MIGRATORY WORKER
17
said Ike. "Shake," said the guy. "I'll take you around to see the bird
who does the hiring."
That was how Ike met Jinny Connor. He'd been sent out one
morning with his toolkit on his shoulder to see what the trouble was
with the lights in a row of unpainted bungalows on the dusty hill
acrossthe river. In the first of them there was this pale looking girl
with big brown eyes and brown curls. She wore a blue apron and
was washing dishes in the kitchen. She was shy but mighty civil
spoken.First thing Ike did when he started monkeying with the wiring
wasgive himself a shock that just about dropped him to the floor and
blewout the main fuse into the bargain. The girl gave a yell when
she saw the flash. A hunched old woman with a face that would
curdlemilk shuffled in from the other room and said she smelt smoke
and was he trying to set the house on fire and please to be quiet
because the mister was sick in bed. Ike took off his cap and said he
wassorry, ma'am, but he'd had to test the insulation. The old woman
bawled the girl out for not getting the kitchen cleaned up quicker
and shu~ed out into the front room again.
Ike's eye caught the girl's and they got to laughing. It took him
all day to finish up the job because he had to learn the business as
hewent along and by the time the job was finished he knew all about
her, how her folks were dead and she had to live with her aunt and
an uncle who was a lunger and how the old woman drove her like
a nigger and how she wanted to run away and get a job waiting in a
cafeonly she was scared to. When Ike got back to the office the boss
bawledhim out for being so long on this one job, but Ike didn't give
a damn, he was just figuring how he could fix it to go out there again
next day.
He did what the doc had told him about laying off the women
until he'd dried him up, although the married women in some of the
houseshe went to sure did make passes at him. In the old days when
hewas out looking for it, he'd never known you could get it so easy.
Evenings when Jinny could slip away from the old folks who
watched her like a hawk they would meet down at the drugstore at
the corner and walk out together, just like brother and sister. Her
real name was Virginia. The first time they walked out she put her
headon his shoulder and said she trusted him because he was such a
cleanlookingboy or maybe because his eyes were blue. He said he
gues~edhe was
as
much of a bum as the next guy but he knew a nice
girlwhen he saw one.
There wasn't any place they could go because all the hangouts
weretoo tough to take a nice girl like that to, so they would scramble
overthe rocks and along irrigation ditches in the valley of the Salt
