Ask the Dust (14 page)

We drove south and slightly east, each of us taking a turn at the wheel. By dawn we were in a land of grey desolation, of cactus and sagebrush and Joshua trees, a desert where the sand was scarce and the whole vast plain was pimpled with tumbled rocks and scarred by stumpy little hills. Then we turned off the main highway and entered a wagon trail clogged with boulders and rarely used. The road rose and fell to the rhythm of the listless hills. It was daylight when we came to a region of canyons and steep gulches, twenty miles in the interior of the Mojave Desert. There below us was where Sammy lived, and Camilla pointed to a squat adobe shack planted at the bottom of three sharp hills. It was at the very edge of a sandy plain. To the east the plain spread away infinitely.

We were both tired, hammered to exhaustion by the bouncing Ford. It was very cold at that hour. We had to park two hundred yards from the house and take a stony path to its door. I led the way. At the door I paused. Inside I could hear a man snoring heavily. Camilla hung back, her arms folded against the sharp cold. I knocked and got a groan in response. I knocked again, and then I heard Sammy's voice. “If that's you, you little Spick, I'll kick your goddamn teeth out.”

He opened the door and I saw a face clutched in the persistent fingers of sleep, the eyes grey and dazed, the hair in ruins across his forehead. “Hello, Sammy.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought it was her.”

“She's here,” I said.

“Tell her to screw outa' here. I don't want her around.”

She had retreated to a place against the wall of the hut, and I looked at her and saw her smiling away her embarrassment. The three of us were very cold, our jaws chattering. Sammy opened the door wider. “You can come in,” he said. “But not her.”

I stepped inside. It was almost pitch dark, smelling of old underwear and the sleep of a sick body. A feeble light came from a crack in the window covered by a slice of sacking. Before I could stop him, Sammy had bolted the door.

He stood in long underwear. The floor was of dirt, dry and sandy and cold. He yanked the sacking from the window and the early light tumbled through. Vapors spilled from our mouths in the cold air. “Let her in, Sammy,” I said. “What the hell.”

“Not that bitch,” he said.

He stood in long underwear, the knees and elbows capped with the blackness of dirt. He was tall, gaunt, a cadaver of a man, tanned almost to blackness. He padded across the hut to a coal stove and began making a fire. His voice changed and became soft when he spoke. “Wrote another story last week,” he said. “Think I got a good one this time. Like you to see it.”

“Sure,” I said. “But hell, Sammy. She's a friend of mine.”

“Bah,” he said. “She's no good. Crazy as hell. Cause you nothing but trouble.”

“Let her in anyway. It's cold out there.”

He opened the door and pushed his head out.

“Hey, you!”

I heard the girl sob, heard her try to compose herself. “Yes, Sammy.”

“Don't stand out there like a fool,” he said. “You coming in or ain't you?”

She entered like a frightened deer while he went back to the stove. “Thought I told you I didn't want you hanging around here no more,” he said.

“I brought him,” she said. “Arturo. He wanted to talk to you about writing. Didn't you, Arturo?”

“That's right.”

She was like a stranger to me. All the fight and glory of her was
drained like blood from her veins. She stood off by herself, a creature without spirit or will, her shoulder blades humped, her head drooping as though too heavy for her neck.

“You,” Sammy said to her. “Go get some wood, you.”

“I'll go,” I said.

“Let her go,” he said. “She knows where it is.”

I watched her slink out the door. In a while she came back, her arms loaded. She dumped the sticks into a box beside the stove, and without speaking she fed the flames, a stick at a time. Sammy sat on a box across the room, pulling on his socks. He talked incessantly about his stories, a continuous flow of chatter. Camilla stood dismally beside the stove.

“You,” he said. “Make some coffee.”

She did as she was told, serving us coffee out of tin cups. Sammy, fresh from sleep, was full of enthusiasm and curiosity. We sat at the fire, and I was tired and sleepy, and the hot fire toyed with my heavy lids. Behind us and all around us, Camilla worked. She swept the place out, made up the bed, washed dishes, hung up stray garments and kept up an incessant activity. The more Sammy talked, the more cordial and personal he became. He was interested in the financial side of writing more than in writing itself. How much did this magazine pay, and how much did that one pay, and he was convinced that only by favoritism were stories sold. You had to have a cousin or a brother or somebody like that in an editor's office before they took one of your stories. It was useless to try to dissuade him, and I didn't try, because I knew that his kind of rationalizing was necessary in view of his sheer inability to write well.

Camilla cooked breakfast for us, and we ate from plates on our laps. The fare was fried corn meal and bacon and eggs. Sammy ate with the peculiar robustness of unhealthy people. After the meal, Camilla gathered the tin plates and washed them. Then she had her own breakfast, seated in a far corner, quiet except for the sound of her fork against the tin plate. All that long morning Sammy talked. Sammy really didn't need any advice about writing. Vaguely through the fog of semi-slumber I heard him telling me how it
should and shouldn't be done. But I was so tired. I begged to be excused. He led me outside to an arbor of palm branches. Now the air was warm and the sun was high. I lay in the hammock and fell asleep, and the last thing I remember was the sight of Camilla bent over a wash tub filled with dark water and several pairs of underwear and overalls.

Six hours later she woke me to tell me that it was two o'clock, and that we had to start back. She was due at the Columbia Buffet at seven. I asked her if she had slept. She shook her head negatively. Her face was a manuscript of misery and exhaustion. I got off the hammock and stood up in the hot desert air. My clothes were soaked in perspiration, but I was rested and refreshed.

“Where's the genius?” I said.

She nodded toward the hut. I walked toward the door, ducking under a long heavy clothesline sagging with clean, dry garments. “You did all of that?” I asked. She smiled. “It was fun.”

Deep snores came from the hut. I peeked inside. On the bunk lay Sammy, half naked, his mouth wide open, his arms and legs spread apart. I tiptoed away. “Now's our chance,” I said. “Let's go.”

She entered the hut and quietly walked to where Sammy lay. From the door I watched her lean over him, study his face and body. Then she bent down, her face near his, as if to kiss him. At that moment he awoke and their eyes met. He said: “Get out of here.”

She turned and walked out. We drove back to Los Angeles in complete silence. Even when she let me out at the Alta Loma Hotel, even then we did not speak, but she smiled her thanks and I smiled my sympathy, and she drove away. Already it was dark, a smudge of the pink sunset fading in the west. I went down to my room, yawned, and threw myself on the bed. Lying there I suddenly remembered the clothes closet. I got up and opened the closet door. Everything seemed as it should, my suits hanging from hooks, my suitcases on the top shelf. But there was no light in the closet. I struck a match and looked down at the floor. In the corner was a burned matchstick and a score of grains of brown stuff, like
coarsely ground coffee. I pressed my finger into the stuff and then tasted it on the end of my tongue. I knew what that was: it was marijuana. I was sure of it, because Benny Cohen had once showed me the stuff to warn me against it. So that was why she had been in here. You had to have an air-tight room to smoke marijuana. That explained why the two rugs had been moved: she had used them to cover the crack under the door.

Camilla was a hophead. I sniffed the closet air, put my nostrils against the garments hanging there. The smell was that of burned cornsilk. Camilla, the hophead.

It was none of my business, but she was Camilla; she had tricked me and scorned me, and she loved somebody else, but she
was
so beautiful and I needed her so, and I decided to make it my business. I was waiting in her car at eleven that night.

“So you're a hophead,” I said.

“Once in a while,” she said. “When I'm tired.”

“You cut it out,” I said.

“It's not a habit,” she said.

“Cut it out anyway.”

She shrugged. “It doesn't bother me.”

“Promise me you'll quit.”

She made a cross over her heart. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” but she was talking to Arturo now, and not to Sammy. I knew she would not keep the promise. She started the car and drove down Broadway to Eighth, then south toward Central Avenue. “Where we going?” I said.

“Wait and see.”

We drove into the Los Angeles Black Belt, Central Avenue, night clubs, abandoned apartment houses, broken-down business houses, the forlorn street of poverty for the Negro and swank for the whites. We stopped under the marquee of a night spot called the Club Cuba. Camilla knew the doorman, a giant in a blue uniform with gold buttons. “Business,” she said. He grinned, signaled someone to take his place, and jumped on the running board. It was done like a routine procedure, as though it had been done before.

She drove around the corner and continued for two streets, until we came to an alley. She turned down the alley, switched off the lights and steered carefully into pitch blackness. We came to some kind of opening and killed the engine. The big Negro jumped off the running board and snapped on a flashlight, motioning us to follow. “May I ask just what the hell this is all about?” I said.

We entered a door. The Negro took the lead. He held Camilla's hand, and she held mine. We walked down a long corridor. It was carpetless, a hardwood floor. Far away like frightened birds, the echo of our feet floated through the upper floors. We climbed three flights of stairs and proceeded the length of another hall. At the end was a door. The Negro opened it. Inside was complete darkness. We entered. The room reeked with smoke that could not be seen, and yet it burned like an eyewash. The smoke choked my throat, leaped for my nostrils. In the darkness I swallowed for breath. Then the Negro flashed on his light.

The beam traveled around the room, a small room. Everywhere were bodies, the bodies of Negroes, men and women, perhaps a score of them, lying on the floor and across a bed that was only a mattress on springs. I could see their eyes, wide and grey and oyster-like as the flashlight hit them, and gradually I accustomed myself to the burning smoke and saw tiny red points of light everywhere, for they were all smoking marijuana, quietly in the darkness, and the pungency stabbed my lungs. The big Negro cleared the bed of its occupants, flung them like so many sacks of grain to the floor, and the flash spot revealed him digging something from a slot in the mattress. It was a Prince Albert tobacco can. He opened the door, and we followed him down the stairs and through the same darkness to the car. He handed the can to Camilla, and she gave him two dollars. We drove him back to his doorman's job, and then we continued down Central Avenue to metropolitan Los Angeles.

I was speechless. We drove to her place on Temple Street. It was a sick building, a frame place diseased and dying from the sun. She lived in an apartment. There was a Murphy bed, a radio, and dirty blue overstuffed furniture. The carpeted floor was littered with
crumbs and dirt, and in the corner, sprawled out like one naked, lay a movie magazine. There were kewpie dolls standing about, souvenirs of gaudy nights at beach resorts. There was a bicycle in the corner, the flat tires attesting to long disuse. There was a fishing pole in one corner with tangled hooks and line, and there was a shotgun in the other corner, dusty. There was a baseball bat under the divan, and there was a bible lodged between the cushions of the overstuffed chair. The bed was down, and the sheets were not clean. There was a reproduction of the Blue Boy on one wall and a print of an Indian Brave saluting the sky on another.

I walked into the kitchen, smelled the garbage in the sink, saw the greasy frying pans on the stove. I opened the Frigidaire and it was empty save for a can of condensed milk and a cube of butter. The icebox door would not close, and that seemed as it should be. I looked into the closet behind the Murphy bed and there were lots of clothes and lots of clothes-hooks, but all the clothes were on the floor, except a straw hat, and that hung alone, ridiculous up there by itself.

So this was where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odor possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, an apartment in Los Angeles. She belonged to the rolling hills, the wide deserts, the high mountains, she would ruin any apartment, she would lay havoc upon any such little prison as this. It was so, ever in my imagination, ever a part of my scheming and thinking about her. This was her home, her ruin, her scattered dream.

She threw off her coat and flung herself on the divan. I watched her stare dismally at the ugly carpet. Sitting in the overstuffed chair, I puffed a cigaret and let my eyes wander the profile of her curved back and hips. The dark corridor of that Central Avenue Hotel, the sinister Negro, the black room and the hopheads, and now the girl who loved a man who hated her. It was all of the same cloth, perverse, drugged in fascinating ugliness. Midnight on
Temple Street, a can of marijuana between us. She lay there, her long fingers dangling to the carpet, waiting, listless, tired.

“Have you ever tried it?” she asked.