To Make Death Love Us (15 page)

The juggler was
replaced by a dance team that had seen
better and younger days. The two old parties whirled across the stage with arthritic
abandon.

As Susy walked past
John's seat he wanted to speak out to her, but, instead, he lowered his head until he appeared to
be a man bending over in search of something in the dark and so went unnoticed.

Cursing himself for
a fool, John sat slumped in his the­ater seat. Changing his mind yet again, he bolted up from the
seat and hurried to catch up to her. He made it out the front just in time to see her go into a
coffee shop just across the street.

John stood on the
sidewalk, trying to make up his mind. Did he want to see her? Should he let her go her own way as
he must go his? And if he did catch up to her, was it worth making a scene in public, as no doubt
Susy would insist in doing? John suddenly felt very weary. He turned away then, retracing his
steps, considering returning to their cheap rented room. I must call my booking agent and
discover why I was not called upon to audition for the theater owner who was offering vaudeville,
John thought. As he walked, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the juggler, Will Carney,
sweeping past on the other side of the street with a determined walk.

Something in the
juggler's manner caused John to pause and turn back again to look at the cafe. Through the clear
glass windows, he saw the small pantomime of Susy's and the juggler's meeting, the too bright
smiles to cover shyness. John was ashamed at the simpering way Susy seemed to hang on the
juggler's every phrase.

Well, I simply
don't give a damn, thought John. I won't be trifled with. I won't allow myself to be the third
man in a triangle so commonplace. I won't be provoked. And yet he found himself hiding in the
shadow of a billboard, pretending he did not care, but unable to look away, sensing as he watched
them—Susy and the juggler—a new and terrible change in his life.

Susy and the
juggler left the coffee shop together, arm in arm, soon after, and John—very much ashamed of not
being strong enough not to—followed them to a rooming house no less dark and cold than his own.
John stood out in the street and looked up at the dark windows until a light was turned on up on
the third floor. A man's hand reached out and pulled down a stained and weathered window shade.
John imagined that the shadow of a woman—Susy, of course—came into an embrace with the shadow of
the juggler. It all belonged to Susy's bad movie.

John began to
laugh. It was not a happy laugh, steeped as it was in dark irony. It all seemed so tawdry and
predict­able. Why should he, a man who, while still a boy, had volunteered to fly a suicide
mission to Germany and de­stroy Hitler, be forced to take a part in this ridiculous
charade.

So John
straightened his shoulders and marched off down the street, vowing not to return, but he didn't
get very far. He spent a frustrating half hour pacing up and down the street until a cop gave him
a warning when John, in inexplicable fury, had kicked over a couple of garbage cans. John found
himself again outside the room­ing house in which Susy and the juggler were making a damned fool
out of him.

The bloody, flaming
hell with it, swore John and, swag­gering in an unconscious imitation of Bogart, he stormed his
way up several flights of stairs—several
can
be three but there were six—until he reached
the proper door. I suppose I should have a gun or a baseball bat or some other instrument of
violence, he thought to himself as he made a small fist and hammered on the door. He tilted his
hat on his head till it had a tough-guy tilt, movie-style.

There were muffled
sounds of irritation from the room
within, the creaking of bedsprings, and the squeak of an­cient floors before he heard the
voice of the juggler ask who it was and what was wanted.

"Telegram," John
said, knowing that entertainers al­ways hoped for and expected one.

John had both his
hands balled into fists, ready to do battle, however ineffectual and one-sided it might
be.

The door opened a
crack and John pushed his way into the room with sudden strength. Susy, wide-eyed, clutched the
sheet to her bosom and ducked down in the bed as if looking for a place to hide. The juggler
stood at the door, holding his trousers on with one hand, and scratching his head in pure
bewilderment with the other.

John struck a
fighting pose in front of the astonished juggler. The juggler let loose an involuntary
exclamation of surprise. John, taking it as a cue, swung on him then and there, the blow glancing
ineffectually off the juggler's bony hip. But the juggler ruined it all. He began to laugh, not
in a small way, but in a big, uproarious guffaw that filled the entire room.

John had his fists
poised to strike again, dancing on the balls of his feet, but found himself unable to hit a man
convulsed with laughter.

"Well, I'll be
rolled up and bounced like a ball," cried the juggler, his voice registering great delight. "I'll
be plain, downright fried and tied if this don't beat all. I say, my good man, who the dickens
are you?"

It was as if John
had never struck him at all.

"I am," said John,
dropping the fists he now realized he wasn't going to use, "that woman's husband."

"You're not! You're
not!" Susy protested, almost drop­ping the sheet and exposing herself.

"I'll be pruned and
piano tuned," said Will Carney, staring at the little man with unmistakable curiosity.

"Don't that beat
anything."

"Well, common-law
married, at any rate," John am-mended.

"Holy Kee-rist on
skates! I can't believe this," the jug­gler said, and self-consciously zipped up his fly. "If
this isn't the ever-loving end, I don't know what is."

Susy, sensing a
fight, jumped out of bed. The sheet slipped out of her hands and fell away.

"You cover
yourself, woman. Don't you have no shame, woman?" said the juggler, as if assuring John of his
own decency.

Susy sniffed
disapprovingly and turned her back on them. She cursed under her breath as she eased back into
her rumpled clothes.

The juggler ignored
her and, with a little formal bow, asked John if he would take a chair. Caught by surprise, by
the juggler's politeness and manners, John numbly shook his head yes, for he was quite at a loss
for something to do. This wasn't going quite as he had hoped it would.

"It's a pleasure to
meet you, sir. You are really quite something. As small and just about as perfect as any I've
ever seen or ever will see."

"You haven't seen
much then," John said, bristling and preening at the compliment all in the same
moment.

"Not all there is
to see, I grant you. But, my good man, I've seen plenty, far and wide, and I tell you right to
your face, you are a proper wonder."

Susy glared angrily
at the two of them, as John felt his face flush with pleasure.

"And that entrance!
Why, no actor in the history of theater has done quite as good a comic turn as that!" raved the
juggler, choosing to misinterpret the act. "I swear I don't know when I ever laughed
so!"

The juggler
practically gushed with praise for the little man. In the voice of a rather stupid Southern hick,
the
juggler went on. "Well, I declare. I
haven't had so much fun since the hogs up and ate my brother."

John laughed in
spite of himself. The juggler surely was a master at putting a fellow to ease.

Susy was only the
more enraged.

"Are you in the
business?" asked the juggler.

"I am an actor,
yes," said John with pride.

"Do I know the
name?" asked the juggler.

"What are you
talking to that miserable little creep for?" said Susy, all too aware of their indifference to
her. They didn't act as if they had heard a single word she had said.

"My name is John
Feather. Actually, Featherstone."

"Why, sure. Why,
hell yes, I've heard of you," lied the juggler. "You're all but damn-well famous, you
are."

John cleared his
throat, basking in a sudden glow, readying a modest demurrer.

"But badly
mismanaged, I'd say. Isn't that the truth?" asked the juggler.

"Well . . . yes, it
is," John allowed, warming to the crisp friendliness and levelheadedness of the juggler. John
could not but help like his open grin, could not help ad­miring the way he gestured with his
slender, clever hands.

"You're damn right.
I call them as I see them," the juggler said. "My name's Will Carney, by the by." He stuck out
his hand with such a spirit of hail-fellow that John took it and was glad of the
chance.

"Would you like a
beer?"

"I would love
one."

"How about you,
honey?" There was a hesitation after "you" and before "honey" that said clearly that Will Car­ney
had already forgotten Susy's name.

"No. I don't want
nothing," she said in a voice choked with rage.

John winced at her
poor grammar as he would were she an illiterate child of his own. Will opened a pair of beers and
handed one over to John.

"Now, see, that's
what I always did say."

"What?"

"I always said, no
agent, no ten percenter is going to do the proper job for the artist. No sir. Got to do it for
your­self or ..." He took a long pull on the beer and licked his lips.

"Yes?" John said,
leaning forward with an eagerness and hope he'd not experienced for a long time.

"Or have somebody
close do it for you. Better yet, art­ists get together and do it for each other."

"Do
what?"

"Bring what they
got to the public attention."

Susy tapped her
foot impatiently against the floor. She cleared her throat loudly several times to get their
atten­tion but they paid her no heed.

"Will Carney,
aren't you going to throw this little wea­sel out?" she said.

The juggler looked
at her as if she had suddenly started speaking Swahili or some other foreign tongue. "Now why
ever would I want to do that?"

"Well, he broke
right in here while we was ..." She left it unsaid; the telling apparently was more immoral than
the doing.

"Well, it's clear
to me this fellow came up here to pro­tect his woman. No idea what would be waiting for him. Some
mean bastard, maybe, who would do him harm for butting in. Why, you seldom find a 'true artiste'
would take the risk of hurting himself. He's brave, truly brave."

"You better damn
well throw him out on his ear if you want me to stay around," said Susy, looking mean.

The juggler winked
conspiratorily at John, who grinned
in
pleasure. "Well, if you're too far away to touch, you'll be too far away to see, won't
you?"

She stood there
looking from Will's white grin to John's sad eyes. She trembled all over and then turned away.
When she was at the door, John wanted to run and stop her. He wanted to take her back home and
call her his own, but Will started talking, about the open road, about the carefree life of the
traveling 'artiste,' and suddenly there were bright visions dancing before John's eyes and he
settled back in his chair, Susy forgotten. He closed his eyes the better to be entranced by the
smooth river of promises that tumbled from Will Carney's mouth.

And so, having
dawdled with his woman—who was never seen or heard of again—Will Carney contracted John
Feather—without contract or signature—to join his company, made him a Colonel, and changed his
name.

On the very top of
that particular face of the mountain, the seams of rotting stone shale were sucking up the rain,
swelling just that little bit, loosening up just that fraction. Capillary action drew it deep
under the cap of the hill and gorged the rootlets of the clinging moss till they burst and broke
apart. A whole shelf of shale slipped, two hundred feet above the truck, dropping a few feet,
hinging on something, threatening at any moment to continue its plunge and wipe the truck and its
occupants off the side of the mountain once and for all time. The whole mountain shuddered to its
heart.

It was about to
lose a piece of itself and it knew it, as did the occupants of the truck, who could feel the
heaving shale shifting under them almost as if it were an animal turning over in its sleep under
them in the darkness.

It was getting hot
as hell inside the van. Inside the cab as well. Strangely, it seemed to affect Marco the most.
The bleeding had slowed but by no means stopped. His face was pale, wracked with pain. He tapped
Will's arm and made a motion, telling him in pantomime to roll down his window. The one on his
side was blocked with dirt a quarter of the way up and he had no need or desire for a ton of it
in his lap. Will opened the window and found the angle of the cab had slipped so that the rain,
even blowing around as it was, didn't enter the space. The truck was ten degrees off center,
canting over toward the chasm side.