Curly knew his workers would split towards the end of the harvest and the hottest days of July towards August. His custom was to give anyone who stayed on to the end a bonus of 500 bucks. 500 bucks in 1965 terms was a fortune to any eighteen year old so all of our group stayed on except for the college boys and a few others. That means we were short-handed.
At the start of the last week I had a fever… I came down with a bug of some sort… There was no calling in sick. Damn, I had the day shift too. My fever had to be over a hundred-three and so was the temp out in the fields. I was so weak I could hardly pull myself into the cab. Curly pulled up in his dust caked El Camino as I was starting… Ah-ha, I thought, I could ask him for the day off.
Curly just grinned, "Buck it up kid… the harvest doesn't wait until we feel like working." And he drove away. My first real job! There I was with a fever of 103… while the temperatures rose to equal that by noon. Since we were but a skeleton crew some of us had to fill-in on some extra shifts. After twelve hours Curly showed up to tell me there was no one to replace me but he’d try his damnedest to get someone. I knew that he knew there was no-one to replace me. I begged him, "Just let me off a few hours."
I hoped to get the fuck off of those damned cursed fields and scrub the dust from my sweating pores... I'd jump on the next Greyhound out of Dayton and never look back!
Curly just grinned a dusty Palouse Country grin that beamed through the terrain carved on his face from years in the sun in the fields, “Welcome to the harvest boy… you get through this and you’ll have a shot at bein’ a man.”
So weak I could barely shift or steer… I climbed back into the dust-crust of a cab as though it was the last hundred feet to the summit of Everest. I worked through on that challenge, in a damned if I will or damned if I won't give up hell... thirty-six hours straight... while hallucinating phantoms in the fields at night and sweltered in the heat of the noon day sun ‘til my fever broke during the last hours that followed. To look back on it now I know that this was exactly where… the very day... that I passed the test. I was from that day on, a man… a man of my word. I stayed in that cab because I told Curly I would and that was that. I never got a pat on my back from Curly but I had hit on something that would stick and I could look any man in the eyes after that and stand on equal grounds.
Curly treated us to a steak dinner after harvest was over at the only restaurant/steakhouse in town. I held my bonus check in my hands as though it was a prize of war. We were hosted as though we were honored veterans of the harvest... and we were! I had never had that much money before then plus I had the money from the last two weeks of work. We were paid well; $2 and hour for seven days a week…. The Braceros got minimum wage… $1.25 per hour. One day off between that hell of a thirty-six hours and one more shift came to 168 hours in two weeks… $336 before taxes.
Myron, Chuck and I planned to leave for Tacoma after one last bash. That bash ended with Chuck having a seizure. I’d never seen anyone have a seizure before. We tried to hold him down to no avail… it was wild… Chuck was strong and lithe… there would have been no holding him down under normal conditions. Someone trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about, said, “Put something in his mouth so he won’t swallow his tongue!” Thank God, no one had the strength to pry his mouth open. Hell, when I think of it, putting a stick in his mouth would seem to be worse than swallowing one’s tongue if it were at all possible to do so at all. We had the excitement of an ambulance coming to our place but, by the time they’d gotten to us, Chuck had already ridden out his tremors and wanted nothing to do with hospitals. That was just as good for us because no one wanted to stay in Dayton one day longer.
Myron was able to get his radiator replaced on the Ford and drove through and across the State through Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades where we found a poker game in the back of a gas station. We’d originally pulled up for gas. The lights were on but no one came to the pumps. Chuck filled up the car and went inside to see if anyone was there at all. He heard the chips hitting the table in a shack in back. It was after midnight. He was invited in to sit out a few hands. We sat in the car waiting for him to come back.
Myron checked his watch and muttered, “What the fuck… he’s been gone too long to pay up.”
“What do you think happened to him?” It was a bit horror film nervous…
Chuck finally came out just as Myron opened his door. “Hey c’mon back here… there’s beers and a poker game….”
I was suspicious… “What is goin’ on Chuck?”
“Just take in no more than twenty bucks…. You’ll be okay.”
We sat at the table with two grease monkeys and some guy in a suite and tie that looked like he came out of the shadows of the room lit by one bare bulb from a dark Humphrey Bogart movie.
Grease monkey #1 was dealing. The cards were as greasy as his hands. Damned if you couldn’t read them after ten minutes. “Sit down boy, it is just a friendly game.”
Humphrey added, “Yeah, we play nickel Annie here.”
Five card stud. In those days I don’t remember a poker game with all the variations the boys have now. It was five car draw and five cards stud. The most complicated it got was seven card stud. If you were to call anything else you were looked at sideways like you’d suggested Old Maid. Everyone would sit out your deal until you came around to their way of thinking. Anything like Texas No See-um would have given rise to a hoot… a call for a new sexual identity… if you know what I mean.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that these guys were just curious about who we were and had no designs to take us for a ride. Grease Monkey #2 sucked on the wettest butt of a cigar I have ever seen, “You boys comin’ from Yakima?”
“Naw, Dayton…” Chuck offered, throwing down three cards. "I'll draw three to an inside straight"
“Jazz here is the Sheriff,” he smirked past that soggy butt, “Ya’ll be tellin’ the truth now.”
Humphrey threw down his cards, “I fold. ‘Sides, I’m off duty now. You boys are at a poker table, you can lie all you want to here.”
Myron won some… enough to pay for the tank of gas, Chuck broke even and I lost about twenty bucks but it was one of those adventures on the road that is still sweet for the memory of being damned near adult. Drinking beer out of cans opened with a church key… swapping stories about our plans and the harvest… the sun came up and we drove away red-eyed but glad to be back on the road.
Chuck was meeting Beth, another one of his and Myron’s cousins, in Tacoma. She was six months pregnant with Chuck’s baby and was leaving her abusive husband for Chuck. Kissin’ cousins for sure… they were the Romeo and Juliet of the family as Chuck was a home wrecker and they were.... well, they were. The reason we were going to Tacoma is that they had a Notary Public friend there that would marry them even though they were cousins. Some had no idea of what inbreeding was all about but Chuck and Beth were in love... what the hell. We all stood before the desk of their friend’s Real Estate office… I was a witness standing next to the Notary Public’s wife who was the second witness… Myron was best man who slipped a gold wedding band to Chuck but a few minutes before and a sweet set of “I dos” were exchanged.
This happy wedding group all crammed into the Ford and Myron drove me to the Greyhound station. I got on the bus with no more that a small trunk and about eight hundred bucks in cash or traveler’s checks. I looked out at the pals I’d spent most of the last couple of months with and felt a lump rise in my throat. I was finally alone with absolutely no one to answer to. I can’t explain how liberating that feeling was but I knew it was over with this set of pals and that I was on my own. I figured that if I was ever to write a book about my adventures from that day on aboard the Greyhound bus, choking back the tears…, I would title it “Alone”.
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