Undercurrent

kelp. It was everything you could want in the way of scenic splendor-or it would have been if there were no oil slicks and garbage dumps and beer cans and toilet paper and cardboard boxes and condoms and litter bags; if humanity had not spread the diseased wastes of its 'civilization' like a plague over the land…

Beach Road was a narrow paved lane that turned off Highway 1 six miles below Cypress Bay and dropped on a sharp incline toward the ocean. Three or four bungalows and a small trailer encampment were interspersed among dense stands of pine. Rural mailboxes on wooden poles lined the road, but the largest number was 27 and the phone directory had listed R. Dancer at 31. I drove to the end of the lane-a fifth of a mile from the high-way-and found myself on a sort of convex bluff face, half-mooned at the edge by low white guardrails mounted with reflectors. Over on the left was an old Ford wood sided station wagon, drawn up near the head of a set of wood- railed steps leading down to the sea; the number of the mailbox there was 31.

I parked in the dappled shade of one of the large cypress growing there and walked to the stairs, the clean, pungent smell of salt in my nostrils. Once there, I could see the dwelling built on a long sand-and-rock shelf some fifty feet below; the shelf tapered downward into an irregular-shaped, driftwood-strewn beach bounded on both sides by projections formed of a series of eroded, bird-limed boulders-like natural stone jetties extending into the Pacific. The structure was a kind of shack, heavily weathered, fashioned of redwood shingles and beams that had withstood the elements for a long while, but which would not withstand them a great deal longer. It was raised off the shelf on concrete blocks, with gap-toothed lattice board to cover the open spacing; a tired-looking catwalk was attached to the right wall, leading onto a sort of sun porch across the rear width. There was a short walk in front, log-railed like the catwalk and porch, which led from the bottom of the steps to the shack's door; the property was otherwise unadorned, save for a carpeting of sand and small bits of driftwood that had been blown back against the bluff by the wind.

I went down the wooden steps, hanging onto the handrail and moving carefully. The angle of them was not steep, but there was a thin coating of sand on each, and the boards were old and loose. An exposed network of water piping ran down the side of the bluff alongside the steps, and there were power lines that looped down from overhead. I wondered irrelevantly if Dancer's phone had been disconnected because he could not or would not pay his bill.

When I reached the bottom of the steps and started along the sandy walk, I could hear the steady, rhythmic clacking of typewriter keys from inside the shack. I looked for a doorbell, did not find one, and rapped sharply on the heavy door. The typewriter maintained its rhythm. There was a window beside the door, but jalousied shutters were drawn over it and I could not see inside. I knocked again, loudly this time.

Another ten seconds went by, and I was getting ready to knock a third time; but then the keys fell silent and I could hear steps approaching within. The door opened jerkily, under an irritated hand, and I was looking at a thin guy in his early fifties dressed in an old pullover sweater and blue Levi's and white canvas sneakers. He had a shaggy mane of dust-colored hair, clean-shaven if faintly hollowed cheeks, a wryly crooked mouth, and a long Grecian nose marbled by whiskey veins. His eyes were a liquidy blue-gray under thick dust-colored brows that formed lopsided, inverted V's on his forehead, and they were not particularly friendly at the moment.

He looked me over, decided I was nobody he knew, and said, 'Well? What is it?'

'Are you Russell Dancer-the writer?'

'No, I'm Russell Dancer-the hack. There's a hell of a big difference. What do you want?'

'I'd like to talk to you, if you wouldn't mind.'

'I would mind. I'm working right now.'

'It won't take very long.'

'You wouldn't be a goddamn bill collector, would you?'

'No,' I said. 'I'm a private detective.'

He stared at me. 'A what?'

'A private detective.'

'Are you putting me on?'

I got my wallet out of my coat pocket and opened it to the photostat of my license and let him look at it. He read it over twice, ran a prominently veined hand through his shaggy hair, and said, 'Well, I'll be damned. You sure as hell don't look like a private dick.'

'What does a private dick look like? Rex Hannigan?'

He gave me the stare again. 'You remember Rex Hannigan?'

'Sure. Why not?'

'I haven't written a Hannigan story in twenty years.'

'I read one a couple of weeks ago.'

'Where?'

'In a copy of Dime Detective.'

'How did you come across that?'

'I collect pulp magazines.'

'A private eye that collects pulp magazines,' Dancer said. He shook his head wonderingly, but his eyes were friendlier now. 'And the first person I've met in fifteen years who admits to reading the Hannigan stories. Christ, most people won't admit to reading anything I ever wrote; who wants to confess that he wastes his time on hack work?'

'I don't think Hannigan was hack work,' I said.

'No? Well, Hannigan was the product of a young snot who thought he had some revolutionary ideas about detective fiction that would shake up the industry. The new Hammett, the new Chandler. Yeah. Then he woke up one morning with the truth in his mouth like the taste of vomit: his ideas were old and imitative, and he was not anywhere near as good as he thought he was. After he got over the shock of that, he sold himself out and he sold out what there was of Hannigan for the almighty dollar. He became a prolific hack and he moved to California-it might have been anywhere in the world-and he lived unhappily thereafter. End of story.'

'Well,' I said.

'Yeah,' he said. His mouth turned wolfish. 'So what brings a private eye to an ex-creator of private eyes? Don't tell me my former wife is trying to stir up trouble again? The bitch likes to put the shaft in my behind whenever she can, but this would be going a little far-even for her.'

'It's nothing like that.'

'You might as well come in and tell me what it is, then. The longer you're here, the longer I'm going to believe you were actually here.'

He turned, and I followed him inside and down a short hallway with an open kitchen on one side, and on the other, two closed doors that would lead to a bedroom and a bathroom. The entire rear half of the dwelling was a single room, and its end wall was mostly glass that looked out on the sun porch and the Pacific beyond; on the right, a closed door gave access to the porch. The room itself was chaotic. Unpainted tier-type bookshelves-the kind you put together yourself-covered the right-hand wall, but there were more books and magazines strewn on the floor in front of it and around it than there were on the shelves. Against the other wall was a long, narrow redwood plank mounted on two old-fashioned beer kegs; on the plank was a portable typewriter, a stack of manuscript pages in a wire basket, and a farrago of pens, pencils, sheets of paper, and overflowing ashtrays. The remainder of the room's appointments included an old mohair couch, a wicker armchair with an attached footrest, and a stack of cardboard boxes which seemed to serve as filing cabinets.

Dancer said over his shoulder, 'Some place, isn't it? Writers are slobs; not Bohemians, just slobs.'

I thought of my own apartment in San Francisco; writers were not the only ones who were slobs. I said, 'It's not so bad.'

'My ex-wife couldn't stand it. She didn't like anything about this place. To tell you the truth, I don't like it much myself any more. When I bought it in '52, I thought it was arty as hell; you know, the writer living in a beach shack and all that horseshit. Now the sound of the sea gives me a perpetual headache and disturbs my concentration. I'm getting old, I guess-old and tired.'

And bitter, I thought. But I could understand some of the way he felt, some of the reasons why. There was a certain loneliness in him, too-the kind that came as the result of vanished dreams and painful understanding of individual limitations-and loneliness is a corroding substance inside a man. I found myself liking him in a kindred sort of way-and because he seemed honest; in a world filled with phonies, you did not meet many honest men.

He asked, 'How about a beer?'