Ask The Dust (19 page)

'You,' he said. 'Make some coffee.'

She did as she was told, serving us coffee out of tin cups. Sammy, fresh from sleep, was full of enthusiasm and curiosity. We sat at the fire, and I was tired and sleepy, and the hot fire toyed with my heavy lids. Behind us and all around us, Camilla worked. She swept the place out, made up the bed, washed dishes, hung up stray garments and kept up an incessant activity. The more Sammy talked, the more cordial and personal he became. He was interested in the financial side of writing more than in writing itself. How much did this magazine pay, and how much did that one pay, and he was convinced that only by favouritism were stories sold. You had to have a cousin or a brother or somebody like that in an editor's office before they took one of your stories. It was useless to try to dissuade him, and I didn't try, because I knew that his kind of rationalizing was necessary in view of his sheer inability to write well.

Camilla cooked breakfast for us, and we ate from plates on our laps. The fare was fried corn meal and bacon and eggs. Sammy ate with the peculiar robustness of unhealthy people. After the meal, Camilla gathered the tin plates and washed them. Then she had her own breakfast, seated in a far corner, quiet except for the sound of her fork against the tin plate. All that long morning Sammy talked. Sammy really didn't need any advice about writing. Vaguely through the fog of semi-slumber I heard him telling me how it should and shouldn't be done. But I was so tired. I begged to be excused. He led me outside to an arbour of palm branches. Now the air was warm and the sun was high. I lay in the hammock and fell

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asleep, and the last thing I remember was the sight of Camilla bent over a wash tub filled with dark water and several pairs of underwear and overalls.

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 manuscript 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,

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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 coarsely 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

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night clubs, abandoned apartment houses, broken-down business houses, the forlorn street of poverty for the Negro and swank 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 buttons. '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 hell 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

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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 butter. 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

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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 ASK THE DUST

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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 space, 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 passion. 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 glass 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.

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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 mass 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.