"Howard Waldrop - Occam's Ducks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

them, as if every pachyderm that had ever lived had died there. It was near dark, the
sky overhead paling, the jumbled bones around him becoming purple and indistinct.
Over the narrow valley, against the early stars a strange light appeared, It came
from a searchlight somewhere beyond the cliffs, and projected onto a high bank of
noctilucent cirrus was a winged black shape. From somewhere behind him a
telephone rang with a sense of urgency Then he’d awakened with a start.
Lillian Gish, who’d only arrived at the dock the morning they left, going
directly from the Florida Special to the yacht, had spent the whole week before at the
new studio at Mamaroneck, New York, overseeing its completion and directing her
sister in a comedy feature. On the tossing, pitching yacht, she’d had a terrible time
getting to sleep. She had dreamed, she said, of being an old woman, or being
dressed like one, and carrying a Browning semiautomatic shotgun. She was being
stalked through a swamp by a crazed man with words tattooed on his fists, who
sang hymns as he followed her. She was very frightened in her nightmare, she said,
not by being pursued, but by the idea of being old. Everyone laughed at that.
They asked David Wark Griffith what he’d dreamed of. “Nothing in
particular,” he said. But he had dreamed: there was a land of fire and eruptions,
where men and women clad in animal skins fought against giant crocodiles and
lizards, much like in his film of ten years before, Man’s Genesis. Hal Roach, the
upstart competing producer, was there, too, looking older, but he seemed to be
telling Griffith what to do. D. W. couldn’t imagine such a thing, Griffith attributed
the dream to the rolling of the ship, and to an especially fine bowl of turtle soup he’d
eaten that morning aboard the Grey Duck, before the storm hit.
Another person didn’t tell of his dreams. He saw no reason to. He was the
stubby steward who kept them all rocking with laughter through the storm with his
antic’s and jokes. He said nothing to the film people, because he had a dream so
very puzzling to him, a dream unlike any other he’d ever had.
He had been somewhere; a stage. a room. He wore some kind of livery; a
doorman’s or a chauffeur’s outfit. There was a big Swede standing right in front of
him, and the Swedish guy was made up like a Japanese or a Chinaman. He had a big
mustache like Dr. Fu Manchu on the book jackets, and he wore a tropical planter’s
suit and hat. Then this young Filipino guy had run into the room yelling a mile a
minute, and the Swede asked, “Why number-three son making noise like
motorboat?”, and the Filipino yelled something else and ran to a closet door and
opened it, and a white feller fell out of it with a knife in his back.
Then a voice behind the steward said, “Cut!” and then said, “Let’s do it
again,” and the guy with the knife in his back got up and went back into the closet,
and the Filipino guy went back out the door, and the big Swede took two puffs on a
Camel and handed it to someone and then just stood there, and the voice behind the
steward said to him, “Okay,” and then, “This time, Mantan, bug your eyes out a little
more.”
The dream made no sense at all.
After their return on the yacht, the steward had performed at the wrap party
for the productions. An Elk saw him, and they hired him to do their next initiation
follies. Then he won a couple of amateur nights, and played theaters in a couple of
nearby towns. He fetched and carried around the mayor’s house in the daytime, and
rolled audiences in the aisles at night.
One day early in 1920, he looked in his monthly pay envelope and found it
was about a quarter of what he’d earned in the theater the last week.
He gave notice, hit the boards running, and never looked back.