Copy Boy Read online

“Aw, you got this gig too young.” Lambert shook his head. “That’s the tragedy. You don’t know what you need to know to be good. You’re gonna fuck it up!”

  Mac waited, looking in the mirror. “I give you rope.”

  He let it hang.

  “All right.” Lambert rubbed his stubbled cheeks with both hands.

  She had no idea what they were talking about but understood they were doing it in front of her because she didn’t matter. This was the way people on top did, in front of people on the bottom, confessing bad behavior in front of some guy sweeping the sidewalk, wiping the counter. But it didn’t matter because she was going to be ruined as soon as somebody found her notebook anyway. None of this pig slop mattered if she was found out.

  “Malachi!” Mac waved at the potato-nosed bartender. “Telephone.”

  Malachi wiped his hands on a towel, carefully refolding it and hanging it on a rail before delivering the phone from the end of the bar, stretching the coiled cord at least fifty feet. He wiped the mouthpiece in five precise motions with a cloth before pushing the heavy black machine in front of Mac.

  “MIssion 7-2073,” Mac said. “Mary, send Jorge,” and then he banged it down.

  Jane moved to the back of the bar, opening the door to the toilet.

  “Hey!” the bar boy yelled. “Gents is open. Leave the ladies’ alone. Do I really gotta wash up after you again?”

  The toilet. She remembered a shrieking woman and Lambert laughing—“He’s a girl!” A roomful of strangers laughing. That’s what happened last night. She’d used the ladies’.

  It was time to get good at holding her water.

  She entered the men’s room, taking a stall, and sat behind the latched door with her head between her hands. Lordie, the notebook. Small hexagonal tiles spun at her feet.

  When she returned, Mac was talking to a guy, his belly against the bar, craning right and left.

  “I led Benny astray last night, Jorge, kept him out late, left the bar tab open. Kid’s suffering consequences.” Mac looked like he might rub her head—Who’s a good boy? “I’m gonna make it up to him. Get him on the bench.”

  Jorge raised a sausage finger to Malachi as he returned from the kitchen with a tub of clean glasses. Then he looked Jane up and down, his brow furrowed. “How awful for the boy. He’s really earned the job.” Sarcasm pooled on the bar.

  Malachi poured Stolichnaya into a short glass over ice and handed it sloshing to Jorge. Its antiseptic smell made Jane’s belly twist up more than the oysters or pigs’ feet.

  “I can pick a horse,” Mac said. “Train him.” Mac turned to her. “Benny, this is your boss, Jorge, best in the business. He is the Prospect. Knows everything. Mind your Ps and Qs around this guy.”

  Lambert slid off his stool and slammed the door on his way out, no goodbye.

  Mac set a short pile of bills on the bar. “This should cover breakfast and whatever. Talk to Jorge.” He hit Jane’s back and followed Lambert.

  She looked down at the cash. Too much. Why’d he do that? She should slip it in her pocket, get out, buy gas and drive Uno’s car south, maybe to Los Angeles, where she knew no one, no one knew her. Try again, far from her stolen moleskin.

  “Malachi!” Jorge held up two more fingers and headed to the far-corner booth. Then he yelled, “Boy!”

  Malachi put their plates into a tub while Jane counted out breakfast money.

  “About the contents of your pocket,” Malachi said. “Lambert took ’em.”

  “What?”

  “Saw him do it. You was passed out in the corner. He picked your pocket. He saw I saw. Told me, ‘Stay quiet.’ Said it was a joke.” She looked hard at Malachi, trying to tell whether this was him playing a joke on her.

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “Dunno, son.” He kept wiping. Then he refilled her cup of coffee. “Somebody over there ought to see straight. How do they put out a paper, everybody drunk?”

  Jane left the tab plus a nickel on the counter and gripped the rest in her pocket with a clammy palm.

  She joined Jorge in a back-corner booth, sliding onto the leather bench where the old editor hunched, his white shirtsleeves soaking up table spills, bow tie askew, dotted suspenders holding the getup together. His liver-spotted hand clutched the glass. A pair of spectacles magnified the spider veins under his eyes. Big as a mountain, face like a mudslide.

  Malachi delivered two more glasses of vodka as Jorge started up on the ice.

  “Boy,” he said, phlegmy.

  “Yessir.”

  “You are lucky to have a patron in our editor.” He slurped and rattled the ice in his glass. “Must see something in you.” Another sip. “Probably ambition. That would be enough for him. Maybe you got the loyalty gene.”

  “Sorry for the trouble, sir . . .”

  “Don’t interrupt, Boy.” He took out a handkerchief, blew his nose with a blast, folded it up and put it back in his pocket. “If I were in charge, you would not jump ahead of more obviously qualified boys.”

  Jane knew every job had a Jorge—the wall between you and what you wanted, protecting the old way from the new.

  “But apparently, for this hire, this time, it is not up to me.”

  He held his glass in the air, empty but for ice. Jane slid her drink in front of him.

  “Not drinking today, Boy?”

  “Don’t like the clear stuff.”

  Jorge took a sip out of her glass and wiped his wet chin.

  “As I previously noted, you are a lucky fellow to have such a friend. A friend in high places. Nonetheless, let me tell you about the very low place where you will begin.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PROSPECT

  Jane practiced herself into an excellent liar.

  The seed of that skill had been planted long before, but it sprouted and grew and blossomed with constant tending at the Prospect. Only three months after her arrival, people looked at her and saw a copy boy, at the bottom of the ladder but capable of climbing.

  She’d been hazed, yes, like any new boy, sent to the basement, told to fetch “the long weight,” made to stand there with the press running for an hour before she got the joke.

  It was nothing compared to the things she saw happening to girls in the building, pushed into closets, groped, laughed at by clusters of men. She never heard the details—she was just a copy boy, not privy to the inside talk of the girls or the men—but she did see one or two of them run out of the building crying, with a new girl to take her place two days later.

  Her boy hazing wasn’t so bad. It sharpened her ability to smell a rat, made her try even harder to apply herself to what she needed to learn.

  Before work every morning she went to the South O’ Slot Diner on Fifth, where she ordered black coffee and crackers and read the Prospect, the Examiner, the Call-Bulletin, and the News—a tomato picker surrounded by longshoremen, policemen, artists, an Okie among Orientals, Italians, Irish, and Coloreds. She became interested, less intimidated, by the people around her, wanting to master their differences, their similarities.

  She read the politics, police blotters, sports, even the society pages, and listened to everybody talk, heard their opinions and their accents and their gossip. She wrote it all down to study because she planned to use it soon, when she had her own column. She’d believed in such a goal even before the ditch, but now she saw a clear path leading her to it and she loved a clear path.

  Rivka bought into the goal too. Jane’s getting this job and caring about it made Rivka like her better. She hadn’t said anything about kicking her out ever since. Every week she’d restock a pile of books next to Jane’s bed—Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, newspapermen all—and Jane loved them, but none as much as the syndicated articles of Martha Gellhorn, which Rivka would put on top of the pile.

  Martha was a beautiful lady, and young, who wrote from war zones all over the world. She said plain, honest things, saw who people were, what was in them, even in
children. Jane copied into her new notebook one of Gellhorn’s lines about a little boy in war-torn Spain—“Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire little boy.” When Jane read those words she saw the faces of kids she knew, saw her own tent-living self, “tough and entire,” her own “whiskey voice.” She underlined sentences like these throughout Martha’s columns and read them out loud, trying them out with different accents in the mirror.

  That’s who Jane would be, the second Martha Gellhorn. Plain, honest, smart. Though she was obviously willing to for-sake the honesty. Momma always said she would do something, after all, not that she would be something—like honest—which liberated her from some of the rules, so long as she was working toward the main prize.

  She’d won a spot on the long copy boy bench, her new starting line, where six guys sat waiting to be sprung by a reporter’s shouted “Boy!” When that call went out, the boy at the end of the bench hopped up and ran, eager for his twenty-minute adventure up or downstairs to hustle copy or out on the street to fetch coffee or whiskey. They weren’t supposed to have names on the bench. They were all “Boy.” It was efficient. The ones who’d studied at Stanford or Berkeley or Columbia felt worse about that than she did. “Humiliating” or “unconscionable,” they said, angry not to be known. All that schooling hadn’t taught them how to make the best of the worst.

  Unburdened by education, Jane just introduced herself to everybody anyway—“Hello, I’m Benny Hopper”—willing to break rules to be remembered. As for being a boy, she’d fix that when the time was right, after she proved herself. Identity was a decision subject to timing, not a solid fact, after all, she thought.

  Lambert was the only stink in the tent. The whole first week she worked at the Prospect she worried about her missing moleskin, expecting him to spring it on her. On the very first Friday, she waited until he left for lunch and then sneaked over to hunt through his desk, finding the moleskin and her wallet there, shoved to the back of a filthy top drawer. Not her keys though. Uno’s car was lost to her now. She’d have to ask the girls for another key to the flat. She went through every page of the moleskin, looking for clues, but couldn’t tell whether he’d read it or not. She stewed through that lunch hour until he returned, marched to his desk and confronted him—“You stole my stuff at Breens!”—hissing like a beetle, which for some reason she was unafraid of doing in front of him.

  He laughed in her face.

  “Yeah, I took your shit! You’re lower than a rookie! You’re a rookie on the bench! What’d you expect? If you’re stupid enough to pass out in a bar, then you’ve fucked your own self, dummy.”

  She didn’t know how to react, other than to hate and distrust him and worry every night that he’d read the notebook, that he knew her story. But if he knew, he hadn’t done anything with it. Was he saving it, to use at the best, most humiliating time? Was he all hat, no cattle, or a real threat? She kept her eyes on Lambert.

  She hardly ever saw Mac anymore. She’d obviously been nowhere near his apartment or even his stool at Breen’s since the second day she’d met him, and now at work he was always in his office in meetings, door closed, on the telephone with the publisher, Mr. Mercer, or out of the building, attending functions, confirming for her the desirability of social busyness. His absence was a disappointment. He was the sun, her cheeks toasting when he passed through the room, even if he didn’t glance her way, so she worried that, because she didn’t see him, she’d lost his interest, that he’d found another more deserving underling on whom to gift opportunity. That thought weighed heavier than almost anything else in this otherwise happy season.

  But finally Mac rewarded her patience.

  Catching her on the stairs after she’d finished a run, he grabbed her elbow and leaned in.

  “I need you to do me a favor.”

  A bubble of hope bounced in the spot where her throat met her clavicle.

  “I need you to pick up my Cadillac—it broke down in Berkeley, I had it repaired there. I need you to bring it back for me.”

  He put an envelope in her pocket and patted it, and she felt a shiver on the back of her neck.

  “This should cover it.”

  It was simple, nothing personal, but still it separated her from the others, put her out front. And he’d said, “I need you,” three times.

  SHE picked the car up and paid for it with the wad he gave her. This was the second time he’d trusted her with money, so she counted it twice, thinking it might be a test, before pulling away from the repair shop, over to the pier, where she waited with the other parked cars in line to cross the bay on the auto ferry.

  Jumpy with coffee and sprinkle donuts, she got out and walked to the rail’s edge. Seagulls flapped all around and over her head, squealing like they do. She watched a dozen dirty birds malingering on wood gone white with ammonia droppings. They all faced one direction and stood on one leg. She’d heard they kept themselves warm that way. She tried it herself, standing on her own right leg, pulling her left one up as high as she could get it, extending her arms like wings. This was another good thing about being a boy, the freedom to look stupid in front of strangers when you wanted to. She thought the bird warming method was working but then had to grab the pier rail to save herself from tipping over.

  That’s when she saw a girl walking her way, slim and pale, a large coat cinched around her waist, ending just above her bare ankles and thick-heeled black leather shoes. Though she wore no makeup on her eyes, her lips were painted black-red. Platinum hair blew all around her head. She had a thin neck, and her bare, ridged collarbones were exposed where the coat stood open.

  The girl walked straight toward her in a rush, stopping a couple yards away. Then she closed the remaining space, moving slower, rolling her eyes. “Sorry. That was cuckoo. I thought you were someone else.” She tilted her head to the side, squinting.

  Jane couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Can I bum one?“ the girl asked, pulling her hair back to stop it from flying in her face. Her voice was scratchy, with a trace of West Texas. She jerked her head toward an unhappy group standing three cars behind them. “They’re crazy-making.”

  A short-haired woman in a khaki skirt and black beret was at the center of three sobbing boys of grade-school age. The oldest of the three cried least dramatically, but his face looked most miserable. With one hand he held his gray wool cap on his head against the wind. The smallest of the three slapped the back of the middle boy, who ignored him, crying to the lady instead. She leaned down to their heads, talking, her face serious, the way a person looks when talking to an adult. The older boy looked pinched, like he was trying to be who she wanted. The other two didn’t. They just looked a basic sort of unhappy.

  Jane fumbled in three jacket pockets before finding the Luckies pack in the last spot, empty. She said, “Sorry” in her deepest voice, hoping to be believed.

  “Share?” the girl asked, tilting her head toward Jane’s mouth, and then she looked back over her shoulder at the quartet.

  Her right hand was still holding her hair, her left grasping her coat collar, covering her throat, so Jane put the burning cigarette in the girl’s mouth, touching her bottom lip.

  The skin on her face looked thin, but it was thicker, chapped, bumpy on her mouth. Odd. Was it scarred?

  Jane shuddered at the strangeness.

  The girl pointed and asked if she minded stepping behind a big red booze truck with her, to get out of the wind. Jane followed.

  “That your family?”

  “My boss and her sons.” The girl hugged herself.

  “Y’all headed over to see the sights?”

  The girl didn’t answer for a second. “Y’all?”

  It was hard to be perfect all the time, to always remember, in every spontaneous moment, never to say “y’all” or “ain’t”
or “might could,” when those were the words that popped out of your mouth when you were nervous or when you were relaxed.

  The girl shrugged. “I do that too. Where you from?”

  Jane didn’t want to get into that. “East. Heading to see the sights?”

  The girl nodded like she got it—Don’t mention Texas.

  “She’s putting me and her boys on the boat with their foster father.”

  “Foster?” Jane leaned in, getting her ear closer to the girl’s mouth. The seagulls and the kids were so loud.

  “She boards her kids during the week, when she and her husband are working.”

  Jane glanced back at beret lady to see if she looked relieved or guilty but couldn’t tell at this distance.

  “Sometimes they come home on weekends. This week’s a change.” She looked back over the truck hood. “I’ll ride with them, settle them down.” She nodded her head and marched in place, closing her eyes, inhaling again. Her face was a little lopsided, pretty, but the left cheekbone was higher than the right.

  “I’m a reporter,” Jane said, feeling the need to assert who was who and what was what, though a reporter wasn’t what or who Jane was, and she was surprised at herself for saying it.

  The girl dropped her ashes with three sharp shakes. “Really?” She handed back the cigarette.

  “Rookie, but, yeah,” Jane said, sounding casual, thinking, Soon. She exhaled smoke to the side, but the wind blew it back in her face and she coughed.

  “I’ve got a story for you, rookie.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Vee!” beret lady yelled, and the girl looked around the truck at her boss and the kids just as the ferry blasted loud, approaching the pier.

  “I gotta get back.” She held the cigarette out and Jane accidentally took it like a girl, between her pointing and middle fingers. Then she rearranged it awkwardly.

  The girl looked hard at her.

  Jane thought, You don’t look at people you don’t know that way. This girl was breaking some kind of code.

  “Do you want to meet for drinks tonight? Hear my story?” the girl asked.