Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  You draw close to others only to use them. What else is there to it all? The racket Tom was in was tough enough. Who would know that better than himself? Unlike the big business man, company promoter, Wall Street stock jobber, organizer of huge chains of retail stores... small merchants in thousands of towns swept ruthlessly aside... water power magnates, power sleeping in rivers grabbed, huge blocks of heavily watered stock thrown on the market... the people in turn grabbing it...

  “You can’t let yourself be sentimental about the suckers. We are the builders. Wait. You’ll see. In the end we are the benefactors. There is a new kind of world coming. We are making it. We are making it.”

  None of that for Tom. It did not matter how he had begun, he had landed, as leader, man of power over other men, in a business outside the law. There is no doubt that he occasionally said to himself, as he had once said in conversation with Kit, as Al Capone, big shot in the criminal world of Chicago, is reported to have said...

  “Well, they wanted it. I only gave them what they wanted.”

  Others enough saying it.

  Novelists saying it... “I admit that I am just a commercial writer. I’m no highbrow. I give ’em what they want. I only hand them out the rosy pap they want, the suckers.”

  Writers for the movies... “I’m only doing this to get some dough. When I have got what dough I need I’m going to do some straight honest work.”

  Merchants doing it. Politicians doing it. Capitalists doing it. Newspaper publishers doing it.

  Oh, for the higher life.

  Tom wouldn’t have had even the satisfaction that must have come to Capone, people making a half hero of him, romanticizing his obvious cruelty as their fathers did that of a Jesse James or Billy the Kid... the newspapers, movies and radio speakers, shrewdly enough, playing up to the passion always in masses of people for some sort of a big man.

  Oh, how easy, easy, to make fascism here... hunger of people to find and follow the big shot, getting thereby some little feeling of bigness in self.

  But Tom Halsey was not a big big shot. He was a little big shot. He knew that. He was cautious, careful, quiet talking, doing in the meantime very well by himself.

  He was suspicious of women.

  There was the woman Kate. It is unlikely that his son’s suspicions in regard to the father’s relations with the woman who had suckled the son were founded on anything. Kate was Kate. She was the woman who makes the final, the absolute surrender to some man. It is unlikely that she ever got from Tom Halsey anything beyond this privilege of surrender. It is a privilege deeply desired by some women.

  There came an odd period in Kit’s life. It would be hard to say how much she ever knew of what went on in her at that time. She did not, at once, as Tom had directed, go to Kate. For the time being she stayed as she was, living in the suite in the hotel, driving in her car. She took long drives to neighboring towns, sometimes staying over night in some hotel in some strange town. She talked at length later of that period in her life. She had an experience that must be common to many people. It had happened that, in the conversation with Tom, when she told him of the hopelessness of his looking forward to a grandson as a result of the son’s marriage with herself, when she told him she had been to a doctor who had told her that she was all right, she had done something people often do when they are lying. She had purposely prevented conception happening as a result of her always reluctant relations with Gordon, not as she afterwards frankly said, wanting a son by him, but in the moment when she was telling Tom that she had been to a doctor, when she was sitting before him, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking by an effort of her own will in trying to convey to him the impression that he was facing a broken-hearted woman, she had made a slip.

  “I was momentarily a damn fool. I gave him the name of the doctor I was telling him I had been to see. It would be as funny as hell if it hadn’t been at the moment such a serious slip. You see, he hadn’t asked me for the doctor’s name. I just put it in. There is a thing happens to you when you are lying. You get to thinking you are good and then you slip.”

  There was an office building in the industrial town of the Upper South in which Kit lived with Gordon. It was near the hotel in which Kit and Gordon lived. It was a building for the most part taken up with the offices of doctors. Kit said... “I’m damned.

  “The truth is that of course as soon as we were married and Gordon thought he had me, he found out he didn’t.

  “He kept going after me for a while but presently found out that he wasn’t getting anywhere with it.”

  Kit explained her technique. She said that when she could no longer get away with the game of having a headache or trying to put it over on him that she was ill of women’s historic illness when she wasn’t, she tried the game of being just listless. “I sure gave him a dirty deal,” she said, and I gathered that there were several rows, Gordon tramping angrily up and down in their bedroom. “He slugged me once,” she said.

  “Of course he was a lot stronger physically than I was. I was sitting in a chair, in my nightgown, and he came over to me and putting his big hands under my arm pits jerked me to my feet. I had sure been pulling the lada-dada on him. He jerked me up and then he hit me. He knocked me down.

  “Then he picked me up from the floor and threw me across the room and I landed on the bed.... It was the only time he came at all near getting me,” she said.

  “So I was talking that time to his father, handing him the bunk. I guess I had been pretty lonely for a long time. I used to sit a lot by the window in our little living room and look down into the street, you know, always quite a lot going on down there... maybe just a young mountain boy come into town and trying to make him a pick-up of a young town girl. She might have been a girl working in the big cigarette factory there was in that town and she was off for a Saturday afternoon. She’d be walking up and down the main street as girls do, you know, wanting to be picked up and not wanting... —

  “She wouldn’t anyway be wanting that country boy with his Jaky ways and he’d be trying but afraid to really go right up to her and I’d be sitting there and watching that and other things going on in the street. I had got fixed on my mind the name of a doctor that was on the window of that office building, so I sprung it on Tom when I was giving him that line about not being able to have a child and how it wasn’t my fault.

  “I gave him the doctor’s name. I just put it in when I was talking. The doctor’s name was Ashley.

  “You see, it turned out, he was a dentist,” Kit said.

  She began to drive for Tom, getting, as he had suggested, her orders through Kate. She never did get Kate’s attitude toward herself very clear. “I think she liked me. She might have done me dirt if Tom had told her to, but I don’t know. She’d tell me where to go, what drive I was to make, where I was to deliver the stuff, she’d give me money for expenses... I got as much as fifty to a hundred dollars for trips.... She never asked me for an expense account.... ‘Oh, I guess thirty-five will cover it’ I’d say and then, sometimes, when I was leaving her... we never mentioned the names of either Gordon or Tom when we were talking... we just talked business... she’d stand looking at me.

  “I’d be by the door going out to get into my car. I always went into her house by the kitchen door, never into that room where I went that time with Gordon. Sometimes I’d hear voices of men, some of Tom’s crowd, talking in there. I’d stand by the door looking at Kate and she’d be looking at me.

  “I think she wanted to say, ‘Cut it out... get out... this is too thick for you,’ but she didn’t say it.

  “She must have known about Gordon and me, that I was through with him, that I’d never go back to him, you know, in that way, that something in me couldn’t, and perhaps she knew that Tom would only wait until he had something on me or was ready to get rid of me in another way but knew also that I was bull-headed too.

  “She’d stand looking at me with a funny troubled look in her eyes and I
’d look at her and then I’d go.”

  At first Kit didn’t act as pilot for strings of liquor cars as she did later but took out single loads. When she began driving, making a business of it, the late fall had come. Thanksgiving had passed and Christmas holidays were ahead. Birthday of the Christ to be again celebrated.

  There was a good deal of so-called good liquor, imported stuff, brought in from the West Indies, landed in some of the innumerable bays and inlets along the gulf coast or on the North or South Carolina coast... Tom Halsey’s grip on his own territory at that time being strong enough so that it was better for other big-little shots to make a deal with him... otherwise danger always of high-jacking, some of Tom’s crowd doing the job.. -

  Better pay the price. Get it through.

  Plenty of big business men, politicians, professional men, big and little, even sometimes judges in law courts where you would be tried and sentenced if they caught you taking it to them... all of these clamoring for it, in big towns, little towns, in clubs, in hotels. Interior cities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa clamoring. All of this during the Harding-Coolidge times. Plenty of money flowing.

  You went to a certain town and to a certain hotel and a man came for you in a car. He might be a local man, even a deputy sheriff of some interior county. There were a good many deals made with such men, in some cases all of the officials of a county taken in. Tom Halsey was an adept at such work. The idea was that there would be no selling or delivery of liquor to the citizens of such a county. “We’ll see to it that you do not get into any trouble with your local people.” There was always some money passed. Such local deals didn’t cost so much.

  Kit would be taken out to some country road, perhaps to some lonely farmhouse, and there was a big car, loaded and waiting. This might be at nine or ten in the evening. In the weeks of waiting, after Tom told her to go to Kate and before she did go, she had been making an extensive study of road maps. She said... “I was green at first, had to take risks, keep to the big highways, take a chance on just getting through anyway, but after I went into the business, as I was alone most of the time, often having to stay for three or four days in some little town, some load I was to pick up having been delayed, I had plenty of time to study.”

  She became an expert on the roads of several states, knew short-cuts and the condition roads were likely to be in in all kinds of weather. When she was in a small town waiting... one of Tom’s men or one of the law officials who had been fixed had come to her and had passed her word that a load she was to handle had been delayed and that she might have to wait two or three days... she did not stay about the town but sent word that she wanted a car and spent the time in studying the roads in that section of the country. Often on such days she drove three or four hundred miles, taking notes in a little book she kept. She was like a river pilot in the early days of steamer travel on the Mississippi. As he studied forming and shifting sandbars in the river, stages of the water, snags that might drive a hole through his boat’s hull, studied cut-offs, knew when they were safe to run, studied tall trees and bluffs along the river, getting fixed in his mind points by which to steer on dark nights, so she studied road construction, detours, marked down places into which to dodge when pursued by law officers who were not fixed or couldn’t be fixed, she knew which dirt roads were clay and almost impassable in wet weather and which were sand and could be run over, knew even, eventually and after she had been for two or three years, sometimes acting as pilot for fleets of loaded cars, sometimes herself taking a load...

  She knew where on some main road there was a sudden and just noticeable by-pass, a little dirt road that ran up into a wood, where you could dodge up, cut off your engine and lights, get out of the car and creep down near to the road... “If they get the car and the load they won’t get me”... He low, watch the car or cars of the law go roaring past...

  .. “Where the hell’s that bitch got to now?”

  .. Knew even farm roads, leading past perfectly innocent farmhouses and barns.

  “On clear nights, if there was a moon, you could turn off lights, slip in, slide past house and barn, get out of the car to open farm gates, go down across a meadow, through a strip of woodland, open another gate. You could get out on to another road. They’d be after you maybe back there on the road you’d left.”

  There might be some honest federal man or local sheriff who was out laying for you. He had parked a car across the entrance to a narrow bridge, was stopping all cars on that road that night, some deputy he had with him having slipped the word to some one in Tom’s crowd.

  There was in Kit an odd loyalty to a vague thing she called “the crowd.” It wasn’t that she ever knew many of the men of Tom’s crowd personally. She didn’t. There was however a kind of belief, a feeling running through all the men she met so casually. “We take care of our own.” Many of the men in Tom’s organization had been poor mountain whites. They were often illiterate. Some, like Kit, had been factory hands. They felt themselves at war, against some vague thing — society — the law-and-order people.

  “Laws for themselves. Laws by which to gouge and rob us,” they would have said.

  She was, had been all her life, deeply lonely. It is likely that, after she went to work for Tom, knowing in a vague way that he was out to get her, there was in her no special loyalty to the so-called big-shot of that particular section of America’s outlaw world, partitioned as it was all over America — little big shots and big big shots... the big shots, little and big, getting the gravy but nevertheless...

  Men of the so-called criminal classes.... There is a man lying in hospital. He has been taken for a ride. He was thrown out of a car on a country road or on some quiet suburban street outside some big city. A man with a submachine gun riddled his body with bullets. He was picked up and hurried to a hospital.

  The law speaking... “You tell us. Come on, buddy, you tell us.”

  “You go to hell. My own crowd’ll take care of this.”

  Loyalty to some vague, never definitely defined thing. “Well, what else have I got to be loyal to?” There is a loyalty somewhat of the same sort in factories. It is so little understood, not taken into account by union labor men, by reformers, by radicals, by revolutionists. Little factory girls and often badly treated factory men. “No, I’ll not go out on strike. I don’t trust those who ask me to go on strike either.

  “Sure I know the boss has gypped us.

  “I guess maybe I’d do the same if I was in his place. I dunno.

  “I got to be loyal to some one.

  “I guess maybe he ain’t such a bad guy.”

  When Kit began, got into the game, it was a year when there had been early and deep snows all over the Upper South mountain country. She went rigged out now, she said, to her first job. There was... it lasted, all through her connection with Tom’s crowd... a notion that she was in some way closely connected with Tom, to them the big shot. There was even a notion that she was Tom’s daughter.

  She played up to it.

  And there was something else. She got it, understood it shrewdly. If you are a woman and associated with the sort of men she did at that time associate with... she thought it went for most men... and if you wear fine, well-tailored clothes, an expensive fur coat, becoming hats, expensive shoes, there is something happens to them in relation to you.

  “It gets them. They can’t get gay.” Kit had got her own sort of cynicism all right. “Most men, when they are out on the hunt, as most men are most of the time, go after working girls. You look at the foremen in the factories where I worked. They nearly all did it.

  “And nearly all the rich young fellows and the sons of the well-to-do merchants, etc., in the towns where the factories are.

  “And even the cops in the towns.”

  To the end it was Kit’s notion that the law enforcement officials, great and small, and particularly during the prohibition era, were not too far removed from the law breakers. “And the pe
ople who buy the stuff, too,” she said. “If we’re so bad what about the ones who pay for the stuff we run to them?”

  And there was the notion Tom had once or twice brought into his conversations with her — this before the break between them, while he still thought of her as the possible instrument for the creation of a new and more highly respected race of Halseys — he having built up the money foundation for such respectability... he also not being lacking in shrewdness... the notion that, almost without exception, the founders of almost all the so-called great families in America, from colonial times down, had been law-breakers.

  It was a fact, obviously beyond denial, that all through her law-breaking days... the thing at first manifest throughout all the ramifications of Tom’s organization... gradually getting across to the public in one whole section of America, a section embracing several states... that Kit’s flair for clothes helped her. It helped to create the tradition, the half-mystical romance that surrounded her figure. She felt it in country and city hotel clerks, in men in hotel lobbies, in workmen in garages, in the often illiterate men of Tom’s crowd, in tobacco-chewing deputy sheriffs, who had been fixed. All of these she thought paid a kind of reluctant but real respect to what the clothes she wore led them to think she must be.

  “They thought I was some kind of a strange, new sort of big shot.”

  And there was for her also the satisfaction of at least having some use for the clothes bought with the money that had been showered down upon her. After all there had been no point, no fun, in doing what Gordon had, crudely, wanted her to do... the putting on of evening clothes to go with him to a prize fight or a wrestling match or in strutting about in really well-made clothes before the members of such a crowd, men and women, as he ran with.

  Surely much more fun, excitement, even self-respect... a thing she always did passionately want... in really using the clothes to some purpose... to appear, say on a rainy November or early December night, when it was raining after a time of snow, at some lonely seeming farmhouse, hidden away on some little dirt road near a town in Southwest Virginia or East Tennessee...