Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “Lay off what?” Eddie said. “What’s going on?”

  “Some kind of scam,” Jake said. “Some guy has been coming around here daytimes, you know, when there’s not too many men around, and hassling people in their homes. I mean telling them, hey lady, I am a city inspector for the zoning up here, and the zone rules are changed because of that new YMCA building going up across the street, so I got to inspect your place and see if it conforms. And then they come back and they go, Hey, your wiring’s no good, or your plumbing’s not up to code, or this or that, so we’re going to have to condemn it. Only this guy is saying he’s got a buyer, somebody who wants to buy your place and put the money in it to bring it up to code. This buyer would buy cheap, but it would still be a better price than the city will give you if they condemn the place, this guy says. And then he goes, don’t tell your neighbors or it’s no deal, my buyer can’t have everybody trying to get him to buy their place at a better price than the city would give. How does all that sound to you, Eddie?”

  Blanca hugged the knobby trunk of the cedar. She liked the way Jake talked, quiet like his brother, but hard, too; no crap.

  Eddie scratched the back of his neck. “Sounds like you got some kind of real problem.”

  Great-Uncle Tilo spoiled it all by moving forward and saying humbly, “We just want to make our statement, Eddie. You can see no harm is being done.”

  “The harm, the only harm,” Jake said, “is being done to us, man. That’s why we’re taking this action.”

  A city police car drew up with two cops in it. They got out in a carefully casual manner and came over to join the group. Jake began explaining again about the man who called himself an inspector. Mrs. Roybal came out of her house, drying her hands on a dishtowel. She hung, frowning, on the edges of the knot of men. Somebody came over from the trailer park. Soon a small crowd had gathered, listening to Jake and the cops talk.

  One of the city cops got back in his car and used the radio. When he returned, Blanca could see the patches of sweat beginning to darken under the arms of his blue shirt. He was nervous, she thought. Funny to think of the cops, who made everybody else nervous, being up-tight themselves. But there were only the two of them and Eddie, and all these people from Pinto Street.

  Martín Maestas was talking to Mrs. Roybal and several other neighbors now. Mrs. Roybal was not liking whatever it was he was telling her. She looked mad. She shouldered into the crowd and started talking over Jake as he talked to the police, all on top of the racket from Ramon’s portable stereo.

  One of the cops asked Ramon to turn the sound down. Ramon sneered. He didn’t turn the sound down.

  Here came Roberto, running down Pinto Street with the Anglo kid tagging after him. Blanca watched him work his way into the crowd to be nearer to Jake. He really hero-worshiped Jake Maestas. And he better not see her here, or he’d send her home.

  She swung herself up into one of the lower branches of the tree where the bark had been polished smooth by a lot of kids sitting there. She sat panting slightly, triumphant to have gotten up this high without setting off the asthma and to have had the strength to climb at all.

  The radio in the city cop-car jabbered loudly. With that and the people talking and Ramon’s radio blasting away, she couldn’t hear anything anybody was saying any more. She noticed the Anglo kid moving around the outside of the group, scribbling on his newsprint pad.

  One of the city cops came back from another conversation on his radio and walked over to the Anglo kid.

  “Hey,” the cop said, “you don’t live around here, do you? Go on home.”

  “I was invited,” the Anglo kid said. He put the pad behind him.

  The cop said, “This is no place for sightseers.”

  The Anglo kid’s voice creaked with nerves and anger. “You can’t just run me off like that. I got asked if I wanted to come here.”

  “You got asked into a lot of other people’s trouble,” the cop said. “Go on over to my car there. I’m going to get you taken home.” He gave the boy a pat on the shoulder that was partly a shove. The Anglo kid stumbled and dropped his pad and pencil. He went on his knee to pick them up, just in front of Mrs. Roybal, who was coming out of the crowd talking angrily with Estelle Ruiz the widow. Mrs. Roybal stopped and said loudly, “I saw you. You hit him. He hit that boy.”

  Blanca heard the quick silence, attention yanked tight. All the faces turned.

  “I didn’t hit him,” the cop said. His face was red.

  The Anglo boy straightened up, looking from face to face with a scared expression. “Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “I just dropped some of my stuff, that’s all.”

  Jake Maestas said loudly to the red-faced cop, “What you picking on a kid for? There’s grown men here for you to try and rough up, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  Beto, with his big mouth, jumped out right at Jake’s elbow and hollered, “Yeah, man, leave my friend there alone. That’s my friend, I asked him down here. You got a problem with that?”

  Beto watched too much tv.

  “Come on, guys, relax,” Eddie said.

  The city cop turned and looked at Jake, arms akimbo. “I know you,” he said. “Dope charge, couple of months ago.”

  Jake shook his head. “Not me, man. Or maybe me, but not you. That was Officer Walter Tate that took me in that time, you can ask him.”

  That was when the tv people came. They piled out of their truck laden with equipment. It was almost as exciting as if there’d been a fight after all. Some stupid woman ended up right in the middle of the crowd holding out a microphone for Jake and Martín to talk into, and Beto had to stick in his two cents, scowling and playing the big honcho.

  When the tv people moved on, leaving the cops talking with Jake, Blanca skinned her shin scrambling down out of the tree and hurried up the street after the camera team. She caught up to them outside the Vallejo place.

  “That’s my house over there,” she said, pointing. “Roberto Cantu, who was telling you all about what’s been going on? He’s my brother. My name is Blanca Cantu.”

  She pulled off Roberto’s cap so that her hair tumbled out around her face. The tv people looked at each other. Both turned toward her, one with a microphone he had just been talking into and the other with the camera that hung on his body like a huge black insect.

  Thing about this Miss Stern, Roberto reflected, was she had boobs, man; big ones, for a small lady. Him and Bobbie had laughed their heads off about that, whooping and roaring over the Death-Race game down at the arcade in Coronado, for almost an hour yesterday.

  But she was out of it, man. Just fooling around out here for the summer and teaching a class — what a jerk. Why should a teacher teach on her vacation? Like if I spent my free time digging holes in the yard and piling up rocks to look pretty. And art wasn’t even her subject, which was some kind of literature; she’d even come out and told them that. Weird.

  The class was sometimes interesting, though. It was going to be especially interesting today.

  Sure enough, soon as they walked in (a little late), she looks up and she says in this cut-you voice, “Ah, the three musketeers. Where were you three during our last class?”

  Three because it was Roberto and Bobbie and Alex.

  Bobbie said, “We did some drawing, Miss Stern. Alex did, anyhow, and we did ours after. We just didn’t come to class to do it, that’s all.”

  What a wimp! Look at him holding out the big newsprint pages like they were money to buy the teacher off. At least he hadn’t let Roberto down at the closing, in front of the Maestas brothers and all. He showed up and he stuck around till everybody went home. But look at him now.

  Miss Stern frowned at the papers, dismissing them. “That you can do without bothering with school at all,” she said. Huh, damn straight, Roberto thought; hope everybody else is listening. “But then why did you sign up here?”

  “This was something special,” Alex said.

  “Too special
to share with the rest of the class?” she said, taking the papers.

  “You wouldn’t have let us,” Bobbie said.

  “How do you know if you don’t —” She stopped, looking at the pictures they’d made. The rest of the kids waited, their faces full of curiosity. Wait till they heard. Bunch of jerks. Fat Paul who couldn’t draw a straight line, and that brown-nose Joni Reed who had an answer for everything, or skinny Jeff who looked like he was someplace else most of the time. And those two blonde foxes who giggled all the time, and sour little Angie who was always late. Alex was the best of the bunch, and he wasn’t so great.

  Eight people in a class, so everybody could always spot you, especially the teacher. He was glad he wasn’t part of it, only a sort of guest of Bobbie’s.

  He tried to catch Angie’s eye. She wasn’t so bad, Angie, except she wouldn’t admit he was alive. Too stuck up from living in the Heights. He wrinkled his nose at her. That skinny dope Jeff saw and snickered behind his hand.

  Miss Stern didn’t even notice. There she stood, looking at the pictures Bobbie had handed her. Her dress was loose and cool today, not one of those clingy ones that really showed off her tits. Too bad.

  She looked up — not at Roberto, she never looked at him directly, and he knew and enjoyed knowing that it was because she was a little scared of him.

  “What is this, boys?” she said, speaking to Bobbie, of course, the wimp.

  Roberto answered for his cousin. “That’s pictures of the cops hassling people. We closed my street down that day, and the cops came.”

  “Closed it? What do you mean? Who’s ‘we’?” Now she looked at him.

  He straightened his shoulders and resisted an impulse to run his hands over his hair. He was neat enough.

  Keeping it casual he said, “Somebody’s been coming around scamming people on my street to try to get them to sell their houses. A couple of our guys went to the building inspection office to complain about this inspector but all they got was a runaround — the guy you want to talk to is in a meeting, come back later, can you wait, all that shit — so we all decided to take care of it ourselves. We decided to keep this inspector out. We closed the street and called the tv, and they came and talked to us.”

  “That was you on the news, then,” one of the chicks said, and the other one giggled.

  Alex said, “The cops tried to give me a hard time about making those pictures.”

  So then Stern did this thing she did sometimes, she grabbed what was going on and turned it around into something she wanted instead of what it was supposed to be. She said in this clippy voice like she was pissed off but trying not to show it, “So you boys made a field trip. Well, maybe it’s time we gave some consideration to the subject of field trips. There’s no reason to confine the class to this room all the time, assuming we can manage to all do our trips together as a class after this. I’ve been thinking about going out to the zoo one day to draw the animals, and maybe a session in the foothills for studies from nature. Any other suggestions?”

  Nobody said anything at first. Then that little bitch Joni Reed piped up, “How about one of the big shopping centers, like the Coronado Mall? There’s always stuff going on there, people moving around; or we could draw the trees they have growing out of the planting boxes.”

  “Good,” Miss Stern said, nodding. She laid the boys’ drawings on the desk, and that was going to be that for them, you could tell.

  Bobbie sat down with the others. Alex shuffled over and stood behind Angie, leaning against the wall and scowling. Roberto stayed where he was, near the door, angry about how things were turning out. Okay that’s enough for Pinto Street, let’s talk about the zoo. Shit.

  “Jeff, you have a suggestion?”

  Jeff said, “Maybe we could visit a car dealer and draw the new models in the showroom.”

  The foxes groaned.

  “Good idea,” Stern said, all light and smiles again. “Any others?”

  Roberto said, “The jail.”

  Everybody looked at him. Good. Now tell me it’s a good idea, Miss Stern.

  “The jail?” she said in this squeezed voice.

  “Yeah,” he said. “If you want to draw people, why don’t you go to the jail where there’s people that have to sit there and let you? Like going to the zoo if you want to draw animals.”

  “I don’t think we’d be allowed to do that,” Miss Stern said. “But look, people, I’ll bet we could go visit one of the courtrooms and draw the judge and the jury and the lawyers in a trial, the way professional artists do sometimes for television. Is that the kind of thing you had in mind, Roberto?”

  I got you something real, lady, from my real street, but you don’t even want to look at it. Out loud he said, “It was just an idea.”

  Shit, he wished he could just holler out what he felt, but school was school, like he told Bobbie, and the chance always just slipped past him. He sat down next to Angie.

  She whispered, “I saw that news report on the tv. Was that really your sister? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Nothing.”

  Goddamn Blanca, sticking her nose into everything. They gave her more time on the tv than anybody else. You always got shorted with a cripple next to you.

  “There is one field trip,” Miss Stern was saying loudly, glaring briefly at him and Angie to make them shut up, “that might work out, a really important one. I wasn’t going to tell you until it was a sure thing, but since the subject has come up —”

  She wanted them to go spend a day with some old lady painter living up in Taos.

  Not me, lady, Roberto thought. He stared at the worn blue carpeting. You want to get rid of me, this is sure a good way to do it. He was way past the stage of going to get permission from his mother to be away all day. This school-thing was just a joke anyhow, man. He was only along to keep Bobbie company and out of curiosity. He hadn’t dropped out of school to go on any stupid field trips.

  He’d had his field trip the day they closed Pinto Street, just like Miss Stern said. Too bad for the others that they missed it.

  3

  She watched the man go to the window, and she saw with him what he saw. There they were, the mob outside, yelling and jeering and shaking their fists.

  She was aware of a terrible constriction, as of difficulty in breathing, although it was not really a physical sensation at all but a suffocating horror of seeing the same scene play itself out again.

  The man threw the casement wide, lifted something from his head — God, was he going to throw his own head to the mob? No, only his hat. He had on a cylindrical black hat with a strip of ribbon around the base. He threw it down and bowed to the crowd, now a group of men in frock coats who applauded.

  But what’s so horrible about this, she thought, confused. The scene was comic rather than awful, the figure at the window a caricature rather than a demon: stick limbs and a whiskery head sticking out of his absurd dark gown. But a caricature should not move, bend, wave to the crowd, act like a living being. It’s like the puppet in DEAD OF NIGHT, she thought, the ventriloquist’s dummy that speaks on its own — unspeakable —

  And he’s going to turn now and show me his face —

  She woke, gasping but triumphant with discovery. The figure at the window was lifted right out of a source she knew well, she was sure of it. Daumier, the Daumier prints satirizing the legal profession. That gowned and oddly-capped figure, so familiar!

  Ricky was in the chair by the window, head sunk on chest, gently snoring. Silently, not to waken him, she put on her robe and slippers, took her notebook and went into the chilly living room. She turned on a lamp and dug out her books on Daumier.

  Like that, she thought, squinting at a long-nosed tyrant leaning from the bench to bully a young witness. A judge? Come to judge me, my judgment on myself?

  But then what’s the French Revolution doing mixed up in it all? And why do I sometimes get traces of Claire?

  There came a scratching at the door
to the kitchen. She let the dogs come in and curl up with her on the couch. Hugging their comforting largeness and warmth helped settle her mind again for sleep.

  Ricky’s going to love this, she thought. It’s almost worth waking him to tell him: here come de judge. She giggled. Brillo licked her ear.

  “And what do you dream of, my fine fellow?”

  Having Ricky at the wall with her was a pleasure; she’d been a fool to have feared it. He settled always in the shade of a thick, twisted juniper with her dream notebook and his yellow pad. After a while the dogs would get tired of snuffling around and go lie down with him.

  The wall, too, pleased her immensely. She had set the plastic hands. They were like small creatures from deep under the sea, some sort of cross between coral and sea anemones with their tendril-like pink fingers. But what next? She could not seem to see what was needed next. She walked back and forth, the shadow of her body and her wide-brimmed hat sliding over the sandy ground with her. The pleasure of looking seemed almost enough. Almost. Perhaps it was the habit of action that impelled her to do something, even if it was only using sandpaper on some of the brighter plastics to try to tone down the more acid colors.

  She hummed. Pages fluttered softly in Ricky’s hands. She forgot him for a while, remembered again when he brought her some coffee from the thermos. The realization that he was here always came with a little kick of pleasure. To have this companionship at her work, a companionship that demanded nothing, was a luxury she had never imagined.

  Well, she deserved some luxury, by God. She was tired today. Maybe that was why the wall offered no essential next step for the moment. The constant interruptions of her sleep by the dreams were telling on her, she knew. Ricky had commented with concern this morning on the black marks under her eyes, the tracks of her nightmares.