"I can't manage quite enough sleep," I said, wondering if that was the remark of a tenderfoot.
"Sometime--maybe one day a month--I feel all right, good, no sleepy," he went on. "Daytime work, ten hour, all right, feel good; fourteen hour always too much tired. Sometime, goddam, I go home, I go to bed, throw myself down this way." He threw both arms backward and to the side in a gesture of desperate exhaustion, allowing his head to fall back at the same time. "Goddam, think I no work no more. No day nuff sleep for work," he concluded.
Later on in the day, I saw Jimmy let the charge-up man, George, take the spoon and make front-wall. The heat "got his goat." "I lose about ten or fifteen pounds every summer," he said, "but I get it back in the winter. My wife is after me the whole time to leave this game. I tell her every year I will. Better quit this business, buddy, while you're young, before you get stuck like me."
I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the generic name for non-Hunky helpers.
"Say, Joe," he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, "what's your name right?"
"Charlie," I answered. "By the way, where have you been?"
"Drunk, Charlie," he answered, smiling cheerfully.
"Three week," he stated, with satisfaction; "beer, whiskey, everyt'ing. What the hell, work all time goddam job, what the hell?"
I tried to get a lot of sleep last night for handling the long turn; managed about nine hours. When I came to the locker, Stanley was there, dressed, cleaning his smoked glasses.
"You're a damned fool," I said; "this is the long turn."
"I know, I know," he returned, "I have t'ing to do. No have time sleep."
I looked at him. He had a big frame, but his limbs were hung on it, like clothes on hooks. His face was a gray pallor, sharply caving in under the cheek-bones. His eyes were very dull, and steady. I'd noticed those eyes of his before, and never could decide whether they showed a kind of sullen defiance, or resignation, or were just extraordinarily tired.
"Two month more this work every Sunday--goddam work all day like hell, all night like hell. Pretty soon go back to good job."
I knew what he meant now. He had told me weeks before, when we had hewed cinders together in the pit, how he was a rougher in a Pittsburgh mill. Worked only twelve hours a day and no Sundays.