The 42nd Parallel
One day he noticed The Industrial Worker sticking out of the pocket of the man beside him. They had both sat on the bench a long time when something made him turn to look at the man. “Say, aren’t you Ben Evans?” “Well, Mac, I’ll be goddamned . . . What’s the matter, boy, you’re lookin’ thin?” “Aw, nothin’, I’m lookin’ for a master, that’s all.”
They talked for a long time. Then they went to have a cup of coffee in a Mexican restaurant where some of the boys hung out. A young blonde fellow with blue eyes joined them there who talked English with an accent. Mac was surprised to find out that he was a Mexican. Everybody talked Mexico. Madero had started his revolution. The fall of Diaz was expected any day. All over the peons were taking to the hills, driving the rich cientificos off their ranches. Anarchist propaganda was spreading among the town workers. The restaurant had a warm smell of chiles and overroasted coffee. On each table there were niggerpink and vermilion paper flowers, an occasional flash of white teeth in bronze and brown faces talking low. Some of the Mexicans there belonged to the I.W.W., but most of them were anarchists. The talk of revolution and foreign places made him feel happy and adventurous again, as if he had a purpose in life, like when he’d been on the bum with Ike Hall.
“Say, Mac, let’s go to Mexico and see if there’s anything in this revoloossione talk,” Ben kept saying.
“If it wasn’t for the kids . . . Hell, Fred Hoff was right when he bawled me out and said a revolutionist oughtn’t to marry.”
Eventually Mac got a job as linotype operator on The Times, and things at the house were a little better, but he never had any spare money, as everything had to go into paying debts and interest on mortgages. It was night work again, and he hardly ever saw Maisie and the kids any more. Sundays Maisie would take little Ed to brother Bill’s and he and Rose would go for walks or take trolleytrips. That was the best part of the week. Saturday nights he’d sometimes get to a lecture or go down to chat with the boys at the I.W.W. local, but he was scared to be seen round in radical company too much for fear of losing his job. The boys thought he was pretty yellow but put up with him because they thought of him as an old timer.
He got occasional letters from Milly telling him about Uncle Tim’s health. She had married a man named Cohen who was a registered accountant and worked in one of the offices at the stockyards. Uncle Tim lived with them. Mac would have liked to bring him down to live with him in Los Angeles, but he knew that it would only mean squabbling with Maisie. Milly’s letters were pretty depressing. She felt funny, she said, to be married to a Jew. Uncle Tim was always poorly. The doctor said it was the drink, but whenever they gave him any money he drank it right up. She wished she could have children. Fainie was lucky, she thought, to have such nice children. She was afraid that poor Uncle Tim wasn’t long for this world.
The same day that the papers carried the murder of Madero in Mexico City, Mac got a wire from Milly that Uncle Tim was dead and please to wire money for the funeral. Mac went to the savingsbank and drew out $53.75 he had in an account for the children’s schooling and took it down to the Western Union and wired fifty to her. Maisie didn’t find out until the baby’s birthday came round, when she went down to deposit five dollars birthday money from brother Bill.
That night when Mac let himself in by the latchkey he was surprised to find the light on in the hall. Maisie was sitting half asleep on the hall settee with a blanket wrapped round her waiting for him. He was pleased to see her and went up to kiss her. “What’s the matter, baby?” he said. She pushed him away from her and jumped to her feet.
“You thief,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep till I told you what I thought of you. I suppose you’ve been spending it on drink or on some other woman. That’s why I never see you any more.”
“Maisie, calm down, old girl . . . What’s the matter; let’s talk about it quietly.”
“I’ll get a divorce, that’s what I’ll do. Stealing money from your own children to make yourself a bum with . . . your own poor little . . .”
Mac drew himself up and clenched his fists. He spoke very quietly, although his lips were trembling.
“Maisie, I had an absolute right to take out that money. I’ll deposit some more in a week or two, and it’s none of your damn business.”
“A fat chance you saving up fifty dollars; you aren’t man enough to make a decent living for your wife and children so you have to take it out of your poor little innocent children’s bank account,” Maisie broke out into dry sobbing.
“Maisie, that’s enough of that . . . I’m about through.”
“I’m the one that’s through with you and your ungodly socialistic talk. That never got nobody anywheres, and the lowdown bums you go around with . . . I wish to God I’d never married you. I never would have, you can be damn well sure of that if I hadn’t got caught the way I did.”
“Maisie, don’t talk like that.”
Maisie walked straight up to him, her eyes wide and feverish.
“This house is in my name; don’t forget that.”
“All right, I’m through.”
Before he knew it he had slammed the door behind him and was walking down the block. It began to rain. Each raindrop made a splatter the size of a silver dollar in the dust of the street. It looked like stage rain round the arclight. Mac couldn’t think where to go. Drenched, he walked and walked. At one corner there was a clump of palms in a yard that gave a certain amount of shelter. He stood there a long time shivering. He was almost crying thinking of the warm gentleness of Maisie when he used to pull the cover a little way back and slip into bed beside her asleep when he got home from work in the clanking sour printing plant, her breasts, the feel of the nipples through the thin nightgown; the kids in their cots out on the sleepingporch, him leaning over to kiss each of the little warm foreheads. “Well, I’m through,” he said aloud as if he were speaking to somebody else. Then only did the thought come to him, “I’m free to see the country now, to work for the movement, to go on the bum again.”
Finally he went to Ben Evans’ boarding house. It was a long time before he could get anybody to come to the door. When he finally got in Ben sat up in bed and looked at him stupid with sleep. “What the hell?” “Say, Ben, I’ve just broken up housekeepin’. . . I’m goin’ to Mexico.” “Are the cops after you? For crissake, this wasn’t any place to come.” “No, it’s just my wife.” Ben laughed. “Oh, for the love of Mike!” “Say, Ben, do you want to come to Mexico and see the revolution?” “What the hell could you do in Mexico? . . . Anyway, the boys elected me secretary of local 257. . . I got to stay here an’ earn my seventeenfifty. Say, you’re soaked; take your clothes off and put on my workclothes hangin’ on the back of the door . . . You better get some sleep. I’ll move over.”
Mac stayed in town two weeks until they could get a man to take his place at the linotype. He wrote Maisie that he was going away and that he’d send her money to help support the kids as soon as he was in a position to. Then one morning he got on the train with twentyfive dollars in his pocket and a ticket to Yuma, Arizona. Yuma turned out to be hotter’n the hinges of hell. A guy at the railroad men’s boarding house told him he’d sure die of thirst if he tried going into Mexico there, and nobody knew anything about the revolution, anyway. So he beat his way along the Southern Pacific to El Paso. Hell had broken loose across the border, everybody said. The bandits were likely to take Juarez at any moment. They shot Americans on sight. The bars of El Paso were full of ranchers and mining men bemoaning the good old days when Porfirio Diaz was in power and a white man could make money in Mexico. So it was with beating heart that Mac walked across the international bridge into the dusty-bustling adobe streets of Juarez.
Mac walked around looking at the small trolleycars and the mules and the wafts daubed with seablue and the peon women squatting behind piles of fruit in the marketplace and the crumbling scrollface churches and the deep bars open to the street. Everything was strange and the air was peppery to his
nostrils and he was wondering what he was going to do next. It was late afternoon of an April day. Mac was sweating in his blue flannel shirt. His body felt gritty and itchy and he wanted a bath. “Gettin’ too old for this kinda stuff,” he told himself. At last he found the house of a man named Ricardo Perez whom one of the Mexican anarchists in Los Angeles had told him to look up. He had trouble finding him in the big house with an untidy courtyard, on the edge of town. None of the women hanging out clothes seemed to understand Mac’s lingo. At last Mac heard a voice from above in carefully modulated English. “Come up if you are looking for Ricardo Perez . . . please . . . I am Ricardo Perez.” Mac looked up and saw a tall bronzecolored grayhaired man in an old tan duster leaning from the top gallery of the courtyard. He went up the iron steps. The tall man shook hands with him.
“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.
The Camera Eye (12)
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 g
irl 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
Newsreel X
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