In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck Read Free Book Online

big to get licked.’
    “My mother had light blue eyes. I remember they looked like white stones. Well, after dinner my old man sat in his chair by the stove. And he got madder and madder. My mother sat beside him. I went to bed. I could see my mother turn her head from my father and move her lips. I guess she was praying. She was a Catholic, but my father hated churches. Every little while he’d growl out what he’d do to May when she did come home.
    “About eleven o’clock both of ’em went into the bedroom, but they left the light burning in the kitchen. I could hear them talking for a long time. Two or three times in the night I woke up and saw my mother looking out from the bedroom. Her eyes looked just like white stones.”
    Jim turned from the window and sat down on the cot. Harry was digging his pencil into the desk top. Jim said, “When I woke up the next morning it was sunshiny outside, and that light was still burning. It gives you a funny, lonely feeling to see a light burning in the daytime. Pretty soon my mother came out of the bedroom and started a fire in the stove. Her face was stiff, and her eyes didn’t move much. Then my father came out. He acted just as though he’d been hit between the eyes—slugged. He couldn’t get a word out. Just before he went to work, he said, ‘I think I’ll stop in at the precinct station. She might of got run over.’
    “Well, I went to school, and right after school I came home. My mother told me to ask all the girls if they’d seen May. By that time the news had got around that May was gone. They said they hadn’t seen May at all. They were all shivery about it. Then my father came home. He’d been to the police station on the way home,too. He said, ‘The cops took a description. They said they’d keep their eyes peeled.’
    “That night was just like the one before. My old man and my mother sitting side by side, only my father didn’t do any talking that second night. They left the light on all night again. The next day my old man went back to the station house. Well, the cops sent a dick to question the kids on the block, and a cop came and talked to my mother. Finally they said they’d keep their eyes open. And that was all. We never heard of her again, ever.”
    Harry stabbed the desk and broke his pencil point. “Was she going around with any older boys she might’ve run off with?”
    “I don’t know. The girls said not, and they would have known.”
    “But haven’t you an idea of what might have happened to her?”
    “No. She just disappeared one day, just dropped out of sight. The same thing happened to Bertha Riley two years later—just dropped out.”
    Jim felt with his hand along the line of his jaw. “It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that my mother was quieter even than before. She moved kind of like a machine, and she hardly ever said anything. Her eyes got a kind of a dead look, too. But it made my old man mad. He had to fight everything with his fists. He went to work and beat hell out of the foreman at the Monel packing house. Then he did ninety days for assault.”
    Harry stared out the window. Suddenly he put down his pencil and stood up. “Come on!” he said. “I’m goingto take you down to the house and get rid of you. I’ve got to get that report out. I’ll do it when I get back.”
    Jim walked to the radiator and picked off two pairs of damp socks. He rolled them up and put them in his paper bag. “I’ll dry them down at the other place,” he said.
    Harry put on his hat, and folded the report and put it in his pocket. “Every once in a while the cops go through this place,” he explained. “I don’t leave anything around.” He locked the office door as he went out.
    They walked through the business center of the city, and past blocks of apartment houses. At last they came to a district of old houses, each in its own yard. Harry turned into a driveway. “Here we are. It’s in back of this