The Nothing Man

by Jim Thompson

  I uncorked the bottle and dug some dry cigarettes out of the pocket of the car. I sat drinking and smoking, thinking how strange it was that the thing that had to be done was always the hardest to do.

  She wasn’t bad, you see. She was weak, spiteful, stubborn; she’d made her own life a hell as a means of making mine one. But, except for what had happened to me, she wouldn’t have done what she had. The flaws of character and spirit would never have appeared.

  I think the truest maxim ever coined is the one to the effect that untried virtue doesn’t count.

  Years before, when I was a kid, I owned a little Ford runabout, a Model T. And I took care of that car as a man takes care of his love—for I did love it. I was and remain a Model T guy, more comfortable with imperfection than its opposite, cherishing the ability to discern and shore up a latent weakness. I knew the car wasn’t a Cadillac. Hell, what would a guy like me do with a Cad? It was a Model T, and I treated it good and it treated me good. When I sold it, after two years of trouble-free driving, it was actually in better shape than the day I bought it.

  Two months later it was on the junk heap.

  Less than two months after I split with Ellen, she was whoring.

  I belched and kicked open the door of the car.…It was too bad but that’s the way it was. If I had to live, I had to work. And if I had to work, I had to be around people. And if I had to be around people, I had—I had to be around people. They mustn’t know.

  Mr. Clinton Brown regrets the necessity of murdering Ellen Tanner Brown.

  I stuffed the full bottle into my pocket and carried the other under my arm. I staggered down the pier to the community dock and climbed down the ladder. Somewhere near the foot of it, I paused and peered around in the darkness. Then I said eenie-meenie-miney-moo-toodle-de-doo, and let go.

  Everything was a little confused for a moment. My head was planted firmly in a boat, but my feet were in the clouds.

  Having great faith in the wisdom of providence, particularly that section dealing with the laws of gravity, I remained unperturbed. I am a Courier man, I thought, and a Courier man does not miss the boat.

  My feet came down and my head came up, and my ass end was planted firmly in the water. Clear-eyed, I let it remain there while I got the bottle from under my arm and bought myself a drink. Then I pulled it over the side, untied the mooring rope, and picked up the oars.

  5

  I have never been able to understand the high regard that leaders of dangerous missions have for sobriety. Sober, one challenges the fates; unsober, the fates cannot be bothered with you. While the drunk wanders unharmed amid six-lane traffic, a car swerves up on the sidewalk to pick off the sober man. While the drunk walks away from an eight-story fall, the sober man stumbles from the curb and breaks his neck. It never fails. That’s the way it is, so that’s the way it is.

  Take me, which you are doomed to do for some two hundred pages. Take me. I know nothing about boats. I had never been in a rowboat before. And while I wasn’t drunk, naturally, since I cannot get drunk, I was very far from sober. A sober man would never have got fifty feet from the dock. Not being sober, I got a mile and a half, all the way to Rose Island.

  Due to my falling or being thrown out of the boat a couple of times, and subsequent willy-nilly driftings while the boat found me again, my trip was something less than speedy. But I got there. I pulled the boat up on the beach and finished the opened bottle. Then, having got my bearings, I headed for the Golden Eagle cottages.

  They were only about a block away. I couldn’t have debarked much nearer to them if I’d ridden the ferry and taken a taxi. There were twelve of them, laid out in a triangle with its base to the ocean. Number seven was at the end. Its shades were drawn, but I could detect a little light inside. I seemed to hear a faint stirring and splashing.

  I tapped softly on the door. There was silence for a moment, then a splash and a muted, “Yes?”

  “Brownie,” I said.

  “Brownie! What in the—?”

  The door flew open. She pulled me inside, stood against me naked, her arms around my neck, her thick black hair buried against my chest.

  “Gosh, honey! Gee, it’s good to see you! I—but you’re soaked! Let me take—”

  “I’m all right,” I said, and I pushed her away. “I’m going to keep on being all right.”

  I walked on into the room and sat down in a chair. For a moment she stood where I had pushed her; then she came and sat down on the bed opposite me.

  She smiled at me, timidly, swinging her bare legs to and fro, holding her knees together while she swung her legs out from each other. “You’re—you’re not mad at me, Brownie?”

  “I wish you hadn’t come back, Ellen,” I said. “It’s going to make things very hard for both of us.”

  “No, it won’t, honey! I—Did you know I only called the office one time today? Just once! They said you were gone for the day, so I said, thank you. I’ll call again tomorrow and—and—that’s all I did. Honest!” She nodded her head vigorously, her eyes fixed anxiously on my face.

  I said, “So you called one time. Why did you call at all?”

  “H-Haven’t you any idea, Brownie?”

  “Sure. You had a dime.”

  The smile faded and a sullen look edged into its place. Then the look faded, without disappearing, and the smile—a semblance of it—returned. “Maybe…I guess maybe you’ve got a right to talk that way. But—but think of me, honey! I h-hadn’t done anything, and—”

  “Hadn’t done anything!” I jeered. “You didn’t need to do anything. I didn’t know my way around when I married you. I’d never been anywhere or seen anything. After I did, I wised up. I saw I was married to a goddamned flabby-tailed dumbbell with a fried egg for a brain.”

  “You dirty bas—! Oh, Brownie, don’t! Don’t, honey. You don’t mean—”

  “The hell I don’t! I’ve seen better tail on a mule.”

  She stuttered and spluttered, trying to curse and beg me at the same time. Trying to fight down her temper. I’d touched her on her sore spots. She didn’t have much in the way of an education. Her rear end was a little on the wriggly side.

  “Y-You burn me up! You—”

  “Not me,” I said, “that hot little business of yours. Remember that poem I dedicated to you?”

  “You’re goddamned right, I remember! Of all the dirty—”

  “By the way, what did you do with the rest of those sonnets? I was thinking, perhaps, you’d like to have them autographed.”

  She told me what she’d done with them. Something indelicate but completely practical.

  “They didn’t catch fire?”

  “You burn me—That’s right! Sit there and laugh! You done—you did all this! Why shouldn’t you laugh about it?”

  “Jesus,” I said. “What a freak you turned out to be! Do the boys make you put a sack over your head?”

  It was going swell. She was getting angrier and angrier. I had her sold, and if I could just keep her that way…she’d live.

  I—

  She began to cry.

  She’d very seldom done that, really cried. She’d grown up in pretty rugged circumstances, and she’d never got the crying habit. But on those rare occasions when she did break down, she pulled all the stops. She cried like the child she’d never been.

  She didn’t cover her face with her hands, and all of it was puckered and reddened. Her eyes were tight shut. Her nose ran. Her mouth, with the ludicrously drawn-down corners, opened so wide you could see her tonsils.

  I tried to laugh, and I couldn’t. I jerked the cork on the second quart and took a big slug, and it didn’t do any good. It had always got me to see her cry. It did now.

  You do not have your head in the clouds, Brown, I thought. Your feet are of clay and the arches are falling.

  I took another drink. I gripped the arms of the chair. I said, “Look, now. Now see here, dammit. There’s no sense in—in—”

  And she s
huddered and sobbed. “Y-You—you h-hurt my f-feelings.…”

  And suddenly I was on the bed with her, dabbing at her eyes with my handkerchief, telling her to blow her nose, dammit. And she shuddered and choked back the tears.

  “Aw r-right, Brownie. I—I—w-will.”

  She clung to me, shivering with my wetness but clinging tighter when I tried to draw away. She curled up on the bed, drawing me down with her, burrowing and snuggling her head against my shoulder.

  After a while, she said, “H-Honey…?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Another silence. Then: “I know what—what happened. I don’t know why I didn’t guess in the beginning, because you couldn’t be mean to anyone and—”

  “All right,” I said. “You know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, honey? It wouldn’t have made any difference. There’s more to marriage than—than that.”

  “A great deal more,” I said. “There’s more to a house than a roof, but you’d find it impractical to live without one. You’d move from one room to another and they’d all be fine—and not worth a damn. Finally, you’d have to move out.”

  “You don’t know! You can’t be sure! It—you think this is better?”

  “It doesn’t need to be like this. I hoped you’d remarry.”

  “I can’t! H-How can I when I still love you?”

  My hands trembled on her bare back. I had to keep on, but I knew it was no use. She was a child, weeping for a broken doll, stubbornly refusing any other.

  “Look,” I said. “Listen to me, Ellen. A lot of people have thought I was a pretty smart guy. You always thought so. Have you changed your mind?”

  “No, Brownie, but—”

  “Wasn’t I always good to you? Didn’t I always do what was best for you? Now, answer me. Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think I did it this way? Do you think it was easy for me, ridiculing you, breaking every bond between us so that you could form new ones with someone else? Do you think it’s something that popped into my mind on the spur of the moment?”

  “Of course not, honey. But—”

  “I thought it over for weeks. I studied the record of what had happened in similar cases. I talked it over with two damned good psychiatrists. I told them what you—we—were like,

  and—”

  Her head jerked back. “Like? What am I supposed to be like?”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Let’s not get started on another row. I told them the truth, that you were anything but a nympho but also very far from frigid. I told them that you’d always—Well, skip it. There wasn’t any real best thing to do, but I did the best there was.”

  “And look how it turned out!”

  “It would have turned out this way anyhow, if you can’t face facts. My telling you the truth wouldn’t have made any difference. Don’t you—”

  “We could have tried, couldn’t we? How do you know how it would have turned out when we didn’t even try? You don’t know everything! You.…Oh”—she hesitated and I heard her swallow heavily—“it’s—it’s t-too late, Brownie? You don’t want to come back to me now, after what I’ve—I’ve—?”

  I kissed her on the forehead, wondering abstractedly why the weakest of us seem always subjected to the greatest stress. Good and evil: were there such things or were there only weakness and strength? Was a car bad because it became junk? Was a woman bad who became a whore?

  “Brownie…is th-that the reason why—?”

  I kissed her again. “You haven’t done anything,” I said. “Not a single thing.”

  “Let’s try it, Brownie! Why, honestly, I won’t mind a bit! Really, I won’t. We’ll have all those nice funny talks together, and you can read to me in the evenings and—and maybe we can get Skipper back from those people! Or we can get another dog. Why, we could even adopt a baby, honey, and it would be just like—”

  “Don’t,” I said. “For Christ’s sake, DON’T!”

  But she wouldn’t stop. She went on and on, over and over, that one refrain, earnest, tearful, laughable, maddening: It wouldn’t, honey! It wouldn’t make a bit of difference! My heart began to beat time to it. The blood roared and raced through my brain, beating time.

  “Brownie!” she said. “Brownie!”

  I drifted back from a faraway place. A place where all the straight paths were blocked off and everything moved at a tangent.

  Her voice had become firm. “You understand, Brownie! We’re stopping this foolishness right now! We need each other, and we’re going to have each other. I’ve tried your way. Now you’re going to try mine. I’m going to—I’m going to make you, Brownie!”

  “Spread it all out,” I said. “Lay the cards down.”

  “I—cards?”

  “Card, then. Lem Stukey. Either I do as you say, or you get tough. You get me or you have a little talk with Lem.”

  She drew her head back, looked into my face, frowning. “I d-don’t understand. What would I—?”

  “He’s been in touch with you, hasn’t he? He sent you the dough to come back here on?”

  “We-ell, he—he—” She blushed. “Well, he was just being nice. Just because he liked me.”

  I laughed.

  “Well, he was—he does!” she snapped. “What’s so funny about it?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “But that’s the deal, isn’t it, El? You have to tell me, you know. You can’t make threats without showing what you’re threatening.”

  “But I haven’t—” She paused; she was silent for several seconds. “What if I—how could I threaten you with that?” she said, in a half-shamed voice. “It isn’t any crime. You couldn’t help—”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “You know what I’m like. You know what the newspaper business is like. It’s a closed world; there’s no place you can go where you’re not known. Put it in plain language. Put yourself in my place. How long could you live in a world where everyone knew you didn’t have a pecker?”

  “Brownie! That’s dir—”

  “You mean it’s funny,” I said. “Sure it is. You could even catch the doctors and nurses in the hospital grinning about it. You know I couldn’t take it, El. You may not know that I might not get the chance to take it. Because there are a hell of a lot of places that wouldn’t hire me. That’s right; that’s straight from the case histories. They’re afraid of you. They figure you’re not normal.”

  “But—listen to me, Brownie! I—”

  “That’s what you’re threatening me with,” I said. “You’d do that to me, or you’d let Lem do it. Put me under his thumb for keeps. You’d take away the only thing I have left, the little pride and integrity that gives me an excuse to go on living. You love me—you can’t love anyone else, you say—and you’d do that to me?”

  “No!” She gripped me fiercely. “No, I won’t, Brownie, I won’t have to because—No, I won’t do it, honey! I didn’t know what I was thinking about! I’ve just been kind of crazy and lonely and hopeless-feeling, and—” Her voice trailed off.

  After a moment she said reproachfully, a trifle angrily, “After all, I could get a divorce on those grounds. That would be a lot worse, wouldn’t it?”

  You see? She didn’t know what she was going to do. How, then, could I?

  “Yes,” I said. “That would be worse. You wouldn’t get the nice chunk of change you can get out of Lem.”

  “I—You’ve got a lot of right to talk about him,” she said, “after the way you’ve acted. You’re the one that’s always running people down. Even if I did tell him, what makes you think he’d—”

  “For God’s sake!” I said. “What are you saying, Ellen? First, you don’t have anything to threaten me with. Next, you have something but you’re not going to use it. Then, you’re going to use it—you’re going to pass it on to Lem—but he isn’t going to. You don’t make sense from one minute to—”

  “Oh, sure!” she said sullenly. “You’re a genius, and I�
��m a dumbbell. Well, maybe I’m not as dumb as you think.”

  “Let it go. It’s no use,” I said.

  “Whatever I got out of Stukey it wouldn’t be enough! After all I’ve been through!”

  “No,” I said. “It wouldn’t be enough.”

  I sat up and uncorked the bottle. I took a drink, replaced the cork, and fumbled for a cigarette. I didn’t have any with me, of course, any dry ones. They were back in the car. I reached out to the reading stand, took a cigarette from her package, and lighted it.

  “Brownie—” She sat up, too, half sat up, with her legs folded under her.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “You know I wouldn’t do that, don’t you?” She smiled at me brightly. “It’s like you say. How could I when I love you so much? And—but, oh, Brownie! Let’s go back together! Please, darling. It won’t make any difference, and even if it does a little it’ll still be better than this. I just can’t go on like—”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t, and you won’t.”

  And I brought the bottle down on her head.

  I stood looking down at her, and my head swam and I weaved slowly on my feet. The wetness and the exertion and the long talk were sobering me, and when I sobered I became drunk. Far drunker than any amount of whisky could make me. All my sureness was gone, and the ten thousand parts of an insane puzzle were scattered to the winds.

  She lay, twitching a bit and moaning, with her head and shoulders slumping toward her knees, her thighs in a tangent curve to her legs. A question mark. She was a question, and she had to be answered.

  Had it been necessary?

  Or had I done it because I wanted to?

  Was every move I made, as Dave Randall had once angrily declared, designed to extract payment from the world for the hell I dwelt in? Had I tried to destroy slowly and, failing that, killed wantonly?

  It was a nice question. It was something to think about on these long rainy evenings.

  I took another stiff drink.

  The terrible sobriety-drunkenness, with its terrible questions, began to fade. I slid back into the sideways world. This was the way it was, and the way it was was this.