The Ivory Grin

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 pearlike 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 redbrick 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.