In Dubious Battle (19 page)

“Then you don’t think the cause is good?”

Burton sighed. “You see? We’re going to pile up on that old rock again. That’s why I don’t like to talk very often. Listen to me, Mac. My senses aren’t above reproach, but they’re all I have. I want to see the whole picture—as nearly as I can. I don’t want to put on the blinders of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and limit my vision. If I used the term ‘good’ on a thing I’d lose my license to inspect it, because there might be bad in it. Don’t you see? I want to be able to look at the whole thing.”

Mac broke in heatedly, “How about social injustice? The profit system? You have to say they’re bad.”

Dr. Burton threw back his head and looked at the sky. “Mac,” he said. “Look at the physiological injustice, the injustice of tetanus, the injustice of syphilis, the gangster methods of amoebic dysentery—that’s my field.

“Revolution and communism will cure social injustice.”

“Yes, and disinfection and prophylaxis will prevent the others.”

“It’s different, though; men are doing one, and germs are doing the other.”

“I can’t see much difference, Mac.”

“Well, damn it, Doc, there’s lockjaw every place. You can find syphilis in Park Avenue. Why do you hang around with us if you aren’t for us?”

“I want to
see
,” Burton said. “When you cut your finger, and streptococci get in the wound, there’s a swelling and a soreness. That swelling is the fight your body puts up, the pain is the battle. You can’t tell which one is going to win, but the wound is the first battleground. If the cells lose the first fight the streptococci invade, and the fight goes on up the arm. Mac, these little strikes are like the infection. Something has got into the men; a little fever had started and the lymphatic glands are shooting in reinforcements. I want to see, so I go to the seat of the wound.”

“You figure the strike is a wound?”

“Yes. Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This seems to be a bad one. I want to
see,
Mac. I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all; he’s a cell in an organism
that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you. I want to watch the group, and see what it’s like. People have said, ’mobs are crazy, you can’t tell what they’ll do.’ Why don’t people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.”

“Well, what’s this got to do with the cause?”

“It might be like this, Mac: When group-man wants to move, he makes a standard. ’God wills that we re-capture the Holy-Land’ or he says, ‘We fight to make the world safe for democracy’; or he says, ‘we will wipe out social injustice with communism.’ But the group doesn’t care about the Holy Land, or Democracy, or Communism. Maybe the group simply wants to move, to fight, and uses these words simply to reassure the brains of individual men. I say it
might
be like that, Mac.”

“Not with the cause, it isn’t,” Mac cried.

“Maybe not, it’s just the way I think of things.”

Mac said, “The trouble with you, Doc, is you’re too God damn far left to be a communist. You go too far with collectivization. How do you account for people like me, directing things, moving things? That puts your group-man out.”

“You might be an effect as well as a cause, Mac. You might be an expression of group-man, a cell endowed with a special function, like an eye cell, drawing your force from group-man, and at the same time directing him, like an eye. Your eye both takes orders from and gives orders to your brain.”

“This isn’t practical,” Mac said disgustedly. “What’s all this kind of talk got to do with hungry men, with layoffs and unemployment?”

“It might have a great deal to do with them. It isn’t a very long time since tetanus and lockjaw were not connected. There are still primitives in the world who don’t know children are the result of intercourse. Yes, it might be worthwhile to know more about group-man, to know his nature, his ends, his desires. They’re not the same as ours. The pleasure we get in scratching an itch causes death to a great number of cells. Maybe group-man gets pleasure when individual men are wiped out in a war. I simply want to see as much as I can, Mac, with the means I have.”

Mac stood up and brushed the seat of his pants. “If you see too darn much, you don’t get anything done.”

Burton stood up too, chuckling softly. “Maybe some day—oh, let it go. I shouldn’t have talked so much. But it does clarify a thought to get it spoken, even if no one listens.”

They started back over the crisp clods toward the sleeping camp. “We can’t look up at anything, Doc,” Mac said. “We’ve got to whip a bunch of scabs in the morning.”

“Deus vult,” said Burton. “Did you see those pointers of Anderson’s? Beautiful dogs; they give me a sensual pleasure, almost sexual.”

A light still burned in Dakin’s tent. The camp slept. Only a few coals of fire still burned in the streets. The silent line of old cars stood against the road, and in the road itself a clump of sparks waxed and waned, cigarettes of the watchful deputies.

“D’you hear that, Jim? That’ll show you what Burton is. Here’s a couple of fine dogs, good hunting dogs, but they’re not dogs to Doc, they’re feelings. They’re dogs, to me. And these guys sleeping here are men, with stomachs;
but they’re not men to Doc, they’re a kind of a collective Colossus. If he wasn’t a doctor, we couldn’t have ’im around. We need his skill, but his brain just gets us into a mess.”

Burton laughed apologetically. “I don’t know why I go on talking, then. You practical men always lead practical men with stomachs. And something always gets out of hand. Your men get out of hand, they don’t follow the rules of common sense, and you practical men either deny that it is so, or refuse to think about it. And when someone wonders what it is that makes a man with a stomach something more than your rule allows, why you howl, ‘Dreamer, mystic, metaphysician’. I don’t know why I talk about it to a practical man. In all history there are no men who have come to such wild-eyed confusion and bewilderment as practical men leading men with stomachs.”

“We’ve a job to do,” Mac insisted. “We’ve got no time to mess around with high-falutin’ ideas.”

“Yes, and so you start your work not knowing your medium. And your ignorance trips you up every time.”

They were close to the tents now. “If you talked to other people that way,” Mac said, “we’d have to kick you out.”

A dark figure arose suddenly from the ground. “Who is it?” a voice demanded; and then, “Oh, hello. I didn’t know who it was coming in.”

“Dakin set out guards?” Mac asked.

“Yeah.”

“He’s a good man. I knew he was a good man, cool-headed man.”

They stopped by a big, peaked troop tent. “Guess I’ll turn in,” Doc said. “Here’s where my bodyguard sleeps.”

“Good idea,” Mac agreed. “You’ll probably have some bandaging to do tomorrow.”

When Doc had disappeared inside the tent, Mac turned to Jim. “No reason why you shouldn’t get some sleep too.”

“What are you going to do, Mac?”

“Me? Oh, I thought I’d take a look around, see if everything’s all right.”

“I want to go with you. I just follow you around.”

“Sh-h, don’t talk so loud.” Mac walked slowly toward the line of cars. “You do help me, Jim. It may be sloppy as an old woman, but you keep me from being scared.”

“I don’t do anything but pad around after you,” said Jim.

“I know. I guess I’m getting soft. I’m scared something might happen to you. I shouldn’t have brought you down, Jim. I’m getting to depend on you.”

“Well, what’re we going to do now, Mac?”

“I wish you’d go to bed. I’m going to try to have a talk with those cops in the road.”

“What for?”

“Listen, Jim, you didn’t get bothered by what Doc said, did you?”

“No. I didn’t listen.”

“Well, it’s a bunch of bunk; but here’s something that isn’t bunk. You win a strike two ways, because the men put up a steady fight, and because public sentiment comes over to your side. Now most of this valley belongs to a few guys. That means the rest of the people don’t own much of anything. The few owners either have to pay ’em or lie to ’em. Those cops out in the road are special deputies, just working stiffs with a star and a gun and a two-weeks’
job. I thought I’d try and sound ’em out; try and find out how they feel about the strike. I guess how they feel is how the bosses told ’em to feel. But I might get a line on ’em, anyway.”

“Well, how about it if they arrest you? Remember what that man said in the road last night.”

“They’re just deputies, Jim. They won’t recognize me the way a regular cop would.”

“Well, I want to go with you.”

“O.K., but if anything looks funny, you cut for the camp and yell like hell.”

In a tent behind them a man started shouting in his sleep. A soft chorus of voices awakened him and stopped his dreaming. Mac and Jim wedged their way silently between two cars and approached the little group of glowing cigarettes. The sparks died down and shifted as they approached.

Mac called, “Hey, you guys, can we come out there?”

From the group a voice, “How many of you?”

“Two.”

“Come on, then.” As they drew near a flashlight glanced out and touched their faces for a second, and then went off. The deputies stood up. “What do you want?” their spokesman demanded.

Mac replied, “We just couldn’t sleep; thought we’d come out and talk.”

The man laughed. “We been having lots of company tonight.”

In the dark Mac pulled out his Bull Durham bag. “Any of you guys want to smoke?”

“We got smokes. What is it you want?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. A lot of the guys want to know
how you fellows feel about the strike. They sent us out to ask. They know you’re just working men, the same as them. They want to know if you maybe won’t help your own kind of guys.”

Silence met his words. Mac looked uneasily around.

A voice said softly, “All right, you chickens. Get ’em up. Let out a squawk and we plug you.”

“Say, what the hell is this? What’s the idea?”

“Get behind ’em, Jack, and you, Ed, get your guns in their backs. If they move, let ’em have it. Now, march!”

The rifles pushed into their backs and punched them along through the darkness. The leader’s voice said, “Thought you was God-damn smart, didn’t you? You didn’t know those day-cops pointed you two guys out.” They marched across the road, and in among the trees on the other side. “Thought you was darn smart, getting the men out of here before daylight; thought you’d leave us holding the sack. Hell, we knew that gag ten minutes after you decided it.”

“Who told you, mister?”

“Don’t you wish you knew?” Their feet pounded along. The rifles jabbed into their backs.

“You takin’ us to jail, mister?”

“Jail, hell, we’re takin’ you God-damn reds to the Vigilance Committee. If you’re lucky they’ll beat the crap out of you and dump you over the county line; if you ain’t lucky, they’ll string you up to a tree. We got no use for radicals in this valley.”

“But you guys are cops, you got to take us to jail.”

“That what
you
think. There’s a nice little house a little ways from here. That’s where we’re taking you.”

Under the orchard trees even the little light from the stars was shut off. “Now be quiet, you guys.”

Jim cried, “Go, Mac!” and at the same instant he dropped. His guard toppled over him. Jim rolled around the trunk of a tree, stood up and bolted. At the second row he climbed up into an apple tree, far up, among the leaves. He heard a scuffle and a grunt of pain. The flashlight darted about and then fell to the ground and aimlessly lighted a rotten apple. There came a rip of cloth, and then steady pounding of footsteps. A hand reached down and picked up the flashlight and switched it off. Muffled, arguing voices came from the place of the scuffle.

Jim eased himself gently out of the tree, panting with apprehension every time the leaves quivered. He moved quietly along, came to the road and crossed it. At the line of cars a guard stopped him. “This is the second time tonight, kid. Why’n’t you go to bed?”

Jim said, “Listen, did Mac come through?”

“Yeah, goin’ like a bat out of hell. He’s in Dakin’s tent.”

Jim hurried on, lifted the brown tent-flap and went in. Dakin and Mac and Burke were there. Mac was talking excitedly. He stopped on a word and stared as Jim came in. “Jesus, I’m glad,” he said. “We was just goin’ to send out a party to try and get you. What a damn fool I was! What a damn fool! You know, Dakin, they was marchin’ us along, had guns right in our backs. I didn’t think they’d shoot, but they might of. Jim, what in hell did you do?”

“I just dropped, and the guy fell over me, and his gun dug in the dirt. We used to do that trick in the school yard.”

Mac laughed uneasily. “Soon’s the guns wasn’t touching
us, I guess they was afraid they’d kill each other. I jumped sideways and kicked my guy in the stomach.”

Burke was standing behind Mac. Jim saw Mac wink at Dakin. The cold eyes almost disappeared behind pale-lashed lids. Dakin said, “Burke, you’d better make the rounds, and see if the guards are all awake.”

Burke hesitated. “I think they’re O.K.”

“Well, you better see, anyway. We don’t want no more raids. What they got in their hands, Burke?”

“They got nice clubs.”

“Well, go take a look around.”

Burke went out of the tent. Mac stepped close to Dakin. “Tent walls is thin,” he said quietly. “I’d like to talk to you alone. Want to take a little walk?”

Dakin nodded his head with two jerks. The three of them strolled out into the darkness, going in the direction Dr. Burton had taken earlier. A guard looked them over as they passed.

Mac said, “Somebody’s double-crossin’ us already. Them deputies knew we was goin’ to shove off before daylight.”

Dakin asked coldly, “D’you think it’s Burke? He wasn’t there, even.”

“I don’t know who it was. Anybody hanging around could of heard through the tent.”

“Well, what are we goin’ to do about it? You seem to know all about this stuff.” The cold voice went on, “I got an idea you reds ain’t goin’ to do us no good. A guy come in tonight and says if we kick you out, maybe the bosses ’11 talk business.”