Ask the Dust (11 page)

One day his craze for meat was gone, and the craze for gin returned. He was steadily drunk for two nights. I could hear him stumbling about, kicking bottles and talking to himself. Then he went away. He was gone another night. When he returned, his pension check was spent, and he had somehow, somewhere, he did not remember it, bought a car. We went behind the hotel and looked at this car. It was a huge Packard, more than twenty years old. It stood there like a hearse, the tires worn, the cheap black paint bubbling in the hot sun. Somebody down on Main Street had sold it to him. Now he was broke, with a big Packard on his hands.

“You want to buy it?” he said.

“Hell, no.”

He was dejected, his head bursting from a hangover.

That night he walked into my room. He sat on the bed, his long arms dangling to the floor. He was homesick for the middle-west. He talked of rabbit-hunting, of fishing, of the good old days when he was a kid. Then he began on the subject of meat. “How would you like a big thick steak?” he said, his lips loose. He opened two fingers. “Thick as that. Broiled. Lots of butter over it. Burned just enough to give it a tang. How would you like it?”

“I'd love it.”

He got up.

“Then come on, and we'll get one.”

“You got money?”

“We don't need any money. I'm hungry.”

I grabbed my sweater and followed him down the hall to the alley. He got into his car. I hesitated. “Where you going, Hellfrick?”

“Come on,” he said. “Leave it to me.”

I got in beside him.

“No trouble,” I said.

“Trouble!” he sneered. “I tell you I know where to get us a steak.”

We drove in moonlight out Wilshire to Highland, then out Highland over Cahuenga Pass. On the other side lay the flat plain of the San Fernando Valley We found a lonely road off the pavement and followed it through tall eucalyptus trees to scattered farmhouses and pasture lands. After a mile the road ended. Barbed wire and fence posts appeared in the glare of headlights. Hellfrick laboriously turned the car around, faced it toward the pavement from which we had detoured. He got out of the front seat, opened the rear door, and fumbled with car tools under the rear cushion.

I leaned over and watched him.

“What's up, Hellfrick?”

He stood up, a jackhammer in his hand.

“You wait here.”

He stopped under a loop in the barbed wire and crossed the pasture. A hundred yards away a barn loomed in the moonlight. Then I knew what he was after. I jumped out of the car and called to him. He shushed me angrily. I watched him tiptoe toward the barn door. I cursed him and waited tensely. In a little while I heard the mooing of a cow. It was a piteous cry. Then I heard a thud and a scuffle of hoofs. Out of the barn door came Hellfrick. Across his shoulder lay a dark mass, weighing him down. Behind him, mooing continually, a cow followed. Hellfrick tried to run, but the dark mass beat him down to a fast walk. Still the cow pursued, pushing
her nose into his back. He turned around, kicked wildly. The cow stopped, looked toward the barn, and mooed again.

“You fool, Hellfrick. You goddamn fool!”

“Help me,” he said.

I raised the loose barbed wire to a width that would permit him and his burden to pass under. It was a calf, blood spurting from a gash between the ears. The calf's eyes were wide open. I could see the moon reflected in them. It was coldblooded murder. I was sick and horrified. My stomach twisted when Hellfrick dumped the calf into the back seat. I heard the body thump, and then the head. I was sick, very sick. It was plain murder.

All the way home Hellfrick was exultant, but the steering wheel was sticky with blood, and once or twice I thought I heard the calf kicking in the back seat. I held my face in my hands and tried to forget the melancholy call of the calf's mother, the sweet face of the dead calf. Hellfrick drove very fast. On Beverly we shot by a black car moving slowly. It was a police cruiser. I gritted my teeth and waited for the worst. But the police did not follow us. I was too sick to be relieved. One thing was certain: Hellfrick was a murderer, he and I were through. On Bunker Hill we turned down our alley and pulled up at the parking space adjacent the hotel wall. Hellfrick got out.

“Now I'm going to give you a lesson in butchering.”

“You are like hell,” I said.

I acted as lookout for him as he wrapped the calf's head in newspapers, slung it over his shoulder, and hurried down the dim hallway to his room. I spread newspapers over his dirty floor, and he lowered the calf upon them. He grinned at his bloody trousers his bloody shirt, his bloody arms.

I looked down at the poor calf. Its hide was spotted black and white and it had the most delicate ankles. From the slightly open mouth there appeared a pink tongue. I closed my eyes and ran out Hellfrick's room and threw myself on the floor in my room. I lay there and shuddered, thinking of the old cow alone in the field in the moonlight, old cow mooing for her calf. Murder! Hellfrick and I were through. He didn't have to pay back the debt. It was blood
money—not for me.

After that night I was very cold toward Hellfrick. I never visited his room again. A couple of times I recognized his knock, but I kept the door bolted so he couldn't barge in. Meeting in the hall, we merely grunted. He owed me almost three dollars, but I never did collect it.

Good news from Hackmuth. Another magazine wanted
The Long Lost Hills
in digest form. A hundred dollars. I was rich again. A time for amends, for righting the past. I sent my mother five dollars. I cried when she sent me a letter of thanks. The tears rolled down my eyes as I quickly replied. And I sent five more. I was pleased with myself. I had a few good qualities. I could see them, my biographers, talking to my mother, a very old lady in a wheel chair: he was a good son, my Arturo, a good provider.

Arturo Bandini, the novelist. Income of his own, made it writing short stories. Writing a book now. Tremendous book. Advance notices terrific. Remarkable prose. Nothing like it since Joyce. Standing before Hackmuth's picture, I read the work of each day. I spent whole hours writing a dedication: To J. C. Hackmuth, for discovering me. To J. C. Hackmuth, in admiration. To Hackmuth, a man of genius. I could see them, those New York critics, crowding Hackmuth at his club. You certainly found a winner in that Bandini kid on the coast. A smile from Hackmuth, his eyes twinkling.

Six weeks, a few sweet hours every day, three and four and sometimes five delicious hours, with the pages piling up and all other desires asleep. I felt like a ghost walking the earth, a lover of man and beast alike, and wonderful waves of tenderness flooded me when I talked to people and mingled with them in the streets. God Almighty, dear God, good to me, gave me a sweet tongue, and these sad and lonely folk will hear me and they shall be happy. Thus the days passed. Dreamy, luminous days, and sometimes such great quiet joy came to me that I would turn out my lights and cry, and a strange desire to die would come to me.

Thus Bandini, writing a novel.

One night I answered a knock on my door, and there she stood.

“Camilla!”

She came in and sat down on the bed, something under her arm, a bundle of papers. She looked at my room: so this was where I lived. She had wondered about the place I lived. She got up and walked around, peering out the window, walking around the room, beautiful girl, tall Camilla, warm dark hair, and I stood and watched her. But why had she come? She felt my question, and she sat on the bed and smiled at me.

“Arturo,” she said. “Why do we fight all the time?”

I didn't know. I said something about temperaments, but she shook her head and crossed her knees, and a sense of her fine thighs being lifted lay heavily in my mind, thick suffocating sensation, warm lush desire to take them in my hands. Every move she made, the soft turn of her neck, the large breasts swelling under the smock, her fine hands upon the bed, the fingers spread out, these things disturbed me, a sweet painful heaviness dragging me into stupor. Then the sound of her voice, restrained, hinting of mockery, a voice that talked to my blood and bones. I remembered the peace of those past weeks, it seemed so unreal, it had been a hypnotism of my own creation, because this was being alive, this looking into the black eyes of Camilla, matching her scorn with hope and a brazen gloating.

She had come for something else beside a mere visit. Then I found out what it was.

“You remember Sammy?”

Of course.

“You didn't like him.”

“He was alright.”

“He's good, Arturo. You'd like him if you knew him better.”

“I suppose.”

“He liked you.”

I doubted that, after the scuffle in the parking lot. I remembered certain things about her relationship with Sammy, her smiles for him during work, her concern the night we took him home. “You love that guy, don't you?”

“Not exactly.”

She took her eyes off my face and let them travel around the room.

“Yes you do.”

All at once I loathed her, because she had hurt me. This girl! She had torn up my sonnet by Dowson, she had shown my telegram to everybody in the Columbia Buffet. She had made a fool of me at the beach. She suspected my virility, and her suspicion was the same as the scorn in her eyes. I watched her face and lips and thought how it would be a pleasure to strike her, send my fist with all force against her nose and lips.

She spoke of Sammy again. Sammy had had all the rotten breaks in life. He might have been somebody, except that his health had always been poor.

“What's the matter with him?”

“T. B.” she said.

“Tough.”

“He won't live long.”

I didn't give a damn.

“We all have to die someday.”

I thought of throwing her out, saying to her: if you've come here to talk about that guy, you can get the hell out because I'm not interested. I thought that would be delightful: order her out, she so wonderfully beautiful in her own way, and forced to leave because I ordered her out.

“Sammy's not here any more. He's gone.”

If she thought I was curious about his whereabouts, she was badly mistaken. I put my feet on the desk and lit a cigaret.

“How are all your other boy friends?” I said. It had bolted out of me. I was sorry at once. I softened it with a smile. The corners of her lips responded, but with an effort.

“I haven't any boy friends,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, touching it slightly with sarcasm. “Sure, I understand. Forgive an incautious remark.”

She was silent for a while. I made a pretense at whistling. Then she spoke: “Why are you so mean?” she said.

“Mean?” I said. “My dear girl, I am equally fond of man and beast alike. There is not the slightest drop of enmity in my system. After all, you can't be mean and still be a great writer.”

Her eyes mocked me. “Are you a great writer?”

“That's something you'll never know.”

She bit her lower lip, pinched it between two white sharp teeth, looking toward the window and the door like a trapped animal, then smiled again. “That's why I came to see you.”

She fumbled with the big envelopes on her lap, and it excited me, her own fingers touching her lap, lying there and moving against her own flesh. There were two envelopes. She opened one of them. It was a manuscript of some sort. I took it from her hands. It was a short story by Samuel Wiggins, General Delivery, San Juan, California. It was called ‘Coldwater Gatling,' and it began like this: “Coldwater Gatling wasn't looking for trouble but you never can tell about those Arizona rustlers. Pack your cannon high on the hip and lay low when you seen one of them babies. The trouble with trouble was that trouble was looking for Coldwater Gatling. They don't like Texas Rangers down in Arizona, consequently Coldwater Gatling figured shoot first and find out who you killed afterwards. That's how they did it in the Lone Star State where men were men and the women didn't mind cooking for hard-riding straight-shooting people like Coldwater Gatling, the toughest man in leather they had down there.”

That was the first paragraph.

“Hogwash,” I said.

“Please help him.”

He was going to die in a year, she said. He had left Los Angeles and gone to the edge of the Santa Ana desert. There he lived in a shack, writing feverishly. All his life he had wanted to write. Now, with such little time remaining, his chance had come.

“What's in it for me?” I said.

“But he's dying.”

“Who isn't?”

I opened the second manuscript. It was the same sort of stuff. I shook my head. “It stinks.”

“I know,” she said. “But couldn't you do something to it? He'll give you half the money.”

“I don't need money. I have an income of my own.”

She rose and stood before me, her hands on my shoulders. She lowered her face, her warm breath sweet in my nostrils, her eyes so large they reflected my head in them and I felt delirious and sick with desire. “Would you do it for me?”

“For you?” I said. “Well, for you—yes.”

She kissed me. Bandini, the stooge. Thick, warm kiss, for services about to be rendered. I pushed her away carefully. “You don't have to kiss me. I'll do what I can.” But I had an idea or two of my own on the subject, and while she stood at the mirror and rouged her lips I looked at the address on the manuscripts. San Juan, California. “I'll write him a letter about this stuff,” I said. She watched me through the mirror, paused with the lipstick in her hand. Her smile was mocking me. “You don't have to do that,” she said. “I could come back and pick them up and mail them myself.”

 

That was what she said, but you can't fool me, Camilla, because I can see your memories of that night at the beach written upon your scornful face, and do I hate you, oh God how I loathe you!

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that would be best. You come back tomorrow night.”

She was sneering at me. Not her face, her lips, but from within her. “What time shall I come?”

“What time are you through work?”

She turned around, snapped her purse shut, and looked at me. “You know what time I'm through work,” she said.

I'll get you, Camilla. I'll get you yet.

“Come then,” I said.

She walked to the door, put her hand on the knob.

“Goodnight, Arturo.”

“I'll walk up to the lobby with you.”

“Don't be silly,” she said.

The door closed. I stood in the middle of the room and listened to her footsteps on the stairs. I could feel the whiteness of my face,
the awful humiliation, and I got mad and I reached my hair with my fingers and howled out of my throat as I pulled at my hair, loathing her, beating my fists together, lurching around the room with arms clasped against myself, struggling with the hideous memory of her, choking her out of my consciousness, gasping with hatred.

But there were ways and means, and that sick man out in the desert was going to get his too. I'll get you, Sammy. I'll cut you to pieces, I'll make you wish you were dead and buried a long time ago. The pen is mightier than the sword, Sammy boy, but the pen of Arturo Bandini is mightier still. Because my time has come, Sir. And now you get yours.

I sat down and read his stories. I made notes on every line and sentence and paragraph of it. The writing was pretty terrible, a first effort, clumsy stuff, vague, jerky, absurd. Hour after hour I sat there consuming cigarets and laughing wildly at Sammy's efforts, gloating over them, rubbing my hands together gleefully. Oh boy, would I lay him low! I jumped up and strutted around the room, shadow-boxing: take that, Sammy boy, and that, and how do you like this left hook, and how do you like this right cross, zingo, bingo, bang, biff, blooey!

I turned around and saw the crease on the bed where Camilla had been seated, the sensuous contour where her thighs and hips had sunk beneath the softness of the blue chenille bedspread. Then I forgot Sammy, and wild with longing I threw myself upon my knees before the spot and kissed it reverently.

“Camilla, I love you!”

And when I had worn the sensation to vaporous nothingness, I got up, disgusted with myself, black awful Arturo Bandini, black vile dog.

I sat down and grimly went to work on my letter of criticism to Sammy.

There it was, finished, devastating. I folded the manuscripts, placed the note with them inside a big envelope, sealed it, addressed it to Samuel Wiggins, General Delivery, San Juan, California, stamped it, and shoved it into my back pocket. Then I went upstairs and out of the lobby to the mailbox on the corner. It was a little after three o'clock of an incomparable morning. The blue and white of stars and sky were like desert colors, a gentleness so stirring I had to pause and wonder that it could be so lovely. Not a blade of the dirty palms stirred. Not a sound was to be heard.

All that was good in me thrilled in my heart at that moment, all
that I hoped for in the profound, obscure meaning of my existence. Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.

I looked southward in the direction of the big stars, and I knew that in that direction lay the Santa Ana desert, that under the big stars in a shack lay a man like myself, who would probably be swallowed by the desert sooner than I, and in my hand I held an effort of his, an expression of his struggle against the implacable silence toward which he was being hurled. Murderer or bartender or writer, it didn't matter: his fate was the common fate of all, his finish my finish; and here tonight in this city of darkened windows were other millions like him and like me: as indistinguishable as dying blades of grass. Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task. And Sammy was soon to die.