Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (79 page)

He lost himself in the
crowd.  He lost count of the days.  His little store of
money melted.  He moved from a cheap hotel, loud at night with
the noise of harlotry, to a little attic room in a lodging-house, an
oven of hot pine and tarred roof; he moved from the lodging-house to
a fifty-cent cot in the Y. M. C. A., where, returning night by night,
he paid his fee, and slept in a room with forty snoring sailors.

Finally, his money gone,
he slept, until driven out, in all-night lunchrooms; upon the
Portsmouth ferry; and over lapping water on a rotting pier.

By night he prowled about
among the negroes; he listened to their rich proposed seductions; he
went where the sailors went, down Church Street, where the women
were.  He prowled the night with young beast-lust, his thin
boy-body stale with sweat, his hot eyes burning through the dark.

He grew hungry for food. 
His money was gone.  But there was a hunger and thirst in him
that could not be fed.  Over the chaos of his brain hung the
shadow of Laura James.  Her shadow hung above the town, above
all life.  It had brought him here; his heart was swollen with
pain and pride; he would not go to find her.

He was obsessed with the
notion that he would find her in the crowd, upon the street, around
the corner.  He would not speak to her if he met her.  He
would go proudly and indifferently by.  He would not see her. 
She would see him.  She would see him at some heroic moment,
just as he was receiving the love and respect of beautiful women. 
She would speak to him; he would not speak to her.  She would be
stricken; she would be beaten down; she would cry to him for love and
mercy.

Thus, unclean, unkempt,
clothed in rags and hunger and madness, he saw himself victorious,
heroic and beautiful.  He was mad with his obsession.  He
thought he saw Laura on the streets a dozen times a day: his heart
turned rotten; he did not know what he should do or say, whether to
run or remain.  He brooded for hours over her address in the
telephone directory; sitting by the phone, he trembled with
excitement because its awful magic could be sounded at a gesture,
because within a minute he could be with her, voice to voice.

He hunted out her home. 
She was living in an old frame house far out from the centre of the
town.  He stalked carefully about the neighborhood, keeping a
block away from the house at all times, observing it obliquely,
laterally, from front and back, with stealthy eye and a smothering
thud of the heart, but never passing before it, never coming directly
to it. He was foul and dirty.  The soles of his shoes wore
through: his calloused feet beat against hot pavements.  He
stank.

At length, he tried to
get work.  Work there was in great abundance--but the princely
wages of which he had been told were hard to find.  He could not
swear he was a carpenter, a mason.  He was a dirty boy, and
looked it.  He was afraid.  He went to the Navy Yard at
Portsmouth, the Naval Base at Norfolk, the Bush Terminal--everywhere
there was work, abundant work--hard labor that paid four dollars a
day.  This he would gladly have taken; but he found that he
could not have his wages until after the second week, and that one
week's pay would be withheld to tide him over in illness, trouble, or
departure.

And he had no money left.

He went to a Jew and
pawned the watch Eliza had given him upon his birthday.  He got
five dollars on it.  Then he went by boat once more to Newport
News, and by trolley up the coast to Hampton.  He had heard, in
the thronging rumor of Norfolk, that there was work upon the flying
field, and that the worker was fed and housed upon the field, at
company expense.

In the little employment
shack at the end of the long bridge that led across into the field,
he was signed on as a laborer and  searched by the sentry, who
made him open his valise.  Then he labored across the bridge,
kneeing his heavy bag, which bulged with his soiled and disorderly
belongings, before him.

He staggered at
length into the rude company office and sought out the
superintendent, a man in the thirties, shaven, pale, weary, who wore
a blue eyeshade, armbands, and
talked
with a limp cigarette plastered on his lip.

Eugene thrust out his
employment slip in shaking fingers.  The man looked briefly at
it.

"College boy, aren't
you, son?" he said, glancing at Eugene.

"Yes, sir,"
said Eugene.

"Did you ever do day
labor before?" said the man.

"No, sir," said
Eugene.

"How old are you,
son?" the man asked.

Eugene was silent for a
moment.  "I'm--nineteen," he said at length,
wondering, since he had lied, why he had not had courage to say
twenty.

The superintendent
grinned wearily.

"It's hard work,
son," the man said.  "You'll be among the wops and the
Swedes and the hunkies.  You'll live in the same bunkhouse,
you'll eat with them.  They don't smell nice, son."

"I have no money,"
said Eugene.  "I'll work hard.  I won't get sick. 
Give me the job.  Please!"

"No," said the
man.  "No, I won't do that."

Eugene turned blindly
away.

"I tell you what
I'll do," said the superintendent.  "I'll give you a
job as a checker.  You'll be with the office force.  That's
where you belong.  You'll live with them in their own
bunk-house. They're nice fellows," he said elegantly, "college
fellows, like yourself."

"Thank you,"
said Eugene, clenching his fingers, with husky emotion.  "Thank
you."

"The checker we've
got is quitting," said the superintendent. "You'll go to
the stables with him in the morning to get your horse."

"H-h-h-horse?"
said Eugene.

"You'll have a
horse," said the superintendent, "to ride around on."

With strong
bowel-excitement Eugene began to think of the horse, with joy, with
fear.  He turned to go.  He could not bear to talk of
money.

"H-h-how much--?"
he finally croaked, feeling that he must. Business.

"I'll give you $80 a
month to begin with," said the manager with a touch of
magnificence.  "If you make good, I'll give you a hundred."

"And my keep?"
whispered Eugene.

"Sure!" said
the manager.  "That's thrown in."

Eugene reeled away with
his valise, and with a head full of exploding rockets.
 
 

These months, although
filled with terror and hunger, must be passed in rapid summary with
bare mention of the men and actions that a lost boy knew.  They
belong to a story of escape and wandering--valuable here to indicate
the initiation to the voyage this life will make.  They are a
prelude to exile, and into their nightmare chaos no other purpose may
be read than the blind groping of a soul toward freedom and
isolation.

Eugene worked upon the
Flying Field for a month.  Three times a day he rode around the
field to check the numbers of two dozen gangs who were engaged in the
work of grading, levelling, blasting from the spongy earth the ragged
stumps of trees and filling interminably, ceaselessly, like the weary
and fruitless labor of a nightmare, the marshy earth-craters, which
drank their shovelled toil without end.  The gangs were of all
races and conditions: Portugee niggers, ebony-black, faithful and
childlike, who welcomed him with great toothy grins, each pointing to
his big white pin, on which was printed his number, crying out in
strange outlandish voices, "feefety-nine, nine-net-ty seex,"
and so on; Bowery bums, in greasy serge and battered derbies, toying
distastefully with pick-handles that shredded their dirty uncalloused
palms?their hard evil faces, with their smudge of beard, were like
things corrupt, green-yellow, that grow under barrels.  And
there were also drawling fishermen from the Virginia coast, huge
gorilla niggers from Georgia and the lower South, Italians, Swedes,
Irishmen--part of the huge compost of America.

He came to know them and
their overseers--tough reckless men, gray-haired and lustful, full of
swift action and coarse humor.

Stuck like a jigging doll
upon the horse, whom he feared, he rode, staring into heaven,
sometimes almost unconscious of the great engine expanding and
contracting below him with a brown sensual rhythm.  The bird-men
filled the blue Virginia weather with the great drone of the
Liberties.

At length, hungry again
for the ships and faces, he left his work and spent his earnings in a
week of gaudy riot in Norfolk and on the Virginia beaches. 
Almost penniless again, with only the savage kaleidoscope of a
thousand streets, a million lights, the blazing confusion and the
strident noise of carnival, he returned to Newport News in search of
employment, accompanied by another youth from Altamont, likewise a
thriftless adventurer in war-work, whom he had found upon the beach. 
This worthy, whose name was Sinker Jordan, was three years older than
Eugene.  He was a handsome reckless boy, small in stature, and
limping from an injury he had received in a football game.  His
character was weak and volatile--he hated effort, and was obstinate
only in cursing ill-fortune.

The two young men had a
few dollars between them.  They pooled their resources, and,
with wild optimism, purchased from a pawnbroker in Newport News the
rudiments of carpenter's equipment--hammers, saws, and T-squares. 
They went inland fifteen or twenty miles to a dreary government camp
sweltering in the Virginia pines. They were refused employment here
and in black dejection returned in the afternoon to the town they had
left so hopefully in the morning.  Before sundown they had
secured employment in the Shipbuilding Yards, but they had been
discharged five minutes after they reported for work, when they
confessed to a grinning foreman in a room full of woodshavings and
quietly slatting belts, that they had no knowledge of the intensely
special carpentry of ship's carving.  Nor (they might have
added) of any other.

They were quite moneyless
now, and once on the street again, Sinker Jordan had hurled upon the
pavement the fatal tools, cursing savagely the folly that threatened
now to keep them hungry.  Eugene picked the tools up, and took
them back to the imperturbable Uncle, who repurchased them for only a
few dollars less than the sum they had paid him in the morning.

Thus the day.  They
found a lodging in a dingy house where, as an appropriate climax to
his folly, Sinker Jordan surrendered their remaining capital into the
greedy palm of the landlady--and a real lady too, she admitted. 
But, having previously eaten, they had all the hope of a full belly
and their youth--they slept, Sinker without care and without effort.

Eugene was early up at
dawn, and after futile efforts to waken the luxuriously somnolent
Sinker, he was off to the dingy yellow piers along the waterfront,
which were stored with munitions for the war. After a morning
tramping up and down the dusty road outside the guarded enclosure, he
had obtained employment for himself and Sinker from the chief
checker, a nervous ugly man, swollen with petty tyranny.  He had
gimlet eyes, glittering below spectacles, and hard muscular jaws that
writhed constantly.

Eugene went to work at
seven the next morning--Sinker, a day or two later, only when his
last small coin had vanished.  Eugene screwed up his pride and
borrowed a few dollars from one of the other checkers.  On this
he and Sinker lived meagerly until pay-day--which was only a few days
off.  This money slipped quickly through their careless
fingers.  Down to a few coins again, with the next pay-day
almost two weeks off, Sinker gambled at dice with the checkers,
behind the great fortress of sacked oats upon the pier--lost, won,
lost, rose penniless and cursing God.  Eugene knelt beside the
checkers, with his last half-dollar in his palm, heedless of Sinker's
bitter taunt.  He had never thrown dice before: naturally, he
won--$8.50.  He rose exultantly from their profane surprise, and
took Sinker to dinner at the best hotel.

A day or two later, he
went behind the oats again, gambled with his last dollar--and lost.

He began to starve. 
Day crawled into weary day.  The fierce eye of July beat down
upon the pier with a straight insufferable glare. The boats and
trains slid in and out, crammed to the teeth with munitions--with
food for the soldiers.  The hot grainy air on the pier swam
before his eyes speckled with dancing patches, and he made weary
tallies on a sheet as the big black stevedores swarmed past him with
their trunks.  Sinker Jordan cadged small sums from the other
checkers, and lived miserably on bottled pop and cheese at a little
grocery across the road from the pier.  Eugene was unable to beg
or borrow.  Partly from pride, but more from the powerful
brooding inertia of his temper, which more and more was governing his
will to act, he found himself unable to speak.  Each day he
said:  "I shall speak to one of them to-day.  I shall
say that I must eat, and that I have no money."  But when
he tried to speak he could not.

As they grew more
efficient in their work they were called back, after the day's end,
for work at night.  This extra work, with its time-and-a-half
pay, he would otherwise have been glad to get, but stumbling from
exhaustion, the command to return was horrible.  For several
days now he had not been home to the dingy little room which he
shared with Sinker Jordan.  At the end of his day's work, he
would climb to a little oasis in the enormous wall of sacked oats and
sink into exhausted sleep, with the rattling of cranes and winches,
the steady rumble of the trucks, and the remote baying of boats
anchored in the stream--mixing in a strange faint symphony in his
ears.