U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [54]
Popper's voice was unexpectedly kind:
"You go straight up to bed without any supper and remember that you have enough to do to fight your own battles, Janey." She ran up to her room and lay on the bed shaking. When she'd gone to sleep Joe's voice woke her up with a start.
He was standing in his nightgown in the door. "Say, Janey," he whispered. "Don't you do that again, see. I can take care of myself, see. A girl can't butt in between men like that. When I get a job and make enough dough I'l get me a gun and if Popper tries to beat me up I'l shoot him dead." Janey began to sniffle. "What you wanna cry for; this ain't no Johnstown flood." She could hear him tiptoe down the stairs again in his bare feet. At highschool she took the commercial course and
learned stenography and typewriting. She was a plain thinfaced sandyhaired girl, quiet and popular with the teachers. Her fingers were quick and she picked up typing
-138-and shorthand easily. She liked to read and used to get books like The Inside of the Cup, The Battle of the Strong, The Winning of Barbara Worth out of the li-brary. Her mother kept tel ing her that she'd spoil her eyes if she read so much. When she read she used to imagine she was the heroine, that the weak brother who went to the bad but was a gentleman at core and capable of every sacrifice, like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities was Joe and that the hero was Alec.
She thought Alec was the bestlooking boy in George-town and the strongest. He had black closecropped hair and a very white skin with a few freckles and a strong squareshouldered way of walking. After him Joe was the bestlooking and strongest and the best basebal player anyway. Everybody said he ought to go on through high-school on account of being such a good basebal player, but at the end of his first year Popper said he had three girls to support and that Joe would have to get to work; so he got a job as a Western Union messenger. Janey was pretty proud of him in his uniform until the girls at high-school kidded her about it. Alec's folks had promised to put him through col ege if he made good in highschool, so Alec worked hard. He wasn't tough and dirtytalking like most of the boys Joe knew. He was always nice to Janey though he never seemed to want to be left alone with her. She pretty wel admitted to herself that she had a terrible crush on Alec.
The best day of her life was the sweltering summer
Sunday they al went canoeing up to Great Fal s. She had put up the lunch the night before. In the morning she added a steak she found in the icebox. There was blue haze at the end of every street of brick houses and dark summergreen trees when before anybody else was awake she and Joe crept out of the house round seven that morn-ing. They met Alec at the corner in front of the depot. He
-139-stood waiting for them with his feet wide apart and a skil et in his hand. They al ran and caught the car that was just leaving for Cabin John's Bridge. They had the car al to them-selves like it was a private car. The car hummed over the rails past whitewashed shanties and nigger cabins along the canal, skirting hil sides where the sixfoot tal waving corn marched in ranks like soldiers. The sunlight glanced in bluewhite glare on the wavingdrooping leaves of the tassling corn; glare, and a whirring and tinkling of grass-hoppers and dryflies rose in hot smoke into the pale sky round the clattering shaking electric car. They ate sweet summerapples Joe had bought off a colored woman in
the station and chased each other round the car and flopped down on top of each other in the cornerseats; and they laughed and giggled til they were weak. Then the car was running through woods; they could see the trestle-work of the rol ercoasters of Glen Echo through the trees and they piled off the car at Cabin John's having more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
They ran down to the bridge to look up and down the river brown and dark in the white glary morning between foliagesodden banks; then they found the canoe that be-longed to a friend of Alec's in a house by the canal, bought some cream soda and rootbeer and some packages of