Stars Screaming (33 page)

“Take it easy, Tibbles.”

The sound of his own name startled the cowboy. He turned and saw Jack Rose standing at the edge of the open grave, dressed in a dark blue suit. In his right hand was a small brown paper sack. “I didn’t see you walk up, Mr. Rose,” the cowboy said, wincing at how nervous his voice sounded. “You kinda scared me.”

“It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? What, twenty years?”

“Around that.”

Jack Rose nodded his head. He was gazing at the cowboy, evaluating him but not in an unfriendly way. “How’s your ranch?”

“I’m makin’ out all right. Switched over to almonds last year. Almonds are a good crop.”

“I like almonds,” Jack Rose said.

“I’ll send you some.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to,” the cowboy said.

Jack Rose gave the cowboy a hard stare and held it, working his jaw silently for several seconds. Then he took his hand away from his body, muttered a few phrases in Hebrew, and dropped the brown paper bag into the grave. “Pastrami on rye from Nate and Al’s,” he said. “Max’s favorite sandwich.”

“He liked chili dogs, too,” the cowboy said. “One time at the Tail of the Pup I saw him put away six, one right after another, piled high with all the trimmings.”

Jack Rose said, “Max had an appetite.”

“He sure did.”

Jack Rose looked off in the distance, allowing a long significant silence before he spoke again. “’Forty-seven. Is that the year we met?” he asked the cowboy.

“In the summer. Up in Crestline. I was doin’ a Johnny Mack Brown picture. You represented the girl.”

“Which one?”

“The second lead. A blonde. I don’t remember her name.”

“Max liked blondes. The younger the better,” Jack Rose said, and the cowboy squirmed underneath his gaze. “Right, Tibbles?”

“Max had problems, like all of us.”

“Problems with little girls.”

The cowboy shrugged this off. “He always treated me okay.”

“You remember Grace Elliot?” Jack Rose said, his smile turning gentle.

“The name sounds familiar.”

“She was an extra, mostly in Westerns. Tall, auburn hair, strong jaw. Eyes were an extraordinary shade of blue.”

The cowboy looked down at his feet. “I think I know who you mean.”

“In ’forty-nine Max did a picture up in Big Bear. It was called
The Crooked Man
,” Jack Rose said, his smile slowly drifting off his face. “Grace Elliot was in it. There was an accident. The picture never got finished.” The cowboy stood quiet, remembering. “She brought her daughter out that summer. I guess she was around thirteen. Bonnie, I think her name was.”

“I was up there,” the cowboy said. “I did some stunt work.”

“And some special effects. Everyone doubled on Max’s films. Right?”

“Yeah. That’s right. I did effects,” the cowboy said. The way he said it sounded like a confession. “I cared about Grace,” he said.

“Of course you did, Tibbles.”

“Max knew I did, too.”

“And he knew the accident wasn’t your fault. It was just that— an accident.”

The cowboy made a move to turn away, but Jack Rose said, “No. Not yet.”

Tears came out of the cowboy’s eyes. “I came down here to pay my respects,” he said. “That’s all.”

“I’m here for the same reason,” Jack Rose said evenly. Then, in a quick but agile move, he stepped across the grave. The two of them were now standing very close together their gray hair shining in the sunlight. “Still, it’s important to know the truth.”

“I know the truth,” the cowboy said.

“No. I don’t think so. Not all of it. Part of it you know. Part I know. And part no one will ever know, because it’s buried with Max.” Jack Rose gripped the cowboy’s bicep and moved him toward the limousine. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

On the way to the airport, Jack Rose sat so close to the cowboy that their knees touched lightly whenever they turned a corner. Neither spoke until the limousine pulled onto the freeway, then Jack mentioned, casually, that he drove Grace Elliot’s daughter to the train station back in the summer of 1949.

“I sent her off to Omaha,” he said. “Never heard from her again.”

“Maybe she grew up and had a normal life.”

“I hope so,” Jack Rose said, remembering the little girl’s sad, defeated face.

“So do I,” the cowboy said, and once more he saw the cabin explode in his mind, a wall of flames, and a woman staggering into the apocalyptic sunlight, crying out for release. “It would only seem right.”

Eighteen

Going Home

May 29, 1971

Four days after Max Rheingold’s funeral, Ricky found Bobby on his knees on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard, between Hudson and Cherokee, bent over a star he was polishing on the Walk of Fame. The blue sky above him was immense, infinite, and the shadows from the power lines fell across his yellow polo shirt, tiger-striping his back.

A few paces away, a man dressed in cook’s whites stood in the open doorway of a luncheonette. A waitress with a bossy face came outside and stood next to him. Pointing a finger at Bobby, she said to Ricky, “You know this guy?”

“Yes.”

“That star ain’t got no name on it. How come he’s polishing it?”

“I guess he’s getting it ready.”

The fry cook laughed a smoker’s laugh. “Ready? For who?”

“For whatever name they decide to put there.”

The waitress gave Ricky a withering look. “He’s fucking crazy. You both are,” she said. Then she turned around and stepped back inside the luncheonette.

The fry cook spit on the sidewalk by Bobby’s knee. “Get him out of here,” he said to Ricky in a threatening voice. “He’s blocking traffic. Get him away from my door.”

Ricky tapped Bobby lightly on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said, urging him to stand with his voice. “I think we better go.”

Bobby glanced at the fry cook’s hostile face, sizing him up; then he slipped his handkerchief and his bottle of Brasso into the front pocket of his khaki trousers. When he stood up, Ricky threw his arm around his shoulder in a masculine fashion. “Guess who I saw when I was walking past the Columbia lot?”

“Who?”

“Carol Lynley.”

“Did you get her autograph?”

“I already have it, dummy. Remember?
Bunny Lake Is Missing
.”

“That’s right. I forgot,” Bobby said, nodding slowly as they started up the street. “Did she say anything?”

“No. But she looked over.”

“That’s all?”

“I think she recognized my face.”

Near Frederick’s of Hollywood, Ricky and Bobby stepped around a circle of French tourists who were snapping pictures of Jerry Lewis’s star on the Walk of Fame. Ahead of them, just west of Highland, was the El Capitan theater.
Diamonds Are Forever
was triple-billed with
Wild Rovers
and
The Ballad of Cable Hogue.

Outside the theater a construction crew was repairing potholes in the right lane, slowing the midafternoon traffic along the Boulevard. A girl in a tight sweater stood by the curb with her chest pushed out, ogling a long-haired man operating a jackhammer. The scrawny dog she was holding was turning in circles, his leash becoming tangled around a parking meter, his frantic barks swallowed up by the noise of the street.

Bobby and Ricky crossed with the light. Away from the hectic sounds, Bobby said, hesitantly, “When I came back from the Laundromat this morning, there was a letter from my uncle at the desk. He wants me to come home. He wants me to come back to Omaha. He says they’re opening a florist shop and a travel agency in the hotel. He said I could work in either one—or maybe I could be in charge.”

Ricky and Bobby glanced at each other quickly as they walked east on the boulevard; then Ricky put his hand on Bobby’s arm, stopping
him on the sidewalk so a car could pull into the busy lot next to Musso & Frank. “What do you know about flowers?” Ricky said, as they resumed walking.

“I know a little.”

“You have to know more than a little.”

“Dandelions and goldenrod are everywhere in Omaha,” Bobby said. “And roses, of course. In the hotel dining room in the spring there were always yellow and pink roses standing in vases on every table.” Bobby paused in front of a store with windows blocked out with wood. “You could come with me.”

“To Omaha?”

“I called my uncle collect after I got the letter. I told him I had a friend. He said, ‘Bring him out if you want.’”

“Does he—?”

“He knows,” Bobby said, starting up the sidewalk once more. “It doesn’t matter to him.”

For the next two blocks Ricky remained quiet, struggling with the possibilities of this offer, turning it over in his mind. Crossing Ivar he said, “I get money every month from the state. That’s how we live, Bobby. That’s how I pay the rent and buy the food.”

“We don’t need that money anymore,” Bobby said. “We could stay at the Sherwood. Free. Including our meals. You could work there too. We would both have salaries. Then, maybe, eventually we could rent a house with a yard big enough for a dog. A golden retriever. Sam. That would be his name.”

At Vine, Ricky slowed by the open doorway of the Taft building and pulled Bobby out of the sunlit air. He said quietly, looking at him, “I grew up in a house in a nice neighborhood. We had pets and played ball in the street. We did all that, Bobby. But it didn’t work out for me.”

“We’ll be in another city, where the seasons change,” Bobby said. “It could work out differently this time.”

“I don’t know that.”

“Don’t you think I was scared to leave Omaha? It took me two years before I could get on the Greyhound bus with my bags packed. But I made it here. I had to do something important and I did it. Now I get to go home.”

Ricky put his hand on Bobby’s shoulder and gently pushed him back on the sidewalk. There was another long silence that continued to stretch as they walked east with the sun warming their necks.
Finally, in a voice that Bobby had never heard before—a voice that seemed to throb in his throat—Ricky said, “When I hear the Dodger games on the car radios in the traffic, it takes me back to high school. I was a wonderful ballplayer, Bobby. That’s the word Coach Burroughs used: wonderful. ‘You’ve got a wonderful swing, Ricky,’ he would say, or a ‘wonderful arm.’ And when he touched me underneath my shirt, he would tell me I had ‘wonderful skin.’ I remember one time at the end of the dugout he held my head between his hands and let his thumbs slide slowly down my cheeks. ‘Just peach fuzz now,’ he said. ‘But later when you’re older you’ll have a wonderful beard.’

“And once, before a geography test, he unlocked the gym and made me shower, so he could watch me and tell me where to soap myself and for how long. When I was done he had me lie down on the trainer’s table on my stomach. Right away he made the moisture flow inside me with his finger; then he climbed up on the table and pushed himself into my wet place. For the next half hour, while he traced the map of the world on my back with his tongue, he tested me over and over on the names of the countries on each continent.

“When we were finished, after I got every question right, he took a shower with me in the dark. Through the transom I remember hearing someone practicing drums in the music room next door, the sound of the bass bouncing off the tiled walls surrounding us, echoing the heartbeat sounding in my ears.

“And then that spring all the scouts started showing up after school. Instead of being called wonderful, instead of that word, they used the word ‘great.’ Like he has ‘great power’ or ‘great balance’ or ‘great instincts.’ And my coach would say, ‘Yes, he’s a wonderful boy.’

“They didn’t get it, Bobby. Wonderful was a safe place. Great was something else, something I had to live up to. At least that’s what I felt. I was terrified of ‘great.’ Say
great
, Bobby.”

“Great.”

“See how it sounds: all hard edges, like a piece of furniture you trip over in the dark. Wonderful is soft, like . . . like . . .”

“Like a bucket of bunnies.”

Ricky laughed loudly, uncontrollably, a sound that drew stares from the passersby.

“You don’t belong here anymore,” Bobby said. “Neither of us do.”

They were standing in front of the St. Francis Arms. Ricky’s eyes were still gleaming with joy, but inside he was frightened. “What
about autographs?” he said, the panic now showing on his face. “What will I do? There’s nobody there.”

“We’ll be working, Ricky. We’ll be busy,” Bobby said. “We won’t have time for all that.”

Ricky nodded, thinking, his eyes moving away from Bobby’s face. “Marlon Brando. You said he was from Omaha. Right?”

“Right.”

“He probably comes home sometimes to visit. Right?”

“I guess.”

“And maybe he goes to church or stops by the hotel for a meal. If I was around I could get his autograph. True?”

“That could happen,” Bobby said.

“And Henry Fonda and Jane and Peter, and Fred Astaire and Dorothy McGuire. They could show up too.”

“You already have Henry Fonda.”

“I could get him again,” Ricky said, with a grin of delight. “Doubles are okay, when they’re far enough apart in years. I’d like to get Henry and Peter and Jane to sign on the same page, like my dad did with Walter Huston and his son John.” Ricky reached for his autograph book. “You want to see?”

Bobby put his hand on Ricky’s arm and smiled patiently. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “Let’s go up to the room and pack.”

Ricky made a sound of resignation as he stared into Bobby’s face with an expression of blind trust. Then, ever so slowly, a moment from their recent past, started to fill the space in the air between them.

It’s late at night and Bobby takes off all his clothes before he steps into the shallow end of the large swimming pool behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. He pushes off the wall and begins to sidestroke silently through the water, his breath unaccountably soft as he pulls alongside a man floating in the lane next to him. There is light on the water from the moon, reflecting Bobby’s face. The man raises his head and says, “Who are you?”

“My name’s Bobby.”

“Get the hell away from me. You’re not supposed to be in the pool.”

“Why not? You’re in the pool . . . Max.”

“You know my name.”

“Uh-huh. I know everything about you.”

“What’re you, an actor or something?”

“No, Max. I’m your son.”

Max is now treading water with his hands, trying to ease himself toward the side of the pool.

“I don’t have a son.”

“Yes, you do.”

Bobby grins like a dolphin. There is something in his eyes like joy. Overhead a star blinks twice—a celestial signal—and he places his palm on top of Max’s head, pushing down hard.

“You cocksucker! Get your hands off me!” Max shouts, his eyes bulging in fear as he frantically tries to break away and swim to safety. “You’re trying to kill me!”

A few yards away Ricky is relaxing on one of the lounge chairs scattered around the deck. He’s laughing softly, his chest rising and falling, watching Max’s head disappear underneath the water—once, twice, three times!

Max is taking in water, unable to breathe, a white-hot pain screaming through his chest; then finally, in the sweetness of surrender, his life quickly unravels behind his eyes and all that he knows of hope is gone.

“Oh, sweetheart, oh, Holy Mother. . . .”

Those are Max Rheingold’s final words: tiny green bubbles rising to the water’s surface, words no one will ever hear.