And our Joe became a personality boy with a big, toothy smile and all the box scores at his finger tips. I studied them. I could tell anybody in any saloon I called what M—H—batted last year in the Texas League, and why so and so blew up in that tough inning against the Yanks. What chance Louis had against Blah-blah. I tried to find out what each of my accounts or potential accounts was most interested in, and I carefully avoided politics. As O’Rourke had it:
“There’s still a few Republicans around and you can’t ever be sure...”
Simpson gave me a territory, the near north side, as soon as he felt I could handle it, and he seemed very interested in how I was making out. O’Rourke gave me the low-down on Simpson one night when we were drinking.
“That guy’s no sales manager...he’d starve to death if he had to make a living on what he knows. He just married the job—married MacDougall’s daughter. MacDougall used to be Gimbel’s partner, and he left half the brewery to Simpson’s wife.” I immediately made a mental note not to wear the new gray flannel suit I’d ordered to the office. I’d ordered it from Simpson’s tailor so I’d look like what I thought a sales manager should look like.
O’Rourke had pretty definite opinions about the whole bunch, but he had nothing but respect for old man Gimbel. According to O’Rourke there was something pretty phony about Simpson, but I put this down to a natural beef O’Rourke would have because he felt he should be sales manager.
You finally did get the job, O’Rourke, after Simpson blew his top and tried to jump out of the window of his wife’s penthouse. Poor bastard, he couldn’t even do that successfully. All he did was break his leg on a terrace two floors below, and now he’s somewhere with his crazy dreams still torturing him. Do you remember, Joe, the way he’d drop his hand from the gear shift and emphasize a point in his conversation by squeezing your thigh? Poor, bewildered bugger, filled with dreams he couldn’t explain and desires he hadn’t the guts to face. And somewhere he’s still being abused by that cold bitch of a wife, still living on her money and still unable to answer her laughing taunts at his ridiculous attempts at manhood; and even when he tried to show her, to show the world—all he could do was break his leg. But he helped you, Joe, even if he was as queer as a three-dollar bill and didn’t know it.
Simpson’s wife came into the office one day and I was introduced to her. A tall, cold woman in the most expensive-looking fur coat I’ve ever seen. When Simpson introduced me he said:
“This is young Mack whom I’ve spoken about, my dear...”
“How do you do, Mr. Mack.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Simpson...”
She looked me up and down from head to toe as though I were for sale and said, “You must come to us for dinner one night, Mr. Mack.”
“Thank you, I would like to very much.”
She looked at me again in that maybe-I’ll-buy-maybe-I-won’t way and said, “You are quite a big boy, aren’t you?”
“It’s from reaching things off high shelves.”
She smiled and they left.
I really thought she wanted our Joe’s pink-and-white body, because she looked it over so carefully. She looked you over, Joe, because she wanted a good, healthy stud for her sister, and she was prepared to buy you if you’d fill the bill, just as she’d buy a new jumper to sweeten the line at the farm. Some MacDougall had to have a child, and Clare Simpson couldn’t waste the time. It would have been a bother, Clare, having to go out and get some comparative stranger to sire it; God knows one good lay and a cup of black coffee would kill your Johnny. Yes, Clare, and you could have mixed those two fine Scotch strains if a little German girl named Kramer hadn’t messed it up, but I’m satisfied not to have brought a child into the direct exposure of your loving interest.
Clare Simpson’s sister, Mary MacDougall, was tall like Clare, but Mary was sweet. She hadn’t Clare’s positive manner nor cold brilliance. She had, though, a damned sweet way and a great desire to be free of Clare. I didn’t like her at first, for there was so little to like. She didn’t say three words for two hours, and she wasn’t pretty enough to sit and be looked at. When we talked alone I found many things to like and many things to feel very sorry for.
It might have worked, Mary, because I know you would have been far happier with me than Clare ever permitted you to be, in her loving care. I didn’t love you, Mary, and you didn’t love me, but it might have worked because you were a kid and it almost had you beaten. I wasn’t much then, Mary, and I haven’t changed any, but I could have supplied something you needed, and not just a healthy body with which to he; and it wasn’t the MacDougall dough, Mary, although that may have been what started it. I hope you found a guy who felt sorry about you and not just sorry you were going to be spending all that money alone. Someone not too afraid of Clare. One Simpson is enough in any family.
Dinner at Simpson’s was pretty impressive. Flunkies at the door to meet me. Hovering about in the knee-deep rugs with cocktails, and parked behind me at the table. You should have seen your boy, Mrs. Mack. He was really with the toffs! Mary acknowledged the introduction and then, other than answering remarks addressed to her, said nothing. I wondered if maybe Mary was just a mite nuts. Simpson tried to talk about the brewery, but Clare merely turned it off with:
“Please, John, no more brewery.”
It’s a damned good thing you had the brewery, Clare, or you might have had to wiggle that selfish ass of yours a little in this world. After dinner Mary and I were brushed off to a show, with the chauffeur in a Cadillac a block long. At the theatre entrance Mary sent the chauffeur home and asked if we might go to some quiet place and drink beer instead.
“You are a nice boy, Joe, and it’s nice of you to spend an evening with me.”
“That’s a funny thing to say. Why the hell wouldn’t I want to spend an evening with you?”
“Don’t you see, Joe, Clare’s looking for a husband for me. A big, healthy boy like you, and it doesn’t matter whether I want you or you want me, just so long as you suit Clare. I thought I’d tell you and then you needn’t come back again.”
“But what if I’d like to come back again?”
Yes, Joe, it was quite an evening. You were a cocky bugger...you figured Clare wanted that frame of yours to play with; and Clare wanted to mix a couple of good Scotch lines and breed a husky brewery proprietor. That’s what bodies are for, eh Clare? Either breeding or playing. Not loving. What does it matter if a sweet, awkward girl cries a little in her pillow when she thinks of having had to tell a stranger that her sister wanted to use her for breeding. What does a fool like Simpson matter other than to amuse yourself by seeing if he really would jump out of the window. What does Joe Mack matter if he can be taken to service your sister and line her with a good strong baby.
The scramble with Nora over the Simpsons started neck-and-neck with my first invitation. The first night she raised hell and kept it up until our Joe had to do one thing or the other. I was afraid the Simpsons would learn of my setup and the budding friendship with Mary would be knocked on the head. I liked Nora a lot and hated to leave, and I tried to do it on an amicable basis, but no dice. Nora tore the joint up.
“Tell me what the hell it’s all about, Joe? What’s she got that I haven’t got except all that dough? Haven’t I bin good to you? Christ awmighty, Joe, no guy’s touched me since we started. Don’t I wash your shirts, cook your meals, an’ still slug it out at Field’s ten hours a day? What the hell d’yuh want...Oh, Joe...”
And she broke and cried like a baby. I took her in my arms and she kept her head buried in my shoulder. I could feel the unending motion of the gum as she sobbed.
“Honey, it’s been swell...damn’ swell, and there isn’t anyone really but you, but it’d cost me my job if Simpson found out how I’m living. We’ll see a lot of each other...” She jumped away from me, hotter than a two-dollar pistol.
“The hell we will...you mean I’ll see you whenever you ain’t seeing that MacDougall broad
. Up yer keister with that guff, Joe—you’ll see me from here out or by Christ, you’ll see no one, and keep it in mind.”
The tears were gone as if they hadn’t been. She was white-hot and damned sure of herself, and I knew what she meant. ,
You were good to me, Nora, find maybe I asked for what happened, but I never could have married you, and sending me back to Canada didn’t help a hell of a lot, did it? Who were you getting at, Nora? Joe, or Mary MacDougall, or just that funny little thing in your mind-sticking you, scratching you, prodding you to the phone. I can see you lifting the receiver off the hook and dialing the number.
“United States Immigration Department...a Canadian named Joe Mack is living at the Broadhurst Hotel on Elm Street...” and you hung up.
That was enough, Nora-girl—that did it. And you could go on to the next pair of shoulders and a tall, awkward girl could cry into her pillow because she had lost again just when she thought she was starting to win.
I’d been away from Nora a week when she phoned me at the Broadhurst.
“Joe?” ‘
“Hello, Nora...”
“Joe...yuh gotta come home, I’m going nuts...
“I can’t, Nora...
“Yuh better, Joe, or I’m gonna turn you in. Yuh got till tomarra night.”
And that was all.
Mary and I sat on the back road in her coupe. I knew I was saying good-by. She liked me a lot and she trusted me. Her head was on my shoulder and I hated to tell her.
“Mary, I’m going home. Back to Canada. You didn’t know I was born in Canada. I’m here illegally and I expect they’ll send me back. There’s something I’d like you to know, though. It isn’t my job, and it isn’t your dough, and it certainly isn’t Clare or John. I like you, Mary, and other guys will, too, if you give them a chance...”
Home is the sailor, Mr. Stevenson, home from the sea, and the hunter is home from Chicago. Stretching across in front of our Joe was the bridge at Cataract City. At the other end was Canada, and behind me were Jake and Sarah, and Mary; Nora and Simpson, and Clare. And in a lonely hole a guy with nice teeth is lying.
The smells are here and they seem to vary with my thoughts. Mary is sweet and woody, Nora is raw and warm, Simpson is oily, and Clare is sick-sweet like the rotting civilization she represents; like the meat falling off the sides of a dead horse in great, putrid blobs. Maggoty blobs, that once were the muscles. Yes, God, it’s sweet, sick-sweet, but it doesn’t fool Joe, God, because you know and I know it’s rotten.
CHAPTER 5
You keep changing it, God, you’ve sent the sweetness back. Back to wherever you found it. Back to the rotting horse, or the Canadian boy with the foolish look, or maybe even back to Clare. It’s gone, and in its place is a cool, green smell. As if the air carrying it had touched nothing but millions of acres of snow and fir trees. Places that look like evergreen smells. Cool and clean like new things, living green things like trees and leaves on trees. Like the forests that must have lived even here once. Nothing much living here now, eh, Joe? Nothing but a few dirty men, some whores, and some stinking kids with their little bellies stuck out from starvation; crawling things waiting to die. There’re a few soldiers on either side waiting, too. Yes, Joe, only the smells have a future.
After they’re dead, after the human oils have dried and just the dust remains...then, God, the smells will actually be green and cool, but until then it’s a fake, God, and a smart one. It’s a damned good trick to be able to pull a cool, green smell out of this place.
I can remember another place in another November where a guy could be fooled by the way it looked and the way it smelled. And it did have millions of acres of snow and stunted firs. That was Northern Ontario, and if you didn’t look underneath, it was as pretty a sight as a guy could see. It smelled green and cool, too, but down in the ground, down under thousands of feet of rock, men were burrowing like worms—not sensibly like worms, for food or safety but, for reasons none could explain, they dug dangerously in search of a useless yellowish metal. They dug long shafts vertically, then dug long shafts horizontally, and with unbelievable effort they brought hundreds of tons of this rock to the surface. They crushed it to powder with great, steel jaws and then floated the powder in a cyanide solution, and little beads of gold came free. If they were very lucky, sometimes half an ounce of gold came from one full ton of ore! But the burrowing men didn’t always get back to the surface; sometimes the heavy timbers in their silly shafts grew tired and quit, or the earth, angered at having its guts torn loose, decided to close their silly openings as you’d close an ant hole with your toe. Yes, God, it looks cool and green, far more than it does here, but it isn’t really, it’s a fake, too. Where did you find a cool, green smell in Italy, God?
Long vertical shafts, dropping almost a mile with an oily sump at the bottom. And Freddie Miller dropping those long feet, crushed and bleeding and very dead, to lie in that oily swill for three weeks. I don’t suppose it makes you feel any better to know Moreland got it too, does it, Freddie? Does it make it better to know you avoided wasting these years I’m wasting? All you know is you had to leave Fern, and Christ! what a way to go.
Yes, Freddie, Moreland got it, too, only it wasn’t an accident and he had no life net under him either. All his dough merely got his head broken for him and no one cared very much. Sure, they cared about his two hundred million enough to try to hang a murder rap on some jerk, but they couldn’t make it stick. No, I don’t think that jerk did it, he doesn’t look as though he could punch his way out of a paper bag. But it’s nice to know that Moreland got it, isn’t it, Freddie-boy? And the cheap son-of-a-bitch that wouldn’t put life nets under the scaffolding in the shaft, wouldn’t spend the dough for a bodyguard either, and so he got his head cracked open. He took a powder out of Canada to beat the income tax, and took all that dough he’d dug out of Canada with him. Yes, Freddie, took every last damned cent down to one of those fishy-smelling islands and built a great big ranch. But he should have built a wall around it, Freddie, because somebody got in. Sleep well, Freddie, it might have seemed like a tough break but you’re luckier than you know.
It’s still green and cool like Moreland Lake in November of ‘36. That sprawling bastard of a town...Moreland wouldn’t let them incorporate it because he might be stuck for more taxes. Just a sprawling wooden mess of shacks that one half-assed fire could clean out, huddling around the mine shaft-head like mongrel pups sucking at the paps of a half-starved bitch. Huddling for warmth for six freezing months and swatting black flies for six more.
And three times a day two thousand men crawled out of those hovels and were dropped thousands of feet so an arrogant fool could have more and more millions to take out of Canada. If you didn’t like it, Joe-boy, why did you go there? Why? It was one of the few places in Canada where a guy might get a job. No, you couldn’t live there unless you were lucky enough to know people like Fern and Freddie, but you could exist. You could eat and sleep and for eight hours a day expose yourself to sudden death. I can do that here, right here in Italy, lucky me! And all so that I can go back to crawling up those drifts, poking at chunks of loose rock to see if they’re likely to come crashing down on me, setting my machine up in the stopes and drilling off, putting in my powder charge and lighting the fuses, and then hauling my machine out of there like a bat out of hell. But that was a lot later. Yes, half a year later.
It was three freezing months before I even got hired by the Moreland Consolidated, and those months I cut and hauled wood in the bush with a bush-whacky hunky. They go “bushed” when they stay up in that country too long. The hunky had carried on a conversation with his wife for years, and it didn’t matter that she was still in the Ukraine, he went right on talking to her. After a few days I wouldn’t have flickered an eyelash if she’d answered him. We cut cords of that stunted fir to stove length, and hauled it into town on a two-horse sleigh. The hunky paid me $3.50 a day and paid me off each night in case he didn’t need me t
he next day.
I met Fern and Freddie Miller by answering an ad in the Nugget for a boarder. Yes, Joe-boy, do you remember how she looked when she answered the door of the little bungalow. She looked like a doll in a doll’s house and you felt you should duck your head because the ceilings seemed too low for a big man. You asked her if her mother were at home, and she laughed and said she was the lady of the house, and were you answering the ad, and which mine did you work at? The funny, round face and those huge eyes. How Freddie came out of the kitchen just then and he looked like a doll, too? Suddenly you all grinned and our Joe had a home. We got a case of ale because it was Saturday, and they had a girl in for me, and by Sunday I felt as I used to feel at Jake’s and Sarah’s, and within a week it was as if I’d never lived anywhere else.
The house was so damned tiny that to live in it at all meant we had to like each other a lot, or someone would have to get out. We liked each other. They were terribly in love, Fern and Freddie, too much in love, because it gets in too deep when it’s like that and it leaves too big a hole when it has to be torn out. Freddie, like most small men, was as cocky as a bantamweight; he was built like a steel wedge and just as tough, and had more energy than any ten men I’ve ever known. He worked eight hours a shift and sometimes overtime, rotating the shifts every three weeks; and in the remaining hours he found time to practice on the accordion, go skating or skiing, study accounting, and keep the outside of the house shining. He dreamed of the time when Moreland Consolidated would recognize in him the natural executive ability he was so damned sure he had, and he would no longer have to work underground.
“It’ll be a cinch for me, Joe, ‘cause I’m not afraid of responsibility. That’s what makes an executive, you know...just the ability to make decisions and stick to ‘em. I won’t be one of these stuffed shirts, no sir-ee, I’ll be able to put the overalls on and crawl right in with the boys...”
The Long November Page 6
