by Colin Asher
Nelson handed her his bottle of liquor, and she took a slug. He saw her lips encircle the opening, and told himself to throw the bottle away when she left.
“I bet you’re from out of town,” she said. Her tone was part flirtation, part business. “Have you got any change?”
Nelson showed her his sixty cents. It was a meager offering, but she didn’t take offense. She didn’t accept, either.
“It aint [sic] enough there,” she said. “Haven’t you got no folding money?”
Nelson did not. “Let’s finish the bottle,” he offered. He was repulsed by her, but lonely too—desirous. He placed his lips gingerly on the bottle of Rock and Rye and took a swig. Then he passed it to the woman, and she emptied it.
He began talking because he didn’t want her to leave. “It’s a tiresome kind of game, isn’t it?” he asked.
“O-you mean downstairs,” she said. “Yeh, it gets you down after a while. Well, just like everything else.”
“Does everything get you down?” Nelson asked.
“Well, you know what I mean,” she said. “What’s the diff if you come to work here at seven and stay till five in the morning taking care of guys, or whether you stand on your pins from nine to five-thirty runnin’ a elevator? Here at least you get a chance to have a cigarette when you want it. You’re all punched out when it’s time to go home anyhow. And this pays a little better.”
The woman’s confidence surprised Nelson. He had assumed she would be ashamed of her profession. “Do you go home?” he asked.
“I live home and my folks think I’m a real nice girl,” she snapped.
“Well you are,” Nelson said. “I think you’re a nice girl—I don’t have sympathy with people who just start condemning before understanding—preachers you know—”
The woman’s face went blank when Nelson said “condemning.” His voice trailed off when he noticed her reaction. “I had been overly eager to prove I had no contempt for her,” he wrote later, “while she had never once assumed I would be contemptuous.”
The woman moved toward the door. “You aren’t preaching at me now, are you?” she asked with her hand on the knob. Nelson mumbled an apology, and the woman obliged him with a few minutes of small talk. Then she left him alone with his sixty cents, his empty bottle, and his view of the Foshay Tower.
Nelson contacted his sister Irene in New York after that conversation and asked her to wire money so he could leave Minneapolis. He paid his debts when it arrived, and returned to Chicago. Then he hunkered down at home.
He left town again in the spring to search for work, and headed south—through southern Illinois and Kentucky, then farther.
This time, he traveled mostly by train. When he needed a ride, he found a freight yard, hid just beyond its boundary line, and scrutinized every train that approached. When he spotted one moving slowly and pulling empty boxcars or uncovered gondolas, he emerged from his hiding place and started jogging. He adjusted his pace to match the train’s, and when he pulled even with something he could grasp—a ladder, or a handhold near an open door—he grabbed it, leapt, and allowed the train to pull him into the air as it galloped down the tracks.
It was a perilous way to travel. When the railroad police, known to everyone as “bulls,” spotted free riders, they arrested them, or worse. Some riders claimed they had witnessed killings, or been beaten severely—and the trains were lethal in their own right. Men sometimes leapt into hopper cars without looking, slid down a sloping inside wall, fell through an open hatch at the bottom, and landed on the rail ties beneath the moving train. If a rider closed the top of a tank car they were hiding inside and sealed themselves in, they were likely to starve. And boarding was dangerous as well. It was easy to stumble while running alongside a train and fall beneath the wheels. Once, Nelson saw a man lying near the tracks and bleeding to death after being mangled that way.
There were two million people on the road that year, chasing the promise of work or fleeing chaos, and before long Nelson was anonymous among them—a shadow flitting through the trees at the edge of the road, a hint of menace sleeping in the weeds on the outskirts of town. He traveled by night to avoid being arrested for vagrancy, begged, and stood in line at relief missions to wait for his turn to shower, eat putrid meat, and drink weak coffee.
Weeks passed, and then months. Pounds melted off Nelson’s thin frame, and his suit became threadbare. His Press Association card tattered around the edges, and his expectations withered. He rolled through Tennessee without finding work, and then Virginia. He passed through North Carolina, headed toward the Atlantic coast, then caught a ride on the South Pacific line outside Greenville and jogged south—through South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and then into Louisiana.
Nelson’s train pulled into New Orleans early one morning in August, and he hopped off near the Mississippi River and walked along its bank until he reached the French Market on North Peters Street. Vendors were raising their curtains for the day when he arrived, stocking their shelves, and beginning to cook. He had a little money, maybe a nickel, so he went inside, bought a po’ boy sandwich, and sat down. He spotted a man at work near where he was eating, and decided to watch him. The man was large, shirtless, and thickly muscled, and he was using a large knife to decapitate turtles—thwunk . . . thwunk . . . thwunk.
Nelson wandered after he ate. He walked through the city until he found a soup kitchen distributing chicory coffee and bananas, and then he lay down on a park bench and went to sleep.
Nelson had traveled at least three thousand miles since he began looking for work the year before, and the ambition that drove him after he graduated from college had diminished over their course. He no longer expected to become a journalist, and he made his plans for the future in units of hours and days instead of years. He wanted enough money to eat and rent a room, and he wasn’t particular about how he earned it.
Not long after Nelson arrived in New Orleans, the Standard Coffee Service Company offered him a job selling delivery subscriptions door to door. He had never been in sales, and didn’t like the idea of spending hours on his feet under the Louisiana sun, but he accepted anyway. It was the only work he could find.
Nelson’s days began early. He was still sleeping on a park bench, so he woke when the sun rose. He tried to find some food, and then he walked to Magazine Street and waited for a truck from Standard Coffee to pull up. He climbed in the back when it arrived, along with a dozen other men, and then the driver ferried him to the neighborhood he had been assigned to canvass that day.
When the truck stopped, Nelson went to work. He climbed porch steps, his body dripping with sweat, and knocked on doors. Women usually answered, and when they did he held up a red tin percolator and began his pitch.
A coffeepot just like this one could be yours for free, he said. All you have to do is agree to buy your coffee from Standard.
He carried a stack of subscription forms, and when someone looked interested, he held one out for their signature. Speed was an important part of his sales strategy. If he allowed potential customers to deliberate, they were likely to realize that buying two pounds of coffee from Standard every week for six months would cost them more than a new coffeepot.
Nelson met the other salesmen on a street corner at the end of his shift, and when the Standard Coffee truck arrived, he handed his sales slips to the driver. He had been promised one dollar for every two the company received from the customers he signed up, but he rarely saw it. The drivers distributed the commissions, and they skimmed freely. Discontent was widespread among the crew, but no one complained too bitterly—a fraction of a commission was better than nothing.
One day, a man from the sales crew approached Nelson and asked if he needed a place to stay. He called himself Luther, and said he was renting a room on Camp Street for seven dollars a week. He had one roommate already, but there was space on the floor for another body and Nelson was welcome to it so long as he agreed to pay a thir
d of the rent.
Luther was a pigeon-chested man who said he came from Florida. He wore cowboy hats, chain-smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and had a sociopath’s way with words. He dissembled mellifluously and was full of schemes that couldn’t possibly fail.
Nelson accepted Luther’s proposal and followed him back to Camp Street. That’s when he met the other roommate—a rangy Texan with a steel plate in his skull. This man introduced himself as Luther as well, and told Nelson his head had been injured while he was fighting in World War I. It was not the most likely explanation. He had a violent temper, carried a gun, and had been to prison.
Luther, Luther, and Nelson Abraham were a bizarre trio—two Southerners in their late thirties or early forties, and a twenty-three-year-old secular Jew from Chicago. Poverty was the only thing they had in common, but for a time it was enough to bind them. They slept shoulder to shoulder in their tiny room. They shared meals, and Nelson declined to question either of his roommates about their names, or their past, to avoid confrontation. He was convinced that neither man was really named Luther, but didn’t press the issue. He called the smooth talker from Florida “Luther Luther” to prevent confusion. The violent Texan was just “Luther.”
One evening, Luther returned home with a stack of certificates the size of high school diplomas. They had been printed by a chain of beauty salons, and each one promised the bearer a free shampoo and a marcel wave. The fine print stipulated that “free” was a term of art. The five-dollar wave was really being offered for three fifty, as a promotion, but Luther said no one would notice that caveat. The way he figured it, the three of them could make their rent in a day if they distributed the certificates and collected tips as they went.
Nelson and Luther Luther agreed to the plan, and the next morning all three men left home together and began scouting for likely targets. They walked until they found a block of apartments that looked promising, and then they checked each building to see if there were phone lines running between it and the poles on the corner. When they found one with no connection, they approached.
Nelson selected doors at random and knocked. If a woman answered, he held up a certificate and congratulated her. He explained that he had been instructed to give away one free marcel wave on every block he visited that day. The salon that hired him was trying to develop its business, and she was her block’s lucky recipient. If the woman looked at Nelson suspiciously, he urged her to call the salon. He knew she couldn’t do so without going to the pay phone on the corner, but he played the innocent.
Almost every woman Nelson spoke to that day accepted the certificate and gave him the twenty-five-cent “courtesy charge” he asked for.
Nelson and the Luthers made ten dollars that day. They went out again the next morning, and by the evening they had ten more—a small fortune. A sandwich cost a nickel at the time, steak cost a quarter, and you could buy sex for a dollar in the city’s red-light district.
They felt rich, so they doubled down. They worked their scheme a third time the following day, but by then their luck was gone. Nelson and Luther Luther did well, but Luther did not. He returned to the room on Camp Street at the end of the day looking like tenderized meat. He had been jumped by a group of men whose wives had been scammed by the trio earlier in the week, and beaten severely.
Nelson and the Luthers left New Orleans the next morning in Luther Luther’s car—a 1928 Studebaker with running boards, a boxy top, and bug-eye headlights. They had no destination in mind.
They went north first—past Baton Rouge and Alexandria, Natchitoches and Shreveport. They entered Texas after three hundred miles, and pulled into a boomtown called Gladewater, where oil rigs encircled Main Street like mechanical giants closing in for a kill. Nelson asked for work, but he was turned away.
Then they went south—past Houston, Corpus Christi, and Baffin Bay. The landscape emptied as they drove, and the air became heavy with moisture blowing off the Gulf of Mexico. Eventually, they entered the floodplain speculators had begun calling Magic Valley, saw thousands of trees dripping with brightly colored fruit lined up neatly on both sides of the road, and decided to stop.
They rented a cabin using Nelson’s wristwatch as collateral, and found a grapefruit orchard that needed pickers. Then they went to work—climbing ladders, pulling ripe fruit from sagging limbs and placing it in bags, descending to the ground, and then sprinting to the next tree.
Nelson was soon covered with bruises, and scratches that festered in the damp heat, but he was grateful for the work despite its hardship. On a good day, he earned seventy-five cents.
Luther was not. He had no interest in laboring under the Texas sun for a starvation wage, so one afternoon he took out his pistol when the trio returned to their cabin. He told Nelson and Luther Luther that he had been watching the local convenience store, a Jitney Jungle, and thought it would be easy to rob. They had a car and a gun, and if they planned everything well, they could make it out of the valley before the police began chasing them.
Nelson and Luther Luther agreed, but they had no intention of following through. When Luther fell asleep that night, they snuck out of the cabin and drove away in the Studebaker. They raced south again, and didn’t stop until they spotted an abandoned Sinclair station twenty miles north of the Mexican border. They were on a quiet stretch of highway between Rio Hondo and Harlingen when they pulled over, and there was no one around. There was a grapefruit orchard on one side of the road, abandoned and gone to seed, and a mesquite forest on the other. Lizards and snakes sunned themselves on stones and tree stumps, and buzzards circled in the sky.
Nelson and Luther Luther examined the station. The pumps were dry, but the building was intact. They peered through its windows to make sure no one was living inside, and then they drove to Harlingen to find out who owned it.
Benton Curtis, Nelson’s childhood friend, never left Chicago. He continued to live with his parents after he graduated from high school, and when the Depression hit, he resigned himself to a long tenure. “Jobs were absolutely unavailable,” he said. He and Nelson had only seen each other a few times since Nelson left for college, but they still enjoyed each other’s company. They got together after Nelson returned from Urbana-Champaign at least twice, went dancing, and visited a speakeasy.
Those visits had been the only bright spots in an otherwise bleak year for Curtis, so he got excited when he received an envelope bearing a Texas return address, and Nelson’s name.
There was a letter from Nelson inside, and a proposal.
I found an abandoned gas station on a “thoroughfare” in Texas, Nelson wrote. It’s a Sinclair station, and the local agent says I can have it for nothing as long as I fill the tanks with his gas. We can run the station together if you come down here. The building needs work, but it’s livable, and gas is cheap. If you can provide some cash, we can open the station as soon as our gas arrives. You should come; after all, “you’ve got nothing better to do.”
Curtis wrote back and said he liked the idea of running a gas station in Texas. Then he bought a bus ticket.
Nelson met Curtis in Harlingen when he arrived. They caught up, and then they visited the local Sinclair agent. Curtis had twenty dollars with him, and he used fifteen to buy about 150 gallons of gas. The agent promised to have it delivered soon.
Nelson wanted to go to the station then, but Curtis was hungry.
I still have five dollars, he said. Let’s get something to eat.
Nelson recoiled. “Don’t ever show me that money and don’t ever show anybody that,” he snapped. “If anyone ever discovers you have any money, they’ll kill you for it.”
Nelson’s reaction worried Curtis, but he didn’t understand the depth of his predicament until he saw the station. That’s when he realized that the “thoroughfare” Nelson mentioned in his letter was really a sleepy road stretching between two poor, sleepy towns. And the money-making opportunity he’d spoken of was really a chance to sleep in an unheated garage an
d sell gas for two cents more per gallon than it cost to purchase.
Curtis realized Nelson’s plan was ill-fated when he arrived, but he stayed anyway, and soon he and Nelson slipped into a daily routine the way they had when they became friends in Albany Park.
They took turns lugging a five-gallon jug to a nearby creek to collect drinking water each morning, and then they sat in the station’s shadow to avoid the Texas sun and waited for customers. There was a red-lettered sign that read SINCLAIR—SE HABLA ESPAñOL—SINCLAIR above their heads, and a Spanish–English dictionary rested on the ground by their feet. They staved off boredom by reading out-of-date newspapers, and occasionally they sold some gas—two gallons on an average day, three when they were lucky.
They bunked down near each other inside the station each night, and slept lightly. That was the only time they saw Luther Luther. He spent his days puttering up and down the valley in the Studebaker, burning gas. He returned after dark each night and claimed a cot, but never seemed to sleep. Curtis often woke several times before dawn, and every time he opened his eyes he saw Luther Luther chain-smoking in silence across the room—his body obscured by shadow, but his face lit by the crimson glow of the cherry burning at the tip of his cigarette.
Luther Luther approached Curtis and Nelson with a plan a few weeks after they got the station running. He had been spending his days making arrangements with local farmers, he said, and several of them had agreed to give him black-eyed peas on consignment. In exchange, he had agreed to shell them, package them, sell them to stores, and pass on a share of the profits.
There was a fortune to be made in black-eyed peas, Luther Luther said, and if Nelson and Curtis wanted a piece of it, they could supply the labor. If they did the shelling and packaging, he said, they were welcome to eat as many of the beans as they wanted. They would get paid as well, when money started coming in.
