James Cain - Serenade

“With the Santa Fe, mashing down ballast.”

“Happy days.”

“Happy days.”

“Happy days.”

The crowd was gone and she was all alone when I ran down the hill, waving the cape at her. She turned her back on me, started to walk to the bus stop. I pulled out the wad of five Lahr had given me. “Look, look, look!” She wouldn’t even turn her head. I took my coat off her, put it on, and dropped the cape over her shoulders. “... I wait very long time.”

“Business! I been talking business.”

“Yes. Smell very nice.”

“Sure we had a drink. But listen: get what I’m telling you. I been talking business.”

“I wait very long.”

I let her get to the bus stop, but I didn’t mean to ride on a bus. I began yelling for a taxi. There weren’t any, but a car pulled up, a car from a limousine service. “Take you any place you want to go, sir. Rates exactly the same as the taxis—”

Did I care what his rates were? I shoved her in, and that did it. She tried to stay sore, but she felt the cushions, and when I took her in my arms she didn’t pull away. There weren’t any kisses yet, but the worst was over. I halfway liked it. It was our first row over a little thing. It made me feel she belonged to me.

We went to the Derby and had a real feed. It was the first time I had been in a decent place for a year. But I didn’t break the big news until we were back at the hotel, undressing. Then I kind of just slid into it. “Oh, by the way. I got a little surprise for you.”

“Surprise?”

“I got a job in pictures.”

“Cinema?”

“That’s right. A thousand a week.”

“Oh.”

“Hell, don’t you get it? We’re rich! A thousand a week — not pesos, dollars! Three thousand, six hundred pesos every week! Why don’t you say something?”

“Yes, very nice.”

I didn’t mean a thing to her! But when I took the cape, and stood up there in my drawers, and sang the Toreador song at her, like I had at the Bowl, that talked. She clapped her hands, and sat on the bed, and I gave her the whole show. The phone rang. The desk calling, to ask me to shut up. I said O.K., but send up a boy. When he came I gave him a five and told him to get us some wine. He was back in a few minutes and we got a little tight, the way we had that night in the church. After a while we went to bed, and a long while after that she lay in my arms, running her fingers through my hair. “You like me?”

“Yes, much.”

“Did I sing all right?”

“Very pretty.”

“Were you proud of me?”

“... You very fonny fallow, you, Hoaney. Why I be proud? I no sing.”

“But I sang.”

“Yes. I like. Very much.”

I didn’t like Hollywood. I didn’t like it partly because of the way they treated a singer, and partly because of the way they treated her. To them, singing is just something you buy, for whatever you have to pay, and so is acting, and so is writing, and so is music, and anything else they use. That it might be good for its own sake is something that hasn’t occurred to them yet. The only thing they think is good for its own sake is a producer that couldn’t tell Brahms from Irving Berlin on a bet, that wouldn’t know a singer from a crooner until he heard twenty thousand people yelling for him one night, that can’t read a book until the scenario department has had a synopsis made, that can’t even speak English, but that is a self-elected expert on music, singing, literature, dialogue, and photography, and generally has a hit because somebody lent him Clark Gable to play in it. I did all right, you understand. After the first tangle with Ziskin I kind of got the hang of how you handle things out there to get along. But I never liked it, not even for a second.

It turned out he wasn’t the main guy on his lot, or even a piece of the main guy. He was just one producer there, and when I showed up the next morning he seemed even to have forgot my name. I had his piece of paper, so they had to pay me, but I wandered around for a week not knowing what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to do it. You see, he didn’t have his script ready. But my piece of paper said six weeks, and I mean to collect on it. After four or five days they shoved me in what they call a B picture, a Western about a cowboy that hates sheep and the sheep man’s daughter, but then he finds some sheep caught in a blizzard and brings them home safe, and that fixes it all up. I couldn’t see where it fixed anything, but it wasn’t my grief. They had bought some news-reel stuff on sheep caught in the snow, and that seemed to be the main reason for the picture. The director didn’t know I could sing, but I got him to let me spot a couple of campfire songs, and on the blizzard stuff, Git Along, Little Dogies, Git Along.

They finished it toward the end of September, and gave it a sneak preview in Glendale. I thought it was so lousy I went just out of curiosity to see how bad they would razz it. They ate it up. On the snow stuff, every time I came around the bend with a lamb in my arms, breaking trail for the sheep, they’d clap and stamp and whistle. Out in the lobby, after it was over, I caught just a few words between the producer, the director, and one of the writers. “B picture hell — it’s a feature!”

“Christ, would that help the schedule! We’re three behind now, and if we can make an extra feature out of this, would that be a break! Would that be a break!”

“We got to do retakes.”

“We got to do it bigger, but it’ll get by.”

“It’ll cost dough, but it’s worth it.”

She hadn’t come with me. We were living in an apartment on Sunset by that time, and she was going to night school, trying to learn how to read. I went home and she had just gone to bed with her reader, Wisdom of the Ages, a book of quotations from poetry, all in big type, that she practiced on. I got out the guitar and some blank music paper that I had, and I went to work. I split up that song, Git Along, Little Dogies, Git Along, into five-part harmony, one part the straight melody, the other four a quartet obbligato in long four-beat and eight-beat notes, and maybe you think it wasn’t work. That song is nothing extra to start with, and when you try to plaster polyphonic harmony on top of it, it’s a job. But after a while I had it done, and went to bed with her to get a little sleep.

Next morning, before they could get together and really think up something dumb, I got the producer, the director, the writer and the sound man together in the producer’s office, and I laid it down to them.

“All right, boys, I heard a little of what you said last night. You thought you had a B picture here, and now you find out if it’s fixed up a little bit, you can get away with it for a feature. You want to do retakes, put some more money in it, do it bigger. Now listen to me. You don’t have to put one extra dime in this if you do what I tell you, and you can make it a wow. The big hit is the snow stuff. You’ve got at least ten thousand feet of that that you didn’t use. I know because I saw it run off one day in the projection room. The problem is, how to get more of that stuff in, and tie it up so it makes sense so they don’t get tired of it before you’ve really made full use of it. All right, this is what we do. We rip out that sound track where I’m singing, and make another one. I do that song, but after the first verse I come in, singing over top of myself, see? My own voice, singing an obbligato to myself on the verse. Then when that’s done, I come in and sing another one on top of that. Then I come in on top of that, so before the end of it, there’s five voices there — all me — light falsetto for the tenor part, heavier for the middle point, and plenty of beef in the bass. Then we repeat it. At the repeat, we start a tympanum, a kettle drum, just light at first, but keeping time to the slug of his feet, and when he gets in sight of the ranch-house we bang hell out of it, and let the five-part harmony swell out so the thing really gets there. All during that, you keep cutting in the snowy stuff, but not straight cuts. Slow dissolves, so you get a kind of dream effect, to go with the cock-eyed harmony on that song. And it doesn’t cost you a dime. Nothing but my pay, and you’ve got me anyhow, for another two weeks. How does it hit you?”