Yondering: Stories

by Louis L'Amour

  They stared at each other, shocked at their forgetting. “Maybe it ain’t busted,” Bert said.

  Stumbling in his eagerness, Joe fell across the muck, bumping Frank as he did so, jerking an involuntary grunt from him. Then Joe fell on his knees and began clawing rocks away from where the end of the pipe should be, the pipe that supplied compressed air for drilling. He found the pipe and cleared the vent, unscrewing the broken hose to the machine. Trembling, he turned the valve. Cool air shot into the room, and as they breathed deeply, it slowly died away to nothing.

  “It will help,” Joe said. “Even if it was a little, it will help.”

  “Damned little,” Rody said, “but you’re right, Joe. It’ll help.”

  “How deep are you?” Frank asked. He started to shift his body and caught himself with a sharp gasp.

  “Four feet—maybe five. She’s tough going.”

  Joe lay with his face close to the ground. The air was close and hot, every breath a struggle. When he breathed, he seemed to get nothing. It left him gasping, struggling for air. The others were the same. Light and air were only a memory now, a memory of some lost paradise.

  How long had they been here? Only Frank had a watch, but it was broken, so there was no way of calculating the time. It seemed hours since that crash. Somehow it had been so different from what he had expected. He had believed it would come with a thundering roar, but there was just a splintering sound, a slide of muck, a puff of wind that put their lights out, then a long slide, a trickling of sand, a falling stone. They had lacked even the consolation of drama.

  Whatever was to come of it would not be far off now. Whatever happened must be soon. There came no sound, no breath of moving air, only the thick, sticky air and the heat. They were all panting now, gasping for each breath.

  Rody sat down suddenly, the pick slipping from his fingers.

  “Let me,” Joe said.

  He swung the pick, then swung it again.

  When he stopped, Bert said, “Did you hear something?”

  They listened, but there was no sound.

  “Maybe they ain’t tryin’,” Rody said. “Maybe they think we’re dead.

  “Can you imagine Tom Chambers spendin’ his good money to get us out of here?” Rody said. “He don’t care. He can get a lot of miners.”

  Joe thought of those huge, weighted timbers in the Big Stope. Nothing could have held that mass when it started to move. Probably the roof of the Big Stope had collapsed. Up on top there would be a small crowd of waiting people now. Men, women, and children. Still, there wouldn’t be so many as in Nevada that time. After all, Bert was the only one down here with children.

  But suppose others had been trapped? Why were they thinking they were the only ones?

  The dull thud of the pick sounded again. That was Rody back at work; he could tell by the power. He listened, his mind lulled into a sort of hypnotic twilight where there was only darkness and the sound of the pick. He heard the blows, but he knew he was dying. It was no use. He couldn’t fight it any longer.

  Suddenly the dull blows ceased. Rody said, “Hey! Listen!” He struck again, and it was a dull sound, a hollow sound.

  “Hell!” Rody said. “That ain’t no ten feet!

  “Let’s have some light over here,” Rody said. “Frank—?”

  He took the light from Frank’s hand. The light was down to a feeble flicker now, no longer the proud blade of light that had initially stabbed at the darkness.

  Rody peered, then passed the lamp back to Frank.

  “There should be a staging down there.” Frank’s voice was clear. “They were running a stopper off it to put in the overhead rounds.”

  Rody swung, then swung again, and the pick went through. It caught him off balance, and he fell forward, then caught himself. Cool air was rushing into the drift end, and he took the pick and enlarged the hole.

  Joe sat up. “God!” he said. “Thank God!”

  “Take it easy, you guys, when you go down,” Frank said. “That ladder may have been shaken loose by blasting or the cave-in. The top of the ladder is on the left-hand side of the raise. You’ll have to drop down to the staging, though, and take the ladder from there. It’ll be about an eight- or nine-foot drop.”

  He tossed a small stone into the hole, and they heard it strike against the boards down below. The flame of the light was bright now as more air came up through the opening. Frank stared at them, sucking air into his lungs.

  “Come on, Rody,” Joe said. “Lend a hand. We’ve got to get Frank to a doctor.”

  “No.” Frank’s voice was impersonal. “You can’t get me down to that platform and then down the ladder—I’d bleed to death before you got me down the raise. You guys go ahead. When they get the drift opened up will be time enough for me. Or maybe when they can come back with a stretcher. I’ll just sit here.”

  “But—” Joe protested.

  “Beat it,” Frank said.

  Bert lowered himself through the opening and dropped. “Come on!” he called. “It’s okay!”

  Rody followed. Joe hesitated, mopping his face, then looked at Frank, but the big man was staring sullenly at the dark wall.

  “Frank—” Joe stopped. “Well, gee…”

  He hesitated, then dropped through the hole. From the platform he said, “Frank? I wish—”

  His boots made small sounds descending the ladder.

  The carbide light burned lower, and the flame flickered as the fuel ran low. Big Frank’s face twisted as he tried to move; then his mouth opened very wide, and he sobbed just once. It was all right now. There was no one to hear. Then he leaned back, staring toward the pile of muck, his big hands relaxed and empty.

  “Nobody,” he muttered. “There isn’t anybody, and there never was.”

  OLD DOC YAK

  I came into Los Angeles hitchhiking on a truck and went down to San Pedro wanting to get a ship heading for the Far East. At the time there were about seven hundred seamen on the beach and all of them broke. It was very tough to get a ship of any kind but I registered at the Marine Service Bureau, which we used to call Fink Hall or the Slave Market. That was where you had to register and wait your turn to get a ship. Meanwhile, you had to live some way or other, and during the next three months I slept in empty boxcars and lumber piles, got along as best I could.

  During those three months, fellows were living it any way they possibly could. If you had two dimes in your pocket you’d better hold them together—if they rattled, somebody would roll you for them.

  At one point we got a little cash ahead, several of us, and we rented a shack up on the side of a hill. At that time there were several places: Mexican Hollywood was one of them and there was a place called Happy Valley and then there were a few scattered outside of that. There were shacks that you could rent for eight to twelve dollars a month. Well, a couple of other fellows and myself rented a shack up on the side of the hill. It was two rooms and a small kind of cubbyhole that did a job as a kitchen and we had a cot and a full-sized bed and a mattress on the floor and we would rent out space to other people to come in and sleep for ten cents a night. And with that we would try to accumulate money enough to pay the rent the next time it came around.

  Then we decided that we would do our own cooking, so we’d send a sailor down to the docks to help the Japanese fishermen hoist the fish up from the boats and the Japanese would usually give the man a fish for this and we’d send others down to a wholesale grocery and vegetable place where they would help clean out and sweep up and they’d pick up some extra onions and potatoes and carrots and whatnot and bring those home and then we’d send other guys down to bum bread from some of the ships. The result was that we were doing pretty well there for a while.

  HE WAS A man without humor. He seemed somehow aloof, invulnerable. Even his walk was pompous and majestic
. He strode with the step of kings and spoke with the voice of an oracle, entirely unaware that his whole being was faintly ludicrous, that those about him were always suspended between laughter and amazed respect.

  Someone began calling him Old Doc Yak for no apparent reason, and the name stayed with him. He was a large man, rather portly, wearing a constantly grave expression and given to a pompous manner of speech. His most simple remark was uttered with a sense of earthshaking import, and a listener invariably held his breath in sheer suspense as he began to speak, only to suffer that sense of frustration one feels when an expected explosion fails to materialize.

  His conversation was a garden of the baroque in which biological and geological terms flowered in the most unexpected places. Jim commented once that someone must have thrown a dictionary at him and he got all the words but none of the definitions. We listened in amused astonishment as he would stand, head slightly tilted to one side, an open palm aslant his rather generous stomach, which he would pat affectionately as though in amused approbation of his remarks.

  Those were harsh, bitter days. The waterfronts were alive with seamen, all hunting ships. One theme predominated in all our conversations, in all our thoughts, perhaps even in the very pulsing of our blood—how to get by.

  No normal brain housed in a warm and sheltered body could possibly conceive of the devious and doubtful schemes contrived to keep soul and body together. Hunger sharpens the wits and renders less effective the moral creeds and codes by which we guide our law-abiding lives. Some of us who were there could even think of the philosophical ramifications of our lives and of our actions. The narrow line that divides the average young man or woman from stealing, begging, or prostitution is one that has little to do with religion or ethics but only with such simple animal necessities as food and shelter. We had been talking of that when Old Doc Yak ventured his one remark.

  “I think,” he said, pausing portentously, “that any man who will beg, who will so demean himself as to ask for food upon the streets, will stoop to any abomination, no matter how low.”

  He arose, and with a finality that permitted of no reply, turned his back and walked away. It was one of the few coherent statements I’d ever heard him make, and I watched his broad back, stiff with self-righteousness, as he walked away. I watched, as suddenly speechless as the others.

  There was probably not a man present who had not at some time panhandled on the streets. They were a rough, freehanded lot, men who gave willingly when they had it and did not hesitate to ask when in need. All were men who worked, who performed the rough, hard, dangerous work of the world, yet they were men without words, and no reply came to their lips to answer that broad back or the bitter finality of that remark. In their hearts they felt him wrong, for they were sincere men, if not eloquent.

  Often after that I saw him on the streets. Always stiff and straight, he never unbent so far as to speak, never appeared even to notice my passing. He paid his way with a careful hand and lived remote from our lonely, uncomfortable world. From meal to meal we had no idea as to the origin of the next, and our nights were spent wherever there was shelter from the wind. Off on the horizon of our hopelessness there was always that miracle—a ship—and endlessly we made the rounds in search of work. Shipping proceeded slowly, and men struggled for the few occasional jobs alongshore. Coming and going on my own quest, I saw men around me drawn fine by hunger, saw their necks become gaunt, their clothing more shabby. It was a bitter struggle to survive in a man-made jungle.

  The weeks drew on, and one by one we saw the barriers we had built against hunger slowly fall away. By that time there were few who had not walked the streets looking for the price of a cup of coffee, but even the ready generosity of a seaport town had been strained, and shipping seemed to have fallen off.

  One morning a man walked into the Seaman’s Institute and fainted away. We had seen him around for days, a quiet young man who seemed to know no one, to have no contacts, too proud to ask for food and too backward to find other means. And then he walked in that morning and crumpled up on the floor like an empty sack.

  It was a long moment before any of us moved. We stood staring down at him, and each of us was seeing the specter of his own hunger.

  Then Parnatti was arrested. He had been hungry before, and we had heard him say, “I’m going to eat. If I can make it honest, I’ll make it, but I’m going to eat regardless.” We understood his feelings, although the sentiments were not ours. Contrary to opinion, it is rarely the poor who steal. People do not steal for the necessities but for the embellishments, but when the time came, Parnatti stole a car from a parking lot and sold it. We saw the item in the paper without comfort and then turned almost without hope to the list of incoming ships. Any one of them might need a man; any one of them might save us from tomorrow.

  Old Doc Yak seemed unchanged. He came and went as always; as always his phrases bowed beneath a weight of words. I think, vaguely, we all resented him. He was so obviously not a man of the sea, so obviously not one of us. I believe he had been a steward, but stewards were rarely popular in the old days on the merchant ships. Belly robbers, they called them.

  Glancing over the paper one afternoon, searching for a ship that might need men, I looked up accidentally just in time to see Old Doc Yak passing a hand over his face. The hand trembled.

  For the first time, I really saw him. Many times in the past few days we had passed each other on the street, each on his way to survival. Often we had sat in the main room at the Institute, but I had paid little attention. Now, suddenly, I was aware of the change. His vest hung a little slack, and the lines in his face were deeper. For the moment even his pompous manner had vanished. He looked old and tired.

  In the ugly jungle of the waterfront, the brawl for existence left little time for thinking of anything except the immediate and ever-present need for shelter and food for the body. Old Doc Yak had been nothing more than another bit of waterfront jetsam discarded from the whirl of living into the lazy maelstrom of those alongshore. Now, again, as on that other night, he became an individual, and probably for the first time I saw the man as he was and as he must have seen himself.

  Tipped back against the wall, feeling the tightness of my leather jacket across my shoulders, I rubbed the stubble on my unshaved chin and wondered about him. I guess each of us has an illusion about himself. Somewhere inside of himself he has a picture of himself he believes is true. I guess it was that way with Doc. Aloof from those of us who lived around him, he existed in a world of his own creation, a world in which he had importance, a world in which he was somebody. Now, backed into a corner by economic necessity, he was a little puzzled and a little helpless.

  Some of us had rented a shack. For six dollars a month we had shelter from the wind and rain, a little chipped crockery, a stove, and a bed. There was a cot in the corner where I slept, and somebody had rustled an old mattress that was stretched out on the deck—floor, I should say. For a dime or perhaps three nickels, if he was good for them, a man could share the bed with three or four others. For a nickel a man got an armful of old newspapers with which he could roll up on the floor. And with the money gathered in such a way we paid another month’s rent.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a corner away from the wind, a place of warmth, and a retreat from the stares of the police and the more favored. Such a place was needed, and never did men return home with more thankfulness than we returned to that shack on its muddy hillside. Men came and went in the remaining weeks of our stay, the strange, drifting motley of the waterfront, men good, bad, and indifferent. Men were there who knew the ports and rivers of a hundred countries, men who knew every sidetrack from Hoboken to Seattle. And then one night Old Doc Yak walked up the path to the door.

  There was rain that night, a cold, miserable rain, and a wind that blew it against our thin walls. It was just after ten when the knock came at the door, an
d when Copper opened it, Old Doc walked in. For a moment his small blue eyes blinked against the light, and then he looked about, a slow distaste growing on his face. There was a sailor’s neatness about the place, but it was crude and not at all attractive.

  He looked tired, and some of his own neatness was lacking. He might have been fifty-five, but he looked older this night; yet his eyes were still remote, unseeing of us, who were the dregs. He looked around again, and we saw his hesitation, sensed the defeat that must have brought him, at last, to this place. But our shack was warm.

  “I would like,” he said ponderously, “a place to sleep.”

  “Sure,” I said, getting up from the rickety chair I’d tipped against the wall. “There’s room in the double bed for one more. It’ll cost you a dime.”

  “You mean,” he asked abruptly, and he actually looked at me, “that I must share a bed?”

  “Sorry. This isn’t the Biltmore. You’ll have to share with Copper and Red.”

  He was on the verge of leaving when a blast of wind and blown rain struck the side of the house, sliding around under the eaves and whining like a wet saw. For an instant he seemed to be weighing the night, the rain, and the cold against the warmth of the shack. Then he opened his old-fashioned purse and lifted a dime from its depths.

  I say “lifted,” and so it seemed. Physical effort was needed to get that dime into my hand, and his fingers released it reluctantly. It was obviously the last of his carefully hoarded supply. Then he walked heavily into the other room and lay down on the bed. It was the first time I had ever seen him lie down, and his poise seemed suddenly to evaporate, all his stiff-necked righteousness seemed to wilt, and his ponderous posturing with words became empty and pitiful. Lying on the bed with the rain pounding on the roof, he was only an old man, strangely alone.

  Sitting in the next room with a fire crackling in the stove and the rattling of rain on the windows, I thought about him. Youth and good jobs were behind him, and he was facing a question to which all the ostentatious vacuity of his words gave no reply. The colossal edifice he had built with high-sounding words, the barriers he had attempted to erect between himself and his doubt of himself were crumbling. I put another stick in the stove, watched the fire lick the dampness from its face, and listened to the rain beating against the walls and the labored breathing of the man on the bed.