| |
LATHAM LOOP was a finalist
in the
Historical Fiction category
for the 2004 EPPIE awards.
Visit EPIC's web site for details.
BOOK ONE
PROLOGUE - July 4, 1912
Just outside Topeka
"Four dollars and eighty-five cents."
"You sure? Count it again, Jed. That can't be all we have."
Jed threw the red bandanna grouch bag down on the wooden planking floor, where it jingled faintly. "I'm tellin' ya, that's it. We had over five bucks, but then we had lunch."
"Jesus."
"You said it. We're flat broke, kid."
"I told you not to order the pie." Mim's voice sounded faint from where she sat on the other side of the waiting room, but the rancor was loud and clear.
Harold rubbed his sweaty hands over his face and eased into the open doorway of the train station to catch a breeze. The setting sun was still so hot the twin ribbons of track looked like they were fresh off the anvil, glowing red, trailing off into the scorched horizon. The burr of a million cicadas droned in his ears, a sound so pervasive and constant it could just as well have been in his head as outside of it.
Across the tracks there was nothing but miles and miles of corn, an undulating sea of it, sizzling under translucent waves of heat like a living thing. No different than Nebraska in the summer - just as hot, just as dead. If he knew when he left Burlington he'd end up stranded outside Topeka, Kansas on the Fourth of July with four dollars and eighty-five cents, he would have never left home.
It was supposed to have been a holiday matinee, full bill, with their act going on right after intermission. The booking agent had fronted Jed enough for train fare to get them there, and he promised they'd get paid after the show.
But when they showed up at the stage door of the Topeka Opera House, the manager had argued they weren't supposed to be Billings and Gilbert, Jugglers Extraordinaire, but Lady Valencia and her Professorial Poodles. He wouldn't let them into the theater, so they had to haul their equipment trunk back to the train station, empty handed and with no prospects of future work.
Harold leaned against the frame wall of the depot and let himself slide down until he was hunkered over the cracked red brick paving stones. They'd toured and worked and polished the act, but still weren't able to get on the Keith or the Orpheum wheels, the big vaudeville programs. Instead, they hit the prairie circuit - Topeka, and not even good enough to stand in for a pack of poodles.
He rubbed his hands over his face again, digging fingers into his eye sockets until fireworks exploded behind his closed lids. He didn't want to do this anymore. Not this way, knocking on a door that would never open.
He touched his breast pocket, feeling for the brochure put out by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the one Fred Wetzel from the Wonder Boys act had given him. Along with a chromo print of an orange grove and a beach, there was a picture of a cameraman in a rakish beret, cranking away at a stylishly dressed couple in an embrace. The actor, his hair slicked back, had a blonde woman tilted over his arm, as if he was about to kiss her. Harold had studied the brochure until it separated at the folds, memorizing the facts and figures about why California was the ideal place to make moving pictures. "Stake your creative claim in beautiful Los Angeles!" the caption read. "A sunny paradise ideal for the modern motion picture!"
Suddenly decisive, he stood up and began digging in his vest pocket. He found a stick of Wrigley's Spearmint Gum, which he unpeeled and chewed, a ripped ticket stub from the Apollo Playhouse in Pittsburgh, some lint, his lucky silver dollar, and a brass key.
Then he strode back into the station and over to Mim, who was fanning herself with a newspaper and glaring at Jed. The suitcases and equipment trunk were stacked on the floor next to her.
Harold slid his trunk across the floor and fitted the key into the lock. The heavy pocket watch, buried behind his rolled-up socks, was still ticking. He hefted it in his hand speculatively and closed the trunk again.
Across the room, behind an iron grille set into the wall, the stationmaster drowsed under a single incandescent light.
"Sir? Is there a pawn shop back in town?" Harold asked him.
The man startled and peered at Harold through wire-rim glasses so covered with fingerprints they were practically opaque. "Uh, sure, Sam Lindbaum's place, but you know it's a holiday, sonny. Everything's closed."
"Well, how about you, then?" Harold held up the watch by its chain and set it spinning. "This was my grandfather's. Eighteen karat gold, made in Switzerland. Twenty-one jewel movement. Keeps perfect time. What'll you give me for it?"
The old man peered over his spectacles and reached for the watch. "Don't know that I need no watch." He took it into gnarled fingers and examined it closely. "What do you want for it?"
Harold nodded toward Jed and Mim. "Three tickets to Los Angeles, California. One-way."
The stationmaster put the watch to his ear, then rubbed a horny thumbnail over the engraving. "They your folks?"
"Nope. We're show people."
"Humph. Nice-lookin' young fella like you oughta be doin' somethin' respectable, not chasin' around the country in show business. That's work for bums and whoors." He spat a wad of chew into a nearby spittoon, where it pinged melodiously.
"Say, who're you callin' a whoor?" Jed shouted. "My wife's no whoor, sir. And if you say anything else, we can settle this back behind the station."
"Didn't say I was talkin' about you or yourn," the stationmaster said with a smile. "And yes, sonny, in fact, I can accommodate you. The five-thirty-eight that stops here will take you straight to Los Angeles."
"Fine. Let's have the tickets, and the watch is yours."
"Wait a minute, Hal." Jed materialized at his elbow, his Bassett hound face creased in query. "Why California? Why not New York? There's booking agents all up and down Broadway who'd be happy to see a couple seasoned troupers who could stand the gaff. Hell, all the first-rate theaters are there. The Palace - the Belasco - it could be our shot at the big time!"
Harold looked at his friend and realized for the first time Jed was getting old, and he didn't know everything. After three years of nothing but hard knocks, Harold knew the closest Billings and Gilbert were going to get to the Palace Theatre in New York was the candy butcher's stand.
"Jed," he said, putting a hand on his friend's arm, "don't you remember all the stuff we been hearing on the circuit about moving pictures? Well, that's where a lot of the studios are now, California. I saw a brochure on it. It's beautiful weather there, 300 days out of the year. No freezing your kiester off in Cedar Rapids or Cleveland. And they're looking for actors. You can make almost twenty-five bucks a week, just putting on a costume and standing in a crowd."
"Hal, we ain't actors, we're jugglers, for God's sake!" Jed threw up his hands in supplication to the pressed tin ceiling. "Just 'cause we added some comic stuff to the act don't change that."
"New York fare works out about the same," the stationmaster said, a finger on the destination chart on the wall. "Train comes about an hour later, that's all."
"If we're goin' anywhere, I vote for New York," Jed said. "I ain't gonna give up everything I worked for to be a galloping tintype."
"Give up what?" Harold yelped. "All this? Catching trains and living like a gypsy? Living from hand to mouth and waiting for the big break? I'm 20 years old, Jed. I want to do something new, go somewhere different. I wanna see palm trees and swim in the Pacific Ocean. I wanna - " He paused, the words jammed up inside him, useless and too small and weak to express what he wanted, and everything he didn't want: cramped theatrical hotels that stank of sweat and cheap cigars; the Midwestern springs filled with freezing drizzle and aborted crocuses; and summers like this, stuck in some cornfield, waiting for a train to another destination just like the last one.
"They got potted palms down to the big hotel in Topeka," the stationmaster said. "You can go see 'em anytime."
"Hey, we don't need no background music from you, pops," Jed barked. "Mind your beeswax!" He turned to his wife, an angular, pinch-faced woman who sat watching the proceedings. "Mim, what do you think?"
"I think you boys have gotten us into this predicament, and you'd better figure a way out," she said, straightening her hat. "Otherwise, I'll take what little money we have and leave you to your own devices."
Jed looked at the stationmaster and grinned sheepishly. "Women," he said. "You can always count on 'em for support."
Harold dug into his vest pocket again and took out his lucky silver dollar, the one Mother had given him on a long-ago birthday, the one he'd never spend no matter how bad things got. He flipped it into the air and watched it tumble head over tail back into the palm of his hand.
"Call it, Jed," he said. "New York or California."
Jed scrunched up his face in thought and opened one eye. "Tails," he said. "Tails for New York."
"All right, then," Harold said. "Heads for California."
Mim and the stationmaster leaned forward, watching them. The waiting room was silent except for the sound of a distant train whistle. Harold tossed the coin into the air again, where it caught the sun coming in through the open door and glinted red on one side, silver on the other, as it fell.
And landed in Harold's hand head side up, Lady Liberty striding into the future.
"Heads," he said, slapping the coin onto the back of his hand. "It's California."
"Oh, Lord," Mim said. "Wild red Indians are going to murder us all in our beds."
"Not if we starve first," Jed muttered.
Harold didn't say anything. He was imagining the fragrance of orange groves, and lying on the sand with a beautiful young girl, and wondering how soon it would be before the stationmaster realized the watch Harold had won in a backstage poker game was nothing but gold-plated brass.
* * *
|
|
