Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  Two glasses on the mantel—Jane couldn’t imagine who Rivka would invite in for a drink. Maybe Sweetie had come to collect her things and sat for a bit before leaving.

  She walked down the hall to the kitchen. Dishes in the sink, on the counters. Sheet music on the table. At least she’s got privacy for practice, she thought, wondering if that was a good thing.

  Feeling bad for Rivka, so alone, she collected dishes in the parlor and kitchen and began to clean, filling the sink with hot, soapy water, laying out a towel on the counter to drain them on. While she worked, she sang, “Hand on the plow, hold on.”

  “Kind of elevates the work, I imagine.”

  She turned to see Oppie standing in the doorway in his slacks and undershirt, no socks.

  “Something in this room is out of place,” she said.

  “Don’t you belong on the stoop, dusty doorman?”

  “Explain yourself,” she said.

  “Let us begin with you.” Rivka passed Oppie, coming around to the table, wearing a slip—a slip! She’d never gone around in a slip before. She was always dressed in street clothes or pajamas. She sat at the table and lit a cigarette. “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning up. Somebody’s got to.”

  “Tidiness has suffered without Sweetie.”

  Jane said, “Looks like there’ve been gains.”

  “Did you return to insult me?” Rivka blew smoke.

  Jane dried her hands on a towel and turned back to Rivka. “I’m sorry. I’ve wrecked things here, I know. I took what you offered and then just messed it up for you. I’m sorry.”

  Rivka left a silence there for a moment, squinting at Jane, and then said, “It was not your fault. Sweetie had reason to move on. She needs someone to help, someone to help her. If anyone gets between her and that, all is disrupted. Besides, it was time for somebody higher up. Mac will be good, until she bores him or she finds someone higher, publisher maybe.”

  “Which she certainly will,” Oppie added, taking the chair next to Rivka. “Bore him, I mean. Her charms are ephemeral.”

  “What’s that?” Jane asked.

  “They don’t last.”

  Jane thought about it for a minute, disagreeing. Oppie was wrong. Sweetie lingered. “Didn’t know you were such a relationship expert.”

  “Just sharing the fruits of my research.”

  Rivka said, “From your decades of successful social interactions.”

  “I read a lot. The fact I maintain antisocial boundaries merely hides my basic sensitivity.”

  Rivka put her hand over Oppie’s, surprising Jane. He looked awkward, his spine stiff, struggling to maintain a comfortable posture with his shirt off, his hand held.

  “Bashful dogs get no scraps,” Jane said. Oppie rolled his eyes.

  Then he said, “Are you going to say what’s happened to you?”

  Jane touched the cut on her cheek from the wall at Playland. “How about a drink?”

  He went down the hall and she yelled after him, “No vodka!” and he came back with a bottle of bourbon, dried off three clean glasses, poured two inches of the golden stuff into each, and pushed one in front of each girl. Rivka cut up sharp cheese and apple to go with the drinks, a reviving combination, food and drink. Nourishment.

  A couple weeks before Momma, Daddy, and Jane had left for California, right before Granny died, she stood with her in the garden. The dust had destroyed everything for them there, but Granny took her out to the patch right behind her tar shack home.

  “I got you a surprise.”

  In one corner of the ruined garden, she pulled a tomato off a spindly volunteer stalk. She reached into her apron pocket for a knife and sliced it in half. She returned the knife to her pocket, pulled out a saltshaker, dusted each tomato half. She handed one half to Jane and took the other for herself. They ate them like peaches, salty and red. Jane could taste it now.

  “Simple is good,” Granny said. It was.

  SHE felt better with the apple and cheese in her.

  “Why don’t you introduce me to Jane,” Oppie said.

  She emptied her glass in one take. “Being Benny got me the job.”

  “Benny still in business?”

  “Looks like.”

  She turned to Rivka. “I was with my daddy tonight. We were shot at.” Then she laid her head on her arms, exhausted, and Rivka rubbed her shoulders. When she lifted her head up, Rivka’s eyes were warm and Oppie had poured her another glass, which she sipped this time, tasting dark, orange, caramel, fire, lifting the top off her skull, opening things up, so much better than vodka or beer. “I wrote a story for the paper.”

  Rivka and Oppie exchanged looks.

  “Daddy knew all about Vee. Somebody shot at him for it. It’ll be in the paper tomorrow. He told me Grete faked her photos, posed them, paid people, all kinds of things like that. She made a lot of money because her pictures are more . . .”

  “Arresting,” Rivka said. “And gorgeous. But do you really think she makes much money?”

  “Yeah! Her pictures are all miles past real,” she said, ignoring her own fictions.

  “You never really know who a person is,” Oppie said.

  “You think you got it,” Jane agreed, “but you don’t. It’s right there, but you don’t see it. Maybe other people do . . .”

  “Expectations influence behavior, causing expected results.”

  She shook her head, confused.

  “We collect the evidence that supports what we already believe. We ignore what supports a different conclusion.”

  “Can’t we ever just think something, right away, fast, just come to the right idea?”

  Rivka said, “That is what practice is for. You practice for long time, until you can do your thinking without as much thinking. It will not always be so hard.”

  “You don’t think it’s too late for me? You don’t think if you’re just really behind, really late, and have a lot of bad things . . .”

  “It is not too late for you,” Rivka said. “Not too late at all. Where I come from . . .”

  “Where’s that?” asked Oppie.

  “Prague,” she said, and he nodded. “From there, some people in family, bad things happened, they fell down and never got up. Other people got up, climbed over, got strong. Recovered. Better than recover.”

  “Like you,” Jane said.

  “And you.”

  “I want to believe it, but . . .”

  “Believe it,” Oppie said, raising his glass. “Huzzah.”

  “Huzzah,” Jane and Rivka echoed, clinking glasses.

  “Where did you get your grit, Miss Jane?”

  She thought of the field, the camp, the ditch.

  “Good genes.”

  Then she told them her story, as much as she could before the bottle was empty.

  ONE block from the Prospect, Jane picked the morning edition up off the sidewalk—“Picture worth a thousand dollars, by Derek Lambert, reporting by Prospect staff.”

  No Benny Hopper. He’d stolen her byline.

  She looked up from the story to see Lambert pulling away from the curb ahead.

  She ran to the car, wrenched open the passenger door as he was beginning to glide into traffic, scrambling, the door hanging open, unsure what to do when she got in there.

  “What the hell!”

  She reached over to pull the shift, stop the car, managing to get it to neutral with a great grinding. She hated him, had to stop him from ruining her chance—if it wasn’t too late already—had to get him to tell Mac to give her back her story somehow. She was the writer! He was a thief!

  Lambert shoved her right shoulder.

  Her back to the open door, her legs facing Lambert, she kicked the side of his body with her stiff wingtips as hard as she could.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he yelled, hunching away from her, his broad shoulders curving to protect his ribs and organs.

  But she kept kicking, so he pulled up his knees. Then
he rounded up and punched her over her knees, hitting her hard so that she fell backward, her head out the car door.

  “What’s wrong with you? Idiot!”

  She wrenched herself upright. “You stole my byline!” She kicked him again.

  They were so close in the front seat that neither could get up the momentum to do much damage, but they both had bloody faces and knuckles by the time Lambert backed up into his own door and held Jane off with his feet.

  Her face stung, head throbbed, ribs ached. Lambert’s eyeglass lenses were cracked, the frames bent. She was breathing hard. She wiped blood and snot off her face with her arm.

  “Liar!” she yelled.

  “What about you, Benny? Oh, no, wait, isn’t it Benjamina or something? Who’s the liar?”

  He’d known all this time. Still. “It was my story! I’m telling Mac . . .”

  “Do you have to act like such a fucking baby? I needed that article to get out of here. You’ll get other chances. This is how it works. There’s a hierarchy, get it?”

  She kicked at him again, with less vigor.

  “I left you a bone, it’s gonna get you further here. Do something with it!”

  “Great, oh, thanks a lot! ‘With reporting by Prospect staff.’ Yeah, that’ll get me there!”

  Lambert yelled, “You are what your name’s on, hayseed! You’re not anything until your name’s on what you need it on!”

  “I know that! What do you think? I didn’t know that?”

  “I gave you what you need to do well here! Fuck you if you don’t get it!”

  Lambert shifted the Chevy back into drive and began to jerk it forward into a stream of honking traffic. Jane kicked at him once more, the momentum throwing her backward, out the open car door, where she landed in the gutter as Lambert crunched into a Ford, people yelling all around them in the street.

  Disaster. She should never have trusted him. He was a liar. More than she was.

  She got up, stared at by passing accountants, dockworkers, and factory men on the sidewalk, pressed down her hair, and turned to enter the building, yelling at a hobo next to the door: “Get out of my way! I work here!”

  SHE didn’t race up the spine—her head was pounding from the fight and the bourbon and the wall. She chose the elevator instead.

  “Second floor,” she said to the old guy manning the controls. He closed the gate, pushed a button, and pulled a lever. “It’s not too late,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “This thing can go right back down.”

  “Right,” she said, not paying attention.

  The elevator doors closed and then opened, and she stepped out, intending to march straight to Mac’s office, talk over next steps, but she stopped just outside the elevator. The room was full of people but quiet. No typing. Writers, copy boys, editors, switchboard operators silent. There were good suits among them, men whose clothes didn’t look so ratty as the writers’, their hair slicker, more like roosters, less like dogs.

  “Hopper!” Mac called from his doorway. Everyone looked.

  She shuddered and then walked to him.

  “Shut the door,” he said, his face white.

  She did it.

  “I was going to say you’ve made a colossal mistake, but it seems you’ve made a truckload of ’em.” He looked her up and down with disgust. “You can’t talk this kind of thing into something else.” His jaw muscles clenched and unclenched, his nostrils flaring. Otherwise his body was still.

  “Mac, you wanted . . .”

  “I have lawyers representing three newspapers, the federal government, and a photographer outside, lawyers who claim their clients have been libeled. They say you falsified information about Wright and her photographs and all the newspapers that ran them.”

  “Well, Lambert . . .”

  “He’s no longer with this newspaper.”

  His fist came down on a copy of the paper, open to the city section, an unfamiliar column under a line drawing of a reporter—visor, armband, pointer finger touching the rim of his glasses, thumb under his chin. “Barbary Coast Lines, by Benny Hopper.” Her byline.

  She picked it up and skimmed the Prospect’s first-ever gossip column, about Dr. R. J. Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist at UC Berkeley—

  Oh, the money we spend. Piles of federal research dollars flow to UC Berkeley’s physics department, including Dr. Oppenheimer, called Oppie by his communist and free-love friends, in spite of his betraying every possible morality clause in the university’s contract. In particular, he parades an extramarital relationship with Rivka Tomás, radio pianist and commie wife of Old Europe. . . .

  He’d written this garbage, given it to her, taken the real story, the big story, for himself.

  Mac barked, “Get out there and talk to the fact-checkers in the story room. Then the lawyers. Then you’re finished. Go home, wherever the hell that is. You’re a disappointment, Boy. A stupendous failure.”

  Don’t let him do this!

  But she had nothing to say, no voice to say it with.

  She walked out of Mac’s office, closing that door, all the faces in the room looking up at her, none bleaker than Jorge’s, and headed toward the story room, where three men sat working telephones behind glass, typewriters, notepads, and newspapers all over the conference table. But when she touched the doorknob, she couldn’t turn it because when she’d finished in that room, she would have revealed her lies, or some of them, and everything she wanted would be over. There was nothing for her but what she had in this place.

  Keep going.

  She walked past the room, toward the spine, which would take her down, out the back door, to the alley.

  “The fact-checkers!” someone yelled.

  “Hopper!” Jorge boomed from the end of the room. “Fix it!”

  She stopped, looked at all the faces.

  Fix what?

  Pictures first.

  She headed up the spine, not down, to the third floor, past the linotype room, all the way back to the darkroom, went in, locked the door, turned on the amber light. She got on her hands and knees under the counter, pushing the first two boxes away, pulling the third toward her. It was sealed shut, the wrong box. Things had been moved. They’d been opening boxes. She grabbed the first one, close to the table front—Kodak Film. Nothing but smaller sealed boxes. No loose photos or film.

  Had someone opened her box, found the negatives? She sat under the desk and dragged the second box to her, also a film box, its top open. She reached in and felt the loose pile of negatives. She grabbed the pile, all of them from Grete’s collection of bodies.

  She stood and fanned them out on the light box: two toddlers digging a hole in the sand with tiny shovels; a chubby hand, dimpled, holding a daisy in its fist; a boy standing on a stool at the sink, his bubble-covered hands holding a dish; a close-up baby’s ear, whirled like a seashell; the back of a girl’s head, close, her hair braided, French style; Grete’s small foot, held in the air, turned in upon itself, artistic. All beautiful and somewhat strange.

  She looked at the Family negative. If she’d known nothing about these people, just saw the picture, she would have thought they were connected, Daddy married to Noreen, Vee their daughter, P. B. their granddaughter, like Momma and she had been stand-ins, like Daddy had a shadow family, like Vee was Jane’s sister in a way. Or like Jane was Daddy now.

  The door shook in its jamb.

  She had the negative on the table before her. Other papers had run the picture a year before. Only she had this negative, though. Not Roy Stryker at the FSA, not Grete, not the other papers. The original proof that Daddy was connected to Grete and Vee. And that she was connected to Daddy. That either or both of them might be connected to Vee’s attempted murder. Proof she’d broken into Grete’s darkroom and stolen her work, which by itself was maybe enough for those lawyers and fact-checkers to throw her in jail.

  Burn it.

  That wasn’t her. She wouldn’t think that. Sh
e wondered if she should let the idea float past her, un-acted on. Did she always have to do what that voice said?

  The static was louder now, so that it hurt her forehead. How long had it been since her mind was quiet?

  Do it.

  To stop the noise, she took a match from her pocket, lit it, and held it to the edge of the Family negative.

  There was pounding against the door.

  Family lit up, cellulose nitrate sparking, toxic smoke popping in tiny explosions out of the square between her thumb and middle finger.

  The door unlocked, opened, lighting the room. Flame burned her fingers, and she dropped the picture.

  “What are you doing?” Fleming screamed.

  The other negatives on the desk in front of her ignited. Fleming rushed out and back in with two mugs of coffee and poured them on the negatives, causing more smoke, but without stopping the flames. Somebody else ran in—“Water won’t stop it! It makes its own oxygen!”

  Fleming took off his coat and threw it on top of the smoking counter, patting it down with his hands and arms, his torso, trying and failing to save the pictures, jumping back, singed, flames licking up around him.

  The cellulose nitrate had aged, forming nitrogen monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, nitric acid, and oxygen. Fleming found it impossible now to fight the film on fire. Smothering wouldn’t work, nor would water, the picture generating enough oxidant to keep itself burning until the film was consumed, as it burned the releasing explosive gases. Combustible magic. Poor Fleming couldn’t stop it.

  She ran out of the fiery darkroom, past all the people, downstairs, into the street where sirens wailed, heroes on their way to save what Jane was burning.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ACCOUNTS

  The doors were locked.

  The windows, dummy.

  “Shut up! Don’t call me dummy.”

  She did it though, crawling around the house, behind big-leafed, flowering shrubs, checking first-floor and basement windows—all latched. She sprinted back to the edge of the lawn for a better view, hiding in the shadow of redwoods, to investigate second-floor windows. One was cranked open. Near it stood a cottonwood tree, sturdy, thick-branched, its canopy sloughing white mounds of fluff.