by Jim Thompson
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I had the impression at times that you weren’t scared because you just weren’t thinking about what you were doing. If that’s the case, you’ve been a very lucky boy this morning and you’d better not count on your luck holding.”
I mumbled something about just being tired, I guessed. Four Trey said sharply that I’d better get over it, then, and get over it fast.
“I mean that, Tommy. I like you, but not nearly enough to let you blow me up. Now, if you’ve got something on your mind, let’s get it to hell unloaded right now.”
“Well,” I swallowed guiltily. “I, uh.…”
“Yes?”
“Well, to tell you the truth,” I said, and it was partly the truth. “I’ve been thinking about that guy Bones. You know, the one that fell off the truck—only you said maybe he didn’t fall off, that someone murdered him.…”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Four Trey stopped dead in his tracks. “You mean you’re still thinking about that? But I told you I was just making talk! Just killing time.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I still can’t get it out of my mind. It’s so logical, you know, when you stop to think about it. It could have happened just the way you said.…”
“A lot of things could happen that don’t. Now, forget it, for God’s sake. Bones was a working stiff who fell off a truck. That’s all there was to it, so forget anything I said.”
I promised that I would, and we went on down to where the chow was.
Everything was steaming hot to prevent spoilage. Sometimes, you got a little ice in your drinking water and the canned milk would usually be mixed with ice water. But there was no ice for food. The only time you got cold food on the pipelines was in the winter when you didn’t want it.
All the food was served plain; that is, without gravies or sauces. No pipeliner would have touched anything with sauce or gravy on it, just as none would have eaten hash or chili or anything like that. They had to be able to see what they were eating, to know exactly what it was. Anyone who’s ever had a bad case of dysentery will know why.
Four Trey and I filled platters with food and drew bowls of boiling coffee. We carried them over to where a group of guys were eating and sat down alongside them on the fill from the ditch. I’d just taken a big mouthful of baked beans when one of them called to me.
“Hey, Tommy. You seen the chippy yet?”
Chippy?
I choked and coughed, almost strangling. Four Trey gave me a long slow look, but I went on coughing, pretending not to notice. I also pretended like I couldn’t answer the guy who’d called to me, and he spoke again, pointing.
“She’s camped off over in there, Tommy. I was standing up on the truck coming out this morning and I got a good look at her. Wowee, what a babe!”
“I seen her, too,” another guy said, and a couple of others chimed in that they’d also seen her. “Come payday I’m really gonna have some of that!”
I went on eating, forcing the food down, my face on fire with shame and anger. I wanted to stomp every one of them, and I couldn’t even object to what they were saying. If I’d had a hold of Carol right then, I’d have shaken her until her teeth rattled.
“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do”—the first guy was speaking again. “I’m gonna pay that little doll a visit tonight. I’ll bet if I talk to her right, I can get it on credit until payday. Why.…”
“Save yourself a trip,” Four Trey said. “She wouldn’t trust you for a penny of it.”
“Yeah? You talk like you know, man.”
“I do. I was over to see her last night.”
It was a lie, of course, but they didn’t know that. I doubt if there was another person in the world who knew that he was impotent.
“No, sir,” Four Trey went on. “That little gal doesn’t trust no one for nothing. I had some dough; more than enough, I thought. But it wasn’t enough for her, and she wouldn’t wait for even a dollar of it.”
“Yeah? How much did she want, anyway?”
Four Trey said that she wanted twenty bucks, and he held up his hand at their grunts of surprise and disbelief.
“I know, I know, boys. Three to five bucks is the going price, but it’s not going for her. Either you pay twenty or you can stay in your sack and dream about it.”
“Maybe not”—from a big loose-lipped guy. “Maybe I get it without payin’ nothing.”
Four Trey gave him a pitying smile. “You mean you think you can take it away from her?”
“She wouldn’t be the first one I took it from!”
“Probably not,” Four Trey nodded evenly. “But you’d probably be the first guy to have his bellybutton next to his asshole. The little lady has a sawed-off twelve-gauge and she knows how to use it.”
He stood up, lifting his tray and bowl with him. I stood up with him, and he looked down at the guy with a smile that would have chilled a Polar bear.
“Maybe you’d better try it,” he said. “Or maybe you’d just better drag-up and get out of camp tonight. Because if I ever see you again, I’m going to swing at you with a rock drill.”
“And I’ll be swinging right along with you,” I said.
The guy looked down at the ground. No one said anything, and finally he moved his head in a little jerk. He’d leave camp. He knew that he’d better.
Four Trey and I walked back up the line to the place where we’d been shooting. He stopped there, and I stopped with him. Wanting to thank him or to explain; to say something or do something—I didn’t know just what.
“Well, Tommy.” He began drawing on his gloves. “You’d better be getting up to those jackhammers, hadn’t you?”
“I’m going right now,” I said. “I…I got to tell you something, Four Trey. I know what you’re thinking, but.…”
“What I think, Tommy, is that a kid with a great potential is about to throw it all down the drain. But that’s his business, as long as he keeps it his. If it ever again gets to crowding in on mine, as it did this morning.…”
“Four Trey,” I said, “I wasn’t lying when I said I’d been thinking about Bones’ death. It has bothered me.”
“It has, huh?” He gave me a look of cynical amusement. “Been losing a lot of sleep over it, have you? Not that pipeline chippy out there, but poor old anonymous Bones.”
“All right,” I said doggedly. “I was just trying to explain, but have your own way about it.”
“Maybe I’d better explain something to you, Tommy. The mortality rate on pipeline jobs is approximately one death to every ten miles of line. Since we’ve already had one death, in our burial of Brother Bones—how’s that for alliteration, Tommy?—and since we’ve made a little less than five miles of line, I’d say you need have no fear of the grim reaper for another day or two.”
He bent down, began looking for the shot holes which the jackhammers had drilled.
I turned away and began trudging up-line.
In the scorching midday heat, everything rested but man. Quail and pheasant hid beneath the sage and chaparral, wings hung loosely from their bodies, their undersides wallowed into the dust. Cottontails, whole families of them, napped in the wind-cooled stands of grass. Giant mule-jacks stood like sleepy sentries under the needly groves of Spanish bayonet. Prairie dogs dreamed in the sparse shade of their mounds.
All the life of this wild and lonely land was there to see…for those with the eyes to see it. Nothing took cover. Nothing ran from you. Having seen no men before, they saw no need to hide or run.
I stopped to light a cigarette, and a long, thick shape slid frantically across the blistering earth and began to wind itself around the relative coolness of my leg. It was a bull snake, all of five feet long with a middle as thick as my biceps. I let it rest for a minute, then gently unwound it. It struck at me with its head, its only weapon. But the blows were lazy, heat-drugged; and the snake, finding itself unhurt, ceased them immediatel
y. I put it inside my shirt, let it cool in my evaporating sweat. When I took it out, transferring it to the interior of a joint of pipe, it was blissfully asleep.
13
There were two jackhammers. Two men, spelling one another, worked each jackhammer. I took the place of a guy who’d had so much of it that even a mormon board looked good to him. He didn’t know mormon boards, I guess, or maybe he just had an awful hate for jackhammers. Which is a mighty easy thing to get.
You’ve probably seen jackhammers—or airhammers, to use their proper name. They’re used in breaking up pavement and the like. They have a two-handed grip across the top, in the shape of an elongated oval, with a heavy air-cylinder extending down from it. A steel drill fits into the end of the cylinder, and when the air is cut in that drill begins to vibrate and bounce about umpteen times a second.
It’s not the only thing that vibrates, either, as you may have noticed. Hanging on to that jackhammer is like holding on to a steel wildcat with St. Vitus’ dance. It shakes you from your shoe soles to your eyeballs, and little chips of rock sting your hide like birdshot, and I guess God must have his ears plugged to the noise because he sure wouldn’t put up with it if he could hear it.
On pavement jobs, the jackhammer work is only a few minutes at a time; on the pipeline, it’s almost steady. When you run out of rock, you move right ahead until you find some more. And if you don’t move real fast, if that jackhammer stops popping and rattling for more than a minute or two, you’ve got high-pressure on your tail.
Two strawbosses ran a check on us that afternoon; one of Depew’s men also came by to check our time and note my change of jobs. Then, a little after four in the afternoon, Higby drove up.
My partner and I had been taking fifteen-minute runs on the hammer. It was my turn to rest, and I was sitting on the ditch fill when Higby arrived. He gave me a sharp look, started to say something I guess; then figured out the situation—that I wasn’t just loafing—and came over and sat down by me.
“How’s it going, Tommy?”
I shook my head, shrugged.
“How’d you like to run a hammer…steady?”
I laughed, still not saying anything. Higby grinned sourly, then made his voice persuasive.
“You run a nice hammer, Tommy. And it’s a lot safer than powder. You just check back over your memory and tell me if you ever saw an old powder monkey.”
I said I’d never seen any old jackhammer men either. Then I looked at him frowning, struck by the strangeness of his urging a change of jobs on me.
“I work with Four Trey,” I said. “That was the understanding when I hired on. I help on powder with him and I deal blackjack for him as soon as.…”
“That’s still the understanding, as long as you cut the stuff and Four Trey wants you. I had the impression, however, that you didn’t care too much about shooting powder.”
“I like it all right,” I said. “I like it just fine. Now, unless Four Trey’s got some complaints.…”
“I imagine he’d tell us both if he had.” Higby shook his head. “But I’m sure he’d be willing to change helpers if I asked him to. And there’d be no trouble about finding him one. There’s always someone willing to shoot powder. Someone with so little imagination that he can’t picture himself getting killed or maimed, or who actually wants to get killed. You find a lot of those, too, around the big labor camps.”
“Four Trey’s got plenty of imagination,” I said. “He sure as hell doesn’t want to get killed, either, and neither do I.”
“I’d like to see you stay on jackhammer, Tommy. You could make a lot of overtime.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And who can take it?”
“It’s good for a man. Keeps him out of trouble. A man puts in a long day on a jackhammer, and he doesn’t want anything but bed.”
I said I’d been keeping out of trouble long before I ever fitted hands to a jackhammer and I figured I still knew the secret. He nodded and stood up, dusting the seat of his pants. I got up, too, since it was about time to go back to work; kind of wondering about his mention of keeping out of trouble. It might mean that he’d somehow found out about Carol, but I didn’t see how he could have. Certainly, Four Trey would never, never have butted into my affairs by asking him to talk to me.
I went back to work, deciding that it was just a generality tossed off during a conversation. He’d stopped for a breather and used the time to make a hard sell on jackhammers. He needed operators badly so he’d pulled out all the stops, getting a lot more personal than a pipeline boss ordinarily would have.
He spoke to the other men briefly, about what I couldn’t hear because of the noise of my hammer. Then he started walking up the line route, stopping every now and then to make a little marker of piled-up rock. He made approximately twenty of them in the space of about five hundred yards, then came back to his pickup and drove off toward camp.
Those markers were places where we had work to do. There appeared to be enough of them to keep us busy through noon tomorrow, if not longer. I mentioned this to my partner when it came his turn on the hammer, and he gave me a sore look.
“Lay off, pal. I ain’t in the mood for kidding.”
“Kidding? What are you talking about?”
“The big boy didn’t tell you, huh?” He shook his head grimly. “We do that tonight. Every damned bit of it before we button up the day.”
“Tonight? But…but, dammit to hell…!”
“Can’t do it, hmmm? Just ain’t up to it? Well, don’t bother to tell the man, because I already done it and he just didn’t believe me at all. He said I must mean that I wanted to drag-up my time, and if I didn’t mean that I’d better get hot on this hammer.”
“Gee,” I said, “I was just going to ask if I couldn’t work over.”
He grinned tiredly, spat dust from his mouth and scoured his hands against his pants. I turned the hammer over to him, and he gave it a boost with his knee, brought the drill down on a patch of rock and cut in the air.
It began to shake, rattle and roar. He bore down on it, arms stiff, and it whined and clattered and tried to jump away from him. His teeth clenched with the effort to hold on, and his whole body jerked and vibrated.
I moved back away from the noise and dropped down on the fill. I began to massage my legs and arms, groaning when I hit a knotted muscle and wondering what Carol would think when I didn’t show up.
I figured that she’d probably be pretty upset about it, that she’d maybe think I was sore and wasn’t coming back. I looked up the line at the work that remained to be done and I decided that we might get through in time for me to pay her a quick call. A doggone quick one, just long enough to say hello and let her know I wasn’t sore. Because I sure wasn’t up to or interested in anything else tonight.
Like Higby had said, all you wanted after a hard day on the hammer was bed. Just a bed, with no one in it to crowd you.
At five o’clock a kitchen flunky in a company pickup brought supper to us. It was packed into five-gallon lard cans: one for coffee, another for beef, chicken and ham, another for bread-and-butter, cookies and doughnuts, and the remaining two for potatoes and mixed vegetables. We ate all we could hold and put a few doughnuts and cookies in our pockets. The flunky dumped everything that was left over onto the prairie, then drove back down the line toward camp.
We had a cigarette or two…makin’s since none of us had any ready-rolleds. Then we matched for turns on the hammers, stepped up the speed of the generator and went back to work.
It was almost ten o’clock by the time we had finished, and long jagged streaks of lightning were crackling across the black sky, seeming to rip it apart like a curtain, then to sew it back up with thunder.
I rode in the seat with Higby going into camp, and he kept sticking his head out the window, feeling for rain. He looked as tired as I felt and he seemed to get older with each crack of lightning. A hard rain, one that continued through tomorrow, would stop work on the line. Even
a hard night’s rain would set the job back, but for only a few hours with any kind of luck. The blazing sun and the constant wind dried things up fast. You could toss a dipper of water on the ground, and it would evaporate almost before it landed.
Higby swore under his breath, sidled a worried glance at me. “Well, Tommy? What do you think?”
“Nothing to it,” I shrugged. “Nothing more than a spring shower.”
He said he sure as hell hoped I was right, and I lied that I’d bet money on it. I figured that he already knew that only a fool or a stranger prophesies the weather in West Texas, and there was no point in reminding him of it.
Camp was dark except for the water-barrel lantern and the lantern in the truck-parking area. Higby brought the pickup to a stop, spoke to me quietly as I started to climb out.
“A hell of a hard day, huh, Tommy? I imagine you can’t wait to hit the sack.”
“Well…” I hesitated. “If there’s something you want to talk to me about, Mr. Higby…”
“No, no, bed’s the best place for you. I guess you know I’ll want you on the hammers again tomorrow.”
“I figured,” I said. “But that wraps it up, right? I’m down for powder monkey’s helper and I’ll be back to it after tomorrow.”
“Stay on the hammers, Tommy,” he said softly. “You’ll be glad you did later. Stay there and make your overtime and keep out of trouble, and.…”
And that was as far as he got. Because I was about as exhausted as a man can get and every nerve of my body was raw, and that second mention of keeping out of trouble—well, it was too damned much. I was in plenty of trouble right then, and I’d got it all from being put on those lousy hammers.
“Look!” I exploded. “What the hell is this, Mr. Higby? What does the top man on a big pipeline job care what happens to a working stiff like me? Why are you bothering with me? What am I to you, anyway? I appreciate your sticking up for me with Depew, but.…”
“You don’t owe me a thing, Burwell. I did what I had to do; what I thought was right. And you’d better make that Mr. Depew.”
