“What did you do, fall in the water?” his mother demanded.
He did not answer.
“Get your clothes on. We’re going back to town. I can’t understand why they’d let a child fall in the water and just sit and get sick.”
“I didn’t fall in.” But she had gone out of the tent. He got slowly out of bed.
“Hurry up,” her voice came. “Do you need help?”
“No,” Carl said.
Carl’s mother died while he was in junior high school. He went to live with his grandmother and grandfather. They were German. His grandfather worked for the Wonder Bread Company. He slept all day long down in the cellar, coming up late at night to go to work.
It was a huge old house that his grandparents had. In the front an ancient palm tree rose up, dirty and ugly. The front porch sagged. One of the side windows was broken. Carl had a room of his own, in the back of the house, where he could see the garden. The backyard was large. It was full of cats. At night he could hear them quarreling among themselves. The yard was wild and overgrown. The garden had not been tended for years. There were many plants out in the back. Bamboo, wisteria, jungle grass. At the far end berry bushes sagged with dripping blackberries.
Early in the summertime Carl liked to go outside and stand, smelling the berries rotting in the sun, a sweet hot smell, like flesh of a person near him. He liked to go and lie down in the jungle grass near the berry bushes, smelling them, feeling them close to him. The smell of the berries, the warm wind, the movement of the bamboo all came together and made him sense life so close and tangent that he could scarcely believe there was not someone in the yard with him.
He would become tired and go to sleep, lying in the grass. When he woke from sleep he always felt loggy and saturated with the smell and presence of the garden. He would struggle to his feet and go into the house to wash his face.
Looking in the cracked mirror in the high-ceilinged old bathroom, the walls yellow and peeling, Carl would wonder at his reflection, wonder where he was going and what would finally become of him, as he grew older. His mother was dead. His grandparents were quite old. Soon he would be out on his own, earning his own living, making his own way. Where would he go? Which direction would he take? Soon he would know.
He gazed and wondered.
Sixteen
When Carl was in high school he joined the chess club and the debating team. He debated political questions with great zeal. There was one debate a week, held after school in one of the class rooms. Anyone who wanted to could come and listen. A few students came, and some of the teachers.
“You’re a good debater, Carl,” Mr. McPherson said to him one day. “When we debate against Lawrence High I want you on the team.”
Carl swelled with pleasure. “No kidding?”
“What question do you want to take? The teams usually submit sample questions.”
Carl considered. “I want to defend the Political Action Committee,” he stated. The PAC was under attack that year. Sidney Hillman was on the hook from all sides.
Mr. McPherson raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s not my idea of a good subject. Why don’t you take federal aid to schools? Wouldn’t you rather tackle that?”
“No. I want to defend the PAC. I feel a labor union has the right to make itself heard. How else can the working class gain political representation? It’s useless to expect the regular parties to represent labor. They’re firmly in the hands of reactionary big city business men.”
Mr. McPherson shook his head. “Well, we’ll see,” he murmured. He went off down the hall.
Carl had been a socialist for some time, ever since the middle of the tenth grade. He had attended a lecture on socialism by the Youth Socialist League at a neighborhood church. He contributed twenty-five cents and took home a handful of pamphlets. The pamphlets described the condition of the working masses. It was pretty awful.
“Look at this,” Carl said to Bob Baily. They were sitting at a soda fountain. It was after school. Other high school kids sat around them, throwing paper wads at each other and playing the juke box.
“What is it?” Baily said.
Carl handed him a pamphlet, folded open. “Read it.”
Baily read it, his lips moving. Presently he gave it back.
“What do you think?” Carl demanded.
“Interesting.”
“Did you know things like that went on in this country?”
“I guess not.”
“Strikers beaten, their wives terrorized. Children working fifteen hours a day.” Carl told him about a book in which a child, working in a pork refining plant, had gradually lost his feet in the pools of corrosive acid lying everywhere on the cement floor, until at last there was nothing left below his ankles.
“Terrible,” Baily said.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What are you going to do about it?”
Baily considered. He was a tall thin youth with glasses and red hair. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to get out in the streets?”
“Streets?”
“The barricades!” Carl shouted, his eyes flashing, his face alight.
Baily was puzzled. But by then their cokes had come and the matter was forgotten. Carl drank his coke, staring off into the distance.
“What are you thinking about?” Baily asked.
Carl stirred. “What?”
“What are you thinking about?”
Carl smiled a little. “Many things,” he said.
Carl went to college only one year. It was election year. A friend of his, a graduate student doing work in the political science department, was running for the office of city councilman against the corrupt Democratic and Republican candidates. Earl Norris was running on his own. He did not go along with anybody, not even with the Progressive Party, which was controlled by Stalinists.
Carl helped him with his campaign. They argued with Progressives they knew and distributed leaflets in the downtown district of town.
One night, very late, they drove through town putting up campaign posters of Norris on telephone poles. Their old Ford drove silently along, without lights. When they came to a pole Carl leaped off, ran up to the curb and stapled the poster to the pole, and then ran back.
“How’s it coming?” Norris whispered. He was behind the wheel.
“Fine.”
At the next pole, as Carl was running back to the car, a police car slid up behind them.
“All right,” the policeman said.
There was an old city law against using property of the city for campaign purposes. The telephone poles all belonged to the city. But when the judge learned that Norris was running on his own as a graduate student of the political science department he suspended sentence and let them go. It would have been thirty days.
Carl and Norris stood outside the police station in the bright sunlight. People flocked by, going to work.
“See how the reactionaries stifle the voice of the masses,” Norris grumbled.
He did not win the election. The Republican candidate won, with the Democratic candidate next. Norris received almost no votes. But at least, the Progressives didn’t get in.
“It’s pretty hard to make yourself heard,” Carl murmured.
“Someday it’ll change,” Norris said.
To stay out of military service Carl accepted a job with the American Metals Development Company, for overseas work. It was an indefinite assignment. And as long as he were with the Company he would be draft exempt.
The night before he was supposed to sail he felt a strange nostalgia begin to move around inside him. It began as he was walking back to his room after eating dinner uptown. He walked slowly, his hands in his pockets. It was a warm July night. Thousands of stars clustered overhead. Many people were out in the streets, walking along the sidewalks, men and women together, kids scampering around, high school boys in cars parked with their girls in drive-ins, eating hot dogs and ice cream.