‘You a wobbly?'

‘You a wobbly?’
‘Sure I am, you dirty yellow…,’he began.
The sheriff came up and hauled off to hit him. ‘Look out, he’s got glasses on.’ A big hand pulled his glasses off. ‘We’ll fix that. ‘Then the sheriff punched him in the nose with his fist. ‘Say you ain’t.?
Ben’s mouth was full of blood . He set his jaw. ?He’s a kike, hit him a again for me.’
‘Say you ain’t a wobbly.? Somebody whacked a rifle barrel against his shins and fell forward. ‘Run for it,’ they were yelling. Blows with clubs and rifle buts were splitting his ears.
He tried to walk forward without running. He tripped on a rail and fell, cutting his arm on something sharp. There was so much blood in his eyes he couldn’t see. A heavy boot was kicking him again and again on the side. He was passing out. Somehow he staggered forward. Somebody was holding him up under the arms and was dragging him free of the cattle guard on the track. Another fellow began to wipe his face off with a handkerchief . He heard Bram’s voice way off somewhere, ‘We’re over the county line, boys.’ What with losing his glasses and the rain and the night and the shooting pain all up and his back Ben couldn’t see anything. He heard shots behind them and yells from where other guys were running the gantlet. He was the center of a little straggling group of wobblies making their way down the railroad track. ?Fellow workers.’ Bram was saying in his deep quiet voice, ‘we must never forget this night.’
At he interurban trolley station they took up a collection among the ragged and bloody group to buy tickets to Seattle for the guys most hurt. Ben was so dazed and sick he could hardly hold the ticket when somebody pushed it into his hand. Bram and the rest of them set off to walk the thirty miles back to Seattle.
Ben was in hospital three weeks. The kicks in the back had affected his kidneys and he was in frightful pain most of the time. The morphine they gave him made him so dopey he barely knew what was happening when they brought in the boys wounded in the shooting on the Evertett dock on November 5th. When he was discharged he could just walk. Everybody he knew was in jail. At General Delivery he found a letter from Gladys, enclosing fifty dollars and saying his father wanted him to come home.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

They went down on the boat to Seattle

They went down on the boat to Seattle, I.W.W. headquarters there was like a picnic ground, crowed with young men coming in from every part of the U.S. and Canada. One day a big bunch went down to Everett on the boat to try to hold a meeting at the corner of Wetmore and Hewitt Avenues. The dock was full of deputies with rifles, and revolvers. ‘The Commercial Club boys are waiting for us,? Some guy’s voice tittered nervously. The deputies had white handkerchiefs around their necks. There’s Sheriff McRae’ said somebody. Bram edged up to Ben ‘We better stick together…Looks to me like we was going to get tamped up some.’ The wobblies were arrested as fact as they stepped off the boat and herded down to the end of the dock. The deputies were drunk, most of them . Ben could smell the whiskey on the breath of the red-faced guy who grabbed him by the arm. ‘Get a move on there, you son of bitch…’ He got a blow from a riffle butt in the small of his back. He could hear the crack of saps on men’s skulls. Anybody who resisted had his face beaten to a jelly with a club. The wobblies were made to climb up into a truck. With the dusk a cold drizzle had come on. ‘Boys we got to show them we got guts’ a red haired boy said. A deputy who was holding on to the back of the track aimed a blow at him with his sap, but lost his balance and fell off. The wobblies laughed. The deputy climbed on again, purple in the face. ?You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your dirty mugs when we get through with you.’ He yelled.
Out in the woods where the country road crossed the railroad track they were made to get out of the tracks. The deputies stood around them with their guns levelled while the sheriff who was reeling drunk, and two well-dressed middle aged men talked over what they’ do. Ben heard the world gantlet.
‘Look here, sheriff,’ somebody said. ‘we’re not here to make any kind of disturbance. All we want is our constitutional rights of free speech.’
The sheriff turned towards them waving the butt of his revolver. ‘Oh, you do, you do. Well this is Snohomish County and you ain’t going to forget it… if you come here again some of your fellers is going to die, that’s all there is about it… All right, boys, let’s go.’
The deputies made two lines down towards the railroad track. They grabbed the wobblies one by one and beat them up.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

He fumbled with the engine

He fumbled with the engine awhile and she could hear him swearing in French. Then he went into the hangar to wake up a mechanic. Daughter stood there shivering in the growing silvery light.: She wouldn’t think of anything. She wanted to go up in a plane. Her head ached,, but she didn’t feel nauseated. When the mechanic came back with Pierre, she could make out that she was arguing with him trying to make him give up the flight. She got very sore: Pierre, you’ve got to take me up,’ she yelled at the two men sleepily arguing in French. ?All right , miss Sistair’. They wrapped a heavy army coat around her and strapped her very carefully in the observer’s seat. Pierre climbed into the pilot seat. It was a Blèriot monoplane, he said. The mechanic spun the propeller. Te engine started. Everything was full of the roar of the engine. Suddenly she was scared and sober, thought about home and the boat she was going to take tomorrow. It seemed an endless time with the engine roaring. The light was brighter . She started to fumble with the straps to unstrap them. It was crazy going up like this. She had to catch the boat. The plane had started. It was bouncing over the field, bouncing along the ground. They were still on the ground rumbling bouncing along. Maybe it wouldn’t go up. She hoped it wouldn’t go up. A row of poplars swept past below them. The motor was a settles roar now, they were climbing. It was daylight: a cold silver sun shone in her face. Underneath them was a floor of thick white clouds like a beach.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

Joe had been hanging around New York

Joe had been hanging around New York and Brooklyn for a while, borrowing money from Mrs. Olsen and getting tanked all the time. One day she went to work and threw him out. It was damned cold and he had to go to a mission a couple of nights. He was afraid of getting arrested for the draft and he was fed up with every god dam thing; it ended by his going out as ordinary seaman on the Appalachian, a big new freighter bound for Bordeaux and Genoa. It kinder went with the way he felt treated like a jailbird again and swobbing decks and chipping paint. In the fo’c’stile there was mostly country kids who’d never seen the sea and a few old bums who’d never seen the sea and a few old bums who weren’t good for anything. They got into a dirty blow four days out and shipped a small tidal wave that stove in two of the starboard lifeboats and the convoy got scattered and they found that the deck hadn’t been properly caulked and the water kept coming down into the fo’c’style. It turned out that Joe was the only man they had on board the mate could trust at the wheel, so they took him off scrubbing paint and in his four hour tricks he had plenty of time to think about how lousy everything was. In Bordeaux he’d have liked to look up Marceline, but none of the crew got to go ashore.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

Bran knew all the ropes

Bran knew all the ropes. Walking, riding blind baggage or on empty gondolas, hopping rides on delivery wagons and trucks, they got to Buffalo. In a flophouse there Bram found a guy he knew who have got them signed on as deckhands on a whaleback going back light to Duluth. There they joined a gang being shipped up to harvest wheat for an outfit in Saskatchewan. At first the work was very heavy for Ben and Bram was scared he’d caved in, but he fourteen hour days out in the sun and the dust, the copious grub, the dead sleep in the lofts of the big barns began to toughen him up. Lying flat on the straw in his sweaty clothes he’d still feel through his sleep the tingle of the sun on his face and neck, the strain in his muscles, the whir of the reapers and binders along the horizon, the roar of the thresher, the grind of gears of the tracks carrying the red wheat to the elevators. He began to speak like a harvest stiff. After the harvest they worked in a fruit cannery on the Columbia River, a lousy steamy job full of the sour stench of rotting fruit peelings . there they read in Solidarity about the shingle weavers’ strike and the free speech fight en Everett, and decided they’ go down and see wht they could do to help out.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

It was a funny trip round Spain

It was a funny trip round Spain and through the Straits and up the French coast to Genoa. All the way there was a single file of camouflaged freighters, Greeks and Britishers and Norwegians and Americans, all hugging the coast and creeping along with life preservers piled on deck and boats swung out on the davits. Passing them was another line coming back light, transports and colliers from Italy and Saloniki, white hospital ships, every kind of old tub out of the seven seas, rusty freighters with their screws so far out of the water you could hear them a couple of hours after they were hull down and out of sight. Once they got into the Mediterranean there were French and British battleships to seaward all he time and silly looking destroyers with their long smokes smudges that would hail you and come aboard to see your papers Ashore it didn’t look like the war a bit. The weather was sunny after they passed Gibraltar. The Spanish coast was green with bare pink and yellow mountains back of the sore and all scattered with little white houses like lumps of sugar that bunched up here and there into towns. Crossing the gulf of Lyons in a drizzling rain and driving fog and nasty choppy sea,,, they came within an ace of running down a big felucca with barrels of wine. Then they were bowling along the French Riviera in a howling north west wind, with the red roofed towns all bright and shiny and the dry hills rising rocky behind them, and snow mountains standing out clear above. After they passed Monte Carlo it was a circus, the houses were all pink and blue and yellow and there were tall poplars and tall pointed church steeples in all the valleys.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

Now obviously there comes a time

Now obviously there comes a time when a girl has to make decisions, and clearly this was one of those times. What to do? I’d seldom found anything as profoundly ridiculous as the fig display – thank God we didn’t have oysters, or mussels. Or clams, or he’d have probably tongued those as well, making some ghastly remark about them ‘tasting of sea’ – but, on the other hand, beggars etc. Nor That I think of myself as a beggar,but this definitely constituted an offer, and offers have been thin in the ground thin on the ground in my neck on the woods. (Still, what a thing to do: I couldn’t _ I can’t _ conceive of a situation where I’d be out at dinner and get it into my head that it would be a really terrific idea to impress the man next to me by cheerfully fellating a sausage. Imagine if you got it all the way in and choked a bit and had to be rescued by your hosts, the head, as it were, of the sausage peering helplessly out of your parted lips.)
So, que faire ? I was given a few minutes’ respite by Emma, on Cooper’s left, asking him whether it was really true that liposuction was bad for you, and during these minutes I am sorry to say I decided, Yes. I decided that since I was practically rusty from lack of sexual use, I’d give Cooper a go. Why not? He was remarkably good-looking, he clearly had the horn, ha had quite a long tongue and I never needed to see him again, so who cared if his seduction techniques involved violating fruits ?
I thought about it – fortifying myself with another couple of glasses of wine – the more it seemed to me that Cooper coitus was really a good idea: the perfect way of easing myself back in the saddle. As it were – a neat. Nonsense solution to my problem. I’d go somewhere with him after dinner, have a quickie, prove to myself that I was still capable of having sex, perhaps an orgasm, and go home. Perfect. It was about time I slept with someone who wasn’t Dom, and got on with my life. Once the decision was made, I began rather looking forward to it
From the book ‘Don’t you want me?’ By India Knight