Copy Boy Read online

  A foot, held aloft in the sky, as if its attached body were lying on the grass. The foot had soft, tended-looking skin. It was curled up into itself, fetal. It reminded her of a girl in a story she’d read, a girl whose feet were bound to make them look smaller, prettier in shoes, to keep her from walking far. That foot hadn’t stopped Grete.

  She pulled out another.

  A skeletal man on an overturned bucket, propped up against a tree, his face turned to the side so you could see every bone in his cheek, his jaw, around his ear, even the shape of the teeth under his lips, gray, like he was part of the bark. But his eyes faced the camera, directly level with his face. Grete must have knelt on dirt to get him, eye-to-eye, that way. Jane turned the negative over and saw the word “Hunger” in pencil on the frame.

  SHE’D had to take the risk. The greater risk lay in not getting the negative. Of course that didn’t mean she also had to take the extras, but she wasn’t going to consider that now, bogging down like some people did, worrying over what was done.

  She wanted to really go through the pictures but not on the ferry or the jitney to Sweetie’s for the suitcase, per Mac’s instructions. While she was there, she’d spread the pictures out, see what they were, figure it out, make a plan.

  She paid the driver from Mac’s wad of cash and stepped out, entering without a sound, like a burglar.

  Inside the door, at the bottom of the stairwell, she heard the girls in the kitchen.

  “You promised!”

  “No! You promised!”

  Why weren’t they at work?

  Should she sneak up to their room, take the suitcase, with them next door in the kitchen? Could she do that? What would he say if she came back without doing it?

  “I do care!”

  Jane took two silent steps up the stairs.

  “Used me!” Rivka cried.

  Jane took another step, ashamed of them for having this fight, ashamed at herself for listening. Maybe she should get out, explain her failure to Mac, honor the streak running through her that hated useless displays of emotion. She stepped backward once on the stairs.

  “Please!”

  Another step.

  Sweetie said, “You have Jane.”

  Jane stepped back wrong, into space, nothing beneath her foot, and felt herself fall. She grabbed at the rail before she went all the way down, clattering.

  She looked up at both girls at the top of the stairs, Rivka’s face ashen, Sweetie’s glossy pink.

  She did the math, got quickly to the bottom line.

  “Sweetie, let’s go.”

  SWEETIE sniveled into her kerchief in the cab’s back seat.

  “Mac needs me to settle him, make sure the world doesn’t take too much. People take from him all the time. He needs me to be the one who doesn’t.”

  “What in Sam Hill does that mean?”

  “You’re young. You don’t know . . .”

  “I know cow pie when I step in it. You’re quitting Rivka after she did everything for you, got you a job, paid for your home, your food, clothes! Stupid!”

  “Then why are you taking me to Mac’s place now?”

  “Because you’re what Mac wants, and it’s best for me to do what he wants.” She hadn’t said anything more honest for months. “It’s best for me. That doesn’t mean I think you should do it. What about your job? What about designing costumes? You ain’t quitting work, are you?”

  “Aren’t! Will you never learn? And this is not a choice!” She turned and said this to the window. “It’s . . . it’s like I’m submitting to gravity, only a thousand times stronger. To try to pull myself up would be impossible.”

  “Oh, gawd. Does Mac feel the gravity too? Does he?”

  Sweetie sighed and dropped her hands.

  She disgusted Jane now. All that helper talk was claptrap. Sweetie was moving up by abandoning Rivka for Mac.

  She didn’t compare that to what she herself was doing.

  Mac had never been Jane’s, not even close, but she’d liked being near him, the senses that rose up in his company, wishing he would choose her, someday. She’d known it was all but impossible, given the Benny charade, but she’d seen him, underneath, as a potential someone for her. A trophy. Instead he’d used her to get Sweetie. She’d used him, too, to get this job. It got confusing when she spread it out. That’s why she rarely did it. Why she tried to keep things in their own piles.

  Never would have worked.

  Then Rivka. Sweetie said Rivka had her? Rivka didn’t have her! Nobody had Jane unless she decided they did. She felt some guilt about the typewriter, about Rivka’s guiding her, but still she knew it did no good to linger on things.

  When the car stopped at Mac’s, Sweetie turned back to her. “What you’ve done can’t last forever. A person can’t go on being what she isn’t.”

  “You make costumes, Sweetie!” Jane yelled. “Costumes!”

  “Make fun of me all you want. I don’t care! I don’t even care about your lie—you know what I mean! I gave you a chance, knowing the people you come from, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I never believed you! You’re not believable! This is going to come out!” Then she slammed the car door and ran into the foyer of Mac’s apartment.

  She don’t matter.

  Jane gave the driver the Prospect’s address.

  She had more important things to think of.

  As the cab rumbled over potholes, she pressed negatives against the backseat window but kept returning to Hunger, the man so eerie, exposed. She saw the picture was beautiful, but even its beauty seemed dirty. Grete had done what she said— captured a real moment in time and delivered it to the viewer. A picture like this would affect people, probably already had. It made her think of Granny, in the hospital at the end. It was tiring, keeping so much stacked away. She’d figure it out later.

  SHE ran up the spine, past the second-floor copy bench and reporters’ desks, to the third floor, hustling past the compositors—“Got something?” “Nah!”—straight to the corner, where a photo guy, Fleming, sat at a desk in front of the darkroom, hunched over a comic book.

  Jane straightened her hat, fake pass still in its brim, identity in place.

  Fleming threw a newspaper over his comics when he heard her approach, but then smiled when he saw who it was. “Hey! Promotion!”

  “Can’t keep a good man down,” she said.

  “That’s the spirit! A little surprising . . .”

  “Fleming, I need some darkroom instruction. I’m writing something where the picture itself is the story. The art and science of it. Can you show me how you do it?”

  “Art and science? Heck yeah! ’Bout time somebody paid attention!”

  He opened the door to the darkroom, and she followed him in.

  “You gotta use your whole brain for this.”

  “Show me.” She held out the negative.

  He held it up to the light. “How’d you get your hands on this?”

  “Turn it into a picture.”

  Fleming’s enthusiasm filled the darkroom with bubbles of delight—glisten, pop.

  “Wright—oh man! She’s good. I mean, not at developing. She’s no artist there. But taking the pictures? Yeah. Used the Graflex for this one. Single-lens reflex camera. See, she looks down through this black leather hood.” He hunched his shoulders and dropped his head to act it out in the posture of a buzzard. “She looks through the lens that’ll expose the film. A mirror projects the image up, and then it flips out of the way when she presses the shutter. It’s got film packs that can be exposed real fast, by pulling paper tabs. Makes these nice big negatives, four by five, two times bigger than her Rolleiflex, which . . .”

  She found it hard not to stare at his bobbing Adam’s apple and pimply cheeks, growing redder the more excited he became about the Graflex. He had a face for the darkroom.

  “Actually, I don’t need all the details. Just the simple steps.”

  “I thought you wanted . . .�
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  “Later.”

  He continued, a few degrees less bubbly than before.

  “So, mostly we get the unexposed film and have to develop the negative, but not in this one. This negative’s already exposed. So if you wanted to change it, you’d do it when you make the print. You’d dodge or burn it.”

  “Burn it?”

  “Not burn, burn, though, yeah, these are nitrate, so they’ll burn.” He took a slurpy breath. “Wanna see?”

  “Nope.”

  Now his complexion just looked pasty with isolated red spots—this wouldn’t be the diversion he’d hoped for.

  “Turn on the amber light. Go ahead,” he said.

  She did, and then started a list in her notebook.

  He flipped off the regular lights, turning the room gold.

  “Put it in the enlarger.” He pointed to the machine.

  She wrote this down too. She heard her own breath as she slipped the Hunger negative into the square slot in the camera enlarger, pushing until it clicked.

  “Now put the photo paper below, there.”

  She wrote it and placed a piece into the squared-off tool on the counter below the enlarger.

  “Just flip the switch, shine the picture onto the paper. Twenty seconds.”

  Right away, the image shone onto paper at her fingertips.

  “I remember when this one came out,” he said. “Surprising she loaned you the negative. It’s kind of famous.”

  She rolled her lips over her teeth and pressed. Did she hear a challenge in that?

  He continued.

  “Turn off the light and move over there, bring it up on the paper.” He indicated the counter behind her, and she carried the blank-again photo paper to the liquid in a tub labeled “developer.”

  “Drop it in, swish it,” he said, unemphatic. The picture reemerged.

  “Okay, now the stop bath,” he said, his voice flat.

  She picked it up by its edges and dropped it into the second tub, swirling it around before making her note.

  “Move it to the fixer tub, make it last. Then you’ll rinse it off and let it dry.”

  When she’d done it, she had a four-by-five-inch print of Hunger.

  “She wants the negative back, right?”

  He was nosy.

  “Can I turn on the overhead now?”

  He turned it on and looked down at the picture. “Work of art, man, work of art.”

  Her resentment tasted briny.

  “This is a starving man. You think he wants her camera in his face? Think he cares about art? He wants food! He needs money!”

  Fleming lowered his eyebrows.

  She calmed her voice. “So how’s the dodging and burning work again?”

  He quarter-turned his body away, his shoulder toward her as he answered. “You dodge by reducing the light that hits the paper. You can use a paddle, piece of cardboard, even your hand”—he looked at hers—“anything to come between the light and the paper. It keeps that part of the photo lighter. When you burn, you protect the other parts from the light and burn the spot you’re aiming to change. Like a sunburn.”

  “Got it.”

  It was so simple to change the way things were or looked.

  Family had been published at the Examiner over a year ago.

  “How long do newspapers hang onto pictures?”

  “Not long. They’re flammable. Especially as they age. Like I said, the nitrates . . .”

  “I appreciate your help here. I’ll name you on the article.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, frowning, looking down his long nose at her.

  Darkroom judgment. She did hate to be judged, unless it ended in a prize, like Grete said.

  She unlocked the door and started to step out of the darkroom, but then she stepped back.

  “I’m gonna try again, on my own.”

  “Don’t mess anything up,” he said as he exited in a slump.

  She relocked the door and spread the negatives from her pocket all over the light box, a gritty mosaic, which she studied through Fleming’s eyepiece.

  Then she put all the negatives into a film box, behind two others, under the counter, keeping out the two developed pictures—Hunger and Family.

  She looked at Family on the desk, unable to tell if Daddy was older or younger than when she’d seen him last. The photograph, its light, caught the essence of him, not just him then or him now. Eternal him. Grete was good.

  She guessed she did love him. He was her father. She’d never hated him at all, really, before that night of the ditch when the new voice spoke in her head.

  She’d think about that later.

  She put both pictures in her pocket and headed out of the darkroom, past Fleming’s desk, where he stood with a couple other guys, talking, shaking his head, looking disgusted.

  It didn’t matter what he thought about her. He didn’t matter. He was some nobody who worked in a dark corner of a vast place. He was never going anywhere. What mattered was finding Daddy, making sure no one had the idea Grete had—that Jane was BH. What mattered was getting where she was going.

  SHE hunched over her notebook, the telephone cradled between her chin and shoulder, at the desk of a reporter, Pete, who’d been out on a one-week bender.

  “Security Administration? Farm Security?”

  She rechecked her notes. The agency had visited campsites she’d lived in, fields where she’d picked, making her parents suspicious—“What do they want? They trying to get us fired?”—acting sincere, though everybody knew they were the government.

  “Who can I speak to about the pictures that come through your program?”

  “I can help you,” said a lady in a thick, unfamiliar accent.

  Jane was silent.

  “Though I am a woman, I am an actual professional, I assure you.”

  Jane lowered her voice. “What’s your policy on fixing photographs, if something’s wrong?”

  “We don’t do it.”

  “Even . . .”

  “We don’t do it. Mr. Stryker has rigid rules about that. We don’t want to risk the legitimacy of our documentary work in any way.”

  “Could you explain . . .”

  “The point is not to take beautiful pictures, though that’s desirable—it increases the reach of our photos—but the point is to accurately document conditions so decision makers can respond appropriately.” She popped her gum, then continued. “Mr. Stryker kills any photos he finds at all problematic in terms of objectivity, factuality, punches holes right through the negatives. Thousands of photos. He won’t risk unprofessional work.”

  Manipulation was unprofessional.

  Nitpickers.

  “What happens if a photographer breaks the rule, poses the picture or changes the picture when he develops his own?”

  Silence, not even the popping of gum. She’d gone too far.

  “We get the negatives.”

  “What if he burns something out of a negative?”

  “He would be fired.”

  Jane said nothing.

  “Is there something you’d like to tell me, sir? It is sir, isn’t it?”

  Before she’d hung up on the question, Lambert said, “Gimme the picture,” like a ghost over her shoulder.

  “I don’t have it.”

  His face flamed. “I don’t have time for your hick do-si-do. Gimme the picture.”

  “Wright wouldn’t give it to me.”

  “Idiot! We sent you on a simple errand, entirely arranged in advance! Are you trying to ruin me? Or are you just so incompetent . . .” He shoved her shoulder.

  Jorge stepped between them. “What’s this?”

  “He came back without the picture!”

  “She wouldn’t give me the negative. Said it was hers.”

  “Who asked for the negative? We just need the picture.”

  “I thought you said the negative. She wouldn’t give it to me.”

  Jorge yelled, “Boy!” A pig-
eyed kid in a frayed tie jogged over from the hot seat and took a quarter from Jorge, who said “Three Danish,” and the kid hustled downstairs. The other copy boys scooted down the bench, closing the gap.

  “Those are real copy boys,” Jorge said, his eyes bugging. “They know what a ladder is and they climb it right, don’t knock other guys down, one rung at a time. That’s how civilizations are built. That’s how it works. That’s how to be useful, how to get ahead. That’s how you do it!”

  She saw massive bricks, one set atop another, for decades, centuries, to build a thing, guys like Jorge doing it.

  Make-work.

  “We’re not just making rules to annoy you. We have knowledge about how things work. You think because you’re young, think you’re smart, you can just turn over all the tables . . .”

  “No, Jorge . . .”

  “The reporters,” Jorge continued, pointing at a group of them joking, playing cards, one asleep on his desk. “Split their infinitives, mess up their and there, pronoun reference switching . . .”

  Lambert rolled his eyes. “Gawd! Now?”

  “Most of them?” Jorge continued. “Worthless. Complacent. Got in the door by natural talent or connections, not work. But they aren’t going anywhere else without the work. You,” he pointed his fat finger at Jane, “are obviously aiming to graduate up off of the bench into that tribe of assholes. You know how I can tell?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Because you fail to do what you have been asked—no, told—to do.”

  “It’s just . . .”

  “You were told, Boy, to bring back a picture. And you failed at doing what you were told to do, the way you were told to do it.”

  Lambert yelled “Goddammit!” and ran to his telephone. “Give me Wright’s house! Again! Grete Wright!”

  “What are you . . .” Jane started.

  “I’m gonna get the fucking picture!”

  “Wait, you can’t bother her again today. She’ll say no!”

  “Don’t you tell me, Boy!”

  “I’ll go back in the morning. I’ll get it for you. I’ll tell her I messed up, not you. I’ll do it.”

  Jorge yelled, “For Chrissake! Hang up, Lambert! We’ll send somebody back to do it right in the morning. Too late to use the picture tonight anyway.”