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She zigzagged across the forecourt, a dozen fast steps to the right, another dozen to the left, pause, and a final two dozen steps to a third set of prints, where she froze, as if it were a land mine.
A car horn hooted. I turned. When I glanced back, the Grauman’s front door swallowed a shadow.
I counted to ten to give her a real start, then I bent down to pick up the tiny shoes she had left behind in her footprints. Then I walked over to the first set of prints where she had paused. Sally Simpson, 1926. The name was just an echo from a lost time.
I moved on to the second set of prints. Gertrude Erhard, 1924. An even fainter ghost of time. And the final footprints nearer the front door. Dolly Dawn, 1923. Peter Pan. Dolly Dawn? A fleeting mist of years touched me. I almost remembered.
“Hell,” I whispered. “No way.”
And got ready to let Uncle Sid’s fake Chinese palace swallow me with one huge dark dragon swallow.
Chapter Twenty-One
I stopped just outside the crimson doors, for as clearly as if he were calling, I heard Father Rattigan shout, “Lamentable!”
Which made me pull out Rattigan’s Book of the Dead.
I had only looked for names, now I looked for a place. There it was under the Gs: Grauman’s. Followed by an address and a name: Clyde Rustler.
Rustler, I thought, my God, he retired from acting in 1920 after working with Griffith and Gish and getting involved with Dolly Dimples’s bathtub death. And here was his name—alive?—on a boulevard where they buried you without warning and erased you from history the way dear Uncle Joe Stalin rubbed out his pals, with a shotgun eraser.
And, my heart thumped, there was red ink around his name and a double crucifix.
Rattigan—I looked at the dark beyond the red door—Rattigan, yes, but Clyde Rustler, are you here, too? I reached and grasped one brass handle and a voice behind me announced bleakly: “There’s nothing inside to steal!”
A gaunt homeless guy stood to
my right, dressed in various shades of gray, speaking to the universe. He felt my gaze.
“Go ahead.” I read his lips. “You got nothing to lose.”
Plenty to win, I thought, but how do you excavate a big Chinese tomb filled with black-and-white flicker film clips, an aviary of birds shuttling the air, fireworks ricocheting a big ravenous screen, as swift as memory, as quick as remorse?
The homeless man waited for me to self-destruct with remembrance. I nodded. I smiled.
And as quickly as Rattigan, I sank into the theater’s darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Inside the lobby there was a frozen army of Chinese coolies, concubines, and emperors, dressed in ancient wax, parading nowhere.
One of the wax figurines blinked. “Yes?”
God, I thought, a crazy outside, a crazy in, and Clyde Rustler moldering toward ninety or ninety-five.
Time shifted. If I ducked back out, I would find a dozen drive-ins where teenage waitresses roller-skated hamburgers.
“Yes?” the Chinese wax mannequin said again.
I moved swiftly through the first entry door and down the aisle under the balcony, where I stared up.
It was a big dark aquarium, undersea. It was possible to imagine a thousand film ghosts, scared by gunshot whispers, soaring to flake the ceiling and vanish in the vents. Melville’s whale sailed there, unseen, Old Ironsides, the Titanic. The Bounty, sailing forever, never reaching port. I focused my gaze on up through the multiple balconies toward what had once been called nigger heaven.
My God, I thought, I’m three years old.
That was the year when Chinese fairy tales haunted my bed, whispered by a favorite aunt, when I thought death was just a forever bird, a silent dog in the yard. My grandfather was yet to lie in a box at a funeral parlor, while Tut arose from his tomb. What, I asked, was Tut famous for? For being dead four thousand years. Boy, I said, how’d he do that?
And here I was in a vast tomb under the pyramid, where I had always wished to be. If you lifted the aisle carpets, you’d find the lost pharaohs buried with fresh loaves of bread and bright sprigs of onions; food for far-traveling up-river to Eternity.
