by Jim Thompson
Though his night shift was over, and he would necessarily be going to bed in a few minutes, Judson had replaced his white uniform with spotless tan slacks and a short-sleeved sport shirt. Looking at him in his neatness, his cleanliness—looking at the man’s chiseled black face with its serene intelligent eyes—Doc felt awkward and dirty and shabby. And somehow shamed. Judson was a Negro. He deserved better than his job. Judson served coffee on a small table set up on the sand. He offered cigarettes, made polite comment on the pleasantness of the morning. Doc waited warily.
“I don’t like to mention it, Doctor, but—”
“The hell you don’t!” snarled Doctor Murphy. “Well, go on. Get it off your chest!”
Judson looked at him gravely, silently.
The doctor grunted a word of apology. “I know. I talked pretty rough to Rufus, and it was the wrong thing to do. But dammit, Jud, look at the stunts he pulls! If I take my eyes off of him for a minute, he’s—well, you know how he is!”
“I know,” nodded Judson, “but it’s only because he wants to better himself. He’s ambitious.”
“So he’s ambitious,” snapped Doc. “He wants to learn. Fine. Why can’t he go about it the right way? Why can’t he be, uh, well more like you?”
“Probably because he isn’t me,” Judson suggested pleasantly. “Or are you of the opinion all Negroes are born with equal abilities and receive equal opportunities?”
“Oh, go to hell,” said Doc, wearily.
“As a matter of fact,” said Judson, “I hadn’t intended to say anything about Rufus. I didn’t see any need to. I knew you were at least as much disturbed by what you said to him as he was—”
“The hell I was!” lied Doc. “I told him exactly what I should have!”
“…what I really wanted to talk about was Mr. Van Twyne. Do you think he should be here, Doctor? A prefrontal lobotomy case?”
“This is an alcoholic sanitarium,” said Doctor Murphy. “He’s an alcoholic.”
“I see.”
“Well, he is. He’s worse than an alcoholic—he’s a psychopathic drunk. Any other guy, a guy without dough, would be in the bughouse or Alcatraz for the stunts he’s pulled. He’s damned lucky that the courts gave him this chance; let him have the pre-frontal instead of—”
“The operation was performed in New York, Doctor.”
“That’s bad? Where the hell would you go for a prefrontal?”
“To New York,” said Judson. “And I would remain there, afterwards, under the care of the surgeons who performed it. Certainly, I would not allow myself to be transported across the country, a few days later, to an obscure—er—”
Doc’s pale, never-tanning face had reddened. “I’m a horse-doctor?” he demanded. “I’m a diploma-mill quack? Why, dammit, if I’d wanted to turn this place into a cure-joint—if I’d been willing to sell silver salts and nux vomica at fifty dollars a shot—I’d be rolling in dough instead of—of—”
“No one,” Judson was saying, “has more appreciation for your integrity and what you’ve tried to do here than I, Doctor. That’s why I couldn’t understand…will he be with us long?”
“I don’t know,” Doctor Murphy said, curtly. “What kind of night did he have?”
“Very bad, up until around midnight. Restive. Completely unresponsive to sedation. It was actually painful to watch him. He tried to talk to me, but having had none of the re-training he should have had—”
“Save it! Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was on the point of doing so when I discovered the trouble. I took off his sheets, and…”
Judson explained. Angry fires danced in the doctor’s eyes.
“That clumsy bitch!” he swore.
“Yes,” said Judson. “It’s hard to understand how a registered nurse could be so clumsy. How anyone who’s had the slightest patient training could be.”
“Well…” The doctor studied him frowning. “You’re all wet if you think she’s a fake. I checked her references myself.”
“I don’t doubt that she’s R.N., Doctor. I might say, however, that good references are rather easily come by.”
“But, I don’t—Are you trying to tell me that—”
“Only one thing. People work in places like these for only two reasons: Out of altruism, because, like you, they are genuinely interested in helping the alcoholic—”
“Me? Now, get this,” said Doctor Murphy. “If every goddam alcoholic in the world dropped dead tomorrow, it would tickle me pink. I mean it, by God! I hate every damned one of ’em!”
Judson laughed softly. Doctor Murphy glowered at him.
“That’s one reason,” the Negro continued. “And not, I’m afraid, a very common one. The other? Well, that might be broken down into two reasons. Because they cannot hold jobs elsewhere. Or because the alcoholic sanitarium, with a clientele which shuns publicity, gives them a better than even chance to satisfy abnormal appetites.”
“But you surely don’t think—”
“Only this, Doctor. Mainly this. That the world being as it is, it is a rather terrible thing to condemn a man like Van Twyne to live in it a helpless idiot.”
“Who’s condemning him? How do you know he wouldn’t be an idiot anyway? The pre-frontal is a hell of a long way from being perfected. It’s a last-ditch operation—something you have when there’s nothing left to lose. Where do you get that stuff, I’m condemning him?”
Judson shrugged. He picked up the doctor’s cup with a polite, “May I?”
Doc swung his hand, palm open, slapping the cup far out into the water.
“How about it?” he raged, kicking back his campstool. “Do you think I like this, any damned stinking part of it? Haven’t I sunk a fortune in this place without having a dime left to show for it? Haven’t I worked my ass off, with nothing but a high-paid bunch of whiners and incompetents to help me?”
Judson shook his head sympathetically. He was very fond of Doctor Murphy.
“Now, get this,” said the doctor, his voice hoarse. “I didn’t have Humphrey Van Twyne III flown across country. His family did. I didn’t solicit him as a patient. His family had him brought here. I didn’t want to treat him here. They—their own family doctor insisted on it. What the hell? Who am I to tell them what to do? What if I did tell them? They’d just dump him in another place.”
“I don’t think so,” said Judson. “I don’t think they could.”
“You don’t think period,” said Doctor Murphy. “You don’t know what I’m up against. If I don’t get—” He broke off the sentence abruptly. Something would turn up. Something had to turn up. He couldn’t admit to the cold facts: That he would have to raise fifteen thousand dollars today or go out of business, and that the Van Twynes were the only possible means of raising it.
“I’m the guy who has to do the thinking,” he continued. “I have to do the doing. Suppose I’m wrong. Suppose I weigh all the factors in the case and make my decision, and it turns out to be wrong. So what? I’m not infallible. I’m a doctor, not God. Goddammit, I’m not God!”
Judson turned his head and looked up the cliff. He looked back at the doctor, and nodded gravely.
“You are,” he said, “so far as he’s concerned.”
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Acclaim for Jim Thompson
“The best suspense writer going, bar none.”
—New York Times
“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”
—Stephen King
“If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”
—Washington Post
“Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”
—New Republic
“The master of the American groin-kick novel.”
—Vanity Fair
“The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”
—Chicago Tribune
Contents
Title Page
Welcome Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
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26
About the Author
Preview of The Alcoholics
Books by Jim Thompson
Acclaim for Jim Thompson
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1965 by Jim Thompson
Copyright © renewed 1994 by Alberta H. Thompson, Sharon Thompson Reed, Patricia Thompson Miller, and Michael J. Thompson
Excerpt from The Alcoholics copyright © 1953 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1981 by Alberta H. Thompson
Author photograph by Sharon Thompson Reed
Cover design by Julianna Lee. Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-0-316-19604-8