She had a neck as strong as a tree. Joe said in wonder, “So you’re Boxcar Betty.”
“Why, heard of me?”
“All over.”
Her laugh was hoarse, big-chested, full of delight. He thought as he left them and went on to the mission that there ought to be a song about a girl like that, a real dyed-in-the-skein rebel.
The door to room seventeen was open. Tom Barnabas with his suspenders dangling was shaving in front of the washstand mirror. “Be with you in a second,” he said over his shoulder, pulling the skin of his throat to stretch it. Joe sat down. In a moment Betty Spahn came in from across the hall and sprawled on the bed.
“Got your songs?”
Joe tossed her the envelope with the sheets of verses and drawings.
“How about the music? You write that too?”
“Not for any of these.”
“Not for any of these,” she said, raising her eyes to his face. “Do you write it for some of them?”
“I’ve got one, Workers of the World Awaken’ that I’m writing a new tune for,” Joe said. “I haven’t got it worked out yet.” With a finger he scattered the sheets till the one he wanted was showing:
Workers of the world, awaken!
Break your chains, demand your rights.
All the wealth you make is taken
By exploiting parasites.
As she read it he watched her, but Barnabas, clean and pink, tenderly mopping with a towel, leaned to read over her shoulder and obscured her face. He made no comment, but only said, “If I have to shave once more in cold water I won’t have any hide left.”
Betty Spain’s fingers picked up another sheet. “What’s the tune to this one?”
“Which one?”
“ ‘Mr. Block.’ ”
“ ‘It looks to Me like a Big Time Tonight.’ ”
She hummed it, reading through the lines, and now Barnabas threw the towel on the stand and chuckled, swinging his alert face toward Joe. “That’s a good one—good as Casey Jones.”
Joe was annoyed at how much the casual praise meant, and he half hated Barnabas for putting him in this position of a menial who could be thrown a bone of commendation. Yet Barnabas was his ally, his friend, his fellow worker. Joe looked away from him into the yellow-flecked eyes of Boxcar Betty. She flapped another sheet at him. “How about this one? ‘The White Slave’?”
“ ‘Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,’ ” Joe said. “I wrote that a while back, up in Seattle. It isn’t exactly a labor song.”
“It is at the end,” Barnabas said, and put his finger on the last verse:
Girls in this way fall every day
And have been falling for ages.
Who is to blame? You know his name,
It’s the boss that pays starvation wages.
“That’s a tear-jerker,” Betty said with her throaty laugh. Barnabas reached over her and gathered up the papers, leaning against the dresser with his suspenders down, his face expressionless as he read. Over at the window a blowfly buzzed and stopped and buzzed again, angrily trying to force a way through the curtains. The room was hot and airless. On the bed Boxcar Betty leaned back against her braced hands and catching Joe’s eye inexplicably winked. Joe stirred, wanting to be gone.
Even when he was done, Barnabas said nothing, but reached into the suitcase on the chair and brought out a small bottle from which he poured a little lotion into his hand. The sharp cool odor of bay rum spread in the humid air. With both hands Barnabas worked the bay rum into his cheeks and jaws, and through his hands he said, “Those are absolutely wonderful, you know. They’ve got the real stuff in them, the real feel.” His smile was so suddenly winning that it extorted a weak and unwilling smile from Joe in return. But as abruptly as he had turned on his charm Barnabas turned it off again, reached into the suitcase and started getting into a clean shirt.
“Any chance you could find a Chinaman to wash some shirts before we leave tonight?” he said to Betty. He had apparently forgotten Joe completely.
“I’ll see,” Betty said lazily. Barnabas was already tucking in the tails of the shirt, turning momentarily away from the girl. He pulled on a light alpaca coat and slapped the flat straw hat on his head. For a second Joe thought he was going to leave without saying anything more about the songs. But at the last minute Barnabas sat down on the bed beside Betty and looked across at Joe with a widening smile, his eyes alert and filled with the clearest, most disciplined intelligence.
“You want to make a book of songs,” he said. “How?”
Again Joe was put at a disadvantage by the unexpectedness of the question. He stumbled. “I don’t know. Just make it. Have them printed and sew them together. I could do some drawings. We could sell them for a dime.”
“Just locally, you mean.”
“I guess so, yes.”
Barnabas removed the hat and smoothed the leather band. In the heat the band had already left a slight mark around his forehead. “What if the union wanted to put out a book, distribute it all over the world, put in the ‘Internationale’ and some others besides yours. Would you be willing to give us your songs for a book like that?”
In their faces he saw their eagerness that he should do it, and he felt how his own vague plans had fitted into larger plans. “Why not?” he said.
The hat was back on Barnabas’ smooth head, tipped over one eye, and Barnabas rose with the big booming, something-settled satisfaction in his voice. “Good! Good. Can I take them along?”
“These are the only copies I’ve got.”
“Can you copy them for me?” He hesitated. “I’ll be so wound up with Herb and the strike committee …”
“Sure,” Joe said. His resentment of Barnabas’ magnetism was gone. Now he was an accepted partner, not a local boy being patronized. “How soon do you want them?”
Barnabas was already pulling paper and pencils from the suitcase. “I’ll have to see the stevedoring company with Herb, and later we’re talking with the committee over at the brotherhood office. Do you talk at the street meeting tonight?”
“I’m no good on the talk.”
The eyes were sharp and shrewd on him. “You ought to be organizing, with your knack for making songs.”
“I’d make a bad soapboxer,” Joe said. “Organizing, that’s all right, but I haven’t got the gift of gab like Herb and some of the others.”
“Well, we’ll talk about that later,” Barnabas said on his way to the door. “Maybe Betty can help you copy them off now.” He hung in the doorway, and Joe intercepted a curious quizzical look that passed between him and the girl. “You want to come along, or stay here, Betty?”
“It’s too hot to be running around,” she said. “I guess I’ll stick here, unless you need me.”
“No,” Barnabas said. His eyebrows lifted, the corner of his mouth went down slightly, and with a fleeting, odd, half-humorous glance he went down, his heels sharp on the brass binding of the stair-treads.
Boxcar Betty stood up from the bed, felt in her hair as if she were used to having a pencil stuck there, and said, “Well, shall we get busy?”
Silently Joe passed her half the sheets. The room was stuffier than ever, and though the door into the hall stood open it seemed almost unbearably intimate for the two of them to be writing here. Joe’s constraint had gone with Barnabas. Now every detail of the room, bed and pitcher and washstand and slop jar and the mirror in which he could see the top of Betty’s head, was suggestive. His nostrils quivered with the belief that he could smell her. It took an effort to bend his head and copy “Mr. Block.”
A movement of her arm made him lift his eyes alertly. She was lighting a cigarette. Across the exhaled smoke her eyes brushed his in the friendly, amused, comprehending look he had noticed several times before. But somehow her look was more intimate, less careful, than what she said.
“What got you started writing songs?”
“I don’t know. I always liked to fool around that way.”
“Hillstrom, that’s Swedish, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve hardly got any accent at all.”
Because he could think of nothing to say, he kept still, and she bent her head to the copying. He had just brought himself back to his careful round transcribing when she snorted with laughter and slapped the pencil on the suitcase she was using for a table.
“What is it?” he said.
“Nothing.”
Half rising, he saw that she was copying “The White Slave.” “Is it as funny as all that?” he said.
She came twisting around on the chair toward him, and he saw that in her face was an almost incredulous mirth. “I love it. Don’t you?”
Slow heat began to burn in his face. “I can’t tell about them,” he said and returned to his copying.
He knew she watched him for a while; he heard the sound her clothes made when she finally looked down. Once, when their eyes met during a break in the writing, she pulled her arm slowly up from the varnished surface of the suitcase, showing him how the heat had stuck her skin down, but he was troubled by her now, and he made no comment.
After another five minutes she stood up. “Well, that’s it.” At the window she stood pulling back the limp curtains. “My God it’s hot.”
Joe wrote on. In a moment she was beside him. “About done? Want me to do some of these?”
“There’s only this one left.”
Now he could definitely smell her, a faint, exciting effluvium of sweat and powder and starched shirtwaist.
“You write a nice hand,” she said, and in a tone of definite irony she added, “I used to read character from handwriting.”
His hand paused, embarrassed to go on making letters under her gaze. “I guess my character wouldn’t stand much reading.”
Then abruptly she seemed to lose interest. “I’m going in and take a sponge bath,” she said. “Stick around a few minutes and I’ll walk over to the hall with you.”
“All right.”
Her eyes met his, yellow-flecked, slightly narrowed in her smiling face. He felt as if he could breathe only off the top of his lungs, as if the lower parts were stuck together like sheets of flypaper face to face. He watched her through the door and into the open door opposite, and at precisely the right instant she turned her head and gave him the narrow-eyed smile again.
The thought of Tom Barnabas kept him sitting still, writing mechanically through the last chorus, but his ears were pricked for sounds from the other room, and he had shifted his chair slightly so that without turning he had the open doorways in the corner of his eye. For several minutes he neither saw nor heard anything. Then her head appeared around the jamb.
“Has Tom got any clean towels in there?”
Joe looked. There were two rumpled face towels and a clean bath towel on the stand. “There’s one, yes.”
Her head had disappeared again, and he waited, expecting her to come and get the towel. The sticky constriction in his lungs almost deprived him of air. Abruptly, in three steps, he crossed the hall, hesitating in the doorway. Betty was standing with her back to him, near the washstand. The light-crazed green blind was drawn to the sill. She had taken off her blouse, and he saw her bare shoulders, the strong taper of her back. Her head was bent, her hands fussing with something at her waist. In the greenish humid twilight her skin looked waxen.
Finally she turned her head. Something leaped the arc of space between them, and he was against her, his arm circling her from behind. Her uncorseted ribs rose sharply as she drew in her breath; her face was provocatively twisted, her eyes close to his. Her breast was sticky in his hand.
“Nice,” he said thickly, almost voiceless, and bent his lips to hers. As he fumbled with her clothes she turned toward him fully, but he was mindless by then. There was only one impatient lucid moment when he waited by the bed and she came toward him from the door where she had turned the key. He saw her then clearly, deep-chested and chunky, strong-armed, flat-bellied, a woman on a man’s frame, but as female as a mare in heat.
Later, lying quietly, he felt her bodily heat beside him and moved a little to escape the stickiness of her skin. “The strategy meeting will be starting pretty quick,” he said.
She laughed low and throatily at his shoulder, and nipped his arm. “We’ve already started the meeting with a song,” she said. She nipped him again. “That’s my favorite song.”
Joe made an inarticulate sound, wanting to be up and gone. Against his back her breath was scalding hot. Her hand came across him, felt up his ribs, across his collarbone, under his jaw, over his chin and mouth, delicately tracing the outline of his lips, and down across his jaw again.
“You’ve got a hard mouth,” she said. “Is it the scars?”
At first he had let her hands go over him, not knowing how to brush them away, but as they went on, crawling like insects over his closed eyes and his brows, he rolled his head to be free of them. She stood up without warning, yanking the sheet off him. In alarm he grabbed for it, but her own nakedness was so careless that he was ashamed to be more delicate of his own. Trapped, worrying about what might happen if Tom Barnabas came back, all at the same time furious with himself and fascinated by Betty Spahn’s animal unconcern as she padded around the room, he lay and watched her while she bathed. With the wet towel she mopped face and neck and throat, and when she moved the towel over and around her breasts, pushing them into provocative unconscious distortions, he felt again the sticky closing of his lungs. He watched her, queerly moved by the revelation of the secret places under her breasts and the rough way she flopped herself around with the towel.
As if a blind had slipped and gone roaring to the top of the window, he was back in a scene from his boyhood, from the time when he was perhaps twelve or thirteen, when he had come home from school one afternoon and caught his mother bathing in the bedroom. He had seen her from the kitchen, through two open doors, not directly but reflected in the dresser mirror that tipped at just the right angle. She was completely out of sight, yet completely visible, and it had not occurred to him that mirror reflections went two ways, and that he was as visible to her as she to him. Stopped on the instant of calling for her, he had stood and watched, and had seen her all over. There was a moment when her face turned toward the mirror and she stood still, bending, but after a moment she straightened again and went on with her bath almost stiffly, almost ritually. She let the crooked eye of the mirror stare at her until she was done, and afterward he tiptoed off and in ten minutes came loudly back into the house, whistling and banging his books. When he reflected on it later he knew she had seen him and stood up to his peeping with a kind of proud modesty that made him crawl with shame whenever he remembered. Now Betty Spahn stood and stooped and mopped with the towel, giving him her whole body to study coolly, and it fascinated and half sickened him to see how the weight of her breast drooped over the secret fold precisely as his mother’s breast had drooped, and how the nipple looked out like a stupid cocked eye.
Swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, he found his scattered clothes, but before he could put any of them on she came over to him and somehow willed him to his feet. Cool now from the sponging, her body moved against his, and he stood dull as a stump, embarrassed and helpless, while she stood against him searching his face. He could see no gold flecks in her eyes now; they seemed pure amber. She was not laughing, or even smiling, and what she was doing to him could not have come from unsatisfied desire.’ Quite seriously she said, “You’re a funny one. It isn’t women you want at all, is it?”
“Why should I when I’ve just had one?” Cupping his hands like the pans of a scale, he balanced her breasts, one against the other, but she paid no attention to what he was doing, and she was not fooled.
“And you never give a straight answer,” she said. “You’re as cautious as a rabbit in a foxfarm. But I’m right, it isn’t women you want, is it? They don’t mean anything to you. You want something e
lse.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and pulled away as if irritated. “I thought I knew a hungry look when I saw one, and what a guy like you is generally hungry for, but the kind of hungry look you’ve got beats me.” She turned and started dressing, and in the silence he disliked her sullenly.
But when she finished buttoning her blouse she kissed him and held his face between her hands. “Forget it,” she said. “We had a nice time and nobody’s hurt.”
“How about Tom?” He knew what about Tom, but he wanted her to say it.
“Tom and I understand each other,” she said. Unlocking the door, she poked out her head and pulled it in again, laughing. Across in Barnabas’ room he gathered up the song sheets. “Leave the copies here,” Betty said. “We’re pulling out right after the meeting tonight.”
“North?”
“Frisco, Portland, Seattle. We’re trying to work where we’ve already got some strength. Tom thinks it’s smart to concentrate your power. He’ll be after you and everybody else to get up there and organize.”
“That’s all right with me. I’ve got no love for the lumber trust.”
Before they went downstairs she touched his face again, gently, and her smile squeezed her eyes almost shut. “Sweet,” she said, and then knocked her head raucously with her fist. “Why do I have to go on all my life playing second fiddle to the union?”
At the street door he paused. “I’ll see you later.”
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 8