Some Came Running

by James Jones

  “Yes, sir,” Edith said, without looking up. She was a good girl. That was a good enough story to tell Agnes, too, he thought with surprise. Sometimes his own versatility amazed him. Only he’d better make it Chicago to Agnes instead of Indianapolis, in case she might try to get hold of him for something. But he’d better make it Hammond, then, instead of Chicago, that was still in Indiana. He could say he was staying in Chicago, and driving over.

  “I’ll leave the store in yours and Al’s care,” he said. He felt he could trust this girl with just about anything. He thought for a moment of making a humorous remark about finding himself a little girlfriend for while he was away. But then he thought better of it. She might think it suggestive. “And if that no good half-assed brother of mine comes around looking for me, you have Al tell him I’ll be back in a few days. And you stay away from him.”

  “Okay, Boss,” Edith grinned. He was such a roly-poly little guy with that round head like a ball, and that pudgy face, and those eyes that were usually so mild but that became so flat whenever he was being a businessman. You wanted to laugh and cry over him at the same time—him with all his transparent little subterfuges he thought he was getting away with. He was comical yes, but he was also heartrendingly tragic. What he really needed was a wife who would really love him—and that was just exactly what he would probably never get.

  “And don’t laugh. I mean it,” Frank said; “if you want to keep on workin for me. Somebody’s got to look after you.” Well, he had solved the problem of what to tell Agnes, but there was still the contract and he still didn’t know what to do about it.

  There was, actually, a choice of two or three things he could do. The whole thing centered around Judge Deacon. The minute the judge heard about the taxi service, he was going to want in on it. It wasn’t much of a thing but that wouldn’t stop the judge. He would want to put in a piece of change and sit back and draw down part of the profits without doing any of the work, and he was going to feel he had a right to do it because of all the things he’d put Frank onto in the last five years. On the other hand, if the judge had got the idea first, he would have gone and started it up himself, and not have let anybody in on it.

  Besides, Frank didn’t want him in on it. He had been the judge’s satellite just about long enough. And anyway that would mean splitting ownership three ways, which meant that no one party would have control, and any two could gang up on the other one. And he didn’t trust Dave that much. And yet he didn’t want to antagonize the judge. Not yet.

  That was the crux of the thing. And the trouble was, the judge was his lawyer. Had been for years.

  The more he thought about it the best choice—best? the only—seemed to be to take it right to the judge to draw, and then some way or other talk him out of wanting to invest in it. But how? He cast around. Why couldn’t he say that Dave absolutely refused to go into it if anybody else at all was allowed in? After all, he was only doing this to get Dave’s money out of the Second National where it was embarrassing them, wasn’t he? Heh-heh.

  Frank brought the chair back up level and got his cigarettes. The desk clock said eleven-twenty, which meant that he would have to wait till after lunch now. The judge always left his office at eleven and went to Ciro’s where he drank five or six bottles of beer before he ate his lunch—dinner was more the word—at Annie’s Restaurant next door. Why in the name of God the judge with his money wanted to hang out at dumps like Ciro’s and Annie’s, Frank could never understand, but he knew it was because that bunch of girls from the brassiere factory hung out there. The judge was sinking pretty low, he thought smugly. But then he had always been a sort of low-type character. If it hadn’t been for his wife’s father in the state senate—?

  Well, he would have time to go down to the Elks and maybe get in a game of fourteen ball or two, have a drink or two for his aching head, eat lunch and catch him back at the office at one o’clock.

  “I won’t be back,” he said to Edith, in parting. “If anybody wants me for anything, tell them I’ve already left. Except my wife. Just tell her I plan to leave. But then I’ll probably be home by then. And you remember what I told you.”

  Outside, the snow was melting off fast under a bright winter sun, as he walked to the Elks. It gave him a deep satisfaction to know he walked this same path every day like this, and that he would continue to do so days without number.

  There was almost no trouble with the judge. The old man—he was old, Frank thought, by God, looking at him in his office, he’d never noticed it till now—sat behind his desk in the long expanse of the room whose other end was legal library, looking with all his drooping fat Frank suddenly thought rather like one of those less than half-filled hydrogen balloons that they send up into the stratosphere. It was a tall high-ceilinged room, with ornate moldings, and behind the desk the two very tall windows framing the judge who sat like an out of condition and very possessive frog perched emphatically on a toadstool. The far end with its table and chairs in the center was literally lined, from floor to ceiling, with those bookcases with the push-up glass doors, all filled with legal volumes which looked as though they had never been opened but just left to age, but which Frank was sure wasn’t true, not with the legal stunts the Judge had pulled in the past thirty years, no, sir! The whole of it looked like it had been dusted hastily once a day for twenty years by the twenty-year-old secretary, and that was all the cleaning it had had. The year-by-year increasingly stringy secretary had ushered him in from her cubicle outside and gone out and quietly closed the door.

  The judge behind his desk did not have just a double chin, he had four of them, all of which ran in curved parallel lines around the outside of his head and faded off together somewhere in the vicinity of his ears as if they were beards. From behind the armor of this fat, he peered forth out of his shrewd little eyes like a man looking out the porthole of a battleship. All his life he had doggedly bucked the vested interests—the Wernzes, the Crowders, the Scotts, Frank Madin, with their Wernz-owned Second National Bank—all of whom had backed his wife’s father as state senator—because of which he hated them implacably—and finally he had become chairman of the board of the competition bank the Cray County, and made some few dents in them, and had become a vested interest in his own right— though never quite of the calibration they had. He belonged to the Country Club and the Elks Lodge they had built, and meticulously kept his dues paid, and never went inside of either. He steadfastly refused to move from his tacky office. He lived silently, and occasionally jovially, in his father-in-law’s, the senator’s—the state senator’s—big old three-story frame house, formerly a mansion, but the interior exterior and grounds of which he had systematically allowed to run down into such nearly complete dilapidation that it looked like something out of the Deep South. Here he subsisted in ignored discomfort with his mad wife, some years older than himself, who still insisted that her friends (all dead now) were conspiring against her for having married beneath her, and never set her foot out of the house—just as she had done a number of years ago when her assertion had been absolutely and unequivocally true. The judge never talked about her; and kept on a housekeeper for her, a slatternly former mistress of his. All this in a house which had once been one of the showplaces of Parkman—and still was, historically at least—one of the very oldest houses in town. He dressed almost as sloppily as a bum—which was not difficult for him, with his figure—and spent his time and a small part of his money at Ciro’s and Smitty’s and the Eagles Lodge, jovially buying drinks for the brassiere factory girls whom he often took riding. As he said, as long as you had the money you did not have to worry about people’s feelings, and he continued to direct the estates of his eight married and unmarried sisters, plus the estates of the widows of several of his friends, and two large estates left to minor children of divorces for whom he had contrived to get himself appointed guardian. As he said to Frank on numerous occasions, he handled them well enough to make all of us some money. In
addition, he handled the bank and his own investments and enough shrewd legal work to make him a good bit right there.

  Yes, and that was all the good it had done him, Frank thought smugly: four chins, a hide that fit like a burlap suit, a mad wife, the right to ruin the senator’s property. He spent almost no money. He enjoyed nothing. Not even the brassiere factory girls, Frank suspected, and his numerous relatives when he died childless would have no time to bury him for fighting over his financial bones. When he, Frank, finally broke him—broke his monopoly, rather, he amended—he, Frank, was going to enjoy his money. He and Agnes. And he knew how he was going to break it, too. And it wouldn’t be long.

  Judge Deacon listened to him silently, looking at him shrewdly, as Frank explained what he wanted. He laid the whole thing out for him. The story he told was not the truth, but it served his purpose much better than the truth would have. Then, before the judge could make any kind of an answer beyond a grunt, he brought in his clincher: Dave refused to go into it if anybody else but the two was brought in; he distrusted businessmen.

  The judge nodded brusquely, asked no questions, and wheezed in his scornful withering voice: “You may find, that you’ve got yerself in a lot more trouble, than just havin that money in the Second Nashnul would have made.”

  “Well, I didn’t know what else to do,” Frank said. “And I knew you wanted that money out of there?”

  The judge merely grunted.

  “Now,” Frank said. “I just want a regular partnership contract, sort of. You know. That calls him a junior partner. Except that there’s one extra thing I want put in it. I’ve got to be out of town a few days, and I’d like to have it ready for me when I get back.”

  “It’ll be ready,” the judge grunted, without bothering to ask about the extra.

  “Thanks. But about that extra thing: I want a regular ‘Give or Take’ partnership clause put in it. You know, the kind that says if for any reason either partner wishes to get out, his partner is then allowed to set the price and the partner who wishes to get out must then either buy his partner’s share or sell his own at the price set by the other. You know what I mean. ‘Give or Take.’ You’ll know how to word it better than me.”

  “You don’t need that clause in this contract,” the judge said scornfully, as if talking to an idiot. “That ‘Give or Take’ thing is for full partnerships that are fifty-fifty. The partner who sets the price thus sets the price for both halves. Since that screwball brother of yours will own less than half, and you’ll have the controllin interest, you don’t need it.”

  “I know all that,” Frank said, “but I’d like to have it put in anyway, if it’s all right with you.”

  The judge looked at him a long moment, peering out with those shrewd little eyes set very deep between the fat cheeks and that broad forehead. He seemed to be making some mental note Frank thought.

  “All right,” the judge grunted, “it’ll have to be worded so as to include two prices stead of one. I’ll put it in. If it’ll make you sleep better nights.”

  That seemed a strange thing for him to say Frank thought. He could not be sure what was going on in his mind. “The reason I did that,” he explained, “is that the business is liable to expand some. And it might be hard to appraise what a share of it is worth exactly. And besides we’re relatives.”

  “I been writin contracts for years,” the judge said witheringly.

  Frank still did not know what he had in mind. If anything.

  “I got work to do,” the judge grunted, and swung his chair around to the little table full of papers beside him.

  “Okay,” Frank said. “I’ll see you then. You’ll have it ready for me when I get back?”

  The judge merely looked at him, scornfully, witheringly. He made no answer.

  The pigheaded, miserly, insulting old son of a bitch, Frank thought furiously as he went down the stairs from the office. Someday he would learn his goddamned lesson. If he ever lost his money, there wouldn’t be a single soul in town who would speak to him on the street, or give him a chunk of bread for a handout. Still, in spite of his fury, he felt it had come off the way he wanted it. It was mid-afternoon outside. Almost all the snow was gone, and everything looked wet and dirty. Now all he had to do was go home and pack, which he dreaded.

  Everything went all right at home, but then it always did. It was a dreadful experience just the same. Agnes had just got home from one of her club luncheons and was still all dressed up. She had her own car, a Ford. He packed a two-suiter in the bedroom, the bag lying spread open on his bed. She came and stood in the doorway. As he packed, he explained to her why he was going. He had already told her he was going. The call from Jeff Miller, the Indiana Jewelers’ meeting in Hammond, his staying in Chicago because he liked that hotel. It was horrible.

  Agnes did not say anything. But he was positive she knew, and knew he knew she knew, he was sure from little things she had let drop at other times. She even knew who, he was quite sure. At that moment, as he finished packing the bag, he wondered why the hell he was doing it, and what the hell good there was in it, and if he had not already gone this far with it he would not even have gone. Chicago actually seemed nothing, nonexistent. And he was puzzled at himself wanting to go there.

  But when he was free, and out in the Buick on the highway, he felt better. It was as if for an hour he had existed under some kind of a mental fog, an amnesia. And that was strange, because that was exactly how he had felt about the other, about Geneve, when he had been home packing with Agnes there.

  It was a good day to drive: sunny with the bright but weak sunshine of early winter, the highway already dry of the melted snow, the fields beautifully damp, and here and there one with the thin green spikes of winter wheat showing. He settled down into the long haul to Chicago, enjoying the power of the car, and the being alone, and put his mind upon his plans that were coming clearer every day now and would soon be at the time to put them into action.

  The whole thing centered around the highway bypass. Since the war, they had already built the new bridge and the bypass around Israel. They were working on Route 40 all across the state, widening and straightening it. All the new types of earthmoving equipment, like LeTourneau and Caterpillar, that had been developed during the war to build airstrips, were responsible for this. Nowadays, they could make the earth conform to the road instead of fitting the road to the land. Come summer, they would probably start it. And on all the other new sections of road they were doing the same thing: bypassing the towns. That meant that, eventually, they would build a bypass around Parkman. Right now the highway ran straight through the center of town, with stop signs, and stoplights, and one school zone, slowing the traffic, and the tourist trade in food and lodging on 40 in the summertime was an important item. The bypass would kill all that. The tourists would completely miss the business section.

  If a man could find out exactly where that bypass was going to be built, and buy up some of the land it would cross before the price began to go up, not only would he own the land to which business must move when it moved out there, which he could then sell in small lots at a high price, but he could also build and invest in and own a couple businesses himself. Apparently no one in Parkman had thought of this as yet. That, with certain other basic additions, he thought fondly, was his plan.

  He was pretty sure the bypass was going to go to the north of town. And if it did, he already owned a small farm there out in back of the college which he had bought up some time ago as a mortgage, and which the highway would if not actually cross almost certainly have to touch along somewhere. That would put him in on the ground floor, but he wanted more and if he started buying adjoining land it would look—at least for a while—like he was only adding to his farm. But first he had to know exactly where the bypass would go. Of course, it was always possible it might go to the south, but he didn’t think so because out east of town, where they had also built new the five miles of highway from the bridge to the
Parkman city limits, there was a long slow curve into town, which if it were only extended straight would throw the road naturally to the north side. Ahhh, he had thought it all out very carefully. And so far he had not said a word to a soul, even his own wife.

  The only man he knew who might get him the information was Clark Hibbard, who owned and edited the Parkman Oregonian & Evening News, a paper founded as a weekly by his grandfather who named it after the title of Francis Parkman’s best seller The Oregon Trail and which Clark’s father had changed into an evening daily. Clark, in his spare time, was also State Representative from this district. Frank was a staunch Republican and Clark was a Republican, and Frank had always supported Clark and worked hard for him in the last election. He had been one of the group who first got Clark to come out for office. Clark was still a young man, and had ambitions of someday going to Washington as Senator. He felt he could trust Clark. And Clark could get him the information. The new plans were probably right now being decided by the highway department in Springfield. It might even be remotely possible that Clark had enough influence to get that bypass laid whereever he wanted it. Heh heh.

  Of course, that would mean tipping Clark off to the deal, but that couldn’t be helped. Anyway, he wasn’t greedy, he told himself proudly, he didn’t want it all. And besides, he had another plan; a corollary.

  This had to do with the new factory. An eastern glove concern had been accepted by the City Council and Chamber of Commerce to build a new plant in Parkman. Naturally they would want to be near the railroad—one of them—and what would be a more ideal spot for them than out north of town, in the strip of land between the New York Central tracks where the freight depot was, a mile from the edge of town, and the new bypass highway! Then they’d have railway freighting and trucking both!