Kit said, “You go to see some of the ones whose names I’ll give you. You won’t have any trouble finding some of them. They’ll be in jail.”
“Most of them, when they went into the racket, were young fellows,” she said. “It was a young man’s game.
“It was for them a game, like war.” She told of a young man she’d known. “They never got onto Jim, didn’t know who he was.”
I got it that Jim was a young fellow of eighteen, going into the racket actuated by the same motives as the rich manufacturer’s daughter who once came to her in a jail cell.
This one, the one she called Jim, she knew after she had herself got broken into the game.
“He was one of these bright ones.” She told me Jim’s story, saying that he was a kind of genius— “in book learning,” she said.
He was also the son of a rich man and Jim wasn’t his name.
He had got through a preparatory school at fifteen and then had two years in college.
Suddenly he quit it all. One night he was in a college town, in a speak-easy with other students, and he began talking to the proprietor. “Where do you get your stuff?” he asked. The proprietor of the speak-easy was a fellow who had been a prize-fighter. He had cauliflower ears. He hadn’t made good as a fighter and had got out and had started the speak-easy.
He and the boy Kit called Jim got to be friends and Jim was taken to other men.
“He wanted excitement,” Kit said. She understood that. The boy was his father’s only son and the father owned a big furniture factory in a town of the upper South. A lot of factories had come down out of the North, the Middle West and out of New England into towns of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee — to lap up the cheap labor of hill billies and girls like Kit herself, girls who had left their mountain homes. They were wanting what they could not get at home, and “Why not?” I thought as Kit talked. Even into the most isolated of the mountain homes the catalogues of the big mailorder houses had begun to come. They were wanting what all modern girls and women are wanting. They were wanting new hats, silk stockings. They were wanting new dresses.
There was the new source of cheap labor, naturally intelligent and quick, young women and boys, out of the hills. A lot of them couldn’t read and write. Kit had anyway got that far when she ran away from her father.
She had got a place in a factory, in Greenville, South Carolina, just over the line from North Carolina. It was a big and a growing town and when she was there, in the loom room of a big cotton mill, rooming in a house with a lot of other mountain people, she had gone to a night school.
She commented shrewdly. “They were taking a government census,” she said. There were too many illiterates in the town and the state, and the manufacturers, having been criticized for working little children, sometimes working them sixty hours a week when they should have been in school, had paid to have out-of-work school teachers of the town and often young society women, eager to be uplifters, go to the workers at night. The idea amused her all right.
“Do you know what it means to pass as literate?” Kit asked. “It means you can read and write your own name. That’s all.”
The father of the young man named Jim had the big furniture factory. He made cheap furniture, the kind sold by mail-order houses and by city installment furniture stores. It is rolled out of the factories, so many millions of chairs, so many millions of beds — beds, chairs, and tables that will stand up and look shiny and new for a year or two. They will stand up until the installments are paid.
In America, every day, trainloads of such furniture, knocked quickly together. There it goes. See the trains rolling along. See the trucks on the new highways. Happy days have come again.
The boy named Jim — Kit said he was a big laughing young fellow, a kind of Jack Reed with gray eyes and big shoulders... he had played football on his college football team.
He had been a fast, quick scholar. (She was living at that time with a young man named Halsey, the son of Tom Halsey, one of the big rumrunners of that section of the country.)
Tom Halsey was not an Al Capone or a Legs Diamond, Kit said, but he was big enough.
“So this kid,” she said, “this Jim — you may have read about his mysterious disappearance. It was in all of the newspapers. His father and mother never knew what happened to him.
“He had a high-powered car. He was at the state university.”
He had gone, I gathered, escorted by the ex-prize-fighter, to Tom Halsey. “We used to pay fifty dollars for running a big load, maybe an all-night trip, maybe less, all a car could hold, maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred miles.” Kit explained how it was done. “When we had to move the stuff a long ways we had hide-out places.” I gathered there was a cache.
The gang, led by Tom Halsey, who was really a big business man, like Jim’s father, got another man, one of his gang, to rent a farm. A farm would be picked out that was in an isolated place and that had a big barn.
Kit said that the man, so hired, or one of the gang who had been raised on a farm, would work the farm like any other farmer. She said laughing that he would be one farmer who did not have to complain about hard times, the price of hogs, the price of corn. “He’d have a woman with him, passing her off as his wife. He’d get a farm that was far away from any other place. The game was for the man to keep himself isolated. If he could get, in the neighborhood, the reputation of being mean and unneighborly, all the better. Tom Halsey might have a half dozen such places strung across the country in which he operated. Often the stuff, Kit said, had to be moved a long way.
So the man, one of the rumrunners — or there might be a fleet of cars — came to such a place at night. They loaded quickly and lit out for the next place. There were extra beds, for the rumrunners, in some of the places. A queer light came into Kit Brandon’s eyes telling her story. Some of the places, isolated farmhouses, hidden away on side roads, innocent enough looking places, got, I gathered, quite lively at times.
There would be women brought in. When the liquor cache was isolated enough, Tom Halsey did not object to his men having a good time. There would be fights sometimes. She herself did not stay in these places. “There would be the goddamnedest women,” she said. There would be a phonograph, drinking and dancing. The women, in such places, would get into bed with any man of the gang.
Jim, son of the rich man, the furniture manufacturer... he was no doubt a leading citizen of his town... member of the local Kiwanis or Rotary or Lions club... “I’ll tell you, that boy of mine... he’s a bright one all right”... the father planning the future of his son. “I was a poor boy myself. I had to work my way up. That son of mine... I’ll make a gentleman of him.”
“We got quite a lot of bright young kids into our gang,” Kit said. “What the hell!” she said.
She became, as she sometimes did, philosophical. She spoke again of Jim. He was one of the fastest and most daring of Tom Halsey’s drivers.
“A kid like that,” she said. He had been a football player in his second year in college, his name in the newspapers.
“You’re a kid and you go on like that, maybe for three or four years, and then what?” she said.
“You make it pretty swell for your dad,” she said.
The father could go about, among his associates, other business men, and brag, “See, we licked them again.”
I got a picture, as Kit talked, of fat middle-aged men at football games. They were sitting in grandstands with fat well-dressed women, their wives. Life had run fast for Kit after she got down out of her hills.
The young man, who had become in secret a member of Tom Halsey’s gang, had, she pointed out, ahead of him the glowing prospect of going into his dad’s furniture factory. He could, so easily, become a man like his dad.
Going to New York, or Chicago, seeing the buyers, buying them dinners, the theatre in the city at night. “What I like is a good musical show.” There was, I thought, something surprising in Kit. She had lea
rned fast, after she got into her racket.
The young man, the so fortunate young American man, getting married. He would marry a rich girl, could, she said, go off to Palm Beach in the winter. He would be like one of the rich young men in a Hearst newspaper. He would be like a young man in a cigarette advertisement.
An American dream. “Jesus Maria,” said Kit. The young fellow had been in revolt. He had been very educational with Kit. She said, quite frankly, that he had taken a fancy to her. “We were pals,” she said.
He’d been around a good deal with his dad and made for Kit a picture of the sort of father who is forever speaking of his closeness to his son. Kit thought it nice of Jim that he seemed to have no special grouch on his father.
“They seem to like to brag,” he said to Kit. “I guess it makes them feel swell.” Her association with Jim had been one of the high lights in her life. Her curiosity was awakened because his whole background was something so different from her own.
And so there was Jim, one of Kit’s friends, helping to make her what she became. He wanting excitement, to take chances. She said that Jim, more than many others of the Halsey gang, had understood Tom Halsey. The man Tom Halsey, as his figure was unfolded before me by Kit, became to me more and more an American figure. He became more and more an earlier American, one of our pioneers, a pioneer of business, of industry, I thought. He was like a man building a railroad across the continent in an earlier day... stealing land along the railroad as he went... corrupting legislatures of States as he went. He was like a fur trader, of an earlier day... breaking down the morals of Indians. He was an organizer in steel, in oil, he was a chief. Tom Halsey had begun his career in the liquor racket as driver, had fought his way up to the head of a mob, killing three or four men on the way up. Later, like all such men, when Tom Halsey had got to the top — I got it from Kit that he never did quite become one of the great ones — he had hired others to do the more unpleasant jobs.
Tom Halsey — I never saw him — was, at least outwardly, a quiet enough fellow. He was even, in his own way, gentle. It was difficult to get, from Kit, a definite picture of him. “Oh, I don’t know. He was all right in his way.” That was her word.
There was Kit, the mountain girl, with the background already suggested, with the young college man Jim. He was one of her adventures. I have, I think, already declared that she was herself a marvelous driver of automobiles. She and the college boy became friends. When he was taken in with the gang she went out with him, on two or three runs. Her doing so made the man she was living with then — that was Gordon Halsey, the no-account son of the big shot Tom Halsey — a little sore but she had already grown tired of him. “I’d got his number,” she said.
“I never gave much of anything to him or any other man I’ve been with that way,” she said proudly. She said that a woman, if she was onto her job, knew how to use what she had, could go pretty far, all the way, with a man and give nothing. “Men are pretty easy. Any woman knows about that.”
She went with the college boy on two or three runs at night. “And could he drive!” Her eyes shining. She had — it was as much a part of her as the hair on her head — this admiration for the skillful handling of automobiles. The boy wasn’t caring about the pay from Tom Halsey. He was doing it for the fun, for the reckless fun of it.
Taking his chance of being shot, or killed, or caught, or thrown into prison.
The wild plunges through the night, sometimes pursued by federal men, also in fast cars. The game often outrunning them, outwitting them. It is said that foxes, in a fox-hunting country, hearing the cry of hounds sometimes come gladly out of their holes, to get the hounds on their trail.
For the college boy it was that kind of game, to dodge sometimes into a woodland path, shut off the engine, lie low, or get into a side road or even into a strange farmyard, perhaps some farmer with a lantern coming out of his house. You put a gun to his guts. “Goddam you, lay low. Put out that light, quick, do you hear?
“And keep your trap shut.”
You drive your car into an orchard beyond the farmer’s barn. “He’ll have something to talk about for months, the farmer will.” A farmer, on such an out-of-the-way place, has a dull enough life.
“You get this straight, ‘cause if you make a mistake I’ll get you for sure.”
Kit and that boy, on the road at night. The idea of such a boy ever shooting any one was, she said, absurd. Knowing him had helped make Kit what she was.
He had helped make her aware. He drove only at night, sometimes alone, sometimes as one of a fleet of six or eight cars, and he was keeping up his work in the school.
He was in a car with such a fleet often — Kit riding with him — and the other men, driving for Tom, were, Kit said, tough enough birds.
It was in a country he knew well. Kit said he talked and talked. He had, I gathered, given Kit, perhaps for the first time, an idea of the big world and how it is run.
“He was killed,” she said, and told the story of that.
He had been unidentified after death and Kit said, smiling, that she thought his father ought to be grateful for that. She said it was lucky he wasn’t driving his own car. He was driving a big Packard roadster belonging to Tom.
It was a stolen car and wasn’t much good. There was a fleet of liquor cars and she was acting as pilot. The boy with the stolen car was, on that particular night, one of some six or eight.
It made a story, simply told, Kit’s tale of the rides and talks with the boy. They would be plunging along. Two or three times they were pursued. When they were pursued there was a kind of fire came into Jim. Kit’s eyes shone speaking of it. He was trying to tell Kit, the mountain girl, of the world of his father, of industry and business.
He seemed to have made a study of it. She thought maybe he was even a little cracked on the subject. He was terribly in earnest. As they were speeding through the night, intent on an illegal business, he spoke to her at length of men of whom she had never heard.
There were the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Goulds. The boy’s father, with his furniture factory, was but a little piker. The other men, men of an earlier day — he mentioned several of them. Kit could not remember the names.
They were such men as Tom Halsey or even bolder ones, like Al Capone himself. They were men having a kind of bold unscrupulousness the boy admired, and Kit said she listened to him thinking of herself.
She was thinking, she said, of her life as a factory girl and of how she might have gone on being that and she spoke with a kind of understanding bitterness of the fate of thousands, perhaps even millions, of such girls and women.
Giving, she said, what they had, that is to say their lives. She had got for herself, vaguely, a kind of idea... her marriage, to Gordon Halsey, son of the successful big bootlegger, had been a part of a kind of program she had made for herself.
She had been, after her escape from her home, what she had been, that is to say a factory girl. She had been in a cotton mill and a shoe factory. She had been a clerk in a five-and-ten-cent store.
And all the time she had been thinking and planning. She was, she said quite frankly — she knew it well enough — what woman doesn’t know — quite a pretty girl. Although she had, for herself, within herself, no special call toward men, they seemed to want her. She had been specially attracted toward the college boy Jim because he made no play for her.
She had liked that and she had liked his telling her how things are run in the world. “I wanted to know,” she said and spoke at length of the years when she was a working woman — men of all sorts making their plays for her.
There had been one man, son of a man who owned one of the factories in which she had worked. “I was pretty green,” she said. She had let him take her out in his car.
She had gone even farther than that. It had happened to her. She had got, she said bluntly, the notion into her head that she might get him so... there had been talk of love... but it had not worked out.
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Later and when she was employed as a clerk in the five-and-ten-cent store Tom Halsey’s son had fallen for her, she had profited by that other experience and had driven a harder and a shrewder bargain.
“But as to Jim, the manufacturer’s son?” I said, calling him back to her.
She explained that a pilot car ran on ahead of a fleet.
As I understood it, on certain occasions, when what she called “the law” was laying for them... often, she said, they had been tipped off... there would be a certain tenseness.
The law would be somewhere waiting for them. There would be cars parked on a side road, just off the big road along which they sped.
Mystery of the night. Tenseness.
And it was the business of the pilot, running on ahead, to spot the law and drop back. He let the others catch up to him and gave a signal.
The signal was for the other drivers to give her the gun, if possible to scatter, in any event to get the hell down the road.
It was a rule among liquor runners to try to have always faster and better cars than the law.
As for the individual driver, it was his business, if he got into a place where he could not escape, to wreck his car.
He was to save himself if he could. When his car was wrecked he could, if he was lucky, if there were no legs or arms broken, jump and run for it.
“He was to let the car and the load go to hell.
“And, if caught, he was to keep his mouth shut.”
There was an understanding. A man like Tom Halsey, one of the big shots, if you were working for him and got caught...
He would put up the money to get you clear. He would hire the best lawyers. Jurors could almost always be bought.
Kit was telling the story of what had happened to her friend, Jim. He was driving the last car, that big stolen Packard, and it wasn’t so good. They had planned after the one trip to leave it somewhere in the road.
There were two of the law’s cars and she had cut one of them out, stalling her own car in the road before it, the law cursing at her, but the other got clear. It took out after the Packard. “We were within about two miles of a town, and the Packard wasn’t so fast.”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 179