Джеймс Эллрой - Clandestine

I appreciated her honesty and decided that candor would be the only decent kind of barter. I decided not to bullshit her: maybe our encounter would leave her more of a realist.

The restaurant was a one-armed Italian place, strictly family, with faded travel posters of Rome, Naples, Parma, and Capri interspersed with empty Chianti bottles hanging from a phony grape arbor. I decided to forgo chow, and ordered a big jug of dago red. We raised our glasses in a toast.

“To the end of war,” I said.

“Do you really believe that?”

“Sure. Just because I don’t carry placards or make a big deal out of it doesn’t mean I don’t hate it.”

“Tell me why you dodged the draft,” Sarah said softly.

I drained my glass and poured another. Sarah was sipping hers slowly.

“I’m an orphan. I grew up in an orphanage in Hollywood. It was lousy. It was Catholic, and run by a bunch of sadistic nuns. The food stank. During the Depression we ate nothing but potatoes, watery vegetable stews, and powdered milk, with meat maybe once a week. All the kids were skinny and anemic, with bad complexions. It wasn’t good enough for me. I couldn’t eat it. It made me so angry my skin stung. We got sent out to a Catholic school over on Western Avenue. They fed us the same slop for lunch. When I was about eight, I knew that if I continued to eat that garbage I would forfeit my claim to manhood. So I started to steal. I hit every market in Hollywood. I stole canned sardines, cheeses, fruit, cookies, pies, milk — you name it. On weekends the older kids used to get farmed out to wealthy Catholic families, to show us a bit of the good life. I got sent regularly to this family in Beverly Hills. They were loaded. They had a son about my age. He was a wild kid, and an accomplished shoplifter. His specialty was steaks. I joined him and we hit every butcher shop on the West Side. He was as fat as a pig. He couldn’t stop eating. A regular Goodyear blimp.

“During the Depression there was a kind of floating hobo jungle in Griffith Park. The cops rousted the bums out of there regularly, but they would recongregate in another place. A priest from Immaculate Heart College told me about it. I went looking for them. I was a curious, lonely kind of kid, and thought bums were romantic. I brought a big load of steaks with me, which made me a big hit. I was big enough so that no one messed with me. I listened to the stories the old bums would tell — cops and robbers, railroads and Pinkerton men, darkness. Strange things that most people had no inkling of. Perversions. Unspeakable things. I wanted to know those things — but remain safe from them.

“One night we were roasting steaks and drinking some whiskey I had stolen when the cops raided the jungle. I scampered off and got away. I could hear the cops rousting out the bums. They were firm, but humorous about the whole thing; and I knew that if I became a cop I could have the darkness along with some kind of precarious impunity. I would know, yet be safe.

“Then the war came along. I was seventeen when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And I knew again, though this time in a different way. I knew that if I fought in that war I would die. I also knew that I needed an honorable out to insure getting on the police department.

“I never knew my parents. My first adopted parents gave me my name before they turned me over to the orphanage. I devised a plan. I read the draft laws, and learned that the sole surviving son of a man killed in a foreign war is draft exempt. I also knew I had a punctured eardrum that was a possible out, but I wanted to cover my bets. So I tried to enlist in ’42, right after I graduated from high school. The eardrum came through and they turned me down.

“Then I found an old wino woman, a down-and-out actress. She came with me when I made my appeal to the draft board. She yelled and screamed that she needed me to work and give her money. She said her husband, my dad, was killed in the Chinese campaign of ’26, which was why I was sent to the orphanage. It was a stellar performance. I gave her fifty bucks. The draft board believed her and told me never to try to enlist again. I pleaded, periodically, but they were firm. They admired my patriotism — but a law was a law, and ironically the punctured eardrum never kept me from becoming a cop.”

Sarah loved it, and sighed when I finished. I loved it, too; I was saving the story for a special woman, one who could appreciate it. Aside from Wacky, she was the only person to know of that part of my life.

She put her hand on mine. I raised it to my lips and kissed it. She looked wistful and sad. “Have you found what you’re looking for?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Will you take me by that hobo jungle? Tonight?”

“Let’s go now. They close the park road at ten o’clock.”

It was a cold night and very clear. January is the coldest, most beautiful month in L.A. The colors of the city, permeated by chill air, seem to come into their own and reflect a tradition of warmth and insularity.

We drove up Vermont and parked in the observatory parking lot. We walked north, uphill, holding hands. We talked easily, and I laid on the more gentle, picaresque side of police work: the friendly drunks, the colorful jazz musicians in their zoot suits, the lost puppies Wacky and I repatriated to their youthful owners. I didn’t tell her about the rape-o’s, the abused kids, the stiffs at accident scenes or the felony suspects who got worked over regularly in the back rooms at Wilshire Station. She didn’t need to hear it. Idealists like Sarah, despite their naiveté, thought that the world was basically a shit place. I needed to temper her sense of reality with some of the joy and mystery. There was no way she could accept that the darkness was part of the joy. I had to do my tempering Hollywood-style.

I showed her the site of the old jungle. I hadn’t been here since 1938, thirteen years, and now it was just a clearing overgrown with weeds and littered with empty wine bottles.

“It all started here for you?” Sarah asked.

“Yes.”

“Time and place awes me.”

“Me, too. This is January 30, 1951. It’s now and it won’t ever be again.”

“That scares me.”

“Don’t be scared. It’s just the wonder. It’s very dark here. Are you afraid of the dark?”

Sarah Kefalvian raised her beautiful head and laughed in the moonlight. Big, hearty laughter worthy of her Armenian ancestors. “I’m sorry, Joe. It’s just that we’re speaking so somberly, so symbolically that it’s kind of funny.”

“Then let’s get literal. I’ve confided in you. You confide in me. Tell me something about yourself. Something dark and secretive that you’ve never told anyone.”

She considered this and said, “It’ll shock you. I like you and I don’t want to offend you.”

“You can’t shock me. I’m immune to shock. Tell me.”

“All right. When I was an undergrad in San Francisco I had an affair — with a married man. It ended. I was hurt and I started hating men. I was going to Cal Berkeley. I had a teacher, a woman. She was very beautiful. She took an interest in me. We became lovers and did things — sexual things that most people don’t even guess about. This woman also liked young boys. Young boys. She seduced her twelve-year-old nephew. We shared him.”

Sarah backed away from where we stood together, almost as if fearing a blow.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“All of it?”

“Yes! I won’t get graphic with you. I loved that woman. She helped through a difficult time. Isn’t that dark enough for you?”

Her anger and indignation had peaked and brought forth in me a warm rush of pure stuff. “It’s enough. Come here, Sarah.” She did and we held each other, her head pressed hard into my shoulder. When we disengaged, she looked up at me. She was smiling, and her cheeks were wet with tears. I wiped them away with my thumbs. “Let me take you home,” I said.