We walked fast along the creek, cut through the Malstar place to the road and then followed the railroad tracks to town.
“Better not let father see us,” Joe said. “He’d sure be mad.”
There was a packing shed right at the end of the grove, and we climbed on the platform and sat on some lug boxes, waiting. It was pretty quiet at first. Away off a train whistled twice and you could hear the engine puffing, the night was so still. In the grove people were talking and through the trees you could see them sitting around their fires.
A lot of automobiles were parked in front of the stores that faced the main street and up at the end of the line was our buckboard, the only one there, but father wasn’t in it.
Someone was talking in a loud voice over by John Good’s store. We moved our boxes back so no one could see us, and waited, and then a lot of men were crossing the road to the grove. It was too dark to see who they were, but I knew they were farmers and that father was probably with them. The crowd stopped not far from the tracks, right in front of us. Out of the trees came a bunch of men and the big man was in front.
I looked all through the crowd but couldn’t see father, and that made me feel better. Emory Whitfield stepped forward and began to yell, “Get the hell out of our town or we’ll run you out, you damned Bolsheviks.”
“We’re harming no one,” the big man said. “We have a right to do as we please.”
“Not in this town, you don’t.” Jake Cole moved toward the tramps beside the hunchback. “Pack up your trash and get out of here.”
“We stay here,” the big man said.
The farmers moved closer. A couple of them had shotguns under their arms. Others were carrying pitchforks and lumber. The tramps edged backward, all but the big man.
“They won’t hurt us,” he said.
“Not if you clear out we won’t,” Jake said.
“Don’t let them frighten you,” the big man told the other tramps.
The hunchback started to yell again, running back and forth between the crowds of men, yelling at the farmers to run the tramps out of town.
Someone was coming fast across the road. It was father, and Old Tim, the constable, trying to keep up with him.
“Let Tim handle this,” father told the farmers. “I routed him out and brought him over here. It’s his job. You boys go on home before you get into trouble.”
“You keep your nose out of this,” Jake said.
The hunchback was jumping up and down in front of father. “You got a mess of kids to do your work,” he said. “You don’t have to worry none. Come butting in here when it’s none of your damn business.”
“Send ’em all home, Tim,” father said. “To-morrow you can clear the camp out. Old man Galt will give you an order. But hell, they can’t move to-night.”
Jake stepped up close to father. “I said to keep your nose out of this.” Jake was pretty big but my father was a head taller and a lot broader. He grabbed Jake’s shoulder, spun him around, and planted his foot in the seat of Jake’s pants. “You got that coming to you, Jake,” he said. “Run along home.”
One of the farmers raised a club.
“Look out, father,” I yelled. It didn’t do any good. The two by four smashed against his head, he put up his hands, moved around like he was dizzy, and then fell down. Joe jumped off the platform screaming “Father, father” at the top of his voice, and I jumped after him.
And as we ran toward the crowd the big man jumped forward, grabbed Jake, and hurled him at the farmers. I caught Joe and held him because we couldn’t do any good. He kept screaming, clawing at my hands to get loose, and over his head I saw the men fighting, the big man hitting at the people I knew with his fists, all alone because the other tramps had run into the grove.
“Red. Bolshevik. Rooshian,” the hunchback was yelling. “Kill the bastard Rooshian.”
Hal Bradley grappled with the big man, but he was thin, and the tramp picked him up and tossed him out of the way as though he were a little boy. Then the big man stood there, telling them to come on, telling them to drive him out of town.
A gun went off and a red flame pointed at the big man. He put his hands over his belly and started moving backward, very slowly, toward the grove, but he didn’t get there. Maybe he tripped over something, I don’t know; but he fell down and a woman came running out to him, took his head in her arms, and started to cry.
All of a sudden the farmers were gone and father was sitting up, holding his head and swearing. We went over to him, and Joe held on to him tight and kept asking, “You all right, father, you all right?”
Old Tim helped father up and we all went over and looked at the big man. He wasn’t groaning, just lying stretched out with his head in the woman’s lap, and she was crying.
In the grove the fruit tramps were tearing the tents down and packing their stuff in automobiles, and inside of an hour there was only one tent left in the grove. That belonged to the big man and he didn’t need it any more.
James M. Cain
(1892–1977)
In the 1930s and 1940s, James M. Cain was the most talked-about writer in the United States. His novels of that period, like the work of Dashiell Hammett a few years earlier, broke new ground in crime fiction. Until the publication of The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934, sex was a topic handled with kid gloves and almost always peripheral to the central storyline. Cain made sex the primary motivating force of his fiction and presented it to his readers frankly, at times steamily.
But Cain was much more than just a purveyor of what one of his critics termed “hard-boiled eroticism.” His best works are masterful studies of average people caught up in and often destroyed by passion of one type or another: adultery, incest, hatred, greed, lust. They are also sharp, clear portraits of the times and places in which they were written, especially California during the Depression. As Cain himself said of his work in his preface to Three of a Kind (1942): “I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent.”
This is as true of his relatively few short stories as it is of such novels as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Serenade (1937), Love’s Lovely Counterfeit (1942), and Double Indemnity (1943). The best of his shorter pieces were collected in The Baby in the Icebox (1981); of these, “Brush Fire” is particularly fine. Its spare, elemental style (which “possesses the sleeve-holding, hypnotic power of an ancient Mariner’s tale,” in one reviewer’s eloquent phrase), sexual motivation, vivid depiction of life during the Depression, and grimly inevitable conclusion give it some of the powerful impact of Postman.
B. P.
Brush Fire
(1936)
He banged sparks with his shovel, coughed smoke, cursed the impulse that had led him to heed that rumor down in the railroad yards that CCC money was to be had by all who wanted to fight this fire the papers were full of, up in the hills. Back home he had always heard them called forest fires, but they seemed to be brush fires here in California. So far, all he had got out of it was a suit of denims, a pair of shoes, and a ration of stew, served in an army mess kit. For that he had ridden twenty miles in a jolting truck out from Los Angeles to these parched hills, stood in line an hour to get his stuff, stood in line another hour for the stew, and then labored all night, the flames singeing his hair, the ground burning his feet through the thick brogans, the smoke searing his lungs, until he thought he would go frantic if he didn’t get a whiff of air.