The Wild Girl (6 page)

“The greedy capitalist bastards!” he rants. “The system is corrupt and decaying and they know it; they’re hanging on by their fingernails. They’re desperate; they’re terrified of the movement and trying to silence us. But they can’t silence Jerry Mackey; they can’t stop me from exposing the disease of capitalism in my photographs. Mark my words, kid, the workers of America—the hungry, the persecuted, the heroic millions who suffer quietly—will rise up and take this country back. And I’ll be there in the front lines to document the revolution with my camera!”

I have a lot of respect for Jerry Mackey, and I’m grateful to him for everything he has taught me in the past few weeks. I don’t know anything about revolutions, but ever since Kevin Anderson asked me that question the other night, I’ve been stewing over it, thinking about the answer I wish I’d given. I wish I’d said that to me the photographer’s only responsibility is to tell the truth. But I guess maybe that sounds a little highfalutin’, doesn’t it?

Anyway, with the photographer fired, the newspaper hardly needed a photographer’s assistant, and so I, too, was laid off. In a few days, I’ll be hitting the road again, headed south.

29 FEBRUARY, 1932

Somewhere outside Oklahoma City

I have to admit, it’s lonelier out here than I thought it was going to be, and a lot less romantic. Of course, it’s wintertime, and the countryside looks pretty gloomy. It’s awful cold and the trees are bare, everything brown and frozen and dead. There are a lot of people on the road, many of them obviously uprooted by the hard times, but everyone seems isolated from one another, hurrying past with averted eyes as if ashamed by their circumstances. I feel strangely dislocated myself, as if I’ve been cut loose from the earth, with no anchor to hold me here. After Mom and Pop died, and I lived those months in our house, surrounded by their things and comforted by their smells, I think I began to truly believe that somehow they were coming back. And not until I actually left home and have been traveling these past weeks have I come to fully understand that my parents are gone forever, and I’m never going to see them again. About all I have left are a few photographs and this automobile of Pop’s. The truth is, I’m embarrassed to be driving such a fancy car. So I go out of my way to pick up hitchhikers, often entire families, their poor possessions and maybe a child or two crammed into the rumble seat of the Roadster. They eye me furtively, as if I might be the enemy, and nearly all of them have a kind of hollow-eyed look, tired and disoriented, oddly apologetic about being down-and-out as if somehow it is their fault that the bottom has fallen out of the economy, their lives cast so suddenly adrift. I think I know just how they feel, although for different reasons.

Yesterday, outside Wichita, Kansas, I stopped to give a ride to a woman traveling alone with a little girl. It was a cold, windy afternoon, and a fine dust of snow blew across the fallow winter fields. The girl was bundled in her mother’s worn woolen overcoat, which was far too big for her. The woman herself was inadequately dressed in a thin cotton print dress and gray cardigan sweater with holes at the elbows. They stood on the side of the road with a single battered suitcase and two paper bags full of possessions. I got them situated in the front seat of the Roadster, gave the mother a blanket to wrap around them, and turned the heater up high. As we got under way, the little girl looked up at me with a solemn, dirt-streaked face. “Mister, we live on a farm,” she said. “I have my own room. My daddy has a truck but he had to go away.” Maybe they were on their way to join the little girl’s father, or maybe they were going to live with relatives. I didn’t ask. I’ve learned not to ask such questions on the road.

“Quiet, dear,” her mother said. “The nice young man isn’t interested in that.”

“Sure I am, kid,” I said. And I put the back of my hand against the little girl’s ice-cold cheek. “What color is your daddy’s truck?”

Then the mother leaned over her daughter on the car seat between us and whispered something in my ear that made me flush with embarrassment. Even in the privacy of my own notebooks, I cannot repeat what she said, and I saw that she was weeping herself from the shame of having to propose such a thing in order to put food in her daughter’s mouth. “Oh, no, thank you, ma’am,” I stammered. “But I’ve got a few extra dollars I could let you have. And if you and your little girl are hungry, we’ll stop when we come to a café and get a bite to eat. It’ll be my treat. Maybe you’d just let me take your photograph in return.”

That’s how it is on the road these days. It’s enough to turn a young fellow into a Communist.

12 MARCH, 1932

Goodnight, Texas

I have made it all the way to Texas, where for the past two weeks I’ve been working on the Circle J Ranch outside Amarillo. The ranch is owned by a wealthy Scotsman named Monty McGillivray, who is in the cattle business and has a home in Chicago and is yet another member of the Racquet Club, which institution has served me so well in my travels. I saw Mr. McGillivray at the club over the holidays and he told me to stop in on my way south and he would give me a job. He’s one of my favorites of the club members, a stocky, hearty fellow who dresses in tweed jackets and plus fours, sports a thick, black mustache, and wears his dark hair combed straight back. He’s always cheerful, always has a kind word for the employees, one of the few members who seems genuinely interested in our lives.

I don’t have much experience with horses but I figured it would help my chances to get on the Great Apache Expedition if I at least knew how to ride. So I’ve been trying to learn since I’ve been here. Knowing that I’m interested in photography, Mr. McGillivray has also had me take portraits of his family and his guests.

I like this West Texas country, the hills and plains, the striated rock canyons and vistas of grasslands. The ranch contains one of the last remnant wild herds of American bison. During the winter, wealthy sporting friends of the McGillivrays are invited to come here to hunt these animals, although the term
hunt
might be a slight overstatement. The guests are driven to the herd in well-appointed ranch vehicles, their rifles and rifle stands readied for them by gun bearers. They sight down on a buffalo bull grazing placidly in the meadow and shoot it where it stands. It seems to me about like shooting cows and I can’t see a great deal of sport in it, but the herd needs to be thinned and the rich people seem to enjoy this diversion.

It is among my duties to take care of the guests, which from my years at the club is an occupation in which I’ve had a good deal of practice. It’s also my job to photograph the sports with their trophies. I print the film myself in a makeshift darkroom off the bunkhouse and give these portraits to the guests as a memento of their visit. Mr. McGillivray seems very pleased with my work and the other day he asked me to stay on full-time at the ranch. “I’ve known you at the club since you were a boy, lad,” he said. “You’re practically like a son to me. Why don’t you stay here and work for me, give up this wild Apache chase. I’ll make it worth your while, Ned.”

I have to admit, it was a tempting offer. “I really like it here, sir,” I answered. “But just now I’ve got my heart set on going down to Mexico. Maybe if I don’t get hired on by the expedition, I’ll come back if you still need me. Or maybe after it’s over, if there’s still a place for me.”

“There’s always a place for you at the Circle J, lad,” Mr. McGillivray said.

To tell the truth, as much as I like Mr. McGillivray and appreciate his kindness to me, I’m kind of tired of working for rich people. Maybe it’s just from listening to Jerry Mackey and his comrades ranting about the ruling classes, or maybe it’s simply from all my years at the club. Maybe it’s from the past weeks of travel, and all the people I’ve encountered on the road who are out of work and on the move. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, but I feel like everything has changed in the last few months . . . well, of course, everything
has
changed. I’ve been thinking a lot about Pop recently, and I realize that he made up to rich people all his life, he denied his family’s politics and working-class roots in order to try to conform to some notion of being a successful Republican capitalist. His own father worked himself to death clubbing steers over the head with a sledgehammer in a meatpacking plant in the Chicago stockyards so that his son could get an education and start his own business, so that his son’s son could clean his father’s brains off the bathroom wall. It’s a lot to think about, isn’t it?

Speaking of rich people, here’s a story for you . . . This week a man from Philadelphia named Tolbert Phillips, whose family made their fortune in the railroad business, came to the ranch with his son, Tolbert Jr. Tolley, as he is known, is a couple of years older than I am, a tall, gangly foppish Ivy League kid, who reminds me of all the entitled young men whose tennis balls I fetched during their summer lessons when I was a kid. Except this guy acts like a damn girl. Evidently Tolley’s father is an old friend of Mr. McGillivray’s and brought his son down here to shoot a bison as some sort of rich boy’s rite of passage.

Young Tolley arrived for the hunt dressed head to toe in an Abercrombie & Fitch khaki safari outfit, complete with pith helmet. “Don’t you just love a man in uniform?” he whispered to me, seemingly oblivious to how ridiculous he looked, even absurdly proud of it. For his part, Mr. Phillips, who is a gruff, imperious man, was clearly ashamed of his son, and after Tolley had bagged his bison, his father left him with me in the field while I set up my camera to take his portrait. As I was doing so, Tolley inspected the bull, lifting the animal’s hind leg.

“What are you doing, anyway?” I asked.

“Checking out his equipment,” Tolley said.

“Why the hell would you do that?”

“Comparing him to the Cape buffalo. I’ve been to Africa, you know?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” I answered.

“Father is constantly shipping me off on these sporting adventures,” he said, “in the hopes that they’ll make a man out of me. As you may have guessed, Giles, I like boys.”

I’ve never heard anyone admit to such a thing before. “Ah, no, I hadn’t really guessed that,” I said.

“To tell the truth, I wasn’t really all that interested in the big-game hunting,” Tolley said. “But there are no end to the lovely young men available in Nairobi. Even on safari, I had my own tent boy.”

This was much more than I cared to know about Tolbert Phillips Jr.’s predilections. “Okay,” I said hurriedly. “All set. Let’s shoot this portrait.”

“I’m going to pose holding the bull’s pizzle in my hand,” Tolley announced.

“What are you talking about?”

“You heard me, old sport.”

“Why would you want to do such a thing?”

“Why? To amuse my circle of close friends, of course,” Tolley said. “If you understand my meaning.”

“No, I really don’t,” I said. “I don’t understand a thing about it. And I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

“Oh, don’t be such a prude, old sport,” Tolley said. “We’ll call it
The Buffalo Hunter’s Reward.
God, imagine how it will infuriate Father!”

“Why would you want to make your father mad?” I asked.

Tolley looked at me with a tolerant expression. “You’re rather naive, aren’t you, Giles?” he said.

“I guess so.”

“Well, that’s all right, old sport,” he said. “Because all you really need to know is that I’m the guest and you’re the employee. Now let’s make that portrait, shall we?”

18 MARCH, 1932

Goodnight, Texas

Yes, well, I shot Tolley Phillips’s portrait just as he requested, and for my efforts I got called into Mr. McGillivray’s office this morning.

“Sit down, Ned,” he said from his chair behind the desk, and I knew right away that I was in for it. “I’ve known you for a long time, lad. You’ve always been a good boy.” He held out my photograph of Tolley and dropped it on the desk in front of me. “It seems quite unlike you to pull a stunt like this.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “But that’s how Tolbert asked to have his photo taken. I think he just meant it as a joke.”

“A distinctly bad joke,” Mr. McGillvray said. “A sick, perverted joke.”

“Yes, sir,” I admitted. “I didn’t think it was very funny, either.”

“But you took the photograph, didn’t you, Ned?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Because Tolley asked me to. And he’s your guest.”

“Tolbert’s father is an old and dear friend of mine,” Mr. McGillivray said. “He was not in the least bit amused by your tasteless photograph of his son.”

“No, sir, I don’t imagine that he was,” I said.

“I’m afraid that I have no choice but to let you go,” Mr. McGillivray said.

“Let me go, sir?” I asked, stunned. “But I was just following the wishes of the guest.”

“I think you must understand, lad, that I cannot have my employees intentionally humiliating my guests in such a manner.”

I’ve never been fired from a job before and I could feel the blood rising to my face, not just from the shame of it, but also from anger at the casual power which the wealthy yield in dismissing others from their lives. “But I wasn’t trying to humiliate anyone, Mr. McGillivray,” I said. “Honest. I was only doing what the guest asked.”