The 42nd Parallel (47 page)

Charley dragged through a couple of years of highschool, making a little money helping round the Moorhead Garage evenings, but he didn’t like it home any more after he got back from his trip to the Twin Cities. His mother wouldn’t let him work Sundays and nagged him about being confirmed and his sister Esther nagged him about everything and Lizzie treated him as if he was still a little kid, calling him “Pet” before the boarders and he was sick of schooling, so the spring when he was seventeen, after commencement, he went down to Minneapolis again looking for a job on his own this time. As he had money to keep him for a few days the first thing he did was to go down to Big Island Park. He wanted to ride on the rollercoasters and shoot in the shootinggalleries and go swimming and pick up girls. He was through with hick towns like Fargo and Moorhead where nothing ever happened.

It was almost dark when he got to the lake. As the little steamboat drew up to the wharf he could hear the jazzband through the trees, and the rasp and rattle of the rollercoaster and yells as a car took a dip. There were a dancing pavilion and colored lights among the trees and a smell of girls’ perfumery and popcorn and molasses candy and powder from the shooting gallery and the barkers were at it in front of their booths. As it was Monday evening there weren’t very many people. Charley went round the rollercoaster a couple of times and got to talking with the young guy who ran it about what the chances were of getting a job round there.

The guy said to stick around, Svenson the manager would be there when they closed up at eleven, and he thought he might be looking for a guy. The guy’s name was Ed Walters; he said it wasn’t much of a graft but that Svenson was pretty straight; he let Charley take a couple of free rides to see how the rollercoaster worked and handed him out a bottle of cream soda and told him to keep his shirt on. This was his second year in the amusement game and he had a sharp foxface and a wise manner.

Charley’s heart was thumping when a big hollowfaced man with coarse sandy hair came round to collect the receipts at the ticket booth. That was Svenson. He looked Charley up and down and said he’d try him out for a week and to remember that this was a quiet family amusement park and that he wouldn’t stand for any rough stuff and told him to come round at ten the next morning. Charley said “So long” to Ed Walters and caught the last boat and car back to town. When he got out of the car it was too late to take his bag out of the station parcelroom; he didn’t want to spend money on a room or to go out to Jim’s place so he slept on a bench in front of the City Hall. It was a warm night and it made him feel good to be sleeping on a bench like a regular hobo. The arclights kept getting in his eyes, though, and he was nervous about the cop; it’d be a hell of a note to get pinched for a vag and lose the job out at the park. His teeth were chattering when he woke up in the gray early morning. The arclights spluttered pink against a pale lemonyellow sky; the big business blocks with all their empty windows looked funny and gray and deserted. He had to walk fast pounding the pavement with his heels to get the blood going through his veins again.

He found a stand where he could get a cup of coffee and a doughnut for five cents and went out to Lake Minnetonka on the first car. It was a bright summer day with a little north in the wind. The lake was very blue and the birchtrunks looked very white and the little leaves danced in the wind greenyellow against the dark evergreens and the dark blue of the sky. Charley thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. He waited a long time drowsing in the sun on the end of the wharf for the boat to start over to the island. When he got there the park was all locked up, there were shutters on all the booths and the motionless red and blue cars of the rollercoaster looked forlorn in the morning light. Charley roamed round for a while but his eyes smarted and his legs ached and his suitcase was too heavy, so he found a place sheltered by the wall of a shack from the wind and lay down in the warm sun on the pineneedles and went to sleep with his suitcase beside him.

He woke up with a start. His Ingersoll said eleven. He had a cold sinking feeling. It’d be lousy to lose the job by being late. Svenson was there sitting in the ticket booth at the rollercoaster with a straw hat on the back of his head. He didn’t say anything about the time. He just told Charley to take his coat off and help MacDonald the engineer oil up the motor.

Charley worked on that rollercoaster all summer until the park closed in September. He lived in a little camp over at Excelsior with Ed Walters and a wop named Spagnolo who had a candy concession.

In the next camp Svenson lived with his six daughters. His wife was dead. Anna the eldest was about thirty and was cashier at the amusement park, two of them were waitresses at the Tonka Bay Hotel and the others were in highschool and didn’t work. They were all tall and blond and had nice complexions. Charley fell for the youngest, Emiscah, who was just about his age. They had a float and a springboard and they all went in swimming together. Charley wore a bathingsuit upper and a pair of khaki pants all summer and got very sunburned. Ed’s girl was Zona and all four of them used to go out canoeing after the amusement park closed, particularly warm nights when there was a moon. They didn’t drink but they smoked cigarettes and played the phonograph and kissed and cuddled up together in the bottom of the canoe. When they’d got back to the boys’ camp, Spagnolo would be in bed and they’d haze him a little and put junebugs under his blankets and he’d curse and swear and toss around. Emiscah was a great hand for making fudge, and Charley was crazy about her and she seemed to like him. She taught him how to frenchkiss and would stroke his hair and rub herself up against him like a cat but she never let him go too far and he wouldn’t have thought it was right anyway. One night all four of them went out and built a fire under a pine in a patch of big woods up the hill back of the camps. They toasted marshmallows and sat round the fire telling ghoststories. They had blankets and Ed knew how to make a bed with hemlock twigs stuck in the ground and they all four of them slept in the same blankets and tickled each other and roughhoused around and it took them a long time to get to sleep. Part of the time Charley lay between the two girls and they cuddled up close to him, but he got a hard on and couldn’t sleep and was worried for fear the girls would notice.

He learned to dance and to play poker and when laborday came he hadn’t saved any money but he felt he’d had a wonderful summer.

He and Ed got a room together in St. Paul. He got a job as machinist’s assistant in the Northern Pacific shops and made fair money. He learned to run an electric lathe and started a course in nightschool to prepare for civil engineering at the Mechanical Arts High. Ed didn’t seem to have much luck about jobs, all he seemed to be able to do was pick up a few dollars now and then as attendant at a bowling alley. Sundays they often ate dinner with the Svensons. Mr. Svenson was running a small movie house called the Leif Ericsson on Fourth Street but things weren’t going well. He took it for granted that the boys were engaged to two of his daughters and was only too glad to see them come around. Charley took Emiscah out every Saturday night and spent a lot on candy and taking her to vaudeville shows and to a Chink restaurant where you could dance afterwards. At Christmas he gave her his seal ring and after that she admitted that she was engaged to him. They’d go back to the Svensons’ and sit on the sofa in the parlor hugging and kissing.

She seemed to enjoy getting him all wrought up, then she’d run off and go and fix her hair or put some rouge on her face and be gone a long time and he’d hear her upstairs giggling with her sisters. He’d walk up and down in the parlor, where there was only one light in a flowered shade, feeling nervous and jumpy. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to get married because that ’ud keep him from traveling round the country and getting ahead in studying engineering. The other guys at the shop who weren’t married went down the line or picked up streetwalkers, but Charley was afraid of getting a disease and he never seemed to have any time what with nightschool and all, and besides it was Emiscah he wanted.

After he’d given her a last rough kiss, feeling her tongue in his mouth and his nostrils full of her hair and the taste of her mouth in his mouth he’d walk home with his ears ringing, feeling sick and weak; when he got to bed he couldn’t sleep but would toss around all night thinking he was going mad and Ed’d grunt at him from the other side of the bed for crissake to keep still.

In February Charley got a bad sore throat and the doctor he went to said it was diphtheria and sent him to the hospital. He was terribly sick for several days after they gave him the antitoxin. When he was getting better Ed and Emiscah came to see him and sat on the edge of his bed and made him feel good. Ed was all dressed up and said he had a new job and was making big money but he wouldn’t tell what it was. Charley got the idea that Ed and Emiscah were going round together a little since he’d been sick but he didn’t think anything of it.

The man in the next cot, who was also recovering from diphtheria, was a lean grayhaired man named Michaelson. He’d been working in a hardware store that winter and was having a hard time. Up to a couple of years before he’d had a farm in Iowa in the cornbelt, but a series of bad crops had ruined him, the bank had foreclosed and taken the farm and offered to let him work it as a tenant but he’d said he’d be damned if he’d work as a tenant for any man and had pulled up his stakes and come to the city, and here he was fifty years old with a wife and three small children to support trying to start from the ground up again. He was a great admirer of Bob La Follette and had a theory that the Wall Street bankers were conspiring to seize the government and run the country by pauperizing the farmer. He talked all day in a thin wheezy voice until the nurse made him shut up, about the NonPartisan League and the Farmer-Labor party and the destiny of the great northwest and the need for workingmen and farmers to stick together to elect honest men like Bob La Follette. Charley had joined a local of an A. F. of L. union that fall and Michaelson’s talk, broken by spells of wheezing and coughing, made him feel excited and curious about politics. He decided he’d read the papers more and keep up with what was going on in the world. What with this war and everything you couldn’t tell what might happen.

When Michaelson’s wife and children came to see him he introduced them to Charley and said that being laid up next to a bright young fellow like that made being sick a pleasure. It made Charley feel bad to see how miserably pale and illfed they looked and what poor clothes they had on in this zero weather. He left the hospital before Michaelson did and the last thing Michaelson said when Charley leaned over him to shake his dry bony hand was “Boy, you read Henry George, do you hear . . . ? He knows what’s the trouble with this country; damme if he don’t.”

Charley was so glad to be walking on his pins down the snowy street in the dryicecold wind and to get the smell of iodoform and sick people out of his head that he forgot all about it.

First thing he did was to go to Svenson’s. Emiscah asked him where Ed Walters was. He said he hadn’t been home and didn’t know. She looked worried when he said that and he wondered about it. “Don’t Zona know?” asked Charley. “No, Zona’s got a new feller; that’s all she thinks about.” Then she smiled and patted his hand and babied him a little bit and they sat on the sofa and she brought out some fudge she’d made and they held hands and gave each other sticky kisses and Charley felt happy. When Anna came in she said how thin he looked and that they’d have to feed him up, and he stayed to supper. Mr. Svenson said to come and eat supper with them every night for a while until he was on his feet again. After supper they all played hearts in the front parlor and had a fine time.

When Charley got back to his lodging house he met the landlady in the hall. She said his friend had left without paying the rent and that he’d pay up right here and now or else she wouldn’t let him go up to his room. He argued with her and said he’d just come out of the hospital and she finally said she’d let him stay another week. She was a big softlooking woman with puckered cheeks and a yellow chintz apron full of little pockets. When Charley got up to the hall bedroom where he’d slept all winter with Ed, it was miserably cold and lonely. He got into the bed between the icy sheets and lay shivering, feeling weak and kiddish and almost ready to cry, wondering why the hell Ed had gone off without leaving him word and why Emiscah had looked so funny when he said he didn’t know where Ed was.

Next day he went to the shop and got his old job back, though he was so weak he wasn’t much good. The foreman was pretty decent about it and told him to go easy for a few days, but he wouldn’t pay him for the time he was sick because he wasn’t an old employee and hadn’t gotten a certificate from the company doctor. That evening he went to the bowling-alley where Ed used to work. The barkeep upstairs said Ed had beaten it to Chi on account of some flimflam about raffling off a watch. “Good riddance, if you ask me,” he said. “That bozo has all the makin’s of a bad egg.”

He had a letter from Jim saying that ma had written from Fargo that she was worried about him and that Charley had better let Jim take a look at him so he went over to the Vogels’ next Sunday. First thing he did when he saw Jim was to say that busting up the Ford had been a damn fool kid’s trick and they shook hands on it and Jim said nobody would say anything about it and that he’d better stay and eat with them. The meal was fine and the beer was fine. Jim’s kid was darn cute; it was funny to think that he was an uncle. Even Hedwig didn’t seem so peevish as before. The garage was making good money and old man Vogel was going to give up the liverystable and retire. When Charley said he was studying at nightschool old Vogel began to pay more attention to him. Somebody said something about La Follette and Charley said he was a big man.

“Vat is the use being a big man if you are wrong?” said old Vogel with beersuds in his mustache. He took another draft out of his stein and looked at Charley with sparkling blue eyes. “But dot’s only a beginning . . . ve vill make a sozialist out of you yet.” Charley blushed and said, “Well, I don’t know about that,” and Aunt Hartmann piled another helping of hasenpfeffer and noodles and mashed potatoes on his plate.