Joe Hill (10 page)

When he threw a third piece of sandwich toward the rat there was no running away. That’s the way it goes, Joe said. The minute anybody tosses out some food, you practically stand on your head. The biggest, toughest, smartest rat under the wharf, and all it takes to tame you is a scrap of sandwich. If you really got wise you could take over the town of San Pedro, did you know that? Just by going after what you really want and not being satisfied with a chunk of bread.

Steps came around the warehouse, close, and in one motion as smooth as water the rat was over the edge and gone. For
a moment its snaky tail lay there, and then as if it had a life of its own it crawled out of sight. Joe looked up into the cocky, square face of Herb Davis.

Davis pulled down his mouth. “I guess I queered it.”

“Queered what?”

“Weren’t you trying to get him?”

“I was feeding him.”

Davis stared, his tough red face contracted. Even on so hot a day he wore a snap-bow tie. His sleeves were puffed out above metal elastic armbands. “What the hell for?”

“Anything wrong with it?”

“Nothing except the city probably spends a hundred thousand a year exterminating ’em.”

“That’s why I was feeding him,” Joe said. “What’s new?”

“I come down to spread the word. Tom Barnabas is here.”

“He is?” Joe stood up.

“Flying trip,” Herb said. “He’ll be around all afternoon and talk at a street meeting tonight. Also he wants to talk to you.”

“Me?”

“I been telling him about you,” Herb said. “What you get for being famous.”

Since Sunday he had felt it—a kind of expectancy, and he believed implicitly that there would be a day like this when the waiting immobility of his life would be broken and something big would happen. Destined and dedicated, a man on a big errand, he had yet hung on the brink, uncertain, committed but not wholly involved; and his unprecipitated, uncorroborated myth of himself hung with him. There would have to be a moment or an event that would be crucial. He felt it coming now.

Dusting off the seat of his corduroy pants, he said carefully, “He at the hall?”

“Was when I left. You coming back now?”

“I want to stop off at the shack for a minute first. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

“He particularly wants to see you,” Herb said. He went off along the platform, a hurrying man, an aggressive, thrusting-aside, doing man, and Joe started for the shack.

Barnabas was a member of the General Executive Board of the
IWW
, an intellectual and an orator, almost as big a figure
as Trautman or St. John or Haywood, and he represented something Joe wanted to see and know: a man high in the union, a leader and an organizer, Barnabas also wanted to see him. To be known and sought out—there was a satisfaction in that that pulled his mouth upward in a smile. But he still felt what he had felt when Davis told him—a little uncertainty, a little fear. He was going to the shack to change his clothes and see if John Alberg was around to go down with him.

The moment he came in the shack he gave up the second notion. John had got himself tanked last night as usual. The quilt and the shucked-off clothes were all over the floor. In underwear and socks, John sat on the brass bed rubbing the back of his neck, bleary-eyed and whiskery and with the corners of his mouth brown from
snus
. Anger flew in Joe’s face like a bird caught in the room. Without a word he yanked the chest out from under his bunk and got out the blue suit, the shirt and collar, the yellow shoes.

John scrubbed at his swollen face, yawned, sank his head and cautiously rolled it on his neck. “Holy yee!” he said vaguely but with feeling. His toes curled in the holey socks, he watched Joe change.

“Going somev’ere?”

“Tom Barnabas is in town.”

For two or three minutes more John said nothing, but watched stupidly. Then astonishment visibly broke the surface of his mind. He said, “You dressing up to see
him?
”

Tying the string tie, Joe saw the image of his cousin in the broken mirror, temples clutched between the heels of his hands, dog-eyes bent upward.

“Maybe I should go around looking the way you look,” Joe said.

“You couldn’t look as bad as I feel,” John said. He rose, groaning “Oh, holy smoke!” and shuffled to the stand and with one hand poured a dipperful of water over his head. Dripping, with water catching in his stubbled cheeks, he turned and groped among his clothes on the floor, finally coming up with a pint bottle about half full. Muttering to himself, his big foolish face stunned and swollen, his big head wagging, he worked the cork out with his thumb and finger while Joe watched.

“Are you going to start right in again?”

“Vell, holy yee,” John said.

As if he carried a fifty-pound weight on his head he cautiously tipped the bottle, moving his head and the bottle together. Joe let the anger lick out again, realizing how much was there only when he let it go. He said, “When every man in the union ought to be down on the line or over at the hall hearing what Barnabas has got to say, you sit around here in your drawers starting another drunk.”

The bottle came cautiously down. “Dis is har of dog.”

“A souse!” Joe said. “A lousy dehorn!”

He slammed the door on the sight of John’s opening, astonished face. Along the path he walked carefully, walking on grass instead of in the path, so as to avoid getting dust on his shoes. Without precisely admitting it to himself, he knew why he had jumped on John, why he had felt it necessary to dress up. He could even, in the layer of his mind which knew things without admitting them, discover an almost voluptuous appreciation of his own cunning.

Barnabas was for labor but not born in it. He was not a working stiff, but a college graduate, a leader. And to him now, ready to listen with attention but not in any way acknowledging any superiority in brains or value in the other, came Joe Hillstrom in good dressy clothes; also a leader, also a man who showed above the rest.

But he wished with a last flash of anger that John had been sober enough to come along. A man alone showed up more.

He came into the hall under the poster of the worker stripped to the waist, with the red letters
IWW
rising behind him like a red dawn, and saw Barnabas in the midst of a group—Davis and Manderich and some others, and a girl Joe did not know. The whole group turned as he came in, so that he entered alone and spotlighted. “Here he is now,” Herb Davis said.

So he was expected, he had been named. Crossing the room was like an actor’s entrance. Though he shook hands with Barnabas almost indifferently, he felt at once the man’s magnetism. Something emanated from him, a glow of conviction and assurance that shriveled Joe’s confidence instantly. Barnabas gave his undivided, friendly attention when he shook hands, his eyes were brown and warm, and his eyes and his hand and his voice all said the same thing. Glad to know you. Really glad.

“You wrote Casey Jones,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s a great song. It really puts the finger on something.”

Joe said nothing. His embarrassment and his pride made him look into Barnabas’ open handsome face almost jeeringly. The brown eyes were warm and compelling on him. He knew that his unadmitted notion of being equal to this man was a pipedream. His challenge was defeated before it ever got made.

“Herb tells me you’re working on some more.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. He felt in the group around him, in Herb especially, the unspoken urge: Go on, tell him about it, show your stuff, impress the visitor so the local boys can take pride. But something stiff and clumsy in his insides would not bend, his tongue was awkward in his mouth. To his own ears his voice sounded surly and resentful. On the broad freckled face of the girl in the circle he thought he saw amazement, and he leveled a glance of hatred at her.

Barnabas was pressing him, his warmth unchanged. “You’re making a book of them, is that right?”

“I had a notion.”

“Can I see it?”

“It isn’t done.”

“How many songs?”

“Only three really finished.”

“That’s all right. Where are they?”

“Over at the mission.”

He felt his neck redden at how the words sounded and the things they implied, and added, “I write them there because there’s a piano.”

Barnabas was looking at his watch with one eye still on Joe. “I
was just going over to the hotel. Can you bring them there? Regent Hotel, room seventeen?”

“How soon?”

“Right away.”

“I guess so.”

“Good!” Barnabas said. His voice boomed, a big commanding sound, and his actions got at once brisker, as if something now was settled and other things remained to be attacked. He put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Sooner or later we’ve got to quit organizing to ‘Halleluiah I’m a Bum.’ I want to see your songs for a very particular reason.”

Several of them went through the door together, and in the street Barnabas turned, apologizing. “You didn’t meet Betty. This is Betty Spahn.”

He looked at her sharply now, focusing on her for the first time. The hand she gave him was broad as a man’s, her eyes were flecked with yellow, her mouth was flexible, wide, amused. So Barnabas traveled with a klootch. And this klootch! “Boxcar Betty?” he said.

She was known wherever migrants gathered, in boardinghouses and jungles and camps all up and down the West. Her father was an itinerant populist agitator, her mother the daughter of a country parson who had lived with a half-dozen workers in the labor movement. Mother Spahn’s house in Aberdeen was still headquarters for harvest stiffs; in the yards at Aberdeen the girl had grown up with boxcars for playhouses. She had hit the road at sixteen, been for a while the girl of Dutch Weiss until he was killed in a battle with the Kansas City cops, and she had scratched her name on the walls of half a dozen jails where she had been thrown for her work in free-speech fights and walkouts. Once she had ridden from Seattle to the
IWW
convention in Chicago with the Overall Brigade of Jack Walsh, hopping freights with the rest, jungling up with them, working at meetings and asking no favors, one girl among twenty-five men, as red a Wobbly as ever grew.

She had a neck as strong as a tree. Joe said in wonder, “So you’re Boxcar Betty.”

“Why, heard of me?”

“All over.”

Her laugh was hoarse, big-chested, full of delight. He thought
as he left them and went on to the mission that there ought to be a song about a girl like that, a real dyed-in-the-skein rebel.

The door to room seventeen was open. Tom Barnabas with his suspenders dangling was shaving in front of the washstand mirror. “Be with you in a second,” he said over his shoulder, pulling the skin of his throat to stretch it. Joe sat down. In a moment Betty Spahn came in from across the hall and sprawled on the bed.

“Got your songs?”

Joe tossed her the envelope with the sheets of verses and drawings.

“How about the music? You write that too?”

“Not for any of these.”

“Not for any of these,” she said, raising her eyes to his face. “Do you write it for some of them?”

“I’ve got one, Workers of the World Awaken’ that I’m writing a new tune for,” Joe said. “I haven’t got it worked out yet.” With a finger he scattered the sheets till the one he wanted was showing:

As she read it he watched her, but Barnabas, clean and pink, tenderly mopping with a towel, leaned to read over her shoulder and obscured her face. He made no comment, but only said, “If I have to shave once more in cold water I won’t have any hide left.”

Betty Spain’s fingers picked up another sheet. “What’s the tune to this one?”

“Which one?”

“ ‘Mr. Block.’ ”

“ ‘It looks to Me like a Big Time Tonight.’ ”

She hummed it, reading through the lines, and now Barnabas threw the towel on the stand and chuckled, swinging his alert face toward Joe. “That’s a good one—good as Casey Jones.”

Joe was annoyed at how much the casual praise meant, and
he half hated Barnabas for putting him in this position of a menial who could be thrown a bone of commendation. Yet Barnabas was his ally, his friend, his fellow worker. Joe looked away from him into the yellow-flecked eyes of Boxcar Betty. She flapped another sheet at him. “How about this one? ‘The White Slave’?”

“ ‘Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,’ ” Joe said. “I wrote that a while back, up in Seattle. It isn’t exactly a labor song.”

“It is at the end,” Barnabas said, and put his finger on the last verse:

“That’s a tear-jerker,” Betty said with her throaty laugh. Barnabas reached over her and gathered up the papers, leaning against the dresser with his suspenders down, his face expressionless as he read. Over at the window a blowfly buzzed and stopped and buzzed again, angrily trying to force a way through the curtains. The room was hot and airless. On the bed Boxcar Betty leaned back against her braced hands and catching Joe’s eye inexplicably winked. Joe stirred, wanting to be gone.