The Short Novels of John Steinbeck Read Free Page A

two houses.”
    “Whorehouses?” Pilon asked hopefully. “Thou art a drunken liar,” he continued.
    “No, Pilon. I tell the truth. The viejo died. I am the heir. I, the favorite grandson.”
    “Thou art the only grandson,” said the realist Pilon. “Where are these houses?”
    “You know the viejo ’s house on Tortilla Flat, Pilon?”
    “Here in Monterey?”
    “Yes, here in Tortilla Flat.”
    “Are they any good, these houses?”
    Danny sank back, exhausted with emotion. “I do not know. I forgot I owned them.”
    Pilon sat silent and absorbed. His face grew mournful. He threw a handful of pine needles on the fire, watched the flames climb frantically among them and die. For a long time he looked into Danny’s face with deep anxiety, and then Pilon sighed noisily, and again he sighed. “Now it is over,” he said sadly. “Now the great times are done. Thy friends will mourn, but nothing will come of their mourning.”
    Danny put down the bottle, and Pilon picked it up and set it in his own lap.
    “Now what is over?” Danny demanded. “What do you mean?”
    “It is not the first time,” Pilon went on. “When one is poor, one thinks, ‘If I had money I would share it with my good friends.’ But let that money come and charity flies away. So it is with thee, my once-friend. Thou art lifted above thy friends. Thou art a man of property. Thou wilt forget thy friends who shared everything with thee, even their brandy.”
    His words upset Danny. “Not I,” he cried. “I will never forget thee, Pilon.”
    “So you think now,” said Pilon coldly. “But when you have two houses to sleep in, then you will see. Pilon will be a poor paisano, while you eat with the mayor.”
    Danny arose unsteadily and held himself upright against a tree. “Pilon, I swear, what I have is thine. While I have a house, thou hast a house. Give me a drink.”
    “I must see this to believe it,” Pilon said in a discouraged voice. “It would be a world wonder if it were so. Men would come a thousand miles to look upon it. And besides, the bottle is empty.”

2
    How Pilon Was Lured by Greed of Position to Forsake Danny’s Hospitality.
    The lawyer left them at the gate of the second house and climbed into his Ford and stuttered down the hill into Monterey.
    Danny and Pilon stood in front of the paintless picket fence and looked with admiration at the property, a low house streaked with old whitewash, uncurtained windows blank and blind. But a great pink rose of Castile was on the porch, and grandfather geraniums grew among the weeds in the front yard.
    “This is the best of the two,” said Pilon. “It is bigger than the other.”
    Danny held a new skeleton key in his hand. He tiptoed over the rickety porch and unlocked the front door. The main room was just as it had been when the viejo had lived there. The red rose calendar for 1906, the silk banner on the wall, with Fighting Bob Evans looking between the superstructures of a battleship, the bunch of red paper roses tacked up, the strings of dusty red peppers and garlic, the stove, the battered rocking chairs.
    Pilon looked in the door. “Three rooms,” he said breathlessly, “and a bed and a stove. We will be happy here, Danny.”
    Danny moved cautiously into the house. He had bitter memories of the viejo. Pilon darted ahead of him and into the kitchen. “A sink with a faucet,” he cried. He turned the handle. “No water. Danny, you must have the company turn on the water.”
    They stood and smiled at each other. Pilon noticed that the worry of property was settling on Danny’s face. No more in life would that face be free of care. No more would Danny break windows now that he had windows of his own to break. Pilon had been right—he had been raised among his fellows. His shoulders had straightened to withstand the complexity of life. But one cry of pain escaped him before he left for all time his old and simple existence.
    “Pilon,” he said sadly, “I wished you