The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [65]
The tramps knew, too, that Chinese were family people who took in their own and kept to themselves when things went sour, so when a Chinaman showed up riding the lines, that qualified as news. Slocum Haney said he'd hopped a freight in Sacramento and this chink was already in the boxcar. Never said a word between there and Yuma, not even when spoken to. Never saw him sleep or eat; he just sat in the corner watchful as a cat. Haney didn't even know if he understood English or not. Something crawly about the man, even now, sitting out there alone on the edge of the circle round the bonfire.
"You talk to him, Denver," said Slocum Haney. "You worked with Chinamen before."
Denver Bob Hobbes commanded universal respect from his peers based on his longevity on the bum and a habit of straight talk; in the egalitarian world of the hobos, he held an unofficial post of elder statesman emeritus. He'd been a working stiff once, came west from Ohio pounding rails on the transcontinental back in the sixties, when one day picking potatoes in Pocatello, Idaho, twenty years ago he saw the light and vowed never again to lift his hand in the service of another man's profiteering.
Denver Bob had kept that promise and studied himself into an authority on the economic exploitation of the working man. He'd marched on Washington with Kelly's Industrial Army in '93 to protest the industrial workers' plight—and besides there was nothing like political demonstrations for free food and good company. Bob claimed to have met Walt Whitman once, always carried with him a dog-eared edition of Leaves of Grass, and he could talk about the nobility of poverty and life on the open road to a complete stranger until all the oxygen in the neighborhood was depleted. If the presence of this Chinaman was upsetting the harmony of the camp, then Denver Bob saw it as his responsibility to set things right.
"You get cold snaps like this in October here in the desert," said Denver Bob, setting his plump butt down on an empty copper wire spool beside the Chinaman. "Most men start moving toward California around this time of year but it seems to me you've just come from there."
He offered the man a swallow of the homemade raisin jack they'd brewed the night before. The man shook his head and kept his eyes straight ahead. Denver Bob wasn't used to people turning down his generosity—he was big and round and with his thick, white beard and apple cheeks he looked like Father Christmas—but it didn't set him back. Not much did.
"This camp's been here ten years now, ever since they opened the line from Los Angeles. Hundreds of men pass through these yards every season." The shanty camp occupied the outskirts of the switching yards at Yuma, the major interchange between Los Angeles and the Arizona Territory, on the banks of the Colorado River. "Do you speak English, my friend?"
The man looked directly at him for the first time; Denver Bob felt a chill scamper over his scalp. Not that there was any overt threat in those dull black eyes. There was just... nothing. No personality, submission, false good humor. No Chinaman he'd ever known looked or acted anything like this.
"I am looking for work," the man said.
"Work? Well, that feeling comes over a man from time to time," said Denver Bob, bringing his well-oiled geniality to bear. "He don't know whether to shit or wind his watch; it's like a fever, see; best thing is to lie down, have a drink, and wait for it to pass."
"I work with explosives," said the man, immune to Denver's merry creed of sloth.
"Is that a fact?"
"Demolition."
"Yes, I follow you. So you're a working man." Whatever else he might be, this fella was no tramp. Didn't seem much like a railroad hand neither for that matter; too self-possessed, independent. Maybe a miner who just lost his stake. No matter: Everything about the man gave Denver Bob the willies; if there was anything he could say or do to get him out of camp and on his way, it