The Feud

by Thomas Berger

  He got the idea, and said, “Tell him Walt Huff hopes he gets better real soon. Tell him Walt is real sincere. Tell him I … tell him I will sure miss him at work and hope he gets back there before long. I mean it!”

  “I certainly will. It’s real nice of you. My name’s Bobby. We been married twenty-three years.”

  “Is that right?” He still looked uneasy. Bobby decided he was one of those people who were always shy around somebody else’s wife when alone with her, as opposed to the kind like Harvey Yelton, who when everybody was younger would naturally take such an occasion as an opportunity to get fresh, and how far can you go in fending off a policeman? It made a real difference when a man carried a gun and a nightstick, even though Harvey never made a threat of any kind and would have laughed off her fear. It was a relief that they had both gotten too old long since for him to think any more about such things, though if the truth be known she had never really blamed him altogether, considering that awful wife of his.

  “You married and have a family, Walt?”

  He nodded sadly. “Yes, I do. I live over in Millville, you know. I just walk to work. It’s real convenient. I go home for lunch. I live so close there’s plenty of time in the half hour. The missus has a ham ‘n’ cheese samwich ready or a bowl of chili…” He seemed to get more nervous as he talked.

  “I guess we better get going,” Bobby said, “though they said we can’t see him right away. It might help just to be there.” Suddenly she felt weak, and it was in appeal to male sympathy that she said, “I hope to God he’ll pull through. He’s a real good man, Walt. He’s had some trouble lately with some mean people over in Millville. Maybe you know ‘em? The Bullards?”

  He got an awful look. Given her worry, she had spoken without thinking. He might be friendly with some of them: far as she was concerned that wouldn’t necessarily be a crime. Some of them might be all right: it wasn’t your fault into which family you were born.

  Walt finally said, “Well, it was nice meeting you.”

  Bobby could hear the boys coming. “Listen here,” she said, “we’ll just give you a lift back to Millville. That’s the same way we’re headed.”

  He looked scared. “Oh, now that won’t be—”

  “Nosir,” said Bobby. “We’re not going to let you walk! You just come on.” With that shy sort of person you just had to bully them for their own good.

  “This here’s Mister Huff works with your father,” Bobby told the boys when everybody converged on the car.

  They said “Hi” to Walt, and Tony checked the hood to see if it was still holding. Bobby insisted that Walt climb into the front passenger’s seat. It was at such times she was pleased that Dolf had had the foresight to buy a four-door: a person of her bulk would have had a tough time climbing over a folded seat.

  Jack entered through the far side. He had tried to comb his hair, but in back he had a persistent cowlick that wouldn’t stay down without grease, which he hated. He said he would make his hair slick only if he had a cookie-duster mustache to go with it.

  He leaned forward and said to the back of his brother’s neck, “Let me know if you wanna move the seat forward: I’ll push.”

  “I must of grown some more,” said Tony. “Seat’s just right.”

  Walt was staring out his window. Jack addressed him.

  “Just let us know where you want off.”

  Bobby said to Jack, “Mister Huff.”

  “I’m sorry. Say, Mister Huff, please let us know where you want to go.”

  “Sure,” Walt said nervously. “Anyplace, anyplace at all will be just fine.” He was silent until they crossed the Millville line. At the first corner inside his town he said urgently, “Right here!”

  Tony pulled to the curb, and Huff got out. He stared wildly in through the back window at Bobby, and she cranked the glass down.

  He cried, “I never meant no harm. As God is my witness, I never did!”

  “Nobody said you did, I’m sure,” Bobby gently replied.

  But Huff looked ready to burst into tears. “They will!” He continued to stand there, though he said nothing more.

  Tony pulled away. Jack said, “Who was that guy? He’s sure got a big nose. He acts like some kind of screwball. What does he do at the plant, sort the nuts?” He looked grinning at his mother.

  “I don’t know as how it ought to be a joke, Jack,” said she. “I think Mister Huff just feels real bad about your father.”

  Tony’s shoulders heaved slightly. He said, “I wonder if he knows I had a fight with a kid of his last year after the basketball game with Millville.”

  Jack made a cackling sound. “I bet you whipped him, Tone.”

  “Tony!” Bobby chided. “You know I don’t like you to fight.”

  “You got to sometimes, Mom,” said Tony. “You just got to.” He was calm behind the wheel and didn’t get angry at other drivers as Dolf often did.

  “I just hope you didn’t hurt that poor boy,” said Bobby. She naturally assumed that Tony himself was invulnerable. “It would be a shame, considering how nice a man his father is. You know, you’re awful strong, lifting those bells of yours.”

  Jack snickered. “Barbells, Mom, or dumbbells. Not just bells.”

  “I guess you’re calling me a dumbbell?” asked Bobby, but behind all of this she was worried sick about Dolf. If he was laid up for any length of time, they’d lose their house, having only something like seventy-six dollars in savings.

  Tony thought he’d go crazy if he didn’t get to Eva sometime soon. Everything was getting worse and worse, and he was still stuck with the last memory of how he got rid of her so that those two assholes wouldn’t think less of him. Now this had happened to his father, and he still hadn’t even got Jack to write that letter for him.

  He put the car into a space in the parking lot, and they all went into the hospital. After his mother had inquired at the main reception desk, she came back and said, “It hasn’t changed. He still can’t have visitors, but I called Doc Kinney from home and asked him to take over. He said he’d get there soon’s he can. Maybe we could get Dad switched to Jewish. That’s Doc Kinney’s hospital.”

  Jack asked, “I didn’t know he was Jewish.”

  “You don’t have to be, either as doctor or patient,” said Bobby. “It’s just the name of the place.”

  Tony said, “Hey, Jack, you want to look for the coffee shop?” He added, hypocritically, because he yearned for some privacy, “You wanna Coke or something, Mom?”

  “No, Tony. I’ll just sit over there in that waiting room. If anything happens before you two get back, I’ll come looking for you.”

  That was a relief. He and Jack explored the corridors until they found what they wanted, which had the usual counter and booths. There were not many customers during the middle of the day. Of a wide offering of stools Tony took the farthest from the door.

  Jack said worriedly, “I hope you have dough. I don’t.”

  Tony sank his hand into the pants pocket where he carried his cash if any. He saw he had a dime. When the waitress came he ordered two small Cokes.

  “Wait a minute,” said Jack. “Have you got root beer?”

  The waitress shook her head.

  “O.K., Coke then.” Jack turned to his brother. “You know anything about heart attacks? What does that mean? The heart just stops? Christ sakes.”

  “Doc Kinney ‘ll handle it,” said Tony, and added piously, “The rest is in the hands of the Guy Upstairs. We just got to wait.” After a decent interval of silence he said, “As long as we’re waiting, I was wondering if you might get going on that letter again.”

  “Huh?”

  Tony was annoyed. “You know, the bomb and all came before you really got started.”

  The waitress brought the Cokes. When she had gone Jack said, “What’s eating her, I wonder?”

  “Huh?”

  “She’s sorta snippy.”

  “I’m serious, Jack. If you ain’t got noth
ing better to do at the moment, maybe you could start writing that letter.”

  Jack gulped half the Coke in one gulp and briefly chewed some of the shaved ice. “I would if I had some paper and something to write with.”

  Tony said, “Here.” He produced some folded sheets of paper from the pocket of his suit coat, and a fountain pen.

  “This is nice stuff,” said Jack, taking the paper and feeling the top sheet with his thumb. “Real smooth and thick…. Hey, aren’t these pages from books?“

  “Those pages at the beginning and end that don’t have any printing on them, you know? Nobody will miss ‘em.”

  “The owner might,” said Jack. “What’re they from, one of Mom’s books in the living-room cabinet?”

  “Naw, I wouldn’t touch them. Schoolbooks, you know: English, history…”

  “You’re a wild man,” Jack said. “You’ll have to pay a fine at the end of the year, I bet.”

  Tony said impatiently, “So what? Let’s get that letter going.”

  “Right here?” Jack thoughtfully took a paper napkin from the chromium holder and cleaned the counter top. He unfolded the sheets of paper, then unscrewed the cap of the pen, and put it onto the end of the shaft. He tested the point on the napkin, making a blue-black blob. He began to write: Dear … “Uh, what’d you say her name was again?”

  Tony found it hard to believe that the name that was so precious to him could be forgotten by his brother in one day. “Eva.” He leaned against Jack’s narrow shoulder so that he could watch the writing.

  “Now, what was it we were going to say?” Jack asked.

  “ ‘Dear Eva,’ “ said Tony, “I want to apologize to you, Eva, for the dumb stunt I pulled last summer, the second time we ran into each other at those dances, when I was with those guys from Hornbeck, though I didn’t come there with them, I just ran into them by acci—’ ”

  Jack said, “If I’m supposed to write that down, go slower, willya? So far I haven’t got the whole first sentence, and I’ve forgotten the rest of it.”

  “O.K.” Tony took a swig from the glass before him. As he put it down, the sixth sense by which one sees through the sides and even the back of the head sent him a signal to look to his left. When he obeyed this command he saw Eva Bullard. She was just entering the coffee shop, wearing a green sweater and a pleated plaid skirt. For an instant he assumed she was alone, but then behind her came the woman he recognized, from that trip Reverton had taken him on through their kitchen, as her mother, and then came a kid his own age, and then some adult fat guy wearing rimless glasses. They all definitely proved to be together when they took the same booth.

  Eva and her mother sat on the same side, their backs at an angle to Tony. Had they occupied the other side of the booth, they could have seen him. As it was, he was safe enough unless she turned to scan the room, which of course people will sometimes do for no reason at all, and she was seated on the outside. The other difficulty was that to leave the coffee shop he would have to go right past her, and her group had just come in, meaning that they would be there for a while, whereas Jack had long since finished his Coke, and neither of them had any money for a refill.

  But some time could be gained by giving Jack his own glass, which he had scarcely touched.

  Jack was suspiciously incredulous. “Something wrong with it?”

  “Naw. I just ain’t thirsty.”

  Jack made a moue, accepted the glass, and drained it. He said, in a perversely louder voice than he had been using, “I got it! How about, ‘Dear E—’ ”

  The athlete’s reflexes came in handy here. Tony was able to get his hand across his brother’s mouth before more than the initial sound of her name emerged.

  Jack was dumfounded. “What was that supposed to be?”

  “Look,” Tony said in a low voice, “I don’t want my business broadcast to the world.”

  Jack was good enough to reply in a whisper, “But there’s nobody to hear, except those people who just came in.” The waitress, who appeared to be the only functionary on duty at the moment, had gone over to the booth.

  “Yeah, well,” said Tony.

  Jack would have done better to stop at this point, but he had to add, still in the near-whisper, “When we get this letter done, I think I’ll write one to that girl with them over there. She’s really neat.”

  Tony felt like punching someone—not his brother, who was totally innocent, but something inanimate that could represent the face of the god of Chance. Why, on the same day of his father’s sickness, should she be chosen to come to the coffee shop of the Merryvale Hospital?

  He inhaled and said to Jack, “Listen, let the letter go for a while, and go out and see if Mom’s all right. O.K.?” Again Jack looked astonished. Tony added, “I’m worried about her, see? Maybe she should have a cup of coffee to calm her down.”

  Jack lowered the pen, but then he picked it up again and screwed the top on it. “So it won’t dry up? You know? Did you ever try to write with one that—”

  “Would you mind getting going?” Tony asked.

  Jack shook his head. “Gee, Tony, you’re getting pretty nervous these days, aren’t you?”

  Frieda Bullard was telling the Reverend Amburgy of some of the events that had preceded her husband’s admission to the mental ward of Merryvale Hospital. She suppressed certain details, not only because of the presence of the children: she would not have wanted to tell the whole story to the preacher.

  “Junior went down the store at noontime, before he came home for his dinner, and he says looters had already cleaned out a good deal of the merchandise as was left after the fire. Well, you know that store was everything to Bud. He worked and saved and scraped—” Suddenly she was on the verge of tears, and to come back to normal she told her daughter, “You can have pop or plain milk.”

  Eva made a face. “I was going to have a sundae.”

  Frieda said, “I figured you had that in mind, but we got to watch our pennies now.”

  The Reverend Amburgy looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat and said, “Please permit me to pay for my own order.” Some people called him stingy, but Frieda was aware that his salary was not large; though it was true that his rent was free and the church bought his car, and he was a single man.

  Junior said, in the almost angry voice he had been using for the past few days, “I’ll just have ice water.”

  “Now, that’s not necessary,” Frieda said. “You have whatever you want, Junior.”

  Eva wailed, “But I only get pop?”

  “I’d think you could figure it out, Eva,” Frieda told her. “There isn’t any danger that Junie would order something expensive.” Eva went into a sulk. She didn’t need ice cream: it looked as though she was already getting a hickey on her chin. Her mother resumed the story.

  “So Junior says there was still some kids around poking through the ashes, and he run ‘em off. But some of the bigger ones sassed him even though he says he was the owner’s boy, and—”

  Junior interrupted angrily. “There was three or four, and I didn’t know any of ‘em. I don’t think they’re in school. Probly some of them hillbilly kids that quit when they’re sixteen. I ain’t yella, but they were three or four and real tall.”

  The Reverend Amburgy smiled on Junior, who sat next to him, and he said, “Why, now, you mustn’t blame yourself. We all know you are a brave young man. That was a job for the police.” He patted Junior’s hand on the tabletop.

  Frieda went on, “So uh course when Bud heard that he—well, he couldn’t even eat any of his dinner. He just went upstairs and got his gun.”

  “Oh dear me,” said Amburgy, pursing the little lips in his chubby face.

  “He always sold guns but he never even hunted, himself,” Frieda said. “So when he takes this shotgun—”

  Amburgy said, “Was it loaded?” And when Frieda said yes, he murmured, “Oh, my.”

  The waitress came and took their orders, and Frieda resumed. “So I
was sure worried when he goes out with that gun. I knew he was headed for the store, or what was left of it, but there’s no arguing with Bud when he’s got his mind set on something, so I never said beans. Of course a man’s got a perfect right to protect his own property…”

  “Certainly,” the preacher agreed, turning to smile at Junior.

  Junior said in anger, “He should of shot them down like dogs.”

  Amburgy’s expression turned to something like fright, and he turned back to Frieda.

  She said, “I don’t think he actually shot at anybody personally. From what I hear, he was firing mostly up into the air. But I guess he kept it up for quite some time, even when there wasn’t nobody there any more, and then if some car just came by he got the idea that they might be some looters coming back, and so he’d shoot off his gun again. Ray Dooley was on duty at the station, and nobody reported it or anything: he could hear the shots from town hall, so he runs over in the cruiser, and there’s Bud shooting away.

  “ ‘Say, Bud,’ Ray says, ‘I can’t letcha keep doing that. It’s against the law.’ ‘You just mind your own business, Ray,’ says Bud, ‘I’m only protecting what’s mine. A man’s gotta do that. He can’t leave it to others.’ ‘Near as I can see, Bud,’ Ray says, ‘ain’t got nothing left to protect. Come on now, gimme that shotgun.’ But Bud he wouldn’t put it down, so Ray finally says, pointing, ‘Oh-oh, they’re creeping up behind your back, Bud,’ and Bud he whirls around and shoots into the ashes, and Ray conks him with his nightstick, lays him out cold.

  “Then he hauls him back home, and he says, ‘Let’s get this poor devil in bed, Frieda. You take this here gun and keep it away from him until he settles down. Somebody might get hurt otherwise, and it would sure be a shame, with all the bad luck Bud’s been having lately.’ “

  She stopped talking so that the waitress could serve their refreshments: two coffees, one Coke, and an Orange Crush for the preacher.