by Jim Thompson
“She’s not on the take,” I said glumly. “I know that dame!”
“Well,” he shrugged, “that’s the way you’ll have to swing it. If you can’t do it from the inside, you just ain’t gonna get it done.”
I left him disconsolately, all the more depressed because I knew he was right. A new record card, filled out in a hand wholly dissimilar to that of the other cards, would be damnably incriminating. Even with a fix in, the crime was certain to be spotted. For as long as school was in session the cards were referred to, and there were certain teachers who knew my record by heart.
I had not one problem, then, but two. To do the job from the inside, and to do it right at the close of the school term. Thus, by the time there was again occasion to refer to that card, I would be safely out of reach, my sins would have become dim in the minds of the authorities, and any long-memoried snoop who sought to make trouble would find his contentions impossible to prove.
It was a large order, one seemingly impossible to fill. Yet fill it I must or become the world’s only senile schoolboy.
So fill it I did. And I shall tell you how I did it a little later.
Meanwhile, let us move back in the story, taking its events in as proper a sequence as their general impropriety will permit.
13
Pop’s luck went sour almost from the day he set foot in Texas. The fortune which I was to inherit shrank at the rate of almost four hundred thousand dollars a year. I naturally thought it was a hell of a note to be losing all that dough without so much as a soda to show for it, but I was more concerned with certain issues tangential to the main one. Briefly, as I discussed them with Pop, they were about as follows:
First of all, was a man who had made such a thorough screw-up of his own affairs a suitable mentor for me? (I did not think so.)
Second, with him losing money at the rate of a couple thousand dollars a week, was there any sense in my knocking myself out for a pittance on some part-time job? (I did not think so.)
Finally, since I apparently would have no dough to look after, wasn’t all this Spartan training I was undergoing pretty damned stupid? (I thought it was.)
I was not trying to be snide or facetious, and I was irritated and bewildered that Pop should think I was. I pointed out that if I wanted to be smart-alecky or nasty, I could do a heck of a lot better than that. (“Just ask anyone, Pop.”) But Pop was as near to being furious as I have ever seen him.
Addressing me as “sirrah,” he let it be known that I was pretty poor comfort for a man no longer young whose life’s gleanings were slipping through his fingers, never to be grasped again. He said that when he was my age he had done such and such and so and so, and all I could do was get into trouble and sass my betters. He said that I was completely irresponsible and out-of-hand, and that the remedy lay in work and more work. He had been too easygoing with me, he said, but now the old free and easy days were over.
I was to study every night from dinner until bedtime. Also, since I had chosen to quit my part-time job as a soda jerk, I would find “suitable” employment on the weekends.
The first ordinance did not bother me particularly. I was no more popular in the neighborhood than I was elsewhere and normally remained indoors at night for reasons connected with my health. I did not study, naturally, but the fact was difficult to prove. I was always writing something. I always had a half-dozen books spread in front of me. They never had anything to do with my lessons, but Pop would have been the first to argue the fact. The Prince, to his way of thinking, was a splendid and necessary adjunct to the study of civics. So also was there an indisputable relationship between Schopenhauer and sociology, Malthus and mathematics, and Lycurgus and commercial law.
It was easy, then, to meet Pop’s “study” requirements. But finding part-time work was something else again. Such employment was difficult to find in that day, and it paid very little when one did find it. It will seem incomprehensible to our contemporary youth, who sneer at offers of a five-dollar fee for mowing a lawn, but my wage as a soda jerk had been five dollars for an approximate thirty-hour week.
Pop was a firm believer in the adage that there is always work for those who want it, and when I found none in the time allotted me, he supplied it. He bought a ladder, brushes and a supply of paint and set me to work painting the house.
Now, while I showed little liking for useful employment, it does not necessarily follow that I liked useless work any better. And this was worse than useless. The house was only a few months old. It stood in need of paint much less than I. Disgusted and resentful, I did the job at the rate of a few inches a day, painting over and over the same places. The end effect, naturally, was that of a checker board, and the whole place had to be done over by professional painters.
We lived in an unincorporated suburb of Fort Worth. Like our neighbors—a meat packer, a steel magnate and another oil man—we had bought the lots surrounding ours, and our total land holdings were probably an acre. Pop now caused a barn to be built on this surplus land, and furnished it with two purebred Jerseys. And I, I was advised, was in the dairy business.
Since we were outside the city limits, our neighbors were without legal recourse. Mom, her frugal soul mollified by the prospect of free milk for the household, did no more than hint that Pop had become a hopeless lunatic. I protested, of course, bitterly, profanely and continuously. And knowing something of Pop you will know how little my protests accomplished.
I was to have full charge of the cows—“a free hand,” as Pop put it. The family would receive its milk free, the remainder would be distributed through a house-to-house milk route, which would be “no trouble at all” for me to establish. I would be allowed to keep any monies remaining—after the care and feeding of the cows had been paid for.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity for you,” said Pop. “You should be very grateful.”
I said something that sounded like “ship.”
Not that I gave a damn really, but there were no profits from the business. Jerseys are not the hardiest breed of cattle, and one visit from a veterinarian consumed the returns from a week’s sale of milk. Too, while customers were fairly plentiful in the beginning, they did not continue so. They seemed alarmed by a milkman who lost no opportunity to declare that he would be fried with onions sooner than touch a drop of that “blank blank triple-blank Jersey juice.”
I put up with the dairy until summer. Then, being told that I would have to keep the cows staked out during the day—move them around on a tether from one vacant lot to another—I went down to the railroad yards and caught a northbound freight.
I got as far as Kansas before I was apprehended and returned.
I waited a few days, then caught a freight southward.
I was brought back from Houston.
Pop sold the cows.
I was made to feel, of course, that I had behaved very badly. The family had been put to much expense and trouble, on my account, and the only return I would give them was insolence and shiftlessness.
I was bewildered by this attitude, and still am. Even more now than I was at the time.
I have three children, one a fifteen-year-old boy. I think they are pretty good kids, but honesty compels me to say that no one of them has ever made a bed, washed a dish or swept a floor without violent protest. Moreover, they commonly refer to their mother and me as “nuts” or “screwy” and they frequently suggest that we “turn blue” or “stop breathing” or otherwise end our patent misery.
You see, when these children were quite young we had an elderly man living with us. This man would not let the children lift a finger to any task, reproaching us scornfully and speaking darkly of “child slaves.” He would not let us reprove them, no matter what their misdeeds. He sternly ruled down the suggestions that treats should be withheld for bad behavior, and that allowances should be earned with household chores. Naturally, the kids got pretty spoiled.
Who was this man, you ask? Who was the man w
ho encouraged our children in insolence, who constantly bawled us out for failing to swallow his dictum that kids were kids and should only be addressed with words of praise?
Who?
Pop.
14
We spent a large part of that summer at the fashionable Spa, in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The family lounged about the place “taking the waters,” and I found employment as a plumber’s helper. I did not mind it too much.
Jack, the plumber I was assigned to, was a prize goldbrick, a man who saw no virtue in work whatsoever. “I can lay right down aside a job and go to sleep,” he would boast. He seldom referred to work as such, apparently hating even the sound of it. He spoke of it rather with a kind of glum obliqueness as “the Killer.”
He struck me as being an extremely wise and discerning man, and I treated him with due deference. Under his earnest tutelage, I became almost as expert at stalling and loafing as he.
One morning, the morning after a day we had killed in repairing a leaky toilet trap, the boss plumber confronted Jack with considerable severity.
He said that he had put up with just about all he was going to, and that he would be “forced to take steps” unless Jack improved his ways.
Jack blinked at him stolidly. Then he reached into an inside pocket, took out a notebook and withdrew a sheaf of clippings from it.
“Read those,” he commanded.
The boss read them, perforce. They were all obituaries of people who had died while working.
“ ’At’s what you’re up to,” Jack would growl, at the conclusion of each clipping. “You tryin’ to kill me, maybe?”
There was obviously but one acceptable answer to the question, and the boss made it over and over. In fact, as Jack glowered and glared at him, his huge hands fondling a thirty-six-inch Stillson, our employer began to anticipate the gloomy inquiry. He could not stand it if anything happened to us, he babbled. We must take better care of ourselves and avoid over-exertion in the summer heat.
Jack finally allowed him to escape to his office. Whereupon, of course, my colleague placed his hands on his hips, spread his feet, sucked in his lungs, threw back his head, opened his mouth to its widest, and addressed the ceiling with a bellowed promise to kill that dirty son-of-a-bitch.
Along with obituaries of people who had succumbed to “the Killer,” Jack collected French postcards, and many was the hour we whiled away with these in the restfully cool sanctuary of bathrooms, basements and cess-basins.
“Looky at them,” Jack would say. “Now, ain’t that somethin’?”
“Now, ain’t that somethin’!” I would respond.
“Betcha they’s plenty o’ people’d give a thousand dollars to see somethin’ like that.”
“Betcha they is plenty.”
Jack felt there was an unreasonable and foolish prejudice against these “art studies” and that a fortune awaited the person who could overcome it.
“Everyone likes ’em themselves,” he said, “but they’re afraid to let on. Now, if you could get everyone to lookin’ at ’em all at the same time, out in the open like—”
“Yeah,” I frowned wisely. “All at the same time. Out in the open like.”
Jack was much impressed with the manner in which I held up my end of our discussions. He said I had a way of getting right to the point of a thing, and that I did wonders toward clarifying his own thinking.
We were installing guard rails in a local food-processing plant when the solution to the French-postcard-prejudice problem came to him. Generous man that he was, and grateful for the many times I had gotten to the point of things, he promised me a full half of his potential millions.
“Yes, sir, Jimmie,” he said, nodding to a conveyor belt. “That’s the way to do it. We hit the nail right on the head.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, blankly. “That’s the way to do it.”
“Them packages.”
“Them packages.”
“We slip ’em in there.”
“We slip—Hey!” I said. “What are we waiting for?”
It seemed odd that this triumphant moment should have marked the beginning of the end of a beautiful friendship. But I am forced to report that it did. For now instead of plunging forthright into the cause, and forging ahead to victory and riches, Jack held back in ultra-caution. We had to do the thing right, he said. And they was plenty of things to be worked out before we could do it right.
As the days passed, and two items appeared in the ranks of things-to-be-worked-out for each one I expunged, I became impatient with Jack, then suspicious of him. I declared that he was deliberately delaying operations until I had returned to Texas where I would be unable to reap my just dues as co-owner of the company.
Jack was placatory for a time. But I seemed to detect a certain lack of candor in his manner—a damning sheepishness. So my indictments continued, and finally he was brought to respond with hideous slurs. He said I was an eager beaver, willing and willful fodder for “the Killer.” He would bet money, he said, that I liked to work; he had had his doubts about me from the beginning, and my vigorous manner and unseemly impetuosity had now revealed the awful truth to him.
We stopped speaking after that.
We did not speak again until the eve of my departure for Texas, when we shook hands diffidently and exchanged stiff farewells.
More than thirty years have passed since that stilly evening in a Wisconsin plumbing shop. Thirty years, in which I have become the noninventing inventor of such things as story-book toilet paper, cigarettes with built-in matches, neckties which assume the hue of the gravy dropped on them and a tongue-shaped sponge for licking stamps. So I can understand Jack’s attitude now. I can see that the more beautiful a dream, the more hopeless its realization, that we have but to grasp to destroy it.
All I could see at the time, however, was that a venal and crafty man had taken sorry advantage of an innocent and trusting boy. And for months after our return to Texas, I searched for proof of Jack’s perfidy.
Every container of food that came into the house was carefully dissected by me—cartons, labels, wrappers, tax stamps. I even took apart the lids of catsup bottles and cracked open the stoppers to sauce carafes. Since I declined to explain this activity, mumbling only of a million dollars and people who thought they could kid me, the family was more than ever convinced that I didn’t have a brain in my head.
Which, I imagine, was a pretty fair statement of the case.
15
The school I attended was not too far distant from Glen Garden Country Club, so it was only natural that I should gravitate there in search of week-end employment. I found it, as a caddie, and I liked it. At least, I liked it better than the other types of work I had thus far encountered. There was something about receiving pay from play which pleased me very much. And, as a Glen Garden caddie, one had the privilege of playing on the course at certain hours.
You were out at the club at the crack of dawn, you and Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, and all the other caddies who were ambitious to improve “their game.” There wasn’t a full set of clubs among the lot of you, but that didn’t matter. You formed into foursomes, according to your handicap. You strode down the dew-wet fairway, calling back and forth to one another, diagnosing each other’s drives and approaches as competently as any pro. Later in the day, when the jobs were being passed out, you would engage in profane and bloody struggle behind the caddie shack. But now all the niceties of etiquette were observed. All was politeness and consideration.
The game made you that way.
I thought it was pretty swell.
Well, though, caddies were paid sixty-five cents for eighteen holes, and there were more caddies than there were those who wanted them. On a good day, during a tournament for example, you might “get out” twice for a total of thirty-six holes. And if the tips broke right for you, you might make as much as a dollar seventy-five or two dollars. This was darned big money, of course, for a mere twelve or fifteen miles�
� trudging with a fifty-pound bag on your back. But it was seldom that one enjoyed such great good fortune.
On an average, you were lucky to get out for eighteen. Or maybe a round and nine. And there were days when you waited around from dawn to sunset without ever getting out. Obviously, as Pop pointed out, caddying was neither dependable nor lucrative.
He did not forbid me to continue with it. In fact, although my habit of ellipsis may have made him appear otherwise, Pop very seldom ordered me or forbade me to do anything. Pop believed in “reasoning a thing through,” in “looking at a matter from all sides.” There were times, as I have indicated, when I preferred being proved an ingrate, idiot and all-around horse’s ass to giving in. But these times were infrequent. I didn’t particularly mind being an i., i. and h.a., but the process of establishing my status was just too damned wearying to be endured.
Pop spoke amusingly of “grown men, chasing a little white ball around a cow pasture.” He looked down his nose as I boasted of “breaking forty.” He himself had broken forty at my age, he said, forty acres of virgin land with only a one-horse plough.
I was spending two days a week at the golf course. Two days that once gone were lost to me forever. Two a week, one hundred and four a year—three hundred and twelve in three years.
Pop grew more eloquent with every word, and I grew older. When, at last, I retired to the bathroom for a smoke, it was with bent back and trembling, rheumatic legs. And I had to study myself in the mirror for minutes before I was convinced that I still had teeth and did not have a long gray beard.
Naturally, I retired from Glen Garden.
As I mentioned awhile back, I had sold several short squibs to magazines. This activity was not encouraged, since my puny sales were taken as proof that I lacked talent and was frittering away my time, but neither was it actively discouraged. I had ceased to write, except occasionally and in the greatest secrecy, out of fear of publicity. I had taken dreadful and prolonged razzing as the result of my writing, and I wanted no more of it.