The 42nd Parallel (38 page)

the magnetic ore separator,
an electric railway.         

He kept them busy at the Patent Office filing patents and caveats.

To find a filament for his electric lamp that would work, that would be a sound commercial proposition he tried all kinds of paper and cloth, thread, fishline, fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut-shells, spruce, hickory, bay, mapleshavings, rosewood, punk, cork, flax, bamboo and the hair out of a redheaded Scotchman’s beard;

whenever he got a hunch he tried it out.

In eighteen eightyseven he moved to the huge laboratories at West Orange.

He invented rockcrushers and the fluoroscope and the reeled film for movie cameras and the alkaline storage battery and the long kiln for burning out portland cement and the kinetophone that was the first talking movie and the poured cement house that is to furnish cheap artistic identical sanitary homes for workers in the electrical age.

Thomas A. Edison at eightytwo worked sixteen hours a day;

he never worried about mathematics or the social system or generalized philosophical concepts;

in collaboration with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone who never worried about mathematics or the social system or generalized philosophical concepts;

he worked sixteen hours a day trying to find a substitute for rubber; whenever he read about anything he tried it out; whenever he got a hunch he went to the laboratory and tried it out.

those spring nights the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round the curved tracks of Harvard Square dust hangs in the powdery arclight glare allnight till dawn can’t sleep

haven’t got the nerve to break out of the bellglass

four years under the ethercone breathe deep gently now that’s the way be a good boy one two three four five six get A’s in some courses but don’t be a grind be interested in literature but remain a gentleman don’t be seen with Jews or socialists

and all the pleasant contacts will be useful in Later Life say hello pleasantly to everybody crossing the yard

sit looking out into the twilight of the pleasantest four years of your life

grow cold with culture like a cup of tea forgotten between an incenseburner and a volume of Oscar Wilde cold and not strong like a claret lemonade drunk at a Pop Concert in Symphony Hall

four years I didn’t know you could do what you Michaelangelo wanted say

         Marx

                 to all

the professors with a small Swift break all the Greenoughs in the shooting gallery

but tossed with eyes smarting all the spring night reading
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
and went mad listening to the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round Harvard Square and the trains crying across the saltmarshes and the rumbling siren of a steamboat leaving dock and the blue peter flying and millworkers marching with a red brass band through the streets of Lawrence Massachusetts

it was like the Magdeburg spheres the pressure outside sustained the vacuum within

and I hadn’t the nerve

                 to jump up and walk out of doors and tell them all to

go take a flying

             Rimbaud

                     at the moon

an attack by a number of hostile airships developed before midnight. Bombs were dropped somewhat indiscriminately over localities possessing no military importance

RAILROADS WON’T YIELD AN INCH

We shall have to make the passage under conditions not entirely advantageous to us, said Captain Koenig of the
Deutschland
ninety miles on his way passing Solomon’s Island at 2:30. Every steamer passed blew his whistle in salute.

You make me what I am today

    
I hope you’re satisfied

You dragged me down and down and down

    
Until the soul within me died

Sir Roger Casement was hanged in Pentonville Gaol at nine o’clock this morning.

U-BOAT PASSES CAPES UNHINDERED

clad only in kimono girl bathers shock dairy lunch instead of first class cafe on amusement dock heavy losses shown in US crop report Italians cheered as Austrians leave hot rolls in haste to get away giant wall of water rushes down valley professor says Beethoven gives the impression of a juicy steak

PRISON’S MAGIC TURNS CITY JUNK INTO
GOLD MINE

MOON WILL HIDE PLANET SATURN FROM
SIGHT TONIGHT

BROTHERS FIGHT IN DARK

The rebels took Juarez and Huerta fled and the steamboats to Europe were packed with cientificos making for Paris and Venustiano Carranza was president in Mexico City. Somebody got Mac a pass on the Mexican Central down to the capital. Encarnacion cried when he left and all the anarchists came down to the station to see him off. Mac wanted to join Zapata. He’d picked up a little Spanish from Encarnacion and a vague idea of the politics of the revolution. The train took five days. Five times it was held up while the section hands repaired the track ahead. Occasionally at night bullets came through the windows. Near Caballos a bunch of men on horses rode the whole length of the train waving their big hats and firing as they went. The soldiers in the caboose woke up and returned the fire and the men rode off in a driving dustcloud. The passengers had to duck under the seats when the firing began or lie flat in the aisle. After the attack had been driven off an old woman started to shriek and it was found that a child had been hit through the head. The mother was a stout dark woman in a flowered dress. She went up and down the train with the tiny bloody body wrapped in a shawl asking for a doctor, but anybody could see that the child was dead.

Mac thought the trip would never end. He bought peppery food and lukewarm beer from old Indian women at stations, tried to drink pulque and to carry on conversations with his fellowpassengers. At last they passed Queretaro and the train began going fast down long grades in the cold bright air. Then the peaks of the great volcanos began to take shape in the blue beyond endless crisscrosspatterned fields of century-plants and suddenly the train was rattling between garden walls, through feathery trees. It came to a stop with a clang of couplings: Mexico City.

Mac felt lost wandering round the bright streets among the lowvoiced crowds, the men all dressed in white and the women all in black or dark blue. The streets were dusty and sunny and quiet. There were stores open and cabs and trolleycars and polished limousines. Mac was worried. He only had two dollars. He’d been on the train so long he’d forgotten what he intended to do when he reached his destination. He wanted clean clothes and a bath. When he’d wandered round a good deal he saw a place marked “American Bar.” His legs were tired. He sat down at a table. A waiter came over and asked him in English what he wanted. He couldn’t think of anything else so he ordered a whisky. He drank the whisky and sat there with his head in his hands. At the bar were a lot of Americans and a couple of Mexicans in tengallon hats rolling dice for drinks. Mac ordered another whisky. A beefy redeyed man in a rumpled khaki shirt was roaming uneasily about the bar. His eye lit on Mac and he sat down at his table. “Mind if I set here awhile, pardner?” he asked. “Those sonsobitches too damn noisy. Here, sombrero . . . wheresat damn waiter? Gimme a glassbeer. Well, I got the old woman an’ the kids off today . . . When are you pullin’ out?”

“Why, I just pulled in,” said Mac.

“The hell you say . . . This ain’t no place for a white man . . . These bandits’ll be on the town any day . . . It’ll be horrible, I tell you. There won’t be a white man left alive . . . I’ll get some of ’em before they croak me, though . . . By God, I can account for twentyfive of ’em, no, twentyfour.” He pulled a Colt out of his back pocket, emptied the chamber into his hand and started counting the cartridges, “Eight,” then he started going through his pockets and ranged the cartridges in a row on the deal table. There were only twenty. “Some sonvabitch robbed me.” A tall lanky man came over from the bar and put his hand on the redeyed man’s shoulder. “Eustace, you’d better put that away till we need it . . . You know what to do, don’t you?” he turned to Mac; “as soon as the shooting begins all American citizens concentrate at the embassy. There we’ll sell our lives to the last man.” Somebody yelled from the bar, “Hey, big boy, have another round,” and the tall man went back to the bar.

“You fellers seem to expect trouble,” said Mac.

“Trouble—my God! You don’t know this country. Did you just come in?”

“Blew in from Juarez just now.”

“You can’t have. Railroad’s all tore up at Queretaro.”

“Well, they musta got it fixed,” said Mac. “Say, what do they say round here about Zapata?”

“My God, he’s the bloodthirstiest villain of the lot . . . They roasted a feller was foreman of a sugar mill down in Morelos on a slow fire and raped his wife and daughters right before his eyes . . . My God, pardner, you don’t know what kind of country this is! Do you know what we ought to do . . . d’you know what we’d do if we had a man in the White House instead of a yellowbellied potatomouthed reformer? We’d get up an army of a hundred thousand men and clean this place up . . . It’s a hell of a fine country but there’s not one of these damn greasers worth the powder and shot to shoot ’em . . . smoke ’em out like vermin, that’s what I say . . . Every mother’s sonvabitch of ’em’s a Zapata under the skin.”

“What business are you in?”

“I’m an oil prospector, and I’ve been in this lousy hole fifteen years and I’m through. I’d have gotten out on the train to Vera Cruz today only I have some claims to settle up an’ my furniture to sell . . . You can’t tell when they’ll cut the railroad and then we won’t be able to get out and President Wilson’ll let us be shot down right here like rats in a trap . . . If the American public realized conditions down here . . . My God, we’re the laughing stock of all the other nations . . . What’s your line o’ work, pardner?”

“Printer . . . linotype operator.”

“Looking for a job?”

Mac had brought out a dollar to pay for his drinks. “I guess I’ll have to,” he said. “That’s my last dollar but one.” “Why don’t you go round to
The Mexican Herald?
They’re always needin’ English language printers . . . They can’t keep anybody down here . . . Ain’t fit for a white man down here no more . . . Look here, pardner, that drink’s on me.”

“Well, we’ll have another then, on me.”

“The fat’s in the fire in this country now, pardner . . . everything’s gone to hell . . . might as well have a drink while we can.”

That evening, after he’d eaten some supper in a little American lunchroom, Mac walked round the alameda to get the whisky out of his head before going up to
The Mexican Herald
to see if he could get a job. It would only be for a couple of weeks, he told himself, till he could get wise to the lay of the land. The tall trees on the alameda and the white statues and the fountains and the welldressed couples strolling round in the gloaming and the cabs clattering over the cobbles looked quiet enough, and the row of stonyeyed Indian women selling fruit and nuts and pink and yellow and green candies in booths along the curb. Mac decided that the man he’d talked to in the bar had been stringing him along because he was a tenderfoot.

He got a job all right at
The Mexican Herald
at thirty mex dollars a week, but round the printing plant everybody talked just like the man in the bar. That night an old Polish American who was a proofreader there took him round to a small hotel to get him a flop and lent him a couple of cartwheels till payday. “You get your wages in advance as much as you can,” said the old Pole, “one of these days there will be revolution and then goodby
Mexican Herald
. . . unless Wilson makes intervention mighty quick.” “Sounds all right to me; I want to see the social revolution,” said Mac. The old Pole laid his finger along his nose and shook his head in a peculiar way and left him.

When Mac woke up in the morning he was in a small room calsomined bright yellow. The furniture was painted blue and there were red curtains in the window. Between the curtains the long shutters were barred with vivid violet sunlight that cut a warm path across the bedclothes. A canary was singing somewhere and he could hear the flap pat flap pat of a woman making tortillas. He got up and threw open the shutters. The sky was cloudless above the redtile roofs. The street was empty and full of sunlight. He filled his lungs with cool thin air and felt the sun burning his face and arms and neck as he stood there. It must be early. He went back to bed and fell asleep again.

When Wilson ordered the Americans out of Mexico several months later Mac was settled in a little apartment in the Plaza del Carmen with a girl named Concha and two white Persian cats. Concha had been a stenographer and interpreter with an American firm and had been the mistress of an oilman for three years so she spoke pretty good English. The oilman had jumped on the train for Vera Cruz in the panic at the time of the flight of Huerta, leaving Concha high and dry. She had taken a fancy to Mac from the moment she had first seen him going into the postoffice. She made him very comfortable, and when he talked to her about going out to join Zapata, she only laughed and said peons were ignorant savages and fit only to be ruled with the whip. Her mother, an old woman with a black shawl perpetually over her head, came to cook for them and Mac began to like Mexican food, turkey with thick chocolate brown sauce and encheladas with cheese. The cats were named Porfirio and Venustiano and always slept on the foot of their bed. Concha was very thrifty and made Mac’s pay go much further than he could and never complained when he went out batting round town and came home late and with a headache from drinking tequila. Instead of trying to get on the crowded trains to Vera Cruz, Mac took a little money he had saved up and bought up the office furniture that wildeyed American businessmen were selling out for anything they could get for it. He had it piled in the courtyard back of the house where they lived. Buying it had been Concha’s idea in the first place and he used to tease her about how they’d ever get rid of it again, but she’d nod her head and say, “Wait a minute.”