Joe Hill (6 page)

They coddle their beer, their broken shoes indifferent among the other feet on the rail, their elbows proprietary on the bar, their hands circling the glasses in wet rings on the wood, their eyes watchful for when Tinetti will renew the free lunch. They raised their elbows and pull their chest away from the bar as Emil the bartender swabs with his wet rag, and then belly back to the dark old walnut before the twilight mirrors.

“… cold this summer,” Emil says. “Logs of fog.” His face is square and serious, with a pale curl stuck flat on his anxious forehead. His hands are clean and unhealthily white, like something pickled.

It is a lovely and restful thing to stand in a saloon in the late afternoon taking your time with a nickel glass of steam beer and hearing the quietness of the talk, nobody argumentative yet, nobody drunk and wanting a fight, everybody relaxed and waiting for the free lunch, the light gray across the tables and the mirrors shadowy and the bar shining with pale soft reflections. It is a good thing to cross your feet, leaning; or to put one foot on the rail and hunch over the bar’s friendly solidity, just resting and taking it easy after a day’s work or a day’s hanging around or a day’s walking on the picket line.

Across the bar, before the dusky mirrors, there are bright-colored punch boards painted all over with gold coins, and with shoulders comfortably touching the shoulders of the men on right and left you can study the things the boards will give you for nothing, for a nickel, if the luck happens to come your way: 90, 190, 290, 390, 490, 590, 690, 790, 890, and 990 all win a box of delicious assorted chocolates. The boxes are there in a stack, solid proof of the board’s honesty. There are also the things the even hundreds will get you—a jackknife, a razor, a fishing reel, a varnished fish basket with a strap, a shaving mug. There is the grand prize for number 1000, a .12-gauge Marlin repeating shotgun worth twenty dollars. It slants there in the corner of the mirror, a satiny shine up its blue barrel, its stock seductive and smooth and curved.

You can get it for a nickel. Everybody’s got a chance. If you miss the shotgun, you’ve still got a chance at the reel, or the fish basket, or the shaving mug, and if you miss those you can probably win some chocolates.

In the squares of little paper-covered cells where luck hides,
some of the holes are punched out and black. Someone has played a system and punched out the corner cells of each square; one whole square in the lower left hand corner is punched out.

“… Anybody won anything on that board, Emil?”

“Just one knife and a box of chocolates. That’s getting ripe.”

He lays the board on the bar, and you say, “If it wasn’t for suckers like me, sharks like you would have to work as hard as I do.” But there are all those chances. You can pick off a twenty-dollar prize for a nickel. Everybody’s got the same chance.

You push at random with the little punch. “What the hell,” you say, “I’m shooting the wad.” You unroll the little worm of paper, 596, and Emil slides your nickel off his edge and drops it in the till.

The crowd is thickening at the bar, and you move down, making room for more shoulders. “How about another beer, Emil?” Then there is a difference in the room, as if a corner has been turned, and here is Tinetti with the tray of mounded plates, the loaves of thin-sliced rye, the pickles knobby as an alligator’s back and sweating cool brine, the sliced bologna and the salami with globules of fat among the rich dark meat, the slices lying spiraled and overlapping like the ripe coins painted on the punchboard.

As the plates slide out there is a perceptible drift, a gradual slow surge, dignified but irresistible, toward the free lunch end. The men who are closest say something to Tinetti, something friendly and casual, and for a suitable interval Tinetti stands there dangling the empty tray, talking. It is two or three minutes before one of the beer drinkers, almost absentmindedly, reaches out and picks up a slice of bologna. Still talking to Tinetti, he peels the gut off and chews slowly. They are talking about the relative chances of Detroit and Philadelphia in the American League race. A man on the left, listening politely, covers a slice of rye with a slice of ham, and as if by afterthought with a pickle. The first man moves away, getting a slice of salami and a piece of bread as he goes, and the crowd edges past a little at a time. There is a smell of garlic in the air, and Emil refills many beers. Tinetti, moving away from the free-lunch counter, lights the lamps back of the bar, and now another phase has come, the warm phase.

After a second beer and a bologna sandwich and the lights, the Forecastle is a place of warmth and comradeship and life. Now
everything is rich and gilded, the colors shine fatly, the pearl handle of the prize jackknife is fabulous, the razor is a princely instrument, the shotgun a weapon for King George in a Scottish shooting box.

There is more talk now, louder, more vehement.

“… I matching you or you matching me?” the voices say.

“… Ketchel?” they say. “He couldn’t lick his weight in duck feathers. Over in Goldfield once he hired out as a fink, and one night a friend of mine laid him cold as a wedge with a ketchup bottle. You want to talk fighters, I’ll talk to you, but not Ketchel. Not that dirty stool …”

“… so when she’d been gone three or four days they finally find her in this hotel with the Greek, and I guess her old man was wild. He busted in the room, and her and the Greek was in bed, and the old man just grabbed the covers and yanked. Neither of them had a god damn thing on. Bert said she had hair on her like a man. How’d you like that, boy? Jesus, I’d like to have been there when they busted in that room. I guess the old man was really mad …”

“… split you ten punches, Jack,” says the man on the left.

You punch five apiece, and then another five, and win a box of chocolates and then match the man for them and lose. The expensive Marlin shines, blue-satin barrel and polished stock, against the mirror, and the pearl-handled jackknife and the razor and the reel and the mug and basket stay where they were. They shine there, a comfortable reassurance and a promise, and multiply themselves in the fecund deceptive glass.

There is usually music about this time of the evening, a big Swede who sings and plays the guitar with fingers so thick it is a miracle he manages to hit only one string at a time. Not a
j
or a
w
to his name. It’s a riot to hear him when he gets a little stewed and starts off on “Yoost a song at tvilight.” Maybe on Saturday nights he starts later.

But here he is now—Lord, what a moose!—between a couple of other men, a slim dressed-up fellow with a tight mouth, and a funny-paper Swede with a face like an old ewe. They crowd up behind the men at the bar, and the big Swede says, “Vot you got for soft drinks, Emil?”

The way Emil stops and stares, puckering his troubled forehead under the flat curl, gets a laugh.

The big Swede keeps insisting, laughing. “Sure, vot you got?”

“Lemon pop,” Emil says, and they both look at the slim man in the blue serge. He smiles as if it hurt him. After the big Swede’s, his voice is quiet and low. “Lemon pop’ll do fine,” he says.

They get the pop and a pint of whiskey and mix back into the crowd looking for a table. Every now and again the big Swede’s laugh vibrates the glassware, but it seems that he is not going to sing. Maybe he will later.

After a while he does. The guitar starts to plink and hum, and men at the bar or around the room half cock their heads to listen. The Swede has pushed back his chair and slung the guitar around his neck and is picking aimlessly at the strings, saying something and laughing. Now there is a little hook-nosed man, McGibbeney, a railroader, sitting at the table between the man in the blue suit and the ewe-faced Swede.

The men who are listening grin a little and nod a little when the big Swede, Alberg is his name, starts off. “Halleluiah I’m a Bum.” That’s the one. The Swede has a voice like coal pouring down a tin chute, but his thick fingers are surprisingly nimble on the neck of the guitar. Voices join in from along the wall, among the tables:

The Swede’s voice leads them and drowns them out and leads them again, The tune goes like a man who swings his elbows as he walks.

Warmth flows into the room from the lamps, the rich reflections along the bar, the glint and shine of glasses, the sound of singing. John Alberg’s cousin and McGibbeney sit watching the singer, their lips turning up in the curl of a smile. He is a man that everybody likes, John Alberg, a big worthless good-natured man like a shaggy dog that wags its tail at everybody and hangs out its tongue and laughs. This is his theme song, the thing they expect of him, a kind of national anthem of the
IWW
. You can tell the Wobs around the saloon: they are the ones who sing. Quite a lot of them, by their clothes, are also railroaders. The Wobblies have been organizing a lot among the trainmen, especially among the boomers.

Smoke rises toward the gaslights slowly, is sucked into the draft and streams upward above the jets. John Alberg hits the guitar a final lick and rolls out his big laugh. With that laugh on tap, he should play Santa Claus in department stores.

“… it’s the back muscles,” a high argumentative voice says at the bar. “Hell, what’re you givin’ us? That’s where you get your punch. Look at Bob Fitzsimmons, he had back muscles big as oranges. You can’t hit just with your arm. Look at John L. …”

McGibbeney is leaning forward, saying something with his sharp fierce face thrust toward Alberg. Alberg pulls a paper from his pocket and spreads it on the table. He looks at the guitar, hunts some chords, taps with meaty fingertips on the soundbox.

“Dis is new song,” he says confidentially to those nearest. “My cousin Yoe yust wrote it. You listen, dis is damn gude song. ‘Casey Yones the Union Scab.’ ”

“Hey you guys,” McGibbeney says. “Listen to this!”

As Alberg plays and sings, the blue-suited man sits almost uncomfortably in his chair, poker-faced. With his pale skin and his neat fair hair and his string tie he looks like a gambler. It is as if Alberg applauded him with eyebrows and lips, singing directly at him, but the cousin cracks no smile in reply. Once when two men edge closer behind him to hear he half turns and looks at them, but he is stiff in the face of the applause that comes when Alberg is through. The man next to him now is Herb Davis, the secretary of the
IWW
local, and he is saying something into the cousin’s ear. The cousin shakes his head, a quick, impatient motion.

McGibbeney is very excited. “By God, a thing like that can
win for us! Come on, Alberg, the meeting’ll be on in ten minutes. Come on down there and sing it once.”

Other voices are saying the same thing. “It’ll have ’em breaking up chairs,” Herb Davis says. A kind of delegation forms, and McGibbeney carefully picks up and folds the paper with the song on it. “They’ll want you to take a bow,” he says. “I didn’t quite get your name. Hill, was it? Joe Hill?”

“That’ll do,” the cousin says.

They go out, ten or a dozen of them working between the tables, Herb Davis with his hand around the cousin’s arm, talking seriously. Over their heads John Alberg shakes his guitar at Tinetti, who has rolled down his cuffs and is adjusting a heavy gold cufflink. “Dese boys vant me to do a little yob,” Alberg says. “I be back pretty qvick, Nino.”

They go on out, and the doors they hold open as they pass let in a brief breath of evening air, the lugubrious sound of a Salvation Army band down on the corner, and the sad ragged voices singing “In the Sweet By and By.”

The man called Joe Hill walks with the others, unsmiling, light and easy on his feet but unbending, almost ill at ease. Under the expressionless pale face lies another face, mercurial as an actor’s, eager-eyed and tugged at by responsive smiles; inside the erect blue serge is another man, no laborer but an artist, fine-tendoned and blue-veined and white-handed, a skinless man, avid for praise.

The shack was hot from the stove and the blaze of sun on the tin roof, and full of the laundry-smell of boiling rice, the sweet-sour fragrance of Chinese cookery. Joe Hillstrom, delegated cook, an experienced hand who knew what he was about, watched over the kettles, draining the gluey liquid from the rice, pouring dipperfuls of cold water in to separate the grains, draining that. Out on the back platform above the tide creek the boys were kidding Moe Dreyfuss and Moe was retorting in excited, staccato bursts.
A cool little wind blew through the shack and drew Joe to the back door, where he stood looking down.