Collected Stories, page 29
Carol gave Prescott the merest drawing down of the lips. “That’s the third job in a month,” she said, and added, “Johnny’s one of my boys. Johnny Bane. This is Charlie Prescott, Johnny.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Johnny said without looking. Prescott nodded and withdrew himself, staring out into the dripping garden court.
“You know a fact?” Johnny said. “That old strawboss keep eyeballin’ me and givin’ me that old hurry-up, hurry-up, that gets old. I get to carryin’ my knife up the sleeve of my sweatshirt, and he comes after me once more, I’m goin’ cut him. So I quit before I get in bad trouble out there.”
Carol laughed, shaking her head. “At least that’s ingenious. What’ll you do now?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He wagged his busy hands. “No future pushin’ a truck around or cuttin’ lemons off a tree. I like me a job with some class, you know, something where I could learn something.”
“I can imagine how ambition eats away at you.”
“No kiddin’!” the burbling voice said. “I get real industrious if I had me the right kind of a job. Over on Second Street there’s this Chinaman, he’s on call out at Paramount. Everytime they need a Chinaman for a mob scene, out he goes and runs around for a couple of hours and they hand him all this lettuce, man. You know anybody out at MGM, Paramount, anywhere?”
“No,” she said. “Do you, Charlie?”
“Nobody that needs any Chinamen.” Prescott showed her the face of his watch. Johnny Bane was taking in, apparently for the first time, the camera bag, the tripod, the canvas sack of flash bulbs beside Prescott’s chair.
“Hey, man, you a photographer?”
“Charlie and I are doing a picture study of your part of town for the Russell Foundation,” Carol said.
“Take a long time to be a photographer?” Johnny’s mouth still worked over his words, but now that his attention was fixed his eyes were as unblinking as an alligator’s.
“Three or four years.”
“Man, that’s a rough sentence! Take a long time, uh? Down by the station there’s this place, mug you for a quarter. Sailors and their chicks always goin’ in. One chick I was watchin’ other night, she had her picture five times. Lots of cats and chicks, every night. Money in that, man.”
She shook her head, saying, “Johnny, when are you going to learn to hold a job? You make it tough for me, after I talk you into a place.”
“I get me in trouble, I stay over there,” he said. “I know you don’t want me gettin’ into trouble.” Lounging, crossing his feet, he said, “I like to learn me some trade. Like this photography. I bet I surprise you. That ain’t like pushin’ a truck with some foreman givin’ you the eyeballs all the time.”
Prescott lifted the camera bag to the chair. “If we’re going to get anything today we’ll have to be moving.”
“Just a minute,” Carol said. To Johnny she said, “Do you know many people over on your hill?”
“Sure, man. Multitudes.”
“Mexicans too?”
“They’re mostly Mexicans over there. My chick’s Mexican.” He staggered with his eyes dreamily shut. “Solid, solid!” he said.
“He might help us get in some places,” Carol said. “What do you think, Charlie?”
Prescott shrugged.
“He could hold reflectors and learn a little about photography.”
Prescott shrugged again.
“Do you mind, Charlie?”
“You’re the doctor.” He handed the sack of flash bulbs and the tripod to Johnny and picked up the camera bag. “Lesson number one,” he said. “A photographer is half packhorse.”
The barrio was a double row of shacks tipping from a hilltop down a steep road clayily shining and deserted in the rain, every shack half buried under climbing roses, geraniums, big drooping seedheads of sunflowers, pepper and banana trees, and palms: a rural slum of the better kind, the poverty overlaid deceptively with flowers. Across the staggering row of mailboxes Prescott could see far away, over two misty hilltops and an obscured sweep of city, the Los Angeles Civic Center shining a moment in a watery gleam of sun.
Johnny hustled around, pulling things from the car. As Prescott took the camera bag, the black face mugged and contorted itself with laughter. “You want me and my chick? How about me and my chick cuttin’ a little jive, real mean? Colored and Mexican hobnobbin’. That okay?”
“First some less sizzling shots,” Carol said dryly. “Privies in the rain, ten kids in a dirt-floored shack. How about Dago Aguirre’s? That’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”
“Dago’s? Man, that’s a real dump. You want dumps, uh? Okay, we try Dago’s.”
He went ahead of them, looking back at the bag Prescott carried. “Must cost a lot of lettuce, man, all those cameras.”
Prescott shook the bag at him. “That’s a thousand dollars in my hand,” he said. “That’s why I carry it myself.”
Rain had melted the adobe into an impossible stickiness; after ten steps their feet were balls of mud. Johnny took them along the flat hilltop to a gateless fence under a sugar palm, and as they scraped the mud from their shoes against a broken piece of concrete a Mexican boy in Air Force dungarees opened the door of the shack and leaned there.
“Ese, Dago,” Johnny said.
“Hórale, cholo.” Dago looked down without expression as Johnny shifted the tripod and made a mock-threatening motion with his fist.
“We came to see if we could take some pictures,” Carol said. “Is your mother home, Dago?”
Dago oozed aside and made room for a peering woman with a child against her shoulder. She came forward uncertainly, a sweet-faced woman made stiff by mistrust. Carol talked to her in Spanish for five minutes before she would open her house to them.
Keeping his mouth shut and working fast as he had learned to on this job, Prescott got the baby crawling on the dirt floor between pans set to catch the drip from the roof. He got the woman and Dago and the baby and two smaller children eating around the table whose one leg was a propped box. By backing into the lean-to, between two old iron bedsteads, and having Carol, Johnny, and Dago hold flashes in separate corners, he got the whole place, an orthodox FSA shot, Standard Poverty. That was what the Foundation expected. As always, the children cried when the flashes went off; as always, he mollified them with the blown bulbs, little Easter eggs of shellacked glass. It was a dump, but nothing out of the ordinary, and he got no picture that excited him until he caught the woman nursing her baby on a box in the corner. The whole story was there in the protective stoop of her figure and the drained resignation of her face. She looked anciently tired; the baby’s chubby hand was clenched in the flesh of her breast.
Johnny Bane, eager beaver, brisk student, had been officious about keeping extension cords untangled and posing with the reflector. By the time Prescott had the camera and tripod packed Johnny had everything else dismantled. “How you get all them lights to go off at once?” he said.
Prescott dropped a reflector and they both stooped for it, bumping heads. The boy’s skull felt as hard as cement; for a moment Prescott was unreasonably angry. But he caught Carol’s eye across the room, and straightening up without a word, he showed Johnny and Dago how the flashes were synchronized, he let them look into the screen of the Rolleiflex, he explained shutter and lens, he gave them a two-minute lecture on optics. “Okay?” he said to Carol in half-humorous challenge.
She smiled. “Okay.”
The Aguirre family watched them to the door and out into the drizzle. Johnny Bane, full of importance, a hep cat, a photographer’s assistant, punched the shoulder of the lounging Dago. “Ay te wacho,” he said. Dago lifted a languid hand.
“Now what?” Prescott asked.
“More of the same,” Carol said. “Unfortunately, there’s plenty.”
“Overcrowding, malnutrition, lack of sanitation,” he said. “Four days of gloom. Can’t we shoot something pretty?”
“There’s always Johnny’s chick.”
“Maybe she comes under the head of lack of sanitation.”
They were all huddled under the sugar palm. “What about my chick?” Johnny demanded. “You want my chick now?”
Carol stood tying a scarf over her fair hair. In raincoat and saddle shoes, she looked like a college sophomore. “Does your chick’s family approve of you?” she said. “Most Mexican families aren’t too happy to see boy friends hanging around.”
Tickled almost to idiocy, he cackled and flapped his hands. “Man, they think I’m rat poison, no kiddin’. They think any cat’s rat poison. They got this old Mexican jive about keepin’ chicks at home. But I come there with you, they got to let me in, don’t they?”
“So who’s helping whom?” Prescott said.
That made him giggle and mug all the way down the slippery hill. “Hey, man,” he said once, “you know these Mexicans believe in this Evil Eye, this ojo. When I hold up that old reflector I’m sayin’ the Lord’s Prayer backwards and puttin’ the eyeballs on him, and when here comes that big flash, man, her old man really think he got the curse on him. I tell him I don’t take it off till he let Lupe go out any time she want. Down to that beach, man. She look real mean down there on that sand gettin’ the eyeballs from all the cats. Reety!”
“Spare us the details,” Carol said, and turned her face from the rain, hanging to a broken fence and slipping, laughing, coming up hard against a light pole. Prescott slithered after her until before a shack more pretentious than most, almost a cottage, Johnny kicked the mud from his shoes and silently mugged at them, with a glassy, scared look in his odd little eyes, before he knocked on the home-made door.
It was like coming into a quiet opening in the woods and startling all the little animals. They were watched by a dozen pairs of eyes. Prescott looked past the undershirted Mexican who had opened the door and saw three men with cards and glasses and a jug before them on a round table. A very pregnant woman stood startled in the middle of the floor. On a bed against the far wall a boy had lowered his comic book to stare. There was a flash of children disappearing into corners and behind the stove. The undershirted man welcomed them with an enveloping winy breath, but his smile was only for Carol and Prescott; his recognition of Johnny was a brief, sidelong lapse from politeness. Somewhere behind the door a phonograph was playing “Linda Mujer”; now it stopped with a squawk.
Once, during the rapid Spanish that went on between Carol and the Mexican, Prescott glanced at Johnny, but the boy’s face, with an unreal smile pasted on it, blinked and peered past the undershirted man as if looking for someone. His forehead was puckered in tense knots. Then the undershirted man said something over his shoulder, the men at the table laughed, and one lifted the jug in invitation. The host brought it and offered it to Carol, who grinned and tipped and drank while they applauded. Then Prescott, mentally tasting the garlic and chile from the lips that had drunk before him, coldly contemplating typhoid, diphtheria, polio, drank politely and put the jug back in the man’s hands with thanks and watched him return it to the table without offering it to Johnny Bane. They were pulled into the room, the door closed, and he saw that the old hand-cranked Victrola had been played by a Mexican youth in drape pants and a pretty girl, short-skirted and pompadoured. The girl should be Lupe, Johnny’s chick. He looked for the glance of understanding between them and saw only the look on Johnny’s face as if he had an unbearable belly-ache.
This was a merry shackful. The men were all a little drunk, and posed magnificently and badly, their eyes magnetized by the camera. The boy was lured from his comic book. Lupe and the youth, who turned out to be her cousin Chuey, leaned back and watched and whispered with a flash of white teeth. As for Johnny, he held reflectors where Prescott told him to, but he was no longer an eager beaver. His mouth hung sullenly, his eyes kept straying to the two on the couch.
Dutifully Prescott went on with his job, documenting poverty for humanitarianism’s sake and humanizing it as he could for the sake of art. He got a fair shot of the boy reading his comic book under a hanging image of the Virgin, another of two little girls peeking into a steaming kettle of frijoles while the mother modestly hid her pregnancy behind the stove. He shot the card players from a low angle, with low side-lighting, and when an old grandmother came in the back door with a pail of water he got her there, stooping to the weight in the open door, against the background of the rain.
Finally he said into Carol’s ear, with deliberate malice, “Now do we get that red-hot shot of Johnny jiving with his chick?”
“You’re a mean man, Charlie,” she said, but she smiled, and looking across to where Johnny stood sullen and alone, she said, “Johnny, you want to come over here?”
He came stiff as a stick, ugly with venom and vanity. When Carol seated him close to Lupe the girl rolled her eyes and bit her lip, ready to laugh. The noise in the room had quieted; it was as if a dipperful of cold water had been thrown into a boiling kettle. Carol moved Chuey in close and laid some records in Lupe’s lap. Prescott could see the caption coming up: Even in shacktown, young people need amusement. Lack of adequate entertainment facilities one of greatest needs. Older generation generally disapproves of jive, jive talk, jive clothes.
The girl was pretty, even with her ridiculous pompadour. Her eyes were soft, liquid, very dark, her cheekbones high, and her cheeks planed. With a rebozo over her head she might have posed for Murillo’s Madonna. She did not stare into the camera as her elders did, but at Prescott’s word became absorbed in studying the record labels. Chuey laid his head close to hers, and on urging, Johnny sullenly did the same. The moment the flash went off Johnny stood up.
Prescott shifted the Victrola so the crank handle showed more, placed Chuey beside it with a record in his hands. “All right, Lupe, you and Johnny show us a little rug-cutting.”
He watched the girl glance from the corners of her eyes at her parents, then come into Johnny’s arm. He held her as if she smelled bad, his head back and away, but she turned her face dreamily upward and sighed like an actress in a love drama and laid her face against his rain-wet chest. “Qúe chicloso!” she said, and could not hold back her laughter.
“Surote!” Johnny pushed her away so hard she almost fell. His face was contorted, his eyes glared. Spittle sprayed from his heavy lips. “Bofa!” he said to Lupe, and suddenly Prescott found himself protecting the camera in the middle of what threatened to become a brawl. Chuey surged forward, the undershirted father crowded in from the other side, the girl was spitting like a cat. With a wrench Johnny broke away and got his back to the wall, and there he stood with his hand plunged into the pocket of his blazer and his loose mouth working.
“Please!” Carol was shouting, “Chuey! Lupe! Please!” She held back the angry father and got a reluctant, broken quiet. Over her shoulder she said, “Johnny, go wait for us in the car.”
For a moment he hung, then reached a long thin hand for the latch and slid out. The room was instantly full of noise again, indignation, threats. Prescott got his things safely outside the door away from their feet, and by that time politeness and diplomacy had triumphed. Carol said something to Lupe, who showed her teeth in a little white smile; to Chuey, who shrugged; to the father, who bowed over her hand and talked close to her face. There was handshaking around, Carol promised them prints of the pictures, Prescott gave the children each a quarter. Eventually they were out in the blessed rain.
“What in hell did he call her?” Prescott said as they clawed their way up the hill.
“Pachuco talk. Approximately a chippy.”
“Count on him for the right touch.”
“Don’t say anything, Charlie,” she said. “Let me handle him.”
“He’s probably gone off somewhere to nurse his wounded ego.”
But as he helped her over the clay brink on to the cinder road he looked towards the car and saw the round dark head in the back seat. “I must say you pick some dillies,” he said.
Walking with her face sideward away from the rain, she said seriously, “I don’t pick them, Charlie. They come because they don’t have anybody else.”
“It’s no wonder this one hasn’t got anybody else,” he said, and then they were at the car and he was opening the door to put the equipment inside. Johnny Bane made no motion to get his muddy feet out of the way.
“Lunch?” Carol said as she climbed under the wheel. Prescott nodded, but Johnny said nothing. In the enclosed car Prescott could smell his hair oil. Carol twisted around to smile at him.
“Listen!” she said. “Why take it so hard? It’s just that Chuey’s her cousin, he’s family, he can crash the gate.”
“Agh!”
“Laugh it off.”
He let his somber gaze fall on her. “That punk!” he said. “I get him good. Her too. I kill that mean little bitch. You wait. I kill her sometime.”
For a moment she watched him steadily; then she sighed. “If it helps to take it out on me, go ahead,” she said. “I’ll worry about you, if that’s what you want.”
A few minutes later she stopped at a diner on Figueroa, but when she and Prescott climbed out, Johnny sat still. “Coming?” she said.
“I ain’t hungry.”
“Oh, Johnny, come off it! Don’t sulk all day.”
The long look he gave her was so deliberately insolent that Prescott wanted to reach through the window and slap his loose mouth. Then the boy looked away, picked a thread indifferently from his sleeve, stared moodily as if tasting some overripe self-pity or some rich revenge. Prescott took Carol’s arm and pulled her into the diner.
“Quite a young man,” he said.
Her look was sober. “Don’t be too hard on him.”
“Why not?”
“Because everybody always has been.”
He passed her the menu. “Mother loved me, but she died.”
“Stop it, Charlie!”
He was astonished. “All right,” he said at last. “Forget it.”
