by Jim Thompson
She looked at me. I looked at her. She blinked absently and shook her head. She took off her glasses and blew on them.
I eased my hands back out of the window to the brick ledge outside. Suspended in an aching, shaking arc, holding on with my toes and fingertips, I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t go on. I could, of course, but the old gal might drop dead. She undoubtedly would scream her head off. And how could anyone explain a deal like this—crawling through the tenth-floor window of a women’s john?
I think I have never heard a sweeter sound than the flushing of that toilet. Unless, that is, it was the click of the hall door as it closed behind her. She had gone without coming near the window. Apparently, she distrusted her eyes as much as she seemed to.
I gripped the inside of the window again, and pulled myself up on the ledge. But I couldn’t go on with my plan. The woman was probably working in the corridor, or I might run into someone else. Anyway, I just didn’t have the heart for it.
I repeated my fall-over, returning to the room I had come from. I sank down at the table and killed the rest of the bottle.
I was seated there, half-dozing, when the professor arrived.
“We are all feenished, eh? We are…Mis-ter Tomseen, where is…You have wreet-en noth-eeng!”
“Not a damned noth-eeng,” I nodded surlily. “What’d you expect?”
“What deed I”—he choked. His eyes began to bulge. “Mister Tom-seen, why do you theenk I—what do you think this ees?” He waved his arms wildly, the gesture encompassing the other room and the abbreviated legend on the door. “What, Mis-ter Tom-seen? You cannot read, no? You have no eyes, yes?”
He glared. I stared. And, slowly, the terrible truth dawned on me. A friend of his…A governmental agency…And what kind of agency would a friend of his—?
“Oh,” I groaned. “Oh, no!”
“Yes, Mis-ter Tom-seen. Oh, yes. A babe in arms, no. A drooling idiot, no. They could not do it, too smart they would be. But you—you—!”
Me, I had done it. I had failed a pathology examination in a pathology library!
…Now, back to the pipeline.
28
Stretched out along the big ditch, and moving farther and farther into the wilderness as the line progressed, were several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment and supplies. There were two ditches, twenty electric generators, a dragline, trucks and tractors. There were gasoline and oil dumps, bins of tires, tubes, spark plugs and a hundred other accessories.
It was my job to guard this stuff.
All night long I tramped up and down the ditch, walking the line above the Pecos at one point. I carried a weather-proof gasoline lantern and a repeating rifle. My instructions were literally to “shoot any son-of-a-bitch that shows his face and ask questions afterward.”
I rather liked the job in the beginning. The days were still long, and even at midnight there was a friendly semi-twilight over the prairie. By standing on top of a ditching machine, I could see from one end of the job to the other. Very little walking was necessary, and when I did walk it was with comparative safety. I could see and avoid the rattlesnakes, the tarantulas and the great twelve-inch centipedes who considered this area their own private domain.
These things had been bad enough before the coming of the pipeline, but with its advent they seemed to have gotten ten times worse. They weren’t any more numerous, of course, but they were considerably more active. The reverberations of the machinery shook them in their subterranean apartments. Dynamite blasted out great sections of their cities. The ditches scooped them up—there was one nest of a hundred and sixty rattlesnakes—and hurled them out upon the prairie.
Naturally, they didn’t like this a damned bit.
The more foolhardy and determined of them gave battle on the spot: this was their home and they did not intend to be dispossessed. The majority, however, preferred to bide their time. They vanished among the sage and rock, waiting until the earth-shaking machinery stilled its clatter and the sun went down. Then, they came swarming back to seek their former dwelling places and to scare hell out of me.
Having no place to hibernate, they became increasingly active and aggravated as the days shortened and cold weather set in. They crept under the canvas jackets of the generators. They hid in the recesses of machinery. They moved endlessly up and down the line, creeping into the joints of pipe, crawling under the curves of the gasoline drums. I was safe from them nowhere, neither on the ground nor up on the machinery.
I had thought I was completely rid of the d.t.’s—the illusion of crawling things. Now, they came back and with increased frequency and intensity.
I fought them in the only way I knew how. I would force myself to walk straight toward the spiders and snakes that loomed in the light of my lantern. Sometimes they would melt away under my boots, and sometimes they would not. Instead of vanishing, a diamond-shaped head would lash out venomously, or a ball of centipedes would explode and swarm up my legs. I would drop my lantern and run, brushing hysterically at myself—run and run, shrieking, until I could run no more.
I gave up fighting. Too often an apparent illusion became reality. I tried to get transferred to a day job, but it was no soap. They could get no one to take my place.
Every morning I told myself that I couldn’t take another night. But every night I came back. I had waited all summer for the line to start, and it seemed a shame to quit now. Also, I had invested heavily in winter clothes which would be of no use to me on another job.
So I hung on, night after night, and every night was more agonizing and fearful than its predecessor.
A tarantula bite is not fatal, I understand, only painful. But these evil-looking spiders terrified me more than any of their nightmarish colleagues. They grew to the size of soup plates, and they were furred like rabbits. They could leap like rabbits, too, a dozen feet or more. And they invariably would leap at anything that showed up in the darkness—the lantern, my face and hands.
I never saw one of them alone. There was always at least a pair of them, marching side by side, and sometimes there were squadrons. I lived in mortal fear of them.
Late one night, I was walking the line across the Pecos, moving cautiously to preserve my balance on the snow-covered pipe. I had reached a point about mid-stream when, looking ahead, I saw a double file of pie-shaped blots—a squadron of tarantulas marching straight toward me.
I knew it was an illusion, but—but nothing. If a thing exists in a man’s mind, it exists. My heart began to pound wildly. I choked up with terror. I turned around and started to head back toward the other bank. There, marching toward me from that direction, was another tarantula squadron.
I let out a wild yell and plunged from the pipe.
I fell thirty feet, smashing through the ice-sheathed river and going all the way to the bottom. Fortunately, it was not wide at that point, and despite my heavy boots and layers of thick clothing I managed to get to shore.
Soaked to the skin, I scrambled up the bank and cranked up a generator. I jumped the spark on a plug, got a fire started and rigged up a makeshift shelter with canvas. I huddled in it, hugging the fire while my clothes dried, shivering, miserable, but thoughtful.
I had gotten over my illness. Now, and for some time, I had been going downhill again. No job was worth that, and certainly this one was not.
It was time to pull out—to get completely out of the oil fields. My destiny wasn’t here. I had never intended it to be. The West had been good to me, but it had done all it could. Now, it was my turn to do something, and something much better than what I had been doing.
My clothes dried. Dawn spread over the prairie. I kicked out the fire, walked into camp and quit.
29
I returned to Fort Worth in the winter of 1928. Except for the fact that Maxine had married, everything was about the same or more so. Pop was earning practically nothing. T
he family was barely skimping by.
I applied for a job at the hotel and was turned down flatly. The assistant managers and bell captains I had known were gone. The A.M. I applied to liked neither my appearance or my record.
“Nothing for you,” he said curtly. “You’ve been in too much trouble around here. Anyway, you’re too big to be hopping bells. A fellow as big as you ought to be out heaving coal.”
“It doesn’t have to be bell-hopping,” I said, my face turning red. “I can hold almost any job around a hotel.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll tell you something,” I said. “I think you’re too little to be an assistant manager.”
He grinned, coldly, and walked away.
I thought he had acted pretty onery, but I couldn’t greatly disagree with him on the point of my size. When I first went to work at the hotel, I had been well under six feet. Now, I was six feet four. While I was still underweight my broadened shoulders gave me the appearance of massiveness.
I was pretty self-conscious about my size. There were few other hotel jobs worth having, but I hadn’t really wanted to hop bells. I was too big. Being a menial contrasted unpleasantly with the rugged independence of my recent years.
But I had to have a job, and quickly. So, unable to find anything else, I went to work in a chain grocery.
Theoretically, the work week was a mere seventy-four hours. Seven to seven on weekdays and seven to nine on Saturdays. The actuality, however, was something else. One had to arrive at six during the week to have the store ready for its seven o’clock opening, and at least another hour was spent in cleaning up and closing up at night. On Saturday, the biggest business day, one came to work at five and was lucky to get away in the early hours of Sunday morning. Sunday, or what remained of it, was usually spent at sales meetings, refurbishing the store or in taking inventory.
My salary was eighteen dollars a week.
I learned a very valuable lesson from this outfit, i.e., the longer the application blank, the worse the employer. This company insisted on knowing everything even remotely concerned with a prospective employee—everything from the size of his shoes to the religious and political preferences of his relatives. In fact, the only thing it was not interested in was how he could exist on a virtually nonexistent wage.
Although it was obviously a losing proposition, I held onto the job, looking around for another whenever I had the opportunity. This finally led me to a meeting with Allie Ivers, who, since I knew what his attitude would be, I had hitherto avoided.
Allie had been permanently discharged from the hotel for dropping the baggage of a non-tipping guest out of a window. He was now the manager of a wildcat taxi service, a calling well suited to his superb gall and larcenous nature.
“You,” he exclaimed, staring at me incredulously. “You are putting in a hundred hours a week for a lousy eighteen bucks? I’m ashamed of you, Jimmie! You can go back to the hotel.”
“They won’t take me,” I said. “I’m too big.”
“Keep on working in that store,” said Allie, grimly, “and you won’t be. They’ll have you down in worse shape than you were before you went west. You can’t feed yourself, let alone your family. You’re about to be kicked out of your house and you all need clothes and medical attention. I’ll tell you what’s too big about you—your head. You think you’re too good to hop bells.”
“That’s not it,” I mumbled, although it was just about it. “Maybe I could have gone back, but I sort of told this assistant manager off.”
“So what? You know how hotel men are. He probably laughed about it when he got off by himself. Anyway, there’s two assistant managers and one sticks strictly out of the other’s business.”
“Well,” I said, evasively, “how would I go about it?”
“How would you go about it,” Allie mocked. “You stand there acting dumb and asking me. Get out of here! Get over there and get you a job.”
I got out. I went over to the hotel.
I talked with the coffee shop manager and the maître d’. I talked with a room clerk, a couple of the auditors, the chief engineer and the steward. I knew all these people, and had done favors for them. They all agreed to put in a strong word in my behalf.
Now, an assistant manager is held responsible for anything that goes wrong on his shift, and a great many things can go wrong if his key personnel so choose. Insofar as his position will permit, he must be obliging with them.
It was Sunday afternoon when I talked with my various friends at the hotel. Having been unable to install a telephone at home, I waited around the lobby for the results.
The assistant manager on duty was the same one who had turned me down. He saw me and started toward me several times. Each time his phone rang, calling him back to his desk. After the last call, he motioned for me to come to him.
“Been studying you,” he said, his mouth twitching. “You don’t look nearly as big to me as you did.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “You look a lot bigger to me.”
He grinned good naturedly. “Well, like to come to work tonight?”
“Very much. If I can get a uniform altered to fit me.”
“You will,” he said firmly.
And I did.
Out of the great mass of stuff I had written in the oil fields, I had placed two short pieces with a locally published magazine of regional literature. The rate of pay had been low, but, because of its high standards, it was considered an honor to appear in it. I responded promptly when the editor, having learned that I was back in town, asked me to drop in for a visit.
I spent the larger part of an afternoon with him. He was a kindly man but a frank one, and I was able to accept his estimate of me without resentment. I had talent, he said, and also that dogged persistence without which talent was worthless. But that was just about all I had. Whatever my skill, I was writing from motives which were basically childish. I was trying to “get even” with people—to show ’em I wasn’t so dumb as they thought I was, and to make them sorry for the many slights, real and fancied, which I had suffered. I lived too much inside myself. I needed to write more—much more—of what I saw, and less—much less—of what I wanted to see.
I was not well read, as I had thought myself. Here again I had tried to “show people,” to prove that I knew more than they did. I had read something of everything but never everything of anything.
The editor thought it would help me immeasurably to go to college. College would bring some order to my chaotic efforts at self-improvement. It would help to bring me out of myself. I would be placed in an environment where writing was not looked upon as effete or slightly ridiculous.
He, himself, was an alumnus of the University of Nebraska. If I could see my way clear to enrolling, it was just possible that he could arrange a student loan for the tuition, or, perhaps, a small scholarship.
I thanked him and promised to think about it, but the project was obviously impossible. Financially speaking, we were just beginning to see daylight at home. And summer was coming on—always a bad time for hotel business.
I told Mom and Pop about it, and they insisted that I should go, by any and all means. Pop could find some way of maintaining himself. Mom and Freddie could stay with my grandparents who, as you will remember, lived in a small Nebraska town. But I just couldn’t see it. All we had was each other, and I would be almost twenty-three years old when the fall school term started. It was crazy to think about it.
But, I did think about it, of course. And very unwisely I mentioned it to Allie.
“Hmmm,” he mused. “I think you should go, Jimmie. How much dough would you have to have?”
“A lot more than I’ll ever get,” I said.
“Maybe not. I think I may be able to think of something.”
I met him the following night, and he had indeed thought of something. In fact, he had done a great deal more than think about it. I listened to his proposition, and told him flatly to go to hell
.
“But what’s wrong with it?” he inquired, putting on an air of great puzzlement. “There’s big dough in it, and you don’t have to invest any. What’s wrong with selling whiskey?”
“It’s against the law, for one thing!”
“So what? It won’t be very long. Everyone knows prohibition’s on the way out. Hell, you can clean up, Jimmie! You can get away with it where no one else could. You stand in good all over the hotel. The management trusts you, and—”
“They’re going to keep right on trusting me, too!”
“You can wholesale—push the stuff with all the service employees. We’ll see that they don’t buy from anyone else, and you can hold the price up.”
“Who’s we?”
“Some of Al’s boys. They’re taking over here on the booze.”
“Al? You mean—?”
“Uh-huh. That one. Incidentally, Jimmy, I don’t think they’ll like it if you turn this proposition down.”
“They can lump it then,” I scoffed. “Al Capone’s boys! You mean Allie’s, don’t you? Get someone else to hustle your booze.”
“It’s not mine, honest.” Allie held up a hand. “I’m not making a nickel on it. I was just trying to help you out.”
“You’d better go back to stealing baggage,” I said. “You’re not good at lying any more.”
I went on to work.
About one o’clock that morning, Mom called me. She sounded frightened.
“J-Jimmie. Two men—t-two men in a big Cadillac were j-just here.”
“Yes?” I said. “What’s the matter? What did they want, Mom?”
“I t-tried to stop them, but they came right on in. They left four cases of whiskey for you.”
30
I met them the next morning, or, rather, they met me as I came out of the hotel’s service entrance. Soft-spoken, modishly dressed young men, not a great deal older than I, they were not at all like the creatures which my study of gangster movies had led me to expect. We had breakfast together, and I felt encouraged to explain why I could not sell whiskey for them.