Ask The Dust (15 page)

'You're going with me, Mexican.'

I seized her wrist.

'Let go!' she said. 'Get your filthy hands off!'

'You're going with me.'

Sammy leaned over. 'Maybe she doesn't feel like it, kid.' I had her with my right hand. I raised my left fist and shoved it against Sammy's face. 'Listen,' I said. 'I don't like you. So keep that lousy trap shut.'

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'Be sensible,' he said. 'What for you want to get all burned up about a dame?'

'She's going with me.'

'I'm
not
going with you!'

She tried to pass. I grabbed her arms and flung her like a dancer. She went spinning across the lot, but she did not fall. She screamed, charged me. I caught her in my arms and pinned her elbows down. She kicked and tried to scratch my legs. Sammy watched with disgust. Sure I was disgusting, but that was my affair. She cried and fought, but she was helpless, her legs dangling, her arms held tight. Then she tired a little, and I released her. She straightened her dress, her teeth chattering her hatred.

'You're going with me,' I said.

Sammy got out of the car.

'This is terrible,1 he said. He took Camilla's arm and led her towards the street.

'Let's get out of here.'

I watched them go. He was right. Bandini, the idiot, the dog, the skunk, the fool.

But I couldn't help it. I looked at the car certificate and found her address. It was a place near 24th and Alameda. I couldn't help it. I walked to Hill Street and got aboard an Alameda trolley. This interested me. A new side to my character, the bestial, the darkness, the unplumbed depth of a new Bandini. But after a few blocks the mood evaporated. I got off the car near the freight yards. Bunker Hill was two miles away, but I walked back. When I got home I said I was through with Camilla Lopez forever. And you'll regret it, you little fool, because I'm going to be famous. I sat before my typewriter and worked most of the night.

I worked hard. It was supposed to be autumn, but I couldn't tell the difference.

We had sun every day, blue skies every

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night. Sometimes there was fog. I was eating fruit again. The Japanese gave me credit and I had the pick of their stalls. Bananas, oranges, pears, plums.

Once in a while I ate celery. I had a full can of tobacco and a new pipe. There wasn't any coffee, but I didn't mind. Then my new story hit the magazine stands.

The Long Lost Hills!
It was not as exciting as
The Little Dog Laughed.
I scarcely looked at the free copy Hackmuth sent me. This pleased me nevertheless.

Some day I would have so many stories written I wouldn't remember where they appeared. 'Hi there, Bandini! Nice story you had in
The Atlantic Monthly
this month.' Bandini puzzled. 'Did I have one in the
Atlantic?
Well, well.'

Hellfrick the meat-eater, the man who never paid his just debts. So much I had lent him during that lush period, but now that I was poor again he tried to barter with me. An old raincoat, a pair of slippers, a box of fancy soap - these he offered me for payment. I refused them. 'My God, Hellfrick. I need money, not secondhand goods.' His meat craze had got out of hand. All day I heard him frying cheap steaks, the odour creeping under my door. It gave me a mad desire for meat. I would go to Hellfrick. 'Hellfrick,' I would say. 'How about sharing that steak with me?' The steak would be so large it filled the skillet. But Hellfrick would lie brazenly. 'I haven't had a thing for two days.' I would call him violent names, soon I lost all respect for him. He would shake his red, bloated face, big eyes staring pitifully. But he never offered me so much as the scraps from his plate. Day after day I worked, writhing from the tantalizing odour of fried pork chops, grilled steaks, fried steaks, breaded steaks, liver and onions, and all manner of meats.

One day his craze for meat was gone, and the craze for gin returned. He was steadily drunk for two nights. I could hear

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him stumbling about, kicking bottles and talking to himself. Then he went away.

He was gone another night. When he returned, his pension cheque was spent, and he had somehow somewhere, he did not remember it, bought a car. We went behind the hotel and looked at this car. It was a huge Packard more than twenty years old. It stood there like a hearse, the tyres worn, the cheap black paint bubbling in the hot sun. Somebody down on Main Street had sold it to him.

Now he was broke, with a big Packard on his hands.

'You want to buy it?' he said.

'Hell, no.'

He was dejected, his head bursting from a hangover.

That night he walked into my room. He sat on the bed, his long arms dangling to the floor. He was homesick for the middle-west. He talked of rabbit-hunting, of fishing, of the good old days when he was a kid. Then he began on the subject of meat. 'How would you like a big thick steak?' he said, his lips loose. He opened two ringers. 'Thick as that. Broiled. Lots of butter over it. Burned just enough to give it a tang. How would you like it?'

'I'd love it.'

He got up.

'Then come on, and we'll get one.'

'You got money?'

'We don't need any money. I'm hungry.'

I grabbed my sweater and followed him down the hall to the alley. He got into his car. I hesitated. 'Where you going, Hellfrick?'

'Come on,' he said. 'Leave it to me.'

I got in beside him.

'No trouble,' I said.

'Trouble!' he sneered. 'I tell you I know where to get us a steak.'

130

JOHN FANTE

We drove in moonlight out Wilshire to Highland, then out Highland over Cahuenga Pass. On the other side lay the flat plain of the San Fernando Valley.

We found a lonely road off the pavement and followed it through tall eucalyptus trees to scattered farmhouses and pasture lands. After a mile the road ended.

Barbed wire and fence posts appeared in the glare of headlights. Hellfrick laboriously turned the car around, faced it towards the pavement from which we had detoured. He got out of the front seat, opened the rear door, and fumbled with car tools under the rear cushion.

I leaned over and watched him.

'What's up, Hellfrick?'

He stood up, a jackhammer in his hand.

'You wait here.'

He stopped under a loop in the barbed wire and crossed the pasture. A hundred yards away a barn loomed in the moonlight. Then I knew what he was after. I jumped out of the car and called to him. He shushed me angrily. I watched him tiptoe towards the barn door. I cursed him and waited tensely. In a little while I heard the mooing of a cow. It was a piteous cry. Then I heard a thud and a scuffle of hoofs. Out of the barn door came Hellfrick. Across his shoulder lay a dark mass, weighing him down. Behind him, mooing continually, a cow followed. Hellfrick tried to run, but the dark mass beat him down to a fast walk.

Still the cow pursued, pushing her nose into his back. He turned around, kicked wildly. The cow stopped, looked towards the barn, and mooed again.

'You fool, Hellfrick. You goddamn fool!'

'Help me,' he said.

I raised the loose barbed wire to a width that would permit him and his burden to pass under. It was a calf, blood spurting

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from a gash between the ears. The calf's eyes were wide open. I could see the moon reflected in them. It was coldblooded murder. I was sick and horrified. My stomach twisted when Hellfrick dumped the calf into the back seat. I heard the body thump, and then the head. I was sick, very sick. It was plain murder.

All the way home Hellfrick was exultant, but the steering wheel was sticky with blood, and once or twice I thought I heard the calf kicking in the back seat. I held my face in my hands and tried to forget the melancholy call of the calf's mother, the sweet face of the dead calf. Hellfrick drove very fast. On Beverly we shot by a black car moving slowly. It was a police cruiser. I gritted my teeth and waited for the worst. But the police did not follow us. I was too sick to be relieved. One thing was certain: Hellfrick was a murderer, he and I were through. On Bunker Hill we turned down our alley and pulled up at the parking space adjacent the hotel wall. Hellfrick got out.

'Now I'm going to give you a lesson in butchering.'

'You are like hell,' I said.

I acted as lookout for him as he wrapped the calf's head in newspapers, slung it over his shoulder, and hurried down the dim hallway to his room. I spread newspapers over his dirty floor, and he lowered the calf upon them. He grinned at his bloody trousers and his bloody shirt, his bloody arms.

I looked down at the poor calf. Its hide was spotted black and white and it had the most delicate ankles. From the slightly open mouth there appeared a pink tongue. I closed my eyes and ran out Hellfrick's room and threw myself on the floor in my room. I lay there and shuddered, thinking of the old cow alone in the field in the moonlight, old cow mooing for her calf. Murder! Hellfrick and I were through.

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JOHN FANTE

He didn't have to pay back the debt. It was blood money -not for me.

After that night I was very cold towards Hellfrick. I never visited his room again.

A couple of times I recognized his knock, but I kept the door bolted so he couldn't barge in. Meeting in the hall, we merely grunted. He owed me almost three dollars, but I never did collect it.

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Good news from Hackmuth. Another magazine wanted
The Long Lost Hills
in digest form. A hundred dollars. I was rich again. A time for amends, for righting the past. I sent my mother five dollars. I cried when she sent me a letter of thanks. The tears rolled down my eyes as I quickly replied. And sent five more. I was pleased with myself. I had a few good qualities. I could see them, my biographers, talking to my mother, a very old lady in a wheel chair: he was a good son, my Arturo, a good provider.

Arturo Bandini, the novelist. Income of his own, made it writing short stories.

Writing a book now. Tremendous book. Advance notices terrific. Remarkable prose. Nothing like it since Joyce. Standing before Hackmuth's picture, I read the work of each day. I spent whole hours writing a dedication: To J. C.

Hackmuth, for discovering me. To J. C. Hackmuth, in admiration. To Hackmuth, a man of genius. I could see them, those New York critics, crowding Hackmuth at his club. You certainly found a winner in that Bandini kid on the coast. A smile from Hackmuth, his eyes twinkling.

Six weeks, a few sweet hours every day, three and four and sometimes five delicious hours, with the pages piling up and all other desires asleep. I felt like a ghost walking the earth, a lover of man and beast alike, and wonderful waves of tenderness flooded me when I talked to people and mingled ASK THE DUST

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with them in the streets. God Almighty, dear God, good to me, gave me a sweet tongue, and these sad and lonely folk will hear me and they shall be happy.

Thus the days passed. Dreamy, luminous days, and sometimes such great quiet joy came to me that I would turn out my lights and cry, and a strange desire to die would come to me.

Thus Bandini, writing a novel.

One night I answered a knock on my door, and there she stood.

'Camilla!'

She came in and sat down on the bed, something under her arm, a bundle of papers. She looked at my room: so this was where I lived. She had wondered about the place I lived. She got up and walked around, peering out of the window, walking around the room, beautiful girl, tall Camilla, warm dark hair, and I stood and watched her. But why had she come? She felt my question, and she sat on the bed and smiled at me.

'Arturo,' she said. 'Why do we fight all the time?'

I didn't know. I said something about temperaments, but she shook her head and crossed her knees, and a sense of her fine thighs being lifted lay heavily in my mind, thick suffocating sensation, warm lush desire to take them in my hands. Every move she made, the soft turn of her neck, the large breasts swelling under the smock, her fine hands upon the bed, the fingers spread out, these things disturbed me, a sweet painful heaviness dragging me into stupor.

Then the sound of her voice, restrained, hinting of mockery, a voice that talked to my blood and bones. I remembered the peace of those past weeks, it seemed so unreal, it had been a hypnotism of my own creation, because this was being alive, this looking into the black

136 JOHN FANTE

eyes of Camilla, matching her scorn with hope and a brazen gloating.

She had come for something else beside a mere visit. Then I found out what it was. 'You remember Sammy?' Of course.

'You didn't like him.' 'He was alright.'

'He's good, Arturo. You'd like him if you knew him better.'

'I suppose.' 'He liked you.'

I doubted that, after the scuffle in the parking lot. I remembered certain things about her relationship with Sammy, her smiles for him during work, her concern the night we took him home. 'You love that guy, don't you?' 'Not exactly.'

She took her eyes off my face and let them travel around the room. 'Yes you do.'

All at once I loathed her, because she had hurt me. This girl! She had torn up my sonnet by Dowson, she had shown my telegram to everybody in the Columbia Buffet. She had made a fool of me at the beach. She suspected my virility, and her suspicion was the same as the scorn in her eyes. I watched her face and lips and thought how it would be a pleasure to strike her, send my fist with all force against her nose and lips.

She spoke of Sammy again. Sammy had had all the rotten breaks in life. He might have been somebody, except that his health had always been poor.

'What's the matter with him?'

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'T. B.,' she said.

'Tough.'

'He won't live long.'

I didn't give a damn.

'We all have to die some day.'

I thought of throwing her out, saying to her: if you've come here to talk about that guy, you can get the hell out because I'm not interested. I thought that would be delightful: order her out, she so wonderfully beautiful in her own way, and forced to leave because I ordered her out.