John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

After the meeting Big Bill was round at the office and he joked everybody and sat down and wrote an article right there for the paper. He pulled out a flask and everybody had a drink, except Fred Hoff who didn’t like Big Bill’s drinking, or any drinking, and they all went to bed with the next issue on the press, feeling tired and flushed and fine.

Next morning when Mac woke up he suddenly thought of Maisie and reread her letter, and tears came to his eyes sitting on the edge of the cot before anybody was up yet. He stuck his head in a pail of icy water from the pump, that was frozen so hard he had to pour a kettleful of hot water off the stove into it to thaw it, but he couldn’t get the worried stiff feeling out of his forehead. When he went over with Fred Hoff to the Chink joint for breakfast he tried to tell him he was going back to San Francisco to get married.

“Mac, you can’t do it; we need you here.” “But I’ll come back, honest I will, Fred.” “A man’s first duty’s to the workin’ class,” said Fred Hoff.

“As soon as the kid’s born an’ she can go back to work I’ll come back. But you know how it is, Fred. I can’t pay the hospital expenses on seventeenfifty a week.”

“You oughta been more careful.”

“But hell, Fred, I’m made of flesh and blood like everybody else. For crissake, what do you want us to be, tin saints?”

“A wobbly oughtn’t to have any wife or children, not till after the revolution.”

“I’m not giving up the fight, Fred… I’m not sellin’ out; I swear to God I’m not.”

Fred Hoff had gotten very pale. Sucking his lips in between his teeth he got up from the table and left the restaurant. Mac sat there a long time feeling gloomy as hell. Then he went back to the office of the Workman. Fred Hoff was at the desk writing hard. “Say, Fred,” said Mac, “I’ll stay another month. I’ll write Maisie right now.” “I knew you’d stay, Mac; you’re no quitter.” “But Jesus God, man, you expect too much of a feller.” “Too much is too damn little,” said Fred Hoff. Mac started running the paper through the press.

For the next few weeks, when Maisie’s letters came he put them in his pocket without reading them. He wrote her as reassuringly as he could, that he’d come as soon as the boys could get someone to take his place.

Then Christmas night he read all Maisie’s letters. They were all the same; they made him cry. He didn’t want to get married, but it was hell living up here in Nevada all winter without a girl, and he was sick of whoring around. He didn’t want the boys to see him looking so glum, so he went down to have a drink at the saloon the restaurant workers went to. A great roaring steam of drunken singing came out of the saloon. Going in the door he met Ben Evans. “Hello, Ben, where are you goin’?” “I’m goin’ to have a drink as the feller said.” “Well, so am I.” “What’s the matter?” “I’m blue as hell.” Ben Evans laughed. “Jesus, so am I… and it’s Christmas, ain’t it?”

They had three drinks each but the bar was crowded and they didn’t feel like celebrating; so they took a pint flask, which was all they could afford, up to Ben Evans’ room. Ben Evans was a dark thickset young man with very black eyes and hair. He hailed from Louisville, Kentucky. He’d had considerable schooling and was an automobile mechanic. The room was icy cold. They sat on the bed, each of them wrapped in one of his blankets.

“Well, ain’t this a way to spend Christmas?” said Mac. “Holy Jesus, it’s a good thing Fred Hoff didn’t ketch us,” Mac snickered. “Fred’s a hell of a good guy, honest as the day an’ all that, but he won’t let a feller live.” “I guess if the rest of us were more like Fred we’d get somewheres sooner.” “We would at that… Say, Mac, I’m blue as hell about all this business, this shootin’ an’ these fellers from the W.F.M. goin’ up to the Montezuma Club and playin’ round with that damn scab delegate from Washington.” “Well, none of the wobbly crowd’s done anything like that.” “No, but there’s not enough of us…” “What you need’s a drink, Ben.” “It’s just like this goddam pint, as the feller said, if we had enough of ’em we’d get fried, but we haven’t. If we had enough boys like Fred Hoff we’d have a revolution, but we haven’t.” They each had a drink from the pint and then Mac said: “Say, Ben, did you ever get a girl in trouble, a girl you liked a hellova lot?”

“Sure, hundreds of’em.”

“Didn’t it worry you?”

“For crissake, Mac, if a girl wasn’t a goddam whore she wouldn’t let you, would she?”

“Jeez, I don’t see it like that, Ben… But hell, I don’t know what to do about it… She’s a good kid, anyways, gee…”

“I don’t trust none of ’em… I know a guy onct married a girl like that, carried on and bawled an’ made out he’d knocked her up. He married her all right an’ she turned out to be a goddam whore and he got the siph off’n her… You take it from me, boy…. Love ’em and leave ’em, that’s the only way for stiffs like us.”

They finished up the pint. Mac went back to the Workman office and went to sleep with the whisky burning in his stomach. He dreamed he was walking across a field with a girl on a warm day. The whisky was hotsweet in his mouth, buzzed like bees in his ears. He wasn’t sure if the girl was Maisie or just a goddam whore, but he felt very warm and tender, and she was saying in a little hotsweet voice, “Love me up, kid,” and he could see her body through her thingauze dress as he leaned over her and she kept crooning, “Love me up, kid,” in a hotsweet buzzing.

“Hey, Mac, ain’t you ever goin’ to get waked up?” Fred Hoff, scrubbing his face and neck with a towel, was standing over him. “I want to get this place cleaned up before the gang gets here.” Mac sat up on the cot. “Yare, what’s the matter?” He didn’t have a hangover but he felt depressed, he could tell that at once.

“Say, you certainly were stinkin’ last night.”

“The hell I was, Fred… I had a coupla drinks but, Jesus…”

“I heard you staggerin’ round here goin’ to bed like any goddam scissorbill.”

“Look here, Fred, you’re not anybody’s nursemaid. I can take care of myself.”

“You guys need nursemaids… You can’t even wait till we won the strike before you start your boozin’ and whorin’ around.” Mac was sitting on the edge of the bed lacing his boots. “What in God’s name do you think we’re all hangin’ round here for… our health?” “I don’t know what the hell most of you are hangin’ round for,” said Fred Hoff and went out slamming the door.

A couple of days later it turned out that there was another fellow around who could run a linotype and Mac left town. He sold his suitcase and his good clothes for five dollars and hopped a train of flatcars loaded with ore that took him down to Ludlow. In Ludlow he washed the alkali dust out of his mouth, got a meal and got cleaned up a little. He was in a terrible hurry to get to Frisco, all the time he kept thinking that Maisie might kill herself. He was crazy to see her, to sit beside her, to have her pat his hand gently while they were sitting side by side talking the way she used to do. After those bleak dusty months up in Goldfield he needed a woman. The fare to Frisco was $11.15 and he only had four dollars and some pennies left. He tried risking a dollar in a crapgame in the back of a saloon, but he lost it right away and got cold feet and left.

Prof Ferrer, former director of the Modern School in Barcelona who has been on trial there on the charge of having been the principal instigator of the recent revolutionary movement has been sentenced to death and will be shot Wednesday unless