In Dubious Battle (5 page)

Jim said fiercely, “I worked in Tulman’s Department Store. Head of the wrapping department. I was out to a picture show one night, and coming home I saw a crowd in Lincoln Square. I stopped to see what it was all about. There was a guy in the middle of the park talking. I climbed up on the pedestal of that statue of Senator Morgan so I could see better. And then I heard the sirens. I was watching the riot squad come in from the other side. Well, a squad came up from behind, too. Cop slugged me from behind, right in the back of the neck. When I came to I was already booked for vagrancy. I was rum-dum for a long time. Got hit right here.” Jim put his fingers on the back of his neck at the base of his skull. “Well, I told ’em I wasn’t a vagrant and had a job, and told ’em to call up Mr. Webb, he’s manager at Tulman’s. So they did. Webb asked where I was picked up, and the sergeant said ‘at a radical meeting,’ and then Webb said he never heard of me. So I got the rap.”

Nilson plugged in the hot plate again. The coffee started rumbling in the pot. “You look half drunk, Jim. What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know. I feel dead. Everything in the past is gone. I checked out of my rooming house before I came here. I still had a week paid for. I don’t want to go back to any of it again. I want to be finished with it.”

Nilson poured the coffee cups full. “Look, Jim, I want to give you a picture of what it’s like to be a Party member. You’ll get a chance to vote on every decision, but once the vote’s in, you’ll have to obey. When we have money we try to give field workers twenty dollars a month to eat on. I don’t remember a time when we ever had the money. Now listen to the work: In the field you’ll have to
work alongside the men, and you’ll have to do the Party work after that, sometimes sixteen, eighteen hours a day. You’ll have to get your food where you can. Do you think you could do that?”

“Yes.”

Nilson touched the desk here and there with his fingertips. “Even the people you’re trying to help will hate you most of the time. Do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why do you want to join, then?”

Jim’s grey eyes half closed in perplexity. At last he said, “In the jail there were some Party men. They talked to me. Everything’s been a mess, all my life. Their lives weren’t messes. They were working toward something. I want to work toward something. I feel dead. I thought I might get alive again.”

Nilson nodded. “I see. You’re God-damn right I see. How long did you go to school?”

“Second year in high-school. Then I went to work.”

“But you talk as though you had more school than that.”

Jim smiled. “I’ve read a lot. My old man didn’t want me to read. He said I’d desert my own people. But I read anyway. One day I met a man in the park. He made lists of things for me to read. Oh, I’ve read a hell of a lot. He made lists like Plato’s Republic, and the Utopia, and Bellamy, and like Herodotus and Gibbon and Macaulay and Carlyle and Prescott, and like Spinoza and Hegel and Kant and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He even made me read
Das Kapital.
He was a crank, he said. He said he wanted to know things without believing them. He liked to group books that all aimed in the same direction.”

Harry Nilson was quiet for a while. Then he said, “You
see why we have to be so careful. We only have two punishments, reprimand and expulsion. You’ve got to want to belong to the Party pretty badly. I’m going to recommend you, ’cause I think you’re a good man; you might get voted down, though.”

“Thanks,” said Jim.

“Now listen, have you any relatives who might suffer if you use your right name?”

“I’ve an uncle, Theodore Nolan. He’s a mechanic. Nolan’s an awful common name.”

“Yeah, I guess it is common. Have you any money?”

“About three dollars. I had some, but I spent it for the funeral.”

“Well, where you going to stay?”

“I don’t know. I cut off from everything. I wanted to start new. I didn’t want to have anything hanging over.”

Nilson looked around at the cot. “I live in this office,” he said. “I eat and sleep and work here. If you want to sleep on the floor, you can stay here for a few days.”

Jim smiled with pleasure. “I’d like that. The bunks in jail weren’t any softer than your floor.”

“Well, have you had any dinner?”

“No. I forgot it.”

Nilson spoke irritably. “If you think I’m chiseling, go ahead,” he said. “I haven’t any money. You have three dollars.”

Jim laughed. “Come on, we’ll get dried herrings and cheese and bread. And we’ll get stuff for a stew tomorrow. I can make a pretty good stew.”

Harry Nilson poured the last of the coffee into the mugs. “You’re waking up, Jim. You’re looking better. But you don’t know what you’re getting into. I can tell you
about it, but it won’t mean anything until you go through it.”

Jim looked evenly at him. “Did you ever work at a job where, when you got enough skill to get a raise in pay, you were fired and a new man put in? Did you ever work in a place where they talked about loyalty to the firm, and loyalty meant spying on the people around you? Hell, I’ve got nothing to lose.”

“Nothing except hatred,” Harry said quietly. “You’re going to be surprised when you see that you stop hating people. I don’t know why it is, but that’s what usually happens.”

ALL during the day Jim had been restive. Harry Nilson, working on a long report, had turned on him several times in exasperation. “Look,” he said finally, “you can go down to the spot alone if you want. There’s no reason why you can’t. But in an hour I’ll go down with you. I’ve got to finish this thing.”

“I wonder if I ought to change my name,” said Jim. “I wonder if changing your name would have any effect on you.”

Nilson turned back to his report. “You get some tough assignments and go to jail enough and change your name a few times, and a name won’t mean any more to you than a number.”

Jim stood by the window and looked out. A brick wall was opposite, bounding the other side of a narrow vacant lot between two buildings. A crowd of boys played handball against the building. Their yells came faintly through the closed window.

“I used to play in lots when I was a kid,” Jim said. “Seems to me we fought most of the time. I wonder if the kids fight as much as they used to.”

Harry did not pause in his writing. “Sure they do,” he said. “I look out and see ’em down there. Sure they fight.”

“I used to have a sister,” Jim went on. “She could lick nearly everybody in the lot. She was the best marble shot
I ever saw. Honest, Harry, I’ve seen her split an agate at ten feet, with her knuckles down, too.”

Harry looked up. “I didn’t know you had a sister. What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” said Jim.

“You don’t know?”

“No. It was funny—I don’t mean funny. It was one of those things that happen.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know what happened to her?” Harry laid his pencil down.

“Well, I can tell you about it,” said Jim. “Her name was May. She was a year older than I was. We always slept in the kitchen. Each had a cot. When May was about fourteen and I was thirteen, she hung a sheet across the corner to make a kind of a little closet to dress and undress behind. She got giggly, too. Used to sit on the steps downstairs with a lot of other girls, and giggle when boys went by. She had yellow hair. She was kind of pretty, I guess. Well, one evening I came home from playing ball over on Twenty-third and Fulton—used to be a vacant lot, there’s a bank there now. I climbed up to our flat. My mother said, ’Did you see May down on the steps?’ I said I hadn’t. Pretty soon my old man came home from work. He said, ‘Where’s May?’ My mother said, ‘She hasn’t come in yet.’

“It’s funny how this whole thing stands out, Harry. I remember every bit of it, what everybody said, and how everybody looked.

“We waited dinner a while, but pretty soon my old man stuck out his chin and got mad. ‘Put on the food,’ he said. ‘May’s getting too smart. She thinks she’s too big to get licked.’

“My mother had light blue eyes. I remember they looked like white stones. Well, after dinner my old man sat in his chair by the stove. And he got madder and madder. My mother sat beside him. I went to bed. I could see my mother turn her head from my father and move her lips. I guess she was praying. She was a Catholic, but my father hated churches. Every little while he’d growl out what he’d do to May when she did come home.

“About eleven o’clock both of ’em went into the bedroom, but they left the light burning in the kitchen. I could hear them talking for a long time. Two or three times in the night I woke up and saw my mother looking out from the bedroom. Her eyes looked just like white stones.”

Jim turned from the window and sat down on the cot. Harry was digging his pencil into the desk top. Jim said, “When I woke up the next morning it was sunshiny outside, and that light was still burning. It gives you a funny, lonely feeling to see a light burning in the daytime. Pretty soon my mother came out of the bedroom and started a fire in the stove. Her face was stiff, and her eyes didn’t move much. Then my father came out. He acted just as though he’d been hit between the eyes—slugged. He couldn’t get a word out. Just before he went to work, he said, ‘I think I’ll stop in at the precinct station. She might of got run over.’

“Well, I went to school, and right after school I came home. My mother told me to ask all the girls if they’d seen May. By that time the news had got around that May was gone. They said they hadn’t seen May at all. They were all shivery about it. Then my father came home. He’d been to the police station on the way home,
too. He said, ‘The cops took a description. They said they’d keep their eyes peeled.’

“That night was just like the one before. My old man and my mother sitting side by side, only my father didn’t do any talking that second night. They left the light on all night again. The next day my old man went back to the station house. Well, the cops sent a dick to question the kids on the block, and a cop came and talked to my mother. Finally they said they’d keep their eyes open. And that was all. We never heard of her again, ever.”

Harry stabbed the desk and broke his pencil point. “Was she going around with any older boys she might’ve run off with?”

“I don’t know. The girls said not, and they would have known.”

“But haven’t you an idea of what might have happened to her?”

“No. She just disappeared one day, just dropped out of sight. The same thing happened to Bertha Riley two years later—just dropped out.”

Jim felt with his hand along the line of his jaw. “It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that my mother was quieter even than before. She moved kind of like a machine, and she hardly ever said anything. Her eyes got a kind of a dead look, too. But it made my old man mad. He had to fight everything with his fists. He went to work and beat hell out of the foreman at the Monel packing house. Then he did ninety days for assault.”

Harry stared out the window. Suddenly he put down his pencil and stood up. “Come on!” he said. “I’m going
to take you down to the house and get rid of you. I’ve got to get that report out. I’ll do it when I get back.”

Jim walked to the radiator and picked off two pairs of damp socks. He rolled them up and put them in his paper bag. “I’ll dry them down at the other place,” he said.

Harry put on his hat, and folded the report and put it in his pocket. “Every once in a while the cops go through this place,” he explained. “I don’t leave anything around.” He locked the office door as he went out.

They walked through the business center of the city, and past blocks of apartment houses. At last they came to a district of old houses, each in its own yard. Harry turned into a driveway. “Here we are. It’s in back of this house.” They followed the gravelled drive, and in back came to a tiny cottage, newly painted. Harry walked to the door and opened it, and motioned Jim inside.

The cottage contained one large room and a kitchenette. In the big room there were six steel cots, made up with army blankets. Three men were in the room, two lying on cots and one large man, with the face of a scholarly prizefighter, pecking slowly at a typewriter.

He looked up quickly when Harry opened the door, and then stood up and came forward smiling. “Hello, Harry,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

“This is Jim Nolan,” Harry explained. “Remember? His name came up the other night. Jim, this is Mac. He knows more about field work than anybody in the state.”

Mac grinned. “Glad to see you, Jim,” he said.

Harry, turning to go, said, “Take care of him, Mac. Put him to work. I’ve got to get out a report.” He waved to the two who were lying down. “’Bye, boys.”

When the door was closed, Jim looked about the room. The wallboarded walls were bare. Only one chair was in the room, and that stood in front of the typewriter. From the kitchenette came an odor of boiling corned beef. He looked back at Mac, at his broad shoulders and long arms, at his face, wide between the cheek-bones with flat planes under the eyes like those of a Swede. Mac’s lips were dry and cracked. He looked at Jim as closely as he was being inspected.

Suddenly he said, “Too bad we’re not dogs, we could get that all over with. We’d either be friends or fighting by now. Harry said you were O.K., and Harry knows. Come on, meet the boys. This pale one here is Dick, a bedroom radical. We get many a cake because of Dick.”

The pale, dark-haired boy on the bed grinned and held out his hand.

Mac went on, “See how beautiful he is? We call him the Decoy. He tells ladies about the working classes, and we get cakes with pink frosting, huh, Dick?”

“Go to hell,” said Dick pleasantly.

Mac, guiding Jim by his arm, turned him toward the man on the other cot. It was impossible to tell how old he was. His face was wizened and battered, his nose crushed flat against his face; his heavy jaw sagged sideways. “This is Joy,” said Mac. “Joy is a veteran, aren’t you, Joy?”

“Damn right,” said Joy. His eyes flared up, then almost instantly the light went out of them again. His head twitched several times. He opened his mouth to speak, but he only repeated, “Damn right,” very solemnly, as though it finished off an argument. He caressed one hand with the other. Jim saw that they were crushed and scarred.