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“You didn’t know him,” said Crumley. “Why those noises?”
The last police car was leaving. The morgue van had long since left. A lone policeman on his motorcycle stood at the bottom of Mount Lowe. Crumley leaned out his window.
“Anything to keep us from driving up?”
“Just me,” said the officer. “But I’m leaving.”
“Were there any reporters?”
“No, it wasn’t worth it.”
“Yeah,” I said, and made more noises.
“Okay, okay,” Crumley groused, “wait till I get this damn car aimed before you upchuck your hairball.”
I waited and fell apart, silently.
The motorcycle policeman left, and it was a long late afternoon journey up to the ruined temple of Karnak, the destroyed Valley of the Kings, and lost Cairo, or so I said along the way.
“Lord Carnarvon dug up a king, we bury one. I wouldn’t mind a grave like this.”
“Bull Montana,” said Crumley. “He was a wrestling cowboy. Bull.”
At the top of the hill there were no ruins, just a vast pyramid of newspapers being rummaged by a bulldozer driven by an illiterate. The guy bucking the wheeled machine had no idea he was reaping Hearst’s outcries, ’29, or McCormick’s eruptions in the Chicago Tribune, ’32. Roosevelt, Hitler, Baby Rose Marie, Marie Dressler, Aimee Semple McPherson, one, twice buried, forever shy. I cursed.
Crumley had to restrain me from leaping out to seize VICTORY IN EUROPE or HITLER DEAD IN BUNKER or AIMEE WALKS FROM SEA.
“Easy!” Crumley muttered.
“But look what he’s doing to all that priceless stuff ! Let go, dammit!”
I leaped forward to grab two or three front pages.
Roosevelt was elected on one, dead on another, reelected on the third, and then there was Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima at dawn.
“Jesus,” I whispered, pressing the damned lovely things to my ribs.
Crumley picked up “I WILL RETURN,” SAYS MACARTHUR. “I get your point,” he admitted. “He was a bastard, but the best emperor Japan ever had.”
The guy minding the grim reaping machine had stopped and was eyeing us like more trash.
Crumley and I jumped back. He plowed through toward a truck already heaped with MUSSOLINI BOMBS ETHIOPIA, JEANETTE MACDONALD MARRIES, AL JOLSON DEAD.
“Fire hazard!” he yelled.
I watched a half-hundred years of time pour into the Dumpster.
“Dry grass and newsprint, firetraps,” I mused. “My God, my God, what if—”
“What if what?”
“In some future date people use newspapers, or books, to start fires?”
“They already do,” said Crumley. “Winter mornings, my dad shoved newspaper under the coal in our stove and struck a match.”
“Okay, but what about books?”
“No damn fool would use a book to start a fire. Wait. You got that look says you’re about to write a ten-ton encyclopedia.”
