Lonely Crusade (3 page)

“Do you have everything you need, Lee?”

Her voice drew his stabbing stare. “What the hell do you care?” he thought.

But aloud, without inflection, he said: “Yes.”

“Now don’t get angry and impatient with everyone,” she cautioned. u Give yourself a chance.”

He turned the full impact of his contempt on her. “Lord, you’ve gotten important since you’ve become a counselor. I’d hate to be around you if they made you manager of the joint. Well, listen, suppose you tend to your job and let me tend to mine?”

She lay back and looked away from him, feeling the full, hard brunt of his rejection. She had been foolish to say anything at all, she upbraided herself. She should have realized that he would take advantage of it to hurt her again. Mentally she washed her hands of the whole proceedings—let him do as she wished.

He slipped into his trench coat, jammed on his hat, and turned toward the door.

But now it was she who could not let it go. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she called.

The question startled him. Then it brought a blind, cornered rage against her subtle pressure. This dirty, despicable, underhanded trick, he thought. Only a petty woman would stoop to such a thing. For she knew that he did not want to kiss her. She never kissed him when she left for work. But she knew also it would cost him more in peace of mind to refuse. It was her sly way of forcing him to accept the token of her Godspeed after he had rejected the accompanying counsel.

So he turned and came woodenly and with blank face across the room and bent toward her. In the moment intervening she had put passion into her manner. Now prone with one of her large, ripe breasts overflowing in brown warmth the blue night gown, her lips flowering prettily against the darker brown of her heart-shaped face, she looked more desirable and voluptuous than in many a long, lonely night. But he did not see her. He put his flat, cold lips to the pressure of her kiss, and when her arms came up to encircle him, he broke quickly away.

Outside, the horn sounded three times. Coming as it did against Lee’s cornered fury, it planted the first seed of discord in his attitude toward Smitty. His impulse was to just stop still and let him wait. But he shook it from his mind and continued outside. At the steps he stiffened, then took a deep breath, braced himself, and went down the walk in the rain. It was like stepping into another world.

Smitty opened the door of the coupe and greeted him in a deep-toned, inflectionless voice: “It’s not that I’m rushing you, Lee, boy, but we want to get out to the plant before the day-shift boys go inside.”

Lee felt a sudden defensiveness under the flat, unsmiling scrutiny of Smitty’s light blue eyes, which protruded from the pink and white roundness of his face like painted marbles.

“Oh, I was waiting,” he said, adjusting himself in the seat and closing the door. “But a couple of last-minute things came up I had to do. You know these wives.” Now, addressing a white person, there was a difference in his speech, something of a falter, a brief, open-mouthed hesitancy before sound, the painful groping, not quite a stammer, for the exact word.

Turning the car into the northbound traffic on Western Avenue, Smitty replied: “We’ve got a job ahead of us.”

It was not intended as a reproof, but Lee took it as such. “Oh, I know. But my wife doesn’t seem to understand the importance of unionism.”

“Many people don’t. It’s our job to convince ‘em.”

Although Lee did not look at Smitty, he could visualize him sitting there, his big, paunchy body uncomfortable in a suit that had been wrinkled from the first day he had put it on, gripping the wheel in his two big, white, flabby fists more as if wrestling the car than driving it. Yesterday, he had felt an unconscious liking for Smitty, but now it was gone. He felt restrained by his slow-motioned seriousness, compelled against his will to make it some concession.

“It seems that Negroes should be convinced already—all the union’s done for us.”

As quickly as he said it, he wished that he had not. It had come, he knew, from a strange, involuntary urge to please, to dissemble, to impress Smitty with his acumen. He hated this in himself yet many times lately he had caught himself doing it.

But Smitty had not heard; driving had claimed his attention.

The rain fell in a steady, windless downpour. It came drearily out of the dark-gray sky and filled the streets to overflowing. It drummed on the car top, splattered on the hood, poured down the windshield in rivulets, making driving perilous.

Lee lowered the window on his side to stop the windshield fogging, and the spray wet his face and hands, beaded on his raincoat. The coolness felt refreshing to the hot haze of his mind, but the tight defensiveness continued to nag him.

At Washington Boulevard they turned west, taking their position in the long line of warworkers’ cars. Headlights glowed yellow in the gray gloom, and from the flanking murk a drab panorama of one-storied, stuccoed buildings unfolded in monotonous repetition. At every intersection a streetcar ahead forced them to a stop.

“Let’s see if we can’t get by,” Smitty said, gunning the coupe through the curb-high flood.

Cutting back to the center of the street after they had passed, they narrowly missed the streetcar; and the motorman clanged furiously, frantically on his bell. Lee’s heart caught in his throat. But the physical tension abruptly loosened the tightness of his mind, causing him to give a spurt of laughter.

“Sunny California,” Smitty muttered.

“That’s what the post cards say.”

“How long have you lived here, Lee?”

“I was born here. Didn’t I tell you?”

“I believe you did at that. Then you know about the history of unionism here.”

“Well—not too much. Only that the road has been rocky.”

“Didn’t you tell me that you hold a union card?”

“Not now. I joined the Cannery Workers when I worked in the cannery. But that was only through the spinach season—about a couple of months—then I let my membership lapse.”

“That’s been part of the trouble here; the work has been too seasonal.”

“The cannery and agricultural workers haven’t been so difficult to organize, have they?”

“Not the workers, no; but the golden sons and daughters have fought us at every turn in the road.”

“I thought you were getting those workers pretty well organized.”

“We’re bringing ‘em into the fold. But they’re not the only workers in California. They’re just the only ones who want to admit that they’re workers—aside from the dock hands, of course.”

Lee gave a perfunctory laugh. “Well, now that industries are coming here, we’ve got a whole new group of workers,” he said.

“Have you ever stopped to think, Lee,” Smitty began ponderously, “that ninety per cent of the people are workers?”

“Is that so?”

“I don’t mean that all are workers in the sense of industrial workers, agricultural workers, office workers, and such. I mean in the professions, in the sciences—doctors, lawyers, technicians. Why, half of the staffs of managements are workers. Any person who does not own the business from which he derives his income is a worker.”

“That sounds like Marx,” Lee commented.

“I don’t give a damn who it sounds like. I said it, and it’s true. And sooner or later we’re all going to realize it, and they’re going to realize it, too.”

“Well—yes. But the industrial workers are the ones who must be organized first.”

“Yes, that’s the ticket, now,” Smitty nodded. “That’s why this job is so important.” He slapped the steering wheel in emphasis. “This is the beginning. We’re going to organize every worker in a war industry. But it’s always important at the beginning.”

“Yes, that’s the hard part,” Lee agreed.

“This job is big, boy. There is a possibility that the future of the union may hang on it.”

“I can see that.” From the sound of his voice Lee appeared alert and attentive, but he was scarcely listening. He wanted to arrive and get over the first shock of strangeness, to see what sort of fellows the local officials were, and to learn of their attitude toward himself.

But Smitty continued as if carried away: “This country is virgin—industrially virgin. Five, ten years maybe, it might be the center of gravity of American industry.”

“It could easily be.”

“Good country for industry. Big, warm—low taxes, cheap living—the Pacific opening up the whole Asia market. In ten years the whole auto industry might be located here—if the native fascists haven’t scared off the labor by then.”

“Well—”

“That’s our problem, to keep the workers here. And the only way we can do it is to organize ‘em.”

“That’s right.”

“Lee, you might say the fate of the working class of the world depends on us here. As Comstock goes, the West Coast goes. As the West Coast goes, the nation goes. As the nation goes, the world goes.”

Lee felt a desire to laugh, but he realized that Smitty was serious. “It’s a big job, all right,” he hastened to agree.

“Your people have a big stake in it too.”

“Yes, I know that.”

Smitty nodded approvingly. “I think you’re going to be a great help to us, Lee.”

“Well—I’m going to try.”

“Unionism is the only answer,” Smitty declared dogmatically. “All the rest is so much crap.”

But Lee had finished with echoing.

In silence they passed a drive-in restaurant, possessed of no glamour in the rain; then came into the glass-fronted, neon-lighted extension of a business district. A housing development, seemingly deserted, grew out of the gloom. Beyond was a rolling expanse of gray-green, dimensionless meadowland fusing with the gray horizon. But as they neared, the meadow assumed angles and shape and dimensions, and revealed itself as the huge, flat, sprawling assembly of camouflaged buildings that was Comstock Aircraft Corporation. A knot caught in Lee’s chest. He felt small, insignificant, incapable.

Turning into a muddy driveway beside a one-room, unpainted shack, Smitty parked behind another car. Lee opened the door, stepped out, and stood breathless in the rain waiting for Smitty to come around and lead the way inside.

A white glare coned from a green-shaded droplight over a motley scene. Men and women of varying ages and several nationalities crowded about an oil burner, talking above the voices of each other. All wore the uniform of California, jacket and slacks, with Comstock badges pinned to their lapels. The air was hazy with cigarette smoke, stale with the smell of dampness, rank from the fumes of the oil burner. But the general atmosphere contained a note of militance, the positive character of people assembled for a purpose.

A rough pine table, stacked with union literature, stood along the wall. Two chairs flanked it. One man sat apart on the corner of the table, a foot propped on a chair, stolidly smoking a cigarette. Unlike the others, he wore a shiny blue serge suit complete to vest, a soiled gray shirt, and a green tie. No badge was in evidence on his clothing. About him was the air of settled implacability.

Voices greeted Smitty as he came into the room—quips, curses, questions. But when Lee followed, a silence came. The silence passed as suddenly as it had come. But now the voices had a different sound. There was a quality in the difference that Lee could always hear.

But the first person Lee saw was the man who sat apart. Their glances crossed, and from where he stood Lee could feel the force of this man’s stare—neither hostile nor friendly, but stripping away the layers of all subterfuge.

Then Smitty drew his attention to make an introduction: “Lee Gordon, Marvin Todd. Marv’s our acting chairman of the local.”

Lee extended his hand to a tall, blond man with glassy blue eyes. “Hello, Marvin.”

“Hah!” Todd gave the single explosive epithet and turned away.

Slowly Lee withdrew his hand as silence again descended upon the room. Now it was not fear he felt, but a stricture of the soul, the torture of the damned, a shriveling up inside, an actual diminution of his organs and the stoppage of their functions.

Disapproval fashioned the expressions of the others. But blood reddened Smitty’s face with apoplectic rage. For an instant it seemed as if he would call Todd back. All the workings of his slow, ponderous mind were visible in his face—the furious incredulity at Todd’s outburst of prejudice, the tortured sympathy for Lee’s predicament, the indecision as to what steps he should take, the deep aversion for the entire racial scene, bafflement, hesitancy…Until then, Lee had been watching him. Now he looked away. He did not want to see the compromise he thought might come next, for after that he would not have anything at all for Smitty.

For a moment longer the silence hung, pregnant with expectancy. The man in the blue serge suit slid from the table and crossed the room.

“I’m Joe,” he said, extending his hand to Lee. There was the slight indication of an accent in his voice, which made his words seem battened down.

Lee never shook a hand with more gratitude.

Relief flooded Smitty in red and white waves. “Joe’s the man.” The words poured out of him. “Joe’s the big boss, Lee. I’m only his helper. Joe Ptak, Lee Gordon.”

For an instant Lee was conscious of the attention of the others in the room. Then he forgot them in the hard, calloused pressure of Joe’s grip, in the cold, level scrutiny of Joe’s slate-gray eyes.

“Hello, Joe.”

Joe Ptak nodded without replying. There was an impenetrable aloofness in his manner, an uncompromising rejection of human instability. His body was stocky, barrel-chested, rooted in the earth; his face was blunt with features that seemed hammered and his head was square.

Still scrutinizing Lee, he raised a cigarette with his left hand from which the first two fingers were gone, parked it in the corner of his mouth. Then he ran his two remaining fingers through his bristling shock of iron-gray hair, and turned away.

Voices came back into the room, and Smitty resumed the introductions.

Lee met Benny Stone next, a short, curly-haired Jew with sharp, dark eyes, who was acting financial secretary of the local. Benny’s effusive greeting brought a recurrence of the old troubling question: On what side did the Jew actually play? Was Benny’s effusion a slap at Todd or a pretense for Joe?