Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  “Abyssinia,” she said in a low voice, and pulled out of the station.

  She crossed the I Street Bridge, exiting onto the frontage road where the American and Sacramento Rivers meet, a space filled with the familiar tents of canvas, tin, cardboard, plywood, just a little above her family’s old campsite, a mile or two above Tumbleweed.

  She parked along the levee, patting her pockets. Without a jacket and hat she felt bare, her hands burning with cold, but glad she’d rearranged the layer of breast binding between her undershirt and skin, girl-hobo armor.

  She walked down the slope toward the river, her wingtips sinking in mud. Only three months before, she’d slept in such a place. These people could know Daddy and Momma, might even see through this getup, recognize her. She was a confident fake, but in this place, without a hat and jacket, she doubted her disguise. She crossed her arms over her chest, protective.

  In a flat spot next to the river, near a trash can fire, a guy played mouth harp, another banjo, singing along, and about a dozen men, women, and children danced around them—“If y’all’s house catches fire, and they ain’t no water ’round, throw the jelly out the window. Let the doggone shack burn down.”

  A song she knew, a song she’d sung.

  Apart from them, six men stood in a circle around another fire, drinking out of bottles, a couple wearing coats, not just shirtsleeves, kids playing tag around them, running through tree branches and rocks and bushes, like Jane used to do, stirring up smells of wet, rotting leaves.

  She thought about what Grete said she did when she approached a group, how she found the story through the outsider, how that had irritated Jane, but she decided to try it. She walked up to the one guy standing back from the fire, apart from the circle of drinkers.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, sir,” she said, dipping her head.

  He nodded. His face was leathery, his body short and wiry, his hands safe in his pockets.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m looking for information about a woman.” She pulled out the Family picture and pointed at Vee’s face. “I was told she came this way.”

  He looked at it, and then back at Jane.

  “That you in the middle?”

  “No, it ain’t. He’s a lot bigger! I’m looking into her,” she said, and pointed again at Vee’s face. “I was told she came this way.”

  “You were told?” he asked. “Or did you read it in the paper? You know we read out here, son. We know she’s dead.”

  “She’s not dead.” It felt important to say that.

  “Near dead.”

  “Did you know her?

  “Who wants to know?”

  The men around the fire rearranged themselves around the two of them, so that this man she was talking to was no longer the outsider but the center of a new formation.

  “Benny Hopper. I work for the Prospect.” Her ears burned with cold.

  “You’re from the paper but you don’t remember her name?”

  “Her name’s Vee Russell.”

  “Y’all sold a lot of papers with her and Noreen’s pretty faces before, but Noreen didn’t get a dime from it. Even her name in the paper.” Through his shirt his arm muscles looked hard, squared off.

  “I’m sorry . . . The other woman, her name’s Noreen?”

  “Sold all them papers with this picture? Big, big deal, they said. And they didn’t put her name in there?”

  “Another paper ran the picture at first, not us,” she said, trying to sell that as an excuse. She saw herself the way he’d see her—as a low-level agent of an untrustworthy institution. Such a person sometimes got hurt as a scapegoat for the bigger, badder guy.

  The man’s face glowed, like he was getting hot out there in the cold. “Noreen never wrote home and told her folks she lives in a ripped-up tent. She told ’em cotton grows high out here and she can pick them oranges right off the tree. She didn’t want her people worrying about her. But they saw her picture in the paper. Just a poor lady. Just poor. Nothin’ but that. Paper didn’t pay her.” He drew out pay.

  “She wasn’t in our paper. We didn’t run it. Besides, I’m not here about her.”

  “What are you here about?” His voice sounded rougher now, and the group of bodies around the two of them seemed to thrum. He dropped his bottle, clenching his fists, stretching his fingers.

  Hold your ground.

  “I need your help,” she said, standing in the cold wind off the river, tasting salty sweat.

  “You need help? Why don’t you sell that car, like Noreen sold hers? For scrap?”

  “Not that kind of help. Not money.”

  “Oh,” the man said, looking around at the group. “He don’t need money!”

  The pack laughed and she saw tongues, teeth, gums. Her own people, dangerous.

  “Photographer said she was gonna help Noreen. How would she do that, if she never even took her name?”

  “Look, someone’s been attacked.” Jane’s voice cracked.

  “You think Noreen has somethin’ to do with that? You think any of us does?”

  The circle pulsed, contracting and expanding like a living thing.

  “Pretty boy’s making claims,” one of them said, and others laughed, hacking laughs.

  Jane closed her arms tighter over her chest and looked at the faces, dirty, lined, some young men, some old, hard to tell because of the time they’d spent outside.

  “I think the photographer is in on this.” She hadn’t planned to say that. It just came out.

  “You think the lady photographer did it?”

  “Maybe, yes.” That wasn’t true. Grete wasn’t a brute. She was an artist, an intellectual.

  “You think Noreen wants to get messed up with her again?”

  Messed up with Grete? Vee?

  “Noreen!” He turned his face up in a howl, his chin and throat where his face had been.

  Jane looked toward the car but didn’t run. She’d see it through. The dancers and musicians close to the river stopped.

  One of them, a woman in a blue dress over a longer slip, walked over, her hair down around her shoulders. It was the other lady from Family, but different in life, smiling, the corners of her eyes turned up. She had a good, strong figure. As she walked toward them, she moved her body like a sensual person, like Elthea walked, unlike the way she looked in the picture, downtrodden.

  “Yes, darlin’?” she said in a low voice, pushing off a trailing dance partner.

  “Ma’am,” Jane said, tilting her head. “Benny. From the newspaper.”

  “Hello, Benny.” She brought her hair up off her neck with one hand and wiped her brow with the other.

  “Yes, Mrs. . . . ?”

  The woman looked at the man and then back at Jane. “Noreen.”

  “Noreen . . .”

  Get ’er done.

  “I’d like to ask you about Vee Russell, and . . .”

  “Want a drink, Benny?”

  She didn’t, not at all, but she said, “Thank you,” because she knew not to insult Noreen if she wanted to find out about Vee and Daddy.

  Noreen led her to a boulder, where she picked up a jug, took a swig, and handed it to Jane. It went down bad, oily as gasoline, so that Jane coughed, making Noreen laugh. She patted a spot on the boulder next to her and Jane sat, near enough to smell Noreen’s yeasty scent.

  “Now you listen,” Noreen said, then took another drink.

  “And I will tell you all the lies in that article and the lies in that picture.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But you gotta pay me first.”

  She couldn’t pay, shouldn’t pay. She felt a roiling in her belly, as she had when she was a girl, thinking about what Momma’d do for money.

  JANE had been walking home from school when the public address system crackled, “Would the Hopper family report to the camp office to make good on their late rent fee? The Abraham Lincoln Hopper family, please report to the Tumbleweed Federal Camp office at your earlies
t convenience? To set accounts right.”

  Uno’s tinny accent bounced all around town, a loose ball bearing, so everybody outside, or even inside with a window cracked open, heard. In the bank, in the diner, through the truck windows of teachers and coaches. This was the third Thursday in a row.

  This time, he’d done it when Jane was walking home from school, just behind the popular girls, who were themselves just behind the baseball players. She was following close on their heels so she could keep her eye on the muscled-up first baseman with a snub nose, a boy several lengths out of her reach, thick shoulders, sharp cheekbones, and a perfect knob of an Adam’s apple.

  Right in that space between algebra and tomatoes, Uno announced, his voice calm and businesslike, “Would the Abraham Lincoln Hopper family make good on their rent?”

  She’d always thought his physical injury made him mean. He couldn’t do the camp work his job description required, couldn’t carry things that required both hands. He mostly sat in his little electrified office, wires snaking in and out of his cabin only, with the fan on his desk and the one radio in the camp playing Los Angeles Angels baseball, out of Mr. Wrigley’s self-named South Central field, for nobody but him. He’d sit there, chewing on a pencil and looking out his window, one hand rubbing short hair on a narrow skull, frowning at folks walking by. Sweetie’d already run off by then. He was all alone, so he got others to do the work for him, move folks in or repair a fence or post signs about meetings or new rules, sweep up dirt in the common areas, so they wouldn’t mess up the community hall. He was persuasive, as representative of the government, and most people were glad to pitch in, hopeful they’d be invited in to listen to baseball, or provided with beans or cornmeal. But he did his figuring and communication himself. He did not delegate that. That’s where he excelled. He always knew who paid for what and how much.

  When he called out Daddy’s name that day, three girls ahead of Jane on the sidewalk locked eyes, confirming prior conversations, and giggled, poking each other—“Abraham Lincoln Hopper family, please get your no-count, white trash butts to the . . .”

  “Shut your mouth, catfish!” Jane yelled, and ran. The last thing she heard as she passed was the first baseman’s voice, a scrap in a sentence—“Okie picker.”

  She ran past camp to the big oak. She wouldn’t pick that day. She lay under that tree in the weeds, looking at the sky, wheezing from the valley fever, which always acted up in the heat when she was mad. She wanted to talk to Daddy, but he was in Turlock, performing at the Play Pen. So she headed back to camp.

  As she stepped up to their cabin door, Uno stepped out, smiling, in wrinkled shirtsleeves, and tipped his hat. “Well, good afternoon, Miss Hopper. How pretty you look today.”

  Through the open door, in the dark, she saw Momma, putting the kettle on, her face blank.

  When he’d gone, Momma held out a fist of change. “Get us a bag of flour, eggs, coffee. Choose something you want too.”

  Jane did what she said, and the two of them ate on that for a week. And for four afternoons straight, on the walk home alone from school, two blocks ahead of the mean kids, she sucked on a different color piece of penny candy, pretending that made up for it.

  Sometimes it had been hard to love Momma. But she did know the price of things. She had a sharpness, a practical nerve Jane respected, even when it cut her.

  SHE saw that in Noreen, too, the edge of her need for money.

  But still Jane said, “A reporter don’t pay for information,” feeling the grammatical error after it slipped out.

  “Where you from?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “No mind. Pay me.” Noreen smirked, patient.

  Jane sighed, checking her pockets for what she had left of Mac’s money. “How much?”

  “Everything you got.” Her face was hard now, like in the picture, worrying Jane. She handed her all Mac’s bills, six dollars.

  “That’s not enough,” Noreen said.

  Jane gave her the bottle of Izzy’s vodka, and Noreen opened the lid and took a sip. “Okay then!” She tucked it into her bra.

  “It was a good picture of you,” Jane said, wanting to open up the right topic.

  “I look like failure. That was the point.”

  “It was moving that way. Made people care.”

  Noreen squinted at Jane, her nose, her chin. “You related to the guy in the picture? That why you’re lookin’?”

  “No relation.”

  Noreen rolled her eyes. “Whole damn thing’s a lie anyway.”

  “What’s the lie?” Jane got out her notebook.

  “Make you a deal.”

  “Are we gonna have to do this at every step?”

  “I need your car.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “A friend’s,” Jane said, thinking Lambert was the opposite of a friend.

  “Alright then,” she said. “Drive me.”

  “Ma’am . . .”

  “Or I ain’t gonna budge.”

  Jane pushed off the rock. Noreen picked up a dirty bag, and together they walked up the road to the Chevy.

  “You okay?” somebody yelled.

  “Doin’ the pickup.”

  They got in the car and Noreen told Jane to drive up the road, about four miles.

  Jane worried that would put them at Tumbleweed but didn’t ask.

  Noreen set her bag on her lap and pulled out a frayed newspaper. “This,” she said, pointing to the back page, “fries me.”

  Jane saw her finger on a boxed story, set in italics, near the Examiner’s article about Vee’s attack and the photo of Daddy and Vee and Noreen. They’d rerun the picture they’d published a year before, after all that trouble Jane had gone to hide it. Wasted. The box headline read, “Photographer’s Journal—taking a picture that saves.”

  Noreen changed her posture, the tilt of her head, making her body small, and read aloud as Jane drove.

  It had been a long seven days of driving and getting out of the old Packard and waiting and getting back into the Packard, and driving more. And now, in a surprising June rainstorm on a valley afternoon, with all that behind me, I still had hours of slick roads ahead before I got home to my family.

  Noreen read well, her accent all but disappearing into her version of Grete’s voice.

  In spite of the ache in my bad foot, I felt good. In the passenger seat was the box I would send to Roy Stryker the next day. I was proud of what I had done. As I drove, I looked down at that box and knew I had been productive.

  The rain pounding on the sedan’s roof made me feel clean. There were no other cars on the road, and I considered turning off the wipers to watch the flow of water down my window. Then I saw a sign: TOMATO CAMP. Another invitation to shoot.

  Had Jane ever seen that sign, on that road?

  But I had a full box. No need to stop. I kept driving. Ten miles on, I began to feel irritated. Why did I care about that sign? I had done more than enough for this trip.

  Jane believed Grete had these thoughts.

  I drove on, thinking I wanted to get back to my family. The children were all home. They would be asleep by the time I got there, but I could tiptoe into their rooms.

  Push David’s damp hair off his forehead, hold my hand there, feeling the pulse in his temple with my fingers. Smell the cut grass scent of Jacob’s skin. He can never wash it all off. I wanted to be with them. And my husband. And his children.

  “What a wonderful mother.” Noreen broke character. “Ain’t it nice how she’ll tuck them in when she gets home?”

  The kids probably weren’t in those beds at all. Probably farmed out.

  Noreen continued.

  Ten miles further and I knew I had trouble. I wanted to turn around.

  I told myself I did not need more pictures. I said if I stop now I will be tired driving later. I will ruin my equipment if I take it out in the rain. Don’t be ridiculous, Grete, I told myself. I was alre
ady proud of the work I had done.

  After ten more miles, I made a U-turn on the empty highway. Those miles back took forever. And then I saw the backside of the sign. It was painted with the same message, by a different hand: TONTATO CANTP. That was it. No directions. But I knew where to go. I did not doubt myself. I just drove straight, did not consider turning left or right down this or that gravel road leading to another muddy field. I just drove straight for three miles. And that is where I saw them. The rain had stopped. I got out of the car and went around to the passenger door. I opened it and got out my Graflex. I walked straight to the starving grandmother.

  “Liar!” Noreen said.

  She wasn’t a grandmother.

  It took me five minutes to reach her. My right foot slowed me when I was tired. I saw her look at it as I came through the rows on the inside edge of my sole.

  Injury’s her ticket.

  I do not remember the exact words I said, but she understood I was there to help. She didn’t tell me her name. She said they had been living on found vegetables. And birds they caught and killed. Her man didn’t have work—none of them did—but he played banjo to get their minds off it. I said I would help. I shot them five times, each one from closer range, until at the end I was close. I took care to let them know we were equals.

  Noreen dropped the paper onto the car seat. A vein pulsed blue at her temple. “Equals? She changed everything about us to look right for those pictures. None of it true.”

  “Changed what?”

  “She wanted ‘noble savages.’”

  “Noble . . . ?”

  “That’s what the guy with the banjo said. Stop here!” Noreen pointed to a white farmhouse on the left. As they pulled over, she rolled down her window and leaned across Jane’s lap to honk the horn, four long blasts, causing a load of children to pour out of the house.

  “Ma!” they screamed, maybe a dozen of them, including a toddler in the arms of an older girl, running from the house, across the lawn, to the car.

  “Did you say, ‘Thank you?’” Noreen asked the big girl.

  “Yes, Ma.”

  The back doors opened and the car filled with kids. Jane counted ten, sitting on each other’s laps and the floorboard, smelling woolly as wet dogs.