The 42nd Parallel (12 page)

full of his dream of green grass in winter ever

blooming flowers ever

bearing berries; Luther Burbank

could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Burbank

carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in winter

and seedless berries and stoneless plums and thornless roses brambles cactus—

winters were bleak in that bleak

brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts—

out to sunny Santa Rosa;

and he was a sunny old man

where roses bloomed all year

everblooming everbearing

hybrids.

America was hybrid

America should cash in on Natural Selection.

He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and Natural

Selection and the influence of the mighty dead

and a good firm shipper’s fruit

suitable for canning.

He was one of the grand old men until the churches

and the congregations

got wind that he was an infidel and believed

in Darwin.

Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil,

selecting improved hybrids for America

those sunny years in Santa Rosa.

But he brushed down a wasp’s nest that time;

he wouldn’t give up Darwin and Natural Selection

and they stung him and he died

puzzled.

They buried him under a cedartree.

His favorite photograph

was of a little tot

standing beside a bed of hybrid

everblooming double Shasta daisies

with never a thought of evil

And Mount Shasta

in the background, used to be a volcano

but they don’t have volcanos

any more.

SAYS THIS IS CENTURY WHERE BILLIONS
AND BRAINS ARE TO RULE

infant born in Minneapolis comes here in incubator

Cheyenne Cheyenne

Hop on my pony

says Jim Hill hits oil trust on 939 counts

BIG FOUR TRAIN BLOWN TO PIECES

woman and children blotted out admits he saw floggings and even mutilations but no frightful outrages

TRUTH ABOUT THE CONGO FREE STATE

Find Bad Fault In Dreadnaught Santos Dumont tells of rival of bird of prey wives prime aim of Congo natives extraordinary letter ordering away U.S. marines

WHITES IN CONGO LOSE MORAL SENSE

WOMAN HELD A CAPTIVE BY AMBULANCE CHASERS

Thaw Faces Judge in Fateful Fight

LABOR MENACE IN POLITICS

last of Salome seen in New York heroism of mother unavailing

There’s room here for two, dear
,

      
But after the ceremony

Two, dear, as one, dear, will ride back on my pony

      
From old Cheyenne

you sat on the bed unlacing your shoes Hey Frenchie yelled Tylor in the door you’ve got to fight the Kid      doan wanna fight him      gotto fight him hasn’t he got to fight him fellers?      Freddie pushed his face through the crack in the door and made a long nose Gotta fight him umpyaya and all the fellows on the top floor were there if not you’re a girlboy and I had on my pyjamas and they pushed in the Kid and the Kid hit Frenchie and Frenchie hit the Kid and your mouth tasted bloody and everybody yelled Go it Kid except Gummer and he yelled Bust his jaw Jack and Frenchie had the Kid down on the bed and everybody pulled him off and they all had Frenchie against the door and he was slamming right an’ left and he couldn’t see who was hitting him and everybody started to yell the Kid licked him and Tylor and Freddy held his arms and told the Kid to come and hit him but the Kid wouldn’t and the Kid was crying

the bloody sweet puky taste and then the bell rang for lights and everybody ran to their rooms and you got into bed with your head throbbing and you were crying when Gummer tiptoed in an’ said you had him licked Jack it was a fucking shame it was Freddy hit you that time, but Hoppy was tiptoeing round the hall and caught Gummer trying to get back to his room and he got his

By Thanksgiving Mac had beaten his way to Sacramento, where he got a job smashing crates in a dried fruit warehouse. By the first of the year he’d saved up enough to buy a suit of dark clothes and take the steamboat down the river to San Francisco.

It was around eight in the evening when he got in. With his suitcase in his hand, he walked up Market Street from the dock. The streets were full of lights. Young men and pretty girls in brightcolored dresses were walking fast through a big yanking wind that fluttered dresses and scarfs, slapped color into cheeks, blew grit and papers into the air. There were Chinamen, Wops, Portuguese, Japs in the streets. People were hustling to shows and restaurants. Music came out of the doors of bars, frying, buttery foodsmells from restaurants, smells of winecasks and beer. Mac wanted to go on a party but he only had four dollars so he went and got a room at the Y and ate some soggy pie and coffee in the deserted cafeteria downstairs.

When he got up in the bare bedroom like something in a hospital he opened the window, but it only gave on an airshaft. The room smelt of some sort of cleaning fluid and when he lay down on the bed the blanket smelt of formaldehyde. He felt too well. He could feel the prancing blood steam all through him. He wanted to talk to somebody, to go to a dance or have a drink with a fellow he knew or kid a girl somewhere. The smell of rouge and musky facepowder in the room of those girls in Seattle came back to him. He got up and sat on the edge of the bed swinging his legs. Then he decided to go out, but before he went he put his money in his suitcase and locked it up. Lonely as a ghost he walked up and down the streets until he was deadtired; he walked fast not looking to the right or left, brushing past painted girls at streetcorners, touts that tried to put addresscards into his hand, drunks that tried to pick fights with him, panhandlers whining for a handout. Then, bitter and cold and tired, he went back to his room and fell into bed.

Next day he went out and got a job in a small printshop run and owned by a baldheaded Italian with big whiskers and a flowing black tie, named Bonello. Bonello told him he had been a redshirt with Garibaldi and was now an anarchist. Ferrer was his great hero; he hired Mac because he thought he might make a convert out of him. All that winter Mac worked at Bonello’s, ate spaghetti and drank red wine and talked revolution with him and his friends in the evening, went to Socialist picnics or libertarian meetings on Sundays. Saturday nights he went round to whorehouses with a fellow named Miller whom he’d met at the Y. Miller was studying to be a dentist. He got to be friends with a girl named Maisie Spencer who worked in the millinery department at the Emporium. Sundays she used to try to get him to go to church. She was a quiet girl with big blue eyes that she turned up to him with an unbelieving smile when he talked revolution to her. She had tiny regular pearly teeth and dressed prettily. After a while she got so that she did not bother him so much about church. She liked to have him take her to hear the band play at the Presidio or to look at the statuary in Sutro Park.

The morning of the earthquake Mac’s first thought, when he got over his own terrible scare, was for Maisie. The house where her folks lived on Mariposa Street was still standing when he got there, but everyone had cleared out. It was not till the third day, three days of smoke and crashing timbers and dynamiting he spent working in a firefighting squad, that he found her in a provision line at the entrance to Golden Gate Park. The Spencers were living in a tent near the shattered greenhouses.

She didn’t recognise him because his hair and eyebrows were singed and his clothes were in tatters and he was soot from head to foot. He’d never kissed her before, but he took her in his arms before everybody and kissed her. When he let her go her face was all sooty from his. Some of the people in the line laughed and clapped, but the old woman right behind, who had her hair done in a pompadour askew so that the rat showed through and who wore two padded pink silk dressing gowns one above the other, said spitefully, “Now you’ll have to go and wash your face.”

After that they considered themselves engaged, but they couldn’t get married, because Bonello’s printshop had been gutted with the rest of the block it stood in, and Mac was out of a job. Maisie used to let him kiss her and hug her in dark doorways when he took her home at night, but further than that he gave up trying to go.

In the fall he got a job on the
Bulletin.
That was night work and he hardly ever saw Maisie except Sundays, but they began to talk about getting married after Christmas. When he was away from her he felt somehow sore at Maisie most of the time, but when he was with her he melted absolutely. He tried to get her to read pamphlets on socialism, but she laughed and looked up at him with her big intimate blue eyes and said it was too deep for her. She liked to go to the theater and eat in restaurants where the linen was starched and there were waiters in dress suits.

About that time he went one night to hear Upton Sinclair speak about the Chicago stockyards. Next to him was a young man in dungarees. He had a nose like a hawk and gray eyes and deep creases under his cheekbones and talked in a slow drawl. His name was Fred Hoff. After the lecture they went and had a beer together and talked. Fred Hoff belonged to the new revolutionary organization called The Industrial Workers of the World. He read Mac the preamble over a second glass of beer. Fred Hoff had just hit town as donkeyengine man on a freighter. He was sick of the bum grub and hard life on the sea. He still had his pay in his pocket and he was bound he wouldn’t blow it in on a bust. He’d heard that there was a miners’ strike in Goldfield and he thought he’d go up there and see what he could do. He made Mac feel that he was leading a pretty stodgy life helping print lies against the working class. “Godalmighty, man, you’re just the kind o’ stuff we need out there. We’re goin’ to publish a paper in Goldfield, Nevada.”

That night Mac went round to the local and filled out a card, and went home to his boarding house with his head swimming. I was just on the point of selling out to the sons of bitches, he said to himself.

The next Sunday he and Maisie had been planning to go up the Scenic Railway to the top of Mount Tamalpais. Mac was terribly sleepy when his alarmclock got him out of bed. They had to start early because he had to be on the job again that night. As he walked to the ferrystation where he was going to meet her at nine the clank of the presses was still in his head, and the sour smell of ink and paper bruised under the presses, and on top of that the smell of the hall of the house he’d been in with a couple of the fellows, the smell of moldy rooms and sloppails and the smell of armpits and the dressingtable of the frizzyhaired girl he’d had on the clammy bed and the taste of the stale beer they’d drunk and the cooing mechanical voice, “Goodnight, dearie, come round soon.”

“God, I’m a swine,” he said to himself.

For once it was a clear morning, all the colors in the street shone like bits of glass. God, he was sick of whoring round. If Maisie would only be a sport, if Maisie was only a rebel you could talk to like you could to a friend. And how the hell was he going to tell her he was throwing up his job?

She was waiting for him at the ferry looking like a Gibson girl with her neat sailorblue dress and picture hat. They didn’t have time to say anything as they had to run for the ferry. Once on the ferryboat she lifted up her face to be kissed. Her lips were cool and her gloved hand rested so lightly on his. At Sausalito they took the trolleycar and changed and she kept smiling at him when they ran to get good places in the scenic car and they felt so alone in the roaring immensity of tawny mountain and blue sky and sea. They’d never been so happy together. She ran ahead of him all the way to the top. At the observatory they were both breathless. They stood against a wall out of sight of the other people and she let him kiss her all over her face, all over her face and neck.

Scraps of mist flew past cutting patches out of their view of the bay and the valleys and the shadowed mountains. When they went round to the seaward side an icy wind was shrilling through everything. A churning mass of fog was welling up from the sea like a tidal wave. She gripped his arm. “Oh, this scares me, Fainy!” Then suddenly he told her that he’d given up his job. She looked up at him frightened and shivering in the cold wind and little and helpless; tears began to run down either side of her nose. “But I thought you loved me, Fenian . . . Do you think it’s been easy for me waitin’ for you all this time, wantin’ you and lovin’ you? Oh, I thought you loved me!”

He put his arm round her. He couldn’t say anything. They started walking towards the gravity car.

“I don’t want all those people to see I’ve been crying. We were so happy before. Let’s walk down to Muir Woods.” “It’s pretty far, Maisie.” “I don’t care; I want to.” “Gee, you’re a good sport, Maisie.” They started down the footpath and the mist blotted out everything.