The Immigrants (56 page)

“It makes a kind of sense,” Mark said. “If only be cause it’s finally over.”

“And what about Jean?” Sarah asked.

“What about Jean? We’re divorced.”

“She did this to you.”

“Well, not really,” Mark said. “No one did it to us. It was something that happened, and once it started to happen, there was no way to stop it.”

Dan slept late the following morning. Fatigue and tension had been building up in him, and he lay in bed until noon, luxuriating in the fact that he had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no obligations, no duties, no plans. Sarah was alone in the kitchen. She fixed bacon, three eggs, and fried potatoes, and Dan ate everything she put in front of him.

“Danny, you haven’t eaten like that since you were a kid.”

“No? I guess not. Where’s Mark?”

“He went down to the marina. There’s a bait and tack le shop there that he thought he might buy. It would give him something to do. I wish he’d just take it easy, but I suppose that’s something you have to learn when you’re young.”

“He took it better than I thought he would.”

“And you, Danny? No regrets?”

“Sure I have regrets, but not too many. It finished for me before it finished for Mark. Then I was just going through the motions.

Funny thing is—I really don’t care.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t want to think about it.”

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“You mean you don’t want to think about May Ling.”

“Maybe. It’s over two years since I spoke to her.”

“You’re a fool,” Sarah said. “It’s no use talking to a fool. You and Mark are like children.”

“I suppose most men are. Maybe that’s why we louse things up the way we do.”

After eating, Dan walked down to the village and went into a work-clothes store. He bought a heavy pair of rubber-soled work shoes for four dollars, two pairs of blue denim trousers, and two blue denim work shirts. He paid ten dollars and fifty cents for the lot. He added a small canvas bag to his purchases, and then paid another dollar for four excellent Cuban cigars. It was the first time in twenty years that he had bought anything against the money in his pocket, knowing that what was there was all of it, and while it gave him a strange feel ing, it also gave him a curious sense of exhilara-tion. Smoking a cigar, he walked back to Mark’s house slowly and comfortably, a part of the little road he walked on and a part of the bright, sunlit afternoon. He was still short of his forty-first year, ten pounds over weight, but in good health, and he had come out clean.

That was something he could not explain to Mark and Sarah. The community property thing—that peculiar California law which divided the personal property of a man and wife equally between them when they di vorced—was the trap. Jean would have gladly given him a hundred thousand dollars, perhaps more, to leave the house on Russian Hill and its contents untouched and in her possession; and then it would begin again; and if he had learned one single thing out of his life, it was to leave the trap untouched. There was no other road to freedom, no other gateway out of the strange, incomprehensible insanity that had been his life for the past twenty years; and he knew that without being able to delineate to himself the fact or the content of the in sanity. The ships, the airplanes, the property, the charge accounts, the world where one bought what

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one desired, food, women, clothes, transportation, and never asked the price or gave a second thought to the price—that world was as insubstantial as a dream. It was over.

When he came down the next morning, he wore the work shoes and the denim pants and shirt. Mark and Sarah looked at him curiously.

“I’ll be leaving after breakfast,” he told them.

“No!” Sarah cried. “Not now. Not so quick, Danny.”

“Where are you going?” Mark asked.

Dan shrugged. “I still have to work that out.”

“Will you be back, Danny?”

“Sometime, sure.”

When he was ready to leave, carrying the small can vas bag containing the extra pants and shirt, some socks, and underwear, and wearing an old leather jacket, Sarah clung to him, sobbing. Then Mark drove him to the ferry and then to the bus station. “I left the two suitcases in the guest room,” he said to Mark. “Put them away, would you, old sport?”

“I can’t talk to you. You’re a goddamn mule. Never mind about me. But if you don’t stay in touch, you’ll break Sarah’s heart.”

“I’ll stay in touch.”

At the bus station, people turned to watch at the sight of a bald little man with a potbelly hugging a very large man in work clothes. Then the bald little man hurried away, not trusting himself to speak.

At the ticket window, Dan bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

Six months later, Dan Lavette walked out of the Los Angeles city jail, having served ninety days for resisting arrest. He owned a pair of shoes, a pair of worn denim pants, and a denim shirt, all of which he wore, and all of which constituted his total worldly possessions.

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He weighed nine pounds less than when he had entered the jail.

Otherwise, he felt reasonably good, consoling him self with the fact that this was the first time in his forty-one years that he had been sent to prison. The ninety days had been interesting and instructive and now and then deadly boring. There were few books in the jail, but he had gotten hold of a copy of
War and Peace
, which May Ling had often pressed him to read, and he had finished it. He had also read
The Return of the Native
and
An American Tragedy
. He had survived the attempt of a drug-crazed inmate to kill him, escaping with a slight knife cut between two ribs, and he had eaten some two hundred and seventy of the worst meals he had ever tasted, and he had learned the insanity and futility of a system of punishment unchanged since the dawn of what man euphemistically called civilization. He had also spent countless hours lying on a bedbug-ridden bunk, trying to make some sense and reason and validity out of his life, thinking of many things, thinking of his children from the wombs of two women and thinking of the women.

He was only half alive without the women. Within his enormous bulk, there was an almost maudlin gentleness, an aching, pleading need to be loved, to be valued, to be told by word and deed and gesture that he was hu man, that he was something more than a senseless, ig norant brute; and al of his efforts to prove that to him self by playing the game of the cultured and the mighty were of no avail. When he had purchased the bus ticket to Los Angeles, a part of him was returning to May Ling; and this part of himself he understood better than the part of himself that was afraid to return. Introspec tion was difficult for him; he compensated for it by doing things; and in prison for the first time in his life he had day after day with nothing to do.

When he came to Los Angeles, he had not gone to May Ling.

He argued with himself that he needed a job. He found a room for three dollars a week at the Charlton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, a wretched little room with a narrow bed, a chest of

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drawers, a chair, and an overhead, unmasked string light. He lay sleeplessly on the bed and thought about May Ling and told himself that he would find a job first. Main Street was the pit in the sorrowful belly of downtown Los Angeles, a succession of pool halls, speakeasies, vermin-ridden lunch counters, Chinese restaurants, and unabashed whorehouses; and the sorrow was the torment of several thousand men looking for jobs where there were no jobs. At a sign reading, “Wanted to clean toilets,” there were two hundred men waiting. He got two days of work at a lot, scraping the rust from farm machinery that was being reconstituted. He was paid three dollars a day, and no one on the job complained about the pay.

On Signal Hill, oil flowed, as it did from a thousand other derricks spotted around the sprawling, shapeless city, from downtown to Wilshire Boulevard to Venice and Torrance. He found three weeks of work on Signal Hill, where he was chosen out of two hundred men for his bulk and his strength; and for three good weeks he worked in the sun, wrestling with pipe and drill-casing and chains, feeling his muscles harden and his body re spond to physical effort.

He drew twenty-five dollars a week, and his mind was filled with thoughts of May Ling, with fears and hopes and anticipations—and also with the thought that now she could be married or could hate him, which would certainly have been just and proper—and then he and forty other men were laid off, and there were no more jobs after that. He tried everything. When an advertisement appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
, asking for men over six feet three inches in height to come to the film studio in Culver City, he made his way there, even though he was an inch short of the requirement. But he was only one among a thousand tall men, and after three hours of waiting, the gates of Metro were closed.

Walking on Third Street one night, he took out the roll of sixteen dollar bills that remained to him and was jumped from behind by

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two men who were more des perate than he was. He went down, the money flying from his hand, and then when they leaped to grab the money, he flung himself on the two of them, fighting mindlessly and crazily for the small fortune that sixteen dollars represented. A third man joined in, and he fought the three of them; and when the cops came, he was so lost in the violence he had committed himself to that he fought them as well. Beaten, one eye closed, his shirt stained with dry blood, he told his story to the judge and was told in turn that he was fortunate to re ceive no more than ninety days.

And now it was over, and he walked out of the jail with the clothes on his back and no more.

The distance from downtown Los Angeles to San Pedro is about twenty-seven miles. Dan set out on foot. He had made a simple equation to himself; the fishing boats sailed out of San Pedro, and where boats brought in fish, no one starved. In any case, it was his trade, and if twenty years had gone by since he had stood on the deck of a fishing boat, he had not forgotten. After two hours under the burning Southern California sun, he re alized that walking in Los Angeles was quite different from walking in San Francisco. He stopped at a gas sta tion, where he drank from a hose and stood in the shade until the owner told him to move on or he’d call the cops. He started to walk again, and an oil truck slowed and gave him a lift as far as Sepulveda Boule vard. He then walked the remaining seven miles. It was early evening now, and the heat of the sun had ex changed itself for the chill of the night wind off the sea.

Attracted by the twinkle of campfires, he wandered onto a weed-grown lot just off Gaffey Street. There at least a hundred jobless, homeless men sat around fires built of driftwood and odds and ends of boards. He joined one of the groups and was made welcome by

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a nod here and there, no more than that. They were silent men, bent and dispirited. A two-gallon tin of fish and water sat in the coals. When they pulled it out of the fire, they scooped into it with old cans. Dan had not eaten since morning, but he had accepted their warmth uninvited and he had no intention of asking for food.

Anyway, he still hated fish. But when an old man sitting next to him lifted a half-cooked piece of mackerel out of the sardine can he was using as a plate and offered it to Dan, he accepted the offer, and realized that he had forgotten that he hated fish—or perhaps to a man half starved, anything would taste good.

One by one, the men around the fire stretched out to sleep. Dan made his own bed on the ground. His thin shirt offered poor protection from the cold, and again and again he awakened shivering.

Finally, morning came, and with it the warmth of the sun.

The next four days were like a nightmare; they were the first time Dan Lavette ever lost all control of his life as he lived it. Never before in his adult life did he have the feeling that he was without control. Even in jail, when the man ran at him with a knife, he had remained calm and deflected the blade. Control was the essence of himself as he saw himself, the essence of his mascu linity, of his right to have money or not have money, as he saw fit, but always as he saw fit. He might suspend control, but he never had to surrender it before.

Now the old man who had sat next to him at the fire said to him, “It takes twenty-four hours without food to make a bum, or four days without shaving.” In four days without shaving, two of them without food, he ad mitted the fact. He was a bum. They were all bums. San Pedro teemed with bums, because when you had no money and no job and no place to lay your head, you were a bum, and it was just as plain and simple as that. The population of San Pedro was thirty-seven thousand, and for every fifteen of the population, there was a beached seaman, an unemployed steelworker

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or welder or carpenter out of the dead shipyards, an unemployed stevedore, an unemployed clerk, an unemployed fisher man—dead souls who sat silently on the docks or shuf fled along the streets or sprawled in empty lots and on the beaches—and who gave a damn that one of them was Dan Lavette? Who gave a damn for human flesh without money?

He sat on a box on Fisherman’s Wharf and stared at the fishing boats and talked to himself without listen ing, which was something he had learned to do after two days without eating. Out on the ocean in the dis tance, with only the top of its masts showing, a ship lay, at least fifteen miles by his calculation, just lying there outside the limit, probably a mother ship for the rum runners, loaded to the hatches with whiskey; and he tried to remember how long it was since he had tasted whiskey or a fresh egg or a piece of decent steak. He remembered May Ling’s chiding him for the fat on his waistline. It was gone now. He was fasting, not an ounce of fat on him. Another day or two, and he would begin to stagger. Bums staggered, but not from liquor. It was plain, simple starvation. The trouble was, he told himself, that he had lost his ambition—otherwise he would find that weed-grown lot again, where they cooked fish and fish heads in tin oil cans. Well, he’d sit a while, and then he’d work out that ambition thing. He rubbed the thick stubble of beard on his cheeks, won dering idly how he looked.