Algren by Mary Wisniewski Read Free Book Online Page B

desperation of the times, when people were doing all kinds of odd things for money, from hanging upside down to exhausting themselves in dance marathons. He had his own worthless certificate from the University of Illinois tattering in his pocket.
    The marcel wave caper ended when somebody made the mistake of trying to sell certificates again on the same block. He was beatenup by a couple of vengeful husbands—being cheated of a quarter was a big deal in the early 1930s. It was time to leave town.
    In August 1932 Nelson took off in a boxcar for East Texas, where he bummed around the booming oil town of Gladewater, still hoping for white-collar work. An oilman named Isidor Achinofsky took time from his derricks to give Nelson a handwritten note of introduction, asking the recipient to give Mr. Nelson Abraham a job on a local newspaper. But nothing came of the note, which Nelson saw as the man’s way of getting rid of him. So Nelson kept traveling west to the Rio Grande Valley, where there were oranges and grapefruits to pick at seventy-five cents a day.
    Nelson was still traveling with Florida Luther, who was full of ideas and thought they could do better than picking fruit in the tropical Texas sun and hoping for a better job at the packing plant. Luther had found an abandoned Sinclair station near the town of Hondo. A hand-painted sign by the local Lion’s Club warned speeding drivers, This Is God’s Country Don’t Drive Through It Like Hell. The disintegrating station itself did not see much traffic, speeding or otherwise—it was in an overgrown grapefruit grove, hung with mesquite vines, with deer, snakes, and wild hogs going in and out, and swarms of mosquitoes. Nelson and Luther visited a Sinclair agent and suggested fixing it up. The agent agreed, and Luther explained humbly that his handwriting was no good, so Nelson should sign for a hundred gallons of gas, as “this lad here got more knowance ’n I’ll
ever
have.” Nelson was proud of his “knowance,” so he signed. He was joined on this adventure by his old Roosevelt High School and Uptown Arrows friend Ben Curtis. Nelson lettered the sign for the station using his high school Spanish: Se Habla Espanol in red paint.
    But Luther had another angle besides the gas. The station would be a shelter while they made their fortune selling black-eyed peas, bought cheap from Mexican farmers, then shelled and packed and sold in Mason jars to the Piggly Wiggly. They would be the black-eyedpea kings of Texas. Dripping sweat, Nelson shelled peas “till I was nearly blind,” a burlap sack of produce on one side, on the other a stack of Mason jars glinting in the South Texas sun. He watched snakes and lizards crawl among the tree stumps, and swarms of white and black butterflies flutter down and then away again. Nelson likely practiced his road stories on Ben, improving the timing, sharpening the descriptions, and rubbing his hand back and forth through his damp hair, which stood up wildly all over. He kept a Spanish-English pocket-sized dictionary on hand, in case of customers. They sold an occasional gallon of gas. But when Mexicans arrived at the station, they wanted liquor, not gas, and laughed at the pea shelling—weren’t peas as common as cactus? As grass? What else were these idiotic gringos doing out there in the brush if not running a still?
    There was no newspaper, so Ben and Nelson had to wait until Luther came home in the evening from his mysterious pea-dealing excursions in an old Studebaker. Bonnie and Clyde were still free, Luther told them as they ate another meal of black-eyed pea mush or tomatoes. That was good news, but where was the pea money? They hadn’t sold a single jar. One night, lying awake in the humid dark, Nelson heard a noise outside, and woke to see Luther and another man with another car messing around with some kind of device by the gas pit. Standing quietly in the shadows, Nelson