Mendoza in Hollywood (33 page)

U
NFORTUNATELY
, in the same Company communiqué that had contained Oscar’s commendation there was a memo of a less positive nature. It seemed that Juan Bautista’s quota of rescued birds hadn’t been met for several months in a row, though his budget allocation for maintenance had been exceeded to a remarkable degree.

“I know, I know!” he groaned, sinking into a chair, which brought Erich von Stroheim down to eye level with us. “It’s not my fault, though. How am I supposed to go out and look for anything? I can’t leave John Barrymore alone for two minutes, and I have to take Erich every place I go. Marie’s the only one who’ll stay where I tell her to.”

“I warned you about this, Juanito,” said Porfirio, shaking his head. “Didn’t I warn you about this? Now you don’t have a choice. You crate up the big birds and ship them off to HQ. They’ll be all right. What’s more important, you’ll be able to get back to your work.”

Juan Bautista’s face went pale. “Please, just give me a little more time. I think I’m finally beginning to make some progress with John Barrymore. The microsurgery’s all healed up, and lately he’s even started to act like a normal bird sometimes. Please? One more month. As soon as the weather’s better, I swear I’ll send them away.”

Porfirio leaned forward. “You don’t seem to get it. This is not me telling you. This is Dr. Zeus
officially
telling you that you have screwed up. You’re not doing your job. That’s not acceptable, kid. You do understand that, don’t you? And it doesn’t take a lot of brains to figure out what your next move has to be, and you have brains to spare, thanks to Dr. Zeus. This is tough enough; don’t make it tougher.”

“What if I was able to catch up on my quota?” said Juan Bautista. “I know I’ve fallen behind, but it’s not the birds’ fault. I’ll learn to manage my time better. I’ll bring my work up to speed, you’ll see. Couldn’t I keep them just another month, if I was able to do that? Would one more month make any difference, if I was able to make the Company happy?”

This was too much for me. I had to slink out, so I didn’t catch the rest of the conversation; but I gathered that Porfirio gave in again, because no big birds were crated up or shipped off in the next few days. All the stock of songbirds and little owls went, though, tagged in their wicker cages; and Juan Bautista was admirably industrious for a whole day in front of his room, weaving new cages for the new stock he had sworn to bring in.

Imarte was industrious, too. We never saw Alfred Rubery again, but he
had
left his valise behind. She spent days locked in her room with it, going over the contents in minute detail and making copies of what she found. We only saw her at mealtimes, and the transformation from whore to scribe was unsettling: inky fingers, disheveled hair, stained dressing gown. She looked radiantly happy, though, with whatever lode of cryptohistory she’d struck. I confess I was curious, but not curious enough to bring myself to ask her about it.

And Einar was certainly industrious. Longhorns were going for ridiculously low prices now, and he was acquiring them every day and conducting cattle minidrives into Los Angeles. Porfirio was always busy, of course. The one advantage to the drought was that no roads washed out that winter, and now that the smallpox epidemic was tapering off, the stagecoaches were running regularly again. Banning
seemed to be deferring maintenance on the coaches, though, or maybe his regular crew had died of the pox, because there were repairs to be made at our smithy nearly every day.

I was the only one with nothing to do. Why was that, señors? There was nothing left for me to save. Everything that grew in the temperate belt had either been collected by me or grazed down to bare earth by starving cattle. There were no rarities left to find, unless I cared to venture into the Canyon of Lunacy again. But no prize on earth could have tempted me back into that place where I might glimpse the deadly city again, the future desolation.

Now, you would think, wouldn’t you, that Dr. Zeus might give me a pat on the head and tell me to run along now, back to my beautiful green Ventana? I certainly thought so. I wasn’t expecting commendations or prizes, or even thanks for a job well done; but I did expect a new posting, and none came, though I checked the Company directives pouch every time Einar returned from Los Diablos. Bureaucratic willfulness, or some subtle punishment to make me work harder, to improve my attitude? Why was I being ignored, señors? Was it simply that nobody noticed that I was stranded there, unable to do the work I’d been programmed for, the work I needed? The work that kept my demon at bay?

Or did the Company know? Did you know what would happen next? Did you know and sit there like God, silent, remorseless, useless? What happens if I sit here in silence, too? What if I never give you my all-important testimony, eh?

But of course you couldn’t have known. You’re stuck here in 1863, just like me. I don’t imagine our masters up there in the future would tell you if they knew, either. No operative is ever told any personal detail of the Temporal Concordance. It’s forbidden to tell. Though Lewis tried . . . Will you punish him, too?

More Theobromos? Well, thank you so very much. You damned well better anesthetize me now, if you want me to go on with this.

S
O THERE WE WERE, ALL
happily going about our work except for me. I sat huddled in my room most days, wrapped in a blanket and viewing holos hour after hour. Not as much fun as old-style cinema, overall. There is a pleasant sense of camaraderie with the rest of the audience, watching cinema. You know: throwing popcorn at the flat screen and cheering and sharing moments of excitement, like when Luke Skywalker is shooting down the bad guys pursuing the
Millennium Falcon
, or any part of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
.

It’s true that a holo takes you right into the center of the action; but that illusion is not always a good thing. The leeches scene from
The African Queen
comes shudderingly to mind.
Sunset Boulevard
, too. Who the hell wants to get unbearably close to Norma Desmond’s scary eyes in that last scene? And let’s not even talk about Hitchcock’s films. Though it’s no better, really, in the films you
want
to be a part of, because you’re still isolated, you’re like a ghost. No amount of technological cleverness can make Sean Connery take you in his arms, and no Good Witch will ever take you by the hand and welcome you to Oz. They won’t see you, they won’t hear you, because their reality is complete and you are not a part of it.

At last I gave it up and started following the war news again. Depressing, inconclusive, inaccurate, but at least it was really happening.
I feel badly that it absorbed my attention so much. If it hadn’t, I might have noticed the noises in Juan Bautista’s room that awful day.

Not that I could have done anything if I had, of course.

You see, encouraged by the progress that John Barrymore seemed to be making, Juan had taken to leaving him shut in his room when he went out on his collecting trips. Erich von Stroheim he kept in Einar’s room, liberally dosed with bird dope of some kind, so the damn creature was quiet all day. He didn’t like to do it, of course, but the idea was that it was only temporary, until he caught up on his quota and reassured Dr. Zeus that he too was a good little machine.

In my opinion he should have been doing this all along. It was no effort for Juan Bautista to catch birds: all he had to do was stand still, and the bloody things would light all over him. But he was seventeen! Sloppy and disorganized and stupid as youth will always be, no matter how cyberaugmented it’s made. Perhaps that was why he filled his room to the ceiling with flimsy woven cages full of the miserable cheeping little things, and left a psychotic predator in there with them while he went out each day to hunt for more.

Do I have to tell you what happened, señors?

It was as bad as you could imagine. I heard his wail of horror when he opened his door. I came stumbling from my room in time to see John Barrymore bouncing clumsily out into the clearing. Porfirio and Einar emerged from the house too, and stopped dead at the sight of the eagle.

Not that he was covered with gore, or anything like that. Well, a little blood, and some few bright feathers from some little victim. He regained his composure and took a few paces sideways, cocking his head to stare at us in a puzzled way. But there was the most heartbroken sobbing from Juan Bautista’s room.

The irony was that John Barrymore had been making progress. While he was sick and mad, he tried only to kill himself. It was when he began to heal that he felt the normal urge to do what predators do. But Juan Bautista was in no condition to appreciate this, as he emerged from his room with a little torn body in either hand.

“You
bastard,”
he screamed. “How could you do this?”

He ran at John Barrymore, who started and crouched in alarm. Then, with a wild flapping of wings, the big bird rose into the air and floated onto the roof of the inn. He looked down at us all, and we stood looking up at him with open mouths. Experimentally he beat his wings again, twice, three times, and we felt the rush of air in our faces as he nearly lifted off. Had the madness left any room for joy, when it vacated that narrow killer’s skull of his? What was in his flat blank eyes, when he beat his wings again with a noise like a stiff breeze filling canvas? I don’t know. In the next moment he leaned into the evening air and sailed away on spread wings, effortlessly, a long curve ascending. Up and up he went, high enough at last to catch the last light of the sun, and then he flew northward and was gone.

Marie Dressier had survived; she had managed to get into the clutter under Juan Bautista’s bed and defend herself from there with her formidable old bill. And of course Erich von Stroheim was fine; he’d slept through it all in Einar’s room. But the boy who loved them had changed.

Do you remember that terrible moment, señors, when the self-righteousness of your youth died? When all the stern warnings of your elders, ignored until the consequences abruptly came crashing down on your head, made you see in a flash that the warnings hadn’t been unfair or mean-spirited or blind, they’d been
right
? All along your elders had been trying to tell you about the black joke that is life, trying to help you and save you from pain. But you insisted on running straight into the trap, mocking them as you ran, to the agony that was irreversible and permanent, with no one to blame, finally, but yourself.

It’s not good to see yourself in the mirror then. Juan Bautista was reflected in the eyes of every one of the little dead birds he had to clean out of his room.

Next time Einar loaded up the wagon for the trip into Los Diablos, there were two big cages among his cargo. Marie sat patiently in hers, considering her new fate with a calculating eye; but Erich von
Stroheim croaked and hissed with anxiety, trying to muscle through the wire mesh that kept him from Juan Bautista. When the wagon started up and he found himself rolling away from the boy, he started up the piercing scream we knew all too well. Juan Bautista just stood there, watching, his face like stone. It took a long time and a lot of distance for the screams to fade to silence.

“It’s better this way, muchacho,” Porfirio said at last. “They’ll be safe, they’ll be happy, they’ll have great lives in the Company aviary.”

Juan Bautista nodded, but I knew what he was thinking: no way now he could kill them, either, with his well-meaning mistakes or unintentional neglect or selfish love. I wondered if he’d ever dare love anything mortal again. Some of us don’t.

I
T WAS MARCH
13, 1863. I was struggling back and forth between our galvanized bathtub and the nearest oak tree, carrying buckets of cold and slightly soapy water in my unending irrigation efforts, when I looked up to see Einar returning from Los Diablos in the wagon, trailing a cloud of dust several stories high. I squinted in the glare and frowned; he’d brought back a load of crates, something so heavy the wagon was low on its springs. Porfirio picked up the question I was broadcasting and came out to see.