U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [28]
"Jesus Christ, that's funny, she musta moved. Now I think of it, I haven't had a letter in a couple of months. I hope she ain't sick . . . I'l ask at Bud Walker's next door." Mac sat down on the wooden step and waited. Over-head in a gash in the clouds that stil had the faintest stain of red from the afterglow his eye dropped into empty black ful of stars. The smel of the sweetwil iams tickled his nose. He felt hungry.
A low whistle from Ike roused him. "Come along," he said gruffly and started walking fast down the hil with his head sunk between his shoulders.
"Hey, what's the matter?"
"Nothin'. The old woman's gone to Buffalo to live with my brothers. The lousy bums got her to sel out so's they could spend the dough, I reckon."
"Jesus, that's hel , Ike."
Ike didn't answer. They walked til they came to the corner of a street with lighted stores and trol eycars. A tune from a mechanical piano was tumbling out from a saloon. Ike turned and slapped Mac on the back. "Let's go have a drink, kid . . . What the hel ." There was only one other man at the long bar. He
was a very drunken tal elderly man in lumbermen's boots
-66-with a sou'wester on his head who kept yel ing in an in-audible voice, 'Whoop her up, boys,' and making a pass at the air with a long grimy hand. Mac and Ike drank down two whiskies each, so strong and raw that it pretty near knocked the wind out of them. Ike put the change from a dol ar in his pocket and said:
"What the hel , let's get out of here." In the cool air of the street they began to feel lit.
"Jesus, Mac, let's get outa here tonight . . . It's terrible to come back to a town where you was a kid . . . I'l be meetin' al the crazy galoots I ever knew and girls I had crushes on . . . I guess I always get the dirty end of the stick, al right." In a lunchroom down by the freight depot they got
hamburger and potatoes and bread and butter and coffee for fifteen cents each. When they'd bought some ciga-rettes they stil had eight seventyfive between them.
"Gol y, we're rich," said Mac. "Wel , where do we go?"
"Wait a minute. I'l go scout round the freight depot. Used to be a guy I knowed worked there."
Mac loafed round under a lamp post at the street-corner and smoked a cigarette and waited. It was warmer since the wind had gone down. From a puddle somewhere in the freight yards came the peep peep peep of toads. Up on the hil an accordion was playing. From the yards came the heavy chugging of a freight locomotive and the clank of shunted freightcars and the singing rattle of the wheels.
After a while he heard Ike's whistle from the dark
side of the street. He ran over. "Say, Mac, we gotta hurry. I found the guy. He's goin' to open up a boxcar for us on the westbound freight. He says it'l carry us clear out to the coast if we stick to it."
"How the hel wil we eat if we're locked up in a freightcar?"
"We'l eat fine. You leave the eatin' to me."
"But, Ike . . ."
-67-"Keep your trap shut, can't you . . . Do you want everybody in the friggin' town to know what we're tryin'
to do?"
They walked along tiptoe in the dark between two
tracks of boxcars. Then Ike found a door half open and darted in. Mac fol owed and they shut the sliding door very gently after them.
"Now al we got to do is go to sleep," whispered Ike, his lips touching Mac's ear. "This here galoot, see, said there wasn't any yard dicks on duty tonight." In the end of the car they found hay from a broken
bale. The whole car smelt of hay. "Ain't this hunky dory?" whispered Ike.
"It's the cat's nuts, Ike."
Pretty soon the train started, and they lay down to sleep side by side in the sparse hay. The cold night wind streamed in through the cracks in the floor. They slept fitful y. The train started and stopped and started and shunted back and forth on sidings and the wheels rattled and rumbled in their ears and slambanged over crossings. Towards morning they fel into a warm sleep and the thin layer of