James Cain - The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

“Check the rest of us! You ain’t passed the P’s yet!”

“O.K. Sing out when I call. Gus Ritter!”

“Yo!”

When the names had been checked, Paul took one of Ike’s arms and pulled it over his shoulder; somebody else took the other, and they started for the place, a half mile or so away on the main road, where the camp was located. The rest fell in behind. Dawn was just breaking as the little file, two and two, fell into a shambling step.

“Hep!.. Hep!”

“Hey, cut that out! This ain’t no lockstep.”

“Who says it ain’t?”

When he woke up, in the army tent he shared with five others, he became aware of a tingle of expectancy in the air. Two of his tent mates were shaving; another came in, a towel over his arm, his hair wet and combed.

“Where did you get that wash?”

“They got a shower tent over there.”

He got out his safety razor, slipped his feet in the shoes, shaved over one of the other men’s shoulders, then started out in his underwear. “Hey!” At the warning, he looked out. Several cars were out there, some of them with women standing around them, talking to figures in blue denim.

“Sunday, bo. Visiting day. This is when the women all comes to say hello to their loved ones. You better put something on.”

He slipped on the denims, went over to the shower tent, drew towel and soap, stripped, waited his turn. It was a real shower, the first he had had in a long time. It was cold, but it felt good. There was a comb there. He washed it, combed his hair, put on his clothes, went back to his tent, put the towel away, made his bunk. Then he fell in line for breakfast — or dinner, as it happened, as it was away past noon. It consisted of corned beef, cabbage, a boiled potato, apricot pie, and coffee.

He wolfed down the food, washed up his kit, began to feel pretty good. He fell into line again, and presently was paid, $4.50 for nine hours’ work, at fifty cents an hour. He fingered the bills curiously. They were the first he had had in his hand since that day, two years before, when he had run away from home and begun this dreadful career of riding freights, bumming meals, and sleeping in flophouses.

He realized with a start they were the first bills he had ever earned in his twenty-two years; for the chance to earn bills had long since departed when he graduated from high school and began looking for jobs, never finding any. He shoved them in his pocket, wondered whether he would get the chance that night to earn more of them.

The foreman was standing there, in the space around which the tents were set up, with a little group around him. “It’s under control, but we got to watch it, and there’ll be another call tonight. Any you guys that want to work, report to me eight o’clock tonight, right here in this spot.”

By now the place was alive with people, dust, and excitement. Cars were jammed into every possible place, mostly second-, third-, and ninth-hand, but surrounded by neatly dressed women, children, and old people, come to visit the fire fighters in denim. In a row out front, ice-cream, popcorn, and cold-drink trucks were parked, and the road was gay for half a mile in both directions with pennants stuck on poles, announcing their wares. Newspaper reporters were around too, with photographers, and as soon as the foreman had finished his harangue, they began to ask him questions about the fire, the number of men engaged in fighting it, and the casualties.

“Nobody hurt. Nobody hurt at all. Oh, early this morning, fellow kind of got knocked out by smoke, guy went in and pulled him out, nothing at all.”

“What was his name?”

“I forget his name. Here — here’s the guy that pulled him out. Maybe he knows his name.”

In a second he was surrounded, questions being shouted at him from all sides. He gave them Ike’s name and his own, and they began a frantic search for Ike, but couldn’t find him. Then they decided he was the main story, not Ike, and directed him to pose for his picture. “Hey, not there; not by the ice-cream truck. We don’t give ice cream a free ad in this paper. Over there by the tent.”

He stood as directed, and two or three in the third shift told the story all over again in vivid detail. The reporters took notes, the photographers snapped several pictures of him, and a crowd collected. “And will you put it in that I’m from Spokane, Washington? I’d kind of like to have that in, on account of my people back there. Spokane, Washington.”

“Sure, we’ll put that in.”

The reporters left as quickly as they had come, and the crowd began to melt. He turned away, a little sorry that his big moment had passed so quickly. Behind him he half heard a voice: “Well, ain’t that something to be getting his picture in the paper?” He turned, saw several grins, but nobody was looking at him. Standing with her back to him, dressed in a blue silk Sunday dress, and kicking a pebble, was a girl. It was a girl who had spoken, and by quick elimination he decided it must be she.

The sense of carefree goodness that had been growing on him since he got his money, since the crowd began to jostle him, since he had become a hero, focused somewhere in his head with dizzy suddenness. “Any objections?”

This got a laugh. She kept her eyes on the pebble but turned red and said: “No.”

“You sure?”

“Just so you don’t get stuck up.”

“Then that’s O.K. How about an ice-cream cone?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Hey, mister, two ice-cream cones.”

“Chocolate.”

“Both of them chocolate and both of them double.”

When they got their cones he led her away from the guffawing gallery which was beginning to be a bit irksome. She looked at him then, and he saw she was pretty. She was small, with blue eyes, dusty blonde hair that blended with the dusty scene around her, and a spray of freckles over her forehead. He judged her to be about his own age. After looking at him, and laughing rather self-consciously and turning red, she concentrated on the cone, which she licked with a precise technique. He suddenly found he had nothing to say, but said it anyhow: “Well, say — what are you doing here?”

“Oh — had to see the fire, you know.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Haven’t even found out where it is, yet.”

“Well, my, my! I see I got to show it to you.”

“You know where it is?”

“Sure. Come on.”

He didn’t lead the way to the fire, though. He took her up the arroyo, through the burned-over area, where the fire had been yesterday. After a mile or so of walking, they came to a little grove of trees beside a spring. The trees were live oak and quite green and cast a deep shade on the ground. Nobody was in sight, or even in earshot. It was a place the Sunday trippers didn’t know about.

“Oh, my! Look at these trees! They didn’t get burnt.”

“Sometimes it jumps — the fire, I mean. Jumps from one hill straight over to the other hill, leaves places it never touched at all.”

“My, but it’s pretty.”

“Let’s sit down.”

“If I don’t get my dress dirty.”

“I’ll put this jacket down for you to sit on.”

“Yes, that’s all right.”

They sat down. He put his arm around her, put his mouth against her lips.

It was late afternoon before she decided that her family might be looking for her and that she had better go back. She had an uncle in the camp, it seemed, and they had come as much to see him as to see the fire. She snickered when she remembered she hadn’t seen either. They both snickered. They walked slowly back, their little fingers hooked together. He asked if she would like to go with him to one of the places along the road to get something to eat, but she said they had brought lunch with them, and would probably stop along the beach to eat it, going back.