The Ravine (6 page)

So I’ll transcribe, with all the fidelity I can muster, the conversation I had with him last night, and see if you don’t hate him, too. If you don’t mind, I’ll do it in a style I am more at home with, or as John would put it, placing his hand over his face (his impulse is to adjust his spectacles, even though he doesn’t wear any), in a style with which I am more at home.

All right, enough. Although we stayed for more drinks, very little got said after that. Hooper left fairly early, claiming he had a rendezvous with, I forget what, a diplomat or a runway model or something, some international woman of intrigue, possibly even a secret agent.

I stayed on in the lounge until the bitter end. By that point my brother had given up any pretense of playing popular tunes; he’d moved on to the French composers he so adores, Satie, Fauré and Poulenc. Ravel’s
Pavane for a Dead Princess
was a crowd pleaser—
Jay became completely undone. It was not so much that he wept, because he’d been weeping, on and off but mostly on, all evening. But the
Pavane
caused his hands to tremble (although he missed or flubbed no notes) and his chest to heave. His head jerked convulsively; sometimes its sheer weight made it plummet, and once or twice he came within an inch of knocking himself unconscious on the keyboard.

Then, with a quick little flourish full of mordents and pralltrillers,
Good evening, friends!!
, he was done.

There was a smattering of applause, but Jay rose without acknowledging it and disappeared into the shadows. I know that he backed through a small doorway and mounted a flight of stairs to a little apartment above the lounge. There he lay down on a small bed. He rested his heavy head upon a thin pillow and waited for sleep to come.

Myself, I went home and dreamt of Milligan.

In my dream, Milligan is dressed in his Westernized garb, a beaded buckskin jacket over his soutane, a large white stetson over the golden curls. His boots are made from snakeskin, his blue jeans flared slightly to fit over them. Otherwise, his denims are so tight that he seems to have been vacuum-packed into them.

It is not all that odd that I dreamt Milligan this way, because 1) I was dreaming, after all, and 2) he dressed in wardrobe a lot, even when he wasn’t due on set for hours, even when he was nowhere near the studio. On occasion he even went out to the bars dressed that way. He’d check his belt and holster, assuring the bouncers that the guns were merely replicas, although that wasn’t
always
true. Edward Milligan had a vast collection, revolvers of a mostly historical significance, from the Old West circa 1880. In my dream, Milligan and I are down in his rumpus room, and it is a very strange place. Mounted
vintage revolvers cover three of the walls, the fourth wall is a huge plasma television screen. The broadcast image is of a group of naked women going at each other with huge strap-on dildos. They have smaller dildos, too, which they use to penetrate smaller orifices. The rumpus room contains a well-stocked bar, well-stocked to the extent that it contains things like
árbol de los brujos
, or sorcerer’s tree, and various exotic fungi. All of the horizontal surfaces—the bar top, a coffee table, a few shelves—are mirrored, the better for their employ as conveyors of cocaine.

Now, I want to admit to you, this isn’t
all
dreamt up. Indeed, it is a fairly accurate depiction of Milligan’s rumpus room, which I had occasion to visit a couple of times. The only thing that may be a little fanciful is that I don’t think his bar actually had any
árbol de los brujos
, because that particular hallucinogenic concoction is a little hard to come by. (The only reason I’ve even heard of it is that Milligan often bemoaned the fact that it was extremely rare and oh-so-illegal.)

Okay, so there we are in the rumpus room and Milligan has taken some guns from the wall, and he is demonstrating his quick-draw and gun-spinning techniques. This is something of a lost art, you know. We often saw it as youngsters, sitting in the gloomy plush of the Galaxy Odeon (you shall hear more of the Galaxy Odeon, indeed, it’s coming right up). Cowboy heroes, even though their lives were on the line, would often take a few nanoseconds to orbit their revolvers around their trigger fingers, first this way, then that, before popping off a lethal round. Milligan was excellent at this. He is demonstrating his technique, high on
árbol de los brujos
, and I have guns, too, and then (it’s a dream) I start shooting. I shoot at the plasma screen, and naked women start to scream and to bleed. I’m not aiming the guns, but every bullet I fire seems to find a perfect trajectory. The bottles behind the bar explode with a stately rhythm,
pop-pop-pop!! Milligan doesn’t seem to notice that I’m shooting up his rumpus room, as he’s concentrating on his gun-twirling. And then, of course, one of my bullets hits Milligan, and explodes his skull, and I wake up and go to get a drink.

HOOPER’S NOT GOING TO LIKE THIS, BUT I THINK IT’S TIME I TOLD YOU
about
The Bullet and the Cross.
It explains much. I mean, it’s almost embarrassing for me to admit this, but if you know about 1) the “incident” in the ravine, 2) my addiction to television and 3) the movie I’m about to recall, you’ll understand pretty much everything about me. You’ll understand my current situation, which I’m gearing up to describe in some detail. Hey, you’ll even understand certain details in the pages of what you’ve already read—for example, why I thought that distraction-by-knot-tying might be an effective escape strategy.

The Galaxy Odeon lay on the outskirts of our survey, surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. Rainie and her mother lived in one of these buildings, so on Saturday afternoons my brother and I would go into the lobby and press the button beside the name “Van der Glick.” Then we would wait. There was never any staticky communication from above, never an inquiry as to our identity or an admonition to wait patiently, so we would just sit there in silence and in a few minutes the elevator doors would open in the lobby and out would step Rainie.

One time, I remember, I buzzed and there came a curious clicking sound, repetitive and insistent. (I was calling on Rainie alone, which was rare but not unprecedented. Jay was sometimes elsewhere, and no one knew where that “elsewhere” might be.) I understood that someone upstairs was releasing the lock on the big glass door that separated the vestibule from the lobby, and without thinking I pulled it open and entered. The elevator waited and I stepped inside and pressed the button numbered “14.” Rainie and her mother actually lived on the thirteenth floor, but the designers and architects were unwilling to acknowledge that fact. I rode up—I recall that a very thin man dressed in pyjamas got on at the fourth floor and ascended to the fifth—and then I wandered the hallway until I came to 1412. I knocked lightly at the door and almost instantly it was opened, but not all the way. The security chain was still attached, allowing a crack of perhaps five inches. That afforded me my only impression of Rainie’s apartment, namely: it was very dark inside, full of shadows, and what light there was flickered, as though produced by candles. There was a painting on the wall opposite the door, and I could see some of it, an aggressively geometric abstract. And then Mrs. van der Glick’s face filled the opening, gaunt and heavily made up. She wore only a nightdress. “What do
you
want?” she demanded.

“Is Rainie in?”

“Leave her alone,” said Mrs. van der Glick, closing the door and throwing a deadbolt.

But what usually happened was that Jay and I would wait in the lobby, Rainie would appear and the three of us would head toward the Galaxy Odeon Theatre for the Saturday matinee. We would pay our fifty cents, regardless of the fare, and the fare was wide-ranging. There were war movies, although they were occasional, as they tended to overexcite the children. There were films about pirates and knights, and these were Rainie’s favourites, although she complained
constantly about historical inaccuracies. She also disliked the overtly romantic moments—the kisses and tearful farewells—which caused her to squirm in her seat. Having typed these last sentences, I realize it’s hard to credit that period dramas were Rainie’s favourites, but they were. As soon as she saw a foreign land—a Saharan desert or a tempest-tossed coastline—she would smile and, for a while, cease to be the tightly twisted little ranker she was.