The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [99]
it was bad manners. "Do you ever see Sailor Bulba?" "Not that dumbhead, he's no good to me. He's in an organization now, slugger for a union, and it's all he's good for. Besides, what I'm in now, I have no use for anybody like that. But I could do something for you if you wanted to earn a fast buck." "Is it risky?" "Nothing like what worried you last time. I don't go in for that any more myself. It's not legitimate, what I'm doing, but it's a lot easier and safer. And what do you think makes the buck so fast?" "Well. what is it?" "Running immigrants over the border from Canada, from around Rouse's Point over to Massena Springs, New York." "No," I said, not having forgotten my conversation with Einhorn. "I can't do that." "There's nothing to it." "And if you're caught?" "And if I'm caught? And if I'm not caught?" he said with savage humor, poking fun at me. "You want me to go around and peddle paint? I'd rather sit still, like the pilot light inside the gas; and I can't sit around or I'd go bats." "Thi;> is federal." "You don't have to tell me what it is. I only asked you because you look as if you needed a break. I make this trip two and three times a month, and I'm getting tired of doing all the driving. So if you want to come along and be my relief on the road as far as Massena Springs I'll give you fifty bucks and all expenses. Then if you decide to come the rest of the way I'll up it to a hundred. There'll still be time to think it over on the way, and we'll be back in three days." I took him up on this and considered it a break. Fifty dollars, clear, would go a long way toward easing my mind about Simon. I was fed i* 161 up with trying to peddle the rubberized paint, and my reckoning was that with a little dough to tide me over I could spend a week or two looking for something else, perhaps dope out a way to get back to college, for I had not altogether given up on that. All this was how I | decided, in my outer mind, to go; with the other, the inner, I wanted a change of pressure, and to get out of the city. As for the immigrants, my thought about them was. Hell, why shouldn't they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There's enough to go around of everything including hard luck. I gave the paint to Tillie Einhorn, to decorate her bathroom, and early in the morning Joe German picked me up in a black Buick; it was souped up, I could tell the first instant, from the hell-energy that gives you no time to consider. I wasn't even well settled, with spare shirt wrapped in a newspaper in the back seat and my coat straightened under me, before we were on the far South Side, passing the yards of Carnegie Steel; then the dunes, piled up like sulphur; in and out of Gary in two twists and on the road for Toledo, where the speed increased, and the mouth of the motor opened out like murder, not panting, but liberated to do what it was made for. Slender, pressing down nervous on the wheel, with his long nose of | broken form and the color running fast up his face and making a narrow crossing on his forehead, German was like a jockey in his feeling toward the car. You could see what pleasure he got out of finding what j he needed to wrap his nerves in. Outside Toledo I took the wheel, | and occasionally found him looking sardonically sidewise from his < narrow face, a long dark eye making a new measure of me from its splotch of discoloration by fatigue or by the trouble of a busy will; and he said--they seemed his first words to me, though they weren't literally--"Step it up!" So I apologized that I didn't have the feel of the car yet and obeyed. But he didn't like my driving, particularly that I hesitated to pass trucks on the hills, and took the wheel from me before we had covered much i of the ground to Cleveland. I It was beginning April, and the afternoon was short, so that it was getting dark when we approached Lackawanna. Some way beyond it we stopped for gas, and Gorman gave me a bill to buy some hamburgers at a joint next door. There I went to the can first, and from the window saw a state trooper by the pump,