by Jim Thompson
I laughed. “Hell, Joe, I was four years old at the time, and Mike was six. You’re not much concerned with money at that age, and anyway, Dad never had any. He was too softhearted to dun his patients.”
“You liked Mike, then?” He sounded like he wasn’t quite convinced.
“Like isn’t the word for it,” I said. “He was the finest, swellest guy that ever lived. I couldn’t have loved a real brother more.”
“Even after he did what he did?”
“And just what,” I drawled, “would that be?”
Rothman raised his eyebrows. “I liked Mike myself, Lou, but facts are facts. The whole town knows that if he’d been a little older he’d have gone to the chair instead of reform school.”
“No one knows anything. There was never any proof.”
“The girl identified him.”
“A girl less than three years old! She’d have identified anyone they showed her.”
“And Mike admitted it. And they dug up some other cases.”
“Mike was scared. He didn’t know what he was saying.”
Rothman shook his head. “Let it go, Lou. I’m not really interested in that as such; only in your feelings about Mike.…Weren’t you pretty embarrassed when he came back to Central City? Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d stayed away?”
“No,” I said. “Dad and I knew Mike hadn’t done it. I mean”—I hesitated—“knowing Mike, we were sure he couldn’t be guilty.” Because I was. Mike had taken the blame for me. “I wanted Mike to come back. So did Dad.” He wanted him here to watch over me. “My God, Joe, Dad pulled strings for months to get Mike his job as city building inspector. It wasn’t easy to do, the way people felt about Mike, as popular and influential as Dad was.”
“That all checks,” Rothman nodded. “That’s my understanding of things. But I have to be sure. You weren’t sort of relieved when Mike got killed?”
“The shock killed Dad. He never recovered from it. As for me, well all I can say is that I wish it had been me instead of Mike.”
Rothman grinned. “Okay, Lou. Now it’s my turn.…Mike was killed six years ago. He was walking a girder on the eighth floor of the New Texas Apartments, a Conway Construction job, when he apparently stepped on a loose rivet. He threw himself backwards so he’d fall inside the building, onto the decking. But the floors hadn’t been decked in properly; there were just a few planks scattered here and there. Mike fell all the way through to the basement.”
I nodded. “So,” I said. “What about it, Joe?”
“What about it!” Rothman’s eyes flashed. “You ask me what about it when—”
“As President of the building unions, you know that the Ironworkers are under your jurisdiction, Joe. It’s their obligation, and yours, to see that each floor is decked in as a building goes up.”
“Now you’re talking like a lawyer!” Rothman slapped his desk. “The Ironworkers are weak out here. Conway wouldn’t put in the decking, and we couldn’t make him.”
“You could have struck the job.”
“Oh, well,” Rothman shrugged. “I guess I made a mistake, Lou. I understood you to say that you—”
“You heard me right,” I said. “And let’s not kid each other. Conway cut corners to make money. You let him—to make money. I’m not saying you’re at fault, but I don’t reckon he was either. It was just one of those things.”
“Well,” Rothman hesitated, “that’s a kind of funny attitude for you to take, Lou. It seems to me you’re pretty impersonal about it. But since that’s the way you feel, perhaps I’d better—”
“Perhaps I’d better,” I said. “Let me do the talking and then you won’t have to feel funny about it. There was a riveter up there with Mike at the time he took his dive. Working after hours. Working by himself. But it takes two men to rivet—one to run the gun and one on the bucking iron. You’re going to tell me that he didn’t have any rightful business there, but I think you’re wrong. He didn’t have to be riveting. He could have been gathering up tools or something like that.”
“But you don’t know the whole story, Lou! This man—”
“I know. The guy was an iron tramp, working on a permit. He blew into town without a dime. Three days after Mike’s death he left in a new Chevy which he paid cash on the line for. That looks bad, but it doesn’t really need to mean anything. He might have won the dough in a crap game or—”
“But you still don’t know it all, Lou! Conway—”
“Let’s see if I don’t,” I said. “Conway’s company was the architect on that job as well as the contractor. And he hadn’t allowed enough space for the boilers. To get ’em in, he was going to have to make certain alterations which he knew damned well Mike would never allow. It was either that or lose several hundred thousand dollars.”
“Go on, Lou.”
“So he took the loss. He hated it like hell, but he went ahead and did it.”
Rothman laughed shortly. “He did, huh? I pushed iron on that job, myself, and—and—”
“Well.” I gave him a puzzled look. “He did, didn’t he? No matter what happened to Mike, your locals couldn’t close their eyes to a dangerous situation like that. You’re responsible. You can be sued. You could be tried for criminal collusion. You—”
“Lou.” Rothman cleared his throat. “You’re a hundred percent right, Lou. Naturally we wouldn’t stick our necks out for any amount of money.”
“Sure,” I smiled stupidly. “You just haven’t thought this deal through, Joe. You’ve been getting along pretty good with Conway, and now he’s taken a notion to go nonunion, and naturally you’re kind of upset about it. I reckon if you thought there’d really been a murder you wouldn’t have waited six years to speak up.”
“Yeah, I mean certainly not. Certainly, I wouldn’t.” He began rolling another cigarette. “Uh, how did you find out all these things, Lou, if you don’t mind telling me?”
“Well, you know how it is. Mike was a member of the family, and I get around a lot. Any talk that’s going around, I’d naturally hear it.”
“Mmmm. I didn’t realize there’d been so much gossip. In fact, I didn’t know there’d been any. And you never felt inclined to take any action?”
“Why should I?” I said. “It was just gossip. Conway’s a big business man—just about the biggest contractor in West Texas. He wouldn’t get mixed up in a murder any more’n you people would keep quiet about one.”
Rothman gave me another sharp look, and then he looked down at his desk. “Lou,” he said softly, “do you know how many days a year an ironworker works? Do you know what his life expectancy is? Did you ever see an old ironworker? Did you ever stop to figure that there’s all kinds of ways of dying, but only one way of being dead?”
“Well, no. I reckon not,” I said. “I guess I don’t know what you’re driving at, Joe.”
“Let it go. It’s not really relevant.”
“I suppose the boys don’t have it too easy,” I said. “But here’s the way I look at it, Joe. There’s no law says they have to stick to one line of work. If they don’t like it they can do something else.”
“Yeah,” he nodded, “that’s right, isn’t it? It’s funny how it takes an outsider to see through these problems.…If they don’t like it let ’em do something else. That’s good, that’s very good.”
“Aw,” I said, “it wasn’t anything much.”
“I disagree. It’s very enlightening. You really surprise me, Lou. I’ve been seeing you around town for years and frankly you hardly struck me as a deep thinker.…Do you have any solution for our larger problems, the Negro situation for example?”
“Well, that’s pretty simple,” I said. “I’d just ship ’em all to Africa.”
“Uh-huh. I see, I see,” he said, and he stood up and held out his hand. “I’m sorry I troubled you for nothing, Lou, but I’ve certainly enjoyed our talk. I hope we can get together again sometime.”
“That would be nice,” I said.
“Meanwhile, of course, I haven’t seen you. Understand?”
“Oh, sure,” I said.
We talked for a minute or two more, and then we walked to the outside door together. He glanced at it sharply, then looked at me. “Say,” he said. “Didn’t I close that damned thing?”
“I thought you did,” I said.
“Well, no harm done, I guess,” he said. “Could I make a suggestion to you, Lou, in your own interests?”
“Why, sure you can, Joe. Anything at all.”
“Save that bullshit for the birds.”
He nodded, grinning at me; and for a minute you could have heard a pin drop. But he wasn’t going to say anything. He wasn’t ever going to let on. So, finally, I began to grin, too.
“I don’t know the why of it, Lou—I don’t know a thing, understand? Not a thing. But watch yourself. It’s a good act but it’s easy to overdo.”
“You kind of asked for it, Joe,” I said.
“And now you know why. And I’m not very bright or I wouldn’t be a labor skate.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I see what you mean.”
We shook hands again and he winked and bobbed his head. And I went down the dark hall and down the stairs.
4
After Dad died I’d thought about selling our house. I’d had several good offers for it, in fact, since it was right on the edge of the downtown business district; but somehow I couldn’t let it go. The taxes were pretty high and there was ten times as much room as I needed, but I couldn’t bring myself to sell. Something told me to hold on, to wait.
I drove down the alley to our garage. I drove in and shut off the lights. The garage had been a barn; it still was, for that matter; and I sat there in the doorway, sniffing the musty odors of old oats and hay and straw, dreaming back through the years. Mike and I had kept our ponies in those two front stalls, and back here in the box stall we’d had an outlaws’ cave. We’d hung swings and acting bars from these rafters; and we’d made a swimming pool out of the horse trough. And up overhead in the loft, where the rats now scampered and scurried, Mike had found me with the little gi—
A rat screamed suddenly on a high note.
I got out of the car and hurried out of the big sliding door of the barn, and into the backyard. I wondered if that was why I stayed here: To punish myself.
I went in the back door of the house and went through the house to the front, turning on all the lights, the downstairs lights I mean. Then I came back into the kitchen and made coffee and carried the pot up into Dad’s old office. I sat in his big old leather chair, sipping coffee and smoking, and gradually the tension began to leave me.
It had always made me feel better to come here, back from the time I was kneehigh to a grasshopper. It was like coming out of the darkness into sunlight, out of a storm into calm. Like being lost and found again.
I got up and walked along the bookcases, and endless files of psychiatric literature, the bulky volumes of morbid psychology…Krafft-Ebing, Jung, Freud, Bleuler, Adolf Meyer, Kretschmer, Kraepelin.…All the answers were here, out in the open where you could look at them. And no one was terrified or horrified. I came out of the place I was hiding in—that I always had to hide in—and began to breathe.
I took down a bound volume of one of the German periodicals and read a while. I put it back and took down one in French. I skimmed through an article in Spanish and another in Italian. I couldn’t speak any of those languages worth a doggone, but I could understand ’em all. I’d just picked ’em up with Dad’s help, just like I’d picked up some higher mathematics and physical chemistry and half a dozen other subjects.
Dad had wanted me to be a doctor, but he was afraid to have me go away to school so he’d done what he could for me at home. It used to irritate him, knowing what I had in my head, to hear me talking and acting like any other rube around town. But, in time, when he realized how bad I had the sickness, he even encouraged me to do it. That’s what I was going to be; I was going to have to live and get along with rubes. I wasn’t ever going to have anything but some safe, small job, and I’d have to act accordingly. If Dad could have swung anything else that paid a living, I wouldn’t even have been as much as a deputy sheriff.
I fiddled around Dad’s desk, working out a couple of problems in calculus just for the hell of it. Turning away from the desk, I looked at myself in the mirrored door of the laboratory.
I was still wearing my Stetson, shoved a little to the back of my head. I had on a kind of pinkish shirt and a black bow tie, and the pants of my blue serge suit were hitched up so as to catch on the tops of my Justin boots. Lean and wiry; a mouth that looked all set to drawl. A typical Western-country peace officer, that was me. Maybe friendlier looking than the average. Maybe a little cleaner cut. But on the whole typical.
That’s what I was, and I couldn’t change. Even if it was safe, I doubted if I could change. I’d pretended so long that I no longer had to.
“Lou…”
I jumped and whirled.
“Amy!” I gasped. “What in the—You shouldn’t be here! Where—”
“Upstairs, waiting for you. Now, don’t get excited, Lou. I slipped out after the folks went to sleep and you know them.”
“But someone might—”
“No one did. I slipped down the alley. Aren’t you glad?”
I wasn’t, although I suppose I should have been. She didn’t have the shape that Joyce did, but it was a big improvement over anything else around Central City. Except when she stuck her chin out and narrowed her eyes, like she was daring you to cross her, she was a mighty pretty girl.
“Well, sure,” I said. “Sure, I’m glad. Let’s go back up, huh?”
I followed her up the stairs and into my bedroom. She kicked off her shoes, tossed her coat on a chair with her other clothes, and flopped down backwards on the bed.
“My!” she said, after a moment; and her chin began to edge outward. “Such enthusiasm!”
“Oh,” I said, giving my head a shake. “I’m sorry, Amy. I had something on my mind.”
“S-something on your mind!” Her voice quavered. “I strip myself for him, I shed my decency and my clothes for him and h-he stands there with ‘something’ on his m-mind!”
“Aw, now, honey. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting you, and—”
“No! And why should you? The way you avoid me and make excuses for not seeing me. If I had any pride left I’d—I’d—”
She buried her head in the pillow and began to sob, giving me an A-1 view of what was probably the second prettiest rear end in West Texas. I was pretty sure she was faking; I’d picked up a lot of pointers on women from Joyce. But I didn’t dare give her the smacking she deserved. Instead I threw off my own clothes and crawled into bed with her, pulling her around facing me.
“Now, cut it out, honey,” I said. “You know I’ve just been busy as a chigger at a picnic.”
“I don’t know it! I don’t know anything of the kind! You don’t want to be with me, that’s what!”
“Why, that’s plumb crazy, honey. Why wouldn’t I want to?”
“B-because. Oh, Lou, darling, I’ve been so miserable.…”
“Well, now that’s a right foolish way to act, Amy,” I said.
She went on whimpering about how miserable she’d been, and I went on holding her, listening—you got to do plenty of listening around Amy—and wondering how it had all started.
To tell the truth, I guess it hadn’t started anywhere. We’d just drifted together like straws in a puddle. Our families had grown up together, and we’d grown up together, right here in this same block. We’d walked back and forth to school together, and when we went to parties we were paired off together. We hadn’t needed to do anything. It was all done for us.
I suppose half the town, including her own folks, knew we were knocking off a little. But no one said anything or thought anything about it. After all we were going to get married…even if we were kind of taking our ti
me.
“Lou!” she nudged me. “You aren’t listening to me!”
“Why, sure, I am, honey.”
“Well, answer me then.”
“Not now,” I said. “I’ve got something else on my mind, now.”
“But…Oh, darling…”
I figured she’d been gabbing and nagging about nothing, as usual, and she’d forget about whatever I was supposed to answer. But it didn’t work out that way. As soon as it was over and I’d reached her cigarettes for her, taking one for myself, she gave me another one of her looks and another, “Well, Lou?”
“I hardly know what to say,” I said, which was exactly the case.
“You want to marry me, don’t you?”
“Mar—but, sure,” I said.
“I think we’ve waited long enough, Lou. I can go on teaching school. We’ll get by a lot better than most couples.”
“But…but that’s all we’d do, Amy. We’d never get anywhere!”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t want to go on being a deputy sheriff all of my life. I want to—well—be somebody.”
“Like what, for example?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s no use in talking about it.”
“A doctor, perhaps? I think that would be awfully nice. Is that what you had in mind, Lou?”
“I know it’s crazy, Amy. But—”
She laughed. She rolled her head on the pillow, laughing. “Oh, Lou! I never heard of such a thing! You’re twenty-nine years old, and y-you don’t even speak good English, and—and—oh, ha, ha, ha…”
She laughed until she was gasping, and my cigarette burned down between my fingers and I never knew it until I smelled the scorching flesh.
“I’m s-sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but—Were you teasing me? Were you joking with your little Amy?”
“You know me,” I said. “Lou the laughing boy.”
She began to quiet down at the tone of my voice. She turned away from me and lay on her back, picking at the quilt with her fingers. I got up and found a cigar, and sat down on the bed again.
“You don’t want to marry me, do you, Lou?”