Joe Hill (42 page)

That there was love involved, he needed no more looks at Ingrid
Olson’s face to know. He kept his eye on her, and when, five minutes before the noon recess, she rose and went out, he followed her.

The elevator door was just closing. Dourly the one-legged elevator man—some precinct worker rewarded with a job—held it open for them. In silence they rode down the creaking old rig. Lund saw that the girl’s face was drawn; her starched waist was wilted a little by the heat. At the ground floor she started toward the south entrance, and when Lund followed she stopped and turned, her face a mixture of impatience and pleading.

“Please—I haven’t anything to tell you.”

“You don’t understand,” Lund said, stopping dead still. “I’m not a reporter. I’m a friend of Joe’s.”

Her eyes searched his; he found them candid as well as troubled. “Even then,” she said.

“I don’t want to force myself on you,” he said, “but I’d like to talk. Could you go with me somewhere and have lunch?”

“I’m on my way home.”

“Can I come along?”

“I live clear out in Murray.”

“Out where Joe lived?”

“Near there.”

“All the better.”

Smiling to reassure her, deliberately working the warmth that he knew people found in him, he waited. “All right,” she said, and turned again toward the door.

In the hot noon the trees hung still, lush with the jungle growth of summer. Birds ducked and shook themselves under the sprinklers on the park lawn. Out by the sidewalk a fox terrier lay with its hindquarters spraddled flat in the dust. As they passed, a drop fell from its jerking pink tongue.

“Why do you come to the trial?” Lund said, and felt at once that the question sounded blunt.

Without turning her face she answered, “He should know his friends are standing by him.” She led him to the corner and across the street and stopped under a tree.

“Of course,” he said. “I meant … it’s a brave thing for you to do.”

“Braver?”

“Considering how people talk. You expose yourself to all kinds of guesses.”

“I didn’t expect to get involved,” she said. “I just went there so he could see me.”

Up the street he saw the yellow car coming, and he let his glance slip sideward, hoping to surprise something in her expression, but she was looking in her purse for carfare.

“He wasn’t pleased to see you brought into it,” he said.

She shook her head, her lips tightening. “No.”

“Though you were the only one who could do anything with him.”

The car started from the next corner and came rocking. They stepped down off the curb to meet it, and she surprised him with an absolutely direct look. “If I were the woman,” she said, “would it be any harder for me to go and tell how he got shot than to appear in court and let everybody guess?”

He was embarrassed. “I didn’t mean …”

“If he’d got shot over me I’d have told long ago,” she said. The car passed them, slowing and grinding, with a whiff of ozone and oil and a billowing of disturbed hot air.

“Do you think he got shot over a woman?” Lund said, following her toward the front end.

The folding doors opened. “He says he did,” Ingrid said over her shoulder, and mounted the steps.

They were in a seat at the rear, away from the handful of other passengers, when Lund spoke again. “You’re very loyal.”

“His friends should be,” she said, aiming it so directly at him and his doubt that he kept silence. In the next few minutes he stole looks at her face. She was pale, and she kept her head turned to look out the window. The inconsequentialities of the trackside occupied his eyes and at least part of his brain. The car ran through a little concentration of business buildings, past the board fences of a ball park, and then into something more country than city, with only scattered houses, with big gardens, with orchards and privies. They rocked along at a clattering pace, stopping only at main intersections where the houses momentarily thickened.

“I’m sorry if I seem to keep at you,” he said finally. “I’m trying
to understand. Ever since I first heard, yesterday, of the trouble Joe was in, I’ve been trying to fit the Joe I know into this. I can’t.”

“Nobody can,” she said.

Ingrid Olson’s skull, like the skull of Joe Hillstrom, might contain some of the answers Lund craved, but he saw now, as he should have seen earlier, that there was no digging them out. His methods were the methods of the district attorney. There were no other methods available. Learning what he needed to know was like trying to weigh the impalpable air with a freight scale.

“Have you known Joe long?” he said.

“Since September.”

“September. That’s when I saw him last. He must have come straight up here from San Pedro.”

He wondered if this decent, clean, troubled young woman knew that Joe carried a gun, and what she would make of the theory that it was for his own protection as an organizer. He wondered what she would think if he told her the story of the wad of money thrown at him frantically for hiding when the police knocked on the alley door. And yet wasn’t it a demonstration of Joe’s soundness that he should have been keeping company with this kind of girl, this decent clean troubled obviously good and loyal and dependable young woman? Or at least keeping part-time company with her. There was always the nameless source of his wound, if she existed.

The confusions in his mind began to communicate themselves to his body; on an empty stomach, the rocking of the car and the smells of ozone and oil and straw seats and cigar butts began to make him queasy. He sat swallowing down his uneasy gorge, making no attempt to press the conversation further, and he was glad when Ingrid Olson stood up to get off.

The two-block walk to her house quieted his stomach, but still he said nothing, because he felt there was nothing he could say. The instruments he had were inadequate for understanding or measurement. When the girl finally stopped at an unpainted wooden gate, before a house with a bow window in which stood a cardboard sign saying “Ingrid Olson, Piano Lessons,” she put one hand on the gatepost and stood waiting, and he knew she was only being polite, she wanted him to say goodbye and be gone.

Opening his hand ruefully, turning it upward, he smiled. “I wish I knew what to think. It’s almost as easy for me to think Joe
guilty of murder as to believe this story about the woman. He just isn’t the man for either one. I don’t understand.”

Under a catalpa tree drooping with long pods, her hand on the gate, she stood quietly, a quiet girl with her own dignity about her. Her voice was low. “Is it so necessary to understand?” she said. “Isn’t it enough just to take his word and try to help?”

“I should think …” he began.

Massed tears had gathered in the girl’s eyes, but she did not turn her face. She stared at him through the tears, it seemed to him angrily, and her mouth twisted in an uncontrollable grimace.

“Do you think
I
understand?” she said, and turned swiftly up the walk and into the house.

The Wobbly hall looked like every other Wobbly hall he had ever been in—a single big bare room with folding chairs piled against the wall and a “baggage room” in the back corner where migrants stacked their bindles. In the broken-down black-leather hotel chairs along the window side a half-dozen men were arguing. The room smelled of cooking and tobacco smoke and printer’s ink from the old flatbed press shoved against the inside wall where a man in a canvas apron was setting up a stick of type.

At first he saw nothing of Ricket, but a second look showed him the cubbyhole office with its door half ajar, and he leaned in to see the secretary sprawled in a swivel chair before a desk tempestuous with papers and pamphlets. He was too big for the chair, the room, the overflowing desk. His movement of welcome made the chair squeal, and he lunged to keep papers from sliding off onto the floor.

“Sit down,” he said. “Glad to see you.”

Lund did not take the offered chair. “I’ve got to catch a train in a few minutes. I just dropped in to leave something for the defense fund.”

“Sure thing.” Pawing among papers and drawers in a half-hearted
attempt to find something, Ricket said, “If I could locate the damn book I’d fix you up a receipt.”

“Never mind.”

“Oh sure, just as easy as not.”

The forty dollars that Lund took from his wallet was more than he could spare; he would be short by the time he got home. But he would not do less. Seeing the surprise flick in Ricket’s black eyes at the amount, he said, “This is a debt. This really belongs to Joe already, I owe it to him. I’ll send on a contribution of my own after I get back east.”

He knew that Ricket’s insistence on the receipt was a recognition of his difference and his status as an outsider, a “sympathizer.” Ricket would demonstrate that the
IWW
was punctilious and that there was not the slightest chance of graft in its collection of defense funds. Though he had never believed otherwise, Lund submitted to being receipted. When the slip was in his hands he said, “How did Joe behave this afternoon?”

“Well,” Ricket said, and his eyes looked beyond Lund and his mouth twitched in the phantom smile. “He didn’t fire any more lawyers.”

“Are Scott and McDougall as bad as he says?”

“They’re all right. He never gave them anything to work with.”

Ricket heaved back in the chair, found two cigars in a drawer, offered one to Lund, who refused. He bit off the end and sat absently, the smile coming and going, his brows in a webbed frown. For an aimless half-minute he tried carefully to get the cigar band onto his little finger, but could slip it only as far as the second knuckle.

“I don’t know,” he said, and yawned powerfully, cracking his jaws. “Scott’s been on half a dozen labor cases here, he’s all right. McDougall’s new in town. But Joe don’t even want Hilton.”

“He told me he didn’t want the union to bleed its treasury.”

“Yeah,” Ricket said. “But before he got in this jam himself he was busting a gut raising money for the defense of the Oatfield boys. No, I’ve watched Joe on this from the beginning. He didn’t fire those two because they were doing a bad job. He fired them because he didn’t want anybody defending him at all.”

“Some people might take that as a sign he’s guilty.”

“Or extra innocent,” Ricket said. He smoked thoughtfully and
watched Lund with eyes that seemed pure liquid. His voice was gentle. “Did you ever get hauled into jail?”

“No.”

The secretary dropped his head back and blew smoke at the ceiling, and the ghostly smile like a tightening of the jaw muscles or a gritting of the teeth came mirthlessly and went again. “I remember the first time I ever got pulled,” he said. “I was just a kid, maybe sixteen, and I was on the bum in a strange town—Denver, if it matters any. So I was rubbering around the streets looking for a
YMCA
when a cop spotted me, and finally he came up and said he guessed he better look me over. He searched me and found a jackknife I had, one with a button on the handle that springs the blade out, you know? Bingo, I’m in the clink, concealed weapons. It was that button jigger that did it. The cop booked me and took me on down a hall and shoved me through a door, and on the other side I land of hesitated, you know, the way you would, not knowing which way he wanted you to go. But I never got my mouth open to ask, because this bull let me have it across the face with his billy. I saw stars for about an hour, and after that I laid all night in the tank thinking over my sins. In the morning I was so swelled up, like a punkin all across this side, that they finally brought in a sawbones to look me over. Busted cheekbone. I kept wanting them to wire my folks in Sioux Falls, but they didn’t pay me any mind. They made it plenty clear how I could get a year for that jackknife if they wanted to be tough, and they kept inviting me to confess any robberies or anything I’d been mixed up in. They even pretended they had me all hooked up with one special job, but I was too dumb innocent to know what went on. Finally I got a probation officer to wire my old man, and after three days I got out of there.”

Lund waited. “Yes?”

“I was just thinking how helpless they can make you feel,” Ricket said. “You’re minding your own business and right out of a clear sky comes this tough mick in a blue suit and he can pull any damn thing on you he wants. He can murder you if he feels like it, beat you plumb to death, and the rest of them will cover up for him like a horse blanket. You can’t open your peep. Just squawk once, or even break step going through a door, and he can bust you with a club. If you look cross-eyed you’re resisting an officer, or
trying to escape. And then they get you up before some sergeant and start firing questions at you, and there’s something about a jail makes everything you say sound like a lie, even to yourself. In five minutes they got you thinking you probably
are
some gonoph. You tell ’em where to find out about you and will they do it? They’d let you rot in jail for a week before they’d even send a wire.”

“Yes,” Lund said again.

“I think I can figure Joe out,” Ricket said. “Suppose you’re him, and you get hurt—how, that’s your business. You’re lying in bed when the cops come and pinch you. If they can make me feel the way I did about the jackknife, how could they make Joe feel about a double murder? Would you talk for them? Even if it meant your neck, would you let them beat some alibi out of you?”