Clarkton

by Howard Fast

  “Nothing of the kind,” Ryan answered, “The sidewalk’s broad, and it’s still free.”

  “You don’t like me, do you, Ryan?” the priest chuckled.

  “It ain’t a question of like or dislike. You’re on one side.

  I’m on the other. That’s all.”

  “I’m on God’s side, Ryan,” Father O’Malley said.

  “Well, you got to produce His mutual assistance pact before you declare Him in,” Ryan laughed.

  “You don’t believe in God, do you, Ryan?”

  “When you put it in my hand and I see it, then I believe in it,” Ryan grinned, noticing how many people they met along the street nodded and gave the best of the morning to the priest.

  “The difference is that I like you, Ryan. I wouldn’t if you believed only in what I could put in your hand.”

  “That’s the way it is.”

  “When you call a man comrade,” the priest said casually, “what do you believe in then?”

  “Socialism.”

  “Without the brotherhood of man, Ryan? By God, then it’s not worth much the way I see it.”

  “Sure you see it your way—you’re a good man for your organization, Father, but I don’t fall for the did-you-stop-beating-your-wife line. You had a monopoly, so as to speak, of the brotherhood of man these past couple of thousand years, and what in hell’s name did you make of it! Fifty million dead in the past ten years—if that’s brotherhood, keep it!”

  “You really broke with the church, didn’t you, Ryan?” the priest said, unperturbed. “When an Irishman breaks, he breaks. But how long can you live with even the specter of damnation eternal?”

  “I get along.”

  “Sure you do. That’s what I want to put my finger on. You say you don’t believe in God. You say you don’t believe in the brotherhood of man. You say you don’t believe in salvation through Jesus Christ. Yet you’re willing to die for what you believe in.”

  “I’d rather live for it.”

  “What do you believe in?”

  “If that’s a straight question,” Ryan said, looking up at the priest, “I’ll try a straight answer.”

  “It’s a straight question.”

  “Okay—I believe in a time when man will stop exploiting his fellow man. That sums it up. If you want a book to read about it, I can give you one.”

  “I read a little Marxism, Ryan—not a lot. It’s pretty tough reading, if you ask me. But I read some. You want me to accept the fact that all evil on earth comes because one man gives a job to another. I can’t accept that.”

  “You make it awful damned simple,” Ryan said.

  “So do you,” the priest smiled. “But when I look at the Soviet Union, it isn’t simple, is it? It’s mighty complicated, it seems to me. And you still haven’t told me what you believe in that makes you willing to die for it.”

  “It takes a lot of telling,” Ryan sighed.

  “I have time.”

  “I haven’t—not now.”

  “Whenever you have, Ryan, let’s sit down and talk about it. I’ve grappled with bad men and won, so it seems to me I ought to have a fighting chance with a good one.”

  “What makes you think I’m a good one?” Ryan grinned.

  “The fact that you’re willing to die for what you believe in.”

  “That’s a presumption, Father. And suppose I was—so were the Nazis and they did.”

  “They never deluded themselves with the notion that they were making a better world. It was a black day for the church when they came into power.”

  “I never noticed the church making any show of stopping them.”

  “It’s not the duty of the church, Ryan, to take sides with one part of her flock against the other. You never heard me preach a sermon in support of Lowell.”

  “No—and did you preach one in support of the strike? Did you ever tell your flock how to raise five kids healthy on beans three times a day?”

  “No, I don’t know that I did,” Father O’Malley said good-naturedly.

  “It’s a funny thing,” Ryan told him, “but whenever we get to talking, Father, it gets up in the sky. I don’t live there. You want to talk about this earth and these United States—hell, I’ll be glad to. We’ll talk about the Negroes they’re lynching, the fact that a million vets got no place to live, the twenty-three miners who were killed in the last explosion, and the Greeks who are being murdered because they like freedom. There’s a hell of a lot for us to talk about.”

  “There is that,” Father O’Malley said.

  Afterward, when they came to the edge of the meadow, Joey Raye said to Ryan, “That’s one smart priest, and don’t you kid yourself, Danny. You ain’t going to sell him no bill of goods.”

  “He won’t sell me none either,” Ryan laughed.

  7.One of the maintenance men brought word to Gelb that Danny Ryan and Joey Raye had arrived at the Birch Street gate, and Gelb, who was in the little office he had been given, turned to Wilson and Norman and said:

  “All right, let’s go and throw it at them.”

  “How about the others?” Wilson asked.

  “Ryan and the nigger are enough.” He said to Norman,

  “Take their warrants and take a dozen John Does. Let Curzon’s men handle it, Frank. You stand back and watch and learn. Jack Curzon is no fool, and he learned under the best.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Norman nodded, wishing that he could slip back to Wilson’s office and tell Fern that this was the moment and make sure she would be watching.

  As they got into the little self-service elevator, Gelb said to the boy, “This is a point to remember, Frank. To go down there and arrest the two reds wouldn’t mean a damn thing. Nothing they’d want better and nothing that would be less effective from our point of view. At the same time, it would be worse to have to use the John Does and pull in the whole picket line. This thing hasn’t reached either the stage or the psychological moment, for mass arrests.”

  Norman shook his head. “I thought that was the point of the warrants—” The elevator came to a stop, and they got out.

  “Yes and no. I want to work on Ryan a little; I want to work on that nigger a little. But the main thing is to break that line in front of the gates. Not by force—that would be easy enough, but by putting them in a situation where picketing itself poses a legal problem. An injunction is another way of doing the same thing, but this isn’t the kind of a situation; anywhere in the country, where you want to throw an injunction at them. Remember, Frank, the hardest thing in the world, for any human being, is to make a decision—especially when they haven’t made this kind of decision in a long time.”

  At the entrance of the building, two of Curzon’s men were waiting, along with four of the armed maintenance men. Gelb handed the warrants to the officers, spoke a few words to them, and then the whole party started toward the gate. Gelb, Wilson, and Norman dropped behind, Gelb saying to the boy:

  “Put them in a position where they must make a decision. It’s human nature not to, not to want to. You would be surprised, if you only thought about it, how much of our society is based on that fact, the inability of the average man to make any kind of decision.”

  8.Danny Ryan was talking to Maurice Renoir, the picket captain, and Joey Raye was helping two of the girls to stoke a salamander, joshing them in his soft, easygoing way, when they noticed the approach of the little party from the plant. There was something in the even, determined manner of their walk that had its effect on everyone at the gate. The picket line stopped, and from an organized group they became a cluster of apprehensive and wary men and women. Their hearts beat faster; the chill of the winter day crept into them; the quick, formless threat of law drove them back on their heels and left them empty-handed.

  Ryan started the picket line again. He said to Renoir, “Let me do the talking, Murray.” He kidded the girls and said, “Here comes the SS. Give them the arm.” “We’ll belch in unison,” someone said, and the tension wa
s broken. Renoir began to sing, in his high voice, with a strange French accent, “There once was a union maid, who never was afraid.…” It was forced laughter, but they were able to laugh. Joey Raye whispered to Ryan:

  “That’s Ham Gelb, there in back. The joker in the sharp gray suit—with the mustache.”

  “Joey, you don’t lose your temper,” Ryan said. “You keep your mouth shut.”

  “He had Sam Brodsky shot through the head in Allentown in ’thirty-seven. He brought his torpedoes in from New York, and one of them just walked up to Sam and asked him his name and then shot him. And Sam was like a brother to me when I was just a big, ignorant black bastard and a cropper—”

  “You shut up,” Ryan said quickly. “You open that big mouth of yours, and sure as hell I’ll kick the living daylights out of you. You just keep that big mouth shut!”

  The officers came through the gate, leaving Norman and Gelb and Wilson inside. One of the city men walked toward the picket line, prodding with his nightstick and telling them to call it a day. Three of the maintenance men followed him, grouped close behind him, backing him. The other officer demanded:

  “Which one of you is Ryan?”

  Ryan knew the officer who was shouldering the picket line. His name was Fanway, a big blond man who had come in from the outside with Curzon, and Ryan said to him, easily:

  “Let’s talk about this, Fanway. We don’t want no trouble. You don’t want no trouble.”

  The maintenance men had shouldered their way in now, and the picket line had stopped once again, the workers clumping up uncertainly. Renoir, who had a fiery temper, kept his hands in his pockets and watched Ryan. The girls were frightened, admittedly; the men were also frightened and tried not to show it.

  “Are you Ryan?” the second officer demanded.

  “That’s right. What is this? We’re in our rights.”

  “You’re in company property too,” Fanway said. “Company property starts out there on Birch Street, and you’re just about four hundred yards outside the law. In other words, you’re going to break up this picket line and pull it back there to the city streets.”

  “That’s a laugh,” Ryan said. “That’s a laugh if I ever heard one.”

  “You got a big mouth, Ryan,” the other officer told him. “You got one hell of a big mouth.”

  “Sure I have, and I’m going to shoot it off. What kind of crap are you trying to pull on us? These are the plant gates—they been the plant gates for twenty-five years. That’s enough for common law, isn’t it? There’s nobody used those lots out there except the cows, and the public road comes in.”

  “It’s a company road,” Fanway said. “You don’t want no trouble, Ryan—all right. We don’t want none either. We got warrants for you and for Raye over there for trespass, and if you’re going to force our hand, we got John Does for the whole goddam lot of you. Now are you going to get that line out of here peaceful and back it up to the street, or do we have to run the whole lot of you in?”

  Ryan could hear Raye breathing, short and hot. “Let’s see the warrants,” he said.

  “Here they are, clean and legal and neat.”

  Raye said, “I told you, Danny. I know that sonovabitch from way back.”

  “I don’t like that kind of talk,” Fanway said.

  “How come you got warrants for Raye and me?” Ryan wanted to know.

  “I don’t write the warrants,” Fanway sighed. “What about it, Ryan?”

  Ryan nodded and turned slowly to Renoir. “Take them back to the street, Murray. Pull the other lines back too. Then get the story over to Noska and Max Goldstein. Tell Max to fix bail. We don’t want to sleep in that dirty, lousy can of theirs.”

  9.It was too late to meet Wilson at the office, so Lowell went to the police station, and he arrived there only a few minutes after Ryan and Joey Raye were taken in. Lowell was not drunk; he did not get drunk easily; but two drinks on an empty stomach had taken the edge off his thoughts. A fairly mellow fuzz had tempered the mental agony that accompanied him from Abbott’s office; and the jigsaw nature of the future had resolved itself into a piece. Things always had worked out, and this would too. In Lois’ lap he threw the responsibility of leaving him or not, and it seemed to him that it did not make a great deal of difference which course she took; for, the way he felt now, he could trace an end to the real importance of things to the time of Clark’s death. He liked that thought. Perhaps he would go off to Europe with Fern—he could find a business reason for a passport—once this miserable interruption of the strike was done; the thought of traveling with a pretty young girl like Fern—so young himself—and people seeing them together, watching them together, was a most pleasant thought, and he thought nostalgically of a young person’s discovery of Paris, the adventures Europe offered anyone who had a little money and enthusiasm, the abstract culture of things long dead and broken, and the way he might communicate that to Fern—almost to a point where he could substitute her for Clark.

  Along with this, there was a determination to see the strike through and see it through quickly, wash his hands of it. The more he despised Wilson as an insufferable ass, the less eager he was to remove himself to the tune of Wilson’s admiring condescension.

  He walked into the police station, and the officer at the desk said, “Yes, Mr. Lowell—they’re inside in Captain Curzon’s office. They’re waiting for you.”

  Nodding, he followed the officer. He was a sick man, but he didn’t feel sick; he was a man bereft, and yet he didn’t feel bereft. It gave him a sense of excitement to know that in the absolute, he controlled this business, and Hamilton Gelb, Tom Wilson, Young Frank Norman, and Jack Curzon all would do his wishes, if he only formulated his wishes definitely enough. Power was not something he had ever sought for, and when he read about people whose life pattern was determined by a quest for power, or met such people, he reacted as he always had to his father, with a mixture of awe, disgust, and contempt. The extreme of it, the Adolf Hitler, was an insane and vulgar little man, and that varied in degrees all the way down the scale. He had never had any desire for power, just as he had never been conscious of a desire for money—but he was conscious of power how, more and more conscious, and the taste was not unpleasant. It was microcosmic; it was not his doing, as he thought; it was a little world in a corner of Massachusetts: but the taste was not unpleasant. He became George Clark Lowell more precisely. He was George Clark Lowell walking into Curzon’s dusty, shabby office, where four men who worked for him sat and waited, and after they shook hands with him, they explained to him what they had done.

  He sat down. “You can’t hold them on a trespass charge,” he said.

  “A few hours,” Gelb said. “All we need is a few hours.”

  Wilson, less certain than Gelb, thought about Goldstein. “That Jew,” he decided, “will begin to raise hell.”

  Gelb ignored Wilson and said to Lowell, “I don’t like to draw things out. If you want an endurance contest, you don’t need me.”

  “I don’t want an endurance contest. If you think you could wind it up, how long would that be?”

  “Most of it today—and the rest tomorrow.”

  Curzon said anxiously, “I just want your assurances that you’ll be behind me, Mr. Lowell.”

  “Whatever Mr. Gelb does—”

  “Could you stay?” Gelb asked Lowell. “Jack is becoming fat and old.” He had the faculty for saying insulting things without actually being insulting, and he could frame a request in the type of insinuation that is almost impossible to refuse. Lowell wanted to refuse, but he found himself agreeing. They all walked out of the office and went up the grooved wooden stairs to the second floor. Curzon opened the door to a room in the back of the building, standing aside for them to go in. As they entered, Lowell could not help reflecting on the cheapness of the whole thing, made out of the thin tissue of a Hollywood film—or perhaps this reality was the pattern that Hollywood used—Ryan sitting on a wooden chair under a str
ong electric light with one of Curzon’s men on each side of him. To Lowell, it was real and foolish at the same time, and he found it difficult to associate Gelb, a man whom he had come to respect highly and even to like, with this sort of thing. He stood well back in the shadow, ashamed and uncomfortable, looking at Ryan, a small, ordinary, work-worn man of no particular age—and asking himself whether he wouldn’t have to stop it now, be forced to stop it, since it was an affront to every sensibility and every parcel of good taste he owned.

  He wondered whether it had been like this for Clark, coming into a battle, and whether a battle was as shabby. Like Elliott Abbott, the little man in the wooden kitchen chàir was his archetype enemy, the bearded, bomb-carrying subject matter of ten thousand cartoons stretching back to his earliest childhood, but for the life of him he could not associate the charade with the actuality.

  Yet he didn’t stop it.

  It began with Gelb, who stood a little in front of Lowell. Wilson and Norman stepped over to one side, and the shadows swallowed them. Curzon placed himself at the edge of the circle of light, snapping Ryan’s head up with the back of his hand as Gelb spoke. To Lowell, the change that came over Curzon was extraordinary; the flabbiness of the man disappeared; his whole nature seemed to undergo a transformation, just as a surgeon, ordinary and run-of-the-mill in everyday life, becomes an artist in an operating room.

  “Hello, Ryan,” Gelb said casually. “I been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “You don’t want the dinge too?” Curzon smiled.

  “I just want Ryan. Ryan’s my boy.”

  “Not the dinge?”

  “Just Ryan—just Danny Ryan. He’s my boy. I like Ryan. I respect him. All I hear in Clarkton is Danny Ryan; he’s a big man in Clarkton.”

  “You’re Gelb,” Ryan said, smiling very thinly. “I like to see who I’m talking to.”