Savage Night
Page 18
It was like we’d never known how to talk.
It began to get pretty cold, so we shut off all the upstairs rooms and stayed downstairs. And it got colder and we shut off all the rooms but the living room and the kitchen. And it got colder and we shut off all the rooms but the kitchen. We lived there, never more than a few feet away from each other. It was always right close by, that thing was, and outside…it was out there too. It seemed to edge in closer and closer, from all sides, and there was no way to get away from it. And I didn’t want to get away. I kept getting weaker and littler, but I couldn’t stop. There was nothing else to think about, so I kept taking that thing. I’d go for it fast, trying to win the race against the goats. And I never did, but I kept on trying. I had to.
Afterwards, when the howling began to get so bad I couldn’t stand it, I’d go outside looking for the goats. I’d go running and screaming and clawing my way through the fields, wanting to get my hands on just one of them. And I never did, of course, because the fields weren’t really the place to find the goats.
23
I couldn’t eat much of anything. The basement was loaded with food and whiskey, but I had a hard time getting any down. I’d eaten less and less ever since that first day when I’d raised up the trap door that was set flush with the kitchen floor and gone down the steep narrow steps.
I’d gone down them, taking a lantern with me, and I’d looked all along the shelves, packed tight with bottles and packages and canned goods. I’d circled around the room, looking, and I came to a sort of setback in the walls—a doorless closet, kind of. And the entrance to it was blocked off, stacked almost to the ceiling with empty bottles.
I wondered why in hell they’d been dumped there instead of outside, because it would be stupid of a guy to drink the stuff upstairs, where he naturally would drink it, and then bring the bottles back down here. As long as he was up there, why hadn’t he…?
24
I said we never talked, but we did. We talked all the time to the goats. I talked to them while she slept and she talked to them while I slept. Or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, I did my share of talking.
I said we lived in the one room, but we didn’t. We lived in all the rooms, but they were all the same. And wherever we were the goats were always there. I couldn’t ever catch them but I knew they were there. They’d come up out of the fields and moved in with us, and sometimes I’d almost get my hands on them but they always got away. She’d get in my way before I could grab them.
I thought and I thought about it, and finally I knew how it must be. They’d been there all along. Right there, hiding inside of her. So it wasn’t any wonder I could never win the race.
I knew they were in her, where else could they be, but I had to make sure. And I couldn’t.
I couldn’t touch her. She didn’t sleep with me any more. She ate a lot, enough for two people, and sometimes in the morning she vomited…
It was right after the vomiting started that she began walking. I mean, really walking, not using the crutch.
She’d tuck her dress up around her waist, so that it wouldn’t be in the way, and walk back and forth on one knee and that little foot. She got to where she could walk pretty good. She’d hold her good foot up behind her with one hand, making a stump out of the knee. It came just about even, then, with that little baby foot and she could get around pretty fast.
She’d walk for an hour at a time with her dress tucked up and everything she had showing, but you’d never have known I was there from the way she acted. She…
Hell, she talked to me. She explained to me. We’d been talking all the time, and not to the goats either, because of course there weren’t any goats, and…
She walked on the little foot, exercising the goats. And at night they sat on my chest howling.
25
I stayed in the basement as much as I could. She couldn’t get me down there. She wasn’t good enough on that little foot and knee to come down the stairs. And somehow I had to hang on.
The last race was over, and I’d lost them all, but still I hung on. I seemed to be right on the point of finding something…of finding out something. And until I did I couldn’t leave.
I found out one evening when I was coming up out of the basement. I came even with the floor and turned sideways on the steps, putting down the stuff I’d brought up. And I’d brought a pretty big load because I didn’t want to come up any more often than I had to; and I was kind of dizzy. I leaned my arms on the floor, steadying myself. And then my eyes cleared, and there was the little foot and leg right in front of me. Braced.
The axe flashed. My hand, my right hand, jumped and kind of leaped away from me, sliced off clean. And she swung again and all my left hand was gone but the thumb. She moved in closer, raising the axe for another swing…
And so, at last, I knew.
26
Back there. Back to the place I’d come from. And, hell, I’d never been wanted there to begin with.
“…but where else, my friend? Where a more logical retreat in this tightening circle of frustration?”
She was swinging wild. My right shoulder was hanging by a thread, and the spouting forearm dangled from it. And my scalp, my scalp and the left side of my face was dangling, and…and I didn’t have a nose…or a chin…or…
I went over backwards, then down and down and down, turning so slowly in the air it seemed that I was hardly moving. I didn’t know it when I hit the bottom. I was simply there, looking up as I’d been looking on the way down.
Then there was a slam and a click, and she was gone.
27
The darkness and myself. Everything else was gone. And the little that was left of me was going, faster and faster.
I began to crawl. I crawled and rolled and inched my way along; and I missed it the first time—the place I was looking for.
I circled the room twice before I found it, and there was hardly any of me then but it was enough. I crawled up over the pile of bottles, and went crashing down the other side.
And he was there, of course.
Death was there.
28
And he smelled good.
About the Author
James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906. In all, Jim Thompson wrote twenty-nine novels and two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory). Films based on his novels include The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.
…and Now and On Earth
In May 2012, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s Now and On Earth. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.
Now and On Earth
I got off at three-thirty, but it took me almost an hour to walk home. The factory is a mile off Pacific Boulevard, and we live a mile up the hill from Pacific. Or up the mountain, I should say. How they ever managed to pour concrete on those hill streets is beyond me. You can tie your shoelaces going up them without stooping.
Jo was across the street, playing with the minister’s little girl. Watching for me, too, I guess. She came streaking across to my side, corn-yellow curls bobbing around her rose-and-white face. She hugged me around the knees and kissed my hand—something I don’t like her to do, but can’t stop.
She asked me how I liked my new job, and how much pay I was getting, and when payday was—all in one breath. I told her not to talk so loud out in public, that I wasn’t getting as much as I had with the foundation, and that payday was Friday, I thought.
“Can I get a new hat then?”
“I guess so. If it’s all right with Mother.”
Jo frowned. “Mother won’t let me have it. I know she won’t. She took Mack and Shannon downtown to buy ’em some new shoes, but she won’t get me no hat.”
“ ‘No hat’?”
“Any hat, I mean.”
“Where’d she get the money to go shopping with? Didn’t she pay the rent?”
“I guess not,” Jo said.
“Oh, goddam!” I said. “Now, what the hell will we do? Well, what are you gaping for? Go on and play. Get away from me. Get out of my sight. Go on, go on!”
I reached out to shake her, but I caught myself and hugged her instead. I cannot stand anyone who is unkind to children—children, dogs, or old people. I don’t know what is getting the matter with me that I would shake Jo. I don’t know.
“Don’t pay any attention to me, baby,” I said. “You know I didn’t mean anything.”
Jo’s smile came back. “You’re just tired, that’s all,” she said. “You go in and lie down and you’ll feel better.”
I said I would, and she kissed my hand again and scurried back across the street.
Jo is nine—my oldest child.
Recently released e-books by Jim Thompson
The Killer Inside Me
The Grifters
A Swell-Looking Babe
The Nothing Man
After Dark, My Sweet
Pop. 1280
Wild Town
The Getaway
The Kill-Off
Nothing More than Murder
A Hell of a Woman
Bad Boy
Heed the Thunder
The Rip-Off
Roughneck
Cropper’s Cabin
Savage Night
The Alcoholics
Texas by the Tail
Now and On Earth
Coming soon by Jim Thompson
The Transgressors
Recoil
The Criminal
South of Heaven
The Golden Gizmo
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
25
26
27
28
About the Author
Preview of Now and On Earth
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 © 1953 by Jim Thompson
Copyright © renewed 1981 by Alberta H. Thompson
Excerpt from Now and On Earth copyright © 1942 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1970 by The Estate of Jim 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 permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
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First e-book edition: May 2012
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ISBN 978-0-316-19610-9