Face the Winter Naked (5 page)

On
Thursday, July 28, the festering boil of Bonus Marchers came to a head and all
hell broke loose. President Hoover ordered the Army to clear out the veterans.
Infantry and cavalry supported by six tanks were dispatched, with Chief of
Staff General Douglas MacArthur in command. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower served
as his liaison with the Washington police, and Major George Patton led the
cavalry. By early afternoon, troops were stationed on Pennsylvania Avenue.

"I'll
be damned," someone shouted, "would you look at that?"

The
veterans hoisted their flags higher and the crowd roared.

"We've
won! They called out the military, the generals, the whole shebang to honor us."

More
cheers arose throughout the crowd.

But
Daniel hit the ground running and screaming.

"Take
cover!"

He
grabbed a young woman dressed as an infantryman and pulled her out of harm's
way just as Patton's troopers charged. Soldiers with fixed bayonets hurled tear
gas into the crowd.

Daniel
fell upon the woman in a nearby ditch, shielding her body with his own. His
right shoulder hurt like hell, as though it had been ripped from its socket.
The woman cried and struggled as he pinned her down.

"Stay
still," he whispered. "They'll kill us."

"Let
me go!"

"It's
too late for me to save Woody or Frank or the others." He stopped to get
his breath. "But by the Lord, if I can't save the life of just one person,
then my own life ain't worth a damn."

She
cried, and he covered her mouth with his hand.

"You—you
see what they're doing. They ain't going to give us our money. They're going to
kill every last one of us. Our own government's trying to kill us."

"No!"
The woman escaped his clutches and scrambled to her feet. "My husband! Oh
my God, I have to find him!"

"Come
back—" He reached for her, but she took off running.

"Jim!"
she screamed. "Jim, where are you?"

Daniel's
heart lurched as the woman ran blindly toward the group of veterans. Her
screams echoed in his head. No longer able to see her, he crouched in the
ditch, waiting and watching in horror as soldiers on horseback attempted to
evacuate men, women, and babies from the federal grounds with tanks, rifles,
and bayonets. All around him people fell screaming. Others retreated across the
river. When a canister of tear gas landed nearby, he yanked his overalls' bib
over his nose and mouth, choking and gagging on the fumes. His eyes watered and
burned, his tears mingled with the sweat of his fear, and the living nightmares
returned full-force.

Darkness
fell, and MacArthur—ignoring the injured around him—led his infantry to the
main camp, and by morning the camp was in flames.

Daniel
didn't know if he'd passed out from sheer terror or simply fell asleep, but his
next awareness was a smoke-filled sky and burning lungs. Scenes of war clogged
his brain. He knew from experience it would take awhile before they faded enough
for him to think straight.

He
shook his head to clear it, wiped sweat from his face, sat up in the ditch and
saw destruction wherever he looked. He straightened his glasses and found his
cap on the ground. Slapped the dust from the cap and covered his head. The
veterans had been ragged and hungry, hollow-eyed and lost, and their own
government had tried to kill them. Never in all his born days would Daniel
Tomelin have imagined this could happen in his own country. How could the
president condone such treatment of its citizens? His trip to Washington D.C.
had planted him smack-dab in the middle of a war between the wealthy and the
desperate. He thought of the young woman he'd tried to save, and wondered if
she found her husband.

He
left the scene in a daze, found his tools and gunnysack where he'd stashed them
in Chester's shack. A deep sorrow came over him when he saw the hovels he'd
helped build lying in ruins.
Damn. All our hard work shot to hell.
There
was no sign of the man who befriended him his first day in camp—had Chester
made it to safety? Or was he sitting off somewhere nursing a grudge and a
broken heart. He was glad nobody was around to see his own tears.

Daniel
adjusted his tools in the loops and pockets of his overalls, checked his pack
and slung it over his shoulder. He took one last, sad look at the veterans'
disbanded camp—signs of fighting, hoof and boot prints in the dust—then left
the city the way he'd come almost two months before, by the back roads near the
Anacostia River. Toward evening, when the opportunity presented itself, he took
refuge aboard a freight going west. The rocking of the train lulled him into a
restless sleep filled with ghastly images of the Bonus Marchers' camp in
flames.

When
the train slowed the next morning, he grabbed his pack and hopped from the car
to the ground, dusted himself off and started walking away from the pink sky in
the east.

As
the light came up, buildings appeared on the horizon, and the closer he got, he
could see the dilapidated evidence of a Hooverville hobo camp. Knowing from
experience what to expect, he removed some dimes from his leather purse and
dropped them in his pants pocket.

 He
approached the squalor, set his pack on the ground and squatted near a
smoldering campfire with a lard can of coffee simmering over the coals. The
aroma whet his appetite and he licked his lips. Three filthy, unshaven tramps
sat on milk crates around the fire, smoking snipes and spitting tobacco juice
into the coals. Faces hardened by despair and suspicion, they watched him like
a pack of hungry wolves.

"Can
you spare a little coffee? I can pay."

"You
got your own cup?" The man shifted his eyes at the others as Daniel opened
his pack and removed his tin cup.

He
watched the man fill it, then blew the steam away before sipping.

"Where
you been?" a second man asked.

Daniel
handed each person a dime and found himself a box to sit on. For good measure,
he pulled his screwdriver out of its loop and laid it across his lap. His head
was clear. Gone were the nightmares, for now. He drank the coffee, taking his
time, knowing the bums were eyeing him and wondering where he kept the rest of
his money.

"I
been in D.C. with the Bonus Army."

"Yeah?"

A
grizzled old tramp in ragged clothes inched closer to Daniel, and Daniel's free
hand moved ever so slightly toward his screwdriver. The man retreated, leaving
him to his hot drink as he scanned the group with one eye open for trouble. The
coffee was strong and bitter.

"A
terrible tragedy happened in Washington," he said. "Maybe you heard
about it."

"Word
travels fast in hobo jungles." The man nodded. "That was shameful.
You can't trust nobody these days."

"Only
one good thing can come of it." Daniel raised his cup and drank. "If
Hoover had any chance of getting re-elected, it ended that day."

The
other man rose and took a leak in a nearby weed patch, and when he came back,
Daniel continued.

"Some
people in this country are still decent. This rich society lady went around
asking people, 'Have you ate?' Then later she came with coffee and cigarettes
for the whole bunch, and a thousand sandwiches, to boot. That's something you
don't see every day."

He
waited for someone to speak, but the bums sat silently staring at him, their
eyes half closed in grubby faces. All of a sudden, he felt an uneasy urge to
leave this camp of drifters.
Hunger makes a man crazy and dangerous.

He
rose and stretched, shook the leavings from his cup and replaced it in his bag.

"Gonna
git now."

"Where
ya going?"

"I'm
not sure. Hop a train maybe. Or strike out over the hills to find work."

"It's
a damn cold day in hell when there's a lick of work in this country." The
man spat in the hot coals.

"So
be it," Daniel said. "We'll find out when Mr. Roosevelt gets elected,
won't we?"

He
tipped his cap and moved off into the morning.

Crouching
in the shadows of a deserted shack somewhere in eastern Ohio, Daniel held his
breath and watched the flashlight beam approach in the darkness. Heavy
footsteps crunched in the gravel. The light stopped moving. Except for crickets
reporting the temperature in the hot, humid air and the faint hissing of other
night insects, all was quiet. The light moved; the footsteps resumed. From
somewhere a dog barked. Then silence.

The
dark figure of a railroad "bull" worked its way along the freight
sitting idle on the tracks half a mile from the depot. There was no great hurry
yet. The man would make his rounds first, checking inside every car.

Keeping
his ears open for the train's whistle and one eye on the train, Daniel observed
George's outline in the darkness, hating to disturb him as he huddled against
the building half asleep. But the train would be pulling out soon and they both
wanted to be on it. He didn't think the old man could do it himself. He
recalled their first meeting, thinking how things were different now.

Last
December. Cincinnati. They were waiting outdoors in a soup line as a cold wind
with traces of sleet whistled through the alley between the downtown buildings.
If Daniel himself was freezing in his old winter coat and thin overalls, it was
a lot worse for the old man with a banjo directly ahead of him.

"We'll
both feel better with a little soup in our bellies," he said.

"Even
if it is thin and watery slop," the man replied. "I hope it ain't
dishwater."

Daniel
leaned closer. "What do you mean?" He grabbed his cap as the wind
lifted it up.

"Some
people pour dishwater in the slop bucket and feed it to their hogs."

"No
kidding? Why would they do that?"

A
shrug. "Can't waste nothing these days."

"Well,
this soup might be thin, but it'll warm us up." Daniel opened his pack and
removed a small, tattered blanket. "Here now, let me wrap this ol' rag
round your shoulders so you don't freeze to death." George had nodded and
let Daniel tuck the blanket around him. "There, how's that?"

"Mighty
good. Thanks."

"Nice
of the soup folks to take pity on us," Daniel said.

"We
can thank Al Capone for the soup."

"Al
Capone? The gangster?"

"Yep.
Capone opened the first soup kitchen right after the Crash. Three meals a
day." People turned and stared at him. "Well, it's true!" he
said, his gritty voice rising. "Al Capone had a good side, crook or
not." They turned away, shaking their heads.

Cold
air crept down Daniel's collar. His gunnysack, held against him for warmth, did
little to block the cold. He hunched down into his coat and motioned to
George's banjo. "Can you play that thing?"

"Not
till my fingers thaw out."

"Where
you headed? Got family somewhere?"

George
had a faraway look in his eyes, but offered no reply.

"You
got a name?"

"George."

"Well,
George, I'm Daniel Tomelin. There, we've met. Now we can take soup
together."

Though
George would never admit it, Daniel suspected he rode the rails from one end of
the country to the other, simply because he was all alone in the world and had
nowhere else to go. They traveled together for a few weeks, George following
him around like a lost pup, and Daniel started calling him the "banjo
man," for the playing he did after his fingers thawed.

Then
George disappeared, and he didn't know if the old man had fallen climbing into
a boxcar and got crushed under the wheels, or if he'd just got tired of
Daniel's company and wandered away.

Whatever
the reason, Daniel Tomelin was damned if he knew how the old tramp always ended
up in the same boxcar as himself. He thought he'd lost George before going to
Baltimore to see the Kimballs. But he'd popped up again yesterday in a
one-gas-pump village in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a farmer to dump a
load of old cabbages and turnips on the ground for the bums to pick through.
The two men resumed their relationship, and Daniel was beginning to feel
responsible for him. Sometime between now and the last time he saw him, George's
health had deteriorated.

Now,
a noise over by the tracks caught Daniel's attention and he turned to see the
officer swing himself up into a boxcar. He tapped George's shoulder.

"Wake
up, train's leaving any minute." George mumbled and tried to stand. Daniel
helped him up and  lay a hand on his shoulder. "You okay, buddy? Watch
your step."

George
coughed. "Yeah—hand me ol' Betsy there."

Daniel
picked up George's banjo and his parcel, then jerked around as the train
whistle blasted. "Come on!" He shoved George's belongings at him and
grabbed his gunnysack. "Can you make it?"