“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you can make use of your service experience and repair the old cannons in front of American Legion halls.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “And maybe they’ll let me fire a salute on the Fourth of July.”
“It’s too bad you never learned how to play a bugle,” Mooney said. “You could double up and play taps.”
“I can always teach dismounted drill to the Boy Scouts. Or maybe I’ll open a real high-class professional shoeshine parlor.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’d rather be crazy than chronic,” I said. “You’re chronic, Mooney. Nothing but an old chrome-plated chronic.”
“Don’t go,” he said suddenly. “Change your mind.”
I was all through packing and I was ready to leave. I didn’t want to hang around talking to Mooney all day long. We had been through it all so many times before.
“It’s too late,” I said. “They already give me my mustering-out pay and my permanent grade of PFC—poor freaking civilian.”
“What’s everything coming to?” Mooney said. “What am I supposed to do for soldiers?”
“Hell, just grab ahold of a couple of those new kids and give them the sales talk. Maybe you’ll convert some of them. If you signed up enough of them they might even make you Recruiting NCO and you could get yourself a bonus.”
“You got ninety days,” he said. “You got ninety days to change your mind. Just remember that.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just give me ninety days. So long, Mooney.”
I stuck out my hand to shake hands with him.
“Don’t give me that shit,” he said. And he turned his back on me and walked away.
I didn’t blame him. I guess I would have been mad, too, if I was Mooney. I knew how he felt, but that didn’t help me a whole lot. He was my friend, a good one, and about the best soldier I ever saw. He was a great guy and you took him for himself. You just forgot all about Mooney being a nigger.
I didn’t go home. What was the sense in that? I joined the Army in the first place to get away from that. They never would miss me. They’ve got a houseful anyway. Somebody told me jobs were easy to come by in Houston, Texas, so I went on down there and got a job driving a truck for an ice company. Now you might think in this modern day and age there wouldn’t be a whole lot for an iceman to do. I mean with refrigerators and freezers and all. So did I. I was wrong. There was plenty for me to do all day, and there were plenty of people right there in a great big city who had an old-fashioned icebox.
That job lasted three days. The first day on the job the boss took me aside and told me what was what. There was one special case I had to worry about.
“There’s a woman at this address, a real good-looking woman,” he said, showing me the number on the delivery roster.
“Yeah?”
“Now, when you go in the house, this woman will be in the living room taking a sunbath under a sunlamp, buck naked with the door wide open to the kitchen.”
“That’s all right with me,” I said. “I don’t mind if she don’t.”
“Now you listen to me, sonny boy,” he said. “You take the ice in and you put it in the top of the icebox. You don’t look left and you don’t look right. You don’t stop and talk, even if she talks to you. All you do is put the ice in the icebox and get out. If you look, if you stop and talk, she’s going to call up the company just as soon as you leave and I’ll have to fire you.”
“She must be a pretty good customer.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s regular.”
“Why don’t she get herself a refrigerator?” I said. “That woman must be crazy.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said. “She’s my wife.”
I think that woman was crazy. She didn’t need an icebox even if her husband did run an ice company. They had a nice house with air-conditioning and everything. The kitchen was full of all kinds of machines and appliances. And, to top it all, she had this great big funny old icebox. Well, I put up with it for two days, sneaking in and out of the kitchen like a dog. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear the portable radio playing and see the glare of the heat lamp out of the corner of my eye and I could feel the heat of it. And I could tell she was just waiting to see what I was going to do.
The third day she tried to trip me up. I got inside and was just putting the ice in the icebox.
“Honey,” she called out. “Would you kindly open a can of beer for me and put it by the sink so I can come get it when you leave?”
“Sure,” I said.
It was a hot summer day in Houston, really hot and so humid the air seemed to stick to you. I was tired and I wouldn’t have minded a beer myself.
“Don’t you drink any of it.”
“Don’t you worry, lady,” I said. “When I want to drink a beer, I’ll buy it myself.”
“You’re kind of sassy,” she said. “What’s your name, honey?”
I came right up to the living-room door and leaned against the doorframe and just looked at her. She was laying on her stomach facing me, so she couldn’t very well move to cover herself up. I’d say she was a pretty nice-looking woman, a little on the heavy side, but a nice, very nice ass.
“Pudding Tame, you bitch,” I said. I figured I was as good as fired anyway.
“That’s no way to talk to a lady,” she said.
I lit myself a cigarette and looked around.
“I don’t see no lady.”
“You got a nerve,” she said. “I’m going to phone my husband.”
“You know what I’d do if I was your husband?”
“No,” she said. “What would you do?”
“I’d whip your ass good and throw you out in the street where you belong.”
I walked over and smacked her fanny so hard I left a print on it, all five fingers included, and then I walked right out of the house with her hollering rape and murder and everything else. I drove straight back to the company and gave the boss the keys to his truck.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning.”
“Mister, you can have this job.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t help it. It’s just the way things are.”
“The hell you can’t!” I said. “You ought to knock some sense into that woman. And if she won’t shape up, get rid of her.”
“I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is.”
“Okay,” I said. “Have it your own way.”
At the end I almost felt sorry for him. He was just an old guy with a young wife. You know how it goes.
A few days later an oil exploration company hired me to drive a pickup truck for one of their crews. I was really hoping they would send me to South America or Arabia or some place, but they sent me up to Texarkana instead. Texarkana was a crazy town. I don’t know how it is now and I couldn’t care less, but it was a crazy place then. The state line between Arkansas and Texas ran right up the middle of the street and they said you could break the law on one side and then run across to the other and thumb your nose at the cops if you felt like it. One state, I forget which, was partially dry. You could buy only beer there. If you went across to the other side you could get beer and whiskey and pretty nearly anything else you wanted. Naturally it was heavenly country for bootleggers. On a still calm day you could see the smoke rising up from a half a dozen stills out in the pinewoods. The law wouldn’t do anything about it or, anyway, I guess they couldn’t.
About the same time I showed up there was another kind of crime that had everybody worried and worked up. Somebody took to killing off couples parked out in the woods. Whoever it was would sneak up on them in the dark, kill the man, rape the woman, and then kill her too. Then he would carve up the bodies with a butcher knife. All the newspapers were full of it. They called him the Phantom Killer and everybody in the area w
as supposed to be on the lookout to catch him. All this was in the middle of summer when everybody is edgy anyway. Life goes on the same everywhere, with or without no Phantom Killer, but I don’t mind telling you it made the town a nervous, kind of suspicious place to be in.
All that part didn’t bother me one way or the other at first, though. I was too busy on the job and getting used to the people I was working with to worry about what kind of a place I was living in. The whole crew lived together in a boardinghouse. We would be up long before daylight and out on the road, driving miles to wherever we had to work that day. I have to drive a pickup for Pete, the surveyor, and all his gear. We would drive way out in the woods or swamps somewhere and then run a survey for elevation and distance, setting up known locations, stations where the gravity-meter crew could come along later and take readings. The driving on those back roads was pretty bad, but I was used to rough driving. The only tough time I had was getting along with Pete. Right from the first day. Part of it was my own fault, I’ll admit. He reminded me of my old man. Pete was a little scrawny guy like that and all puffed up with himself like a banty rooster. I guess he figured everybody was against him to start with, so he might as well give everybody else a bad time before they had a chance to do it to him. He went out of his way to let you know right away he thought you were dirt. The first time I ever drove for him he started in on me.
“What did you do before you came to work for us?” he asked me.
“I was in the Army.”
“Yeah? I thought so.”
I didn’t say anything. Plenty of people have plenty of good reasons for not liking the Army. I even have a few good ones myself. When he saw I wasn’t about to take his bait, he kept after me.
“Well,” he said, “don’t try any of your Army tricks around here or you won’t last too long.”
“Yeah?”
“I know how it is. I was in the Army. The idea is to get out of as much work as you can and let somebody else do it. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Come on now,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“I hope you do,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Just don’t try any tricks on me.”
Like I’ve said, one of my big troubles is I don’t like to get pushed around by anybody. And another one is a quick temper sometimes. I pulled the truck off the road and stopped.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m playing my first trick on you,” I said.
“I wasn’t joking,” he said.
“Now listen, you,” I said. “I don’t want any trouble with you. Let’s get everything straight right now. You tell me what to do on this job and I’ll do it. Just as good or better than the next guy. But let’s just leave the bullshit out of it. They don’t pay me to listen to you.”
“You talk pretty big for a kid,” he said.
“Try me,” I said. “I’d just as soon whip your ass as anybody else’s. Just try me and find out.”
He shut up and we drove on. Later he asked me what rank I had in the Army and I told him sergeant. He said, “I might have known,” or something like that. I let it pass. I let him get away with that. He was like my old man. He had to say the last word even if it killed him.
After that Pete didn’t give me any trouble for a while. And I didn’t bother him. Which is more than the rest of the guys on the crew. They didn’t like him either and they always had some practical joke to pull on him. They made him pretty miserable I guess. The hell with it. I just worked with him and let him alone.
We always worked until pretty near dark and then we would drive hell for leather back to town. After we got back and cleaned up and had some supper, we would either go over to the cafe across the street and drink beer or else hang around the filling station.
The filling station was run by this one-arm guy that used to be in the Army away back. He had been a mule-pack soldier in the days when they still had mules and I liked to go over there and sit around and talk with him about how it had been in the old days. We could talk the same kind of language and I got to where I really liked to hang around there in the evening. Except for one thing. He had this nigger they called Peanuts working for him. Peanuts was tall and skinny and kind of funny-looking with great big loose hands and feet about half a block long. He wasn’t very smart, but he was a good-natured simple guy and I got to where I couldn’t stand the way they picked on him. Everybody played jokes on Peanuts. They would send him all over town on crazy errands like getting a bucket of polka-dot paint or taking the slack out of the state line. He never caught on. Once or twice somebody gave him a bottle of cheap whiskey and got him drunk. He would stagger all around the station singing and hollering and slobbering and carrying on until he just passed out cold. Whiskey put him out of his head. There would be a crowd of the guys to see this happen. They thought it was pretty funny, like seeing a pig drunk. In a way I guess it was funny too. Except a man is not a pig. So I made up my mind. I would rather sit in the cafe and drink beer by myself than to put up with a thing like that.
“What’s the matter?” Pete asked me. “You don’t hang around with the rest of the guys anymore.”
“I’d rather drink beer.”
“That Delma is a nice piece.”
“Who?”
“Delma,” he said, “the waitress.”
“Which one is she?”
“Don’t try and fool me,” Pete said. “I know what you’re up to.”
“Well, you know a lot more than I do then.”
To tell you the truth Pete put an idea in my head. I hadn’t thought about it before, but there was this good-looking waitress working over at the cafe. And I was lonesome and horny as a jack rabbit and I figured that getting tied up with a woman wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I never had a whole lot to do with women before I went in the Army. The only women I really knew anything about were gooks. I like them fine, especially the Japanese, but they sure are different from American women.
Delma was a pretty good-looking girl, short and stacked with dark hair and a good smile. Of course they all look good when you want one bad enough. It didn’t take long for me to get to know her a little. When business was slack she would come over and sit in the booth with me. She talked a lot and joked. She was full of laughs about everything. She seemed all right.
One night, after I had been around Texarkana for a few weeks, she asked me if I wanted to go out with her.
“Sure,” I said. “The only trouble is I don’t have a car.”
“We can use mine,” she said. “I don’t feel like working tonight. I feel like going out and having a good time.”
She went back to the ladies’ room and changed out of her white uniform and into a dress. She looked good in a dress. I never had seen her except in her uniform and so she looked like a different person. She had that clean, kind of shiny look American girls have when they’re all dressed up to go somewhere. Like a picture out of a magazine. We got in her car and drove out in the country to some honky-tonk where they had a band.
“I don’t dance much,” I told her. “I never had much time to learn.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ll show you how.”
We tried dancing awhile, but it didn’t work too well. So we sat down at a table and just drank and listened to the music. That Delma could really drink. I had a hard time keeping up with her.
“This is a pretty rough place,” she told me. “A lot of really rough guys come here.”
“Is that so?”
“You see that big man?” She pointed at a great big guy standing at the bar. “He is one of the toughest men in this whole part of the country. A big bootlegger.”
“What did he do to get so tough?”
“They say he’s killed two or three men.”
I started to laugh. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t help it. I was drunk and it struck me funny to hear somebody talk like that, like he was som
e kind of a hero or something.
“What’s so funny?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something must be funny.”
“Is that what you have to do to get a name around here—kill somebody?”
“You better not let him catch you laughing at him.”
For some reason that made me mad.
“I don’t give a damn who catches me laughing,” I said. “I’ll laugh whenever I damnwell please and take my chances. Listen, I’ve seen bigger, tougher guys than him break down and pray to Jesus. I’ve seen plenty of great big tough guys that was as yellow and soft as a stick of butter. It don’t take no guts to kill a man. I’ve seen the yellowest chicken-hearted bastards in the world that would shoot prisoners. I’ve seen some terrible things. So don’t come telling me about no big bad country bootlegger.”
While I was sounding off like that she reached across the table and grabbed my hands and squeezed hard. She kept staring at me.
“Finish your drink,” she said. “And let’s go somewhere.”
We went out in the parking lot and got in the car and necked awhile. She was all hot and bothered and breathing hard.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she said.
“Where do you want to go?” I said. “Out in the woods?”
“No,” she said. “Not out there, I’m scared.”
“What of?”
“I’m just nervous since all that Phantom Killer stuff has been in the papers.”
“All right, you name it.”
We drove even farther out the highway to a cheap motel. After I paid the man we went in the cabin and sat down on the bed.
“I’ve got to have a drink,” she said. “Go ask the man for a pint of whiskey. He sells it and don’t let him tell you he doesn’t.”
When I came back to the cabin with the whiskey all the lights were out.
“Hey,” I said. “I can’t see anything.”
“Hurry up and get your clothes off,” she said. “I’m so hot I can’t stand it.”
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