He was waiting just inside the free men’s barracks when Buster and I came in from the messhall. We’d had coffee and a sandwich. I felt better.
Evans Howell winced when Buster told him who I was. Buster’s mouth was twisted in a grin, and I knew Howell recognized the silent ribbing he was getting from the driver. Howell had hired too many migrants not to see instantly that if he’d left me to roam loose in Fort MacKeeney for another hour or two, I’d have showed up out here as county-paid labor.
But there was one thing I had to give the foreman. He saw immediately that he’d been had, hiring me for pay, but he spent no time in regret.
He looked me over. “You look kind of mussed up, Walker,” he said.
“Bus travel,” Buster said, grinning.
Howell ignored the little man. “Well, Walker, take the rest of the day. Walk around, get the feel of things. Buster will assign you a bunk. Rest up. We turn out at five A.M. tomorrow for breakfast.”
‘And we’re loaded on the trucks at a quarter to six. Right, boss?”
Howell ignored Buster Kane again. He looked me over. “You’re a strong-looking man, Walker,vbetter than we usually get around here. If you want to leave any time, that’s your choice. But if you like the work, or—” his pale blue eyes narrowed and I saw he knew I had good reasons for showing up here,”—or if for any other reason, you want to stay on here, we’ll be glad to have you as long as you do your work.”
Buster snorted with laughter again, but Howell paid no more attention to him than he would to a fly.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be all right. Soon as I’ve had a shave and a shower.”
Now Buster did burst out laughing. But Howell did not even smile. His face pulled in a cold way, and I saw that though he was terribly thin, there was nothing weak about him.
“No showers,” he said. “We don’t waste water, Walker. Not on showers. Not out here.”
“My God. Men work all day in this heat and don’t even take a bath?”
Buster laughed. “Hell, man, week or ten days, you’ll get used to it. Most the workers like it that way. You don’t see anybody but each other anyhow. What difference does it make how you smell?”
Howell said, “We pump a lot of water, Walker. But I want you to see how it is. Every drop of water in the state of Kansas is a drop of gold. We got wells sunk down to two-fifty, three hundred feet. We don’t work that hard so a bunch of stoop-laborers can look spic and span. We got a lot of expensive dairy cattle, a truck farm. It takes a lot of water. And wheat. Sometimes a year or even two years pass when that wheat don’t get a drop of rainfall. Lot of wheat people take the wheat that matures from the snow in winter, whatever rain they get. But not us. We don’t raise that kind of wheat. When we send a cutter out in our fields we know the wheat is going to sprout high enough so the blades can reach it.”
“So you can see how it is,” Buster Kane said, grinning at me.
Howell glanced at him now. “Why don’t you get back into town, Buster? Must be something you can do in there.”
Buster stared at him, his face set mouth pulled as far as he dared.
“Yes sir, Mr. Howell.”
I found a razor in the men’s room at the rear of the barracks. Iron cots were pushed against the wall with an aisle down the middle of the frame building separating them. There were a hundred and twenty of these cots on each side of the aisle.
The first thing I noticed in the men’s room was that the shower spigot handles had been removed and the fittings had been twisted out of shape and soldered at the pipe nipple. Nobody was even going to steal a bath out here.
I washed my face in the tin basin, scrubbed soap into my beard, scraped the razor over it until my face burned.
I felt better after I’d shaved.
I dropped my jacket across the bunk they’d assigned to me. Then with my sleeves rolled up and my collar open I went out into the bunkyard.
I went through the first gate, prowled the implement barn, the stables, the milking barns. All the latest machinery was in use here. The stalls were scrubbed, hosed down, gleaming. In the cattle barns were men sprawled sleeping in the shade. I found out they had one job. They jumped a cow when it lifted its tail and stood ready to clean up after it before it hardly finished, scrubbing, hosing, polishing, until even the cow was uncomfortable. They swore some of the cows were housebroke.
I went through all the barns and finally found myself at the cyclone fence where the cottonwoods grew like a windbreak and a cyclorama over the ugly facts of life behind the farm house.
I paused at the locked gate, staring up at the house. There was a small sign beside the padlock: Laborers wishing to visit at the house, please get written okay from foreman. Signed, Evans Howell.
The sign was so politely worded that you almost believed a laborer could visit the big three-story white house set in the cottonwoods.
“Where you going?” I heard the voice at my shoulder, but I hadn’t heard anybody approach on the hard-packed gravel. I looked over my shoulder at the boy in denim shirt and Levis. He had a key ring hooked on his black leather belt. He had black hair and black eyes, looked to be about eighteen. I shrugged and grinned at him. “Nowhere. The foreman said for me to look around, so that’s what I was doing. How much farther can I go?”
“You got a pass from the boss?”
“Nope.”
“Then this is it”
“Suppose I wanted to get out of here? Suppose I wanted to leave?”
He stared at me. “Where would you want to go?”
“Hell. I don’t know. Just anywhere.”
He shrugged. “That’s easy. You just collect your money and they drive you out to the highway. No trouble.”
“But nobody walks out there?”
He shrugged again. “Not since I been here.”
I stood there a moment just for the hell of it, looking at the big house, seeing the gardeners working around it, the people scurrying around in the rear cooking area.
Then I turned toward the barns, the second gate and the free men’s barracks. The boy was still standing there, squinting at me in the sun.
“See you around,” I said to him.
“Sure.”
I kept waiting for Evans Howell to ask me where I was from, what work I had done, what I could do. It didn’t happen.
As I walked back past the milking station, he came out of the huge hangar-type building carrying a clipboard. He paused and stared at me, as if surprised to see me, as if he didn’t even remember me.
“You said look around,” I told him.
It took him another second to come all the way out of it. I had seen men like him before. Nothing organically wrong with them. What men like him suffered was a virus of the soul.
He smiled. “Oh? Sure, Walker. Good idea.” He exhaled heavily, as if there were so much on his mind, he had to clear it all away before he could enter in the simplest discussion. He looked around, seeing the brightly painted barns, the rows of farm machinery, the men bowed over them, working, painting, scrubbing. “Quite a place,” he said.
“I never saw anything like it”
“No.” He smiled again in that abstracted, blonde way. He glanced around. “Kind of fact nowadays. Just one way to run a farm, any enterprise. Big business. If it ain’t big business, you might as well shut down. Lot of work to this place. God knows. But the profits are big. Really big. If a man likes this sort of thing, he can really make something ... What do you think of it?”
I was startled at the sudden interest in his voice, the depth and life that abruptly appeared in it. It was as if he had finally emerged from his funk and was aware that I was standing before him, a man almost as tall as he, much heavier, shaved now, practically presentable.
I jerked my head up and looked at him, warily. What was the pitch here? Was this it? Would he start asking now? Where did you come from, Walker? Why are you here? What do you want? What are you running away from?
One thing we
can pin down hard: He hadn’t been fooled from the first minute he saw me in that barracks. He knew there was plenty of trouble wherever it was I’d come from. He knew I was running. He knew I was up to my ears in it.
I frowned. I couldn’t help it. As I’ve already said, he was a nice looking young guy, and when he smiled, he looked very friendly.
I warned myself to be on guard, but even so, his smile was warm, disarming. He just looked like a pleasant, personable young guy. Look out, Mitch, you haven’t run into much friendliness lately, you’ll be spilling your guts.
He gestured again, “What do you think of all this, Walker?”
“Oh, hell,” I said, “I don’t know. Doesn’t mean much to me. I won’t be around here long.”
He shrugged, still smiling, still looking at me as if I were an honest-to-God human being. “That’s up to you. But ... well, I came here a few years ago, Walker, just like you did today.”
He paused, and stopped smiling for a moment, and I saw he meant that literally.
He exhaled. “For the right man, this can be quite a place. Quite a place. It … it was for me.”
He winced, turning his head quickly as if he was afraid I’d see the sickness in his face.
He smiled again. “A man with intelligence, and some strength. A man like you, Walker. He doesn’t have to stay down there with the stoop-laborers. Those men down there—” he shook his head. “They’re not really human. They’re kind of subhuman ... They’re better than animals. But not much.”
I grinned coldly at him. “Maybe if they had showers they’d smell better.”
His smile was warm, but he shook his head.
“Don’t fool yourself, Walker. They don’t want to bathe. Most of them don’t even bother to shave. We put razors down there and they steal them to sell. I’ve tried to find out. Honest to God, I’ve tried to find out what it is any of them want. Any of them. But they don’t want anything. They get up in the morning. They eat without even looking to see what it is they’re eating. They do just exactly what they are told. Just exactly.” His mouth twisted. “Just exactly like a herd of dumb, stupid animals.”
“What else can they do?”
He frowned, looking at me. “They can have anything they want for breakfast. I mean just for instance. Eggs, any way they like them, all the cold fresh milk they want Pancakes, rib steaks, beans. Now, don’t get me wrong. We’re not the Waldorf, but Cassel learned a long time ago that men work better on a full stomach. It’s just plain good business. Big business … But you know what happens? If they go in that messhall, and their breakfast isn’t sitting right on the tables waiting, they’re confused, don’t know what to do. If a cup of coffee was set there, they’d drink that and get up, ready to work. They’d grumble among themselves, but that’s all. So, you know what we’ve had to do?”
“Something big business, I’ll bet.”
He grinned. “We set out dishes of oatmeal at each place every morning. The best protein we can give them, the best possible breakfast. There’s a man stands at the entrances everyday telling them as they come in that they can have anything they want for breakfast, all they’ve got to do is ask the servers for it You know what happens? They slink in, eat the oatmeal ladled out to them, and then file out, ready to go to work.”
“Nobody can call this Sunnybrook farm,” I said.
He smiled again. “No. It’s hard work. But a man with brains can get himself a good job, and good pay—and a private room in those quarters beyond the machine shop.”
He nodded his head toward a painted two-story frame building, square and red-roofed, but gleaming and clean in the sun.
“You live there?” I said.
He smiled and nodded, “That’s right. I’ve a suite up on the second floor. Parlor, bedroom, dinette, kitchen. Food brought out from the big house kitchen and served up here. You see there’s no fence between that place and the big house.”
“Very swank,” I said. “You have your own shower.”
He laughed and nodded again. “All the water I want. Hot and cold.”
“You make this ambition kick sound very appealing,” I said. “I’ll give it a lot of thought.”
I was sitting on the barracks steps, watching the nothingness in the sun-bleached sky, and the nothingness to match on the unbroken land all the way to the horizon.
It troubled me. That Evans Howell was friendly, easy-talking. But I got a sense of wrong. He was the boss. He ran this place, or all of it this side of the farmyard fence. Why wouldn’t he want to know where I came from, what I was doing here?
It didn’t make sense.
He seemed anxious not to learn a damned thing about my life before the moment I dialed 404-Blue in Fort MacKeeney today.
I watched the big gates swing open up near the painted barns. Three big yellow buses rolled through. They looked like school buses except they were paint-scabbed. And painted along the sides of them in bold red letters was: BARTON M. CASSELS GREAT PLAINS EMPIRE FARMS. PRIVATE. NO RIDERS.
Another gate opened and the prison-labor bus drove through it.
I sat there and watched it stop outside the jail barracks. Two county guards stepped out of the bus with rifles across their arms. After a minute the workers began to spill out, they were yelling and laughing and jostling each other. The guards yelled at them, leather-lunged. They shouted, ordering the men to shut up and fall in line.
I felt my mouth pull in a grin. It took a long time to get those men in two lines outside the bus and headed toward the barracks steps where two more armed guards stood waiting to take over. The men fell in, but only when there was nothing else they wanted to do. They stopped talking then because the guards patrolled the lines, rifles extended ready to slam a gun-butt across the face of the first man that spoke.
The other two buses of free men rolled slowly along the fence to the barracks where I sat. I got up and moved away from the steps.
I leaned against the front of the house, watching them unload.
They came out of the buses silently, shoulders round, heads lowered. Their clothing was sweated, gravel-crusted. The two strawbosses wore denim shirts and Levis.
There were almost two hundred men in the buses. They trooped tiredly up the steps without talking and plodded along the aisles to their bunks.
When all were inside, the strawboss nearest me turned and looked me over.
“You a new one?”
“Yes. That’s right. Mitch Walker.”
“Okay. Inside, Walker. Nobody hangs around out here.”
He was set on his parted legs, waiting for me to answer back. I shrugged. “All right. I didn’t know”
I went up the steps. They stood there looking at me. The man who’d spoken first said, “Walker.”
I stopped. He said, “My name’s Handecker. This here is Tom Potter. We’re in charge down here. You give us a fair day’s work, do what you’re told, you have no trouble with us.”
“I don’t want any trouble,” I told him.
He nodded. “Okay. Anything you want, you got any gripe, you come to Tom or me. Right?”
“Anything at all,” Potter said. “You don’t have to bother nobody else. Handecker and me will take care of everything.”
They stood there at the foot of the steps smiling, sweating and smiling. But they knew I read their message. Loud and clear. There was a chain of command here. And nobody went over their heads.
Twenty minutes later the front doors were shoved open and chocked wide. Potter and Handecker entered. Potter leaned against the doorjamb swinging his billy stick. Handecker blew a shrill police whistle three times.
“All right, men,” Handecker shouted. “Chow’s down. You guys washed up, let’s go. No lagging. Huh? Okay?”
The men got up from their bunks, talking quietly among themselves as they moved along the aisles toward the front doors.
Outside in the waning sunlight we lined up. We made two rows. Across the barbed wire fence I saw the prisoners were lined u
p also, smaller lines, but noisier, once in a while there would be a burst of laughter from over there.
We marched into the chow hall first. There was a rafter-high wire fence that separated the long narrow hall from outer walls to serving counters.
Potter stood just inside the doorway of the messhall. As the two lines came in, he directed them to benches on each side of the door, filling the far tables and then the nearer ones.
I sat down on a bench. The plate before me was already served, steaming. There were two lamb chops, cooked carrots, mashed potatoes with lamb gravy, a fresh salad and dried white beans. Servers in white aprons moved between the tables with pitchers of coffee and iced tea. Beside each plate was a slice of white cake.
The men around me didn’t even check to see what they were being served. It was a well-prepared, generously portioned meal, but these men didn’t care. They didn’t have energy enough to care. The food was good, but it could have been slop for all they knew or cared. They began to eat noisily, rapidly, faces close to their plates. They looked up only to grunt when the servers came along asking if they wanted coffee or iced tea.
I got up from the table. I picked up my plate and sidled through the rows of hunched men to the aisle. Carrying my food, I went over to the serving counters.
One of the servers came from the big urns in the cooking area. He was frowning.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Nothing. Nothing. But they told me I could have anything I wanted to eat.”
He frowned again, looking around, “Sure. So what’s wrong with what you got?”
“I said nothing. I just want a steak, that’s all.”
I felt somebody standing close against my shoulder. I turned. Handecker was there. Potter was just behind him.
“What’s the matter?” Handecker said.
A Night for Screaming Page 5