts. A Santa Ana was blowing, the hot wind whipping her electric black hair around her head. The locomotive stood impatiently panting steam while she kissed my mother farewell. When we shook hands she said, “Reconsider, Harry. I can get you a job at Metro. I’ve got pull there.”
Grit and cinders were flying in the wind. I knew I was done with Hollywood. I shook my head.
“Maybe it’s best,” she said, tugging down the hem of her skirt against the Santa Ana’s ferocity. “Maybe this isn’t the place for you.”
And she was right. Like Shorty McAdoo, I didn’t belong there.
The conductor was calling us aboard. As we stepped up into the railway car she cried out, “Don’t be a stranger, Harry! Write me!”
Pressed against the window, my mother and I didn’t take our eyes from Rachel until the train left her behind, waving.
I never did write to Rachel Gold. A couple of months after I’d settled back in Saskatoon, I landed a job managing a movie theatre. I’ve been there almost thirty years. Funny, isn’t it? Harry Vincent still in the picture business. In 1925 I put a down payment on a little house overlooking the river which runs through the city. My mother lived with me in this house for ten years, until she died in February of 1935.
I never married. It isn’t that I’ve been carrying a torch all these years. I remember being a rookie at the studio, Rachel laughing and showing me a picture of herself in an old central-casting book. It was from the days when she was a bit actress, before she became a scriptwriter. The photograph was of a very young woman, but it was still Rachel. She had a knowing look in her eye.
Later, I pinched the book, took it home, and cut her picture out of it. I discovered it in my wallet a couple of years after I moved back to Saskatoon. Pictures on cheap paper don’t wear well. I could hardly make out her face. During one of my walks by the river I dropped it into the water. I have no more idea where Rachel Gold ended up than I do where that photograph did. Both moved out of view.
I accept that. Living beside the river has taught me something about change. Paved white with snow and ice in winter, slack and brown in summer, the river is never the same. As a boy, I had rushed down to it only in its moments of crisis, when it ripped apart and roared, shattered while I stood on the bank, shaking with excitement. The apocalypse has its attractions.