by Jim Thompson
“But, why?” I said. “Why did you ever mix yourself up in such a mess in the first place? Why did you ever start it? You don’t need the money. You could have made a baby fortune between here and the Gulf. Why…?”
“How do you know what I need, Tommy?” He shook his head. “But never mind. I’ve told you as much as I can and probably more than I should. And now it’s about time to go dance with Dyna.”
He turned his hat brim up fore and back. Made motions of getting up. I said I didn’t believe he was working with the Longs, even if they did think so.
“I know you too well, Four Trey. You’re working for the law, aren’t you? You and the sheriff and everyone are out to trap the Longs. Why, sure,” I laughed, “that has to be it! Every member of the gang will be out in the open for the first time, and.…”
“I’m working for myself, Tommy. Strictly.”
“Oh, sure you are,” I grinned, winking at him. “You’d have to say you were. You wouldn’t dare admit the truth even to me.”
“Particularly to you, Tommy—if it was the truth.”
“What?” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Now, don’t get your back up,” he drawled. “You’ve got a lot going for you, my friend. You’re smart and you’ve got guts and you’re hell on wheels when it comes to dealing blackjack to a bunch of hardnoses. But I’d never let you play poker for me or chess. A couple of games, incidentally, which Longie Long is damned good at.”
I looked down at the ground, my face reddening. I mumbled that I was sorry that he thought I was so stupid, and he sighed that he hadn’t said anything of the kind.
“But you’d be bound to mix yourself up in this. With the best of intentions, of course, and the worst possible results. Certainly, you’d feel impelled to pass the word to your girl. Fortunately, or otherwise, I told you the truth in the beginning. I’m in this for myself for what it will do for me. Just me…no one else.”
“Now, you wait a minute!” I jumped to my feet as he stood up. “What about my girl? What about Carol?”
“What about her? She’ll be all right as long as she does what she’s told.”
“But.…”
“No more, Tommy.” He turned away, drawing on his gloves. “Time to go back to work.”
“Please,” I said. “Just answer one question for me. Just one, and I won’t ask you any more.”
“All right, but make it fast.”
“It’s about tomorrow, payday. Will I be dealing blackjack for you?”
He hesitated; grinned at me crookedly. “A cute question, Tommy. But the answer is simple. You’ll be dealing blackjack for me if there’s a blackjack game.”
27
Breakfast was doughnuts, coffee and dry cereal, with each man getting a can of evaporated milk. By ten in the morning, the chow and kitchen tents, the stoves, cooking utensils and so on were loaded onto flatbeds. They pulled out of camp for the new site with the cook and his staff riding the loads.
Four Trey and I blasted over the latrine and garbage pits. Then we turned to with the other men for the tearing down and loading. Everyone worked at it—machine men, welders, everyone—all six hundred men. Jumping a big camp was one hell of a big job, and every hand was needed. Also, the various jobs were interdependent, and when you pulled a bunch of men out of one place you soon halted work in another.
We had fruit, cookies and cold coffee for lunch. Afterwards, Higby assigned us a pickup and we packed and loaded our blasting materials.
Twenty cases of dynamite went into the back, each case wrapped in blankets and the whole load resting on bunk mattresses. I rode in the rear with it, kind of holding it down with my body. Four Trey drove, the supply of dynamite caps cradled in pillows on the seat beside him. And I guess you know we didn’t take any passengers.
It was quite a ride, those forty miles. Not the kind I’d want to go through again. But it had one advantage; it sure took my mind off Carol and the Longs and all my other troubles. My mind was strictly on the load I was riding and those little black caps on the front seat, and I didn’t have any trouble keeping it there.
There was no road after the end-of-line; not even the truck ruts that passed for a road. There were tracks across the prairie from the vehicles that had gone ahead of us, but they were so twisty and crisscrossed from the drivers trying to feel their way that they were virtually more harm than help.
We had to go very slowly, of course. The big flatbeds and pickups loaded with men and materials kept passing us. They swung wide around us, giving us plenty of room, then squared off to the south again and went jouncing and bouncing on their way until they faded into the rolling, sunbaked wilderness.
And it was a wilderness. In miles, we were no great distance from our former camp. But that had been the jumping-off place, you might say, the end of somewhere. And when you went beyond that, you were all-the-way gone.
Now and then a flatbed or pickup would pass us coming from the new camp, seeming to romp across the prairie as it burned daylight to make a final load. One truck from town passed us with booms and chains holding down its cargo of ice. The ice was melting fast, marking a trail toward the new camp. I might have wondered about it, why a tight-fisted outfit would pamper the men at such a busy time. But the only thing I was wondering about that day was how to stay alive.
Traveling so slowly, we didn’t reach the new camp until almost four that afternoon, and it was nearly five by the time we had everything unloaded and stowed. We got busy with the other men then, wrapping up what remained of the work. Fortunately, there wasn’t lot of it, because the combination of scorching heat, back-breaking labor and short rations had just about wrapped us up.
Everyone was barely dragging tail; barely able to put one foot in front of the other. They lingered in the shade at every opportunity, sometimes flopping down flat on the ground.
It was more like a wake than payday. I sorted the Longs out of the crowd and saw that they were in no better shape than anyone else. Longden (Longie) Long passed me once and tried to muscle-up a grin, but he just didn’t have it in him. A couple of times I took a long look at the tumbling terrain outside of camp, carefully searching the landscape for some sign of Carol or the housecar. There wasn’t any. Neither in nor out of camp was there anything to indicate that a holdup was about to take place.
In fact, the way things stacked up, it was ridiculous to think that there might be a holdup.
It was almost six o’clock when Higby climbed up on the long wash bench and shouted that that was all she wrote. A few yells went up, pretty weak and weary ones, but enough to let him know that they were tickled to have it made. Someone shouted, “What about chow?” Not money but food. Higby waved a pick handle, motioning everybody to come in close. As they did so, Depew climbed up on the wash bench with him, and a couple of timekeepers passed up a large cardboard box.
That would be the payroll box, I figured, loaded with the men’s two weeks’ earnings. That’s what it was, too—and what it wasn’t. But no one seemed much interested in it.
Depew whispered in Higby’s ear. Higby frowned, then shrugged and nodded, banging the pick handle against the wash bench for attention.
“Now simmer down out there!” He stared sternly around the crowd. “Mr. Depew has something to say to you!”
Depew stepped forward, tried to glare around as Higby had. It got him a big laugh, which he didn’t like at all. And when he opened his mouth and said, “Now, listen you men…” his voice came out in a high-pitched squeak.
A roar of laughter went up. He waited peevishly for it to die down, then started in again. “You men all know I’m your friend.…”
That was too much. Even Higby could hardly keep a straight face. You could have heard the laughter and jeering five miles away, and it got louder every time Depew tried to speak. He gave it up, finally; whirled around to leave. But he was so mad he couldn’t see, I guess, because he fell smack off the bench. And what had happened before in the
way of laughing wasn’t anything to what happened then.
It was one great whooping and hollering, wave after mounting wave of it. A sound that went all the way through to your bones. Guys staggered around with tears in their eyes, doubling up and gasping for breath and finally getting so weak they had to sit down. Before the laughter had died, Higby began to speak.
The pipeline company was a big outfit. It had other jobs running besides this one, and some of those jobs were paid by check. So there’d been a little mixup. The company had sent checks here instead of cash.…
“Now, listen to me!” he shouted, raising his voice above the angry rumbling. “I’ve got some questions! How many of you want free cigarettes and cigars? Well, there’s all you want over there,” waving the pick handle toward the chow tent. “And that’s not all that’s there! How many of you want to stuff your guts with ice-cold potato salad—you heard me, ice-cold—and fried chicken and buttered rolls, the biggest by-God feast you ever saw in your life! Well, let me hear it!”
He heard it; cheers and yells of approval. But there was also an angry sullen rumbling. They were raging hungry, and the word ice was magic to them. But they wanted money, too. Not checks—where, for God’s sake, could you cash a check? But money.
So they were pulled two ways. Teetering, they could swing one way as easily as another.
“How many of you want some free hours?” Higby was shouting again. “How many of you want to sack-in until nine tomorrow morning on company time? How many of you want all the booze you can drink?”
The anger, the grumbling sullen rumble wasn’t quite gone. But it was weakening fast, all but lost in the cheering, shouting clamor for booze.
“Now, you’re talking!” Higby grinned around at them. “By Christ, I almost believe you’re pipeliners! So let’s get it wrapped up. Anyone that wants to can take his check and start walking. Right now! Because the rest of us are going to draw cash-pay for four weeks come next payday! The rest of us are going to have a party, and we’re starting right now!”
He jumped down from the bench and headed for the chow tent.
For a split second longer, the mob continued to teeter, weighing disappointment against desire. Then, with a great happy roar they followed him.
Even the welders and machine men, who would as soon have had a check as cash, went along with the others.
Higby had done the impossible; what I would have thought impossible. Also, of course, either innocently or otherwise, he had arranged for the next payroll to be as large as the Longs had to have it.
28
The booze was a punch made of jake and fruit juice (and not much fruit juice). It hit a man fast and hard, and the camp was a howling riot inside of an hour.
Fights broke out everywhere. Except for a corps of high-pressure and strawbosses armed with pick handles, many men would have been killed. The high-pressure and straw-bosses had had drinks themselves—enough to put plenty of zip into their pick handles. When a guy got one of those hardash clubs against his head, the fight usually went out of him fast. Usually, it did. But not always.
There were a couple of guys, for example, who’d stolen butcher knives from the kitchen tent, and they were chasing around, claiming to be barbers and trying to give everyone shaves and haircuts. They practically got their ears knocked off with pick handles, and it just kind of acted like a tonic on ’em. The more they were clubbed the worse they got. So finally they had to be shot a little.
Just a little, you know. Not so bad that they couldn’t be patched up in camp and go to work the next day. One of them had his little toe shot off and the other got a bullet through the palm of his hand. And they were pretty well-behaved after that.
A wild bunch of drunks was going around with a blanket, and tossing other guys in it. They were making a nutty game out of it, the idea being that they would all take a drink while the tossed guy was in the air. And they never did make it so far as I could see, but they acted like they had. Every time a guy would hit the ground, which was every time they did it, they’d all shake hands and congratulate each other, then start looking for another guy.
They were headed toward me, and I was waiting for them with a nice big tent stake, when the pick handle squad moved in and knocked ’em all senseless.
Some of the men had pipelined through the old Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma, where they’d picked up the game of Indian ball. Even in those days the game had been outlawed for years, but these pipeliners had run across one somewhere, and they’d got a game going. Folks up in The Nation used to say that you didn’t have to be a crazy drunk killer to play it, but it sure gave you a big edge.
The game didn’t have any rules in the usual sense of the word. A ball was simply tossed into the air and two groups of people struggled for it. The groups could be of any size; and anything and everything went: kicking, gouging, biting, slugging. The game lasted until one side or the other was too bashed-up to continue.
Tonight a pillow was being used for a ball, and the playing field was the long wash bench. That added an extra hazard, what with men being thrown off and knocked off. So many men joined in the game, a couple of hundred of them it looked like, that the bench collapsed with their weight, and they all went down on the ground in a fighting howling tangle.
That didn’t stop the game, of course. In fact, it made it worse. Clubs were ripped up out of the broken bench, and the players moved in on each other swinging. There were too many of them for the pick-handle boys to knock out and, of course, you couldn’t shoot that many men even mildly. So the game went on, the bosses figuring, I suppose, that everyone was too drunk to get hurt very much.
I was standing back as far out of things as possible when Wingy Warfield sidled up to me. I’d made one big mistake, I guess, in calling him my pal and acting friendly, because he’d been latching on to me ever since, boasting and loud-mouthing and putting on airs.
“Well, Tommy,” he said, wagging his head and trying to look important. “They can’t say I didn’t warn ’em. I told ’em, You give booze to a stinkin’ bunch of jungle stiffs, an’.…”
“They’re all right,” I said coldly. “You’re one of ’em, remember.”
“Me?” He laughed like it was a joke. “No, sir, I don’t have no part of that kind, Tommy. I’ve boomed from Ranger to Smackover t’Seminole, an’ when it comes to that kind of trash.…Where you goin’, Tommy?”
“To my bunk,” I said.
“Want me to come in and set with you for a while? I can spare you a few minutes, I reckon. I mean, there ain’t much I can do now, anyways, an’…Tommy?”
I kept on going without answering him.
My tent was empty, as I’d figured it would be. No one could have slept with the ruckus that was going on, and it just wouldn’t have been smart to sack-in with so many drunks on the prowl. I sat down on the edge of my bunk and lighted a cigarette. I smoked it down and part of another, taking an occasional sip from my jake bowl. Giving Wingy plenty of time to lose himself.
I’d gotten a lousy headache; from the noise, I suppose, and fretting over things I couldn’t help. It kept getting worse, and the jake began to do queasy things to my stomach. Finally, I jumped up and started back outside for some fresh air. And Bigger and Doss Long slid through the rear flap of the tent, and brother Longie came through the front.
They pinned me down pretty much as they had that day on the pipeline, Bigger and Doss sitting on either side of me on my bunk, and Longie hunkering down on the bunk in front of me. But there was one big difference between that day on the pipeline and now. Then we’d been out in the open—out in the daylight were everyone could see us and a shout would have brought help. Now, with six hundred men around us, we couldn’t have been more alone, and I could have yelled my lungs out without ever being heard.
“Now, Tommy, boy.…” Longie apparently saw how I felt and grinned reassuringly. “Just a friendly visit, Tommy. How you gettin’ along, anyway?”
“I’m alive,”
I said, “no thanks to you. So maybe you’d just better mope off before I start thinkin’ about it and get sore.”
It was a pretty silly thing to say under the circumstances, and all three of them laughed. In their place, I’d’ve probably laughed, too.
“A real tiger, ain’t he, boys?” Longie chuckled, and Doss and Bigger agreed that I was. “But this is friendly, Tommy. Pure friendly. We been out checkin’ the countryside—gonna have us plenty of checkin’ to do, y’know, after such a long jump—and we just thought we’d drop in for a chat. We figured you’d be lonesome, y’see, an’.…”
“Let’s get it over with,” I said. “What do you want to talk about? How smart you are? How you knew there was going to be a double payday right from the beginning?”
“Huh-uh. We want to talk about trouble, Tommy.”
“Trouble?” I said.
“Trouble,” Longie nodded. “You’re a real smart young fella, Tommy boy. Oh, I know, I teased you a little, but pokin’ fun is just a way of mine. I actually got plenty o’ admiration for you, an’ the boys here will tell you so.”
“We sure will,” Bigger said solemnly.
“It’s God’s truth,” Doss declared. “Ol’ Longie thinks you got a real head on you, Tommy boy, and Longie ain’t never wrong about a man.”
“Right!” Longie said. “Now, you talked pretty sharp t’other night, Tommy; pointed out quite a few things that could go wrong on this little job we’re plannin’. ’Course, it turned out that they ain’t goin’ to go wrong, they’re not the problems you thought they was goin’ to be. But just the same.…How do things look to you now, Tommy, boy?”
