by Jim Thompson
He was brought out of these abstract reveries when, a few miles short of his son’s school, they stopped at a service station. The emblem Z (for Zearsdale) on the station’s gas pumps was responsible. He had seen these signs before, naturally, but they had had no meaning for him. Now, after last night, they had a great deal. For a man needs something very, very special in the oil business to become an important refiner and distributor.
Attempting to become one, he invariably is confronted by the giant-with-many-names who proceeds nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a million to stomp the holy God out of him. The giant has posted Keep Out signs around the field of refining and distributing. Littering that field are the bleached and broken bones of intruders who had everything to go the distance—yet not quite enough.
There was Gidsen, for example, a man with great wit and charm, and the backing of some of the east’s wealthiest families. No more. There was Harlund, who had as much going for him as Gidsen, plus plenty of political power. No more. And so on, endlessly.
To fight the many-named giant, you had to fight his way. And that was not something you could learn. It had to be second-nature with you. An instinct for the jugular. A conviction that the destruction of an enemy was as necessary as defecation. A social outlook that was as intestinal as it was amoral; seeing one’s neighbors as something to be gobbled up, and a knife in the back as the best way to a man’s heart.
Not all the giant’s successful rivals were like that, of course. There are always exceptions. But Mitch doubted that Zearsdale was one of them.
What the hell? he asked himself. I’m not that important. I didn’t really do anything to get him down on me.
His son, Sam, was waiting for them at the gate of the school. Mitch’s heart quickened as the boy came toward them—black-haired, gray-eyed, wirily trim in his cadet’s uniform. The long-ago image of one Mitchell Corley, dice handler de luxe.
Sam shook hands with him, kissed Red and complimented her on her suit. Then, he cast a lingering and longing eye at the car’s controls, and cocked a brow at his father.
“Okay,” Mitch laughed. “If it’s all right with your Aunt Red.”
“Of course, it’s all right,” Red smiled. “I’ll sit on your lap, Mitch.”
Mitch slid over on the seat, and Sam got behind the wheel. How old was he now, thirteen, fourteen? He experimented with the stick shift for a moment, then drove them smoothly through the gate to a nearby picnic area. Mitch complimented him on his driving as they unloaded the picnic hamper. It wouldn’t be long now, he said, before Sam was driving his own car.
The boy shrugged casually. “I wouldn’t have much use for one in a place like this, Dad.”
“Well, of course, you won’t be here by the time you’re old enough to vote.”
“Of course.”
To Mitch, the words seemed an echo of his own voice; something that he had once said pretty much as Sam had said them now. He glanced at Red, and found her looking at him meaningfully.
“I think you’ll be through with boarding schools before long, Sam,” he heard himself saying. “Red—your Aunt Red and I hope we’ll be able to run our business without traveling in another year or two, and then we’ll all settle down together.”
“Well,” Sam said. “I don’t care particularly about settling down. I’d just as soon travel as not.”
Mitch passed a paper plate of roast beef, murmuring that he needed to get an education before he started traveling. Sam said that Mitch seemed to have managed to combine the two.
“No, I didn’t really get an education,” Mitch said seriously. “My folks couldn’t afford to put me in boarding school, or you can bet they would have.”
“What about Aunt Red?”
“What? Oh, well, Aunt Red was just a tot while we were on the road. By the time she was of school age, the family was settled down in one place.”
The boy looked gravely from his father to Red. He nodded, as though to himself, and began buttering a roll.
“Good chow,” he said. “Did you cook it, Red—Aunt Red, I mean?”
“Why, no, I didn’t. They don’t allow cooking in the apartment where we are.”
“I’ll bet you could cook though, couldn’t you? I’ll bet you can do anything better than a wife could do.”
“W-What?” Red stammered. “I, uh, why do you say that?”
“Because Dad has never got married. Again, I mean. You take care of him so good that he doesn’t want a wife.”
A deep blush had spread over Red’s face. She bit her lip, hand trembling as she reached for a piece of fruit. In the heavy silence, Sam looked innocently (too innocently?) at his father.
“I’ve got the afternoon off, Dad. Want me to show you around or anything?”
“Why don’t you show your Aunt Red around, and let me join you later?” Mitch said. “Right now I imagine I’d better make my courtesy visit to the Colonel.”
“He’s been in the infirmary all week,” Sam told him. “But I guess you should drop in on the adjutant. He’s sitting in for the Colonel.”
“Good. I’ll take care of it right now,” Mitch said.
He left the car with them, and headed on foot for the ivy-covered administration building. Crossing the sunbaked parade ground, he skirted a small group of drilling cadets, in the custody of a red-faced man in sergeant’s uniform. They were a punishment squad, apparently. Or, perhaps, an awkward squad. Sweat streaked their straining faces, dripping down to darken the gray of their uniforms. To Mitch they seemed like automatons, moving like a single machine. Yet they did not satisfy the sergeant. With a harsh and unintelligible yell he brought them to a halt, molded them into a dozen-odd sweating statues. Then, pacing up and down in front of them, occasionally thrusting his nose within an inch of some supposed miscreant, he spewed out such a threatening and insulting tirade that even Mitch was a little shocked.
But this was a good school. One of the very best, he thought, as he went up the steps of the administration building. The sons of the southwest’s elite were enrolled here, and he had only been able to enter Sam with the help of some of his highly placed hotel friends. It was good—so how could you knock it? How could you object, after a nonage in bellboys’ locker rooms, to the discipline in one of the very best schools?
Certainly, Sam never kicked about it. Sam never kicked about anything, for that matter.
Major Dillingham, the colonel’s adjutant, might have been created by a drunken Cruikshank or Hogarth, using the parade-ground sergeant as model. Face bloated and beet-colored, he wobbled up from behind his desk as though floated by the balloon of his belly. He proffered a puffy hand, which seemed to compress interminably within Mitch’s grasp. Then, he teetered to the door and closed it, his pipestem legs, seeming on the point of snapping at any moment, so thin that their puttees appeared to be wrapped about less than nothing, a kind of embryonic invisibility.
He sat down again. He treated Mitch to what had all the aspects of a sternly penetrating stare, except for the absence of eyes, which were presumably lurking within the puffy fox-holes of their lids.
“Mr. Corley,” he wheezed heavily. “Mr. Corley. Mr. Mitchell Corley.”
Mitch waited, looking at him silently. He could smell something here, something besides the faint aroma of talcum and the osmotic emanations of faulty kidneys.
“Something has come up, Mr. Corley. Something that, uh, must be explained, but which I see no satisfactory explanation for. I was going to take it up with the Colonel, and of course I will have to. There is no alternative, I’m afraid. But hearing that you were visiting Samuel today—a very fine young man, Mr. Corley. One of our best young men—”
“I know that,” Mitch said. “What I don’t know, Major, is what you’re leading up to, and when or if you’re going to get to it.”
The statement seemed to stun the adjutant. It was meant to. Mitch had always believed that attack was the best defense. He leaned back negli
gently, as the major puffily collected himself.
“It, uh, came on today’s mail, Mr. Corley. Addressed to the Colonel, naturally, but since I am temporarily in charge, I—I find it difficult to understand. Impossible to understand…”
“Go on,” Mitch said coldly. But he knew what the trouble was now. “I’m a busy man. Aren’t you?”
The major underwent another moment of shock. Then, a faint gleam of malice in his enbunkered eyes, he took an envelope from a locked drawer and pitched it across the desk. Mitch opened it.
There was a picture inside, a blown-up copy of one. A rogue’s gallery front-and-profile photograph of a woman; it listed her police record on the reverse side. Sixteen arrests, sixteen convictions, all for the same crime.
There were no aliases. The woman had always used her legal name.
Mrs. Mitchell Corley.
9
Fort Worth…
Cowtown. Where the West Begins.
Take it easy here, and people will do you the same kind of favor. Dress as you like. You won’t be judged by your dress. That kind of crummy looking fella in Levi’s and boots is worth forty million dollars. Do as you like. Do anything you’re big enough to do. But be danged sure that you are big enough.
Neighboring Dallas started an evil rumor about its rival. Forth Worth was so rustic, the libel ran, that panthers prowled the streets at high noon. Fort Worth promptly dubbed itself the Panther City, and declared the lie was gospel truth.
Certainly, there were panthers in the streets. Kiddies had to have somethin’ to play with, didn’t they? Aside from that, the cats performed a highly necessary service. Every morning they were herded down to the east-flowing Trinity River, there to drain their bladders into the stream which provided Dallas’ water supply.
That was probably why them people over in Dallas had so many nutty ideas. They’d take a few swigs of that panther piss, and pretty soon they were thinking that they were just as good as other people.
…Mitch and his wife Teddy arrived in Forth Worth approximately a month before their son was born. And Mitch—as Teddy declared he must—became the housekeeper for the family.
He felt that he just about had to, for the time being and under the circumstances. Teddy’s earning power was far greater than his, and much would be needed for a family of three. Also, he could not dispute with his wife at what he considered a very trying period for her, nor could he ask her to cut down on expenses merely to indulge his vanity.
As a bachelor, living in a furnished room, he had entered marriage with only the vaguest idea of the cost of maintaining a wife and household. A wife like Teddy, that is, and a household governed by her whims. In fact, he never knew, since Teddy did the buying and bill-paying, accepting whatever portion of his earnings he gave her as being “plenty.” But it did gradually dawn on him that Teddy was pooping off enormous amounts of money.
Teddy had to have the very best of everything—furniture, food and drink, apparel, living quarters. But that was only the beginning. She would buy a hundred-dollar dress, and discard it after one wearing. She would buy new furnishings, decide that they were “all wrong” and dispose of them for whatever was offered. She would do senselessly extravagant things for Mitch—the purchase, for example, of a dozen pairs of watered-silk pajamas—then pout when he was not properly appreciative.
Mitch had the weird notion at times that Teddy hated money, that she felt guilty about having it and was impelled to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
Well, things were going to change, he told himself determinedly. After the baby was born and she had recovered from her pregnancy-inspired goofiness (as he thought of it), little Teddy was going to get squared away fast.
That’s what the man thought. That wasn’t what happened.
For one thing, he was immediately enchanted by little Sam—named after his father. For another, Teddy was not enchanted by the baby. It annoyed her. She regarded it as an intruder on a situation which had been just about perfect as it was.
“You’re my baby,” she told Mitch. “You’re all I need.”
“But you’re his mother,” Mitch insisted. “A mother should want to take care of her baby.”
“I do. I love taking care of you.”
“But goddammit—! I mean, look, honey, why did you have a baby if you felt like this?”
“Because you wanted one. You wanted a baby, so I gave you a baby.”
“But—but, Teddy—”
“So now it’s your job to take care of him,” Teddy continued sweetly. “You take care of your baby, and I’ll take care of my baby.”
The conversation took place about ten days after Sam’s birth, and Teddy had already returned to work. He had awakened in the middle of the night to find her gone from his side and a note pinned to her pillow. He had been so angry that he almost called her employers, and he refrained from doing so only out of fear of embarrassing her.
They didn’t know she was married. Her pregnancy, almost undetectable even to Mitch, had gone unnoticed; and she had gotten her needed time off on the pretext of traveling to the deathbed of a close relative. It was the company’s policy not to employ married women. Teddy had strictly enjoined him against ever calling or coming to the place.
Well, anyway. Mitch decided to let things rock along as they were for a while. He loved being with the baby. Someone had to earn the living, and he had no job to go to.
So he became the housekeeper for their apartment, and the full-time nurse for his son. He read a lot. He worked with the dice. On nice days, he loaded Sam into his perambulator and took him out for an airing. As time went on, these walks often wound up in hotel locker-rooms and the back rooms of pool halls and cigar stores, or wherever else a crap game could be found.
Mitch was getting better and better with the dice. He was not nearly as good then as he eventually got to be, but he was good. He banked part of his winnings, contributing the rest to household expenses. That gave him some feeling of independence; at least, he was paying for his own keep. But he was far from satisfied.
Sure, he loved being with the baby, but he couldn’t make a career of it. Sure, he was doing fairly good with the dice—but how was he doing it? By hanging out in the kind of places that had always been faintly repugnant to him. Cheap, shoddy places; the habitat, as a rule, of cheap, shoddy people. Walk into one of those joints ten years from now, and you’d find pretty much the same people there.
They were pikers, bums, the small fry of the nowhere world. Stick around them long enough, and you became a permanent member of the family. If you ever wanted to be in the big time, you had to be where the big-timers were.
Still…what to do about Teddy? He loved Teddy; he wanted her to be happy. He wasn’t afraid of her—not exactly, that is—but he shrank from the prospect of annoying her.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to do anything about Teddy, because she had also become dissatisfied with the way they were living. She announced abruptly one morning that they were renting a house, and in that house there was going to be a housekeeper or a nurse-housekeeper or whatever the heck was necessary to allow Mitch to take a job.
“I mean it, Mitch!” she said crossly. “I don’t care what kind of job it is, but by golly you get one and get it fast!”
“But—but that’s what I’ve been wanting to do, all along!” Mitch exploded. “You’re the one that insisted that I stay at home, and—”
“I did not! Anyway, what good is it having you stay at home if I never get to be with you? When I’m working, you’re asleep, and when I’m ready for bed you’re cleaning house or out walking with the baby or some other crazy thing!”
“I know, but—”
“You’d better stop arguing with me, Mitch Corley! Get yourself a night job like I’ve got. Then maybe we’ll get to see each other from one weekend to the next!”
Mitch did as he was told. The job he took—hotel doorman—was not something he would have bothered with ordinarily; it didn�
��t pay enough money. But money wasn’t the most important factor at the moment, and there were compensations for the lack of cash.
He wore the hotel’s livery, but he was actually employed by the garage-taxi company which serviced the hotel. Thus, since the latter company could hardly hire a supervisor for one man, he was pretty much his own boss. Then (and this was more important to him than he had previously realized) he was no longer addressed as “boy.” Lifted out of the category of faceless flunkies, he became a person—a man with a name, who was to be consulted with at least a measure of respect on the vital matters of transportation and the maintenance of ultra-expensive cars.
There was little if anything to do between two and six in the morning, and he could sit in his starter’s cubicle and read or chat with the inevitable guests who were afflicted with insomnia. One of his most frequent visitors was an ageless little man, with eyes which bugged enormously behind his thick-lensed glasses and a great mop of wiry iron-gray hair. Early in Mitch’s employment, he had introduced himself with a question:
“If you are a doorman,” he said, in subtly accented English, “why are you called a starter?”
“I’ll look it up,” Mitch grinned. “Ask me tomorrow night.”
“So.” The man nodded, gravely approving, then leaned far over into the starter’s cubicle. “Why do you read a book on modern art? Someone has asked you a question about it?”
Mitch said no, he was simply doing it on his own account. He’d heard some ostensibly important people talking about modern art, and he figured it was something he should know about.
“Then, you are not doing it on your own account. It is only a sop to others.”