Roughneck

by Jim Thompson

  "Aahh, look fellow,"—he grinned at me pleadingly—"it's kind of a joke, see? An old friend of yours had us pull it on you. Me and the other boys are just doin' what we're told to."

  "Joke?" I said. "An old friend of mine? But—"

  "You'll see. And don't tell him I tipped you off, huh?"

  The door closed. Bewildered, I went down the hall and pressed the bell for the service elevator. It arrived instantly, operated by a frail, blond, blue-eyed young man. The word STARTER was emblazoned across the jacket of his tuxedo-style uniform.

  "What took you so long?" he said. "Been arguing with my hired hands?"

  "I might have known it," I said. "Allie Ivers!"

  13

  Allie had caught a glimpse of me when I entered the building that forenoon. Being his own boss, practically speaking, and with very little real work to do, he had chosen this elaborately backhanded way of renewing our acquaintance.

  "About time, too," he declared, as he headed the car upwards. "A smart guy like you hanging around relief job offices! I'm going to have to take you in hand!"

  He stopped the elevator at roof level and motioned for me to follow him. I did so, and he unlocked the door of a penthouse with his pass key and waved me inside.

  It was a very elaborate layout, a beautifully furnished combination apartment and office. Stepping over to the bar, Allie selected several bottles at random and mixed us two huge drinks. We clinked glasses and, rather cautiously, I sat down next to him on one of the leather-upholstered stools.

  "Whose place is this, Allie?" I said. "And don't tell me it's yours!"

  "Belongs to an oil man," he shrugged. "He's only here about a week out of the month. What are you so jumpy about, anyway? I've never got you into any trouble, have I?"

  "Oh, no!" I said. "What about the time you hooked me into taking that cop's pants and the time you got me mixed up in the Capone gang, and the time—well, that last time in Lincoln when you had me drive the cab for you?"

  Allie grinned and reached for the bottles. I asked him how he'd gotten away from the country club that night.

  "Nothing to it," he said casually. "I gave the doorman my cigar to hold. Then, I helped the babe into the cab and drove off."

  "Without any clothes on?"

  "Well, it was a warm night. We dressed down the road a ways...Speaking of clothes, incidentally, let's go back here."

  We went into one of the outsize bedrooms, and Allie rolled back the closet doors. Inside were at least a dozen men's suits, three or four topcoats and racks of shoes and ties. Allie indicated that I was to help myself.

  "They won't be a perfect fit, but it'll be good enough. And don't argue about it. You're just going to borrow them for the night."

  "But why? I can't—"

  "How would you like to edit a magazine? Be the publicity man for a big fraternal order?"

  "Well, fine, but—"

  "Then do what I tell you, and I'll order up dinner for us."

  I could get no further information out of him at the moment, so with considerable hesitation I exchanged my clothes for some of the splendid garb in the closet. Except for the shoes, which were a trifle large, everything fitted me perfectly. By the time I had finished dressing, the waiter arrived with our dinner—two outsize porterhouse steaks with all the accessories for a modest banquet. Allie signed the check (using the tenant's name, of course) and wrote in a five-dollar tip for the waiter.

  "The guy never checks his bills," he explained as we sat down to the meal: "I throw parties up here all the time."

  He went on to explain at some length and somewhat apologetically that he had not, appearances to the contrary, sunk to doing an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. With the elevator boys and charwomen acting as his agents, he was working several small but profitable rackets in the building—selling chances on punchboards, peddling raffle tickets and so on, collecting a cut from the office to office peddlers. Also, needless to say—although he said it—he was stealing.

  "Nothing very big, you understand. A few bucks' worth of stamps in one place and a few typewriter ribbons in another and a box or so of stationery in another. I got a guy that takes the stuff for a short profit."

  I shook my head. "Allie, what makes you go on like this? Why don't you do something with your life? You're smart. You've got a nice personality and you make a good appearance. If you'd act sensible, stop making like a cheap crook—"

  He was grinning at me thinly, looking me up and down. "Yeah, Jimmie? What would it get me? Rides on freight trains? Ten-cent meals and a job digging ditches? Rags for clothes and a weedpatch for a bed?"

  "Well, all right," I said, stubbornly. "Maybe I'm not doing so good right now, but I'll pull out of it. I—"

  "Right you are," Allie nodded. "You're on your way to pulling out of it right now. After tonight you'll be sitting pretty."

  "How? Just what am I supposed to do, anyway?"

  "You know all about publicity, don't you? How to put out a small magazine?"

  "Well, I don't know 'all' about it, but—"

  "You know enough. Just let these guys that I introduce you to know that you know. I'll do the rest."

  Again, I could get no more information from him. He did insist—he swore to it—that he would involve me in no trouble, and I had to be satisfied with that.

  We finished eating. Urging me to help myself to the liquor, he went down to the locker room and changed clothes. He returned with a briefcase which he filled with bottles from the bar.

  By this time, naturally, I had had more than a little to drink and the qualms which I usually felt in Allie's presence were fairly well desensitized. As I have indicated, I was very fond of him. In his own peculiar way, he had always tried to be kind to me; and now, I hoped, in my hour of need, he might pull a plump rabbit from the fiscal hat.

  I accompanied him downstairs, and we taxied to an address on upper Broadway. We debarked there, and I followed him upstairs to the second-floor lodge rooms. The men he introduced me to, as I saw them, were semi-prosperous, lower middle-class citizens—master barbers, delicatessen owners, head bookkeepers and the like. Genial men, wise enough in their own way, but not too well-informed when they strayed outside of it. Allie seemed very popular with them. With him vouching for me as "the well-known author and editor," I was looked upon with almost embarrassing awe.

  After a score or so of introductions, Allie ushered me into a kind of board room and seated me at the head of the long table therein. Then, having distributed the bottles around at strategic points, he advised me that everything was going nicely and departed for the outer rooms.

  Some thirty minutes elapsed before the door reopened and Allie ushered in a group of the brothers. They ranged themselves around the table, and the bottles began moving from hand to hand. As the room filled with tobacco smoke and the gentlemen with high-grade bourbon, Allie got down to the business of the evening.

  For some months past, he pointed out, the lodge had considered the establishment of a small magazine or newspaper—something which every self-respecting fraternal order had and which this one certainly must have if the brothers were to go on holding their heads high. The delay in inaugurating such a periodical had reached the point of becoming a lodge disgrace; there was no longer any excuse for it. Here before them sat one of the country's most renowned publicists and editors. Purely out of friendship and the desire to help along a good cause, he '(me, that is)' had consented to get the publication started without fee...except, of course, his personal expenses. All that was required now, was that the good brothers present, these more substantial members who comprised the backbone of the lodge, should underwrite the proposition.

  One of the brothers cleared his throat. Just how much was this—uh—this thing going to cost?

  "Three thousand dollars," said Allie. And then, as his eyes swept the table, weighing the brothers, seeing a troubled expression spread from one face to another—"That's Mr. Thompson's offhand estimate, I should
say.

  "What about it, Jim? Could we put out something a little smaller for about—uh"—another lightning-sharp glance at the brothers—"about two thousand?"

  I nodded, looking, I suspect, not a little troubled myself, for I had given him no offhand estimates nor any other kind. Before I could do more than nod, Allie was proceeding:

  "Call it two thousand. That'll be one hundred and fifty each for you gentlemen, or a total of eighteen hundred, and I'll throw in the remaining two hundred. Until the loan is repaid, we'll hold a lien on all advertising and subscription fees—that's Mr. Thompson's suggestion—and each of us will receive a lifetime subscription free of charge. In other words, we'll have the honor of funding the publication and be liberally repaid for—"

  "Allie," I said, rising to my feet. "You can't—I can't—"

  "Of course," said Allie smoothly, "I'd forgotten you had another appointment. You run right along now, and I'll see you later."

  "But—"

  "You don't have to apologize. We all understand," said Allie. "Go right ahead, and I'll get on with the meeting."

  He got on with it, drawing the attention of the brothers away from me to him. After a moment of standing there awkwardly, with the group but not of it, I left. It was all I could do, as I saw it. There would be later opportunities to block Allie's swindle, and I would crack down on him then.

  Waiting at the foot of the stairs outside, I wondered what his next step would be, how he intended to extract eighteen hundred dollars from a group such as this. Certainly they wouldn't have so much cash on them tonight. Neither, with their slender resources, would they hand over their checks for one hundred and fifty each. They were doing very well for the times, yes, but they were still very small fish in the puddle. To men like these, the loss of one hundred and fifty dollars would be a severe financial blow.

  I was still wondering how Allie intended to swing it when he came hustling down the stairs. He was obviously expecting an assault of reproaches and questions, so, just to confound him, I said nothing at all. We returned to the penthouse in an almost dead silence, and silently I went into the bedroom and redressed in my own clothes. Allie looked at me quizzically as I returned to the living room.

  "Well, we pulled it off, Jim."

  "We did?" I said.

  "Sit down and have a drink and I'll tell you about it."

  I hesitated but I sat down and accepted a drink. Allie told me about it. The lodge brothers would draw personal notes in our favor, co-signed by one another. Since they were all good credit risks there would be not the slightest trouble in discounting the notes for cash. All he and I had to do was accompany the various lodge members to the bank and collect the money.

  "We can wind it all up in a day or two, and then—"

  "And then we skip town?"

  "I'm telling you," said Allie. "These little job printing shops are all screaming for work. We go to one of 'em and sign him up to put us out a little throwaway for a year—a few dozen copies each month of the cheapest thing he can put together. He does everything, see, even collects news from the lodge. We give him maybe three hundred bucks, and he bills us for a thousand. The rest of the eighteen hundred is your expenses."

  I sat staring at him. Allie's pleased grin slowly changed to an uncomfortable frown.

  "Well, what's the matter with it? Just show me where there's room for a rumble."

  "There isn't any," I said. "It's airtight. Your friends at the lodge may squawk, but there's nothing they can do."

  "Friends, hell! They're chumps. I've been trying to figure out a way of taking 'em ever since I joined the outfit...We're the only friends in this deal, just you and me. I've known you half your lifetime and I've always liked you, and—"

  "And I've always liked you," I said. "You were always on the make, but you did it in such a way that it seemed more humorous than criminal. When you took anyone it was usually a sharpie or a least someone who could afford to be taken...Guys like these tonight, poor trusting bastards with some little job or business—you wouldn't have touched them in the old days, Allie. I can't really believe that you'd do it now."

  I set my glass down and stood up. Scowling, he stepped in front of me.

  "You're not going to play, Jim? You come in here today flat on your ass and I practically hand you a grand—hell, I'll make it a grand; you can have a thousand for your end and I'll—"

  "I'm not going to play," I said.

  "This isn't the old days, Jim. We can't call our shots any more. Why, Christ, I'm really doing this for your sake, anyway. You can't back out on me, leave me to try to explain to those birds, after all the trouble I—"

  "I'm not backing out," I said. "I was never in. I warned you in the beginning that I wouldn't go for any swindle."

  "What the hell are you going to do, then? Dig ditches or sponge off your friends? I've got a pretty sweet setup here, but if you think I'm going to—to—"

  I gave him a level look. He turned his head, scowling but shamefaced. "Aahh, hell, Jim, you know I didn't mean that. It's that I'm pretty damned disappointed. You know how you'd feel if a guy you'd always kind of, well...?"

  "I know exactly what you mean," I said. "Now, do I walk downstairs or do you take me on the elevator?"

  We rode down on the elevator. Diffidently, each of us hurt by the other, we parted at the entrance. We had several casual encounters in Oklahoma City after that, but the diffidence, the stiffness, remained. Allie was ashamed of himself. He was angry with me for making him ashamed.

  Years passed before we met again in another city, and Allie, still sore and ashamed, yet wanting to crack the ice between us, found a way of reestablishing our friendship. The medium he chose virtually frightened me witless—more so, I should say, than I ordinarily am. But though it almost turned my hair gray, I think it was worth it.

  I'll tell you about it at the proper time.

  14

  Shorty and Jiggs knew the location of a pot of gold, figuratively but none the less golden: an abandoned oil well with a mile of high grade pipe in it. The well was deep in the heart of eastern Texas on part of a one-time plantation. For years past the worn-out soil of the area had gone unfarmed, and was now a jungle of weeds, bush and second-growth timber. Its present owner would gladly permit the removal of the pipe for a fraction of its resale value.

  As Shorty told the story, the plantation owner had been so embittered at the drilling contractor's failure to strike oil that he had chased him and his employees from the property at gunpoint. The contractor had sued for recovery of his machinery and equipment. The plantation owner had filed counter suit. Having more money than the contractor, he won after years of litigation. But his victory was an empty one. News of the gentleman's bad temper and stubbornness had spread among the oil field fraternity, and no one would touch the job on a share-salvage basis. It was cash-on-the-line or no deal. So, with the land owner now nearly bankrupt and still as stubborn as ever, it was no deal.

  When he died, his heirs split and sold off the property as small farms. As the land went bad, the farms moved from one owner to another. One of them was no longer sufficient to support a family. It took several, and the original forty-acre plots were consolidated and reconsolidated. And even then large areas were so depleted as to be not worth tilling. Thus, the case with the land on which "our" well stood.

  "I don't know, Shorty," I said, when he first told me the story. "It sounds like another oil field fairy tale, just too damned good to be true. You actually saw it yourself?"

  "Damned right I did. I didn't believe the story myself when I first heard it, so not having nothing else to do, I looked the place up. I talked to the guy that owns the land, and then I waded on out through the jungle and looked at the well. It's there, by God. More than five thousand feet of highgrade casing. And it's free—I mean, it ain't frozen in the hole. I rocked it and I know."

  "But it might be cemented part way down. If it was cemented, say at a thousand feet, you could still get some sway
."

  "Why the hell would it be cemented? They didn't strike oil."

  "Well," I shrugged, "I don't know. Maybe that plantation owner did it. He might have been afraid that someone would steal the pipe, so—"

  "But he couldn't have got it out himself if he did that! Ain't that right?...I know how you feel, Jim. It sounds so bee-yoo-tiful you figure there's just got to be something wrong, but there ain't a danged thing."

  "The derrick and the rig and the tools are still there? They're still in good shape?"

  "Good enough to do the job. Naturally, they ain't first-class after all these years."

  "Why couldn't we just truck the above-ground stuff off and sell it?"

  "Aah—" Shorty gave me a disgusted look. "An oil field hand like you asking a question like that? It ain't oil country down there. What'd you have left by the time you hauled twenty tons of machinery out of the backwoods and shipped it a thousand miles? Pipe—casing—is different. There's a dozen pipe yards within a hundred miles. We get it trucked to the railroad on credit and sell our bill of lading."

  Shorty was a driller and Jiggs a tool dresser—a full cable-rig crew. They needed a third man—I was their candidate—to help with the rigging up, and serve as boilerman and roustabout when the job proper began. They also needed about three hundred dollars for supplies, repairs and fuel oil for the boiler.

  Three hundred dollars. That was all that stood between us and the three-way split of a small fortune!

  We talked about it endlessly. It got so that we could talk about nothing else. We would sit around our freezing rooms at night, dining off of stale bread and tea, squeezing the last crumbs from a nickel sack of tobacco and passing the butt from hand to hand: three half-starved ragamuffins talking and dreaming of riches. We got out pencil and paper, and we argued and we haggled and we figured and we 'figured.' And that awesome, that terrible and frustrating three hundred dollars began to shrink...Food? Well, we would get that farmer to help us out for an increased share in the profits. Travel and other expenses? Well, we would travel by foot and freight, and nuts to the other expenses. New parts for the machinery? Well, Shorty and Jiggs both had hand tools and our time was worth nothing. We would simply rebuild the old parts.