all that most of them know how to do." He was a friendly man with whitish
hair, and his easy temper sounded in his voice. It was a thinking voice.
" 'Course," a big Swede told us, "we justa kid along. These monkeys
dun't mean about halfa what they say. Now, like, you take me, Swede, I
prayed long time ago. Usta believe in it strong. Then, whoof, an' a lot of
other things happen that knock my prop out from under me, make me a railroad
bum, an'--I just forget how to pray an' go church."
A guy that talked more and faster said, "I think it's dam crooks that
cause folks like us to be down and out and hungry, worried about finding
jobs, worried about our folks, and them a-worrying about us."
"Last two or three years, I been sorta thinkin' long them lines--an' it
looks like I keep believin' in somethin'; I don't know exactly, but it's in
me, an' in you, an' in ever' dam one of us." This talker was a young man
with a smooth face, thick hair that was bushy, and a fairly honest look
somewhere about him. "An' if we c'n jist find out how ta make good use of
it, we'll find out who's causin' us alla th' trouble in the' world, like
this Hitler rat, an' git ridda them, an' then not let anybody be outta work,
or beat down an' wonderin' where their next meal's a comin' from, by God,
with alla these crops an' orchards bubblin' up around here!"
"If God was ta do what's right," a heavy man said, "he'd give all of
these here peaches an' cherries, an' oranges, an' grapes, an'
stuff to eat, to th' folks that are hungry. An' for a hungry man to pray an'
try to tell God how to run his business, looks sort of backwards, plumb
silly to me. Hell, a man's got two hands an' a mind of his own, an' feet an'
legs to take him where he wants to go; an' if he sees something wrong with
the world, he'd ought to get a lot of people together, an' look up in th'
air an' say, Hey, up there, God, I'm--I mean, we're goin' to fix this!"
Then I put my three cents worth in, saying, "I believe that when ya
pray, you're tryin' ta get yer thinkin' straight, tryin' ta see
what's wrong with th' world, an' who's ta blame fer it. Part of it is
crooks, crooked laws, an' jist dam greedy people, people that's afraid of
this an' afraid of that. Part of it's all of this, an' part of
it's jist dam shore our own fault."
"Hell, from what you say, you think we're to blame for everybody here
being on the freights?" This young traveler reared his head back and laughed
to himself, chewing a mouthful of sticky bread.
"I dunno, fellers, just to be right real frank with you. But
it's our own fault, all right, hell yes. It's our own personal
fault if we don't talk up, 'er speak out, 'er somethin'--I ain't any too
clear on it."
An old white-headed man spoke close to me and said, "Well, boys, I was
on the bum, I suppose, before any of you was born into this world."
Everybody looked around mostly because he was talking so quiet, interrupting
his eating. "All of this talking about what's up in the sky, or down in
hell, for that matter, isn't half as important as what's right here, right
now, right in front of your eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids
hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has just got to have more faith in one
another, believe in each other. There's a spirit of some kind we've all got.
That's got to draw us all together."
Heads nodded. Faces watched the old man. He didn't say any more.
Toothless for years, he was a little bit slow finishing up his piece of old
bread.
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
"Hey! Hey! Train's pullin' out in about ten minnits! This a way!
Ever'body!"
We got rolling again. The high peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains
jumped up their heads in the east. Snow patches white in the sun. There was
the green valley of the San Joaquin River, rich, good-smelling; hay meadows
waving with thick, juicy feed that is life; people working, walking bending
down, carrying heavy loads. Cars from farms waited at the cross-roads, some
loaded down with wooden crates, and boxes, and some with tall tin cans of
cow's milk. The air was as sweet as could be, and like the faint smell of
blossom honey.
Before long we hit a heavy rain. A lot of us crawled into an empty car.
Wet and yelling, we hollered and sung till the sun went down, and it got
wetter and dark. New riders swung into our car. We curled up on strips of
tough brown wrapping paper, pulling it over us like blankets, and using our
sweaters and coats for pillows.
Somebody pulled the doors shut, and we rambled on through the night.
When I woke up again, the train had stopped, and everything was in a wild
hustle and a bustle. Guys snaking me, and saying in my ear, "Hey! Wake up!
Tough town! Boy! This is far's she goes!"
"Tough bulls! Gotta git th' hell outta here. C'mon, wake up."
I rousted myself out, pulling my wet sweater over my head. The train
was falling heavy as about twenty-five or thirty of us ganged up in front of
a Chinese bean joint; and when a certain big, black patrol car wheeled
around a corner, and shot its bright spotlight into our faces, we brushed
our clothing, straightened our hats and neck ties, and in order to act like
legal citizens, we marched into the Chinaman's bean joint.
Inside, it was warm. The joint contained seven warped stools. And two
level-headed Chinese proprietors, "Chili bean! Two chili bean! Seven chili
bean!" I heard one say through the hole in the wall to the cook in the back.
And from the kitchen, "Me gotcha! All chili bean!"
I was going through the process, not only of starving, but also of
being too hot and too cold about fifty times in the last forty-eight hours.
I felt dizzy and empty and sick. The peppery smell of the hot chili and
beans made me feel worse.
I waited about an hour and a half, until ten minutes before the
Chinaman locked the door, and then I said, "Say, friend, will you gimme a
bowl of yer chili an' beans fer this green sweater? Good sweater."
"You let me slee sletee."
"Okay--here--feel. Part of it's all wool."
"Chili bean you want this sletee for?"
"Yeah. Cuppa coffee, too."
"Price. You go up."
"Okay. No coffee."
"No. No chili bean."
"Good sweater," I told him.
"Okay. You keep. You see, I got plentee sletee. You think good sletee,
you keep sletee. My keep chili bean.''
I set there on the stool, hating to go out into the cold night and
leave that good warm stove. I made a start for the door, and went past three
men finishing off their first or second bowl of chili and beans. The last
man was a long, tall, irony-looking Negro. He kept eating as I walked past,
never turned his face toward me, but told me, "Let me see yo sweatah. Heah's
yo dime. Lay th' sweatah down theah on th' stool. Bettah hurry an' ordah yo'
chili. Joint'll shut down heah in a minute."
I dropped the sweater in a roll on the stool, and parked myself on the
next stool, and a bowl of red-hot, extra hot, double hot chili beans slid
down the counter and under my nose.
It was long about two o'clock when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, and
the rain was getting harder, meaner, and colder, and blowing stiffer down
the line. A friendly looking cop, wearing a warm overcoat, walked around the
corner. Three or four of the boys stood along under the porch, so as to keep
out of the drift of the rain. The cop said, "Howdy, howdy, boys. Time to
call it a night." He smiled like a man doing an awful good job.
"What time yuh got?" a Southern boy asked him, dripping wet.
"Bed time."
"Oh."
"Say, mister," I said to him, "listen, we're jist a bunch of guys on
th' road, tryin' ta git somewhere where ther's a job of work of some kind.
Come in on that there freight. Rainin', an' we ain't got no place ta sleep
in outta th' weather. I wuz jist wonderin' if you'd let us sleep here in yer
jail house--jist fer tonight."
"You might," he said, smiling, tickling all of the boys.
"Where's yer jail at?" I asked him.
"It's over across town," he answered.
Then I said, "Reckon ya could put us up?"
And he said, "I certainly can."
"Boy, man, you're a pretty good feller. We're ready, ain't we, guys?"
"I'm ready."
"Git inside out of this bad night."
"Me, too."
The same answer came from everybody.
"Then, see," I said to the cop, "if anything happens, they'd, you'd
know it wuzn't us done it."
And then he looked at us like a politician making a speech, and said,
"You boys know what'd happen if you went over there to that jail to sleep
tonight?"
We said, "Huh uh." "No." "What?"
"Well, they'd let you in, all right, not for just one night, but for
thirty nights and thirty days. Give you an awful good chance to rest up out
on the County Farm, and dry your clothes by a steam radiator every night.
They'd like you men so much, they'd just refuse to let you go. Just keep you
for company over there." He had a cold, sour smile across his face by now.
"Let's go, fella." Somebody back of me jerked my arm.
Without talking back, I savvied, and walked away. Most of the men had
left. Only six or eight of us in a little bunch. "Where we gonna sleep,
anybody know?" I asked them.
"Just keep quiet and follow us."
The cop walked away around the corner.
"And don't ever let a smiling cop fool yuh," a voice in back of me told
us. "That wasn't no real smile. Tell by his face an' his eyes."
"Okay, I learnt somethin' new," I said, "But where are we gonna sleep
at?"
"We gotta good warm bed, don't you worry. Main thing is just to walk,
an' don't talk.''
Across a boggy road, rutty, and full of mudholes, over a sharp
barb-wire fence, through a splashing patch of weeds that soaked our clothes
with cold water, down some crunching cinders, we followed the shiny rails
again in the rain about a half a mile. This led us to a little green shack,
built low to the ground like a doghouse. We piled in at a square window, and
lit on a pile of sand.
"Godamighty!"
"Boy, howdy!"
"Ain't this fine?"
"Warmer'n hell."
"Lemme dig a hole. I wanta dig a hole, an' jist bury myself. I ain't no
live man. I'm dead. I been dead a long, long time. I'm gonna jist dig me a
grave, an' crawl off in it, an' pull my sand in on top of me. Gonna sleep
like old Rip Van Twinkle, twenty, thirty, or fifty dam years. An' when I
wake up, I want things ta be changed around better. When I wake up in th'
mornin'--" And I was tired and wet, covering up in the sand, talking. I
drifted off to sleep. Loose and limber, I felt everything in the world just
slipping out from under me and fading away. I woke up before long with my
feet burning and stinging. Everything was sailing and mixed up backwards,
but when they got straight I saw a man in a black suit bending over me with
a big heavy club. He was beating the bottoms of my feet.
"You birds get up, and get your ass out of here! Get up. Goddam you!"
There were three men in black suits, and the black Western hats that
told you so plain that you was dealing with a railroad deputy.
They had come in through a little narrow door and were herding us out
the same. "Get out of here, and don't you come back! If you show your head
back in this sandhouse, you'll go to the judge! Ninety days on that pea farm
would do you loafers good!"
Grabbing shoes, hats, little dirty bundles, the migratory workers were
chased out of their bed of clean sand. Back outside, the rain was keeping
up, and in the V-shaped beam of the spotlights from the patrol car you could
see that even the rain was having trouble.
"Git on outta town there!" "Keep travelin'!" "Don't you even look
back!" "Start walkin'!" We heard low, grumbling voices coming from the car
behind us. Heard, too, the quiet motor start up and the gears shifted as the
car rolled along back of us. It followed us about a half a mile, rain and
mud. It drove us across a cow pasture.
From the car, one of the watchmen yelled, "Don't you show up in Tracy
again tonight! You'll be dam good an' sorry if you do! Keep walking!"
The car lights cut a wide, rippling circle in the dark, and we knew
that they had turned around and went back to town. The roar of their exhaust
purred and died away.
We'd marched out across the cow pasture, smiling and yelling, "Hep!
Hep! Whattaya say, men? Hep! Hep! Hep!"
Now we stood in the rain and cackled like chickens, absolutely lost and
buffaloed. Never before had I had anything quite so dam silly happen to me.
Our clothes were on crooked and twisted; shoes full of mud and gravel. Hair
soaking wet, and water running down our faces. It was a funny sight to see
human beings in any such a shape. Wet as we could get, dirty and muddy as
the ground, we danced up and down through puddles, ran around in wide
circles and laughed our heads off. There is a stage of hard luck that turns
into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in
laughing that turns into fight.
"Okay. Hey, fellers! C'mere. Tell ya what we're gonna do. We're a-gonna
all git together, see, an' go walkin' right back into town, an' go back to
sleep in that sandhouse ag'in. What say? Who's with me?" a tall, slippery,
stoop-shouldered boy was telling us.
"Me!"
"Me."
"Same fer me!"
"Whatever you guys does, I'll stick."
"Hell, I c'n give that carload of bulls a machine gun apiece, an' whip
th' whole outfit with my bare hands!" an older man said.
"But, no. We don't aim ta cause no trouble. Ain't gonna be no
fightin'."
"I'd just like to get one good poke at that fat belly."
"Get that outta your head, mister."
Just walking back toward town, talking.
"Hey. How many of us here?"
'Two. Four. Six. Eight."
"Mebbe we'd better split up in twos. Too plain to see a whole big
bunch. We'll go into town by pairs. If you make it back to the old
blacksmith shop right there by the old Chinese bean joint, whistle once,
real long. This way, if two gets caught, the rest'll get away."
"What'll we do if we get caught an' run in jail?"
"Whistle twice, real short," and under his breath he showed us how to
whistle.
"Can everybody here whistle?"
"I can."
Four of us said yes. So one whistler and one expert listener was put
into each pair.
"Now, remember, if you see the patrol car's gonna ketch yuh, stop
before it gits yuh, an' whistle twice, real short an' sweet."
"Okay. First pair take that street yonder. Second pair, drop over a
block. Third couple, down the paved highway; and us, last pair, will walk
back down this same cow trail that we got run out of town on. Remember,
don't start no trouble with them coppers. Loaded dice, boys; you cain't win.
Just got to try to outsmart 'em a little."
Back through the slick mud, walking different ways, we cussed and
laughed. In a few minutes, there came a long, low whistle, and we knew the
first pair had made it to the blacksmith shop. Then, in a minute or so,
another long one. We came in third, and I let out a whistle that was one of
California's best. The last pair walked in and we stood under the wide eaves
of the shop, watching the water drip off of the roof, missing our noses by
about three inches. We had to stand up straight against the wall to stay out
of the rain.
The sandhouse was just across the street and up a few steps.
"Lay low."
"Duck."
"Car."
"Hey! Ho! Got us ag'in!"
The new model black sedan coasted down a side street, out over in our
direction real quick, and turned two spots on us. We held our hands up to
keep the lights from blinding us. Nobody moved. We thought maybe they'd made
a mistake. But, as the car rolled up to within about fifty feet of us, we
knew that we were caught, and got ready to be cussed out, and took to the
can.
A deputy opened his front door, turned off one spotlight, and shot his
good flashlight into our faces. One at a time, he looked us over. We blinked
back at him, like a herd of young deer, but nobody was to say afraid.
"Come here, you--" he said in a hard, imitation voice.
The light was in my face. I thought it was shining in everybody's, so I
didn't move.
"Hey, mister. Come over here, please." He was a big heavy man, and his
voice had a nice clank to it, like cocking back the hammer of a rifle.
I shook the light out of my eyes and said, "Who?"
"You."
I turned around to the men with me and told them loud enough for the
cops to hear it, "Be right back, fellers."
I heard the patrol man turn around to the other cops and kid them about
something, and as I walked up they were all laughing and saying, "Yeah. He's
th' one. He's one. One of them things."
The radio in the car was turned on a Hollywood station, and a lady's
voice was singing, telling what all of the pretty girls were thinking about
the war situation.
"I'm a what?" I asked the cop.
"You know, one of them 'things.' "
"Well, boys, ya got me there. I don't even know what one of them
'things' is."
"We know what you are."
"Well," I scratched my head in the rain, "maybe you're smarter than I
am; 'cause I never did know jist what I am."
"We do."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"What am I then?"
"One of them labor boys."
"Labor?"
"Yeah, labor."
"I think I know what labor is--" I smiled a little.
"What is it?"
"Labor's work."
"Maybe, you're one of them trouble causers."
"Listen, fellers, I jist rolled inta this town from Oklahoma, I mean
Texas, an' I'm on my way to Sonora to stay with my relatives."
"Relatives?"
"Yeah," I said. "Aunt. Cousins. Whole bunch. Well off."
"You're going to stay in Sonora when you get there, aren't you?" A
different, higher-sounding voice wheezed out from the back seat.
"I'm gonna settle down up there in them mountains, an' try ta go ta
work."
"Kinda work, sonny?"
"Painter. Signs. Pictures. Houses. Anything needs paintin'."
"So you don't go around causing trouble, then?"
"I'm runnin' inta a right smart of it. I don't always cause it."
"You don't like trouble, do you, mister painter?"
"Oh, I ain't so 'fraid no more. Sorta broke in by this time."
"Ever talk to anybody about working?"
"Train loads of 'em. That's what ever'body's talkin' 'bout, an' ridin'
in all of this bad weather for. Shore, we ain'ta 'fraid of work. We ain't
panhandlers, ner stemwinders, jest a bunch of guys out tryin' ta do th' best
we can, an' had a little streak of hard luck, that's all."
"Eyer talk to the boys about wages?"
"Wages? Oh, I talk to ever'body about somethin'. Religion. Weather.
Picture shows. Girls. Wages."
"Well, mister painter, it's been good to get acquainted with you. It
seems like you are looking for work and anxious to get on up the road toward
Sonora. We'll show you the road and see that you get out onto the main
highway."
"Boy, that'll be mighty fine."
"Yes. We try to treat an honest working man right when he comes through
our little town here, either by accident or on purpose. We're just a little,
what you'd call, 'cautious,' you understand, because there is trouble going
around, and you never know who's causing it, until you ask. We will have to
ask you to get out in front of this car and start walking down this highway.
And don't look back--"
All of the cops were laughing and joking as their car drove along
behind me. I heard a lot of lousy jokes. I walked with my head ducked into
the rain, and heard cars of other people pass. They yelled smart cracks at
me in the rain.
After about a mile, they yelled for me to halt. I stopped and didn't
even turn around. "You run a lot of risk tonight, breaking our orders."
"Muddy out there!"
"You know, we tried to treat you nice. Turned you loose. Gave you a
chance. Then you broke orders."
"Yeah, I guess I did."
"What made you do it?"
"Well, ta be right, real truthful with you guys, we got pastures just
about like these back in Oklahoma, but we let the cows go out there and eat.
If people wants to go out there in the cow pasture, we let them go, but if
it's rainin' an' a cold night like this, we don't drive or herd anybody out
there."
Cop said, "Keep travelin'."
I said, "I wuz born travelin'. Good-bye!"
The car and the lights whirled around in the road, and the tail light
and the radio music blacked out down the road in the rain.
I walked a few steps and seen it was too rainy and bad to see in the
fog, so I went to thinking about some kind of a place to lay down out of the
weather and go to sleep. I walked up to the headstones of a long cement
bridge that bent across a running river. And down under the bridge I found a
couple of dozen other people curled up, grinding their teeth in the mist and
already dreaming. The ground was loose dirt and was awful cold and damp, but
not wet or muddy, as the rain couldn't hit us under the concrete. I seen men
paired up snoring together, some rolled in newspapers and brown wrapping
paper, others in a chilled blanket, one or two here and yonder all snoozed
up in some mighty warm-looking bedrolls. And for a minute, I thought, I'm a
dam fool not to carry my own bedroll; but then again, in the hot daytime a
heavy bedroll is clumsy, no good, and in the way, and besides, people won't
give you a ride if you're lugging an old dirty bundle. So here in the
moisture of the wind whiffing under the bridge, I scanned around for
something to use for a mattress, for a pillow, and for a virgin wool
blanket. I found a soaked piece of wrapping paper which I shook the water
off of, and spread on the dirt for my easy-rider mattress; but I didn't find
a pillow, nor anything to use as a blanket. I drew my muscles down into just
a little pile of meat and bones, and shivered on the paper for about an
hour. My breath swishing, and teeth hitting together, woke a big
square-built man up off his bedroll. He listened at me for a minute, and
then asked me, "Don't you know your shiverin's keepin' everybody awake?" I
said, "Y-y-y-es-s-s, I sup-p-pose it is; I ain't gettin' no sleep, on
account of it." Then he said, "You sound like a snare drum rattlin' that
paper; c'mon over here an' den up with me."
I rolled across the ground and peeled off my wet clothes, my gobby
shoes, and stacked them up in a pile; and then he turned his wool blankets
back and said, "Hurry, jump in before the covers get wet!" I was still
shivering and shaking so hard it jerked my whole body into kinks, and
cramped me all over so that I couldn't move my lips to say a word. I scooted
my feet down inside and then pulled the itchy covers all up over my head.
"You feel like a bucket of cold frogs,'' the man told me. "Where've you
been?"
I kept on shaking, without saying a word.
"Cops walk you?" he asked me. And I just nodded my head with my back to
him.
"I'm not minding this weather very much; I'm on my way to where it will
be a hell of a lot colder than this. I don't know about the cops, but, I'll
be in Vancouver by this time next week; and I know it'll freeze the horns
off of a brass bulldog up 'there. Lumberjack. Timber. I guess you're too
cold to talk much, huh?" And his last words blotted and soaked out across
the swampy river bottom and faded away somewhere in the fog horn and red and
green lights on a little boat that pounded down the waters.
It was hard for me to walk next morning early on account of my legs
being drawn like torn leather. My thighs felt like the gristle was tore
loose from my bones, and my knees ached and jittered in the joints. I shook
hands with the lumberjack and we went our opposite ways. I never did get a
real close look at him in the clouds; and when he walked away, his head and
shoulders just sort of swum away in the fog of the morning. I had made
another friend I couldn't see. And I walked along thinking, Well, now, I
don't know if I'll ever see that man again or not, but I'll see a lot of men
a lot of places and I'll wonder if that could be him.
Before long the sun and the fog had fought and flounced around so long
on the river banks the highway run along that it didn't seem like there was
enough room in the trees and reeds and canebrakes for the sun or the clouds,
either one, to really win out; so the clouds from the ground got mad and
raised up off of the earth to grab a-hold of the sunrays, and fight it out
higher up in the air. I caught a ride on a truckload of grape stakes and
heard a hard-looking truck driver cuss the narrow, bad roads that cause you
to get killed so quick; and then found myself wheeling along with a deaf
farmer for an hour or two, an Italian grape grower in debt all of the time,
a couple of cowboys trying to beat their way to a new rodeo; and before the
day was wore very slick, I was walking down the streets of Sonora, the queen
of the gold towns, in the upper foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Sonera's crooked, narrow streets bent and run about as wild as some of
the prospectors and their burros, and I thought as I pushed my way along the
tight alleys called streets, that maybe the whole town had been laid out by
just following the tracks of a runaway prospector. Little houses poking
their bellies out over the curbs and sidewalks, and streets so steep I had
to throw myself in low gear to pull them. Down again so steep, I figured,
that most of Sonora's citizens come and went by way of parachutes. Creeks
and rocky rivers guggling along under the streets, where the gambling dives
and dram joints flush their mistakes down the drains, where, on down the
creek a-ways, the waters are planned by hungry gold-bugs.
I walked along with my address in my hand, seeing herds of cowboys,
miners, timber men, and hard-working, pioneer-looking women and kids from
the mountains around; and saw, too, the fake cowboys, the drug-store
calibre, blazing shirts of all bright colors along the streets, and
crippling along bowlegged in boots never meant to be worn on the hard
concrete. And the honest working people stand along in bunches and laugh
under their breath when the fake dudes buckle past.
In the smell of the high pines and the ripple of the nugget creeks,
Sonora, an old town now, is rated as California's second richest person.
Pasadena is first, and looks it, but what fools you in Sonora is that it
looks like one of the poorest. I walked up the main street loaded to the
brim with horses, hay, children playing, jallopy cars of the ranchers and
working folks around, buggies of the Indians, wagons loaded with groceries
for grubstake, town cars, limousines, sporty jobs, the big V-16's and the
V-Twelves. The main street crooks pretty sharp right in the business end,
and crooks another time or two trying to get out of the first crook. The
street is so narrow that people sneeze on the right-hand side and apologize
to the ones on the left.
I asked a fireman asleep on a bench, "Could you tell me where bouts
this address is?"
He disturbed, without scaring, a fly on his eyelid, and told me, 'It's
that big rock house right yonder up that hill. No danger of missing it, it
covers the whole hill."
I thanked him and started walking up a three-block flight of rock steps
thinking, Boy, I'm as dirty an' ragged an' messed up as one feller can git.
Knees outta my britches. My face needs about a half a dozen shaves. Hands
all smeary. Coal dust an' soot all over me. I don't know if I'd even know
myself in a lookin-glass. Shirt all tore to hell, an' my shoes stinkin' with
sweat. That's a hell of a big rock house up there. Musta took a mighty lot
of work ta build it. I'd go back down in town to a fillin' station an' wash
an' clean up, but gosh, I'm so empty an' hungry, so tremblin' weak, I don't
know, I couldn't pull it back up these long steps again. I'll go on up.
A black iron fence and a cedar hedge fenced the whole yard off. I stood
at the gate with the letter in my hand, looking up and down, back down at
the town and the people, and then through the irons at the mansion. I wiped
the sweat off of my face on the arm of my shirt, and unlocked the gate and
walked through. Wide green grass lawn that made me think of golf courses I'd
caddied on. Mowed and petted and smoothed and kept, the yard had a look like
it had just got back from a barber shop. The whiff of the scrub cedar and
middle-size pine, on top of the flowers that jumped up all around, made it
smell good and healthy, like a home for crippled children. But the whole
place was so still and so hushed and quiet, that I was thinking maybe
everybody was gone off somewhere. When I walked the rock walk a little more,
the whole house got plainer to see: gray native stones from the hills
around, flagstone porches and sandrock columns holding up the roof; windows
so high and wide that the sun got lost trying to find a way to shine through
all of them big thick drapes and curtains. Iron braces in the windows built
to keep the nice, good, healthy sunshine out for a long, long time. Big
double doors with iron cross braces, handles like the entrance to a funeral
parlor, locks bigger and stouter than any jail I'd ever slept in.
I'll walk quieter now, because this porch makes a lot of noise, and a
little noise, I bet, would scare all of these trees and flowers to death.
This place is so quiet. I hope I don't scare nobody when I knock on this
door. How in the dickens do you operate this knocker, anyhow? Oh. Pick it
up. Let it just fall. It knocks. Gosh. Reckon it'll bring any watchdogs out
on me? Hope not. Dern. I don't know. I'm just thinking. This old rambling's
pretty bad in some places, but, I don't know, I never did see it
get this quiet and this lonesome.
Reckon I rung that door knocker right? Guess I did. Things so still
here on this porch, I can hear my blood run, and my thoughts grazing around
in my head.
The door opened back.
My breath went away in the tips of the pines where the cones hang on as
long as they can, and then fall down to the ground to get covered up in the
loose dirt and some day make a new tree.
"How do you do," a man said.
"Ah, yeah, good day." I was gulping for air.
"May I do something for you?"
"Me? No. Nope. I wuz jist lookin' fer a certain party by this name." I
handed him the envelope.
He was wearing a nice suit of clothes. An old man, thin-faced, and
straight shoulders, gray hair, white cuffs, black tie. The air from the
house sifted past him on its way out the door, and there was a smell that
made me know that the air had been hemmed up inside that house for a long
time. Hemmed up. Walled in. Covered away from the moon and out of the reach
of the sun. Cut away from the drift of the leaves and the wash of the
waters. Hid out from the going and the coming of the people, cut loose from
the thoughts of the crowds on the streets. Lazy in there, sleepy in there,
cool and pale and shady in there, dark and dreary in the book case there,
and the wind under the beds hadn't been disturbed in twenty-three years. I
know, I know, I'm on the right hill, but I'm at the wrong house. This wasn't
what I hung that boxcar for, nor hugged that iron ladder for, nor bellied
down on top of that high rolling freight train for. The train was laughing
and cussing and alive with human people. The cops was alive and pushing me
down the road in the rain. The bridge was alive with friends under it. The
river was alive and arguing with the fog and the fog was wrestling the wind
and boxing the sun.
I remember a frog they found in Okemah, once when they tore the old
bank building down. He'd been sealed up in solid concrete for thirty-two
years, and had almost turned to jelly. Jelly. Blubbery. Soft and oozy.
Slicky and wiggly. I don't want to turn to no jelly. My belly is hard from
hard traveling, and I want more than anything else for my belly to stay hard
and stay wound up tight and stay alive.
"Yes. You are at the right house. This is the place you are looking
for." The little butler stood aside and motioned for me to walk in.
"I--er--ah--think, mebbe I made a mistake--"
"Oh, no." He was talking just about the nicest I'd ever heard anybody
talk, like maybe he'd been practicing. 'This is the place you're looking
for."
"I don't--ah--think--I think, maybe I made a little mistake. You
know--mistake--"
"I'm positive that you are at the right address."
"Yeah? Well, mister, I shore thank ya; but I'm purty shore." I backed
down off of the slate-rock steps, looking down at my feet, then up at the
house and the door, and said, "Purty shore, I'm at th' wrong address. Sorry
I woke ya, I mean bothered ya. Be seein' ya."
When I stood there on top of the hill and listened to that iron gate
snap locked behind me, and looked all down across the roofs and church
steeples and chimneys and steep houses of Sonora, I smelled the drift of the
pine rosin in the air and watched a cloud whiff past me over my head, and I
was alive again.
Chapter XV
THE TELEGRAM THAT NEVER CAME
In a bend of the Sacramento is the town of Redding, California. The
word had scattered out that twenty-five hundred workers was needed to build
the Kenneth Dam, and already eight thousand work hands had come to do the
job. Redding was like a wild ant den. A mile to the north in a railroad bend
had sprung up another camp, a thriving nest of two thousand people, which we
just called by the name of the "jungle." In that summer of 1938, I learned a
few little things about the folks in Redding, but a whole lot more, some
way, down there by that big jungle where the people lived as close to
nature, and as far from everything natural, as human beings can.
I landed in Redding early one morning on a long freight train full of
wore-out people. I fell off of the freight with my guitar over my shoulder
and asked a guy when the work was going to start. He said it was supposed to
get going last month. Telegram hadn't come from Washington yet.
"Last month, hell," another old boy said, over his shoulder. "We've
been camped right here up and down this slough for over three months,
hearin' it would git started any day now!"
I looked down the train and seen about a hundred men dropping off with
their sleeping rolls and bundles of all kinds. The guy I was talking with
was a big hard looker with a brown flannel shirt on. He said, "They's that
many rollin' in on ever' train that runs!"
"Where are all of these here people from?" I asked him.
"Some of them are just louses," he said. "Pimps an' gamblers, whores,
an' fakes of all kinds. Yes, but they ain't so many of that kind. You talk
around to twenty men an' you'll find out that nineteen of them are just as
willing and able to work as anybody, just as good a hand, knows just as
much, been all over everywhere tryin' ta git onto some kind of a regular job
an' bring his whole family, wife, kids, everything, out here an' settle
down."
It was a blistering hot day, and some of the men walked across a vacant
lot over to the main street. But the biggest part of them looked too dirty
and too beat-down and ragged to spend much time on the streets. They didn't
walk into town to sign up at no hotel, not even at a twenty-cent cot house,
not even somebody's green grass lawn, but walked out slowly across the
little hill to the jungle camp. They asked other people already stranded
there, Where's the water hole? Where's there a trash pile of pretty good tin
cans for cookin'; where's the fish biting in the river? Any of you folks got
a razor you ain't using?
I stood there on a railroad platform looking at my old wore-out shirt.
I was thinking, Well now, I don't know, there might be a merchant's daughter
around this town that's a little bit afraid of all of these other tough
lookers, but now, if I was to go an' rustle me up a couple of dollars an'
buy me a clean layout, she might spend a little time talking to me. Makes
you feel better when you get all slicked up, walking out onto the streets,
cops even nod and smile at you, and with your sleeves rolled up and
everything, sun and wind sorta brushing your skin, you feel like a new
dollar watch. And you think to yourself, Boy, I hope I can meet her
before my clothes get all dirty again. Maybe this little Army and Navy
store down the street has got a water hydrant in the rest room; and when I
put on my new shirt and pants, maybe I can wash up a little. I can pull out
my razor and shave while I'm washing, keep an eye skint for the store man,
not let him see me. And I'll come walkin' out from that little old store
looking like a man that's all bought and paid for.
I heard all kinds of singing and playing through the wide-open doors of
the saloons along the street, and dropped in at all of them and tried to
draw a hand. I'd play my guitar and sing the longest, oldest, and saddest
songs and ballads I knew; I'd nod and smile and say thank you every time
somebody dropped a penny or a nickel into my cigar box.
A plump Mexican lady wearing a sweated-out black dress, walked over and
dropped three pennies in my box and said, "Now I'm broke. All I'm waiting
forr iss thiss beeg dam to start. For somebody to come running down the
street saying, "Work hass opened up! Hiring men! Hiring everybody!' "
I made enough money to run down and buy me the new shirt and pair of
pants, but they was all sweat-soaked and covered with loose dust before I
had a chance to get in good with the merchant's daughter. I was counting my
change on the curb and had twenty some odd cents. A bareheaded Indian with
warts along his nose looked over in my hand and said, "Twenty-two cent. Huh.
Too much for chili. Not enough for beef stew. Too much for sleeping outside,
and not enough for sleeping inside. Too much to be broke and not enough to
pay a loafing fine. Too much to eat all by yourself, but not enough to feed
some other boomer." And I looked at the money and said, "I reckin one of th'
unhandiest dam sums of money a feller c'n have is twenty some-odd cents." So
I walked around with it jingling loose in my pockets, out across the street,
through a vacant lot, down a cinder dump onto a railroad track, till I come
to a little grassy trail that led into the jungle camp.
I followed the trail out over the hill through the sun and the weeds.
The camp was bigger than the town itself. People had dragged old car fenders
up from the dumps, wired them from the limbs of oak trees a few feet off of
the ground and this was a roof for some of them. Others had taken old canvas
sacks or wagon sheets, stretched the canvas over little limbs cut so the
forks braced each other, and that was a house for those folks. I heard two
brothers standing back looking at their house saying, "I ain't lost my hand
as a carpenter, yet." "My old eyes can still see to hit a nail," They'd
carried buckets and tin cans out of the heap, flattened them on the ground,
then nailed the tin onto crooked boards, and that was a mansion for them.
Lots of people, families mostly, had some bedclothes with them, and I could
see the old stinky, gummy quilts and blankets hung up like tents, and two or
three kids of all ages playing around underneath. There was scatterings of
cardboard shacks, where the people had lugged cartons, cases, packing boxes
out from town and tacked them into a house. They was easy to build, but the
first rain that hit them, they was goners.
Then about every few feet down the jungle hill you'd walk past a shack
just sort of made out of everything in general-- old strips of asphalt tar
paper, double gunny sacks, an old dress, shirt, pair of overhalls, stretched
up to cover half a side of a wall; bumpy corrugated iron, cement sacks,
orange and apple crates took apart and nailed together with old rusty burnt
nails from the cinder piles. Through a little square window on the side of a
house, I'd hear bedsprings creaking and people talking. Men played cards,
whittled, and women talked about work they'd struck and work they were
hunting for. Dirt was on the floor of the house, and all kinds and colors of
crawling and flying bugs come and went like they were getting paid for it.
There were the big green blow-flies, the noisy little street flies, manure
and lot flies, caterpillars and gnats from other dam jobs, bed bugs, fleas,
and ticks sucking blood, while mosquitoes of all army and navy types,
hummers, bombers, fighters, sung some good mosquito songs. In most cases,
though, the families didn't even have a roof or shelter, but just got
together once or twice every day and, squatting sort of Indian fashion
around their fire, spaded a few bites of thickened flour gravy, old bread,
or a thin watery stew. Gunny sacks, old clothes, hay and straw, fermenting
bedclothes, are usually piled full of kids playing, or grown-ups resting and
waiting for the word "work" to come.
The sun's shining through lots of places, other patches pretty shady,
and right here at my elbow a couple of families are squatting down on an old
slick piece of canvas; three or four quiet men, whittling, breaking grass
stems, poking holes in leaves, digging into the hard ground; and the women
rocking back and forth laughing out at something somebody'd said. A little
baby sucks at a wind-burnt breast that nursed the four other kids that crawl
about the fire. Cold rusty cans are their china cups and aluminum ware, and
the hot still bucket of river water is as warm and clear as the air around.
I watch a lot of little circles waving out from the middle of the water
where a measuring worm has dropped from the limb of a tree and flips and
flops for his very life. And I see a man with a forked stick reach the forks
over into the bucket, smile, and go on talking about the work he's done; and
in a moment, when the little worm clamps his feet around the forks of the
stick, the man will lift him out, pull him up close to his face and look him
over, then tap the stick over the rim of the bucket. When the little worm
flips to the ground and goes humping away through the twigs and ashes, the
whole bunch of people will smile and say, "Pretty close shave, mister worm.
What do you think you are, a parshoot jumper?"
You've seen a million people like this already. Maybe you saw them down
on the crowded side of your big city; the back side, that's jammed and
packed, the hard section to drive through. Maybe you wondered where so many
of them come from, how they eat, stay alive, what good they do, what makes
them live like this? These people have had a house and a home just about
like your own, settled down and had a job of work just about like you. Then
something hit them and they lost all of that. They've been pushed out into
the high lonesone highway, and they've gone down it, from coast to coast,
from Canada to Mexico, looking for that home again. Now they're looking, for
a while, in your town. Ain't much difference between you and them. If you
was to walk out into this big tangled jungle camp and stand there with the
other two thousand, somebody would just walk up and shake hands with you and
ask you, What kind of work do you do, pardner?
Then maybe, farther out on the ragged edge of your town you've seen
these people after they've hit the road: the people that are called
strangers, the people that follow the sun and the seasons to your country,
follow the buds and the early leaves and come when the fruit and crops are
ready to gather, and leave when the work is done. What kind of crops? Oil
fields, power dams, pipe lines, canals, highways and hard-rock tunnels,
skyscrapers, ships, are their crops. These are migrants now. They don't just
set along in the sun--they go by the sun, and it lights up the country that
they know is theirs.
If you'd go looking for social problems, you'd find just a good
friendly bunch of people getting a lot of laughing and talking done, and
some of it pretty good sense.
I listened to the talk in the tanglewood of the migratory jungle.
"What'll be here to keep these people going," a man with baggy overhalls and
a set of stickery whiskers is saying, "when this dam job is over? Nothing?
No, mister, you're wrong as hell. What do you think we're putting in this
hair, and his easy temper sounded in his voice. It was a thinking voice.
" 'Course," a big Swede told us, "we justa kid along. These monkeys
dun't mean about halfa what they say. Now, like, you take me, Swede, I
prayed long time ago. Usta believe in it strong. Then, whoof, an' a lot of
other things happen that knock my prop out from under me, make me a railroad
bum, an'--I just forget how to pray an' go church."
A guy that talked more and faster said, "I think it's dam crooks that
cause folks like us to be down and out and hungry, worried about finding
jobs, worried about our folks, and them a-worrying about us."
"Last two or three years, I been sorta thinkin' long them lines--an' it
looks like I keep believin' in somethin'; I don't know exactly, but it's in
me, an' in you, an' in ever' dam one of us." This talker was a young man
with a smooth face, thick hair that was bushy, and a fairly honest look
somewhere about him. "An' if we c'n jist find out how ta make good use of
it, we'll find out who's causin' us alla th' trouble in the' world, like
this Hitler rat, an' git ridda them, an' then not let anybody be outta work,
or beat down an' wonderin' where their next meal's a comin' from, by God,
with alla these crops an' orchards bubblin' up around here!"
"If God was ta do what's right," a heavy man said, "he'd give all of
these here peaches an' cherries, an' oranges, an' grapes, an'
stuff to eat, to th' folks that are hungry. An' for a hungry man to pray an'
try to tell God how to run his business, looks sort of backwards, plumb
silly to me. Hell, a man's got two hands an' a mind of his own, an' feet an'
legs to take him where he wants to go; an' if he sees something wrong with
the world, he'd ought to get a lot of people together, an' look up in th'
air an' say, Hey, up there, God, I'm--I mean, we're goin' to fix this!"
Then I put my three cents worth in, saying, "I believe that when ya
pray, you're tryin' ta get yer thinkin' straight, tryin' ta see
what's wrong with th' world, an' who's ta blame fer it. Part of it is
crooks, crooked laws, an' jist dam greedy people, people that's afraid of
this an' afraid of that. Part of it's all of this, an' part of
it's jist dam shore our own fault."
"Hell, from what you say, you think we're to blame for everybody here
being on the freights?" This young traveler reared his head back and laughed
to himself, chewing a mouthful of sticky bread.
"I dunno, fellers, just to be right real frank with you. But
it's our own fault, all right, hell yes. It's our own personal
fault if we don't talk up, 'er speak out, 'er somethin'--I ain't any too
clear on it."
An old white-headed man spoke close to me and said, "Well, boys, I was
on the bum, I suppose, before any of you was born into this world."
Everybody looked around mostly because he was talking so quiet, interrupting
his eating. "All of this talking about what's up in the sky, or down in
hell, for that matter, isn't half as important as what's right here, right
now, right in front of your eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids
hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has just got to have more faith in one
another, believe in each other. There's a spirit of some kind we've all got.
That's got to draw us all together."
Heads nodded. Faces watched the old man. He didn't say any more.
Toothless for years, he was a little bit slow finishing up his piece of old
bread.
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
"Hey! Hey! Train's pullin' out in about ten minnits! This a way!
Ever'body!"
We got rolling again. The high peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains
jumped up their heads in the east. Snow patches white in the sun. There was
the green valley of the San Joaquin River, rich, good-smelling; hay meadows
waving with thick, juicy feed that is life; people working, walking bending
down, carrying heavy loads. Cars from farms waited at the cross-roads, some
loaded down with wooden crates, and boxes, and some with tall tin cans of
cow's milk. The air was as sweet as could be, and like the faint smell of
blossom honey.
Before long we hit a heavy rain. A lot of us crawled into an empty car.
Wet and yelling, we hollered and sung till the sun went down, and it got
wetter and dark. New riders swung into our car. We curled up on strips of
tough brown wrapping paper, pulling it over us like blankets, and using our
sweaters and coats for pillows.
Somebody pulled the doors shut, and we rambled on through the night.
When I woke up again, the train had stopped, and everything was in a wild
hustle and a bustle. Guys snaking me, and saying in my ear, "Hey! Wake up!
Tough town! Boy! This is far's she goes!"
"Tough bulls! Gotta git th' hell outta here. C'mon, wake up."
I rousted myself out, pulling my wet sweater over my head. The train
was falling heavy as about twenty-five or thirty of us ganged up in front of
a Chinese bean joint; and when a certain big, black patrol car wheeled
around a corner, and shot its bright spotlight into our faces, we brushed
our clothing, straightened our hats and neck ties, and in order to act like
legal citizens, we marched into the Chinaman's bean joint.
Inside, it was warm. The joint contained seven warped stools. And two
level-headed Chinese proprietors, "Chili bean! Two chili bean! Seven chili
bean!" I heard one say through the hole in the wall to the cook in the back.
And from the kitchen, "Me gotcha! All chili bean!"
I was going through the process, not only of starving, but also of
being too hot and too cold about fifty times in the last forty-eight hours.
I felt dizzy and empty and sick. The peppery smell of the hot chili and
beans made me feel worse.
I waited about an hour and a half, until ten minutes before the
Chinaman locked the door, and then I said, "Say, friend, will you gimme a
bowl of yer chili an' beans fer this green sweater? Good sweater."
"You let me slee sletee."
"Okay--here--feel. Part of it's all wool."
"Chili bean you want this sletee for?"
"Yeah. Cuppa coffee, too."
"Price. You go up."
"Okay. No coffee."
"No. No chili bean."
"Good sweater," I told him.
"Okay. You keep. You see, I got plentee sletee. You think good sletee,
you keep sletee. My keep chili bean.''
I set there on the stool, hating to go out into the cold night and
leave that good warm stove. I made a start for the door, and went past three
men finishing off their first or second bowl of chili and beans. The last
man was a long, tall, irony-looking Negro. He kept eating as I walked past,
never turned his face toward me, but told me, "Let me see yo sweatah. Heah's
yo dime. Lay th' sweatah down theah on th' stool. Bettah hurry an' ordah yo'
chili. Joint'll shut down heah in a minute."
I dropped the sweater in a roll on the stool, and parked myself on the
next stool, and a bowl of red-hot, extra hot, double hot chili beans slid
down the counter and under my nose.
It was long about two o'clock when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, and
the rain was getting harder, meaner, and colder, and blowing stiffer down
the line. A friendly looking cop, wearing a warm overcoat, walked around the
corner. Three or four of the boys stood along under the porch, so as to keep
out of the drift of the rain. The cop said, "Howdy, howdy, boys. Time to
call it a night." He smiled like a man doing an awful good job.
"What time yuh got?" a Southern boy asked him, dripping wet.
"Bed time."
"Oh."
"Say, mister," I said to him, "listen, we're jist a bunch of guys on
th' road, tryin' ta git somewhere where ther's a job of work of some kind.
Come in on that there freight. Rainin', an' we ain't got no place ta sleep
in outta th' weather. I wuz jist wonderin' if you'd let us sleep here in yer
jail house--jist fer tonight."
"You might," he said, smiling, tickling all of the boys.
"Where's yer jail at?" I asked him.
"It's over across town," he answered.
Then I said, "Reckon ya could put us up?"
And he said, "I certainly can."
"Boy, man, you're a pretty good feller. We're ready, ain't we, guys?"
"I'm ready."
"Git inside out of this bad night."
"Me, too."
The same answer came from everybody.
"Then, see," I said to the cop, "if anything happens, they'd, you'd
know it wuzn't us done it."
And then he looked at us like a politician making a speech, and said,
"You boys know what'd happen if you went over there to that jail to sleep
tonight?"
We said, "Huh uh." "No." "What?"
"Well, they'd let you in, all right, not for just one night, but for
thirty nights and thirty days. Give you an awful good chance to rest up out
on the County Farm, and dry your clothes by a steam radiator every night.
They'd like you men so much, they'd just refuse to let you go. Just keep you
for company over there." He had a cold, sour smile across his face by now.
"Let's go, fella." Somebody back of me jerked my arm.
Without talking back, I savvied, and walked away. Most of the men had
left. Only six or eight of us in a little bunch. "Where we gonna sleep,
anybody know?" I asked them.
"Just keep quiet and follow us."
The cop walked away around the corner.
"And don't ever let a smiling cop fool yuh," a voice in back of me told
us. "That wasn't no real smile. Tell by his face an' his eyes."
"Okay, I learnt somethin' new," I said, "But where are we gonna sleep
at?"
"We gotta good warm bed, don't you worry. Main thing is just to walk,
an' don't talk.''
Across a boggy road, rutty, and full of mudholes, over a sharp
barb-wire fence, through a splashing patch of weeds that soaked our clothes
with cold water, down some crunching cinders, we followed the shiny rails
again in the rain about a half a mile. This led us to a little green shack,
built low to the ground like a doghouse. We piled in at a square window, and
lit on a pile of sand.
"Godamighty!"
"Boy, howdy!"
"Ain't this fine?"
"Warmer'n hell."
"Lemme dig a hole. I wanta dig a hole, an' jist bury myself. I ain't no
live man. I'm dead. I been dead a long, long time. I'm gonna jist dig me a
grave, an' crawl off in it, an' pull my sand in on top of me. Gonna sleep
like old Rip Van Twinkle, twenty, thirty, or fifty dam years. An' when I
wake up, I want things ta be changed around better. When I wake up in th'
mornin'--" And I was tired and wet, covering up in the sand, talking. I
drifted off to sleep. Loose and limber, I felt everything in the world just
slipping out from under me and fading away. I woke up before long with my
feet burning and stinging. Everything was sailing and mixed up backwards,
but when they got straight I saw a man in a black suit bending over me with
a big heavy club. He was beating the bottoms of my feet.
"You birds get up, and get your ass out of here! Get up. Goddam you!"
There were three men in black suits, and the black Western hats that
told you so plain that you was dealing with a railroad deputy.
They had come in through a little narrow door and were herding us out
the same. "Get out of here, and don't you come back! If you show your head
back in this sandhouse, you'll go to the judge! Ninety days on that pea farm
would do you loafers good!"
Grabbing shoes, hats, little dirty bundles, the migratory workers were
chased out of their bed of clean sand. Back outside, the rain was keeping
up, and in the V-shaped beam of the spotlights from the patrol car you could
see that even the rain was having trouble.
"Git on outta town there!" "Keep travelin'!" "Don't you even look
back!" "Start walkin'!" We heard low, grumbling voices coming from the car
behind us. Heard, too, the quiet motor start up and the gears shifted as the
car rolled along back of us. It followed us about a half a mile, rain and
mud. It drove us across a cow pasture.
From the car, one of the watchmen yelled, "Don't you show up in Tracy
again tonight! You'll be dam good an' sorry if you do! Keep walking!"
The car lights cut a wide, rippling circle in the dark, and we knew
that they had turned around and went back to town. The roar of their exhaust
purred and died away.
We'd marched out across the cow pasture, smiling and yelling, "Hep!
Hep! Whattaya say, men? Hep! Hep! Hep!"
Now we stood in the rain and cackled like chickens, absolutely lost and
buffaloed. Never before had I had anything quite so dam silly happen to me.
Our clothes were on crooked and twisted; shoes full of mud and gravel. Hair
soaking wet, and water running down our faces. It was a funny sight to see
human beings in any such a shape. Wet as we could get, dirty and muddy as
the ground, we danced up and down through puddles, ran around in wide
circles and laughed our heads off. There is a stage of hard luck that turns
into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in
laughing that turns into fight.
"Okay. Hey, fellers! C'mere. Tell ya what we're gonna do. We're a-gonna
all git together, see, an' go walkin' right back into town, an' go back to
sleep in that sandhouse ag'in. What say? Who's with me?" a tall, slippery,
stoop-shouldered boy was telling us.
"Me!"
"Me."
"Same fer me!"
"Whatever you guys does, I'll stick."
"Hell, I c'n give that carload of bulls a machine gun apiece, an' whip
th' whole outfit with my bare hands!" an older man said.
"But, no. We don't aim ta cause no trouble. Ain't gonna be no
fightin'."
"I'd just like to get one good poke at that fat belly."
"Get that outta your head, mister."
Just walking back toward town, talking.
"Hey. How many of us here?"
'Two. Four. Six. Eight."
"Mebbe we'd better split up in twos. Too plain to see a whole big
bunch. We'll go into town by pairs. If you make it back to the old
blacksmith shop right there by the old Chinese bean joint, whistle once,
real long. This way, if two gets caught, the rest'll get away."
"What'll we do if we get caught an' run in jail?"
"Whistle twice, real short," and under his breath he showed us how to
whistle.
"Can everybody here whistle?"
"I can."
Four of us said yes. So one whistler and one expert listener was put
into each pair.
"Now, remember, if you see the patrol car's gonna ketch yuh, stop
before it gits yuh, an' whistle twice, real short an' sweet."
"Okay. First pair take that street yonder. Second pair, drop over a
block. Third couple, down the paved highway; and us, last pair, will walk
back down this same cow trail that we got run out of town on. Remember,
don't start no trouble with them coppers. Loaded dice, boys; you cain't win.
Just got to try to outsmart 'em a little."
Back through the slick mud, walking different ways, we cussed and
laughed. In a few minutes, there came a long, low whistle, and we knew the
first pair had made it to the blacksmith shop. Then, in a minute or so,
another long one. We came in third, and I let out a whistle that was one of
California's best. The last pair walked in and we stood under the wide eaves
of the shop, watching the water drip off of the roof, missing our noses by
about three inches. We had to stand up straight against the wall to stay out
of the rain.
The sandhouse was just across the street and up a few steps.
"Lay low."
"Duck."
"Car."
"Hey! Ho! Got us ag'in!"
The new model black sedan coasted down a side street, out over in our
direction real quick, and turned two spots on us. We held our hands up to
keep the lights from blinding us. Nobody moved. We thought maybe they'd made
a mistake. But, as the car rolled up to within about fifty feet of us, we
knew that we were caught, and got ready to be cussed out, and took to the
can.
A deputy opened his front door, turned off one spotlight, and shot his
good flashlight into our faces. One at a time, he looked us over. We blinked
back at him, like a herd of young deer, but nobody was to say afraid.
"Come here, you--" he said in a hard, imitation voice.
The light was in my face. I thought it was shining in everybody's, so I
didn't move.
"Hey, mister. Come over here, please." He was a big heavy man, and his
voice had a nice clank to it, like cocking back the hammer of a rifle.
I shook the light out of my eyes and said, "Who?"
"You."
I turned around to the men with me and told them loud enough for the
cops to hear it, "Be right back, fellers."
I heard the patrol man turn around to the other cops and kid them about
something, and as I walked up they were all laughing and saying, "Yeah. He's
th' one. He's one. One of them things."
The radio in the car was turned on a Hollywood station, and a lady's
voice was singing, telling what all of the pretty girls were thinking about
the war situation.
"I'm a what?" I asked the cop.
"You know, one of them 'things.' "
"Well, boys, ya got me there. I don't even know what one of them
'things' is."
"We know what you are."
"Well," I scratched my head in the rain, "maybe you're smarter than I
am; 'cause I never did know jist what I am."
"We do."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"What am I then?"
"One of them labor boys."
"Labor?"
"Yeah, labor."
"I think I know what labor is--" I smiled a little.
"What is it?"
"Labor's work."
"Maybe, you're one of them trouble causers."
"Listen, fellers, I jist rolled inta this town from Oklahoma, I mean
Texas, an' I'm on my way to Sonora to stay with my relatives."
"Relatives?"
"Yeah," I said. "Aunt. Cousins. Whole bunch. Well off."
"You're going to stay in Sonora when you get there, aren't you?" A
different, higher-sounding voice wheezed out from the back seat.
"I'm gonna settle down up there in them mountains, an' try ta go ta
work."
"Kinda work, sonny?"
"Painter. Signs. Pictures. Houses. Anything needs paintin'."
"So you don't go around causing trouble, then?"
"I'm runnin' inta a right smart of it. I don't always cause it."
"You don't like trouble, do you, mister painter?"
"Oh, I ain't so 'fraid no more. Sorta broke in by this time."
"Ever talk to anybody about working?"
"Train loads of 'em. That's what ever'body's talkin' 'bout, an' ridin'
in all of this bad weather for. Shore, we ain'ta 'fraid of work. We ain't
panhandlers, ner stemwinders, jest a bunch of guys out tryin' ta do th' best
we can, an' had a little streak of hard luck, that's all."
"Eyer talk to the boys about wages?"
"Wages? Oh, I talk to ever'body about somethin'. Religion. Weather.
Picture shows. Girls. Wages."
"Well, mister painter, it's been good to get acquainted with you. It
seems like you are looking for work and anxious to get on up the road toward
Sonora. We'll show you the road and see that you get out onto the main
highway."
"Boy, that'll be mighty fine."
"Yes. We try to treat an honest working man right when he comes through
our little town here, either by accident or on purpose. We're just a little,
what you'd call, 'cautious,' you understand, because there is trouble going
around, and you never know who's causing it, until you ask. We will have to
ask you to get out in front of this car and start walking down this highway.
And don't look back--"
All of the cops were laughing and joking as their car drove along
behind me. I heard a lot of lousy jokes. I walked with my head ducked into
the rain, and heard cars of other people pass. They yelled smart cracks at
me in the rain.
After about a mile, they yelled for me to halt. I stopped and didn't
even turn around. "You run a lot of risk tonight, breaking our orders."
"Muddy out there!"
"You know, we tried to treat you nice. Turned you loose. Gave you a
chance. Then you broke orders."
"Yeah, I guess I did."
"What made you do it?"
"Well, ta be right, real truthful with you guys, we got pastures just
about like these back in Oklahoma, but we let the cows go out there and eat.
If people wants to go out there in the cow pasture, we let them go, but if
it's rainin' an' a cold night like this, we don't drive or herd anybody out
there."
Cop said, "Keep travelin'."
I said, "I wuz born travelin'. Good-bye!"
The car and the lights whirled around in the road, and the tail light
and the radio music blacked out down the road in the rain.
I walked a few steps and seen it was too rainy and bad to see in the
fog, so I went to thinking about some kind of a place to lay down out of the
weather and go to sleep. I walked up to the headstones of a long cement
bridge that bent across a running river. And down under the bridge I found a
couple of dozen other people curled up, grinding their teeth in the mist and
already dreaming. The ground was loose dirt and was awful cold and damp, but
not wet or muddy, as the rain couldn't hit us under the concrete. I seen men
paired up snoring together, some rolled in newspapers and brown wrapping
paper, others in a chilled blanket, one or two here and yonder all snoozed
up in some mighty warm-looking bedrolls. And for a minute, I thought, I'm a
dam fool not to carry my own bedroll; but then again, in the hot daytime a
heavy bedroll is clumsy, no good, and in the way, and besides, people won't
give you a ride if you're lugging an old dirty bundle. So here in the
moisture of the wind whiffing under the bridge, I scanned around for
something to use for a mattress, for a pillow, and for a virgin wool
blanket. I found a soaked piece of wrapping paper which I shook the water
off of, and spread on the dirt for my easy-rider mattress; but I didn't find
a pillow, nor anything to use as a blanket. I drew my muscles down into just
a little pile of meat and bones, and shivered on the paper for about an
hour. My breath swishing, and teeth hitting together, woke a big
square-built man up off his bedroll. He listened at me for a minute, and
then asked me, "Don't you know your shiverin's keepin' everybody awake?" I
said, "Y-y-y-es-s-s, I sup-p-pose it is; I ain't gettin' no sleep, on
account of it." Then he said, "You sound like a snare drum rattlin' that
paper; c'mon over here an' den up with me."
I rolled across the ground and peeled off my wet clothes, my gobby
shoes, and stacked them up in a pile; and then he turned his wool blankets
back and said, "Hurry, jump in before the covers get wet!" I was still
shivering and shaking so hard it jerked my whole body into kinks, and
cramped me all over so that I couldn't move my lips to say a word. I scooted
my feet down inside and then pulled the itchy covers all up over my head.
"You feel like a bucket of cold frogs,'' the man told me. "Where've you
been?"
I kept on shaking, without saying a word.
"Cops walk you?" he asked me. And I just nodded my head with my back to
him.
"I'm not minding this weather very much; I'm on my way to where it will
be a hell of a lot colder than this. I don't know about the cops, but, I'll
be in Vancouver by this time next week; and I know it'll freeze the horns
off of a brass bulldog up 'there. Lumberjack. Timber. I guess you're too
cold to talk much, huh?" And his last words blotted and soaked out across
the swampy river bottom and faded away somewhere in the fog horn and red and
green lights on a little boat that pounded down the waters.
It was hard for me to walk next morning early on account of my legs
being drawn like torn leather. My thighs felt like the gristle was tore
loose from my bones, and my knees ached and jittered in the joints. I shook
hands with the lumberjack and we went our opposite ways. I never did get a
real close look at him in the clouds; and when he walked away, his head and
shoulders just sort of swum away in the fog of the morning. I had made
another friend I couldn't see. And I walked along thinking, Well, now, I
don't know if I'll ever see that man again or not, but I'll see a lot of men
a lot of places and I'll wonder if that could be him.
Before long the sun and the fog had fought and flounced around so long
on the river banks the highway run along that it didn't seem like there was
enough room in the trees and reeds and canebrakes for the sun or the clouds,
either one, to really win out; so the clouds from the ground got mad and
raised up off of the earth to grab a-hold of the sunrays, and fight it out
higher up in the air. I caught a ride on a truckload of grape stakes and
heard a hard-looking truck driver cuss the narrow, bad roads that cause you
to get killed so quick; and then found myself wheeling along with a deaf
farmer for an hour or two, an Italian grape grower in debt all of the time,
a couple of cowboys trying to beat their way to a new rodeo; and before the
day was wore very slick, I was walking down the streets of Sonora, the queen
of the gold towns, in the upper foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Sonera's crooked, narrow streets bent and run about as wild as some of
the prospectors and their burros, and I thought as I pushed my way along the
tight alleys called streets, that maybe the whole town had been laid out by
just following the tracks of a runaway prospector. Little houses poking
their bellies out over the curbs and sidewalks, and streets so steep I had
to throw myself in low gear to pull them. Down again so steep, I figured,
that most of Sonora's citizens come and went by way of parachutes. Creeks
and rocky rivers guggling along under the streets, where the gambling dives
and dram joints flush their mistakes down the drains, where, on down the
creek a-ways, the waters are planned by hungry gold-bugs.
I walked along with my address in my hand, seeing herds of cowboys,
miners, timber men, and hard-working, pioneer-looking women and kids from
the mountains around; and saw, too, the fake cowboys, the drug-store
calibre, blazing shirts of all bright colors along the streets, and
crippling along bowlegged in boots never meant to be worn on the hard
concrete. And the honest working people stand along in bunches and laugh
under their breath when the fake dudes buckle past.
In the smell of the high pines and the ripple of the nugget creeks,
Sonora, an old town now, is rated as California's second richest person.
Pasadena is first, and looks it, but what fools you in Sonora is that it
looks like one of the poorest. I walked up the main street loaded to the
brim with horses, hay, children playing, jallopy cars of the ranchers and
working folks around, buggies of the Indians, wagons loaded with groceries
for grubstake, town cars, limousines, sporty jobs, the big V-16's and the
V-Twelves. The main street crooks pretty sharp right in the business end,
and crooks another time or two trying to get out of the first crook. The
street is so narrow that people sneeze on the right-hand side and apologize
to the ones on the left.
I asked a fireman asleep on a bench, "Could you tell me where bouts
this address is?"
He disturbed, without scaring, a fly on his eyelid, and told me, 'It's
that big rock house right yonder up that hill. No danger of missing it, it
covers the whole hill."
I thanked him and started walking up a three-block flight of rock steps
thinking, Boy, I'm as dirty an' ragged an' messed up as one feller can git.
Knees outta my britches. My face needs about a half a dozen shaves. Hands
all smeary. Coal dust an' soot all over me. I don't know if I'd even know
myself in a lookin-glass. Shirt all tore to hell, an' my shoes stinkin' with
sweat. That's a hell of a big rock house up there. Musta took a mighty lot
of work ta build it. I'd go back down in town to a fillin' station an' wash
an' clean up, but gosh, I'm so empty an' hungry, so tremblin' weak, I don't
know, I couldn't pull it back up these long steps again. I'll go on up.
A black iron fence and a cedar hedge fenced the whole yard off. I stood
at the gate with the letter in my hand, looking up and down, back down at
the town and the people, and then through the irons at the mansion. I wiped
the sweat off of my face on the arm of my shirt, and unlocked the gate and
walked through. Wide green grass lawn that made me think of golf courses I'd
caddied on. Mowed and petted and smoothed and kept, the yard had a look like
it had just got back from a barber shop. The whiff of the scrub cedar and
middle-size pine, on top of the flowers that jumped up all around, made it
smell good and healthy, like a home for crippled children. But the whole
place was so still and so hushed and quiet, that I was thinking maybe
everybody was gone off somewhere. When I walked the rock walk a little more,
the whole house got plainer to see: gray native stones from the hills
around, flagstone porches and sandrock columns holding up the roof; windows
so high and wide that the sun got lost trying to find a way to shine through
all of them big thick drapes and curtains. Iron braces in the windows built
to keep the nice, good, healthy sunshine out for a long, long time. Big
double doors with iron cross braces, handles like the entrance to a funeral
parlor, locks bigger and stouter than any jail I'd ever slept in.
I'll walk quieter now, because this porch makes a lot of noise, and a
little noise, I bet, would scare all of these trees and flowers to death.
This place is so quiet. I hope I don't scare nobody when I knock on this
door. How in the dickens do you operate this knocker, anyhow? Oh. Pick it
up. Let it just fall. It knocks. Gosh. Reckon it'll bring any watchdogs out
on me? Hope not. Dern. I don't know. I'm just thinking. This old rambling's
pretty bad in some places, but, I don't know, I never did see it
get this quiet and this lonesome.
Reckon I rung that door knocker right? Guess I did. Things so still
here on this porch, I can hear my blood run, and my thoughts grazing around
in my head.
The door opened back.
My breath went away in the tips of the pines where the cones hang on as
long as they can, and then fall down to the ground to get covered up in the
loose dirt and some day make a new tree.
"How do you do," a man said.
"Ah, yeah, good day." I was gulping for air.
"May I do something for you?"
"Me? No. Nope. I wuz jist lookin' fer a certain party by this name." I
handed him the envelope.
He was wearing a nice suit of clothes. An old man, thin-faced, and
straight shoulders, gray hair, white cuffs, black tie. The air from the
house sifted past him on its way out the door, and there was a smell that
made me know that the air had been hemmed up inside that house for a long
time. Hemmed up. Walled in. Covered away from the moon and out of the reach
of the sun. Cut away from the drift of the leaves and the wash of the
waters. Hid out from the going and the coming of the people, cut loose from
the thoughts of the crowds on the streets. Lazy in there, sleepy in there,
cool and pale and shady in there, dark and dreary in the book case there,
and the wind under the beds hadn't been disturbed in twenty-three years. I
know, I know, I'm on the right hill, but I'm at the wrong house. This wasn't
what I hung that boxcar for, nor hugged that iron ladder for, nor bellied
down on top of that high rolling freight train for. The train was laughing
and cussing and alive with human people. The cops was alive and pushing me
down the road in the rain. The bridge was alive with friends under it. The
river was alive and arguing with the fog and the fog was wrestling the wind
and boxing the sun.
I remember a frog they found in Okemah, once when they tore the old
bank building down. He'd been sealed up in solid concrete for thirty-two
years, and had almost turned to jelly. Jelly. Blubbery. Soft and oozy.
Slicky and wiggly. I don't want to turn to no jelly. My belly is hard from
hard traveling, and I want more than anything else for my belly to stay hard
and stay wound up tight and stay alive.
"Yes. You are at the right house. This is the place you are looking
for." The little butler stood aside and motioned for me to walk in.
"I--er--ah--think, mebbe I made a mistake--"
"Oh, no." He was talking just about the nicest I'd ever heard anybody
talk, like maybe he'd been practicing. 'This is the place you're looking
for."
"I don't--ah--think--I think, maybe I made a little mistake. You
know--mistake--"
"I'm positive that you are at the right address."
"Yeah? Well, mister, I shore thank ya; but I'm purty shore." I backed
down off of the slate-rock steps, looking down at my feet, then up at the
house and the door, and said, "Purty shore, I'm at th' wrong address. Sorry
I woke ya, I mean bothered ya. Be seein' ya."
When I stood there on top of the hill and listened to that iron gate
snap locked behind me, and looked all down across the roofs and church
steeples and chimneys and steep houses of Sonora, I smelled the drift of the
pine rosin in the air and watched a cloud whiff past me over my head, and I
was alive again.
Chapter XV
THE TELEGRAM THAT NEVER CAME
In a bend of the Sacramento is the town of Redding, California. The
word had scattered out that twenty-five hundred workers was needed to build
the Kenneth Dam, and already eight thousand work hands had come to do the
job. Redding was like a wild ant den. A mile to the north in a railroad bend
had sprung up another camp, a thriving nest of two thousand people, which we
just called by the name of the "jungle." In that summer of 1938, I learned a
few little things about the folks in Redding, but a whole lot more, some
way, down there by that big jungle where the people lived as close to
nature, and as far from everything natural, as human beings can.
I landed in Redding early one morning on a long freight train full of
wore-out people. I fell off of the freight with my guitar over my shoulder
and asked a guy when the work was going to start. He said it was supposed to
get going last month. Telegram hadn't come from Washington yet.
"Last month, hell," another old boy said, over his shoulder. "We've
been camped right here up and down this slough for over three months,
hearin' it would git started any day now!"
I looked down the train and seen about a hundred men dropping off with
their sleeping rolls and bundles of all kinds. The guy I was talking with
was a big hard looker with a brown flannel shirt on. He said, "They's that
many rollin' in on ever' train that runs!"
"Where are all of these here people from?" I asked him.
"Some of them are just louses," he said. "Pimps an' gamblers, whores,
an' fakes of all kinds. Yes, but they ain't so many of that kind. You talk
around to twenty men an' you'll find out that nineteen of them are just as
willing and able to work as anybody, just as good a hand, knows just as
much, been all over everywhere tryin' ta git onto some kind of a regular job
an' bring his whole family, wife, kids, everything, out here an' settle
down."
It was a blistering hot day, and some of the men walked across a vacant
lot over to the main street. But the biggest part of them looked too dirty
and too beat-down and ragged to spend much time on the streets. They didn't
walk into town to sign up at no hotel, not even at a twenty-cent cot house,
not even somebody's green grass lawn, but walked out slowly across the
little hill to the jungle camp. They asked other people already stranded
there, Where's the water hole? Where's there a trash pile of pretty good tin
cans for cookin'; where's the fish biting in the river? Any of you folks got
a razor you ain't using?
I stood there on a railroad platform looking at my old wore-out shirt.
I was thinking, Well now, I don't know, there might be a merchant's daughter
around this town that's a little bit afraid of all of these other tough
lookers, but now, if I was to go an' rustle me up a couple of dollars an'
buy me a clean layout, she might spend a little time talking to me. Makes
you feel better when you get all slicked up, walking out onto the streets,
cops even nod and smile at you, and with your sleeves rolled up and
everything, sun and wind sorta brushing your skin, you feel like a new
dollar watch. And you think to yourself, Boy, I hope I can meet her
before my clothes get all dirty again. Maybe this little Army and Navy
store down the street has got a water hydrant in the rest room; and when I
put on my new shirt and pants, maybe I can wash up a little. I can pull out
my razor and shave while I'm washing, keep an eye skint for the store man,
not let him see me. And I'll come walkin' out from that little old store
looking like a man that's all bought and paid for.
I heard all kinds of singing and playing through the wide-open doors of
the saloons along the street, and dropped in at all of them and tried to
draw a hand. I'd play my guitar and sing the longest, oldest, and saddest
songs and ballads I knew; I'd nod and smile and say thank you every time
somebody dropped a penny or a nickel into my cigar box.
A plump Mexican lady wearing a sweated-out black dress, walked over and
dropped three pennies in my box and said, "Now I'm broke. All I'm waiting
forr iss thiss beeg dam to start. For somebody to come running down the
street saying, "Work hass opened up! Hiring men! Hiring everybody!' "
I made enough money to run down and buy me the new shirt and pair of
pants, but they was all sweat-soaked and covered with loose dust before I
had a chance to get in good with the merchant's daughter. I was counting my
change on the curb and had twenty some odd cents. A bareheaded Indian with
warts along his nose looked over in my hand and said, "Twenty-two cent. Huh.
Too much for chili. Not enough for beef stew. Too much for sleeping outside,
and not enough for sleeping inside. Too much to be broke and not enough to
pay a loafing fine. Too much to eat all by yourself, but not enough to feed
some other boomer." And I looked at the money and said, "I reckin one of th'
unhandiest dam sums of money a feller c'n have is twenty some-odd cents." So
I walked around with it jingling loose in my pockets, out across the street,
through a vacant lot, down a cinder dump onto a railroad track, till I come
to a little grassy trail that led into the jungle camp.
I followed the trail out over the hill through the sun and the weeds.
The camp was bigger than the town itself. People had dragged old car fenders
up from the dumps, wired them from the limbs of oak trees a few feet off of
the ground and this was a roof for some of them. Others had taken old canvas
sacks or wagon sheets, stretched the canvas over little limbs cut so the
forks braced each other, and that was a house for those folks. I heard two
brothers standing back looking at their house saying, "I ain't lost my hand
as a carpenter, yet." "My old eyes can still see to hit a nail," They'd
carried buckets and tin cans out of the heap, flattened them on the ground,
then nailed the tin onto crooked boards, and that was a mansion for them.
Lots of people, families mostly, had some bedclothes with them, and I could
see the old stinky, gummy quilts and blankets hung up like tents, and two or
three kids of all ages playing around underneath. There was scatterings of
cardboard shacks, where the people had lugged cartons, cases, packing boxes
out from town and tacked them into a house. They was easy to build, but the
first rain that hit them, they was goners.
Then about every few feet down the jungle hill you'd walk past a shack
just sort of made out of everything in general-- old strips of asphalt tar
paper, double gunny sacks, an old dress, shirt, pair of overhalls, stretched
up to cover half a side of a wall; bumpy corrugated iron, cement sacks,
orange and apple crates took apart and nailed together with old rusty burnt
nails from the cinder piles. Through a little square window on the side of a
house, I'd hear bedsprings creaking and people talking. Men played cards,
whittled, and women talked about work they'd struck and work they were
hunting for. Dirt was on the floor of the house, and all kinds and colors of
crawling and flying bugs come and went like they were getting paid for it.
There were the big green blow-flies, the noisy little street flies, manure
and lot flies, caterpillars and gnats from other dam jobs, bed bugs, fleas,
and ticks sucking blood, while mosquitoes of all army and navy types,
hummers, bombers, fighters, sung some good mosquito songs. In most cases,
though, the families didn't even have a roof or shelter, but just got
together once or twice every day and, squatting sort of Indian fashion
around their fire, spaded a few bites of thickened flour gravy, old bread,
or a thin watery stew. Gunny sacks, old clothes, hay and straw, fermenting
bedclothes, are usually piled full of kids playing, or grown-ups resting and
waiting for the word "work" to come.
The sun's shining through lots of places, other patches pretty shady,
and right here at my elbow a couple of families are squatting down on an old
slick piece of canvas; three or four quiet men, whittling, breaking grass
stems, poking holes in leaves, digging into the hard ground; and the women
rocking back and forth laughing out at something somebody'd said. A little
baby sucks at a wind-burnt breast that nursed the four other kids that crawl
about the fire. Cold rusty cans are their china cups and aluminum ware, and
the hot still bucket of river water is as warm and clear as the air around.
I watch a lot of little circles waving out from the middle of the water
where a measuring worm has dropped from the limb of a tree and flips and
flops for his very life. And I see a man with a forked stick reach the forks
over into the bucket, smile, and go on talking about the work he's done; and
in a moment, when the little worm clamps his feet around the forks of the
stick, the man will lift him out, pull him up close to his face and look him
over, then tap the stick over the rim of the bucket. When the little worm
flips to the ground and goes humping away through the twigs and ashes, the
whole bunch of people will smile and say, "Pretty close shave, mister worm.
What do you think you are, a parshoot jumper?"
You've seen a million people like this already. Maybe you saw them down
on the crowded side of your big city; the back side, that's jammed and
packed, the hard section to drive through. Maybe you wondered where so many
of them come from, how they eat, stay alive, what good they do, what makes
them live like this? These people have had a house and a home just about
like your own, settled down and had a job of work just about like you. Then
something hit them and they lost all of that. They've been pushed out into
the high lonesone highway, and they've gone down it, from coast to coast,
from Canada to Mexico, looking for that home again. Now they're looking, for
a while, in your town. Ain't much difference between you and them. If you
was to walk out into this big tangled jungle camp and stand there with the
other two thousand, somebody would just walk up and shake hands with you and
ask you, What kind of work do you do, pardner?
Then maybe, farther out on the ragged edge of your town you've seen
these people after they've hit the road: the people that are called
strangers, the people that follow the sun and the seasons to your country,
follow the buds and the early leaves and come when the fruit and crops are
ready to gather, and leave when the work is done. What kind of crops? Oil
fields, power dams, pipe lines, canals, highways and hard-rock tunnels,
skyscrapers, ships, are their crops. These are migrants now. They don't just
set along in the sun--they go by the sun, and it lights up the country that
they know is theirs.
If you'd go looking for social problems, you'd find just a good
friendly bunch of people getting a lot of laughing and talking done, and
some of it pretty good sense.
I listened to the talk in the tanglewood of the migratory jungle.
"What'll be here to keep these people going," a man with baggy overhalls and
a set of stickery whiskers is saying, "when this dam job is over? Nothing?
No, mister, you're wrong as hell. What do you think we're putting in this