The Moth

14

You got three musketeers, and maybe it’s a beautiful friendship, but it’s a cinch to be a gabfest all the time, with one and two talking about three, two and three talking about one, and one and three talking about two. Through all the hunger and dirt and sickness and cold that we had the next few months, I’d say the part of us that could still think was trying as much to understand the other two as it was to do something about the spot we were in. But mainly it was Hosey trying to understand me and Buck, and me and Buck trying to understand Hosey. Hosey would talk and talk and talk to me about Buck, and how he’d never learn the ways of the road, and just kept lousing things up for right guys that were willing to live and let live and didn’t want any trouble. Like the way Buck always acted with the bulls. He never could let them call it like they were paid to call it, and shut up and figure it was all in a day’s ride. He had to cuss at them like he had at me that night, and a couple of times he landed in jail. It was pretty tough waiting for him till his five days were up, once in the Baptist mission there on the Esplanade in New Orleans, and another time at a lousy jungle on the riverbank at Alexandria, but I couldn’t quite get sore at him for it, even so. He yelled what I felt, and I didn’t ever mean to feel different, or come around to the idea there was justice in it, I didn’t care how often I had to wait. But to Hosey, it was a stab in the back to two pals, and you’d think we had a date with Clark Gable out there in Hollywood, at a certain time on a certain day, the way he beefed and bawled and bellyached. He said Buck would never be a real hobo, that was the long and the short and the size of it, and the way he told it, you’d think real hobos were some kind of an order, like Odd Fellows or Masons or Elks, but exclusive.

And me and Buck, when it was Hosey’s turn to scavenge up something to eat, would talk about him, and this real hobo idea, and Buck could hand you a laugh the way he’d take that malarkey off: “The real hobo don’t ever get in trouble with the railroad bulls, because if he ever got his arm high enough for a sock it would fly over the telegraph wires, on account the mulligan don’t have enough vitamins in it to keep the bone from coming apart at the elbow.” And: “The real hobo never steals his grub, on account if he tried to sneak up on anything he’d stink so bad there’d be a hurry call for the department of health, and after the exterminator squad got done he’d amaze hisself one day by waking up to find he was a bedbug.” And: “The real hobo always leaves the jungle like he found it, in shipshape for the next fellow, same as a tumblebug always leaves the manure like he found it, in shipshape for the next tumblebug, so he can show the world he is a real tumblebug and not no goddam cockroach... Jack.”

“Yeah, Buck?”

“How that son of a bitch loves a jungle.”

“To him it’s home.”

“But why? To a flea it couldn’t be home!”

“He likes it.”

You’ve probably never seen a jungle, but you may have read about it. I had too, and somehow got the idea there was something to it, inside stuff that you had to know about, that once you got the hang of, would give you the chance to cook yourself something to eat, take a little rest, and have some sleep. Well, that’s a lot of hooey, because what’s there is nothing at all, covered with dirt. Picture to yourself a bank, a stretch of grass, a bare spot under the trees, sometimes a slope. Here and there, four or five or six feet apart, are gray spots that would turn out if you kicked them to be the remains of old fires. Off in the bushes are old cans, buckets, pans, or whatever it would be, some of them with holes punched in them and wires attached, to hang over a fire, but none of them clean enough to cook a meal in for any self-respecting skunk. Not so far off a ditch to use as a latrine. And that is the hobo’s dream of heaven, the free apartment house he’s supposed to flock to, and sing his own particular songs, and have sociability and relax. That’s what Hosey was always trying to sell us, except he never quite did. Well, why this place and not some other place? Why not any place, if that’s all there is to it? Buck figured that out one day: “Jack, you ever fish?”

“Me? In Chesapeake Bay? Sure.”

“Me too, in Lake Erie. One time my three uncles all came to spend the Fourth of July with us at once. My mother bunked them down in the garage, and then they and my father decided to go fishing and they went, and took me along. They chartered a power boat and we ran out in Lake Erie and baited up and put our lines down — hand lines, on account there were too many in the boat for poles. And boy, did we bring them in — whitefish and perch. I never saw so many fish in my life. We came home with two baskets full and my mother almost got reconciled to it, having three brother-in-laws in the house at the same time. She fried the perch and put the whitefish away, some in the icebox, some in a basket with ice on top on account the icebox wasn’t big enough for them all. Next morning when she went to look, the fish in the basket weren’t there, and by night we knew why. The rats had got them, and they were in between the walls. Brother, they stunk. So that was a summer, tearing out laths, getting the fish, and putting the poison around for the rats. At night, my father would check every tap and spigot and sink, screw everything down, and even wipe away drops. ‘The thing is,’ he’d say, ‘to fix it so when they’ve got to have water they’ll go outside for it and die there. With arsenic, the thirst is unbearable, and if you cut off everything in the house you’re all right. But God help us if they find water inside and stay inside.’ Jack, you see any connection between them rats and Hosey’s jungle?”

“I’m beginning to.”

“There’s just one thing you’ll find in them jungles, and that’s water. Some goddam fool put it there and forgot about it, maybe a tap to water the grass, or fill up his steam boiler, or wet down his cabbages, or maybe it’s a spring. Whatever it is, it’s water, and it draws hobos, like rats. You hear me, Jack? Hosey’s a rat.”

“He’s not far from it.”

“When did you go on the road, Jack?”

“Oh — year or two ago.”

“Why did you?”

“Little trouble at home.”

“That’s it, we all had a little trouble at home, you and me and a million others that are riding the cars. But do you know how long Hosey’s been on the road?”

“I never asked him.”

“Since before the war. The real hobo, you know, always has his papers in order, and he was showing me his registration card, for the draft or whatever it was. He got rejected, he says, on account of physical, but that card said 1917. Nineteen seventeen, Jack — he’s been on the road all his life. Jack, don’t he ever work?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He leaned close to me. “Jack, will we get like that?”

One time, riding the U.P. out of St. Louis bound for Kansas City, or K.C. as the hobos call it, we got thrown off I guess eight or ten miles the other side of Independence. We’d spent the winter in New Orleans, Alexandria, Shreveport, Port Arthur, Beaumont, and God knows where else, and it was a little warmer down there than some other place, but how they treated hobos was a crime. So, soon as winter began to break, we hit north, in the early spring of 1934. Pretty soon we slid over to the highway and began hiking for Kansas City. But we hadn’t gone very far when we came to a road-building camp, where they were doing a relocation job, with bunk shacks, and mess shacks and all the rest of it. So of course Hosey headed for the cook to see what he could mooch, and Buck and I sat down to wait for him. But then we noticed no work was being done. Mexicans were standing around talking, and off to one side three or four guys that looked like foremen were in a huddle, but no dirt was being moved, no concrete was being poured, no shoulder was being smoothed. Buck knew about road-building, and he kept saying something funny was going on. When Hosey came back he had nothing, and said everybody was sore, on account of the blacksmith quitting. “They’ve sent to town for somebody to take his place, but right now they’re closed down.”

“Blacksmith? What’s he got to do with roads?”

“Jack, I only know what they told me.”

We sat there a few minutes, then Buck said: “I got it figured out, I guess.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“You see that bunch of stuff over there?”

Off to one side in a field was a ledge of rock, an outcropping with a face on it, with big slabs and pieces lying under that, and in front some machinery, with yellow dust all over it. “Jack, that’s their stone quarry. The thing out front is a crusher. And those boulders are stuff that’s been shot down and that has to be blockholed and shot and sledged before it’ll go into the crusher. That’s what’s holding things up. The blacksmith, he has to sharpen their bits for the blockholing teams, and he’s gone off. Without fresh stone for the crusher, there’s nothing for these mixers here by the road, and that’s why they’ve shut down.”

“So?”

“Let me think.”

So he thought, trying to figure an angle, and I did, and I guess Hosey did. And then I remembered the smithing course I’d taken in college, something I hadn’t paid much attention to because I hated hot metal and the stink of the forge made me sick. But if I hated the smell of coke it was nothing to how I hated an empty belly, so next off I was legging it over toward the Mexicans, asking for the super, and when they pointed to a little shack near the mixers I went in there. “Hear your blacksmith quit.”

“My blacksmith got fired, for being drunk, him and his no-good helper both, and if you’re some relation of his—”

“Me? I’m a blacksmith.”

“... Oh, yeah?”

He looked me over, from the hat I still had from Baltimore, that had dust, dirt, and sweat ground into it till you couldn’t tell what color it was any more, to the jeans that had been boiled in every jungle from Macon, Georgia, to St. Louis, Missouri, and to the shoes, a pair of brogans I’d got in the Good Samaritan Inn at Columbus, Ohio, just before heading south. It was something, at least, that he couldn’t see the suit, inside the overalls, with the snags and rips and tears in it. I kind of bowed in a very elegant way, and there wasn’t much he could do but bow back, and then I went on to say if he’d put me and my two helpers to work, by lunchtime I could have stuff sharpened up for him so he could start his crusher that afternoon and put his whole crew to work. By that time Buck and Hosey were hanging around outside, and he thought a minute, but one thing on my side was he had a bunch of idle men on his hands, and every minute they didn’t work was piling up trouble, and besides maybe he had some penalty clause in his contract with a bonus for speed, and I could see he wanted to get going. “Of course, chief, I don’t kid you any — a bright hombre like you I wouldn’t even try. Before we work, we’ve got to eat. On an empty stomach we’re a little weak. And, while we’re filling up, I could be having a look at the stuff you’ve been using.”

“What stuff?”

“Why... your drills. Your bits.”

“What for?”

By the way his eyes bored into me, I knew I’d pretty near overplayed it. But I acted surprised, and said: “To see the color, how they’re tempered for the rock you’re busting. That is, unless you want some broken shanks before I see what I’m up against.”

“O.K., O.K.”

Just the least thing that sounded like I might know my business was all he wanted to hear, and the next thing the three of us, Buck, Hosey, and me, were in the cook shack, putting away sow belly, beans, flapjacks, and coffee with plenty of sugar and condensed milk in it, something we hadn’t tasted in months. I’ve heard that when you’re starved for a while and then sit down to a full meal you can’t eat anything. Well, if somebody tells you that, you can say I investigated the matter that morning and there’s nothing to it. We ate so much that even the cook went bug-eyed, and he wasn’t exactly used to delicate appetites. In the middle of it the super, whose name turned out to be Casey, came in with an armload of steel, 7/8”, 1” and 1¼” pieces, in lengths from a foot to eighteen inches, and dumped it on the table beside me. “O.K., chief, that’s what I want. Thanks.”

“Say when, Jack.”

“How are you on tempering fluid?”

“Four cans, more on order.”

“Coke?”

“Plenty.”

“Tub?”

“Two or three or four of them.”

“I’ll be right over.”

He went and I had a look at the smaller pieces, the bits I mean, and they were just straight cutting edges, crosswise of the length of the rod, like a little square block had been set in there, cocked 45°. The edge was longer than the steel was thick, as it would have to be, naturally, if the shank was to follow the bit down in the hole, and on the shorter pieces quite a lot longer. The big pieces, though, the 1¼” stuff, really gave me a creepy feeling in the pit of the stomach. Because the end had been bulged out, then creased four ways so the face was like a four-leaf clover, then fixed up with four cutting edges, and how to smith any of it I had no more idea than the man in the moon. I studied a while, then leaned over to Buck. “How do these goddam things work?”

“... You mean you don’t know?”

“Come on, let me have it!”

“A guy sits on the rock. On the rock they’re breaking up, the block, they call it. He holds the drill, with both hands, against the stone. Then two other guys, three if they’re in a hurry, beat on it with striking hammers. Six-pound hammers, that look like croquet mallets, with handles about three feet long. The guy holding it, every time one of the hammers strikes, he turns the steel a little bit. They do it in time. Sometimes they sing. It sinks down, two inches, two feet, as deep as they want. Halfway through the block. As it goes down the guy holding it pours water in, to cool it, and wash the dust out. When it’s down far enough the powder man sets his charge, and at quitting time they light fuses and duck. Next day it’s ready for sledging.”

“How about these big steels?”

“They’re for the power drills. They’re used on the face of the rock. They drill holes sometimes ten feet deep, maybe deeper—”

“And they use steels that long?”

“Sure, they’ve got to be.”

“They made here, on the job?”

“Of course.”

“How are they made? Can you tell me that?”

“They got a dolly or something.”

It began to come back to me, what I’d learned in college, and all of a sudden I could hear Dr. Buchhalter, the metallurgist, ding-donging at us, over and over: “Upset it, upset it, upset it, you must upset it first, before you can make anything from it at all.” Upsetting it is to take a length of steel, an octagonal rod, an inch thick or whatever it may be, and heat the end for maybe six inches up the shank to a cherry red, then stand with it beside the anvil, hold it in both hands, raise it above your head, and bang it down, over and over and over again, until you’ve bulged the end of it out so it looks like the rubber cuff on one of those things a plumber uses to clean out stopped-up pipes. It’s tough work, and if it slips or you don’t hit the anvil or something you’re liable to mark yourself up for life. But at last I understood what I was supposed to do, and when the super came in again I said: “O.K., Mr. Casey, why don’t I get some of these small drills in shape first? Then you can bust up the stuff that’s already shot down, set charges tonight, and in the morning send your sledgers in, so by lunchtime you have something for your crusher?”

“That makes sense. And be sure on anything less than two feet, to make those bits plenty wide, so when we switch to longer drills they slip down easy and we don’t get jammed.”

“I’ll be watching it.”

The fire had been started by the time I got to the forge, and I stuck four or five short pieces of steel in there, showed Hosey how to turn the blower, and stood around till they were cherry red. Then I picked one up, beat on it to shape it, then began hammering it to spread the bit. When it widened a little I’d shape some more. Then I gave it some licks to sharpen it, and so far as I could see it looked all right. I held it up to Casey: “O.K. for size?”

“Looks fine.”

Now I had come to the one thing I remembered right, or thought I did, from my college days, which was tempering. I heated it up again until the shank was red for about two inches above the bit. Then I waited until it came down from cherry to crimson, then I dipped the bit in the fluid. It sizzled and I took it out. The bit was a hot, bubbly gray, like it ought to be, and the shank was just going from red to black. Then pretty soon here it came, the straw color I wanted, creeping down the shank, with the purple just behind. I waited till the straw was all over the bit, then I plunged it in the tub of water. I took it out and handed it over. “Try that.”

They quit at four thirty, and set off their shots, so at last I could rest. We took a shower, all three of us, before checking in at the mess tent, and there was no hot water, but at least we got clean. Then we ate. Then we headed for a bunk and sat down for a little rest. For Buck and Hosey that meant a smoke. They had drawn cigarettes at the commissary, and I could see their eyes closing, as they lay back against the blankets, like a couple of hopheads in a Chinese joint. I lay back on the blankets. They smelled like disinfectant but they didn’t stink, like the beds in the missions. They stink like feet and puke and sweat that’s soured. Around sundown Casey came in. “Jack?”

“Yeah, chief?”

“Feel like a little work?”

“... So it’s just a little. I’m shot.”

“For overtime up to twelve it’s time and a half. After that, if it runs that long, I can make it double. Double time. I need drills.”

“I left you a dozen.”

“I mean the big ones.”

“I can’t do them tonight. I’m too tired.”

“Jack, I got to have them. If I can have some ready by morning I can start work on my face and have a batch of stuff shot down by tomorrow night and really get going again. If I’ve got to wait till tomorrow before I’ve got them all working my gang falls apart and I’m behind and it’ll be a week before I get them together again, and — I’m in a spot.”

“Plenty more men where they came from.”

“These are Mexicans. That makes it all different.”

“Let me rest.”

“O.K.”

So I rested, then told him he had to take on Buck and Hosey, and he said O.K., and around seven o’clock we went to work on the big stuff. I cut six of the pieces in half, so he’d have a dozen ten-foot lengths to start. I made Buck and Hosey do the upsetting, so I could save my strength. When they had a bulge on all the pieces big enough to suit me, I took a chisel and put four light creases on each bulge. Then I upset a little more myself. Like I thought, the splits deepened, and I had my four-leaf clover. Then I took the dolly, had Buck hold it in place while Hosey held the steel, and beat on it. I could feel it bite in. When it was in solid I pulled it away and looked. As well as I could tell the cutting edges were right. I heated and tempered, but let the straw almost flicker off before I plunged, as I figured on the big stuff, the shank could be a little softer. I made another, another, and another. Along about number eight Hosey cracked up. I thought Buck would kill him. “That goddam simple-looking jungle buzzard, even when a blower’s all he’s got to turn he can’t do it! What the hell good is he? Why don’t he—”

“Leave him be!”

“But—”

“Stop it!”

We let Hosey sit, so he could run up his time, and I think he slept a little, there near the forge, in the heat. Wrestling the steels, dolly, and blower was more than a two-man job, and I almost cracked up too, but we got along somehow. By three o’clock we had stuff for the power crews next day.

What woke me up, some time around four o’clock that afternoon, was the anvil. There’s no sound just like it, that clink-clink-clink, flop-it-over-on-the-other-side, clank-clank-clank. Somebody else was working that forge, but it had no business to be anybody but me. I got up, showered, and dressed. When I went outside, it seemed to me the cook was awful friendly. “¿Sí, sí, señor? Feel like some grub, yeah?”

“Who’s the blacksmith?”

“Ah, some goddam fellow. Who cares?”

But coming over from his office was Casey. “Jack, I got bad news for you... This morning, after you turned in, this yap showed up from Kansas City.”

“And?”

“I had to hire him.”

“Why?”

“He had a note from the home office, and — what the hell, Jack? I rang up and raised hell and told what you’d done for me and how it helped us out of a spot and all, but they got a waiting list too. Guys they laid off two, three, and four years ago they feel they got to make way for, if any making way can be done.”

“Nice appreciation a guy gets.”

“Boy, I hate it.”

“... What else you got around here?”

“Nothing.”

When we hit for K.C., with a little money in our jeans at last, the driver wouldn’t let us on the bus we were so dirty. Up the line were three boxcars we’d seen unloading, and it looked like sometime a train would come along to haul them out. We camped down there and Hosey found a crate and we built a fire and tried to keep warm. We saw something back of us, and pretty soon an express rolled up and stopped and we got ready, because that meant they were waiting for a freight to take the siding and let them by. Pretty soon, maybe a mile away, we heard it whistle. The express began to roll, and the diner came in sight, with people eating soup, steak, ice cream, everything we hadn’t tasted in a month of Sundays. Hosey jumped up and shook his fist at them. “Damn you! Damn you all! Damn every son of a bitch in there, and your—”

“Hosey! Take it easy!”

“And all their goddam brother-in-laws and stepfathers that are keeping us out of a job.”

“Tell ’em, bo.”

“Damn ’em!”

That was one thing we did, unanimous, was damn the people in the dining cars. We used to talk how if it was us in there, and hungry guys were out on the road, we’d invite them in to have a bite and rest their feet. We used to talk how we’d give them jobs. We used to talk how guys had taken enough, and it was their turn now. It makes no sense, but you try it for a while, out there in the cold, with no food and no hope and no place to sleep, and see how much you like a guy that’s unbuttoning his vest on account he’s full from the meal he just finished.