Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “Swanson is the name of the man who is handling the matter,” Macomber said. “He’s waiting for your call.”

  “Ask them to catch a murderer in Los Angeles,” the sheriff said bitterly, “and see what you get … They’re wonderful on people who break into boxcars.”

  While the sheriff was waiting for the call to be put through, Macomber turned ponderously, the seat of his pants sticking to the yellow varnish of the chair, and looked out at the deserted street, white with sunlight, the tar boiling up in little black bubbles out in the road from the heat. For a moment, deep under the fat, he couldn’t bear Gatlin, New Mexico. A suburb of the desert, a fine place for people with tuberculosis. For twelve years he’d been there, going to the movies twice a week, listening to his wife talk. The fat man. Before you died in Gatlin, New Mexico, you got fat. Twelve years, he thought, looking out on a street that was empty except on Saturday night. He could see himself stepping out of a barber shop in Hollywood, walking lightly to a bar with a blonde girl, thin in the waist, drinking a beer or two, talking and laughing in the middle of a million other people talking and laughing. Greta Garbo walked the streets there, and Carole Lombard, and Alice Faye. “Sarah,” he would say to his wife, “I have got to go to Los Angeles. On State business. I will not be back for a week.”

  “Well …?” the sheriff was calling into the phone. “Well? Where is Los Angeles?”

  Ninety dollars, ninety lousy dollars … He turned away from looking at the street. He put his hands on his knees and was surprised to see them shake as he heard the sheriff say, “Hello, is this Swanson?”

  He couldn’t sit still and listen to the sheriff talk over the phone, so he got up and walked slowly through the back room to the lavatory. He went in, closed the door, and looked carefully at his face in the mirror. That’s what his face looked like, that’s what the twelve years, listening to his wife talk, had done. Without expression he went back to the office.

  “All right,” the sheriff was saying, “you don’t have to keep him for two months. I know you’re crowded. I know it’s against the constitution. I know, I said, for Christ’s sake. It was just a suggestion. I’m sorry he’s crying. Is it my fault he’s crying? Maybe you’d cry, too, if you were going to jail for fifteen years. Stop yelling, for Christ’s sake, this call is costing the county of Gatlin a million dollars. I’ll call you back. All right, by six o’clock. All right, I said. All right.”

  The sheriff put the telephone down. For a moment he sat wearily, looking at the open top of his pants. He sighed, buttoned his pants. “That is some city,” he said, “Los Angeles.” He shook his head. “I got a good mind to say the hell with it. Why should I run myself into an early grave for a man who broke into a boxcar? Who can tell me?”

  “He’s a known criminal,” Macomber said. “We got a whole case.” His voice was smooth but he felt the eager tremor deep under it. “Justice is justice.”

  The sheriff looked at him bitterly. “The voice of conscience. The sheriff’s white light, Macomber.”

  Macomber shrugged. “What’s it to me? I just like to see a case closed.”

  The sheriff turned back to the telephone. “Get me the county treasurer’s office,” he said. He sat there, waiting, looking at Macomber, with the receiver against his ear. Macomber walked over to the door and looked out across the street. He saw his wife sitting at the window of their house up the street, her fat elbows crossed, with the sweat dripping off them. He looked the other way.

  He heard the sheriff’s voice, as though distant and indistinct, talking to the county treasurer. He heard the county treasurer’s voice rise in anger through the phone, mechanical and shrill. “Everybody spends money,” the county treasurer screamed. “Nobody brings in money, but everybody spends money. I’ll be lucky to have my own salary left over at the end of the month and you want ninety dollars to go joy-riding to Los Angeles to get a man who stole nine dollars’ worth of second-hand goods. The hell with you! I said the hell with you!”

  Macomber put his hands in his pockets so that nobody could see how tense they were as he heard the receiver slam on the other end of the wire. Coldly he watched the sheriff put the phone gently down.

  “Macomber,” the sheriff said, feeling his deputy’s eyes on him, hard and accusing, “I’m afraid Joan Crawford will have to get along without you, this year.”

  “They will hang crepe on the studios when they hear about this,” the second deputy said.

  “I don’t care for myself,” Macomber said evenly, “but it will sound awfully funny to people if they find out that the sheriff’s office let a known criminal go free after he was caught.”

  The sheriff stood up abruptly. “What do you want me to do?” he asked with violence. “Tell me what the hell more you want me to do? Can I create the ninety dollars? Talk to the State of New Mexico!”

  Macomber shrugged. “It’s not my business,” he said. “Only I think we can’t let criminals laugh at New Mexican justice.”

  “All right,” the sheriff shouted. “Do something. Go do something! I don’t have to call back until six o’clock! You got three hours to see justice done. My hands are washed.” He sat down and opened the top three buttons of his pants and put his feet on the desk. “If it means so much to you,” he said, as Macomber started through the door, “arrange it yourself.”

  Macomber passed his house on the way to the district attorney’s office. His wife was still sitting at the window with the sweat dripping off her. She looked at her husband out of her dry eyes, and he looked at her as he walked thoughtfully past. No smile lit her face or his, no word was passed. For a moment they looked at each other with the arid recognition of twelve years. Then Macomber walked deliberately on, feeling the heat rising through his shoes, tiring his legs right up to his hips.

  In Hollywood he would walk firmly and briskly, not like a fat man, over the clean pavements, ringing to the sharp attractive clicks of high heels all around him. For ten steps he closed his eyes as he turned into the main street of Gatlin, New Mexico.

  He went into the huge Greek building that the WPA had built for the County of Gatlin. As he passed down the quiet halls, rich with marble, cool, even in the mid-afternoon, he said, looking harshly around him, “Ninety dollars—ninety lousy dollars.”

  In front of the door that said “Office of the District Attorney” he stopped. He stood there for a moment, feeling nervousness rise and fall in him like a wave. His hand sweated on the doorknob when he opened the door. He went in casually, carefully appearing like a man carrying out impersonal government business.

  The door to the private office was open a little and he could see the district attorney’s wife standing there and could hear the district attorney yelling, “For God’s sake, Carol, have a heart! Do I look like a man who is made of money? Answer me, do I?”

  “All I want,” the district attorney’s wife said stubbornly, “is a little vacation. Three weeks, that’s all. I can’t stand the heat here. I’ll lie down and die if I have to stay here another week. Do you want me to lie down and die? You make me live in this oasis, do I have to die here, too?” She started to cry, shaking her careful blonde hair.

  “All right,” the district attorney said. “All right, Carol. Go ahead. Go home and pack. Stop crying. For the love of God, stop crying!”

  She went over and kissed the district attorney and came out, past Macomber, drying the tip of her nose. The district attorney took her through the office and opened the door for her. She kissed him again and went down the hall. The district attorney closed the door and leaned against it wearily. “She’s got to go to Wisconsin,” he said to Macomber. “She knows people in Wisconsin. There are lakes there. What do you want?”

  Macomber explained about Brisbane and Los Angeles and the sheriff’s fund and what the county treasurer had said. The district attorney sat down on the bench against the wall and listened with his head down.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked when Macomber finished.<
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  “That Brisbane is a man who should be behind bars for fifteen years. There wouldn’t be any doubt about it, once we got him here. He’s a known criminal. After all, it would only cost ninety dollars … If you said something, if you made a protest …”

  The district attorney sat on the bench with his head down, his hands loose between his knees. “Everybody wants to spend money to go some place that isn’t Gatlin, New Mexico. You know how much it’s going to cost to send my wife to Wisconsin for three weeks? Three hundred dollars. Oh, my God!”

  “This is another matter,” Macomber said very softly and reasonably. “This is a matter of your record. A sure conviction.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my record.” The district attorney stood up. “My record’s fine. I got a conviction on that case already. What do you want me to do—spend my life getting convictions on a nine-dollar robbery?”

  “If you only said one word to the county treasurer …” Macomber tagged after the district attorney as he started for his inner office.

  “If the county treasurer wants to save money, I say, ‘That’s the sort of man we need.’ Somebody has to save money. Somebody has got to do something else besides supporting the railroads.”

  “It’s a bad precedent, a guilty man …” Macomber said a little louder than he wanted.

  “Leave me alone,” the district attorney said. “I’m tired.” He went into the inner office and closed the door firmly.

  Macomber said, “Son of a bitch, you bastard!” softly to the imitation oak door, and went out into the marble hall. He bent over and drank from the shining porcelain fountain that the WPA had put there. His mouth felt dry and sandy, with an old taste in it.

  Outside he walked down the burning sidewalk, his feet dragging. His belly stretched against the top of his trousers uncomfortably, and he belched, remembering his wife’s cooking. In Hollywood he would sit down in a restaurant where the stars ate, no matter what it cost, and have light French dishes, served with silver covers, and wine out of iced bottles. Ninety lousy dollars. He walked in the shade of store-awnings, sweating, wrenching his mind to thought. “Goddamn it, goddamn it!” he said to himself because he could think of nothing further to do. For the rest of his life, in Gatlin, New Mexico, with never another chance to get even a short breath of joy … The back of his eyes ached from thinking. Suddenly he strode out from under the awning, walked up the steps that led to the office of the Gatlin Herald.

  The city editor was sitting at a big desk covered with dust and tangled copy. He was wearily blue-penciling a long white sheet. He listened abstractedly as Macomber talked, using his pencil from time to time.

  “You could show the voters of Gatlin,” Macomber was leaning close over the desk, talking fast, “what sort of men they got serving them. You could show the property owners of this county what sort of protection they can expect to get from the sheriff, the district attorney, and the county treasurer they put into office. That would make interesting reading-matter, that would, letting men who committed crimes in this county go off thumbing their noses at law enforcement here. If I was you I would write one hell of an editorial, I would. For ninety lousy dollars. One expression of opinion like that in the paper and the sheriff’s office would have a man in Los Angeles tomorrow. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah,” the city editor said, judiciously running his pencil in straight blue lines three times across the page. “Why don’t you go back to being the third deputy sheriff, Macomber?”

  “You’re a party paper,” Macomber said bitterly, “that’s what’s the matter with you. You’re Democrats and you wouldn’t say anything if a Democratic politician walked off with Main Street in a truck. You’re a very corrupt organization.”

  “Yes,” the city editor said. “You hit the nail on the head.” He used the pencil again.

  “Aaah!” Macomber said, turning away. “For Christ’s sake.”

  “The trouble with you,” the city editor said, “is you don’t get enough nourishment. You need nourishment.” He poised the pencil thoughtfully over a sentence as Macomber went out, slamming the door.

  Macomber walked dully down the street, regardless of the heat beating solidly against him.

  He passed his house on the way back to the office. His wife was still sitting there, looking out at the street that was always empty except on Saturday night. Macomber regarded her with his aching eyes, from the other side of the street. “Is that all you have to do,” he called, “sit there?”

  She didn’t say anything, but looked at him for a moment, then calmly glanced up the street.

  Macomber entered the sheriff’s office and sat down heavily. The, sheriff was still there, his feet on the desk.

  “Well?” the sheriff said.

  “The hell with it.” Macomber dried the sweat off his face with a colored handkerchief. “It’s no skin off my back.” He loosened the laces of his shoes and sat back as the sheriff got Los Angeles on the phone. “Swanson?” the sheriff said into the phone. “This is Sheriff Hadley of Gatlin, New Mexico. You can go tell Brisbane he can stop crying. Turn him loose. We’re not coming for him. We can’t be bothered. Thanks.” He hung up, sighed as a man sighs at the end of a day’s work. “I’m going home to dinner,” he said, and went out.

  “I’ll stay here while you go home to eat,” the second deputy said to Macomber.

  “Never mind,” Macomber said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “O.K.” The second deputy stood up and went to the door. “So long, Barrymore.” He departed, whistling.

  Macomber hobbled over to the sheriff’s swivel chair in his open shoes. He leaned back in the chair, looked up at the poster, “Wanted for Murder … Four Hundred Dollars,” lit now by the lengthening rays of the sun. He put his feet into the wastebasket. “Goddamn Walter Cooper,” he said.

  Stop Pushing, Rocky

  Mr. Gensel carefully wrapped six feet of adhesive tape around Joey Garr’s famous right hand. Joey sat on the edge of the rubbing table, swinging his legs, watching his manager moodily.

  “Delicate,” Mr. Gensel said, working thoughtfully. “Remember, delicate is the keyword.”

  “Yeah,” Joey said. He belched.

  Mr. Gensel frowned and stopped winding the tape. “Joey,” he said, “how many times I got to tell you, please, for my sake, don’t eat in diners.”

  “Yeah,” Joey said.

  “There is a limit to everything, Joey,” Mr. Gensel said. “Thrift can be carried too far, Joey. You’re not a poor man. You got as much money in the bank as a Hollywood actress, why do you have to eat thirty-five-cent blueplates?”

  “Please do not talk so much.” Joey stuck out his left hand.

  Mr. Gensel turned his attention to the famous left hand. “Ulcers,” he complained. “I will have a fighter with ulcers. A wonderful prospect. He has to eat garbage. Garbage and ketchup. The coming welterweight champion. Dynamite in either fist. But he belches forty times a day. My God, Joey.”

  Joey spat impassively on the floor and squinted at his neatly slicked hair in the mirror. Mr. Gensel sighed and moved his bridge restlessly around in his mouth and finished his job.

  “Allow me, some day,” he said, “to buy you a meal. A dollar-fifty meal. To give you the taste.”

  “Save yer money, Mr. Gensel,” Joey said, “for your old age.”

  The door opened and McAlmon came in, flanked on either side by two tall, broad men with flat faces and scarred lips curled in amiable grins.

  “I am glad to see you boys,” McAlmon said, coming up and patting Joey on the back. “How is my little boy Joey tonight?”

  “Yeah,” Joey said, lying down on the rubbing table and closing his eyes.

  “He belches,” Mr. Gensel said. “I never saw a fighter belched so much as Joey in my whole life. Not in thirty-five years in the game. How is your boy?”

  “Rocky is fine,” McAlmon said. “He wanted to come in here with me. He wanted to make sure that Joey understood.”


  “I understand,” Joey said irritably. “I understand fine. That Rocky. The one thing he is afraid of maybe some day somebody will hit him. A prizefighter.”

  “You can’t blame him,” McAlmon said reasonably. “After all, he knows, if Joey wants he can put him down until the day after Thanksgiving.”

  “With one hand,” Joey said grimly. “That is some fighter, that Rocky.”

  “He got nothing to worry about,” Mr. Gensel said smoothly. “Everything is absolutely clear in everybody’s mind. Clear like crystal. We carry him the whole ten rounds.”

  “Lissen, Joey,” McAlmon leaned on the rubbing table right over Joey’s upturned face, “let him look good. He has a following in Philadelphia.”

  “I will make him look wonderful,” Joey said wearily. “I will make him look like the British navy. The one thing that worries me all the time is maybe Rocky will lose his following in Philadelphia.”

  McAlmon spoke very coldly. “I don’t like your tone of voice, Joey,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Joey turned over on his belly.

  “Just in case,” McAlmon said in crisp tones, “just in case any party forgets their agreement, let me introduce you to Mr. Pike and Mr. Petroskas.”

  The two tall broad men smiled very widely.

  Joey sat up slowly and looked at them.

  “They will be sitting in the audience,” McAlmon said. “Watching proceedings with interest.”

  The two men smiled from ear to ear, the flat noses flattening even deeper into their faces.

  “They got guns, Mr. Gensel,” Joey said. “Under their lousy armpits.”

  “It is just a precaution,” McAlmon said. “I know everything will go along smooth. But we got money invested.”

  “Lissen, you dumb Philadelphia hick,” Joey began.

  “That isn’t the way to talk, Joey,” Mr. Gensel said nervously.

  “I got money invested, too,” Joey yelled. “I got one thousand dollars down even money that that lousy Rocky stays ten rounds with me. You don’t need your gorillas. I am only hoping Rocky don’t collapse from fright before the tenth round.”