The Doomsters Read Free Page A

queer air of being confined, almost as though he were trapped in the past, or in himself. He said:
    “It was a rough two years, for all of us. Especially for Mildred. She did her best to put a good face on it, but it wasn’t what she had planned to do with her life, keeping house for in-laws in a dead country hole. And I was no use to her. For months I was so depressed that I could hardly bear to get up and face the daylight. What there was of it. I know it can’t be true, but the way I remember those months, it was cloudy and dark every day. So dark that I could hardly see to shave when I got up at noon.
    “The other people in the house were like gray ghosts around me, even Mildred, and I was the grayest ghost of all. Even the house was rotting away. I used to wish for an earthquake, to knock it down and bury us all at once—Father and me and Mildred and Jerry and Zinnie. I thought a good deal about killing myself, but I didn’t have the gumption.
    “If I’d had any gumption, or any sense, I’d have gone for treatment then. Mildred wanted me to, but I was too ashamed to admit I needed it. Father wouldn’t have stoodfor it, anyway. It would have disgraced the family. He thought psychiatry was a confidence game, that all I really needed was hard work. He kept telling me that I was pampering myself, just as Mother had, and that I’d come to the same bad end if I didn’t get out in the open air and make a man of myself.”
    He snickered dolefully, and paused. I wanted to ask him how his mother had died. I hesitated to. The boy was digging pretty deep as it was, and I didn’t want him to break through into something he couldn’t handle. Since he’d told me of his earlier breakdown and the suicidal depression that followed it, my main idea was to get him back to the hospital in one mental piece. It was only a few miles more to the turnoff, and I could hardly wait.
    “Eventually,” Carl was saying, “I did go to work on the ranch. Father had been slowing down, with some sort of heart condition, and I took over some of his supervisory duties. I didn’t mind the work itself, out in the groves with the pickers, and I suppose it did me some good at that. But in the long run it only led to more trouble.
    “Father and I could never see eye to eye on anything. He was in orange-growing to make money, the more money the better. He never thought in terms of the human cost. I couldn’t stand to see the way the orange-pickers were treated. Whole families, men and women and kids, herded into open trucks and hauled around like cattle. Paid by the box, hired by the day, then shunted on their way. A lot of them were wetbacks, without any legal rights. Which suited Father fine. It didn’t suit me at all. I told Father what I thought of his lousy labor policy. I told him that this was a civilized country in the middle of the twentieth century and he had no right to push people around like peons, cut them off from employment if they asked for a living wage. I told him he was a spoiledold man, and I wasn’t going to sit idly by and let him oppress the Mexican people, and defraud the Japanese!”
    “The Japanese?” I said.
    Carl’s speech had been coming in a faster rhythm, so fast that I could hardly follow it. There was an evangelical light in his eye. His face was flushed and hot.
    “Yes. I’m ashamed to say it, but my father cheated some of his own best friends, Japanese people. When I was a kid, before the War, there used to be quite a few of them in our county. They had hundreds of acres of truck gardens between our ranch and town. They’re nearly all gone now. They were driven out during the war, and never came back. Father bought up their land at a few cents on the dollar.
    “I told him when I got my share of the ranch, I’d give those people their property back. I’d hire detectives to trace them and bring them back and give them what was theirs. I intended to do it, too. That’s why I’m not going to let Jerry