Cannery Row: Chapters 9-16

Mack became open and confidential. “I’ll tell you, Doc. I and the boys got to get some dough—we simply got to. It’s for a good purpose, you might say a worthy cause.”

Mack was jovial. “Don’t you worry about frogs, Doc,” he said.

“Oh,” said Mack dispiritedly. “Oh. Well, don’t you worry about it, Doc. Maybe we can get Lee Chong’s old truck.”

Once he had financed Gay to go for turtles. He financed him for two weeks and at the end of that time Gay was in jail on his wife’s charge and he never did go for turtles.

Doc’s dealings with Mack and the boys had always been interesting but rarely had they been profitable to Doc.

He remembered ruefully the time Mack sold him fifteen tom cats and by night the owners came and got every one.

When there was laughter at a joke he didn’t understand Frankie laughed delightedly behind his chair and when the conversation dealt with abstractions his brow furrowed and he became intent and serious.

When Mr. Rattle embezzled a client’s money and ran away to San Jose, he was caught with a high-hair blonde and sent up within ten days.

By this time the truck was little more than four wheels and an engine and the engine was so crotchety and sullen and senile that it required expert care and consideration.

By this time the truck was little more than four wheels and an engine and the engine was so crotchety and sullen and senile that it required expert care and consideration.

As it was they used decrepit, struggling old horrors of machines that needed the constant attention of a man like Gay.

It was a good omen that Eddie came back with the dry cells without trouble.

And if at some time all the heaps of jalopies, cut-down Dusenbergs, Buicks, De Sotos and Plymouths, American Austins and Isotta-Fraschinis praise God in a great chorus—it will be largely due to Gay and his brotherhood.

The party clambered on the truck—Gay drove and Mack sat beside him; they bumped around the corner of Lee Chong’s and down through the lot, threading among the pipes.

With all their alacrity, it was afternoon when they got started.

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation.

He worked with animals too and, having studied in France, he even dabbled in the new practice of embalming bodies before they were buried.

Some of the old-timers considered this sentimental and some thought it wasteful and to some it was sacrilegious since there was no provision for it in any sacred volume.

The knocking got him out of bed and brought him tousled of hair and beard to the door in his nightgown.

There was one nice thing about Model T’s. The parts were not only interchangeable, they were unidentifiable.

“You more or less knows what you’ll do. A fightin’ guy fights and a cryin’ guy cries, but this—” he said magnanimously—“why you don’t know whether it’ll run you up a pine tree or start you swimming to Santa Cruz. It’s more fun that way,” he said weakly.

Right in the middle I seen he knew...the story was so much malarkey.

Mack was mulling over the last piece of reasoning when the sound of footsteps on the ground made them turn.

Mack stood up humbly. “I didn’t know, Captain,” he said. “Honest we never seen the sign, Captain.”

Imperceptibly the shoulders of the man straightened, nothing obvious, but he held himself differently.

Mack was instantly solicitous. “Mind if I look, Captain? Come, girl. Come on, girl.”

The pointer looked up at her master and then sidled up to Mack.

“Well you make a hot poultice of epsom salts and put it on there. She’s weak, you know, from the pups. Be a shame if she got sick now. You’d lose the pups too.”

Silent early morning dogs parade majestically picking and choosing judiciously whereon to pee.

From up near the station came the barking of a dog—the watchman, a dark and surly man, had seen them and his black and surly cocker spaniel had seen them.

There were frogs there all right, thousands of them. Their voices beat the night, they boomed and barked and croaked and rattled. They sang to the stars, to the waning moon, to the waving grasses.

Then into the pool plunged the line of men, stamping, churning, moving in a crazy line up the pool, flinging their feet about.

Hysterically the frogs displaced from their placid spots swam ahead of the crazy thrashing feet and the feet came on.

Tens and fifties of them were flung into the gunny sacks, and the sacks filled with tired, frightened, and disillusioned frogs, with dripping, whimpering frogs.

“My wife is a wonderful woman,” he said in a kind of peroration.

Mack glanced at the burned curtains, at the floor glistening with whiskey and puppy dirt, at the bacon grease that was coagulating on the stove front.

Dora was having trouble with her income tax, for she was entangled in that curious enigma which said the business was illegal and then taxed her for it.

In addition to everything else there were the regulars—the steady customers who had been coming down for years, the laborers from the gravel pits, the riders from the ranches, the railroad men who came in the front door, and the city officials and prominent business men who came in the rear entrance back by the tracks and who had little chintz sitting rooms assigned to them.

The doctors of Monterey—and there were enough of them to take care of the ordinary diseases, accidents and neuroses—were running crazy.

Before he knew it he found himself running from shanty to shanty taking temperatures, giving physics, borrowing and delivering blankets and even taking food from house to house where mothers looked at him with inflamed eyes from their beds, and thanked him and put the full responsibility for their children’s recovery on him.