Authors: Howard Fast
"It makes a lot of sense to me," Joe said. "Only I wish you'd stay. Please stay, Barbara."
She left at ten o'clock that day, Wednesday, the fourth day of July. Dan walked out to the car with her. "I'm here," he said, "whenever you need me. I'm not much good at saying these things, but I love you very much.
Vaya con Dios.
And come back—soon."
Barbara drove north without hurrying. She was still wrapped in a dreamy, delightful sense of well-being, encased in the warmth of the family she had just left. Never in her own home had she experienced this same sense of family, of support, of plain, uncritical approval and admiration; and the excitement of finding a brother who was both a stranger and a blood relation was quite wonderful. She tried not to compare him to Tom, telling herself that it was unfair, yet the comparison inevitably entered her mind again and again.
She stopped for gas and for lunch at a roadside stand, and then she drove on. It was late afternoon when she reached the peninsula and began to compare prices at the roadside vegetable stands. She bought sacks of potatoes, onions, and carrots and four bushels of oranges. The kitchen workers had reacted with annoyance the first time she brought oranges. "What the hell good are they in stew?" But she persisted in her own campaign to get the longshoremen to take them home for the children, holding forth again and again on the virtues of vitamin C.
It was almost seven o'clock when she turned into the alley on Bryant Street, only to find that the soup kitchen was closed for the day. She parked her car near the St. Francis Hotel, locked the doors, and hoped that no one would break into it. Then she checked into the hotel, and having no luggage, she paid for her room in advance.
She called the Whittier house from her hotel room. Knox answered the phone, and when she asked for Mr. Whittier, she was informed that he was out for the evening. Knox added that Mr. Whittier had been quite disturbed by her absence the night before, despite Mr. Lavette's call.
"I want you to assure him that I am perfectly all right.
I spent last night at my father's house in Los Angeles, and if my mother telephones, she is not to be alarmed. I will stop by the house sometime tomorrow."
Then she went downstairs to the coffee shop and ate two ham sandwiches, a glass of milk, and a piece of pie. She brought a newspaper back to her room, hoping to catch up with the progress of the strike, but once in bed, she found that the words blurred and that she couldn't keep her eyes open. By nine-thirty, she was sound asleep.
Barbara awakened with the first light of dawn in the hotel room, at about five o'clock in the morning. She felt wonderfully rested and refreshed, and at first she just lay in bed languidly, enjoying the adventure of being naked between the sheets in this strange hotel room, away from her home, free at least for the moment to do as she pleased when she pleased. Then she remembered her car, filled with food and parked on the street. She leaped out of bed, considered taking a shower, wavered, then darted into the shower, dried herself and her hair as best she could, swished soapsuds in her mouth in lieu of toothpaste, and then pulled on her clothes, shrugging away the fact that she had not changed in three days. She should have washed her underthings and stockings the night before. Well, she had forgotten. So much for that. The dark blouse, the cardigan sweater, and the plaid skirt were durable and quite clean. The saddle shoes she was wearing did not matter. She grabbed her purse and dashed out of the room.
The lobby of the hotel was empty except for a clerk, who dozed behind the desk. The restaurants had not yet opened. It didn't matter. She wasn't hungry, and there would be time enough to eat after she had unloaded her car at the kitchen. Usually it did not open until seven o'clock, but Barbara decided that she would drive her car into the alley and then sit there, guarding her load of food, until someone arrived to open the doors. She walked down Stockton to Market, and as she was crossing the street, a file of a dozen mounted police trotted by, their horses' hoofs making a strangely loud tattoo on the empty street. They looked at her strangely. A block away, there were two men. Otherwise, no one.
Her car was parked on 4th Street, and she breathed a sigh of relief to find it was untouched. It was a quarter after six. She got into the car and drove to Bryant Street and into the alley. There, to her surprise, the kitchen door was open, and the sound of men's voices came from inside. As she cut her motor, Guzie and Salone came out of the kitchen, and Salone called out to her, "God damn it, Bobby, where the hell have you been?" But there was no rancor in his voice, and evidently the squabble of the day before yesterday had been forgotten.
"I drove down to Los Angeles to see my father."
"You sure picked the day."
"Everyone gets a day off," she said testily, "even longshoremen."
"Sure. Sure. Maybe it's good you weren't here. All hell broke loose on Tuesday."
Barbara got out of the car and started to let down the tailgate. Salone helped her. Guzie began to unload the sacks of food.
"What happened?" Barbara asked.
"That sonofabitch Joe Ryan sold us out. That lousy bastard, calls himself a labor leader, comes here from New York and sells us out."
"That was two weeks ago," Barbara said.
"All right. They were only waiting for Whittier to come back from wherever the hell he was. Tuesday, they decide to bust the pier on Townsend Street. Seven hundred cops and goons, riot guns, tear gas—the works. We had maybe six, seven hundred guys there, and they roll through us with a line of trucks like tanks."
"Did they break the strike?"
"Like hell they did!" Guzie said. "The trucks got through onto Pier Thirty-eight, but then we held the lousy goons for four hours, and then they broke it up. All right, they got one lousy pier open, and now the papers are screaming that the strike's busted. It ain't— not by a long shot."
"Bobby, today's the day," Dominick said. "They laid us off for the Fourth. They're so stinking patriotic, they don't want to break nobody's head on the Fourth of July, but the scuttlebutt is that today they gonna open the whole waterfront. We got every member of the union out for today, and the seamen too. That's the way Limo laid it out when Ryan tried to sell us—the seamen and the longshoremen together or nothing. So today we gonna have a thousand seamen and a thousand longshoremen on the docks, and let them try to bust that up. The point is, Bobby, we want to borrow your car. We need cars. All hell is gonna break loose. We need the cars for command posts, first aid stations, maybe ambulances, food. This picket line ain't gonna stop. Nobody goes off, nobody gets relieved. So we figure to load sandwiches and coffee, and we got some bandages and iodine. We been cleaning up the room in front here, and we're supposed to have two doctor-volunteers—they'll cover the place. So you can stay here and help them when the trouble starts. Honest to God, you can trust us with the car—"
"It sounds like a war."
"That's right. Maybe. So what do you say, kid?"
"You can have the car," Barbara said, "but I go with it. I don't want anyone else to drive it."
"Kid, that's crazy. You don't know what can happen down there."
"You can have the car for whatever you need," Barbara said firmly. "But I drive. I know the,car. The clutch is ragged. You put someone else in here, and in a pinch he'll stall it."
"I can drive anything," Guzie said. "Anything."
"That may be. But if you want the car, I drive it."
Dominick nodded. "O.K., O.K. We ain't got time to argue. Let's load and get rolling."
They loaded the station wagon—a milk can of hot coffee, a bushel basket of tin cups, another of wrapped sandwiches, a box of rolled bandages and adhesive tape, two bottles of peroxide, and a quart bottle of iodine. By now, dozens of longshoremen and seamen were pouring into the alley. Barbara went into the kitchen, gulped hot coffee, and munched on a piece of stale bread. The longshoremen crowded in, and she found herself pouring coffee and hacking pieces from a salami. The bread was gone now, used up in the making of sandwiches, and with wonder Barbara watched the half-awake men making a breakfast of salami and black coffee. It did not matter. They were victims of a pervasive and consuming hunger.
Irma Montessa arrived, and she shouted for someone to take a basket of oranges and put it in the station wagon. "Stupid bastards," she said to Barbara. "All they know is meat and potatoes."
From outside, Dominick yelled, "Bobby, Bobbyl Let's get it on the road!"
She pushed through to the door. Out in the alley, forty or fifty strikers, some of them with picket signs, were crowded around the station wagon. TTiey were rubbing their hands, hopping up and down to keep warm, grinning at her as she came out. Many of them knew her, and they shouted things like, "Hey, Bobby! Here's our girl!" and "You'll tell 'em, Bobby!" as they opened up for her to get through to the car.
She heard one of the men say to Dominick, "The goons are forming up across Fourth Street. They say they're going to make a cordon from the depot to Market Street."
"Listen, you guys," Dominick shouted. "We go down Bryant, slow. So stay around the car. If the cops try to stop us at Fourth, we push through. We get the car inside the police line and as close to the docks as possible."
Dominick climbed into the car next to her, and Barbara started the motor, easing it into low gear and moving slowly out of the alley, the longshoremen walking in a group around the car. It was eight o'clock, and already the city appeared to be converging on the waterfront. Empty of cars, Bryant Street was spotted with clusters of strikers, sympathizers, kids, curious citizens. On the other side of the street, a solid knot of a dozen men moved toward the docks.
"Goons," Dominick said.
Moving at a walking pace, the Ford's motor whining in low gear, they were approaching 4th Street. Barbara saw the line of police stretching across the street, almost shoulder to shoulder. The kids and the curious were being barred, a crowd of people beginning to fill the street. She was also able to see herself in perspective: Jean Whittier's daughter, driving a car loaded with food and medical supplies into a police barricade. She was frightened and excited at the same time.
"Are you O.K., kid?" Dominick asked.
"O.K.," she said. "I'm fine," with just the slightest quaver in her voice.
"Don't stop unless I tell you to. Just keep it going at the same speed."
They were now about fifty feet from the police line, and the crowd of strikers around the station wagon had increased to several hundred. The tight group of men that Dominick had specified as "goons" now moved into the street on a diagonal toward the strikers. A police officer moved to meet them. Another police officer began to make his way through the strikers to the station wagon. A young man with a press card in his hat pushed in among the strikers and yelled at Barbara,
"Hey, lady, what's your name?"
"Roll down your window," Dominick said. "Keep it down."
"Not closed?"
"Down. Down."
The strikers were at the police line now. "Move it, move it!" Dominick yelled.
"That wagon don't go through!" an officer shouted.
Barbara kept the car moving, and the police line gave. Several of the policemen drew their sidearms, and then an officer who appeared to be in charge waved his arms, and the policemen dropped back, opening the way for the strikers and the station wagon to move through.
Barbara's heart had stopped beating. "Thank God," she whispered. Dominick grinned at hef. The man with the press card in his hat swung onto the running board.
"Lady, you got guts. What's your name?"
"Buzz off!" Dominick yelled. The strikers pulled him away. Then he said to Barbara, "Just right on down as close to the Embarcadero as we can get." They passed 3rd Street. In her rearview mirror, Barbara could see the police re-forming their line and holding back the increasing crowd of spectators. "We're in," she said to herself, "but how do we get out?"
"Turn left here," Dominick said, "and pull over to the curb."
Longshoremen and seamen were filling the street. Barbara eased the car through them up to the curb, and then she kept her hands on the wheel for fear that if she lifted them they'd shake violently. Dominick reached over and cut the ignition. "Good kid," he said. "You got lots of stuff."
Now she saw the crowd open up to let Harry Bridges through. His hair was slicked back, his blue eyes alive and darting from face to face. Two other men, heavyset, moved on either side of and behind him. He came over to the car and said,
"Hello, Nicky. Got some boodle?"
"Coffee, sandwiches, and medical stuff."
"Good. Who's the kid?" he asked, nodding at Barbara.
"It's her car. She's a good kid."
"Yeah." He stared at Barbara thoughtfully for a moment, then he said, "What's your name, miss?"
"Bobby Winter."
He called over his shoulder, "Hey, Fargo!" Fargo pushed through the crowds, a big, slope-shouldered, heavy-bellied man in his forties. "Fargo was a medic during the war. Fargo, that's Bobby behind the wheel. Bobby, you show him where the stuff is, and maybe if you want to, lend a hand."