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Crime Stories Page 130

by Dashiell Hammett


  Doubt was gone from the little man; in the quarter-light he seemed to have grown larger, taller, and his voice rang.

  Morphy, perhaps alone of the audience not for the moment caught in the little man’s eloquence, laughed briefly.

  “An’ what started all this hullabaloo?” he asked.

  “I done a thing,” Feach said, and stopped. He cleared his throat sharply and tried again. “I done a thi—” The muscles of throat and mouth went on speaking, but no sound came out. “What difference does that make?” He no longer bulked large in the dimness, and his voice was a whine. “Ain’t it enough that I’ve had Him hounding me year after year? Ain’t it enough that everywhere I go He—”

  Morphy laughed again.

  “A hell of a Jonah you are!”

  “All right!” Feach gave back. “You wait and see before you get off any of your cheap jokes. You can laugh, but it ain’t ever’ man that’s stood up to God and wouldn’t give in. It ain’t ever’ man that’s had Him for a enemy.”

  Morphy turned to the others and laughed, and they laughed with him. The laughter lacked honesty at first, but soon became natural; and though there were some who did not laugh, they were too few to rob the laughter of apparent unanimity.

  Feach shut both eyes and hurled himself down on Morphy. The big man shook him off, tried to push him away, could not, and struck him with an open hand. Sandwich picked Feach up and led him in to his bed. Feach was sobbing—dry, old-man sobs.

  “They won’t listen to me, Sandwich, but I know what I’m talking about. Something’s coming here—you wait and see. God wouldn’t forget me after all these years He’s been riding me.”

  “Course not,” the freckled ex-sailor soothed him. “Everything’ll come out all right. You’re right.”

  After Sandwich had left him Feach lay still on his bunk, chewing his fingers and staring at the rough board ceiling with eyes that were perplexed in a blank, hurt way. As he bit his fingers he muttered to himself. “It’s something to have stood up to Him and not give in . . . He wouldn’t forget. chances are it’s something new. He wouldn’t!”

  Presently fear pushed the perplexity out of his eyes, and then fear was displaced by a look of unutterable anguish. He stopped muttering and sat up, fingers twisting his mouth into a clown’s grimace, breath hissing through his nostrils. Through the open door came the noise of stirring men: they were coming in to bed.

  Feach got to his feet, darted through the door, past the men who were converging upon it, and ran up along the river—a shambling, jerky running. He ran until one foot slipped into a hole and threw him headlong. He scrambled up immediately and went on. But he walked now, frequently stumbling.

  To his right the river lay dark and oily under the few stars. Three times he stopped to yell at the river.

  “No! No! They’re wrong! There’s got to be a God! There’s got to!”

  Half an hour was between the first time he yelled and the second, and a longer interval between the second and third; but each time there was a ritualistic sameness to word and tone. After the third time the anguish began to leave his eyes.

  He stopped walking and sat on the butt of a fallen pine. The air was heavy with the night-odor of damp earth and mold, and still where he sat, though a breeze shuffled the tops of the trees. Something that might have been a rabbit padded across the pine-needle matting behind him; a suggestion of frogs’ croaking was too far away to be a definite sound. Lightning- bugs moved sluggishly among the trees: yellow lights shining through moth-holes in an irregularly swaying curtain.

  Feach sat on the fallen pine for a long while, only moving to slap at an occasional pinging mosquito. When he stood up and turned back toward the canning-factory he moved swiftly and without stumbling.

  He passed the dark American bunk- house, went through the unused husking-shed, and came to the hole that the hoisting engine had made in the store-house wall. The boards that had been nailed over the gap were loosely nailed. He pulled two of them off, went through the opening, and came out carrying a large gasoline can.

  Walking downstream, he kept within a step of the water’s edge until to his right a row of small structures showed against the sky like evenly spaced black teeth in a dark mouth. He carried his can up the slope toward them, panting a little, wood-debris crackling under his feet, the gasoline sloshing softly in its can.

  He set the can down at the edge of the pines that ringed the Polacks’ huts, and stuffed his lower lip with snuff. No light came from the double row of buildings, and there was no sound except the rustling of tree and bush in the growing breeze from southward.

  Feach left the pines for the rear of the southernmost hut. He tilted the can against the wall, and moved to the next hut. Wherever he paused the can gurgled and grew lighter. At the sixth building he emptied the can. He put it down, scratched his head, shrugged, and went back to the first hut.

  He took a long match from his vest pocket and scraped it down the back of his leg.

  There was no flame. He felt his trousers; they were damp with dew. He threw the match away, took out another, and ignited it on the inside of his vest. Squatting, he held the match against the frayed end of a wall-board that was black with gasoline. The splintered wood took fire. He stepped back and looked at it with approval. The match in his hand was consumed to half its length; he used the rest of it starting a tiny flame on a corner of the tar-paper roofing just above his head.

  He ran to the next hut, struck another match, and dropped it on a little pile of sticks and paper that leaned against the rear wall. The pile became a flame that bent in to the wall.

  The first hut had become a blazing thing, flames twisting above as if it were spinning under them. The seething of the fire was silenced by a scream that became the whole audible world. When that scream died there were others. The street between the two rows of buildings filled with red-lighted figures: naked figures, underclothed figures—men, women and children—who achieved clamor. A throaty male voice sounded above the others. It was inarticulate, but there was purpose in it.

  Feach turned and ran toward the pines. Pursuing bare feet made no sound. Feach turned his head to see if he were being hunted, and stumbled. A dark athlete in red flannel drawers pulled the little man to his feet and accused him in words that had no meaning to Feach. He snarled at his captor, and was knocked down by a fist used club-wise against the top of his head.

  Men from the American bunk-house appeared as Feach was being jerked to his feet again. Morphy was one of them.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he asked the athlete in red drawers.

  “These one, ‘e sit fire to ‘ouses. I see ‘im!”

  Morphy gaped at Feach. “You did that?”

  The little man looked past Morphy to where two rows of huts were a monster candelabra among the pines, and as he looked his chest arched out and the old sparkling ambiguity came back to his eyes.

  “Maybe I done it,” he said complacently, “and maybe Something used me to do it. Anyways, if it hadn’t been that it’d maybe been something worse.”

  THE CURE

  I

  “So I shot him.”

  Rainey screwed himself around in his chair to see us better, or to let us see him better.

  I was sitting next to him, a little to the rear. Above the porch rail his profile stood out sharp against the twilight gray of the lake, though there was nothing sharp about the profile itself. It had been smoothly rounded by thirty-five or more years of comfortable living.

  “I wouldn’t have a dog that was cat-shy,” he wound up. “What good is a dog, or a man, that’s afraid of things?”

  Metcalf, the engineer, agreed with his employer. I had never seen him do anything else in the three days I had known them.

  “Quite right,” he said. “Useless.”

  Rainey twisted his face farther around to look at me. His blue eyes—large and clear—had the confident glow they always wore when he talked. You only had to have him look at you onc
e like that to understand why he was a successful promoter.

  I nodded. I didn’t agree with him, but I was there to put him in jail if I could, not to pick arguments with him. And with Rainey you had to agree or argue: he always treated his audience like a board of directors to be won over one by one to some project.

  Satisfied with my nod, he turned to the fourth man on the porch, Linn, who sat on the other side of Metcalf. That—saving Linn till last—was another promoter’s trick. Rainey never forgot his profession. He had turned first to Metcalf, his personal yes-man, then to me, who had managed to agree with him in most things during the three days of our acquaintance, and then, with our votes in his pocket, had turned to the one of whose agreement he was least sure.

  Linn didn’t say anything. He was staring thoughtfully down the lake, down where Rainey’s and Metcalf’s dam was not hidden by the dusk.

  Rainey leaned toward him, trying to catch his eye, didn’t succeed, settled back in his chair again, and asked: “Well, am I right, Linn?”

  Linn cleared his throat and, still staring down at the dusky lake, replied: “I don’t know.” He said it as if he really did not know. “It’s possible, isn’t it, that a dog might run from a cat and not from a wolf? There are things—”

  “Nonsense.” Rainey’s easy tone made his words sound more polite than they really were. “Either you’re afraid or you’re not. You can’t pin fear on one form of danger. The things to be afraid of are pain and death. Either you have the nerve to do things that might bring them, or you haven’t. That’s all there is to it. Eh, Metcalf?”

  “Quite right, I think,” the engineer agreed without much interest. He was a lank sandy-haired man, hard and sour of face, who seldom spoke unless spoken to, and then, even when coming up with a yes for his employer, made no attempt to hide his indifference.

  Linn turned his face slowly from the lake to the promoter. His face seemed a little pale under its sunburn, and a little tense, as if the conversation was of importance to him. Light from one of the hotel windows behind us made shiny ripples on his smooth black hair when he shook his head.

  “You may be right,” he said hesitantly, “about pain and death being the things men fear, but in one form they might frighten him beyond reason, while in other forms he might be able to face them quite calmly. Fear isn’t a reasonable thing, you know.”

  Rainey clapped a hand on his thick knee and thrust his ruddy face—full-blooded and round-muscled under curly light hair—forward.

  “I’ve heard of that,” he said, “but I’ve never seen it. I’ve banged around some. The men I’ve seen that were afraid of one thing were afraid of others. All of them.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Linn insisted quietly.

  “Yes?” Rainey’s deep-chested voice was openly skeptical. “Can you give us a specific instance?”

  “I could.”

  “Well?”

  “Myself,” Linn replied, so low that the word was barely audible.

  Rainey’s voice was loud and challenging: “And you’re afraid of—?”

  Linn shivered slightly and turned his face from the promoter to nod simply at the dark water in front of us.

  “Of that,” he said, still speaking very low. “Of water.”

  Rainey made a little puffing noise with his mouth and looked with proprietary contemptuousness at the broad lake that had been little more than a pond before the organization of the Martin E. Rainey Development Company. Then he smiled with little less contemptuousness at the man who was afraid of the thing he had built.

  “You mean,” he suggested, “that being on the water makes you a little nervous, perhaps because you’re not sure of your swimming?”

  “I mean,” Linn said, speaking rapidly through tightened, thinned lips, looking Rainey straight in the eye, “that I’m afraid of water as a rat is of a cat. I mean that I am not a little nervous when I am on the water, because I do not go on it. I mean that to cross a bridge even leaves me useless for hours afterwards. I mean, in short, that I am afraid of water.”

  I looked at Metcalf. The engineer was looking, without moving anything but his eyes, from Linn to Rainey. He looked disgusted with the pair of them, as if he wished they would shut up.

  I was enough interested in what was going on that I didn’t light my cigarette because I was afraid the flare of light would bring them, or at least Linn, back to normal.

  Rainey made a circle in the air with the pink end of his cigar.

  “You’re exaggerating, of course,” he said. “Swim?”

  “Swim?” Linn repeated with an angry sort of softness. “How in hell can I swim when more water than a bath-tub will hold drives me into lunacy?”

  Rainey chuckled.

  “Ever try to cure yourself?”

  Linn laughed, a low laugh with an insulting purr in it.

  “Try to cure myself?” Excitement blurred his words, but he kept his voice pitched very low. “Do you think I like being this way? Oh, yes, I’ve tried—and succeeded in making myself worse.”

  “Nonsense,” Rainey said, and now the professional mellowness of his voice couldn’t hide a sharp-edged undertone of annoyance. “A thing like that can be cured—if its owner is sound at bottom.”

  Linn’s face flushed in the deepening twilight, and then paled again. He didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll bet you,” Rainey said, “one thousand dollars I can cure you.”

  Linn laughed in his throat, without enjoyment.

  “It would be worth that and more,” he said, “but—” He shrugged and asked: “Do you know what time the last mail goes out?”

  “It’s simple as can be,” Rainey said. “Naturally you’re afraid of water if you can’t swim. Why shouldn’t you be? It’s a real enemy if you’re helpless in it. But if you learn to swim, then where will your fear come from?”

  Linn laughed again.

  “Fair enough,” he said softly, “but how in hell can a man learn to swim when more than a tubful of water turns him into a lunatic? Do you think I’ve gone all these years without trying to learn? Do you think I like burying my head under Pullman blankets when I hear the roar of a bridge under my train?”

  “You’ve tried to swim, then, and couldn’t?” Rainey insisted.

  “Of course,” Linn said wearily.

  “How?”

  “How? In the water, of course, going into the water.”

  “Going slowly in, with fear climbing up into your neck with each step?”

  “Something of the sort.”

  “Exactly the wrong way,” Rainey said triumphantly. “No wonder you’re still scared silly.”

  “And how”—Linn’s voice was tauntingly mild—“would you suggest going about it in the right way?”

  “In the simplest, most sensible way, the way I learned. Listen, Linn, I’ll cure you, absolutely, if you’ll do what I say. I’ll put five hundred dollars against your hundred that I can do it. Or if you don’t want to bet I’ll put a hundred dollars in either of these gentlemen’s hands—yours if it doesn’t work.”

  “How?”

  “In the only sensible way. Go out with me in a boat tomorrow, and jump over in the middle of the lake. If you can’t jump, let me throw you. You’ll swim, no fear.”

  “My God,” Linn said in an awed tone, “I believe you mean it.”

  “Certainly I mean it. Why shouldn’t I mean it? And it’ll work, too. You needn’t be afraid of drowning. I’ll be there to pull you out if necessary: I’m not exactly an infant in the water. But it’s ten to one you won’t need pulling out. Swimming isn’t a mysterious thing: it’s something that all animals do naturally and that a man can do naturally too when he needs to. You’ll find yourself somehow moving back to the boat. Are you game?”

  The corner of my left eye caught a movement. I turned my head to that side, but saw nothing now except the dark angle of the porch eight or ten feet from us, where it turned to run down the side of the building. I had the impression that somebody had l
ooked, or had started to come, around the corner, and then, seeing us, had withdrawn.

  “It isn’t a question of gameness,” Linn was protesting evenly. “It’s simply that I know myself and my terror in water. I’m supposed to be resting just now. It seems foolish that I should tear my nerves to pieces—that’s what it would amount to—just to disprove an old theory.”

  “Well, of course, if you’re afraid to take a chance.” Rainey shrugged his big shoulders.

  “It’s not that I’m afraid to.” Linn’s voice was thin and higher pitched than it had been. “But it’s so useless. I’ve tried everything, and—”

  “And you’re used to being afraid,” Rainey finished for him, bluntly. “Did it ever occur to you that everybody is more or less afraid of nearly everything, and that courage isn’t a damned thing but a habit of not dodging things because you’re afraid of them?”

  Linn started to jump up out of his chair, and then sat there very erect. In the dim light from the window his face showed pale and shiny with sweat. He was trembling from foot to mouth.

  “But,” the promoter said, and yawned showily, “if you’re really too scared to take a first-rate chance of curing yourself, I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it.”

  Linn jumped up out of his chair now and cried angrily: “I tell you, it’s more complicated than that. It’s not simply a matter of driving myself to do something. That can be done. But it’s the after-effect—whether it’s worth it or not.”

  Rainey said, “Oh, hell!” and threw the remains of his cigar away. He stood up and looked contemptuously down at Linn. “It’s all right with me,” he said. He turned his broad back to Linn and addressed Metcalf and me: “Let’s see if we can find a billiard table.”

  Linn put out a hand to Rainey’s arm and turned the big man around.

 

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