VII (April Showers, Girls and Sours)

“Hey, mister!” Carla called from the alleyway as the man stepped out the side door of the shop.

The aproned clerk looked up from his broom.  “Whatcha want, kiddo?”

Carla stepped forward, clutching her cap in her hands, and turned big, earnest eyes on him.  “Please, mister, ain’t there anythin’ I can help out with?” If she lowered the pitch of her voice just slightly, Carla knew that she sounded like a boy whose voice had not yet broken.  “Anythin’ at all?  I got no money, but we’re needin’ groceries real bad at home.  I’m a top-notch assistant and willin’ t’work hard.  Please, mister?”

“Well...” the clerk looked down at his broom and then handed it to Carl.  “Here take this, I guess.  There’s not much you can do round here, but sweep up real good, kid, and I’ll find something for you to do, boxes to break down and the like.  What do you folks need at home?”

“Really?  Gee, thanks, mister!  Ma says she been achin’ for some coffee and were runnin’ low on toothpaste and...”

A few hours later, Carla left the grocery store, carrying a paper bag of supplies as she walked to the Apollo City Hotel, where she and Nick were staying.  The sky had darkened while she’d been working, and it looked like they were in for a spell of rain.  She quickened her step, not wanting to be caught outside without an umbrella.  Carla’s thoughts were distracted with Belleville and Mrs. Randal, both of which she missed nearly as much as she did her siblings back home.  Nick had warned her when they started traveling together that they couldn’t ever stay in one place for long, that they must always be on the lookout for the next opportunity.  This was the life of the drifter, after all, and Carla knew that he was right.  They had to keep moving.  Besides, it would have been an abuse of the old woman’s kindness to stay any longer.  But at least they’d repaid Mrs. Randal somewhat before parting—not only by painting her house and doing general yard work, but also by stuffing some of their music earnings into the well-hidden coffee can that the woman used for her savings.

Since Belleville, the two had passed through several cities and over into the next state entirely, working the various gigs for whatever pay was to be had.  Word was getting around about the young duo—the playful guitarist with the face of an angel but a devil’s grin, who could make up a song off the top of his head, and the silent pianist boy whose lively playing could set any piano on fire.

About a block away from the hotel Carla’s musing was disrupted by a large, fat raindrop, which plunked down wetly on her shoulder, followed by another and another.  She looked up at the sky just as the rain came pouring down and broke into a mad dash home, hoping to save her bag of groceries.  The last thing she needed was to have all the little packages of food provisions she’d worked so hard for get soaked.  Once she was safely sheltered in the lobby, Carla stamped her feet on the entry mat and checked that all of the food was fine.  A packet of soda crackers had gotten a bit smashed but otherwise her things were all right.

When Carla got to the front desk, the elderly clerk greeted her with, “Quite a shower out there, eh?”  Carla only responded with a thin smile and the clerk realized, “Oh, you’re the mute lad, ain’t ya?  Well, as I was sayin’, it’s pouring like from a big bucket out there.  Looks like you got indoors just in time, eh?  At least April showers bring May flowers ‘cause we sure do need some flowers around here.  If Treno this ain’t the grayest most somber city I ever been in, then I don’t know where is.  Some call Chicago pretty gray but them folks ain’t never been to...”  Carla stood there awkwardly as the old man rattled on, when finally he said, “Here now, you and that other fellow are in room 308, right?  Got some mail for you.”

He handed over a slim enveloped addressed to “C. Miner” in handwriting that Carla recognized as her mother’s.  She wanted to hurry off and read the letter, but the elderly man stopped her.  Afraid that he wanted to keep chatting, Carla hung back hesitantly.  But all the clerk said was “Buy a newspaper, lad?  Only two cents, and it’s got the latest story about the Lindbergh kidnapping, sad story that one.  They call it ‘The Crime of the Century,’ you know.”  Carla fished two pennies out of her pocket and handed them over before the clerk could started chatting again, grabbed the newspaper, and headed for the elevator.

Juggling the paper and bag of groceries, she tore open the letter from her mother excitedly and began to read in the elevator on her way up to the third-floor room she and Nick currently inhabited.  There was no mention in the message of whether her step-father Paul had found a job yet, but there were plenty of details on the latest hijinks of her little brothers and sisters.  Carla read the letter twice and then clutched it to her breast, smiling gently. How she cherished this link to her home!

The idea of writing her mother she’d gotten from Nick and Mrs. Randal, of course.  If they could keep in touch with letters and telegrams, then why not Carla and her family?  She had sent the first telegram, uncertain of whether or not there’d be a reply, but wiring along a bit of her income for the support of her younger siblings had helped to make her mother a gracious correspondent.  Money talked, and in these days it went a long way.

“Hey, open up,” Carla called when she reached her and Nick’s hotel door.  She had to stuff her letter into the grocery bag to free a hand for knocking.  “Nick, you in there?”

No answer.  Carla set down the paper bag, searched through her pockets for the room key, and let herself in.  There was a note waiting on the double bed.

Carl.  Went out to mingle a bit.  Worked some more on a song.  Check it out, will ya?  Don’t wait up for me.  – Nick.

“Figures,” she muttered, balling up the paper and tossing it in the trash.  She couldn’t exactly blame Nick for not inviting her along.  After all, it was hard to make small talk with the natives as a mute.  The problem was that he’d called her Carl again, which irked Carla in a way that she didn’t know quite how to explain to him—so he kept on doing it, oblivious.  Nick still didn’t trust Carla not to reveal the fact that she was actually a girl, except when she went out to do odd jobs at grocery stores and the like, so they’d kept up the pretense that she couldn’t speak.  Sure, Carla could understand that it was necessary for their cover, but Nick had gotten so into the habit that he called her Carl even when she was in “girl mode,” as he dubbed it.

“Girl mode” was when Carla, tired of dressing as a dusty, dirty boy all the time put on one of the two dresses she hadn’t pawned off, which she kept tucked away in the bottom of her knapsack along with a pair of pantyhose and a few modest hair barrettes.  She had also kept a pair of pink satin harem slippers, prettily decorated with rhinestones and bits of lace, which Nick teased her about endlessly.  “You should’ve sold them, you can’t wear those!” he’d laughed.  “They would be worn clean through after just one day out on the road.”  But Carla kept them anyway for a touch of femininity when Nick drove her up the wall calling her Carl, Carl, Carl and as a reminder of the days when she’d had a father who loved her and would buy her pretty things.

After putting her letter aside to be answered later, the paper on the desk to be read, and the supplies from the grocery store away in their places, Carla reached for Nick’s guitar on the side of the bed.  There was a sheet of paper there beside it, and it contained some lyrics and chords for one of Nick’s new songs.  Carla had heard him playing it earlier and hummed the melody, trying to pick out a few lines on the guitar.  She was learning to play slowly.  Before they’d left Belleville Mrs. Randal had started to teach her, and since then Nick had taken over the lessons.

“It’s got a catchy tune,” Carla admitted after strumming through a few chords.  She continued humming it as she returned the guitar to its place then went about the bare hotel room, tidying up their home.  It wasn’t late yet, but Carla wondered whether Nick would indeed be out so late that she needn’t wait for him, as he’d written.  She hoped that he had an umbrella because the rain was indeed a true April shower that would soak him to the bone.

Eventually Carla decided to eat a light cold supper and browse the paper.  The Lindbergh kidnapping, which received a full cover-page spread, was the heartbreaking story of American hero Aviator Charles Lindbergh, the very one who’d flown all the way from New York to Paris, whose infant son had been kidnapped from his New Jersey home.  The baby was still missing and the reward for returning little Charles Jr. home to his family had reached a dizzying $75,000!  Carla could not even begin to imagine such a huge sum of money, but if anything like that were to happen to one of her little brothers or sisters, she knew that she would pay any amount to get them back.

After dinner Carla did laundry, washing her clothes in the bathtub, before settling down at the desk to reply to the note from her mother.

Dear Mom,

Got your last letter and I’m glad to hear that things are great at home, or at least as great as they can be anyway...

She stopped there, wondering what to write about.  She couldn’t talk about Nick because her mother had no clue about Carla’s current lifestyle and traveling companion, and she couldn’t ask about Paul, though she really wanted to, because her mother’s reply would be cold and reserved.  She sighed.  As usual, they would stick to safe topics like the weather and her siblings.  Before Carla could touch her pen to the paper again, however, there came the sound of a key turning in the lock.  She heard a young woman’s giggle.

“Oh, you’re so funny!” cried the first person to walk into the room, a female about Carla’s age.  The lady was dressed for a night out, wearing flashy high heels with metallic stitching and white gloves up to her elbows.  She was trying to dash drops of water from her fashionable Hollywood-style wave of loose curls, and the beaded capelet about her shoulders was lightly rain-soaked.  “I don’t know how we ever—” she stopped abruptly, seeing Carla at the writing desk.  “Oh.  Who’s this?”

“That’s my buddy Carl, the mute one I mentioned to you earlier,” Nick entered the room behind her.  “That means he can’t talk so don’t try getting a response outta him, honey.  Carl, this is Patricia.  I met her down at the café.”

“Stole me away from my friends is what he did.  We were having just a grand old time when this charming fellow strolled in and charmed me off my feet.  The girls were terribly sad that I had to go.  Anyhow, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Carl-darling.”  Patricia held out her gloved hand daintily for Carla to shake.  “Nicky here’s been a real sweetheart, said he would show me some of his music.”

“Yup, so don’t mind us, Carl.  We’ll try not to bother you.”

“Oh, but first,” Patricia fished around in her little purse and pulled out a few wrapped candies, “would you fancy a sour?”

“Carl’s seventeen, not ten year’s old,” Nick reminded her, but Patricia insisted.  Carla stuck out her hand awkwardly and accepted the candies, which the young woman dropped into her palm.  Nodding her thanks, Carla turned back to her letter except now she couldn’t concentrate.  Patricia was one of those pretty types that Nick always seemed to run into, no matter where they went.  Her face was powdered, her lips rouged, and she wore dangly earrings that swayed when she tittered at Nick’s jokes.  Carla could hear them behind her, sitting on the bed and chatting amiably.  

“Well, my little brothers always enjoy when I give them sours; I don’t see why Carl wouldn’t, as well.  All boys like sours.  Besides,” Patricia’s voice dropped to a whisper, “your friend’s kinda a runt; he doesn’t even have any facial hair.  Are you sure he’s seventeen?”

Nick laughed and hastily began strumming his guitar, asking the young lady to pick a song in order to change the subject.  He substituted words as he sang, changing some of the lines to include Patricia’s name.  This made her giggle, and even though Carla tried to block them from her concentration, after a few songs she heard a thump as the guitar was put off to the side.  She gripped her pen tightly at the hushed murmurs behind her, and after that the two fell silent, their words replaced with the smacking sound of lips joined together.

Get a grip and just ignore them, Carla told herself, unwrapping a sour candy and jamming it into her mouth.  The tartness made her lips pucker and her eyes water, yet it only distracted her for a moment before her attention was drawn back to the situation behind her.  She tried closing her eyes to faze Nick and Patricia out, but a vision of them going at each other beat incessantly into Carla’s mind.  Their kissing intensified; she could hear them heavily breathing, the ruffle of hands moving along clothes, the moans as bodies pressed up against each other.  She shut her eyes more tightly, but the image only became extra vivid in her imagination.

Carla stood up suddenly, unable to bear it, and left the room taking care not to slam the door as she would have liked.  She took her stationary and pen with her, sighing to herself over the two who barely registered her presence—much less her departure.  Argh! It’s like I don’t even exist! Carla fumed in the hallway, chomping down angrily on the sour in her mouth.  It broke with a satisfying crack.

“Maybe in Nick’s eyes I don’t,” she said, irritated, “not as a girl, anyway.”  Carla sat down with her back to the hotel door, knees propped up to balance the writing pad with the letter to her mother.  Why am I so upset?  It’s not like he’s ever mean to me... I just dislike being treated like a throw rug is all.

“‘We’ll try not to bother you,’” she repeated, bowing her head to the paper at her knees.  The letter sat there, unfinished; Carla couldn’t bring herself to finish it.  Her mind was occupied with the goings-on inside the hotel room.  She couldn’t hear a thing through the door but wondered whether she’d have to reconsider sleeping in that bed tonight.  If she tried to write a letter now, it would probably come out like:  “Dear Mom, I travel around the country with a guy who treats me like a boy and calls me ‘Carl,’ and now he’s frenching in our hotel room with some beautiful girl he just met and it’s awful.  P.S. I chopped off all my hair for money.”

Without warning the door was pulled open, and Carla fell backwards before she could stop herself.  Looking up, she saw a pair of bare feet as Patricia stalked out of the room and stopped in the hallway to sneer at her.  “That friend of yours is a real cad,” the young woman declared.  “I don’t know how you can stand him.”

Carla wrote a large question mark on her notepad and held it up to the girl.  “Humph!” was all she got in reply.  With her nose in the air, Patricia marched down the hallway, struggling to pull on her pumps and walk away at the same time.

“Ca—rl!” From inside the room, Nick’s anguished cry somehow managed to make the name sound like two syllables.

“What happened?” Carla walked in and set her letter on the desk.  She saw that the bed sheets were slightly rumpled and Nick stood in the doorway to the bathroom with his shirt unbuttoned and his hair messy.

He brandished a pair of nylons at her and shook them in her face.  “Your laundry.  Patricia went into the bathroom to freshen up and saw the clothes drying.  You left your girl things out, Carl.  Pantyhose.  Pantyhose!!! She thought that another girl had already been in here with me!"

Carla burst out laughing but somehow her companion failed to see the humor in the situation.