Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels Page 10
I could have robbed a bank and Mom would have seen a rosy future in finance for me. As it was, I started breaking into houses.
The Record pickings were slim. The town was going through a fallow period. Accidents were run of the mill. Cars. Tractor spills. Incidents and tragedies small scale and unremarkable. Three with one blow was our assigned minimum. Four or more would be saying something.
One night after dinner, I was watching TV when the doorbell rang. Mom called to me as she went to answer. “Leo, it’s your friend, Douglas Dunwood.”
I peeked out through the venetians. The angle of the living room window was pretty neat; if you stayed to the right, you could see who was at the door without them seeing you back.
“Leo, it’s your friend,” she called again as she opened the door. “Do come in, Douglas. Leo should be right out.”
He was wearing his dopey Scouting outfit, merit badges up the Mickey-Mental ying-yang. He took off his stupid hat, flashed his baboon Mickey-Mental teeth. “‘Good evening, Ma’am,” he said, and launched into a prepackaged spiel. “The Boy Scouts are conducting a paper drive in your area next Saturday. Should you have papers to donate, please bundle them neatly and deposit them on your stoop. We will be by to pick them up between the hours of eight in the morning and seven in the evening. If you are elderly or infirm, we will be pleased to assist you. On behalf of Scouts Canada, thank you for contributing to the well-being of our community.’”
“I don’t know where that boy is. Leo. Leo. Are you coming? Douglas is waiting.” And then to Dunwood: “He tells me you’re in taxidermy club together. If only you could get him involved in Scouting, too.”
Dougie said something I didn’t hear and plugged his Mickey-Mental head back into his Mickey-Mental hat.
“He’ll be so sorry to have missed you. Leo, Leo, Douglas is leaving.”
This was when the idea came to me. Old newspapers would be filled with disasters and crimes. Old newspapers would allow me to pull my own weight, give me the heft to compete with Jack. Never mind the Record archives being lost, I’d create my own archives.
Jack got his stories from the old and living. I’d get mine from the old and dead.
I confined my crimes to houses of the freshly departed, the 60-plusses, where “widow of” or “widower of” or “predeceased by” factored large in the Record’s obituary. Houses you could bet were vacant.
Old people didn’t draw much attention to begin with. Lights out on Halloween. No jack-o’-lanterns or candy. What did they expect? And in the immediate aftermath of last-corpse-out, their houses drew less attention still. Until the will turned up, that is. I prowled the buffer between after-death and before-heirs.
And it wasn’t precisely breaking in. Unlocked windows and doors were routine, which made it walking in or climbing in, and there was nothing criminal in that. And when the place was locked up, I didn’t push it, simply moved on to the next obit.
In spring and summer I carried hedge trimmers. In autumn a rake. In winter a shovel. Good Deed Gus, for all to see. You’d be amazed how a smile, a friendly wave, can derail a nosy neighbour. Direct challenges were met by a forlorn, “I miss my grammy/grampy.” Worked like a charm.
I’d guessed right about the elderly. Old newspapers were as plentiful as doilies, dust, Q-tips, and Ex-Lax. In stacks. In boxes. Sealing drafts. Lining drawers and cupboards. Wadded into shoes. Wadded around glasses, cups, saucers, and heirlooms.
I kept it brief. Riffled through pages with a trained eye. I knew what I was after. Tore out whatever tickled. And skedaddled. I never took anything more, I swear. Okay. Once. A Mighty Mouse comic book in 3D from 1953. But that was it.
A few stories touched on some of what Jack had been told, though details were sketchy and follow-ups scarce. You had the sense interest petered out fast. Or glossing-over horror had begun early on.
As for bad stuff of consequence, I came up with a couple I thought might qualify. Still, I was in no rush to share. The finds were of a different nature than Jack’s. I didn’t want to come off stupid, like I’d missed the point and murder had no place on our list.
Five
Joy in death, hope in destruction
On alternate Sundays, Dottie Lange dropped by our house on her way home from church. My mother would make finger sandwiches, while Dottie supplied date squares or brownies. The lunch was their “square meal,” a little joke between them. Dottie was a Betty Boop soprano in her early forties, a Miss Clairol blue-black with Cleopatra bangs. She wasn’t old enough to be Mom’s real mom, but she was a reliable surrogate. My mother had no family. None she spoke of, anyhow. Among the photos in the drawer of Dad’s night table (so called long after it had ceased to be), there was one of baby me in my mother’s arms. Standing with us, a lady I had never met. On the back, in dull pencil and Mom’s hand:
July 1951
Leo (2 mos), Emily, Eden
Mom and Eden could have been twins, had Mom’s hair been longer, had Eden been happier.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Someone who used to matter,” Mom said. “In time you’ll see, people like her turn up a lot in old photos.”
I do not know the age at which deceit begins to contaminate a kid’s brain. Don’t know when exactly darkness chokes off the light or skepticism subverts assumption. But I do know this: The captain of the Titanic had a better handle on icebergs than any grown-up has ever had on any kid.
Mom poured Dottie’s tea. “I read his letter to you, didn’t I?”
“Once wasn’t enough,” Dottie said. She plopped two lumps into her cup.
“I’m telling you, Dottie, Mr. Malbasic’s confidence in him is already having a positive effect. I can’t wait to tell him when we meet.”
Dottie tipped the creamer, stirred the white to beige. “What have I been telling you about Leo all along, Emily? The quieter they are . . . Special. He is special.” She patted my hand. “You are special.”
“Sometimes I see him as the little boy he is. Other times . . .”
“Man of the house.”
“Yes. Yes.”
Their belief in me, their optimism, does not in any way diminish the warm memories of those Sunday get-togethers.
The thing no adult could be allowed to see was how Jack and I found joy in death and hope in destruction. Every qualifying accident, crime, or disaster logged—past or present—was cerebral confirmation of worse things to come. Our watchword was impending. God, we loved the word. Impending gave us purpose.
It helped, too, how we were both into Ripley’s Believe It or Not, though it was my frequent and casual mentions of Elsie Hix, Frank Edwards, Rupert Furneaux, Edgar Cayce, and Charles Fort that cemented my potential as a viable sidekick. I’d wager we debated the merits of every unexplained mystery and phenomenon known to man.
The Mary Celeste. Or, as Arthur Conan Doyle had misnamed it, the Marie Celeste.
“You’d think Sherlock Holmes would have pointed out the error.”
“Or solved the mystery.”
The Abominable Snowman.
“Hillary found a Yeti scalp on Everest.”
Death by spontaneous combustion.
“You could be walking home from school and next you know you’re a cherry bomb.”
The Loch Ness Monster.
“There’s one in Lake Ontario, too.”
“But it’s only a prehistoric earthworm.”
Lost worlds. Atlantis. Lemuria. Mu.
“I bet you could find them all, Jack. If anybody could.”
Houdini’s secrets, which according to page 129 of my Reader’s Digest Junior Omnibus, would be revealed in their entirety on April 6, 1974.
“I hope I’m still alive to see it,” I said.
“Me, too,” Jack said.
The Nazca Lines of Peru.
The vanishing lighthouse keepers of Flannan Isle.
The Tunguska flying saucer explosion of 1908.
The Dropa Stones.
And Oak Isl
and, the Nova Scotia treasure pit engineered by Captain Kidd himself. It intrigued me like no other, and spooked me the same, instilling a lifelong fear of being buried alive. In quicksand. In a landslide. In a coffin. In my lies.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Jack said. “They won’t find anything on Oak Island till it wants to be found.”
His certainty could be so damn aggravating. “Things don’t want to be found,” I said. “They get found.”
“If that’s what you want to think. But I’m telling you, when something is lost, it lets you know when it’s ready to be found. Like hide-and-seek, when you’re still under the bed an hour in, you sure as heck want to be found, right? You show yourself. You catch an eye. You make noise. Like that.”
“Is that why you haven’t found anything since Mrs. Bruce’s ring? Because nothing’s ready?”
“I’ve found plenty. Just nothing to brag about.”
“You gotta show me. Please.” He couldn’t refuse his best friend. Annie had recognized it, after all. Jack must have, too.
The Levins’ garage stood remote and perpendicular to the house, concealed at the end of a grass and gravel driveway—a misplaced country lane, really—that wound between a stand of overzealous pines. The roof was a patchwork of bare plywood, weathered tar, and fractured shingles. The wood siding thirsted for a fresh coat of white. It was a fitting postscript to my surveillance of Jack and the disappointing answer to why my Sunday stakeouts had turned up nothing. The garage was obvious if you knew it was there; not so much if you didn’t. I’d neglected to cover off the underlying principle of Hardy Boys detective work: Get the big picture, clodhopper.
Jack fished a key from his pocket. “You got to promise you won’t tell anyone about this. Ever.”
“I promise.” I couldn’t think of anyone who’d be interested, besides Annie. “I’m good at keeping my mouth shut.”
“I need you to swear, Gus. Dumbwood or some of the others, they get wind of what I’ve got here and . . . well, you know what they could do.”
“I won’t tell. I swear.”
“Even if we stop being friends and hate each other. You need to swear you’ll keep this to yourself, so help you God.”
“I swear. So help me God. Even if we hate each other.”
“You Catholic?”
“Mom says we’re between religions.”
“Well, cross your heart or something anyhow, for extra insurance. That’s what you do, right?”
“Cross my heart.” I ran a plausible sequence from navel to throat and twice from tit to tit. I stopped short of “and hope to die” and “stick a needle in my eye.”
“All right,” Jack said, and we shook on it. “‘Rich or poor, a man’s word is the most valuable thing he’s got.’”
“Roy Rogers or Gene Autry?” I said. Had to be one or the other.
“Joey the Clown.” He bent to one knee and popped the lock. “Circus Boy.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, unconvinced.
Jack gripped the handle. “Well, you asked for it.” He straightened and the garage door rose with him.
4:30 5 SUPERMAN—Adventure
Gloomy Gus, cub reporter for the Daily Planet newspaper, visits Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.
Six
X, N, and K
“You’re the first and only friend I’ve let in,” Jack said. “Except for Mr. McGrath, once.”
Homemade shelves lined the walls to my left and right, boxes on unpainted planks. Centred on the wall ahead was a bulletin board with newspaper clippings, and surrounded by maps on all sides. Notes, pushpins, and coloured wool dotted and crisscrossed the lot, suggesting rhyme to Jack’s reason. Atom-Age linoleum overlaid the floor, blue and red starbursts on a faded yellow universe. An 8 x 4 work table held down the middle of the floor, sawhorse supports at either end and a too-logical arrangement on top: Gilbert microscope, Gilbert chemistry set, magnifying glasses, transistor radio, spiral-bound notepads, a Woody Woodpecker mug stocked with pens and coloured pencils, and two yards of hardcovers and paperbacks strung upright between Lone Ranger and Tonto bookends.
“Where do you want to start?” he said.
He took me through his unpublicized finds, as he called them, the artifacts stored in empty chocolate bar and chewing gum cartons scavenged from the restaurant.
Indian arrowheads.
Fossils.
Shell casings. Bullets.
The brass hands and face from an old clock. (An upside-down 2 filling in for a 7.)
Shards of dishes and pottery.
A Howdy Doody glass, a chip in the rim. (It had begun life as a Welch’s grape jelly jar.)
Forks. Knives. Spoons.
Tin boxes, rusty or very rusty, with lids and without. Rowntree’s Cocoa. King George Coronation ‘1937 Souvenir’ Tea Biscuits. Ivory Soap. Macintosh’s Toffee de Luxe. Cracker Jack. Shawmut Seidlitz Powders, whatever the heck that was.
Jars and bottles.
Doll heads. Tin soldiers. Dinky Toys.
Coins. Military buttons.
Where more than one item was in a box, they would be separated by dividers and wrapped individually in Saran or, if tiny, in frosted envelopes, the ones stamp collectors favour.
Stickers indicated the name, date, and place of the finds, with Jack rating the items according to quality. X for Excellent. N for Neat. K for Okay.
“Show me something good,” I said. “Like the bottle you found. Or the meteorite.”
“The X finds.”
“Yeah. Them.”
“They’re tough to come by, man. And the ones I have found, well, you know what happened . . . you read the paper.”
“I just thought . . .”
“Not as exciting as you expected.”
I approached the maps.
“I keep track of where I find what. Occasionally patterns develop. Like over here. See. Most of the buttons and bullets turned up by Keating Woods—the open field between the orchards. Mr. McGrath figures it was the site of a skirmish. But he didn’t write it up. He worried people would start digging the place up and ruin what was left. I found some bones there, too, but I covered them up.”
“Like human bones?”
“Don’t forget, you promised to keep all this to yourself.”
“Hanna Park, too.” I moved to another map. “You’ve found a bunch out there.”
“Mostly Ks, though.”
“You gotta take me with you, Jack. You got to.”
“Damn it, Gus, how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t go looking for anything. Swear to God, I don’t. Whatever I find comes looking for me. You found money outside the A&P once, right?”
“Five bucks.”
“Did you go looking for it? Did you? Or did you look down and it was there?”
“I guess.”
“Exactly. It called to you. Think how many people walked by before you did. And how many never noticed.”
“My mom, she didn’t.”
“Right. The five bucks chose you.”
“Yeah, but everything else chooses you. Why not me?”
Jack groaned, steered me to his work table. “I thought you’d understand. You’re here because you’re the only one who would.” He ran his hand from Tonto to the Lone Ranger. “Some things cannot be explained.”
The books were arranged alphabetically by title. I recognized most by the spines alone. I owned them all, save four or five.
The Art of Thought Reading
Atlantis: Found!
The Book of the Bizarre
The Book of the Damned
Boys’ Book of the Supernatural
Confounding Coincidences
Developing Your ESP
Extra-sensory Perception
Haunted Houses
Lo!
Lost Treasures of the Ancient World
Lost Treasures of North & South America
Lost Worlds
Mysteries of the Ancient World
Mysteries of the Une
xplained
On Mysteries of the Mind
On Reincarnation
On Secrets of the Universe
Past Lives
Real Ghost Stories
Reincarnation and Karma
Strange as It Seems
Strange but True
Stranger than Science
Strange World
Strangest of All
Supernatural! Unnatural! Actual!
Unexplained Mysteries
Unexplained Phenomena
World’s Strangest Mysteries
Weird, Weirder, Weirdest!
The Werewolf in Lore and Legend
You Have Lived Before!
“Why not you, Gus? Why not you?” Jack said. “Hey, why me? Why me?”
I had no answer.
He showed me his Mad magazines. It was no match for my collection. But he had me beat on comic books. Three huge boxes. I’d barely cracked the lot when I turned up Detective Comics 225, the first appearance of J’onn J’onzz, The Martian Manhunter.
I didn’t bring up the finding again until it was time to go. I was cautious and disarming. Stuttered a little. “Maybe if we hang out more, I was thinking maybe, you know, your finding powers might rub off on me.”
He laughed, relented. “Okay. Sure. How about this Saturday, we go to Hanna Park and see what happens?”
“Yeah. Yeah. But after the Odeon, okay? No way I’m missing 13 Ghosts.”
“Me, neither,” he said.
The wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz was in 13 Ghosts. So was that kid from The Boy and the Pirates, hands down the best pirate movie ever made. But the best thing about 13 Ghosts, the reason I associate it with Jack and that day, was the ghost viewer they gave to everybody who showed up. You couldn’t see the ghosts without it. (Well, actually you could, but you wouldn’t know unless you broke the rules and removed your viewer during the ghost scenes.)
Jack saved his viewer. I saved mine, too.
Seven