Cropper's Cabin

by Jim Thompson

  I’d had several letters from Miss Trumbull and Mr. Redbird: Be of good faith. Hold your head high. Things may seem very dark now, but they can change overnight…

  I’d had a couple of letters from Kossmeyer: “It’s taking a little time, kid, but we’ll pull it off. Just keep that pumpkin screwed on your neck…”

  I didn’t answer ’em. I’d thought about it, the first letters I got. But then, after a little, it just didn’t seem worth doing. It didn’t matter, like everything else.

  I’d heard from Donna, too—she’d sent me something in an envelope, rather. Because it wasn’t a real letter. When I saw what it was, I almost changed my mind about writing to Kossmeyer. I didn’t see how he could have done this to me, on top of everything else.

  But writing him wouldn’t have done any good. And it was beginning to sink in on me that he couldn’t make things any worse than they already were. When you’re at the end of something, you can’t go any further. So I hadn’t written.

  But I was hoping he’d show up.

  He’d said he’d come out to see me, as soon as he had some news. And when he did, I’d have some news for him.

  … I had about the kind of night I’d expected to have. Worse than any I’d gone through during any of my other times in the hospital. It was daylight before I could go to sleep, and I didn’t sleep soundly then. I waked up when I heard the doctor coming.

  He took my temperature and glanced at the trusty. “He been getting along all right?”

  “Didn’t say nothin’, didn’t ask for nothin’,” the trusty shrugged. “You know him, doc.”

  “Yes”—the doctor turned back to me. “How are you feeling?”

  “All right.”

  “Pretty stiff? Want a shot?”

  “Suit yourself,” I said.

  He handed his bag to the trusty and walked away.

  He didn’t stop by my cot again until four days later. He had me stand up and strip then, while he examined me.

  “It’s going to be hot out there today”—he was going over my neck, pulling and pushing on the skin with his fingers. “There isn’t a breath of air stirring, not a breath, Carver. That quarry dust will be hot as a furnace and just about as thick.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t asking him to do my job, and I wasn’t going to do his.

  “Those welts are… they could stand a lot of healing, Carver. You might be pretty weak yet.” He turned me back around. “Or don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What would you like to have me say?” There was a little tight-lipped grin on his face. “You tell me, Carver. Ask me. Ask me to say that you can’t take the quarry for another week.”

  “I’m not asking for anything,” I said. “I’d just as soon go now.”

  He hesitated, and his grin went away. But he was awfully young himself, and I’d crowded him hard; and he’d gone too far to back down.

  “I’m not sure I heard you, Carver. What…?”

  “I’d just as soon go now,” I said.

  So I went.

  A guard marched me down through the corridors and across the yard and out through the gates. I walked five paces in front of him with my hands clasped behind my back, but that—nothing like that was necessary. Not, that is, to keep a man from escaping. Sometimes, quite a few times, a con had stooped down, grabbed up a chunk of sandstone and thrown it—all in one motion. They’d knocked the guards out and killed them with their own guns.

  But none of them had ever escaped. The tower guards had telescopic sights on their rifles, and they could pick a man off two miles away if they had to. But they never had to. No one ever got that far.

  It was May, and hot like the doctor had said it would be. The heat hit you twice, striking down against your head and neck, glancing up off the rock and getting you in the eyes and face.

  I was glad when we got to the quarry. I was getting a little dizzy, and I knew I’d better not. I knew I’d better not fall or stop walking or say anything. The doctor had said I was all right, and that was that.

  Usually, when there was a wind, the guards stood way back from the pit. You could look out of some of the cell windows, and see them strung out in a big circle, lounging a couple of hundred yards apart, with that mile-across cloud of dust in the center. Today, though, there wasn’t a puff of breeze and they were moved in close so they could call back and forth to each other.

  The prison guard left me, and one of the quarry guards took over.

  I took off my cap and stuffed it in my pocket. I took off my shirt, folded it and wrapped it around my head. He tossed me a dust mask, and I strapped it over my mouth and nose. It was all stopped up, but it didn’t matter. I’d take it off when I got to the bottom. You couldn’t get enough air through a mask, and there weren’t any guards to make you wear one.

  They didn’t need guards in the pit. There was no way out except by the ladder. The quarry gangs had so much work to do every day, a certain amount of rock to be hoisted up at the end of the day. And if they didn’t have it, they stayed there until they got it.

  I edged forward through the dust until I came to the ladder. I wiped my hands against my pants, grabbed the top of the ladder and swung my feet around on the rungs. I went down over the side, and down, down, down.

  It was funny about that dust. Up at the top you’d think, well, one thing’s sure, it can’t be any worse than this. You’d think that every time, because you couldn’t see how it could be any worse. And it always was.

  It got worse every rung you went down.

  After a little ways I could barely see the ladder. Except for the feel, I’d have thought I was gripping dust instead of iron. And I was gripping a lot of dust; dusty mud. My hands were sweating. They slipped against the dusty rungs; you couldn’t grip them tight enough to keep from slipping.

  I came to a little ledge, a set-back, where the first ladder ended. I hooked my arm through a rung, pulled down the mask, and scrubbed my face against my arm. I started down the next ladder.

  I stopped every few rungs or so to wipe my hands against my pants. But they were wet with sweat too, now, and it didn’t help much. I whuffed out my nose against my shoulder, but in a moment it was stopped and stinging again. I tried to dig out my eyes with my fists, and it wasn’t any good, of course. It was just piling dirt on dirt.

  I went down and down, and I thought—I remember thinking—Now, this doesn’t make any sense. A man’s got to see, he’s got to breathe, he’s got to be able to get a grip… And it seemed like a pretty unusual thought.

  I stopped and whuffed my nose out good and dug out my eyes, and it helped a lot. And my hands didn’t slip any more. Because…

  Now, this is more like it, I thought. Why didn’t I think of this…

  Because I wasn’t holding on to anything.

  19

  I was in the hospital almost ten weeks, and—And I didn’t see that doctor again, the young one who’d wanted to know why. He left just as soon as they could get another doctor, before I became conscious, and I never saw him again. And I was sorry about that. Because I didn’t blame him a bit. I’d have gotten out of temper with a guy like me, myself, if I’d been in his place.

  The new doctor was a man up near his sixties, and he didn’t care about whys and whats. He didn’t care period. You were just a job with him, and the quicker he got through with you the better he liked it.

  He was three weeks finding out that I had anything wrong with me besides concussion and two broken collar bones. Finally, when he got around to noticing that I was passing a lot of blood, he opened my chest and took out the splinters of rib. And I guess he did a pretty good job. But there was quite a bit of infection and it was slow in going away.

  I coughed a lot. I got down to where I wasn’t much more than skin and bones. And around the temples—well, there wasn’t much of it but—my hair turned gray.

  It was along toward the end of the sixth week, when I’d started getting a l
ittle better, that Kossmeyer came to see me.

  I went out to the visitors room, and he looked up from the papers he was reading, then looked back down again. Then he looked up the second time, and a half-dozen expressions flickered across his face in the space of a second. And I knew he couldn’t decide on which one to use, how he’d better act.

  Finally, he decided and he stood up, wagging his head, the corners of his mouth drawn down. He grabbed my hand, shook it, and pulled me down into a chair beside his.

  “Jesus, kid, you look like hell. Think you’re going to live?”

  “I’ll live,” I said. “What do you want?”

  His expression shifted again. He tapped me on the chest. “Not a thing, boy”—I drew back from his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice—“Not a thing—but to get you out of here!”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I know. It seems like a long time, and you’re sore. But this took a hell of a lot of finagling, Tom. I’m strictly a yak guy, you know. I couldn’t do the brief on the case, and I wanted it done by exactly the right guys. The right ones, get me? Two attorneys who used to sit on the appeals bench. So—”

  “So you’ve got me a new trial,” I said.

  “I ain’t done nothing else but, Tom!”

  “What’ll you get me this time?” I said. “Ninety-nine years?”

  “So you’re sore. Should I say it again?” He spread his hands. “Now, look, kid. Here’s how it stands. I got that son-of-a-bitch—Jesus, that’s a lousy jail down there!—I got him reversed on umpty-nine different points. And we’re going to go right back before him. We’ll get that dirty bastard—I tell you I’m still scratching!—if I have to hogtie him and carry him into court on my back. We’ll…”

  “No,” I said.

  “You think we won’t? We’ll get him, and—and that county attorney will be a set-up, too. He’ll be begging for a deal, and we’ll make like he isn’t there. We’ll go right into trial, toss ’em all into the suds again. Only this time it’ll be lye water. She—they’ll be screaming for that calf rope, kid, and that judge won’t—I’ll have that wall-eyed St. Bernard paying me fi—”

  “That’s not very smart, is it?” I said.

  “What?” He slowed down a little. “How do you mean?”

  “About her. She sent me your bill. Marked paid.”

  “Well…” He ran through his expression again; decided on the right act. “You don’t mean you’re sore about that?”

  He shrugged and widened his eyes, looking kind of bewildered and hurt, like I’d hauled off and hit him on the nose. And I’d have done it, too, I think, if I’d had the strength.

  “Tell me something,” I said, slowly, “are you crazy?”

  “Actually or relatively? You’d better shake up the seeds in that pumpkin, boy. Didn’t I tell you I’d be sending my bill to the plantation? Well. So what if you weren’t there yet? Can’t a gal write her own checks?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Just—never mind.”

  “Good. Now, I was saying. We’ll go right into trial; we’ll get everything screwed up good. Then, we’ll talk deal, we’ll let the county attorney talk us into one. And here’s what it’ll be, Tom. You know what it’ll be?”

  “Nineteen and a half years.”

  “Manslaughter. That’s the only thing we’ll plead to. With the time you’ve served to equal the amount of your sentence.” He nodded firmly, watching me. “We’ll get it, Tom. He’ll fall over his feet to give it to us.”

  He waited again, and I didn’t say anything; and gradually a look came into his eyes that I’d never seen there before.

  “Oh, well,” he said, “why am I excited? I’ve already got my money.”

  And I’d wanted to hit him a minute before, but now I’d have laid anyone out that put a finger on him. He didn’t think like I did. I could never think like he did. But I knew now, seeing that look in his eyes, that what he’d done had been every bit as hard on him as it had on me. Harder, perhaps, because he hadn’t been fighting for his life but mine. And I knew that there wasn’t enough money in the world to have made him do it.

  “Mr. Kossmeyer,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Ask anyone. That’s all I care about.”

  “I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been so wrapped up in how I felt, sympathizing with myself, I guess, that I haven’t seen how other people might feel. That they might not give way to their feelings like I did.”

  “Hell! Now you’re talking like a…”

  “You couldn’t have made any money on this case. You’ve probably spent a lot of your own. I don’t know why I couldn’t see how much it must have taken, that you’d have to have that money from—from any place you could get it to keep on fighting for me. And I should have…”

  “Will you catch this guy?” He was grinning again, grinning and trying to scowl at the same time. “Wait’ll I make him sign a mortgage on that plantation!”

  “And I should have stopped you,” I said. “But I couldn’t see how things stood, and I just couldn’t care. I’m sorry, Mr. Kossmeyer. There isn’t going to be another trial. I’m not pleading guilty to anything.”

  “You’re not”—he shook his head—“you don’t mean that, Tom.”

  “I mean it. Don’t you see? I just couldn’t do it. It would be bad enough if I were cleared—if they found me innocent. Even then she’d never be sure that…”

  “She’s sure already. You think she’d have laid out all that dough on you if she wasn’t sure? After what I put her through?”

  “That’s not why she did it. You just don’t know her, Mr. Kossmeyer.

  “You know how she feels,” I said. “You heard her.”

  “In court. And you heard me there, too. And what did it all mean?”

  “That’s not the same thing. She…”

  “Now, you listen to me,” he said. “Listen good. You roughed her up when you made a break from your pa’s place, and she said things she didn’t mean. Then I roughed her up, and she said a lot more. I made her say it. So what? It wasn’t because of what she thought you’d done, but the way she felt. And I’d lay you twenty to one that she feels pretty damned sorry about it. She’s tried to show you she was, and you’re too goddamned stupid to see it. You won’t meet her even a tenth of the way. We cut up rough, she cut up rough. It was hard on her—but you really got the dirty end of the stick. You’re the one who had to stand trial, and serve time. She helped put you here, and she knows you’re not guilty, and now she…”

  “She doesn’t know it. No one knows it.”

  “You lay—she’s practically married to you for more than a year and she doesn’t know that? She doesn’t know what you’re like? She thinks you’re guilty, but she doesn’t throw a special prosecutor in against me? She doesn’t fight a new trial? She pays my bill?”

  I hesitated. But I knew what she was like, and I knew what he was like. I knew he could talk a cat into barking if he took the notion.

  “Well,” he said, “how about it, you stupid jerk?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sure sorry, Mr. Kossmeyer, after all the work you’ve done. But…”

  “But what? What the hell’s there to but about? You’d better be thinking about but, kid. Twenty years is a hell of a long time to go without.”

  “I’m sorry. I just can’t do it,” I said.

  “Tom. My God, boy…”

  “And I’m not going to be here twenty years,” I said. “Maybe that’s partly why I can’t do what you want. Because I know I’m going to get out, anyway. I’m going to be out before the end of this year.”

  “Uh-uh”—he jerked his head toward the window. “Out there in the boneyard, you mean. Under it. That’s where you’ll wind up. They never break out of this place.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I don’t think it’ll be that way.”

  “How, then? If you don’t break out or get out on a new trial?”

  “I do
n’t know. But I know I will.”

  I couldn’t tell him why I was sure—about the picture I had in my mind of facing Pa with the axe. Because he might have thought it was crazy, but he’d have made it his business to see that nothing of the kind happened.

  He told me about the thirty-day jail sentence he’d served; kidding, trying to cheer me up. And it was funny as heck, most of it—all but the part about his last night there. I couldn’t get much of a laugh out of that.

  “… screwy? Kid, I thought I’d seen some prize goof-balls, but this guy took the cake! They’d picked him up early that evening—Saturday, it was—for being drunk. Put him in the cell next to mine, and he went right to sleep. By sundown, he was as sober as I am now. Get that, Tom; he was dead sober. He knew what he was doing when—Well, I was going to tell you. It looked like about half of the Indians in the county had got hold of a bottle, and the turnkey kept bringing ’em in until there ain’t an empty cell left. And then he starts doubling and tripling them up—jamming them into the cells together until they’ve hardly got standing room. Well, so finally he herds in a fresh batch and stops in front of this cell next to mine, the one the sober Indian’s in, and he tells him to clear out. ‘Okay, Abe,’ he says. ‘Hit the street. You’re okay, now, and your pals don’t want you around.’ Abe starts jabbering at the other Indians, and they act like he ain’t there. The turnkey tells him to beat it again. He keeps on telling him, and Abe keeps on jabbering and these Indians keep on playing no-see, no-hear. Finally, the turnkey has to call a couple deputy sheriffs and it takes all three of ’em to toss Abe out of jail. Out of it, see? It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of! Can you imagine a guy being so hard up for company that he’d stay in jail to get it?”

  “Well…” I hesitated. “Yes, I can imagine that.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe.” He shrugged and looked at his watch. “Well, think over that new trial, Tom. You’ll see that I’m right.”

  “I’ve already thought it over,” I said.

  “Think some more. Drop me a line at the end of the week. Just write okay on a piece of paper, and shoot it to me. Here. I’ll write it for you.”