Chapter Fifteen
Along 66 the hamburger stands—Al & Susy’s Place—Carl’s Lunch—Joe & Minnie —Will’s Eats. Board-and-bat shacks. Two gasoline pumps in front, a screen door, a long bar, stools, and a foot rail. Near the door three slot machines, showing through glass the wealth in nickels three bars will bring. And beside them, the nickel phonograph with records piled up like pies, ready to swing out to the turntable and play dance music, “Ti- pi-ti-pi-tin,” “Thanks for the Memory,” Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman. At one end of the counter a covered case; candy cough drops, caffeine sulphate called Sleepless, No-Doze; candy, cigarettes, razor blades, aspirin, Bromo-Seltzer, Alka-Seltzer. The walls decorated with posters, bathing girls, blondes with big breasts and slender hips and waxen faces, in white bathing suits, and holding a bottle of Coca-Cola and smiling—see what you get with a Coca-Cola. Long bar, and salts, peppers, mustard pots, and paper napkins. Beer taps behind the counter, and in back the coffee urns, shiny and steaming, with glass gauges showing the coffee level. And pies in wire cages and oranges in pyramids of four.
And little piles of Post Toasties, corn flakes, stacked up in designs.
The signs on cards, picked out with shining mica: Pies Like Mother Used to Make.
Credit Makes Enemies, Let’s Be Friends. Ladies May Smoke But Be Careful Where You Lay Your Butts. Eat Here and Keep Your Wife for a Pet. IITYWYBAD?
Down at one end the cooking plates, pots of stew, potatoes, pot roast, roast beef, gray roast pork waiting to be sliced.
Minnie or Susy or Mae, middle-aging behind the counter, hair curled and rouge and powder on a sweating face. Taking orders in a soft low voice, calling them to the cook with a screech like a peacock. Mopping the counter with circular strokes, polishing the big shining coffee urns. The cook is Joe or Carl or Al, hot in a white coat and apron, beady sweat on white forehead, below the white cook’s cap; moody, rarely speaking, looking up for a moment at each new entry. Wiping the griddle, slapping down the hamburger. He repeats Mae’s orders gently, scrapes the griddle, wipes it down with burlap. Moody and silent.
Mae is the contact, smiling, irritated, near to outbreak; smiling while her eyes look on past—unless for truck drivers. There’s the backbone of the joint. Where the trucks stop, that’s where the customers come. Can’t fool truck drivers, they know. They bring the custom. They know. Give ’em a stale cup a coffee an’ they’re off the joint. Treat ’em right an’ they come back. Mae really smiles with all her might at truck drivers. She bridles a little, fixes her back hair so that her breasts will lift with her raised arms, passes the time of day and indicates great things, great times, great jokes. Al never speaks. He is no contact. Sometimes he smiles a little at a joke, but he never laughs. Sometimes he looks up at the vivaciousness in Mae’s voice, and then he scrapes the griddle with a spatula, scrapes the grease into an iron trough around the plate. He presses down a
hissing hamburger with his spatula. He lays the split buns on the plate to toast and heat.
He gathers up stray onions from the plate and heaps them on the meat and presses them in with the spatula. He puts half the bun on top of the meat, paints the other half with melted butter, with thin pickle relish. Holding the bun on the meat, he slips the spatula under the thin pad of meat, flips it over, lays the buttered half on top, and drops the hamburger on a small plate. Quarter of a dill pickle, two black olives beside the sandwich. Al skims the plate down the counter like a quoit. And he scrapes his griddle with the spatula and looks moodily at the stew kettle.
Cars whisking by on 66. License plates. Mass., Tenn., R.I., N.Y., Vt., Ohio. Going west. Fine cars, cruising at sixty-five.
There goes one of them Cords. Looks like a coffin on wheels.
But, Jesus, how they travel!
See that La Salle? Me for that. I ain’t a hog. I go for a La Salle.
’F ya goin’ big, what’s a matter with a Cad’? Jus’ a little bigger, little faster.
I’d take a Zephyr myself. You ain’t ridin’ no fortune, but you got class an’ speed.
Give me a Zephyr.
Well, sir, you may get a laugh outa this—I’ll take a Buick-Puick. That’s good enough.
But, hell, that costs in the Zephyr class an’ it ain’t got the sap.
I don’ care. I don’ want nothin’ to do with nothing of Henry Ford’s. I don’ like ’im.
Never did. Got a brother worked in the plant. Oughta hear him tell.
Well, a Zephyr got sap.
The big cars on the highway. Languid, heat-raddled ladies, small nucleuses about whom revolve a thousand accouterments: creams, ointments to grease themselves, coloring matter in phials—black, pink, red, white, green, silver—to change the color of hair, eyes, lips, nails, brows, lashes, lids. Oils, seeds, and pills to make the bowels move.
A bag of bottles, syringes, pills, powders, fluids, jellies to make their sexual intercourse safe, odorless, and unproductive. And this apart from clothes. What a hell of a nuisance!
Lines of weariness around the eyes, lines of discontent down from the mouth, breasts lying heavily in little hammocks, stomach and thighs straining against cases of rubber.
And the mouths panting, the eyes sullen, disliking sun and wind and earth, resenting food and weariness, hating time that rarely makes them beautiful and always makes them old.
Beside them, little pot-bellied men in light suits and panama hats; clean, pink men with puzzled, worried eyes, with restless eyes. Worried because formulas do not work out; hungry for security and yet sensing its disappearance from the earth. In their lapels the insignia of lodges and service clubs, places where they can go and, by a weight of numbers of little worried men, reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is; that business men are intelligent in spite of the records of their stupidity; that they are kind and charitable in spite of the principles of sound business; that their lives are rich instead of the thin tiresome routines they know; and that a time is coming when they will not be afraid any more.
And these two, going to California; going to sit in the lobby of the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel and watch people they envy go by, to look at mountains—mountains, mind you, and great trees—he with his worried eyes and she thinking how the sun will dry her skin.
Going to look at the Pacific Ocean, and I’ll bet a hundred thousand dollars to nothing at all, he will say, “It isn’t as big as I thought it would be.” And she will envy plump young bodies on the beach. Going to California really to go home again. To say, “So-and-So was at the table next to us at the Trocadero. She’s really a mess, but she does wear nice clothes.” And he, “I talked to good sound business men out there. They don’t see a chance till we get rid of that fellow in the White House.” And, “I got it from a man in the know—she has syphilis, you know. She was in that Warner picture. Man said she’d slept her way into pictures. Well, she got what she was looking for.” But the worried eyes are never calm, and the pouting mouth is never glad. The big car cruising along at sixty.
I want a cold drink.
Well, there’s something up ahead. Want to stop?
Do you think it would be clean?
Clean as you’re going to find in this God-forsaken country.
Well, maybe the bottled soda will be all right.
The great car squeals and pulls to a stop. The fat worried man helps his wife out.
Mae looks at and past them as they enter. Al looks up from his griddle, and down again. Mae knows. They’ll drink a five-cent soda and crab that it ain’t cold enough. The woman will use six paper napkins and drop them on the floor. The man will choke and try to put the blame on Mae. The woman will sniff as though she smelled rotting meat and they will go out again and tell forever afterward that the people in the West are sullen. And Mae, when she is alone with Al, has a name for them. She calls them
shitheels.
Truck drivers. That’s the stuff.
Here’s a big transport comin’. Hope they stop; take away the taste of them shitheels.
When I worked in that hotel in Albuquerque, Al, the way they steal—ever’ darn thing.
An’ the bigger the car they got, the more they steal—towels, silver, soap dishes. I can’t figger it.
And Al, morosely, Where ya think they get them big cars and stuff? Born with ’em?
You won’t never have nothin’.
The transport truck, a driver and relief. How ’bout stoppin’ for a cup a Java? I know
this dump.
How’s the schedule?
Oh, we’re ahead!
Pull up, then. They’s a ol’ war horse in here that’s a kick. Good Java, too.
The truck pulls up. Two men in khaki riding trousers, boots, short jackets, and shiny- visored military caps. Screen door—slam.
H’ya, Mae?
Well, if it ain’t Big Bill the Rat! When’d you get back on this run?
Week ago.
The other man puts a nickel in the phonograph, watches the disk slip free and the turntable rise up under it. Bing Crosby’s voice—golden. “Thanks for the memory, of sunburn at the shore— You might have been a headache, but you never were a bore—”
And the truck driver sings for Mae’s ears, you might have been a haddock but you never was a whore—
Mae laughs. Who’s ya frien’, Bill? New on this run, ain’t he?
The other puts a nickel in the slot machine, wins four slugs, and puts them back.
Walks to the counter.
Well, what’s it gonna be?
Oh, cup a Java. Kinda pie ya got?
Banana cream, pineapple cream, chocolate cream—an’ apple.
Make it apple. Wait— Kind is that big thick one?
Mae lifts it out and sniffs it. Banana cream.
Cut off a hunk; make it a big hunk.
Man at the slot machine says, Two all around.
Two it is. Seen any new etchin’s lately, Bill?
Well, here’s one.
Now, you be careful front of a lady.
Oh, this ain’t bad. Little kid comes in late ta school. Teacher says, “Why ya late?”
Kid says, “Had a take a heifer down—get ’er bred.” Teacher says, “Couldn’t your ol’ man do it?” Kid says, “Sure he could, but not as good as the bull.”
Mae squeaks with laughter, harsh screeching laughter. Al, slicing onions carefully on a board, looks up and smiles, and then looks down again. Truck drivers, that’s the stuff.
Gonna leave a quarter each for Mae. Fifteen cents for pie an’ coffee an’ a dime for Mae.
An’ they ain’t tryin’ to make her, neither.
Sitting together on the stools, spoons sticking up out of the coffee mugs. Passing the time of day. And Al, rubbing down his griddle, listening but making no comment. Bing Crosby’s voice stops. The turntable drops down and the record swings into its place in the pile. The purple light goes off. The nickel, which has caused all this mechanism to work, has caused Crosby to sing and an orchestra to play—this nickel drops from between the contact points into the box where the profits go. This nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction.
Steam spurts from the valve of the coffee urn. The compressor of the ice machine chugs softly for a time and then stops. The electric fan in the corner waves its head slowly back and forth, sweeping the room with a warm breeze. On the highway, on 66, the cars whiz by.
They was a Massachusetts car stopped a while ago, said Mae.
Big Bill grasped his cup around the top so that the spoon stuck up between his first and second fingers. He drew in a snort of air with the coffee, to cool it. “You ought to be out on 66. Cars from all over the country. All headin’ west. Never seen so many before.
Sure some honeys on the road.”
“We seen a wreck this mornin’,” his companion said. “Big car. Big Cad’, a special job and a honey, low, cream-color, special job. Hit a truck. Folded the radiator right back into the driver. Must a been doin’ ninety. Steerin’ wheel went right on through the guy an’ lef’ him a-wigglin’ like a frog on a hook. Peach of a car. A honey. You can have her for peanuts now. Drivin’ alone, the guy was.”
Al looked up from his work. “Hurt the truck?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ! Wasn’t a truck. One of them cut-down cars full a stoves an’ pans an’ mattresses an’ kids an’ chickens. Goin’ west, you know. This guy come by us doin’ ninety—r’ared up on two wheels just to pass us, an’ a car’s comin’ so he cuts in an’ whangs this here truck. Drove like he’s blin’ drunk. Jesus, the air was full a bed clothes an’ chickens an’ kids. Killed one kid. Never seen such a mess. We pulled up. Ol’ man that’s drivin’ the truck, he jus’ stan’s there lookin’ at that dead kid. Can’t get a word out of ’im. Jus’ rum-dumb. God Almighty, the road is full a them families goin’ west. Never seen so many. Gets worse all a time. Wonder where the hell they all come from?”
“Wonder where they all go to,” said Mae. “Come here for gas sometimes, but they don’t hardly never buy nothin’ else. People says they steal. We ain’t got nothin’ layin’ around. They never stole nothin’ from us.”
Big Bill, munching his pie, looked up the road through the screened window. “Better tie your stuff down. I think you got some of ’em comin’ now.”
A 1926 Nash sedan pulled wearily off the highway. The back seat was piled nearly to the ceiling with sacks, with pots and pans, and on the very top, right up against the ceiling, two boys rode. On the top of the car, a mattress and a folded tent; tent poles tied along the running board. The car pulled up to the gas pumps. A dark-haired, hatchet- faced man got slowly out. And the two boys slid down from the load and hit the ground.
Mae walked around the counter and stood in the door. The man was dressed in gray wool trousers and a blue shirt, dark blue with sweat on the back and under the arms. The boys in overalls and nothing else, ragged patched overalls. Their hair was light, and it stood up evenly all over their heads, for it had been roached. Their faces were streaked with dust. They went directly to the mud puddle under the hose and dug their toes into the mud.
The man asked, “Can we git some water, ma’am?”
A look of annoyance crossed Mae’s face. “Sure, go ahead.” She said softly over her shoulder, “I’ll keep my eye on the hose.” She watched while the man slowly unscrewed the radiator cap and ran the hose in.
A woman in the car, a flaxen-haired woman, said, “See if you can’t git it here.”
The man turned off the hose and screwed on the cap again. The little boys took the hose from him and they upended it and drank thirstily. The man took off his dark, stained
hat and stood with a curious humility in front of the screen. “Could you see your way to sell us a loaf of bread, ma’am?”
Mae said, “This ain’t a grocery store. We got bread to make san’widges.”
“I know, ma’am.” His humility was insistent. “We need bread and there ain’t nothin’ for quite a piece, they say.”
“ ’F we sell bread we gonna run out.” Mae’s tone was faltering.
“We’re hungry,” the man said.
“Whyn’t you buy a san’widge? We got nice san’widges, hamburgs.”
“We’d sure admire to do that, ma’am. But we can’t. We got to make a dime do all of us.” And he said embarrassedly, “We ain’t got but a little.”
Mae said, “You can’t get no loaf a bread for a dime. We only got fifteen-cent loafs.”
From behind her Al growled, “God Almighty, Mae, give ’em bread.”
“We’ll run out ’fore the bread truck comes.”
“Run out, then, goddamn it,” said Al. And he looked sullenly down at the potato salad he was mixing.
Mae shrugged her plump shoulders and looked to the truck drivers to show them what she was up against.
She held the screen door open and the man came in, bringing a smell of sweat with him. The boys edged in behind him and they went immediately to the candy case and stared in—not with craving or with hope or even with desire, but just with a kind of wonder that such things could be. They were alike in size and their faces were alike. One scratched his dusty ankle with the toe nails of his other foot. The other whispered some soft message and then they straightened their arms so that their clenched fists in the overall pockets showed through the thin blue cloth.
Mae opened a drawer and took out a long waxpaper-wrapped loaf. “This here is a fifteen-cent loaf.”
The man put his hat back on his head. He answered with inflexible humility, “Won’t you—can’t you see your way to cut off ten cents’ worth?”
Al said snarlingly, “Goddamn it, Mae. Give ’em the loaf.”
The man turned toward Al. “No, we want ta buy ten cents’ worth of it. We got it figgered awful close, mister, to get to California.”
Mae said resignedly, “You can have this for ten cents.”
“That’d be robbin’ you, ma’am.”
“Go ahead—Al says to take it.” She pushed the waxpapered loaf across the counter.
The man took a deep leather pouch from his rear pocket, untied the strings, and spread it open. It was heavy with silver and with greasy bills.
“May soun’ funny to be so tight,” he apologized. “We got a thousan’ miles to go, an’ we don’ know if we’ll make it.” He dug in the pouch with a forefinger, located a dime,
and pinched in for it. When he put it down on the counter he had a penny with it. He was about to drop the penny back into the pouch when his eye fell on the boys frozen before the candy counter. He moved slowly down to them. He pointed in the case at big long sticks of striped peppermint. “Is them penny candy, ma’am?”
Mae moved down and looked in. “Which ones?”
“There, them stripy ones.”
The little boys raised their eyes to her face and they stopped breathing; their mouths were partly opened, their half-naked bodies were rigid.
“Oh—them. Well, no—them’s two for a penny.”
“Well, gimme two then, ma’am.” He placed the copper cent carefully on the counter.
The boys expelled their held breath softly. Mae held the big sticks out.
“Take ’em,” said the man.
They reached timidly, each took a stick, and they held them down at their sides and did not look at them. But they looked at each other, and their mouth corners smiled rigidly with embarrassment.
“Thank you, ma’am.” The man picked up the bread and went out the door, and the little boys marched stiffly behind him, the red-striped sticks held tightly against their legs. They leaped like chipmunks over the front seat and onto the top of the load, and they burrowed back out of sight like chipmunks.
The man got in and started his car, and with a roaring motor and a cloud of blue oily smoke the ancient Nash climbed up on the highway and went on its way to the west.
From inside the restaurant the truck drivers and Mae and Al stared after them.
Big Bill wheeled back. “Them wasn’t two-for-a-cent candy,” he said.
“What’s that to you?” Mae said fiercely.
“Them was nickel apiece candy,” said Bill.
“We got to get goin’,” said the other man. “We’re droppin’ time.” They reached in their pockets. Bill put a coin on the counter and the other man looked at it and reached again and put down a coin. They swung around and walked to the door.
“So long,” said Bill.
Mae called, “Hey! Wait a minute. You got change.”
“You go to hell,” said Bill, and the screen door slammed.
Mae watched them get into the great truck, watched it lumber off in low gear, and heard the shift up the whining gears to cruising ratio. “Al—” she said softly.
He looked up from the hamburger he was patting thin and stacking between waxed papers. “What ya want?”
“Look there.” She pointed at the coins beside the cups—two half-dollars. Al walked near and looked, and then he went back to his work.
“Truck drivers,” Mae said reverently, “an’ after them shitheels.”
Flies struck the screen with little bumps and droned away. The compressor chugged for a time and then stopped. On 66 the traffic whizzed by, trucks and fine streamlined cars and jalopies; and they went by with a vicious whiz. Mae took down the plates and scraped the pie crusts into a bucket. She found her damp cloth and wiped the counter with circular sweeps. And her eyes were on the highway, where life whizzed by.
Al wiped his hands on his apron. He looked at a paper pinned to the wall over the griddle. Three lines of marks in columns on the paper. Al counted the longest line. He walked along the counter to the cash register, rang “No Sale,” and took out a handful of
nickels.
“What ya doin’?” Mae asked.
“Number three’s ready to pay off,” said Al. He went to the third slot machine and played his nickels in, and on the fifth spin of the wheels the three bars came up and the jack pot dumped out into the cup. Al gathered up the big handful of coins and went back of the counter. He dropped them in the drawer and slammed the cash register. Then he went back to his place and crossed out the line of dots. “Number three gets more play’n the others,” he said. “Maybe I ought to shift ’em around.” He lifted a lid and stirred the slowly simmering stew.
“I wonder what they’ll do in California?” said Mae.
“Who?”
“Them folks that was just in.”
“Christ knows,” said Al.
“S’pose they’ll get work?”
“How the hell would I know?” said Al.
She stared eastward along the highway. “Here comes a transport, double. Wonder if they stop? Hope they do.” And as the huge truck came heavily down from the highway and parked, Mae seized her cloth and wiped the whole length of the counter. And she took a few swipes at the gleaming coffee urn too, and turned up the bottle-gas under the urn. Al brought out a handful of little turnips and started to peel them. Mae’s face was gay when the door opened and the two uniformed truck drivers entered.
“Hi, sister!”
“I won’t be a sister to no man,” said Mae. They laughed and Mae laughed. “What’ll it be, boys?”
“Oh, a cup a Java. What kinda pie ya got?”
“Pineapple cream an’ banana cream an’ chocolate cream an’ apple.”
“Give me apple. No, wait—what’s that big thick one?”
Mae picked up the pie and smelled it. “Pineapple cream,” she said.
“Well, chop out a hunk a that.”
The cars whizzed viciously by on 66.
