Free Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner Page B

the impression that Otto crouched, ready to fight or run, before the slight tension relaxed and Otto’s face pulled up in the sleepy smile.
    “Hello,” he said. “What was Macs big secret?”
    “Eniting,”
Joe said. “Nothing special.”
    Otto’s smile widened while he rolled the newspaper package and twisted one end. He had his hat and coat on as if ready to go out. “You’re sure a talker,” he said.
    “I talk enough,” Joe said, surprised.
    “Never too much, eh?”
    When they locked eyes, Otto’s eyes did not fall. They wrinkled at the corners as if he were enjoying some private joke.
    “Maybe I haven’t got much to talk about,” Joe said.
    “Not as much as me, is that what you mean?”
    “Maybe.”
    Into Otto’s smile now had come something definitely knowing and amused. He picked up the package and rolled it gently between his palms. At last he said softly, “Who’re you trying to fool?”
    Puzzled by the concentrations and the air of knowingness in Otto’s look, Joe felt the backs of his knees tensing as if before a fight. But he only said, “Not you, I guess.”
    “I got eyes,” Otto said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.” Holding Joe’s eyes, he tipped the package and jiggled it until a pair of wire cutters and a thin-bladed hacksaw slid out on the table. “I been watching you,” he said. “I like the way you keep your mouth shut.”
    “I kind of like it too,” Joe said.
    Otto was loosely built, shorter than Joe, nondescript except for the sheep face and the silly-looking smile. Everything about him seemed limp and loose, hair and smile and clothes, even the way his arms hung from his shoulders. But his eyes had the unwavering reflecting brightness of a rat’s. “How’d you like a build up your stake a little tonight?” he said.
    But now Joe began to smile. He shook his head. “Don’t tell me anything about it, Otto.”
    “You can’t live forever without work,” Otto said. “Even ifthey break this strike, you’re back on the dock bosses and the mates.”
    “That’s all right.”
    Shrugging, Otto shook the hacksaw and wire cutters back into the package and retwisted the end. “You like to work alone, is that it?”
    “Maybe I’m particular what I work at,” Joe said. He returned Otto’s mocking grin, and as Otto turned to the door he wagged his finger at Otto’s coat lapel. “You wearing that button out tonight?”
    Otto’s eyes lighted on the button in Joe’s own coat. He laughed aloud, shaking his head almost in admiration, and slipped the button from his lapel and into his pocket. “You’re all right,” he said. “We’ll get along.”
5 San Pedro, July, 1910

    On ordinary days the waterfront is a blocks-long stage crisscrossed with railroad tracks, cluttered with stacks of poles, lumber, neatly layered ties, pyramids of coal. The two long wharves stretch out into the bay toward Dead Man’s Island, each with its own pattern of tracks, stalled freight- and flatcars, piles of merchandise going or coming. Around the ends of the wharves small craft cluster like fruit flies around something sweet and sticky; along the other end lounge the longshoremen waiting for the dock boss’s call.
    This is a stage on which are enacted the tedious scenes of arrival and departure, of fetch and carry, more erratic than the tides but just as repetitive. Out along the docks the stagehands prepare the sets, warp in freighters and lumber schooners and colliers and coastwise passenger ships and an occasional old three- or four-master. Their work is complex with lines and bawled orders, but it comes quickly to a neatness, a readiness, and a waiting. At a certain point the dock gates are unlocked and at the window of his little office the stage manager selects his actors from the loungers on the proscenium. He selects them for various reasons:because they are personal friends, because they have bought him drinks, because they have kicked back a folded bill out of their wages, because