Saga Of Arturo Bandini - Ask The Dust Part 10

Six hours later she woke me to tell me that it was two o'clock, and that we had to start back. She was due at the Columbia Buffet at seven. I asked her if she had slept. She shook her head negatively. Her face was a ma.n.u.script of misery and exhaustion. I got off the hammock and stood up in the hot desert air. My clothes were soaked in perspiration, but I was rested and refreshed. 'Where's the genius?' I said.

She nodded towards the hut. I walked towards the door, ducking under a long heavy clothesline sagging with clean, dry garments. 'You did all of that?' I asked. She smiled. 'It was fun.'

Deep snores came from the hut. I peeked inside. On the bunk lay Sammy, half naked, his mouth wide open, his arms and legs spread apart. I tiptoed away. 'Now's our chance,' I said. 'Let's go.'

She entered the hut and quietly walked to where Sammy lay. From the door I watched her lean over him, study his face and body. Then she bent down, her face near his, as if to kiss him. At that moment he awoke and their eyes met. He said: 'Get out of here.'

She turned and walked out. We drove back to Los Angeles in complete silence. Even when she let me out at the Alta Loma Hotel, even then we did not speak, but she smiled her thanks and I smiled my sympathy, and she drove away. Already it was dark, a smudge of the pink sunset fading in the west. I went down to my room, yawned, and threw myself on the bed. Lying there I suddenly remembered the clothes closet. I got up and opened the closet door. Everything seemed as it should, 167.

my suits hanging from hooks, my suitcases on the top shelf. But there was no light in the closet. I struck a match and looked down at the floor. In the corner was a burned matchstick and a score of grains of brown stuff, like coa.r.s.ely ground coffee. I pressed my finger into the stuff and then tasted it on the end of my tongue. I knew what that was: it was marijuana. I was sure of it, because Benny Cohen had once showed me the stuff to warn me against it. So that was why she had been in here. You had to have an air-tight room to smoke marijuana. That explained why the two rugs had been moved: she had used them to cover the crack under the door.

Camilla was a hophead. I sniffed the closet air, put my nostrils against the garments hanging there. The smell was that of burned cornsilk. Camilla, the hophead.

It was none of my business, but she was Camilla; she had tricked me and scorned me, and she loved somebody else, but she was so beautiful and I needed her so, and I decided to make it my business. I was waiting in her car at eleven that night.

'So you're a hophead,' I said.

'Once in a while,' she said. 'When I'm tired.'

'You cut it out,' I said.

'It's not a habit,' she said.

'Cut it out anyway.'

She shrugged. 'It doesn't bother me.'

'Promise me you'll quit.'

She made a cross over her heart. 'Cross my heart and hope to die,' but she was talking to Arturo now, and not to Sammy. I knew she would not keep the promise. She started the car and drove down Broadway to Eighth, then south towards Central Avenue. 'Where we going?' I said.

'Wait and see.'

We drove into the Los Angeles Black Belt, Central Avenue, 168.

night clubs, abandoned apartment houses, broken-down business houses, the forlorn street of poverty for the Negro and sw.a.n.k for the whites. We stopped under the marquee of a night spot called the Club Cuba. Camilla knew the doorman, a giant in a blue uniform with gold b.u.t.tons. 'Business,' she said. He grinned, signalled someone to take his place, and jumped on the running board. It was done like a routine procedure, as though it had been done before.

She drove around the corner and continued for two streets, until we came to an alley. She turned down the alley, switched off the lights and steered carefully into pitch blackness. We came to some kind of opening and killed the engine. The big Negro jumped off the running board and snapped on a flashlight, motioning us to follow. 'May I ask just what the h.e.l.l this is all about?' I said.

We entered a door. The Negro took the lead. He held Camilla's hand, and she held mine. We walked down a long corridor. It was carpetless, a hardwood floor. Far away like frightened birds, the echo of our feet floated through the upper floors. We climbed three flights of stairs and proceeded the length of another hall. At the end was a door. The Negro opened it. Inside was complete darkness. We entered. The room reeked with smoke that could not be seen, and yet it burned like an eyewash. The smoke choked my throat, leaped for my nostrils. In the darkness I swallowed for breath. Then the Negro flashed on his light.

The beam travelled around the room, a small room. Everywhere were bodies, the bodies of Negroes, men and women, perhaps a score of them, lying on the floor and across a bed that was only a mattress on springs. I could see their eyes, wide and grey and oyster-like as the flashlight hit them, and gradually I accustomed myself to the burning smoke and saw 169.

tiny red points of light everywhere, for they were all smoking marijuana, quietly in the darkness, and the pungency stabbed my lungs. The big Negro cleared the bed of its occupants, flung them like so many sacks of grain to the floor, and the flash spot revealed him digging something from a slot in the mattress. It was a Prince Albert tobacco can. He opened the door, and we followed him down the stairs and through the same darkness to the car. He handed the can to Camilla, and she gave him two dollars. We drove him back to his doorman's job, and then we continued down Central Avenue to metropolitan Los Angeles.

I was speechless. We drove to her place on Temple Street. It was a sick building, a frame place diseased and dying from the sun. She lived in an apartment. There was a Murphy bed, a radio, and dirty blue overstuffed furniture. The carpeted floor was littered with crumbs and dirt, and in the corner, sprawled out like one naked, lay a movie magazine. There were kewpie dolls standing about, souvenirs of gaudy nights at beach resorts. There was a bicycle in the corner, the flat tyres attesting to long disuse. There was a fishing pole in one corner with tangled hooks and line, and there was a shotgun in the other corner, dusty. There was a baseball bat under the divan, and there was a bible lodged between the cushions of the overstuffed chair. The bed was down, and the sheets were not clean. There was a reproduction of the Blue Boy on one wall and a print of an Indian Brave saluting the sky on another.

I walked into the kitchen, smelled the garbage in the sink, saw the greasy frying pans on the stove. I opened the Frigidaire and it was empty save for a can of condensed milk and a cube of b.u.t.ter. The icebox door would not close, and that seemed as it should be. I looked into the closet behind the Murphy bed and there were lots of clothes and lots of 170.

clothes-hooks, but all the clothes were on the floor, except a straw hat, and that hung alone, ridiculous up there by itself. So this is where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odour possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, an apartment in Los Angeles. She belonged to the rolling hills, the wide deserts, the high mountains, she would ruin any apartment, she would lay havoc upon any such little prison as this. It was so, ever in my imagination, ever a part of my scheming and thinking about her. This was her home, her ruin, her scattered dream.

She threw off her coat and flung herself on the divan. I watched her stare dismally at the ugly carpet. Sitting in the overstuffed chair, I puffed a cigarette and let my eyes wander the profile of her curved back and hips. The dark corridor of that Central Avenue Hotel, the sinister Negro, the black room and the hopheads, and now the girl who loved a man who hated her. It was all of the same cloth, perverse, drugged in fascinating ugliness. Midnight on Temple Street, a can of marijuana between us. She lay there, her long fingers dangling to the carpet, waiting, listless, tired. 'Have you ever tried it?' she asked. 'Not me,' I said. 'Once won't hurt you.' 'Not me.'

She sat up, fumbled for the can of marijuana in her purse. She drew out a packet of cigarette papers. She poured a paperful, rolled it, licked it, pinched the ends, and handed it to me. I took it, and yet I said, 'Not me.'

She rolled one for herself. Then she arose and closed the 171.

windows, clamped them tightly by their latches. She dragged a blanket off the bed and laid it against the crack of the door. She looked around carefully. She looked at me. She smiled. 'Everybody acts different,' she said. 'Maybe you'll feel sad, and cry.'

'Not me,' I said.

She lit hers, held the match for mine.

'I shouldn't be doing this,' I said.

'Inhale,' she said. 'Then hold it. Hold it a long time. Until it hurts. Then let it out.'

'This is bad business,' I said.

I inhaled it. I held it. I held it a long time, until it hurt. Then I let it out. She lay back against the divan and did the same thing. 'Sometimes it takes two of them,' she said.

'It won't affect me,' I said.

We smoked them down until they burned our fingertips. Then I rolled two more. In the middle of the second it began to come, the floating, the wafting away from the earth, the joy and triumph of a man over s.p.a.ce, the extraordinary sense of power. I laughed and inhaled again. She lay there, the cold languor of the night before upon her face, the cynical pa.s.sion. But I was beyond the room, beyond the limits of my flesh, floating in a land of bright moons and blinking stars. I was invincible. I was not myself, I had never been that fellow with his grim happiness, his strange bravery. A lamp on the table beside me, and I picked it up and looked at it, and dropped it to the floor. It broke into many pieces. I laughed. She heard the noise, saw the ruin, and laughed too.

'What's funny?' I said.

She laughed again. I got up, crossed the room, and took her in my arms. They felt terribly strong and she panted at their crush and desire.

I watched her stand and take off her clothes, and somewhere out of an earthly past I remembered having seen that face of hers before, that obedience and fear, and I remembered a hut and Sammy telling her to go out and get some wood. It was as I knew it was bound to be sooner or later. She crept into my arms and I laughed at her tears.

When it was all gone, the dream of floating towards bursting stars, and the flesh returned to hold my blood in its prosaic channels, when the room returned, the dirty sordid room, the vacant meaningless ceiling, the weary wasted world, I felt nothing but the old sense of guilt, the sense of crime and violation, the sin of destruction. I sat beside her as she lay on the divan. I stared at the carpet. I saw the pieces of gla.s.s from the broken lamp. And when I got up to walk across the room, I felt pain, the sharp agony of the flesh of my feet torn by my own weight. It hurt with a deserving pain. My feet were cut when I put on my shoes and walked out of that apartment and into the bright astonishment of the night. Limping, I walked the long road to my room. I thought I would never see Camilla Lopez again.

Chapter Seventeen.

But big events were coming, and I had no one to whom I could speak of them. There was the day I finished the story of Vera Rivken, the breezy days of rewriting it, just coasting along, Hackmuth, a few more days now and you'll see something great. Then the revision was finished and I sent it away, and then the waiting, the hoping. I prayed once more. I went to ma.s.s and Holy Communion. I made a novena. I lit candles at the Blessed Virgin's altar. I prayed for a miracle.

The miracle happened. It happened like this: I was standing at the window in my room, watching a bug crawling along the sill. It was three-fifteen on a Thursday afternoon. There was a knock on my door. I opened the door, and there he stood, a telegraph boy. I signed for the telegram, sat on the bed, and wondered if the wine had finally got the Old Man's heart. The telegram said: your book accepted mailing contract today. Hackmuth. That was all. I let the paper float to the carpet. I just sat there. Then I got down on the floor and began kissing the telegram. I crawled under the bed and just lay there. I did not need the sunshine anymore. Nor the earth, nor heaven. I just lay there, happy to die. Nothing else could happen to me. My life was over.

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 175.

were falling, covering the earth with wreckage, killing pilots: it was too d.a.m.ned unsafe, a pioneering venture, and where the h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.s mail. With it was a cheque for five hundred dollars. My G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l 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 176.

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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 b.u.t.ts 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, b.u.t.ter, vegetables, meat, potatoes. It took three trips to carry it all 177.

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.sful, 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.

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 cl.u.s.ter 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.

179.

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 G.o.d. 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 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 181.

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 a.s.sistant doctors, I saw nurses, and a.s.sistant nurses, I waited in lobbies and halls, but n.o.body 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 inst.i.tution, 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.

182.

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 Inst.i.tute 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." 'h.e.l.lo, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 183.

pavement, under the staring stars, my feet on the dashboard, my head full of plans for another book, one night and then another, all of them together spelling dream days I had never known, serene days I feared to question. I prowled the city with my Ford: I found mysterious alleys, lonely trees, rotting old houses out of a vanished past. Day and night I lived in my Ford, pausing only long enough to order a hamburger and a cup of coffee at strange roadside cafes. This was the life for a man, to wander and stop and then go on, ever following the white line along the rambling coast, a time to relax at the wheel, light another cigarette, and grope stupidly for the meanings in that perplexing desert sky.