Collected Stories, page 30
While they were eating dessert she ordered two hamburgers to go, and when she passed them through the car window Johnny Bane took them without a word. “What do you want to do?” she said. “Come along, or have us drop you somewhere?”
“Okay if I go along?”
“Sure.”
“Okay.”
In a street to which she drove, a peddler pushed a cart full of peppers and small Mexican bananas through the mud between dingy frame buildings. No one else was on the street, but two children were climbing through the windows of a half-burned house. The rain angled across, fine as mist.
“What’s here?” Prescott said.
“This is a family I’ve known ever since I worked for Welfare,” Carol said. “Grandmother with asthma, father with dropsy, half a dozen little rickety kids. This is to prove that bad luck has no sense of proportion.”
Fishing for a cigarette, Prescott found the package empty. He tried the pockets of coat and raincoat without success. Carol opened her purse; she too was out. Johnny Bane had been smoking hers all morning.
“We can find a store,” she said, and had turned the ignition key to start when Johnny said, “I can go get some for you.”
“Oh, say, would you, Johnny? That would be wonderful.”
Prescott felt dourly that he was getting an education in social workers. One rule was that the moment your delinquent showed the slightest sign of decency, passed you a cigarette or picked up something you had dropped, you fell on his neck as if he had rescued you from drowning. As a matter of fact, he had felt his own insides twitch with surprised pleasure at Johnny’s offer. But then what? he asked himself. After you’ve convinced him that every little decency of his deserves a hundred times its weight in thanks, then what?
“No stores around here,” Johnny said. “Probably the nearest over on Figueroa.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Then I guess we’d better drive down. That’s too far to walk.”
“You go ahead, do your business here,” Johnny said. He leaned forward with his hands on the back of the front seat. “I take the car and go get some weeds, how’s that?”
Prescott waited to hear what she would say, but he really knew. After a pause her quiet voice said, “Have you got a driver’s license?”
“Sure, man, right here.”
“All right,” she said, and stepped out. “Don’t be long. Charlie dies by inches without smokes.”
While Prescott unloaded, Johnny slid under the wheel. He was as jumpy as a greyhound. His fingers wrapped around the wheel with love.
“Wait,” Carol said. “I didn’t give you any money.”
With an exclamation Prescott fished a dollar bill from his pocket and threw it into the seat, and Johnny Bane let off the emergency and rolled away.
“What was that?” Prescott said. “Practical sociology?”
“Don’t be so indignant,” she said. “You trust people, and maybe that teaches them to trust you.”
“Why should anybody but a hooligan have to be taught to trust you? Are you so unreliable?”
But she only shook her head at him, smiling and denying his premises, as they went up the rotted steps.
This house was more than the others. It was not merely poor, it was dirty, and it was not merely dirty, but sick. Prescott looked it over for picture possibilities while Carol talked with a thin Mexican woman, worn to the bleak collarbones with arms like sticks. In the kitchen the sink was stopped with a greasy rag, and dishes swam in water the color of burlap. On the table were three bowls with brown juice dried in them. There was a hole clear through the kitchen wall. In the front room, on an old taupe overstuffed sofa, the head of the house lay in a blanket bathrobe, his thickened legs exposed, his eyes mere slits in the swollen flesh of his face. By the window in the third room an old woman sat in an armchair, and everywhere, in every corner and behind every broken piece of furniture, were staring broad-faced children, incredibly dirty and as shy as mice. In a momentary pause in Carol’s talk he heard the native sounds of this house: the shuffle of children’s bare feet and the old woman’s harsh breathing.
He felt awkward, and an intruder. Imprisoned by the rain, quelled by the presence of the Welfare lady and the strange man, the children crept soft as lizards around the walls. Wanting a cigarette worse than ever, Prescott glanced impatiently at his watch. Probably Johnny would stop for a malt or drive around showing off the car and come in after an hour expecting showers of thanks.
“What do you think, Charlie?” Carol’s voice had dropped; the bare walls echoed to any noise, the creeping children and the silent invalids demanded hushed voices and soft feet. “Portrait shots?” she whispered. “All this hopeless sickness?”
“They’ll be heartbreakers.”
“That’s what they ought to be.”
Even when he moved her chair so that gray daylight fell across her face, the old woman paid no attention to him beyond a first piercing look. Her head was held stiffly, her face as still as wood, but at every breath the cords in her neck moved slightly with the effort. He got three time exposures of that half-raised weathered mask; flash would have destroyed what the gray light revealed.
Straightening up from the third one, he looked through the doorway into the inhuman swollen face of the son. It was impossible to tell whether the Chinese slits of eyes were looking at him or not. He was startled with the thought that they might be, and wished again, irritably, for a cigarette.
“Our friend is taking his time,” he said to Carol, and held up his watch.
“Maybe he couldn’t find a store.”
Prescott grunted, staring at the dropsical man. If he shot across the swollen feet and legs, foreshortening them, and into the swollen face, he might get something monstrous and sickening, a picture to make people wince.
“Can he be propped up a little?” he asked.
Carol asked the thin, hovering wife, who said he could. The three of them lifted and slid the man up until his shoulders were against the wall. It troubled Prescott to see Carol’s hands touch the repulsive flesh. The man’s slits watched them; the lips moved, mumbling something.
“What’s he say?”
“He says you must be a lover of beauty,” Carol said.
For a moment her eyes held his, demanding of him something that he hated to give. Once, on his only trip to Mexico, he had gone hunting with his host in Michoacán, and he remembered how he had fired at a noise in a tree and brought something crashing down, and how they had run up to see a little monkey lying on the bloodied leaves. It was still alive; as they came up its eyes followed them, and at a certain moment it put up its arms over its head to ward off the expected death blow. To hear this monster make a joke was like seeing that monkey put up its arms in an utterly human gesture. It sickened him so that he took refuge behind the impersonality of the camera, and when he had taken his pictures he said something that he had not said to a subject all day. “Thanks,” he said. “Gracias, señor.”
Somehow he had to counteract that horrible portrait with something sweet. He posed the thin mother and one of the children in a sentimental Madonna and Child pose, pure poster art suitable for a fund-raising campaign. While he was rechecking for the second exposure he heard the noise, like a branch being dragged across gravel. It came from the grandmother. She sat in the same position by the window of the other room, but she seemed straighter and more rigid, and he had an odd impression that she had grown in size.
The thin woman was glancing uneasily from Prescott to Carol. The moment he stepped back she was out of her chair and into the other room.
The grandmother had definitely grown in size. Prescott watched her with a wild feeling that anyone in this house might suddenly blow up with the obscene swelling disease. Under the shawl the old woman’s chest rose in jerky breaths, but it didn’t go down between inhalations. Her gray face shone with sudden sweat; her mouth was open, her head held stiffly to one side.
“Hadn’t I better try to get a doctor?” Prescott said.
Bending over the old woman, Carol turned only enough to nod.
Prescott went quickly to the door. The peddler had disappeared, the children who had been climbing in the burned house were gone, the street lay empty in the rain. Johnny Bane had been gone for over an hour; if this woman died he could take the credit. In a district like this there might not be a telephone for blocks. Prescott would have to run foolishly like someone shouting fire.
A girl of ten or so, sucking her thumb, slid along the wall, watching him. He trapped her. “Where’s there a telephone?”
She stared, round-eyed and scared.
“Teléfono? You sabe teléfono?”
He saw comprehension grow in her face, slapped a half-dollar into her hand, motioned her to start leading him. She went down the steps and along the broken sidewalk at a trot.
It took four calls from the little neighborhood grocery before he located a doctor who could come. Then, the worst cause for haste removed, he paused to buy cigarettes for himself and a bag of suckers for the children. His guide put a sucker in her mouth and a hand in his, and they walked back that way through the drizzle.
The street before the house was still empty, and he cursed Johnny Bane. Inside, the grandmother was resting after her paroxysm, but her head was still stiffly tilted, and a minute after he entered she fell into a fit of coughing that pebbled her lips with mucus and brought her halfway to her feet, straining and struggling for air. Carol and the thin woman held her, eased her back.
“Did you get someone?” Carol said.
“He’s on his way.”
“Did he tell you anything to do?”
“There’s nothing to do except inject atropine or something. We have to wait for him.”
“Hasn’t Johnny come back?”
“Did you really expect him to?”
Her eyes and mouth were strained. She no longer looked like a college sophomore; a film from the day’s poverty and sickness had rubbed off on her. Without a word she turned away, went into the kitchen, and started clearing out the sink.
As Prescott started to pack up it occurred to him that a picture of an old woman choking to death would add to the sociological impact of Carol’s series, but he was damned if he would take it. He’d had enough for one day. The dropsical man turned his appalling swollen mask, and on an impulse Prescott stood up and gestured with the packet of cigarettes. The monster nodded, so Prescott inserted a cigarette between the lips and lighted it. Sight of the man smoking fascinated him.
The Rolleiflex was just going into the bag when it struck him that he had not seen the Contax. He rummaged, turned things out on to the floor. The camera was gone. Squatting on his heels, he considered how he should approach the mother of the house, or Carol, to get it back from whichever child had taken it. And then he began to wonder if it had been there when he unpacked for this job. He had used it at the Aguirre house for one picture, but not since. The bag had been in the car all the time he and Carol had been eating lunch. So had Johnny Bane.
Carefully refusing to have any feeling at all about the matter, he took his equipment out on the porch. Four or five children, each with a sucker in its mouth, came out and shyly watched him as he smoked and waited for the doctor.
The doctor was a short man with an air of unhurried haste. He examined the grandmother for perhaps a minute and got out a needle. The woman’s eyes followed his hands with terror as he swabbed with an alcohol-soaked pad, jabbed, pushed with his thumb, withdrew, dropped needle and syringe into his case. It was like an act of deadpan voodoo. Within minutes the old woman was breathing almost normally, as if the needle had punctured her swelling and let her subside. For a minute more the doctor talked with Carol; he scribbled on a pad. Then his eyes darted into the next room to where the swollen son lay watching from his slits.
“What’s the matter in here?”
“Dropsy,” Carol said. “He’s been bedridden for months.”
“Dropsy’s a symptom, not a disease,” the doctor said, and went over.
In ten more minutes they were all out on the porch again. “I’ll expect you to call me then,” the doctor said.
“I will,” Carol said. “You bet I will.”
“Are you on foot? Can I take you anywhere?”
“No thanks. We’re just waiting for my car.”
It was then four-thirty. Incredulously Prescott watched her sit down on the steps to wait some more. The late sun, scattering the mist, touched her fair hair and deepened the lines around her mouth. Behind her the children moved softly. Above her head the old porch pillar was carved with initials and monikers: GJG, Mingo, Lola, Chavo, Pina, Juanito. A generation of lost kids had defaced even the little they had, as they might deface and abuse anyone who tried to help them in ways too unselfish for them to understand.
“How long do you expect to sit here?” he said finally.
“Give him another half hour.”
“He could have gone to Riverside for cigarettes and been back by now.”
“I know.”
“You know he isn’t going to come back until he’s brought.”
“He was upset about his girl,” she said. “He felt he’d been kicked in the face. Maybe he went up there.”
“To do what? Cut her throat?”
“It isn’t impossible,” she said, and turned her eyes up to his with so much anxiety in them that he hesitated a moment before he told her the rest.
“Maybe it isn’t,” he said then, “but I imagine he went first of all to a pawnshop to get rid of the camera.”
“Camera?”
“He swiped the Contax while we were having lunch.”
“How do you know?”
“Either that or one of the kids here took it.”
Her head remained bent down; she pulled a sliver from the step. “It couldn’t have been here. I was here all the time. None of the children went near your stuff.”
She knew so surely what Johnny Bane was capable of, and yet she let it trouble her so, that he was abruptly furious with her. Social betterment, sure, opportunities, yes, a helping hand, naturally. But to lie down and let a goon like that walk all over you, abuse your confidence, lie and cheat and steal and take advantage of every unselfish gesture!
“Listen,” he said. “Let me give you a life history. We turn him in and he comes back in handcuffs. Okay. That’s six months in forestry camp, unless he’s been there before.”
“Once,” she said, still looking down. “He was with a bunch that swiped a truck.”
“Preston then,” Prescott said. “In half a year he comes back from Preston and imposes on you some more, and you waste yourself keeping him out of trouble until he gets involved in something in spite of you, something worse, and gets put away for a stretch in San Quentin. By the time they let him out of there he’ll be ripe for really big-time stuff, and after he’s sponged on you for a while longer he’ll shoot somebody in a hold-up or knife somebody in a whorehouse brawl, and they’ll lead him off to the gas chamber. And nothing you can do will keep one like him from going all the way.”
“It doesn’t have to happen that way. There’s a chance it won’t.”
“It’s a hell of a slim chance.”
“I know it,” she said, and looked up again, her face not tearful or sentimental as he had thought it would be, but simply thoughtful. “Slim or not, we have to give it to him.”
“You’ve already given him ten chances.”
“Even then,” she said. “He’s everything you say—he’s mean, vicious, dishonest, boastful, vain, maybe dangerous. I don’t like him any better than you do, any better than he likes himself. But he’s told me things I don’t think he ever told anyone else.”
“He never had such a soft touch,” he said.
“He grew up in a slum, Harlem. Routine case. His father disappeared before he was born, his mother worked, whatever she could find. He took care of himself.”
“I understand that,” Prescott said. “He’s a victim. He isn’t to blame for what his life made him. But he’s still unfit to live with other people. He isn’t safe. Nine out of ten, maybe, you can help, but not his kind. It’s too bad, but he’s past helping.”
“He wasn’t a gang kid,” she said. “He’s unattractive, don’t you see, and mean. People don’t like him, and never did. He tries to run with the neighborhood Mexican gang here, but you saw how Chuey and Dago and Lupe just tolerate him. He doesn’t belong. He never did. So he prowled the alleys and dreamed up fancy revenges for people he hated, and played with stray cats.”
Prescott moved impatiently, and the children slid promptly further along the wall. Carol was watching him as steadily as the children were.
“He told me how he ran errands to earn money for liver and fish to feed them. He wanted them to come to him and be his cats.”
Prescott waited, knowing how the script ran but surprised that Carol, a hardened case worker, should have fallen for it.
“But they were all alley cats, as outcast as he was,” she said. “He’d feed a cat for a week, but when he didn’t have anything for it, it would shy away, or he’d grab it and get clawed. So he used to try to tie cats up when he caught them.”
Prescott said nothing.
“But when a cat wouldn’t let itself be petted, or when it fought the rope—and it always did—he’d swing it by the rope and break its neck,” Carol said.
She stirred the litter in the step corner and a sow bug rolled into its ball and bounced down into the dirt. “‘I give them every chance, Miss Vaughn,’ that’s what he told me. ‘I give them every chance and if they won’t come and be my friend I pop their neck.’ ”
Cautiously Prescott moved the camera bag backwards with his foot. He looked at the afternoon’s grime in the creases of his hands. “That’s a sad story,” he said at last. “I mean it, it really is. But it only proves what I said, that he’s too warped to run loose. He might try that neckpopping on some human being who wouldn’t play his way—Lupe, for instance.”
“Would you pop a cat’s neck if it wouldn’t come to you?” Carol said softly.
