Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

At last it came time to quit. I rode back with a couple dozen Mexicans, went in the store, bought some canned stuff and Nescafe, and went to the mess-hall kitchen. I heated it up, whatever it was, and ate it. Then I went to the bathhouse and showered. Then I went to the bunkhouse, took off my clothes, and at last stretched out on my bunk. I had it all to myself, as I’d had the kitchen, because the Mexicans were all outside, laughing and smoking and talking, and hadn’t even thought about eating yet, let alone sleeping. I had my mind on one thing, and that was sleep. Inside me were twitches, jerks, and hysteria, all trying to break loose, but I fought them back, and was just getting quiet when three Mexicans came in with Holtz and began jabbering in Spanish. Then they came over. Holtz said: “What’s this about that spray?”

“What spray?”

“That you fixed.”

“I thought it was a fire boat.”

“What ailed it?”

“Fuel pump. Tell them next time they wipe it off use something that won’t fall apart in a bunch of ravelings like an old flour bag.”

“You understand machinery?”

“Little bit.”

“You want a job? A regular job?”

“Yeah. What is it?”

“Tower man on that spray. Tower man is foreman of the gang, three men and yourself. These boys, they kind of went for the way you helped them out. If you want to try it, it’s sixty cents an hour, start tomorrow morning.”

“If you’ve got water, oil, and gas, I’ll make it go.”

“Then O.K. And one other thing.”

“Which is?”

“You stuck. That impressed me.”

I slept for a month. On the food, it turned out I didn’t have to cook it, as tower man was a company job, and I could board with Mrs. Emory, wife of the irrigation boss, who had one of the cottages beyond the ravine, two or three hundred yards from the fruit tramps’ camp. She was expecting another addition to the family, so she was glad to make some extra cash, and fixed my lunch box and let me eat the other meals with the family. When I came in from work I’d shower, dress, and go to supper. Then I’d go back to the bunkhouse and go to bed. By that time the Mexicans would be hooking it up with phonograph, radio, guitar, or whatever they had. They’re the noisiest breed of man on earth, but I slept through it like I was doped. Then after a while I didn’t sleep so long. I’d wake up around four or five, with everything dark out there, or maybe the moon still shining, and the birds warbling in the trees, like they do all night in California, and begin to think.

I’d think about my father, and try to remember what he’d done for me, and forget the other things, so I wouldn’t feel so bitter. I’d think about my aunts, and how silly they were, and want to laugh and want to cry. I’d think about my mother, the one time I saw her, and about Miss Eleanor, and how proud she’d been of me for beating up the organist. It seemed funny anybody’d ever been proud of me. I thought about Easton, and she seemed a million miles away. I thought about Margaret, and the miserable way I’d treated her. I thought about Helen, and that was just a stab through my heart. And down under it all I kept thinking about this thing I’d lost, that Buck had given his life for, and kept wondering if I’d ever get it back.

The Friday before Labor Day I got paid, quite a lot for a ranch hand, as I’d made extra by working three or four Sundays getting Holtz’s trucks in shape, and that night I went in to Whittier and got stuff I needed, shirts and things like that. Next day they didn’t work, and I lay around and read magazines. Then after lunch I thought if I didn’t go somewhere I’d go nuts and around one o’clock I started out. I hitched a ride to 101, and a couple of hundred yards from our entrance was a bus stop. I walked down there and stood around watching people buy fruit from a little stand off to one side. Pretty soon here came a guy with a box of tomatoes, staggering toward a coupe that was standing there. He was a big guy, burned brown as terra-cotta pipe, with kind of a twinkle in his eye, like carrying tomatoes wasn’t exactly in his line, but he’d do the best he could with it as long as he had them. He had trouble with the door, and I yanked it open and slipped inside and took his box and shoved it up on the ledge behind the seat so it wouldn’t fall but at the same time he’d have plenty of room. “Well, thanks, that helps a lot.”

“Kind of left-handed, loading stuff in a car.”

“Give you a lift, maybe?”

“Well — depends on which way you’re going.” It depended on which way I was going too, but that was something I hadn’t got around to yet. But I heard my mouth tell him: “I’m headed for the border.”

“Oh — Tia Juana?”

“I believe they call it that.”

“In that case, if you want to ride with me over to 101, I think you’d do better on the busses than here. I mean, over there, there are more of them. You got to get to San Diego first anyhow, and the through cars all go down the coast, or anyway most of them do. And in Long Beach you’ll have more luck.”

“Isn’t this 101?”

“The other’s alternate.”

“You got two?”

“California. We do it big.”

He grinned and I laughed and he climbed in and we started. As we rode he talked. He’d been over to Whittier, he said, to arrange with the photographer to be at his church the next night, to take pictures of the surprise party they were giving the rector in celebration of his tenth anniversary. He didn’t hide it any he was annoyed with the rest of them for not postponing it a week on account of the Labor Day week end. “I have charge of the music, you see, and what they don’t realize is that all summer I’ve been running with pick-up singers, kids and visiting firemen and whoever I could find, while our regular choir members are away to the mountains or some place and nobody due back till next week. The trouble I’ve had to round them up I’d hate to tell you.”

“You a musician?”

“Hell, no. Oil’s my business. Been at it thirty years, ever since I was twelve years old. Kind of a roving wildcat, I guess you’d call me, anyway till I put down a well for a lady that had a property and then married her. After that I settled down, if you can call it settling down to try and manage the little end of some of the worst made deals ever seen in the field. But it’s all I know, so I do it. That and the choir. No, I’m no musician, but I found out something funny about them a long time ago. They know all there is to know about music, except music. I mean, they can yiddle their fiddle or tootle their tooter or bear on their beartone so long as somebody tells them what they yiddle or tootle or bear down on. But to pick out something themselves, and get it in the right key, and learn it, and sing it, why, that would be a little too original for them. So when I went in the choir I began doing some of those things myself, and next thing I knew I was in charge of it all. I just about know two flats from three sharps, but if you sit down and learn it by heart you can teach it to them well enough, and if I do say it myself, when we’ve got everybody present and our things rehearsed up, we’ve got as nice a little choir as you’re going to hear in some time.”

I said I’d been a boy soprano when I was young, so of course that made us buddies, and we talked along pretty sociable. I kind of wished he’d talk more about oil and less about choir, but at that I kind of liked him. We came in sight of the sea, the first I’d seen of the Pacific Ocean, and he stopped to let me take a gander at it. Then he went on and pretty soon turned into a place that seemed to be his, and said he had to make a couple of phone calls, but then we’d go. He parked in front of the house, and I could hear him in there talking, but there seemed to be quite a lot of it, so I got out and took a stretch. It was a pretty place, a white frame house with a garage out back, tall trees around it, and lawn clear out to the road, maybe a hundred yards of it. Pretty soon he came out and said a guy was going to call him back, but it wouldn’t be long. I said he should take his time. Pretty soon I could hear him at the piano, going over some kind of church music that sounded familiar, but he played so bad I couldn’t place it. But then pretty soon I had it: a Dudley Buck Te Deum I’d sung a hundred times. I hummed it under my breath, and it seemed funny that the whole melody part was too high for me, though once I had stepped into it like it was nothing at all. But when he came to a bass solo it was just right and I rolled it out: “The glorious company of the apostles praise Thee!” Well, if I’d set off a pack of firecrackers out there I couldn’t have got action sooner. He was at the door in a second, looking all around, and then, at last, at me. “Was that you?”