U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [8]
a chance to learn the profession from the ground up. So he ran errands, delivered packages of circulars, throw-aways, posters, was always dodging trol eycars, ducking from under the foamy bits of big truckhorses, bumming rides on deliverywagons. When there were no errands to run he swept out under the presses, cleaned type, emptied the office wastepaper basket, or, during rush times, ran round the corner for coffee and sandwiches for the type-setter, or for a smal flask of bourbon for Uncle Tim. Pop puttered round on his crutch for several years, always looking for a job. Evenings he smoked his pipe and cursed his luck on the back stoop of Uncle Tim's house and occasional y threatened to go back to Middle-town. Then one day he got pneumonia and died quietly at the Sacred Heart Hospital. It was about the same time that Uncle Tim bought a linotype machine.
Uncle Tim was so excited he didn't take a drink for three days. The floorboards were so rotten they had to build a brick base for the linotype al the way up from the cel ar. Wel , when we get another one we'l concrete the whole place, Uncle Tim told everybody. For a whole day there was no work done. Everybody stood around
looking at the tal black intricate machine that stood there like an organ in a church. When the machine was work-ing and the printshop fil ed with the hot smel of molten metal, everybody's eyes fol owed the quivering inquisitive
-18-arm that darted and flexed above the keyboard. When they handed round the warm shiny slugs of type the old German typesetter who for some reason they cal ed Mike pushed back his glasses on his forehead and cried. Fifty-five years a printer, and now when I'm old I'l have to carry hods to make a living.
The first print Uncle Tim set up on the new machine was the phrase: Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
When Fainy was seventeen and just beginning to worry about skirts and ankles and girls'
underwear when he walked home from work in the evening and saw the lights of the city bright against the bright heady western sky, there was a strike in the Chicago printing trades. Tim O'Hara had always run a union shop and did al the union printing at cost. He even got up a handbil signed, A Citi-zen, entitled An Ernest Protest, which Fainy was al owed to set up on the linotype one evening after the operator had gone home. One phrase stuck in Fainy's mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for al honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.
The next day was Sunday, and Fainy went along
Michigan Avenue with a package of the handbil s to dis-tributd. It was a day of premature spring. Across the rot-ting yel ow ice on the lake came little breezes that smelt unexpectedly of flowers. The girls looked terribly pretty and their skirts blew in the wind and Fainy felt the spring blood pumping hot in him, he wanted to kiss and to rol on the ground and to run out across the icecakes and to make speeches from the tops of telegraph poles and to vault over trol eycars; but instead he distributed hand-bil s and worried about his pants being frayed and wished he had a swel looking suit and a swel looking girl to walk with.
Hey, young fel er, where's your permit to distribute
-19-them handbil s? It was a cop's voice growling in his ear. Fainy gave the cop one took over his shoulder, dropped the handbil s and ran. He ducked through between the shiny black cabs and carriages, ran down a side street and walked and walked and didn't look back until he managed to get across a bridge just before the draw opened. The cop wasn't fol owing him anyway.
He stood on the curb a long time with the whistle of a peanutstand shril ing derisively in his ear.
That night at supper his uncle asked him about the
handbil s.
Sure I gave 'em out al along the lakeshore . . . A cop tried to stop me but I told him right where to get off. Fainy turned burning red when a hoot went up from everybody at the table. He fil ed up his mouth with mashed potato and wouldn't say any more. His aunt and his uncle and their three daughters al laughed and laughed. Wel , it's a good thing you ran faster than the cop, said Uncle Tim, else I should have had to bail you out and that would have cost money.