Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

This, as well as I remember, was toward the end of September, maybe early in October. I was wearing my overcoat, which surprised me, as I thought in Dixie you wore shirt sleeves all the time. Anyhow, whenever it was, a political campaign was going on, or it seems it must have been. It says in the history books that in 1932 we elected a president, but if we did I don’t remember anything about it. That’s something I’d like to get straight. Later, when relief came in and all that kind of stuff, politics got to be everybody’s business. But in 1932 there was such a thing as being so jammed up with your own grief it didn’t mean a thing to you. The band played and the band stopped, and we elected Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt instead of Mr. Herbert Hoover, but down where I lived, what we heard about it was nothing whatever.

“Oh it’s you, Jack.”

“Hank, what do you know?”

“Got news at last, some of it good, some — not so hot.”

“Let’s hear it anyway.”

“Another radiogram, sent me here at the paper, same as usual:

BOAT IN SHAPE AT LAST BUT OF ALL COCKEYED THINGS GWENDOLYN COMMANDED APPEAR PRESENTATION AT COURT JUST RECEIVED WORD FROM EMBASSY TODAY SO THAT MEANS LONDON UNTIL LATE NOVEMBER EARLY DECEMBER BUT TELL DILLON IF HE CAN HOLD EVERYTHING TILL FIRST OF YEAR AM DEFINITELY INTERESTED.

Don’t that beat all hell, Jack?”

“Kind of louses it up.”

“Gwendolyn’s his daughter. Spoiled, bull-headed kid, all she thinks about is riding horses and getting her picture taken with some kind of a duke. What could he do?”

“Then — better luck next time.”

“Knocks it in the head for this season all right. But for next year, maybe it’s even better, as it gives us more time. You know what I mean, Jack? This way, we’ll have our feet on the ground and can do it right.”

“Right.”

“You’ll buzz me on it? First of the year.”

“Right.”

“I’ll be looking for you.”

“Right.”

Around November 1 I sold the car. It was a 1928 Buick, with only 80,000 miles on it. But the book said $170, and that’s what I had to take. I moved out of the Rosemary into a place out on Marietta Street that didn’t have any name. It was run by a Mrs. Pickens, and I took a back room, third floor, bath on the second floor, at $3.50 a week. Meals I ate in a drugstore. Ham on white, with mustard, mostly, and coffee. I got expenses down to $1.50 a day, and figured that with the $160 or so I had left from the sale of the car I might last till spring, with a little luck, and by then things might be different. But before Christmas it was gone.

“Two fifty.”

“My God, the suit cost forty bucks!”

“Two fifty.”

“Look, stop being funny. The suit cost forty, like I told you, less than six months ago, it’s hardly been worn at all — now make me an offer.”

“Two fifty.”

I handed it over and he gave me my ticket. It had been wrapped in paper because at Mrs. Pickens’s I was a week behind in my rent and both my suitcases had disappeared. So one by one I had taken both suits, the good suits I mean, the ones I could hock, and carried them out as bundles. The first one I took to a second-hand place, and they gave me $2.25. It made me sore, but I had to eat. The next one, two days later, I took to this hockshop and did two bits better. And still I looked for work, and still there was nothing to do. Then one day, when another week’s rent was due, I let myself in with my key, late, so I wouldn’t run into anybody, and tiptoed upstairs. The door to my room was locked.

“Mister, can you direct me to Terminal Station?”

“Keep right on down this street here till you come to the taxis all bunched at the curb, and that’s it. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you, sir... And could you give me a lift on a ticket to Meriwether? You see, I come from there, and I’ve got the offer of a job, if I can only—”

Some of them cussed me out for playing them a trick, asking my way to the station when I really meant to mooch, some of them gave me a dime, one gave me a nickel, and one gave me a quarter. This last guy looked pretty sore, and as he felt around in his pocket I wondered what I was going to do if he changed his mind and gave me a poke in the jaw. But all of a sudden, as he kept glaring at me, a bus stopped a few feet away, and who should get off it but Hank. I felt my blood turn to water. After all the big talk I had handed out to him, to be caught here on the street, with my hand out like a beggar, was more than I could stand. He didn’t see me. I turned and ran. I never wanted a touchdown as bad as I wanted a good, big, deep hole in the ground that day.

I didn’t decide to leave town, or have some reason that made sense, or figure an angle that would take me to some other place — I mean, if you’ve wondered why guys on the road move from one place to some other place, or why they think being hungry in Jacksonville is better than being hungry in Atlanta. I lammed out of Atlanta for the same reason I lammed out of a thousand places: I was just washed up there, that’s all. Harmon was one guy. There were two hundred and fifty others, guys I’d try to fool, guys it would make my face turn red to meet face to face, guys that had told me to scram, bum, scram, guys that had something on me, so I couldn’t take it any more, and had to have a fresh slate that might be bad, but not this bad. So instead of deciding anything I just kept on going. I couldn’t run very far, because by now I was getting a little weak. I had spent my last buck for a flop the night before and something to eat at a joint. Then, with everything I owned on my back or in my pockets, I had started out to bum a feed. That phony opening I didn’t think up particularly. At first I just put it on the line: “Mister, I hate to bother you, but could you—” And that was all. By then they’d be gone. I had to get them to stop, somehow. I thought asking my way to the station would do it. I kept at it all day, downtown and on side streets, but not on any good street. I don’t know why you hate it, that a guy with good clothes on might give you a snooty look, but you do.

I guess I was heading for New Orleans, and every time I’d hear something back of me I’d throw up my thumb. Nothing stopped. Then I saw some guys standing across the Southern yards like they were waiting for something. Then a string of gonds went past them, and banged into some flats. Then the engine would unhook and go down the yards, and I tumbled to what was going on. A freight was making up and these guys were waiting for it. I thought, me too. If that’s how you go, that’s how you go, and I should be here on the highway wasting my time on cars. It was, I would say, about five o’clock in the afternoon, just coming on dark with lights showing everywhere and fog hanging over. I went down in the ditch and up the other side and began crossing tracks. The guys looked up, and it was too far off to see them well, but the way they stared said there was something funny about it.

From down the yard I could see a light moving, and I guess I knew it was an engine, but as I said it was foggy, and you couldn’t see anything clear. Anyway it was over on the other side of the yards and didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. Then came a clanking, like a bunch of steel rods dumped down on concrete all at once. I mean it went clank-clank-clank-clank-clank. Then something hit me in the eyes, a glare that blinded me so I couldn’t tell where I was. I knew then I’d heard switches clanking from an electric control, so the crossovers made a diagonal line across the yards, and that the engine was coming right at me. I staggered back the way I had come, but it went through my mind I might as well stay put. There was no way to tell which track the thing had been switched to, and I could be racing right into it. I crouched down between tracks and waited. It got bigger and bigger in the fog, until it was right on top of me. Then it went by on the next track, a mile high, its firebox breathing hot on me.