white hair. The yellow teeth grind the bit despairingly while a grass-green slobber bubbles over the lips. The legs are scarred; the hooves cracked, broken, spreading, pie-plates of horn.
“You leave Shorty alone. You made him enough trouble.”
“Where’d the horse come from, Wylie?”
The question distracts him. He thinks before answering. “Shorty ain’t too restful lately. Many a times he leaves his bunk and goes to night-walking – he won’t let me go along. I says he’s going to founder in the dark and break a leg but he don’t listen. Three mornings in a row he comes back and says he seen a horse a-wandering up and down the roads. It don’t sound likely. I never seen no horse by day. Then, first light, one morning he comes along a- leading this here old horse. Somebody turned him loose, Shorty says. Don’t want to pay his feed bill.”
“I didn’t come to make Shorty trouble,” I say. “I just came to see how he is.”
Wylie shifts in the saddle. The old horse stands like a statue. Wylie casts his eyes anxiously toward the horizon like a man seeking the exit of a burning theatre.
“Where is he, Wylie?”
“He got enough trouble without you,” says Wylie. “Shorty boughten himself a new black suit. Every day he puts it on and goes to say his say. Alls he wants is a word. But they don’t let him get close to that man. ‘Move along,’ they say. Shorty says, ‘They making a pitcher on me. I got a right.’ ‘Yeah and I’m the Queen of Siam, look at my yeller tits,’ they says and shoves him on. I put a poke in that feller’s eye when he said that and now Shorty says I can’t come along no more. Keep to home, he says. I’m a-keeping but it ain’t proper what they doing to him. Old Shorty standing outside that gate in his boughten suit waiting for that man.”
“Listen, Wylie,” I say, “there’s nobody for Shorty to see. They’re away shooting the picture. On location. There’s nothing he can do now. It’s finished. You tell Shorty that. You tell him it’s gone too far to stop. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. There’s no changing it now.”
“He’s sitting on the step of a morning, dogged out. I say, ‘You got to go night-travelling, ride that horse, Shorty, hold to your strength for waiting by that gate.’ But Shorty he won’t ride this horse.”
“Ask Shorty to take you to Canada. Tell him you want to go.”
“You ain’t getting rid of us that easy,” says Wylie. His face is a hard white plaster splendour. “Somebody got to talk to him. He’s Shorty McAdoo.”
Farnum has stopped buying my scripts. He says I’ve lost my way, that it isn’t up to him to support a sermon- writer. For weeks my savings have been going to pay my mother’s bills at the Mount of Olives Rest Home. I have to stoop to taking work as an extra. It’s a few dollars and the studios supply a boxed lunch. Then I get a job on a picture about the French Revolution that almost qualifies as acting. A revolution requires mobs of the convincingly crushed and downtrodden and my lameness makes me a natural for a
When I get out of bed at four o’clock the morning of my debut, I don’t feel at all well. In costuming and make- up the feeling grows worse. The girl rubbing grime into my face remarks how hot I am. I am, and then again I’m not. One second my scanty beggar’s rags are as stifling as a winter overcoat and the next I am shivering and my teeth are chattering. My legs ache. The scene is to be filmed at dawn, on a set with a cobbled street and a Parisian tavern. After standing for an hour waiting for props to deliver the aristocrat’s coach my bones feel tender and bruised. A slow stain of misery seeps through me; something is putting brutal thumbs to the back of my eyeballs.
I get the call, the coach has arrived. I wade through harsh, raucous light which skids off the papier-mache tiles of the tavern roof and into my aching eyes. The director booms at me through a megaphone, the coach lurches around the corner and brakes dramatically at the tavern door. When I hold out my hand and cry for alms, I can feel fingernails scraping my throat.
At a touch of the cane I topple. Acting is not required. However, I collapse on my back, not my face. Somebody drags me to my feet as the director barks for another take. The coach circles the set and rattles at me again, four horses, four madly spinning wheels. The tip of the cane thuds into my chest; I reel down into cold, glutinous muck. But I’ve forgotten my close-up. The director rages through his megaphone. Where is bewilderment? Where is wounded pride?
We do it again. We do it four more times. And each time is a greater failure than the last.
Someone takes me back to costuming and strips the soaked and filthy rags from my body. Somebody else climbs into them and rushes out the door and into my part while I sit on a chair naked, shivering. People bustle in and out of the room, the noise makes my head hurt. At last, I order my legs to stand and begin to put on my street clothes. With one hand I steady myself against the wall while the other painfully fumbles with buttons. I don’t try to tie my shoes, just shuffle out, laces dragging.
I board a streetcar. At first I hear people whispering all around me, even though the car is nearly empty, then I realize it is the hissing of the tramlines overhead. I’ve never been so tired in my life. I keep dozing off and waking, disoriented, whenever the streetcar bangs to a stop. The people boarding move in slow motion, sway sickeningly up the aisle. In my desperation to get home I have to stop myself from shouting, “Get a move on!” Watching them lurch unsteadily up the aisle, the hot California sunshine pressing against the glass of the windows, I am on the verge of puking at my feet.
So I close my eyes, struggling to hold the nausea at bay, and miss my stop. Walking the two blocks back to my apartment, everything seems bursting bright: the grass of the lawns a vitriolic, throbbing green, the violent blue of the sky shifting and tilting, making the earth do the same beneath my feet. I stop and vomit beside a fire hydrant. “Drunk,” a passing woman says disgustedly.
The longest walk of my life and the stairs in my building the longest climb. I have to rest on each landing, clinging to the banister. My feet are leaden and awkward; they fumble and paw the stair-treads. The lock refuses my key; I have to brace my right hand with my left to insert it. The light swims giddily in my head, I have to draw the curtains in my apartment. But the darkness whirlpools, a vortex sprinkled with sparks makes a whooshing sound like a firehose. I sit on the sofa, clammy sweat soaking my shirt. Now and then I open my eyes and hold up my hands, not sure if they really belong to me, watch the madman tremble, the dim light between splayed fingers shaking in sympathetic agitation.
I sit like this for hours, my head flung back against the top of the sofa. Every time I try to move, I smell and taste my own vomit, the ceiling and floor slant or rear dizzily.
It isn’t until I find my way to the kitchen that I recognize my thirst. Lowering my head to the gushing tap I gulp an icy flood until my insides turn cold, until the sweat on my skin shrinks back into my pores. Propped against the sink, water-logged and dazed, I stare at the clock on the wall. It says five o’clock – that isn’t possible.
I tear off my clothes and burrow into my bed, weighted with water, weighted with an overwhelming need for sleep. Sunlight shimmers in a slit of the curtains like a candle flame. The flame slowly wanes and I sleep, burning.
I wake with a start. The sunlight no longer stands in the slit of the curtain, the candle has been snuffed. But light is coming from somewhere else; lifting my head I locate a crack of it under the bedroom door, drop back on the pillow. It feels late, the hushed, lonely silence of three o’clock in the morning. Can I have slept ten hours? I feel better, but not well. There’s a nasty, scummy taste in my mouth, like I’ve licked an ashtray clean. The fever is still there, but nearly burned out, restless and fitful, a dying fire. When I move my legs over the sheets, searching for a patch of coolness, they feel strange, weak, the muscles as reliable as ropes of water.
No, I’m not well. Beyond the door I can hear the whispering of the streetcar again. A tramline running in my apartment? Lines overhead, suspended in darkness, rustling with a low insistent rumour. Whisper, whisper, whisper. Monotonous. Was that a word? I thought I heard a word. Now the trolley stops. To take someone on. Who?
Who? Somebody is out there.
“Rachel?”
A mocking voice, a man’s voice. “Rachel?”
It’s not sickness now, just my heart drumming. I pull myself up in bed. Night and a stranger in your house.
“Who is it?”
