Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  “You be all right, Dorothy,” said Wilbur. He and Dorothy had a secret.

  Aunty Em was sitting at the table, reading by candlelight. She wore steel spectacles.

  “Time for bed, Dorothy,” she said.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Aunty Em stood up, pulling back her chair. She pulled back the old blanket that hung across the room. She pointed to the straw.

  “This is where you sleep. We will be getting you a bed as soon as we can afford it, but for now you’ll have to sleep on straw. Not what you’re used to, but it is good clean Kansas straw.” She took a rag, soaked it in the bathwater, and used it to wipe the mud from Dorothy’s feet. “At least the rain got you clean,” she said. She gave Dorothy one of her own old, darned nightdresses. “This has already been cut down for you.”

  Aunty Em unfolded blankets over the straw. She stood up, wincing, hands pressed against the small of her back. “Good night, Dorothy,” she said.

  “Good night, Ma’am.”

  “That was quite an introduction we had.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Dorothy crawled onto the blanket, and felt the straw underneath it. She pretended to go to sleep. She listened. She wanted to hear what Aunty Em said. She heard pots banging on the stove. She smelled food burning. She heard the rain on the roof.

  “I’d say that was as thorough a job as she could manage of showing me up, with the Jewells,” Aunty Em said, a long time later.

  Uncle Henry sighed. “I don’t reckon Wilbur will say anything about it.”

  “She had a scarlet dress. Scarlet. For a child. God knows what sort of life she had in St. Louis with that man.”

  Dorothy heard creaking. Uncle Henry was crawling onto the bed.

  “Work,” he mumbled.

  And Dorothy heard Aunty Em pace. She heard boots clunking back and forth, back and forth on the hollow floor. She heard Aunty Em weep, brief, breathless sobs. She heard the garments slip off. She heard the lamp being blown out. Everything went dark. She waited until she heard Aunty Em snore. Aunty Em’s snores were loud, enraged. Then Dorothy took off the sour old nightdress and she padded on light child’s feet across the floor, and she stepped out into the rain again, and she slipped under the house. It was fairly dry under the house, except for where the water trickled in little streams like blood.

  “Toto,” she whispered. “Toto.”

  He crawled toward her whimpering. She hugged him and he licked her face. He shivered. They both shivered. Dorothy had to be loyal.

  I will wait, Dorothy promised Aunty Em. I will wait until you are sick and old, and I’ll put lye soap in your eyes, and I’ll take some shears, and I’ll cut all your hair off, and you won’t be able to do a thing, and I’ll say, It’s for your own good, Aunty Em, because you’re dirty. And I’ll just let you cry.

  Dorothy had learned how to hate.

  Lancaster, California

  Christmas 1987

  1876—When the Southern Pacific Railroad Company laid its tracks through what was to be Lancaster in the summer of 1876, many of the early settlers stated the railroad named the train stop at that time. . . The Southern Pacific also built the first house in Lancaster, for their employees.

  1881—Nicholas Cochran passed through the Valley on the train and recognized its agricultural possibilities.

  1883—The first artesian well in the Valley was sunk near the Southern Pacific track for locomotive use. Soon after this, several men from Sacramento, connected with a bank there and other businessmen of that city, purchased land from the railroad company and prepared to colonize the Valley.

  1884—M. L. Wicks purchased 60 sections from the railroad company at two and one-half dollars an acre, laying out a townsite in streets and lots.

  An English corporation called the Atlantic and Pacific Fibre Company, with Col. Gay and Mrs. Payne as managers and J. A. Graves of Los Angeles as attorney, contracted to furnish paper for the London Daily Telegraph. They brought up a good deal of yucca land around the Valley and sent a large number of Chinese laborers in to cut down the trees. . .

  The early streets of Lancaster were easy to find. Starting at 8th St., now Avenue I, continuing South, the streets were 9th and 10th (now Lancaster Blvd.), 11th and 12th streets. Starting at Antelope Avenue, now Sierra Highway, and going west were: Beech, Cedar, Date, Elm, and Fern . . .

  —Lancaster Celebrates a Century

  There was snow on the Joshua trees. It rested on and between the spines. It was as if giant cotton balls had grown thorns. Jonathan made Ira stop the car for yet another photograph. Jonathan photographed the clouds in the sky, the points of the spines, the snow on the ground. Jonathan shivered in shorts and a baseball hat with a short ponytail sticking out the back. He hopped back into the car with an actor’s brown-legged spring, and a flash of a perfect smile.

  “I’m a photo-realist actor,” he said.

  “You’re playing a Joshua tree,” said Ira. “Good. I’m glad. It’s got to be better than most of those parts you play.” Ira was a lawyer. He worked in offices and was plump and pale.

  “Private or otherwise. Listen, just content yourself. I could have another hobby, like practicing the drums. Drive on, MacDuff.”

  “Jonathan?” Ira asked. “Mind telling me what we’re doing here?”

  Jonathan just smiled, gave his eyebrows a Groucho Marx wiggle. They both adored Groucho Marx. Ira adored living with Jonathan. It made life more interesting. Ira was very proud of living with Jonathan. The guy was maybe seven years older than he was, but already some people thought Jonathan was younger. He did strange, slightly mysterious things like this, drag Ira out to Lancaster, with a secret smile. Ira was so proud that he wished he could tell the people at work about Jonathan. But it was easier if they thought he lived alone and pitied him. Ira carefully looked over his shoulder before signaling and pulling out.

  Ahead the road stretched straight for miles. The distant hills were either blue and smooth or rocky and craggy. There was nothing on them, not even a pimple of shrub. A perfect desert complexion.

  “Why would anyone come to live here?” Ira asked.

  “House prices,” said Jonathan. “And anyway, it didn’t used to be like this. There used to be grasslands and so many rabbits there was a plague of them. People came and it just stopped raining. The climate changed. They don’t know why.”

  They came to a town called Pearblossom and another called Littlerod. There were tiny, wooden-frame houses that were like a child’s stereotyped drawing of a house.

  “Woe-hoe!” said Jonathan, which meant photo stop. Just outside of Littlerod, there was a stone ranch-style house with a low wooden front porch. The car’s turn signal went click click click and Ira pulled the car over to the side. They kept pulling over. Jonathan scanned the landscape, scanned maps, his eyes fierce, his hair in spikes.

  In Palmdale, Jonathan nearly killed them both. Hunched over a map, he suddenly shouted, “Turn! Turn here, now!”

  With an illegal but magisterial sweep, the car did a U-turn. There was a screech of brakes and Ira found himself hemmed in by other vehicles in the middle of the intersection. Ira’s breath was taken away. “This better be worth it,” he said. As if embarrassed, the car crept forward into a broken, ordinary street.

  “What’s wrong with Highway 14?” Ira asked.

  “It’s not from Back Then,” said Jonathan. “This is the old Sierra Highway. See? The old railway tracks run beside it.” His voice was hushed with something like lust. The car tires hummed a broken melody on the road surface.

  “Woe-hoe!”

  Jonathan stopped to photograph an old water tower, perched on wooden beams, with a faded, flaking advertisement painted in a circle on it. They passed a low, stricken arcade of brick shops—“Happy Hocker Pawn Shop.” Jonathan photographed that, too
.

  “Why?” Ira asked.

  “It shows no one uses this road anymore.”

  Jonathan stopped to photograph a railroad sign.

  “Doesn’t it take you back?” he asked. “I haven’t seen a warning sign like that in maybe ten years.” The warning sign had a round black plate with a long, sheltering hood over the light. In front of the crossing, there was a wooden X painted black and white. Jonathan photographed that too. When Jonathan started to photograph the telephone poles, Ira felt compelled to ask him why again.

  “’Cause of this little plate on it, see, embossed? Pure thirties.” The picture was taken.

  “What I mean is why do you do this at all? This whole thing?”

  Jonathan smacked his lips as if tasting something. “I’m trying to piece it together.”

  “But why?” Their feet crunched in companionable unison back along the soft shoulder toward the car.

  “Oh,” said Jonathan, bundling himself into the car. He looked preoccupied. He put on a pair of mirror shades. Somehow, Ira knew, he gave Jonathan the confidence to dress as he did, despite his age, despite himself. Ira knew Jonathan was shy. Jonathan was quiet.

  Ira eased the car back onto the road. Jonathan answered the question.

  “I do it so that I can see it. Back Then, I mean. I want to see it, so I can catch some of the flavor. Of the people.”

  “So you can act them?”

  “Maybe sometime. I just get this strange feeling of something gone. It makes me love it. I even fancy the guys in the old sports photographs. It’s because they’re gone now, or old.”

  “I get it,” said Ira. “It’s necrophilia.”

  “It’s just that, in some of those old photographs, only a few of them, they’re so clear, like they were taken yesterday, you could almost just walk into the street, with the wooden houses and the funny windows and the cars with canopies, and the guys with straw boaters. And some of the faces, only some of the faces, you can see who they were, what kind of people. And some of them—some of the old flinty-eyed kind—they might as well be Martians.”

  “They didn’t like being photographed either.” Ira hated photographs of himself.

  They went first to the public library. They nearly always did on Jonathan’s expeditions. The library was on Avenue J.

  “Imaginative street names.”

  “Oh hey, that’s nothing, you want confusion, it used to be that all the streets running east to west were numbered. Then they turned them around sometime so the numbered streets run north to south. So you can never tell from a photograph if Tenth Street means Lancaster Boulevard or not.”

  “So who wants to know?” Ira asked. “Except you?”

  AIDS? asked a cheery poster inside the library. YOU’RE NOT ALONE.

  “Well, that must be encouraging for them,” said Ira.

  Jonathan asked at the reference desk for a copy of the 1927 local paper. It had been stolen. Jonathan took 1928 instead. Ira sat and read Jonathan’s book.

  It was full of photographs. There were Mexican railroad workers in the snow. A great cloud of rabbits, thousands of them, ran between picket fences, watched by women in high, folded formal hats. Someone called Mr. Hannah and his friends posed on the front porch of the Lancaster Hotel in 1901. The hotel had two floors and was three windows wide, and the upper floor of the porch leaned outward. Cowboys lined up on horseback in 1906. There were truckloads of alfalfa, and photographs of floods, horse carriages fording the main street. The Woman’s Relief Corps smiled out at Ira from the turn of the century. Some of the women were named, but there was one woman with a particularly smiling, attractive face who was not named. No one, apparently, knew who she had been.

  Ira began to be able to trace particular people. One face started as a watchful, rather handsome lad graduating from grammar school in the twenties. Then he was seen even more stern behind the counter of a grocery store. The sports teams began and there he was again, still stern until the 1930s when, disastrously, he smiled. His face looked plump, uncertain, unrecognizable. And there he was as a coach in 1948, looking suddenly lively, bright-eyed, gleaming. In one photograph, in the 1950s, he was portly, polished and beaming. It was the story of a man who had learned how to smile.

  Ira looked up at the quiet, modern library, with its row of books, its tan and varnished index-card files, and its very slightly battered computers. Redolent of its age. There will come a time, Ira thought, when Jo and I are gone. Or one of us is gone. It wouldn’t be the same, with one of us gone.

  An athletic-looking man in running shoes strode past and left behind him a disturbance in the air, a bit like body odor. Ira looked at Jonathan, his long, fan-shaped back, his nonexistent butt, his wiggly, knobbly legs, and the effect on Ira was bland, neutral as if the body were invisible. A perfect relationship, except for one thing.

  Ira went over to see how Jonathan was doing.

  As he approached, Jonathan seemed to flicker sideways somehow, and he flipped the microfilm forward.

  “You really don’t want me to see what this is all about, do you?” Ira chuckled.

  “I wanted you to look at this,” said Jonathan, oblivious with enthusiasm. A headline in quaint serif type said: STERLING RINEAR TALKS TO KIWANIS ABOUT EISTEDDFOD.

  The Eisteddfod was the Welsh bardic festival—another one of Jonathan’s enthusiasms.

  “It just all connects,” said Jonathan.

  Like electricity. Even Ira felt the jolt, but only through Jonathan.

  “Look at this. And look at this,” said Jonathan, showing him ads for Safeways and banks.

  “I mean the Bank of Italy. What was it doing here? Except that it became the Bank of America.” He paused. “You bored?”

  “A bit,” admitted Ira.

  Jonathan rubbed his forehead and looked helplessly at the unending trail of stories, advertisements. “Yeah. Okay. I just wish I could photograph the whole thing.”

  It was impossible to catch the past. “You know, someday they’ll do a computer model of every town every ten years. The shops, the cars, the parks, the houses. The people in them, the clothes, everything. And you’ll put on your electronic glasses, and your earplugs, and you’ll walk through it. You’ll say hello to women in cloche hats and brown silk stockings and they’ll say hello back.” He paused, and Ira saw that he was almost near tears. “In very slightly tinny voices.”

  It was Ira’s private conviction that he had married a genius. Ira never said anything about this to anyone, especially to Jonathan. But Ira had seen Jonathan act Shakespeare and had heard him talk. No one else knew what Jonathan was. The TV shows, the horror movies in which Jonathan appeared, were rubbish. This only made it more poignant for Ira, so Ira joked.

  “Wouldn’t you bump into them if you had electronic specs?”

  “This isn’t some dumb joke, Ira.” Jonathan’s face had suddenly gone solemn, and slightly ill-looking.

  “No,” said Ira gently. “No, it isn’t.” Ira kept watch over Jonathan. There was a downside to the hyperactivity that glittered in Jonathan’s eyes.

  Suddenly the downside was dispelled or, rather, cast out. “Get out of here!” said Jonathan, bullish again, and he stood up with a kind of whiplash smartness to his spine. He tossed the microfilm up into the air and caught it effortlessly. He was strangely put together, too long in the back, but top-heavy, with small thin legs. He had wonderful coordination and he always beat Ira at everything. Ira had to try hard at everything. Jonathan tried hard at nothing. Ira was the success.

  “On,” said Jonathan, “to Cedar Street.”

  “What’s there?” Ira asked.

  “A house,” said Jonathan, with another secret smile.

  “If this is some dumb movie-star pilgrimage . . .” Ira threatened. He had been the kind of kid who preferre
d Mozart to Kiss. And Bach to Mozart.

  “You’ll do what?” Jonathan asked.

  “I’ll tell everyone you’re a John Wayne fan.”

  “Well, he’s from Lancaster.”

  “I know! Listen, it’s not John Wayne, is it? Please? Tell me it’s not John Wayne.”

  “It’s not John Wayne,” said Jonathan, still smiling with his secret.

  The house was on Cedar Street, on a corner, by what had once been the grammar school. “That’s it, it must be it, two-story!”

  “You want to stop?” Ira asked.

  “No, no, keep going,” said Jonathan, ducking down.

  “Are you or are you not the world’s only photo-realist actor?”

  “I’m embarrassed,” said Jonathan, and the words were like lead. “That’s someone’s house. I can’t just go up and start snapping pictures. Go on, go on!”

  There was a hum as the car accelerated. “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Ira, “you’ll never be a photo-realist journalist.”

  “Drive round the block,” said Jonathan. He switched baseball hats.

  “Hey, master of disguise. Do you really think they won’t recognize you in a different baseball hat?”

  “You’re a lawyer,” accused Jonathan.

  “Whenever I think straight, you tell me that.”

  Jonathan looked afraid. Ira chuckled and slapped his leg. “You’re nuts,” he said.

  “I know,” said Jonathan very seriously.

  The fake-Spanish bungalows, the tiny 1920s frame houses with porches and tile roofs, slipped past. Consistency was not Jonathan’s strong point. It ruined his career. He would sometimes freeze like this on a part. Something about it wouldn’t be right, and Jonathan would have to stop. No amount of ambition, or gratitude to the people who had worked so hard to get him the part, could force a performance out of him. “I’m sorry,” Jonathan would say, helpless. “I’m not being funny. I want to do it, I wish I could, but if I tried now there would be nothing. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And implacable, he would walk away from money, from opportunity, from reputation. And it isn’t even artistic integrity, thought Ira. I mean, he does those terrible monster movies. There’s just something in those that he can grab hold of.