Joe Hill (25 page)

His circling cautious run took him around the barns and along the edge of the orchard, and as he ran he hated the necessity for running, and knew that he had made a bonehead play. Even though McHugh had seen only his arm and his masked face, they would naturally pin the holdup on him. His description would be out; every bull on the coast would have his number.

Then as he turned with the gully, feeling his way from tree to tree, he heard the train, and saw the glow, moving slowly, as the passenger loafed into the switch. Any minute now the express would show from the south. There wasn’t much time. And if he didn’t make this and get out right away, McHugh would wake up, the bloodhounds would be out for fair. He was sweating lightly as he got through the eucalyptus grove, felt and climbed the right-of-way fence, and made his way down to where the culvert bored through the cliff of the high grade. Getting his breath, he stood listening to the big puff and whistle and dry sighing of the wind in the branches, and under it the boom and swash of the surf. On an impulse he stepped into the mouth of the culvert and peered through.

The darkness was so deep it could almost be felt. At its far end, apparently miles away, was a misty paleness, perhaps only an illusion, a widening of his pupils, a strain on his eyes. The noise of the surf was surprisingly loud—the toppling, running thunder, the boom, the long hiss, the boom again. He imagined the sand fleas hopping before the lick of water, dizzying the sand in the dark.

Now the thing that he felt was fear—fear and an overpowering
thirst. As he stepped backward out of the culvert he went in over his ankles in muck, and the thought of footprints, giveaway tracks, flashed in his mind, so that he stooped and flapped the slime and mud with his hand, smoothing it out. Up the gully, where he had got his water while jungling-up on the beach, he lay down and dipped quick handfuls. The water tasted of ooze; the cress that grew in it was leggy and clinging on his hand and wrist.

Slipping in the loose gravel, clawing with hands and feet, he climbed the grade, thinking again with a kind of helpless anguish of incriminating tracks. He was panting when he made the top. A pulse in the air, a half-felt vibration, made him kneel and put his hand on the rail. It vibrated faintly under his palm. Gone as fast as it came, a faint glow swept over and past him, and he saw the far headlight coming.

He began to run, his stomach tight with anxiety. The siding was a good half-mile. He could see, as soon as he turned the gentle curve, how the headlight of the standing locomotive was diffused and broken beyond the trees. Already light was growing on the track behind him. Sprinting awkwardly under the bindle, holding the straight grade as long as he dared, he finally felt the light so close and revealing upon him that he leaped down the bank, where he scrambled on through high weeds and stubbly burned patches. Light grew, the tunnel between the eucalyptus trees grew in definition, a steep-walled passage lined by the geometrical rails. Not daring to duck or hide because it would lose him too much time, Joe stumbled ahead while the express came on behind him like a nightmare, like retribution, light growing, sound growing, a thunder and glare rushing up and then a hot blast and the red wink of the firebox and the furious pound of the drivers and darkness again, with the steady drumming clatter of the dark Pullmans pouring by.

He had jumped to the left because the siding lay on that side. Now he saw the headlight of the waiting passenger begin to grope and swing along the tall white-trunked trees as it came back onto the main line. The noise of the express was already small, almost gone.

Joe hit the ditch, lying flat while the weeds became black silhouettes before his eyes and the glare felt over him and went
on. He was going to be lucky. The train would still be crawling when it passed him. He heard its slow, warning, heavy chuffs with a wonderful, panting exhilaration, and when the locomotive shoved past and the light was gone he stood up almost casually, waited for the tender to move by, and swung up into the blinds with ridiculous ease. With his back against the door he felt the motion of the train jiggle through him; the taste of coal smoke was bitter in his mouth. But he felt safe, and he knew he was going to be continuously lucky. By the time pursuit could be organized he would have ditched the train and got out on the road across San Marcos Pass. He could catch a stage if he wanted to, go inland and come way around. There were plenty of ways to change your looks; with money and half a chance, he could make himself look like a clerk or a theological student in a half-hour, as far from the description of the holdup man as McHugh was himself.

The thought of McHugh standing before the gun with his skin mottling sickly was a pleasant image, and he thought, There are ways and ways. If the slaves won’t organize and fight for their rights, if they fold up just when they should hang together, then there will have to be other ways. The trouble with the soft-pedal wing of the union was that they never carried their logic to its conclusion. They believed in the class war, they swore by the Preamble, but they didn’t admit it was really war. Strikes were okay, free-speech fights were okay, sabotage was fair in a really bitter fight like some of the fights up in the lumber woods, but they tried to stop there, halfway.

He would have liked to talk, and the man he wanted most to talk to was Manderich. Art had been all through it, he had been a rebel for thirty years and fought the Austrian cops and lain in Austrian and German and English jails. He spoke with the voice of authority and experience. Joe could hear him:

–Right and wrong haff notting to do vit us, and neffer did haff.

–But you were ready to slaughter Otto for pinching a few rugs from the
S.P.

–Dot iss different. Dot sonofapitch vas stealing for himself, he vas using the union for a hiding place.

–Well, what about tonight? What do you make of what I just did?

But he couldn’t get an answer out of old Art. All he got was another of the old man’s maxims: It iss alvays our strike.

He sat alert, but his mind wandered erratically and somewhat warily among images and ideas and formulas. It iss alvays our strike. Right and wrong haff notting to do vit us. I vill show you the difference between a revolutionary and a gott damned t’ief.

Once more Manderich’s bloody trampled face rose up in his mind, and the wariness with which he was poking among his thoughts was obliterated in a rush of anger. Who pays for old Art? Who pays for the Puerto Rican kid?

But one thing he kept returning to, one picture had the power to fill him with voluptuous satisfaction, one thing he knew for sure old Art would have approved: the splinter and crunch of expensive glass and gold as he ground McHugh’s watch under his shoe.

For the first time he began to wonder how much money he had.

The Sunday morning class in reading and writing for illiterate members is over, the folding chairs are back on the dusty stack against the wall of the outer room. Most of the home guards, at least the married ones, have gone home for Sunday dinner, but in the inner room, which during big meetings is thrown together with the outer one, a half-dozen bindles are piled neatly under the windows, and from the stove rises a meaty, fragrant steam mingled with the syrupy sweetness of stewing prunes.

Eight or ten men, home guards and go-abouts, are sitting around waiting for the biscuits and mulligan to be done. There does not happen just now to be a spittoon philosopher among them; there is no talk of Lawrence and Patterson, the Black International, the Haymarket martyrs, the organizational strategy of Haywood and St. John and Barnabas, the perfidy of the
A.F.L.
, the inevitability
of industrial unionism. The talk is relaxed, unpolemical; they are more interested in biscuits and mulligan.

The cook is warm over the stove, his bare arms are tattooed to the shoulder, the cigarette between his lips is dead. He moves about the stove squinting and with puckered lips, slipping his hand in his pocket and using the pocket for a potholder, swinging his hip around sideways and standing on tiptoe to move things on or off the hot part of the fire. He is like a man unlocking a high door with a key chained to his belt.

–That’s a hell of a goddam way to take hold of anything. Why don’t you get a dishrag?

–Peace on you, fellow worker.

–Piss on you too, Judge.

–When are them biscuits gonna be done?

–Don’t get your ass in an uproar.

He tips the lid of the stew kettle, stirs the bubbling stew, moves about the stove with jerky movements, stabbing his hand in his pocket, poising tiptoe over the stove to shove the coffeepot against the stovepipe where it is hottest. He opens the oven door and looks in upon the biscuits, and another fragrance is let out into the room. Though it is August, it is like fall, pleasant to be inside, with smells of good cooking. Outside a gray, foggy day.

–Hey, Doyle, let’s see your tattoos.

The cook holds a match against the stovelid until it explodes, lights the broken cigarette in his mouth, lets his dangling arm be passed around like something amputated. He is indifferent but obliging, and he never takes the cigarette from between his lips and never seems to puff at it, so that he has to keep his head thrown back and his eyes squinted against the smoke. They pass him on down the line.

–Every tattoo a blind drunk. What a dehorn.

–Did anybody ever get tattooed when he was sober?

–Who’s Bernice?

–Beatrice, you dumb bastard. Can’t you read?

–Well, who is she?

–Girl I knew in Sydney.

–What’d she ever do for you?

–She stuck by him, that’s a cinch. Good old Bernice.

–Beatrice, you ignorant patoot.

–That’s one thing I could never figure out about guys that get tattooed. You can never get rid of the damn things. Guy gets himself all done up like wallpaper and he has to wear the same pictures all his life.

–Somebody told me once if you got yourself needled all over again with milk, right in the same dots, it’d …

–That’s a lot of crap, you can’t get it off.

–It is ineradicable. (This is a Frenchman, a kind of nutty intellectual, who keeps books for some company and lives in a furnished room and comes down on Sundays to give reading lessons at the hall. An eager, wet-lipped, bright-eyed little man.) Let me tell you a story about that. When I was younger I lived in Algiers …

–Well, Algiers, I guess yes. That’s where you see the tattooing. Fella told me once he seen a French soldier that had a whole general’s uniform done on him, clear up to his ears.

–Exactly, but let me tell you. In Algiers there was a famous prostitute—not a prostitute, really, a courtesan …

–What’s that, a higher-priced name for the same thing?

–I never saw that the price made much difference, myself.

–A courtesan. And right between her breasts, right here, she had a motto tattooed,
pour la vie
, and under it the name of her lover.
Pour la vie
, for life.

(The cook goes back to the stove. For a moment he stands wiggling his fingers, staring at the flag on his forearm that waves with the movement of the tendons and muscles, and then he opens the oven door and looks in at the biscuits. The little Frenchman’s voice hurries as if he is afraid it will be cut off.)

–Life, that is a long time for a courtesan—for anybody. Soon this lover is out of favor, he is unfaithful, she tires of him, something. He is out. But his name is indelible, here. (He clicks his tongue and snaps his fingers, stiffening to a kind of seated attention.)
Alors
. She is furious at herself. This name is an embarrassment in her business. Men see it and ask questions. It is worse than a last-year’s election poster with a picture of someone who was not elected. What does she do? She takes a cigarette, lights it, crushes it out, here, on the name of her lover. Thus she erases him,
pouf
. He is a scar, nothing more.

–That’s what I’m telling you, it’s too hard to get rid of. This
cigarette method ain’t practical, except maybe for high-priced whores.

–Harder to get rid of than bedbugs. Everybody that gets needled wishes he hadn’t, sometime or other. Ain’t that so, Doyle? Ain’t that why you all swear you was stiff as a plank when you done it?

–But wait, wait! There is more. Now this courtesan has a second lover’s name tattooed below the scar of the first, under the same motto,
pour la vie
. Alas, in two months he is out with the first one, and again she has this embarrassing label on her bosom. Again she takes a cigarette, again she wipes him out.

–Fatima, the human ashtray.

–Wait, I am not finished! (The little Frenchman throws out his hands in an overboard gesture and cackles invitingly, looking around with bright eyes, his mouth hanging a little open.) She is a woman of mettle, this courtesan, and of an amazing optimism. When I live in Algiers she is famous, for on her bosom is still this motto,
pour la vie
, and under it like crossed-off items on a grocery list are thirty-two names.