Getting sent out meant the minimum wage—minus Uncle Sam’s share—for as many hours as you were needed. You swept floors, stuffed envelopes, took inventory, washed dishes, sorted potato chips (really!), cleaned toilets, marked prices on merchandise … you did whatever you were sent out to do. It was nearly always mindless work, and as far as most employers were concerned, it was done by mindless people. Nonpeople rented for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. It didn’t matter.
I did the work, I went home, I ate, and then slept for a few hours. Finally, I got up and wrote. At one or two in the morning, I was fully awake, fully alive, and busy working on my novel. During the day, I carried a little box of No Doz. I kept awake with them, but not very wide awake. The first thing Kevin ever said to me was, “Why do you go around looking like a zombie all the time?”
He was just one of several regular employees at an auto-parts warehouse where a group of us from the agency were doing an inventory. I was wandering around between shelves of nuts, bolts, hubcaps, chrome, and heaven knew what else checking other people’s work. I had a habit of showing up every day and of being able to count, so the supervisor decided that zombie or not, I should check the others. He was right. People came in after a hard night of drinking and counted five units per clearly-marked, fifty-unit container.
“Zombie?” I repeated, looking up from a tray of short black wires at Kevin.
“You look like you sleepwalk through the day,” he said. “Are you high on something or what?”
He was just a stock helper or some such bottom-of-the-ladder type. He had no authority over me, and I didn’t owe him any explanations.
“I do my work,” I said quietly. I turned back to the wires, counted them, corrected the inventory slip, initialed it, and moved down to the next shelf.
“Buz told me you were a writer,” said the voice that I thought had gone away.
“Look, I can’t count with you talking to me.” I pulled out a tray full of large screws—twenty-five to a box.
“Take a break.”
“Did you see that agency guy they sent home yesterday? He took one break too many. Unfortunately, I need this job.”
“Are you a writer?”
“I’m a joke as far as Buz is concerned. He thinks people are strange if they even read books. Besides,” I added bitterly, “what would a writer be doing working out of a slave market?”
“Keeping herself in rent and hamburgers, I guess. That’s what I’m doing working at a warehouse.”
I woke up a little then and really looked at him. He was an unusual-looking white man, his face young, almost unlined, but his hair completely gray and his eyes so pale as to be almost colorless. He was muscular, well-built, but no taller than my own five-eight so that I found myself looking directly into the strange eyes. I looked away startled, wondering whether I had really seen anger there. Maybe he was more important in the warehouse than I had thought. Maybe he had some authority …
“Are you a writer?” I asked.
“I am now,” he said. And he smiled. “Just sold a book. I’m getting out of here for good on Friday.”
I stared at him with a terrible mixture of envy and frustration. “Congratulations.”
“Look,” he said, still smiling, “it’s almost lunch time. Eat with me. I want to hear about what you’re writing.”
And he was gone. I hadn’t said yes or no, but he was gone.
“Hey!” whispered another voice behind me. Buz. The agency clown when he was sober. Wine put him into some kind of trance, though, and he just sat and stared and looked retarded—which he wasn’t, quite. He just didn’t give a damn about anything, including himself. He drank up his pay and walked around in rags. Also, he never bathed. “Hey, you two gonna get together and write some books?” he asked, leering.
“Get out of here,” I said, breathing as shallowly as possible.
“You gonna write some poor-nography together!” He went away laughing.
Later, at one of the round rusting metal tables in the corner of the warehouse that served as the lunch area, I found out more about my new writer friend. Kevin Franklin, his name was, and he’d not only gotten his book published, but he’d made a big paperback sale. He could live on the money while he wrote his next book. He could give up shitwork, hopefully forever …
“Why aren’t you eating?” he asked when he stopped for breath. The warehouse was in a newly built industrial section of Compton, far enough from coffee shops and hot dog stands to discourage most of us from going out to eat. Some people brought their lunches. Others bought them from the catering truck. I had done neither. All I was having was a cup of the free dishwater coffee available to all the warehouse workers.
“I’m on a diet,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment, then got up, motioned me up. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“To the truck if it’s still there.”
“Wait a minute, you don’t have to …”
“Listen, I’ve been on that kind of diet.”
“I’m all right,” I lied, embarrassed. “I don’t want anything.”
He left me sitting there, went to the truck, and came back with a hamburger, milk, a small wedge of apple pie.
“Eat,” he said. “I’m still not rich enough to waste money, so eat.”
To my own surprise, I ate. I hadn’t intended to. I was caffeine jittery and surly and perfectly capable of wasting his money. After all, I’d told him not to spend it. But I ate.
Buz sidled by. “Hey,” he said, low-voiced. “Porn!” He moved on.
“What?” said Kevin.
“Nothing,” I said. “He’s crazy.” Then, “Thanks for the lunch.”
“Sure. Now tell me, what is it you write?”
“Short stories, so far. But I’m working on a novel.”
“Naturally. Have any of your stories sold?”
“Some. To little magazines no one ever heard of. The kind that pay in copies of the magazine.”
He shook his head. “You’re going to starve.”
“No. After a while, I’ll convince myself that my aunt and uncle were right.”
“About what? That you should have been an accountant?”
I surprised myself again by laughing aloud. The food was reviving me. “They didn’t think of accounting,” I said. “But they would have approved of it. It’s what they would call sensible. They wanted me to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher like my mother. At the very best, a teacher.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “I was supposed to be an engineer, myself.”
“That’s better, at least.”
“Not to me.”
“Well anyway, now you have proof that you were right.”
He shrugged and didn’t tell me what he would later—that his parents, like mine, were dead. They had died years before in an auto accident still hoping that he might come to his senses and become an engineer.
“My aunt and uncle said I could write in my spare time if I wanted to,” I told him. “Meanwhile, for the real future, I was to take something sensible in school if I expected them to support me. I went from the nursing program into a secretarial major, and from there to elementary education. All in two years. It was pretty bad. So was I.”
“What did you do?” he asked. “Flunk out?”
I choked on a piece of pie crust. “Of course not! I always got good grades. They just didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t manufacture enough interest in the subjects to keep me going. Finally, I got a job, moved away from home, and quit school. I still take extension classes at UCLA, though, when I can afford them. Writing classes.”
“Is this the job you got?”
“No, I worked for a while at an aerospace company. I was just a clerk-typist, but I talked my way into their publicity office. I was doing articles for their company newspaper and press releases to send out. They were glad to have me do it once I showed them I could. They had a writer for the price of a clerk-typist.”
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“Sounds like something you could have stayed with and moved up.”
“I meant to. Ordinary clerical work, I couldn’t stand, but that was good. Then about a year ago, they laid off the whole department.”
He laughed, but it sounded like sympathetic laughter.
Buz, coming back from the coffee machine, muttered, “Chocolate and vanilla porn!”
I closed my eyes in exasperation. He always did that. Started a “joke” that wasn’t funny to begin with, then beat it to death. “God, I wish he’d get drunk and shut up!”
“Does getting drunk shut him up?” asked Kevin.
I nodded. “Nothing else will do it.”
“No matter. I heard what he said this time.”
The bell rang ending the lunch half-hour, and he grinned. He had a grin that completely destroyed the effect of his eyes. Then he got up and left.
But he came back. He came back all week at breaks, at lunch. My daily draw back at the agency gave me money enough to buy my own lunches—and pay my landlady a few dollars—but I still looked forward to seeing him, talking to him. He had written and published three novels, he told me, and outside members of his family, he’d never met anyone who’d read one of them. They’d brought so little money that he’d gone on taking mindless jobs like this one at the warehouse, and he’d gone on writing—unreasonably, against the advice of saner people. He was like me—a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying. And now, finally …
“I’m even crazier than you,” he said. “After all I’m older than you. Old enough to recognize failure and stop dreaming, so I’m told.”
He was a prematurely gray thirty-four. He had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two.
“You look older,” he said tactlessly.
“So do you,” I muttered.
He laughed. “I’m sorry. But at least it looks good on you.”
I wasn’t sure what “it” was that looked good on me, but I was glad he liked it. His likes and dislikes were becoming important to me. One of the women from the agency told me with typical slave-market candor that he and I were “the weirdest-looking couple” she had ever seen.
I told her, not too gently, that she hadn’t seen much, and that it was none of her business anyway. But from then on, I thought of Kevin and I as a couple. It was pleasant thinking.
My time at the warehouse and his job there ended on the same day. Buz’s matchmaking had given us a week together.
“Listen,” said Kevin on the last day, “you like plays?”
“Plays? Sure. I wrote a couple while I was in high school. One-acters. Pretty bad.”
“I did something like that myself.” He took something from his pocket and held it out to me. Tickets. Two tickets to a hit play that had just come to Los Angeles. I think my eyes glittered.
“I don’t want you to get away from me just because we won’t be co-workers any more,” he said. “Tomorrow evening?”
“Tomorrow evening,” I agreed.
It was a good evening. I brought him home with me when it was over, and the night was even better. Sometime during the early hours of the next morning when we lay together, tired and content in my bed, I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought—and much less than I would know when he went away.
2
I decided not to go to the library with Kevin to look for forgeable free papers. I was worried about what might happen if Rufus called me from the car while it was moving. Would I arrive in his time still moving, but without the car to protect me? Or would I arrive safe and still, but have trouble when I returned home—because this time the home I returned to might be the middle of a busy street?
I didn’t want to find out. So while Kevin got ready to go to the library, I sat on the bed, fully dressed, stuffing a comb, a brush, and a bar of soap into my canvas bag. I was afraid I might be trapped in Rufus’s time for a longer period if I went again. My first trip had lasted only a few minutes, my second a few hours. What was next? Days?
Kevin came in to tell me he was going. I didn’t want him to leave me alone, but I thought I had done enough whining for one morning. I kept my fear to myself—or I thought I did.
“You feel all right?” he asked me. “You don’t look so good.”
I had just had my first look in the mirror since the beating, and I didn’t think I looked so good either. I opened my mouth to reassure him, but before I could get the words out, I realized that something really was wrong. The room was beginning to darken and spin.
“Oh no,” I moaned. I closed my eyes against the sickening dizziness. Then I sat hugging the canvas bag and waiting.
Suddenly, Kevin was beside me holding me. I tried to push him away. I was afraid for him without knowing why. I shouted for him to let me go.
Then the walls around me and the bed beneath me vanished. I lay sprawled on the ground under a tree. Kevin lay beside me still holding me. Between us was the canvas bag.
“Oh God!” I muttered, sitting up. Kevin sat up too and looked around wildly. We were in the woods again, and it was day this time. The country was much like what I remembered from my first trip, though there was no river in sight this time.
“It happened,” said Kevin. “It’s real!”
I took his hand and held it, glad of its familiarity. And yet I wished he were back at home. In this place, he was probably better protection for me than free papers would have been, but I didn’t want him here. I didn’t want this place to touch him except through me. But it was too late for that.
I looked around for Rufus, knowing that he must be nearby. He was. And the moment I saw him, I knew I was too late to get him out of trouble this time.
He was lying on the ground, his body curled in a small knot, his hands clutching one leg. Beside him was another boy, black, about twelve years old. All Rufus’s attention seemed to be on his leg, but the other boy had seen us. He might even have seen us appear from nowhere. That might be why he looked so frightened now.
I stood up and went over to Rufus. He didn’t see me at first. His face was twisted with pain and streaked with tears and dirt, but he wasn’t crying aloud. Like the black boy, he looked about twelve years old.
“Rufus.”
He looked up, startled. “Dana?”
“Yes.” I was surprised that he recognized me after the years that had passed for him.
“I saw you again,” he said. “You were on a bed. Just as I started to fall, I saw you.”
“You did more than just see me,” I said.
“I fell. My leg …”
“Who are you?” demanded the other boy.
“She’s all right, Nigel,” said Rufus. “She’s the one I told you about. The one who put out the fire that time.”
Nigel looked at me, then back at Rufus. “Can she fix your leg?”
Rufus looked at me questioningly.
“I doubt it,” I said, “but let me see anyway.” I moved his hands away and as gently as I could, pulled his pants leg up. His leg was discolored and swollen. “Can you move your toes?” I asked.
He tried, managed to move two toes feebly.
“It’s broken,” commented Kevin. He had come closer to look.
“Yes.” I looked at the other boy, Nigel. “Where’d he fall from?”
“There.” The boy pointed upward. There was a tree limb hanging high above us. A broken tree limb.
“You know where he lives?” I asked.
“Sure. I live there too.”
The boy was probably a slave, I realized, the property of Rufus’s family.
“You sure do talk funny,” said Nigel.
“Matter of opinion,” I said. “Look, if you care what happens to Rufus, you’d better go tell his father to send a … a wagon for him. He won’t be walking anywhere.”
“He could lean on me.”
“No. The best way for him to go home is flat on his back—the least painful way, anyhow. You go tell Rufus’s father that Rufus broke his
leg. Tell him to send for the doctor. We’ll stay with Rufus until you get back with the wagon.”
“You?” He looked from me to Kevin, making no secret of the fact that he didn’t find us all that trustworthy. “How come you’re dressed like a man?” he asked me.
“Nigel,” said Kevin quietly, “don’t worry about how she’s dressed. Just go get some help for your friend.”
Friend?
Nigel gave Kevin a frightened glance, then looked at Rufus.
“Go, Nigel,” whispered Rufus. “It hurts something awful. Say I said for you to go.”
Nigel went, finally. Unhappily.
“What’s he afraid of?” I asked Rufus. “Will he get into trouble for leaving you?”
“Maybe.” Rufus closed his eyes for a moment in pain. “Or for letting me get hurt. I hope not. It depends on whether anybody’s made Daddy mad lately.”
Well, Daddy hadn’t changed. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting him at all. At least I wouldn’t have to do it alone. I glanced at Kevin. He knelt down beside me to take a closer look at Rufus’s leg.
“Good thing he was barefoot,” he said. “A shoe would have to be cut off that foot now.”
“Who’re you?” asked Rufus.
“My name’s Kevin—Kevin Franklin.”
“Does Dana belong to you now?”
“In a way,” said Kevin. “She’s my wife.”
“Wife?” Rufus squealed.
I sighed. “Kevin, I think we’d better demote me. In this time …”
“Niggers can’t marry white people!” said Rufus.
I laid a hand on Kevin’s arm just in time to stop him from saying whatever he would have said. The look on his face was enough to tell me he should keep quiet.
“The boy learned to talk that way from his mother,” I said softly. “And from his father, and probably from the slaves themselves.”
“Learned to talk what way?” asked Rufus.
“About niggers,” I said. “I don’t like that word, remember? Try calling me black or Negro or even colored.”
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