Buried Caesars (3 page)

“He may not be back from the dead yet,” said Chester. “But he’s a good soldier and he’d die for the old man.”

“And you?”

Chester shrugged.

“I’ll do what I have to do. My brother died somewhere in the Solomons last month. General had you in the hot room?”

He glanced at my limp hair and soaked shirt.

“Man’s immune to heat,” I said.

“Man changes his clothes six times a day,” said Corporal Chester. “Probably changed just before you got there and stepped into the room from outside. Eisenhower was the General’s adjutant for years. One of my buddies heard Ike say he’d studied acting under MacArthur for three years.”

We didn’t say much more the rest of the trip back. I suggested that we stop for a beer but Chester didn’t have the time. He had to get back to San Marino before midnight.

Just before nine-thirty he dropped me in front of the Farraday.

“I’ll see you,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.”

Chester didn’t say anything but he did nod as he drove off. Twenty minutes later I parked my Crosley in front of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house on Heliotrope in Hollywood.

D
own the street and inside one of the small box houses that had gone up during the first boom of the war, a woman was crying; farther away, traffic in the direction of Wilshire echoed an occasional outlawed beep from an impatient driver. I knew I had no hope of getting up the porch steps, into the house, and up to my room before Mrs. Plaut caught me. I had never made it before and nothing had happened to make me think tonight would be different. I was right. Mrs. Plaut was sitting on the porch in her wicker chair, a neat stack of papers in her lap, staring down at me as I tucked the pouch Major Castle had given me under my arm and moved resolutely forward.

“I am morose,” Mrs. Plaut announced.

She was a small but not frail broomstick of a woman with a cotton billow of white hair. At the moment she was wearing a gray dress and an orange sweater. No one knew her age, probably not even Mrs. Plaut, but boarders’ estimates ranged from seventy-eight to three hundred. The three hundred guess was from Joe Hill, the mailman and oldest tenant in the boarding house.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, moving across the porch, knowing I would never make it to the door.

“Would you like to know why I am morose?” she asked, without turning her head to me as my hand touched the doorknob.

There was no help for it. I turned, leaned against the white wooden wall, clutched the pouch to my chest and said, “I certainly would.”

The woman down the street let out a wail of anguish. My guess was a late-night battle with her husband or boyfriend. In this neighborhood, it usually was.

“It is not that I don’t have things to be thankful for,” she said. She paused, but I had given her all the encouragement I had the heart for. “I shall tell you a few of the things for which I am thankful and then I will inform you of why I am morose,” she went on.

“Mrs. Plaut.” I tried holding up the pouch. “I have a lot of work to do. I’ve got a job. I’m supposed to save General MacArthur’s reputation and possibly the United States or at least California.”

“General Douglas MacArthur has no need of your services, Mr. Peelers,” she said with a sigh. “You are joshing me again. The MacArthurs are self-sufficient. We, the mister and I, briefly lived two doors from the MacArthurs in Milwaukee. The older general, Douglas’s father, Arthur, was a stately man.”

“Things you are grateful for,” I reminded her.

The woman down the street had settled into a soft sobbing and the faraway traffic sounds had faded. There were crickets chirping in the warm darkness and I felt sleepy.

“I am grateful that my hearing device is no longer on the fritz,” she said, pointing to the hearing aid I had bought her. “I am grateful that Evelyn Ankers and Richard Denning have just been married. I am grateful that I have my health, a breathing canary, all my teeth, a subscription to
Liberty Magazine
, and that my book is almost completed.”

“You have much to be grateful for,” I agreed, fearing what was coming next.

“And now you will discover why I am morose,” she said, nodding her head. “There are three reasons. First, I have discovered that the photograph which you gave me and which has hung on the wall of this very porch for some months in spite of being shot by one of your friends was not, as you had told me, Marie Dressier, but Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“I never told you it was Marie Dressier,” I protested feebly. What I really wanted was to get undressed, shave, have a bowl of cereal and get some sleep. I could wait an hour or so for my nightmare.

“I respect Mrs. FDR,” said Mrs. Plaut, “but as you know I am not of the Democratic persuasion.”

I considered asking her if she were a Tory or a Whig but I managed to hold my tongue.

“Therefore,” she went on, “I have removed the photograph and, since the fault was yours, I believe you should replace the photograph with one of Marie Dressier or someone of comparable ilk.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “Now I really …”

“Two,” she continued, ignoring my whining, “you have not read or edited my manuscript for some time. I am not a young woman. I do not have all day.”

Mrs. Plaut had for years been writing the history of her family. It had reached mega-epic size, several thousand pages, each neatly printed with random tales of confusion and family myth. I had discovered the plot of several familiar movies and novels in her pages, including
Wild Boys of the Road
. I had read the pages because Mrs. Plaut was convinced that I was an editor and exterminator, not necessarily in that order.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Plaut,” I said, reaching for the manuscript pages on her lap.

She handed them to me.

“Pay particular attention to the disclosure concerning Aunt Eloise and the three-footed duck,” she said.

“Three-footed duck,” I repeated. “Got it.”

“It was not a real three-footed duck,” she said confidentially, urged on by the crickets in the front lawn. “It was a fraud perpetrated by a Mr. Victor Sensibaugh of Seattle for the purpose of bilking money from widow women.”

“I look forward to reading it,” I replied. “Now I’ve really got to …”

“I said that I was morose about three things,” she said, holding up three fingers now that her hands were free of manuscript. “The third thing is that the Farmer’s Market at Third and Fairfax is having a sale on beef tongue, twenty-nine cents a pound.”

“Why does that make you morose, Mrs. Plaut?”

“Because I am unable to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime sale,” she explained. “Mr. Wherthman is usually a tiny gentleman and drives me to such sales, but he is, as you know, in Des Moines at the present.”

Actually, Gunther Wherthman, who had the room next to mine in Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house, was in San Francisco. Gunther, who stood all of three feet tall, was Swiss. He earned his living by translating most of the known languages of Europe and western Asia. The war had brought him deskloads of work, much of it for the government. He was in San Francisco translating an opera into English for the San Francisco Opera Company.

“I’ll drive you to Des Moines early in the morning,” I said.

“Good, and in response I’ll make my great-grandmother’s beef tongue pie,” she said ignoring my wit.

“My taste buds tingle in tart delight,” I said. “Now if I can …”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Peelers,” she interrupted, standing up, “but I really cannot talk to you any longer tonight. I’ll make up my shopping list and be ready in the
A.M.
”

“Nine,” I said.

“Eight,” she countered and went through the door and into the house.

I stood on the porch for a few seconds, Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript in one hand, the information on General MacArthur’s case in the other. The woman down the street was no longer sobbing. The crickets were still chirping and I thought I could smell the trees.

The rest of what remained of the night was uneventful. I took a bath in spite of the trickle of water that seemed to evaporate before it hit the porcelain. I shaved as I reclined in the tub, and tried to remember the words to “Elmer’s Tune.” Back in my room I ignored the pouch and Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript while I sat in my boxer shorts eating a bowl of Puffed Rice with too much sugar and the last of a small bottle of cream, listening to the Blue Network news.

The Nazis were pounding away at Stalingrad. Roosevelt was threatening wage controls. Wendell Willkie, for whom I’d voted, was in Turkey announcing that Rommel was losing the Sahara war.

I wished I had some fruit to slice up into the second bowl of cereal. My wants are few. I had money now from MacArthur. I could afford some canned pineapple.

The Beech-Nut Gum clock on my wall told me it was nearly midnight when I turned off the light, pulled the mattress from the bed in my single room, got on my knees and rolled over clutching one of my two pillows. My back had threatened retaliation once or twice during the day and I wanted to be sure to let it know that I cared.

I was tired but I couldn’t sleep. I tried not thinking that I was fifty years old, living alone in a boarding house, and irritated that a Swiss midget was going to be out of town for two weeks. Before I could give the name
loneliness
to what I was feeling I rolled over, got up, put on the light and opened the pouch Major Castle had given me. I had trouble reading. I remembered that my ex-wife Ann, recently widowed by her second husband, was back in town after a month of recuperating with her sister in Boston. Howard’s death hadn’t been clean and he hadn’t left her much. I decided to call her the next day.

An hour later I put the papers back inside the pouch and opened my window. I fell asleep clutching my pillow with the crickets keeping me company.

Mrs. Plaut and the dawn burst into my room around six the next morning. She stood over me in her white dress and gloves with an ancient beaded purse over her arm. Our trip to the Fanner’s Market was uneventful if you exclude the battles with shoppers and Mrs. Plaut’s threat to a less-than-enthusiastic butcher that “Mr. Peelers will turn your establishment in for health violations if you don’t stop smoking in the store.” I did manage to pick up some groceries, including three boxes of cereal and a few cans of fruit. By the time Mrs. Plaut stepped out of my Crosley in front of the boarding house, just after nine in the morning, I was in need of a quiet day, searching for a thief.

“I know how much you like beef tongue pie, Mr. Peelers,” she said, standing on the sidewalk where she had followed me out of the house after we had put her groceries and mine away. “And I will have a large room-temperature slice ready upon your return.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Plaut,” I said, unwilling to even consider where she got the idea that I salivated in anticipation of digging into small pieces of the marinated tongue of a cow.

“And I’ll also make some Colorado Mervin cookies,” she mused. “Now, if you just find a suitable photograph of Marie Dressier and work on the pages of my book, you will be firmly within my good graces.”

“I dream of that moment,” I said.

I left her standing there and pulled away. The sun was shining. The morning was bright and promising. I had a full wallet and a job to do. If it weren’t for the fact that the world was being blown apart, it would have been a great day.

In spite of the canned fruit on my shelf, the money in my pocket, and a job of work to do, I felt depressed when I parked in the alley behind the Farraday. Zanzibar Al, a derelict who lived from doorway to doorway, usually strolled my way when I parked the car and held out his hand. I usually placed a coin in his hand, in return for which he kept others of the alley from heisting the tires and breaking the windows. Zanzibar Al looked like’ a tuberculosis victim, which he claimed he was not. His pants were held up with a rope and his flannel shirt—he had two of them, one red and one blue—was always neatly tucked in. Zanzibar had the brains but not the inclination to get a job. He had once been a lawyer, or claimed to have been. He sounded like one when he was sober.

Zanzibar wasn’t around this morning. No one was around, not even delivery men and late-arriving Farraday tenants. Everyone seemed to have taken a long Labor Day weekend in spite of the President’s urging to keep working. I locked the Crosley, hoping that no one would step on it or put it in their pocket and walk off. The pouch and Mrs. Plaut’s chapter were under my arm, and I carried a paper bag of stuff I’d picked up at Roscoe Wheat’s All-Night Eats in my hand.

Jeremy Butler wasn’t in the hall of the Farraday when I went through the rear door and pushed open the double doors near the rear stairwell. Jeremy was my landlord, a massive, bald, former pro wrestler who dabbled in poetry and had recently been wed to the equally massive Alice Pallice, former pornographic printer, now reformed protector of her husband’s
oeuvre
. Great word,
oeuvre
. Gunther had taught it to me. I pulled it out privately at moments like this and said to myself, “I may look like a pug but, baby, I can pull out a word like
oeuvre
with the best of them.”