THE HUNT
Ben Field
''I
F IT SAID ON THE
agenda whoring and booze, it would be
a hell of a lot easier."
Lanky Schneider stopped his pacing. He glared at the
punchswollt"n face, the heavy shoulders, the paws flung like
guards over the knees.
Gordon
~miled
back at him. "Now if it was kicking the
lousy system like a football into the coffin corner, I'd be all
there. Or if it was swapping punches. But it ain't so simple.
The strings are tight. You got to do this that way, and that this
way.
If
the cops arrest a bunch of little comrades with you and
beat hell out of them, you got to stand on the sidelines.
If
you
fight, you get hell bawled out of you."
"\Vhy shouldn't you?'' Lanky's long nose reared further
back from his ragged, worried moustache. "What's the sense in
giving them the chance to smash that bullethead of yours? What
do you prove by flying off the handle? We've got to have
discipline. The party is no party for whoring and boozing. You
disappear whenever you damn please. We find you buried in a
whore or swilling till the booze drips out of your pants."
"It's hard, Lanky. I come from the other class."
"I'm talking about you. To hell with your class."
"That's what I say. But it's hard to separate me from my
class. I'm a fellow with a past. Look at it."
Lanky faughed in disgust. He stared out thru the open
window of the Workers Center. The city's tinkering came in on
the spring air.
"Look, Lanky. I got the clap when I was r 6. I got
kicked out of prep school and college. I run off to the wheat–
fields one summer. I got a job in a lumber camp and got my
foot smashed to hell and pruned off. I got shipped back to
Pennsylvania, to the National Farm School. There who should
rome along but a senior with a long nose and misplaced eyebrow
to start a strike against corned beef and cabbage. And when
37
