Ask the Dust Read online

  After a while I pushed back my chair and got up to leave. Standing at the bar, she watched me go. There was pity for me upon her face, a tiny smile of regret for what she had done, but I kept my eyes away from her and walked into the street, glad for the hideous din of street cars and the queer noises of the city pounding my ears and burying me in an avalanche of banging and screeching. I put my hands in my pockets and slumped away.

  Fifty feet from the saloon I heard someone calling. I turned around. It was she, running on soft feet, coins jingling in her pockets. “Young fellow!” she called. “Oh kid!”

  I waited and she came out of breath, speaking quickly and softly. “I’m sorry, she said. “I didn’t mean anything—honest.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t mind.”

  She kept glancing toward the saloon. “I have to get back,” she said. “They’ll miss me. Come back tomorrow night, will you? Please! I can be nice. I’m awfully sorry about tonight. Please come, please!” She squeezed my arm. “Will you come?”

  “Maybe.”

  She smiled. “Forgive me?”

  “Sure.”

  I stood in the middle of the sidewalk and watched her hurry back. After a few steps she turned, blew a kiss and called, “Tomorrow night. Don’t forget!”

  “Camilla!” I said. “Wait. Just a minute!”

  We ran toward each other, meeting halfway.

  “Hurry!” she said. “They’ll fire me.”

  I glanced at her feet. She sensed it coming and I felt her recoiling from me. Now a good feeling rushed through me, a coolness, a newness like new skin. I spoke slowly.

  “Those huaraches—do you have to wear them, Camilla? Do you have to emphasize the fact that you always were and always will be a filthy little Greaser?”

  She looked at me in horror, her lips open. Clasping both hands against her mouth, she rushed inside the saloon. I heard her moaning. “Oh, oh, oh.”

  I tossed my shoulders and swaggered away, whistling with pleasure. In the gutter I saw a long cigaret butt. I picked it up without shame, lit it as I stood with one foot in the gutter, puffed it and exhaled toward the stars. I was an American, and goddamn proud of it. This great city, these mighty pavements and proud buildings, they were the voice of my America. From sand and cactus we Americans had carved an empire. Camilla’s people had had their chance. They had failed. We Americans had turned the trick. Thank God for my country. Thank God I had been born an American!

  Chapter Six

  I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.

  But down on Main Street, down on Towne and San Pedro, and for a mile on lower Fifth Street were the tens of thousands of others; they couldn’t afford sunglasses or a four-bit polo shirt and they hid in the alleys by day and slunk off to flop houses by night. A cop won’t pick you up for vagrancy in Los Angeles if you wear a fancy polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses. But if there is dust on your shoes and that sweater you wear is thick like the sweaters they wear in the snow countries, he’ll grab you. So get yourselves a polo shirt boys, and a pair of sunglasses, and white shoes, if you can. Be collegiate. It’ll get you anyway. After a while, after big doses of the Times and the Examiner, you too will whoop it up for the sunny south. You’ll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you’ll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semitropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.

  As for the folks back home, you can lie to them, because they hate the truth anyway, they won’t have it, because soon or late they want to come out to paradise, too. You can’t fool the folks back home, boys. They know what Southern California’s like. After all they read the papers, they look at the picture magazine glutting the newsstands of every corner in America. They’ve seen pictures of the movie stars’ homes. You can’t tell them anything about California.

  Lying in my bed I thought about them, watched the blobs of red light from the St. Paul Hotel jump in and out of my room, and I was miserable, for tonight I had acted like them. Smith and Parker and Jones, I had never been one of them. Ah, Camilla! When I was a kid back home in Colorado it was Smith and Parker and Jones who hurt me with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser, and their children hurt me, just as I hurt you tonight. They hurt me so much I could never become one of them, drove me to books, drove me within myself, drove me to run away from that Colorado town, and sometimes, Camilla, when I see their faces I feel the hurt all over again, the old ache there, and sometimes I am glad they are here, dying in the sun, uprooted, tricked by their heartlessness, the same faces, the same set, hard mouths, faces from my home town, fulfilling the emptiness of their lives under a blazing sun.

  I see them in the lobbies of hotels, I see them sunning in the parks, and limping out of ugly little churches, their faces bleak from proximity with their strange gods, out of Aimee’s Temple, out of the Church of the Great I Am.

  I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what’s going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father’s father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.

  Chapter Seven

  I am thinking of the Alta Loma Hotel, remembering the people who lived there. I remember my first day there. I remember that I walked into the dark lobby carrying two suitcases, one of them filled with copies of The Little Dog Laughed. It was a long time ago, but I remember it well. I had come by bus, dusty to the skin, the dust of Wyoming and Utah and Nevada in my hair and in my ears.

  “I want a cheap room,” I said.

  The landlady had white hair. Around her neck was a high net collar fitting tightly like a corset. She was in her seventies, a tall woman who increased her height by rising on tiptoe and peering at me over her glasses.

  “Do you have a job?” she said.

  “I’m a writer,” I said. “Look, I’ll show you.”

  I opened my suitcase and got out a copy. “I wrote that,” I told her. I was eager in those days, very p
roud. “I’ll give you a copy,” I said. “I’ll autograph it for you.”

  I took a fountain pen from the desk, it was dry and I had to dip it, and I rolled my tongue around thinking of something nice to say. “What’s your name?” I asked her. She told me unwillingly. “Mrs. Hargraves,” she said. “Why?” But I was honoring her, and I had no time to answer questions, and I wrote above the story, “For a woman of ineffable charm, with lovely blue eyes and a generous smile, from the author, Arturo Bandini.”

  She smiled with a smile that seemed to hurt her face, cracking it open with old lines that broke up the dry flesh around her mouth and cheeks. “I hate dog stories,” she said, putting the magazine out of sight. She looked at me from an even higher view over her glasses. “Young man,” she said, “are you a Mexican?”

  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 upward 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 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 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 cigarets.

  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 fingers 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 reveled in memories of Memphis, Tennessee, 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 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 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 herse
lf 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 awhile, 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 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 bangs 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 her the best chair. She sat down so delicately, the child’s dress she wore not even concealing her knees. “Do you want a glass of water?” I said. “It’s a hot day. Maybe you’re thirsty.”