Death of a City

by Lionel White

  Mort Goldfeather, who’d arrived at the clubhouse only a few minutes before, couldn’t resist interrupting.

  “Maybe you’d better get that gun and start shooting, Knocky,” Mort cut in. “I just left town a half hour ago and I understand that they broke into your place and are looting it. They tell me that, if they can’t find the keys to the new cars, they are pushing them out in the street and setting them on fire. Why ...”

  Knocky stopped talking and swung around and stared at the other man, his mouth hanging open.

  The fact is that Mort Goldfeather had heard nothing of the sort. But he simply couldn't resist needling the other man. It wasn’t just that Knocky's bragging and loud mouth offended Goldfeather. Mort Goldfeather had very good reasons to dislike, even hate, Knocky Higgins. He knew that it was Knocky who’d started the rumor around that Goldfeather was actually a Jew and was passing as an Episcopalian. Goldfeather was a relative latecomer to Oakdale, having arrived from up North somewhere only a couple of years back. He’d bought Brown and Mason, the oldest and biggest department store in the city, and had, from the very first, moved in the very best social circles in the city. Cass Asmore had more or less sponsored him and it was believed that Cass had been responsible for making the arrangements so that Goldfeather had been able to buy the controlling interest in the department store. He and Knocky had rubbed each other the wrong way from the very first. And then the rumor had started going around that Mort was actually a Jew from New York and had only joined the local Episcopal Church as a coverup. It hadn’t taken Mort long to discover the source of the rumor.

  “Of course, I don’t suppose it really matters, Knock,” Mort went * on. “I should imagine that your insurance will fully cover..

  “Matter!” Knocky said, finally catching his breath. “What the hell do you mean, it doesn’t matter! Those sons of bitches looting and burning my business and it doesn’t matter? Are you crazy or something? Why, Goddamn it, when did any insurance policy ever cover...”

  He stopped, half choking, and grabbed for his drink, downing the eight ounces in a single swallow.

  “Where did you get that story anyway, Goldfeather?” he asked, suddenly cold sober. “Are you sure? Do you know for certain that Higgins Chevy is being looted and burned? Where the hell are the police in this city anyway? Why don’t..

  “Oh, I don't know for sure, Knocky,” Mort interrupted. “I’m just telling you what I heard in town. I didn't personally happen to see it. I did see a lot of other buildings going up in flames and there is certainly looting going on. No, I didn’t actually see anything at your place, but of course, I wasn’t anywhere near the Higgins Chevrolet Company. I am only repeating what I heard. It could be nothing but a rumor. You know, Knocky, how rumors get started in this town.” He shrugged, turned away and asked Tony if he could have a Scotch and soda.

  Tony nodded, but told him he’d have to be satisfied to take it with a single ice cube. Knocky merely stared at him as he accepted the drink. It occurred to him that Goldfeather was really pulling his leg, but then again, he couldn’t be sure. What the hell, the thing was to get the hell out of this madhouse and go on into town and see what really was happening. He must be stupid, hanging around here with a bunch of drunks instead of taking care of his business.

  Turning, wordlessly, he stalked out of the barroom.

  Miles Overstreet wasn’t sure whether it was the two cups of black coffee or that business between Goldfeather and Knocky Higgins, but for some reason, he was beginning suddenly to get sober. At least he was feeling a little less fuzzy and he was no longer about to fall off his bar stool and pass out.

  So they were burning down Higgins Chevy. Well wasn’t that just too Goddamned bad. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

  Miles climbed down off his bar stool and slowly moved next to Mort Goldfeather.

  "Tell me, Mort,” he said. "Was that on the up and up, about Knocky’s auto agency?”

  Mort swung around and looked at Miles and slowly smiled.

  “I only wish it was, Miles,” he said. “But no, I am afraid I was just taking old Knocky for a sleigh ride. I just got tired of standing here and listening to his bullshit. I couldn’t resist throwing a needle into him. The idea of that loud-mouthed son of a bitch going home and getting a shotgun and going back and spending the night sitting up in his stinking automobile clip joint, defending it against all comers, struck me as hilarious. And I will just bet you that that is what he is going to do.”

  Miles threw his arm around the other man’s shoulder. "By God, Mort,” he said, “you’re a genius. I'll buy you a drink on that. In fact, I’ll buy us both a drink. Tony, make it two more, will you?”

  While the club manager was mixing the drinks, Miles again spoke to Mort Goldfeather.

  “You honestly think that that louse will really stay up all night guarding his place?” he asked.

  Mort nodded solemnly. “You can bet on it, boy," he said. “You know Knocky, the all-American hero. He’s not going to let any black bastard shove him around. No, sirree. I’ll be willing to bet you that right now he’s burning up the road to town to get his trusty firing piece preparing to defend what’s his’n."

  Miles laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re probably right. I can just see him sitting up the rest of the night in that office of his waiting to fend off the black hordes. As a matter of fact,” he added, a little thoughtfully, “he may not be completely crazy at that. If just about one-tenth of the rumors that have been coming in here tonight are true, I suppose it would be a good idea if everyone of us were at home watching out for trouble.”

  “The trouble seems pretty well confined to the downtown Negro district,” Mort said. “Or at least it was the last I heard, about an hour ago. There have been isolated incidents of rock throwing and sniping in other parts of town, however, I understand.”.

  “Sniping?”

  “Oh, I don’t know whether it is true or not, but I heard that a policeman riding in a squad car out on the east side of town was shot. There are several versions of the story going around.”

  Tony Meriot pushed over the two drinks and Miles hesitated as his hand started for the glass. He shook his head as though to clear it and then suddenly pulled back away from the bar.

  “Think I’d better skip this one, Mort,” he said. “The fact is, I better be getting out to my own house. There’s no telling for sure how far the trouble might spread.”

  Five minutes later he drove away from the parking lot. He pushed his accelerator to the floor board once he’d turned onto the main highway. He had a sudden terrible urge to get out to his house as fast as possible. My God, what had he been thinking about, hanging around that stupid clubhouse with a bunch of drunks, not even bothering to check up and see if Beth was OK?

  2 THE odd thing was that he hadn’t really started hating him, really hating him, until Knocky had told that story over at the Cosmos Club some ten days before. Even though he had known that Beth and Knocky had been having an affair for some time now, he had rather liked Knocky Higgins. Not that he exactly approved of the affair and not that he didn’t resent it. Resent it like hell. But he couldn’t kid himself. It wasn't the first time or the first guy. He simply had to face the facts. And the facts were that he was married to a tramp. He loved her, or at least he guessed he still loved her. In any case, he was still living with her and they managed to get along together somehow or other.

  You can get used to anything, he guessed. At least he managed -to make some sort of adjustment. Beth was what she was, for better or worse. Of course, the first time, that terrible time when he’d first really known that she had slept with someone else, it had damned near killed him. If the facts hadn’t been irrefutable, he simply wouldn't have believed it. And, naturally, he hadn’t blamed

  Beth. He’d been damned sure that she’d been hypnotized, seduced and violated through some weird magical power possessed by the man who’d had her. The blame had been, in his mind at least, entirely with
the man, and he had forced himself to believe in Beth’s essential innocence. She was either drunk or under some sort of spell.

  Later on, when it was no longer a case of the first time or the second or even the third, he’d gradually come to face the truth. A woman doesn’t go around being seduced and reseduced and seduced again, and maintain a status of eternal victim. She is involved, she is asking for it.

  It didn’t, quite obviously, make for a very happy marriage. On the other hand, one must accept the facts of life. Beth was what she was and he could take it or leave it. After all, some men were married to alcoholics, some were married to women who suffered from tuberculosis or some other tragic disease. Some wives were slobs around the house, some were grossly fat or ugly. But one took marriage for better or worse, the good along with the bad. It just happened that he was married to a woman who couldn’t resist falling in bed now and then with other men.

  In all fairness, it was hard to blame the man completely. If a really good-looking, sexually attractive woman—and Beth even at forty was still a damned attractive woman—made it quite obvious that she was available for a quick roll in the hay, well, one could hardly damn a healthy, normal man for taking advantage of the fact.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t feel jealousy. He did, and at times it ate him up. But he had to be fair and he had to be realistic, if he wanted to maintain any sort of sanity, certainly. So he’d learned to live with it and he’d learned to adjust—or at least to survive.

  In one way, the affair with Knocky Higgins hadn’t really bothered him so much as a couple of the other ones had. Knocky was only a casual acquaintance, not a really close personal friend the way one or two of the other ones had been. The one thing, of course, which had bothered him, when he’d finally learned about the Knocky Higgins affair, had been his opinion of the man himself. Most of Beth’s affairs had at least shown good taste. The men, almost without exception, had been physically attractive and socially acceptable. Knocky, at least in Miles Overstreet's mind, failed to come up to either standard. The man was both crude and stupid. In spite of this, in spite of the fact that he couldn’t quite accept Knocky as a properly qualified lover for his wife, he hadn’t really hated him. He’d been more inclined to criticize Beth for her bad taste and secretly wonder if perhaps she wasn’t beginning to slip just a bit, lose her hold.

  But then Knocky had told that story at the Cosmos Club and, in a single moment, what had been merely a slight dislike turned into definite personal hatred. It wasn’t the story exactly. The story had merely been the tipoff that Knocky, instead of merely being satisfied to cuckold him, was actually having the Goddamned audacity publicly to proclaim his conquest and rub it in. He was using the affair with his wife as an excuse publicly to humiliate him. At least the others had had the common decency to keep their mouths shut and protect Beth and save his own feelings as much as possible under the circumstances.

  It had certainly been deliberate.

  There had been half a dozen of them at the club, having a drink at the bar. That’s when it had happened. He remembered every single detail, how he’d been telling some story himself, something about how he’d asked for the wrong number at the fifth race out at the track and how his horse had come in paying sixty-eight to one and he’d taken what he’d thought was the winning ticket to the window and, when he handed it in to collect a small fortune, had learned that he’d asked for number eight instead of number four, which had been the winner.

  He’d said, “My God, I could have shot myself, then and there.”

  Knocky, who’d been among those listening, had looked up and smiled. “Maybe you should have, Miles," Knocky said. “Yeah, maybe you should have shot yourself. Which reminds me of a funny story about that sort of thing, if you guys haven’t heard it. Stop me if you have, Miles.”

  Miles had thought right then that Knocky was aiming the story directly at him, had known he was.

  “Well, anyway,” Knocky went on, “this story has a sort of international twist, the different emotional reactions of different people. Let’s take a man who is being cuckolded.”

  Knocky had hesitated, putting his arm around Miles’ shoulder and smiling around at the group of men who were listening to him.

  “In the case of the Frenchman,” Knocky said, “the guy goes home when he learns about it and shoots his wife. An Italian reacts completely different. He shoots the guy who’s laying his wife. But the American, well, he’s really a different breed. He goes home and shoots himself.”

  Driving back toward Oakdale, Miles Overstreet was again reliving that afternoon at the Cosmos Club when Knocky had told the story, again was reliving that shocked and horrible few moments after Knocky had finished and had been greeted by a few embarrassed laughs. At that moment Miles had realized suddenly that every man within hearing was completely aware that Knocky had been boffing Beth Overstreet and that Knocky knew they knew and knew that Miles himself knew. Knocky had told that story for one and only one reason: publicly to humiliate him.

  And it was at that precise moment that Miles had discovered hatred, had made up his mind that sometime sooner or later he would kill Knocky Higgins, kill him not because he had slept with his wife but because he had publicly advertised the fact in front of the whole wide world, had not only made a laughing stock of Miles, but had equally made a laughing stock and a tramp out of Beth. He had forgiven Knocky for sleeping with his wife, he had even been willing to accept his own humiliation, but he was Goddamned if he could ever forgive him for what he did to Beth.

  Two miles from the city limits, Miles spotted the flames shooting into the sky in the direction of the center of the city. The sudden sight of that flame-decorated horizon acted almost like a cold shower and snapped him out of his bitter reverie. For the first time the full realization of what must be happening in the heart of Oakdale really hit him. He thought of Beth, alone in the house in Far Hills, and felt a sudden sense of guilt. What in the hell had ever possessed him to stay on at the country club getting slopped to the gills and leaving her there alone and unprotected? Jesus, the poor kid was probably half scared to death, what with no phone and all.

  Miles pushed harder on the accelerator and turned to the left, cutting around the edge of the city. He should be home in another ten minutes at the most.

  God, he just hoped she was all right. So far, he’d seen no signs of any trouble, but one never knew when things started where they would spread to or who might become involved. One thought did give him comfort. Beth wasn’t the sort to panic. She had a damned cool head. She would certainly have had sense enough to lock the doors and windows. And, of course, there were the guns, a couple of shotguns—and she certainly knew how to handle them, being one of the best women skeet shots in the country. And there were several long guns, a twenty-two, a thirty-o-six, a Remington thirty-thirty. And his own forty-five, which he had liberated from the Army after he’d done his hitch in Korea.

  Beth had plenty of protection, but it still didn’t excuse him for not getting home. After all, protecting the home was a husband’s responsibility, protecting one’s home and one’s wife.

  It was probably at this precise moment that the idea first came to him: the city in a state of riot, guns, your home and your wife, your responsibility to protect them.

  The moment he turned into the driveway of the house in Far Hills, he knew that Beth was not there. It wasn’t just that the house was dark—after all, she could have gone to bed, perhaps run out of candles. No, it wasn't that. It was some sort of sixth sense that told him the place was deserted and Beth was not home.

  Two minutes later, after he’d opened the twin overhead doors of the garage and his headlights found the empty spot where Beth’s car normally would have been parked, he knew that his instincts had been correct. The MG was gone and that meant that Beth would also be gone.

  He hurriedly clicked off his ignition switch and got out of his car, taking the flashlight from the glove compartment.

  T
he note was propped up against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. It was scrawled in pencil and barely readable. Beth had a notoriously bad script, but Miles guessed she’d just had time to scratch out the message in a hurry as she was leaving. It read:

  Honey, I heard about the rioting in town and was unable to reach you as the phone doesn’t work. I have gone over to my sister’s to spend the night. I have fed Tiger and will call you or see you in the morning.

  Standing there reading the note, Miles Overstreet felt a sudden, tremendous sense of relief. And for some completely unfathomable reason, he had an almost overwhelming desire to burst into tears.

  He went to the ice box, opened it and took out a bottle of beer. Then he went into the library and, walking to the gun case, unlocked it and took out the thirty-o-six with the telescopic sight. He unlocked the drawer under the cabinet and removed three shells from a box of cartridges and slowly fed them into the magazine of the rifle. Five minutes later, he carefully backed his car out of the garage, keeping his headlights off until he was more than a block away from his house. He figured it would take him no longer than an hour at the most to drive into town and return. Normally he could make the trip in half of the time.

  But the colored sector of Oakdale lay midway on a direct route as the crow flies, between his home in Far Hills and the Higgins Chevrolet Agency on South Peach Street.

  His intelligence told him it would be the better part of caution to avoid the colored section of the city on this particular night. He didn’t want any unwarranted difficulty until he reached his destination. And he certainly wanted no difficulty once he had reached that destination, had done what he knew he had to do, and once again returned to his home in Far Hills.

  3 IT wasn’t until he was more than halfway into town that Knocky Higgins realized he was doing a pretty stupid thing. Suppose Mort Goldfeather had been telling the truth? Suppose that the Higgins Chevrolet Company actually was being looted? What Goddamned good was he going to do just driving up in time to be a witness to the looting and burning? Did he think for a minute they’d stop because he politely asked them to? Those bastards only understood one kind of language, the kind that spewed out of the end of a gun.