Collected Stories, page 59
The pale head lifted again; the smooth face was still, the eyes almost closed. He could have been a UCLA halfback praying in the huddle, a stern, handsome hero headed, after graduation, for a job in public relations or the movies, a hero whose head was full of muscle and the assurance that God was with him in everything, whether he was blocking for the fullback or making a better deal with his sponsor about his athletic scholarship. In some surprise I asked myself when I had started being so mistrustful of him. On the record, he was a dedicated spirit. I was as convinced as he was that the Red Car boys were innocent, had been railroaded on purely circumstantial evidence. And it was no crime, at fifty, to look as if you were still good for five sets of singles or to wear a jacket that some tailor had worked on with love.
“That’s all we’re asking,” Guy said. “Also, in the jobs we find you, you won’t have to worry about the record following you. If it does, so much the better. And don’t think the committee will be sitting on its duff while you work. Just let me tell you a few things. We’re putting out a little book, for instance—the whole history of this case from the dragnet arrests until the final reversal. People all over the country are going to read that Supreme Court decision in thirty-six-point capitals and know the kind of conspiracy that put you behind bars. Now! Jean here has scheduled another radio series on the Mexican-American community. She’ll want all three of you one of these days for an interview. Next week? Next week. Then there’s the big long-range study Carol and Charlie have been working on. That’ll be terrif, simply terrif, and I hear it’ll be ready for the press in another couple of months. That reminds me, Charlie, can we beg some photographs to illustrate our booklet? Pete’ll see you about it. Finally—don’t let this out yet because we haven’t got it absolutely in the cage—I think I’ve got Len Fowler talked into doing a full-length documentary on the pachucos, and if he does it, you know how it’ll be done. The most, absolutely the most.” Cocking a humorous eye at Dago, he added, “How’d you like to star in a picture called The Kid from Happy Valley?”
That was a joke. Happy Valley was the barrio these kids from La Loma had always feuded with. They groaned. Chuey Bernal looked all around with an Emmett Kelly crying face, put his hands up in a fighting pose as if someone had pushed him, nodded, half convinced by inner voices, and then shook his head hard. You could almost hear it rattle. “Happy Valley! Those guys are from Gonesville.”
“Well, it sounds better than The Kid from Fifty-eighth Street or The Kid from Watts. And there’s a nice irony in Happy Valley. Happy Valley with dirt floors and typhoid wells.”
Pepe Garcia, rubbing his head slowly against his girl’s thighs, said in a soft voice, “Tell him to work in a beef and we’ll go over there and clean the place out for the camera. A real fight scene, man.”
Mazur was laughing. “The solidarity of the Mexican-American community,” he said. “And you talk about disbanding.” It was neatly done; he had got them to make his point for him.
“Listen,” said Nemerov, slight, nervous, dark, hopelessly typecast for a conspirator, with a tic in his left eyelid. “Listen. Here’s another idea. What if we got together all the great unjust trials—you know, Lawrence Strike and Sacco-Vanzetti and Joe Hill and the Scottsboro Boys and the rest. Red Car too, naturally. Get them all into one set of covers. What an indictment of capitalist justice, eh? What a book that would make. Wouldn’t it? Pete, couldn’t you take that on? There’s bound to be transcripts of all those cases. What do you think, Guy?”
I caught Carol’s eye, wordlessly asking her if we had to stick around all night while the cell plotted strategy. The circle had broken out in contributions from several sides. The Red Car boys and their chicks watched and listened. Then Debbie Mazur came in again from somewhere with a bottle of bourbon in her hand and started tipping it into glasses that would hold still. In the kitchen she may have had a quick one to cool her irritation; her eyes as well as her complexion showed it now. “What I think,” she said rather loudly, “is that there’s a time and place for everything. For God’s sake, I gave the maid the night off so we could dance and make whoopee and have a good time. So let’s adjourn the meeting and dance.”
When she nudged me with the bottle, I turned away and covered my glass with my hand. “Don’t you think we ought to dance?” she asked.
I said with a mucous leer, “You bead you ad be?”
“You and me,” she said. “The others are all right, but you’re the cutest.” She flung her arms around my neck and fastened a suckerfish kiss on me. The bottle dangling from her hand banged me between the shoulder blades. I couldn’t breathe, and besides that, I was a regular Typhoid Mary, a Great Dismal Swamp where germs throve. Struggling, I broke loose for air and found myself looking right into Guy Mazur’s eyes. Something passed off his face like breath off a mirror—or I thought it did. On the other hand, he may have been looking all the time the way he looked when I had got my breath and could see: tolerantly amused.
Debbie’s arms were still around my neck. Past her ear I saw the smile on Dago Aguirre’s face and Luz’s rolling eyes. “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm-mmm!” Debbie said, and plunged off on some other errand. Voices tentatively picked up the talk again, but if she had meant to break up the meeting and force Guy off his planned course, she had done it. We were no longer a captive audience.
Taking my arm, Carol walked me over to the top of the steps looking down into the greenish dusk of the solarium. “You watch it,” she said.
I went for the inhaler. “I can’t take my eyes off it.”
“Don’t be a slob, Charlie. I mean really—watch it.”
“For God’s sake!” I said.
From the study at the far end of the room we heard the scrape of a needle across a record, and then Kid Ory or somebody took off on “Muskrat Ramble.”
Raising her voice over the music, Carol said, “I do mean really. Guy and Debbie have had a beef going all evening. If she starts using you to get even with him, you could get hurt. And don’t think you could play it cool. She’s got too many hormones, and she’s too damned smart.”
I said, “I’m touched that you should worry, but relax. Otorhinolaryngology is working on your side.”
The band, whatever it was, had a real beat. I saw Dago and Luz rise and excuse themselves from among the feet along the sofa. Chuey was already up, snapping his fingers and jerking his head with a gone spastic look while he waited for Lupe to fix her belt. Then Pepe uncoiled from the floor, folded his chick in his arm, and moved her off with jerky, light movements. Angelina made even jitterbugging, which is about as personal as pole vaulting, look sexy. Her face was wiped clean of all expression; the fringes on her skirt snapped.
As cleanly as a good axman splits a straight-grained block, the music had split the party in two. A couple of the nameless do-gooders rose and said good-bye all around. The double doorway of the study was full of prancing, jerking, twirling shapes. “Muskrat Ramble” rambled itself out; Chuey Bernal yelped and clapped and staggered with exhaustion; the phonograph squawked a horrible amplified squawk as somebody scraped the needle again.
“Darling,” Guy Mazur called from a deep conversation with Nemerov and Welling, “can you turn it down a little? We hardly want the neighbors protesting.”
Debbie appeared promptly in the study door. “In the words of Papa Hemingway, obscenity the neighbors.”
“Not a bad idea,” Mazur called good-naturedly. “But the committee might like to hear themselves think.”
“Obscenity the committee, too,” Debbie said. She disappeared, and in a moment Louis Armstrong came on in “Gut Bucket Blues,” loud and dirty.
I said to Carol, “What are we? Planners or jivers? Saviors or delinquents?”
“The delinquents seem to be having more fun.”
So we danced across the living room and into the study. It was a good thing to do; they welcomed us. When the record ended, we were all in a big collapse of laughing and clapping.
“You dance too mean,” Chuey told his cousin Lupe. “I can’t stand it.”
“Angelina, she’s who dances mean,” Lupe said. “Jijole! Pepe, you better watch out.”
Pepe smiled. Angelina’s expressionlessness took on a shading of disdain. Then Debbie, who was minding the phonograph, put on a new record, set down her drink, and slid her feet in an exaggerated stalk across the floor. “Whose idea was this? I get up a dance and everybody’s dancing except me. This is ladies’ tag night. Tag!” She slapped Dago’s arm, and Luz moved away, giggling. The loudspeaker hidden among the bookshelves was hammering out “Lady Be Good.” Chuey tagged Carol, and I leaned against the desk between Luz and Lupe and dragged on the inhaler.
“Poor Señor Pictures,” Lupe said. “You’re smooched, too.” She touched my mouth with a paper napkin and it came off red.
“It’s a privilege,” I said.
“She’s beautiful,” Luz said.
“You think so?”
“Oh, yes. Like a movie star.”
“Keep your eye on your boyfriend.”
“Don’t you worry.”
“He’s already limping. She’s wearing him down.”
“Oh, limping. That’s not her; that’s his ankle.”
“What’s the matter with his ankle?”
“He broke it boxing, up in that jail. In the first round. But he finished the last two rounds with it broken, and still won.”
We watched Dago hand off Debbie and turn and pick her up smoothly. She wasn’t as smooth as he was, but she was giving her all. They were like a couple of old silent stars restored in their prime, Valentino and La Marr, personal appearance tonight only. And I could imagine Dago in that ring with his broken ankle. Not to quite, not even to grimace: His whole morality and the morality of his kind would have been involved. And however limited that morality was, it was neither small nor weak. “Quite a boy, your Dago,” I said.
She smiled at me sidelong with her Indian eyes half closed. “I believe it,” she said.
“You want to go to Idaho?”
“What do you think?”
“You’d get to dance squaw dances on some reservation,” Lupe said. “What’s so good with Idaho?”
“I don’t know,” Luz said. “I just don’t want Dago in no more trouble. He goes out with the guys and they do something, steal a car or beat somebody up, and he won’t tell on them and then he’s in it, too. Maybe in Idaho there isn’t this trouble all the time.”
“Maybe in Idaho there isn’t anything,” Lupe said. “I bet they have last year’s movies once a week. John Wayne in The Fighting Seabees. Que suave!”
The dance ended, and Debbie planted an enthusiastic kiss on Dago. Lupe cheered; Luz groaned. From the living room the sob sister and the graduate student in need of a haircut came to replenish their drinks. The sob sister smiled upon us, an indulgent auntie. “I wish I could do that. It looks like fun.” It was not clear whether she meant the jitter-bugging or the smooching, and her companion did not offer to teach her either one. He said only, “Soda or water?” and after a minute they drifted back to join the planning commission.
Chuey put on a slow, sullen blues, returned Carol to me, and picked up Lupe. Luz with a finger rubbed at the lipstick smear on Dago’s mouth, and Pepe, in his controlled slouch, stood with a little smile before Debbie. Angelina twitched her fringed skirt out of the way and leaned with her hands behind her against the bookcases. Her indifference was considerable: She read titles on books; she opened an atlas on the desk. I wondered if I should go over and ask her to dance, but then her eyes wandered back from following Pepe in his graceful, dangerous, foot-placing, foot-withdrawing, spinning-and-releasing, handing-off and taking-back movements with Debbie, and she caught me looking. She so obviously hated me for watching her watch them that I stayed where I was.
We danced for a half hour or so, and before long Debbie had us all smeared with lipstick. She was everybody’s big loving sister. She told Dago to go on up to Idaho and not let himself get captured by Guy’s medicine show. She leaned back to look into the living room and laugh at the shrunken group there. “The planners,” she said. “The thinkers. My God, they think the first thing you do to have fun is elect a chairman pro tem.” Touching glasses again with Dago, she gave him an impulsive smooch. The girls laughed, but not very hard.
“Tell you a secret,” Debbie said. “Mazur thinks he made you all out of tin and wound you up. Tell you another secret. He thinks he made me out of tin and wound me up, too.” Silent and gleeful, she shrank her shoulders together with mirth and at once stiffened and marched around in a marvelously precise imitation of a mechanical toy. When she stopped, she found Pepe Garcia in front of her, wanting to dance again. Chuey put on another record.
Poor Angelina. I have a friend who practices a science he calls kinesics, the language of the body. From Angelina he would have got a plain statement. She had only three kinetic expressions. She could switch her tail, she could be as stiff as a wooden image, and she could shrivel like a wronged vampire. She was at the wronged-vampire stage as she moved in on Dago and led him off in a dance, and if she had danced mean before, she was pure poison now.
Pepe did not notice. Dancing with Debbie, he was a graceful scorpion carrying his stinger ready over his back, and when at the end of the record Debbie as usual flung her arms around him for the kiss, he was ready for her. Their bodies tightened together; their mouths made one mouth. The laughter and the talk died away in the study. I noticed that the kissers were right in the double doors, in plain sight from the living-room plotters. The sudden quiet from the study would make them look up if anything would.
Carol took my hand and led me, walking loud on her heels, to the still-spinning record player. As she turned it off, she hissed at me, “This is getting out of hand!”
“Well, you can’t expect them to push her away.”
Voices had begun again behind us; apparently Carol’s movement had broken up the big clutch in the doorway. “It’s all wrong,” Carol said. “The kids are getting the idea that anything goes.”
“Apparently it does.”
“I wish to hell people wouldn’t involve other people in their squabbles,” she said, and for a second she looked as mean as Angelina. “If anything happens, it’s the kids who’ll suffer. They’re vulnerable.”
“Think we should go?”
She did not answer. Somebody was calling for more music. She put something on without looking. “Muskrat Ramble” again. When we turned around, Angelina and Dago were dancing by. She was throwing her little tail around and wearing the smile that the Gorgon made fashionable. Pepe was still dancing with Debbie, who looked about ready to pop out of her cocoon.
“We’d better stay,” Carol said. “Somebody’s got to keep the peace.”
“Shall I hide the liquor? Pull a wire on the record player?”
She shook her head irritably.
“Why don’t you talk to her?”
“She’s past talking to.”
“What if I went around shooting some pictures? Would that help?”
“Ah, Charlie,” she said. “You’re an angel, you’re a darling.”
So I went around snapping flashbulbs in people’s faces, but the principal effect was to bring on a clamor from Debbie that I shoot her and Pepe jiving. She said she would blow it up into a photomural and paper the wall with it. I did my best to disperse things by posting people in corners with reflectors, but I did not capture Angelina. She and Dago were jiving on their own, and by now she was pure provocation. While I focused, I was aware of her out of the corner of my eye, her feet in an intricate pattern of yield and go, her tail wagging, her fringes snapping, her arms and shoulders suggesting embracings and entwinings and her face like cold stone. A deadly one, what the kids called a bruja. I hardly paid attention to the immortalizing of Debbie and Pepe, I was so interested in the other two.
So was Luz interested. I heard her mutter to Carol, “That Angie is mean, man. Qué relajo! If she tries anything with Dago, I’ll scratch her eyes out.”
“Dago’s all right,” Carol said. He did seem to be, at that. He was not contributing much to Angelina’s show but looked amused and a little high. Debbie and Pepe, once I was through shooting them, were back practicing steps. Debbie missed a move, cried out with laughter, threw her arms around Pepe, stepped back, tried it again. She looked blowsy and hypnotized, purple-cheeked, moist as the captain of a Danish ladies’ gymnastic team.
“Maybe it’s time we all went home,” Carol said finally, brightly, to Luz. “You kids have to be careful. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Se siente aviador,” Luz said, still with her eyes on Angelina. “She’s high as a pilot. What does she think she’s doing?”
Chuey, exhausted, had fallen into a chair and pulled Lupe on top of him and was emitting wolf cries, and Carol was turning her head in anger and bafflement from Debbie to Angelina and back when three of the ancient anarchs paused in the door to say good night. That gave Carol an opening. She shut off the record player. “We’ve got to go, too. Debbie, can I see you a minute?”
The look Debbie gave her was brighter and bluer than it had any right to be if she was as tight as she had been acting. “One minute,” she said. “I’m just getting the hang of this.”
They went out and off down the hall. By inspiration, a leader much in hope that he had followers, I looked into the living room, saying, “I wonder what they’ve got settled in there?,” and walked in. When I got there, I found that everybody was with me except Pepe and Angelina. Well, they could stay in the study and weave their hooded necks at one another. The others could be handled.
The planning commission, what was left of it, regarded us with tolerance and some curiosity. “Finally wear yourselves out?” Mazur said. After all the tensions I had been aware of, I was surprised by the big confident boom of his voice. So far as he was concerned, some of us had just been in dancing. And he went straight back to where he had been when Debbie led the kids away. “How would a warehouse job suit you?” he said.
