by Jim Thompson
“Well”—Donna pondered the problem seriously, her forehead puckering in thought—“well, no, I suppose not. Like Pa used to say, it’s everyone for himself in this world. But,” she added, her face brightening as though the sun had risen behind it, “I’m awfully glad you don’t feel that way. I’d hate to think where I’d be if you did.”
McBride said uncomfortably that the two situations were different. He’d had a duty toward her, she being a child and his wife’s relative.
“You did not! You just did it because you’re you, and you’d be just as kind and considerate with Mr. Lord or anyone else.” She hesitated, noticing the flicker of pain in his expression. “You—you do like Mr. Lord, don’t you? I remember your writing me that he’d been very friendly to you.”
“And he was! He has been!” Seeing the concern in her eyes, he hurried on hastily, making his voice firm and hearty. “Lord’s been very friendly to me. No one could have been pleasanter than he has. I can’t say that we see eye to eye on everything, but—”
“Yes, dear?” She had not noticed his use of the past tense. “But you do like him? You get along well together?”
“Now, why shouldn’t we, child? He’s a good man, and you know I’d never willfully offend anyone.”
“Yes, I know. I just thought that, perhaps—”
“I’ll tell you, Donna,” McBride said, uncomfortable with his indirect lies and yet forced to tell another. “I think I’d trust Lord with everything I have, even if I didn’t like him personally. If such a thing is possible, he’s actually too honest.”
“I’m so glad,” Donna murmured. “You need a good friend like that.”
It was the last time they talked about Tom Lord. McBride wanted to tell her the truth, but he did not know how to begin. He was too fearful of hurting her, or worrying her, or belittling himself in her eyes.
And, so, finally, before he could inform her that Lord was by no means his good friend, death came for Aaron McBride.
With the morning baths out of the way, and her fourth cup of coffee warming the flesh beneath her stiffly starched uniform, the nurse went down the corridor to 4-B (Surgical), hesitated before the threshold a moment as though to gather her strength, and cautiously opened the door. She was an older woman; gray-haired, crisp-voiced, authoritative of manner. She was used to fussy and demanding patients, and she knew just how to handle them. Yet she had delayed far longer than she should in calling on 4-B. For 4-B somehow made her nervous. The patient not only failed to grasp the idea that the nurses knew what was best for her, and that she should do as they told her, but clung to a directly opposite viewpoint.
Fortunately, the nurse saw with a sigh of relief, 4-B had fallen asleep. (After running everyone ragged for the past three days!) And cautiously crossing to the bed, she pulled back the patient’s sheet. The short surgical gown had crawled upward, and the shaved crotch and abdomen, with their cruel Caesarean wounds, were fully exposed. The nurse glanced at them quickly; assuring herself, without much conviction, that the bandage-change could well wait a while.
She was still hesitating over her decision when the patient made it for her. Firmly grasping the sheet with both hands and pulling it back over her body, she said, “That can wait. Right now, I want you to bring me a telephone.”
Oh, you do, do you? the nurse thought indignantly. Well, just try and get it, you little snip! And she said nervously, “Why, of course, dear. Did we sleep well last night? Have our bowels moved this morning?”
“Speaking for myself,” said the patient, “the answer is yes to both questions. Now, you will please bring me a telephone.”
“But, dear. You’ve already talked a number of times, and it hasn’t accomplished a thing. It just upsets you, and—”
“Perhaps. And I intend to do some upsetting myself, until something is accomplished.”
The nurse looked down at her helplessly, her sense of being put upon slowly giving way, fading before a wave of tenderness and sympathy. Why, she was just a child really, this girl with the wide-set, wisely innocent eyes, the small, too-firm mouth. She might act like a woman, have more than her fair share of lush womanhood’s characteristics, but she was still a child, in years and in experience. And in her direct approach, her complete unsubtlety of manner, the child in her was constantly apparent.
“You poor, poor dear, you,” the nurse said warmly. “I want you to know how sorry we all feel for you.”
“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I want a telephone.”
“To lose your husband and your baby in less than a week—a girl of your age! But…but we must accept these things, don’t you see, dear? We must reconcile ourselves to them. If God, in His wisdom, sees fit to take our loved ones—”
“God in His wisdom did not see fit to do anything of the kind. Someone else is responsible, and I intend to find out who. And when I do, that someone is going to be sorry. So,” said Donna McBride, half-rising in the bed, “either you get me a telephone right this minute, or by golly I’ll get one myself!”
The nurse argued no more. A little wildly, moving at her fastest clip in years, she ran to get a telephone.
6
The house nestled behind a stand of blackjack on the edge of Big Sands, a neat blue-and-white cottage, with a lean-to at the rear for a garage, and a white picket fence surrounding its ample grounds. Drought-resistant ivy vines clustered around the windows and spread spiny fingers over roof and eaves. A crumbling sandstone walk, its interstices laced with hardy Bermuda grass, stretched from the gate to the front stoop.
Originally a parsonage, it had remained miraculously untouched by a cyclone which had lifted the adjoining church intact and scattered the pieces over a hundred miles of wasteland. The church was rebuilt in a closer-in and (its congregation hoped) a luckier location. The parsonage remained where it was; unoccupied, shied away from by potential tenants, lest they attract the fate which the original residents had escaped.
With the coming of the oil boom, of course, and the consequent housing shortage, the place was readily rented. But the tenants came and went, moving in and out after a few weeks or a few months—moving farther out as the fields expanded, or moving on to oilier pastures. And in the opinion of the bank—the owner of the house—they were more trouble than they were worth. The constant necessity to clean up and refurbish for incoming tenants, to replace broken windows and rehang unhinged doors and repair the other wreckage which the oil-field crowd invariably left behind them, practically absorbed the rent they paid, inflated as the rent was. A permanent tenant was needed—someone who, being permanent, would be concerned with keeping the place livable.
Joyce Lakewood became that tenant.
Her landlord, naturally, did nothing so discourteous as to inquire into her source of income. Perhaps, in such uncivilized areas as Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, the question—with all its ugly implications—would have been raised, but it was not done out here. The lady was obviously a responsible person. What her business was, and her banker-landlord could pretty well guess what it was, was her own business.
Every town needed at least one “fancy lady.” The need was as obvious as it was for gambling joints and bootleggers. It was the obligation of the law not to prohibit them, but to see that they were properly regulated.
So Joyce settled down in Big Sands in the one-time parsonage of the church, and except for the bluest-nosed of its populace—fanatics, in the town’s opinion—no one objected. The law, in the person of Tom Lord, did visit her. But this was merely routine. It was only doing what was expected of it, fulfilling its unwritten obligations.
Lord was elaborately polite. But he was still a cop; and cops, to her way of thinking, were all alike. They either had their hand extended or drawn back, ready to slug you or take something from you. And a lot of times they did both.
So Joyce too was polite, but barely so; the minimum necessary to skirt trouble. She answered his questions promptly, but coldly.
No, s
he had never been convicted or even arrested on a felony charge. For misdemeanors, yes: vagrancy, consorting, soliciting, and the like. But nothing serious. Yes, she was aware that her record could be checked. He was welcome to check hers; in fact, it would suit her just fine if he did.
Yes, her health was excellent, and she intended to keep it that way. A girl should do that for her own sake, even if she didn’t have any respect for other people.
He was finished very quickly; with the formal questioning, that is. But still he lingered, studying her, his eyes shrewdly humorous beneath their delicately arched brows.
“Reckon you didn’t like this much,” he said. “Don’t exactly cotton to it myself.”
“It’s all right. I’m used to it.”
“Yeah? Don’t see how you hardly could be.” He pushed himself up from his chair, announced that he’d better be getting along. “You suppose I could see you again some time?”
“What’s to stop you?” Joyce shrugged. “Any time, on the house.”
Lord looked at her sharply. Then, with a curtly courteous nod, he left the house.
She did not see where she had blundered, but she knew that she had, and she knew that getting a cop down on you was very bad business. Thus, after an apprehensive three days, she was eagerly pleasant when he called her.
“Why, of course, it’s all right, Mr. Lord. It’s not short notice, at all. I’ll be expecting you, so come right on in.”
Lord said maybe it would be better if she just came right on out. “Be dinnertime, after we get down a drink or two, and I’m kinda hungry.”
“Din— But I thought that—that—” She got a grip on herself. “All right, Mr. Lord. I think I’m kinda hungry myself.”
She supposed that, after dinner and drinks in the town’s spanking new hotel, she would shortly find herself in one of its bedrooms. But Lord merely took her for a drive in the country and then returned her to her doorstep, circumspectly declining her invitation to come inside.
“Kinda late, you know, an’ people talk a lot in a small town.”
He tipped his hat and departed, leaving her completely bewildered and warmed by an emotion she had never felt before. In the ensuing weeks, they were together almost every day.
He cooked dinner for them at his house, a very good dinner eaten to the accompaniment of hi-fi operatic recordings. They had picnics in the country. They went on long drives to the town’s far-flung neighbors. Always, whatever they did or wherever they went, Lord was the essence of correctness. After a time, he did kiss her and embrace her, but never in the manner she was accustomed to. There was as much giving in it, as taking. He was sharing something, not brutally depriving her.
Once, falteringly, she inquired into his nominal aloofness: was it, perhaps, rooted in some organic difficulty? Lord laughed tenderly at the question.
“Nothin’ like it, honey. Maybe I’ll prove it to you before long. Meanwhile, well, I figure that somethin’ you get for nothin’, or next to nothin’, is just about worth that. Aside from that…”
“Yes, Tom?”
“I figured you needed somethin’—somethin’ you’d never had before, or had too far back to remember—and I figured it would do me good to give it to you.”
When, at last, there was the ultimate coming together between them, it was a completely new experience for her. It was as though it was the first time, instead of one of a near-endless series. She felt like a bride; like a person died and brought to life again.
And strangely, once the immediate ecstasy was over, she was unhappy. Dissatisfied. What he had given her he could as readily take away. And she could not allow that; the thought of it was unbearable.
She had to be sure of him, to have him bound to her; and if that could be done—and, of course, it could not, really—there was only one way to do it.
She began to hint at it. Lord was impervious to the hints. She asked for it openly, and he blandly evaded the request. She begged, nagged, and threatened. Lord’s attitude was correspondingly sympathetic, sarcastic, and blunt.
She tried to remember this: that Lord invariably reacted, in kind, to her actions. He would treat her as well—or better—as he was treated, and he would hit back as hard—or harder—as he was hit. But wanting what she did, wanting it so badly, she could not be fair to him. Not until tonight, this night of McBride’s death, could she admit that she had probably pressed her quest too hard.
“Tom,” she said, as he stopped the car in front of her house. “I didn’t mean what you thought I did—what it sounded like. I’d never do anything to hurt you.”
“Well, that’s fine,” Lord said. “Reckon we both got nothin’ to worry about then.”
“Aren’t you—won’t you come in? It won’t be any trouble at all to fix dinner for you.”
“Reckon not,” Lord said. “Ain’t really hungry right now.”
She looked at him anxiously, timidly laid a hand on his arm. “Then, come back later. Please, Tom! I—I don’t want you to feel like you must. I can’t stand it, darling! Please promise me you’ll come back.”
Lord fumbled at his shirt pocket, frowned, and drummed nervously on the steering wheel. He drawled that if he didn’t get a see-gar pretty soon, he was goin’ plumb out of his mind.
“Let me get you one, Tom! There’s almost a whole box in the house. I—”
She reached for the car door eagerly. He gestured, restraining her.
“Somethin’ I got to do,” he said. “Don’t know just how long it’ll take, and I might not be real good company afterward. But if you really want me to come back…”
“Oh, I do, darling! I do!” She kissed him warmly, again moved toward the door. “And, Tom, honey, would you put your car around in back, please? I imagine you’ll be staying quite a while—I hope you will, anyway—and it doesn’t look very nice to leave it parked out in front.”
Lord agreed, sober-faced, silently laughing with wry wonderment. Then he helped her out of the car and drove off.
Originally, the town had consisted of little more than a courthouse, standing at the end of a dusty main street whose largest building was a false-front store—groceries & meats, ladies’ & gents’ ready-to-wear, hardware, furniture and undertaking—and whose one place of amusement was a pool hall. Now, with the oil boom, Main Street was almost a mile long, and it boasted a fourteen-story hotel and a handsome sandstone-and-granite bank building. But in most respects the basic character of the town remained peculiarly unchanged. Only the oldest structures, the shabby nucleus of the place, seemed to have any permanence. There was a wraithlike quality about the others, the hastily thrown-up shops, honky-tonks, gin mills, and cothouses—yes, even the magnificient hotel and bank—an air of restless hovering, as though they had been brought here by the wind and must inevitably move on with it.
Sadly, although why he was sad about it he wasn’t sure, Lord pictured the town as it once was and knew, with prophetic certainty, that it would be that way again. In a few years; a few decades, at most. It was only a matter of time until the magic of oil would lose its potency, and the town would be as it had been. Just another wide place in the road. Just big sands.
Years ago, over in the wilderness of Iraan-way, he had waded a shallow place in the Pecos, and plowing through the tangled brush and trees on the other side, had come into a city. Its central square was paved. Its business structures were solidly and expensively built. In the tiled lobby of the motion picture theater stood a beautifully sculpted fountain—dry now, nested with scorpions and centipedes. For there was no one in the city. There had been no one there for so long that few people in Iraan knew of its existence and none could even remember its name.
Lord drove slowly down the Main Street of Big Sands, expertly weaving a path between the high-booted men with their mud-daubed hats and the huge twenty-two-wheel trucks. He drove slowly, his manner idly deceptive, eyes and ears alerted for trouble in the raucous chaos of swarming crowds, coin pianos, and tinkling glassware.
/> The city and county fathers had never been of a mind to banish the boom’s illegal elements; only to control them. For “everyone,” as was generally known, liked to drink, just as “everyone” liked to gamble and whore around a little. And as long as a man hurt no one but himself, what difference did it make?
Tom Lord guessed that it made no difference to him, if it made none to others. He guessed it was every man’s right to make a damned fool of himself. “Sic transit gloria,” he thought, parking his car at the courthouse curb. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow…”
He got out of the car and entered the courthouse.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor and went down the shadowy, linoleum-floored corridor to the sheriff’s office. There was a light on there. He paused on the threshold, pushing the Stetson back from his forehead.
“Somethin’ I got to tell you,” he said. “Didn’t know whether I should at first, but I guess I better. I just killed a fella…”
7
Sheriff Dave Bradley had changed radically since the pre-boom days of Big Sands. Or, to be fair, time and circumstances had changed him. Insofar as he was conscious of change, he disliked it and fought against it. He hated the increased responsibilities of his job, the necessity to be an important executive instead of a simple lawman. He hated the advancing age which made him curt without cause, peevish and suspicious without reason. Yet he could not hold back the years, and he would not retire from office.
Sometimes he would hint at retiring, suggest that he was too old for the job and that a younger man was needed. But his friends and subordinates knew better than to agree with him. Or, if they didn’t, they soon learned. He wanted assurance, not agreement. He wanted to be told that he wasn’t old, that he was more than capable of his duties. So that was what he was told.