The Angel's Cut Read online

  ‘I should forget it,’ Xas thought. ‘After all, I must remember that, for years, all I’ve wanted is to live in the air. I’ve gone looking for flight, not for pilots or aircraft designers. I wanted to be severed from my own shadow, not to touch anyone.’ He told himself that it was only that Cole had spoken so eloquently of flight and he’d fallen for Cole’s talk. ‘I should just have kept him talking,’ Xas thought. He believed that he could choose what sensations would enslave him. There were no white water rapids between Long Beach and Santa Monica, and no hurricanes that midsummer, so he was forced to choose the Hi-Boy rollercoaster. He would choose to undo his belt and stand up as the car hit that sharpest seaward bend. After that everything would be all right again. His senses would be restored to him, clean and empty.

  Xas was in the last car. He hoped no one was watching. The rollercoaster was ramming up and down against the dazzle of the setting sun and, he hoped, his body would show only as a floating flake of soot in all that fire. He unclasped his belt and stood up and, instead of being jerked to the left and snatched down into the next dip, the floor of the car punched the soles of his feet and he flew out in an arc, hundreds of feet up. The first catapulting force began to weaken; gravity touched and tested him, and then took his weight. His flight slowed to a fall, then his fall sped up and he plummeted into the water twenty feet from the end of the pier.

  Xas swam to shore, causing a bit of a stir coming out of the water fully dressed and in a flying jacket. One drunk yelled, ‘Hey! Look! It’s one of those drowned pilots!’ Xas realised the man meant somebody from Crow’s crashed Travel Airs. He trudged, squelching, up the beach and climbed steps to the concrete and timber strip that went on along the shore. He turned north into the haze. As he walked under the hissing palms, the breeze dried his shirt and pants. His boots stayed wet, and water seeped from their eyelets at each step.

  Xas felt smug. He imagined his own ghost, like a movie ghost, a double exposure Xas, still riding the Hi-Boy. He’d flung himself out of that person, had left that person’s hungry skin. If he looked back he was sure he’d see, in the dusk, that susceptible self still riding in the last car, shining, a lantern of hallucinatory memory, the afterglow of his encounter with Cole.

  He walked along the shore for an hour. Above his head strings of lightbulbs swung and bounced in the breeze.

  Xas eventually found his way back to the steakhouse near Glendale airport where he’d gone with Millie. He began to haunt the place and, several days later, they managed to reconnect.

  Millie kept Xas close, and took him about with her. When she went home to wash and change her clothes, he’d wait in her car, parked outside the building where she lived, a Coloured-only boarding house.

  She’d hurry upstairs and be back out within half an hour. ‘I don’t need a bed when I’m not sleeping anyway,’ she’d say.

  She was drinking at all hours and hitting her Benzedrine inhaler hard. There were several used canisters rolling about in the back seat. Xas drank and took hits of Benzedrine with her, and the city seemed to dry out around them, its colours dull under clouds as fine as fish scales.

  Millie took Xas to jazz clubs. First she sent him on his own into Sebastian’s Cotton Club, where the musicians were black and the clientele white. Then, at around two in the morning he’d hook up with her again down in Watts, at the Château or Villa Venice supper clubs, where they’d mingle with movie stars and listen to black and white musicians jamming together. And if Millie was still on the upward slope of a bout of Benzedrine they’d move on to one of the speakeasies or breakfast clubs.

  July wore on another week and the bodies were recovered from the submerged Travel Airs of the six men who hadn’t managed to jump before the tangled planes hit the sea.

  Xas went with Millie to Gil Crow’s funeral. Or, rather, she pulled down the half veil on her hat, and walked up to the graveside, while he stayed to mind her car.

  The car was parked in the shade of a pepper tree against the kerb of a curving road in a cemetery that, from the fresh state of the stones and green sod, appeared to be growing as rapidly as the boomtown whose citizens it buried. The cemetery looked a little like a set after the carpenters had finished, before the art department had gone through painting moss and mildew, time and twilight.

  The grave and coffin were obscured from his sight by a bulwark of floral tributes and black-clad bodies. He spotted Conrad Crow’s grey hair, his bowed head. The crying was subdued, and from where Xas waited he could hear only the murmured eulogy, then the prayer of commitment. The speaker was more careful than solemn, he seemed to stop and start.

  Above Xas the pepper tree fidgeted, the wind puffing up its green plumes. The lawns had been watered that morning and the verges were still seeping, the road’s pink-tinged paving dark at its edges, as though scorched.

  Flora was surprised to see that Gil’s wife, Myra, hadn’t attended his funeral. The actress was sequestered, the columnists said—and under a doctor’s care. The studio was protecting its asset.

  The studio had sent two huge wreaths, towers of white gardenias, that stood at the head and foot of the grave. Gil’s tall man’s coffin lay between them like the span of a suspension bridge. The floral tributes seemed to shoulder the minister aside. He stood at one corner of the baize-lined hole to perform his rites, flicking his aspergillum awkwardly so that some drops of holy water landed on Flora’s shoes.

  Flora watched the crowd. Apart from Gil’s parents, it was largely a movie business crowd. Since Gil was Myra’s husband and Connie’s brother there was some politics in the tears. Some of the sorrow was for show, and so was some of the composure. Monroe Stahr was at the graveside, a man both Gil and Connie had made films for. Connie had picked a fight with Stahr to get out of contract, so the man, while looking appropriately sombre, still managed to favour Connie with a look that suggested it was the better Crow they were burying. Because Myra wasn’t present her friends weren’t crying, but merely dabbing their eyes. These women might have wept, but lacked the right cue. Edna, Connie’s fragile wife, was there, doped-up and trembling. Ray Paige was there, sober, and knuckling water out from under his eyes. And at the back of the crowd, brushed and polished, were the stunt pilots, all looking as though they’d rather not be there, most of them having long ago forgone all ceremony of mourning. Many were veterans of the war, and others had worked on the early airmail carriers—on airlines that, at times, had lost up to ninety pilots in eighteen months in planes downed by storms, lightning strikes, mountains, iced wings, engine trouble, or thick fog. The pilots had attended too many funerals. Still, they were regarding Gil’s coffin with expressions of settled shock. It was the scale of the loss that had surprised them—eight men, in a moment, in one wreck, no seasoned seat-of-the-pants pilots, but camera crews, men with—for Christ’s sakes—insurance policies.

  Flora caught Millie’s eye and nodded, then continued to take stock of the crowd. It seemed that this was the way she could best cope—by keeping her eyes moving from face to face.

  Flora hated public gatherings as thoroughly as she loved her house at the end of the street and edge of a waste ground, and her cramped and dark cutting room. Crowds made her uncomfortable. She’d been that way since her accident. Yet, as she stood through the service, forced to contemplate this particular crowd, Flora suddenly realised what it was about crowds that she didn’t like. The mass of faces forced her to search for one face, one in particular. And it wasn’t the face of the man in the coffin that Flora found herself looking out for. No—she was looking for the face of another old boyfriend, the man who had touched his cigarette to the hem of her grass skirt. Flora suddenly understood that, for years, she’d had her eye out for John Weber. Not because the sight of him would make her fearful—after all, John had been an even-tempered man, often drunk and silly, but only once to devastating effect. At the time of her accident Flora hadn’t even realised who it was who’d set her skirt on fire. John hadn’t visited her in the hospital, an
d she hadn’t seen him since. She had no idea where he was now, or how he’d paid for what he’d done to her. She remembered that there had been a charge considered, assault, later downgraded to a misdemeanour. In the hospital there was once a bitter exchange over her bed between her friend Avril and Conrad Cole about what John Weber deserved. Flora had a vague memory of the argument, of Avril’s tears and Cole’s vehemence. But after that no one mentioned the man in her presence again.

  Standing over the coffin of the man she’d most cared for and thinking about the man who had hurt her most, Flora began to feel that there was something curiously wrong with her life. Something odd, and misshapen. Her injury and her burden of pain couldn’t entirely account for her sense of having holes in her story. It was as though her life had a bad director and an inexperienced cameraman, a combination that always meant a lack of ‘coverage’ of the film’s scenes. If a scene was badly covered, filmed in too few takes, then an editor might find herself with too little film to work with. Poor coverage meant that it was hard to make a story make sense, or flow. At that moment, at Gil’s graveside, Flora’s story didn’t make sense to her—even with this soundtrack, from The Book of Common Prayer. She should know where the man who maimed her was, and what had become of him.

  Flora stared at Gil’s coffin and saw her own face and other faces reflected on the curve of the casket’s lacquered lid, all stretched and draped like a sheet of soft, pale pastry.

  The service ended. The sexton and another man operated a mechanism that winched the coffin down into the grave. A hymn was sung. The crowd thinned and reformed around the chief mourners.

  Flora went back down to Jimmy Chan’s car—she’d come with him. She took her bags from the back seat. Her handbag, and the canvas satchel holding a can of film. Flora waited while cars filled, and pulled out, and drove away, and the throng by the grave thinned further. She kept her eye on Crow, who took his mother’s and father’s arms and escorted them to their car, leaving them in the care of his wife and sister.

  Jimmy came back to his car and Flora thanked him for the lift and told him she’d take the trolley home. Then she went to intercept Crow, who was standing looking after his departing relatives, perched on the kerb, his big feet in his stiff shoes seesawing, like a twelve-year-old playing with the possibility of a fall. Flora said his name and he turned to her, startled, and stepped off the kerb. She took his hand and he stooped to kiss her cheek.

  ‘I know your film’s in trouble,’ she said, but didn’t say that Gil had detailed its trouble when he came to see her the night before he was killed. Flora didn’t know whether Crow knew about Myra’s affair. If not she didn’t want to be the one to tell him.

  ‘I’ve lost my whole second unit,’ Crow said. ‘The way things are now it won’t be released. The studio is patching every film it has with dialogue. They even have title-writers on it—writing terrible stuff.’

  Flora handed Crow her bag. He took it, puzzled, then when he felt the shape of the canister through the cloth his eyes widened.

  Flora said, ‘Altogether there’s six minutes in there. Dog fighting footage, all solid stuff, but nothing really distinguished. You can cut it in with what you have.’

  ‘Cole doesn’t know anything about this, I’m guessing.’

  ‘No,’ Flora said. ‘It’s up to you what to do with it, Connie.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Crow said. He took her hand again and they stood together for a time, holding hands and standing at an angle to one another as if leaving an opening, an invitation for some other person to join them. Above them the pepper tree puffed up like a bird letting air in under its feathers.

  Crow said, ‘Myra is at San Simeon with her buddy Marian. I’m going up there to establish the facts about her “tenuous health”. I guess I’m hoping for the sort of good news the studio won’t necessarily like. Anyway, I want to talk to her before the studio offers her a doctor and “a simple solution”. I don’t know how she’s feeling. She and Gil were in trouble.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Flora said. ‘So do you really think she’s pregnant?’

  Crow shrugged, said, ‘Come and see me sometime soon,’ and released her hand.

  Flora went down toward the cemetery gates, walking along the now broken line of cars. She saw Millie ahead of her and called out. Millie stopped and they stood with their hat brims touching while Flora lit a cigarette from the fiery tip of Millie’s.

  Flora said, ‘What do you say to a trip down to Brawley? I’m working only one day in five. Cole’s re-shooting every scene with the girl in it.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard he sacked Miss Jensen.’

  ‘He had to. It turned out that when she opened her mouth she sounded like a cow lost in a mossy tunnel. He’s got someone else, someone much better.’

  ‘He’s burning celluloid while he learns,’ Millie said. Then, ‘I’d like to go, Flora, but I won’t have my stake till I’m finished for Crow. I promised myself never to touch my savings.’

  Flora remembered that Millie was saving up to establish her Coloured flight school. She said, ‘I’ll stake you. After all, you do the flying.’

  They reached Millie’s car and Flora saw who was in it.

  ‘This is Xas,’ said Millie. ‘It’s short for exasperating. Xas, this is my friend Flora.’ Millie leaned on her car door and frowned at Flora, her forehead puckered into four perfectly even ripples. ‘I don’t know how long my stunt is postponed, or even if Crow is still wants me to do it. I didn’t think I should ask him today.’

  Xas was watching Millie. He looked as though he were waiting for something—patient and placid.

  ‘Crow wants me to crash a plane,’ Millie said, to Flora. ‘I’ve done that kind of thing before, often. But I don’t want to.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Flora said.

  ‘I could do it,’ Xas said, as if this was what he had been waiting for.

  ‘You might get hurt, sweetie,’ Millie said.

  ‘No,’ Xas said. Then, ‘Only if I meet another angel in the air.’

  Flora frowned at him. She said, ‘So is that what you think happened? Gil and the rest of them “met an angel in the air”?’

  ‘No,’ Xas said, thoughtful. ‘I wasn’t thinking about that.’

  ‘He’s very religious,’ Millie said.

  Flora raised an eyebrow. She remembered Xas tucking his shirt-tails back into his flight togs, which struck her as a rather unusual religious observance. She asked him, ‘When you dropped the Fokker back at Mines Field, why didn’t you tell me Gil had been killed?’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew him.’

  ‘You didn’t even mention an accident.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew any of them. Cities are so big now I’ve stopped expecting people to know one another.’

  ‘So you two have met already?’ Millie sounded disappointed.

  ‘Millie,’ Xas said, ‘I’d gladly do the stunt and—’

  ‘Don’t!’ Millie warned.

  ‘—give you the money.’ He began by sounding eager then, suddenly, impatient. ‘I’m so sick of having to pretend to have feelings about money. And I don’t mean that doing the stunt for you is a way for me to show that I don’t care about it, because I don’t care about showing anything either.’

  ‘You’re raving,’ Millie said, fond. ‘Honey, stunts are my livelihood. I can’t afford to be afraid. So, I’ll wear a diaper and do the damn stunt. But—sweetheart—are you broke?’

  Xas turned out his pockets. He had a thin stack of bills, limp and sandwiched together as though they been soaked and dried. ‘The jazz clubs and rollercoasters have just about cleaned me out,’ he said.

  Flora said, ‘Do you have enough to get us drunk?’

  ‘Says Flora, with conciliatory self-interest.’ Xas smiled at her. ‘I think I have enough.’

  ‘So—you two have met?’ Millie wanted to hear where and how.

  ‘At Mines,’ said Flora.

  ‘Over Cole,’ said Xas. ‘Flora had Cole�
�s bow tie.’

  ‘And Xas had Cole’s attention,’ said Flora. ‘Briefly.’

  Millie said, ‘Why are you fighting?’

  They said together, ‘We’re not.’

  But they were, Flora thought. It wasn’t just that he had an annoying manner, or that, at any moment, she expected to get an even more annoying explanation for his annoying manner—like, for instance, that he wrote poetry or was a devotee of Aimee Semple McPherson. Something like that, something he was proud of, and thought distinguished him from the masses. His otherworldliness irritated her. And it wasn’t even consistent. In fact, it was just inconsistent enough for Flora to imagine that perhaps it wasn’t an affectation. Perhaps he was simple, not a fake. Whatever—he was hugely exasperating. But Flora realised that some of her irritation was made up of tension. It was as if, although she expected nothing from Xas, she sensed that he somehow had the ability to cause her a sudden, serious, personal disappointment.

  She could see him clearly now, at least. She had him in focus as she hadn’t in Cole’s hangar where what she could see was distorted by her expectations. She could see how he looked—white skin, dark blue eyes, a purplish sheen on his thick, close cut black hair. He looked like a star, glowing in his own key light.

  Millie opened the back door of her car. She began to run through a list of places they could go to shut themselves up all day and drink. Flora knew that Millie would understand that she wouldn’t want to talk about Gil. Millie wouldn’t want to either; she’d lost too many flying friends over the years and, in that profession, the form was not to dwell on their losses. Millie would want her company—Flora knew—but silence on that subject. She wondered how many of the eight men Millie had known well. More than Flora, and possibly Millie knew one or two nearly as well as Flora had known Gil. But they wouldn’t talk about it. And somehow it helped that the other stunt pilot—Xas—hadn’t known any of them, had returned the Fokker but not carried the news, and had sat in the car during the service.