The 42nd Parallel

Charley Anderson

Charley Anderson’s mother kept a railroad boardinghouse near the Northern Pacific station at Fargo, N. D. It was a gabled frame house with porches all round, painted mustard yellow with chocolatebrown trim and out back there was always washing hanging out on sagging lines that ran from a pole near the kitchen door to a row of brokendown chickenhouses. Mrs. Anderson was a quietspoken grayhaired woman with glasses; the boarders were afraid of her and did their complaining about the beds, or the food, or that the eggs weren’t fresh to waddling bigarmed Lizzie Green from the north of Ireland who was the help and cooked and did all the housework. When any of the boys came home drunk it was Lizzie with a threadbare man’s overcoat pulled over her nightgown who came out to make them shut up. One of the brakemen tried to get fresh with Lizzie one night and got such a sock in the jaw that he fell clear off the front porch. It was Lizzie who washed and scrubbed Charley when he was little, who made him get to school on time and put arnica on his knees when he skinned them and soft soap on his chilblains and mended the rents in his clothes. Mrs. Anderson had already raised three children who had grown up and left home before Charley came, so that she couldn’t seem to keep her mind on Charley. Mr. Anderson had also left home about the time Charley was born; he’d had to go West on account of his weak lungs, couldn’t stand the hard winters, was how Mrs. Anderson put it. Mrs. Anderson kept the accounts, preserved or canned strawberries, peas, peaches, beans, tomatoes, pears, plums, applesauce as each season came round, made Charley read a chapter of the Bible every day and did a lot of churchwork.

Charley was a chunky little boy with untidy towhair and gray eyes. He was a pet with the boarders and liked things allright except Sundays when he’d have to go to church twice and to sundayschool and then right after dinner his mother would read him her favorite sections of Matthew or Esther or Ruth and ask him questions about the chapters he’d been assigned for the week. This lesson took place at a table with a red tablecloth next to a window that Mrs. Anderson kept banked with pots of patienceplant, wandering jew, begonias and ferns summer and winter. Charley would have pins and needles in his legs and the big dinner he’d eaten would have made him drowsy and he was terribly afraid of committing the sin against the holy ghost which his mother hinted was inattention in church or in sundayschool or when she was reading him the Bible. Winters the kitchen was absolutely quiet except for the faint roaring of the stove or Lizzie’s heavy step or puffing breath as she stacked the dinnerdishes she’d just washed back in the cupboard. Summers it was much worse. The other kids would have told him about going swimming down in the Red River or fishing or playing follow my leader in the lumberyard or on the coalbunkers back of the roundhouse and the caught flies would buzz thinly in the festooned tapes of flypaper and he’d hear the yardengine shunting freightcars or the through train for Winnipeg whistling for the station and the bell clanging, and he’d feel sticky and itchy in his stiff collar and he’d keep looking up at the loudticking porcelain clock on the wall. It made the time go too slowly to look up at the clock often, so he wouldn’t let himself look until he thought fifteen minutes had gone by, but when he looked again it’d only be five minutes and he’d feel desperate. Maybe it’d be better to commit the sin against the holy ghost right there and be damned good and proper once and for all and run away with a tramp the way Dolphy Olsen did, but he didn’t have the nerve.

By the time he was ready for highschool he began to find funny things in the Bible, things like the kids talked about when they got tired playing toad in the hole in the deep weeds back of the lumberyard fence, the part about Onan and the Levite and his concubine and the Song of Solomon, it made him feel funny and made his heart pound when he read it, like listening to scraps of talk among the railroad men in the boardinghouse, and he knew what hookers were and what was happening when women got so fat in front and it worried him and he was careful when he talked to his mother not to let her know he knew about things like that.

Charley’s brother Jim had married the daughter of a liverystable owner in Minneapolis. The spring Charley was getting ready to graduate from the eighth grade they came to visit Mrs. Anderson. Jim smoked cigars right in the house and jollied his mother and while he was there there was no talk of biblereading. Jim took Charley fishing one Sunday up the Sheyenne and told him that if he came down to the Twin Cities when school was over he’d give him a job helping round the garage he was starting up in part of his fatherinlaw’s liverystable. It sounded good when he told the other guys in school that he had a job in the city for the summer. He was glad to get out as his sister Esther had just come back from taking a course in nursing and nagged him all the time about talking slang and not keeping his clothes neat and eating too much pie.

He felt fine the morning he went over to Moorhead all alone, carrying a suitcase Esther had lent him, to take the train for the Twin Cities. At the station he tried to buy a package of cigarettes but the man at the newsstand kidded him and said he was too young. When he started it was a fine spring day a little too hot. There was sweat on the flanks of the big horses pulling the long line of flourwagons that was crossing the bridge. While he was waiting in the station the air became stifling and a steamy mist came up. The sunlight shone red on the broad backs of the grain elevators along the track. He heard one man say to another, “Looks to me like it might be a tornado,” and when he got on the train he half leaned out of the open window watching purple thunderheads building up in the northwest beyond the brightgreen wheat that stretched clear to the clouds. He kinda hoped it would be a tornado because he’d never seen one, but when the lightning began cracking like a whip out of the clouds he felt a little scared, though being on the train with the conductor and the other passengers made it seem safer. It wasn’t a tornado but it was a heavy thundershower and the wheatfields turned to zinc as great trampling hissing sheets of rain advanced slowly across them. Afterwards the sun came out and Charley opened the window and everything smelt like spring and there were birds singing in all the birchwoods and in the dark firs round all the little shining lakes.

Jim was there to meet him at the Union Depot in a Ford truck. They stopped at the freight station and Charley had to help load a lot of heavy packages of spare parts shipped from Detroit and marked “Vogel’s Garage.” Charley tried to look as if he’d lived in a big city all his life, but the clanging trolleycars and the roughshod hoofs of truckhorses striking sparks out of the cobbles and the goodlooking blond girls and the stores and the big German beersaloons and the hum that came from mills and machineshops went to his head. Jim looked tall and thin in his overalls and had a new curt way of talking. “Kid, you see you mind yourself a little up to the house; the old man’s an old German, Hedwig’s old man, an’ a little pernickety, like all old Germans are,” said Jim when they’d filled the truck and were moving slowly through the heavy traffic. “Sure, Jim,” said Charley and he began to feel a little uneasy about what it ’ud be like living in Minneapolis. He wished Jim ’ud smile a little more.

Old man Vogel was a stocky redfaced man with untidy gray hair and a potbelly, fond of dumpling and stews with plenty of rich sauce on them and beer, and Jim’s wife Hedwig was his only daughter. His wife was dead but he had a middleaged German woman everybody addressed as Aunt Hartmann to keep house for him. She followed the men around all the time with a mop and between her and Hedwig, whose blue eyes had a peevish look because she was going to have a baby in the fall, the house was so spotless that you could have eaten a fried egg off the linoleum anywhere. They never let the windows be opened for fear of the dust coming in. The house was right on the street and the livery stable was in the yard behind, entered through an alley beyond which was the old saddler’s shop that had just been done over as a garage. When Jim and Charley drove up the signpainters were on a stepladder out front putting up the new shiny red and white sign that read “vogel’s garage.” “The old bastard,” muttered Jim. “He said he’d call it Vogel and Anderson’s, but what the hell!” Everything smelt of stables and a colored man was leading a skinny horse around with a blanket over him.

All that summer Charley washed cars and drained transmissions and relined brakes. He was always dirty and greasy in greasy overalls, in the garage by seven every morning and not through till late in the evening when he was too tired to do anything but drop into the cot that had been fixed for him in the attic over the garage. Jim gave him a dollar a week for pocket money and explained that he was mighty generous to do it as it was to Charley’s advantage to learn the business. Saturday nights he was the last one to get a bath and there usually wasn’t anything but lukewarm water left so that he’d have a hard time getting cleaned up. Old man Vogel was a socialist and no churchgoer and spent all day Sunday drinking beer with his cronies. At Sunday dinner everybody talked German, and Jim and Charley sat at the table glumly without saying anything, but old Vogel plied them with beer and made jokes at which Hedwig and Aunt Hartmann always laughed uproariously, and after dinner Charley’s head would be swimming from the beer that tasted awful bitter to him, but he felt he had to drink it, and old man Vogel would tease him to smoke a cigar and then tell him to go out and see the town. He’d walk out feeling overfed and a little dizzy and take the streetcar to St. Paul to see the new state capitol or to Lake Harriet or go out to Big Island Park and ride on the rollercoaster or walk around the Parkway until his feet felt like they’d drop off. He didn’t know any kids his own age at first, so he took to reading for company. He’d buy every number of Popular Mechanics and The Scientific American and Adventure and The Wide World Magazine. He had it all planned to start building a yawlboat from the plans in The Scientific American and to take a trip down to the Mississippi River to the Gulf. He’d live by shooting ducks and fishing for catfish. He started saving up his dollars to buy himself a shotgun.

He liked it all right at old man Vogel’s, though, on account of not having to read the Bible or go to church, and he liked tinkering with motors and learned to drive the Ford truck. After a while he got to know Buck and Slim Jones, two brothers about his age who lived down the block. He was a pretty big guy to them on account of working in a garage. Buck sold newspapers and had a system of getting into movingpicture shows by the exit doors and knew all the best fences to see ballgames from. Once Charley got to know the Jones boys he’d run round to their place as soon as he was through dinner Sundays and they’d have a whale of a time getting hitches all over the place on graintrucks, riding on the back bumpers of streetcars and getting chased by cops and going out on the lumber booms and going swimming and climbing round above the falls and he’d get back all sweaty and with his good suit dirty and be bawled out by Hedwig for being late for supper. Whenever old Vogel found the Jones boys hanging round the garage he’d chase them out, but when he and Jim were away, Gus the colored stableman would come over smelling of horses and tell them stories about horseraces and fast women and whiskydrinking down at Louisville and the proper way to take a girl the first time and how he and his steady girl just did it all night without stopping not even for a minute.

Labor Day old man Vogel took Jim and his daughter and Aunt Hartmann out driving in the surrey behind a fine pair of bays that had been left with him to sell and Charley was left to take care of the garage in case somebody came along who wanted gas or oil. Buck and Slim came round and they all talked about how it was Labor Day and wasn’t it hell to pay that they weren’t going out anywhere. There was a doubleheader out at the Fair Grounds and lots of other ballgames around. The trouble started by Charley showing Buck how to drive the truck, then to show him better he had to crank her up, then before he knew it he was telling them he’d take them for a ride round the block. After they’d ridden round the block he went back and closed up the garage and they went joyriding out towards Minnehaha. Charley said to himself he’d drive very carefully and be home hours before the folks got back, but somehow he found himself speeding down an asphalt boulevard and almost ran into a ponycart full of little girls that turned in suddenly from a side road. Then on the way home they were drinking sarsaparilla out of the bottles and having a fine time when Buck suddenly said there was a cop on a motorcycle following them. Charley speeded up to get away from the cop, made a turn too sharp and stopped with a crash against a telegraph pole. Buck and Slim beat it as fast as they could run and there was Charley left to face the cop.

The cop was a Swede and cursed and swore and bawled him out and said he’d take him to the hoosegow for driving without a license, but Charley found his brother Jim’s license under the seat and said his brother had told him to take the car back to the garage after they’d delivered a load of apples out at Minnehaha and the cop let him off and said to drive more carefully another time. The car ran all right except one fender was crumpled up and the steering wheel was a little funny. Charley drove home so slow that the radiator was boiling over when he got back and there was the surrey standing in front of the house and Gus holding the bays by the head and all the family just getting out.

There was nothing he could say. The first thing they saw was the crumpled fender. They all lit into him and Aunt Hartmann yelled the loudest and old Vogel was purple in the face and they all talked German at him and Hedwig yanked at his coat and slapped his face and they all said Jim’d have to give him a licking. Charley got sore and said nobody was going to give him a licking and then Jim said he reckoned he’d better go back to Fargo anyway, and Charley went up and packed his suitcase and went off without saying goodby to any of them that evening with his suitcase in one hand and five back numbers of The Argosy under his arm. He had just enough jack saved up to get a ticket to Barnesville. After that he had to play hide and seek with the conductor until he dropped off the train at Moorhead. His mother was glad to see him and said he was a good boy to get back in time to visit with her a little before highschool opened and talked about his being confirmed. Charley didn’t say anything about the Ford truck and decided in his mind he wouldn’t be confirmed in any damned church. He ate a big breakfast that Lizzie fixed for him and went into his room and lay down on the bed. He wondered if not wanting to be confirmed was the sin against the holy ghost but the thought didn’t scare him as much as it used to. He was sleepy from sitting up on the train all night and fell asleep right away.

Charley dragged through a couple of years of highschool, making a little money helping round the Moorhead Garage evenings, but he didn’t like it home any more after he got back from his trip to the Twin Cities. His mother wouldn’t let him work Sundays and nagged him about being confirmed and his sister Esther nagged him about everything and Lizzie treated him as if he was still a little kid, calling him “Pet” before the boarders and he was sick of schooling, so the spring when he was seventeen, after commencement, he went down to Minneapolis again looking for a job on his own this time. As he had money to keep him for a few days the first thing he did was to go down to Big Island Park. He wanted to ride on the rollercoasters and shoot in the shootinggalleries and go swimming and pick up girls. He was through with hick towns like Fargo and Moorhead where nothing ever happened.

It was almost dark when he got to the lake. As the little steamboat drew up to the wharf he could hear the jazzband through the trees, and the rasp and rattle of the rollercoaster and yells as a car took a dip. There were a dancing pavilion and colored lights among the trees and a smell of girls’ perfumery and popcorn and molasses candy and powder from the shooting gallery and the barkers were at it in front of their booths. As it was Monday evening there weren’t very many people. Charley went round the rollercoaster a couple of times and got to talking with the young guy who ran it about what the chances were of getting a job round there.

The guy said to stick around, Svenson the manager would be there when they closed up at eleven, and he thought he might be looking for a guy. The guy’s name was Ed Walters; he said it wasn’t much of a graft but that Svenson was pretty straight; he let Charley take a couple of free rides to see how the rollercoaster worked and handed him out a bottle of cream soda and told him to keep his shirt on. This was his second year in the amusement game and he had a sharp foxface and a wise manner.

Charley’s heart was thumping when a big hollowfaced man with coarse sandy hair came round to collect the receipts at the ticket booth. That was Svenson. He looked Charley up and down and said he’d try him out for a week and to remember that this was a quiet family amusement park and that he wouldn’t stand for any rough stuff and told him to come round at ten the next morning. Charley said “So long” to Ed Walters and caught the last boat and car back to town. When he got out of the car it was too late to take his bag out of the station parcelroom; he didn’t want to spend money on a room or to go out to Jim’s place so he slept on a bench in front of the City Hall. It was a warm night and it made him feel good to be sleeping on a bench like a regular hobo. The arclights kept getting in his eyes, though, and he was nervous about the cop; it’d be a hell of a note to get pinched for a vag and lose the job out at the park. His teeth were chattering when he woke up in the gray early morning. The arclights spluttered pink against a pale lemonyellow sky; the big business blocks with all their empty windows looked funny and gray and deserted. He had to walk fast pounding the pavement with his heels to get the blood going through his veins again.

He found a stand where he could get a cup of coffee and a doughnut for five cents and went out to Lake Minnetonka on the first car. It was a bright summer day with a little north in the wind. The lake was very blue and the birchtrunks looked very white and the little leaves danced in the wind greenyellow against the dark evergreens and the dark blue of the sky. Charley thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. He waited a long time drowsing in the sun on the end of the wharf for the boat to start over to the island. When he got there the park was all locked up, there were shutters on all the booths and the motionless red and blue cars of the rollercoaster looked forlorn in the morning light. Charley roamed round for a while but his eyes smarted and his legs ached and his suitcase was too heavy, so he found a place sheltered by the wall of a shack from the wind and lay down in the warm sun on the pineneedles and went to sleep with his suitcase beside him.

He woke up with a start. His Ingersoll said eleven. He had a cold sinking feeling. It’d be lousy to lose the job by being late. Svenson was there sitting in the ticket booth at the rollercoaster with a straw hat on the back of his head. He didn’t say anything about the time. He just told Charley to take his coat off and help MacDonald the engineer oil up the motor.

Charley worked on that rollercoaster all summer until the park closed in September. He lived in a little camp over at Excelsior with Ed Walters and a wop named Spagnolo who had a candy concession.

In the next camp Svenson lived with his six daughters. His wife was dead. Anna the eldest was about thirty and was cashier at the amusement park, two of them were waitresses at the Tonka Bay Hotel and the others were in highschool and didn’t work. They were all tall and blond and had nice complexions. Charley fell for the youngest, Emiscah, who was just about his age. They had a float and a springboard and they all went in swimming together. Charley wore a bathingsuit upper and a pair of khaki pants all summer and got very sunburned. Ed’s girl was Zona and all four of them used to go out canoeing after the amusement park closed, particularly warm nights when there was a moon. They didn’t drink but they smoked cigarettes and played the phonograph and kissed and cuddled up together in the bottom of the canoe. When they’d got back to the boys’ camp, Spagnolo would be in bed and they’d haze him a little and put junebugs under his blankets and he’d curse and swear and toss around. Emiscah was a great hand for making fudge, and Charley was crazy about her and she seemed to like him. She taught him how to frenchkiss and would stroke his hair and rub herself up against him like a cat but she never let him go too far and he wouldn’t have thought it was right anyway. One night all four of them went out and built a fire under a pine in a patch of big woods up the hill back of the camps. They toasted marshmallows and sat round the fire telling ghoststories. They had blankets and Ed knew how to make a bed with hemlock twigs stuck in the ground and they all four of them slept in the same blankets and tickled each other and roughhoused around and it took them a long time to get to sleep. Part of the time Charley lay between the two girls and they cuddled up close to him, but he got a hard on and couldn’t sleep and was worried for fear the girls would notice.

He learned to dance and to play poker and when laborday came he hadn’t saved any money but he felt he’d had a wonderful summer.

He and Ed got a room together in St. Paul. He got a job as machinist’s assistant in the Northern Pacific shops and made fair money. He learned to run an electric lathe and started a course in nightschool to prepare for civil engineering at the Mechanical Arts High. Ed didn’t seem to have much luck about jobs, all he seemed to be able to do was pick up a few dollars now and then as attendant at a bowling alley. Sundays they often ate dinner with the Svensons. Mr. Svenson was running a small movie house called the Leif Ericsson on Fourth Street but things weren’t going well. He took it for granted that the boys were engaged to two of his daughters and was only too glad to see them come around. Charley took Emiscah out every Saturday night and spent a lot on candy and taking her to vaudeville shows and to a Chink restaurant where you could dance afterwards. At Christmas he gave her his seal ring and after that she admitted that she was engaged to him. They’d go back to the Svensons’ and sit on the sofa in the parlor hugging and kissing.

She seemed to enjoy getting him all wrought up, then she’d run off and go and fix her hair or put some rouge on her face and be gone a long time and he’d hear her upstairs giggling with her sisters. He’d walk up and down in the parlor, where there was only one light in a flowered shade, feeling nervous and jumpy. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to get married because that ’ud keep him from traveling round the country and getting ahead in studying engineering. The other guys at the shop who weren’t married went down the line or picked up streetwalkers, but Charley was afraid of getting a disease and he never seemed to have any time what with nightschool and all, and besides it was Emiscah he wanted.

After he’d given her a last rough kiss, feeling her tongue in his mouth and his nostrils full of her hair and the taste of her mouth in his mouth he’d walk home with his ears ringing, feeling sick and weak; when he got to bed he couldn’t sleep but would toss around all night thinking he was going mad and Ed’d grunt at him from the other side of the bed for crissake to keep still.

In February Charley got a bad sore throat and the doctor he went to said it was diphtheria and sent him to the hospital. He was terribly sick for several days after they gave him the antitoxin. When he was getting better Ed and Emiscah came to see him and sat on the edge of his bed and made him feel good. Ed was all dressed up and said he had a new job and was making big money but he wouldn’t tell what it was. Charley got the idea that Ed and Emiscah were going round together a little since he’d been sick but he didn’t think anything of it.

The man in the next cot, who was also recovering from diphtheria, was a lean grayhaired man named Michaelson. He’d been working in a hardware store that winter and was having a hard time. Up to a couple of years before he’d had a farm in Iowa in the cornbelt, but a series of bad crops had ruined him, the bank had foreclosed and taken the farm and offered to let him work it as a tenant but he’d said he’d be damned if he’d work as a tenant for any man and had pulled up his stakes and come to the city, and here he was fifty years old with a wife and three small children to support trying to start from the ground up again. He was a great admirer of Bob La Follette and had a theory that the Wall Street bankers were conspiring to seize the government and run the country by pauperizing the farmer. He talked all day in a thin wheezy voice until the nurse made him shut up, about the NonPartisan League and the Farmer-Labor party and the destiny of the great northwest and the need for workingmen and farmers to stick together to elect honest men like Bob La Follette. Charley had joined a local of an A. F. of L. union that fall and Michaelson’s talk, broken by spells of wheezing and coughing, made him feel excited and curious about politics. He decided he’d read the papers more and keep up with what was going on in the world. What with this war and everything you couldn’t tell what might happen.

When Michaelson’s wife and children came to see him he introduced them to Charley and said that being laid up next to a bright young fellow like that made being sick a pleasure. It made Charley feel bad to see how miserably pale and illfed they looked and what poor clothes they had on in this zero weather. He left the hospital before Michaelson did and the last thing Michaelson said when Charley leaned over him to shake his dry bony hand was “Boy, you read Henry George, do you hear…? He knows what’s the trouble with this country; damme if he don’t.”

Charley was so glad to be walking on his pins down the snowy street in the dryicecold wind and to get the smell of iodoform and sick people out of his head that he forgot all about it.

First thing he did was to go to Svenson’s. Emiscah asked him where Ed Walters was. He said he hadn’t been home and didn’t know. She looked worried when he said that and he wondered about it. “Don’t Zona know?” asked Charley. “No, Zona’s got a new feller; that’s all she thinks about.” Then she smiled and patted his hand and babied him a little bit and they sat on the sofa and she brought out some fudge she’d made and they held hands and gave each other sticky kisses and Charley felt happy. When Anna came in she said how thin he looked and that they’d have to feed him up, and he stayed to supper. Mr. Svenson said to come and eat supper with them every night for a while until he was on his feet again. After supper they all played hearts in the front parlor and had a fine time.

When Charley got back to his lodging house he met the landlady in the hall. She said his friend had left without paying the rent and that he’d pay up right here and now or else she wouldn’t let him go up to his room. He argued with her and said he’d just come out of the hospital and she finally said she’d let him stay another week. She was a big softlooking woman with puckered cheeks and a yellow chintz apron full of little pockets. When Charley got up to the hall bedroom where he’d slept all winter with Ed, it was miserably cold and lonely. He got into the bed between the icy sheets and lay shivering, feeling weak and kiddish and almost ready to cry, wondering why the hell Ed had gone off without leaving him word and why Emiscah had looked so funny when he said he didn’t know where Ed was.

Next day he went to the shop and got his old job back, though he was so weak he wasn’t much good. The foreman was pretty decent about it and told him to go easy for a few days, but he wouldn’t pay him for the time he was sick because he wasn’t an old employee and hadn’t gotten a certificate from the company doctor. That evening he went to the bowling-alley where Ed used to work. The barkeep upstairs said Ed had beaten it to Chi on account of some flimflam about raffling off a watch. “Good riddance, if you ask me,” he said. “That bozo has all the makin’s of a bad egg.”

He had a letter from Jim saying that ma had written from Fargo that she was worried about him and that Charley had better let Jim take a look at him so he went over to the Vogels’ next Sunday. First thing he did when he saw Jim was to say that busting up the Ford had been a damn fool kid’s trick and they shook hands on it and Jim said nobody would say anything about it and that he’d better stay and eat with them. The meal was fine and the beer was fine. Jim’s kid was darn cute; it was funny to think that he was an uncle. Even Hedwig didn’t seem so peevish as before. The garage was making good money and old man Vogel was going to give up the liverystable and retire. When Charley said he was studying at nightschool old Vogel began to pay more attention to him. Somebody said something about La Follette and Charley said he was a big man.

“Vat is the use being a big man if you are wrong?” said old Vogel with beersuds in his mustache. He took another draft out of his stein and looked at Charley with sparkling blue eyes. “But dot’s only a beginning… ve vill make a sozialist out of you yet.” Charley blushed and said, “Well, I don’t know about that,” and Aunt Hartmann piled another helping of hasenpfeffer and noodles and mashed potatoes on his plate.

One raw March evening he took Emiscah to see “The Birth of a Nation.” The battles and the music and the bugles made them all jelly inside. They both had tears in their eyes when the two boys met on the battlefield and died in each other’s arms on the battlefield. When the Ku Klux Klan charged across the screen Charley had his leg against Emiscah’s leg and she dug her fingers into his knee so hard it hurt. When they came out Charley said by heck he thought he wanted to go up to Canada and enlist and go over and see the Great War. Emiscah said not to be silly and then looked at him kinda funny and asked him if he was pro-British. He said he didn’t care and that the only fellows that would gain would be the bankers, whoever won. She said, “Isn’t it terrible? Let’s not talk about it any more.”

When they got back to the Svensons’, Mr. Svenson was sitting in the parlor in his shirtsleeves reading the paper. He got up and went to meet Charley with a worried frown on his face and was just about to say something when Emiscah shook her head. He shrugged his shoulders and went out. Charley asked Emiscah what was eating the old man. She grabbed hold of him and put her head on his shoulder and burst out crying. “What’s the matter, kitten; what’s the matter, kitten?” he kept asking. She just cried and cried until he could feel her tears on his cheek and neck and said, “For crissake, snap out of it, kitten; you’re wilting my collar.”

She let herself drop on the sofa and he could see that she was working hard to pull herself together. He sat down beside her and kept patting her hand. Suddenly she got up and stood in the middle of the floor. He tried to put his arms around her to pet her but she pushed him off. “Charley,” she said in a hard strained voice, “lemme tellye somethin’… I think I’m goin’ to have a baby.”

“But you’re crazy. We haven’t ever…”

“Maybe it’s somebody else… Oh, God, I’m going to kill myself.” Charley took her by the arms and made her sit down on the sofa. “Now pull yourself together, and tell me what the trouble is.”

“I wish you’d beat me up,” Emiscah said, laughing crazily. “Go ahead; hit me with your fist.”

Charley went weak all over.

“Tell me what the trouble is,” he said. “By Jez, it couldn’t be Ed.”

She looked up at him with scared eyes, her face drawn like an old woman’s. “No, no… Here’s how it is. I’m a month past my time, see, and I don’t know enough about things like that, so I asks Anna about it and she says I’m goin’ to have a baby sure and that we’ve got to get married right away and she told dad, the dirty little sneak, and I couldn’t tell ’em it wasn’t you… They think it’s you, see, and dad says it’s all right, young folks bein’ like that nowadays an’ everythin’ an’ says we’ll have to get married and I thought I wouldn’t let on an’ you’d never know, but, kid, I had to tell you.”

“Oh, Jez,” said Charley. He looked at the flowered pink shade with a fringe over the lamp on the table beside him and the tablecover with a fringe and at his shoes and the roses on the carpet. “Who was it?”

“It was when you were in the hospital, Charley. We had a lot of beer to drink an’ he took me to a hotel. I guess I’m just bad, that’s all. He was throwin’ money around an’ we went in a taxicab and I guess I was crazy. No, I’m a bad woman through and through, Charley. I went out with him every night when you were in the hospital.”

“By God, it was Ed.”

She nodded and then hid her face and started to cry again.

“The lousy little bastard,” Charley kept saying. She crumpled up on the sofa with her face in her hands.

“He’s gone to Chicago… He’s a bad egg allright,” said Charley.

He felt he had to get out in the air. He picked up his coat and hat and started to put them on. Then she got to her feet and threw herself against him. She held him close and her arms were tight round his neck. “Honestly, Charley, I loved you all the time… I pretended to myself it was you.” She kissed him on the mouth. He pushed her away, but he felt weak and tired and thought of the icy streets walking home and his cold hallbedroom and thought, what the hell did it matter anyway? and took off his hat and coat again. She kissed him and loved him up and locked the parlor door and they loved each other up on the sofa and she let him do everything he wanted. Then after a while she turned on the light and straightened her clothes and went over to the mirror to fix her hair and he tied his necktie again and she smoothed down his hair as best she could with her fingers and they unlocked the parlor door very carefully and she went out in the hall to call dad. Her face was flushed and she looked very pretty again. Mr. Svenson and Anna and all the girls were out in the kitchen and Emiscah said, “Dad, Charley and I are going to get married next month,” and everybody said, “Congratulations,” and all the girls kissed Charley and Mr. Svenson broke out a bottle of whisky and they had a drink all round and Charley went home feeling like a whipped dog.

There was a fellow named Hendriks at the shop seemed a pretty wise guy; Charley asked him next noon whether he didn’t know of anything a girl could take and he said he had a prescription for some pills and next day he brought it and told Charley not to tell the druggist what he wanted them for. It was payday and Hendriks came round to Charley’s room after he’d gotten cleaned up that night and asked him if he’d gotten the pills allright. Charley had the package right in his pocket and was going to cut nightschool that night and take it to Emiscah. First he and Hendriks went to have a drink at the corner. He didn’t like whisky straight and Hendriks said to take it with ginger ale. It tasted great and Charley felt sore and miserable inside and didn’t want to see Emiscah anyway. They had some more drinks and then went and bowled for a while. Charley beat him four out of five and Hendriks said the party was on him from now on.

Hendriks was a squareshouldered redheaded guy with a freckled face and a twisted nose and he began telling stories about funny things that had happened with the ribs and how that was his long suit anyway. He’d been all over and had had high yallers and sealskin browns down New Orleans and Chink girls in Seattle, Wash., and a fullblooded Indian squaw in Butte, Montana, and French girls and German Jewish girls in Colon and a Caribee woman more than ninety years old in Port of Spain. He said that the Twin Cities was the bunk and what a guy ought to do was to go down an’ get a job in the oilfields at Tampico or in Oklahoma where you could make decent money and live like a white man. Charley said he’d pull out of St. Paul in a minute if it wasn’t that he wanted to finish his course in nightschool and Hendriks told him he was a damn fool, that book learnin’ never got nobody nowhere and what he wanted was to have a good time when he had his strength and after that to hell wid ’em. Charley said he felt like saying to hell wid ’em anyway.

They went to several bars, and Charley who wasn’t used to drinking anything much except beer began to reel a little, but it was swell barging round with Hendriks from bar to bar. Hendriks sang My Mother Was a Lady in one place and The Bastard King of England in another where an old redfaced guy with a cigar set them up to some drinks. Then they tried to get into a dancehall but the guy at the door said they were too drunk and threw them out on their ear and that seemed funny as hell and they went to a back room of a place Hendriks knew and there were two girls there Hendriks knew and Hendriks fixed it up for ten dollars each for all night, then they had one more drink before going to the girls’ place and Hendriks sang:

Two drummers sat at dinner in a grand hotel one day

While dining they were chatting in a jolly sort of way

And when a pretty waitress brought them a tray of food

They spoke to her familiarly in a manner rather rude

“He’s a hot sketch,” said one of the girls to the other. But the other was a little soused and began to get a crying jag when Hendriks and Charley put their heads together and sang:

My mother was a lady like yours you will allow

And you may have a sister who needs protection now

I’ve come to this great city to find a brother dear

And you wouldn’t dare insult me, sir, if Jack were only here.

They cried and the other one kept shoving her and saying, “Dry your eyes, deary, you’re maudlin,” and it was funny as hell.

The next few weeks Charley was uneasy and miserable. The pills made Emiscah feel awful sick but they finally brought her around. Charley didn’t go there much, though they still talked about “When we’re married,” and the Svensons treated Charley as a soninlaw. Emiscah nagged a little about Charley’s drinking and running round with this fellow Hendriks. Charley had dropped out of nightschool and was looking for a chance to get a job that would take him away somewhere, he didn’t much care where. Then one day he busted a lathe and the foreman fired him. When he told Emiscah about it she got sore and said she thought it was about time he gave up boozing and running round and he paid little attention to her and he said it was about time for him to butt out, and picked up his hat and coat and left. Afterwards when he was walking down the street he wished he’d remembered to ask her to give him back his seal ring, but he didn’t go back to ask for it.

That Sunday he went to eat at old man Vogel’s, but he didn’t tell them he’d lost his job. It was a sudden hot spring day. He’d been walking round all morning, with a headache from getting tanked up with Hendriks the night before, looking at the crocuses and hyacinths in the parks and the swelling buds in the dooryards. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He was a week overdue on his rent and he wasn’t getting any schooling and he hadn’t any girl and he felt like saying to hell with everything and joining up in the militia to go down to the Mexican border. His head ached and he was tired of dragging his feet over the pavements in the early heat. Welldressed men and women went by in limousines and sedans. A boy flashed by on a red motorbike. He wished he had the jack to buy a motorbike himself and go on a trip somewhere. Last night he’d tried to argue Hendriks into going South with him, but Hendriks said he’d picked up with a skirt that was a warm baby and he was getting his nookie every night and going to stay right with it. To hell with all that, thought Charley; I want to see some country.

He looked so down in the mouth that Jim said, “What’s the trouble, Charley?” when he walked into the garage. “Aw, nothing,” said Charley, and started to help clean the parts of the carburetor of a Mack truck Jim was tinkering with. The truckdriver was a young feller with closecropped black hair and a tanned face. Charley liked his looks. He said he was going to take a load of storefittings down to Milwaukee next day and was looking for a guy to go with him. “Would you take me?” said Charley. The truckdriver looked puzzled. “He’s my kid brother, Fred; he’ll be allright… But what about your job?”

Charley colored up. “Aw, I resigned.” “Well, come round with me to see the boss,” said the truckdriver. “And if it’s allright by him it’s allright by me.”

They left next morning before day. Charley felt bad about sneaking out on his landlady, but he left a note on the table saying he’d send her what he owed her as soon as he got a job. It was fine leaving the city and the mills and grainelevators behind in the gray chilly early morning light. The road followed the river and the bluffs and the truck roared along sloshing through puddles and muddy ruts. It was chilly although the sun was warm when it wasn’t behind the clouds. He and Fred had to yell at each other to make their voices heard but they told stories and chewed the fat about one thing and another. They spent the night in LaCrosse.

They just got into the hashjoint in time to order hamburger steaks before it closed, and Charley felt he was making a hit with the waitress who was from Omaha and whose name was Helen. She was about thirty and had a tired look under the eyes that made him think maybe she was kind of easy. He hung round until she closed up and took her out walking and they walked along the river and the wind was warm and smelt winey of sawmills and there was a little moon behind fleecy clouds and they sat down in the new grass where it was dark behind stacks of freshcut lumber laid out to season. She let her head drop on his shoulder and called him “baby boy.”

Fred was asleep in the truck rolled up in a blanket on top of the sacking when he got back. Charley curled up in his overcoat on the other side of the truck. It was cold and the packingcases were uncomfortable to lie on but he was tired and his face felt windburned, and he soon fell asleep.

They were off before day.

The first thing Fred said was, “Well, did you make her, kid?” Charley laughed and nodded. He felt good and thought to himself he was damn lucky to get away from the Twin Cities and Emiscah and that sonofabitchin’ foreman. The whole world was laid out in front of him like a map, and the Mack truck roaring down the middle of it and towns were waiting for him everywhere where he could pick up jobs and make good money and find goodlooking girls waiting to call him their baby boy.

He didn’t stay long in Milwaukee. They didn’t need any help in any of the garages so he got a job pearldiving in a lunchroom. It was a miserable greasy job with long hours. To save money he didn’t get a room but flopped in a truck in a garage where a friend of Jim’s was working. He was planning to go over on the boat as soon as he got his first week’s pay. One of the stiffs working in the lunchroom was a wobbly named Monte Davis. He got everybody to walk out on account of a freespeech fight the wobblies were running in town, so Charley worked a whole week and had not a cent to show for it and hadn’t eaten for a day and a half when Fred came back with another load on his Mack truck and set him up to a feed. They drank some beer afterwards and had a big argument about strikes. Fred said all this wobbly agitation was damn foolishness and he thought the cops would be doing right if they jailed every last one of them. Charley said that working stiffs ought to stick together for decent living conditions and the time was coming when there’d be a big revolution like the American revolution only bigger and after that there wouldn’t be any bosses and the workers would run industry. Fred said he talked like a damn foreigner and ought to be ashamed of himself and that a white man ought to believe in individual liberty and if he got a raw deal on one job he was goddam well able to find another. They parted sore, but Fred was a goodhearted guy and lent Charley five bucks to go over to Chi with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They had a good time together. They sat on the edge of the bed talking. She looked flushed and pretty in a fragile sort of way in her pink shimmy shirt. She showed him a snapshot of her steady who was second engineer on a tanker. “Ain’t he handsome? I don’t hustle when he’s in town. He’s that strong… He can crack a pecan with his biceps.” She showed him the place on his arm where her steady could crack a pecan.

“Where you from?” asked Charley.

“What’s that to you?”

“You’re from up North; I can tell by the way you talk.”

“Sure. I’m from Iowa, but I’ll never go back there no more… It’s a hell of a life, bo, and don’t you forget…‘Women of pleasure’ my foot. I used to think I was a classy dame up home and then I woke up one morning and found I was nothing but a goddam whore.”

“Ever been to New York?”

She shook her head. “It ain’t such a bad life if you keep away from drink and the pimps,” she said thoughtfully.

“I guess I’ll shove off for New York right after Mardi Gras. I can’t seem to find me a master in this man’s town.”

“Mardi Gras ain’t so much if you’re broke.”

“Well, I came down here to see it and I guess I’d better see it.”

It was dawn when he left her. She came downstairs with him. He kissed her and told her he’d give her the ten bucks if she got his hat and coat back for him and she said to come around to her place that evening about six, but not to go back to the “Tripoli” because that greaser was a bad egg and would be laying for him.

The streets of old stucco houses inset with lacy iron balconies were brimful of blue mist. A few mulatto women in bandanas were moving around in the courtyards. In the market old colored men were laying out fruit and green vegetables. When he got back to his flop the Panama woman was out on the gallery outside his room holding out a banana and calling “Ven, Polly… Ven, Polly,” in a little squeaky voice. The parrot sat on the edge of the tiled roof cocking a glassy eye at her and chuckling softly. “Me here all night,” said the Panama woman with a tearful smile. “Polly no quiere come.” Charley climbed up by the shutter and tried to grab the parrot but the parrot hitched away sideways up to the ridge of the roof and all Charley did was bring a tile down on his head. “No quiere come,” said the Panama woman sadly. Charley grinned at her and went into his room, where he dropped on the bed and fell asleep.

During Mardi Gras Charley walked round town till his feet were sore. There were crowds everywhere and lights and floats and parades and bands and girls running round in fancy dress. He picked up plenty of girls but as soon as they found he was flat they dropped him. He was spending his money as slowly as he could. When he got hungry he’d drop into a bar and drink a glass of beer and eat as much free lunch as he dared.

The day after Mardi Gras the crowds began to thin out, and Charley didn’t have any money for beer. He walked round feeling hungry and miserable; the smell of molasses and the absinthe smell from bars in the French Quarter in the heavy damp air made him feel sick. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He didn’t have the gumption to start off walking or hitchhiking again. He went to the Western Union and tried to wire Jim collect, but the guy said they wouldn’t take a wire asking for money collect.

The Panama woman threw him out when he couldn’t pay for another week in advance and there he was walking down Esplanade Avenue with Grassi’s accordion on one arm and his little newspaper bundle of clothes under the other. He walked down the levee and sat down in a grassy place in the sun and thought for a long time. It was either throwing himself in the river or enlisting in the army. Then he suddenly thought of the accordion. An accordion was worth a lot of money. He left his bundle of clothes under some planks and walked around to all the hockshops he could find with the accordion, but they wouldn’t give him more than fifteen bucks for it anywhere. By the time he’d been round to all the hockshops and musicstores it was dark and everything had closed. He stumbled along the pavement feeling sick and dopy from hunger. At the corner of Canal and Rampart he stopped. Singing was coming out of a saloon. He got the hunch to go in and play Funiculi funicula on the accordion. He might get some free lunch and a glass of beer out of it.

He’d hardly started playing and the bouncer had just vaulted across the bar to give him the bum’s rush, when a tall man sprawled at a table beckoned to him.

“Brother, you come right here an’ set down.” It was a big man with a long broken nose and high cheekbones.

“Brother, you set down.” The bouncer went back behind the bar. “Brother, you can’t play that there accordeen no mor’n a rabbit. Ah’m nutten but a lowdown cracker from Okachobee City but if Ah couldn’t play no better’n that…” Charley laughed. “I know I can’t play it. That’s all right.” The Florida guy pulled out a big wad of bills. “Brother, do you know what you’re going to do? You’re going to sell me the goddam thing…. Ah’m nothin’ but a lowdown cracker, but, by Jesus Christ…”

“Hey, Doc, be yourself… You don’t want the damn thing.” His friends tried to make him put his money back.

Doc swept his arm round with a gesture that shot three glasses onto the floor with a crash. “You turkey-buzzards talk in your turn… Brother, how much do you want for the accordeen?” The bouncer had come back and was standing threateningly over the table. “All right, Ben,” said Doc. “It’s all on your Uncle Henry… and let’s have another round a that good rye whisky. Brother, how much do you want for it?”

“Fifty bucks,” said Charley, thinking fast. Doc handed him out five tens. Charley swallowed a drink, put the accordion on the table and went off in a hurry. He was afraid if he hung round the cracker ’ud sober up and try to get the money back, and besides he wanted to eat.

Next day he got a steerage passage on the steamer Momus bound for New York. The river was higher than the city. It was funny standing on the stern of the steamboat and looking down on the roofs and streets and trolleycars of New Orleans. When the steamer pulled out from the wharf Charley began to feel good. He found the colored steward and got him to give him a berth in the deckhouse. When he put his newspaper package under the pillow he glanced down into the berth below. There lay Doc, fast asleep, all dressed up in a light gray suit and a straw hat with a burntout cigar sticking out of the corner of his mouth and the accordion beside him.

They were passing between the Eads Jetties and feeling the sea-wind in their faces and the first uneasy swell of the Gulf under their feet when Doc came lurching on deck. He recognized Charley and went up to him with a big hand held out. “Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch if there ain’t the musicmaker… That’s a good accordeen, boy. Ah thought you’d imposed on me bein’ only a poa country lad an’ all that, but I’ll be a sonofabitch if it ain’t worth the money. Have a snifter on me?”

They went and sat on Doc’s bunk and Doc broke out a bottle of Bacardi and they had some drinks and Charley told about how he’d been flat broke; if it wasn’t for that fifty bucks he’d still be sitting on the levee and Doc said that if it wasn’t for that fifty bucks he’d be riding firstclass.

Doc said he was going up to New York to sail for France in a volunteer ambulance corps; wasn’t ever’day you got a chance to see a big war like that and he wanted to get in on it before the whole thing went bellyup; still he didn’t like the idea of shooting a lot of whitemen he didn’t have no quarrel with and reckoned this was the best way; if the Huns was niggers he’d feel different about it.

Charley said he was going to New York because he thought there were good chances of schooling in a big city like that and how he was an automobile mechanic and wanted to get to be a C.E. or something like that because there was no future for a working stiff without schooling.

Doc said that was all mahoula and what a boy like him ought to do was go and sign up as a mechanic in this here ambulance and they’d pay fifty dollars a month an’ maybe more and that was a lot of seeds on the other side and he’d ought to see the goddam war before the whole thing went bellyup.

Doc’s name was William H. Rogers and he’d come from Michigan originally and his old man had been a grapefruit grower down at Frostproof and Doc had cashed in on a couple of good crops of vegetables off the Everglades muck and was going over to see the mademosels before the whole thing went bellyup.

They were pretty drunk by the time night fell and were sitting in the stern with a seedylooking man in a derby hat who said he was an Est from the Baltic. The Est and Doc and Charley got up on the little bridge above the afterhouse after supper; the wind had gone down and it was a starlight night with a slight roll and Doc said, “By God, there’s somethin’ funny about this here boat… Befoa we went down to supper the Big Dipper was in the north, and now it’s gone right around to the southwest.”

“It is vat you vould expect of a kapitalistichesky society,” said the Est. When he found that Charley had a red card and that Doc didn’t believe in shooting anything but niggers he made a big speech about how revolution had broken out in Russia and the Czar was being forced to abdicate and that was the beginning of the regeneration of mankind from the East. He said the Ests would get their independence and that soon all Europe would be the free sozialistitchesky United States of Europe under the Red flag and Doc said, “What did I tell yez, Charley? The friggin’ business’ll go bellyup soon… What you want to do is come with me an’ see the war while it lasts.” And Charley said Doc was right and Doc said, “I’ll take you round with me, boy, an’ all you need do’s show your driver’s license an’ tell ’em you’re a college student.”

The Est got sore at that and said that it was the duty of every classconscious worker to refuse to fight in this war and Doc said, “We ain’t goin’ to fight, Esty, old man. What we’ll do is carry the boys out before they count out on ’em, see? I’d be a disappointed sonofabitch if the whole business had gone bellyup befoa we git there, wouldn’t you, Charley?”

Then they argued some more about where the Dipper was and Doc kept saying it had moved to the south and when they’d finished the second quart, Doc was saying he didn’t believe in white men shootin’ each other up, only niggers, and started going round the boat lookin’ for that damn shine steward to kill him just to prove it and the Est was singing The Marseillaise and Charley was telling everybody that what he wanted to do was to get in on the big war before it went bellyup. The Est and Charley had a hard time holding Doc down in his bunk when they put him to bed. He kept jumping out shouting he wanted to kill a couple of niggers.

They got into New York in a snowstorm. Doc said the Statue of Liberty looked like she had a white nightgown on. The Est looked around and hummed The Marseillaise and said American cities were not artistical because they did not have gables on the houses like in Baltic Europe.

When they got ashore Charley and Doc went to the Broadway Central Hotel together. Charley had never been in a big hotel like that and wanted to find a cheaper flop but Doc insisted that he come along with him and said he had plenty of jack for both of them and that it was no use saving money because things would go bellyup soon. New York was full of grinding gears and clanging cars and the roar of the “L” and newsboys crying extras. Doc lent Charley a good suit and took him down to the enlistment office of the ambulance corps that was in an important lawyer’s office in a big shiny officebuilding down in the financial district. The gentleman who signed the boys up was a New York lawyer and he talked about their being gentleman volunteers and behaving like gentlemen and being a credit to the cause of the Allies and the American flag and civilization that the brave French soldiers had been fighting for so many years in the trenches. When he found out Charley was a mechanic he signed him up without waiting to write to the principal of the highschool and the pastor of the Lutheran church home in Fargo whose names he had given as references. He told them about getting antityphoid injections and a physical examination and said to call the next day to find out the sailing date. When they came out of the elevator there was a group of men in the shinymarble lobby with their heads bent over a newspaper; the U.S. was at war with Germany. That night Charley wrote his mother that he was going to the war and please to send him fifty dollars. Then he and Doc went out to look at the town.

There were flags on every building. They walked past business block after business block looking for Times Square. Everywhere people were reading newspapers. At Fourteenth they heard a drumbeat and a band and waited at the corner to see what regiment it would be but it was only the Salvation Army. By the time they got to Madison Square it was the dinner hour and the streets were deserted. It began to drizzle a little and the flags up Broadway and Fifth Avenue hung limp from their poles.

They went into the Hofbrau to eat. Charley thought it looked too expensive but Doc said it was his party. A man was on a stepladder over the door screwing the bulbs into an electric sign of an American flag. The restaurant was draped with American flags inside and the band played The Star-Spangled Banner every other number, so that they kept having to get to their feet. “What do they think this is, settin’ up exercises?” grumbled Doc.

There was one group at a round table in the corner that didn’t get up when the band played The Star-Spangled Banner, but sat there quietly talking and eating as if nothing had happened. People round the restaurant began to stare at them and pass comments. “I bet they’re… Huns… German spies… Pacifists.” There was an army officer at a table with a girl who got red in the face whenever he looked at them. Finally a waiter, an elderly German, went up to them and whispered something.

“I’ll be damned if I will,” came the voice from the table in the corner. Then the army officer went over to them and said something about courtesy to our national anthem. He came away redder in the face than ever. He was a little man with bowlegs squeezed into brightly polished puttees. “Dastardly pro-Germans,” he sputtered as he sat down. Immediately he had to get up because the band played The Star-Spangled Banner. “Why don’t you call the police, Cyril?” the girl who was with him said. By this time people from all over the restaurant were advancing on the round table.

Doc pulled Charley’s chair around. “Watch this; it’s going to be good.”

A big man with a Texas drawl yanked one of the men out of his chair. “You git up or git out.”

“You people have no right to interfere with us,” began one of the men at the round table. “You express your approval of the war getting up, we express our disapproval by…”

There was a big woman with a red hat with a plume on it at the table who kept saying, “Shut up; don’t talk to ’em.” By this time the band had stopped. Everybody clapped as hard as he could and yelled, “Play it again; that’s right.” The waiters were running round nervously and the proprietor was in the center of the floor mopping his bald head.

The army officer went over to the orchestra leader and said, “Please play our national anthem again.” At the first bar he came stiffly to attention. The other men rushed the round table. Doc and the man with the English accent were jostling each other. Doc squared off to hit him.

“Come outside if you want to fight,” the man with the English accent was saying.

“Leave ’em be, boys,” Doc was shouting. “I’ll take ’em on outside, two at a time.”

The table was upset and the party began backing off towards the door. The woman with the red hat picked up a bowl of lobster mayonnaise and was holding back the crowd by chucking handfuls of it in their faces. At that moment three cops appeared and arrested the damn pacifists. Everybody stood around wiping mayonnaise off his clothes. The band played The Star-Spangled Banner again and everybody tried to sing but it didn’t make much of an effect because nobody knew the words.

After that Doc and Charley went to a bar to have a whisky sour. Doc wanted to go to see a legshow and asked the barkeep. A little fat man with an American flag in the lapel of his coat overheard him and said the best legshow in New York was Minsky’s on East Houston Street. He set them up to some drinks when Doc said they were going to see this here war, and said he’d take them down to Minsky’s himself. His name was Segal and he said he’d been a socialist up to the sinking of the Lusitania, but now he thought they ought to lick the Germans and destroy Berlin. He was in the cloak and suit business and was happy because he’d as good as landed a contract for army uniforms. “Ve need the var to make men of us,” he’d say and strike himself on the chest. They went down town in a taxi but when they got to the burlesque show it was so full they couldn’t get a seat.

“Standin’ room, hell… Ah want women,” Doc was saying. Mr. Segal thought a little while with his head cocked to one side. “Ve will go to ‘Little Hungary,’” he said.

Charley felt let down. He’d expected to have a good time in New York. He wished he was in bed. At “Little Hungary” there were many German and Jewish and Russian girls. The wine came in funny-looking bottles upside down in a stand in the middle of each table. Mr. Segal said it was his party from now on. The orchestra played foreign music. Doc was getting pretty drunk. They sat at a table crowded in among other tables. Charley roamed round and asked a girl to dance with him but she wouldn’t for some reason.

He got to talking to a young narrowfaced fellow at the bar who had just been to a peace meeting at Madison Square Garden. Charley pricked his ears up when the fellow said there’d be a revolution in New York if they tried to force conscription on the country. His name was Benny Compton and he’d been studying law at New York University. Charley went and sat with him at a table with another fellow who was from Minnesota and who was a reporter on The Call. Charley asked them about the chances of working his way through the engineering school. He’d about decided to back out of this ambulance proposition. But they didn’t seem to think there was much chance if you hadn’t any money saved up to start on. The Minnesota man said New York was no place for a poor man.

“Aw, hell; I guess I’ll go to the war,” said Charley.

“It’s the duty of every radical to go to jail first,” said Benny Compton. “Anyway, there’ll be a revolution. The working class won’t stand for this much longer.”

“If you want to make some jack the thing to do is to go over to Bayonne and get a job in a munitions factory,” said the man from Minnesota in a tired voice.

“A man who does that is a traitor to his class,” said Benny Compton.

“A working stiff’s in a hell of a situation,” said Charley. “Damn it, I don’t want to spend all my life patchin’ up tin lizzies at seventyfive a month.”

“Didn’t Eugene V. Debs say, ‘I want to rise with the ranks, not from them?’”

“After all, Benny, ain’t you studyin’ night an’ day to get to be a lawyer an’ get out of the workin’ class?” said the man from Minnesota.

“That is so I can be of some use in the struggle… I want to be a wellsharpened instrument. We must fight capitalists with their own weapons.”

“I wonder what I’ll do when they suppress The Call.”

“They won’t dare suppress it.”

“Sure, they will. We’re in this war to defend the Morgan loans… They’ll use it to clear up opposition at home, sure as my name’s Johnson.”

“Talking of that, I got some dope. My sister, see, she’s a stenographer… She works for J. Ward Moorehouse, the public relations counsel, you know… he does propaganda for the Morgans and the Rockefellers. Well, she said that all this year he’s been working with a French secret mission. The big interests are scared to death of a revolution in France. They paid him ten thousand dollars for his services. He runs pro-war stuff through a feature syndicate. And they call this a free country.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised at anything,” said the man from Minnesota, pouring himself out the last of the bottle of wine. “Why, any one of us may be a government agent or a spy right at this minute.” The three of them sat there looking at each other. It gave Charley chills down his spine.

“That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell ye… My sister, she knows all about it, see, on account of workin’ in this guy’s office… It’s a plot of the big interests, Morgan an’ them, to defeat the workers by sendin’ ’em off to the war. Once they get you in the army you can’t howl about civic liberty or the Bill of Rights… They can shoot you without trial, see?”

“It’s an outrage… The people of the Northwest won’t stand for it,” said the man from Minnesota. “Look here, you’ve been out there more recently than I have. La Follette expresses the opinion of people out there, don’t he?”

“Sure,” said Charley.

“Well, what the hell?”

“It’s too deep for me,” said Charley and started working his way among the closepacked tables to find Doc. Doc was pretty drunk, and Charley was afraid the evening would start running into money, so they said goodby to Mr. Segal who said please to kill a lot of Germans just for him, and they went out and started walking west along Houston Street. There were pushcarts all along the curb with flares that made the packed faces along the sidewalk glow red in the rainy darkness.

They came out at the end of a wide avenue crowded with people pouring out from a theater. In front of the Cosmopolitan Café a man was speaking on a soapbox. As the people came out of the theater they surged around him. Doc and Charley edged their way through to see what the trouble was. They could only catch scraps of what the man was shouting in a hoarse barking voice:

“A few days ago I was sittin’ in the Cooper Institute listenin’ to Eugene Victor Debs, and what was he sayin’?… ‘What is this civilization, this democracy that the bosses are asking you workers to give your lives to save, what does it mean to you except wageslavery, what is…?’”

“Hey, shut up, youse… If you don’t like it go back where you came from,” came voices from the crowd.

“Freedom to work so that the bosses can get rich… Opportunity to starve to death if you get fired from your job.”

Doc and Charley were shoved from behind. The man toppled off his box and disappeared. The whole end of the avenue filled with a milling crowd. Doc was sparring with a big man in overalls. A cop came between them hitting right and left with his billy. Doc hauled off to slam the cop but Charley caught his arm and pulled him out of the scrimmage.

“Hey, for crissake, Doc, this ain’t the war yet,” said Charley. Doc was red in the face. “Ah didn’t like that guy’s looks,” he said.

Behind the cops two policedepartment cars with big searchlights were charging the crowd. Arms, heads, hats, jostling shoulders, riot-sticks rising and falling stood out black against the tremendous white of the searchlights. Charley pulled Doc against the plateglass window of the café.

“Say, Doc, we don’t want to get in the can and lose the boat,” Charley whispered in his ear. “What’s the use?” said Doc. “It’ll all go bellyup before we get there.”

“Today the voikers run before the cops, but soon it will be the cops run before the voikers,” someone yelled. Someone else started singing The Marseillaise. Voices joined. Doc and Charley were jammed with their shoulders against the plate glass. Behind them the café was full of faces swimming in blue crinkly tobaccosmoke like fish in an aquarium. The plate glass suddenly smashed. People in the café were hopping to their feet. “Look out for the Cossacks,” a voice yelled.

A cordon of cops was working down the avenue. The empty pavement behind them widened. The other way mounted police were coming out of Houston Street. In the open space a patrolwagon parked. Cops were shoving men and women into it.

Doc and Charley ducked past a mounted policeman who was trotting his horse with a great clatter down the inside of the sidewalk, and shot round the corner. The Bowery was empty and dark. They walked west toward the hotel.

“My God,” said Charley, “you almost got us locked up that time… I’m all set to go to France now, and I wanter go.”

A week later they were on the Chicago of the French Line steaming out through the Narrows. They had hangovers from their farewell party and felt a little sick from the smell of the boat and still had the music of the jazzband on the wharf ringing through their heads. The day was overcast, with a low lid of leaden clouds, looked like it was going to snow. The sailors were French and the stewards were French. They had wine with their first meal. There was a whole tableful of other guys going over in the ambulance service.

After dinner Doc went down to the cabin to go to sleep. Charley roamed around the ship with his hands in his pockets without knowing what to do with himself. In the stern they were taking the canvas cover off the seventyfive gun. He walked round the lowerdeck full of barrels and packingcases and stumbled across coils of big fuzzy cable to the bow. In the bow there was a little pinkfaced French sailor with a red tassel on his cap stationed as a lookout.

The sea was glassy, with dirty undulating patches of weed and garbage. There were gulls sitting on the water or perched on bits of floating wood. Now and then a gull stretched its wings lazily and flew off crying.

The boat’s bluff bow cut two even waves through dense glassgreen water. Charley tried to talk to the lookout. He pointed ahead. “East,” he said, “France.”

The lookout paid no attention. Charley pointed back towards the smoky west. “West,” he said and tapped himself on the chest. “My home Fargo, North Dakota.” But the lookout just shook his head and put his finger to his lips.

“France very far east… submarines… war,” said Charley. The lookout put his hand over his mouth. At last he made Charley understand that he wasn’t supposed to talk to him.