Never Love a Stranger (24 page)
It was still snowing when I woke up. I turned out of the flophouse and went up towards Sixth Avenue to the agencies. At each corner as I walked I saw a man, generally with his overcoat collar turned up around his neck and a cap pulled up around his neck
That night I slept in a hallway, and when I woke up in the morning the snow had stopped falling. It was piled high in front of some stores where the side-walks had been cleaned, and everywhere men and women were pushing and shovelling snow from the street into the gutter.
I stopped in front of a new-stand on the corner and read the headlines. They said: “Expect 30,000 Work On Snow”. That gave me an idea. I stopped in a restaurant near there and got rolls and coffee for a nickel, for breakfast.
I went to the Department of Sanitation office on Eighth Street for a job on the snow. But the line of vags there was a block long, and while I watched them, it kept growing larger and larger. I took a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it and walked towards the Third Avenue El. The exit gate was closed, so I invested my last nickel in a ride uptown.
I left the train at 125th Street. At a D.S. office on West 126th Street I got a job and was sent right out with a crew of men to work. The man in charge of about fifteen men was a well-fed-looking Italian street cleaner. We all looked at him rather enviously, thinking how well off and contented he must be to have a good, steady-paying, city job.
“All right,” he said, “Yousa fellas afolla me.”
I had a big scoop-shaped snow shovel, which I threw over my shoulder and followed the rest of the men. At 135th Street and Amsterdam Avenue we stopped.
Big trucks were lumbering up and down the sides of the street, pushing snow into great piles. There were other men working out in the middle of the gutter, shovelling snow into a manhole. At the far end of the block more men were throwing snow up into a big dump truck.
The Italian in charge of our group led us into the middle of the road where the other men were shovelling snow down the manhole. He spoke a few words of Italian to the man in charge of the others, and then the other group picked up their shovels and walked down the hill.
My job was to push snow up to the manhole, where other men were waiting to shovel it down. When the foreman thought we had satisfactorily started our work, he left us and went to a big fire burning at the side of the road down the block, where a number of D.S. men were standing. They would stand there, warming their behinds against the fire, and call orders to their groups.
One of the two men that were working right next to me was a thin-lipped, pasty-faced Irishman, and the other was a short, powerfully-built black man. Most of the men wore lumber jackets or sweaters or coats, and gloves to keep their hands warm. I didn’t feel the cold so much, but my hands got pretty stiff, and soon my shoes and feet were soaking wet. When my fingers were so cold that they hurt, I put down my shovel and went over to the fire where the D.S. men were standing. They fell silent as I approached them, and my foreman, who was smoking a Guinea stinker, watched me closely.
“Wassa da matta, boy,” he asked, “you a lazy kid?”
“Hell!” I said, showing him my hands, “my fingers are froze.”
I put my hands over the fire. The foreman reached into his pocket and took out an old pair of work gloves which he gave me.
“Thanks,” I said, and put them on.
There were several holes in them but they were warm. I left the fire and picked up my shovel and went back to work.
About an hour later the Mick said to me: “A few minutes more and we knock off for lunch.” Looking enviously at the D.S. men standing around the fire, he said: “Just watch them babies scatter when the head fink comes around.”
And sure enough, a few minutes later a small coupé pulled up and a man got out who seemed to be some kind of a boss. As soon as he showed his nose outside his car, all the foremen went over to their groups and got busy shouting orders and directions.
A whistle blew and our foreman said: “All right, boys, putta the tools by the truck and ’a go to lunch.”
He turned and walked away.
Some of the men began taking packages of sandwiches out of their coat pockets and scattering to different hallways on the street to eat their lunch, while others headed for near-by restaurants and lunch counters.
It was about two o’clock. I walked quite a way down the block before I found a doorway empty so that I could get in it and out of the cold.
I walked all the way back in the hallway and sat down on the steps. I took a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it, and the moment I relaxed I began to shiver. It wasn’t that I felt cold or particularly hungry, but without something to do, my body just seemed to feel the cold more intensely.
A few minutes later the hall door opened and the man who worked next to me came into the hallway followed by a coloured boy about my size. They didn’t see me at first since the hallway was dim.
The older man said: “What did Mom send for lunch, Sam?” “Y’all got some hot soup an’ baloney sandwiches an’ coffee,” the kid replied.
“Man, I’m sho’ hungry!” said the older man. “Let’s go sit on the steps while I eat.”
They walked back towards me and stopped short when they saw me sitting there on the steps.
“What chu doin’ here?” the older man asked. “Smokin’,” I replied.
“Ain’t chu eatin’?” he asked. “I’m not hungry,” I said.
They sat down on the steps beside me. The older man tore open a paper bag and took out two milk bottles—one half filled with soup, the other half filled with coffee—and several sandwiches. The smell of the hot soup made my mouth fill with water.
“Ya workin’ hard?” asked the kid.
“Nope, Sam,” said the older man. Then turning to me, he said: “This yere’s my kid brother. He brought m’ lunch.”
“That’s good,” I said.
He began to drink the soup out of a bottle. Holding the bottle against his lips, he
leaned his head back and the soup just seemed to go down his throat in great gulps. I moved several steps up the stairway to give him room, and looked down at him. His brother was watching me, and I tried to look in another direction so that I wouldn’t see him eating. The cigarette burned down to my fingers and I threw it over the banister without putting it out.
As if some unspoken word had passed from the boy to the older man, the older man turned around and looked at me. “Man, I’m not as hungry as I thought I was,” he said. Then turning to the boy, he said: “Mom gave me too much soup. I can’t eat all this.” And he turned back to me. “Why don’t you drink it? It’s a shame to let it go to waste.”
I looked at him for a minute, not saying anything. Then I took the bottle out of his hand. “Thanks,” I mumbled, and began drinking the soup. I don’t know what kind of soup it was, but it was good. A few minutes later while I was still drinking the soup, he reached behind him without looking around and held out a sandwich in his hand towards me. When I took the sandwich from his hand, it seemed that we had made a bargain. He knew, instinctively perhaps, of the circumstances and condition I was in, and with the extreme gentleness of the really simple and without trying to make me uncomfortable, he offered me help. I didn’t utter any further thanks. It was unnecessary. He didn’t expect any.
When we finished the coffee I reached in my pocket and took out three cigarettes.
Putting one in my mouth, I offered each of them one.
The boy shook his head. The older fellow explained to me: “He’s goin’ to high school— he’s on the track team”; and took one himself.
I lit his cigarette and then mine, and we sat back smoking. “You in New York long?” the old fellow asked.
“No,” I answered; “Just got in yesterday.” “Damned cold out today!” he said.
I grunted: “Uh-huh.”
“My name is Tom Harris,” he said.
I told him mine. We sat there without saying anything for a few minutes, and then we heard a whistle blowing in the street.
“That’s us,” Tom said. “Let’s go!” As I started to get up, he said to Sam: “Give him your coat. You’ll be in the house all day and you won’t need it. I’ll brine it back tonight.”
Without saying anything, Sam took his coat off and handed it to me. I put it on. I don’t think I could have thanked him if I tried. I just walked out into the street ahead of him and up to the gang already assembling in the middle of the block.
The afternoon passed by a little more quickly than the morning had. I began to feel somehow that the day would turn out right. In the evening just before we knocked off, the coloured fellow asked me: “Where you staying?”
I said: “I haven’t got a place yet.”
“Why don’t you come over to my place for a couple of nights—at least until you get paid?”
“You might not have any room,” I said weakly. “Sho’, we have!” he said. “We got a big place.”
And suddenly the day was over. We followed the foreman back to the office and handed in our tools. The coloured fellow tapped me on the shoulder and I walked with him up to 126th Street and into a tenement between Convent and St. Nicholas’ Avenue, where I saw their “big place”. We entered a dimly-lit hallway. Somehow, on walking into the hall you’d know, maybe by the shadows or by the odour of pork or even by the dim lights that hung high on the ceiling, that black people lived there. We went up about three landings, and I followed Tom into one of the apartments.
The door opened up into a kitchen, in which there were a table, some chairs, a dirty wooden closet, and a coal stove, on top of which a big pot was cooking. There was a grey-haired coloured woman of about fifty standing in one corner of the room.
Tom went over to her and said: “Mom, this is Francis Kane. He hasn’t any place to stay and he’s gonna stay here with us tonight.”
I didn’t know it at that time, but that night lasted almost a month. She came close to me and looked at my face and I watched her. I don’t think that we were going to pass judgment on each other, but I knew that unless she said it was all right, I couldn’t stay.
For a few minutes she looked at me, and then she said: “Sit down here, Frankie. We’re goin’ to eat now.”
I thanked her and we had supper and then sat at the table. The heat from the stove began to make me drowsy, and my head and eyes felt so heavy, I had to keep shaking my head in order to stay awake.
It was about seven o’clock when she said, “Tom, you and your friend better go to sleep because at ten-thirty you have to be over at the other station.”
I looked up at Tom. He explained: “I kin get night work in the snow at 129th and Third. They don’t know I’m working in the daytime over here. You want to come along?”
“Yes,” I answered, “thanks.”
“I can get you on,” he said, smiling.
I didn’t see the younger boy anywhere around, and on asking his brother where he was, found out that the kid was working in a near-by store in the afternoon.
We went to sleep in a big double bed in a room where there was another bed, which he told me was his sister’s.
I took off my clothes and shoes and stretched out. The next thing I knew, someone was shaking my shoulders and saying: “Get up, boy, get up! Time to go to work.”
I opened my eyes and sat up. I could hardly see in the room because there was no light in it—light came from the next room into this just through a cut in the wall. Half asleep, I began to dress. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw the other bed was occupied. I saw the head of a girl just outside the blanket, and the whites of her eyes as she watched me move around the room. I felt no self-consciousness, and when I left the room I said good-night to her. She didn’t say anything. I followed Tom down the street, both of us carrying the lunch that she had packed for us. We worked until five- thirty in the morning. The work was about the same as I had done earlier in the day, and at five-thirty, when we quit, we went back up to Tom’s place and went right to sleep. At eight-thirty we got up again and worked the day through.
A
LTOGETHER
we worked two and a half days before we were laid off. And when we got paid I actually received pay for five days’ labour because I had worked two shifts. I had
$17.50, and I think when I walked back from the paymaster I felt as if New York was my oyster. It wasn’t so hard to make money or find work. For the first time in weeks I became aware of other people —not regarding them as a class set aside or apart from myself, but thinking of myself as one of them. I too had worked—for a while.
I stopped off at a hock shop and bought myself a suit, two shirts, an overcoat, and a pair of shoes, all second-hand, for eleven dollars. I left my old clothes there.
When I got to Tom’s place, I went over to Mrs. Harris and offered her half of what I had left, because she had let me stay there, but she wouldn’t take it. She said I’d need it. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon when Tom and I went right to sleep. We didn’t wake up until about nine that night. When we got up we ate and while we were eating their sister came in, and for the first time I saw what she was like. She was about fourteen, with hard, straight, black hair that was combed down in back of her ears. She had a long face and a dark-brown skin, and wore a purple-coloured lipstick. Her shoulders were wide, her arms and legs thin and slightly muscular. She sat down at the table and
spoke to Tom. “You all laid off?”
“Uh-huh,” said Tom, “we sho’ is!”
“What you going to do now?” she asked him. But she didn’t mean him; she meant me. Tom didn’t answer her.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Guess I’ll go out and get a job.”
She tossed her head. “The hell you will! There ain’t no jobs to be had nowhere.” “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I got this one easy enough.”
“You was lucky,” she said, “but you ain’t going to be that lucky now.” “Where’s Mom?” Tom asked her, tactfully changing the subject.