The Americans

by John Jakes

  Sure enough, there it was—itemized. Lodging. Liquor. Extra. The extra amounted to a hundred and fifty dollars.

  Dumbfounded, Carter pointed to the last item. “What’s this?”

  Olaf sniggered. “You mean you forgot little Miss Lu Ann already?”

  For the first time, he realized she was gone. “She told me—she told me it cost two dollars!”

  Another laugh, harsh this time. “What the hell does she know? She’s only been here a week. The customers pay me.”

  Carter raked fingers through his hair as he peered at the bill, noting that it was soiled and wrinkled, as if it had been used many times. There was no name at the top, merely a notation. Charges, Room 6. The tin numeral on the open door was 6, he saw.

  “Where’s the girl—” he began.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “But I thought—”

  “That she liked you? She does what she’s told, friend.”

  “Let me speak to the man who runs this place. Your brother-in-law.”

  “Horace?” He smirked. “No such fellow. I run this place.”

  Carter began to realize how stupidly he’d behaved. Hunger, tiredness, and the need for a little companionship had lulled him out of his usual wariness. In his hand he held the result.

  He thought of the girl, and of his foolish babbling. How she must be laughing. She’d put one over on him. Put one over on the glib Mr. Carter Kent, who always fancied himself in charge of things. Somehow, being gulled by the little yellow-haired whore was worse than being cheated by this—this—

  He couldn’t finish. He didn’t know the word he wanted. What was this place? The answer came suddenly from the past, from his memories of the docks of Boston.

  “This is a damn crimping operation. You’re all in cahoots.”

  “Smart boy for a Yankee,” Olaf said with a chilly smile. “Guess you’re quick enough to figure what comes next, then. A choice. You can go to jail for refusal to pay my fair and lawful charges, or you can sign on as an ordinary seaman on the Gulf Empress, leaving day after tomorrow.”

  “For where?”

  “Liverpool, Marseilles—you’ll only be gone half a year or thereabouts. Don’t think you can go to the law about this. They’re friends of mine.”

  Carter shivered under the coverlet he was still clutching against his middle. He thought he heard someone tread on a board in the hall. Had the crimp brought help, just in case?

  He eyed the room. No windows, but he seemed to recall one in the corridor. Desperate, he knew he had to choose an option he detested.

  “All right,” he said, feigning defeat. “Guess I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “You Yankees have some brains after all,” Olaf chortled, waving the paper. “Pull your britches on. Maum Charlene will feed you a plate of grits, and then I’ll introduce you to the master of the Empress.”

  Carter nodded, rubbed his stubbled jaw, lurched from bed, and got dressed. Just as he was buttoning up his denim pants, Olaf turned and stepped through the door to say something to whoever was waiting outside. Seeing his chance, Carter lunged and hit him in the back.

  CHAPTER II

  BEHIND BARS

  i

  JAMES OLAF WAS HURLED across the hall so violently, his chin tore a hole in the flimsy wall. He hung there a second or so, his right hand clawing for the spike in his belt. “Help, help up here!” he bellowed.

  A man leaped at Carter from the left, one of the loungers he’d seen on the front steps the night before. Carter ducked as the man hacked the air with his whittling knife. Suddenly he smelled fish. His stomach ached so badly, he wanted to double over.

  The knife shaved past Carter’s left arm. He drove two hard but clumsy punches into the man’s midsection. The man reeled backward, off balance. Not far behind him, there was a landing where the stairs went down to the left. At the far side of the landing was the window Carter remembered. Beyond it, calm water glittered in the morning sun.

  Terror drying his mouth, he charged the staggering man and hit him with his shoulder, driving him toward the glass. The man realized he was falling, and fought for balance. That gave Carter a chance to rush in beneath the man’s knife hand, seize his old blue seaman’s shirt and fling him sideways down the stairs. Halfway to the bottom, he crashed into the black woman, Maum Charlene, who was coming up with a shotgun in her big hands.

  Arms and legs flew, the gun discharged, and shot punched scores of small holes in the ceiling directly over the stairs. Carter had other things on his mind—chiefly Olaf, who was running toward him full tilt, swinging the marlin spike in a murderous arc.

  Carter backed toward the window but miscalculated the distance. He struck the glass too quickly and forcefully. It gave way. He flung his arm over his face and tumbled through with a strangled oath. Because of his fall, the spike missed his face by three inches, burying its tip in the window frame instead.

  Amid a shower of glass, he rolled down the sloping roof below the window. The roof saved him from a serious injury; when he tumbled off the eave, he fell only six feet to the sand. He fought to get his wind back as he scrambled to his feet. He ran toward Galveston in fear for his life.

  ii

  When he reached the center of Galveston with no sign of pursuit, he calmed down and tried to reassure himself that the incident was over. He’d hear no more from Olaf— the man was obviously a crook, and couldn’t afford to draw attention to his crimping operation.

  He was famished. But he had no money for a meal; his trousers had been searched while he slept in Lu Ann’s bed. His Montana peak hat and his bedroll had been left behind, so he had nothing to sell, either. He’d have to steal the price of the ferry to the mainland, or sneak aboard. But that could wait until he filled his growling belly.

  That decision was his second mistake.

  Carter was foraging for food in the garbage cans of a large hotel when two uniformed men suddenly appeared at the mouth of the alley, billy clubs in hand.

  “There he is!” the taller policeman shouted, charging.

  Carter turned to run, bumped against one of the garbage barrels and overturned it. He slipped and fell in a slimy heap of cold meat fat, fruit rinds, coffee grounds—all of it stinking like hell.

  “Fits the description,” panted the other officer as the two raced up to him, clubs ready. This time Carter was in no mood to fight. He lay there in the garbage, staring up at their coarse faces. The bigger officer leaned down and grinned.

  “Say somethin’, boy.”

  “How—how’d you find me?”

  “Why, Jim Olaf came to see the captain—Jim’s got a lot of friends in town, y’understand. He described you and the rest was easy. We just started lookin’ for a darkhaired, well set-up Yankee tramp. Your accent just filled in the last bit of identification. You’re a Yankee, all right.”

  “An’ he’s right where a Yankee belongs,” said the other, grinning even wider than his companion. “In the slops.”

  He drew his booted foot back and kicked Carter’s genitals. Carter screamed and clutched himself. After the fourth kick, he fainted.

  iii

  The magistrate was an avuncular man with white side whiskers. He identified himself as another friend of Jim Olaf’s. The crimp must have paid off half the damn town!

  The charge was defrauding an innkeeper. Carter tried to speak in his own defense but was gaveled to silence. The magistrate sentenced him to thirty days in jail.

  On the eleventh day of his jail term the fringe of a tropical storm brushed Galveston with heavy rains and howling winds, and Carter was glad to be indoors. The food wasn’t bad in jail, either. Each meal included greasy grits, but at least the plate and tin cup were shoved into his cell three times daily.

  Even so, he nearly went crazy in the confines of the six-by-ten-foot cell with its plank sleeping platform, its bucket of tepid, bug-infested wash water, and its second, uncovered pail for his own wastes. The jailor was supposed to em
pty the waste pail once a day but he often forgot. Complaints were useless.

  A small, high window in the cell overlooked a side street that Carter often watched for hours by standing on the plank platform. Late one afternoon, he saw Olaf drive by in an expensive buggy, two finely dressed girls riding with him under parasols, chatting and laughing. One was the little yellow-haired trollop. Carter clutched the bars and stared after her with a stricken look.

  The month in the Galveston jail was an experience that scarred Carter, just as other brushes with violent death and deceitful people had scarred him. The cell was the most potent proof he’d yet encountered that if you didn’t run others, they’d run you.

  He thought about the yellow-haired girl, and of how foolishly he’d trusted her. Under the influence of beer and what surely must have been cigars impregnated with some kind of drug, he’d even gotten sentimental over her. And while the girl was no one he really cared about, her deception humiliated him.

  He thought a lot about the Greek woman, too. In a way, he had also trusted Helen Stavros. He’d trusted her beauty, her warm eyes, her smile—and they had deceived him. She had meant for them to do that. Helen Stavros had made him suspicious of all women, and now the yellow-haired girl had confirmed and solidified that suspicion.

  Women had their place, he supposed. A man needed them for physical satisfaction. But as for loving them— trusting them—he had been suspicious of that before he came to Galveston, and now he knew he was right.

  As for trusting men—strangers such as Olaf who smiled and pretended to be decent, generous, helpful—well, the cell demonstrated where that got you. He concluded that the only people in the entire world it would be safe for him to trust were his mother, Will, and Gideon—none of whom he’d ever see again, probably.

  Therefore he was alone in a world of Olafs and Lu Anns—a world of potential enemies. He’d long suspected it. Now he knew it. So if he didn’t behave accordingly, he was a damn fool—

  Which was exactly what he’d been thus far in Galveston. Like the fearful lesson of the Red Cod, that was another he wouldn’t soon forget.

  iv

  On the day he was released, a policeman escorted him to the ferry and paid his passage across to the mainland. It was a gray November morning, unseasonably cold for Texas. A light drizzle was falling.

  The policeman turned up the collar of his old overcoat and said, “On your way, now. Don’t let us see you in Galveston again, boy.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Where you headin’? North?”

  Carter hadn’t the slightest idea. He gazed out past the docked ferry and the rain-stippled Gulf to the coast, a vast, slate-colored flatland embracing Galveston Bay. Earth, water, and dark gray sky seemed to fuse into one immense and hostile waste in which he had no home, countless enemies, little future, and less hope.

  His spirits sank. What good were the lessons he’d learned? What good was cleverness, ambition—anything? He was alone and all that had happened to him in Galveston could well happen to him again, no matter how carefully he guarded against it.

  Then the unquenchable Kent optimism came to his aid. He brought his chin up. Forced a smile that surprised the shivering policeman.

  “Don’t know where I’m going,” he answered. “But you’ll hear from me one of these days, you can bet. Galveston’s going to feel bad about treating me the way it did.”

  He said it with such conviction, the officer couldn’t bring himself to laugh. Cocking his head, he asked, “That a threat or just a promise?”

  Carter held up both hands. “Oh, a promise. Threats can get you killed.”

  Smiling that dazzling smile, Carter stepped onto the ferry and tried to ignore the rain, the freezing wind, the great empty vista of water, and forlorn sky in which he, of all human beings, had no place.

  But surely, in a land so vast, there should be a place for him. He’d keep traveling in search of it, trusting no one.

  And he wouldn’t stop unless they buried him.

  CHAPTER III

  JO

  i

  WILL’S COLLISION WITH A fellow student on the steps of the medical school proved to be the start of a friendship.

  Will soon discovered that Drew Hastings had a first-rate mind, an interest in medicine that was almost a passion, and a desire to succeed that matched or exceeded Will’s own. Drew’s ambition was due in large part to the dedication with which his mother and father had approached the task of educating him. His parents were storekeepers, people of modest means, to whom the annual tuition of two hundred dollars plus incidental fees was an enormous sum. They had scrimped for years to accumulate the money.

  Drew was the sole recipient. He had a younger sister, Will learned, and he was devoted to her; but his devotion didn’t extend to a belief that she should receive higher education. The family could afford just one standard bearer. Drew, older, and male, was the clear choice. He made no secret of liking it that way.

  Each young man brought certain qualities to the friendship. Drew brought the steadiness and authority that went with being two years older. He liked having a friend to whom he could expound about medicine. He’d read extensively before coming to Boston, and he knew some startling things. On one occasion he astonished Will by telling him that Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician of the fifth century b.c., probably had little to do with the body of medical writing known as the Hippocratic Collection. Some scholars said he had no connection with the famous oath bearing his name.

  Many skilled doctors had taught and written at the medical school on the island of Cos, Drew said. Hippocrates was among the most famous. He had also been born on the island. So it was undoubtedly inevitable that his name would be ascribed to aphorisms and bits of advice actually authored by others. Drew’s favorite was “Not only must the physician be ready to do his duty, the patient, the attendants, and external circumstances must conduce the cure.”

  The first time Drew quoted the saying to Will, he went on, “But tell that to someone living in a city slum. Those people don’t have time to think about good health, let alone do something about it. All their energy goes into surviving. As to their circumstances—what could be more conducive to sickness than a tenement? The poor need doctors more than the rich do. Hippocrates knew that.”

  Will didn’t agree with Drew’s conclusions, but he was fascinated by the breadth of his friend’s knowledge. Hence one of his contributions to the friendship was the devotion of a pupil eager to learn. On the other hand, at certain times during the first term, he turned out to be the teacher.

  The practice of medicine interested Drew, but not the preparation that was fundamental to it. He hated the scientific studies required of first-year students—general chemistry, physiology, materia medica. Only anatomy held any appeal.

  Because of his attitude, he was soon flirting with dismissal. Even when studying physiology under an acknowledged master such as Henry Bowditch, he refused to attend most of the eight-man laboratory sessions. Instead, he relied on Will’s notes, and Will’s good memory. On the night before a test, Will would drill him for hours on the periodic table or Latin terms they were expected to know. Drew would absorb just enough information to squeak by.

  There were two hundred and seventy-five students in the medical school, ninety-six of them in the first class. They lived in a closed universe consisting of the school building, its various annexes and laboratories, the City Hospital and Massachusetts General, where demonstrations took place and charity patients were observed, and the rooms in which they did their studying. Since Charles Eliot’s inauguration as President of Harvard, the medical curriculum had undergone extensive revision and improvement. Courses were more complex and more difficult than they’d been just a few years earlier. Will and Drew had to keep up with daily and weekly work, but they also faced comprehensive examinations in the spring, examinations covering all the material studied during the year. Only by passing those examinations did a student earn the r
ight to advance to the next class.

  During his first term at the school, Will worked twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day—Sundays included. Sometimes the workload became so heavy he existed for days in a state of near exhaustion. Once in a while he grew deeply discouraged. But when he did, he would recall standing in the rain outside the Vanderbilt mansion, or lunching with Vlandingham, or promising his stepbrother he’d amount to something. Any of those memories, but especially the last one, was enough to overcome his discouragement and keep him going without sleep and without complaint.

  ii

  Occasionally there was a short respite from the routine. One came in mid-November. Drew announced that his father would be arriving on Saturday, to check on his son’s progress. He’d be staying overnight. Will was invited to join them for supper.

  To Will’s surprise—and Drew’s—another member of the family turned up, too. Drew’s younger sister.

  The three members of the Hastings family invited Will to eat at a Boston fish house not noted for low prices. Will had already heard that Mr. Hastings had been forced to travel from Hartford in a borrowed farm wagon; he couldn’t afford train fare. So Will insisted that he pay for supper, and made Drew’s agreement a condition of his acceptance of the invitation.

  Joab Hastings was a stout, soft-spoken man with rough skin and a red face. He was almost uncomfortably in awe of the two students, because they were venturing into intellectual realms wholly foreign to him. But his pride in his son was obvious.

  Less impressed was Drew’s fifteen-year-old sister, Joanna, whom everyone called Jo. Her father said she’d nagged him in such a cheerful but determined way, he’d been forced to bring her along. His smile said it wasn’t an imposition, though. “She clerks at the family store,” he explained to Will. “She’s a hard worker. She deserved a little holiday.”

  Perhaps Joab Hastings was appeasing his guilt, Will concluded a few minutes later, when all of them were enjoying the first course—roasted oysters from a huge silver platter. Making conversation, he said, “Did you enjoy the ride up here, Miss Hastings?”