The Road to Los Angeles (13 page)

"Yeah," he said. "You puke all right. You no writer. You just puke."

"I'm writing all the time. My head swims in a transvaluated phantasmagoria of phrases."

"Bah! You make me puke too."

"Nuts to you! You Brobdingnagian boor!"

He began stacking boxes for his load. With each he grunted, they were so high and hard to reach. He was supposed to be showing me. Hadn't the boss said to watch? Well, I was watching. Wasn't Shorty the boss? Well, I was carrying out orders. His eyes flashed in anger.

"Come on! Work!"

"Don't talk to me, you capitalistic proletarian bourgeois."

The boxes weighed fifty pounds apiece. He stacked them ten high, one above the other. Then he eased the nose of his truck under the stack and pinched the bottom box with clamps at the base of the truck. I had never seen that kind of a truck. I had seen hand trucks, but not hand trucks with clamps.

"Again Progress rears its fair head. The new technic asserts itself even in the humble hand truck."

"Keep still and watch."

With a jerk he lifted the load from the floor and balanced it on the wheels, the handle-bars at shoulder height. It was a trick. I knew I couldn't do it. He wheeled the load away. And yet, if he could do it, he, a Mexican, a man who without doubt had never read a book in his life, who had never even heard of the transvaluation of values, then so could I. He, this mere peon, had trucked ten boxes.

Then what about you, Arturo? Are you going to be outdone by him? No — a thousand times no! Ten boxes. Good. I will truck twelve boxes. Then I got my truck. By that time Manuel was back for another load. "Too many," he said. "Shut up."

I pushed my truck toward the stack and opened the clamps. It had to happen. Too hard. I knew it was going to happen. There was no sense in trying to out-do him, I knew it all the time, yet I did it. There was a splintering and a crash. The tier of boxes tumbled like a tower. They went everywhere. The top box was smashed open. Cans leaped from it, their oval shapes running over the floor like frightened puppies.

"Too many!" Manuel shouted. "I tell you. Too damn many!"

I turned around and screamed, "Will you shut your goddamn greaser face, you goddamn Mexican peon of a bootlicking bourgeois proletarian capitalist!"

The fallen stack was in the path of the other truckers. They trucked around it, kicking out of the way the cans that impeded their movement. I knelt down and gathered them up. It was disgusting, with me, a white man, on my knees, picking up cans of fish, while all around me, standing on their feet, were these foreigners.

Soon enough Shorty Naylor saw what happened. He came on the run.

"I thought you knew how to work a hand truck?"

I stood up.

"These aren't hand trucks. These are clamp-trucks."

"Don't argue. Get that mess cleaned up."

"Accidents will happen, Naylor. Rome wasn't built in a day. There's an old proverb from Thus Spake Zarathustra . . ."

He waved his hands.

"For Christ's sake never mind that! Try again. But this time, don't carry so many. Try five boxes at a time until you get the knack of it."

I shrugged. Oh well, what could you do amongst that hot-bed of stupidity? The only thing left was to be brave, to have faith in man's intrinsic decency, and to cling to a belief in the reality of progress.

"You're the boss," I said. "I'm a writer, you know. Without qualification I ..."

"Never mind that! I know all about that! Everybody knows you're a writer, everybody. But do me a favor, will you?" He was almost pleading. "Try carrying five boxes, will you? Just five. Not six or seven. Just five. Will you do that for me? Take it easy. Don't kill yourself. Just five at a time."

He walked away. The low words rolled under his breath - obscenities meant for me. So that was it! I thumbed my nose at his retreating back. I despised him, a low person, a boob of limited vocabulary, unable to express his own thoughts, however nasty, except through the brummagem medium of foul language. A rat. He was a rat. He was a nasty, evil-tongued rat who knew nothing about Hitler's Weltanschauung.

Pee on him!

I returned to the task of picking up the fallen tins. When they had all been gathered I decided I would get another truck. In the corner I found one unlike the others, a four-wheeler, a sort of wagon with an iron tongue. It was very light with a wide, flat surface. I drew it to where the boys were loading their hand trucks. It created a sensation. They looked at it as though they had never seen it before, exclaiming in Spanish. Manuel scratched his head in disgust.

"What you do now?"

I pulled the truck into place.

"You wouldn't know — you tool of the bourgeoisie."

Then I loaded it. Not with five boxes. Not with ten. And not with twelve. As I continued to stack them up I realized what possibilities lay in this type of truck. When I finally stopped I had thirty-four aboard.

Thirty-four times fifty? How much was that? I took out my notebook and pencil and figured it. Seventeen hundred pounds. And seventeen hundred times ten were seventeen thousand pounds. Seventeen thousand pounds were eight and one half tons. Eight and one half tons an hour were eighty-five tons a day. Eighty-five tons a day were five hundred and ninety-five tons a week. Five hundred and ninety-five tons a week were thirty thousand nine hundred and forty tons a year. At that rate I would carry three hundred and nine thousand four hundred tons a year. Imagine! And the others carried a mere five hundred pounds per load. "Gangway!"

They stepped aside and I began to pull. The load moved slowly. I tugged backward, facing the load. My progress was slow because my feet slipped on the wet floor. The load was in the midst of things, directly in the path of the other truckers, which caused a little confusion, but not much, both coming and going. Finally the work stopped. All trucks were glutted in the middle of the room, like a downtown traffic jam. Shorty Naylor hurried in. I was tugging hard, grunting and slipping, losing more ground than I was gaining. But it was no fault of mine. It was the fault of the floor, which was too slippery.

"What the hell's going on here?" Shorty yelled.

I relaxed for a moment's rest. He slapped his hand over his forehead and shook his head.

"What’re you doing now?"

"Trucking boxes."

"Get it out of the way! Can't you see you're holding up the job?"

"But look at the size of this load! Seventeen hundred pounds!"

"Get it out of the way!"

"This is more than three times as many . . ."

"I said, get it out of the way!"

The fool. What could I do against such odds?

The rest of the afternoon I trucked five at a time with a two-wheel truck. It was a very unpleasant task. The only white man, the only American, and he trucking but half as much as the foreigners. I had to do something about it. The boys didn't say anything, but every one of them grinned when they passed me with my measly load of five.

At length I found a way out of it. The worker Orquiza pulled a box from the top of the stack, loosening the whole wall of other boxes. With a yell of warning I ran to the wall and pushed it with my shoulder. It wasn't necessary, but I held the wall against my body, my face purpling, as if the wall was about to collapse upon me. The boys quickly broke down the wall. Afterward I held my shoulder and moaned and clinched my teeth. I staggered away, barely able to walk.

"Are you all right?" they asked.

"It's nothing," I smiled. "Don't worry, fellows. I think I dislocated my shoulder, but it's all right. Don't let it worry you at all."

So now, with a dislocated shoulder, there was no reason for them to grin at my load of five.

That night we worked until seven o'clock. The fog held us up. I stayed a few minutes overtime. I was stalling. I wanted to see Shorty Naylor alone. I had a few things I wanted to discuss with him. When the others had gone and the cannery was deserted, a strange, pleasant loneliness fell upon it. I went to Shorty Naylor's office. The door was open. He was washing his hands in that strong soap powder which was half lye. I could smell it. He seemed a part of the strange, vast loneliness of the cannery, he belonged to it, like a girder across the roof. For a moment he seemed sad and soft, a man with many worries, a person like me, like anyone else. At that evening hour, with the building exposing him to vast loneliness, it seemed to me he was a pretty good fellow after all. But I had something on my mind. I knocked on the door. He turned around.

"Hello there. What's your trouble?"

"No trouble at all," I said. "I merely wanted to get your view on a matter."

"Well, shoot the works. What is it?"

"A little matter I tried to discuss with you earlier this afternoon."

He was drying his hands on a black towel.

"I can't remember. What was it about?"

"You were very uncivil about it this afternoon," I said. "Maybe you won't want to discuss it."

"Oh," he smiled. "You know how it is when a man's busy. Sure, I'll discuss it. What's the trouble?"

"Hitler's Weltanschauung. What is your opinion of the Fuhrer's Weltanschauung?"

"What's that?"

"Hitler's Weltanschauung."

"Hitler's what? Weltan - what?"

"Hitler's Weltanschauung?"

"What's that? What's Weltanschauung? You got me there, boy. I don't even know what it means."

I whistled and backed away.

"My God!" I said. "Don't tell me you don't even know what it means!"

He shook his head and smiled. It was not very important to him; not as important as drying his hands, for instance. He was not at all ashamed of his ignorance — not in the least shocked. In fact, he seemed rather pleased. I tsk-tsk-tsked with my tongue and backed out of the door, smiling hopelessly. This was almost too much for me. What could I do against an ignoramus like that?

"Well, if you don't know, well, I guess you don't know, and I guess there's no sense in trying to discuss it, if you don't know, and, well, it looks as if you don't know, so, well, goodnight, if you don't know. Goodnight. See you in the morning."

He stood so surprised he forgot to keep drying his hands. Then he called suddenly. "Hey!" he called. "What's this all about?"

But I was gone, hurrying through the darkness of the vast warehouse, only the echo of his voice reaching me. On the way out I passed through the wet clammy room where they dumped mackerel, from the fishing boats. But tonight there were no mackerel, the season had just ended, and instead there were tuna, the first real tuna I ever saw in such numbers, the floor littered with them, thousands of them scattered over a carpet of dirty ice, their white corpse-like bellies blundering through the semi-darkness.

Some of them were still alive. You could hear the sporadic slapping of tails. There in front of me flapped the tail of one who was more alive than dead. I dragged him out of the ice.

He was bitter cold and still kicking. I carried him as best I could, dragging him too, until I got him upon the cutting table where the women would dress him tomorrow. He was tremendous, weighing almost a hundred pounds, a monster of a fellow from another world, with great strength still left in his body, and a streak of blood coming from his eye, where he had been hooked. Strong as a man, he hated me and tried to break away from the cutting board. I pulled a gutting knife from the board and held it under his white pulsing gills.

"You monster!" I said. "You black monster! Spell Weltanschauung! Go on — spell it!"

But he was a fish from another world; he couldn't spell anything. The best he could do was fight for his life, and he was already too tired for that. But even so, he almost got away. I slugged him with my fist. Then I slid the knife under his gill, amused at his helpless gasping, and cut off his head.

"When I said spell Weltanschauung, I meant it!"

I pushed him back among his comrades upon the ice.

"Disobedience means death."

There was no response save the faint flapping of a tail somewhere in the blackness. I wiped my hands on a gunny sack and walked into the street toward home.

Chapter Sixteen

THE DAY AFTER I destroyed the women I wished I had not destroyed them. When I was busy and tired I did not think of them, but Sunday was a day of rest, and I would loaf around with nothing to do, and Helen and Marie and Ruby and the Little Girl would whisper to me frantically, asking me why I had been so hasty to destroy them, asking me if I did not now regret it. And I did regret it.

Now I had to be satisfied with their memories. But their memories were not good enough. They escaped me. They were unlike the reality. I could not hold them and look at them as I did the pictures. Now I went around all the time wishing I had not destroyed them, and I called myself a dirty stinking Christian for having done it. I thought about making another collection, but that was not so easy. It had taken a long time to gather those others. I couldn't at will go about finding women to equal the Little Girl, and probably never again would there ever in my life be another woman like Marie. They could never be duplicated. There was another thing that prevented me from making another collection. I was too tired. I used to sit around with a book of Spengler or Schopenhauer and always as I read I kept calling myself a fake and a fool, because what I really wanted were those women who were no more.

Now the closet was different, filled with Mona's dresses and the disgusting odor of fumigation. Some nights I thought I could not bear it. I walked up and down the grey carpet thinking how horrible grey carpets were, and biting my fingernails. I couldn't read anything. I didn't feel like reading a book by a great man, and I used to wonder if they were so great after all. After all, were they as great as Hazel or Marie, or the Little Girl? Could Nietzsche compare with the golden hair of Jean? Some nights I didn't think so at all. Was Spengler as great as Hazel's fingernails? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There was a time and place for everything, but as far as I was concerned I would rather have the beauty of Hazel's fingernails to ten million volumes by Oswald Spengler.