Read In Dubious Battle for Free Online

feeling the edges of paper, following the corner of the desk, touching in turn each button on his vest. The right hand went to the electric plate and pulled out the plug.
    Jim closed the door quietly and stepped to the desk. “I was told to come here,” he said.
    Suddenly the man stood up and pushed his right hand across. “I’m Harry Nilson. I have your application here.” Jim shook hands. “Sit down, Jim.” The nervous voice was soft, but made soft by an effort.
    Jim pulled the extra chair close and sat down by the desk. Harry opened a desk drawer, took out an open can of milk, the holes plugged with matches, a cup of sugar and two thick mugs. “Will you have a cup of coffee?”
    “Sure,” said Jim.
    Nilson poured the black coffee into the mugs. He said, “Now here’s the way we work on applications, Jim. Your card went in to the membership committee. I have to talk to you and make a report. The committee passes on the report and then the membership votes on you. So you see, if I question you pretty deep, I just have to.” He poured milk into his coffee, and then he looked up, and his eyes smiled for a second.
    “Sure, I know,” said Jim. “I’ve heard you’re more select than the Union League Club.”
    “By God, we have to be!” He shoved the sugar bowl at Jim, then suddenly, “Why do you want to join the Party?”
    Jim stirred his coffee. His face wrinkled up in concentration. He looked down into his lap. “Well—I could give you a lot of little reasons. Mainly, it’s this: My whole family has been ruined by this system. My old man, my father, was slugged so much in labor trouble that he went punch-drunk. He got an idea that he’d like to dynamite a slaughter-house where he used to work. Well, he caught a charge of buckshot in the chest from a riot gun.”
    Harry interrupted, “Was your father Roy Nolan?”
    “Yeah. Killed three years ago.”
    “Jesus!” Harry said. “He had a reputation for being the toughest mug in the country. I’ve heard he could lick five cops with his bare hands.”
    Jim grinned. “I guess he could, but every time he went out he met six. He always got the hell beat out of him. He used to come home all covered with blood. He’d sit beside the cook stove. We had to let him alone then. Couldn’t even speak to him or he’d cry. When my mother washed him later, he’d whine like a dog.” He paused. “You know he was a sticker in the slaughter-house. Used to drink warm blood to keep up his strength.”
    Nilson looked quickly at him, and then away. He bent the corner of the application card and creased it down with his thumb nail. “Your mother is alive?” he asked softly.
    Jim’s eyes narrowed. “She died a month ago,” he said. “I was in jail. Thirty days for vagrancy. Word came in she was dying. They let me go home with a cop. There wasn’t anything the matter with her. She wouldn’t talk at all. She was a Catholic, only my old man wouldn’t let her go to church. He hated churches. She just stared at me. I asked her if she wanted a priest, but she didn’t answer me, just stared. ’Bout four o’clock in the morning she died. Didn’t seem like dying at all. I didn’t go to the funeral. I guess they would’ve let me. I didn’t want to. I guess she just didn’t want to live. I guess she didn’t care if she went to hell, either.”
    Harry started nervously. “Drink your coffee and have some more. You act half asleep. You don’t take anything, do you?”
    “You mean dope? No, I don’t even drink.”
    Nilson pulled out a piece of paper and made a few notes on it. “How’d you happen to get vagged?”
    Jim said fiercely, “I worked in Tulman’s Department Store. Head of the wrapping department. I was out to a picture show one night, and coming home I saw a crowd in Lincoln Square. I stopped to see what it was all about. There was a guy in the middle of the park talking. I climbed up on the pedestal of that statue of Senator Morgan so I could see