The Wild Girl (7 page)

“You could have refused, lad,” he said. “You showed very poor judgment.”

“I’m just an employee, sir,” I said. “I’m taught to do what my employer and his guests ask of me. That’s always been my job.”

“That will be all, Ned,” Mr. McGillivray said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d pack your bags tonight and leave first thing in the morning. You can collect your final paycheck from Mr. Cummins before you go.” Mr. McGillivray busied himself with the papers on his desk, as a sign that the interview was over.

I sat there for a moment, dazed, unable to move. And then I said: “Sir?”

Mr. McGillivray looked up as if surprised and mildly irritated to see me still there. “Yes, what is it, Ned?” he asked impatiently.

“The other day you said I was like a son to you, sir.”

The man met my gaze and held it. He frowned thoughtfully and shook his head with a brisk finality. “No, lad,” he answered pointedly, pushing away from his desk and standing, “I said ‘
practically
like a son.’ What you are is an employee, who has been fired.”

That was a good lesson to learn. And it was almost time to move on anyway.

26 MARCH, 1932

Eastern New Mexico

From Texas I am traveling south and west, through the choppy sandhills of eastern New Mexico—big, arid, empty country. The tiny towns are few and far between, and many of them have been abandoned, their storefronts boarded up and posted with signs that read
FOR SALE, GONE BROKE, CALIFORNIA OR BUST
. A cold winter wind moans through the broken windows of deserted homesteads, and in the fields, the dried stalks of last season’s failed wheat and corn crops sprout brown and withered from the drought-cracked earth. It is lonely country and I am lonely in it.

I’ve stopped for the night in an abandoned clapboard farmhouse outside Pep, New Mexico. I don’t think its previous owners will mind. Still, I can’t shake the odd sense I have that they’re going to come home suddenly and discover my trespass. I walk quiet as a thief through the silent, empty rooms, imagining the people who once lived here, hearing their voices and laughter. On the floors lies the detritus of their lives left behind, a child’s crayon drawing . . . a bald one-armed doll . . . last year’s Montgomery Ward catalog with the corners of some of the pages so hopefully turned down . . . an empty whiskey bottle . . . a foreclosure notice from the bank. Earlier, while I still had enough light, I set up my camera and tripod and made some negatives of the interior of the house, half expecting that when I print them, the family will materialize like ghosts in the photographs . . . as I once believed that my parents would magically reappear on earth.

They’ve left their kitchen cookstove behind, probably it was too heavy for them to transport, and as the nights are cold, I’ve built a fire in the grate, gathering scrap wood from the collapsed chicken coop out back and branches from a dead elm tree in the yard. I found a discarded chair on the porch and an old bench to use as a table. I tidied the place up just as if I were the new tenant, sweeping the mouse droppings away with a broken-handled broom. I spread my bedroll on the floor and lit my kerosene lantern.

I had to learn to cook a little after my mother got sick. Pop was hopeless in the kitchen and it was that or a steady diet of baloney sandwiches. I travel with a kitchen box that contains a cast-iron skillet and pot, a tin coffeepot, plate and coffee cup, basic utensils, and a few staples such as salt, sugar, flour, and coffee—everything I need. A pot of beans simmers on the stove and I bought a thin steak at a butcher shop in Portales this morning. I’ll fry it up with onions and eat it with the beans and some fresh tortillas that I bought from a Mexican lady there. I have a single precious tomato that I bought in the general store and which I’ll chop up over the steak. It’s really not much of a tomato, small and wrinkled, but still it looks so brilliantly red against this gray winter scene.

And so I’ve made myself right at home here. The cookstove warms the kitchen nicely and it’s kind of cozy. But I can hear the winter wind moving around through the house like another restless traveler, and outside the window the big empty country lies lonesome in the dusk.

4 APRIL, 1932

Douglas, Arizona

Today is my seventeenth birthday and I have arrived at last at my destination. I make this entry parked along the side of Main Street in Douglas, Arizona. The high desert air is cool and still, one of those limbo days that seems neither winter any longer nor quite yet spring. The sun is low on the western horizon, lighting the pale mountains to the east with soft color but without warmth. The town itself has that feeling of semiabandonment which has become so familiar to me in my travels, a scruffy, down-at-the-heels border town with empty storefronts, broken windows, and deserted streets.

It’s been over two months since I left Chicago, and now that I’m here I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lonely and homesick in my life. The desert I’ve been driving across these past few hundred miles seems harsh and alien. I am a stranger here in strange country. Away to the south, across the border into Mexico, I can see the high jagged peaks of the Sierra Madre Mountains, rising like monsters above the plains. In the late-afternoon light they seem a far less romantic place than I had imagined; they seem only hard and rocky and inhospitable . . .

I am scared. There, I’ve said it. I’m thinking about turning the Roadster right around and heading back to Chicago. But everything that is familiar to me there is gone . . . my parents, my house, my room. I have nothing to go back to. So I’m just going to sit here for a while and try to regain my courage. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. The sun is setting and the cold desert air seems to be falling down upon me like stones from the sky above. I wish Mom and Pop were still alive. I wish I could have stayed in Chicago, finished college, and taken a steady job. Maybe I could have gone into Pop’s automobile business with him and he wouldn’t have killed himself. I could have married Annie Parsons and had a family of my own . . .
Have a nice life, Ned Giles,
Annie said.

There . . . I have just finished weeping, sitting in the car parked on the side of the street in Douglas, Arizona, on my seventeenth birthday bawling like a damn baby. It’s the first time I’ve cried for my parents . . . the first time I’ve cried for myself . . . and now I’m all hollowed out.

5 APRIL, 1932

Douglas, Arizona

When I read what I wrote yesterday, I’m ashamed of feeling so sorry for myself, for being such a big crybaby. So much has happened in the past twenty-four hours that everything is different now. I hardly know where to begin. If I hadn’t promised to always be honest in these pages, I’d cross out my entire last entry.

After I’d had my little cry, I started the car up again and drove on into town. Because it was my birthday and because I was feeling so blue, I decided to treat myself to a hotel room, a bath, and a steak dinner. I had no trouble at all finding the Gadsden Hotel at the end of Main Street. It’s a grand five-story stone building that seems completely out of place in this scruffy little border town.

It’s even grander inside, and as soon as I walked in I could see that it was way beyond my means. I stood in the lobby craning my neck at the exposed balconies that spiral upward from a massive central staircase built of white Italian marble. The stairs lead to a mezzanine framed by four enormous marble columns decorated in gold leaf and spanned by a forty-two-foot-long Tiffany stained-glass mural. The lobby was full of Great Apache Expedition volunteers, milling around or sitting chatting in islands of plush velvet furniture.

The desk clerk was a slender, dapper fellow dressed in a dark suit and bow tie. I was dressed myself in dungarees and a T-shirt, and he raised his eyebrows when I walked up, sizing me up quickly and professionally as one clearly unsuited to such luxury. I know the look, and I know from my experience working at the club that the only people capable of being snootier than the rich are those who work for the rich.

“May I help you, sir?” he asked with an imperious English accent, making it clear from his tone that he probably couldn’t.

“Yes, I’d like a room, please,” I said, trying to appear older than my years, and somehow magically better dressed.

“Do you have a reservation, sir?”

“Not exactly.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“No, I don’t have a reservation.”

“
Ummm.
Pity.” He pursed his lips and made a show of consulting the register, running a dry, papery finger swiftly down the page. “We’re terribly busy, sir,” he said. “You see the volunteers for the Great Apache Expedition are beginning to arrive.”

“Yes, that’s why I’m here myself,” I said. “I read the flyer at my club in Chicago and thought I’d come down here and see about signing on.”

“You’re a member of a private gentlemen’s club, then, are you, sir?” he asked, looking up with raised eyebrows.

“Well, not exactly a member,” I admitted. “I worked at the Chicago Racquet Club. I’m hoping to get hired on in a paying position with the expedition.”

The desk clerk smiled knowingly. “Ah, yes, of course you are, sir,” he said, “you and everyone else in town.”

“I’m a really good photographer,” I said.

“Yes, sir, I’m quite sure you are,” said the desk clerk. “Nevertheless, I’m afraid that I have nothing available at all tonight.”

“You’re completely full?”

“It would seem so, sir.”

“Would you have a room for me if I was a member of a club rather than an employee?” I asked.

“Dashed unfair, I know, sir,” he said. “But I have strict instructions to hold the remaining rooms for expedition volunteers.”

“Instructions from whom?” I asked. “Isn’t my money as good as theirs?”

“From the management, of course, sir,” he said. “I only work here.”

And then from behind me came a vaguely familiar voice. “Put Mr. Giles in the spare room in my suite, Mr. Browning. It has nothing in it but my polo gear.”

I turned around to find Tolbert Phillips Jr., tall and gangly and tanned, dressed in natty white slacks and a polo shirt, his hair slicked back, a striped tennis sweater draped over his shoulders, as if he’d just come in off the court. He beamed affably at me, with a goofy, expectant look, as if we were the best of old friends.

“Giles, old sport!” he said. “Tolley Phillips! The Circle J Ranch, Goodnight, Texas. Remember?”

“How could I forget?” I said. “What are you doing here, Tolley?”

“Volunteering for the Apache expedition, of course,” he answered. “Another of Father’s schemes to make a man out of me. Which, as you can plainly see, is a losing cause. God, I wish you could have seen his face when he saw the portrait you took of me, Giles. It was absolutely delicious!”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t so delicious for me, Tolley,” I said.

“I know, and I’m terribly sorry about that, really I am. Of course, I took full responsibility.”

“A lot of good that did me,” I said. “I got fired over your little prank.”

“I know you did, Giles,” Tolley said. “You took the fall for me. Isn’t that what you gangsters from Chicago say? And it was damned decent of you, too. Believe me, Father would fire me as his son if he possibly could. You know he can hardly wait for another war to break out so he can ship me off to fight for democracy. ‘That’ll make a man out of you, Tolbert!’ he likes to say. Or get me killed, which to Father would still be preferable to having a fairy for a son. Chasing wild Apaches, for God sakes! Have you ever heard of anything more absurd? But tell me, Giles, what are
you
doing here?”

“I came to apply for a job on the expedition.”

“Splendid!” Tolley said. “What a wonderful coincidence that our paths should cross again. This gives me the opportunity to repay you for the trouble I’ve caused.” He turned to the desk clerk, snapping his fingers officiously. “Put Mr. Giles on my bill, Mr. Browning. And get a bellhop down here to take his bags up to my suite.”

“Very well, sir,” Mr. Browning said.

“Where are your bags, old sport?” Tolley asked me.

“Look, I appreciate the offer, Tolley,” I said. “But you don’t owe me anything. I’ll sleep in my car. I’m used to it. Thanks anyway.”

“Nonsense!” Tolley said. “I won’t hear another word about it. I’ve got a spare room in my suite, and it’s all yours, Giles. And don’t worry, I won’t bother you, if that’s what you’re worried about. In fact, you’re not my type at all.”

“That’s good, Tolley,” I said. “Because I like girls.”

Tolley Phillips laughed his high, whinnying laugh. “Well, of course you do, Giles. I know
that.
It’s probably why I don’t find you more attractive.”

The desk clerk put a registration form down on the counter in front of me. Having been privy to enough private conversations at the club, and no slouch myself in the discretion department, I appreciated the man’s complete mastery of the poker face; not so much as an eyebrow twitched to suggest that he had heard a single word of what Tolley had just said. “Here you are, sir,” he said to me, “if you’ll just fill this out and sign at the bottom.”