“No. And seems to me folks are gonna start looking at you, too, now.”
She nodded.
He dropped his cigarette, ground it out. “I gotta get back. Can’t lose the gig.”
She dropped hers and grabbed his wrist. “Tell me what you know.”
A cream Chrysler squealed up behind the building, lighting the other end of the parking lot, and she dropped Daddy’s wrist.
“People act so unpredictable here,” he said, jerking his head at the car.
She said, “Let’s just walk for a minute then. Just a minute.”
He picked up his canes and followed Jane out of their dark corner of the lot, away from the still-rumbling car, toward a nearly empty roller coaster, two couples and one guy all by himself flying by, screaming.
“We both look like suspects. You there in the picture with her. Me . . .”
“Lookin’ like me.”
“That, but also, I was supposed to meet her at Breen’s the night she was hurt.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No.”
“Don’t look good for either of us.”
“Why would someone attack her? If we can figure this out . . .”
“Good night, Playland revelers,” a voice boomed over loudspeakers. “The Playland party is over tonight. Return tomorrow to relive the thrills! For now, please find your nearest exit and go safely into the night.”
The roller coaster screeched into its station, wobbly couples climbing out, laughing. The solo guy stepped out carefully, giving them a look.
Daddy turned and started walking back toward Topsy’s, leaning on the canes, Jane behind him.
“It’s hard to say why. There’s a lot of parts.”
She kept her mouth shut. Anything she said might stop his talking.
“I ain’t proud of it, but I wanted some of what Uno has.”
“Momma?”
He laughed. “Well, maybe her, too, maybe not.” He shook his head. “But I mean he has an arrangement with the photographer.”
“Uno?”
“He’s a kind of arranger for her.”
“What’s that mean?”
“She lets him know she’s coming, he arranges for something interesting to happen when she gets there.”
“Interesting?”
“People to take pictures of—desperate, dangerous, sad people—like that.”
“He’s a scout?”
“More than that. He doesn’t just say, ‘Hey, there’s some people down by the river.’ It’s more like, ‘I’ll get some people together by the river for you.’ And she pays him for it. He does all right that way.”
“That’s how you and Noreen and Vee and the baby came to be in that picture.”
“You know Noreen?”
She nodded.
“That’s how. But it isn’t just us. It’s a lot of them. He does a lot of work for her.”
“There’s poor people everywhere. Why’s she need to fix it up through him?”
“It ain’t that she needs help finding people. She needs help finding special people.”
She thought about Family. It was special. Daddy was special.
Then she thought, Even Uno has an eye for it.
“There’s this one,” Daddy said, “of a man—Tom Jesson. Hunger.”
Jane’s skin cooled. It was in her pocket. “I’ve seen it.”
“Got a lot of attention, lot of money too.”
“From who?”
“Papers pay her more than they pay other photographers, I’ve heard.”
“Why would they?”
“Her pictures sell more papers than other pictures do. She doesn’t just photograph a dirty, poor girl. It’s a beautiful, dirty, poor girl. Somebody special. Her pictures get in all the papers, across the country.”
Jane knew Vee was beautiful but had looked at her and thought, off, feared, off. But it was her strangeness, her difference that made her stand out.
Jane thought of Mac insisting on getting the Family photo back rather than just going with some other picture. It would draw more eyes.
Daddy continued. “She don’t give you a picture of a hungry man, she gives you a picture of a dying man, so you can see he’s dying. If she calls him hungry, he’s gotta be dying-hungry.”
“What are you saying?”
“That picture? She took so long in that shoot, propping Jesson up all over the place, promising him money for his family, he died before the shoot was over. Right there on the dirt with the photographer and Uno and their cars right there. They didn’t take him to the hospital. They took his picture. That picture? He’s dead. Eyes open.”
The eerie blankness of his staring eyes.
She thought, That’s what makes it good. Nothing between him and you. No pretend. Long as you’re alive, you’re faking, convincing, persuading. Because he’s dead, there’s none of that. Just the truth, his hunger.
“Uno got paid. The photographer got paid. Some folks probably got more government food deliveries that week. Can’t say if Jesson’s family got paid . . .”
“That’s terrible.” Focused so long on how she’d been cheated, mistreated, now Jane felt deep, righteous hate toward Grete, for what she’d done to other people.
“I don’t like to say it, but I wanted part of that. Wanted some of that money too. I done a lot of things I’m not proud of for money. I’m ’shamed about that.”
She knew what hunger did, especially when it combined with hope and ambition.
This was the story she’d write. But she couldn’t let Daddy be her source. Protect the family. She had to hide him from the news.
“Who else knows? Who’d go on record?”
“Lotta people know, but nobody’s gonna talk. Won’t risk uncovering stuff they themselves done.”
She wouldn’t talk if it were her.
“But she writes it all down, all the figures, in a ledger. I put my X there, for my five dollars.” His cheeks reddened, mentioning the X.
All those notebooks he helped her make, when he couldn’t read or write himself. She hadn’t thought much about that before, but now she saw his humiliation, taking Grete’s money, unable to write his name. That understanding expanded, taking up space.
She brought herself back. She’d seen piles of leather books in Grete’s darkroom. Some of them had to be the ledgers. There would be pages of names, columns of figures.
Now we’re talking.
As bubbles popped in her head, the Chrysler door swung open and a man sprung out in the dark, his arm extended.
Daddy pushed her hard with both hands, slamming her into a wall, her cheek hitting first. As she went down, she heard crack, tzing, ping, before darkness.
She woke a few minutes later, maybe, on the threshold of Topsy’s back door, music stopped, headlights blinding. She pushed up, her face pounding, onto her hands and knees, gripped the doorway to rise, walked through the parking lot, full of cop cars. The empty roller coaster screamed by. The Chrysler was gone. Daddy was gone, again.
CHAPTER NINE
STORY
She told them she’d gone out back for a smoke, next to some other guy, a stranger, when shots went off, said she dove and hit the wall, that the other guy took off. Nobody was really hurt, so the cops weren’t as interested as they should have been.
An old cop told her she should go home, to bed, but she didn’t have a home or a bed—she couldn’t go back to Rivka’s. She didn’t belong anywhere but the paper, so she had him drop her at the corner of Fifth and Mission. When he drove off, she went into the paper, up its spine, her cut-up, swollen face and ripped, dirty clothes shocking everybody into spilling coffee, dropping telephone handsets as she marched past Lambert, Jorge, and the rest, straight into Mac’s office.
“I got our story.”
Mac didn’t answer, just stared, his mouth open.
“Wright has people, a team, who help her fix photos, fake them. She pays everybody. The photos are great, the best, because of
this arranging, and the papers—we—pay her more than we pay anybody else because she cheats.”
“Hey now . . .”
“That famous one, Hunger?”
She pulled it out of her pocket and laid it on his desk, Jesson’s blank eyes looking straight at her. She felt and then saw that Lambert and Jorge had entered the office and were standing behind her, looking over her shoulders.
“He’s dead. Tom Jesson died, right there, while she was propping him up, trying to get the right shot. She let him die for the picture.”
“This is a story,” Jorge said, and turned to Jane. “What’s your evidence?”
“Quotes,” she lied, patting the pocket where her moleskin was. “Plus our records of how much her pictures earn compared to everybody else.”
Mac shook his head. He didn’t like that part.
She wasn’t going to wait to do the rest of the research. She knew what the story was. She was going to get it out now.
“Somebody’s dead! It’s not just Vee’s coma. Tom Jesson’s dead. I was shot at tonight, and I’m not waiting. I’m writing the story. Either you take it, or somebody else will.”
“Who killed Vesta? They do it for Grete?” Jorge asked.
“She’s not dead yet, right?”
“Whatever.”
“I don’t have that all the way yet.”
“Who’s your source for what you’ve got?”
“I can’t say. But Vee was hit and choked because she was coming to us to tell the story. She met me the night before. I’m ‘BH.’ I never showed up.” Of everything she’d said, this last bit slowed her.
She felt Lambert’s hand on her shoulder.
Mac said, “Jorge, set ’em up, the parameters. Let’s go, goddammit!”
She knew he didn’t want this story. It made the Prospect look bad. But he knew they had to do it. It was the story.
Jorge divided up the bits between her and Lambert, and they got to work at side-by-side desks in the big writing room, at the center of the action together.
She read through her moleskin, notes that came close to what she needed but not enough to get her all the way. She knew much more than she could report. She had to jump that gap.
Her notes from Noreen said she’d been posed, that Grete had chosen what to include in the frame and what not to, but that wasn’t enough, and Noreen wasn’t reachable by telephone for more information. She had to do something she didn’t relish.
She got a switchboard girl to call Tumbleweed. She waited, the telephone at her ear, hearing a high-pitched squeal. She looked around. Nobody else seemed to hear it. The newsroom looked yellow to her, fuzzy. How could she ask for Momma’s help without getting into everything else, without letting her know where she was, what she was doing? She’d have to trust her.
It clicked on the fourth ring. “Joe Jeffers.”
She froze at the sound of his voice, at what she knew he’d done, the photograph pimping she was reporting on. It was crazy to call this number. She hung up. What would stop him from calling the cops on her for the things she’d done, leaving Daddy for dead, taking the car, taking money from their drawer? Momma was wrapped up in it too. They were tangled together, Momma, Daddy, Uno. The new baby.
She told the girl to re-call it. This time he picked up on the first ring. “Sweetie?”
She hung up again.
She’d thought Sweetie hated him. She never said anything about him. Had they been talking all along? If Sweetie did talk to him, what did she tell him about Jane? What did Uno and Momma know?
“Woo-hoo!” Lambert slammed his desk, rattling hers. “Coming together, Hopper! How about you? Getting what we need?”
She wasn’t.
“Haven’t got all day!” His face was red. He pushed his telephone back and pulled his typewriter closer to the edge of his desk. “One slip at a time. I do grafs on what I got. You do ’em on what you got. Fill a half slip, put it in the pile. Don’t worry—do they go together or in what order or even if we need them. The other guys’ll paste ’em together, and we’ll see what we got!”
He was off and typing again.
A pile of empty half slips sat on the crack between their two desks, accusing in their blankness. She wasn’t ready, didn’t have the quotes. But she saw him racing ahead and thought about how she had to make things right, had to beat Grete, who must have arranged to have Daddy shot.
That song Daddy mentioned ticked at the back of her mind—“Can’t plow straight and keep a-lookin’ back.”
That’s how, like she’d learned from Momma. Keep your hand on the plow. Your horse pulls your plow, you hold on behind. Don’t need to push. But lift your hand, relax it? Plow lifts up out of its rut, and you fail to do the work. If your hand holds on? Plow turns the soil. Just loop the reins around your neck. If you look left, your horse veers left. If you look right, your horse veers right. You have to look ahead, to the end of the row, to lay that track down straight. Take your hand off the plow, look the wrong way, the field is ruined. You’re ruined.
She started typing, her notebook open.
First a graf describing Family as it appeared in the other papers. She set it on the desk, yelling, “Boy!” and somebody swooped in to grab it.
Then a graf on a different version of the photograph’s setting, as she imagined it from Noreen’s description, dirty diapers, piles of clothes to bucket-wash, broken machines to remake, bottles, imagined memory.
She described the black-haired, buzz-cut boy, who looked Cherokee or Mexican—she just decided Cherokee, flinching at the fact that she was bad at seeing who people were. But she kept going, straight ahead, in spite of that, speed beating doubt.
She described how Grete bullied Noreen into better pictures, better poses. She wrote about Noreen, Vee, and Daddy—“the unknown male”—having no real family relation.
She wrote that Grete burned out things she hadn’t physically moved out of the picture that made it to the paper. She wrote a paragraph describing the FSA rules on altering and staging photographs, the rules Grete was supposed to follow. Then a graf explaining why they had that policy. Then a graf describing how dodging and burning work.
Then a half sheet about money.
Then the hungry man, the dying man.
The words came as fast as she could make sense of them. Typing these grafs, shot through with fiction, felt as fine to her as anything ever had.
With Lambert typing right next to her, about the big picture, the federal money, where it came from and where it went—those papers that published Family—she felt like she did that night typing with Rivka, connected to someone else who also wanted to do good work, or something like that, ambitious work. She saw that about Lambert. Though she hated him, she respected him too. He worked hard. He knew how things were done.
She needed quotes, so she found what she’d handwritten from memory out of Grete’s blue leather notebooks and used it to make a quote from Noreen: “We make just enough for cornbread, and when we gotta buy gas it comes out of that. We had to do what the lady photographer said. We had no choice. She said she was going to help us. But she didn’t give us nothing.”
She read it under her breath a few times, thinking, It’s the kind of fiction that’s true.
But it wasn’t enough, so she added more to come out of Noreen’s mouth. “That great, fancy lady told me to move my kids out of the picture because some people wouldn’t want to help a lady with so many kids from so many different daddies. She only wanted a little blond baby because that would sell a lot of papers. She cleaned up bottles ’round the camp because people don’t want to give money to poor folk who have enough to buy something to drink. If folks are merciful, they shouldn’t care about the quality of the ones they give to.” Noreen never said that right out, but she meant it. It was true.
It took a while to get it done.
She’d upheld Noreen’s dignity and taken Grete down. Everything was close enough to right that she felt almost complete about it.
Jorge talked to two editors, looking at the copy, his sleeves rolled, tie gone, suspenders dangling. He poured vodka into a glass for himself and offered some to Jane.
“I’m a bourbon guy,” she said, deciding in the moment, and slumped into her chair, feeling old, like fifty.
Right away, a new brunette receptionist clicked over to her desk, her eyes popped wide when she saw Jane, maybe expecting someone older, more distinguished, more masculine.
“Here you go, Mr. Hopper,” she said, handing her a glass of bourbon, while Jorge read the last of the half slips aloud.
Then he boomed, “Run it, dammit!”
“Boy!” Lambert yelled, and Wally ran over to grab the remaining copy, glaring at Jane.
“You’re a surprise,” Jorge said, slapping her back.
Lambert stood, stretching. “You look like shit. But not too shitty to celebrate.”
She felt so high now; just one bourbon was gas on fire.
“Somebody get him a coat and hat!”
The pretty receptionist came back with some other slob’s clothes in her hands.
Jane slipped the coat on and it fit. Patting the pockets, buttoning the jacket, her eyes watered. She fit.
“Meet you out front,” she said as the others dispersed.
She took Lambert’s keys from her pocket and set them on his desk.
Then she slumped back into his chair and twirled, so that her vision was a blur of desks and typewriters and walls and windows.
SHE put her key in the lock, surprised the knob turned. Rivka hadn’t changed it.
She’d had one drink in celebration of the story at Breen’s, but she couldn’t stay. It had been so long since she slept. She needed to take everything in, and there was nowhere else to go.
“It’s me, Jane!” she called, going upstairs. No answer.
The front parlor was different. It had never been really clean, but now it was much messier, full ashtrays on the piano, side table, arm of the velvet sofa. Music books strewn not just on the piano but on the floor all around it. A plate with bread crusts and a piece of bacon balanced on a pillow on the floor against bookshelves. A bottle of rye and two glasses sat on the mantel, where the painting of a tractor no longer hung. All the costume drawings were down now too. The always-closed sliding doors to the interior parlor were open, and that space was a disaster of wooden crates, some open.
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