The Little Men Read Free Page A

slightly fraying.
    Her favorite was about a detective recovering
stolen jewels from an unlikely hiding spot.
    But there was one that frightened her.
About a farmer’s daughter who fell asleep
each night on a bed of hay. And in the night,
the hay came alive, poking and stabbing at her.
    It was supposed to be funny, but it gave
Penny bad dreams.
    â€œWell, she was in love with Larry,” Mr. Flant
said. “But she was not Larry’s kind.”
    Penny had been telling them how Mrs.
Stahl had shown up at her door the night before, in worn satin pajamas and cold cream,
to scold her for moving furniture around.
    â€œI don’t even know how she saw,” Penny
said. “I just pushed the bed away from the
wall.”
    She had lied, telling Mrs. Stahl she could
hear the oven damper popping at night. She
was afraid to tell her about the shadows and
lights and other things that made no sense in
daytime. Like the mice moving behind the
wall on hindfeet, so agile she’d come to think
of them as pixies, dwarves. Little men.
    â€œIt’s not your place to move things,” Mrs.
Stahl had said, quite loudly, and for a moment
Penny thought the woman might cry.
    â€œThat’s all his furniture, you know,” Benny
said. “Larry’s. Down to the forks and spoons.”
    Penny felt her teeth rattle slightly in her
mouth.
    â€œHe gave her books she liked,” Benny
added. “Stiff British stuff he teased her about.
Charmed himself out of the rent for months.”
    â€œWhen he died she wailed around the
courtyard for weeks,” Mr. Flant recalled. “She
wanted to scatter the ashes into the canyon.”
    â€œBut his people came instead,” Benny said.
“Came on a train all the way from Carolina.
A man and woman with cardboard suitcases
packed with pimento sandwiches. They took
the body home.”
    â€œThey said Hollywood had killed him.”
    Benny shook his head, smiled that tobaccotoothed
smile of his. “They always say that.”
    â€œYou’re awfully pretty for a face-fixer,” one of
the actors told her, fingers wagging beneath
his long makeup bib.
    Penny only smiled, and scooted before the
pinch came.
    It was a Western, so it was mostly men,
whiskers, lip bristle, three-day beards filled
with dust.
    Painting the girls’ faces was harder. They
all had ideas of how they wanted it. They were
hard girls, striving to get to Paramount, to
MGM. Or started out there and hit the Republic
rung on the long slide down. To Allied,
AIP. Then studios no one ever heard of, operating
out of some slick guy’s house in the
Valley.
    They had bad teeth and head lice and some
had smells on them when they came to the
studio, like they hadn’t washed properly. The
costume assistants always pinched their noses
behind their backs.
    It was a rough town for pretty girls. The
only place it was.
    Penny knew she had lost her shine long
ago. Many men had rubbed it off, shimmy by
shimmy.
    But it was just as well, and she’d just as soon
be in the warpaint business. When it rubbed
off the girls, she could just get out her brushes,
her power puffs, and shine them up like new.
    As she tapped the powder pots, though, her
mind would wander. She began thinking
about Larry bounding through the backlots.
Would he have come to Republic with his
wares? Maybe. Would he have soft-soaped her,
hoping her bosses might have a taste for T.S.
Eliot or a French deck?
    By day, she imagined him as a charmer, a
cheery, silver-tongued roué.
    But at night, back at the Canyon Arms, it
was different.
    You see, sometimes she thought she could
see him moving, room to room, his face pale,
his trousers soiled. Drinking and crying over
someone, something, whatever he’d lost that
he was sure wasn’t ever coming back.
    There were sounds now. Sounds to go with
the two a.m. lights, or the mice or whatever
they were.
    Tap-tap-tap.
    At first, she thought she was only hearing
the banana trees,