She whipped off the wrapper and a fellow whistled. Except for the ribbon in her hair and the red shoes on her feet, she didn’t have a stitch on, and she never looked more beautiful or more horrible. “Are you going to bet?”
She kicked, and a slipper hit me in the face. I held on for another second, and then I ran. I ran out back, the way I came in, and I just made the rail in time. It seemed a year before all the stuff I had drunk splashed down below, and before it did, a yell went up inside. I went down the scantlings ashamed and licked and scared. I ran till I came to a street, but when I came to a saloon I went in. If it killed me, I had to have a drink.
Around three o’clock I was at the International, sitting around the bar, afraid to go to bed for fear of what I’d think about when the light was out and it was dark. An officer came in and ordered rye. He raised his glass at me and I saw it was the young lieutenant that had got into the row with Biloxi over the song. “You left too soon.”
“I had to run. I was sick.”
“It’s all you can hear down there — the hundred she made out of it, the five she made for Biloxi, and the extra change she made for the girls. It’s all over the street. They say it’ll put Biloxi’s place right on top. They say it’ll even put her in front of the Twins.”
“Pretty slick.”
“Brewer, he loved it.”
“He can have her.”
“He did.”
Things began to go round, and he said a lot, but I didn’t hear what it was. Then he was asking me something: “You know what she did?”
“I don’t much care.”
“She—”
“I said I don’t care what she did.”
“She stood on one foot, and—”
“You want to take a dive in that spittoon?”
“Well, if that’s how you feel about it.”
“That’s how I feel about it.”
I never did find out what she did. What was coming out of their throats when they were yelling in there was all I wanted to know about it. They sounded like a pack of hyenas.
5
“Sale la linda
Sale la fea,
Sale el enano
Con zo zalea.”
It was him all right, plunking the same guitar, singing the same song, eshriveled in the same foolish way. I ran over there fast, because I think I was gladder to see him than I had ever been to see anybody in my life. I had moved out of the International by now, because my money was running low, to a boarding house on B Street, and my shoes were wearing out and my hat was caving in, and still I couldn’t get up enough gump to get a job or leave the place or do anything but hang around the saloons and pretend what I was going to do when I got me a thousand dollars, and after that I was going to get the hell out. I had seen her once or twice, with this or that big sport, but mostly with Brewer, and she was carrying every inch of silk, satin, and lace that her sticks would hold.
But when I went running over to him, where he was on the boardwalk with some other Mexicans, he just gave me a quick handshake and motioned me to wait, and went on singing till he had a crowd. Then he began making a speech, in Spanish. What it was about I couldn’t understand, but they all followed him close, and nodded at each other, and whispered. It wasn’t till he had written down some names and appointed some kind of a committee that he let his meeting break up. Then he took me to a little Spanish place on Silver Street, and only when we were sitting down to a table and he had ordered some red wine did he really shake hands and show his white teeth and look me over and ask me how I’d been. I said all right, and asked for his brother and the other boys in Sacramento, and he said the little muchacha was dancing with the mariachi now, and they were doing so well they had a job riding a steamboat. Then, like he didn’t remember at all what I’d come here for, he said: “And you, Rodrigo? You marry, yes?”
“Not yet, Paddy.”
“Some day, with nice muchacha.”
“...I found her.”
“Thees Morina?”
“Just like you said.”
I told him, then, something about it, not much, because talking about it upset the hell out of me, but a little bit. He shook his head, and after a while said: “In Mexico, not so bad. In Mexico, each do own work, and if liddle muchacha do thees work, take care of mamma maybe, give papa fine serape, what more can liddle muchacha do? Fallow love her, pay not attention. In thees country, is not so good.”
“It stinks in any country.”
“M’m — so.”
“Would you like it?”
“Rodrigo, I like you.”
I knew, of course, he was only trying to soften it up a little, so it wouldn’t hurt so bad, so I shut up and we sat there awhile, not saying anything. Then: “What you do here, Rodrigo?”
“Kill flies for the bartenders.”
“But you work, yes?”
“I got work waiting for me in Sacramento.”
“Thees rocker? Pah!”
“There’s some other stuff, too.”
I had never told him about what I was doing for Annapolis, and for some reason didn’t want to. If I did, I had to admit some stuff that was heavy on my heart, but if he didn’t know it, at least there was that much he wouldn’t look down on me for. I could feel him studying me, and he must have figured there was some lying to it somewhere, because he said: “Rodrigo, how you like to come work with me?”
“In a mine? Would be pretty tough for me.”
“Is only part.”
“And what’s the rest of it?”
“You hear me tonight? Make spich Mexican miner, on a corner, after liddle plinka-plank and liddle song? I start a union. Right here in Virginia City, I get thees men together, thees Mexican fallow, in miners’ union.”
“You mean a loafing association.”
“That is what is called.”
“That’s what it is.”
“Rodrigo, I work in mine all over Estados Unidos, all over Mexico, see many mine, many town. Never, in my whole life, do I see such ’orrible mine, such throw away man’s life only to make money, such rich man no give a good goddam if poor man live or die, as here in thees place, Virginia City. Yes, one time I think like you, union is loafing association. But now I know, must come. Thees bad man, they no do for miner, then miner must say, yes you do. I make you.”
“Quite a speech you got.”
“To Mexican, yes. For American, I need you.”
“Sorry, it doesn’t interest me.”
“Rodrigo, you need. To forget thees girl.”
“I’m all against unions.”
“You make big mistake.”
I was almost asleep that night when it came to me, like a big bell ringing in the dark: with a union, if I could start it and run it and stop it when I chose, I could close down Virginia City tighter than the lid of hell, and stop that river of silver that was running east and furnishing the money to the North that they needed to win the war. I lay there so excited I couldn’t sleep, because that would make it all right about my being here, and I could write Annapolis, and my leaving Sacramento wouldn’t be something I had to be ashamed of any more. I waited as long as I could, but it was still dark when I ran down C Street and over to Gold Canyon, where he and two or three friends had their shacks. He was frying his beans when I got there, and showed his teeth and laughed when I told him about changing my mind, even if he had no idea what my reasons were. He took me over to the Dakota then, which was the mine he worked in, to get a job, because of course I couldn’t organize any union unless I had a job in the mines. We lined up in front of the timekeeper’s window, outside the stockade, us and the twenty or thirty that wanted jobs that day, and after a while Trapp came out, the foreman that needed men.