reflected on the sweat on her face. That look. That same old look. Houses
and barns and vacant lots and trees whizzed past me like I was riding down
the road on a runaway motorcycle.
I blammed into Papa's office, knocking people out of my way with their
papers saying something about somebody needing some license tags. I shoved
across Papa's desk, and puffed and gasped for air, saying, "Run! Quick!
Mama!"
Papa and Roy left their typewriters with papers rolled into them and
people looking sideways at one another. They busted out the door and met
Warren just starting in to buy Grandma some car tags.
"Take that kid back home with you! Keep him tonight!" Papa ran up the
street to the truck. Roy yelled back over his shoulder, "Get Grandma! Come
back in the morning!"
Warren took me up into the seat of his car and I was screaming, "I
wanta go home where Mama is! I don't wanta stay all night with you! You ol'
cat-killer!"
And it was cussing and mad that Warren drove me the seven miles out to
Grandma's, and crying and bawling that I walked into their house.
That night at Grandma's I laid awake and watched a hundred moving
pictures go through my mind, but I didn't have to make them up, because they
was snapping and cracking and flashing all around me. The crickets chirped
like they was calling for their lovers, but halfway scared their own voice
would cause them to get stepped on. The frogs down around the banks of the
pond seemed to laugh. I laid there in a puddle of cold late-summer sweat,
and my body cramped in knots and I didn't move an arm or a leg. I rolled my
head on my pillow once to look out the night window, and beyond a turtle
dove hay meadow I could see a yellow prairie fire that had broke loose
across a slope of dry grass, five or six miles away to the south; and I was
glad it wasn't to the east, toward home. I guess Grandpa is asleep and
getting ready to go to work with Lawrence in the morning, cutting wood on
the hill. Warren is asleep, too; I can hear him snoring here beside me,
worried mostly about his own self. But I know that in the next bedroom
Grandma, too, like me, is laying there with her eyes stinging and her face
salty and wet, having crazy dreams that float across the night winds and
twist and turn and roll and coil and jump and fight and burn themselves out,
like the meadow fire over across the wind yonder, like the dry hay.
Warren drove Grandma and me back to town when morning came. We walked
through the yard gate and in at the back door of the old Jim Cain house.
Windows smashed and glass laughing in the sun on the floor. Kitchen upside
down and dishes and pots and pans slung across the room and floor. Front
room, a handful of torn books and old letters, chairs laying over on their
sides, and a coal-oil lamp smashed where the oil soaked the wallpaper and
then run down the north wall. Little bedroom, both beds full of wild strewn
clothes that almost looked like people that had died in their dreams. Warren
and me followed Grandma from the bedroom, through the front room, and back
into the kitchen. I didn't hear anybody say a single word. The second-handed
oil stove was smashed in the corner and the new kerosene smelled strong,
soaking in the floors and walls. Charred wallpaper run up the wall behind
the stove, some of the boards black and smoked and scorched with flames that
had been beat out with a wet gunny sack at my feet.
Roy walked in from the back porch and I noticed that he was all dirty,
messy, and needed a shave; his new shirt and pants tore in several places;
his hair was in his eyes and his eyes had a beat-down look. He let his eyes
drift around the room without looking us in the face, and then he looked at
the oil stove and said, "Oil stove exploded. Papa's in the hospital. Pretty
bad burns."
'' 'S funny," I said, "I was afraid yesterday when ya started ta
fumigate th' house. `Fraid this coal oil would ketch afire. So I took th'
oil tank off th' stove an' set it out in th' back 'yard under th' mulberry
tree. I cain't figger out how it blowed up." I was looking at the oil tank
piled in the corner with the oil soaked out across the floor. "Jist cain't
see how."
"Shut you mouth!" Roy doubled up both fists and raved back at me, and
his eyes blazed wildfire. "You little rat!"
I set down close to the stove against the wall and heard Grandma say,
"Where--how is Nora!''
Warren was listening, swallowing hard.
"She's on the westbound passenger train." Roy slid down on the floor
beside me and fumbled with a burner on the wreck of a stove.
"On her way to the insane asylum."
Nobody said very much.
Away off somewheres we heard a long gone howl of a fast-running train
whistling down.
Chapter X
THE JUNKING SACK
With Mama gone, Papa went to West Texas to live with my aunt in Pampa
till he could get over his burns. Roy and me hung on for a while and lived
in the old Jim Cain house. When daylight come to our house and I woke up out
of bed, there wasn't no warm breakfast, and there wasn't a clean bed. It was
a dirty house. A house that had old dirty clothes throwed around here and
yonder, or a tub of water, soap suds and soppy pants on the bench out in
back, that had set there now for two or three weeks, waiting for Roy or me
to wash them. I don't know. That house, that old, old, big mulberry tree,
those dried-up flowers in the front yard, the kitchen so sour and
lonesome--it seemed like everything in the world echoed in there, but you
couldn't hear it. Yon could stand still and cock your ear to one side, but
you couldn't hear anything. I know how I felt about it, I only had one
feeling toward it: I wanted to get the hell out of it when daytime come and
it got light outside.
Then Roy stumbled onto a job at the Okemah Wholesale House. The day we
moved out of the Jim Cain house, I helped him haul and store all of our
belongings in the hayloft of the rottenest barn in town. He asked me to come
across town and stay with him in his new three-dollar room, but I told him
"no," that I wanted to shuck out on my own.
Every day I combed the alleys and the dump grounds with my gunny sacks
blistering my shoulders, digging like a mole into everybody's trash heaps to
see if I couldn't make a little something out of nothing. Ten or fifteen
miles walking a day, with my sack weighing up to fifty pounds, to weigh in
and sell my load to the city junk man along about sundown.
The refuse heaps and trash piles didn't turn my stomach. I was baptized
into ten or fifteen different junking crews by getting splashed, kicked,
squirted on, throwed down, heaped over and covered under in every earthly
article of garbage and junk known to man. I'd come back to the gang house
laughing and scare the kids with wild tales about the half-kids and
half-rats, half-coyotes, and half-men.
When I told Roy good-bye I had brought an old quilt and blanket over to
the gang-house shack and made it my hotel.
It had rained and turned hot, rained and turned hot, so many times
lately that the whole gang house hill simmered and steamed. The weeds turned
into a jungle where spiders golfed the ladybugs and wasps dive-bombed the
spiders. A world where the new babies of one came from the dead bodies of
others. The sun was hot as fire on the henhouse, and the chicken manure had
carried its lice across the hill in the rains. A smothery vapor covered the
place with the smell and the poison of cankering wood.
The waters oozed from the hill above and kept the floor of the house
soggy and wet. My quilt and blanket soured and molded. I woke up every
morning in my bed on the floor, feeling as if the matter that rotted in the
night had soaked into my brain and filled my body with a blind fever. The
sun, fermenting the dew in the piles of trash, put out some kind of a gas
that made me laugh and lay down in the path in the sun and dream about dying
and moldering.
When the kids had gone home on these nights, I'd lay on my back on my
damp blanket and whirl away to a land of bloody, cutthroat dreams, and fight
and wallow in corruption and slime all night, chased and trampled under the
feet of demons and monsters, wound up in the coils of a boa constrictor
crawling in the city cesspool. I'd wake up bug-eyed. The sun coming up
brought the smell from the weeds again, and the vapor from the hill choked
me down.
For several mornings now I'd been too weak to hang my blankets out to
air and sun while I was junking. My first thought every morning was to crawl
out on the side of the hill and lay in the sun in the path. I felt the rays
cut through my whole body and I knew the sun was good medicine. One morning
I was so crazy and dizzy I crawled to the top of the hill and pulled myself
a block to the school grounds. I flopped down on a bench by a fountain. The
world was hot and I was cold. Then the world turned cold and I was hot. I
used my gunny sack for a pillow. It felt like lightning was cracking through
my head. My teeth chattered.
The next thing I knew somebody was shaking my shoulder and saying,
"Hey, Woody, wake up! What's the matter?"
I looked up and saw Roy. "Howdy, brother. How come you ta be passin' by
here?"
"How come you piled up here sick?" Roy asked me.
"I ain't sick! Little woozie."
"Where are you living these days? Hanging out up at that little old
gang house of a night?"
"I be all right."
"What's this old dirty sack under you head?"
"Junkin' sack."
"Still crawling through the dumps, huh? Listen, young sprout, I've got
a good room. You know where Mrs. Hutchinson lives over there in that big
white two-story house yonder? You go over there. I'll send a doctor up to
look you over pretty quick. See you about six o'clock. Get up! Here's the
key!"
"I c'n take care of my own self!"
"Listen, brat, I mean brother! Take this key."
"Go onta work!" I got up and pushed Roy down the sidewalk, "Shore, I'll
go sleep in yer room. Send me yer good docter! An' go onta work!" I was
pushing Roy in the back and laughing at the same time. Then I got so dizzy I
caved in, and Roy caught me and held me up, and give me a little shove to
get me started off toward his room.
I come to the big two-story white house and clumb the stairs to room
number ten. My junking sack was soaking wet with the morning dew, so I
struck a match to a gas heating stove and set down in the floor, spreading
out the sack to dry. I felt a cold chill crawling over me. I took off my
shirt on the floor and let the warmth from the gas heater bake me. It felt
so good I stretched out in front of it, put my hands between my knees and
shivered a little while, and laid there chilling and wet with dew, getting
warm through my overhalls, and thinking about other times I'd been in hard
spots and somebody had always come along. Junk was bringing more money. I
guess they want brass. Copper's good. Aluminum's what's best. That old junk
man's a Jew. Some folks around town don't like Jews 'cause they're Jews,
Niggers 'cause they're black; me 'cause I'm a dam little junk boy, but I
don't care 'bout all of that. This old floor's good an' warm. What's that?
Fire whistle? О God, no! Not a fire whistle! Not no fire whistle! Fire
whistles has run me nuts' Fire! Fire! Put it out! Fire!
"Get up! Wake up! Move!" A lady rolled me over out of the way; then she
trampled and danced up and down in front of the stove. Smoke all over the
place. She drew a pitcher of water from the sink, poured it along in front
of the stove' and a big cloud of white smoke shot up and filled the whole
room. "Wake up! You'll burn up! You'll blister!"
You'll blister. You'll blister. You will blister. Wait and see. Hot tar
and hot feathers and you'll blister. Kloo Kluxx Klam. Wake up. Wake up an'
crawl on your belly.
The lady yelled at me. She took me by the hand and pulled me up off of
the floor. I walked to the bed and crawled in between the covers with my
overhalls on. "Looks like you'd at least take off your overhauls, boy! What
do you mean spreading that old greasy sack out here on the floor in front of
this fire, and then going off to sleep any such a way? You ought to have
your little hind end blistered!"
You low-down lousy sneakin' Kluck Klucks! Git th' hell outta my house!
Ol' ghosty robes! Wound up in a windin' sheet! Windin' sheet! Windin' sheet!
The lady pushed her hair back out of her face and walked to the edge of
the bed. "Why, you're having a fever!' She touched her hand to my forehead.
"Your face is simply blistered!"
Tar me an' feather me! I hate ya! Hoodlum....
I made a dive for her and missed, and went down to the floor. I
scrambled around trying to get up. Everything blacked out. ...
"Feel better now? This nice cool rag on your forehead?" She smiled and
looked into my face like my mama used to look at me a long, long time ago.
"It burned a hole or two in my old rug, but you'll have to go out and hunt
in the alleys and find you a brand-new gunny sack. Don't worry about my old
rug. Do you know when I first bursted into this room and found the smoke and
the sack blazing on the floor, and I saw you mere asleep on the floor, I
wasn't mad. Nooo. Here. Eat this oatmeal. And drink this warm milk down.
Good? Sugar enough? I took your overhalls off. You ought to wear some
underwear, little tousle-head."
I looked out through the screened window across the old school grounds
and thought of a million friends arid a million faces, a million brawls and
fights, and a whole town full of just as good a people as you'll ever find
anywhere. The lady still knelt down at the side of my bed.
She put her hand on my head and said, "Go to sleep?''
"Back of my head. Hurts. Jumps."
"You roll over and lay on your tummy. That's a good boy. I'll rub the
back of your head for you. Does this feel good?'' She rubbed and petted, and
rubbed and petted.
"Is it rainin'?" I snuggled down under the covers deeper.
"Why, no. Why?" She patted the back of my neck.
"I'm all wet an' cold."
"You're dreaming!" She rubbed and petted some more.
"Is this train runnin' away?"
"Go to sleep."
"Ever'thing's funny, ain't it? I c'n hear it rainin'."
"Does this rubbing feel better?" She patted me again.
" 'At's better."
"Quit your talking and go to sleep.''
" 'At's better."
"Want anything?"
"Yup."
"What?"
"New junkin' sack.''
Chapter XI
BOY IN SEARCH OF SOMETHING
I was thirteen when I went to live with a family of thirteen people in
a two-room house. I was going on fifteen when I got me a job shining shoes,
washing spittoons, meeting the night trains in a hotel up in town. I was a
little past sixteen when I first hit the highway and took a trip down around
the Gulf of Mexico, hoeing figs, watering strawberries, picking mustang
grapes, helping carpenters and well drillers, cleaning yards, chopping
weeds, and moving garbage cans. Then I got tired of being a stranger, so I
stuck my thumb in the air again and landed back in the old home town,
Okemah.
I found me a job at five dollars a week in a push-button service
station. I got a letter twice a week as regular as a clock from Papa out on
the Texas plains. I told him everything I thought and he told me everything
he was hoping. Then, one day, he wrote that his bums had healed up enough
for him to go to work, and he'd got him a job managing a whole block of
property in Pampa, Texas.
In three days I was standing in the little office shaking his hand,
talking old times, and all about my job with him as general handyman around
the property. I was just past my seventeenth birthday.
Pampa was a Texas oil boom town and wilder than a woodchuck. It
traveled fast and traveled light. Oil boom towns come that way and they go
that way. Houses aren't built to last very long, because the big majority of
the. working folks will walk into town, work like a horse for a while, put
the oil wells in, drill the holes down fifteen thousand feet, bring in the
black gushers, case off the hot flow, cap the high pressure, put valves on
them, get the oil to flowing steady and easy into the rich people's tanks,
and then the field, a big thick forest of drilling rigs, just sets there
pumping oil all over the world to run limousines, factories, war machines,
and fast trains. There's not much work left to do in the oil fields once the
boys have developed it by hard work and hot sweat, and so they move along
down the road, as broke, as down and out, as tough, as hard hitting, as hard
working, as the day they come to town.
The town was mainly a scattering of little old shacks. They was built
to last a few months; built out of old rotten boards, flattened oil barrels,
buckets, sheet iron, crates of all kinds, and gunny sacks. Some were lucky
enough to have a floor, Others just the dusty old dirt. The rent was high on
these shacks. A common price was five dollars a week for a three roomer.
That meant one room cut three ways.
Women folks worked hard trying to make their little shacks look like
something, but with the dry weather, hot sun, high wind, and the dust piling
in, they could clean and wipe and mop and scrub their shanty twenty-four
hours a day and never get caught up. Their floors always was warped and
crooked. The old linoleum rugs had raised six families and put eighteen kids
through school. The walls were made out thin boards, one inch thick and
covered over with whatever the women could nail on them: old blue wallpaper,
wrapping paper from the boxcars along the tracks, once in a while a layer of
beaver board painted with whitewash, or some haywire color ranging from
deep-sea blue through all of the midnight blues to a blazing red that would
drive a Jersey bull crazy. Each family usually nailed together some sort of
a chair or bench out of junk materials and left it in the house when they
moved away, so that after an even thirty-five cents worth of hand-made wash
benches, or an old chair, or table had been left behind, the landlord hired
a sign painter to write the word "Furnished" on the "For Rent" sign.
Lots of folks in the oil fields come in from the country. They heard
about the high wages and the great number of jobs. The old farm has dried up
and blowed away. The chickens are gone dry and the cows have quit laying.
The wind has got high and the sky is black with dust. Blow flies are taking
the place over, licking off the milk pails, falling into the cream, getting
hung up in the molasses. Besides that, they ain't no more work to do on the
farm; can't buy no seed for planting, nor feed for the horses and cows.
Hell, I can work. I like to work. Born working. Raised working. Married
working. What kind of work do they want done in this oil boom town? If work
is what they want done, plowing or digging or carrying something, I can do
that. If they want a cellar dug or some dirt moved, I can do that. If they
want some rock hauled and some cement shoveled, I can do that. If they want
some boards sawed and some nails drove, hell's bells, I can do that. If they
want a tank truck drove, I can do that, too, or if they want some steel
towers bolted up, give me a day's practice, and I can do that. I could get
pretty good at it. And I wouldn't quit. Even if I could, I wouldn't want to.
Hell with this whole dam layout! I'm a-gonna git up an' hump up, an'
walk off of this cussed dam place! Farm, toodle-do. Here I come, oil town!
Hundred mile down that big wide road.
Papa's new job was the handling of an old ramshackle rooming house,
right on the main street, built out of corrugated iron on a framework of two
by four scantlings, and cut up into little stalls called rooms. You couldn't
hardly lay down to sleep in your room without your head scraping the wall at
one end and your feet sticking out in the hall. You could hear what was
taking place in the six stalls all around you, and it was a pretty hard
matter to keep your mind on your own business for trying to listen in on the
rooms on each side of you. The beds made so much racket it sounded like some
kind of a factory screaking. But there was a rhythm and a song in the
scraping and the oil boom chasers called it "the rusty bedspring blues." I
got so good at this particular song that I could rent a flop in a boom-town
hotel, and go to my room and just set there and listen a minute, and then
guess within three pounds of the other roomers' weight, just by
the squeek of the springs.
My dad run one of these houses. He tended to a block of property where
girls rented rooms: the girls that follow the booms. They'd come in to look
for work, and they'd hit the rooming house so as to set up a home, and
straighten out their citizenship papers with the pimps, the McGimps, the
other girls, and the old satchels that acted as mothers of the flock. One of
Papa's boarders, for instance, was an old lady with gray hair dyed as red as
the side of a brick barn, and her name was Old Rose. Only there never was a
rose that old. She'd been in all of the booms, Smackover, Arkansas,
Cromwell, Oklahoma, Bristow, Drumright, Sand Springs, Bow Legs, and on to
East Texas, Kilgore, Longview, Henderson, then west to Burke-Burnett,
Wichita Falls, Electra, and farther west, out on the windy plains, around
Panhandle, Amarillo, and Pampa. It was a thriving business, boom chasing;
and this old rusty sheet-iron rooming house could have been in any of these
towns, and so could Old Rose.
Come to think of it, I've been in every one of these towns. I might of
slept in this old rooming house a dozen times around over the country, and
it was awful high-priced sleeping. I might of paid out a lot of them sheets
of iron. And the girls that stayed here, they might of paid out a truck load
or two of them two by fours. The usual price is about five dollars a week.
If a girl is working, that is not so much, but if she's out of job, it's a
lot of money. She knows that the officers might grab her by the arm any time
for "Vag," for it's a jail house offense to be a-loafing in a boom town.
I remember one little girl that come in from the country.
She blowed into town one day from some thriving little church
community, and she wasn't what you'd call a good-looking girl, but she
wasn't ugly. Sort of plump, but she wasn't a bit fat. She'd worked hard at
washing milk buckets, doing housework, washing the family's clothes. She
could milk an old Jersey cow. Her face and her hands looked like work. Her
room in the rooming house wasn't big enough to spank a cat in. She moved in,
straightened it up, and gave it a sweeping and a dusting that is headline
news in a oil boom town. Then she washed the old faded window curtains,
changed the bed and dresser around every way to see how it looked best, and
tacked pretty pictures on her wall.
She didn't have any extra clothes with her. I wondered why; something
went haywire at home, maybe. Maybe she left home in a hurry. Guess that's
what she done. She just thought she'd come into town and go to work in a
cafe or hotel or in somebody's house, and then when she got her first week's
pay, she'd get what things she needed, and add to them as she went along.
She wasn't a town girl. You could tell that. Everything about her looked
like the farm, and the outhouses and barns, and the pastures, and wide-open
spaces, and the cattle grazing, and the herds of sheep, or like looking out
across the plains and seeing a hard-working cowhand rolling down across the
country on a fat bay mare. Some way or another, her way of talking and the
words that she knew just didn't seem to connect up with this oil-smeared,
gasoline-soaked, whiskey-flavored, wild and fast-moving boom town. No
cattle; no milk buckets. Nothing about raising an early garden, or putting
on a big-brim straw hat and driving a speckled mare and a black hoss to a
hay rake. I guess she was just a little bit lost. The other girls flocked in
to see her, walking on high-heel shoes, with a bottle or two of fingernail
paint, some cigarets, different flavors of lipstick, and a half a pint of
pale corn whiskey. They jabbered and talked a blue streak. They giggled and
snickered, and hollered, Oh, Kid, this, and Oh, Kid, that. Everything they
said was funny and new, and she would set, listen, soak it all in, but she
didn't talk much. She didn't know much to talk about. Didn't smoke, and
didn't know how to use that fingernail paint. Hadn't seen the picture show
lately. Once in a great while she'd get up and walk across the floor and
straighten up something that had got pushed over, or remark that she had to
scrape the grease and dirt off of her two-burner hot plate.
When the girls had gone off to their rooms, she'd take a good look
around over her room to see if it was neat enough, and if it was she'd
sometimes take a little walk down the old dark hall, out into the back yard
that stood about ankle deep in junk and garbage. You'd run onto her every
once in a while out there. You'd catch her with a handful of old sacks and
papers, carrying them in a high north wind out to the alley to put them in
the trash box. Sometimes she'd smile at you and say, "I just thought I'd
pick up a few of these papers."
She's thinking it's over a week now since I paid my room rent. Wonder
what the landlord will do? Wonder if I'd grab the broom and pitch in and
sweep out the hall, and go and carry a few buckets of water and mop it,
wonder if he'd care? Maybe it'll get under his skin, and he might give me a
job of keeping it up.
She'd come to the office where Papa was, and she'd set down and turn
through the magazines and papers, looking at all of the pictures. She liked
to look at pictures of the mountains. Sometimes she'd look at a picture for
two or three minutes. And then she'd say, "I'd like to be there."
She'd stand up and look out the window. The building was just one
story. It was all right down on the ground. The sidewalk went past the door,
and all of the oil field boys would crowd up and down the street, talking,
staggering, in their work clothes, khaki pants and shirts smeared with crude
oil, blue overhalls soaked with grease and covered with thick dust, salted
and flavored with sweat. They made good money. The drillers drawed as high
as twenty-five dollars a day. Boy, that was a lot of money. They wasted most
of it. Whooped it off on slot machines and whiskey. Fights broke out every
few minutes up and down the street. She could see the mob gang up. She could
see a couple of heads bobbing up and down and going around in the middle.
Pretty soon everybody would be beating the hound out of everybody else,
choked, wet with blood and hot sweat. You could hear them breathing and
cussing a block away. Then the fight would bust up and the men would come
down the sidewalk, their clothes tore all to pieces, hats lost, hair full of
mud and dirt, whiskey broke.
She was new in town, I knew that because she held back a little when a
fist fight broke out. She just didn't much want to jump into that crazy
river of oil field fist fighters. She might have liked it if she'd known the
people better, but she didn't know anybody well enough to call them friend.
It was plumb dangerous for a strange girl even to go from one joint to the
other looking for a job, so she waited till her money was all gone and her
room rent was about two weeks behind. Then she went to a few places and
asked for work. They didn't need her. She wasn't experienced. She went back
several times. They still didn't need her. She was flat.
She got acquainted with a one-eyed girl. The one-eyed girl introduced
her to a truck driver. The truck driver said he might find her a job. He
would come in every day from the fields with a yarn about a job that he was
trying to get her. The first few days they usually met in the office or hall
and he would tell her all about it. But he'd have to wait another day or two
to see for sure. The day come along when they didn't happen to meet in the
office or hall, so he had to go to her room to tell her about something else
that looked like a job for her. He made this a regular habit for about a
week and she turned up at the office one day with seven dollars and fifty
cents to pay on her rent. This was a big surprise to my dad, so he got
curious. In fact he stayed curious. So he thought he would do a little
eavesdropping around over the hotel to see what was going on. On day he saw
her go off uptown with the one-eyed girl. In about an hour they come back
with their hats in their hands, brushing their hair back out of their eyes,
talking and saying that they was awful tired. The one-eyed girl took her
down the hall and they went into a room. Papa tiptoed down to the door and
looked through the keyhole. He could see everything that was going on. The
one-eyed girl took out a teaspoon and put something in it. He knew then what
it was. The girl struck a match and held it under the spoon, and heated it
real hot. That's one way of fixing a shot of dope--morphine. Sometimes you
use a needle, sometimes you sniff it, sometimes you eat it, sometimes you
drink it. The main idea seems to be any old way to get it into your system.
He pushed the door open and run in while they was trying to take the
dope. He grabbed the works away from the one-eyed girl and bawled both of
them out good and proper, telling how terrible it was to get on the stuff.
They cried and bawled and talked like a couple of little babies, and swore
up and down that neither of them used it regular, they didn't have the
habit. They just bought it for fun. They didn't know. The girl from the
country never tasted it. She swore that she never would. They all talked and
cried some more and promised never to touch the junk again.
But I stayed around there. I noticed how that girl with the one eye
would come and go, and come and go, feeling one minute like she was the
queen of the whole wide world, all smiles, laughing and joking; and then
she'd go and come again, and she'd be all fagged out, tired and footsore,
broke, hungry, lonesome, blue, and her eyes sunk way back, her hair tangled.
This kept up after Dad took away her morphine apparatus, and after all of
her big promises to lay off the stuff. The farm girl never showed the least
signs of being on dope, but the truck driver brought a little bottle of
whiskey along with him after he got to knowing her better, and through the
partition I heard them drinking.
Mister truck driver ate his meals in a little greasy wall restaurant
right next door. He introduced her to the boss of the joint, a man with ТВ,
about six foot four inches tall, skinny and humped as a spider. He had
studied to be a preacher, read most of the books on the subject, and was
bootlegging liquor in his eating place.
He gave the girl a job in the kitchen of this place, where she done all
of her work, his work, and run over two or three swampers and helpers trying
to keep the place from falling down, and all of the boards on the roof, and
all of the meals cooked and served. It was so hot I don't see how she stood
it. I more or less went into and out of these places because Papa was
looking after them. Personally, I never have been able to figure out how
anybody ate, slept, or lived around in this whole firetrap.
He give her one dollar a day to hang around there. He didn't call it a
job, so he didn't have to pay her much. But he said if she wanted to hang
around, he'd pitch her a dollar every night just to show her that his heart
was on the right side.
The whole rooming house had been added onto a little at a time by
moving old odd shacks onto the lot, till it had about fifty stalls. None of
them were ever painted. Like a bunch of match-boxes strung along; and some
of them housed whole families with gangs of kids, and others sheltered
several men in one room where there was fifteen or twenty cots in a one-bed
space, dirty, beg-buggy, slick, slimy, and otherwise not fit to live in or
around.
It was my job to show folks to their rooms, and show the rooms to the
people, and try to convince them that they was really rooms. One day when I
was out bungling around with a mattress and a set of rusty bed springs, I
chanced to hear a couple having more or less of a two-cylinder celebration
in one of the rooms. I knew that the room was supposed to be vacant. Nobody
was registered in there. The door was shut and the thumb-latch was throwed,
I had a sneaking idea of what was up.
Through a knothole in the shack, I saw a half a pint of hot whiskey
setting up on the old dirty dresser, and it was about eighty-nine percent
drunk up. The bed didn't have a sheet on it, or any kind of covers, just the
bare mattress. It was a faded pink mixed with a running brownish green,
trimmed around with a bed-bug tan color soaked into the cloth. The ТВ boss
of the little cafe and the bootleg store was setting on the side of the bed
with the country girl. Both of them had had a few out of the bottle. He was
talking to her, and what he said had been said too often before by other men
like him to put into quotes. You've had lots of trouble lately, haven't you?
You look kinda sad. Even when you smile or laugh, it stays in your eyes. It
never goes away. I've noticed it a lot since you've been around me lately.
You're a good girl. I've read lots of books and studied about people. I
know.
She said she liked to work.
He told her that she had a pretty face.
You got pretty eyes, even if they are sad. They're blue. Sad and blue.
She said she wasn't feeling so bad now since she had a job.
He said he wished that he could pay her more than a dollar. He said she
made a good hand. He didn't feel like working very hard. It was too hot for
him in his condition with the low roof.
I could hear him breathe and could hear the rattling in his lungs. His
face was pale and when he rubbed his hand over his chin the red blood would
show through his skin. He said, I feel better when I got you around.
She said that she was going to buy a few little things.
Where do your folks live at? Must have run away from home once. Tell me
what caused it.
Her family lived thirty-five miles away in Mobeetie. Thirty-five or
forty miles. She never did know just how far. Times got hard. And the farm
gets awful lonesome when the sun comes up or when it goes down. A family
argument got started and she got mad at her folks. So she bought a bus
ticket. Hit the oil fields. Heard lots about oil fields. Said they paid good
wages and always was needing somebody to work in them.
You've got a job right where you are. Just as long as you want it. I
know you'll learn as you keep working. I don't think my dollar is entirely
wasted. This fall is going to be good, and you'll know my business better,
and I'll pay you better. We'll get an old man to be dishwasher. It's too
much for you when business get rushing.
Her hand was resting on the mattress and he looked down at it and said,
It looks nice and clean, and I don't want the strong lye soap and the hot
dishwater to make it all red and dry the skin out. Cause it to chap. Break
open. Bleed. He put his hand on hers and give it a good friendly squeeze. He
rubbed real slow up and down her arm with the back of his hand just barely
touching her skin, and they stopped talking. Then he took her hand and
folded his fingers between hers and pulled her hand from the mattress and
took the weight from her arm in such a way that she fell back across the bed
He held her hand and he bent over and kissed her. And then he kissed her
again. They kept their mouths together for a long time. He rolled over
against her, and she rolled up against him. She had good firm muscles on her
shoulders and her back, and he felt each one of them, going from one to the
other. Her green cafe uniform was fresh washed and ironed so that it shined
where the light struck it, and where it curved to fit her body. Several
times he rubbed across the belt that tied in a big bow knot above her hips
and he pulled the sash and the knot came loose. The uniform started coming
open a little at the front and by the touch of his hand he laid it half open
almost without her knowing it. His hands was long and his fingers was slim
and he'd turned the pages of lots of books, and he took the first two long
fingers of his right hand and caught the thickness of the uniform between
them, and with a twist of his wrist he turned the rest of the dress back. He
played and felt of both of her breasts, his fingers walking from first one
and then the other like some kind of a big white spider. His ТВ caused him
to make a loud spitry noise when he breathed in and out, and he was
breathing faster all of the time.
I heard the sound of somebody's feet walking down the old boardwalk,
and I took a quick glance down and out of the door, and saw somebody's
shadow coming. I was standing on the steel frame of an iron folding cot, and
I jumped down from my lookout for a minute. It was my dad. He said he had to
go to the bank and for me to come and watch the office. There was a couple
there to look at a room and the room had to be fixed up before they moved
in. Needed linens. I stood there for about ten seconds not saying a thing.
My dad looked sort of funny at me. I didn't let on. Just stood there
straining my ears through that wall, and wondering what I was a-missing.
But, shucks, I knew. Yeah, I knew, it was just exactly like all of the rest
of them, and I wasn't a-missing out on nothing.
About thirty minutes later and along about dark, after the couple had
been well rented and well roomed, and the linens had been put on for them, I
took a flying high dive back out to the old board wall and knothole and
climbed up and took a last look. But they had left. Nothing left to tell the
tale but the prints of her hips sunk 'way down deep in the mattress.
I'll never feel as funny as the day I walked into the office and found
Papa behind the flowery curtain, setting on the edge of the bed holding his
face in his hands.
"Matter?" I asked him.
His finger pointed to the top of the dresser, and I found a check made
out to me for a dollar and fifty cents.
At first I grinned and said, "Guess mebbe it's some o' my oil money
a-rollin' in."
My blood turned to cold slush oil when my eyes saw on the corner of the
check the name and address of the Insane Asylum in Norman, Oklahoma.
I set down by the side of Papa and put my arm around him.
The letter said that Nora B. Guthrie had died some days ago. Her death
was a natural death. Because she only knew my address in Okemah, they were
sending me the balance of her cash account.
Papa was wiping his eyes red with his knuckles, trying to quit crying.
I patted him on the back and held the check down between my knees, reading
it again.
I walked over across the tracks, uptown to the bank, not wanting to
cash the check in our neighborhood. The man in the bank window could tell by
my face that I was nervous and scared, and everybody standing in line was
anxious for me to move on out of their way. I seen their hands full of
checks, pink, tan, yellow and blue ones. My face turned a pale and sickly
color, and my throat was just a wadding of dry cotton, and my eyes got hazy,
and my whole life went through my head. It took every muscle in my body to
pick up that dollar bill and fifty-cent piece. Somewhere on the outskirts of
town, a high whining fire whistle seemed to be blowing.
I got a job selling root beer. It was just a big barrel with a coil
running around inside of it, and it cost you a nickel for me to pull the
handle, unless you was a personal friend of mine, in which case I'd draw you
off a mug free.
Prohibition was on and folks seemed like they were dry. The first day
that I was there, the boss come around and said, "Oh, here's your day's pay.
We pay every day here, because we may have to close up any day. Business is
rushing and good right now, but nobody can tell.
"Another thing I want to show you is about this little door right down
here under the counter. You see this little door? Well, you push this
trigger right here, just like that, and then you see the door comes open.
Then you see inside. There's some little shelves. On these little shelves,
as I suppose you see, are some little bottles. These little bottles are two
ounces. They are fifty cents a bottle. They are a patented medicine, I
think, and it's called Jamaica Ginger, or plain Jake--a mixture of ginger
and alcohol. The alcohol is about ninety-nine percent. So now, in case
anybody comes in with their thumbnail busted or ankle sprung, or is snake
bit, or has got ancestors, or the hoof and mouth disease, or is otherwise
sick and has got fifty cents cash money on him, get the fifty cents and then
reach down here and give him one of these little bottles of Jake. Be sure to
put the money in the register."
While I worked there only about a month, I saved up four dollars, and
to boot I got an inside view of what the human race was drinking.
You couldn't tell any more about the rot-gut called whiskey than you
could about the Jake. It was just about as poison. Lots of people fell over
dead and was found scattered here and yonder with different kinds of whiskey
poisoning. I hated prohibition on that account. I hated it because it was
killing people, paralyzing them, and causing them to die like flies. I've
seen men set around and squeeze that old pink canned heat through an old
dirty rag, get the alcohol drained out of it, and then drink it down. The
papers carried tales about the men that drunk radiator alcohol and died from
rust poisoning. Others came down with the beer head. That's where your head
starts swelling up and it just don't quit. Usually you take the beer head
from drinking home brew that ain't made right, or is fermented in old rusty
cans, like garbage cans, oil drums, gasoline barrels, and slop buckets. It
caused some of the people to die. They even had a kind of beer called Old
Chock that was made by throwing everything under the sun into an old barrel,
adding the yeast and sugar and water to it, and letting her go. Biscuit
heels, corn-bread scraps, potato leavings, and all sorts of table scraps
went into this beer. It is a whitish, milky, slicky-looking bunch of crap.
But especially down in Oklahoma I've seen men drive fifteen miles out in the
country just to get a hold of a few bottles of it. The name Chock come from
the Choctaw Indians. I guess they just naturally wanted to celebrate some
way or another, and thought a little drink would fire them up so's they'd
break loose, forget their worries, and have a good time.
When I was behind the counter, men would come in and purchase bay rum,
and I'd get a look into their puffy, red-speckled faces, and their bleary,
batty eyes, that looked but didn't see, and that went shut, but never slept,
that closed, but never rested, and dreamed but never arrived at a
conclusion. I would see a man come in and buy a bottle of rubbing alcohol,
and then buy a bottle of coke and go out and mix it half and half, hold his
breath, wheeze for a few seconds, and then waddle on away.
One day my curiosity licked me. I said that I was going to taste a
bottle of that Jake for myself. Man ought to be interested. I drawed up
about a half a mug of root beer. It was cold and nice, and I popped the
little stopper out of one of the Jake bottles, and poured the Jake into the
root beer. When that Jake hit that beer, it commenced to cook it, and there
was seven civil wars and two revolutions broke out inside of that mug. The
beer was trying to tame the Jake down and the Jake was trying to eat the
beer up. They sizzled and boiled and sounded about like bacon frying. The
Jake was chasing the little bubbles and the little bubbles was chasing the
Jake, and the beer spun like a whirlpool in a big swift river. It went
around and around so fast that it made a little funnel right in the middle.
I waited about twenty minutes for it to settle down. Finally it was about
the color of a new tan saddle, and about as quiet as it would get. So I bent
over it and stuck my ear down over the mug. It was spewing and crackling
like a machine gun, but I thought I'd best to drink it before it turned into
a waterspout or a dust storm. I took it up and took it down, and it was hot
and dry and gingery and spicy, and cloudy, and smooth, and windy and cold,
and barns and vacant lots and trees whizzed past me like I was riding down
the road on a runaway motorcycle.
I blammed into Papa's office, knocking people out of my way with their
papers saying something about somebody needing some license tags. I shoved
across Papa's desk, and puffed and gasped for air, saying, "Run! Quick!
Mama!"
Papa and Roy left their typewriters with papers rolled into them and
people looking sideways at one another. They busted out the door and met
Warren just starting in to buy Grandma some car tags.
"Take that kid back home with you! Keep him tonight!" Papa ran up the
street to the truck. Roy yelled back over his shoulder, "Get Grandma! Come
back in the morning!"
Warren took me up into the seat of his car and I was screaming, "I
wanta go home where Mama is! I don't wanta stay all night with you! You ol'
cat-killer!"
And it was cussing and mad that Warren drove me the seven miles out to
Grandma's, and crying and bawling that I walked into their house.
That night at Grandma's I laid awake and watched a hundred moving
pictures go through my mind, but I didn't have to make them up, because they
was snapping and cracking and flashing all around me. The crickets chirped
like they was calling for their lovers, but halfway scared their own voice
would cause them to get stepped on. The frogs down around the banks of the
pond seemed to laugh. I laid there in a puddle of cold late-summer sweat,
and my body cramped in knots and I didn't move an arm or a leg. I rolled my
head on my pillow once to look out the night window, and beyond a turtle
dove hay meadow I could see a yellow prairie fire that had broke loose
across a slope of dry grass, five or six miles away to the south; and I was
glad it wasn't to the east, toward home. I guess Grandpa is asleep and
getting ready to go to work with Lawrence in the morning, cutting wood on
the hill. Warren is asleep, too; I can hear him snoring here beside me,
worried mostly about his own self. But I know that in the next bedroom
Grandma, too, like me, is laying there with her eyes stinging and her face
salty and wet, having crazy dreams that float across the night winds and
twist and turn and roll and coil and jump and fight and burn themselves out,
like the meadow fire over across the wind yonder, like the dry hay.
Warren drove Grandma and me back to town when morning came. We walked
through the yard gate and in at the back door of the old Jim Cain house.
Windows smashed and glass laughing in the sun on the floor. Kitchen upside
down and dishes and pots and pans slung across the room and floor. Front
room, a handful of torn books and old letters, chairs laying over on their
sides, and a coal-oil lamp smashed where the oil soaked the wallpaper and
then run down the north wall. Little bedroom, both beds full of wild strewn
clothes that almost looked like people that had died in their dreams. Warren
and me followed Grandma from the bedroom, through the front room, and back
into the kitchen. I didn't hear anybody say a single word. The second-handed
oil stove was smashed in the corner and the new kerosene smelled strong,
soaking in the floors and walls. Charred wallpaper run up the wall behind
the stove, some of the boards black and smoked and scorched with flames that
had been beat out with a wet gunny sack at my feet.
Roy walked in from the back porch and I noticed that he was all dirty,
messy, and needed a shave; his new shirt and pants tore in several places;
his hair was in his eyes and his eyes had a beat-down look. He let his eyes
drift around the room without looking us in the face, and then he looked at
the oil stove and said, "Oil stove exploded. Papa's in the hospital. Pretty
bad burns."
'' 'S funny," I said, "I was afraid yesterday when ya started ta
fumigate th' house. `Fraid this coal oil would ketch afire. So I took th'
oil tank off th' stove an' set it out in th' back 'yard under th' mulberry
tree. I cain't figger out how it blowed up." I was looking at the oil tank
piled in the corner with the oil soaked out across the floor. "Jist cain't
see how."
"Shut you mouth!" Roy doubled up both fists and raved back at me, and
his eyes blazed wildfire. "You little rat!"
I set down close to the stove against the wall and heard Grandma say,
"Where--how is Nora!''
Warren was listening, swallowing hard.
"She's on the westbound passenger train." Roy slid down on the floor
beside me and fumbled with a burner on the wreck of a stove.
"On her way to the insane asylum."
Nobody said very much.
Away off somewheres we heard a long gone howl of a fast-running train
whistling down.
Chapter X
THE JUNKING SACK
With Mama gone, Papa went to West Texas to live with my aunt in Pampa
till he could get over his burns. Roy and me hung on for a while and lived
in the old Jim Cain house. When daylight come to our house and I woke up out
of bed, there wasn't no warm breakfast, and there wasn't a clean bed. It was
a dirty house. A house that had old dirty clothes throwed around here and
yonder, or a tub of water, soap suds and soppy pants on the bench out in
back, that had set there now for two or three weeks, waiting for Roy or me
to wash them. I don't know. That house, that old, old, big mulberry tree,
those dried-up flowers in the front yard, the kitchen so sour and
lonesome--it seemed like everything in the world echoed in there, but you
couldn't hear it. Yon could stand still and cock your ear to one side, but
you couldn't hear anything. I know how I felt about it, I only had one
feeling toward it: I wanted to get the hell out of it when daytime come and
it got light outside.
Then Roy stumbled onto a job at the Okemah Wholesale House. The day we
moved out of the Jim Cain house, I helped him haul and store all of our
belongings in the hayloft of the rottenest barn in town. He asked me to come
across town and stay with him in his new three-dollar room, but I told him
"no," that I wanted to shuck out on my own.
Every day I combed the alleys and the dump grounds with my gunny sacks
blistering my shoulders, digging like a mole into everybody's trash heaps to
see if I couldn't make a little something out of nothing. Ten or fifteen
miles walking a day, with my sack weighing up to fifty pounds, to weigh in
and sell my load to the city junk man along about sundown.
The refuse heaps and trash piles didn't turn my stomach. I was baptized
into ten or fifteen different junking crews by getting splashed, kicked,
squirted on, throwed down, heaped over and covered under in every earthly
article of garbage and junk known to man. I'd come back to the gang house
laughing and scare the kids with wild tales about the half-kids and
half-rats, half-coyotes, and half-men.
When I told Roy good-bye I had brought an old quilt and blanket over to
the gang-house shack and made it my hotel.
It had rained and turned hot, rained and turned hot, so many times
lately that the whole gang house hill simmered and steamed. The weeds turned
into a jungle where spiders golfed the ladybugs and wasps dive-bombed the
spiders. A world where the new babies of one came from the dead bodies of
others. The sun was hot as fire on the henhouse, and the chicken manure had
carried its lice across the hill in the rains. A smothery vapor covered the
place with the smell and the poison of cankering wood.
The waters oozed from the hill above and kept the floor of the house
soggy and wet. My quilt and blanket soured and molded. I woke up every
morning in my bed on the floor, feeling as if the matter that rotted in the
night had soaked into my brain and filled my body with a blind fever. The
sun, fermenting the dew in the piles of trash, put out some kind of a gas
that made me laugh and lay down in the path in the sun and dream about dying
and moldering.
When the kids had gone home on these nights, I'd lay on my back on my
damp blanket and whirl away to a land of bloody, cutthroat dreams, and fight
and wallow in corruption and slime all night, chased and trampled under the
feet of demons and monsters, wound up in the coils of a boa constrictor
crawling in the city cesspool. I'd wake up bug-eyed. The sun coming up
brought the smell from the weeds again, and the vapor from the hill choked
me down.
For several mornings now I'd been too weak to hang my blankets out to
air and sun while I was junking. My first thought every morning was to crawl
out on the side of the hill and lay in the sun in the path. I felt the rays
cut through my whole body and I knew the sun was good medicine. One morning
I was so crazy and dizzy I crawled to the top of the hill and pulled myself
a block to the school grounds. I flopped down on a bench by a fountain. The
world was hot and I was cold. Then the world turned cold and I was hot. I
used my gunny sack for a pillow. It felt like lightning was cracking through
my head. My teeth chattered.
The next thing I knew somebody was shaking my shoulder and saying,
"Hey, Woody, wake up! What's the matter?"
I looked up and saw Roy. "Howdy, brother. How come you ta be passin' by
here?"
"How come you piled up here sick?" Roy asked me.
"I ain't sick! Little woozie."
"Where are you living these days? Hanging out up at that little old
gang house of a night?"
"I be all right."
"What's this old dirty sack under you head?"
"Junkin' sack."
"Still crawling through the dumps, huh? Listen, young sprout, I've got
a good room. You know where Mrs. Hutchinson lives over there in that big
white two-story house yonder? You go over there. I'll send a doctor up to
look you over pretty quick. See you about six o'clock. Get up! Here's the
key!"
"I c'n take care of my own self!"
"Listen, brat, I mean brother! Take this key."
"Go onta work!" I got up and pushed Roy down the sidewalk, "Shore, I'll
go sleep in yer room. Send me yer good docter! An' go onta work!" I was
pushing Roy in the back and laughing at the same time. Then I got so dizzy I
caved in, and Roy caught me and held me up, and give me a little shove to
get me started off toward his room.
I come to the big two-story white house and clumb the stairs to room
number ten. My junking sack was soaking wet with the morning dew, so I
struck a match to a gas heating stove and set down in the floor, spreading
out the sack to dry. I felt a cold chill crawling over me. I took off my
shirt on the floor and let the warmth from the gas heater bake me. It felt
so good I stretched out in front of it, put my hands between my knees and
shivered a little while, and laid there chilling and wet with dew, getting
warm through my overhalls, and thinking about other times I'd been in hard
spots and somebody had always come along. Junk was bringing more money. I
guess they want brass. Copper's good. Aluminum's what's best. That old junk
man's a Jew. Some folks around town don't like Jews 'cause they're Jews,
Niggers 'cause they're black; me 'cause I'm a dam little junk boy, but I
don't care 'bout all of that. This old floor's good an' warm. What's that?
Fire whistle? О God, no! Not a fire whistle! Not no fire whistle! Fire
whistles has run me nuts' Fire! Fire! Put it out! Fire!
"Get up! Wake up! Move!" A lady rolled me over out of the way; then she
trampled and danced up and down in front of the stove. Smoke all over the
place. She drew a pitcher of water from the sink, poured it along in front
of the stove' and a big cloud of white smoke shot up and filled the whole
room. "Wake up! You'll burn up! You'll blister!"
You'll blister. You'll blister. You will blister. Wait and see. Hot tar
and hot feathers and you'll blister. Kloo Kluxx Klam. Wake up. Wake up an'
crawl on your belly.
The lady yelled at me. She took me by the hand and pulled me up off of
the floor. I walked to the bed and crawled in between the covers with my
overhalls on. "Looks like you'd at least take off your overhauls, boy! What
do you mean spreading that old greasy sack out here on the floor in front of
this fire, and then going off to sleep any such a way? You ought to have
your little hind end blistered!"
You low-down lousy sneakin' Kluck Klucks! Git th' hell outta my house!
Ol' ghosty robes! Wound up in a windin' sheet! Windin' sheet! Windin' sheet!
The lady pushed her hair back out of her face and walked to the edge of
the bed. "Why, you're having a fever!' She touched her hand to my forehead.
"Your face is simply blistered!"
Tar me an' feather me! I hate ya! Hoodlum....
I made a dive for her and missed, and went down to the floor. I
scrambled around trying to get up. Everything blacked out. ...
"Feel better now? This nice cool rag on your forehead?" She smiled and
looked into my face like my mama used to look at me a long, long time ago.
"It burned a hole or two in my old rug, but you'll have to go out and hunt
in the alleys and find you a brand-new gunny sack. Don't worry about my old
rug. Do you know when I first bursted into this room and found the smoke and
the sack blazing on the floor, and I saw you mere asleep on the floor, I
wasn't mad. Nooo. Here. Eat this oatmeal. And drink this warm milk down.
Good? Sugar enough? I took your overhalls off. You ought to wear some
underwear, little tousle-head."
I looked out through the screened window across the old school grounds
and thought of a million friends arid a million faces, a million brawls and
fights, and a whole town full of just as good a people as you'll ever find
anywhere. The lady still knelt down at the side of my bed.
She put her hand on my head and said, "Go to sleep?''
"Back of my head. Hurts. Jumps."
"You roll over and lay on your tummy. That's a good boy. I'll rub the
back of your head for you. Does this feel good?'' She rubbed and petted, and
rubbed and petted.
"Is it rainin'?" I snuggled down under the covers deeper.
"Why, no. Why?" She patted the back of my neck.
"I'm all wet an' cold."
"You're dreaming!" She rubbed and petted some more.
"Is this train runnin' away?"
"Go to sleep."
"Ever'thing's funny, ain't it? I c'n hear it rainin'."
"Does this rubbing feel better?" She patted me again.
" 'At's better."
"Quit your talking and go to sleep.''
" 'At's better."
"Want anything?"
"Yup."
"What?"
"New junkin' sack.''
Chapter XI
BOY IN SEARCH OF SOMETHING
I was thirteen when I went to live with a family of thirteen people in
a two-room house. I was going on fifteen when I got me a job shining shoes,
washing spittoons, meeting the night trains in a hotel up in town. I was a
little past sixteen when I first hit the highway and took a trip down around
the Gulf of Mexico, hoeing figs, watering strawberries, picking mustang
grapes, helping carpenters and well drillers, cleaning yards, chopping
weeds, and moving garbage cans. Then I got tired of being a stranger, so I
stuck my thumb in the air again and landed back in the old home town,
Okemah.
I found me a job at five dollars a week in a push-button service
station. I got a letter twice a week as regular as a clock from Papa out on
the Texas plains. I told him everything I thought and he told me everything
he was hoping. Then, one day, he wrote that his bums had healed up enough
for him to go to work, and he'd got him a job managing a whole block of
property in Pampa, Texas.
In three days I was standing in the little office shaking his hand,
talking old times, and all about my job with him as general handyman around
the property. I was just past my seventeenth birthday.
Pampa was a Texas oil boom town and wilder than a woodchuck. It
traveled fast and traveled light. Oil boom towns come that way and they go
that way. Houses aren't built to last very long, because the big majority of
the. working folks will walk into town, work like a horse for a while, put
the oil wells in, drill the holes down fifteen thousand feet, bring in the
black gushers, case off the hot flow, cap the high pressure, put valves on
them, get the oil to flowing steady and easy into the rich people's tanks,
and then the field, a big thick forest of drilling rigs, just sets there
pumping oil all over the world to run limousines, factories, war machines,
and fast trains. There's not much work left to do in the oil fields once the
boys have developed it by hard work and hot sweat, and so they move along
down the road, as broke, as down and out, as tough, as hard hitting, as hard
working, as the day they come to town.
The town was mainly a scattering of little old shacks. They was built
to last a few months; built out of old rotten boards, flattened oil barrels,
buckets, sheet iron, crates of all kinds, and gunny sacks. Some were lucky
enough to have a floor, Others just the dusty old dirt. The rent was high on
these shacks. A common price was five dollars a week for a three roomer.
That meant one room cut three ways.
Women folks worked hard trying to make their little shacks look like
something, but with the dry weather, hot sun, high wind, and the dust piling
in, they could clean and wipe and mop and scrub their shanty twenty-four
hours a day and never get caught up. Their floors always was warped and
crooked. The old linoleum rugs had raised six families and put eighteen kids
through school. The walls were made out thin boards, one inch thick and
covered over with whatever the women could nail on them: old blue wallpaper,
wrapping paper from the boxcars along the tracks, once in a while a layer of
beaver board painted with whitewash, or some haywire color ranging from
deep-sea blue through all of the midnight blues to a blazing red that would
drive a Jersey bull crazy. Each family usually nailed together some sort of
a chair or bench out of junk materials and left it in the house when they
moved away, so that after an even thirty-five cents worth of hand-made wash
benches, or an old chair, or table had been left behind, the landlord hired
a sign painter to write the word "Furnished" on the "For Rent" sign.
Lots of folks in the oil fields come in from the country. They heard
about the high wages and the great number of jobs. The old farm has dried up
and blowed away. The chickens are gone dry and the cows have quit laying.
The wind has got high and the sky is black with dust. Blow flies are taking
the place over, licking off the milk pails, falling into the cream, getting
hung up in the molasses. Besides that, they ain't no more work to do on the
farm; can't buy no seed for planting, nor feed for the horses and cows.
Hell, I can work. I like to work. Born working. Raised working. Married
working. What kind of work do they want done in this oil boom town? If work
is what they want done, plowing or digging or carrying something, I can do
that. If they want a cellar dug or some dirt moved, I can do that. If they
want some rock hauled and some cement shoveled, I can do that. If they want
some boards sawed and some nails drove, hell's bells, I can do that. If they
want a tank truck drove, I can do that, too, or if they want some steel
towers bolted up, give me a day's practice, and I can do that. I could get
pretty good at it. And I wouldn't quit. Even if I could, I wouldn't want to.
Hell with this whole dam layout! I'm a-gonna git up an' hump up, an'
walk off of this cussed dam place! Farm, toodle-do. Here I come, oil town!
Hundred mile down that big wide road.
Papa's new job was the handling of an old ramshackle rooming house,
right on the main street, built out of corrugated iron on a framework of two
by four scantlings, and cut up into little stalls called rooms. You couldn't
hardly lay down to sleep in your room without your head scraping the wall at
one end and your feet sticking out in the hall. You could hear what was
taking place in the six stalls all around you, and it was a pretty hard
matter to keep your mind on your own business for trying to listen in on the
rooms on each side of you. The beds made so much racket it sounded like some
kind of a factory screaking. But there was a rhythm and a song in the
scraping and the oil boom chasers called it "the rusty bedspring blues." I
got so good at this particular song that I could rent a flop in a boom-town
hotel, and go to my room and just set there and listen a minute, and then
guess within three pounds of the other roomers' weight, just by
the squeek of the springs.
My dad run one of these houses. He tended to a block of property where
girls rented rooms: the girls that follow the booms. They'd come in to look
for work, and they'd hit the rooming house so as to set up a home, and
straighten out their citizenship papers with the pimps, the McGimps, the
other girls, and the old satchels that acted as mothers of the flock. One of
Papa's boarders, for instance, was an old lady with gray hair dyed as red as
the side of a brick barn, and her name was Old Rose. Only there never was a
rose that old. She'd been in all of the booms, Smackover, Arkansas,
Cromwell, Oklahoma, Bristow, Drumright, Sand Springs, Bow Legs, and on to
East Texas, Kilgore, Longview, Henderson, then west to Burke-Burnett,
Wichita Falls, Electra, and farther west, out on the windy plains, around
Panhandle, Amarillo, and Pampa. It was a thriving business, boom chasing;
and this old rusty sheet-iron rooming house could have been in any of these
towns, and so could Old Rose.
Come to think of it, I've been in every one of these towns. I might of
slept in this old rooming house a dozen times around over the country, and
it was awful high-priced sleeping. I might of paid out a lot of them sheets
of iron. And the girls that stayed here, they might of paid out a truck load
or two of them two by fours. The usual price is about five dollars a week.
If a girl is working, that is not so much, but if she's out of job, it's a
lot of money. She knows that the officers might grab her by the arm any time
for "Vag," for it's a jail house offense to be a-loafing in a boom town.
I remember one little girl that come in from the country.
She blowed into town one day from some thriving little church
community, and she wasn't what you'd call a good-looking girl, but she
wasn't ugly. Sort of plump, but she wasn't a bit fat. She'd worked hard at
washing milk buckets, doing housework, washing the family's clothes. She
could milk an old Jersey cow. Her face and her hands looked like work. Her
room in the rooming house wasn't big enough to spank a cat in. She moved in,
straightened it up, and gave it a sweeping and a dusting that is headline
news in a oil boom town. Then she washed the old faded window curtains,
changed the bed and dresser around every way to see how it looked best, and
tacked pretty pictures on her wall.
She didn't have any extra clothes with her. I wondered why; something
went haywire at home, maybe. Maybe she left home in a hurry. Guess that's
what she done. She just thought she'd come into town and go to work in a
cafe or hotel or in somebody's house, and then when she got her first week's
pay, she'd get what things she needed, and add to them as she went along.
She wasn't a town girl. You could tell that. Everything about her looked
like the farm, and the outhouses and barns, and the pastures, and wide-open
spaces, and the cattle grazing, and the herds of sheep, or like looking out
across the plains and seeing a hard-working cowhand rolling down across the
country on a fat bay mare. Some way or another, her way of talking and the
words that she knew just didn't seem to connect up with this oil-smeared,
gasoline-soaked, whiskey-flavored, wild and fast-moving boom town. No
cattle; no milk buckets. Nothing about raising an early garden, or putting
on a big-brim straw hat and driving a speckled mare and a black hoss to a
hay rake. I guess she was just a little bit lost. The other girls flocked in
to see her, walking on high-heel shoes, with a bottle or two of fingernail
paint, some cigarets, different flavors of lipstick, and a half a pint of
pale corn whiskey. They jabbered and talked a blue streak. They giggled and
snickered, and hollered, Oh, Kid, this, and Oh, Kid, that. Everything they
said was funny and new, and she would set, listen, soak it all in, but she
didn't talk much. She didn't know much to talk about. Didn't smoke, and
didn't know how to use that fingernail paint. Hadn't seen the picture show
lately. Once in a great while she'd get up and walk across the floor and
straighten up something that had got pushed over, or remark that she had to
scrape the grease and dirt off of her two-burner hot plate.
When the girls had gone off to their rooms, she'd take a good look
around over her room to see if it was neat enough, and if it was she'd
sometimes take a little walk down the old dark hall, out into the back yard
that stood about ankle deep in junk and garbage. You'd run onto her every
once in a while out there. You'd catch her with a handful of old sacks and
papers, carrying them in a high north wind out to the alley to put them in
the trash box. Sometimes she'd smile at you and say, "I just thought I'd
pick up a few of these papers."
She's thinking it's over a week now since I paid my room rent. Wonder
what the landlord will do? Wonder if I'd grab the broom and pitch in and
sweep out the hall, and go and carry a few buckets of water and mop it,
wonder if he'd care? Maybe it'll get under his skin, and he might give me a
job of keeping it up.
She'd come to the office where Papa was, and she'd set down and turn
through the magazines and papers, looking at all of the pictures. She liked
to look at pictures of the mountains. Sometimes she'd look at a picture for
two or three minutes. And then she'd say, "I'd like to be there."
She'd stand up and look out the window. The building was just one
story. It was all right down on the ground. The sidewalk went past the door,
and all of the oil field boys would crowd up and down the street, talking,
staggering, in their work clothes, khaki pants and shirts smeared with crude
oil, blue overhalls soaked with grease and covered with thick dust, salted
and flavored with sweat. They made good money. The drillers drawed as high
as twenty-five dollars a day. Boy, that was a lot of money. They wasted most
of it. Whooped it off on slot machines and whiskey. Fights broke out every
few minutes up and down the street. She could see the mob gang up. She could
see a couple of heads bobbing up and down and going around in the middle.
Pretty soon everybody would be beating the hound out of everybody else,
choked, wet with blood and hot sweat. You could hear them breathing and
cussing a block away. Then the fight would bust up and the men would come
down the sidewalk, their clothes tore all to pieces, hats lost, hair full of
mud and dirt, whiskey broke.
She was new in town, I knew that because she held back a little when a
fist fight broke out. She just didn't much want to jump into that crazy
river of oil field fist fighters. She might have liked it if she'd known the
people better, but she didn't know anybody well enough to call them friend.
It was plumb dangerous for a strange girl even to go from one joint to the
other looking for a job, so she waited till her money was all gone and her
room rent was about two weeks behind. Then she went to a few places and
asked for work. They didn't need her. She wasn't experienced. She went back
several times. They still didn't need her. She was flat.
She got acquainted with a one-eyed girl. The one-eyed girl introduced
her to a truck driver. The truck driver said he might find her a job. He
would come in every day from the fields with a yarn about a job that he was
trying to get her. The first few days they usually met in the office or hall
and he would tell her all about it. But he'd have to wait another day or two
to see for sure. The day come along when they didn't happen to meet in the
office or hall, so he had to go to her room to tell her about something else
that looked like a job for her. He made this a regular habit for about a
week and she turned up at the office one day with seven dollars and fifty
cents to pay on her rent. This was a big surprise to my dad, so he got
curious. In fact he stayed curious. So he thought he would do a little
eavesdropping around over the hotel to see what was going on. On day he saw
her go off uptown with the one-eyed girl. In about an hour they come back
with their hats in their hands, brushing their hair back out of their eyes,
talking and saying that they was awful tired. The one-eyed girl took her
down the hall and they went into a room. Papa tiptoed down to the door and
looked through the keyhole. He could see everything that was going on. The
one-eyed girl took out a teaspoon and put something in it. He knew then what
it was. The girl struck a match and held it under the spoon, and heated it
real hot. That's one way of fixing a shot of dope--morphine. Sometimes you
use a needle, sometimes you sniff it, sometimes you eat it, sometimes you
drink it. The main idea seems to be any old way to get it into your system.
He pushed the door open and run in while they was trying to take the
dope. He grabbed the works away from the one-eyed girl and bawled both of
them out good and proper, telling how terrible it was to get on the stuff.
They cried and bawled and talked like a couple of little babies, and swore
up and down that neither of them used it regular, they didn't have the
habit. They just bought it for fun. They didn't know. The girl from the
country never tasted it. She swore that she never would. They all talked and
cried some more and promised never to touch the junk again.
But I stayed around there. I noticed how that girl with the one eye
would come and go, and come and go, feeling one minute like she was the
queen of the whole wide world, all smiles, laughing and joking; and then
she'd go and come again, and she'd be all fagged out, tired and footsore,
broke, hungry, lonesome, blue, and her eyes sunk way back, her hair tangled.
This kept up after Dad took away her morphine apparatus, and after all of
her big promises to lay off the stuff. The farm girl never showed the least
signs of being on dope, but the truck driver brought a little bottle of
whiskey along with him after he got to knowing her better, and through the
partition I heard them drinking.
Mister truck driver ate his meals in a little greasy wall restaurant
right next door. He introduced her to the boss of the joint, a man with ТВ,
about six foot four inches tall, skinny and humped as a spider. He had
studied to be a preacher, read most of the books on the subject, and was
bootlegging liquor in his eating place.
He gave the girl a job in the kitchen of this place, where she done all
of her work, his work, and run over two or three swampers and helpers trying
to keep the place from falling down, and all of the boards on the roof, and
all of the meals cooked and served. It was so hot I don't see how she stood
it. I more or less went into and out of these places because Papa was
looking after them. Personally, I never have been able to figure out how
anybody ate, slept, or lived around in this whole firetrap.
He give her one dollar a day to hang around there. He didn't call it a
job, so he didn't have to pay her much. But he said if she wanted to hang
around, he'd pitch her a dollar every night just to show her that his heart
was on the right side.
The whole rooming house had been added onto a little at a time by
moving old odd shacks onto the lot, till it had about fifty stalls. None of
them were ever painted. Like a bunch of match-boxes strung along; and some
of them housed whole families with gangs of kids, and others sheltered
several men in one room where there was fifteen or twenty cots in a one-bed
space, dirty, beg-buggy, slick, slimy, and otherwise not fit to live in or
around.
It was my job to show folks to their rooms, and show the rooms to the
people, and try to convince them that they was really rooms. One day when I
was out bungling around with a mattress and a set of rusty bed springs, I
chanced to hear a couple having more or less of a two-cylinder celebration
in one of the rooms. I knew that the room was supposed to be vacant. Nobody
was registered in there. The door was shut and the thumb-latch was throwed,
I had a sneaking idea of what was up.
Through a knothole in the shack, I saw a half a pint of hot whiskey
setting up on the old dirty dresser, and it was about eighty-nine percent
drunk up. The bed didn't have a sheet on it, or any kind of covers, just the
bare mattress. It was a faded pink mixed with a running brownish green,
trimmed around with a bed-bug tan color soaked into the cloth. The ТВ boss
of the little cafe and the bootleg store was setting on the side of the bed
with the country girl. Both of them had had a few out of the bottle. He was
talking to her, and what he said had been said too often before by other men
like him to put into quotes. You've had lots of trouble lately, haven't you?
You look kinda sad. Even when you smile or laugh, it stays in your eyes. It
never goes away. I've noticed it a lot since you've been around me lately.
You're a good girl. I've read lots of books and studied about people. I
know.
She said she liked to work.
He told her that she had a pretty face.
You got pretty eyes, even if they are sad. They're blue. Sad and blue.
She said she wasn't feeling so bad now since she had a job.
He said he wished that he could pay her more than a dollar. He said she
made a good hand. He didn't feel like working very hard. It was too hot for
him in his condition with the low roof.
I could hear him breathe and could hear the rattling in his lungs. His
face was pale and when he rubbed his hand over his chin the red blood would
show through his skin. He said, I feel better when I got you around.
She said that she was going to buy a few little things.
Where do your folks live at? Must have run away from home once. Tell me
what caused it.
Her family lived thirty-five miles away in Mobeetie. Thirty-five or
forty miles. She never did know just how far. Times got hard. And the farm
gets awful lonesome when the sun comes up or when it goes down. A family
argument got started and she got mad at her folks. So she bought a bus
ticket. Hit the oil fields. Heard lots about oil fields. Said they paid good
wages and always was needing somebody to work in them.
You've got a job right where you are. Just as long as you want it. I
know you'll learn as you keep working. I don't think my dollar is entirely
wasted. This fall is going to be good, and you'll know my business better,
and I'll pay you better. We'll get an old man to be dishwasher. It's too
much for you when business get rushing.
Her hand was resting on the mattress and he looked down at it and said,
It looks nice and clean, and I don't want the strong lye soap and the hot
dishwater to make it all red and dry the skin out. Cause it to chap. Break
open. Bleed. He put his hand on hers and give it a good friendly squeeze. He
rubbed real slow up and down her arm with the back of his hand just barely
touching her skin, and they stopped talking. Then he took her hand and
folded his fingers between hers and pulled her hand from the mattress and
took the weight from her arm in such a way that she fell back across the bed
He held her hand and he bent over and kissed her. And then he kissed her
again. They kept their mouths together for a long time. He rolled over
against her, and she rolled up against him. She had good firm muscles on her
shoulders and her back, and he felt each one of them, going from one to the
other. Her green cafe uniform was fresh washed and ironed so that it shined
where the light struck it, and where it curved to fit her body. Several
times he rubbed across the belt that tied in a big bow knot above her hips
and he pulled the sash and the knot came loose. The uniform started coming
open a little at the front and by the touch of his hand he laid it half open
almost without her knowing it. His hands was long and his fingers was slim
and he'd turned the pages of lots of books, and he took the first two long
fingers of his right hand and caught the thickness of the uniform between
them, and with a twist of his wrist he turned the rest of the dress back. He
played and felt of both of her breasts, his fingers walking from first one
and then the other like some kind of a big white spider. His ТВ caused him
to make a loud spitry noise when he breathed in and out, and he was
breathing faster all of the time.
I heard the sound of somebody's feet walking down the old boardwalk,
and I took a quick glance down and out of the door, and saw somebody's
shadow coming. I was standing on the steel frame of an iron folding cot, and
I jumped down from my lookout for a minute. It was my dad. He said he had to
go to the bank and for me to come and watch the office. There was a couple
there to look at a room and the room had to be fixed up before they moved
in. Needed linens. I stood there for about ten seconds not saying a thing.
My dad looked sort of funny at me. I didn't let on. Just stood there
straining my ears through that wall, and wondering what I was a-missing.
But, shucks, I knew. Yeah, I knew, it was just exactly like all of the rest
of them, and I wasn't a-missing out on nothing.
About thirty minutes later and along about dark, after the couple had
been well rented and well roomed, and the linens had been put on for them, I
took a flying high dive back out to the old board wall and knothole and
climbed up and took a last look. But they had left. Nothing left to tell the
tale but the prints of her hips sunk 'way down deep in the mattress.
I'll never feel as funny as the day I walked into the office and found
Papa behind the flowery curtain, setting on the edge of the bed holding his
face in his hands.
"Matter?" I asked him.
His finger pointed to the top of the dresser, and I found a check made
out to me for a dollar and fifty cents.
At first I grinned and said, "Guess mebbe it's some o' my oil money
a-rollin' in."
My blood turned to cold slush oil when my eyes saw on the corner of the
check the name and address of the Insane Asylum in Norman, Oklahoma.
I set down by the side of Papa and put my arm around him.
The letter said that Nora B. Guthrie had died some days ago. Her death
was a natural death. Because she only knew my address in Okemah, they were
sending me the balance of her cash account.
Papa was wiping his eyes red with his knuckles, trying to quit crying.
I patted him on the back and held the check down between my knees, reading
it again.
I walked over across the tracks, uptown to the bank, not wanting to
cash the check in our neighborhood. The man in the bank window could tell by
my face that I was nervous and scared, and everybody standing in line was
anxious for me to move on out of their way. I seen their hands full of
checks, pink, tan, yellow and blue ones. My face turned a pale and sickly
color, and my throat was just a wadding of dry cotton, and my eyes got hazy,
and my whole life went through my head. It took every muscle in my body to
pick up that dollar bill and fifty-cent piece. Somewhere on the outskirts of
town, a high whining fire whistle seemed to be blowing.
I got a job selling root beer. It was just a big barrel with a coil
running around inside of it, and it cost you a nickel for me to pull the
handle, unless you was a personal friend of mine, in which case I'd draw you
off a mug free.
Prohibition was on and folks seemed like they were dry. The first day
that I was there, the boss come around and said, "Oh, here's your day's pay.
We pay every day here, because we may have to close up any day. Business is
rushing and good right now, but nobody can tell.
"Another thing I want to show you is about this little door right down
here under the counter. You see this little door? Well, you push this
trigger right here, just like that, and then you see the door comes open.
Then you see inside. There's some little shelves. On these little shelves,
as I suppose you see, are some little bottles. These little bottles are two
ounces. They are fifty cents a bottle. They are a patented medicine, I
think, and it's called Jamaica Ginger, or plain Jake--a mixture of ginger
and alcohol. The alcohol is about ninety-nine percent. So now, in case
anybody comes in with their thumbnail busted or ankle sprung, or is snake
bit, or has got ancestors, or the hoof and mouth disease, or is otherwise
sick and has got fifty cents cash money on him, get the fifty cents and then
reach down here and give him one of these little bottles of Jake. Be sure to
put the money in the register."
While I worked there only about a month, I saved up four dollars, and
to boot I got an inside view of what the human race was drinking.
You couldn't tell any more about the rot-gut called whiskey than you
could about the Jake. It was just about as poison. Lots of people fell over
dead and was found scattered here and yonder with different kinds of whiskey
poisoning. I hated prohibition on that account. I hated it because it was
killing people, paralyzing them, and causing them to die like flies. I've
seen men set around and squeeze that old pink canned heat through an old
dirty rag, get the alcohol drained out of it, and then drink it down. The
papers carried tales about the men that drunk radiator alcohol and died from
rust poisoning. Others came down with the beer head. That's where your head
starts swelling up and it just don't quit. Usually you take the beer head
from drinking home brew that ain't made right, or is fermented in old rusty
cans, like garbage cans, oil drums, gasoline barrels, and slop buckets. It
caused some of the people to die. They even had a kind of beer called Old
Chock that was made by throwing everything under the sun into an old barrel,
adding the yeast and sugar and water to it, and letting her go. Biscuit
heels, corn-bread scraps, potato leavings, and all sorts of table scraps
went into this beer. It is a whitish, milky, slicky-looking bunch of crap.
But especially down in Oklahoma I've seen men drive fifteen miles out in the
country just to get a hold of a few bottles of it. The name Chock come from
the Choctaw Indians. I guess they just naturally wanted to celebrate some
way or another, and thought a little drink would fire them up so's they'd
break loose, forget their worries, and have a good time.
When I was behind the counter, men would come in and purchase bay rum,
and I'd get a look into their puffy, red-speckled faces, and their bleary,
batty eyes, that looked but didn't see, and that went shut, but never slept,
that closed, but never rested, and dreamed but never arrived at a
conclusion. I would see a man come in and buy a bottle of rubbing alcohol,
and then buy a bottle of coke and go out and mix it half and half, hold his
breath, wheeze for a few seconds, and then waddle on away.
One day my curiosity licked me. I said that I was going to taste a
bottle of that Jake for myself. Man ought to be interested. I drawed up
about a half a mug of root beer. It was cold and nice, and I popped the
little stopper out of one of the Jake bottles, and poured the Jake into the
root beer. When that Jake hit that beer, it commenced to cook it, and there
was seven civil wars and two revolutions broke out inside of that mug. The
beer was trying to tame the Jake down and the Jake was trying to eat the
beer up. They sizzled and boiled and sounded about like bacon frying. The
Jake was chasing the little bubbles and the little bubbles was chasing the
Jake, and the beer spun like a whirlpool in a big swift river. It went
around and around so fast that it made a little funnel right in the middle.
I waited about twenty minutes for it to settle down. Finally it was about
the color of a new tan saddle, and about as quiet as it would get. So I bent
over it and stuck my ear down over the mug. It was spewing and crackling
like a machine gun, but I thought I'd best to drink it before it turned into
a waterspout or a dust storm. I took it up and took it down, and it was hot
and dry and gingery and spicy, and cloudy, and smooth, and windy and cold,