The Moth (20 page)

“Looks fine.”

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

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

“Yeah, chief?”

“Feel like a little work?”

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

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

“I left you a dozen.”

“I mean the big ones.”

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

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

“Plenty more men where they came from.”

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

“Let me rest.”

“O.K.”

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

“Leave him be!”

“But—”

“Stop it!”

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

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

“Who’s the blacksmith?”

“Ah, some goddam fellow. Who cares?”

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

“And?”

“I had to hire him.”

“Why?”

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

“Nice appreciation a guy gets.”

“Boy, I hate it.”

“... What else you got around here?”

“Nothing.”

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

“Hosey! Take it easy!”

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

“Tell ’em, bo.”

“Damn ’em!”

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

I
DON’T KNOW HOW
it is now, but at that time Kansas City was a wide-open town, the only one, outside of the Nevada places, that was left in the whole country, any way that I heard of. So the day after we got there Buck came up with his bright idea. We were in a little hotel on Walnut Street, though in single rooms. There were three things I meant to do: get clean, lock the door on the whole human race, and tell somebody to do something and hear him say: “Yes, sir.” But he came in pretty often, and this time he camped on the edge of my bed, talked about how good it was to have a place to sleep, and pretty soon said: “Jack, I been hearing things about the town. She’s free, wide, and careless.”

“Meaning?”

“They got houses.”

“With red lights on them?”

“So how about stepping out? Take ourselves around to one of those places and have ourself a time.”

“... That I would have to think about.”

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s a new one on me. I—don’t know if I like it or not. I’ll have to let it cook a while, see how it hits me.”

“Don’t you ever think about the red lights, Jack?”

“I heard about them. That’s all I can say.”

“I always wanted to see them.”

“We got all day. They don’t open till night.”

“Oh, there’s no hurry.”

He sat there and talked about spring being in the air, even in a dump like this, and while he talked I thought. I guess the man never lived that didn’t get a prickle up his back when he thought about a house, I don’t know exactly why. Maybe it’s like what a guy told me once, in England, about the bullfights in Mexico: “If it was my own country I’d be against them, and do everything I could to get them stopped. But when it’s somebody else’s country, and there’s not one thing in the world I can do about it, I go. They get me. And as to why they get me, if you ask me, it’s because they’re so horribly, intentionally, and completely evil—evil all dressed up in purple satin, with lace sewed down the side.” Something like that was running through my head, listening to Buck, but pretty soon I knew I wasn’t going with him. To pay a woman for what had always been kind of a dream was something I couldn’t do. Still, that was something locked inside me, that I wouldn’t have wanted to tell anybody, and anyway it seemed a little over Buck’s head. So after a while I said: “Well, count me out.”

“... I’d been hoping you’d come.”

“Little old for that stuff.”

“How old are you, Jack?”

“I was born in 1910.”

“Twenty-four—old, say, that’s a joke.”

“How old are you, Buck?”

“Twenty-five.”

“When did you go on the road?”

“Three years ago. Oh, I’d left home before, so far as that goes. I started out when I was eighteen, to get me a job so I could get married. She was fifteen. I started on road work, got promoted to power shovel, and then came 1929 and the shovel blew up and the road job blew up and all jobs blew up. I’d been home quite a few times, and gave her a ring one Christmas, but when I didn’t have any job she started in teaching school, and then when I still didn’t have any job she lost interest. Then at home one thing led to another and I blew.”

“Change it around a little bit it’s me.”

“It’s everybody.”

“Getting back to the lights: No.”

“Any special reason?”

“Might catch something.”

“These places are inspected.”

“They were, up to last night. This is tonight.”

“Some things, Jack, you got to take a chance.”

“Not me, I haven’t.”

He sat thinking, and seemed so down I felt half sorry for him, and remembered what I’d heard once or twice: that one reason a mug goes to a house is he’s so lonesome he’d give anything for a half hour with a girl and the chance to forget who he is or what he is or why he is. But then he had another proposition: “Well, if you don’t want to go how about keeping me company while I do some visiting? You know—buy some girl a drink, sit out the dance, but—be there?”

“Me? Buy some tart a drink with dough that will mean another night out of the weather if I can hold on to it that long? Besides, you can’t buy a girl a drink in those places. It’s drinks up for everybody every time you call the maid, and what do I care for a bunch of stockyard cowboys and their sweeties? They got money. Let them spend it.”

“You mean—there’s ropes you got to know?”

“They’ll teach you. Take you, too.”

“Jack, just as a favor to me—”

“Buck, no.”

“But I never been to a house.”

“Me neither.”

“But you know your way around, and—”

“You’ll find your way.”

After a while there was a knock on the door and I opened and it was Hosey, with a bundle. Of course he hadn’t come to the hotel with us, but hiked himself over to some mission back of Union Station, because if no real hobo would work he wouldn’t pay either, or do anything but mooch. But it was all right, it turned out, for me to pay and him to wash up in the hot water I had, and that’s what the bundle was for. If you think I said help himself, just out of the kindness of my heart, you don’t know Jackie. I bawled him out for the filthy jungle buzzard that he was, told him I wasn’t going to have my bathroom stunk up like a mission bed, and said if he wanted to wash he could march himself downstairs, plunk down his money, and get a room like decent guys did. But he just sat there with a little grin on his face, his eyes shifting around like a rat on a dump. Pretty soon Buck said: “Hosey, what you doing tonight?”

“... Nothing, that I know of. Why?”

“How about going out among ’em?”

“Among who?”

“Why—the pretty dollies.”

“You mean
women?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t
know
no women.”

“Don’t have to know them. Here they got women that’s so sociable you don’t even have to be introduced. They’re broad-minded. They got whole houses full of them.”

Hosey stood up and his eyes turned black and you wouldn’t have thought he could dig up that much excitement, let alone care about anything enough to go on like he did: “Buck, I’m telling you something, for your own good, right now. The real hobo, he don’t have nothing to do with women, of any age, shape, or kind—they’re
out!
They’re no part of his life. He just has to give up any thought of women. In the first place, he can’t afford it. In the second place, if he keeps it up, the kind of women he meets, he going to get himself a disease, and if he does, God help him. For typhoid or diphtheria or pneumonia or whatever else he catches, or a broken bone if he falls off a train, or anything of that kind, he can go to a clinic and they’ll take care of him, the public health will, wherever he is, some kind of way. But let him get something like that, and he’s just out of luck and nobody’ll do anything for him. In the third place, sooner or later some woman he’s with is going to get caught by friend husband, and then God help him. There’s plenty of guys doing time right now for rapes that was never committed, just because some two-timing dame had to say something quick, and hung it on them. Buck, I’m telling you,
leave women alone!”

By then he was so hysterical he could hardly talk. Buck looked at me and I looked at him and then we begun talking about something else. Hosey picked up his bundle and went out. “Well, Jack, what the hell do you make of
that?”

“It was real hobo talk, whatever it was.”

“Is he a
preacher
or something?”

“In some ways, of course, it made sense, but—”

“Yeah, but he
looked
so funny.”

The next night I was in bed, reading a magazine, when there came a rap on the door. I unlocked it and Buck came in. He looked pretty solemn. I waved him in, shut the door, and got back under the covers again. He sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette. “Well, Buck, was she nice?”

“—And pretty.”

“Then if you had a good time, what the hell?”