The Collected Stories of William Humphrey

by William Humphrey

  By that hour Prof. Simms had for some while felt himself to be the target of resentful looks and the subject of discontented mutterings. So when the committee of three men who had contracted with him for his services came seeking him out, he was expecting them. One look at their faces and Prof. Simms thought he detected the odor of warm tar, and he felt himself break out all over in goose feathers.

  “Well, Professor!” said the first man, and stood waiting for an answer. He was a burly six-footer whose bone-crushing grip Prof. Simms remembered from the handshake with which they had sealed their agreement.

  “Kind of let things get out of hand, ain’t you, Professor?” said the second.

  “Rain, we said,” said the third. “But this—!”

  All were silent, Prof. Simms in expectation of violence, they awaiting some practical proposal from him. This was revealed when, none forthcoming, they made their own. Speaking one after the other, the three said:

  “So without further ado, maybe you better climb back up the tower—”

  “—and put that machine of yours into rearverse gear—”

  “—and de-magnetize things, ’fore you drownd us all.”

  He had learned his lesson, and in commending himself to his Maker, here is what Prof. Simms said:

  “Dear Lord, listen to a con man’s prayer. Looking to the future—if I am allowed to have any—please show me the way to some other part of Your creation where You distributed a little bit more sense. Some place where—how does it go?—where you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but deliver me, Lord, from a place where you can fool all of the people all of the time. Amen.”

  VI

  The river, after three days and nights, had returned to its banks and on both sides the roads to the ferry landing were now passable. But anybody who thought he was going to buck that current for fifty cents or for that matter fifty dollars had another think coming to him. They could sit there honking till their arms dropped off.

  A ferryman’s life was just one blamed thing after another. A week ago you couldn’t see to blow your nose for the dust; now this. Not a drop of rain for three blessed years, then all of a sudden floods. It was like God had been out of the office all that while and returned to find all those prayers for rain piled up on His desk. It did seem like He might have used a little better judgment than to answer them all at once.

  What a time it had been! Rain rain rain—you couldn’t see to blow your nose for the rain. River rising and the banks crumbling in, levees washing out. Cabins coming floating down, some with families sitting on the rooftops, black and white, men, women, children, babies at the breast, old grandfolks. One with a nanny goat astraddle of the peak. Later, town shanties with street numbers on the doors. Trees. Wagonbeds. Chicken coops. Barrels. Cows. Hogs. Mules. And there were people who expected him to ferry them across this! Like the one idiot this morning who came dashing up, said he just had to get over to Texas, and asked how much it would cost. “Two hundred dollars,” he had replied. “Then you’ll own the boat and can ferry your own self across.” Like that one in the truck over there right now—truck or van, bus, whatever the hell it was with a sign painted on its side—honking as if his life depended on it.

  The Pump

  FOR WEEKS Jordan Terry had been down on his knees promising God to drink the first barrelful if only they would go on drilling and not give up; but they were about ready to haul out the rig and call it another dry hole, when at fifty-nine hundred feet they brought in a gusher. Jordan was digging turnips in a field that he was being paid by the government not to grow anything on when he got the news, and though he went out and drank a barrelful all right, it wasn’t oil.

  A day or so later old Jordan was rocking on his front porch and smoking a White Owl when he saw a couple of men of the drilling crew up on top of his derrick with hammers and crowbars taking it apart. Barefoot as he was he jumped out of his rocker and tore down to see what the hell was going on. They told him they were fixing to cap his well.

  “Cap it?” cried Jordan with a white face. “Put ere a cap on it? Why? For God’s sake, Misters, let her come! Don’t go a-putting ere a cap on it!”

  They explained that the derrick was just for the drilling. Like a pile driver. There was no further need of it now. They were fixing to install a pump.

  “Pump? What do we need ere a pump for?” asked Jordan, remembering how it had shot up in the air, like Old Faithful. “The way it spurted out?”

  “It’s like opening a bottle of beer, ol’ hoss,” said the chief engineer. “That first little bit that foams over comes by itself. The rest you have to work for.”

  Work! Hah! Set on your ass in a rocking chair and knock down two bits on every barrelful! That kind of work suited old Jordan to a tee.

  So the derrick was dismantled and taken away and in its stead the pump was set up. It was like an off-balance seesaw, a beam the size of a crosstie set off-center in the notch of an upright post. To either end of the beam was attached a rod which disappeared into the ground. Up and down it went, up and down, bowing in frenzied, untiring obeisance. Yes, sir, it said to Jordan, you’re the boss! Yes, sir, you’re the boss! Yes, sir! Listening with your ear to the ground you could hear, or could fancy that you did, a sound like a seashell makes, of endless vast waves lapping the shores of a vast underground sea. And in the pipe you could hear the mighty surge, like the pulse of a great artery drawing up a steady stream of rich, black blood. Day and night the pump went, night and day, working for him: rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump.… In the daytime it went at about the same trot that Jordan went at in his rocking chair, at night as he lay awake grinning in the dark each stroke of the cycle matched a beat of his heart: rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump.…

  “How much you reckon she draws every time she goes up and down?” he asked the engineers.

  They told him how many barrels it pumped per day. Jordan worked it out from there. He wanted to know just how much he was worth by the minute, how much richer he had grown with each rock of his rocker, each beat of his heart. He got twenty-five cents a barrel. A barrel held fifty-five gallons. It averaged twenty-five strokes a minute. Call it half a cent a stroke. Rocket-a-bump: half a cent. Rocket-a-bump: that makes a penny. Rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump—the last thing he heard at night, the first thing he heard in the morning. Sixty times twenty-five was fifteen hundred. Twenty-four times fifteen hundred times three hundred and sixty-five …

  Jordan—though he was far from being its first owner—had for some years been driving a 1921 Durant. Driving it, that is to say, whenever it felt like going. And only now did he possess somewhere about the amount of oil it demanded. Naturally a man in his position couldn’t be seen around in that old flivver anymore. As even the hungriest car dealer was not going to allow him anything for it on a trade-in, it occurred to Jordan that he would be doing a mighty fine deed by making a present of it to his next-door neighbor, Clarence Bywaters. Poor son of a bitch. It must be hard on a man to have oil struck right next door to you. Like a canary bird in a cage hung out of a window, and having to watch a fat sassy old blue jay hopping about in the trees and plucking juicy worms out of the ground. They had begun drilling on poor old Clarence’s land even before Jordan’s, and they were still at it, but only because they had poured so much money down that dry hole that they just hated to call it quits. They were talking about pulling out any day now. Jordan remembered what he had gone through. He didn’t think Bywaters would take exception to his offer. Poor son of a bitch, with all that raft of kids he wasn’t in any position to despise a little charity.

  Delivery on a new Duesenberg, especially one with as many custom accessories as Jordan had put in for, took some time. Meanwhile he still went about in the old Durant. He hadn’t gotten around to giving it to Clarence Bywaters when the news broke one morning that they had brought in a gusher on his neighbor’s holdings.

  Jordan Terry was not the sort t
o begrudge another his good fortune. Christ, he had his! He went over and took Clarence Bywaters by the hand and congratulated him. He could not help mentioning his intention to have given him the Durant; but, rather to his irritation, Bywaters thought it was an even better joke than he did. He got fifty dollars’ allowance on it (not that he needed the damned fifty dollars, but them that had it never got it by throwing any away) by threatening to cancel the order on his new Duesenberg.

  It looked like a Pullman car. And it turned out to use a bit more gas and oil than the Durant. But what the hell! If there was one thing he had plenty of that was it. While he was out burning it up in those twelve big-bore cylinders, back home that little old pump, going steady as the heart in his breast, was bringing up more. And at night while the car rested, and after he himself had been lulled to sleep by that sweet cradlelike rhythm, the pump worked on, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump.…

  One day the man who maintained the pump, on one of his periodical visits, happened to let drop something which suggested that both Jordan’s and his neighbor’s wells were drawing upon the same subterranean pool.

  “You mean,” cried Jordan with a white face, “you mean that son of a bitch is tapping onto my oil?”

  What could he do about it? Nothing! Couldn’t he go to law? He had got there first. Didn’t a man have no rights? Couldn’t they do something? Install a second pump? Replace this one with a bigger, stronger, faster one? Sink a thicker pipe? Christ, wasn’t there nothing could be done to stop him, keep ahead of him, get it before he took it all?

  But they didn’t care, the oilmen. The same company (a Yankee outfit) had drilled both wells, his and his neighbor’s. They were getting theirs on both sides of the fence, the sons of bitches. What the hell did they care which of them got more on his royalty check? It was all one and the same to them.

  Jordan tried to visualize the lake of oil deep underground. It seemed to have shrunk. It had seemed bigger before, when he had thought of it as lying just under his own thirty acres, than it did now that he must think of it as extending also under his neighbor’s forty-odd. Twelve acres more of it that damned Bywaters had than he had! To think there was a time when he could have bought him out at fifteen dollars an acre! A piddling six hundred dollars! Christalmighty, he spent more than that a week now. To be sure, at the time he didn’t have six dollars cash money, much less six hundred, and wouldn’t have spent it on Clarence Bywaters’s forty acres of dust and erosion if he had had. It was enough to bring on heart failure when Jordan recalled that he had countered Bywaters’s price by offering to sell out to him at ten an acre.

  They had had to drill deeper on his neighbor’s land. Did that mean that it was shallower on his side, that his oil was draining downhill into Bywaters’s deeper pool? Was he just on the edge of it and Bywaters sitting in the middle? Since they had had to drill deeper that meant that his neighbor had a longer pipe. Jordan pictured the two of them underground, both sucking away, and the level of the pool dropping lower and lower, and suddenly his pipe made a sound like a soda straw makes at the bottom of the glass when the ice-cream soda is all gone. But his neighbor’s pipe went on sucking greedily away.

  The sound of his neighbor’s pump, now that he knew it was pumping his oil, was like the steady drip of a leaky faucet: Jordan couldn’t not hear it. Rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, all day long and into the night, growing louder and louder, drowning out nearer sounds, including that of his own pump.

  Once Jordan’s pump stopped. He was lying in bed one night, sweating, tossing, the pounding of his neighbor’s pump like a migraine headache, hating his wife for her deep untroubled sleep at his side, when suddenly his pump stopped. That was his own damned heart he heard, his pump had stopped. He leaped out of bed, ignoring his wife’s sleepy, questioning whine, and dashed outdoors in his BVD’s. It was going. Thank God, it was going. The relief was almost more than Jordan could stand. But wasn’t it going slower, weaker? It seemed to be going slower. Had it reached the bottom and was it having to strain to draw up the last little bit? Or was it only that his heart was beating so fast?

  From that time on the rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, instead of lulling Jordan to sleep at night, kept him awake, listening, afraid it was going to stop, uncertain whether it was his own he was hearing or his neighbor’s. He had to give up rocking in his rocking chair: the noise it made interfered with his listening. He sat very still, listening. He was afraid to go off for a ride in his car for fear his pump might stop while he was gone. Sometimes at night, when at last out of exhaustion he dropped off and momentarily ceased to hear the fevered rhythm of his own pulse drumming in his ear against his twisted and sweaty pillow, he awoke with a jerk, sure that his pump had stopped, that it was the other that he heard, and at such times as he bolted up in the darkness his heart gasped and gurgled as if it had drawn up the very last drop.

  The bills for his new style of living began pouring in, bills of a size to take your breath away, in numbers like germs. Debts Jordan had always had, money to pay them with never before. The one was real, the other just paper, something in a bank. He lectured his wife and daughters on their extravagance. He reminded them how well they had always got by before without jewels and permanent waves. How much money a rich man needed!

  Meanwhile that s.o.b. next door was really living high. Burning up the road in a Graham roadster. A blowout every weekend. Delivery vans from Ardmore and Oklahoma City pulling up to the door all day long. And his womenfolks going around bundled up in furs when it was a hundred and ten degrees in the shade, looking like an escaped zoo. He was not economizing. Whenever they met, Bywaters gave him such a glad hand and such a big fat possum-eating grin that the conviction grew on Jordan’s mind that his neighbor was laughing at him. If Bywaters knew—and how could he not know?—that they were both pumping out of the same pool, it never fazed him. Which could only mean that he somehow knew he was getting the lion’s share.

  Jordan was not the only one to notice those fur coats, those delivery vans. Complaining that they were tackier now than when they were poor, his wife and daughters whined at him from morn till night. Clarence Bywaters now, his wife and daughters were dressed as women in their position ought to be. Were the Bywaters any better off than they were? And they would catalog the finery which Mrs. Bywaters and each of the Bywaters girls had worn to church that morning. As if Jordan hadn’t seen! As if it wasn’t him who was paying for every stitch of all those gladrags! How could he afford to deck out his own women when it was him who was outfitting Bywaters’s like four grand duchesses?

  Often poor Jordan chewed the bitter cud of that moment when his neighbor had offered to sell out to him. The scene was vivid in his mind. He saw Bywaters’s furrowed brow, saw him stroke his stubbly chin, saw his head shake, heard him say, “It’s a dog’s life. Crops burning up. Soil all blown away. Cotton selling for nothing. If I could just raise the money I’d leave tomorrow. You know anybody that’ll give me fifteen an acre?” Jordan had laughed. Oh, how he wished he had it to do over again! Surely he could have raised six hundred dollars if he had only tried. He could have borrowed that on his own place. It already had a first lien on it, but he could have got a second. Oh, why had he let that golden opportunity slip? Then all seventy-two acres of that lake of oil would have been his, both those pumps his alone. These days to lay his hands on six hundred dollars all he had to do was reach in his pocket. He saw himself doing so. He saw Bywaters’s face break into a grateful smile, felt the grateful pressure of his hand. His heart melted with pity for his neighbor, poor son of a bitch, and with the warmth of its own generosity. “California, here I come!” said Bywaters, hope shining like a rainbow through the tears brimming in his eyes. “Best of luck, ol’ hoss,” Jordan said. “I’ll miss you.” From this dream he was awakened by the throb of his neighbor’s pump.

  To wash the bitter taste from his mouth Jordan would take a pull at the bottle, drinking red whiskey now instead of white, his sole extrava
gance. Presently, despite himself, he would slip into another reverie. Rocking faster and faster as the figures mounted, he would calculate how much ahead he would be if his neighbor’s pump was to break down, be out of commission for a week, ten days, two weeks. A month. Two months! Three! By then he was rocking so fast that when he caught himself and slowed down he was out of breath and panting, in a sweat. All he had succeeded in doing was in figuring how much his neighbor was making every minute. Then he would feel the hairs on the nape of his neck rise up and tingle as though someone was watching him.

  Then Jordan knew he was in for it, and his heart seized with dread. For any misfortune wished upon another is a boomerang, it circles back and hits you. A man can’t think one mean thought, not even in a whisper, not even alone in a dark room at night or down in a cave deep in the earth, without Him hearing it and visiting it right back on you. Once a thought has been thought there is no calling it back. It goes out on the air like the radio waves, with the thinker’s name all over it. He gets a whiff and says, “Who made that bad smell?” He looks down, right at you, and grabs you by the scruff of the neck and rubs your nose in your own mess.

  So it was bound to happen. Try as he might to unwish the wish that his neighbor’s pump might fail, Jordan went right on wishing it. So it was only a matter of time until his own broke down. Really. Not just a false alarm. And who knew for how long? Two weeks? Not likely! He had wished three months against Bywaters.

  As is so often the case in such matters, for all his anxiety, Jordan was unaware of it when it befell. He had lain awake that night listening so intently to the hateful sound of his neighbor’s pump that he didn’t not hear his. Or maybe he fondly imagined that it was Bywaters’s which had stopped, permitting him to fall asleep at last. The silence awoke him early next morning: steady, throbbing silence, and, in the background, Bywaters’s pump going double time. He went out on the porch and looked. The beam hung down as if it had been pole-axed.