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 "Inland Empire Hotel."

Graydon trudged up the staircase to Door 3, 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 finished the kitchenette hotel apartment. 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. The 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, sat crookedly in the corner.

They'd lived in this hotel apartment since late winter. Alex Johns had finished up his high-iron riveting job on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, built to replace the fallen original. The old suspension bridge, nick-named Galloping Gertie, flogged itself to destruction in a wind storm. Alex moved the family to eastern Washington to a job at Rocky Reach dam near Wenatchee. It was one of many dams that turned the free-flowing Columbia River into a series of stair-stepped reservoirs. Working on dams was regular work for his step-father. His first big job had been the Grand Coulee Dam, built in the twilight years of the Great Depression.

Construction work ended when the nation was thrust into the second half of the great world war. Private First Class Alex Johns was ordered by the U.S. Army to a remote arctic atoll no one other than a few hungry fishermen and a handful of neglected native peoples had known existed. Japanese military strategists sent an invasion force to the Aleutian Island chain as a feint, a diversion to draw American military assets away from a greater Japanese goal in the middle Pacific.

Alex Johns drove heavy equipment in a battalion construction unit. He escaped a sub-zero blizzard with frostbitten lungs, emerging from the storm with three survivors from the construction crew riding his bulldozer. He was discharged as a buck sergeant on 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 purely to enjoy himself before he went in the hole. Going in the hole was iron-worker slang for falling to death from the high iron.

He met a red-headed divorcee at a Fort Lewis U.S.O. club dance. While he waited for his discharge papers to be cut, he'd 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. He resumed civilian life with an instant family. They packed themselves into a second-hand 1941 Hudson 4-door sedan to hit the road as gypsies in 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 bloodied in fist-fights with bullies and suffered humiliation from teachers who disliked construction camp trash.

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

His five year old half-brother, Alex Jr., was sometimes called cue ball by his father who would drunkenly brag about sinking one in the corner pocket one fateful 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 uprooting were not factors in his life. His world was mom and dad and big brother. Soon he know a school where he would grow up with friends he'd have for life.