Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck Read Free Book Online Page B

because there was a change of bill at the movie house. He never missed a movie. That’s what done it, the movies. I and you, Doc, we know what liars the movies are. He won’t be happy out there. He’ll just be miserable to come back.”
    Doc gazed at his run-down laboratory. “I wish I were out there with him,” he said.
    â€œWho don’t?” said Mack. “Why, them South Sea Island girls will kill him. He ain’t as young as he used to be.”
    â€œI know,” said Doc. “You and I should be out there, Mack, to help protect him from himself. I’m wondering, Mack, should I step across the street and get another pint or should I go to bed?”
    â€œWhy don’t you flip a coin?”
    â€œYou flip the coin,” said Doc. “I don’t really want to go to bed. If you flip it I’ll know how it’s going to come out.”
    Mack flipped, and he was right. Mack said, “I’d just as lief step over for you, Doc. You just set here comfortable—I’ll be right back.” And he was.

2
The Troubled Life of Joseph and Mary
    Mack came back with a pint of Old Tennis Shoes and he poured some in Doc’s glass and some in his own.
    Doc said, “What kind of a fellow is the new owner over there—Mexican, isn’t he?”
    â€œNice fellow,” said Mack. “Classy dresser. Name of Joseph and Mary Rivas. Smart as a whip, but kind of unfortunate, Doc—unfortunate and funny. You know how it is, when a pimp falls in love it don’t make any difference how much he suffers—it’s funny. And Joseph and Mary’s kind of like that.”
    â€œTell me about him,” said Doc.
    â€œI been studying him,” said Mack. “He told me some stuff and I put two and two together. He’s smart. You know, Doc, there’s a kind of smartness that cuts its own throat. Haven’t you knew people that was so busy being smart they never had time to do nothing else? Well, Joseph and Mary is kind of like that.”
    â€œTell me,” said Doc.
    â€œI guess you couldn’t find no two people oppositer than what you and him is,” Mack began. “You’re nice, Doc, nice and egg-heady, but a guy would have to be nuts to think you was smart. Everybody takes care of you because you’re wide open. Anybody is like to throw a sneak-punch at Joseph and Mary just because he’s in there dancing and feinting all the time. And he’s nice too, in a way.”
    â€œWhere’d he come from?” Doc asked.
    â€œWell, I’ll tell you,” said Mack.
    Mack was right. Doc and Joseph and Mary were about as opposite as you can get, but delicately opposite. Their differences balanced like figures of a mobile in a light breeze. Doc was a man whose whole direction and impulse was legal and legitimate. Left to his own devices, he would have obeyed every law, down to pausing at boulevard stop signs. The fact that Doc was constantly jockeyed into illicit practices was the fault of his friends, not of himself—the fault of Wide Ida, whom the liquor laws cramped like a tight girdle, and of the Bear Flag, whose business, while accepted and recognized, was certainly mentioned disparagingly in every conceivable statute book.
    Mack and the boys had lived so long in the shadow of the vagrancy laws that they considered them a shield and an umbrella. Their association with larceny, fraud, loitering, illegal congregation, and conspiracy on all levels was not only accepted, but to a certain extent had become a matter of pride to the inhabitants of Cannery Row. But they were lamblike children of probity and virtue compared to Joseph and Mary. Everything he did naturally turned out to be against the law. This had been true from his earliest childhood. In Los Angeles, where he had been born, he led a gang of pachucos while he was still a child. The charge that he lagged with loaded pennies, if not provable, at least seems