by Jim Thompson
She was about twenty-five and she’d spent most of her life on a two-by-four farm down in the sand flats, raising a bunch of brothers and sisters that ran off as soon as they got big enough to be any help. Her father was serving a five-year stretch for stealing hogs. Her mother was dead. Now, she was starting out to try to make something of herself.
We were changing programs the next day, and it was after midnight when I got home. But Carol was still up. She was sitting out at the kitchen table with a lot of books spread in front of her, and you could tell they didn’t mean a thing to her. Not as much even as they would have to me.
She jumped up, all scared and trembling, like I’d caught her stealing. Her face got red, then white, and she snatched up a dish towel and began scrubbing at the table.
“Take it easy, kid,” I said. “You’re not on twenty-four-hour duty around here.”
She didn’t say anything; I don’t guess she could. She stood watching me a minute, then she snatched up her books and sort of scuttled over to a corner and sat down on a stool.
She pretended to be studying, but I knew she wasn’t. I knew it because I knew how she felt—because I’d felt the same way. I knew what it meant to be nothing and to want to be something. And to be scared out of your pants that someone is going to knock you down—not because of what you’ve done but because you can’t strike back. Because they want to see you squirm, or they have a headache, or they don’t like the way your hair is parted.
I opened the refrigerator door and took a look inside. It was full, as usual, with the leftover junk that passes for food with Elizabeth. Little plates of salad, bowls of consommé, sauce dishes of fruit, and nonfattening desserts. But way back in the rear I spotted a baked ham and a chocolate cake.
I took them over to the table, along with some bread and butter and a bottle of milk.
“You ain’t—you’re not supposed to eat that, Mr. Wilmot.”
“Huh?” I almost dropped the carving knife.
“Huh-uh. I mean, no, sir. Mrs. Wilmot said that was for tomorrow.”
“Well,” I said, “ain’t that just dandy?”
“Yes, sir. There’s some soup on the stove. That’s what I—we—what we’re supposed to have tonight.”
I didn’t argue about it. I just went over to the cupboard and got two plates, and I filled one of them so full it needed sideboards.
“Now, come over here,” I said, “and eat this. Eat every damned bit of it. If there’s any holler I’ll say I did it.”
Christ, I wish you could have seen her! She must have been empty all the way down. She didn’t hog the food. She just sat and ate steadily, like she was going at a big job that needed doing. And she didn’t mind my watching her. She seemed to know that I’d been the same way myself.
When she’d finished I told her to take her books and go to bed; and she said, “Yes, sir,” and took off.
It made me a little uncomfortable for anyone to be so obedient, and yet I can’t say I didn’t like it, either. And it wasn’t because I ever thought about telling her to do anything, well, anything bad. I just couldn’t see the gal that way. I couldn’t see her at all, if you know what I mean. If there was ever a woman that you wouldn’t look at twice she was it. Probably she still is.
Because the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that I’m seeing something that no one else can. And it took me three months before I could see it.
It was a Sunday afternoon. Elizabeth had taken her car and gone visiting, and I was lying down. We don’t operate the house on Sunday afternoon. Local sentiment’s against it.
There was a knock on my door, and I said, “Come in, Carol,” and she came in.
“I just wanted to show you the new suit Mrs. Wilmot gave me,” she said.
I sat up. “It looks very nice, Carol.”
I don’t know which I wanted to do most, laugh or cry.
She was a little bit cockeyed—maybe I didn’t tell you? Well. And she was more than a little pigeon-toed. The suit wasn’t new. It was a worn-out rag Elizabeth had given her to make over, and she’d botched it from top to bottom. And she had on a pair of Elizabeth’s old shoes that didn’t fit her half as well as mine would.
The blouse was too tight for her breasts, or her breasts were too big for the blouse, however you want to put it. They were too big for anything but an outsize. A good deep breath and she’d have had to start dodging.
I felt the tears coming into my eyes, and yet I wanted to laugh, too. She looked like hell. She looked like a sack of bran that couldn’t decide which way it was going to fall.
And then the curtain rose or however you want to put it, and everything was changed.
And what I began to think about wasn’t laughing or crying.
That tiny bit of cockeyedness gave her a cute, mad look, and the way she toed in sort of spread her buttocks and made a little valley under her skirt, and—and it don’t—doesn’t—make sense but there was something about it that made me think of the Twenty-Third Psalm.
I’d thought she looked awkward and top-heavy, and, hell, I could see now that she didn’t at all. Her breasts weren’t too big. Jesus, her breasts!
She looked cute-mad and funny-sweet. She looked like she’d started somewhere and been mussed up along the way.
She was a honey. She was sugar and pie. She was a bitch.
I said, “Come here, Carol,” and she came there.
And then I was kissing her like I’d been waiting all my life to do just that, and she was the same way with me.
I don’t know how long it was before I looked up and saw Elizabeth in the doorway.
4
I always stop at the Crystal Arms when I’m in the city. They know I pay for what I get, and no questions, and whenever they can do me a favor they don’t hold back.
There wasn’t anything in my room box but a few complimentary theater tickets. I gave them to the bell captain and took the elevator upstairs. The heat was just being turned on full, and the room was a little chilly. I dragged a chair up to the radiator and sat down with my coat and hat on.
I wasn’t worried. Not too much. I guess I just had a touch of the blues. I had everything in the world to look forward to, and I had the blues. I got out part of a pint I had in my Gladstone, and sat down again.
The lights were coming on, blobbing through the misty night haze that hung over the city. Over in the yards a freight gave out with a highball. I took a drink and closed my eyes. I tried to imagine it was fifteen years ago, and I was on the freight, and I was looking at the city for the first time. And I thought, Hell, if you had to be blue why not then instead of now?
When I saw it was getting really dark I pulled myself together and changed my socks and shirt. I took the stairs down a couple of floors, and knocked on Carol’s door. The ventilator was open, and I could hear her splashing around in the tub.
“House dick,” I said. “Open up.”
She came to the door holding a big bath towel in front of her. When she saw it was really me—I—she dropped the towel and stood back for me to come in. She locked the door and walked over to the bed and lay down.
“That’s all right,” I said, sitting down by her. “You can put something on if you want to.”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t want you to catch cold,” I said.
She said she wouldn’t.
I gave her a drink out of the part of a pint, and lighted a cigarette for both of us. She sat up on one elbow and coughed and choked until I had to slap her on the back. I remembered then that I’d never seen her smoke before and that that was the first drink I’d ever given her.
“Is that the first time you smoked a cigarette?” I asked.
“Yes, Joe.”
“And that’s your first drink of liquor? What’d you take it for?”
“You gave it to me.”
“Hell,” I said, “you didn’t have to take it.”
There was a little finger of hair hanging do
wn the middle of her forehead. She looked at it, turning her eyes in to be more cockeyed, and blew upward over her nose. The wisp of hair rose and settled down on her forehead again. I laughed and patted her on the bottom. I put my head down against her breast and squeezed. She freed one of her hands…
We had supper in her room—club sandwiches, waffle potatoes, apple pie with cheese, and coffee. I stood in the closet when the waiter delivered it. She’d never seen waffle potatoes before. She kept turning them around in her fingers, and nibbling the squares off a little at a time.
“Did everything go all right today?” she said finally.
“Pretty good.”
“Why are you worried, then? Did something happen at the newspaper office?”
“Nothing much,” I said; and I told her about it. “It’s a good joke on Elizabeth. She’s always acted like we didn’t have good sense, and—”
“Maybe we don’t have.”
“Huh?” I said. “What do you mean, Carol?”
She’d never spoken up much before, and it surprised me; and I guess I sounded pretty abrupt. She dropped her eyes.
“I’m afraid, Joe. I’m afraid Elizabeth’s trying to get us into trouble.”
“Why, that’s crazy!” I said. “We’re all in this together. She couldn’t make trouble for us without making it for herself.”
“Yes, she—I mean, I think she could,” said Carol. “You and me have to do everything. We run all the risks.”
“Well, but look,” I said. “I admit I got pretty much up in the air at the time. But what’s actually the worst that could have happened there at the newspaper office? All they could have done was to refuse to take the ad, isn’t that right?”
She shook her head as though she hadn’t heard me. “Anyway, she’s trying to get me in trouble. Why did she have to have me register here as Mrs. J.J. Williamson?”
“Why not? We had to agree on some name so we could reach you in case of emergency. You had to have some name to receive answers to the ad.”
“But not that one, Joe. I got to thinking about it today; it’s the same initials as yours. It kind of sounds like yours.”
“Well—well,” I said. I laughed, not very hard. “It’s just a coincidence. What harm could it do, anyhow?”
She didn’t answer me. She just shook her head again.
“If anyone made any boners it was me,” I said, and I started telling her about Hap Chance. “It looked suspicious, see? With all the product I’ve got, why should I want sixteen reels of junk from him?”
Carol shrugged. “You explained it to him.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t look so good, particularly with me forgetting to buy paper.”
“Well.”
“It made it look like I didn’t intend to play the picture. I almost might as well have told him I wanted that sixteen-reeler because of its length. Because it would make twice as hot a fire as—”
It wasn’t true. The slip couldn’t have meant anything like that to Hap, and Carol knew it. She saw I was just trying to divert her from Elizabeth.
We’d turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, and I was holding her on my lap in a big chair in front of the window. She began to breathe very deeply. I turned her face away from my chest, and I saw that she was crying.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Please, Carol.”
“Y-You’re in love with her,” she said. “She treats you like a dog, an’—and you go right on loving her.”
“The hell I do!”
“Y-You do. And it’s not fair! I’d do anything in the world for you, anything, Joe! And she hates you. And—a-and it doesn’t make any difference. Y-You k-keep right on—”
“But, damnit, I don’t!”
“You do, too!”
It would have gone on all night, but I didn’t let it.
As the guy said on his wedding night, it was no time for talking.
5
It was the next afternoon, and I was feeling pretty low.
Coming out of the city I’d passed a guy walking, a tired shabby-looking guy that looked like he needed a good night’s sleep and a square meal; and I started to stop for him. And then, just when he was about to catch up with me, I stepped on the gas and drove off.
It was a mean thing to do and I hadn’t intended doing it. What I meant to do was carry him down the road as far as he was going, and give him some food and change. Instead of that, I’d torn off when he almost had his hand on the door.
All of a sudden it came over me why I’d had so many blue spells lately. It was because I felt like I didn’t amount to much anymore. It was because I didn’t feel that I was as good as other people—that I shouldn’t put myself with people who wouldn’t do what I was doing.
Subconsciously, I’d been afraid that hitchhiker might sense something, like maybe he’d pass up the car or ask to be let out after he got in. Subconsciously, I’d felt like he ought to.
I wondered again, like I had a thousand times, how the hell it all started.
One time, years ago, I sat in on one of Elizabeth’s literary club meetings when they were discussing some lady poet. This poetry, this stuff this lady wrote, wasn’t like real poetry. It wasn’t like anything, in fact. It was just a lot of words strung together about God knows what all, and they’d say the same things over and over.
Well, though, it seemed like the stuff did make sense, once you understood what this lady was trying to do. She was writing about everything all at one time. She was writing about one thing, of course, more than the others, but she was throwing in everything that was connected with it; and she didn’t pretend to know what was most important. She just laid it out for you and you took your choice.
I’ll have to do the same thing.
Offhand, you’d say it began with Elizabeth catching Carol and me together that Sunday afternoon. But if there was a murder every time a husband or wife got caught like that there wouldn’t be any people left. So—
It might have begun with the time I closed up Bower’s house, and moved part of his equipment up to our garage. Or the time, right after we were married, when Elizabeth and I each took out twelve thousand five hundred dollars’ insurance on the other. Or the time when I was delivering film for the exchanges, and it was raining, and I drove her up to her house in the company truck.
It may have started with Carol’s old man being pinched for stealing hogs. Or the pushing around I took in reform school. Or at the orphanage—although it wasn’t so bad there. The head matron was an old Irishwoman, weighing about three hundred pounds and so cross-eyed she scared me stiff the first time I saw her. But an angel couldn’t have been any better.
But—Well, I’ll tell things the best way I can.
One night I lost my key ring and couldn’t lock up the show. Elizabeth wasn’t in the house and she carried her keys with her, so I went out to the garage, upstairs, where she was checking some film.
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can look that over in the morning before we open up.”
“I’m quite capable of doing it.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you feel I’m still of some value.”
“Okay, be stubborn,” I said. I took the keys and started to leave. “Where’s the new cord for that motor?”
She looked blank.
I told her I’d bought a new cord and laid it by her breakfast plate that morning. “I thought you’d have sense enough to know what it was for. That cord’s got a short in it.”
“Why, how gallant of you, Joe!” she said. But she was scared.
I got the new cord and changed it, and threw the old one in the trash bucket. But the next time I was out there I saw that she’d dug it out and put it on one of the metal shelves.
And now that I think of it, it might have begun with her mother. The old lady never threw anything away. For months after she died, Elizabeth and I were throwing out balls of string and
packages of wrapping-paper and other junk.
I don’t know. It’s hard to know what to put down and what to leave out.
There was a lot of stuff on the radio and in the newsreels and newspapers. People getting run over, blown up, drowned, smothered, starved, lynched. Mercy killings, hangings, electrocutions, suicides. People who didn’t want to live. People who deserved killing. People who were better off dead.
I don’t suppose it was any different from usual, any different from what it always has been and always will be. But coming then, right at that time, it kind of tied in.
Day after day and night after night, there was a row. With one breath Elizabeth would tell us to get out; with the next she was threatening what she’d do if we tried.
“What the hell do you want?” I’d yell. “Do you want a divorce?”
“Be publicly displaced by a frump like that? I think not.”
“Then I’ll clear out. Carol and I.”
“What with? And how would I run the show?”
“We’ll sell the show.”
“We can’t. We couldn’t get a fraction of its value from an outsider. I’m willing to give you credit, Joe. You’re at least half the business.”
That was true. A showman would know that. Anyone that was a showman wouldn’t want to buy.
“I think I get you,” I said. “You want me to give up any claim I’ve got on the business. Then you could peddle out at any old price and still have a nice wad.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Such language, Joe! What would your parents think?”
“Goddamn you!”
“How much, Joe? What will you give me to leave you in undisputed possession of the field?”
“You know damned well I haven’t any money.”
“So you haven’t. Mmm.”
There was more talk. Carol and me talking by ourselves. Elizabeth and me talking. The three of us talking together. Nagging and lashing out, and getting madder and edgier. And the stuff in the newspapers, and the newsreels, and on the radio. There were some Canadian travel folders, and a farmer’s wife over in the next county who stumbled into a tubful of hot lard and was burned unrecognizably. There were the premiums on those insurance policies falling due. Twelve thousand five hundred dollars—double indemnity.