FLANKED BY HIS WIFE AND two crying daughters, Walter Waters stood helpless as the tenement manager threw the last few pieces of their furniture out of their one-room flat that sat above the rail yards. Prodded by his wife, Waters tried to reason with the man. “I have money coming at the end of the m-m-month!”
The super kicked another chair down the stairwell. “Come back when you can lie without spitting.”
“I got a lead on a j-j-job in Sellwood.”
“Doing what?” the super scoffed. “Selling wood in Sellwood? Get the hell off this property. And don’t come back.”
Wilma Waters, scrawny as a heron and ten years younger than her husband, tried to plant a heel into the super’s shin, but his forearm sent her staggering against the wall. “This ain’t no way to treat a veteran and his family!”
The big tough just laughed at her. “The war’s been over for thirteen years. This is Oregon, not Russia. Your ‘hero’ here ain’t no Alvin York. And he has to pay rent like everybody else.”
“He git a job, and then they keep laying him off!”
“Then why don’t you get a job?” the super said.
“I’ve been working off and on down at Meier and Frank.”
“Doing what?”
Wilma didn’t want to answer, but she did. “I display myself in the street window.”
The rent enforcer howled so loudly at her that he spawned another round of bawling from the frightened girls. “You stand in for them naked mannequins, do you? Or do they call you when they need to scare the pigeons off the sills?”
Wilma knelt down and tried to rub away the burning pangs in the bellies of her daughters. “Tell him, Dubya!”
Waters just stood there with his eyes cast down, a beaten man. “She brings in a d-d-dollar ten a day. B-b-but we got to eat.”
The super snorted. “Not my problem.”
“I got m-m-money coming from the government. The Bonus—”
The super pushed him aside with no more effort than if flicking a fly. “Yeah, Bonus! Bonus! That’s the only word you can mutter clean. By the time nineteen and forty-five gets here, you can use that measly five hundred bucks to buy a nice granite stone that says, ‘Here lies the Bonus of Wa-Wa-Waters.’”
The door slammed, and Waters was cast into the hallway’s darkness. He staggered down the stairs and outside into a chilly fog that hung low over the harbor. His wife and daughters followed after him, fracturing the morning silence with their screams and crying. He circled aimlessly in the street, bereft of a direction. The marine soup that morning reminded him of those days on the Front when the smoke would linger over the trenches and nearly strangle you with its peppery stench of gunpowder. He sniffed the air and caught the scent of something burning down near the plaza. Above him, in one of the tenement windows, a radio was playing a Rudy Vallee song:
They used to tell me I was building a dream,
with peace and glory ahead.
Why should I be standing in line
just waiting for bread?
He started walking toward the aroma of charcoal, remembering fondly the beef barbecues of his youth in Idaho.
“Dubya!” Wilma cried. “Where you think you’re going?”
“Aw, I just n-n-need to do some thinking.”
“You ain’t taking off on me again like you did in Idaho! Come on back here, Dubya! These girls gotta be fed!”
Waters disappeared into the mists as Rudy Vallee crooned on:
Once in cocky suits, gee we looked swell,
full of yankee doodle dum.
Half a million boots went sloggin’ through mud,
I was the kid with the drum...
Brother, can you spare a dime?
GOD KNOWS I'VE TRIED.
Waters kept mumbling that protest as he limped down the crumbling sidewalk. How many hours had he been out here? Didn’t matter. He had nowhere to go. What was a man supposed to do? Since coming back from the war, he had lost at least a dozen jobs. Sold cars in Weiser for a while, until nobody had any money left to buy one. How the hell was that his fault? Then he got hired on as a mechanic. But if people ain’t got the money to buy a vehicle, it ain’t long before they ain’t got the money to fix one, either. After that, he had migrated west, picking asparagus and working in a bakery along the way. He’d thought he finally had the world licked when he arrived here in Portland two years ago. Made it all the way up the ladder to night boss at the cannery factory, but then that went under, too.
The mists thinned, and he came to an open concrete square dotted with abandoned oil barrels burning kindling fires. Hundreds of hollow-eyed men in threadbare jackets and trousers milled about aimlessly. One old codger slumping on his haunches offered him an apple for a penny.
He shrugged off the transaction by opening his empty pockets as proof of his poverty. The next block down, dozens of out-of-work fellows just like him stood in a bread line, waiting for a single ladling of that rotten vegetable stew they served with a piece of moldy bread. His stomach curdled at the thought of another day’s meal of that gruel not fit for rats. Driven by a rush of anger and despair, he jumped on a cinder block and shouted, “F-f-fellas, I just got tossed outa my shanty by a vet! Wha-wha-t’s it coming to if we turn on ourselves?”
The ghoulish faces below looked up at him languidly, as if pestered by a gnat. Most of the men ignored him, but one big-boned fellow had enough sap in his veins to quip, “What d’ya want, the Medal of Honor?”
“I say we go to Wa-Wa-Washington!” Waters cried. “Tell the president himself we need that mo-mo-money they promised us!”
“Yeah, you and Herbert would have a pretty talk,” scoffed another veteran who tugged at the drab overcoat issued to him on mustering out in France.
“B-b-bonus for fighting!” Waters insisted. “That was the deal! Ever one of us is owed at least five hundred dollars! That was the d-d-deal!”
“That’s three thousand miles to Washington,” the hulking Irishman reminded him. “I could kick you farther than you can walk.”
“What’s your name?” Waters asked.
“Mickey Dolan.”
“Let me t-t-tell you what, Mickey Dolan. I betcha we all w-w-walked three thousand miles in France. Hell, I remember w-w-walking three thousand miles in those d-d-damn trenches just to find the latrine.”
Several of the men laughing bitterly, and a new voice from the retreating mists inquired, “How you figure to get us there? Hoover sending us an escort?”
Waters looked across the plaza. He saw that the questioner was a Negro sitting by himself and caressing a tube that resembled a grenade launcher.
Dolan walked over and hovered above the Negro. “Us? Where you think you’re going, Sambo?”
The black man didn’t back down. “I’ze just as much a veteran as you.”
“Prove it. Or I’ll put a knee in those flapping African gums.”
The black hobo inserted one end of his grenade launcher in his mouth and, to the amazement of all, began playing a sad rendition of George M. Cohan’s patriotic tune, Over There. After tooting the first stanza, he sang his own modified version of the lyrics:
Over here, over here,
the Yanks are starving,
the Yanks are starving,
the Yanks are starving everywhere.
While some of the men began clapping to the beat and singing along, Waters spotted a short, bald fireplug of a man perched on a crate under a lamppost. Possessed of dark, penetrating eyes and a proud Jesuit demeanor that seemed at war with his rags, that hobo sitting off by himself had been silently enjoying the oratorical performance like a customer in the back row of an outdoor theatre. The seated mime kicked his feet up and down against the asphalt as if mocking a marching routine, and Waters began to wonder if the fellow wasn’t a little off in the head.
The mime imposter shifted his eyes toward the Negro, who was now singing and playing his instrument like a black angel of death summoning the multitudes to damnation.
Waters interpreted the odd fellow’s gesture as a coded suggestion that he go over and befriend the black minstrel. He couldn’t quite figure why this mute bum was trying to orchestrate his decisions, and he really couldn’t figure why he was now feeling the impulse to humor him, but he did. He motioned the Negro over and shook his hand. “We c-c-could use a little entertainment on our way east. I’m Dubya Dubya Waters.”
“Ozzie Taylor.”
Dolan ambled over and circled the black hobo. “What unit?”
“Three Hundred and Sixty-Ninth.”
Impressed by that pedigree, several of the white bums made a determined effort to rise from their stupor to more closely examine the claimant.
“You were with the Hellfighters?” Waters asked.
Taylor proudly displayed a frayed regimental patch that he had sewn on the inside of his jacket. “I was Big Jim Europe’s orderly. This here’s the oboe I played with him on our triumphal march home down Fifth Avenue.”
One of the men whistled his admiration. “You don’t say. Hell of a bandleader, that Reese Europe. What ever happened to the old boy?”
Taylor lowered his hangdog eyes. “He got stabbed.”
“Was he f-f-fooling around with someone’s wife?” Waters asked.
Taylor shook his head, as if not quite believing what he was about to report. “One of Big Jim’s drummers didn’t like the way he was being treated on the payroll. So he busted into the Boss’s dressing room one night and gutted him in the neck with a pen knife.”
Dolan kneaded up his cauliflower nose as if sniffing out a tall tale. “That’s a whopper of a fish story, Oswald, or whatever the hell you claimed your name was. What exactly is a Harlem shoe shiner doing all the way out here.”
“Looking for work. Just like you fellas.”
Waters took a liking to the Negro veteran. “I say he c-c-comes with us.”
Dolan bristled all six-foot-three of his imposing frame in protest. “First of all, I’m not traveling with no Ethiopian. Second of all, no soldiers ever marched on the Capitol. So it’s not happening. None of it.”
“Ain’t no one never s-s-starved in this country before, too. And the man’s a soldier, and he’s welcome to c-c-come with us. What the hell difference does it make what c-c-color he is if he’s down on his luck just like all of us?”
Dolan couldn’t dredge up a rebuttal to that point.
Yet Taylor seemed a little skittish about the plan. “Now Mister Waters, I appreciate your way of thinking. But I reckon if the government sees a bunch of trained gunmen coming east, the G-men will have us in the stockade before we cross the Rockies. Especially with my ebony face in the regiment.”
“We go peaceful,” Waters insisted. “We got that right. Those Wall Street thieves go to Washington to lobby for their pockets to be filled. We ain’t ever gonna get nothing done until we do the same. We go peaceful.”
“Yeah,” smirked Dolan. “Just like those boys in Dearborn went peaceful. They got their skulls peaceably knocked in for it, too.”
“By God, I’m going!” Waters shouted. “You all c-c-can stand here and rot if you want, but I’m going! We’d never won the war if we stood around and q-q-quarreled!”
Most of the hobos laughed Waters off, and the sullen Irishman shot a jet of root juice at the unemployed canner’s feet to chase him away.
“Take that to Washington with you,” Dolan said.
The men walked off to return to their bivouacs around the barrel fires. Abandoned, Waters tried to step down from the concrete block, but his weakened legs buckled him, and he stumbled to his hands and knees. Chased by the catcalls and jeers, he arose and limped away discouraged, forced to find an empty corner.
LATER THAT NIGHT, WATERS WALKED the deserted streets trying to memorize a speech. He worked hard to smooth his stuttering, just as he used to do when he walked the rail spur as a boy. “It’s in the Const-ti-tu-shun. Man’s g-gotta right to assemble peaceful. Nah, man’s gotta ri-right to ay-semble peaceably. Man’s g-g-got—”
“Your dear voice is not clear, gentle and evening clear, as theirs whom none now hear.”
Waters turned toward the silhouette of a bum sitting against the cannery wall. He came closer, angling for more light from the lamppost, and recognized the night warbler as the taciturn veteran who had traded nods with him in the plaza that afternoon.
The shadowy intruder gestured with his hands as if orchestrating music. “And though your hand be pale, paler are those which trail.”
Waters looked around for a bottle. “Sounds like y-y-you been into some bad cognac, bub.”
“Au contraire, my eloquent friend! I prefer the sweet nectar of the verse. Wilfred Owen, the troubadour of the trench. Until he became a small patch of England left in France. That almost rhymed, didn’t it?”
“You a poet?”
“No, but I can spot one. I watched you on the stump this afternoon.”
“Don’t t-t-toy with me, fella. I’ve had enough of the needle for one day.”
“Name’s George Alford. Fifty-fifth Infantry.”
“Mine’s Waters.”
“Yeah, I know all about you. You tried to push those privates off the dime with cold reasoning this afternoon. Men down on their luck don’t navigate with their heads. You want them to chin the moon, you have to light a fire in their souls.”
“Fat chance of that. I g-g-got this obvious problem with my t-t-talking.”
“That’s just the flame of inspiration in your throat burning those fine mots to cinders before they can reach the world’s ears. All the great poets have that rush of the tongue. I think I may have a solution for your problem.”
The squat veteran climbed to his ponderous feet. Tacking against the night winds with a crook-legged rodeo gait, he led Waters through the back alleys. When they came to the stockyards near the river, Alford signaled for him to stay silent and then led him past a couple of sleeping guards. This odd fellow had the route down so pat that Waters figured he must have made trespassing a regular habit. Together they threaded their way past a herd of cattle mooing sleepily, until they came to another section of the yards.
Thousands of turkeys sat huddled together behind a wire fence.
The birds watched suspiciously as Alford opened up a hole in the mesh and retied the strands of wire behind them. He stood up in the middle of the flock and, stretching his arms skyward as if to stretch his lungs, whispered to Waters, “Say hello to your troops.”
Waters was beginning to wonder if he had put himself in the hands of a madman, but he had to admit the birds looked pretty succulent.
“Go ahead,” Alford insisted. “Cajole these fine fellows into roosting with you on the Capitol dome.”
Waters balled his fists; the prankster was obviously pulling a stunt so that he could tell the other fellows about it tomorrow. “You need some head d-d-doctoring.”
“Maybe, but I’m not the one who can’t spit out a full mouthful without tripping. Give it a try, like you did today.”
Waters looked around the yard to make sure that Alford hadn’t brought an audience of hobos to cackle at his gullibility. Assured that they were alone, he turned to the curious turkeys and said in a weak voice, “What I pro-propose is we take our gr-gr-grievances to the president.”
The turkeys just stared at him.
“Hold on, Mother Goose, before you put these fowl to sleep. Dig deeper into the gut. Scream them like you are a man going over the top.”
Waters was fed up with being jestered. “I got no job and no camp! But I ain’t so low that I got to converse with poultry!”
The turkeys shook the night with gobbles that sounded like applause.
Alford grinned as if having conjured a magic trick. “Your first ovation. Give us some more of that high oratory.”
Waters was amazed—these birds loved him. For the first time in his life, he felt free to say whatever the hell he wanted without fear of ridicule. He turned to his feathered constituency again and announced in the same confident voice, “Hoover and Mellon give loans to their high finance buddies! But not a dime to us vets! You beaks gonna sit here and take that?” He beamed from ear to ear as the turkeys gobbled their applause again.
“Yeah, you’re a regular Teddy Rough-Riding Roosevelt,” Alford said. “Now, here’s the real test. Tell them something they’d rather not hear.”
After thinking a moment, Waters shouted, “You’re all looking at the basting pan tomorrow! Strung up and stuffed!”
To his amazement, the turkeys applauded with hearty gobbles again.
Alford wrapped an encouraging arm around the shoulder of his new protégé. “Those boys down at the plaza aren’t much different than these clipped wingers. It’s not what you tell them, but how. Give them the high notes, and they’ll march to their own funerals.”
The turkeys kept gobbling their ovations, and now Waters couldn’t stop speechifying.
Alford spotted one of the hens that had gotten outside the fence. Her head was bloodied and drooping. He reached through the hole, picked her up, and grinned at dinner. “Turkeys all look the same to each other, till one gets a little red in the neck. Then the others will surround it and peck it until it bleeds to death. It’s just their nature.”
Waters didn’t even hear him. Inspired by his newfound power of oratory, he stood gazing downriver toward the plaza, thinking about how, with this newfound power of his, he was going to change Mickey Dolan’s mind about going to Washington.
Alford smiled with secret knowledge as he stroked the dying turkey’s bloodied head. Watching Waters orate to the birds, he whispered another verse by the British poet Wilfred Owen: “The silver swan, who living had no voice, when death approached unlocked her silent throat.”