U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [158]
Charley's brother Jim had married the daughter of a liverystable owner in Minneapolis. The spring Charley was getting ready to graduate from the eighth grade they came to visit Mrs. Anderson. Jim smoked cigars right in the house and jol ied his mother and while he was there there was no talk of biblereading. Jim took Charley fish-ing one Sunday up the Sheyenne and told him that if he came down to the Twin Cities when school was over he'd give him a job helping round the garage he was starting up in part of his fatherinlaw's liverystable. It sounded good when he told the other guys in school that he had a job in the city for the summer. He was glad to get out as his sister Esther had just come back from taking a course in nursing and nagged him al the time about talking slang and not keeping his clothes neat and eating too much pie. He felt fine the morning he went over to Moorhead
al alone, carrying a suitcase Esther had lent him, to take
-371-the train for the Twin Cities. At the station he tried to buy a package of cigarettes but the man at the newsstand kidded him and said he was too young. When he started it was a fine spring day a little too hot. There was sweat on the flanks of the big horses pul ing the long line of flourwagons that was crossing the bridge. While he was waiting in the station the air became stifling and a steamy mist came up. The sunlight shone red on the broad backs of the grain elevators along the track. He heard one man say to another,
"Looks to me like it might be a tornado," and when he got on the train he half leaned out of the open window watching purple thunderheads building up in the northwest beyond the brightgreen wheat that
stretched clear to the clouds. He kinda hoped it would be a tornado because he'd never seen one, but when the lightning began cracking like a whip out of the clouds he felt a little scared, though being on the train with the conductor and the other passengers made it seem safer. It wasn't a tornado but it was a heavy thundershower and the wheatfields turned to zinc as great trampling hissing sheets of rain advanced slowly across them. Afterwards the sun came out and Charley opened the window and
everything smelt like spring and there were birds singing in al the birchwoods and in the dark firs round al the little shining lakes.
Jim was there to meet him at the Union Depot in a
Ford truck. They stopped at the freight station and Charley had to help load a lot of heavy packages of spare parts shipped from Detroit and marked "Vogel's Garage." Charley tried to look as if he'd lived in a big city al his life, but the clanging trol eycars and the roughshod hoofs of truckhorses striking sparks out of the cobbles and the goodlooking blond girls and the stores and the big Ger-man beersaloons and the hum that came from mil s and machineshops went to his head. Jim looked tal and thin in his overal s and had a new curt way of talking. "Kid,
-372-you see you mind yourself a little up to the house; the old man's an old German, Hedwig's old man, an' a little pernickety, like al old Germans are," said Jim when they'd fil ed the truck and were moving slowly through the heavy traffic. "Sure, Jim," said Charley and he began to feel a little uneasy about what it 'ud be like living in Minneapolis. He wished Jim 'ud smile a little more. Old man Vogel was a stocky redfaced man with untidy gray hair and a potbel y, fond of dumpling and stews with plenty of rich sauce