14

The Super Chief made the trip to Chicago in forty hours or so, as advertised. Drury could have given me the exact time if I’d thought to ask him. He was remarkably well informed for a man who never left his compartment and who sat with his back to the passing scenery. He asked me if I’d seen the Grand Canyon when I checked on him once and, later, whether I knew that we’d averaged eighty-two miles an hour between Garden City and Lamar. Maybe he’d made the trip so often he had the rails memorized.

Shepard kept Drury company most of the time. The two played game after game of chess using a beautiful little traveling set whose pieces had tiny pegs on their bases that corresponded to holes in the squares. I never saw more than a few moves of any one game, there being no room in the compartment for me to sit down. From what I did see, though, Shepard was more than holding his own. He played a rapid, aggressive game, leaning over the little board like an arm wrestler. Drury leaned well back; his propped-up leg would permit no other arrangement, but it seemed to me to be his natural stance. He played slowly, examining both the board and Shepard as he worked out his moves.

For the most part I kept myself company, reading or haunting the club car where I worked at breaking in my pipe. The project brought Ella to mind, but then, almost everything did. It got so bad that I left the train during the twelve-minute stop in Flagstaff and sent her a telegram: “Start packing. I’ll call when coast is clear.”

The girl who took it down for me smiled to herself, perhaps imagining some complicated, interstate tryst between this Mrs. Elliott and the stranger before her with the gurgling pipe. I let her imagine.

Our train had a two-story, domed observation car, called a “Pleasure Dome Lounge Car” by the railroad, apparently with a straight face. Hank Shepard found me sitting beneath the pleasure dome late on the second night of our trip.

“Having trouble?” he asked, pointing to my pipe. It was sitting in an ashtray, surrounded by the dead remains of a pack of matches.

“Can’t keep it lit,” I said.

“It’s like sex, I’m told. The less you think about it, the better you do.”

We both regretted the analogy as soon as it was spoken, Shepard more than I.

“Try one of these,” he said, shaking a cigarette out of his pack. “They stay lit all by themselves.”

I accepted the cigarette gratefully, which relaxed Shepard. He lit one for himself and settled back in his chair. “I want to apologize for the other evening,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to since I sobered up the next morning, but too much started happening. Thanks for letting me off with a poke on the chin.”

He ran his hand back and forth beneath his pug nose a few times. It was the kind of manly expression of emotion Wallace Beery had done so well.

“You’d been drinking,” I said to give him an out.

“I drink all the time,” Shepard said. “It doesn’t usually make me a heel. That night, though, I was high on more than booze. I had the feeling that things were finally coming together for Drury and me, that we’d finally found our way out of the fun house.”

He looked up through the glass ceiling of the dome. I looked up, too, amazed again at how many stars you could see when you got away from the lights and smog of Los Angeles.

“I felt like I owned the place that night,” Shepard said, a little in awe. “Like I was in command of things for once.” He looked down from the sky, and his voice lost its hushed quality. “Sort of like the flea deciding he owns the dog.

“Anyway, I wanted to say I’m sorry. One lesson I learned in the infantry is that you have to get along with the guys in your squad. They’re the ones watching your back, after all.”

“We felt the same way in the field artillery.”

“Then you know that the last thing you want is for the guy next to you to develop an ambivalent attitude toward your health and well-being. I’m afraid your attitude toward me has sunk way below ambivalent.”

“You figure we’re heading into a battle zone?”

“I haven’t a clue where we’re heading,” he said, looking upward again. “And I have the feeling I wouldn’t like it if I did know.”

“I’ll watch your back,” I said.

Shepard stuck out his big, soft hand. “Thanks, pally.”

We traveled by day coach from Chicago to Traynorville, sitting in facing seats with Drury’s plastered leg acting as our fourth. Drury was disguised almost as effectively as his leg. He wore Shepard’s hat, my dark glasses, and his own two-day growth of beard. Not that you could see any of that. His first line of defense was a Chicago Tribune, unfolded to its full size.

Meanwhile, Shepard and I relaxed in our anonymity, meeting people’s eyes and, in my case, even saying hello.

“You don’t know all these people, do you?” Shepard asked as our car filled up at South Bend.

“Hoosiers still say hello,” I said. “They don’t have to know you.”

“Probably leave their chicken coops unlocked at night, too,” Shepard said, amazed. He leaned past Drury to peer out the window. “It’s flat, too. Flatter than the beers of yesterday.”

“Hank’s that rare thing,” Drury said, lowering his paper to half-mast. “The native of California. Only the northern half of Indiana is really flat, Hank. All its irregularities were pushed down into southern Indiana by a glacier about a million years ago.”

Shepard looked to me for confirmation. “Before my time,” I said.

Thanks to his radio work, Drury’s voice was easily as famous as his face. His brief geology lecture had attracted the attention of several of our near neighbors in the coach. Drury noticed this and buried himself in his paper again.

It was Shepard’s turn to chuckle. “Carson’s that unrare thing,” he said to me unsoftly. “The celebrity who’s afraid of his fans.”

Fortunately for Drury, our fellow passengers were as polite as they were friendly. No one bothered the great man during the ride to Traynorville, a ride that felt slow and bumpy after the Super Chief. They didn’t even make a fuss at the Traynorville station, where the process of unloading the director turned into a small circus. Drury’s wheelchair had traveled in the baggage car, and it was waiting on the platform when we finally got him down the narrow stairs of the day coach.

“I have it on good authority,” Drury said as he settled himself, “that this is the very chair Lionel Barrymore used in Young Dr. Kildare.”

The chair was old enough to have been Barrymore’s, or Dr. Gillespie’s. It was a huge wooden model with wheels like an antique bicycle’s. They were arranged like a high-wheeler’s, too, with the big ones in front and the little ones behind.

Drury noted my inspection. “I don’t trust the modern practice of putting the little wheels up front. Has to be inherently unstable. The big wheels should always lead the way.”

“He’s stating his personal philosophy,” Shepard joked, but absently. He’d spotted Gilbert Traynor at the far end of the platform, and he was waving to him. “I didn’t expect Andy Hardy to come after us himself.”

I had, but I’d been wrong about something else. Traynor had seemed ill at ease in Hollywood, unsure of himself and his ground. I’d expected him to be changed for the better by his return to his natural habitat, relaxed and confident if not downright arrogant. But it hadn’t happened.

None of the platform workers knuckled their foreheads to Traynor as he crossed to us or even seemed to notice him. I might not have myself without Shepard’s help. Traynor had been dapper if slight in his tuxedo, but now, in a too-flashy sports coat and baggy trousers, he just looked undersized–an undersized man on the far side of young who wasn’t particularly happy to see us. He had the look of a guy who had awakened after a hard night’s drinking and found a stranger in his bed. Three strangers, in fact.

If Drury was put out by the absence of a brass band, he didn’t let it show. He wrung Traynor’s hand, shaking a little life into him in the process.

“Welcome to Culver City east,” Traynor said, smiling thinly. “I’ve arranged for you to stay at our farm, Riverbend. You’ll have plenty of privacy, and there’s a room in the barn that would be perfect for your editing.”

“What’s there to edit?” I asked.

“The Imperial Albertsons,” Drury said. “Gilbert was nice enough to fly the negative out while we three provided a diversion by taking the train. Did I forget to mention that part of the plan?”

He’d forgotten to mention it to Paddy, too, or I’d never have been sent alone to guard two targets, the film and its director. Shepard passed me a suitcase. “Get used to the feeling, pally,” he said.

Traynor had brought along an appropriate vehicle, a wooden-sided station wagon. It wasn’t a new one, but it was impeccably maintained. On each varnished door, a familiar symbol was painted: the blue winged T of the Traynor Automobile Company.

On our way to the farm–Drury seated sideways on the backseat and Traynor, Shepard, and I jammed into the front–our host gave us the nickel tour. A nickel’s worth was all there was to Traynorville. It was a county seat, but a small one, its business district not much larger than the courthouse square. The square was something of a community attic, as it was decorated with the castoffs of several wars. I spotted a World War I artillery piece, a French Seventy-five. Shepard was more interested in the exhibit on the next corner, a VI flying bomb mounted on a concrete pedestal.

“Don’t get many English tourists here, I see,” he said.

Beyond the square, the residential neighborhoods turned modest in a hurry. Traynor pointed out exceptions to this rule, Victorian survivors he thought might interest Drury. One of the old mansions did. Drury had Traynor drive by it several times.

“That belonged to my great-uncle,” Traynor said, “my mother’s uncle. I’m sure the current owners would welcome the chance to be involved with your film.”

The old house was currently a funeral parlor. Shepard noted its sign between discreet sips from his flask. “If things turn sour,” he whispered to me, “they can bury the damn negative.”

Out loud he asked, “Where’s this factory of yours, Gilbert?”

“It’s on the west side of town, west of the rail yard. We have to head east to get to Riverbend.”

Instead of explaining our hurry, he launched into a description of the farm. He ended it by saying, “It’s the original Traynor homestead, settled by my great-grandfather in 1852.”

“What did he build?” Shepard asked.

“Nothing but his own life. The Traynors weren’t manufacturers then. My grandfather got that started. He founded a coach works. Later, with my father’s help, he turned it into an automobile company. Grandfather kept the old homestead, though. I think he honestly believed there’d be some call for a Traynor museum someday. Something along the lines of what Henry Ford did in Dearborn. Grandfather hated Ford, but he would have loved to have had his success. Anyway, we’ve held on to the shrine and kept it up. But nobody actually lives there. Nobody except Clark, the caretaker.

“I should tell you about Clark before you see him–meet him, I should say. He’s a disabled veteran, not that he’s really very disabled. He can outwork most of the able-bodied men we employ at the works. But he does have a stiff leg and an arm he can’t raise above his shoulder. He was busted up pretty badly in Europe. Blown up and sewn back together again. And he was disfigured. That’s really what I’ve been trying to say. That’s the worst part for Clark. The doctors weren’t able to give him back much of his face.

“He ended up in a VA hospital down in Indianapolis. We advertised for a caretaker after the war, and he applied. I was feeling sentimental about veterans at the time because of a loss my family had suffered, so I insisted we take Clark on. It’s worked out about as well as it could have, I guess. We needed the help, and he needed a place to be away from people.”

“What will Mr. Clark think of us?” Drury asked.

“He won’t bother you. He has his own cabin back on the wooded part of the property. You probably won’t see much of him, unless something goes wrong at the main house.”

“Count on us becoming old friends in no time,” Shepard said.