Stanley swats Claudio’s knee and jerks a thumb, and the two of them walk to the front, cross below the screen, and exit the theater in the opposite corner. They wait in the lobby long enough to see whether the Dogs will follow them out of the movie; they do, but evidently aren’t carrying enough of a grudge to give chase in the rain. Stanley blinks drops from his eyes, looks over his shoulder as he waits for a break in traffic: the Dogs huddled under the marquee, vague and shapeless through the downpour, clouding the air before them with their spoiled breath.
From this day forward, Claudio says, I believe that we should see films only in Santa Monica.
He’s naked now, candlelit from below, standing tiptoe in the backroom of the shop on Horizon. Stanley has strung a length of twine between two wallmounts with a midshipman’s hitch; Claudio is draping his soaked clothes over it. Stanley leans in a corner, peevish and aroused, wrapped in his father’s Army blanket: his cock chafes against the rough fabric. Don’t let those jokers rattle your cage, he says. Today was just bad luck. Back in the neighborhood, that’s what we always did in bad weather — we saw bad movies. I should’ve figured those punks would be hanging around the Fox.
They will give us more trouble.
I don’t think so. We made ’em mad the other day, but we made ’em look pretty silly, too. If we steer clear, they’ll let us alone.
How will we do your con? How will we get money?
Money? Stanley laughs and shakes his head, like he’s talking to a child. Money’s the biggest con of all, chum. It’s only good for making more money. Anything you can pay for, you can steal.
Claudio gives him a skeptical look, wipes his damp palms across his hollow stomach.
What’s the matter? Stanley says. If you don’t believe me, just name something. Anything you want, I’ll be back here with it in less than an hour. I’ll get you two of ’em. Go on and try me.
You will be caught.
I ain’t gonna get caught. C’mon, what do you want? A watch? A fancy watch? I’ll get us a couple of fancy watches. A matching pair.
You should not even go outdoors in the daylight. You need your hair to be cut. You look like a criminal.
Like hell I do, Stanley says. I look like an honest American boy. He pats his matted curls with an involuntary hand.
You look like a monkey. A dirty American monkey.
Claudio grins slyly, steps forward. He tugs a handful of Stanley’s hair; the blanket slips. Stanley flails at Claudio’s arm, shoves him away, pulls him back in, wriggling.
It’s another two days before the rain blows through, by which time Stanley has grown stir-crazy, desperate to wander. He walks Claudio to the traffic circle through the cool morning air, sharing a stolen breakfast of Twinkies and oranges. The bus to Santa Monica pulls up as they arrive; Claudio shoves what’s left of his fruit into Stanley’s sticky fingers and runs ahead. He turns and smiles once he’s crossed Main, and Stanley smiles back. The fleeting dialogue of their faces across the busy street conveys many things, trust not foremost among them. Claudio vanishes behind the coach, reappears in shadow through its windows, settles into a seat. Stanley watches the kid’s sharp-nosed profile — eclipsed by the irregular beat of passengers in the aisle, cars on the street — until the bus rolls away.
He walks back to the oceanfront and crosses the boardwalk to the beach, swallowing the last of the luminous orange wedges, sucking his fingertips clean. He breaks the rind into bits and pitches it to a group of seagulls running in the swash; the gulls take the pieces, fly with them, and drop them into the waves, where other gulls swoop at them in turn. Aerated, the ocean is sky-blue, opaque, dotted with pulses of silver. A row of white surf breaks two hundred feet out, cracking like a heavy whip, hollowing a brief cavern in the foam. Its dyspeptic growl echoes down the waterfront.
Stanley wipes his mouth and smells the citrus oil on his hands, thinking of the winter harvest in Riverside. That first week of work he probably ate his weight in fruit: sweet clementines, brilliant valencias, navel oranges bigger than bocce balls. Last month, after he and Claudio snuck away from the groves and hitched a ride into Los Angeles from a Fuller Brush man, they both swore they’d never touch citrus again. Now they find themselves craving it.
Stanley met Claudio on a mixed picking crew. He didn’t like him much at first. The kid seemed too smooth for harvest work, too cagey, no more born to it than Stanley was himself. Stanley made him out to be on the run from trouble, or maybe just slumming: a prodigal outcast from some mansion on some hill. He also figured Claudio for a sandbagger, feigning ineptitude to duck the worst work, certain his job was secure since the crew boss spoke no Spanish and needed him to translate. They ignored each other at first. But the whites on the crew were all older than Stanley, closemouthed, and the Mexicans seemed to steer clear of Claudio. Eventually the two began to talk.
Stanley never asked questions, so Claudio’s story came out slowly, in no special order. The youngest of thirteen by two mothers, he’d grown up comfortable and invisible in a big house outside Hermosillo. His father was a famous general — he’d fought Pancho Villa at Calaya, the Cristeros in Jalisco — and his brothers left home to become lawyers, bankers, statesmen. Claudio spent his days in the cinema in town, learning English from Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, raising his small hands to hide the subtitles. He grew older, made quiet plans to travel north. Claudio told Stanley these stories as they worked, whispered them at night in the bunkhouse, and later, when they slipped into the dark groves to plot escape under moon-silvered citrus leaves, Stanley lay still and watched Claudio’s lips move until he no longer understood anything at all.
He likes Claudio a lot. He’s not sick of having him around. At idle times on his long cross-country drift he’s often wished he had somebody to share his adventures — somebody who’d listen to him, who’d believe the stories he tells himself about himself — and then this oddball Mexican kid came along and seemed to fit the bill. And it’s been great, having a partner. It’s made things possible that otherwise wouldn’t be.
But there are also things that Stanley wants to do alone.
When the rind is gone and the gulls are scattered, Stanley takes a deep breath and turns back toward the boardwalk. The late-morning sun is high over the city: buildings and streetlamps and palmtrees angle their shadows at him, marking channels in the sand, and the storefronts are blacked-out beneath their porticos. Stanley checks the signs over the arcades as he draws closer: Chop Suey, St. Mark’s Hotel, Center Drug Co. On the corner of Market Street, blue and red stripes coil around a white column; he smoothes his frizzed hair as he passes it by.
Beachfront characters are out enjoying the weather — an old lady in an opera coat, stooped under her parasol; a bearded man in paint-spattered chinos, chasing two laughing women across the sand; a stout burgher walking an ugly dog, singing to it in a strange language — but Stanley pays them all little mind. He broadcasts his attention among the buildings, mindful of shapes and textures, of the attitude of sunlight on walls and streets. Patterns catch his eye, then slip into the background: rows of lancet windows, bricks emerging from stucco, mascarons grinning atop cast-iron columns. There’s an absence here that he’s training himself to see, something he can only glimpse sidelong, as if by accident. It’s bound up with the past, with the lapsed grandeur of this place, but even that is insubstantial, a shadow cast by the thing itself, flickering behind the scrim of years like the ghost of a ghost.
This is Welles’s city, so named in the book — which makes it Crivano’s city, too, as much as any earthly city can be. Stanley will learn to move through it as Crivano would: silent, catlike, on the balls of his feet. Unhidden yet unseen. Whenever his path clears, he shuts his eyes to walk a few blind steps, imagining the feel of cobblestones under soft boots, of a slender blade at his hip, of a black cape fanning his ankles, billowing in the night air. The night itself another cloak. He’s not sure how he came to have so clear a picture of Crivano; in the book, Welles never really says what he looks like. It occurs to Stanley that he could gotten this idea from someplace else: from Stewart Granger in Scaramouche, maybe, or even from a corny Zorro movie that he saw when he was a kid. He opens his eyes, blinks and winces in the sun, corrects his course.