by Jada M Davis
One for Hell
by Jada M. Davis
To my Mac–
And to Jeffry Brett,
Now three years old,
Whose determined aid
Made it possible
To complete this story
In only twice the time.
ONE FOR HELL
Published by Stark House Press
4720 Herron Road
Eureka, CA 95503, USA
ONE FOR HELL
Originally published by Gold Medal Books as a Red Seal Book
and copyright @ 1952 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.
Copyright renewed @ 1980 by Jada M. Davis
Reprinted by permission of the Jada M. Davis Estate
Introduction copyright @ 2010 by Mark Davis
All rights reserved
ISBN: 1-933586-45-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-933586-45-8
Cover design by Mark Shepard, SHEPGRAPHICS.COM
Proofreading by Rick Ollerman
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recorded or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
First Stark House Press Edition: October 2010
Table Of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Tweny-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Introduction
Jada M. Davis
By Mark Davis
There are parts of West Texas where the land is so flat you can sometimes be stricken with the dizzying sense that you are about to fall upwards into the blue, featureless sky. Against such a horizon, individual human beings seem larger than life. Like actors projected against an enormous drive-in movie screen, ordinary people take on the dimensions of giants.
A bullying police chief who liked to frame others for his crimes. A couple of dime-store plutocrats who were in on the next sweet deal brewing at city hall. The cynic who imagined he was clever enough to get his part of the action and yet stay above them all.
This was the landscape that my father, Jada Davis, knew as the editor of several daily newspapers in the 1950s. A journalist’s immediacy and unrefined raw observation characterizes this novel of the outlandish oil boom days of West Texas.
As a journalist and as a novelist, Jada was an instinctive muckraker. His wife, Mary Alice, wrote the society columns and helped out with the grueling work of running hot-lead presses. It was around this time that Jada turned out One for Hell.
He had no lack of raw material for his writing. As a journalist, Jada had exposed corrupt land deals, as well as the local police practice of blaming unsolved crimes on any convenient black youth. More than once my mother, Mary Alice, came running from the courthouse to say one young man or another had appeared in court beaten half to death. More than once, my father had been taken for a ride–literally–by a local police official in menacing silence for daring to complain about such violations of constitutional notices.
It was dangerous, hard work—and it was great while it lasted.
Jada Davis was born in 1919 on a West Texas farm to a sharecropping family, one of eleven children. After running through the gauntlet of the usual boy names—Jack, Tom, Bob—my grandparents named their tenth child after a popular ragtime song, the one with the refrain, “Ja-Da, Ja-Da/Ja-Da, Ja-Da, jing, jing, jing.”
The family of Jada Davis had deep roots in the American past. Jada’s grandfather, who had served in Hood’s Brigade as a teen-ager, often sat his grandson on his knees to recount horrifying stories from the Civil War. Jada’s father, Elijah, by then well into his forties, was old enough to remember his pioneer parents grabbing him by the suspenders and throwing him under the bed while they fought off a Comanche raid. Jada’s mother Sally was a dark, beautiful woman whose Cherokee ancestors had avoided persecution by marrying whites.
While Jada’s father Elijah made a little money trading knives, horses and mules, Jada himself was hired out with the other Davis children to pick cotton. At age ten, Jada labored in the fields under the blistering Texas sun, his hands raw and bleeding. While suffering in the heat, Jada Davis fantasized that someday he would awe and humble his neighbors by driving around his little West Texas town in a big, expensive car.
The Davis family had at one point become so hungry that out of desperation, Elijah shot a possum. Sally dutifully cooked it up with sweet potatoes. The pot of possum meat sat stewing the middle of the table, the hungry family glumly staring at the bowl. No one could bear to eat it, so they all went to bed hungry that night. Jada later observed that he was so poor that the Great Depression brought no observable differences in his family circumstances.
When he could escape farm chores, Davis was a voracious reader of novels, histories and poetry. He found that he could make extra money by writing short pieces for magazines and newspapers. He briefly attended a small college before signing up for the U.S. Army in the 1930s. In the ill-equipped Army of that time, Davis trained in a cavalry unit in horseback deployments across the deserts of the Southwest. Later, when my brother and I were growing up, my father enchanted us with his stories of the horse cavalry. He would tell us how his sergeant would station all the men with their horses before troughs and cry out, “Don’t feed till I say feed... FEEEEED!” (In my childhood, this became our family dinner cry.) My father also told us how an old cavalry horse, Mayberry, once saved his life by bracing herself in front of him to protect him in the middle of a 500-horse stampede.
At the beginning of World War Two, Jada was stricken with tuberculosis. So while his comrades went on to fight in steaming jungles (with typical Army logic, men trained on horseback for desert warfare were sent to the Philippines), Jada spent the duration of the war in a sanitarium reading classics. When he recovered at war’s end, he felt a need to perform a heroic service for his country. Jada volunteered for medical experiments being performed on servicemen at that time. He allowed his chest to be bombarded with atomic radiation.
After marrying a long-legged gal named Mary Alice, Jada went on to earn a degree from the University of Texas at Austin. It was in Odessa and other West Texas towns, however, that he had the adventure of his life as a newspaper editor and paperback novelist.
After some success with One for Hell, Jada’s agent and editors urged him to move to New York, where his raw, self-taught writing-style would be sharpened in the company of the best. Television was already thinning out the ranks of dime-store novelists. To make it as a writer, Jada Davis would have to undergo the painful process of constant criticism, revision and learning. This would be a
whole new start for him, with study at the City College or Columbia, and then a job in publishing, television or a magazine.
Jada Davis turned down the offer. Partly, he turned them down out of sheer stage fright. Like many charming and charismatic people, his easy-going exterior hid a raging inferiority complex—Jada Davis feared being ridiculed before such sophisticated company as a hick, a half-Indian kid from the fields with no real middle name (the “M” in Jada M. Davis was his creation). I believe another concern was also at work. New York would not just be an adventure. It would be a whole new life for his wife and sons. He saw disruption for his family. I believe he saw more financial struggle ahead, perhaps divorce. A new life that would come with costs.
With a family and a mortgage, Jada opted instead to accept an offer to join the telephone company, where he worked as a PR executive until his retirement. He had taken the easy path, opting to keep the life and family that he had.
In time, Jada’s work for Southwestern Bell/AT&T made him a virtual creature of New York. He had the best of both worlds, his home and family back in Texas, and his separate life in Manhattan, with his executive circle, his steakhouse and martini haunts. He had a big job with a big expense account. He became a legendary and much loved figure in AT&T. He outfoxed some of the nation’s most rapacious trial lawyers on the witness stand, and befriended powerful politicians. But like so many of us, he never lived up to the high standards of his youth.
He never fulfilled the promise of One for Hell to become the writer he had always wanted to be.
In time, Jada Davis would live out one ambition. After his retirement, Jada and Mac moved back to their small, West Texas town. He drove around that town in a big, silver Cadillac that far exceeded his youthful cotton field dreams.
He would drive around town, shake his head and laugh. It was nothing like he imagined it would be.
Jada Davis died in 1996, a victim of the radiation experiments compounded by his addiction to smoking. As his life wound down, Jada puttered around his little town in his Cadillac, mostly content. But his happiness was always edged with a slight trace of disappointment. He had not gotten everything that he had wanted. But he had got everything that he had chosen.
We can now be grateful that one of his choices was to write One for Hell, a tale that is both a period piece of a Texas long vanished, and an indelible portrait of human cupidity.
McLean, VA
September 2009
Chapter One
Ree heard the whistle and cursed the engineer.
The far away whoo-ooo-ooo, whoo-ooo-ooo, whoo-ooooooing was a going-away echo, faraway faint and going away fast.
Half asleep, he sat up and groped for the bundle he’d been using for a pillow, found it and curled up on the hard boxcar floor. His back ached, head ached, throat scratched, and his stomach was emptier than empty, sick empty and heavy. Soon he’d have to find food, but sooner he’d have to find water. Food he needed. Water he had to have.
Again the whistle skimmed the night, and he wondered why the hell the engineer would hoot his whistle out in the middle of nowhere leading to nothing.
Maybe at cows.
Or maybe at some bypassed whistle stop of a town sitting like an ugly boil on the bare face of the desert.
The train had stopped not long ago and someone had boarded the car. He had heard the door slide open and had heard the pantings and gruntings of a man climbing aboard. Then he hadn’t wondered why the train had stopped, but now he remembered that the road maps had not shown a town on the tracks.
A water stop, maybe.
“Shut the door,” he’d growled. And the newcomer had obeyed.
The man had made no noise, and Ree guessed he had dropped to the floor to sleep. Anyway, there was plenty of room.
It was stuffy in the car, and he couldn’t sleep. The clickity-clicking of the wheels, before unnoticed, now drummed in his ears. The car swayed, gently rocking his body, and no position was comfortable.
A slithering sound.
The man?
It had to be the man. The sap had waited a long time to make up his mind. Too long. And, suddenly, Ree remembered the dime in his pocket and shook with silent laughter.
He separated the clickity-clicking of the wheels and the tortured rumblings of the car from the slithering, until the slithering was a loud thing to hear. He tensed, not laughing now, and waited while the man slid his body across the car floor, nearer and nearer....
A hand touched his hip lightly, so lightly, and was withdrawn.
Ree didn’t move.
He could hear the man breathing and marveled that the breathing was so loud. Before he had heard only the slithering of the man’s body across the floor, but now the breathing sounded like the rasping of a file on soft wood.
Inside himself somewhere, deep inside, he talked to himself and cursed the darkness of the car. He strained his eyes, willing himself to see, but only flashes of light danced before his eyes and he knew the light was in his head, behind his eyes.
The hand touched his leg, again so lightly, and crept toward his hips.
Ree caught the hand in his left hand, grasped hard with fingernails biting deeply, twisted back hard and harder still, and reached out with his right hand to grasp the wrist.
The man groaned.
Ree twisted the hand back, pulling at the wrist, and the man screamed.
And then the man wrenched away, his feet flailing the darkness and grazing Ree’s chest.
Ree dived forward, exulting and his widespread arms caught the man’s legs.
They fought silently, gouging and butting and biting, unseeing and uncaring.
And then the man was gone. Ree could hear his breathing across the car, in the darkness, but when he advanced the breathing circled away.
“Come on and fight,” Ree said.
“Why?”
“Well, why not?”
“Don’t see no point to it. I ain’t got nothing against you.”
“You wanted my money.”
“Well, that’s cause enough for you to be mad but it ain’t no reason for me to be mad.”
Ree laughed.
“Maybe you’ve got a point there,” he said. “Open the door and let’s get a little light on the subject.”
“You won’t try to throw me out?”
“Not if you don’t start anything. Anyway, you might be twice as big as I am.”
“I doubt it. I felt you.”
The door slid open, and the lighter dark of the outside made the car only half dark on the inside. The man was big. He stood in the doorway, silhouetted, his arms long and dangling and his shoulders broad and hunched. Ree couldn’t see his face, but his head seemed too big for his body.
“You wouldn’t have made much of a haul off me, mister,” Ree said. “I’ve got one thin dime between me and starvation.”
The man laughed. “I’ve got a quarter.”
Ree stepped to the doorway, leaning against the edge. Cool air rushed at him, plucked at him, and moved around and away in front of some evil-smelling something. He sniffed.
Gas.
Moments later he saw the flares, hundreds of them, like the lights of a far-off city, and knew this flatland was oil country.
Where there’s oil, there’s money. And people to spend it. So this was it. Red light. Bottom of page. End of journey. No need to make decisions or weigh pros or cons or consider this and that. There was a dime in his pocket and a rumbling emptiness in his belly. Here he’d make money. And this time it would be different from last time and the time before and the time before that and the time beyond that time.
No more slipups, no more mistakes, he promised himself.
He looked at the far-off flares and marveled at the flatness of the shadowed landscape. It had taken a long time to get this far, but there must be a town somewhere lying ahead. Where there’s oil there are towns, near railroads, for oil wells need pipe and bits for drilling and machinery and men and towns.
It will be different this time, he thought.
After all, he was no stranger to oil or oil country or oil towns. Especially oil towns.
He’d been orphaned in an oil town.
There’d been an oil town once, long ago, and a home in a tar-paper shack. He remembered the mud, seas of mud, and the hogs that wallowed in the mud of the streets. There’d been huge wagons loaded with pipe, lumbering and monstrous things. The drivers were fearsome men, bearded and dirty and huge. They’d used long whips which popped and crackled and their oaths had been their chief weapons against mud and hogs and rock-throwing boys.
He’d been alone in that town, later. At first there had been a man and a woman, but his memory of them was more a feeling than a memory. They’d been there and then they hadn’t been there, and he’d been alone in the town of mud and hogs and wagons and men and women who had no time for boys alone in their town.
Memories were sharp after that, for they were memories of cold and hunger, loneliness and emptiness and fear. He’d been ill once, broken-out and red-spotted ill, and that memory was a dim memory of fever and thirst in an abandoned shack.
There’d been big cities then. Cold cities and hot cities, dirty cities and clean. Papers to be sold, groceries to be sacked, things to filch and things to steal and things to beg for and whine for.
And then it had been easier. Still empty and still lonely, but easier. Plenty to eat and warm places to sleep and good clothes to wear, because there’d been more things to steal and fewer things to whine for or beg for or ask for.
“My name’s Murdock,” the big man said.
“What?” Ree had forgotten the man.
“My name,” the man said. “It’s Murdock.”
“Oh.”
“What’s your name?” The man’s voice was sharp.
“Ree. Willa Ree.”
“Glad to know you, Willie.”
“Not Willie. Willa. W-i-l-l-a.”