The Land of Plenty, page 12
“Yeah.”
“He’s a good guy to work with. He’s the only one here I like; he’s the only one that don’t try to make it hard for you if you’re a new man. These God-damn Polacks, hell, they knife you every chance they get.”
Johnny listened. He sat back and let his cigarette burn down and listened. Walt moved around restlessly, sometimes beating his fist impatiently against his open palm. “All they do is beef,” he said. “Right now … I got a chance at a good job and they’re making a lot of trouble….”
Another skyrocket sailed over town.
“If I was back in school!” Walt said. “You don’t know what you miss. Now I’d appreciate it. Now I’d know what to get out of it. Before, all I did was run around and blow in the old man’s dough. After the football season I was drunk three nights every week. Girls used to come around begging for it.”
Johnny sighed and tried to sit back more comfortably.
“I’m going to go,” he said. “Sooner or later. If the old man can’t send me I’ll find some way.”
Walt gave a skeptical grunt. He said nervously, “They all do it. Even Winters. They beef all the time. You can’t depend on them. All these foreigners try to take advantage of you. If you don’t stand up for your rights—Jesus, you’re done for. Like this Polack I work with. He knows I’m a new man, so he thinks I can’t tell when he’s shoving off all the work on me…. It reminds me,” Walt said, “of a story I read once in The Saturday Evening Post. It was in them lumber camps up in the Canadian woods; a college man went up there, and the French Canadians, tough bastards, tried to raise hell with him. Put icicles in his bed, and stole his shoes and did every Goddamn thing. You know, they tried to break him; if he was yellow, they’d beat the hell out of him. Finally he beat some of them up, and they saw they couldn’t walk over him.”
“I think I read that story,” Johnny said. “There was a big fight in the end where they jumped on each other with their calked shoes and tried to gouge each other’s eyes out, wasn’t there?”
Walt nodded. With his head tipped back, looking out across the tideflat, he seemed preoccupied and determined; Johnny felt sort of sorry for the Polack. He wondered vaguely if they were trying to put anything over on him because he was a new man; but the only person who could be doing it was Winters, or maybe Carl. “Gee,” he said, “it certainly seems funny—I never thought—what I mean is, everybody here! Sort of hard to get along with!”
“Yes,” Walt agreed. He lit a cigarette. Inhaling thoughtfully, with his head thrown back, he flicked the match out on the tideflat. “A bunch of Polacks,” he said. “They’re all Polacks. The squarehead I work with drives me nuts.”
Here Johnny felt a little chill. After all, his father worked in the factory, and he worked in it too, so it was hardly fair to go calling them all Polacks just because they worked in the factory. Walt corrected himself. “Oh, of course some of the fellows are all right,” he said. “Winters is all right. But most of these guys are hopeless. The goofy Polack I work with now, he always gives me the heavy end of every truck. Some day I’m going to lam him one. He thinks he’s putting it over on me and that I don’t know what he’s doing. Some day I’m not going to say a word, I’m just going to haul off and paste him one. I don’t care if they fire me for it.”
Somewhat impressed by this determination, Johnny did not say anything. The spasms of the rockets followed one another at periodic intervals, and once an underslung tugboat, with its mast and stack tilted so it could pass under the bridges, floated by close to shore. The men stretched out in their varied attitudes of repose, crabbing to each other in low voices, or stirring to rest more comfortably or to light their cigarettes. Listening to Walt, Johnny felt a confused stir of worry and longing. Suppose he couldn’t go to college? For the last year, all during his senior year at high school, he had been worried about it; all his friends were going; everybody knew that ninety-nine per cent of the men in Who’s Who were college graduates. But how could he go? He was beginning to see that unless somebody left him a lot of money, or he won a prize or something, he wouldn’t have a chance; his father would never earn enough to send him; and now with all the family home…. As he listened to Walt he thought about something he had read, about dusk stealing over the campus and the late students hurrying from the ivy-covered buildings toward the lighted fraternity houses and the sound of young carefree voices rising from Fraternity Row. What could he do if he didn’t go to college? Work in the factory all his life? The thought of it made his blood run cold. When Walt, after throwing away his cigarette, took out his square, blunt, English pipe and said he guessed he would stoke up, Johnny was thinking about college with such intensity that he was almost in despair. Suppose he could not get to college? Suppose he could not get enough money, ever? Suppose his father never earned any more than he did now? Suppose he had to work in the factory for the rest of his life?
Oh, he thought, why am I always looking on the dark side of things?
He sat back and listened to Walt, dreaming of the ivy-covered halls, the long slopes of green lawn, the beautiful coeds, each with her own sports roadster, giving herself so gaily and passionately with a true F. Scott Fitzgerald abandon; yes, and long canoe rides on the lake, with the water lapping the frail sides of the fragile craft, and long bull-fests, blue with tobacco smoke, before the open fire of the country-club fraternity house, and fellows smoking pipes sitting up all night chewing the fat about philosophy and sex! What a life! Yes, and real hard work too, cramming for exams in the spring, when the air was raw and the leaves off the trees, staying up all night drinking hot coffee and cramming for exams tomorrow morning. And the beautiful girls, each lovely coed with streamlined hips and dainty breasts barely perceptible under a clinging pull-over sweater, pinned down and yielding on the secret davenports of a dark sorority house. “The Dekes are a good house,” Walt said. “We got some good men.” Johnny decided that soon he too would buy a pipe.
A lot of questions began circling around in his mind. “I been wondering,” he said hesitantly, “what I mean is, I read an editorial once, are fraternities a good thing? This editorial, I remember, it said they made for an un-American snobbishness among the students, sort of, like Greece and Rome.”
“Hah!” Walt said. “What the hell. Some independent probably wrote it, some sorehead, son of a bitch, couldn’t make a fraternity himself, so he’s got a grudge against them. You run into that all the time.”
“That’s what I thought.” They were silent for a time. “Then I was reading in College Days—there was an article—is too much emphasis placed on sport? You know, it said there was too much emphasis on sport, and the moral standard was low and there was a lot of drinking and orgies going on all the time.”
“It makes me smile,” Walt said, “to hear you refer to College Days.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, you never see a copy of that magazine within ten miles of the campus. Nobody at the house ever read it.”
“I don’t read it,” Johnny said hastily. “I just happened to pick up a copy, and I saw this article, and I wondered.”
Walt sat down, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his pipe cupped in the palm of his hand. From time to time, between his comments, his pipe gave off a choked, strangled, bubbling sound.
“A lot of people,” he began, “think college students are always running around and raising hell.”
Here he stopped, and Johnny waited breathlessly. Were college students always running around and raising hell? Walt did not answer him at once. He puffed thoughtfully at his pipe before he said anything, and tamped the tobacco down in the bowl with great care.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I doubt if you could find a more serious-minded bunch of fellows anywhere than the fellows in the house.”
At this point he stopped, waiting somewhat belligerently to be questioned. Johnny nodded. He had never doubted that the fellows in the house were among the most serious-minded you could find anyhere.
“I mean it!” Walt went on emphatically. “You don’t believe me when I tell you some of the fellows in the house never go out. They just stay in all the time.” He paused again, and Johnny made a noncommittal uhm! sound in his throat. “That’s why it’s such a laugh,” Walt went on, after a moment, “when all these people say the fellows never do anything but run around. They haven’t time! How can they! Why good God!” he cried with sudden vigor, “Some of these people who are always saying that college is a waste of time never saw the inside of a college! That’s a fact! They don’t know a damn thing about it!”
“That’s right,” Johnny said quickly, filled with contempt for all the people who gave snap judgments on things they knew nothing about.
Walt removed his pipe from his mouth and spoke with a slow, deliberate intensity. “Listen, Hagen,” he said. “Ninety per cent of the fellows at the university are working their way through school. Ninety per cent! I think it’s ninety per cent. Think of that! I know a guy—Flynn his name is—his folks never gave him a cent. Every summer he had to go to work as a forest ranger. You think that makes any difference? Hal” he exclaimed scornfully. “And then people say it’s only a waste of time!”
They were silent while they considered the injustice of it.
“The dirty bastards,” Walt said at last.
Nodding, Johnny acknowledged the truth of these remarks. Of course, he thought, naturally the people who didn’t know the first thing about colleges would be the first to criticize them. If they knew the facts they wouldn’t be so critical. He was filled with a growing anger against these people who were always saying that college was a waste of time. “The crazy boobs,” he muttered.
“Can you imagine it?” Walt asked. “Can you imagine it?”
“Gosh,” Johnny replied. Then, as this seemed inadequate as an expression of his contempt, he went on, “It’s pretty terrible.”
“Terrible!” Walt roared. “Terrible’s no name for it!”
Johnny was thinking that it certainly wasn’t true that fraternities made fellows snobbish! As a matter of fact, he had never believed this, because he thought that it must be a good thing for a lot of congenial fellows to be living together in the same house, sort of sharing each other’s problems, besides the social advantages, such as learning how to meet people and making good contacts that would be useful in later life, for everybody knew that the friendships formed in college were among the most precious things in a man’s life. And from the way Walt Connor, who you’d expect to be stuck on himself, was acting, coming up and introducing himself and shaking hands in the most natural way in the world, it certainly didn’t look as if fraternities made fellows very snobbish!
Checking his mirth, Walt went on in an oh-of-course-in-certain-instances voice, “I won’t say there aren’t some fellows who don’t go out of their way to raise general hell and give the school a rotten reputation. I won’t say there aren’t. There are. But what can you expect? You can’t get any bunch of healthy young fellows together and expect them to just sit at home all the time.”
At first Johnny was sobered to think that there were two sides to every question, but as soon as he saw what Walt was driving at he was reassured. Naturally there would always be some who would want to raise general hell because they were young, like himself; he wouldn’t expect himself just to sit around all the time, so why expect others? When Walt was talking about how serious-minded everybody was at the house, Johnny had wondered uneasily if he would be serious-minded enough, but now he saw that there was a way out—you could be serious-minded and still run around and raise hell once in a while if you wanted to.
“Of course not,” he replied. Then he took a savage blow at the people who were always criticizing colleges, and fraternity men in particular. “What do they expect?” he asked scornfully.
But Walt went even further. “I won’t say,” he said quietly, “that there aren’t some fellows who aren’t just looking for trouble and go to college for whatever they can get out of it. Some of them do. I admit it. In fact, I know of one case in particular … a fellow you may have heard of—fraternity man, too—you may know him….”
Here his voice died away, and he sat back shaking his head while he tamped the tobacco down in his pipe, making quick jabs against the coals with his finger. Johnny waited to find out what the fellow had done. What could he have done? Steal? Cheat? Get some girl in trouble? Probably he was weak, Johnny thought, not vicious. But as the silence continued, he realized that Walt was not going to say any more. For a moment he was puzzled, and then he understood that Walt was not going to repeat idle gossip or injure a fellow who was down. It was a real gentlemanly sporting attitude, and the first time Johnny had observed it at such close range. He was deeply stirred, and somewhat awed, but at the same time he racked his brains trying to figure out what the fellow could possibly have done.
Suddenly there was a loud scream from the factory. After a moment there was another. Johnny jumped to his feet. What had happened? He looked at Walt. Should they do anything? Run back inside? Was somebody hurt? But Walt was only listening. There were no more screams. In a moment there was a shout from inside, nor far beyond the nearest wall. Let her up! Can’t you see she’s tired?
“They’re screwing in there,” Walt said quietly.
Johnny said, “Ah,” in an involuntary expression of disbelief, before he corrected himself with “Are they?” and added in confusion, “How do you know?”
“I know.”
Johnny turned to stare at the factory again, seeing it dimly outlined against the sky, a huge and shapeless heap of darkness more intense than the darkness surrounding it. His heart began beating more rapidly at the thought that people were actually screwing inside, beyond the thin walls a few feet away, in the hot, oppressive silence. Where? Right there? He had suspected that the girls were all as hard as nails, but to think that right there, in the factory…. “Gosh,” he said. It was too much for him. There was a long silence as they both stared at the lascivious manufacturing plant standing there in the lonely tideflat like a car parked in the bushes beside a country road.
Walt put his pipe away. He relaxed and drew a deep breath. “Bunch of chippies,” he said. His voice was a little strained.
Johnny nodded. His heart was still pounding. How did Walt know? He glanced sideways at his friend, wondering if Walt too. Probably, he thought. Yes. “God,” Johnny said. His hands clenched and he walked a few steps from a restlessness that gripped him too suddenly for him to wonder whether it was right or not, whether it was what a fraternity man ought to do. Let her up! Were they? he wondered. Or was it merely? Another burst of fireworks spilled out across the sky in all directions, but he did not look up, scarcely aware of them for the inner excitement that held him. All of them? Or only a few? He tried feverishly to remember how the girls looked, but he could not visualize them personally or distinctly; in his memory they all seemed exactly alike.
Walt stood up and stretched. He was a good deal taller than Johnny. He put his hands over his head, clutching at the air and yawning. “I’ve got my car here,” he announced.
“You have?”
“Yes.”
A long silence fell while they stared at the dark building. Nothing else happened. There was no more shouting, no more screaming, only a passionate silence. Johnny felt weak. His legs were beginning to tremble.
“Jesus,” Walt said, after a time, “I hated to come to work tonight. I tried every way I could to get out of it. There’ll be a lot going on downtown even after work. I was thinking I might go home and change my clothes and go down to the Biltmore. It only ought to take me about half an hour to get a bath and slip into my tux and get back downtown….” He yawned again, flexing his quarterback muscles. “What a life!” he said. “Without a wife!” He turned to Johnny abruptly. “By the way,” he said. “Do you know the two girls—sisters—work on the table up at this end?”
“Where?”
“One’s tall,” Walt said. “Black hair. Sister’s about your height. I’ve seen them around town.” His voice was somewhat stiff. “Polacks. You know who I mean.”
“Oh,” Johnny said. “The Turner girls.”
Now he understood. Putting two and two together, Walt’s car and the Turner girls, a cold chill went down his spine as he realized what Walt was suggesting. Now he understood why Walt made such a point of having his car at work. All his life he had known about the Turner girls. Their name was not really Turner. It was Dombroski, or something like that, but they had changed it to Turner when their mother married again. Even in grade school he had known about them. Once some big kids had put Johnny and some of the little kids up to asking the Turner girls if they would for a nail, on the supervised playground of the Benjamin Franklin school. Then in high school Marie Turner finally got expelled for doing it under the grandstand with the quarterback of Centralia’s tricky eleven. Everybody knew they did it all the time, living as they did on the wrong side of the river and maintaining a low standard of living like all the foreigners because they sent all their money back home to their folks in the Old Country. When Johnny began to think of himself and the Turner girls in Walt’s car, he thought only I wonder and Suppose, with his mind floundering downstream among the possibilities.
“You see I thought,” Walt was saying, “I wondered if you. What I mean is this. If you want to take the little one home, I’ll take her sister. You see? You know them better than I do. You ask.”
Here a quick flash of resistance crossed Johnny’s mind. Why me? he asked silently.
Then, a moment later, a dirty, disloyal thought, cynical and unworthy of him, set him to wondering if Walt had come to him with such complete fraternity-brother affability with this secret mission always at the back of his mind. No, he decided, depressed at his own pessimistic disloyalty in crediting such morbid cunning to his new-found friend.
“Me,” he said blankly. “Why don’t … I mean, why should I….”
“He’s a good guy to work with. He’s the only one here I like; he’s the only one that don’t try to make it hard for you if you’re a new man. These God-damn Polacks, hell, they knife you every chance they get.”
Johnny listened. He sat back and let his cigarette burn down and listened. Walt moved around restlessly, sometimes beating his fist impatiently against his open palm. “All they do is beef,” he said. “Right now … I got a chance at a good job and they’re making a lot of trouble….”
Another skyrocket sailed over town.
“If I was back in school!” Walt said. “You don’t know what you miss. Now I’d appreciate it. Now I’d know what to get out of it. Before, all I did was run around and blow in the old man’s dough. After the football season I was drunk three nights every week. Girls used to come around begging for it.”
Johnny sighed and tried to sit back more comfortably.
“I’m going to go,” he said. “Sooner or later. If the old man can’t send me I’ll find some way.”
Walt gave a skeptical grunt. He said nervously, “They all do it. Even Winters. They beef all the time. You can’t depend on them. All these foreigners try to take advantage of you. If you don’t stand up for your rights—Jesus, you’re done for. Like this Polack I work with. He knows I’m a new man, so he thinks I can’t tell when he’s shoving off all the work on me…. It reminds me,” Walt said, “of a story I read once in The Saturday Evening Post. It was in them lumber camps up in the Canadian woods; a college man went up there, and the French Canadians, tough bastards, tried to raise hell with him. Put icicles in his bed, and stole his shoes and did every Goddamn thing. You know, they tried to break him; if he was yellow, they’d beat the hell out of him. Finally he beat some of them up, and they saw they couldn’t walk over him.”
“I think I read that story,” Johnny said. “There was a big fight in the end where they jumped on each other with their calked shoes and tried to gouge each other’s eyes out, wasn’t there?”
Walt nodded. With his head tipped back, looking out across the tideflat, he seemed preoccupied and determined; Johnny felt sort of sorry for the Polack. He wondered vaguely if they were trying to put anything over on him because he was a new man; but the only person who could be doing it was Winters, or maybe Carl. “Gee,” he said, “it certainly seems funny—I never thought—what I mean is, everybody here! Sort of hard to get along with!”
“Yes,” Walt agreed. He lit a cigarette. Inhaling thoughtfully, with his head thrown back, he flicked the match out on the tideflat. “A bunch of Polacks,” he said. “They’re all Polacks. The squarehead I work with drives me nuts.”
Here Johnny felt a little chill. After all, his father worked in the factory, and he worked in it too, so it was hardly fair to go calling them all Polacks just because they worked in the factory. Walt corrected himself. “Oh, of course some of the fellows are all right,” he said. “Winters is all right. But most of these guys are hopeless. The goofy Polack I work with now, he always gives me the heavy end of every truck. Some day I’m going to lam him one. He thinks he’s putting it over on me and that I don’t know what he’s doing. Some day I’m not going to say a word, I’m just going to haul off and paste him one. I don’t care if they fire me for it.”
Somewhat impressed by this determination, Johnny did not say anything. The spasms of the rockets followed one another at periodic intervals, and once an underslung tugboat, with its mast and stack tilted so it could pass under the bridges, floated by close to shore. The men stretched out in their varied attitudes of repose, crabbing to each other in low voices, or stirring to rest more comfortably or to light their cigarettes. Listening to Walt, Johnny felt a confused stir of worry and longing. Suppose he couldn’t go to college? For the last year, all during his senior year at high school, he had been worried about it; all his friends were going; everybody knew that ninety-nine per cent of the men in Who’s Who were college graduates. But how could he go? He was beginning to see that unless somebody left him a lot of money, or he won a prize or something, he wouldn’t have a chance; his father would never earn enough to send him; and now with all the family home…. As he listened to Walt he thought about something he had read, about dusk stealing over the campus and the late students hurrying from the ivy-covered buildings toward the lighted fraternity houses and the sound of young carefree voices rising from Fraternity Row. What could he do if he didn’t go to college? Work in the factory all his life? The thought of it made his blood run cold. When Walt, after throwing away his cigarette, took out his square, blunt, English pipe and said he guessed he would stoke up, Johnny was thinking about college with such intensity that he was almost in despair. Suppose he could not get to college? Suppose he could not get enough money, ever? Suppose his father never earned any more than he did now? Suppose he had to work in the factory for the rest of his life?
Oh, he thought, why am I always looking on the dark side of things?
He sat back and listened to Walt, dreaming of the ivy-covered halls, the long slopes of green lawn, the beautiful coeds, each with her own sports roadster, giving herself so gaily and passionately with a true F. Scott Fitzgerald abandon; yes, and long canoe rides on the lake, with the water lapping the frail sides of the fragile craft, and long bull-fests, blue with tobacco smoke, before the open fire of the country-club fraternity house, and fellows smoking pipes sitting up all night chewing the fat about philosophy and sex! What a life! Yes, and real hard work too, cramming for exams in the spring, when the air was raw and the leaves off the trees, staying up all night drinking hot coffee and cramming for exams tomorrow morning. And the beautiful girls, each lovely coed with streamlined hips and dainty breasts barely perceptible under a clinging pull-over sweater, pinned down and yielding on the secret davenports of a dark sorority house. “The Dekes are a good house,” Walt said. “We got some good men.” Johnny decided that soon he too would buy a pipe.
A lot of questions began circling around in his mind. “I been wondering,” he said hesitantly, “what I mean is, I read an editorial once, are fraternities a good thing? This editorial, I remember, it said they made for an un-American snobbishness among the students, sort of, like Greece and Rome.”
“Hah!” Walt said. “What the hell. Some independent probably wrote it, some sorehead, son of a bitch, couldn’t make a fraternity himself, so he’s got a grudge against them. You run into that all the time.”
“That’s what I thought.” They were silent for a time. “Then I was reading in College Days—there was an article—is too much emphasis placed on sport? You know, it said there was too much emphasis on sport, and the moral standard was low and there was a lot of drinking and orgies going on all the time.”
“It makes me smile,” Walt said, “to hear you refer to College Days.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, you never see a copy of that magazine within ten miles of the campus. Nobody at the house ever read it.”
“I don’t read it,” Johnny said hastily. “I just happened to pick up a copy, and I saw this article, and I wondered.”
Walt sat down, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his pipe cupped in the palm of his hand. From time to time, between his comments, his pipe gave off a choked, strangled, bubbling sound.
“A lot of people,” he began, “think college students are always running around and raising hell.”
Here he stopped, and Johnny waited breathlessly. Were college students always running around and raising hell? Walt did not answer him at once. He puffed thoughtfully at his pipe before he said anything, and tamped the tobacco down in the bowl with great care.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I doubt if you could find a more serious-minded bunch of fellows anywhere than the fellows in the house.”
At this point he stopped, waiting somewhat belligerently to be questioned. Johnny nodded. He had never doubted that the fellows in the house were among the most serious-minded you could find anyhere.
“I mean it!” Walt went on emphatically. “You don’t believe me when I tell you some of the fellows in the house never go out. They just stay in all the time.” He paused again, and Johnny made a noncommittal uhm! sound in his throat. “That’s why it’s such a laugh,” Walt went on, after a moment, “when all these people say the fellows never do anything but run around. They haven’t time! How can they! Why good God!” he cried with sudden vigor, “Some of these people who are always saying that college is a waste of time never saw the inside of a college! That’s a fact! They don’t know a damn thing about it!”
“That’s right,” Johnny said quickly, filled with contempt for all the people who gave snap judgments on things they knew nothing about.
Walt removed his pipe from his mouth and spoke with a slow, deliberate intensity. “Listen, Hagen,” he said. “Ninety per cent of the fellows at the university are working their way through school. Ninety per cent! I think it’s ninety per cent. Think of that! I know a guy—Flynn his name is—his folks never gave him a cent. Every summer he had to go to work as a forest ranger. You think that makes any difference? Hal” he exclaimed scornfully. “And then people say it’s only a waste of time!”
They were silent while they considered the injustice of it.
“The dirty bastards,” Walt said at last.
Nodding, Johnny acknowledged the truth of these remarks. Of course, he thought, naturally the people who didn’t know the first thing about colleges would be the first to criticize them. If they knew the facts they wouldn’t be so critical. He was filled with a growing anger against these people who were always saying that college was a waste of time. “The crazy boobs,” he muttered.
“Can you imagine it?” Walt asked. “Can you imagine it?”
“Gosh,” Johnny replied. Then, as this seemed inadequate as an expression of his contempt, he went on, “It’s pretty terrible.”
“Terrible!” Walt roared. “Terrible’s no name for it!”
Johnny was thinking that it certainly wasn’t true that fraternities made fellows snobbish! As a matter of fact, he had never believed this, because he thought that it must be a good thing for a lot of congenial fellows to be living together in the same house, sort of sharing each other’s problems, besides the social advantages, such as learning how to meet people and making good contacts that would be useful in later life, for everybody knew that the friendships formed in college were among the most precious things in a man’s life. And from the way Walt Connor, who you’d expect to be stuck on himself, was acting, coming up and introducing himself and shaking hands in the most natural way in the world, it certainly didn’t look as if fraternities made fellows very snobbish!
Checking his mirth, Walt went on in an oh-of-course-in-certain-instances voice, “I won’t say there aren’t some fellows who don’t go out of their way to raise general hell and give the school a rotten reputation. I won’t say there aren’t. There are. But what can you expect? You can’t get any bunch of healthy young fellows together and expect them to just sit at home all the time.”
At first Johnny was sobered to think that there were two sides to every question, but as soon as he saw what Walt was driving at he was reassured. Naturally there would always be some who would want to raise general hell because they were young, like himself; he wouldn’t expect himself just to sit around all the time, so why expect others? When Walt was talking about how serious-minded everybody was at the house, Johnny had wondered uneasily if he would be serious-minded enough, but now he saw that there was a way out—you could be serious-minded and still run around and raise hell once in a while if you wanted to.
“Of course not,” he replied. Then he took a savage blow at the people who were always criticizing colleges, and fraternity men in particular. “What do they expect?” he asked scornfully.
But Walt went even further. “I won’t say,” he said quietly, “that there aren’t some fellows who aren’t just looking for trouble and go to college for whatever they can get out of it. Some of them do. I admit it. In fact, I know of one case in particular … a fellow you may have heard of—fraternity man, too—you may know him….”
Here his voice died away, and he sat back shaking his head while he tamped the tobacco down in his pipe, making quick jabs against the coals with his finger. Johnny waited to find out what the fellow had done. What could he have done? Steal? Cheat? Get some girl in trouble? Probably he was weak, Johnny thought, not vicious. But as the silence continued, he realized that Walt was not going to say any more. For a moment he was puzzled, and then he understood that Walt was not going to repeat idle gossip or injure a fellow who was down. It was a real gentlemanly sporting attitude, and the first time Johnny had observed it at such close range. He was deeply stirred, and somewhat awed, but at the same time he racked his brains trying to figure out what the fellow could possibly have done.
Suddenly there was a loud scream from the factory. After a moment there was another. Johnny jumped to his feet. What had happened? He looked at Walt. Should they do anything? Run back inside? Was somebody hurt? But Walt was only listening. There were no more screams. In a moment there was a shout from inside, nor far beyond the nearest wall. Let her up! Can’t you see she’s tired?
“They’re screwing in there,” Walt said quietly.
Johnny said, “Ah,” in an involuntary expression of disbelief, before he corrected himself with “Are they?” and added in confusion, “How do you know?”
“I know.”
Johnny turned to stare at the factory again, seeing it dimly outlined against the sky, a huge and shapeless heap of darkness more intense than the darkness surrounding it. His heart began beating more rapidly at the thought that people were actually screwing inside, beyond the thin walls a few feet away, in the hot, oppressive silence. Where? Right there? He had suspected that the girls were all as hard as nails, but to think that right there, in the factory…. “Gosh,” he said. It was too much for him. There was a long silence as they both stared at the lascivious manufacturing plant standing there in the lonely tideflat like a car parked in the bushes beside a country road.
Walt put his pipe away. He relaxed and drew a deep breath. “Bunch of chippies,” he said. His voice was a little strained.
Johnny nodded. His heart was still pounding. How did Walt know? He glanced sideways at his friend, wondering if Walt too. Probably, he thought. Yes. “God,” Johnny said. His hands clenched and he walked a few steps from a restlessness that gripped him too suddenly for him to wonder whether it was right or not, whether it was what a fraternity man ought to do. Let her up! Were they? he wondered. Or was it merely? Another burst of fireworks spilled out across the sky in all directions, but he did not look up, scarcely aware of them for the inner excitement that held him. All of them? Or only a few? He tried feverishly to remember how the girls looked, but he could not visualize them personally or distinctly; in his memory they all seemed exactly alike.
Walt stood up and stretched. He was a good deal taller than Johnny. He put his hands over his head, clutching at the air and yawning. “I’ve got my car here,” he announced.
“You have?”
“Yes.”
A long silence fell while they stared at the dark building. Nothing else happened. There was no more shouting, no more screaming, only a passionate silence. Johnny felt weak. His legs were beginning to tremble.
“Jesus,” Walt said, after a time, “I hated to come to work tonight. I tried every way I could to get out of it. There’ll be a lot going on downtown even after work. I was thinking I might go home and change my clothes and go down to the Biltmore. It only ought to take me about half an hour to get a bath and slip into my tux and get back downtown….” He yawned again, flexing his quarterback muscles. “What a life!” he said. “Without a wife!” He turned to Johnny abruptly. “By the way,” he said. “Do you know the two girls—sisters—work on the table up at this end?”
“Where?”
“One’s tall,” Walt said. “Black hair. Sister’s about your height. I’ve seen them around town.” His voice was somewhat stiff. “Polacks. You know who I mean.”
“Oh,” Johnny said. “The Turner girls.”
Now he understood. Putting two and two together, Walt’s car and the Turner girls, a cold chill went down his spine as he realized what Walt was suggesting. Now he understood why Walt made such a point of having his car at work. All his life he had known about the Turner girls. Their name was not really Turner. It was Dombroski, or something like that, but they had changed it to Turner when their mother married again. Even in grade school he had known about them. Once some big kids had put Johnny and some of the little kids up to asking the Turner girls if they would for a nail, on the supervised playground of the Benjamin Franklin school. Then in high school Marie Turner finally got expelled for doing it under the grandstand with the quarterback of Centralia’s tricky eleven. Everybody knew they did it all the time, living as they did on the wrong side of the river and maintaining a low standard of living like all the foreigners because they sent all their money back home to their folks in the Old Country. When Johnny began to think of himself and the Turner girls in Walt’s car, he thought only I wonder and Suppose, with his mind floundering downstream among the possibilities.
“You see I thought,” Walt was saying, “I wondered if you. What I mean is this. If you want to take the little one home, I’ll take her sister. You see? You know them better than I do. You ask.”
Here a quick flash of resistance crossed Johnny’s mind. Why me? he asked silently.
Then, a moment later, a dirty, disloyal thought, cynical and unworthy of him, set him to wondering if Walt had come to him with such complete fraternity-brother affability with this secret mission always at the back of his mind. No, he decided, depressed at his own pessimistic disloyalty in crediting such morbid cunning to his new-found friend.
“Me,” he said blankly. “Why don’t … I mean, why should I….”
