Girl of My Dreams (10 page)

“Dark in the middle of the day?” I asked Bicker.

“Darker than night,” he said as he shoveled down the last of his eggs, “because you can see at night but your eyes can't get into a dirt wall though a dirt wall can get into your eyes. Like Hollywood, Jant, where the big guys get into us but we can't get anywhere with them unless they happen to need us. Shit, we're going to parties with perfume and Champagne and gold cufflinks with A and Z on them telling us Amos Zangwill encloses everything yet he don't know and you don't know what's going on out there in the planet of dust.”

“Stop pummeling me, Bicker,” I managed to say, using his last name as he had mine. “You're in Hutchinson, Kansas?”

“Huge grain elevators grew out of the prairie like exclamation marks, but they were empty. As wheat prices fell farmers plowed more land, planting seeds that wouldn't grow in the drought. Ranchers had cattle grazing their acres bare. When the wind came up there was nothing to hold the surface earth in place, and it was leaving. The joke in town was that crows were learning to fly backward to keep the dust out of their eyes. Farmers and workers couldn't afford each other's produce. The Hutchinson paper told about a farmer who couldn't feed his three thousand sheep and couldn't bear to watch them starve. He drove them to a cliff where he and his son, both weeping, cut all their throats and shoved them down into the canyon. The dust didn't care; it just kept blowing.

“That night my fairy godmother smiled. As I was about to start wagging my thumb on the edge of town I saw a lady in a nice hat walk in the front entrance of a small house that still had traces of a garden on the side. I went around to the back door to see if she might have any food to spare. Wouldn't you know it, she asked me to join her for dinner. Not pretty but not plain either, she had eyes that made up their mind about you fast. All her bowls were upside down to keep the dust out of them. I washed up as well as I could and put on one of my two extra shirts. Funny thing, we talked about baseball while she made dinner, she'd once seen Ty Cobb get four hits and steal four bases in a game. Meat loaf with mashed potatoes and string beans is simple as a meal gets, and it tasted better than anything back at Joubair's. She was a teacher who'd come out from Michigan when she married a professional man, an optometrist. After '29 people stopped buying new glasses, so the husband went east to Pittsburgh to work for his brother who exported steel to countries that could still afford it. She was working part-time at the library and teaching composition at the local junior college. She was supposed to close up the house and join her husband, but she'd come to like Hutchinson and didn't much miss the husband. When the wind became a scream and dust blew through a closed window like it was open, the lady asked if I wanted to stay the night.

“Even then I wasn't expecting we'd sleep together, but one thing led to another and that's what we did. We were shy, and then we weren't. After we finished, she turned the light back on to look for a tissue and I saw she was crying. Her tears were muddy. While the wind still howled outside—and not just outside—we went to sleep. In the morning the only spaces in the bed still white were the outlines of where our bodies had lain. Everything else was covered. She fed me breakfast and I asked if there was anything I could do for her, chop wood or something. ‘No wood to chop, just be on your merry way,' she said, and she was smiling. Funny thing, we didn't exchange names.”

As I listened to this story, I thought Poor Jim had found something pretty good in a pretty bad time. I thought I'd have wanted to stick around. “Weren't you tempted to stay there?” I asked.

“Nope, she didn't suggest it and I wasn't tempted,” he said. “Hitched up with a family at a filling station—grandparents, parents, three kids. We soon hit what looked like a wall of dirt. This was known as a black blizzard and even with the windows rolled up we chewed dirt. When it let up a little, we headed for Hot Springs, Arkansas, where they said there'd be jobs at a resort. Generous folks, they shared everything. I waited on the privs for a week in Hot Springs, bringing them towels and drinks while they took the sulfur waters, everyone acting as though there was no such thing as Prohibition or the Depression. The wind died down and the dust was manageable. With tips I left Hot Springs flush, a bag of tobacco in my clothing sack and ten dollars in my pocket, another twenty in my shoe.”

Some of his riches didn't last long. The driver who picked him up had a pistol and made off with ten dollars. The twenty stayed in Jim's shoe as he headed west on a boxcar out of Little Rock, enjoying the view for a precious hour before the wind came up again.

“The countryside was wounded. Thunderheads of dust left the plains bare. Nothing growing for miles. Earth's answer to greed and ignorance. Dumb suckers wanted too much from nature. Cattlemen, sheepherders, farmers, bankers, big investors, railroads striping across the prairie—they all had a hand in the ruin of the land.”

Poor Jim Bicker is a sulky bastard, I thought, delivering his inverted rhapsody on America, yet he's seen things with those angry eyes. I asked how he turned his miserable journey into a job in Hollywood.

“It was anything but miserable!” he stormed. “The truth is never miserable. It's always a discovery. I wouldn't trade a minute of it.”

“I mean it's so bleak. You were in danger all the time.”

“That's life, my friend.”

“You could have lost yours.” Was I sounding like his mother?

“You don't want death, don't try life.”

“Okay, I get it. America is broken, even the land is cracked. We have to fix it.”

“You don't know the half of it.”

“I know your family's had some hard—”

“My family, Jant, is as rotten as this whole rotten country! We're the underside of the America the big boys don't want you thinking about. How'd I get to Hollywood? How'd Hollywood get to me is the question. First of all, the Depression is nothing new to the Bickers. We've always been lowest on the totem pole, all of us lost or losing, ever since we settled in this country. Michael Martin Bircher was the first of us born in America before it was America, in Anne Arundel County, colony of Maryland, 1648. Not all the early settlers became Jeffersons or Adamses. The only thing we bottom-feeders knew was how to record our misfortunes and villainies, those we were caught for, in a musty old family Bible my parents still have.”

Poor Jim ticked off the family statistics: died in prison. Ran off with a stable boy to the Louisiana Territory. Killed in a bar fight, buried in Potters Field. Hanged, put in stocks, bankrupt, wife-deserter, whore in Philadelphia, whore in Indiana, embezzler in Milwaukee. These were the entries. “So much for being scribes,” he said.

I sighed. Reproached, informed, badgered, I could imagine no family tree as blighted as Jim's, yet the America he'd crisscrossed mirrored his own history.

“We are a dozen generations despoiling the countryside with our presence,” he said. “Now across the ocean—which for us was Holland, Austria, and England—we'd thrived, sometimes even had our own villages. In the old country conniving and pretense and timely bootlicking flourished like they do here in Hollywood. But in the new country the colonists were making, the land of opportunity, those ruses didn't work as well at first, and most of the time, neither did the Birchers. Until one of us, on the lam for nothing nobler than forgery, found California.

“Missed the Gold Rush, of course, got here in the late 1850s, changed his name to Bicker because that's what his Mexican wife could pronounce. Two daughters and a son. Ran a dry goods business that actually drew in most of Fresno, so he planted branches of it up and down the state. His drunken brother came out to work for him, but he didn't like his sister-in-law and the feeling was mutual. The drunk either insulted or raped the Mexican wife one Saturday night while the dry goods brother was counting the week's take and stashing it in the safe. Well, Bicker shot Bircher. They let him off when he claimed his brother had attacked him, but they ran him out of the state and he took his wife and three kids back east to Buffalo and resumed the family habit of losing. Couldn't get started in dry goods, learned how to cheat at shell games and poker. His half-Mexican son became my grandfather. Providers we never have been; integrity we did not breed; almost none of us above the rank of hired hand or drifter.”

“Your father in the screw factory,” I said, “was an exception.”

“Fat lot of good it did him. But I told you I had a relative out here in Sacramento. When I was a kid my father got that letter asking for family news, talking about a rose garden and privet hedge and a Victorian house, ending with the sign-off of Your Cousin, Bloomie Symmes. He didn't answer, but I always thought if I ever reached her precinct I'd look her up. The spelling of her last name, which must originally have been Sims, seemed to indicate someone was trying to rise, if not Bloomie herself then her husband. So from Arkansas I headed vaguely, dustily west.”

Jim's journey became, if anything, even worse. He got a ride with a trucker who had scooped up a woman hugging a dead chicken she'd found on the road. She wouldn't let go of it. Jim jumped out of the truck when the radiator boiled over. “I'm thinking no one obeys any law except the one that says hunger still strikes three times a day. I wanted to show that Russian poet Tatiana Etcherbina that we have millions of our own poberties right here. That madwoman clinging to her dead chicken maybe tells the whole story.”

“But you knew that wasn't true,” I told Poor Jim. “You knew people would find jobs again when factories heated up to supply anything worn out, from shoes to motors. You must have known the land would be fertile again.”

“I knew no such goddam thing!” Bicker yelled. “And no such goddam thing has happened. Farmers and workers are still broke, all they have from Mr. Smiling-cigarette-holder are promises, and how long do you think faith and patience will last when reality makes lies of those promises?”

Back on the rails, Jim's freight was wrecked going up a steep incline in Montana. The engineer and fireman were killed, and Jim had a sprained back and several cracked ribs. When he could travel again he caught the Northern Pacific to Spokane, where he saw he was in apple country. He found a farmer who raised both apples and sheep. “After a month picking apples and fencing sheep,” he said, “I'm up forty dollars, ready for Bloomie Symmes.”

For the first time he took a train as a paying passenger and the next day he was in Sacramento. “Knowing I'd need decent clothes for my passport out of the underworld,” he said, “I look in the window of a store and wonder who is the bearded weatherbeaten hobo staring out. I turn to see who is next to me before I realize who the bum is. I buy the clothes and get a room in the YMCA where I can make myself presentable to Cousin Bloomie. Then I go to the address where her letter came from ten years earlier.”

“At last,” I said, “your appointment with destiny.”

“Right,” Jim said. “It's a quiet Sacramento street with trees shading the houses. There's the privet hedge, all right, in front of the gabled, many-roomed Victorian. This is going to be nice, I think. A pretty lady answers the doorbell with a bandanna around her head—she has been cleaning her house—and I think this is the answer to prayers I haven't even prayed. A beautiful second or third cousin, she's like an advertisement for something that makes your home look or smell better. Can she help me? she asks. I ask if she's Mrs. Symmes. For a moment she's puzzled, and she asks me if I have the right address. Then she remembers. I must mean old Bloomie. Well, Bloomie passed away about three years ago, and the bandanna lady and her husband bought the house from the widower Colton Symmes who himself passed on in February.”

“So you're nowhere after all this time on the road,” I said. I didn't see how we'd ever get to Hollywood. Yet in a way I was grateful to Jim.

“What an idiot I am,” Jim said. “I go back to the YMCA and make a collect call to my parents' landlord, who surprises me by telling me to call my parents, they have a phone now. I'm even more surprised when I hear a party going on at their place. They haven't had a party since my dad was laid off from the Erie Metal Works. ‘What's the occasion, Ma?' I ask. She hopes I won't be mad but they're living a lot better now. ‘Of course I'm not mad, I'm overjoyed, Ma.' Then she tells me. Two months earlier she got a letter with a check from the
Police Gazette
. Seventy dollars for one of my stories. The next week comes an envelope from
Collier's
with a check for a hundred and twenty-five dollars for another story. Two weeks later a third check, a hundred and fifty dollars from the
Saturday Evening Post
. They had no idea how to reach me so they've been living off the checks. Then she says a week ago a man named Colonel DeLight called from the Jubilee Studios in Hollywood, well not exactly Hollywood but Culver City, California. Would I like to write a picture for them? Jubilee, huh. Well I was in jubilation over Jubilee. Somebody gave his studio the right name for a place I'd want to work.”

Before he called Colonel DeLight, Jim found his stories in the Sacramento library. “Sure enough there's the crime-doesn't-pay yarn about a stick-up man and his moll in the
Gazette
, the
Collier's
adventure of the oil wildcatter in Alaska saving the hunter from being clawed to death by a bear even though the hunter has stolen his wife, and the
Post
tear-jerker with the parents granting their dying son his last wish, a visit to Niagara Falls, which of course I knew like the back of my hand from having grown up near there. It's the wildcatter in Alaska they want, and I tell Colonel DeLight I'll see him next week.”

Jim's feet were itchy for one more ride on the iron horse. Wanting the trip to end, wanting just a little more, Jim grabbed a southbound freight from Sacramento as his farewell to the road. In addition to the usual hoboes, he shared a boxcar with a woman and a girl. “A tired dame with a face sad as an old moon is protecting this girl of maybe fifteen,” he said, “from the toughs in the car. She's too pretty for her own good. The hoboes are talking about easy times in the city of angels, and I know I'm heading for the easy times they're dreaming of while they're going to be skidrow bums heaped like old boards in a new city. The tired woman is passing along her philosophy of life to the girl. ‘Never go with a strange,' she says, ‘because once he's dicked you he vamooses.'”