“Don’t waste your good looks like a rose in a mudpit” was how her mother put it. Finish school, she told Belle, and then grab the first chance that came along to get away from the stink and grime of oil-town life.
Her daddy himself had been killed in the fields a year ago, gassed to death, him and eight others, by a leak at one of the rigs. They’d brought the bodies into town and laid them all in a row and every man of them had a bright red face and huge eyeballs and their bulging tongues were black. She hated that she still couldn’t get that picture of him out of her head. He didn’t leave any money so they’d had to move in with his brother Lyle and sickly wife Jean. To help with expenses Belle got a job at a bakery that specialized in fruitcakes. Her mother didn’t do much of anything for a couple of months except sleep or sit at the window and stare out at the derricks, and then finally took a job as a waitress at a hotel restaurant.
For a time everything went all right, then her mother started going with a waitress friend to speakeasy parties after work. She sometimes didn’t come home till dawn. Uncle Lyle pleaded with her to no effect. She told Belle not to worry, she was only having a little fun. It was like that for weeks and weeks. And then four months ago a policeman showed up at the door late one night. Her mother and some salesman from Waco had kicked up their heels for a while in a couple of speakeasies and then gone speeding off in the man’s coupe. A few miles outside of town they’d crashed into a tree and were killed. Belle’s mother was at the wheel.
For weeks afterward she felt like she was going around in a kind of trance. School lost the small pleasure it had held for her and she quit going. She stayed with her job because it didn’t require much concentration and she could pass the days in the hum and whirr of the batter machines.
The problem was at night, when she’d lie in the dark and feel more alone than she’d ever imagined it was possible to feel. Her boyfriend, Billy Jameson—the only boy she’d ever “been with,” as she put it—had got in trouble for breaking into a grocery store and left town without even saying goodbye. And her only two girlfriends had recently moved away with their daddies to some new oil boom in Oklahoma. She got along with her aunt and uncle, but in truth they were little more than strangers to her, and they anyway had their own troubles, what with her aunt now bedridden. The only relief she could find from her loneliness was at the movies. She began going every night. She loved sitting in the dark and getting swept into the stories on the screen, into the daring adventures and grand romances.
And then one night about three weeks ago, as she came out of the moviehouse, she was approached by a pair of well-dressed men who politely introduced themselves as Mr. Benton and Mr. Young. She’d noticed them outside the theater the night before and had felt herself blush when one of them nudged the other and nodded at her. They said they were talent scouts for a Hollywood producer who was sending them to towns all over America in search of fresh new faces. They thought she might be one. Would her parents give permission for her to go to Austin—all expenses paid, of course—to take a screen test?
I saw a look pass between Buck and Russell and knew what they were thinking. We’d heard stories of girls getting conned by guys passing themselves off as bigtime talent scouts. It was fairly easy to do, since singing contests and movie star look-alike competitions were popular entertainments all over the country, and it seemed like every couple of weeks there was another story in the papers of a smalltown girl being discovered and whisked off to New York to sing on the radio or taken to Hollywood by a movie producer who’d been passing through. Charlie had told me that a cousin of hers won twenty-five dollars for finishing third in a Mary Pickford look-alike contest in Baton Rouge.
The offer was so unexpected that Belle couldn’t think of what to say except no, thank you. All right, the men said, but in case she should change her mind they gave her a few forms for her parents to sign. They were on their way to Dallas to meet with some other scouts and would then take their talent search into a few more towns in the region before coming back through Corsicana. If she changed her mind, all she had to do was be at the station in exactly two weeks when the Dallas southbound made its daily stop.
She made up her mind before the next sunrise, reminding herself of her mother’s urging to get out of Corsicana at the first chance. She was scared, of course—she didn’t know these men from Cain and Abel—but who knew when, if ever again, she’d have another chance to make her getaway? Over the next thirteen days and nights she bit her nails raw, afraid the men might not come back.
But they did. She met them at the station, suitcase in one hand, forged papers in the other. They had another pretty girl with them, Gladys Somebody from Waxahachie. She and Belle hit it off and talked about how swell it’d feel to be a movie star someday.
They changed trains three times before finally arriving in Austin, but they didn’t get off there, after all. Instead they were joined by yet another girl—Lucy Somebody. Change of plan, the men told Belle and Gladys. The producer had decided to hold the screen tests in San Antonio. If either Belle or Gladys wanted to return home rather than go to San Antone with them, just say so and they’d be on the next train back. Neither Belle nor Gladys wanted that. How about calling home to tell the folks about the change in plan? Neither Belle nor Gladys felt the need to do that either.
“They knew you wouldn’t,” Russell said. “They’d already checked to see if either of you had any family that might be a problem. Asking did you want to call home about going to San Antonio was the last check to be sure.” Buck stared out the window and nodded.
When the train got to San Antonio, Benton and Young took them to supper at a nice restaurant and then checked them into a hotel—the Travis. She and Gladys shared a room, and they figured Lucy must’ve been given a room of her own. She never did see Lucy again.
After breakfast the next morning they went to a room on the third floor that had been made into a sort of studio, with a camera set up in the living room to take what they called portfolio stills, and a movie camera in the other room for the screen tests. The windows were kept draped so the lighting would be consistent in all the pictures. There was a closet full of clothes of all kinds and sizes, and Young took a series of pictures of her and Gladys in turn wearing different outfits. He said they were naturals, the camera loved them. It was fun and she was enjoying herself. Then Benton brought lunch up to the room, sandwiches and a pitcher of ice-cold fruit juice.
“It’s hard to remember things real clear after that,” she said. And started crying again.
“The old Mickey Finn,” Buck said. “In the Quarter one time a guy I knew was having trouble getting past first base with this girl. One night I run into them as they’re coming out of a speak and the girl’s smiling and all shitfaced and the guy’s grinning like tonight’s the night. She’d always said no to more than one drink, see, but I thought he’d finally figured some way to get her soused. Then she gives me a sloppy kiss hello and her breath didn’t smell of booze, it smelled like this girl’s did last night. Few days later the guy tells me she only had the one drink but he’d slipped a mickey in it. Worked like a damn charm, he said. A sweet drink’ll hide the taste at the time but you sure breathe it out afterward.”