I AM IN THE GREEN ROOM, WAITING. They are setting up lights and cameras in the studio. The director has been taking Hitler lessons. He is screaming at everybody and has created an atmosphere of intense hatred and mistrust. Apparently this is crucial to the making of fine television adverts. It doesn’t bother me, though. I sit on the sofa and wait. Pennylegion’s assistant, Kim, is wearing a blouse that you can see through. She has small Japanese breasts that bounce a lot as she races around instilling in people the fear of Pennylegion. This girl is having quite the effect on Blue Hermann. He is so excited that I suspect blood is actually coursing through his veins. And Clay, well, Clay’s phantasmic eyes are bugging out of his head, as if he’s never seen a bubby before in all his days.
Kim screams at me about something, but I watch the heave of her breasts and grin. She leaves disgusted, reducing me, Blue, and Clay to wheezy old-fart laughter. Kim is slim hipped as a boy and from the rear (as she storms away) she looks to be no more than twelve years old. And we are still giggling when a voice says, “Here you guys are!” My blood chills. Manfred Armstrong Ozikean comes into the Green Room.
I think I mentioned before that Clay’s spirit has his young man’s face and his older man’s stout belly. When first laid eyes upon, that’s how Clinton appeared, but things are always changing. Sometimes the ghost is sixty-seven years old, preyed on by disease and bullied by the pugnacious heart, and sometimes Clay is eighteen and still a mite pimple faced. It is this Clay, a young brash one, that is currently engaged in pursuing Kim around the Green Room. Myself, I’m used to these Sirius transmogrifications, and even if it is a bit frightening, it’s the least I deserve. But I’m unprepared for Manny. Manny is melting, Manny is unglued. It’s as though he fled the grave without any practice at managing his wraith. Manfred grins toothlessly, his mouth gray, his empty eye sockets a deep black. “Percival!” he says, and then, catching sight of Clinton, Manny grins even wider. “Clay!” he booms.
Clay won’t be distracted from the Kim girl. He’s bouncing along backwards in front of her, his hopping timed to the fury of her breasts. “Freddy! Pull yourself together!”
Manny sheepishly tries to keep body and soul intact, but various limbs and accoutrements continue to drop off.
Blue Hermann begins to shiver, and for a second I think that he must see Manfred, then I realize he’s shivering because he’s taken poorly. Sweat has beaded on his face. Manny drags himself across the room and stares at Hermann for a long moment, if a fellow who has neglected to equip himself with eyes can be said to do that. Manny reaches out a spectral hand and touches Blue’s wrinkled brow. Hermann instantly tumbles into a sweet slumber, even commences a loud and gnarly snoring. The snoring amuses Manny, who steps back, chuckling. “What a racket!” he announces.
Here comes the Pennylegion creature himself. He stands five foot nil, wears a baseball cap, and carries a clipboard. The purpose of the clipboard is to beat against his thigh. Pennylegion looks in most regards to be somewhere in his early thirties, but his hair and beard are peppered with gray. “People, people, people!” he bellows. “Can we keep the fucking noise down!!??” He stops in front of Duane Killebrew, who is sitting on a couch with the long-limbed girl. Pennylegion snaps his fingers a few times. “What, what, what is it, Killebrew?”
Duane-o nods.
“Killebrew, here’s what the hair says. The hair says, remember the seventies? Killebrew, we lose the fucking hair.”
“I like his hair,” protests the show-biz type girly.
“I’m sure you do, honey. That’s why you’re, what, what is it, you’re a receptionist or a facialist or something, correct-a-mundo?” Pennylegion snaps the fingers on one hand and uses the other to beat the clipboard against his thigh. He must have one hell of a bruise there. “Hair people! Where are the fucking hair people?” Some hair people, two young women, charge in and set upon Duane with hedge clippers. “Now,” says Pennylegion, “where is this hockey legend?”
“Who’s that, you?” whispers Manfred. Typical of Manny to whisper even though he’s a vision that appears only to me.
Kim drags Pennylegion my way. She makes terse introductions, annoyed at me for being unable to take my eyes off her bubbles. “The point is, we are making a commercial for ginger ale,” Pennylegion grumbles. “We are not making fucking Night of the Living Dead. This creature should have been in makeup hours ago. I don’t see how we can have him resembling a humanoid before next fucking Thursday. Makeup people! Where are the fucking makeup people?” A girl bolts forward. Pennylegion grabs her elbow and waves at me. “You pull this off, I guarantee the fucking Pfeiffer Award.” Pennylegion turns to go away, but I halt him.
“Hey, you! Pup!”
“Pup?”
“Listen, pup. This is the thing. Any time now I expect to have my arse hauled out onto the carpet in a major way. I would appreciate it if you’d just calm down.”
“You tell him, King!” says Killebrew, whose golden locks are being shorn.
“Fucking hockey players,” Pennylegion mutters. He and Kim wander away. The makeup person attacks my puss with a powder puff. The girl is maybe seventeen years of age and very smiley. All the time as she does my makeup she talks, but I don’t pay much attention. She calls me “dahlink.” “Look up, dahlink. Look over there, dahlink.” Over there is Manny Oz. He is sitting down, his huge hands resting on his knees, and he looks as delighted as a child at the circus. “My goodness gracious me” he sighs. “What a world.”
“Worst part of it is,” I tell him, “this is typical.”
Iain comes over with a couple of sheets of paper in his hand. “All right, Kinger,” he says, “I’m your script coach.” He tosses one of the pages at me. His drink has an olive in it. Ever notice how serious booze hounds like to put olives in their drinks? Without the olive it would be too much like they were pouring liquid solvent down their gullets. “Your part is underlined in red, sire,” Iain says sloppily. “I shall read the part of Duane Killebrew, finest hockey player on the planet, which is what …?” Iain ticks off with his fingers. “One, two, three stones from the sun. Okay? Here we go. Ahem. First, a small sip of the pulque. Ahh. Now. ‘Winning the Stanley Cup was a lot of fun, hut it was a lot of hard work, too.’ ”
I have to hold my sheet at arm’s length to pull it into focus.
IT WAS THE SAME FOR ME BACK IN 1919.
“It was the … same for me … back in one-nine one-nine.”
“King, I don’t think they want you to say ‘one-nine one-nine.’ ”
“That’s when we claimed the goblet—one-nine one-nine!”
“Yeah, but people don’t say that, ‘one-nine one-nine’ Only you say that.”
“It was the same for me back in nineteen nineteen.”
“Aren’t you hockey legend Percy ‘King’ Leary?”
AND AREN’T YOU FUTURE HALL-OF-FAMER DUANE KILLEBREW?
“And aren’t you … future hall-of-famer … Duane Killebrew?”
Manny gets up, at least most of him does. He roams around the room, investigating its corners and contents. His passage across to the other side was a rough one, from what I understand. It was undignified.
“That’s what’s so bad about it, boy. It can steal your dignity.”
“What’s that, Kinger-Binger, an ad lib?”
“The booze, I mean.”
“I’m just having a wee nog and pomperkin. What the fuck could be more civilized?”
“He was all alone in a hotel room.”
“It’s not my fault all’s they have is shandygaff and rumbullion, so of course I get drunk. What did everyone expect?”
“All alone in a hotel room.”
“For the early part of the evening” Manny Oz says, “Hallie was with me. We had some wine and some cocaine. We talked for a while, and then we loved each other. Hallie had to go somewhere. She gave me a bottle of whiskey for a present. I wondered why she’d given me a present. Well, it was New Year’s Eve. Then I felt very far away from home. Very far away. Sol took the whiskey and I drank it all, very fast. And while my brain was still buzzing from that, I broke the bottle across the windowsill and cut myself. Here and here. Then I went to the bed and lay down. It was not a bad feeling, Percival. I felt happy just before the end.”
“You didn’t cut yourself, Manfred. You died of something called ‘alcoholic insult to the brain.’ ”
Manny shrugs. “I remember what I remember.”
Clay floats toward me. “Do you think Jubal and I would have let it be known that Manfred was a suicide?”
“You knew this?”
“Well, St. Amour implied as much to me, yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You can see why I need that crucifix! You never even noticed it was gone.”
“I thought it was with my hats.”
“Hats? What hats?”
“The hats I got for scoring real, true hat tricks, which is three goals in a row in the same period.”
The Claire thing and Pennylegion are standing in front of me. The director’s thigh is taking a furious beating from the clipboard. “Fine, fine,” he says, “the old fart is visiting relatives in Flip City.”
I have to be sneaky here. “I bet you didn’t know that, did you, Mr. Pennylegion?”
“Know what, what?”
“That a true hat trick is three goals all in a row, all in the same period.”
“A piece of information that has inexplicably eluded my grasp all these years.”
“I thought maybe you could use that fact in your advert. Like this here. Friends, a true hat trick is all three goals all in a row in the same frame. And a true ginger ale is this crap here.”
Pennylegion and the Claire thing exchange trepidatious glances. Then they get excited, they start to nod rapidly and energetically. They make for the doorway. I study the dragon’s head on top of my walking stick. It bears a distinct resemblance to that loutish growtnoll Pennylegion.
Blue Hermann is awake. “You ought to get paid extra for that, Leary.”
“Blue, how did Manny Oz die?”
“You know.”
“Tell me the truth. Did Manfred break a whiskey bottle over the windowsill and cut himself on the wrists?”
Blue’s eyebrows—each comprising one or two snowy white tendrils—begin a slow climb up his forehead. “If something like that happened,” he says finally, his voice quiet and inhuman, “Jubal St. Amour would have paid a lot of money to the coroner of New York City to alter the death certificate. And if there was a newshound who knew the scoop—because, for instance, he went to the Forrest Hotel to wish Manfred a Happy New Year—then Jubal would have given him a lot of money to never say what he saw. And that newsman likely would have taken the money—because he needed it for booze, mostly—and then he might have moved away from New York. Maybe to Toronto. So he would not be at liberty to discuss what happened to Manfred Ozikean.”
“But he couldn’t have done it. Manfred was a Catholic.”
“Manny died without a God.”
“I’m glad Hallie was with him, at least for a while. She was a hell of a girl.”
Blue Hermann tilts his head, bewildered. “How do you know all this?”
Iain goes down spectacularly, almost as if he was hip-checked by the ghost of the son of a bitch Sprague Cleghorn. “Whoopsy daisy!” Iain lies there motionless for a while. “All right, all right,” he says. “I admit it. I am a drunker and a lowly, lorn shebeener.” He crawls back to his feet. “But what the hey. A little drop of usquebaugh never did no one no harm!”
Iain searches the floor for something to blame for his tumble. Then his brain skips off in another direction. For some reason Iain starts to pretend that he’s playing the saxophone, and he blows a lot of razzes and spit through his lips.
“Calm down, boy.”
“Loof-weeda!” calls Iain. “Care for a drinky-poo?”
“I want a drinky-poo,” snarls Blue Hermann, the ancient scribe.
“What’s your pleasure? A little dram of Nelly’s Death?”
Blue lifts his palsied claw and waves it in the air. “Gimme the top shelf in a pail.”
Manny and Clay are talking over in a corner. They are sharing laughter, which surprises me. I assumed they’d not have much to say to each other. I am sitting alone, wondering what is so damn funny.