U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [31]
looked at him queerly when he went in, but he got up to his room and fel into bed without anybody saying any-thing to him. Ike wasn't back yet. He dozed off feeling his headache al through his sleep. When he woke up Ike was sitting on the bed. Ike's eyes were bright and his cheeks were red. He was stil a little drunk. "Say, Mac, did they rol yer? I can't find my pocketbook an' I tried to go back but I couldn't find the apartment. God, I'd have beat up the goddam floosies . . . Shit, I'm drunk as a pissant stil . Say, the galoot at the desk said we'd have to clear out. Can't have no drunks in the Y.M.C.A."
"But jez, we paid for a week.""He'l give us part of it back . . . Aw, what the hel , Mac . . . We're flat, but I feel swel . . . Say, I had a rough time with your Jane after they'd thrown you out."
"Hel , I feel sick as a dog."
"I'm afraid to go to sleep for fear of getting a hang-over. Come on out, it'l do you good." It was three in the afternoon. They went into a little Chinese restaurant on the waterfront and drank coffee. They had two dol ars they got from hocking their suit--76-cases. The pawnbroker wouldn't take the silk shirts be-cause they were dirty. Outside it was raining pitchforks.
"Jesus, why the hel didn't we have the sense to keep sober? God, we're a coupla big stiffs, Ike."
"We had a good party . . . Jez, you looked funny with that liprouge al over your face."
"I feel like hel . . . I wanta study an' work for things; you know what I mean, not to get to be a god-dam slavedriver but for socialism and the revolution an'
like that, not work an' go on a bat an' work an' go on a bat like those damn yaps on the railroad."
"Hel , another time we'l have more sense an' leave our wads somewhere safe . . . Gee, I'm beginning to sink by the bows myself."
"If the damn house caught fire I wouldn't have the strength to walk out." They sat in the Chink place as long as they could and then they went out in the rain to find a thirtycent flop-house where they spent the night, and the bedbugs ate them up. In the morning they went round looking for jobs, Mac in the printing trades and Ike at the shipping agencies. They met in the evening without having had any luck and slept in the park as it was a fine night. Eventual y they both signed up to go to a lumbercamp up the Snake River. They were sent up by the agency on a car ful of Swedes and Finns. Mac and Ike were the only ones who spoke English. When they got there they found the foreman so hardboiled and the grub so rotten and the bunkhouse so filthy that they lit out at the end of a couple of days, on the bum again. It was already cold in the Blue Mountains and they would have starved to death if they hadn't been able to beg food in the cook-houses of lumbercamps along the way. They hit the rail-road at Baker City, managed to beat their way back to Portland on freights. In Portland they couldn't find jobs because their clothes were so dirty, so they hiked south--77-ward along a big endless Oregon val ey ful of fruit-ranches, sleeping in barns and getting an occasional meal by cutting wood or doing chores around a ranch house. In Salem, Ike found that he had a dose and Mac
couldn't sleep nights worrying for fear he might have it too. They tried to go to a doctor in Salem. He was a big roundfaced man with a hearty laugh. When they said they didn't have any money he guessed it was al right and that they could do some chores to pay for the con-sultation, but when he heard it was a venereal disease he threw them out with a hot lecture on the wages of sin. They trudged along the road, hungry and footsore;
Ike had fever and it hurt him to walk. Neither of them said anything. Final y they got to a smal fruitshipping station where there were watertanks, on the main line of the Southern Pacific. There Ike said he couldn't walk any further, that they'd have to wait for a freight.
"Jesus Christ, jail 'ud be better than this."
"When you're outa luck in this man's country, you certainly are outa luck," said Mac and for some reason they both laughed.
Among the bushes back of the station they found an