Ask The Dust (18 page)

When we woke up it was morning and we were both

nauseated, and your swollen lip was more grotesque than ever, and your black eye was now green. You got up, staggered to the wash-stand and washed your face. I heard you groan. I watched you dress. I felt your kiss on my forehead as you said goodbye, and that nauseated me too. Then you climbed out the window and I heard you stagger up the hillside, the grass swishing and the little twigs breaking under your uncertain feet.

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] am trying to remember it chronologically. Winter or spring or summer, they were days without change. Good for the night, thanks for the darkness, otherwise we would not have known that one day ended and another began. I had 240 pages done and the end was in sight. The rest was a cruise on smooth water. Then off to Hackmuth it would go, tra la, and the agony would begin.

It was about that time that we went to Terminal Island, Camilla and I. A man-made island, that place, a long finger of earth pointing at Catalina. Earth and canneries and the smell of fish, brown houses full of Japanese children, stretches of white sand with wide black pavements running up and down, and the Japanese kids playing football in the streets. She was irritable, she had been drinking too much, and her eyes had that stark old woman's look of a chicken. We parked the car in the broad street and walked a hundred yards to the beach. There were rocks at the water's edge, jagged stones swarming with crabs. The crabs were having a tough time of it, because the sea gulls were after them, and the sea gulls screeched and clawed and fought among themselves. We sat on the sand and watched them, and Camilla said they were so beautiful, those gulls.

'I hate them,' I said.

'You!' she said. 'You hate everything.'

'Look at them,' I said. 'Why do they pick on those poor crabs? The crabs ain't doing anything. Then why in the hell do they mob them like that?'

'Crabs,' she said. 'Ugh.'

'I hate a sea gull,' I said. 'They'll eat anything, the deader the better.'

'For God's sake shut up for a change. You always spoil everything. What do I care what they eat?'

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In the street the little Japanese kids were having a big football game. They were all youngsters under twelve. One of them was a pretty good passer. I turned my back on the sea and watched the game. The good passer had flung another into the arms of one of his teammates. I got interested and sat up.

'Watch the sea,' Camilla said. 'You're supposed to admire beautiful things, you writer.'

'He throws a beautiful pass,' I said.

The swelling had gone from her lips, but her eye was still discoloured. 'I used to come here all the time,' she said. 'Almost every night.'

'With that other writer,' I said. 'That really great writer, that Sammy the genius.'

'He liked it here.' 'He's a great writer, alright. That story he wrote over your left eye is a masterpiece.'

'He doesn't talk his guts out like you. He knows when to be quiet.'

'The stupe.'

A fight was brewing between us. I decided to avoid it. I got up and walked towards the kids in the street. She asked where I was going. 'I'm going to get in the game,' I said. She was outraged. 'With them?' she said. 'Those Japs?' I ploughed through the sand.

'Remember what happened the other night!' she said.

I turned around. 'What?'

'Remember how you walked home?'

'That suits me,' I said. 'The bus is safer.'

The kids wouldn't let me play because the sides were evenly numbered, but they let me referee for a while. Then the good passer's team got so far ahead that a change was necessary, so I played on the opposite team. Everybody on our team

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wanted to be quarterback, and great confusion resulted. They made me play centre, and I hated it because I was ineligible to receive passes. Finally the captain of our team asked me if I knew how to pass, and he gave me a chance in the tailback spot. I completed the pass. It was fun after that. Camilla left almost immediately. We played until darkness, and they beat us, but it was close. I took the bus back to Los Angeles.

Making resolutions not to see her again was useless. I didn't know from one day to the next. There was the night two days after she left me stranded at Terminal Island. I had been to a picture show. It was after midnight when I went down the old stairway to my room. The door was locked, and from the inside. As I turned the knob I heard her call. 'Just a minute. It's me, Arturo.'

It was a long minute, five times as long as usual. I could hear her scurrying about within the room. I heard the closet door slam, heard the window being thrown open. I fumbled with the doorknob once more. She opened the door and stood there, breathless, her bosom rising and falling. Her eyes were points of black flame, her cheeks were full of blood, and she seemed alive with intense joy. I stood in a kind of fear at the change, the sudden widening and closing of her lashes, the quick wet smile, the teeth so alive and stringy with bubbled saliva.

I said, 'What's the idea?'

She threw her arms around me. She kissed me with a passion I knew was not genuine. She barred my entrance by a flourish of affection. She was hiding something from me, keeping me out of my own room as long as she could.

Over her shoulder I looked around. I saw the bed with the mark of a head's indentation upon the pillow. Her coat was flung over the chair, and the dresser was strewn with small

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combs and bobby pins. That was alright. Everything seemed in order except the two small red mats at the bedside. They had been moved, that was plain to me, because I liked them in their regular place, where my feet could touch them when I got out of bed in the morning.

I pulled her arms away and looked towards the closet door. Suddenly she began to pant excitedly as she backed to the door, standing against it, her arms spread to protect it. 'Don't open it, Arturo,' she pleaded. 'Please!' 'What the hell is all this?' I said.

She shivered. She wet her lips and swallowed, her eyes filled with tears and she both smiled and wept. Til tell you sometime,' she said. 'But please don't go in there now, Arturo. You mustn't. Oh, you mustn't. Please!' 'Who's in there?'

'Nobody,' she almost shouted. 'Not a soul. That isn't it, Arturo. Nobody's been here. But please! Please don't open it now. Oh please!'

She came towards me, almost stalking, her arms out in an embrace that was yet a protection against my attack on the closet door. She opened her lips and kissed me with peculiar fervour, a passionate coldness, a voluptuous indifference. I didn't like it. Some part of her was betraying some other part, but I could not find it. I sat on the bed and watched her as she stood between me and that closet door. She was trying so hard to conceal a cynical elation. She was like one who is forced to hide his drunkenness, but the elation was there, impossible to conceal.

'You're drunk, Camilla. You shouldn't drink so much.' The eagerness with which she acknowledged that indeed she was drunk made me immediately suspicious. There she stood, nodding her head like a spoiled child, a coy smiling

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admission, the pouted lips, the look out of downcast eyes. I got up and kissed her. She was drunk, but she was not drunk on whiskey or alcohol because her breath was too sweet for that. I pulled her down on the bed beside me. Her ecstasy swept across her eyes, wave after wave of it, the passionate languor of her arms and fingers searched my throat. She crooned into my hair, her lips against my head.

'If you were only him,' she whispered. Suddenly she screamed, a piercing shriek that clawed the walls of the room. 'Why can't you be him! Oh Jesus Christ, why can't you?' She began to beat me with her fists, pounding my head with rights and lefts, screaming and scratching in an outburst of madness against the destiny that did not make me her Sammy. I grabbed her wrists, yelled at her to be quiet. I pinned her arms and clamped my hand over her shrieking mouth.

She looked out at me with bloated, protruding eyes, struggling for breath. 'Not until you promise to keep quiet,' I said. She nodded and I let go. I went to the door and listened for footsteps. She lay on the bed, face down, weeping. I tiptoed towards the closet door. Instinct must have warned her. She swung around on the bed, her face soggy with tears, her eyes like crushed grapes.

'You open that door and I'll scream,' she said. 'I'll scream and scream.'

I didn't want that. I shrugged. She resumed her face down position and wept again. In a little while she would cry it off; then I could send her home. But it didn't happen that way. After a half hour she was still crying. I bent over and touched her hair. "What is it you want, Camilla?'

'Him,' she sobbed. 'I want to go see him.'

'Tonight?' I said. 'My God, it's a hundred and fifty miles.'

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She didn't care if it was a thousand miles, a million, she wanted to see him tonight. I told her to go ahead; that was her affair; she had a car, she could drive there in five hours. 'I want you to come with me,' she sobbed. 'He doesn't like me. He Tikes you, though.1

'Not me,' I said. 'I'm going to bed.' She pleaded with me. She fell on her knees before me, clung to my legs and looked up at me. She loved him so much, surely a great writer like myself understood what it was to love like that; surely I knew why she couldn't go out there alone; and she touched the injured eye.

Sammy wouldn't drive her off if 1 were to come with her. He'd be grateful that she had brought me, and then Sammy and I could talk, because there was so much I could show him about writing, and he would be so grateful to me, and to her. I looked down at her, gritted my teeth, and tried to resist her arguments; but when she put it that way it was too much for me, and when I agreed to go I was crying with her. I helped her to her feet, dried her eyes, smoothed the hair from her face, and felt responsible for her. We tiptoed up the stairs and through the lobby to the street, where her car was parked.

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 ASK THE DUST

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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.

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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 ASK THE DUST

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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.