Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

We were slowing down in Whittier, I guess a little before eight in the morning, when I noticed a bunch of men standing around on the sidewalk. They were in jeans and looked like Mexicans, but I knew they were guys hoping for work. I still had thirty or forty cents’ worth of ticket, but at the next stop I got out and went legging it back to the mob. I guess there were twenty or thirty of them, all talking Spanish, but I found out they’d come down from L.A. for lemon-picking, on a call from a state bureau. Pretty soon a door opened and we all went inside an office, where a tall guy with a hatchet face began talking in some kind of Spanish. I pushed up front but he kept passing me by, and the Mexicans had all been given cards with numbers, and were back outside, waiting for a truck to pick them up, before he turned to me. “What’s your name?”

“Jack Dillon.”

“You American?”

“Native.”

“What do you want?”

“Work.”

“This is lemons. You want that?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Got to eat.”

“What else have you tried?”

“Fixing flats, washing cars, parking jalopies, sacking wheat, shoveling guano, blacksmithing drills, panhandling, and stealing. I’ve tried everything there is, from East to West, and North to South and back again, and if there’s a living in any one of them, I don’t know which one it is. If lemons are what I’ve got to pick, then I mean to get at it, but what you’ve got to do with what I’ve tried, I don’t exactly know.”

“You tried the CCC?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“They wouldn’t have me.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve got to be certified. I won’t go home.”

“What other reason?”

“Commies.”

“Then O.K. Let’s talk. To me, an American’s as good as a wetback, who is a Mexican that we don’t know how he got here and we’re much too polite to ask, but if he happened accidentally on purpose to do it by swimming the Rio Grande River, his hindside would be a little wet.”

“One would think so.”

“Just the same, I don’t recommend this job to you.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“You can’t stand it.”

“How do you know what I can stand?”

“All I know is what I found out from twenty years in the business and watching about eighteen hundred other Americans go down there and topple over in the heat and quit before lunchtime. A Mexican, he was born to heat, and before you or I or Columbo ever got here he was working in an Aztec chain gang with a tump line over his head and a whip over his back so a nice lemon grove 110 in the shade practically looks to him like a political job. If you want it, it’s yours, and here’s your identification. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Thanks. Sorry I blew my top.”

“That’s O.K. God knows what you’ll blow next.”

We rode down in a truck, all of us jammed so close together standing on each other’s feet I hated to think what would happen if we hit something. Two or three miles out of town we turned in between two concrete pillars and began running between miles and miles of orange groves and lemon groves and grapefruit groves, with concrete water pipes all around. Some of the fruit was in bloom, and some of it was ripe and some half ripe, there didn’t seem to be any rule about it. Then we came to the ranch houses, the main office and store and mess hall and commissary and bunkhouse and garage and employees’ houses, all painted white with green trim and looking like a dairy would look in the East, or maybe a horse farm in Kentucky. We piled out and went in the office and turned in our cards and got rings and nippers and chalk. The rings are made of heavy wire bent with a ring to measure lemons and a little one for a handle. The lemons are bigger than the ring, then O.K., cut them even if they’re green. In the packing house they’ll grade for storage and don’t have to be sold right away, as happens with tree-ripened fruit. If they go through the ring, let them hang. The nippers were for cutting. The chalk was to mark your number on your boxes. That stuff they issue to you when you come in and take up when you go. On lunch boxes, you were supposed to bring your own, and Mr. Holtz, the super, seemed annoyed that I didn’t have any, though it seemed to help that I had a canteen. He asked me some questions, and then, after he sent the others off to work in the truck, took me over to the company store, fixed me up with a box, and said I’d better take something to eat with me, or I might get a little weak before night. I took a can of beans, and he was surprised I could pay and he didn’t have to write me an order. Then he took me to the bunkhouse, assigned me a bunk, and said I’d do better if I shed all my clothes except the khakis, undershirt, and hat. I changed, and while he wasn’t looking smelled the blankets. They smelled like hay, and were clean. I made up my mind that short of falling dead I’d have that bunk. We went to the trees in his car, and on the way passed the jalopies of the fruit tramps, with tents put up beside them, that stunk so bad I was glad when we were by. Now they’re called Okies and Arkies and Louies, as they’ve been written up and it has been discovered what wonderful characters they’ve got, but then they were just fruit tramps, whole families of men, women, and children that travel around, and pick fruit and fight and stink. “Just what is the system here, Mr. Holtz? I mean, where do I eat, where do I bathe, how does it work? I’m a little new, and I’d like to know.”

So he explained about the mess hall and how I could cook my own stuff, with the pots there in the kitchen, and about the bathhouse and the rest of it. Now, a ranch has a cook and the pickers board with him, but at that time they were on their own, with three or four splitting it up in a cooking team. “And what do I get for all this?”

“The pay is ten cents a box, if you work by the box, or thirty cents an hour, if you want it that way, plus four cents a box.”

“Which pays best?”

“By the box, if you can pick.”

“Any great trick to it?”

“Well, it’s pretty hard, for a beginner, and there’s quite a few tricks to it. If I were you, to start, I’d try the hourly rate. We don’t expect too much, the first day or two, and if you don’t last, at least you have something in your pocket when you leave.”

“Do many Americans last?”

“Except for the fruit tramps, practically none.”

I’ve played football games till I thought I’d drop, I’ve hung on to freights till my hands were numb, I’ve taken my share on the chin. But for that kind of stuff, that day picking lemons, on the Green Hills Ranch, Whittier, California, topped anything I ever saw or hope to see. You stand on a stepladder that you move from tree to tree, with a pouch slung under one arm, your ring in one hand, your nippers in the other, and pick fruit. Where you first feel it is your back, from the reaching and being off balance all the time. Next you get it in your arms. In boxing, you have to shoot your punches straight instead of swinging them, or the other guy will lay all over your wrists with his elbows and make you arm-weary. That’s how it is reaching for those lemons. They’re off to one side, they’re over your head, they’re under your knees, they’re any place but straight in front, easy to your hands, so you can size them and cut them and pouch them without any work. At last you get it in the legs, from the strain, heavy aching pains that start back of your thighs and creep down past your knees and into your heels. Long before lunch I was so far gone I thought I’d pass out, and wondered how the women pickers, the fruit tramps’ wives, could stand it like they did. Then pretty soon a guy passed out, right on top of his ladder. First he was leaning over backwards, reaching for fruit, and then he was leaning too far. It crossed my mind, why didn’t he throw out his leg, to catch himself? Then he hit, flat. A girl screamed and scrambled down her ladder. Then she fell. Then a dozen people were around them yelling for a truck. It backed up and took them aboard. Then it was lunchtime and I opened my beans, but by the time I got my back straightened up so I could eat somebody said: Ole. How the afternoon went I can’t tell you, except now and then I’d get a box full, and carry it to the end of the row, and start back, and a Mexican would yell something at me in Spanish, and I’d go back and mark my number on it, in chalk. After a while, off in the trees, I kept hearing a motor, where somebody was trying to start it, and it would cough and die. Then there’d be an argument in Spanish and another whine from the starter and another cough. At last I couldn’t stand it any more and went over there. I thought it was the fuel pump, and sure enough, wrapped around it was a wad of rag they’d used to wipe it off with, just frazzed threads but enough to foul it. I pulled them out, had them start it, and it went. I went back to my ladder. At least that was one less thing to go crazy about.