The 42nd Parallel

Mac

Mac went down to the watertank beyond the yards to wait for a chance to hop a freight. The old man’s hat and his ruptured shoes were ashen gray with dust; he was sitting all hunched up with his head between his knees and didn’t make a move until Mac was right up to him. Mac sat down beside him. A rank smell of feverish sweat came from the old man. “What’s the trouble, daddy?”

“I’m through, that’s all… I been a lunger all my life an’ I guess it’s got me now.” His mouth twisted in a spasm of pain. He let his head droop between his knees. After a minute he raised his head again, making little feeble gasps with his mouth like a dying fish. When he got his breath he said, “It’s a razor a’ slicin’ off my lungs every time. Stand by, will you, kid?” “Sure I will,” said Mac.

“Listen, kid, I wanna go West to where there’s trees an’ stuff… You got to help me into one o’ them cars. I’m too weak for the rods… Don’t let me lay down… I’ll start bleedin’ if I lay down, see.” He choked again.

“I got a coupla bucks. I’ll square it with the brakeman maybe.”

“You don’t talk like no vag.”

“I’m a printer. I wanta make San Francisco soon as I can.”

“A workin’ man; I’ll be a son of a bitch. Listen here, kid… I ain’t worked in seventeen years.”

The train came in and the engine stood hissing by the watertank.

Mac helped the old man to his feet and got him propped in the corner of a flatcar that was loaded with machine parts covered with a tarpaulin. He saw the fireman and the engineer looking at them out of the cab, but they didn’t say anything.

When the train started the wind was cold. Mac took off his coat and put it behind the old man’s head to keep it from jiggling with the rattling of the car. The old man sat with his eyes closed and his head thrown back. Mac didn’t know whether he was dead or not. It got to be night. Mac was terribly cold and huddled shivering in a fold of tarpaulin in the other end of the car.

In the gray of dawn Mac woke up from a doze with his teeth chattering. The train had stopped on a siding. His legs were so numb it was some time before he could stand on them. He went to look at the old man, but he couldn’t tell whether he was dead or not. It got a little lighter and the east began to glow like the edge of a piece of iron in a forge. Mac jumped to the ground and walked back along the train to the caboose.

The brakeman was drowsing beside his lantern. Mac told him that an old tramp was dying in one of the flatcars. The brakeman had a small flask of whisky in his good coat that hung on a nail in the caboose. They walked together up the track again. When they got to the flatcar it was almost day. The old man had flopped over on his side. His face looked white and grave like the face of a statue of a Civil War general. Mac opened his coat and the filthy torn shirts and underclothes and put his hand on the old man’s chest. It was cold and lifeless as a board. When he took his hand away there was sticky blood on it.

“Hemorrhage,” said the brakeman, making a perfunctory clucking noise in his mouth.

The brakeman said they’d have to get the body off the train. They laid him down flat in the ditch beside the ballast with his hat over his face. Mac asked the brakeman if he had a spade so that they could bury him, so that the buzzards wouldn’t get him, but he said no, the gandywalkers would find him and bury him. He took Mac back to the caboose and gave him a drink and asked him all about how the old man had died.

Mac beat his way to San Francisco.

Maisie was cold and bitter at first, but after they’d talked a little while she said he looked thin and ragged as a bum and burst into tears and kissed him. They went to get her savings out of the bank and bought Mac a suit and went down to City Hall and got married without saying anything to her folks. They were both very happy going down on the train to San Diego, and they got a furnished room there with kitchen privileges and told the landlady they’d been married a year. They wired Maisie’s folks that they were down there on their honeymoon and would be back soon.

Mac got work there at a job printer’s and they started payments on a bungalow at Pacific Beach. The work wasn’t bad and he was pretty happy in his quiet life with Maisie. After all, he’d had enough bumming for a while. When Maisie went to the hospital to have the baby, Mac had to beg a two months’ advance of pay from Ed Balderston, his boss. Even at that they had to take out a second mortgage on the bungalow to pay the doctor’s bill. The baby was a girl and had blue eyes and they named her Rose.

Life in San Diego was sunny and quiet. Mac went to work mornings on the steamcar and came back evenings on the steamcar and Sundays he puttered round the house or sometimes sat on one of the beaches with Maisie and the kid. It was understood between them now that he had to do everything that Maisie wanted because he’d given her such a tough time before they were married. The next year they had another kid and Maisie was sick and in hospital a long time after, so that now all that he could do with his pay each week was cover the interest on his debts, and he was always having to kid the grocerystore along and the milkman and the bakery to keep their chargeaccounts going from week to week. Maisie read a lot of magazines and always wanted new things for the house, a pianola, or a new icebox, or a fireless cooker. Her brothers were making good money in the real estate business in Los Angeles and her folks were coming up in the world. Whenever she got a letter from them she’d worry Mac about striking his boss for more pay or moving to a better job.

When there was anybody of the wobbly crowd in town down on his uppers or when they were raising money for strike funds or anything like that he’d help them out with a couple of dollars, but he never could do much for fear Maisie would find out about it. Whenever she found The Appeal to Reason or any other radical paper round the house she’d burn it up, and then they’d quarrel and be sulky and make each other’s lives miserable for a few days, until Mac decided what was the use, and never spoke to her about it. But it kept them apart almost as if she thought he was going out with some other woman.

One Saturday afternoon Mac and Maisie had managed to get a neighbor to take care of the kids and were going into a vaudeville theater when they noticed a crowd at the corner in front of Marshall’s drugstore. Mac elbowed his way through. A thin young man in blue denim was standing close to the corner lamppost where the firealarm was, reading the Declaration of Independence: When in the course of human events… A cop came up and told him to move on… inalienable right… life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now there were two cops. One of them had the young man by the shoulders and was trying to pull him loose from the lamppost.

“Come on, Fainy, we’ll be late for the show,” Maisie kept saying.

“Hey, get a file; the bastard’s locked himself to the post,” he heard one cop say to the other. By that time Maisie had managed to hustle him to the theater boxoffice. After all, he’d promised to take her to the show and she hadn’t been out all winter. The last thing he saw the cop had hauled off and hit the young guy in the corner of the jaw.

Mac sat there in the dark stuffy theater all afternoon. He didn’t see the acts or the pictures between the acts. He didn’t speak to Maisie. He sat there feeling sick in the pit of his stomach. The boys must be staging a free-speech fight right here in town. Now and then he glanced at Maisie’s face in the dim glow from the stage. It had puffed out a little in wellsatisfied curves like a cat sitting by a warm stove, but she was still a good looker. She’d already forgotten everything and was completely happy looking at the show, her lips parted, her eyes bright, like a little girl at a party. “I guess I’ve sold out to the sonsobitches allright, allright,” he kept saying to himself.

The last number on the programme was Eva Tanguay. The nasal voice singing I’m Eva Tanguay, I don’t care brought Mac out of his sullen trance. Everything suddenly looked bright and clear to him, the proscenium with its heavy gold fluting, the people’s faces in the boxes, the heads in front of him, the tawdry powdery mingling of amber and blue lights on the stage, the scrawny woman flinging herself around inside the rainbow hoop of the spotlight.

The papers say that I’m insane

But… I… don’t… care.

Mac got up. “Maisie, I’ll meet you at the house. You see the rest of the show. I feel kind of bum.” Before she could answer, he’d slipped out past the other people in the row, down the aisle and out. On the street there was nothing but the ordinary Saturday afternoon crowd. Mac walked round and round the downtown district. He didn’t even know where I.W.W. headquarters was. He had to talk to somebody. As he passed the Hotel Brewster he caught a whiff of beer. What he needed was a drink. This way he was going nuts.

At the next corner he went into a saloon and drank four rye whiskies straight. The bar was lined with men drinking, treating each other, talking loud about baseball, prizefights, Eva Tanguay and her Salome dance.

Beside Mac was a big redfaced man with a widebrimmed felt hat on the back of his head. When Mac reached for his fifth drink this man put his hand on his arm and said, “Pard, have that on me if you don’t mind… I’m celebratin’ today.” “Thanks; here’s lookin’ at you,” said Mac. “Pard, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so, you’re drinkin’ like you wanted to drink the whole barrel up at once and not leave any for the rest of us… Have a chaser.” “All right, bo,” said Mac. “Make it a beer chaser.”

“My name’s McCreary,” said the big man. “I just sold my fruit crop. I’m from up San Jacinto way.”

“So’s my name McCreary, too,” said Mac.

They shook hands heartily.

“By the living jumbo, that’s a coincidence… We must be kin or pretty near it… Where you from, pard?”

“I’m from Chicago, but my folks was Irish.”

“Mine was from the East, Delaware… but it’s the good old Scotch-Irish stock.”

They had more drinks on that. Then they went to another saloon where they sat in a corner at a table and talked. The big man talked about his ranch and his apricot crop and how his wife was bedridden since his last child had come. “I’m awful fond of the old gal, but what can a feller do? Can’t get gelded just to be true to your wife.” “I like my wife swell,” said Mac, “and I’ve got swell kids. Rose is four and she’s beginning to read already and Ed’s about learnin’ to walk…. But hell, before I was married I used to think I might amount to somethin’ in the world… I don’t mean I thought I was anythin’ in particular… You know how it is.” “Sure, pard, I used to feel that way when I was a young feller.” “Maisie’s a fine girl, too, and I like her better all the time,” said Mac, feeling a warm tearing wave of affection go over him, like sometimes a Saturday evening when he’d helped her bathe the kids and put them to bed and the room was still steamy from their baths and his eyes suddenly met Maisie’s eyes and there was nowhere they had to go and they were just both of them there together.

The man from up San Jacinto way began to sing:

O my wife has gone to the country,

Hooray, hooray.

I love my wife, but oh you kid,

My wife’s gone away.

“But God damn it to hell,” said Mac, “a man’s got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.”

“I agree with you absholootely, pard; every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.” “Oh, hell,” said Mac, “I wish I was on the bum again or up at Goldfield with the bunch.”

They drank and drank and ate free lunch and drank some more, all the time rye with beer chasers, and the man from up San Jacinto way had a telephone number and called up some girls and they bought a bottle of whisky and went out to their apartment, and the rancher from up San Jacinto way sat with a girl on each knee singing My wife has gone to the country. Mac just sat belching in a corner with his head dangling over his chest; then suddenly he felt bitterly angry and got to his feet upsetting a table with a glass vase on it.

“McCreary,” he said, “this is no place for a classconscious rebel… I’m a wobbly, damn you… I’m goin’ out and get in this free-speech fight.”

The other McCreary went on singing and paid no attention. Mac went out and slammed the door. One of the girls followed him out jabbering about the broken vase, but he pushed her in the face and went out into the quiet street. It was moonlight. He’d lost the last steamcar and would have to walk home.

When he got to the house he found Maisie sitting on the porch in her kimono. She was crying. “And I had such a nice supper for you,” she kept saying, and her eyes looked into him cold and bitter the way they’d been when he’d gotten back from Goldfield before they were married.

The next day he had a hammering headache and his stomach was upset. He figured up he’d spent fifteen dollars that he couldn’t afford to waste. Maisie wouldn’t speak to him. He stayed on in bed, rolling round, feeling miserable, wishing he could go to sleep and stay asleep forever. That Sunday evening Maisie’s brother Bill came to supper. As soon as he got into the house Maisie started talking to Mac as if nothing had happened. It made him sore to feel that this was just in order to keep Bill from knowing they had quarrelled.

Bill was a powerfullybuilt towhaired man with a red neck, just beginning to go to fat. He sat at the table, eating the potroast and cornbread Maisie had made, talking big about the real estate boom up in Los Angeles. He’d been a locomotive engineer and had been hurt in a wreck and had had the lucky breaks with a couple of options on lots he’d bought with his compensation money. He tried to argue Mac into giving up his job in San Diego and coming in with him. “I’ll get you in on the ground floor, just for Maisie’s sake,” he said over and over again. “And in ten years you’ll be a rich man, like I’m goin’ to be in less time than that… Now’s the time, Maisie, for you folks to make a break, while you’re young, or it’ll be too late and Mac’ll just be a workingman all his life.”

Maisie’s eyes shone. She brought out a chocolate layer cake and a bottle of sweet wine. Her cheeks flushed and she kept laughing showing all her little pearly teeth. She hadn’t looked so pretty since she’d had her first baby. Bill’s talk about money made her drunk.

“Suppose a feller didn’t want to get rich… you know what Gene Debs said, ‘I want to rise with the ranks, not from the ranks,’” said Mac.

Maisie and Bill laughed. “When a guy talks like that he’s ripe for the nuthouse, take it from me,” said Bill. Mac flushed and said nothing.

Bill pushed back his chair and cleared his throat in a serious tone: “Look here, Mac… I’m goin’ to be around this town for a few days lookin’ over the situation, but looks to me like things was pretty dead. Now what I propose is this… You know what I think of Maisie… I think she’s about the sweetest little girl in the world. I wish my wife had half what Maisie’s got… Well, anyway, here’s my proposition: Out on Ocean View Avenue I’ve got several magnificent mission-style bungalows I haven’t disposed of yet, twentyfivefoot frontage on a refined residential street by a hundredfoot depth. Why, I’ve gotten as high as five grand in cold cash for ’em. In a year or two none of us fellers’ll be able to stick our noses in there. It’ll be millionaires’ row… Now if you’re willing to have the house in Maisie’s name I’ll tell you what I’ll do… I’ll swop properties with you, paying all the expenses of searching title and transfer and balance up the mortgages, that I’ll hold so’s to keep ’em in the family, so that you won’t have to make substantially bigger payments than you do here, and will be launched on the road to success.”

“Oh, Bill, you darling!” cried Maisie. She ran over and kissed him on the top of the head and sat swinging her legs on the arm of his chair. “Gee, I’ll have to sleep on that,” said Mac; “it’s mighty white of you to make the offer.” “Fainie, I’d think you’d be more grateful to Bill,” snapped Maisie. “Of course we’ll do it.”

“No, you’re quite right,” said Bill. “A man’s got to think a proposition like that over. But don’t forget the advantages offered, better schools for the kids, more refined surroundings, an upandcoming boom town instead of a dead one, chance to get ahead in the world instead of being a goddam wageslave.”

So a month later the McCrearys moved up to Los Angeles. The expenses of moving and getting the furniture installed put Mac five hundred dollars in debt. On top of that little Rose caught the measles and the doctor’s bill started mounting. Mac couldn’t get a job on any of the papers. Up at the union local that he transferred to they had ten men out of work as it was.

He spent a lot of time walking about town worrying. He didn’t like to be at home any more. He and Maisie never got on now. Maisie was always thinking about what went on at brother Bill’s house, what kind of clothes Mary Virginia, his wife, wore, how they brought up their children, the fine new victrola they’d bought. Mac sat on benches in parks round town, reading The Appeal to Reason and The Industrial Worker and the local papers.

One day he noticed The Industrial Worker sticking out of the pocket of the man beside him. They had both sat on the bench a long time when something made him turn to look at the man. “Say, aren’t you Ben Evans?” “Well, Mac, I’ll be goddamned… What’s the matter, boy, you’re lookin’ thin?” “Aw, nothin’, I’m lookin’ for a master, that’s all.”

They talked for a long time. Then they went to have a cup of coffee in a Mexican restaurant where some of the boys hung out. A young blonde fellow with blue eyes joined them there who talked English with an accent. Mac was surprised to find out that he was a Mexican. Everybody talked Mexico. Madero had started his revolution. The fall of Diaz was expected any day. All over the peons were taking to the hills, driving the rich cientificos off their ranches. Anarchist propaganda was spreading among the town workers. The restaurant had a warm smell of chiles and overroasted coffee. On each table there were niggerpink and vermilion paper flowers, an occasional flash of white teeth in bronze and brown faces talking low. Some of the Mexicans there belonged to the I.W.W., but most of them were anarchists. The talk of revolution and foreign places made him feel happy and adventurous again, as if he had a purpose in life, like when he’d been on the bum with Ike Hall.

“Say, Mac, let’s go to Mexico and see if there’s anything in this revoloossione talk,” Ben kept saying.

“If it wasn’t for the kids… Hell, Fred Hoff was right when he bawled me out and said a revolutionist oughtn’t to marry.”

Eventually Mac got a job as linotype operator on The Times, and things at the house were a little better, but he never had any spare money, as everything had to go into paying debts and interest on mortgages. It was night work again, and he hardly ever saw Maisie and the kids any more. Sundays Maisie would take little Ed to brother Bill’s and he and Rose would go for walks or take trolleytrips. That was the best part of the week. Saturday nights he’d sometimes get to a lecture or go down to chat with the boys at the I.W.W. local, but he was scared to be seen round in radical company too much for fear of losing his job. The boys thought he was pretty yellow but put up with him because they thought of him as an old timer.

He got occasional letters from Milly telling him about Uncle Tim’s health. She had married a man named Cohen who was a registered accountant and worked in one of the offices at the stockyards. Uncle Tim lived with them. Mac would have liked to bring him down to live with him in Los Angeles, but he knew that it would only mean squabbling with Maisie. Milly’s letters were pretty depressing. She felt funny, she said, to be married to a Jew. Uncle Tim was always poorly. The doctor said it was the drink, but whenever they gave him any money he drank it right up. She wished she could have children. Fainie was lucky, she thought, to have such nice children. She was afraid that poor Uncle Tim wasn’t long for this world.

The same day that the papers carried the murder of Madero in Mexico City, Mac got a wire from Milly that Uncle Tim was dead and please to wire money for the funeral. Mac went to the savingsbank and drew out $53.75 he had in an account for the children’s schooling and took it down to the Western Union and wired fifty to her. Maisie didn’t find out until the baby’s birthday came round, when she went down to deposit five dollars birthday money from brother Bill.

That night when Mac let himself in by the latchkey he was surprised to find the light on in the hall. Maisie was sitting half asleep on the hall settee with a blanket wrapped round her waiting for him. He was pleased to see her and went up to kiss her. “What’s the matter, baby?” he said. She pushed him away from her and jumped to her feet.

“You thief,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep till I told you what I thought of you. I suppose you’ve been spending it on drink or on some other woman. That’s why I never see you any more.”

“Maisie, calm down, old girl… What’s the matter; let’s talk about it quietly.”

“I’ll get a divorce, that’s what I’ll do. Stealing money from your own children to make yourself a bum with… your own poor little…”

Mac drew himself up and clenched his fists. He spoke very quietly, although his lips were trembling.

“Maisie, I had an absolute right to take out that money. I’ll deposit some more in a week or two, and it’s none of your damn business.”

“A fat chance you saving up fifty dollars; you aren’t man enough to make a decent living for your wife and children so you have to take it out of your poor little innocent children’s bank account,” Maisie broke out into dry sobbing.

“Maisie, that’s enough of that… I’m about through.”

“I’m the one that’s through with you and your ungodly socialistic talk. That never got nobody anywheres, and the lowdown bums you go around with… I wish to God I’d never married you. I never would have, you can be damn well sure of that if I hadn’t got caught the way I did.”

“Maisie, don’t talk like that.”

Maisie walked straight up to him, her eyes wide and feverish.

“This house is in my name; don’t forget that.”

“All right, I’m through.”

Before he knew it he had slammed the door behind him and was walking down the block. It began to rain. Each raindrop made a splatter the size of a silver dollar in the dust of the street. It looked like stage rain round the arclight. Mac couldn’t think where to go. Drenched, he walked and walked. At one corner there was a clump of palms in a yard that gave a certain amount of shelter. He stood there a long time shivering. He was almost crying thinking of the warm gentleness of Maisie when he used to pull the cover a little way back and slip into bed beside her asleep when he got home from work in the clanking sour printing plant, her breasts, the feel of the nipples through the thin nightgown; the kids in their cots out on the sleepingporch, him leaning over to kiss each of the little warm foreheads. “Well, I’m through,” he said aloud as if he were speaking to somebody else. Then only did the thought come to him, “I’m free to see the country now, to work for the movement, to go on the bum again.”

Finally he went to Ben Evans’ boarding house. It was a long time before he could get anybody to come to the door. When he finally got in Ben sat up in bed and looked at him stupid with sleep. “What the hell?” “Say, Ben, I’ve just broken up housekeepin’… I’m goin’ to Mexico.” “Are the cops after you? For crissake, this wasn’t any place to come.” “No, it’s just my wife.” Ben laughed. “Oh, for the love of Mike!” “Say, Ben, do you want to come to Mexico and see the revolution?” “What the hell could you do in Mexico?… Anyway, the boys elected me secretary of local 257… I got to stay here an’ earn my seventeenfifty. Say, you’re soaked; take your clothes off and put on my workclothes hangin’ on the back of the door… You better get some sleep. I’ll move over.”

Mac stayed in town two weeks until they could get a man to take his place at the linotype. He wrote Maisie that he was going away and that he’d send her money to help support the kids as soon as he was in a position to. Then one morning he got on the train with twentyfive dollars in his pocket and a ticket to Yuma, Arizona. Yuma turned out to be hotter’n the hinges of hell. A guy at the railroad men’s boarding house told him he’d sure die of thirst if he tried going into Mexico there, and nobody knew anything about the revolution, anyway. So he beat his way along the Southern Pacific to El Paso. Hell had broken loose across the border, everybody said. The bandits were likely to take Juarez at any moment. They shot Americans on sight. The bars of El Paso were full of ranchers and mining men bemoaning the good old days when Porfirio Diaz was in power and a white man could make money in Mexico. So it was with beating heart that Mac walked across the international bridge into the dusty-bustling adobe streets of Juarez.

Mac walked around looking at the small trolleycars and the mules and the wafts daubed with seablue and the peon women squatting behind piles of fruit in the marketplace and the crumbling scrollface churches and the deep bars open to the street. Everything was strange and the air was peppery to his nostrils and he was wondering what he was going to do next. It was late afternoon of an April day. Mac was sweating in his blue flannel shirt. His body felt gritty and itchy and he wanted a bath. “Gettin’ too old for this kinda stuff,” he told himself. At last he found the house of a man named Ricardo Perez whom one of the Mexican anarchists in Los Angeles had told him to look up. He had trouble finding him in the big house with an untidy courtyard, on the edge of town. None of the women hanging out clothes seemed to understand Mac’s lingo. At last Mac heard a voice from above in carefully modulated English. “Come up if you are looking for Ricardo Perez… please… I am Ricardo Perez.” Mac looked up and saw a tall bronzecolored grayhaired man in an old tan duster leaning from the top gallery of the courtyard. He went up the iron steps. The tall man shook hands with him.

“Fellowworker McCreary… My comrades wrote me you were coming.” “That’s me, allright… I’m glad you talk English.” “I lived in Santa Fe many years and in Brockton, Massachusetts. Sit down… please… I am very happy to welcome an American revolutionary worker… Though our ideas probably do not entirely agree we have much in common. We are comrades in the big battle.” He patted Mac on the shoulder and pressed him into a chair. “Please.” There were several little yellow children in torn shirts running round barefoot. Ricardo Perez sat down and took the smallest on his knee, a little girl with kinky pigtails and a smudged face. The place smelt of chile and scorched olive oil and children and washing. “What are you going to do in Mexico, fellowworker?”

Mac blushed. “Oh, I want to kinda get into things, into the revolution.”

“The situation is very confusing here… Our townworkers are organizing and are classconscious but the peons, the peasants, are easily misled by unscrupulous leaders.”

“I want to see some action, Perez… I was living in Los Angeles an’ gettin’ to be a goddam booster like the rest of ’em. I can earn my keep in the printin’ line, I guess.”

“I must introduce you to the comrades… Please… We will go now.”

Blue dusk was swooping down on the streets when they went out. Lights were coming out yellow. Mechanical pianos jinglejangled in bars. In a gateway a little outoftune orchestra was playing. The market was all lit up by flares, all kinds of shiny brightcolored stuff was for sale at booths. At a corner an old Indian and an old broadfaced woman, both of them blind and heavily pockmarked, were singing a shrill endless song in the middle of a dense group of short thickset country people, the women with black shawls over their heads, the men in white cotton suits like pajamas.

“They sing about the murder of Madero… It is very good for the education of the people… You see they cannot read the papers so they get their news in songs… It was your ambassador murdered Madero. He was a bourgeois idealist but a great man… Please… Here is the hall…. You see that sign says “Viva the Revindicating Revolution prelude to the Social Revolution.” This is the hall of the Anarchist Union of Industry and Agriculture. Huerta has a few federales here but they are so weak they dare not attack us. Ciudad Juarez is heart and soul with the revolution… Please… you will greet the comrades with a few words.”

The smoky hall and the platform were filled with swarthy men in blue denim workclothes; in the back were a few peons in white. Many hands shook Mac’s, black eyes looked sharp into his, several men hugged him. He was given a campchair in the front row on the platform. Evidently Ricardo Perez was chairman. Applause followed in every pause in his speech. A feeling of big events hovered in the hall. When Mac got on his feet, somebody yelled “Solidarity forever” in English. Mac stammered a few words about how he wasn’t an official representative of the I.W.W. but that all the same classconscious American workers were watching the Mexican revolution with big hopes, and ended up with the wobbly catchword about building the new society in the shell of the old. The speech went big when Perez translated it and Mac felt pretty good. Then the meeting went on and on, more and more speeches and occasional songs. Mac found himself nodding several times. The sound of the strange language made him sleepy. He barely managed to keep awake until a small band in the open door of the hall broke into a tune and everybody sang and the meeting broke up.

“That’s Cuatro Milpas… that means four cornfields… that’s a song of the peons everybody’s singing now,” said Perez.

“I’m pretty hungry… I’d like to get a little something to eat somewheres,” said Mac. “I haven’t eaten since morning when I had a cup of coffee and a doughnut in El Paso.”

“We will eat at the house of our comrade,” said Perez. “Please… this way.”

They went in off the street, now black and empty, through a tall door hung with a bead curtain, into a whitewashed room brightly lit by an acetylene flare that smelt strong of carbide. They sat down at the end of a long table with a spotted cloth on it. The table gradually filled with people from the meeting, mostly young men in blue workclothes, with thin sharp faces. At the other end sat an old dark man with the big nose and broad flat cheekbones of an Indian. Perez poured Mac out two glasses of a funnytasting white drink that made his head spin. The food was very hot with pepper and chile and he choked on it a little bit. The Mexicans petted Mac like a child at his birthday party. He had to drink many glasses of beer and cognac. Perez went home early and left him in charge of a young fellow named Pablo. Pablo had a Colt automatic on a shoulder strap that he was very proud of. He spoke a little pidginenglish and sat with one hand round Mac’s neck and the other on the buckle of his holster. “Gringo bad… Kill him quick… Fellowworker good… internacional… hurray,” he kept saying. They sang the International several times and then the Marseillaise and the Carmagnole. Mac was carried along in a peppery haze. He sang and drank and ate and everything began to lose outline.

“Fellowworker marry nice girl,” said Pablo. They were standing at a bar somewhere. He made a gesture of sleeping with his two hands against his face. “Come.”

They went to a dancehall. At the entrance everybody had to leave his gun on a table guarded by a soldier in a visored cap. Mac noticed that the men and girls drew away from him a little. Pablo laughed. “They think you gringo… I tell them revolucionario internacional. There she, nice girl… Not goddam whore… not pay, she nice working girl… comrade.”

Mac found himself being introduced to a brown broadfaced girl named Encarnacion. She was neatly dressed and her hair was very shinyblack. She gave him a bright flash of a smile. He patted her on the cheek. They drank some beer at the bar and left. Pablo had a girl with him too. The others stayed on at the dancehall. Pablo and his girl walked round to Encarnacion’s house with them. It was a room in a little courtyard. Beyond it was a great expanse of lightcolored desert land stretching as far as you could see under a waning moon. In the distance were some tiny specks of fires. Pablo pointed at them with his full hand and whispered, “Revolucion.”

Then they said good night at the door of Encarnacion’s little room that had a bed, a picture of the Virgin and a new photograph of Madero stuck up by a pin. Encarnacion closed the door, bolted it and sat down on the bed looking up at Mac with a smile.