Spider’s Cage Page 2

  “Nobody here knows anything about it,” Windrow said into the phone, and hung it up without taking his eyes of Sal.

  “How’d you find me Sal?” said the girl on the bed, still facing the wall.

  “We never lost track of you honey. We just thought to leave you alone until the time came.”

  There was a silence. It seemed to Windrow that something was leaving. The woman on the bed waited a while longer, then spoke carefully. “Boojum…”

  Sal said nothing.

  Windrow blinked. Boojum?

  The woman sat up. Facing away from Windrow and Sal she lowered her head. The blonde curls that descended to her shoulders parted evenly around the nape of her neck.

  “Boojum’s dead,” she whispered, not quite giving her words the inflection that would distinguish them as a declaration or a question.

  “Hardpan found him last night,” Sal said, her voice gentler now, “just sitting in his chair.” She cleared her throat. “He died about a week, maybe ten days ago.”

  The girl held her breath a long time, then exhaled loudly. Her head lowered further, the shoulders slumped. She began to pick fitfully at a corner of the sheet.

  “He was reading that book,” Sal continued softly, “the one you’d given him about the music business…?”

  The girl was silent, then she gave a big sniff and looked up at the corner over her head, where the wall met the ceiling. “ Gnashmill ,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “The fucking story of the fucking country fucking music business.”

  After a short silence, Sal nodded. “He was about halfway through it. Readin’ by lamplight, like always.”

  After a longer silence, the woman turned to look at Windrow. He realized that he hadn’t seen her face since just after Sal had appeared. It looked different than he remembered it. She looked from him to Sal and to the floor. “I’ll get into some clothes,” she said, and stood up. She moved naturally, without embarrassment.

  Windrow thought her most beautiful. As she poked around the guitar for her jewelry and clothes, looking under the bed, discovering a stocking under a lemon, her beauty displayed itself most advantageously, and in spite of the contraindicative circumstances, he managed to continue being aroused.

  Sal apparently sensitive to these things, looked at him and snorted. “Looks like the bull got left in the chute,” she observed.

  “Here’s that record,” the girl said softly, placing a record sleeve on the desk. She kissed him on his mouth, and brushed her now clothed hips against his naked ones.

  “Don’t forget me. I’ll come back for the six-string,” she said, indicating the guitar with a sweep of her arm. She smiled sadly and kissed him again. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Jodie, what’s going on?” Genuinely puzzled, his eyes searched hers.

  “Goodbye,” she said, and hurried out the door and down the hallway. He could hear her heels on the first step of the staircase before he moved to follow her. “Hey,” he said, “wait.” But Sal was still there, her hand on the doorknob. Windrow was just confused enough by the way life had thought to treat him this morning that he’d not noticed Sal retrieve the wrapped roll of quarters from her jacket pocket. He walked right into it. Making a fist around them, she buried ten dollars in change in Windrow’s stomach. All the air went out of him with a whoosh. The little jar of Vaseline hit the wall on the opposite side of the hall, but before it made the floor, Sal had delivered the roundhouse with the weighted fist to the side of Windrow’s head. He didn’t hear Jodie yell, he was unconscious at the time. But he pirouetted on tiptoe, backwards, to his desk as if to answer the phone again. Then, as if the phone had stopped ringing before he got it, he twisted around, as if the conversation with Sal might continue past the interruption. But then the detective suddenly relinquished the pantomime—or, vice versa, the pantomime flung him from its grasp and he flew incongruously backwards over the desk, sweeping it clean; and crashed into the slatted blinds covering the window behind. He pulled them down on top of himself, to the floor in a heap. Scotch bubbled out of a bottle onto the floor.

  Sal opened her hand. Forty quarters cascaded out of their split wrapper onto the floor boards. Then Sal pushed an astonished Jodie back into the hall, smiled mildly, and closed the door behind them.

  Several quarters twirled slowly flat, and a couple of others rolled lazily to the far corners of the room.

  Chapter Three

  THREE DAYS PASSED BEFORE ANY MENTION OF THE death of Jodie Ryan’s grandfather—“Boojum”—showed up in the newspapers. Windrow read seven California newspapers a day until the item turned up in the Tuesday L.A. Times, page 2.

  OIL PIONEER DEAD AT 85

  Vegas Cremation

  The remains of Edward “Sweet Jesus” O’Ryan, rancher, cowboy, rodeo star, philanthropist and pioneer oilman, were discovered Saturday in his desert retreat at the edge of the Temblor Range, west of Bakersfield, Ca.

  Details of Mr. O’Ryan’s death were scanty. A family spokeswoman would say only that it was several days before his badly decomposed remains were discovered by a family employee. The body was cremated in a private ceremony, attended only by members of the O’Ryan household, on Monday in Las Vegas. The press were informed of his death Monday night.

  O’Ryan began his career as a cowboy in Texas, and by the time he was 25 ran his own cattle on a 2,000 acre ranch. He lost the ranch to the depression, declared bankruptcy, and joined a travelling rodeo as a stock handler. At this time his first wife, Jodie Dweem of Philadelphia, “packed up and went home to Momma,” according to O’Ryan in an interview granted the Times in 1970.

  By the time the rodeo got to Bakersfield, Ca., two years later, in 1934, O’Ryan was an accomplished bronco buster and rodeo clown. When a talent scout spotted him and offered him a job doing stunt riding for Western movies, O’Ryan quit the rodeo and headed for Hollywood. But before he left Kern County, O’Ryan made a $50 down payment on a quarter-section of “god-forsaken desert” just north of Taft, California. Nearly forty years later, asked about the purchase, O’Ryan said, “Sweet Jesus, I thought it was the prettiest land I’d ever seen. It reminded me of Texas, but you just can’t find any place in Texas with that much creosote bush on it. It was downright green. I thought that little piece of real estate was just about the most lush country I’d ever laid eyes on. Figured if Hollywood didn’t work out, I could always herd tarantulas.”

  O’Ryan went on to spend twelve years in Hollywood, working in over 25 western and adventure films. “The only lines I ever got paid to speak was Eeyah and Argh ,” he told the Times in 1970.

  By 1947, O’Ryan had remarried, his Hollywood career had stagnated, and he felt he was “too old to be falling off horses for a living.” He and his wife packed up and headed for the desert. Driving through Taft, they noticed a new structure on a hillside just east of town, and stopped to inquire about it. “Was a wood oil derrick,” he recalled for the Times. “Greasy feller called Hardpan was standing next to it. We got to talkin’.”

  According to Hughes Tool Co. records, in 1960 O’Ryan Petroleum had 29 wells producing on the original quarter section, and owned or operated 75 wells under a variety of other arrangements, including leases in Texas, Oklahoma, the Gulf of Mexico, and California coastal sites.

  In 1970, O’Ryan established Petrofoundlings, a philanthropic organization widely known for its Old Well-driller’s Home “for fellers too pooped to poke” and the Old Stuntmen’s Home “for fellers too brittle to fall,” both located in the Los Angeles area, as well as worldwide charitable endeavors.

  To the end of his life, O’Ryan preferred the simple existence afforded by his two-room shack located in the foothills on his original oil property. Though electricity runs to every pump and well in the valley, he never had electricity installed in his home there. He preferred to read Greek philosophers and Latin poets by lamplight, and to live without “godforsaken modern gadgetry,” except for his Cadillac. “You ever see a cowboy didn’t w
ant a Cadillac? Any butt ever sat a mean horse don’t want to do without one, or maybe two of ’em, one for each bun.”

  Why was O’Ryan known as Sweet Jesus? Long time friend and employee Hardpan, who would not give his last name (“I got one, but I can’t pronounce it.”), told the Times, “Ever time a well’d come in, whether he was standin’ on top of it, like the early days, gettin covered with s—, or in the penthouse office, in downtown L.A., knee deep in likewise, I reckon, he’d throw his hat or a monkey wrench or a secretary just as far as he could, and holler, ‘Sweet Jesus.’ No, I never knowed him to go to church, ‘less he was gettin’ married.”

  Edward O’Ryan is survived by a daughter by his second marriage, Mrs. Kitty Larkin, of Malibu, Ca., and his granddaughter, country-western singer Jodie Ryan, of San Francisco. His third wife, Pamela Neil, divorced from Mr. O’Ryan in 1975, also lives in the Bay Area.

  Windrow spun his desk chair around to face the window, put his feet up on the sill. The venetian blind lay in a heap in the corner, against the lower drawer of the file cabinet. He crossed his ankles one way, then another. He readjusted his sunglasses. He sighed. He let his feet down with a bang, stood, and paced to the office door, where he paused. Her guitar and case were on top of the refrigerator. He hadn’t heard from her. No doubt that, now, she could afford a spare. He would have time to teach himself how to play a mazurka in E fl at before she called for this instrument. He kicked the bottom of the refrigerator. Desultory? Not at all. The thin protective grill clattered off the bottom of the refrigerator and lay at his feet. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at it. Nondesultory. Oh for a desultory mind randomly flipping from thought to thought, like a severed lizard’s tail in a box of matches. Leaps. Hmph. Squat frogmind emits the lovemad croak and uncoils its rear legs, airborn, plop, into the same ontological topography as before: mud. Emotional mud.

  Must be my diet, Windrow thought: short on protein and ruffage. He opened the refrigerator and inspected its contents. These amounted, in short, to a serious indictment of his personal nutrition. From the corroded and empty shelves of the old Kelvinator he extracted the ingredients of his breakfast. He poured a dark Mexican beer into a glass and broke a brown egg into it. He garnished the sepia barm with a dilapidated sprig of flaccid parsley, and drank. Ahh. He smacked his lips, chewed the parsley, and Pow, his mind made the leap. He paced back to the window.

  He’d first met Jodie Ryan on a television shoot on the Embarcadero. He’d been hired to find one of the gypsy crewmen working the production. Seeing Windrow, the startled subject fell off a pier into the bay and nearly drowned. Seeing Windrow and the shivering subject gave Jodie Ryan a distinctly bad taste for Windrow’s person, and they’d had a swell time ever since. This is to say, she’d call whenever she was in town and had nothing else to do, which occurred about every three months. Every three months was just often enough to keep Windrow interested, but not often enough for the affair to get respectable. However, he’d howled at the moon from beneath Coit Tower one night, and she’d sat up in the covers of the convertible sofa early one morning and composed a song for him.

  The song was titled: “Stealin’ Eyes.”

  So it must be love.

  Right?

  Windrow stared out his window, his head to one side, and blew air past his lips, making them flap. He could see a woman in the door of the grocery across Folsom Street. She was black, wore stacked heels, black mesh stockings, a bright scarlet blouse, a white skirt slit way up the front. She got a light for a long, brown cigarette from another woman, one of two who exited the grocery and joined her. Of these two, one was white, the other black, both dressed more or less similarly to the first. The second black woman held a large package in her arms. She took leave of the other two and crossed the street. Windrow heard and felt the street door of the Scarf Building open and crash shut, two stories below.

  He sipped his breakfast. The obituary yellowed on the desk behind him. The room still reeked of Scotch. After a time, the office door opened.

  “It’s the curtain lady, sweet thang.”

  Windrow grunted.

  “Oh, now, let momma look at it.” The lady from across the street put her packages down on the desk and turned Windrow’s face toward her. Her fingertips pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head and probed the yellowing black and blue bruise on the left side of his face. Windrow narrowed his eyes.

  “Do you think I’m still handsome, baby?” he said.

  Sister Opium Jade leveled her brown almond eyes with his. In her stacked heels, she stood as tall as Windrow. She moved until no parts per million separated them.

  “Honey,” she said huskily, “all you got to do in the morning,” her free hand dropped to his hip and fooled around expertly, “to crack eggs is look at them.” She fellated the tip of his nose.

  Windrow pushed her away, taking his wallet from her.

  “There’s no money in it,” he said, “but thanks for the compliment.”

  Opium pouted. “Awww,” she said, laying on her thickest street accent. “Y’all wanna walk aroun with your dick in your shoe for what?”

  He said nothing.

  “You’re supposed to say chacun son goût ,” she said, suddenly articulate.

  “Huh?”

  “Dif’rent strokes.”

  Windrow growled and finished his first glass of breakfast. Opium busied herself unwrapping her packages.

  “My pimp’s old lady beat me up once,” she said, holding a couple of yards of fabric up to the light. “Mean old thing. Tried to break my nose with a sock full of sand.” Windrow paced back to the refrigerator and refilled his glass, omitting the egg and parsley. Opium put aside the fabric and extracted a hammer and a small package of hardware from another bag. She rolled Windrow’s desk chair to one corner of the window, kicked off her shoes, and climbed onto the chair, showing a lot of leg in the process. “Course,” she said, tacking a curtain rod hook onto one corner of the window, “all that cocaine I was doing had eat all the bones out it, so every time she’d smash with the sock my old nose would just flatten out then bounce right back .” The first fixture in place, she stepped down and rolled the chair to the other side of the window. “She was so amazed it didn’t bust I had time to grab her by her esophagus. I had it ’most tore out before Lenny—that’s the pimp, that pimp—hit me with a bottle on my head…”

  Windrow interrupted her. “Hey O, keep talking French to me so I can’t understand you, will you?” He raised his eyebrows and narrowed his eyes, so the bruise hurt differently. He dipped a forefinger in his beer and moistened the painful crow’s foot behind his left eye with it. He squinted his eyes, then bulged them. “You’re putting that bracket lower than the other one.” He gestured with his beerglass.

  “Why honey,” said Opium. “That’s because this here Scarf Building runs uphill to the left. Besides,” she turned and glowered at him, “if I didn’t put these curtains up, who would?” She stuck her tongue out at him and went back to work. The hammer defied the ensuing silence.

  Windrow sat on the front edge of his desk, his back turned to the window. His stomach was sore. The bruise on his face still had his left eye swollen not quite shut. He kneaded it to make it hurt differently. Gratuitous violence.

  It all seemed so unnecessary.

  Why had Sal been so hyperbolic about the whole thing?

  Hadn’t she noticed that spiriting Jodie right out from under his nose would be depressing enough? Why beat up on such a sensitive man as himself, when a little psychosexual anguish would more than serve the purpose? A lovelorn landscape overshadowed a bulldozer job any day, didn’t it? In terms of temporary discomfort, at least.

  Sister Opium Jade had quietly extracted six Mexican beers and a long, telescoping curtain rod from one of her shopping bags, and was back on the chair, inserting one end of the rod into the hardware she’d hung on the wall.

  “Best forget her, Mr. Windrow. Easy come, easy go. She’s young, beautiful, talented,
smart and white—the bitch. She’s on the way up, right? What’s she want with somebody who forgets to shave in the morning?”

  Windrow stared at the slot under the door and slowly turned his face around the axis of his gaze.

  Les roses étaient toutes rouges

  Et les lierres étaient tout noirs

  She elocuted these lines with exaggerated articulation, floating the savor of each syllable on her most whiskied voice.

  Chère, pour peu que tu te bouges

  Renaissant tous mes désepoirs.

  She hit the rod fixture with the flat of her hand.

  Le ciel était trop bleu, trop tendre,

  La mer trop verte et l’air trop doux.

  Her beautiful voice expertly intoned the arcane French.

  Windrow had no idea what the lines meant, but their sound momentarily lulled him into distraction, a liquid jump.

  “The next line’s for you, blue balls,” Opium said cheerily, not turning around from her work. “I translate freely: ‘I’m constantly terrified you’ll make some um, precipitous flight.’ And then, ‘so that I’m sick of everything,’ there’s a list of things symbolic of everything, trees and shit, ‘sick of everything, alas, but you.’ ” She paused. “It’s called ‘Spleen.’ ”

  Windrow, charmed, nodded, his back still toward the window.

  “Paul Verlaine,” Opium said.

  Windrow opened a beer.

  “Goddam faggot,” she said.

  Windrow suppressed a smile and rolled his eyes.

  The telephone rang. “It’s for you,” Opium said, still on the chair. Windrow reached behind him and picked up the phone.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Marty.”

  Windrow woke up. “Jodie.”

  “Marty I’m in troub—”

  The connection went dead.

  Chapter Four