Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Mac broke into their circle. “What’s this?”

  Lambert slammed the telephone into its cradle. “You’d think this kid could do one thing right!”

  Jorge said, “Boy got confused on the difference between a negative and a picture.”

  “I’ll go back to Wright’s in the morning. I’ll get it!” She went all the way. “But I have something better.”

  “Oh Gawwwwddd!” Lambert wailed.

  “I think there’s something wrong with her pictures. I think she’s been scamming the Feds, the FSA, staging things, faking them.”

  Lambert moaned, “And you know this how?”

  “Reporting! That’s what I’ve been doing. That’s why it was harder to get the picture.”

  “The picture is what we told you to get!” said Jorge.

  Lambert said, “We’re on a murder story, dummy!”

  “Is she . . . dead?”

  “On her way!”

  “But I think this is part of it. If the victim’s—Vee’s—boss is involved in a federal scam, and it’s connected to her attack . . .”

  Mac interrupted. “What?”

  “Wright cheats the government, fakes her pictures . . .”

  “The ones we run?”

  “Everybody runs them. I think Vee knew. And I think that’s why she’s dead—not dead, coma!” The idea was forming as she said it.

  “Kid’s a bad slug!” said Lambert.

  “Pipe down!” Mac pounded one fist into the other palm. “All right! You’ve got one day. But we’re not going to use your story if we don’t get the picture too! You hear me? The story and the picture.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “What’d I tell you?”

  “Mac, sir. Mac, not sir.”

  “Tick tock, Boy. Tick tock.”

  SHE took over Pete’s desk again, which was jammed up against Lambert’s. He’d stomped off, so she used the chance to look in his desk for the keys to the red Chevrolet he kept parked on the street in front with about a thousand tickets on the windshield. Tit for tat, she thought, pocketing the keys. She’d make trouble for him in return for all his trouble, not to mention the moleskin theft. That wasn’t a grudge she’d forgotten, and it felt good to take his key after he’d unloaded on her just now.

  “ I already talked to you people,” said Detective Mel Toledo.

  “Different section,” she said, checking over her shoulder to make sure Lambert hadn’t returned to hear her messing with his story.

  “First we thought it was all about the crowbar. On the ground, next to her body. Turns out that’s not it.”

  “Another weapon . . .”

  “Sort of. Cerebral hypoxia. She had petechiae—little red dots in her eyes. Contusions and abrasions on the right side of her throat. Fingernail marks show he choked her first, hit her second.”

  “He choked her? Then hit her?”

  “When she was already out, face up. Hit her on the right side of her head with that bar. He was a leftie. Made a circular fracture to her skull.”

  She hadn’t thought about Vee’s body, what it meant she’d been attacked. Hearing it now made her see yellow, so she sat. She tried to picture Daddy choking Vee, swinging a crowbar down on her head, thinking of Jane while he did it, but she couldn’t, didn’t want to.

  There were other possibilities—he did it for Grete, or someone else did it, to make it look like it was Daddy.

  He wasn’t a leftie, but he was a two-hander, like Jane.

  “You there?” Toledo asked.

  “Why would he hit her after he thought he’d killed her?”

  “Sometimes, something like that, maybe it had special meaning to him.”

  “Anything else?”

  She heard rustling over the telephone line.

  “Crowbar, wallet with her license, two bucks.” Toledo laughed at somebody in the background before continuing. “Wright’s business card with ‘Breen’s, 8, BH’—in pencil. That’s it.” Jane wrote it all down. Then he asked, “What’s your name again?”

  “Ja . . . Benny. Wheeler.”

  She heard a scratching pencil in the background.

  She hung up, flushed. It was hard to keep lies straight.

  Raggedy ass. Don’t ruin this, said the voice.

  “Shut up,” she answered.

  She pulled the crumpled half sheets of Lambert’s story toward her on the desk and reread them. On the last one was the line that would have gone below the photo she stole—“Vesta Russell, taken by FSA photographer Mrs. Grete Wright, near Sacramento’s federal labor camp.”

  Tumbleweed. This picture happened when Jane lived a couple miles away.

  Though Daddy might be dead, he might not. He might still be living back there in Sacramento, near that dark-haired woman and the baby.

  There was too much in her head. She couldn’t contain it.

  She got a notepad, turned it horizontal, and made a chart, columns left to right, with everything she knew, questions she had. Then it got to overflowing and she redid it, neater, so it was clearer what she had to do next. Everything in its numbered box.

  All the day shift were gone now, so she went back to the darkroom, locked the door, climbed under the desk behind the film boxes and slept for a few hours, newsprint crumpled under her head, before the morning guys began to arrive. She took a hobo bath in the men’s room and went out to the diner for coffee and to reread her chart before taking care of business.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THANKS

  Jane walked through the open door to a house packed with people, the living room decorated for a day-early Thanksgiving party—eggs, potatoes, sausage, champagne, juice, other drinks on a table in the middle. Leaves, feathers, sticks, and ribbons hung in garlands on the walls.

  The Wright boys were acting crazy, hanging on the arms of a guy in a cowboy getup who swung them around, threatening to shoot ’em up. One of them squealed, “I’ll scalp you!” They looked ecstatic in the presence of the man who must be their first father. He was wearing a white linen suit with a bolo tie, silver belt buckle, and sharp-toed boots. None of the farmers or ranchers she’d known wore clothes like that. His fingers were stained, blue, orange, red.

  Then there were the guys who looked to be from Professor Wright’s university department, gray-suited men using big words—three- and four-syllables—milling with Grete’s arty friends in corduroy jackets and messy hair. Everybody looked their own kind of arrogant, preening, everybody fake, she thought.

  She could hear Grete and Paul in the back of the room, their voices rising and falling dramatically—“tragic,” “heartbreaking,” “institutional poverty.”

  Apart, in the corner, were a woman and three children, their clothes ragged but clean. The woman had fine, wavy strawberry hair pulled back into a bun. She wore a faded floral dress. No makeup or hose. She had to be Vee’s mother. Jane turned away.

  She moved to the kitchen, gateway to the basement.

  There, a red-haired girl sat at the table, her cheek resting on one arm, her wiry hair in disarray. She’d need a rope, not a rubber band to tie that hair back. Her skin was pale, the kind that gets dark in the summer when all her freckles run together. She wore a faded plaid shirt and overalls. She neither smiled nor frowned, just watched Jane, as if she’d been waiting.

  It was mostly her hair, brick-colored, rough, untamed, prairie not garden, that reminded Jane of the difference between the place she’d been living and the place she was from. It was a difference in texture. The tips of her fingers tingled, remembering the roughness, the realness of home.

  Not that the city was smooth and slick. She knew its pebbly concrete, its thick sludge of fog, the almost physical smell of fish on the bus, the clang of metal in the basement where the printing press worked. That was texture, too, obviously. But it was different.

  At home things were granular, made of particles she could feel, so that if she were to take a strand of that girl’s wiry hair between her fingers, she’d touch the many little mo
ving bits gathered to build it, and under a microscope those bits would look like grains of dirt. The same was true of the loose-weave dresses made of cotton sacks, and the canvas wrapped over tent poles, and the wood grain of a homemade banjo. Even the cornbread, especially the cornbread, which was why she loved it, that graininess, soaking in buttermilk.

  Looking at that wiry red hair brought it back. She was homesick.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  The girl sat up, bringing her fists to her chin.

  “You her boyfriend?”

  “No. But I thought she was pretty.”

  “Pretty ain’t nothin’.”

  Jane shuddered, having said something so stupid.

  “She sung me awake every day.”

  “What’d she sing?”

  The girl started up, no self-consciousness—“Wake up, Jacob, day’s a breakin’. Peas in the pot and hoe cakes baking.”

  Jane joined her—“Bacon’s in the pan and coffee’s in the pot. Come on round and get it while it’s hot.”

  She nodded, wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “She did some things not a one other person mighta done.”

  “What sort of things?”

  The girl looked out the window at the lawn. “Why you asking?”

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to her.”

  The girl chewed on her lip. “Wouldn’t it have been better to do something before?”

  The sorest spot.

  The kitchen door opened and the maid came in, carrying a tray of dirty coffee cups and champagne glasses. Her mouth opened as she looked from Jane to the girl.

  “Get out, Hopper. She’s coming.”

  Jane rose and looked at the red-haired girl, who said, “She ain’t dead yet.”

  SHE hadn’t been to a hospital since Granny and didn’t know what to do.

  She followed the signs that read “Emergency/Maternity.” Two cop cars were parked in front of that entrance, and she hurried past them. One of them, leaning out his window, yelled, “I guess they’ll let anybody be a daddy these days!” and the other one laughed.

  She rushed the wrong direction through the maternity ward and the children’s ward and the cancer ward until finally she came back around to emergency, passing through all the miserable people waiting for attention, and asked a round-cheeked nurse, “Where will I find Vee Russell?”

  “Vee?”

  “Vesta, I mean.”

  Her starched hat concealed her eyes. “She’s been moved.” The nurse wrote directions on a scrap of paper without asking questions, too many people wailing all around to care about Jane.

  Up the elevator, she found the pea soup-colored waiting room she’d been directed to, where a couple of worried people in work uniforms stood with a pale-skinned doctor and a ruddy, athletic-looking nurse in starchy white. Jane sat in a chair against the wall and hid her face in a Saturday Evening Post, listening, trying to plan. She wasn’t catching much—“patient,” “trauma,” “coma.” But also, she heard them say “he” instead of “she.”

  The smell of the room—antiseptic floor cleaner—brought her back to the room where Granny had passed, and that was enough to start a prickling in her eyes, which she rubbed with the back of her hand.

  Over the top of her magazine, she looked at the dark-haired woman holding a handkerchief to the lower part of her face with both hands. Her eyes were puffy, no eyelashes or brows. A tall man with spiky hair, in denims and a heavy work jacket, held his arm tight around her as they faced the doctor.

  He answered their questions in a voice too quiet for Jane to hear. But after he walked away, the nurse took his place in the center of their group, leaning in to put a hand on each of their shoulders. “Really, in spite of the shock of his being unconscious, a coma is the best thing for him. It reduces the trauma while the swelling goes down. The doctor thinks that’s good.”

  The couple hugged each other, and then the woman hugged the nurse.

  For some reason, Jane thought of Hank Ikeda, the copy boy who missed his mom. Maybe his mom was like this woman.

  Her cheeks warmed. She’d made a coma happen to Vee, ruined everything for her and her family. How would she fix the rubble collapsing all around her? She’d be held to account.

  She was in one corner of the waiting room. In another, the nurse continued comforting the couple. In a third, an impatient doctor tried to talk with two men who didn’t speak English. And near the fourth corner were a pair of swinging doors under a sign that read, “Hospital personnel only.”

  She’d crossed so many borders. She put down the magazine and walked past everyone else, entering those doors into a wide, quiet hallway, expecting someone to stop her, though no one did. No one ever stopped her.

  A nurse’s desk loomed ahead on her left. Beyond that was a chalkboard with names and room numbers on it. She couldn’t read it from where she stood. Just to her right was a cart of dirty laundry. She dropped her suit jacket into the cart and brought out the only white jacket in the cart, stained with blood on its right arm. She slipped it on and walked toward the chalkboard, her head down, past the nurses, who were circled up, whispering to each other, gossiping, toward the chalkboard—Room 437, Vesta Russell. The line below her name was blank.

  She made a right down a long hallway, the wrong direction, and then doubled back and found 437 at the other end of the hall. She waited outside the door, looking both ways, but heard nothing, saw nothing, so she entered.

  There were two narrow beds, the one closest to the door empty, unmade.

  Vee lay on the one near the window, in a blue hospital gown, her head flat on the mattress, no pillows. Surrounded by that antiseptic smell, which was also, still, somehow earthy— sweat and urine—Vee seemed so delicate, more so here than on the pier. Her cheek and forehead and eye were blackened, swollen, bandaged. Ruined. Jane wanted to lay her hand against her cheek, wanted to be bloody herself instead of Vee. She made a loud coughing sound, shocking herself, and stopped it with her hand.

  Vee was a real person, really harmed, by Jane.

  Mind your row.

  There was no clipboard or chart hanging off the end of the bed like in the movies. Nothing on the side tables. No papers anywhere. She looked on the chair backs. Nothing. In the drawers, nothing but jars, cotton balls, bandages. Finally she looked in the closet across from the bed, where a canvas bag hung on a hook. She opened it and looked inside to see Vee’s clothes. She pulled them out, spreading them on the foot of the bed, on Vee’s feet, her coat, chunky shoes, a summery dress, not right for this city.

  No evidence. No explanation.

  Was she just a desperate mother, like so many others, who’d take whatever work she could get at almost any cost?

  Was she a normal girl who wanted to escape terrible circumstances, get to the city?

  Was she someone like Jane, with visions of a great big future?

  A would-be photographer?

  A do-gooder?

  Jane felt angry at the absence of answers, almost angry even at Vee.

  Why’d this happen? Who are you?

  She said it out loud—“Who are you?”

  “May I help you, Doctor?”

  She turned and the athletic nurse gasped, staring at Jane’s arm, the blood all over her sleeve.

  “I’ll, I’d better . . . take this off.”

  As Jane crossed the room to the door, the nurse asked, “Who are you?”

  Jane pushed past her, out to the hall, past the ogling others.

  “Who are you?” the nurse yelled.

  Jane ran through the double doors and into the waiting room, directly into a circle of people who’d migrated into the hallway. Running, she knocked the grieving lady—Hank’s maybe mother—to the floor.

  The nurse yelled, “Fake!”

  Someone else yelled, “Security!”

  Jane ran toward an exit sign leading to a stairwell, down four flights, through one last hallway, passing women in labor and their pacing husbands in the wa
iting room, and out the door of the maternity ward. She ripped off the white jacket and threw it into a trash can at the exit in front of the cops, busy in conversation, laughter.

  She ran around the corner and leaned, panting, against a building.

  She found a pass on the ground near the garbage and used it to board a streetcar, pushing through the smokers in the open-air rear of the car into the center. It was full of people coming from the market, standing and hanging onto the overhead bar, their shopping bags dangling. Jane felt sick, surrounded by the smells of fish and spice. She wanted to spit out those smells. Every clanging bell alarmed her—Fake! Security!

  She felt a bunching at her waist and saw her wrapping had come loose and was gathered just over her belt, allowing the small rise of her breasts to show beneath her sweaty man’s shirt. She had no jacket, so she wrapped her arms around herself. She couldn’t fix things here.

  She jumped out at Market and Fifth and walked to Mission, where she found Lambert’s red Chevrolet, parking tickets covering the windshield. She wiped them off into the gutter and used the key she’d stolen from his drawer to unlock the door, rolled down the window, started the ignition, and pulled away from the curb, spreading a glove compartment map on the steering wheel as she drove.

  Entering traffic, she heard, “Hey, that’s not Lambert!”

  She pushed on the gas—right on Fifth, left on Market, heading east, the window partway open—and pointed Lambert’s car out of the city.

  SHE smelled home before she saw it. Silt and pesticide—arsenic, sulfur, kerosene.

  She watched the gas gauge drop until she was just a few miles west of Sacramento. She pulled into a closed Texaco station, peeling sign out front: Beer, Beans, and Gas. Nobody was there at this hour to fill her tank. She drove around back, rolled up the windows and closed her eyes, waiting for morning.

  “HEY! You can’t sleep here!” A jumpsuited attendant rapped on her window.

  She rolled it down, gave him two dollars, and pulled the car around to the pump.

  He looked at her suspiciously as he filled her gas tank.

  She saw it was already late, noon. She’d slept hard and long out back. How had she wasted so much time?