Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

“What the hell is a white man doin’ on a ginzo job like that?” asked Burgess, stoutly built, bronzed young family man. “Why don’t you ask Kelly for a decent job?”

“I’m happy,” Ira assured him. “I don’t mind.”

Summer of his twenty-first year, summer of 1927, still vivid after almost seventy summers, still printed on memory: the straw-boss worker, near day’s end, proceeding from aisle to aisle, like a town crier, warning all and sundry: “On the juice! On the juice!” Now that all the trains had been lowered down to the tracks, ready to roll out of the barn, unaccustomed quiet prevailed, and the sunlight, sloping on the high smudged glass roof, hinted of evening. Because smoking was forbidden, those who craved a cigarette crouched in the gloom of the pit beneath the lowered trains, as in a tunnel. Cigarette tips glowing, the smokers took hasty, furtive, heady drags. Tobacco smoke mingled with smell of unwashed bodies, unmistakable stench of unwashed feet. And once again, member of a group, sharing the risk, squatting with the others, Ira felt the claim of nostalgia: of a fraternity missed, a communion lost.

From a distance in the tunnel, his kerosene flare rising, falling, as he ducked under train axles, disappearing when he poked the torch into crannies to examine newly done work and metal tags, the long, lean inspector approached — to be stopped sometimes by someone lagging in the shadow who wanted to light a butt off the yellow flame: tobacco aroma, kerosene stink, musty body odor.

Ira could scarcely continue. Ah — the regretful wish kept coming back and back — if only you had written of this while you were engaged in it, or soon after, never mind the unpolished prose. The freshness of it, or perception, sensation, experience, would have more than made up for lack of finish. Why didn’t someone say, Hey, sit down and describe it. Why wasn’t there someone to assign it as a theme for a course? Why wasn’t there a course? Why? Don’t blame anyone else for your own lack of gumption, your idler’s ways. Instead of supinely taking those deadly ed courses at CCNY, if you had enrolled in one of Edith’s courses at NYU, perhaps with Edith’s assistance. .

There were eighty trains at a time in the shop every day, eight rows of ten each. Quinto, the lead man, though illiterate, would be given the work sheet. Their stint for the day consisted of eight cars whose brake cylinders were to be maintained. Before work began, with list in hand, Ira would lead the way, traveling from aisle to aisle, and pointing out to Quinto the cars on the list. Eight cars in eighty; they were like separate points in the huge rectangular quadrant determined by a pair of coordinates. Eight points in eighty, and yet Quinto’s ability to remember them afterward was all but uncanny. It was Ira who was more apt to make a mistake in location than he. They got along quite well, after Ira learned to do most of the work. They horseplayed now and then, after work, especially at Saturday noon, during wash-up, in the euphoria of the remainder of the weekend off: Quinto initiated the practice of dousing his workmate with kerosene-soaked wads of lint: “ Managia chi ti battiavo ” was the sound of the words Quinto baptized him with. Ira followed suit, without benefit of clergy — and dashed kerosene into Quinto’s eyes. They almost came to blows.

They loafed a great deal together, as did most of the crews. The practice was one of the things that puzzled Ira at first, and he was never really sure later why it was so. The company would rather have them — and the other workers in the place — loaf, than reduce the hours of work down to the time it would actually take to finish the assigned task.

Oh, hell — he lifted his eyes from the monitor — it was obvious now (showed he was growing more practical, finally, nearly ninety).

Keeping the work force on the job longer than was necessary reduced the hourly rate of the work — that was at least one good reason.

So they loafed a good deal, especially after the half-hour lunch break, when full of food, and lethargic with summer heat, they seemed unable to contend with drowsiness, and yielding, fell into stuporous sleep — on the straw-covered subway seats of a train lifted up on its wooden trestles, and safely out of the way of foreman and superintendent. At other times, their stint finished, or all but finished, they lounged in the lifted trains along with others whose work was almost done and were killing time. One could smoke up there too, take a few drags discreetly, or gab about anything under the sun. Usually talk was about sports: racehorses, and the odds on them, the jockeys, and the favorites, about baseball, the standing of the home teams and the ballplayers, for Babe Ruth was nearing a record in home runs. Or about women: what tight lays the new wave of German nursemaids were. And about wages and working conditions. This was where Ira came to life.

A union, that’s what was needed. Instead of the company union whose meetings nobody attended except the bosses and their stooges. Instead of a company union that was as phony as a three-dollar bill, the subway workers needed a bona fide union of their own, one that would win them an eight-hour day and higher rates of pay, pensions, sick leave, paid vacations — it was obvious as hell. Ira preached with fervor: all they had to do was organize.

“Muz be a union.” Padget, whose task was to change the advertising cards under the train ceiling, looked up from his green racing form. “Muz be right away a union,” he jibed.

Young family-man Burgess, dark-haired, serious, assistant electrician, had been telling the others about fishing for flounder: “Sure, we ought to have a union,” he said to Ira. And not challenging, not hostile, but stalwart and practical: “Who’s gonna do it? You?” And relenting when he saw the effect of his words on Ira: “It’s a good idea. Nobody’s against that. But how’re you gonna do it? That’s what we wanna know: How?”

Their job was their livelihood — Ira had the queer feeling that the murkiness of his callow thought was being parted by realization, the way the dark waters of the East River foamed before the prow of a tugboat. The job was their rent, the meals on the table for themselves and their family, clothes and shoes and a pack of butts and an outing once in a while. They couldn’t depend on words, on good intentions; they had responsibilities, pressing ones: wife and kids depended on them. How mawkish he was, urging them forward, onward, out of the security of a summer job. Why should they risk what they had for just words? No wonder. They had to know how the thing worked that would improve their lot, just like their tools, concrete, visible. He could feel his insights float away afterward, but something remained: a notion of practicality, bare though it was: of necessity, necessity.

As if to punish him for his impulsive harangues about the benefits of organizing into a union, when a brief strike did break out, a strike called by the motormen, the operators of the subway trains, against the company in the shape of the city-appointed IRT board members, Ira and a half-dozen other expendable workers in different departments of the system were culled out to attend to the wants of the strikebreakers. “Scabs,” hired to replace the striking motormen in the event the strike was a prolonged one, they were herded onto the platform of a marshaling yard spur deep in the Bronx. So Ira, great proponent of trade unions though he was, confronted with the choice of being fired or submitting to the new assignment, Ira went meekly along. It wasn’t hard to compromise with principles, such as they were, Ira discovered, and he enjoyed the irony of the adventure.

Everything was adventure. He no longer reported for duty at the car barn. Instead, he rode all the way out to the last stop of the Bronx line, got off, and walked over tracks and covered third rails to the spur. Under the supervision of a surly Italian cook, Ira and his fellow “caterers” prepared the ingredients for beef stews, chowders, and the other entrées that met the cook’s criteria for a strikebreakers’ menu.Sitting perched on the steel stairs leading to the platform, the kitchen hands pared and peeled vegetables. An Englishman from the El station maintenance crew, probably singled out because he was an Englishman, had been a steward aboard transatlantic liners before he settled in America. Never did Ira see potatoes peeled as the Englishman peeled them: they had as many facets as a fine gem. Ira tried to do the same; he wasted potatoes like mad, but not once was he able to produce anything resembling the exquisite polyhedra of the other.