"Make me some tea that's hot, George. This wasn't. Oh, and a double bowl
of shredded; I've got a hole to fill up."
George kept the best of the four Greek restaurants. It had a certain
variety. It splurged into potato salad, and a few other kinds, and went
into omelets that were very acceptable. The others confined themselves
to fried things, with a few cereals and skimmed milk. I looked up from
my shredded wheat. George was wiping up a rill of gravy and milk from
the porcelain table, and a man was getting ready to sit down opposite.
It was Herb, the pit craneman.
"Always feed here?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, "best place in town, isn't it?"
He nodded.
"How big is Bouton? how many people has it?" I asked.
He grinned slowly, and put his elbows on the table. He was a
Pennsylvania Dutchman, with worry settling over good nature in a square
face.
"Twenty thousand," he said.
"It seems small for twenty thousand," I returned; "like a little
village. There's really only one store, isn't there,--the company
store,--where they keep anything? Only one empty newspaper, no theatre,
unless you count that one-story movie place, no enterprise--"
"A one-man town," he said, quickly. "Nearly every house in town is owned
by Mr. Burnham. Now look here, suppose a man works like hell to fix
things up, to work around and get a pretty damn good garden, puts a lot
of money into making his house right. Suppose he does, and then gets
into a scrap with his boss. What can he do? The company owns his house,
the company owns every other damn thing in town. He's got to beat
it--all his work shot to hell. That's why nobody does anything.--Hey,
ham and--Where you workin' now? Ain't seen yer in the pit."
"I'm on the floor, helpin' on Number 7."
"Att-a-boy!"
At last, Saturday night. Everyone felt Sunday coming, with twenty-four
hours of drunkenness or sleep alluringly ahead. The other shift had
tapped the furnace at three o'clock. We might not tap again, and that
was nice to think about. A front-wall and a hot back-wall we went
through as if it were better fun than billiards.
"Look out for me, I've got the de'il in me," from Jock, Scotch First on
Number 8. I looked up, and the crazy fool had a spoon--they weigh over a
hundred--between his legs, dragging it like a kid with a broomstick. As
it bounced on the broken brick floor, he yelled like a man after a Hun.
"Who's the maun amang ye, can lick a Scotchman?" he cried, dropping the
spoon to the floor.
"Is this the best stuff you can show on Number 8?" said Fred slowly. He
dived for Jock's waist, and drew it to him, though the Scotchman tried
to break his grip with one of his hands and with the other thrust off
his opponent's face. When Fred had him tight, he caught one of Jock's
straying arms, bent it slowly behind his back, and contrived a
hammerlock.
"You're no gentlemen,"--in pain; "you're interruptin' my work."
Fred relaxed, and Jock jumped away.
"Come over to a good furnace, goddam it, and fight it out!" he yelled,
from a distance that protected his words.
The charging-machine, in its perpetual machine-tremolo, shook past and
stopped. George slid down from his seat, and came over to Number 8's
gang.
"Well, Fred, how in hell's the world usin' yer?"
"Ask me that to-morrow."
"Well, guys, good night; I'm dead for forty minutes."
He picked up a board some six feet long and about six inches in width.
He laid himself carefully on it, and was sleeping inside of a minute.
I looked at him enviously for a few minutes. Suddenly it occurred to me
that the board lay over a slit in the floor. It was the opening through
which the pipes that attach to the gas-valve rise and fall. When gas is
shifted from one end of the furnace to the other, the pipes emerge
through the slit to a height several feet from the floor. Finally Fred
made the same discovery, and a broad smile spread over his face. He
continued to watch George, his grin deepening. At last he turned to the
second-helper.
"Throw her over," he said.
Nick threw the switch. Slowly and easily the valve-pipes rose, lifting
George and the head of his bed into the air, perilously. An immense and
ill-controlled shout swelled up and got ready to burst inside the
witnesses. George slept on, and the bed passed forty-five degrees. In
another second it rolled off the side of the pipes, and George, scared,
half-asleep, and much crumpled, rolled over on the furnace floor. It
was several seconds before he recovered profanity.
The pure joy of that event spread itself over the entire shift.
When the light from the melting scrap-iron inside the furnace shot back,
it lit up the hills and valleys in Nick's face. I noticed how sharp the
slope was from his cheek-bones to the pit of his cheeks, and the round
holes in which his eyes were a pool at the bottom. His lips moved off
his white teeth, and twisted themselves, as a man's do with effort. He
looked as if he were smiling. I picked up my shovel, and shoved it into
the dolomite pile, with a slight pressure of knee against right forearm
that eases your back. The thermometer in the shade outside was 95 deg. I
wondered vaguely how much it was where Nick stood, with the doors open
in his face.
We walked back together after the front-wall to the trough of water.
"Not bad when you get good furnace, good first-helper," he said. "Fred
good boy, but furnace no good. A man got to watch himself on this job,"
he went on bitterly; "he pull himself to pieces."
"I can't manage quite enough sleep," I said, wondering if that was the
remark of a tenderfoot.
"Sometime--maybe one day a month--I feel all right, good, no sleepy," he
went on. "Daytime work, ten hour, all right, feel good; fourteen hour
always too much tired. Sometime, goddam, I go home, I go to bed, throw
myself down this way." He threw both arms backward and to the side in a
gesture of desperate exhaustion, allowing his head to fall back at the
same time. "Goddam, think I no work no more. No day nuff sleep for
work," he concluded.
Later on in the day, I saw Jimmy let the charge-up man, George, take the
spoon and make front-wall. The heat "got his goat." "I lose about ten or
fifteen pounds every summer," he said, "but I get it back in the winter.
My wife is after me the whole time to leave this game. I tell her every
year I will. Better quit this business, buddy, while you're young,
before you get stuck like me."
I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the
generic name for non-Hunky helpers.
"Say, Joe," he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, "what's your
name right?"
"Charlie," I answered. "By the way, where have you been?"
"Drunk, Charlie," he answered, smiling cheerfully.
"Ever since I saw you in the pit?"
"Three week," he stated, with satisfaction; "beer, whiskey, everyt'ing.
What the hell, work all time goddam job, what the hell?"
V