Joe Hill (13 page)

“Let me tell you,” Manderich said. “In such a system it iss a distinction to be in jail.”

It seemed to Joe that they had been standing there indefinitely. He flexed his fingers; the itch to be doing something made him kick the brick wall. Up the street the electric sign above the Peerless Pool Parlor jerked into brightness, its hundreds of little globes glowing steadily for a few seconds before it took off on its mechanical night-long repetition of movement. First there was a pool table and a bending player outlined in white lights. Then a cue flashed on in the player’s hand. Then the triangle of colored balls appeared at the far end of the table. Then the cue jerked backward, jerked forward. The cue ball blinked down an unerring line, the colored balls broke and ran in every direction and one after another blinked out in corner or side pockets. Then cue and table and bending player went black too, leaving only a single clicking light that crawled around the outline of the sign, unhurried and inevitable and purposeless as the days in a man’s life.

Joe recognized the sign and everything it said. It said that in
the friendly surroundings of the Peerless Pool Parlor players of unerring accuracy made mechanically perfect shots. It implied that at the Peerless everything was arranged for a man’s pleasure and relaxation; friendly games of skill to pass the time. It intimated that it must be a pretty good world if on a workingman’s street there could be palaces of pleasure like the Peerless, open to everyone, and that in these places the shot never missed, the ball never kissed or rebounded, the cue never scratched, the cushions were never dead or crooked. The sign said this to him three or four times with a rigid, automaton inflexibility; on every break, every ball ran unerringly toward a pocket. And all the time the little clicking insinuating light crept around and around and around the edge.

“I wonder what would happen if that guy missed sometime?” he said. Manderich and McGibbeney looked, but he saw that they had no idea what he was talking about. To break the inertia that pressed too heavily upon him he said, “Let’s go on down to the docks and see if anything’s stirring.”

“Jeez, I don’t know,” said McGibbeney. “I was just thinkin’ I better be gettin’ on home before the old lady throws a fit.”

“They keep running scabs through there. The bigger we keep that picket line the better.”

“I did a trick down at the yards this morning,” McGibbeney said.

“All right,” Joe said. “You go on home.” He half expected McGibbeney to follow as he and Manderich turned down the street, but when he looked back from the corner the sidewalk was empty. Contempt for McGibbeney tightened his mouth. A spare-time milker, a milk-and-water rebel, a big bag of wind.

Crossing the web of tracks on the way to the waterfront they were yelled at, and a man put a bull’s-eye lantern on them. “Where do you guys think you’re going?”

“Down to the dock,” Joe said.

“What for? What do you want?”

“Vot difference does it make?” said Manderich.

“Go on,” the yard dick said. “Get on back where you come from. You don’t go across here.”

They retreated. “Dot iss a sample,” Manderich said. “Dey own the gott damn vorld.”

Circling, they crossed the tracks at an intersection. The watchman in the door of the switchman’s shanty stared at them but made no move to stop them, and they came out on the dock side to see the glow of lanterns and the popping fizzle of the arc lights out on the dock. Evenly spaced along the horizon, the breakwater lights strung out beyond. Between lanterns hung on both sides of the dock gates, two policemen sat their horses and talked with the gatekeeper.

“Vorking overtime,” Manderich said, and jerked a hand at the figures out along the dock. “How does a scap figure?”

Joe saw how it was arranged like a stage, how the shadows of the skeleton picket line moved back and forth in the street below the platform, how the dock stretched vaguely outward, spotted with lights and the small dark figures of men. He put his foot up on the edge of the platform, silently watching.

Then he felt the silence, and into the silence came the soft plop of hoofs. One of the cops was above them, leaning on his pommel. “What are you boys doing down here?”

“Standing,” Manderich said. “It iss a public street.”

“Ah, Dutchy,” the cop said. “I didn’t recognize you at first.” For a considerable quiet time he looked them over. “You guys better move on,” he said.

“Yes?” Manderich said. “Vy?”

“Want to argue it?” the cop said softly.

“We’ve got a perfect right to get into that picket line,” Joe said.

The cop straightened up. “If you’re getting into the line, get in it. You can’t just hang around here.”

Bringing his foot down from the platform edge, Manderich grunted, “I vould argue aboudt my rights to stand on a public street, but ve are not arguing now. Ve are valking only. So ve vill go valk.”

They passed contemptuously close to the putteed calf, the swelling thigh, the uniformed wrist with the billy hanging loosely from it. Neither horse nor rider moved. Behind a shadow who turned out to be Whitey Blattner, a Wobbly trucker from a brewery warehouse, they shuffled into the line. Joe lagged, turning to see who else was on, and recognized Coscarart, a longshoreman, and Bill Sever, a sailor. The other two he did not know. Across the street the temporary headquarters shack was dark.

The man ahead made one circle and stopped, waiting for them. “Who’re you guys? Wobblies? Yeah, okay.”

“It looks to me as if this was more sympathy than strike,” Joe said. “Where are all your trainmen?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” the man said. “This is all sort of on the spur of the moment. They run in this bunch of scabs about six, and we’re sticking it out till they quit. I been here since four.”

They started again, moving slowly, Joe and Manderich lagging until they opened a space between themselves and the other. “Holy smoke,” Joe said. “This is a kind of sad strike.” Art only grunted.

Around and around, shuffling and lag-footed, half asleep, a headless and tailless motion without destination, the line moved. Into darkness, around into murky light, into darkness again, stubborn and dull and ineffectual, seven men walking in protest before a locked gate to shame the scabs who labored on uninterrupted; a handful of impotent men trying to force concessions from an opponent who laughed at them and rode over them and held them off with the blue and brass of the law. To Joe, shuffling with the rest in and out of the light, it seemed as if he had got trapped in something immutable and interminable, without beginning or end, like the little blind light that crawled round and round the sign above the Peerless Pool Parlor.

Maybe it was always your strike, as Art said, but this was a bad strike, badly organized and already drying up, and it graveled him to sink himself in it and get muddied by its hopelessness. It was a meager satisfaction that being on the line was a defiance to the cop. The cop could run the whole bunch of them off the waterfront if he wanted to call out the wagon, and the
S.P.
and the newspapers and the law and public opinion would all justify him. Only because the bosses held it in contempt was the picket line permitted to operate at all.

And out on the dock the scabs were justifying themselves as free American workingmen who weren’t going to be pushed around and told what to do by a bunch of radicals and foreigners.

Around and around and around, stubborn and shuffling and sullen and confused and too few, the pickets circled. Probably all of them wanted to sit down. Occasionally, for a while, one did, or two, to light a pipe and smoke a few minutes before coming back in again. There was no reason they should not all sit down except
that if they did they would admit to the cops and gatekeeper and scabs that militancy had its limits and that rebellion could grow tired.

So they shuffled along their symbolic frontiers, and as they shuffled Joe with another part of his mind walked in other lines, not in pointless circles but directly and boldly toward a gate, a door, a goal. He walked ahead of multitudes like a troubadour or a pied piper, leading them with songs, scattering sarcasm like acid on the ones who held back and weakened the cause. These were the ones who prepared every defeat: the unconvincibles, the immovables, the Mr. Blocks, the scabs and the scissorbills.

He was making a song as he went:

He bumped into Manderich, who had stopped. “Dey’re coming oudt,” Manderich said.

A stir moved among the shadowy figures of the pickets. Blattner and Coscarart had picked up placards from the platform and now had them on their shoulders: “Don’t Scab on Your Fellow Workers—Join the One Big Union,” and “Shoulder to Shoulder-Solidarity of All Labor.” The line was not a line any longer, but a group, and there was more life in it when it stood still than there had been when it moved. A perceptible preparatory intentness had come over the gatekeeper and the cops too. The cops were sitting straight on their horses, the gatekeeper scraped his chair as he rose. The scabs were coming in a compact cluster.

Just as the gate swung open Manderich’s harsh voice grated at Joe’s ear. “Come oudt! Don’t be a lousy scap! Come oudt and fight on the right side!”

Now they were all shouting. The cops moved over, holding their horses broadside so that the pickets had to yell across them at the scabs, who moved compactly across the platform and into the street. In the shifting light of lanterns the scabs’ faces looked still and wooden. The further they moved the more furious Manderich’s harsh bellow became.

“Vot are dey paying you to scap? Uh? Vot kind of dirty sonofapitching money do you get? How does it feel to be a scap? You know vot a scap iss? A scap iss a sonofapitch dot vould steal Christ off the cross for two bits!”

Someone in the tight group of scabs shouted back. In an instant Manderich had sprung around the shoulder of the protecting horse. “Vot do you say? You sonofapitching scap?”

The policeman rode him back among the pickets, and as the horse moved Joe saw Harry Piper in the crowd of scissorbills. He had been cool enough before, shouting with the others but not letting himself get mad. But to see someone he knew among the enemy filled him with a strangling fury.

“Hey, Harry!”

Piper’s face jerked for a moment sideward, looking blindly into the murk, and turned back. “Come out!” Joe yelled. “You don’t belong in there. Come out and join up!”

The policeman had pivoted his horse and was coming back, so close that Joe had to jump to avoid being trampled. A dab of saliva from the bit flew and landed wet on his cheek. The touch of it doubled his rage. He ducked, came up, saw that Manderich had again eluded the police and was blocking the way of the scabs, who veered left to go around him. That put them between Manderich and the police, so that they couldn’t ride him out of the way. The cop nearest Joe swore and kicked his horse, which leaped suddenly off to the right. And into the hole he left Joe dove like a ferret, intent on reaching Harry Piper and dragging him out. As he caught up with the retreating edge of the group one of the scabs turned with a thin almost whimpering cry and swung a dinner pail at his head.

The pail crashed against his shoulder and spilled open, and he leaped in punching with both hands in the midst of a sudden violent melee. At the last moment he saw the horse coming and sprang aside. Something struck him across nose and mouth with
eye-watering violence, he was on his hands and knees, covering up, and the weight and power of the horse went past him, missing him by inches. When he shook his head clear and came up among struggling figures and the short grunting outcries of fighting, he saw Manderich holding off several men by swinging a lantern. Art rushed, driving the men back and giving Joe time to scramble in beside him. Then the two retreated slowly, back to back, across the street toward the warehouses and protecting darkness.

Manderich was wheezing with effort. He fumbled at his suspender and pressed something into Joe’s hand. It was a four-inch hatpin. “The horse, if you get a chance,” he said.

A man ran diagonally across the intersection pursued by one of the policemen. When the horse was almost on him he ducked, covering his head with his hands, but the cop anticipated him and clubbed him twice before the plunging horse carried him past. As he turned and came back past the puddled shadow of the picket’s body the shadow of horse and man, cast by light from a spilled and broken lantern, leaped clear across the street and up the corrugated warehouse wall.

With the cops behind them, the scabs were pressing in again. Manderich kept them at arm’s length with the swinging lantern, Joe held the hatpin ready for anyone who rushed. “Vatch him!” Manderich said.

Joe rose to his toes, ready to jump either way, as the cop came in from the side. He had a moment of absolute paralyzed panic when the hoofs roared in on him. He saw the flattened ears, the glaring eyes, the foaming mouth, a spark of metal on the martingale, and then he was leaping aside, the swinging club grazed his coattails, and he pivoted awkwardly and swung the hatpin at the passing haunches.

It went in sweetly, almost its full length. The screaming horse rose up, plunging out of control. He saw the arc of Manderich’s lantern thrown at the faces of the scabs and the two of them were running, in almost total dark now. The black of a wall went past, they turned up a narrow alley between buildings, running cautiously with their hands outstretched, until the sky lightened above and they were in the enclosing walls of a court. Straining in the blackness, his eyes made out regular shapes that he recognized as parked dray wagons.