The Ivory Grin (2 page)

I swallowed my irritation. “Where is she now, or is that another secret?”

“I know I seem unreasonable and suspicious,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve been burned. I take it you’ll do this job for me?”

“I might as well.”

“She’s in Bella City, up the Valley. You’ll have to hurry to make it before noon. It’s a good two hours from here.”

“I know where it is.”

“Good. A friend of mine saw her there yesterday, in a restaurant on Main Street near the corner of Hidalgo. My friend talked to the waiter and found out that Lucy eats her lunch there every day between twelve and one. It’s a combination café and liquor store called Tom’s. You can’t miss it.”

“A picture of Lucy would help.”

“I’m sorry.” She spread her hands in an automatic gesture that placed her ancestry on the north shore of the Mediterranean.
“The best I can do is a description. She’s a handsome girl, and so light she could pass for South American or California Spanish. She has nice big brown eyes, and not too much of a mouth, like some of them. A nice little figure, too, if she wasn’t so skinny.”

“How old?”

“Not old. Younger than me—than I.” I noticed the self-correction, as well as the self-flattery in the comparison. “In her early twenties, I’d say.”

“Hair?”

“Black, in a straight bob. She keeps it straight with oil.”

“Height?”

“A couple of inches taller than I. I’m five foot two.”

“Distinguishing characteristics?”

“Her legs are her best feature, as she well knows.” Una couldn’t pay another woman an unmixed compliment. “Her nose is sort of turned up—cute, if her nostrils didn’t sort of stare at you.”

“What was she wearing when your friend saw her?”

“A black-and-white checkered sharkskin suit. That’s how I know it was her. I gave her the suit a couple of months ago. She altered it for herself.”

“So you won’t want the suit back.”

That seemed to strike a nerve. She removed the butt that had gone out in her holder and crushed it violently in the ashtray beside her chair. “I’ve taken quite a bit from you, mister.”

“We’re about even now,” I said. “I’ve been keeping score. I just wouldn’t want you to think that you were buying very much for a hundred bucks. I have to watch that around here. You’re suspicious. I’m touchy.”

“You talk as if you were bitten by a bear. Do you have an unhappy home life, by any chance?”

“I was just going to ask you about yours.”

“Don’t start worrying about my home life. That’s one thing—I don’t want you talking to Lucy.” She had a quick change of mood, or affected one. “Oh hell, it’s my life and I live it. We’re wasting time. Are you willing to do what I say, no more no less?”

“No more anyway. She mightn’t turn up at the restaurant today. If she does, I tail her, keep a record of where she goes, who she sees. And report to you?”

“Yes. This afternoon if possible. I’ll be registered at the Mission Hotel in Bella City. Ask for Mrs. Larkin.” She glanced at the square gold watch on her right wrist. “You better get going. If she leaves town let me know immediately, and stay with her.”

She moved deliberately and quickly to the outer door. Her walk was the shortest distance between things she wanted. The back of her neck was heavy under the cropped hair, swollen with muscle as if she had often used it for butting and rooting. Turning at the door to lift a flashing hand in good-bye, she hitched the mink stole higher. I wondered if she used it to conceal that telltale grossness.

I went back to my desk and dialed the switchboard of my answering service. Standing by the window, I could see the sidewalk below through the slats of the Venetian blind. It swarmed with a bright young crowd of guys and girls buzzing and fluttering in pursuit of happiness and the dollar.

Una emerged among them, dark and foreshortened by the height from which I was watching her. She turned uphill, her head thrust forward on her heavy neck, like an irresistible force searching for an immovable object. The switchboard answered in a youthful female gurgle on the fifth ring. I told it I was going out of town for the weekend.

CHAPTER
2
:
    
From the top of the grade I could
see the mountains on the other side of the valley, leaning like granite slabs against the blue tile sky. Below me the road meandered among brown September hills spattered with the ink-blot shadows of oaks. Between these hills and the further mountains the valley floor was covered with orchards like vivid green chenille, brown corduroy ploughed fields, the thrifty patchwork of truck gardens. Bella City stood among them, a sprawling dusty town miniatured and tidied by clear space. I drove down into it.

The packing houses of the growers’ associations stood like airship hangars on the edge of the green fields. Parched nurseries and suburban ranchos offered tomato plants and eggs and lima beans for sale. There was a roadside traffic of filling stations, drive-ins, motels slumping dejectedly under optimistic names. In the road the big trucks went by in both directions, trailing oil smoke and a long loud raspberry for Bella City.

The highway was a rough social equator bisecting the community into lighter and darker hemispheres. Above it in the northern hemisphere lived the whites who owned and operated the banks and churches, clothing and grocery and liquor stores. In the smaller section below it, cramped and broken up by ice plants, warehouses, laundries, lived the darker ones, the Mexicans and Negroes who did most of the manual work in Bella City and its hinterland. I remembered that Hidalgo Street ran parallel to the highway and two blocks below it.

It was fairly hot and very dry. The dryness ached in my
sinuses. Main Street was loud and shiny with noon traffic moving bumper to bumper. I turned left on East Hidalgo Street and found a parking space in the first block. Housewives black, brown, and sallow were hugging parcels and pushing shopping carts on the sidewalk. Above them a ramshackle house, with paired front windows like eyes demented by earthquake memories, advertised Rooms for Transients on one side, Palm Reading on the other. A couple of Mexican children, boy and girl, strolled by hand in hand in a timeless noon on their way to an early marriage.

Two privates appeared from nowhere, pale in their uniforms like young ghosts trapped by reality. I got out and followed them across Main and into a magazine shop near the corner. The unlit neon sign of Tom’s Café was almost directly across the street. Beer on Tap. Steam Beer. Try Our Spaghetti Special.

The soldiers were inspecting a rack of comic books with the air of connoisseurs. They selected half a dozen each, paid for them and left.

“Milk sops,” the clerk said. He was a gray-headed man with smeared spectacles. “They draft them in didees these days. Cradle to grave in one jump. When I was in the AEF.”

I grunted, stood by the window looking out. Tom’s Café had a varied clientele. Business suits and overalls, sport shirts and T-shirts and sweaters went in and came out. The women wore gingham dresses, sunsuits with halters, slacks and shirts, light topcoats over faded flowered silk. There were whites among them, but Negro and Mexican heads were in the majority. I didn’t see a black-and-white sharkskin suit.

“When I was in the AEF,” the clerk said softly and wistfully from behind the counter.

I picked up a magazine and pretended to read it, watching the changing crowd on the other side of the street. The light danced in standing waves on the car tops.

The clerk said in a changed tone: “You’re not supposed to read them until you pay for them.”

I tossed him a quarter, and he was mollified: “You know how it is. Business is business.”

“Sure.” I said it gruffly, to ward off the AEF.

Through the dusty window, the people resembled extras in a street scene in very early color. The faces of the buildings were depthless and so ugly that I couldn’t imagine their insides. Tom’s Café was flanked on one side by a pawnshop displaying violins and shotguns in its window, on the other side by a movie house plastered with lurid advertisements for
La Liga de Muchachos
. The crowd hurried faster, it seemed, and then the scene focused on the double swinging doors of Tom’s Café. A light-skinned Negro girl with short black hair and a black-and-white checked suit came out, paused on the edge of the sidewalk and turned south.

“You forgot your book,” the clerk called after me.

I was halfway across the street when she reached the corner of Hidalgo and Main. She turned left, walking quickly with short steps. The sun gleamed on her oiled hair. She passed within three feet of my convertible. I slid behind the wheel and started the engine.

Lucy carried herself with an air. Her hips swayed pear-like from the narrow stem of her waist, and her stockingless tan legs worked pleasantly below the checked skirt. I let her cover the rest of the block, then followed her by fits and starts from parking place to parking place. In the second block I stopped in front of a frame Buddhist church. In the third, a pool hall where black and Mexican and Asian
boys handled cues over green tables. In the fourth, a red-brick school in a yellow desert of playground. Lucy kept on walking due east.

The road degenerated from broken asphalt to dirt, and the sidewalk ended. She picked her way carefully among the children who ran and squatted and rolled in the dust, past houses with smashed windows patched with cardboard and scarred peeling doors or no doors at all. In the photographic light the wretchedness of the houses had a stern kind of clarity or beauty, like old men’s faces in the sun. Their roofs sagged and their walls leaned with a human resignation, and they had voices: quarreling and gossiping and singing. The children in the dust played fighting games.

Lucy left Hidalgo Street at the twelfth intersection and headed north along the green board-fence of a baseball park. A block short of the highway she went east again into a different kind of street. It had a paved road and sidewalks, small green lawns in front of small well-kept houses, white frame and stucco. I parked at the corner, half hidden by the clipped eugenia hedge that surrounded the corner lot. The name of the street was stenciled on the curb. Mason Street.

About the middle of the block, a faded green Ford coupé stood in a driveway under a pepper tree in front of a white bungalow. A Negro boy in yellow swimming trunks was hosing it down. He was very large and strong-looking. At a distance of half a block I could see the muscles shimmering in his wet black arms. The girl crossed the street toward him, walking more slowly and gracefully than she had been.

When he noticed her he smiled and flicked the spray from the hose in her direction. She dodged and ran toward him, forgetting her dignity. He laughed and shot the water
straight up into the tree like a jet of visible laughter that reached me as sound a half second later. Kicking off her shoes, she scampered around the car one step ahead of his miniature rain. He dropped the hose and raced around after her.

She reappeared on my side and snatched up the nozzle. When he came around the car she turned the white stream full in his face. He came on dripping and laughing, and wrenched the nozzle out of her hands. Their laughter joined.

Face to face on the green grass, they held each other by the arms. Their laughter ended suddenly. The pepper tree shaded them in green silence. The water from the hose bubbled springlike in the grass.

A door slammed. I heard its delayed percussion like the sound of a distant ax-blow. The lovers sprang apart. A stout black woman had come out on the porch of the white bungalow. She stood with her hands clasped at her thick aproned waist and looked at them without speaking. At least her lips didn’t move perceptibly.

The boy picked up a chamois and began to polish the car top like somebody wiping out the sins of the world. The girl stooped for her shoes with an air of earnest concentration, as if she’d been searching high and low for them. She passed the boy without turning her head and disappeared around the side of the bungalow. The stout black woman went back into the house, closing the screen door soundlessly behind her.

CHAPTER
3
:
    
I circled three quarters of the block
, left my car short of the intersection, and entered Mason Street from the other end, on foot. Under the pepper tree the Negro boy was still wiping down the Ford. He glanced at me as I crossed the road, but paid me no further attention.

His house was the fifth on the north side of the street. I opened the white picket-gate of the third house, a stucco cottage wearing a television aerial like a big metal feather in its cap. I knocked on its screen door and took a black notebook and a pencil out of my inside breast pocket.

The inner door was opened a few inches, the thin yellow face of a middle-aged Negro inserted in the aperture. “What do you want?” When they shut, his lips turned inward over his teeth.

I opened the notebook and held the pencil poised over it. “My firm is making a national survey.”

“There’s nothing we need.” The ingrown mouth closed, and the door closed after it.

The door of the next house was standing open. I could see directly into a living-room crowded with old Grand Rapids furniture. When I knocked on the door, it rattled against the wall.

The boy under the pepper tree looked up from the fender he was polishing. “Just walk right in. She’ll be glad to see you. Aunty’s glad to see anybody.” He added: “Mister,” as a deliberate afterthought and turned his wedge-shaped back on me.

The voice of the house spoke up from somewhere in the rear. It was old and faded but it had a carrying quality, like a chant: “Is that you, Holly? No, it wouldn’t be Holly yet. Anyway, come in, whoever you are. You must be one of my friends, and they visit me in my room now, now that I can’t get out. So come on in.”

The voice went on without a break, the words linked to each other by a pleasant deep-South slurring. I followed it like a thread across the living-room, down a short hallway, through the kitchen to a room that opened from it. “I used to have my visitors in the sitting-room, that wasn’t so long ago. Just lately the doctor told me, you stay in bed now, honey, don’t try to cook any more, let Holly do for you. So here I lie.”