The 42nd Parallel (17 page)

“Fellowworker McCreary . . . My comrades wrote me you were coming.” “That’s me, allright . . . I’m glad you talk English.” “I lived in Santa Fe many years and in Brockton, Massachusetts. Sit down . . . please . . . I am very happy to welcome an American revolutionary worker . . . Though our ideas probably do not entirely agree we have much in common. We are comrades in the big battle.” He patted Mac on the shoulder and pressed him into a chair. “Please.” There were several little yellow children in torn shirts running round barefoot. Ricardo Perez sat down and took the smallest on his knee, a little girl with kinky pigtails and a smudged face. The place smelt of chile and scorched olive oil and children and washing. “What are you going to do in Mexico, fellowworker?”

Mac blushed. “Oh, I want to kinda get into things, into the revolution.”

“The situation is very confusing here . . . Our townworkers are organizing and are classconscious but the peons, the peasants, are easily misled by unscrupulous leaders.”

“I want to see some action, Perez . . . I was living in Los Angeles an’ gettin’ to be a goddam booster like the rest of ’em. I can earn my keep in the printin’ line, I guess.”

“I must introduce you to the comrades . . . Please . . . We will go now.”

Blue dusk was swooping down on the streets when they went out. Lights were coming out yellow. Mechanical pianos jinglejangled in bars. In a gateway a little outoftune orchestra was playing. The market was all lit up by flares, all kinds of shiny brightcolored stuff was for sale at booths. At a corner an old Indian and an old broadfaced woman, both of them blind and heavily pockmarked, were singing a shrill endless song in the middle of a dense group of short thickset country people, the women with black shawls over their heads, the men in white cotton suits like pajamas.

“They sing about the murder of Madero . . . It is very good for the education of the people . . . You see they cannot read the papers so they get their news in songs . . . It was your ambassador murdered Madero. He was a bourgeois idealist but a great man . . . Please . . . Here is the hall. . . . You see that sign says “Viva the Revindicating Revolution prelude to the Social Revolution.” This is the hall of the Anarchist Union of Industry and Agriculture. Huerta has a few federales here but they are so weak they dare not attack us. Ciudad Juarez is heart and soul with the revolution . . . Please . . . you will greet the comrades with a few words.”

The smoky hall and the platform were filled with swarthy men in blue denim workclothes; in the back were a few peons in white. Many hands shook Mac’s, black eyes looked sharp into his, several men hugged him. He was given a campchair in the front row on the platform. Evidently Ricardo Perez was chairman. Applause followed in every pause in his speech. A feeling of big events hovered in the hall. When Mac got on his feet, somebody yelled “Solidarity forever” in English. Mac stammered a few words about how he wasn’t an official representative of the I.W.W. but that all the same classconscious American workers were watching the Mexican revolution with big hopes, and ended up with the wobbly catchword about building the new society in the shell of the old. The speech went big when Perez translated it and Mac felt pretty good. Then the meeting went on and on, more and more speeches and occasional songs. Mac found himself nodding several times. The sound of the strange language made him sleepy. He barely managed to keep awake until a small band in the open door of the hall broke into a tune and everybody sang and the meeting broke up.

“That’s
Cuatro Milpas
. . . that means four cornfields . . . that’s a song of the peons everybody’s singing now,” said Perez.

“I’m pretty hungry . . . I’d like to get a little something to eat somewheres,” said Mac. “I haven’t eaten since morning when I had a cup of coffee and a doughnut in El Paso.”

“We will eat at the house of our comrade,” said Perez. “Please . . . this way.”

They went in off the street, now black and empty, through a tall door hung with a bead curtain, into a whitewashed room brightly lit by an acetylene flare that smelt strong of carbide. They sat down at the end of a long table with a spotted cloth on it. The table gradually filled with people from the meeting, mostly young men in blue workclothes, with thin sharp faces. At the other end sat an old dark man with the big nose and broad flat cheekbones of an Indian. Perez poured Mac out two glasses of a funnytasting white drink that made his head spin. The food was very hot with pepper and chile and he choked on it a little bit. The Mexicans petted Mac like a child at his birthday party. He had to drink many glasses of beer and cognac. Perez went home early and left him in charge of a young fellow named Pablo. Pablo had a Colt automatic on a shoulder strap that he was very proud of. He spoke a little pidginenglish and sat with one hand round Mac’s neck and the other on the buckle of his holster. “Gringo bad . . . Kill him quick . . . Fellowworker good . . . internacional . . . hurray,” he kept saying. They sang the
International
several times and then the
Marseillaise
and the
Carmagnole.
Mac was carried along in a peppery haze. He sang and drank and ate and everything began to lose outline.

“Fellowworker marry nice girl,” said Pablo. They were standing at a bar somewhere. He made a gesture of sleeping with his two hands against his face. “Come.”

They went to a dancehall. At the entrance everybody had to leave his gun on a table guarded by a soldier in a visored cap. Mac noticed that the men and girls drew away from him a little. Pablo laughed. “They think you gringo . . . I tell them revolucionario internacional. There she, nice girl . . . Not goddam whore . . . not pay, she nice working girl . . . comrade.”

Mac found himself being introduced to a brown broadfaced girl named Encarnacion. She was neatly dressed and her hair was very shinyblack. She gave him a bright flash of a smile. He patted her on the cheek. They drank some beer at the bar and left. Pablo had a girl with him too. The others stayed on at the dancehall. Pablo and his girl walked round to Encarnacion’s house with them. It was a room in a little courtyard. Beyond it was a great expanse of lightcolored desert land stretching as far as you could see under a waning moon. In the distance were some tiny specks of fires. Pablo pointed at them with his full hand and whispered, “Revolucion.”

Then they said good night at the door of Encarnacion’s little room that had a bed, a picture of the Virgin and a new photograph of Madero stuck up by a pin. Encarnacion closed the door, bolted it and sat down on the bed looking up at Mac with a smile.

when everybody went away for a trip Jeanne took us out to play every day in Farragut Square and told you about how in the Jura in winter the wolves come down and howl through the streets of the villages

and sometimes we’d see President Roosevelt ride by all alone on a bay horse and once we were very proud because when we took off our hats we were very proud because he smiled and showed his teeth like in the newspaper and touched his hat and we were very proud and he had an aide de camp

but we had a cloth duck that we used to play with on the steps until it began to get dark and the wolves howled ran with little children’s blood dripping from their snout through the streets of the villages only it was summer and between dog and wolf we’d be put to bed and Jeanne was a young French girl from the Jura where the wolves howled ran through the streets and when everybody had gone to bed she would take you into her bed

and it was a very long scary story and the worst of the wolves howled through the streets gloaming to freeze little children’s blood was the Loup Garou howling in the Jura and we were scared and she had breasts under her nightgown and the Loup Garou was terrible scary and black hair and rub against her and outside the wolves howled in the streets and it was wet there and she said it was nothing she had just washed herself

but the Loup Garou was really a man hold me close cheri a man howled through streets with a bloody snout that tore up the bellies of girls and little children Loup Garou

and afterwards you knew what girls were made like and she was very silly and made you promise not to tell but you wouldn’t have anyway

MOON’S PATENT IS FIZZLE

insurgents win at Kansas polls Oak Park soulmates part 8000 to take autoride says girl begged for her husband

PIT SENTIMENT FAVORS UPTURN

Oh you be-eautiful doll

You great big beautiful doll

the world cannot understand all that is involved in this, she said. It appears like an ordinary worldly affair with the trappings of what is low and vulgar but there is nothing of the sort. He is honest and sincere. I know him. I have fought side by side with him. My heart is with him now.

Let me throw my arms around you

Honey ain’t I glad I found you

Almost Motionless In Midsummer Languor On Business Seas One Million See Drunkards Bounced

JURORS AT GATES OF BEEF BARONS

compare love with Vesuvius emblazoned streets await tramp of paladins

Honey ain’t I glad I found you

Oh you beautiful doll

You great big beautiful doll

TRADES WHITE HORSE FOR RED

Madero’s troops defeat rebels in Battle at Parral Roosevelt carries Illinois oratory closes eyelids Chicago pleads for more water

CONFESSED ANARCHISTS ON BENDED KNEES
KISS U.S. FLAG

The Sunbeam Movement is Spreading

BOMB NO. 4 IN LEVEE WAR
SPLINTERS WEST SIDE SALOON

a report printed Wednesday that a patient in a private pavilion in St. Luke’s Hospital undergoing an operation for the extirpation of a cancerous growth at the base of the tongue was General Grant was denied by both the hospital authorities and Lieut. Howze who characterized the story as a deliberate fabrication

he was a towboat captain and he knew the river blindfold from Indian Head to the Virginia Capes and the bay and the Eastan Shoa up to Baltima’ for that matter and he lived in a redbrick house in Alexandria the pilothouse smelt of a hundred burntout pipes

that’s the
Mayflower
the president’s yacht and that there’s the
Dolphin
and that’s the ole monitor
Tippecanoe
and that there’s the revenoo cutter and we’re just passin’ the po-lice boat

when Cap’n Keen reaches up to pull the whistle on the ceiling of the pilothouse you can see the red and green bracelet tattooed under the black hairs on his wrist

Ma soul an’ body ole Cap’n Gifford used ter be a frien’ o’ mahne many’s the time we been oysterin’ together on the Eastan Shoa an’ oysterpirates used to shanghai young fellers in those days an’ make ’em work all winter you couldn’ git away less you swam ashoa and the water was too damnation cole an’ the ole man used to take the fellers’ clothes away so’s they couldn’t git ashoa when they was anchored up in a crik or near a house or somethin’ boy they was mean customers the oysterpirates ma soul and body onct there was a young feller they worked till he dropped and then they’d just sling him overboard tongin’ for oysters or dredgin’ like them oysterpirates did’s the meanest kinda work in winter with the spray freezin’ on the lines an’ cuttin’ your hands to shreds an’ the dredge foulin’ every minute an’ us havin’ to haul it up an’ fix it with our hands in the icy water hauled up a stiff onct      What’s a stiff? Ma soul an’ body a stiff’s a dead man ma boy a young feller it was too without a stitch on him an’ the body looked like it had been beat with a belayin’ pin somethin’ terrible or an’ oar mebbe reckon he wouldn’t work or was sick or somethin’ an’ the ole man jus’ beat him till he died sure couldn’t a been nothin’ but an oysterpirate

When Janey was little she lived in an old flatface brick house a couple of doors up the hill from M Street in Georgetown. The front part of the house was always dark because Mommer kept the heavy lace curtains drawn to and the yellow linen shades with lace inset bands down. Sunday afternoons Janey and Joe and Ellen and Francie had to sit in the front room and look at pictures or read books. Janey and Joe read the funnypaper together because they were the oldest and the other two were just babies and not old enough to know what was funny anyway. They couldn’t laugh outloud because Popper sat with the rest of
The Sunday Star
on his lap and usually went to sleep after dinner with the editorial section crumpled in one big blueveined hand. Tiny curds of sunlight flickering through the lace insets in the window shade would lie on his bald head and on one big red flange of his nose and on the droop of one mustache and on his speckled sundayvest and on the white starched shirtsleeves with shiny cuffs, held up above the elbow by a rubber band. Janey and Joe would sit on the same chair feeling each other’s ribs jiggle when they laughed about the Katzenjammer kids setting off a cannon-cracker under the captain’s stool. The little ones would see them laughing and start laughing too, “Shut up, can’t you,” Joe would hiss at them out of the corner of his mouth. “You don’t know what we’re laughing at.” Once in a while, if there was no sound from Mommer who was taking her Sunday afternoon nap upstairs stretched out in the back bedroom in a faded lilac sack with frills on it, after they’d listened for a long time to the drawnout snort that ended in a little hiss of Popper’s snores, Joe would slip off his chair and Janey would follow him without breathing into the front hall and out the front door. Once they’d closed it very carefully so that the knocker wouldn’t bang, Joe would give her a slap, yell “You’re it” and run off down the hill towards M Street, and she’d have to run after him, her heart pounding, her hands cold for fear he’d run away and leave her.