John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

The brakeman was a small blackhaired man with a mean quiet manner.

“Where are we, guv’ner?” asked Ike, trying to talk like an Englishman.

“Gretna… You’re in the Dominion of Canada. You can be had up, too, for illegally crossin’ Her Majesty’s frontier as well as for bein’ vags.”

“Well, I guess we’d better shell out… You see we’re a couple of noblemen’s sons out for a bit of a bloody lark, guv’ner.”

“No use currsin’ and prevarricatin’. How much have you?”

“Coupla dollars.”

“Let’s see it quick.”

Ike pulled first one dollar, then another, out of his pocket; folded in the second dollar was a five. The Scotchman swept the three bills up with one gesture and slammed the sliding door to. They heard him slip down the catch on the outside. For a long time they sat there quiet in the dark. Finally Ike said, “Hey, Mac, gimme a sock in the jaw. That was a damn fool thing to do… Never oughta had that in my jeans anyway… oughta had it inside my belt. That leaves us with about seventyfive cents. We’re up shit creek now for fair… He’ll probably wire ahead to take us outa here at the next big town.” “Do they have mounted police on the railroad, too?” asked Mac in a hollow whisper. “Jez, I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

The train started again and Ike rolled over on his face and went glumly to sleep. Mac lay on his back behind him looking at the slit of sunlight that made its way in through the crack in the door and wondered what the inside of a Canadian jail would be like.

That night, after the train had lain still for some time in the middle of the hissing and clatter of a big freightyard, they heard the catch slipped off the door. After a while Ike got up his nerve to slide the door open and they dropped, stiff and terribly hungry, down to the cinders. There was another freight on the next track, so all they could see was a bright path of stars overhead. They got out of the freight-yards without any trouble and found themselves walking through the deserted streets of a large widescattered city.

“Winnipeg’s a pretty friggin’ lonelylookin’ place, take it from me,” said Ike.

“It must be after midnight.”

They tramped and tramped and at last found a little lunchroom kept by a Chink who was just closing up. They spent forty cents on some stew and potatoes and coffee. They asked the Chink if he’d let them sleep on the floor behind the counter, but he threw them out and they found themselves dogtired tramping through the broad deserted streets of Winnipeg again. It was too cold to sit down anywhere, and they couldn’t find anyplace that looked as if it would give them a flop for thirtyfive cents, so they walked and walked, and anyway the sky was beginning to pale into a slow northern summer dawn. When it was fully day they went back to the Chink’s and spent the thirtyfive cents on oatmeal and coffee. Then they went to the Canadian Pacific employment office and signed up for work in a construction camp at Banff. The hours they had to wait till traintime they spent in the public library. Mac read part of Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Ike, not being able to find a volume of Karl Marx, read an instalment of “When the Sleeper Wakes” in the Strand Magazine. So when they got on the train they were full of the coming Socialist revolution and started talking it up to two lanky red-faced lumberjacks who sat opposite them. One of them chewed tobacco silently all the while, but the other spat his quid out of the window and said, “You blokes ’ll keep quiet with that kinder talk if you knows what’s ’ealthy for ye.” “Hell, this is a free country, ain’t it? A guy’s free to talk, ain’t he?” said Ike. “A bloke kin talk so long as his betters don’t tell him to keep his mouth shut.” “Hell, I’m not tryin’ to pick a fight,” said Ike. “Better not,” said the other man, and didn’t speak again.

They worked for the C.P.R. all summer and by the first of October they were in Vancouver. They had new suitcases and new suits. Ike had forty-nine dollars and fifty cents and Mac had eighty-three fifteen in a brand new pigskin wallet. Mac had more because he didn’t play poker. They took a dollar and a half room between them and lay in bed like princes their first free morning. They were tanned and toughened and their hands were horny. After the smell of rank pipes and unwashed feet and the bedbugs in the railroad bunkhouses the small cleanboarded hotel room with its clean beds seemed like a palace.

When he was fully awake Mac sat up and reached for his Ingersoll. Eleven o’clock. The sunlight on the windowledge was ruddy from the smoke of forestfires up the coast. He got up and washed in cold water at the washbasin. He walked up and down the room wiping his face and arms in the towel. It made him feel good to follow the contours of his neck and the hollow between his shoulderblades and the muscles of his arms as he dried himself with the fresh coarse towel.

“Say, Ike, what do you think we oughta do? I think we oughta go down on the boat to Seattle, Wash., like a coupla dude passengers. I wanta settle down an’ get a printin’ job; there’s good money in that. I’m goin’ to study to beat hell this winter. What do you think, Ike? I want to get out of this limejuicy hole an’ get back to God’s country. What do you think, Ike?”

Ike groaned and rolled over in bed.

“Say, wake up, Ike, for crissake. We want to take a look at this burg an’ then twentythree.”

Ike sat up in bed. “God damn it, I need a woman.”

“I’ve heard tell there’s swell broads in Seattle, honest, Ike.”

Ike jumped out of bed and began splattering himself from head to foot with cold water. Then he dashed into his clothes and stood looking out the window combing the water out of his hair.

“When does the friggin’ boat go? Jez, I had two wet dreams last night, did you?”

Mac blushed. He nodded his head.

“Jez, we got to get us women. Wet dreams weakens a guy.”

“I wouldn’t want to get sick.”

“Aw, hell, a man’s not a man until he’s had his three doses.”

“Aw, come ahead, let’s go see the town.”

“Well, ain’t I been waitin’ for ye this halfhour?”

They ran down the stairs and out into the street. They walked round Vancouver, sniffing the winey smell of lumbermills along the waterfront, loafing under the big trees in the park. Then they got their tickets at the steamboat office and went to a haberdashery store and bought themselves striped neckties, colored socks and four-dollar silk shirts. They felt like millionaires when they walked up the gangplank of the boat for Victoria and Seattle, with their new suits and their new suitcases and their silk shirts. They strolled round the deck smoking cigarettes and looking at the girls. “Gee, there’s a couple looks kinda easy… I bet they’re hookers at that,” Ike whispered in Mac’s ear and gave him a dig in the ribs with his elbow as they passed two girls in Spring Maid hats who were walking round the deck the other way. “Shit, let’s try to pick ’em up.”

They had a couple of beers at the bar, then they went back on deck. The girls had gone. Mac and Ike walked disconsolately round the deck for a while, then they found the girls leaning over the rail in the stern. It was a cloudy moonlight night. The sea and the dark islands covered with spiring evergreens shone light and dark in a mottling silvery sheen. Both girls had frizzy hair and dark circles under their eyes. Mac thought they looked too old, but as Ike had gone sailing ahead it was too late to say anything. The girl he talked to was named Gladys. He liked the looks of the other one, whose name was Olive, better, but Ike got next to her first. They stayed on deck kidding and giggling until the girls said they were cold, then they went in the saloon and sat on a sofa and Ike went and bought a box of candy.