“Right. The smaller towns. West. Maybe south and west where the winters won’t be so long. Lord, I’ve been wantin’ to see the West all my days. We’ll pick us out an empty boxcar—”
We were feverish with our plans. We talked excitedly, interrupting one another with new ideas. Nothing seemed impossible during that hour when Howie and I sat on the curb and made our plans.
Then there was suddenly a distraction. I had paid no attention to the shadowy figure of a boy approaching until he stopped and stood before us. It was my brother.
“What are you doing here, Joey?” I asked gruffly.
“I’m going with you, Josh,” he said as quietly as Howie had spoken an hour before.
“How do you know I’m going anywhere?”
“I know you’re going to leave home—I heard you tell Mom. And you listen to me, Josh. I’m going with you.”
“And you listen to me, Joey. You’re going to do nothing of the sort. You’re too young. You couldn’t keep up with guys our age—you’ve got sense enough to know that.”
“Howie, make him let me go with you.” Joey turned away from me. His voice pled with Howie. I think I knew at that minute what the decision would be.
Joey knew what he was doing when he turned to Howie. This was his friend, and he knew it. They had often sat on the school steps during late afternoons in summer when no one was around, and Howie had shown Joey how to pick out a few chords on the banjo. Sometimes he’d ask Joey to sing and he’d make his banjo sing too, and their faces would be all shined up with delight. Howie was kinder to Joey than I was, more patient, more respectful of Joey as an individual.
He looked at me when Joey made his plea. “Why can’t he go with us, Josh?”
“He just can’t. He wouldn’t be able to keep up with us. He’d be a nuisance, and you know it. We’ve made our plans, Howie, and I think they’ll work. But not if we have to have a kid along.”
“He can sing,” Howie said as if to himself. “He’s got a good, clear voice, a little off-pitch now and then, but nice. Lots of people will pay to hear a little kid sing who wouldn’t notice older ones. Joey just might do all right for himself.”
“I’ve told you, Howie, he can’t go. I won’t let him. And that’s final.”
“Maybe you and me could go it alone, Joey. Let old Josh stay here and boss people around if that’s what he likes to do. You and me might get ourselves a lot of loose change if we practiced a little and got into the right spot.” He grinned at Joey, and my brother grinned back in triumph. For a minute I was furious with both of them, but even in that minute it struck me that if some artist could paint those two faces, both of them thin from too scanty meals during the past two years, but both of them bright with laughter—if some artist could have caught them at that minute, he could have made a picture that was really something.
So it was settled, and late that night Joey and I crawled out of our room with an old cardboard suitcase full of clothing, the remnants of a tattered blanket, and all the matches I could find. Matches, I felt, were very important. I had read a story somewhere of an expedition that appeared to be all set, everything packed and ready. Then it smashed, all because one little item had been forgotten. No matches. I hunted around and collected every one I could find.
I was too excited to think about how grave a step we were taking. If I thought of Mom and Dad at all, it was with anger which I sought to fan in order to keep up my courage. Nothing mattered except getting away.
We joined Howie, who waited down in our alley with his banjo and a bundle of clothes tucked under his arm. The three of us slept in a park for a few hours that night. Then very early the next morning we found a Salvation Army kitchen open with no one else yet around. A big, tired-looking man shook his head at us, but he gave each of us a bowl of oatmeal. Then he told us not to come back. The food he handed out was for men who must wait in line to get to employment windows—it wasn’t for runaway kids.
Our experience that first day showed how right Howie had been in making me allow Joey to come with us. We stopped down on Randolph and Wabash early in the afternoon and tried our luck for the first time at the art of panhandling. That is, Joey and Howie tried it. They were right for it, both of them being small, Joey’s blondness contrasting vividly with Howie’s great dark eyes and sallow face. I drifted off in the crowd and watched the other two perform.
Joey sang, his small face bright under the blond hair that he had to brush out of his eyes from time to time. His voice was sweet and clear, a little thin, of course, and not always true to pitch, but with Howie covering up for him, he did all right. Howie, with his sense of showmanship, would run his fingers across the strings in a gay arpeggio and then grin up at Joey as if that flurry of notes was some pleasant secret between them. People stopped to watch them. Some smiled as they stood listening, and some sad faces looked sadder than ever. But a lot of people reached out to drop a nickel or a few pennies into Joey’s outstretched cap.
They collected seventy-eight cents that afternoon. Then at twilight they joined me, and we moved on in triumph at our beginning. We bought hot dogs and a loaf of bread and still had money enough for some breakfast. We gloated as we ate. If Joey’s singing with Howie’s banjo could do that well for us, we were pretty sure that, given the luck to find an available piano, Howie and I could make music that some restaurant owner or dance hall proprietor would pay us to do. Once in a while I’d play popular numbers straight, I thought, and Joey could sing with us. I no longer underestimated Joey. He had done fine that afternoon.
I felt happier than I had felt in weeks. We had found confidence down there on the corner of Randolph and Wabash, seventy-eight cents worth of confidence, and the glow it gave us was a wonderful experience.
When it grew dark, we huddled together under the steps of a stairway leading up to an el platform. We talked softly together for a while, and the words “We can make it; I know we can make it” became a refrain. We didn’t realize at first how many times we’d repeated those words, and when we did, we carried our refrain to ridiculous lengths and laughed at our own absurdity.
Joey and Howie grew tired very early. They leaned against me for warmth and were soon asleep, but I sat there wide awake for a long time. Little gusts blew scraps of dirty newspaper and flurries of dust into my face from time to time. Overhead the elevated trains rumbled so often that their noise finally became a familiar monotony of which I was barely conscious.
Once a woman came and stood leaning against the pillar of the stair for a long time. She was so close I could have touched her dress, but she didn’t see us. She was crying. She made me think of Kitty, and I was glad when she finally began climbing the steps up to the platform.
Very late in the night when the moonlight made it look like morning, a policeman came by. He stopped to look at us, but after one glance I kept my eyes closed, and he evidently decided to let us sleep. After a long time he walked away, very slowly.
The next morning after a better breakfast than we usually had at home, we started for the freight yards. We had money enough left for streetcar fare, and so, after some inquiries, we found the right car and rode out to the yards in style. We weren’t too much concerned about money. We thought we’d ride as far as we could on the freight train; then Howie and Joey could repeat their panhandling stunt, and we could eat until a real job could be located. We had the remainder of the loaf of bread we’d bought the night before; that would have to do us for the train ride.
We found acres of tracks down in the freight yards; I had never known there were so many. We saw trains coming in and leaving, trains being loaded for a run, trains backing, lurching forward, switching—everything was confusion. Adding to that confusion was an army of men, many of them railroad workers; just as many others were loiterers like us. These men were looking around, sizing up the cars and their loads, waiting for the whistles that meant a train was about to start. When that signal came, they would run to leap into a car or swing up on an outer ladder and cli
mb to the top of the train once the wheels had picked up speed.
I asked a cautious question or two whenever I saw a face that looked friendly. There weren’t many such. Men’s faces seemed to be much alike that year—lean, scowling, and angry. One man who told me that he’d been a hobo for fifteen years was friendly enough, however, and was willing to talk to us. When we told him we were headed west, he didn’t question the vagueness of our “west,” but pointed out a train and told us it would leave for Iowa that afternoon, would get to Nebraska the next morning. That sounded good to us; that was west and far away from Chicago.
I asked the hobo about the railroad detectives, the bulls of whom I’d heard a lot. Were they really brutal as many of the newspapers and magazine articles described them? Sometimes they were, he told me, especially when the higher-ups began to put on the pressure and a bull felt his job was in danger. He had seen bulls club men off the trains; he’d also seen an angry group of free riders seize a bull and throw him from the train. On the other hand he’d seen riders and bulls sit together for long hours, chatting or playing cards as if everything were all above board and just fine. It all depended, he said; it all depended on your luck.
I asked about the dangers. Yes, he’d seen kids—men too, but mostly kids—get killed if they were careless. Big loads of lumber or steel might shift with a sudden lurch of the train and crush an unwary rider. Some people misjudged the speed of a train and made their grabs for the ladder or the open car too late. Legs were often crushed in accidents of that sort.
A feeling of uneasiness chilled me, uneasiness especially for Joey. He was thin, even to skinniness, and he wasn’t as active as most kids his age. He hadn’t grown up accustomed to the leaping and climbing and bike riding that I had done as a youngster; he’d had too many years of illness for that. Howie was slender, too, and short, but he was an agile little guy who had survived Chicago’s traffic and some of its worst slums. Howie could keep up with me, I was pretty sure, but I was worried about Joey.
I decided against waiting until the freight started. We’d find an open car and hide until we were on our way. If the bulls discovered us and threw us off before we got moving, we’d just have to find another train. I couldn’t see Joey undertaking a scramble that was dangerous even for men who had jumped on moving trains for years. Howie agreed with me.
We found an open car filled with big sacks of lime, which farmers use to fertilize their fields. There were some fairly good hiding places among these piles, fairly good, that is, if a railroad bull happened to be lax in his car inspection. And, of course, that all depended on your luck. We jumped inside when we felt no one was watching, and in the hour of waiting for the train to start, not a soul came near us. We got to feeling pretty confident after a while, almost as if we had bought tickets for a ride somewhere “out west.”
Three men jumped into our car when the train began to pick up speed, but they didn’t pay any attention to us. They looked very blue and tired; they didn’t even talk to one another.
We rattled out of Chicago, and in an hour or two we were passing farms and small towns; the fields, brown with withered cornstalks, looked ghostly as twilight closed in. We crossed rivers, most of them low and sluggish after the drouth that had burned things up that summer, and then finally we were rushing through nothing but black night with only the light from the engine, at least a mile ahead of our car, to cut the darkness.
Talk lagged that night. All three of us were quiet, a little thoughtful. Once Howie stroked the strings of his banjo a few times, but somehow the chords sounded mournful. I felt as if I couldn’t stand to hear them, and I was glad when he shook his head and laid the banjo aside.
Joey had charge of the leftover bread. He took it out after a while, and we cut it up into chunks with Howie’s knife. We ate it very slowly, chewing each bite a long time to stretch out the experience of having food in our mouths. Joey finished first and Howie handed him a crust from his own share. “Here, Joey, you eat this. I hate the crusty part,” he lied indifferently. That was like Howie.
The rhythmic roar of the wheels soon made us drowsy. There wasn’t much to talk about anyway, so we leaned against a high stack of the lime sacks and closed our eyes. Suddenly I remembered what the hobo had said about heavy loads that shifted with a lurching train and sometimes killed riders. I got up and tested the stack above us. It seemed firm as a stone wall. Then I relaxed and went to sleep.
It was toward morning but still dark when a couple railroad bulls came through our car. One of them kicked me in the shins, not hard, but lively enough to let me know he meant business.
“Come on, you kids, you’re gettin’ off in just about fifteen minutes. You’re gettin’ off and stayin’ off, the whole lousy lot of you.”
One of the men over in the corner gave the bulls some lip—didn’t hear what he said, but I could tell by the tone.
“We’ve had our orders, bud, and the company ain’t foolin’. This train is crawlin’ with free riders tonight. You’re gettin’ off, brother, and you can wait for the next freight and see what happens.”
We got off when the freight stopped. It was cold and dark except for the dim lights around the railroad yards. Down the length of the train we saw men and boys leaping out of car doors or climbing down from the tops of the cars. I thought about frightened rats running out of the path of danger. I didn’t like being one of those rats.
I held on to Joey when he made the leap down from the car. He was sleepy and stiff from the cramped position he’d had, and bewildered about what was happening. Howie swore softly, one hand clutching his banjo, the other hand guiding Joey.
There was noise all around us, noise of the panting freight, of the yelling and cursing of angry men as they milled about the train. Suddenly we became aware of another noise, a swelling roar from the town beyond the tracks. We stopped to listen, and in the near-darkness we saw what looked like a wall of men coming toward us. They carried clubs and pitchforks, and as they approached, we could hear the savagery in their voices.
“Don’t take another step this way,” a huge man yelled, stepping in front of the others. “You can take your empty bellies to another part of the country. We’ve enough of your kind to feed already. Take another step and we’ll club you down like dogs.”
There were snarls and yells of rage from our side. A man cried out, “What do you want us to do—throw ourselves under the wheels?” and there was a loud chorus of “Yes! That’s right! Do that!”
It was like a horror dream. The thought ran through my mind, “Joey’s hearing this. He’s only ten, and he’s hearing things like this.”
Out of the crowd of men the hobo from the Chicago yards was suddenly beside us.
“You boys stay with me. We’ll jump the train as soon as it gets movin’. It’s all we can do. I’ll help the kid on. You two stay close.”
And so we waited. It seemed a long time, but finally the signal for pulling out was sounded and the train started moving. Men ran along its side and waited to make their leap. I think the railroad bulls must have given up; they couldn’t afford to club men to death because they were stealing another hour’s ride.
The hobo lifted Joey like a sack of flour and half-tossed, half-pushed him into an empty car. He yelled to Howie and me, “Stay close. There’s a passenger highballin’ through town on the other track.”
There was, indeed, though I’d been too excited to notice. The light was tearing down the parallel track toward us. It was blinding. I grabbed at the floor of the car and swung up inside. It wasn’t hard to do; the freight was still moving slowly.
Howie was right behind me, and I braced myself to help draw him up. But he didn’t leap as I expected him to do. He yelled, “Here, catch my banjo, Josh,” and as I extended my arms, he leaned back a little and threw the banjo up to me. What happened then, I don’t know. I’ll never know. But the banjo had no sooner touched my hands than I saw Howie’s body lifted by the express train and thrown down the tracks as
if it had been an empty crate, a worthless piece of junk.
I had the wildest kind of feeling that I must go after him; it seemed I’d die if I couldn’t get to Howie. I heard Joey screaming and a man yelling, “Grab that kid. He’s goin’ to jump.” Then it was as if a dozen pairs of arms grabbed me and threw me down on the floor against the side of the car. I didn’t know anything more for a long time.
3
Joey and I got off the freight in the late afternoon. The bulls had quieted down after word of the accident traveled through the train, I guess; at least those of us in the car where Joey and I sat saw nothing more of them. We got off the train of our own accord; there was nothing we wanted so much as to get away from that place of tragedy.
It was a small town where we stopped, and no one around the depot paid any attention to us. Joey’s face was swollen with his tears, and my legs were shaking until I could hardly walk. We were hungry, but with the numbness of grief, my courage was gone. I couldn’t bring myself to face the possibility of a hostile answer if I approached someone for food. I wouldn’t have dared to ask for a job. I couldn’t have played the finest piano in the country that night; I couldn’t have chopped wood or stacked lumber or done any other job even if I had had the chance. I stumbled a time or two when we climbed down from the train, and I held on to Joey’s shoulder for support. We walked along the track a little distance and sat down for a while, trying to make some plan for the night.
One of the men who had climbed off the train stopped beside us. He and some of the others had gone into a small store beside the depot and had evidently bought a few groceries. He held a half dozen cans of food in his arms.
“A bunch of us are going to cook a little down the tracks tonight,” he said. “If you kids want to come with me, I guess we can spare you a meal.”
To refuse the food was plain madness on our part, but when I looked at Joey, he was shaking his head. I felt the same way. We were in too deep a shock for an evening with strangers; we wanted to crawl away with our grief and face it in silence.