The Mirror Thief(141)
The machine won’t take nickels; Stanley’s out of dimes. In a minute he’ll have the attendant break a dollar, but in the meantime there’s one last nickel show left.
The label has worn away, or been removed. The title card just says JULY 4, 1905. Stanley’s nickel falls with a hollow lonely clank.
The first thing he sees is a long black boat, making its way down a broad canal, a massive rollercoaster in the background. That image is quickly replaced by others: camels and pachyderms, a miniature railroad, bathing beauties in bizarre swimsuits, bowler-hatted men and their corseted wives strolling through shaded arcades. Then Stanley spots a familiar sign: ST. MARK’S HOTEL.
His hand freezes on the crank; the viewer goes dark. He starts it again, and soon other familiar sights emerge: buildings along Windward and the boardwalk, though the names of just about all the shops—Harry A. Hull Billiards, H. C. Burmister Grocery, Frasinelli Fruit Co.—are strange to him. Most disorienting of all, in this film Windward doesn’t stop at the boardwalk: it crosses the beach to become the midway of a thronged amusement pier, with bathhouses and dancehalls and lit-up carnival rides. When the spool ends he feeds the machine more nickels. Eventually he spots the building that will one day become the Fortune Bridgo parlor, and then, a few doors down, the building he’s standing in right now. He presses his face to the brass viewer, inches the crank forward. Tiny silent figures march erratically along the pier, black-garbed and plume-hatted, flickering like the ghosts they are.
A moment of panic seizes Stanley: the sensation of being watched. He straightens up and turns to scan the room, but he meets no eyes. The air has changed, grown heavy. Beyond the open windows, the sky over the ocean has gone gray and solid. He has a creepy Rip-Van-Winkle feeling, like something just slipped past him. He stands stock-still, eyeing the boardwalk and the shore, waiting for whatever’s coming.
Soon he sees it. Charlie again, slouching across the beach, his expression sober and serious. He has an arm around somebody’s waist, somebody he’s helping to walk. Their approach through the clotted air is nightmare-slow.
Stanley dashes out the door, onto the boardwalk. Wanting to see, though by now he knows. The figure with Charlie stumbles forward as if half-blind; his eyes, Stanley sees, are swollen nearly shut. He cradles his right hand against his chest as if it’s a bird stunned by a flight into a windowpane; Stanley can tell right off that the hand is broken. As messed-up as he is, the figure measures his steps, keeps his chin high, and it’s mostly from that—and from the blue rayon shirt he wears, now flecked down the front with rusty dried blood—that Stanley is able to recognize him as Claudio.
47
At a luncheonette on Market they get Claudio a glass of water and an icepack for his hand. Claudio sips the water through a drinking-straw. Stanley’s worried at first that his jaw is broken, but when he finally speaks his voice is clear enough. Thank you, he tells Charlie. It is okay for you to go. I will be fine.
Charlie’s nearly in tears as they walk away, kneading his hands in the middle of the boardwalk, as if Claudio were his own wounded son. Stanley clenches his teeth, holding something in, though he’s not sure what: curses maybe, or puke. His stomach feels like it’s dropped into his thigh.
They’re no more than a hundred yards from the hideout, but Claudio won’t go there. It takes them just about forever to pass the four blocks of boardwalk to Wave Crest. The crowd parts around them, passing on both sides. Stanley watches the faces light up as they draw close and see Claudio: startled, sympathetic, disgusted, amused. A few servicemen on dates stop to offer help, but Stanley waves them off. At the corner of Club House a beat cop detains them for a couple of minutes with questions. My buddy just had a bicycle accident, officer, Stanley says. He ran into a telephone pole. No, nobody else got hurt. He’s gonna be okay.
Yes, Claudio’s split lips corroborate. It is just as my friend has told you. A telephone pole.
All along the walk, Claudio whispers, then falls silent. Relentlessly repeating himself. I looked every place for you, he says. All the morning I looked for you, and all the afternoon. I had so many things I wished to tell you. I had so many ways I had learned to make our lives better. And I could not find you. Where were you?
Stanley clenches his teeth, says nothing.
The first round of knocks brings no one to Welles’s door. A second round—hard and protracted—also dies away with no results, and Stanley is about to jump from the stoop and try the side door when the lace curtain swings aside to reveal Synn?ve’s face, her pale paint-smeared hand over her horrified mouth.
She wraps Claudio in an afghan—the same one Cynthia used last night—then makes another icepack, and hurries from the room to the telephone. Stanley holds the new pack to Claudio’s face; Claudio keeps the freeze on his cracked hand with the other one. His forehead is corpse-pale; he’s bruising quickly under both eyes. Where were you, Stanley? he says. I looked every, every, everywhere.
Listen, Stanley says. Shut up a minute. Tell me who did this.
The hoods.
No shit it was the hoods. What hoods?
Claudio’s mouth goes sour. It doesn’t matter, he says.
It does matter, kid. Who was it? I gotta—
Where were you? Claudio says. A sharp note creeps into his voice, sad and dangerous.
Kid, Stanley says. You need to tell me, right now, who did this. Because if you don’t, then I’m gonna have to guess. And I’m gonna guess whoever it was had a lot of help, and I’m gonna wind up making a bigger mess than I need to. Now. Who? Whitey, right? How many more?