Fadeout (3 page)

"Who's that?" Dave hadn't heard the announcer. 

"Who!" She was indignant. "Why, Fox, Fox Olson, of course. Who'd you think?" 

"I didn't know." Dave smiled apology. 

"Then you must be a stranger," she said. 

"I am." He tried the coffee. It was good. He lit a cigarette. "I gather Fox Olson's a local celebrity." 

"Was," she said. "Oh, we miss him. The day they stop playing his songs ... Well, you know, they tried. Right after he was killed in that car crash up the canyon. They just stopped playing him. As though we was such hicks we didn't know there's such a thing as tapes these days. Like now he was gone, we wasn't going to hear him no more. 

"But everybody hollered so. Oh, I tell you, Pima kicked up a fuss. I don't expect there was anybody in town, except Mayor Chalmers, of course, that didn't phone up KPIM"—she said it as if it were a name, not call letters—" and say, put Fox Olson back on the radio. Well, they did, They got recordings of all his old broadcasts. They keep playing parts of those. They better." Her jowls set firmly, she turned and banged the coffeepot back on its hot plate. "They better not stop. . . ." 

Out of the radio the voice had sounded tinny. Here, now, in the rain, on the slatted wooden landing at the top of the garage stairs, hearing it through the open door, it sounded real. It wasn't. It was a recording. Ten-inch reels turned on a big professional tape rig against the wall opposite the door. Stainless steel panels, knobs, dials. Black speaker cones next to the ceiling. Once inside the room he could hear tape hiss. But for a moment there he'd have sworn he heard a living man. 

A girl in blue sat at a big, sleek, clean-lined desk. Her hands were on the keys of a new electric typewriter but they were stilL She was sitting with her face turned up, listening, wearing the same rapt expression as the old Daffodil waitress. Only her eyes were shut and she was young and her face was like a flower with rain blessing it. Had been, for an instant. Then Mrs. Olson shut the door, crossed the room and struck a switch and the voice slurred and died. The girl opened her eyes, startled blue. 

"I wish you wouldn't, Terry. I've asked you before." 

"I'm sorry, Thorne." The girl was very blond. She blushed like a white rose. "You said you had an appointment. I didn't think you'd be coming out." 

"Neither did I. And I apologize for interrupting your ... work." Thorne Olson eyed skeptically the half-typed page in the machine, the heap of mimeographed scripts on the desk. "But I felt it was important for Mr. Brandstetter, here, to see Fox's studio." Her smile at Dave was mechanicaL She gestured, already turning away. "Miss Lockridge, my husband's secretary." She crossed the room to a small, glossy bar, where she found brandy and two more little snifters. She said, "Tell him what you're working on, would you, Terry?" 

"Why ... " The girl had a nice, shy, high-school smile. Her voice was a whisper. "It's a book. Of Fox's—Mr. Olson's stories. He used to tell them on the air, read them. I'm typing them up from his scripts." 

Thorne Olson named a major New York publisher. "We sent them tapes of a few of the stories. They were wild about them. Terry's just getting the copy into shape for the typesetters." 

"Stories?" Dave sat on the desk comer and picked up the top script. A green-and-blue logo, KPIM, was printed in its upper-left-hand corner.
The Fox Olson Show
. He started to leaf through it. But Thorne came back and took it out of his hands and pushed brandy at him instead. She dropped the script back on the pile. 

"Later," she said. "I'll give you some scripts to take with you, if you like. Right now I want you to listen to me, please. We haven't a lot of time." She glanced at her watch. "I'm expecting . . . someone at four." She turned to the girl. "Terry, we'll be in your way. Suppose you take the rest of the day off?" 

The girl blinked at her, then gave a little so-what shrug, got up and took from a corner closet a white raincoat. Wasting no time, she put it on whileshe walked to the door. She threw Dave a small smile, gave Thorne Olson a look that might have meant anything or nothing, then went out and shut the door. They heard her feet go fast and young down the outside stairs. 

"Fox spoiled her." Thorne covered the typewriter. "Of course, I'm letting her go. There'll be nothing for her to do once the book is finished. If"—irony was heavy in her voice—"she ever finishes it. Unless I'm out here with her, she spends all her time mooning over Fox's tapes. She adored him, of course." 

"I gather a lot of people did," Dave said. 

"Thousands." She drew the curtains from a big window that looked down the canyon. The view today was full of muted colors, like a Sung landscape. A couch faced the window—deep, square-built, comfortable-looking. "Shall we sit down?" she said. Then, "No, wait. First, I want you to look at this room. Carefully. Go ahead." 

He did. It was big and nearly square, ceiled and walled with perforated Celotex tile, soundproof, painted eggshell white to set off the pictures. Neat, bright, posterlike, they were signed "Fox Olson," but they were very different from the looming stiff white skeleton thing above the fireplace in the house. 

Like the drapes and furniture, the carpeting was mottled autumn reds and yellows. Black cables snaked across it, leading from the elaborate tape-recording equipment to microphones that hung from glittering booms. There were guitars and cases for guitars, a spinet piano piled with music manuscript. T squares, triangles, French curves glinted on an orange square of pegboard above a broad soft pine expanse of drafting table. Sleek, hand-rubbed Danish teak cabinets held art supplies, a hi-fi rig. 

He saved the books and records for last. There were lots of them, on handsomely carpentered shelves. The books ran to biographies of American writers. There were novels. Only the best. Not always the popular best but always the knowledgeable best. The records came as a surprise, considering what he'd heard on the Daffodil radio. There was no popular stuff. A lot of Mozart, a lot of the late romantics, Mahler, Bruckner, Sibelius. A lot of opera. But that was forgivable in a singer. 

He turned away. "All right." He smiled. "It's a nice layout." 

Thorne sat watching him from a corner of the couch, her feet tucked up, an arm in its checked wool sleeve extended along the back of the couch, a cigarette burning in the fingers. She said, "It's everything he ever wanted." 

Dave walked toward her, brows raised. 

"After a lifetime of wanting," she said. "Let me tell you about this man Fox Olson." 

He let himself down on the other end of the couch and lit a cigarette and smoked it and sipped his brandy while she talked. 

"He had talent, intelligence, taste, sensitivity. He was good-looking. He had charm and a sense of humor. He could write, paint, sing, play, compose—" 

"A thousand and one admirers," Dave said. 

"I was the first in line." She smiled, maybe a little bitterly. "He was nineteen when I met him. I was a year younger. It was during the war. The aircraft factories—remember? I'd just graduated from high school. Here in Pima we were . . . out of things. All the excitement. I wanted to be in the middle. I ran away to Los Angeles and found a job. They were hiring anybody and everybody, you know. Lots of women, lots of girls. I riveted P-38s and Hudson bombers for Lockheed. Fox was a timekeeper." 

"Why wasn't he in the service?" 

Small lines appeared between her brows. She shook her head. "I don't know. He never told me and I didn't ask. I was just thankful. I was in love with him. He was the most romantic creature I could imagine. He was writing. He had a little room at the very top of an old frame house in Hollywood. Franklin Avenue. He'd work graveyard shift and, when he got home in the morning, write. He had an ancient Underwood and he hammered it as if he were beating down doors." 

"What?" Dave asked. 

"What did he write? Everything. Novels, plays, verse. He ate in drugstores and slept on a sleazy old couch that made down into a bed. He didn't care. Not about anything except writing. He even grew a beard to save the shaving time. He'd show me what he was doing. He was so excited. He'd rip sheets out of the typewriter and toss them at me. We both thought they were wonderful. . . ." 

With a little remembering smile she sat forward now, elbows on knees, and stared out the big window at the fog and drizzle in the trees. 

"Publishers didn't agree. Out went the manuscripts. . . . I remember carrying them to the little branch post office down near Hollywood Boulevard on days like this, and trudging home wet to the skin to find the mailbox full of rejected ones." She glanced at him. "It was disappointing, but it was kind of romantic too, an adventure. Then. We were very young." She stopped smiling. "We didn't stay young." 

She went to the bar again for the brandy bottle and inched the amber stuff into Dave's glass and her own. 

"We had a baby—Gretchen. The war ended. The aircraft factories let people go. We'd thought Fox would be on all the bookshelves in the country by then. Pulitzer Prize, no less. We'd kept thumbing the biographical dictionary to check how young American writers had been when their first books were published." She sighed. "Fox passed all their ages. I hated seeing it. He grew—well, thin. He was sick a lot. He wouldn't let me work before the baby came. Afterward it was out of the question-or so he felt. He was the responsible male. He must do it all, work and write. He took grubby little dollar-an-hour jobs in bookshops. And when he came home he pounded the typewriter. They were always novels now. And a novel takes a long time to write. He got more and more frustrated and bewildered when book after book came back rejected. He was always swearing he'd never touch the typewriter again. But he couldn't stop. Some kind of desperation drove him." 

Back of the handsome desk stood a pair of gray steel file cabinets. She led Dave to them, stooped and pulled open a lower drawer. Lined up inside, like the sheeted dead after some disaster, he saw thick manuscripts in binders. She slid one out, stood and turned over the pages. They were, he saw, neatly typed, but the paper had been cheap. It was turning brown at the edges. 

"He wrote this one in 1953, 1954. How fine I thought it was." With a small, sad laugh, she closed the covers, bent and pushed the manuscript back into its slot. "It wasn't, I guess. Nobody would publish it." She stood and watched her foot as it rolled the drawer shut. "There are twelve novels in this cabinet. Three plays. Fifty short stories. Hundreds of poems." She looked at Dave and her voice was dry with remembered resentment. "Out of it all, only a handful of poems ever saw print." 

Dave frowned. "You're telling me about a failure. What happened?" 

"To make it a success story?" she asked. "We came to Pima. . . . But look, really I haven't told you about him. I've left out too much. For instance, how funny he was. I've only told you about the despair. But he had a marvelous sense of humor." She touched the scripts on the desk. "You'll see when you read these. Antic and zany and never cruel. Just warm and wildly funny." 

"And the music," Dave said. "What about that?" 

"Yes, that was there too. Not that he ever counted it much. It was"—she gave a little shrug and went back to the couch and sat down and picked up her glass—"a habit. His people were musical. He'd sung and played ever since he was old enough to make a noise. It was in his blood. He took it for granted, like breathing." 

Her brown eyes warmed, recalling. 

"Sometimes, when the gloom grew gloomiest about the writing, he'd suddenly dust off his gui- tar and sing all evening. Old songs, songs he made up himself. Friends would come in. We'd drink beer.... It wasn't all dust and Dostoevsky." 

She glanced at him wryly and away again. 

"Just mostly. And the good times grew fewer and fewer. We weren't in our twenties anymore. Then we weren't even in our thirties anymore. Gretchen was growing up and needing things girls need. So Fox quit the bookshop and went to work in a factory because the wages were better. And he didn't have the energy he used to have. Naturally, who does? It grew harder and harder for him to write. He kept trying. But he didn't joke much anymore. There were a lot of silences. . . ." 

She gazed out the window again, looking her age, looking like someone too much has happened to. 

"So you came to Pima," Dave said. "Why?" 

"My father had a stroke and sent for me." 

"I'm sorry. Is he all right now?" 

"He'll never be the same, but he manages. He can walk again. Drive his own car. That was a year ago last summer. It was strange, coming back." 

"You hadn't been back at all?" Dave asked. 

"Not in twenty-two years. Dad was very angry about my running away. He was even angrier about my marrying Fox. He wrote to tell me so and then he never wrote again, not even when Gretchen was born. You see, he'd planned for me to marry somebody else, a rich boy here in Pima. I didn't want to. Not a very original story, is it?" Her smile was thin, self-mocking. "And I thought, we'll show the' old bastard. My husband will be the most successful writer in America. While I was down on my knees scrubbing worn- out linoleum in our grubby little rented kitchens in L.A., I'd dream of the sweet, vengeful day I'd come back to Pima. In glory. Wife of the famous novelist. Small-town girl makes good." 

"And thumbs nose at Dad. He's well off, is he?" 

"He came to California in 1933, the dust bowl time. From Oklahoma. I was ten. The way he tells it, he arrived"— she said it with a country twang—" 'in a five-dollar Ford with my old woman and my sprout here and thirty cents in my pocket.' By 1938 he owned his own ranch free and clear. And in a matter of months after the government ran the Japanese Americans out in 1942, he had one of the largest spreads in this valley. Grapes, citrus, truck. Yes ... my father's well off. And nobody'd better forget it." She glanced at her watch again. "But we're wasting time. You want to know about Fox. I want to tell you.... " 

"The success story." Dave nodded. 

"It was purest accident." She lifted the bottle at him. He shook his head. She poured herself a finger of brandy and lit another cigarette. "I was at the A&P in Pima, buying supplies for Dad's ranch. And this man stopped me and asked if I wasn't Thorne Loomis. It was Hale McNeil. We'd gone to high school together. Well, not exactly together. He was three years ahead of me. But it's a small school. We knew each other. His father owned the Pima Valley
Sun
. Now Hale owns it—and the radio station.