Sal serves as a barracks guard in Mill City

Sal’s Mill City guard job turns an improvised plan to support himself into an uneasy encounter with authority. Hired as a special policeman to watch temporary barracks for overseas construction workers, he receives a badge, club, flashlight, and Remi’s .32 automatic, but proves temperamentally unsuited to the arrest-minded culture around him. His most revealing night on duty ends with him drunk alongside the workers, while his later resistance to a colleague’s two-chance rule makes his divided position plain: he is sworn to keep order, yet would rather leave the post and discover what is happening across the country.

From writing to paid work

Sal initially comes to Mill City to write while Remi pursues the prospect of a ship job. Instead, Sal spends the first week in the shack trying to produce an original story for a Hollywood studio. He writes furiously, but the New York tale seems too sad; Remi can barely read it, and Lee Ann is too bored and hostile to bother. Sal eventually admits that the story will not do and asks for work, explaining that he has to depend on the couple even for cigarettes. Remi arranges a position like his own, guarding the barracks.

Sal is surprised to be hired. The local police chief swears him in, and the new guard is issued a badge and club. He needs navy-blue trousers to complete the uniform, so for his first two weeks he wears Remi’s: the trousers hang awkwardly on him because Remi is tall and potbellied. Remi also supplies a flashlight and his .32 automatic. The equipment makes Sal a formally authorized officer, but the gun is itself a reminder of his inexperience: he asks where Remi got it, and learns that Remi bought it after jumping off a train at North Platte, Nebraska, to stretch his legs.

The barracks and its guards

The barracks house construction workers waiting for ships, most of them bound for Okinawa. Sal’s night route to the buildings takes him across a canyon and down a ravine, past a farmhouse and creek, then along a dusty road beneath trees before he climbs another hill to the grounds. The workers include tough groups from Alabama and men from New York; many are running from something, often the law. Knowing that a year in Okinawa will be hard, they drink. The guards’ stated task is to prevent damage to the barracks, but Sal sees that the men around him want arrests and praise from the town’s police chief. They say a guard who fails to make at least one arrest a month will be fired.

Sal and Remi stand apart from the other guards in his account. He describes the crew as men with “cop-souls,” while saying that he and Remi are simply trying to make a living. That distinction is tested on a night when Sal is alone for six hours and the workers are drinking heavily because their ship is due to leave in the morning. He sits in the office reading adventures about Oregon and the northern country until the noise and activity spread across the grounds: lights blaze in the shacks, men shout, and bottles break.

Sal goes to the noisiest door and asks the occupants to keep quiet, telling them he will lose his job if they make too much noise. They slam the door in his face. He knocks again, but his appeal remains conciliatory. The men invite him to come back for another drink, and Sal goes from door to door in the same manner, soon as drunk as anyone in the barracks. At dawn, he is supposed to raise the American flag on a sixty-foot pole; he puts it up upside down and goes home to bed. The regular guards later ask about the disturbance after complaints from people across the canyon. Sal claims not to know what happened, answering that the place seems quiet now.

Confrontation with Sledge

The older guards regard Sal’s leniency as a failure of duty. One recalls his years guarding prisoners at Alcatraz and warns that Sal is too soft with the men. Sal agrees that he is not cut out to be a cop, though the older man insists that he applied for the job, was sworn in, and must decide whether to enforce the rules. Sal recognizes the force of the argument but privately wants to slip into the night and find out what everyone across the country is doing.

Sledge embodies the stricter approach. Tall, muscular, and dressed like an old Texas Ranger, he is eager to make arrests and says he gives a man two chances, not three. When Sledge returns angry because workers have continued making noise after two warnings, he announces that he will arrest them. Sal asks to speak to them first, offering a third chance. Sledge arrests one worker anyway, calls the town patrol car, and leaves the rest sullen. One of the men warns Sal to tell Sledge that his brother had better be released by the next night. Sal passes the threat on neutrally; the brother is let off easily, and nothing further happens. The group ships out, replaced by a new group of workers. The episode exposes how a small disciplinary decision can bring the guards into direct conflict with the people whose temporary housing they police, while Sal’s instinct remains to defuse rather than escalate.

Wages, dependence, and departure

The job lasts ten weeks. Sal earns fifty-five dollars a week and sends his aunt an average of forty dollars, yet he spends only one evening in San Francisco during that period. His days and nights are instead enclosed by the shack, Remi’s battles with Lee Ann, and the barracks after dark. The wages provide a practical foothold, but the work does not deliver the shipboard journey or open-ended time to write that had helped draw him west.

Sal ultimately quits shortly before Remi’s stepfather arrives, just before he would otherwise have been fired for failing to make enough arrests. On his final Saturday night, he has traveling money and gets drunk in the hotel bar before joining Remi, Lee Ann, and the distinguished doctor. His departure marks the end of the guard job, but not a clean break from the household: the visit unfolds amid Remi’s attempt to make a good impression and Sal’s disruptive arrival. The position has shown him earning money within a rigid institution while remaining unwilling to become the kind of officer its colleagues demand. Its central contrast is between the badge and the man wearing it, and between the fixed duties of the post and Sal’s continuing impulse to be elsewhere.