Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  “Benny’s givin’ us a ride back to camp.”

  They all cried out hellos, and the biggest girl, about thirteen, with frizzy black braids, handed a few dollars up to her mother.

  “How was it?” Noreen asked.

  “Just helpin’ her get ready for her big dinner,” the girl said. “She was okay.”

  “Thanks dumplin’.” Noreen smiled at her daughter and turned back to Jane.

  “Photographer didn’t think it would look good to show my kids. People wouldn’t care as much if they saw the variety.”

  In the rearview Jane saw towheads, brunettes, redheads.

  “Anything to eat?” asked a crusty-nosed boy with a black buzz cut and dark skin.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Noreen answered. “There’ll be something in the . . .”

  “I can get you dinner.”

  The backseat crew cheered.

  “But you’ve got to answer my questions. No more deals.”

  “Okay,” Noreen said, having already gotten a deal she liked.

  Jane pulled the Chevy onto the highway, heading to Tumbleweed Federal Labor Camp.

  THOUGH they’d wrestled and fussed on the highway, the kids acted almost holy as they pulled up to the arched wood Tumbleweed sign, their hands folded on their laps, their voices whispers.

  Jane parked on the side of the road, just past the sign. “Wait here,” she said.

  She got out and walked up the drive, under the sign, past the men’s showers and women’s showers and vegetable garden—winter spinach and collards and beets—dozens of canvas-sided cabins raised up on wood foundations, porches and water pumps out front, all of them dim and quiet. She walked past the community room, lit up like a bonfire, every open window glowing, the sound of fiddles inside. Loud voices, all turned inward toward each other, not out at her, celebrating the holiday.

  She passed that, heading to the biggest cabin with a sign out front: MANAGER.

  When she knocked on the door she got nothing, knocked again, still nothing. She turned the knob and pushed, but it was locked, so she pressed her face against the crack and said, “Momma.” Nothing.

  She walked around to the side and pushed her hand between the curtains—no glass, even for the manager. She went over to a pile of cardboard and pallets stacked next to the fence and got an orange crate and stood on it to climb through the opening into their bedroom, and jumped into a room with a nice-sized bed, Granny’s quilt, flowers in a jar on the dresser.

  She opened the dresser’s top drawer: store-bought underwear, panties, bras, girdles, slips, hose, garters, a couple each of some things, all clean. She lifted them up, moved them around, disturbing the neatness. In the back of the drawer she found a folded stack of ones, dirty, bound with a rubber band.

  She was the reason Momma had this cabin, these flowers on the dresser, this money in her underwear drawer. She’d gotten rid of Daddy so Momma could live here with Uno. She unbanded the bills, counting twenty-three dollars, put the money in her pocket and closed the drawer, balancing accounts.

  She walked through the bedroom into the main room— kitchen, table, chairs. Against the far wall was a desk, a calendar on top, four lockable drawers, a telephone. Momma lived someplace with a telephone. This was far nicer than the Tumbleweed cabin Momma, Daddy, and she used to have, which Uno had evicted them from.

  She unlocked the door, walked back to the Chevy, and told Noreen’s family to follow her, silent, if they wanted to eat. They followed her orders exactly, silent past the community room party, where she could hear Momma’s loud laugh. She felt sick with fear she’d be seen.

  She got them to the Manager cabin, ushered them in.

  “Pretty,” said the black-haired girl, looking at a clean quilt in pink and blue—the Okie star pattern, Momma’s favorite— folded on a kitchen chair.

  Jane spread it out so they could sit on it.

  In the icebox she found potatoes, onions, celery, carrots, and leftover chicken thighs. Only a little hesitant, she shredded the chicken and chopped vegetables and added them to salted water in a pot on the stove, still warm from the fire beneath. From jars on wood plank shelves over the stove, she crumbled in sage and red peppers. She mixed flour with water in a cup before adding the thickener to the soup. This was a dinner Granny would make.

  She got down a jar of homemade biscuit mix and Noreen added water, stirring the dough.

  “We need help,” Noreen said. “But I don’t want nobody looking down on us.”

  “I know,” Jane said.

  “That in the newspaper makes it seem like we’re gypsies. We ain’t gypsies except by circumstance. We want to own land again, settle our own land, stop wandering.”

  Jane took a bite of the dough, liking its salt.

  “I bent for that woman.”

  She looked at Noreen, at the planes of her tanned face, and felt a pang. Momma was a proud woman who never bent for someone else. But Noreen had a bruised look her mother didn’t have.

  “I looked pitiful. More pitiful than I am. After she left, I unbent myself, had fun when the others come back to the campsite where she took our picture. Nobody wants to take my picture having fun. I like to have fun. I ain’t no dog. I have some wolf left in me.”

  Jane took the bowl from Noreen to drop spoons of dough onto a pan and put it in the still-warm oven with a small lump of lard on each biscuit, feeling silence would work better than questions.

  “Back in Sayre, the dust got everywhere. Inside the house, inside the stove. All over me. All in me. I breathed it in. It’s a part of me.”

  The dust gets in you.

  Noreen was Vee’s unnamed friend in the newspaper.

  “Now, in California, rain gets under the tent walls, makes all of us muddy. I eat that mud. Any baby I may yet have . . .”

  Jane gasped and Noreen laughed.

  “If I ever have another baby, she’ll inherit that dust and that mud, even if she lives the rest of her life in the city.”

  Jane wanted to disagree.

  “I’d like her to inherit other things too. Oranges. Grapes.”

  “You don’t inherit that stuff,” Jane said. “You pick it.”

  “Some people inherit it.”

  Jane thought, She doesn’t see it there for the picking.

  They got out cups and bowls and filled them with soup and biscuits. On the porch, Jane pumped water into an urn, and they poured it into jelly jars for everybody to share. The kids sat on that quilt on the floor taking bites and passing cups.

  The music on the other side of camp was lively, fiddle driven.

  “Anything else you want to tell me about the photographer?”

  Noreen put her hand over her mouth, rubbing it, and then dropped it to her lap. “I’m used to folks lying. But I hate when they lie and pretend it’s good for me.” She fished around in her cup for a piece of potato.

  Jane felt the tightness of the bandages hiding her breasts.

  “Which lie?”

  “She tried to clean the campsite of everything that looked like us? The bottles and the trash and the diapers? Made up who we are.”

  “Don’t you think she was protecting you, your dignity?”

  “When she told my big girl to get out of the picture, to keep the other kids out? When she posed me and that guy and Vee and her pretty blond baby? When she promised to help me but never gave me nothing? When she said authorities don’t like to know about a drunk mother with ten kids from different daddies, different skin. A woman who puts her children out to work!”

  “She said that and you still let her take your picture?”

  “No, she took the picture a long time ago!”

  “When did she say it?”

  “Night after the first articles in the paper about Vee. When she come back.”

  “Came back? Why?”

  “Vee had come to see us, worried. Then, after, when I read that about her being attacked, I called the photographer. I told her she owed us. For the picture.” />
  “This happened when?”

  “The day after Vee was attacked. I called the photographer in the morning. Then I stood all day in line at the cannery. When I come back to the tent, after stopping in old town, she was there, sitting with my kids, like to bite my head off.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t want me talking about the picture to anybody, telling about her pushing me around, paying the guy. She gave me twenty dollars, said she wouldn’t give me no more. Said if I knew what was good for me, that’d finish it.”

  “She paid you?” Grete was such a liar. She wouldn’t want those payments getting out. It wouldn’t have looked good.

  “Wasn’t nothing, what she gave me. Compared to what she earned.”

  Jane thought a photographer probably didn’t get paid much. But then Grete’s house was so nice, and she seemed in charge of her husband, like she earned the dough.

  “What do you know about what she earned?”

  “Nothing. Just people talked about her, that she was different than the other photographers.”

  “How?”

  “Said her pictures were more important. That’s what she said.”

  Uppity.

  “What about Abraham and Vee?” she asked. “How well did you know them?”

  Noreen looked at the toddler, sleeping on the big girl’s lap.

  “That’s her baby there, P. B., Potato Bug.”

  Jane looked at the girl’s chubby cheeks, sticky with soup, the only one in the group with store-bought clothes.

  “The baby in this picture?”

  “Vee’s baby.”

  “And Abraham’s?”

  “He was a prop.”

  Jane winced. A thing, not a man.

  “Just for the picture. He does look like you. Do you see it?”

  Jane breathed through her nose. “Did you know him?”

  “He was just standing there, watching, up against the tree. Then he come up, trying to bargain, said he knew the photographer takes money.”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t get anything from her then. Didn’t occur to me then.”

  “Why do you have P. B.?”

  “After the picture, Vee asked the photographer for work. When she got it, we made a deal. She was gonna come back regular with money, for P. B. and us. Which she did. She kept her promise.”

  “Where’s P. B.’s daddy?”

  “Young fella. Don’t matter.”

  Jane looked at her picture. “Abraham’s not the daddy?”

  “You’re fixed on Abraham.”

  Jane frowned.

  “He just looked right for the picture, with his banjo. I told you, he was a prop.”

  “Did Vee know him?”

  “Ain’t my pigs, ain’t my barn.”

  Jane chewed her lip, thinking. “What will you do about P. B.?”

  “Keep her. Vee was doing her best. It ain’t easy to raise a child.”

  Noreen’s kids sat, playing finger games, humming, daydreaming. They were poor, didn’t eat regularly, were ill-dressed, dirty looking. They had to work, even the littlest of them. But they looked somehow all right, like they might take care of each other, like they were secure. Why were they this way?

  Why wasn’t Jane sweet and grateful for so little?

  “Where’s Abraham now?”

  “Somebody said he had a gig with a band, some kind of barn thing. Farm-sounding gig, in Frisco.”

  Jane thought, Don’t call it Frisco.

  “Name sounded made-up to me. Can’t remember.”

  They all got up and washed dishes and returned them to their shelf, scrubbed the pot, put everything to rights.

  Noreen sighed and said, “This sure is nice.”

  A floor and walls make a difference, Jane thought. And electricity.

  Noreen and the kids left the cabin the way they came in, single file, silent, out the gate to the Chevy.

  Jane washed her face and hands in the sink, drying them with a dish towel, which she left damp, crumpled on the floor, a message to Momma.

  SHE glided the Chevy on dying fumes into a tight space in front of the Prospect. The security guard silently admitted her to the building. The night staff moved like ghosts through the usually bustling place, no unneeded chatter, the smell of coffee, smoke. Everybody else at home with family, recovering from turkey and drink.

  Jane waved at Sandy at the switchboard.

  “You’re coming up in the world. Got lots of calls, some for you, one about you.”

  “What do you mean, about me?”

  “Lady wanted to know where you were. I told her Sacramento.”

  Jane glowered. “You told her?”

  “That’s it! Nothing else! I didn’t know anything to tell!”

  “Who was it?”

  “She didn’t say. Then your roommate called.” Sandy read her note. “She said, ‘Don’t talk to Sweetie.’ Didn’t say why.”

  “That it?” Jane spit it out.

  “No. You got a message from Wright. Said you should look into the guy in the picture. Said there was something funny about him, that he had another woman, who was jealous.”

  Was this Grete threatening her, through Momma?

  “That it?” she repeated.

  “Nope. Somebody left you this.” Sandy handed her Daddy’s worn pocketknife. “Left at the reception desk.”

  Jane turned it over in her hand. “Who left it?”

  “It was just sitting there with a scrap of paper on it, your name.”

  “Benny Hopper?”

  “Have you got some other name I don’t know about?”

  Find him before he finds you, before he ruins this.

  “Do you know a bar that has something to do with a barn or a farm or farm animals even?”

  “Do I know a bar? I know all the bars! Even the ones to do with a barn! Even the baaaaaaad ones!” Sandy cackled as she made a list of three.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BARS

  Jane entered the Marina District’s Horse Trough Tavern, conspicuously alone and awkward outside her usual places, no one to help her fit in by association, and pushed her way to the crowded bar. A hundred things fought for space in her head. She looked all around and didn’t see Daddy or any obvious musicians.

  She spotted a burly guy behind the bar, the other servers making space around him without his doing anything obvious to demand it.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Acme. You the owner?”

  He nodded, giving Jane a wary up and down. “Howard.” He handed her the beer.

  “Nice place you got here, Howard, very nice.”

  He didn’t answer. A damp paper turkey slouched on the bar.

  “I’m Benny Hopper. Nice to meet you. Why’d you call it the Horse Trough?”

  Howard reached under his counter and brought up a horseshoe, set it on the bar, patted it.

  “This was my granddaddy’s. I got lucky after football and bought this place.”

  He looked like an athlete gone to fat, ham-armed, tattooed.

  “Who’d you play for?”

  “You don’t know?”

  She had nothing to offer, no quip like any real boy would have. She’d done so much with Daddy, talked a lot of baseball, but not football at all.

  He stared at her, waiting, she thought, for her to ask the questions anybody who followed football might ask.

  “Bet you get tired of talking about those days, eh?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Ain’t that the truth. All that in the papers.”

  The sports section? Something else? She played it safe. “What’s your take?”

  “My take?”

  “What do you think about it?” She had to get out of this, over to the real line of questions.

  He stopped pushing his cloth around the counter and said, “Really?”

  What was going on here?

  He gripped the bar with both hands, his arms bent, muscles
bulging under fat, and leaned forward into her, like they were conspiring.

  “Justice isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Justice?”

  “I was convicted. Did my time.”

  She prepared to hear he was innocent, it wasn’t fair, he’d been framed.

  “I shoulda lost it all. Everybody said I would.”

  “Shoulda lost it all,” Jane repeated, her voice dipping.

  “Everybody expected me to lose everything, come out of Folsom a loser, living on the street, nowhere to turn.”

  She looked around at the packed bar, full of men of an athletic shape and the beautiful women who follow them.

  “Hell, even the guys who retired from the game heroes, they don’t have what I got. I got much more than they do.”

  Now she really wanted to know. “Why’d this happen to you instead?”

  He smiled, revealing regular white teeth, sparkling. “people like a criminal.”

  She felt her nearness to him.

  “I’m not sure . . .”

  “It’s the American dream—the outlaw life. Be the best, be great, jump over the rules. Rules are for the other guy.”

  “For the average Joe.”

  “He hates his job, his boss is a jerk, his wife complains night and day—that guy loves to see somebody come out swinging, win the fight, ring the bell. Gives him hope. My grit, my luck, gives all the schmucks hope.”

  “So . . . how’d you get the tavern?”

  He laughed. “I get out, big guy backs me, I open this place—hit from day one. Everybody wants to rub shoulders, they’ll pay to rub shoulders. This is just a piece of it. I got a much bigger pie, much bigger, opening bars all over town.”

  “In a depression?”

  “I ain’t depressed. Are you?”

  “No, sir. I’m one of the happy guys.”

  “Good for you, kid.” He straightened up, grabbed a clean rag. “Stay happy.”

  “So everybody knows what you did? It’s out in the open?”

  “Break the rules big and come clean, air the cut. Leaves a scar, but a scar’s interesting.”

  He adjusted the paper turkey, made it upright again.

  “This is very educational.”

  “Glad to help.” Howard started to walk away from Jane’s spot at the bar.