The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [115]
Sleeping in parks, being picked up for vagrancy.
When they let him out of the county workhouse he walks back to town, spends the dollar he has made for a good meal and a package of cigarettes, and catches a freight out of town that night. The moon gives a silver wash to the cornfields, and he curls up in a flatcar and watches the sky. An hour later another hobo drops into his car. He has a flask of whisky and they drink it up and finish Red's cigarettes. In the flatcar lying on his back the sky quivers in time to the clacking and jolting of the train. It's not too bad.
Jesus, tonight's Saturday night, the other bum says.
Yeah.
On Saturday night in his mining town there is always a dance in the basement of the church. The round tables have checked cloths on them, and each family sits around one table, the miners and their grown sons, the wives and daughters and grandparents, the younger kids. There are even infants slobbering drowsily at their mother's teats.
Provincial.
Only it stinks. The miners bring a bottle with them, and fall into sullen drunks, tired men at the end of a week. By midnight they're quarreling with their wives. All through his childhood his father would be cursing at his mother while the company band -- violin, guitar and piano -- would be whining out a square dance or polka.
To a kid from a mining town, getting drunk in a flatcar on Saturday night is still fun. The horizon extends for a million miles over the silver cornfields.
In the hobo jungle, in the marshes outside town near the railroad tracks, a few shanties sprawl in the weeds. The roofs are made of rusted sheets of corrugated iron, and the grass inside grows through the planking. Most of the men sleep on the ground outside, and wash in the brown sluggish river that sloughs through the flat railroad bogs. Time lolls away in the sun; the flies are golden-green against the gray and orange litter of the garbage dump. There are a few women in the camp, and at night Red and a few of the other men stay with them. In the daytime, it's wandering through town, sifting the garbage cans, and trying for handouts. But most of all it's sitting in the shade watching the trains labor past, just talking.
I got it from Joe they're gonna be kicking us outa here soon.
Sonsofbitches.
They's gonna be a revolution, men, I tell ya what we got to do is make a march on Washington.
Hoover'll run ya out. What are ya doin', kidding yourself, Mac?
I can see us marchin'. 'I Love a Parade, the Beat of a Drum.'
Listen, boys, I watched it myself right from the beginning, it's the fuggin Jews, it's the fuggin International Jews.
Mac, ya don't know what you're talkin' about, what we want is revolutionary action, we're being exploited. You got to wait for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
What are you, a Communist? Listen, I owned my own business, I was a big man in my town, I had money in the bank, I was all set to go but there was a conspiracy.
It's the big boys, they're scared of us, 'I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal, You,' what do ya think those songs don' mean anything? That's the only line anybody remembers.
Red sits there drowsing. (They're full of crap. Talk is pretty cheap. The thing to do is to keep moving, and keep your mouth shut.)
You think I'm a Communist; listen, I'm a student of human nature, I'm self-educated. American aspirations, that's what those songs are, opium for the masses, catch phrases to fool a man. Listen. . . it's a passion for movement, it's to trick us into staying at home and being exploited.
Aaaah.
They're gonna move us out, men.
I'm movin' anyway, Red says. Itchy feet.
Somehow it seems as if you never do go under, there is always the providential handout, or the pair of shoes you can buy after the ones you own flap in the wind. Somehow, there is always a little job, or some meal to keep you going, or there's a new town to go to, there is even the good feeling once every month or two when you catch a freight at dawn, and the land rises out of the night and you're not too hungry.
If you throw a handful of