Up ahead, I could see the brakeman coming. I didn’t move. When he got to me I waved. “Hiya, big boy.”
“Hiya.”
18
For three days I sat around the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles, washing dishes for my grub and sleeping in their main dormitory. But it kept worrying me, spending nights with other guys. I was afraid I might talk in my sleep. I picked up a buck or two on some parking lot and moved to a little hotel over on Sixth Street, fifty cents a night and no questions asked. For the first time since I’d been on the road I signed in under my own name, because I wanted it in black and white I was in California, not Nevada. I kept talking to the clerk like he must remember me, and saying how glad I was to be back in Los Angeles from up in Fresno. It turned out he was new there. But then something happened that helped quite a lot. A guy came downstairs, carrying a vacuum cleaner, and telling how well he’d cleaned the upper halls, and the clerk said fine, he’d mark him paid right now. So he did. It was just an old-fashioned register, where guys signed their names, or F.D. Roosevelt, or whatever, with their address, if they had one. On the right-hand side was the room number, and beside this was marked “pd.” Soon as I handed over my fifty cents I was marked “pd.” But if this guy was working for his bed, and all they did about it was mark him “pd.” too, that meant there was no cross-check on cash, and that meant, if a name was there, a few days back, this clerk wouldn’t know if the face behind the name had been there or not. I watched my chance, then went to the register and began turning pages. I found July 10, the day we held up the station. The page was full up, solid. I looked at July 9. It was full. But on July 8 there was a blank line. I picked up the pen and wrote “Jack Dillon, City.” Then beside that I wrote a room number, and then with my thumb I smudged it. Then beside it I wrote “pd. pd. pd. pd.” All that time I watched the clerk. He went right on with what he was doing. I went up to my room, lay down, and felt better. It wasn’t much of an alibi, but it was some kind of alibi.
I felt better, but not much better. By day, I tramped around to every garage, shop, and filling station I could find, trying to land a job, and now and then picking up a buck fixing flats. If things had been bad before, they were as bad now as they could get. By night I worked on my clothes with spot remover, then pressed them under the mattress, trying to get myself in some kind of shape in case a chance would come. But it all spelled Skid Row, and sooner or later I knew Hosey would come along, or I’d bump into him in some soup kitchen, and what that would lead to I didn’t know. Maybe he was harmless, but I was afraid of him. So pretty soon, when I got two parking jobs in a row, and had five dollars I could call my own, I made up my mind to blow. Where I didn’t know, but I marched myself up to the bus depot at the corner and bought me a ticket for some town down the line.
We were slowing down in Whittier, I guess a little before eight in the morning, when I noticed a bunch of men standing around on the sidewalk. They were in jeans and looked like Mexicans, but I knew they were guys hoping for work. I still had thirty or forty cents’ worth of ticket, but at the next stop I got out and went legging it back to the mob. I guess there were twenty or thirty of them, all talking Spanish, but I found out they’d come down from L.A. for lemon-picking, on a call from a state bureau. Pretty soon a door opened and we all went inside an office, where a tall guy with a hatchet face began talking in some kind of Spanish. I pushed up front but he kept passing me by, and the Mexicans had all been given cards with numbers, and were back outside, waiting for a truck to pick them up, before he turned to me. “What’s your name?”
“Jack Dillon.”
“You American?”
“Native.”
“What do you want?”
“Work.”
“This is lemons. You want that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Got to eat.”
“What else have you tried?”
“Fixing flats, washing cars, parking jalopies, sacking wheat, shoveling guano, blacksmithing drills, panhandling, and stealing. I’ve tried everything there is, from East to West, and North to South and back again, and if there’s a living in any one of them, I don’t know which one it is. If lemons are what I’ve got to pick, then I mean to get at it, but what you’ve got to do with what I’ve tried, I don’t exactly know.”
“You tried the CCC?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“They wouldn’t have me.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve got to be certified. I won’t go home.”
“What other reason?”
“Commies.”
“Then O.K. Let’s talk. To me, an American’s as good as a wetback, who is a Mexican that we don’t know how he got here and we’re much too polite to ask, but if he happened accidentally on purpose to do it by swimming the Rio Grande River, his hindside would be a little wet.”
“One would think so.”
“Just the same, I don’t recommend this job to you.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“You can’t stand it.”
“How do you know what I can stand?”
“All I know is what I found out from twenty years in the business and watching about eighteen hundred other Americans go down there and topple over in the heat and quit before lunchtime. A Mexican, he was born to heat, and before you or I or Columbo ever got here he was working in an Aztec chain gang with a tump line over his head and a whip over his back so a nice lemon grove 110 in the shade practically looks to him like a political job. If you want it, it’s yours, and here’s your identification. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Thanks. Sorry I blew my top.”
“That’s O.K. God knows what you’ll blow next.”
We rode down in a truck, all of us jammed so close together standing on each other’s feet I hated to think what would happen if we hit something. Two or three miles out of town we turned in between two concrete pillars and began running between miles and miles of orange groves and lemon groves and grapefruit groves, with concrete water pipes all around. Some of the fruit was in bloom, and some of it was ripe and some half ripe, there didn’t seem to be any rule about it. Then we came to the ranch houses, the main office and store and mess hall and commissary and bunkhouse and garage and employees’ houses, all painted white with green trim and looking like a dairy would look in the East, or maybe a horse farm in Kentucky. We piled out and went in the office and turned in our cards and got rings and nippers and chalk. The rings are made of heavy wire bent with a ring to measure lemons and a little one for a handle. The lemons are bigger than the ring, then O.K., cut them even if they’re green. In the packing house they’ll grade for storage and don’t have to be sold right away, as happens with tree-ripened fruit. If they go through the ring, let them hang. The nippers were for cutting. The chalk was to mark your number on your boxes. That stuff they issue to you when you come in and take up when you go. On lunch boxes, you were supposed to bring your own, and Mr. Holtz, the super, seemed annoyed that I didn’t have any, though it seemed to help that I had a canteen. He asked me some questions, and then, after he sent the others off to work in the truck, took me over to the company store, fixed me up with a box, and said I’d better take something to eat with me, or I might get a little weak before night. I took a can of beans, and he was surprised I could pay and he didn’t have to write me an order. Then he took me to the bunkhouse, assigned me a bunk, and said I’d do better if I shed all my clothes except the khakis, undershirt, and hat. I changed, and while he wasn’t looking smelled the blankets. They smelled like hay, and were clean. I made up my mind that short of falling dead I’d have that bunk. We went to the trees in his car, and on the way passed the jalopies of the fruit tramps, with tents put up beside them, that stunk so bad I was glad when we were by. Now they’re called Okies and Arkies and Louies, as they’ve been written up and it has been discovered what wonderful characters they’ve got, but then they were just fruit tramps, whole families of men, women, and children that travel around, and pick fruit and fight and stink. “Just what is the system here, Mr. Holtz? I mean, where do I eat, where do I bathe, how does it work? I’m a little new, and I’d like to know.”