Collected Stories, page 60
Chuey and Dago looked doubtfully at each other. Both were smeared with Debbie’s lipstick. Dago good-naturedly let his head roll as Luz, behind him, yanked at his hair. “Work?” Chuey said. “You get out of that old calabozo, you don’t feel like diving right into some job.”
“Out here they don’t serve those nice free jailhouse meals,” Mazur said.
Chuey fainted halfway to the floor. “Did you ever eat one of those nice free jailhouse meals?”
“Come on,” Mazur said. “We can put one of you in a warehouse job at one ninety an hour. Who wants it?”
“Hey,” Chuey said. “One ninety? That ain’t birdseed.”
“ILWU,” Mazur said. “A strong union and a great hiring hall.” He was looking steadily at Dago.
“I don’t know,” Dago said softly. “My mother’s sort of thinking Idaho.”
“You won’t get pay like that in the potatoes.”
Dago nodded and lifted his shoulders dubiously. Nemerov, looking irritated, put a cigarette between his lips and took out a matchbook and said, with the matchbook in his fingers and the cigarette wobbling from his lips, “You’ve got a responsibility in this fight, too. Don’t you think the rest of us have got families to think about? What do you think we’re out here on the barricades for, fun? Nobody’s persecuting us, or sending us to San Quentin.” The tic winked in his eyelid; he broke a match trying to light it and tore off another. When he had lighted his cigarette, he shook out the match and dropped it on the floor and looked at Dago hard through the smoke. “We can’t have just a few working and the rest getting the benefits. Everybody’s got to work.”
Dago sat silent, smiling and thinking, with his head a little on one side. Welling broke in in his light, eager voice, running all his words together. He was one of the hardest people to understand I ever listened to. I gathered that Dago would feel pretty crummy if he let others carry the whole load.
“Hey,” Chuey said, “if Dago don’t want that buck ninety, how about me?”
“I thought you didn’t want to work,” Nemerov said, still staring at Dago.
“Well, jeez,” Chuey said, “I thought the idea was we all had to.”
Dago sat still, with the dubious, demurring half-smile on his face and Luz’s hand still in his hair. Then all at once Guy Mazur reached his arms along the sofa back in a long stretch. He yawned, and laughed at his own uninhibited noise. “Let’s let it ride for now,” he said. “You kids are O.K. You’ll be in there, I know you will. A few days’ vacation won’t hurt you any. Let’s call the meeting adjourned. How about one for the road?”
His hand slapped Chuey’s knee, and as he rose, slapped again on Dago’s back. He went over and mended the drinks of Nemerov and Welling and himself.
“Well,” I said to Dago, “you’ve got lots of opportunities for public service.”
“Sure. I guess I ought to, when you think about it. It’s just … I don’t know. I kind of think Idaho could be better.”
“But you feel grateful to Guy and the committee.”
“Why not?” Dago said. “We’d still be in there if it hadn’t been for them.” He shrugged, a handsome, almost a beautiful boy, and a thoughtful one, with feelings. His laugh was troubled. “Who do you say no to?” he said, and, twisting toward Luz, said something in Spanish or pachucana.
“No secrets,” I said.
“It’s just a saying. El que al cielo escupe a la cara le cae.”
“You know I don’t speak Spanish.”
“You spit at the sky, you get it back in the face,” Luz said.
I was very thick in the head, and dry from breathing through my mouth. Cautiously, feeling that I had missed something, I said, “Who’s been spitting at the sky?”
“Who hasn’t?” Dago said. “Who wouldn’t be?” As he pinched out his cigarette and dropped it in his cuff, here came Pepe and Angelina. She was three steps ahead of his easy slouch. They did not look like reconciled lovers; they looked like fighters going to their corners at the bell.
The sight of them curdled me. It was one thing to talk to a pair of nice youngsters like Dago and Luz, and another to deal with that pair. I felt what a mating theirs would be, corrupt seedbed and poisoned seed and a hatch of snakes and dragons, and I was suddenly irritated at Dago and Luz for even associating with such obvious bad ones. I was struggling for air like an asthmatic, and in no mood for Spanish riddles. I didn’t care whether Dago himself or Mazur or Pepe or Angelina or Debbie or the whole bunch of them had been spitting at the sky. It was possible even Carol had been. It was more than possible that she ought to change her profession. My head ached, I needed air, and I had already hit the inhaler so many times that I could expect not to sleep.
Debbie and Carol came in from the hall. Debbie had combed her hair and tucked herself in, but she looked sulky. She carried a tray of cheese and crackers; Carol had a percolator that she plugged into a floor plug by the coffee table.
“Well,” I said sourly as we walked aside. “What cheer?”
“Tears,” Carol said. “Furies. He treats her like a child or a plaything. She’s a muff dog who wants to retrieve ducks or trail bears. Nothing new for her, it just blew up tonight. She says he won’t let her be a person.”
“Is being a person such a delight?”
“Poor Charlie. Do you feel awful?”
“Yes.”
“Could you stand it just a few more minutes? I’d like to get some coffee into the kids before they take off. Wouldn’t you like some?”
“My head’s too stuffed.”
“Just five minutes,” she said. “How has it been in here?”
“All right. Pressure on Dago to take their warehouse job and be an exhibit.”
“Is he going to?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope not. Debbie’s absolutely right about that part of it.”
“They want him here,” I said. “Obviously he’s the one they could make the most use of. Chuey’s a featherbrain, and Pepe is a bad one on sight.”
Silent, lips pursed, she stood looking back at them all. It struck me how complex a roomful of people could get, some manipulating others, some feeling responsibility to others, or to causes, or programs, or ideas, or the gang, or the party line, or something else. It was like a ship’s deck full of lines and rigging all entangling your feet, and I wanted out. I said, “You start everybody to laughing merrily, and bring the party to a climax, and get some coffee down your kids. I’m going outside for some oxygen.”
The night air was marvelously cool and damp, and I opened my mouth and took it in by the lungful. On both sides, down toward Franklin and up toward Los Feliz, went the hum and hush and whisper of traffic. Searchlights scissored around overhead, racing across the belly of the overcast. It seemed very peaceful; nobody was mad at anybody, or using anybody, or getting even with anybody. But my nose was still impenetrably shut, and a sharp pain stabbed me between the eyes as I stepped down onto the lawn.
The spotlight glared into the eucalyptus tree, the only color or decoration in the yard. There were no flower beds. The brilliant tree was posed there in a sweep of grass, its bloodred blossoms bedded in leaves lighted almost white against black holes of shadow. A true, calculated Mazur effect. I walked toward the corner of the solarium, not lighted itself but glowing with diffused light from the living room and shadowy with the hothouse jungle inside. Dew showered up from my toes, and looking back, I saw my own dark tracks. Wet feet would be fine for my cold. But the air was so pleasant and the lawn so soft underfoot that I went on. I was near the corner of the solarium when I saw the movement inside.
I didn’t think; I simply stepped into the angle between house and glass porch, where it was darkest. As if a tube had been pushed through my head, I got a sudden, merciful draft of air. In the same instant I recognized the shadows inside. They were dancing—no, wrestling. She was pushing and beating at him as he bent her backward. Their heads darted and feinted like the heads of snakes. He was trying to kiss her.
She twisted sideways and wrenched away from him. They were no more than ten feet from me, and through the glass I heard him laugh. “You jealous bitch,” he said, and brought his face close again. Her fingers flew at his face, but he caught one wrist, then the other, and got them into one hand and held them behind her while he hunted down her mouth again. Flattened back against the wall, my cleared head now sour with smog, I felt ugly spying on them, but I did not dare move now and reveal myself. Through the glass I heard her grunt as she tried to free her hands. Then one hand flashed up, and he jerked his head aside with an exclamation. They wrestled again; again he captured her wrists. He forced his face down to hers. Beyond them I saw Dago Aguirre’s silhouette move into the doorway from the living room, at the head of the steps, and pause, looking down, with a coffee cup half raised to its lips.
He couldn’t have missed seeing what I saw. Pepe, still with Angelina’s wrists locked in his left hand, straightened backward and sideward from his conquering kiss, and as he did so, he knocked the girl down with one quick hooking blow.
I ran tiptoe across the wet grass to the door. There I waited a few breaths, wiping my wet shoes up the backs of my trousers and listening. A frantic uproar was going on inside. With everyone’s attention focused on that, I turned the knob and slipped in.
Carol ran past down the hall without even seeing me. From the solarium Angelina’s screaming came in raw bursts as mindless as a fire siren. When I stepped into the living room, there was a confused, vehement cluster at the top of the solarium steps. Debbie and Welling each held one of Angelina’s arms; without them she would have fallen on her face. The floor all around her was splashed with blood, there was blood on her clothes and on the clothes of those who held her. Borne on by Angelina’s weight, Debbie slipped in blood and nearly went down. The girl was bleeding incredibly, as if her throat had been cut.
Then Carol came running with towels in her hands, and Mazur and Nemerov moved in to help hold Angelina while Carol and Debbie worked with towels on her face, blotting the steady screaming and letting it burst out again and then blotting it once more. When they straightened her under the light, trying to see where she was hurt, I had a glimpse of the foolish, disarranged pompadour, the artificial little pachuca face smeared with blood and tears, and the quick, welling gash. Pepe had split her lips from her nose to the point of her chin.
Debbie was crying, “Stand up, Angelina, we can’t … Don’t cry, honey, you’ll make it worse. Guy, call a doctor, we can’t stop it, it just keeps coming!”
They led Angelina to the couch and got her lying down. Debbie and Carol were kneeling with their towels at her head. Mazur stood back, gnawing his lip, thinking.
“Guy,” Debbie screamed at him, “do something, for God’s sake! Call Schwartz!”
“No,” Mazur said. “No doctor. Not here. We’ll take her to the clinic. But we’ve got another problem.”
“Oh, how can you talk about other problems? She’s bleeding to death!”
“Not from a cut lip,” Mazur said. He looked around at the room, spattered with blood—blood on Debbie and Carol, blood on the couch, blood all over Angelina, and pressed his lips together. “What happened?” he said. “Who saw it?”
But nobody had anything to say. The Mexican kids, all but Pepe, were in a tight, still group. Pepe stood against the wall, a red scratch across his cheekbone, his hands behind him. For a couple of seconds he stood the weight of all the eyes on him; then he shrugged the faintest, iciest little shrug. “She fell down.”
Angelina sat up, tearing at the towels pressed against her face. In an instant her chin was wet with blood, she spattered blood as she screamed, “He hit me! Pepe hit me!”
Carol and Debbie fought her back down and muffled her in towels. We were all still watching Pepe, who hung there still as a gun on a wall. One shoulder moved. “Anda pedo,” he said. “She’s crazy drunk. She don’t know what she’s doing. She fell down and hit her face on the steps.”
Carol said, bitterly for her, “It doesn’t upset you much that your girl’s hurt.”
“I didn’t make her fall down,” Pepe said.
“But you saw her fall?” Mazur said.
“I didn’t say that. I’m coming up the steps ahead of her, and I hear her stumble, and look back, and there she is on the steps.”
Unexpectedly, not knowing I was going to get into it until the words were out of my mouth, I said, “What’s that scratch on your cheek?”
His hand started up—his right—and then he switched and brought out the left. His fingers touched the scratch, and they knew exactly where to find it. He put his hand back behind him and shrugged.
“Let’s see your right hand.”
He made no move to show it. His eyes said that he would have killed me as casually as he would have wrung a chicken’s neck.
“Are you scared to?”
“What are you getting at?” Mazur said. “What makes you think he’s lying? It was dark, the girl was high. She could have tripped.”
“Could have, but didn’t. I still want to see his hand.”
“What would that show you?”
“Maybe the marks of her teeth.”
“You think he did hit her.”
“I know damned well he hit her. I saw him.”
Now I was the one they were all looking at. “How?” Guy said. “From where?”
“Through the window. I was outside.”
Mazur thought that over, with all its implications, while Angelina sobbed and hiccuped and moaned and was blotted with towels. “We’ve got to think about this,” Mazur said.
“You can’t!” Debbie cried, across Angelina’s bloody length. “We’ve got to get this girl to a doctor!”
“In a minute,” Mazur said. To me he said, “Suppose you’re right.”
“Suppose Angelina and I are right.”
“Yes. But it’s still your word against his.”
“Thanks for your confidence,” I said. I went into the hall and dug the Rolleiflex out of the bag and without flash, without anything but the oval blobs of Mazur’s theatrical houselights, I went bang, bang, bang: the still Mexican kids; Pepe with his back to the wall; the committee leaning and crouched over Angelina, portraits of complicity.
“Nah, nah, nah!” Nemerov was saying. The tic jumped like a trapped insect in his eyelid.
Mazur said, “What was that for, Charlie?”
“Evidence, maybe.”
“You want to turn Pepe in?”
“I don’t want him to get away with it.”
“What good would it do?” Mazur said. “What evidence have you got? Your word and Angelina’s against his. Maybe that’s enough to put him back in jail. Then what? Then what happens to our program, and the cause of justice, and all the rest? What happens to those kids over there?”
Those kids over there had turned to stone. Innocent as they were, they could not have been picked out in a lineup, by the best psychologist in America, as the innocent ones. They wore the same expressionlessness as Pepe wore. I looked for some acknowledgment or help in Dago’s face and found nothing. His eyes were as flat as dry stones.
“We haven’t got a lot of time,” Mazur said. “We’ve got to get Angie to the clinic. It wouldn’t do to bring a doctor here; he’d look around and deduce a massacre; he’d have to report to the cops. Let’s think long-range. We’re trying to right social injustice. We’re all instruments in a cause. Think what else you’ll do if you try to put Pepe back in jail.”
I looked at Carol, crouched by the sofa with bloody towels in her hands. I listened to Angelina’s diminishing moans and sobs. I looked at Pepe, tight-wound and ready to spring from his nonchalance against the wall. I looked at Chuey, foolish and stony, and at Lupe, beautiful and stony, and at Luz, dark and Indian and stony, and at Dago, the best of this whole bunch, stony.
“What if there’s other evidence?” I said. “When I was outside there, I saw someone else through the window, someone at the head of the stairs. He saw it as plain as I did.”
“Who?” Mazur said.
“I couldn’t quite tell.”
He gave a harsh bark of justified skepticism.
“Let’s give whoever it was a chance to say.”
I looked straight at Dago, and he looked straight back at me. We had an extraordinary exchange that included his past and present and future, his commitments, his hopes, most of all his solidarity with whatever had always been his enemy.
“I was there,” he said. “I saw it. She fell down.”
For another instant our eyes held. I could imagine what Carol was seeing and thinking, for she was the one truly committed to these kids, but I could not look at her. I looked only at Dago, the deer-eyed one, the one with a mother and sisters, the one whose father had been run over by a potato digger, the one who except for the Red Car Committee might still be in San Quentin and who except for the Red Car Committee might still have a chance at Idaho and a life. I could read his future now without tarot cards: Sometime some of his crowd would stick up a truckload of cigarettes or rob a liquor store; he would be involved, or an accomplice, or innocent; everybody would go back to San Quentin; sometime—a year, two years, three—we would hear on the radio that a prisoner had knifed a guard or another prisoner, and we would hear the name, Pepe Garcia, and hear the name of Dago Aguirre, a friend of the accused, who refused to talk. He would be blotted out as Angelina was blotted out, but not by compassionate helpers.
“O.K., that settles it,” I said. “Let’s get Angie to the clinic. Let’s clean up after ourselves.”
I opened the Rollei and took out the exposed film and found a wastebasket for it. Carol’s big, troubled eyes met mine briefly as she and Debbie eased Angelina up off the sofa. But what I was most interested in, what held me, was Dago’s face, still in a tight protective group with his friends. He pursed his lips; his stoniness dissolved into an ironic, fatalistic, rueful half-smile. He tipped his head back and made a motion of spitting upward.
