The Feud

by Thomas Berger

  Junior smiled as feebly as he possibly could.

  His father said, “I don’t know if you can unnerstand that Rev was a lot more than you could see. I mean, he wore that one suit of his so much it could of walked by itself, and then he was just a skinny measly kinda little guy physically speaking, and you know, he began to go bald when he was about your age, I believe, and always wore that hat all the time for many years. And I don’t know as you ever observed his funny way of walking? Which I do believe was due to one leg being shorter’n the other from birth, and uh course the injuries from that accident sure didn’t help. You might of looked at him and thought he wasn’t much, and by George, he wouldn’t of been on the outside alone, but by gosh, inside he was quite a man. That little guy can teach a lesson to us all. Going up against Reno Fox, for golly sakes, wanted all over the country from coast to coast, and it’s our Rev gets him. I betcha that’ll get in the big city papers, believe you me.”

  “Wellsir,” said Junior, “I myself stood right next to Reno just the night before down Curly’s, and he never said beans.” He had already related this incident many times. “He seemed like a real nice guy.”

  His old man’s face grew hard: he glanced around at the jabbering, gluttonizing relatives, and then he turned back to Junior. He said, “Yeah, Curly finally got in touch today. He told me what you was doing in there: helping yourself to the cash register when he was back inna kitchen. He told me you owe him five dollars.”

  Junior took in some quick air and with all the indignation he could muster he said, “Me? Reno Fox the master criminal is right in front of that register, and Curly accuses me?”

  His father smiled grimly. “Reno Fox is preparing to risk his life at the bank for thousands, and he would filch five dollars from a lunch-counter till? That don’t make sense, Junior. Now, I tell you what Curly says. He’s a real nice man, that Curly. Curly says he knows that with all my troubles presently I don’t have any extra five-spots laying around. So he says, ‘I tell you what, my colored dishwasher has run off, probly got himself some white lightning rotgut and is laying drunk in some alley in Jigtown,’ and Curly says, ‘I’m fed up with him. Junior can work off that five bucks by doing a little dishwashing after school.’ I says I thought that was the perfect solution. You start tomorra.”

  Junior said, “The hell I do.”

  His father slapped him so fast he didn’t see it coming and so hard he was knocked against the frame of the doorway to the living room. Not one of the relatives seemed to notice this. For an instant he thought he would strike back, but his father was still slightly larger than he and probably the dirtiest of fighters, who would knock his son to the floor and kick and trample him, and if the victim continued to resist, all those fat uncles would jump on him and smear him into the floorboards. He could expect no mercy in this family.

  “And then,” his old man went on as though nothing had happened, “in your free time I expeckcha be down the store, where we’re gonna be seeing what we can recover and maybe get rid of in a fire sale, and then I’m going to rebuild with the help of that reward money left me by Cousin Rev, and I don’t think the bank will refuse me a loan since it was their own bacon he saved the other day by laying down his own life. And by the way, his pitcher goes in the window of the new store when it’s built.” He smiled at the son he had just hit in the face with all his strength. “I hope you’re gonna take more interest in the new store than you did in the last, Junior, for I’ll tell you this”—he leaned confidentially close—”all of that’ll be yours one day, son.”

  Junior recoiled from his father’s sentiments and bad breath. The aftereffects of the slap had now arrived in full force. He slunk upstairs to the bathroom and inspected himself in the mirror. It looked as if he had painted his face to be a Halloween Indian, with the purple and yellow of the acne and the reddened patch left behind by the blow. His nose also was home to a tribe of brand-new blackheads. While he went to work on them with the tips of whichever fingernails he could find that had not been chewed blunt, he realized he would have to get out of this house, and since the town was so small, out of it as well, and he couldn’t go to Hornbeck, being forbidden to do so by law.

  After he took a leak with the toilet seat down, shooting through the aperture, Junior went into his parents’ bedroom, where the outer clothing of his relatives had been put onto the bed. Not all the women had taken their purses downstairs, and he ransacked those that were here, collecting six dollars and thirty-two cents. This was his entire fortune, for he never saved a penny of the dime-per-hour he had been paid for his after-school and Saturday service at the hardware store, and someone at the Hornbeck tavern had rifled his pockets while he was unconscious after being coldcocked by the bartender, and had helped themselves to the money taken from Curly’s cash register. The world was full of crooks.

  En route to the back staircase, Junior passed Eva’s closed door. He briefly considered luring her to open it with a promise of some treat and then sending her away on a wild-goose chase, so that he could rape the newly attractive Clara in her absence, but he knew this as an impossible fantasy while he was concocting it. For some reason his nerve did not extend to grown girls, but he was sure it would in the future if he could only escape from Millville and into the great world outside.

  At the foot of the stairs he peeped around to see if his mother was in the kitchen. She was not, and he slipped past the stove and out the back door, shutting it quietly. As usual he cut through the Durkeys’ property. No flowers were in bloom at the moment, the season being fall, but Old Man Durkey had nothing better to do with himself than hang around outside, endlessly sprucing up his back yard, raking up every leaf as soon as it fell, painting his screens for next year, and so on.

  There he was now, just coming out of his garage. His eyes widened when he saw Junior.

  “Say, Junior, that was your cousin Reverton down the bank? Many’s the time I seen him right over your house. And I’m proud to say I chewed the fat with him on occasion. He was quite a man.”

  Junior stepped around the corner of the garage so that he would be out of sight from his own house. He said, “Yezzir, that’s right. But you know, I myself run inta that bank robber down Curly’s night before the robbery. He had them little mean eyes set right together, and a real low brow like a nape’s, you know? I knew right away he was on the wrong side of the law, but I dint have any way of proving it, and I tried to get Curly to tell the cops, but he wouldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t be supprised if he was in on it.”

  “I can’t afford to eat out,” said Durkey, who was all bent over and whose bald head was covered with brown spots, “so I never go down Curly’s. I been in Tom’s a time or two, though. I like to get the old woman outa the kitchen on her birthday, so might take her to Tom’s for what they call the blue-plate special.” He wrinkled his nose. “But it ain’t much good: ham croquettes, you know, low on the ham and big on the croquette, string beans…” His voice faded. He was getting too old for his own good, and should probably be put out of his misery. Junior intended to knock himself off before he ever got that old and became an object of scorn.

  “You didn’t miss much if you ain’t been to Curly’s,” Junior told him. “He’s dirty as a pig, and he’s got some black African coon for a cook who spits in the food. I hear he’s gonna be closed up by the health authorities.”

  “They all should be,” Durkey said with some heat. “All of ‘em.” He seemed to be getting weak-minded.

  Junior left the neighborhood and walked west until he got near the district where dark-skinned people abounded, and he made a wide detour to the south: he had always heard that boogie girls had hot asses and would give it away for free to anybody who asked, white or black, but he didn’t want to risk having his guts cut out by some big buck’s razor at this stage of the game.

  When he reached the highway he went above the intersection a block or two and began to show his thumb to the cars that passed. This proved to be totall
y useless for a good half hour. Most drivers didn’t even seem to see him. He was beginning to get discouraged in this venture and to consider going home. If he could only watch his mouth and be patient, there might come a time when Curly would trust him—and have more than a few dollar bills in the register while his back was turned. The same might be true of his father, at the new hardware store. Meanwhile he could make it up with Clara, and maybe joke around and get into a mock-wrestling match on a bed when everybody else was downstairs and feel her tits and maybe even get his hand up inside her pants as if by accident, in the heat of the game, and, rolling around, before she knew it, his pecker would be right up her giggy and she would be moaning, “Oh, oh, oh, please don’t, please … don’t… stop!” He remembered this bit of erotic dialogue from one of those little cartoon fuckbooks, shown him by that cousin of Howard Bing’s, that smart-aleck kid from Hornbeck named Dickie Herkimer, who thought he was a big shot because he had this book and a brand-new rubber in its original folder, like a matchbook. Junior would have had to trim his ass if he was forced to spend much time with him.

  Just as he was about to turn away from the road now, a little green coupe stopped opposite him, the door was flung open merrily, and a middle-aged guy looked out and said, with a grin, “Hi there! Hop in!”

  Junior did so hastily. This guy was wearing a suit and tie and a felt hat. He looked pretty successful.

  He asked, putting the car in gear, “Where you headed for?”

  “Just about anyplace.” No sooner than he’d said it, Junior realized it hadn’t been a wise statement. The man could well be with the Authorities.

  “By gosh,” said his benefactor, “you met just the right fellow. I got my customers outa the way for today, and I was just thinking I’d have me some fun.” His hand, on which there was a big ring with a red stone in it, closed over Junior’s kneecap. “But what I always say is, you can’t have much fun alone. Don’t you agree?” His hand was moving slowly but surely up the inside of Junior’s thigh. Nothing like this had ever happened to Junior before, yet he knew exactly what it was, and he was ready for it.

  “Let’s have a nice picnic in the state park,” said the salesman, and it wasn’t long before he turned into the entrance of the place in reference.

  But when he found a remote place to park and turned to deal with Junior, the latter slid against the door and said, “Gee, I guess I oughta be getting home, though I’m gonna be in dutch when I get there.”

  The salesman’s pink, hairless hand pursued him. “You mean, for doing naughty things? But how will they know?”

  “Naw,” said Junior. “I lost some money I was holding for my dad.”

  The salesman got a funny look. He reclaimed his hand. “How much?”

  “Five bucks.”

  The salesman now acquired a definitely peevish expression. He deliberately lifted his rump and took a wallet from his back pocket. He said, “All right. But for that kinda money I want what I want.”

  This turned out to be something Junior had not expected or even known that anybody really did, despite all the jokes on the subject. It also was so painful that it brought tears to his eyes, but he stuck it out like the trooper he was.

  CHAPTER 12

  Bobby Beeler had made a little shrine to Dolf on an end table in the living room: a hand-colored portrait photo of him taken in the days when he had held office at his lodge, five years or more ago, which seemed to have been the period of his life in which he was happiest, was flanked by two vases full of flowers. But when the blossoms from the funeral floral pieces had withered, it looked as if the vases would stay empty, at least until the following spring, because only rich people could have afforded to buy the hothouse products of the Hornbeck florist in the ordinary course of events.

  But Bernice said, “I sure hate the look of empty vases, Mama. They got some real nice-looking artificial flowers downtown at Gobel’s. They ain’t cheap, but gee they never die.” She sat at the kitchen table, drinking beer from the bottle’s mouth and puffing on a cigarette. Bobby had assumed that smoking was a newly acquired habit, but Bernice assured her that she had enjoyed it for years but did not indulge when on visits home so as not to disturb her late father. She had also lately taken to drinking beer in mid-moming.

  Bobby had just lugged in a big wicker-basketful of sun-dried clothing from the lines in the back yard. She now put up the ironing board and began to sprinkle the garments that needed dampening.

  Bernice said, “Maybe I’ll go down there ‘safternoon and pick up some of them. Japanese cherry blossoms are nice. They make it look like spring all year, and you can’t hardly tell ‘em from the real thing. A couple dollars’ worth’d do it, I bet.”

  “A couple dollars!” said Bobby. “That’d feed us the better part of a week.” She dipped her fingers in the soup bowl that held the water and flicked them at a shirt of Jack’s that lay in that peculiar rumple of sun-dried clothes, which was altogether different from that of clothing rumpled by wear or, again, neglect. Bobby was a real journeyman in the craft of keeping house. She rolled up the shirt and began to flick water on another. “I’m sure Dad would understand, up there.” She looked at the ceiling. Though she wasn’t really sure he would hear her words as such, she knew that wherever he might be, he was aware of her: you couldn’t dismiss all those years of marriage merely by dying.

  “We have to watch our pennies now, Bernice. That insurance won’t take care of much more than the mortgage for a year or two.” She had made the same statement morning, day, and night ever since the funeral, and though both the boys had taken it to heart (though neither was ever extravagant in the old days), and Tony now had that Saturday job—Bernice gave no evidence of having been affected by it in the least. Not a day went by without her suggesting some new expenditure.

  “Well, I sure wish I could help,” Bernice said. “But with this one on the way”—she patted her stomach, which thus far was perfectly flat—”I got my work cut out for me. I got to build up my strength.” She had apparently retained some smoke inhaled earlier, for it all came out now, in pale blue, from her nose and mouth.

  “Then you better not go downtown,” said her mother, “and have to dodge those trolleycars and fire trucks and police cars and swallow a lot of fumes. They always make me sick to my stomach.”

  “You sure got a hick’s idea of the city,” Bernice said, and then lifted the bottle and poured some of its contents down her throat. Bobby wondered where she had picked up this unladylike style. “You don’t notice stuff like ‘at when you’re used to the big town,” Bernice went on, having swallowed and burped. She polished off the rest of the bottle and got to her feet. “Maybe I’ll just go down and do some winda-shopping. Better’n sitting around here all day. And Ernie can’t make it for lunch today. His mother wants him home. He’s gotta fix something.” She sighed sulkily.

  “Well,” said Bobby, “it’s sure your personal business, Bernice, but I believe Miz Krum will have to find out someday. Whatcha gonna do when the baby comes?”

  “Oh, Ernie’s gonna tell her any day now. He’s working her up to it by degrees.” Bernice lifted her shoulders and let them fall. “Well, I guess I’ll take a bath, anyway.” She was still in her pajamas, under a satin dressing gown somewhat the worse for wear. She shuffled to the dining-room doorway in her runover mules, then turned back. “Maybe he could come over for supper, though. He gets out sometimes to go down the firehouse for a stag evening, you know, to play cards and have a few brews. Maybe he would come over here for supper for a change…. Say, Mama, coont you make something else for a change but a casserole? Some nice baked ham, maybe? Or fried chicken?”

  Bobby sighed deeply. “Bernice, I just wish you would think about—”

  Her daughter threw up her hands and howled, “O.K., O.K.”

  When Bobby had finished dampening all the clothes, it was a quarter after eleven, and she had no food on hand for the boys when they came home from school for lunch, so she took off the
apron she wore even when doing clean housework, fetched her purse, and went down the street to Wessel’s little corner grocery. Bernice was still in the tub, she knew, because every now and again she could hear the faucet running as her daughter warmed up the water. Luckily she had the wash all done early, for there wouldn’t have been enough hot water for the machine had Bernice been soaking at the same time. A new hot-water tank had been on the list of improvements Dolf made from time to time and shared with her as they undressed for bed. For some reason, that was his favorite time for discussing such subjects. That had never seemed at all odd when he was alive, but now she saw that some people might have found it so. He had got around to realizing few of the projects he had mentioned over the years, and maybe that was just as well, for look what had happened when at long last he was ready to strip the paint from that old dresser which she suspected might be, underneath it all, solid walnut. As a result, the last few days of his life had been unhappy ones, and it was a really unfortunate coincidence that his death came at that moment rather than at one of the many times when he had been satisfied with his lot.

  At Wessel’s, Bobby bought a couple of cans of soup—Tony would put away one all by himself—a pound and a half of baloney, a big hunk of rat-trap cheese, and a loaf of unwrapped rye bread with a nice shiny crust.

  Wessel, a short, bald-headed man with a brushy gray mustache, wrapped these items in brown paper and put them in a bag. He pushed it across the counter.

  “Say, Bobby,” said he, not meeting her eyes, “with all your troubles and all, I didn’t want to to mention it, but, uh, your bill is running real high, uh, and I was wondering if…” He cleared his throat. “See, maybe I should of … well, the fact is, Bernice is charging quite a bit of beer and cigarettes and potato chips, salted peanuts—?”

  Bobby had lifted the bag. Now she lowered it to the scarred but polished counter. “She’s been putting the beer on the tab?”