ON THE OTHER HAND
Mayer, Milton
On The Other Hand By Milton Mayer Not So Strange Fruit On U. S. Highway 66 stands a shabby young man with a thumb, hitching rides. There's no sizing him up until he gets into your car; not even...
...It's a long, long way from that shabby young man, whom no one suspected twenty-five years ago, to Sen...
...You'll live until you smother...
...It was a good three-dollar sweater, too...
...It isn't this or that terrible evil that comes and goes and leaves the sun still shining...
...She looked at Roy and me and asked if I would drive her car for her...
...The Rosenbergs were certainly up to something that good Americans shouldn't be up to...
...How did that gun get into my hand...
...He never sent the sweater back...
...What was the Rosenbergs' motive...
...You get a feeling that he must have had a strong motive for doing what he did, stronger than the love of life...
...But nothing much was made of it by the government, except in respect of the single capital crime of which they were convicted...
...He'd been wearing a sweater of mine, and he asked if he could keep it...
...I know I was...
...What about it...
...Besides, I had no windshield...
...We sat there a couple of hours, saying nothing, and then, away up ahead, we saw a tiny red light...
...He may rob you, kill you, torture you...
...We tried to push the girl's car out with ours, and ours went in the ditch...
...At least it looked that way...
...I can't imagine myself stealing something that belonged to my country and giving it to some other country, even to an ally...
...But I am...
...What broke the government's back in the Rosenberg case—you can still throw an electric switch, even with a broken back—was their refusal to save their lives by confessing...
...For miles and miles a slick yellow Chrysler coupe was behind us with its lights off...
...Now a man who believes in something so strongly that his life is nothing to him usually has a long record of extremist, or at least devoted, activity on behalf of that belief, and the trail of that activity, if it's Communism, is pretty hard to cover these days in America...
...A thin, good-looking girl was alone in the car, and white as wax...
...Springtime Once, on 66, outside San Bernardino, or San Berdoo, I had a car myself, and I picked up a man named Bowman, who turned out to be an ex-convict...
...That funny feeling, that a man you hate is not just a cheap crook, but really believes in the evil he was doing, disturbs your slumbers—especially if you yourself do not believe, so fanatically that you would volunteer your life for it, in the good that you yourself are doing...
...I asked her why she had no lights on and if we could help her...
...We—I mean I, again—much prefer men who sell their souls to the devil to those who give them to him...
...It's a long, sad way for a land to go...
...Then I got out and sat in my car with Roy...
...I started cussing her out for that and she got mad and said she'd drive...
...Still...
...He couldn't have done it for money, which is less than life...
...And now there's a movie called The Hitch-Hiker...
...I'll send it back to you," he said, "with the money you've paid out for meals...
...One hundred fifty-nine million Americans are up to that...
...I don't know their names, most of them, or they mine...
...If we meet again, ever, anywhere, we'll fall into each other's arms...
...So Roy got in mine and drove, in front of us, and I drove hers...
...So we stopped and it stopped, and we got out and went back to see...
...I don't...
...You will lock up your house, and lock up your children, and lock up your wife, and pull the covers over your head at night...
...She'd bought it two days before and started home in it...
...I asked her, how about me...
...I don't leastwise...
...Total strangers, all the friends with whom I've eaten and slept, talked to through long days and long nights, borrowed from, lent to, crawled under axles with, carried bags for (that I could have got away with), parked cars for (that I could have got away with), minded babies for, been taken care of by...
...She said she would have shot that other man —Roy—if he'd tried to get into the car with her...
...And the things you'll have to do to get enough money to stay in the best hotels are not the things you'd like to do...
...it's everything, Communism, hitch-hikers, everything possible and impossible, until, as the man says in the Bible, you grope in the noonday as in darkness...
...You mustn't let the bogeyman get into your life at all, or he'll spoil it altogether...
...I've got a thousand lifelong friends—more than that, I guess—all over America and they have me...
...So we sat there, and I suggested that, since my car had no windshield, and the top was torn, we ask Roy to sit with us in her car...
...That's what broke the government's back, and maybe the country's...
...When we went slow, it went slow...
...Roy knew better than to try to turn around in that clay, so he'd backed down...
...That I'm not up to...
...The rear right wheel slid into the ditch going around a curve...
...She didn't know that cars needed oil—a quart every fifty miles or so, in those days—or that lights did not attract lightning...
...I wonder why...
...He said he was going there too...
...You'll get scareder and scareder...
...that was the trouble with the government's case, which rested on the confessions of men who, willy-nilly, saved their lives by confessing...
...Some men will confess to save their lives even when they have nothing to confess...
...I've bummed them all, in my time, time and time again...
...McCarthy, who suspects everybody, and on to that shabby young man whom everyone suspects...
...But send me the sweater back...
...It's nonsense, I think, to compare the Rosenbergs with Sacco and Vanzetti...
...It wouldn't be so bad if the bogeyman gave you the measles or the chicken-pox, or even if he killed your mother or daddy or burned your house down...
...What's all that...
...I asked her what she was going to do with the gun...
...She was holding a gun, but she didn't know how to hold it...
...better people, for all I know, die every day, people who haven't been convicted •of treason...
...She said I looked different...
...Of course there are Communists in America, and shabby young men with guns, but if you suspect everyone, what's going to happen to you...
...I drove, and she sat with the gun in her lap...
...I can't imagine myself being up to that...
...That's what I think...
...But when a man, even an innocent man, won't confess, even falsely, to save his life, you get a funny feeling...
...But a lot of Americans are up to something that good Americans shouldn't be up to...
...he helped me change a tire (it took two men to get a tire off a Ford rim in those days) and asked me to give him a lift, and I was afraid not to...
...The remilitarization of Japan and Germany, for instance...
...I asked her how she could tell...
...The only thing they can do to be absolutely safe is to be dead...
...Some dame," said Roy...
...I am the shabby young man you picked up, on 66, on 58, on 41, on 1, on 30, on Alternate 30, on 101...
...I wanted the milk spilled and over with...
...Maybe they believed that equal armament is a step toward equal disarmament...
...Spill the milk...
...She said she had turned off the lights to avoid attracting the lightning...
...I think the country was in a hurry to kill them...
...Then there will be no use crying...
...Spilled Milk The Rosenbergs are dead, and there's no use crying...
...it was out of oil...
...It had a bearing knock...
...When you have to go out, you will drive in a bullet-proof car as fast as you can, with a bodyguard, and keep away from people except in the best hotels...
...The safety was on, and I was sure she didn't know it had a safety...
...When we went faster, it went faster...
...not even then, for sure...
...you did half the driving...
...Three days later Roy and I got to Tulsa, where I was stopping off, and he said he guessed he'd go on...
...Maybe they believed in Communism...
...What's bad about the bogeyman is his possession of you...
...Won't the sun shine tomorrow, even so...
...You don't want your slumbers disturbed...
...The advertisement shows a shabby young man with a thumb in one hand—and a gun in the other—and the advertisement says: "Have you ever picked up a hitch-hiker?—You won't ever . . . after you see this picture...
...You know, a man who has something to confess will usually confess it to save his life...
...Some people think that the government's hurry to kill the Rosenbergs proves something...
...You—I mean "I," of course—get the feeling that he must have believed in something so strongly that his very life was nothing in the balance...
...I don't...
...Let a man sleep...
...The reason I was is that I didn't want to cry, and there's no use crying over spilled milk...
...Ran, because you don't want to consume any more of a traveler's time than you have to...
...On the other hand, men who believe in evil, and who willingly give up their lives for it, are harder to dismiss than those who merely do it...
...He asked me where I was going, and I made the mistake of saying I was going to Pennsylvania...
...It got brighter, slowly, and by and by it turned out to be the rear light of my car...
...She said I was different...
...By the time she had tried to spin it out and failed, Roy, in my car up ahead, was out of sight...
...Forget the meals," I said...
...Certainly the government would have left no Gibraltar unturned to uncover it...
...I had to...
...They had been, I believe, at one time...
...You'll live, but how...
...She drove, with the gun still in her lap...
...I picked up her gun and threw it into the ditch, like a detective-story detective...
...I don't mind saying that I was suspicious of them...
...Thanks, friend...
...Men and countries that live like this aren't living, but dying...
...On second thought, you'd better pick up every shabby young man you see, or he'll shoot a hole through one of your tires as you whizz past and then, when you've had to stop, he'll break the bullet-proof glass with the butt of his gun, and then where will you be...
...The clay was glassy wet and we were driving slow...
...I can understand the former so much easier...
...She said she'd shoot him if he tried to get in...
...We had to go by way of Ama-rillo, because 66 was washed out, and there was a great rain that night and a lot of lightning...
...The girl said I'd have to make up my mind to go with her or with Roy, so I went with Roy...
...She was the daughter of a New York lawyer, one of those three-name characters everyone has heard of, and she had no mother and had been in Hollywood and her father had sent her money to buy the Chrysler...
...I'm thankful for all the friends, on all the highways, who have picked me up, total strangers until they stopped their cars and I grabbed my suitcase and ran to catch up with them...
...Were they Communists...
...A farmer and his wife came along and took us in and gave us breakfast, and we got the cars and the gun out of the ditch in the morning...
Vol. 17 • August 1953 • No. 8
