The Feud

by Thomas Berger

  “My God,” said Bud. “My God Almighty. He finally got his chance. Good for Rev! But he’s one lucky man, not to get shot himself by some professional crook like that.”

  Frieda lowered her chin as far as it would go. “Thing is, he did get shot.”

  “Rev?”

  “He’s still hanging on,” said Frieda. “But Doc Swan says he isn’t long for this world.”

  This marked the end of Bud’s nervous breakdown. He was ready to leave the nut ward in his robe and pajamas, but Frieda went out into the corridor and brought in Dr. Swan, who cleared things with the nurse while Bud was putting on the street clothes his wife had brought him.

  Reverton was in the emergency room, where he had been brought a few hours earlier, directly from the bloody steps of the bank. Various tubes were connected to him, and in attendance were people dressed in white.

  His eyes were open when Bud reached the bed. Bud roused himself to say, “This is a fine kettle of fish, Rev! Whatchoo doing here anyway? Why, you look fit as a fiddle.”

  Rev had never much been one for jollity. His voice was so feeble that Bud had to lean way over to hear the words.

  “I got a reward coming. I want Junior to have it.”

  Bud was trying to keep up his nerve. “Why, I think you can put it to mighty good use yourself, Rev,” said he.

  Reverton had a funny smell to him, a mixture of medicaments and, probably, death. His voice became ever so slightly stronger now. “I want Junior to have that money…. Don’t you worry none: I got a little inssurance policy to get buried on…. You see Junior getss the reward. Tell him…” His voice failed.

  “Sure, Rev, I sure will,” said Bud into his ear. “Now you get yourself some rest.” He was about to leave when he remembered that thus far he had not said what he wanted his cousin to hear before dying. But he had a superstitious feeling that if he didn’t say it, Rev would not die. It was an awful choice to make, because Reverton might expire anyway, and then Bud would have to live the rest of his own life with the knowledge that he had not said it in time, and the fact was that though Bud went to church regularly and certainly called himself a Christian, he didn’t for a minute believe in an afterlife of any kind. Therefore it was important how a man was thought of while he was alive, or anyway for a while after his death, though eventually just about everybody was forgotten, when it came to that. But nobody else in the family so far as he knew had ever shot it out with a crook on the steps of a bank.

  He bent down to Reverton’s ear again, but before he could say a word his cousin spoke. “Tell Junior…” The voice failed again, but suddenly it returned strongly, at normal volume: “To buy himsself a real gun.”

  A nurse and a doctor came to the bed on opposing sides. They said nothing to Bud, but suggested by their movements that he was in the way.

  He stepped aside but asked, “If I could just tell him one more thing?”

  They were bending over the patient. In a long moment the doctor straightened up and said to Bud, “It’s too late now.”

  Ordinarily at such a juncture Bud would have turned regretfully and made a sad exit, but now he silently forced the doctor to give him access to his cousin’s body.

  He didn’t care whether he was overheard or not. “So long, Rev. You were one swell guy, for my money. Listen…” A greater grief than he had been conscious of suddenly enveloped him. He had to use all his strength to add, “Listen. The whole family’s real proud of you.” He found Reverton’s hand, which was unusually small and finely made, like a woman’s, though you could never have told him that. He shook it once, then put it back.

  He thought he would break down when he got outside the room, but in fact he did not. He told Frieda, “He’s gone. I got there just in time. You know, everybody but me always thought he was a mighty queer duck, and God knows he wasn’t your ordinary run-of-the-mill, but I liked Rev. I always had a soft spot for him, and on his side he would of put his hand inna fire for me. You recall how he give me a good deal of his settlement money from that accident, for the store. Well, the last thing he said before passing away was he wanted me to have this reward money he’s got coming, to get the business started again. Ain’t that somepin?”

  He stayed O.K. until they went to Reverton’s rooming house, in search of the insurance policy mentioned by the deceased. While going through his cousin’s few pathetic effects, he found an old snapshot which had undoubtedly been taken by his own mother, with the big box camera, showing little Rev in cloth cap and knickers, on a Sunday visit from the orphanage. The knickers had in fact been worn by Bud himself for several years before being passed down.

  Bud was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed. He lowered the photo and began to weep in almost silent gasps. But after a while he got up and joined Frieda at the grimy window from which she was looking onto the nearby railroad yard.

  Harvey Yelton led the funeral procession for Dolf Beeler, but he pulled aside at the gate of the cemetery and did not enter. He was an old friend of Dolf’s and had been even more intimate with Bobby many years before, but when he could, he avoided all actual funeral ceremonies no matter for whom, except of course those for his sainted mother. (His father had been a dirty drunkard who disappeared one day when Harvey was six.) It was around back, on the other side of the cemetery, that he regularly apprehended violators of the ordinances protecting public decency. The damnable fact was that no matter how faithfully you patrolled Lovers’ Lane you could still find used rubbers and empty liquor bottles there next morning. These were obviously the work of no-goods who did not have to get up in the morning and earn an honest living with the rest of the human race, but could just drink and fuck their nights away, and Lord help them if they came around earlier, but he had to sleep sometime.

  He had turned the cruiser around and was about to head back to the station when he saw a boy come to the cemetery entrance and look furtively within. He recognized him as a kid named Dickie Herkimer. He knew most of the local lads and could spot potential troublemakers among them, but Dickie was a clean-cut live wire who would make a good businessman when he grew up, a go-getter real-estate agent or a used-car dealer.

  “Hi there, Dickie,” he said through the open window. The morning was sunny and warm for October, though the leaves on the cemetery trees had pretty well all turned color. Assuming that Dickie probably wanted to go to Dolf Beeler’s gravesite—he being a friend of Jack’s and a responsible young fellow—Harvey said, pointing, “It’s on in there to the left, around back of the Mumphrey crypt.” This monument was a landmark in the Hornbeck cemetery, being the largest and the most elaborate, with stone angels and so on, the Mumphreys, whose line was now extinct, having been the prosperous but childless coal dealers of a generation past.

  But the Herkimer kid stayed where he was, grinning foolishly.

  Harvey beckoned the boy over to the window of the cruiser. “Dickie,” he said, “you look kinda peakèd. You O.K.?” Harvey had a police officer’s sixth sense with regard to people, especially youths.

  Dickie was grinning ever more wildly, and then all of a sudden the grin burst into a big sob, and tears coursed down his face, on which the skin was clear except for a developing boil on the chin.

  Harvey reached over and opened the passenger’s door, and Dickie came around and climbed into the cruiser. He rubbed his eyes on both sweater sleeves.

  He stared desperately at the chief and said, “I’m turning myself in.”

  Harvey put the car in gear and began to move slowly along the street. He asked, mostly tongue-in-cheek, “What am I supposed to charge you with?”

  Dickie sniveled for a while, and then he began to sob again. Harvey got a certain pleasure from the tears of young girls, but male crybabies gave him the willies. He had thought better of Dickie. He felt like slapping him silly.

  He said, threateningly, “You gonna tell me?”

  The boy was sharp enough to know when he was going too far. He breathed deeply and said, “Murder, probab
ly.”

  Harvey grunted in his kind of laughter. “Who’d you kill?”

  “Mr. Beeler.”

  The chief braked at a stop sign. While at the halt he looked at Dickie. “Gun or knife?” He started rolling again. “You ain’t pulling my leg, are you, Dickie? Or dint you know Dolf died of heart trouble?”

  “I think what I did,” said Dickie, “was what gave him the heart attack.”

  “Whajoo do?”

  “Blew up his automobile,” Dickie said. He sniveled for a while. “I had some cannon crackers saved from the Fourth, when I got sick and couldn’t shoot off all my fireworks, and I tied the fuses of a whole lot of ‘em together, and I put ‘em under the hood—”

  “Oh you did, didja?” Harvey wouldn’t give the little fart the satisfaction of seeing him surprised.

  Dickie said, “I guess I thought it would be funny. See, Jack told me they had been having ‘sargument with some family over Millville. I figured they’d probably get the blame. I thought it would be a neat joke, I guess.” He was staring anxiously at Harvey.

  The chief drove several blocks in a silence that he expected Dickie to find unbearable. At last he said, “Wellsir, you ain’t telling me anything I dint pretty much know already, Dickie. I just been so busy I didn’t get around to picking you up on it. Then I was worried about what would happen when your dad heard about it. He might just whip you to death before we could ship you out to the reformatory.” From the corner of his eye he could see Dickie begin to quiver. He turned and pointed right in his face. “You start to bawl again, I’ll take out your front teeth, you goddam smart-aleck little shit-ass. I don’t know what you punk kids think you’re doing, but by God you won’t do any more of it in my town. I’m gonna declare a curfew at sunset and run you all off the streets. And that definitely includes Halloween and the week before. Going around in masks for handouts is all finished in Hornbeck, and anybody who does any damage—I mean, so much as throws a handful of corn on somebody’s front porch—he won’t ever know what hit ‘im. You hear me?”

  Dickie said, “Yezzir.”

  “Now, about this here damage you done to the late Dolf Beeler’s auto. He’s dead and gone, so you can’t make resitooshun to the man whose propitty the car was. Now if Bobby Beeler didn’t have two strapping sons, I’d send you over to cut the grass for her and run down the store and other errands, but as it is, you’d just get inna way, and Tony would probly end up kicking your butt for you, so I tell you what you do: you come down the police station every Sairdy till Christmas and make yourself useful, warshing windas and mopping the floor and all. You can simonize the cruiser.”

  “Yezzir.”

  Harvey stopped at the next corner. “Just keep your nose clean, Dickie, cuz I alweez got my eye on you.” Dickie did nothing: he seemed pretty thick. “Go on,” Harvey said. “Make yourself scarce.”

  After the kid got out, the chief drove slowly past Horn-beck’s bank, something he had been doing frequently since the events of two days before over in Millville, when that part-time cop had shot it out with a bank robber. If the latter was part of a gang, Hornbeck might well be next on the list, and if so Harvey had no intention of getting out of the cruiser and trading shots on the sidewalk: clipped to the back of the front seat was an automatic twelve-gauge shotgun. The first crook he saw, he would start blasting from the window while driving one-handed at high speed.

  At least it hadn’t been Clive Shell who made the kill. Harvey had called up Ray Dooley to get the score, for Dooley owed him one since he let off that little Millville punk with the starter’s pistol. Ray said the fellow was by profession a railroad detective and had been deputized to fill in while Clive was sick.

  “You birds ain’t ever gonna kill yourself with hard work, that’s for sure,” said Harvey. It was always a sore point with him that Shell even had the part-time services of Ray.

  “Heck, Harvey,” said Ray, “we got a bigger town than yours, and you ain’t got no colored district.”

  “Shit, you don’t ever go into Jigtown unless they call you special!”

  Ray couldn’t deny that, having told him more than once that experience had proved that if you just let the coloreds stew in their own juice, a lot of otherwise painful situations would never come up, so he changed the subject and told Harvey, “This thing sure shows the sense in keeping up to date on who’s wanted, don’t it? You can’t ever tell who’ll blow into town.”

  Harvey’s practice in the past had been to glance briefly at each circular as it came in and then clip it with the others and drop the thick sheaf back into the drawer, in an assumption that Hornbeck’s little bank would hardly be attractive to a professional. But he had changed now. He could only pray that no practical joker ever turned in a false alarm about a bank robbery, for he intended to arrive on the scene behind a spray of hot lead.

  Junior’s crotch itched him like crazy during the Reverend Amburgy’s remarks on the late Reverton Kirby, and he tried to bring relief by doing a slow grind on the pew seat, but to no avail, and when he bumped against Eva, she whined and gave him an elbow. He began to think he had picked up a dose of crabs, but since he had still had no intimate contact with a living female, they must have come from someplace else: maybe the toilet in the Hornbeck police station, the dirtiest crapper he had ever seen, and he would not have used it had his sudden realization that he was arrested not given him instant diarrhea.

  His father and five adult male relatives served as pallbearers for Reverton. Junior was humiliated by his father’s request that he walk alongside in an honorary role because the coffin was too heavy for him to tote even a sixth of its weight, but owing to the recent escapade he felt he was skating on thin ice, and he therefore complied, while making another secret entry on his shitlist.

  As he watched the bronze box being lowered into the grave he could not help thinking of that little ditty that went: Your eyes fall in/ Your teeth fall out/ The worms crawl over/ Your nose and mouth. Dying was a lousy thing, and he intended to avoid it, for its inevitability seemed only theoretical to him. How did they know that you couldn’t live forever? Had anybody ever tried it?

  After Reverton had been tamped down in the grave, all the relatives returned to the Bullard house and began to stuff themselves on the food prepared by Junior’s mother and various females related to the family by blood or marriage. The dining-room table was covered with loaded platters, but few held anything that Junior liked, and by the time he reached the macaroni ‘n’ cheese (having been forced by his father to let the guests go first) all the brown crust was gone from the casserole, with only the lower contents left, which looked like fat maggots. Then, at dessert time, his portion of Jello contained no fruit beyond one maraschino cherry half and a withered white grape, not to mention that the dollop of whipped cream had returned most of the way to the liquid state.

  For some reason, among all the assembled relatives there was not one single male kid of his own age. A good many of these fat old biddies were childless, if not old maids, and most children who did exist were so much older than Junior that they seemed of the generation of uncles, except for his cousin Clara, who was about the same age as Eva and originally not very good-looking. He had got her in the corner of the cellar once when he was younger and showed her his dong and she told on him, and in revenge he thereafter terrorized her in various ways, sometimes furtively, as when the girls would go to the public swimming pool with their bathing suits on underneath their clothes and Junior would sneak into Eva’s room and smear mustard in Clara’s underpants; and sometimes openly, as on the famous occasion when he barged into the bathroom and jeered at her while she sat on the throne.

  Now, however, in some magical way, Clara had turned overnight into one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen in his life, with long lustrous brown hair, oversized eyes, no skin trouble, high firm neat breastworks, and long legs above fantastically small ankles (the last-named being a feature he had only recently begun to look for). He could only
too easily have fallen for her had he not had that unfortunate past to overcome, and for her at least it was at the moment unforgettable. “Hi, monkey,” she said on encountering him at the funeral home. “Did the organ grinder give you a day off?” He was forced to answer in kind—”Wanna pick my fleas?”—but for the first time his heart was not in it.

  Clara and Eva had gone to the latter’s room after eating. Junior was hoping their cousin would stay overnight: he thought he might be able to pierce a spyhole into the bathroom ceiling from the crawl space overhead, to which he had access from his attic quarters. If he kept it close to the base of the ceiling light, it would go undetected. However, some further thought disclosed to him the strong possibility that from such a perspective he might well see only the top of her head and her titty-tips, and not the pubic brush if she sat in the orthodox position in the tub, facing the faucets. He wouldn’t see much if she sat on the toilet, for she was unlikely to do that while naked—unless of course she went before taking a bath. Junior himself liked to piss while bathing, but only in a shower, not a tub, where you would have to sit in it.

  But what he would have liked to do most of all was to get hold of another gun, a real one this time, and go over again to that tavern in Hornbeck and make that big fat Marie play with his peter, and if the bartender so much as raised the blackjack, blast him right between the eyes. But first he wanted to stop at Curly’s and have a couple of hotdogs with sweet relish on them, and a piece of blueberry pie, and a bottle of chocolate pop, and—

  His father drew him aside. “Junior, I wanna tellya Cousin Reverton, God rest his soul, thought the world of you. Your name was on his lips when he died. How about that?”

  Junior nodded. “That’s nice.”

  His father frowned slightly. “Well, I’d say it’s more than just nice. I’d say it ought to be an inspiration to you to wanna make something of yourself in life.”