That night when Mac let himself in by the latchkey he was surprised to find the light on in the hall. Maisie was sitting half asleep on the hall settee with a blanket wrapped round her waiting for him. He was pleased to see her and went up to kiss her. “What’s the matter, baby?” he said. She pushed him away from her and jumped to her feet.
“You thief,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep till I told you what I thought of you. I suppose you’ve been spending it on drink or on some other woman. That’s why I never see you any more.”
“Maisie, calm down, old girl… What’s the matter; let’s talk about it quietly.”
“I’ll get a divorce, that’s what I’ll do. Stealing money from your own children to make yourself a bum with… your own poor little…”
Mac drew himself up and clenched his fists. He spoke very quietly, although his lips were trembling.
“Maisie, I had an absolute right to take out that money. I’ll deposit some more in a week or two, and it’s none of your damn business.”
“A fat chance you saving up fifty dollars; you aren’t man enough to make a decent living for your wife and children so you have to take it out of your poor little innocent children’s bank account,” Maisie broke out into dry sobbing.
“Maisie, that’s enough of that… I’m about through.”
“I’m the one that’s through with you and your ungodly socialistic talk. That never got nobody anywheres, and the lowdown bums you go around with… I wish to God I’d never married you. I never would have, you can be damn well sure of that if I hadn’t got caught the way I did.”
“Maisie, don’t talk like that.”
Maisie walked straight up to him, her eyes wide and feverish.
“This house is in my name; don’t forget that.”
“All right, I’m through.”
Before he knew it he had slammed the door behind him and was walking down the block. It began to rain. Each raindrop made a splatter the size of a silver dollar in the dust of the street. It looked like stage rain round the arclight. Mac couldn’t think where to go. Drenched, he walked and walked. At one corner there was a clump of palms in a yard that gave a certain amount of shelter. He stood there a long time shivering. He was almost crying thinking of the warm gentleness of Maisie when he used to pull the cover a little way back and slip into bed beside her asleep when he got home from work in the clanking sour printing plant, her breasts, the feel of the nipples through the thin nightgown; the kids in their cots out on the sleepingporch, him leaning over to kiss each of the little warm foreheads. “Well, I’m through,” he said aloud as if he were speaking to somebody else. Then only did the thought come to him, “I’m free to see the country now, to work for the movement, to go on the bum again.”
Finally he went to Ben Evans’ boarding house. It was a long time before he could get anybody to come to the door. When he finally got in Ben sat up in bed and looked at him stupid with sleep. “What the hell?” “Say, Ben, I’ve just broken up housekeepin’… I’m goin’ to Mexico.” “Are the cops after you? For crissake, this wasn’t any place to come.” “No, it’s just my wife.” Ben laughed. “Oh, for the love of Mike!” “Say, Ben, do you want to come to Mexico and see the revolution?” “What the hell could you do in Mexico?… Anyway, the boys elected me secretary of local 257… I got to stay here an’ earn my seventeenfifty. Say, you’re soaked; take your clothes off and put on my workclothes hangin’ on the back of the door… You better get some sleep. I’ll move over.”
Mac stayed in town two weeks until they could get a man to take his place at the linotype. He wrote Maisie that he was going away and that he’d send her money to help support the kids as soon as he was in a position to. Then one morning he got on the train with twentyfive dollars in his pocket and a ticket to Yuma, Arizona. Yuma turned out to be hotter’n the hinges of hell. A guy at the railroad men’s boarding house told him he’d sure die of thirst if he tried going into Mexico there, and nobody knew anything about the revolution, anyway. So he beat his way along the Southern Pacific to El Paso. Hell had broken loose across the border, everybody said. The bandits were likely to take Juarez at any moment. They shot Americans on sight. The bars of El Paso were full of ranchers and mining men bemoaning the good old days when Porfirio Diaz was in power and a white man could make money in Mexico. So it was with beating heart that Mac walked across the international bridge into the dusty-bustling adobe streets of Juarez.
Mac walked around looking at the small trolleycars and the mules and the wafts daubed with seablue and the peon women squatting behind piles of fruit in the marketplace and the crumbling scrollface churches and the deep bars open to the street. Everything was strange and the air was peppery to his nostrils and he was wondering what he was going to do next. It was late afternoon of an April day. Mac was sweating in his blue flannel shirt. His body felt gritty and itchy and he wanted a bath. “Gettin’ too old for this kinda stuff,” he told himself. At last he found the house of a man named Ricardo Perez whom one of the Mexican anarchists in Los Angeles had told him to look up. He had trouble finding him in the big house with an untidy courtyard, on the edge of town. None of the women hanging out clothes seemed to understand Mac’s lingo. At last Mac heard a voice from above in carefully modulated English. “Come up if you are looking for Ricardo Perez… please… I am Ricardo Perez.” Mac looked up and saw a tall bronzecolored grayhaired man in an old tan duster leaning from the top gallery of the courtyard. He went up the iron steps. The tall man shook hands with him.
“Fellowworker McCreary… My comrades wrote me you were coming.” “That’s me, allright… I’m glad you talk English.” “I lived in Santa Fe many years and in Brockton, Massachusetts. Sit down… please… I am very happy to welcome an American revolutionary worker… Though our ideas probably do not entirely agree we have much in common. We are comrades in the big battle.” He patted Mac on the shoulder and pressed him into a chair. “Please.” There were several little yellow children in torn shirts running round barefoot. Ricardo Perez sat down and took the smallest on his knee, a little girl with kinky pigtails and a smudged face. The place smelt of chile and scorched olive oil and children and washing. “What are you going to do in Mexico, fellowworker?”
Mac blushed. “Oh, I want to kinda get into things, into the revolution.”
“The situation is very confusing here… Our townworkers are organizing and are classconscious but the peons, the peasants, are easily misled by unscrupulous leaders.”
“I want to see some action, Perez… I was living in Los Angeles an’ gettin’ to be a goddam booster like the rest of ’em. I can earn my keep in the printin’ line, I guess.”
“I must introduce you to the comrades… Please… We will go now.”
Blue dusk was swooping down on the streets when they went out. Lights were coming out yellow. Mechanical pianos jinglejangled in bars. In a gateway a little outoftune orchestra was playing. The market was all lit up by flares, all kinds of shiny brightcolored stuff was for sale at booths. At a corner an old Indian and an old broadfaced woman, both of them blind and heavily pockmarked, were singing a shrill endless song in the middle of a dense group of short thickset country people, the women with black shawls over their heads, the men in white cotton suits like pajamas.
“They sing about the murder of Madero… It is very good for the education of the people… You see they cannot read the papers so they get their news in songs… It was your ambassador murdered Madero. He was a bourgeois idealist but a great man… Please… Here is the hall…. You see that sign says “Viva the Revindicating Revolution prelude to the Social Revolution.” This is the hall of the Anarchist Union of Industry and Agriculture. Huerta has a few federales here but they are so weak they dare not attack us. Ciudad Juarez is heart and soul with the revolution… Please… you will greet the comrades with a few words.”