She had got a kind of philosophy. “If you are going to get smashed you’re going to get smashed.” She knew, felt Tom Halsey, as in some way of his own, having her on the spot.
“All right. I’ll show him.
“I’ll show him who’s the best driver he’s got.”
Well enough she knew that there were plenty of so-called tough fellows in Tom’s crowd. “All right. Let’s see if any of them can make a better record than I can in getting the stuff through.”
The night was black but she was clad in the warm luxurious fur coat. At last there was some sense to the expensive mink coat she had got with the Halsey money. There was a high plateau to be crossed, the road covered with ice so that she had to keep one wheel off the pavement, finding partly unfrozen mud mixed with gravel in which at least one of the wheels could get some traction.
“Give it to her. If we smash, we smash.” She had got a kind of personal feeling about the machine she drove. It seemed beautifully alive to her. There was an exhilaration, a kind of half madness. Sometimes as she drove thus, every moment taking the chance of throwing her life away, she talked aloud to the machine. In a sense she loved it. “Come on, boy,” she cried. There was a kind of drunkenness — half insane determination to get through. From the very first she began to establish a reputation in the minds of others of Tom’s crowd. Word of her exploits was whispered about. “God, what a driver.
“She puts the stuff through,” was the word whispered about.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
KIT HAD BEEN driving for two adventurous years. There was a notion she had got.
It concerned the roads at night. She was always running at night, in or out of some city or big town. She worked winter and summer through rainstorms, moonlight, through hot nights, cold nights, road-frozen nights. She was more and more alone. She grew in realization of the loneliness of nights, the laying-up, hiding-out, in lonely little hotels. She got a feeling that there was no day, only nights.
She had got into the habit of reading books. What else was there to do? She was becoming more and more known and it was better not to be seen abroad in streets of towns. She read books that told about early adventurers in America, the pioneers who went out of the East to open up the West, western railroad builders, builders of bridges, books about men who bound all of America together, by railroad and telegraph lines.
The pony express riders on western plains. Sometimes at night, when she was half hiding out in some little town and darkness had settled over the streets she crept out of the hotel to go to a movie. She said that at such times she put on one of the cheap little dresses she always carried in her bag, such a dress as a working girl ought to wear. Men spoke to her, tried to pick her up. There were many little adventures on such nights.
There was one with a shy little man, perhaps ten years older than herself, and she thought the whole thing was due to loneliness. The man might have been a clerk in a grocery or a drug store. —
He followed her out of a movie where he had happened to sit beside her and, realizing that he was following her... he had looked at her with such a shy hungry look in the theatre, she did not return to her hotel but went walking in the sleeping residence streets of the town.
The man followed. She didn’t quite know herself what she was up to. She thought it might have been kind of defiance of Tom Halsey, whom now she so seldom saw and never spoke with. Occasionally she returned to the hotel where she had lived with Gordon and where she still kept her suite of rooms. Either Gordon or Tom paid. She didn’t know which. Once or twice she saw her husband, who seemed afraid of her. “How are you?” he asked, meeting her in the hotel corridor. There was a look of fear in his eyes. She didn’t know what he was afraid of.
“Oh, I’m all right. How are you?” He hurried away.
She thought Tom might have one of his spies watching her. She wanted to defy him.
And there was something else. Since she had given up living with Gordon there had been no intimacy with any other man. She didn’t herself understand the particular adventure she got into. It was in a small Ohio town, near the Ohio river. She afterwards thought it was the town of Marietta, Ohio. “I can’t be sure,” she said. She had become like a travelling salesman or a member of some small wandering theatrical troop, one who awakens in the morning, always in a strange room, stretches and lies wondering, “Oh, Lord, what town am I in now?”
She went along a street of the Ohio town, walked slowly through several quiet residence streets, past little lights, followed by the man. “Shall I let him pick me up?” She had looked him over in the little movie theatre. He was rather small and neatly dressed, with bright eyes and a sharp little face. She had on, as suggested, rather commonplace working girl’s clothes and a little cheap hat. There was a kind of sickness, brought on by loneliness.
And here was the other feeling. A new desire had come. She did want in some way to defy Tom. “I have played square with him, taking all sorts of chances for him. I’m helping him to get rich. What right has he to get up-stage on me now?”
Suppose she double-crossed Tom for a change, got herself pregnant... she had been careful, not to let that happen with Gordon.... “If I got that way I felt I could bluff Gordon out, make him lie law.
“I felt I could even make him claim it to Tom as his own child.”
She didn’t think it all out. It might have been just sheer loneliness, wanting to break it, to get close to some one.... “I didn’t care at the moment who it was.”
She had got into a quiet little street near the outer edge of the town, into a place where the street ended on a high sloping bank that led down to the Ohio River. The bank was grassy. The whole adventure was a little uncanny and strange.
The man had followed her, keeping a half block behind and she turned and walked back to him. When she approached him she felt him as frightened, as about to turn and hurry away but she spoke to him firmly. “Come here,” she said.
She led him back along the street and down the grassy bank into the darkness toward the river and there, in the darkness, no word spoken between them, she half forced him to draw close, holding him, embracing him... he full of half fears... then wonder... that it could be so easily achieved... a kind of queer boyishness, as sometimes, earlier, in Gordon... in him too... this mixed with fright. Blind, dumb effort of perplexed hungry humans to draw close.
“It was all terribly silly,” she said, speaking of it afterwards. There was her own peculiarly boyish frankness, telling of the half success, half failure, of the embrace with the strange frightened man, in this silence by the silent river, and then of their climbing back up the bank to the street’s end, she holding fast to his arm and then of releasing him. “He half ran away,” she said, and there was a picture made of the little man escaping by running away along a dark small town street and of Kit standing and watching him go.
She would have laughed, a very bitter little laugh, as he disappeared.
The adventure had been followed by a sleepless night. She was back in her bed at the hotel, propped up in bed reading. She laughed a little, cried a little. In speaking of the adventure of the night she was glad to get off the story of the frightened small town man... she thought he was probably married, a very respectable little merchant or clerk.... He like herself, not a sensualist but wanting something warm and real outside his own little narrow money-grubbing life... and to talk again of the road.
There was a kind of ecstacy in that, in the cool adventures. The American roads, asphalt roads, twisting their ways through states, over mountains, over rivers, at night through sleeping towns, the half mystery of the night, plunges into darkness, through strips of forests, now out into the moonlight.
Books read in the hotel rooms, stories of early adventurous American men. She at times felt herself some such a one.
There were the truck drivers on the roads, the men who had begun to move great vans of goods across country at night, going on as she did in all kinds of weather
. She met such a truck on a winter night in the high mountains, the road icy. It ground along over the edge of some sheer drop of several hundred feet. Nearly all the truck drivers, working thus at night, as she did, were young as she was. She flashed past such a truck on an icy night, dry snow blowing in clouds across hills and in the light of her car lamps saw some young workman Kit thought was taking chances at least as great as any taken by the early American adventurers of the books. She saw and felt something she wanted. There was a young truck driver, slender and strong, narrow hipped, in a leather jacket and cap. His truck was stuck on a steep icy hill and he had got stones to scotch the wheels, to keep it from slipping off into space. He stood there, hands on hips, in the light from her car headlight, dry snow, driven by icy winds, whirling about his figure. Something in Kit jumping. “There! Will I get me, sometime, one like that?”
Not a buyer or seller, not an exploiter, merchant, lawyer, not a schemer of any kind. There was the sharp sting of sadness. “If I wasn’t so outside, away from people, a marked person, always hiding out, I might have a chance.”
There was another sort of adventure, inevitable in the work Kit was doing. Not all of the law officials of the counties through which she dashed at night could be fixed. She was occasionally picked up, the road or bridge blocked. You had to try to bluff your way through if you could, if there was a chance, to smash through. You couldn’t always. She was arrested, thrown into some little county jail and immediately called for a lawyer. A wire was sent to Kate and presently a man appeared.
He was one of Tom’s fixers. He knew how. There was a hearing, perhaps an agreement made between Tom’s fixer and the county prosecuting attorney. She was let out on bail and then didn’t appear for trial or she pled guilty of having and possessing and paid a fine.
There was a jail sentence but it could be set aside and if she had been taken, acting as a pilot car for a convoy of cars, she carried no liquor and could play the innocent.
There was however, for Kit, another side to the story. She was in jail. Sometimes she had to stay for two or three days. At that time all of the little jails in the mountain states of the upper South were kept filled with mountain men. There would be a dirty little room, often without outer windows, no toilet arrangements. There was a pot, pushed under a cot that was covered with dirty bedding. She sat on the edge of the cot. There was a hole in a door leading into a corridor and men, friends of the jailer or of some deputy who had brought her in, came to look at her.
There were remarks thrown at her... coarse laughter. She could glance up and see eyes looking in at her. She did not dare sleep but sat on the cot’s edge in silence, well clad... if this happened in the winter, in an expensive fur coat.
There were words heard whispered out there, in the corridors of the jail, “That’s her.” There was a kind of awe in the voices. She was becoming well-known, notorious. Already her picture... “Kit, the rum-running queen”... it was faked... she was made to look like a tall slender young society girl, a débutante... it had been in newspapers of big towns that circulated out through the country in which she worked, that Tom dominated. There was a story of her great wealth. She was a beautiful young society girl who had gone into the game as an adventure.
She was a dangerous woman, always armed and was said to have killed two or three men. In one of the papers there was a story that she had diamonds set in her teeth.
It was dangerous. It was all bad. She kept her face covered from photographers and became sullen and silent when approached by some small town newspaperman wanting to get a flash story to send off to a daily in a near-by larger town.
She was bailed out of the jail or her fine was paid. Smart lawyers could fix things. There might be federal men, higher ups, who could be seen. Tom had always managed to keep himself rather in the background but she was known in the racket as Kit Halsey. When up for trial she always gave another name but even her own lawyer smiled. There was that persistent story that she was the daughter of Tom, the big shot.
“My name is Mary Graves.”
“Oh, yeah?” a newspaperman leaned over and whispered to her lawyer. “It doesn’t matter. I am nobody. I have nothing to lose.”
But it did matter. Kit went to see Kate. Was it time to get out of the racket? She thought it was. She waited.
“I had some money stowed away all right.”
It wasn’t a question of money. There was something else. “I wanted to get away and I didn’t want to.”
There was the matter of Tom, something between herself and Tom. She was determined not to be scared out. There was a kind of growing hatred, a growing determination. For a time after her marriage Tom had taken her into his confidence. “Suppose I did lie to him about that doctor, that time I told him I was all right, that it wasn’t my fault I didn’t have a kid.” She had been a good driver for Tom, had time and again risked her own life. No other driver he had got his loads through as she did. She had become an expert as pilot for convoys of liquor cars, had on one occasion taken her own life deliberately into her hands and had wrecked a pursuing car filled with officers, this to enable a big shipment carried in six cars to get away.
She knew that when keeping her on got too hot for him Tom would throw her to the dogs. She knew she should quit, get out of it. She wouldn’t. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was no longer just a working woman. I had been spoiled for that.
“There was a way in which I liked the racket too well to give it up.” She went to see Kate.
It was a summer night, the moon shining, and she left a town in which she had been waiting for orders and drove some two hundred miles, arriving at Kate’s house at two in the morning. The house was dark and she had come in, the lights of her car turned off, by a back way. She parked her car near the small grove of trees, where she had once stood talking with Tom, and went toward the house.
The house was quite dark and altogether silent. Would Tom be there? She rather wished he would, was in a defiant mood. “Look here, Tom, what’s wrong between us?” She remembered two or three times when, since her separation from Gordon, she had been in Tom’s presence.
The first time was at Kate’s house, when she had come there for a settlement and had gone into Kate’s kitchen. Tom was standing in the kitchen but when she came in he walked away, into his own room. That time she had been embarrassed, remembering the lie she had told him, but the second meeting was different. She had acted as pilot for a string of loaded cars and had got them through to a certain farmhouse in Ohio, near a certain town, not far from the city of Cincinnati and having got them through was about to leave when Tom appeared.
He had driven into the farmyard that night, a bright clear warm winter night, and was getting out of his car as she was about to get into hers.
The incident had been ridiculous. It had infuriated her. At that time she had never lost a car intrusted to her. She had already made a record for getting cars through. He stood in the farmyard, the drivers of the several cars of the convoy standing about... it was their presence that made the incident so exasperating. If she had been alone with Tom it would not have mattered so much.
There was what she thought an unnecessary insult. She saw him standing there and walked over to him. She thought, “What’s the use of our being like a couple of kids?” She thought, “What’s the use of our being like this?”
She was remembering the confidential talks had in her hotel suite, his telling her, always a little vaguely, of his ambitions, hints thrown out as to his ambitions... these including herself.
She walked over and spoke to him. “Hello, Tom”... and he uttered a little sound and-again walked away from her. “Huh!” he grunted. It was as-though he had spat in her face.
And there were the other men, other drivers for Tom, standing, listening and looking. She went back to her car and drove away wanting to spit at him, fight him, scratch his face.
“What a fool I am to bother. Why don’t I chuck it, cut out, go on my own?�
�� During the week before one of the men of Tom’s crowd, a mountain man of forty who had before prohibition been a little mountain farmer, had spoken to her. There had been hints thrown out. Two things were in the wind. She had been told that there were new federal men, come into Tom’s territory under a new leader. It was said that their leader had got men into Tom’s crowd, was getting some of Tom’s men fixed as Tom fixed law-enforcement men.
It was said that the new man was after the big shot, after Tom himself.
And there was something else. The mountain man who talked to Kit spoke shyly and carefully. He was being canny. She saw there a side to Tom’s operations she had not heard about or thought about. There were great quantities of mountain-made moon... pretty raw stuff it was... being made in the mountain country of the upper South and more and more Tom and his crowd had begun to dominate the industry.
It was the story of every big American industry. Tom had grown more and more greedy. The little makers in the hills, the old type of mountain moonshiner of romance, was being wiped out. In the patter of the communists he was being “liquidated.” In many of the mountain counties Tom had made an arrangement with the local officials. He and his men helped catch the smaller offenders, they “turned them up.” There was a small maker, turning out his twenty to thirty gallons a day, back somewhere in the thick laurel in the hills, and a sheriff got a phone call. “A man will meet you at the red bridge on the Clare Ford road at ten tonight. Bring about three deputies.”
The little makers were thrown into jail. They were serving time in road gangs. The number of arrests made in this way helped some local sheriff to make a good record of arrests.
And when such a man, usually some young mountain man, had served his time in jail or on the road and was again free he was approached by one of Tom’s men.
“You are broke, eh? You think perhaps you will try another little run?
“You will get caught. It is no good.”
It was suggested... the man was given a hint.... “Why not get in with the big one?”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 198