Chapter 19 Home in Italy
Musical Theme; Abandoned Garden by Michael Franks
Will collected Sassie, Glenn, Jennie, Poquita, Karl, Marcie, Chrissie, Father James and May and took them to dinner. They chose their own table in a local restaurant. Will looked at May. “Don’t you try to be inconspicuous, May. You are just as good as anyone here, including me. Did you see our shoot, what did you think?”
“I didn’t see. I was cleaning.”
“You work for me, not some oppressor.”
“I was working, Will.”
Poquita said “Will, some day you will retire. She will need to have another job, and she will need to act like maids do. Same as me. I know my job is only good for a few more years, and you won’t need a secretary.” Tears welled up in her eyes.
“Poquita, you’re not leaving when I retire, unless you want to.”
Will didn’t mention that if he and Chrissie predeceased Poquita, she would receive a little bit of Aurora and Phillipa stock. Not a lot of course.
Sassie said, “I was not ready for what I saw in the photo shoots. Jennie was good, and I saw how you directed her. But Marcie! I know now why she is the world’s top model. She does two poses in two seconds and you shoot them both.”
“She knows I am fast. We have worked together before.”
“She’s awesome.”
“Thanks, Sassie. Something we want to get on video is just what you just said so well. We want you to make the movies that show girls how to do this. When you have Wild Bill shooting, you move very fast. If it’s someone ordinary, then a little slower. Some photographers want to direct every shot, and some direct when you’re not making good images. Some direct when they should shut up and let the model give them the images. Models need to understand that even if he’s wrong, you have to let him run the show. He sees what you don’t.”
“Get your video cam out.”
Sassie fiddled around.
“While you fumble with your equipment, let me tell you a Will story.”
“Not at dinner, Marcie.”
“Sassie, Will and I were in a car in Chicago. We were held up because there was someone on a roof threatening to jump. He opened the car door, pulled a camera out from his shirt, and got a pic of her going over the side. 17 stories. Poquita, what did he get for that pic?”
“Nineteen thousand four hundred eighty five dollars and forty six cents. From UPI”
“Girl, you are a photographer, and you take pictures like that, which are in Will’s nightmares, or you are not a photographer, and you carry your camera so that you can’t pull it out as fast as Doc Holliday. Show her your piece, Will.”
Will pulled the .357 and put it away.
“Do you have a license for that?”
Will showed her his Carabiniere ID.
“Who are you guys actually?”
“Just a photographer, his wife, a model, some friends.”
Dinner came, and they started in on their salad. Marcie must have been hungry, because she ate a whole leaf of lettuce.
Sassie gave Will a hard look. “Will, I’m not going to ask questions you are not going to answer.”
“That will save time.”
“But this thing about being ready to film.”
“Go, Marcie.”
Marcie and Will jumped out of the booth. Marcie did a lighting series of poses, and Will took about 50 shots in not even a minute. They sat down and went to dinner, Marcie even eating a whole slice of tomato.
“Sassie, you can miss a lot of good stuff fast.”
“You want to put me down. Well, I don’t need you.” She stood up.
“We’re teaching you, but if you don’t want to learn, Marcie will put you on one of her birdies.”
“You’re firing me?”
“No. I’m asking you to cowgirl up.” He started in on a slice of pizza.
Father James said, “He is trying to tell you that a videographer needs to be ready to shoot whatever happens, any time. Modern history belongs to you. If you miss it, it’s lost forever. They did that to make a point, not to put you down.”
Sassie held up her hand. “I’ve got it. You told Marcie somehow, and she knew what you wanted to do.”
“I didn’t tell her anything. She knew what I was going to do. I knew what she was going to do. That’s going to be something for you and I to work out as well. You’ll need to know where to be. Mostly on my six, but probably not quite.”
“Your six?”
“Where you are facing is your 12 o’clock. You imagine a clock dial on the ground. So my nine is to my left, my three is to my right. That’s the danger zone. When quail run around playing, I may need to turn to get the Kodak moment. I won’t have time to push you out of the way, so you have to not be in the way.”
“You’re going to push me out of the way to get a shot?”
“When we’re shooting, it’s real intense. We’re not going to change because you are here. You are here to document what we really do, not some phony crap.”
The waitress came and took dinner orders. She also brought bread and butter. Jennie ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a pasta salad.
Will shook his head. “Ma’am, would you add a lobster to her order?”
“Certainly. Does anyone want another drink before dinner?”
Father James touched his wine glass, and she nodded. Several others wanted another. Jennie wanted a drink, but a perusal of her passport and work permit indicated that it would not be possible.
“What would you drink anyway, if you could?”
“The best thing there is, Coke and Bacardi.”
“Ma’am she will have a large Coke. I’d like to add about 3 ounces of Bacardi 151, but she is underage.”
The waitress was back soon with the drink order. She exchanged a smile with Jennie when Jennie tasted her Coke. It’s one of those things, that a bartender can think he heard ‘Rum and Coke’ when he was supposed to pour a Coke, is all. Mistakes happen.
The main course came, with lots of artichokes.
Chrissie said, “We don’t have any artichokes, Will?”
“We do, but they are old. We have some ground that Carlos thinks is good for them. So we will have him rip an acre with his cat, and we divide our artichokes. We might buy some new ones, too. We will sell some, probably right here, and give a lot away.”
Will’s phone rang. “Will. Eating dinner with some friends. Oh, I forgot that. Well it’s no surprise, but nice to know for sure. Great, Steve. The fishes and the tanks are mine, but you can keep them there. Quint and I will eventually ask to sell them or something. If the feeding directions aren’t there, Poquita knows what they are. OK, thanks for calling. Don’t be late to his court.”
“Well, guys, it’s a done deal. Steve has been elected DA, not to surprise anyone too much.”
Chrissie said, “Anyone running against him would be running against you. Nobody who had any sense would run. Just a few fools who probably got one percent of the vote each.”
“That’s about what happened. Poquita, where is Quint?”
“Oregon. Taking care of unfinished fish business. Now that you’re telling me this job is long term, we might sell out in Oregon. Depends on work permits and all, I guess.”
“I know I can get you a permanent visa. I don’t know about legal restrictions, if he can start an aquaria business here, but I think he can.”
Poquita said “Well, Jennie got a work permit.”
“Poquita, come out front with me. I have something to show you. We’ll be right back.”
They went out the front door to the sidewalk. “Poquita, she worked her way over here on a freighter. She didn’t even have shoes when she got here. What do you think she did to get a work permit and a passport?”
“Oh.”
“Don’t ask her what the law is. She doesn’t know. I’ll get a lawyer to work this crap out. I don’t know the rules either. You know that I got you a visa and a work permit. You don’t know how, do you?”
“No. I suppose, though, you didn’t fill out an application and stand in line.”
“I didn’t do that. So you see, I don’t know the rules either. I ask for things, and I get them, and nobody tells me how it works, and I don’t care or want to know, either. We’ll hire a lawyer and do the thing the usual way, and Quint can file an application, get a corporation formed and all that. If there is a problem I will ask someone who doesn’t exist to help me out.”
They went back inside.
Chrissie moved in on the silence. “We should have a covey here in about a week. Jennie will be able to clue them in a little bit. May told me the brick barn back there has a bathroom in it, and she thinks we can make it into a kind of sorority house for the girls, and that will knock out some hotel bills and travel time.”
“That’s great. Thank you, May, for thinking that out for us. Are we going to need help to get some cots or beds or something in there and clean it up?”
“My brother can help. We can get bunk beds from a place in the city. They are not nice, they came from a prison. But we can put new mattresses on them. We can pressure wash them before we bring them in. Poquita only needs your permission to buy this all.”
“If you and Poquita think you have the best choice, then you can do it. See if it’s practical to put curtains around them so the girls can have privacy.”
“I think it will be. My brother is a welder, so he can put some curtain rods on very easily. My mother will tell you what it would cost to make the curtains.”
“Do you girls know how many of these would fit in there?”
“12”
“So 24 beds, then?”
“Right.”
“Buy 12 then.”
They went back to eating. Jennie liked the lobster.
Will said, “Marcie, can you get Jennie going on weight lifting? I think she would look a lot better a little toned up.”
“Sure.”
Marcie worked out with weights no bigger than the sinkers you would use fishing the deep reefs in the ocean. You could tell pretty easily what was whose in the weight room. Chrome plated itty bitty dumbbells, that would be Marcie. The neatly arranged small dumbbells, that would be Chrissie. The mess of massive rusted iron, Olympic barbells and crap in the corner, that would be Will.
Will wanted Jennie to eat better and get some strength going, but he was wary of saying anything that might make her feel inadequate. He wanted to keep her away from pasta, which he considered the curse of Italian cooking. Starch with all the vitamins removed by bleaching the grain.
“Marcie, Chrissie, we are going to need to do something about how the covey eats. We have to keep them away from the high pasta intake. An infantryman who humps the boonies for 12 hours a day, a pro football player, a marathon runner, those guys can eat lots of junk food and burn it off. I’ve heard models talk about things like going on a popcorn and Coca Cola diet to lose weight. A Coke and Bacardi before dinner isn’t a problem, but Coke for dinner, with starch to go with it, that is not so good.”
Sassie asked, “Should I be filming this?”
“Is it something we are trying to teach future models?”
“Yes.”
“What are we making the video for?”
She took out the camera and started filming him.
“Marcie doesn’t eat junk food. She works out with weights. She is not very big, but she is pretty strong for her size. She keeps her weight down by exercise. Eating a few eggs and tuna fish are not going to make a model fat. High fat foods and starches like white bread might. Say a girl weighs 120. She starts pumping iron and eating well, riding a bike, hiking, that sort of thing. She could maybe lose 10 pounds of fat and gain 15 pounds of muscle, so she weighs 125. She will look slimmer. She could pump serious iron and go to 132, and still look good. She has added 10% to her body weight, but she will probably fit the same dresses. Her legs, for example, will have more definition. She will look better, be healthier, and be able to do longer photo shoots without getting tired. That’s my advice to models. Get out in the fresh air and get some exercise. Don’t worry about a little sun.”
“Are you talking about the old parasol stuff, women trying to be as light as possible?”
“Uh, touching on it, anyway. I saw an ad once where they had this café au lait girl putting some crud on her to make her lighter. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, and I have seen a few. She had this wonderful light brown color. Much nicer than mine. They were trying to tell women that they should feel inadequate and do something about it if they were not paper white like me. God damn them!”
“I won’t be able to use that.”
“Yes you will. You will portray us honestly. You will not portray Marcie as a flawless goddess, and you will certainly not portray me as someone who never uses nasty words or gets angry. You will show our virtues and our vices objectively or you will not be doing your job. We’re showing models and photographers what it is really like. People expect to learn from this, not to be disinformed. This is hard work. It isn’t what people think. Girls want in to this world, fine. But they have to understand that it will be hard. Can you imagine Marcie in a bikini on a beach looking like she’s having fun when it’s 40 degrees?”
“Scotland.”
“It was really 40 degrees?”
“And a 20 knot wind. She did about an hour shoot, changing in a car. The driver and I had to tell her she looked too cold, and couldn’t take a good pic, and we hauled her to the hotel and put her in a hot bath.”
Marcie said, “Thing is, we finished the shoot, pretty close anyway. And we did the rest at the pool at the hotel, which was heated, thank God.”
“But you make a lot of money.”
Marcie laughed. “That was in our salad days, when we couldn’t afford salad. We have never been lovers, but we shared motel rooms. Will would wait for night and develop film in the bathroom. We sent contact prints in the hotel’s envelopes. We always kept the soap and shampoo. We drank cheap vodka from plastic cups, and traded off going to the ice machine to get enough ice for our cooler. Will had an enlarger but it would not stay up, so he took a hacksaw blade from wherever he bought it, and made a prop with notches out of a piece of a forklift pallet.”
“That’s how you overcome poverty, with hard work and dedication?”
Marcie shook her head. “No. We did the hard work and dedication, but most poor people will work harder than us all their lives and have nothing. You could overcome poverty by us simply realizing that we were lucky and someone else was not. Or you could do it more effectively with socialism. Why should the US have given land to Jay Gould and the rest of those robber barons so they would lay rails? A rational leader would simply lay the rails and charge for the use of them. If I owned the railroad, I would let everyone ride. A guy has no money, you ask him to clean the windows or something. I’d kick the something for nothing crowd to the curb. Will would probably run them over.”
Jennie spoke up. “For all my life, I have been poor. If I can work, and be paid then that is wonderful. I have come halfway around the world for this chance to be a model. I came on a freighter, and they treated me like dirt. I cleaned the bathrooms, mopped the floors, washed the dishes. I came here, and Will says I can just hang around. Marcie buys food at the store and she says I can have anything I like. May has all this work to do and I helped, of course. It is so easy to help. Everyone, if someone helps them, they should help back.”
Will said, “We will have to work together if our world is to survive. It used to be that the apex predator starved to a reasonable population. Now we don’t. So we have to determine our population limit, and not breed out of it. We have to help each other, like Jennie said. We can’t play this new game by the old rules. If people in Africa keep on with the idea that wealth is measured in cattle, then a dry year comes and herds larger than there is any need for will desertify grazing land. Mother Nature let her greatest creation become her greatest threat. We are the first species with the ability to destroy the planet, and it’s not hard to imagine that we will do it.”
Chrissie said, “I can imagine this has happened many times somewhere in the universe. Maybe it’s why there is no sign of intelligent life out there. It doesn’t last.”
Father James said, “I think God has it figured out a little better than that.”
Will said, “I imagine the creator of a universe that is millions, or maybe billions of light years across, and maybe even infinite, and then look at Earth, and I just cannot imagine him caring if we take his name in vain or even blow the whole planet up. We’ve talked about this before, like the idea that Jesus is his only begotten son, in a universe that makes Earth an imperceptible speck. You know I respect your faith, and your connection to the spiritual, whatever it is, and also your phenomenal education, but I cannot accept God as an old man sitting on a cloud fussing over someone eating an apple.”
Father James smiled. “As you know, Will, it’s a lot more complicated than that. But we would bore our dinner partners if we kept this up. You could come to the Vatican for a few decades of discussion of these ideas.”
Chrissie said, “Father, you are still here, which, it’s fine with me if you want to stay at our house for the rest of your life, but you’re not teaching Will Italian, and Teresa is not here. We will cover your expenses if you go to Vienna to tutor her, but I don’t understand why you are here.”
“God seems to want me to be here. As far as teaching Will Italian, I should just as well teach a marlin how to swim.”
“I might ask you to tone up my French, though.”
“That would be more like teaching an eagle to fly.”
Chrissie said, “Father, to change the subject from the one you and Will could discuss for decades, do you think we’re doing good with this quail thing?”
“It’s always good to give someone an opportunity. But the way you look on the net, well, it’s not wrong, but if you want to give opportunity to those who need it most, you will not find them on the net. I think you should take your show on the road. What would Mother Teresa have done?”
Marcie said, “She would take the seven three to Calcutta and look there. Well, she was not a businesschick, but she would have tried to find the cute girls living in desperate poverty and groomed them as models. And that is what we should do.”
She opened her phone, and looked at the time. She called Ken at Aurora. “Marcie for Ken. I thought you might be. We’re letting dinner get cold in a restaurant. Well, we have this idea. Suppose we go on the road and get covies in poor countries like, say India? You did? What’s that going to do to production? Great. Take it to the board for us. We could design a line based on saris. We can shoot in India. Seeya!”
Marcie said, “Aurora just bought a big factory that was making dresses they could not sell, so the rules are changing. Ken thinks the board will go for another small catalog. So we can go to Calcutta or wherever when we get done with the current covey. Maybe we could let a covey of Indian cuties scamper around the Taj Mahal.”
“There is probably a certain dignity expected there,”Will noted.
Poquita asked, “Are we going to hire a couple of local ladies to be house mothers, Will?”
“Well, sure, Poquita. Someone who would be good and who needs the work. See who you can find. Remember they need to speak English and Italian. We have American girls with no Italian, and I’m going to do this in those two languages only.”
Father James asked, “Why so limited?”
“Interpreters will take time, Also, if we can say, English only left, Italian only, right, Bilingual center, then we can pretty easily make them into groups. Say we had 7 English only. So we put four in a team, Add one Italian girl with good English, and we have 2 who do their classes in English, and 2 who do them in Italian.”
“Seems a little restrictive.”
“Father, if you want to see restrictive try programming in assembler. I would divide them by radix.”
“I suppose that is a mathematical term.”
Chrissie smiled. “It is, Father, but actually. Will means it as a numerical base for an assembler. Take the number 15 in decimal. In hexadecimal it would be F. In octal it would be 17. in binary it would be 1111. The left column is always the base. In binary, the second is the twos. In octal, it is the eights. In hexadecimal, it is the sixteens column.”
“I know that as base 2, 8, or 10. but what is Hexadecimal”
Will answered. “Base 16. Each hex digit represents 8 binary digits, or bits. 4 bits is a nibble, 8 is a byte. One hex digit can represent a number between 0 and 15. 2 hex digits is a word, which is two bytes, or in other words, a number between 0 and 255. 4 hex digits is a double word. It can represent a number between 0 and 65,535,”
“If you needed to handle bigger numbers?”
“You could do it in exponential notation, or there are some real complex routines in C compilers that cut your problem up in pieces somehow, and they have what they call an expression evaluator, which can calculate the result of an equation with lots of stuff in it. So you would feed it in, and someone has done all the tricky moving around part of the result for you. Or you could just open your program by calling DOS services, and see what platform you’re on, and if it’s not 32 bits, you tell the user, “Sorry, you need a better computer.”
Chrissie intervened. “Eat your dinner, Will. We’ve done enough programming for the night. If I hear any more stuff like Sector: Offset, interrupt vector tables, terminate and stay resident programs, memory overlays, or any of that kind of thing, you’d better watch out for a sudden bunch of coffee in your face when they serve it.”
Sassie asked, “Is that all real stuff?”
“It’s all real stuff, girl. But we are done with that. How do you like Italy?”
“Its pretty, and the climate is nice.”
They finished dinner and ordered dessert. When it came, Marcie took a piece from Will’s that would perhaps be sufficient for micro sample chemical analysis. The pastries were all great, so it was easy to order. When they got back to the house, it was dark. They went into the house, and were introduced to a couple of guys who would help with the arriving crew. They were both casually dressed, loose shirts making it hard to see what hardware they might be carrying. Will was not troubled by this, he knew both of them already, anyway, and was not concerned about what hardware in particular it was. They were Lou and Joe, Carabiniere, a couple of guys who were going to make sure the covey was tucked in before they slept, each of course with her teddy bear. Lou and Joe explained that they were just there to show everyone how the security things worked. They had everyone put their thumbs on a little reader on a computer. They read in drivers’ licenses, and the computer took pictures it said nothing about. They proceeded to show everyone how they could open doors by putting their thumb on the little pad. These were really neat, because your key could neither be lost or stolen, and if someone made you open a door, the system would know when that happened, and if there was a problem, they would find you, believe it. You were safe here in Italy. If you put your thumb on the pad, and hit your two diget ID number, it would open. If you didn’t want it to open, you hit 01, and it would not open. If you hit 06, it would open, but a silent alarm would go off. This was all about terrorism.
The data went to somewhere that is not there, and was entered into a database that has never been there, and in about as it takes for a rattlesnake to get tired of being poked with a stick, Will was told that all these people were fine, and they were who they said they were, or maybe what it really meant was that if they were not, you didn’t need to know that they were not.
* * *
The bus arrived with the covey and their dorm mothers. Will was happy. everyone was happy. They put their stuff in the bunkhouse. They went inside, and Anita, the housekeeper, made sandwiches for everyone. Not all the girls were happy with there being no sodas, but they took fruit juice, grape juice, milk, and mineral water and made do. Anita had buns and bread, all whole wheat, and all locally baked. She had freshly made mayonnaise that also came from just down the street, and lots of great cheeses and lunchmeats, as well as lettuce that was still attached to the ground that morning, and organic tomatoes.
May’s cousin, Pauline, told them she needed some volunteers to milk cows. There were a lot of volunteers, so she signed them up for morning, afternoon and evening milking of the beautiful Jersey cows Will had recently bought. They would come through a chute into the shed, be hand milked, examined by another cousin, Henri, and they would get some cattle cubes and sweet feed, then go into the barnyard. There they would eat some vegetable scraps and bread crusts, and so on, and when that was done Henri would take them to the pasture they would be using. The place had been set up for rotation grazing 100 years before people in the US had started saying it was the newest discovery.
The girls wore Phillipa boots that looked a lot like Carthage shoes work boots but with a little style thrown in. Aurora jeans and beautiful woven wool shirts, Aurora of course. They wore Aurora cowboy hats, and scarves and such. They had been strictly instructed not to make the cows uncomfortable. They waved quirts as if they might hit the cattle, although they didn’t. They directed the cattle to where they were going already. Once they were all in, one shot caught a quail closing the gate behind the cattle who would be as likely to come back out as they would to take up hang gliding.
Henri demonstrated the technique, and the girls milked the cows. Between shots, he came and felt their bags to see if they needed some more work. When they did, a quail would get next to him as if she was speaking something private and romantic while he stripped them. Will got some shots he didn’t know what he could use for, of the master’s hands pulling four nipples at the same time. Some of them showed the quail watching intently. There were a lot of dairy farmers who would have watched like that, too. There were quite a few who would have thought it could not be done.
Will did the younger girls as Daddy showing her how.
“I didn’t think you could do four at the same time.”
“Will she has six.”
“Don’t tell me you can do that.”
“Video, bring her here. I make no claim, I show you.”
Sassie came over.
“Sassie, you’re in front, but give me a little squeeze in space, let me get some stills.”
“Got it.”
Sassie said, “Ready.”
Henri’s hands put a little disinfectant on the udder, then he put some petroleum jelly on his hands and rubbed it in a bit. He stroked and bumped the udder. The cow, a master of her own art, stood still. Henri put his hands on the nipples, and stroked. The third time he did, He shot six streams of milk going into the bucket. Sassie came in close on the work, and Will gave her a little space as Henri did it again and again. They got back. Henri finished the cow two at a time. Bumping the udder a little. He stood up. “Girls, sterilize your hands before you milk.”
Two of the girls made a nice picture struggling with the heavy milk barrel. They managed it into the sterilizer. Will got a couple of nice shots of them struggling with the 80 pound barrel. They finished the milking, and put the barrels into a big chamber that was essentially a double boiler. Will brought the last four over, two in each hand. Henri fired it, and set a timer. “We will take them out in 75 minutes, and let them air cool for 40, then we put them in the freezer for an hour to take them down and into the reefer. I think you like to have the girls make butter in mason jars?”
“What will you do?”
“Clean the milk house.”
“The girls will do that with you. So they make butter in three hours, but they clean the milk house right now, or maybe they all have a sandwich first?”
“I’ll wash with the firehose. They can help in a while.”
Will took the girls inside, and they all got some soup and sandwiches. Everyone wanted to go back in the milk house, and luckily, Phillipa was selling rubber boots, which of course came from Carthage, but they were designer boots. Jeans were changed, cowgirls got more serious looks w