by Jim Thompson
I was about as steamed up as a man can get, and if she’d said one word back to me I’d have done a little fanning right then and there. On the seat of her pants, that is, and it wouldn’t have cooled ’em off any if you know what I mean.
But she didn’t talk back. She looked up at me, hesitantly, seemingly on the point of speaking, then took a quick look around as though to make sure that no one was listening.
“Tommy,” she said softly—very, very softly. “There won’t be any lineup over here on payday. No one will be over here but me.”
“Now, that makes a lot of sense,” I said. “Six hundred men with fourteen days’ pay in their pocket, and.…”
“There won’t be.”
“Won’t be?” I said. “Won’t be what? Well?” I waited, frowning. “There’s six hundred men on the line. Nothing can change that. And they’ll have two weeks made in another six-seven days. So…so.…Wait a minute!” I said. “Are you telling me that they won’t get paid?”
“Sshh!” She shot a terrified glance into the darkness. “No! I’m not telling you anything! I haven’t told you anything!”
She started to back away from me, her face very white in the night. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and she tore out of my grasp.
“Leave, Tommy! Go away, you hear?”
“But…but.…”
“I’ll follow you later. I swear I will! I’ll write you general delivery in Fort Worth or Dallas or.…But you’ve got to leave now. Please, honey! Please!”
“No,” I said. “I’m staying.”
“But you can’t! You just can’t!”
I told her she’d darned sure see if I couldn’t; whenever I left she’d be going right along with me. She pleaded with me a little longer and then she called me a darned old stubborn fool and said I could do whatever I doggoned pleased, but I’d better not come near her again.
“I don’t like you, Tommy Burwell! I never did like you! You’re just as mean and hateful as you can be, and I wouldn’t go to a dogfight with you. An’…an’ you ever come near me again, I’ll just slap you good!”
“I’ll look forward to it,” I said. “See you tomorrow night.”
I turned and walked away from her. She ran after me a few steps, scolding and pleading and finally crying. But I kept right on heading for camp, not daring to turn around for fear I’d weaken and give in to her. And three-four minutes later I heard the slam of the housecar doors as she locked herself in for the night.
There was a kind of grim finality about it. A don’t-forget-I-warned-you sound. It slowed me down for a moment, forced me to think of what I might be getting myself into. If I hadn’t talked-up so big to her and if I hadn’t been a chronic hard-head, I just might have done what she’d begged me to do. But I had and I was, so I didn’t. Instead, I went right on into camp.
A light was burning in the high-pressure tent, and I could see a shadow moving against the wall. Otherwise, everyone appeared to be bedded down. Or everyone, that is, but Wingy Warfield. He was out fooling around the wash benches, trying to find something wrong, I figured, so he could bellow about it.
I remembered how he’d knocked me to the law, making it look like I had a death-grudge against Bud Lassen just because I hadn’t shaken hands with him. A real nice guy, Wingy was—risking my neck just for the fun of hearing himself loudmouth! Apparently, he remembered, too, and he naturally thought I’d be sore, because he was sure one nervous camp boss as I came up to him.
I put a big smile on my face and slapped him on the back. “How are you, Wingy, my friend,” I said. “How’s it goin’, old pal?”
“H-how…friend?” he said. “P-pal?”
“You know it,” I said. “You can’t fool me, Wingy. The law told me all the nice things you said about me. Why, I’ll bet I’d be in jail yet if it wasn’t for you.”
I squeezed a five-dollar bill into his hand; told him he’d just have to take it or I’d be sore. After all, he’d saved my life, and friends were supposed to help each other.
“W-well…well, Jesus, Tommy!” He let out a long deep breath, somehow managing to stick out his chest and look cocky. “By God, that’s damned white of you, boy! Ain’t nothin’ like a real friend, I always say, an’ anytime you need anything you just tell ol’ Wingy Warfield!”
“That’s my pal!” I gave him another slap on the back. “By the way, pal, some guys came in from town about an hour and a half, two hours ago. Three guys with beards. I wonder if you happened to.…”
“You mean the guys that witnessed for you?” he cut in on me. “Those three?”
“Wit…what?” I said.
“You know, the guys that cleared you. The three that saw Bud Lassen get hisself killed.”
And the three that had been with Carol!
“Yes,” I said. “Those are the ones I’m talking about. Do you know what tents they’re in?”
He said, o’ course, he knew. There was damned little that went on in camp that Wingy Warfield didn’t know! “Longden’s in number three tent, Bigger’s in four and Goss is in seven. I reckon they’re all asleep by now, but.…”
“Burwell!”
It was Higby. He came striding toward me, jaw set, swinging a pick handle in his hand. Wingy Warfield took a quick look at him, then at me, and scooted away from his ol’ pal Tommy Burwell just as fast as his big flat feet could take him.
I lighted a cigarette, casually flipping the match away as Higby strode up.
“Yeah?” I said. “Want something?”
“You were told not to come back here, Burwell. Now, let’s see you make tracks!”
“But I’ve been cleared,” I said. “You know that. Why can’t I have a job?”
“We’ve got no jobs for birds like you! You’ve made nothing but trouble since you hit camp and, by God, you’re not making any more!”
“I don’t plan on making any trouble,” I said. “I never make trouble when I can make money.”
“Beat it!” He pointed with the pick handle. “Get your ass long-gone or you’ll be digging this Irish toothpick out of it!”
I drawled that I reckoned I’d wait for payday. He jerked the pick handle up like a baseball bat, and I repeated the word.
“Payday,” I said softly. “Payday, Mr. Higby. I hear it’s going to be something pretty special.”
It was just a guess. About all I had to go on was what Four Trey had said: that Higby would have no place to go when he wound up here. That this would probably be the last big pipeline to be built.
It was betting a guess against a beating. But the guess apparently was a good one. He lowered the pick handle, wet his lips, hesitantly.
“You’re not being smart, Tommy. I don’t know where you tie in or how. But the smartest thing you can do is to drop it and beat it.”
“I want a job,” I said. “What have you got open?”
“Tommy, for God’s sake, son…!”
“Yeah?” I said. “What did you say you could give me?”
He started to say something else, then brought his mouth shut with a snap. “How does a mormon board suit you, punk?”
“Mormon…!” I gulped, tried to make my voice nonchalant. “Fine,” I said. “Nothing I like better than riding a mormon board.”
“You do, eh?” His eyes slitted grimly. “Like pouring dope, too?”
“Why not?”
“Good,” he grunted. “You’re going to be doing both.”
They were the lousiest jobs on a pipeline. The lousiest jobs in the world. The board killed you, and the dope cooked you.
I wondered if I couldn’t have squeezed him for something better and I reckoned I probably could have, if I hadn’t played right into his hands. He’d used my cockiness against me, leading me into acting the tough guy. Now, I couldn’t back down without appearing the punk he’d called me. And it just wasn’t in me to do that.
I’d bet into a cold deck and I couldn’t pull my chips.
20
My working partner an
d I hoisted the mormon board behind the fill from the ditch. We slammed it down hard, forcing its blade flush with the earth. Then, stiff-armed, with all our weight bearing downward on the handles, we signaled to the tractor driver on the other side of the ditch.
He began to back away slowly, taking the slack out of the heavy cable between board and tractor. When it was tight, he poured on the coal, and the tractor roared backward and our board went forward, slowly dumping our load of fill back into the ditch. When it was all in, the tractor slacked off on the cable, allowing us to reset the board for another bite.
It was about six feet long, that board. Six feet long and maybe three feet deep. Put a plow handle at each end of the top of a kitchen table, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of it. Of course, it was built a hell of a lot heavier than any tabletop. Two men had just about all they could do to lift it. But lifting it was the easiest part of the job. The real work was in riding it toward the ditch.
The ditch was treetop deep in some places. A man standing at the bottom of it could just barely clear the top with a long-handled muckstick. Naturally then, you were never pushing a light load of fill. Any bite you took would be a big one, seven or eight hundred pounds of rock and earth. And it fought you every damned inch of the way.
It kicked, it bucked, it tried to ride up over the fill. One side would be pushing rock when the other had only loose dirt. That allowed one end to whip ahead of the other, which meant that it was going to do some tall whipping to whoever was hanging on to it. I almost had a shoulder dislocated my first day on the board. An hour later, the handle kicked back on the guy who was spelling me, and he dragged-up with two broken ribs.
There’d been no spellers after that first day. There just weren’t enough men who’d take the job. They’d drag-up before they’d take it. This was my third day on the job, and I’d had five different sets of partners. Looking at the one I had now, I figured I was just about due to have another one.
He was stripped to the waist, his hair tied back pirate fashion with a bandanna. His face was pock-marked from gravel-stings, and his mouth was caked with dusty blood where the board had jumped up at him. There was an ugly heaving to his chest, a losing struggle for breath. The shuddery shaking of it was something to make you a little sick. A mighty shaking, yet somehow too weak to break the sweat-formed crust of mud which encased his naked torso like a cast.
“Take a doss, bo,” I told him. “It’s not worth it.”
He turned glazed eyes toward me; fixed unseeing eyes. “Huh?”
“Let go. Walk away from it,” I said.
“Huh?”
I yelled, trying to get through to him. The tractor driver took it as a signal. The slack went out of the cable, and the board began to move forward. There was nothing to do but grab the handle and ride it.
I didn’t ride it long; not more than a couple of seconds. After that I stopped riding and flew.
I soared up into the air, and headed straight down into the ditch. I did a twisting jackknife, managing to get my feet down and my head up. But I couldn’t miss the ditch. It was a good thing I didn’t, too, because of that mormon board. And it would have cut me in two if I hadn’t been out of the way.
I was shook up pretty bad when my feet slammed down on the pipe. But I wasn’t really hurt so much as shocked. Someone held a hand down to me, and I climbed back up out of the ditch, spitting dirt and brushing dust from my eyes. I scrambled over the top of the fill and down the other side.
All work had stopped. A cluster of men stood around the sprawled body of my former partner, leaning on their shovels and picks while the straw boss bent over him.
The guy was dead, of course. He’d needed the job too badly to quit, and the board had killed him. The straw boss straightened, turned his head to spurt out a mouthful of tobacco juice. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and brushed the hand against the side of his pants.
“That goddam board,” he said, in a deep Southwestern drawl. “That board done went and yanked the heart clean out of a fella named Otto Cooper, an’ I’ll bet me a pretty no one knows a danged thing about him.”
No one did.
Higby drove up, wanting to know why the hell the work stoppage, and he had nothing on the guy either. Cooper had hired on late with a bad case of brokes, so naturally he’d gone straight on the mormon board. That was all that was known about him.
Higby drew the straw boss to one side and had a few words with him. Then he drove on down the line, and the straw boss nodded to me.
“ ’Bout caught up with the dope gang, Tommy, so we’re givin’ the old board a rest. Just one more little go-round for you an’ me, and then we’ll break for lunch.”
“I figured,” I said. “Let’s wrap it up and put a button on it.”
He took the dead man’s head, and I took his feet. We lowered him into the ditch, spreading him face down against the pipe. We climbed back up again, latched on to the mormon board and signaled the tractor driver.
The board moved forward, pushing its great load of earth into the ditch, burying the body of Otto Cooper beneath it.
The straw boss spit tobacco juice downwind. He squinted at the straight-up sun, wiping a hand against his mouth, wiping the hand against his pants. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he drawled. “Shit and three are nine. Well, he’s sure as hell got the world’s longest grave, ain’t he?”
“He’ll have company before we make the Gulf,” I said. “A lot of company.”
“Ain’t it the truth, now?” He nodded solemnly. “Ain’t that the God’s truth? Well, screw and two is four and frig makes ten. An’ here comes the chow truck.”
21
The chow truck parked a ways up-line near the largest gang of workmen. I took my time about getting to it, needing to get the kinks out of my arms and back as much as I needed food and wanting to avoid the jostling I’d get in a crowd.
The flunky loaded my tray and filled my coffee bowl. I looked around for a good spot to sit, finally hunkering down away from everyone on a joint of line pipe. It wasn’t a prize place to eat, as it turned out. The dope-boiler was a little too close, and its pale thin smoke stung me like a swarm of ants.
I went on eating, trying to tough it out; just too tired and sore to move. Finally, though, I couldn’t take it any longer, and I started to get up.
“You just stay there.” A foot came down on top of mine. “You just stay right there, Tommy, boy.”
I said, “What the…” and tried to lunge upward. I couldn’t do it, of course, with my foot pinned down, and I banged back down on the pipe.
“Now, that’s better, Tommy, boy. Not a real good spot to squat, it seems like, but this won’t take long.”
He was one of the bearded men I’d seen last night. He squatted down in front of me, his eyes dancing with malicious amusement. As he did so, the two other men I’d seen sat down on the pipe with me. One on each side, squeezed in close.
“I’m Longden.” The first man pointed a thumb at himself. “Those two gents are Bigger and Doss, and if you’d’ve asked us who we were instead of Wingy Warfield we’d’ve told you so. Real polite about answering questions, ain’t we, boys?”
“That’s us. The best little old question-answerers in the world.”
“That’s good,” I said, trying to keep the shakes out of my voice. “Then I reckon you won’t mind telling me why you had to have your arms twisted before you admitted seeing Lassen get killed.”
“What makes you think they were twisted, Tommy, boy?”
“A friend of mine as good as said so,” I said, and I told him how Four Trey had known they were clearing me before they did it. “He found out that you were out of camp that night and he threatened to talk if you didn’t.”
Longden pursed his lips, exchanged a glance with the other two—a signal—and said I had it all wrong.
“Now, here’s the way it was, Tommy, boy. Here’s exactly the way it was. In the first place, Bud Lassen didn’t just get killed. We ki
lled him…”
“Wha…!” I stared at him. “You…you admit it?”
“Why not? Talk never hurt anyone without proof to back it up.” He chuckled softly. “Being sound of mind and body, as the saying is, we naturally thought Bud was ripe for killin’. He was a bum who could be trouble, and you were building into a nuisance. So we figured to kill him and stick you for it. We like to do things that way, Tommy, boy. Plan a killing so it either looks like an accident or points the finger at someone else.”
“That’s the way,” Doss nodded. “We made it an accident with nosy ol’ Bones, so you had to be chumped for murderin’ Bud.”
“Right,” Bigger said. “You got to switch ’em around, you know, because too many accidents is as bad as an unsolved murder.”
Longden beamed at them like an admiring father. “Good boys. Aren’t they good boys, Tommy? Well, anyway. It was Carol that twisted our arms, not Four Trey. He told her what had happened to you, and she did the rest. Swore she wouldn’t go through with some plans we had, unless we got you out of the clink.”
He spoke as idly as though he were discussing the weather. We were within fifty feet of hundreds of men, yet these three, these three killers…
“You’re going to hold up the payroll,” I said. “Carol is going to drive the escape car.”
“And she’ll get a nice cut of the loot, Tommy, boy. Plenty for the two of you to set up housekeeping on. That’s what you want, ain’t it?” His brows quirked in cynical amusement. “Me and the boys certainly have no objection, do we, boys?”
Doss said he certainly didn’t object, and Bigger said that he was all for it. I added up to an all-right guy in his book, and a girl just didn’t get no better than Carol!
“You see, Tommy, boy?” Longden spread his hands expressively. “We’re all for you livin’ happily ever after, an’ so on. But right now you’re going to have to keep away from her. We’ve got plans to make and work to do and we can’t have you hangin’ around.”
