some clothes. Mexican or white, you couldn't tell which. She asked me in a
whisper, "What, what do you want?"
"Lady, I'm headin' ta California lookin' fer work. I just wondered if
you had a job of work of some kind that a man could do to earn a lunch. Sack
with somethin' in it ta carry along."
She gave me the feeling that she was afraid of something. "No, I
haven't any kind of work. Sshhh. Don't talk so loud. And I haven't got
anything in the house--that is--anything fit to pack for you to eat."
"I just got a meal off of th' lady down th street here, an' just
thought maybe--you know, thought maybe a little sack of somethin' might come
in purty handy after a day or two out on the desert--any old thing. Not very
hard ta please," I told her.
"My husband is sleeping. Don't talk so loud. I'm a little ashamed of
what I've got left over here. Pretty poor when you need a good meal. But, if
you're not too particular about it, you're welcome to take it with you. Wait
here a minute."
I stood there looking back up across the tomato patch to the railroad
yards. A switch engine was trotting loose cars up and down the track and I
knew that our freight was making up.
She stuck her hand out through an old green screen door, and said,
"Sshhh," and I tried to whisper "thank you," but she just kept motioning,
nodding her head.
I was wearing a black slip-over sweater and I pulled the loose neck
open, and pushed the sack down into the bosom. She'd put something good and
warm from the warming-oven into the sack, because already I could feel the
good hot feeling against my belly.
Trains were limbering up their big whistles, and there was a long
string of cars made up and raring to step. A hundred and ten cars meant
pretty certain that she was a hot one with the right-of-way to the next
division.
A tired-looking Negro boy trotted down the cinders, looking at the new
train to spot him a reefer car to crawl into. He seen that he had a spare
second or two, and he stopped alongside of me.
"Ketchin' 'er out?" I asked him.
"Yeah. I'm switchin' ovah pretty fas'. Jes' got in. Didn' even have no
time ta hustle me up a feed. I guess I c'n eat when I gets to wheah I'm
headed." His pale khaki work clothes were soaked with salty sweat. Loose
coal soot, oil smoke, and colored dust was smeared all over him. He made a
quick trip over to a clear puddle of water and laid flat of his belly to
suck up all of the water he could hold. He blowed out his breath, and came
back wiping his face with a bandana handkerchief as dirty as the railroad
itself, and then the handkerchief being cool and wet, he tied it around his
forehead, with a hard knot on the back of his head. He looked up at me, and
shook his head sideways and said, "Keeps th' sweat from runnin' down so
bad."
It was an old hobo trick. I knew it, but didn't have any kind of a
handkerchief. The heat of the day was getting to be pretty hard to take. I
asked him, "When's th' last time ya had anything to eat?"
"El Paso," he told me. "Coupl'a days back."
My hand didn't ask me anything about it, but it was okay with me
anyhow, and I slid the sack out of my sweater and banded it over to him.
Still warm. I knew just about how good it felt when he got his hands on that
warm greasy sack. He bit into a peanut-butter sandwich together with a hunk
of salty pork between two slices of bread. He looked toward the water hole
again, but the train jarred the cars a few feet, and we both made for the
side of the high yellow cars.
We got split up a few yards, and had to hang separate cars, and I
thought maybe he wouldn't make it. I looked down from the top of mine, and
saw him trotting easy along the ground, jumping an iron switchpost or two,
and holding his sandwich and sack in both hands. He crammed the sandwich
down into the sack, rolled the top edge of the sack over a couple of twists,
and stuck the sack into his teeth, letting both of his hands free to use to
climb up the side of the car. On the top, he crawled along the blistered tin
roof until he set facing me, me on the end of my car, and him on the end of
his. It was getting windier as the train got her speed up, and we waved our
hats "good-bye and good luck and Lord bless you" to the old town of Tucson.
I looked at the lids of my two reefer holes, and both was down so tight
that you couldn't budge them with a team of horses. I looked over at my
partner again, and seen that he'd got his lid open. He braced the heavy lid
open, using the lock-bar for a wedge, so that it couldn't fly shut in the
high wind. I seen him crawl down inside, examine the ice hole, and then he
stuck his head out, and motioned for me to come on over and ride. I got up
and jumped the space between the two cars, and clumb down out of the hot
winds; and he finished his lunch without saying a word in the wind.
Our car was an easy rider. No flat wheels to speak of. This is not true
of many cars on an empty train, because loaded, a train rides smoother than
when empty. Before long, a couple of other riders stuck their heads down
into the hole and hollered, "Anybody down in this hole?"
We yelled back, 'Two! Room fer two more! Throw yer stuff down! C'mon
down!"
A bundle hit the floor, and with it come an old blue serge coat, from a
good suit of clothes, no doubt, during one of the earlier wars. Then one man
clumb through each of the holes, and grabbed the coarse net of wire that
lined the ice compartment. They settled down into a good position for riding
and looked around.
"Howdy. I'm Jack."
The Negro boy nodded his head, "Wheeler." He put the last bite into his
mouth, swallowed it down, and said, "Plenty dry."
The second stranger struck a match to relight a spitty cigaret, and
mumbled, "Schwartz, my name. Goddam this bull tobaccer!"
The country outside, I knew, was pretty, sunny, and clear, with patches
of green farming country sticking like moss along the sandy banks of the
little dry desert creeks. Yes, and I would like to climb out on top and take
a look at it. I told the other three men, "Believe I'll roll me one of them
fags, if ya don't mind, an' then git out on top an' watch th' tourists go
past."
The owner of the tobacco handed me the sweaty little sack, and I licked
one together. Lighting it up, I thanked him, and then I dumb up on top, and
soaked up the scenery by ten million square miles. The fast whistling train
put up a pretty stiff wind. It caused my cigaret to burn up like a flare of
some kind, and then a wide current tore the paper from around the tobacco,
and it flew in a million directions, including my own face. Fighting with
the cigaret, I tilted my head in the wrong direction, and my hat sailed
fifty feet up into the air, rolled out across the sand, and hung on a
sticker bush. That was the last I seen of it.
One of the men down on the hole hollered out, "Havin' quite
a time up there, ain't you, mister?"
"Quite a blow, quite a blow!" I yelled back into the hole.
"Seein' much up there?" another one asked me.
"Yeah, I see enuff sunshine an' fresh air ta cure all th' trouble in
th' world!" I told them.
"How fast we travelin'?"
"I'd jedge about forty or forty-five.''
The land changed from a farming country into a weather-beaten,
crumbling, and wasted stretch, with gully washes traveling in every way,
brownish, hot rocks piled into canyons, and low humps topped with irony
weeds and long-eared rabbits loping like army mules to get away from the
red-hot train. The hills were deep bright colors, reddish sand, yellow
clays, and always, to the distance, there stood up the high, flat-top
cliffs, breaking again into the washing, drifting, windy face of the desert.
We followed a highway, and once in a while a car coasted past, full of
people going somewhere, and we'd wave and yell at one another.
"Must be th' first time you ever crossed this country," the colored boy
hollered up at me.
"Yeah it is." I blinked my eyes to try to wash the powdery dust out of
them. "First time."
"I been over this road so many times I ought to tell the conductor how
to go," he said. "We'll be headin' down through the low country before very
long. You'll run a hundred miles below sea level and look up all at once,
and see snow on the mountains and then you'll start over the hump right up
to the snow. And you'll freeze yourself coming up out of all of this heat."
"Mighty funny thing."
"You can stay down in this hole and keep pretty warm. If all of us
huddle up and cuddle up and put our hand in each others' pockets, our
heat'll keep us from freezing."
The coal dust and the heat finally got too tough for me, so I clumb
down. The low pounding of the wheels under us, and the swaying and quivering
of the train, got so tiresome that we drifted right off to sleep, and
covered the miles that would put us across the California line. Night got
dark, and we got closer together to keep warm.
There is a little railroad station just east of Yuma where you stop to
take on water. It is still at desert altitude, so you climb down and start
walking around to limber up a little. The moon here is the fullest and
brightest that you ever saw. The medium-size palm plants and fern-looking
trees are waving real easy in the moonlight, and the brush on the face of
the desert throws black shapes and shadows out across the sand. The sand
looks as smooth as a slick pool of crude oil, and shines up yellow and white
all around. The clear-cut cactus shapes, the brush, and the silky sand makes
one of the prettiest pictures that you ever hope to see.
All of the riders, seeing how pretty the night was, walked, trotted,
stretched their legs and arms around, moved their shoulders, and took
exercise to get their blood to running right again. Matches flare up as the
boys light their smokes, and I could get a quick look at their sunburnt,
windburnt faces. Flop hats, caps, or just bareheaded, they looked like the
pioneers that got to knowing the feel and the smell of the roots and leaves
across the early days of the desert, and it makes me want to sort of hang
around there.
Voices talked and said everything.
"Hello."
"Match on yuh?"
"Yeah--shorts on that smoke."
"Headin'?"
" 'Frisco--ship out if I can."
"How's crops in South California?"
"Crops--or cops?"
"Crops. Celery. Fruit. Avacados."
"Work's easy ta git a holt of, but money's hard as hell.''
"Hell, Nelly, I wuz borned a-workin', an' I ain't quit yit!"
"Workin', er lookin' fer work?"
There was a big mixture of people here. I could hear the fast accents
of men from the big Eastern joints. You heard the slow, easy-going voices of
Southern swamp dwellers, and the people from the Southern hills and
mountains. Then another one would talk up, and it would be the dry, nosy
twang of the folks from the flat wheat plains; or the dialect of people that
come from other countries, whose parents talked another tongue. Then you
would hear the slow, outdoor voices of the men from Arizona, riding a short
hop to get a job, see a girl, or to throw a little celebration. There was
the deep, thick voices of two or three Negroes,. It sounded mighty good to
my ears.
All at once the men hushed up. Somebody nudged somebody else, and said,
"Quiet."
Then everybody ducked their heads, turned around and whispered,
"Scatter out. Lay low. Hey! You! Get rid of that cigaret! Bulls a-comin'!"
Three men, dressed in hard-wearing railroad suits, walked up to us
before we could get gone.
Flashing bright lanterns and flashlights on us, we heard them holler,
"Hey! What's goin' on here?"
We didn't say anything back.
"Where you birds headed for?"
Still silence.
"What's wrong? Buncha dam dumb-dumbs? Can't none of you men say
nuthin'?" The three men carried guns where it was plain to see,
and hard to overlook. Their hands resting on the butts, shuffling their
lights around in their hands. They rounded us up. The desert is a good place
to look at, but not so easy to hide on. One or two men ducked between cars.
A dozen or so stepped out across the desert, and slid down out of sight
behind little bushes. The cops herded the rest of us into a crowd.
Men kept scattering, taking a chance of going against the cops' orders
to "halt." The few that stood still were asked several questions. "Where yuh
headed?"
"Yuma."
"That'll be th' price of a ticket to Yuma. Step right into the office
there and buy your ticket--hurry up."
"Hell, fellers, you know I ain't got th' price of no ticket; I wouldn't
be ridin' this freight if I had th' money fer a ticket."
"Search `im,"
Each man was shook down, jackets, jumpers, coats, britches and
suspenders, pants legs, shoes. As the searching went on, most of us managed
to make a quick run for it, and get away from the bulls. Trotting around the
end of the train, thinking that we'd give them the dodge, we run head-on
into their spotlights, and was face to face with them. We stopped and stood
still. One by one, they went through our pockets looking for money. If they
found any money, whatever it was, the man was herded into the little house
to buy a ticket as far down the line as his money would carry him. Lots of
the boys had a few bucks on them. They felt pretty silly, with nothing to
eat on, being pushed into buying "tickets" to some town they said they were
heading for.
"Find anything on you?" a man asked me.
"Huh uh." I didn't have any for them to find.
"Listen, see that old boy right in front of you? Pinch 'im. Make 'im
listen to what I'm tellin' him. Ppsssst!"
I punched the man right in front of me. He waited a minute, and then
looked around sideways. "Listen," I said to him.
The other rider commenced to talk, "I just found out"-- then he went
down into a whisper "that this train is gonna pull out. Gonna try ta ditch
us. When I holler, we're all gonna make a break an' swing 'er. This is a
hell of a place to get ditched."
We shook our heads. We all kept extra still, and passed the word along.
Then the train moved backwards a foot or two--and the racket roared all
out across the desert--jarring itself into the notion of traveling again,
and all at once the man at my side hollered as loud as the high-ball whistle
itself, "Go, boy!"
His voice rung out across the cactus.
"Jack rabbit, run!"
Men jumped out from everywhere, from between the cars they'd been
hanging onto, and out from behind the clumps of cactus weeds, and the cops,
nervous, and looking in every direction, stuttered, yelled, and cussed and
snorted, but when the moon looked down at the train steaming out, it saw all
of us sticking on the sides, and on the top, waving, cussing, and thumbing
our noses back in the faces of the "ticket" sellers.
Then it got morning. A cold draft of wind was sucking in around the
sides of the reefer lid. I'd asked the boys during the night how about
closing the lid all of the way down. They told me that you had to keep it
wedged open a little with the handle of the lock, to keep from getting
locked inside. We stuck close together, using each other for sofas and
pillows, and hoped for the sun to get warmer.
I asked them, "Wonder how heavy that big оl' lid is, anyhow?"
"Weighs close to a hunderd pound," the Negro boy said. He was piled in
the corner, stretched out, and his whole body was shaking with the movement
of the train.
"Be a hell of a note if a feller wuz ta git up there, an' start ta
climb out, an' that big lid wuz ta fly down an' ketch his head," another
fellow said. He screwed his face up just thinking about it.
"I knew a boy that lost a arm that way."
"I know a boy that used ta travel around on these dam freights," I
said, "harvestin', an' ramblin' around; an' he was shipped back to his folks
in about a hundred pieces. I seen his face. Wheel had run right across it,
from his ear, across his mouth, over to his other ear. And I don't know, but
every day, ridin' these rattlers, I ketch myself thinkin' about that boy."
" 'Bout as bad a thing as I can think of, is th' two boys they found
starved to death, locked up inside of one of these here ice cars. Figgered
they'd been in there dead 'bout a week or two when they found 'em. One of
'em wasn't more'n twelve or thirteen years old. Jist a little squirt. They
crawled in through the main door, an' pulled it to. First thing they knew, a
brakeman come along, locked th' door, dropped a bolt in th' lock, an' there
they was. Nobody even knew where they's from, or nuthin'. Just as well been
one of your folks or mine." He shook his head, thinking.
The heat got worse as the train sailed along. "Git out on top, an' you
c'n see Old Mexico," somebody said.
"Might as well ta git yer money's worth," I told him, and in a minute
I'd scrambled up the wire net again, and pushed the heavy lid back. The wind
was getting hotter. I could feel the dry, burning sting that let me know
that I was getting a windburn. I peeled off my sweater, and shirt, and
dropped them onto the hot sheet iron, and hooked my arm around an iron
brace, and laid stretched out flat of my back, getting a good Mexican border
sunburn along with my Uncle Sam windburn. I get dark awful quick in the sun
and wind. My skin likes it, and so do I.
The Negro boy clumb up and set down beside me. His greasy cap whipped
in the wind, but he held the bill tight, and it didn't blow off. He turned
the cap around backwards, bill down the back of his neck, and there was no
more danger of losing it. "Some country!" he told me, rolling his eyes
across the sand, cactus, and crooked little bushes, "I guess every part of
th' country's good for somethin', if you c'n jist only find out what!"
"Yeah," I said; "Wonder what this is good for?"
"Rabbits, rattlesnakes, gila monsters, tarantulars, childs of the
earth, scorpions, lizards, coyotes, wild cats, bob cats, grasshoppers,
beetles, bugs, bears, bulls, buffaloes, beef," he said.
"All of that out there?" I asked him.
"No, I was jist runnin' off at th' mouth," he laughed. I knew that he
had learned a lot about the country somewhere, and guessed that he'd beat
this trail more times than one. He moved his shoulders and squared his self
on top of the train. I saw big strong muscles and heavy blood vessels, and
tough, calloused palms of his hands; and I knew that for the most part he
was an honest working man.
"Lookit that ol' rabbit go!" I poked him in the ribs, and pointed
across a ditch.
"Rascal really moves!" he said, keeping up with the jack.
"Watch 'im pick up speed," I said.
"Sonofa bitch. See him clear dat fence?" He shook his head, and smiled
a little bit.
Three or four more rabbits began showing their ears above the black
weeds. Big grayish brown ears lolling along as loose and limber as could be.
"Whole dam family's out!" he told me. "Looks like it! Ma an' pa an' th'
whole fam damly!" I said. 'Purty outfits, ain't they? Rabbits."
He eyed the herd and nodded his head. He was a deep-thinking man. I
knew just about what he was thinking about, too.
"How come you ta come out on top ta ride?" I asked my friend.
"Why not?"
"Oh, I dunno. Said somebody had ta go."
"How'd it come up?" I asked him.
"Well, I sort of asked him for a cigaret, and he said that he wasn't
panhandlin' for nickels to get tobacco for boys like me. I don't want to
have no trouble."
"Boys like you?"
"Yeah, I dunno. Difference 'tween you an' me. He'd let you have
tobacco, 'cause you an' him's th' same color."
"What in th' Goddam hell has that got ta do with ridin' together?" I
asked him.
"He said it was gettin' pretty hot down in th' hatch, you know, said
ever'body was sweatin' a lot. He told me th' further away from each other
that we stay th' better we're gonna get along, but I knew what he meant by
if'
"Wuz that all?"
"Yeah."
"This is one hell of a place ta go ta bringin' up that kinda dam talk,"
I said.
The train drew into El Centre, and stooped and filled her belly,
panting and sweating. The riders could be seen hitting the ground for a walk
and a stretch.
Schwartz, the man with the sack of smoking, come out of his hole,
grumbling and cussing under his breath. "Worst Goddam hole on the train, and
I had to get caught down in it all night!" he told me, climbing past me on
his way to the ground.
"Best ridin' car on th' rail," I said. I was right, too.
"It's th' worst in my book, boy," Schwartz said.
The fourth man from our end of the car crawled out and dropped down to
the cinders. All during the ride, he hadn't mentioned his name. He was a
smiling man, even walking along by his self. When he walked up behind us, he
heard Schwartz say something else about how bad our riding hole was, and he
said in a friendly way, " 'Bout th' easiest riding car I've hung in a many a
day."
"Like hell it is," Schwartz spoke up, stopping, and looking the fellow
in the face. The man looked down mostly at Schwartz's feet and listened to
see what Schwartz would say next. Then Schwartz went on talking at the
mouth, "It might ride easy, but th' Goddam thing stinks--see?"
"Stinks?" The man looked at him funny.
"I said stink, didn't I?" Schwartz ran his hand down in his pocket.
This is a pretty bad thing to do amongst strangers, talking in this tone of
voice and running your hand in your pocket. "You don't have to be afraid,
Stranger, I ain't got no barlow knife," Schwartz told him.
And then the other man looked along the cinders and smiled and said,
"Listen, mister, I wouldn't be the least bit afraid of a whole car load of
fellows just like you, with a knife in each pocket and two in each hand."
"Tough about it, huh?" Schwartz frowned the best he could.
"Ain't nothing tough about me, sort of--but I don't make a practice of
bein' afraid of you nor anybody else." He settled his self a little more
solid on his feet.
It looked like a good fist fight was coming off. Schwartz looked
around, up and down the track. "I bet you a dollar that most of the fellows
riding this train feel just about like I do about riding in a hole with a
dam nigger!"
The Negro boy made a walk toward Schwartz. The smiling man stepped in
between them. The Negro said, "Nobody don't hafta take my part, I can take
up for myself. Ain't nobody gonna call me--"
"Take it easy, Wheeler, take it easy," the other man said. "This guy
wants something to happen. Just likes to hear his guts crawl."
I took the Negro boy by the arm, and we walked along talking it over.
"Nobody else thinks like that goof. Hell, let 'im go an' find another car.
Let 'im go. They'll run him out of every hole on th' train. Don't worry. Ya
cain't help what ya cain't help."
"You know, that's right," Wheeler told me.
He pulled his arm away from me, and straightened his button-up sweater
a little. We turned around and looked back at our friend and Schwartz. Just
like you would shoo a fly or a chicken down the road, our friend was waving
his arms, and shooing Schwartz along. We could hear him awful faint,
yelling, "Go on, you old bastard! Get your gripey ass out of here! And if
you so much as even open your trap to make trouble for anybody riding this
train, I'll ram my fist down your throat!" It was a funny thing. I felt a
little sorry for the old boy, but he needed somebody to teach him a lesson,
and evidently he was in the hands of a pretty good teacher.
We waited till the dust had settled again, and men our teacher friend
trotted up to where we stood. He was waving at bunches of men, and laughing
deep down in his lungs.
'That's that, I reckon," he was saying when he got up to us.
The colored boy said, "I'm gonna run over across th' highway an' buy a
package of smokes. Be back in a minute--" He left us and ran like a desert
rabbit.
There was a faucet dripping water beside a yellow railroad building. We
stopped and drank all we could hold. Washed our hands and faces, and combed
our heads. There was a long line of men waiting to use the water. While we
walked away, holding our faces to the slight breath of air that was moving
across the yards, he asked me, "Say your name was?"
I said, "Woody."
"Mine's Brown. Glad ta meet you, Woody. You know I've run onto this
skin trouble before." He walked along on the cinders.
"Skin trouble. That's a dam good name for it." I walked along beside
him.
"Hard to cure it after it gets started, too. I was born and raised in a
country that's got all kinds of diseases, and this skin trouble is the worst
one of the lot," he told me.
"Bad," I answered him.
"I got sick and tired of that kind of stuff when I was just a kid
growing up at home. You know. God, I had hell with some of my folks about
things like that. But, seems like, little at a time, I'd sort of convince
them, you know; lots of folks I never could convince. They're kinda like the
old bellyache fellow, they cause a lot of trouble to a hundred people, and
then to a thousand people, all on account of just some silly, crazy notion.
Like you can help what color you are. Goddam' it all. Goddamit all. Why
don't they spend that same amount of time and trouble doing something good,
like painting their Goddam barns, or building some new roads?"
The four-time whistle blew, and the train bounced back a little. That
was our sign. Guys walked and ran along the side of the cars, mumbling and
talking, swinging onto their iron ladders, and mounting the top of the
string. Wheeler hadn't come back with the cigarets. I went over the top, and
when I got set down, I commenced yanking my shirt off again, being a big
hand for sunshine. I felt it burning my hide. The train was going too fast
now for anybody to catch it. If Wheeler was on the ground, he's just
naturally going to have a little stay over in El Centre. I looked over the
other edge of the car, and saw his head coming over the rim, and I saw that
he was smiling. Smoke flew like a rain cloud from a new tailor-made cigaret
in his mouth. He scooted over beside me, and flipped ashes into the breeze.
"You get anything to eat?" he said.
I said, "No," that I hadn't got anything.
He reached under his sweater and under his belt and pulled out a brown
paper sack, wet, dripping with ice water, and held it up to me and said,
"Cold pop. I brung a couple. Wait. Here's something to gnaw on with it," and
he handed me a milk candy bar.
"Candy's meal," I told him.
"Sure is; last you all day. That was my last four bits."
"Four bits more'n I got," I joked.
We chewed and drank and talked very little then for a long time.
Wheeler said that he was turning the train back to the railroad company at
Indio. That's the town coming up.
"I know just where to go," Wheeler told me, when the train come to a
quick stop. "Don't you worry 'bout me, boy." Then before I could talk, he
went on saying, "Now listen, I know this track. See? Now, don't you hang on
'er till she gets to Los Angeles, but you leave 'er up here at Colton.
You'll be just about fifty miles from L.A. If you stay on till you come to
L.A., them big dicks'll throw you so far back in that Lincoln Heights jail,
you never will see daylight again. So remember, get off at Colton, hitch on
in to Pasadena, and head out north through Burbank, San Fernando, and stay
right on that 99 to Turlock." Wheeler was climbing over the side. He stuck
out his hand and we shook.
I said, "Good luck, boy, take it easy, but take it."
He said, "Same to you, boy, and I always take it easy, and I always
take it!"
Then be stood still for a few seconds, bending his body over the edge
of the car, and looked at me and said, "Been good to know you!"
Indio to Edom, rich farm lands. Edom to Banning, with the trees popping
up everywhere. Banning to Beaumont, with the fruit hanging all over the
trees, and groceries all over the ground, and people all over everything.
Beaumont to Redlands, the world turned into such a thick green garden of
fruits and vegetables that I didn't know if I was dreaming or not. Coming
out of the dustbowl, the colors so bright and smells so thick all around,
that it seemed almost too good to be true.
Redlands to Colton, A railroad and farming town, full of people that
are wheeling and dealing. Hitch-hikers are standing around thicker than
citizens. The 99 looks friendly, heading west to the coast. I'll see the
Pacific Ocean, go swimming, and flop on the beach. I'll go down to Chinatown
and look around. I'll see the Mexican section. I'll see the whole works.
But, no, I don't know. Los Angeles is too big for me. I'm too little for Los
Angeles. I'll duck Los Angeles and go north by Pasadena, out through
Burbank, like Wheeler told me. I'm against the law, they tell me.
Sign says: "Fruit, see, but don't pick it." Another one reads:
"Fruit--beat it." Another one: "Trespassers prosecuted. Keep Out. Get away
from Here."
Fruit is on the ground, and it looks like the trees have been just too
glad to grow it, and give it to you. The tree likes to grow and you like to
eat it; and there is a sign between you and the tree saying: "Beware The
Mean Dog's Master."
Fruit is rotting on the ground all around me. Just what in the hell has
gone wrong here, anyhow? I'm not a very smart man. Maybe it ought to be this
way, with the crops laying all around over the ground. Maybe they couldn't
get no pickers just when they wanted them, and they just let the fruit go to
the bad. There's enough here on the ground to feed every hungry kid from
Maine to Florida, and from there to Seattle.
A Twenty-nine Ford coupe stops and a Japanese boy gives me a ride. He
is friendly, and tells me all about the country, the crops and vineyards.
"All you have got to do out in this country is to just pour water
around some roots, and yell, 'Grapes!' and next morning the leaves are full
grown, and the grapes are hanging in big bunches, all nice and ready to
pick!"
The little car traveled right along. A haze was running around the
trees, and the colors were different than any that I'd ever seen in my life.
The knotty little oak and iron brush that I'd been used to seeing rolling
with the Oklahoma hills and looking smoky in the hollers, had been home to
my eyes for a long time. My eyes had got sort of used to Oklahoma's beat-up
look, but here, with this sight of fertile, rich, damp, sweet soil that
smelled like the dew of a jungle, I was learning to love another, greener,
part of life. I've tried to keep loving it ever since I first seen it.
The Japanese boy said, "Which way do you plan to go through Los
Angeles?"
"Pasadena? That how ya say if? Then north through Burbank, out that
a-way!"
"If you want to stay with me, you'll be right in the middle of Los
Angeles, but you'll be on a big main highway full of trucks and cars out of
town. Road forks here. Make up your mind quick."
"Keep a-drivin'," I said, craning my neck back to watch the Pasadena
road disappear under the palm trees to the north of us.
We rounded a few hills and knolls, curving in our little jitney, and
all at once, coming over a high place, the lights of Los Angeles jumped up,
running from north to south as far as I could see, and hanging around on the
hills and mountains just as if it was level ground. Red and green neon
flickering for eats, sleeps, sprees, salvation, money made, lent, blowed,
spent. There was an electric sign for dirty clothes, clean clothes, honky
tonky tonks, no clothes, floor shows, gyp-joints, furniture in and out of
homes. The fog was trying to get a headlock on the houses along the high
places, Patches of damp clouds whiffed along the paving in crazy,
disorganized little bunches, hunting some more clouds to work with. Los
Angeles was lost in its own pretty lights and trying to hold out against the
big fog that rolls in from that ocean, and the people that roll in just as
reckless, and rambling, from the country as big as the ocean back East.
It was about seven or eight o'clock when I shook hands with my Japanese
friend, and we wished each other luck. I got out on the pavement at the
Mission Plaza, a block from everything in the world, and listened to the
rumbling of people and smoking of cars pouring fumes out across the streets
and alleys.
"Hungry?" the boy asked me.
"Pretty empty. Just about like an old empty tub,'' I laughed
at him. If he'd offered me a nickel or a dime, I would of took it, I'd of
spent it on a bus to get the hell out of that town. I was empty. But not
starved yet, and more than something to eat, I felt like I wanted to get
outside of the city limits.
"Good luck! Sony I haven't any money on me!" he hollered as he circled
and wheeled away into the big traffic.
I walked along a rough, paved street. To my left, the shimmy old houses
ran up a steep hill, and tried to pretend that they were keeping families of
people in out of the wind and the weather. To my right there was the noise
of the grinding, banging, clanging, and swishing of the dirty railroad
yards. Behind me, south, the big middle of Los Angeles, chasing hamburgers.
Ahead of me, north, the highway ached on, blinking its red and green eyes
and groaning under the heavy load of traffic that it had to carry. Trains
hooted in the low yards close under my right elbow, and scared me out of my
wits.
"How'd ya git outta this town?" I asked a copper.
He looked me over good, and said, "Just follow your nose, boy. You can
read signs. Just keep traveling!''
I walked along the east side of the yards. There was lots of little
restaurants beside the road, where the tourists, truck drivers, and
railroaders dropped in for a meal. Hot coffee steamed up from the cups along
the counters, and the smell of meat frying leaked out through the doors. It
was a cold night. Drops of steamy moisture formed on the windows, and it
blurred out the sight of the people eating and drinking.
I stopped into a little, sawed-off place, and the only person in sight,
away back, was an old Chinaman. He looked up at me with his gray beard, but
didn't say a single word.
I stood there a minute, enjoying the warmth. Then I walked back to
where he was, and asked him, "Have ya got anything left over that a man
could do some work for?"
He set right still, reading his paper, and then looked up and said, "I
work. Hard all day. Every day. I got big bunch people to feed. We eat things
left over. We do work."
"No job?" I asked him.
"No job. We do job. Self."
I hit the breeze again and tried two or three other places along the
road. Finally, I found an old gray-headed couple humped up in front of a
loop-legged radio, listening to some of the hollering being done by a lady
name Amy Semple Temple, or something like that. I woke the old pair up out
of their sermon on hell fire and hot women, and asked them if they had some
work to do for a meal. They told me to grab some scalding hot water and mop
the place down. After three times over the floors, tables, kitchen, and
dishes, I was wrapping myself around a big chicken dinner, with all of the
trimmings.
The old lady handed me a lunch and said, "Here's some-thing extra to
take with you--don't let John know about it."
And as I walked out the door again, listening to the whistle of the
trains getting ready to whang out, John walked over and handed me a quarter
and said, "Here's somethin' ta he'p ya on down th' road. Don't let th' оl'
lady know."
A man dressed in an engineer's cap and striped overhalls told me that a
train was making up right at that point, and would pull out along about four
in the morning. It was now about midnight, so I dropped into a coffee joint
and took an hour sipping at a cup. I bought a pint of pretty fair red port
wine with the change, and stayed behind a signboard, drinking wine to keep
warm.
A Mexican boy walked up on me and said, "Pretty cold iss it not? Do you
want a smoke?"
I lit up one of his cigarets, and slipped him the remains of the wine
jug. He took about half of the leavings, and looked at me between gulps,
"Ahhhh! Warms you up, no?"
"Kill it. I done had my tankful," I told him, and heard the bubbles
play a little song that quit when the wine was all downed.
"Time's she gittin' ta be? Know?" I said to him. "Four o'clock or
after," he said. "When does that Fresno freight run?" I asked him. ''Right
now," he said.
I ran out into the yards, jumping dark rails, heavy switches, and
darting among the blind cars. A string of black ones were moving backwards
in the wrong direction. I mounted the side and went over the top, and down
the other side, and took a risk on scrambling between another string at the
hitch. I could just barely see, it was so dark. The cars were so blended
into the night. But, all at once, I looked up within about a foot of my
face, and saw a blur, and a light, and a blur, and a light, and I knew that
here was one going my way. I watched the light come along between the cars,
and finally spotted an open top car, which was easier to see; and grabbed
the ladder, and jumped over into a load of heavy cast-iron machinery. I laid
down in the end of the car, and rested.
The train pulled along slow for a while. I ducked as close up behind
the head end of the car as I could to break the wind. Pretty soon the old
string got the kinks jerked out of her, and whistled through a lot of little
towns. Then we hit a good fifty for about an hour, and started up some
pretty tough grade. It got colder higher up. The fog turned into a drizzle,
and the drizzle into a slow rain.
I imagined a million things bouncing along in the dark. A quick tap of
the air brakes to slow the train down, and the hundred tons of heavy
machinery would shift its weight all over me, I felt so soft and little. I
had felt so tough and big just a few minutes ago.
The lonesome whip of the wind sounded even more lonesome when the big
engine joined in on the whistling. The wheels hummed a song, and the weather
got colder. We started gaining altitude almost like an airplane. I pulled
myself up into a little ball and shook till my bones ached all over. The
weather didn't pay any more attention to my clothes than if I didn't have
them on. My muscles drew up into hard, leathery strings that hurt. I kept a
little warmer by remembering people I'd known, how they looked, faces and
all, and all about the warm desert, and cactus and sunshine growing
everywhere; picturing in my mind something friendly and free, something to
sort of blot out the wind and the freezing train.
On a big slope, that went direct into Bakersfield, we stopped on a
siding to let the mail go by. I got off and walked ten or fifteen cars down
the track, creaking like an eighty-year-old rocking chair. I had to walk
slow along the steep cinder bank, gradually getting the use of myself back
again.
I was past the train when the engineer turned the brakes loose, give
her the gun, and started off.
I'd never seen a train start up this fast before. Most trains take a
little time chugging, getting the load swung into motion. But, setting on
this long straight slope, she just lit out. Running along the side, I just
barely managed to catch it. I had to take a different car as mine was
somewhere down the line. In a few minutes the train was making forty miles
an hour, then fifty, then sixty, down across the strip of country where the
mountains meet the desert south of Bakersfield. The wind blew and the
morning was frosty and cold. Between the two cars, it was freezing. I
managed to mount to the top, and pull a reefer lid open. I looked in, and
saw the hole was filled with fine chips of new ice.
I held on with all of my strength, and crawled over and opened up
another lid. It was packed with chipped ice, too. I was too near froze to
try the jump from one car to the next, so I crawled down the ladder between
two cars--sort of a wind-break--and held on.
My hands froze stiff around the handle of the ladder, but they were
getting too cold and weak to hold on much longer. I listened below to five
or six hundred railroad wheels, clipping the rails through the morning
frost, and felt the windy ice from the refrigerator car that I was hanging
onto.
The fingers of one hand slipped from around the handle. I spent twenty
minutes or so trying to fish an old rag out of my pocket Finally I got it
wound around my hands and, by blowing my breath inside the cloth for a few
minutes, seemed to be getting them a little warmer.
The weather gained on me, though, and my breath turned into thick
frosty ice all over my handkerchief, and my hands started freezing worse
than ever. My finger slid loose again, and I remembered the tales of the
railroaders, people found along the tracks, no way of telling who they were.
If I missed my hold here, one thing was sure, I'd never know what hit
me, and I'd never slide my feet under that good eating table full of hot
square meals at the big marble house of my rich aunt.
The sun looked warmer as it came up, but the desert is cold when it is
clear early in the morning, and the train fanned such a breeze that the sun
didn't make much difference.
That was the closest to the 6x3 that I've ever been. My mind ran back
to millions of things--my whole life was brought up to date, and all of the
people I knew, and all that they meant to me. And, no doubt, my line of
politics took on quite a change right then and there, even though I didn't
know I was getting educated at the time.
The last twenty miles into the Bakersfield yards was the hardest work,
and worst pain, that I ever run onto; that is, of this particular brand.
There are pains and work of different sorts, but this was a job that my life
depended on, and I didn't have even one ounce to say about it. I was just a
little animal of some kind swinging on for my life, and the pain was not
being able to do anything about it.
I left the train long before it stopped, and hit the ground running and
stumbling. My legs worked more like toys than like my real ones. But the sun
was warm in Bakersfield, and I drank all of the good water I could soak up
from a faucet outside, and walked over to an old shack that was out of use
in the yards, and keeled over on the cinders in the sun. I woke up several
hours later, and my train had gone on without me.
Two men said that another train was due out in a few minutes, so I kept
an eye run along the tracks, and caught it when it pulled out. The sun was
warm now, and there were fifty men lined up along the top of the train,
smoking, talking, waving at the folks in cars on the highway, and keeping
quiet.
Bakersfield on into Fresno. Just this side of Fresno, the men piled off
and walked through the yards, planning to meet the train again when it come
out the north end. We took off by ones and twos and tried to get hold of
something to eat. Some of the men had a few nickels, some a dollar or two
hid on them, and others made the alleys knocking on the back doors of
bakeries, greasy-spoon joints, vegetable stands. The meal added up to a
couple or three bites apiece, after we'd all pitched ours in. It was
something to fill your guts.
I saw a sign tacked up in the Fresno yards that said: Free Meal &
Nights Lodging. Rescue Mission.
Men looked at the sign and asked us, "Anybody here need ta be rescued?"
"From what?" somebody hollered.
"All ya got ta do is ta go down there an' kneel down an' say yer
prayers, an' ya git a free meal an' a flop!" somebody explained.
"Yeah? Prayers? Which one o' youse boys knows any t'ing about any
prayers?" an Eastern-sounding man yelled out.
"I'd do it, if I wuz just hungery 'nuff! I'd say 'em some prayers!"
"I don't hafta do no prayin' ta get fed!" a hard looker laughed out. He
was poking a raw onion whole into his mouth, tears trickling down his jaws.
"Oh, I don't know," a quieter man answered him, "I sometimes believe in
prayin'. Lots of folks believes in prayin' before they go out to work, an'
others pray before they go out to fight. An' even if you don't believe in a
God up on a cloud, still, prayin's a pretty good way to get your mind
cleared up, or to get the nerve that it takes to do anything. People pray
because it makes them think serious about things, and, God or no God, it's
whisper, "What, what do you want?"
"Lady, I'm headin' ta California lookin' fer work. I just wondered if
you had a job of work of some kind that a man could do to earn a lunch. Sack
with somethin' in it ta carry along."
She gave me the feeling that she was afraid of something. "No, I
haven't any kind of work. Sshhh. Don't talk so loud. And I haven't got
anything in the house--that is--anything fit to pack for you to eat."
"I just got a meal off of th' lady down th street here, an' just
thought maybe--you know, thought maybe a little sack of somethin' might come
in purty handy after a day or two out on the desert--any old thing. Not very
hard ta please," I told her.
"My husband is sleeping. Don't talk so loud. I'm a little ashamed of
what I've got left over here. Pretty poor when you need a good meal. But, if
you're not too particular about it, you're welcome to take it with you. Wait
here a minute."
I stood there looking back up across the tomato patch to the railroad
yards. A switch engine was trotting loose cars up and down the track and I
knew that our freight was making up.
She stuck her hand out through an old green screen door, and said,
"Sshhh," and I tried to whisper "thank you," but she just kept motioning,
nodding her head.
I was wearing a black slip-over sweater and I pulled the loose neck
open, and pushed the sack down into the bosom. She'd put something good and
warm from the warming-oven into the sack, because already I could feel the
good hot feeling against my belly.
Trains were limbering up their big whistles, and there was a long
string of cars made up and raring to step. A hundred and ten cars meant
pretty certain that she was a hot one with the right-of-way to the next
division.
A tired-looking Negro boy trotted down the cinders, looking at the new
train to spot him a reefer car to crawl into. He seen that he had a spare
second or two, and he stopped alongside of me.
"Ketchin' 'er out?" I asked him.
"Yeah. I'm switchin' ovah pretty fas'. Jes' got in. Didn' even have no
time ta hustle me up a feed. I guess I c'n eat when I gets to wheah I'm
headed." His pale khaki work clothes were soaked with salty sweat. Loose
coal soot, oil smoke, and colored dust was smeared all over him. He made a
quick trip over to a clear puddle of water and laid flat of his belly to
suck up all of the water he could hold. He blowed out his breath, and came
back wiping his face with a bandana handkerchief as dirty as the railroad
itself, and then the handkerchief being cool and wet, he tied it around his
forehead, with a hard knot on the back of his head. He looked up at me, and
shook his head sideways and said, "Keeps th' sweat from runnin' down so
bad."
It was an old hobo trick. I knew it, but didn't have any kind of a
handkerchief. The heat of the day was getting to be pretty hard to take. I
asked him, "When's th' last time ya had anything to eat?"
"El Paso," he told me. "Coupl'a days back."
My hand didn't ask me anything about it, but it was okay with me
anyhow, and I slid the sack out of my sweater and banded it over to him.
Still warm. I knew just about how good it felt when he got his hands on that
warm greasy sack. He bit into a peanut-butter sandwich together with a hunk
of salty pork between two slices of bread. He looked toward the water hole
again, but the train jarred the cars a few feet, and we both made for the
side of the high yellow cars.
We got split up a few yards, and had to hang separate cars, and I
thought maybe he wouldn't make it. I looked down from the top of mine, and
saw him trotting easy along the ground, jumping an iron switchpost or two,
and holding his sandwich and sack in both hands. He crammed the sandwich
down into the sack, rolled the top edge of the sack over a couple of twists,
and stuck the sack into his teeth, letting both of his hands free to use to
climb up the side of the car. On the top, he crawled along the blistered tin
roof until he set facing me, me on the end of my car, and him on the end of
his. It was getting windier as the train got her speed up, and we waved our
hats "good-bye and good luck and Lord bless you" to the old town of Tucson.
I looked at the lids of my two reefer holes, and both was down so tight
that you couldn't budge them with a team of horses. I looked over at my
partner again, and seen that he'd got his lid open. He braced the heavy lid
open, using the lock-bar for a wedge, so that it couldn't fly shut in the
high wind. I seen him crawl down inside, examine the ice hole, and then he
stuck his head out, and motioned for me to come on over and ride. I got up
and jumped the space between the two cars, and clumb down out of the hot
winds; and he finished his lunch without saying a word in the wind.
Our car was an easy rider. No flat wheels to speak of. This is not true
of many cars on an empty train, because loaded, a train rides smoother than
when empty. Before long, a couple of other riders stuck their heads down
into the hole and hollered, "Anybody down in this hole?"
We yelled back, 'Two! Room fer two more! Throw yer stuff down! C'mon
down!"
A bundle hit the floor, and with it come an old blue serge coat, from a
good suit of clothes, no doubt, during one of the earlier wars. Then one man
clumb through each of the holes, and grabbed the coarse net of wire that
lined the ice compartment. They settled down into a good position for riding
and looked around.
"Howdy. I'm Jack."
The Negro boy nodded his head, "Wheeler." He put the last bite into his
mouth, swallowed it down, and said, "Plenty dry."
The second stranger struck a match to relight a spitty cigaret, and
mumbled, "Schwartz, my name. Goddam this bull tobaccer!"
The country outside, I knew, was pretty, sunny, and clear, with patches
of green farming country sticking like moss along the sandy banks of the
little dry desert creeks. Yes, and I would like to climb out on top and take
a look at it. I told the other three men, "Believe I'll roll me one of them
fags, if ya don't mind, an' then git out on top an' watch th' tourists go
past."
The owner of the tobacco handed me the sweaty little sack, and I licked
one together. Lighting it up, I thanked him, and then I dumb up on top, and
soaked up the scenery by ten million square miles. The fast whistling train
put up a pretty stiff wind. It caused my cigaret to burn up like a flare of
some kind, and then a wide current tore the paper from around the tobacco,
and it flew in a million directions, including my own face. Fighting with
the cigaret, I tilted my head in the wrong direction, and my hat sailed
fifty feet up into the air, rolled out across the sand, and hung on a
sticker bush. That was the last I seen of it.
One of the men down on the hole hollered out, "Havin' quite
a time up there, ain't you, mister?"
"Quite a blow, quite a blow!" I yelled back into the hole.
"Seein' much up there?" another one asked me.
"Yeah, I see enuff sunshine an' fresh air ta cure all th' trouble in
th' world!" I told them.
"How fast we travelin'?"
"I'd jedge about forty or forty-five.''
The land changed from a farming country into a weather-beaten,
crumbling, and wasted stretch, with gully washes traveling in every way,
brownish, hot rocks piled into canyons, and low humps topped with irony
weeds and long-eared rabbits loping like army mules to get away from the
red-hot train. The hills were deep bright colors, reddish sand, yellow
clays, and always, to the distance, there stood up the high, flat-top
cliffs, breaking again into the washing, drifting, windy face of the desert.
We followed a highway, and once in a while a car coasted past, full of
people going somewhere, and we'd wave and yell at one another.
"Must be th' first time you ever crossed this country," the colored boy
hollered up at me.
"Yeah it is." I blinked my eyes to try to wash the powdery dust out of
them. "First time."
"I been over this road so many times I ought to tell the conductor how
to go," he said. "We'll be headin' down through the low country before very
long. You'll run a hundred miles below sea level and look up all at once,
and see snow on the mountains and then you'll start over the hump right up
to the snow. And you'll freeze yourself coming up out of all of this heat."
"Mighty funny thing."
"You can stay down in this hole and keep pretty warm. If all of us
huddle up and cuddle up and put our hand in each others' pockets, our
heat'll keep us from freezing."
The coal dust and the heat finally got too tough for me, so I clumb
down. The low pounding of the wheels under us, and the swaying and quivering
of the train, got so tiresome that we drifted right off to sleep, and
covered the miles that would put us across the California line. Night got
dark, and we got closer together to keep warm.
There is a little railroad station just east of Yuma where you stop to
take on water. It is still at desert altitude, so you climb down and start
walking around to limber up a little. The moon here is the fullest and
brightest that you ever saw. The medium-size palm plants and fern-looking
trees are waving real easy in the moonlight, and the brush on the face of
the desert throws black shapes and shadows out across the sand. The sand
looks as smooth as a slick pool of crude oil, and shines up yellow and white
all around. The clear-cut cactus shapes, the brush, and the silky sand makes
one of the prettiest pictures that you ever hope to see.
All of the riders, seeing how pretty the night was, walked, trotted,
stretched their legs and arms around, moved their shoulders, and took
exercise to get their blood to running right again. Matches flare up as the
boys light their smokes, and I could get a quick look at their sunburnt,
windburnt faces. Flop hats, caps, or just bareheaded, they looked like the
pioneers that got to knowing the feel and the smell of the roots and leaves
across the early days of the desert, and it makes me want to sort of hang
around there.
Voices talked and said everything.
"Hello."
"Match on yuh?"
"Yeah--shorts on that smoke."
"Headin'?"
" 'Frisco--ship out if I can."
"How's crops in South California?"
"Crops--or cops?"
"Crops. Celery. Fruit. Avacados."
"Work's easy ta git a holt of, but money's hard as hell.''
"Hell, Nelly, I wuz borned a-workin', an' I ain't quit yit!"
"Workin', er lookin' fer work?"
There was a big mixture of people here. I could hear the fast accents
of men from the big Eastern joints. You heard the slow, easy-going voices of
Southern swamp dwellers, and the people from the Southern hills and
mountains. Then another one would talk up, and it would be the dry, nosy
twang of the folks from the flat wheat plains; or the dialect of people that
come from other countries, whose parents talked another tongue. Then you
would hear the slow, outdoor voices of the men from Arizona, riding a short
hop to get a job, see a girl, or to throw a little celebration. There was
the deep, thick voices of two or three Negroes,. It sounded mighty good to
my ears.
All at once the men hushed up. Somebody nudged somebody else, and said,
"Quiet."
Then everybody ducked their heads, turned around and whispered,
"Scatter out. Lay low. Hey! You! Get rid of that cigaret! Bulls a-comin'!"
Three men, dressed in hard-wearing railroad suits, walked up to us
before we could get gone.
Flashing bright lanterns and flashlights on us, we heard them holler,
"Hey! What's goin' on here?"
We didn't say anything back.
"Where you birds headed for?"
Still silence.
"What's wrong? Buncha dam dumb-dumbs? Can't none of you men say
nuthin'?" The three men carried guns where it was plain to see,
and hard to overlook. Their hands resting on the butts, shuffling their
lights around in their hands. They rounded us up. The desert is a good place
to look at, but not so easy to hide on. One or two men ducked between cars.
A dozen or so stepped out across the desert, and slid down out of sight
behind little bushes. The cops herded the rest of us into a crowd.
Men kept scattering, taking a chance of going against the cops' orders
to "halt." The few that stood still were asked several questions. "Where yuh
headed?"
"Yuma."
"That'll be th' price of a ticket to Yuma. Step right into the office
there and buy your ticket--hurry up."
"Hell, fellers, you know I ain't got th' price of no ticket; I wouldn't
be ridin' this freight if I had th' money fer a ticket."
"Search `im,"
Each man was shook down, jackets, jumpers, coats, britches and
suspenders, pants legs, shoes. As the searching went on, most of us managed
to make a quick run for it, and get away from the bulls. Trotting around the
end of the train, thinking that we'd give them the dodge, we run head-on
into their spotlights, and was face to face with them. We stopped and stood
still. One by one, they went through our pockets looking for money. If they
found any money, whatever it was, the man was herded into the little house
to buy a ticket as far down the line as his money would carry him. Lots of
the boys had a few bucks on them. They felt pretty silly, with nothing to
eat on, being pushed into buying "tickets" to some town they said they were
heading for.
"Find anything on you?" a man asked me.
"Huh uh." I didn't have any for them to find.
"Listen, see that old boy right in front of you? Pinch 'im. Make 'im
listen to what I'm tellin' him. Ppsssst!"
I punched the man right in front of me. He waited a minute, and then
looked around sideways. "Listen," I said to him.
The other rider commenced to talk, "I just found out"-- then he went
down into a whisper "that this train is gonna pull out. Gonna try ta ditch
us. When I holler, we're all gonna make a break an' swing 'er. This is a
hell of a place to get ditched."
We shook our heads. We all kept extra still, and passed the word along.
Then the train moved backwards a foot or two--and the racket roared all
out across the desert--jarring itself into the notion of traveling again,
and all at once the man at my side hollered as loud as the high-ball whistle
itself, "Go, boy!"
His voice rung out across the cactus.
"Jack rabbit, run!"
Men jumped out from everywhere, from between the cars they'd been
hanging onto, and out from behind the clumps of cactus weeds, and the cops,
nervous, and looking in every direction, stuttered, yelled, and cussed and
snorted, but when the moon looked down at the train steaming out, it saw all
of us sticking on the sides, and on the top, waving, cussing, and thumbing
our noses back in the faces of the "ticket" sellers.
Then it got morning. A cold draft of wind was sucking in around the
sides of the reefer lid. I'd asked the boys during the night how about
closing the lid all of the way down. They told me that you had to keep it
wedged open a little with the handle of the lock, to keep from getting
locked inside. We stuck close together, using each other for sofas and
pillows, and hoped for the sun to get warmer.
I asked them, "Wonder how heavy that big оl' lid is, anyhow?"
"Weighs close to a hunderd pound," the Negro boy said. He was piled in
the corner, stretched out, and his whole body was shaking with the movement
of the train.
"Be a hell of a note if a feller wuz ta git up there, an' start ta
climb out, an' that big lid wuz ta fly down an' ketch his head," another
fellow said. He screwed his face up just thinking about it.
"I knew a boy that lost a arm that way."
"I know a boy that used ta travel around on these dam freights," I
said, "harvestin', an' ramblin' around; an' he was shipped back to his folks
in about a hundred pieces. I seen his face. Wheel had run right across it,
from his ear, across his mouth, over to his other ear. And I don't know, but
every day, ridin' these rattlers, I ketch myself thinkin' about that boy."
" 'Bout as bad a thing as I can think of, is th' two boys they found
starved to death, locked up inside of one of these here ice cars. Figgered
they'd been in there dead 'bout a week or two when they found 'em. One of
'em wasn't more'n twelve or thirteen years old. Jist a little squirt. They
crawled in through the main door, an' pulled it to. First thing they knew, a
brakeman come along, locked th' door, dropped a bolt in th' lock, an' there
they was. Nobody even knew where they's from, or nuthin'. Just as well been
one of your folks or mine." He shook his head, thinking.
The heat got worse as the train sailed along. "Git out on top, an' you
c'n see Old Mexico," somebody said.
"Might as well ta git yer money's worth," I told him, and in a minute
I'd scrambled up the wire net again, and pushed the heavy lid back. The wind
was getting hotter. I could feel the dry, burning sting that let me know
that I was getting a windburn. I peeled off my sweater, and shirt, and
dropped them onto the hot sheet iron, and hooked my arm around an iron
brace, and laid stretched out flat of my back, getting a good Mexican border
sunburn along with my Uncle Sam windburn. I get dark awful quick in the sun
and wind. My skin likes it, and so do I.
The Negro boy clumb up and set down beside me. His greasy cap whipped
in the wind, but he held the bill tight, and it didn't blow off. He turned
the cap around backwards, bill down the back of his neck, and there was no
more danger of losing it. "Some country!" he told me, rolling his eyes
across the sand, cactus, and crooked little bushes, "I guess every part of
th' country's good for somethin', if you c'n jist only find out what!"
"Yeah," I said; "Wonder what this is good for?"
"Rabbits, rattlesnakes, gila monsters, tarantulars, childs of the
earth, scorpions, lizards, coyotes, wild cats, bob cats, grasshoppers,
beetles, bugs, bears, bulls, buffaloes, beef," he said.
"All of that out there?" I asked him.
"No, I was jist runnin' off at th' mouth," he laughed. I knew that he
had learned a lot about the country somewhere, and guessed that he'd beat
this trail more times than one. He moved his shoulders and squared his self
on top of the train. I saw big strong muscles and heavy blood vessels, and
tough, calloused palms of his hands; and I knew that for the most part he
was an honest working man.
"Lookit that ol' rabbit go!" I poked him in the ribs, and pointed
across a ditch.
"Rascal really moves!" he said, keeping up with the jack.
"Watch 'im pick up speed," I said.
"Sonofa bitch. See him clear dat fence?" He shook his head, and smiled
a little bit.
Three or four more rabbits began showing their ears above the black
weeds. Big grayish brown ears lolling along as loose and limber as could be.
"Whole dam family's out!" he told me. "Looks like it! Ma an' pa an' th'
whole fam damly!" I said. 'Purty outfits, ain't they? Rabbits."
He eyed the herd and nodded his head. He was a deep-thinking man. I
knew just about what he was thinking about, too.
"How come you ta come out on top ta ride?" I asked my friend.
"Why not?"
"Oh, I dunno. Said somebody had ta go."
"How'd it come up?" I asked him.
"Well, I sort of asked him for a cigaret, and he said that he wasn't
panhandlin' for nickels to get tobacco for boys like me. I don't want to
have no trouble."
"Boys like you?"
"Yeah, I dunno. Difference 'tween you an' me. He'd let you have
tobacco, 'cause you an' him's th' same color."
"What in th' Goddam hell has that got ta do with ridin' together?" I
asked him.
"He said it was gettin' pretty hot down in th' hatch, you know, said
ever'body was sweatin' a lot. He told me th' further away from each other
that we stay th' better we're gonna get along, but I knew what he meant by
if'
"Wuz that all?"
"Yeah."
"This is one hell of a place ta go ta bringin' up that kinda dam talk,"
I said.
The train drew into El Centre, and stooped and filled her belly,
panting and sweating. The riders could be seen hitting the ground for a walk
and a stretch.
Schwartz, the man with the sack of smoking, come out of his hole,
grumbling and cussing under his breath. "Worst Goddam hole on the train, and
I had to get caught down in it all night!" he told me, climbing past me on
his way to the ground.
"Best ridin' car on th' rail," I said. I was right, too.
"It's th' worst in my book, boy," Schwartz said.
The fourth man from our end of the car crawled out and dropped down to
the cinders. All during the ride, he hadn't mentioned his name. He was a
smiling man, even walking along by his self. When he walked up behind us, he
heard Schwartz say something else about how bad our riding hole was, and he
said in a friendly way, " 'Bout th' easiest riding car I've hung in a many a
day."
"Like hell it is," Schwartz spoke up, stopping, and looking the fellow
in the face. The man looked down mostly at Schwartz's feet and listened to
see what Schwartz would say next. Then Schwartz went on talking at the
mouth, "It might ride easy, but th' Goddam thing stinks--see?"
"Stinks?" The man looked at him funny.
"I said stink, didn't I?" Schwartz ran his hand down in his pocket.
This is a pretty bad thing to do amongst strangers, talking in this tone of
voice and running your hand in your pocket. "You don't have to be afraid,
Stranger, I ain't got no barlow knife," Schwartz told him.
And then the other man looked along the cinders and smiled and said,
"Listen, mister, I wouldn't be the least bit afraid of a whole car load of
fellows just like you, with a knife in each pocket and two in each hand."
"Tough about it, huh?" Schwartz frowned the best he could.
"Ain't nothing tough about me, sort of--but I don't make a practice of
bein' afraid of you nor anybody else." He settled his self a little more
solid on his feet.
It looked like a good fist fight was coming off. Schwartz looked
around, up and down the track. "I bet you a dollar that most of the fellows
riding this train feel just about like I do about riding in a hole with a
dam nigger!"
The Negro boy made a walk toward Schwartz. The smiling man stepped in
between them. The Negro said, "Nobody don't hafta take my part, I can take
up for myself. Ain't nobody gonna call me--"
"Take it easy, Wheeler, take it easy," the other man said. "This guy
wants something to happen. Just likes to hear his guts crawl."
I took the Negro boy by the arm, and we walked along talking it over.
"Nobody else thinks like that goof. Hell, let 'im go an' find another car.
Let 'im go. They'll run him out of every hole on th' train. Don't worry. Ya
cain't help what ya cain't help."
"You know, that's right," Wheeler told me.
He pulled his arm away from me, and straightened his button-up sweater
a little. We turned around and looked back at our friend and Schwartz. Just
like you would shoo a fly or a chicken down the road, our friend was waving
his arms, and shooing Schwartz along. We could hear him awful faint,
yelling, "Go on, you old bastard! Get your gripey ass out of here! And if
you so much as even open your trap to make trouble for anybody riding this
train, I'll ram my fist down your throat!" It was a funny thing. I felt a
little sorry for the old boy, but he needed somebody to teach him a lesson,
and evidently he was in the hands of a pretty good teacher.
We waited till the dust had settled again, and men our teacher friend
trotted up to where we stood. He was waving at bunches of men, and laughing
deep down in his lungs.
'That's that, I reckon," he was saying when he got up to us.
The colored boy said, "I'm gonna run over across th' highway an' buy a
package of smokes. Be back in a minute--" He left us and ran like a desert
rabbit.
There was a faucet dripping water beside a yellow railroad building. We
stopped and drank all we could hold. Washed our hands and faces, and combed
our heads. There was a long line of men waiting to use the water. While we
walked away, holding our faces to the slight breath of air that was moving
across the yards, he asked me, "Say your name was?"
I said, "Woody."
"Mine's Brown. Glad ta meet you, Woody. You know I've run onto this
skin trouble before." He walked along on the cinders.
"Skin trouble. That's a dam good name for it." I walked along beside
him.
"Hard to cure it after it gets started, too. I was born and raised in a
country that's got all kinds of diseases, and this skin trouble is the worst
one of the lot," he told me.
"Bad," I answered him.
"I got sick and tired of that kind of stuff when I was just a kid
growing up at home. You know. God, I had hell with some of my folks about
things like that. But, seems like, little at a time, I'd sort of convince
them, you know; lots of folks I never could convince. They're kinda like the
old bellyache fellow, they cause a lot of trouble to a hundred people, and
then to a thousand people, all on account of just some silly, crazy notion.
Like you can help what color you are. Goddam' it all. Goddamit all. Why
don't they spend that same amount of time and trouble doing something good,
like painting their Goddam barns, or building some new roads?"
The four-time whistle blew, and the train bounced back a little. That
was our sign. Guys walked and ran along the side of the cars, mumbling and
talking, swinging onto their iron ladders, and mounting the top of the
string. Wheeler hadn't come back with the cigarets. I went over the top, and
when I got set down, I commenced yanking my shirt off again, being a big
hand for sunshine. I felt it burning my hide. The train was going too fast
now for anybody to catch it. If Wheeler was on the ground, he's just
naturally going to have a little stay over in El Centre. I looked over the
other edge of the car, and saw his head coming over the rim, and I saw that
he was smiling. Smoke flew like a rain cloud from a new tailor-made cigaret
in his mouth. He scooted over beside me, and flipped ashes into the breeze.
"You get anything to eat?" he said.
I said, "No," that I hadn't got anything.
He reached under his sweater and under his belt and pulled out a brown
paper sack, wet, dripping with ice water, and held it up to me and said,
"Cold pop. I brung a couple. Wait. Here's something to gnaw on with it," and
he handed me a milk candy bar.
"Candy's meal," I told him.
"Sure is; last you all day. That was my last four bits."
"Four bits more'n I got," I joked.
We chewed and drank and talked very little then for a long time.
Wheeler said that he was turning the train back to the railroad company at
Indio. That's the town coming up.
"I know just where to go," Wheeler told me, when the train come to a
quick stop. "Don't you worry 'bout me, boy." Then before I could talk, he
went on saying, "Now listen, I know this track. See? Now, don't you hang on
'er till she gets to Los Angeles, but you leave 'er up here at Colton.
You'll be just about fifty miles from L.A. If you stay on till you come to
L.A., them big dicks'll throw you so far back in that Lincoln Heights jail,
you never will see daylight again. So remember, get off at Colton, hitch on
in to Pasadena, and head out north through Burbank, San Fernando, and stay
right on that 99 to Turlock." Wheeler was climbing over the side. He stuck
out his hand and we shook.
I said, "Good luck, boy, take it easy, but take it."
He said, "Same to you, boy, and I always take it easy, and I always
take it!"
Then be stood still for a few seconds, bending his body over the edge
of the car, and looked at me and said, "Been good to know you!"
Indio to Edom, rich farm lands. Edom to Banning, with the trees popping
up everywhere. Banning to Beaumont, with the fruit hanging all over the
trees, and groceries all over the ground, and people all over everything.
Beaumont to Redlands, the world turned into such a thick green garden of
fruits and vegetables that I didn't know if I was dreaming or not. Coming
out of the dustbowl, the colors so bright and smells so thick all around,
that it seemed almost too good to be true.
Redlands to Colton, A railroad and farming town, full of people that
are wheeling and dealing. Hitch-hikers are standing around thicker than
citizens. The 99 looks friendly, heading west to the coast. I'll see the
Pacific Ocean, go swimming, and flop on the beach. I'll go down to Chinatown
and look around. I'll see the Mexican section. I'll see the whole works.
But, no, I don't know. Los Angeles is too big for me. I'm too little for Los
Angeles. I'll duck Los Angeles and go north by Pasadena, out through
Burbank, like Wheeler told me. I'm against the law, they tell me.
Sign says: "Fruit, see, but don't pick it." Another one reads:
"Fruit--beat it." Another one: "Trespassers prosecuted. Keep Out. Get away
from Here."
Fruit is on the ground, and it looks like the trees have been just too
glad to grow it, and give it to you. The tree likes to grow and you like to
eat it; and there is a sign between you and the tree saying: "Beware The
Mean Dog's Master."
Fruit is rotting on the ground all around me. Just what in the hell has
gone wrong here, anyhow? I'm not a very smart man. Maybe it ought to be this
way, with the crops laying all around over the ground. Maybe they couldn't
get no pickers just when they wanted them, and they just let the fruit go to
the bad. There's enough here on the ground to feed every hungry kid from
Maine to Florida, and from there to Seattle.
A Twenty-nine Ford coupe stops and a Japanese boy gives me a ride. He
is friendly, and tells me all about the country, the crops and vineyards.
"All you have got to do out in this country is to just pour water
around some roots, and yell, 'Grapes!' and next morning the leaves are full
grown, and the grapes are hanging in big bunches, all nice and ready to
pick!"
The little car traveled right along. A haze was running around the
trees, and the colors were different than any that I'd ever seen in my life.
The knotty little oak and iron brush that I'd been used to seeing rolling
with the Oklahoma hills and looking smoky in the hollers, had been home to
my eyes for a long time. My eyes had got sort of used to Oklahoma's beat-up
look, but here, with this sight of fertile, rich, damp, sweet soil that
smelled like the dew of a jungle, I was learning to love another, greener,
part of life. I've tried to keep loving it ever since I first seen it.
The Japanese boy said, "Which way do you plan to go through Los
Angeles?"
"Pasadena? That how ya say if? Then north through Burbank, out that
a-way!"
"If you want to stay with me, you'll be right in the middle of Los
Angeles, but you'll be on a big main highway full of trucks and cars out of
town. Road forks here. Make up your mind quick."
"Keep a-drivin'," I said, craning my neck back to watch the Pasadena
road disappear under the palm trees to the north of us.
We rounded a few hills and knolls, curving in our little jitney, and
all at once, coming over a high place, the lights of Los Angeles jumped up,
running from north to south as far as I could see, and hanging around on the
hills and mountains just as if it was level ground. Red and green neon
flickering for eats, sleeps, sprees, salvation, money made, lent, blowed,
spent. There was an electric sign for dirty clothes, clean clothes, honky
tonky tonks, no clothes, floor shows, gyp-joints, furniture in and out of
homes. The fog was trying to get a headlock on the houses along the high
places, Patches of damp clouds whiffed along the paving in crazy,
disorganized little bunches, hunting some more clouds to work with. Los
Angeles was lost in its own pretty lights and trying to hold out against the
big fog that rolls in from that ocean, and the people that roll in just as
reckless, and rambling, from the country as big as the ocean back East.
It was about seven or eight o'clock when I shook hands with my Japanese
friend, and we wished each other luck. I got out on the pavement at the
Mission Plaza, a block from everything in the world, and listened to the
rumbling of people and smoking of cars pouring fumes out across the streets
and alleys.
"Hungry?" the boy asked me.
"Pretty empty. Just about like an old empty tub,'' I laughed
at him. If he'd offered me a nickel or a dime, I would of took it, I'd of
spent it on a bus to get the hell out of that town. I was empty. But not
starved yet, and more than something to eat, I felt like I wanted to get
outside of the city limits.
"Good luck! Sony I haven't any money on me!" he hollered as he circled
and wheeled away into the big traffic.
I walked along a rough, paved street. To my left, the shimmy old houses
ran up a steep hill, and tried to pretend that they were keeping families of
people in out of the wind and the weather. To my right there was the noise
of the grinding, banging, clanging, and swishing of the dirty railroad
yards. Behind me, south, the big middle of Los Angeles, chasing hamburgers.
Ahead of me, north, the highway ached on, blinking its red and green eyes
and groaning under the heavy load of traffic that it had to carry. Trains
hooted in the low yards close under my right elbow, and scared me out of my
wits.
"How'd ya git outta this town?" I asked a copper.
He looked me over good, and said, "Just follow your nose, boy. You can
read signs. Just keep traveling!''
I walked along the east side of the yards. There was lots of little
restaurants beside the road, where the tourists, truck drivers, and
railroaders dropped in for a meal. Hot coffee steamed up from the cups along
the counters, and the smell of meat frying leaked out through the doors. It
was a cold night. Drops of steamy moisture formed on the windows, and it
blurred out the sight of the people eating and drinking.
I stopped into a little, sawed-off place, and the only person in sight,
away back, was an old Chinaman. He looked up at me with his gray beard, but
didn't say a single word.
I stood there a minute, enjoying the warmth. Then I walked back to
where he was, and asked him, "Have ya got anything left over that a man
could do some work for?"
He set right still, reading his paper, and then looked up and said, "I
work. Hard all day. Every day. I got big bunch people to feed. We eat things
left over. We do work."
"No job?" I asked him.
"No job. We do job. Self."
I hit the breeze again and tried two or three other places along the
road. Finally, I found an old gray-headed couple humped up in front of a
loop-legged radio, listening to some of the hollering being done by a lady
name Amy Semple Temple, or something like that. I woke the old pair up out
of their sermon on hell fire and hot women, and asked them if they had some
work to do for a meal. They told me to grab some scalding hot water and mop
the place down. After three times over the floors, tables, kitchen, and
dishes, I was wrapping myself around a big chicken dinner, with all of the
trimmings.
The old lady handed me a lunch and said, "Here's some-thing extra to
take with you--don't let John know about it."
And as I walked out the door again, listening to the whistle of the
trains getting ready to whang out, John walked over and handed me a quarter
and said, "Here's somethin' ta he'p ya on down th' road. Don't let th' оl'
lady know."
A man dressed in an engineer's cap and striped overhalls told me that a
train was making up right at that point, and would pull out along about four
in the morning. It was now about midnight, so I dropped into a coffee joint
and took an hour sipping at a cup. I bought a pint of pretty fair red port
wine with the change, and stayed behind a signboard, drinking wine to keep
warm.
A Mexican boy walked up on me and said, "Pretty cold iss it not? Do you
want a smoke?"
I lit up one of his cigarets, and slipped him the remains of the wine
jug. He took about half of the leavings, and looked at me between gulps,
"Ahhhh! Warms you up, no?"
"Kill it. I done had my tankful," I told him, and heard the bubbles
play a little song that quit when the wine was all downed.
"Time's she gittin' ta be? Know?" I said to him. "Four o'clock or
after," he said. "When does that Fresno freight run?" I asked him. ''Right
now," he said.
I ran out into the yards, jumping dark rails, heavy switches, and
darting among the blind cars. A string of black ones were moving backwards
in the wrong direction. I mounted the side and went over the top, and down
the other side, and took a risk on scrambling between another string at the
hitch. I could just barely see, it was so dark. The cars were so blended
into the night. But, all at once, I looked up within about a foot of my
face, and saw a blur, and a light, and a blur, and a light, and I knew that
here was one going my way. I watched the light come along between the cars,
and finally spotted an open top car, which was easier to see; and grabbed
the ladder, and jumped over into a load of heavy cast-iron machinery. I laid
down in the end of the car, and rested.
The train pulled along slow for a while. I ducked as close up behind
the head end of the car as I could to break the wind. Pretty soon the old
string got the kinks jerked out of her, and whistled through a lot of little
towns. Then we hit a good fifty for about an hour, and started up some
pretty tough grade. It got colder higher up. The fog turned into a drizzle,
and the drizzle into a slow rain.
I imagined a million things bouncing along in the dark. A quick tap of
the air brakes to slow the train down, and the hundred tons of heavy
machinery would shift its weight all over me, I felt so soft and little. I
had felt so tough and big just a few minutes ago.
The lonesome whip of the wind sounded even more lonesome when the big
engine joined in on the whistling. The wheels hummed a song, and the weather
got colder. We started gaining altitude almost like an airplane. I pulled
myself up into a little ball and shook till my bones ached all over. The
weather didn't pay any more attention to my clothes than if I didn't have
them on. My muscles drew up into hard, leathery strings that hurt. I kept a
little warmer by remembering people I'd known, how they looked, faces and
all, and all about the warm desert, and cactus and sunshine growing
everywhere; picturing in my mind something friendly and free, something to
sort of blot out the wind and the freezing train.
On a big slope, that went direct into Bakersfield, we stopped on a
siding to let the mail go by. I got off and walked ten or fifteen cars down
the track, creaking like an eighty-year-old rocking chair. I had to walk
slow along the steep cinder bank, gradually getting the use of myself back
again.
I was past the train when the engineer turned the brakes loose, give
her the gun, and started off.
I'd never seen a train start up this fast before. Most trains take a
little time chugging, getting the load swung into motion. But, setting on
this long straight slope, she just lit out. Running along the side, I just
barely managed to catch it. I had to take a different car as mine was
somewhere down the line. In a few minutes the train was making forty miles
an hour, then fifty, then sixty, down across the strip of country where the
mountains meet the desert south of Bakersfield. The wind blew and the
morning was frosty and cold. Between the two cars, it was freezing. I
managed to mount to the top, and pull a reefer lid open. I looked in, and
saw the hole was filled with fine chips of new ice.
I held on with all of my strength, and crawled over and opened up
another lid. It was packed with chipped ice, too. I was too near froze to
try the jump from one car to the next, so I crawled down the ladder between
two cars--sort of a wind-break--and held on.
My hands froze stiff around the handle of the ladder, but they were
getting too cold and weak to hold on much longer. I listened below to five
or six hundred railroad wheels, clipping the rails through the morning
frost, and felt the windy ice from the refrigerator car that I was hanging
onto.
The fingers of one hand slipped from around the handle. I spent twenty
minutes or so trying to fish an old rag out of my pocket Finally I got it
wound around my hands and, by blowing my breath inside the cloth for a few
minutes, seemed to be getting them a little warmer.
The weather gained on me, though, and my breath turned into thick
frosty ice all over my handkerchief, and my hands started freezing worse
than ever. My finger slid loose again, and I remembered the tales of the
railroaders, people found along the tracks, no way of telling who they were.
If I missed my hold here, one thing was sure, I'd never know what hit
me, and I'd never slide my feet under that good eating table full of hot
square meals at the big marble house of my rich aunt.
The sun looked warmer as it came up, but the desert is cold when it is
clear early in the morning, and the train fanned such a breeze that the sun
didn't make much difference.
That was the closest to the 6x3 that I've ever been. My mind ran back
to millions of things--my whole life was brought up to date, and all of the
people I knew, and all that they meant to me. And, no doubt, my line of
politics took on quite a change right then and there, even though I didn't
know I was getting educated at the time.
The last twenty miles into the Bakersfield yards was the hardest work,
and worst pain, that I ever run onto; that is, of this particular brand.
There are pains and work of different sorts, but this was a job that my life
depended on, and I didn't have even one ounce to say about it. I was just a
little animal of some kind swinging on for my life, and the pain was not
being able to do anything about it.
I left the train long before it stopped, and hit the ground running and
stumbling. My legs worked more like toys than like my real ones. But the sun
was warm in Bakersfield, and I drank all of the good water I could soak up
from a faucet outside, and walked over to an old shack that was out of use
in the yards, and keeled over on the cinders in the sun. I woke up several
hours later, and my train had gone on without me.
Two men said that another train was due out in a few minutes, so I kept
an eye run along the tracks, and caught it when it pulled out. The sun was
warm now, and there were fifty men lined up along the top of the train,
smoking, talking, waving at the folks in cars on the highway, and keeping
quiet.
Bakersfield on into Fresno. Just this side of Fresno, the men piled off
and walked through the yards, planning to meet the train again when it come
out the north end. We took off by ones and twos and tried to get hold of
something to eat. Some of the men had a few nickels, some a dollar or two
hid on them, and others made the alleys knocking on the back doors of
bakeries, greasy-spoon joints, vegetable stands. The meal added up to a
couple or three bites apiece, after we'd all pitched ours in. It was
something to fill your guts.
I saw a sign tacked up in the Fresno yards that said: Free Meal &
Nights Lodging. Rescue Mission.
Men looked at the sign and asked us, "Anybody here need ta be rescued?"
"From what?" somebody hollered.
"All ya got ta do is ta go down there an' kneel down an' say yer
prayers, an' ya git a free meal an' a flop!" somebody explained.
"Yeah? Prayers? Which one o' youse boys knows any t'ing about any
prayers?" an Eastern-sounding man yelled out.
"I'd do it, if I wuz just hungery 'nuff! I'd say 'em some prayers!"
"I don't hafta do no prayin' ta get fed!" a hard looker laughed out. He
was poking a raw onion whole into his mouth, tears trickling down his jaws.
"Oh, I don't know," a quieter man answered him, "I sometimes believe in
prayin'. Lots of folks believes in prayin' before they go out to work, an'
others pray before they go out to fight. An' even if you don't believe in a
God up on a cloud, still, prayin's a pretty good way to get your mind
cleared up, or to get the nerve that it takes to do anything. People pray
because it makes them think serious about things, and, God or no God, it's