70
PARTISAN REVIEW
me like Murf'll have to cook this winter." He glared at them
as if they were all in league against him, flung his head up as if
to rip them up the belly, and stalked off.
Steve grunted, "Hell with him. There's jobs."
Elsa had turned white. "It ain't so easy. !-you've got
the same job for years." Her husband working in the foundry
lost his job. She had to go back to work in the slaughterhouse
again linking sausages, coming home with pay checks snipped off
always (now they'd take off
5
cents, now a dollar) mice and
bugs in her clothing, the strawboss finally getting at the women
who were fat. "Fat asses," he called them. In bed that's what
they want, but in the factory, no. The women caught between
two knives. How she had to starve herself, her German girl
friend using rubber pads and drugs. They were fired anyway.
Her husband disappeared. She got a waitress job working
nights. With the Blue Eagle, the boss charged waitresses for
meals, fired her. Then her spunky girl friend and she bought
overalls to keep the cold and everything else out and rode the
freights. She looked at the men hatefully. In New York they
waited around for jobs, once sleeping all night on the pavement
to be first in line, once in a subway with newspapers round their
faces like chickens with their heads chopped off. Her friend
was weak from reducing drugs, couldn't stand it any longer, took
sick, and died in the hospital ...
She dug her fist into her lap. "Who's afraid of work?
I
-I want to live. Was always going to the movies back home,
now ain't been in one so long. It's-." She banged the screen
door and ran upstairs.
Mule had his face muzzled with his hands. His brother
walked around as if he had a worm in his head.
Old Murf said, "We got to look out for number
1.
If
it
was a factory, say, where a boss is trying to frog a girl clerk or
cut her pay, everybody together can kind of slam him against
the wall." The old man lay back on the grass as if his last
thread had snapped.
Steve went looking for the boss. The boss said quickly,
"Movies? I'm using the car, going tonight to a bank meeting.
I'll t'ake her along to the town movie, pick her up way back."
Steve gawked and walked off, the boss's laugh like a hornet
plugged into his ear.
The boss yelled up at her window. He sat in his car blow·
