Cannery Row

“You should of asked him. I think he’s a liar.”

“You better not let him hear you say that,” said Joey.

“Well, you can tell him I said it. I ain’t afraid of him and I ain’t afraid of you. I ain’t afraid of anybody. You want to make something of it?” Joey didn’t answer. “Well, do you?”

“No,” said Joey. “I was thinkin’, why don’t we just go up and ask the guy if he’s got babies in bottles? Maybe he’d show them to us, that is if he’s got any.”

“He ain’t here,” said Willard. “When he’s here, his car’s here. He’s away some place. I think it’s a lie. I think the Sprague kid is a liar. I think you’re a liar. You want to make something of that?”

It was a lazy day. Willard was going to have to work hard to get up any excitement. “I think you’re a coward, too. You want to make something of that?” Joey didn’t answer. Willard changed his tactics. “Where’s your old man now?” he asked in a conversational tone.

“He’s dead,” said Joey.

“Oh yeah? I didn’t hear. What’d he die of?”

For a moment Joey was silent. He knew Willard knew but he couldn’t let on he knew, not without fighting Willard, and Joey was afraid of Willard.

“He committed — he killed himself.”

“Yeah?” Willard put on a long face. “How’d he do it?”

“He took rat poison.”

Willard’s voice shrieked with laughter. “What’d he think— he was a rat?”

Joey chuckled a little at the joke, just enough, that is.

“He must of thought he was a rat,” Willard cried. “Did he go crawling around like this — look, Joey — like this? Did he wrinkle up his nose like this? Did he have a big old long tail?” Willard was helpless with laughter. “Why’n’t he just get a rat trap and put his head in it?” They laughed themselves out on that one, Willard really wore it out. Then he probed for another joke. “What’d he look like when he took it — like this?” He crossed his eyes and opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue.

“He was sick all day,” said Joey. “He didn’t die ’til the middle of the night. It hurt him.”

Willard said, “What’d he do it for?”

“He couldn’t get a job,” said Joey. “Nearly a year he couldn’t get a job. And you know a funny thing? The next morning a guy come around to give him a job.”

Willard tried to recapture his joke. “I guess he just figured he was a rat,” he said, but it fell through even for Willard.

Joey stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He saw a little coppery shine in the gutter and walked toward it but just as he reached it Willard shoved him aside and picked up the penny.

“I saw it first,” Joey cried. “It’s mine.”

“You want to try and make something of it?” said Willard. “Why’n’t you go take some rat poison?”

Chapter XXVII

Mack and the boys — the Virtues, the Beatitudes, the Beauties. They sat in the Palace Flophouse and they were the stone dropped in the pool, the impulse which sent out ripples to all of Cannery Row and beyond, to Pacific Grove, to Monterey, even over the hill to Carmel.

“This time,” said Mack, “we got to be sure he gets to the party. If he don’t get there, we don’t give it.”

“Where we going to give it this time?” Jones asked.

Mack tipped his chair back against the wall and hooked his feet around the front legs. “I’ve give that a lot of thought,” he said. “Of course we could give it here but it would be pretty hard to surprise him here. And Doc likes his own place. He’s got his music there.” Mack scowled around the room. “I don’t know who broke his phonograph last time,” he said. “But if anybody so much as lays a finger on it next time I personally will kick the hell out of him.”

“I guess we’ll just have to give it at his place,” said Hughie.

People didn’t get the news of the party — the knowledge of it just slowly grew up in them. And no one was invited. Everyone was going. October 27 had a mental red drde around it. And since it was to be a birthday party there were presents to be considered.

Take the girls at Dora’s. All of them had at one time or another gone over to the laboratory for advice or medicine or simply for unprofessional company. And they had seen Doc’s bed. It was covered with an old faded red blanket full of fox tails and burrs and sand, for he took it on all his collecting trips. If money came in he bought laboratory equipment. It never occurred to him to buy a new blanket for himself. Dora’s girls were making him a patchwork quilt, a beautiful thing of silk. And since most of the silk available came from underclothing and evening dresses, the quilt was glorious in strips of flesh pink and orchid and pale yellow and cerise. They worked on it in the late mornings and in the afternoons before the boys’ from the sardine fleet came in. Under the community of effort, those fights and ill feelings that always are present in a whore house completely disappeared.

Lee Chong got out and inspected a twenty-five-foot string of firecrackers and a big bag of China lily bulbs. These to his way of thinking were the finest things you could have for a party.

Sam Malloy had long had a theory of antiques. He knew that old furniture and glass and crockery, which had not been very valuable in its day, had when time went by taken on desirability and cash value out of all proportion to its beauty or utility. He knew of one chair that had brought five hundred dollars. Sam collected pieces of historic automobiles and he was convinced that some day his collection, after making him very rich, would repose on black velvet in the best museums. Sam gave the party a good deal of thought and then he went over his treasures which he kept in a big locked box behind the boiler, He decided to give Doc one of his finest pieces — the connecting rod and piston from a 1916 Chalmers. He rubbed and polished this beauty until it gleamed like a piece of ancient armor. He made a little box for it and lined it with black cloth.

Mack and the boys gave the problem considerable thought and came to the conclusion that Doc always wanted cats and had some trouble getting them. Mack brought out his double cage. They borrowed a female in an interesting condition and set their trap under the cypress tree at the top of the vacant lot. In the corner of the Palace they built a wire cage and in it their collection of angry torn cats grew with every night. Jones had to make two trips a day to the canneries for fish heads to feed their charges. Mack considered and correctly that twenty-five tom cats would be as nice a present as they could give Doc.