Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“But I never been to a house.”

“Me neither.”

“But you know your way around, and—”

“You’ll find your way.”

After a while there was a knock on the door and I opened and it was Hosey, with a bundle. Of course he hadn’t come to the hotel with us, but hiked himself over to some mission back of Union Station, because if no real hobo would work he wouldn’t pay either, or do anything but mooch. But it was all right, it turned out, for me to pay and him to wash up in the hot water I had, and that’s what the bundle was for. If you think I said help himself, just out of the kindness of my heart, you don’t know Jackie. I bawled him out for the filthy jungle buzzard that he was, told him I wasn’t going to have my bathroom stunk up like a mission bed, and said if he wanted to wash he could march himself downstairs, plunk down his money, and get a room like decent guys did. But he just sat there with a little grin on his face, his eyes shifting around like a rat on a dump. Pretty soon Buck said: “Hosey, what you doing tonight?”

“... Nothing, that I know of. Why?”

“How about going out among ’em?”

“Among who?”

“Why... the pretty dollies.”

“You mean women?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t know no women.”

“Don’t have to know them. Here they got women that’s so sociable you don’t even have to be introduced. They’re broad-minded. They got whole houses full of them.”

Hosey stood up and his eyes turned black and you wouldn’t have thought he could dig up that much excitement, let alone care about anything enough to go on like he did: “Buck, I’m telling you something, for your own good, right now. The real hobo, he don’t have nothing to do with women, of any age, shape, or kind — they’re out! They’re no part of his life. He just has to give up any thought of women. In the first place, he can’t afford it. In the second place, if he keeps it up, the kind of women he meets, he going to get himself a disease, and if he does, God help him. For typhoid or diphtheria or pneumonia or whatever else he catches, or a broken bone if he falls off a train, or anything of that kind, he can go to a clinic and they’ll take care of him, the public health will, wherever he is, some kind of way. But let him get something like that, and he’s just out of luck and nobody’ll do anything for him. In the third place, sooner or later some woman he’s with is going to get caught by friend husband, and then God help him. There’s plenty of guys doing time right now for rapes that was never committed, just because some two-timing dame had to say something quick, and hung it on them. Buck, I’m telling you, leave women alone!”

By then he was so hysterical he could hardly talk. Buck looked at me and I looked at him and then we begun talking about something else. Hosey picked up his bundle and went out. “Well, Jack, what the hell do you make of that?”

“It was real hobo talk, whatever it was.”

“Is he a preacher or something?”

“In some ways, of course, it made sense, but—”

“Yeah, but he looked so funny.”

The next night I was in bed, reading a magazine, when there came a rap on the door. I unlocked it and Buck came in. He looked pretty solemn. I waved him in, shut the door, and got back under the covers again. He sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette. “Well, Buck, was she nice?”

“—And pretty.”

“Then if you had a good time, what the hell?”

“I didn’t have any good time.”

“... I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either. God, you wanted to think, now let me do a little of it. Jack, there must be something the matter with me.”

“You mean — you’ve got something?”

“No, something else. Jack, I couldn’t go in any of the houses, once I found one. That part was easy. I thought I’d pay a taxi driver fifty cents to take me to one, but hell, before I could even see a cab a cop showed me. But I was afraid to go in. I don’t know why. There was guys ringing the bell of a dozen places and women letting them in, but — I couldn’t get up the nerve.”

“I’m not sure I could.”

“I thought about you, and didn’t feel so bad, somehow. So then I went over on Broadway, to see a picture maybe, before coming back here. And there I saw two girls. They were kind of cute and one of them looked at me and said something to the other one and I got excited, because she was a pretty little thing, maybe eighteen or nineteen, Mexican, but with color in her cheeks and not as dark as some of them. Another thing, she had on just a little cheap dress and coat so I didn’t feel so bad about this suit I had on. I started to cross, but just then a bus stopped and the other girl got on. My girl, she waved goodbye, then went on up the street. But just once she looked back and I piled after her hell to split. When I got close I spoke and she laughed and then we were arm in arm and I said something about a drink and she said she knew a place and then we were in one of these new cocktail bars they got all over now, and she ordered a bottle of red wine and we drank part of it. Then she said she had a place we could go and we took our bottle and walked quite a way, to some kind of Jimtown across from the yards, and went past Mexican shacks and then she took me inside a place made out of old boards and dry-goods boxes, but not too dirty, and with a couple of chairs and a coal-oil stove with two burners. We drank the rest of our wine, me loving her up all the time. And — that’s all.”

“What do you mean, that’s all?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Why not?”

“I... couldn’t.”

“Did something scare you, or what?”

“Nothing scared me. Get how it was. She was pretty as a picture. She was small, with as nice a shape as I ever hope to see. And she wanted me. I guess maybe she could be bought, I don’t know. I gave her five dollars when I left, but it didn’t seem she could be bought. I don’t think I had to buy her. I think she liked me. But — that was all. I couldn’t.”

“How long did this go on?”

“I guess an hour.”

“And what did you do then?”

“What would you do? After a while, from being friendly and laughing and all that, she just sat there looking at me, then just sat there. I got up and pitched the five dollars in her lap and left... What the hell does it mean, Jack?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wanted her, bad.”

“You wanted the idea of a woman, bad.”

“Yeah, but that’s the main part of it.”

He sat there a long time, looking at his feet. It seemed a pity, much as it had been on his mind, that things should have turned out like they did. His face began wrinkling up. “What did Hosey mean?”

“If anything.”

“Jack, he meant more than he said. Nobody could get that hot under the collar for the reasons he said were his reasons. There’s something else.”

After our money ran out in Kansas City we swung off through Kansas and Colorado and then south, and everywhere we went it got tougher. I mean, on the trains they didn’t bother you so much any more, because the big mob was gone, but in the towns they treated you like a polecat with the itch, and meant get out and stay out. That was on account of the CCC. It drew guys off the road all right, but at the same time it gave people the idea things were under control and there was no need to mooch. It was under control, if you’d go home and get certified by your family, or establish residence somehow, to prove you were entitled to help. But that was something Buck and I wouldn’t do, and Hosey couldn’t do, for reasons that kind of seemed to be there, once you got thinking about them. We applied of course, all three of us, in Denver. But when we found out the terms, having to go back home I mean, Buck and I backed off, and Hosey got almost hysterical: “It’s nothing but a stunt to get votes, that’s what it is. A guy ain’t no hungrier home than he is any other place, and he ain’t no better. But he’s on the books there, or can get put on the books, and if he affiliates right, he’s in. But how about them that can’t—”