Joe Hill Read Free

Just boomin’ around, you meet stiffs from all over, and all kinds of them are fine guys.”
    By turning his head a little Joe could see the boy’s face with the last dying glow of the coke oven on it. It was a good-natured kid face. He had a lot to learn.
    “Just for instance,” the kid was saying, “who’d ever expect to light in a place like this? You blow in from somewhere, I blow in from the woods, we both know somebody that knows Bottles, and bingo, here we sit like millionaires on a private yacht.” He laughed and stretched out flatter in the tilted chair with his arms locked over his head.
    Joe said nothing. He watched the delayed coming of the freighter’s wave. The gasworks lights bent like glowing rods in the water, and then the smooth wave reached the floathouse, shouldering it heavily upward and passing under and losing itself against the shore. The following waves rocked them, slapping under the flat hull.
    “I’m sort of surprised,” the kid said. “I expected to run into all kinds of rough stuff on the road. You know the kind of stories you hear. I thought I’d be runnin’ into nothin’ but a lot of stew-bums and fruits. But Jesus, it’s mainly nice guys you meet, just ordinary guys like you are yourself.”
    He yawned again, and the front legs of his chair hit the deck. “Well, it’s a great life,” he said, and yawned a third time, not so convincingly. “Always some’n new,” he said. “You gonna ship out, or stick around Seattle, or what?”
    It was only because he had been thinking about the same thing that Joe bothered to answer. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll head south.”
    “Yeah,” the kid said vaguely. He hung around, leaning against the wall. “The shark was signin’ ’em up for a lumber camp over by Redmond the other day. You know anything about Redmond? That’s the Snohomish outfit, I think.” When Joe was silent he went on, “Hell, I don’t know whether to go back to the woods or not. That’s a rough god damn job. I walked out the last camp I was at.” For a moment he waited, as if expecting Joe to say something or act surprised. His laugh was short, almost a giggle. “I told the boss to kiss me behind and I up and beat it.” He labored to a halt, but then beat his way ahead again, fumbling and uncertain. “If I had my druthers I’d stay right here on Bottles’ yacht and play jungle-buzzard all summer, but I don’t s’pose Bottles’d want boarders that long.”
    Joe made the indeterminate sound again, wishing the kid didn’t insist on being so important to himself. The people he met, the places he went, the plans he made, what he said to the boss. Whatdifference did it make? He could get to be a pest, making adventures out of every two-bit thing that happened to him.
    Now the kid yawned a last time, almost with determination; his feet shuffled determinedly on deck. “Well, guess I’ll go see if Bottles has got paper and a pencil. I haven’t wrote a letter to my Sis for six weeks.”
    “You better do that,” Joe said.
    “She takes an interest in what I do,” the boy said. “She sits there in Akron, ironin’ shirts in a laundry all day, and the places I get around to seem pretty exciting to her. If I know I’m gonna be someplace around a certain time I give her a general-delivery address, and she writes me these big long letters. If I let her, she’d quit tomorrow and hit the road out here. That old laundry stuff has got her goat pretty bad.”
    “Yeah,” Joe said. “Well, you go write her.”
    Eventually the kid broke his embarrassed hanging around and went inside. After a minute the lamp bloomed yellow, pushing light through the window back of Joe and showing the worn deck planking, the unpainted stern rail, the broken armchair where the kid had sat. Across on the island the gasworks twinkled on, as remote as the stars, and as incomprehensibly conducted. The few lights that had shone high on the hill had gone out. The night air was growing