HOW FATIGUED I BECOME WITH transcribing brutalities. Let us just say that I dealt out suffering, a lot of it, and death, some of it, as I, with my discharging sidearm, slouched ever further from the promised land of Church’s Theory of 17. But retrieve In Our Image I did, and the liberated screenplay recuperated upon the dashboard, orange and snarled with drying blood.
For hours I drove about without destination for no better reason than to let Merle sleep. Even through the discord of a full-service gas station stop, she failed to rise from her twitching coma. I smiled with warm affection and blotted her damp hair with a handkerchief. With but an hour of sun left in the sky, she came to, smacking dry lips and thumbing the leather interior as if it were an elegant ballgown she’d wakened to find herself wearing. We were in a neighborhood even worse than Watts. Nevertheless I parked, filled my pockets with script and knife and gun, shooed aside the brats playing jacks, and assisted Merle from the car. A brisk walk, that’s what she needed.
This was no Rodeo Drive. Establishments brawled for air: tobacconists, clothiers, soda fountains, and taverns, each papered with avowals that their wares were the zenith in quality and value. Most were spruced with yuletide trappings of some sort—berried wreathes, sprigs of mistletoe, tinsel—and Christmas shoppers made the best of it, lugging about bags and flipping pennies to the Salvation Army Santas. Holiday songs feuded from competing doorways.
It felt rather grotesque given the drug addict clawing at my elbow. We walked as geriatrics, with Merle choosing each inch of sidewalk with suspicion. Still, the movement did her good. She lifted her face to the breeze and her brindled cheeks started to pinken. I, too, began to feel the happy rush of once more holding my blood relative in my arms. At length I decreed her well enough to dispense information.
“Merle, my sweet. Tell me why you came here.”
“Why does anyone?” Her voice was hoarse. “To act.”
It was not entirely implausible. Who could cycle through emotions with the zoetrope speed of my daughter? The hard fact, however, was that her beauty, once upon a time of silver-screen quality, had been scratched to the bone.
“Forgive me,” said I, “but aren’t you a touch old to make that your métier?”
“No. I’ve already filmed one picture.”
“Give me the title. I am well-versed.”
“Peeping-Tom Picnic. A fabulous lark.”
“If you tell me that this was a stag film,” said I, “my heart will fail.”
“Yes, it was. And no, your heart won’t do anything.”
I tripped and stumbled while the succubus snorted.
“Merle! Why would you subject yourself to such degradation?”
“It’s no different from what Bridey Valentine does. Show a little leg, a little tit, and like magic they give you money. I swear, Papa, you can be such a child.”
A delicatessen, packed with upright folk who did not strip in front of cameras, presented itself. On impulse, I ducked inside and pulled Merle along. Here we could sit in a booth, father and daughter, ordinary as you please.
“Your obvious intent is to ruin me,” muttered I. “But I won’t let that happen. Waitress?”
“Me? Ruin you? Oh, that’s right, I haven’t told you about my lovely abortion.”
A dozen people looked up from their soup and sandwiches. I wheeled about, steered Merle back outdoors, and quickened down a byway thick with men of nefarious leans. Evening had lowered; pink and yellow neon dissipated like dye into the sapphire sky. But darkness provided inadequate cover from Merle’s unblushing account of the cold table upon which she’d endured surgery. The abortionist had botched the job and she’d bled for a week, and when she’d finally scraped together the cash to see a qualified physician, she’d learned of the internal scarring that now rendered her infertile.
“Naturally, that’s when I started to actually want a baby. If only to stick you with a granddaughter. Seeing how much you enjoy taking care of me.”
“These are false fronts,” reasoned I. “You love me; I know you love me. You do not blame me for your barrenness.”
“Oh, but I do, Papa! I do! Had I had one single pocketful of your money, everything would’ve been different. There would have been better clothes, and therefore a better job, and therefore a husband, and therefore a child, and therefore no abortion, and therefore no stag picture, and therefore and therefore and therefore and therefore!”
Her yelps bothered the passing unbotherables. I corralled her against the brick wall of a pawn shop. We had progressed into a red-light district of peep-show cinemas and penny arcades boasting lewd photo reels entitled Hot-Cha!, Nude Kisses, and Girls of Spain. Scragged pitchmen jabbered their wares at pedestrians while street-corner twosomes swapped money for illegal goods. It was a Harlem drained of all joy, sapped of all class.
“Looks like my kind of place,” said she. “So be a peach? Give me the two grand and we’ll call it even.”
Merle might as well have carved out my dead heart. Unkind to her though the unknowns of life had been, she still preferred that risk, along with the gift of a couple thousand dollars, over accepting me for who I was—or the prospect of owing me a single damn thing.
“But the money.” I sounded feeble. “It was meant for your rescue.”
“You really want to rescue me? Then hand it over.”
“I don’t believe that wise, given the state of your . . .”
“Poverty? My state of poverty? The same sort of poverty as my mother?”
“I try and try to atone for how I treated her, but you refuse to let me.”
“This is how you atone. You give me the money.”
“I might be the child you say I am. But a stooge I am not. In one week you would spend every cent on morphine. I am not blind to those bruises on your arms. I have seen a hundred men, former soldiers most of them, marked by the same addiction.”
“I’m supposed to go cold turkey? Papa, that would kill me.”
Merle switched on a grin and dug into her skirt pocket.
“I have one left,” enthused she. “My last hit. I want you to have it. We don’t even need a needle. You can just swallow it or crush it—”
“Put that away.”
“Mother told me you drank, smoked, everything. Don’t you miss it? Here. Five minutes and you’ll feel it in your legs, the back of your neck, and then it’s like you’re in a secret, safe place where no one can hurt you. Morphine is for pain, Papa. Don’t you have any pain?”
I seized her arm and wrenched it. The beige tablet hit the sidewalk and bounced. Merle cried out and reached for it but I bounded in the direction of the Yankee Doodle, dragging my child behind. Did I know pain? Introducing Merle Watson to Bridey Valentine—now that would be painful! I could but pray that Bridey would, after stages of shock and disgust, sign a check that would pay for Merle’s medical impoundment. And if Bridey refused? Well, those medieval chastity belts and aboriginal pendants could be stolen and sold. Nothing, swore I, would thwart me from righting my wrongs toward Wilma Sue and Merle Ruby Watson.
Nothing, perhaps, except the most unexpected voice in the whole world.
We tumbled past a colorless, paint-chipped establishment beneath the eaves of which crackled a grandiloquent but impish sales pitch; ’twas the sort of voice that could flatten the back row of a crowd to its pew even as it fondled the fragile fancy of a worshipful front-row face. In the forty years since I’d last heard it, it had lost not a blurt of bombast, an edge of erudition, a whip of wickedness.
I turned about. Merle crashed into me and held on, sobbing.
Ashes to apocryphal ashes, dust to doleful dust.
The Barker.