The Feud

by Thomas Berger

  Harvey told Junior, “This lady might be willing to drop the charges againstcha if you apologize to her.”

  Junior remained silent. His mother approached him gingerly.

  “Please, Junior…”

  Ray had enough of this. He said, “Listen, Junior, if these folks want to, they can putcha in reform school for quite a while.”

  Junior turned his head somewhat to the side and mumbled.

  “How’s that?” Harvey Yelton cupped a hand at his ear.

  Junior repeated the apology in a louder voice.

  Harvey went ponderously behind his desk. He said, “Izzat good enough for you, Marie? Or you think he oughta come over after school for a couple weeks and clean out your rest rooms or whatnot?”

  Marie shook her head. It had been a surprise to Ray to hear that she was a tavern owner; she looked like a whore.

  She said, “Naw, that’s O.K. I don’t wanna be nasty. We run a real respectable place, and we hope to keep it that way. You just grow up first, sonny, and then you come over and see us. We don’t bear no grudges.” She gave Junior a great big smile. Ray could see now that she was a pretty nice person, and he thought he might drop in at the bar & grill, next time he was over in Hornbeck, and have a brew.

  He said to Junior, who looked as though he would continue to maintain a sullen silence, “Why, that’s real nice, don’t you think, Junior? Now you just thank the lady.”

  Junior said, “Thanks.”

  “God bless you,” said Frieda.

  Harvey opened a tomato-soup-colored fountain pen and put the cap onto the butt. He handed it to Junior and then turned a piece of paper and slid it across the desk.

  “You sign this receipt,” he ordered sternly. Junior did so, and the chief reclaimed it. “That weapon of yours is hereby officially confiscated. Which means you don’t get it back. Now, you are just lucky the lady decided to drop the charges, but don’t think that means your slate is clean.” He put a big finger in Junior’s face. “You’re banned from entering the town limits of Hornbeck for—how old’re you now?”

  It was Frieda who answered. “He just turned eighteen. Yes, sir.”

  Harvey glowered at Junior. He said, “I don’t want to see you in my town for three years, see? Till you’re twenty-one years of age. You’re supposed to become a man then. We’ll see about that. Meantime, if you come over here any sooner, I’ll make you wish you was dead.”

  Ray was sorry to see that Junior did not look as though he found this threat impressive. He just stared at the Hornbeck chief for a while and then dropped his eyes.

  “He won’t,” said Frieda. “You can count on that. I want tuh thank you, sir, you been real nice to us, and you too, ma’am. I’m real sorry we causedjany trouble. We won’t be back.”

  Ray said so long to Marie and shook Harvey’s hand for the favor to a fellow professional which he considered had been done here, and he, Frieda, and Junior went out.

  As soon as the door closed behind them, Junior swung around and put his thumb to his nose and blew a raspberry at the station. Then he lowered his hand with the thumb still erect and the index finger extended, in which position it was a simulated pistol.

  “Bah-ROOM,” he said, pretending to shoot through the door.

  Ray grabbed his arm and, pulling him aside, said in a lowered voice, “Lissenere, you little shitass, I come over here and used my influence to getcha loose because of your dad and mom, but by God you keep acting like a little smart aleck, and I’ll kick your butt alla way back to Millville. And I hate to think what Clive would do to you if he knew. He’d figure you disgraced him in front of Harvey Yelton, and he hates his guts.”

  Junior nodded and said, “O.K.,” but he didn’t look like he was bluffed. Ray couldn’t understand the kids of the present time. When he was a boy he would have crapped his pants if a cop gave him so much as a dirty look.

  Frieda had already climbed into the back seat of the car, as if she were a prisoner.

  “Why’re you back there?” Ray asked.

  “Junior always likes to ride up front,” said she.

  There you had the reason for the way he acted: he was spoiled rotten. What the boy needed most was to have his ass whipped.

  “You gonna leave all them lights on?” Tony asked Eva as they were going down the driveway to the front sidewalk.

  “Sure! Otherwise Mama will be suspicious when she comes back. This way she will probably think I already went to bed, and it’ll be morning before she realizes I’m not there.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Until now that way of looking at their going off together had not occurred to Tony. “What’ll you think she’ll do when she finds out?”

  “Go crazy,” said Eva, shrugging. “I don’t know. Maybe call the cops.”

  He decided that pursuing this matter at the moment could only be unpleasant. Once they reached, Canada and he joined the Mounted Police and got a red coat, shiny boots, and a horse, no woman would object to his taking care of her daughter. Besides which he had no intention of doing anything illicit to Eva until they were married.

  “Speaking of the cops,” Eva said as they reached the sidewalk, “I wonder what happened with my brother.”

  “Brother?”

  “I told you he was arrested in Hornbeck.” She had a slight edge to her voice. “Junior ‘n’ I don’t get along so well. He stole some money I was saving up and bought a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes and a bottle of grape wine. I would have had him arrested myself if he hadn’t been my brother. Once a couple of years ago my cousin Clara? She came here to see me and she was using the bathroom, and Junior walked right in, and it wasn’t a mistake, because he just stood there watching her with a big grin on his face while she was sitting on the you-know-what, and he wouldn’t leave till she said she would yell for my mother to come.”

  Tony had little interest in any of this. But neither did he have any real plans as yet on how to get to Canada from Millville.

  He said, “It might of been simpler to wait till daylight, but tomorrow morning there’ll be plenty of people who will want to stop us. I guess if we get over to the pike we might hitch a ride from some truckdriver going north.” This was a good idea! He felt his assurance return.

  “But that doesn’t mean I would really like to send Junior to jail,” Eva went on. She was quite a talker, it seemed, when she got started. “He is my only brother, after all, though I guess Mama had a little baby boy before him, but it died. It was only a couple days old, but they gave it a name and buried him in the cemetery. It’s really strange to go there on Decoration Day and see his little gravestone with his name, Willard Bullard, the brother I never knew. Sometimes I like to think of him growing up, and I bet he’d have been nicer to me than Junior ever was.”

  Tony said, “Listen, Eva, I think we better cut through these back streets, because you can’t tell who might come along if we go down to Main, but I don’t know so much about Millville beyond here.”

  Eva said, “Could we get a Coke ‘n’ chips or something first? I’m pretty hungry. We didn’t get much for supper, just scrambled eggs, because my dad’s in the hospital. He had a nervous breakdown, and he was acting really strange. Our store burned down. Some of our family think that your family did that. But I don’t! Why would you set fire to our store and then come around to see me?” She giggled.

  For an instant Tony wondered whether she was all there, but then he realized she was just young. “I don’t know if there’s any place to eat still open around here. It’s getting pretty late. If we hitched a ride maybe we could stop at an all-night diner. The truckdrivers go to those diners and drink coffee to keep them awake.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Eva. “I saw that in a movie with, you know, that girl who wears that dark lipstick … Well, anyway, there’s this fellow—”

  “How far can we go on this street?” Tony asked. They were at the end of the block, going west, at the edge of, for him, unknown territory.

  “Maybe Curly will still be
open,” Eva said. “Curly’s Luncheonette? I don’t know if you ever ate his chili. Some kids don’t like it, but I do, a lot. It’s on spaghetti?” She walked in a childish way, sometimes lagging behind, sometimes swinging out in front of Tony. She was wearing a sweater set in powder blue, and looked a little bit heavier than she had been in the summer, or maybe it was just the extra clothes. He still really liked the way she looked.

  He said, “I just worry about who we might run into if we go down there.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Eva. “I can go out if I do my homework, and I finished it earlier. Of course, I’m not supposed to stay out after ten, but Mama probably won’t notice, with everything else going on.”

  Tony wondered whether he had heard her correctly. He thought he had explained clearly at the beginning: this wasn’t just a date. What did she think he meant when he was talking about hitching a ride on a truck? Had she listened to anything he said? But it made no sense at this point to ignore her wishes.

  “Are you serious?” he asked. “Are you really hungry?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know for what. Maybe a chocolate soda … I know! Cider and doughnuts! It’s that season again, ladies and gentlemen.” She was imitating some radio announcer.

  “The only thing is,” said Tony, “they don’t ever serve that our, do they? You got to buy the cider and the doughnuts, and have them at home, I think.”

  “The junior class runs a booth at the football games,” Eva said, doing a little skip along the sidewalk. “They sell cider ‘n’ doughnuts and hotdogs and potato chips and stuff like that. Gee, I wish it was Friday night, and then we’d be at the game.”

  “Except that I’d be playing somewhere else, for Hornbeck,” Tony pointed out. His depression was growing.

  “Oh, yeah. Well then, you couldn’t have any! So why don’t you move to Millville? It’s a much better town, anyway.” She leered at him under a streetlamp. “We always say that all the dumbbells live in Hornbeck.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Tony didn’t want to get into one of those stupid my-town’s-better-than-yours games at this point.

  “We say it’s where you have to go to find all the dopes.”

  He had certainly begun to feel like one. He probably should have thought this whole thing out much more thoroughly. “Well, a person don’t have much say in where he’s born.”

  Eva came up to him. “I was just kidding, Tony. I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

  What a terrific girl she really was. He returned to being crazy about her. She had such good manners and delicacy of feeling: he had never known anyone like that.

  “Gosh, I know you were, Eva. But, see, I really do think Millville is the best place to live. You know why?”

  “Huh-uh.” She had a fragrant smell, not perfume, but something in the wool of her sweaters, maybe mothballs, an odor he had never previously cared for.

  “Well, isn’t that where you live?”

  She lowered her face in a kind of embarrassed pleasure, and then looked up with an impish grin. “Are you getting gooey?”

  “Huh?” Was that something dumb again?

  “That was in another movie,” said Eva. “This chorus girl met this guy who played the saxophone in some night-club? It was one of those places, uh, you know, Broadway or Paris or someplace like that, real sophisticated? Maybe you saw it? After all, the nearest movie theater’s in Hornbeck, isn’t it? Score one for your town!”

  Tony realized that they were in the last block before reaching Main Street, just exactly where he had not wanted to end up, but Eva was proving somewhat difficult to manage, in a way he had not anticipated.

  He said, “I go to the movies quite a bit, but I don’t remember them so well. My brother does, though. He reads a lot too. He’s just a young kid, but he can talk on any subject.” He remembered that Eva was even younger and wondered whether he should have said that about Jack.

  “My brother got thrown out of that theater once,” said Eva. “He brought along one of those things they call Bronx cheers, you know? You blow in them and the rubber thing makes an awful noise? Every time the boy would say something to the girl in a love scene, Junior would blow that thing.”

  Tony actually thought that was pretty funny, though he remembered seeing Junior at the hospital coffee shop and hadn’t like his ratty looks much at that time. But he was glad to hear that his future brother-in-law had a sense of humor. He felt somewhat sensitive about Junior’s having been arrested in Hornbeck, but then he himself, if spotted by that cop he had punched, was surely in danger of going to jail here in Millville.

  He asked Eva, “Are you still hungry?”

  Her voice had a note of aggrievement. “Well, since I haven’t eaten anything, I don’t know why I wouldn’t be.”

  He asked stoically, “Where is this chili place?”

  “Come on.”

  He hunched up in his jacket and tried to assume a different stride, so as not to be immediately recognizable, but he knew that his glasses would be a dead giveaway if any of his Millville enemies appeared.

  But they reached Curly’s without incident. The luncheonette was dark.

  “Darn,” said Eva, stamping her saddle oxford on the concrete. “My life is ruined.”

  Tony tried not to show how relieved he was. “That’s too bad, but if we get out to the pike, it won’t be too long before we catch a ride and then we can stop at one of them all-night—”

  Eva socked him painlessly in the chest at this point, snickered, and ran up the side alleyway next to the luncheonette. There was a streetlamp at the intersection with the north-south alley, but darkness came again not far beyond. Tony was at once sexually excited by the chase, which apparently was to be a standard feature of his association with Eva, and unpleasantly anxious in being further frustrated in his attempt to get out of town. He was determined this time not to let her give him the slip even momentarily, and not far beyond the perimeter of the ring of light he seized her from behind. She immediately stopped and pressed back firmly against him, and when he began to move again, they walked as one, with his hands around her waist and her bottom against his thighs.

  Just across the street from the top of the alley was the park where they had first met. Tony was now in such a state as to forsake all plans to go to Canada or anywhere else: he had lost his will altogether and was not his own man. His hands were clasped just below her weighty breasts, not touching them except in accidental grazings. His face was against her hair. Her aroma now seemed to be that of teaberry gum. They were marching in a synchronized way that would probably have looked clownish to an observer: Tony was strangely objective in this thought. There probably were cars that passed, but he didn’t notice them at all as particulars.

  In the park they reached a low retaining wall on the far slope beneath the concrete slab where the dances were held. The light was dim there; the trees screened that of the moon, and there were no lamps. They stopped simultaneously, without a thought on his part, and sat down side by side on the wall. Tony hadn’t done much kissing aside from the party game Spin the Bottle, in which he was always worried about his glasses being in the way and what to do with his nose. At the conclusion of both his dates with Mary Catherine Lutz she had nervously stuck out her mitt, and he had shaken it gratefully.

  While being occupied mentally with the matter of kissing he had put his hand up under Eva’s skirt without thinking about it at all. In fact, he only finally took note of the action because of how agreeably she moved her knees apart.

  When Curly and the colored dishwasher had seen Junior leave the luncheonette, they came back down the alley and returned to their duties, though the dishwasher, whose name was Homer Waters, was not too thrilled.

  He said, “What if he be back?”

  Curly thrust his chin forward and moved it slowly from side to side. “He won’t. That’s the Bullard kid. He had a few drinks, I bet, and he’s feeling his oats, but he’s all mouth, take it from me. I seen lots of that kind. I s
hould of kicked his little ass, but I don’t like to mess around when somebody’s carrying a gun. Thing is, his dad’s laid up, in the hospital. Poor devil lost his store inna fire the other night. I don’t want to cause him any more trouble.”

  Homer said, “I don’t foke with no guns or knaves. I hate that kine shat. I don’t like to get hoit, and I don’t wanna hoit nobody else.” He wasn’t any too crazy about working himself to death, either, but Curly knew you had to settle for either somebody who was regular and lazy or one who would work hard till payday and then get drunk and never show up for three days. Homer was professedly a teetotaler, and Curly had never seen any reason to doubt him.

  They went in through the kitchen door. The same dishes had been stacked between the sinks all day, so far as Curly could see. He put a finger in the soapy water in the right-hand sink. It was cold as could be.

  “I wish you’d get these cleared up,” he told Homer. “It’s closing time.” He went through the swinging door to the counter. The old man was gone and had neglected to leave any money, but Curly knew who he was and would get it out of him next time.

  The fellow who had eaten the fish sandwich was sitting behind an empty coffee cup. He winked.

  Curly said, “How about that? He’s a kid from town.” He told about Bud Bullard’s bad luck.

  The man shrugged and got up from his stool. He pulled a half-dollar from his pants pocket.

  When Curly went to make change, he saw that the cash register was empty of folding money. “By God,” he said forcefully. “Was he at this drawer?”

  “Yeah.” The man wore a salt-and-pepper suit and a gray tie and felt hat, and he had a five-o’clock shadow.

  Junior hadn’t touched the change. Curly found a nickel and a dime and gave them to the customer. He said, “I’m gonna have to think about this now. I was gonna let the other thing ride. Just walking around with a pistol, and nobody hurt. But he robbed me?”