by Jim Thompson
…Zearsdale gestured and the three fell back behind Mitch; poised, ready to pounce at another gesture. Red was recovering fast from her fear, and her eyes were icy as the oil man gave her a smile of apology.
“I’m sorry if I was a little rough a moment ago, Miss Red. These movies I was about to show, well, I thought you should see them. But if you’d really rather not—”
“She would rather not,” Mitch said. “They’re pictures of the dice game our host and I had the other night, Red. I think he feels there was something wrong with the game.”
“Does he now?” Red said. “And just what does he think he’s going to do about it?”
Zearsdale obviously didn’t like her tone. But with what was patently an effort, he managed a fatherly smile. “I understand your feelings. You’re far more a victim of this man than I am. I know, of course, that you’re not his sister.”
“So you know I’m not his sister,” Red said. “What about it?”
“Child, child…” He shook his head gravely. “He’s led you to believe that he’s going to marry you, hasn’t he? He’s promised to marry you. But what you don’t know is that he’s already married. I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to find out about this man, and—”
“Why?”
“Why? Well, I, uh—”
“Why?” Red repeated. “Who asked you to? What business is it of yours? Who do you think you are, anyway?”
“He thinks he’s God,” Mitch said. “He told me so himself.”
Zearsdale flushed angrily. He said they would do well to shut up, and Red told him to shut up himself.
“I mean it, doggone you! I know Mitch is married and I know he’s getting unmarried, and as soon as he does he’s marrying me. Oh, yes, you are, darling!” She gave him a dazzling smile. “I was angry enough to kill you when I found out. I went out to the airport tonight, swearing that I was going to kill you. But your plane was late, and I began to get frightened and worried about you, and—and—”
She turned back to Zearsdale, eyes sparkling with tears.
“Don’t you tell me anything about Mitch! He didn’t know he was married when he met me. When he found out, he couldn’t tell me, because I would have been hurt and he loved me and wanted to protect me, and—an’—Never mind. N-Never mind. It’s n-none of your business, you big ape!”
She broke off sniffling. Mitch swallowed lumpily, and for a moment he would have given both of his arms just to have them around her. Now, everything fell into place, and he knew why she had been so strained and awkward with him, why she had wanted to be around others for a while before facing him alone. The crisis in their relationship had given her a new and mature insight, and she had needed time to adjust to the unexpected depths she had found within herself. Also, doubtless, she had wanted to dispose of—
“I’m afraid I was mistaken about you,” Zearsdale frowned at her. “You seem to be just about as bad as Corley is.”
“Oh, shut up! You just hush,” said Red.
“Yes, just as bad,” Zearsdale nodded grimly. “So you’ll have to suffer as he—Stop that, Corley! Don’t snap your fingers when I’m talking!”
“I need a light.” Mitch held up a cigarette. “Tell one of your apostles to give me one.”
Zearsdale motioned curtly, and one of the mugs thrust a light at Mitch.
Mitch grabbed his wrist, yanked him forward, then swung him backward, simultaneously kicking over his chair as he lunged to his feet.
The thrown guy and another went down in a tangle. The third came in swinging. Mitch ducked inside the flailing arms, brought his head up sharply. There was a messy crunching sound and the guy’s chin almost met his nose, and he went down to the floor in a heap. But now the other two were up, were weaving in with blood in their eyes. Mitch sprang squarely between them, his arms outflung.
Their arms whipped around their necks. Locked. Contracted. Their heads smashed together and they wobbled dazedly, then suddenly sat down as he kicked their legs from under them.
“Mitch! Take it, honey…” Red was holding a small gun out to him, the gun she had thought she was going to shoot him with.
Mitch took it, and swung coldly on Zearsdale. “All right,” he snapped. “You claim I cheated you. No ifs, ands and buts about it, I rooked you, so you get these punks out here to give Red and me a hard time. Now I want to know just why you think you were cheated.”
The oil man was staring at the three beaten hoods. He turned to Mitch, a curious expression in his deep-set eyes.
“Where did you learn to fight like that, Corley? I thought I was the only person who knew how.”
“In hotel locker-rooms mostly. I used to be a bellboy.”
“That’s very interesting. I’ll bet you were a very good bellboy, weren’t you?”
Mitch began to get angry all over again. Three minutes ago, this character was going to have him worked over and now he wanted to make conversation.
“Let’s stick to the subject,” he said, curtly. “You say I’m a cheat. I say I win because I’m good, because I go into a game with a big edge; an edge I’ve gotten through training and experience. Any man who wants to be in the big time has to have one. You have, obviously. When was the last time you went into a business deal without a better than even chance of winning?”
“What?” Zearsdale’e eyes had strayed to the hoodlums again. “Oh, come now, Corley. You’re a professional gambler. You can make the dice do anything you want them to.”
“Can I? Can I always do it? Then why is it that you broke me the night we played?”
“Well—But you came out winner.”
“But you broke me,” Mitch insisted. “You took me right down the line, and I was all ready to tell you good night and leave. That’s what I meant to do, what I’ve done many times before when I went broke. But you wouldn’t have it that way. You forced a loan on me to keep the game going. Well, isn’t that right or not? You won and you have no one to blame but yourself for not staying winner.”
“Well.” Zearsdale wet his lips hesitantly. “That was purely a come-on. You lost deliberately.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! I was doing my damnedest to win, and those movies must have shown that I was! Why would I deliberately throw to you, anyway? To get you in another game? How do I know I can do it? What’s the percentage in it? Why not take you in the game that I have?”
He waited, frowning. Zearsdale shrugged.
“Whatever you say. I’m hardly in a position to argue about it.”
“Why not?” Mitch looked down at the gun. “You mean because of this? Well, we’ll fix that right now.” He walked over to the oil man, slapped the gun into his hand and stepped back. “Now, argue all you damned please. Or do you want these punks to sit on me before you begin?”
Zearsdale looked a little stunned. He hesitated, then nodded to the three. “All right, I won’t need you anymore.” They sidled out the door, keeping a wary eye on Mitch, and he shook his head bemusedly.
“Corley…Mr. Corley, I—I hardly know what to say. I seldom make a mistake about a man, but—”
“If you don’t know what to say, maybe you’d better not say anything,” Mitch told him. “Maybe if you just listen to me, you might learn something.”
“Maybe I will,” Zearsdale nodded. “Why don’t we see?”
“All right,” Mitch said. “You asked me if I was a good bellboy. The truth is that I was lousy. I was like a lot of young men you see, wanting a lot but not willing to do much to get it. That’s why I took up dice, I suppose. Because it looked like an easy way of making out big. I kept on playing with them, always thinking it would suddenly get easy. And by the time I found out that there was no easy way of being good at anything, it was too late to stop.”
But simply being good with the dice wasn’t enough, of course. Not if you wanted to move into the upper brackets. You had to be well-informed, well-read, polished. You had to acquire an outlook on life, a certain way of dealing with people—an indefi
nable thing called class, which could never be imitated. So he had accomplished all that, and in accomplishing it, he had become far more than the very best man in the country with a pair of dice.
“The trouble with you, Zearsdale, is that you’ve forgotten how good a man can get through nothing but his own efforts. If he’s good, as good as I am, then he can’t be for real. If he beats you, he’s got to be cheating. Well, I’m a ringer, yes, but I’m the straightest player you’ll ever come up against. I’m no more a cheat than the baseball pitcher who throws nine strikes out of ten. Or the sharpshooter who keeps ringing up bulls-eyes. And I’m good at a lot of things besides dice. I’ll take you on for a question-and-answers game on any subject you name. I’ll take you on at poker—with you dealing all the cards. I’ll take you on at golf—and let you pick my clubs. I’ll take you on at anything from matches to marbles, Zearsdale, and I’ll beat the ever-lovin’ socks off of you, because it’s been so damned long since you met a good man you’re ready to lie down and holler foul before you ever begin!”
Red clapped her hands enthusiastically. Zearsdale sat scowling, squirming a little. He wasn’t used to being talked to like that. He certainly didn’t have to take it. He liked a man with pride, of course. God, how he loved a man with pride and the guts to stand up and speak his mind! But—
His broad mouth twisted into a reluctant grin. Then he threw back his head and laughed, and he laughed until the tears came to his eyes. At last, after a vigorous blowing of his nose, he got control of himself.
“Corley, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world! I honestly wouldn’t. I—” He suddenly became aware of the gun he was holding. “My God, what am I doing with this? Let me give it back to you.”
“Keep it,” Mitch said. “Red and I don’t have any need for guns.”
“Neither do I,” Zearsdale said. “I’ll get rid of it for us.”
He excused himself and left the room. He returned without the gun, wheeling a small portable bar in front of him.
“I think we all need a drink,” he declared roundly. “Or maybe two, who knows? What would you like, Miss, uh, Red?”
“Nothing,” said Red, looking very stern. “Not until you say you’re sorry.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
“With sugar on it,” Red insisted. “That’s what you have to say when you’re really and truly sorry.”
Zearsdale squirmed, glanced appealingly at Mitch. Mitch told him he might as well give in and say it. Red would persist until he did. So the oil man said very rapidly that he was sorry with sugar on it.
“Well, all right, then,” Red said, and she gave him one of her very best smiles, a smile that reached right inside of him and patted him on the heart. “I guess you’re really not so bad when a person gets to know you.”
“Who is?” said Mitch.
“Hear, hear,” said Zearsdale.
And then they all had a drink together.
Or maybe two, who knows…?
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 Alcoholics
In May 2012, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s The Alcoholics. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.
The Alcoholics
His real name was Pasteur Semelweiss Murphy; so naturally he called himself Dr. Peter S. Murphy: rather, his patients and colleagues knew him by that name. In his own mind, he called himself names as hideous and hopeless as the agony of which they were born. You!—he would snarl savagely. You goofy-looking beanpole! You lanky, long-drawn son-of-a-bitch! You scrawny red-haired imbecile!
Doctor Murphy had always spoken to Doctor Murphy with disparagement and invective. But never with such frequence and intensity as since he had become the proprietor of El Healtho—Modern Treatment For Alcoholics. Not until then had he called himself dishonest; never before, in the endless annals of Murphy vs. Murphy, had the defendant been charged with gross incompetence. And yet—and this was odd—the knowledge that he was about to be divorced from El Healtho, no later, barring miracles, than the close of business today, did nothing to modify or mollify the prosecution. On the contrary, tonight he would shut down the sanitarium, and along with everything else, he would stand accused of failure, of bollixing a job, of screwing up the works. By God, but good!
El Healtho perches on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in the southerly limits of the city of Los Angeles. It is a rambling stucco and tile structure, styled in that school of architecture known as Spanish Mediterranean to its adherents and “California Gothic” to its detractors; originally the home of a silent motion-picture actor whose taste, whatever else may be said about it, proved considerably better than his voice.
As a matter of fact, it was not particularly unpleasing to the eye—unless that eye were Doctor Murphy’s.
His long scrawny shanks clad in a pair of faded-red swim trunks, the good doctor squatted on the beach and stared blindly at the Pacific; April sunlight in his eyes, Arctic ice in his heart. He had been swimming for three hours when a great breaker had caught him up in its arms and hurled him rolling and spinning and half-drowned onto the sand. It had cast him up and out—and it should have, by God; he was enough even to make the ocean puke!—simultaneously burying him beneath a hundred-odd pounds of slithery seaweed.
Lying there, breathless, in the dank tentacled mess, he had remembered those searing lines from—from Wells? Yes, the Outline of History: “To this stage has civilization progressed from the slime of the tidal beaches…” And there had been a masochistic satisfaction in remembering, in associating the words with his own sorry state.
A hundred million years of life…and in what had it resulted? Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? A pile of crap. A will-less thing, floating on the tide, lacking the elementary grace to sink out of sight.
Doctor Murphy had entered the ocean with the intention of drowning himself. He felt that it would be a good idea, a clean-cut scientific approach to an otherwise insoluble problem; and a secret voice had advised him that here was triumph, not surrender, not exit but ingress. He was not sure of the soundness of his hunch, nor the veracity of the voice. Perhaps it would not have been a good idea; perhaps his voyage would have terminated in the phosphorescent muck of the ocean bottom. But—well, that was the point, you see. The fact that he wasn’t sure. How in hell could a man know whether his ideas were good if he never tried them out?
And if a man wasn’t willing to act on his ideas—if he didn’t have the guts to act on ’em—why in the hell did he have to keep having ’em?
“Just once”—he spoke to the Pacific, his blue eyes frosty. “If I could just once, for once in my goddam life…”
Life had teased and taunted Doctor Murphy severely. It had constantly confronted him with problems, then presented him with solutions—a single solution to each—which he was incapable of using.
It had begun this evil teasing years before, long before he became Dr. Peter S. Murphy and was merely a freckle-faced brat—ol’ Doc Murphy’s kid, Pasty. Even then, life was giving him problems and answers—that’s-the-only-way answers—leaving the rest of the world undisturbed. Was a dog beaten to death? Life brought the matter immediately to Doc Murphy’s kid, advising him exactly what should be done…if anything was to be done at all. The other townsfolk were undisturbed; the incident was regrettable, sad, but best forgotten. They were allowed to forget it. But not Pasty Murphy. He had to do something—and the one adequate thing, the only thing, he could not do. He could procure the horse-whip, yes; he could find exactly the right place to lie in wait. And he could stand up silently in the darkness, bringing the whip back over his shoulder. But that was all he could do, that was as far as he could go. He could not knock the do
g-beater senseless, then beat the dog-beater’s rotten ass to the color of eggplant.…
Once, while he was interning at Bellevue, Dr. Pasteur Sem—that is, Dr. Peter S. Murphy, had lined up the most delectable piece in all Manhattan. She was a nurse, and she wasn’t selling the stuff, you understand. But she required a great deal of working on. Well, young Doc Murphy had worked on that babe for months; and finally his victory seemed as imminent as it was inevitable. One firm and final move, and the jackpot would be his. So, with twenty dollars saved and another twenty borrowed, he took her to a nightclub. And their waiter—oh, damn his white-tied soul—had shamed and snubbed them unmercifully. He had made Doc look like a cheapskate, a boob, a shrimp, a guy contemptible and unworthy of the prize he sought.
Doc had laid his steak knife on the table, with the tip pointing outward. Casually, he had placed his elbow against the handle. Then, he waited, firmly intending to deprive that waiter permanently of what he himself had, but couldn’t use. His opportunity came—and went. In the end, he and the girl slunk out of the nightclub, leaving the waiter triumphant and unharmed.
A couple of hundred yards away, now, around a curve in the beach, a neat blue trailer was parked. Doc turned and looked at it, just as a man leaned out the door and waved to him. Beckoned to him. Doc groaned and cursed.
He did not want to talk to Judson, ex-Navy corpsman, now the night attendant, night nurse, night everything at El Healtho. He didn’t want any lectures from Judson, no matter how politely and subtly those lectures were delivered. He considered thumbing his nose at the night man. Why not? Who was the doctor in this place, he or Judson? Then, he stood up and shambled toward the trailer.