T. Parker: California Girl

“Sad,” he said.

“I already thought of that, too.”

“I’m trying to write, Beth.”

“But all you can think about is Meredith.”

He looked up. Beth’s unpredictable and direct assaults always caught him off guard.

“I don’t care if you don’t like her,” he said.

“Name one intelligent thing she ever said.”

The Linotype roared into action in the basement. Andy felt the vibrations and heard the rattle of the Royal’s ribbon spool.

“She read Les Misérables in French and wrote a paper on it.”

“And the paper was in French, too?”

“Yes. It was good.”

Beth was quiet for a while. She typed furiously, stopped, then typed furiously again. Andy was always amazed at how fast she could type with hardly any strikeovers.

Beth ripped the paper and carbon from the platen, straight up so it would make lots of noise but not tear. From the corner of his eye he saw her place the original in one tray and the copy in another.

“She’ll be fat someday, like her mother.”

“I don’t care.”

“You’re sickening, Andy. When it comes to her.”

He shrugged, felt the cool spot down in his pants, but didn’t look up. Thought of Carol Thornton’s calves, the alarming bigness with which they disappeared into her skirts. And her arms above the elbows. Meredith looked nothing like that.

Andy found Gunnar downstairs working the Blue Streak, setting the week’s editorial. The room smelled of hot metal and machine oil. Gunnar was a small, pointy-toothed Swede with fingers blackened by decades of typesetting and printing the Tustin Times. Andy thought that Gunnar looked old and somehow permanent sitting before the big machine. He’d seen Gunnar, sitting right here, almost every week since getting a paperboy’s route five years ago. When he had just turned thirteen.

Andy watched him touch the keyboard, then saw the brass letter molds drop from the magazine to the travel belt on their way to the holder. Then the spacebands falling into place at Gunnar’s deft, strong strokes.

Gunnar swiveled out of his chair, crouched across the room, and locked the door. Then to his desk where he removed a bottle of vodka and two small glasses. He poured them half full and gave one to Andy.

They clicked the bottoms and sipped. “Andy, I liked the Garcia story,” he said. “He was a mean old man but you made him tolerable.”

“Thanks,” said Andy. He’d been worried about the Garcia obit, wondering if he’d gotten enough truth into it. “Maybe a little heavy on the creative writing.”

“You know, he advertised with us for twenty years, always paid his bills. We can afford to let you polish him up.”

Andy nodded and sipped more vodka. His father and mother were liberal drinkers and Andy felt at ease with the stuff, like it was natural for him to drink it. Actually liked the flavor. Never felt thick or out of control. Just stabilized. With a slightly lower center of gravity. Sometimes a little goofy. Though J. J. Overholt, the Times publisher, would fire them both in a heartbeat if he walked in on this. Overholt didn’t drink.

“Nixon was in again yesterday, talking with J.J.,” said Gunnar.

“Amazing that the vice president of the United States has time for the Tustin Times,” said Andy.

“He wants to be president. Badly. He’ll do anything.”

“Stoltz with him?” Andy asked. “Stoltz is the guy who’s going to be president.”

“No, no. Stoltz just wants to make money and fight Communists.”

“Stoltz got Nixon this far,” Andy said with conviction.

Andy wanted to know things. He read the Los Angeles Times and the Santa Ana Register and every magazine he could get his hands on. Listened to the L.A. radio news while he did his homework. Liked the politics. Thought he was getting to know the way things worked.

“No, no he didn’t,” said Gunnar. He smiled his pointed smile. “He just wrote some speeches for him during Ike’s campaign. Nixon will court the extreme right wing privately, but he can’t afford to be seen with them. If you know what I mean.”

Andy thought about this, sipped more vodka. The Linotype machine cycled through, fresh slugs cooling in the bin. Andy looked at the hard lines of type, wondered again how Gunnar could read so well backwards. Gunnar would catch mistakes the editors didn’t see. Things even Overholt missed. Collected a quarter each for them, which kept his secret bottle full. The amazing part was that when he was done with all the physical and mental effort of setting type, Gunnar ran the press, too.

Upstairs Beth pounded on her Royal. Sounded like a machine gun. Gunnar looked up, shook his head, and smiled.

Then his smile subsided and he locked his cool gray eyes on Andy. “You haven’t heard about Alma Vonn?”

Andy waited.

“Killed herself with gin and rat poison. Dead when the girls came home from school today.”

Andy thought of flying through the air and into Lenny Vonn six years ago. Of the blood running down Casey’s face, of the girls on the tracks by the packinghouse. He remembered how shabby the Vonn house had been and he remembered his father saying later that trouble had chased the Vonns to California and trouble would probably find them here again. He could still picture how tightly Alma Vonn’s hair was pulled back that night. He’d seen her since then, peddling his J. C. Higgins past their house on his paper route. The Vonns had never subscribed. And Alma Vonn had looked at him plenty of times but never once shown him any recognition.

“I’ve never written a suicide obit,” Andy said.

“Some papers admit the suicide, and some cover it up,” said Gunnar. “J.J. decides for us. If the person wasn’t noteworthy, J.J.’ll usually just leave out the suicide part.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Andy raised his glass and finished off the vodka. Wondered if J. J. Overholt and the Vonn girls might have different ideas about who was noteworthy.

Gunnar finished his, too, and collected Andy’s glass. “Did you like The Dwarf?” He’d loaned Andy the book a month ago.

Andy had grown up believing that written words were to be respected. That some were even sacred. An enthusiasm for words was in his blood but he didn’t know how it got there. The Beckers had a big bookshelf in the living room but his mother and father had never talked directly about writing. It was just something natural, like his taste for alcohol or his limitless desire for Meredith Thornton.

“It was great, Gunnar.”

Gunnar smiled, pointed teeth in a lined and somewhat wicked old face. “I knew you would like it.”

AFTER BURGERS Andy parked on the street and took Meredith into the little orange grove not far from her house. The night had cooled sharply and she wore her long red overcoat. They came to their clearing and Andy spread the blanket. He lay down first, then Meredith arranged herself next to him with a kind of gentle formality. They could see the house lights of Tustin scattered below, and the black acres of the groves.

“I really like you, Andy.”

“I like you, too.”

“It’s nice to be up here with you.”

A meteor with a tail sailed across the sky, left to right, the tail dissolving behind it. Then another, in the opposite direction. Some were just short flashes, like sparks.

Andy watched the meteors drop and skate through the darkness, thought of Alma Vonn and her daughters. Wondered how it had happened, who had walked into the bedroom, had she knocked? Or maybe Mrs. Vonn was in the bathroom or the garage. How old were those girls-ten, twelve? He wondered what type of rat poison it was, where she’d gotten it, how much of it she’d taken. When did she decide to do it? What was she wearing? Anything playing on the radio? Was it painful? Did she turn a color? Did she regret it? What finally made her do it? Did a vision or some review of her life take place?