Killy

by Donald E. Westlake

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. Really. I’ll get a hotel room tonight.’

  ‘Let me call for you,’ he said, reaching for the phone. ‘Get you a couple dollars off. There’s a hotel we book our visiting firemen into, won’t take a minute.’ He was honestly embarrassed at his inability to offer me shelter for the night, and felt he had to do something to make up for it.

  He made the call, and gave me the address of the hotel. Then he gave me the pile of pamphlets he had on his desk, and told me to read them over and we could talk about them tomorrow. ‘I’ll pick you up around ten,’ he said. ‘We’ll be driving up.’

  ‘All right. Fine.’

  He jumped up and came around the desk again, and I switched the pamphlets to my left hand to accept his handshake. ‘I think you’ll enjoy the job, Paul,’ he said.

  ‘I think I will, too.’

  Outside, in the small tan reception room, I had to ask the blonde secretary which way I should go to find the elevators. She told me, with a smile, and I left. I thought briefly of asking her for a date—she was a good-looking girl, Washington-thin, and probably no more than twenty-two—but then I reminded myself I had all those pamphlets to read tonight, and the bus trip in had worn me out more than a little, anyway. But going down in the elevator I had to admit to myself that I’d simply been bashful, that I’d been feeling as though somehow she was too old for me. Walter was partly to blame for that, making me feel so young and awkward, but he had simply intensified an attitude that had already been there before I’d met him. When you go to college too late—drift around for a year after high school and then go into the Army for three years, so you start college as a twenty-one-year-old freshman—a kind of regression takes place. You’re in an environment constructed for people in their late teens, you’re surrounded by people in their late teens, and gradually you begin to adapt yourself, until you’ve lost two or three years from your maturity. I remember in the Army, in basic training, there was a man I met, twenty-five years old. He’d managed to avoid the draft long enough to get a master’s degree in American history. He told me one time that Army basic training was engineered for a seventeen-year-old boy with two years of high school, and that the training programme was far less flexible than the human mind. ‘Every day in every way,’ he told me, ‘I’m getting younger and younger.’ I’d been too close to the norm myself then really to understand him, though I did recognize the fact that he acted an awful lot like a kid, and not like a man in his mid-twenties with a master’s degree. Once I got to college, I could finally understand what he was talking about, and I sometimes wonder if you can ever get back those two or three years that are wiped away.

  At any rate, I left the AAMST Building and walked back toward the bus depot. After the air-conditioning in Walter’s office, the heavy mugginess of the air amid the white marble buildings was even stronger and more unreal. As I walked along, moving slowly because of the heat, I suddenly realized another result of my childishness. I hadn’t talked to Walter about salary. I knew that I was to get fifty-three dollars and sixty-seven cents a week, hut I had no idea when the first payment was due, and I only had thirty-four dollars to my name. I would have to ask about money the first thing tomorrow morning.

  If worst came to worst, though, I knew I’d be able to borrow some money from Walter. He was that kind of man.

  Two

  We travelled northwards at a steady sixty-five miles an hour on Route 111. Walter drove the company car—a pale grey Ford with less than six thousand miles on it—with practised ease and nonchalance. Sitting behind the wheel, his bristled yellow hair bright in the sun, he looked big and competent and sure of himself. He held the steering wheel high in his right hand, his left elbow out the window, and watched the hard stripe of road unreel before us. On the back seat were his tan leather briefcase and the cartons full of pamphlets and posters and throwaways. In the trunk were our suitcases, his matched set and my lonely orphan.

  As we drove, we talked about what I’d read the night before. The literature had been of two types, one aimed at convincing independent workers it was to their advantage to join the union, and the other at explaining to interested union members the history and objectives of the organization. The latter type had been more informative to me, though the former—because of the Gung Ho style of the writing—had been more interesting.

  The AAMST was rather large, as unions go, boasting nearly two hundred thousand dues-paying members in thirty-seven states. Its objectives, to oversimplify slightly, were to gain for its workers increasingly shorter hours of labour for increasingly higher rates of pay. This policy was kept from reaching its illogical conclusion—no work at all and a millionaire’s income—by a combination of government control, managerial stubbornness at the bargaining table, and a number of realists among the union executives. The history of the union since 1940 was relatively free of strikes, and totally free of such long bitter strikes as the one at the Moehler furniture plant.

  Since all of the large unions overlap into each other’s territory tremendously, there wasn’t a single member of the Machinists who wouldn’t have been eligible to join one or more of the other national unions instead. And as with so many of those others, the Machinists was an amalgamation of a number of earlier unions, two or three of them having vague connections with the Wobblies of the twenties. Whatever the philosophical or theoretical antecedents might have been, however, the Machinists was today strongly in favour of capitalism, stating unequivocally in its literature that industry belonged in the hands of private enterprise rather than with government, possibly because a plant owner, no matter how rich or influential, was still less awesome an opponent across a bargaining table than the United States government would be.

  The union did practise socialism—having its own welfare fund and retirement fund, and being in favour of Social Security and Workmen’s Compensation—but it was no more socialistic than the rest of the national economy. As for Communism, the last Red in this part of the labour movement had been demobbed a generation ago. ‘One of the strongest weapons against Communism in all the arsenal of liberty,’ one of the pamphlets had said, ‘is a strong patriotic pro-American labour movement.’

  On other fronts, the union favoured high tariffs and low immigration quotas, tax relief for the small wage earner, an end to government restrictions in labour disputes, industry-wide adoption of the guaranteed annual wage and the totally closed shop, and state bonuses for Korean War veterans. In political campaigns, support was usually but not always thrown to the Democratic candidate.

  For the last three years, I had been a college student, majoring in economics. This meant, of course, that I’d taken a lot of courses in English, maths, history, the natural sciences, a foreign language (French), and other social sciences, in order to fulfil the requirements for a degree, but it also meant that every once in a while I’d been able to squeeze in a course in economics. Now, full of what the books had told me, I studied this union’s pronouncements about itself, and gradually a number of facts and theories and ideas I’d memorized in class began all at once to make sense to me. This union—any large national union—was a potent economic force. Its major arena was the economy itself, but since our society is so infinitely interconnective, the influence and interest of the Machinists spread wide into other areas, into federal and state and municipal politics, into governmental theory, into international relations. And the attitudes and beliefs of the union, in every case, were based solely on what has been called enlightened self-interest. High tariffs, for instance. Whether high tariffs were good or bad for the nation—or for the entire world—was not the union’s concern; high tariffs were good for the members of the union, since they cut foreign industrial competition and therefore made more jobs available in American industry. A department-store chain, on the other hand, might favour low tariffs because they allowed the department store to buy comparable goods cheaper, sell them cheaper, and therefore sell more of them, therefore keeping more mo
ney active in the economy. In an ideal world, all the human beings would get together and decide what was best for all of them, but in the practical world groups of human beings get together and squabble to get as much as possible of what is best for each of them. With so many groups, fired by so much conflicting self-interest, pushing and pulling in so many directions at once, a kind of shaky balance is usually maintained.

  All of this I had heard about, often and in different ways, in the classroom, but none of it had ever truly been real for me. Now I was inside one of the pushing groups, seeing the relationships and the effects from the angle of its point of view, and all at once the dogma and dictum of the textbooks began to take on flesh and blood. It was all true, I realized, it was just exactly the way the books said, and I began to pity the poor maths major, who could never see the laws of his persuasion acted out upon the stage of life.

  Riding northward, Walter and I discussed what the pamphlets had said, and I found that he was passionately interested in his job and in the entire field, that if the term vocation can be used in reference to a profane occupation, then Walter had a vocation. I asked him questions, not because I couldn’t figure out the answers for myself but because I wanted him to believe that I was interested, too, and he answered them with pleasure, and in great detail.

  We stopped in Harrisburg for hamburgers and coffee, and to stretch our legs. Walter flirted with the waitress, a leggy redhead with green make-up on her eyelids, and I was annoyed to find that now I felt about twelve years old, that it was a surprise my feet reached the floor under the table. After Harrisburg, we took Route 22 to Allentown and picked up the Turnpike Extension, northbound. Route 11 took us across the line into New York State, at Binghamton, and that’s where we stopped for dinner.

  It was dark when we left the restaurant and went back to the car, but Walter said, ‘I think we can make it tonight. Only about a hundred and fifty miles to go.’ We’d travelled nearly three hundred and fifty already.

  The last stretch, up through Syracuse, I dozed off. Eight hours sitting in the car, talking for long times and then being silent and watching the green-black countryside go by for long times, had drugged me. I felt thick and muggy, like Washington, but without the white marble, and just above Binghamton I fell asleep.

  When Walter woke me up, I had no idea who he was or where I’d come to. Through the windshield I looked at a flat blue wall with a pink door in it and a casement window backed by a yellow shade, the whole lit by a spotlight shining full on it from somewhere behind me. And a large grinning man was shaking my shoulder and saying, ‘Here we are, this is our unit.’

  I was out of phase for only a few seconds, and then it was the dashboard of the Ford I recognized first. That led to the recognition of Walter, and the further recognition of the fact that the structure in front of me must be a motel. ‘Dozed off,’ I said, my mouth dry and thick-tongued, and sat up. My back and shoulders ached, and I crawled out of the Ford like a cripple. I stood there blinking in the light—the spotlight was at the base of the roadside sign, and shone directly at the motel—while Walter unlocked the trunk. He had to call me to come get my bag.

  We had a double unit, which meant twin beds in a single room, separated by a bowlegged night table with chipped mahogany finish and bearing a lamp with a pleated shade. Walter shucked out of his clothes and went away to take a shower, but I felt so beaten down all I wanted to do was go back to sleep so I wouldn’t know what condition I was in. I crawled into the nearest bed, and fell asleep with the sound of rushing water in my ears.

  Three

  I got my first real look at Wittburg the next morning, when we went out for breakfast. Walter had given me the vital statistics, that the town had a population of not quite nine thousand, thirty-five hundred of whom worked in the Mclntyre Shoe Company plant. The other fifty-five hundred served as the plumbers, doctors, carpenters, grocers, wives, teachers, and delivery boys for the first thirty-five hundred. The shoe factory, therefore, was the only possible reason for the town’s existence.

  It was situated about ten or twelve miles from Watertown, along the Black River. The river, which actually was black, split the town in two, and at one point—being more a creek than a river—was straddled by one of the shoe company buildings. But though the river formed a natural division of the town, it was not along this boundary that the social tracks were laid. The river ran east and west, and midway through town was crossed by Harpur Boulevard, running north and south. The factory buildings and the lower-class homes were to the west of Harpur Boulevard, and the more expensive part of town was to the east. Harpur Boulevard itself—which was actually a part of the unnumbered spur road leading into the town from Route 3—was the entire downtown section, and boasted two movie houses and a Woolworth, but no Kresge.

  The Wittburg Motel was just south of town, on the road that became Harpur Boulevard an eighth of a mile farther north. After my shower in the morning, Walter and I got into the Ford and drove that eighth of a mile and stopped for breakfast at the City Line Diner. The Ford had no union markings on it, so no one paid more than casual attention to us. The people I saw on the street and in the green upholstered diner looked grimy and hard-working, wearing clothing of dull colours. It was a hot day, but far less humid than Washington had been, and ten hours sleep had left me feeling chipper and my rightful age. Sitting at the booth in the diner, I looked out the window and saw an elderly man go by, mopping the back of his neck with a red handkerchief. Finishing my eggs and sausage, I tried to remember when I had last seen a red handkerchief.

  While on the road, Walter and I were on an expense account, the details of which Walter was handling, so he paid the check for both of us and left the tip. We went outside to the morning sunlight again, and stood on the sidewalk, squinting in the light and looking up and down the street. It was nine-thirty in the morning, very bright, with a kind of silent buzz in the air. A few women pushed children in strollers, and some Chevvys and Plymouths were angle-parked on both sides of the street. The stores mostly had their awnings down, and as I watched I saw a short man in rolled-up shin sleeves come out of a shoe store with a metal rod and crank the awning down there.

  I lit a cigarette, pleased to be alive, and turned to Walter. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Take our time,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to this fellow Hamilton, but first let’s just look the place over a little. Get the feel of it.’

  I grinned, saying, ‘I feel like the advance scout of an invading army.’

  ‘You are,’ Walter told me. He punched my arm, grinning, and we went over to the Ford.

  We drove here and there for a while, back and forth, every once in a while crossing Harpur Boulevard again. To the east, we found one block of rolling tended lawn and well-separated brick homes, half of which showed doctors’ shingles. Other blocks on that side of town were middle-class clapboard, two storeys high, less separation between houses, with lengths of hose curled on the grass at the side of the house and with a porch containing a tricycle or a glider or both. Trees lined most of these streets, and along some blocks the trees were so old and huge they roofed the street in greenery, making a cool shadowed waterless grotto of an entire block. Through screen doors came television laughter, and here and there I caught a glimpse of an infant in a playpen in a back yard.

  To the west was a different town, dominated by the ancient brick piles of the factory buildings. There were six or seven of these buildings, all close to the river on one side or the other—the town had ten bridges, all of them short and most of them white-washed concrete—and all the factory buildings were Mid-lands grim in style. Four or five storeys high, squared off and lopped by black metal bulks, the old brick grimed by smoke and grease and time, rows of dusty unshaded windows, and small green doors at the corners. This was not a plant; a plant is one of those modern one-storey prefab shells that look like one of those modern one-storey prefab grammar schools. This was, without question, a factory.

  In among
the buildings of the factory was the slum. If a town has three buildings, one of them will immediately decay so the town can have a slum. It seems to be a rule. Outside staircases with rotted risers, broken windows patched with cardboard, frayed and faded cotton curtains flapping from open windows where mattresses were humped to air, lumpy lots with their quotas of old tyres and rusted cans, board fences unpainted and crumbling, three junkyards, a bar in a sleezy tilting corner building and calling itself the Crystal Palace. The residents over here seemed to be about half and half white and black, and a few that seemed to be truly half and half.

  ‘All these towns look alike,’ said Walter at one point. ‘In fourteen years, I’ve seen a lot of them. And they all look pretty much like this. Except the cement towns, the towns where the cement factories are. There, everything looks dusty white all the time, like the towns in northern Italy.’ He glanced at me. ‘You ever been to Italy?’

  I shook my head. ‘I never got out of the States. The Army had me in Montana for a while, and then Texas, and then St Louis.’

  ‘I played football in Italy one time,’ he said. ‘Believe it or not.’ Then he went on to explain, the professional team he was with went to Italy, and it had something to do with the State Department.

  That somehow led to my telling him a story about a girl I met at the USO in St Louis, one of the few cities in the world that still has a USD and then he told me about a girl who got into the locker room when his team was playing at Detroit one time, ant I I told a story about somebody else in Mexico, which I heard from a friend of mine and which was probably false, but which made a good story. And as we told our half-truths to one another, we drove back and forth across the town, looking at it and getting used to its existence.