He looked up and saw us. Quickly, I put my arm around Roy’s shoulder to ease his sadness.
Now the old man bent. With raking fingers, he combed the grass. Soon there was no trace of anything heavy that might have fallen from the sky last night, in a terrible rain.
“You believe now?” I said.
“I wonder,” said Roy, “where that hearse went to.”
As we were driving back in through the main gate of the studio, the hearse whispered out. Empty. Like a long autumn wind it drifted off, around, and back to Death’s country.
“Jesus Christ! Just like I guessed!” Roy steered but stared back at the empty street. “I’m beginning to enjoy this!”
We moved along the street in the direction from which the hearse had been coming.
Fritz Wong marched across the alley in front of us, driving or leading an invisible military squad, muttering and swearing to himself, his sharp profile cutting the air in two halves, wearing a dark beret, the only man in Hollywood who wore a beret and dared anyone to notice!
“Fritz!” I called. “Stop, Roy!”
Fritz ambled over to lean against the car and give us his by now familiar greeting.
“Hello, you stupid bike-riding Martian! Who’s that strange-looking ape driving?”
“Hello, Fritz, you stupid …” I faltered and then said sheepishly, “Roy Holdstrom, world’s greatest inventor, builder, and flier of dinosaurs!”
Fritz Wong’s monocle flashed fire. He fixed Roy with his Oriental-Germanic glare, then nodded crisply.
“Any friend of Pithecanthropus erectus is a friend of mine!”
Roy grabbed his handshake. “I liked your last film.”
“Liked!” cried Fritz Wong.
“Loved!”
“Good.” Fritz looked at me. “What’s new since breakfast!”
“Anything funny happening around here just now?”
“A Roman phalanx of forty men just marched that way. A gorilla, carrying his head, ran in Stage 10. A homosexual art director got thrown out of the Men’s. Judas is on strike for more silver over in Galilee. No, no. I wouldn’t say anything funny or I’d notice.”
“How about passing through?” offered Roy. “Any funerals?”
“Funerals! You think I wouldn’t notice? Wait!” He flashed his monocle toward the gate and then toward the backlot. “Dummy. Yes. I was hoping it was deMille’s hearse and we could celebrate. It went that way!”
“Are they filming a burial here today?”
“On every sound stage: turkeys, catatonic actors, English funeral directors whose heavy paws would stillbirth a whale! Halloween, yesterday, yes? And today the true Mexican Day of Death, November 1st, so why should it be different at Maximus Films? Where did you find this terrible wreck of a car, Mr. Holdstrom?”
“This,” Roy said, like Edgar Kennedy doing a slow burn in an old Hal Roach comedy, “is the car in which Laurel and Hardy sold fish in that two reeler in 1930. Cost me fifty bucks, plus seventy to repaint. Stand back, sir!”
Fritz Wong, delighted with Roy, jumped back. “In one hour, Martian. The commissary! Be there!”
We steamed on amidst the noon crowd. Roy wheeled us around a corner toward Springfield, Illinois, lower Manhattan, and Piccadilly.
“You know where you’re going?” I asked.
“Hell, a studio’s a great place to hide a body. Who would notice? On a backlot filled with Abyssinians, Greeks, Chicago mobsters, you could march in six dozen gang wars with forty Sousa bands and nobody’d sneeze! That body, chum, should be right about here!”
And we dusted around the last corner into Tombstone, Arizona.
“Nice name for a town,” said Roy.
There was a warm stillness. It was High Noon. We were surrounded by a thousand footprints in backlot dust. Some of the prints belonged to Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and Ken Maynard, long ago. I let the wind blow memory, lifting the hot dust. Of course the prints hadn’t stayed, dust doesn’t keep, and even John Wayne’s big strides were long since sifted off, even as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s sandal marks had vanished from the shore of the Sea of Galilee just one hundred yards over on Lot 12. Nevertheless, the smell of horses remained, the stagecoach would pull in soon with a new load of scripts, and a fresh batch of riflemen cow pokes. I was not about to refuse the quiet joy of just sitting here in the old Laurel and Hardy flivver, looking over at the Civil War locomotive, which got stoked up twice a year and became the 9:10 from Galveston, or Lincoln’s death train taking him home, Lord, taking him home.
But at last I said, “What makes you so sure the body’s here?”
“Hell.” Roy kicked the floorboards like Gary Cooper once kicked cow chips. “Look close at those buildings.”
I looked.
Behind the false fronts here in Western territory were metal welding shops, old car museums, false-front storage bins and—
“The carpenters’ shop?” I said.
Roy nodded and flivvered us over to let the dog die around the corner, out of sight.
“They build coffins here, so the body’s here.” Roy climbed out of the flivver one long piece of lumber at a time. “The coffin was returned here because it was made here. Come on, before the Indians arrive!”
I caught up with him in a cool grotto where Napoleon’s Empire furniture was hung on racks and Julius Caesar’s throne waited for his long-lost behind.
I looked around.
Nothing ever dies, I thought. It always returns. If you want, that is.
And where does it hide, waiting. Where is it reborn? Here, I thought. Oh, yes, here.
In the minds of men who arrive with lunch buckets, looking like workers, and leave looking like husbands or improbable lovers.
But in between?
Build the Mississippi Belle if you want to steamboat landfall New Orleans, or rear Bernini’s columns on the north forty. Or rebuild the Empire State and then steam-power an ape big enough to climb it.
Your dream is their blueprint, and these are all the sons of the sons of Michelangelo and da Vinci, the fathers of yesterday winding up as sons in tomorrow.
And right now my friend Roy leaned into the dim cavern behind a Western saloon and pulled me along, among the stashed facades of Baghdad and upper Sandusky.
Silence. Everyone had gone to lunch.
Roy snuffed the air and laughed quietly.
“God, yes! Smell that smell! Sawdust! That’s what got me into high school woodshop with you. And the sounds of the bandsaw lathes. Sounded like people were doing things. Made my hands jerk. Looky here.” Roy stopped by a long glass case and looked down at beauty.
The Bounty was there, in miniature, twenty inches long and fully rigged, and sailing through imaginary seas, two long centuries ago.
“Go on,” Roy said, quietly. “Touch gently.”
I touched and marveled and forgot why we were there and wanted to stay on forever. But Roy, at last, drew me away.
“Hot dog,” he whispered.