The Winter of Our Discontent

by John Steinbeck

  "I've overslept."

  "Nonsense. It's early."

  "No, my ablative absolute. This is a monster day for me. The world will be grocery-happy today. Don't you get up."

  "You'll need a good breakfast."

  "Know what I'll do? I'll get a carton of coffee at the Foremaster and I'll raven Marullo's shelves like a wolf."

  "You will?"

  "Rest, little mouse of a mouseness, and try to find a way for us to escape from our darling children. We need that. I mean it."

  "I know we do. I'll try to think."

  I was dressed and gone before she could suggest any of the seasonal things for my protection and comfort.

  Joey was in the coffee shop and he patted the stool beside him.

  "Can't, Morph. I'm late. Annie, could you give me a quart of coffee in a carton?"

  "It'll have to be two pints, Eth."

  "Good. Even gooder."

  She filled and covered the little paper buckets and put them in a bag.

  Joey finished and walked across with me.

  "You'll have to say mass without the bishop this morning."

  "Guess so. Say, how about that news?"

  "I can't take it in."

  "You remember I said I smelled something."

  "I thought about that when I heard it. You've got quite a nose."

  "It's part of the trade. Baker can come back now. Wonder if he will."

  "Come back?"

  "You get no smell there?"

  I looked at him helplessly. "I'm missing something and I don't even know what it is."

  "Jesus God."

  "You mean I should see something?"

  "That's what I mean. The law of the fang is not repealed."

  "Oh, Lord! There must be a whole world I miss. I was trying to remember whether it's both lettuce and mayonnaise you like."

  "Both." He stripped the cellophane cover from his pack of Camels and wadded it to push in the lock.

  "Got to go," I said. "We've got a special sale on tea. Send in a box top, you get a baby! Know any ladies?"

  "I sure do, and that's about the last prize they want. Don't bother to bring them, I'll come for the sandwiches." He went in his door and there was no click of the spring lock. I did hope that Joey never discovered that he was the best teacher I had ever had. He not only informed, he demonstrated and, without knowing it, prepared a way for me.

  Everyone who knew about such things, the experts, agreed that only money gets money. The best way is always the simplest. The shocking simplicity of the thing was its greatest strength. But I really believe it was only a detailed daydream until Marullo through none of his fault walked in his own darkness over a cliff. Once it seemed almost certain that I could get the store for my own, only then did the high-flown dreaming come down to earth. A good but ill-informed question might be: If I could get the store, why did I need money? Mr. Baker would understand, so would Joey--so, for that matter, would Marullo. The store without running capital was worse than no store at all. The Appian Way of bankruptcy is lined with the graves of unprotected ventures. I have one grave there already. The silliest soldier would not throw his whole strength at a break-through without mortars or reserves or replacements, but many a borning business does just that. Mary's money in marked bills bulged against my bottom in my hip pocket, but Marullo would take as much of that as he could get. Then the first of the month. The wholesale houses are not openhanded with credit for unproved organizations. Therefore I would still need money, and that money was waiting for me behind ticking steel doors. The process of getting it, designed as daydreams, stood up remarkably when inspected. That robbery was unlawful troubled me very little. Marullo was no problem. If he were not the victim he might have planned it himself. Danny was troubling, even though I could with perfect truth assume that he was finished anyway. Mr. Baker's ineffectual attempt to do the same thing to Danny gave me more justification than most men need. But Danny remained a burning in my guts and I had to accept that as one accepts a wound in successful combat. I had to live with that, but maybe it would heal in time or be walled off with forgetfulness the way a shell fragment gets walled off with cartilage.

  The immediate was the money, and that move was as carefully prepared and timed as an electric circuit.

  The Morphy laws stood up well and I remembered them and had even added one. First law: Have no past record. Well, I had none. Number two: No accomplices or confidants. I certainly had none. Number three: No dames. Well, Margie Young-Hunt was the only person I knew who could be called a dame, and I was not about to drink champagne out of her slipper. Number four: Don't splurge. Well, I wouldn't. Gradually I would use it to pay bills to wholesalers. I had a place for it. In my Knight Templar's hatbox there was a support of velvet-covered cardboard, the size and shape of my head. This was already lifted free and the edges coated with contact cement so it could be restored in an instant.

  Recognition--a Mickey Mouse mask. No one would see anything else. An old cotton raincoat of Marullo's--all tan cotton raincoats look alike--and a pair of those tear-off cellophane gloves that come on a roll. The mask had been cut several days ago and the box and cereal flushed down the toilet, as the mask and gloves would be. The old silvered Iver Johnson pistol was smoked with lampblack and in the toilet was a can of crankcase oil to throw it in for delivery to Chief Stoney at the first opportunity.

  I had added my own final law: Don't be a pig. Don't take too much and avoid large bills. If somewhere about six to ten thousand in tens and twenties were available, that would be enough and easy to handle and to hide. A cardboard cakebox on the cold counter would be the swap bag and when next seen it would have a cake in it. I had tried that terrible reedy ventriloquism thing to change my voice and had given it up for silence and gestures. Everything in place and ready.

  I was almost sorry Mr. Baker wasn't here. There would be only Morph and Harry Robbit and Edith Alden. It was planned to the split second. At five minutes to nine I would place the broom in the entrance. I'd practiced over and over. Apron tucked up, scale weight on the toilet chain to keep it flushing. Anyone who came in would hear the water and draw his own conclusion. Coat, mask, cakebox, gun, gloves. Cross the alley on the stroke of nine, shove open the back door, put on mask, enter just after timeclock buzzes and Joey swings open the door. Motion the three to lie down, with the gun. They'd give no trouble. As Joey said, the money was insured, he wasn't. Pick up the money, put it in cakebox, cross alley, flush gloves and mask down toilet, put gun in can of oil, coat off. Apron down, money in hatbox, cake in cakebox, pick up broom, and go on sweeping sidewalk, available and visible when the alarm came. The whole thing one minute and forty seconds, timed, checked, and rechecked. But carefully as I had planned and timed, I still felt a little breathless and I swept out the store prior to opening the two front doors. I wore yesterday's apron so that new wrinkles would not be noticeable.

  And would you believe it, time stood still as though a Joshua in a wing collar had shot the sun in its course. The minute hand of my father's big watch had set its heels and resisted morning.

  It was long since I had addressed my flock aloud, but this morning I did, perhaps out of nervousness.

  "My friends," I said, "what you are about to witness is a mystery. I know I can depend on you to keep silent. If any of you have any feeling about the moral issue involved, I challenge you and will ask you to leave." I paused. "No objections? Very well. If I ever hear of an oyster or a cabbage discussing this with strangers, the sentence is death by dinner fork.

  "And I want to thank you all. We have been together, humble workers in the vineyard, and I a servant as you are. But now a change is coming. I will be master here henceforth, but I promise I will be a good and kind and understanding master. The time approaches, my friends, the curtain rises--farewell." And as I moved to the front doors with the broom, I heard my own voice cry, "Danny--Danny! Get out of my guts." A great shudder shook me so that I had to lean on the broom a moment before I ope
ned up the doors.

  My father's watch said nine with its black, stumpy hour hand and minus six with its long, thin minute hand. I could feel its heart beat against my palm as I looked at it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever. It is the law in many states, certainly in ours, that it must rain on long holiday weekends, else how could the multitudes get drenched and miserable? The July sun fought off a multitude of little feathered clouds and drove them scuttling, but thunderheads looked over the western rim, the strong-arm rain-bearers from the Hudson River Valley, armed with lightning and already mumbling to themselves. If the law was properly obeyed, they would hold back until a maximum number of ant-happy humans were on the highways and the beaches, summer-dressed and summer-green.

  Most of the other stores did not open until nine-thirty. It had been Marullo's thought to catch a pinch of trade by having me jump the gun half an hour. I thought I would change that. It caused more ill feeling among the other stores than the profit justified. Marullo didn't care about that, if he ever knew about it. He was a foreigner, a wop, a criminal, a tyrant, a squeezer of the poor, a bastard, and eight kinds of son of a bitch. I having destroyed him, it was only natural that his faults and crimes should become blindingly apparent to me.

  I felt old long hand edging around on my father's watch and I found I was sweeping viciously with tensed muscles, waiting for the moment of swift, smooth movement of my mission. I breathed through my mouth, and my stomach pushed against my lungs as I remember it did waiting for an attack.

  For Saturday-morning-Fourth-of-July-weekend, there were few people about. A stranger--old man--went by, carrying a fishing rod and a green plastic tackle box. He was on his way to the town pier to sit all day dangling a limp strip of squid in the water. He didn't even look up, but I forced his attention.

  "Hope you catch some big ones."

  "Never catch anything," he said.

  "Stripers come in sometimes."

  "I don't believe it."

  A red-hot optimist, but at least I had set the hook in his attention.

  And Jennie Single rolled along the sidewalk. She moved as though she had casters instead of feet, probably New Baytown's least reliable witness. Once she turned on her gas oven and forgot to light it. She'd have blown herself through the roof if she could have remembered where she had put the matches.

  "Morning, Miss Jenny."

  "Good morning, Danny."

  "I'm Ethan."

  "Course you are. I'm going to bake a cake."

  I tried to gouge a scar in her memory. "What kind?"

  "Well, it's Fannie Farmer but the label fell off the package so I really don't know."

  What a witness she would make, if I needed a witness. And why did she say "Danny"?

  A piece of tinfoil on the pavement resisted the broom. I had to stoop down and lift it with a fingernail. Those assistant bank mice were really mousing the hour with Cat Baker away. They were the ones I wanted. It was less than one minute to nine when they burst from the coffee shop and sprinted across the street.

  "Run--run--run!" I called and they grinned self-consciously as they charged the bank doors.

  Now it was time. I must not think of the whole thing--just one step at a time and each in its place, as I had practiced. I folded my anxious stomach down where it belonged. First lean the broom against the doorjamb where it could be seen. I moved with slow, deliberate speed.

  From the corner of my eye I saw a car come along the street and I paused to let it go by.

  "Mr. Hawley!"

  I whirled the way cornered gangsters do in the movies. A dusty dark green Chevrolet had slid to the curb and, great God! that Ivy League government man was getting out. My stone-built earth shuddered like a reflection in water. Paralyzed, I saw him cross the pavement. It seemed to take ages, but it was simple as that. My long-planned perfect structure turned to dust before my eyes the way a long-buried artifact does when the air strikes it. I thought of rushing for the toilet and going through with it. It wouldn't work. I couldn't repeal the Morphy law. Thought and light must travel at about the same speed. It's a shock to throw out a plan so long considered, so many times enacted that its consummation is just one more repetition, but I tossed it out, threw it away, closed it off. I had no choice. And light-speed thought said, Thank God he didn't come one minute later. That would have been the fatal accident they write about in crime stories.

  And all this while the young man moved stiffly four steps across the pavement.

  Something must have showed through to him.

  "What's the matter, Mr. Hawley? You look sick."

  "Skitters," I said.

  "That'll wait for no man. Run for it. I'll wait."

  I dashed for the toilet, closed the door, and pulled the chain to make a rush of water. I hadn't switched on the light. I sat there in the dark. My quaking stomach played along. In a moment I really had to go, and I did, and slowly the beating pressure in me subsided. I added a by-law to the Morphy code. In case of accident, change your plan--instantly.

  It has happened to me before that in crisis or great danger I have stepped out and apart and as an interested stranger watched myself, my movements and my mind, but immune to the emotions of the thing observed. Sitting in the blackness, I saw the other person fold his perfect plan and put it in a box and close the lid and shove the thing not only out of sight but out of thought. I mean that by the time I stood up in the darkness and zipped and smoothed and laid my hand on the flimsy plywood door, I was a grocery clerk prepared for a busy day. It was no secretiveness. It was really so. I wondered what the young man wanted, but only with the pale apprehension that comes from a low-grade fear of cops.

  "Sorry to keep you waiting," I said. "Can't remember what I ate to cause that."

  "There's a virus going around," he said. "My wife had it last week."

  "Well, this virus carried a gun. I nearly got caught short. What can I do for you?"

  He seemed embarrassed, apologetic, almost shy. "A guy does funny things," he said.

  I overcame an impulse to say, It takes all kinds--and I'm glad I did because his next words were, "In my business you meet all kinds."

  I walked behind the counter and kicked the leather Knight Templar hatbox closed. And I leaned my elbows on the counter.

  Very odd. Five minutes earlier I saw myself through the eyes of other people. I had to. What they saw was important. And as he came across the pavement, this man had been a huge, dark, hopeless fate, an enemy, an ogre. But with my project tucked away and gone as a part of me, I saw him now as an object apart--no longer linked with me for good or bad. He was, I think, about my age, but shaped in a school, a manner, perhaps a cult--a lean face and hair carefully trimmed short and standing straight up, white shirt of a coarse woven linen with the collar buttoned down and a tie chosen by his wife, and without doubt patted and straightened by her as he left the house. His suit a gray darkness and his nails home cared for but well cared for, a wide gold wedding ring on his left hand, a tiny bar in his buttonhole, a suggestion of the decoration he would not wear. His mouth and dark blue eyes were schooled to firmness, which made it all the more strange that they were not firm now. In some way a hole had been opened in him. He was not the same man whose questions had been short, squared bars of steel spaced perfectly, one below its fellow.

  "You were here before," I said. "What is your business?"

  "Department of Justice."

  "Your business is justice?"

  He smiled. "Yes, at least that's what I hope. But I'm not on official business--not even sure the department would approve. But it's my day off."

  "What can I do for you?"

  "It's kind of complicated. Don't know quite where to begin. It's not in the book. Hawley, I've been in the service twelve years and I've never had anything like this before."

  "Maybe if you tell me what it is
I can help you do it."

  He smiled at me. "Hard to set it up. I've been driving three hours from New York and I've got to drive three hours back in holiday traffic."

  "Sounds serious."

  "It is."

  "I think you said your name was Walder."

  "Richard Walder."

  "I'm going to be swamped with customers, Mr. Walder. Don't know why they haven't started. Hot-dog-and-relish trade. You'd better start. Am I in trouble?"

  "In my job you meet all kinds. Tough ones, liars, cheats, hustlers, stupid, bright. Mostly you can get mad at them, get an attitude to carry you through. Do you see?"

  "No, I guess not. Look, Walder, what in hell's bothering you? I'm not completely stupid. I've talked to Mr. Baker at the bank. You're after Mr. Marullo, my boss."

  "And I got him," he said softly.

  "What for?"

  "Illegal entry. It's not my doing. They throw me a dossier and I follow it up. I don't judge him or try him."

  "He'll be deported?"

  "Yes."

  "Can he make a fight? Can I help him?"

  "No. He doesn't want to. He's pleading guilty. He wants to go."

  "Well, I'll be damned!"

  Six or eight customers came in. "I warned you," I called to him, and I helped them select what they needed or thought they did. Thank heaven I had ordered a mountain of hot-dog and hamburger rolls.

  Walder called, "What do you get for piccalilli?"

  "It's marked on the label."

  "Thirty-nine cents, ma'am," he said. And he went to work, measuring, bagging, adding. He reached in front of me to ring up cash on the register. When he moved away I took a bag from the pile, opened the drawer, and, using the bag like a potholder, I picked up the old revolver, took it back to the toilet, and dropped it in the can of crankcase oil that waited for it.

  "You're good at this," I said when I came back.

  "I used to have a job at Grand Union after school."

  "It shows."

  "Don't you have anybody to help?"