It wasn’t. It was a greasy-spoon hamburger shack beyond the cotton gin on the other side of the street. Smoke, red-laced with flame, boiled out of the rear door and the window while the front of the place was a traffic jam of men trying to get in with hoses and other men trying to fight their way out with tables and chairs and a big jukebox. The street was blocked with swollen white hoses and the one piece of fire-fighting equipment, an old pumper left over from the ‘Twenties, while volunteer firemen ran back and forth carrying axes and yelling at each other. I slowed down, trying to get a better look, but the highway cop waved me on with a furious gesture of his arms, shouting something I couldn’t hear above the uproar and pointing to the cross street detouring around the block.
I went up a couple of blocks and then turned back to the main street again, past the corner where the bank was. It was deserted here. Everybody was down at the other end fighting the fire or just gawking and getting in the way. When I turned in at the lot the other salesman was gone and Harshaw was alone in the office. As I got out I looked at her, wondering if she was going to say anything, but the big eyes were stony and blank, not even seeing me. She was probably scared blue of what I might say to Harshaw but she’d die before she’d plead again. She was a sweet-looking kid taking a beating about something, and suddenly I was ashamed and wanted to apologize.
“Wait—“ I started. She turned her head and looked at me as if I were something crawling out of a cesspool and went on into the office with her back straight.
Harshaw was on the phone when I came in and she was waiting to talk to him. He hung up in a minute and looked across at me.
“You get the car?” he asked.
“No,” I said. I sat down and lighted a cigarette.
“Why not?”
He had a habit of barking like a non-com, and he looked like one, like an old master sergeant with thirty years in. He was stocky and square-faced, around fifty-five, with a mop of iron gray hair, and the frosty gray eyes bored into you from under bushy overhanging brows. There were little tufts of hair in his ears, and he always had a cigar clamped in his mouth or in his hand.
I don’t know why I did it. “Because he paid Miss Harper,” I said.
He grunted. “Just have to do it again next month. The guy’s a dead-beat. What’s afire down there? The gin?”
“No. Hamburger joint across from it.”
“Well, how about hanging around while I go to dinner?”
That burned me a little. I’d wasted the whole morning running an errand for him and now he wanted me to wait around while he went to eat. I got up from the table and started to the door. “Sure,” I said. “As soon as I get back from mine.”
He glared at me. “Maybe you won’t like this job.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Maybe I won’t.”
I went out, and as I started angling across the street she caught up with me, headed for the loan office. She walked alongside, not looking up, and when I glanced around at her the top of that blonde strawstack was just on a level with my eyes.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“Forget it.” I turned at the curb and went on up the sidewalk.
Down the street I could see the smoke still boiling into the sky and the jam of cars and people around the fire engine. The restaurant was deserted, like everything else in this end of town, and when I sat down at the counter the lone waitress hurried up eagerly.
“Are they going to save it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been down there. How’d it start?”
“Somebody said a grease fire in the kitchen.”
“Oh. Well, how’s the grease here? You got a menu?”
She shook her head. “The dinner’s not ready. Cook’s gone to the fire. I could fix you a sandwich, though.”
“Never mind,” I said. “Just a glass of milk and a piece of pie.”
It was awful pie and the crust was like damp cardboard. I wasn’t hungry anyway, because of the heat, and I kept thinking about the girl and the whole crazy thing out there at the oil well. Why was she taking the responsibility for Sutton’s car payments, and why had he looked at her that way? He hadn’t been just taking her clothes off; he was doing it in company, with his face full of that dirty joke of his. The simplest explanation, of course, was that he knew something about her and she didn’t dare take the car away or even try to collect for it. But when I’d tried a little pressure politics myself I got smeared in nothing flat. Why? I gave up, but I couldn’t get rid of her entirely because random parts of her kept poking into my mind, the odd gravity about her eyes, the way she walked, and the way the top of her head reminded you of a kid with sunburned hair. She added up to something I couldn’t quite place, and then I knew what it was—an ad-writer’s picture of The Girl Back Home. For God’s sake, I thought. I got up and pushed some change across the counter and went out. I had to go to the bank.
I still had about two hundred dollars in a bank in Houston which I hadn’t had time to get when I left there, and if I didn’t put through a draft for it right away I’d be going hungry. I had about forty dollars in my pocket. I went up the street in the white sunlight, not meeting anybody and absently watching the confusion down at the other end. A shower of sparks went pin-wheeling upwards in the smoke and I decided the roof of the place must have fallen in at last.
The bank was a little deadfall on the corner, and when I went inside it was dim and a little cooler than the street. It had a couple of tellers’ cages and a desk behind a railing in the rear, but there was nobody in the place—nobody at all. I stood there for a moment looking around, wondering if they operated the place like a serve-yourself market. I went over and looked through the grilles above the cages, thinking somebody might have passed out with a heart attack and be lying on the floor. Money was lying around on the shelf but there was no one in either cage.
Then I heard someone step inside the door behind me. A voice said, “Wheah the fiah, Mister Julian? Heered the sireen and the people a-runnin’ but ain’t nobody tell me wheah the fiah is at.”
I looked around. It was a gaunt, six-foot figure, a Negro, dressed in what looked like the trousers of some kind of lodge uniform and a white T-shirt with a big, frayed straw hat on his head. Then I saw the cane and dark glasses. He was blind.
“I don’t think there’s anybody here, Dad,” I said.
“Mister Julian must be heah. He always heah.”
“Well, damned if I see him.”
“You know wheah the fiah is at?” he asked.
“Yeah. Down the street just this side of the gin. It’s a hamburger shack.”
“Oh. Thank you, Cap’n.” He turned and tapped his way out with the cane.
Just then a door in the rear opened and a man came out, apparently from a washroom. He must have been around sixty and looked like a high-school maths teacher with his vague blue eyes and high forehead with thin white hair.
He smiled apologetically. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting. Everybody’s gone to the fire.”
“No,” I said absently. “No. Not at all.”
He came over and went into one of the cages, and said something.
“What?” I hadn’t been paying attention.
“I said what can I do for you?”
“Oh. I want to open an account.”
I made out the draft and deposited it and went on back to the lot, still thinking about it. Everybody in this town must be fire crazy.
I sold a car that afternoon and felt a little better for a while. I saw Gloria Harper only once, when she came out of the loan office at five o’clock with another girl. She went up the street without looking towards where I was leaning against a car on the lot. We locked up the office a little later and I got in my own car and drove over to the rooming house. It was sultry and oppressive, and after I took a shower and tried to dry myself the fresh underwear kept sticking to my perspiration-wet body. I sat in the room in my shorts and looked out the
window at the back yard as the sun went down. It had a high board fence around it, a little grass turning brown with the heat, and a chinaberry tree with a dirty rabbit hutch leaning against it. This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?
After a while I put on white slacks and a shirt and went down to the restaurant. When I had eaten it was still only seven o’clock, and there was nothing except the drugstore or the movie. I wandered up that way, but it was a Roy Rogers western, so I got in the car and drove around without any thought in mind except staying out of that room as long as I could. Without knowing why, I found myself following the route we’d taken that morning, going over the sandhill past the abandoned farms and down into the bottom.
There was a slice of moon low in the west and when I parked off the road at the end of the bridge the river was a silvery gleam between twin walls of blackness under the trees. I stripped off my clothes and walked down to the sandbar and waded in. The water was a little cooler than the air and went around in a big lazy eddy in the darkness under the bridge. I circled back up the other side and waded out after a while to lie on the sandbar and look up at the stars.
I was still sweltering when I went back to the room. I couldn’t sleep. In the next room an old man was reading aloud to his wife from the Bible, laboring slowly through the Book of Genesis, a begat at a time, and pronouncing it with the accent on the first syllable. I lay there on the hard slab of a bed in the heat and wondered when I’d start walking up the walls. Gloria Harper and Sutton kept going around and around in my mind, and a long time afterwards, just before I dropped off, I came back to that other thing I couldn’t entirely forget. It was that bank with nobody in it.
3
The next morning there was another argument with Harshaw. Just after we opened the office he wanted me to take a cloth and dust off the cars. I was feeling low anyway and told him the hell with it. The other salesman, an older, sallow-faced man named Gulick, got some dust cloths out of a desk drawer and went on out.
Harshaw leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “What’s the matter with you, Madox? You got a grudge against the world?”
“No,” I said. “I’m a salesman. When I want a job cleaning cars I’ll get one.”
“The way you’re going, you may get one sooner than you think. How old are you?”
“Thirty. Why?”
“Well, you haven’t set the world on fire so far or you wouldn’t be here in this place.”
“I wouldn’t argue with you.”
“You can’t sell dirty cars,” he grunted. “You want Gulick to do all the work keeping ‘em clean while you skim off the gravy?”
“I’ll take down my hair,” I said, “and we’ll both cry.” I got off the desk and went outside, disgusted with the argument and with everything. I leaned against a car, smoking a cigarette and watching Gulick work, and after a while I threw the butt savagely out into the street and went over and picked up one of the cloths.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, when I started in on the other side of the car he was working on. “I don’t mind it. I like to keep busy.”
He had sad brown eyes, a little like a hound’s, and his health wasn’t good. The doctors had told him to work outside and he’d have to give up a job as book-keeper.
“How long have you worked for Harshaw?” I asked.
He stopped rubbing for a minute and thought about it. He did everything very slowly and deliberately. “About a year, I reckon.”
“Hard guy to get along with, isn’t he?”
“No-o. I wouldn’t say that. He’s just got troubles, same as anybody.”
“Troubles?”
“Got ulcers pretty bad. And then he’s had a lot of family trouble. Lost his wife a year or so ago, and he’s got a boy that— Well, I guess you’d say he’s just not much good.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah.” He straightened and stretched his back. “I always figure there’s a lot of things can make a man grouchy. He may have troubles you don’t even know any thing about—” He acted as if he intended to say more, and then thought better of it and went back to work.
Harshaw came out of the office a little later and got in one of the cars. “Going out in the country for a while,” he said to Gulick. “Be back around noon.”
It was Friday and there wasn’t much activity along the street. The sun began to get hot. We had only two cars left to dust off when I saw a young Negro in peg-top pants and yellow shoes wander on to the end of the lot and begin circling around an old convertible with a lot of gingerbread on it. He kicked the tires and backed off to look at it.
I nodded to Gulick. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll finish it.”
I watched then as I rubbed off the last car. The Negro tried the big air-horn mounted on a fender, and then they both stood there with their hands in their pockets saying nothing at all. Just then a blue Oldsmobile sedan slid in off the street and stopped in front of the office. There was a woman in it, alone. She tapped the horn.
I walked over. “Good morning. Could I help you?”
The baby-blue eyes regarded me curiously. “Oh, hello,” she said. “I was just looking for George.”
“George?”
“Mr. Harshaw,” she explained. And then she added. “I’m his wife.”
“Oh.” It took a second for that to soak in. Gulick hadn’t said Harshaw had married again. “He said he was going out in the country. I think he’ll be back around noon.” She must be a lot younger, I thought; she couldn’t be over thirty. Somehow she made you think of an overloaded peach tree. She wasn’t a big woman, and she wasn’t fat, but there was no wasted space inside the seersucker suit she had on, especially around the hips and the top of the jacket. Her hair was poodle-cut and ash blonde, and her face had the same luscious and slightly over-ripe aspect as the rest of her. Maybe it was the full lower lip, and the dimples.
“Well, thanks anyway,” she said. Then she smiled. “You must be the new salesman. Mr.—uh—”
“Madox,” I said. “Harry Madox.”
“Oh, yes. George told me about you. Well, I won’t keep you from your work.” She switched on the ignition and pressed the starter button. The motor didn’t take hold the first time and she kept grinding at it. I’d started away, but turned now and came back.
“What do you suppose is the matter?” she asked petulantly.
“I think it’s flooded. Hold the accelerator all the way to the floor while you crank it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Like this?”
I looked in the car. It was stupid, actually, because anybody would know how to press down on the gas to cut out an automatic choke, but I looked anyway. She had very small feet in white shoes which were mostly heels, and around one ankle, under the nylon, she had one of those gold chains women wore a year or so ago. The seersucker skirt was up over her knees. Well, I thought, she asked me to. What did she expect?
“Yes,” I said. “Like that.”
She jabbed at the starter again and in a moment the motor caught and took off. She smiled. “Well. How did you know that?”
“It’s just one of those things you pick up.”
“Oh. I see. Well, thanks a lot.” She waved a hand and drove off.
In about twenty minutes she was back. I was sitting in the office, and when she tapped the horn I went out. “George hasn’t got back yet?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Oh, darn. He never remembers anything.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
She hesitated. “I hate to ask you. I mean, you’re working.”
“I’m not hurting myself. What is it?”
“Well, if you really wouldn’t mind. It’d only take a few minutes.” She gestured towards the rear of the car. “I’ve got a lot of papers and old clothes I want to unload in our storeroom, and I promised to take the key back before noon.”
“Sure,” I said, “where is it?”
�
��Are you sure it’ll be all right to leave for a few minutes?”
“Yes. Gulick can hold it down.” I looked up the lot. He and the Negro boy were still rooted in the same spot, staring at the old convertible. It’s like a horse trade, I thought; it’ll be hours before either of them makes a move.
I slid in beside her and we started down Main Street. “It’s awful nice of you,” she said. “The stuff is tied up in heavy packages, and I couldn’t carry it by myself.”
“What is it?” I asked. “A junk drive?”
“Uh-uh. It’s our club project. We store the stuff in Mr. Taylor’s old building and every two or three months a junk man comes and buys the paper. We sort out the clothes and send bundles.”
That’s nice, I thought. They send bundles. Well, maybe it keeps them off the streets. We went down a block beyond the bank and turned right into a cross street which was only a couple of blocks long. There wasn’t much here after you got off the main drag. A small chain grocery stood on the corner, and beyond that there was a Negro juke joint covered with Coca-Cola signs. She went on up to the second block and stopped in front of a building on the right. It was a boxlike two-storey frame with glass show-windows in front and vacant lots full of dead brown weeds on both sides. You could still see the lettering “TAYLOR HARDWARE” on the windows, but they were fly-specked and dirty and the place was vacant, and the door was closed with a big padlock. A “FOR RENT” sign leaned against the glass down in one corner. We got out and she fished around in her bag for the key. Standing up, she wasn’t as tall as the Harper girl and had none of her long-legged, easy grace, but she was stacked smoothly and twelve to the dozen against the contoured retaining-wall of her clothes.
She went around and opened the trunk of the car. “I expect it’ll take two trips,” she said.
I glanced in. There were two bundles of old newspapers and magazines tied up with cord, and a lot of loose clothes. I hefted the papers. They weren’t over fifty or seventy-five pounds each, so I gathered them up and asked her to stuff the old clothes under my arms.
She looked up at me with a kittenish smile. “Well, goodness, I expect to carry something myself. I don’t look that puny, do I?”
Hell Hath No Fury Page 2
