by W. L. Heath
“I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been awake since practically dawn.”
“It’s a sort of guilty feeling, isn’t it?”
“Very. You always feel like everybody else was cold sober and you were putting on a disgusting performance of some kind.”
“I don’t think we were any drunker than the rest of them. Look at Wally Faulk.”
“I do wish we hadn’t though. No fooling, I feel awful.”
“Come on back to bed,” he said.
“It wouldn’t help. Besides, Mother’ll probably be over any minute. I’ve got to put up some kind of a front.”
She got up and walked to the window, peering through the Venetian blind. Boyd watched her, looking at her bare thighs beneath the pajama shirt, and again he felt a desire for her. She had always been more appealing to him at times like this. He wondered why. Something about the melancholy look she had. The tangled hair and general air of dissolution. A thing like that appealed to a man at times. Like blues music, he thought, there’s something about it. Something sad and earthy and don’t-give-a-damn. Something low-down and at the same time beautiful.
“Don’t you want to come back to bed a little while?”
She looked at him to see if he had meant what she thought. “I’m sorry, darling. I just don’t think I could. I’m in bad shape, really. I’m sorry.”
“All right. I just thought it was a nice day to be in bed – raining and all.”
“You going to make that coffee?”
“Yes. Put your pants on though.”
She smiled and came back to the bed to kiss him. “I’m sorry, darling. Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not. It was just a passing thought.” He got up and looked at the clock. “You feel like breakfast too?”
“I doubt it. I might be able to swallow some orange juice and toast.”
“I think I’ll eat a raw egg.”
“Don’t let me see you do it, for God sakes.”
Chapter Seven
At one-thirty that afternoon the rain had slacked off a little, but there was no sign of a change in the weather. It was going to rain on for quite awhile yet. The sky was still solid and gray with overcast, and there was no trace of wind or even a breeze, just the rain falling as warm as tears and the thirsty grass and trees drinking it up.
The public square was not as busy as normal on a Saturday afternoon. The cars were fewer and they went slowly with the windshield wipers flagging. A few people hurried across at the corners carrying umbrellas or walking with their heads down and their collars turned up, and now and then a woman who had forgotten her umbrella would dash from a parked car to the shelter of a store, holding a newspaper over her head. On the courthouse lawn the big maple trees stood silent and dripping, and the pigeons that clustered under the cornice and around the dome of the old red brick building shouldered each other fretfully for a place in the dry. The brass Civil War cannon was dull and wet, and atop the monument the old Confederate trooper looked out at the little town with water dripping from the bill of his kepi.
As it happened, Shelley failed to make the light. It was green when he turned the corner, and before he was halfway down the block it went yellow and then red, reflected on the wet pavement like a smear of bright red paint. He stopped, and when he did, a man waiting at the curb came over and tapped on the glass.
“How about a lift down the block?”
Shelley nodded and the man came around in front of the car and got in. He was a neat-looking man wearing a blue gabardine suit that was dark on the shoulders from the rain.
“I’m only going to the next corner,” Shelley said.
“That’ll be fine,” the man said.
He had unbuttoned his coat as he got in, and now suddenly there was a gun in his hand. A revolver with a long thin barrel like a target pistol. When Shelley saw it his scalp prickled.
“Turn right when the light changes,” the man said. “You won’t get hurt. All we want is the car. Just do like I tell you and don’t get excited.”
When the light went green, Shelley turned the corner and looked down at the gun again. His mouth and throat felt dry. “Mind telling me what the hell this is all about?”
The man didn’t answer. He simply smiled as if that question was exactly the one he had expected. “You see those two fellows standing up there by the used-car lot?”
“Yes.”
“Stop and let them get in. Do just what I say now and you’ll be all right. We’re not going to hurt you.”
Shelley drove carefully up the block, gripping the wheel. He stopped at the car lot, and the two men got in the back seat. One was a tall man wearing glasses and a hearing aid; the other was shorter and heavily built, with an undershot jaw. He carried a cheap, imitation-leather suitcase.
“Now turn to your right again,” the one with the gun said. “Head out of town like you was going to Birmingham.”
Not another word was spoken until they were well out of town and going into the stretch of curving road through the river hills. As they took the second curve of the hill road, the man with the undershot jaw craned his neck around and looked out the rear window; then he settled back in his seat and let go a heavy sigh, as if he had been holding his breath for a long time.
“Nice,” he said.
The man sitting beside Shelley laid the pistol across his lap and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Care for a cigarette?”
Shelley shook his head. “What is this?” he said. “Mind telling me now?”
“I already told you all I can, friend. It happens we need a car, and you drew the lucky number.”
“All right, you can have the car.”
One of the men in the back seat gave a high soft giggle, and Shelley felt his scalp prickle again.
Emily Fairchild was lying on the sofa with her shoes off, drinking coffee and listening to the phonograph. It was a gloomy day, partly because of the weather and partly because of her hangover, and she had picked the Swan Lake album as music to fit the mood. Her gaze wandered aimlessly over the ceiling and then down the opposite wall to where the black-framed Lautrec posters hung precisely in a row. One of the pictures, her favorite, showed a man in a black hat and black cape holding a rolled paper in his left hand. The man had on a long red scarf, one end of which hung down his back. She looked at this picture for a while, then she sighed and closed her eyes.
I wonder if it did happen last night, she thought. I wonder if last night was the night.
She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling again.
Let’s see now, she thought. It was two weeks ago last what? Last Thursday. Well, that makes it just about wrong, all right. Just about exactly wrong. Damn the luck. Damn the rotten, drunken luck. Why do we always do that when we’re drinking? Why, always, must we get that way and then be careless? He did it deliberately too, I bet. No, I mustn’t say that. Boyd wouldn’t do a thing like that, much as he might want to. But damn it all, why?
Maybe it won’t happen though. It’s not really so easy. Look at Madge and Steve. They tried for over two years – even went to doctors about it, and then finally had two in a row. You can’t tell. I guess I don’t need to worry. But you can’t help worrying, damn it. You can’t control worrying. If only we hadn’t. Or had waited till this morning.
Well, what’s done is done, I guess. I’ll just have to wait and see. Poor Boyd. I mustn’t upset him about it. I made enough trouble for him last night. Maybe I could take a little quinine. He’d never know the difference. Where would I get it though? I could never fool Dr. Huff on something like that. I’ll play golf. And run up the stairs.
She closed her eyes and sighed and rocked her head back and forth on the pillow.
What’s the matter with me anyhow? she thought.
She tried again to listen to the music, and then after a while Boyd came in and she had to collect herself. He sat down facing her and began to file his nails.
“I was just thinking,” he said, “how nice a beer would g
o right now. A nice, ice-cold suds with about an inch of cuff on it.”
“Stop torturing me,” she said.
“They have it down at the poolroom, you know.”
“I know. How do they get away with that anyhow?”
Maybe if we talk, she thought, I can get my mind off it.
“They get away with it the same way they get away with the whisky,” Boyd said.
“But that’s different. When they sell you whisky, you take it home and drink it. But from what I hear, you can drink beer right there in the poolroom. Practically like a saloon or something.”
“You take it in the john,” Boyd said. “You latch the door and swill it down and throw the empty in the trash bucket. The trash bucket in there is always full of empty beer cans.”
“That’s what I mean. It looks like they’d be caught, being so flagrant about it.”
“You know perfectly well why they don’t get caught. Ace Kelley pays the Law to stay the hell out. That’s why they don’t get caught.”
“Well, I’ve heard that, but I don’t necessarily believe it.”
“You’re blind then, if you don’t believe it. Hobbs and all that crowd take a pay-off. They could stop this bootlegging any time they felt like it. Hell, Ace the same as told me he was paying off. Everybody knows it.”
“I bet Dad doesn’t know it. Darling, do you have to file your nails?”
“Sure he knows it.” Boyd put the file down. “He just can’t do anything about it, that’s all. A circuit judge can’t go out and arrest people. He has to depend on the officers for that. Besides, you’re always going to have crooked Law as long as you have prohibition. It’s been that way since time immemorial. The only sensible thing is to have legalized liquor. I’m for state-owned stores like they have in Huntsville and Birmingham, myself. That way you control it.”
“I suppose so. But try telling your mother that.”
“I know it. Try telling any of these older people that.”
They were silent for a while.
“The whole thing goes back to religion,” Boyd said. “This is the Bible Belt, and down here the devil is a bottle of liquor. It’s the worst sin you can commit, according to the way they look at it.”
“Why do they look at it that way I wonder?”
“Search me. Methodists and Baptists just happen to be liquor haters, that’s all. At the Baptist church they don’t even use real wine to take Communion.”
“Will you change those records?”
Boyd got up and went over to the phonograph. “I think if I were going to join the church, I’d be an Episcopalian,” he said. “They take a more liberal attitude toward drinking and things like that.”
“I could never join that church,” Emily said. “I had a roommate at Stevens that was an Episcopalian, and I used to go to church with her once in a while. No thanks. All that kneeling and chanting. They’re nothing but watered-down Catholics.”
“Not quite. They don’t go in for all the dogma the way the Catholics do. Bodily ascensions and all that nonsense.”
“They have a good bit of it though. And that creed, or whatever it is they say, it lays it right on the line about believing in the Holy Catholic Church. I know. I used to go with my roommate.”
“Still I think it beats what you have to put up with down here at the Baptist churches. No fooling, half the Baptist preachers in this part of the country aren’t even literate, for God’s sake. Old Shallowford says irregardless, and sang for sing. ‘The congregation will please stand and sang hymn number so-and-so.’ At least the Episcopal ministers are educated. The Catholics too.”
“Well, have it your way. But I still say I could never join that church. Catholics. Devout Catholic. Did you ever notice that Catholics are always referred to as ‘devout Catholics’? ‘He was a devout Catholic. She was a devout Catholic.’ The two words go together like they were hyphenated. Aren’t there any ‘devout’ Presbyterians?”
“How did we get off on this anyway?”
“Talking about beer and prohibition and the high cost of bootleg whisky. And that reminds me,” she said, “I’ve got to go to the bank this afternoon. Mother gave me a little check. Will you run me down?”
“Yes, but let’s wait awhile and see if the rain won’t let up. It’s still raining out there.”
He got up and left the room, and Emily gazed up at the ceiling again. Poor Boyd, she thought. Poor baby. He’s trying to cheer me up.
When they left the hills the road straightened out again on a gentle downgrade past cotton fields and woodlands, and the rain was still falling, spattering against the windshield where it was cut cleanly and quickly away by the wipers. Shelley could make no sense out of what was happening to him. He felt stunned. I’m in trouble, he thought. I’m in a hell of a jam of some kind. But what?
The men were silent, and there was a tenseness about all of them. In the car there was a charged, electric quietness. They’ve killed somebody or robbed a store, Shelley thought. But when he looked back on it in his mind, there had been no excitement in the town as they went through. The men had gotten into the car without any particular hurry. There was a tenseness but no sign of hurry or fear. In fact, they had made him drive slowly, not at all like they were escaping from something. I can’t figure it, he thought. But I’m in a mess all right. These boys are up to something unpleasant, and I’m right in the middle of it. What the hell is this anyway? He felt a vein throbbing in the side of his neck.
When they were about eight miles from town, passing through the second range of scrubby hills that faced the river, the man with the gun told him to slow down.
“As soon as we come out on the straight again, you’ll see a dirt road that turns off to the right,” he said. “Take that road and I’ll tell you when to stop.”
Shelley did as he was told. It was a wide smooth chert road, a farm-to-market road, and when they had gone about a mile, the man with the gun told him to stop the car. It was not possible to see the highway from where they stopped.
“Now you get out and get in the back seat with the boys,” the man said. “I’ll drive the rest of the way.”
“Oughtn’t we to blindfold him?” said the man with the undershot jaw.
“Yeah, tie a handkerchief over his eyes,” said the man in front. “We don’t want him to see anything from here on in.”
Shelley sat between the two men in the back seat and the one who wore the hearing aid tied a handkerchief around his head, drawing the knot very tight.
“Don’t try to pull it off, either,” he said.
Shelley noticed that he had been eating onions.
“If you pull it off you might see something we can’t afford for you to see, and then we might have to be a little rough on you.”
“Don’t worry,” Shelley said.
He had no intention of pulling the blindfold off.
The car started again and they drove on for another half mile or so, not talking. When they stopped the second time Shelley heard a car door slam and heard someone coming toward them across the chert road.
“Well, you finally made it,” a new voice said outside the window.
“Now, watch what you say,” the man in front cautioned him. “This fellow don’t need to know anything, see? No names, no nothing.”
“How did it go?” the new voice asked.
“It went fine. Not a hitch anywhere, so far.”
They were all getting out of the car now, and Shelley felt a hand take his arm and he got out too. They were standing at the side of the road, and there was a barn nearby. He could smell it.
“Come over here a minute,” said the man who had done most of the talking. “One of you stay with him, and if you hear a car or anything coming, make him get back in the car before they see him with a blindfold on.”
“Why not take him on to the barn?”
“All right. I guess that would be better. Take him on to the barn, the two of you. Slick and me’ll be up there as soon as we go
over a couple of things.”
“I thought you said no names.”
“That slipped. But it don’t matter. All he knows is there’s a guy here called Slick. Take him on to the barn.”
Shelley let them lead him away from the road and up a sloping muddy path. It was still raining, but it was a light rain now and the men seemed to pay it no attention at all. Shelley was made to stop while they opened a gate. He heard a chain clank, and heard the soft scudding sound the corner made as they dragged the gate open. A cattle gate, he thought. He tried to place the barn in his memory, but he couldn’t. There were too many farms and barns along this road to remember any of them in particular. He knew the territory though, because he had hunted it. He knew pretty well where he was.
They led him up the barn lot and into the aisle of the barn. He could smell it very strongly now, the dank warm odor of straw and manure and harness leather. The ground underfoot was cushiony, and overhead he could hear the rain falling on the tin roof.
“What about taking him up in the loft?” one of the men said.
“I don’t know,” said the other. “We better wait and see what he says.”
“I think the loft is the place for him. Up there he’s really on ice, and no one sees him from the road.”
“Let’s wait and see.”
They stood in the hall of the barn and waited, listening to the rain, and after a while Shelley heard a car door slam again. It sounded more like a truck door, he thought. Then the other two men came into the barn.
“We thought about putting him up in the loft,” one of the men said. “We thought that would be a good place to hide him.”
“It would be all right. It don’t matter too much though, because Slick here is going to stay with him till we get back. We ought to keep an eye on him that long, at least.”
“I agree,” someone said. “If he was to get loose too soon he could gum the works.”
“Show him how to get up the ladder.”
Shelley felt himself led to the wall of the barn, and then his hands were placed on the rungs of the ladder.