Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  COPY BOY

  Copyright © 2020 Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2020

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-697-8

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-698-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020900063

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1569 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  Book design by Stacey Aaronson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First chapter previously published in This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West (Baobab Press, 2019).

  For Nonny and Poppy

  “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman.”

  — IVAN TURGENEV

  CHAPTER ONE

  DEBT

  You think you’re a body, but you’re not. That’s just the container you collect in. Your body’s a light bulb. If it burns out or breaks, the electricity’s still there—you’re still there, still you.

  Benjamin Franklin Hopper was born into a shattered bulb, shards buried under the loose, gray silt of a ravaged Texas plain, but his energy never diffused. For seventeen years, he hovered in particles over the heads of his family as they plowed their soil too fine, dodging tightfisted bankers, riding the Okie trail, Route 66, sleeping under railroad bridges, in lean-tos made of potato sacks, flattened tin cans, and orange crates. He hovered as they built a canvas-and-cardboard home just off the levee at the confluence of two rivers—the clear American and the muddy Sacramento.

  No, he didn’t stay underground back in the gray Texas dirt. He rose in a silty cloud and floated over their heads for seventeen years, waiting for a shape to fill.

  Finally, under pressure, his sister cracked. Though she didn’t shatter—not yet—that hairline fracture created a vacuum in her, a charged emptiness that siphoned his particles to her, causing a surge to her filament, making her glow.

  That’s how she would explain it to herself.

  JANE walked home on the levee that night, no breeze coming off the delta. After a long day picking, her arms were sticky yellow, the tomato-leaf smell of piney, bitter sunlight under her fingernails. The river was finally slowing after months of running fast and clean with melted Sierra snow. In Indian summer, with the grass bleached white and the blue burnt out of the sky, she looked down as she walked home from the field, even at night, in case a rattler stretched fat across the path in the heat. That may be why she didn’t see at first what was happening in front of her as she approached the campsite.

  Uno Jeffers’s headlights shone on the dirt between his Ford and her family’s tent, the Cotton Bollers loud on his radio—“Lace up them boots, let leather meet tar.” His car was loaded with their things: shovel, mattress, blankets, pots, crowbar, washtub, Jane’s hope chest of books and awards, everything they’d carted from Amarillo to Sacramento in the great caravan of Okies. Everything they’d collected since.

  Daddy’s banjo and hat were on the dirt, not in the tent, not in the car.

  Momma stepped out of the tent, full belly first, squinting into the headlights, her black hair frizzing like ideas shooting out of her scalp.

  “Where’s Daddy?” Jane asked.

  Momma spit out a toothpick. “In town. With Elthea.”

  ELTHEA was married to dumpy Leroy Lathrop, editor of a skid row newspaper, the Swale. She herself owned Do or Donut Shop, a base from which she was able to meet up weekly with Daddy, who seemed to like her feminine smell of maple.

  Just the Sunday before, for what seemed like the hundredth time, Jane had walked for donuts with Daddy and witnessed it.

  Elthea came out to the counter from the back room when the front doorbell jangled.

  “Abraham Lincoln Hopper.”

  Daddy smiled, putting off heat. Neither of them said anything for a good minute while Jane focused her eyes on the display case, thinking, Order the damn donut.

  But instead of that, he started singing as if Elthea were the only person on earth who might understand just how misunderstood he was—“Big man stoopin’ so low, gotta stand up some day.” He sang it hoarse, hitting some notes off-key, lingering a beat long on words you might not expect. He made the air quiver around him like heat waves that distract you from your blisters while you walk.

  He delivered this particular performance in a sulfur-yellow donut shop for a chubby waitress on a Sunday morning with no less style than he conjured every Saturday night for paying customers—scab-armed pickers, sitting on dirt, tilting beer, tithing a dime each to Abraham.

  When he finished singing, Elthea clapped real slow and rocked her curls back and forth in appreciation, the moist flesh around her collar turning pink.

  Momma didn’t react that way to his talents anymore.

  Daddy smiled, his teeth white under a scruffy mustache.

  “Do you need some help with the boxes, Elthea?”

  “I always need help with the boxes, Abraham.”

  “I’m gonna help Elthea with the boxes, Jujee.”

  He followed her to the back room, his eyes on her wide hips in a tight white uniform.

  Jane moved without a donut to the front booth under the window and watched people pass on their way to the market. She licked her finger and pressed it on each donut crumb left behind on the table, one at a time, bringing it to the tip of her tongue.

  Just the week before, she’d dropped a fat envelope of her Daily Dragon clippings on the corner of Leroy’s desk. She’d told Daddy about her plan to get on at that newspaper. He knew about her plan. It would ruin things for her if Leroy showed up wanting to see his wife and found her in back with Daddy.

  She wandered up to the counter and cocked her head at the coffee mugs jiggling on the back wall shelves, at the back room breathing, like a pierced heart and lung, that burbling release of liquid and steam. Her eyebrows lowered.

  She went to the front door and locked it, flipping the OPEN sign to CLOSED.

  She sat at the counter and wrote on a napkin to the beat of the jiggling mugs and the flow of their breath. When she finished, she went behind the counter and used a wax paper square to pick up a maple old-fashioned, took one bite, and set it back on the shelf. She also took a bite of a sprinkle and a bear claw and a cinnamon roll, carefully turning the bite marks back to the wall when she was done. Then she returned to her seat at the front table.

  A few minutes later, Daddy came back, flushed and messy.

  Elthea waved goodbye, her dimpled fingers close up to her eyes, waggling like lashes.

  It must have done something for Daddy to leave her alone at that table while he went off to rut with Elthea every week and then came back to find her waiting there. It may have been a test of her loyalty or taste or of Daddy’s appeal. It may even have been his idea that it was a gift to include her in his life this way. Or maybe he was teaching her something about the way of things between women and men, about the necessary differences between them.

  For some months, it looked like a donut would pay for it—she was, after all, a hungry girl—but not anymore. Didn�
�t he care what she was trying to do? He was putting something big at risk for her now. She didn’t like this feeling, when two things she wanted conflicted. It made her want to choose one fast and forget the other, to make the confusion go away.

  Back at the tent, she wrote the napkin story in her notebook and called it “Donut Ass.” That didn’t change anything, but it made her feel better to write it, scratching an itch.

  MOMMA had always said Jane was gonna do something. Not that she was something, but that she was gonna do something. Momma never said what that something might be, but still it shone in the distance, like Jane’s North Star.

  Growing up, whenever she’d brought home a B-plus in English or a science fair ribbon, her raised eyebrows would ask, Is this it? Is this the thing I’m gonna do? Momma’s silence was the answer—That ain’t it—so Jane would fold up her achievement and file it in her hope chest, one more artifact in the historical record of Not Quite Yet. Though Jane didn’t know what she was going to do, she did know why she had to keep trying.

  Jane owed Momma.

  Her supposedly ten-pound, twenty-two-inch body had ripped Momma open at birth, taking so long in the push out before her brother Benjamin that she’d blocked him from pushing out at all. Daddy wasn’t there when this happened.

  Momma said Granny had to pull Benjamin out, rough, with tongs.

  “Selfish from the outset,” Momma said.

  She said Benjamin had been born blue and never cried once before they buried him behind Granny’s place and he became spirit, a stream of particles, charged like light. Jane would often think about the magic or physics of that, and it worried her, though the story made them special, and she did like that.

  From her birthday tear, Momma developed an infection that almost killed her, and when she was out of her mind with pain and grief, passing in and out of consciousness, she suckled Jane the offender, too big for her womb, as if it were her greatest calling, passing that virulent secretion into her daughter, so that the incident and what it seemed to mean became a part of her.

  The two of them surprised everybody by living.

  That’s why Jane owed Momma.

  Now, at seventeen, she still hadn’t cleared the account, though she’d tried in a thousand off-target ways. No matter what mile time or exemplary attendance record she brought home, Momma found fault—“Who got first?” “Perfect record of bootlicking!”

  Momma kicked her ass and waited for thank you.

  Daddy seemed to like her better but not enough so to counteract the Momma effect. He was insufficient for that. His strengths lay elsewhere.

  Momma used to tell Jane stories about it in their tent.

  “Your uncle Arthur drove us from Bonham over to Paris— Paris, Texas—to watch baseball. We was sitting in the stands, all those folks hollering and cheering and drinking beer. But the only thing I could see was your daddy. Such a handsome man. Slick and strong, like a new truck . . .”

  She put a piece of watermelon in her mouth and licked a red bit off her finger. Even in the dark, you could see she was beautiful, her heart-shaped face, her heavy arched brows.

  “Watching him out there?” She sighed, shook her head. “And then his voice. After the game, he come on over to us in the stands and picked up another fella’s guitar and started to sing. You remember this one?—‘Will you miss me? Miss me when I’m gone?’”

  She sang it high and thin, a complaint, making Jane’s eyes water.

  “I could see he was doin’ it just for me.” She smiled. “Charged straight through me.” She kneaded the skin over her heart. “Your daddy had a certain kind of power.”

  Still has it, Jane thought.

  “Wasn’t no stopping it. We made you and your brother. God’s greatest blessings, no matter I was just the age you are now.”

  Momma had delivered two babies, buried one, when she was just fifteen.

  “But you know what, Jane? Your daddy don’t have that power over me no more. Power I need now? Electricity. I want a man who can turn on the lights.”

  That wasn’t Daddy.

  IN spite of Momma’s prophesying, by seventeen, Jane didn’t look like the kind of person who was gonna do something. Though she was tall, coming up on six feet, she only weighed 125 pounds—“All vine, no taters,” Momma said. She couldn’t consume enough eggs and biscuits to stop her collarbones from sticking out further than her bosom. She wore her thick brown hair in a single braid wrapped in a coil at the nape of her neck to hide her irregular schedule of washing, which was hard to do well with a bucket of river water. The hairdo called attention to her wide mouth and dark lips just covering an abundance of teeth. If she’d had a big mirror in the tent to examine the effect of the hairstyle, she might have rethought it. But she had eyes the color of spring peas, and you could see how her features might be improved with a skillful hand and money for makeup.

  Momma would grimace when she caught sight of Jane, no doubt wishing she had the time and tools to fix her appearance, cogs turning in her pretty-woman mind, probably calculating how she might divert the tragedy of Jane’s ugliness, making her more useful, if she didn’t have to work so hard appeasing creditors or corralling Daddy, advancing their circumstances in a world that required constant vigilance.

  That may make her sound mean, but people who didn’t know Momma almost always seemed to like her, the way innocents sometimes like a shrewd woman. She’d always been smart about earning at cotton, timing their picking and the weighing of the bags according to the dew, and she’d share her tactics with some of them who were new to the fields, city transplants who’d joined the exodus to California, where everybody said money grew on orange trees.

  Even if a person knew Momma well enough to fear her, that person would often move closer to her spot at the side of a field, offering to share a sip of water out of a lidded mayonnaise jar, mimicking the way she stretched her back and arms, the way she laughed loud at a joke. Though she was only five foot one, she was powerful and real and completely herself, not a fake. And when a person stood near enough to her, he had a good chance of hearing the truth about his life—“Baby oughta be crawling by now.” “Stop howling and get off the porch.” “Don’t like the shape of that mole.”

  Jane heard a lot of her honest talk. Heard she was too slow, too careless, too noisy, too sloppy, too selfish. If it was Momma’s goal to improve Jane, then it worked, because Jane always tried to fix what Momma criticized. She’d had a lot of practice trying to win her approval. It got to where she wouldn’t enter a contest she didn’t think she could win—spelling bees, high jump, Daily Dragon features editor—winning them all in spite of being a white trash Okie, freckled with pollen and tent dirt.

  Nothing much came of her successes. She hadn’t pleased Momma yet, and she wouldn’t have money for college, so she quit school after her junior year and went to work full-time in a Natomas tomato field instead of just-before and right-after school, thinking maybe earning a good amount of money was what she was supposed to do. After a couple months working harder in the 106-degree heat than any boy, woman, or man, she’d begun to understand no farmer would promote a girl picker to foreman. There would be no payoff in tomatoes.

  She’d been wondering if there was going to be any payoff at all for her, living in a tent between the river and the tracks, no matter how hard she worked. That’s what she was thinking the night she came home to find Momma packing their belongings into Uno’s Ford.

  UNO lifted the tent’s sheet flap with his good left arm and sneered. “Evening, beauty queen.”

  She scowled. “What’re you doing with our stuff?”

  “Don’t be rude to Mister Jeffers.”

  “Mister Jeffers?”

  Momma stepped out of the headlights’ glare, closer to Jane. “Our names were drawn for a cabin. We’re back in.”

  Uno was manager of Tumbleweed, the federal labor camp. The wait list was long, and the Hoppers had a black mark next to their name.

  “You musta
bent some rules,” Jane said. “Does Daddy know?”

  “Well, he should know,” Uno said, “but he probably don’t.”

  Momma pointed her melon belly in his direction, looking up through her lashes.

  Jane said, “He knows plenty.”

  Momma pinched the skin on Jane’s arm. “Don’t sass.”

  Jane pulled her arm away, rubbing the red spot. “Daddy won’t like it.”

  There’d be a blowup, everybody talking—white trash Hoppers, all that, and the thing with Leroy.

  Uno set the basket and jar in his Ford’s front seat, and he and Momma went back in the tent, so Jane started unloading what they’d packed, even the mattress, almost everything but the hope chest, making a pile on the dirt.

  It was her job to keep the family together, stealing money from Momma’s bean can when Daddy asked her to, though never as much as he wanted. She bought him whiskey from the Watkins tent down the levee with the bean-can money, topping off a three-quarter jug with water. She lied for him about how he lost the Studebaker, keeping the card game a secret. And the personal stuff with Elthea and the others before her.

  She protected herself and Daddy from Momma’s knowing the details of his behavior. Any kind of family was better than none. Her parents required a lot of managing so as not to botch up her life entirely, beyond what was already messed up by nature, economics, and ruinous government policy, but Jane was optimistic and liked to control what she could, believing her effort would make a difference.

  When Momma and Uno came out of the tent again, carrying stools, Momma’s eyes bugged at her daughter’s boldness. She threw her stool down, crossing the space between them, gripped both sides of Jane’s jaw with one hand and squeezed hard. She was small but bulldog sturdy.

  She let go, and Jane rubbed her second red spot. “We can find some place better.”

  Daddy wouldn’t move back to a camp Uno’d kicked them out of for no good reason. Not even for hot showers and an outhouse.