He has no means of recognizing Welles. He could pass him on the street—maybe he already has—and he’d have no idea. This is obvious, but it’s hard for Stanley to keep in mind. In his daydreams he always knows Welles by sight: their paths cross, their eyes lock, Stanley catches the impish and ironical expression on the older man’s face and knows him immediately. He always imagines that Welles recognizes him, too. As a confederate. As the boy he has been looking for.
Stanley knows that this is childish. He needs to start asking around, and he’s not sure of the best way to go about it. He’s got good front going now—not an easy thing to maintain—and the idea of becoming more visible bothers him. Aside from running grifts and hustling occasional work, he hasn’t had any real traffic with the squarejohn world in years. These people—walking their dogs, mowing their lawns, going about their ordinary business—seem almost like a different species.
As Stanley thinks this, he can hear his father’s voice saying it, and he smiles. Remembering his dad seated in the kitchen of the apartment on Division, in full dress uniform, sipping buttermilk. Everybody else—his grandfather, his uncle, his mother, Stanley himself—was standing, and nobody else spoke. Stanley kept staring at the decorations on his dad’s chest: the Pacific Campaign Medal, the Bronze Star. They flapped against his olive tunic every time he laughed. Later he let Stanley drag his new fieldpack partway to the Bedford Ave station, then tipped him a palmful of mercury dimes. Get out of there quick as you can, he said. Those fuckers will bleed you dry.
By the time the Red Chinese finally killed his father, as he’d promised they would, Stanley was living in the apartment like a cockroach, sneaking in whenever he needed food or shelter, creeping out again to forage. He thought this at the time: a cockroach. The idea made him proud. A year after that, when his grandfather died and his mother stopped speaking forever, Stanley quit coming home at all.
The house ahead on his right is entirely overgrown by bougainvillea: only a slumped porch and a pair of dormers still hold off the emerald leaves and vermillion bracts. Stanley’s thrilled to see a building obliterated like this in the midst of a city. Something moves in the vine-snared yard—a cat—and now he can see several, maybe a dozen. One emaciated gray persian watches from the porch, so thin it seems to lack a body, to be nothing but yellow eyes and a snarl of fur.
Stanley walks on. The ocean recedes behind him. He thinks about the cats, and about the anonymous neighborhood houses. About Welles. About Crivano. About black scorpions, and hidden watchers in dense jungles.
He comes to a dead stop on the sidewalk. Barber shop, he thinks.
18
When the bus from Santa Monica pulls up two hours later, Stanley is waiting at the curb, the combat unit from his father’s fieldpack dangling from his fingers. He catches Claudio as he’s stepping from the door, shoves him back inside, and climbs in after him, paying the fare, shrugging into a seat. Stolen sardine cans in the pack scrape together as he settles it in his lap. We’re going to Hollywood, Stanley says.
Claudio stands in the aisle, slackjawed, then puts out a hand to touch Stanley’s fresh buzzcut. Your hair, he says.
Stanley catches him by the wrist, jerks him into the seat. Knock it off, he says. Did you hear what I just told you? Hollywood, chum.
You look like a soldier, Claudio says.
As the bus rolls south to the end of its route and swings north again, Stanley fills Claudio in on what the barber told him. Adrian Welles, it turns out, is now mixed up with the movies: writing, sometimes even directing them. A big production of his just finished filming nearby—right along the boardwalk, in fact—and now he’s in Hollywood editing it. It had a bunch of big stars in it, Stanley says. Even I knew some of the names. This could be your big break, kid.
Claudio’s trying to seem cool and appraising, but Stanley can see the gooseflesh on his forearms. With what studio is he contracted? he asks.
Universal Pictures, I think, is what the guy told me.
I do not believe that the headquarters of Universal-International are in Hollywood, Claudio says. I believe they are outside the city. Do we know how to find this place?
Sure we do, Stanley says. How tough can it be?