He became a hog killer.
Hogs chained by one rear leg to an overhead conveyer were brought in, squealing, upside down. Ben, standing in one spot as the hogs came helplessly to him, would grip each pig by its throat and dig his knife into its jugular, in a thrust and turn motion. Blood ran off his leather apron; his boots got painted red.
He lasted a week. He didn't ask for any other position at the slaughterhouse; he just hopped a freight and reentered the world of the hobo.
A hobo, which is what Ben was in those days, traveled around looking for work. Whereas tramps were those looking for the open road, for thrills; that described the prewar Ben. But he never was a bum, which was how Ben classified those who never worked at all, beggars who slept in doorways, drunks and junkies, the sort of vagrant that gave folks like Ben a bad name.
In those days after the war, after the slaughterhouse, Ben always thought he'd find work somewhere and settle down. Maybe get back in touch with Ida, the girl in 'dry casings' at Armour who he'd been going with when he up and quit the slaughterhouse.
But instead he'd found himself on the hobo circuit, hitting the same towns year after year, seeking out jails to winter in, getting used to a life where lack of material belongings was a blessing, not a curse. He heard a lot of talk about socialism and communism; there was a sort of hobo underground, with organizations and such, hobo 'colleges' and coffee houses, mostly under the wing of the I.W.W., the radical labor party.
And the Depression had swelled the ranks of the wandering homeless, with free-spirited adventurers being outnumbered by the evicted and the desperate. Still, these folks fell right in with the kind of life Ben and others were living. After all, a lot of the men were war vets, like Ben, and had endured much worse. They had lived out of backpacks before.
The last time Ben believed in anything but his animal needs had been back in '32, when he got swept up in the Bonus Army. Ben was pretty radical back then, took it real serious, and that June, Ben and twenty thousand or so other war veterans and their families poured into Washington, D.C.. They were demanding the government cough up the war bonus the vets were not due to receive till 1945. President Hoover liked to say there weren't any hungry people in America, but Ben and thousands of other vets and their thousands of stomachs knew better; starving, jobless, they knew they needed their bonus dough, now.
They put up a Hooverville on Anacostia Flats in the southwest of the nation's capital. This army camp had no tents or barracks; just lean-tos cobbled together out of cardboard boxes and packing crates and scrap metal and tar-paper roofing. Desperation and hope mingled in the air, as communists, socialists, Wobblies, and the just plain hungry climbed on the Bughouse Square-type platform, preaching to the converted about the bonus they had coming. Congress wasn't sold, but did vote to pay passage home for the ex-soldiers.
Hardcore radical leaders urged the Bonus Army to stay on, and only a few thousand took Congress's bribe; the leadership assured those who remained that this battle, this war, would be won. Hoover was already campaigning for reelection-he could hardly afford to oust the Bonus Army by force. Use bayonets against unarmed war veterans, many of whom had their families with them, an army whose only weaponry was petitions? It would never happen.
General Douglas MacArthur, astride a white horse, led four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a mounted machine-gun squadron, half a dozen tanks, several hundred city cops, and a phalanx of Secret Service and Treasury agents against the Bonus Army. Ben saw one veteran shot to death, heard of another; saw veterans slashed and stabbed by bayonets and sabers-saw a man's ear cut off. The shanties were torched; smoke clouds hovered over the capital city. Countless men, women, and children were teargased, Ben among them.
Gassed at the Argonne; gassed at Anacostia.
It had soured Ben on just about everything. He didn't blame the soldiers-they were just kids, like he'd been a kid when he was in the army, taking orders and doing what they were told, like he had.
To him the radicals were little better than goddamn Hoover. Here it was, four years later, and the revolution that they promised wasn't here yet. Ben's revolution had been an internal one. He would no longer answer to any authority but that of his belly, presidents and radicals be damned.
He had gotten off a freight at Cleveland-home-and had been part of the landscape of Kingsbury Run ever since. He and his knife had carved out a place for themselves. He cut a few 'bos who got tough or tried to steal from him, carved a homo or two who got cute, and the word spread. Feared and respected, he was. Just how he wanted it.
Today was Wednesday, but Ben was unaware of that; the only time he became aware of what day it was, was Sunday, because of the church bells. He would then know it was time for his weekly bath, which he'd accomplish in the lake usually, or at the Sally in winter; he kept himself and his clothes clean. Then, his weekly hygienics accomplished, time would turn into the vague, meaningless thing that it was in his life.
Yesterday and today, the newspapers had been filled with the story of the Torso Clinic, with much being made of Safety Director Ness taking on the Mad Butcher case personally. Ben was unaware of this, too: newspapers were of no interest to him in the summer. In the winter, newspapers had value: they kept you warm.
What was on Ben's mind this early evening was getting drunk and getting laid, in no particular order. He had spent the long, hot day at the Central Market, unloading boxes, and now had two dollars to help him fulfill both those needs. He knew just the place to get the job done, too. A nameless, seedy little saloon near Central and Twentieth; it had been a speakeasy during Prohibition and had never gotten around to making itself look legal.
If getting drunk had been all he had in mind, Ben could have just bought a bottle and retreated to his cave. But this saloon-in a neighborhood of rooming houses, secondhand-store fencing operations, and bookie joints, on the edge of an industrial area-was a hangout for professional beggars, one of whom, Blister Betsy, was a sort of sweetie of Bens.
Ben entered the room and inhaled, with satisfaction, the aroma of stale smoke mixed with beer-soaked sawdust. An exhaust fan churned noisily, fighting with the sound of Amos and Andy on the radio. Half a dozen men dressed in sweaty work clothes stood at the bar, a foot on the rail, putting away beers; some were talking, several were listening to what the Kingfish was up to.
The pasty-faced fat bartender nodded at Ben noncommittally, drawing a beer from the tap.
Ben put fifteen cents on the counter and said, 'Boilermaker, Pete. Betsy been in?'
'Nope.'
'Well, it's early yet.'
'Yeah.'
Ben took his glass of beer and his shot of whiskey and sat in a booth and drank them slowly, savoringly. More patrons began wandering in, and they were a shabby-looking lot, but they had money to spend. They were professional beggars who gathered every evening at this nameless saloon after a day of shamming downtown, leaving their phony afflictions behind.
A few of the beggars had genuine handicaps-the wingies, who had one or no arms, and the peggies, who had one or no legs. There were also the blinkies (the fake blind ones), deafies, dummies, D and D's (a combination of the latter two categories), and fitzies (epileptics). Blister Betsy put acid on her arms to make it look like she had ugly sores that needed a doctor's care.
Ben didn't as a rule have much respect for beggars or panhandlers, but he thought people like Blister Betsy gave value for the dollar. It was a job; it was show business. The person paying got to feel good about himself, for helping out a poor needy soul.
Betsy herself was a skinny thing, with mousy brown hair and a face as plain as a plank; but she laughed real pretty when she drank, and Ben liked the way her hips moved when he was in her.
A skinny character called Sightless Red spotted Ben and, after getting himself a beer, came over and joined him.
'It's been a while, pard,' Red said, smiling, showing very decayed teeth, where teeth remained. Ben had all his teeth; he took care of himself.
'Yes it has,' Ben said.
'Betsy was asking for you, while back.'
Ben felt warm inside, and it wasn't just the boiler-maker. 'That's good. Betsy and me get along fine.'
Every month or so, Ben would show up at the nameless saloon, spend a buck or so of odd-job money on Betsy, getting her well-oiled, then go to her room at the boarding house nearby and do the time-honored lying-down
