John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

When they got their first month’s pay they packed up their few belongings in a newspaper and sneaked on board the Juniata for Duluth. The fare took all their capital, but they were happy as they stood in the stern watching the spruce and balsamcovered hill of Mackinac disappear into the lake.

Duluth; girderwork along the waterfront, and the shack-covered hills and the tall thin chimneys and the huddle of hunch-shouldered grain elevators under the smoke from the mills scrolled out dark against a huge salmon-colored sunset. Ike hated to leave the boat on account of a pretty dark-haired girl he’d meant all the time to speak to. “Hell, she wouldn’t pay attention to you, Ike, she’s too swank for you,” Mac kept saying. “The old woman’ll be glad to see us anyway,” said Ike as they hurried off the gangplank. “I half expected to see her at the dock, though I didn’t write we was coming. Boy, I bet she’ll give us a swell feed.”

“Where does she live?”

“Not far. I’ll show you. Say, don’t ask anythin’ about my old man, will ye; he don’t amount to much. He’s in jail, I guess. Ole woman’s had pretty tough sleddin’ bringin’ up us kids… I got two brothers in Buffalo… I don’t get along with ’em. She does fancy needlework and preservin’ an’ bakes cakes an’ stuff like that. She used to work in a bakery but she’s got the lumbago too bad now. She’d ’a’ been a real bright woman if we hadn’t always been so friggin’ poor.”

They turned up a muddy street on a hill. At the top of the hill was a little prim house like a schoolhouse.

“That’s where we live… Gee, I wonder why there’s no light.”

They went in by a gate in the picket fence. There was sweetwilliam in bloom in the flowerbed in front of the house. They could smell it though they could hardly see, it was so dark. Ike knocked.

“Damn it, I wonder what’s the matter.” He knocked again. Then he struck a match. On the door was nailed a card “FOR SALE” and the name of a realestate agent. “Jesus Christ, that’s funny, she musta moved. Now I think of it, I haven’t had a letter in a couple of months. I hope she ain’t sick… I’ll ask at Bud Walker’s next door.”

Mac sat down on the wooden step and waited. Overhead in a gash in the clouds that still had the faintest stain of red from the afterglow his eye dropped into empty black full of stars. The smell of the sweetwilliams tickled his nose. He felt hungry.

A low whistle from Ike roused him. “Come along,” he said gruffly and started walking fast down the hill with his head sunk between his shoulders.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

“Nothin’. The old woman’s gone to Buffalo to live with my brothers. The lousy bums got her to sell out so’s they could spend the dough, I reckon.”

“Jesus, that’s hell, Ike.”

Ike didn’t answer. They walked till they came to the corner of a street with lighted stores and trolleycars. A tune from a mechanical piano was tumbling out from a saloon. Ike turned and slapped Mac on the back. “Let’s go have a drink, kid… What the hell.”

There was only one other man at the long bar. He was a very drunken tall elderly man in lumbermen’s boots with a sou’wester on his head who kept yelling in an inaudible voice, ‘Whoop her up, boys,’ and making a pass at the air with a long grimy hand. Mac and Ike drank down two whiskies each, so strong and raw that it pretty near knocked the wind out of them. Ike put the change from a dollar in his pocket and said:

“What the hell, let’s get out of here.” In the cool air of the street they began to feel lit. “Jesus, Mac, let’s get outa here tonight… It’s terrible to come back to a town where you was a kid… I’ll be meetin’ all the crazy galoots I ever knew and girls I had crushes on… I guess I always get the dirty end of the stick, all right.”

In a lunchroom down by the freight depot they got hamburger and potatoes and bread and butter and coffee for fifteen cents each. When they’d bought some cigarettes they still had eight seventyfive between them. “Golly, we’re rich,” said Mac. “Well, where do we go?”

“Wait a minute. I’ll go scout round the freight depot. Used to be a guy I knowed worked there.”

Mac loafed round under a lamp post at the streetcorner and smoked a cigarette and waited. It was warmer since the wind had gone down. From a puddle somewhere in the freight yards came the peep peep peep of toads. Up on the hill an accordion was playing. From the yards came the heavy chugging of a freight locomotive and the clank of shunted freightcars and the singing rattle of the wheels.

After a while he heard Ike’s whistle from the dark side of the street. He ran over. “Say, Mac, we gotta hurry. I found the guy. He’s goin’ to open up a boxcar for us on the westbound freight. He says it’ll carry us clear out to the coast if we stick to it.”

“How the hell will we eat if we’re locked up in a freightcar?”

“We’ll eat fine. You leave the eatin’ to me.”

“But, Ike…”

“Keep your trap shut, can’t you… Do you want everybody in the friggin’ town to know what we’re tryin’ to do?”

They walked along tiptoe in the dark between two tracks of boxcars. Then Ike found a door half open and darted in. Mac followed and they shut the sliding door very gently after them.

“Now all we got to do is go to sleep,” whispered Ike, his lips touching Mac’s ear. “This here galoot, see, said there wasn’t any yard dicks on duty tonight.”

In the end of the car they found hay from a broken bale. The whole car smelt of hay. “Ain’t this hunky dory?” whispered Ike.

“It’s the cat’s nuts, Ike.”

Pretty soon the train started, and they lay down to sleep side by side in the sparse hay. The cold night wind streamed in through the cracks in the floor. They slept fitfully. The train started and stopped and started and shunted back and forth on sidings and the wheels rattled and rumbled in their ears and slambanged over crossings. Towards morning they fell into a warm sleep and the thin layer of hay on the boards was suddenly soft and warm. Neither of them had a watch and the day was overcast so they didn’t know what time it was when they woke up. Ike slid open the door a little so that they could peek out; the train was running through a broad valley brimfull-like with floodwater, with the green ripple of fullgrown wheat. Now and then in the distance a clump of woodland stood up like an island. At each station was the hunched blind bulk of an elevator. “Gee, this must be the Red River, but I wonder which way we’re goin’,” said Ike. “Golly, I could drink a cup of coffee,” said Mac. “We’ll have swell coffee in Seattle, damned if we won’t, Mac.”

They went to sleep again, and when they woke up they were thirsty and stiff. The train had stopped. There was no sound at all. They lay on their backs stretching and listening. “Gee, I wonder where in hell we are.” After a long while they heard the cinders crunching down the track and someone trying the fastenings of the boxcar doors down the train. They lay so still they could hear both their hearts beating. The steps on the cinders crunched nearer and nearer. The sliding door slammed open, and their car was suddenly full of sunlight. They lay still. Mac felt the rap of a stick on his chest and sat up blinking. A Scotch voice was burring in his ears:

“I thought I’d find some Pullman passengers… All right, byes, stand and deliver, or else you’ll go to the constabulary.”

“Aw hell,” said Ike, crawling forward.

“Currsin’ and swearin’ won’t help ye… If you got a couple o’ quid you can ride on to Winnipeg an’ take your chances there… If not you’ll be doin’ a tidy bit on the roads before you can say Jack Robinson.”