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[Continuing chapter five]
It took maybe ten minutes, and when she’d finished Casey couldn’t really see much difference. He could feel it, of course: his face seemed wet, sticky, as if he was wearing a too-tight mask. But Susan gave him another appraising look, then nodded. “Good,” she said. She grabbed a hat from the rack by the door, tossed it to him. “Let’s go.”
Back on the sound stage, someone gave Casey a few sheets of type-script, a jumble of words that made next to no sense to him, and told him to study the scene. This turned out not to be as difficult as he’d dreaded: there weren’t that many words on the page, and he was only expected to say about half of them. He was pretty sure he’d memorized everything he was supposed to say and do by the time Susan came for him again. As he let himself be led to the set, Casey noticed that the wire-haired, bird-like man had stopped fiddling with lights and was now fiddling with the camera.
They’d brought a young woman to share the test with him, a very pretty brown-haired girl Susan introduced to him as Margot Griffith. Margot had done this sort of thing before, but not so many times that she was inclined to lord her experience over Casey. She added a few hints to the store he’d got from Susan, and after a few minutes in which they were bundled about by Straebo and his makeshift crew as if they’d been a pair of dress-maker’s dummies, Margot whispered, “Good luck,” Straebo shouted, “Places!” in a voice that trailed off to a hung-over whimper, and the intensity of the light increased so much that Casey almost felt the breath being sucked from his lungs.
He wasn’t too sure of what happened next. Straebo shouted something, then shouted some more and they did it again. Straebo muttered something that Casey couldn’t hear, and then the lights dropped back to their previous level. Margot, Casey noted, was staring at him, her mouth open. Either he’d been brilliant or his ineptitude had left her speechless. I’m pretty sure I said everything I was supposed to, he thought.
Then the lights returned to blinding-white form, and Casey felt his makeup beginning to melt and bubble in the heat. “Hi,” a voice said from somewhere outside the corona of incandescence, and then the stork-like man emerged into the halo of light. His hair was even more amazing close-up. Casey guessed that it added a good four inches to a height that was already substantially above average. “Casey, right?” the man said. “I’m Smokey Burnett. I’m your cameraman today.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Casey said, offering his hand. “Thanks for coming out. I know what a pain it must be to have to give up your only day off.”
“Oh, it’s not a problem,” Burnett said. “I’m between pictures right now. Haven’t worked for two glorious weeks. So this morning is a chance for me to file off some of the rust—I start a new job tomorrow.”
“In that case, I’m glad to be able to help you out.”
Burnett laughed. “That’s the spirit,” he said. Then he looked at Casey for a moment, apparently thinking. “Listen,” he eventually said. “If you really want to help, why don’t you and Margot just sit around here and talk for a few minutes? That way I can run a bit more film through the camera.”
“Sure,” Casey said. “Anything to help.” He turned to Margot. “Uh… what do we talk about?”
“Anything,” Burnett said, walking back into the darkness. “Did I hear right that you were a pilot in the War?”
Margot turned out to be an excellent conversationalist. She seemed genuinely interested, not so much in the whole fighting-the-Hun thing, but in the pleasures of flying. She had a sense of humor, too. Casey enjoyed the next five minutes, and was honestly sorry when Burnett interrupted them to announce that he was out of film, Straebo was out of the building, and Casey’s screen test was finally over.
One final surprise awaited Casey when he stepped out of the stage and into the blinding sunlight. “You Casey?” a uniformed guard asked.
“That’s me.”
“Mr. Straebo wanted me to tell you you’re to use this truck to get yourself back to Glendale. We can’t spare anyone to drive you. He says the truck is yours to use until you’ve bought yourself a car.”
The guard pointed to a worn Model T truck with a board-sided cargo bed. The truck was probably older than the planes he was flying for Monarch, but Casey didn’t care. He’d been without a car for even longer than he’d been without a plane, and in California it was getting ever harder to live without a car, unless you cherished being dependent on the schedules of the Pacific Electric Red Car.
“Hey, thanks,” Casey said. “Anything I need to know about how she runs?”
“Nothing I can tell you, pal,” the guard said. “If she’s got problems, I expect you’ll find out about ‘em soon enough.”
The truck started on the first turn of the crank, probably because the engine was still warm. For a moment, Casey just sat behind the wheel, enjoying the rattle of the engine and way it made the truck shake, like a horse anxious to start running. It occurred to him that he had all of Sunday afternoon and evening to himself, with nowhere he had to be and nothing he had to do. He was his own man, with a full tank of gas and the entirety of Hollywood to explore.
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