Chapter 1

But not us! An’ why? Because … because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.

God a’mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an’ work, an’ no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and get whatever I want. Why, I could stay in a cat house all night. I could eat any place I want, hotel or any place, and order any damn thing I could think of.

And when it rains in the winter, we’ll just say the hell with goin’ to work, and we’ll build up a fire in the stove and set around it an’ listen to the rain comin’ down on the roof—Nuts!

Jesus Christ, somebody’d shoot you for a coyote if you was by yourself. No, you stay with me. Your Aunt Clara wouldn’t like you running off by yourself, even if she is dead.

Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws.

I could get along so easy and so nice if I didn’t have you on my tail. I could live so easy and maybe have a girl.

“An’ live off the fatta the lan’,” Lennie shouted.

O.K. Someday—we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs and——

“They was so little,” he said, apologetically. “I’d pet ’em, and pretty soon they bit my fingers and I pinched their heads a little and then they was dead—because they was so little.”

With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us.