"I think it's dam crooks that
cause folks like us to be down and out and hungry, worried about finding
jobs, worried about our folks, and them a-worrying about us."
"Last two or three years, I been sorta thinkin' long them lines--an' it
looks like I keep believin' in somethin'; I don't know exactly, but it's in
me, an' in you, an' in ever' dam one of us." This talker was a young man
with a smooth face, thick hair that was bushy, and a fairly honest look
somewhere about him. "An' if we c'n jist find out how ta make good use of
it, we'll find out who's causin' us alla th' trouble in the' world, like
this Hitler rat, an' git ridda them, an' then not let anybody be outta work,
or beat down an' wonderin' where their next meal's a comin' from, by God,
with alla these crops an' orchards bubblin' up around here!"
"If God was ta do what's right," a heavy man said, "he'd give all of
these here peaches an' cherries, an' oranges, an' grapes, an'
stuff to eat, to th' folks that are hungry. An' for a hungry man to pray an'
try to tell God how to run his business, looks sort of backwards, plumb
silly to me. Hell, a man's got two hands an' a mind of his own, an' feet an'
legs to take him where he wants to go; an' if he sees something wrong with
the world, he'd ought to get a lot of people together, an' look up in th'
air an' say, Hey, up there, God, I'm--I mean, we're goin' to fix this!"
Then I put my three cents worth in, saying, "I believe that when ya
pray, you're tryin' ta get yer thinkin' straight, tryin' ta see
what's wrong with th' world, an' who's ta blame fer it. Part of it is
crooks, crooked laws, an' jist dam greedy people, people that's afraid of
this an' afraid of that. Part of it's all of this, an' part of
it's jist dam shore our own fault."
"Hell, from what you say, you think we're to blame for everybody here
being on the freights?" This young traveler reared his head back and laughed
to himself, chewing a mouthful of sticky bread.
"I dunno, fellers, just to be right real frank with you. But
it's our own fault, all right, hell yes. It's our own personal
fault if we don't talk up, 'er speak out, 'er somethin'--I ain't any too
clear on it."
An old white-headed man spoke close to me and said, "Well, boys, I was
on the bum, I suppose, before any of you was born into this world."
Everybody looked around mostly because he was talking so quiet, interrupting
his eating. "All of this talking about what's up in the sky, or down in
hell, for that matter, isn't half as important as what's right here, right
now, right in front of your eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids
hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has just got to have more faith in one
another, believe in each other. There's a spirit of some kind we've all got.
That's got to draw us all together."
Heads nodded. Faces watched the old man. He didn't say any more.
Toothless for years, he was a little bit slow finishing up his piece of old
bread.
Chapter XIV
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
"Hey! Hey! Train's pullin' out in about ten minnits! This a way!
Ever'body!"
We got rolling again. The high peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains
jumped up their heads in the east. Snow patches white in the sun. There was
the green valley of the San Joaquin River, rich, good-smelling; hay meadows
waving with thick, juicy feed that is life; people working, walking bending
down, carrying heavy loads. Cars from farms waited at the cross-roads, some
loaded down with wooden crates, and boxes, and some with tall tin cans of
cow's milk. The air was as sweet as could be, and like the faint smell of
blossom honey.
Before long we hit a heavy rain. A lot of us crawled into an empty car.
Wet and yelling, we hollered and sung till the sun went down, and it got
wetter and dark. New riders swung into our car. We curled up on strips of
tough brown wrapping paper, pulling it over us like blankets, and using our
sweaters and coats for pillows.
Somebody pulled the doors shut, and we rambled on through the night.
When I woke up again, the train had stopped, and everything was in a wild
hustle and a bustle. Guys snaking me, and saying in my ear, "Hey! Wake up!
Tough town! Boy! This is far's she goes!"
"Tough bulls! Gotta git th' hell outta here. C'mon, wake up."
I rousted myself out, pulling my wet sweater over my head. The train
was falling heavy as about twenty-five or thirty of us ganged up in front of
a Chinese bean joint; and when a certain big, black patrol car wheeled
around a corner, and shot its bright spotlight into our faces, we brushed
our clothing, straightened our hats and neck ties, and in order to act like
legal citizens, we marched into the Chinaman's bean joint.
Inside, it was warm. The joint contained seven warped stools. And two
level-headed Chinese proprietors, "Chili bean! Two chili bean! Seven chili
bean!" I heard one say through the hole in the wall to the cook in the back.
And from the kitchen, "Me gotcha! All chili bean!"
I was going through the process, not only of starving, but also of
being too hot and too cold about fifty times in the last forty-eight hours.
I felt dizzy and empty and sick. The peppery smell of the hot chili and
beans made me feel worse.
I waited about an hour and a half, until ten minutes before the
Chinaman locked the door, and then I said, "Say, friend, will you gimme a
bowl of yer chili an' beans fer this green sweater? Good sweater."
"You let me slee sletee."
"Okay--here--feel. Part of it's all wool."
"Chili bean you want this sletee for?"
"Yeah. Cuppa coffee, too."
"Price. You go up."
"Okay. No coffee."
"No. No chili bean."
"Good sweater," I told him.
"Okay. You keep. You see, I got plentee sletee. You think good sletee,
you keep sletee. My keep chili bean.''
I set there on the stool, hating to go out into the cold night and
leave that good warm stove. I made a start for the door, and went past three
men finishing off their first or second bowl of chili and beans. The last
man was a long, tall, irony-looking Negro. He kept eating as I walked past,
never turned his face toward me, but told me, "Let me see yo sweatah. Heah's
yo dime. Lay th' sweatah down theah on th' stool. Bettah hurry an' ordah yo'
chili. Joint'll shut down heah in a minute."
I dropped the sweater in a roll on the stool, and parked myself on the
next stool, and a bowl of red-hot, extra hot, double hot chili beans slid
down the counter and under my nose.
It was long about two o'clock when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, and
the rain was getting harder, meaner, and colder, and blowing stiffer down
the line. A friendly looking cop, wearing a warm overcoat, walked around the
corner. Three or four of the boys stood along under the porch, so as to keep
out of the drift of the rain. The cop said, "Howdy, howdy, boys. Time to
call it a night." He smiled like a man doing an awful good job.
"What time yuh got?" a Southern boy asked him, dripping wet.
"Bed time."
"Oh."
"Say, mister," I said to him, "listen, we're jist a bunch of guys on
th' road, tryin' ta git somewhere where ther's a job of work of some kind.
Come in on that there freight. Rainin', an' we ain't got no place ta sleep
in outta th' weather. I wuz jist wonderin' if you'd let us sleep here in yer
jail house--jist fer tonight."
"You might," he said, smiling, tickling all of the boys.
"Where's yer jail at?" I asked him.
"It's over across town," he answered.
Then I said, "Reckon ya could put us up?"
And he said, "I certainly can."
"Boy, man, you're a pretty good feller. We're ready, ain't we, guys?"
"I'm ready."
"Git inside out of this bad night."
"Me, too."
The same answer came from everybody.
"Then, see," I said to the cop, "if anything happens, they'd, you'd
know it wuzn't us done it."
And then he looked at us like a politician making a speech, and said,
"You boys know what'd happen if you went over there to that jail to sleep
tonight?"
We said, "Huh uh." "No." "What?"
"Well, they'd let you in, all right, not for just one night, but for
thirty nights and thirty days. Give you an awful good chance to rest up out
on the County Farm, and dry your clothes by a steam radiator every night.
They'd like you men so much, they'd just refuse to let you go. Just keep you
for company over there." He had a cold, sour smile across his face by now.
"Let's go, fella." Somebody back of me jerked my arm.
Without talking back, I savvied, and walked away. Most of the men had
left. Only six or eight of us in a little bunch. "Where we gonna sleep,
anybody know?" I asked them.
"Just keep quiet and follow us."
The cop walked away around the corner.
"And don't ever let a smiling cop fool yuh," a voice in back of me told
us. "That wasn't no real smile. Tell by his face an' his eyes."
"Okay, I learnt somethin' new," I said, "But where are we gonna sleep
at?"
"We gotta good warm bed, don't you worry. Main thing is just to walk,
an' don't talk.''
Across a boggy road, rutty, and full of mudholes, over a sharp
barb-wire fence, through a splashing patch of weeds that soaked our clothes
with cold water, down some crunching cinders, we followed the shiny rails
again in the rain about a half a mile. This led us to a little green shack,
built low to the ground like a doghouse. We piled in at a square window, and
lit on a pile of sand.
"Godamighty!"
"Boy, howdy!"
"Ain't this fine?"
"Warmer'n hell."
"Lemme dig a hole. I wanta dig a hole, an' jist bury myself. I ain't no
live man. I'm dead. I been dead a long, long time. I'm gonna jist dig me a
grave, an' crawl off in it, an' pull my sand in on top of me. Gonna sleep
like old Rip Van Twinkle, twenty, thirty, or fifty dam years. An' when I
wake up, I want things ta be changed around better. When I wake up in th'
mornin'--" And I was tired and wet, covering up in the sand, talking. I
drifted off to sleep. Loose and limber, I felt everything in the world just
slipping out from under me and fading away. I woke up before long with my
feet burning and stinging. Everything was sailing and mixed up backwards,
but when they got straight I saw a man in a black suit bending over me with
a big heavy club. He was beating the bottoms of my feet.
"You birds get up, and get your ass out of here! Get up. Goddam you!"
There were three men in black suits, and the black Western hats that
told you so plain that you was dealing with a railroad deputy.
They had come in through a little narrow door and were herding us out
the same. "Get out of here, and don't you come back! If you show your head
back in this sandhouse, you'll go to the judge! Ninety days on that pea farm
would do you loafers good!"
Grabbing shoes, hats, little dirty bundles, the migratory workers were
chased out of their bed of clean sand. Back outside, the rain was keeping
up, and in the V-shaped beam of the spotlights from the patrol car you could
see that even the rain was having trouble.
"Git on outta town there!" "Keep travelin'!" "Don't you even look
back!" "Start walkin'!" We heard low, grumbling voices coming from the car
behind us. Heard, too, the quiet motor start up and the gears shifted as the
car rolled along back of us. It followed us about a half a mile, rain and
mud. It drove us across a cow pasture.
From the car, one of the watchmen yelled, "Don't you show up in Tracy
again tonight! You'll be dam good an' sorry if you do! Keep walking!"
The car lights cut a wide, rippling circle in the dark, and we knew
that they had turned around and went back to town. The roar of their exhaust
purred and died away.
We'd marched out across the cow pasture, smiling and yelling, "Hep!
Hep! Whattaya say, men? Hep! Hep! Hep!"
Now we stood in the rain and cackled like chickens, absolutely lost and
buffaloed. Never before had I had anything quite so dam silly happen to me.
Our clothes were on crooked and twisted; shoes full of mud and gravel. Hair
soaking wet, and water running down our faces. It was a funny sight to see
human beings in any such a shape. Wet as we could get, dirty and muddy as
the ground, we danced up and down through puddles, ran around in wide
circles and laughed our heads off. There is a stage of hard luck that turns
into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in
laughing that turns into fight.
"Okay. Hey, fellers! C'mere. Tell ya what we're gonna do. We're a-gonna
all git together, see, an' go walkin' right back into town, an' go back to
sleep in that sandhouse ag'in. What say? Who's with me?" a tall, slippery,
stoop-shouldered boy was telling us.
"Me!"
"Me."
"Same fer me!"
"Whatever you guys does, I'll stick."
"Hell, I c'n give that carload of bulls a machine gun apiece, an' whip
th' whole outfit with my bare hands!" an older man said.
"But, no. We don't aim ta cause no trouble. Ain't gonna be no
fightin'."
"I'd just like to get one good poke at that fat belly."
"Get that outta your head, mister."
Just walking back toward town, talking.
"Hey. How many of us here?"
'Two. Four. Six. Eight."
"Mebbe we'd better split up in twos. Too plain to see a whole big
bunch. We'll go into town by pairs. If you make it back to the old
blacksmith shop right there by the old Chinese bean joint, whistle once,
real long. This way, if two gets caught, the rest'll get away."
"What'll we do if we get caught an' run in jail?"
"Whistle twice, real short," and under his breath he showed us how to
whistle.
"Can everybody here whistle?"
"I can."
Four of us said yes. So one whistler and one expert listener was put
into each pair.
"Now, remember, if you see the patrol car's gonna ketch yuh, stop
before it gits yuh, an' whistle twice, real short an' sweet."
"Okay. First pair take that street yonder. Second pair, drop over a
block. Third couple, down the paved highway; and us, last pair, will walk
back down this same cow trail that we got run out of town on. Remember,
don't start no trouble with them coppers. Loaded dice, boys; you cain't win.
Just got to try to outsmart 'em a little."
Back through the slick mud, walking different ways, we cussed and
laughed. In a few minutes, there came a long, low whistle, and we knew the
first pair had made it to the blacksmith shop. Then, in a minute or so,
another long one. We came in third, and I let out a whistle that was one of
California's best. The last pair walked in and we stood under the wide eaves
of the shop, watching the water drip off of the roof, missing our noses by
about three inches. We had to stand up straight against the wall to stay out
of the rain.
The sandhouse was just across the street and up a few steps.
"Lay low."
"Duck."
"Car."
"Hey! Ho! Got us ag'in!"
The new model black sedan coasted down a side street, out over in our
direction real quick, and turned two spots on us. We held our hands up to
keep the lights from blinding us. Nobody moved. We thought maybe they'd made
a mistake. But, as the car rolled up to within about fifty feet of us, we
knew that we were caught, and got ready to be cussed out, and took to the
can.
A deputy opened his front door, turned off one spotlight, and shot his
good flashlight into our faces. One at a time, he looked us over. We blinked
back at him, like a herd of young deer, but nobody was to say afraid.
"Come here, you--" he said in a hard, imitation voice.
The light was in my face. I thought it was shining in everybody's, so I
didn't move.
"Hey, mister. Come over here, please." He was a big heavy man, and his
voice had a nice clank to it, like cocking back the hammer of a rifle.
I shook the light out of my eyes and said, "Who?"
"You."
I turned around to the men with me and told them loud enough for the
cops to hear it, "Be right back, fellers."
I heard the patrol man turn around to the other cops and kid them about
something, and as I walked up they were all laughing and saying, "Yeah. He's
th' one. He's one. One of them things."
The radio in the car was turned on a Hollywood station, and a lady's
voice was singing, telling what all of the pretty girls were thinking about
the war situation.
"I'm a what?" I asked the cop.
"You know, one of them 'things.' "
"Well, boys, ya got me there. I don't even know what one of them
'things' is."
"We know what you are."
"Well," I scratched my head in the rain, "maybe you're smarter than I
am; 'cause I never did know jist what I am."
"We do."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"What am I then?"
"One of them labor boys."
"Labor?"
"Yeah, labor."
"I think I know what labor is--" I smiled a little.
"What is it?"
"Labor's work."
"Maybe, you're one of them trouble causers."
"Listen, fellers, I jist rolled inta this town from Oklahoma, I mean
Texas, an' I'm on my way to Sonora to stay with my relatives."
"Relatives?"
"Yeah," I said. "Aunt. Cousins. Whole bunch. Well off."
"You're going to stay in Sonora when you get there, aren't you?" A
different, higher-sounding voice wheezed out from the back seat.
"I'm gonna settle down up there in them mountains, an' try ta go ta
work."
"Kinda work, sonny?"
"Painter. Signs. Pictures. Houses. Anything needs paintin'."
"So you don't go around causing trouble, then?"
"I'm runnin' inta a right smart of it. I don't always cause it."
"You don't like trouble, do you, mister painter?"
"Oh, I ain't so 'fraid no more. Sorta broke in by this time."
"Ever talk to anybody about working?"
"Train loads of 'em. That's what ever'body's talkin' 'bout, an' ridin'
in all of this bad weather for. Shore, we ain'ta 'fraid of work. We ain't
panhandlers, ner stemwinders, jest a bunch of guys out tryin' ta do th' best
we can, an' had a little streak of hard luck, that's all."
"Eyer talk to the boys about wages?"
"Wages? Oh, I talk to ever'body about somethin'. Religion. Weather.
Picture shows. Girls. Wages."
"Well, mister painter, it's been good to get acquainted with you. It
seems like you are looking for work and anxious to get on up the road toward
Sonora. We'll show you the road and see that you get out onto the main
highway."
"Boy, that'll be mighty fine."
"Yes. We try to treat an honest working man right when he comes through
our little town here, either by accident or on purpose. We're just a little,
what you'd call, 'cautious,' you understand, because there is trouble going
around, and you never know who's causing it, until you ask. We will have to
ask you to get out in front of this car and start walking down this highway.
And don't look back--"
All of the cops were laughing and joking as their car drove along
behind me. I heard a lot of lousy jokes. I walked with my head ducked into
the rain, and heard cars of other people pass. They yelled smart cracks at
me in the rain.
After about a mile, they yelled for me to halt. I stopped and didn't
even turn around. "You run a lot of risk tonight, breaking our orders."
"Muddy out there!"
"You know, we tried to treat you nice. Turned you loose. Gave you a
chance. Then you broke orders."
"Yeah, I guess I did."
"What made you do it?"
"Well, ta be right, real truthful with you guys, we got pastures just
about like these back in Oklahoma, but we let the cows go out there and eat.
If people wants to go out there in the cow pasture, we let them go, but if
it's rainin' an' a cold night like this, we don't drive or herd anybody out
there."
Cop said, "Keep travelin'."
I said, "I wuz born travelin'. Good-bye!"
The car and the lights whirled around in the road, and the tail light
and the radio music blacked out down the road in the rain.
I walked a few steps and seen it was too rainy and bad to see in the
fog, so I went to thinking about some kind of a place to lay down out of the
weather and go to sleep. I walked up to the headstones of a long cement
bridge that bent across a running river. And down under the bridge I found a
couple of dozen other people curled up, grinding their teeth in the mist and
already dreaming. The ground was loose dirt and was awful cold and damp, but
not wet or muddy, as the rain couldn't hit us under the concrete. I seen men
paired up snoring together, some rolled in newspapers and brown wrapping
paper, others in a chilled blanket, one or two here and yonder all snoozed
up in some mighty warm-looking bedrolls. And for a minute, I thought, I'm a
dam fool not to carry my own bedroll; but then again, in the hot daytime a
heavy bedroll is clumsy, no good, and in the way, and besides, people won't
give you a ride if you're lugging an old dirty bundle. So here in the
moisture of the wind whiffing under the bridge, I scanned around for
something to use for a mattress, for a pillow, and for a virgin wool
blanket. I found a soaked piece of wrapping paper which I shook the water
off of, and spread on the dirt for my easy-rider mattress; but I didn't find
a pillow, nor anything to use as a blanket. I drew my muscles down into just
a little pile of meat and bones, and shivered on the paper for about an
hour. My breath swishing, and teeth hitting together, woke a big
square-built man up off his bedroll. He listened at me for a minute, and
then asked me, "Don't you know your shiverin's keepin' everybody awake?" I
said, "Y-y-y-es-s-s, I sup-p-pose it is; I ain't gettin' no sleep, on
account of it." Then he said, "You sound like a snare drum rattlin' that
paper; c'mon over here an' den up with me."
I rolled across the ground and peeled off my wet clothes, my gobby
shoes, and stacked them up in a pile; and then he turned his wool blankets
back and said, "Hurry, jump in before the covers get wet!" I was still
shivering and shaking so hard it jerked my whole body into kinks, and
cramped me all over so that I couldn't move my lips to say a word. I scooted
my feet down inside and then pulled the itchy covers all up over my head.
"You feel like a bucket of cold frogs,'' the man told me. "Where've you
been?"
I kept on shaking, without saying a word.
"Cops walk you?" he asked me. And I just nodded my head with my back to
him.
"I'm not minding this weather very much; I'm on my way to where it will
be a hell of a lot colder than this. I don't know about the cops, but, I'll
be in Vancouver by this time next week; and I know it'll freeze the horns
off of a brass bulldog up 'there. Lumberjack. Timber. I guess you're too
cold to talk much, huh?" And his last words blotted and soaked out across
the swampy river bottom and faded away somewhere in the fog horn and red and
green lights on a little boat that pounded down the waters.
It was hard for me to walk next morning early on account of my legs
being drawn like torn leather. My thighs felt like the gristle was tore
loose from my bones, and my knees ached and jittered in the joints. I shook
hands with the lumberjack and we went our opposite ways. I never did get a
real close look at him in the clouds; and when he walked away, his head and
shoulders just sort of swum away in the fog of the morning. I had made
another friend I couldn't see. And I walked along thinking, Well, now, I
don't know if I'll ever see that man again or not, but I'll see a lot of men
a lot of places and I'll wonder if that could be him.
Before long the sun and the fog had fought and flounced around so long
on the river banks the highway run along that it didn't seem like there was
enough room in the trees and reeds and canebrakes for the sun or the clouds,
either one, to really win out; so the clouds from the ground got mad and
raised up off of the earth to grab a-hold of the sunrays, and fight it out
higher up in the air. I caught a ride on a truckload of grape stakes and
heard a hard-looking truck driver cuss the narrow, bad roads that cause you
to get killed so quick; and then found myself wheeling along with a deaf
farmer for an hour or two, an Italian grape grower in debt all of the time,
a couple of cowboys trying to beat their way to a new rodeo; and before the
day was wore very slick, I was walking down the streets of Sonora, the queen
of the gold towns, in the upper foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Sonera's crooked, narrow streets bent and run about as wild as some of
the prospectors and their burros, and I thought as I pushed my way along the
tight alleys called streets, that maybe the whole town had been laid out by
just following the tracks of a runaway prospector. Little houses poking
their bellies out over the curbs and sidewalks, and streets so steep I had
to throw myself in low gear to pull them. Down again so steep, I figured,
that most of Sonora's citizens come and went by way of parachutes. Creeks
and rocky rivers guggling along under the streets, where the gambling dives
and dram joints flush their mistakes down the drains, where, on down the
creek a-ways, the waters are planned by hungry gold-bugs.
I walked along with my address in my hand, seeing herds of cowboys,
miners, timber men, and hard-working, pioneer-looking women and kids from
the mountains around; and saw, too, the fake cowboys, the drug-store
calibre, blazing shirts of all bright colors along the streets, and
crippling along bowlegged in boots never meant to be worn on the hard
concrete. And the honest working people stand along in bunches and laugh
under their breath when the fake dudes buckle past.
In the smell of the high pines and the ripple of the nugget creeks,
Sonora, an old town now, is rated as California's second richest person.
Pasadena is first, and looks it, but what fools you in Sonora is that it
looks like one of the poorest. I walked up the main street loaded to the
brim with horses, hay, children playing, jallopy cars of the ranchers and
working folks around, buggies of the Indians, wagons loaded with groceries
for grubstake, town cars, limousines, sporty jobs, the big V-16's and the
V-Twelves. The main street crooks pretty sharp right in the business end,
and crooks another time or two trying to get out of the first crook. The
street is so narrow that people sneeze on the right-hand side and apologize
to the ones on the left.
I asked a fireman asleep on a bench, "Could you tell me where bouts
this address is?"
He disturbed, without scaring, a fly on his eyelid, and told me, 'It's
that big rock house right yonder up that hill. No danger of missing it, it
covers the whole hill."
I thanked him and started walking up a three-block flight of rock steps
thinking, Boy, I'm as dirty an' ragged an' messed up as one feller can git.
Knees outta my britches. My face needs about a half a dozen shaves. Hands
all smeary. Coal dust an' soot all over me. I don't know if I'd even know
myself in a lookin-glass. Shirt all tore to hell, an' my shoes stinkin' with
sweat. That's a hell of a big rock house up there. Musta took a mighty lot
of work ta build it. I'd go back down in town to a fillin' station an' wash
an' clean up, but gosh, I'm so empty an' hungry, so tremblin' weak, I don't
know, I couldn't pull it back up these long steps again. I'll go on up.
A black iron fence and a cedar hedge fenced the whole yard off. I stood
at the gate with the letter in my hand, looking up and down, back down at
the town and the people, and then through the irons at the mansion. I wiped
the sweat off of my face on the arm of my shirt, and unlocked the gate and
walked through. Wide green grass lawn that made me think of golf courses I'd
caddied on. Mowed and petted and smoothed and kept, the yard had a look like
it had just got back from a barber shop. The whiff of the scrub cedar and
middle-size pine, on top of the flowers that jumped up all around, made it
smell good and healthy, like a home for crippled children. But the whole
place was so still and so hushed and quiet, that I was thinking maybe
everybody was gone off somewhere. When I walked the rock walk a little more,
the whole house got plainer to see: gray native stones from the hills
around, flagstone porches and sandrock columns holding up the roof; windows
so high and wide that the sun got lost trying to find a way to shine through
all of them big thick drapes and curtains. Iron braces in the windows built
to keep the nice, good, healthy sunshine out for a long, long time. Big
double doors with iron cross braces, handles like the entrance to a funeral
parlor, locks bigger and stouter than any jail I'd ever slept in.
I'll walk quieter now, because this porch makes a lot of noise, and a
little noise, I bet, would scare all of these trees and flowers to death.
This place is so quiet. I hope I don't scare nobody when I knock on this
door. How in the dickens do you operate this knocker, anyhow? Oh. Pick it
up. Let it just fall. It knocks. Gosh. Reckon it'll bring any watchdogs out
on me? Hope not. Dern. I don't know. I'm just thinking. This old rambling's
pretty bad in some places, but, I don't know, I never did see it
get this quiet and this lonesome.
Reckon I rung that door knocker right? Guess I did. Things so still
here on this porch, I can hear my blood run, and my thoughts grazing around
in my head.
The door opened back.
My breath went away in the tips of the pines where the cones hang on as
long as they can, and then fall down to the ground to get covered up in the
loose dirt and some day make a new tree.
"How do you do," a man said.
"Ah, yeah, good day." I was gulping for air.
"May I do something for you?"
"Me? No. Nope. I wuz jist lookin' fer a certain party by this name." I
handed him the envelope.
He was wearing a nice suit of clothes. An old man, thin-faced, and
straight shoulders, gray hair, white cuffs, black tie. The air from the
house sifted past him on its way out the door, and there was a smell that
made me know that the air had been hemmed up inside that house for a long
time. Hemmed up. Walled in. Covered away from the moon and out of the reach
of the sun. Cut away from the drift of the leaves and the wash of the
waters. Hid out from the going and the coming of the people, cut loose from
the thoughts of the crowds on the streets. Lazy in there, sleepy in there,
cool and pale and shady in there, dark and dreary in the book case there,
and the wind under the beds hadn't been disturbed in twenty-three years. I
know, I know, I'm on the right hill, but I'm at the wrong house. This wasn't
what I hung that boxcar for, nor hugged that iron ladder for, nor bellied
down on top of that high rolling freight train for. The train was laughing
and cussing and alive with human people. The cops was alive and pushing me
down the road in the rain. The bridge was alive with friends under it. The
river was alive and arguing with the fog and the fog was wrestling the wind
and boxing the sun.
I remember a frog they found in Okemah, once when they tore the old
bank building down. He'd been sealed up in solid concrete for thirty-two
years, and had almost turned to jelly. Jelly. Blubbery. Soft and oozy.
Slicky and wiggly. I don't want to turn to no jelly. My belly is hard from
hard traveling, and I want more than anything else for my belly to stay hard
and stay wound up tight and stay alive.
"Yes. You are at the right house. This is the place you are looking
for." The little butler stood aside and motioned for me to walk in.
"I--er--ah--think, mebbe I made a mistake--"
"Oh, no." He was talking just about the nicest I'd ever heard anybody
talk, like maybe he'd been practicing. 'This is the place you're looking
for."
"I don't--ah--think--I think, maybe I made a little mistake. You
know--mistake--"
"I'm positive that you are at the right address."
"Yeah? Well, mister, I shore thank ya; but I'm purty shore." I backed
down off of the slate-rock steps, looking down at my feet, then up at the
house and the door, and said, "Purty shore, I'm at th' wrong address. Sorry
I woke ya, I mean bothered ya. Be seein' ya."
When I stood there on top of the hill and listened to that iron gate
snap locked behind me, and looked all down across the roofs and church
steeples and chimneys and steep houses of Sonora, I smelled the drift of the
pine rosin in the air and watched a cloud whiff past me over my head, and I
was alive again.
Chapter XV
THE TELEGRAM THAT NEVER CAME
In a bend of the Sacramento is the town of Redding, California. The
word had scattered out that twenty-five hundred workers was needed to build
the Kenneth Dam, and already eight thousand work hands had come to do the
job. Redding was like a wild ant den. A mile to the north in a railroad bend
had sprung up another camp, a thriving nest of two thousand people, which we
just called by the name of the "jungle." In that summer of 1938, I learned a
few little things about the folks in Redding, but a whole lot more, some
way, down there by that big jungle where the people lived as close to
nature, and as far from everything natural, as human beings can.
I landed in Redding early one morning on a long freight train full of
wore-out people. I fell off of the freight with my guitar over my shoulder
and asked a guy when the work was going to start. He said it was supposed to
get going last month. Telegram hadn't come from Washington yet.
"Last month, hell," another old boy said, over his shoulder. "We've
been camped right here up and down this slough for over three months,
hearin' it would git started any day now!"
I looked down the train and seen about a hundred men dropping off with
their sleeping rolls and bundles of all kinds. The guy I was talking with
was a big hard looker with a brown flannel shirt on. He said, "They's that
many rollin' in on ever' train that runs!"
"Where are all of these here people from?" I asked him.
"Some of them are just louses," he said. "Pimps an' gamblers, whores,
an' fakes of all kinds. Yes, but they ain't so many of that kind. You talk
around to twenty men an' you'll find out that nineteen of them are just as
willing and able to work as anybody, just as good a hand, knows just as
much, been all over everywhere tryin' ta git onto some kind of a regular job
an' bring his whole family, wife, kids, everything, out here an' settle
down."
It was a blistering hot day, and some of the men walked across a vacant
lot over to the main street. But the biggest part of them looked too dirty
and too beat-down and ragged to spend much time on the streets. They didn't
walk into town to sign up at no hotel, not even at a twenty-cent cot house,
not even somebody's green grass lawn, but walked out slowly across the
little hill to the jungle camp. They asked other people already stranded
there, Where's the water hole? Where's there a trash pile of pretty good tin
cans for cookin'; where's the fish biting in the river? Any of you folks got
a razor you ain't using?
I stood there on a railroad platform looking at my old wore-out shirt.
I was thinking, Well now, I don't know, there might be a merchant's daughter
around this town that's a little bit afraid of all of these other tough
lookers, but now, if I was to go an' rustle me up a couple of dollars an'
buy me a clean layout, she might spend a little time talking to me. Makes
you feel better when you get all slicked up, walking out onto the streets,
cops even nod and smile at you, and with your sleeves rolled up and
everything, sun and wind sorta brushing your skin, you feel like a new
dollar watch. And you think to yourself, Boy, I hope I can meet her
before my clothes get all dirty again. Maybe this little Army and Navy
store down the street has got a water hydrant in the rest room; and when I
put on my new shirt and pants, maybe I can wash up a little. I can pull out
my razor and shave while I'm washing, keep an eye skint for the store man,
not let him see me. And I'll come walkin' out from that little old store
looking like a man that's all bought and paid for.
I heard all kinds of singing and playing through the wide-open doors of
the saloons along the street, and dropped in at all of them and tried to
draw a hand. I'd play my guitar and sing the longest, oldest, and saddest
songs and ballads I knew; I'd nod and smile and say thank you every time
somebody dropped a penny or a nickel into my cigar box.
A plump Mexican lady wearing a sweated-out black dress, walked over and
dropped three pennies in my box and said, "Now I'm broke. All I'm waiting
forr iss thiss beeg dam to start. For somebody to come running down the
street saying, "Work hass opened up! Hiring men! Hiring everybody!' "
I made enough money to run down and buy me the new shirt and pair of
pants, but they was all sweat-soaked and covered with loose dust before I
had a chance to get in good with the merchant's daughter. I was counting my
change on the curb and had twenty some odd cents. A bareheaded Indian with
warts along his nose looked over in my hand and said, "Twenty-two cent. Huh.
Too much for chili. Not enough for beef stew. Too much for sleeping outside,
and not enough for sleeping inside. Too much to be broke and not enough to
pay a loafing fine. Too much to eat all by yourself, but not enough to feed
some other boomer." And I looked at the money and said, "I reckin one of th'
unhandiest dam sums of money a feller c'n have is twenty some-odd cents." So
I walked around with it jingling loose in my pockets, out across the street,
through a vacant lot, down a cinder dump onto a railroad track, till I come
to a little grassy trail that led into the jungle camp.
I followed the trail out over the hill through the sun and the weeds.
The camp was bigger than the town itself. People had dragged old car fenders
up from the dumps, wired them from the limbs of oak trees a few feet off of
the ground and this was a roof for some of them. Others had taken old canvas
sacks or wagon sheets, stretched the canvas over little limbs cut so the
forks braced each other, and that was a house for those folks. I heard two
brothers standing back looking at their house saying, "I ain't lost my hand
as a carpenter, yet." "My old eyes can still see to hit a nail," They'd
carried buckets and tin cans out of the heap, flattened them on the ground,
then nailed the tin onto crooked boards, and that was a mansion for them.
Lots of people, families mostly, had some bedclothes with them, and I could
see the old stinky, gummy quilts and blankets hung up like tents, and two or
three kids of all ages playing around underneath. There was scatterings of
cardboard shacks, where the people had lugged cartons, cases, packing boxes
out from town and tacked them into a house. They was easy to build, but the
first rain that hit them, they was goners.
Then about every few feet down the jungle hill you'd walk past a shack
just sort of made out of everything in general-- old strips of asphalt tar
paper, double gunny sacks, an old dress, shirt, pair of overhalls, stretched
up to cover half a side of a wall; bumpy corrugated iron, cement sacks,
orange and apple crates took apart and nailed together with old rusty burnt
nails from the cinder piles. Through a little square window on the side of a
house, I'd hear bedsprings creaking and people talking. Men played cards,
whittled, and women talked about work they'd struck and work they were
hunting for. Dirt was on the floor of the house, and all kinds and colors of
crawling and flying bugs come and went like they were getting paid for it.
There were the big green blow-flies, the noisy little street flies, manure
and lot flies, caterpillars and gnats from other dam jobs, bed bugs, fleas,
and ticks sucking blood, while mosquitoes of all army and navy types,
hummers, bombers, fighters, sung some good mosquito songs. In most cases,
though, the families didn't even have a roof or shelter, but just got
together once or twice every day and, squatting sort of Indian fashion
around their fire, spaded a few bites of thickened flour gravy, old bread,
or a thin watery stew. Gunny sacks, old clothes, hay and straw, fermenting
bedclothes, are usually piled full of kids playing, or grown-ups resting and
waiting for the word "work" to come.
The sun's shining through lots of places, other patches pretty shady,
and right here at my elbow a couple of families are squatting down on an old
slick piece of canvas; three or four quiet men, whittling, breaking grass
stems, poking holes in leaves, digging into the hard ground; and the women
rocking back and forth laughing out at something somebody'd said. A little
baby sucks at a wind-burnt breast that nursed the four other kids that crawl
about the fire. Cold rusty cans are their china cups and aluminum ware, and
the hot still bucket of river water is as warm and clear as the air around.
I watch a lot of little circles waving out from the middle of the water
where a measuring worm has dropped from the limb of a tree and flips and
flops for his very life. And I see a man with a forked stick reach the forks
over into the bucket, smile, and go on talking about the work he's done; and
in a moment, when the little worm clamps his feet around the forks of the
stick, the man will lift him out, pull him up close to his face and look him
over, then tap the stick over the rim of the bucket. When the little worm
flips to the ground and goes humping away through the twigs and ashes, the
whole bunch of people will smile and say, "Pretty close shave, mister worm.
What do you think you are, a parshoot jumper?"
You've seen a million people like this already. Maybe you saw them down
on the crowded side of your big city; the back side, that's jammed and
packed, the hard section to drive through. Maybe you wondered where so many
of them come from, how they eat, stay alive, what good they do, what makes
them live like this? These people have had a house and a home just about
like your own, settled down and had a job of work just about like you. Then
something hit them and they lost all of that. They've been pushed out into
the high lonesone highway, and they've gone down it, from coast to coast,
from Canada to Mexico, looking for that home again. Now they're looking, for
a while, in your town. Ain't much difference between you and them. If you
was to walk out into this big tangled jungle camp and stand there with the
other two thousand, somebody would just walk up and shake hands with you and
ask you, What kind of work do you do, pardner?
Then maybe, farther out on the ragged edge of your town you've seen
these people after they've hit the road: the people that are called
strangers, the people that follow the sun and the seasons to your country,
follow the buds and the early leaves and come when the fruit and crops are
ready to gather, and leave when the work is done. What kind of crops? Oil
fields, power dams, pipe lines, canals, highways and hard-rock tunnels,
skyscrapers, ships, are their crops. These are migrants now. They don't just
set along in the sun--they go by the sun, and it lights up the country that
they know is theirs.
If you'd go looking for social problems, you'd find just a good
friendly bunch of people getting a lot of laughing and talking done, and
some of it pretty good sense.
I listened to the talk in the tanglewood of the migratory jungle.
"What'll be here to keep these people going," a man with baggy overhalls and
a set of stickery whiskers is saying, "when this dam job is over? Nothing?
No, mister, you're wrong as hell. What do you think we're putting in this
dam for, anyhow? To catch water to irrigate new land, and water all of this
desert-looking country here. And when a little drop of water hits the ground
anywhere out across here--a crop, a bush, sometimes even a big tall tree
comes jumping out of the dirt. Thousands and thousands of whole families are
going to have all the good land they need, and I'm a-going to be on one of
them little twenty acres!"
"Water, water," a young man about twenty or so, wearing a pair of
handmade cowboy shoes, talks up. "You think water's gonna be th' best part?
Well, you're just about half right, friend. Did you ever stop to think that
th' most, th' best part of it all is th' electric power this dam's gonna
turn out? I can just lay here on this old, rotten jungle hill with all of
these half-starved people waiting to go to work, and you know, I don't so
much see all of this filth and dirt. But I do see--just try to picture in my
head, like--what's gonna be
here. Th' big factories makin' all kinds of things from fertilizer to
bombin' planes. Power lines, steel towers runnin' out acrost these old
clumpy hills--most of all, people at work all of th' time on little farms,
and whole bunches and bunches of people at work in th' big new factories."
"It's th' gifts of th' Lord, that's what 'tis." A little nervous man,
about half Indian, is pulling up grass stems and talking. "Th' Lord gives
you a mind to vision all of this, an' th' power to build it. He gives when
He wants to. Then when He wants to, He takes it away--if we don't use it
right."
"If we all get together, social like, and build something, say, like a
big ship, any kind of a factory, railroad, big dam--that's social work,
ain't it?" This is a young man with shell-rimmed glasses, a gray felt hat,
blue work shirt with a fountain pen stuck with a notebook in his pocket, and
his voice had the sound of books in it when he talked. "That's what 'social'
means, me and you and you working on something together and owning it
together. What the hell's wrong with this, anybody--speak up! If Jesus
Christ was sitting right here, right now, he'd say this very same dam thing.
You just ask Jesus how the hell come a couple of thousand of us living out
here in this jungle camp like a bunch of wild animals. You just ask Jesus
how many million of other folks are living the same way? Sharecroppers down
South, big city people that work in factories and live like rats in the
slimy slums. You know what Jesus'll say back to you? He'll tell you we all
just mortally got to work together, build things together, fix up old things
together, clean out old filth together, put up new buildings, schools and
churches, banks and factories together, and own everything together. Sure,
they'll call it a bad ism. Jesus don't care if you call it socialism or
communism, or just me and you."
When night come down, everything got a little stiller, and you could
walk around from one bunch of people to the other one and talk about the
weather. Although the weather wasn't such an ÁÓÅ-high subject to talk about,
because around Redding for nine months hand running the weather don't change
(it's hot and dry, hot and dry, and tomorrow it's still going to be hot and
dry), you can hear little bunches of folks getting acquainted with each
other, saying, "Really hot, ain't it?" "Yeah, dry too." "Mighty dry."
I run onto a few young people of twelve to twenty-five, mostly kids
with their families, who picked the banjo or guitar, and sung songs. Two of
these people drew quite a bunch every evening along toward sundown and it
always took place just about the same way. An old bed was under a tree in
their yard, and a baby boy romped around on it when the shade got cool,
because in the early parts of the day the flies and bugs nearly packed him
off. So this was his ripping and romping time, and it was the job of his two
sisters, one around twelve and the other one around fourteen, to watch him
and keep him from falling off onto the ground. Their dad parked his self
back on an old car cushion. He throwed his eyes out over the rims of some
two-bit specks just about every line or two on his reading matter, and run
his Adam's apple up and down; and his wife nearby was singing what all the
Lord had done for her, while the right young baby stood up for his first
time, and jumped up and down, bouncing toward the edge of the mattress. The
old man puckered up his face and sprayed a tree with tobacco juice, and
said, "Girls. You girls. Go in the house and get your music box, and set
there on the bed and play with the baby, so's he won't fall off."
One of the sisters tuned a string or two, then chorded a little. People
walked from all over the camp and gathered, and the kid, mama, and dad, and
all of the visitors, kept as still as day Light while the girls sang:
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I'm worried nowwww
But I won't be worried long.
I heard these two girls from a-ways away where I was leaning back up
against an old watering trough. I could hear their words just as plain as
day, floating all around in the trees and down across the low places. I hung
my guitar up on a stub of a limb, went down and stretched myself out on some
dry grass, and listened to the girls for a long time. The baby kicked and
bucked like a regular army mule whenever they'd quit their singing; but, as
quick as they struck their first note or two on the next song, the kid would
throw his wrist in his mouth, the slobbers would drip down onto his sister's
lap, and the baby would kick both feet, but easy, keeping pretty good time
to the guitar.
I don't know why I didn't tell them I had a guitar up yonder hanging on
that tree. I just reared back and soaked in every note and every word of
their singing. It was so clear and honest sounding, no Hollywood put-on, no
fake wiggling. It was better to me than the loud squalling and bawling
you've got to do to make yourself heard in the old mobbed saloons. And,
instead of getting you all riled up mentally, morally and sexually--no, it
done something a lot better, something that's harder to do, something you
need ten times more. It cleared your head up, that's what it done, caused
you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest and your muscles go limber
like a cat's.
Two little girls were making two thousand working people feel like I
felt, rest like I rested. And when I say two thousand, take a look down off
across these three little hills. You'll see a hat or two bobbing up above
the brush. Somebody is going, somebody is coming, somebody is kneeling down
drinking from the spring of water trickling out of the west hill. Five men
are shaving before the same crooked hunk of old looking-glass, using tin
cans for their water. A woman right up close to you wrings out a tough work
shirt, saves the water for four more. You skim your eye out around the south
hill, and not less than a hundred women are doing the same thing, washing,
wringing, hanging out shirts, taking them down dry to iron. Not a one of
them is talking above a whisper, and the one that is whispering almost feels
guilty because she knows that ninety-nine out of every hundred are tired,
weary, have felt sad, joked and laughed to keep from crying. But these two
little girls are telling about all of that trouble, and everybody knows it's
helping. These songs say something about our hard traveling, something about
our hard luck, our hard get-by, but the songs say well come through all of
these in pretty good shape, and we'll be all right, we'll work, make ourself
useful, if only the telegram to build the dam would come in from Washington.
I thought I could act a little bashful and shy, and not rush the people
to get to knowing them, but something inside of me just sort of talked out
and said, "Awful good singing. What's your name?"
The two little girls talked slow and quiet but it was not nervous, and
it wasn't jittery, just plain. They told me their names.
I said, "I like the way you play that guitar with your fingers! Sounds
soft, and you can hear it a long ways off. All of these three hills was just
ringing out with your guitar, and all of these people was listening to you
sing."
"I saw them listening," one sister said.
"I saw them too," the other sister said.
"I play with a flat celluloid pick. I've got to be loud, because I play
in saloons and, well, I just make it my job to make more noise than they
make, and they're sorry for me and give me nickels and pennies."
"I don't like old saloons," one little girl said.
"Me neither," the other little girl said.
I looked over at their daddy, and he sort of looked crossways out my
side of his specks, pouched his lips up a little, winked at me, and said,
"I'm against bars myself."
His wife talked up louder, "Yes, you're against bars! Right square up
against them!"
Both of the sisters looked awful sober and serious at their dad.
Everybody in the crowd laughed, and took on a new listening position,
leaning back up against trees, squatting on smoky buckets turned upside
down, stretched out in the grass, patting down places to lay in the short
weeds.
I got up and strolled away and took my guitar down off of the sawed-off
limb, and thought while I was walking back to where the crowd was, Boy
howdy, old guitar, you been a lot of places, seen a lot of faces, but don't
you go to actin' up too wild and reckless, 'cause these Little girls and
their mama don't like saloons.
I got back to where everybody was, and the two little sisters was
singing "Columbus Stockade":
Way down in Columbus stockade
Where my gally went back on me;
Way down in Columbus stockade,
I'd ruther be back in Tennessee.
"Columbus Stockade" was always one of my first picks, so I let them run
along for a little while, twisted my guitar up in tune with theirs, holding
my ear down against the sounding box, and when I heard it was in tune with
them I started picking out the tune, sort of note for note, letting their
guitar play the bass chords and second parts. They both smiled when they
heard me because two guitars being played this way is what's called the real
article, and millions of little kids are raised on this kind of music. If
you think of something new to say, if a cyclone comes, or a flood wrecks the
country, or a bus load of school children freeze to death along the road, if
a big ship goes down, and an airplane falls in your neighborhood, an outlaw
shoots it out with the deputies, or the working people go out to win a war,
yes, you'll find a train load of things you can set down and make up a song
about. You'll hear people singing your words around over the country, and
you'll sing their songs everywhere you travel or everywhere you live; and
these are the only kind of songs my head or my memory or my guitar has got
any room for.
So these two little girls and me sung together till the crowd had got
bigger and it was dark under the trees where the moon couldn't hit us.
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet, Lord God!
And I ain't a-gonna be treated this a-way!
When the night got late and the men in the saloons in town lost their
few pennies playing framed-up poker, they drifted out to sleep the night in
the jungle camp. We saw a bunch of twenty-five or thirty of them come
running over the rim of the hill from town, yelling, cussing, kicking tin
buckets and coffee pots thirty feet, and hollering like panthers.
And when the wild bunch run down the little trail to where we was
singing--it was then that the whole drunk mess of them stood there reeling
and listening in the dark, and then shushed each other to keep quiet and set
down on the ground to listen. Everybody got so still that it almost crackled
in the air. Men took seats and leaned their heads back against tree trunks
and listened to the lightning bugs turn their lights on and off. And the
lightning bugs must of been hushing each other, because the old jungle camp
was getting a lot of good rest there listening to the little girls' song
drift out across the dark wind.
Chapter XVI
STORMY NIGHT
I set my hat on the back of my head and walked out west from Redding
through the Redwood forests along the coast, and strolled from town to town,
my guitar slung over my shoulder, and sung along the boweries of forty-two
states; Reno Avenue in Oklahoma City, Lower Pike Street in Seattle, the jury
table in Santa Fe; the Hooversvilles on the flea-bit rims of your city's
garbage dump. I sung in the camps called "Little Mexico," on the dirty edge
of California's green pastures. I sung on the gravel barges of the East
Coast and along New York's Bowery watching the cops chase the bay-rum
drinkers. I curved along the bend of the Gulf of Mexico and sung with the
tars and salts in Port Arthur, the oilers and greasers in Texas City, the
marijuana smokers in the flop town in Houston. I trailed the fairs and
rodeos all over Northern California, Grass Valley, Nevada City; I trailed
the apricots and peaches around Marysville and the winy-grape sand hills of
Auburn, drinking the good homemade vino from the jugs of friendly grape
farmers.
Everywhere I went I throwed my hat down in the floor and sung for my
tips.
Sometimes I was lucky and found me a good job. I sung on the radio
waves in Los Angeles, and I got a job from Uncle Samuel to come to the
valley of the Columbia River and I made up and recorded twenty-six songs
about the Grand Coulee Dam. I made two albums of records called "Dust Bowl
Ballads" for the Victor people. I hit the road again and crossed the
continent twice by way of highway and freights. Folks heard me on the
nationwide radio programs CBS and NBC, and thought I was rich and famous,
and I didn't have a nickel to my name, when I was hitting the hard way
again.
The months flew fast and the people faster, and one day the coast wind
blew me out of San Francisco, through San Jose's wide streets, and over the
hump to Los Angeles. Month of December, down along old Fifth and Main, Skid
Row, one of the skiddiest of all Skid Rows. God, what a wet and windy night!
And the clouds swung low and split up like herds of wild horses in the
canyons of the street.
I run onto a guitar-playing partner standing on a bad corner, and he
called his self the Cisco Kid. He was a
long-legged guy that walked like he was on a rolling ship, a good
singer and yodeler, and had sailed the seas a lot of times, busted labels in
a lot of ports, and had really been around in his twenty-six years. He
banged on the guitar pretty good, and like me, come rain or sun, or cold or
heat, he always walked along with his guitar slung over his shoulder from a
leather strap.
We moved along the Skid looking in at the bars and taverns, listening
to neon signs sputter and crackle, and on the lookout for a gang of live
ones. The old splotchy plate-glass windows looked too dirty for the hard
rain ever to wash clean. Old doors and dumps and cubbyholes had a sickly
pale color about them, and men and women bosses and work-hands humped around
inside and talked back and forth to each other. Some soggy-smelling news
stands tried to keep their fronts open and sell horse-race tips and sheets
to the people ducking head-down in the rain, and pool halls stunk to high
heaven with tobacco smoke, spit and piles of dirty men yelling over their
bets. Hock-shop windows all piled and hanging full of every article known to
man, and hocked there by the men that needed them most; tools, shovels,
carpenter kits, paint sets, compasses, brass faucets, plumbers tools, saws,
axes, big watches that hadn't run since the last war, and canvas tents and
bedrolls taken from the fruit tramps. Coffee joints, slippery stool dives,
hash counters with open fronts was lined with men swallowing and chewing and
hoping the rain would wash something like a job down along the Skid. The
garbage is along the street stones and the curbing, a shale and a slush that
washes down the hill from the nicer parts of town, the papers crumpled and
rotten, the straw, manure, and silt, that comes down from the high places,
like the Cisco Kid and me, and like several thousand other rounders, to land
and to clog, and to get caught along the Skid Row.
This is where the working people come to try to squeeze a little fun
and rest out of a buffalo nickel; these three or four blocks of old wobbling
flop houses and buildings.
I know you people I see here on the Skid. The hats pulled down over the
faces I can't see. You know my name and you call me a guitar busker, a joint
hopper, tip canary, kittybox man.
Movie people, boss wranglers, dead enders, stew bums; stealers,
dealers, sidewalk spielers; con men, sly flies, flat foots, reefer riders;
dopers, smokers, boiler stokers; sailors, whalers, bar flies, brass railers;
spittoon tuners, fruit-tree pruners; cobbers, spiders, three-way riders;
honest people, fakes, vamps and bleeders; saviors, saved, and side-street
singers; whore-house hunters, door-bell ringers; footloosers, rod riders,
caboosers, outsiders; honky tonk and whiskey setters, tight-wads,
spendthrifts, race-horse betters; blackmailers, gin soaks, comers, goers;
good girls, bad girls, teasers, whores; buskers, com huskers, dust bowlers,
dust panners; waddlers, toddlers, dose packers, syph carriers; money men,
honey men, sad men, funny men; ramblers, gamblers, highway anklers; cowards,
brave guys, stools and snitches; nice people, bastards, sonsabitches; fair,
square, and honest folks; low, sneaking greedy people; and somewhere, in
amongst all of these Skid Row skidders--Cisco and me sung for our chips.
This December night was bad for singing from joint to joint. The rain
had washed some of the trash along the streets, but had chased most of the
cash customers on home. Our system was to walk into a saloon and ask the
regular musicians if they would like to rest a few minutes, and they usually
was glad to stretch their legs and grab a coffee or a burger. Then we took
their places on the little platform and sung our songs and asked the
customers what they would like to hear next. Each joint was good for thirty
or forty cents, if things went just right, and we usually hit five or six
bars every night. But this was an off night. Men and women filled the
booths, talking about Hitler and Japan and the Russian Red Army. A few
soldiers and sailors and men in uniform scattered along the bar nodding to
longshoremen, and tanker men, and freighter men, and dock workers, and
factory men, and talking about the war. Cops ducking in and out of the rain
stood around and took a good look to see if there was any trouble cooking.
The Cisco Kid was saying, "It looks like most of these old buildings
had ought to be jacked up and a new one run under them." He was on the go
from door to door, trying to keep his guitar out of the rain.
"Purty old, all right, some of these flop houses. I think th' Spaniards
found 'em here when they first chased th' Indians outta this country." I
dodged along behind him.
"Wanta drop in here at th' Ace High?"
I followed him in the door. "It'll be a cinch ta git ta play here, I
don't know about makin' any money."
The Ace High crowd looked pretty low. We nodded at Charlie the Chinaman
and he nodded back toward the music platform. The whole joint was painted a
light funny blue that sort of made your head spin whether you was drinking
or not. All kinds of ropes and corks and big fishing nets hung around over
the walls and down from the ceiling. Cisco turned a nickel machine around
with its face to the wall, while I flipped the strings of his guitar hanging
on his back and tuned mine up to his. Then I waved at Charlie the Chinaman
and he reached above the bar and turned on the loud speaker. I pulled the
mike up to where it would be level with our mouths and we started in
singing:
Well, I come here, to work, I didn't come to hang around
Yes, I come here to work, I didn't come to hang around
And if I don't find me a woman, I'll just roll on out of town.
"Hey there, slim boy," a fast-talking little bald-headed man wearing a
right new suit of gray clothes told us, handing Cisco a phone book at the
same time, "turn in here and find me a name and a number to call."
"Which number?" Cisco asked him.
"Just any number," he said; "just read one off. I never could read
those phone numbers very good."
I listened to Cisco call out a number. The man handed Cisco a dime and
then Cisco and me heard him talking.
"Miss Sue Perfalus? How are you? I'm Mister Upjohn Smith, with the
Happy Hearth and Home Roofing Company. I was fixing your next-door
neighbor's roof today. While I was on top of her house, I looked over on top
of your house. The rainy season is here, you know. Your roof is in a
terrible condition. I wouldn't be surprised to see the whole thing go any
minute. The water will cause the plaster to fall off your laths and ruin
your piano and your furniture. It might fail down and hit you in the face
some night while you're in bed. What? Sure? Sure, I'm sure! I got your phone
number, didn't I? The price? Oh, I'm afraid it's going to run you somewhere
around two hundred dollars. What's that? Oh, I see. You haven't got a roof?
Apartment house? Oh, I see. Well, goodbye, lady."
"Wrong number?" I asked him when he hung up.
"No. Here, you take this phone book and try calling me off one." He
took the book from Cisco and handed it to me.
"Who is this? Oh, Judge V. A. Grant? Your plaster is falling off your
roof. This is the Happy Hearth and Home Roofing Company. Sure? Sure, I'm
sure! The plaster might fall on your wife while she's in bed. Sure, I can
fix it. That's my business. Price? Oh, it's going to run you right at three
hundred dollars. Fine. Come around in the morning? I'll be there with bells
on!" He took his phone book and handed me another dime and walked out.
Cisco laughed and said, "People do any dam thing under th' sun these
days ta make a livin'! Huckle an' buck!"
"Git ta singin'. There's some live ones comin' in th' door. Boy howdy,
this is our first catch tonight. I hope we can git three more dimes out of
this Navy bunch. Sail on, sailor boys, sail on! Step up an' give us yer
request!"
"Let's sing 'em one first," Cisco told me, "so they'll know it ain't
juke-box stuff. What'Il we sing? Sailor boys are really wet. Got caught out
in the rain."
I nodded and started singing:
Well, it's rainin' on th' Skid Row
Stormin' down in Birmin'ham
Rainin' on th' Skid Row
Stormin' down in Birmin' ham
But there ain't no stormy weather
Gonna stop these boys of Uncle Sam!
"You tell 'em, back there, bud!"
"Let 'er reel! Let 'em ramble!"
"Hey! Hey!"
Lord, it's stormy on that ocean
Windy on th' deep blue sea
Boys, it's stormy on the ocean
Windy on th' deep blue sea
I'm gonna bake them Nazis a chicken
Loaded full of TNT!
"Hey, Bud! I ain't got no money, 'cept just a little here to get me a
'burger an' a beer. I'd give you a dime if I had it. But just keep on
singing that song, huh?" A big broad sailor was leaning his head over my
guitar, talking.
"He's just now makin' that song up, aren't you, friend?"
I woke up this mornin'
Seen what the papers said
Yes, boys, I woke up this mornin',
Seen what the papers said
Them Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor
And war had been declared.
I didn't boil myself no coffee
I didn't boil no tea
I didn't boil myself no coffee
I didn't boil no tea
I made a run for that recruitin' office
Uncle Sam, make room for me!
We stopped singing and the whole bunch of sailors got around the
platform. They all leaned on the rail and listened.
"You boys ought to sing those two verses first every time,'' one sailor
told us.
"Anybody know the latest news from Pearl Harbor?" I asked them.
They all talked at the same time. "It's worse than we figured." "Japs
done a lot of damage." "First I heard it was twelve hundred," "Yeah, but
they say now it's closer to fifteen." "I'm just askin' one dam thing, boys,
an' that's a Goddam close crack at them Jap bastards'" "Why, th' sneak-in'
skunk buzzards to hell, anyway, I hope to God that Uncle Sam puts me where I
can do those Japs the most damage!"
A lone soldier walked in through the door and yelled, "Well, sailors,
I'll be on a troopship the first thing in the morning! And you'll be out
there keeping me company! C'mon! Beer's on me!"
"Hi, soldier! Come on back here! Charlie will send us some beer. Five
of us! Oh, seven! Two of th' best Goddam singers you ever did cock your ear
at! On your way to camp?"
"Gotta be there in about an hour," the soldier said. "Knock me off a
tune! This is my last greenback! Seven dam beers, there, Charlie!" He waved
the dollar bill.
Five or six couples walked in the door and took seats m some booths.
A lady waved a handkerchief from a booth and said, "Hey boys! Sing some
more!"
"You jingle a nickel there on th' platform, lady," Cisco told her,
"that'll sound like back where I come from!"
A nickel hit the platform. A sailor or two laughed and said, "Sing one
about th' war. Got any?"
I scratched my head and told him, "Well, not to brag about. We've
scribbled one or two."
"Le's hear 'em.''
"Ain't learnt 'em so good yet." I pulled a piece of paper out of my
pocket and handed it to one of the men. "You be my music rack. Hold this up
in th' light where I can see it. I don't even know if I can read my own
writin' or not."
Our planes will down these buzzards
Before this war has past,
For they have fired the first, folks,
But we will fire the last!
Charlie laughed out from behind the bar, "Plenty quick! Song come
fast!"
The people in the booths clapped their hands, and the sailors and
soldier boy reached across the rail and slapped us on the shoulders.
"Whew! That's gittin' songs out fast!" The soldier drained his beer
glass.
"You guys oughtta move up to th' Circle Bar! You'd pick up some real
tips up there!" A wild-looking cowboy turned around from the bar and told
us.
"Keep mouth shut!" Charlie hollered and waved a slick glass. "These boy
know Cholly Chinee. Like Cholly Chinee! Girly! Take two beer back to sing
man."
"I'd set 'em up again, if I could, guys," the soldier said, "but that
was my last lone dollar."
"Cholly!" I yelled. "Did you say two free beers fer us?"
"Yes. I say girly bring. Two free beer," he said.
"Make it seven!" I told him.
"Seven free beer?"
"If ya don't, we're gonna move th' singin' up to th' Circle Bar!" Cisco
put in.
"Seven?" Charlie looked up quick. Then he held up his finger and said,
"Cholly good man. Cholly bring."
"By God, we gotta treat our soldiers an' sailors like earls an' dukes
from here on out," Cisco laughed. We'd both tried that morning to ship
aboard a freighter headed for Murmansk. They'd turned us down for some damn
health reason and now Cisco and me was hot and crazy and laughing and mad
clear through.
"Well, men!" One of the sailors held up his new glass of beer off of
Charlie's tray. "I got th' prettiest gal in Los Angeles. Got a
good uniform on. Got a free glass of beer. Got some real honest music. Got a
great big war to fight I'm satisfied. I'm ready. So here's to beatin' th'
Japs!" He drained his glass at one pull.
"Beat 'em down!" another one said.
"And quick!"
"I'm in!"
"Gimme a ship!"
"I ain't no talker. I'm a fighter! Wow!"
One of the biggest and toughest of the civilian bunch downed a double
drink of hard cold liquor and washed it down with a glass of beer, then he
stood right in the middle of the floor and said, "Well, people! Soldier's!
Sailors! Wimmen an' gals! I'm not physical fit ta be in th' navy er th'
army, but I'll promise ya I'll beat th' livin' hell outta ever' Goddam
livin' Jap in this town!"
"If you ain't got no more sense than that, big shot, you just better
pull your head in your hole and keep it there!" a long, tall sailor yelled
back at him. "None of your wild talk in here!"
"Cholly got plentee good friend. Japonee. You say more, Cholly bust
bottle. Your head!" The boss was shaking a towel over the bar.
"We no fight Japonee people!" Charlie's waitress talked up at the far
end of the bar by the door. "We fight big-shot Japonee crook. Big lie! Big
steal! You not got no good sense! Try start Japonee fight here! Me China
girl. Plentee Japonee friend!"
The soldier boy walked across the floor with his fists doubled up,
shoving his glass empty along the counter, and saying in the tough boy's
face, "Beat it, mister. Start walkin'. We ain't fightin' these Japs just
because they happen to be Japs."
The big man backed out through the door into a crowd of fifteen or
twenty people. He ducked off up the street in the dark.
"Hell!" The soldier walked back through the saloon saying, "That guy
won't last a dam week talking that kind of stuff.
"Far as that goes," Cisco was bending over, talking in my ear, "this
Imperial Saloon right next door here is run by a whole family of Japanese
folks. I know all of them. Sung in there a hundred times. They always help
me to get tips. They're just as good as I am!" He started a song on his
guitar.
"Music! Play, boys, play!" The sailors grabbed each other and danced
around in the floor, doing the jitterbug, sticking their fingers up in the
air, making all sorts of goofy faces. and yelling, "Yippee! Cut th' rug!"
Most of the girls got up out of the booths and walked across the floor
smiling and saying, "No two men allowed to dance together in this place
tonight." "No sailors are allowed to dance unless it's with an awful pretty
girl." And a sailor cracked back when he danced his girl around, "It never
was this a-way back home! Yow!"
Somebody else yelled, "I hope it stays this a-way fer th' doorashun!
Yeah, man!"
Cisco and me played a whipped-up version of the old One Dime Blues,
fast enough to keep up with the jitterbugs. Everybody was wheeling and
whirling, waving their hands and shuffling along like a gang of circus
clowns dancing in the sawdust.
"Mama, don't treat yore daughter mean!" I joked over the loud speaker.
"Meanest thing that a man most ever seen!" Cisco threw in.
The music rolled from the sound holes of the guitars and floated out
through the loud speaker. Everybody at the bar tapped their glasses in time
with the music. One man was tapping a nickel against the rim of his beer
glass and grinning at his face in the big looking-glass. The joint boomed
with music and dancing. Charlie stood behind the bar and smiled like a full
moon. Music turned a pretty bad old night outside into a good, friendly,
warm shindig on the inside. Sailors bowed their necks and humped their backs
and made goo-goo eyes and clown faces. Girls slung their hair through the
air and spun like tops. Whoops and hollers. "Spin 'er!'' "That
sailor ain't no slouch!" "Hold 'er, boy!" "Hey! Hey! I thought I had 'er,
but she got away!"
And then just out on the street there came a clattering of glass
breaking on the sidewalk. I quit the music and listened. People were running
past the door, darting around in big bunches, cussing and hollering.
The girls and the sailors stopped dancing and walked to the door.
"What is it?" I spoke over the microphone.
"Big fight! Looks like!" the fat sailor was saying.
"Let's go see, boys!" another sailor said. He pushed off out the door.
"All time fight. Me not bother." Charlie kept swabbing the bar down
with a wet rag. "Me got work."
I slung my guitar across my shoulder and run out the door with Cisco
right in after me saying, "Must be a young war!"
A bunch of men that had the looks of being pool-hall gamblers and
horse-race bookies stood on the curb across the street hooting and heaving
and cussing and pointing. The sailors and working men from our saloon
stepped out and walked in front of the Imperial Bar next door. Already plate
glass lay at our feet in the dark. Out of all of the milling and loud
talking something whizzed over our heads and smashed a second window. Glass
flew like chipped ice all around us. A slice cracked one of Cisco's guitar
strings, and the music bonged.
"Who throwed that can of corn?" a lady yelled from right at my elbow.
"Was that a can of corn?" I asked her.
"Yes. Two cans," she told me. "Who throwed them two cans of corn, and
broke them windows? I've a good notion to bust my parasol over his head when
I find out!"
Two men in the middle of the street argued and pushed each other all
around.
"You're th' man I want, all right!" the biggest one said.
"You won't want me very long!"
A soldier with a brown overcoat on was pushing the big man back to the
curb. I elbowed near and saw it was the same soldier that had just bought us
the seven beers. I looked a little closer in the night and seen the face of
the big pug-ugly that had said he was going to beat hell out of all of the
Japs in Los Angeles.
About ten of his thug friends chewed on old cigars, smoked snipe
cigarets, and backed him up with tough talk when he said anything. "We come
ta git 'em, an' dam me, we're gonna git 'em! Japs is Japs!" "I'm da guy wot
t'rew dat corn, lady, whataya gonna do wid me?"
"I'll show you, you big bully!" She waved the can in the air to throw
it at him, and her man right behind her said, "No, don't. We don't want to
start no trouble. What's this all about, anyhow?" He took the can of corn
away from her in the air.
"We're at war with them yeller-belly Japs! An' we come down ta git our
share of 'em!" A big man with a lost voice was talking on the curb. "We're
'Meric'ns!"
"You ain't nuthin', but th' worst dam scum of th Skid Row! Two-bit
gambler!" A big half-Indian truck driver was trying to push his way across
the street to get the man.
"Jap rats!" another tough one said.
"Spies! They tipped off th' Goddam Jap army! These yeller snakes knew
to a split second when Pearl Harbor was gonna be blowed up. Git 'em! Jail
'em! Kill 'em!" He started to cross from the other side of the street.
A couple of sailors edged their way toward him saying, "You're not
going to hurt anybody, Mister Blowoff!"
"Where is th' cops?" a girl was asking her boy friend.
"I guess they're on th' way," Cisco told her.
"Cops ain'ta gonna put no stop ta us, neither!" one of the mob yelled
across at us.
"But, brother, we are!" I answered him back.
"You mangy little honky-tonk guitar-playin' sot, I'll come over there
an' bust that music box over yore bastardly head!"
'I'll furnish th' guitar, mister," I talked back, "but you'll hafta
furnish th' head!"
Everybody squeezed around me and laughed back at the rioters. Cursing
flew in the air and fists waved above the crowd in the rain and in the dark.
The people on our side of the street formed two or three lines in front of
the Imperial's door. Several Japanese men and women stood inside picking up
glass from the floor. "That's it, folks," Cisco told everybody, "squeeze
together. Stand right where you are. Don't let that crazy mob get through!"
"Wonder why they threw two cans of corn?" I was looking around asking
people.
Then I listened across the street and a wild man mounted the running
board of a car and hollered out, "Listen people! I know! Why, just this
morning, right here in this neighborhood, a housewife went into a Japanese
grocery store. She asked him how much for a can of corn. He told her it was
fifteen cents. Then she said that was too much. And so he said when his
Goddam country took th' U.S.A. over, that she would be doing the work in the
store, and the corn would cost her thirty-five cents! She hit him over the
head with that can of corn! Ha! A good patriotic American mother! That's why
we smashed that Goddam window with th' cans of corn! Nobody can stop us,
men! Go on, fight! Get 'em!"
"Listen, folks," Cisco climbed up on the wheel of a little vegetable
cart at our curb. "These little Japanese farmers that you see up and down
the country here, and these Japanese people that run the little old cafes
and gin joints, they can't help it because they happen to be Japanese.
Nine-tenths of them hate their Rising Sun robbers just as much as I do, or
you do."
"Lyin' coward! Git down from dere!" a guy with hairs sticking out from
his shirt collar bawled at Cisco.
"Pipe down, brother. l'll take care of you later. But this dam story
about the can of corn is a rotten, black and dirty lie! Made up to be used
by killers that never hit a day's honest work in their whole life. I know
it's a lie, this can-of-corn story, because even two years ago, I heard this
same tale, word for word! Somebody right here in our country is spreading
all kinds of just such lies to keep us battling against each other!" Cisco
said.
"Rave on, you silly galoon!"
"You're righter than hell, boy! Pour it on!"
"You're a sneakin' fifth column sonofabitch! Tryin' ta pertect them
skunk Japs agin' native-borned American citizens!"
The crowd started slow across from the other side. We stood there ready
to keep them back. The whole air was full of a funny, still feeling, like
all of hell's angels was just about to break loose.
Just then an electric train, loaded down with men and railroad tools,
pulled past in front of them. The railroad workers hollered a few cracks at
the two sides. "What goes on here?" "Gangfight?" "Keep back there, ya'll git
run over!" "Listen ta these ratheads bark!"
Cisco dropped down fast off of the hub of the wheel. "Me, I'm going to
stand right here," he hollered, "right here on this curb. I just ain't
moving."
"I'm with yuh, brother!" A lady walked up with a big black purse and a
gallon jug of wine, ready to be broke over somebody's head.
"I ain't a-movin', neither!" A little old skinny man was flipping his
belt buckle. "Let 'em come!"
As the last two or three flat cars of men rolled down the street and
kept the wild mob back for a minute, I grabbed my guitar up and started
singing:
We will fight together
We shall not be moved
We will fight together
We shall not be moved
Just like a tree
That's planted by the water
We
Shall not
Be moved.
"Everybody sing!" Cisco grabbed his guitar and hollered out.
"All together! Sing! Give it all ya got!" I told them.
So as the last car of the train went on down the middle or the street,
everybody was singing like church bells ringing up and down the grand canyon
of the old Skid Row:
Just like
A treeeee
Standing by
The waterrr
We
Shall not
Be
Moooooved!
The whole bunch of thugs made a big run at us sailing cuss words of a
million filthy, low-down, ratty kind. Gritting their teeth and biting their
cigar butts and frothing at the mouth. Everybody on our side kept singing.
They made a dive to bust into our line. Everyone stood there singing as loud
and as clear and as rough-sounding as a war factory hammering.
Sailors threw out their chests and sung it out. Soldiers drifted in.
Truck drivers laid their heads back and cotton pickers slung their arms
along with the cowboys and ranch hands and bartenders from other saloons
around.
The rain come down harder and we all got wetter than wharf rats. Our
singing hit the mob of rioters like a cyclone tearing into a haystack. They
stopped--fell back on their heels like you had poked them in the teeth with
a ball bat. Fumbled for words. Spewed between their teeth and rubbed their
fingers across their eyes. Scratched their heads and smeared rainwater down
across their cheeks. I saw three or four in the front row coming toward us
that grinned like monkeys up a grapevine. The bunch backing them up split
off and stopped there in the rain for a little bit, then mostly slunk off in
twos and threes in different directions. Four or five walked like gorillas
and waved their arms and fists in the faces of the soldiers and sailors
standing along the curb singing. I thought for a minute that the battle was
on, but nobody touched each other.
And then, after some howling and screeching that didn't halfway match
with our singing, there whined through the clouds that old familiar siren
that tinhorn pimps, horse betters, and gamblers get to knowing so good, the
moan of the police patrol wagon a block away. In a second, the toughs bent
over and skidded away in between the cars, and got lost in the crowds along
the walk, and hit the alleys and disappeared.
A big long black hoodlum wagon drove up and fifteen or twenty big cops
fell out with all of the guns and sticks and clubs it would take to win a
war. They made a step or two at us, and then stopped and listened to the
raindrops and the wind in the sky and the singing echoing around over the
old skiddy row. They shook their heads, looked at their address books,
flashed searchlights around.
"The chief said this was where the riot was." A cop pointed his
flashlight onto his address sheet.
"Jest a buncha people singnin'." Another big copper shook his head.
"Hhmmmm."
"Sing with us, officer?" Cisco laughed out in the crowd.
"How does it go?" the big chief asked him back.
"Listen."
"Yeah. Dat's it. Tum. Tum. Tum. Tum. Dat's planted by de water, we
shall not--be--moved!"
All of the cops stood around smiling and swinging their clubs. The
patted their feet and hands. They watched and hummed and they listened.
"Okay! Dat's all!" the head officer told them. "Back on da wagon, men!
Back on!"
And when it drove off down the street-car tracks to fade away into the
night rain, that old patrol wagon was singing:
Just like a treeee
Planted by th' waterrr
We
Shall not
Be
Mooooved!
Chapter èVII
EXTRY SELECTS
"You look like one of these here pretty boys that tries to get out of
all th' hard work you can!" a nice pretty girl, about eighteen, was saying
to me as we rode along.
It was about a 1929 sedan, the kind of used car salesmen call lemons.
No two wires quite connected like they ought to; there was a gap of daylight
between every two moving parts, and every part was moving.
''I got jest as many callouses on my hands as you!" I hollered at her
above the racket. "Take a look at th' ends of my fingers!"
She set her eyes on the ends of my guitar fingers. Then she told me,
"Well, I reckon I was wrong."
"That's about th' only place ya get stuck pickin' cotton, too!" I told
her. I pulled my hand back. I sung a little song and made my old guitar talk
about it, too:
I worked in your farm
I worked in your town
My hands is blistered
From the elbows down
Ride around little doggies
Ride around them slow
They're fiery, they're snuffy,
And rarin' to go.
A middle-size lady in the front seat, with streaks of gray hair sailing
in the wind, grinned at her husband beside her and said, "Well, I don't know
if that guitar boy back there hits any of th' heavy work or not, but he can
dang shore sing about it!"
"Mighty near make work sound like fun, cain't he?" Her husband kept his
eyes running along the road ahead, and all I seen of him was just an old
slouch hat jammed on the back of his head.
"Long ye been runnin' around playin' an' singin'?" the mama asked me.
"Round about eight years," I said.
"That's a pretty good little spell" she told me. She was watching out
the broke window at the scenery jumping past.
"California's mortally loaded down with stuff to ride along an' look
at, ain't it?"
"Long on climate out here! But still, It costs ya like th' devil ta
soak up any of it!" the boy who was driving said.
"All you folks one family?" I asked them.
"All one family. This is me'n my husband, an' these is all th' kids we
got left! Four of us now. Used to be eight "
"Where's th' other four?" I asked her. The trees got so thick and green
along the river bottom that the leaves blotted out the sunlight.
"They just went," I heard the lady say.
The girl in the back seat with me said, "You know where they go," and
she didn't take her eyes off of the loaded orchard all along out through the
window. She had gray eyes and her black hair sort of curled down to her
shoulders
"Yeah," I told her, "I know all right."
And just about that time there was a big racket and a tire right under
where I was setting went out, Keeeeblam! The car got out of gallop with the
trailer and jumped along like a sick frog. I could feel the tire tearing
itself to pieces between the iron rim and the pavement, and we all had to
hold what we had till everything bounced to a stop.
"Good-bye, little trailer hitch!" The driver boy was talking to his
self as he piled out of the front door and trotted around to the back.
"Shot to hell," the papa said.
"Tire ration's on, top of all this," the mama was telling us.
"Rubber's rubber, old 'er new. Uncle Sammy says, 'Gotta save that
rubber ta haul soldiers 'n' guns, 'n' cannons." The driver was talking while
he wired some old wire around the bolt that kept up the friendship between
the car and trailer.
"I'd shore hate to see a soldier ridin' aroun' with a hungry gut,
myself." The old man was running a couple of fingers down over his chin and
smacking his lips over the fence at the orchard.
"Now, Mister Papa, just tell me, what has this old rotten tire got to
do with a hungry soldier?" the girl asked her dad.
"Well, if we could git on down th' country just a little bit further,
'y God, I could pick enuff fruit an' stuff ta feed three er four soldiers,
heavy eaters." I seen a light strike fire in the old man's eyes. '' 'Bout
all I'm good fer, I reckon. I can pick more fruit with both hands over my
eyes than most of these new pickers fioodin' out here."
"Don't go to braggin'," the old lady told him. "You was th' best
blacksmith back in Johnson County, all right, but I ain't seen you break no
pickin' records yet. That's one mighty fine-lookin' orchard right in through
there. Wonder what it is?"
"Apercots," the girl spoke up.
"Nice even rows," the old man told us; "trees all just 'bout th' same
size. Limbs just achin' full wantin' us to come over that old fence an' pick
'em clean. I suppose a soldier wouldn't smack his goozler over a good big
hot apercot pie right about now!"
"How we gonna get another tire?" I asked the bunch, "Anybody got any
money in their clothes?"
"Ain't a-packin' nothin' that jingles," one of them said.
" 'Er folds either," another one talked up.
I heard the slick drone of an easy motor oozing down the line. Before I
could center my eyes on it good, there was a Ssssss Swish. And a
Zzooommmm--a blue gray sedan lit up in the sun like a truckload of diamonds
sailing past. The heavy tread on the new tires sung a sad-sounding song off
down the highway.
A truck come angling down the highway, no two wheels running in the
same direction. This truck just wasn't quite politically clear. But it had a
big bunch of men, women, and kids on it, and stopped on the shoulder just
ahead of us. Five or six people yelled back, but one big raw-boned lady
drowned most of the others out. "Need some help, or just lost?"
"Both!" the mama of our little bunch hollered back.
"Tire blowed off!"
"Can't you fix it up?" the big lady asked us.
"Not this 'un! It'd take th' Badyear Rubber Outfit three months to make
this thing ever hold air again!" the lady in our bunch said.
'Tire ration got us!"
"Wanta pick?" the lady asked us.
"Pickin' around here? Where 'bouts? What?"
"We ain't got no time to waste! But if ya wanta work, foller us! First
gate here! Crank up and roll on that bad tire! Ya cain't hurt it no worse!"
Our bunch piled back into the seats. I was riding right on top of the
bad tire and the girl asked me, "What kind of a song would you make up now,
to sing about this?" I let out with:
Tell me, mama, is your tread thin as mine?
Hey! Hey! Woman, is your tread thin as mine?
Work and roll, is your tread thin as mine?
Every old tire's gonna blow its side sometime!
'Wheel 'em an' deal 'em!" the driver laughed out.
Say, Lord Godamighty, roll them wheels around!
Hey! Good gal, you gotta roll them wheels around!
Workin' woman, roll your wheels around!
I'll find me a job or roll California down!
"Where 'bouts ye hear that ther song? 'At's a mighty good 'un," the old
man asked me from the front seat.
'That ain't even no song. I just made it up," I told him. There was a
big orchard passing us up on both sides.
The young girl by me in the back seat said, "Boy, you sure can sing
about work, whether you get any done or not."
'Time ya sing six hours or eight or ten, right straight hand runnin',
in some of these saloons or places, like I do, you'll say music runs inta
work!" I told her.
"Sing that long every night?" she asked.
"General thing. Get started out about eight o'clock, sing till 'bout
two or three, sometimes daylight in th' mornin'."
"Make how much?" she asked.
"Dollar, dollar an' a half," I said.
"Just about an orchard day." She glanced out the window at a stinging
bee trying to carry a big load of honey and keep up with our car. "Looky!
This poor little old bee. He's a havin' a hard time tryin' to fly with too
much honey!"
"Looks like even that little old bee's all lined up workin'
fer Uncle Sam Deeefense!" her papa said, bending his neck and head
around to see the bee.
" Tain't deefense!" she told him.
"Deeefense. Beeeefense. Some kind of a fence,'' the old man said.
She screwed her eyes up a little bit and told him, " 'Tain't deefense.
Not no more, it ain't!"
"What is it?"
"War."
"Same thing, war's defense, ain't it?" her papa asked her.
''Not by a dam sight!" the girl talked back at him.
"What's th' diff'rence?"
"If Hitler made a run at me with a big club, an' I took a step
backwards to get fixed, that'd be defense," she said.
"So what?"
"Then if I reached and got me a hell of a lot bigger club," she made a
grab for the tire pump on the floor, "that'd be changin' my belt line!"
"Yeah?"
'Then when I hauled off an' beat old Hitler plumb into th' ground,
that'd be war!"
" 'Y God, 'at's right, sis," the old man backed her up. "Only you don't
hafta swing that there pump aroun' so much here in th' car. You don't want
to konk none of yer own soldiers out, do you?"
"No." She smiled a little and dropped the pump back down onto the
floorboards. "Gotta not hurt none of my own soldiers here.''
The mama spit out her front window and said, "Reckon all of us is
soldiers these days. Look like th' gate where we turn."
The car turned through a big swinging gate into an orchard of trees set
out in a deep sandy land.
"Truck stopped on ahead yonder," I heard the old man say.
People piled down off th' truck bed, men in their overhalls and khaki
britches, shirts two or three colors where a new patch had been sewed, and
the blue and brownish color sweated out a lot of times. Some tied
handkerchiefs around their necks and slipped on their gloves. Tobacco cans
flew out and men rolled the makin's. You could see a snuff can shine like it
was polished in the sun. Hoppers and bugs and all kinds of critters with
wings wheeled through the air, and spider webs ran from tree limbs to the
clods of orchard dirt.
The tall lady from the truck jumped on our running board and said,
"Keep drivin'. Careful, don't run over none of our pickers. Lucky to get 'em
these days to come out in the fields with this gas and rubber cut down like
it is." I could see her arm and hand stuck through the window, holding onto
the door handle inside. She had fair skin with light freckles and I took her
to be a Swedish lady. "See that bunch of cars and trailers through yonder?
Pull on ahead!"
The Swedish lady stepped down on the ground and the car stopped. I got
out and brushed some of the dust out of my duds, and everybody was standing
there waiting for her to tell us something about something.
"You folks pick for a living?"
"Yes'm." Everybody nodded.
"Know about apricots then, I suppose?"
We all nodded that we knew.
"Do you know how we grade the apricots?"
"Grade 'em?"
"No'm."
"I don't reckon."
"Three grades of apricots, you know. Just plain ones. Then, next best
are called Selects. Very best, Extra Selects."
"Plain ones."
"Selects."
"Extry Seelects."
We nodded our heads up and down.
"Now, the plain ones ripen last in the warm weather; anybody can pick
the plain ones. Pay so much a box. Selects ripen earlier. Better taste,
better shape, less of them. You get a little more money for picking them,
about twice as much a box as the plain ones."
"Is th' Seelects on now?" the old man in our bunch asked her.
"No," the lady said to us. "Too early. The Extra Selects are on now."
The young girl nodded her head. "Oh, yes ma'm. They're th' very
earliest ones, aren't they?" The sun was hitting down in her face and I saw
her hair was going to curl up awful pretty when she washed the dirt out in
river water.
"First to ripen. Moneyed folks want the very best they can get, and the
best is the Extra Selects. Now, here, I'll give you an idea how you pick
them, so when the orchard boss gets here in a minute, you'll already know
the answers. See those limbs over there?"
"Loaded plumb down."
"Man alive, look at them apercots!"
'Trees got a lot of patience, ain't they?"
"Oooooooozin' in juice."
"You've got to be able to tell an Extra Select when you run onto one,"
the Swede lady told us. "Here's one. See? Clear bright color. Nice gold
look."
"Makes my mouth run water," the old man said.
"I won't even have time to dip my snuff, I'll be eatin' so many of them
there yeller outfits." The old lady was laughing and winking at all of us.
"I'm sure we see what you mean," the young girl told the lady. "We've
picked lots of other fruit where they graded them just about the same way.
They're pretty, aren't they?"
"One little thing," the lady talked so quiet I had to step closer to
hear, "I'll tell you to save the field boss from tangling horns with you. If
he catches you eating the Extra Selects, he takes it out of your day's pay,
so don't say I didn't warn you. He's walking over toward us now. You'll make
out all righ