The 42nd Parallel (10 page)

Mac sat down on the wooden step and waited. Overhead in a gash in the clouds that still had the faintest stain of red from the afterglow his eye dropped into empty black full of stars. The smell of the sweetwilliams tickled his nose. He felt hungry.

A low whistle from Ike roused him. “Come along,” he said gruffly and started walking fast down the hill with his head sunk between his shoulders.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

“Nothin’. The old woman’s gone to Buffalo to live with my brothers. The lousy bums got her to sell out so’s they could spend the dough, I reckon.”

“Jesus, that’s hell, Ike.”

Ike didn’t answer. They walked till they came to the corner of a street with lighted stores and trolleycars. A tune from a mechanical piano was tumbling out from a saloon. Ike turned and slapped Mac on the back. “Let’s go have a drink, kid . . . What the hell.”

There was only one other man at the long bar. He was a very drunken tall elderly man in lumbermen’s boots with a sou’wester on his head who kept yelling in an inaudible voice, ‘Whoop her up, boys,’ and making a pass at the air with a long grimy hand. Mac and Ike drank down two whiskies each, so strong and raw that it pretty near knocked the wind out of them. Ike put the change from a dollar in his pocket and said:

“What the hell, let’s get out of here.” In the cool air of the street they began to feel lit. “Jesus, Mac, let’s get outa here tonight . . . It’s terrible to come back to a town where you was a kid . . . I’ll be meetin’ all the crazy galoots I ever knew and girls I had crushes on . . . I guess I always get the dirty end of the stick, all right.”

In a lunchroom down by the freight depot they got hamburger and potatoes and bread and butter and coffee for fifteen cents each. When they’d bought some cigarettes they still had eight seventyfive between them. “Golly, we’re rich,” said Mac. “Well, where do we go?”

“Wait a minute. I’ll go scout round the freight depot. Used to be a guy I knowed worked there.”

Mac loafed round under a lamp post at the streetcorner and smoked a cigarette and waited. It was warmer since the wind had gone down. From a puddle somewhere in the freight yards came the peep peep peep of toads. Up on the hill an accordion was playing. From the yards came the heavy chugging of a freight locomotive and the clank of shunted freightcars and the singing rattle of the wheels.

After a while he heard Ike’s whistle from the dark side of the street. He ran over. “Say, Mac, we gotta hurry. I found the guy. He’s goin’ to open up a boxcar for us on the westbound freight. He says it’ll carry us clear out to the coast if we stick to it.”

“How the hell will we eat if we’re locked up in a freightcar?”

“We’ll eat fine. You leave the eatin’ to me.”

“But, Ike . . .”

“Keep your trap shut, can’t you . . . Do you want everybody in the friggin’ town to know what we’re tryin’ to do?”

They walked along tiptoe in the dark between two tracks of boxcars. Then Ike found a door half open and darted in. Mac followed and they shut the sliding door very gently after them.

“Now all we got to do is go to sleep,” whispered Ike, his lips touching Mac’s ear. “This here galoot, see, said there wasn’t any yard dicks on duty tonight.”

In the end of the car they found hay from a broken bale. The whole car smelt of hay. “Ain’t this hunky dory?” whispered Ike.

“It’s the cat’s nuts, Ike.”

Pretty soon the train started, and they lay down to sleep side by side in the sparse hay. The cold night wind streamed in through the cracks in the floor. They slept fitfully. The train started and stopped and started and shunted back and forth on sidings and the wheels rattled and rumbled in their ears and slambanged over crossings. Towards morning they fell into a warm sleep and the thin layer of hay on the boards was suddenly soft and warm. Neither of them had a watch and the day was overcast so they didn’t know what time it was when they woke up. Ike slid open the door a little so that they could peek out; the train was running through a broad valley brimfull-like with floodwater, with the green ripple of fullgrown wheat. Now and then in the distance a clump of woodland stood up like an island. At each station was the hunched blind bulk of an elevator. “Gee, this must be the Red River, but I wonder which way we’re goin’,” said Ike. “Golly, I could drink a cup of coffee,” said Mac. “We’ll have swell coffee in Seattle, damned if we won’t, Mac.”

They went to sleep again, and when they woke up they were thirsty and stiff. The train had stopped. There was no sound at all. They lay on their backs stretching and listening. “Gee, I wonder where in hell we are.” After a long while they heard the cinders crunching down the track and someone trying the fastenings of the boxcar doors down the train. They lay so still they could hear both their hearts beating. The steps on the cinders crunched nearer and nearer. The sliding door slammed open, and their car was suddenly full of sunlight. They lay still. Mac felt the rap of a stick on his chest and sat up blinking. A Scotch voice was burring in his ears:

“I thought I’d find some Pullman passengers . . . All right, byes, stand and deliver, or else you’ll go to the constabulary.”

“Aw hell,” said Ike, crawling forward.

“Currsin’ and swearin’ won’t help ye . . . If you got a couple o’ quid you can ride on to Winnipeg an’ take your chances there . . . If not you’ll be doin’ a tidy bit on the roads before you can say Jack Robinson.”

The brakeman was a small blackhaired man with a mean quiet manner.

“Where are we, guv’ner?” asked Ike, trying to talk like an Englishman.

“Gretna . . . You’re in the Dominion of Canada. You can be had up, too, for illegally crossin’ Her Majesty’s frontier as well as for bein’ vags.”

“Well, I guess we’d better shell out . . . You see we’re a couple of noblemen’s sons out for a bit of a bloody lark, guv’ner.”

“No use currsin’ and prevarricatin’. How much have you?”

“Coupla dollars.”

“Let’s see it quick.”

Ike pulled first one dollar, then another, out of his pocket; folded in the second dollar was a five. The Scotchman swept the three bills up with one gesture and slammed the sliding door to. They heard him slip down the catch on the outside. For a long time they sat there quiet in the dark. Finally Ike said, “Hey, Mac, gimme a sock in the jaw. That was a damn fool thing to do . . . Never oughta had that in my jeans anyway . . . oughta had it inside my belt. That leaves us with about seventyfive cents. We’re up shit creek now for fair . . . He’ll probably wire ahead to take us outa here at the next big town.” “Do they have mounted police on the railroad, too?” asked Mac in a hollow whisper. “Jez, I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

The train started again and Ike rolled over on his face and went glumly to sleep. Mac lay on his back behind him looking at the slit of sunlight that made its way in through the crack in the door and wondered what the inside of a Canadian jail would be like.

That night, after the train had lain still for some time in the middle of the hissing and clatter of a big freightyard, they heard the catch slipped off the door. After a while Ike got up his nerve to slide the door open and they dropped, stiff and terribly hungry, down to the cinders. There was another freight on the next track, so all they could see was a bright path of stars overhead. They got out of the freight-yards without any trouble and found themselves walking through the deserted streets of a large widescattered city.

“Winnipeg’s a pretty friggin’ lonelylookin’ place, take it from me,” said Ike.

“It must be after midnight.”

They tramped and tramped and at last found a little lunchroom kept by a Chink who was just closing up. They spent forty cents on some stew and potatoes and coffee. They asked the Chink if he’d let them sleep on the floor behind the counter, but he threw them out and they found themselves dogtired tramping through the broad deserted streets of Winnipeg again. It was too cold to sit down anywhere, and they couldn’t find anyplace that looked as if it would give them a flop for thirtyfive cents, so they walked and walked, and anyway the sky was beginning to pale into a slow northern summer dawn. When it was fully day they went back to the Chink’s and spent the thirtyfive cents on oatmeal and coffee. Then they went to the Canadian Pacific employment office and signed up for work in a construction camp at Banff. The hours they had to wait till traintime they spent in the public library. Mac read part of Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
and Ike, not being able to find a volume of Karl Marx, read an instalment of “When the Sleeper Wakes” in the
Strand Magazine.
So when they got on the train they were full of the coming Socialist revolution and started talking it up to two lanky red-faced lumberjacks who sat opposite them. One of them chewed tobacco silently all the while, but the other spat his quid out of the window and said, “You blokes ’ll keep quiet with that kinder talk if you knows what’s ’ealthy for ye.” “Hell, this is a free country, ain’t it? A guy’s free to talk, ain’t he?” said Ike. “A bloke kin talk so long as his betters don’t tell him to keep his mouth shut.” “Hell, I’m not tryin’ to pick a fight,” said Ike. “Better not,” said the other man, and didn’t speak again.

They worked for the C.P.R. all summer and by the first of October they were in Vancouver. They had new suitcases and new suits. Ike had forty-nine dollars and fifty cents and Mac had eighty-three fifteen in a brand new pigskin wallet. Mac had more because he didn’t play poker. They took a dollar and a half room between them and lay in bed like princes their first free morning. They were tanned and toughened and their hands were horny. After the smell of rank pipes and unwashed feet and the bedbugs in the railroad bunkhouses the small cleanboarded hotel room with its clean beds seemed like a palace.

When he was fully awake Mac sat up and reached for his Ingersoll. Eleven o’clock. The sunlight on the windowledge was ruddy from the smoke of forestfires up the coast. He got up and washed in cold water at the washbasin. He walked up and down the room wiping his face and arms in the towel. It made him feel good to follow the contours of his neck and the hollow between his shoulderblades and the muscles of his arms as he dried himself with the fresh coarse towel.

“Say, Ike, what do you think we oughta do? I think we oughta go down on the boat to Seattle, Wash., like a coupla dude passengers. I wanta settle down an’ get a printin’ job; there’s good money in that. I’m goin’ to study to beat hell this winter. What do you think, Ike? I want to get out of this limejuicy hole an’ get back to God’s country. What do you think, Ike?”

Ike groaned and rolled over in bed.

“Say, wake up, Ike, for crissake. We want to take a look at this burg an’ then twentythree.”

Ike sat up in bed. “God damn it, I need a woman.”

“I’ve heard tell there’s swell broads in Seattle, honest, Ike.”

Ike jumped out of bed and began splattering himself from head to foot with cold water. Then he dashed into his clothes and stood looking out the window combing the water out of his hair.

“When does the friggin’ boat go? Jez, I had two wet dreams last night, did you?”

Mac blushed. He nodded his head.

“Jez, we got to get us women. Wet dreams weakens a guy.”

“I wouldn’t want to get sick.”

“Aw, hell, a man’s not a man until he’s had his three doses.”

“Aw, come ahead, let’s go see the town.”

“Well, ain’t I been waitin’ for ye this halfhour?”

They ran down the stairs and out into the street. They walked round Vancouver, sniffing the winey smell of lumbermills along the waterfront, loafing under the big trees in the park. Then they got their tickets at the steamboat office and went to a haberdashery store and bought themselves striped neckties, colored socks and four-dollar silk shirts. They felt like millionaires when they walked up the gangplank of the boat for Victoria and Seattle, with their new suits and their new suitcases and their silk shirts. They strolled round the deck smoking cigarettes and looking at the girls. “Gee, there’s a couple looks kinda easy . . . I bet they’re hookers at that,” Ike whispered in Mac’s ear and gave him a dig in the ribs with his elbow as they passed two girls in Spring Maid hats who were walking round the deck the other way. “Shit, let’s try to pick ’em up.”

They had a couple of beers at the bar, then they went back on deck. The girls had gone. Mac and Ike walked disconsolately round the deck for a while, then they found the girls leaning over the rail in the stern. It was a cloudy moonlight night. The sea and the dark islands covered with spiring evergreens shone light and dark in a mottling silvery sheen. Both girls had frizzy hair and dark circles under their eyes. Mac thought they looked too old, but as Ike had gone sailing ahead it was too late to say anything. The girl he talked to was named Gladys. He liked the looks of the other one, whose name was Olive, better, but Ike got next to her first. They stayed on deck kidding and giggling until the girls said they were cold, then they went in the saloon and sat on a sofa and Ike went and bought a box of candy.

“We ate onions for dinner today,” said Olive. “Hope you fellers don’t mind. Gladys, I told you we oughtn’t to of eaten them onions, not before comin’ on the boat.”

“Gimme a kiss an’ I’ll tell ye if I mind or not,” said Ike.

“Kiddo, you can’t talk fresh like that to us, not on this boat,” snapped Olive, two mean lines appearing on either side of her mouth.

“We have to be awful careful what we do on the boat,” explained Gladys. “They’re terrible suspicious of two girls travelin’ alone nowadays. Ain’t it a crime?”

“It sure is,” Ike moved up a little closer on the seat.

“Quit that . . . Make a noise like a hoop an’ roll away. I mean it.” Olive went and sat on the opposite bench. Ike followed her.

“In the old days it was liberty hall on these boats, but not so any more,” Gladys said, talking to Mac in a low intimate voice. “You fellers been workin’ up in the canneries?”

“No, we been workin’ for the C.P.R. all summer.”

“You must have made big money.” As she talked to him, Mac noticed that she kept looking out of the corner of her eye at her friend.