“I dunno. I just get a funny feeling in Manny’s office. The furniture looks unused. The desk is always clean. There’s a big white telephone in the middle of the desk, and a chair behind the desk that’s twice the size of Manny Leiber’s bottom. He’d look like Charlie McCarthy in it.”
“He does act like hired help, doesn’t he? It’s the telephone, I suppose. Everyone thinks films are made in Hollywood. No, no. That telephone is a direct line to New York City and the spiders. Their web crosses the country to trap flies here. The spiders never come west. They’re afraid we’d see they’re all pygmies, Adolph Zukor size.”
“Trouble is,” I said. “I was at the bottom of a ladder, in the graveyard, with that mannequin, dummy, whatever, in the rain.”
Maggie Botwin’s hand jerked on the crank. Arbuthnot waved much too swiftly across the street. The camera panned to see: the creatures from another world, the uncombed crowd of autograph collectors. The camera prowled their faces.
“Wait a minute!” I cried. “There!”
Maggie cranked two more frames to bring up close the image of a thirteen-year-old boy on roller skates.
I touched the image, a strange loving touch.
“That can’t be you,” said Maggie Botwin.
“Just plain old homely, dumpy me.”
Maggie Botwin let her eyes shift over to me for a moment and then back down through twenty years of time to some October afternoon with a threat of rain.
There was the goof of all goofs, the nut of all nuts, the crazy of all crazies, forever off balance on his roller skates, doomed to fall in any traffic, including pedestrian women who passed.
She cranked backward. Again Arbuthnot was waving to me, unseen, on some autumn afternoon.
“Arbuthnot,” she said quietly, “and you … almost together?”
“The man on the ladder in the rain? Oh, yes.”
Maggie sighed and cranked the Moviola. Arbuthnot got in his car and drove away to a car crash just a few short weeks ahead.
I watched the car go, even as my younger self across the street, in that year, must have watched.
“Repeat after me,” said Maggie Botwin, quietly. “There was no one up some ladder, no rain, and you were never there.”
“—never there,” I murmured.
Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s that funny-looking geek next to you, with the big camel’s-hair overcoat and the wild hair and the huge photo album in his arms?”
“Clarence,” I said, and added, “I wonder, right now, tonight, if … he’s still alive?”
The telephone rang.
It was Fritz in the final stages of hysteria.
“Get over here. J. C.’s stigmata are still open. We got to finish before he bleeds to death!”
We drove to the set.
J. C. was waiting on the edge of the long pit of charcoal. When he saw me he shut his beautiful eyes, smiled, and showed me his wrists.
“That blood looks almost real!” cried Maggie.
“You could almost say that,” I said.
Groc had taken over the job of pancaking the Messiah’s face. J. C. looked thirty years younger as Groc patted a final powder puff at his shut eyelids and stood back to smile in triumph at his masterwork.
I looked at J. C.’s face, serene there by the embered fire, while a slow, dark syrup moved from his wrists into his palms. Madness! I thought. He’ll die during the scene!
But to keep the film in budget? Why not? The mob was gathering again and Doc Phillips loped forward to check the holy spillage and nod yes to Manny. There was life yet in these holy limbs, some sap remained: Roll ’em!