Jim had told him to go to see a friend of his who worked in a Ford servicestation on Blue Island Avenue but it was so far that by the time he got there the guy had gone. The boss was there though and he told Charley that if he came round next morning he’d have a job for him. As he didn’t have anywhere to go and didn’t like to tell the boss he was flat he left his suitcase in the garage and walked around all night. Occasionally he got a few winks of sleep on a park bench, but he’d wake up stiff and chilled to the bone and would have to run around to warm up. The night seemed never to end and he didn’t have a red to get a cup of coffee with in the morning, and he was there walking up and down outside an hour before anybody came to open up the servicestation in the morning.
He worked at the Ford servicestation several weeks until one Sunday he met Monte Davis on North Clark Street and went to a wobbly meeting with him in front of the Newberry Library. The cops broke up the meeting and Charley didn’t walk away fast enough and before he knew what had happened to him he’d been halfstunned by a riotstick and shoved into the policewagon. He spent the night in a cell with two bearded men who were blind drunk and didn’t seem to be able to talk English anyway. Next day he was questioned by a police magistrate and when he said he was a garage mechanic a dick called up the servicestation to check up on him; the magistrate discharged him, but when he got to the garage the boss said he’d have no goddam I Won’t Works in this outfit and paid him his wages and discharged him too.
He hocked his suitcase and his good suit and made a little bundle of some socks and a couple of shirts and went round to see Monte Davis to tell him he was going to hitchhike to St. Louis. Monte said there was a freespeech fight in Evansville and he guessed he’d come along to see what was doing. They went out on the train to Joliet. When they walked past the prison Monte said the sight of a prison always made him feel sick and gave him a kind of a foreboding. He got pretty blue and said he guessed the bosses’d get him soon, but that there’d be others. Monte Davis was a sallow thinfaced youth from Muscatine, Iowa. He had a long crooked nose and stuttered and didn’t remember a time when he hadn’t sold papers or worked in a buttonfactory. He thought of nothing but the I.W.W. and the revolution. He bawled Charley out for a scissorbill because he laughed about how fast the wobblies ran when the cops broke up the meeting, and told him he ought to be classconscious and take things serious.
At the citylimits of Joliet they hopped a truck that carried them to Peoria, where they separated because Charley found a truckdriver he’d known in Chicago who offered him a lift all the way to St. Louis. In St. Louis things didn’t seem to be so good, and he got into a row with a hooker he picked up on Market Street who tried to roll him, so as a guy told him there were plenty jobs to be had in Louisville he began to beat his way East. By the time he got to New Albany it was hot as the hinges of hell; he’d had poor luck on hitches and his feet were swollen and blistered. He stood a long time on the bridge looking down into the swift brown current of the Ohio, too tired to go any further. He hated the idea of tramping round looking for a job. The river was the color of gingerbread; he started to think about the smell of gingercookies Lizzie Green used to make in his mother’s kitchen and he thought he was a damn fool to be bumming round like this. He’d go home and plant himself among the weeds, that’s what he’d do.
Just then a brokendown Ford truck came by running on a flat tire. “Hey, you’ve got a flat,” yelled Charley. The driver put on the brakes with a bang. He was a big bulletheaded man in a red sweater. “What the hell is it to you?” “Jez, I just thought you might not a noticed.” “Ah notice everythin’, boy… ain’t had nutten but trouble all day. Wanta lift?” “Sure,” said Charley. “Now, Ah can’t park on de bridge nohow… Been same goddam thing all day. Here Ah gits up early in de mornin’ b’fo’ day and goes out to haul foa hawgsheads a tobacca an de goddam nigger done lost de warehouse key. Ah swear if Ah’d had a gun Ah’d shot de son of a bitch dead.” At the end of the bridge he stopped and Charley helped him change the tire. “Where you from, boy?” he said as he straightened up and brushed the dust off his pants. “I’m from up in the Northwest,” said Charley. “Ah reckon you’re a Swede, ain’t yez?” Charley laughed. “No; I’m a garage mechanic and lookin’ for a job.” “Pahl in, boy; we’ll go an’ see ole man Wiggins — he’s ma boss — an’ see what we can do.”
Charley stayed all summer in Louisville working at the Wiggins Repair Shops. He roomed with an Italian named Grassi who’d come over to escape military service. Grassi read the papers every day and was very much afraid the U.S. would go into the war. Then he said he’d have to hop across the border to Mexico. He was an anarchist and a quiet sort of guy who spent the evenings singing low to himself and playing the accordion on the lodginghouse steps. He told Charley about the big Fiat factories at Torino where he’d worked, and taught him to eat spaghetti and drink red wine and to play Funiculi funicula on the accordion. His big ambition was to be an airplane pilot. Charley picked up with a Jewish girl who worked as sorter in a tobacco warehouse. Her name was Sarah Cohen but she made him call her Belle. He liked her well enough but he was careful to make her understand that he wasn’t the marrying kind. She said she was a radical and believed in free love, but that didn’t suit him much either. He took her to shows and took her out walking in Cherokee Park and bought her an amethyst brooch when she said amethyst was her birthstone.
When he thought about himself he felt pretty worried. Here he was doing the same work day after day, with no chance of making better money or getting any schooling or seeing the country. When winter came on he got restless. He’d rescued an old Ford roadster that they were going to tow out to the junkheap and had patched it up with discarded spare parts.
He talked Grassi into going down to New Orleans with him. They had a little money saved up and they’d run down there and get a job and be there for the Mardi Gras. The first day that he’d felt very good since he left St. Paul was the sleety January day they pulled out of Louisville with the engine hitting on all four cylinders and a pile of thirdhand spare tires in the back, headed south.
They got down through Nashville and Birmingham and Mobile, but the roads were terrible and they had to remake the car as they went along and they almost froze to death in a blizzard near Guntersville and had to lay over for a couple of days, so that by the time they’d gotten down to Bay St. Louis and were bowling along the shore road under a blue sky and feeling the warm sun and seeing palms and bananatrees and Grassi was telling about Vesuvio and Bella Napoli and his girl in Torino that he’d never see again on account of the bastardly capitalista war, their money had run out. They got into New Orleans with a dollar five between them and not more than a teacupful of gasoline in the tank, but by a lucky break Charley managed to sell the car as it stood for twentyfive dollars to a colored undertaker.
They got a room in a house near the levee for three dollars a week. The landlady was a yellowfaced woman from Panama and there was a parrot on the balcony outside their room and the sun was warm on their shoulders walking along the street. Grassi was very happy. “This is like the Italia,” he kept saying. They walked around and tried to find out about jobs but they couldn’t seem to find out about anything except that Mardi Gras was next week. They walked along Canal Street that was crowded with colored people, Chinamen, pretty girls in brightcolored dresses, racetrack hangerson, tall elderly men in palmbeach suits. They stopped to have a beer in a bar open to the street with tables along the outside where all kinds of men sat smoking cigars and drinking. When they came out Grassi bought an afternoon paper. He turned pale and showed the headline, war with Germany imminent. “If America go to war with Germany cops will arrest all Italian man to send back to Italy for fight, see? My friend tell who work in consule’s office; tell me, see? I will not go fight in capitalista war.” Charley tried to kid him along, but a worried set look came over Grassi’s face and as soon as it was dark he left Charley saying he was going back to the flop and going to bed.