Heed the Thunder

by Jim Thompson

  “Well, what was the trouble then?”

  “We just got tired of living on the farm,” said Ted, and looked appealingly at Gus.

  “We’re looking for jobs,” said Gus flatly.

  “Oh,” said Simpson. “Umm-hmmm.”

  He was greatly annoyed, and, more than that, depressed. He had a theory that a boy could be removed from the country, but not the country from the boy. He had convinced himself that he was sorry he had ever left the farm. He thought that Ted and Gus would be much better off back with their father. Still, their father was a good customer of his company and he had visited at their house so many times that their status was almost that of friends.

  Then, he could not forget his own first days in the city, when he had wandered lonely and friendless from place to place, rebuffed at every turn, aching with homesickness, yet too full of stubborn pride to admit failure.

  He supposed he should do something for Ted and Gus. At least, he should make the effort.

  “I’m glad to help you,” he said. “I don’t know that I can do anything, but I’m willing to try. I’m just not sure that it’s the best thing for you. Now, I was going to say, if you need a little money—”

  “We ain’t broke,” said Gus and Ted.

  “Well, I was going to say: this city life isn’t what it’s cracked up to be by a long shot. The wages they pay in places like this look big, but it costs a lot to live. A lot more than the average fellow would think. Now, why don’t you do this—have you got you a hotel room yet?”

  “Uh-huh.” They nodded.

  “Well, why don’t you sort of look around for a few days? Just have a good time. I’ll get you some show tickets and we’ll take in a cabaret or two and have a nice visit together. It won’t cost you a cent, and if you need a little help to get home, I’ll be glad to lend—”

  “We ain’t going home.”

  Simpson shrugged. “I think that would be best, but—well, come along. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Hurrying, for he had pressing business matters to take care of, he escorted them through a maze of corridors and soundproof doors, and down, at last, via several flights of iron stairs, into the plant proper.

  The din was so terrific that the boys’ ears ached from it, but they were too busy gawking to mind. The plant was one great seemingly unbounded room, with steel rafters from which traveling cranes were suspended. At one end of the room, the end which they were passing, were the embryos of more than a dozen different types of farm implements—the bare unpainted chassis of threshers, combines, mowers, balers, and so on—drawn up in the manner of animals beginning a race. (And indeed the men who worked upon them were racing.) Perhaps fifty feet away was a parallel line, and here the embryos were a little easier to identify for what they were, or would be. And beyond that was a third line, and a fourth, and a tenth, each advancing the growth of the implement by a step or two until it was finished.

  The last line was so far away that the men were mere specks—bobbing bug-like fixtures, moving in what seemed to be a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues.

  Those were the spray-painters, Simpson explained, and some of them made as much as seven dollars a day. He did not explain that they had no teeth after six months, little eyesight after a year, and that their occupational expectancy was about three years. In all likelihood he was not acquainted with these facts, and he would have been annoyed at their recital.

  To the best of his knowledge, there wasn’t any law compelling a man to be a spray-painter.

  They entered the glass-enclosed, paper-littered office of the plant superintendent, and Simpson introduced his charges. The superintendent looked them over with his hard protuberant eyes, tapping nervously on his desk with a pair of calipers. He didn’t like interference from the front office in his affairs. Nevertheless, he conceded that Bill Simpson was a pretty regular fellow who was never too proud to stop and say hello to a man, and he didn’t like to turn him down on a favor.

  “I don’t know, though,” he said. “We’re laying men off right now. I don’t hardly see how…”

  “Well, if you’re laying ’em off, lay off a couple extra,” said Simpson, laughing. “How about it, eh?”

  “Well, I guess I could.…”

  “You do that, then,” said Simpson, swiftly closing the matter. “Try to pick out a couple about the same size as Ted and Gus, here, so they can use their work clothes.”

  He shook hands with the boys, told them to take care of themselves, and hurried back upstairs.

  Two weeks later the superintendent called him. “Look, Mr. Simpson, those friends of yours—I just don’t see how I can keep them on any longer.”

  “Why can’t you?” demanded the salesmanager, instinctively aroused by opposition. “Don’t tell me they’re not good workers.”

  “Oh, they work all right,” the superintendent admitted. “But—well, they’re just upsetting the whole plant. You know, I put them to installing the number-four blade on our model X-473 mower, and they started off fine at it. I was figuring on maybe before long putting them on a real important job, maybe even truing and cottering wheels. But this last week they’ve just gone completely haywire. They finish their own work and then they go wandering off around the other stations, butting in on the other men, and—and, well, by God, I just can’t put up with it, Mr. Simpson.”

  “That is bad,” said Simpson, seriously. “I was afraid they might get a little restless. Uh—how about the repair department, Pat? That’d give ’em a little more variety. You put ’em over in repair and I guarantee they’ll make two of the best men in the place.”

  “But I’ve got all the men I need in repair. They’re good men, too.”

  “Oh, the world’s full of good men,” said Simpson. “Uh—wasn’t your daughter looking for a place here in the office a while back?”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “You put those boys to work in the repair department, Pat. I’ll see what I can do for your daughter.”

  So the boys went to work in repair, and the following week he received a call from the head auditor.

  “See here, Simpson,” said that gentleman, curtly, “these friends of yours, the Fargoes, are going to have to look for another job.”

  “Why, if you say so, certainly,” said Simpson. He had an unholy fear of the chief auditor. He was constantly in hot water with him over his and his salesmen’s expense accounts. “What’s the trouble, anyway?”

  “They’re a couple of Red trouble-makers, that’s what!”

  “Why, that’s pretty hard to believe. Not that I doubt your word—”

  “They were held over a few hours last night to do some extra work, and they wanted to know how much they were going to be paid for it. The foreman naturally told them that they wouldn’t be paid extra. The company is providing them with a good job, and they should be more than willing to help out when called upon.…”

  “Why, certainly. That’s no more than right.”

  “Well, they didn’t see it that way. They came down three hours late this morning, to make up for the time they worked last night, and when the foreman hopped them about it, they got pretty rough with him. I say they’ve got to clear out!”

  “I agree absolutely,” said Simpson. “If you don’t mind, though, I’ll send over my check to cover their wages until the end of the week.”

  “You can suit yourself about that.” The chief auditor banged up his telephone.

  Simpson banged up his. He pressed the button for his secretary.

  “Miss Beatrice, if anyone named Fargo calls for me from now on, I am out of the city, That’s Fargo—F-a-r-g-o.”

  “Yes, Mr. Simpson. Any initial?”

  “Any initial,” said the salesmanager, grimly.

  …From that time on, the saga of Ted and Gus Fargo was similar in many respects to that of thousands of other ex-farm boys.

  They heard about a man in De-troit, an automobile manufacturer, who was paying four dollars a day
for hands; and they bummed their way there, in time. To their disappointment, however, they were weeks in even getting into the employment office of the fortress-like plant; and when they did, they were not offered four dollars a day, nor even half that.

  Yes, the man did pay four dollars for a relatively few men, veterans of the industry, who worked in his own plant; but the greater part of the works was not his at all (he merely controlled it), being operated by a maze of subcontractors.

  Ted and Gus worked for one of these for six weeks, and they had no complaint to make about the lack of work or its variety. But when they were ultimately and inevitably laid off, they found that they had lost twenty pounds apiece and that they had exactly ten dollars between them.

  By this time, they were carrying on a sketchy correspondence with their father, and the letters on both sides were friendly. But he did not urge them to return. He had had to let a good part of his mortgaged land revert; things were awful tight in the valley; if they could make out all right, it might be best for them to stay where they were.

  They drifted to Cleveland, to Cincinnati, to Chicago. Now and then they picked up a week or so’s work in a machine shop or garage. Sometimes there was a ditch-digging job they could sit in on. In Chicago, they made a little money roustabouting on the lake boats.

  Nights, in some bug-ridden dump, they lay awake and talked. They did not talk much in the daytime when they could see each other’s faces.

  “Jesus! I wonder how the old lady’s getting along. You remember that night you pushed me out the window?”

  “God, yes! I wonder how she is getting along.”

  “She was pretty good, kind of.”

  “Hell, yes. The old man was all right, too.”

  “Hell, yes, he was. I wonder why he don’t ever say nothing about Bobbie? I’d like to know how Bobbie’s getting along.”

  “Goddam if I wouldn’t, too.”

  “Y’know…y’suppose the old man really wants us to come back, an’—an’ kind of hates to say so?”

  “I’m afraid he—I guess not.”

  “Hell, I don’t want to go back, nohow.”

  “Hell, I don’t neither.”

  They headed south to avoid the cold. Sunning themselves in a Houston park, they came to a decision. They had been following the wrong kind of work. When they did make a day, it took it all to eat on. What they needed was a job where found was part of the wages.

  It didn’t make much difference what kind of money they drew. If they could hold out until May, when the Texas harvest began, they could take to the road again. They’d follow the harvest right on up through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas—maybe on into Canada. Then they’d swing back to Verdon with a pocketful of money and get the old man straightened out.

  They assured each other that it was about time someone was giving the old son-of-a-bitch a hand. They might even have to stay right on there in the valley and farm…goddamit.

  Having come to this decision, they began searching for a job that would fill their needs. And after much weary and hungry pounding of pavements, they found what—or so they thought—they wanted.

  It was in a Greek restaurant, and the proprietor desired only one man: a combination waiter, bus boy, sweeper-out, and relief dishwasher. But being offered the services of both for the wages of one, and knowing nothing of their appetites, he hired them.

  They were hungry for work, and during the first two weeks of their employment, they delighted the proprietor with their efforts. They washed the walls and ceiling. They scrubbed the floors until they were as bright as they had been on the day they were laid. They moved fixtures, destroying the nests of vermin behind them and plugging the rat-and mouse-holes. Handy with tools, they made alterations and improvements which would have cost into the hundreds of dollars. They even painted the front of the establishment. And when two pickets from the painters’ union showed up, they gave them such a drubbing that they never reappeared.

  But, then, everything was done. Two of them were no longer necessary, and yet two remained—and ate.

  The proprietor’s first move was to cut their joint salary of six dollars a week to five. That did not faze them, nor did another reduction to four. They still had, after paying their room rent, a dollar left to spend for amusement, laundry, tobacco, stamps, and medical attention; and, after all, they were only trying to make the winter. And, too, they sometimes picked up a tip.

  The proprietor would have cut their wages to nothing, but there was some sort of state law against that. Anyway, their meals alone were enough to make their employment unprofitable.

  He would have fired them outright, but he had a feeling of gratitude for what they had done and a much greater feeling of fear for what they might do.

  He issued strict orders to the cook, and he remained adamant to their protests. But while they became sullen, they did not quit.

  There came an evening when a white-suited planter and his organdy-gowned wife entered the place. They had never been more than forty miles from their plantation, and they had what probably amounted to a fifth-grade education. But they were experts on everything in the field of human conduct.

  Frowning over the menu, the gentleman suddenly drawled an inquiry at Gus as to why a big strappin’ white fellah like him was doin’ a niggah’s wuk. Gus restrained the obvious retort that it was none of his goddamned business, and replied that he didn’t intend doing it any longer than he had to.

  The planter grunted disapprovingly.

  “Ain’t you from the No’th?” his consort asked.

  Gus said, yes, he was.

  “I thought so.” The couple nodded at each other grimly.…“Well, what do you recommend?”

  Gus didn’t know what he meant for a moment. Then he said that everything on the menu was good. He added that he wished he had some himself.

  The planter advised him not to be insolent. Gus said he wasn’t being: everything was good.

  “Ah you goin’ to recommend somethin’, oah will Ah have to call the managuh?”

  “All right,” said Gus, “I’ll tell you something. Try you a bowl of scabs and a glass of snot.”

  “That’s bettah,” nodded the planter. “What—” He paled.

  His lady screamed faintly.

  Ted came up and stood shoulder to shoulder with his brother. “I can think of something better. Try you some horse-turds with piss gravy.”

  The planter tried to cane them, and they flattened him.

  They flattened the proprietor and the cook.

  They flattened the first detachment of police that arrived.

  Then more police came and Ted and Gus were flattened. They were beaten up so thoroughly that they lingered between life and death for days. And it was almost six weeks before they recovered sufficiently to be brought to trial.

  They were tried for assault with a deadly weapon, malicious destruction of property, the carrying of deadly weapons (penknives), inciting to riot, and, since they were without jobs, that most serious of charges in a Southern court, vagrancy.

  They were obviously damyankees of the worst sort, and they were sentenced to two years on each charge, or a total of ten years. At hard labor. Because of their extreme youth, however, and to show his lack of prejudice, the kindly judge, one Robert E. Lee Clay, directed that the sentences run concurrently.

  25

  At thirteen (almost fourteen), the boy Bob Dillon was a mass of contradictions, infinitely more worrisome and puzzling to himself than he was to others.

  When anyone stopped to analyze his features one by one, which few did besides himself, they decided that he was the homeliest kid in the country. Still, in the aggregate, he seemed to be nice-looking; and the general opinion to that effect had swayed his own. On the other hand, he was inordinately clumsy, and his relatives, his mother included, never missed a chance to reprove him for his gawkiness; but he did not believe that he was awkward. He would deny the fact at the top of his lungs, with all the profani
ty at his command.

  Generally, he did not swear much. He did not object to others cursing—he even enjoyed it. But for himself he preferred using, searching for, words and phrases which expressed the same vehemence and decadence, but yet were acceptable in any company.

  His companions were of all ages and sizes. One day he might be seen walking between two high-school seniors, his hands companionably dropped upon their shoulders. An hour later he could be observed talking to some four-year-old tot, his bony face tender, amused—and interested—at the child’s prattling.

  He had that mixed curse and blessing, the ability to make people laugh without trying to, even when trying not to. He had but to stroll into any gathering to invoke smiles. An innocent and completely solemn remark about the weather would start a storm of laughter. His teachers seldom called upon him to recite. At the mere mention of his name the class would grin; his standing up would start giggles and chuckles; and a matter-of-fact statement about factoring or the American Revolution would create an uncontrollable hurricane of mirth.

  His school grades were amazingly good or abysmally bad, usually the latter. He read all his books through at the beginning of each term and never looked at them again. He could not diagram a sentence and such terms as “past participle” and “present imperfect” filled him with amused annoyance. But he could write better themes than the examples in the text. His grades for the first semester of algebra were seventy-five, zero, and ninety-eight. He had read every history, ancient and modern, in the public library, but he passed the subject in school by the skin of his teeth. The Latin class was unbearable to him, but he would plug away for hours at some foreign-language newspaper.

  He was little good at anything that he had to do, yet he possessed a strong sense of duty. Extremely credulous, he was also suspicious of almost everyone.

  At thirteen (almost fourteen), the one possible defect in Paulie Pulasky’s make-up was her undeviating affection for Bob Dillon.

  She had been voted the prettiest girl in the freshman class, and even oldsters, and Protestants at that, were constantly remarking on her beauty. She was the spirit of gracefulness. She went with girls of her own age and took little interest in others. Her grades were invariably good. She thought that most men swore and it wasn’t very bad for them to do so. She went to mass twice a week, and enjoyed doing as she was told.