by Saul Bellow
Slender, pressing down nervous on the wheel, with his long nose of broken form and the color running fast up his face and making a narrow crossing on his forehead, Gorman was like a jockey in his feeling toward the car. You could see what pleasure he got out of finding what he needed to wrap his nerves in. Outside Toledo I took the wheel, and occasionally found him looking sardonically sidewise from his narrow face, a long dark eye making a new measure of me from its splotch of discoloration by fatigue or by the trouble of a busy will; and he said—they seemed his first words to me, though they weren’t literally—“Step it up!”
So I apologized that I didn’t have the feel of the car yet and obeyed. But he didn’t like my driving, particularly that I hesitated to pass trucks on the hills, and took the wheel from me before we had covered much of the ground to Cleveland.
It was beginning April, and the afternoon was short, so that it was getting dark when we approached Lackawanna. Some way beyond it we stopped for gas, and Gorman gave me a bill to buy some hamburgers at a joint next door. There I went to the can first, and from the window saw a state trooper by the pump, examining the car, and no sign of Gorman. I slipped into the filthy side hall and glanced into the kitchen, where an old Negro was washing dishes, and passed behind him without being noticed, over a bushel in the doorway, into the intervening yard, or lot, and I saw Gorman beating it along the wall of the garage, swiftly, toward the border of trees and bushes where the fields began. I ran parallel, having a start of ten yards or so, and met him back of these trees, and there was almost a disaster before he recognized me, for he had a pistol in his hand—the gun Einhorn had warned me he carried. I clapped my hand to the barrel and pushed it away.
“What’ve you got that out for?”
“Take your hands off, or I’ll clobber you with it!”
“What’s got into you? What’re you running from the cops for? It’s only for speeding.”
“The car’s hot. Speeding hell!”
“I thought it was your car!”
“No, it’s stolen.”
We started to run again, hearing the motorcycle in the lot, and threw ourselves down in plowed field. It was open country, but dusk. The trooper came as far as the trees and looked but did not come through. Luck was with us that he didn’t, since Gorman had him covered with the gun on a sod for a rest, and was cowboy enough to shoot, so that I tasted puke in my throat from terror. But the trooper turned off, splitting the beams of his lamp on the evergreens, and we beat it over the plowland to a country road well back from the highway. This place, for sure, had a demon; it was blue, lump-earthed, oil-rank, and machinery was cooking in the dark, not far back of us, into heaven, from the Lackawanna chimneys.
“You weren’t going to shoot, were you?” I said. He was reaching inside his sleeve with a lifted shoulder, almost like a woman pulling up an inside strap. He put away his gun. Each of us, I suppose, was thinking in his own fashion that we didn’t make a pair—I of the vanity of being so leaping dangerous, and he, despisingly, that I must have shit in my blood, or such poolroom contempt.
“What did you run for?” he said.
“Because I saw you running.”
“Because you were scared.”
“That too.”
“Did the guy in the garage notice two of us?”
“He must have. And if he didn’t somebody in the hamburger joint must be wondering where I went.”
“Then we’d better split up. We’re not far outside of Buffalo, and I’ll pick you up there tomorrow in front of the main post office at nine o’clock.”
“Pick me up?”
“In a car. By then I’ll have one. You’ve got the tenner I gave you for the chow—that’ll take care of you. There must be a bus into town. You go up the road and take it; I’ll go down. Let a couple of buses go by so we won’t be getting on the same one.”
So we split up, and I felt safer without him.
Narrow, tall, sharp in the way his shoulders, hat, and features broke, he seemed, as he watched me get started up the road, like a city specialist on this unfamiliar interurban ground. Then he turned swiftly too, going low on his legs downhill, fast, scraping on the stones.
I tramped a considerable distance to take the first crossroad back to the highway. Headlights on a barn approached around a curve and made me drop down. It was a state police car, and what would it be doing on a side lane like this if not looking to pick us up? Probably Gorman hadn’t even bothered to change the license plates of the car. I got off the lane into the fields then, and made up my mind to take the shortest way back to Lackawanna and not to meet him in Buffalo. He was too inspired for me, and his kind of outlawry wasn’t any idea of mine; therefore why should I be sprawling in the mud waiting for him to commit a hothead crime and get me in as accessory for a stiff sentence? When I had left him to go up the road I had already begun to think of this and was actually on my way back to Chicago.
I began to run cross-country because I was tired of picking my way, and I came out to the highway near town, where the edge of Lake Erie approaches. And there I saw a crowd, forming up in old cars, with banners and signs, blocking the traffic. I think it was an organization of the unemployed, many veterans, wearing Legion caps; I was too hard pushed in the crude hard air of darkness to get it straight. But they were gathering for a march on Albany or Washington to ask for a relief increase and starting out to meet the Buffalo contingent. I came up slowly and saw that there were more troopers around, who were trying to keep traffic open, and also town cops, and I figured it to be safer to mingle than to try to go into town. By the lamps I was able to see how much mud had stuck to me, too wet to get off. There was such yelling and sheaving of old engines jockeying to form a line that I got to the tail gate of a jalopy, and, giving a man a hand putting in planks for benches and laying a tarpaulin over the top, I made myself a part of his outfit in the dusk. And now, though no distance at all from Lackawanna, I was about to start for Buffalo anyhow. I might have returned to the fields and gone around into town, but I calculated that, looking as I did, I might be picked up.
As I was tying down canvas behind the cab the crowd was slowly forced back, and from the beam that was painting back and forth on the people, yellow and red, I knew that a squad car was forcing a path and saw the eye of it swiveling and rolling smoothly from the top. I twisted backward from the running board to look, and it was as fear had inspired me to suspect, Joe Gorman was sitting in the back seat between two troopers, with blood lines over his chin showing that he had probably tried to fight with them and they had opened up his lip, doing their cops’ work. This was what he had come a long way to get, and got it, and looked not dazed but bright awake—which may have been an appearance, as the red of the blood appeared black. I felt powerfully heartsick to see him.
The squad car passed, and we started off in the truck at a slow sway, something like twenty men stowed in shank to shank behind the black open roar of the engine. There was nasty weather; rain, first thing, and the wet blowing in, which made a human steam like the steam of rinsing in a dairy, and while we were squelching and rocking over the swells of the road I was thinking of the misery of Joe Gorman’s being picked up, how they must have nabbed him, and if he had had a chance to pull his gun. Behind the canvas I didn’t get to see the gas station and whether the car we had left was still there, or anything else. Until the truck got into the city I couldn’t see a thing.
I dropped off the tail gate in the middle of town and found myself a hotel where I was dumb enough not to ask the price; but I was more concerned that the clerk shouldn’t see the dirt on me and carried the coat on my arm. Besides, I was so sick over Joe Gorman I didn’t think. Then, when they had beaten me out of two bucks in the morning, or about twice what a fleabag like that should have cost, and after I had paid for a big breakfast, which I had to have, there wasn’t enough money for a bus ticket back to Chicago. I telegraphed Simon to wire me some money, and then I went to see the main drag, and I took th
e excursion to Niagara Falls where nobody seemed to have any business that day, only a few strays beside the crush of the water, like early sparrows in the cathedral square before Notre Dame has opened its doors; and then in the brute sad fog you know that at one time this sulphur coldness didn’t paralyze everything, and there’s the cathedral to prove it.
So I walked around the rails by the dripping black crags until it began to drizzle again, and I returned to see whether Simon’s reply had come in yet. Till late afternoon I kept asking, and at last the girl in the cage looked tired of seeing me, and I recognized that I had the option of another night in Buffalo or hitting the road. And I was dim with the troubles I had got into, all this speeding and scattering, Gorman in the squad car pressing through the crowd, then the terrific emptying of Niagara waters, and also hobbling on the Buffalo cars, eating peanuts and hard rolls, my bowels like a screw of rubber, and the town unfriendly and wet—because if I hadn’t been in such a dim state I’d have realized sooner that Simon wasn’t going to send any money. But all of a sudden I realized that that was so. He might not even have it to spare, just after the first of the month when there was the rent to pay.
Thinking this, I told the telegraph girl to forget about the wire, I was leaving town.
Not to be picked up on the road in northern New York, I took a ticket to Erie at the Greyhound Station, and I was in the Pennsylvania corner that evening. To get off in Erie gave me no feeling that I had arrived somewhere, in a place that was a place in and for itself, but rather that it was one which waited on other places to give it life by occurring between them; the breath of it was thin, just materialized, waiting.
The flop I found was in a tall clapboard hotel, a kind of bone of a building, with more laths than plaster, with burns in the blanket, splits in the sheet opening on the mattress and its many stains. But I didn’t care too much where I was; it would have been a nuisance to care; and I dropped off my shoes and climbed in. It sounded like a gale on the lake that night.
Nevertheless it was a serene warm morning when I went out on the road to start thumbing. I wasn’t alone; people in great numbers were on the highways. Sometimes they traveled in pairs, but more usually alone, because it was easier to get rides alone. There was the CCC, draining swamps and planting trees in the distance, and on the road was this wanderer population without any special Jerusalem or Kiev in mind, or relics to kiss, or any idea of putting off sins, but only the hope their chances might be better in the next town. In this competition it was hard to get lifts. Appearances were against me too, for the Renling clothes were both smart and filthy. And then in my hurry to put distance between me and the stretch of road near Lackawanna where Joe Gorman had been picked up, I didn’t have the patience to stand and flag for long but walked.
The traffic dived and quivered past me, and when I reached a place near Ashtabula, Ohio, where the Nickel Plate line approaches the highway, I saw a freight going toward Cleveland with men sitting on the boxcars, and in the flats, and in under-angles of gondolas, and eight or ten guys shagging after and flipping themselves up on the rungs. I ran too, down from the unlucky highway, up the rocky grade where I felt the thinness of my shoes, and took hold of a ladder. I wasn’t agile, so ran with the red car, unable to swing from the ground until I was helped by a boost from behind. I never saw who it was that gave it—someone among the runners who didn’t want me tearing my arms from their sockets or breaking the bones of my feet.
So I climbed to the roof. It was a high-backed cattle car topped with broad red planks. Ahead the slow bell was turning over and over, and I was in plenty of company, the rough-looking crowd of non-paying passengers the Nickel Plate was carrying. I felt the movement of the stock against the boards and sat in the beast smell. Until Cleveland, with the great yards and overbuilt hills and fume, chaff and grit flying at your face.
There was a hotshot or nonstop express to Toledo making up in the yards, the word came, which would be ready in a couple of hours. Meanwhile I went up to the city to get some food. Going back to the yards, I climbed down a steep path, like a cliff of Pisgah, below the foundations of factories, and emerged on rusty tracks by the Sherwin Williams paint factory—the vast field of rails and hummocky ground to the sides covered with weed stalks where people were waiting: catching a nap, reading old papers, mending.
This was both a boring and a tense afternoon, soon dark with oncoming rain, while we squatted in the weeds, waiting; brackish and yet nerve-touching. Therefore I rushed up when I saw by the rising and motion along the darkening line that the train was coming. In the sudden shift toward the open and the tracks it seemed that hundreds had risen, the most distant already closing in upon the train. The locomotive came slowly, like a bison, the iron shell of the boiler black.
The train crashed its boxes and went backwards a moment. It was picking up its last cars. In that moment I got under a gondola carrying coal, into the angle of it between the slope end and the wheels. When we rolled forward the wheels creaked and bit out sparks like grindstones, and the couplings played free and hooked tight in a mechanical game into which your observation and brain were forced. Having to recognize whose kingdom you were in, with tons of coal at the back and riding in the tiny blind gallery with the dashing dark rain at the sides. There were four of us sitting in this space; a lean, wolfy man, who stretched his legs clear over the wheels, on the bar, while the rest of us fetched ours up short. I saw his face when he lit a butt, grinning and somewhat sick, blues under his eyes like chain links. He held his fingers in his crotch. On the other side was a young boy. The fourth man, as I didn’t know till we were chased off the train at Lorain, was a Negro. All I saw of him as we were running was his yellow raincoat, but when I caught up by a trackside shack he was leaning on the boards, his big eyes shut, a stumpy, heavy man getting his breath with much trouble and his beard sparkling about his mouth with sweat or drizzle.
The hotshot stopped at Lorain; it wasn’t a hotshot at all. Or perhaps they stopped it because it carried too many free riders. These made a ragged line, like a section gang that draws aside at night back of the flares as a train comes through, only much more numerous. There were flashlights swinging from car to car as the cops emptied them, and then the train went off, cleared of riders, down into the semaphore lights and the oily blues of the track.
This stocky young boy—Stoney was his name—attached himself to me and we went into the town. The harbor with its artificial peaks and cones of sand and coal was visible from the muddy main stem. In the featureless electric faces of bulbs hung on the dredges, cranes, cables, the rain looked like nothing either and was nullified. I laid out some of my money for bread and peanut butter and a couple of bottles of milk and we had supper.
It was after ten and streaming rain. I wasn’t going to chase another freight that night, I was too bushed. I said, “Let’s find a place to flop,” and he agreed.
On the sidings we found some boxcars retired from service, of great age, rotten and swollen, filled with old paper and straw, a cheesy old hogshead stink of cast-off things such as draws rats, a marly or fungus white on the walls. There we bedded down in the refuse. I buttoned up, for security as well as the cold, and stretched out. There was plenty of room at first. But till far into the night men kept arriving, rolling back the door, and passing back and forth over us, discussing where to sleep. I heard them coming, grating with the feet along the rows of cars, until our boxcar was so full that newcomers would look in and then pass on. It was no time to be awake, or half awake, with the groaning and sick coughing, the grumbles and gases of bad food, the rustling in paper and straw like sighs or the breath of dissatisfaction. And when I fell asleep I didn’t sleep long, for the man next to me began to press up, and I thought it was only his unconscious habit of the night, that he was used to a bedmate, and I just drew away, but he drew after. Then he must have worked long in secret to open his pants and first to touch my hand as if by accident and then to guide my fingers. I had trouble getting free
because he finally held my wrist with both hands, and I knocked his head against the boards. That couldn’t have hurt much, the wood was so rotten it was almost soft, but he let me go and said almost with laughter, “Don’t raise a fuss.” He rolled back from me a space. I sat up and I reasoned that if I didn’t move he might think he wasn’t unwelcome to me. As a matter of fact he was waiting and he began to talk, with a hard tremble, both cynical and hopeful, about the filth of women, and when I heard that I went away, helping myself up in back against the wall and stepping over bodies to where I had seen Stoney lie down. A bad night—the rain rattling hard first on one side and then on the other like someone nailing down a case, or a coop of birds, and my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn’t feel, but over-all general misery.
