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Whoever had been sent to search Calvary hadn’t searched very well. They had come and gone and the hill lay empty under the stars. A wind prowled through, pushing dust ahead of it, around the bases of the three crosses that, for their presence, felt as if they might have grown there long before the studio was built around them.
I ran to the bottom of the cross. I could see nothing at the top, the night was dark. There were only fitful gleams of light from far off where Antipas ruled, Fritz Wong raved, and the Romans marched in a great cloud of beer from the Makeup Buildings to the Tribunal Square.
I touched the cross, swayed, and called up, blindly: “J. C.!”
Silence.
I tried again, my voice trembling.
A small tumbleweed blew by, rustling.
“J. C.!” I almost yelled.
And at last a voice came down out of the sky.
“Nobody by that name on this street, up this hill, on this cross,” the voice murmured, sadly.
“Whoever you are, dammit, come down!”
I groped up trying to find rungs, fearful of the dark around me. “How’d you get up there?”
“There’s a ladder and I’m not nailed in place. Just holding on to pegs and there’s a little footrest. It is very peaceful up here. Sometimes I stay nine hours fasting for my sins.”
“J. C.!” I called up, “I can’t stay. I’m afraid! What’re you doing?”
“Remembering all the haylofts and chicken feathers I rolled in,” said J. C.’s voice in the sky. “See the feathers falling down like snowflakes? When I leave here I go to confession every day! I got ten thousand women to unload. I give exact measurements, so much backside, bosom, groan, and groin, until the priest grabs his seething armpits! If I can’t climb a silk stocking, I’ll at least get a cleric’s pulse so hyperventilated he ruptures his turn-around collar. Anyway, here I am, up, out of harm’s way. Watching the night that watches me.”
“It’s watching me, too, J. C. I’m afraid of the dark in the alleys and Notre Dame, I was just there.”
“Stay outa there,” said J. C., suddenly fierce.
“Why? You been watching its towers tonight? You see something?”
“Just stay outa there, is all. Not safe.”
I know, I thought. I said, looking around suddenly, “What else you see, J. C., night or day up there?”
J. C. glanced swiftly off at the shadows.
“What,” his voice was low, “would there be to see in an empty studio, late?”
“Lots!”
“Yes!” J. C. turned his head south to north and back. “Lots!”
“On Halloween night—” I plunged on—“you didn’t happen to see—” I nodded north some fifty yards—“a ladder on top of that wall? And a man trying to climb?”
J. C. stared at the wall. “It was raining that night.” J. C. lifted his face to the sky to feel the storm. “Who’d be nuts enough to climb up there in a storm?”
“You.”
“No,” said J. C. “I’m not even here now!”
He put his arms out, grasped the crossbars, leaned his head forward and shut his eyes.
“J. C.,” I called. “They’re waiting on set seven!”
“Let them wait.”
