Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  He bellowed and grabbed her feet, knocking her down, and she fell into the ditch. Her face hit cold water, and she sputtered and rose up, coughing. She struggled to stand, the water waist high. She stepped on something sharp—a branch? —tearing right through her shoe into her foot. She pulled it out, screaming. The pain moved in a wave through her body, into her head, pounding to get out. But still she crawled up the edge to the muddy bank.

  He was standing over her now. “I thought you were different!”

  You are different! raged the voice in her head.

  “I am!” she yelled.

  Different than he thought, different than she was a few hours before.

  She thought he was going to throw her back in the water, drown her. She knew it. This was how she would end. Momma was wrong. She wasn’t going to do something. She was going to end right there, in the muddy water. Not in the papers, on the radio. Just a dirty, ugly girl, white trash, dead in a ditch, alone, if she didn’t do something now.

  Her fingers sank in the mud, inches from moonlit metal, the crowbar. She reached and gripped it again, rose up and swung a third time, hitting him hard on his knees.

  He cried out, tumbling into the ditch himself, splashing, yelling.

  Her whole leg throbbed. Her skull was brittle, like it might explode from pressure.

  She climbed up, sobbing, her face muddy, streaked red, brown, white.

  Finally she stopped crying. The only sound left was the rushing ditch water. Still she waited, her heart pounding, but nothing happened—something should happen! She waited longer. Still nothing. No one. An empty space between then and now.

  She breathed—one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. When her breath no longer rasped, she thought, Maybe he swam off, climbed out of the ditch down the road. He’s hitching a ride to Stockton. He won’t come back.

  She waited some more, but still nothing happened.

  Her ears filled with that sizzling static.

  He cain’t come back. He’s dead.

  She waited on the dirt until her thoughts had gone to ash.

  She got up and threw the crowbar in the ditch. She limped to the car and opened the glove box, finding what she wanted, a matchbook. She struck one match, pushing too hard, breaking it. She struck another but couldn’t make it light, scratching it over and over before tossing it. Then one smoked and lit right up, but by the time she held it out in front of her it burned her fingers, and she flung it away. Next one she got a little light from. Finally she struck one that shone onto the key, lying against the front tire.

  She got back into the driver’s seat and started the ignition, without Daddy’s voice in her ear, and turned the car around, toward home.

  When she got to camp, the tent was gone, Momma and Uno too. Even Daddy’s banjo. Just trash, empty cans, a broken plate, spilled nails.

  You paid your debt, said the voice.

  “That ain’t it. That ain’t what I’m gonna do.”

  She kicked the dirt, looking for any small thing that belonged to her—a book, a bag of marbles, a comb—but found none of it. Near where Daddy hit Uno, she found seven pennies and a hand-printed card—“Sweetie, 3528 Clay Street, San Francisco.”

  She felt a knot of pain in her forehead and fingered an almond-sized lump there, which worried her. She knew deadly wounds were often bullet small.

  But she wasn’t dead yet.

  She put the pennies and the card in her pocket, got back in Uno’s Ford, her hope chest filling half the back seat, and started the car, heading west.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CLAY

  Let me in,” Jane said to a sliver of face visible through the chain-locked door.

  Sweetie’s left blue eye traveled the length of Jane, over her bloody overalls, her cut-up forehead, her bare left foot—she’d removed her shoe as her foot swelled over the five hours it took her to find her way to this Clay Street doorstep. She’d rolled down her window a dozen times on the drive, desperate enough to talk to all manner of people who were not like her, asking Orientals, Coloreds, Italians, Irish, prostitutes, police, and swells how to get to this porch of the only person she knew who lived in San Francisco—Sweetie Jeffers, daughter of Uno.

  “Janie? What happened?”

  “A fight.”

  “Here?”

  “Home.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Let me in, Sweetie, please.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “You said I could come if I ever needed anything.”

  “When did I? I . . . I couldn’t have. I left without . . .” Her voice quavered.

  In fact, Sweetie hadn’t said it to Jane but had said something like it to a crying, jilted, eighth-grade girl, years before. Jane had been so touched by Sweetie’s salve-like tone in that overheard conversation that she’d filed the moment in her memory, retrieving it for practical use tonight. She hadn’t seen Sweetie since she’d disappeared from Tumbleweed right after Jane and Daddy and Momma first moved in, but Jane thought Sweetie would be on her side, having already escaped Uno herself.

  “Please,” Jane said. “I need your help.”

  Sweetie’s one visible eye grew bigger, softening what Jane could see of her face. “Help” looked like the magic word.

  “I can’t have you stay here. It’s not my place.”

  “You’re the only one I can go to,” Jane said.

  Sweetie closed the door, unchained the lock, and opened it all the way. “Come in,” she said. “But be quiet.”

  She led Jane, limping, upstairs into a front parlor, settling her on a brown velvet sofa facing a piano the size of a truck bed, sheet music papering its top.

  Looking down at Jane’s foot, she said, “Looks like a ham hock,” which it did.

  Sweetie’s nose crinkled up at that. She had a sprinkle of freckles across its ridge and the rise of her cheeks. Jane had never known a redhead with so few freckles. Uno never put her in the field with the other kids, Jane recalled, keeping her inside their Tumbleweed cabin instead, cleaning up, cooking, sewing, ever since her mother had died of tuberculosis. She’d always looked like a little lady, no matter how patchy her wardrobe.

  Now, grown up, she had the same small peach mouth over a pointy chin. Her pearl earrings matched the buttons of her navy shirtdress, tailored to her curves, belted at her waist just so. She was still in her day clothes, not her sleep clothes, at two in the morning. Her navy leather heels were waxed over scuffs. She’d always been so pretty in a clever way, the kind of girl who knew how to make herself look good, even if she hadn’t looked good by nature. Jane remembered watching her sew a cheerleader outfit and spot-bleach it at night by the fire all season, captivating the younger camp girls. The way she let them into that intimate work by the fire showed a real generosity, a willingness to share her success, to say they were worthy of it, to let them—who were so low—connect with her—so far above. That was the memory that had risen up when Jane found her address left behind like a charm in the dirt.

  “Do your momma and daddy know you’re here?”

  Jane leaned back on the velvet and waited, mute, for a steep hill of pain to flatten. Then she said, “No.” She’d told Daddy about San Francisco, but he was dead now.

  The phonograph breathed a moaning kind of music from an instrument Jane didn’t know, sounding like it was coming through the room’s thin plaster skin, from its lungs.

  Sweetie blew a puff of air that raised the fringe of hair on her forehead. “Don’t go anywhere.” She headed out the door, down the hall, leaving Jane alone.

  Jane took in her surroundings. Bookshelves anchored the lower two-thirds of the parlor walls. Three books were stacked next to her on the sofa, scraps of paper sticking out the sides, strange words on the books’ spines: Tchaikovsky’s Impossible Concerto, Great Thinkers on Ligeti’s Etudes and Hearing the Macabre: Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. Double doors on the nearest wall were pulled closed.

  Pen
cil drawings of people with tall white hair and hats like ships, canes of vining flowers and swords of fire, were strung all around with twine. Over the fireplace hung a gold-framed painting of a John Deere tractor up close, its grill huge, parked on black soil under an orange sky with pink clouds, signed “SJ” in the corner. The room smelled toasty, acidic, lingering proof of cigarettes, all of it chaotically impossible to decipher.

  Though the music stopped, the record kept spinning, scratching.

  She heard a conversation down the hall.

  “She is not my problem. I do not need another project.”

  “I won’t ask anything of you. It’ll just be a short time.”

  “Right. You won’t ask anything. Nothing at all.”

  “What, do you want me to call the cops or something? Silly, Rivka, think about it.”

  This was a mistake, better to sleep in the car, near the hobos, by the water. Jane pushed off the sofa, stepped once— unh!—and dropped back again.

  Settle down. There was no static around the voice this time. It was coming in clearer.

  “Break that foot and we’ll have to shoot you,” Sweetie said from the doorway, laughing in a tinkly, nickels-dropping way. “Sorry. Joking, joking.” She crossed the room and turned off the phonograph.

  Another girl, dark-haired, stood with her hands on her hips, assessing Jane. Her lips twisted to the side, like she was having a private joke.

  “Jane, Rivka. Rivka, Jane,” Sweetie said.

  Rivka looked like a Cherokee girl Jane remembered from a corn stand in Oklahoma. Her lids covered the top third of her eyes, making her look almost sleepy, though below the lids her brown eyes were focused, critical. Her nose bone rose in a bump and then veered to the left on the way down. She wore pajamas, top and bottoms, buttoned all the way up to her throat, and a bracelet of oddly shaped pearls, each wrapped in silver strands, spinning around her ankle. On her ankle, Jane thought. Her feet were bare, toenails buffed and shiny but unpainted. Jane remembered how everybody treated the Cherokees bad in Texas and Oklahoma, needing to feel somebody was below them. Rivka didn’t look like she’d had that sort of treatment.

  “Pills and bath,” Rivka said, and walked out again.

  When she’d gone down the hall, Sweetie said, “I recall your momma and daddy had a habit of fighting.” Her voice rose up at the end, inviting Jane to talk.

  She’s gossiping about me, to me, Jane thought. “Your papa ain’t no Jesus.”

  Sweetie sat up straighter and patted the skirt of her dress. “He’s a good enough man. He isn’t violent. I know that.”

  “He’s a good number cruncher. Ain’t a good man.”

  In spite of how she felt about Momma and Daddy and how badly she needed help, she wasn’t going to lose a parent contest to Uno’s girl. Judging by a little slump in Sweetie’s shoulders, it didn’t look like she planned to argue the point anyway.

  Rivka returned with water and a small bottle, shaking three pills into her hand, passing them and the glass to Jane, looking her straight in the eye, like she saw who Jane was, knew she didn’t measure up, was a waste of her medicine.

  “Go on,” Sweetie said, nodding, and Jane swallowed the pills.

  Rivka left, and moments later Jane heard water running.

  “Come on! Before it gets cold!” Rivka yelled.

  Sweetie put her arm around Jane’s waist and helped her to the bathroom, the two of them at the end of a rope pulled by Rivka.

  Sweetie removed Jane’s clothes and undergarments and settled her into a clawfoot tub of hot, foamy water, all the way to her chin. Jane winced at the heat at first, and then it felt better, numbing her body. She began to disappear that way in her head, too, and was grateful for the pills and the heat, in spite of the vulnerability they created.

  Rivka returned, grumbling as she used Jane’s ruined clothes to mop blood and clay off the tile, and then she carried the clothes out of the bathroom by her thumb and pointer finger, away from her body—“Would that we had incinerator.”

  Even fuzzy-headed, Jane thought there were words missing in that sentence.

  Sweetie sat on a towel on the floor, pushed up her sleeves, unbraided Jane’s hair, and used a measuring cup to pour bathwater over her head, lathering it up with a thick, orange-smelling soap that foamed into a crown. Jane sank below the water and considered staying there but rose up anyway when she had to breathe.

  Sweetie scrubbed the mud from Jane’s hairline and the creases around her nose and the cleft in her chin. Then she scrubbed in and around Jane’s ears and the dirty necklaces of skin around her throat. She scrubbed her hands, not just the red stains in her calluses, but also all the way round and under her rough fingernails, until they looked pink and clean as a schoolgirl’s. She brushed Jane’s knotted hair until it lay flat and plaited it, right there in the tub.

  Then Sweetie reached into the water and picked up Jane’s foot, holding it in the light.

  Jane didn’t like her touching that.

  Sweetie shook her head. “I’m sorry, hon.”

  Something wedged in Jane’s throat.

  Sweetie put the foot carefully down and took Jane’s hand to help her out of the water. With her own free hand Jane covered her bosom. When she was standing, balanced on one foot, she covered her other private parts. She’d not stood this way in front of another person in years, and even so medicated, she was ashamed to be stared at.

  Rivka held out a nightgown, looking at Jane’s skinny frame, and whistled.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” she lied.

  “Apparently you need more than pills and bath.”

  Sweetie giggled. “You make such a nice nurse, so empathetic.”

  Then she handed Jane the towel and the gown, which she pulled over her head before she was dry.

  With Sweetie’s support, Jane limped down the shotgun hallway after Rivka, through a black-and-white kitchen, and out a glass door to a white wood room with uncovered windows on three walls and a second glass door to the landing out back. A narrow bed was laid with chenille blankets in a space scarcely bigger than the Ford.

  Sweetie turned down the covers.

  Jane lay down, and Sweetie sat on the side of the bed, lifting Jane’s foot. Rivka came back and handed Sweetie a small tool, which she used to pick splinters and grit from the wounds. Tears wet Jane’s face. She was defenseless, prone to Sweetie’s small surgery.

  Rivka returned again with a pile of extra blankets, dropping them on the end of the bed with a grieved exhalation.

  Everything here was different than home—the mineral smell was different, no irrigation-on-dirt smell. Here it was brisk, even inside, but also spicy—garlicky aromas floating in from the neighborhood.

  When Rivka walked out again, Jane took her chance. “Can’t I please stay for a while?”

  The skin under Sweetie’s eyes pinked. “She won’t like it. She’ll say no.”

  “Can’t you just tell her?”

  “That’s not how it works. I tend things for her. She rescued me when I showed up.” Sweetie dimpled, like she was proud to be chosen for rescue or proud to be needed, maybe both.

  “Rescued how?”

  Sweetie frowned. “Got me together.” She looked down at her dress. “She’s something,” she said, shifting. “Plays piano in the symphony on KGO. She knows everybody, all the musicians, of course, but also the celebrities who come to the radio. She knows Dorothy Lamour!” Sweetie beamed at this. “She opened me up to so much.” Sweetie looked around the bare little room, appreciative.

  At home, Jane had pinned a picture of Dorothy Lamour in a sequined aqua gown up on the wall of her tent over her pallet as some kind of ideal. Rivka knew the real Dorothy, and Sweetie knew Rivka. Jane understood how she must feel about that.

  “Do you work at the radio too? Did you meet her there?”

  Sweetie’s eyes rounded. “Oh no! We met sitting next to each other at the Castro Theater to see San Francisco. I had hardly an
y money, but that didn’t stop me going to the movies. We both got the hysterics at this one part—have you seen it?—Clark Gable tells Jeannette MacDonald to show him her legs. She says, ‘I said I’m a singer.’” Sweetie recited this in a loud, offended voice with her hands on her hips, her laughter trilling.

  Jane hadn’t seen the movie, just the poster, but the poster was what had gotten her here.

  “We were a team from the start. I moved in, and Rivka fixed me up—got me a starter job at the opera. Now I’m head assistant to the costume designer! So I guess I’m redeemed for spending food money on a movie.”

  This new Sweetie was nothing like the girls back at the river, or even the farmers’ kids who lived in houses. She was already special back then, pretty, well liked, clean. But now, her voice and mannerisms, her expectations, they were all different. She was like a girl in the movies, Janet Gaynor, the funny heroine. There wasn’t an ounce of Okie left in her. She could go anywhere, Jane thought.

  Sweetie floated two more blankets over her, settling them in a warm cloud.

  Jane liked her gestures, how much gentler she was than Rivka, who’d helped her on this night but with such a dark attitude that it scarcely felt like kindness. Sweetie made you feel you were being helped.

  She straightened Jane’s covers at the edges of the bed and rose to go, clicking off the lamp. “We’ll find a place for you in the morning.”

  Her mind eased from the pills and the bath and the bed, Jane thought, This is the place I want. This place—these blankets, this bed, this room, these crackers, that music, these pills.

  She could bond Sweetie to her, remind her that though they weren’t blood, they were from the same clay. She sensed what Sweetie might want to hear and gave it to her.

  “My daddy did this.”

  Sweetie stood still and then sat back down on the foot of Jane’s bed, waiting without visible breath.

  “He fought me.”

  Sweetie’s body gave off a hum, like it was doing great work to stay so still, listen so well. Jane could hardly see her face, just sensed a blurry glow of energy. Jane closed her eyes, thinking how it might feel to tell Sweetie what happened, to trust someone. The muscles from the base of her skull to the edge of her shoulders relaxed imagining that.