U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [8]
-16-were asleep on the seat opposite. Their mouths were open, their faces were splotched and he didn't like the way they looked. Mil y was curled up with a wooly shawl al over her. The train was slowing down, it was a station. If it was Chicago they ought to get off. At that moment the con-ductor passed, an old man who looked a little like Father O'Donnel .
Please, mister, is this Chicago? Chicago's a long way off yet, son, said the conductor without smiling. This is Syracuse.
And they al woke up, and for hours and hours the
telephone poles went by, and towns, frame houses, brick factories with ranks and ranks of glittering windows, dumping grounds, trainyards, plowed land, pasture, and cows, and Mil y got trainsick and Fainy's legs felt like they would drop off from sitting in the seat so long; some places it was snowing and some places it was sunny, and Mil y kept getting sick and smelt dismal y of vomit, and it got dark and they al slept; and light again, and then the towns and the framehouses and the factories al started drawing together, humping into warehouses and elevators, and the trainyards spread out as far as you could see and it was Chicago.
But it was so cold and the wind blew the dust so hard in his face and his eyes were so stuck together by dust and tiredness that he couldn't look at anything. After they had waited round a long while, Mil y and Fainy huddled to-gether in the cold, they got on a streetcar and rode and rode. They were so sleepy they never knew exactly where the train ended and the streetcar began. Uncle Tim's voice went on talking proudly excitedly, Chicago, Chicago, Chi-cago. Pop sat with his chin on his crutch. "Tim, I feel like a whipped cur."
Fainy lived ten years in Chicago.
At first he went to school and played basebal on back lots on Saturday afternoons, but then came his last com--17mencement, and al the children sang My Country, 'Tis Of Thee, and school was over and he had to go to work. Uncle Tim at that time had his own jobprinting shop on a dusty side street off North Clark in the ground floor of a cranky old brick building. It only occupied a smal sec-tion of the building that was mostly used as a ware-house and was famous for its rats. It had a single wide plateglass window made resplendent by gold Old English lettering: TIMOTHY O'HARA, JOB PRINTER. Now, Fainy, old sport, said Uncle Tim, you'l have
a chance to learn the profession from the ground up. So he ran errands, delivered packages of circulars, throw-aways, posters, was always dodging trol eycars, ducking from under the foamy bits of big truckhorses, bumming rides on deliverywagons. When there were no errands to run he swept out under the presses, cleaned type, emptied the office wastepaper basket, or, during rush times, ran round the corner for coffee and sandwiches for the type-setter, or for a smal flask of bourbon for Uncle Tim. Pop puttered round on his crutch for several years, always looking for a job. Evenings he smoked his pipe and cursed his luck on the back stoop of Uncle Tim's house and occasional y threatened to go back to Middle-town. Then one day he got pneumonia and died quietly at the Sacred Heart Hospital. It was about the same time that Uncle Tim bought a linotype machine.
Uncle Tim was so excited he didn't take a drink for three days. The floorboards were so rotten they had to build a brick base for the linotype al the way up from the cel ar. Wel , when we get another one we'l concrete the whole place, Uncle Tim told everybody. For a whole day there was no work done. Everybody stood around
looking at the tal black intricate machine that stood there like an organ in a church. When the machine was work-ing and the printshop fil ed with the hot smel of molten metal, everybody's eyes fol owed the quivering inquisitive
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