“It smells like George Reimer’s barn,” Henry said. “Hey, wait. Maybe it’s just me you smell.”
Paul froze, and I stared.
Henry busted out laughing. “Hell, I can’t even make a joke about me? Gawd, you guys are the worst schoolmarms I’ve ever seen!”
Paul and I laughed, but it sounded like raw nerves.
I flopped into the one chair and got butt-stuck by a spring. “Food” was all I could manage to say.
Paul was the only one with money. Henry and I waited.
“Should we walk somewhere?” Paul said. “Drive? Does either of you know someplace to go?”
My eyes were already half shut. “I’m starved to death and still don’t want to move. Just find some food and stuff it in my mouth, okay?”
They were likely as beat as me, but I didn’t have enough energy to feel bad about it.
Henry finally said, “Gimme a dollar, Paul. I’ll find somethin’ and bring it back here.” Paul hesitated just long enough for Henry to add, “Okay, you go. I don’t care,” before he flopped onto the bed.
“No, I just—” Paul was doing that finger rubbing I’d seen before.
“You just don’t trust me.” Henry let out a ragged breath. “Well, I won’t take the Model T. The crank’s right here.” He threw it near my feet.
I was too tired even to jump.
“And I ain’t gonna take your dollar and go whoopin’ it up. And I’m too tired to argue.” That trip up the hotel stairs seemed to have taken the last energy any of us had. “I hope I don’t get any farther than the old biddy behind the desk downstairs. Surely she’s got some bread and meat back in the kitchen.”
I guess he left. I had dozed off when I heard, “John? John?” and realized it wasn’t Mary Albrecht.
“Huh?” I rubbed my eyes.
Paul was sitting on the bed holding out the newspaper I’d bought that morning. “Would you, please?”
“Aw, hell,” I said before I could stop myself.
“Oh. Well, if it’s too much trouble . . .”
Yeah, yeah, Paul. I’m traveling in your car. I’m eating on your nickel, at least for now. Hand me the goddamned paper. “How ’bout headlines?” is what I said out loud. “You interested, you tell me.”
“That’s what I always have Sam do, every day.” Even with his citified English, he’d never sounded prissy to me before, but now I wanted to smack him upside the head. Amazing what bone-tired will do to a person.
“Okay.” I took the paper. “Mrs. James Carroll is home after surgery at Liberty Hospital. Harold Weames had a boar hog stolen night before last. Farmers’ Almanac predicts a rainy July.”
“No, no, no.” Paul’s hands erased an invisible blackboard. “News from Washington, DC. New York. California. Anything on Jim Jeffries or Jack Johnson?”
“Who? Oh, those fighters they said ain’t gonna fight?”
“Never mind.” Paul laid back on the bed and threw an arm across his eyes. Downright girly.
“It’s the Lexington paper, Paul. Give ’em a break. We’ll get a Kansas City Star tomorrow.”
And I hope I’m not as tired after a day at the stockyards as I am after driving your two sorry asses around and playing referee.
In the morning, we told Paul the address of the Ben Bolt and put him on a trolley headed for downtown. I felt anxious, but Henry was like the parent who kicks his kid out the door first day of school.
“Be sure and write!” he yelled. Streaks of green already showed through the purple on his bruises. Like a mallard drake and just about as loud.
We walked over to the stockyards and wandered around looking for the office. A bald fat man wearing a visor looked up from his desk and eyed us over his glasses. “What?”
“We’re looking for work,” I told him.
He landed on Henry. “What happened to you?”
“I ran into a door.”
“Uh-huh.” He sized us up some more. “Go to the first building south of here and find Jim Miller. He runs the works. We lost so many men last payday you may be in luck.” He went back to his paperwork.
When we got to him, Jim Miller was curious about Henry too. “What happened to you?”
“I ran into a fist.”
“Uh-huh.” He dropped his chin and eyed him until Henry looked away. He turned to me. “You ever worked cattle, son?”
“All my life, sir.”
Back to Henry. “You look like the sort that wouldn’t mind shootin’ dumb animals.”
“I’d shoot my own dog if I’s tired of it.”
“Well, that’s more’n I needed to know. But all right.” Miller lifted an eyebrow and pointed out a window so dirty it was close to useless. “Yonder over there’s the slaughterhouse. Go see Pete Willis.” He nodded at me. “You come on with me.”
And no more than fifteen minutes later, I was put to work. There were five of us to run cattle through the chutes, some straddling gates and prodding animals to cull and sort. I was down in the mud, shoulder to shoulder with the beasts. Before long, I knew which way they were going to cut before they did. It was way easier without Dad yelling at me nonstop. Jim Miller walked the grounds all morning, but twice I saw him stop and watch me awhile, nodding.
At noon, I went to the warehouse with the rest of them and sat at a picnic table in the near-empty room they used for a mess hall. There must have been fifty men tearing into their dinner pails all at once.
The fellow next to me, brown as a nut and skinny as leather stretched over bone, said, “How come you ain’t eatin’? Watchin’ your girlish figure?” and he elbowed me right where I’d just got kicked by an ornery steer.
I winced and mumbled something about leaving my lunch pail at home. He tore his sandwich in half and handed one part to me.
I shook my head. “Naw, I can’t do that. It’s okay—I’ll eat plenty tonight.”
He set the food on the table in front of me. “Eat it. Your sorry ass keels over this afternoon, they’ll process your carcass, and my luck you’ll end up on my dinner table.”
I nodded my thanks.
We worked seven to seven. When the bell clanged at quitting time, I was tired but happy. I’d been told I was a good worker for the first time in my life and half a dozen times more.
I caught up with Henry at the stockyard gate. His shoes were spattered with blood to go with his fright mask of a face, and nobody walked too close to him even in the rush to leave. He ran his mouth all the way to the Ben Bolt.
“Blam!” he said. “Twenty-two rifle shot right between the eyes! Blam! And they drop.”
The knot on my head from the pistol-whipping in Lexington throbbed in the sunshine. “Is that all you did all day?”
“For the most part. Swished a little water around sometimes to keep the floor from gettin’ too sticky to walk on.”
I felt queasy around the edges.
“Only had to shoot one of ’em twice, and that was the fault of the damn fool holdin’ her. Blam! Blam! And for this they’re payin’ me a dollar and a half.”
“Sounds like you oughta be payin’ them.”
We were on our way up the stairs to our room.
“Man alive, I would, and that’s a natural fact.”
I opened the door.
We stopped at the sight of Paul, facedown on the bed. He offered a muffled hello into the pillow, which answered my first question: he was alive.
I sat down and studied the crust on my boots and thought, Well, at least the room doesn’t smell like feet anymore.
Henry didn’t look like he could sit down if he was paid to. “I’m goin’ down to the crapper,” he said, and we heard him “Blam! Blam!” his way down the hall.
“Bad day?” I took a wild guess.
His “No” surprised me. But then Paul rolled over, and his face was calling him a liar. “Not today anyway. Bad day comes tomorrow.”
I took off my boots and pulled out my pocketknife to scrape mud and manure onto yesterday’s newspaper. “
You’re gonna have to help me out there, Paul. I’m no good at seein’ tomorrow.”
“I made two dollars today.”
My knife stopped midair. “You what? Good God, man, that’s fantastic!”
He sat up on the edge of the bed. “I tuned every piano Stiller’s had on the showroom floor, and they paid me forty cents apiece.”
Tired was catching up to me again, and I snapped, “So what’s wrong with tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow they said I could go with the deliverymen and tune pianos in people’s houses. A dollar apiece.”
“God a’mighty, that’s great! What’s wrong with you?” I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him.
“I met the delivery team today. Two gorillas who make Henry seem like John D. Rockefeller at a dinner party.”
“Oh.” That was a picture. “Aren’t you maybe exaggerating?”
“You tell me.” Paul snorted. “Ape Number One told me, ‘Good luck finding your way back from our first stop.’ And Ape Two said, ‘Even if you do, you won’t make your way back from the second one. Not naked, you won’t.’”
Christ on a biscuit. “But, Paul, don’t they know you can get them fired? You know that, don’t you?”
“They said—Ape Number Two, that is, said, ‘Just in case you got some big ideas, piano wire is just perfect for shutting up tattletales.’”
I couldn’t get my mind around it. Henry offering to shoot his pet dog did sound refined by comparison. “I just can’t feature. Why?”
“It’s nothing I haven’t heard before,” Paul told me. Same as Henry talking about his dad. “There are thugs, and I met plenty in St. Louis, who think anybody . . . different should be drowned at birth like an unwanted cat. Or at least institutionalized, so that so-called normal people don’t have to be insulted by looking at them.”
“How does looking at you insult anybody?”
Paul let out some air. “It doesn’t, really. But it scares them.”
“You’re about the least scary fella I’ve ever known. No offense.”
“None taken.” Paul’s mouth pulled into a straight line that might have been a smile. “I guess seeing me reminds them of the hand they could have been dealt.”
Henry came busting through the door and took a look at each of us. “Somebody die?”
“No, it just smells that way.” I stood and lifted Paul’s elbow an inch. “Come on. Everything looks better over a full stomach.”
We passed a drugstore before we came to a restaurant we liked the looks of. I bummed two cents from Paul and ducked in to grab a newspaper.
Over food served on a table with a red-and-white-checkered cloth, I read headlines out loud. “The Wright Flyer exhibition team was at that new motor speedway in Indianapolis the other day.”
“That was almost a week ago,” Paul said.
Henry rolled his eyes.
“Well, here’s something about Jack Johnson. Wasn’t that one of them you were asking about?”
Paul sat up straighter. “Yes!”
“Well, he was scheduled to put on an exhibition with Kid Cotton in San Francisco today, for whatever that’s worth.”
“Hmm.” Paul found that worth consideration. He nodded. “Showing people that he really is training, likely.”
“That uppity nigger?” Henry said around a wad of potatoes. “I hope you’re askin’ ’cause you wanna see his ass handed to him bad as I do.”
Paul flinched. “Would you not . . . Could you use the word colored instead? Please? I know how Sam feels about . . . that.”
“Can’t call a spade a spade?” Henry thought that was so funny, he whacked the table hard enough for people to turn and look.
“Please.” Paul’s cheeks each sported a spot of red.
“Oh, okay, Mr. Schoolteacher,” Henry said. “You wanna see that uppity . . . colored handed his ass bad as I do?”
“One of you wanna fill me in on what you’re talkin’ about?” I asked.
“Where you been?” Henry said.
“Boxing.” They both spoke at once.
“Yeah, I know there’s a fight comin’ up—or not, depending on who you talk to. But what’s this . . . colored got to do with it?”
“You don’t know?” Henry looked astonished. “That’s Johnson. He’s a pretender to the championship.” He snorted. “Jim Jeffries is comin’ out of retirement just to show him what’s what. The Great White Hope. That colored never should’ve been fightin’ white men anyway, let alone the real heavyweight champion.”
“Why?” Paul asked.
Henry made a face at him and grinned at me. “Because the colored’s inferior—that’s why.”
I wondered where he’d picked up a two-dollar word like that.
“If he’s inferior, how did he beat any white men at all, let alone what you call the real champion?” Paul said.
Henry laid down his fork with a clatter. “All of ’em’s jes’ monkeys in clothes, is what I mean. White men shouldn’t have to fight ’em.”
“Hey, Henry,” I said. “How’d you come to know all about it?”
He mumbled something, and I cupped a hand behind my ear.
“They was talkin’ about it at the slaughterhouse today,” he admitted.
Paul was quiet a good long while before he said, “So you’ve never heard of this fellow Jack Johnson before today?”
“Yeah. So?”
“But you’re automatically against him fighting for the title? You only want to know who’s the best fighter with skin the color of yours?”
Henry leaned forward and hissed, “There’s more to it than color of the skin, you know.”
Paul leaned toward him. “No, I didn’t know. What else is there?”
Henry’s scalp showed red at the part in his hair. “They’re different—that’s what.” He picked up his fork and started shoveling it in again.
“I see. They’re different from whites? But all white people are exactly the same as one another? And that goes for all colored people too?”
“There’s some things you gotta see to know enough to understand.”
I waited for Paul to pounce, but he just said, “Ah,” and went back to his food with a little smile.
We were walking back to the hotel when I said, “Well, Paul, you can’t go back to that store, and that’s that. So don’t lay awake tonight thinkin’ about it.”
“Go back where?” Henry asked.
I’d forgotten Henry missed the earlier conversation. I filled him in without too many details.
“Why, I oughta go down there and beat the shit outta those goons.”
Funny how battle lines shift in a war.
Next morning was pure misery. “What will you do all day, Paul?” I had bummed a quarter for food and was hanging on the door.
“Figure out how to get to a library.” He looked lower than a snake in a wagon rut, being the one left behind without a job.
“Well, be careful.”
The bell rang a half hour early that evening, since it was Saturday. We all lined up to get paid. I looked around for Henry and thought he must have been first in line and already gone. I hoped he wouldn’t drink up his pay before morning.
We all filed through and saw the man at the desk with the visor. He asked my name, checked his log, and said, “Jim Miller says good things about you. Hope to see you next week,” before he handed me three dollars and marked something next to my name.
I flashed him a grin. “Thank you.” Monday was a whole world away, for all that could happen by then.
Tired as I was, I walked back to the hotel with a light step. I could see myself maybe coming back to the stockyards to work when we got back from Yellowstone. They liked me. And Kansas City was just about the perfect distance from home.
But then I remembered the older guys. The ones who took half an hour to limber up in the morning and were shuffling along like cripples by the time they lined up to get their paychecks. I thought about getting kicked in the ribs every day for
thirty years. There was a lot more to it than it seemed on the surface.
But at least it was something to think about. It seemed like a possibility.
Paul was back at the room when I got there, and I was glad to see he’d bought a newspaper. A way to ease into conversation.
We went through the whole thing, including what Jack Johnson had said the night before, promising the Fourth of July fight was on the up-and-up. Paul explained some people assumed Johnson would throw the fight so he wouldn’t be obliged to whip every other white man around too. Bored out of my head with not caring, I told Paul we ought to get ready to leave on Sunday.
“Why? You two haven’t made enough money to get very far.”
“No, but we all three need work. Time to move on to someplace friendlier.” I was about to say something more when Henry came busting in so fast Paul and I jumped a foot.
“Hey, come on!” he yelled. “Payday! Let’s go get us the best supper we can find and hit the trail.” He was all over the room, picking up everybody’s stuff and shoving it all together. He turned his back when he picked up his metal safe box.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
“Let’s go!” He made scooping motions toward the door, shooing us out. “Grab your stuff. Time to move on!”
“What’s the big rush?” I asked.
He was already pounding down the stairs and couldn’t hear.
“Paul?”
He shrugged.
I loaded his arms and took the rest.
I was pretty sure the Ford had been moved since that morning. Henry was behind the wheel and threw the crank at me when I was still four steps away and not expecting it. It hit my arm before it clattered to the sidewalk.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I yelled.
But I didn’t really want an answer. By then I’d figured whatever it was Henry knew and Paul and I didn’t, we were probably better off not knowing.
Henry jumped out, shoved our gear into the luggage carrier, and picked up the crank to hand it to me. “Come on. Time to go!” He was already behind the wheel again.
Seeing America Page 8
