I could have turned up from anywhere, and I didn’t know a soul. All I could do was hang around and look willing. If a hand was needed on the handle of a fork and I was there and nobody else was, then I would earn a nickel or a dime cleaning out a stall. I carried buckets of water. I ran—and I mean ran—for coffee and sandwiches. Whenever I caught the scent of a small coin looking to change pockets, I tried my best to furnish the pocket. “I’ll do it!” I’d say. “Let me do it!”
And in that way I got to be recognized a little. It got so that when some odd job needed doing, somebody would jerk his head in my direction and say, “He’ll do it! Let him do it!”
But if you’ve never tried it, you’d be surprised how long it takes to make a dollar out of nickel-and-diming at little jobs that come just now and then. It was a good thing for me that you could get a pretty good meal (if you weren’t particular where you got it) for a quarter. I was a long way from what you would call steady employment. However willing I was, I was a long way from working for anybody in particular. And hard to tell how long it would have been before anybody would have let me actually touch a horse.
I was lucky that spring was coming, for it was clear right away that present earnings might keep me clothed a little on the decent side of nakedness, and fed a little short of full, but they were not going to buy me a place to sleep. And so, lost and ignorant as I was, I made a good discovery. There were drivers and regular hands who, if they saw you still hanging around after dark, would let you go up in a loft and sleep in the hay. They would always make you turn out your pockets to see that you had no matches, and then they would say, “Boy, if anybody asks you, I didn’t tell you you could sleep up there. I don’t know a thing about it.”
And then I made another good discovery. I liked those nights of sleeping in the hay. I still like to remember them. If I could I would find an old horse blanket—a cooling blanket was best—and double it and lay it down on the hay and pile a forkful or two of hay on top of it, and then just burrow in. That was fine when the nights were cold. When they were warm, I could just lie down anywhere on a pile of hay, or even in the bedding on the floor of an empty stall. Aside from eating and keeping warm, I didn’t have anything on my mind, and I slept good.
After the human stir had quieted down, and the stable hands had quit talking and laughing or shooting craps, I loved to lie there in the dark, listening to the horses eating their hay or shifting about in the bedding. Now and again I’d hear a snort or a dog barking, and off in the distance the sounds of traffic and trains. I always went to sleep before I thought I would. The next thing I knew, roosters would be crowing and horses nickering, and though it would still be dark the horsemen would be up and busy, putting the morning ration into the troughs and fresh hay in the mangers. They were fanatical about feeding times. You could set your watch by them, if you had one. I would lie still a little while just to enjoy the sounds, and then I would get up too, to be on hand for little jobs and maybe a few scraps of somebody else’s breakfast. As I said, I didn’t have any cares except for a few necessities, and I felt industrious and alert and on the lookout in those days.
It was hard to keep my box of personal things either safely in sight or well hidden, but that got easier. And I wore my old jacket with my money in the lining like it was my skin. I almost never took it off.
“Boy,” somebody was always saying, after the weather began to warm up, “ain’t you hot in that jacket?”
And even if the sweat was running down my nose and dripping off, I would say, “I ain’t hot!”
For bathing and shaving, I would wait until after dark and borrow a water bucket, or slip into a public restroom.
I went on in that hand-to-mouth, day-to-day fashion until well into June without looking forward or back and without any plans at all. And then everything changed, by surprise.
One of my problems, living on present earnings, was that my hair kept growing. People were beginning to say, “Boy, when you going to get you a hairnet?” And one or two even started calling me “girlie.” It was beginning to interfere with business.
So I decided I’d have to sacrifice one day’s eating money to a proper haircut. Not far from the track was a sort of run-down barbershop on a run-down street. When I got there not long after dinnertime I was the only customer. I climbed into the chair and told the old barber to civilize my mop.
He hadn’t even shaved was the kind of barber he was. As he started in on me, he started talking, as barbers generally will. He waved his comb toward a second chair that sat idle, covered with a cloth, and said that he and another barber had once stayed busy there all day every day with hardly time to sweep up the cut hair. And he went on to name all the famous horsemen who had been his customers, and he was telling me a number of things that various ones of them had told him.
Maybe I was a good listener, or maybe he hadn’t had a customer for several days, but he went on and on with his talk about how good the times had been there in the shop back in the old days, stopping now and then to let fly a streak of ambeer at a spittoon under the backbar.
He went on so much that finally I got to feeling dishonest, sitting there listening and not saying anything. So I said, “Well, what happened?”
He said, “What do you mean what happened?”
“There’s surely been a comedown,” I said. “It don’t look like you say it used to.”
He hadn’t been working very fast, and now he slowed down even more. He took another wild shot at the spittoon. “Well,” he said, “the other fellow died.”
“Well, what about you?” I said. “You’re still among us.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. He seemed to be refining his work, leaning way back to keep his bifocals homed in, and cutting little snips just here and there.
“Verily,” he said. “I ain’t sober all the time anymore.”
And then for a longer time he didn’t say anything but seemed to be thinking, or maybe he was embarrassed by his confession. Maybe he was just snipping his scissors in the air over the top of my head.
Finally he spat and cleared his throat. “You don’t know a barber looking for a job, I don’t reckon, do you?”
“Yessir,” I said. “Me.”
He quit work entirely then and came around in front of the chair and stood there with his scissors in one hand and his comb in the other, looking at me, with his face all bristly and the white whiskers around his mouth stained with ambeer.
Finally he said in a low voice, “Hunh!”
He was brisk about his work after that. He brushed off the loose hair, shaved around my ears, and whisked away the neckcloth.
I had no more than stood up and was reaching into my pocket to pay him when he climbed into the chair.
“Suppose you just give me a haircut,” he said, “and let’s see.”
He needed a haircut as badly as I needed to give him one, and I didn’t hesitate. I flipped the neckcloth out over his lap, pinned it around his neck, and went to work. It had been a long time since I had barbered anybody, but I took my time and was careful. After I had cut his hair, without either of us saying a word I put in the headrest, tilted him back, lathered his face, and gave him a shave. He turned out not a bad-looking fellow, and a good deal younger than I had thought.
He got up and looked at himself this way and that in the mirror while I stood holding out my coins.
When he had seen enough, he said, “Turnabout’s fair play. Keep your money.” And then he said, “When can you start?”
We struck a deal. He would furnish shop and equipment, and I could keep half of whatever I earned. I said all right, but what if I wanted to take a couple of courses in school? He said he would keep things going while I was gone, if I wasn’t gone too much, and if I would do the same for him. I said all right, if he wasn’t gone too much, and we shook. He was Skinner Hawes,