The Feud

by Thomas Berger

  “Oh, I ain’t in the poorhouse yet, Harvey. I’m still working on my first million, but I got nice friends.”

  A striped rubber ball came from nowhere and rolled across the street, half a block ahead. Harvey drove to it, stopped the cruiser, and got out. By this time a kid about ten years of age had come running from between the houses. He skidded to a halt when he saw the police car.

  Harvey said, “You know better than that, Willis. You oughtn’t play ball so it comes into the street. You know why? It could hit somebody’s automobile and scare them so they would lose control of the wheel and drive up over the curb and turn over and burst into flames, and everybody in the car would be burned to a crisp, see? Or the driver might just lose his head and turn and run over your pooch. Or you and your friends might tear after the ball onto the road and you’d all be killed if a big Mack truck was coming along real fast, or you’d scare the truckdriver and he’d smash into them high-tension wires, which would fall down and electrocute the whole neighborhood and kill everybody and burn up all your houses, maybe get outa control and bum everything in the whole town, see. Now, you wouldn’t want that to happen, wouldja?”

  “Huh-uh.” Willis had blond hair in a butch cut. His face was expressionless.

  Harvey picked up the ball. He weighed it in his hand and said, “I oughta take this ball away from yuh.” He stared at Willis. “Now you wouldn’t like that, wouldja?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  Harvey thought for a long moment. To Bernice it sure seemed like a storm in a teacup, but then she wasn’t a policeman, and you did have to keep kids in line or they’d grow up to be bums.

  Finally he tossed the ball to the boy, returned to the cruiser, and put it in gear. He said, “Little snotnose.”

  Bernice crossed her legs. The hem of her skirt was caught just above the roll of her stockings, but if Harvey looked at this, she did not see him.

  He asked, staring straight ahead through the windshield, “What time you got to get back?”

  “Well,” said she, “I ain’t in any real big hurry.”

  He kept driving as slowly as ever through the neighborhood streets. Now and again he nodded to people through the window or even rolled it down and said “Hi.” In Horn-beck’s business district he slowed to a crawl when passing a driverless rattletrap flivver at the curb in front of the butcher shop, and stopped altogether when parallel to a shiny, new-looking maroon coupe that was parked outside the drugstore. The man and the woman in the front seats were colored people.

  Harvey leaned across Bernice, his elbow on her knees, and rolled down the window. He asked, “Can I help you folks find something?”

  “Yes sir,” said the colored man. “We was looking for a drugstore that was open on Sunday.”

  “You won’t find one in this town,” said the chief. “That’s against the law here.”

  “Yes sir. You don’t know of any that is open anyplace else?”

  “If you want to find one, you better move along.”

  “Yes sir,” said the colored man, “we was fixing to do that.”

  Bernice said with a smile, “You go down to the city, you might find one.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The chief kept the cruiser where it was until those people drove away, and then he followed them, at a distance, to where Hornbeck gave way to unincorporated territory to the south, mainly weed fields.

  “I’d of asked for their papers,” said Harvey, driving the cruiser into the entrance of a coal yard. He shifted into reverse and turned back before he completed the statement. “But every time I done that recently with one of them, he’s owned it, sure enough. You wonder how it is they can afford that when white folks got to drive old heaps.” He glanced at Bernice. “I ain’t holding you up for your bus?”

  “Naw, I got time.”

  “Sundays is real quiet,” Harvey said. “My radio’s broke, besides. But I make my rounds.”

  They reached the high school, and he drove the police car into the service alleyway behind the building, stopping at the base of an iron fire escape.

  “We got kids around here who have figured out a way to pick the lock up there and they sneak in on weekends and fool around.” He gave Bernice a look and then climbed from the car and began to mount the metallic stairs of the fire escape.

  Bernice followed him. When Harvey reached the door at the top, which was on the second floor of the three-story structure, he took a key from a ring of many attached to his belt along with the other gadgets, and he opened the door and entered.

  Bernice closed the iron door when she was inside. It made a loud noise that echoed along the dark, empty corridor with its shining floor and the peculiar smell of a school in the off hours.

  About halfway along the hall Harvey turned in at the entrance to the women teachers’ lounge. When Bernice came in, she stepped out of her shoes, pulled up her skirt and took her pants off, and lay down on the old leather couch there. The chief removed only his equipment belt, the tunic of his uniform, and his cap, and he unbuttoned his fly.

  He was not awfully good at it, but she enjoyed it more than she had seven years earlier. When they were finished the chief went into the toilet part of the lounge and presumably washed himself, but Bernice just put back on what she had taken off. She figured she had now got herself a father for the baby, in case she ended up being stuck with one.

  Harvey dropped her off at the bus stop near the First National Bank, but before she had waited very long a nice big black car pulled up and the driver, a white-haired gentleman in suit and tie, leaned over to ask from the passenger’s window whether she would be going to the city, for if so he could offer her a ride. Bernice accepted. This Good Samaritan turned out to be the Presbyterian preacher in Hornbeck, Reverend Finch. Bernice did not know him, because her family was of a different persuasion, being nominally Methodists though none of them ever went to church except sometimes her mother, and her father had been born Catholic but had stopped being one when he got married.

  The minister was driving to the city for some church conference, and in Millville he stopped at the Presbyterian manse of that town to pick up a fellow preacher.

  “Say, Jim,” said Finch, “I want you to make the acquaintance of Bernice Beeler. She’s from my town but not my congregation. This is Reverend Amburgy, Bernice.”

  Amburgy waved off Bernice’s offer of the corner of the front seat, she sliding toward the middle, and he entered the rear door. He was a pudgy individual, who wore eyeglasses above fat cheeks.

  When they started to roll Amburgy leaned forward and said, “Bernice, is it your family that has gotten into some disagreement with the Bullards who come to my church?—though not as often as they should, I must say!” He simpered, but corrected himself with a cough. “I do hope that can be straightened out, and if I can be of any help…”

  Bernice had forgotten about that subject, but now that she was reminded she permitted herself some indignation. “I should say it’s a disagreement and then some! Those Bullards ought to be arrested. They just blew up my dad’s automobile.”

  “Good grief,” said Amburgy, withdrawing to the rear of the seat. “It certainly is a troublesome matter. I was hoping it would simmer down. But it doesn’t sound like it has, does it?” He had begun to assume a cute intonation. “Oh, dear me. These things can get out of hand. Burning down a store, blowing up an automobile. What ever could happen next?”

  Reverend Finch said, from behind the wheel, which he steered with rigid arms in his blue-serge suit, “I’d sure be willing to offer my ‘umble services if they wouldn’t be taken the wrong way, but I bet you’d want to go to your own minister, Bernice, who is?…”

  “I’ll tellya,” she said, “I probly ought to be seeing him right now, now that you mention it. I oughtn’t go back downtown till I got that settled. You want to let me off right at this corner?”

  Finch was startled by the request, but he glided to a slow stop at the place indicated. He turned gravel
y and said, “Bernice, I think you’re a pret-ty fine young lady.”

  “I join in those sentiments,” said Amburgy, in that voice of his, from the back seat. “I’m sure all this will be cleared up soon enough, and you’ll all be even greater friends than before.”

  Bernice hopped out onto the main street of Millville, which was a direct continuation of Hornbeck’s main drag and on the same city-bus route. She looked for the sign that marked a stop and saw it ahead in the next block and was about to walk there when she thought about those Bullards and what trouble they were causing her father, and feeling full of confidence now that she had worked out a possible solution to her own predicament, she decided to call them up and tell them to let her father alone, or else. She had always been known for her spunk.

  She walked a couple of blocks to the business district and went into Tom’s Restaurant, the only place open and with a telephone, and she consulted the directory, which was mounted on an outside wall of the varnished wooden booth, on a sloping shelf beneath a brass lamp.

  Three Bullards were listed, none under the name of Bud, but one was an Ada and could therefore be eliminated, which left Cornelius and Herman, and of these two, the former would be more likely to be called Bud, so she committed that number to memory and went inside and dialed it.

  The phone at the other end was answered by the voice of a young girl.

  As those things went, Bernice had expected to be speaking immediately to someone in Bullard authority, if not Bud, then another male, and for a moment she was almost embarrassed.

  But then she recovered and asked, “Who’s this?”

  “Eva.”

  “Is this the Bullard residence?”

  “Yes.”

  Bernice had regained her strength. “Well, you just go tell Mr. Bud Bullard that I want to speak to him and pronto,” said she.

  “He can’t come right now.”

  Eva had a soft, sweet voice. In the current situation Bernice found it annoying. She growled, “Well, he better if he knows what’s good for him.”

  Eva said, “He’s sick in bed. The doctor said he’s having a nervous breakdown.”

  Again Bernice was taken aback. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, but with no real assurance, “I’ve heard that one before. Is he hiding out? Is that it?”

  “He just tried to kill himself,” said Eva. “Maybe you could call back when he feels better.”

  * * *

  There was a gas burner in the Bullard cellar that Bud’s wife, Frieda, had used, before he bought her the washing machine, to heat a copper tub of water, and what Bud did after Reverton had marched Tony Beeler away was to lock the cellar door from the inside and then put a big paper shopping bag over his head, which he lowered near the burner, and turned on the gas. The gas stank like rotten eggs, and it was all Bud could do to keep breathing till he passed out.

  When he woke up, the bag had fallen from his head and he was on hands and knees, vomiting onto the concrete floor. He was still there when some of his male relatives broke the door open and came down to the cellar and turned off the gas and opened all the little windows that were set in the walls just under the joists of the floor above.

  After a while they helped him up the steps and out through the living room, the women staring at him, and up the stairs to the bedroom, where Frieda took over, shooing them out, and got his outer clothes off him and put him to bed in his BVD’s. Before leaving the room, she pulled the blind down, and Bud went into further darkness by drawing the covers over his head.

  But he was still awake when the doctor came, twenty minutes later, and rolled the shade up again and even lighted the lamp on the bedside table.

  “We need to get a little light on these matters,” said Dr. Swan, who had brought Bud into the world more than four decades earlier and prided himself on still going strong. He had a brushy mustache, all salt-and-pepper, though given his age it was a wonder it was not snow-white. He whipped a stethoscope from his bag and, having opened the first two buttons of the BVD top, pressed the cold hard-rubber cup against Bud’s chest and asked him to cough. Then he took his pulse, after which he put the shiny mirror on his forehead and examined eyes, nose, mouth, and ears with that flashlight the little front of which came to a point.

  “You’ll live,” the doctor said when he had put away the instruments. “But what is it that ails you?”

  Bud started to answer, but his head hurt too much: it was as if a barrel of pain. He managed to communicate this to the doctor, who flipped open that part of his bag in which were mounted, within little leather straps, rows of vials, and from one of them he removed two fat pink capsules. Bud barely got them down, with water from the pitcher his wife brought.

  When the doctor left, Bud fingered at Frieda to come close, and he croaked into her ear, “Don’t… tell … Rev.” For luckily his cousin had left the house before the unsuccessful attempt at suicide.

  Bud slept throughout the remainder of Sunday and did not wake up till Monday noon. He felt physically exhausted, but his soul was, oddly enough, refreshed. Though his predicament was exactly the same as it had been when he put his head into the shopping bag and turned on the gas, his morale was high. He still had not the least idea of how to inform his relatives of the lack of fire insurance, let alone how he would get through the remainder of his life: yet simply living, at the moment, was rewarding.

  When Frieda quietly opened the door and peeped in, he said brightly, “Hi. How’re you doing?”

  “Why,” said she, having raised the window blind, “you look fit as a fiddle.”

  Bud said, “Mom, I been thinking. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Maybe we’re being told to start off on a new foot.”

  Frieda was puzzled. “Huh?”

  Bud pointed at the ceiling, but then he shrugged. “Aw, I don’t know, maybe we should get outa this place.”

  “Then where’d we go, Bud? It’s our home. And how’d we go anywhere, now?”

  “I’m thinking,” he said. “I know hardware inside and out. I could probly get a nice position with a chain, but if so we’d have to move.”

  Frieda was wearing a very gloomy expression. Clearly, this wasn’t the time to pursue the matter.

  “Say,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind tying on the feedbag. I think I missed supper. I could stand some breakfast.”

  She brightened. “You missed breakfast too, but I can still make some for you.”

  When he discovered what time it was—twenty to twelve—he said he would as usual eat lunch with the family, and got up and went to the bathroom to shave.

  Eva had come home by bike promptly at a few minutes past noon, washed her hands, and was sitting at the kitchen table when her mother was dishing up the chicken-and-noodle soup.

  “Why do you think it’s taking your brother so long to get home?” Bud asked. He hadn’t seen Junior since the store burned down. That boy actually went to the early Sunday matinee at the moviehouse in Hornbeck, having made and gobbled a pot-roast sandwich and passed up Sunday dinner. Bud himself would never have permitted this, but he had been distracted at the time, and Frieda was a notorious pushover for her only son. Now he was lagging in his return from school, though so far as he knew, his father was lying in a sickbed. This was the son to whom Bud’s Hardware would eventually have been turned over.

  “I don’t know,” said Eva. “I don’t see him at school very much. The seniors are all on the first floor, and the freshmen never go down there except on the way to gym.”

  Bud approved of his daughter, who had always been an obedient child and a diligent student, whereas it was just the other way around with Junior, who as quite a young boy began to play the smart aleck and had been sent home many times throughout the years with a teacher’s complaining note and never once got a higher rating than Fair in the space for Conduct on his report cards and never a better grade than C in anything, including Phys. Ed. Junior was the only boy in the history of the school to tangle with the gym
instructor, who was also the track coach, a fine big man’s man habitually worshiped by the male students. But leave it to Junior, when only a sophomore, to be caught in the locker room drinking stolen elderberry wine from a jam jar, the little snot. He was just doing it to show off because he wasn’t good at sports. Bud himself, being of the same light build, and by nature lacking in coordination, had been no great shakes as an athlete, but he never tried to distinguish himself by acting like a little turd; he used the old noggin, and in a positive way. He got through school, and then he started out as an errand boy for Old Man Kuntz, the stingiest man in the world, and drudged and trudged, and finally acquired his own little business, which had never gotten in the black before it burned to the ground. He didn’t know if the Beelers had done that, but he was sure that, whatever, they were gloating now—and not only them, but most of his neighbors right in Millville, for people don’t like their friends to succeed, as everybody knows. Bud was well aware of that truth. When Kuntz was the proprietor of the only hardware in town, people lined up at the counter, and he was a real bastard. Nobody realized that they seldom got more than twelve-fourteen ounces in a pound of tenpenny nails and the old man would put tools to extended personal use and then polish them up and sell them as new.

  Junior finally arrived at 12:23. The others had finished their soup and were well into sandwiches of ham salad and American cheese.

  Bud said, “ ‘Bout time.”

  Junior seemed startled to see his father. “You up?” he asked.

  “What’s it look like?” Bud replied.

  Frieda served Junior his soup, which she had kept hot in the pan, and passed him a box of soda crackers. He sank his hand into the latter and seized several at once and began to crush them before he got anywhere near the bowl, crumbs snowing down onto the oilcloth.

  Bud watched Junior hide with broken crackers the entire surface of the liquid. He hated his son’s ways at the table. He said, “That’s gonna be thick enough to eat with a fork.”