by Howard Fast
“Lousy, bloody bastards,” the fox-faced man said, and he walked toward the mass of strikers who were falling back before the police. The cops were shooting over the heads of the strikers now and flinging tear gas bombs, and for the first time Barbara experienced the acrid taste of tear gas. Dominick jumped out of the car to follow Bridges, leaving Barbara sitting behind the wheel, too paralyzed with fear and horror even to attempt what her common sense told her was the thing to do, to start the motor and get out of there before it was too late. Instead, she remained at the wheel, staring at the battle raging only a hundred feet from her—the surging mass of longshoremen and seamen, the line of police, the gunfire, and the windblown cloud of tear gas.
It ended. The last truck passed down Harrison Street, and the line of police gave back toward Harrison Street, leaving a neutral space between them and the strikers. Now Barbara could hear gunfire and shouting from the direction of the Embarcadero. It was all a dream, an insane, impossible dream.
“Lady, for Christ’s sake, where the hell are those bandages?” It was Fargo, prodding her arm, shaking her back to reality, and she realized that the bloodied, hurt men being helped toward the car were part of no dream.
She forced herself into action, clenching her shaking hands, climbing out of the car, and fumbling with the tailgate. “Let me do that,” Fargo said. Then she crawled into the car and found the corrugated vegetable box that was packed with bandages and peroxide and iodine. Her hands were steadier now. She glanced up. A man stood in front of her, his face covered with blood. “Where the hell are the gauze pads?” Fargo shouted at her.
“None. We don’t have any,” she said, fighting back her tears and her desire to be sick.
“Shit! Don’t none of you have an ounce of brains? O.K., cut up the wide bandage and make me pads. Where’s the water?”
She was struggling with the bandage now, realizing that no one had thought to provide a pair of scissors. “Water?”
“Water! How the hell do you expect to wash wounds without water?”
“We don’t have any water. Just peroxide and iodine.”
“Oh, Jesus God!”
Barbara was trying to tear the heavy cotton bandage with her shaking hands and her teeth.
“Here, use this,” Fargo said, taking a knife out of his pocket, opening the blade and handing if to her. “You got court plaster?”
She nodded.
“O.K. Make the pads and then have strips of court plaster ready to hold them in place.” He turned to two of the longshoremen. “You two—take that can”—pointing to the milk can of coffee, and saying to Barbara, “What’s in it?”
“Coffee.”
“Dump the coffee, and fill it with warm water.”
“Where?”
“Shit! Don’t ask me questions. Get the fuckin’ water!”
Glancing up from the pads she was making, Barbara had a vision of the particular hell that she had been plunged into. Kneeling in the station wagon, she was looking at a mass of bleeding, battered men gathered around the tailgate, their faces covered with blood, gashed, eyes swollen and closed, one man with a bullet hole in the palm of his hand, groaning with pain, another holding an obviously broken arm.
“Line up, mates,” Fargo said, his voice suddenly gentle. “Worst injured first. Let me see that hand. Peroxide, Bobby.”
She handed him the peroxide. She was getting the knack of stripping the bandage, piling the pads neatly in the box. “Please, don’t shake so,” she whispered to her hands. She began to strip the court plaster into different lengths, sticking the end of each piece onto one of the ceiling struts of the station wagon. “That’s the girl,” Fargo said. “You’re doing fine.”
“There’s supposed to be two doctors in the soup kitchen on Bryant Street,” Barbara said.
“That’s just fine. We need them in the soup kitchen. Hand me a pad. Now plaster.”
“The man with the bullet wound—he ought to go there.”
He had bandaged the hand. Now he was putting a pad on a head cut. “You’re O.K., buddy. Take him over to Bryant Street, and if the goddamn doctors won’t come back with you, get more plaster and bandages. And gauze pads. And more peroxide. And get them back here.”
Now the street had almost emptied of everyone but the hurt men, yet they came, more and more of them. The battle had moved down to the Embarcadero, and Barbara could hear the shouting and the screaming and the gunfire in the distance.
“We’re going to close the belt line,” Fargo said.
“You mean the railroad?”
“That’s right. They got their scabs and they’re shipping goods. Either we stop the railroad or it’s over.”
The two men who had taken the milk can returned. One of them had a cut over his eye. Fargo was occupied. “Let me help you,” Barbara said.
Without looking at her, Fargo said, “Get the can open. Wash it with the water. Then use iodine, carefully. We’ll save the peroxide. It’s half gone already.”
She had stopped thinking about what she was doing, simply doing it. She washed the cut, touched it with iodine, pressed a pad on it as she had seen Fargo do, and then secured it with strips of plaster. Another man took his place. Head cuts, cheekbones laid open, a broken mouth with half the teeth gone. She recoiled from this, fighting back the tears again. “Fargo, please, I don’t know what to do with this.” As with a broken arm. “Hold it like this,” Fargo said to her. He broke up a picket sign to make splints. Then, “More pads, Bobby. We’re running out.”
As she began to fold pads, she realized that these were not just the men who had fought the police when the trucks came through Harrison Street. These were the wounded from another battle, raging down on the Embarcadero. “Buckshot wounds,” Fargo said. “Where the hell are those lousy doctors?”
A longshoreman appeared with a box of gauze pads and bandages. “These are from Bryant Street.”
“Where the hell are the doctors?”
“They got their hands full, Fargo. All hell has broken loose down on Steuart Street. It’s like a goddamn battlefield all the way over to the Ferry Building. Maybe fifty, a hundred men lying on the streets with their heads broken. Half the city is there, every cop, and they say they’re calling out the National Guard. They got these fuckin’ gas guns, and we’re not giving ground. Jesus, I never seen anything like it.”
Barbara’s eyes were burning, and she had had only a taste of it, a whiff of it. The men coming up to the station wagon now were stumbling, falling, half-blinded, their hands pressed to their faces.
“Fargo, what can we do?” she asked desperately.
“Wet gauze pads on their eyes. That’s all we can do, kid. Dip the pad in water, don’t wring it out. Put it on their eyes wet and let them sit on the ground and hold it there until the pain eases.”
Gauze pads for the eyes, clean the head wounds, pads, bandages. A police plane circled overhead. The sun was shining, the morning chill gone, and the day had turned as gently warm and fine as only a San Francisco day can be. An apparently endless stream of the curious moved down Harrison Street, many of them filtering into Second Street to stand and watch. And still, in the distance, the sound of hundreds of men shouting in rage, the sound of gunfire. Time had no end. Once Barbara thought she saw a film camera directed at them, but when she looked again it was gone.
“Fargo,” she said, “no more bandages, no more pads.” She was very tired, but the nausea and the fear had gone away. She looked at her hands. Hadn’t she seen them before? They were covered with caked blood, blood on her arms up to her elbows, blood on her blouse. The gunfire had stopped. The shouting had stopped.
“We’ll send the rest to Bryant Street. No real bad ones anymore.” He spread his arms. “Sorry, guys. Go up to Bryant Street. They got doctors there. We’re out of everything.”
Barbara was staring at what was left of th
e milk can of water. Blood had colored the remaining water pink. She hadn’t noticed that before either. Fargo sat down on the tailgate, clasping his hands across his huge stomach. “Christ, I’m tired. What time is it, Bobby?”
She looked at her watch. “Four o’clock.” She shook her head in amazement. Where had the day gone? “It’s four o’clock. It’s so quiet suddenly. I guess everything’s over.” She took a crumpled handkerchief from her purse, dipped it into the pink water in the milk can, and began to wash the blood off her hands and arms. Fargo watched her.
“You’re a funny kid, Bobby,” he said at last. “But you’re all right. You’re all right.”
***
In the photo lab at the Examiner, a man called Blakely fished a wet print out of the developing solution and clipped it to the board. He stared at it for a while, and then he called over two other men in the room to have a look.
“It’s all right. It’s not great.”
“Who’s the fat guy?”
“Never mind him. Look at the girl. I seen that girl somewhere. I swear I have.”
He took it to the photo editor, who glanced at it and pushed it aside. “We got too much already.”
“Look at the girl. She’s a beauty.”
“So she’s a beauty. Who is she?”
“I don’t know, but I seen her somewhere.”
He stared at the picture. The numbers on the license plate of the car were barely discernible. He copied them off and picked up the telephone on his desk.
A few minutes later, he dropped the photograph on the city editor’s desk. “This is a lulu. Look at that girl.”
“What about the girl?”
“If the car belongs to her, her name is Barbara Lavette.”
“Look, this is Thursday. ‘Bloody Thursday’—that name’s going to stick. We got the worst war in the history of this city, two dead and God knows how many injured.”
“Barbara Lavette. Her mother is Jean Lavette. Jean Lavette divorced Dan Lavette about five years ago and married John Whittier. This picture was taken on Second Street at about one o’clock today.”
The city editor picked up the photo again and stared at it.
***
Alone in the car, Barbara drove back to Bryant Street. Fargo had taken off. She had no desire to return to the soup kitchen, no desire to do anything but get away from all this, to be by herself, to be quiet for a while, but in the car were the uneaten sandwiches, the tin cups, and the emptied milk can that Fargo had upended, a pink stream of blood and water pouring into the street.
The street in front of the soup kitchen and the alley too were crowded with men—longshoremen, seamen, reporters. Two ambulances were in the street, backed up to the storefront. Barbara’s first impulse when she saw the crowd was to keep on going, but she pushed it away and eased the station wagon into the alley, the men giving way in front of her. As she cut her motor, she saw Franco Guzie come out of the kitchen. He made his way through and stood at the car door, staring at her.
“I brought back the stuff,” Barbara said. “I’m very tired. Could you have someone unload?”
“Sure, kid.” Still he stood there.
“What’s wrong, Franco?”
“You ever get together with Dominick?” he asked unhappily. “I don’t know what was with you and Dominick.”
“What difference does that make?” She was tired, annoyed, every nerve in her body taut and strained.
“Dominick’s dead.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered. “Oh, no. No.” The pent-up flood of emotion released itself, and she laid her head down on the wheel and wept. A reporter worked his way down the alley and wanted to know what went on with the woman.
“Fuck off!” Guzie snarled at him. Then he opened the car door and helped Barbara out. The longshoremen in the alley pushed the reporter away and then stood there watching, grim-faced. “Come inside,” Guzie said gently. “You sit down and have some coffee. You rest a little.”
Irma was in the kitchen. Wet-eyed, she folded Barbara into her massive bosom. “Poor baby, poor baby.”
They found a chair for her. “She needs a drink,” Irma said. “One of you find her a drink.”
“Where?”
“Jerks,” Irma snapped. She took a half bottle of gin from behind the stove and poured some into a tin cup. “Drink this, baby.”
Barbara swallowed the gin, choking on it. Guzie stood in front of her, watching anxiously.
“I’m all right,” she managed to say. “I don’t have a handkerchief.”
Guzie took a dirty, bloodstained rag out of his pocket. She wiped her face with it and handed it back to him. “I’m all right, Franco. What happened?”
“A bullet in the head. Two guys killed, and one of them has to be Nicky.”
“Has he any family? Do they know?”
“Not here. He got a mother up in Seattle.”
“What happens to him? Who takes care of him?”
“The union takes care of that.”
“Where is his body?” She had to ask. She had never encountered death before. She had no knowledge of the way of death.
“At the hospital. Look, kid, when the time comes, we’ll tell you. You don’t want to stay here. There’s nothing but grief in this lousy place. You got a place to go?”
She nodded.
“Can you drive? Are you O.K.?”
“I can drive.”
“All right. Just rest up a little, and then I’ll clear the way and you can back out of the alley. You don’t have to talk to none of them lousy reporters. We’ll take care of that.”
She sat there for another ten or fifteen minutes. The longshoremen who came in and out of the kitchen looked at her curiously, but no one spoke to her. They were filled with the horror of the day, and distantly, as if she were in another world, she listened to their talk of the pitched battles fought with the police and the company goons on the Embarcadero, of what had happened on Pier 20 and Pier 22 and Pier 38, of who had been clubbed and who had been gassed. Irma was cooking stew. Most of them had not eaten at all during the day, and vaguely Barbara felt she should remain and help. But she couldn’t; she had to get out of there. Finally, she got up and went to the door. Guzie helped her to back out of the still-crowded alley, and then she began to drive. She just drove, with no destination in mind.
It was still early evening, a beautiful, golden California evening, the city sitting over the bay like a shining jewel, the rust-colored tower of the unfinished Bay Bridge glowing in the slanting light of the sun. Beauty and misery always go together, Barbara thought. It was all a part of the chaotic senselessness that had replaced the well-ordered serenity of her life.
She was on Franklin Street when she realized that she had no place to go, and she pulled over to the curb and sat behind the wheel, staring glumly at the shining waters of the bay. She couldn’t face another night alone at the St. Francis Hotel, not the way she felt now, and to go to the Whittier house was simply out of the question. As for another trip to Los Angeles, the very thought of the long drive turned her weariness into a nightmare. For a few minutes, she just sat there, and then, noticing a drugstore down the street, she locked the ignition and got out.
She found Sam Goldberg’s number in the directory, but when she called the office, there was no answer. She should have known that; it was past six o’clock already. There were three residence numbers for three Samuel Goldbergs. The man at the counter changed a dollar for her, and she said a silent prayer. She had already ruled out her friends and her mother’s friends. To face any one of them now and try to explain was patently impossible. The first number did not answer. The second number brought a familiar voice.
“Is this Sam Goldberg the attorney?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“This is Barbara Lavette. You do remember me?”
“Of course. Are you in trouble, Barbara?”
“Yes—no. Oh, I don’t know. Could I see you, now?”
“Certainly. Where are you?”
“I’m at Franklin, near Clay Street. I have my car.”
“I’m not far away, Barbara, at Green on the corner of Polk. A white house with yellow trim. You can park right in front.”
A middle-aged black woman opened the door for her. “You’re Miss Lavette? Mr. Goldberg’s expecting you—right inside, dear.”
It was an old Victorian house, the outside scalloped and bracketed, the inside full of framed plush pieces upholstered in olive-tinted velour. Barbara walked into a library: three walls of books and on the fourth wall an oil portrait of a pretty, delicate-featured woman. Goldberg got up out of a leather armchair and greeted her warmly.
“This is a wonderful surprise, Barbara—” He broke off, staring at her. “Is that blood on your blouse? On your neck too. Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m not hurt. I’m all right. I’m just so tired, and I had no other place to go. And please forgive me, Mr. Goldberg, but I’m so hungry. I haven’t eaten all day. Could I have something, anything? A sandwich?”