The Americans

by John Jakes

  “You take a job, you’ll have to dance to somebody else’s hornpipe,” Tillman said. “That isn’t your style, is it?”

  “I’ll make it my style.” Carter quickly controlled the sarcasm, adding, “I’m certainly sorry to hear about Eben. At least he has that woman to care for him. She’s beautiful, and she loves him—that counts for something.”

  Tillman gave him another strange stare.

  “Not as much as you might think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” Tillman heaved his huge body out of the chair and lumbered toward the door. Carter asked another question but the man wouldn’t elaborate on his remark. The door opened. Tillman looked like a great black balloon against the brassy light of the sky.

  “Bear in mind what I told you,” he called. “They do say Ortega isn’t gone for good. And those who were around after the fracas that night said he spoke your name nigh as often as he spoke Eben’s. Have a care where you walk.”

  The door closed, leaving Carter in the amber-tinged shadows, the palms of his hands suddenly much too cold for the spring day.

  iv

  He was soon on his way back to Beacon Street. He glanced over his shoulder every block or so, and walked wide of the mouths of unfamiliar alleys en route. Tomorrow was time enough to look into the job at the processing plant; tonight he was glad to be going home.

  He knew Gideon and Julia would be gone by six o’clock—some civic banquet or other. He spent his last few cents for a large tin pail of beer, entered the house by the rear entrance and took the back stairs up to Will’s room.

  His relationship with his stepbrother was the one bright spot left in his life. The younger boy continued to take Carter just as he was, faults and all. He never mentioned the recent troubles which were common knowledge even among the servants.

  “Greetings, little brother,” Carter said as he entered Will’s room. “Look what I brought.” He displayed the pail.

  Grinning, Will jumped up from his desk. “Beer?”

  “Right you are. Lock the door. Some of the servants are too blasted nosy to suit me.”

  Carter had given Will his first taste of beer only a couple of months earlier. The younger boy didn’t care for the stuff, but he was anxious to make Carter think he was grown up and worldly. And he was more than happy to put his geometry text aside. He liked his courses at the Boston Latin School about as much as he liked beer. Still, good marks were necessary for admission to Harvard. Carter continually encouraged him to go there, even after his own dismissal. So Will studied hard. Without being fully aware of it, he was already trying to disprove what the voice from the past said about him.

  He bolted the door. Carter propped a couple of cushions against the black haircloth sofa and sat down with his back against them. He swigged from the pail, then handed it to the younger boy.

  “Where have you been all day?” Will asked. “Still hunting for a job?”

  Carter nodded. Then, sounding almost irritable, he said, “Go on. Drink up or let me have it back.”

  Will frowned. He lifted the pail to his lips. Carter watched his stepbrother drink, wince, and stifle a cough. But he didn’t laugh. He wouldn’t have embarrassed Will for the world.

  “That’s good,” Will declared without conviction. Carter reclaimed the pail and gulped as the younger boy went on. “I’m sorry you’re having a hard time finding work. I’m sorry you decided to quit the publishing house.”

  “It was either that or be fired.” He’d told Will that the decision had been his. Gideon had never said anything to the contrary in Will’s presence. “I hate to say anything against your father, but he acts pretty high and mighty around that place. I got tired of him ordering me around.”

  “Don’t apologize. I’m starting to feel the same way myself.”

  “Well, don’t let me influence you.”

  Carter took another long drink. Will observed the older boy’s every move, admiration in his eyes. “Gideon and Mother still have confidence in you,” Carter went on. “They’ve given up on me. Mother thinks I’m too much like my real father to amount to anything.”

  Will looked shocked. “She doesn’t say that, does she?”

  Carter’s answer was a truthful one. “No, never in so many words.”

  “Then why do you feel it?”

  Carter’s dark eyes seemed to search past the younger boy into some lost time or place. “I don’t really know. But I’m positive she and Gideon believe I’m a good-for-nothing—exactly like the late Mr. Louis Kent.”

  “Maybe you feel that way because too many people have told you how bad your father was.”

  A shrug. “Like father, like son. There must be something to an old saying like that. Else why is it a saying in the first place?” He gulped from the pail again.

  Carter’s dour mood upset the younger boy. Will sat down beside his stepbrother and changed the subject. “What are you going to do now that you don’t have to go to Harvard?”

  “I hear there’s a fish-processing plant looking for men. I’m going to inquire there tomorrow. What a comedown for a member of the Kent family—smelling like hake or market cod twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I didn’t mean what are you going to do about working,” Will said. “I mean what are you going to do for the rest of your life?”

  “It’s easy to answer that.” He smiled in a humorless way. “I’m damned if I know.”

  Then he thought of Willie Hearst. The smile grew cynical. “I’ll probably wind up a politician, or go to hell by some other, equally direct route. I’ve finally realized I’m stuck with talking my way through life because I don’t know how to do anything else.” He held out the pail. “Want any more?”

  Will shook his head, his expression unhappy. Carter noticed. Instantly, a smile spread over his swarthy face. “But don’t fret about me, little brother. If I’m headed for hell, I promise you I’ll have a fine time getting there.”

  Will refused to smile. He continued to stare at his stepbrother for a long moment. Then he said very softly, “Well, you’d better not leave Boston.”

  “What’s that? Why not?”

  “Because”—avoiding Carter’s eyes, he forced out the rest—“because I couldn’t get along without you. You’re the only one I can ask for advice about important things.”

  “Such as cigars and girls, eh?” Carter said. He was secretly touched by the younger boy’s words.

  “I’m serious. Having you here is like having a real brother.”

  “But you could get along without me. It’s nice to hear you say otherwise, though. One thing’s for sure—” He squeezed his stepbrother’s arm affectionately. “You don’t want to follow my example. You need to attend to your studies and behave yourself. If you do, you’ll get somewhere.”

  Carter scrambled to his feet. There was pain showing in his eyes. Will saw it, but he didn’t know what to do.

  “Back to your lessons, little brother,” Carter admonished as he left. “Mother and Gideon deserve at least one son who turns out right.”

  CHAPTER IX

  THE GREEK WOMAN

  i

  CARTER LIED TO THE man doing the hiring at the Northeast Fishery Company. He said he was experienced, and because he could say it with a show of conviction, he got the job. He was scheduled to start work the following evening, on the twelve-hour shift which began at six, after the fishing boats returned.

  So that he wouldn’t be fired the very first day, he began a search through the taverns in the neighborhood as soon as he left the hiring office. Around ten that night he located a whiskey-sodden derelict who was pointed out as a former processing plant worker discharged for constant malingering. Carter approached the old man and gave him some money he’d borrowed from Will. The man called for a knife and a rancid gray scrod from the kitchen. He showed Carter how to chop off the head and tail and clean and bone the fish—all that he needed to know to keep his inexperience from being detected.


  The effort—and the money—turned out to be wasted. Carter was assigned to the bottom of the chute down which the catches were dumped. The head of the chute opened onto a dock at street level. The bottom was one flight below at ground level—where the principal work area of the packing house was located. Carter was one of half a dozen men who hacked off the heads and tails of the incoming fish, then threw the fish onto a large, slimy table where four other workers sorted them onto moving belts powered by steam. By midnight of his first shift, Carter was ankle-deep in stinking fish parts.

  He hated the sight of the eyes in the lifeless heads; the dead fish seemed to be watching him in an accusing way, as if he were the one who had deprived them of life. He hated the smell even more. It was so pervasive, he couldn’t eat the supper he’d brought wrapped in a piece of butcher paper. By the time he went home, spent and nauseous, right after sunrise, he was almost deliriously anxious for his first whiff of fresh air. A long hot bath somehow failed to cleanse the fish odor from his hands or hair, though. Even Will made a face when Carter saw him later that day.

  He didn’t think he could stand to go back to the Northeast Fishery Company, but somehow he did. He didn’t encourage the other workers when they attempted to strike up a conversation. They were an illiterate, foulmouthed lot. But they did impart one useful piece of information. They told him he’d stay cleaner if he wore gloves, a black rubber apron, and high rubber boots, as they did. He’d have to buy them for himself, though. That was company policy.

  On that subject, he had his first dispute with the foreman.

  To those around him, he began arguing that boots, apron, and gloves should be provided for every worker. A man shouldn’t have to pay out part of his already low salary in order to have the proper work outfit. The men needed to stand up together and make their demand known to the owners.

  He had little trouble persuading the other men to accept that viewpoint—or so he thought. Then, on the first night of his second week, the foreman, a long-jawed lout named Kimpton, marched into the work area and sarcastically called him down in front of the others, “Hear you been tellin’ everybody they should make some demands of the company.”

  “How’d you find out about that?” Carter exclaimed, gesturing with his serrated knife without thinking. The foreman grabbed his wrist and shoved it aside.

  “Don’t wave that damn thing at me, college boy.” Kimpton growled the words. “And listen close. You’re here to work, not think. You obey the company rules as written, or go back to Harvard.” He gave Carter’s wrist a second shove, pivoted, and left. Carter looked around and saw a couple of his fellow workers snickering as they bent their heads over the fish coming down the chute in a glistening silver avalanche.

  Someone had talked behind his back, that much was certain. It gave him an eerie feeling to know there were company spies within the workforce—and that information evidently flowed both ways. He’d told no one, not even the hiring manager, that he was a former Harvard student. But Kimpton knew, and now the others did too. What else did they know?

  The foreman’s harsh words made him want to quit on the spot. But he kept working—chop the head, chop the tail, throw the fish—because of the large debt he still owed for the wagon. He despised being treated like a slave, and forced to put up with it, but reluctantly decided he’d have to until he could work his way out of his present difficulties. If the company didn’t pay for the boots, apron, and gloves, then he’d have to ask his stepfather for a loan. Stifling his frustrated fury, he plied the knife with savage singlemindedness. Chop the head, chop the tail, throw the fish—

  At the end of the second week, he discovered that someone knew much more about him than he liked. Each worker at the plant had an old, wooden locker in a dingy room near the employees’ entrance. None of the lockers could be secured against entry by unauthorized persons; you stored your things and took your chances. When he got off work early on a Saturday morning he opened his locker and blinked. A folded scrap of paper lay on the locker shelf.

  He unfolded the paper, read it, and hastily folded it again. He leaned against the adjacent locker, sick with fright.

  He looked to the right and left. Men were stripping off aprons, tugging off boots, chattering sleepily about going home to their beds or their women or a morning meal. Who had put the note in his locker? A friend of Ortega’s certainly—but who was it?

  On the way to Beacon Street, he stopped and studied the scrap of paper again. The message was scrawled in pencil; the handwriting was terrible—perhaps on purpose, to disguise it.

  Onega wil be glad to know wher to find you

  Any anonymity he’d possessed when he started work at the processing plant was gone. Someone—perhaps more than one person—knew who he was.

  Should he quit? Try to find another job in a different part of town? It was the sensible thing to do, perhaps, and yet he equated such a move with cowardice. He didn’t want to flee the docks unless it became absolutely necessary.

  Which it very well might, he realized as he limped wearily on toward home, and sleep, while the city woke around him.

  ii

  At the end of a month—four weeks of hard work and constant watchfulness—Carter concluded that the note might have been nothing more than a malicious joke perpetrated by one of the clods at the packing plant: someone who knew of his trouble with Ortega, but had no personal stake in it; someone who just wanted to make him squirm because he’d gone to college.

  Reassured, he started venturing into the taverns again. He even returned to the Red Cod. No one had seen Ortega or heard a word about him. Carter began to think Tillman had been wrong, and that the Portugee had left Boston for good.

  Soon he no longer hesitated to go anywhere after dark. And although he was repaying the bakery owner, and working twelve hours a night, six nights a week, he had enough time and money left over so that he could occasionally enjoy a beer and the favors of a whore such as Josie.

  On one of his free nights, he was ambling toward the Cod when he spied a familiar figure half a block ahead. Even at a distance, Carter could see the cruel malformation of Captain Eben Royce’s hands. The fisherman hobbled along on a heavily padded crutch braced beneath his left arm.

  Carter stopped near a chandler’s side door to watch Royce. He made good progress, yet Carter couldn’t help rubbing his stubbled chin, and swallowing hard. Royce’s left foot was unmistakably twisted. It scraped the ground, useless.

  Royce was coming toward him. Carter stepped out from the doorway, waved and called, “Eben? It’s me—Carter. I haven’t seen you for—”

  He stopped. With a strange, almost humiliated look, Royce turned and hobbled out of sight down a passageway. Carter ran to the passage and peered into it. But it was so dark, he could see nothing, only hear the dragging of Royce’s foot.

  The sound grew softer, then died. Carter shook his head and turned back on his original course. Later that week he ran into Tillman, who had a new job as mate on another fishing boat. When Carter mentioned the encounter with Royce, Tillman told him Royce had become almost a complete recluse. He lived near the Red Cod, but he no longer went there or to any other tavern. He only left his room to get food or tobacco.

  “He makes do with the money he got from the sloop. All he talks about—all he lives for—is the chance of seeing Ortega again.”

  Carter didn’t say so, but he fervently hoped poor Eben Royce never got his wish.

  iii

  Shortly after starting at the processing plant, he’d learned why Tillman, during their first conversation about Royce’s misfortune, had given him an odd look when Carter mentioned the Greek woman. It was Phipps who told him the woman had moved out of the quarters she shared with Royce, shortly after Royce sold his boat.

  Carter supposed her action was understandable. Royce was no longer a whole man. At least she’d helped nurse him back from the worst of his injuries.

  When he said as much to Phipps, the landlord replied, “Oh,
yes, she’s a regular Nightingale, that one.”

  Carter resented the sneering tone. He assumed the landlord had some grudge against the woman, whose beautiful dark eyes were often in Carter’s thoughts, and whose face he sometimes imagined when he was making love to a whore. The Greek woman remained an ideal, perfect—someone he wished he could see again.

  Eventually he did. It happened on another Sunday evening late in June. He had left the tavern where he’d eaten supper and was bound for the Red Cod, planning to take Josie over the jumps. It had been three weeks since he’d been able to afford her—the tension in his groin testified to that.

  He was just passing an old man playing his concertina while a trained monkey jigged at the end of a rope. Suddenly, on the far side of the small crowd, he saw Helen Stavros turning the corner into a dark, narrow lane. He ran to catch up.

  “Mrs. Stavros—wait.” Excited about his good fortune, he ran after her in the lane. He came up beside her where she’d paused near the lamplit doorway of an oyster house. He raked a hand through his dark hair, wishing he were better dressed.

  “Perhaps you don’t remember me—”

  It was a warm evening. Above the scoop neckline of her blouse, her cleavage was visible, shiny with sweat. After one covert glance at it, he was rigid.

  She smiled. “Of course I do. You’re the one who helped Eben that night at the Red Cod. You helped me too.”

  Her voice was low and pleasant, her English smooth and only slightly accented. She gave him a smile whose unmistakable sexuality bothered him. She was too beautiful to behave that way with someone she hardly knew.

  She touched his cheek then, adding, “I am grateful.”

  He waved that aside awkwardly. “I haven’t seen much of Eben lately.”

  A remote tone came into her voice. “But you know what happened to him.”

  “Yes. I can understand why you might not want to stay with him for good. But I heard that you stayed for several weeks after he was hurt. I’d say that was very kind.”