The 42nd Parallel

Mac

Next morning soon after daylight Fainy limped out of a heavy shower into the railroad station at Gaylord. There was a big swag-bellied stove burning in the station waiting room. The ticket agent’s window was closed. There was nobody in sight. Fainy took off first one drenched shoe and then the other and toasted his feet till his socks were dry. A blister had formed and broken on each heel and the socks stuck to them in a grimy scab. He put on his shoes again and stretched out on the bench. Immediately he was asleep.

Somebody tall in blue was speaking to him. He tried to raise his head but he was too sleepy.

“Hey, bo, you better not let the station agent find you,” said a voice he’d been hearing before through his sleep. Fainy opened his eyes and sat up. “Jeez, I thought you were a cop.”

A squareshouldered young man in blue denim shirt and overalls was standing over him. “I thought I’d better wake you up, station agent’s so friggin’ tough in this dump.”

“Thanks.” Fainy stretched his legs. His feet were so swollen he could hardly stand on them. “Golly, I’m stiff.”

“Say, if we each had a quarter I know a dump where we could get a bully breakfast.”

“I gotta dollar an’ a half,” said Fainy slowly. He stood with his hands in his pockets, his back to the warm stove looking carefully at the other boy’s square bulljawed face and blue eyes.

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from Duluth… I’m on the bum more or less. Where are you from?”

“Golly, I wish I knew. I had a job till last night.”

“Resigned?”

“Say, suppose we go eat that breakfast.”

“That’s slick. I didn’t eat yesterday…. My name’s George Hall… The fellers call me Ike. I ain’t exactly on the bum, you know. I want to see the world.”

“I guess I’m going to have to see the world now,” said Fainy. “My name’s McCreary. I’m from Chi. But I was born back east in Middletown, Connecticut.”

As they opened the screen door of the railroad men’s boarding house down the road they were met by a smell of ham and coffee and roachpowder. A horsetoothed blonde woman with a rusty voice set places for them.

“Where do you boys work? I don’t remember seein’ you before.”

“I worked down to the sawmill,” said Ike.

“Sawmill shet down two weeks ago because the superintendent blew out his brains.”

“Don’t I know it?”

“Maybe you boys better pay in advance.”

“I got the money,” said Fainy, waving a dollar bill in her face.

“Well, if you got the money I guess you’ll pay all right,” said the waitress, showing her long yellow teeth in a smile.

“Sure, peaches and cream, we’ll pay like millionaires,” said Ike.

They filled up on coffee and hominy and ham and eggs and big heavy white bakingpowder biscuits, and by the end of breakfast they had gotten to laughing so hard over Fainy’s stories of Doc Bingham’s life and loves that the waitress asked them if they’d been drinking. Ike kidded her into bringing them each another cup of coffee without extra charge. Then he fished up two mashed cigarettes from the pocket of his overalls. “Have a coffin nail, Mac?”

“You can’t smoke here,” said the waitress. “The missus won’t stand for smokin’.”

“All right, bright eyes, we’ll skidoo.”

“How far are you goin’?”

“Well, I’m headed for Duluth myself. That’s where my folks are…” “So you’re from Duluth, are you?” “Well, what’s the big joke about Duluth?” “It’s no joke, it’s a misfortune.”

“You don’t think you can kid me, do you?” “’Tain’t worth my while, sweetheart.” The waitress tittered as she cleared off the table. She had big red hands and thick nails white from kitchenwork.

“Hey, got any noospapers? I want somethin’ to read waitin’ for the train.” “I’ll get you some. The missus takes the American from Chicago.” “Gee, I ain’t seen a paper in three weeks.” “I like to read the paper, too,” said Mac. “I like to know what’s goin’ on in the world.”

“A lot of lies most of it… all owned by the interests.”

“Hearst’s on the side of the people.”

“I don’t trust him any more’n the rest of ’em.”

“Ever read The Appeal to Reason?”

“Say, are you a Socialist?”

“Sure; I had a job in my uncle’s printin’ shop till the big interests put him outa business because he took the side of the strikers.”

“Gee, that’s swell… put it there… me, too…. Say, Mac, this is a big day for me… I don’t often meet a guy thinks like I do.”

They went out with a roll of newspapers and sat under a big pine a little way out of town. The sun had come out warm; big white marble clouds sailed through the sky. They lay on their backs with their heads on a piece of pinkish root with bark like an alligator. In spite of last night’s rain the pine needles were warm and dry under them. In front of them stretched the singletrack line through thickets and clearings of wrecked woodland where fireweed was beginning to thrust up here and there a palegreen spike of leaves. They read sheets of the weekold paper turn and turn about and talked.

“Maybe in Russia it’ll start; that’s the most backward country where the people are oppressed worst… There was a Russian feller workin’ down to the sawmill, an educated feller who’s fled from Siberia… I used to talk to him a lot… That’s what he thought. He said the social revolution would start in Russia an’ spread all over the world. He was a swell guy. I bet he was somebody.”

“Uncle Tim thought it would start in Germany.”

“Oughter start right here in America… We got free institutions here already… All we have to do is get out from under the interests.” “Uncle Tim says we’re too well off in America… we don’t know what oppression or poverty is. Him an’ my other uncles was Fenians back in Ireland before they came to this country. That’s what they named me Fenian… Pop didn’t like it, I guess… he didn’t have much spunk, I guess.”

“Ever read Marx?”

“No… golly, I’d like to though.” “Me neither, I read Bellamy’s Looking Backward, though; that’s what made me a Socialist.” “Tell me about it; I’d just started readin’ it when I left home.” “It’s about a galoot that goes to sleep an’ wakes up in the year two thousand and the social revolution’s all happened and everything’s socialistic an’ there’s no jails or poverty and nobody works for themselves an’ there’s no way anybody can get to be a rich bondholder or capitalist and life’s pretty slick for the working class.” “That’s what I always thought… It’s the workers who create wealth and they ought to have it instead of a lot of drones.” “If you could do away with the capitalist system and the big trusts and Wall Street things ’ud be like that.”

“Gee.”

“All you’d need would be a general strike and have the workers refuse to work for a boss any longer… God damn it, if people only realized how friggin’ easy it would be. The interests own all the press and keep knowledge and education from the workin’men.”

“I know printin’, pretty good, an’ linotypin’… Golly, maybe some day I could do somethin’.”

Mac got to his feet. He was tingling all over. A cloud had covered the sun, but down the railroad track the scrawny woods were full of the goldgreen blare of young birch leaves in the sun. His blood was like fire. He stood with his feet apart looking down the railroad track. Round the bend in the far distance a handcar appeared with a section gang on it, a tiny cluster of brown and dark blue. He watched it come nearer. A speck of red flag fluttered in the front of the handcar; it grew bigger, ducking into patches of shadow, larger and more distinct each time it came out into a patch of sun.

“Say, Mac, we better keep out of sight if we want to hop that freight. There’s some friggin’ mean yard detectives on this road.” “All right.” They walked off a hundred yards into the young growth of scrub pine and birch. Beside a big green-lichened stump Mac stopped to make water. His urine flowed bright yellow in the sun, disappearing at once into the porous loam of rotten leaves and wood. He was very happy. He gave the stump a kick. It was rotten. His foot went through it and a little powder like smoke went up from it as it crashed over into the alderbushes behind.

Ike had sat down on a log and was picking his teeth with a little birchtwig.

“Say, ever been to the coast, Mac?”

“No.”

“Like to?”

“Sure.”

“Well, let’s you an’ me beat our way out to Duluth… I want to stop by and say hello to the old woman, see. Haven’t seen her in three months. Then we’ll take in the wheat harvest and make Frisco or Seattle by fall. Tell me they have good free night-schools in Seattle. I want to do some studyin’, see? I dunno a friggin’ thing yet.”

“That’s slick.”

“Ever hopped a freight or ridden blind baggage, Mac?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“You just follow me and do what I do. You’ll be all right.”

Down the track they heard the hoot of a locomotive whistle.

“There is number three comin’ round the bend now… We’ll hop her right after she starts outa the station. She’ll take us into Mackinaw City this afternoon.”

Late that afternoon, stiff and cold, they went into a little shed on the steamboat wharf at Mackinaw City to get shelter. Everything was hidden in a driving rainstreaked mist off the lake. They had bought a ten-cent package of Sweet Caps, so that they only had ninety cents left between them. They were arguing about how much they ought to spend for supper when the steamboat agent, a thin man wearing a green eyeshade and a slicker, came out of his office. “You boys lookin’ for a job?” he asked. “Cause there’s a guy here from the Lakeview House lookin’ for a coupla pearldivers. Agency didn’t send ’em enough help I guess. They’re openin’ up tomorrer.” “How much do they pay ye?” asked Ike. “I don’t reckon it’s much, but the grub’s pretty good.” “How about it, Mac? We’ll save up our fare an’ then we’ll go to Duluth like a coupla dudes on the boat.”

So they went over that night on the steamboat to Mackinac Island. It was pretty dull on Mackinac Island. There was a lot of small scenery with signs on it reading “Devil’s Cauldron,” “Sugar Loaf,” “Lover’s Leap,” and wives and children of mediumpriced business men from Detroit, Saginaw and Chicago. The grayfaced woman who ran the hotel, known as The Management, kept them working from six in the morning till way after sundown. It wasn’t only dishwashing, it was sawing wood, running errands, cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors, smashing baggage and a lot of odd chores. The waitresses were all old maids or else brokendown farmers’ wives whose husbands drank. The only other male in the place was the cook, a hypochondriac French Canadian halfbreed who insisted on being called Mr. Chef. Evenings he sat in his little log shack back of the hotel drinking paregoric and mumbling about God.

When they got their first month’s pay they packed up their few belongings in a newspaper and sneaked on board the Juniata for Duluth. The fare took all their capital, but they were happy as they stood in the stern watching the spruce and balsamcovered hill of Mackinac disappear into the lake.

Duluth; girderwork along the waterfront, and the shack-covered hills and the tall thin chimneys and the huddle of hunch-shouldered grain elevators under the smoke from the mills scrolled out dark against a huge salmon-colored sunset. Ike hated to leave the boat on account of a pretty dark-haired girl he’d meant all the time to speak to. “Hell, she wouldn’t pay attention to you, Ike, she’s too swank for you,” Mac kept saying. “The old woman’ll be glad to see us anyway,” said Ike as they hurried off the gangplank. “I half expected to see her at the dock, though I didn’t write we was coming. Boy, I bet she’ll give us a swell feed.”

“Where does she live?”

“Not far. I’ll show you. Say, don’t ask anythin’ about my old man, will ye; he don’t amount to much. He’s in jail, I guess. Ole woman’s had pretty tough sleddin’ bringin’ up us kids… I got two brothers in Buffalo… I don’t get along with ’em. She does fancy needlework and preservin’ an’ bakes cakes an’ stuff like that. She used to work in a bakery but she’s got the lumbago too bad now. She’d ’a’ been a real bright woman if we hadn’t always been so friggin’ poor.”

They turned up a muddy street on a hill. At the top of the hill was a little prim house like a schoolhouse.

“That’s where we live… Gee, I wonder why there’s no light.”

They went in by a gate in the picket fence. There was sweetwilliam in bloom in the flowerbed in front of the house. They could smell it though they could hardly see, it was so dark. Ike knocked.

“Damn it, I wonder what’s the matter.” He knocked again. Then he struck a match. On the door was nailed a card “FOR SALE” and the name of a realestate agent. “Jesus Christ, that’s funny, she musta moved. Now I think of it, I haven’t had a letter in a couple of months. I hope she ain’t sick… I’ll ask at Bud Walker’s next door.”

Mac sat down on the wooden step and waited. Overhead in a gash in the clouds that still had the faintest stain of red from the afterglow his eye dropped into empty black full of stars. The smell of the sweetwilliams tickled his nose. He felt hungry.

A low whistle from Ike roused him. “Come along,” he said gruffly and started walking fast down the hill with his head sunk between his shoulders.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

“Nothin’. The old woman’s gone to Buffalo to live with my brothers. The lousy bums got her to sell out so’s they could spend the dough, I reckon.”

“Jesus, that’s hell, Ike.”

Ike didn’t answer. They walked till they came to the corner of a street with lighted stores and trolleycars. A tune from a mechanical piano was tumbling out from a saloon. Ike turned and slapped Mac on the back. “Let’s go have a drink, kid… What the hell.”

There was only one other man at the long bar. He was a very drunken tall elderly man in lumbermen’s boots with a sou’wester on his head who kept yelling in an inaudible voice, ‘Whoop her up, boys,’ and making a pass at the air with a long grimy hand. Mac and Ike drank down two whiskies each, so strong and raw that it pretty near knocked the wind out of them. Ike put the change from a dollar in his pocket and said:

“What the hell, let’s get out of here.” In the cool air of the street they began to feel lit. “Jesus, Mac, let’s get outa here tonight… It’s terrible to come back to a town where you was a kid… I’ll be meetin’ all the crazy galoots I ever knew and girls I had crushes on… I guess I always get the dirty end of the stick, all right.”

In a lunchroom down by the freight depot they got hamburger and potatoes and bread and butter and coffee for fifteen cents each. When they’d bought some cigarettes they still had eight seventyfive between them. “Golly, we’re rich,” said Mac. “Well, where do we go?”

“Wait a minute. I’ll go scout round the freight depot. Used to be a guy I knowed worked there.”

Mac loafed round under a lamp post at the streetcorner and smoked a cigarette and waited. It was warmer since the wind had gone down. From a puddle somewhere in the freight yards came the peep peep peep of toads. Up on the hill an accordion was playing. From the yards came the heavy chugging of a freight locomotive and the clank of shunted freightcars and the singing rattle of the wheels.

After a while he heard Ike’s whistle from the dark side of the street. He ran over. “Say, Mac, we gotta hurry. I found the guy. He’s goin’ to open up a boxcar for us on the westbound freight. He says it’ll carry us clear out to the coast if we stick to it.”

“How the hell will we eat if we’re locked up in a freightcar?”

“We’ll eat fine. You leave the eatin’ to me.”

“But, Ike…”

“Keep your trap shut, can’t you… Do you want everybody in the friggin’ town to know what we’re tryin’ to do?”

They walked along tiptoe in the dark between two tracks of boxcars. Then Ike found a door half open and darted in. Mac followed and they shut the sliding door very gently after them.

“Now all we got to do is go to sleep,” whispered Ike, his lips touching Mac’s ear. “This here galoot, see, said there wasn’t any yard dicks on duty tonight.”

In the end of the car they found hay from a broken bale. The whole car smelt of hay. “Ain’t this hunky dory?” whispered Ike.

“It’s the cat’s nuts, Ike.”

Pretty soon the train started, and they lay down to sleep side by side in the sparse hay. The cold night wind streamed in through the cracks in the floor. They slept fitfully. The train started and stopped and started and shunted back and forth on sidings and the wheels rattled and rumbled in their ears and slambanged over crossings. Towards morning they fell into a warm sleep and the thin layer of hay on the boards was suddenly soft and warm. Neither of them had a watch and the day was overcast so they didn’t know what time it was when they woke up. Ike slid open the door a little so that they could peek out; the train was running through a broad valley brimfull-like with floodwater, with the green ripple of fullgrown wheat. Now and then in the distance a clump of woodland stood up like an island. At each station was the hunched blind bulk of an elevator. “Gee, this must be the Red River, but I wonder which way we’re goin’,” said Ike. “Golly, I could drink a cup of coffee,” said Mac. “We’ll have swell coffee in Seattle, damned if we won’t, Mac.”

They went to sleep again, and when they woke up they were thirsty and stiff. The train had stopped. There was no sound at all. They lay on their backs stretching and listening. “Gee, I wonder where in hell we are.” After a long while they heard the cinders crunching down the track and someone trying the fastenings of the boxcar doors down the train. They lay so still they could hear both their hearts beating. The steps on the cinders crunched nearer and nearer. The sliding door slammed open, and their car was suddenly full of sunlight. They lay still. Mac felt the rap of a stick on his chest and sat up blinking. A Scotch voice was burring in his ears:

“I thought I’d find some Pullman passengers… All right, byes, stand and deliver, or else you’ll go to the constabulary.”

“Aw hell,” said Ike, crawling forward.

“Currsin’ and swearin’ won’t help ye… If you got a couple o’ quid you can ride on to Winnipeg an’ take your chances there… If not you’ll be doin’ a tidy bit on the roads before you can say Jack Robinson.”

The brakeman was a small blackhaired man with a mean quiet manner.

“Where are we, guv’ner?” asked Ike, trying to talk like an Englishman.

“Gretna… You’re in the Dominion of Canada. You can be had up, too, for illegally crossin’ Her Majesty’s frontier as well as for bein’ vags.”

“Well, I guess we’d better shell out… You see we’re a couple of noblemen’s sons out for a bit of a bloody lark, guv’ner.”

“No use currsin’ and prevarricatin’. How much have you?”

“Coupla dollars.”

“Let’s see it quick.”

Ike pulled first one dollar, then another, out of his pocket; folded in the second dollar was a five. The Scotchman swept the three bills up with one gesture and slammed the sliding door to. They heard him slip down the catch on the outside. For a long time they sat there quiet in the dark. Finally Ike said, “Hey, Mac, gimme a sock in the jaw. That was a damn fool thing to do… Never oughta had that in my jeans anyway… oughta had it inside my belt. That leaves us with about seventyfive cents. We’re up shit creek now for fair… He’ll probably wire ahead to take us outa here at the next big town.” “Do they have mounted police on the railroad, too?” asked Mac in a hollow whisper. “Jez, I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

The train started again and Ike rolled over on his face and went glumly to sleep. Mac lay on his back behind him looking at the slit of sunlight that made its way in through the crack in the door and wondered what the inside of a Canadian jail would be like.

That night, after the train had lain still for some time in the middle of the hissing and clatter of a big freightyard, they heard the catch slipped off the door. After a while Ike got up his nerve to slide the door open and they dropped, stiff and terribly hungry, down to the cinders. There was another freight on the next track, so all they could see was a bright path of stars overhead. They got out of the freight-yards without any trouble and found themselves walking through the deserted streets of a large widescattered city.

“Winnipeg’s a pretty friggin’ lonelylookin’ place, take it from me,” said Ike.

“It must be after midnight.”

They tramped and tramped and at last found a little lunchroom kept by a Chink who was just closing up. They spent forty cents on some stew and potatoes and coffee. They asked the Chink if he’d let them sleep on the floor behind the counter, but he threw them out and they found themselves dogtired tramping through the broad deserted streets of Winnipeg again. It was too cold to sit down anywhere, and they couldn’t find anyplace that looked as if it would give them a flop for thirtyfive cents, so they walked and walked, and anyway the sky was beginning to pale into a slow northern summer dawn. When it was fully day they went back to the Chink’s and spent the thirtyfive cents on oatmeal and coffee. Then they went to the Canadian Pacific employment office and signed up for work in a construction camp at Banff. The hours they had to wait till traintime they spent in the public library. Mac read part of Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Ike, not being able to find a volume of Karl Marx, read an instalment of “When the Sleeper Wakes” in the Strand Magazine. So when they got on the train they were full of the coming Socialist revolution and started talking it up to two lanky red-faced lumberjacks who sat opposite them. One of them chewed tobacco silently all the while, but the other spat his quid out of the window and said, “You blokes ’ll keep quiet with that kinder talk if you knows what’s ’ealthy for ye.” “Hell, this is a free country, ain’t it? A guy’s free to talk, ain’t he?” said Ike. “A bloke kin talk so long as his betters don’t tell him to keep his mouth shut.” “Hell, I’m not tryin’ to pick a fight,” said Ike. “Better not,” said the other man, and didn’t speak again.

They worked for the C.P.R. all summer and by the first of October they were in Vancouver. They had new suitcases and new suits. Ike had forty-nine dollars and fifty cents and Mac had eighty-three fifteen in a brand new pigskin wallet. Mac had more because he didn’t play poker. They took a dollar and a half room between them and lay in bed like princes their first free morning. They were tanned and toughened and their hands were horny. After the smell of rank pipes and unwashed feet and the bedbugs in the railroad bunkhouses the small cleanboarded hotel room with its clean beds seemed like a palace.

When he was fully awake Mac sat up and reached for his Ingersoll. Eleven o’clock. The sunlight on the windowledge was ruddy from the smoke of forestfires up the coast. He got up and washed in cold water at the washbasin. He walked up and down the room wiping his face and arms in the towel. It made him feel good to follow the contours of his neck and the hollow between his shoulderblades and the muscles of his arms as he dried himself with the fresh coarse towel.

“Say, Ike, what do you think we oughta do? I think we oughta go down on the boat to Seattle, Wash., like a coupla dude passengers. I wanta settle down an’ get a printin’ job; there’s good money in that. I’m goin’ to study to beat hell this winter. What do you think, Ike? I want to get out of this limejuicy hole an’ get back to God’s country. What do you think, Ike?”

Ike groaned and rolled over in bed.

“Say, wake up, Ike, for crissake. We want to take a look at this burg an’ then twentythree.”

Ike sat up in bed. “God damn it, I need a woman.”

“I’ve heard tell there’s swell broads in Seattle, honest, Ike.”

Ike jumped out of bed and began splattering himself from head to foot with cold water. Then he dashed into his clothes and stood looking out the window combing the water out of his hair.

“When does the friggin’ boat go? Jez, I had two wet dreams last night, did you?”

Mac blushed. He nodded his head.

“Jez, we got to get us women. Wet dreams weakens a guy.”

“I wouldn’t want to get sick.”

“Aw, hell, a man’s not a man until he’s had his three doses.”

“Aw, come ahead, let’s go see the town.”

“Well, ain’t I been waitin’ for ye this halfhour?”

They ran down the stairs and out into the street. They walked round Vancouver, sniffing the winey smell of lumbermills along the waterfront, loafing under the big trees in the park. Then they got their tickets at the steamboat office and went to a haberdashery store and bought themselves striped neckties, colored socks and four-dollar silk shirts. They felt like millionaires when they walked up the gangplank of the boat for Victoria and Seattle, with their new suits and their new suitcases and their silk shirts. They strolled round the deck smoking cigarettes and looking at the girls. “Gee, there’s a couple looks kinda easy… I bet they’re hookers at that,” Ike whispered in Mac’s ear and gave him a dig in the ribs with his elbow as they passed two girls in Spring Maid hats who were walking round the deck the other way. “Shit, let’s try to pick ’em up.”

They had a couple of beers at the bar, then they went back on deck. The girls had gone. Mac and Ike walked disconsolately round the deck for a while, then they found the girls leaning over the rail in the stern. It was a cloudy moonlight night. The sea and the dark islands covered with spiring evergreens shone light and dark in a mottling silvery sheen. Both girls had frizzy hair and dark circles under their eyes. Mac thought they looked too old, but as Ike had gone sailing ahead it was too late to say anything. The girl he talked to was named Gladys. He liked the looks of the other one, whose name was Olive, better, but Ike got next to her first. They stayed on deck kidding and giggling until the girls said they were cold, then they went in the saloon and sat on a sofa and Ike went and bought a box of candy.

“We ate onions for dinner today,” said Olive. “Hope you fellers don’t mind. Gladys, I told you we oughtn’t to of eaten them onions, not before comin’ on the boat.”

“Gimme a kiss an’ I’ll tell ye if I mind or not,” said Ike.

“Kiddo, you can’t talk fresh like that to us, not on this boat,” snapped Olive, two mean lines appearing on either side of her mouth.

“We have to be awful careful what we do on the boat,” explained Gladys. “They’re terrible suspicious of two girls travelin’ alone nowadays. Ain’t it a crime?”

“It sure is,” Ike moved up a little closer on the seat.

“Quit that… Make a noise like a hoop an’ roll away. I mean it.” Olive went and sat on the opposite bench. Ike followed her.

“In the old days it was liberty hall on these boats, but not so any more,” Gladys said, talking to Mac in a low intimate voice. “You fellers been workin’ up in the canneries?”

“No, we been workin’ for the C.P.R. all summer.”

“You must have made big money.” As she talked to him, Mac noticed that she kept looking out of the corner of her eye at her friend.

“Yare… not so big… I saved up pretty near a century.”

“An’ now you’re going to Seattle.”

“I want to get a job linotypist.”

“That’s where we live, Seattle. Olive an’ I’ve got an apartment… Let’s go out on deck, it’s too hot in here.”

As they passed Olive and Ike, Gladys leaned over and whispered something in Olive’s ear. Then she turned to Mac with a melting smile. The deck was deserted. She let him put his arm round her waist. His fingers felt the bones of some sort of corset. He squeezed. “Oh, don’t be too rough, kiddo,” she whined in a funny little voice. He laughed. As he took his hand away he felt the contour of her breast. Walking, his leg brushed against her leg. It was the first time he’d been so close to a girl.

After a while she said she had to go to bed. “How about me goin’ down with ye?” She shook her head. “Not on this boat. See you tomorrow; maybe you and your pal ’ll come and see us at our apartment. We’ll show you the town.” “Sure,” said Mac. He walked on round the deck, his heart beating hard. He could feel the pound of the steamboat’s engines and the arrowshaped surge of broken water from the bow and he felt like that. He met Ike.

“My girl said she had to go to bed.” “So did mine.” “Get anywheres, Mac?” “They got an apartment in Seattle.” “I got a kiss off mine. She’s awful hot. Jez, I thought she was going to feel me up.” “We’ll get it tomorrow all right.”

The next day was sunny; the Seattle waterfront was sparkling, smelt of lumberyards, was noisy with rattle of carts and yells of drivers when they got off the boat. They went to the Y.M.C.A. for a room. They were through with being laborers and hobos. They were going to get clean jobs, live decently and go to school nights. They walked round the city all day, and in the evening met Olive and Gladys in front of the totempole on Pioneer Square.

Things happened fast. They went to a restaurant and had wine with a big feed and afterwards they went to a beergarden where there was a band, and drank whiskeysours. When they went to the girls’ apartment they took a quart of whiskey with them and Mac almost dropped it on the steps and the girls said, “For crissake don’t make so much noise or you’ll have the cops on us,” and the apartment smelt of musk and facepowder and there was women’s underwear around on all the chairs and the girls got fifteen bucks out of each of them first thing. Mac was in the bathroom with his girl and she smeared liprouge on his nose and they laughed and laughed until he got rough and she slapped his face. Then they all sat together round the table and drank some more and Ike danced a Solomeydance in his bare feet. Mac laughed, it was so very funny, but he was sitting on the floor and when he tried to get up he fell on his face and all of a sudden he was being sick in the bathtub and Gladys was cursing hell out of him. She got him dressed, only he couldn’t find his necktie, and everybody said he was too drunk and pushed him out and he was walking down the street singing Make a Noise Like a Hoop and Just Roll Away, Roll Away, and he asked a cop where the Y.M.C.A. was and the cop pushed him into a cell at the stationhouse and locked him up.

He woke up with his head like a big split millstone. There was vomit on his shirt and a rip in his pants. He went over all his pockets and couldn’t find his pocketbook. A cop opened the cell door and told him to make himself scarce and he walked out into the dazzling sun that cut into his eyes like a knife. The man at the desk at the Y looked at him queerly when he went in, but he got up to his room and fell into bed without anybody saying anything to him. Ike wasn’t back yet. He dozed off feeling his headache all through his sleep. When he woke up Ike was sitting on the bed. Ike’s eyes were bright and his cheeks were red. He was still a little drunk. “Say, Mac, did they roll yer? I can’t find my pocketbook an’ I tried to go back but I couldn’t find the apartment. God, I’d have beat up the goddam floosies…Shit, I’m drunk as a pissant still. Say, the galoot at the desk said we’d have to clear out. Can’t have no drunks in the Y.M.C.A.” “But jez, we paid for a week.” “He’ll give us part of it back… Aw, what the hell, Mac… We’re flat, but I feel swell… Say, I had a rough time with your Jane after they’d thrown you out.”

“Hell, I feel sick as a dog.”

“I’m afraid to go to sleep for fear of getting a hangover. Come on out, it’ll do you good.”

It was three in the afternoon. They went into a little Chinese restaurant on the waterfront and drank coffee. They had two dollars they got from hocking their suitcases. The pawnbroker wouldn’t take the silk shirts because they were dirty. Outside it was raining pitchforks.

“Jesus, why the hell didn’t we have the sense to keep sober? God, we’re a coupla big stiffs, Ike.”

“We had a good party… Jez, you looked funny with that liprouge all over your face.”

“I feel like hell… I wanta study an’ work for things; you know what I mean, not to get to be a goddam slavedriver but for socialism and the revolution an’ like that, not work an’ go on a bat an’ work an’ go on a bat like those damn yaps on the railroad.”

“Hell, another time we’ll have more sense an’ leave our wads somewhere safe… Gee, I’m beginning to sink by the bows myself.”

“If the damn house caught fire I wouldn’t have the strength to walk out.”

They sat in the Chink place as long as they could and then they went out in the rain to find a thirtycent flophouse where they spent the night, and the bedbugs ate them up. In the morning they went round looking for jobs, Mac in the printing trades and Ike at the shipping agencies. They met in the evening without having had any luck and slept in the park as it was a fine night. Eventually they both signed up to go to a lumbercamp up the Snake River. They were sent up by the agency on a car full of Swedes and Finns. Mac and Ike were the only ones who spoke English. When they got there they found the foreman so hardboiled and the grub so rotten and the bunkhouse so filthy that they lit out at the end of a couple of days, on the bum again. It was already cold in the Blue Mountains and they would have starved to death if they hadn’t been able to beg food in the cookhouses of lumbercamps along the way. They hit the railroad at Baker City, managed to beat their way back to Portland on freights. In Portland they couldn’t find jobs because their clothes were so dirty, so they hiked southward along a big endless Oregon valley full of fruit-ranches, sleeping in barns and getting an occasional meal by cutting wood or doing chores around a ranch house.

In Salem, Ike found that he had a dose and Mac couldn’t sleep nights worrying for fear he might have it too. They tried to go to a doctor in Salem. He was a big roundfaced man with a hearty laugh. When they said they didn’t have any money he guessed it was all right and that they could do some chores to pay for the consultation, but when he heard it was a venereal disease he threw them out with a hot lecture on the wages of sin.

They trudged along the road, hungry and footsore; Ike had fever and it hurt him to walk. Neither of them said anything. Finally they got to a small fruitshipping station where there were watertanks, on the main line of the Southern Pacific. There Ike said he couldn’t walk any further, that they’d have to wait for a freight. “Jesus Christ, jail ’ud be better than this.”

“When you’re outa luck in this man’s country, you certainly are outa luck,” said Mac and for some reason they both laughed.

Among the bushes back of the station they found an old tramp boiling coffee in a tin can. He gave them some coffee and bread and baconrind and they told him their troubles. He said he was headed south for the winter and that the thing to cure it up was tea made out of cherry pits and stems. “But where the hell am I going to get cherry pits and stems?” Anyway he said not to worry, it was no worse than a bad cold. He was a cheerful old man with a face so grimed with dirt it looked like a brown leather mask. He was going to take a chance on a freight that stopped there to water a little after sundown. Mac dozed off to sleep while Ike and the old man talked. When he woke up Ike was yelling at him and they were all running for the freight that had already started. In the dark Mac missed his footing and fell flat on the ties. He wrenched his knee and ground cinders into his nose and by the time he had got to his feet all he could see were the two lights on the end of the train fading into the November haze.

That was the last he saw of Ike Hall.

He got himself back on the road and limped along until he came to a ranch house. A dog barked at him and worried his ankles but he was too down and out to care. Finally a stout woman came to the door and gave him some cold biscuits and applesauce and told him he could sleep in the barn if he gave her all his matches. He limped to the barn and snuggled into a pile of dry sweetgrass and went to sleep.

In the morning the rancher, a tall ruddy man named Thomas, with a resonant voice, went over to the barn and offered him work for a few days at the price of his board and lodging. They were kind to him, and had a pretty daughter named Mona that he kinder fell in love with. She was a plump rosy-cheeked girl, strong as a boy and afraid of nothing. She punched him and wrestled with him; and, particularly after he’d gotten fattened up a little and rested, he could hardly sleep nights for thinking of her. He lay in his bed of sweetgrass telling over the touch of her bare arm that rubbed along his when she handed him back the nozzle of the sprayer for the fruittrees, or was helping him pile up the pruned twigs to burn, and the roundness of her breasts and her breath sweet as a cow’s on his neck when they romped and played tricks on each other evenings after supper. But the Thomases had other ideas for their daughter and told Mac that they didn’t need him any more. They sent him off kindly with a lot of good advice, some old clothes and a cold lunch done up in a newspaper, but no money. Mona ran after him as he walked off down the dustyrutted wagonroad and kissed him right in front of her parents. “I’m stuck on you,” she said. “You make a lot of money and come back and marry me.” “By gum, I’ll do that,” said Mac, and he walked off with tears in his eyes and feeling very good. He was particularly glad he hadn’t got the clap off that girl in Seattle.