The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (55 page)

We arrived at the Oakland station stiff, rumpled, bone-bruised and disoriented. After a week of living on sandwiches and developing sea legs to cope with the constant motion of the train, we were weak-kneed, and the polished marble floor of the waiting room felt unreliably solid beneath our feet. Less than two dollars remained in our travel kitty, but we had made it to California. We were finally Out West. Our ship was about to come in.

We waited for three and a half hours in the station, sitting among our cardboard boxes and knotted sheets stuffed with clothes and soft belongings, before we learned from a message left with Travelers' Aid that Ben wasn't going to meet us. He was in Point Barrow, Alaska, where the Army had sent him without warning to help install communication equipment at a weather station. He had been unable to contact us because we were on the train crossing the continent, but he had sent a buddy, who looked as though he had stopped off at every bar between the base and the train station.

The buddy spanked all his jacket pockets twice before he found an envelope from Ben containing a letter and three hundred dollars, all he had managed 'to beg, borrow or steal' in the short time before his departure. Mother read Ben's letter quickly, her eyes stabbing angrily at the lines. He said how sorry he was that he had been snatched away, but the good news was that before shoving off he had managed to buy us a house in a town called Mission San José. Nothing fancy, but a really great investment.

It was after midnight when the rented pick-up turned off the paved road that wound through the hill country south of Haywood, and bounced up a dirt track. Ben's buddy helped us unload our boxes and packages onto the ground, then he drove back down the track, raising dust into the moonlit night, his retreating taillights hopping as he jolted onto the paved road.

Mother, Anne-Marie and I stood looking at our new home. Ben's letter had said how lucky we were that he had found us a place to live, because the housing shortage in California was something fierce, what with all the war industry. The man he bought the house from, sight unseen, had assured him that it was sure to soar in value... they had even had a couple of drinks on it.

The hinges groaned as I tugged open the sagging door of the two-room shack. The interior smelled of straw and what I would learn to recognize as chicken shit. I felt along the wall for a light switch, snorting and flailing my arms each time a cobweb brushed my face.

Back out in the moonlight, I walked around the outside of the shack, then I returned to my mother and sister.

“Well?” Mother asked, her voice infinitely weary.

“There's no electricity.”

There was no running water either. Or toilet. Just a slumping wooden outhouse around back.

We bedded down on the floor as best we could, putting coats and sweaters over us for warmth. Anne-Marie snuggled up next to Mother and soon fell into a deep defensive sleep. From across the room, I could feel that Mother was rigid with anger as she stared into the darkness overhead. I fell asleep before she did.

Over the next few days, Mother displayed the resilient energy with which she always responded to emergencies. Crises brought out the best in her, and I admired the brave, can-do way she took charge. A lot of our three hundred dollars went into buying second-hand furniture and replacing the household goods we'd had to leave behind. We spent a full day in the blistering heat, scraping and scrubbing every surface because the shack had done service as a chicken coop.

The dusty town of Mission San José was a mile from our shack, up a road patched with tar that the sun melted to slick and gooey beneath a layer of dust. I went through the town from door to door asking for work, but all I could find was pumping gas at the general store, where I had to snatch a clacking handle back and forth to draw gas up into a calibrated glass cylinder before letting it run down a hose into the car's tank. The old man who ran the place didn't pay wages as a matter of principle, but he gave us a discount on the kerosene for our stove and lamps, and I got the occasional tip for scraping splatted bugs off windshields. When cars pulled up to the pump they had to avoid an old dog that dozed in the middle of the road, spittle dribbling from its tongue into the dust. That dog darkening the dusty road with its drool will forever epitomize Mission San José for me... indeed, all rural life.

I was standing at the pump when an old-fashioned touring car came weaving down the road, its horn blaring. It narrowly missed the old dog, jumped the curb, skidded to a stop, and out piled two reeling sailors and a heavily made-up woman who couldn't stop giggling because she had lost one of her shoes somewhere. They were celebrating the unconditional surrender of Japan. It was V-J Day! The war was over!

The next morning Mother appeared in her bright blue Bette Davis suit with the flopping bell-bottom slacks and set off down the dirt road in search of work. The only job she could find was in a cannery, cutting apricots for twelve cents a lug. At first, she could do only two lugs an hour, but by the time the apricots ran out, she had worked her way up to four, so a twelve-hour day of cutting apricots at full speed brought in five dollars and seventy-five cents. Experienced Mexican women could make twice that. In her effort to rush Mother repeatedly nicked her thumbs with the hooked, razor-sharp 'cot knife until they stung with the acid juice and throbbed so much she had to hold them up above her head to get some relief, so it was hard for her to sleep.

We ate lots of apricots during those first days, with effects on our bowels that one might imagine.

Two weeks later, the apricot harvest was over and Mother lost her job at the cannery. She hitchhiked to towns as distant as Haywood, but there was no work to be had anywhere and, because we had not lived long enough in California to merit public assistance, there was nothing anyone could do for us. What was left of our three hundred dollars would last only a few weeks. We tried to borrow money on the shack and discovered that it was worthless now that the war industry had collapsed and with it the demand for local housing.

I remembered Ben once saying, “Sometimes you almost feel thankful for a little bad luck, because if it wasn't for bad luck, you wouldn't have any luck at all.”

One hot, airless evening I was sitting on the front step of the shack. Out over the hills a condor soared, its bald head low between narrow shoulder blades, the tips of its wings fingering the air for up-drafts, its eyes relentlessly scanning for the crippled and the dead. And I suddenly came to the chilling realization that we were poor people. Through all the hard years on Pearl Street I had never thought of us as poor people. We had little money, sure, and we were temporarily down on our luck, but we weren't poor people, like destitute characters in Dickens, or the wretched of Les Misérables. But now we were poor, really poor, because this rural poverty was heavier and more hopeless than poverty in a city with museums and libraries and streets that might lead to a bit of good luck. I now felt sure that we would always be poor, and there was no way out.

In response to Mother's crisp, angry letters, Ben had written to say that he had applied for a hardship discharge from the army. As soon as it came through, he would come to Mission San José. But when would that be? How could we survive until he got there, and what could I do to help? Far from contributing to Mother and Anne-Marie's maintenance, I was just another mouth to feed, so I decided to follow the Mexican crop-pickers north and send every cent I could spare back to Mother. I promised her I would write often and come home as soon as the apple harvest was over, but down deep I knew that my decision to hit the road had as much to do with escape as with filial self-sacrifice.

Mother must have known it too because, when my last morning in Mission San José came, she didn't say good-bye. She just sat at the kitchen table staring into her coffee cup. I took the packet of sandwiches she had made for me and bent over to kiss her hair. She didn't look up. I patted her shoulder and left.

After tying off my bindle I stood on the front step of the shack and looked out at the sunburnt hills. I had told myself that I would follow the crops only until Ben came back from Alaska and we could pick up our lives again. But in fact something subtle but irremediable was already happening: the bonds were falling away; the epiphany I had experienced in the golden lamplight beneath the pewter clouds of Snyders Corners was nearing fulfillment. I knew with a sur-logical certitude that I soon would be adrift, a drifter and free. I closed my eyes and a wave of bone-deep relief flowed over me.

Anne-Marie came with me down the dirt track to the main road. We walked side by side, our heads down, our shoes kicking up little dust puffs.

“I told you,” she said without looking at me.

“Told me what?”

“I said you'd go away one of these days, and I'd be left behind.”

“I'm not leaving you behind. I'll be back in no time.”

She stopped and turned to me. She searched my eyes gravely. Then she smiled and shook her head.

I squeezed her hand and walked on. As I crested the hill I looked back, but Anne-Marie was no longer there.

And there's the story's natural closing image... the boy going down a patched tar road, walking out of childhood, into the rest of his life. But our lives are continuous and interwoven, and narrative fabric doesn't tear neatly; there are threads to tie off, curiosities to satisfy.

After Ben got mustered out, he and Mother tried to make a go of things in Mission San José, but in the end they had to let the land go for taxes. The 'ruptured duck' lapel pin that showed he was an ex-serviceman was of no use in getting work. For about two years, while defense factories re-tooled, the job market was flooded by people thrown out of work at the end of the war. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of returning veterans chasing the handful of jobs. The luckiest of these used their GI Bill loans for university or for technical training, and they emerged with qualifications for good jobs in the great consumer boom soon to begin. But Ben couldn't take off two or three years to go to college. He had Mother and Anne-Marie to care for, and it wasn't long before they had two sons of their own as well.

Mother never forgave Ben for squandering their money on that useless shack and scuttling her dream of success in Wyoming, any more than she forgave him for not being my smooth-talking, slick-dressing father. Despite his quick intelligence, his jack-of-all-trades skills and his willingness to work long and hard, Ben never managed to get ahead in life; in fact, he never quite managed to catch up. He chased scheme after scheme but he failed each time for lack of planning and capital, so they had to begin again at the bottom of the labor ladder until they managed to claw their way back out of debt and save up enough to launch themselves into another venture. By the time they ended up with a little subsistence farm on Puget Sound, their dreams had soured into bitterness, and communication had been replaced by the relentless guerrilla sniping of mutual recrimination.

One night, after years of adhering to his self-imposed rule of abstinence, Ben brought Mother to a New Year's Eve party with neighbors where, to be sociable, he drank two hot toddies. Just before dawn, he committed suicide. He was not yet fifty.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note69#note69” ??[69]?

My mother always viewed Ben's death as a desertion. She felt that he had run out on her, just as her first husband had... and her eldest son.

I met my father only once, twenty-four years after that day the three of us sat on the stoop and waited for him to come home bearing a green cake. We spent about three hours together in a grim tenement in South Philadelphia. He sat at a kitchen table breathing through a mask attached to an oxygen cylinder. He told me about his time with the carnivals, trying to impress me with the colorful and audacious scams he had run over the years. I'll never know how he got my address, but I had received a letter from him saying that he'd been released from prison early on compassionate grounds (he was dying of emphysema) and he wanted to see me before he went 'to work the great tip up yonder'. Curiosity had brought me across the United States on an Indian motorcycle manufactured in the year of my birth to meet this man whose absence had shaped my childhood. That, and the promise that if I came he would tell me tales the likes of which I'd never heard. As it turned out, I had heard most of his stories of scam and hustle because by then I had done a couple of seasons with the carnivals myself, and I knew the ways of a con with his mark. But some of his yarns had bitter, ironic twists, and there were details of scams and stings I wasn't familiar with, even a few old-fashioned carnie terms I didn't know. He hadn't anticipated that I might have been 'with it' myself, and he both resented this and was put off pace by it, as though I were trumping his ace by not being totally unacquainted with the world of con. It immediately became important to him to show me that he was the real carnie in this family and that, while I may have drifted with the shows for a couple of seasons, I was a mere 'forty-miler'... a mark at heart. After all, if this dying old wreck wasn't a better con man than the son he had abandoned, then what was he, for Christ's sake?

With considerable relish, he described a scam he had run during the war when, impersonating a federal officer, he had confiscated illegal slot machines in peaville towns in Colorado and New Mexico, then he would con the owner of the bar into loading the slot machine into his rented car as 'confiscated evidence'. (For the true con, inflicting a last humiliation on the mark, like making him grunt his slot machine into your car, is the cherry on the top of a genuinely satisfying scam... the last proof that the mark and the con don't descend from a common primates ancestor. In carnie parlance, this final humiliation is termed 'making the mark take his shoe off'.) Ray then drove out into the desert and broke the slot machine open with a sledge hammer... ideally one borrowed from the mark. The upshot of this scam was that Ray ended up with both the Feds and the Mob looking for him. And for what? For a little loose change and the thrill of the sting.