U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [338]
-433-glad to be a living example of the injustice and brutality of the capitalist system. The judge shut him up by saying he'd give him another six months for contempt of court if he didn't keep quiet, and Ben was taken to the county jail in an automobile ful of special deputies with riot guns. The papers spoke of him as a wel known socialist agitator. In jail Ben got to be friends with a wobbly named Bram Hicks, a tal youngster from Frisco with light hair and blue eyes who told him if he wanted to know the labor-movement he ought to get him a red card and go out to the Coast. Bram was a boilermaker by profession but had shipped as a sailor for a change and landed in Perth Amboy broke. He'd been working on the repairshift of one of the mil s and had gone out with the rest. He'd pushed a cop in the face when they'd broken up a picketline and been sent up for six months for assault and battery. Meeting him once a day in the prison yard was the one thing kept Ben going in jail.
They were both released on the same day. They walked along the street together. The strike was over. The mil s were running. The streets where there'd been picketlines, the hal where Ben had made speeches looked quiet and or-dinary. He took Bram around to Helen's. She wasn't there, but after a while she came in with a little redfaced ferret-nosed Englishman whom she introduced as Bil y, an Eng-lish comrade. First thing Ben guessed that he was sleeping with her. He left Bram in the room with the Englishman and beckoned her outside. The narrow upper hal of the old frame house smelt of vinegar.
"You're through with me?" he asked in a shaky voice.
"Oh, Ben, don't act so conventional."
"You mighta waited til I got outa jail."
"But can't you see that we're al comrades? You're a brave fighter and oughtn't to be so conventional, Ben. . . . Bil y doesn't mean anything to me. He's a steward on a liner. He'l be going away soon."
-434-"Then I don't mean anything to you either." He grabbed Helen's wrist and squeezed it as hard as he could.
"I guess I'm al wrong, but I'm crazy about you. . . . I thought you. . ."
"Ouch, Ben . . . you're talkin' sil y, you know how much I like you." They went back in the room and talked about the movement. Ben said he was going west with Bram Hicks.
. . . he becomes an appendage of the machine and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, most easily re- quired knack that is required of him. . . . Bram knew al the ropes. Walking, riding blind baggage or on empty gondolas, hopping rides on delivery wagons and trucks, they got to Buffalo. In a flophouse there Bram found a guy he knew who got them signed on as deckhands on a whaleback going back light to Duluth. In Duluth they joined a gang being shipped up to harvest wheat for an outfit in Saskatchewan. At first the work was very heavy for Ben and Bram was scared he'd cave in, but the four-teen hour days out in the sun and the dust, the copious grub, the dead sleep in the lofts of the big barns began to toughen him up. Lying flat on the straw in his sweaty clothes he'd stil feel through his sleep the tingle of the sun on his face and neck, the strain in his muscles, the whir of the reapers and binders along the horizon, the roar of the thresher, the grind of gears of the trucks carrying the red wheat to the elevators. He began to talk like a harvest stiff. After the harvest they worked in a fruitcannery on the Columbia River, a lousy steamy job ful of the sour stench of rotting fruitpeelings. There they read in Soli-darity about the shingleweavers' strike and the free speech fight in Everett, and decided they'd go down and see what they could do to help out. The last day they worked there
-435-Bram lost the forefinger of his right hand repairing the slicing and peeling machinery. The company doctor said he couldn't get any compensation because he'd already given notice, and, besides, not being a Canadian. . . A little shyster lawyer came around to the boarding house where Bram was lying on the bed in a fever, with his hand in a big wad of bandage, and tried to get him to sue, but Bram yel ed at the lawyer to get the hel out. Ben said he was wrong, the working class ought to have its lawyers too. When the hand had healed a little they went down on the boat from Vancouver to Seattle. I.W.W. headquarters there was like a picnic ground, crowded with young men coming in from every part of the U.S. and Canada. One day a big bunch went down to Everett on the boat to try to hold a meeting at the corner of Wetmore and Hewitt Avenues. The dock was ful of deputies with rifles, and re-volvers. "The Commercial Club boys are waiting for us," some guy's voice tittered nervously. The deputies had white handkerchiefs around their necks. "There's Sheriff McRae," said somebody. Bram edged up to Ben. "We better stick together. . . . Looks to me like we was goin' to get tamped up some." The wobblies were arrested as fast as they stepped off the boat and herded down to the end of the dock. The deputies were drunk most of them, Ben could smel the whiskey on the breath of the redfaced guy who grabbed him by the arm. "Get a move on there, you son of a bitch. . ." He got a blow from a riflebutt in the smal of the back. He could hear the crack of saps on men's skul s. Anybody who resisted had his face beaten to a jel y with a club. The wobblies were made to climb up into a truck. With the dusk a cold drizzle had come on. "Boys, we got to show 'em we got guts," a redhaired boy said. A deputy who was holding on to the back of the truck aimed a blow at him with his sap but lost his balance and fel off. The wobblies laughed. The deputy climbed on again, pur--436-ple in the face. "You'l be laughin' outa the other side of your dirty mugs when we get through with you," he yel ed.