Why are you looking at me like that? she said.

And there she was again, before me with her warm, high-cheeked face tilted to one side in question, the fine throat rising out of the white blouse, brown, bepeached, as alive and expressive as any singing bird’s. She wore a small gold watch pinned to her waist and her napkin was tucked there and I said, I was dreaming. Did you realize that you make men dream?

Her mouth became a firm straight line beneath her smiling eyes.

You sitting here eating my fried chicken and can tell me you’re dreaming? And her head went back in girlish pout. You give me back my something-to-eat this very minute!

But it’s all part of the dream, I said. You and the blossoms and the lunch and the weather. All we need is some cold watermelon or perhaps some peach ice cream.

She arched her eyebrows and shook her head. Now just listen to him. Sounds like he wants everything. I can’t figure you out, Mister Movie-Man, she said.

What do you mean?

The way you talk sometimes. Once in a while you sound just like one of us and I can’t tell whether you mean it or just do it to make fun of me.

But you know I wouldn’t make fun of you. You know I wouldn’t. . . .

I hope not, she said, but you do sound like us once in a while, especially when you get that dreamy look on your face. . . .

I haven’t noticed, I said. I just talk as I feel.

Well, I guess you feel like us every once in a while, I mean. Can I ask you a question?

Anything at all, Miss Teasing Brown, I said.

She smiled and lowered her sandwich. Where’d you come from to here, Mister Movie-Man?

From different places back East, I said.

Oh, she said, I kinda thought so. . . .You not from Chicago?

Never been there, I said. And looking at her nibbling the sandwich, her soft eyes on my face, I thought of some of them. We had had a rough time, coming through all of that cloudburst of rain, and the unfriendly towns where the oil rigs pounded night and day, making the trip longer and our money shorter and shorter. Getting stuck in the mud here and having engine trouble there, the tires going twice and the top being split by hailstones the size of baseballs and almost losing all of the equipment off a shaky ferry when we crossed a creek in Missouri. Still, there was some luck with us—my luck or maybe Karp’s—I have always honored my luck—and we managed to keep the film and the equipment dry and the patches and the boots held on the tires until we reached her town. But on our way, moving through the Ozarks and the roads steep and rocky and having to push the car out of ruts and Karp complaining of ever having left the East and complaining, as we strained and sweated in the mud, against all the goy world and all our troubles were goy and our journey goy and goy our schemes. But then along the way Donelson goaded him on: Why the hell, Sweet Jesus, did you ever leave Egypt and all those spades? Why didn’t you stay and lay Pharaoh’s second-best daughter and make another Moses? Put your back into it, Jew boy. Act like a white man for once.

And having to step between them. . . What would she have made of it, the glamour she longed for locked in such grubby circumstance? Driving them as I was driven and some towns suspicious and others without the proper places to work and the people uninterested or the days without sun and the long hot stretches of green green green with no thoughts beyond continuing and little shade—Amen! Then back there in the town where in the hotel the whores were all so ladylike, with high-style airs and comic bitchery and the bellhops black—except for the fat, bald-headed, full-lipped captain, whose pale, milky skin was so dense with freckles that he looked like a white man who’d rusted in the rain three days after drowning. He had our number when we first walked in, though how much of it I couldn’t tell, but when I looked at him the spots seemed to detach themselves before my eyes and move to a tango rhythm across his broad expanse of face—da de dum dum—and back again. His eyes casing me as though to say, I know and you know that I know, so what are you going to do about it? I slipped him a five we couldn’t afford and I swear those spots returned each to its allotted place—muy pronto.

Thank you suh! he said. It’s awfully white of you.

He knew all right, and he knew someone important, too, selling white women and bootleg whiskey to the leading white citizens and the drummer trade and to a few not so leading black ones who slipped in unctuously wearing starched waiter’s jackets with the buttons missing. Yes, suh! and donating good sums of money to the Afro-American Episcopal Missionary Society and to a finishing school for young black upper-class ladies in Baltimore. He had it made all right, with certain complications of adjustment it’s true, but made. He could have taught us all. I kept away from him while we waited for sun and opportunity in that town in which he appeared to be the only one with a capacity for fantasy. Dominated by those high gray walls and the freedom of both those inside and out seemed to be measured in days marked off on the calendar. I’m number so-and-so and I know my time and knowing my time I know the who-what-why-wherefore of me. No dreams, please. Well, so much the worse for you. . . . We tried everyone from the Chamber of Commerce to the bootleggers and no one interested in backing us in bringing a little poetry to the town. We almost starved, broke and cooking beans in our room, patching and pressing with a secret iron borrowed from one of the girls until her pimp threatened Donelson. We left before dawn, half drunk and unwashed and our bills unpaid, slipping into the damp streets by the baggage entrance, past seven stacks of pulp magazines abandoned by the drummers—Argosy, Blue Book, Ace, and Golden Book being saved by the baggage man or the kids in his neighborhood—agent of cultural baggage—doing what he could to keep them reading, stopping on the outskirts of the town as the light grew and buying cheese and crackers in a lamplit general store where the men on the road gang bought their lunch. And near Holdenville getting those shots of the motorcycle circling the overflow embankment around the storage tank in the refinery yard, leaning toward the parallel and his eyes like set points of madness behind his goggles, bent low, close over the handlebars, roaring as though intent upon circling there forever. . . . MOVIE TYCOONS VISIT CITY was the headline and there we were looking out from page 1, my arms across their shoulders and all three looking dashing and devil-may-care, each with goggles on forehead and each with an air of potency, mystery. The camera in the foreground. It made it easy and I kept things simple, a pageant dedicated to the founding of the town with all the old-timers parading past the camera on horseback, or in buck-boards, then sitting before the courthouse in funeral-parlor chairs and an Indian or two in the background. Shot everything from low angles to make them tall and imposing, and the fire engines I made a half-block long. Holdenville, yes, the weather was fine and Holdenville couldn’t hold us. No, but what we made there was lost in Ponca City. Roustabouts, Indians, a thousand and one ranch hands, and Wild Bill Tillman in the flesh in a white suit and white Stetson and astride a white horse every hour of every day in the streets. Yes, but in the middle of a roaring circus who has time for silent scenes? Donelson went wild in the town, getting hot on the dice and winning a thousand then losing our stake before they cooled him off. Then when he asked to see the dice they threw him into the street. There was hardly enough money for gas then Karp to the rescue, found a cousin who helped us on our way. And what a cousin, walking around in a blanket, a bullet-smashed derby, and a necklace of rattlesnake buttons, selling snake oil and mustard plasters. Morris, the Osage Indian Jew, of whom Karp disapproved. Listen, Morris said, here there’s no minyan in fifty miles so what if I temporarily joined another tribe? And let me tell you something, wise guy: I been scalped like the best of them!