The 42nd Parallel (49 page)

Next day he went over on the boat. There were still some yellowish floes of rotting ice on the lake that was a very pale cold blue with a few whitecaps on it. Charley had never been out on a big body of water before and felt a little sick, but it was fine to see the chimneys and great blocks of buildings, pearly where the sun hit them, growing up out of the blur of factory smoke, and the breakwaters and the big oreboats plowing through the blue seas, and to walk down the wharf with everything new to him and to plunge into the crowd and the stream of automobiles and green and yellow buses blocked up by the drawbridge on Michigan Avenue, and to walk along in the driving wind looking at the shiny storewindows and goodlooking girls and windblown dresses.

Jim had told him to go to see a friend of his who worked in a Ford servicestation on Blue Island Avenue but it was so far that by the time he got there the guy had gone. The boss was there though and he told Charley that if he came round next morning he’d have a job for him. As he didn’t have anywhere to go and didn’t like to tell the boss he was flat he left his suitcase in the garage and walked around all night. Occasionally he got a few winks of sleep on a park bench, but he’d wake up stiff and chilled to the bone and would have to run around to warm up. The night seemed never to end and he didn’t have a red to get a cup of coffee with in the morning, and he was there walking up and down outside an hour before anybody came to open up the servicestation in the morning.

He worked at the Ford servicestation several weeks until one Sunday he met Monte Davis on North Clark Street and went to a wobbly meeting with him in front of the Newberry Library. The cops broke up the meeting and Charley didn’t walk away fast enough and before he knew what had happened to him he’d been halfstunned by a riotstick and shoved into the policewagon. He spent the night in a cell with two bearded men who were blind drunk and didn’t seem to be able to talk English anyway. Next day he was questioned by a police magistrate and when he said he was a garage mechanic a dick called up the servicestation to check up on him; the magistrate discharged him, but when he got to the garage the boss said he’d have no goddam I Won’t Works in this outfit and paid him his wages and discharged him too.

He hocked his suitcase and his good suit and made a little bundle of some socks and a couple of shirts and went round to see Monte Davis to tell him he was going to hitchhike to St. Louis. Monte said there was a freespeech fight in Evansville and he guessed he’d come along to see what was doing. They went out on the train to Joliet. When they walked past the prison Monte said the sight of a prison always made him feel sick and gave him a kind of a foreboding. He got pretty blue and said he guessed the bosses’d get him soon, but that there’d be others. Monte Davis was a sallow thinfaced youth from Muscatine, Iowa. He had a long crooked nose and stuttered and didn’t remember a time when he hadn’t sold papers or worked in a buttonfactory. He thought of nothing but the I.W.W. and the revolution. He bawled Charley out for a scissorbill because he laughed about how fast the wobblies ran when the cops broke up the meeting, and told him he ought to be classconscious and take things serious.

At the citylimits of Joliet they hopped a truck that carried them to Peoria, where they separated because Charley found a truckdriver he’d known in Chicago who offered him a lift all the way to St. Louis. In St. Louis things didn’t seem to be so good, and he got into a row with a hooker he picked up on Market Street who tried to roll him, so as a guy told him there were plenty jobs to be had in Louisville he began to beat his way East. By the time he got to New Albany it was hot as the hinges of hell; he’d had poor luck on hitches and his feet were swollen and blistered. He stood a long time on the bridge looking down into the swift brown current of the Ohio, too tired to go any further. He hated the idea of tramping round looking for a job. The river was the color of gingerbread; he started to think about the smell of gingercookies Lizzie Green used to make in his mother’s kitchen and he thought he was a damn fool to be bumming round like this. He’d go home and plant himself among the weeds, that’s what he’d do.

Just then a brokendown Ford truck came by running on a flat tire. “Hey, you’ve got a flat,” yelled Charley. The driver put on the brakes with a bang. He was a big bulletheaded man in a red sweater. “What the hell is it to you?” “Jez, I just thought you might not a noticed.” “Ah notice everythin’, boy . . . ain’t had nutten but trouble all day. Wanta lift?” “Sure,” said Charley. “Now, Ah can’t park on de bridge nohow . . . Been same goddam thing all day. Here Ah gits up early in de mornin’ b’fo’ day and goes out to haul foa hawgsheads a tobacca an de goddam nigger done lost de warehouse key. Ah swear if Ah’d had a gun Ah’d shot de son of a bitch dead.” At the end of the bridge he stopped and Charley helped him change the tire. “Where you from, boy?” he said as he straightened up and brushed the dust off his pants. “I’m from up in the Northwest,” said Charley. “Ah reckon you’re a Swede, ain’t yez?” Charley laughed. “No; I’m a garage mechanic and lookin’ for a job.” “Pahl in, boy; we’ll go an’ see ole man Wiggins—he’s ma boss—an’ see what we can do.”

Charley stayed all summer in Louisville working at the Wiggins Repair Shops. He roomed with an Italian named Grassi who’d come over to escape military service. Grassi read the papers every day and was very much afraid the U.S. would go into the war. Then he said he’d have to hop across the border to Mexico. He was an anarchist and a quiet sort of guy who spent the evenings singing low to himself and playing the accordion on the lodginghouse steps. He told Charley about the big Fiat factories at Torino where he’d worked, and taught him to eat spaghetti and drink red wine and to play
Funiculi funicula
on the accordion. His big ambition was to be an airplane pilot. Charley picked up with a Jewish girl who worked as sorter in a tobacco warehouse. Her name was Sarah Cohen but she made him call her Belle. He liked her well enough but he was careful to make her understand that he wasn’t the marrying kind. She said she was a radical and believed in free love, but that didn’t suit him much either. He took her to shows and took her out walking in Cherokee Park and bought her an amethyst brooch when she said amethyst was her birthstone.

When he thought about himself he felt pretty worried. Here he was doing the same work day after day, with no chance of making better money or getting any schooling or seeing the country. When winter came on he got restless. He’d rescued an old Ford roadster that they were going to tow out to the junkheap and had patched it up with discarded spare parts.

He talked Grassi into going down to New Orleans with him. They had a little money saved up and they’d run down there and get a job and be there for the Mardi Gras. The first day that he’d felt very good since he left St. Paul was the sleety January day they pulled out of Louisville with the engine hitting on all four cylinders and a pile of thirdhand spare tires in the back, headed south.

They got down through Nashville and Birmingham and Mobile, but the roads were terrible and they had to remake the car as they went along and they almost froze to death in a blizzard near Guntersville and had to lay over for a couple of days, so that by the time they’d gotten down to Bay St. Louis and were bowling along the shore road under a blue sky and feeling the warm sun and seeing palms and bananatrees and Grassi was telling about Vesuvio and Bella Napoli and his girl in Torino that he’d never see again on account of the bastardly capitalista war, their money had run out. They got into New Orleans with a dollar five between them and not more than a teacupful of gasoline in the tank, but by a lucky break Charley managed to sell the car as it stood for twentyfive dollars to a colored undertaker.

They got a room in a house near the levee for three dollars a week. The landlady was a yellowfaced woman from Panama and there was a parrot on the balcony outside their room and the sun was warm on their shoulders walking along the street. Grassi was very happy. “This is like the Italia,” he kept saying. They walked around and tried to find out about jobs but they couldn’t seem to find out about anything except that Mardi Gras was next week. They walked along Canal Street that was crowded with colored people, Chinamen, pretty girls in brightcolored dresses, racetrack hangerson, tall elderly men in palmbeach suits. They stopped to have a beer in a bar open to the street with tables along the outside where all kinds of men sat smoking cigars and drinking. When they came out Grassi bought an afternoon paper. He turned pale and showed the headline, war with Germany imminent. “If America go to war with Germany cops will arrest all Italian man to send back to Italy for fight, see? My friend tell who work in consule’s office; tell me, see? I will not go fight in capitalista war.” Charley tried to kid him along, but a worried set look came over Grassi’s face and as soon as it was dark he left Charley saying he was going back to the flop and going to bed.

Charley walked round the streets alone. There was a warm molasses smell from the sugar refineries, whiffs of gardens and garlic and pepper and oil cookery. There seemed to be women everywhere, in bars, standing round streetcorners, looking out invitingly behind shutters ajar in all the doors and windows; but he had twenty dollars on him and was afraid one of them might lift it off him, so he just walked around until he was tired and then went back to the room, where he found Grassi already asleep with the covers over his head.

It was late when he woke up. The parrot was squawking on the gallery outside the window, hot sunlight filled the room. Grassi was not there.

Charley had dressed and was combing his hair when Grassi came in looking very much excited. He had taken a berth as donkey-engineman on a freighter bound for South America. “When I get Buenos Aires goodby and no more war,” he said. “If Argentina go to war, goodby again.” He kissed Charley on the mouth, and insisted on giving him his accordion and there were tears in his eyes when he went off to join the boat that was leaving at noon.

Charley walked all over town inquiring at garages and machineshops if there was any chance of a job. The streets were broad and dusty, bordered by low shuttered frame houses, and distances were huge. He got tired and dusty and sweaty. People he talked to were darned agreeable but nobody seemed to know where he could get a job. He decided he ought to stay through the Mardi Gras anyway and then he would go up North again. Men he talked to told him to go to Florida or Birmingham, Alabama, or up to Memphis or Little Rock, but everybody agreed that unless he wanted to ship as a seaman there wasn’t a job to be had in the city. The days dragged along warm and slow and sunny and smelling of molasses from the refineries. He spent a great deal of time reading in the public library or sprawled on the levee watching the niggers unload the ships. He had too much time to think and he worried about what he was going to do with himself. Nights he couldn’t sleep well because he hadn’t done anything all day to tire him.

One night he heard guitarmusic coming out of a joint called “The Original Tripoli,” on Chartres Street. He went in and sat down at a table and ordered drinks. The waiter was a Chink. Couples were dancing in a kind of wrestling hug in the dark end of the room. Charley decided that if he could get a girl for less than five seeds he’d take one on. Before long he found himself setting up a girl who said her name was Liz to drinks and a feed. She said she hadn’t had anything to eat all day. He asked her about Mardi Gras and she said it was a bum time because the cops closed everything up tight. “They rounded up all the waterfront hustlers last night, sent every last one of them up the river.” “What they do with ’em?” “Take ’em up to Memphis and turn ’em loose . . . ain’t a jail in the state would hold all the floosies in this town.” They laughed and had another drink and then they danced. Charley held her tight. She was a skinny girl with little pointed breasts and big hips. “Jez, baby, you’ve got some action,” he said after they’d been dancing a little while. “Ain’t it ma business to give the boys a good time?” He liked the way she looked at him. “Say, baby, how much do you get?” “Five bucks.” “Jez, I ain’t no millionaire . . . and didn’t I set you up to some eats?” “Awright, sugarpopper; make it three.”

They had another drink. Charley noticed that she took some kind of lemonade each time. “Don’t you ever drink anything, Liz?” “You can’t drink in this game, dearie; first thing you know I’d be givin’ it away.”

There was a big drunken guy in a dirty undershirt looked like a ship’s stoker reeling round the room. He got hold of Liz’s hand and made her dance with him. His big arms tattooed blue and red folded right round her. Charley could see he was mauling and pulling at her dress as he danced with her. “Quit that, you son of a bitch,” she was yelling. That made Charley sore and he went up and pulled the big guy away from her. The big guy turned and swung on him. Charley ducked and hopped into the center of the floor with his dukes up. The big guy was blind drunk, as he let fly another haymaker Charley put his foot out and the big guy tripped and fell on his face upsetting a table and a little dark man with a black mustache with it. In a second the dark man was on his feet and had whipped out a machete. The Chinks ran round mewing like a lot of damn gulls. The proprietor, a fat Spaniard in an apron, had come out from behind the bar and was yellin’, “Git out, every last one of you.” The man with the machete made a run at Charley. Liz gave him a yank one side and before Charley knew what had happened she was pulling him through the stinking latrines into a passage that led to a back door out into the street. “Don’t you know no better’n to git in a fight over a goddam whore?” she was saying in his ear.

Once out in the street Charley wanted to go back to get his hat and coat. Liz wouldn’t let him. “I’ll get it for you in the mornin’,” she said. They walked along the street together. “You’re a damn good girl; I like you,” said Charley. “Can’t you raise ten dollars and make it all night?” “Jez, kid, I’m broke.” “Well, I’ll have to throw you out and do some more hustlin’, I guess . . . There’s only one feller in this world gets it for nothin’ and you ain’t him.”