Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“Yeah, Buck?”

“How that son of a bitch loves a jungle.”

“To him it’s home.”

“But why? To a flea it couldn’t be home!”

“He likes it.”

You’ve probably never seen a jungle, but you may have read about it. I had too, and somehow got the idea there was something to it, inside stuff that you had to know about, that once you got the hang of, would give you the chance to cook yourself something to eat, take a little rest, and have some sleep. Well, that’s a lot of hooey, because what’s there is nothing at all, covered with dirt. Picture to yourself a bank, a stretch of grass, a bare spot under the trees, sometimes a slope. Here and there, four or five or six feet apart, are gray spots that would turn out if you kicked them to be the remains of old fires. Off in the bushes are old cans, buckets, pans, or whatever it would be, some of them with holes punched in them and wires attached, to hang over a fire, but none of them clean enough to cook a meal in for any self-respecting skunk. Not so far off a ditch to use as a latrine. And that is the hobo’s dream of heaven, the free apartment house he’s supposed to flock to, and sing his own particular songs, and have sociability and relax. That’s what Hosey was always trying to sell us, except he never quite did. Well, why this place and not some other place? Why not any place, if that’s all there is to it? Buck figured that out one day: “Jack, you ever fish?”

“Me? In Chesapeake Bay? Sure.”

“Me too, in Lake Erie. One time my three uncles all came to spend the Fourth of July with us at once. My mother bunked them down in the garage, and then they and my father decided to go fishing and they went, and took me along. They chartered a power boat and we ran out in Lake Erie and baited up and put our lines down — hand lines, on account there were too many in the boat for poles. And boy, did we bring them in — whitefish and perch. I never saw so many fish in my life. We came home with two baskets full and my mother almost got reconciled to it, having three brother-in-laws in the house at the same time. She fried the perch and put the whitefish away, some in the icebox, some in a basket with ice on top on account the icebox wasn’t big enough for them all. Next morning when she went to look, the fish in the basket weren’t there, and by night we knew why. The rats had got them, and they were in between the walls. Brother, they stunk. So that was a summer, tearing out laths, getting the fish, and putting the poison around for the rats. At night, my father would check every tap and spigot and sink, screw everything down, and even wipe away drops. ‘The thing is,’ he’d say, ‘to fix it so when they’ve got to have water they’ll go outside for it and die there. With arsenic, the thirst is unbearable, and if you cut off everything in the house you’re all right. But God help us if they find water inside and stay inside.’ Jack, you see any connection between them rats and Hosey’s jungle?”

“I’m beginning to.”

“There’s just one thing you’ll find in them jungles, and that’s water. Some goddam fool put it there and forgot about it, maybe a tap to water the grass, or fill up his steam boiler, or wet down his cabbages, or maybe it’s a spring. Whatever it is, it’s water, and it draws hobos, like rats. You hear me, Jack? Hosey’s a rat.”

“He’s not far from it.”

“When did you go on the road, Jack?”

“Oh — year or two ago.”

“Why did you?”

“Little trouble at home.”

“That’s it, we all had a little trouble at home, you and me and a million others that are riding the cars. But do you know how long Hosey’s been on the road?”

“I never asked him.”

“Since before the war. The real hobo, you know, always has his papers in order, and he was showing me his registration card, for the draft or whatever it was. He got rejected, he says, on account of physical, but that card said 1917. Nineteen seventeen, Jack — he’s been on the road all his life. Jack, don’t he ever work?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He leaned close to me. “Jack, will we get like that?”

One time, riding the U.P. out of St. Louis bound for Kansas City, or K.C. as the hobos call it, we got thrown off I guess eight or ten miles the other side of Independence. We’d spent the winter in New Orleans, Alexandria, Shreveport, Port Arthur, Beaumont, and God knows where else, and it was a little warmer down there than some other place, but how they treated hobos was a crime. So, soon as winter began to break, we hit north, in the early spring of 1934. Pretty soon we slid over to the highway and began hiking for Kansas City. But we hadn’t gone very far when we came to a road-building camp, where they were doing a relocation job, with bunk shacks, and mess shacks and all the rest of it. So of course Hosey headed for the cook to see what he could mooch, and Buck and I sat down to wait for him. But then we noticed no work was being done. Mexicans were standing around talking, and off to one side three or four guys that looked like foremen were in a huddle, but no dirt was being moved, no concrete was being poured, no shoulder was being smoothed. Buck knew about road-building, and he kept saying something funny was going on. When Hosey came back he had nothing, and said everybody was sore, on account of the blacksmith quitting. “They’ve sent to town for somebody to take his place, but right now they’re closed down.”

“Blacksmith? What’s he got to do with roads?”

“Jack, I only know what they told me.”

We sat there a few minutes, then Buck said: “I got it figured out, I guess.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“You see that bunch of stuff over there?”

Off to one side in a field was a ledge of rock, an outcropping with a face on it, with big slabs and pieces lying under that, and in front some machinery, with yellow dust all over it. “Jack, that’s their stone quarry. The thing out front is a crusher. And those boulders are stuff that’s been shot down and that has to be blockholed and shot and sledged before it’ll go into the crusher. That’s what’s holding things up. The blacksmith, he has to sharpen their bits for the blockholing teams, and he’s gone off. Without fresh stone for the crusher, there’s nothing for these mixers here by the road, and that’s why they’ve shut down.”

“So?”

“Let me think.”

So he thought, trying to figure an angle, and I did, and I guess Hosey did. And then I remembered the smithing course I’d taken in college, something I hadn’t paid much attention to because I hated hot metal and the stink of the forge made me sick. But if I hated the smell of coke it was nothing to how I hated an empty belly, so next off I was legging it over toward the Mexicans, asking for the super, and when they pointed to a little shack near the mixers I went in there. “Hear your blacksmith quit.”

“My blacksmith got fired, for being drunk, him and his no-good helper both, and if you’re some relation of his—”

“Me? I’m a blacksmith.”

“... Oh, yeah?”

He looked me over, from the hat I still had from Baltimore, that had dust, dirt, and sweat ground into it till you couldn’t tell what color it was any more, to the jeans that had been boiled in every jungle from Macon, Georgia, to St. Louis, Missouri, and to the shoes, a pair of brogans I’d got in the Good Samaritan Inn at Columbus, Ohio, just before heading south. It was something, at least, that he couldn’t see the suit, inside the overalls, with the snags and rips and tears in it. I kind of bowed in a very elegant way, and there wasn’t much he could do but bow back, and then I went on to say if he’d put me and my two helpers to work, by lunchtime I could have stuff sharpened up for him so he could start his crusher that afternoon and put his whole crew to work. By that time Buck and Hosey were hanging around outside, and he thought a minute, but one thing on my side was he had a bunch of idle men on his hands, and every minute they didn’t work was piling up trouble, and besides maybe he had some penalty clause in his contract with a bonus for speed, and I could see he wanted to get going. “Of course, chief, I don’t kid you any — a bright hombre like you I wouldn’t even try. Before we work, we’ve got to eat. On an empty stomach we’re a little weak. And, while we’re filling up, I could be having a look at the stuff you’ve been using.”