The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  And I lay down by Stoney, who roused a little, recognized me, and fell asleep. Only it was cold; toward morning, deathly cold; and now and then we’d find we were pressed close, rubbing faces and bristles, and we would separate. Until it was too freezing to take account of being strangers—we were trembling too hard—and had to clasp close. I took off my coat and spread it over the both of us to keep in the warmth a little, and even so we lay shivering.

  There was a rooster some brakeman’s family nearby owned, and he had the instinct or the temerariousness to crow in the wet and ashes of the backyard. This morning signal was good enough for us, and we got out of the car. Was it really day? The sky was dripping, and cloud was running as light as smoke; there was pink in it, but whether that was the reflection of the sun or of railroad fire how could you tell? We entered the station where there was a stove of which the bottom skirt was hot to transparency, and we steamed ourselves by it. The heat pushed into your face.

  “Stand me a cup of coffee,” said Stoney.

  It took five such days of travel to get back to Chicago, for I got a train to Detroit by error. A brakeman told us there was a train for Toledo coming soon, and I went to catch it. Stoney came along. Our luck seemed good. Because of the hour this freight was practically empty. We had a car to ourselves. Furniture must have been hauled in it the last trip, for there was clean excelsior on the floor, and we made beds in this paper fleece and lay there sleeping.

  I woke when the angle of the sun was very narrow in the door and guessed it must be noon. If it was that late we must already have gone through Toledo and be crossing Indiana. But these oak woods and the deep-lying farms and scarce cattle were not what I had seen in Indiana crossing it with Joe Gorman. We were going very fast, flying, the locomotive and the empty cars. Then I saw a Michigan license on a truck at a crossing.

  “We must be bound for Detroit; we missed Toledo,” I said.

  As the sun went south it was back of us and not on the left hand; we were going north. There was no getting off either. I sat down, legs hanging at the open door, back-broken and dry, hungry furthermore, and my eyes followed the spin of the fields newly laid out for sowing, the oak woods with hard bronze survivor leaves, and a world of great size beyond, or fair clouds and then of abstraction, a tremendous Canada of light.

  The short afternoon soon darkened; between the trees and stumps it turned blue. The towns became industrial, factories riding up and tank cars and reefers sitting on the spurs. Queer that I didn’t worry more about being taken these hundreds of miles out of my way when there were only a few quarters and some thinner stuff in my pocket, about a buck in all. Riding in this dusk and semiwinter, it was the way paltry and immense were so mixed, perhaps, the jointed spine of train racing and swerving, the steels, rusts, bloodlike paints extended space after space in the sky, and then other existence, space after space.

  Factory smoke was standing away with the wind, and we were in an industrial sub-town—battlefield, cemetery, garbage crater, violet welding scald, mountains of tires sagging, and ashes spuming like crests in front of a steamer, Hooverville crate camps, plague and war fires like the boiling pinnacle of all sackings and Napoleonic Moscow burnings. The freight stopped with a banging and concussion, and we jumped out and were getting over the tracks when someone got us by the shoulders from behind and gave us each a boot in the ass. It was a road dick. He wore a Stetson and a pistol hung on the front of his vest; his whisky face was red as a winter apple and a crazy saliva patch shone on his chin. He yelled, “Next time I’ll shoot the shit out of you!” So we ran, and he threw rocks past us. I wished that I could lay for him till he came off duty and tear his windpipe out.

  However, we were legging it over the rails on the lookout for anything swift that might come down on us out of the steel coldly laid out in the dark and the shrivels of steam and cyclops headlamps, a loose-rolling car. Also the coal rumbled in the hoppers and bounded grim to the ground. We ran, and I didn’t feel angry any more.

  A highway marker told us we were twenty miles from Detroit. As we stood there the fellow came up who had ridden out of Cleveland under the gondola with us, the wolf-looking one. Though it was dark, I spotted him coming in the road. He didn’t seem to have anything special in mind, only to hang around.

  I said to this stocky boy Stoney, “I have a buck to take me back to Chicago, so let’s get some chow.”

  “Hang on to it, we’ll mooch something,” he said. He tried a few stores along the highway and by and by turned up some stale jelly bismarcks.

  A truck carrying sheet-metal took all three of us into town. We lay under the tarpaulin, for it was cold now. The truck dragged up the hills in low gear, and it took hours, with all the stops. Stoney slept. Looking capable of harm, Wolfy didn’t seem to mean us any; he had only tied in with us to be carried along as we were. As we started again in the late night for the city he began to tell me what a rough town it was, that he had heard the cops were mean and everything rugged; he said he had never been here before himself.

  While we penetrated more, by a series of funnels of light, into the city, he made me feel dejected, describing it as he did. Then the truck stopped and the driver let us off. I couldn’t see where; it was empty and silent, past midnight. There was a small restaurant; all else was closed doors. So we went into this joint to ask where we were. It was narrow as a corridor, laid out with oilcloth. The short-order guy told us we were off the center of town, about a mile, if we followed the car line from the next intersection.

  When we came out, there was a squad car waiting with open doors and a cop blocking the way who said, “Get in.”

  Two plainclothesmen were inside, and I had to hold Wolfy on my lap while Stoney lay on the floor. This Stoney was only a young boy. Nothing was said. They brought us into the station—concrete, and small openings everywhere, the bars beginning at the end of a short flight of stairs not far from the sergeant’s desk.

  The cops kept us to one side, for there was another matter being heard, and four or five faces of peculiar night-wildness by the electric globe of the desk, and the sergeant with his large flesh and white fatty face presiding. There was a woman, and it was hard to take in the fact that she had been in the middle of a brawl, she was so modest-looking and dressmakerish, with a green trout knot to her hat. Alongside her there were two men, one with a bloody beehive of bandages, totter-headed, and the other shut up with defiance and meanwhile his hands pressing all his concern to his chest. He was supposed to be the offender. I say supposed because it was the cop who did the explaining, the three principals being deaf-mutes. This guy attacked the other with a hammer, was what he said; he said that the woman was a lousy bitch and didn’t care for whom she spread, and the bastard was the biggest cause of trouble in the deaf-mute community even if she did look like a schoolteacher. I report what the cop told the sergeant.

  “What’s my idea,” he said, “is that this poor jerk thought he was engaged to her and then he caught her with this other joker.”

  “What doin’?”

  “I wouldn’t know. It depends on how much of a sorehead he is. But with the pants off, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I wonder what makes ‘em so randy. They fight more about love than the dagoes,” said the sergeant. His face had a one-eye emphasis, and his cheek was so much rough wall. The arm he had up his sleeve was very thick; I wouldn’t have liked to see it used. “Why do they have t’be all the time hittin’? Maybe because they talk with their hands.”

  Stoney and Wolfy grinned, wishing to be of the same humor as the cops.

  “Well, is anything broke under them bandages?”

  “They took a couple of stitches on his dome.”

  The bloody-haired topple-bandage was pushed into the light where the sergeant could see.

  “Well,” he said when he had looked, “take an’ lock ‘em up till we can see if we can get an interpreter tomorrow, and if we can’t, then just kick ‘em out in the morning. What would they d
o with this cocky in the workhouse? Anyway, a night in the clink will show them they aren’t alone by themselves in the world and can’t be carryin’ on as if they was.”

  We were next, and I had meantime been worrying about a connection between Joe Gorman’s arrest and our being picked up, but there was no such connection. There was only that shirt in the back seat of the stolen Buick to trace me by. The laundry mark. That was farfetched, but I didn’t know what else to think. I was relieved when I heard what they had us in for: theft of automobile parts from wrecking yards.

  “We’ve never been in Detroit before,” I said. “We just arrived in town.”

  “Yeah, where from?”

  “Cleveland. We’re hitch-hiking.”

  “You’re a sonofabitch liar. You belong to the Foley gang and you been stealing car parts. But we caught up with you. We’ll get all you guys.”

  I said, “But we’re not even from Detroit. I’m from Chicago.”

  “Where you goin’?”

  “Home.”

  “That’s a fine way to get to Chicago from Cleveland, by way of this town. Your story stinks.” He started on Stoney. “Where’re you gonna say you come from?”

  “Pennsy.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “NearWilkes-Barre.”

  “And where you headin’ for?”

  “Nebraska, to study to be a vet’narian.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “About dogs and horses.”

  “About Fords and Chevvies, you mean, you little asswipe hoodlum! And you, where’s home for you, what’s your story?” He started on Wolfy.

  “I’m from Pennsylvania too.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Around Scranton. It’s a little town.”

  “How little is it?”

  “About five hundred population or so.”

  “And what’s the name of it?”

  “It ain’t much of a name.”

  “I bet. Well, tell me, what is it?”

  He said, his eyes moving tensely, which was poison to his effort to smile easily. “The name of it is Drumtown.”

  “It must be a tough little hole to breed up rats like you. Okay, we’ll see where it is on the map.” He opened his drawer.

  “It ain’t on the map. It’s too small.”

  “That’s okay, if it has a name it’ll be on my map. It’s got them all.”

  “What I mean is it ain’t really incorporated. It’s just a little burg and hasn’t got around to be incorporated yet.”

  “What do they do there?”

  “Dig up a little coal. Nothin’ much.”

  “Hard coal or soft coal?”

  “Both,” said Wolfy, sinking his head and still grinning a little; but his underlip was somewhat withdrawn from his teeth and his sinews were out.

  “You belong to Foley’s gang, friend,” the sergeant said.

  “No, I never been in this town before.”

  “Fetch me Jimmy,” the sergeant instructed one of the cops.

  Jimmy came, slow and old, from the narrow stairs of the lower cells; his flesh was like a stout old woman’s; he was wearing cloth slippers and a front-buttoned sweater holding up his wide breasts; he seemed to die a little with every breath. But his eyes were as explicit as otherwise everything was vague about this gray, yellow, and white-haired head, bent with weakness. The eyes, however, trained so they were foreign to anything but their long-time function, they had no personal regard. This Jimmy gazed on Stoney and me and passed us and his look rested on Wolfy. To him he said, “You was in here three years ago. You rolled a guy, and you got six months. It won’t be three years yet till May. One month more.”

  This great classifying organ of a police brain!

  “Well, Bumhead, Pennsylvania?” said the sergeant.

  “That’s right, I did six months. But I don’t know Foley, that’s the truth, and never stole car parts. I don’t know anything about cars.”

  “Lock ‘em all up.”

  We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such objects of harm. But for me that wasn’t what it was for, but to have the bigger existence taking charge of your small things, and making you learn forfeits as a sign that you aren’t any more your own man, in the street, with the contents of your pockets your own business: that was the purpose of it. So we gave over our stuff and were taken down, past cells and zoo-rustling straw where some prisoner got off his sack for a look through the bars. I saw the wounded deaf-mute like a magus holding his head, on a bunk. We were marched to the end of the row where the great memory-man sat sleeping, or perhaps he was only at dim rest all night, in a chair below a fish tail of ribbon tied into the grill of a ventilator. They stuck us in a large cell, a yell going up over us, “We got no room. We got no more room!” and obscene lip sounds and razzberries and flushing of the toilet, ape-wit and defiances. It really was a crowded cell, but they pushed us in anyway, and we did as well as we could, squatting on the floor. The other mute was in here, sitting by the feet of a drunk, crouched up as if in a steerage. An enormous light was on at all hours. There was something heavy about it, like the stone rolled in front of the tomb.

  Then by the wall, at day, a big dull rolling began, choking, the tube-clunk of trucks and heavy machine fuss, and also the needle-mouth speed of trolleys, fast as dragonflies.

  I must say I didn’t get any great shock from this of personal injustice. I wanted to be out and on my way, and that was nearly all. I suffered over Joe Gorman, caught and beat.

  However, as I felt on entering Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a darkness. It is for everyone. You don’t, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it like a barbershop “September Morn.” Nor are lowered into it with visitor’s curiosity, as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to observe the fishes. Nor are lifted straight out after an unlucky tumble, like a Napoleon from the mud of the Arcole where he had been standing up to his thoughtful nose while the Hungarian bullets broke the clay off the bank. Only some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the admiration of the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed, street-pounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some under a coal-sucking Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving Calcutta midnight, who very well know where they are.

  In the dinky grayness and smell of morning, after giving us coffee and bread, they let Stoney and me out; Wolfy was kept on suspicion.

  The cops said to us, “Get out of town. We give you a flop last night, but next time you’ll get a vagrancy hung on you.” There was a dawn smokiness and scratchiness in the station as the patrolmen off the night beat were taking a load off themselves, unstrapping guns, lifting off hats, sitting down to write out reports. Was there a station next door to Tobit, the day the angel visited, it would have been no different.

  We went along with the main traffic and ended in Campus Martius, which is not like the other Champs de Mars I know. Here all was brick, shaly with oil smoke and the shimmying gas of cars.

  We started off to ride to city limits on the trolleys; and then it happened that the conductor shook my shoulder to warn me that we were at a transfer point, and I jumped out thinking that Stoney was back of me, but I saw him still asleep by the window as the car passed with air-shut doors, and pounding on the glass didn’t wake him. Then I waited the better part of an hour before going on to the end of the line where the highway was. I stayed there till nearly noon. He maybe thought I had shaken him off, which wasn’t so. I felt despondent that I had lost him.

  At last I started to flag rides. First a truck took me to Jackson. I found a cheap flop there. Next afternoon a salesman for a film company picked me up. He was going to Chicago.

  Chapter 10

  WHEN EVENING CAME on we were te
aring out of Gary and toward South Chicago, the fire and smudge mouth of the city gorping to us. As the flamy bay shivers for home-coming Neapolitans. You enter your native water like a fish. And there sits the great fish god or Dagon. You then bear your soul like a minnow before Dagon, in your familiar water.

  I knew I wasn’t coming back to peace and an easy time. In rising order of difficulty, there’d be the Polish housekeeper, always crabbing about money; next Mama, certain to feel my unreliability; and Simon who’d have been storing up something for me. I was ready to hear hard words from him; I felt I deserved some for going off on this trip. I also had a few to answer with, about the telegram. But I wasn’t approaching the usual kind of family fight with its hot feelings and wrangled-out points; it was something different and much worse.

  A new, strange Polish woman who spoke no English came to the door. I thought the old housekeeper had quit and this one had replaced her, but it was odd how the new woman had filled the kitchen with bleeding hearts, crucifixes, and saints. Of course, if she had to have them in her place of work, Mama couldn’t see them anyhow. But there were also little children, and I wondered if Simon had taken in an entire family; and then, from the way the woman kept me standing, I began to grasp that this was no longer our flat, and an older girl wearing the dress of St. Helen’s parochial school came to tell me that her father had bought the furniture and taken over the flat from the man who owned it. That was Simon.