by Howard Fast
When he came down the next morning, he wore the work shoes and the denim pants and shirt. Mark and Sarah looked at him curiously.
“I’ll be leaving after breakfast,” he told them.
“No!” Sarah cried. “Not now. Not so quick, Danny.”
“Where are you going?” Mark asked.
Dan shrugged. “I still have to work that out.”
“Will you be back, Danny?”
“Sometime, sure.”
When he was ready to leave, carrying the small canvas bag containing the extra pants and shirt, some socks, and underwear, and wearing an old leather jacket, Sarah clung to him, sobbing. Then Mark drove him to the ferry and then to the bus station. “I left the two suitcases in the guest room,” he said to Mark. “Put them away, would you, old sport?”
“I can’t talk to you. You’re a goddamn mule. Never mind about me. But if you don’t stay in touch, you’ll break Sarah’s heart.”
“I’ll stay in touch.”
At the bus station, people turned to watch at the sight of a bald little man with a potbelly hugging a very large man in work clothes. Then the bald little man hurried away, not trusting himself to speak.
At the ticket window, Dan bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.
Six months later, Dan Lavette walked out of the Los Angeles city jail, having served ninety days for resisting arrest. He owned a pair of shoes, a pair of worn denim pants, and a denim shirt, all of which he wore, and all of which constituted his total worldly possessions. He weighed nine pounds less than when he had entered the jail. Otherwise, he felt reasonably good, consoling himself with the fact that this was the first time in his forty-one years that he had been sent to prison. The ninety days had been interesting and instructive and now and then deadly boring. There were few books in the jail, but he had gotten hold of a copy of War and Peace, which May Ling had often pressed him to read, and he had finished it. He had also read The Return of The Native and An American Tragedy. He had survived the attempt of a drug-crazed inmate to kill him, escaping with a slight knife cut between two ribs, and he had eaten some two hundred and seventy of the worst meals he had ever tasted, and he had learned the insanity and futility of a system of punishment unchanged since the dawn of what man euphemistically called civilization. He had also spent countless hours lying on a bedbug-ridden bunk, trying to make some sense and reason and validity out of his life, thinking of many things, thinking of his children from the wombs of two women and thinking of the women.
He was only half alive without the women. Within his enormous bulk, there was an almost maudlin gentleness, an aching, pleading need to be loved, to be valued, to be told by word and deed and gesture that he was human, that he was something more than a senseless, ignorant brute; and all of his efforts to prove that to himself by playing the game of the cultured and the mighty were of no avail. When he had purchased the bus ticket to Los Angeles, a part of him was returning to May Ling; and this part of himself he understood better than the part of himself that was afraid to return. Introspection was difficult for him; he compensated for it by doing things; and in prison for the first time in his life he had day after day with nothing to do.
When he came to Los Angeles, he had not gone to May Ling. He argued with himself that he needed a job. He found a room for three dollars a week at the Charlton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, a wretched little room with a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and an overhead, unmasked string light. He lay sleeplessly on the bed and thought about May Ling and told himself that he would find a job first. Main Street was the pit in the sorrowful belly of downtown Los Angeles, a succession of pool halls, speakeasies, vermin-ridden lunch counters, Chinese restaurants, and unabashed whorehouses; and the sorrow was the torment of several thousand men looking for jobs where there were no jobs. At a sign reading wanted to clean toilets, there were two hundred men waiting. He got two days of work at a lot, scraping the rust from farm machinery that was being reconstituted. He was paid three dollars a day, and no one on the job complained about the pay.
On Signal Hill, oil flowed, as it did from a thousand other derricks spotted around the sprawling, shapeless city, from downtown to Wilshire Boulevard to Venice and Torrance. He found three weeks of work on Signal Hill, where he was chosen out of two hundred men for his bulk and his strength; and for three good weeks he worked in the sun, wrestling with pipe and drill-casing and chains, feeling his muscles harden and his body respond to physical effort. He drew twenty-five dollars a week, and his mind was filled with thoughts of May Ling, with fears and hopes and anticipations–and also with the thought that now she could be married or could hate him, which would certainly have been just and proper–and then he and forty other men were laid off, and there were no more jobs after that. He tried everything. When an advertisement appeared in the Los Angeles Times, asking for men over six feet, three inches in height to come to the film studio in Culver City, he made his way there, even though he was an inch short of the requirement. But he was only one among a thousand tall men, and after three hours of waiting, the gates of Metro were closed.
Walking on Third Street one night, he took out the roll of sixteen dollar bills that remained to him and was jumped from behind by two men who were more desperate than he was. He went down, the money flying from his hand, and then when they leaped to grab the money, he flung himself on the two of them, fighting mindlessly and crazily for the small fortune that sixteen dollars represented. A third man joined in, and he fought the three of them; and when the cops came, he was so lost in the violence he had committed himself to that he fought them as well. Beaten, one eye closed, his shirt stained with dry blood, he told his story to the judge and was told in turn that he was fortunate to receive no more than ninety days.
And now it was over, and he walked out of the jail with the clothes on his back and no more.
The distance from downtown Los Angeles to San Pedro is about twenty-seven miles. Dan set out on foot. He had made a simple equation to himself; the fishing boats sailed out of San Pedro, and where boats brought in fish, no one starved. In any case, it was his trade, and if twenty years had gone by since he had stood on the deck of a fishing boat, he had not forgotten. After two hours under the burning Southern California sun, he realized that walking in Los Angeles was quite different from walking in San Francisco. He stopped at a gas station, where he drank from a hose and stood in the shade until the owner told him to move on or he’d call the cops. He started to walk again, and an oil truck slowed and gave him a lift as far as Sepulveda Boulevard. He then walked the remaining seven miles. It was early evening now, and the heat of the sun had exchanged itself for the chill of the night wind off the sea. Attracted by the twinkle of campfires, he wandered onto a weed-grown lot just off Gaffey Street. There at least a hundred jobless, homeless men sat around fires built of driftwood and odds and ends of boards. He joined one of the groups and was made welcome by a nod here and there, no more than that. They were silent men, bent and dispirited. A two-gallon tin of fish and water sat in the coals. When they pulled it out of the fire, they scooped into it with old cans. Dan had not eaten since morning, but he had accepted their warmth uninvited and he had no intention of asking for food. Anyway, he still hated fish. But when an old man sitting next to him lifted a half-cooked piece of mackerel out of the sardine can he was using as a plate and offered it to Dan, he accepted the offer, and realized that he had forgotten that he hated fish–or perhaps to a man half starved, anything would taste good.
One by one, the men around the fire stretched out to sleep. Dan made his own bed on the ground. His thin shirt offered poor protection from the cold, and again and again he awakened shivering. Finally, morning came, and with it the warmth of the sun.
The next four days were like a nightmare; they were the first time Dan Lavette ever lost all control of his life as he lived it. Never before in his adult life did he have the feeling that he was without control. Even in jail, when the man ran at him with a kni
fe, he had remained calm and deflected the blade. Control was the essence of himself as he saw himself, the essence of his masculinity, of his right to have money or not have money, as he saw fit, but always as he saw fit. He might suspend control, but he never had to surrender it before.
Now the old man who had sat next to him at the fire said to him, “It takes twenty-four hours without food to make a bum, or four days without shaving.” In four days without shaving, two of them without food, he admitted the fact. He was a bum. They were all bums. San Pedro teemed with bums, because when you had no money and no job and no place to lay your head, you were a bum, and it was just as plain and simple as that. The population of San Pedro was thirty-seven thousand, and for every fifteen of the population, there was a beached seaman, an unemployed steelworker or welder or carpenter out of the dead shipyards, an unemployed stevedore, an unemployed clerk, an unemployed fisherman–dead souls who sat silently on the docks, or shuffled along the streets, or sprawled in empty lots and on the beaches–and who gave a damn that one of them was Dan Lavette? Who gave a damn for human flesh without money?
He sat on a box on Fisherman’s Wharf, and stared at the fishing boats, and talked to himself without listening, which was something he had learned to do after two days without eating. Out on the ocean in the distance, with only the top of its masts showing, a ship lay, at least fifteen miles by his calculation, just lying there outside the limit, probably a mother ship for the rumrunners, loaded to the hatches with whiskey; and he tried to remember how long it was since he had tasted whiskey, or a fresh egg, or a piece of decent steak. He remembered May Ling’s chiding him for the fat on his waistline. It was gone now. He was fasting, not an ounce of fat on him. Another day or two, and he would begin to stagger. Bums staggered, but not from liquor. It was plain, simple starvation. The trouble was, he told himself, that he had lost his ambition–otherwise he would find that weed-grown lot again, where they cooked fish and fish heads in tin oil cans. Well, he’d sit awhile, and then he’d work out that ambition thing. He rubbed the thick stubble of beard on his cheeks, wondering idly how he looked.
And then he heard his name called. A man had come off one of the fishing boats, walked past him, turned, stared, taken a few steps back, and then said tentatively, “Dan Lavette?”
Dan looked blankly at a heavyset man in his middle fifties, burned brown by the sun.
“You’re Dan Lavette.”
Dan rose to face him and nodded.
“I’ll be damned. Don’t you remember me? Pete Lomas. I ran your fleet up on the wharf in San Francisco.”
“Pete? Yes, sure. Glad to see you.”
Lomas was examining him, measuring him with his eyes. “Bad breaks, Dan? Last I heard, you were on top of the world.”
“I climbed down.”
“Well, a lot of them did. Come on, let me buy you a drink. We’ll talk about old times.”
Dan shook his head. “No–no, I’d better not.”
“Are you hungry? When did you eat last?”
“Hell, no, I’m not hungry.”
“Come on. I’m starved. Come on and sit down with me, Dan. Come on.”
“No–”
“Ah, cut out the bullshit. Come on. We go back a long way.” He took Dan’s arm. “Come along, Dan.”
“O.K.,” Dan said. “I’m lying. I’m broke, I’m hungry. I can’t sponge off you, Pete. You find a bum you haven’t seen for twenty years, you got no obligations.”
“That’s a lousy thing to say. Come on.”
They walked over to a lunch wagon on Harbor Road, and Lomas ordered ham and eggs and fried potatoes and coffee for both of them. The waitress put down a basket of bread, and Dan couldn’t hold back. He began to eat the bread. Lomas watched him. The ham and eggs came. Dan looked up and apologized. “Christ, I’m eating like a pig.”
“How long?” Lomas asked softly.
“Two days without anything. They had a soup kitchen going the day before that. Then it closed down.”
Lomas nodded. “The sisters from Saint Mary’s. They keep it going until they run out of money. They’ll start up again soon. They come to me for fish. Go on, eat. You want more?”
“No, this is enough. What do you fish, Pete?”
“Mackerel. I got my own boat. The wife got asthma about ten years ago, and the doctor said she wanted a dry climate. So we came down here and bought a bungalow in Downey. Not that it does her much good, but it’s better than up north, I suppose.”
“Mackerel? How do you take it?”
“Round haul nets, mostly purse seines. Night fishing, we set out drift nets. A lot depends on the season. We pick up blue mackerel and jack mackerel. There’s still a good market, because it’s so much cheaper than meat. We bring in two tons a day and sometimes better than that at three to four cents a pound. I got two men in my crew and we work our asses off. I could use a third.”
“I’m not looking for charity,” Dan said.
“Shit. Your hands will be bleeding and your back broken the first day out, so don’t give me no crap about charity. I got respect for you, Dan, so I’m not feeding you any bullshit. I pay eight dollars a day when we fish. That’s what I pay my other hands, and that’s what I pay you. We go out for ten hours, sometimes more. The pay’s the same, ten hours, twelve hours, so I’m not giving you a damn thing I don’t sweat out of your ass. Jesus, Dan, you’re not the first guy’s been on his uppers. If you want a job, I got a job for you. Yes or no?”
“I’ll take it,” Dan said. “Hell, I’m not a bad fisherman.”
“You can say that again.”
Mark Levy mentioned the pains in his chest to Sarah, and she was so upset and so insistent that he see a doctor that he refrained from mentioning them again. His stomach had been giving him trouble, and he told himself that it was gas and no more. His plans for buying the bait and tackle shop had washed away. He couldn’t see himself standing behind a counter again. For all that he had constantly cautioned Dan through the years, he had played the game with him. It was a wonderful game while it lasted, with the big man storming in and out of the office, an overgrown, easygoing kid building an empire. Well, not precisely an empire; more like an enormous version of the Erector set he once bought for his grandchildren. Yet they had done it, and their ships sailed the seas and their planes flew through the skies when few enough people ever dreamed that ordinary people would travel across the skies as passengers in airplanes. They had built the biggest store west of the Continental Divide and they had built the biggest hotel in the Hawaiian Islands, and they had done it themselves.
And now Dan had gone, and there had not been a word from him since he had left. There was no one he could talk to about Dan, not even Sarah, nor could he put into words what he felt about him. They had been like brothers, but not even brothers had that easy, noninterfering closeness that had marked their relationship. Through the years he had sat in the office while Dan roamed the country and the world, but vicariously he had reached out and touched and felt everything Dan had touched and felt. Now he did nothing because nothing interested him particularly. He lived with memories. He would sit in the garden with his eyes closed, trying to recall his first meeting with Dan. Probably Dan was no more than six years old the first time his father, big Joe Lavette, had brought him into the chandler shop. Mark’s father was still alive then, and Mark remembered how they would talk about the old days when the railroads were being built and there was still gold to be dug out of the earth.
Or else, Mark would wander around the house, room to room, as if he were searching for something he had lost. Sarah watched him in silence, her heart going out to him, unable to help him, unable to bridge the gap that had opened so long ago.
She was not with him when he had the heart attack. She was in the house. He was outside, sitting in the garden, and she found him there, dead from what the doctor described afterward as a massive coronary. Sarah held herself together. She telephoned the doctor, and then she telephoned Jake at Higa
te. An hour later, Jake and Clair arrived at the house, and it was not until then that Sarah went into the kitchen and sat down and wept.
A few hours later, having pulled herself together, Sarah said to Jake, “I want you to find Danny. I want him to know about this. I don’t want Papa buried without Dan here, and I don’t want anyone else to talk about him at the funeral.”
But there was no trace of Dan, no lead, no direction. As far as the Levys were concerned, he had disappeared from the face of the earth. No one of them had any idea where he had gone or in what direction or how far. Sarah told Jake to try to reach May Ling, who was living somewhere in Los Angeles, but no one of them knew that she had taken the name of Lavette, and there was no Feng Wo listed by the telephone company in Los Angeles.
Six weeks after Dan went to work for Pete Lomas, working six days a week, with the mackerel running heavy and kissing the nets, as they put it, Lomas had to put his boat into dry dock and have the bottom scraped. Dan had three days off. The six weeks had changed him. Lean already after the time in prison, his muscles had hardened and his hands had toughened. He was burned brown by the sun, and he felt better than he had in years.
This day, the day the boat went into dry dock, he shaved carefully, put on a pair of cotton twill trousers that he had bought the same morning and a white shirt and a sweater, and took the interurban to Los Angeles. He divested himself of expectations and tried to will himself to anticipate nothing; but it was not easy. He was unable to control his excitement, yet in all truth he had no notion of what awaited him. It was more than three years since he had seen May Ling. The boy, his son, would be fourteen years old. How do you approach a boy of fourteen and tell him that you are his father? “I am your father who let you down and threw you away.” How is it done? What does the boy say? What does he feel?
