Ask The Dust (22 page)

When I came downstairs, Camilla had taken Willie for a walk along the shore. I stood at the back door and watched them, a quarter of a mile away. I could see Camilla bent over, clapping her hands, and then running, with Willie tumbling after her. But I couldn't actually see Willie, he was so small and he blended so perfectly with the white sand. I went inside.

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JOHN FANTE

On the kitchen table lay Camilla's purse. I opened it, dumped the contents on the table. Two Prince Albert cans of marijuana fell out. I emptied them into the toilet, and threw the cans into

the trash box.

Then I went out and sat on the porch steps in the warm sun, watching Camilla and the dog as they made their way back to the house. It was about two o'clock.

I had to go back to Los Angeles, pack my stuff, and check out of the hotel. It would take five hours. I gave Camilla money to buy food and the house things we needed. When I left she was lying on her back, her face to the sun. Curled up on her stomach was Willie, sound asleep. I shouted goodbye, let the clutch out, and swung into the main coast highway.

On the way back, loaded down with typewriter, books, and suitcases, I had a flat tyre. Darkness came quickly. It was almost nine o'clock when I pulled into the yard of the beach house. The lights were out. I opened the front door with my key and shouted her name. There was no answer, I turned on all the lights and searched every room, every closet. She was gone. There was no sign of her, or of Willie. I unloaded my things. Perhaps she had taken the dog for another walk. But I was deceiving myself. She was gone. By midnight I doubted that she would return, and by one o'clock I was convinced she wouldn't. I looked again for some note, some message. There was no trace of her. It was as though she had not so much as set foot in that house.

I decided to stay on. The rent was paid for a month, and I wanted to try the room upstairs. That night I slept there, but the next morning I began to hate the place. With her there it was part of a dream; without her, it was a house. I packed my things into the rumble seat and drove back to Los ASK THE DUST

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Angeles. When I got back to the hotel, someone had taken my old room during the night. Everything was awry now. I took another room on the main floor, but I didn't like it. Everything was going to pieces. The new room was so strange, so cold, without one memory. When I looked out the window the ground was twenty feet away. No more climbing out the window, no more pebbles against the glass. I set my typewriter in one place and then another. It didn't seem to fit anywhere. Something was wrong, everything was wrong.

I went for a walk through the streets. My God, here I was again, roaming the town. I looked at the faces around me and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colours draining fast. I had to get away from that town.

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My book came out a week later. For a while it was fun. I could walk into department stores and see it among thousands of others, my book, my words, my name, the reason why I was alive. But it was not the kind of fun I got from seeing
The Little Dog Laughed
in Hackmuth's magazine.

That was all gone too. And no word from Camilla, no telegram. I had left her fifteen dollars. I knew it couldn't last more than ten days. I felt she would wire as soon as she was penniless. Camilla and Willie - what had happened to them?

A postcard from Sammy. It was in my box when I got home that afternoon. It read:

Dear Mr Bandini: That Mexican girl is here, and you know how I feel about having women around. If she's your girl you better come and get her because I won't have her hanging around here. Sammy

The postcard was two days old. I filled the tank with gasoline, threw a copy of my book in the front seat, and started for Sammy's abode in the Mojave Desert.

I got there after midnight. A light shone in the single window of his hut. I knocked and he opened the door. Before speaking, I looked around. He went back to a chair beside a

ASK. THE DUST 195

coal-oil lamp, where he picked up a pulp western magazine and went on reading. He did not speak. There was no sign of Camilla.

'Where is she?' I said.

'Damned if I know. She left.'

'You mean you kicked her out.'

'I can't have her around here. I'm a sick man.'

'Where'd she go?'

He jerked his thumb towards the southeast.

'That way, somewhere.'

'You mean out in the desert?'

He shook his head. 'With the pup,' he said. 'A little dog. Cute as hell.'

'When did she leave?'

'Sunday night,' he said.

'Sunday!' I said. 'Jesus Christ, man! That was three days ago! Did she have anything to eat with her? Anything to drink.'

'Milk,' he said. 'She had a bottle of milk for the dog.'

I went out beyond the clearing of his hut and looked towards the southwest. It was very cold and the moon was high, the stars in lush clusters across the blue dome of the sky. West and south and east spread a desolation of brush, sombre Joshua trees, and stumpy hills. I hurried back to the hut. 'Come out and show me which way she went,' I said. He put down his magazine and pointed to the southeast. 'That way,' he said.

I tore the magazine out of his hand, grabbed him by the neck and pushed him outside into the night. He was thin and light, and he stumbled about before balancing himself. 'Show me,' I said. We went to the edge of the clearing and he grumbled that he was a sick man, and that I had no right 196

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to push him around. He stood there, straightening his shirt, tugging at his belt.

'Show me where she was when you saw her last,' I said. He pointed.

'She was just going over that ridge.'

I left him standing there and walked out a quarter of a mile to the top of the ridge. It was so cold I pulled my coat around my throat. Under my feet the earth was churning of coarse dark sand and little stones, the basin of some prehistoric sea. Beyond the ridge were other ridges like it, hundreds of them stretching infinitely away. The sandy earth revealed no footstep, no sign that it had ever been trod. I walked on, struggling through the miserable soil that gave slightly and then covered itself with crumbs of grey sand.

After what seemed two miles, I sat on a round white stone and rested. I was perspiring, and yet it was bitterly cold. The moon was dipping towards the north.

It must have been after three. I had been walking steadily but slowly in a rambling fashion, still the ridges and mounds continued, stretching away without end, with only cactus and sage and ugly plants I didn't know marking it from the dark horizon.

I remembered road maps of the district. There were no roads, no towns, no human life between here and the other side of the desert, nothing but wasteland for almost a hundred miles. I got up and walked on. I was numb with cold, and yet the sweat poured from me. The greying east brightened, metamorphosed to pink, then red, and then the giant ball of fire rose out of the blackened hills.

Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after ASK THE DUST

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you, to. cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold.

It was no use. How could I search for her? Why should I search for her? What could I bring her but a return to the brutal wilderness that had broken her? I walked back in the dawn, sadly in the dawn. The hills had her now. Let these hills hide her! Let her go back to the loneliness of the intimate hills. Let her live with stones and sky, with the wind blowing her hair to the end. Let her go that way.

The sun was high when I got back to the clearing. Already it was hot. In the doorway of his hut stood Sammy. 'Find her?' he asked.

I didn't answer him. I was tired. He watched me a moment, and then he disappeared into the shack. I heard the door being bolted. Far out across the Mojave there arose the shimmer of heat. I made my way up the path to the Ford. In the seat was a copy of my book, my first book. I found a pencil, opened the book to the fly leaf, and wrote:

To Camilla, with love, Arturo

I carried the book a hundred yards into the desolation, towards the southeast.

With all my might I threw it far out in the direction she had gone. Then I got into the car, started the engine, and drove back to Los Angeles.

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198 JOHN FANTE