Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

I touched the typewriter, wondering if it was a lost friend or a man or a mean mistress.

Somewhere back a few weeks it had made noises vaguely resembling the Muse. Now, more often than not, I sat at the damned machine as if someone had cut my hands off at the wrists. Three or four times a day I sat here and was victimized by literary heaves. Nothing came. Or if it did, it wound up on the floor in hairballs I swept up every night. I was going through that long desert known as Dry Spell, Arizona.

It had a lot to do with Peg so far away among all those catacomb mummies in Mexico, and my being lonely, and no sun in Venice for the three months, only mist and then fog and then rain and then fog and mist again. I wound myself up in cold cotton batting each midnight, and rolled out all fungus at dawn. My pillow was moist every morning, but I didn’t know what I had dreamed to salt it that way.

I looked out the window at that telephone, which I listened for all day every day, which never rang offering to bank my splendid novel if I could finish it last year.

I saw my fingers moving on the typewriter keys, fumbling. I thought they looked like the hands of the dead stranger in the cage, dangled out in the water moving like sea anemones, or like the hands, unseen, of the man behind me tonight on the train.

Both men gestured.

Slowly, slowly, I sat down.

Something thumped within my chest like someone bumping into the bars of an abandoned cage.

Someone breathed on my neck …

I had to make both of them go away. I had to do something to quiet them so I could sleep.

A sound came out of my throat as if I were about to be sick. But I didn’t throw up.

Instead, my fingers began to type, x-ing out the UNTITLED NOVEL until it was gone.

Then I went down a space and saw these words begin to jolt out on the paper:

DEATH and then IS A and then LONELY and then, at last, BUSINESS.

I grimaced wildly at the title, gasped, and didn’t stop typing for an hour, until I got the storm-lightning train rolled away in the rain and let the lion cage fill with black sea water which poured forth and set the dead man free....

Down and through my arms, along my hands, and out my cold fingertips onto the page.

In a flood, the darkness came.

I laughed, glad for its arrival.

And fell into bed.

As I tried to sleep, I began sneezing and sneezing and lay miserably using up a box of Kleenex, feeling the cold would never end.

During the night the fog thickened, and way out in the bay somewhere sunk and lost, a foghorn blew and blew again. It sounded like a great sea beast long dead and heading for its own grave away from shore, mourning along the way, with no one to care or follow.

During the night a wind moved in my apartment window and stirred the typed pages of my novel on the desk. I heard the paper whisper like the waters in the canal, like the breath on my neck, and at last I slept.

I awoke late to a blaze of sun. I sneezed my way to the door and flung it wide to step out into a blow of daylight so fierce it made me want to live forever, and so ashamed of the thought I wanted, like Ahab, to strike the sun. Instead I dressed quickly. My clothes from last night were still damp. I put on tennis shorts and a jacket, then turned the pockets of my damp coat out to find the clot of papier-mâché that had fallen from the dead man’s suit only a few hours ago.

I touched the pieces with my fingernail, exhaling. I knew what they were. But I wasn’t ready to face up to it yet.

I am not a runner. But I ran …

Away from the canal, the cage, the voice talking darkness on the tram, away from my room and the fresh pages waiting to be read which had started to say it all, but I did not want to read them yet. I just ran blindly south on the beach.

Into Lost World country.

I slowed at last to stare at the forenoon feedings of strange mechanical beasts.

Oil wells. Oil pumps.

These great pterodactyls, I said to friends, had arrived by air, early in the century, gliding in late nights to build their nests. Startled, the shore people woke to hear the pumping sounds of vast hungers. People sat up in bed wakened by the creak, rustle, stir of skeletal shapes, the heave of earthbound, featherless wings rising, falling like primeval breaths at three a.m. Their smell, like time, blew along toe shore, from an age before caves or the men who hid in caves, the smell of jungles falling to be buried in earth and ripening to oil.