It lasted until Ernie’s lids at last began to flutter. As his eyes opened, blinked, squinted and closed again, Ruben struggled to contain his joy, afraid it too was error.
“What’s your name?” asked the doctor in an imperious tenor, and Ruben passed the ammonia again under Ernie’s nose. This time there was a slight recoiling. “That’s enough of that,” said the doctor, but Ruben felt he was the superior in experience and moved the vial once more past the nostrils. Ernie grimaced. Twitching, blinking, he tried to raise his head.
“What’s your name?”
Ernie squinted up at the faces.
“Where are you?”
“Did I get knocked out?”
“What’s your name? Tell me what your name is. Can you do that?”
“Ernie Munger.”
“What town are you in? Hum?”
“Oakland. What round is it?”
“It’s all over. How many fingers do you see? Can you see my hand?”
When Ernie sat up, the Negro bent down to him for the belated gesture of sportsmanship, his face framed by a white towel. “Good fight. You all right now?”
Ernie looked at him dully. Babe rose, patted the victor’s back and hoarsely whispered to his seconds: “Real good puncher.”
Helped to his feet, Ernie stood with one shoulder hunched while Ruben and Babe tied the robe around him. His arms across their necks, his shoes gaping, he was conducted up the aisle and around a vendor shouting: “Cold beer!”
In the dressing room, Ruben held ice at the back of Ernie’s neck, sending Buford Wills out for his fight accompanied only by Babe. “I’ll be right out,” he said.
“I’ll catch up with you.” He was conscious of the minutes going by as he roughly toweled Ernie’s body, as he helped him on with his clothes, gave him a drink of brandy from the medical kit, studied his eyes and draped the robe over his shoulders as he sat shivering on the rubbing table. He heard the bell as he was taking his pulse. “How you feel now?”
“Head hurts. Can I have some water?”
Ruben heard the shouts of the crowd and felt the pull of the fight like a physical compulsion. He ran for another manager’s water bottle, covered with grimy adhesive tape, and as he was returning with it, the door hurled open and Babe was in the room again, shouting inaudibly. “He’s cut!” Ruben saw the lips say before the croaking sounds registered, and he ran to the medical kit. With the water bottle still in his other hand, he ran past Babe out into the cavernous auditorium, soaring with that grave yet turbulent completeness down the aisle toward the square of glaring light where Buford Wills, small and frail and black, with a trickle of blood down his face, was battling a tattooed Mexican.
11
Wearing a new straw hat, Billy Tully crawled for seven days in the onion fields, then he was back on the dark morning street among crowds of men left behind by the buses, acridly awake with nothing to do at the impossible hour of 5 a.m. The men grumbled about workers from Mexico, talked of the canneries hiring, passed bottles, knelt in doorways for furtive games of crap, and in the blue light of dawn dwindled away, up Main and Market, along Center and El Dorado, back to the hotels, the lawn and shade of Washington Square, to Chinese and Mexican cafés and to the bars whose doors again were opening.
After reading the paper over coffee and eggs, Tully went back to his room, slept awhile on top of the covers, then took a bus across town. In a crowd of several hundred he stood in the sweet-sour stench of stewing peaches outside a cannery. Trucks passed laden with peach lugs and can-filled cartons. On a vast paved area behind a Cyclone fence, yellow forklifts were stacking lugs into piles the size of barns. Amid the hum of machinery, gleaming empty cans clattered constantly down a conveyor from a boxcar where a man was unstacking and feeding them to the belt with a wooden pitchfork. Blocking the steps to the office, an aged watchman armed with a billy club and a large revolver, his pants hiked above his belly and dewlaps quivering over his buttoned and tieless collar, warned the crowd to keep back from the building.
“Are you hiring or not?” Tully demanded, sweating and irritable now that the sun had cleared the roof.
“You’ll just have to wait and hear from them inside.”
“It don’t do them no good us standing here. Why can’t they come out and say if they don’t want us?”
“I wouldn’t know nothing about that.”
“Then let me go in and ask somebody.”
“Keep back. No one’s going in that office.”
“Why not? Who the hell you think you’re talking to?”
“I’m just doing what they told me. They told me don’t let nobody in the office and nobody’s going through that door as long as I’m here. It’s none of my doing.”
“They’re hiring all right,” said a man at Tully’s side. “I was out here yesterday and they said come back today.”
Tully pushed to the front of the crowd and stood with his hands on his hips to prevent anyone from pushing around him. One of the big corrugated steel doors was open; visible in the gloom of the cannery were lines of aproned women. Inside the doorway a forklift had set down a pallet stacked with full lugs, and now a man left the crowd, stepped into the doorway and came back with two peaches. Several men and women followed, returning with handfuls of fruit before the watchman arrived and took the peaches from one final, grinning, capitulating pilferer. At that moment two Negro women sat down on the office steps. The guard ran belligerently back, neck and pelvis forward, squared chin bony from the downward abandonment by its flesh. Arguing, the women rose, and his head turned from them to the open door, from which one more man slipped back to the crowd with a handful of peaches.
“Well, you old fart, are they hiring or not?” shouted Tully.
“Not your kind. You can go home right now.”
A whistle blew, the cans stopped rolling from the boxcar, the women inside the building left the line, and the office door was opened by a youthful, sober-faced man in a white short-sleeve shirt with a striped tie.
“The cannery won’t be hiring any more personnel at the present time,” he announced from the porch. “We’ve got our full crews for peaches. Come back when the tomatoes are ripe.”
A peach banged against the corrugated metal wall several yards to his side — a loud juiceless thump.
“Who did that?” shouted the watchman. He was answered with snickers. The man on the porch stated that throwing peaches would not get anybody a job, and he went back into the office. The crowd fragmented, people walking off down the sides of the street, some running to parked cars, some remaining in the yard as if not believing the announcement. Tully went over to the open cannery door.
“Not hiring!” yelled the watchman.
Nearby in the immense dim room, a girl in jeans and workshirt was seated on a pallet eating a sandwich, her neck round and sloping, with short black curls at the nape.
The watchman arrived wheezing. “Not hiring. Come back when the tomatoes are ripe. Don’t take any of that fruit.”
Tully took a peach and walked past him into the sunlight. The small chunk he managed to bite away he spit out. When he threw the peach against the front door of a house, it struck with the hardness of stone. Along the sides of the street green peaches lay in the weeds.
The next morning he went out with a busload of tomato thinners. It was a day haul he had many times been warned against, but it paid ninety cents an hour. There was no talk on the ride out of town. The men slept; those with seats to themselves lay down on them. By sunrise they were in the delta.