A Leap
Oliver Danville—1947
Before he saw the paper that night, before he had inherited its wrinkled pages at an otherwise empty table in a cafeteria, Oliver had been a washed-up stage actor too tall and gangly to play the juvenile and too scrawny to play the heavy, without the talent to cover anything in between. He’d heard it said he was handsome, but lately his hairline wasn’t doing him any favors at auditions, let alone his tongue tripping down a staircase every time he opened his mouth. Only that morning he’d flubbed the lines on a character without even a name. Shoe Salesman. A guy who would play foil to the romantic comedy banter of the two leads, marching in with a box to say, “Your ostrich-skin boots, madam,” with a lisp meant to be funny. The director had kept him onstage alone, with only a cigar-chomping prop man in the wings. A solid minute of silence crept over the place. Then the director had shouted from the center of the auditorium, “We’ve got no place for you, chum. Go back to Winnipeg.”
Oliver had come to Sullivan’s pool hall knowing there was a fifty-fifty chance Necky would be there waiting for his money, but in order to get the money, he had to play the marks, and the marks played at Sullivan’s because it sat right there on the corner of Randolph and Wells, where every rube passing through Chicago found himself on a rainy Thursday, looking around for City Hall. He could work, sure, if he could find a job. But the only thing he had experience in was acting, and after the morning’s train wreck onstage, he felt he’d received a sign from on high that it was all over. Winnipeg? He didn’t even know where the hell Winnipeg was.
Only the last year of the war had felt like a break. Everywhere he went, a girl called out to him, lonely and in need of love, certain to find the dimple in his chin irresistible, his canned jokes funnier than anything she’d heard before, his prick a miracle. He saw many a framed picture turned to the wall in those days. And nobody stateside cared about his twisted left foot. But then Truman brought the boys home, and with all their shouting and elbows and swagger, they filled every bedroom in America, leaving him to his, up a crummy narrow stairwell smelling of dead cabbage. He spent his free time at Sullivan’s pool hall after that, putting on his best act of losing so that he could come back and win double or nothing, chalking it all up to a fluke, your regular con.
And on this day of all days, in the middle of oiling up a real dope from out of Oklahoma City, of all places, in walks Necky, stripped to his undershirt, half shaved, a little swipe of blood on that long neck of his. Oliver’s first thought was that Necky had come for him. He’d showed up to collect his two hundred dollars, and knowing he wouldn’t have anything to collect, he’d come to put a hole in him. But then the hubbub of greetings at the front of Sullivan’s turned to gasps and shouts, and Necky reached up with both hands and grabbed his own throat and then fell out of view, just like that, and before Oliver could even shuffle forward for a look, someone had already said in a disbelieving voice, “He’s dead. They killed him.”
Well. Eventful day for sure. Oliver left the rube where he was, twisting his pool cue in both hands, looking pale and sick as an old fish, and made for the back door, the alley, three blocks over, and up to the fourth floor to the room he was renting, where he left the light off and sat by the window, allowing the terror to strike him. They’d killed Necky, opened him up along that famous throat of his. And Oliver had seen the blood like it meant nothing at first and then spurting between his fingers. He’d never witnessed anything like it. Most sickening, though, was the knowledge that his first thought hadn’t been for Necky or Necky’s wife or Necky’s kids. No, none of those things. Necky stretched dead on the floor in Sullivan’s meant Oliver was off the hook. He’d never have to pay that two hundred back. It was looking at that rube from Oklahoma City, so clearly frightened, that the miserable part occurred to him: he’d put a lousy price of two hundred on a perfectly swell guy like Necky, who’d done so much for so many, who had half a dozen kids or something like that, who could tell a filthy joke better than anybody he knew. It was as if he’d handed the killer a knife.
So he took it as another sign, a second sign. He was washed up as an actor, for one, and he needed to get his life in order, for two. When, after a couple hours, he followed his stomach to the automat cafeteria down the street, he wasn’t planning on getting any more of them. He was only planning to go to church or find a clean union job or settle down and marry the first librarian he ran across—really, whatever it took to become a useful member of society—and wasn’t at all expecting to slide into an empty booth with his chicken salad sandwich and coffee and apple pie and see that story, the one that would change everything, about the navy pilot flying over the Cascade Range a week prior who said he saw lights flying in the night sky. Nine shiny objects that reminded him of tea saucers, and how nobody, but nobody, could explain them.
He read the story at least three times. Then he carefully ripped it from its surrounding page. Back in his one-room apartment four flights up, he stared through the open window trying to make out the stars from all the city light, feeling a familiar buzz, even hearing it, behind his ears. Once when he was onstage at an audition for The Front Page, this same buzzing overtook him and it was like the whole theater had filled with insects fluttering in the unnatural light. Words had spilled out of him then in a sort of ecstasy, but when he turned to the wings, another actor was wagging his head and laughing out loud. This time, though, Oliver didn’t feel any shame, and when he read the first lines of the news story again, he felt the buzzing coming on with even greater force like a drug.
The next morning he was out of Chicago on the highway, thumbing his way west with anyone who would take him. He started with twenty-eight dollars to his name, and by the time he reached Boise, Idaho, where he was stuck for two days before finding a ride for the final leg of the trip, he was down to nineteen. Turns out a hitchhiker with any money at all is expected to pick up the lunch tab. He’d bought food for a salesman and two truckers and coffee for a pair of women who looked white as anything but could hardly speak a word that wasn’t Spanish, but the colored family with their trunk over-packed with everything they owned and three kids stuffed into the back seat with his long legs and arms in their way wouldn’t hear of it. They insisted on covering his dinner and a sandwich to pack for his next leg. The Stuarts. Jim and Tandy and the kids. They played a game of rhyming funny words and laughing that he never caught on to but which warmed him inside. When he parted with them, in Boise, yes, in Boise, they were settling for a job, likely the only black family anyone in that city had ever seen, and without him asking they offered to let him sleep curled up and cramped in the back seat of their car, outside their rental house, under a tall fir tree.
The following day, standing along a narrow state highway with a clear view of rolling blue mountains on the horizon, he was struck by the thought that one of the first things those people in the flying saucers—and he never had any doubt there were people—would think about the human race was what a bunch of narrow-minded cowards we were, running off to our little corners, pointing hateful glares at anyone who looked or sounded or acted any different. They’d probably laugh. People from the skies. From distant planets. He thought of them dressed in clothes made of shiny tinfoil, outfitted with transistor radios, their lives a lackadaisical glide between stars, full of spare time, talking philosophy and poetry with their feet propped up on thick down pillows. Yes, they’d laugh at our foolishness. And if they meant well—and surely, why doubt it, they meant well—they’d swing down out of the air and settle our troubles for us, get everything in line, have everyone shaking hands with everyone else. He could see it, America in another ten years: the whole melting pot getting along, focused on tomorrow, a gleaming technological utopia of television communicators and robot cafeterias and trains zipping along at a thousand miles an hour. Even out here, deep in the old frontier country, there would be magnetic rails to ride in cars that took you around without having to steer, and nobody with any real jobs, just living life, anything of want a distant memory.