The Tin Horse: A Novel (36 page)

“Oh.” She buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed.

“Did someone hurt you?” I said again, when her tears had quieted.

“You can’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise! Not Mama or Papa. And not Danny.”

“I promise.”

She took a deep breath. “Guy sends me a note at the club—he’s a producer, and I should come see him in his office at Warner Brothers. I’m a big girl, I know—if he wants to kiss me, cop a little feel, I don’t care as long as he puts me in a picture.… I’m shocking you, aren’t I?”

“No.”
Yes
.

“He … he … Shit, I’m so stupid! I’m so …” Under my arm, I felt her shudder. “I knew just to tease him, okay, not to let him lay a finger on me unless he promised me a part. But he did promise. He showed me a contract with my name on it! He signed it, and he had me come to his side of the desk to sign my name. And then he unzipped his pants. He made me … he … in my mouth …” Then she shrugged away from me, and her voice went hard. “Big deal, you do that with Danny, right? An old man’s smelly pecker, you just need a bottle of Listerine after. But he said he was going to contact me about a film, and he didn’t. Then I found out he’s not a producer at Warner Brothers, he’s some kind of accountant there. Stupid, stupid! Tonight, I saw him at the club. I asked to talk to him, and he said we could talk in his car. Asshole was just trying to get another blow job. I almost said yes, so I could bite off his little hairy prick!

“Well?” she said after a moment. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“Ah …” I wouldn’t have been surprised if no sound came out of my mouth, if I were in the limbo of a dream. It wasn’t just that I was appalled by the nasty thing the man had done to her. I was appalled by her! She had walked into his office expecting something like this; she’d gone along with it. If the man had turned out to be a real producer, would she have felt it was all worth it?

“Elaine! Here.” She lit a cigarette in her mouth and passed it to me. “Shit, I should never have told you.”

I stared at the girl next to me and couldn’t believe she’d grown up with me in the house on Breed Street. Someone had replaced my sister with a streetwise chippie.

But she wasn’t streetwise. For all her veneer of toughness, Barbara was only eighteen. I found my voice.

“He’s a monster.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s a man.”

“Can you do anything?”

“Like what? Call the guy’s wife and tell him what a jerk she’s married to? She probably already knows. Or maybe I should complain to Jack Warner?” She shook her head. “Look, I don’t know why I got so upset. I bet every girl I work with could tell the same story.”

“What if you get a different job?”

“Doing what?”

“What about dancing in Mr. Horton’s company?”

“Some people in this family need to make a real living. It’s okay. I just needed a shoulder to cry on. Thanks … Hey, I’m beat. I have to get some sleep.”

“Barbara, are you sure you’re all right?”

“Nothing hurt but my pride.” She turned away from me, burrowed under the covers.

She was sleeping when I left the next morning. I waited up for her when she got home from work that night, but she didn’t want to talk. I suspected she regretted having revealed so much, and I didn’t push. But I worried about her after that. I feared that her tendency to leap without looking might get her into a worse situation than what happened with the phony producer, something dangerous.

On top of my concern for her, one more thing lingered from our conversation. I kept hearing her say,
Big deal, you do that with Danny
. But Danny and I had never done
that
. Had he done it with Barbara? I fantasized about trying. When we necked and I was holding his penis, I could slide down his body and put my mouth where my hand had been. But I didn’t have the nerve. And he didn’t ask.

Then something else screamed into my awareness. War.

On August 23, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. That night after dinner, Danny and I sat at Canter’s with several friends: my pal Ann and her boyfriend, Bill; Burt Weber, who was one of Danny’s cronies from Habonim; and a recent addition to our group, Paul Resnick.

Paul had graduated from Roosevelt High two years ahead of us and joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the leftist Americans who had fought with the Republicans in Spain. He’d come home in April, after the Republicans were defeated, and he was about to enter USC like me. Paul made no secret of his membership in the Communist Party nor of his disdain for Zionism, and he and Danny, both natural scrappers, argued over their competing ideals with the gusto of men on a football field. The two of them gravitated toward each other, and now whenever Danny and I got
together with friends, the group usually included Paul—wiry, sandy-haired, his ironic smile a reminder that he, alone among us, had broken free of the cocoon of Boyle Heights and
lived
. He had fired a gun at other men, and their bullets and grenades had whizzed past him. He had guzzled
vino
from the bottle and sung partisan songs; he sang some for us, in a surprisingly sweet baritone. There were women, too. He only alluded to them when I was present, but clearly Paul had crossed the chasm that the rest of us trembled on the brink of. He’d had sex.

I jumped into Paul and Danny’s debates, though I lacked their true-believer faith—I didn’t think any
ism
could save the world. But I enjoyed the sparring. And I was determined to hold my own around Paul, because he rattled me. I couldn’t stand the way Danny and the other boys became wide-eyed kids whenever Paul told war stories. To be fair, Paul didn’t paint a glorified picture of his life as a soldier; still, all the boys listened as if they were sitting in the National Theater watching a war movie, and they couldn’t wait to experience the thrill of battle themselves.

What disturbed me even more about Paul was the shiver in the way he looked at me. And the shiver I felt in return. Even when I was dating other boys, no one but Danny could just meet my eyes and spark that kind of sexual awareness, as if his gaze were a caress. Paul became the second man to evoke that response. Perhaps because of his greater sexual experience, I think he knew he had the power to unsettle me, which made me determined not to show it. It felt like a contest: he’d win if I wavered, but if I gave no sign of the fluttering he provoked in me, then it was my victory. In retrospect, my sense of being in a constant state of subtle combat with Paul made me fling myself into spats with him—as I did on the night of the nonaggression pact.

Danny lit into Paul first. “What do you think of your comrade Joe Stalin now?”

“I think Stalin understands how devastating war can be. He knows it’s not some kids’ game.” Paul’s challenging gaze lingered on me, and I felt embarrassed that I’d ordered a Coke; he was drinking black coffee.

Refusing to let him intimidate me, I glared back. “What about the Communists’ high ideals? Aren’t you dedicated to fighting Fascism? There’s no worse Fascist than Hitler.”

“No, there’s not. But why should the Soviet people go fight Hitler when the capitalist countries are sitting on their fat rumps?”

“What if France and England declare war?” Burt said.

“France and England sat back and said, ‘Take Austria. Take Czechoslovakia.’ They said to Franco, ‘Take Spain.’ ”

“But what if they do?” Burt said.

“Then I’m on the next ship to England to join up,” Danny said. “Anyone with me?”

Danny had said it before—all of the boys talked about fighting for England or France, whichever country had the guts to say no to Hitler first—but in that moment it became real. There was going to be a war, and Danny was going to fight in it. I grasped my Coke glass, clung to the slippery cold of the condensation on the side.

“I’ll go!” Burt said.

“I will, too,” Bill chimed in, but Ann turned to him sternly.

“You’re going to do the world a lot more good as a physicist than as a soldier,” she said. Bill had a scholarship to Princeton. (Yes, he ended up working at Los Alamos.)

A moment of fidgety silence followed.

“What about you, Paul?” I said. “You got Danny and Burt to decide to join the British army. Are you going to go with them?”

“I’ll join up when the U.S. gets into it.”

“So when Danny and Burt are fighting Hitler,” I said witheringly, “I guess you’ll be going to football games at USC.”

“Elaine!” Danny said, and everyone looked at me open-mouthed. “Paul just spent two years fighting. And no one is forcing me to do anything. I decided this on my own.”

Within a few weeks, Danny got his wish. He was going off to war.

On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. France and Britain declared war two days later, and Danny started trying to raise the money to get to England. Then on September 10, Canada got into the fray, and all he needed to do was travel up the coast to the nearest Canadian city, Vancouver. That was a Sunday. The next morning, Danny quit his job and bought a train ticket. Burt did, too. They were leaving on Wednesday at 7:45 a.m.

I longed to spend every remaining minute with Danny, but I had just started at USC, and even students from wealthy families—much less a scholarship girl from Boyle Heights—didn’t dare cut classes the first week of freshman year. And when I did have a chance to see him, the flurry of leave-takings meant we were always in a crowd of people. Even on his last night … I planned to stay up all night with him and see him off at Union Station the next morning, but our entire group of friends would be present; the all-night farewell party was taking place at Burt’s home.

When I got off the streetcar from USC that Tuesday afternoon, I didn’t go home. Instead I walked to the rooming house where he and his father lived—the territory Mama had declared off-limits because it was too easy for us to be alone. Finding Danny alone that afternoon was what I hoped for … and feared. I had made a decision: I wanted to make love with him before he left.

Clammy with nerves, I entered the rooming house and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Approaching Danny’s door, I heard him laugh—not the hearty laugh he’d have in a group of friends but a low, intimate chuckle I associated with our times alone. Another voice laughed with him. A girl?

I knocked. The laughter abruptly stopped.

“Danny?” I called. “Danny, it’s me.”

“Elaine! Just a sec.”

There were scrambling sounds. And a giggle. Definitely a girl.

I tried the door. It was unlocked.

Danny, his face flushed and hair damp with sweat, was fumbling with the zipper of his pants. Behind him, equally sweaty and tucking in her partly buttoned blouse, stood Barbara.

Their mouths were moving. But I couldn’t hear anything except the roaring in my own head. Danny started toward me. I ran.

“Elaine, wait!” he called.

I don’t know if he came after me. I kept going, the streets of Boyle Heights a blur of speed and heat and tears. I had no idea where I was running until I got there—Aunt Pearl’s, the small, neat two-bedroom house she’d bought that spring in an older neighborhood a few blocks from Danny’s.

Once I was at Pearl’s, I hesitated, catching my breath by the azalea bushes on either side of the steps. Could I bear to tell anyone what had happened? Did I
know
what had happened?

“Elaine.” Pearl was standing in the doorway. “What is it?”

I stood speechless, my stomach churning.

She hurried down the steps to me. “Darling, you must be so upset about Danny leaving.”

The heady fragrance of the flowers made me think of standing in Danny’s doorway, smelling scents I hadn’t consciously identified but now gave names to.
Shalimar. Sex
.

I threw up on the azaleas.

S
HE WAS THE SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO, A BELOVED SONGBIRD
and voice on the public address system for the Buffalo Bill Cody Stampede, an extravaganza that ran July 1 to 4 every year, and for the smaller, summer long Cody Nite Rodeo. At any rate, that’s what happened to Kay Devereaux Cochran—who later became Kay Applegate, then Kay Farris, and finally Kay Thorne—according to articles from the Cody, Wyoming,
Enterprise
that Josh has given me. The stories date from 1946—an announcement that Richard Cochran had brought his bride, described as “a USO star,” back to Cody—to 1999, when she was one of the “legends” featured in an issue of the paper dedicated to the Stampede’s eightieth anniversary.

That’s not all Josh has brought me. There’s also a glossy brochure for the OKay Ranch Adventure—Kay’s dude ranch.

“It was a regular ranch when she moved there with Cochran,” Josh explains while I search for my sister in photographs of a blond woman perpetually sporting fringed cowgirl garb. She’s generously built, voluptuous in the early shots and hefty over the years, but her teasing Mona Lisa smile suggests she has no doubt of her appeal to men. Four husbands—I guess she had proof of that.

“Five years later, they turned it into a dude ranch, the KayRich,” he says. “Must have been her idea, because she kept the ranch after they split up.”