In Dubious Battle (6 page)

Mac explained, “Joy won’t shake hands with anybody. Bones are all broken. It hurts Joy to shake hands.”

The light flared in Joy’s eyes again. “Why is it?” he cried shrilly. “’Cause I’ve been beat, that’s why! I been handcuffed to a bar and beat over the head. I been stepped on by horses.” He shouted, “I been beat to hell, ain’t I, Mac?”

“That’s right, Joy.”

“And did I ever crawl, Mac? Didn’t I keep on calling ’em sons-of-bitches till they knocked me cold?”

“That’s right, Joy. And if you’d kept your trap shut, they wouldn’t have knocked you cold.”

Joy’s voice rose to a frenzy. “But they was sons-of-bitches. I told ’em, too. Let ’em beat me over the head with my hands in ’cuffs. Let ’em ride over me! See that hand? That was rode over with a horse. But I told ’em, didn’t I, Mac?”

Mac leaned over and patted him. “You sure did, Joy. Nobody’s going to make you keep quiet.”

“Damn right,” said Joy, and the light went out of his eyes again.

Mac said, “Come on over here, Jim.” He led him to the other end of the room, where the typewriter stood on a little table. “Know how to type?”

“A little,” said Jim.

“Thank God! You can get right to work.” Mac lowered his voice. “Don’t mind Joy. He’s slug-nutty. He’s been smacked over the head too much. We take care of him and try to keep him out of trouble.”

“My old man was like that,” said Jim. “One time I found him in the street. He was walking in big circles off to the left. I had to steer him straight. A scab had smashed
him under the ear with a pair of brass knuckles. Seemed to affect his sense of direction.”

“Now look here,” said Mac. “Here’s a general letter. I’ve got four carbons in the typewriter. We’ve got to have twenty copies. You want to get to it while I fix some supper?”

“Sure,” said Jim.

“Well, hit the keys hard. Those carbon sheets aren’t much good.” Mac went into the kitchen calling, “Dick, come out and peel some onions if you can stand the horrible smell.”

Dick got up from the couch; after rolling the sleeves of his white shirt neatly above his elbows, he followed Mac into the kitchen.

Jim had just started his heavy, deliberate typing when Joy eased himself off the couch and walked over. “Who produces the goods?” Joy demanded.

“Why—the workers,” said Jim.

A foxy look came on Joy’s face, a very wise and secret look. “And who takes the profits?”

“The people with invested capital.”

Joy shouted, “But they don’t produce nothing. What right they got to the profits?”

Mac looked in through the kitchen door. He walked quickly over, a stirring spoon in his hand. “Now listen to me, Joy,” he said. “Stop trying to convert our own people. Jesus Christ, it seems to me our guys spend most of their time converting each other. Now you go back and rest, Joy. You’re tired. Jim here’s got work to do. After he finishes, I’ll maybe let you address some of the letters, Joy.”

“Will you, Mac? Well, I sure told ’em, didn’t I, Mac? Even when they was smackin’ me, I told ’em.”

Mac took him gently by the elbow and led him back to his cot. “Here’s a copy of
New Masses.
You just look at the pictures till I get dinner ready.”

Jim pounded away at the letter. He wrote it four times and laid the twenty copies beside the typewriter. He called into the kitchen, “Here they are, all ready, Mac.”

Mac came in and looked at some of the copies. “Why, you type fine, Jim. You don’t cross out hardly anything. Now here’s some envelopes. Put these letters in. We’ll address ’em after we eat.”

Mac filled the plates with corned beef and carrots and potatoes and raw sliced onions. Each man retired to his cot to eat. The daylight was dim in the room until Mac turned on a powerful unshaded light that hung from the center of the ceiling.

When they had finished, Mac went into the kitchen again and returned with a platter of cup cakes. “Here’s some more of Dick’s work,” he said. “That Dick uses the bedroom for political purposes. Gentlemen, I give you the DuBarry of the Party!”

“You go to hell,” said Dick.

Mac picked up the sealed envelopes from Jim’s bed. “Here’s twenty letters. That’s five for each one of us to address.” He pushed the plates aside on the table, and from a drawer brought out a pen and a bottle of ink. Then, drawing a list from his pocket, he carefully addressed five of the envelopes. “Your turn, Jim. You do these five.”

“What’s it for?” Jim asked.

“Well, I guess it don’t make much difference, but it
might make it a little harder. We’re getting our mail opened pretty regular. I just thought it might make it a little harder for the dicks if all these addresses were in different writing. We’ll put one of each in a mail box, you see. No good looking for trouble.”

While the other two men were writing their addresses, Jim picked up the dishes, carried them into the kitchen and stacked them on the sinkboard.

Mac was stamping the letters and putting them into his pocket when Jim came back. Mac said, “Dick, you and Joy wash the dishes tonight. I did ’em alone last night. I’m going out to mail these letters. Want to walk with me, Jim?”

“Sure,” said Jim. “I’ve got a dollar. I’ll get some coffee, and we’ll have some when we get back.”

Mac held out his hand. “We’ve got some coffee. We’ll get a dollar’s worth of stamps.”

Jim handed him the dollar. “That cleans me,” he said. “It’s the last cent I have.” He followed Mac out into the evening. They walked along the street looking for mailboxes. “Is Joy really nuts?” Jim asked.

“Pretty nuts, all right. You see the last thing that happened to him was the worst. Joy was speaking at a barber shop. The barber put in a call and the cops raided the meeting. Well, Joy’s a pretty tough fighter. They had to break his jaw with a night stick to stop him; then they threw him in the can. Well, I don’t know how Joy did much talking with a busted jaw, but he must have worked on the doctor in the jail some, ’cause the doctor said he wouldn’t treat a God-damn red, and Joy lay there three full days with a broken jaw. He’s been screwy ever since.
I expect he’ll be put away pretty soon. He’s just taken it on the conk too often.”

“Poor devil,” said Jim.

Mac drew his bundle of envelopes from his pocket and collected five in different handwritings. “Well, Joy just never learned to keep his mouth shut. Look at Dick. Not a mark on him. And that pretty Dick’s just as tough as Joy is when there’s some good in it. But just as soon as Dick gets picked up he starts calling the cops ‘sir,’ and they got him sitting in their laps before he gets through with them. Joy’s got no more sense than a bulldog.”

They found the last of four mail boxes on the edge of Lincoln Square, and after Mac had deposited his letters the two of them strolled slowly up the brick walk. The maples were beginning to drop leaves on the path. Only a few of the benches along the walks were occupied. The high-hung park lights were on now, casting black patterns of the trees on the ground. Not far from the center of the square stood a statue of a bearded man in a frock coat. Jim pointed to it. “I was standing up on that pedestal,” he said. “I was trying to see what was going on. A cop must’ve reached up and swatted me the way a man swats a fly. I knew a little how Joy feels. It was four or five days before I could think straight. Little pictures went flying through my head, and I couldn’t quite catch them. Right in the back of the neck I got it.”

Mac turned to a bench and sat down. “I know,” he said. “I read Harry’s report. Is that the only reason you wanted to join the Party?”

“No,” said Jim. “When I got in jail, there were five other men in the same cell, picked up at the same time—a Mexican and a Negro and a Jew and a couple of plain
mongrel Americans like me. ’Course they talked to me, but it wasn’t that. I’d read more than they knew.” He picked up a maple leaf from the ground and began carefully stripping the covering from the hand-like skeleton. “Look,” he said. “All the time at home we were fighting, fighting something—hunger mostly. My old man was fighting the bosses. I was fighting the school. But always we lost. And after a long time I guess it got to be part of our mind-stuff that we always would lose. My old man was fighting just like a cat in a corner with a pack of dogs around. Sooner or later a dog was sure to kill him; but he fought anyway. Can you see the hopelessness in that? I grew up in that hopelessness.”

“Sure, I can see,” Mac said. “There’s millions of people with just that.”

Jim waved the stripped leaf in front of him, and spun it between his thumb and forefinger. “There was more than that to it,” he said. “The house where we lived was always filled with anger. Anger hung in the house like smoke; that beaten, vicious anger against the boss, against the superintendent, against the groceryman when he cut off credit. It was an anger that made you sick to your stomach, but you couldn’t help it.”

“Go on,” said Mac. “I don’t see where you’re getting, but maybe you do.”

Jim jumped up and stood in front of the bench and whipped the leaf skeleton across his palm. “I’m getting to this: In that cell were five men all raised in about the same condition. Some of them worse, even. And while there was anger in them, it wasn’t the same kind of anger. They didn’t hate a boss or a butcher. They hated the whole system of bosses, but that was a different thing. It wasn’t the
same kind of anger. And there was something else, Mac. The hopelessness wasn’t in them. They were quiet, and they were working; but in the back of every mind there was conviction that sooner or later they would win their way out of the system they hated. I tell you, there was a kind of peacefulness about those men.”

“Are you trying to convert me?” Mac asked sarcastically.

“No, I’m trying to tell you. I’d never known any hope or peacefulness, and I was hungry for it. I probably knew more about so-called radical movements than any of those men. I’d read more, but they had the thing I wanted, and they’d got it by working.”

Mac said sharply, “Well, you typed a few letters tonight. Do you feel any better?”

Jim sat down again. “I liked doing it, Mac,” he said softly. “I don’t know why. It seemed a good thing to be doing. It seemed to have some meaning. Nothing I ever did before had any meaning. It was all just a mess. I don’t think I resented the fact that someone profited from the mess, but I did hate being in the rat-cage.”

Mac thrust his legs out straight before him and put his hands in his pockets. “Well,” he said, “if work will keep you happy, you’ve got a pretty jolly time ahead of you. If you’ll learn to cut stencils and run a mimeograph I can almost guarantee you twenty hours a day. And if you hate the profit system, I can promise you, Jim, you won’t get a damn cent for it.” His voice was genial.

Jim said, “Mac, you’re the boss in the joint back there, aren’t you?”

“Me? No, I tell ’em what to do, but they don’t have
to do it. I can’t issue any orders. The only orders that really stick are the ones that come down after a vote.”

“Well, anyway, you’ve got some say, Mac. What I’d really like to do is get into the field. I’d like to get into the action.”

Mac laughed softly. “You want punishment, don’t you? Well, I don’t know but what the committee’ll think a hell of a lot more of a good typist. You’ll have to put romance off for a while—the noble Party assaulted by the beast of Capitalism.” Suddenly his tone changed and he turned on Jim. “It’s all work,” he said. “In the field it’s hard work and dangerous work. But don’t think it’s so soft at the joint, either. You don’t know what night a bunch of American Legioners all full of whisky and drum corps music may come down and beat hell out of you. I’ve been through it, I tell you. There’s no veteran like the man who got drafted into the army and served six months in a training camp punching a bayonet into a sack of sawdust. The men who were in the trenches are mostly different; but for pure incendiarism and brass knuckle patriotism, give me twenty training camp ex-soldiers. Why twenty of ’em will protect their country from five kids any dark night when they can get a little whisky. Most of ’em got their wound stripes because they were too drunk to go to a prophylaxis station.”

Jim chuckled. “You don’t like soldiers much, do you, Mac?”

“I don’t like the ex-soldiers with the gold hats. I was in France. They were good, honest, stupid cattle. They didn’t like it, but they were nice guys.” His voice sobered down. Jim saw him grin quickly in embarrassment. “I got hot, didn’t I, Jim? I’ll tell you why. Ten of the brave
bastards licked me one night. And after they’d licked me unconscious they jumped on me and broke my right arm. And then they set fire to my mother’s house. My mother pulled me out in the front yard.”

“What happened?” Jim asked. “What were you doing?”

The sarcasm came back into Mac’s voice. “Me? I was subverting the government. I’d made a speech saying there were some people starving.” He stood up. “Let’s go back, Jim. They ought to have the dishes washed up by now. I didn’t mean to get bitter, but somehow that busted arm still makes me mad.”

They walked slowly back down the path. A few men on the benches pulled in their legs to let them by.

Jim said, “If you can ever put in a word, Mac, so I can get out in the field to work, I’ll be glad.”

“O.K. But you’d better learn to cut stencils and run a mimeograph. You’re a good kid; I’m glad to have you with us.”

JIM sat under the hard white light typewriting letters. Occasionally he stopped and listened, his ears turned toward the door. Except for a kettle simmering huskily in the kitchen, the house was still. The soft roar of streetcars on distant streets, the slap of feet on the pavement in front only made the inside seem more quiet. He looked up at the alarm clock hanging to a nail on the wall. He got up and went into the kitchen and stirred the stew, and turned down the gas until each jet held a tiny blue globe.

As he went back to the typewriter he heard quick steps on the gravelled path. Dick came bursting into the house. “Mac’s not here yet?”

“No,” said Jim. “He hasn’t got here. Neither has Joy. Collect any money today?”

“Twenty dollars,” said Dick.

“Boy, you sure do it, I don’t know how. We could eat for a month on that; but Mac’ll probably spend it all on stamps. Lord, how he goes through stamps.”