by Jim Thompson
He shifted the cud in his jaw, chewed a moment and went on. “I never had any legal schooling, Mr. Ford; picked up my law by reading in an attorney’s office. All I ever had in the way of higher education was a couple years in agricultural college, and that was pretty much a plain waste of time. Crop rotation? Well, how’re you going to do it when the banks only make crop loans on cotton? Soil conservation? How’re you going to do terracing and draining and contour plowing when you’re cropping on shares? Purebred stock? Sure. Maybe you can trade your razorbacks for Poland Chinas.…I just learned two things there at that college, Mr. Ford, that was ever of any use to me. One was that I couldn’t do any worse than the people that were in the saddle, so maybe I’d better try pulling ’em down and riding myself. The other was a definition I got out of the agronomy books, and I reckon it was even more important than the first. It did more to revise my thinking, if I’d really done any thinking up until that time. Before that I’d seen everything in black and white, good and bad. But after I was set straight I saw that the name you put to a thing depended on where you stood and where it stood. And…and here’s the definition, right out of the agronomy books: ‘A weed is a plant out of place.’ Let me repeat that. 'A weed is a plant out of place.’ I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower.
“You’re in my yard, Mr. Ford.”
…So I told him how it had been while he nodded and spat and drove, a funny pot-bellied shrimp of a guy who really had just one thing, understanding, but so much of it that you never missed anything else. He understood me better’n I understood myself.
“Yes, yes,” he’d say, “you had to like people. You had to keep telling yourself you liked them. You needed to offset the deep, subconscious feelings of guilt.” Or, he’d say, he’d interrupt, “and, of course, you knew you’d never leave Central City. Overprotection had made you terrified of the outside world. More important, it was part of the burden you had to carry to stay here and suffer.”
He sure understood.
I reckon Billy Boy Walker’s been cussed more in high places than any man in the country. But I never met a man I liked more.
I guess the way you felt about him depended on where you stood.
He stopped the car in front of my house, and I’d told him all I had to tell. But he sat there for a few minutes, spitting and sort of studying.
“Would you care to have me come in for a while, Mr. Ford?”
“I don’t think it’d be smart,” I said. “I got an idea it’s not going to be very long, now.”
He pulled an old turnip of a watch from his pocket and glanced at it. “Got a couple of hours until train time, but—well, maybe you’re right. I’m sorry, Mr. Ford. I’d hoped, if I couldn’t do any better, to be taking you away from here with me.”
“I couldn’t have gone, no matter how things were. It’s like you say, I’m tied here. I’ll never be free as long as I live.…”
25
You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything.
You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all.
You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever’ and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.
You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading ’em right. But you know your life doesn’t depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.
You go into the laboratory and start pawing along the rows of bottles and boxes, knocking them on the floor, kicking them, stamping them. You find the bottle of one hundred percent pure nitric acid and you jerk out the rubber cork. You take it into the office and swing it along the rows of books. And the leather bindings begin to smoke and curl and wither—and it isn’t good enough.
You go back into the laboratory. You come out with a gallon bottle of alcohol and the box of tall candles always kept there for emergencies. For emergencies.
You go upstairs, and then on up the little flight of stairs that leads to the attic. You come down from the attic and go through each of the bedrooms. You come back downstairs and go down into the basement. And when you return to the kitchen you are empty-handed. All the candles are gone, all the alcohol.
You shake the coffee pot and set it back on the stove burner. You roll another cigarette. You take a carving knife from a drawer and slide it up the sleeve of your pinkish-tan shirt with the black bow tie.
You sit down at the table with your coffee and cigarette, and you ease your elbow up and down, seeing how far you can lower your arm without dropping the knife, letting it slide down from your sleeve a time or two.
You think, “Well how can you? How can you hurt someone that’s already dead?”
You wonder if you’ve done things right, so’s there’ll be nothing left of something that shouldn’t ever have been, and you know everything has been done right. You know, because you planned this moment before eternity way back yonder someplace.
You look up at the ceiling, listening, up through the ceiling and into the sky beyond. And there isn’t the least bit of doubt in your mind. That’ll be the plane, all right, coming in from the east, from Fort Worth. It’ll be the plane she’s on.
You look up at the ceiling, grinning, and you nod and say, “Long time no see. How you been doin’ anyway, huh, baby? How are you, Joyce?”
26
Just for the hell of it, I took a peek out the back door, and then I went part way into the living room and stooped down so I could look out the window. It was like I’d thought, of course. They had the house covered from every angle. Men with Winchesters. Deputies, most of ’em, with a few of the “safety inspectors” on Conway’s payroll.
It would have been fun to take a real good look, to step to the door and holler howdy to ’em. But it would have been fun for them, too, and I figured they were having far too much as it was. Anyway, some of those “inspectors” were apt to be a mite trigger happy, anxious to show their boss they were on their toes, and I had a little job to do yet.
I had to get everything wrapped up to take with me.
I took one last walk through the house, and I saw that everything—the alcohol and the candles and everything—was going fine. I came back downstairs, closing all the doors behind me—all the doors behind me—and sat back down at the kitchen table.
The coffee pot was empty. There was just one cigarette paper left and just enough tobacco to fill it, and, yeah—yeah!—I was down to my last match. Things were sure working out fine.
I puffed on the cigarette, watching the red-gray ashes move down toward my fingers. I watched, not needing to, knowing they’d get just so far and no further.
I heard a car pull into the driveway. I heard a couple of its doors slam. I heard them crossing the yard and coming up the steps and across the porch. I heard the front door open’ and they came in. And the ashes had burned out, the cigarette had gone dead.
And I laid it in my saucer and looked up.
I looked out the kitchen window, first, at the two guys standing outside. Then I looked at them:
Conway and Hendricks, Hank Butterby and Jeff Plummer. Two or three fellows I didn’t know.
They fell back, watching me, letting her move out ahead of them. I looked at her.
Joyce Lakeland.
Her neck was in a cast that came clear up to her chin like a collar, and she walked stiff-backed and jerky. Her face was a white mask of gauze and tape, and nothing much showed of it but her eyes and her lips. And she was trying to say something—her lips were moving—but she didn’t really have a voi
ce. She could hardly get out a whisper.
“Lou…I didn’t…”
“Sure,” I said. “I didn’t figure you had, baby.”
She kept coming toward me and I stood up, my right arm raised like I was brushing at my hair.
I could feel my face twisting, my lips pulling back from my teeth. I knew what I must look like, but she didn’t seem to mind. She wasn’t scared. What did she have to be scared of?
“…this, Lou. Not like this…”
“Sure, you can’t,” I said. “Don’t hardly see how you could.”
“…not anyway without…”
“Two hearts that beat as one,” I said. “Two—ha, ha, ha,—two—ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha—two—J-jesus Chri—ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha—two Jesus…”
And I sprang at her, I made for her just like they’d thought I would. Almost. And it was like I’d signaled, the way the smoke suddenly poured up through the floor. And the room exploded with shots and yells, and I seemed to explode with it, yelling and laughing and…and…Because they hadn’t got the point. She’d got that between the ribs and the blade along with it. And they all lived happily ever after, I guess, and I guess—that’s—all.
Yeah, I reckon that’s all unless our kind gets another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people.
All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad. All us folks. Me and Joyce Lakeland, and Johnnie Pappas and Bob Maples and big ol’ Elmer Conway and little ol’ Amy Stanton. All of us.
All of us.
About the Author
James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906. In all, Jim Thompson wrote twenty-nine novels and two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory). Films based on his novels include The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.
…and The Grifters
In November 2011, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s The Grifters. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.
The Grifters
As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Not with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.
Somehow, he got back to his car and managed to slide into the seat. But that was all he could manage. He moaned as the change in posture cramped his stomach muscles; then, with a strangled gasp, he leaned out the window.
Several cars passed as he spewed vomit into the street, their occupants grinning, frowning sympathetically, or averting their eyes in disgust. But Roy Dillon was too sick to notice or to care if he had. When at last his stomach was empty, he felt better, though still not well enough to drive. By then, however, a prowl car had pulled up behind him—a sheriff’s car, since he was in the county rather than city of Los Angeles—and a brown-clad deputy was inviting him to step out to the walk.
Dillon shakily obeyed.
“One too many, mister?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” The cop had already noticed the absence of liquor breath. “Let’s see your driver’s license.”
Dillon showed it to him, also displaying, with seeming inadvertence, an assortment of credit cards. Suspicion washed off the cop’s face, giving way to concern.
“You seem pretty sick, Mr. Dillon. Any idea what caused it?”
“My lunch, I guess. I know I should know better, but I had a chicken-salad sandwich—and it didn’t taste quite right when I was eating it—but…” He let his voice trail away, smiling a shy, rueful smile.
“Mmm-hmm!” The cop nodded grimly. “That stuff will do it to you. Well”—a shrewd up-and-down look—“you all right, now? Want us to take you to a doctor?”
“Oh, no. I’m fine.”
“We got a first-aid man over to the substation. No trouble to run you over there.”
Roy declined, pleasantly but firmly. Any prolonged contact with the cops would result in a record, and any kind of record was at best a nuisance. So far he had none; the scrapes which the grift had led him into had not led him to the cops. And he meant to keep it that way.
The deputy went back to the prowl car, and he and his partner drove off. Roy waved a smiling farewell to them and got back into his own car. Gingerly, wincing a little, he got a cigarette lit. Then, convinced that the last of the vomiting was over, he forced himself to lean back against the cushions.
He was in a suburb of Los Angeles, one of the many which resist incorporation despite their interdependence and the lack of visible boundaries. From here it was almost a thirty-mile drive back into the city, a very long thirty miles at this hour of the day. He needed to be in better shape than he was, to rest a while, before bucking the outbound tide of evening traffic. More important, he needed to reconstruct the details of his recent disaster, while they still remained fresh in his mind.
He closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them again, focussing them on the changing lights of the nearby traffic standard. And suddenly, without moving from the car—without physically moving from it—he was back inside the shop again. Sipping a limeade at the fountain, while he casually studied his surroundings.
It was little different from a thousand small shops in Los Angeles, establishments with an abbreviated soda fountain, a showcase or two of cigars, cigarettes, and candy, and overflowing racks of magazines, paperback books, and greeting cards. In the East, such shops were referred to as stationers’ or candy stores. Here they were usually called confectionaries or simply fountains.
Dillon was the only customer in the place. The one other person present was the clerk, a large, lumpy-looking youth of perhaps nineteen or twenty. As Dillon finished his drink, he noted the boy’s manner as he tapped ice down around the freezer containers, working with a paradoxical mixture of diligence and indifference. He knew exactly what needed to be done, his expression said, and to hell with doing a bit more than that. Nothing for show, nothing to impress anyone. The boss’s son, Dillon decided, putting down his glass and sliding off the stool. He sauntered up toward the cash register, and the youth laid down the sawed-off ball bat with which he had been tamping. Then, wiping his hands on his apron, he also moved up to the register.
“Ten cents,” he said.
“And a package of those mints, too.”
“Twenty cents.”
“Twenty cents, hmm?” Roy began to fumble through his pockets, while the clerk fidgeted impatiently. “Now, I know I’ve got some change here. Bound to have. I wonder where the devil…”
Exasperatedly, he shook his head and drew out his wallet. “I’m sorry. Mind cashing a twenty?”
The clerk almost snatched the bill from his hand. He slapped the bill down on the cash register ledge and counted out the change from the drawer. Dillon absently picked it up, continuing his fumbling search of his pockets.
“Now, doesn’t that get you? I mean, you know darned well you’ve got something, but—” He broke off, eyes widening with a pleased smile. “There it is—two dimes! Just give me back my twenty, will you?”
The clerk grabbed the dimes from him, and tossed back the bill. Dillon turned casually toward the door, pausing, on the way out, for a disinterested glance at the magazine display.
Thus, for the tenth time that day, he had worked the twenties, one of the three standard gimmicks of the short con grift. The other two are the smack and the tat, usually good for bigger scores but not nearly so swift nor safe. Some marks fall for the twenties repeatedly, without ever tipping.
Dillon didn’t see the clerk come around the counter. The guy was just there, all of a sudden, a pouty snarl on his face, swinging the sawed-off bat like a battering ram.
“Dirty crook,” he whinnied angrily. “Dirty crooks keep cheatin’ me and cheatin’ me, an’ Papa cusses me out for it!”
The butt of the bat
landed in Dillon’s stomach. Even the clerk was startled by its effect. “Now, you can’t blame me, mister,” he stammered. “You were askin’ for it. I—I give you change for twenty dollars, an’ then you have me give the twenty back, an’—an’”—his self-righteousness began to crumble. “N-now, you k-know you did, m-mister.”
Roy could think of nothing but his agony. He turned swimming eyes on the clerk, eyes flooded with pain-filled puzzlement. The look completely demolished the youth.
“It w-was j-just a mistake, mister. Y-you made a m-mistake, an’ I m-made a m-m-mistake an’—mister!” He backed away, terrified. “D-don’t look at me like that!”
“You killed me,” Dillon gasped. “You killed me, you rotten bastard!”
“Nah! P-please don’t say t-that, mister!”
“I’m dying,” Dillon gasped. And, then, somehow, he had gotten out of the place.
And now, seated in his car and re-examining the incident, he could see no reason to fault himself, no flaw in his technique. It was just bad luck. He’d simply caught a goof, and goofs couldn’t be figured.
He was right about that. And he’d been right about something else, although he didn’t know it.
As he drove back to Los Angeles, constantly braking and speeding up in the thickening traffic, repeatedly stopping and starting—with every passing minute, he was dying.