My makeup kit was ever so slightly out of line with the edge of the dresser where I had left it. The lace on one of my Reboks was fractionally misplaced. Not a bad performance for what must have been a really thorough search. They did slip up in the closet, however, having slightly rumpled my gray skirt when they’d went through the rest of the hangings.
The last thing I did was to look into the drawer of the cheap nightstand next to the bed and smile down at the Gideon Bible, the inevitable adjunct of cheap motels. It was almost exactly where I had placed it. It amused me to think how my uninvited visitors must have shaken it out for hidden notes and probably even checked the binding.
Sleep came quickly, as I relished the thought of the next day in San Francisco.
The Japanese CEO said little, but he did look a bit unhappy, and he was obviously running the show with passable though heavily accented English. The big, bluff American, who represented him and who treated me like a hick from the boonies, tried to push my two attorneys around, but didn’t get very far. I started at fifty million, but he knew it was more than I expected. We jockeyed around for a while, took time out for lunch, toyed with forty-five million, and I was sure he would settle for forty-four. About then I decided my rumpled skirt deserved an additional something, so we came to a final figure of forty-four million, five hundred thousand.
With all the papers signed and everyone shaking hands, the CEO was waiting nervously for me to open the dispatch case and produce the hundred pages of formula. I unlocked the case, reached in and pulled out the Gideon Bible. It had required quite a bit of work to produce suitable substitutions for Deuteronomy and Leviticus. I’d spent hours getting the expert help needed to produce the right paper, fonts, format and rebinding to make the finished product virtually indistinguishable from the millions of other Gideon Bibles run off over the decades to provide inspiration to hotel and motel guests.
As a matter of fact, I felt I had markedly improved on the begats when I replaced them with germanium and iridium and sines and cosines. The entire formula was there, incorporated in words under each numbered verse. Hayataka Electronics now had the hard copy they’d ponied up a fortune for.
After handing over the formula, it occurred to me I should send the Inn Verness a small check to pay for the Bible I’d dumped into the service station trash can.
MURPHY’S CORNER
Mrs. Murphy never really did mind our sitting out on her steps. She never used that entrance to her house, anyway, even though it was technically the front. What was nice about those porch steps was the roof over them, so we were in out of the sun and rain. And from there you could see all up and down Morton Avenue and down the two side streets, which included the Boston & Maine trains running along the track at the end of Pembroke St. In fact, the trains were part of our entertainment, betting pennies on who could guess the closest to the number of railroad cars rumbling by.
By we, I mean me, along with Gene Terrio; Bobby O’Dwyer; and Terry Riordan.
The four of us kind of inherited the spot from Gil, my older brother, and from Gene’s cousin who used to hang out there. And it really was our spot. Some of the other guys in the neighborhood would stop by and chat, but it was pretty much understood the four of us had exclusive use of the steps. There wasn’t room for many more, and we would have frozen them out of our conversation if they’d tried to horn in.
A lot of things held us together, like Bobby’s father’s funeral. The four of us went as pall bearers. I was the only non-Catholic, but Bobby said Father Sullivan wouldn’t mind. Besides, his brother couldn’t get off from work without losing his job, and even his father’s funeral wouldn’t justify his being laid off.
Gene was kind of the brains of the crowd. He’d applied to college while he was still a senior in high school, and he’d been accepted. The only thing he needed was money. So he had put in an application for a scholarship. He was still waiting to hear a year later.
All four of us had been out of high school for over a year. Bobby and Terry for two. We’d gypped around at odd jobs, from shoveling snow, to repairing broken windows. It was enough to keep us in cigarettes, but not much more. Bobby was the go-getter who usually found the jobs.
Terry was the brawn of the outfit. He had a steady girlfriend—Eugenia Kennedy—and they wanted to get married in the worst way, but of course they couldn’t afford to. He’d worked on his uncle’s farm for most of his first year out of high school, and then the Depression really hit. Terry said the potatoes his uncle grew rotted in the field because there wasn’t any market for them.
So, this year, we mostly sat around.
Bobby’s family was a bit better off than the rest of us. His dad had been able to pay up his life insurance, and it was enough to keep them going. They needed it, because his was the biggest family in the bunch. Twelve kids. Though twelve wasn’t so unusual. A lot of families in our neighborhood ran to fifteen or more. And Mrs. Boucher had twenty-one, nineteen of them still living.
I guess Gene was the one who was the worst off. His Dad died of TB and couldn’t work at all for years before he passed on. Things got so bad at his house last year Mr. Laughlin, their landlord, was going to evict them for not having paid rent for months. Father Sullivan talked him out of it and even got him to lower the rent from six dollars a month to five. He also got the Terrios qualified for welfare. And a lot of the neighborhood families chipped in and paid most of the back rent.
What really helped the family was the food Gene’s mother got from welfare. A lot of it was graham flour and prunes, but once in a while they’d get a big block of cheese. Gene’s mother never learned how to bake with graham flour. Her bread was pretty awful, even with big slabs of cheese to go with it. But she traded a lot of the surplus off to neighbors for regular food. Those extras made a big difference.
I was kind of the odd ball of the outfit, being Lutheran and having only one brother and one sister, both older than me. Dad was working on and off with the WPA, and didn’t bring in much money, but Mom made do. She took in sewing, and an occasional boarder. When my brother Gil moved off to California, and my sister Lily got married, they’re leaving pretty much lightened the load. The big problem came about because Dad had bought a house just before times got bad, and we had to meet big mortgage payments every month. It sure didn’t leave much for luxuries. Fortunately, the bank didn’t want to take the house, so they settled for whatever we could afford each month. Of course they still expected to get the full amount eventually, and Dad used to worry himself sick over how he’d ever pay it all off.
I used to have to scrape to buy cigarettes, but then the rest of the four did too. Well, maybe not Bobby. He used to buy Raleighs for the coupons. He told us he got enough to trade in for an ironing board, something his mother had been wanting for years to replace the broken-down one she’d been using.
The rest of us got our cigarettes from Brousseau’s Market. Old man Brousseau charged twenty-five cents for two packs, but if you could get thirteen cents together, he’d mark you down on his charge book and let you have the next pack for twelve cents. He’d even sell the individual cigarettes at a penny apiece, but about the only ones buying them for a penny were the grade-school kids. Of course, there were some places where you could get a carton for a dollar, but none of us, apart from maybe Bobby, ever had a dollar to spare—even for cigarettes.
And, of course, we nursed along those we had. Among ourselves we borrowed back and forth, but the standard practice was to hide them except for a single cigarette kept in an old package in your shirt pocket. So if anyone else tried to bum one, we’d offer the packet so they could see it was the last one we had. No one would ever take your last cigarette—except for Bummer Stone.
Bummer—we never did find out his real name—lived in the Hooverville next to the freight yards. He’d been born in our neighborhood, so he never strayed very far from it. I don’t know what he did for food, but he told us what he did for cigarettes.
“Four or
five butts is all I need. Cut off a strip of newspaper—the pink paper of the Police Gazette is the best—and roll the butts in it. Makes the finest cigarette.”
So we used to save our butts for him, but he needed eight or nine of ours to make one of his, because we used to smoke them down awfully small, even though we never reached the point where he did—using a toothpick to hold the last little end of his home-made product.
We also managed to scrape enough money together for emergencies. Like when Bobby’s father died and we were the pall bearers. Gene’s shoes were at the point where he was stuffing cardboard into them to cover up the holes. We finally found a nice second-hand pair somewhere near his size, along with the fifty cents to pay for them.
I was a lot luckier. I’d gotten most of Gil’s hand-me-downs when he left. My one good white shirt had frayed cuffs, but Mom turned them, and they looked like the originals. It was tougher with the one suit jacket I had. The gray inner lining was showing through at the front edge. Without telling my Dad, I borrowed his fountain pen while he was out looking for regular work, and I touched up the edges. He wouldn’t have been happy about it if he’d found out, because it was a pen his father had given him, but the ink job I did worked fine for the funeral.
The big event came in September when Bobby told us he’d found work for the four of us. Mike Rafferty, one of the town commissioners, wanted his house painted and was willing to pay us twenty dollars to do it. Five dollars apiece sounded pretty good, at first.
“The best part,” Bobby announced, “is he’ll supply all the paint and brushes and everything.”
“Geez,” Gene said, “that’s a two story house. That’s a lot of work for five dollars.”
We put our heads together and figured it would take the better part of a week to do the job. While a dollar-a-day wasn’t bad pay, considering we weren’t getting anything sitting on the steps at Murphy’s Corner, it meant dawn to dusk of climbing ladders and scraping and painting. Bobby agreed and volunteered to go back to negotiate with Rafferty. The end result sounded much better. Twenty-five dollars and his old Nash thrown in. The four of us went off to inspect the vehicle and to make a final estimate of the work involved.
Terry was the only one of us who had a driver’s license and also the only one who knew much about cars. He started it up, after several attempts, drove it back and forth in Rafferty’s driveway, then inspected it from stem to stern. “Needs oil, gas, tires,” he announced. “And the transmission sounds strange.”
“Will it run long enough for us to get it to a used car lot?” I asked
Terry shrugged. “Hard to say. The tires would make it. I’m not sure about the transmission.”
“How much do you think we could get for it?” Gene asked.
Another shrug. “Old wrecks are a drug on the market. But maybe some junkyard would give us five or ten dollars just to get parts off of it.”
I was getting low on cigarettes, so I called for a vote and held up my hand in favor. Terry agreed immediately. Gene was reluctant, but his hand finally went up. Bobby, who’d worked out the deal, was the last to join in, but it was finally unanimous with the proviso Rafferty pay us five dollars at the end of the first day.
It was a miserably hard job. There were more nooks and crannies to fill in than we had ever anticipated, and Rafferty hovered over us most of the time to call attention to any place we might have missed. The week stretched into the weekend, and the end result was we had put in seven-and-a-half days of painting and cleaning up. But it was nice to have so much money all at once.
Better yet, when we all piled into the Nash and managed to get it safely to Terry’s house, there was a letter waiting for him with a much better job offer—for all of us. Terry’s uncle had twenty-acres of apples needing picking and which he had a market for. There would be a week’s work, and we’d be paid so much for every pound we picked—room and board included. After the Rafferty job, the farm work sounded like heaven.
“And we’ve got transportation,” Bobby said, indicating our recent acquisition.
Terry seemed doubtful. “We’re going to have to spend some money fixing it up. We’ll need at least one tire to replace the one that’s down to the threads. Even then, I’m not sure it will make it. Uncle Jack’s farm is over twenty miles from here.”
I was eager. “Let’s try it. What do we have to lose? If it breaks down, we’ll hitchhike the rest of the way.” My optimism carried the day.
So we put in just enough eleven-cent gas at a cut-rate station to get us there, found a used tire which would fit at the junkyard, and made sure the oil was topped out. Terry nursed the old clunker along, and there wasn’t much traffic—though a couple of cars beeped their displeasure at our snail pace. Fortunately, there weren’t any steep climbs, in spite of the fact it was mostly uphill to the farm. Terry shook his head more than once as the noise from the transmission got louder and louder, but the rest of us just sat back and enjoyed the ride. And we did make it all the way.
Uncle Jack’s farm was a revelation, at least to me. I’d never been much further from my home than downtown, so country was something I’d only seen in movies. The animals fascinated me. We had horses in town. Tony, the rag picker, came by with an old nag and wagon. And some of the bakers still used horse-drawn carts. But I’d never been right up close to a cow before. The two Uncle Jack had were real friendly, leaning over the fence expecting a handful of the greener grass on the other side.
But what impressed me most was the quiet. In fact, it was so quiet the first night I woke up early, long before sunrise and thought there must be something wrong. I went outside and almost fell over when I saw the sky. No way can you see so many stars in the city. While I was standing there leaning against a fence rail, Gene showed up. He couldn’t sleep either, but he wasn’t surprised at all the stars. In fact, he started to tell me all about the constellations, and in a few minutes I could locate the Pole Star and Orion and the Dog Star and a bunch of others. We stayed out there talking until the first glimmer of dawn and then went off to one of Aunt Jennie’s enormous breakfasts—cup after cup of steaming hot, black coffee smelling like it was freshly roasted, ham and hash browns and pancakes and more of everything than we could possibly eat.
Even the apple picking was fun, though it began as soon as you could see the fruit and went on till dark. It was hard work, no question about it, what with climbing ladders and filling the big canvas sacks hanging down our fronts. And we had to be careful not to bruise the apples. Uncle Fred said the packer looked for any excuse to dock the growers.
Uncle Fred was great, by the way. He worked right out there in the orchard with us and told us stories. He told us how tough it was to be a farmer when there were people going hungry and he couldn’t sell what he grew. He told us about what happened to his potato crop.
“Last year,” he said, “I had forty acres of potatoes I had to leave rotting in the fields. I even said anyone could have what they wanted for the digging, but only a couple of families showed up. Most people don’t have enough money for gas to get here. When Roosevelt came up with the idea of paying farmers not to plant, I thought he was crazy, but it worked. I left fifteen of those acres lying fallow, and this year a dealer’s coming out and buying all I can produce. He’s not paying much, but I’m making a profit.” He grinned. “Now, I kinda wish I’d planted the whole forty.”
The week flew by. I couldn’t get enough of the country. Every evening I walked through Uncle Fred’s wood lot and felt like hugging the trees. The smells were different, and the sounds—around nightfall—were something out of this world. That’s when I decided I’d find some way to live out in the country. Though, after listening to Uncle Fred, I wasn’t sure I was cut out to be a farmer.
The day before we left to go back home, there was another big surprise—for Gene. A note came from his mother in the afternoon mail and in it was a notice from the college. He’d gotten a work scholarship and, because the student who had it quit, they
wanted him to come to school right in the middle of the quarter and start work in the cafeteria the next week. We whooped and hollered, and Aunt Jennie baked a cake in celebration. I guess the frosting on it was supposed to look like a college diploma. Aunt Jennie wasn’t much of an artist, but the cake sure tasted good.
When we started back, we all felt like kings, with fifteen dollars apiece in our pockets, enough gas in the old Nash to get us back to town, and Gene with a letter he’d been looking for for over a year. The only black cloud on the horizon was the sound from the transmission. Terry nursed the Nash along and coasted down all of the hills in neutral, but the noise kept getting worse and worse. Then, even going as slowly as we were, the car suddenly rocked as though it had been hit by a truck. Terry managed to ease it on to the shoulder, and that’s when we found out we had more than transmission problems. The second-hand tire we’d bought had blown out.
Even so, it was hard to change our mood. We laughed, got out and rolled out the spare. Terry shook his head over it. Not only was it flat, but the air went out of it as fast as we pumped it in. It looked like we had fifteen miles of hitchhiking ahead of us, and the cars coming by were few and far between. Then we found out how much Terry’s fixit qualities could pay off.
I thought he was acting pretty crazy when he started cutting grass with his pocket knife but, when he explained, we all pitched in. Terry managed to stuff enough grass into the spare to make it hold the weight of the car, and off we went again. We sang to drown out the noise of the transmission which was getting louder and louder. At least three of us did. Terry was two busy trying to keep the car on the road and going straight to do much singing.
I was the first to notice when we reached the city limits how pedestrians were stopping and pointing at us. Bobby leaned out of the back seat to look and told us the grass was coming out of the tire and was funny looking enough to make anybody point. It was about then the old wreck finally gave out. We pulled over to the curb and Terry crept under the car to see if there was any possibility he could fix it. He came out from under in a few minutes with a disgusted look on his face.
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