U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [51]
"Maisie, that's enough of that . . . I'm about through."
"I'm the one that's through with you and your ungodly socialistic talk. That never got nobody anywheres, and the
-122-lowdown bums you go around with . . . I wish to God I'd never married you. I never would have, you can be damn wel sure of that if I hadn't got caught the way I did."
" Maisie, don't talk like that."
Maisie walked straight up to him, her eyes wide and feverish.
"This house is in my name; don't forget that."
"Al right, I'm through."
Before he knew it he had slammed the door behind him and was walking down the block. It began to rain. Each raindrop made a splatter the size of a silver dol ar in the dust of the street. It looked like stage rain round the arclight. Mac couldn't think where to go. Drenched, he walked and walked. At one corner there was a clump of palms in a yard that gave a certain amount of shelter. He stood there a long time shivering. He was almost crying thinking of the warm gentleness of Maisie when he used to pul the cover a little way back and slip into bed beside her asleep when he got home from work in the clanking sour printing plant, her breasts, the feel of the nipples through the thin nightgown; the kids in their cots out on the sleepingporch, him leaning over to kiss each of the little warm foreheads. "Wel , I'm through," he said aloud as if he were speaking to somebody else. Then only did the thought come to him, "I'm free to see the country now, to work for the movement, to go on the bum again." Final y he went to Ben Evans'
boarding house. It was a long time before he could get anybody to come to the door. When he final y got in Ben sat up in bed and looked at him stupid with sleep. "What the hel ?""Say, Ben, I've just broken up housekeepin' . . . I'm goin' to Mex-ico.""Are the cops after you? For crissake, this wasn't any place to come.""No, it's just my wife." Ben laughed.
"Oh, for the love of Mike!""Say, Ben, do you want to come to Mexico and see the revolution?""What the hel
-123-could you do in Mexico? . . . Anyway, the boys elected me secretary of local 257 . . . I got to stay here an' earn my seventeenfifty. Say, you're soaked; take your clothes off and put on my workclothes hangin' on the back of the door . . . You better get some sleep. I'l move over." Mac stayed in town two weeks until they could get a man to take his place at the linotype. He wrote Maisie that he was going away and that he'd send her money to help support the kids as soon as he was in a position to. Then one morning he got on the train with twentyfive dol ars in his pocket and a ticket to Yuma, Arizona. Yuma turned out to be hotter'n the hinges of hel . A guy at the railroad men's boarding house told him he'd sure die of thirst if he tried going into Mexico there, and nobody knew anything about the revolution, anyway. So he beat his way along the Southern Pacific to El Paso. Hel had broken loose across the border, everybody said. The ban-dits were likely to take Juarez at any moment. They shot Americans on sight. The bars of El Paso were ful of ranchers and mining men bemoaning the good old days when Porfirio Diaz was in power and a white man could make money in Mexico. So it was with beating heart that Mac walked across the international bridge into the dusty-bustling adobe streets of Juarez. Mac walked around looking at the smal trol eycars and the mules and the wal s daubed with seablue and the peon women squatting behind piles of fruit in the marketplace and the crumbling scrol face churches and the deep bars open to the street. Everything was strange and the air was peppery to his nostrils and he was wondering what he was going to do next. It was late afternoon of an April day. Mac was sweating in his blue flannel shirt. His body felt gritty and itchy and he wanted a bath. "Gettin' too old for this kinda stuff," he told himself. At last he found the house of a man named Ricardo Perez whom one of the Mexican anarchists in Los Angeles had told him to look
-124-up.