The Land of Plenty, page 25
He would not have gone outside, or downtown under the pretext of watching the parade, if the kids had not come running through the house and interrupted him whenever he tried to think back on what had happened and to decide what he ought to do. He would have stayed in the house, in spite of the heat, in spite of his heavy head, if they had only left him alone, if Mildred and Gerald had not started quarreling, if Mildred had not started tormenting him, for he did not know which way to turn in the outside world that had grown inexplicable and dangerous. But they gave him no peace. Little Mildred came running into the room, screaming “Make him stop! Make him stop!” and Mildred answered from upstairs, “Little Gerald! Stop teasing Little Mildred!” though Little Gerald was not even around. He sat back, holding a paper out in front of him, watching his niece with intense hostility while she shouted to her mother upstairs and then to her brother in the yard. Mildred had dressed her daughter in a stiff dress that stuck out all around her like a bell, and had fixed her hair in artificial-looking curls so that everybody said she looked like a little doll, and now, as she called to her mother in her piercing voice, whirling around and around as she pretended to be hurt, he watched her with a smothered loathing and told himself that little kids were vicious. She knew that he hated her; she knew that she got on his nerves; and after she had called out she would look at him slyly and triumphantly and prepare to scream again. When Gerald and Mildred first moved into the house she had pestered him once until he put her out of the room. That was the first sign of what it would mean to have them there. When he closed the door she had dropped over backwards and screamed that he had pushed her, lying on the floor and kicking and screaming until his mother and Mildred both bore down on him in fury. Now Little Gerald came in, shouting over and over, “I wasn’t teasing her! Mama! I wasn’t!”
“Well, stop it!”
He went out on the back porch. The air was dull with smoke from the fires. He stayed on the porch for a while, but there too there was no escape, for in the kitchen Mildred turned on Gerald while he was talking, saying, “Give Santa Barbara a rest.”
“What did I say?”
“Well, we heard all that.”
For a moment there was a silence. Then Gerald said bitterly, “I can’t even carry on a conversation.”
“I don’t care. But you don’t have to keep harping on it. You know you couldn’t make a living there.”
“I made a good living there for seven years.”
“But you can’t now! You can’t any more! So why won’t you admit it?”
He waited uncomfortably, sorry for Gerald and thinking that Mildred ought to leave him alone. But Gerald said abruptly, “The Jews ruined Santa Barbara. It takes a Jew to beat a Jew. If I was a Jew I’d be making a good living now.”
“Why?”
“Because I would. Because they stick up for each other…. Did you ever see a poor Jew?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Oh, Lord,” Mildred said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know the Jews ruined Santa Barbara.”
“How?”
“Because they did!” Gerald cried. “They came in and they grabbed off all the high-income property and nobody else can close a lease! Do you think I’ve got eyes? They got control of all the banks and they got control of all the newspapers and I hope you won’t tell me they haven’t got control of all the movies! You won’t deny that, will you? You won’t deny they got control of all the movies, will you?” His voice rose passionately. “You can’t beat them! They’ve got their fingers in everything! I know! I’ve done business with them! To me there’s nothing lower than a Jew unless it’s a Filipino or a Jap or a nigger, and I’ve done business with all of them!”
“You don’t have to yell!”
“You’d yell if you knew what I know about the Jews.”
“Oh, Mother of God,” she said. “Between you and Little Mildred.”
“What did Father Condon say?”
“That old faker,” she said.
“He’s a Catholic priest!”
“I don’t care if he is! He’s crazy and everybody knows it!”
Gerald said in disgust, “It’s no use arguing with you.”
He heard Gerald starting for the porch, and slipped down around the corner of the house. Now he did not know where to go. In front of the house the kids were planting their firecrackers in the dust, their shouts of excitement rising more loudly than the small explosions, and as he watched them he tried to think of somebody he could talk to, somebody to whom he could tell everything that had happened without leaving out the important things and without being asked a lot of questions, but as he went over the names of everybody he knew, checking them off one after another, he knew there was nobody, nobody he could trust. Already he had found that the kids he went to school with did not respond when he tried to tell them about working, or about how much skill his job demanded at that critical moment when the trucks were changed, and he told himself that they were all growing different and getting dumb; it was no fun running around with them any more. One after another he checked off their names in his mind, leaning against the shady side of the house and treasuring the little moment of privacy there. He tried to imagine himself telling them, “Do you remember Walt Connor? You know what he did?” In his heart he knew they would not believe him, or they would think that Walt was smart and he was a damn fool for getting out of the car and not making Ellen come across too…. Then all at once he heard Mildred’s irritable voice, right at his elbow, “Mamma, make Johnny do something! He moons around here; he gives me the creeps!”
He turned on her, startled and offended. She was standing behind him on the porch, appealing to his mother in the house.
His mother replied, “What is it?”
“Come look at him.”
His mother stepped behind Mildred, peering over her shoulder, her round face a little troubled and impatient, as though she resented this interruption in her work. She gave him a swift scrutiny, concentrating the way she did when she thought one of the children was sick.
He cried out indignantly, “What’s the matter with me?”
“What’s the matter, son?”
“Nothing! She just snoops around…. What does she have to pick on me for? Let her mind her own business!”
“Look at him, Mamma! He looks so dopey! Mamma, he didn’t get in last night till three o’clock. I heard him and I looked to see what time it was. It was after three! Look at his eyes.”
For a moment he was too outraged to answer. Then he said bitterly, “You sneak around…. You have to sneak around.”
“Now Johnny,” his mother said. “Now Mildred.”
Mildred was alarmed at the bitterness she had aroused in him. Her voice softened. “No, Johnny. But you have to take care of yourself. Don’t he, Mamma? And you look like the devil. Have you got a headache?” She began to win him back, speaking softly and good-naturedly, until at last he was calmed.
“I’ve got a kind of a headache,” he admitted.
“Why don’t you go for a walk?”
“I guess I will.”
His mother went back inside, after saying, “Now, don’t torment him, Mildred.” Mildred stirred about on the porch, always working tensely, as if only a few moments were left before she had to catch a train or get the children to bed. As he thought about it he decided uneasily that he did have a headache and probably he did look sick, no wonder, while she worked back around to the questions she wanted to ask him.
“Where’d you go, Johnny?”
“Just downtown.”
“What girl?”
“What?”
“Which one was it?”
“What? … Oh.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Sort of … She works at the factory.”
“What was her name?”
He looked at her with a sudden suspicion. “What do you want to know for?”
“Come on, tell me. I won’t tell anybody.”
“Peggy.”
“Peggy what?”
“I don’t know her last name.”
He could sense her studying him and he felt a little secret pleasure at deceiving her. She continued to move briskly around the porch, but now he knew that she was not thinking of what she was doing, only trying to cover up her interest in where he had been and what he had been doing. She was separating the colored clothes from the white among the things that were to be washed, dividing them swiftly into the two piles, sometimes throwing a stocking or a dress that would fade among the sheets and pillow cases and recapturing it without changing the rushed pace of her movements.
“Did you like her?”
Did I like her, he thought. Why didn’t she say do you like her?
“Oh … she’s all right, I guess.”
She looked up at him. Their eyes met. He could see her trying to see into his mind, her eyes candidly inquisitive and searching. “Where’d you go?”
“I just took her home…. I guess I’ll go for a walk,” he said. He did not turn his eyes away from her until she looked down. “I’ve got a kind of a headache. I guess I’ll go downtown.” As he walked out to the street, past the open windows of the front room, he heard Gerald talking in his nervous salesman voice.
“The French can’t fly,” Gerald said. “Take the Yellow Bird.”
She’s trying to find out if I did anything, he thought wisely. Let her worry. Inside him the thought was warm and pleasing. Let her worry, he repeated. That’s one thing she’ll never find out.
The houses were all alike. The district where the people from the mills lived was larger than all the rest of town put together, acres of close packed wooden dwellings crowded between the hills and the waterfront. It was quiet now; a few children were playing in the dusty streets and here and there a few firecrackers snapped, but most of the people had gone to town or out on the harbor where it was cool. He walked down the narrow sidewalk, sick of the smoky air and the heat and the racket at home, disturbed at Mildred’s questioning and wondering why she turned on him, until his mind began to go back once more to his dim plans for getting out of there, buying an old car, maybe, and heading for the mountains, finding some old deserted shack, maybe, and living off by himself some place in the middle of the woods, or getting a bunch of money together and starting to college before he was too old to enjoy it—no, to hell with that, he thought, thinking of Walt coming up to him like a fraternity brother, saying All right, Shake on it, when he finally promised to try to get Ellen and Marie to go home with them. The bastard.
The air was thick and dead. Sometimes the heavy flakes of ash floated down in the still air, wavering, settling like leaves. The sight of them made him think of the men out fighting the fire in this heat, and he whispered to himself, Poor devils, his brief pity an echo of thousands of comments he heard at home, the first natural response of people whose lives were so bound up with working that they could scarcely see a train without being conscious of the men who ran it, and whose first thought when they watched an exhibition of fireworks was of the rushed and feverish toil of the men who prepared the rockets and set them off. So a bit of ash or a sudden taste of burning fir called up to him a picture of the men burned sweatless in the woods, starting their back fires and driving themselves to clear a space too wide for the fire to leap. Someone called to him and he answered. The sound of the bands in town reached him faintly, and with a little rise of amusement he remembered the forlorn man who had stopped under the street lamp the night before, the huge horn coiled around him, the odd colors of his uniform. But then he began thinking about Ellen again, tormenting himself with the picture of himself that he thought must be built up in her eyes….
Too much! There was too much to think about, too many mysteries, too many worries and surprises! You could not tell what people were going to do. You could not depend on anybody because a man might come up and shake hands with you and the next minute desert you in a moment of danger, the son of a bitch, or sacrifice you like something tossed to the wolves to worry and delay them for a while. I’m going to get out of this town, he thought. I’ll be damned if I’ll live in a crazy place like this. He remembered with a rise of pain the warm excitement that had held him as he sat beside Ellen in the back seat of Walt’s car, remembering her serious little face and the neat fit of her overalls and her shirt unbuttoned way down her neck; he remembered sitting beside her while they waited on the road, her troubled voice, soft and controlled even when she was mad….
Beside him a voice said quietly, “Watch out you don’t knock her up.”
Frankie Dwyer leaned over the fence in front of his house. When Johnny turned to him Frankie looked at him steadily, his expression unchanging, his eyes narrow and cryptic. His eyes were always narrowed because of the heat where he worked and his face was so burned that his eyebrows looked white. Now he said in quiet delight, “I can always see it! I can always recognize that old tail light…. Where’s your Old Man?”
He replied swiftly, hiding behind the words, “I don’t know. I think he’s still home. He was going down to Winters’.”
Frankie Dwyer came out into the street. “I want to see him. I just heard something. Carl’s going to fire your old man anyway. I was going down to your place when I seen you coming…. You don’t want to walk that way when you don’t look where you’re going. Somebody’s liable to trip you. Down where I was raised, down west Texas, a man couldn’t walk ten feet that away ‘thowt some son of a bitch tripping him. That’s a fact! It’s the God-damnedest country for tripping you ever saw….”
He asked in a low voice, “How’d you know…. How’d you hear?”
“Oh. My cousin told me. Some of his wife’s people—niece, I guess—she takes care of the Addisons’ kids and the Addisons live right next door to the Belchers…. I wouldn’t pay no attention. Carl’s just talking. He’d a fired your Old Man last year if he could have.”
Johnny was not reassured, and he did not believe Dwyer intended him to be. He looked at the wooden sidewalk as the pulse began to pound behind his ears. He saw the torn planks that were marked with a thousand little dents, like worm holes, from the corked shoes of the loggers, his eyes searching for something substantial and motionless. The sidewalk sagged in places and some of the planks were broken; at the edges the thistles and other weeds grew high as his knees over the level of the walk, their green hidden under the coating of powdered dust. He forced himself to look hard at the ground until his anxiety subsided. “I don’t take much stock in that kind of talk,” Dwyer said. “There’s always a lot of it going around.”
They turned in at Winters’ house and walked to the back yard where Winters was working on his car. It was a battered old Chevrolet, and Winters spent most of his spare time working on it. He had taken off the hood and the engine head and now he was getting ready to grind the valves, smearing the compound on and setting the grinder in place.
He nodded briefly as they came in. Dwyer asked, “How’s Ann?”
“Better. She’s a good deal better.”
They were silent for a few minutes. The formalities were over. Winters worked on the valve. His fingers darted with feverish adroitness, grasping the tools and holding them with no waste motions or loss of purpose. There was a faint shine of sweat on his dark Indian features.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said. “I guess it’s because I haven’t got anything else to do.”
Dwyer had sat down and drawn a few aimless marks in the ground beside his feet. “The hoist man died,” he announced abruptly.
“I heard.”
“Poor son of a bitch.”
“He never came to.”
“Good thing.” Dwyer looked hard at Johnny. He began to speak in an unvaried voice. “Made me think of something happened once when I was working up at Maloney’s Camp Number Twelve, way hell-and-gone up in the Olympics. That God-damned National City outfit, the worst highball camp I ever worked in—they kill a man up there every week.”
“Bassett kills a man every week,” Winters said.
“For that matter so does the Oberstaller Logging Corporation. So do them Chase camps. But this was different. These guys made a science of it. We logged with the equipment Oberstaller threw away. Once I seen the head rig come down and when the main block hit the cold deck them logs—big bastards; it was fine timber—shot sixty feet in the air. The guy lines whipped around like snakes. That same morning the engineer wouldn’t go to work—said the whole rigging was coming down. But this was different. There was a kid working on the loading crew, just a kid, see, eighteen or nineteen years old—they couldn’t get old hands up into that slaughter-house. Well, they was highballing it so hard they had the whole train always waiting and the minute they pulled the last hook off the last log they pulled out—twelve miles to the main line and they raced their God-damn shay back and forth so fast they finally burnt it up. Anyway, before the kid got out of the way they pulled out and he slipped—it was raining, it was getting dark—and he went right in under the wheels, got both his legs right here.” He drew his hand swiftly across his thighs.
