Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  “Then I came here, as a financial writer. President Hoover wanted me, but our publisher, Mr. Mercer, saw something in me and outbid him, and here I am, youngest managing editor in the country!” He tilted the glass up to his mouth but got nothing but ice cubes slipping off his chin. He licked his lips. “About the only thing I never was? A sailor! Damn! I hate to swim!” He roared at that.

  He was so vain. Completely vain. She knew it was easy to manipulate the vain.

  “Me too!” she hollered. “Only swimming I ever done was in an irrigation ditch. My knees touched bottom!”

  Her throat constricted at having said that word, ditch. She was making mistakes left and right, but Mac laughed again, threw his head back, exposing his throat. The ditch didn’t mean anything to him. He didn’t care what she did in that ditch. She was handling him.

  “How old are you, sir?”

  “Mac,” he corrected her again. “Twenty-six.”

  Could she be like him, successful, in just nine more years? If she were still a him?

  He pointed his elbow at Oppie, who’d wandered off. “Careful whose advice you follow. Professor poisoned his tutor. Over in England? Talked his way out of it.”

  “Shit,” Jane said, intoxicated by tutor and England and poison and happy with a boy’s freedom to say anything, at least when everybody around him was drunk.

  He put his arm around her neck and breathed chemical mist into her eyeballs. He was shorter than she was, though it seemed like they were nose to nose.

  “Hard to know who to trust in this town.”

  But he trusted her. She was winning this night. The arches of her feet tingled. She wanted what he had—fame, popularity, money. Judging by the quiver she felt where his arm circled her shoulders, maybe she wanted him too. She straightened herself up. She wanted the job. That’s what she needed.

  “Thank you, sir—I mean Mac.”

  “Terrific!” He pounded her in the middle of her chest, creating a moment of panic. “You’ll be terrific!” He gave her a big smile, his teeth white and square, his eyes red.

  Her lower belly lurched. Why did his look go straight to her gut? Then he turned and walked away through the crowd, wobbling.

  She yelled, “Wait!”

  A trio nearby turned to look, but Mac didn’t notice, just kept moving between clusters, slapping backs, laughing toward the door.

  She whipped her head around to the kitchen, to Sweetie, who was watching, and spread her arms in the air—What should I do?

  Sweetie turned to Rivka, pouring spaghetti into a bowl, steam clouding her head, and Sweetie spoke in Rivka’s ear.

  Jane turned away from the girls before she could read any mouthed advice. She wanted to stop Mac herself, stop him and get a job.

  She pushed through toward the door. She couldn’t see his head above the crowd, which surprised her as he seemed so big, but she caught a flash of that white shirt, those muscular arms, between clumps of other people.

  She saw the front door open, yellow hair flaming on the threshold. She was stuck. She couldn’t squeeze between the radio people laughing and another trio circling the Australian, talking loud.

  She panicked and gave a big shove, and the Australian— who was reaching out with one arm, indicating something a distance away—fell over in one of the few open spaces in the party, just fell over, onto the ground. Two men squatted to help him up, another started to laugh, and the last one turned to her, balling up his fist.

  “Sorry! So sorry, sir!” she yelled, jumping through the opening where the Australian used to be to push through to the door.

  “Hey, string bean!” somebody yelled.

  She kept pushing and the crowd parted, and she got to the door and saw Mac climbing into the convertible.

  She ran down the steps and across the street, where Mac was trying to steady his hand enough to get his key into the ignition.

  “Mac, sir, why don’t you stay, have coffee?”

  “Meeting somebody for drinks.” He jabbed the key all around his target.

  She thought about teaching herself how to drive on the Golden State Highway, Daddy in back, her hands on the wheel, crowbar on the seat, headed for the ditch. And then she thought about escaping from that night, driving herself here, to this moment.

  “I’d be proud to drive you, Mac.”

  “Don’t need a driver.” He dropped his keys and then fumbled to regain them on the floorboard.

  “It’d be an adventure I haven’t had, driving you around.”

  Mac looked up. She widened her eyes, raised her brows, sincere.

  “See things, people, I couldn’t otherwise, sir.”

  “Mac, I said.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He grinned. “You’re funny.”

  She was flooded with warmth. She could get this.

  “Sweetie’s lodger?”

  “And Rivka’s.”

  He handed her the keys. She couldn’t breathe right. He pushed up out of the driver’s seat and swatted her on the rear end, sending sensation down and up. Then he weaved to the passenger side, leaning against the Cadillac. She rushed around and opened the door for him, and though she acted calm, her heart was beating as hard as it did when she broke tape at a finish line.

  He tumbled into the passenger seat, yelling, “My kingdom awaits!”

  In that moment, seventeen-year-old Jane, tomato-picking, cross-dressing, beer-drunk Okie, felt a shiver of embarrassment for the managing editor of the San Francisco Prospect, seeing how even a high-up person might reveal too much out of uncontained vanity.

  She decided to ignore that so as not to tamp down her success, and the doubt passed.

  She looked up and saw the girls on the porch.

  Behind her, Mac yelled, “Got the kid! Heading to Breen’s!”

  She turned back, saw him wink with the whole left side of his face, a stage wink.

  Then she saw Rivka shaking her head no, staring at Jane, her hand on the doorknob, the look of a naysayer—Don’t drive after drinking. Don’t head to a bar after midnight. Don’t leave with a man you don’t know. Don’t throw out your well-laid plans.

  Sweetie hollered something inaudible, rushing down the steps toward them.

  The machine in Jane’s head began to blend memories of risk and reward—a ribbon she won, a pie she stole—with the nagging of her prefrontal cortex—These are unfamiliar things. You don’t know who to trust—mixing it all up fast, calculating “leap” or “stand” an instant before the chasm, helping her choose the thing she’d do, which had almost never been just to stand. Some of it was built in—a cellular confidence that she had it in her, that the seeds would sprout and the dog wouldn’t bite, a natural optimism that shrank thresholds. The gorge never looked as wide to her as it did to others. But it seemed like more than that now, like an accelerant had been added to the spark of her natural confidence.

  She climbed into the Cadillac, tasting an acidic tang of anxiety. Then, as so many seventeen-year-old boys before her have done, she put the key in the ignition and released the brake.

  SHE woke on the hardwood floor of an unfamiliar apartment in the sky.

  Her right cheek was crushing a brown leather shoe. In the background she could hear the repeating crack of a bat connecting with a ball, a guy yelling in Chinese, a whining bus, horns, all kinds of horns, and the pounding of construction. She pushed up, raising her head a foot off the ground, and then she lay back down on the shoe, moaning, and pressed her thumb into that almond-shaped lump, to stop the throb. Whatever healing her head had done since the ditch seemed ruined now. She’d been dragged through a knothole backwards. She rubbed the hair on the back of her head and remembered she was Benny. “Unhhh.”

  “Shut up, hayseed!”

  She looked toward the sound, which came from a long brown couch pushed against a white wall covered with taped-up pages from the News, the Prospect, the Examiner, and the Call-Bulletin, a wall itself like a busy front page. She squinted through an al
cohol scrim at “Quentin break plotted,” “Dempsey pushes stroller up thirteen flights,” “China Reds Menace SF Missionary,” “Hungry Hobos.”

  On the couch below the wall lay a growling man in wrinkled gray slacks and one shoe, his suit jacket over his head and shoulders.

  She stood and looked out a picture window over water.

  “Telegraph Hill. Hundred-thousand-dollar view there, son.”

  She turned to see Mac standing near the newspaper wall, his buzz-cut shiny in the morning light. He’d showered and smelled, even from a distance, like brushed teeth—the minty smell of apartment dwellers, not the baking soda smell of a person who rubs his teeth with a rag over a tin cup. His flannel suit and dark tie were pressed, like his white shirt. Movie star handsome. Even his bumps and scars looked designed, not suffered. She’d grown up to respect a certain amount of scarring, proof of what a person had accomplished, though that obviously wasn’t true for a woman.

  Her mouth was parched, her lips gummy. She turned back to the window, rubbing her hand through spongy hair, embarrassed to look bad in front of him.

  “The Russian stuff’s great,” he said. “No smell. That’s what they’re drinking in New York. Harder to get here, but everybody loves it. Next time, don’t mix.” He pulled at his sleeve cuff. “I’ll get coffee. Then breakfast. You two can hitch along if you’re hungry.” Then he passed through a door in the newspaper wall, where his kitchen must be.

  She’d never known anyone who spent money easily, who would pay for breakfast out, other than a weekly donut at Elthea’s, which she’d never seen Daddy actually pay for. She would ask for crackers and a coffee. She had a dollar in her wallet.

  Folding over to get a knot out of her back, she saw her own still-red toenails, painted for the radio interview. She hadn’t removed the polish before Rivka’s party—her transformation was incomplete.

  “Loudmouth jackass,” muttered the guy on the couch, his jacket falling to the floor. He had a square head, oily black hair, eyebrows like caterpillars above black-framed glasses. A mud brick of a body, an old brick, maybe forty. He opened his eyes wide, squeezed them shut and opened them wide again, looking like he might lose last night’s supper.

  He was completely drunk. She might not wreck things with her toenails since she was only a quarter-drunk, at most half-drunk, compared to his more complete condition.

  “Morning, sir. Benny Hopper.” She curled her toes under.

  “I know, turnip.” When he rose from the couch to a surprising height—no more than five foot three—Jane went the other way, dropping to the floor and sitting Indian style, her feet tucked under her thighs. She tossed him his shoe. He burped as he reached to catch it. “You don’t remember. I’m Lambert. Derek Lambert. Say it right. Lamb-bear.”

  “Lamb-bear,” she repeated, groping under the sofa for her shoes, trying to remember having met him last night.

  “Riveting, your ambitions.” He lit a cigar and sat back on the couch to tie his lace. “So unique. Taking the city by storm. Good thing you’ve got no competition. The rest of us’ll just step aside, avoid the force of your brilliance. Too bad we’ve been wasting all our time here, waiting for the potato truck to make its delivery.”

  She thought, Okay, he doesn’t like me. Yet.

  Her fingers found a wingtip.

  Mac came out of the kitchen with three mugs, leaning down to hand the first to Jane, before Lambert, violating the obvious order of things. Mac didn’t like him, was trying to unsettle him. Okay then.

  “Longshoreman pal gets me pounds of it, green. Bags fall off the boat.”

  “Hunh,” Lambert said. “Fall off the boat?”

  Mac kept looking at Jane. “Best in the world. I roast it on the stovetop.” The nutty smell overcame the general stink of alcohol. “Anyway, it’s free.”

  “Right. Free,” said Lambert.

  The feeling was mutual—he was openly contemptuous of Mac—though Mac acted like he didn’t see it. He must have a use for him.

  She got the one shoe on her foot, untied, no sock, and groped for the second.

  “Rooms are cigar boxes. No closet. Elevator shakes like the big one. But I can’t get over the view.” Mac jerked his head toward the window. “Soon I’ll get the same view, with better quarters.” He said it like he was bragging—to her. Why would he bother?

  She turned back to the window. To the left was the prison, Alcatraz—the girls had told her about it—on a rock in the bay between the two new bridges, surrounded by sailboats, ferries, and freighters under an alarmingly blue dome. All that beauty, so close to criminals.

  Lambert said, “Every stupid citizen’s gonna be smug all day, like they personally filled the bay, dyed the sky.”

  She knew this kind of guy, who talks down everybody and everything. Nobody was going to sneak up on him with a nasty surprise. He was the nasty surprise.

  She saw her shoe sitting under the window in the corner.

  Lambert dropped ashes into a crystal boat on the coffee table. “You want a view, you gotta go to New York. Lemme explain about views and vodka.”

  Mac rolled his eyes. “Yeah, New York, so you say.”

  Get the shoe on.

  “Any city where the creatives commute to sand dune suburbs for chicken fried steak and pre-mixed Manhattans . . .”

  “I don’t live in the Sunset. I don’t drink canned Manhattans, at any rate.”

  Jane looked at the newspapered wall and interrupted. “Studying the competition?”

  Mac turned from the window to the wall. “Revolving exhibit. Figuring it out.”

  She hopped up, grabbed the shoe and sat with her back to the other two, slipping it on. Discovery avoided.

  Lambert said, “If we’re gonna eat, let’s do it, children,” stubbing his cigar in the candy bowl.

  Jane was queasy, needed the crackers, so she stood and slipped on her jacket, feeling at once it was too light—fully loaded, a suit was heavy, she’d learned yesterday. She patted her hips and found no wallet, cigarettes, keys, or notebook. Checked her breast pockets. Nothing. No ballast.

  “Don’t tell me,” Lambert said. “You’re the kid who loses things, right? Oh my God. Didn’t Mommy sew your money to the inside of your jacket?” He was hoarse with joy. “I know your type. Seen it a million times! I could write an encyclopedia on your type!”

  But that wasn’t her type.

  The keys—the apartment and Uno’s car—and the wallet, her only cash. But worst was the moleskin. She’d written in it all yesterday, about cutting and pomading her hair, learning to smoke, aiming for the Prospect, assessing people at the party, planning how to act like a boy. Someone had stolen it, maybe read it.

  “You must have dropped it at Breen’s,” Mac said. “We’ll find it at breakfast.”

  Explosions went off behind her eyes.

  “Don’t worry about last night. Forget it.”

  The headline taped to the edge of the wall nearest her face read, “Ragged, hungry, broke harvest workers live in squalor amidst death,” over a picture of a pathetic-looking Okie family, like any one of them she knew.

  Lambert leered. “Missing something special, kid?”

  She had to make Mac like her before somebody read that moleskin, found her out, reported it, made her Jane again.

  “Mac, sir, want me to drive?”

  “We’ll walk.”

  She picked up their mugs to carry them to the kitchen.

  “Leave ’em,” he said. “Girl’s on her way.”

  She rubbed her smooth cheeks.

  “What’s a matter, Boy? Need a shave?” Lambert’s face cracked open, grinning. Between his top and bottom teeth, it looked black, like he had no tongue.

  She saw then, in her mind, vivid as life, Lambert laughing, his thick arms wrapped around his belly, rocking back and forth: “Oh my God! He’s a girl! He’s a girl!”

  A twenty-four-inch jar of pickled pigs’ feet sat at eye level on a dark wood bar as long as a football field.
The jar was working its magic on her head and gut, neither of which needed it, especially since Malachi, Breen’s barman, had found neither her wallet nor her notebook.

  “What’re you trying to preserve? The founding family weren’t exactly paragons, were they?” Mac used his eggy fork to punctuate, looking straight ahead at Lambert’s reflection in the mirror over the bar where they’d bellied up for breakfast. “Killing each other, incest, all that. It’s the Barbary Coast. If we want readers, we gotta turn up the lights!”

  Lambert smiled, ugly, everything—his teeth, mouth, head

  —block-shaped. “I know. I’ve been here. I’ve been studying this market since you were in shorts.”

  “We’re booooorrrrring! We gotta expose their secrets. Tell ’em and sell ’em.” Mac chewed three bites of Hangtown fry before looking up in the mirror again at Lambert, who had half an oyster dangling on his lip. Mac winced. “I’ve done the math. We’re last of six. Newsroom’s full of stiffs, except you.” His voice got quieter, almost intimate. “We gotta tell the secrets, the right secrets. This paper’s gonna die off some day, but I don’t want it jumping off the bridge on my watch.”

  Lambert’s nostrils flared. “Sure, we can gossip our way to first. Show every shitty thing everybody does. Readers’ll eat it up. They’ll love you. I know you want that. Who cares if some big fella’s caught ass-up on the front page? But I’m saying we don’t have to do it that way. There are better ways, ways that’ll position us. For the future.”

  Mac set down his fork and rubbed a napkin across his lips and chin, back and forth, getting all the imperceptible grease, laid it over his plate, and turned his stool to Lambert. “I understand. We have to be strategic. Tell certain secrets, which are smart to tell, not the others, which are not so smart to tell. Those we keep. Use ’em later. But don’t mistake me. Don’t think I don’t know the future. I know the future. That’s why they hired me.”