在路上 英文版-8

We ate the grapes, and in the evening Rickey showed up with a loaf of bread and a pound ofhamburg and we had a picnic. In a larger tent next to ours lived a whole family of Okie cotton-pickers; the grandfather sat in a chair all day long, he was too old to work; the son and daughter, andtheir children, filed every dawn across the highway to my farmer’s field and went to work. At dawnthe next day I went with them. They said the cotton was heavier at dawn because of the dew andyou could make more money than in the afternoon. Nevertheless they worked all day from dawn tosundown. The grandfather had come from Nebraska during the great plague of the thirties - thatselfsame dustcloud my Montana cowboy had told me about - with the entire family in a jalopy truck.They had been in California ever since. They loved to work. In the ten years the old man’s son hadincreased his children to the number of four, some of whom were old enough now to pick cotton.And in that time they had progressed from ragged poverty in Simon Legree fields to a kind of smilingrespectability in better tents, and that Vas all. They were extremely proud of their tent..Ever going back to Nebraska?..Pshaw, there’s nothing back there. What we want to is buy a trailer..We bent down and began picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the field were the tents, andbeyond them the brown cottonfields that stretched out of sight to the brown arroyo foothills and thenthe snow-capped Sierras in the morning air. This was so much better than washing dishes SouthMain Street. But I knew nothing about picking cotton. I spent too much time disengaging the whiteball from crackly bed; the others did it in one flick. Moreover, fingertips began to bleed; I neededgloves, or more experience. There was an old Negro couple in the field with They picked cottonwith the same God-blessed patience the grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; themoved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bag increased. My back began to ache. But itwas beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth. If I felt like resting I did, my face on the pillow ofbrown moist earth. Birds an accompaniment. I thought I had found my life’s work. Johnny and Terrycame waving at me across the field in hot lullal noon and pitched in with me. Be damned if lit Johnnywasn’t faster than I was! - and of course Terry twice as fast. They worked ahead of me and left mepiles clean cotton to add to my bag - Terry workmanlike pile Johnny little childly piles. I stuck themin with sorrow. What kind of old man was I that couldn’t support his ass, let alone theirs? They spentall afternoon with me. Wt the sun got red we trudged back together. At the end of field I unloadedmy burden on a scale; it weighed fifty pound and I got a buck fifty. Then I borrowed a bicycle fromof the Okie boys and rode down 99 to a crossroads grocery store where I bought cans of cookedspaghetti and meatballs, bread, butter, coffee, and cake, and came back with the on the handlebars.LA-bound traffic zoomed by; Frisco-boy harassed my tail. I swore and swore. I looked up at darksky and prayed to God for a better break in life an better chance to do something for the little people58I love Nobody was paying any attention to me up there. I shot known better. It was Terry whobrought my soul back; on the tent stove she warmed up the food, and it was one of the greatestmeals of my life, I was so hungry and tired. Sighing like an old Negro cotton-picker, I reclined on thebed and smoked a cigarette. Dogs barked in the cool night. Rickey and Ponzo had given up calling inthe evenings. I was satisfied with that. Terry curled up beside me, Johnny sat on my chest, and theydrew pictures of animals in my notebook. The light of our tent burned on the frightful plain. Thecowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all rightwith me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights.In the morning the dew made the tent sag; I got up with my towel and toothbrush and went to thegeneral motel toilet to wash; then I came back, put on my pants, which were all torn from kneeling inthe earth and had been sewed by Terry in the evening, put on my ragged straw hat, which hadoriginally served as Johnny’s toy hat, and went across the highway with my canvas cotton-bag.Every day I earned approximately a dollar and a half. It was just enough to buy groceries in theevening on the bicycle. The days rolled by. I forgot all about the East and all about Dean and Carloand the bloody road. Johnny and I played all the time; he liked me to throw him up in the air anddown in the bed. Terry sat mending clothes. I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed Iwould be, in Paterson. There was talk that Terry’s husband was back in Sabinal and out for me; Iwas ready for him. One night the Okies went mad in the roadhouse and tied a man to a tree and beathim to a pulp with sticks. I was asleep at the time and only heard about it. From then on I carried abig stick with me in the tent in case they got the idea we Mexicans were fouling up their trailer camp.They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am.But now it was October and getting much colder in the nights. The Okie family had a woodstoveand planned to stay for the winter. We had nothing, and besides the rent for the tent was due. Terryand I bitterly decided we’d have to leave..Go back to your family,. I said. .For God’s sake, you can’t be batting around tents with a babylike Johnny; the poor little tyke is cold.. Terry cried because I was criticizing her motherly instincts; Imeant no such thing. When Ponzo came in the truck one gray afternoon we decided to see her familyabout the situation. But I mustn’t be seen and would have to hide in the vineyard. We started forSabinal; the truck broke down, and simultaneously it started to rain wildly. We sat in the old truck,cursing. Ponzo got out and toiled in the rain. He was a good old guy after all. We promised eachother one more big bat. Off we went to a rickety bar in Sabinal Mextown and spent an hour soppingup the brew. I was through with my chores in the cottonfield. I could feel the pull of my own lifecalling me back. I shot my aunt a penny postcard across the land and asked for another fifty.We drove to Terry’s family’s shack. It was situated on the old road that ran between thevineyards. It was dark when we got there. They left me off a quarter-mile away and drove to thedoor. Light poured out of the door; Terry’s six other brothers were playing their guitars and singing.The old man was drinking wine. I heard shouts and arguments above the singing. They called her awhore because she’d left her no-good husband and gone to LA and left Johnny with them. The oldman was yelling. But the sad, fat brown mother prevailed, as she always does among the greatfellahin peoples of the world, and Terry was allowed to come back home. The brothers began tosing gay songs, fast. I huddled in the cold, rainy wind and watched everything across the sadvineyards of October in the valley. My mind was filled with that great song .Lover Man. as BillieHoliday sings it; I had my own concert in the bushes. .Someday we’ll meet, and you’ll dry all mytears, and whisper sweet, little things in my ear, hugging and a-kissing, oh what we’ve been missing,Lover Man, oh where can you be . . .. It’s not the words so much as their great harmonic tune andthe way Billie sings it, like a woman stroking her man’s hair in soft lamplight. The winds howled. I got59I cold.Terry and Ponzo came back and we rattled off in the old truck to meet Rickey. Rickey was nowliving with Ponzo’s woman, Big Rosey; we tooted the horn for him in rickety alleys. Big Rosey threwhim out. Everything was collapsing. That night we slept in the truck. Terry held me tight, of course,and told me not to leave. She said she’d work picking grapes and make enough money for both ofus; meanwhile I could live in Farmer Heffelfinger’s barn down the road from her family. I’d havenothing to do but sit in the grass all day and eat grapes. .You like that?.In the morning her cousins came to get us in another truck. I suddenly realized thousands ofMexicans all over the countryside knew about Terry and me and that it must have been a juicy,romantic topic for them. The cousins were very polite and in fact charming. I stood on the truck,smiling pleasantries, talking about where we were in the war and what the pitch was. There were fivecousins in all, and every one of them was nice. They seemed to belong to the side of Terry’s familythat didn’t fuss off like her brother. But I loved that wild Rickey. He swore he was coming to NewYork to join me. I pictured him in New York, putting off everything till manana. He was drunk in afield someplace that day.I got off the truck at the crossroads, and the cousins drove Terry home. They gave me the highsign from the front of the house; the father and mother weren’t home, they were off picking grapes.So I had the run of the house for the afternoon. It was a four-room shack; I couldn’t imagine howthe whole family managed to live in there. Flies flew over the sink. There were no screens, just like inthe song, .The window she is broken and the rain she is coming in.. Terry was at home now andputtering around pots. Her two sisters giggled at me. The little children screamed in the road.When the sun came out red through the clouds of my last valley afternoon, Terry led me toFarmer Heffelfinger’s barn. Farmer Heffelfinger had a prosperous farm up the road. We put cratestogether, she brought blankets from the house, and I was all set except for a great hairy tarantula thatlurked at the pinpoint top of the barn roof. Terry said it wouldn’t harm me if I didn’t bother it. I layon my back and stared at it. I went out to the cemetery and climbed a tree. In the tree I sang .BlueSkies.. Terry and Johnny sat in the grass; we had grapes. In California you chew the juice out ofgrapes and spit the skin away, a real luxury. Nightfall came. Terry went home for supper and cameto the barn at nine o’clock with delicious tortillas and mashed beans. I lit a woodfire on the cementfloor of the barn to make light. We made love on the crates. Terry got up and cut right back to theshack. Her father was yelling at her.; I could hear him from the barn. She’d left me a cape to keepwarm; I threw it over my shoulder and skulked through the moonlit vineyard to see what was goingon. I crept to the end of a row and knelt in the warm dirt. Her five brothers were singing melodioussongs in Spanish. The stars bent over the little roof; smoke poked from the stovepipe chimney. Ismelled mashed beans and chili. The old man growled. The brothers kept right on yodeling. Themother was silent. Johnny and the kids were giggling in the bedroom. A California home; I hid in thegrapevines, digging it all. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.Terry came out, slamming the door behind her. I accosted her on the dark road. .What’s thematter?..Oh, we fight all the time. He wants me to go to work tomorrow. He says he don’t want mefoolin around. Sallie, I want to go to New York with you...But how?..I don’t know, honey. I’ll miss you. I love you...But I have to leave...Yes, yes. We lay down one more time, then you leave.. We went back to the barn; I made loveto her under the tarantula. What was the tarantula doing? We slept awhile on the crates as the fire60died. She went back at midnight; her father was drunk; I could hear him roaring; then there wassilence as he fell asleep. The stars folded over the sleeping countryside.In the morning Farmer Heffelfinger stuck his head through the horse gate and said, .How youdoing, young fella?..Fine. I hope it’s all right my staying here...Sure thing. You going with that little Mexican floozy?..She’s a very nice girl...Very pretty too. I think the bull jumped the fence. She’s got blue eyes.. We talked about hisfarm.Terry brought my breakfast. I had my canvas bag all packed and ready to go to New York, assoon as I picked up my money in Sabinal. I knew it was waiting there for me by now. I told Terry Iwas leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissedme in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, andlooked at each other for the last time..See you in New York, Terry,. I said. She was supposed to drive to New York in a month withher brother. But we both knew she wouldn’t make it. At a hundred feet I turned to look at her. Shejust walked on back to the shack, carrying my breakfast plate in one hand. I bowed my head andwatched her. Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again.I walked down the highway to Sabinal, eating black walnuts from the walnut tree. I went on theSP tracks and balanced along the rail. I passed a watertower and a factory. This was the end ofsomething. I went to the telegraph office of the railroad for my money order from New York. It wasclosed. I swore and sat on the steps to wait. The ticket master got back and invited me in. Themoney was in; my aunt had saved my lazy butt again. .Who’s going to win the World Series nextyear?. said the gaunt old ticket master. I suddenly realized it was fall and that I was going back toNew York.I walked along the tracks in the long sad October light of the valley, hoping for an SP freight tocome along so I could join the grape-eating hobos and read the funnies with them. It didn’t come. Igot out on the highway and hitched a ride at once. It was the fastest, whoopingest ride of my life. Thedriver was a fiddler for a California cowboy band. He had a brand-new car and drove eighty milesan hour. .I don’t drink when I drive,. he said and handed me a pint. I took a. drink and offered himone. .What the hail,. he said and drank. We made Sabinal to LA in the amazing time of four hoursflat about 250 miles. He dropped me off right in front of Columbia Pictures in Hollywood; I was justin time to run in and pick up my rejected original. Then I bought my bus ticket to Pittsburgh. I didn’thave enough money to go all the way to New York. I figured to worry about that when I got toPittsburgh.With the bus leaving at ten, I had four hours to dig Hollywood alone. First I bought a loaf ofbread and salami and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country on. I had a dollar left. I saton the low cement wall in back of a Hollywood parking lot and made the sandwiches. As I laboredat this absurd task, great Kleig lights of a Hollywood premiere stabbed in the sky, that hummingWest Coast sky. All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was myHollywood career - this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap inback of a parking-lot John.6114At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert - Indio, Ely the Salome (where shedanced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north tothe Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall,.Le Grand Meaulnes. by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as wewent along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed NewMexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through oneOklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home inOctober. Everybody goes home in October.We arrived in St. Louis at noon. I took a walk down by the Mississippi River and watched thelogs that came floating from Montana in the north - grand Odyssean logs of our continental dream.Old steamboats with their scrollwork more scrolled and withered by weathers sat in the mudinhabited by rats. Great clouds of afternoon overtopped the Mississippi Valley. The bus roaredthrough Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almostHalloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She wasnearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She boughtmy meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories. She was coming fromWashington State, where she had spent the summer picking apples. Her home was on an upstateNew York farm. She invited me to come there. We made a date to meet at a New York hotelanyway. She got off at Columbus, Ohio, and I slept all the way to Pittsburgh. I was wearier than I’dbeen for years and years. I had three hundred and sixty-five miles yet to hitchhike to New York, anda dime in my pocket. I walked five miles to get out of Pittsburgh, and two rides, an apple truck and abig trailer truck, took me to Harrisburg in the soft Indian-summer rainy night. I cut right along. Iwanted to get home.It was the night of the Ghost of the Susquehanna. The Ghost was a shriveled little old man with apaper satchel who claimed he was headed for .Canady.. He walked very fast, commanding me tofollow, and said there was a bridge up ahead we could cross. He was about sixty years old; hetalked incessantly of the meals he had, how much butter they gave him for pancakes, how manyextra slices of bread, how the old men had called him from a porch of a charity home in Marylandand invited him to stay for the weekend, how he took a nice warm bath before he left; how he founda brand-new hat by the side of the road in Virginia and that was it on his head; how he hit every RedCross in town and showed them his World War I credentials; how the Harris-burg Red Cross wasnot worthy of the name; how he managed in this hard world. But as far as I could see he was just asemi-respectable walking hobo of some kind who covered the entire Eastern Wilderness on foot,hitting Red Cross offices and sometimes bumming on Main Street corners for a dime. We werebums together. We walked seven miles along the mournful Susquehanna. It is a terrifying river. It hasbushy cliffs on both sides that lean like hairy ghosts over the unknown waters. Inky night covers all.Sometimes from the railyards across the river rises a great red locomotive flare that illuminates thehorrid cliffs. The little man said he had a fine belt in his satchel and we stopped for him to fish it out..I got me a fine belt here somewheres - got it in Frederick, Maryland. Damn, now did I leave thatthing on the counter at Fredericksburg?..You mean Frederick...No, no, Fredericksburg, Virginia!. He was always talking about Frederick, Maryland, andFredericksburg, Virginia. He walked right in the road in the teeth of advancing traffic and almost got62hit several times. I plodded along in the ditch. Any minute I expected the poor little madman to goflying in the night, dead. We never found that bridge. I left him at a railroad underpass and, because Iwas so sweaty from the hike, I changed shirts and put on two sweaters; a roadhouse illuminated mysad endeavors. A whole family came walking down the dark road and wondered what I was doing.Strangest thing of all, a tenorman was blowing very fine blues in this Pennsylvania hick house; Ilistened and moaned. It began to rain hard. A man gave me a ride back to Harrisburg and told me Iwas on the wrong road. I suddenly saw the little hobo standing under a sad streetlamp with his thumbstuck out -poor forlorn man, poor lost sometime boy, now broken ghost of the penniless wilds. Itold my driver the story and he stopped to tell the old man..Look here, fella, you’re on your way west, not east...Heh?. said the little ghost. .Can’t tell me I don’t know my way around here. Been walkin thiscountry for years. I’m headed for Canady...But this ain’t the road to Canada, this is the road to Pittsburgh and Chicago.. The little man gotdisgusted with us and walked off. The last I saw of him was his bobbing little white bag dissolving inthe darkness of the mournful Alleghenies.I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showedme different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it’s the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded inthe oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wild-buck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find theGap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not greatArizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, andVirginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna,Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy.That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the stationmasters threw me out. Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything underyour father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched andmiserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you goshuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control. AllI could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb. I was starving to death.All I had left in the form of calories were the last of the cough drops I’d bought in Shelton,Nebraska, months ago; these I sucked for their sugar. I didn’t know how to panhandle. I stumbledout of town with barely enough strength to reach the city limits. I knew I’d be arrested if I spentanother night in Harrisburg. Cursed city! The ride I proceeded to get was with a skinny, haggardman who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. When I told him I was starving todeath as we rolled east he said, .Fine, fine, there’s nothing better for you. I myself haven’t eaten forthree days. I’m going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old.. He was a bag of bones, a floppydoll, a broken stick, a maniac. I might have gotten a ride with an affluent fat man who’d say, .Let’sstop at this restaurant and have some pork chops and beans.. No, I had to get a ride that morningwith a maniac who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. After a hundred miles hegrew lenient and took out bread-and-butter sandwiches from the back of the car. They were hiddenamong his salesman samples. He was selling plumbing fixtures around Pennsylvania. I devoured thebread and butter. Suddenly I began to laugh. I was all alone in the car, waiting for him as he madebusiness calls in Allentown, and I laughed and laughed. Gad, I was sick and tired of life. But themadman drove me home to New York.Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around theAmerican continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too,63seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with itsmillions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream - grabbing, taking,giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long IslandCity. The high towers of the land - the other end of the land, the place where Paper America isborn. I stood in a subway doorway, trying to get enough nerve to pick up a beautiful long butt, andevery time I stooped great crowds rushed by and obliterated it from my sight, and finally it wascrushed. I had no money to go home in the bus. Paterson is quite a few miles from Times Square.Can you picture me walking those last miles through the Lincoln Tunnel or over the WashingtonBridge and into New Jersey? It was dusk. Where was Hassel? I dug the square for Hassel; hewasn’t there, he was in Riker’s Island, behind bars. Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? Ihad my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that Iknew was in there somewhere too. I had to panhandle two bits for the bus. I finally hit a Greekminister who was standing around the corner. He gave me the quarter with a nervous lookaway. Irushed immediately to the bus.When I got home I ate everything in the icebox. My aunt got up and looked at me. .Poor littleSalvatore,. she said in Italian. .You’re thin, you’re thin. Where have you been all this time?. I hadon two shirts and two sweaters; my canvas bag had torn cottonfield pants and the tattered remnantsof my huarache shoes in it. My aunt and I decided to buy a new electric refrigerator with the money Ihad sent her from California; it was to be the first one in the family. She went to bed, and late at nightI couldn’t sleep and just smoked in bed. My half-finished manuscript was on the desk. It wasOctober, home, and work again. The first cold winds rattled the windowpane, and I had made it justin time. Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there, waiting for me; spent afternoonstalking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug woven of all the clothes in my family for years,which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as complex and as rich as the passage oftime itself; and then he had left, two days before I arrived, crossing my path probably somewhere inPennsylvania or Ohio, to go to San Francisco. He had his own life there; Camille had just gotten anapartment. It had never occurred to me to look her up while I was in Mill City. Now it was too lateand I had also missed Dean.64PART TWO651It was over a year before I saw Dean again. I stayed home all that time, finished my book andbegan going to school on the GI Bill of Rights. At Christmas 1948 my aunt and I went down to visitmy brother in Virginia, laden with presents. I had been writing to Dean and he said he was comingEast again; and I told him if so he would find me in Testament, Virginia, between Christmas and NewYear’s. One day when all our Southern relatives were sitting around the parlor in Testament, gauntmen and women with the old Southern soil in their eyes, talking in low, whining voices about theweather, the crops, and the general weary recapitulation of who had a baby, who got a new house,and so on, a mud-spattered ‘49 Hudson drew up in front of the house on the dirt road. I had no ideawho it was. A weary young fellow, muscular and ragged in a T-shirt, unshaven, red-eyed, came tothe porch and rang the bell. I opened the door and suddenly realized it was Dean. He had come allthe way from San Francisco to my brother Rocco’s door in Virginia, and in an amazingly short time,because I had just written my last letter, telling where I was. In the car I could see two figuressleeping. .I’ll be goddamned! Dean! Who’s in the car?..Hello, hello, man, it’s Marylou. And Ed Dunkel. We gotta have place to wash up immediately,we’re dog-tired...But how did you get here so fast?..Ah, man, that Hudson goes!..Where did you get it?..I bought it with my savings. I’ve been working on the railroad, making four hundred dollars amonth..There was utter confusion in the following hour. My Southern relatives had no idea what wasgoing on, or who or what Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel were; they dumbly stared. My aunt andmy brother Rocky went in the kitchen to consult. There were, in all, eleven people in the littleSouthern house. Not only that, but my brother had just decided to move from that house, and half his