Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  “Wait!”

  “Yeah?” He turned, annoyed now, free lesson over.

  “I’m looking for somebody.”

  “A body?”

  “Somebody. A banjo player . . . Somebody told me he might play here.”

  “Somebody told you that?”

  “A different somebody.”

  “Well, your somebody’s wrong. Nobody plays music here. Just the records.”

  Sonny Boy Williamson was playing on a phonograph behind the bar next to a propped-up album cover—“Good morning, school girl.”

  “You wanna open a tab?”

  She shook her head and put a bill from the wad she’d stolen from Momma on the counter, rising to go.

  Howard rubbed the horseshoe. “Get lucky, son. Luck matters too.”

  SHE stepped out of a jitney in the Sunset District, Forty-Eighth and Rivera, in front of the block-long Jones-at-the-Beach, its windows turned to the Pacific and its door to the Doelger-built suburbs springing up all over the sand dunes, pretty little boxes, each inches from the next. Where the houses weren’t built yet, they would be in minutes.

  Up and down the street people poured out of cabs and jitneys, full of liquid charm, to join the newspapermen, musicians, boxers, and racing fans that made Jones their headquarters. There were also Sunset locals, rougher, windblown.

  She followed a rowdy group inside. In the center of the dining room was a stone fireplace, four sides open, flames burning. On the right was another, where meals cooked in front of customers, steaks spitting and popping before they were forked onto horse-painted dishes. Most of the crowd was drinking, lined up on the left side of the room at a dark bar carved with racehorses, under a huge painting of a brown horse on the beach, the word “Bullet” painted underneath. Many were newspaper men, some from the Prospect, but also other papers. All seemed to be writers, no copy boys, no secretaries, no accountants. Sandy’d sent her to some kind of secret club.

  Again she pushed her way into prime bar space, planning to grease up before asking questions. She saw nobody was drinking beer, and when she said vodka, the bartender asked if she wanted a martini. She didn’t know if she did but tipped her hat. He shook vodka and a couple other things together with ice in a silver urn, etched with horse heads, and strained it into a fancy glass, dropping an olive into the bottom.

  “Vitamin V,” Jane said.

  “Another little writer was in here ordering one last night. Who started that?”

  “Izzy,” she said. “Must have got it from Izzy Gomez.” The crowd agreed, smiling at the name of the guy who didn’t charge writers. She was learning to answer questions the right way, the way that made people nod and smile. She grinned, feeling happy in this moment. She was good at taking a goal apart, figuring out what it required to get there, deciding if it was graspable or not. She could see she was fitting into this world, and that meant something.

  The bartender said, “My grandfather worked at the Occidental Hotel, in Martinez, where people would wait for the ferry. That’s were the martini was invented. They called it the Martinez.”

  “Baloney!” yelled Lambert from the other end of the bar. “It was invented in New York. Like everything.” The Prospect crowd booed Lambert and toasted the bartender’s grandfather.

  “I have the evidence,” Lambert pushed. “There’s an article about it. I read it! From the Times. I can prove it.”

  “Awww, shuddup!” somebody yelled, and the horde laughed.

  “It’s the accurate fact, I can go back to my ’partment, bring it back!” Lambert slurred his words, swaying as he testified.

  “Don’t give a sulfur egg for facts!” yelled Beauchamp, the Examiner’s gossip guy. “I prefer truth to fact any day!”

  “The truuuuuth! So that’s what they’re calling it now!” This came from a blousy lady on Beauchamp’s arm.

  Lambert fell off his stool but climbed back up, yelling, “No truth without facts!”

  “Totally different items,” said Beauchamp. “Facts are temporary. Truth is forever.”

  “That is a ridiculous assertion. If truth is a greater thing— and it is, because it takes us further than facts, makes meaning of facts—still it cannot exist without the facts at its base.”

  “Facts are dirt,” Jane said. “Truth’s the crop that grows from it.”

  Lambert’s mouth dropped open. “From the mouth of a nincompoop!”

  “Horsefeathers!” yelled the guy next to Jane. “Reporters and your quote, unquote ideas! My horse Bullet’s got more truth in his right front hoof than you got in all your big fat brains!”

  Bullet was the horse in the painting over the bar. This guy was Jonesie, the bar’s owner. Jane jumped on it. “Your horse is pretty smart?”

  “My, Professor, can’t pull nothing over on you! You must be the last guy on earth who don’t know this. But I don’t mind telling you.” He said it loud so the rest could hear it, too, probably like he did every night. “So, my Bullet means everything to me. Damn horse sat at the head of my Thanksgiving table! Better manners than my sister’s family! My sister’s husband? Can’t hold his liquor! But Bullet can! Drank him under the table!” That caused guffaws and elbowing.

  “Anyhow, guy who runs Bay Meadows? Says to me, ‘Horses can’t swim.’ I say my horse Bullet can swim the Golden Gate. So my partner bets a thousand on it. Then the SPCA gets their panties in a twist and talks the Marin city council into stopping us from shoving off there. So we go out on a fishing trawler with a sling and net, and lower Bullet into the water from the side of the boat. I go with him. I love that horse.” He stopped to wipe his eyes of real tears. He put the handkerchief away and continued. “I slather myself with grease and put on a life preserver—I can’t swim—and I ride Bullet’s tail like it’s . . .” The crowd whooped so loud, slapping backs and endorsing Jonesie’s heroism, that Jane couldn’t hear the end of the joke. “Takes us twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds. SPCA’s waiting for us, but they have to admit I look a lot worse than Bullet, so they tear up the ticket and get drunk with the rest of us! Them’s the facts and the truth!”

  The crowd was still laughing when Sweetie entered the bar on Mac’s arm.

  From the double takes breaking necks all around, this was a new sight for everybody. She was especially well put together, in an expensive-looking dress, pale green silk with puff sleeves, a belted waist, and a large collar. Her knit hat matched the dress and her leather shoes did, too, with no scuffs. Long gold earrings dangled near her jaw, matching a bangle on her tiny wrist. She twinkled, wearing nothing she had apparently made or altered. Fresh as Easter grass.

  Mac and Sweetie were each handed a martini, now the official drink of the evening. He raised his glass and twisted his forearm through hers, and they sipped, entwined.

  God, Jane thought, sitting alone in a crowd on that stool.

  Then he kissed Sweetie, his head so much larger than hers, concealing her face, the rough skin of his hand contrasted against her smooth, white neck.

  Something gathered in the base of Jane’s throat, ready to sound. She felt like the voice in her head might pop out in the room, say something wrong, so she swallowed it, wanting just to feel this loss for the long seconds of the kiss.

  Lambert yelled, “Grub!” and she saw she was starving, so she joined the throng moving into booths around the edges of the room. They ordered up a midnight meal of chicken loaf, terrapin stew, steak à la cliff, baked potatoes with sour cream and bacon, and more pitchers of martinis. They were noisy, none more than Lambert, and while the group kept it up, Jane listened. She was part of this. Irritating thoughts circled the outer rim of her brain—she had something real to do here, a problem to solve—but she ignored them now, inside this warm social blanket.

  As she finished her steak, Lambert scooted next to her, putting his arm around her shoulder. “I wouldn’t rely overmuch on Mac and this particular paper, Boy.”

  “Why’d you have to do that?”

  “You could
write any number of places, you know, it doesn’t have to be for Mac.”

  “He’s giving me my break, isn’t he?”

  “He doesn’t give things away. Not like his word is his bond.”

  “Yours is?”

  He was so drunk, acting even more like an ass than usual, she had every reason to ignore him. She hadn’t forgotten what he’d done, stealing that moleskin, disrespecting her. Setting her up for a fall. But something kept her in her seat.

  He was not the kind of person she’d choose for a friend or advisor, so devious and contrary. But still, he had perceptiveness. She’d seen it every day, his knowing something would happen, what it would mean. He was alert to the big picture, a whole system, when most people saw just the little bit in front of them.

  “What have you got against Mac?”

  “I got nothing against him! Fine with me he’s gonna fuck it all up. Everything’s temporary. It’s just we could be a great paper, but we won’t. Because he wants to do it the way he wants to do it. Trash it. Trash it up. Make it trashy.”

  Jane thought this was just getting sad, his drunkenness. “Why do you think he’ll trash it?”

  “He isn’t committed. Not the kind of guy who sticks around, grows something. He’ll be gone, on to the next shiny opportunity right before we crash.”

  Everything was waving and yellow. She didn’t want this conversation. A guy like Lambert had to ruin everything. Couldn’t just let it go, let it be nice. “Good night, Eeyore,” she said, and went back to the bar, as too-drunk people will do.

  The crowd there was more bitter and sloppy now than before. When Jane asked for another martini, the bartender shook his head no, not like he’d deny her, but like he didn’t advise it, though Jane nodded her head yes, full enough of herself to contradict him.

  He poured her drink, and she finally asked what she’d come for an hour before—whether a banjo player with a curved scar on his cheek performed there.

  “Nah, Jonesie’s all the entertainment we need,” he said, which she saw was true.

  She looked down at the name of the last bar on her list and the letters swirled, so she turned the paper to the bartender.

  “Topsy’s Roost, over at Playland-at-the-Beach. They got a band.”

  Coins slipped, tinkling, from her fingers as she overpaid the bill.

  SHE raised her brows high to hold her eyes open. What did I say to that guy on the stool? Who was he? She saw herself setting her glass on the edge of the bar and it toppling, spilling, wetting her sleeve. Staring at her wrist, so slim. She remembered bending to pick up the glass, butting heads and laughing, though the other guy looked angry.

  She’d fallen into the taxi, saying the name of the third bar—Topsy’s—to the driver, who’d rolled his eyes in the mirror. She’d slept to the rocking of city streets. The driver shook her awake, yelling, “Twenty-five cents!”

  She nearly fell as she got out, the wind off the Pacific slapping her hard in the face.

  This is it. You’re here. Wake up.

  Set in an amusement park, Topsy’s was a nightclub and chicken dinner house, built to look like a chicken shack, people seated at human-sized coops in the balcony. Guests could slip down a massive slide from their tables to the dance floor. Waiters ran around dressed like they were headed to a square dance. A band, one level below the entrance, played Gershwin—“They can’t take that away from me.”

  A barn of a bar, with a band.

  A man in a white cowboy hat said, “Howdy,” looking pained. “May I help you?”

  “Sir,” Jane said.

  “Sir.”

  “Looking for a member of the band.”

  He motioned below. “Would you like to take the slide?”

  “I’d rather walk,” she said, too woozy to slide.

  He pointed and Jane followed his finger, walking around the rim of the second floor toward a set of stairs on the opposite side, past fancy people caged by chicken wire, ladies in clinging chiffon, silk, crepe de chine, satin, cut on the bias, metallic lamé, fur, hems flaring all the way out on the floor, puffs, ruffles, plunging backs, men less spectacular but impressive in black tuxedos, shiny black shoes, cufflinks. Everybody clinking champagne flutes, laughing at the weirdness— them, in this stage-set farmyard. A waiter rushed by, platter up, fried chicken, biscuits, okra in the air. Jane pressed up against a coop so he could pass.

  When she got to the other side of the barn and down the stairs, she looked at the band, about sixteen of them, playing swingy country music, or country swing music, she wasn’t sure, the way it blended. She couldn’t see them well and couldn’t figure a way to get closer to them other than walking right up the empty dance floor, so that’s what she did. The music announced her—“Nice work if you can get it.”

  She was halfway there when—Whoosh! Whoosh! Ahhh!— a man and woman in shiny black and white flew down a slide, their arms up, each holding a drink, landing right ahead of her. Someone above yelled “Yee-haw!” and people laughed, and then the slides filled with more couples heading to the dance floor, which grew crowded as the singer crooned.

  Jane pushed through the dancers and arrived at the foot of the stage, looked up at the band, all costumed as some confused combination of cowboys and farmers. She saw the pianist, a drummer, a trumpet player, and in front of them, Daddy, on banjo, sitting—he never sat while he played—wearing clean, new overalls, one strap undone, hanging to his waist, its clasp shiny, over a bright, red-checked shirt. His cowboy hat had a narrow brim, tilted up so you could see almost all his forehead. Everything about him looked wrong, a Daddy doll, store-bought, silly version of the man. Inauthentic.

  She stood in front of the stage and the musicians played on. Daddy looked but didn’t seem to see her. Then his face cracked and his right hand dropped. He turned to another guy and handed him the banjo. The band kept playing. The guy passed the banjo to somebody else backstage, who took over where Daddy left off. Daddy picked up two sticks—canes— using them to cross the stage and walk down its steps to her. Dancers jostled him, left and right, until he reached her.

  “Jujee.”

  She nodded to the back of the room and led him through the crowded floor toward the exit. They went slow and careful. She’d done this, swinging that crowbar at his knees.

  She felt him behind her and pictured him swinging a cane at the back of her head. She kept walking, waiting for the hit, but it didn’t come, and then they got to the back of the room and she opened the door, and they were on Playland’s boardwalk. Fog, piped music, the rumble of a roller coaster, women screaming.

  He took off his stupid hat, setting it on a decorative barrel. His hair was cut and clean, more brown than blond now.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  She felt the strangeness of her man’s clothes, new again with Daddy looking at her.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I know,” he said. “I thought the camp was a nightmare. This is the nightmare. Brought on by myself, but a nightmare still.” Even admitting his failure, his voice expressed tragedy— I’m too good for this. But she knew he must have suffered to be here, playing this ridiculous version of himself. Daddy was rough, but he had taste, real taste, style, a kind of honesty. Nothing about this costume or this setting would feel right to him.

  “Never thought I’d miss the levee.” He lit a cigarette and then another when she reached for it. “So this is how you express yourself.”

  “This is how I climbed out of the ditch and got work.”

  He said, “That it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Incognito,” he said.

  “Sort of.”

  “So are you funny?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not funny. But what I am shouldn’t matter.”

  He said, “You’re a one-man guy.”

  “Whatsat?”

  “Like me and your momma. Sometimes it looks like you’re for another person, but really you’re for yourse
lf.”

  Jane wished she could defend herself against this. But she’d had to be that way.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “for hitting you and leaving you.”

  “You’re apologizin’ because you want something?”

  She felt the red in her cheeks.

  “One-man guy,” he confirmed.

  “I didn’t mean for all that to happen.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t mean to?”

  “I didn’t plan it.”

  “So you didn’t plan it. But you did it.”

  “What do you mean, I did it? You did it too! You hit Momma!”

  “You don’t see me backing out of it, like what I intended matters. It’s just what you do that matters. You and your momma have the killer instinct. Hand on the plow. Never release. Don’t matter why or how.”

  She couldn’t take that.

  “I did what I had to do. So did you! And if that’s what you think, then why’ve you been looking for me?” Her voice cracked. “Are we done?”

  He rearranged his shoulders, stood up straighter. “It don’t excuse what I done, I know. I was out of my mind that night.” He shook his head. “I just want you to know—I know I was wrong. Very, very wrong. For hitting her, for a lot of things. I’m your daddy, and I shouldn’ta done that. Shouldn’ta done anything like that, puttin’ you in that position, between the two of us.”

  “My whole life . . .” She stopped, knowing it would take a while to parse, that she’d have to figure it out in private. She cleared her throat. “Anyway, that it?”

  “I hope you can do somethin’ with it, climb up over.”

  She’d already done that. She moved on. “Did you know Vee before the picture?”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” she said. Then she decided to tell him. “I met her once, last week, that’s all. The night before she was hurt.”

  “What do you have to do with that?”

  “I’ve been trying to keep your picture out of the Prospect. People are gonna look at you there with her and start asking questions. Did you . . . ?”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “You didn’t hit her, choke her.”