The Feud

by Thomas Berger

  “That was a starter’s pistol,” said the man. “Just shoots blanks.”

  Curly disregarded this information. He said, “I had only a few bucks, in ones. Rest of it’s inna sack for the night deposit.”

  “Bank here in town?” asked the man.

  “Yeah,” Curly said. He was breathing harder than he had after his run. He was aware that people thought his shortness of breath was due to having been gassed in the war, but it was not. He didn’t know what it was, and neither did the doctor, but he had never been near any gas. “That little son of a bee! I’ll fix his wagon now, sick dad or not. You can’t let somepin like this here go on.”

  “You got him dead to rights,” said the man. “What time’s bank open inna morning?”

  “Eight A.M.,” said Curly. “Little bastard think he can sashay in here and rob me blind…” He chewed his tongue.

  “I’m here in connection with a bidniss oppitunity,” said the customer, “and am looking for a good bank.”

  “Well, thizere one is real good,” said Curly. “The vice-president eats here on occasion. You wanna go there, you say I sentcha. I’m Curly McCoy. Whole town knows me.” He put his hand across the counter, and it was shaken.

  “Smith,” said the man. “Bill Smith.”

  “Please to meetcha.”

  “Sure.”

  “What line uh bidniss joo say you was in?”

  Smith narrowed his eyes and said, flatly, “Bowling balls.”

  “Zat right? We got a poolhall up the street, but the nearest bowling alley is, oh, on out past—”

  “You got a good police force here?” Smith asked. “Keep the crooks out?”

  “Why sure,” said Curly. He had his own criticisms of Millville, but would not mention them to a stranger. “Chief’s a personal friend of mine, a fellow name of Clive Shell. He don’t let the riffraff go too far, and he keeps the coloreds over where they belong. He’s pretty tough on kids who get outa line, which is why I wasn’t gonna say anything at first—”

  “Just one guy onna force?” asked Smith. “What happens onniz day off? All hell break loose?” He had a lantern jaw when he grinned.

  “Cousin’s a part-time patrolman,” Curly said. “We got a nice little, quiet little town here. But we could use something up and coming.”

  “I sure like what I seen of it,” said Smith, grabbing a toothpick from the shotglassful next to the cash register—just one, not a whole handful like some of the local customers helped themselves to.

  Curly said, “That wouldn’t be a whole plant that made bowling balls, would it?”

  Smith put his head at a knowing angle and squinted. “Why, sure. You got some people who ain’t afraid of work?”

  “We could ahweez use a new bidniss,” said Curly. “I wouldn’t doubt what they’d givya a break onna taxes.”

  “Izzat right?” Smith’s toothpick was at a jaunty angle in the corner of his mouth. “Been a real pleasure,” said he, and went out the door.

  Curly called the police from the phone booth at the rear of the luncheonette. While the bell was ringing at the other end, he probed at the top of the money-return slot to see if anybody had stuffed paper up there to trap refunded coins. He found some on occasion, but had never detected anybody in the act of putting the paper there. It was hard to manage some things in a one-man operation (not counting the dishwasher). Over the course of the year he would also lose a considerable number of spoons and forks, though not many knives; lots of salt shakers but hardly any peppers; and always some sugar containers and napkin holders: there were those who regarded it as classy to have such things on the home dining table. But this pilferage was probably no worse than anywhere else in the world, and he did not regard it as necessary to give Millville a black mark for it so far as Smith went.

  The telephone rang so long without being answered that Curly figured Ray Dooley must be out of the station. Daytimes, if Clive wasn’t there, the city clerk, in the office next door, could answer the police phone on an extension, and if it was an emergency, come over and call the cruiser on the station radio. But only Ray was on duty at night. If it was a real crisis, and the station was empty, you could go out on the street and look for the cruiser, or wake up Clive at home, or the fire chief, if he was more appropriate.

  Curly was about to hang up when a not-quite-familiar voice came on the wire.

  “I’m trying to call the police,” Curly said.

  “This here’s the police station.”

  Curly asked, “You a new cop?”

  The voice took on an unpleasant note. “You get fresh, you’ll find out who I am quicker’n you want.”

  Curly had always been on first-rate terms with Clive Shell. Though the latter was not famous for his geniality, he had never shown anything else to Curly, who didn’t charge him a cent for the considerable amounts of grub he put away at the luncheonette, and, furthermore, his presence tended to drive business away from Curly’s to Tom’s Restaurant, at the end of the block, though true enough, Curly made up for it when Clive went to Tom’s, for not even normally law-abiding folks wanted to eat near a cop.

  “Wellsir,” Curly said, “you don’t have to get on your high horse. This is—” He was speaking in a joking tone, assuming that when he had identified himself, the other fellow would have a laugh and return the favor, for everybody in town knew Curly and vice versa. But he was interrupted by a scream of hatred.

  “You goddam dirty yella dogs! I’ll git you and all your tribe! You’ll eat dirt afore I’m through with you, and you’ll like it.”

  Curly hung up. It was obvious that he had gotten a wrong number. Or else one of the cops had arrested a maniac, who had broken out of the cell and answered the phone. He might have tried again, or even walked on up to the station, because he really believed only the first of the alternatives, but the resistance to his original plan to report Junior’s crimes was sufficient to give him second thoughts. Even to tell Ray Dooley might embarrass the Bullards and add to their troubles. Junior would be around town, and when Curly saw him next time, he’d get those five bucks back or make Millville a living hell for that little piss-willy.

  Sitting with Eva on the concrete wall in the Millville park, Tony, without prior intent, proceeded to feel her up in a way that turned out to be systematic. He ran his hand up her smooth, sturdy thigh, down into the valley where it joined its partner, deep down to where there was a double layer of fabric in the vee of her underpants, where it was a lot warmer, and then up to the coolness of her belly. She did not resist this exploration. In fact, she facilitated it by moving her limbs, but she did nothing else. She was his to do with as he pleased, it seemed, would provide her body but nothing further. She was so quiet that he could not even hear her breathing. He was certain that he could go right up to the waistband of her pants with both hands, and she would lift her bottom so that he could pull them right off. This power, hitherto unknown, was not simple to accept. How could you just go ahead and exercise it without being prepared for the consequent responsibility? In short, what was he supposed to do then?

  He came out of her skirt and went up under her sweater. There was the top of a slip there and, beneath that, a brassiere: a device the back-strap and fastening clips of which he had usually felt when waltzing with partners at the high-school dance classes, though on occasion he had drawn little freshman girls with the bird-chests of children. Yet here was Eva, only fourteen, with these jugs that were so large as to seem insensitive. He pursued them now through the obstacles. This time there was not much that could be done by her to ease his way—not unless she took a hand, which of course was unlikely, since she was not a whore.

  So he labored under her sweater, and eventually came to the point at which to go farther he might have torn some item of her clothing, unless he actually removed the cardigan and then the sweater underneath that, and then went on to work on the straps up at the shoulders. But aside from the matter of decency—they were in a public park, where anyone mi
ght come by at any time—the night was too cool to expose to the air the entire upper body of a young girl. She might end up with pneumonia, and how could he ever explain that?

  At last he gave it up, came out, and pulled the sweater neatly down at her waist. At this point she seemed to sigh, but so softly that he might well have only imagined it. Her legs were still apart, with the hem of the plaid skirt over her knees. Her feet were swinging, in their saddle oxfords and white anklets, and the heels bounced away from each impact with the wall. Her round face was expressionless; in this kind of darkness her eyes looked smaller than in the light. All at once it occurred to him that Eva was too young to have any personality, so that while she was so pretty and physically perfect in every way, there was nothing else about her that was interesting.

  It would have been easy to panic at this point; he had after all promised to marry her and furthermore to take her to Canada, a place which he didn’t even know how to reach, let alone get a job in. In addition, it was a foreign land, and perhaps not even a very scrupulous one, if it claimed to own the Niagara Falls. They might draft him into their army and then get into a war with some nice little country like Holland. And now that he was in this pessimistic state of mind he remembered that in the movies about the Northwest Mounted Police they were always drinking toasts to the Queen, as they did in the ones about India, with which they were intermixed in his memory, whereas he was a one-hundred-percent red-blooded American who did not bow down to foreign monarchs.

  Now Eva sighed loudly and complained, “Gosh, am I hungry.”

  This was a beautiful excuse for him to get out of his immediate predicament. He said eagerly, “Well, we better get something to eat before we go anywhere else. I’m real hungry myself. Ain’t there anyplace open in Millville?”

  Eva groaned. “It’s so late.” She added peevishly, “Why didn’t you come over earlier?”

  He saw an opportunity here to get into a quarrel that might free him of her completely, but was too softhearted to use it. “I was busy,” he said. “But I guess you’re right. It probably wasn’t the best time, but a person can’t always control these things…. Say, maybe we should wait till tomorrow.”

  Eva jumped nimbly down from the wall. “Are you getting cold feet or something?”

  She had a way of keeping him off balance. He had heard that about women, but until now it had been merely theoretical, applying to grown men.

  “Not me! I was thinking about you.”

  “Then get me something to eat,” she wailed. “I’m starving.” She walked away from him. She was just a selfish, small-minded little girl, obviously incapable of doing any of the things that a wife should do for a man. She didn’t even seem to know that it was the female who was supposed to take care of the food. But he also understood that he was cutting an inferior figure, losing the authority with which he had begun. Relative to her, at least, he should be a man of the world, and yet—But then, inspired by desperation, he got the first practical idea he had had all evening, perhaps the best since the beginning of this romance.

  He caught up with Eva. “There’s a bakery in Millville, ain’t there?”

  But now she was turning against him. “Why do you always say ‘ain’t’?” she asked. “Don’t your teachers in Hornbeck tell you it is ignorant?”

  Tony stiffened. “I don’t like to talk like a girl. Somebody might think I was a pansy.”

  Eva put up her chin in a snippy way. “Well, you don’t have to talk like some stupid person to be a he-man.” She proceeded to mention a movie star or two who spoke like gentlemen while also being tough as nails.

  Tony realized that the situation was in danger of deteriorating beyond recovery unless he showed heroic patience at this point. “You’re talking like some teacher,” he complained, but not bitterly, and he went on, “They work all night in bakeries, and usually you can go there and they’ll sell you doughnuts they just made, while they’re still hot.”

  Eva was transformed. “Really?” She went up on the tips of her toes. He had never seen her this excited. “I didn’t know that. I hope you’re right.” But until he was proved otherwise, he was climbing in her estimation. She was at her best when in good spirits, and for the moment anyway he was not bored. He had learned the truth that nothing in the world can provide as much simple joy as the presence of a pretty girl who is anticipating some pleasure that is within one’s power to provide.

  The Millville bakery was just beyond the bank. That the bakers were at work was not in doubt: the yeasty aromas could be smelled for a block. The shop was closed, of course, and they went around back, through the alleyway, and saw that the wooden door was thrown open, with only the screen door in place. Tony opened the latter and stepped inside. The ovens made it really hot in there; no wonder the door was open. The several bakers wore T-shirts and overseas caps in white, and their hairy forearms were prominent as they manhandled lumps and hunks and ropes of dough on a long floury table.

  “Hey whatcha want?” the nearest man shouted, not letting up on the dough he was shaping. He had light curly hair.

  “You got fresh doughnuts?”

  “More ‘n’ you can eat and den some,” the baker yelled jovially, and he went to a high rack with many shallow shelves and before choosing one asked, “Blain or bowdered or yeast or chelly or crullers regular or French?”

  Through the screen door Tony asked Eva what she wanted, and when she said she didn’t know, he turned to the baker and said expansively, “Mix ‘em: a dozen all mixed.”

  It was a pleasure just to stand there and watch the man deftly fill the order from tray after sliding tray, plucking up, inside one of those little squares of baker’s paper, two of each type of doughnut and depositing them, speedily but gently, inside the big white paper bag, which here and there soon showed almost transparent areas of absorbed grease.

  When Tony paid for the doughnuts the baker made change from the pocket of his white canvas pants. The other men had continued to work briskly all this while, going back and forth to the big ovens at the far end of the room. The one who had waited on Tony went back to the loaf of bread he was braiding.

  Tony was reluctant to leave this hot, aromatic place. He opened the screen door and handed the bag out to Eva, who immediately plunged her arm into it.

  He came back and spoke to the baker. “How do you get started in this line of work?”

  “Baker? Bractice. Onna chob. You wanna be baker, kid? Hard work, I can tellya. Nights ain’t choorown. You go to bed when dey’re all getting up.”

  “But you like it?”

  “I’m just a dumb Dutchman,” said the baker. “I don’t know no better. You wanna chob, kid? Helping out in the shop on Saddy? You want it, you get here early, else we’ll get somebody else. Kid we had got hired at the oil station. Just don’t expect to get rich quick.”

  Tony stared in amazement. “This coming Sairdy? I’ll be here real early.”

  “O.K., kid. What’s your name?”

  “Tony.”

  The baker laughed. “Whadduh yuh, some Dago?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  The baker laughed again. “It’s all the same to me. You come on Saddy.”

  Outside, Tony caught up with Eva, who was slowly walking out to the street, chewing away. She held a fragment of doughnut too small to identify as to type.

  “Hey,” Tony said, “know what?” His glasses had fogged up in the cool night air, and he got out the piece of toilet paper he carried for the purpose and cleaned them as he talked. “I just got offered a job there.”

  “No kidding,” said Eva. Having swallowed the rest of the doughnut in hand, she went into the bag and brought out a French cruller. “Gee, this one’s cold. The others were not exactly hot, but they were warm anyway. Boy, what a good idea. How’d joo know about it? I never did, and I live here,” With one bite she took away almost half of the cruller.

  “We always do that over in Hornbeck.”

  “Huh.”

  He
put his glasses on and held out his hand. “Can I have one?”

  “Uh.” She surrendered the bag, which had a nice warm feel to it as well as that delicious aroma.

  He said, “I guess if I work there I can get a cut rate on everything, breads and cakes and all.” The prospect of a steady supply of doughnuts might serve to console her in case she had really set her heart on going to Canada.

  They were under a streetlamp in front of the bake shop. She was watching him grope in the bag. “What are you looking for, jelly? There aren’t any more.”

  “You already ate them both?”

  She whined, “Well, they’re my favorite kind.”

  “You eat so fast, you’ll get a stomachache, for God’s sake,” said he. He assumed he had had a jelly doughnut coming, since it was all his idea and he had paid for the bag.

  “Well…”

  What a baby she was! What was he doing here? He found a plain doughnut, his own least favorite. It tasted of nothing but grease. She took the bag back.

  “Listen, Eva,” he said. “Maybe we oughta wait a while before running away. I mean, you’re pretty young, you know.”

  “O.K.” She now was eating the other French cruller. Apparently she had no concept of fairness. You might have thought she was an only child. He pitied her poor brother if she acted like this at home.

  “You don’t mind?”

  Her mouth full, she answered after a delay. “Naw. I always did think it was just something you were saying.”

  That was pretty insulting, but it was probably better than if she were kicking and screaming about his broken promise.

  “Oh,” said he, “I was plenty serious, but I got to thinking about your age, and my dad’s in the hospital, and all.”

  “So’s my father!” Eva said competitively. “Are you just saying that because of my father?”

  This kid stuff burned him up. “No,” he said in a mocking tone, his mouth screwed up, “I didn’t say that because of your father. I didn’t even know about your father, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ll thank you not to curse at me,” she said. “That might make you a big shot in Hornbeck, but it doesn’t go over in this town, and that’s where you are right now, and don’t forget it. Also, I distinctly remember telling you all about my father being sick in the hospital because of what your family did to him.” Her face twisted up, and she began to cry.