A Graveyard for Lunatics

shut, but you could see shadows inside the glass. And then the doors opened and two or three people stepped out. In the middle was a tall, burly man, laughing, eyes shut, head back to the sky, shoulders quivering with his merriment. His eyes were slits, he was so happy. He was taking a deep breath, almost his last, of life.

?You know him?? asked Maggie.

I peered down into this small half-dark, half-lit cave in the earth.

?Arbuthnot.?

I touched the glass as one touches a crystal ball, reading no future, only pasts with the color leached out.

?Arbuthnot. Dead, the same month you shot this film.?

Maggie cranked backward and started over. The three men came out laughing again and Arbuthnot wound up grimacing into her camera on that long-forgotten and incredibly happy noon.

Maggie saw something in my face. ?Well? Spit it out.?

?I saw him this week,? I said.

?Bosh. You been smoking those funny cigars??

Maggie moved three more frames through. Arbuthnot raised his head higher into an almost raining sky.

And now Arbuthnot was calling and waving to someone out of sight.

I took a chance. ?In the graveyard, on Halloween night, there was a wire-frame papier-mache scarecrow with his face.?

Now Arbuthnot?s Duesenberg was at the curb. He shook hands with Manny and Groc, promising them happy years. Maggie did not look at me, but only at the dark-light dark-light pictures jumping rope below.

?Don?t believe anything on Halloween night.?

?Some other people saw. Some ran scared. Manny and others have been walking on land mines for days.?

?Bosh, again,? Maggie snorted. ?What else is new? You may have noticed I stay in the projection room or up here where the air?s so thin they get nosebleeds climbing up. That?s why I like loony Fritz. He shoots until midnight, I edit until dawn. Then we hibernate. When the long winter ends each day at five, we rise, timing ourselves to the sunset. One or two days a week, you will also have noticed, we make our pilgrimage to the commissary lunch to prove to Manny Leiber we?re alive.?

?Does he really run the studio??

?Who else??

?I dunno. I just get a funny feeling in Manny?s office. The furniture looks unused. The desk is always clean. There?s a big white telephone in the middle of the desk, and a chair behind the desk that?s twice the size of Manny Leiber?s bottom. He?d look like Charlie McCarthy in it.?

?He does act like hired help, doesn?t he? It?s the telephone, I suppose. Everyone thinks films are made in Hollywood. No, no. That telephone is a direct line to New York City and the spiders. Their web crosses the country to trap flies here. The spiders never come west. They?re afraid we?d see they?re all pygmies, Adolph Zukor size.?

?Trouble is,? I said. ?I was at the bottom of a ladder, in the graveyard, with that mannequin, dummy, whatever, in the rain.?

Maggie Botwin?s hand jerked on the crank. Arbuthnot waved much too swiftly across the street. The camera panned to see: the creatures from another world, the uncombed crowd of autograph collectors. The camera prowled their faces.

?Wait a minute!? I cried. ?There!?

Maggie cranked two more frames to bring up close the image of a thirteen-year-old boy on roller skates.

I touched the image, a strange loving touch.

?That can?t be you,? said Maggie Botwin.

?Just plain old homely, dumpy me.?

Maggie Botwin let her eyes shift over to me for a moment and then back down through twenty years of time to some October afternoon with a threat of rain.

There was the goof of all goofs, the nut of all nuts, the crazy of all crazies, forever off balance on his roller skates, doomed to fall in any traffic, including pedestrian women who passed.

She cranked backward. Again Arbuthnot was waving to me, unseen, on some autumn afternoon.

?Arbuthnot,? she said quietly, ?and you? almost together??

?The man on the ladder in the rain? Oh, yes.?

Maggie sighed and cranked the Moviola. Arbuthnot got in his car and drove away to a car crash just a few short weeks ahead.

I watched the car go, even as my younger self across the street, in that year, must have watched.

?Repeat after me,? said Maggie Botwin, quietly. ?There was no one up some ladder, no rain, and you were never there.?

??never there,? I murmured.

Maggie?s eyes narrowed. ?Who?s that funny-looking geek next to you, with the big camel?s-hair overcoat and the wild hair and the huge photo album in his arms??

?Clarence,? I said, and added, ?I wonder, right now, tonight, if? he?s still alive??