Chapter 1: Gypsies

It was just another crummy place to live, a cheap room in a cheap hotel in a cheap part of town, down close to what would have been skid road if this eastern Washington town had been big enough to have a skid road district. The carpets smelled musty, the wall paint stank of stale cigarette smoke; tired light bulbs in filthy overhead globes flickered dingy light and the windows passed gloomy light through their grimy panes.

If the inside of this crummy hotel was bad, the outside was worse. Dirty bricks with chipped edges, crumbling mortar and grimy concrete ledgers framed a lopsided metal sign hung over the front entrance. Faded letters proclaimed Empire Hotel.

Graydon trudged up the staircase to Door 3 and their rooms. The front room overlooked the street. A smaller side window overlooked the trash-littered alley. A refrigerator with condenser coils on top, dirty with dust, stood beside a two-burner gas range. Two overhead cabinets, a chipped counter, and a chrome-legged painted table with four chairs furnished the kitchenette.

A faded brown three-cushion couch slumped under the alley-side window. A yellow overstuffed chair, ripped along one threadbare arm, sat by the doorway into his parents’ bedroom. Another door opened into the bathroom. A bare bulb hung from a twisted, cotton-covered electrical cord. A hard-water stained lavatory bowl flanked a cast iron tub. A rust smear ran down from the dripping tub faucet. The toilet, a big chunk missing from its tank lid, leaned crookedly in the corner.

They’d lived in this hotel apartment since late winter. Alex Johns had finished up his high-iron job on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, built to replace the fallen original suspension bridge nick-named Galloping Gertie. It famously flogged itself to destruction in a wind storm. Alex moved the family to eastern Washington to a job at Rocky Reach dam on the Columbia River near Wenatchee. It was one of many dams that turned the free-flowing Columbia into a riverine terrace of stair-stepped reservoirs. Dam-building offered steady work for his step-father. His first big job had been the Grand Coulee Dam, built in the twilight years of the Great Depression. The federal mania for river damming to generate great quantities of free electricity and canal systems to water the arid western states was abruptly interrupted by Pearl Harbor.

US Army draftee Alex Johns was ordered to a remote Alaskan island chain that no one other than a few crazy fishermen and a handful of neglected native peoples had known existed. Japanese military strategists ordered an invasion force to the Aleutian Islands as a feint, a diversion to draw American military assets away from a greater Japanese goal in the middle Pacific.

Alex Johns operated heavy equipment in a battalion construction unit. He survived a sub-zero blizzard with frostbitten lungs. He emerged from the storm carrying three construction crew survivors on his bulldozer. By war’s end he’d made buck sergeant; he was discharged following VJ Day with a partial disability benefit, a purple heart, and an attitude that before God could throw another nasty surprise his way, he’d live to purely enjoy himself before he went in the hole. Going in the hole is iron-worker slang for falling to death from the high iron.

He met a red-headed divorcee at a Fort Lewis U.S.O. dance. While waiting for his discharge papers to be cut, he dropped a ring on her finger, put a “biscuit in her oven” on the club’s pool table after hours, and agreed to let her five-year-old son tag along while he looked for a job. They packed themselves into a second-hand 1941 Hudson 4-door sedan and hit the road as gypsies, construction camp migrants in a flood of veterans jumping into the American post-war construction boom.

Graydon Williams, tag-along stepson, attended thirteen schools during six years of tramping from job to job, coast-to-coast, before they moved into the Empire Hotel. He’d been bullied and bloodied in fist-fights and humiliated by teachers who resented the presence of construction camp kids, migrant trash, in their classrooms.

He resembled his biological father. He inclined toward studious introspection and escaped into himself whenever his step-father was blustering drunk.

His five year younger half-brother, Alex Jr., was sometimes called cue ball by Alex Sr. who would drunkenly brag about sinking one in the corner pocket late one night in the USO club. Physically, Alex Jr. was a miniature of his father. He was an energetic extrovert. To him, their life was normal; it was all he knew. School and bullies, hostile teachers and frequent uprootings were not factors in his life. His world was mom and dad and big brother. In time he would enjoy a school where he could grow up with friends he’d have for life.

Alex Sr. was late getting home, again. It was the second Friday of the month which meant payday, and if Alex Sr. wasn’t getting drunk with his buddies at the tavern bar, he was getting drunk playing poker in the back room. If he wasn’t getting drunk and rowdy there, he was probably getting drunk at the VFW club while feeding silver dollars into the slot machines.