U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [168]
got everybody to walk out on account of a freespeech fight the wobblies were running in town, so Charley worked a whole week and had not a cent to show for it and hadn't eaten for a day and a half when Fred came back with another load on his Mack truck and set him up to a feed. They drank some beer afterwards and had a big argu-ment about strikes. Fred said al this wobbly agitation was damn foolishness and he thought the cops would be doing right if they jailed every last one of them. Charley said that working stiffs ought to stick together for decent liv-ing conditions and the time was coming when there'd be a big revolution like the American revolution only bigger and after that there wouldn't be any bosses and the work--392-ers would run industry. Fred said he talked like a damn foreigner and ought to be ashamed of himself and that a white man ought to believe in individual liberty and if he got a raw deal on one job he was goddam wel able to find another. They parted sore, but Fred was a good-hearted guy and lent Charley five bucks to go over to Chi with.
Next day he went over on the boat. There were stil some yel owish floes of rotting ice on the lake that was a very pale cold blue with a few whitecaps on it. Charley had never been out on a big body of water before and felt a little sick, but it was fine to see the chimneys and great blocks of buildings, pearly where the sun hit them, growing up out of the blur of factory smoke, and the breakwaters and the big oreboats plowing through the blue seas, and to walk down the wharf with everything new to him and to plunge into the crowd and the stream of automobiles and green and yel ow buses blocked up by the drawbridge on Michigan Avenue, and to walk along in the driving wind looking at the shiny storewindows and goodlooking girls and windblown dresses.
Jim had told him to go to see a friend of his who
worked in a Ford servicestation on Blue Island Avenue but is was so far that by the time he got there the guy had gone. The boss was there though and he told Charley that if he came round next morning he'd have a job for him. As he didn't have anywhere to go and didn't like to tel the boss he was flat he left his suitcase in the garage and walked around al night. Occasional y he got a few winks of sleep on a park bench, bat he'd wake up stiff and chil ed to the bone and would have to run around to warm up. The night seemed never to end and he didn't have a red to get a cup of coffee with in the morning, and he was there walking up and down outside an hour be-fore anybody came to open up the servicestation in the morning.
-393-He worked at the Ford servicestation several weeks until one Sunday he met Monte Davis on North Clark
Street and went to a wobbly meeting with him in front of the Newberry Library. The cops broke up the meeting and Charley didn't walk away fast enough and before he knew what had happened to him he'd been halfstunned by a riotstick and shoved into the policewagon. He spent the night in a cel with two bearded men who were blind drunk and didn't seem to be able to talk English any-way. Next day he was questioned by a police magistrate and when he said he was a garage mechanic a dick cal ed up the servicestation to check up on him; the magistrate discharged him, but when he got to the garage the boss said he'd have no goddam I Won't Works in this outfit and paid him his wages and discharged him too.
He hocked his suitcase and his good suit and made a little bundle of some socks and a couple of shirts and went round to see Monte Davis to tel him he was going to hitchhike to St. Louis. Monte said there was a free-speech fight in Evansvil e and he guessed he'd come along to see what was doing. They went out on the train to Joliet. When they walked past the prison Monte said the sight of a prison always made him feel sick and gave him a kind of a foreboding. He got pretty blue and said he guessed