They had three drinks each but the bar was crowded and they didn’t feel like celebrating; so they took a pint flask, which was all they could afford, up to Ben Evans’ room. Ben Evans was a dark thickset young man with very black eyes and hair. He hailed from Louisville, Kentucky. He’d had considerable schooling and was an automobile mechanic. The room was icy cold. They sat on the bed, each of them wrapped in one of his blankets.
“Well, ain’t this a way to spend Christmas?” said Mac. “Holy Jesus, it’s a good thing Fred Hoff didn’t ketch us,” Mac snickered. “Fred’s a hell of a good guy, honest as the day an’ all that, but he won’t let a feller live.” “I guess if the rest of us were more like Fred we’d get somewheres sooner.” “We would at that… Say, Mac, I’m blue as hell about all this business, this shootin’ an’ these fellers from the W.F.M. goin’ up to the Montezuma Club and playin’ round with that damn scab delegate from Washington.” “Well, none of the wobbly crowd’s done anything like that.” “No, but there’s not enough of us…” “What you need’s a drink, Ben.” “It’s just like this goddam pint, as the feller said, if we had enough of ’em we’d get fried, but we haven’t. If we had enough boys like Fred Hoff we’d have a revolution, but we haven’t.” They each had a drink from the pint and then Mac said: “Say, Ben, did you ever get a girl in trouble, a girl you liked a hellova lot?”
“Sure, hundreds of’em.”
“Didn’t it worry you?”
“For crissake, Mac, if a girl wasn’t a goddam whore she wouldn’t let you, would she?”
“Jeez, I don’t see it like that, Ben… But hell, I don’t know what to do about it… She’s a good kid, anyways, gee…”
“I don’t trust none of ’em… I know a guy onct married a girl like that, carried on and bawled an’ made out he’d knocked her up. He married her all right an’ she turned out to be a goddam whore and he got the siph off’n her… You take it from me, boy…. Love ’em and leave ’em, that’s the only way for stiffs like us.”
They finished up the pint. Mac went back to the Workman office and went to sleep with the whisky burning in his stomach. He dreamed he was walking across a field with a girl on a warm day. The whisky was hotsweet in his mouth, buzzed like bees in his ears. He wasn’t sure if the girl was Maisie or just a goddam whore, but he felt very warm and tender, and she was saying in a little hotsweet voice, “Love me up, kid,” and he could see her body through her thingauze dress as he leaned over her and she kept crooning, “Love me up, kid,” in a hotsweet buzzing.
“Hey, Mac, ain’t you ever goin’ to get waked up?” Fred Hoff, scrubbing his face and neck with a towel, was standing over him. “I want to get this place cleaned up before the gang gets here.” Mac sat up on the cot. “Yare, what’s the matter?” He didn’t have a hangover but he felt depressed, he could tell that at once.
“Say, you certainly were stinkin’ last night.”
“The hell I was, Fred… I had a coupla drinks but, Jesus…”
“I heard you staggerin’ round here goin’ to bed like any goddam scissorbill.”
“Look here, Fred, you’re not anybody’s nursemaid. I can take care of myself.”
“You guys need nursemaids… You can’t even wait till we won the strike before you start your boozin’ and whorin’ around.” Mac was sitting on the edge of the bed lacing his boots. “What in God’s name do you think we’re all hangin’ round here for… our health?” “I don’t know what the hell most of you are hangin’ round for,” said Fred Hoff and went out slamming the door.
A couple of days later it turned out that there was another fellow around who could run a linotype and Mac left town. He sold his suitcase and his good clothes for five dollars and hopped a train of flatcars loaded with ore that took him down to Ludlow. In Ludlow he washed the alkali dust out of his mouth, got a meal and got cleaned up a little. He was in a terrible hurry to get to Frisco, all the time he kept thinking that Maisie might kill herself. He was crazy to see her, to sit beside her, to have her pat his hand gently while they were sitting side by side talking the way she used to do. After those bleak dusty months up in Goldfield he needed a woman. The fare to Frisco was $11.15 and he only had four dollars and some pennies left. He tried risking a dollar in a crapgame in the back of a saloon, but he lost it right away and got cold feet and left.
Newsreel VIII
Prof Ferrer, former director of the Modern School in Barcelona who has been on trial there on the charge of having been the principal instigator of the recent revolutionary movement has been sentenced to death and will be shot Wednesday unless
Cook still pins faith on esquimaux says interior of the Island of Luzon most beautiful place on earth
QUIZZES WARM UP POLE TALK
Oh bury me not on the lone prairie
Where the wild kiyotes will howl over me
Where the rattlesnakes hiss and the wind blows free
GYPSY’S MARCHERS STORM SIN’S FORT
Nation’s Big Men Await River Trip Englewood Clubwomen Move To Uplift Drama Evangelist’s Host Thousands Strong Pierces Heart of Crowded Hushed Levee Has $3,018 and Is Arrested
GIVES MILLION IN HOOKWORM WAR
Gypsy Smith’s Spectral Parade Through South Side Red Light Region
with a bravery that brought tears to the eyes of the squad of twelve men who were detailed to shoot him Francisco Ferrer marched this morning to the trench that had been prepared to receive his body after the fatal volley
PLUNGE BY AUTO; DEATH IN RIVER
The Camera Eye (11)
the Pennypackers went to the Presbyterian church and the Pennypacker girls sang chilly shrill soprano in the choir and everybody was greeted when they went into church and outside the summer leaves on the trees wigwagged greenblueyellow through the windows and we all filed into the pew and I’d asked Mr. Pennypacker he was a deacon in the church who were the Molly Maguires?
a squirrel was scolding in the whiteoak but the Pennypacker girls all the young ladies in their best hats singing the anthem who were the Molly Maguires? thoughts, bulletholes in an old barn abandoned mine pits black skeleton tipples weedgrown dumps who were the Molly Maguires? but it was too late you couldn’t talk in church and all the young ladies best hats and pretty pink green blue yellow dresses and the squirrel scolding who were the Molly Maguires?
and before I knew it it was communion and I wanted to say I hadn’t been baptized but all eyes looked shut up when I started to whisper to Con
communion was grape juice in little glasses and little squares of stale bread and you had to gulp the bread and put your handkerchief over your mouth and look holy and the little glasses made a funny sucking noise and all the quiet church in the middle of the sunny brightblue sunday in the middle of whiteoaks wigwagging and the smell of fries from the white house and the blue quiet sunday smoke of chimneys from stoves where fried chicken sizzled and fritters and brown gravy set back to keep hot