n too greedy for land an' for money an' for th' power to make slaves out
of his feller men! Man has cursed th' very land itself!"
"Now you tell us somethin', Mister Fortune Teller!"
"Hell yes, that's what we come here for! Tell us a vision `bout all of
this stuff!"
I walked out through the door past five or six big husky guys dressed
in all kinds of work clothes, whittling, playing with warts on their hands,
chewing tobacco, rolling smokes. Everybody in the room walked out in the
yard. I stood there on an old rotten board step, and everybody hooted and
laughed and cracked some kind of a joke. And then somebody else said, "Tell
our fortune."
I looked down at the ground and said, "Well sir, men, I ain't no
fortune teller. No more than you are. But I'll tell ya what I see in my own
head. Then ya can call it any name ya like."
Everybody stood as still as a bunch of mice.
"We gotta all git together an' find out some way ta build this country
up. Make all of this here dust quit blowin'. We gotta find a job an' put
ever' single livin' one of us ta work. Better houses 'stead of these here
little old sickly shacks. Better carbon-black plants. Better oil refineries.
Gotta build up more big oil fields. Pipe lines runnin' from here plumb ta
Pittsburgh, Chicago, an' New York. Oil an' gas fer fact'ries ever'where.
Gotta keep an' eye peeled on ever' single inch of this whole country an' see
to it that none of Hitler's Goddam stooges don't lay a hand on it."
"How we gonna do all of this? Just walk to John D. an' tell 'm we're
ready to go to work?" The whole bunch laughed and started milling around
again.
"You ain't no prophet!" one big boy yelled. "Hell, any of us coulda say
that same thing! You're a dam fake!"
"An' you're a Goddam fool!" I hollered out at him. "I told ya I didn't
claim ta be nothin' fancy! Yer own dam head's jist as good as mine! Hell,
yes!"
The mob of men snickered and fussed amongst their selves, and made
motions with their hands like a baseball umpire saying "out." They shuffled
around on their feet, and then broke up into little bunches and started to
drift out of the yard. All talking. Above them, the big boy yelled back at
me, "Look out who're you're callin' a fool, there, bud!"
"Men! Hey! Listen! I know we all see this same thing--like news reels
in our mind. Alla th' work that needs ta be done--better highways, better
buildin's, better houses. Ever'-thing needs ta be fixed up better! But,
Goddamit, I ain't no master mind! All I know is we gotta git together an'
stick together! This country won't ever git much better as long as it's dog
eat dog, ever' man fer his own self, an' ta hell with th' rest of th' world.
We gotta all git together, dam it all, an' make somebody give us a job
somewhere doin' somethin'!"
But the whole crowd walked off down toward Main Street, laughing and
talking and throwing their hands. I leaned back up against the side of the
shack and watched the gravel and dust cutting down the last of the
hollyhocks.
"News reels in my head," I was looking and thinking to myself, and I
was thinking of old Heavy gone. "News reels in my head. By God, mebbe we all
gotta learn how ta see them there news reels in our heads. Mebbe so."
Chapter èû
OFF TO CALIFORNIA
I rolled my sign-painting brushes up inside an old shirt and stuck them
down in my rear pants pocket. On the floor of the shack I was reading a
letter and thinking to myself. It said:
". . . when Texas is so dusty and bad, California is so green and
pretty. You must be twenty-five by now, Woody. I know I can get you a job
here in Sonora. Why don't you come? Your aunt Laura."
Yes, I'll go, I was thinking. This is a right nice day for hittin' th'
road. 'Bout three o'clock in th' afternoon.
I pulled the crooked door shut as best I could, and walked one block
south to the main highway leading west. I turned west and walked along a few
blocks, across a railroad track, past a carbon-block warehouse. "Good old
Pampa. I hit here in 1926. Worked my tail off 'round this here town. But it
didn't give me anything. Town had growed up, strung itself all out across
these plains. Just a little old low-built cattle town to start with; jumped
up big when the oil boom hit. Now eleven years later it had up and died."
A three- or four-ton beer truck blowed its air brakes and I heard the
driver talking, "By God! I thought that looked like you, Woody! Where ya
headin'? Amarilla? Hustlin' signs?" We got off to a jumpy start while he was
spitting out his window.
"Cal'fornia," I said. "Hustlin' outta this dam dust!"
"Fer piece down th' road, ain't it?"
"Enda this dam highway! Ain't a-lookin' back!"
"Aww, ain'tcha gonna take one more good look at good ol'
Pampa?"
I looked out my window and seen it go by. It was just shacks all along
this side of town, tired and lonesome-looking, and lots of us wasn't needed
here no more. Oil derricks running up to the city limits on three sides;
silvery refineries that first smelled good, then bad; and off along the rim
of the horizon, the big carbon-black plants throwing smoke worse than ten
volcanoes, the fine black powder covering the iron grass and the early green
wheat that pushes up just in time to kiss this March wind. Oil cars and
stock cars lined up like herds of cattle. Sun so clear and so bright
that I felt like I was leaving one of the prettiest and ugliest spots
I'd ever seen. "They tell me this town has fell down ta somethin' like
sixteen thousan' people," I said.
"She's really goin' with th' dust!" the driver told me. Then we hit
another railroad crossing that jarred him into saying, "I seen th' day when
there was more folks than that goin' to th' picture shows! She's really
shrivelin' up!"
"I ain't much a-likin' th' looks o' that bad-lookin' cloud a-hangin'
off ta th' north yonder," I told him.
"Bad time uv year fer them right blue northers! Come up awful fast
sometimes. Any money on ya?"
"Nope."
"How ya aimin' ta eat?"
"Signs."
"How's it come ya ain't packin' yer music box with ÕÁ?"
"Hocked it last week."
"How ya gon'ta paint signs in a dam blue norther with th' temperture
hangin' plumb out th' bottom? Here. Fer's I go.''
"This'll gimme a good start at least. Mucha 'blige!" I
slammed the door and backed off onto the gravel and watched the track leave
the main highway, bounce over a rough bridge, and head north across a cow
pasture. The driver hadn't said good-bye or anything. I thought that was
funny. That's a bad cloud. Five miles back to town, though. No use of me
thinking about going back. What the hell's this thing stuck here in my shirt
pocket? I be dam. Well, I be dam. A greenback dollar bill. No wonder he just
chewed his gum. Truck drivers can do a hell of a lot of talking sometimes
without even saying a word.
I walked on down the highway bucking into the wind. It got so hard I
had to really duck my head and push. Yes. I know this old flat country up
here on the caprock plains. Gumbo mud. Hard crust sod. Iron grass for tough
cattle and hard-hitting cowboys that work for the ranchers. These old houses
that sweep with the country and look like they're crying in the dust. I know
who's in there. I know. I've stuck my head in a million. Drove tractors,
cleaned plows and harrows, greased discs and pulled the tumbleweeds out from
under the machinery. That wind is getting harder. Whoooooo! The wind along
the oily weeds sounded like a truck climbing a mountain in second gear.
Every step I took to the west, the wind pushed me back harder from the
north, like it was trying to tell me, for God's sake, boy, go to the south
country, be smart, go where they sleep out every night. Don't split this
blue blizzard west, because the country gets higher, and flatter, and
windier, and dustier, and you'll get colder and colder. But I thought,
somewhere west there's more room. Maybe the west country needs me out there.
It's so big and I'm so little. It needs me to help fill it up and I need it
to grow up in. I've got to keep bucking this wind, even if it gets colder.
The storm poured in over the wheat country, and the powdery snow was
like talcum, or dried paste, blowing along with the grinding bits of dust.
The snow was dry. The dust was cold. The sky was dark and the wind was
changing the whole world into an awful funny-looking, whistling and whining
place. Flat fields and grazing lands got smothery and close. It was about
three more miles on to the little town of Kings Mill.
I walked about two of the miles in the blowing storm and got a ride
with a truck load of worried cattle, and a bundled-up driver, smoking loose
tobacco that blew as wild as the dust and the snow, and stung like acid when
it lit in my eyes.
We hollered the usual hollers back and forth at each other during the
last mile that I rode with him. He said that he was turning north off of the
main road at Kings Mill. I said, Let me out at the post office and I'll
stand around in there by the stove and try to get another ride.
In the general store, I bought a nickel's worth of postal cards and
wrote all five of them back to the folks in Pampa, saying, "Greetings from
the Land of Sunshine and just plenty of Good Fresh Air. Having wonderful
tour. Yrs. trly. Wdy."
Pretty soon another cattle man offered me a ride on to the next cattle
town. He smoked a pipe which had took up more of his time in the last twenty
years than wife, kids, or his cow ranching. He told me, "This old Panhandle
country can be one mighty nice place when it's purty, but hell on wheels
when she gits riled up!" His truck was governed down to fifteen or twenty
miles an hour. It was a windy, brittle hour before we crept the fifteen
miles from Kings Mill over to White Deer. I was so cold when we got there
that I couldn't hardly get out of the truck. The flying heat from the engine
had kept me a degree or two above freezing, but stepping out into that wind
head-on was worse. I walked another mile or two on down the side of the road
and, as long as I walked, kept fairly loose and limber. A time or two I
stopped alongside the concrete, and stood and waited with my head ducked
into the wind--and it seemed like none of the drivers could see me. When I
started to walk some more, I noticed that the muscles in the upper part of
my legs were drawn up, and hurt every time I took a step, and that it took
me a few hundred yards' walking to get full control over them. This scared
me so much that I decided to keep walking or else.
After three or four miles had went under my feet, a big new model
Lincoln Zephyr stopped, and I got in the back seat. I saw two people in the
front seat. They asked me a few silly questions. I mean they were good
questions, but I only gave them silly answers. Why was I out on the highways
at any such a time as this? I was just there. Where was I going? I was going
to California. What for? Oh, just to see if I couldn't do a little better.
They let me out on the streets of Amarillo, sixty miles away from
Pampa. I walked through town, and it got colder. Tumbleweeds, loose gravel,
and dirt and beaten snow crawled along the streets and vacant lots, and the
dust rolled in on a high wind, and fell on down across the upper plains. I
got across town and waited on a bend for a ride. After an hour, I hadn't got
one. I didn't want to walk any more down the road to keep warm, because it
was getting dark, and nobody could see anything out there on a night like
that. I walked twenty-five or thirty blocks back to the main part of
Amarillo. A sign on a board said, Population, 50,000, Welcome. I went into a
picture show to get warm and bought a hot sack of good, salty popcorn. I
figured on staying in the cheap show all I could, but they didn't stay open
after midnight in Amarillo, so I was back on the streets pretty soon, just
sort of walking up and down, looking at the jewelry and duds in the windows.
I got a nickel sack of smoking, and tried rolling a cigaret on every part of
Polk Street, and the wind blew the sack away, a whiff at a time. I remember
how funny it was. If I did succeed in getting one rolled and licked down and
into my mouth, I'd strike up all of the matches in the country trying to get
it lit; and as quick as I got it lit, the wind would blow so hard on the
lighted end that it would burn up like a Roman candle, too fast to get a
good draw off, and in the meantime throwing flaked-off red-hot ashes all
over my coat.
I went down to the railroad yards, and asked about the freights. The
boys were hanging out in two or three all-night coffee joints, and there was
no lead as to where you could get a free flop. I spent my last four-bit
piece on a little two-by-four room, and slept in a good warm bed. If it had
cockroaches, alligators or snapping turtles in it, I was too sleepy to stay
awake and argue with them.
I hit the streets next morning in a bluster of gray, smoky-looking snow
that had managed to get a toehold during the night. It covered the whole
country, and the highway was there somewhere--if you could only find it.
This side of Clovis, fifteen or twenty miles, I met an A Model Ford with
three young boys in it. They stopped and let me in. I rode with them toward
New Mexico all day long. When they came to the state line, they acted funny,
talking and whispering among themselves, and wondering if the cops at the
port of entry would notice anything odd about us. I heard them say that the
car was borrowed, no ownership papers, bill of sale, driver's license--just
borrowed off of the streets. We talked it over. Decided just to act as blank
as possible, and trust to our luck that we could get across. We drove over
the line. The cops waved us past. The sign read: Trucks and Busses Stop For
Inspection. Tourists Welcome to New Mexico.
The three boys were wearing old patched overhalls and khaki work pants
and shirts that looked like they'd stand a couple or three good washings
without coming any too clean. I looked at their hair, and it was dry,
wind-blown, gritty, and full of the dust out of the storm, and not any
certain wave or color--just the color of the whole country. I had seen
thousands of men that looked just the same way, and could usually tell by
the color of the dirt where they were from. I guessed these boys to be from
the oil-field country back up around Borger, and asked them if that was a
good guess. They said that we could ride together better if we asked each
other less questions.
We rolled along, slow, boiling up the higher country, and cooling off
coasting down--until we hit the mountains on this side of Alamagordo. We
stopped once or twice to let the engine cool off. Finally we hit the top of
the mountain ridge, and traveled along a high, straight road that stuck to
the middle part of a flat, covered on both sides by evergreen pine, tall,
thin-bodied, and straight as an arrow, branching out, about thirty or forty
feet up the trunk; and the undergrowth was mostly a mixture of brown scrubby
oak, and here and yonder, bunches of green, tough cedar. The air was so
light that it made our heads feel funny. We laughed and joked about how it
felt.
I noticed that the driver was speeding up and then throwing the clutch
in, letting the car slip into neutral, and coasting as far as he could. I
mentioned this to the driver, and he said that he was running on his last
teacupful of gas, and it was twenty-five miles to the next town. I kept
quiet from then on, doing just what the other three were, just gulping and
thinking.
For five or six miles we held our breath. We were four guys out, trying
to get somewhere in the world, and the roar of that little engine, rattly,
knocky and fumy as it was, had a good sound to our ears. It was the only
motor we had. We wanted more than anything else in the world to hear it purr
along, and we didn't care how people laughed as they went around us, and
throwed their clouds of red dust back into our faces. Just take us into
town, little motor, and we'll get you some more gas.
A mile or two of up-grade, and the tank was empty. The driver throwed
the clutch in, shifted her into neutral, and kept wheeling. The speed read,
thirty, twenty, fifteen--and then fell down to five, three, four, three,
four, five, seven, ten, fifteen, twenty-five, and we all yelled and hollered
as loud and as long as our guts could pump air. Hooopeee! Made 'er! Over the
Goddam hump! Yippeee! It's all down hill from here to Alamagordo! To hell
with the oil companies! For the next half an hour we won't be needing you,
John D.! We laughed and told all kinds of good jokes going down the
piny-covered mountain--some of the best, wildest, prettiest fresh-smelling
country you could ever hope to find. And it was a free ride for us. Twenty
miles of coasting.
At the bottom we found Alamagordo, a nice little town scattered along a
trickling creek or two that chases down from out of the mountains around.
There you see the tall, gray-looking cottonwood sticking along the watered
places. Brown adobe shacks and houses of sun-dried brick, covered over with
plaster and homemade stucco of every color. The adobe houses of the Mexican
workers have stood there, some of them, for sixty, seventy-five, and over a
hundred years, flat. And the workers, a lot of them, the same way.
On the north side of town we coasted into a homey-looking service
station.
The man finally got around to coming out. One of the boys said, "We
want to swap you a good wrench for five gallons of gas, worth twice that
much. Good shape. Runs true, holds tight, good teeth, never been broke."
The service man took a long, interested, hungry look at the wrench.
Good tool. No junky wrench. He was really wanting to make the swap.
"Got as much as fifty cents cash money?" he asked.
"No ..." the boy answered him. Both forgot all about everything,
keeping quiet for a whole minute or more, and turning the wrench over and
over. One boy slid out of the door and walked through the shop toward the
men's rest room.
"Two bits cash ... ?" the mechanic asked without looking up.
"No ... no cash ..." the boy told him.
"Okay ... get your gas cap off; I'll swap with you boys just to show
you that my heart is in the right place."
The gas cap was turned, laid up on a fender, and the gas man held the
long brass nozzle down in the empty hole, and listened to the five gallons
flow into the tank; and the five gallons sounded lonesome and sad, and the
trade was made.
"Okay, Mister, you got the best of this deal. But that's what you're in
business for, I reckon; thanks," a boy said, and the old starter turned over
a few wheels that were gradually getting toothless, and the motor went over
quick, slow, and then a blue cloud of engine smoke puffed up under the
floorboards, and the good smell of burning oil told you that you weren't
quite walking--yet. Everybody heaved a sigh of relief. The man stood with
his good costly wrench in his hands, pitching it up and down, and smiling a
little-- nodding as we drove away.
My eyes fell for a short minute away from the healthy countryside, and
my gaze came upon an old tire tool on the floor of the car, a flat rusty
tire iron, an old pump--and a nice wrench, almost exactly like the one that
we'd just traded for gas; and I remembered the boy that went to the rest
room.
Uptown in Alamagordo, we stopped at the high, west end of the main
street. It was dinner time, but no money. Everybody was hungry and that went
without asking. I told the boys that I'd get out and hustle the town for
some quick signs, signs to paint on windows which I could paint in thirty
minutes or an hour, and we'd surely get enough to buy some day-old bakery
goods and milk to take out on the side of the road and eat. I felt like I
owed them something for my fare. I felt full of pep, rested and relieved,
now that there were five gallons of gas splashing around inside of our tank.
They agreed to let me hustle for a quick job, but it must not take too long.
I jumped out in a big rush, and started off down the street. I heard
one of them holler, "Meet you right here at this spot in an hour and no
later."
I yelled back, "Okie doke! Hour! No later." And I walked down through
the town. I peeled my eyes for an old sign that needed repainting, or a new
one to put on. I stuck my head into ten or fifteen places and got a job at a
shoe store, putting a picture of a man's shoe, a lady's shoe, and: Shoe
Repairing Guaranteed. Cowboy Boots a Specialty.
I had left my brushes in the seat of the car, so I made a hard run up
the main street. I got to the spot, puffing, grinning, and blowing like a
little horse, and looked around-- but no boys, and no car.
I trotted up and down the main street again, thinking that they might
have decided to come on down to where I was. But there wasn't the old Model
A that I'd learned to know and admire, not for being a champion at anything
but as a car that really tried. It was gone. So were my pardners. So were
all of my paint brushes. Just a little rag wound around some old brushes,
but they were Russian Red Sable, the best that money could buy, and about
twenty bucks of hard-earned money to me. They were my meal ticket.
Pulling from Alamagordo over to Las Cruces was one of the hardest times
I'd ever had. The valley highway turned into a dry, bare stretch of
low-lying foothills, too little to be mountains, and too hilly to be flat
desert. The hills fooled me completely. Running out from the high mountains,
they looked small and easy to walk over, but the highway bent and curled
around and got lost a half a dozen times on each little hill. You could see
the road ahead shining like a string of tinfoil flattened out, and then
you'd lose sight of it again and walk for hours and hours, and more hours,
and without ever coming to the part that you'd been looking at ahead for so
long.
I was always a big hand to walk along and look at the things along the
side of the road. Too curious to stand and wait for a ride. Too nervous to
set down and rest. Too struck with the traveling fever to wait. While the
other long strings of hitch-hikers was taking it easy in the shade back in
the town, I'd be tugging and walking myself to death over the curves,
wondering what was just around the next bend; walking to see some distant
object, which turned out to be just a big rock, or knoll, from which you
could see and wonder about other distant objects. Blisters on your feet,
shoes hot as a horse's hide. Still tearing along. I covered about fifteen
miles of country, and finally got so tired that I walked out to one side of
the road, laid down in the sun, and went off to sleep. I woke up every time
a car slid down the highway, and listened to the hot tires sing off a song,
and wondered if I didn't miss a good, easy, cool ride all of the way into
California. I couldn't rest.
Back on the road, I hung a ride to Las Cruces and was told that you
couldn't catch a freight there till the next day. I didn't want to lay over,
so I lit out walking toward Deming. Deming was the only town within a
hundred miles where you could catch one of them fast ones setting long
enough to get on it. I walked a long stretch on the way to Deming. It must
have been close to twenty miles. I walked until past midnight. A farmer
drove up and stopped and said that he would carry me ten miles. I took him
up, and that put me within about fifteen miles of Deming. Next morning I was
walking a couple of hours before sunup, and along about ten o'clock, got a
ride with a whole truckload of hitch-hikers. Most every man on the truck was
going to catch a freight at Deming. We found a whole bunch walking around
the yards and streets in Deming waiting to snag out. Deming is a good town
and a going town, but it's a good town to keep quiet in. Us free riders said
it was best not to go around spouting off at your mouth too much, or the
cops would pull you in just to show the taxpayers that they are earning
their salaries.
The train out of Deming was a fast one. I got to Tucson without doing
anything much, without even eating for a couple of days.
In the yards at Tucson, I didn't know where to go or what to do. The
train rolled in with us after midnight. The cars all banged, and the brake
shoes set down tight, and everything wheeled to a standstill.
I was hanging onto her, because she was a red-hot one, and had been
fast so far, and other trains had given her the right-of-way. I didn't want
to get off now, just for a cup of coffee or something. Besides, I didn't
have the nickel. I crawled down in a reefer hole--a hole in the top of a
fruit car where ice is packed--and smoked the makings with two men whose
faces I hadn't seen.
It was cold there in Tucson that night. We laid low for about a couple
of hours. After a while, a dark head and shoulders could be seen in the
square hole, set against the bright, icy moonlight night. Whoever it was,
said, "Boys, you c'n come on out--we're ditched on a siding. She ain't gonna
take these cars on no further."
"Ya mean we lost our train?"
"Yeah, we just missed 'er, that's all.''
And as the head and shoulders went out of sight above us, you could
hear men scrambling down the sides, hanging onto the shiny iron ladders, and
falling out by the tens and dozens all up and down the cinder track.
"Ditched. ..."
"Shore'n hell. ..."
"Coulda got'er if we'd of knowed it in time. I had this happen to me
before, right here in Tucson."
"Tucson's a bitch, boys, Tucson's a bitch."
"Why?"
"Oh--just is. Hell, I don't know why!"
"Just another town, ain't it?"
" Tain't no town, 'tain't no city. Not fer guys like you an' me. You'll
find out soon enough...."
"What's funny about Tucson?"
Men ganged around the black cars, and talked in low, grumbling voices
that seemed to be as rough as they sounded honest. Cigarets flared in the
dark. A little lantern started coming down the tracks toward where we were
ganged around talking. Flashlights flittered along the ground, and you could
see the funny shadows of the walking feet and legs of men, and the
underparts of the brake drums, air hoses, and couplings of the big, fast
cars.
"Checkers."
"Car knockers."
"Boys--scatter out!"
"Beat it!"
"And--remember--take an old 'bo's word for it, and stay th' hell out of
the city limits of Tucson."
"What kind of a dam town is this, anyhow?"
'Tucson--she's a rich man's bitch, that's what she is, and nothin' else
but."
Morning. Men are scattered and gone. A hundred men and more, rolled in
on that train last night, and it was cold. Now it's come morning, and men
seem to be gone. They've learned how to keep out of the way. They've learned
how to meet and talk about their hard traveling, and smoke each other's
snipes in the moonlight, or boil a pot of coffee among the weeds like
rabbits--hundreds of them, and when the sun comes out bright, they seem to
be gone.
Looking out across a low place, growing with the first sprigs of
something green and good to eat, I saw the men, and I knew who they were,
and what they were doing. They were knocking on doors, talking to
housewives, offering to work to earn a little piece of bread and meat, or
some cold biscuits, or potatoes and bread and a slice of strong onion;
something to stick to your ribs till you could get on down the line to where
you knew people, where you had friends who would put you up till you could
try to find some work. I felt a funny feeling come over me standing there.
I had always played music, painted signs, and managed to do some kind
of work to get a hold of a piece of money, with which I could walk in to
town legal, and buy anything I wanted to eat or drink. I'd always felt that
satisfied feeling of hearing a coin jingle across the counter, or at least,
doing some kind of work to pay for my meals. I'd missed whole days without a
meal. But I'd been pretty proud about bumming. I still hoped that I could
find some kind of short job to earn me something to eat. This was the
longest I had ever gone without anything to eat. More than two whole days
and nights.
This was a strange town, with a funny feeling hanging over it, a
feeling like there were lots of people in it--the Mexican workers, and the
white workers, and the travelers of all skins and colors of eyes, caught
hungry, hunting for some kind of work to do. I was too proud to go out like
the other men and knock at the doors.
I kept getting weaker and emptier. I got so nervous that I commenced
shaking, and couldn't hold myself still. I could smell a piece of bacon or
corncake frying at a half a mile away. The very thought of fruit made me
lick my hot lips. I kept shaking and looking blanker and blanker. My brain
didn't work as good as usual. I couldn't think. Just got into a stupor of
some kind, and sat there on the main line of the fast railroad, forgetting
about even being there... and thinking of homes, with ice boxes, cook
stoves, tables, hot meals, cold lunches, with hot coffee, ice-cold beer,
homemade wine--and friends and relatives. And I swore to pay more attention
to the hungry people that I would meet from there on down the line.
Pretty soon, a wiry-looking man came walking up across the low green
patch, with a brown paper sack wadded mp under his arm. He walked in my
direction until he was about fifteen feet away, and I could see the brown
stain of good tasting grease soaking through his sack. I even sniffed, and
stuck my nose up in the air, and swung my head in his direction as he got
closer; and I could smell, by real instinct, the good homemade bread, onion,
and salty pork that was in the sack. He sat down not more than fifty feet
away, under the heavy squared timbers of the under-rigging of a water tank,
and opened his sack and ate his meal, with me looking on.
He finished it slowly, taking his good easy time. He licked the ends of
his fingers, and turned his head sideways to keep from spilling any of the
drippings.
After he'd cleaned the sack out, he wadded it up properly and threw it
over his shoulder. I wondered if there was any crumbs in it. When he left, I
says to myself, I'll go and open it up and eat the crumbs. They'll put me on
to the next town. The man walked over to where I sat and said, "What the
hell are you doing settin' here on the main line ... ?"
"Waitin' fer a train," I said.
"You don't want one on top of you, do you?" he asked me.
"Nope,'' I says, "but I don't see none coming... .'' "How could you
with your back to it?" "Back?"
"Hell, yes, I seen guys end up like 'burger meat for just sueh
carelessness as that...."
"Pretty mornin'," I said to him. "You hungry?" he asked me.
"Mister, I'm just as empty as one of them automobile cars there, headed
back East to Detroit."
"How long you been this way?"
"More than two days."
"You're a dam fool-----Hit any houses for grub?"
"No--don't know which a way to strike out."
"Hell, you are a dam fool, for sure."
"I guess so."
"Guess, hell, I know so." He turned his eyes toward the better section
of town. "Don't go up in the fine part of town to try to work for a meal.
You'll starve to death, and they'll throw you in jail just for dying on the
streets. But see them little shacks and houses over yonder? That's where the
railroad workers live. You'll get a feed at the first house you go to, that
is, if you're honest, willing to work for it, and ain't afraid to tell it
just like it is." I nodded my head up and down, but I was listening.
Before he quit talking, one of the last things that he said, was, "I
been on the bum like this for a long time. I could have split my sack of
eats with you right here, but you wouldn't have got any good out of it that
way. Wouldn't learn you a dam thing. I had to learn it the hard way. I went
to the rich part of town, and I learnt what it was like; and then I went to
the working folks' end of town and seen what it was like. And now it's up to
you to go out for yourself and get you some grub when your belly's empty."
I thanked him two or three times, and we sat for a minute or two not
saying much. Just looking around. And then he got up sort of slow and easy,
and wishing me good luck, he walked away down the side of the rails.
I don't quite know what was going on inside my head. I got up in a
little while and looked around. First, to the north of me, then to the south
of me; and, if I'd been using what you call horse sense, I would have gone
to the north toward the shacks that belong to the railroad and farm workers.
But a curious feeling was fermenting in me, and my brain wasn't operating on
what you'd call pure sanity. I looked in the direction that my good sense
told me to go, and started walking in the direction that would lead me to
even less to eat, drink, less of a job of work, less friends and more hard
walking and sweating, that is, in the direction of the so-called "good" part
of town, where the "moneyed" folks live.
The time of day must have been pretty close to nine o'clock. There were
signs of people rustling around, moving and working, over around the shack
town; but, in the part of town that I was going toward, there was a dead
lull of heavy sleep and morning dreams.
You could look ahead and see a steeple sticking up out of the trees. It
comes up from a quiet little church house, A badly painted sign, crackling
from the desert heat and crisp nights, says something about the Brethren,
and so, feeling like a Brethren, you walk over and size the place up. There
in the morning sun so early, the yellow and brown leaves are wiggling on the
splattered sidewalk, like humping worms measuring off their humps, and the
sun is speckling the driveway that takes you to the minister's door. Under
the trees it gets colder and shadier till you come to the back door, and
climbing three rotted steps, knock a little knock.
Nothing happens. While you're listening through all of the rooms and
floors and halls of the old house, everything gets so quiet that the soft
Whoo Whoo of a switch engine back down in the yards seems to jar you.
Finally, after a minute or two of waiting, threatening to walk off, thinking
of the noise that your feet would make smashing the beans and seeds that had
fallen from the locust trees on to the driveway, you decide to stick at the
door, and knock again.
You hear somebody walking inside the house. It sounds padded, and
quiet, and far away. Like a leather-footed mountain lion walking in a cave.
And then it swishes through the kitchen, across the cold linoleum, and a
door clicks open, and a maid walks out onto the back porch, scooting along
in a blue-checkered house dress and tan apron, with a big pocket poked full
of dust rags of various kinds, a little tam jerked down over her ear, and
her hair jumping out into the morning breeze. She walks up to the screen
door, but doesn't open it.
"Ah--er--good morning, lady," you say to her.
She says to you, "What do you want?"
You say back to her, "Why, you see, I'm hunting for a job of work."
"Yeah?"
"Yes, I'm wondering if you've got a job of work that I could do to earn
a bite to eat, little snack of some kind. Grass cut. Scrape leaves. Trim
some hedge. Anything like that."
"Listen, young man," she tells you, straining her words through the
minister's screen, "there's a dozen of you people that come around here
every day knocking on this door. I don't want to make you feel bad, or
anything like that, but if the minister starts out to feed one of you,
you'll go off and tell a dozen others about it, and then they'll all be down
here wanting something to eat. You better get on out away from here, before
you wake him up, or he'll tell you worst than I'm telling you."
"Yes'm. Thank you, ma'am." And you're off down the driveway and on the
scent of another steeple.
I walked past another church. This one is made out of sandy-looking
rocks, slowly but surely wearing away, and going out of style. There are two
houses, one on each side, so I stood there for a minute wondering which one
belongs to the minister. It was a tough choice. But, on closer looks, I saw
that one house was sleepier than the other one, and I went to the sleepy
one. I was right. It belonged to the minister. I knocked at the back door. A
mean-tempered cat ran out from under the back porch and scampered through a
naked hedge. Here nothing happened. For five minutes I knocked; still nobody
woke up. So feeling ashamed of myself for even being there, I tiptoed out on
to the swaying sidewalk and sneaked off across town.
Then I come to a business street. Stores just stretching and yawning,
but not wide awake. I moseyed along looking in at the glass windows, warm
duds too high in price, and hot, sugary-smelling bakery goods piled up for
the delivery man.
A big cop, walking along behind me for half a block, looking over my
shoulder, finding out what I was up to. When I turned around, he was smiling
at me.
He said, "Good morning."
I said the same back to him.
He asked me, "Going to work?"
"Naw, just looking for work. Like to find a job, and hang around this
town for a while."
He looked over my head, and down the street as an early morning driver
ran a stop sign, and told me, "No work around here this time of the year."
"I'm generally pretty lucky at gittin' me a job. I'm a good clerk,
grocery store, drug store--paint signs to boot."
He talked out into thin air, and says, "You'll starve to death around
here. Or make the can."
"Can?"
"That's what I said, can."
"You mean, git in trouble?"
He nodded his head, yes. He meant trouble.
"What kinda trouble? I'm a good hand ta keep outta trouble," I went on
to say.
"Listen, boy, when you're not working in this town, you're already in
trouble, see? And there ain't no work for you, see? So you're in trouble
already." He nodded at a barber jingling his keys at a door.
I decided that the best play I could make was to cut loose from the
copper, and go on about my door knocking. So I acted like I was going
somewhere. I asked him, "Say, what time of the day is it, by the way?" I
tried to crowd a serious look onto my face.
He blowed some foggy breath out past a cigaret hanging limber on his
lip, and looked everywhere, except at me and said, "Time for you to get
going. Get off of these streets."
I kept quiet.
"Merchants gonna be coming down to open up their stores in about a
minute, and they don't want to think that I let a bird like you hang around
on the streets all night. Get going. Don't even look back."
And he watched me walk away, each of us knowing just about why the
other one acted like he did.
Rounding a warm corner, I met a man, that, to all looks, was a traveler
suffering from lack of funds. His clothes had been riding the freights, and
I was pretty certain that he was riding with them. Floppy hat, greasy
through the headband.
A crop of whiskers just about right for getting into jail. He was on
his way out of town.
I said, "Howdy. Good-morning."
"What'd the dick say to you?" He got right to the main subject.
"He was telling me how to clear Tucson of myself in five minutes flat,"
I told the man.
"Tough sonsaguns here, them flatfeet. Rich place. Big tourists get sick
and come here for to lay around," he said, spitting off of the sidewalk, out
into the street. "Mighty tough town." He talked slow and friendly, and
looked at me most of the time, ducking his head, a little bit ashamed of the
way he looked. "I was doing all right till I hung a high ball. Engine pulled
out and left my car settin' here." Then he nodded a quick nod and ran his
eyes over his dirty clothes, two shirts, wadded down inside a tough pair of
whipcord cotton pants, and said, "That's how come me to be so dam filthy.
Couldn't find a clean hole to ride in."
"Hell," I said, "man, you ain't half as bad off as I am as far as dirt
goes. Look at me." And I looked down at my own clothes.
For the first time I stood there and thought to myself just what a
funny-looking thing I was--that is, to other people walking along the
streets.
He turned around, took off his hat and ran his hand through his
straight hair, making it lay down on his head; he moved over a foot or two,
and looked at his reflection in the big plate-glass window of a store.
Then he said, "They got a County Garden here that's a dude." His voice
was sandy and broken up in little pieces. Lots of things went through your
mind when he talked-- wheat stems and empty cotton stalks, burnt corn, and
eroded farm land. The sound was as quiet as a change in the weather, and
yet, it was as strong as he needed. If I was a soldier, I would fight
quicker for his talking to me, than for the cop. As I followed his talk, he
added, "I been out on that pea patch a couple of shots; I know."
I told him that I'd been hitting the preachers up for a meal.
He said, "That ain't a very smart trick; quickest way to jail's by
messing around the nice parts. Qughtta get out on the edge of town. That's
best."
The sun was warm on the corner, and Tucson's nice houses jumped up
pretty and clean, pale colors of pink and yellow. "Mighty purty sight to
see. Make anybody want to come out here to live, wouldn't it?" he asked me.
"Looks like it would," I told him. We both stood and soaked our systems
full of the whole thing. Yes, it is a sight to see the early morning sun get
warm in Tucson.
" Tain't fer fellers like me'n you, though," he said.
"Just something pretty to look at," I said to him. "At least, we know
it's here, towns like this to live in, and the only thing we got to do is to
learn how to do some kind of work, you know, to make a living here," I said,
watching the blue shadows chase around the buildings, under the trees, and
fall over the adobe fences that were like regular walls around some of the
buildings.
"Hot sun's good for sick folks. Lungers. ô÷. Consumptives come here all
shot to hell, half dead from no sunshine 'er fresh air; hang around here for
a few months, takin' it easy, an', by God, leave out of here as sound and
well as the day they crippled in," he told me.
I cut in on him and said, "You mean, as well as they ever was. You
don't mean they go out as well as the day they come in sick."
He shuffled his feet and laughed at his mistake. " 'At's right, I meant
to say that. I meant to say, too, that you can come in here with a little
piece of money that you saved up, 'er sold your farm or place of business to
get a holt of, an' it don't last till the sun can get up good," He was
smiling and moving his head.
I asked him how about the broke people that was lungers.
He said that they hung around on the outsides of the town, and lived as
cheap as they could, and worked around in the crops, panned gold, or any old
thing to make a living, in order to hang around the place till they could
get healed up. Thousands of folks with their lungs shot to the devil. Every
other person, he told me, was a case of some kind of ô÷.
"Lots of different brands of lungers, huh?" I asked him.
"Hell's bells, thousand different kinds of it. Mostly 'cording to where
'bouts you ketch it, like in a mine, or a cement factory, or saw mill. Dust
ô÷, chemical ô÷ from paint factories, rosin ô÷ from the saw mills."
"Boy howdy, that's hell, ain't it?" I asked him.
"If they is a hell," he told me, "I reckon that's it. To be down with
some kind of a trouble, disease, that you get while you're workin', an' it
fixes you to where you cain't work no more." He looked down at the ground,
ran his hands down into his pockets, and I guessed that he, hisself, was a
lunger.
"Yeah, I can see just how it is. Kinda messes a person up all th' way
around. But, hell, you don't look so bad off to me; you can still put out
plenty of work, I bet; that is, if you could find some to do." I tried to
make him feel a little better.
He cleared his throat as quiet as he could, but there was the old
give-away, the little dry rattle, like the ticking of a worn-out clock.
He rolled himself a smoke, and from his sack I rolled one. We both lit
up from the same match, and blew smoke in the air. He thought to himself for
a minute, and didn't say a word. I didn't know whether to talk any more
about it or not. There is something in most men that don't like petting or
pity.
What he said to me next took care of the whole thing, " 'Tain't so
terr'ble a thing. I keep quiet about it mostly on account of I don't want
nobody looking at me, or treating me like I was a dying calf, or an old
wore-out horse with a broke leg. All I aim to do is to stay out here in this
high, dry country--stay out of doors all I can, and get all the work I can.
I'll come out from under it."
I could have stood there and talked to this man for a half a day, but
my stomach just wasn't willing to wait much longer; and the two of us being
in Tucson together would have been a matter of explaining more things to
more cops. We wished each other good luck, and shook hands, and he said,
"Well, maybe we'll both be millionaires' sons next time that we run onto
each other. Hope so, anyhow."
The last glimpse I got of him was when I turned around for a minute,
and looked back down his direction. He was walking along with his hands in
his pockets, head ducked a little, and kicking in the dust with the toe of
his shoe. I couldn't help but think, how friendly most people are that have
all of the hard luck.
There was one more church that I had to make, the biggest one in town.
A big mission, cathedral, or something. It was a great big, pretty building,
with a tower, and lots of fancy rock carving on the high places. Heavy vines
clumb around, holding onto the rough face of the rocks, and since it was a
fairly new church, everything was just getting off to a good start.
Not familiar with the rules, I didn't know just how to go about things.
I seen a young lady dressed in a sad, black robe, so I walked down a
mis-matched stone walk and asked her if there was any kind of work around
the place that a man could do to earn a meal.
She brushed the robe back out of her face and seemed to be a very
polite and friendly person. She talked quiet and seemed to feel very sorry
for me since I was so hungry.
"I just sort of heard people talkin' up in town there, an' they said
that you folks would always give a stranger a chance to work fer a meal, you
know, just sorta on th' road to California. ..." I was too hungry to quit
talking.
Then she took a few steps and walked up onto a low rock porch. "Sit
down here where it is cooler," she told me, "and I'll go and find the
Sister. She'll be able to help you, I'm sure." She was a nice-looking lady.
Before she could walk away, I felt like I'd ought to say something
else, so I said, "Mighty cool porch ya got here."
She turned around, just touching her hand to a doorknob that led
somewhere through a garden. We both smiled without making any noise.
She stayed gone about ten minutes. The ten minutes went pretty slow and
hungry.
Sister Rosa (I will call her that for a name) appeared, to my surprise,
not through the door where the first lady had gone, but through a cluster of
tough vines that swung close to a little arched gate cutting through a stone
wall. She was a little bit older. She was just as nice, and she listened to
me while I told her why I was there. "I tried lots of other places, and this
is sort of a last chance."
"I see! Well, I know that, on certain days, we have made it a practice
to fix hot meals for the transient workers. Now, unless I am badly mistaken,
we are not prepared to give meals out today; and I'm not just exactly
certain when it will be free-ration day again. I know that you are sincere
in your coming here, and I can plainly see that you are not one of the kind
that travels through the country eating free meals when you can get work. I
will take the responsibility onto my shoulders, and go and find Father
Francisco for you, tell him your whole predicament, and let the judgment of
the matter be up to him. As far as all of the sisters and nuns are
concerned, we love to prepare the meals when the proper authority is given
to us. I, personally, pray that Father Francisco will understand the great
faith shown by your presence here, and that he will be led to extend to you
the very fullest courtesy and helping hand." And Sister Rosa walked in
through the same door that the first lady had walked in at.
I set there and waited ten more minutes, getting a good bit more
anxious to get a meal inside of me, and I counted the leaves on a couple of
waving vines. Then counted them over again according to dark green or pale
green. I was just getting ready to count them according to light green, dark
yellow green, and dark green, when the first young lady stepped around
through a door at my back, and tapped me on the shoulder and said that if I
would go around to the front door, main entrance, Father Francisco would
meet me there, and we would discuss the matter until we arrived at some
definite conclusion.
I got up shaking like the leaves and held onto the wall like the vines
till I got myself under way, and then I walked pretty straight to the main
gate.
I knocked on the door, and in about three minutes the door swung open,
and there was an old man with white hair, a keen shaved face, and a clean,
stiff white collar that fit him right up around his neck. He was friendly
and warm. He wore a black suit of clothes which was made out of good
material. He said, "How do you do?"
I stuck out my hand to shake, grabbed his and squeezed as friendly as I
knew how and said, "Mister Sanfrancisco, Frizsansco, Frisco, I'm glad to
know you! Guthrie's my name. Texas. Panhandle country. Cattle. You know. Oil
boom. That's what--fine day."
In a deep, quiet-sounding voice that somehow matched in with the halls
of the church, he said that it was a fine day, and that he was very glad to
meet me. I assured him again that I was glad to meet him, but would be
somewhat gladder if I could also work for a meal. "Two days. No eats," I
told him.
And then, soft and friendly as ever, his eyes shining out from the dark
hall, his voice spoke up again and said, "Son, I have been in this service
all my life. I have seen to it that thousands of men just like you got to
work for a meal. But, right at this moment, there is no kind of work to do
here, no kind of work at all; and therefore, it would be just a case of pure
charity. Charity here is like charity everywhere; it helps for a moment, and
then it helps no more. It is part of our policy to be charitable, for to
give is better than to receive. You seem still to retain a good measure of
your pride and dignity. You do not beg outright for food, but you offer to
do hard labor in order to earn your meal. That is the best spirit in this
world. To work for yourself is to help others, and to help others is to help
yourself. But you have asked a certain question; and I must answer that
question in your own words to satisfy your own thinking. You asked if there
is work that you can do to earn a meal. My answer is this: There is no work
around here that you can do, and therefore, you cannot earn a meal. And, as
for charity, God knows, we live on charity ourselves."
The big, heavy door closed without making even a slight sound.
I walked a half a mile trembling past the yards, down to the shacks of
the railroad workers, the Mexicanos, the Negroes, and the whites, and
knocked on the first door. It was a little brown wooden house, costing,
alltogether, less than one single rock in the church. A lady opened the
door. She said that she didn't have anything for me to do; she acted crabby
and fussy, chewing the rag, and talking sour to herself. She went back in
the house again, still talking.
"Young men, old men, all kinds of men; walking, walking, all of the
time walking, piling off of the freights, making a run across my tomato
garden, and knocking on my door; men out gallivantin' around over the
country; be better off if you'd of stayed at home; young boys taking all
kinds of crazy chances, going hungry, thirsty, getting all dirty and ugly,
ruining your clothes, maybe getting run over and killed by a truck or a
train--who knows? Yes. Yes. Yes. Don't you dare run away, young nitwit. I'm
a fixing you a plate of the best I got. Which is all I got. Blame fools."
(Mumbling) "Ought to be at home with your family; that's where you'd ought
to be. Here." (Opening the door again, coming out on the porch.) "Here, eat
this. It'll at least stick to your ribs. You look like an old hungry hound
dog. I'd be ashamed to ever let the world beat me down any such a way. Here.
Eat every bite of this. I'll go and fix you a glass of good milk. Crazy
world these days. Everybody's cutting loose and hitting the road."
Down the street, I stopped at another house. I walked up to the front
door, and knocked. I could hear somebody moving around on the inside, but
nobody come to the door. After a few more knocks, and five minutes of
waiting, a little woman opened the door back a ways, took a peek out, but
wouldn't open up all of the way.
She looked me over good. It was so dark in her house that I couldn't
tell much about her. Just some messed-up hair, and her hand on the door. It
was clean, and reddish, like she'd been in the dishwater, or putting out
some clothes. Mexican or white, you couldn't tell which. She asked me in a
whisper, "What, what do you want?"
"Lady, I'm headin' ta California lookin' fer work. I just wondered if
you had a job of work of some kind that a man could do to earn a lunch. Sack
with somethin' in it ta carry along."
She gave me the feeling that she was afraid of something. "No, I
haven't any kind of work. Sshhh. Don't talk so loud. And I haven't got
anything in the house--that is--anything fit to pack for you to eat."
"I just got a meal off of th' lady down th street here, an' just
thought maybe--you know, thought maybe a little sack of somethin' might come
in purty handy after a day or two out on the desert--any old thing. Not very
hard ta please," I told her.
"My husband is sleeping. Don't talk so loud. I'm a little ashamed of
what I've got left over here. Pretty poor when you need a good meal. But, if
you're not too particular about it, you're welcome to take it with you. Wait
here a minute."
I stood there looking back up across the tomato patch to the railroad
yards. A switch engine was trotting loose cars up and down the track and I
knew that our freight was making up.
She stuck her hand out through an old green screen door, and said,
"Sshhh," and I tried to whisper "thank you," but she just kept motioning,
nodding her head.
I was wearing a black slip-over sweater and I pulled the loose neck
open, and pushed the sack down into the bosom. She'd put something good and
warm from the warming-oven into the sack, because already I could feel the
good hot feeling against my belly.
Trains were limbering up their big whistles, and there was a long
string of cars made up and raring to step. A hundred and ten cars meant
pretty certain that she was a hot one with the right-of-way to the next
division.
A tired-looking Negro boy trotted down the cinders, looking at the new
train to spot him a reefer car to crawl into. He seen that he had a spare
second or two, and he stopped alongside of me.
"Ketchin' 'er out?" I asked him.
"Yeah. I'm switchin' ovah pretty fas'. Jes' got in. Didn' even have no
time ta hustle me up a feed. I guess I c'n eat when I gets to wheah I'm
headed." His pale khaki work clothes were soaked with salty sweat. Loose
coal soot, oil smoke, and colored dust was smeared all over him. He made a
quick trip over to a clear puddle of water and laid flat of his belly to
suck up all of the water he could hold. He blowed out his breath, and came
back wiping his face with a bandana handkerchief as dirty as the railroad
itself, and then the handkerchief being cool and wet, he tied it around his
forehead, with a hard knot on the back of his head. He looked up at me, and
shook his head sideways and said, "Keeps th' sweat from runnin' down so
bad."
It was an old hobo trick. I knew it, but didn't have any kind of a
handkerchief. The heat of the day was getting to be pretty hard to take. I
asked him, "When's th' last time ya had anything to eat?"
"El Paso," he told me. "Coupl'a days back."
My hand didn't ask me anything about it, but it was okay with me
anyhow, and I slid the sack out of my sweater and banded it over to him.
Still warm. I knew just about how good it felt when he got his hands on that
warm greasy sack. He bit into a peanut-butter sandwich together with a hunk
of salty pork between two slices of bread. He looked toward the water hole
again, but the train jarred the cars a few feet, and we both made for the
side of the high yellow cars.
We got split up a few yards, and had to hang separate cars, and I
thought maybe he wouldn't make it. I looked down from the top of mine, and
saw him trotting easy along the ground, jumping an iron switchpost or two,
and holding his sandwich and sack in both hands. He crammed the sandwich
down into the sack, rolled the top edge of the sack over a couple of twists,
and stuck the sack into his teeth, letting both of his hands free to use to
climb up the side of the car. On the top, he crawled along the blistered tin
roof until he set facing me, me on the end of my car, and him on the end of
his. It was getting windier as the train got her speed up, and we waved our
hats "good-bye and good luck and Lord bless you" to the old town of Tucson.
I looked at the lids of my two reefer holes, and both was down so tight
that you couldn't budge them with a team of horses. I looked over at my
partner again, and seen that he'd got his lid open. He braced the heavy lid
open, using the lock-bar for a wedge, so that it couldn't fly shut in the
high wind. I seen him crawl down inside, examine the ice hole, and then he
stuck his head out, and motioned for me to come on over and ride. I got up
and jumped the space between the two cars, and clumb down out of the hot
winds; and he finished his lunch without saying a word in the wind.
Our car was an easy rider. No flat wheels to speak of. This is not true
of many cars on an empty train, because loaded, a train rides smoother than
when empty. Before long, a couple of other riders stuck their heads down
into the hole and hollered, "Anybody down in this hole?"
We yelled back, 'Two! Room fer two more! Throw yer stuff down! C'mon
down!"
A bundle hit the floor, and with it come an old blue serge coat, from a
good suit of clothes, no doubt, during one of the earlier wars. Then one man
clumb through each of the holes, and grabbed the coarse net of wire that
lined the ice compartment. They settled down into a good position for riding
and looked around.
"Howdy. I'm Jack."
The Negro boy nodded his head, "Wheeler." He put the last bite into his
mouth, swallowed it down, and said, "Plenty dry."
The second stranger struck a match to relight a spitty cigaret, and
mumbled, "Schwartz, my name. Goddam this bull tobaccer!"
The country outside, I knew, was pretty, sunny, and clear, with patches
of green farming country sticking like moss along the sandy banks of the
little dry desert creeks. Yes, and I would like to climb out on top and take
a look at it. I told the other three men, "Believe I'll roll me one of them
fags, if ya don't mind, an' then git out on top an' watch th' tourists go
past."
The owner of the tobacco handed me the sweaty little sack, and I licked
one together. Lighting it up, I thanked him, and then I dumb up on top, and
soaked up the scenery by ten million square miles. The fast whistling train
put up a pretty stiff wind. It caused my cigaret to burn up like a flare of
some kind, and then a wide current tore the paper from around the tobacco,
and it flew in a million directions, including my own face. Fighting with
the cigaret, I tilted my head in the wrong direction, and my hat sailed
fifty feet up into the air, rolled out across the sand, and hung on a
sticker bush. That was the last I seen of it.
One of the men down on the hole hollered out, "Havin' quite
a time up there, ain't you, mister?"
"Quite a blow, quite a blow!" I yelled back into the hole.
"Seein' much up there?" another one asked me.
"Yeah, I see enuff sunshine an' fresh air ta cure all th' trouble in
th' world!" I told them.
"How fast we travelin'?"
"I'd jedge about forty or forty-five.''
The land changed from a farming country into a weather-beaten,
crumbling, and wasted stretch, with gully washes traveling in every way,
brownish, hot rocks piled into canyons, and low humps topped with irony
weeds and long-eared rabbits loping like army mules to get away from the
red-hot train. The hills were deep bright colors, reddish sand, yellow
clays, and always, to the distance, there stood up the high, flat-top
cliffs, breaking again into the washing, drifting, windy face of the desert.
We followed a highway, and once in a while a car coasted past, full of
people going somewhere, and we'd wave and yell at one another.
"Must be th' first time you ever crossed this country," the colored boy
hollered up at me.
"Yeah it is." I blinked my eyes to try to wash the powdery dust out of
them. "First time."
"I been over this road so many times I ought to tell the conductor how
to go," he said. "We'll be headin' down through the low country before very
long. You'll run a hundred miles below sea level and look up all at once,
and see snow on the mountains and then you'll start over the hump right up
to the snow. And you'll freeze yourself coming up out of all of this heat."
"Mighty funny thing."
"You can stay down in this hole and keep pretty warm. If all of us
huddle up and cuddle up and put our hand in each others' pockets, our
heat'll keep us from freezing."
The coal dust and the heat finally got too tough for me, so I clumb
down. The low pounding of the wheels under us, and the swaying and quivering
of the train, got so tiresome that we drifted right off to sleep, and
covered the miles that would put us across the California line. Night got
dark, and we got closer together to keep warm.
There is a little railroad station just east of Yuma where you stop to
take on water. It is still at desert altitude, so you climb down and start
walking around to limber up a little. The moon here is the fullest and
brightest that you ever saw. The medium-size palm plants and fern-looking
trees are waving real easy in the moonlight, and the brush on the face of
the desert throws black shapes and shadows out across the sand. The sand
looks as smooth as a slick pool of crude oil, and shines up yellow and white
all around. The clear-cut cactus shapes, the brush, and the silky sand makes
one of the prettiest pictures that you ever hope to see.
All of the riders, seeing how pretty the night was, walked, trotted,
stretched their legs and arms around, moved their shoulders, and took
exercise to get their blood to running right again. Matches flare up as the
boys light their smokes, and I could get a quick look at their sunburnt,
windburnt faces. Flop hats, caps, or just bareheaded, they looked like the
pioneers that got to knowing the feel and the smell of the roots and leaves
across the early days of the desert, and it makes me want to sort of hang
around there.
Voices talked and said everything.
"Hello."
"Match on yuh?"
"Yeah--shorts on that smoke."
"Headin'?"
" 'Frisco--ship out if I can."
"How's crops in South California?"
"Crops--or cops?"
"Crops. Celery. Fruit. Avacados."
"Work's easy ta git a holt of, but money's hard as hell.''
"Hell, Nelly, I wuz borned a-workin', an' I ain't quit yit!"
"Workin', er lookin' fer work?"
There was a big mixture of people here. I could hear the fast accents
of men from the big Eastern joints. You heard the slow, easy-going voices of
Southern swamp dwellers, and the people from the Southern hills and
mountains. Then another one would talk up, and it would be the dry, nosy
twang of the folks from the flat wheat plains; or the dialect of people that
come from other countries, whose parents talked another tongue. Then you
would hear the slow, outdoor voices of the men from Arizona, riding a short
hop to get a job, see a girl, or to throw a little celebration. There was
the deep, thick voices of two or three Negroes,. It sounded mighty good to
my ears.
All at once the men hushed up. Somebody nudged somebody else, and said,
"Quiet."
Then everybody ducked their heads, turned around and whispered,
"Scatter out. Lay low. Hey! You! Get rid of that cigaret! Bulls a-comin'!"
Three men, dressed in hard-wearing railroad suits, walked up to us
before we could get gone.
Flashing bright lanterns and flashlights on us, we heard them holler,
"Hey! What's goin' on here?"
We didn't say anything back.
"Where you birds headed for?"
Still silence.
"What's wrong? Buncha dam dumb-dumbs? Can't none of you men say
nuthin'?" The three men carried guns where it was plain to see,
and hard to overlook. Their hands resting on the butts, shuffling their
lights around in their hands. They rounded us up. The desert is a good place
to look at, but not so easy to hide on. One or two men ducked between cars.
A dozen or so stepped out across the desert, and slid down out of sight
behind little bushes. The cops herded the rest of us into a crowd.
Men kept scattering, taking a chance of going against the cops' orders
to "halt." The few that stood still were asked several questions. "Where yuh
headed?"
"Yuma."
"That'll be th' price of a ticket to Yuma. Step right into the office
there and buy your ticket--hurry up."
"Hell, fellers, you know I ain't got th' price of no ticket; I wouldn't
be ridin' this freight if I had th' money fer a ticket."
"Search `im,"
Each man was shook down, jackets, jumpers, coats, britches and
suspenders, pants legs, shoes. As the searching went on, most of us managed
to make a quick run for it, and get away from the bulls. Trotting around the
end of the train, thinking that we'd give them the dodge, we run head-on
into their spotlights, and was face to face with them. We stopped and stood
still. One by one, they went through our pockets looking for money. If they
found any money, whatever it was, the man was herded into the little house
to buy a ticket as far down the line as his money would carry him. Lots of
the boys had a few bucks on them. They felt pretty silly, with nothing to
eat on, being pushed into buying "tickets" to some town they said they were
heading for.
"Find anything on you?" a man asked me.
"Huh uh." I didn't have any for them to find.
"Listen, see that old boy right in front of you? Pinch 'im. Make 'im
listen to what I'm tellin' him. Ppsssst!"
I punched the man right in front of me. He waited a minute, and then
looked around sideways. "Listen," I said to him.
The other rider commenced to talk, "I just found out"-- then he went
down into a whisper "that this train is gonna pull out. Gonna try ta ditch
us. When I holler, we're all gonna make a break an' swing 'er. This is a
hell of a place to get ditched."
We shook our heads. We all kept extra still, and passed the word along.
Then the train moved backwards a foot or two--and the racket roared all
out across the desert--jarring itself into the notion of traveling again,
and all at once the man at my side hollered as loud as the high-ball whistle
itself, "Go, boy!"
His voice rung out across the cactus.
"Jack rabbit, run!"
Men jumped out from everywhere, from between the cars they'd been
hanging onto, and out from behind the clumps of cactus weeds, and the cops,
nervous, and looking in every direction, stuttered, yelled, and cussed and
snorted, but when the moon looked down at the train steaming out, it saw all
of us sticking on the sides, and on the top, waving, cussing, and thumbing
our noses back in the faces of the "ticket" sellers.
Then it got morning. A cold draft of wind was sucking in around the
sides of the reefer lid. I'd asked the boys during the night how about
closing the lid all of the way down. They told me that you had to keep it
wedged open a little with the handle of the lock, to keep from getting
locked inside. We stuck close together, using each other for sofas and
pillows, and hoped for the sun to get warmer.
I asked them, "Wonder how heavy that big Ïl' lid is, anyhow?"
"Weighs close to a hunderd pound," the Negro boy said. He was piled in
the corner, stretched out, and his whole body was shaking with the movement
of the train.
"Be a hell of a note if a feller wuz ta git up there, an' start ta
climb out, an' that big lid wuz ta fly down an' ketch his head," another
fellow said. He screwed his face up just thinking about it.
"I knew a boy that lost a arm that way."
"I know a boy that used ta travel around on these dam freights," I
said, "harvestin', an' ramblin' around; an' he was shipped back to his folks
in about a hundred pieces. I seen his face. Wheel had run right across it,
from his ear, across his mouth, over to his other ear. And I don't know, but
every day, ridin' these rattlers, I ketch myself thinkin' about that boy."
" 'Bout as bad a thing as I can think of, is th' two boys they found
starved to death, locked up inside of one of these here ice cars. Figgered
they'd been in there dead 'bout a week or two when they found 'em. One of
'em wasn't more'n twelve or thirteen years old. Jist a little squirt. They
crawled in through the main door, an' pulled it to. First thing they knew, a
brakeman come along, locked th' door, dropped a bolt in th' lock, an' there
they was. Nobody even knew where they's from, or nuthin'. Just as well been
one of your folks or mine." He shook his head, thinking.
The heat got worse as the train sailed along. "Git out on top, an' you
c'n see Old Mexico," somebody said.
"Might as well ta git yer money's worth," I told him, and in a minute
I'd scrambled up the wire net again, and pushed the heavy lid back. The wind
was getting hotter. I could feel the dry, burning sting that let me know
that I was getting a windburn. I peeled off my sweater, and shirt, and
dropped them onto the hot sheet iron, and hooked my arm around an iron
brace, and laid stretched out flat of my back, getting a good Mexican border
sunburn along with my Uncle Sam windburn. I get dark awful quick in the sun
and wind. My skin likes it, and so do I.
The Negro boy clumb up and set down beside me. His greasy cap whipped
in the wind, but he held the bill tight, and it didn't blow off. He turned
the cap around backwards, bill down the back of his neck, and there was no
more danger of losing it. "Some country!" he told me, rolling his eyes
across the sand, cactus, and crooked little bushes, "I guess every part of
th' country's good for somethin', if you c'n jist only find out what!"
"Yeah," I said; "Wonder what this is good for?"
"Rabbits, rattlesnakes, gila monsters, tarantulars, childs of the
earth, scorpions, lizards, coyotes, wild cats, bob cats, grasshoppers,
beetles, bugs, bears, bulls, buffaloes, beef," he said.
"All of that out there?" I asked him.
"No, I was jist runnin' off at th' mouth," he laughed. I knew that he
had learned a lot about the country somewhere, and guessed that he'd beat
this trail more times than one. He moved his shoulders and squared his self
on top of the train. I saw big strong muscles and heavy blood vessels, and
tough, calloused palms of his hands; and I knew that for the most part he
was an honest working man.
"Lookit that ol' rabbit go!" I poked him in the ribs, and pointed
across a ditch.
"Rascal really moves!" he said, keeping up with the jack.
"Watch 'im pick up speed," I said.
"Sonofa bitch. See him clear dat fence?" He shook his head, and smiled
a little bit.
Three or four more rabbits began showing their ears above the black
weeds. Big grayish brown ears lolling along as loose and limber as could be.
"Whole dam family's out!" he told me. "Looks like it! Ma an' pa an' th'
whole fam damly!" I said. 'Purty outfits, ain't they? Rabbits."
He eyed the herd and nodded his head. He was a deep-thinking man. I
knew just about what he was thinking about, too.
"How come you ta come out on top ta ride?" I asked my friend.
"Why not?"
"Oh, I dunno. Said somebody had ta go."
"How'd it come up?" I asked him.
"Well, I sort of asked him for a cigaret, and he said that he wasn't
panhandlin' for nickels to get tobacco for boys like me. I don't want to
have no trouble."
"Boys like you?"
"Yeah, I dunno. Difference 'tween you an' me. He'd let you have
tobacco, 'cause you an' him's th' same color."
"What in th' Goddam hell has that got ta do with ridin' together?" I
asked him.
"He said it was gettin' pretty hot down in th' hatch, you know, said
ever'body was sweatin' a lot. He told me th' further away from each other
that we stay th' better we're gonna get along, but I knew what he meant by
if'
"Wuz that all?"
"Yeah."
"This is one hell of a place ta go ta bringin' up that kinda dam talk,"
I said.
The train drew into El Centre, and stooped and filled her belly,
panting and sweating. The riders could be seen hitting the ground for a walk
and a stretch.
Schwartz, the man with the sack of smoking, come out of his hole,
grumbling and cussing under his breath. "Worst Goddam hole on the train, and
I had to get caught down in it all night!" he told me, climbing past me on
his way to the ground.
"Best ridin' car on th' rail," I said. I was right, too.
"It's th' worst in my book, boy," Schwartz said.
The fourth man from our end of the car crawled out and dropped down to
the cinders. All during the ride, he hadn't mentioned his name. He was a
smiling man, even walking along by his self. When he walked up behind us, he
heard Schwartz say something else about how bad our riding hole was, and he
said in a friendly way, " 'Bout th' easiest riding car I've hung in a many a
day."
"Like hell it is," Schwartz spoke up, stopping, and looking the fellow
in the face. The man looked down mostly at Schwartz's feet and listened to
see what Schwartz would say next. Then Schwartz went on talking at the
mouth, "It might ride easy, but th' Goddam thing stinks--see?"
"Stinks?" The man looked at him funny.
"I said stink, didn't I?" Schwartz ran his hand down in his pocket.
This is a pretty bad thing to do amongst strangers, talking in this tone of
voice and running your hand in your pocket. "You don't have to be afraid,
Stranger, I ain't got no barlow knife," Schwartz told him.
And then the other man looked along the cinders and smiled and said,
"Listen, mister, I wouldn't be the least bit afraid of a whole car load of
fellows just like you, with a knife in each pocket and two in each hand."
"Tough about it, huh?" Schwartz frowned the best he could.
"Ain't nothing tough about me, sort of--but I don't make a practice of
bein' afraid of you nor anybody else." He settled his self a little more
solid on his feet.
It looked like a good fist fight was coming off. Schwartz looked
around, up and down the track. "I bet you a dollar that most of the fellows
riding this train feel just about like I do about riding in a hole with a
dam nigger!"
The Negro boy made a walk toward Schwartz. The smiling man stepped in
between them. The Negro said, "Nobody don't hafta take my part, I can take
up for myself. Ain't nobody gonna call me--"
"Take it easy, Wheeler, take it easy," the other man said. "This guy
wants something to happen. Just likes to hear his guts crawl."
I took the Negro boy by the arm, and we walked along talking it over.
"Nobody else thinks like that goof. Hell, let 'im go an' find another car.
Let 'im go. They'll run him out of every hole on th' train. Don't worry. Ya
cain't help what ya cain't help."
"You know, that's right," Wheeler told me.
He pulled his arm away from me, and straightened his button-up sweater
a little. We turned around and looked back at our friend and Schwartz. Just
like you would shoo a fly or a chicken down the road, our friend was waving
his arms, and shooing Schwartz along. We could hear him awful faint,
yelling, "Go on, you old bastard! Get your gripey ass out of here! And if
you so much as even open your trap to make trouble for anybody riding this
train, I'll ram my fist down your throat!" It was a funny thing. I felt a
little sorry for the old boy, but he needed somebody to teach him a lesson,
and evidently he was in the hands of a pretty good teacher.
We waited till the dust had settled again, and men our teacher friend
trotted up to where we stood. He was waving at bunches of men, and laughing
deep down in his lungs.
'That's that, I reckon," he was saying when he got up to us.
The colored boy said, "I'm gonna run over across th' highway an' buy a
package of smokes. Be back in a minute--" He left us and ran like a desert
rabbit.
There was a faucet dripping water beside a yellow railroad building. We
stopped and drank all we could hold. Washed our hands and faces, and combed
our heads. There was a long line of men waiting to use the water. While we
walked away, holding our faces to the slight breath of air that was moving
across the yards, he asked me, "Say your name was?"
I said, "Woody."
"Mine's Brown. Glad ta meet you, Woody. You know I've run onto this
skin trouble before." He walked along on the cinders.
"Skin trouble. That's a dam good name for it." I walked along beside
him.
"Hard to cure it after it gets started, too. I was born and raised in a
country that's got all kinds of diseases, and this skin trouble is the worst
one of the lot," he told me.
"Bad," I answered him.
"I got sick and tired of that kind of stuff when I was just a kid
growing up at home. You know. God, I had hell with some of my folks about
things like that. But, seems like, little at a time, I'd sort of convince
them, you know; lots of folks I never could convince. They're kinda like the
old bellyache fellow, they cause a lot of trouble to a hundred people, and
then to a thousand people, all on account of just some silly, crazy notion.
Like you can help what color you are. Goddam' it all. Goddamit all. Why
don't they spend that same amount of time and trouble doing something good,
like painting their Goddam barns, or building some new roads?"
The four-time whistle blew, and the train bounced back a little. That
was our sign. Guys walked and ran along the side of the cars, mumbling and
talking, swinging onto their iron ladders, and mounting the top of the
string. Wheeler hadn't come back with the cigarets. I went over the top, and
when I got set down, I commenced yanking my shirt off again, being a big
hand for sunshine. I felt it burning my hide. The train was going too fast
now for anybody to catch it. If Wheeler was on the ground, he's just
naturally going to have a little stay over in El Centre. I looked over the
other edge of the car, and saw his head coming over the rim, and I saw that
he was smiling. Smoke flew like a rain cloud from a new tailor-made cigaret
in his mouth. He scooted over beside me, and flipped ashes into the breeze.
"You get anything to eat?" he said.
I said, "No," that I hadn't got anything.
He reached under his sweater and under his belt and pulled out a brown
paper sack, wet, dripping with ice water, and held it up to me and said,
"Cold pop. I brung a couple. Wait. Here's something to gnaw on with it," and
he handed me a milk candy bar.
"Candy's meal," I told him.
"Sure is; last you all day. That was my last four bits."
"Four bits more'n I got," I joked.
We chewed and drank and talked very little then for a long time.
Wheeler said that he was turning the train back to the railroad company at
Indio. That's the town coming up.
"I know just where to go," Wheeler told me, when the train come to a
quick stop. "Don't you worry 'bout me, boy." Then before I could talk, he
went on saying, "Now listen, I know this track. See? Now, don't you hang on
'er till she gets to Los Angeles, but you leave 'er up here at Colton.
You'll be just about fifty miles from L.A. If you stay on till you come to
L.A., them big dicks'll throw you so far back in that Lincoln Heights jail,
you never will see daylight again. So remember, get off at Colton, hitch on
in to Pasadena, and head out north through Burbank, San Fernando, and stay
right on that 99 to Turlock." Wheeler was climbing over the side. He stuck
out his hand and we shook.
I said, "Good luck, boy, take it easy, but take it."
He said, "Same to you, boy, and I always take it easy, and I always
take it!"
Then be stood still for a few seconds, bending his body over the edge
of the car, and looked at me and said, "Been good to know you!"
Indio to Edom, rich farm lands. Edom to Banning, with the trees popping
up everywhere. Banning to Beaumont, with the fruit hanging all over the
trees, and groceries all over the ground, and people all over everything.
Beaumont to Redlands, the world turned into such a thick green garden of
fruits and vegetables that I didn't know if I was dreaming or not. Coming
out of the dustbowl, the colors so bright and smells so thick all around,
that it seemed almost too good to be true.
Redlands to Colton, A railroad and farming town, full of people that
are wheeling and dealing. Hitch-hikers are standing around thicker than
citizens. The 99 looks friendly, heading west to the coast. I'll see the
Pacific Ocean, go swimming, and flop on the beach. I'll go down to Chinatown
and look around. I'll see the Mexican section. I'll see the whole works.
But, no, I don't know. Los Angeles is too big for me. I'm too little for Los
Angeles. I'll duck Los Angeles and go north by Pasadena, out through
Burbank, like Wheeler told me. I'm against the law, they tell me.
Sign says: "Fruit, see, but don't pick it." Another one reads:
"Fruit--beat it." Another one: "Trespassers prosecuted. Keep Out. Get away
from Here."
Fruit is on the ground, and it looks like the trees have been just too
glad to grow it, and give it to you. The tree likes to grow and you like to
eat it; and there is a sign between you and the tree saying: "Beware The
Mean Dog's Master."
Fruit is rotting on the ground all around me. Just what in the hell has
gone wrong here, anyhow? I'm not a very smart man. Maybe it ought to be this
way, with the crops laying all around over the ground. Maybe they couldn't
get no pickers just when they wanted them, and they just let the fruit go to
the bad. There's enough here on the ground to feed every hungry kid from
Maine to Florida, and from there to Seattle.
A Twenty-nine Ford coupe stops and a Japanese boy gives me a ride. He
is friendly, and tells me all about the country, the crops and vineyards.
"All you have got to do out in this country is to just pour water
around some roots, and yell, 'Grapes!' and next morning the leaves are full
grown, and the grapes are hanging in big bunches, all nice and ready to
pick!"
The little car traveled right along. A haze was running around the
trees, and the colors were different than any that I'd ever seen in my life.
The knotty little oak and iron brush that I'd been used to seeing rolling
with the Oklahoma hills and looking smoky in the hollers, had been home to
my eyes for a long time. My eyes had got sort of used to Oklahoma's beat-up
look, but here, with this sight of fertile, rich, damp, sweet soil that
smelled like the dew of a jungle, I was learning to love another, greener,
part of life. I've tried to keep loving it ever since I first seen it.
The Japanese boy said, "Which way do you plan to go through Los
Angeles?"
"Pasadena? That how ya say if? Then north through Burbank, out that
a-way!"
"If you want to stay with me, you'll be right in the middle of Los
Angeles, but you'll be on a big main highway full of trucks and cars out of
town. Road forks here. Make up your mind quick."
"Keep a-drivin'," I said, craning my neck back to watch the Pasadena
road disappear under the palm trees to the north of us.
We rounded a few hills and knolls, curving in our little jitney, and
all at once, coming over a high place, the lights of Los Angeles jumped up,
running from north to south as far as I could see, and hanging around on the
hills and mountains just as if it was level ground. Red and green neon
flickering for eats, sleeps, sprees, salvation, money made, lent, blowed,
spent. There was an electric sign for dirty clothes, clean clothes, honky
tonky tonks, no clothes, floor shows, gyp-joints, furniture in and out of
homes. The fog was trying to get a headlock on the houses along the high
places, Patches of damp clouds whiffed along the paving in crazy,
disorganized little bunches, hunting some more clouds to work with. Los
Angeles was lost in its own pretty lights and trying to hold out against the
big fog that rolls in from that ocean, and the people that roll in just as
reckless, and rambling, from the country as big as the ocean back East.
It was about seven or eight o'clock when I shook hands with my Japanese
friend, and we wished each other luck. I got out on the pavement at the
Mission Plaza, a block from everything in the world, and listened to the
rumbling of people and smoking of cars pouring fumes out across the streets
and alleys.
"Hungry?" the boy asked me.
"Pretty empty. Just about like an old empty tub,'' I laughed
at him. If he'd offered me a nickel or a dime, I would of took it, I'd of
spent it on a bus to get the hell out of that town. I was empty. But not
starved yet, and more than something to eat, I felt like I wanted to get
outside of the city limits.
"Good luck! Sony I haven't any money on me!" he hollered as he circled
and wheeled away into the big traffic.
I walked along a rough, paved street. To my left, the shimmy old houses
ran up a steep hill, and tried to pretend that they were keeping families of
people in out of the wind and the weather. To my right there was the noise
of the grinding, banging, clanging, and swishing of the dirty railroad
yards. Behind me, south, the big middle of Los Angeles, chasing hamburgers.
Ahead of me, north, the highway ached on, blinking its red and green eyes
and groaning under the heavy load of traffic that it had to carry. Trains
hooted in the low yards close under my right elbow, and scared me out of my
wits.
"How'd ya git outta this town?" I asked a copper.
He looked me over good, and said, "Just follow your nose, boy. You can
read signs. Just keep traveling!''
I walked along the east side of the yards. There was lots of little
restaurants beside the road, where the tourists, truck drivers, and
railroaders dropped in for a meal. Hot coffee steamed up from the cups along
the counters, and the smell of meat frying leaked out through the doors. It
was a cold night. Drops of steamy moisture formed on the windows, and it
blurred out the sight of the people eating and drinking.
I stopped into a little, sawed-off place, and the only person in sight,
away back, was an old Chinaman. He looked up at me with his gray beard, but
didn't say a single word.
I stood there a minute, enjoying the warmth. Then I walked back to
where he was, and asked him, "Have ya got anything left over that a man
could do some work for?"
He set right still, reading his paper, and then looked up and said, "I
work. Hard all day. Every day. I got big bunch people to feed. We eat things
left over. We do work."
"No job?" I asked him.
"No job. We do job. Self."
I hit the breeze again and tried two or three other places along the
road. Finally, I found an old gray-headed couple humped up in front of a
loop-legged radio, listening to some of the hollering being done by a lady
name Amy Semple Temple, or something like that. I woke the old pair up out
of their sermon on hell fire and hot women, and asked them if they had some
work to do for a meal. They told me to grab some scalding hot water and mop
the place down. After three times over the floors, tables, kitchen, and
dishes, I was wrapping myself around a big chicken dinner, with all of the
trimmings.
The old lady handed me a lunch and said, "Here's some-thing extra to
take with you--don't let John know about it."
And as I walked out the door again, listening to the whistle of the
trains getting ready to whang out, John walked over and handed me a quarter
and said, "Here's somethin' ta he'p ya on down th' road. Don't let th' Ïl'
lady know."
A man dressed in an engineer's cap and striped overhalls told me that a
train was making up right at that point, and would pull out along about four
in the morning. It was now about midnight, so I dropped into a coffee joint
and took an hour sipping at a cup. I bought a pint of pretty fair red port
wine with the change, and stayed behind a signboard, drinking wine to keep
warm.
A Mexican boy walked up on me and said, "Pretty cold iss it not? Do you
want a smoke?"
I lit up one of his cigarets, and slipped him the remains of the wine
jug. He took about half of the leavings, and looked at me between gulps,
"Ahhhh! Warms you up, no?"
"Kill it. I done had my tankful," I told him, and heard the bubbles
play a little song that quit when the wine was all downed.
"Time's she gittin' ta be? Know?" I said to him. "Four o'clock or
after," he said. "When does that Fresno freight run?" I asked him. ''Right
now," he said.
I ran out into the yards, jumping dark rails, heavy switches, and
darting among the blind cars. A string of black ones were moving backwards
in the wrong direction. I mounted the side and went over the top, and down
the other side, and took a risk on scrambling between another string at the
hitch. I could just barely see, it was so dark. The cars were so blended
into the night. But, all at once, I looked up within about a foot of my
face, and saw a blur, and a light, and a blur, and a light, and I knew that
here was one going my way. I watched the light come along between the cars,
and finally spotted an open top car, which was easier to see; and grabbed
the ladder, and jumped over into a load of heavy cast-iron machinery. I laid
down in the end of the car, and rested.
The train pulled along slow for a while. I ducked as close up behind
the head end of the car as I could to break the wind. Pretty soon the old
string got the kinks jerked out of her, and whistled through a lot of little
towns. Then we hit a good fifty for about an hour, and started up some
pretty tough grade. It got colder higher up. The fog turned into a drizzle,
and the drizzle into a slow rain.
I imagined a million things bouncing along in the dark. A quick tap of
the air brakes to slow the train down, and the hundred tons of heavy
machinery would shift its weight all over me, I felt so soft and little. I
had felt so tough and big just a few minutes ago.
The lonesome whip of the wind sounded even more lonesome when the big
engine joined in on the whistling. The wheels hummed a song, and the weather
got colder. We started gaining altitude almost like an airplane. I pulled
myself up into a little ball and shook till my bones ached all over. The
weather didn't pay any more attention to my clothes than if I didn't have
them on. My muscles drew up into hard, leathery strings that hurt. I kept a
little warmer by remembering people I'd known, how they looked, faces and
all, and all about the warm desert, and cactus and sunshine growing
everywhere; picturing in my mind something friendly and free, something to
sort of blot out the wind and the freezing train.
On a big slope, that went direct into Bakersfield, we stopped on a
siding to let the mail go by. I got off and walked ten or fifteen cars down
the track, creaking like an eighty-year-old rocking chair. I had to walk
slow along the steep cinder bank, gradually getting the use of myself back
again.
I was past the train when the engineer turned the brakes loose, give
her the gun, and started off.
I'd never seen a train start up this fast before. Most trains take a
little time chugging, getting the load swung into motion. But, setting on
this long straight slope, she just lit out. Running along the side, I just
barely managed to catch it. I had to take a different car as mine was
somewhere down the line. In a few minutes the train was making forty miles
an hour, then fifty, then sixty, down across the strip of country where the
mountains meet the desert south of Bakersfield. The wind blew and the
morning was frosty and cold. Between the two cars, it was freezing. I
managed to mount to the top, and pull a reefer lid open. I looked in, and
saw the hole was filled with fine chips of new ice.
I held on with all of my strength, and crawled over and opened up
another lid. It was packed with chipped ice, too. I was too near froze to
try the jump from one car to the next, so I crawled down the ladder between
two cars--sort of a wind-break--and held on.
My hands froze stiff around the handle of the ladder, but they were
getting too cold and weak to hold on much longer. I listened below to five
or six hundred railroad wheels, clipping the rails through the morning
frost, and felt the windy ice from the refrigerator car that I was hanging
onto.
The fingers of one hand slipped from around the handle. I spent twenty
minutes or so trying to fish an old rag out of my pocket Finally I got it
wound around my hands and, by blowing my breath inside the cloth for a few
minutes, seemed to be getting them a little warmer.
The weather gained on me, though, and my breath turned into thick
frosty ice all over my handkerchief, and my hands started freezing worse
than ever. My finger slid loose again, and I remembered the tales of the
railroaders, people found along the tracks, no way of telling who they were.
If I missed my hold here, one thing was sure, I'd never know what hit
me, and I'd never slide my feet under that good eating table full of hot
square meals at the big marble house of my rich aunt.
The sun looked warmer as it came up, but the desert is cold when it is
clear early in the morning, and the train fanned such a breeze that the sun
didn't make much difference.
That was the closest to the 6x3 that I've ever been. My mind ran back
to millions of things--my whole life was brought up to date, and all of the
people I knew, and all that they meant to me. And, no doubt, my line of
politics took on quite a change right then and there, even though I didn't
know I was getting educated at the time.
The last twenty miles into the Bakersfield yards was the hardest work,
and worst pain, that I ever run onto; that is, of this particular brand.
There are pains and work of different sorts, but this was a job that my life
depended on, and I didn't have even one ounce to say about it. I was just a
little animal of some kind swinging on for my life, and the pain was not
being able to do anything about it.
I left the train long before it stopped, and hit the ground running and
stumbling. My legs worked more like toys than like my real ones. But the sun
was warm in Bakersfield, and I drank all of the good water I could soak up
from a faucet outside, and walked over to an old shack that was out of use
in the yards, and keeled over on the cinders in the sun. I woke up several
hours later, and my train had gone on without me.
Two men said that another train was due out in a few minutes, so I kept
an eye run along the tracks, and caught it when it pulled out. The sun was
warm now, and there were fifty men lined up along the top of the train,
smoking, talking, waving at the folks in cars on the highway, and keeping
quiet.
Bakersfield on into Fresno. Just this side of Fresno, the men piled off
and walked through the yards, planning to meet the train again when it come
out the north end. We took off by ones and twos and tried to get hold of
something to eat. Some of the men had a few nickels, some a dollar or two
hid on them, and others made the alleys knocking on the back doors of
bakeries, greasy-spoon joints, vegetable stands. The meal added up to a
couple or three bites apiece, after we'd all pitched ours in. It was
something to fill your guts.
I saw a sign tacked up in the Fresno yards that said: Free Meal &
Nights Lodging. Rescue Mission.
Men looked at the sign and asked us, "Anybody here need ta be rescued?"
"From what?" somebody hollered.
"All ya got ta do is ta go down there an' kneel down an' say yer
prayers, an' ya git a free meal an' a flop!" somebody explained.
"Yeah? Prayers? Which one o' youse boys knows any t'ing about any
prayers?" an Eastern-sounding man yelled out.
"I'd do it, if I wuz just hungery 'nuff! I'd say 'em some prayers!"
"I don't hafta do no prayin' ta get fed!" a hard looker laughed out. He
was poking a raw onion whole into his mouth, tears trickling down his jaws.
"Oh, I don't know," a quieter man answered him, "I sometimes believe in
prayin'. Lots of folks believes in prayin' before they go out to work, an'
others pray before they go out to fight. An' even if you don't believe in a
God up on a cloud, still, prayin's a pretty good way to get your mind
cleared up, or to get the nerve that it takes to do anything. People pray
because it makes them think serious about things, and, God or no God, it's
all that most of them know how to do." He was a friendly man with whitish
hair, and his easy temper sounded in his voice. It was a thinking voice.
" 'Course," a big Swede told us, "we justa kid along. These monkeys
dun't mean about halfa what they say. Now, like, you take me, Swede, I
prayed long time ago. Usta believe in it strong. Then, whoof, an' a lot of
other things happen that knock my prop out from under me, make me a railroad
bum, an'--I just forget how to pray an' go church."
A guy that talked more and faster said,