
ROUGHNECK
An Autobiography
Jim Thompson
First published in 1954
I pulled the old Ford into the curb and cut off the motor. Badly overheated from its flattened crankshaft, it continued to run for a moment or two---pounding so hard from its exertions that the whole car shook. It was a sweltering August day in 1929. It had stopped on upper Grand Avenue in Oklahoma City. Wiping the sweat from my face, I stared glumly out the window.
Along this street I had hustled newspapers as a child, 'The Oklahoman' in the morning and 'The News' at night. Not far from here was the fine residence we had occupied when the Thompson family affairs took a sudden and fantastic turn for the better. And here, across the walk to the right, was the office building from which Pop had directed a multimillion dollar oil business...So long ago, and yet it seemed like yesterday. Now Pop was in Texas and his money was there, too, sunk into one oilless well after another. As for me---me and Mom and my kid sister, Freddie...
Freddie was a large girl, and she had always enjoyed an excellent appetite. She contended now, whimperingly, that Mom and I were deliberately trying to starve her to death. We had money, didn't we? We had 'some' money, anyway. Well, why the heck didn't we eat, then? Just name her one good reason why we didn't eat!
"Shut up," said Mom. "Ask your big brother. He knows everything."
"Oh, for God's sake," I said.
"Well, I don't care," said Mom. "If you'd ever listen to anyone, you wouldn't get into such awful messes. We wouldn't be in this mess now. But, oh, no, not you. Now, I'm not going to say another word, Jimmie, but..."
Being very tired and worried, and no longer young, she said quite a bit more. It seemed I was stubborn, willful, a consistent and deliberate flouter of convention. I seemed never to have used my very good mind for anything but involving myself in trouble.
I spent six years in high school, and I got out then only by falsifying the records. As a youth in my first long pants, I was an associate of chorus girls, grifters, gamblers, and other ne'er-do-wells. By the time I was fifteen, I had been variously employed as a newspaper "man," a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures and in a dozen-odd other occupations. With equal ease, I could quote the Roman lyric poet Catullus, or the odds against making four the hard way.
I was not yet sixteen when I became a night bellboy in a luxury hotel. (This through the intervention of a good natured thug and con man named Allie Ivers.) I earned big money there---and acquired still more by gambling---and spent it all. At eighteen, I broke down with tuberculosis, acute alcoholism and complete nervous exhaustion.
I bummed through west and far west Texas for three years, slowly getting my health back in the high, dry climate. Then I returned to Fort Worth and went back to the hotel. A group of gangsters made me their distributor for bootleg whiskey. The dubious honor was thrust upon me, practically at gunpoint. I plotted to get even, simultaneously recouping my fortunes.
Starting off with a handle of a few cases a week, I gradually enlarged my order until, finally, the few had increased to twenty. In order to do this, I had to wholesale the stuff to other hotel employees at a very short profit and sometimes no profit at all. But that was all right. The total proceeds from the twenty cases were to be my profit. I intended to dump them for a minimum of three thousand dollars, and then skip town. My gangster associates could whistle for the dough I owed them.
Unfortunately, my cache of whiskey was discovered and confiscated by Federal prohibition agents. They took it all, but they only reported five cases. And this bit of official perfidy was an even harder blow than my financial loss. It prevented me from making a new start with the gangsters; it deprived me of any valid excuse for not paying their bill. I had the alternative of paying up or getting my head beaten off...or, of course, leaving town. So, with approximately a thirtieth of my anticipated three thousand---a little less than a hundred dollars---I loaded Mom and Freddie into the car and headed north.
Our destination was Nebraska, and we were not nearly so downhearted as we headed toward it as one might think. Mom's parents lived in a small Nebraska town, and she and Freddie would be welcome with them for a time. As soon as I could arrange it, they would join me in Lincoln where I hoped to enter the state university. I was sorely in need of some higher education, as an editor acquaintance had pointed out. He had also pointed out that I was much more apt to wind up dead, than as the writer I hoped to be, unless I abandoned the course I was following.
We chugged along quite cheerfully for a matter of five or ten miles. Then the car began to reveal its overall worthlessness. The motor steamed and smoked. It clattered, pounded and roared. I pulled off the road and lifted the hood. A brief examination uncovered the terrible truth.
The crankcase was filled with sawdust and tractor oil. It had been doctored thusly to conceal a flat crankshaft---the one incurable ailment of the Model-T Ford. No repair, as the term is usually used, would correct the difficulty for more than a few hours. We needed a new shaft, new bearings, new rods, and other internal accessories. Briefly---and it would have cost us little more---we needed a new motor.
It took us two days to get to Oklahoma City, a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. It also took almost seventy of our one hundred dollars. We had traveled no more than a fourth of the way to our destination, and more than two-thirds of our money was gone.
Here we sat, then, on that sweltering August afternoon in 1929---a tired, middle-aged woman, a tired, hungry young girl, and a tired, somewhat saturnine-looking young man. Here we sat, nominal beggars in a broken-down Ford, at the site of our onetime glory. I closed my eyes against the brilliant sunlight, and I could almost see Pop bustling out of this building---young, smartly dressed, hurrying toward his low-slung Apperson-Jack or the big Cole Aero-Eight. I could see us all riding home together, out to the big high-ceilinged house with its book-lined walls. I could see the friendly face of the cook as she dished up the dinner. I could taste---
I opened my eyes again. Mom gave me a frown.
"Now, that's a nice way to talk," she said. "That's nice language to use in front of your mother and sister."
"What did I say?" I said. "All I said was ship. I was thinking how cool it would be, you know, to be out on a ship and---"
"You did not!" said Freddie. "He did not say ship, Mama! He said s-h-i---"
"Well," I said hastily, opening the door of the car, "I guess I'd better be going. Wish me luck."
The man I went to see had come to Oklahoma from Germany in 1912. Due to some flaw in his immigration papers, he had been detained on Ellis Island for several months, and when World War I broke out he was taken into custody as an enemy alien. The case came to Pop's attention. Through his then powerful political connections, he got the man released and started on the way to becoming a citizen. Moreover, since the man seemed incapable of doing anything for himself, Pop set him up in business. He bought the guy three heavy-duty oil field trucks; he leased the trucks back from the man at a very fancy rental. He gave him a fat "bonus" of oil stock which climbed from its dollar-par to one hundred dollars a share. I don't know why Pop did such things, and I doubt that he knew. It was simply his way---until his money ran out.
Well, I went up to the guy's offices---they occupied a half floor in this building---and I was admitted to the inner sanctum the moment I sent in my name. With tears of pure joy in his eyes, he wrung my hand; and then, seemingly overcome with emotion, he gave me a bear hug...Why hadn't we kept in touch with him all these years? What oil fields was Pop operating in now? Was he, perhaps, contemplating a return to Oklahoma?...He babbled on, firing questions about the family, telling me about his own. His wife and daughter were in Europe. His son had just returned to Harvard prep. They had a "nice little house"---the mansion of a former governor---out on Classen Boulevard, and he insisted that we come out and---
I finally managed to cut in on him, to make him listen. He heard me out, nodding sympathetically; and while I thought I detected a certain coolness in the atmosphere, I attributed it to my own hypersensitive feelings. He neither did nor said anything out of the way, and I incline to a defensive apprehensiveness when asking for favors.
Of course he would help me, he declared. It was no more than right. He was delighted to have seen me, even under these unhappy circumstances, and he wanted to see Mom and Freddie also. His car was about due to call for him, but there would still be time for a chat.
We rode downstairs together. He greeted Mom and Freddie as warmly as he had me. Then, his car pulled up at the side of ours, a chauffeur-driven, twelve-cylinder Packard, and regretfully he bade us goodbye.
He pressed a bill into my hand. He hopped into his limousine, and it glided away into the traffic. I looked down at the bill. Silently I handed it to Mom. She was still staring at it dazedly as I climbed in, and I winced at the stricken wonder in her eyes.
"It must have been a mistake," she said, slowly. "Don't you suppose it was a mistake, Jimmie?"
"With friends you're not careless," I said. "With people you care about, you make sure."
"Why don't we eat?" Freddie demanded. "That man gave you five dollars."
There was no one else we could appeal to. No one we could or would ask for help. My elderly grandparents could not be expected to provide traveling expenses. It would be burden enough on them to take care of Mom and Freddie for several months. Pop, who had remained in Texas, had no money. My married sister, Maxine, was on tour with a girls' orchestra and doing all right financially. But we had no idea of where she might be, or how we could get in touch with her.
I got the car's rods tightened at a cost of eight dollars. We pulled out of Oklahoma City, munching a dinner of day-old cinnamon rolls. There was nothing to do but go on. We couldn't stay there and we couldn't go back, so we went ahead.
The rods were working loose before we were well out of the city limits. By the time we reached Guthrie, a distance of about thirty miles, the car had reverted to its customary clattering, overheated crawl. Somehow we got through the town and chugged up a long grade on the other side. Just as we passed the crest, a car shot out of a side road and piled into us broadside.
It was a stripped-down Ford, loaded with road workers, and they were loaded with home brew. The vehicle skidded off of ours, piled into a telephone pole, and overturned twice. They were all thrown clear and suffered only minor injuries, but their car was pretty well wrecked. We were unhurt, also, and except for a ripped-off fender and headlight and a blown-out tire, our car was undamaged.
They picked themselves up, and apologized handsomely. It was all their fault, they admitted, and they were more than anxious to make amends. Unfortunately, they had no insurance and no money, having exhausted their meager resources to buy beer, but if there was anything else they might do...
I could only think of one thing. They gladly agreed to it. Hitching the two cars together, we coasted back down the hill and into a garage. There they left us, after further protestations of good will, and two mechanics took over. The crankshaft and its appurtenances were transferred from the wrecked car to mine. Also the battery, a headlight, a tire and certain other incidentals.
The job took all night, and until noon the next day. The bill came to forty-one dollars. I couldn't pay it, of course, as I proved by turning out my pockets to the manager. But I pointed out that there was more than enough salvageable material in the road workers' car to take care of the deficit. Rather grimly, he took what cash I had, filled our tank with gas and waved us on our way.
We parked by the roadside that night, eating a dinner and breakfast of purloined roasting ears. Shortly after we crossed the Kansas border the following day, we ran out of gas. I "borrowed" some from a passing motorist ("just enough to get to a filling station"). When that ran out, I hailed another car and received a similar "loan." Thus, we limped across Kansas---ten, twelve, fifteen miles at a time.
At a farm near Topeka, I got a half day's work laying drain pipe, and the proceeds took us almost to the Nebraska line. But here, it seemed, with several hundred miles still ahead of us, we could go no further. The car had to have lubrication, and an oil change. We were all exhausted and suffering from painful stomach troubles. We had been on the road for more than a week, with no real rest and almost nothing but raw or half-cooked vegetables. Some way or somehow, we simply had to get some money.
"We had stopped in a small village, and Mom suggested that she might earn a dollar or two by doing some family's washing. But she obviously was not physically capable of performing any such chore even if, as was highly unlikely in a place like this, she had a chance to. And while I doubted that there was any work for me either I got out and looked around.
It took me about ten minutes to cover the place, to visit and be turned down by each of the business establishments. Turning onto a side street, I picked a cigarette butt from the gutter and lit up. There was a shade tree here between the walk and the street. I leaned against it, puffing hungrily, staring absently at the side of a feed store across the way. It was almost hidden by a gaily colored poster---an outsize twenty-four sheet---advertising some theatrical attraction in a nearby city. My eyes moved up from the trite legends of ONE NIGHT ONLY and STRAIGHT FROM BROADWAY to the line of smiling, evening-gowned girls.
I looked at the one on the end---up past the violin and into her face.
It was my sister, Maxine!
I let out a whoop of pure joy.
I sent a collect wire from the railroad station, and Maxine responded generously. Two days later, having left Mom and Freddie with my grandparents, I arrived in Lincoln.
I was practically broke again. I hoped to sell the car for enough to carry me until I could land a job. Meanwhile, since it was not yet daylight, I cleaned up in a restaurant men's room and ate a large and leisurely breakfast. An hour or so later, when I thought the auto sales lots might be open, I returned to my car.
A police tow truck was just hitching on to it. Overnight parking, it seemed, was a violation of the law in Lincoln, and no, no exceptions were made for newcomers. I could redeem the car by paying a fine, plus towing and storage charges.
I listened to this ultimatum, choked with a mixture of emotions, and then suddenly I sagged against a telephone pole and began to howl with laughter. The tow crew looked at me warily. They hopped into their truck and drove away, taking my car with them, and I sat down on my suitcase and laughed until my lungs ached.
That car---that damned lousy, heartbreaking, backbreaking Ford! And they thought I'd lay out dough to get it back! They thought 'I' was crazy! They thought 'I' was!
And maybe I was. After ten days and a thousand miles in that car, it wouldn't have been surprising.
I worked that day and the next two as a soda and sandwich man. Relatively flush then, and well nourished with free meals, I quit the job and visited the university. I presented the letter of introduction from my editor friend in Texas. The recipient, a member of the administrative staff, was very cordial but was unable to offer me any assistance. He could not make me a loan himself. The university could not extend aid except to students with outstanding scholastic records. Perhaps if I appealed to another writer...some faculty member who was interested in writing...
At this time, the assistant chancellor of the university was Robert Platt Crawford, a big-name writer for 'The Saturday Evening Post' and other large-circulation magazines. I knew him only by reputation and he, of course, did not know me at all. But I went to see him. I showed him some of my stories from regional periodicals, and requested a loan---one sufficient to pay a semester's tuition and buy textbooks, plus, if he had it to spare, a few dollars extra.
Dr. Crawford looked somewhat startled. After a moment of deep silence, he asked that I repeat my request. I did so. The good doctor looked relieved. The acoustics of his office were very poor, he murmured, and he had feared momentarily that a complete remodeling of it might be necessary...Would I mind telling him a little about myself? Something about my background? Obviously, I had been out of high school for a number of years. Why was I starting college now and why had I chosen to come to this one?
I told him, rather brusquely at first, out of nervousness, and then, as he beamed and nodded at me, with increasing ease. I talked on and on, so interested and amiable did he seem, and so intertwined were the various events of my life. To describe my hasty exit from the hotel world, it was necessary to describe my entrance. And that led to an account of the burlesque houses and Allie Ivers, the whores' nemesis; and that, in turn, led back to other things...Newspaper work, and my adventures as a dairyman, and the time I had almost cornered the French postcard market, and my abysmal failure to maintain the high standards of a millionaire's son...
Dr. Crawford smiled. He chuckled. He leaned back in his chair and roared. Recovering himself, he declared that he had great faith in my talents as a writer, and that, moreover, I was obviously scholastic material of the very highest type. He would consider it a privilege, he said, to finance me. And taking out his wallet, he proceeded to do so.
I took the money, gratefully but a little incredulously, for I had been afraid that in being completely frank with him I might have prejudiced my case. Now, having achieved the seemingly impossible, I realized that it could not have been achieved in any other way. The last man in the world to deceive is the man you hope to get money from. If he has it and you don't, the odds are that he is at least as shrewd as you and probably a hell of a lot shrewder.
Dr. Crawford refused my offer to give him a note for the money. "Now why would I want that?" he said; and thus another simple truth was pointed up to me...why 'would' he want it? When a man's sole collateral is his word, why bother with his signature?
With my tuition taken care of, I applied at the newspapers for part-time work; I applied at the radio stations, the advertising agencies, the publicity firms---at every place which conceivably might be in need of literary talent. I was expensively dressed. The fast-money circles in which I had moved had compelled a fine head-to-foot wardrobe, and my attire represented an original investment of several hundred dollars. I suspect that many of the important executives who received me thought that I was either a majority stockholder in the company or wished to become one. Most of them were brusque and some were pointedly unpleasant when they discovered the true and humble purpose of my call. Just why did I think they would want to hire me? What did I have to offer, an ex-bellboy, ex-oil field worker, et cetera, with a few months' newspaper experience and a few unimportant manuscript sales? They could get better men than me for nothing. There were college graduates here in Lincoln---men with graduate degrees in journalism---who were glad to work without salary, solely for the practical experience it gave them.
I left some of these interviews cringing and more than a little shamed. Hell, I was actually sick, for my twenty-two-year-old hide had worn thin, instead of toughening, from the almost incessant onslaught of an outrageous fortune. I winced at each new blow to my pride, and the blows fell hard and fast.
Being very stubborn---and, no doubt, stupid---I persisted in my patently hopeless quest. And, finally, at the last place I expected to, I met with seeming success.
It was at a farm magazine. The two young editors looked me over fondly, ascertaining that I was entering the university, and, after a significant glance at one another, took me into firmly courteous custody...So I was from Texas, eh? (Here an awed look into the lining of my forty-dollar Borsalino.) And I wanted a job, eh? (A glance at label of imported tweed topcoat.) Well, they could understand that. It gave a man a certain independence, helping his standing on the campus. Now, of course---'naturally---'I had enrolled in the College of Agriculture?
"My God, no!" I said, and then, seeing the pained looks on their faces, "Why would I want to do that? I'm in Fine Arts."
They shook their heads. I had made a terrible mistake, they said. No one enrolled in Fine Arts, absolutely no one. The degree was worthless, you know; one might as well have a diploma from a barber college. The thing to do---and they would take immediate steps to arrange it---was to switch to the College of Agriculture. I could take journalism there, also as much English as I liked; and with a B.Sc.A., I would be fixed for life. It was practically as good as an M.D.
Now, I was to become very cross with these young men in ensuing months, but I will say---although I say it grudgingly---that I believe they were sincere. A man with a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture 'can' invariably get a job, and usually at a very handsome beginning salary. He can and he should, for he's damned well earned it. To begin with, he needs to have been raised on a farm and to have taken an active part in 4-H work. He will also find it helpful if he attends a vocational high school specializing in agriculture. Then he goes to an agricultural college---Nebraska is one of the three or four best in the world---and he enrolls for a heavy science curriculum, 'plus.' He doesn't take just physics, which is plenty tough in itself, but 'agricultural' physics. Not just botany, but 'agricultural' botany. And so on down the line. Practically every subject is a laboratory course. When he isn't peering through a microscope or working a slide rule, he will probably be wielding a surgical knife---dissecting the diseased and malodorous innards of some animal.
Well, I had less than no business in such a college; even less, say, than I would have had in a theological seminary. So, of course, I enrolled in it. Or, rather, the two editors enrolled me. And I suspect that they came to regret it as much as I. They were also on the "rush" committee of an ag college fraternity, and they regarded me as a highly solvent, and hence desirable, prospect. They invited me to their "house" for dinner, and the next thing I knew I was pledged and a student in the College of Agriculture.
Came the dawn---as they used to say in movies---and there were curses and recriminations as bitter as they were mutual. I felt that I had been swindled. They, my fraternity brothers, felt that they had been. And it was too late to correct matters. We had to put up with one another, and make the best of it.
They crammed me at every opportunity to get me though my courses (a failing student could not belong to a fraternity). But naturally they could get me no job. How could they, a guy as dumb, agriculturally, as I was? It was up to me to find work for myself, and I couldn't be choosy about it. For the fraternity dues and assessments had added almost a third to my contemplated living costs.
Eventually, and largely among the faculty members, I made some wonderful friends at the Agricultural College of the University of Nebraska, and I actually learned quite a bit about agriculture. But my first few months there were the most miserable in my life. I detested everyone, or so I convinced myself. Everyone appeared to detest me. I lived in a turmoil of worry, disappointment, disgust and self-doubt. Meanwhile, I had taken the first job I could find---as night attendant in a funeral establishment.
I went to work at six o'clock at night, and remained until seven in the morning. My pay was fifty dollars a month. My duties were mainly confined to answering the telephone, and to receiving the occasional callers who dropped by to look upon their late loved ones.
Since I was permitted to sleep at the place---thus saving the price of a room---and since there was plenty of time to study, the job was nominally a good one. But for me, ever squeamish and imaginative, it was a small-scale nightmare. I couldn't sleep in the eerie, softly-lit quiet. I couldn't concentrate on my books. My jittery nerves were always on the point of popping through my skin, and when Bill, the ambulance driver, would creep up behind me and address me in ghostly tones, I literally hit the ceiling.
A southerner and a college student like myself, Bill was the other night employee. He had practically as much time on his hands as I had, and when he wasn't pestering me he was usually down in the basement casket room. He said that I should join him down there---the coffins were beautifully padded and made excellent beds. And it was so peaceful, too, just like being in a nice quiet grave.
"You come along with me, Jim, boy," he would warmly insist. "You jus' let old Bill tuck you in. I got one all picked out for you---a big bronze job with a real heavy lid. I'm tellin' you, man! You get in that good old casket and I close down that good old lid, and you just naturally 'got' to relax..."
I was horrified, then puzzled by his antics. It just didn't seem reasonable that any man could be so perpetually merry in such depressing surroundings. The suspicion grew in my mind that there must be some attraction in the basement besides the caskets.
One night when Bill had laid hands upon me and was insisting that I climb into one of those "good ol' coffins," I grabbed him by the shoulders. Pulling him close to me, I ordered him to expel his breath. He did so, grinning guiltily.
"You sure won't tell no one, will you, Jim?" he pleaded. "The boss man'd just naturally pop his pumpkin if he found out about it."
"Lead the way," I said firmly. "We're wasting time."
He led the way, back into the deepest recesses of the basement. Reaching into a dust-covered pine casket, he withdrew two quarts of homemade beer. His landlady made it, he said, and he always arrived at work with a goodly supply.
We drank. He looked into my face expectantly.
"Not bad," I said. "Of course, it's pretty warm."
"Not bad, pretty warm!" Bill exclaimed. "Now, ain't that just like a Texas fella? Always belittlin' something!"
"Well, it 'is' warm," I said. "Why don't you go over to the restaurant and get a bucket of ice? I'll pay for it."
"Huh-uh!" Bill rolled his head. "They'd wonder what it was all about, and the first thing we knew---wait a minute! I know what we can do, Jim boy!"
"Yeah?" I said.
"Why sure. Now that we're both in on the deal, there ain't a thing in the world to stop us."
He explained. I choked and almost dropped my bottle.
"For God's sake," I said. "We can't do 'that!' It's---well, it's just not right."
"You mean it ain't respectful? What about the Egyptians---I guess they didn't have plenty of respect for the dead, huh? What about the Chinese, all them fine ol' civilizations?"
"Well, sure," I said, "but that's different."
"Sure, it's different. The stuff they put around their dead folks was wasted. This ain't gonna be."
Bill went on to remark that I could drink my beer warm, if I liked, or I could do without entirely. Then, he gathered the remaining bottles from the casket, and trudged off up the stairs.
I followed him. He went into the cooling room, and pulled out one of the two long drawers that were set into the wall. Tenderly, he began tucking beer around the refrigerated body inside. He laughed scornfully as I snatched a bottle away from him.
"You just ain't makin' sense, Jim. Now, just looky here at this nice old fella. Am I botherin' him? Is it hurtin' him any? Why, I bet he likes it---looks like a fella that guzzled plenty himself."
I had to admit that the occupant of the drawer did look that way. His genially ruddy countenance spoke of many gay jousts with the so-called Demon Rum, and the bottles which nestled around him seemed anything but incongruous. There was a certain rightness about them. He looked much more natural in the close company of beer than he had without.
Still, I didn't like it, and I said so. Which, of course, was all I could do by way of protest. Certainly I couldn't report Bill to the management for what was no more than a breach of good taste.
The long night passed. The following night Bill came to work with a dozen quart bottles, giving four to me and placing the other eight in the cool custody of the "nice old fella." He had to go out around nine on an ambulance call. I was dozing comfortably in the chapel, with a half gallon of warm beer in me and another half at my side, when the night bell rang.
I shoved the bottles under my chair, and went to the door.
It was a party of three people, two middle-aged women and a man. They had just arrived from out-of-state, and must start back that very night. Cranky with weariness and sorely pressed for time, they demanded to be shown the remains of you-know-who.
I stammered inane excuses. I urged them to sit down for a few minutes. I was by myself at the moment, I stuttered, and it was against the rules to---to---
The door to the rear opened. Bill strolled in, a quart of beer tilted to his mouth. "How about a cold one, Jim boy?" he said. "Come on back an' see how nice this ol' fella is---"
He broke off, open-mouthed. He looked from the three people to me, and my contorted features told him the terrible truth. Very unwisely, although I could well understand the action, he turned and ran.
Grim and suspicious, our visitors followed him.
Now, seven quarts of beer can be very hard to handle, even if one is not frantic with alarm...as, of course, Bill was. They slid from his stricken fingers. They dropped out of his shirt front where he was futilely trying to stuff them. And save for one which burst on the floor, they all went back around the bosom of their recent host.
Our visitors discovered him thus. The ladies shrieked. The gentleman cursed and threatened to cane us. They stamped out then, to a telephone; some twenty minutes later the owner of the establishment arrived.
He fired Bill and me on the spot.
Somehow, while I do drink it, I have never cared much for beer since then.
My next job was in a bakery. The hours were from six p.m. until midnight five days a week, plus all day Saturday and Sunday. The pay was twelve dollars a week. The work was hard and virtually incessant.
I was what is known as a "batch man," the employee who works in the storeroom and puts together the ingredients necessary for the various bakery products. The bakers and floor workers could rest between jobs, but there was no rest, no between, with mine. I had to "set up" for both the day and night crews. As fast as one batch was out of the way, the floor was crying for another. Bread dough, sweet dough, cake dough, pie dough, filling, topping, icing, frosting, eggwash, oil, and so on into infinity.
The work was not only backbreaking---try juggling hogsheads of lard and ninety-eight-pound sacks of flour and one-hundred-and-eighty-pound sacks of salt, if you doubt my word---but it was also extremely exacting. There was almost no margin for error. A few ounces too much of this or that, and hundreds of dollars worth of dough would be ruined. It seemed to me that for work as difficult and demanding as this I should get more money.
I suggested as much to the manager of the place. He looked me up and down coldly. There was a depression coming on, he said, and he had a long waiting list of job applicants. So, if I was at all dissatisfied, if I felt that I wasn't making enough...
I told him I was entirely satisfied; I loved the job and the pay was more than enough. I apologized humbly for bothering him.
Now eventually, and indirectly, the job paid me a great deal of money. It provided the source material for numerous trade-journal articles, and the background for my ninth novel, 'Savage Night.' In all, I suppose, I cashed in at the rate of several hundred dollars for every week I spent at the bakery. But that was later---more than twenty years later in the instance of the novel---and it did me no good whatsoever at the time. With rent to pay and with all my other expenses, the twelve dollars I received for each seven-day period was ridiculously inadequate.
I considered dropping out of the fraternity. But that would be an involved and painfully embarrassing procedure, and besides, I simply couldn't do it. My "brothers" had their faults, as I was ever ready to point out, but poor scholarship was not among them. I had to have their help scholastically. For the time being, at least, it was impossible to do without it. Moreover, I seriously doubted the wisdom of severing relations with a "house" which had many alumni on the faculty.
Meals were my biggest expense. The hard work gave me a terrific appetite, and it seemed that I could never get enough to eat. Nevertheless, since I could think of no place else to cut down, I cut down on meals. In fact, I practically eliminated them---stuffing myself instead with the various edibles in my stock room. I still get a little ill when I think of some of the messes I put together.
The basic item of my diet was bread---the "crippled" loaves damaged in the machinery. The garnish (or whatever you want to call it) might be raw frozen eggs and lard, mince meat and malt syrup, or some truly weird concoctions such as cooking oil, chopped chocolate, caraway seeds and raisins. I made myself sandwiches of these things, eating them on the job and sneaking them out when I left. And when my stomach revolted, as it frequently did, I bought it into subjection with stiff cocktails of lemon and vanilla extract.
I survived in this fashion for several months. Then, shortly after the college mid-term, when I had barely squeaked by the semester examinations, I was stricken with acute appendicitis.
I was rushed to a hospital. When I emerged from it, some six days later, I was appendix-less, penniless, jobless and considerably in debt. I felt pretty good about the situation. With things that bad, it seemed that they must take a turn for the better. And they did.
Up until then I had scorned anything less than a steady salaried job. Now, since nothing of this kind was available to me, I began taking anything that was offered---a few hours work in one place, an hour or so in another. Some of these odd jobs cost me far more than I earned. As a cafeteria bus boy, for example, I spent sixty hours in paying for a huge tray of dishes which I had broken. Gradually, however, I eliminated such jobs from my agenda and substituted new ones, and finally---and after no great elapse of time---I had several which not only paid reasonably well but also were reasonably to my liking.
I read papers for the English department. I wrote campus news for the Lincoln 'Journal.' I sold radios on commission. I worked as floorman in a dance hall. All irregularly, yes: seven or eight hours a week on each job. But my total pay aggregated more than I had been making at the bakery, and in my various bustlings about the city I ran across a salaried position. It was in a small department store, one of the midwestern chain of installment-sales houses. The hours were noon to six weekdays and all day Saturday. The pay was a magnificent eighteen dollars a week. I rearranged my classes to fit this schedule, and went to work.
Since I held on to my other jobs, there was little time for rest or relaxation in the months that followed. I seldom got to bed before midnight, and I had to be up at dawn to make my seven o'clock classes at the university. But I had never slept when I could find anything else to do (I still don't), and there were ample compensations for the unending round of work.
Mom and Freddie were able to join me. We took a large house, renting out part of the rooms to defray expenses. I studied harder and began to do better in my classes. It was easier to study, now that I was relatively free of financial worry, and with my education costing so much in money and effort I valued it more. I started writing again---freelancing for myself. And I worked harder at that, too. As a result I sold a serial and several short stories to farm magazines, and placed two stories in the literary quarterly. 'The Prairie Schooner.' Almost overnight, the outlook for the future turned from black to bright.
I worked at the store as a collection correspondent, and my immediate superior was the credit manager, a man named Durkin. We admired each other greatly. Barely literate himself, he thought I was a wonderful writer. I thought he showed exceptional wisdom in holding this opinion. Our mutual admiration was to end disastrously, but not until many pleasant months had passed. During this time, about the only discord in the smooth harmony of my affairs was a re-encounter with Allie Ivers---the impish, larcenous, fantastic friend of my Texas nonage.
It happened one quiet summer evening when I was strolling home from work. A cab swept past me as I started across an intersection. It skidded around in a U-turn and headed back in my direction; it headed straight toward me, seemingly out of control, and as I leaped back to the sidewalk, it climbed the curb and followed me. I was frightened out of my wits. Darting back into the street, I began to run for dear life, and I tripped and fell sprawling. The cab drew abreast, and Allie leaned out the window.
"How terrible," he said. "Such a fine young man to be lying in the gutter!"
Well, I had always liked Allie, and despite the weird doings which usually resulted from our association, I was glad to see him. So I cursed him out mildly and entered the cab, first making sure that he was carrying no concealed weapons or other items which might involve us with the police.
Allie pressed a pint of whiskey upon me. Uncorking another for himself, he drove off, bringing me up to date on his affairs. He had left Texas, he said, shortly after I had. The police had had nothing against him, actually, but they had intimated that all parties concerned would be happier if he traveled for a while. And Allie had thought it well to follow their suggestion. He had moved up through Oklahoma and the Midwest, working "the twenties" and other small con rackets. Arriving here in Lincoln well-heeled and under no necessity to "work," he had taken this hack-driving job by way of divertissement. He intended leaving town in the morning. Meanwhile, tonight...
He outlined his plans for the night's entertainment. I told him, firmly and profanely, he could count me out.
"What's the matter?" Allie coaxed. "All I want you to do is drive me and my lady friend around. What's wrong with that?"
"There's everything wrong with it!" I said. "For one thing I don't have a license to drive a hack."
"So what? I've got a dozen. The guy I bought them from gave me a quantity rate."
"Now I'm not going to argue with you, Allie," I said. "I'm tickled to death to see you, but I absolutely refuse---"
Allie wheedled. He reproached me sorrowfully. Was this his onetime protege---the youth he had rescued from the life of a burlesque house candy peddler? Was I so far gone in respectability that I could not do a small favor for an old friend?
"Just answer me one question," Allie demanded. "Are you going to drive this cab or are you going to be a horse's ass?"
We drove on, arguing and drinking. I began to waver. It had been almost a year since I had tasted real whiskey. For months I had been a model of hard-working respectability, and the existence was beginning to pall. College was over until the fall term. Why not, now that I had a little free time, make a break with tiresome routine?
"Well, all right," I said at last. "But no rough stuff, Allie. You've got to promise to keep it clean."
Allie removed the cap from his head and put it on mine. He promised, as I had asked.
"You'll have to promise, too," he said. "This is a very refined young lady we're picking up. I'm taking her to the country club dance."
"You're kidding," I laughed.
"You'll see," said Allie. "By the way, stop at this drug store, will you? I'm taking her a few cigars."
I pulled in at the curb. I turned and looked at him, startled. "Cigars! You're taking her some---"
"Havanas," murmured Allie. "Like I say, she's very refined."
He was in the drug store for some time, deliberately lingering, I suspect. When, finally, he emerged, I was finishing my first pint and much of my trepidation and curiosity about the expedition had vanished with it.
He directed me to a particularly execrable section of the city. I drew up at a house he pointed out---a tumbledown, unpainted shack---and Allie debarked again. He remained in the house for about five minutes. He came out with one of the fattest, ugliest women I have even seen.
Her enormous legs were bare. Her hair frizzled out from her bloated head like the thongs of a mop. She was costumed in tennis shoes (with the toes cut out) and a filthy gray house dress.
Both she and Allie were smoking cigars.
He assisted her, waddling, across the yard. Helping her into the seat with a stream of courteous and honeyed patter, he climbed in at her side.
The door slammed. The rear curtains came down. "James," said Allie. "Take us to the club."
"The club," I said suavely, and I put the cab into gear.
The place was several miles out in the country. By the time we arrived, there was a long line of cabs and cars waiting to debouch their passengers at the brilliantly lighted entrance. I fell in at the end of the line. As it moved up, I edged the cab forward with it. We got nearer and nearer the entrance, and from the back seat came sounds of high---very high---revelry.
I had a pretty good idea of what was under way back there, although I did not realize how far it had progressed. But being very merry by now, I saw no reason to admonish my passengers nor to remind them of their whereabouts. Allie had wanted to come to the club. All right, I had brought him and his lady friend here. The rest was up to them. As I saw it, the "lady" could look no worse than she originally had, whatever her present condition.
The cab crept forward, a car length at a time. Bathed in a boozy, rosy glow, I gazed out at the splendor immediately ahead...Men in tailcoats and tuxedos, women in evening gowns. They milled around beneath the gaily decorated canopy, roamed up and down the broad steps. Laughing, talking, calling hellos to each new arrival.
The last vehicle ahead of me drove away. I pulled up in its place. The doorman stepped forward smartly and flung open the rear door. There was a grunt, a gasp, a curse---and a thud.
And out into the entrance, the cynosure of a hundred horrified stares, tumbled Allie and his lady. Each puffing on a cigar. Both completely naked.
I took one startled glance at them. Then, sliding out of the door on the opposite side, I ran.
Things went very well for me until early spring of the following year. Then the manager of the store which employed me was fired, and everything began to go wrong. The former manager had been a quiet, gentlemanly sort, as kindly to everyone as his job would allow. The man who replaced him was a brassy loudmouth---one of the most deliberately offensive men I have ever known. I had barely got to my desk the day of his arrival when he called me on the carpet.
"Notice you're keeping a couple of women," he growled. "What I want to know is how you're doing it. How you buying stuff for whores on the dough you make?"
"Buying stuff for---for---?" I stared at him, open-mouthed. I didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
"Maybe you've been knocking down a little, huh?" he went on. "Well, you'd better lay off. You want to buy stuff for whores, you have 'em co-sign the account with you. And no phoney names, see? None of this crap that it's for your mother and sister."
I understood him then, all right. But I could still only stand and stare, sick with a swiftly mounting fury...Mom and Freddie. In one and the same breath he had accused me of fraud and referred to my mother and sister as whores.
I think I have never been closer to murdering anyone.
Apparently he saw how I felt.
"Well,"---he forced an uncomfortable laugh---"guess I kind of got my wires crossed, huh? No offense."
I didn't say anything; I couldn't. So, after a word or two more of grudging apology, he waved me out of his office.
My last class at the college let out at 11:50 in the morning, and I had to be at the store at noon. I had no lunch period, then, as the other employees had; and I usually grabbed a bite when I made our afternoon deposit at the bank. I was never more than a few minutes about it---just long enough to gulp down a sandwich and some coffee. Both Durkin and the former manager had consented to the arrangement.
The new manager, having given me a few days to cool off, called a halt to it.
Whether I ate or starved was strictly my own headache---see? I could drop my last morning class, or I could do without lunch; that was for me to decide. All he knew was that I was not going to do any more "fugging around" on company time.
"Getting too goddamned much money, anyway," he grunted. "We could get a full-time employee for what we're paying you."
Well, I had to hold the job, at least until the end of the school term. So I restrained my temper---and went without lunch from then on---and I continued to swallow his insults and arrogance in the miserable days that followed. I had plenty of company in my misery. As boorishly rude as he was with me, he was often more so with the other employees. No one could do anything to suit him. He was always "taking over" on a sale or a credit interview, showing the "goddamned incompetents" (us) how it should be handled. And when the sale or the interview went sour, as it often did, he was furious...Goddammit, couldn't we do anything right? How the hell could he do his job and ours, too?
The credit manager, Durkin, an executive in his own right, caught as much hell as the rest of us. But while he appeared a little hurt at times, he showed no resentment. As a new man, he said, the manager should be given every chance to make good. It was his job to give orders. It was ours to carry them out, insofar as we conscientiously could. That was the only way you could run a business.
"I'm sure he means well," Durkin would assure me earnestly. "After all, we're all here for the same purpose. We all have the store's best interests at heart."
I was sure the manager did not mean well, and that he had no one's interest at heart but his own. But I had learned the futility of arguing with Durkin. Not too intelligent outside of his work, he was utterly devoted to the store. And in his mind the absentee owners were minor gods. They 'had' to know what they were doing, and since they had put the manager here, 'he' had to, also...That was that, as far as Durkin was concerned, and it continued to be that until early summer, a couple of weeks before the end of the school term. Then...
By way of getting new customers into the store, the manager had written a sales letter. Durkin, who had been charged with having it mimeographed and mailed out, showed me a copy of it.
"You're a writer, Jim," he said. "You know all about these things. What do you think of it?"
I read it, shaking my head. It was filled with wornout catch phrases which were completely uninformative and brassily offensive. No one was going to believe that we were giving away merchandise. No one would believe that we were in business solely to "befriend the good people of Lincoln" and that we yearned only to be their pals and buddies.
"It's the worst kind of junk," I told Durkin. "If this doesn't put us out of business, nothing will."
"Oh?" Durkin frowned troubledly. "You really mean that, Jim? You're not just saying it because he wrote the letter?"
"It's the awfullest bunch of tripe I ever read in my life," I said, "and you can tell that stupid bastard I said so."
"Well," Durkin murmured worriedly. "You certainly ought to know, Jim. You're an authority on writing. Maybe I'd better..."
Turning away from my desk, he went into the manager's office. Almost verbatim he gave that gentleman my opinion of the letter. Then, as the manager gaped at him, apoplectic with fury, Durkin suggested that I be commissioned to write a "really good" letter.
Well, the manager finally found his voice, and all hell began to pop. He cursed Durkin out at the top of his lungs. Then he called me in and he cursed us both out together. He'd show us, by God. He'd teach us to make fun of our betters. He would have ten thousand of the letters printed up---ten thousand instead of the five thousand he had originally contemplated. And we---Durkin and I---would have the job of addressing, sealing and stamping them. We'd do it on our own time, with no assistance and no extra pay.
He dismissed us with another string of profanity. Putting through a rush order to the print shop, he got a delivery on the letters that very evening. And for the rest of the week, and part of the next, Durkin and I worked night and day. I was sore as a boil, naturally. Durkin, strangely enough, seemed completely at peace with himself. He remained stolidly polite to the manager. In fact, the more the latter gibed and nagged at him, the more polite he became.
It was the manager's idea to "sweep the town off its feet," to hit it such a blow that it would be "rocked to its heels." So the letters were allowed to accumulate instead of being sent out a thousand or so at a time. He kept close watch on our progress. Seeing that we were near the finish, he remained with us that last night, although he did not, of course, help us with the work. He looked on, grinning maliciously, as we packed the letters into boxes and loaded them into Durkin's car.
"I guess that'll teach you," he jeered when, at last, the job was finished. "Snap into it, now, and maybe you'll get that stuff mailed before midnight."
He drove away laughing. Durkin told me to go on home, that he would take the letters to the post office himself. I protested my willingness to help, and for the first time in our acquaintance he was curt with me. He didn't want my help, he said. He preferred taking care of the letters himself.
I went home. He got into his car and drove off. Late the following afternoon, I learned the reason for his unprecedented conduct.
I was working the cashier's window at the time. A quiet, nondescript little man came up to the wicket and asked to be taken to the manager. I suggested, according to store practice, that I might be able to help him.
"I'm not sure the manager is available at the moment, sir. If it's something about your account, some misunderstanding or---"
"Post office department," he said, displaying his credentials. "Are you in charge of the mail?"
"I handle some of it, yes," I said. "I'm not in charge, but---"
"I'm in charge." Durkin came up and stood beside me. "This young man has nothing to do with the mail."
"I see," the little man nodded. "Well, we received a call from the sanitation department a little while ago." He broke off cautiously. "I think I'd better see the manager."
"You can't. There's no need to see him," said Durkin.
The little man looked at him. Reaching through the window he tapped Durkin on the arm. "Mister," he said, and his voice cracked like a whip, "you get the manager for me and be damned quick about it!"
Durkin shook his head stubbornly. The manager, having heard himself referred to, came out of his office. Surlily, he inquired what the hell was up.
The inspector introduced himself. He explained. And what happened then is impossible to describe adequately. The manager gasped. He choked. His face purpled, puffing up like a balloon, and his eyes stood out from his head like doorknobs. He began to bellow, to scream.
Durkin was fired within the hour, as soon as approval could be obtained from the home office. I, a mere clerk, was discharged immediately---the suspected instigator of, if not an actual accessory to, the credit manager's crime.
"I'm certainly sorry, Jim," he apologized. "I tried to keep you out of it, you know. That's why I sent you on home instead of---"
"But why did you do it at all?" I said. "My God, Durk, you might have gone to the pen for a deal like that. We both might have, if the company wanted to get tough with us. Why the hell did you do it, anyway?"
"Why, Jim," he said, reasonably, "you know why I did it."
"Dammit, I don't know," I said.
"Sure, you do. You said the letters were junk; they'd hurt the store. So, naturally I..."
...so he had taken all ten thousand of them---all carefully addressed, sealed and stamped---and thrown them into the city dump!
With the school term finished, I got a full-time job in another department store---a tumbledown old emporium on the outskirts of the business district which catered largely to the farm trade. It was a strange place, operated by a baffling network of absentee owners and concessionaires. Although an approximate fourscore people worked in it, the auditor and I, his assistant---and a few custodial employees---were the only employees of the store proper. The others were all in the pay of the various concession owners.
A man named Carl Frammich was the auditor. Our duty was to keep tabs on the concessions---the grocery and clothing departments, the cosmetics counter, the cream-buying station, the barber shop, the restaurant, and a dozen-odd other stores within our store. We collected their receipts, and supervised their help.
Complaint department? That was us. Credit and Collections? Us again. Personnel, Purchasing, Payroll? You guessed it. Everything that no one else did---and the clerks did nothing but sell---was handled by the auditor and his assistant. Frankly, I was soon overwhelmed by the job, and, for much of the time, didn't know what I was doing or why.
Carl Frammich...Of all the weird, off-trail characters I have known, he was the weirdest, the most off-trail. Stacked up beside Carl, my old friend Allie Ivers was a dull-normal person. Carl looked like the devil---literally, not in the slang sense. He was Satan come to life, and he had the devil's own cynicism; and he could rarely say three words without two of them being blasphemies or obscenities. Yet his voice was angelic. It was the sweetly piping falsetto of a five-year-old. Musical and high-pitched, and with such a pronounced lisp that it was often impossible to understand him.
"Tompn," he would say, "bwing at doddam fuddin cash ledger in here an ess oo an me twike a skewin balance on uh sonabitsin bastud." Or, "Tompn," he would say, "do down and tell at doddam assho in weddy-to-weah to top skewin up his salestickets or I'll tum down air an kick uh fuddin kwap outta im..."
Despite my own errors in that direction, I have always said that no man can work while he is drunk. But I say this with one mental reservation---lisping, Satanic-looking Carl Frammich. Carl was dead drunk throughout the three months of our association. He came to work drunk, and he drank throughout the day. Straight alcohol when he could get it, anything from horse liniment to "female tonic" when the alcohol was unobtainable.
He would stagger up the stairs in the morning, bottles protruding from every pocket, and lurch wildly toward his desk. Sometimes he would make it on the first try, but more often than not he would wind up in a corner or sprawled on the floor. And once he almost went out the alley window. But whatever his difficulty before he gained his desk, he would never allow me to assist him.
"Need the fuddin etertise," he would explain solemnly. "Dot to teep in tundishun. Always watch oor doddam skewin helf Tompn and oo be awright."
Once seated, Carl seldom arose until the day was over...and the day we worked was never shorter than twelve hours. He didn't eat anything. He didn't go to the toilet. When he had to urinate, he simply scooted his chair around, hoisted himself up on the arms and let go out the alley window. Since the window opened on the store's parking lot, there were frequent and bitter complaints about this practice. Customers were constantly grumbling that Carl's urethral discharges had seriously damaged the paint on their cars, and one guy declared that several holes had been eaten in the hood of his vehicle. All the complainants got short shrift from Carl.
Could they prove that he was guilty? Did they have witnesses who would swear to the fact in court? No? "Well, skew oo, mithter!" And if they did have proof, they still received no satisfaction.
"Looky, mithter," he would explain. "Iss isn't any store---iss a doddam bookteepin tumpny. Oo uh hell oo donna sue, anyway? Oo dit anyfing out uh iss doddam outfit I'll split wif oo."
Except for me, to whom he was always kind, Carl had not a pleasant word for anyone. But he was at his most insulting when dealing with the home office or its representatives. "Now, ess dit one fing straight," he would say, addressing some traveling auditor or supervisor. "I'm wunnin iss doddam place, an I don't need any fuddin assho like oo to tell me how. I do as I doddam pwease, see? Oo don't like at oo can skwew orself and I'll quit."
The home office chose to like it. Very wisely. Carl worked for a pitifully low salary, and despite his drinking he was by far the best auditor in the chain. He could and did do the work of three men, and with an expertness, an unfailing accuracy, which surpassed genius.
Day after day, I saw him so drunk that his eyes were glazed and his head jerked and rolled on his neck in alcoholic spasms; I saw him weave in his chair, tilt perilously backward and forward and from side to side. And with all that I never saw him hesitate in his work or make one single, solitary error! Sometimes I would have to put a pen in his hand, and place his other hand on the comptometer. But once that was done, he needed no further assistance. His left hand would flick over the keys of the machine, veritably playing a tune on it; his right hand would roam over the ledger, inscribing it with long columns of always accurate, excruciatingly neat figures. As often as I watched the miracle, I remained amazed by it.
"Nuffin to it, Tompn," Carl would lisp, grinning at me devilishly. "Jus a matter of teepin in tundishun. Just dotta live wight, ats all."
This "teepin in tundishun" and "livin wight" was (or so Carl advised me) only part of his formula for doing highly complex work while stumbling-blind drunk. The truly important thing, he said, was to "fine 'em, fud 'em and fordet 'em," or, perhaps, to "skwew 'em all an the easy ones twice."
"Pith on 'em, Tompn," he declared a dozen times a day. "Hang it out uh window and skwew uh whole doddam world."
He was such a wonderfully good accountant and had followed the profession for so many years that, I suppose, he could have done his job in his sleep. He didn't need to think about it, in the ordinary sense of the word. Too drunk to see straight, or even to see at all, he was carried through one intricate task after another by his subconscious mind.
I wondered what he was doing in such a job as this one, why he drank as he did. Late one afternoon, some six weeks after the beginning of our association, I found out. I had been smiling about something, some joke one of the clerks had told me. Apparently I had been doing it for some time, and since our desks faced each other Carl got the notion that I was smiling at him.
"Sumpn funny, Tompn?" he demanded, his normally flushed face turning white. "Whynt oo laugh out loud? Did it out uh oore doddam skwewin system!"
"W-why, Carl," I stammered. "I was just---"
"Do ahead!" he lisped angrily. "Evey one else does, doddam wotten son-a-bitsin bastuhds! Tant do anywhere, tant say anything, without some fuddin skwewball laughin his doddam head off...Look like uh Devil, don't I? Look like uh Devil and talk like a skewin doddam baby! Tant dit a doddam decent job. Tant even thay hello to a doddam woman..."
He raved on, cursing and spilling out obscenities, inviting me to "do ahead an have a dood laugh." Thus, at last, I saw why things were as they were with him---that his arrogance was only a cloak for a shamed and hypersensitive man. Fortunately, the right response came to me. I did not make the mistake of apologizing or sympathizing with him.
As soon as I could get a word in edgewise, I told him he was a damned fool. A man might look like the Devil and talk like a baby, but he did not need to 'act' like either. "I'll tell you something," I said---and what I told him was quite true. "One of the best adjusted, happiest men I ever knew was a dwarf with club feet. He was one of the country's top corporation attorneys. He had a beautiful wife and four fine children. No one cared what he looked like. He was such a swell guy---and such a smart one---that no one noticed what he looked like. Oh, a few boobs might snicker at him, but what the hell did he care about them?"
Carl brushed at his eyes---in his self-pity and fury he had actually started to weep. He suggested that his case was different. "It wouldn be tho bad if I could juth thpeak plainly. Thath the worth---"
"It's always different," I said. "We've all got our own brand of trouble; I've had mine. If I'd acted like you do, I'd have died of tuberculosis or the d.t.'s long ago."
"Yeth, but---"
"You're beating yourself over the head," I said. "You'd rather feel sorry for yourself than do something. If you're ashamed of the way you talk, why are you talking all the time? You never miss a chance that I can see. You're shooting off your mouth, getting into arguments, from the time you get here in the morning until you leave. You make a spectacle out of yourself with your drinking. If you don't want to be laughed at, why do you give people so many opportunities?"
I was pretty sore. My many failings do not include laughing at the infirmity of another, and the accusation that I had done so did not set well.
Carl heard me out, looking rather sheepish toward the last. Finally, he grinned and said, "Well, fud oo, Tompn. Fordet it, will oo?" and we both went back to work.
Well, it may have been wishful thinking, but it seemed to me that he did not get quite so drunk from then on. Also that he talked less to those outside the office, avoiding arguments where they could be avoided. Instead of mere working companions, we became quite good friends. Where before he had merely recited trite obscenities, he now conversed with me...Did I really think he might be able to land a good job and not be laughed out of it? Did I really think that one such as he could lead a normal life, with all that the word implied?...I said of course he could---'if' he would stop thinking about himself and straighten up. For a man as brilliant and talented as he was, people would overlook any handicap.
"Oo weally mean at, don't oo, Tompn?"---studying me narrowly. "Oore not dus tiddin, are oo?"
"You know I do," I said. "You know what I say is true. If you go on like you've been doing, you've got no one to blame but yourself."
He thought about that, and a few days later it paid off.
It was now nearing the fall of 1930, and the economic depression was tightening over Nebraska. But the nation's political and business leaders still proclaimed it a temporary recession. It was merely a readjustment period, and prosperity was just around the corner, et cetera. To reachieve prosperity it was only necessary to "tighten our belts," "overcome sales resistance" and so on.
Well, the store tightened its belt---rather, by arranging salary cuts for the various concession employees, it tightened 'their' belts. And by way of overcoming the aforesaid sales resistance it began a series of vigorous campaigns. The clerks were given sales quotas---to be met or else. They were organized into competing "armies," with the winner receiving a blue ribbon or a plaque or some such prize. One "bargain" sale followed another. Every week the home office shipped us a huge batch of advertising matter---flamboyant placards and pennants and counter cards. It was my job, one of my many jobs, to "decorate" the store with these.
In the midst of all this activity, Carl absented himself from work for two days on a plea of sickness. By the time he returned, I was virtually exhausted and he, incredibly, was 'sober!'
He had brought two pint bottles with him---two bottles of good whiskey. He took a drink from one, passed it to me and waved me to a chair at his desk.
"Oo dotta help me dwink at, Tompn. We finis at, at's all eres donna be. I'm tuttin out uh doddam tuff."
"You've got another job," I guessed.
"Doddam wight," he said proudly. "Tart in nex Monday. Chief auditor for big gwocwey chain in Tansas Tity. An I dot oo a job ath my athithtant."
I congratulated him, and thanked him. I pointed out, however, that I would be returning to school the following week and could not take a job in another city.
"I'll just go on working here part-time," I explained. "It's a sweat shop and they don't pay peanuts, but---"
"Ats what ey tol you, huh?" Carl shook his head grimly. "Well, they tol me juth two dayth ago to fire you---inthithted on it. Thaid ey could dit a man full time for what eyd have to pay oo."
"But they promised!" I protested. "They said if I'd accept eighteen dollars a week and work real hard this summer they'd keep me on at the same money when school started."
"Oo dot it in writing?" Carl shook his head again. "Iss asho outfit! Work a manth ath off an en pith on him!"
He declared that he was not going to do another "doddam lick of work" as long as he remained on the job and that I was not to do any either. That was an order, he said---"pothitively not a doddam sonofabitsin bit of work." We would just sit around until the end of the week and enjoy ourselves.
I didn't dispute the order. After a time, by way of conserving his whiskey for him, I went out for a gallon of home brew. I returned to find Carl examining the week's batch of advertising matter.
"Thith skwewin cwap," he said. "Let the bathturdth sthick it up ere ath." Contemptuously, he started to toss a placard aside. Then, a truly devilish grin spread over his face, and he picked it up again. "How about it, Tompn? Long ath oore dittin uh date, oo dus ath thoon dit it tomorrow?"
"I suppose so," I said. "A couple of days won't make much difference."
"Thath uh way I feel. Tho we'll both leave tomorrow. But we'll div iss doddam outfit thumpn to wemember uth by."
"Yeah?" I said. "I don't see---"
"How ith thingth in uh dwug department? Ey dot plenty of Totexth on hand?"
"Totexth? Oh, Kotex," I said. "Why, yeah, I guess so. The inventory shows around five hundred boxes. What---?"
"Wunnerful," said Carl. "Thwell! Loth of Totexth an iss fuddin meth of thigns. Who could ath for anyfing more?"
That was the way, then, that it came about. Thus, the beginning of a joke which was to throw our employers into embarrassed fury and to keep the Lincoln area snickering for months to come.
As soon as the store closed for the day, Carl and I gathered up the advertising matter and went downstairs. We requisitioned the drug department's entire supply of sanitary napkins. With these, and our placards and pennants and counter cards, we proceeded to "decorate" the store. It was after dawn before we finished. We unlocked the restaurant, helped ourselves to breakfast, and retired to the office to await results.
We were hardly seated before the department heads began to arrive. And as soon as they arrived and got one startled look at the store, they came bounding up the stairs to confront Carl...What the hell was the idea, anyway? Was he trying to get the establishment laughed out of business? The display would have to come down immediately.
Carl told them what they could do. If our decoration job was in any way disturbed he would personally see to it that their concession was yanked. "I'm uh doddam boss here," he pointed out. "Oo wun oor skewin concession my way or oo don't wun it!"
One of two of the department heads accepted this dictum. The majority, however, headed for the nearest telephone and laid the matter before their concession owners. The latter called our home office. The home office called us. It was what Carl had wanted.
He listened, grinning, to the outraged tirade which poured over the wire. Then, when there was a temporary pause for breath, he had his blasphemous and bloodcurdling say. He was "fuddin well twitting and Tompn was twitting." We had already paid ourselves to date, and now we were walking out. And since there would be no one around to carry out the management's orders, the decorations---or a large part of them---would stay right where they were. At least they would stay there until someone arrived from the home office.
"At'll teath oo to skwew people!" he yelled. "Doddam dirty pithanth! Do on an skweam oor fudding lungth out---ith muthik to my earth!"
He ended his remarks with a raucous raspberry---and if you have never heard a lisping raspberry, you have missed something. Then, he and I donned our hats, and left the office for the last time.
It was raining that day. As usual, when the weather made agricultural pursuits impractical, the farmers had come into town to shop. It was not yet ten in the morning, but already the store was filling up with customers---or, I should say, people. For few of them were buying anything. They stood around in little groups, the men haw-hawing and pointing, the women giggling and blushing. Wherever they looked they saw the same thing, and each look brought a fresh outburst of amusement.
"Well, Tompn," said Carl happily. "Ith at sumpn or ith at sumpn?"
I said that it was, indeed, something. And it was.
Throughout every department, throughout the store, boxes of the things were arranged in neat pyramids and piles, each forming a pedestal for some bit of advertising matter---a pennant, placard, or counter card.
The pedestals were all of a kind, all made of boxes of sanitary napkins. The advertising matter all voiced the same slogan, the magic words-of-the-week intended to overpower sales resistance. That was all you saw, wherever you looked---stacks of s.n.'s, each crowned or draped with the same gaudily-lettered slogan:
HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN
My literal-minded friend Durkin, the ex-credit manager, had an outside sales and collection job with an installment store. On his recommendation, I got a job with the same firm. My hours were the same as they had been during our previous association, and permitted me to attend school in the morning. The pay was twenty dollars a week, plus car allowance, plus commission.
On the surface, it seemed to be a very fine job and the manager a very cordial fellow. Durkin, who was assigned to breaking me in on my duties, advised me not to be too optimistic.
"You wanted a job, Jim," he said, heading his car toward the shabbiest section of town, "so I helped you to get it. But I don't think you're going to like it. I don't, and I think I can take a lot of stuff that would throw you."
"I don't understand," I said. "Mr. Clark seemed to be---"
"Mr. Clark 'is' a nice guy. As long as you produce. That's all he asks of you, to get the money, and he doesn't care how you do it. But, brother, you'd sure as hell better get it."
"Well," I shrugged, "that's our job. If a man doesn't do his job, he should catch hell."
"It's not quite that simple," said Durkin. "But you'll see what I mean."
We had crossed Salt Creek and entered a neighborhood of rutted dirt streets and unpainted shacks. Durkin stopped in front of one of them, took a collection card from the dashboard clip and got out. I followed him across the trash-strewn yard to the house.
Durkin knocked; he pounded; he stood back and kicked the door. There was no response. All was silent behind the drawn shades of the place.
"Well," I said uneasily, "it looks like there's no one home, Durk."
Durkin gave me a pitying look. Drawing back his fist, he jammed it through the screen and lifted the latch. Then, he turned the doorknob and walked in.
I tottered after him.
Seated at a table made of packing boxes was a burly unshaven man in undershirt and trousers. As we walked in, he set down his tin cup of coffee and directed a string of curses at Durkin.
"Ought to beat your goddamned head off," he swore. "Ought to call the cops on you. Breaking and entering---don't you know that's against the law?"
"Let's have the dough," said Durkin. "Come on, snap into it!"
"I ain't got any dough! I ain't been working."
"Come through," said Durkin. "You worked two days and a half last week."
"So I made a few bucks. I got to have something to eat on, don't I?"
"You don't do any eating on our money," said Durkin. "Let's have it."
The man ripped out another string of curses. Surlily, his eyes wavering away from Durkin's stern stare, he jerked a five-dollar bill from his pocket.
"All right. There's your goddamned dollar. Give me four bucks change."
Durkin put the five in his billfold, wrote out a receipt for it and tossed it on the table. "You were behind in your payments, Pete," he said evenly. "That brings you up to date."
The man's face purpled. Fists clubbed, he started toward Durkin, and, almost absently, Durkin turned to me.
"Jim, get that size forty-six coat out of the car---the sheep-lined. I want Pete to try it on."
"But,"---I stared at him incredulously---"b-but he---"
"That's right. I brought it along especially for Pete. Winter's coming on, and he's going to need a good warm coat."
I got the coat out of the car, noting that it had cost six dollars wholesale according to the code number. Durkin slipped it on Pete, even as the big man glowered and grumbled threats.
"Fit's you like a glove," he declared. "Isn't that a swell coat, Jim? Makes Pete look like a new man."
"Prob'ly fall apart in two weeks," muttered Pete. "What you want for the damned thing?"
"Oh, I'll make you a good price on that. Let you have it for twenty-five dollars."
"Twenty-five dollars!" Pete let out a howl. "Why you can get the same damned thing anywhere for eleven or twelve!"
"But you don't have eleven or twelve," Durkin pointed out, "and you can't get credit anywhere else...Tell you what I'll do, seeing that you're an old customer. I'll make it twenty-two-fifty, and you can pay it out at four bits a week. Make your payments a dollar-fifty a week instead of the dollar you're paying now."
"Well...twenty dollars and two bits a week!"
"You're wasting my time," said Durkin, crisply. "Let's have the coat."
Pete hesitated. "Oh, hell," he said. "Okay. Twenty-two fifty and four bits a week. What you got for me to sign?"
Having given me a demonstration of what the job was like, Durkin filled me in orally as we drove on to the next customer. The store was one of a nation-wide chain of eighty, all operating under the same unorthodox methods. They deliberately sold to poor credit risks---a market avoided by other stores. Thus, being without competition, they could operate from the most unpretentious side-street establishment and charge very high prices for inferior merchandise. Collection expenses were high, of course, but still low enough, percentage-wise, to make the operation immensely profitable. And the losses on uncollectible accounts were not nearly so large as one might think. The chain was constantly on the lookout for good men---"aggressive, forceful men." Such men could earn very handsomely. There were minimum prices on all merchandise; anything a man could get above that price was split between him and the store. He also received a relatively high base salary, and a commission on collections.
"I run better than a hundred dollars a lot of weeks," Durkin said. "That's about three times what I'd get in this town on the average collection job."
"I'd say you earned it," I said. "Are all the customers like Pete?"
"Well, none of 'em are easy to get money out of, but some are worse than others. We've got a real tough baby coming up."
The "tough baby" lived in a place similar to Pete's, and like Pete, he did not appear to be at home. The front door was locked, also the back one. Durkin shaded his eyes with his hands and peered through several of the windows.
"Can't see him," he frowned, "but I know damned well he's here. I'm sure I saw him out on the steps when we rounded the corner. I wonder if..."
He broke off, staring speculatively at the back yard privy. With a significant wink at me, he headed for the edifice, pausing on the way to pick up two fist-sized brickbats.
He pounded on the door of the privy. He kicked it. He stood there and hurled the brickbats at it with all his might. There was a yell from the inside, a furious curse-filled sputtering. Durkin took a pair of pliers from his pocket and hefted them thoughtfully.
"Come on out, Johnnie," he called. "You'll have to do it sooner or later, so why not make it light on yourself?"
"To hell with you!" yelled the man within. "Try and make me come out, you goddamned thieving junk-peddler!"
"All right," said Durkin, reasonably, "don't come out, then. Just shove your money under the door."
Johnnie replied with an unprintable suggestion. He was not shoving any money under the door and he was not coming out; and that, by God, was that.
Durkin shrugged. He fitted the hasp over the staple in the door, and slid a handle of the pliers through it. Then, scooping up an armful of old papers from the yard, he walked around to the back of the privy.
Two planks had been removed from its base, apparently to provide ventilation. Durkin touched a match to the papers, and shoved them through the aperture.
Since they fell into the waste pit, there was no danger---or at least very little---of incinerating Johnnie. But the clouds of stinking smoke which welled up from the pit, soon had him on the point of strangulation. He yelled that he would murder Durkin---he would kill him if it was the last thing he ever did. The next moment he had ceased his threats and was beating wildly on the door, pleading hysterically for mercy.
"Three dollars, Johnnie," said Durkin. "Shove it through the crack and I'll let you go."
"Goddammit,"---'cough, cough---'"I can't. My wife's in the hospital. I've got to have---"
"Three dollars," said Durkin.
"But I---'all right!"---'a terrified scream. "There it is! Now for God's sake let me---"
Durkin took the three crumpled bills, slipped the pliers from the hasp and stepped back. Coughing and strangling, bent double, Johnnie staggered out into the yard.
He was no more than a boy, eighteen, perhaps nineteen years old. He was tall, six feet at least, yet he could not have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. His cheeks were colored with the rosy, telltale spots of tuberculosis. There was no fight left in him.
He stumbled and sat down in the weeds, coughing, staring at us.
"Starved," he said dully, as though he were talking to himself. "Just plain starved, that's all that was the matter with her. And it won't be no different when she gets out. Starvin', her and me together; freezin' when it's cold, scorchin' when it's hot, livin' like no one ever let a dog live. W-what---what's---"
He broke off, gripped in another paroxysm of coughing. He wheezed, spat and spoke again.
"What's a guy gonna do?" he said. "What's he gonna do when he does all he can and it ain't nowheres good enough? Huh? How about it?" He glared at us fiercely for a moment. Then, his eyes lowered and he addressed the question to the ground, to the soured, sun-baked earth. "What's a guy gonna do, anyway? What's a guy gonna do? What's a guy gonna..."
Durkin gripped my arm suddenly, and steered me toward the car. "It's him or us," he said. "Them or us. What's a guy going to do?"
I had beginner's luck that first week. Perhaps I was assigned to some of the easier accounts, or perhaps my customers were feeling me out---taking my measure---before getting tough with me. At any rate, I did very well and without having to resort to the tactics which Durkin had used. The quaint notions grew in my mind that (1) I was the world's champion collector, and (2) that the store's clients were merely misguided and misunderstood. They didn't pay because they had not been made to see the importance of paying. Because they were approached with abuse, they responded with it.
Saturday night came, and Mr. Clark detained me after the other collectors had left for a few words of hearty praise. "I knew you'd be a top man," he declared. "You keep this up and you'll be making more dough than your college professors."
"Oh, well," I smirked, my head swelling three sizes, "I don't expect to make 'that' much."
"You'll do fine. You've got the size---that's the important thing. Throw a good enough scare into these bastards to begin with and you can take it easy from then on."
"Well," I hesitated, uncomfortably. Somehow the fact had evaded me that the store's four collectors and Clark as well were all very large men. "I don't think size has much to do with it, Mr. Clark. I mean---"
"Maybe not," he shrugged. "We always hire 'em big, but I suppose there are plenty of tough little guys. They wouldn't have the psychological advantage, of course, but---"
"I don't mean that," I said. And I went on to tell him what I did mean. That the customers should be treated with kindness---firmly but kindly. Treat them as oneself would like to be treated if in the same circumstances.
Clark stared at me blankly as I expounded my theory. Then, at last, his broad flatnosed face puckered in a grin, and he guffawed. "By God!" He slapped his hand on the counter. "You really had me going there for a minute, Jim!...Treat 'em nice, huh? Be kind to 'em. I think I'll pull that one on the home office!"
"Well," I said, "I guess it does sound kind of funny, but---"
"What a sense of humor! What a kidder!" He burst into another round of guffaws. "Well, have a nice weekend and I'll see you Monday."
I spent the weekend working on the old car I had bought. Monday noon, still stubbornly convinced that I had solved the secret of successful collecting, I went back on the job. It was just about my last day on earth.
My first customer was an employee of a rendering plant, a place which, due to the hellish odor it exuded, was located in the outskirts of the city. Here the unfortunates of the area's animal population were brought---those that had died of old age or disease or accident. Here they were converted into hides and tallow, glue, bristles and bone.
I parked my car in the stinking, refuse-filled yard. Entering the building, I was almost knocked down by the stench and great clouds of blow flies swarmed over me. I gasped, and tried to brush them away. I went forward cautiously, brushing and gasping.
The lower floor of the building appeared to be one huge room, apparently the storage place, so far as any existed, for the animals that were brought in. From wall to wall, they littered the floor---cows, horses, sheep and swine; animals in various hideous stages of mutilation and decomposition. All swarming and crawling with blow flies.
While I was peering around in the darkness, a man---some sort of foreman, I suppose---came in from the yard and inquired my business. I explained, tactfully, that I wished to see Mr. Brown on a business matter.
"Collector, huh?" he grunted. "How come you don't do your collectin' at his house?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm a new man on the job. I imagine, though, that the store wasn't satisfied with the way he was paying so they instructed me to come here."
"Well," he grimaced, surlily, "I'll call him for you---this time."
Moving a few feet away from me, he cupped his hands and shouted up at the ceiling. He was preparing to shout a second time when a trapdoor opened high above him and a man looked down.
"Yes, sir? Was you callin' me?"
"You're damned right I'm calling you!" the foreman said, adding that the next time his work was interrupted by personal matters it would be the last time. "I ain't going to have it, get me? You can't take care of your business without mixing it up with mine, you can get another job!"
He jerked his head at me curtly, and strode away. I moved over beneath the trapdoor.
The man above me was so besmeared and grimed from his work that I could see nothing of his features. But there was that in his attitude which spoke of murderous anger. I called up, apologetically, that I was sorry if I had caused trouble. "If you'll just drop your payment down to me..."
"Tough guy aren't you?" The eyes in the smeared face gleamed broodingly. "Scare hell out of my wife, get her so upset she's half out of her mind. Then you come around here raising hell."
"You're mistaken," I said. "I've never talked to your wife or even seen her for---"
"The hell you ain't! She told me what you looked like. There wouldn't be two guys with that outfit as big as you are."
"But there---"
"You wait there," he said. "You wait right there, and I'll drop something down to you."
I waited. I stood looking upward until my neck began to ache, and then I looked down again. And that was when it happened.
I imagine he must have had someone help him, for the great bloated carcass---a dead hog---which shot down suddenly through the hole must have weighed all of four hundred pounds. It grazed my arm as it went past. Only the fact that I had turned slightly, to glance out the door, kept it from landing on me.
There was a tremendous thud, the sound of splitting hide and exploding flesh. I flung myself backward, instinctively, but not soon enough to avoid a sickening and smelly spattering. I looked down at myself, at the awful thing at my feet, and then I looked up at the trapdoor. Brown was there, peering downward casually.
"Little accident," he said. "Fella forgot that the door was open. Happens all the time around here."
I didn't wait. I was on my way out of the place as fast as my near-nerveless legs would carry me. My hands were trembling so badly that I could hardly get the car started.
I made myself fairly presentable again at a filling station washroom, but the damage to my morale was irreparable. I couldn't collect. I couldn't sell---which, ordinarily, was quite easy to do. I could not approach my customers with the "firm kindliness" which I had so grandiosely advocated (how could you be nice to people like that?). Neither could I get tough with them (tough with people who might kill you!). I didn't know what to do, what to say, how to act; and while I doggedly made every call assigned to me, I wound up the day without a single sale or one small collection.
I stalled at the store that evening until the other collectors had checked in and left. Then, with forced casualness, I sauntered up to the wicket and laid my collection cards in front of Clark. We were alone. Except in very large cities, the managers of the chain's stores were the sole inside employees.
He lighted a cigarette, spewed smoke from the corner of his mouth as he squinted down at the cards. His coat was open. For the first time I noticed the minute ornament that dangled from his watch chain---a tiny pair of golden gloves.
"Yeah, Jim," he said absently, having followed the direction of my eyes. "Yup, I was a pretty good man with the mitts. Might have made a champ heavy if I'd kept at it."
"I see," I said.
"Yeah, I might have and might not, but I figured I'd be better off in another line. Have the odds more on my side. You see, I look at it this way, Jim. It's hard to get anything and hold onto it, even if the other guys in your field are just 'almost' as good as you are. You don't stand out, know what I mean? To really stand out you've got to move out of your own pasture---get into some line of work like, well, like this. Something where you don't have any competition; where you can slap hell out of any three guys you may come up against. Do you get my meaning, Jim?"
"I get it," I said.
"I don't see any sales slips here, Jim..."
"No," I said. "I didn't sell anything."
"And there are no collections on these cards..."
"I didn't collect anything."
He studied me, shook his head. "No, you wouldn't be that stupid. You wouldn't try to knock down the whole lot. Did you take the day off, Jim? No? You actually worked six hours without making any sales or any collections?"
"Yes," I nodded. "I know it sounds funny, but---"
"Funny? No, I wouldn't say it was. Come around the counter, Jim." He pointed. "Come right through that little gate there, and sit down in this chair." He pushed me into it. "And I'll sit down right in front of you." He did so. "Now, let's have the story."
He was sitting so close that his legs pressed against mine; he had also leaned forward, gripping the arms of my chair. Obviously, with our respective noses almost touching each other, the position was not one to put me at my ease. The explanation I stammered out sounded preposterously weak and foolish.
Nevertheless, and much to my surprise, Clark seemed to accept and understand it. "I've been afraid at times, too, Jim. There's been times when I've lost my nerve. I remember once in Chicago when I was working for a loan shark, a very tough outfit, incidentally. They sent me out to collect from a steelworker who owed us a hundred---half of it interest---and the guy went for me with a baseball bat. Damned near caved my skull in. Scared? Why, Jim, it took the guts right out of me. And then I sneaked back to the office, and I got them back. The boss gave me a break. He had a couple of boys take me down into the basement and 'both' of them had baseball bats; and they didn't just threaten me with 'em, they used them. And pretty soon, Jim, I wasn't afraid of that other guy at all. I wasn't afraid to collect from him. All that I was afraid of was what would happen if I didn't collect...Now, to get down to your case, to get to the point, Jim---I'll lay you a little bet. I'll bet you'd like to go out to the rendering plant tomorrow and get the dough out of that jerk. I'll bet you'd a lot rather do that than come in here and tell me that you haven't done it, that you've pissed off a whole day. Am I right, Jim? Isn't that the way you feel about it?"
I would like to be able to say that I stood up at this point, told him to take his job and shove it, and walked out. But, inclined as I am to place myself in the most favorable light, I am incapable of such an outright lie. I had to work. I had grown up in a world, in jobs, where the roughest justice prevailed, where discipline was maintained, more often than not, with physical violence. And, now, in Clark, I recognized an all too familiar type. From such men, a nominal bluff is a warning. Their threats are promises.
"You weren't thinking of quitting, were you, Jim? I'd hate to see you do that. It costs money to break a man in, and I'm supposed to know how to pick 'em."
I shook my head. "No, I don't want to quit."
"That's on the level? You wouldn't just walk out of here tonight and not show up any more? If you have something of that kind in mind..."
"I don't."
"Good boy!" He grinned suddenly and took a playful poke at my chin. "You'll be all right now; you'll do fine from now on. You were just afraid---of the wrong things."
Well, to make an interminable story merely long, I did go out to the rendering plant the next day and I collected from the man who had tried to drop the hog on me. I cut my last class at school, and was thus able to arrive at the plant before noon. I was waiting at the door when Brown came outside to eat his lunch. Taken by surprise and being without the previous day's advantage, he paid up promptly. In fact, after one startled look at me, he was extending the money before I could ask for it.
Heartened by this success, I did fairly well that day. But the following day I went into another slump, and by Saturday I was selling and collecting next to nothing. Clark, whose manner had grown increasingly ominous as the week progressed, detained me that night for another "conference."
It began much the same way that the first one had. The stage setting was the same. Seating me in front of him, he pinned me to the chair with his knees and arms and thrust his face into mine. In a quiet, purring voice, he lectured me on the perils of misplaced fear. He was deadly serious. Now and then, he gripped my arm in emphasis and I almost yelled with the pain. And yet essentially, deep in that part of heart or mind which makes a man what he is, I remained unaffected. I was afraid of him, but the fear could not move me.
"Jim---" His voice snapped suddenly. "You think I'm kidding you? You think I'll let you get away with making a chump out of me? Boy, if you've got any ideas like that...!"
"I haven't," I said. "I know how you feel. I wouldn't really blame you if you took a poke at me."
"It'll be more than a poke, Jim! By God, you're going to start hitting that ball Monday or---"
"I don't think I can," I said. "I'd like to---I need every cent I can get. But you'll be doing the smart thing to fire me."
"Huh-uh! I'm not firing you and you're not quitting."
I shrugged. He was calling the turns. He could keep me on the job---make it extremely unpleasant for me to leave---but he could not make me perform in it. If he thought that he could, I added (rather shakily) now was a good time to try.
"Yeah?" His jaw jutted out. "That's the way you want it, huh?"
"N-no. But---"
"Tell me, Jim..." He paused and wet his lips. Then, he went on, his broad face puzzled, his tone almost wheedling. "You stacked up like my kind of guy. I figured you and me, we probably went to different schools together. So, well, what's the deal, boy? How come it rolls out like this?"
"I don't know," I said.
"You're sure you haven't let some of these deadbeats get you down? They haven't got the Indian sign on you so bad that---"
"It isn't them," I said. "It's me, something that sort of holds me back. I don't know quite how to explain it, but..."
"Go on. Make a stab at it, Jim."
"I guess I'm not afraid of them enough," I said. "They may pull some stunt like that guy at the rendering plant did, but I know they're really no match for us. We've got everything on our side. The law, and a tough bunch of boys to ride them ragged. I can't fight people like that. I feel sorry for them."
"They don't feel that way about you, Jim. They hate your guts. You saw how that Brown character acted."
"I know," I said. "That's what started it. Seeing how they felt, and not being able to resent it. Feeling that I had it coming. If I'd been in Brown's place, if someone had charged me four prices for a bunch of junk and then shoved my wife around, I'd have probably done what he did."
"They don't have to buy the stuff, Jim. If they're stupid enough to do it---"
"They have to buy it or do without. No one else will sell to them."
"Yes, but..." He paused. "Yeah, but Jim..." he said slowly, and paused again. "You see, Jim, It's---uh---uh---"
He stood up and paced around the office. Turning suddenly, he leveled a finger at me. "Now, here's the way it is, Jim. We're actually pretty damned nice to these people. We're just working to help 'em, but naturally---uh---help costs money, so we have to---uh---"
He broke off, scowling, fixing me with a glare that dared me to laugh. Then, following a long moment of silence, his face relaxed and he himself laughed. "All right," he said. "All right, Jim, we'll call it quits for tonight. But you're going to do it, get me? By god, you---you 'got' to do it!"
Judson Clark---Jud Clark. Ex-college football star, ex-pug, ex-heavy in the loan shark racket: a literate thug, to state the case briefly. I worked with him for months---at least, I held my job with the store---and I came to like him very much. I liked him and pitied him.
I was, as he had indicated, "his kind of people." Our backgrounds roughly paralleled one another, and I should have responded to the demands of necessity and self-preservation. I should and I must---for in my failure he saw failure for himself. I represented something vital to him, a threat to the only way of life he could understand. His fear that the structure of that life might be crumbling was far greater than any fear he could inspire in me.
Our conferences became almost nightly affairs, by turns abusive and wheedling. He jeered me in front of the other collectors. He even called Mom one day to declare that I was letting him down sadly---he who had only my best interests at heart---that I was failing her and Freddie, that jobs were very, very hard to get and that it would be a shame if I was forced to drop out of school; and asking her to "lay the proposition" before me and to make me "see the light" and so on.
I told Mom that I wished to God he would fire me. The constant pressure was to do a job which I could not do, and yet being unable to quit was becoming unbearable.
It goes without saying, of course, that I did not always check in at the store empty-handed. I usually had some small something to show for my day's efforts. Generally speaking, however, the nature of my successes was such as to leave Clark almost anything but reassured.
"I don't get it, by God!" he yelled one night. "This bastard---all the other boys gave up on him. Even I took a crack at him and I couldn't score. He's a mean, no-good son-of-a-bitch. He loaded up on that stuff without ever intending to give us a nickel, and he's got so damned many judgments against him it was a waste of time to sue. So I'm all set to charge him off, and then you get his card. And you, by God, you collect!"
"Yes," I said uneasily. "It looks like---uh---I did, all right."
"Well? If you can collect from guys like that, you can collect from anyone!"
I shook my head. We had had similar discussions before, and I had not been able to make him understand. I felt differently about this particular customer and the others like him. I could tackle them without any twinge of conscience.
He stood over my chair, scowling, and I thought that at last he would give way to his feelings by giving me a drubbing. Instead, he turned abruptly and marched over to the card files.
He began to thumb through them swiftly, occasionally jerking a card out and tossing it onto his desk. Then, when he had extracted about twenty of them, he gestured curtly to me.
"All right," he said, "there's your cards for tomorrow. And by God, Jim...Well, you know what I mean. You do it, get me? You do what you're supposed to do!"
I looked at the cards. I looked at him. "All right," I said. "I'll do what I'm supposed to..."
In the deepest black there is some white; and among our several thousand customers there were a few hundred whom any store would have been delighted to have on its books. If one of them fell behind in his payments, a polite note from Clark would usually elicit a prompt remittance. At the worst, a word or two from a collector would turn the trick. There was no, or practically no, collection expense in dealing with these customers. The store made recognition of the fact by selling them reasonably good merchandise and at reasonably fair prices, and in other ways---insofar as it was capable of that figurative act---leaned over backwards to retain their good will.
Collectors, naturally, love such clients...but they are not allowed to keep them. It is a collector's job to collect---not merely to accept payments. It is a manager's or credit manager's job to see that the collector devotes his expensive time to people who will not pay of their own free will. That is the rule. I, through Clark's fear-born stubbornness, became an exception to it.
To use the contemptuous installment house term, I was handed a "milk route." I worked it (you should excuse the expression) well into the following spring.
Occasionally, I would be called upon to take over some nominally uncollectible account---some deadbeat so completely lacking in scruples that I could feel free in abandoning my own---and then I would have to actually work. But most of the time I did nothing more arduous than write receipts and pocket payments.
So Clark had his way; he proved himself right and me wrong. But his triumph was even emptier than it appeared. For now, with one corner of his life's mudsill secured, the others began to waver and give way.
Clark had a saying, a ready retort for the collector who fell down on an account. "The guy's eating, isn't he?" he would say. "Well, if he's eating, he's got dough. He has to have, and by God you better get it!"
It was a pretty conclusive argument. Or, rather, it had been in the past. But in the end---as the end approached---the collectors had an answer for it. They came in at night, dogged and sullen and sometimes battered, men driven as far as they could be driven. And they faced Clark almost pleasurably, anxious to reply to his stock question, to deliver the retort beyond which there could be no other.
"Huh-uh. That's what I'm saying, Jud---they ain't eating. Ain't got a thing in the house but a pound or so of cornmeal."
"What the hell you trying to hand me?" Clark would say, his voice furiously desperate. "Goddammit, everybody's got to eat! You think I'm going to swallow any goddamned story like---"
"I'm telling you how it is, Jud,"---an indifferent shrug, perhaps a thinly disguised sneer---"Why don't you check on it yourself? Maybe you can get that cornmeal away from 'em."
Each week the inflow of cash dropped to a new low. Even some of the best accounts began to go sour. One of the collectors was laid off, then another; finally only Durkin and I remained. The home office issued instructions that no merchandise should be sold except for cash.
This last happening, Durkin told me, was the tipoff. It was all over now but the shouting. "The chain's getting ready to fold, Jim. It's finally sunk in on 'em that they can't beat this. They're just stalling for time, trying to grab off what they can without putting out anything more."
I was sure he was right, but Clark, when I asked him about it, furiously denied that the company was on the verge of bankruptcy.
He had grown quite thin in recent weeks. The flesh was drawn tight on his broad, strong face. He swayed a little as he addressed me, and his breath stank with the odor of rotgut whiskey.
"That goddamned Durkin," he jeered. "A goddamned rube! What the---'hic!---'what the hell does he know? Why, Jim, Jim, ol' pal---" He leaned forward, confidentially, dropping a hand on my shoulder to steady himself. "I've 'seen' it, Jim, I know what I'm talking about. They got their own office building, hundreds, thousands of people workin' in it, an'---and they got their own factories and trucking lines an'---and warehouses that cover a city block. An' they got all these stores---stores in almost every state in the union, two'r three in some states. An'---'hup!---'they even control some banks, Jim. Just the same as own 'em. S-say our accounts are spread over a year's time, why they can take that paper to the banks an' get the cash on it. They got 'em by the balls, see? They crack the whip just like we do, an'---an' you know us, Jim. Long's the bastards've got a nickel to get, we---w-we---"
He swayed, staggered, and lurched back against his desk. He sat there, nodding owlishly into space, and mumbling and muttering to himself.
"G-got to be. S-saw it myself, didn't I? All the people'n the buildings'n the factories'n the b-banks'n the warehouses'n the...the everything. Didn't let 'em jus' tell me. Saw it m'self. Know it's there---g-gotta be there. Somethin's there it's 'there.' 'S'there an' thass all there is to it. Where---w-where the hell's it gonna be if it ain't there? What...where'n hell is anything gonna be?"
Two weeks later the chain closed its doors.
I squeezed through the summer on a variety of odd jobs, anything I could get that would bring in a few dollars. Early in the fall, the radio store for which I had been making an occasional sale came out with a line of low-priced table models---a decided novelty in those days---and I made money hand over fist. I was convinced that I had the depression licked. So much so that I not only reenrolled for the college fall term, but I also got married. My wife had a good job. Our understanding was that, if I should be caught in a pinch, she could give me enough financial help to get through college. Meanwhile, until I was solidly on my feet and a better arrangement could be worked out, she continued to live with her family and I with mine.
Alas, for the best laid plans of newly married couples. A horde of other salesmen jumped in on the radio bonanza. Within a few weeks, the depression-narrowed market was saturated and my earnings fell to nothing. I could find no other work. My wife's employers learned of her marriage (we had been keeping it secret), and having a no-married-women policy, they promptly fired her. Then, to further complicate the situation, she discovered she was pregnant.
Mom and Freddie went back to my grandparents' home. I withdrew from school, gave the remitted tuition fees to my wife and took to the road.
I think I must have hitchhiked the length and breadth of Nebraska ten times in looking for work. I found barely enough to buy myself an occasional meal; and finally I could no longer do that. It was late in November, in the city of Omaha, that I reached the end of my tether. I was light-headed from lack of food. Weeks of sleeping in fields and ditches had ruined my clothes. Cold water shaving and washing had left me smeared, scratched and sinister-looking.
Night came on. Snow began to fall. Shivering, I got up from my park bench and wobbled up the street. I came to an empty doorway and took refuge in it, huddling back against the rusted dusty screen. The building was on the edge of the business district---a poorly lit, semi-slum section. On the corner, a few feet away, was a bus stop. A bus drew up, and a middle-aged, well-dressed man got off.
He peered around in the darkness, frowning. Then with a muttered "Damn," he turned back to the curb. Apparently he had got off at the wrong stop and was now waiting for another bus. I stood staring at his pudgy, well-clothed figure. Never before had I had the nerve to bum anyone---to ask for money. I simply didn't know how to go about it. But I knew I'd better do it now unless I intended to freeze or starve. Perhaps, I thought, taking a preliminary gulp of my pride, it wouldn't be so bad. We were alone, he and I, and there would be no witnesses to my shame.
I stepped out of the doorway, and walked up behind him. I said---well, I don't know what I said. But I suspect that discomfort and nervousness made me rather gruff. He could hardly be blamed if he construed my appeal as a demand.
"Huh!" he grunted and looked startledly over his shoulder.
He gulped and faced straight ahead again. His hand went into his pocket and came out with two one-dollar bills and a quantity of change. He thrust it backwards at me. And without turning around, and before I could thank him, he started across the street at a run.
He dashed into a small cigar store, and I saw him speak excitedly to the proprietor. The latter snatched up a telephone, and...and the truth finally dawned on me.
The guy thought I had held him up. He was summoning the police.
I forgot all about being weak and giddy. For the next five minutes or so, I reclaimed the one athletic skill of my misspent youth---marathon running. When the cops arrived at the scene of the "holdup"---and they wasted no time about it---I was so far away that I could barely hear the frustrated whinings of their sirens.
A good meal and a visit to a barber college did wonders for me. But that night, in a fifty-cent hotel room, I decided to clear out of Nebraska. There was nothing here for me. Perhaps there was nothing elsewhere, either, but I 'knew' there was nothing here.
The next morning I hitchhiked back to Lincoln and said goodbye to my wife. It was not a pleasant occasion, much less so than it would have been ordinarily, since her elderly parents felt---justifiably, no doubt, from their viewpoint---that I had treated their daughter badly.
Well, anyway. I walked down to the freight yards that night, and caught a train south. In the south, at least, a man could sleep out if he had to.
There were two empty boxcars on the train (empty of paying freight, that is), and they were already filled with travelers like myself. So, believing that it would offer me sufficient protection from the cold, I settled down behind a tractor that was loaded on a flat car.
I was wrong. As the train gathered speed, the sub-zero wind whipped and nipped at me from all directions. The snow piled on me and froze on me until I looked like something carved of stone.
I knew that there was a division stop a couple hours out of Lincoln, and I decided to lay over there and thaw out. But apparently due to the cold and my weariness, I lost consciousness. When I came to it was daylight and I was still on the train, and so nearly frozen that I could barely move.
I rode on into Kansas City. There, with the assistance of two other bums, I managed to unload.
I stayed there for a week---I 'laid' there, I should say---in the weeds of the hobo jungles, freeezing and burning by turns, in the throes of pneumonia. Fortunately, I have a hereditarily tough constitution, and I was very lucky. I had fallen among old-time hoboes, men who had chosen the life of wandering workers, not the depression-born bums. We had been in many of the same places---the pipeline jobs, the "rag-towns" of the south and west. I was one of them, a guy who could talk knowingly of Four-Trey Whitey and the Half-A-Half Pint Kid, who knew how to filter canned heat through a handkerchief and rubbing alcohol through dry bread, who knew all the verses to the 'Gallows Song.' In a word, I was a brother in distress, and deserving of all the help they could give. And they gave it. I came out of my illness very weak, but, thanks largely to my hobo benefactors, I did come out of it.
The first day I was able to travel I tramped across the city and walked up into the freight yards on the other side. It was night when I got there, and a train was making up for the south. I walked up and down the cars, looking for an empty box. Finally, becoming very weary, I settled for a gondola.
It was loaded, although not quite full, with hardwood. I snuggled down at the end of the lumber. I was feeling quite pleased with my wisdom in boarding the train in its makeup stages. The other bums, who would hop in on the yard's outskirts, would not be able to choose their berth as I had.
The train humped and jerked and began to move smoothly. There were two short blasts from the locomotive, and its speed increased. Then, with one long wavering blast, we really began to roll. Nervously, I stood up and looked over the side of the gondola.
We were just coming out of the yards, and already our speed was a good forty miles an hour. Groups of men---bums---were standing back from the tracks, showing no interest whatsoever in the cars that whizzed past them. I looked up and down the freight as we shot past a lighted crossing and as far as I could see, every door was closed. I climbed up on the lumber and looked forward and backward.
No one was there. No one riding the tops. And no one, apparently, riding the boxes. Shivering, I heard another long wavering blast from the locomotive---unmistakably a highball---and I knew I'd made one hell of a mistake.
The gondola had fooled me; it had been my experience that open cars were not included in manifest freights. Nonetheless, this was a manifest---an express merchandise train---and tolerant as the railroads were in those days, they tolerated no super-cargo on manifests. These trains carried valuable freight. A man caught riding them was automatically presumed to be a thief, and he was treated as such.
I stayed up on top of the lumber. After a time, I saw a light bob up at the head of the long line of cars, and back at the end another light. They came toward each other slowly, toward me; moving from side to side, now and then sinking out of sight. Those would be trainmen, guards, searching the freight from front to rear. How long would they be in getting to me? And when they did get to me...?
I watched their progress. Longingly I watched the lights of villages flash past us in a blur of speed. The locomotive howled hauntingly, blasted the night with its highball demand for right-of-way.
The speed-induced wind was near freezing, but I was dripping with sweat. A little hysterically, I wondered what the hell I had better do. I couldn't jump---not from a train traveling a mile or more a minute. Just as certainly, I couldn't stay where I was. I was very apt to be shot. At best, if the guards took a chance of my being unarmed, I would no doubt be clubbed insensible.
From my extensive travels in the Midwest, I knew we could not be very far from Fort Scott, Kansas, a railroad division point. But just how far, whether we would get there before the trainmen got to me, I didn't know. Neither could I be certain that the train would stop at Fort Scott, or even slow down sufficiently to let me hop off.
The trainmen came nearer, one from the front, one from the rear. At last they were no more than three car lengths away. Leaning over the edge of the gondola, I stared ahead into the night.
Lights. A lot of lights. It must be Fort Scott. And---and, yes, almost imperceptibly, the train was slowing down. But it wasn't slowing down enough; we weren't going to hit Scott soon enough. It was still several minutes away, and the guards were now only seconds away from me.
They came over the last of the cars separating them from me. They saw me and yelled. I yelled back, holding my arms over my head. But they either did not see my gesture in the darkness, or, seeing it, still did not care to take chances. I heard a shout of "'Get the bastard!"' and they came forward at a lurching, menacing run. Each had a thick club thonged to his wrist. Each was wearing a gun belt and gun.
They reached the end of their respective boxcars simultaneously, and started down the ladders. They jumped down to the gondola and advanced on me, clubs upswung...
As a child, my maternal grandfather had used to tell me all sorts of wild stories, allegories thinly disguised as personal experiences. One of his favorites concerned a hunting dog, which, being attacked by a mountain lion, had climbed a tree and escaped. "But how could he?" I would protest. "Dogs can't climb tress." "All depends on the dog," Grandfather would retort. "This dog 'had' to climb one." Now, at last, after the passing of decades, I saw what he meant.
We were just nearing the outskirts of Fort Scott. The train was still going at a terrifying clip. But I had to jump and a man does what he has to.
I swung over the side of the gondola. I looked over my shoulder---stared down into darkness. And, then, as the guards' lanterns flashed in my eyes and their clubs descended, I jumped. I swung myself outward and backwards and let go.
The tracks at this point were atop a high grade, and I seemed to fall for minutes before my feet touched the cinder-blanketed embankment. They barely touched, then bounced me into the air as though they were springs.
I turned a complete somersault, landed on my feet, and was again bounced into the air. I came down on my shoulders and went into a long skid. Skidding on my shoulders and back, I wound up at the foot of the embankment. There was a strange shrieking in my ears, an almost animal keening. A minute or two passed before I realized that I was listening to myself, screaming in an agony of shock and pain.
I laughed and sat up. I buried my face in my hands and rocked to and fro, laughing and sobbing, unable to believe that I was actually alive. After a time, I pulled myself together, climbed back up to the tracks, and limped into Fort Scott. There I was arrested for vagrancy, jailed for the night and floated out of town in the morning.
I have been pretty critical at times of my native state, Oklahoma. For one thing, I believe it is and always has been the rottenest, politically, in the country. But on the whole I am fond of it and proud of it, and I am quickly annoyed with people who speak disparagingly of "Okies" and make uninformed remarks about the state's "backwardness." Where politics is concerned, Oklahoma may be, to use the Brookings Institution phrase, "the heart of Balkan America." But in many ways it is so far ahead of the majority of the commonwealths as to make comparison pitiful.
To cite a few statistics, it has more paved roads, more institutions of higher learning, and more playgrounds and parks per population than any state in the union. It has a really effective department of labor---not a mere letterhead conglomeration of spineless hacks. Its department of charities and corrections has long been held up as a model among penal and eleemosynary authorities. Unlike a certain state to the south, Oklahoma does not brag about its achievements---not nearly enough, anyway, in my opinion. Progressiveness, and the good life which is its objective, are considered a citizen's rightful due. Many of the state's wealthiest men came there broke and they have not lost touch with, nor sympathy for, those less fortunate than themselves.
I hopped off a freight in Oklahoma City late in a bitter November night, a half-starved and filthy bum. And almost immediately I was taken into custody by two patrol-car cops. Naturally, I thought it was a pinch, and their kindly words sarcasm. But such was not the way of Oklahoma City cops. They drove me to a city shelter where I was fed and able to clean up. Then, they turned me over to another pair who chauffeured me into the downtown district. These last two offered me a choice of "hotels" for the night---the city jail, a section of which was open to homeless men, or one of the several city courtrooms which were also left open at night for the benefit of such as I. Their advice was that, due to overcrowding at the jail, I sleep on one of the courtroom benches. I followed this suggestion, and got my first good night's sleep in weeks. I had no bedding, of course, but the benches were clean and the room well-heated. When morning came, and I again took to the street, I felt wonderfully refreshed and hopeful.
There were several soup kitchens about the city, such as the one I had been taken to the night before. But while I was a bum, and no better than any of the others, I winced at the thought of playing the "mission stiff"---of being drawn into the shabbiness and despair of men who had lost all initiative. I had had no choice last night. Now, being merely hungry instead of starving, I was determined to find some other way of procuring food, or to do without.
I wandered over into the south part of town, up and down Reno and Washington streets which were then a kind of poor man's paradise. There were signs offering new shoes for a dollar, complete men's outfits ("slightly used") for two-fifty, clean hotel rooms for five dollars a month. There were stores and markets pleading with customers to buy butter at ten cents a pound, choice porterhouse steak at twelve cents a pound and high grade coffee at three pounds for a quarter. Eggs were six cents a dozen, milk a nickel a quart, bread three loaves for five cents. As for the restaurants---clean, wholesome-smelling places with their menus posted in the windows---they were practically giving their wares away.
Three large hotcakes with sausage, butter and syrup and coffee---for 'five cents!' Roast beef dinner with four vegetables and beverage, for fifteen cents. Ham or bacon and eggs with French fries, hot buttered biscuits, marmalade and coffee, for ten cents. A little mental calculation told me that a man could live handsomely in Oklahoma City for considerably less than a dollar a day. Unfortunately, I didn't have a dollar, nor even the one-hundredth part of one.
Mouth watering, I turned away from the menu I was studying, almost knocking down a brisk, bird-like little man who had taken up a position beside me.
"Jim Thompson's boy ain't you? Sure you are, spittin' image of him." He bobbed his head, grinning at me happily. "What the hell you doin' in town? Your dad with you? Bet you don't remember me, do you?"
I was about to admit that I didn't know him, but he was rattling on, introducing himself before I had the chance. He was a onetime saloon owner from Anadarko, my birthplace, where Pop had been a United States marshal and later sheriff. Now, he and his wife were operating a rooming house here in Oklahoma City, and nothing would do but that I, the son of the "best damned friend" he'd ever had, should move into their establishment.
"I'd like to," I said. "I'm sure I'd be very comfortable, but I don't think I'll be staying in Oklahoma City."
"Why not?" he demanded promptly. "Best damned city in the best damned state in the union. What you going to find anywhere else that you won't find here?"
"Look," I said, "I can't rent a room anywhere. I'm broke, and I can't find a job and---"
"Hell," he snorted, "you think I thought you was dressed up for a masquerade party? Sure you're broke. Sure you ain't workin'. Who the hell is?"
I would feel perfectly at home at his place, he declared, for all of his other tenants were also broke. Now and then, they picked up an odd job and made a dollar or so, whereupon they paid him what they could. I could do the same and I must or he would feel highly insulted.
So I went home with him, and his wife fixed me a whopping breakfast. And all day long, he and she were running in and out of the room they had assigned me---the best in the house---doing their humble utmost to be friendly and helpful. They dug me up an old suit which, while ill-fitting and worn, was splendid compared with the one I was wearing. They even brought me an old but serviceable typewriter and a quantity of paper.
I have many sharp memories of that winter in Oklahoma City. Of writing two novels and selling neither. Of selling three hundred thousand words of trade-journal material and collecting on less than a tenth of it. Of distributing circulars at ten cents an hour, and digging sewer ditches at nothing per. Of being drawn into a wholesale swindle by Allie Ivers. And of a little streetwalker named Trixie.
The sewer job was sponsored by the state, as a so-called "relief" program. But as I saw it, the only relief it gave was to a handful of political fatcats, the project "supervisors," and to the real estate owners. The supervisors got fancy salaries for doing nothing. The real estate boys got valuable improvements on their property for next to nothing. We, the men who dug eleven-foot sewer ditches under hazardous, backbreaking conditions---well, I shall tell you what some of us got.
I was tipped off to the job by two former oil field workers, Jiggs and Shorty---of whom much more later---who were tenants at the place were I was living. Lacking carfare, we walked the eight miles back and forth to work. It was either raining or snowing throughout the time of our employment, and our clothes were never thoroughly thawed and dried out from one shift to the next. As for the project itself, I have never anywhere seen men treated with such cold-blooded shabbiness.
There were no men left on top of the ditch to keep the dug earth moved back. Thus, as the ditch deepened, it was virtually impossible to throw the dirt up and out as far as it had to be thrown. You would load your long-handled spoon (shovel), grip it by the very tip of the handle, and hurl the soggy earth upward with all your might. It would reach the crest of the ditch and balance there hazardously. Then, slowly but surely, it would topple and slide, and a fourth of it would fall back in your face. Worst of all, however, was the fact that the ditches were unshored. There was no bracing to keep them from caving in, and being deep in saturated earth they caved in constantly.
Those cave-ins were terrifying things. Just how terrifying you may understand if, like most people, you have a horror of being buried alive. There were two kinds of them, one a sudden bulging in on the sides which pinned you around the knees or the waist. In the other, the most frightening, the cave-in was from the top. The sky would suddenly disappear like a lamp blown out, and frenziedly you would hurl yourself forward, race madly away from the collapsing area. And a moment later, in the spot where you had been working, there was no longer a ditch. Only eleven feet of half-frozen mud.
I don't know why the job was managed as it was, for having to do much of the same work twice was certainly poor economy. I suppose the wretched state of affairs was due not so much to bad management as no management. Generally, the supervisors knew little or nothing about construction work and made only token appearances on the job. The supervising, such as it was, was done by relief-roll straw bosses, men too fearful for their own paychecks to point out planning errors or demand better conditions for the workmen.
When our two-week pay period ended---we were allowed to work only twelve days a month---Jiggs, Shorty and I tramped into town and presented our time numbers at the project offices. Our wage had been set at one dollar and a quarter for an eight-hour day, so each of us was entitled to fifteen dollars. But only Jiggs's check was for the full and correct amount. Shorty received five dollars and I drew a check for two-fifty.
We protested, of course, but the well-fed gentleman behind the wicket waved us away indifferently.
"Don't talk to me. All I do is hand out the checks. Go out and argue with your project timekeeper."
"That's swell," I said. "And how long am I going to have to wait for a check after I get it straightened out?"
"How do I know?" he shrugged. "I got nothing to do with it."
Shorty and I argued a while longer, but it was a waste of breath. Finally we gave up, and the following morning we went back out to the job. Our timekeeper wasn't there. Like us---although he was drawing a much better salary---he also was working only two weeks a month. I managed to get his home address, and Shorty and I went out to see him. A young man---and not a very bright one---he listened to us with an air of absentminded virtue.
"You must be mistaken." he said absently. "Your checks had to be for the right amount."
"Look," I said, "maybe they had to be for the right amount, but they weren't. Are you sure you turned us in for the full twelve days?"
"I did if you worked."
"Well, don't you remember that we did work? Don't you know that we did?"
"Can't remember everyone," he said sullenly. "All I know is that if you worked, I marked you down."
Shorty, whose shoulders were almost as broad as he was tall, began to curse. He declared that he had ten dollars coming, and he intended to get it in cash or to collect it from someone's hide. Considerably alarmed, the timekeeper produced his records.
"There you are," he pointed out placatingly. "J. Thompson---fifteen dollars. And here, I got your friend down for the same amount."
I looked through the pages of names. As I had suspected, there were two other J. Thompsons, one with two days work to his credit and the other with six. Much the same situation existed in the case of Shorty, whose last name, like mine, was a common one. Obviously, due to the gross stupidity of the timekeeper, our earnings had gone to the wrong men.
What did he intend to do about it? Well, fellas, there was really nothing he could do. He suggested, however, that we might look up the men who had received our checks and demand an exchange.
"Fat chance," Shorty scoffed bitterly. "You think they'd hand 'em over, huh? How the hell we going to prove they even got 'em?"
"Well---uh---"
"Anyway," I said, "we've already cashed our checks. We've got no way of proving that we didn't get the full amount."
"Well---uh---" A fearful glance at Shorty---"I'm awful sorry, fellas, but..."
Shorty stamped out, cursing, too murderously furious to trust himself in the young man's presence. We were rooked, he said, as we headed back to town. There was nothing we could do but take it and forget and concentrate on finding a quick job to make up for our loss.
"I don't know," I said. "It probably won't do any good, but I think I'll go up to the state offices of the project and give them an argument."
"Power to you," he shrugged glumly. "Me, I know when I'm licked."
The project headquarters were in a major downtown office building. I spent the better part of the day there, shuttling from one hack to another, and of course I got no satisfaction at all. Late in the afternoon, I gave up and walked back to the elevators.
The door to one of the cars slid open. I was about to step into it when the operator barred my way. I had seen him and the other two operators staring at me while I was in the project offices. They had left their cars alternately and wandered down the corridor, glancing in at me through the open office doors. Now this man barred my way, a sly smile spreading under his deadpan expression.
"Can't carry you, chief," he said briskly. "Have to use the service elevator."
"What?" I said. "But I'm no delivery boy. I've got as much right to---"
"Sorry. Got my orders. Down the end of the hall and to your right. Man there will take you down."
It was an insult, a slur brought on, as I saw it, by my shabby appearance. In the south, a self-respecting person does not swallow such affronts. I tried to shove my way past him, and was firmly shoved back. Before I could force my way into the car, the door slammed in my face.
I punched the signal button. Another elevator came, and its operator treated me exactly as the first one had.
"Have to take the service elevator, fellow. Down to the end of the corridor and to your right."
"Now what the hell is this?" I said angrily. "Who the hell told you to do this? I'm here on legitimate business. If you think you can shove me around just because I'm not well-dressed---"
"Aahh, look fellow,"---he grinned at me pleadingly---"it's kind of a joke, see? An old friend of yours had us pull it on you. Me and the other boys are just doin' what we're told to."
"Joke?" I said. "An old friend of mine? But---"
"You'll see. And don't tell him I tipped you off, huh?"
The door closed. Bewildered, I went down the hall and pressed the bell for the service elevator. It arrived instantly, operated by a frail, blond, blue-eyed young man. The word STARTER was emblazoned across the jacket of his tuxedo-style uniform.
"What took you so long?" he said. "Been arguing with my hired hands?"
"I might have known it," I said. "Allie Ivers!"
Allie had caught a glimpse of me when I entered the building that forenoon. Being his own boss, practically speaking, and with very little real work to do, he had chosen this elaborately backhanded way of renewing our acquaintance.
"About time, too," he declared, as he headed the car upwards. "A smart guy like you hanging around relief job offices! I'm going to have to take you in hand!"
He stopped the elevator at roof level and motioned for me to follow him. I did so, and he unlocked the door of a penthouse with his pass key and waved me inside.
It was a very elaborate layout, a beautifully furnished combination apartment and office. Stepping over to the bar, Allie selected several bottles at random and mixed us two huge drinks. We clinked glasses and, rather cautiously, I sat down next to him on one of the leather-upholstered stools.
"Whose place is this, Allie?" I said. "And don't tell me it's yours!"
"Belongs to an oil man," he shrugged. "He's only here about a week out of the month. What are you so jumpy about, anyway? I've never got you into any trouble, have I?"
"Oh, no!" I said. "What about the time you hooked me into taking that cop's pants and the time you got me mixed up in the Capone gang, and the time---well, that last time in Lincoln when you had me drive the cab for you?"
Allie grinned and reached for the bottles. I asked him how he'd gotten away from the country club that night.
"Nothing to it," he said casually. "I gave the doorman my cigar to hold. Then, I helped the babe into the cab and drove off."
"Without any clothes on?"
"Well, it was a warm night. We dressed down the road a ways...Speaking of clothes, incidentally, let's go back here."
We went into one of the outsize bedrooms, and Allie rolled back the closet doors. Inside were at least a dozen men's suits, three or four topcoats and racks of shoes and ties. Allie indicated that I was to help myself.
"They won't be a perfect fit, but it'll be good enough. And don't argue about it. You're just going to borrow them for the night."
"But why? I can't---"
"How would you like to edit a magazine? Be the publicity man for a big fraternal order?"
"Well, fine, but---"
"Then do what I tell you, and I'll order up dinner for us."
I could get no further information out of him at the moment, so with considerable hesitation I exchanged my clothes for some of the splendid garb in the closet. Except for the shoes, which were a trifle large, everything fitted me perfectly. By the time I had finished dressing, the waiter arrived with our dinner---two outsize porterhouse steaks with all the accessories for a modest banquet. Allie signed the check (using the tenant's name, of course) and wrote in a five-dollar tip for the waiter.
"The guy never checks his bills," he explained as we sat down to the meal: "I throw parties up here all the time."
He went on to explain at some length and somewhat apologetically that he had not, appearances to the contrary, sunk to doing an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. With the elevator boys and charwomen acting as his agents, he was working several small but profitable rackets in the building---selling chances on punchboards, peddling raffle tickets and so on, collecting a cut from the office to office peddlers. Also, needless to say---although he said it---he was stealing.
"Nothing very big, you understand. A few bucks' worth of stamps in one place and a few typewriter ribbons in another and a box or so of stationery in another. I got a guy that takes the stuff for a short profit."
I shook my head. "Allie, what makes you go on like this? Why don't you do something with your life? You're smart. You've got a nice personality and you make a good appearance. If you'd act sensible, stop making like a cheap crook---"
He was grinning at me thinly, looking me up and down. "Yeah, Jimmie? What would it get me? Rides on freight trains? Tencent meals and a job digging ditches? Rags for clothes and a weedpatch for a bed?"
"Well, all right," I said, stubbornly. "Maybe I'm not doing so good right now, but I'll pull out of it. I---"
"Right you are," Allie nodded. "You're on your way to pulling out of it right now. After tonight you'll be sitting pretty."
"How? Just what am I supposed to do, anyway?"
"You know all about publicity, don't you? How to put out a small magazine?"
"Well, I don't know 'all' about it, but---"
"You know enough. Just let these guys that I introduce you to know that you know. I'll do the rest."
Again, I could get no more information from him. He did insist---he swore to it---that he would involve me in no trouble, and I had to be satisfied with that.
We finished eating. Urging me to help myself to the liquor, he went down to the locker room and changed clothes. He returned with a briefcase which he filled with bottles from the bar.
By this time, naturally, I had had more than a little to drink and the qualms which I usually felt in Allie's presence were fairly well desensitized. As I have indicated, I was very fond of him. In his own peculiar way, he had always tried to be kind to me; and now, I hoped, in my hour of need, he might pull a plump rabbit from the fiscal hat.
I accompanied him downstairs, and we taxied to an address on upper Broadway. We debarked there, and I followed him upstairs to the second-floor lodge rooms. The men he introduced me to, as I saw them, were semi-prosperous, lower middle-class citizens---master barbers, delicatessen owners, head bookkeepers and the like. Genial men, wise enough in their own way, but not too well-informed when they strayed outside of it. Allie seemed very popular with them. With him vouching for me as "the well-known author and editor," I was looked upon with almost embarrassing awe.
After a score or so of introductions, Allie ushered me into a kind of board room and seated me at the head of the long table therein. Then, having distributed the bottles around at strategic points, he advised me that everything was going nicely and departed for the outer rooms.
Some thirty minutes elapsed before the door reopened and Allie ushered in a group of the brothers. They ranged themselves around the table, and the bottles began moving from hand to hand. As the room filled with tobacco smoke and the gentlemen with highgrade bourbon, Allie got down to the business of the evening.
For some months past, he pointed out, the lodge had considered the establishment of a small magazine or newspaper---something which every self-respecting fraternal order had and which this one certainly must have if the brothers were to go on holding their heads high. The delay in inaugurating such a periodical had reached the point of becoming a lodge disgrace; there was no longer any excuse for it. Here before them sat one of the country's most renowned publicists and editors. Purely out of friendship and the desire to help along a good cause, he '(me, that is)' had consented to get the publication started without fee...except, of course, his personal expenses. All that was required now, was that the good brothers present, these more substantial members who comprised the backbone of the lodge, should underwrite the proposition.
One of the brothers cleared his throat. Just how much was this---uh---this thing going to cost?
"Three thousand dollars," said Allie. And then, as his eyes swept the table, weighing the brothers, seeing a troubled expression spread from one face to another---"That's Mr. Thompson's offhand estimate, I should say.
"What about it, Jim? Could we put out something a little smaller for about---uh"---another lightning-sharp glance at the brothers---"about two thousand?"
I nodded, looking, I suspect, not a little troubled myself, for I had given him no offhand estimates nor any other kind. Before I could do more than nod, Allie was proceeding:
"Call it two thousand. That'll be one hundred and fifty each for you gentlemen, or a total of eighteen hundred, and I'll throw in the remaining two hundred. Until the loan is repaid, we'll hold a lien on all advertising and subscription fees---that's Mr. Thompson's suggestion---and each of us will receive a lifetime subscription free of charge. In other words, we'll have the honor of funding the publication and be liberally repaid for---"
"Allie," I said, rising to my feet. "You can't---I can't---"
"Of course," said Allie smoothly, "I'd forgotten you had another appointment. You run right along now, and I'll see you later."
"But---"
"You don't have to apologize. We all understand," said Allie. "Go right ahead, and I'll get on with the meeting."
He got on with it, drawing the attention of the brothers away from me to him. After a moment of standing there awkwardly, with the group but not of it, I left. It was all I could do, as I saw it. There would be later opportunities to block Allie's swindle, and I would crack down on him then.
Waiting at the foot of the stairs outside, I wondered what his next step would be, how he intended to extract eighteen hundred dollars from a group such as this. Certainly they wouldn't have so much cash on them tonight. Neither, with their slender resources, would they hand over their checks for one hundred and fifty each. They were doing very well for the times, yes, but they were still very small fish in the puddle. To men like these, the loss of one hundred and fifty dollars would be a severe financial blow.
I was still wondering how Allie intended to swing it when he came hustling down the stairs. He was obviously expecting an assault of reproaches and questions, so, just to confound him, I said nothing at all. We returned to the penthouse in an almost dead silence, and silently I went into the bedroom and redressed in my own clothes. Allie looked at me quizzically as I returned to the living room.
"Well, we pulled it off, Jim."
"We did?" I said.
"Sit down and have a drink and I'll tell you about it."
I hesitated but I sat down and accepted a drink. Allie told me about it. The lodge brothers would draw personal notes in our favor, co-signed by one another. Since they were all good credit risks there would be not the slightest trouble in discounting the notes for cash. All he and I had to do was accompany the various lodge members to the bank and collect the money.
"We can wind it all up in a day or two, and then---"
"And then we skip town?"
"I'm telling you," said Allie. "These little job printing shops are all screaming for work. We go to one of 'em and sign him up to put us out a little throwaway for a year---a few dozen copies each month of the cheapest thing he can put together. He does everything, see, even collects news from the lodge. We give him maybe three hundred bucks, and he bills us for a thousand. The rest of the eighteen hundred is your expenses."
I sat staring at him. Allie's pleased grin slowly changed to an uncomfortable frown.
"Well, what's the matter with it? Just show me where there's room for a rumble."
"There isn't any," I said. "It's airtight. Your friends at the lodge may squawk, but there's nothing they can do."
"Friends, hell! They're chumps. I've been trying to figure out a way of taking 'em ever since I joined the outfit...We're the only friends in this deal, just you and me. I've known you half your lifetime and I've always liked you, and---"
"And I've always liked you," I said. "You were always on the make, but you did it in such a way that it seemed more humorous than criminal. When you took anyone it was usually a sharpie or a least someone who could afford to be taken...Guys like these tonight, poor trusting bastards with some little job or business---you wouldn't have touched them in the old days, Allie. I can't really believe that you'd do it now."
I set my glass down and stood up. Scowling, he stepped in front of me.
"You're not going to play, Jim? You come in here today flat on your ass and I practically hand you a grand---hell, I'll make it a grand; you can have a thousand for your end and I'll---"
"I'm not going to play," I said.
"This isn't the old days, Jim. We can't call our shots any more. Why, Christ, I'm really doing this for your sake, anyway. You can't back out on me, leave me to try to explain to those birds, after all the trouble I---"
"I'm not backing out," I said. "I was never in. I warned you in the beginning that I wouldn't go for any swindle."
"What the hell are you going to do, then? Dig ditches or sponge off your friends? I've got a pretty sweet setup here, but if you think I'm going to---to---"
I gave him a level look. He turned his head, scowling but shamefaced. "Aahh, hell, Jim, you know I didn't mean that. It's that I'm pretty damned disappointed. You know how you'd feel if a guy you'd always kind of, well...?"
"I know exactly what you mean," I said. "Now, do I walk downstairs or do you take me on the elevator?"
We rode down on the elevator. Diffidently, each of us hurt by the other, we parted at the entrance. We had several casual encounters in Oklahoma City after that, but the diffidence, the stiffness, remained. Allie was ashamed of himself. He was angry with me for making him ashamed.
Years passed before we met again in another city, and Allie, still sore and ashamed, yet wanting to crack the ice between us, found a way of reestablishing our friendship. The medium he chose virtually frightened me witless---more so, I should say, than I ordinarily am. But though it almost turned my hair gray, I think it was worth it.
I'll tell you about it at the proper time.
Shorty and Jiggs knew the location of a pot of gold, figuratively but none the less golden: an abandoned oil well with a mile of high grade pipe in it. The well was deep in the heart of eastern Texas on part of a onetime plantation. For years past the wornout soil of the area had gone unfarmed, and was now a jungle of weeds, bush and second-growth timber. Its present owner would gladly permit the removal of the pipe for a fraction of its resale value.
As Shorty told the story, the plantation owner had been so embittered at the drilling contractor's failure to strike oil that he had chased him and his employees from the property at gunpoint. The contractor had sued for recovery of his machinery and equipment. The plantation owner had filed counter suit. Having more money than the contractor, he won after years of litigation. But his victory was an empty one. News of the gentleman's bad temper and stubbornness had spread among the oil field fraternity, and no one would touch the job on a share-salvage basis. It was cash-on-the-line or no deal. So, with the land owner now nearly bankrupt and still as stubborn as ever, it was no deal.
When he died, his heirs split and sold off the property as small farms. As the land went bad, the farms moved from one owner to another. One of them was no longer sufficient to support a family. It took several, and the original forty-acre plots were consolidated and reconsolidated. And even then large areas were so depleted as to be not worth tilling. Thus, the case with the land on which "our" well stood.
"I don't know, Shorty," I said, when he first told me the story. "It sounds like another oil field fairy tale, just too damned good to be true. You actually saw it yourself?"
"Damned right I did. I didn't believe the story myself when I first heard it, so not having nothing else to do, I looked the place up. I talked to the guy that owns the land, and then I waded on out through the jungle and looked at the well. It's there, by God. More than five thousand feet of highgrade casing. And it's free---I mean, it ain't frozen in the hole. I rocked it and I know."
"But it might be cemented part way down. If it was cemented, say at a thousand feet, you could still get some sway."
"Why the hell would it be cemented? They didn't strike oil."
"Well," I shrugged, "I don't know. Maybe that plantation owner did it. He might have been afraid that someone would steal the pipe, so---"
"But he couldn't have got it out himself if he did that! Ain't that right?...I know how you feel, Jim. It sounds so bee-yoo-tiful you figure there's just got to be something wrong, but there ain't a danged thing."
"The derrick and the rig and the tools are still there? They're still in good shape?"
"Good enough to do the job. Naturally, they ain't first-class after all these years."
"Why couldn't we just truck the above-ground stuff off and sell it?"
"Aah---" Shorty gave me a disgusted look. "An oil field hand like you asking a question like that? It ain't oil country down there. What'd you have left by the time you hauled twenty tons of machinery out of the backwoods and shipped it a thousand miles? Pipe---casing---is different. There's a dozen pipe yards within a hundred miles. We get it trucked to the railroad on credit and sell our bill of lading."
Shorty was a driller and Jiggs a tool dresser---a full cable-rig crew. They needed a third man---I was their candidate---to help with the rigging up, and serve as boilerman and roustabout when the job proper began. They also needed about three hundred dollars for supplies, repairs and fuel oil for the boiler.
Three hundred dollars. That was all that stood between us and the three-way split of a small fortune!
We talked about it endlessly. It got so that we could talk about nothing else. We would sit around our freezing rooms at night, dining off of stale bread and tea, squeezing the last crumbs from a nickel sack of tobacco and passing the butt from hand to hand: three half-starved ragamuffins talking and dreaming of riches. We got out pencil and paper, and we argued and we haggled and we figured and we 'figured.' And that awesome, that terrible and frustrating three hundred dollars began to shrink...Food? Well, we would get that farmer to help us out for an increased share in the profits. Travel and other expenses? Well, we would travel by foot and freight, and nuts to the other expenses. New parts for the machinery? Well, Shorty and Jiggs both had hand tools and our time was worth nothing. We would simply rebuild the old parts.
We cut the three hundred down to one hundred, but there we seemed to be stuck. For we would need at least a hundred for fuel oil, and that was something we could neither beg, borrow nor invent.
Since we didn't stand a chance of raising a hundred, I gave up at this point. But my mechanically inclined friends were not so easily defeated. After conferring together several days, and making liberal use of paper and pencil, they came to me with a solution to the problem.
There were acres of brush and timber around the well. We would simply convert the oil/gas feed boiler to a wood burner, rigging a blower to obtain the necessary high degree of heat...So that was taken care of, but I still hung back. I had several promising manuscripts in the mail (manuscripts which 'I' felt were promising) and I was about to complete a novel. Too, and this I suppose was my main reason for delaying, I was reluctant to exchange my present situation, poor as it was, for weeks and perhaps months of certain and undiluted hardship.
I begged for time, and grudgingly Jiggs and Shorty gave it to me. It was the aforementioned Trixie who sped me, or caused me to be sped, upon my way. And when I say sped I mean exactly that.
Trixie had come to my door in the guise of a necktie peddler, a waif with a heart-shaped face, indiscernible breasts and a pair of the largest feet I have ever seen. Naturally I was not buying any neckties, nor was I interested in the commodity which she was actually selling. But I invited her in anyway for a cup of tea I had just fixed, and she remained to chat and rest her outsize feet.
The poor girl was undoubtedly a moron; I have seen very few prostitutes who were not. But as she began dropping in on me daily and we got to know each other better, I acquired a high regard for her intelligence in at least one respect. Moron or no, Trixie was a damned good literary critic.
She would lie on my bed, her toes hanging over the footrail like bananas, while I read to her from my latest efforts. And always her response was the one I had hoped to achieve. She laughed in all the right places, she wept in all the right places. By turns, as I turned the pages, she was pensive, gay, frowningly thoughtful. And when I got a rejection, ah, then indeed was she a tonic beyond price for my withering ego.
I have heard some pretty good cussing in my time, but never anything like the epithets which Trixie applied to the editors in faraway New York---those malicious imbeciles who turned down my manuscripts. The obscenities which spewed effortlessly from her rosebud lips were occasionally such as to make me blush, and I would suggest that she was allowing partisanship to carry her away. But Trixie, deferential as she usually was, would have none of this milksop attitude.
Trixie and I became very fond of each other. But she was depressed and disturbed by my insistence on a purely platonic friendship. I had been "awful nice" to her. Now why wouldn't I let her be nice to me return favor for favor, in the only way that she could?
I tried to persuade her that her company and conversation were more than ample recompense for any small kindness I had extended, but this she was unwilling to believe...Was there something---uh---wrong with me, perhaps? Didn't I like "it"? Did I think she wasn't clean? Well, then?
Not only did my continence trouble Trixie, it was also, she advised me, seriously upsetting her "boyfriend, Al" ("Owl," she pronounced it). Al, it seemed, had a great deal of pride. He liked to keep things even-Steven, and he didn't take nothing off of no one. Unless I allowed her to do the "right thing," he was going to call a halt to her visits.
Well, I had some ideas about the pride of a man like Al---if a pimp can be called a man---and I passed them along to her. And that, of course, was a serious mistake. Trixie's face turned white, then red, then white again. She cursed me, she raked, she wept...Al was "wunnerful," she scream-sobbed. He was the finest, kindest, nicest man in the world and no one had better say he wasn't because she'd kill 'em if they did!
Finally, she stamped out, tearfully vowing that I was nine kinds of a bastard and that she would never speak to me again as long as she lived. Two days later, around noon, she returned.
Her little head was high in the air. In place of the customary plough shoes, her gondola feet were squeezed into runover satin slippers, and she was otherwise decked out in rummage-sale finery. There had been a big change in her life's station, she haughtily informed me. She was now a "hostess" in a combination whore house-blind pig, a position which the all-wise and kindly Al had obtained for her. And if I didn't think I was too goddamned good, she and he hereby invited me to attend the grand opening.
I murmured congratulations, squeezing out a compliment to be conveyed to Al. Immediately, Trixie's haughtiness vanished, and weeping, she flung her arms around me...Honest, she'd been just sick about the way she'd acted, calling me all those dirty names. But she simply hadn't been able to help it. Anything that hurt Al, it hurt her a thousand times worse. It just drove her out of her mind, and---and, well, would I please come? Al would be there, and I could see how wunnerful he was. By accepting their hospitality for the evening, I would free them of their onerous feeling of obligation toward me.
"But---" I hesitated, uncomfortably. "But what about your boss, Trixie? The guy who owns the place?"
"It's all fixed, Tommy. You an' Al are gonna get all you want to drink all evening long, and it won't cost you a penny!"
"But I can't let you pay for---"
"I already 'did' pay for it. You know." She blushed prettily. "I spent all last night paying for it. Me an' the boss---well, he took it out in trade and I'm taking it out in trade, and if you don't come..."
She looked up at me anxiously.
I told her I would come, and she squealed with delight. "An' you be sure and drink plenty, too," she said, as she gave me the address of the establishment, "because plenty's what I paid for."
The place was a barn-like old building, a former residence on upper Washington Street. The thug who looked me over and admitted me waved me toward the living room area which was now equipped with tables, chairs and a homemade bar. A sign behind the latter fixture announced that choc beer was fifteen cents, whiskey two shots for a quarter. Beneath this announcement was the large lettered word C-A-S-H and the legend, In God We Trust And You Ain't God.
Although it was still early in the evening, the room was already crowded with guests---largely of the type one would shun from meeting in a dark alley. Trixie spotted me in the doorway, greeted me with a hug and led me back to a rear table. At it was seated a burly, slack-jawed giant, none other than the wunnerful "Owl."
Trixie introduced us and scurried away for refreshments. He looked me over and I looked him over, and it was one of those things...hate at first sight. Probably I would have detested him just as much if I had not known what he was.
We were still giving each other the cold-eye when Trixie returned, but she was too happy at having brought us, her dearest ones, together to notice the congealing atmosphere. Advising us to holler when we ran dry, she gave us each a bright smile and returned to her party.
The whiskey was white corn and was served in heavy glass jelly jars of about three and a half ounces capacity. Owl took his down at a swallow, and without any change in expression, and chased it with an infinitesimal sip from the choc pitcher. He set his glass down with a look that dared me to repeat the performance. I did so and somehow, miraculously, managed not to strangle or cough. Then, by way of pointing up my feelings about him, I poured my chaser into the glass instead of drinking from the pitcher.
A brief flash of his eyes told me that the insult had scored, but ostensibly he took no notice. Turning suddenly genial, he obtained another round of drinks from a passing hostess, and called for bottoms up again. We downed them. A third round arrived. We downed that, too.
He weaved slightly in his chair, then leaned forward bracing his elbows on the table.
"T-Tommy---" he coughed, "Tommy, you're a nice guy an' it's a real pleasure to meet you."
"Swell," I said, flatly.
"Y-you like me, too, Tommy?"
"How," I said, "could I help it?"
"But you don't like Trixie, do you? Think you're too good to take favors off'n me an' Trixie?"
"Now, look," I said, "let's get this straight, once and for all. Trixie doesn't owe me anything, and even if she did I wouldn't---"
"S'all right, Tommy. No need to apologize. If you think you're too goddamned good to lay my girl---'hic!---'it's perfeckly all---'hic!"'
He weaved again, and his meaty right hand came out. Obviously, or so I thought, he intended to give me a friendly pat on the shoulder, and for Trixie's sake I decided to endure it.
"---s'all right. Understand perfeckly. Think you're too damned good for Trixie, why---'hic!"' The hand wobbled, suddenly, and swung sideways. It landed on my ear with an agonizing 'cr-aack!'
The blow almost knocked me from my chair. Righting myself, I started to make a grab for him, but he was beaming at me waterily, too drunk---apparently---to realize what he had done. Moreover, Trixie had suddenly returned to our table, frowning at me, smiling tenderly at him.
"Tommy hurt you, Owl? Did he? What'd you say to him, Tommy?"
"Naah." He waved her away grinning. "Tommy an' me are buddies, ain't we, Tommy? Just havin' a friendly little conversation. Bring us some more whiz an' leave us alone."
"That's right, Trixie," I said. "Bring us some drinks and leave us alone. Owl and I are getting along fine."
Trixie gave me a doubtful look, something between an apologetic smile and a frown. But she brought more of the white lightning and choc, and left us alone again. As usual, we downed the drinks at a gulp.
It was simply too much too fast, particularly in view of the fact that I had eaten almost nothing all day. A thunderbolt seemed to race up my spine and explode in my skull, and for a split second I lost consciousness. When I came to, Owl had returned to his grievance.
So I thought I was too good for him and Trixie? Thought they were some kind of white trash, maybe? Well, that was all right. If that's the way I wanted to feel, why---
His heavy hand wobbled and swung again. Again it cracked painfully against my ear.
Trixie started for us at once, of course. But I smiled at Owl amiably and he grinned at me woozily, still the innocent unaware, so Trixie went back to her own table.
Someone brought us more whiskey. Rather slowly now, studying each other covertly, Owl and I took it down. I wasn't quite sure yet about his condition and intentions. I was reasonably confident that he knew what he was doing, that he was doing it deliberately and with malice aforethought. Believing that I would do anything to keep the peace for Trixie's sake, he intended to sit here and gradually slap me silly.
That was his scheme, I thought. But I was not absolutely positive of it, and I had to be positive before starting a riot in a place like this. Also, I needed just a little more to drink to put me in the proper fettle.
The jelly glasses were refilled. Emptied. Surreptitiously, I lowered mine below the table edge and thence into my pocket. Owl licked his lips cautiously and picked up his favorite conversation piece. His hand began its preliminary wobbling.
It darted, swung and landed. Smack on my ear for the third time.
By now we had become the cynosure of all eyes, to coin a phrase, one pair of which belonged to the proprietor. So while Trixie, confident that all was well between us, stayed where she was, we received a visit from the bouncer.
"What the hell's going on here?" he demanded. "You guys want to fight, get the hell out in the alley."
"Fight?" I grinned bewilderedly. "Alley? Do you want to go out in the alley, Owl?"
"Not me," said Owl firmly, and in extremely clear accents. Then, remembering his pose: "We're ol' buddies, mister. Whash all this stuff 'bout fightin'?"
The bouncer scowled, shrugged and walked away. I pushed back my chair.
"'Scuse me a minute, ol' buddy," I said. "Got to go to the john."
"S-sure." He bobbed his head drunkenly. "I'll jusht---hey, where's your glass?"
"The girl must have taken it away," I said. "You order up another while I'm gone."
I walked back to the men's room. Stepping up on the filthy sink, I pushed up the narrow window to the alley and unlatched the screen. I stepped back down again, removed one of my socks and slid the jelly glass inside. I knotted the open end, dropped it into my pocket and returned to the table.
Apparently Owl had got the notion that I had not intended to return, and now seeing me meekly before him again---a sitting duck as he saw it---he could scarcely conceal his malicious pleasure. It was a situation made to order for pimps, being able to beat hell out of someone who could not strike back. Tossing his drink down, he started working up to the fourth blow almost before I had finished mine.
I slipped the sock out of my pocket and waited.
His hand waggled and found its target. I swung the sock.
He saw it coming and tried to fling himself sideways. It caught him on the side of his head, and the blow combined with his lurch sent him sprawling and stumbling across the room.
He landed on top of a table occupied by four oil field workers and their ladies. But this was not, I am happy to say, the end of his travels. Showered with whiskey, beer and splintered glass, the outraged group laid hands on him, men and women together. They hoisted him up and hurled him, even as children might hurl a doll. And Owl went sailing through the air, screaming until he crashed against the far wall.
It was a wonderful brawl, with Owl the center of attraction, but I got to see very little of it. The bouncer and the proprietor were heading toward me. So was Trixie, a beer pitcher swinging in each hand as she ploughed through the growing riot and wreckage. I fled into the toilet, and out the window.
I trotted down the alley, wondering if it might not be an excellent idea to leave town for a while. By the time I reached my rooming house, I had come to a decision.
I talked with Jiggs and Shorty, and we all conferred with our landlord. He generously allowed us to make up blanket rolls from our bedding, and also lent us five dollars. Early the next morning we caught a freight south.
Jiggs hugged the top joint of casing and braced his feet against the derrick floor. He rocked his body to and fro, then stepped back frowning.
"Well?" said Shorty nervously. "What's the matter? It's just like I told you, ain't it?"
Jiggs shook his head ambiguously. "You try it, Jim. See what you think."
I hugged the pipe---it was twenty-four inches in diameter here at the well's top---and tried to rock it. I stepped back, avoiding my friends' eyes.
"Well, how about it?" Shorty blurted out. "Goddammit, what's wrong with you guys? You---you ain't going to tell me that pipe's cemented?"
"Well," Jiggs shrugged, "maybe it ain't 'cement', but---"
"'Course it ain't! What sense'd there be putting cement in a duster?"
"---but it'll sure as hell do until cement comes along. I don't think---I'm afraid we ain't ever gonna..." He broke off, and there was a heavy silence for a moment. "Oh, Christ," he said at last. "What the hell, anyway?"
Shorty looked at us, and we both looked away. He said, almost pleadingly, "Now, look, you guys. It's just mudded up---silted down. What d'you expect after all these years?"
"Sure," Jiggs sighed. "Bound to be something like that. Be damned funny if it did rock free."
"Ain't that the way you feel, Jim?" Shorty looked eagerly at me. "Don't you figure it's just silt or mud?"
"Sure," I said. "We hook the bull wheel into it, and it'll pull slick as snake oil."
"Sure," Jiggs repeated. "Sure it will."
I was practically certain that it wouldn't, and so was he. And so, for that matter, was Shorty. Perhaps he had been able to get some motion from the pipe on his original visit to the well, but he must have known that something had been gripping it solidly and not too many hundreds of feet below the ground. He had deceived himself nourishing an almost baseless hope until it had become belief. And now here we all were, and there was nothing to do but go ahead.
Silently, we cleaned out the tool house and spread out our blanket rolls. We built a fire, and set a lard-can "kettle" on to boil. The farmer who owned the land had given us a grubstake---blackeyed peas (fifty pounds), cornmeal (fifty pounds), coffee, salt pork and other staples. We would eat, at least, as long as we worked on the project.
We had been on the road three days, walking the last thirty-five miles. But worn out as we were, we tossed sleeplessly for most of the night. We were all too worried to sleep, too disappointed. At the first crack of daybreak, we were up drinking coffee, and by dawn we were at work.
There was a great deal to be done. Basically, the rig and tools were in good shape, but that long-ago contractor had left things in a mess and the vandal, Time, had made mess into chaos. Thousand-pound timbers had sagged and slipped. Collapsed spools of cable were spewed every which way, mingled and intermingled in Gordian tangles. A twenty-foot stem---tons of solid steel---was jammed back into the calf wheels. The walking beam had toppled down into the belt house. The---but let it go. You would have to know your drilling rigs and terminology to appreciate the damage.
Our first task was not with the rig proper but on the pump to the adjacent water well. For while we could carry water for ourselves from the farmer's house, it would take thousands of gallons a day to keep the boiler going. We stripped the engine down, sandpapered its twin pistons and relined the bearings with our single precious bar of babbitt. We filled the tank from the farmer's precious supply of gasoline. And after a mere seven or eight hours of cranking, the damned thing ran.
We all felt better after that. There is something about having water, when you have been without, that does things for a person's spirits. We all took a bath, and flushed out the tank and boiler lines. Using the farmer's tools, we all fell to chopping wood which we stacked in cords before the boiler's feed box. In all, we were about three weeks securing our water and fuel supply. With that taken care of, we were ready to start on the rig.
Now, there are no light objects around drilling machinery. The stuff all weighs into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. It is meant to be moved with winches and cranes---with machine power. And we had a great deal of clearing away to be done before we dared cut steam into the rig. Everything had to done by hand, ours alone, ostensibly, and since ours were simply not adequate...Well, I can't explain it, how we got the necessary help. All I can do is tell you about it.
We would be struggling futilely with some immovable object, when suddenly, from north and south and east and west, men would come plodding through the tangles of underbrush and blackjack. Negro and white, sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Poor ragged devils, even poorer than ourselves if that were possible, bonily emaciated with the ravages of hookworm and malaria. Exactly the right number came to get the job done---no more, no less. They expected no pay and they seemed surprised and embarrassed by our thanks. As soon as the task at hand was completed, they departed again.
It was an eerie phenomenon, one that I have observed nowhere else but in the "lost country" of the Deep South. There were no telephones in the area, and many of our helpers came from miles away. Incredible as it seemed, we were forced to accept the fact that these men could anticipate our need hours before it arose. They knew what we were going to do before we did! We would start to work in the morning, faced with so many tasks that we didn't know which to tackle first. Or, perhaps, we would start on one job, then shift to another. In any case, when the time came that we needed help, it was there and in the right amount.
Unlike Shorty and Jiggs, I could not shrug off this weird state of affairs as "just one of them things." There is a peculiar twist of my mind which impels me to fly into every puzzle as though dear life depended on it. So I pestered our farmer friend about it whenever he put in his appearance. And while I never got a straight explanation of the riddle, I did achieve some understanding of it.
The "how" I never learned. But the "why-for," to use the dialect of the section, became clear.
The occasion was one morning some five weeks after our arrival. We were practically through with the rigging up, and the farmer had been standing around watching us. With an almost abrupt adieu, he stepped down off the derrick floor and started for the backbrush. I asked him where he was going.
"Over to Lije Williams'---" He paused uncomfortably. "Figger I'd he'p him clean out his cellar. Got a plumb big beam to tote back in place after the cave-in."
I asked him when the cave-in had taken place. He mumbled evasively, somehow abashed by the question.
"It hasn't happened yet, has it?" I said.
"Didn't say that," he mumbled. "Just said I was goin' to he'p him."
"How do you people know things like that?" I asked. And he shook his head awkwardly: he didn't know; he couldn't say; he didn't like to talk about it.
"If you knew this cave-in was coming, why didn't you warn Lije? Maybe he could have stopped it."
"Caint," he said simply, his face clearing a little. "Couldn't hardly do that. Suthin's what's goin' to be, it is."
"So you do know," I said, "you just admitted it. How?"
He was growing increasingly uncomfortable at the quizzing, and my friends were nudging me to get on with the work. But I kept after him, and his inherent politeness restrained him from telling me what he should have: viz., to mind my own business and let him mind his.
"Looky, friend," he blurted out at last. "I caint---I don't rightly know how to---to---"
"Make a stab at it," I encouraged him. "Put it in your own words. How do you folks know when somebody needs help?"
He frowned troubledly, scuffing his overrun shoes in the rocky and ruined soil. He looked around at the desolate wasteland. And then his eyes lifted to the bleak, unpromising sky, searching perhaps for a Deity whose head seemed forever turned.
"Got to," he said, bluntly.
That was the end of his explanation.
It was enough.
With the wreckage cleared out of the machinery, we were able to complete the rest of the cleanup with power, and we got it done in a matter of hours. We used the remainder of the day to rig our casing cable and blocks; then, early the next morning, we fired up for the big event.
Since the well had been a deep one, the steam lines were outsize, extra-heavy duty. Similarly, the boiler was something to warm the cockles of an oilman's heart. It had a capacity of one hundred and twenty-five pounds pressure (the safety valve was set to pop off at that point) which is enough power to move a mile-long freight train. It was certainly enough to move a pile of pipe, we felt...if the pipe was movable.
I started off with the water glass (gauge) at the third-full mark, gradually opening the injector valve. The first fifteen or twenty pounds of pressure were hard to get, but after that, with the steam-driven blower cut in, the pressure rose swiftly. Shorty and Jiggs retired to the derrick floor, and readied themselves. At seventy-five pounds, I shouted a high sign.
Shorty manipulated the gear lever. Jiggs kept an anxious eye on the cables and blocks. The derrick creaked as the line tightened. The guy wires began to hum. Then a sound like a monstrous groan rent the air, and there was a high-pitched, ear-shattering whining---and the bull wheel spun uselessly in its belt.
We took the belt off, tightened it with a splice and put it back in place. It spun almost as badly as ever. No power was being transmitted to the machinery.
We took it off again and resurfaced the wheel with bits of old belting. This time it held; there was not the slightest skidding or slipping. But when Shorty "hit it" with ninety pounds pressure, the seven-eighths inch casing cable snapped like a thread.
We re-rigged with two lines instead of one. With the boiler pop-off valve shrieking, with a full one hundred and twenty-five pounds pressure, Shorty began to "run" at the pipe---to let the lines go slack and then hit it with everything he had.
That went on for two days, at the end of which we had to knock off to chop wood. The pipe hadn't budged. Jiggs said it wasn't going to.
"I ain't sore, understand," he told Shorty. "You musta known that pipe wouldn't pull, and you oughta have your butt kicked for draggin' me and Jim down here. But---"
"It'll pull." Shorty's face flushed. "We're gonna re-rig with four lines."
"What good'll that do? The two we got can take anything we can put on 'em."
"You'll see," said Shorty sullenly. "You guys don't want to help, you don't have to. I'll do it myself."
Well, we weren't going to let him do that, naturally. So we finished the wood-cutting, and strung an additional two lines through the blocks and down to the stubborn pipe. Shorty then ordered a double-guying of the derrick---two guy wires for each of those we now had.
We asked the reason for them. He was sullenly uncommunicative. The rig was going to be double-guyed, and to hell with us if we didn't want to help.
Curiously, Jiggs and I did our share of the job.
"Now," said Shorty, when finally everything was as he wanted it, "you think that derrick'll hold? You figure there's anything we can put on it, it won't stand up to?"
There was only one answer to the question; the rig, of course, was bound to hold up. It was inconceivable that it shouldn't.
"And them four casing lines? You figure they'll hold---three and half inches of solid steel line?"
Yes, we nodded, and the lines also would hold. They could no more give way than the rig could. 'But---'
"What the hell you drivin' at, anyway?" Jiggs demanded angrily. "The derrick an' them lines could stand up against three boilers like the one we got. They could take four hundred pounds of steam an' never feel it. But we only got 'one' boiler and we only got a hundred and twenty-five pounds, so---"
Shorty walked off, leaving Jiggs talking. We followed him out to the boiler. He stepped up on the firebox door, and braced his body against the barrel. Taking a piece of wire from his pocket, he firmly wired shut the safety valve.
By no means a professional oil field worker, I did not immediately grasp the significance of this action. But Jiggs's face turned slightly green beneath the tan.
"Are you crazy?" he snapped, as Shorty leaped back down to the ground. "Why you think that's set to pop at one-twenty-five? Because it'll blow up if it don't!"
"No, it won't," said Shorty grimly. "They test these things high. If it's set for one-twenty-five, it ought to take a hundred and seventy-five or two hundred. For a while, anyways."
"Yeah, but for how long a while? And how you going to know if it ain't built up to two-fifty or three hundred? The gauge only reads to a hundred and twenty-five."
"It won't raise more than two hundred. It just ain't got the fire and water capacity."
"Well," Jiggs said, "I wouldn't want to be around it if it was carrying a hundred and fifty pounds pressure, but..."
He turned and looked at me. So did Shorty. The decision was mine, their attitudes said. They worked up on the derrick floor, more than seventy-five yards away from the boiler. If it blew up, I would be the one to be blasted into the next county.
I hardly knew what to say. We had put in almost two months here, and it was agonizing to think of going back to Oklahoma City empty-handed. But I naturally preferred returning empty-handed to not going back at all.
"I don't like to ask you, Jim---" Shorty broke the silence. "But I honest-to-God think it'll be safe enough. You don't need to hang around the old pot...very much. Just crowd that pressure needle around until she hits zero again; then you can load the firebox with all it'll hold and head for the bushes."
"Yeah. But suppose it blows while I'm doing all that?"
"All right," he said dejectedly. "I'm not asking you to."
"Anyway, the steam won't hold. You start hitting it in the rig and---"
"It'll hold long enough, Jim! A half hour or so. That's all I need to get the pipe started."
"And you think it will start?"
"By God, its 'got' to!" he declared. "With all that power on it, it can't help but come, even if it's cemented. The rig and the lines won't give, so the pipe has to!"
Jiggs scratched his head, remarked that for at least once in his life Shorty seemed to be making sense. I wasn't so sure, but as they waited, silently, looking at me, I felt compelled to go along with the stunt.
"All right," I said. "I think I'm making a hell of a mistake but---all right."
We drew the fire from the boiler, swabbed the flues and cleaned the firebox of its last speck of ashes. The next morning, while Jiggs and Shorty made a final check of the rigging, I retired.
The pressure needle moved steadily toward the pop-off point. It swung past it with a sinister lurch, and on around to the zero pin. I wanted to run at this point; never in my life have I wanted to do anything so badly. But the box had to be well-stoked first and the ash was banking up so high that there was little room for the necessary wood.
I flung open the door to the grates and began raking at them furiously. I slammed it shut again, and snatched frantically at the wood pile. I hurled in wood by the armloads---jammed it in until it was hanging out of the firebox. I turned the blower on full blast, opened the water-injector valve to its widest. And ran.
I reached the safety of the bushes, and dropped down breathless on the ground.
Shorty hit the steam.
He jolted the pipe a few times, slackening then suddenly tautening the lines. Then he braced his feet against a post, pulled the long lever out as far as it would go, and held it there.
The guy wires hummed. They began to howl with the strain. There was a vast creaking of timber, and the gears shrieked and groaned and screamed. Louder and louder grew the tumult; and then gradually it dimmed. We had lost our head of steam.
And the pipe had not moved an inch.
I fired up three times that day, lingering a little longer each time before running. It was no good. Maybe, by all the laws of physics, the pipe 'should' move, but apparently it was not law-abiding pipe.
I told Shorty that we were throwing good time after bad. He implied, rather sourly, that I was at fault.
"I just ain't gettin' the steam, Jim. You give me 'enough' steam and that pipe'll pull all right."
"What the hell do you call enough?" I sputtered. "How can I give you any more?"
"Well, I got a little idee about that. I'll think it over tonight---kind of work it out in my head---and we'll give it a try in the morning."
He arose ahead of Jiggs and me in the morning, and when we yawned out into the chilly dawn his invention was ready. It was a stoker, rigged from odds and ends of pipe and a length of sheet iron. Amidst an uncomfortable silence, he demonstrated its operation. He looked at me, and abruptly let go the contraption.
"All right, Jim, forget it. We'll just pack up an' get, and to hell with the damned pipe."
"No, we'll try it," I said. "If we don't get that casing, it won't be my fault."
"You're sure you want to? You know what you'll have to do?"
"I'm dying to do it," I said, not too pleasantly. "And that's probably exactly what I will do."
We had breakfast. Shorty and Jiggs retired to the derrick, and I fired up again.
The steam rose. I cut in the blower, and began to fire more rapidly. The pressure gauge rose to a hundred and twenty-five pounds; the needle swung around to the zero pin. I flung open the grate doors, began to rake ashes with one hand and feed the firebox with the other.
At last the ashes were all removed, while, at the same time, wood bulged from the firebox. I swung the stoker up to the door, and loaded it out to the end.
It was a cold day---bitter with that gnawing, seeping-in cold peculiar to the southern low country. Yet despite this, and the fact that I was stripped to the waist, I was sopping with sweat. It ran down over my body in rivers, and my feet seemed to float in my shoes...out of fear, partly, I suppose. But equally, at least, because of the heat. If I had not been sweating so much, I think I should have literally caught fire.
The boiler plates began to flow with an ugly, warning pink. The pink became a dull cherry-red, and then, slowly, a bright scarlet. Threads of steam curled up ominously from the rivets.
God only knows how much pressure was straining beneath those plates. But the steam had to hold, and already the stoker was practically empty. The intense blaze was gulping down wood as though it were so much paper.
I fed and raked ashes, blind with exhaustion and sweat, numb with fear. The boiler began to quiver and shimmy, but I kept on. And at last I had what Shorty wanted. The grates were clean, the firebox full, the stoker loaded. All at the same time. There was as much steam as could be got, and the steam would hold.
I stumbled back from the glowing, shaking monster. I tottered up the hill and fell down among the bushes, fighting to get my breath.
Down in the derrick, Shorty grasped the long lever to the casing reels.
It was hot---even 'that' was hot. He yelled and did a little dance of pain. Then, he grabbed hold again with a piece of sacking, and pulled it all the way out. And Jiggs jammed it there with a crowbar. They stood back, then, Jiggs looking up into the tower---alert for any breakage---Shorty with his eyes on the pipe.
The by-now familiar and threatening clamor began, but a dozen times louder than it had been on any of our previous attempts. The guys sang; there was an insane howling of tortured wood and metal. It grew to an unbearable pitch, until it seemed to pierce down through your flesh and bones and into your vitals. And, then, suddenly, it was almost quiet.
Every tiny cell and molecule of the equipment had been stretched and squeezed to its limits. There was no longer any give in them, no room for friction nor clashing, and hence it was silent. The only noise was the hissing of steam.
Around me the earth began to tremble, the bushes to weave and sway. Fascinated, I waited and watched. I had heard about this all my life and now I was seeing it; the legendary meeting of the irresistible force and the immovable object.
A shout from Shorty snapped me out of my reverie. I got up and trotted down the hill.
"It's coming, Jim! The pipe's moving! You gotta give me some more steam!"
"You're crazy!" I stammered. "I wouldn't go near that boiler now for all the---"
"Get movin'! Just a little bit more, Jim, an'---'oof!"'
Jiggs had dived into him like a football tackle, knocking him off the derrick floor. He had come off of it at a run, and now still running he propelled us ahead of him.
"Run, damn you, run! The pipe---it's---"
"Damn you, Jiggs!" Shorty tried to jerk away from him. "That pipe's just startin' to move an' if Jim would---"
"Sure, it's moving! It's stretching!"
"Stretch? Why, goddammit, it couldn't---'Yeeow!"' yelled Shorty. And he led the race for the bushes. For, fantastic as it seemed, the pipe 'was' stretching.
And suddenly it snapped.
It soared up out of the hole, some forty feet of "indestructible" twenty-four inch casing. Like a giant lance, it rose up through the tower of the derrick, smashing through the crown block, batting the heavy gear and pulleys high into the air. And then, snared by the attached lines, it whipped sideways and plunged earthward again.
It came down on the rig, splintering braces and cross-braces, leaving the derrick a wobbling ruin. It landed thunderously amidst the machinery...and, for all practical purposes, that machinery ceased to be. Steam spouted from the maze of broken lines---rose mercifully over the ruin. When it cleared away, we trudged back down the hill.
There was nothing to salvage. The rig was utterly and completely beyond repair. At any rate, we were ready to admit that the pipe could not be pulled.
We could not trust ourselves to speak. Case-hardened wretches that we were, we were that near to weeping. Our farmer friend took the disappointment much more philosophically.
"Didn't lose nothin'," he pointed out, as he fed us a farewell banquet of jackrabbit stew. "Didn't have nothin' to begin with."
I received several small manuscript checks in a row that summer, and Mom fell heir to a modest sum. She and Freddie came down to Oklahoma City, bringing my wife and baby with them, and we continued on together to Fort Worth, Texas. Pop had got a job of sorts there. I got one, shortly after my arrival, as a hotel doorman. It was easily the lousiest job I have ever had.
I worked a seven-day, eighty-four-hour week. My salary was fourteen dollars per, less certain arbitrary deductions by my employer which usually totaled two or more dollars. Even with the low prices prevailing in those days, it was a starvation wage for a man with a wife and child.
I was not allowed to sit down during the shift, nor did I have any relief period. I 'could' go to eat or to the toilet if I chose to. But if the motoring guest checked out during my absence, his garage charges were on me. After paying one gentlemen's nine-dollar bill out of my twelve-dollar wage, I chose to stick to my post.
The omission of a lunch period didn't bother me; I couldn't afford to eat anyway. But the interminable and unrelieved standing on a hard sidewalk, and the compulsion to ignore the demands of nature, were something very nearly like torture. Let it go at that. This is one period of my life I don't like to talk about.
A few pennies at a time, I saved enough money to rent a typewriter and buy some fancy letterheads. I circulated the quality business magazines, and got a number of assignments. Mom and Freddie did the necessary interviewing for me. I wrote their findings up in my "spare time." From business writing, I gradually moved into the relatively high-paying field of fact-detective stories. And after more than a year, I was able to quit the doorman job. I still have numerous mementoes of it, swollen joints and weakened kidneys being the least unpleasant of the lot.
I had for a long time inclined to a youthful bemusement with the 'genus Texan,' and as a result I failed to achieve the high Texas standards of character and intelligence. Now, years later, as I moved about the state in search of detective stories, there seemed to be signs that I had improved, or that the professional Texan had. I got along very well with the type, and they were at least tolerant of me. I was beginning to have high hopes of a solid permanent rapprochement when, one day in Dallas, the futility of such fond imaginings was ignominiously borne home to me.
Fact-detective stories cannot be sold without pictures, and I had found it convenient to become acquainted with many newspaper photographers. They were invariably first-class workmen. They could get stuff from their morgues that was ordinarily unobtainable, and they didn't charge me anything. We were always ol' friends---ol' Texas friends---after a few drinks, and were thus above paying each other for favors. The loans to them and the liquor that went into them got to be a rather frightening item of expense. But in view of my ol' friends, magnanimity, I shut my eyes to it.
Well, after an afternoon's "shooting" expedition with one of these ol' friends, during which we had imbibed a quart of whiskey and started on a second, he suggested a call upon some practitioners of the oldest profession. I demurred. He asked for a loan.
"Jus' lend me a couple dollahs, Jim, ol' boy. That's all it takes. You can come up an' wait in the hall, and have some nice drinks for yourself."
"But I haven't got two dollars---dollahs---Hank, ol' boy," I said. "I spent---I done went an' spent all the money I had on that last jug of whiskey."
"You ain't got no money, 'a'-tall?"
"Well, I got this---this here---four-bit piece," I said.
"Well, gimme it, then. I'll match this gal, double or nothin'. I feel pretty lucky."
"But what if you lose?"
"Why, I'll just do without. Naturally."
I murmured that this hardly seemed ethical. "Do you really think you ought to, Hank? I mean, if you lose you'll have to back out. You'll be cheating her."
"Faugh! Fie!" he said, disgusted at this insult. "I'll be teachin' her a very valuable lesson. No tellin' how much it'll be worth to her in future years!"
I went along with him, and he matched the girl and won.
She was a large, bloated woman, somewhat past the first flush of youth. I would hesitate to say exactly how much somewhat. But I think it safe to state that however old the oldest profession is, she must have been a charter member.
Cursing her luck, she led my friend into a room and slammed the door. I sat down on a bench, took a big drink and began fooling with the camera. I lit a cigarette and had another drink. I took a couple more. I examined the camera again.
What seemed like a very brilliant idea popped into my mind.
Creeping across the hall, I turned the doorknob silently and eased the door open an inch or two.
Slowly, I raised and posed the camera.
I don't know whether the "girl" was merely unconventional, or whether she was trying to acquire a suntan. Or whether, perhaps, having worn out her original equipment, she was now employing ersatz. It was impossible to tell whether her pose was a whim or dictated by necessity. At any rate, she was kneeling crosswise on the bed, her stern to my ol' friend, and gazing languidly downward into a crockery chamber pot.
It occurred to me that I would need a flash bulb, and I turned to go back to the bench.
Of course, I bumped and rattled the door.
The woman turned, startled. She stared at me stupidly for a moment. Then, choking with anger, she opened her mouth and let out a bellow of rage. The bellow ended in a sibilant splash as her teeth fell out and dropped into the pot.
Crawling from the bed and holding her hand over her mouth so that we might not see her indecently exposed, she made motions for my colleague to get his clothes on and get to hell out. I beat him down the stairs by a few paces.
"Jim," he said stonily as he buttoned his shirt, panting, "Jim---me an' you, we ain't friends no more."
"Aw," I said, "don't take it that way, Hank. Come back to my hotel with me and I'll get another five for you. You can go to a good place."
"Naw, sir," he declined firmly. "I wouldn't borry another nickel from you, Jim, if you was the last man alive. I thought you was a friend of mine..."
"Well, I am."
"From Texas."
"Well, I've lived here for a long time," I said.
"But you ain't a 'Texas' man." He shook his head in gloomy triumph. "You couldn't give a Texas man enough liquor to make him look in on a fella while he was with a gal. Why, Jim, you ain't---you're im---im---" He faltered, then came out with the hideous epithet.
Of all my critics, he is the only one ever to call me 'immortal!'
In the spring of 1936, I heard of a chief of police who was making a big name for himself in a small Oklahoma city. I queried a magazine about him, and was given the go-sign. I paid him a visit. He seemed to be everything that rumor said, and then some. In fact, his exploits were so many and so well handled as to comprise the stuff for a long serial. I wrote the magazine to that effect, and again I got a go-ahead.
They did not give me a flat promise to buy, of course. Irrevocable commitments are almost unheard of in the publishing world. But they did think it would make a swell serial, and they were anxious to see it. And that was good enough for me.
I moved my family to Oklahoma City (there would be much research to do in the capital's appeals court files). I did my writing there, traveling back and forth to the police chief's town for the numerous interviews we had to hold. It was a long, drawn-out job. What with my traveling and research, I was almost three months getting it done and my slender financial resources were exhausted. I was anything but worried, however. I had forty thousand words of the best damned detective story I had ever written. Counting payments for the pictures, I would receive around two thousand dollars for it, and two thousand in those days was equal to six or eight thousand now.
I was very happy as I caught the bus for the police chief's city. I knew that there would be no difficulty in getting his approval of the story, and once that formality was taken care of, my work was finished. It would take a couple weeks to get my check, but that was all right. I could hock my typewriter for enough to ride a couple weeks.
I arrived at my destination. Grinning dreamily, I mounted the steps to the police station. Two thousand dollars---'wow!' And it couldn't come at a better time. My wife and I could have a real home for the second baby we were expecting.
Well, I went into the police station, grinning like a fool. I came out staggering, so sick and faint that I almost fell down the steps. My story was worthless. No magazine in the world would have it as a gift. For throughout its forty thousand words, it held the chief as a model of public officialdom---a man unflinchingly honest, unswerving in his devotion to duty. And those things were exactly what he was not. He had lived a lie for years, and the lie had at last caught up with him.
I came to a trash receptacle, tossed the thick, carefully prepared manuscript inside. I boarded a bus for Oklahoma City.
A police chief---and he had been head of an interstate auto theft ring! A police chief---and now he was locked up in his own jail! It was a ludicrously comic situation, but somehow I couldn't laugh a bit.
Back in Oklahoma City, I broke the bad news to my wife. The next morning, after pawning my typewriter, I started looking for a job. I had to have one, at least temporarily. Freelance writing, like any other business, requires capital.
I was briskly turned down at the first newspaper I applied to, the city's leading daily. I went on to another one, and the city editor, while pretty crotchety and curt, invited me to sit down.
"Might have something opening up on rewrite," he said. "Nothing certain about it, but...how long you lived here?"
"About ten years," I said, omitting to mention that those years were mainly during my childhood. "I know the city well."
"Wouldn't be much good to us if you didn't," he grunted. "Don't want any floaters, anyway. This is a hometown paper for hometown people."
I told him that I was his man, a bona fide hometown boy. "I was away at college for a couple of years, but..."
"All right. Give me your telephone number, and I'll call you in a day or two."
He picked up a pencil. He waited, looking at me impatiently. Helplessly, I looked back at him.
I had no telephone of my own, and I couldn't remember my landlady's number as many times as I had called it. In most respects, I have a pretty good memory but telephone numbers have always eluded me.
"I---I guess I'll have to look it up," I said. "I just moved recently, and---"
"Give me your old number, then. The operator will make the switch."
"Well, I---" I cursed myself. I should have told him that I didn't have a phone, but I hadn't been able to think that fast.
"Hmmmm." He stared into my reddening face. "This place you're living now, that address. Right down on the edge of the business district isn't it? What is it, a rooming house?"
"Y-yes, sir. But---"
"You've got a wife and baby---you're a permanent resident---and you're staying in a rooming house? Where'd you live before that?"
It was useless to lie to him. Now that his suspicions were aroused, he would run a check on me in the file of city directories which every newspaper maintains, and a lie would be promptly detected.
"All right, I said. "I'll be frank with you, sir. I---"
"Thought so," he grunted, bending back over his desk. "Sorry, nothing for you. Nope, nope, that's all. Don't have a thing."
I started for the door, very dejected as you may guess.
An elderly copy-desk man followed me out into the hall.
"Too bad, son," he said. "If you're not too particular about money, I may be able to put you next to another job."
I said that I would be grateful for anything at all, for the time being. He told me where the prospective job was, and my face fell again.
"Writers' project? But that's relief work, isn't it? I'm not a relief client."
"They have a few non-relief people---men who really know writing and editing. Sort of supervisors, you know, for the non-professionals. One of the fellows who got laid off here is over there now."
"Well," I said dubiously, "I suppose it won't hurt to look into it."
"Sure it won't." He gave me an encouraging slap on the back. "They've got a big set-up over there, a hundred and twenty-five people, I understand. Maybe you can get to be boss of the whole shebang!"
I grinned weakly at the jest, and thanked him for his kindness. Reluctantly, and without any real hope of landing a job, I applied at the writers' project office.
I was hired immediately.
Eighteen months later I was appointed director---"boss of the shebang."
That was how it happened, how the whole course of my life was changed: because I couldn't remember my telephone number...
Except for a very small executive staff, which I did not become a member of for almost a year, project employees worked only two weeks a month. The wage wasn't enough for me to live on, with my increased responsibilities, and I originally intended to quit as soon as I sold a story or two. But my work was appreciated---something which means a great deal to a writer. And having some kind of steady income, however small, meant a great deal to my wife. She had become justifiably bearish on the business of freelance writing after the police chief fiasco. If a story like that could blow up, she pointed out, then there was none we could be sure of, and with two children we had to be reasonably sure of something. I thoroughly agreed with her.
I stayed on the job, writing detective stories in my off-weeks. Little by little, we acquired a degree of solvency. She and the kids returned to Nebraska the following spring for a visit. I went down to Fort Worth to cover a story. My folks were living in rather cramped quarters, so I stayed at the house of my married sister, Maxine.
I was back in the bedroom one afternoon, putting the finishing touches to the story, when Maxine announced that I had a caller.
"An awfully nice young man," she said innocently. "A Mr. Allison Ivers. He's driving a brand new convertible, and---"
"---and it's probably hot," I cut in grimly. "That guy will snitch your silverware and throw it away. Just for the hell of it!"
Allie had showed up in Fort Worth during my tour of duty as a doorman, and I knew that he was now managing a wildcat taxi and rental car service. In view of the constraint that existed between us, I was surprised that he had traced me here to my sister's house. I was also far from pleased by the visit.
I still liked him and was anxious to patch up our misunderstanding. But this, I felt, his coming here to a stranger's house, was damned presumptuous. He was taking advantage of me, as I saw it, putting me in a position where I would be compelled to be polite whether I chose to or not.
I shook hands with him coldly. He took a tall paper sack from his coat pocket and politely pressed it upon Maxine.
"A cold bottle of prepared cocktails," he explained. "Perhaps if father doesn't mind, we might all have a drink."
"My father?" Maxine looked blank, then tittered delightedly. "Did you hear that, Jimmie? He thinks you're my father!"
"He doesn't think anything of the kind," I said. "He's the biggest goddamned liar in the country, and he's got a hell of a lot of guts coming out---"
"Dearie me!" Allie rolled his eyes. "Such language to use in front of a young girl."
He and Maxine stared at me reprovingly. She brought glasses from the sideboard, and I glumly accepted a drink. Allie made primly polite conversation with Maxine.
"It's such a beautiful day," he said in his piping choirboy voice. "On a day like this, I love to be out in the country with the birds and the flowers."
He sighed and fluttered his eyelids. Maxine gave him a fond look. "You hear that, Jimmie? Why can't you ever be interested in nature and---uh---nice things like Mr. Ivers?"
"Mr. Ivers," I said, "is just about three sheets in the wind."
"Why, he is not! I guess I could tell if a person was drunk."
"You couldn't tell with Allie," I said, "not unless you knew him as well as I do. Now, if he'll just tell me why he came out here---"
"Why---" Allie seemed honestly hurt. "I just thought we might take a little ride, Jim. Thought we might be able to iron out a few things. I know you've come up a long way in the world, and I'm still in the same old rut. But---"
"Now, wait a minute," I said uncomfortably. "You know I wouldn't high-nose you, Allie. It's just that---"
"Then how about that ride? It's a company car. You can see the commercial license plates from here."
I looked out through the screen door. "All right," I said, not too graciously. "Let's get going."
We pulled away from the house and headed out West Seventh Street. Allie drove superbly---a reassuring but by no means surprising fact. Drink had never seemed to do the things to him that it does to most people. Its sole effect on Allie was to excite his fantastic sense of humor.
We reached the outer limits of the city and sped down the highway. Allie began to talk quietly. He said I had become stiff-necked, a stuffed shirt, too uncompromising in my dealings with onetime associates. The publishing swindle in Oklahoma City was a case in point. It had been an error on his part, and he would have been quick to admit it---if I had possessed the live-and-let-live attitude which I had once had. But I had lost my tolerance. Instead of kidding with him I had humbled him, made him feel cheap and of no account. And I had persisted in my high and mighty air in our subsequent meetings.
"What about you?" I said. "You got pretty rough yourself that night in Oklahoma City."
"That's different, and you know it. I can rough talk you and it doesn't mean anything. Who in the hell am I, anyway? But when you start pouring it on me, like you did there at your sister's house---"
"Aaah," I scoffed, "I was just kidding, Allie. You know that. Anyway, you started it yourself."
"I told you," said Allie, "that was different. A man with a club foot, you don't kid him because he limps."
I could see his point vaguely, but I didn't know quite what to do about it. I said so.
"You could laugh occasionally for one thing. You could crawl out of that shell you're in, and start acting like a human being."
"I laugh when there's anything to laugh about," I said, "and quite a few people think I act like a human being."
"Well, I don't," said Allie. "I---hey! Look at that!"
I turned and looked out over the prairie in the direction he had pointed. "Look at what? I don't see---"
"That airplane---over there in that patch of clouds! A guy just fell out of it!"
I cupped my hands over my eyes, stared intently at the clouds. I could see nothing resembling an airplane nor a falling body.
"What the hell are you trying to---to---" I turned back around in the seat. "Allie!" I yelled. '"Allie!"'
The blood drained from my face. I almost dropped dead from sheer fright. For the car had suddenly gathered speed, and Allie was no longer at the wheel.
He was slumped in the back seat, a lap robe thrown over his knees, his head lolling foolishly.
The car swerved suddenly and shot toward the ditch. Righting itself at the last instant, it sped toward the opposite ditch. I yelled and flung myself on the steering wheel. It wouldn't turn. It was jammed.
This last circumstance should have been the tipoff for me, but I was not thinking clearly. As the car shot down the road, swinging crazily from side to side, I could only think of one thing: the booze had at last caught up with Allie, and this hideous predicament was the result.
We were traveling far too fast for me to jump. My terrified shouts and screams elicited nothing from Allie but foolish, slit-eyed grins. I tried to apply the brakes. There was no response. I turned the ignition switch---and the car kept right on going. Faster and faster.
I don't know what other motorists must have thought as we roared in and out of the traffic: probably, I suppose, that their eyes were playing tricks on them. I was yelling at the top of my lungs, fighting frantically with the useless wheel. Allie remained slumped in the back seat, apparently unconscious that anything at all was amiss.
It seemed like hours but it was all over in a few minutes. When I could no longer muster a yell, when my terror had exhausted itself and I was resignedly awaiting my seemingly inevitable demise---then the insane ride ended. The car turned smoothly into a side road and came to a gentle stop.
I rubbed my eyes, incredulous. Every nerve standing on end, I turned around in the seat.
Allie was not, of course, drunk. He grinned at me, the lap robe kicked aside, and pointed down at his feet. I looked. I began to curse him.
"Dual controls! Allie, I'll murder you for this if it's the last damned thing---"
I stuttered and choked up with fury. Then, suddenly, reaction set in, and I began to howl with laughter. I laughed until I was breathless and my face streamed with tears.
"Allie," I gasped at last, "what did those controls cost you?"
"Oh," he shrugged, "around sixty dollars. Of course, it'll cost something more to get them taken out."
"And you did that just for this---just to break the ice between us? It was worth that much to you?"
"Well..."
"Why don't we go out on the town tonight?" I said. "Have a real beer bust, like we used to in the old days, and make a tour of the burly houses, and---"
"About your question---" Allie climbed back behind the wheel, beaming---"It was worth it."
I had less than no pull in Oklahoma political circles, and as chief editor of the state writers' project I did not endear myself at Washington headquarters. I went out of my way to be unaccommodating to politically "right people." I would not accept a foolish directive simply because it came from Washington. I got my directorship by hard work---and because (or so a Washington official informally informed me) it would have shrieked of misfeasance to appoint another.
I soon began to wish that someone else had got the appointment.
To begin with, I did not, for a long time, draw a director's salary. The former incumbent had accumulated months of annual leave, and he continued to draw his pay throughout those months. Since the budget allowed for only one director, I was stuck with my relatively meager editor's salary. It was an irksome and embarrassing situation.
It was bad enough to be doing an executive's work at a subordinate's pay. But the struggle to meet my increased expenses, the newly imposed obligations to entertain, became downright maddening. I had practically given up freelance writing to devote myself to the project. Our third child had just been born, and we were head over heels in debt. Several times, in order to finance an unavoidable dinner party, my wife and I pawned everything but the clothes we were wearing.
I got back into freelance writing fast, and finally worked my way out of the financial mess. But the holding of two full-time jobs, which was what it amounted to, was beginning to tell on me. And finances were only part of my troubles.
My predecessor had been left relatively free of political interference, and so had I for the first few months. There were hints---some pretty strong ones---that it might be well to favor this person or that group, but there was never an outright demand followed up by retaliation if one refused. The national administration felt itself too strongly entrenched. It saw little need anywhere to curry political favor, and it saw none at all in the "Solid South." Now, however, the situation changed.
A national election was not far off. There were signs that the administration might have trouble achieving a third term. So it began making up to the local boys, giving in to their hitherto evaded demands. In effect the actual control of the various projects passed from Washington to the states.
Well, I was and am a long way from puritanism, but I could not stomach the squandering of relief moneys for political purposes. Also, I could not (and cannot) be shoved very far along a course which I believe to be wrong. So I resisted the pressure, and was promptly punished.
Travel orders and expense accounts were held up. Requisitions for supplies were delayed interminably. My worker quota and the quota of available workers shifted swiftly from month to month. I couldn't get the people I needed, or I was in danger of employing workers without authorization, having to pay their wages out of my own pocket.
Interested as I was in the job, it seemed foolish and futile to stick with it. I sent in my resignation to Washington.
Washington refused to accept the resignation. It was pointed out to me---with considerable truth---that I held the threads of the various project endeavors and that they would become hopelessly snarled if I should let go. Much time and work would be lost if a new man had to take over. As for my complaints, well, I was doubtless "looking on the dark side" and had unwittingly "exaggerated the situation" but perhaps something could be done about it.
Apparently, Washington did protest to the state officials, and the latter thought it wise to ease up a little. Then gradually they reapplied the pressure, and I fired in another resignation.
This one was also refused with much the same sort of letter as the first. Again the pressure went off and on, and again I resigned.
In all, I sent in four resignations before I finally got an acceptance, but it is not yet time to relate the tragi-comic circumstances surrounding that event. Moreover, in rushing ahead, I am giving the impression that the job was an unrelieved headache. It was not at all.
The phrase "big happy family" has become so abused as to be ridiculous. But, in the main, it accurately describes my project. My people knew that I was fighting to protect their jobs. They knew that they could advance themselves with good work---and in no other way---and the knowledge gave them a dignity and pride that was far from common among relief-roll workers. Many were poorly educated, while others had had no previous work experience. I set up after-hours classes in a number of such subjects as spelling, typing, shorthand and business etiquette. And, as a result, any number of hitherto "unemployables" found jobs in private industry.
This was no more than I should have done, of course, and I don't mean to hold myself up as a model of virtue. It is only that, in relating so much that is ribald and unflattering about myself, I feel compelled to show something of my better, or at least more socially acceptable, side.
And, now, having done this...
One Saturday, I and one of my editors---I'll call him Tom---drove down to a town in southwestern Oklahoma. An Indian celebration was being held there which we intended to cover. Our travel authorization being held up as usual, we went on our own time and at our own expense.
We took in the afternoon events of the "celebration," and they proved to be pretty poor stuff. As long as we were there, however, we decided to stay through the next day. So we checked in at a hotel, had dinner and started to drive around the town.
It was much more colorful than the ceremonies had been. Reservation Indians were everywhere. Many of them appeared to have been drinking, and were having a hell of a time for themselves. But no one interfered. The Federal law, ordinarily unbending in the matter of whiskey and Indians, seemed to have been temporarily---if unofficially---suspended.
Tom and I were stopped at a street light, when two slangy female voices hailed us:
"Hey, you writer fellows---where you going?" and "How about giving us a ride?"
Startled, we looked toward the curb.
Two reservation squaws stood there, grinning at us. Blankets were draped around their beaded dresses, their hair hung in long black braids. They were about fifty years of age, I imagine. One was some six feet tall and extremely thin. Her companion was around five feet, and must have weighed a full three hundred pounds.
I pulled in at the curb. They peered through the car window, and I got a whiff of very good bourbon.
"How about that ride?" the thin one asked. "You guys got nothing else to do."
"I'm afraid we do have," I said. "We're here to write up your celebration, and---"
"Nuts!" Fatty scoffed. "We saw you out there this afternoon---just wastin' your time. That's missionary stuff. We don't do any real dancing for those yokels. You want to see the genuine article, we'll show you where to go."
Tom murmured that it might be a good idea; it was probably the only way we could see any truly authentic dances.
I hesitated, glancing at the large, suspiciously bulging handbag which each of the squaws was carrying.
"What about the whiskey? You're not supposed to have it, are you?"
"What do you care?" said Skinny on a note of belligerence. "I figure we're old enough to drink if we want to."
"Well, of course you are but---"
"So, what's the argument?" said Fatty comfortably. "You didn't sell it to us or give it to us, so there's no need to worry. Just open the door and let's get going."
The car springs groaned as she climbed into the back seat. Skinny joined her and, rather uneasily, I drove on.
We were quite a while in reaching our destination, an isolated section of the river bottoms. The ladies liked their drinks mixed---their bags contained several bottles of pop---and it was necessary to stop for the mixing. Naturally, we took a drink out of courtesy. Naturally---after that first one---we took a great many more. When we finally rolled up at the dance site, we were all four the warmest of friends and in a state of high hilarity.
About twenty-five or thirty Indians, male and female, were gathered there. The women were dressed as our friends were; the men wore breechclouts and paint. Tom and I waited in the car while our erstwhile companions conferred with their tribesmen. They beckoned to us after a moment; we had passed muster. We got out, shook hands all around and were presented with tin cups of a potent beverage which one of the squaws dipped from a large iron pot.
I can't recall the name of the stuff now. But it was made, I learned later, from a base of corn and saliva. The squaws chewed corn to a pulp and spit it into the pot. When they had a sufficient quantity of this mash, they filled the pot with water, added sugar and allowed it to ferment. That was all there was to it, except for an occasional skimming. In a few weeks the stuff had a kick like an army mule.
Things began to get a little fuzzy after our first few drinks. But somehow or another we were divested of our clothes and equipped with breechclouts, and someone---or several someones---decorated us from head to foot with bright clay paint. Tom and I preened and strutted. The braves shouted their approval. Then the fire was built up and the squaws formed in two opposite lines, creating an aisle to the flames. The men arranged themselves single-file at the head of this lane. Tom and I fell in at the end of the line.
There was a wild war whoop; the squaws began a rhythmic stamping and clapping and the dance was on.
Whooping, weaving and bobbing, the Indian at the head of our line danced down the aisle and made a whirling leap over the flames. He started back around to the end of the line, and the next man did his dance and leap. Then, the next, and the next, until everyone had performed but Tom and me. We decided to do a duet.
I wish someone could have gotten a picture of us, for we must have been one of the prize comedy bits of all time. Every time we revolved in the dance one of us socked or kicked the other, and when the crucial moment of our leap arrived we were off-balance and groggy. We leaped, anyway, whirling and whooping.
Tom's flailing feet booted me in the back. I clutched at them instinctively. Thus entangled we soared up and above the fire. We hung poised over it for a moment; then, our forward momentum lost, we dropped smack down into the middle of the flames.
Our friends had been prepared, I suspect, for some such fiasco; otherwise, there would have been a couple of barbecued writers. As it was, however, we were snatched out and rolled in the dust before we could even be singed. And we suffered nothing more than a slight and temporary tingling in our painted hides.
An intermission was declared for refreshments and to allow us to recover. The dance resumed then, and Tom and I resumed our places in the line. But you may be sure that we did no more double acts.
A sudden downpour of rain put an end to the festivities. I had gotten a little too close to the fire on some of my leaps, with a consequent mild toasting of my feet. But the furious exercise had been an antidote for the drink, and except for my smarting soles I was about as near normal as I ever am. Still, Tom insisted that I was in no condition to drive. He would take over, he said, with Skinny to give him directions. The fat squaw and I should sit in the back.
I let him have his way. We started off. In the blinding rain, Skinny became confused; and an hour later we were still wandering around the narrow trails of the back country.
The better to see, Tom rolled down the window and leaned out. He yelled and swung the wheel. He was too late. In the instant that his eyes were off the road, the car had slid onto the rain-caved shoulder.
It lurched, wobbled, and toppled. Then it was lying on its top in the bottom of the ditch, and three hundred pounds of squaw were lying on top of me.
Neither of us was injured, but she had passed out from the booze and all her avoirdupois was so much dead weight. I couldn't move. I could hardly breathe. Tom and Skinny climbed out and tried to pull her off of me, but they could get no leverage, due to the position of the car, and with that much to heft they needed a chain hoist. They tickled her feet, pinched her---did everything they could to revive her. She remained inert, snoring peacefully, and I remained pinned down.
I told them for God's sake to get into town; doubtless they could find their way on foot. "Send out a tow car! And 'hurry!' I can't take much of this!"
They set off for town. The hours passed and they didn't come back, and there was no sign of a wrecking car. I squirmed and struggled to free myself. All it got me was exhaustion. Finally, breathless and numb and worn out, I gave up the futile struggle.
It was around dawn when I heard the creak of harness and wagon wheels. I shouted and there was an answering hail. The sounds quickened and came nearer. They ceased, and a grizzled face appeared at the car window.
It was a farmer, on his way to town with a wagonload of corn. He stared in at me and the squaw, eyes widening incredulously. Then, guffawing and slapping his knees, helpless with merriment, he collapsed against the embankment.
I could see nothing at all funny about the situation. But my profane remarks to that effect seemed only to make him laugh the harder. Finally, upon my angry statement that he was laughing at a dying man, he got himself under a modicum of control.
He unhitched his mules and hitched them onto my car. It came easily upright, and back onto the road.
The farmer refused payment for his help. Gasping, tears of amusement streaming down his face, he claimed that he was actually in my debt.
"Ain't---'haw, haw, haw!---'ain't laughed like that since I don't know when. How in the heck did you get in such a dagnabbed fix?"
"Never mind," I said grimly. "Just never mind."
I drove off. The last I saw him he was hugging the neck of one of the mules---haw-hawing hilariously while the animal hee-hawed.
A few hundred yards down the road I encountered the tow truck, Tom and Skinny riding with the driver. They had been confused about the location of my car and had toured the countryside all night attempting to find it.
We got Fatty revived. The driver agreed to take her and the other squaw to wherever they wanted to go. He also made us a present of a gallon can of gasoline, which, he mysteriously insisted, we were "cert'n'y gonna need."
He was right. Tom and I sneaked in the side door of the hotel, and reached our room unobserved. And we remained there, with the shades drawn, for the next twelve hours. We had to. It took us that long to remove the warpaint, and we didn't quite get it all off then. There were certain areas of our anatomy which were just too tender for the brush and gasoline treatment.
Fortunately, their location was such as to make public exposure unnecessary.
In the fall of 1938, I received a visit from two old-timers in the Oklahoma labor movement. They were pioneers in the state, and men of some substance. They bore warm letters of introduction from several members of the Oklahoma congressional delegation. They wanted the writers' project to do a history of labor in the state.
Well, I liked these gentlemen very much, and I was personally sympathetic to their plan. But it was inadvisable on a great many counts. I explained this to my callers and they left---quite friendly, but intimating that the matter would be carried over my head. I immediately sent a long letter to Washington.
I wrote that we would undoubtedly be politically pressured to do the book, but that we should and must withstand it. Labor was sensitive about its mistakes. It would consider unfriendly a book that was merely accurate and complete. Then, there were the various inter-union quarrels---long-standing jurisdictional disputes, for example. We could hardly ignore them in the proposed history, but the skimpiest mention was certain to offend some organization. Before the book was finished, we would have pleased no one and angered everyone.
I did not believe (I wrote) that labor was yet sure enough of itself to accept an honest, factual history. And even if this were not the case, there was an excellent reason for steering clear of the job. Federal expenditures were intended to benefit all the public. The one contemplated would not. If we did a history of labor we would lay ourselves open to demands from other segments of the population. We could be asked for a history of the state chamber of commerce, or some other such group, and we would have no legitimate grounds for refusing.
I got no reply to my letter; no acknowledgment of it. Washington simply wrote me, a couple of weeks later, to proceed with the labor history.
I did so.
All the problems that I had foreseen, and then some, arose. I could never get the different labor leaders together without the danger of a knock-down, drag-out brawl. Any unfavorable mention of a union was invariably "a goddamned lie" and "that guy sittin' over there" (the leader of an opposition union) should be compelled to admit it. As for me, I was charged with everything from stupidity to personal prejudice to taking pay from the National Association of Manufacturers.
I was fortunate in having the confidence of Pat Murphy and Jim Hughes, respectively the state commissioner and assistant commissioner of labor. Their help in oiling the troubled waters was invaluable. Oddly enough, however, I received the most assistance from a man who had profanely declined to appear at publication committee meetings and who had threatened to kick me out of his office if I ever walked into it.
I called on him. He didn't give me the promised booting, but I did get an ear-blistering cursing out. He had "heard all about" the way his union had been slandered; an acquaintance of his on the committee had tipped him off. Well, if I let one word of it get into print, all hell was going to pop in Congress. And if I thought he couldn't make it pop, I was a bigger damned fool than I looked.
I asked him why he thought I would want to injure his union. He grumbled that he didn't know, but he knew damned well that I had. Laying the manuscript before him, I asked him to look at a portion dealing with another union.
The section was not flattering to the organization involved, and as he read he began to nod approvingly. I had those bastards dead to rights, he said. Someone had at last told the truth about them, and about time, too. I pointed out some other sections to him---likewise unflattering and dealing with other unions. He read through them beaming.
"Could have made it a little stronger, though," he said. "I could tell you things about those sons-of-bitches that would make your hair curl."
"I imagine we'll have to tone it down a lot," I said. "They've been kicking about it."
"Naturally, they're kickin'," he declared. "The truth always hurts."
He nodded to me, piously. Then, after a moment, a slow flush spread over his face, and he cleared his throat uncomfortably.
"Of course," he said, "we shouldn't be too hard on people. Now, I got just about the biggest union in the state, and there's bound to've been a few times when---we---uh---got out of line a little, but---"
I looked at him, torn between the desire to laugh and blow my top. Suddenly, I stood up and reached for the manuscript.
"Let's have it," I said. "I thought I could talk sense to a man as big as you are, but you're even worse than the others."
"Now, wait a minute. All I said was---"
"At least they don't insist on a brag-book. That's what you want. You're good at dishing it out, and when it comes to taking a little you start crying. Everyone's picking on you and you're going to raise hell in Congress, and---"
"Sit down," he said firmly. "Maybe I had you all wrong and maybe you've got me a little wrong. Let's start all over again."
I sat down, and we went through the manuscript together. He was by no means pleased with some of the references to his union, but he felt impelled to prove his fairness---to show me and the other labor organizations how a 'big' man operated. And with his example to point to, I was able to swing the others into line.
I don't mean to say that we, the writers' project, got everything into the manuscript that should have been in it. But this was as much due to the lack of publishing funds as it was to the attitude of the unionists. We published as comprehensive a book as we could for the money we had.
I should mention here that the government furnished no funds for publishing, 'per se;' only for the actual preparation of the manuscript. So, at the beginning, I had set up an apparatus among the unions for soliciting and handling money. It did not function; there were too many conflicts among its members. Too much distrust. In the end, or rather, long before the end, I became the treasurer-solicitor.
By late summer of 1939, we had the funds to publish a modest volume and the manuscript was finished. Washington approved it, I sent it to the printer. A few days later, with the type already set, I was called into state headquarters of the various work projects. They flatly ordered me to kill the book.
Flabbergasted, I wanted to know why. If there was any part of the book which they had justifiable objection to I would gladly cut it out. So much had been cut already that a little more wouldn't be missed. I was told that they "had not had time" to read the manuscript (they had had a copy for days), and the matter was not pertinent. The book simply should not be published 'period.'
I said it would be published 'period.'
I returned to my office...and found a long-distance call from Washington awaiting me. They had just talked with the state officials. They agreed with the latter that the book should be killed.
I was so furious that I could hardly talk. "You shoved this thing down my throat," I said. "I didn't want to touch it and I told you why---and you ordered me to go ahead anyway. Well, now we've spent a fortune in government funds on research and writing. Now we've collected publishing funds from the unions and contracted with a printer and got the book set in type. And now, without any explanation, you tell me to forget the whole thing. I'm not going to do it. I couldn't do it if I wanted to, and I don't want to."
I slammed up the phone. Calling my secretary, I wrote my fourth and very final resignation.
I knew what lay behind the ultimatum handed me---a very shabby kind of politics. A national election was impending. The administration had decided to take a sharp turn to the right, to do nothing that might even remotely offend the conservatives. It was not necessary to do anything for labor or to show any particular regard for it. Labor could be kicked in the teeth, and it would still tag along with the administration. It had no place else to go. The conservatives, on the other hand, must be appeased. No chances could be taken with their vote.
Washington responded to my "insubordination" by sending an official out to see me. We met at his hotel room. A rather prim, old-maidish guy, he was much more conciliatory than I had expected. Washington did not want me to resign, he said. They were sure, and so was he, that some kind of compromise could be worked out to the satisfaction of all parties.
I said that nothing would make me happier, and that, meanwhile, I would delay my resignation.
To abridge events considerably, we got quite companionable as the afternoon waned. He brought out a bottle, and with the first few drinks his prim manner disappeared. I was a swell guy, he declared---a pleasant relief from the stuffed shirts who usually surrounded him. We had been talking business for hours, so now how about a little fun? What could we do tonight by way of relaxation?
Well, in a city without night clubs or a legitimate theater, there was not a very wide choice of entertainments. Anyway, he was not interested in more of "the same old things." We kicked the subject around, continuing to drink, and finally we went out to an amusement park.
We went on a number of rides, he getting gayer and gayer. We arrived eventually at the penny arcade, and here the bag-punching device caught his eye.
"Challenge you," he said. "Go ahead and hit it, and then I will. Bet I can sock it harder than you can."
I dropped a coin in the slot, pulled the bag down on its chain and hit it. He glanced at the dial which registered the impact, and waved me to stand aside.
He wound up, more in the manner of a ballplayer than a boxer. Grunting for me to "just watch this one," he swung. The bag crashed against the dial. It came hurtling back. And since he had not removed himself from its path, it smashed squarely into his face.
That ended the evening's entertainment. In an icy, accusing silence, I drove him back to his hotel. He was going to have a couple of very unlovely black eyes. I, who had seen him at a gross disadvantage, was to receive a figurative shiner. At least, I had a strong hunch that he would slam me as soon as he got back to Washington.
All my life, it seemed, things had been turning out this way. I would work myself into exhaustion, maintain the most correct of attitudes. Then, flukish Fate would take a hand and something preposterous and wholly unrelated would edge into the picture. And all my work and rightness would be as naught.
My hunch was correct.
The gentleman returned to Washington.
Washington "regretfully" decided to accept my resignation.
I refused to quit. My project funds were cut off. I remained at work unpaid, as did my executive staff, until the labor history was through the printers.
With a little string pulling, my staffers were relocated in other jobs. I then did some very earnest pulling on my own behalf.
A few weeks later, through the instrumentality of the University of North Carolina Press, I received a year's research grant-in-aid from the Rockefeller Foundation.
A few nights ago, during one of the rare periods of quiet around our domicile, my wife and I fell to reminiscing about the "good old days" when we and our children were young.
"I don't know how we stood it," said Alberta, with a mixture of fondness and horror. "Of all the nutty, headstrong kids anyone ever had! I guess they must have got it from you, Jimmie."
"Oh, undoubtedly," I said. "It's unthinkable that 'you' might---"
"Well, naturally," Alberta shrugged. "Naturally, no woman in her right mind would have married you in the first place. Or if she did, she'd soon go crazy. And speaking of marriage, Mr. Thompson..."
"Yes?"
"You still owe me the twenty you borrowed for us to get married on."
"To get back to the subject," I said, "those children were really a handful, weren't they? Of course, they still go their own merry way, but compared to how they used to be---when Patricia was about six and Sharon three and Mike two..."
...those kids---our kids---Pat, Mike and Sharon. They took one long look at us as they entered the world, decided that we were no more than well-meaning imbeciles, and thenceforth paid us no heed whatsoever. As far as authority was concerned, one would have thought that they were the adults and we the children. They would have nothing to do with high chairs, sleeping cribs, toidy pots or the other impedimenta of infancy.
Each insisted on his own double bed. Each insisted on using the regular toilet, nor were they at all chagrined when, as frequently happened, they fell into it. High-chairs, milk, baby food---such was not for them. Before they could walk, they were sitting at the table; they demanded to so sit, backing up the demand with hunger strikes. Elevated by stacks of books, they wielded their long razor-sharp carving knives---each had his own pet blade. And while Alberta and I looked on in helpless horror, a whole ham or a nine-pound roast would disappear as though by magic.
They smoked my cigarettes. They appropriated my beer. They took full charge of our household, three firmly autonomous powers, and everything therein or around that household.
Pat, our eldest, and seemingly the least loony of the lot, gave us relatively little trouble. 'Relatively,' mind you. Pat seemed to have been born with a college professor's vocabulary, also a penchant for dramatics, and she used the first attribute to satisfy the second. Left alone with a telephone for five minutes, Pat became "Mrs. Thompson" or "Mrs. Thompson's social secretary." She would call store after store, ordering stuff that she wanted as theatrical props. And she was so damnably glib about it that she frequently obtained credit where Alberta and I ourselves had been turned down flat.
Mike, our youngest, was what I have always regarded as the most horrid of humans, the direct bane of humanity---a practical joker. Visitors to our house invariably found diapers stuffed into their hats, purses and the like. Diapers which looked much more unwholesome than they actually were. Like Pat, Mike had an artistic bent. Mixing dinner leftovers with mustard and mayonnaise, he achieved messes so hideously realistic as to deceive even his mother and me.
Sharon, our middle child, and the second oldest...Sharon. I could write a book about her---a dozen books. But being limited spacewise, perhaps I had better concentrate on her principal and most troublesome peculiarity.
Sharon collected, and ran a school for, wild animals.
Pushing a perambulator which we had bought during Patricia's infancy, and which she and our other kids had flatly declined to ride in, Sharon patrolled the alleys and byways, taking into custody the biggest, the ugliest cats and mongrels she could find. She loaded them into the buggy, dogs and cats together. And there was such a peculiar charm about her, such a fey-ish quality, that they never fought nor protested.
"You be dood," she would say, hoisting a bulldog in one arm and a tomcat in the other. "Be fwiends." Then, into the buggy they would go, and while they did not become friends, their behavior was impeccable.
When she had a full cargo, she wheeled them home and into the bathroom. She washed them there, bandaging any wounds they might have, then escorted them into the kitchen. Stuffed with several dollars' worth of groceries, they were next taken into the living room---her "school." And here, having seated them in a row, Sharon lectured them on personal hygiene, the importance of being "fwiends" and similar assorted subjects.
I don't know what the qualifications were for "graduation," but some classes met them very quickly, were dismissed within an hour or so, while others were held far into the night. In any event, no post-graduate work was required; and each day's student body was composed of a new group of animals.
Well, to get on with my story: with three kids like ours, a home of our own began to seem imperative. So, a few months before I left the writers' project, we moved into one. I didn't buy it outright, of course. As with the furniture---eight rooms of brand-new stuff---I made a substantial down payment and mortgaged my earnings into eternity for the balance. But with all my dread of debt, I felt that the move had been a wise one.
The house was a rambling, roomy tapestry-brick cottage, with an enormous back yard, a garage and servants' quarters. The price was incredibly cheap. It was so low, in fact, that I had been a little alarmed, feeling that there must be something seriously amiss. But I knew quite a bit about building, and even a very superficial investigation of the premises told me that this was first-rate construction. So, as I say, we bought it and moved in.
It was a happy time, that first afternoon in our own home. The kids were pleased with it, impressed with the new furniture. Pat promised to lay off the charge accounts. Mike agreed to forgo the diaper-and-mustard trick. Sharon...
"That child," Alberta sighed wearily. "One minute you see her, and the next one she's gone."
"Well," I said, "at least we know where she's gone. She took the perambulator with her."
"Well, go out and find her, for goodness sake! We've got a nice place now, and I want to keep it that way. Tell her---ask her---please not to...Now what are you grinning about, Mike?"
"Mike's grin widened. "Sha'n," he said. "Sha'n unner house."
'"What?"'
"Uh-huh. Unner house wif tats an' dogs."
It was true, we discovered by stamping on the floor. We went out into the yard, and Sharon presently emerged through the foundation air vent, covered with cobwebs and dirt and followed by her coterie of animals.
"Buds unner house," she explained placidly. "Otsa bad buds. Twied to dit wid of 'em."
Alberta said that of course there were bugs under the house, there were bugs under any house. "What I want you to get rid of," she said, "is those animals. And for heaven's sake get yourself cleaned up."
Sharon dismissed her class without protest; apparently their practical experience in "bud hunting" had earned them a diploma. We were about to reenter the house when Pat yiped suddenly, slapped a four-inch centipede from her neck, and took a hearty swing at Mike.
"Doggone little brat! I'll teach you to put spiders on me!"
"Did not." Mike kicked her on the shin, his face puckered indignantly. "Don't wike buds."
"Tol' you," said Sharon. "Buds unner house. Inna house. All over everywhere."
"Well, they probably are now," said Alberta grimly. "You dragged them all out with you. Now, get cleaned up and stay out of trouble for a few minutes!"
We dragged Mike and Pat into the house and locked them in separate rooms. With Sharon occupied in the bathroom. Alberta and I began preparing dinner.
All was peace for a time, while Alberta pounded the steak and I peeled potatoes. Then, abruptly, she too let out a yipe, and dropped the frying pan she was holding to the floor.
"Jimmie! L-look at that!"
I looked. And my skin crawled. For a small army of centipedes was oozing up from the stove, dropping down from its sides and slithering over the floor.
I got rid of them, stomped on every one in sight. But Alberta remained shuddery and nervous. Probably, she admitted, a thing like this was to be expected in a house long unoccupied; but couldn't we have a cold dinner tonight?
I said we could, naturally, and drove to a nearby delicatessen. When I returned some thirty minutes later, she and the kids were all out in the front yard. And all were squirming and scratching uneasily.
"Jimmie," said Alberta desperately, "we just can't stay in there! The place is literally crawling. The beds and the chairs and the tables and---and they're even in the refrigerator! The more we move around the worse they seem to get."
"Oh, now," I said, "surely they can't be that bad. We'll all get busy killing them, and---"
"Well, they 'are' that bad, and the centipedes are only part of it. That house is just absolutely alive with bedbugs, millions of 'em! You can't even sit down in a chair without getting all bitten up."
Well, I investigated personally, and found that she had not exaggerated the situation. Every stick of our brand-new furniture was infested. Just looking at it closely, at the swarms of ugly brown bugs, made me itch from scalp to toes. I could think of only one explanation, that they must have been in the furnishings when we bought them.
Since it was not yet six o'clock, I called the manager of the furniture store and told him what had happened. Or, I should say, what I believed had happened. He sputtered indignantly.
Vermin in the great B---furniture store? Incredible! Outrageous! "I think it much more likely, Mr. Thompson, that---"
"You made the delivery from your warehouse," I said. "Probably they were in there. Some of the secondhand furniture you handle was infested, and they got from it onto mine."
"B-but---" he hesitated uncertainly, "but all our secondhand items are thoroughly fumigated before storing! It's one of our strictest rules. I'm sure that none of our workmen would ever be so remiss as to---"
"Let's face it," I said. "I've had this furniture barely three hours, and it's damned near jumping with bugs. It couldn't have got that way out here, so they must have been in it all along. It's the only plausible explanation."
"Well---" he coughed uncomfortably---"if we are at fault, and it seems we must be..."
"Get the stuff out of here," I said. "Get it out tonight, and replace it with new. And for God's sake look it over good before you deliver it."
"Yes, yes," he said hastily. "But---uh---tonight, Mr. Thompson. I'm not sure that we can---"
"You'd better," I told him. "You won't get another penny out of me unless you do, and I'll sue you besides."
He surrendered, mumbling apologetically. Within less than two hours the buggy furniture had been removed and replacements installed. The family and I examined them carefully. Satisfied that they were bug-less, we ate our long-delayed dinner and retired.
I can't say which of us hollered first, who was the first to leap scratching and clawing from his bed. The insect attack seemed to have been launched on all of us simultaneously, and we reacted en masse.
Cautiously, our hides smarting with welts, we reexamined the furniture. Only Sharon seemed unsurprised at the result.
"Tol' you," she said placidly. "Buds unner house, inna house. Wiv wight inna bwicks an' wood."
Alberta and I looked at her, looked worriedly at each other. "Jimmie, do you suppose---I mean, could it be that way?"
"I don't know," I said. "But I'll sure as hell find out."
I called the real estate dealer who had sold me the place. He was completely blunt and unapologetic.
"I sold you that house as is, Mr. Thompson, remember? If you don't remember, you'll find the fact stated clearly in your sales agreement."
"Then you knew it was like this?" I said. "You deliberately and knowingly---"
"As is, Thompson. There were no guarantees. It's your house...as long as you make your payments. The bugs are your problem, not mine."
He slammed up the telephone. I tried to call him back and got no answer. Cursing, I called an insect exterminator who advertised night service.
It would cost several hundred dollars, I supposed, to get a house this size renovated. But if I didn't spend it---and, offhand, I didn't know where in the hell I could get it---I would lose everything I had invested.
The owner of the exterminating company answered my call. He promised to send some men out right away, and then he broke off abruptly and asked me to repeat the address.
I repeated it.
"Oh, oh," he said, softly. "Mister, you are stuck."
"How do you mean?" I said. "How do you know when you haven't even---"
"I've been out there. Been there twice in the last year, and the job looked worse the second time than it did the first. For one thing, that house is built right on top of a centipede city---a big colony---and God only knows how far and how deep it extends. And them bedbugs, now; when they get dug in like they are, you've practically got to take a place apart to get 'em...I'm not saying that the job can't be done, understand. It could be, but---"
"Yes?"
"It would cost you more than the place is worth."
I hung up.
Pretty drearily, we shook out our blankets and bedded down in the backyard.
For a week after that, until I could scrape up the money for an apartment, we camped out there, cooking over an open fire and sleeping on the ground.
With so much space available, Sharon enlarged her animal classes and Pat staged theatrical spectacles and Mike's practical joking expanded to ultra-hideous proportions. In a word, the kids loved every minute of it, and we were only able to get them to move with threats of flagellation and promises of expensive treats.
As for Alberta and me, with a small fortune in savings and borrowings gone down the drain, the less said about our feelings the better.
Pop, Mom and Freddie settled in Oklahoma City about a year after my return. Freddie got a cashier's job and Mom found part-time work as a saleswoman. Pop also got a job, but he held it briefly. It was menial and monotonous. He could not, willing as he was, give it the necessary attention. He became increasingly absentminded, retreating into the memories of better days, and his employers fired him.
Poor as the job had been, its loss was a severe blow to Pop's morale. He felt useless and cast aside, and his distress saddened and worried me as nothing else could. As boy and youth, it had been impressed upon me that I fell far short of Pop's standards. He was always kindly, but I was obviously not the son he had hoped for. Well, that was past, and I could do nothing about it. But I felt now that I had to do something to lift him out of his despondency. Help given now, when no one else could give it, would do much to offset my failings of the past.
Pop had always been a rabid and knowledgeable baseball fan. And, at this time, baseball betting books ran wide open in Oklahoma City. The gambling was unorganized---the syndicate boys who tried to move in got the fast heave-ho. But a "local" who wanted to set up a small book was unmolested, nor was he required to pay off to the authorities.
I asked Pop if he would be interested in such an enterprise. He was not only interested but enthusiastic. I talked the proposition over with an acquaintance of mine, a man who ran a pool hall-beer parlor, and found him glad to oblige. He wouldn't take any cut from the book, he said. He had plenty of space for the setting up of a blackboard and Western Union ticker, and the betting would bring him trade.
So the installations were made, and, with a hundred dollars in cash, Pop began business. Like all books around the town, he took the long end of the bets: six to five, say, regardless of the team bet on. And the wagers were limited to a five-dollar top. Operating in this way, he was certain to win---he could not possibly make any serious inroads into his hundred. It was more as a formality than because I had to leave town for a week, that I asked the proprietor of the establishment to take care of him if he needed anything.
The week passed. Pop called on me my first morning back in the office. The betting had gone fine, he said absently. He had managed the bets as he should and wound up each day a modestly comfortable winner...
But he was broke.
"But you couldn't be!" I said. "Even if you'd lost every day you couldn't be. Did you"---I looked at him sharply---"did you give it away? Have some of your old friends been around to see you?"
Pop immediately took umbrage at my tone. Certainly he'd given nothing away, he said; his friends were not beggars. Perhaps he had seen fit to extend a few "small loans," but---
I was pretty bitter about it. Pop's generosity with his "friends" was largely responsible for reducing him from millionaire to pauper, and for years during my childhood it had forced us---his family---to make our home with relatives.
"All right," I said at last. "It took every penny I had to set you up, but I'll refinance my car and bankroll you again. But this time, Pop..."
"I know," he said, a little testily. "You don't need to say anything more on the subject."
"I'm going to make sure of it," I said. "If any of those bums come around you again, there's going to be trouble."
I arranged for the loan by telephone. Then, leaving Pop stiff-necked and hurt, I went to see my beer parlor friend.
I was pretty sure of the identity of the men who had "borrowed" from Pop. Relatively young and able-bodied, they simply sponged because they preferred not to work; they were the kind who would beg with a bankroll in their pockets. I described the pair and the proprietor of the place nodded grimly.
"They've been around, all right. Showed up the first day your dad operated, and they've been here every day since. Two of the worst chiselers I ever seen. Why, I'd never seen the characters before, but they even tried to put the bite on me!"
"I'll tell you what," I said. "I'm going to sit in your back room for a while this afternoon. If they show up today, they'll get worked over with a pool cue."
"Well, now---" He scratched his head uneasily. "Don't think I could let you do that, Jim. Run a nice clean store here, never no trouble or anything, and I want to keep it that way. Anyhow---"
"All right. I'll catch 'em outside, then."
"---anyhow," he continued, "it wouldn't do much good. I dropped some pretty strong hints to your dad, and it didn't stop him. Just got huffy with me. I reckon he's been a pretty big man at one time, huh? Well, he can't get over the idea that he ain't one now---and maybe it's just as well that he can't. Prob'ly couldn't live with himself any other way."
"But look," I said, "I can't let him---"
"Better forget about this book or anything else where he's got to handle money. Know it cost you a nice little wad for that ticker and everything, but---oh, yeah, speaking of money..."
He punched the keys of his cash register, took several small slips of paper from the drawer. They were I.O.U's---Pop's. The total just about equaled the pending loan on my car.
"Didn't think I ought to do it, Jim," he said apologetically, "but you said to take care of him, y'know, an' I done it."
I paid him, of course. And subsequently, unable to meet the loan, I lost my car. Needless to say, Pop's book did not reopen.
There was nothing much wrong with Pop physically, according to the doctors. But no man who feels useless and can see nothing to look forward to can long remain in good health. Pop's condition worsened rapidly. He came to require a great deal of looking after. When I, with my grant-in-aid about to expire, decided to go to California, he was in no condition to make the long trip.
This posed quite a problem, for Freddie's job was about to play out and she and Mom also wanted to make the move to California. Finally, since no other solution offered, Pop entered a small sanitarium.
We hoped that he would be able to come out on his own in a month or so. If that proved impossible, we meant to have him brought out with a nurse in attendance, just as quickly as we could get the necessary money.
For the time being, we had no such sum and no way of getting it. The car I drove was borrowed from a friend; he himself had borrowed it from his brother while on a visit to California. As payment for its use on the trip, I was to return it to that brother, a San Francisco car dealer.
Well, we arrived in San Diego where I intended to headquarter. After getting the folks settled there, I headed on toward San Francisco. It was only about five hundred miles distant---an easy day's drive, I supposed. But to one unfamiliar with the fantastic California traffic, five hundred miles can be a very long way. It was noon before I reached Los Angeles. Hours later, not long before sunset, I was just edging out of the city.
Being very short on money and still shorter on time, I had picked up a snack to take with me at a highway-side delicatessen. It consisted of cheese, crackers, a dill pickle and a bottle of port wine. I opened these purchases, now that I was through the city traffic, and ate and drank as I drove.
Not since I was a child at my grandfather's house had I drunk any wine. And this, by comparison, seemed wonderfully mellow and mild. I gulped it down, feeling the tenseness flow out of me as it flowed into me. I came to another wayside store and purchased another bottle. It sold for twenty-five cents a quart, cheaper than almost any drink but water. Since it was drawn from a keg into an unlabeled bottle (you can't buy it that way any more), I could only judge its potency by taste. And my taste said it was innocuous.
The error had almost fatal consequences.
Without realizing it, I drifted into a rosy haze. I came out of it just in time to keep from going off the highway. I stopped the car immediately, and rubbed my eyes. They didn't want to focus, it seemed, while my head showed a stubborn tendency to nod. I drove on slowly, intending to fill up on black coffee at the first lunch stand I came to.
Mile after mile passed. No lunch stand appeared. Night came on and it was all I could do to keep my eyes open, then suddenly, a few hundred yards ahead of me, the headlights picked out the figure of a man.
He was signaling for a ride. Possibly, I thought, he was the answer to my predicament. I slowed the car to a crawl, looking him over.
Young---seventeen or eighteen, perhaps. Pretty hardbitten and rugged looking...but what of it? I had looked a hell of a lot worse many times.
I came even with him and stopped. "How far you going?" I called blearily.
"San Francisco." He hesitated with his hand on the door. "I mean, almost to San Francisco. A little place this side of---"
"Can you drive? Well, pile in, then," I said; and he piled in.
He was a fast driver but a good one. After watching him a few minutes, I uncorked the wine and leaned back.
"Sure glad you stopped for me, mister," he said. "It was beginning to look like I was going to have to stand there all night."
"Glad to have you along," I told him. "But how come you're out on the highway this late?"
"CCC camp." His face tightened with bitterness. "You know, relief work. Thirty bucks a month to your family, and they treat you like you were a convict. They kicked me out tonight."
"That's too bad. How did it happen?"
"Well, I had this knife, see, and this other kid claimed it was his. And me and him got to fighting, so they kicked 'me' out."
I murmured sympathetically. He went on talking.
He didn't know what his folks were going to think of him. Probably that he was just no good, and probably they would be right. He'd quit high school to work two years ago and since then he'd had three jobs---not counting the CCC---and they'd all blown up on him. The guy he was working for would go out of business or he'd get jumped about something he hadn't done, or---well, something would happen. It looked like there just wasn't any use in a fellow trying to do the right thing. The harder he tried the harder he got it in the neck.
"You've just hit a run of hard luck," I said. "Just stay in there pitching, and you'll come out of it."
"Yeah," he muttered. "It's pretty easy for you to talk. A swell car an'---" He caught himself. "Sorry, mister. Feeling pretty sorry for myself, I guess."
He lapsed into silence for a time. I grinned, boozily, in the darkness.
'Easy for me to talk.' Me with "my" swell car and my one good suit of clothes and little more than enough money for a wildcat bus ticket back to San Diego! My plight was many times worse than this youngster's. I had driven myself too hard, too long; I had become soul-sick with the drivel!---the unadorned commercial writing---which I had poured into the popular magazines. And now I could do no more, even if my life depended on it.
Yet if I did not do that...?
It was quite a question. What does a man of thirty-five do who has lost his one negotiable talent? What does he do, this man, with his history of alcoholism, nervous exhaustion, tuberculosis and almost uninterrupted frustration? What about his wife and three children? What about his father, whom he has promised to---
Abruptly, I cut off this chain of thought. Pop had cried when we left him.
But---I took a long drink of the wine---this was certainly a good joke on my hitchhiker. I should be envying him, instead of the other way around.
"...kind of work you do, mister?"
"What?" I said. "Oh, I'm a writer."
"Must be pretty good money in that."
"Well, I've made quite a bit," I said.
"How do you---uh---how do you do it, anyway? Just drive around the country looking at things until you get an idea, and---"
I laughed, choking on the drink I was taking. He gave me a sour look.
"I don't get it, by gosh," he said. "Me, I don't drink or smoke or, well, anything like that. Never even could afford to take a girl to a show. And all these other people, they go zipping around in big cars havin' a heck of a time for themselves an'---. It just ain't right, mister. You know it ain't!"
"Things will get better for you," I said. "They can get just so bad and then they have to get better."
"Yeah? What if they don't?"
"Then you'll probably be dead anyway, and it won't matter."
I was drowsy, more than a little weary of the conversation. Unconsciously, and quite unfairly---for no two people are alike---I was comparing his situation with the one I had been in at his age. And I felt that he was rather too ready to despair.
He was silent for fifteen or twenty miles. Finally, he said, hesitating: "You---uh---you like to take a shortcut, mister? Up through the mountains?"
"Suits me," I shrugged.
Silence again. Then: "I r-reckon you're pretty tired, ain't you, mister? You want to go to sleep, I'll wake you up when we get there."
"Well, thanks," I said. "I think I'll do that."
I took the last drink in the bottle, and tossed it out the window. I leaned back and was instantly asleep.
At what seemed to be only a moment later, but which was actually several hours, I suddenly woke up.
The car was stopped, motor off, lights extinguished. I rubbed my eyes, tried to penetrate the darkness.
"What the hell?" I grunted. "Why are you stopped here?"
His head was slightly turned away from me; one hand was in his pocket. "I---I t-tell you, mister," he stammered tensely. "G-gonna tell you somethin'. I---I---"
"Well, go ahead, dammit," I said, my head still fuzzy with the wine. "Spit it out!"
"I g-gotta---" His voice broke in a sigh. "I g-got to go to the toilet."
I laughed, not very pleasantly. "That's an idea but let's not make a production out of it. Come on! What's the matter with you, anyway?"
He levered the catch on the door.
I climbed out the door on my side.
And fortunately I held onto it. For at my second step my foot came down into empty space.
I gasped, and flung myself backward. Too frightened to speak or cry out, I peered around me in the pale, near-lightless light of the quarter moon.
We were in the mountains---high among them. And I was standing on the brink of a precipice, on a triangular strip of road bounded on one side by the cliff and on the other by the car.
It was a bad spot to get in: there was no getting past those cut-in front wheels.
It was a very bad spot: there was no getting out the other way, at the base of the triangle.
For the kid was standing there, silently, one arm shakily outthrust, and the dim moonlight sparkled wickedly on the long blade of his knife.
He took a nervous step toward me, knife circling in his hand. I squeezed backward an inch or two.
Then, I could retreat no further, nor could he advance further without actually attacking. So we stood there poised, staring at one another. Breathing heavily. Waiting.
I was terrified, sick and paralyzed with terror. I thought, 'Well, you asked for it. You've been asking for it all your life and you finally got it.' I thought: 'What a hell of a way to die; tossed down a mountainside with your throat cut.'
Then...
Well, it was a strange thing but suddenly all my horror and sickness were for this boy. I could think only of the monstrous joke of which he was about to be victim.
A few dollars, an inexpensive wristwatch, a car that would get him pinched before he had it a day. That was what he was going to get---nothing. Nothing but the gas chamber or a life sentence in prison. And in a way it was all my fault.
I could have set him right about my financial situation. I could have shown some real interest in him, made an effort to give him some constructive advice. Instead I had chosen to spout platitudes, to egg him on with seeming callousness. To drink and sleep.
Now it was too late to tell him the truth; he would never believe me. It was too late to plead. He had begun the preliminaries of a holdup murder. Much as he might want to---and I was sure he did want to---he would be afraid to back out now.
If only there was some way of letting him know, of making him think that...
I swayed unconsciously. The action seemed to tap something in my mind, to set in motion the horror-frozen cells. And I swayed again, exaggeratedly, and spoke:
"Thass the knife you were tellin' me about? Le's see the damn thing."
I put out my hand, slowly. I held it there, the tips of my fingers almost touching the tip of the blade.
"Well, come on," I said. "You wanted to show it to me, didn't you? Can't see it with you hangin' onto it."
"M-mister, I---" His hand jerked convulsively, and the blade described an arc. Then, still holding the haft, he let it come down in my palm.
"Nice knife," I said. "But y'know something? Some people see you carryin' that an' they might think you were goin' to hold 'em up."
I gave a gentle tug on the blade. I said, "Le's throw it away, huh?"
He let go.
I threw it away, flipped it over the precipice.
...We reached his hometown around midnight, and his folks, simple, good-hearted people, insisted that I stay over until morning. They were delighted, incidentally, that he had been dismissed from the camp. His father had landed a job that very day and there was one waiting for him, the boy, at the same place.
The kid and I slept in the same big old-fashioned bed that night. And, yes, I slept soundly. Why not? He was no criminal. Opportunity and necessity had conspired to make him one, but it was doubtful that he would ever again be gripped in such a sinister conjunction. Or, if he was, he had this recent experience to remember and to strengthen him.
The next morning I drove the car into San Francisco and turned it over to the dealer-owner. My arrival interrupted a telephone call he was making.
"Wired me you were coming in yesterday," he explained. "Figured you might have been hijacked, so I was putting out an alarm with the highway patrol."
"I'm glad you didn't have to," I said.
The War Boom, or, rather, the boom incident to the impending war, was just getting under way in San Diego. There was still a great deal of unemployment. Prices, following the oldest of economic laws, were racing far ahead of wages.
The seven of us---Mom, Freddie and my family---had to squeeze into a three-and-a-half room apartment. Freddie's job, as a switchboard operator, just about paid the rent on it. I was faced, then, with meeting our other living expenses, and I responded to the emergency quite ignobly.
I had been proud of my research grant, one of the two awarded yearly in the United States. It was an unusual honor for a man without a college degree, and the field I had been assigned---the building trades---was an important one. The immediate financial return was not large, but that did not matter. A book was to be published from my findings; there would be substantial royalties. Not only that, but it was entirely possible that I might receive academic recognition---an honorary degree. Maybe even a doctorate. I, Jim Thompson, the stupidest guy in high school, the college misfit and bumbler---that Jim Thompson would no longer be, nor his painful memories and gnawing, growing self-doubts. And into his place would step a redoubtable 'Doctor' Thompson.
Having always detested affectation, I would never have used the title. But I needed it for what it represented---to disprove the almost unbearable implications of a long list of failures. If, I told myself, I could just this once achieve a real distinction---an honor unmarred by fluke or my own shortcomings---if I could just this once do a job that allowed me to keep my pride, meanwhile rewarding me handsomely...
Well, I got the bad news a few days after we settled in San Diego. The war boom, with its immense leavening of the nation's economy, had made or would make my material obsolescent. The six-room, five-thousand-dollar house permanently vanished. So also did the dollar-an-hour building craftsman. It was "extremely regrettable" and I was not to consider it a reflection on my research or writing...but the book could not be published.
I started looking for a job.
I could find nothing---no position that paid even reasonably well or that carried any semblance of responsibility. I felt dispirited, licked, and looked it. Appetiteless and unable to sleep, I had begun to drink great quantities of cheap wine. The stuff told on my appearance. It also, so thoroughly had I become impregnated, smelted.
I began applying for menial jobs '("Just anything at all, mister.").' I found one just in time to keep us from starving.
One of the San Diego aircraft factories had begun an extensive expansion program. The building was being carried on simultaneously with the making of planes; and they needed a man to go around on his hands and knees, chipping up the spatterings of plaster and paint.
I leaped at this "opportunity," to use the personnel manager's term. If I made good (his phrasing again) I would be promoted to a full-fledged janitor. For the present, I would draw twenty-five dollars a week.
Well, poke fun at it though I do, the job was good for me. It kept me from drinking for at least eight hours a day. Through it, my interest in life was rearoused.
Roaming the plant from one end to the other, I got a broad and original conception of the workings of a great factory. The snatches of conversation I overhead, the things I saw, began to intrigue me. I tried to resist, but the constant challenge to the imagination was too strong to be ignored. I had to---as we used to say down south---"get in the big middle" of things.
One day I got up from the floor, wiped my hands against my pants and accosted the general manager. "I understand you're having a lot of trouble with your parts records," I said. "I'd like to have the job of straightening them out."
He gave me a quick glance. Grinning out of the corner of his mouth, he started to turn away.
"Give me a chance," I pleaded. "I've held some pretty important jobs in my time. What---"
"Have, huh?" He gave me another look. "You wouldn't be an expert accountant would you? Or a CPA?"
"Well, no, but---"
"You're an engineer, then."
"No, I'm---"
"But, of course, you read blueprints?"
"Well..."
"Better get back to your work," he said.
As soon as dinner was over that night, I hastened down to the public library. I drew out every book I could find on accounting and blueprint reading and took them home. I was still reading the next morning when my wife set toast and coffee before me.
Red eyed, and with a top-heavy feeling in my head, I accosted the general manager again.
"I can do any accounting job you've got around here, now," I said. "And I can sight-read blueprints. I sat up all night studying."
Before he could turn away or order me back to my work, I reeled off the titles of the books I'd read. Some of them apparently struck a familiar chord, for he gave me an appraising look.
"All right. What do you think our trouble is?"
"Everything," I said. "Whoever installed your record system didn't know what they were doing."
"That's pretty hard to believe. It was installed by a very good firm of industrial engineers."
"Well, however good they were," I said, "they didn't know much about people. The system's good enough in theory, but it doesn't work out in practice. It overlooks the human element; it would take a corps of high-paid experts to keep it going. Now what you need is something simple, foolproof, and I can..."
While he fidgeted, wavering between interest and irritation, I went on talking. In the end, doubtless as the only way he saw of shutting me up, he gave me my chance. I was put in the parts-control department for a week at my regular salary. During that week, I was to study the system and recommend changes which I felt would rectify the trouble.
I did better than that. In less than a week, I invented and installed a new system. And I gave such a convincing demonstration of its advantages that the former involved and expensive system was permanently discarded.
In the seven-odd months I remained at the factory, I was steadily promoted to better jobs and I received five pay increases. I quit at the end of that time.
I had progressed to a point where I was in competition with the professionals of aircraft building, men who had made and were making it their life's work. I couldn't hope to compete with them; I had no strong desire to. After all, I had my own profession, and I had spent almost twenty years in it. I would have to capitalize on that experience, and quickly, or remain the rest of my life in a modestly padded rut.
I had managed to labor out two short detective stories. With the slender proceeds from these, my wife and children returned to Nebraska for a visit, and I caught a bus for New York. I was confident that I could turn up some kind of writing or publishing job there. Also, by being able to talk directly with editors and publishers, I would improve my chances for doing some really worthwhile freelancing.
I took a bargain-rate bus, and the fare included meals. You can probably guess what those meals were like. I became violently ill after the first one, nauseated and racked with dysentery. And if there is any worse complaint to have on a cross-country bus---with, of course, no toilet and infrequent rest stops---I cannot think what it is. I began buying my meals but the poison was already in me, and it continued to manifest itself, painfully and embarrassingly.
The bus driver became annoyed, then infuriated. Due to my getting off "at every damned bush and signboard," he was hours behind in his schedule. The next time I made him stop, he declared, he would go off and leave me and I could by God walk to New York.
"But I can't help it," I said. "I'm sick."
"Well, yet yourself some medicine, then! Get a jug of whiskey an' sip on it---that oughta help. Do 'somethin',' for God's sake!"
I bought a bottle of anti-colic compound. Its only effect was to put me to sleep...with almost disastrous results. So I tried sipping whiskey, and that did help. The griping stopped and stayed stopped---as long as I drank.
We arrived in Oklahoma City the third day out, and I laid over there a day to see Pop. He could not believe it was I when I first walked in on him. The seven long, lonely months must have seemed like years to him, and I think he had begun to feel that we had abandoned him.
I made him understand the truth: that his remaining here was due to circumstances beyond our control. He began to brighten up.
"Well, it's all over now," he said. "You just help me get my things together, and I'll clear out of here right now."
"Pop," I said. "I---"
"Well?" He looked at me. "You're going to take me away, aren't you? Th-that's why you've come back?"
I hesitated. Then, I said, yes, that was why. "But I can't go with you. Pop, I'm on my way to New York."
"Oh?" He frowned troubledly. "Well, I guess I could travel by myself if---"
"I've got a swell job there," I lied. "Give me a---well, just give me a month and I can send you to California by stateroom. Get you a nurse if you need one. But the best I can do now is a bus ticket."
"I don't know," he said dubiously. "I'm afraid the doctor...I'm afraid I couldn't..." He sat back down on the bed. "You're sure, Jimmie? If I wait another month, you'll---?"
"That's a promise. And I never break a promise."
"No," he nodded, and his face cleared, "you never do...That'll be fine, then. I won't mind so much now that I know I'm really leaving."
He was very weak, but organically, considering his age, his condition was at least fair. As to the acute mental depression he had sunk into, the doctor felt that this would be greatly relieved once he was back with his family.
I stayed over in Oklahoma City that night. The next morning, leaving Pop happily laying his plans for his trip, I caught another bargain-rate bus for New York.
I had not counted on having to buy my meals on the trip, nor, of course, the purchase of some twenty dollars' worth of whiskey. And I arrived in the big town with one lone quarter in my pocket. It was November of 1941, a cold, bitter night. I was still violently ill, and the cold seemed to congeal my California-thinned blood.
I stood on a street corner for a time, shivering, frightened by the crowds, wondering what to do. It was like a bad dream, like one of those nightmares where one is plunged into a strange world---where running is both imperative and impossible. I had to have rest. I had to have some whiskey. I had to, in a month's time---in less than a month, now...My family had not been in Nebraska for several years, and they wanted to make a long visit. So there was no big hurry where they were concerned. But Pop---there could be no delay there. I could not fail him.
Meanwhile, first things first.
My baggage, a briefcase and Gladstone, was worn but substantial looking. I had no trouble in checking in at a first-class hotel and charging a quart of whiskey to my room. I gave my quarter to the bellboy. Slugging down a few drinks, I tried to map out a plan of action.
It would be impossible to hold a job until this bowel ailment was cleared up. At any rate, a job would not get me the money I had to have as quickly as I had to have it. I thought and thought, turning a thousand wild schemes over in my mind. And the one I finally settled on was probably the wildest of them all.
I would write and sell a novel.
This solution to my dilemma seemed even more preposterous the next morning. But I gave myself a pep talk---and several stiff drinks---and sallied forth into the city. After all, I was a writer, wasn't I? And publishers needed books, didn't they? And it was no crime to be broke, was it? So what was the difference if the proposition I had to make was just a trifle unusual?
It made quite a bit of difference, it seemed. I never got past the receptionists at the first few publishers I called on. At the fifth---or maybe it was the sixth---an editor heard me out sympathetically, and suggested that I wire whatever friends or relatives I had for a ticket back to California. He lent me two dollars for this purpose. I spent it for breakfast, cigarettes and a few more drinks. Then, I tackled another publisher.
This was a small but reputable firm which had published many first novels. I was promptly admitted to an editor's office. He listened to me incredulously, burst into laughter and took me in to see the publisher. That gentleman also listened, a frown of wonder creasing his forehead.
"Let's see," he said at last. "You want us to bail you out of your hotel, then---"
"It's just a small bill."
"Then you want us to lend you a typewriter and stake you while you're writing a novel, a book which you yourself don't have very clearly in mind."
I said I had it clear enough. "I talk a very bad story. And you only need to stake me for two weeks. When I turn in the novel, you can deduct anything you've given me from your usual advance."
'"When' you turn it in, and 'if' it's publishable."
"You'll have it," I said, "within two weeks. And it will be publishable."
He hesitated, moved against his better judgment. "I'm sure your intentions are good, but I don't think you will. I don't see how you can. But perhaps..."
I walked out of that office with a battered typewriter in one hand and a check in the other. I checked out of my hotel, rented a three-dollar-a-week room on Seventh Avenue and started to work. Working an average of twenty hours a day, I finished the book in ten days.
It got a mixed reception at the publishing company. Some of the editors were very enthusiastic about it; others were just as unenthusiastic. So, as is often done, the manuscript was farmed out to another writer for reading and opinion.
This young man was the scion of a wealthy Hollywood family, and the author of one novel. He reported that I showed promise "for a beginning writer" but that I obviously did not know enough about life to attempt a novel. I needed to "meet the stark realities of existence at first hand"---not merely to read about them in books, as (he added) I patently had.
Sick and nearly hysterical with worry as I was, I burst into laughter when I read that report. The publisher gave me a friendly wink. He was no more impressed with the young man's opinion than I was. He would, he said, pass the manuscript on to a couple of other writers.
"Louis Bromfield and Richard Wright. I'm sure they'll like it. And now, as long as we're holding you up on the thing..."
He advanced me another twenty-five dollars. Since I had been practically living on whiskey, and whiskey was very cheap in those days, I still had part of the original advance left. If I had to, I could live two weeks with no additional money.
"Do you think---" I hesitated as I shook hands with the publisher. "Do you think you'll have your reports in within the next two weeks?"
"Well, we'll certainly try to. If we can't, and you should need a few more dollars, we can---"
"It isn't that," I said. "It's something that would be pretty hard to explain, and I won't try to. I've burdened you enough with my personal problems. But---"
"Sure." He clapped me on the back. "I'll let you know just as soon as I can."
The calendar blurred and swayed in front of my eyes. I braced my hands against the dresser, leaned forward squinting.
"Let's see," I mumbled aloud. "T-two days from Oklahoma, plus ten days, plus four f'r that Hollywood bastard, plus---plus---What the hell day is it?"
I couldn't figure it out. My eyes wouldn't focus. My mind was satiated with worry over the inevitable.
It was probably as well that I didn't know the truth, or, knowing, did not accept it. Sodden drunk for days, I was near enough dead already.
"G-got to eat," I thought, again mumbling the thought aloud. "Got to..."
I stumbled around the room, looking for my clothes. I discovered that I was dressed, and laughing crazily I flopped back down on the bed.
There was a knock on the door. I shrugged, and dug a bottle out from under the pillow...Lot of knocking lately. Lot of funny-looking things. Take a drink, and they went away.
The door opened and two men came in. My landlady stood behind them, wringing her hands.
"I just didn't know what to do, gentlemen. I tried to call a doctor, but---"
"Sure. The doctors don't like to fool with us drunks...What do you say, Bill? You thinking the same thing I am?"
"I'm afraid so. And I think we'd better get him there fast."
They took me by the arms, hoisted me to my feet. Suddenly panicked, I tried to jerk away.
They held onto me firmly.
"It's all right, fellow. We're from Alcoholics Anonymous. We're going to take care of you."
"H-how? Where you takin' me?"
"Don't you worry at all. We're on your side. Been through this thing ourselves."
We went down to the street and got into a car. Then on to Bellevue Hospital where I was committed.
Many scare stories have been circulated about Bellevue Alcoholic Ward. Perhaps I am not the most competent critic, but I saw nothing to justify them. The food was good, the beds comfortable and immaculate. Surrounded by some pretty trying customers, the attendants remained accommodating, the doctors and nurses courteous and capable.
In a word, I was very well treated. So much so that by the afternoon of the fifth day I was able to be discharged.
I started across town toward my rooming house, worrying again---continuing to worry. It was a day short of five weeks, since I had left Oklahoma. Not much over a month, to be sure, but to an old man, a lonely old man who secretly feared that he might be forsaken...
I reached Fifth Avenue. Instead of crossing, I suddenly turned and headed uptown. Surely the publisher would be able to make his decision by this time. By God, he simply 'had' to.
Well, he had.
He walked me into his office, his arm around my shoulders. "Got some good reports from Louis and Dick. They're going to fix us up with blurbs to put on the cover...Now, I do feel that quite a few revisions are necessary. There are a couple of chapters I'd like to see excised, and new ones substituted. But---"
"Oh," I said, pretty drearily. "Then it'll still be quite a while before---"
"What? Oh, no, we'll pay for it right now. We're definitely accepting it. Incidentally, when you get this one out of the way, we'll be glad to---Yes?"
The receptionist was standing in the doorway. She murmured an apology, held out a yellow Western Union envelope. "This came in yesterday, Mr. Thompson. I tried to reach you by phone, but---"
"It must be from my mother," I said. "I wasn't sure how long I'd be at that rooming house, so I told her to---to---"
I ripped the envelope open.
I stared down at the message.
Blindly. Stricken motionless.
"Bad news?" The publisher's hushed voice.
"My father," I said. "He died two days ago."
THE END
Table of Contents

