B008J4PNHE EBOK Page 9

  When Sam was five, Booth encouraged him to stop slamming the car door by explaining that cars had feelings, and the oil stains on the driveway were car tears. Mess demons gained entry to the human world through portals made of dirty laundry, Booth informed Sam at age six. Later, his father explained to him that while the sugar in Mountain Dew was bad for eight-year-old Sam’s teeth, a far greater danger lay in the drink’s main chemical compound, P-S 7—Penis-Shrink Number Seven.

  “But you drink it,” Sam protested. The lecture had been precipitated by a request for a sip from Booth’s can of said beverage.

  “That’s because it’s too late for me, Samuel. The damage has been done.” Booth popped the tab and swigged. He coughed a few times. “Long before the deleterious effects of P-S 7 were made public, my penis had already dwindled to the size of a pencil eraser. Let it never be said, my boy, that deliciousness is not without its costs.”

  It didn’t matter that Sam’s relationship to his own penis was at that time strictly utilitarian; he sensed the organ’s long-range significance and immediately went Mountain Dew–cold turkey. Years after determining that P-S 7 was a figment of Booth’s imagination, he still had not recovered his taste for Mountain Dew. He continued to endure prickles of empathy toward cars on oily patches of asphalt. The sight of scattered laundry inflicted him with a sense of foreboding.

  His mother was not weird. She made herself clear. There were certain basics that she required from him: do well in school, be presentable, eat his vegetables, help around the house, and most of all, be happy. Allie came right out and said it. “My big thing, kiddo, is I want you to be happy, you know?”

  By contrast, Booth once told him, “Samuel, I want you to grow up to be the sort of man whom other men want to punch, and to be punched by, and to laugh with, and to consume great volumes of Mexican beer with. I want you to be the sort of man whom beautiful women want to slap and then to apply tender kisses to the spot that they slapped.”

  The kissing part made Sam flush. On top of that, it sounded like what his father wanted was for him to get his ass kicked. “Huh?” he replied.

  Booth sniffed abruptly, flaring the mustache of his spiky beard. “I am afraid that I do not see how I can be any clearer than that.” He made a “come here” gesture and enveloped Sam in a smoky, scratchy embrace that was both comforting and discombobulating.

  There was a story Booth liked to tell about his son’s birth, how, as a newborn, Sam resembled an angry little leper and it had been a sign of things to come. To get Allie’s attention, Booth sometimes dropped to all fours and prowled around her legs, making realistic growling noises and snapping at the tails of her shirt. During movies, though he never uttered a word, Sam’s father did sometimes moan quietly at the sad parts, at the deaths and the farewells.

  Because they were rated R, the boy had never been permitted to see any of his father’s movies. (The movies Sam was allowed to see either were rated G, PG, PG-13 or dated from the black-and-white period. The irony was that, as far as the boy could tell, all black-and-white movies included murder.) Booth’s movies were, his mother said hauntingly, not the sort of movies that were intended for children. No less impenetrable was Booth’s own sketch of his film career: “I make the sorts of pictures that legitimate people legitimately enjoy, if you understand my meaning.”

  What Sam had discerned about Booth’s movies derived primarily from some posters that he’d turned up at the back of a closet. There was one for a movie called Black Soul Riders that showed a black man punching George Washington in the face. The Hard Mommies poster had a woman in a yellow bikini washing a red sports car. On the Devil of the Acropolis poster, his father, dressed in a toga, was being menaced by a werewolf. Rat Fiend! had a big, scary rat, and Hellhole had a big, scary hole. Sam’s father wore a straw boater, and his eyes were pinwheels, and he dangled a pocket watch before a mesmerized crowd on the poster for New Roman Empire.

  The implausibility of the scenes was vivid: there had been no black men in diamond-studded leather jackets when George Washington lived; the breasts of the woman in the yellow bikini were bigger than her head; monsters weren’t real. What Sam saw in the posters seemed dangerous, and the boy felt guilty about returning to the closet repeatedly to study them.

  The oblique references that his parents made to Booth’s films did not lessen Sam’s apprehension. Once, as his father was preparing to leave the house, Allie had wagged a finger at her husband in a mock-scolding way and said, “You be careful out there now, Plato. There are a lot of werewolves running around.”

  “What?” Sam asked, piqued by the mention of werewolves, immediately perceiving an adult subtext. “Plato? Werewolves?”

  Booth slowly lowered himself to a knee and placed his big hands on Sam’s shoulders. “Samuel,” he intoned, “my son. Your mother is being hilarious. She is referring sarcastically to a picture I made, wherein my character, the immortal philosopher Plato, was slain by a werewolf.”

  Sam asked his mother if that was true.

  “Yes,” Allie said. “I am being hilarious.”

  ■ ■ ■

  Sam’s best and most relaxed times with Booth were those mute hours spent shoulder to shoulder in front of the television watching old-time movie marathons, or sitting in dark movie theaters. Even there, it seemed they liked them for divergent reasons.

  Although Sam had been to a church precisely once—for the baptism of a classmate’s infant sibling—the exalted possibilities of film had beguiled him as far back as he could recall. Each movie was formed and populated from air, set inside the frame by a person known as the director—a human being who would, along with the actors, someday be less alive than what he had managed to place on film. The implication was immense. At night Sam lay in bed picturing the events of his plain day on immaculate celluloid: a close-up of his mother, hair in her face, exhaling as she scoured a blackened pan; a wide shot of everyone in math class bent over their tests, and Sam looking up, and pretty Gloria Wang-Petty looking up at the same time, and their gazes finding each other for a second, and then the two of them ricocheting back to their papers; a long static view of his street: the leaves sifting in the wind, the low rock wall of the graveyard bending away left, a squirrel crouched on the yellow line.

  For Booth, a movie was all a movie was—it was an entertainment, it was a goof, it was people in costumes. A movie was “diverting,” “amusing,” “a wonderful yarn.” A movie was just what happened.

  “My favorite part will always be when they sing down the Nazis,” Booth said of Casablanca. About Citizen Kane, he barked, “The old man loved that fucking sled more than anything else in the world, didn’t he, Samuel?” As soon as the credits rolled on The Empire Strikes Back, Booth declared, “Wasn’t that dreadful when he had to cut open his space camel and climb inside its guts!”

  His father had shifted away down the couch, twisting to meet his son’s eye. In a pantomime of horror, he rubbed his beard and blinked at Sam. “My God, can you even imagine, Samuel? To be forced to dig out a the steaming viscera of a dead space camel to gain shelter!”

  Was his father serious, or was he joking? Who was the child, and who was the adult? It didn’t elude Sam that their perspectives seemed to be reversed from what might be expected: his own musings on eternity versus Booth’s exclamations about space camel guts. Or was it that when his father said these things, he was subtly mocking Sam? Mocking him for being so enraptured, for traveling so deeply inside the screen for those one hundred–odd minutes? Teasing him for his unspoken belief that film had bestowed upon Rick’s Place, and Rosebud, and Luke and Han and Leia, something infinite, something better than regular life? Did Booth think he was stupid? The notion frightened Sam. He didn’t want to be stupid, and he didn’t want to be embarrassed for being stupid. As much as he wished for Booth not to behave confusingly, Sam yearned to be enlightened, to be smart enough to understand, no matter what, to be a source of pride. The man was his father; he wanted Booth to like h
im.

  “Yeah,” tried the boy, who was too old to admit aloud that the swathing of his father’s smoky, scratchy hugs felt good. “Space camel guts are pretty gross.”

  Booth ruffled his hair. “Know this, Samuel: if we ever found ourselves in a similar pickle, stranded on an icy planet, exposed to the elements, I would eagerly cut myself open, stem to stern, and dump out my own guts to make you a sanctuary. It would be an honor to be your sacrificial space camel.” His father looked at him expectantly.

  “Okay,” said Sam. “Thanks.”

  ■ ■ ■

  The mold was enclosed within a glass box, and the glass box rested on a wooden plinth. Situated in the center of the museum’s long white-walled gallery, the plinth stood only a few steps from the stairs. A clip at the base of the box held the plate-shaped mold upright, so if you went around to one side, you saw into the vessel of the nose where the latex was poured, and if you went around to the other side, you saw the nose as a nose from without, where it had the broadly jutting aspect of a truck fender. It was the nose of a hard man. An angled spotlight burnished the organ from bridge to tip.

  Sam thought about what a big face Orson Welles must have had. A yellowed letter requesting the mold, written by Welles to his makeup artist, was framed and set into the plinth. Welles wrote that he required “A nose fit for a real working class bull of a fellow.” Sam thought the artist had done a good job.

  There were other exhibits lining the hall, which extended at least the length of a basketball court. He saw a row of old-fashioned wooden camera boxes on tripods, mannequins wearing costumes, televisions on the walls showing films. Sneaky music—lots of plinking keys and rattles—played from hidden speakers. A few other museumgoers were scattered around, studying with their arms crossed, but it wasn’t crowded.

  Booth circled the Welles display, tilting his head one way and another, expressing clucks and grunts of assessment.

  Keen not to say something disappointing, Sam waited. For support he had brought a favorite Nukie figure and squeezed it in his fist.

  If his mother had been there, he could have been more relaxed. Allie had canceled on the long-scheduled trip at the last minute; because someone was sick, she needed to work at the café. “Oh, God. Mom. Please come,” Sam said, and Allie widened her eyes at him and put her hands on either side of his skull. “Kiddo,” she said, gently rocking his head around. “Son of mine. Short person. It’s just a museum. It’s not an earthquake. It’s just a train trip with your old man. You might even enjoy yourself.”

  “All right. Here is the question: should we steal it?” Booth gave a sly glance down the hall and then the other way, toward the stairs, sliding his eyes to look without turning his head. “Make replicas for ourselves, form a father-son bank-robbing team?”

  Sam laughed. He was usually able to maintain his circumspection, but Booth’s side-to-side play was irresistible. “Definitely.”

  “What shall we call ourselves? The Nose Gang? The Noseys? The Nose Boys? The Snout Men?”

  “The Snout Men!” For some reason, the word “snout” was funny, too.

  “Yes! Snout Men is just right.” Booth mimicked the patter of a reedy newsreel: “The infamous Snout Men struck the Kansas City Depository yesterday morning, terrifying customers and bank executives and escaping with a hundred thousand dollars in gold bonds and Missouri’s entire reserve of Kleenex.”

  The boy grinned at his father. The image that came to mind was of dogs in pin-striped suits, holding submachine guns and leaning from running boards, pink tongues lolling. “Snout Men,” he repeated, liking it so much. Maybe this was the day when whatever it was that was missing—not in his father but in him—resolved; maybe Allie was right; maybe he would enjoy himself.

  “So. Do you like it?” Booth had bent to be closer to Sam’s level, but now he straightened.

  Sam took a deep breath. “Yeah. It’s really neat.”

  “Yes, Samuel. It is neat. Beyond neat, in fact. It is gorgeous.” His father swept a hand over the top of the case, and his thick platinum wedding band scraped lightly against the glass. “They say that the eyes are the gateway to the soul, but it’s nonsense. Eyes, ears, mouth, hair, chin, jowls, all secondary. The nose is what gathers all the pieces together. It’s in the middle. The nose leads. It is the face of the face. Change the nose, and you instantaneously change everything else about a countenance. That’s how simple it is to make a new mug, Samuel. If only it were so simple to transform the other parts of ourselves, yes?”

  Sam found that, as Booth was speaking, his fingers had floated up to touch his own nose. He quickly dropped them. “Yeah.”

  Booth tapped his wedding ring against the case. He eyed Sam steadily, his beard fully closing over the faint smile that had accompanied his disquisition. “You know, son, I am so glad that you are here with me, that we can look on this beautiful disguise together. It is terribly special to me.”

  The boy blushed. To try and cover it, he blurted, “It’s fun to think about it, you know, on his face and stuff.”

  “That is fun, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I knew him, you know, Welles. We made a picture together.”

  “You did?” Per his father’s insistence, Sam had seen a number of Orson Welles movies: The Third Man, The Lady from Shanghai, The Stranger, Citizen Kane. They were excellent, with lots of shadows. Welles had a commanding voice and bright eyes that seemed to find their way beyond the screen to pick at you where you sat. No other black-and-white actor was as alive. “What was he like?”

  Booth rubbed a hand along his jaw, forcing his fingers up through the curls until they found his temple, where the hair was speckled gray. The sound-track music that played from hidden speakers in the ceiling dipped, the entire orchestra dropping away except for a lone string instrument, keening. Booth breathed. He shuddered. “I can only tell you—that he had—”

  It occurred to Sam—horribly—that his father was about to cry.

  “—he had quite a large face,” Booth finished, and shot a wink that made the boy giggle again.

  ■ ■ ■

  His father told Sam to go ahead and look around if he wanted. “I need to commune with this marvelous sniffer for a few moments longer.”

  The boy strolled down the museum’s main hall. He felt released, carefree, as if he had passed a test.

  At the railing of the wooden camera exhibit, Sam took out the Nukie. The bright red nuclear man had legs where his arms should have gone and arms where his legs should have gone, so he stood on his hands, and his legs shot out at antenna angles, the feet hanging limp, like underdeveloped wings. The slight twist of the lips on the figure’s face transmitted something along the lines of I knew this would happen. He was one of Sam’s favorite guys.

  Sam placed the Nukie on the railing and cast around, considering which camera had the best position on him.

  “Hey, there.”

  A few feet off, beside a tall glass case containing an array of prop swords, stood a woman in a tall fur hat. Below the hat, she wore oval sunglasses with tinted blue lenses, a yellow raincoat, a dark blue dress over stonewashed jeans, and high, velvety black boots.

  “Oh. Hi.” It was the sleeping lady from the train, he realized.

  “I’m Sandra. You must be Sammy, huh?” Sandra removed her sunglasses. She had prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes. Something about her aspect recalled a tintype photograph he once saw in an antique shop. The picture had shown a pioneer woman in a wilted hat, posed holding a shovel; the woman’s hard, angular features and her expression, simultaneously stoic and dazed, had unnerved Sam. Sandra’s hair was a shade darker than the amber of the tintype, a muddy blond.

  “Do I know you?” He wasn’t nervous; it was a public place, and she was a woman. She was also, he decided, pretty, sort of. All put together, her crazy clothes made a crazy kind of sense.

  “I’m a friend of your daddy’s.”

  Sam nodded. “Okay.” He gestured down
the hall. “He’s over there at the nose.”

  “I have a present for him. It’s a surprise. So happens I followed you boys all the way from Grand Central just to make it. Tricky me, huh? You mind if I give it to you to give to him, Sammy?”

  “Ah, sure, I guess.”

  From a pocket of her raincoat, she withdrew a crumpled pink gift bag. Sam walked to her, and Sandra handed it to him. Whatever was inside the bag was soft, probably fabric.

  “Thanks a bunch. Hm. You know, from listening to Booth—I thought you’d be, I don’t know. More, somehow.” She opened her mouth wide and produced an odd croak. “I guess other people’s kids are always disappointing, though, huh?”

  It took Sam a moment to identify Sandra’s croak as a laugh. To have a peculiarly layered stranger in a fur hat judge him as lacking was an entirely new experience, so he did the easiest thing and concurred. “Uh-huh.”

  “Sammy, Sammy.” She said his name as if he were a gooey-eyed kitten in a shoe box. “Your father’s really quite a man, isn’t he? You must be proud. Big movie star and everything that he is.”

  “I’ve never seen any of his movies.”

  “Probably best. They’re awful. Booth is the Zeus of awful. That’s why I like them, you know?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Sam. Again he was just being polite, letting himself be borne along by the current of adult inquiry.

  “What’s that? Some kind of toy?”

  “It’s a Nukie. They’re guys, they survived a nuclear blast. This one’s got his arms and his legs switched around, see—” He held up the figure for her to see.

  “Ugly.” Sandra slipped her sunglasses back on. “I suppose I was never much of a toys and games person. Chernobyl was a CIA operation, did you know that?”

  “What?” He had never heard the word “Chernobyl” before.