“This town has sure changed a lot in the last forty years,” he said. “Used to be Indians right where we’re walking. All this was a kind of desert. You had to ride a horse to get anywhere.”
“Did you used to live here forty years ago?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “How old do you think I am?”
“About sixty,” I said.
“Seventy-seven my last birthday,” he corrected me. “The name is Bill Cox. You going anywhere?”
I said I wasn’t.
“Why not drop in on me and the missus?” he said. “Live right near here. She didn’t feel in the mood for night life, so I’m bringing her home a sandwich.”
I became a friend of Bill Cox and his wife. The three of us would walk together in the streets at night sometimes, but more often just Bill and I would promenade. He talked chiefly about the Spanish-American War in which he had been a soldier and about Abraham Lincoln. These two topics were very exciting to him.
I had never heard of the Spanish-American War. I must have been absent from school the week it was studied by my history class.
Bill Cox explained the whole war to me, its causes and all its battles. And he also told me the life of Abraham Lincoln from his birth onward. Walking with Bill Cox in the lighted Hollywood streets and hearing stories about the Spanish-American War and Abraham Lincoln, I didn’t feel lonely and the sidewalk wolves didn’t “hi-baby” me.
One evening Bill Cox told me he was going back to Texas.
“I’m feeling a little sick,” he said, “and I’d hate to die anyplace except in Texas.”
He sent me a few letters from Texas. I answered them. Then a letter came from his wife saying Bill Cox had died in an old soldiers’ home in Texas. I read the letter in the restaurant where I had met him and walked home crying. The Hollywood streets seemed lonelier than ever without Bill Cox and San Juan and Abraham Lincoln.
7
another soldier boy
Sundays were the loneliest. You couldn’t look for a job on Sundays or pretend you were shopping in stores. All you could do was walk as if you were going someplace.
On one of these walks I discovered a place to go on Sundays. It was the Union Station. All the trains from all over the country came in at the Union Station. It was a beautiful building, and it was always crowded with people carrying suitcases and babies.
After that, I used to go there on Sundays and stay most of the day. I would watch people greeting each other when the train crowds entered the waiting room. Or saying good-bye to each other.
They seemed to be mostly poor people. Although now and then some well-dressed travelers would appear. But chiefly it was the poor people who kept coming in and going away on trains.
You learned a lot watching them. You learned that pretty wives adored homely men and good-looking men adored homely wives. And that people in shabby clothes, carrying raggedy bundles and with three or four sticky kids clinging to them, had faces that could light up like Christmas trees when they saw each other. And you watched really homely men and women, fat ones and old ones, kiss each other as tenderly as if they were lovers in a movie.
In addition to the Union Station, there were street corner meetings to attend. These were usually of a religious nature.
I used to stand for hours listening to the minister talking from a box. I noticed it was never really a soap box but usually an empty soft drink crate on which he stood.
The talk would be about God and the minister would call on his listeners to give Him their souls and their love.
I watched the faces of the listeners when the minister would cry out how much God loved them and how much they needed to set themselves right with God. They were faces without any argument in them, just tired faces that were glad to hear Somebody loved them.
When it came time to take up the collection I usually slipped away. I usually didn’t have even a dime in my purse for carfare. Sometimes, however, I felt flush enough to drop a half dollar in the collection hat.
I got in the habit of not making up my face on Sundays or combing my hair or wearing stockings. I felt I fitted in better that way with the people in the Union Station and at the corner meetings. As for clothes, I didn’t have to worry about being overdressed.
One Sunday morning I was walking in one of the streets near the Union Station looking for a meeting to attend, when a young man in a soldier’s coat greeted me.
“Help the disabled war veterans,” he said. “Give the crippled war heroes a chance for recovery.”
He was carrying a box full of cards with small tin stars pinned on them.
“Five silver stars for fifty cents,” he said. “Buy them to give to your friends to remind them of our wounded veterans.”
I noticed he was young, around twenty-five, and he had a serious voice and a serious face.
“I’m sorry I can’t buy any,” I said to him. “I haven’t any money.”
“You got fifty cents,” he answered. “That’s all they cost—five stars for fifty cents. Don’t you want to help the war wounded?”
“I would like to very much,” I said, “but I haven’t even carfare to ride home. I have to walk.”
“You don’t say,” he said. “You haven’t even got a dime, eh?”
“Not today,” I said. “I’ll have some money tomorrow, and if I should see you then I’ll be glad to buy your silver stars.”
I noticed that we were walking together. He had put the cover on the box he was carrying.
“I wouldn’t let you buy these tin stars tomorrow if I met you,” he suddenly spoke up.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because they’re fakes,” he said. “The money doesn’t go to any war wounded. Half of what I get I keep. The other half goes to a couple crooks I’m working for. Where you going?”
“I was going to one of those meetings on the corner,” I said.
“There’s one a couple blocks down,” he said. “I just worked the crowd there. I got three bucks.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m really a war veteran myself,” he went on. “There’s no fake about that. I was in France and Germany. Infantry. The reason I’m working for these crooks now selling these fake stars is I don’t want to go home. My pa wants me, but I don’t want to go.”
“Why don’t you?” I asked.
“Because he wants me to work on his farm,” he said. “He’s got a farm in Ohio. I said to him, nothing doing. I’m not going to be a lousy farmer and work all my life for nothing like you. We had a fight, and I lit out. I was on the bum a while and couldn’t connect with a job. Then I run into this outfit with the fake stars. They bought me a couple drinks, and I agreed to go in with them. It’s easy money.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he stopped walking.
“Can you stand here awhile?” he said. “I want to ask you something.”
I stood in front of a grocery store. He smiled at me for the first time.
“What I want to ask you,” he said, “is if you’ll marry me.”
I didn’t answer him.
“I mean it,” he got excited. “If you’ll marry me, I’ll go back to the farm with you. And I’ll be a farmer. It wouldn’t be so bad. We could have fun. There’s a town twenty miles away. What do you say?”
“You don’t even know who I am or what I am,” I said.
“I like your looks,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of girls. There’s something about you I like. It’s different.”
“You shouldn’t ask a strange girl to marry you,” I said. “You’re liable to get into trouble.”
“What trouble?” he asked.
“What if she were somebody no good, some criminal or something?” I said.