MIGRATORY WORKER
John Dos Passos
I
F SOME CRAZY GALOOT
had walked up to Ike Hall while he was
sitting under the watertank at Ash Forks waiting for them to make
up a train of empty orecars and told him that the first thing he was
going to do when he hit Phoenix was get married, Ike would have
called him a goddam liar.
Ike Hall felt sick and tired of the whole woman business. He'd
been working in a pick and shovel gang on an irrigation project near
Needles in a temperature of 110 in the shade, all right for spicks but
no work for a white man; his neck was butned till it was like a piece
of raw steak, and the hard water had brought back an old dose he'd
thought he'd been cured of for years. The foreman had told him
about a crackerjack clapdoctor in Phoenix who was part Indian,
"and you know, son, the injuns are hell's own physicians," so Ike
had drawn his pay and rolled his bundle and hopped a fast eastbound
freight on the trunkline. But waiting at Ash Forks he got to feeling
sick and feverish; hell, he'd done too much of that in his time, so
when a passenger train came along he went to the ticketoffice and
bought him a ticket like a respectable citizen instead of waiting for
the empty orecars they/ kept shunting back and forth on the siding.
Three things he was through with, he told himself as he sat in the
smokingcar rolling himself cigarette after cigarette from his packet of
Bull Durham, were easy women, hopping freights and pick and shovel
work.
He got to talking with a sallowfaced guy with a threedays'
growth of beard who was dressed in a dusty blueserge suit with dand·
ruff on the shoulders and said he was an electrician on his way from
Albuquerque to take a job with the electrical company in Phoenix on
account of the big money they were paying. "Do an' know why it is,"
the guy said, "but there ain't an electrician in the state of Arizona."
Just a week before Ike had been helping the foreman wire the new
bunkhouse so he decided that maybe he was an electrician too. Ike
asked the guy did he think he could get him a job and the guy said
sure, anybody could tell by the cut of Ike's jib he was mechanical.
"Would he join the union?" said the guy. "Sure, I'm a union man,"
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