Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“I only read menus. Let’s eat,” said Penny.

“Let’s drink,” said her husband, and so we did. We went to the Trocadero, and then to the Mocambo. Rocky was looking for the brass band he assumed would welcome him to California: if we just kept looking, surely they would show up. “I’d settle for one lousy sousaphone,” he said. “A flugelhorn. Anything.” At three in the morning we went to a diner to eat ourselves sober, at least a little, and at dawn we were in yet another cab, which took us to the beach. Even Penny could see the ocean: the size of it seemed to knock her over onto the sand, where she sat in her lilac dress, the shawl wrapped several times around her head.

“How very blue.” She pointed at the sky, and then at the sea. “I’d like a dress that shade,” she said, and passed out.

“Whaddya think?” Rock asked.

I answered despite myself, “God is mighty.”

“ I am mighty!” Rocky said, and began to strip off his shoes and socks and pants. Having conquered the West Coast, he’d now whip its ocean into shape. Maybe he could work Hawaii in before breakfast.

“I’ve never seen the ocean before,” I said.

“Yes, you have,” said Rocky. “I saw you see it.”

“You did?”

“The East Coast,” he said. “The East Coast .”

I laughed at my own stupidity: of course. I had seen city harbors, I had even gone across one so I could stand at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, but that wasn’t the ocean ocean. Here it was, miles of ocean ocean, the ocean blue, slapping waves on the sand and then pulling them back like a cardplayer who’s misdealt. Waves . That’s what I hadn’t seen before, the way a wave curled over and stretched and showed its underside, sea green! before it broke. I rolled up my pant legs. Rocky strode into the water in his shorts and undershirt.

Could water around your ankles make you seasick? I closed my eyes and tilted my face up; even the insides of my eyelids seemed sea-green instead of the usual hot orange. Probably I was just hungover. Despite the nausea and a pressing headache around the edges of my brain, I felt pretty terrific. For years I’d felt like I’d jumped bail in my hometown, and now I’d settled my business there and I was free and brave and in California.

We waded out farther. Suddenly Rocky dove forward and began to swim.

“Come on,” he said.

“Can’t. Don’t know how.”

He turned over in the water and wiggled his toes at me. “Everyone knows how to swim,” he said, but then he shrugged his way into a backstroke, and then a front stroke, and kept going.

Behind us on the beach, Penny slumbered next to a pile of clothing shaped like her husband. I thought about covering her with Rock’s jacket, but she looked comfortable enough.

When I turned back and scanned the horizon, Rocky was gone. I searched for a waterspout, the crook of his elbow slicing up like a shark fin, the backs of his heels making whitecaps on the waves. For eight years Rocky had been in plain sight. Where was he now? I looked up the deserted beach and down the deserted beach and back to the ocean, and I could only come to one conclusion: Rocky had drowned. He’d stumbled drunk into the Pacific and sunk to the bottom.

I’d talked him out of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, only to lose him to another body of water. Do you know: I went running farther out, the surf coming up to my hips. I swear I was ready to dive in, to start parting my hands in front of me till I found him (that’s what you did when a child got lost in a cornfield, I remembered), calling his name. Didn’t I have to save him?

Except I couldn’t. I was out to nearly my waist, the waves even higher, before I realized that swimming wasn’t something you’d pick up the first time. The newspaper article would say, one man drowned, and then another man drowned . That, too, was a familiar Iowan story, people who went leaping into flooded rivers, hoping to be heroes but ending up as corpses.

I turned to the shore and yelled Penny’s name, but she was out cold. Then I felt something brush past my ankle.

It was Rocky. He pulled me out of the water like Frankenstein with his bride, my back against the surface of the ocean. My heart had swollen so in my chest it felt rib-striped.

“Kick your legs a little,” he said. “See? You can swim.”

“I wasn’t!” I told him. “I thought you were dead!”

“Me?” He laughed and set me on my feet. He started walking back to Penny. “If there’s one thing you shoulda noticed by now: I’m buoyant. You can’t drown me .”

“No kidding, Rock, I thought you’d drowned yourself.” Then I felt something else run past my ankle, and jumped again. “Something bit me!”

“Nothing bit you. It was probably a dead fish rushing by.”

“I’m getting out of this goddamn ocean,” I said. “Dead fish!”

He was looking at the beach, squinting at the sun. If he’d kept his underclothes on for modesty’s sake, it wasn’t working. His back was to me, his wet undershirt soaked to silk netting. He put his arms up, as if to dry them, and said, “Only their souls ascend to heaven.”

They Also Serve Who Only Dance and Sing

“The studio’s trying to find something to suit your talents,” Tansy told us, and we got antsy. All we knew was we weren’t working, though we did draw a small salary. I started to long for that brass band myself, something to show that Hollywood knew that The Boys had arrived.

Then the draft act passed. Why not draft Carter and Sharp? As it happened, there was an old army script floating around just made for a comedy team, intended for Wheeler and Woolsey, or Olsen and Johnson, or Clark and McCullough, or some other mismatched pair of guys who’d either broken up or died or gotten too old to make credible soldiers. “I got a guy who can spruce it up for you,” Tansy told the studio, and that’s how Neddy became our movie writer too. He punched up the script, took out the references to the Kaiser, stuck in a number in a USO club. A cheap and easy vehicle for its cheap and easy stars.

Red, White, and Who? was a dumb and cheerful army picture, complete with a few patriotic songs belted from the back of a jeep. Some consider it our best movie. The timing, anyhow, made it our luckiest. We played soldiers on leave from camp who accidentally fall asleep on a train and end up in New York City; for the rest of the movie we try to get back to base before our absence is noticed. An old friend of ours from vaude, Johnny Atkinson, appeared as our mean sergeant. He’d been in Hollywood awhile, playing tough guys with hearts of gold. That was Johnny, the kind of guy who smoked a stogie while pruning his rosebushes. He had a flat-nosed gangster’s face and sorrowful blue eyes.

I loved the soundstages, the prop rooms, the cameraman leaning into his camera, the booms, the cars we drove in front of movie screens full of passing scenery. I loved seeing a character who’d last played a cop in a Bette Davis flick playing an army secretary for us. I loved having someone else apply my makeup for me. “Close your eyes,” the makeup girl would say. “Now open. Now close.”

Rocky had been right, all those years before: he had to have an audience to work. We decided to play to the cameramen, the grips, the propmen, the script girl, anyone who happened to be on the soundstage. Frank Brothers, the director, tore out his hair. He needed a silent set, but we needed laughs. So we worked even louder to cover up the laughter, and the folks on the set laughed louder, and we threw our props around — guns to the ground! suitcases on the baggage racks! ourselves onto upper berths! — and together we managed.