Ask The Dust (7 page)

I pointed at myself and laughed.

'Me, a Mexican?' I shook my head. 'I'm an American, Mrs Hargraves. And that isn't a dog story, either. It's about a man, it's pretty good. There isn't a dog in the whole story.'

'We don't allow Mexicans in this hotel,' she said.

'I'm not a Mexican. I got that title after the fable. You know: "And the little dog laughed to see such sport."'

'Nor Jews,' she said.

I registered. I had a beautiful signature in those days, intricate, oriental, illegible, with a mighty slashing underscore, a signature more complex than that of the great Hackmuth. And after the signature I wrote, 'Boulder, Colorado.'

She examined the script, word for word.

Coldly: 'What's your name, young man?'

And I was disappointed, for already she had forgotten the author of
The Little
Dog Laughed
and his name printed in large type on the magazine. I told her my name. She printed it carefully over the signature. Then she crossed the page to the other writing.

'Mr Bandini,' she said, looking at me coldly, 'Boulder is
not
in Colorado.'

'It is too!' I said. 'I just came from there. It was there two days ago.'

She was firm, determined. 'Boulder is in Nebraska. My husband and I went through Boulder, Nebraska, thirty years ago, on our way out here. You will kindly change that, if

you please.'

'But it
is
in Colorado! My mother lives there, my father. I went to school there!'

She reached under the desk and drew out the magazine. She handed it to me.

'This hotel is no place for you, young man. We have fine people here, honest people.'

I didn't accept the magazine. I was so tired, hammered to bits by the long bus ride. 'All right,' I said. 'It's in Nebraska.' And I wrote it down, scratched out the Colorado and wrote Nebraska over it. She was satisfied, very pleased with me, smiled and examined the magazine. 'So you're an author!' she said. 'How nice!'

Then she put the magazine out of sight again. 'Welcome to California!' she said.

'You'll love it here!'

That Mrs Hargraves! She was lonely, and so lost and still proud. One afternoon she took me to her apartment on the top floor. It was like walking into a well-dusted tomb. Her husband was dead now, but thirty years ago he had owned a tool shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His picture was on the wall. A splendid man, who neither smoked nor drank, dead of a heart attack; a thin, severe face out of a heavy framed picture, still contemptuous of smoking and drinking. Here was the bed in which he died, a high mahogany four-poster; here were his clothes in the closet and his shoes on the floor, the toes turned upwards from age. Here on the mantel was his shaving mug, he always shaved himself, and his name was Bert. That Bert! Bert, she used to say, why don't you go to the barber, and Bert would laugh, because he knew he was a better barber than the regular barbers.

Bert always got up at five in the morning. He came from 54 JOHN FANTE

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a family of fifteen children. He was handy with tools. He had done all the repair work around the hotel for years. It had taken him three weeks to paint the outside of the building. He used to say he was a better painter than the regular painters. For two hours she talked of Bert, and Lord! how she loved that man, even in death, but he was not dead at all; he was in that apartment, watching over her, protecting her, daring me to hurt her. He frightened me, and made me want to i rush away. We had tea. The tea was old. The sugar was old and lumpish. The tea cups were dusty, and somehow the tea tasted old and the little dried up cookies tasted of death. When I got up to leave, Bert followed me through the door and down the hall, daring me to think cynically of him. For ; two nights he hounded me, threatened me, even cajoled me in the matter of cigarettes.

I am remembering that kid from Memphis. I never asked his name and he never asked mine. We said 'Hi' to one another,
\
He was not there long, a few weeks.

His pimpled face was always covered by his long hands when he sat on the front > porch of the hotel: every night late he was there; twelve and one and two o'clock, and coming home I would find him rocking back and forth in the wicker chair, his nervous ringers picking at his face, searching his uncut black hair. 'Hi,' I would say, and 'Hi' he would answer.

The restless dust of Los Angeles fevered him. He was a greater wanderer than myself, and all day long he sought out perverse loves in the parks. But he was so ugly he never found his desire, and the warm nights with low stars and yellow moon tortured him away from his room until the dawn arrived. But one night he talked to me, left me nauseated and unhappy as he revelled in memories of Memphis, Tennessee,

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where the real people came from, where there were friends and friends. Some day he would leave this hated city, some day he would go back where friendship meant something, and sure enough, he went away and I got a postcard signed 'Memphis Kid' from Fort Worth, Texas.

There was Heilman, who belonged to the Book of the Month Club. A huge man with arms like logs and legs tight in his pants. He was a bank teller. He had a wife in Moline, Illinois and a son at the University of Chicago. He hated the southwest, his hatred bulging from his big face, but his health was bad, and he was doomed to stay here or die. He sneered at everything western. He was sick after every intersectional football game that saw the east defeated. He spat when you mentioned the Trojans. He hated the sun, cursed the fog, denounced the rain, dreamed always of the snows of the middle-west. Once a month his letter box had a big package. I saw him in the lobby, always reading. He wouldn't lend me his books.

'A matter of principle,' Heilman said.

But he gave me the
Book of the Month Club News,
a little magazine about new books. Every month he left it in my letter box.

And the redheaded girl from St Louis who always asked about the Filipinos.

Where did they live? How many were there? Did I know any of them? A gaunt redheaded girl, with brown freckles below the neckline of her dress, out here from St Louis. She wore green all the time, her copper head too startling for her beauty, her eyes too grey for her face. She got a job in a laundry, but the pay was too little, so she quit. She too wandered the warm streets. Once she lent me a quarter, another time, postage stamps. Endlessly she spoke of the Filipinos, pitied them, thought them so brave in the ASK THE DUST

57

face of prejudice. One day she was gone, and another day I saw her again, walking the streets, her copper hair catching sunbeams, a short Filipino holding her arm. He was very proud of her. His padded shoulders and tight waisted suit were the ultimate of tenderloin fashion, but even with the high leather heels he was a foot shorter than she.

Of them all, only one read
The Little Dog Laughed.
Those first days I autographed a great number of copies, brought them upstairs to the waiting room. Five or six copies, and I placed them conspicuously everywhere, on the library table, on the divan, even in the deep leather chairs so that to sit down you had to pick them up. Nobody read them, not a soul, except one. For a week they were spread about, but they were hardly touched. Even when the Japanese boy dusted that room he never so much as lifted them from where they lay. In the evenings people played bridge in there, and a group of the old guests gathered to talk and relax. I slipped in, found a chair, and watched. It was disheartening. A big woman in one of the deep chairs had even seated herself upon a copy, not bothering to remove it. A day came when the Japanese boy piled the copies neatly together on the library table. They gathered dust.

Once in a while, every few days, I rubbed my handkerchief over them and scattered them about. They always returned untouched to the neat stack on the library table. Maybe they knew I had written it, and deliberately avoided it.

Maybe they simply didn't care. Not even Heilman, with all his reading. Not even the landlady. I shook my head: they were very foolish, all of them. It was a story about their own middle-west, about Colorado and a snowstorm, and there they were with their uprooted souls and sun-burned faces, dying in a blazing desert, and the cool homelands from whence they came were so near at 58 JOHN FANTE

hand, right there in the pages of that little magazine. And I thought, ah well, it was ever thus - Poe, Whitman, Heine, Dreiser, and now Bandini; thinking that, I was not so hurt, not so lonely.

The name of the person who read my story was Judy, and her last name was Palmer. She knocked on my door that afternoon, and opening it, I saw her. She was holding a copy of the magazine in her hand. She was only fourteen, with curls of brown hair, and a red ribbon tied in a bow above her forehead.

'Are you Mr Bandini?' she said.

I could tell from her eyes she had read
The Little Dog Laughed.
I could tell instantly. 'You read my story, didn't you?' I said. 'How did you like it?'

She clutched it close to her chest and smiled. 'I think it's wonderful,' she said.

'Oh, so wonderful! Mrs Hargraves told me you wrote it. She told me you might give me a copy.' My heart fluttered in my throat.

'Come in!' I said. 'Welcome! Have a chair! What's your name? Of course you can have a copy. Of course! But please come in!'

I ran across the room and got the best chair. She sat down so delicately, the child's dress she wore even concealing her knees. 'Do you want a glass of water?' I said. 'It's a hot day. Maybe you're thirsty.'

But she wasn't. She was only nervous. I could see I frightened her. I tried to be nicer, for I didn't want to scare her away. It was in those early days when I still had a bit of money. 'Do you like ice cream?' I said. 'Would you like me to get you a milk nickel or something?'

'I can't stay,' she said. 'Mother will get angry.'

'Do you live here?' I said. 'Did your mother read the story ASK
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DUST

59

too? What's your name?' I smiled proudly. 'Of course you ; already know my name,' I said. 'I'm Arturo Bandini.'

'Oh, yes!' she breathed, and her eyes widened with such admiration I wanted to throw myself at her feet and weep.' I could feel it in my throat, the ticklish impulse to start sobbing.

'Are you sure you won't have some ice cream?'

She had such beautiful manners, sitting there with her pink chin tilted, her tiny hands clinging to the magazine. 'No thank you, Mr Bandini.'

'How about a Coke?' I said.

'Thank you,' she smiled. 'No.'

'Root beer?'

'No, if you please. Thank you.'

'What's your name?' I said. 'Mine's—' but I stopped in time.

'Judy,' she said.

'Judy!' I said, over and over. 'Judy, Judy! It's wonderful!' I said. 'It's like the name of a star. It's the most beautiful name' I ever heard!'

'Thank you!' she said.

I opened the dresser drawer containing copies of my story. It was still well stocked, some fifteen remaining. 'I'm going to autograph it. Something nice, something extra special!'

Her face coloured with delight. This little girl was not joking; she was really thrilled, and her joy was like cool ] water running down my face. 'I'm going to give you two copies,' I said. 'And I'm going to autograph both of them!'

'You're such a nice man,' she said. She was studying me as I opened an ink bottle. 'I could tell by your story.'

'I'm not a man,' I said. 'I'm not much older than you, Judy.' I didn't want to be old before her. I wanted to

60

JOHN FANTE

cut it down as much as possible. 'I'm only eighteen,' I lied.

'Is that all?' She was astonished.

'Be nineteen in a couple of months.'

I wrote something special in both the magazines. I don't remember the words but it was good, what I wrote, it came from my heart because I was so grateful.

But I wanted more, to hear her voice that was so small and breathless, to keep her there in my room as long as I could.

'You would do me a great honour,' I said. 'You would make me terribly happy, Judy, if you'd read my story out loud to me. It's never happened, and I'd like to hear it.'

'I'd love to read it!' she said, and she sat erect, rigid with eagerness. I threw myself on the bed, buried my face in the pillow, and the little girl read my story with a soft sweet voice that had me weeping at the first hundred words. It was like a dream, the voice of an angel filling the room, and in a little while she was sobbing too, interrupting her reading now and then with gulps and chokes, and protesting. 'I can't read anymore,' she would say, 'I can't.' And I would turn over and beseech her: 'But you've got to, Judy. Oh, you got to!'

As we reached the high point of our emotion, a tall, bitter-mouthed woman suddenly entered the room without knocking. I knew it was Judy's mother. Her fierce eyes studied me, and then Judy. Without a word she took Judy's hand and led her away. The little girl clutched the magazines to her thin breast, and over her shoulder she blinked a tearful goodbye. She had come and gone as quickly as that, and I never saw her again. It was a mystery to the landlady too, for they had arrived and departed that very day, not even staying overnight.

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There was a letter from Hackmuth in my box. I knew it was from Hackmuth. I could tell a Hackmuth letter a mile away. I could feel a Hackmuth letter, and it felt like an icicle sliding down my spine. Mrs Hargraves handed the letter to me.

I grabbed it out of her hand.

'Good news?' she said, because I owed her so much rent. 'You never can tell,' I said. 'But it's from a great man. He could send blank pages, and it would be good news to me.'

But I knew it wasn't good news in that sense that Mrs Hargraves meant it, for I hadn't sent mighty Hackmuth a story. This was merely the answer to my long letter of a few days ago. He was very prompt, that Hackmuth. He dazzled you with his speed. You no sooner dropped a letter in the mail box down on the corner, and when you got back to the hotel, there was an answer. Ah me, but his letters were so brief. A forty page letter, and he replied in one small paragraph. But that was fine in its way, because his replies were easier to memorize and know by heart. He had a way, that Hackmuth; he had a style; he had so much to give, even his commas and semi-colons had a way of dancing up and down. I used to tear the stamps off his envelopes, peel them off gently, to see what was under them.