Copy Boy Read online

  Something was off about her—seeing Jane was a liar, offering her a story anyway. And her thinness. There was something off about this girl.

  Jane didn’t know how to get out of this, so she said, “Of course,” polite. “How about Breen’s? Eight? Benny Hopper.”

  The girl pulled a card out of her pocket. Jane loaned her a pencil and watched her write “Breen’s, 8,” pressing hard, so that the pencil end snapped. Then she wrote “BH,” lightly with the broken tip under “8,” and returned the pencil.

  “Vee! Come on!” beret lady hollered, not seeing the two of them as she hustled her boys onto the ferry toward a black sedan.

  “Thanks for the smoke,” Vee said. “See you tonight. Breen’s at eight.” She shook Jane’s hand before she walked to the car, her fists clenched.

  Jane watched her rejoin them, urging the three boys into a back seat. A big man with gray hair sat behind the wheel, facing the boys. Beret lady walked away from the car to the parking lot, her arms folded across her middle, her head down, dragging her right leg to the side.

  Jane climbed back into Mac’s Cadillac and wrote “8, Vee, Breen’s” into her own notebook.

  There was something interesting, sharp-edged, about the way Vee didn’t bother with fussy girl things. Jane imagined looking like that when she got to be a girl again. Smart, more corners than curves—like herself. But not off, definitely not off. She was done being on the outside.

  She pulled forward into an open spot on the ferry, handing Mac’s dollar out the window to the attendant—collecting the change, putting it back into her pocket—and watched the other commuters pull in all around her, blocking her view of Vee’s ride.

  The white boat’s motor groaned and its horn blew as they began to move.

  Jane got out of the car and walked to the rail to admire the skyscrapers.

  As the ferry cut through the waves, she looked up at the new Bay Bridge. A few helmeted figures walked up high on cables, nothing tying them to the span, inventing that bridge with every unharnessed step. Just last month one had fallen to his death, the twenty-second man killed in the project. She’d read that they planned to lose one man for every million dollars they spent. That made sense—only a couple dozen men dead to make this miracle bridge.

  What fine work brave, smart men did in this place. Jane lifted her chin and filled her lungs, feeling brave and smart too.

  I can take this city.

  Then a gust of wind blew her stolen hat off her head and into the churning water below.

  “BENNY!” Linda called from the switchboard where she sat with eight other girls, each in front of boards controlling cords that connected calls. “Look here!”

  Linda was maybe twenty-five, a normal, healthy size, about five foot three and comfortable in her body. She wore a stylish wrap dress with ruffle cap sleeves and a tie around her waist, fashionable but cheap to buy and easy to sew, practical for a working girl who’d arranged no social plans after hours but who liked to look good in case something came up. Her dark hair was neatly pin-curled the way girls’ hair was styled in the magazines. She had a dimpled chin and blackened lashes. She regularly pinched her cheeks throughout the day to avoid the cost of rouge. Jane wondered how it felt to be normal like Linda.

  “Boss said to give you this.” She handed Jane an empty envelope with “Mac” scrawled on the front. Jane knew it was for the leftover car repair money. She pulled the cash out of her wallet, slid it into the envelope, sealed it, and signed her name over the seal. Linda put it in her top drawer. “You can trust me.” She dimpled and said, “I’ll give it to him,” causing the other switchboard girls to giggle.

  Jane did trust her with the money. She wasn’t interesting enough to distrust. As she walked away from the switchboard, she noticed how true that was of most of the girls who worked there, the typists, telephone girls, receptionists, and executive secretaries. Everywhere she looked she saw girls who looked healthy, like they had no history of hunger or illness, or even doubt. Sure, they were living in a depression and everybody felt it, drawing lines down the back of their legs instead of springing for hose, repairing lost buttons, trimming worn fringes rather than replacing them with something new. They grew carrots and peas on their back porches, drank homemade wine, put extra pallets in every rentable room. But still, they maintained an acceptable, middle-of-the-road normalcy because they had their jobs and their paychecks. And because of who they came from. They wore normalcy like skin, unaware of it. That was the way most of the Prospect girls looked, frayed but fine. Not like the people standing in the soup line or sleeping on the sidewalk. Not like the Mexicans— except for Jorge. Why was that?—or the Chinese or Coloreds working in the basement on the presses or on the trucks delivering papers. Not like Jane used to look. Not like Vee.

  Vee had a too-bare neck, like she had no clothes under her coat, like that was her only outer layer. Either way, whether because she didn’t have anything to put below the coat or because she just didn’t choose to, that wasn’t normal. Her hair was so white, too white, like she’d bleached it in the sink. And her mouth so bumpy. Scarred. How would a girl get scars like that? Then she thought of the way Vee looked at her, like she knew her, and that seemed weirdest and most worrying of all.

  She thought about Rivka and Sweetie. Rivka was completely authentic. Though she had weird in her, she wasn’t showy or fake. Her thick accent put Jane in mind of onions, cooking onions, not spicy and raw but warm and savory, Jane’s idea of what it must be to come from the Old World. Sure, that marked her as different, but in a familiar, earthy way. And she never seemed insecure about that difference. She’d been accepted at high levels, made normal by merit. Was it her merit that did that?

  Sweetie wasn’t normal, but she was an A-plus fake. She costumed herself so well that she was like the collector doll version of a real normal girl: hair, clothes, makeup, all recreated from the movies and magazines. Nobody ever eyed Sweetie and thought, What’s she doing here? At least not until Jane herself had drawn their eyes at the opera workshop, when her mistake may have made them reconsider whether Sweetie fit after all.

  The weirdest, least normal girl was Jane herself, pretending to be something she absolutely was not. Faking everything about herself. Hiding when she dressed, when she washed, when she peed. Hiding her body, her voice, her past, her family. She, who wanted to be seen as normal almost as much as she wanted to win. She wanted to be completely inside the Prospect’s machinery, its cogs and chutes, to pass through it easily and come out a well-known writer, one of them. And because she’d been succeeding so well at faking so hard, she had a good distance to fall. Anything could topple her.

  Don’t mess this up.

  Jane didn’t keep her eight o’clock date at Breen’s with Vee.

  She couldn’t risk losing what she’d worked so hard to gain. Joining up in public with a girl like that, no matter how interesting she might be, would put eyes on the two of them, maybe make people see there was something off about Jane too. She didn’t want to hurt Vee’s feelings, but she had to protect her own position. She had almost no choice.

  She went to Breen’s with the bench guys at five thirty and stayed until seven, when she left to walk home with a safe amount of time to spare before Vee would cross that threshold.

  LAMBERT performed his front-page story about a girl who’d been choked, beaten, and lay in a coma, reading aloud in his version of an Okie accent—“‘The dust gets in yuh. Yuh cain’t wash it off. That guhl was always cawfin’ it up. Now she’s choked on it.’” He clutched his throat, rolling his eyes back in his head. Then he slapped the half slip the quote was written on into Jane’s chest, yelling “Giddyup, Boy!”

  Ass, Jane thought, hustling with the paragraph through two dozen desks and the rolling chairs of coughing, barking men blowing clouds of smoke—cigarette, pipe, and cigar— yelling into telephone handsets and banging out paragraphs.

  She ran with the half slip to the spine, the spiral staircase at t
he core of the building, skipping steps without touching the wrought iron rail, up into the barn-large third-floor composing room, where twelve operators rode the keyboard seats of gawky mechanical beasts, linotype machines, seven feet tall and two tons heavy, somewhere between a typewriter and a backhoe.

  Three men in, she found Fred, a reedy, hunchbacked compositor whose gray skin said he normally ate his Spam sandwich right where he sat.

  She passed Fred the half sheet. “Hope your fingers are loose, ’cuz Lambert’s loquacious.” She liked to use her new words here.

  “Goody,” Fred growled. “I love the sound of Lambert’s voice.” He stubbed out his cigar in a half-full coffee cup at his feet. “A little less than he does.”

  Fred put the paper on the dish over a three-color keyboard, capital letters in white keys on the right, lower case in black keys on the left, spaces and punctuation in blue keys in the middle.

  Transcribing Lambert’s copy, each of Fred’s keystrokes called a letter down the beast’s slide. They lined up into a die, which a black metal arm injected with 550-degree molten lead, refilled every so often from a boiling bucket at Jane’s feet. The week before, a copy boy had kicked the bucket, really kicked it, burning his legs and creating an infection that killed him two days later. Jane kept her body parts a smart distance from that danger.

  The metal letters became a slug, a single line of type another guy would pull out and place in a galley frame, together with all the other slugs, to make a column and then a page— click-click-clink, shshshshshsh, clunk—and then the tinkling of brass on brass as the matrices dropped back to start over.

  Fred checked the first line’s die, released it to the process and returned to the next line, all in a nice, natural rhythm. Fred was the meat in his machine, part of the bigger machine, and so on.

  Fred said, “Shit,” feeling a typo, and ran a finger on his right hand down two rows of keys, calling down the metal capital letters “ETAOIN SHRDLU” in the middle of the die, which would be cast into a bad slug, a sign to the proofreader to toss the line. It was faster to do a run-down like that than to fix his mistake when he made it. Jane aimed to rise in this place before somebody figured she was a bad slug and did what they had to do.

  “Back to the mouth,” Fred said, and she hustled toward the spine. She’d have to repeat this run between the second and third floors several times—the story was MTK, more to come. But she was glad for the gap between the last paragraph and the next, glad to move on to another idea. She didn’t want Lambert looking in her face and thinking she was like the choked girl, with the dust in her.

  The girl’s friend was wrong, anyway. You could wash it off. And what did get in you, you could push right out, send it down the pipes. Some poor hicks didn’t know how to do it, but Jane did. She’d cleaned herself thoroughly. She was smooth running now, in spite of the grit she’d had between her teeth and in her nostrils and under her nails when she got there, before she made herself new. She wasn’t like the coma girl.

  Lambert’s next half sheet was sitting beside his typewriter by the time Jane got back. She read what she could as she ran it up to Fred. The girl had been found Saturday morning in the alley outside Breen’s—Breen’s! Where Jane had been that night. Where she went almost every night, with everybody else. Her body had lain just outside the door Jane passed through twice a day.

  Seven times she ran up and down the spine with the little half slips of that story, reading the bits she could while she ran, short phrases, not sentences or paragraphs. In half an hour, she’d delivered the last half sheet from Lambert to Fred, growing more anxious as she went.

  Fred pointed at the mess on the floor, and she gathered the discarded papers and reassembled them in what seemed like the right order so she could piece the whole thing together— Okie . . . eighteen . . . photo . . . unidentified man . . . crowbar.

  Crowbar was a word she didn’t like. Similar to ditch.

  She tried but failed to stifle a coughing fit, valley fever reasserting itself.

  “Get that checked, kid, jeez. Nobody wants to catch that.”

  “It’s the smoke,” she said, stuffing Lambert’s half sheets into her back pocket.

  Her fingers remembered the crowbar’s feel.

  Tucking her chin and blowing in and out her nose to stop the cough, she went back downstairs, sidestepping copy boys descending on the wadded half sheets, sandwich crusts, and cigarette ashes that covered the Prospect’s floor at the end of the day.

  She stepped behind a tall stack of boxes to reread the story without anybody watching. The girl’s skull had been fractured, a crowbar left on the ground next to her body. The article said the girl—Vesta Russell—had been photographed before by a lady photographer working for the Farm Security Administration.

  Jane had seen FSA people poking around campsites and fields, with union guys, stirring up trouble, nudging people to strike. The story said the photographer had hired the girl after taking the picture. It said the girl had gone to Breen’s to meet someone at eight o’clock. Someone named BH.

  Jane’s throat and mouth burned yellow.

  She had to see the picture.

  She ran back to Lambert’s desk, where she found him on the telephone, his back to her, pulling the cord as far as it could go for privacy.

  She feathered piles of paper across his desk until she found the picture that went with the story. Holding it in her hands, the noisy room went silent, nothing but her fingers gripping the corners of a photograph of a man with two women and a baby.

  She knew before she looked that she’d find a picture of Vee, and she did, but her eyes pulled her to the man.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  The girl she ditched was in a coma.

  Hit by a crowbar.

  Pictured with Daddy.

  Fuck!

  She’d thought she could live in this new city, with a new name, new job, new body. New everything, but he’d returned to remind her who she was, who she’d always be.

  She tried to calm her breathing, in and out her nose.

  The dust gets in you, and you can’t wash it out.

  LET’S say you’re some farmer, peas or spinach, and you’ve got yourself a tractor to work good soil near the coast. You inherited that land, that tractor, in a state where the banks aren’t running people off dried-up dirt. You’re a lucky man, you think. So you keep that tractor running every day, keep it well tended, because you’re responsible, you take what you’ve inherited seriously. But the salty sea air all around your land gets inside your tractor’s works, where you don’t even see it, not your fault, salt rubbing every internal surface. And that salt air, laid on the cogs of a good, well-tended machine, doesn’t dry up or blow off. No. It rusts out the interior of that tractor where you can’t see it, so that one day it locks up, broke, and finally, all at once, you see how bad things have always been, even while you were riding that tractor in your rows in your fields in your state, all in spite of how carefully you thought you’d tended it and how well that tractor seemed to be running.

  That’s how it works, Jane saw.

  DADDY stood in the middle of the picture. He wore a soiled white shirt, rolled at his elbows, and overalls, one strap hanging. His arm was wrapped behind the girl, his big brown hand cupping her shoulder, his fingers indenting her skin, his other hand gripping a banjo by the neck. His hair was pushed back, under a cap—she’d never seen that cap—his eyebrows raised in a question or a dare, the wrinkles between them like mountains on a map. He looked thinner. Also his mustache was gone. Maybe that’s what made him look younger, like her, like Benny. When had she seen him last without his mustache? But there was that shovel-curved scar.

  Somebody came right up behind her, and she went cold and turned to find Walt, the copy boy from San Mateo, looking over her shoulder, breathing heavier than usual from running up and down the stairs. He put his finger on Daddy in the picture. “I didn’t know you played banjo.”

  “Go on!” Sh
e elbowed him in the ribs, and he ran off.

  That was the face she saw in the mirror every morning. It looked like Jane-as-Benny standing there next to Vee. A taller Jane-as-Benny, minus the scar. She’d thought a lot about whether she looked like her brother, like Benjamin would have looked if she hadn’t killed him, skipping over the more obvious thing—that with her hair cropped close like it was, dressed as a man, she looked like young Daddy. Anybody who saw the picture would know it.

  On his left side was a weathered, hard-eyed woman holding a naked baby. On the right, the pale girl, Vee, glowed bright.

  In the picture, Vee’s hair was brownish-blond, pointy chin, bare neck, her dress fabric a familiar, washed-out floral, one lots of Hooverville women chose for sewing, the prettiest of all the cotton- or feed-sack patterns. Scraggly-haired, thin— too thin—one bare arm dangling, her hand empty, the other hand at her throat, her fingers wrapped around it. There were those scars on her full, chapped lips. Her eyes were light, blue or gray, and she looked straight at the photographer, blank.

  Beautiful and blank. Not blank like she was empty, just like she wasn’t giving anything away.

  Lambert yelled, “Goddammit!” into the telephone, and Jane dropped the picture, shoving her hands in her pockets, turning her shoulder.

  He poured a shot of whiskey, standing at his desk, drank it fast and slammed the glass down in a bang. Then he stepped away to the coat rack to put on his tie and jacket.

  Wake up! Grab it! Go!

  She slipped the picture in her pocket and ran for the spine.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  COMMUNICATION

  Rivka stood at the top of their Clay Street steps with her hands behind her back.

  “You are very late. We were supposed to meet Sweetie thirty minutes ago.”

  Jane had forgotten her own birthday dinner. She didn’t want to go, couldn’t act normal now. But she had to perform. Sweetie’d arranged this dinner, and Jane still needed to tend their relations after the opera interview. Getting along, having the acceptance of both her roommates was part of her plan.