that wasn’t far from the truth.
He looked up at me and said, “What was your father’s name, Clyde?”
I looked at him for a moment, resisting an urge to lick my lips again. The room was still dark, the sun still behind some
cloud that hadn’t even been in sight when I came in off the street. Landry’s face seemed to float in the gloom like an
old, shrivelled balloon.
“What’s that got to do with the price of cucumbers in Monrovia?’ I asked.
“You don’t know, do you?’
`Òf course I do,” I said, and I did. I just couldn’t come up with it, that was all–
it was stuck there on the tip of my
tongue, like Mavis Weld’s phone number, which had been BAyshore something-or-other.
“How about your mother’s?”
“Quit playing games with me!”
“Here’s an easy one–what high school did you go to? Every red- blooded American man remembers what school he
went to, right? Or the first girl he ever went all the way with. Or the town he grew up in. Was yours San Luis
Obispo?’
I opened my mouth, but this time nothing came out.
“Carmel?’
That sounded right . . . and then felt all wrong. My head was whirling.
`Òr maybe it was Dusty Bottom, New Mexico.”
“Cut the crap!” I shouted.
“Do you know? Do you?’
“Yes! It was–”
He bent over. Rattled the keys of his strange steno machine.
“San Diego! Born and raised!”
He put the machine on my desk and turned it around so I could read the words floating in the window above the
keyboard.
“San Diego! Born and raised!”
My eyes dropped from the window to the word stamped into the plastic frame surrounding it.
“What’s a Toshiba?’ I asked. “Something that comes on the side when you order a Reebok dinner?’
`Ìt’s a Japanese electronics company.”
I laughed dryly. “Who’re you kidding, mister? The Japs can’t even make wind-up toys without getting the springs in
upside down.”
“Not now,” he agreed, `ànd speaking of now, Clyde, when is now? What year is it?’
“1938,” I said, then raised a half-numb hand to my face and rubbed my lips.
“Wait a minute–1939.”
`Ìt might even be 1940. Am I right?”
I said nothing, but I felt my face heating up.
“Don’t feel bad, Clyde; you don’t know because I don’t know. I always left it vague.
The time-frame I was trying for
was actually more of a feel . . . call it Chandler American Time, if you like. It worked like gangbusters for most of my
readers, and it made things simpler from a copy-editing standpoint as well, because you can never exactly pinpoint the
passage of time. Haven’t you ever noticed how often you say things likèfor more
years than I can remember’ or
`longer ago than I like to think about’ or `since Hector was a pup’?”
“Nope–can’t say that I have.” But now that he mentioned it, I did notice. And that made me think of the L.A. Times. I
read it every day, but exactly which days were they? You couldn’t tell from the paper itself, because there was never a
date on the masthead, only that slogan which reads `Àmerica’s Fairest Newspaper in America’s Fairest City.”
“You say those things because time doesn’t really pass in this world. It is . . .”
He paused, then smiled. It was a terrible
thing to look at, that smile, full of yearning and strange greed. `Ìt is one of its many charms,” he finished.
I was scared, but I’ve always been able to bite the bullet when I felt it really
needed biting, and this was one of those
times. “Tell me what the hell’s going on here.”
`Àll right . . . but you’re already beginning to know, Clyde. Aren’t you?’
“Maybe. I don’t know my dad’s name or my mom’s name or the name of the first girl I ever went to bed with because
you don’t know them. Is that it?’
He nodded, smiling the way a teacher would smile at a pupil who’s made a leap of logic and come up with the right
answer against all odds. But his eyes were still full of that terrible sympathy.