Ask The Dust (20 page)

Was the contract coming via air mail? I paced the floor those next days. I read the papers. Air mail was too impractical, too dangerous. Down with the air mail.

Every day planes

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were falling, covering the earth with wreckage, killing pilots: it was too damned unsafe, a pioneering venture, and where the hell was my contract? I called the post office. How were flying conditions over the Sierras? Good. All planes accounted for? Good. No wrecks? Then where was my contract? I spent a long time practising my signature. I decided to use my middle name, the whole thing Arturo Dominic Bandini, A. D. Bandini, Arturo D. Bandini, A. Dominic Bandini.

The contract came Monday morning, first class mail. With it was a cheque for five hundred dollars. My God, five hundred dollars! I was one of the Morgans. I could retire for life.

War in Europe, a speech by Hitler, trouble in Poland, these were the topics of the day. What piffle! You warmongers, you old folks in the lobby of the Alta Loma Hotel, here is the news, here: this little paper with all the fancy legal writing, my book! To hell with that Hitler, this is more important than Hitler, this is about my book. It won't shake the world, it won't kill a soul, it won't fire a gun, ah, but you'll remember it to the day you die, you'll lie there breathing your last, and you'll smile as you remember the book. The story of Vera Rivken, a slice out of life.

They weren't interested. They preferred the war in Europe, the funny pictures, and Louella Parsons, the tragic people, the poor people. I just sat in that hotel lobby and shook my head sadly.

Someone had to know, and that was Camilla. For three weeks I had not seen her, not since the marijuana on Temple Street. But she was not at the saloon.

Another girl had her place. I asked for Camilla. The other girl wouldn't talk.

Suddenly the Columbia Buffet was like a tomb. I asked the fat bartender.

Camilla had not been there for two weeks. Was

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she fired? He couldn't say. Was she sick? He didn't know. He wouldn't talk either.

I could afford a taxicab. I could afford twenty cabs, riding them day and night. I took one cab and rode to Camilla's place on Temple Street. I knocked on her door and got no answer. I tried the door. It opened, darkness inside, and I switched on the light. She lay there in the Murphy bed. Her face was the face of an old rose pressed and dried in a book, yellowish, with only the eyes to prove there was life in it. The room stank. The blinds were down, the door opened with difficulty until I kicked away the rug against the crack. She gasped when she saw me. She was happy to see me. 'Arturo,' she said. 'Oh, Arturo!'

I didn't speak of the book or the contract. Who cares about a novel, another goddamn novel? That sting in my eyes, it was for her, it was my eyes remembering a wild lean girl running in the moonlight on the beach, a beautiful girl who danced with a beertray in her round arms. She lay there now, broken, brown cigarette butts overflowing a saucer beside her. She had quit. She wanted to die. Those were her words. 'I don't

care,' she said.

'You gotta eat,' I said, because her face was only a skull with yellow skin stretched tightly over it. I sat on the bed and held her fingers, conscious of bones, surprised that they were such small bones, she who had been so straight and round and tall. 'You're hungry,' I said. But she didn't want food. 'Eat anyway,' I said.

I went out and started buying. It was a few doors down the street, a small grocery store. I ordered whole sections of the place. Gimme all of those, and all of these, gimme this and gimme that. Milk, bread, canned juices, fruit, butter, vegetables, meat, potatoes. It took three trips to carry it all ASK THE DUST

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up to her place. When it was all piled there in the kitchen I looked at the stuff and scratched my head, wondering what to feed her.

'I don't want anything,' she said.

Milk. I washed a glass and poured it full. She sat up, her pink nightgown torn at the shoulder, ripping all the more as she moved to sit up. She held her nose and drank it, three swallows, and she gasped and lay back, horrified, nauseated.

'Fruit juice,' I said. 'Grape juice. It's sweeter, tastes better.' I opened a bottle, poured a glassful, and held it out to her. She gulped it down, lay back and panted. Then she put her head over the side of the bed and vomited. I cleaned it up. I cleaned the apartment. I washed the dishes and scrubbed the sink. I washed her face. I hurried downstairs, grabbed a cab, and rode all over town looking for a place to buy her a clean nightgown. I bought some candy too, and a stack of picture magazines,
Look, Pic, See, Sic, Sac, Whack,
and all of them

— something to distract her, to put her at ease.

When I got back the door was locked. I knew what that meant. I hammered it with my fists and kicked it with my heels. The din filled the whole building. The doors of other apartments opened in the hall, and heads came out. From downstairs a woman came in an old bathrobe. She was the landlady; I could spot a landlady instantly. She stood at the head of the stairs, afraid to come closer.

'What do you want?' she said.

'It's locked,' I said. 'I have to get inside.'

'You leave that girl alone,' she said. 'I know your kind. You leave that poor girl alone or I'll call the police.'

'I'm her friend,' I said.

From inside came the elated, hysterical laughter of Camilla, 178

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the giddy shriek of denial. 'He's not my friend! I don't want him around!' Then her laughter once more, high and frightened and birdlike, trapped in the room.

The atmosphere was nasty, ominous. Two men in shirt sleeves appeared at the other end of the hall. The big one with a cigar hitched up his pants and said,

'Let's throw the guy out of here.' I started moving then, retreating from them walking fast, past the despicable sneer of the landlady and down the stairs to the lower hall. Once in the street I started running. On the corner of Broadway and Temple I saw a cab parked. I got in and told the driver to just keep moving.

No, it was none of my business. But I could remember, the black cluster of hair, the wild depth of her eyes, the jolt in the pit of my stomach in the first days I knew her. I stayed away from the place for two days, and then I couldn't bear it; I wanted to help her. I wanted to get her away from that curtained trap, send her somewhere to the south, down by the sea. I could do it. I had a pile of money. I thought of Sammy, but he loathed her too deeply. If she could only get out of town, that would help a lot. I decided to try once more.

It was about noon. It was very hot, too hot in the hotel room. It was the heat that made me do it, the sticky ennui, the dust over the earth, the hot blasts from the Mojave. I went to the rear of the Temple Street apartment. There was a wooden stairway leading to the second floor. On such a day as this, her door would be open, to cool the place by cross ventilation from the window.

I was right. The door was open, but she was not there. Her stuff was piled in the middle of the room, boxes and suitcases with garments squirming from them.

The bed was down, the naked mattress showing the sheets gone. The place was stripped of life. Then I caught the odour of disinfectant.

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The room had been fumigated. I took the stairs three at a time to the landlady's door.

'You!' she said, opening the door. 'You!' and she slammed it shut. I stood outside and pleaded with her. 'I'm her friend,' I said. 'I swear to God. I want to help her. You got to believe me.'

'Go away or I'll call the police.'

'She was sick,' I said. 'She needed help. I want to do something for her. You've got to believe me.'

The door opened. The woman stood looking straight into my eyes. She was of medium height, stout, her face hardened and without emotion. She said: 'Come in.'

I stepped into a drab room, ornate and weird, cluttered with fantastic gadgets, a piano littered with heavy photographs, wild-coloured shawls, fancy lamps and vases. She asked me to sit down, but I didn't.

'That girl's gone,' she said. 'She's gone crazy. I had to do it.'

'Where is she? What happened?'

'I had to do it. She was a nice girl too.'

She had been forced to call the police — that was her story. That had happened the night after I was there. Camilla had gone wild, throwing dishes, dumping furniture out of the window, screaming and kicking the walls, slashing the curtains with a knife. The landlady had called the police. The police had come, broken down the door, and seized her. But the police had refused to take her away. They had held her, quieted her, until an ambulance arrived. Wailing and struggling, she had been led away. That was all, except that Camilla owed three weeks' rent and had done irreparable damage to the furniture and apartment.

The landlady mentioned a figure, and I paid her the money. She handed 180 JOHN FANTE

me a receipt and smiled her greasy hypocrisy. 'I knew you were a good boy,'

she said. 'I knew it from the moment I first laid eyes on you. But you just can't trust strangers in

this town.'

I took the street car to the County Hospital. The nurse in the reception room checked a card file when I mentioned the name of Camilla Lopez. 'She's here,'

the nurse said. 'But she can't have visitors.' 'How is she?' 'I can't answer that.'

'When can I see her?'

Visiting day was Wednesday. I had to wait four more days. I walked out of the huge hospital and around the grounds. I looked up at the windows and wandered through the grounds. Then I took the street car back to Hill Street and Bunker Hill. Four days to wait. I exhausted them playing pin games and slot machines. Luck was against me. I lost
a
lot of money, but I killed a lot of time.

Tuesday afternoon I walked downtown and started buying things for Camilla. I bought a portable radio, a box of candy, a dressing gown, and a lot of face creams and such things. Then I went to a flower shop and ordered two dozen camellias. I was loaded down when I got to the hospital Wednesday afternoon.

The camellias had wilted overnight because I didn't think about putting them in water. Sweat poured from my face as I climbed the hospital steps. I knew my freckles were in bloom, I could almost feel them popping out of my face.

The same nurse was at the reception desk. I unloaded the gifts into a chair and asked to see Camilla Lopez. The nurse checked the file card. 'Miss Lopez isn't here anymore,' she said. 'She's been transferred.' I was so hot and so tired.

'Where is she?' I said. I groaned when she said she couldn't answer ASK THE DUST

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that. 'I'm her friend,' I told the nurse. 'I want to help her.'

Tm sorry,' the nurse said.

'Who'll tell me?'

Yes, who'll tell me? I went all over the hospital, up one floor and down the other.

I saw doctors and assistant doctors, I saw nurses, and assistant nurses, I waited in lobbies and halls, but nobody would tell me anything. They all reached for the little card file, and they all said the same thing: she had been transferred.

But she wasn't dead. They all denied that, coming quickly to the point; no, she wasn't dead: they had taken her elsewhere. It was useless. I walked out the front door and into the blinding sunlight to the street car line. Boarding the car, I remembered the gifts. They were back there somewhere; I couldn't even remember which waiting room. I didn't care. Disconsolate, I rode back to Bunker Hill.

If she had been transferred, it meant another State or County institution, because she had no money. Money. I had the money. I had three pocketfuls of money, and more at home in my other pants. I could get it all together and bring it to them, but they wouldn't even tell me what had happened to her. What was money for? I was going to spend it anyway, and those halls, those etherized halls, those low-voiced enigmatic doctors, those quiet, reticent nurses, they baffled me. I got off the street car in a daze. Halfway up the stairs of Bunker Hill I sat down in a doorway and looked down at the city below me in the nebulous, dusty haze of the late afternoon. The heat rose out of the haze and my nostrils breathed it. Over the city spread a white murkiness like fog. But it was not the fog: it was the desert heat, the great blasts from the Mojave and Santa Ana, the pale white fingers of the wasteland, ever reaching out to claim its captured child.

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The next day I found out what they had done to Camilla. From a drugstore downtown I called long distance and got the switchboard at County Institute for the Insane at Del Maria. I asked the switchboard girl for the name of the doctor in charge there. 'Doctor Danielson,' she said. 'Give me his office.'

She plugged the board and another woman's voice came through the wire. 'Dr Danielson's office.'

'This is Dr Jones,' I said. 'Let me speak to Dr Danielson. This is urgent.'

'One moment please.' Then a man's voice. 'Danielson speaking." 'Hello, Doctor,'

I said. 'This is Dr Jones, Edmond Jones, Los Angeles. You have a transfer there from the County Hospital, a Miss Camilla Lopez. How is she?'

'We can't say,' Danielson said. 'She's still under observation. Did you say Edmond Jones?'

I hung up. At least I knew where she was. Knowing that was one thing; trying to see her was another. It was out of the question. I talked to people who knew.

You had to be a relative of an inmate, and you had to prove it. You had to write for an appointment, and you came after they had investigated. You couldn't write the inmates a letter, and you couldn't send gifts. I didn't go out to Del Maria. I was satisfied that I had done my best. She was insane, and it was none of my business. Besides, she loved Sammy.

The days passed, the winter rains began. Late October, and the proofs of my book arrived. I bought a car, a 1929 Ford. It had no top, but it sped like the wind, and with the coming of dry days I took long rides along the blue coastline, up to Ventura, up to Santa Barbara, down to San Clemente, down to San Diego, following the white line of the