The Moth

  “Had to find stuff.”

  “Gee, you’re loaded. We better split it, so we can make time.”

  “Not here. Let’s hit for the river.”

  “O.K. Come on.”

  The river is one of those Western jobs, ten parts sand and rock and gravel to one part water, but it wasn’t too rough, and we figured we could follow it easy enough, and we wouldn’t meet anybody. We hit it in a half hour and began looking for Hosey. He was to light up a fire, so we’d have a torch to steer by. But we walked and walked and routed up about forty things that rustled and hissed and scrabbled, and still nothing but black ahead. “Jack.”

  “Yes, Buck?”

  “Did he say upriver?”

  “Not once but twenty-eight times.”

  “Does the bastard know upriver from down?”

  “Well, feel the water! You can feel how it—”

  “Yeah, Jack, I can and you can. But can he?”

  I’d say we went two miles, feeling like twenty. And we saw a flicker of yellow, and then we could hear him: “Yay Jack, yay Buck!”

  “... Well, why didn’t you pick Alaska?”

  “It’s perfect. It’s a—jungle! Look over top of you!”

  Overhead was a bridge that made shelter, where the railroad went over the river. That it was worth two miles of walking, by the dark of the moon, I couldn’t see, but I didn’t argue about it. He had cans, big ones, for boiling, and little ones, to eat out of, and plenty of wood. We fed up the fire, set water on to heat, and pretty soon put the chicken, soup, peas, and other stuff in, still in the cans. Then in one can I made coffee. When I put that instant stuff in, with sugar and cream, they began gulping it without even waiting for the other stuff. Then we opened the soup and drank a can apiece. Then we had the chicken, but one can was all we were able to get away with. Then we had peas, carrots, and corn, and canned peaches. Then I broke out what I hadn’t said anything to them about. That was the beer, that I had stashed in the running water so it would get cold. They took one look at those cans and began mumbling those cusswords that are little prayers of thanks in tough guys’ language. I cut into three, and we sat there with the foam sliding all over our mouths, and the cold beer sliding down our throats. Buck began to mumble how they both owed plenty to me. Hosey said they sure did. I said thanks, pals, thanks.

  By then it was daylight, so when a train came along we slid out from under to have a look at her. She was a passenger train, westbound, all curtained in, but on the observation platform, smoking a cigar, in pajamas, dressing gown, and slippers, was a fat guy. We waved, and he stared, like he couldn’t believe his eyes: Then he leaned forward, held on to the brass rail, and spit at us. “... That dirty son of a bitch.”

  “O.K., Buck, tell him some more.”

  “God, boys, would I get like that? First they throw you out, then they spit in your goddam eye. That fat slob! No, not one of the three of us would get like that. At least we’d give a guy a break. At least if he waved at us we’d wave back. But that fat bastard couldn’t even give us a wave. Not even a kind look.”

  We went back to the fire and began talking what we’d do if we had it good and three guys off the road came in and asked for a break. We said we’d feed them and bed them down till they were ready to talk and then line it up for them to get a job. In the middle of that Buck took off his coat, crawled inside his gunny sack, stuck the coat under his head and went to sleep. Then Hosey did. Then I did, or tried to. But all the time the beer and chicken and the rest of it were taking me down I kept thinking about the money and why I hadn’t said anything about it. It seemed to me I was as close to them as brothers. And yet I was mortally afraid to open my trap about it.

  Around noon we built up more fire, heated some beans, made some coffee, filled ourselves with all we could hold, and then began to boil up. I boiled everything, even my suit. What to do with the money I didn’t know but I climbed the bank, stuck it in an angle of the abutment, put a stone over it, and came on back. We worked on ourselves, first in the cold water in the river, then in the hot that we kept boiling, until we were pretty clean. The soap came in as handy as anything, and we took turns with it, scrubbing and slopping and lathering with it, until it was just a sliver and then even that was gone. Around four maybe, our clothes were dry and we got dressed. But along toward sundown dogs began barking downriver, and if there’s one thing a real hobo hates worse than work it’s dogs. Hosey began to get nervous and it was easy to see if we were going to keep him we had to move. We talked about where we’d move to, and he was scared to death to go through Phoenix again on a train, as he said they’d “be laying for us, sure.” And yet we all wanted to beat West, instead of going back East, on account of the weather. Finally we decided to break up, each one to hitchhike separately by road, and meet again in Shorty Lee’s jungle in Yuma, that Hosey said was the best in the U. S., bar none. So that’s what we did. We had to break up, because three guys together would scare any private driver to death, and on the trucks, on account of a new no-rider clause in the insurance, there was no chance at all. There had been trouble, hijacking and stuff like that, so the companies put it in the policies that if riders were aboard, all bets were off. Kind of rugged for Mr. Thumb, but it gives you an idea how things were.

  Me, though, I caught a through bus. The driver looked at me funny, but I knew I didn’t stink so I looked right back, and when I got out my roll that talked. It was a day coach, not very full, so there was plenty of room on the wide seat at the rear. I stretched out, got comfortable, and counted my money. There were two or three tens, some fives, and the rest ones, altogether around ninety dollars. I shoved it in my pocket again, then sat there, staring out at the road where it was rolling out behind, working on something that had been bothering me all day: Why had I hid that money? Why hadn’t I said something about it to Buck and Hosey? Why hadn’t I cut them in? Here they were, maybe not the buddies I would have picked some night when I was all dressed up in a dinner coat three years before, but some kind of buddies, and what was pretty important too, all the buddies I had. And yet, at my first stroke of luck, I had ratted on them one hundred per cent, like any real hobo. I began thinking about something else: Why had I passed up the silver? So nobody could hear it clink, seemed to be the answer. Yeah, but who? A cop, when I was toting that sack, if he ever got near enough to hear something clink, would already have nabbed me. Once more, it spelled Buck and Hosey. And at last I admitted to myself, what had been slewing around in the back of my head: I had kept quiet, I had even passed up the silver, because I was afraid of them. On food, as Hosey had said, there’d be nothing to tell. At most it would be thirty days in jail, or more likely ten, serve your time or vag out by sundown. But money was different. Buddies or no buddies, rat or no rat, I’d never put myself in their power by letting them in on it. Or at least so it seemed at that time.

  Shorty Lee, the hobo’s friend, had fixed up a jungle that was a lulu, all right, and though I wouldn’t exactly trade off my membership in the University Club to get into it, it did things to you that somebody had put up a couple of shacks that guys could sleep in, got them some clean pots to cook in, bricks for their fires, and connected up a shower so they could get clean and a water tap so they could drink. I didn’t go there right away, though. I hit town around ten o’clock, checked in at a little hotel down by the river, then went to a cafe for dinner. It was just a cheap cafe, like a million of them all over the country that had opened up since Prohibition got repealed. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been in a bar. In Baltimore, they had served liquor, of course, but it had come in a cup and had no name and you drank it quick. I ordered a Martini, with steak, fried potatoes and coffee. Then I noticed two girls on stools, talking to each other and not with anybody that I could see. They were just Western barflies, in checked blouses, dungaree pants, and stitched boots, but not so bad either. One of them saw me, looked sharp, then looked again. I looked back. Then I began to wonder if she was having any ef
fect on me. I mean, I was trying to figure if it was getting anywhere, this campaign Buck and I had started by stealing some grub. Next thing I knew the waiter was shaking me to wake up and eat. Looked like I had some little way to go. I felt my money. It was still there.

  In the morning I found some other place, and had sliced orange, ham and three eggs, flapjacks, and coffee. They treated me O.K., but by now I was getting more and more self-conscious about my scrubbed-out jeans. I began looking for clothes. The good places I stayed out of, because I figured they’d be shy of the stuff I wanted. But on a side street, back of one of the hotels, I spotted a place that said “summer clearance sale,” and walked over there. First I picked out a pair of heavy khaki work pants, the kind that go up under your chin in front and fasten with a pair of suspenders behind. Then I tried on shoes. I needed brogans, but got the best-looking pair I could see. Then I got two pair of woolen stockings. I think they felt best of all. On the road, if you’ve got any socks at all you’re lucky, but if they’re not all full of holes that cut your toes and blister your heels, then you’re asleep, dreaming. To wobble my foot and feel clean wool all over it was wonderful. Then I picked out drawers, undershirt, and shirt. I wanted a check, like the girls had had, but I happened to think it might be the one thing somebody would remember me by, if they were pinned down in court. I said make it khaki, to go with the pants. Then I picked out flannel pants, to wear under the khaki, a dark coat, and a brown hat, one of the two-and-a-half-gallon jobs that practically everybody wears in that neck of the woods. I dressed in the backroom, and told them to throw my old stuff away. Was I glad to kick it all in a corner, and step out of there clean, whole, and with a decent smell!

  Outside, on a bench, at a bus stop, I counted up again, and had nearly sixty dollars. I sat there, trying to think what I was going to do. Across from me girls kept going up and down, and I wondered if my sixty dollars, provided I ate three times a day, would get me in shape so they looked like girls, instead of just things in skirts. But I had to cut Buck and Hosey in, I knew that, and if I felt it had to be my own way, to be safe, I still had to do it. I walked on down to the store again, and bought them the same outfits. There was no trouble over sizes. I’d heard them call theirs, so many times, in the missions, I’d have known them in my sleep. I took the stuff up over to the hotel, taking care to keep all sales slips in my hip pocket, in case. I still had a little money left, so I went out and bought beans, bacon, eggs, and stuff. I still had my gunny sack, that I had washed out with the other things in the Salt River, so I opened all packages, dumped them in, and threw away the wrappings. I shook it up, like it had been filled in a hurry. I took it over to the S.P. tracks. From there, following Hosey’s directions, I hit the jungle, and there, believe it or not, feeding a fire he’d made between two piles of bricks, was Buck. “Well, for God’s sake look at Adolph Menjou!”

  “Buck, how are you?”

  “Sir, I’m fine.”

  “Hosey here?”

  “Out mooching grub. He’ll be along.”

  “I brought some grub.”

  “Well, will you talk?”

  “Slight case of theft, that’s all.”

  “You mean—?”

  “Well, what do you do in a case like that? I was walking along, going about my business, when up the street a piece of fire apparatus went by. Well, I stopped and looked like everybody else. Then, in front of a store, a party came out, and went running up there, to see better. Or maybe it was his house that was burning down, I don’t know. Well, could I help it if that was the place I’d decided to price a few small articles I needed? I went inside, stomped on the floor, hollered, and whistled three times, and nobody came. So I filled my sack. Every pile I saw, I took three of a kind, and then slid out the back way. But going past the kitchen I noticed some things to eat. Anyway, I dropped them in the sack on the principle we needed them most. Then I beat it.”

  The way he grabbed those socks, and smelled them, and hugged the shoes to him, made you want to turn your eyes away. Hosey came, with a sackful of the rotten potatoes and bread heels and the crab bait that we always had whenever he went out to mooch. He acted the same as Buck, only worse. When we finally got the grub cooked and they were outside some of it and all dressed up in their clothes, I could hear little giggles coming out of them and they’d keep passing their hands over their mouths, to hide their grins, or maybe rub them off. I kept thinking how funny it was, that I had to cook up this yarn, because I couldn’t trust them with the truth. But then, sure enough, Hosey had the wind-up on it: “Boys, we got to move.”

  “Why?”

  Buck wasn’t any too agreeable about it, full of food and all dressed up like he was. “Can’t we just set, for once in our life?”

  “They’ll be looking for us. The cops.”

  “And how would they know who did it?”

  “Ain’t we wearing the evidence?”

  I wanted to tell him for God’s sake be his age, but I’d told them this dilly, and if I went back on it I’d have to tell them the truth, and that didn’t suit me. So there was nothing to do but listen to him line it out, how we’d pulled two jobs here in Arizona, and had to get out of the state, quick. So that’s how we came to hit for the bridge and cross into California.

  17

  WE PULLED JOBS IN Indio, Banning, Redlands, and San Bernardino, then doubled over and pulled one in Mojave. That was a little grocery on one of the streets off the highway, railroad track, and rabbit run in the middle of town. But when I had the stuff sacked, and was tiptoeing out, Buck called. There were shots, and bullets went past my head. I ran so hard that when the three of us met, in a jungle by the water tank, I couldn’t talk for an hour. We cooked our grub and ate it, but figured the time had come for another change of states and hopped the U.P. for Las Vegas. There, after making two dollars parking cars in a lot on Fifth Street, I took a fifty-cent room in a motel near by, washed, shaved, and looked myself over. In the face, I looked what I was, a hard, sun-baked bum. On clothes, I looked good enough, though not quite good enough to sign in under my own name. Ever since Atlanta, in all missions, flophouses, and joints, I had used some phony monicker, like Dikes or Davis, and that’s what I did now.

  I went out and tried my luck on the wheels. I bought a dollar’s worth of ten-cent chips at a cut-rate place, and tried a few passes, red against the black. I won. Then I moved over to the numbers, and bet the first twelve against the second and third. I won some more. I raised the ante, and began making support bets, little gambles that didn’t add up to much if I lost, but meant a whole lot if I won. I mean, on the first twelve I’d put fifty cents. Then on the first four I’d put twenty-five cents. Then on number one I’d put ten cents. Then if the ball fell in any number higher than twelve I was out eighty-five cents clean on the whole spin. But if it fell in any number below twelve I cashed a dollar for my fifty-cent bet, and made fifteen cents. If it fell in the first four I made $2.25 more. If it fell on number one I made $3.50 more. Since then I’ve seen plenty of gambling, and done a little, and have nothing to say against the system I figured out that night. Any betting’s a gamble, but I’ll say this for support betting: It’s offensive, and if you win you take home something. Hedge betting’s defensive, just a way of stringing it out longer. I didn’t have too much luck for a while, just a dribble now and then, but then I landed with number one, and felt the tide come in. I quit after three straight losses, and left with thirty dollars or so.

  It felt good to be able to look up Buck and Hosey, where they were laying kindling, and tell them the truth, and invite them to a room in the motel. Hosey, he hated to cough up, but so long as it was my money he had to. We slept, and then in the morning Buck and I hopped a bus to Boulder Dam, or Hoover Dam they call it now, that was building then, to get a job. They weren’t hiring, but said come back next week.

  So we went back to our motel and cinched our belts, and tried to make our money last by laying on the bed, so as not to get hungry. Then Hosey
wanted to move, on account of the guy in the next room to him, who he said had a gun, and kept shifting it around, from the bureau drawer to his trunk to his suitcase, so it got on his nerves. Buck and I didn’t quite attach the importance to it that Hosey did, and fact of the matter we wouldn’t have paid any attention to it at all, if I hadn’t picked up another day on the parking lot, and when things were slack, slipped across to the filling station next door to use the toilet. The manager was fixing a flat, and part of the time he was outside the toilet window with it, beating on the tire with a hammer. Following him around was a kid that seemed to work there, who as well as I could figure out had been transferred to another station of the chain, and wanted tips on how to act. The place he was going seemed to be the “flagship” as the manager called it, the main station, and the kid was a little nervous about what to do. The manager told him how to get there, by following Highway 91 and watching for the sign, and some more stuff that I remembered later. Then I heard the kid say: “When do they open?”