Donald Westlake - Sacred Monster

“Oh, sure!” Shouldering his shovel, Jack grinned at Buddy, said, “Luck with Linda,” and hurried back to the middle of the stage, facing the exasperated director with his sunniest and most amiable smile. “Sorry,” he said. “Here I am.”

“So I see. We’re going to try reversing the roles. You know the lines?”

“Oh, sure I do,” Jack said. “They’re all my cues.”

“I don’t,” said the football player. He was now reduced to smoldering resentment.

“You’ll read,” the director told him, pushing the paperback into the football player’s midsection. The football player took it like a handoff. The director gave them both an arch look, said, “From the top,” and returned to his seat in the auditorium.

Jack and the football player left the stage; Buddy was already gone. After a moment they re-entered, this time Jack in front. The football player was stiffer than before, sullen anger visible in his expression and posture. This time, Jack was primmer, fussier. He kept smoothing and tidying the rags he wore. There was a hint of pursed-lipped pickiness in his expression and manner, and he sounded aggrieved when he said, “Is she to be buried in Christian burial that willfully seeks her own salvation?”

“I tell thee she is,” the football player read, one word at a time, “and therefore make her grave straight. The crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian burial.”

“How can that be,” Jack demanded, taking personal affront, “unless she drown’d herself in her own defense?”

“Why, ‘tis found so,” read the football player.

Jack was baffled by this. He took the shovel from his shoulder and stood it on the floor, then leaned on it, thinking the situation over. Shaking his head, he said, “It must be se offendendo ; it cannot be else.” He turned so that the shovel stood between himself and the football player, then treated the shovel as though it were a lectern and he the lecturer. “For here lies the point,” he told the unlistening football player. “If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act; and an act hath three branches — it is, to act, to do, and to perform; argal, she drown’d herself wittingly.” Having proved the point to his satisfaction, he released the shovel and spread both hands in accomplishment. The shovel stood poised, then began to topple, then was caught by Jack with a flowing movement that picked it up and placed it back on his shoulder.

The football player read, “Nay, but hear you—”

“Hold it!” cried the director from the auditorium. He was on his feet again, coming now to the edge of the stage, looking up at his actors, saying, “That’s it, we’ll keep it that way. You,” he said, gesturing at Jack, “come here.”

Jack went over to the edge of the stage, carrying the shovel on his shoulder. He went down on one knee, looking down at the director, saying, “Yes, sir?”

Quietly, but smiling, the director said, “You’ll have to carry him, you know.”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Jack said.

“Uh-huh. I wish I could have you play both parts,” the director said.

Oh, how long have I been here? I’m all curled in a ball on the gray slate patio. When did I stop talking? Slowly, with a degree of pain, I straighten out of the fetal position, I lie straight again, on my back, legs straight, feet together, eyes staring up at the sky. White, blue, faded, faint, far-receding sky... Is someone screaming?

“So you knew right then you were an actor.”

The interviewer’s voice brings me back, his words make me happy. “Yes!” I say. “It had to be. I could feel it like, like, like chicken soup. Well, later, like bourbon. Like nose candy, you know what I mean?”

“It made you strong.”

“It flowed through me,” I say, feeling it again, the finest high there is. “It was warm, it was beautiful. Give me a role to play, give me the costume, give me the lines. I don’t need an audience. That’s why I’m good in the flicks, see? You got these stage actors who need that boost, that audience out there with that reaction right now, but I never did. I could play in a closet, man, just me and the coats, in the dark. Just give me somebody to be .”

“Uh-huh.” The interviewer seems to think for a minute, brooding over his notebook like someone with something to hatch. Then he says, “So you came to Hollywood?”

I don’t get it. Confused, I say, “Hollywood?” thinking of those miserable little houses on Woodrow Wilson Drive, with their miserable little swimming pools taking up the whole back yard. Why would anybody want to—?

Then I do get it. “Oh!” I say. “L A ! Here, you mean. No, my college professor sent me to some fruit he knew in New York, an acting teacher. My folks said they’d give me a year, then I was on my own. That’s the only time, really, for any length of time, the only time Buddy and I were ever separated.”

“He didn’t go to New York?”

“He went to the marines.”

It was a cold and drizzly day in Grover’s Corners, the needle-thin rain pasting trash and candy wrappers to the cement of street and sidewalk, the passing traffic a monotonous symphony of shashing tires and flwacking windshield wipers. Beside the big, lumpy blacktop parking lot with its few wet, mud-streaked automobiles like minor artifacts of a preceding civilization, the small building was incongruously bright and exuberant, with its impermeable pale green aluminum siding and the red neon bus-company name dominating its picture window. Posters and other signs cluttered that window with high-pitched come-ons: ski vacations, reliable taxi services, guaranteed package delivery, all-inclusive tours. Here in this false little building, fevered outside, grimy within, here nevertheless there stood the magic doorway between Grover’s Corners and the world. Step through, or stay at home; no one can do both.

Inside, Jack and Buddy, both twenty-one, stood looking out, through the runnels of rain, waiting for their separate buses. They’d talked themselves out. Expectation, bravado, doubt, and then apprehension had each moved in its turn through their minds and speeches and expressions of face, leaving them now drained, emptied, waiting for a world of new experience to refill them. The only remaining residue of emotion was a faint embarrassment, a hint of premature homesickness, causing an inability to speak or to stand naturally, an unwillingness to meet each other’s eyes for more than a glancing second before the gaze of each would slide away, back to the window, the rain, the inactive parking lot, the anonymous traffic on Main Street.

A bus appeared, out there, beyond the nearer line of traffic, signaling hugely for a left turn with a powerful and slowly blinking yellow light — the only vibrantly alive point in all that gray outdoors. The bus’s huge windshield wipers moved vertically back and forth arrhythmically, to separate patterns, narrow straight-standing sentries patrolling to different beats.

Jack made a sound, then cleared his throat. He said, “Yours, or mine?”

“What dif?”

Both stood hipshot, palms against backs, fingers jammed down into hip pockets, in unconscious imitation of the calm insouciance of characters in westerns, but with angular tension in their poses. More than ever, that false familial similarity hovered over them.

A break in the streaming traffic; the bus made the turn, massively, arthritically, the fat driver visible in his rainy fishbowl, turning and turning the huge flat wheel. CHICAGO, said the sign above the windshield: Buddy’s bus.

Jack’s grin was spastic; he’d wanted it to be his bus. “Well, Buddy,” he said, “you’re on.”