by Jim Thompson
I took all the old cards with me, tearing them up on the way home.
Thus, I finished high school. Just before, figuratively speaking, I was finished.
I hadn’t been home an hour when the good feeling rushed from me like water rushing down a drain. Then, after a long moment of absolute emptiness, my heart stuttered and raced, beating faster and faster until one beat overlapped the other. Blood gushed from my mouth and I fell to the floor in convulsions.
Doctors came, although I was unaware of their presence. They administered to me wonderingly. I was eighteen years old, and I had a complete nervous collapse, pulmonary tuberculosis and delirium tremens.
23
From a purely medical standpoint, I should have died. In fact, I should have been dead long before. I seemed to be completely drained of physical resistance. Well over six feet tall, I weighed less than a hundred and ten pounds. And a good part of that weight, in the doctors’ estimation, appeared to be scar tissue. My kidneys were bruised. My ribs floated. My skull had been fractured in three places. I had an incipient rupture. My shoulders were sprained so that the arms did not articulate properly in their sockets. My knuckles had been “knocked down,” my fingers broken. Nothing about me was as it should be, physically speaking. As the doctors saw it, I had nothing with which to battle the diseases from which I was suffering.
Fortunately for me, I come from very rugged stock. On both sides of the family, my ancestors were a tough, stubborn people. Migrating from England to Ireland to Holland and thence to America, they drifted westward from Pennsylvania—after the revolution against King George—and the farther west they went, the tougher and more stubborn they seemed to get. They regarded illness and injury as annoyances, and succumbing to them, weakness. Many had died violent deaths, few of any infirmity but old age.
So, while I was bedfast for several months, I lived. Because the will-to-live was bred into me. Because I was too stubborn to die.
My illness, and the financial crisis it precipitated, was not without its bright side. It forced us to do things which we should have done long before. We gave up our home and its furnishings, and moved into a rented house in a working-class neighborhood. Thus, we were simultaneously freed of oppressive interest payments and the necessity of maintaining “face” among people who had known us when.
We could live on half the amount we had formerly spent. We were free forever from our most avaricious and persistent creditors. Pop worried less and was able to move about more freely. He made several fast lease deals which, though small, were enough to keep us going.
After a convalescence of some four months, I was able to be up and about, taking care of myself instead of being taken care of. But I was still very weak and thin, and the doctors were not at all pleased with the state of my lungs. I would never recover, in their opinion, in the low, damp climate of Fort Worth. I belonged in a high and dry altitude, and the quicker I got to it the better.
So, early one morning, I stood at the edge of the highway on the outskirts of Fort Worth, one arm supporting an up-stretched thumb, the other clutching a small bundle. There was a change of clothing in it, toothbrush and razor, a nickel tablet and pencils. That was about all.
A car stopped. The driver swung the door open, and I climbed in.
“Where you going, kid?”
“West,” I said.
“How far?”
“A long ways. I don’t know exactly.”
“Lookin’ for work? What kinda line you in?”
“I’m a writer,” I said. And somehow my voice rose. “I’m a writer!”
“Sure, now,” he said, amiably. “Sure you are.”
We sped down the highway, and the sun rose behind us, warm, friendly, gentle, silvering the long asphalt ribbon to the west.
I spent more than three years in West and Far West Texas. A bum and casual laborer at first, an itinerant but solvent worker later. In the beginning, I thought it one of the most desolate areas of the world, populated by the world’s most arrogant and high-handed people. Only harsh necessity kept me there. As time went on, however, I came to love the vast stretches of prairie, rolling emptily toward the horizon. There was peace in the loneliness, calm and reassurance. In this virgin vastness, virtually unchanged by the assaults of a hundred million years, troubles seemed to shrink and hope loomed large. Everything would go on, one knew, and man would go on with it. Disappointment and difficulty were only way stops on the road to a happy destination.
As for the West Texans, I became every bit as fond of them as I was of the land they lived in. They were not quite so much arrogant, I found, as plain-spoken. Their first say-so on a subject was also their last one. They said what they meant—whether painful or pleasant—and they meant what they said. No snub was implied by silence. It meant only that the West Texan concerned had nothing to say.
One day, a few weeks after leaving Fort Worth, I went into a store in the then village of Big Springs to buy a work shirt. The proprietor tossed one on the counter. The price, he said, was two dollars and fifty cents.
“What?” I exclaimed. “Two-fifty for just a plain blue work shirt?”
“You want it?” he asked.
“Well, no. I can’t pay—”
“Reckon we’re kind of wastin’ time, then,” he said, casually, and he tossed the shirt back on the shelf.
Red-faced, my ears burning, I turned and walked away.
I had reached the door when he called to me, still in that casually indifferent tone. I hesitated, then I turned around and went back.
“What price shirt was you lookin’ for, bub?” he said. “Somethin’ about a dollar?”
“About that,” I nodded. “But—”
“Think I got one left. Yeah, here it is.”
He took it off the shelf—the two-fifty shirt—and began wrapping it up. “How about some pants?” he said. “That pair you got on is just about the most ragged-assed I ever seen.”
I laughed unwillingly. “I guess not. They’re pretty bad all right, but—”
“Call it a dollar for the shirt and pants,” he said. “What size you wear, bub?”
He wrapped the two garments, tossed them to me and raised his hand in an indifferent salute. I thanked him, telling him I would be in to pay what I owed as soon as I could.
“Glad to see you, bub,” he nodded. “Don’t owe me nothin’, though.”
“But the shirt alone was—”
“It and the pants was one buck. I set my own prices, bub. Don’t need no one to help me.”
“Well, I—I see,” I said.
“So long,” he said, and without another word he slouched back to the rear of the store.
Thus, your typical West Texan—a man who might give you a mile but who would not give in to you an inch. They seldom smiled, those West Texans, and I don’t recall ever hearing one laugh. Yet they had a wonderful sense of humor. Their wit was of a dry, back-handed sort, based on anti-exaggeration and understatement—delightful once you understood it, baffling and even a little terrifying to an outsider.
One of my earlier positions was as a “sweater” in an oil field gambling house. A sweater, as you may know, is one grade above a bum—a person tolerated by the management for making himself useful to the customers. He is allowed to sleep on the dice tables at night. Now and then, when he hustles a round of drinks or sandwiches, the players toss him a chip. The job is obviously a precarious one, and the man who holds it is usually the possessor of a large thirst. Hence, he is in a more or less constant state of anxiety. Figuratively, and often literally, he sweats.
This place was about twenty miles out of the county seat of Big Springs, and late one night it was raided by a party of deputy sheriffs. Players and house employees resisted furiously. The lights were shot out, and bullets, bludgeons and bottles crashed and thudded in the darkness. Unable to see who was whom, everyone began an indiscriminate slugging of everyone else.
I crawled behind the bar and eventually made my
way out to the roof and down to the ground. Here I was grabbed by an old rancher who was loading his ancient touring car with casualties from the brawl.
“Give me a hand with these fellas, slim boy,” he said. “Gotta get ’em in town to a doctor.”
I demurred, at first, feeling more than a little shaky. But the rancher had thoughtfully “borried” a quantity of potables from the bar, and being liberally refreshed with these I soon fell to with a will.
We piled the combatants into the car, my companion merrily insisting that there was always room for one more, and roared off toward town.
The road was a former cow path, now deeply rutted by trucks and filled with sinkholes and washouts. As the car bounced and sailed into the air, landing with bone-breaking violence, groans arose from our cargo.
The rancher frowned with annoyance. He increased his speed, and the groans increased. They became yells, shrieks, curses. Some of the awfullest profanity I have ever heard filled the night.
Grimly, my friend emptied the bottle he had been drinking from and handed it to me. “Bunch o’ dirty mouths,” he scowled. “Give ’em what for, slim boy. Make ’em quiet down.”
“Oh, I don’t think I’d better,” I said. “After all, they’re hurt.”
“Fellas that yells that loud ain’t hurt much. Give ’em somethin’ to fuss about!”
“But they’re cops, deputy sheriffs. They’ll—”
“Huh!” He slammed on the brakes. “I thought they was sportin’ fellas!”
Grumbling angrily, he took a shotgun from the floor boards of the car and climbed out. Sternly, he ordered the thoroughly revived deputies to unload.
They did so. He lined them up in front of the headlights of the car, examined them briefly and declared them physically fit.
“Danged ornery coyotes,” he said, bitterly. “Buttin’ in on a nice friendly game! Takin’ advantage of a pore ol’ man what can’t see good! I’ll learn you, by gadfrey. You want to get to town, start walkin’!”
It was ten miles into town, a greater distance perhaps than many of the saddle-born, boot-shod deputies had walked in their entire lives. Moreover, as one of them pointed out, it was almost impossible to see where one was walking.
“Hadn’t ought to do this to us, Jeb,” he protested. “A dark night like this a fella’s liable to step spang onto a rattlesnake.”
“Don’t give a dang if you do,” the rancher retorted. “Never liked rattlesnakes nohow!”
We left them there on the prairie, and drove back for a load of gamblers. More than three hours later, we passed the deputies as they limped into the outskirts of Big Springs.
Fearing repercussions, I was not very conspicuous around the gambling hall for the ensuing week. But my trepidation seemed unwarranted. The deputies dropped in for drinks and a hand of cards, amiably admitting their error in raiding the place. “Just plumb bit off more’n we could chew,” they said. “Didn’t have no idee they’d be so many o’ you fellas around.” Their attitude was, generally, that they had perpetrated a joke which had backfired on them.
And exactly two weeks from the date of the first raid, they raided the place again.
One man was killed in attempting to escape. Two others were critically wounded. Then, with the remaining habitués under arrest, the deputies took axes and chopped the gambling hall into kindling. All this quite casually—as politely as circumstances would permit. They had taken the joke that was played on them. Now, they were returning it.
Fortunately, I had stopped “sweating” the night before and was not among those present.
24
My new job was with a salvage contractor, a man who bought abandoned derricks and dismantled them for their lumber. It was quite a profitable business, lumber being a high-priced commodity in the plains areas, and he paid his employees well. But none of them worked for him very long. Those who did not have the good sense to quit when they saw what was required of them inevitably fell victim to the laws of gravity.
I was put next to the job by a character named Strawlegs, a one-time banjo player and an all-time dipsomaniac. He brushed over the nature of the work lightly, emphasizing only the money to be made. But even had I known nothing of the oil fields—and I knew quite a bit—I would have known that the job was dangerous.
“You’re dead wrong,” Strawlegs insisted, “and I’ll prove it to you. Grab ahold of that porch roof, there. That’s right, pull your feet up. Now, you’re all right, aren’t you? You can do it, can’t you?”
“But I’m only a few inches off the ground.”
“What’s the difference, as long as you don’t let go? It wouldn’t be any harder if you were a few feet up.”
“Or a hundred and ten,” I suggested sardonically.
Well, I took the job, needing money badly. And Strawlegs, who was then the contractor’s only other employee, received fifty dollars for recruiting me.
My survival, during the subsequent several weeks, can only be credited to a miracle.
We would climb to the top of a derrick, lugging tools and ropes with us. Then, perched more than a hundred feet in the air, we would weave ropes through the crown block, and swing off into space. The ropes could not be tied around us, of course. They were wrapped around our waists in a half-hitch which we snubbed with our feet.
We would swing down to the first crosspieces, get a lowering rope around them, and knock and pry them loose at one end. Then, we would swing over to the other end, hang on with one hand and knock and pry with the other, eventually lowering the lumber to the ground.
There are four sides to a derrick, of course. Strawlegs and I each took two, always careful to work opposite each other. In this way, neither side became weaker than the others, and the great tower did not immediately react to the loss of its bracing. It was not until you were about a third of the way down, a mere eighty feet or so above the sagebrush and cactus, that weird and frightening things began to happen.
The giant legs of the derrick would start shivering, first one, then another, until they were all shivering in unison. Then, with ominous gentleness, one side would lean forward and the other backward, swinging you in through the tower or swaying you out of it. And just when you were sure that it was going to topple, carrying you with it, it would straighten again and lean over another way. When it wasn’t shivering it was leaning, and when it wasn’t leaning it was dancing, shimmying in a crazy catercornered way. Finally, as you neared the bottom, it was doing all three. There was virtually nothing to hold the huge beams in place, and they showed their freedom with such a wild swaying and pitching that it was all one could do to hold on.
Usually, we did not take out the last crosspieces. As the contractor put it, there was no use in taking chances.
We slid down past them, scurried out of the tower and cut the guy wires on one side. Then we ran, and the tall timber skeleton collapsed with an earth-shaking crash.
Because the work was always a long ways from town, Strawlegs and I usually lived on the job, setting up batch in the inevitable tool shed. Now and then, however, we had to or felt we had to go into Big Springs. And on one such occasion we got involved in a donnybrook. I can’t say how it started, and I doubt that any of the other participants could. It was just one of those things that happen when too many men get too much to drink. Anyway, Strawlegs got a fractured skull out of it and had to be taken to a hospital, and I got knocked through a plateglass window.
A party of deputies began collaring the miscreants. One of them laid hands on me and hustled me toward his car.
“But I haven’t done anything!” I said, not too truthfully. “You think I like getting knocked through windows?”
“Shoulda aimed yourself better,” he said. “Ought to been ziggin’ when you was zaggin’.”
“That’s not very damned funny,” I said. “I get—”
“And that’s a fact,” he nodded soberly. “You wanta move or you want me to move you?”
I was fined eighteen dollars
for disturbing the peace. Then, much to my amazement, I was given three days to pay up and released without bond.
I passed the deputy on the way out of the courthouse. “See you soon,” he said.
“Sure, you’ll see me all right,” I said.
“I’ll see you,” he said. “And that’s a fact.”
The derrick we were working on was forty miles from town. It had been erected more than ten years before, and the trail to it was so overgrown and eroded that it was practically impossible to see, let alone traverse. Even the contractor had lost his way several times, and wound up in another county. It was spring-breaking, low-gear going for a stout truck.
I was sure that the deputy would never find the trail, nor get to the end of it if he did find it.
The morning of the fourth day arrived. The contractor was off scouting another job. Strawlegs was still in the hospital. I was up in the derrick, rigging the ropes and removing shivs from the crown block, when a car came over the horizon. It was listing to one side, steam pluming from the radiator, and it clattered deafeningly.
It stopped fifty yards or so away, and the deputy got out. He waved to me, then sauntered up to the derrick floor, teetering in his high-heeled boots.
“Howdy,” he called upward, and waited. “Dropped around to see your buddy yesterday. Said to tell you he was feeling fine.”
I stared down at him. Finally, I found my voice. “Have a nice ride?”
“Tol’able. Left town last night.”
“Well, here I am,” I said. “Come on and get me.”
“Ain’t in no hurry. Just as soon rest a spell.”
“Why don’t you shoot me?” I said. “I’m a pretty desperate criminal.”
“Ain’t got no gun.” He grinned up at me lazily. “Never seen much sense in shooting. And that’s a fact.”
He stretched out on the derrick floor and put his hands under his head. He closed his eyes.
