We couldn’t believe our good luck. We’d only been in the line for about five hours and now we were free. And in California! Dad let out a whoop after we’d passed through the last official-looking barriers. “Well, if that man’s a sonumbitch, then give me a sonumbitch any time.”
Dad drove straight on up the coast to Long Beach to the Seaview Trailer Court where Uncle Ernest and Aunt Doreen were temporarily installed. We were awed by our first sight of the great Pacific Ocean—our first sight of any ocean—the power of those pounding breakers was terrifying and hypnotizing.
One nice thing about the Seaview Trailer Court was that it was near the sea. As a matter of fact, that was the only nice thing about it. There were about three-hundred trailers parked haphazardly just off the main highway—the deserted beach was on the other side of the busy road—on a flat stretch of sand without a tree in sight. What shade there was was created by bits of cloth or awnings spread from the trailers to poles stuck into the sand at odd drunken angles. The core of the place was a cement-block building that turned out to be the toilets and shower rooms—men on one side, women on the other—and wash-rooms with the manager’s office squeezed in one corner. The manager himself looked squeezed. A most disagreeable man who pointed out immediately that if we’d come to visit the Billingses, our car had better not be there the next day.
“Here in Seaview,” he growled, “We rent space. Space. Space for trailers. You come in here, you take up space. We ain’t making any money on the space your car is taking up. Cars that don’t have trailers just ain’t …”
“Welcome?” Dad said.
“That’s the idea.”
“Well, we’re not the sort of folks to stay where we ain’t welcome, so I don’t think you’d better get into too much of a tizzy about where we park the car.” Dad’s voice was getting that dangerous edge.
Mom leaned over and smiled out Dad’s window at the man. “We have just dropped by to see my brother. He’s Ernest Billings. Can you tell us where he’s … er … parked? Situated?”
“Billings. Billings,” he muttered. “Oh yeah. New Mexico? That blue trailer. Third one back from that one.” He pointed “New one. Good looking job it is. Sleeps four, got gas stove—even a gas icebox. All aluminum. Slick as she can be …”
“We ain’t intendin’ to buy it,” Dad said. “Just to know where it is.”
It was slick. It did have a gas stove and icebox. It did sleep four only there were already five living in it. Aunt Doreen’s two sisters, one married with husband in tow, were there and installed. They’d arrived for a day or two some three weeks ago and were still looking for work. Here we were, another quartet who’d planned on using the trailer as headquarters. Nine people in a four-people place. But, curiously, it worked.
I never have quite figured out how Aunt Doreen did it but she was an organizer of infinite imagination. The various beds inside the trailer either slid out, folded down, popped out of walls, covered up tables or contracted or expanded in such a way as to fit all the grownups in. Junior and I were the problem.
“Wall to wall bed,” Aunt Doreen had declared. The problems of who went to bed first were worked out carefully, because once in, you couldn’t get out. I think Aunt Doreen and Uncle Ernest were the last ones in and God help anybody who had to get up in the night.
Since our car wasn’t allowed to be parked there, it evolved that Junior and I would sleep in it on the public beach across the road. Mom was in a state, but Dad said that he could see the car from the trailer.
“I know,” Mom said, “but once we get into bed you won’t be able to get out if something goes wrong.”
“What could go wrong with a car parked beside the road?”
“Some hobo could come along and try to steal …”
“What? The Chinese checker board?”
“I mean, Woody, is it safe for the boys to be over there by themselves?”
It was decided we’d be all right. That is, the grown-ups decided we would be. I was frankly terrified but I’d die before I’d let Junior know. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the dark. I never had been. For example, I’d never had any fear at all going to the outhouses back home at night. I’d walk out perfectly calmly and fearlessly, do what I had to do, close the door and run like lightning back to the house. For some reason, it was the coming back that always scared the life out of me. It has always struck me that the return journey is the dangerous one. Going is easy, it’s on the way home that accidents happen. Just when you can almost see the open, welcoming arms and feel the warmth and security of the known destination that disaster is most apt to strike.
Uncle Ernest had learned a trade in the Navy—he was a qualified Steam and Pipe Fitter and was waiting for a job to come through with a big construction company. The company had several government contracts, but the most important was a dam on the San Joaquin River near Fresno, California, which was already well started and construction slated to last several years. If we could just hold on for the next few months, while Uncle Ernest got his toe in the door with the company, he could then get Dad work on the dam as an apprentice Fitter. He gave dad a set of manuals of the trade to study.
Dad and Mom were back at the familiar task of following up leads in the want-ads, finally winding up under Domestic Help Wanted—Couples, which offered the most opportunities. They took a job as live-in maid and chauffeur in Hollywood while Junior and I continued to live in the Model-A on the beach. The experience they’d had in Phoenix and the glowing recommendation Captain J had written made them most desirable. I was thrilled. A movie star? No, something to do with production.
The job was doomed from the start what with Dad ridiculously clad in white jacket trying to remember to serve from the left and remove plates from the right. When he was ordered to wear his hat and heavy wool uniform driving the car in blistering heat, he didn’t say “I don’t have to take that kind of shit from nobody,” he simply pulled up at a stop light on Sunset Boulevard, yanked on the Cadillac’s handbrake, got out and walked away leaving his boss stranded in the back seat. “That’s all she wrote,” he said. “Besides I heard that silly son-of-a-bitch say on the phone that it ought to have been amusing to have a hillbilly as a butler but it had turned out to be a fucking bore.”
That ended our Hollywood career. Dad had heard that there might be work—ranch work, outdoor work, dealing with horses, farming, livestock, things he understood and was comfortable with—north of Los Angeles around Santa Barbara. A lot of rich Easterners had bought up huge ranches—three, four, six thousand acres of mostly virgin land. It was time we got settled somewhere for several reasons but mainly because school was about to start and Mom’s law of keeping us in school was unbreakable. Also, Junior said he was developing curvature of the spine sleeping in the car and my jumping at every sound in the night was beginning to take its toll. We’d begun to bicker and argue. Junior had developed a persistent cold brought on no doubt from the dampness in the night air next to the sea. He didn’t cough but he sniffled with maddening regularity and it drove me crazy in the tight confines of our wheeled bedroom.
We got as far north as Oxnard, about fifty miles along the coast toward Santa Barbara, and decided we’d spend a day or so and check the possibilities. It was farming country and looked promising only we couldn’t find any place to stay. We turned from the want-ads in the local paper to the Rooms To Let section. The rooms listed, we soon discovered, were either taken or in houses so seedy that we’d really rather sleep in the car, curvature of the spine or no.
It was getting dark when we tried the last house on the list of ads. Dad was standing on the porch of a reasonably respectable frame house, ringing the doorbell and we were all holding our breath, praying that this would be it, we were all tired, cross and cranky.
The door opened and a gray-haired lady stuck her head around it. “Yes?”
“We seen your ad here in the paper, ma’am,” Dad said, “and wondered if the room was still available.”
“We had in mind two, three days. Depending on how things work out.”
She squinted toward the car. “That’d be your wife?”
“It’s better be,” Dad said dead earnestly.
She squinted up at him. “Oh, I see,” she made an attempt at a laugh. “You’re making a joke.” She said it as though she’d never heard anybody make one before.
“Well, I mean she was my wife the last time I looked,” Dad expanded on the theme.
“Yes. Well, then there’s just the two of you?”
“And our two boys. Two heads there in the back seat if you look real close. And each head’s got a body to go with it.” Dad was enjoying himself. “We ain’t no traveling freak show.”
“Oh dear!” the lady clutched her breast and took a step back. “Oh dear me, no. Oh no. We can’t have that.” She shook her head and continued her retreat back into the house. “Oh no. No children. We don’t take children. That just won’t do.”
“Well,” Dad seemed to be pondering possible courses of action. “We sure do need a place …” He snapped his fingers as if he’d just come up with a solution. “Why that’s what we’ll do, by God. We’ll just kill the kids.” He turned on his heel and headed down the cement walk with a determined stride. We were trying not to laugh.
“Oh dear,” the little lady called after him. “I wouldn’t go and do that …”
We laughed all the way to Ventura, a bigger town about ten miles on further where we found an auto court and paid the exorbitant dollar-twenty-five for a double room and slept like babies.
We moved from the expensive motor-court to another one on the other side of town called Sleepy-Time, but quickly rechristened Sleazy-Time. The only beneficiaries of the move were our pocketbook and me. Sleazy-Time was next door to my new school, the Luther Burbank Grammar School, but its proximity was lost since I ran all the way around the block to arrive at school from the other direction, successfully denying its existence. Junior’s new school was something new they called Junior High School so he was right at home.
We were in school and Dad was out of work. I knew that the captain had given Dad three month’s salary as severance pay, but that huge three-hundred dollar bankroll was being chewed away at, not nibbled, daily.
Every newspaper and magazine—weekly, daily, monthly, yearly—no matter how specialized like The Citrus Growers Almanac, Horse Breeders Stud News, Daily Diary, Veterinarians’ Vigils, Auto Mechanics, The Hobbyists’ Hobby or Dental Care Monthly—was gone over by each of us. The only job offer we got was from the man at the drug store who, noticing our all-consuming interest in the printed word, talked me and Junior into selling subscriptions to Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post magazines. Canvas bags with Liberty and Post printed on them were slung over our shoulders, an order pad thrust in our hands and off we went every day after school. Around every corner we found somebody else with the same canvas bag over their shoulders. There was an army out selling those magazines. No wonder the signs we knew from Phoenix—No Peddlers—No Soliciting—were as prevalent here as there.
When the canvas bag over our shoulders became so common that the casual observer might have decided it was some sort of mutation endemic to all boys in the area between the ages of ten and fourteen, we decided to resign from the army. Needless to say, we hadn’t sold one subscription. Our commanding officer was reluctant to let us go.
“Just look at them satchels,” the druggist said. “Filthy! And the magazines. What the hell you been doing with them? Sleeping on them? What good are they going to be now. I can’t sell them.”
“Neither could we,” Junior pointed out.
“But you were responsible for this property. You’ll have to pay for the damages. You signed this paper when you checked this stuff out. Here’s your signature.”
“Where?” Junior asked. The man slapped the paper down in front of us. “Oh yes. I see. And my brother’s?” The man riffled through some sheets of paper and slapped a similar one down beside the first. “That’s what we signed?”
“Yes. And it states that you had received in your custody so many copies … and that they would be returned in the same condition … If not, charges for destruction of property will be paid to …”
Junior snatched the papers off the desk and quickly tore them into little bits. “Those mean nothing, and you know it. You’ve got a whole bunch of kids tramping the streets doing your work for you—so many kids that not one would ever be able to make a sale. Besides, there’s a depression on, in case you hadn’t heard. Nobody’s got any money.” He threw the bits of paper up into the air. “Sue us!” he said, his face so red with rage I thought he was going to cry. “Kids of a certain age aren’t supposed to be working anyway. I think I’ll sue you.” He was his Aunt Dell’s own nephew and I cheered him on. “You’re taking advantage of us kids … we don’t have anything … nobody has, except people like you, and then you try to get money out of us after we’ve worn out our shoes dragging those things around.” He took a deep breath and swallowed. “I think … sir, you are an … asshole!” We both turned and ran toward the door. “Worse than Fagin,” he yelled over his shoulder. I had the door open for him as he shouted out one last thing, “But I doubt if assholes read Dickens.” We flew and didn’t stop running until we were at our favorite spot on the pier, down some side steps where we couldn’t be seen. When we’d caught our breath, he said, “I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Well, I won’t tell,” I said. “Besides he is one.”
“I mean saying he’s worse than Fagin. Fagin was a Jew. It could have sounded like I was making fun of Jews.” I was lost and apparently looked it. “Dickens made him awful … Fagin, a wicked man using little boys to steal and you know … You know the book. And he was Jewish which was supposed to make him even worse. I mean, I think that’s why Dickens did it that way.”
“I thought you were sorry you called him an … well, what you did.”
“Oh that,” he stood up and dusted off his bottom. “That doesn’t worry me.” He headed up the steps. “I said ‘sir’ first.”
Junior found the life-saving ad in one of the big Los Angeles Sunday papers after a static week in Ventura. It’s still a mystery to us how he did it. And how it all worked out. In the first place, the ad was in the Engineers Wanted column—we’d already discussed the uselessness of that sort of listing, but Junior had got into the habit of reading the want-ads from start to finish so that’s how he found it. The mystery was how he’d figured it out because it read, “Engineer in Hydrodynamics.” Now that would have been a listing that my eye would have flown past as apparently Mom’s and Dad’s had. Engineer in Hydrodynamics was what Dad was and he got the job.
It was on a big property about ten miles inland from Ventura called Alligator Ranch. Hydrodynamics, Junior quickly found out by checking his dictionary, was nothing more than the simple science of moving water. In this case, irrigating an avocado grove. Acres and acres of avocados and Dad, with his impressive letter from the captain, convinced the owner of the ranch that he could keep the trees as sopping as he wanted them. There was the water, there the ditches, there the little locks or gates to regulate the flow.
“Engineer, my ass,” Dad said. “Anybody could do it.” It seems that the owner of the ranch was aware of that too, but was clever enough to couch the ad in such a way as to eliminate the dullards.
“Mr. Woods,” he’d said, “if you’re smart enough to know what hydrodynamics is, then you’re the man I want. And incidentally, you’re the only one who answered the ad.” He beamed at his own cleverness.
It was a job. And one didn’t look a job in its nomenclature, as it were. The salary was twenty-five cents an hour for a ten-hour day and a nice four-roomed house was provided for the family set right in the middle of a grove of every sort of tree imaginable. We cou
ld pick oranges out the kitchen window without leaning out, lemons and limes pecked at the panes of the living room windows while only a bit of a stretch was needed to reach the avocados from the bedroom window. The outside was perfect. It was the inside that offered the problem. It was empty. Not a stick of furniture. That meant spending a large hunk of whatever was left of the captain’s golden handshake on furnishing the place.
I’d spotted a second-hand furniture store in Ventura and we were able to get the barest necessities with a minimum down-payment once we mentioned Alligator Ranch and Dad’s new boss, Mr. Logan. Mom and I did the choosing of the things and we both seemed slightly surprised when we picked out the same things.
“Tacky,” I’d say and she’d nod.
We picked out a round dining table that made Dad shake his head in disgust but after we’d sanded it and waxed it, he always acted like it was an old family heirloom. It looked as though it could have been. The only really new things were the mattresses. They weren’t Super-Slumber inner-springs, but they were clean. The settee for the living room was a sort of daybed we covered with green corduroy and stacked with cushions. Two ladder-back rockers completed the living room with an occasional table. There was no electricity—a beat-up icebox for two dollars served more as a food cupboard than anything else. Dad swore that there was some secret heating device inside which caused the ice he brought every other day from our nearest town—El Centro—to melt faster than if we left it out on the porch in the sun. The coal-oil cook-stove had an oven, but even by trimming the wicks in the burners with surgical precision, there was always a faint taste of kerosene in everything that had been baked. But we had a place to live and Dad had a job.
In Tall Cotton Page 24