Bad Boy

by Jim Thompson

  “Carry the car. Grab onto it!”

  Well, we carried it, the right side of it, that is. With Strawlegs and I at the front wheel, elevating the heavier section, and Bragg at the rear, we lugged the car the ten miles into town.

  Strawlegs and I were more dead than alive when we got there. But, with Bragg prodding and threatening us, we managed to get the old Ford into a junk yard. The proprietor gave us ten dollars for it, distributing the money himself so that Strawlegs and I got our share.

  This was not Bragg’s idea of a fair way to divide things, but there was not much he could do about it. There were hundreds of pipeliners in town, men we had known from the last job. He could not get tough with us without becoming painfully involved with them. Moreover, I think he saw that he had pushed us just about as far as he could and that he would either have to kill or be killed if he didn’t leave us alone.

  So, he parted from us, with many curses and threats, and we never saw him again, neither in town or out of it. The pipeline job was not nearly so imminent as it had been rumored to be, and I imagine he decided not to wait for it.

  With no work immediately available in Rankin, Strawlegs and I caught a ride to McCamey. An orchestra was winding up its engagement in the town, and Strawlegs had known the leader in better days. The latter offered him a job as a banjo player, and, at my urging, he took it. It meant the parting of the ways for us, of course, but that parting was not too far off at best. Certainly, I did not intend to tramp through the oil fields any longer than I had to.

  Strawlegs was a very good banjo player, as, if you have guessed his right name, you know. He was also a very good little guy. On the last night of the orchestra’s engagement in McCamey, he met me outside the dance hall and pressed his earnings to date upon me.

  “You’ll need this before you find work,” he insisted. “Anyway, you’ve got it coming to you.”

  He then revealed that he had gotten fifty dollars from the derrick-salvaging contractor for recruiting me. So, seeing him conscience-stricken over the deed and greatly concerned for my welfare, I took the money and we said goodbye.

  The hiring office for the projected pipeline was at Rankin, but construction of the line was to begin near the town of Iran, extending from there to the Gulf of Mexico. I went there, finding no work in McCamey and a hundred men for every job in Rankin.

  Iran was far Far West Texas—a handful of false front buildings and a few dozen people dropped down in the middle of nowhere. The town had once been the center of a shallow oil field, but now there was almost no drilling activity. It existed largely as a stop on the stage lines west and as a trading post for ranchers.

  Obviously, the residents had little for themselves, but what little they had they shared. They were a more sharply drawn version, an emphasized extension of their brethren West Texans. I was so touched by their kindness and reluctant to impose upon it that I stayed outside of town as much as possible.

  With a few cans of food, coffee, flour and salt pork, I “jungled up” on a table rock overlooking the Pecos River, cooking in a lard can, sleeping with my back to a low fire. I was safe there from the rattlesnakes and other poisonous creatures which infested the area. Now and then at night I had brief spells of delirium tremens—a recurrent form which sometimes afflicts a person long after he has stopped drinking—but they were never severe. Almost as soon as I started yelling, the illusion of things crawling over me vanished.

  I wrote a great deal during the days—vignettes, sketches of people I had met. Most of what I wrote I tore up. I passed the days writing, thinking, swimming in the river, eating and sleeping. So the long summer waned, and fall came.

  Construction on the pipeline began. I was given the job of guarding it at night.

  I don’t know why. There was nothing about me that would have intimidated the most timid malefactor, and I had never fired a gun in my life.

  27

  A few years ago, before I began to fight back at booze instead of merely fighting it, I was a patient in a West Coast sanitarium for alcoholics. I had become a habitué of such places, as had many of my fellow patients. By way of whiling away the time, we took turns at relating the horrific adventures which alcohol had gotten us into.

  One man—an actor—had inadvertently crawled into the Pullman berth occupied by a heavyweight fighter and his wife.

  A reporter had bedded down in a garbage wagon and was dumped into a penful of hungry hogs.

  A writer, gripped by a fit of vomiting, had become lodged head and shoulders in a toilet seat and had to be extricated with crowbars.

  One of the best, or, at least, the funniest stories was told by a Hollywood director, a sad-eyed little man who was given to spells of extreme melancholia.

  For years, when he reached a certain stage of saturation, he would telephone the newspapers and announce that he was about to commit suicide. He really meant to when he made the calls, but by the time the reporters arrived he was always out of the notion.

  The reporters and photographers became very irritated with him. The least he could do, they declared, was to scratch himself up a little or take a few too many sleeping pills, or do something they could make a story out of.

  But the director adamantly resisted their pleadings and cursings and jeerings. Scratch himself? Horrors! He might get an infection. Sleeping pills? Never! They gave him a stomach-ache.

  Now, the local reporters always had more than their fill of Hollywood characters, and this guy seemed to be a little too much to bear. They couldn’t ignore him. He was an important man, and there was always the chance that he might decide to go through—or partly through—with his threat.

  Every newspaper man in town was burned up with him. Along toward the last, the desk men were conversing with him somewhat as follows:

  “Now, Bob, you’ve disappointed us very badly. I’m afraid we can’t believe you any more unless you give us at least a little evidence of good faith.”

  “I will!” the director would sob. “Honestly, I will. I know I haven’t done the right thing by you boys, but I’m going to make up for it now.”

  “Well”—the editor would hesitate fretfully—“I’ll give you one more chance to make good.”

  The director summoned them late one night, deciding as usual, after they arrived, that neither death nor its approaches seemed attractive. But before the first trembling syllables passed his lips, the reporters grabbed him.

  Cackling with insane glee, they begged him not to hang himself. “Don’t do it, old friend! Please don’t hang yourself!” they shouted. And they removed the cord from his robe and knotted it about his neck.

  The reporters stood him up on the end of the bed and tied the cord to the chandelier.

  They jerked the bed from beneath him.

  The chandelier came loose from its moorings. The director landed on the floor and it landed on top of him. Stunned as he was, he retained enough sense to scramble under the bed and stay there.

  “Of course, they didn’t intend to actually hang me,” he explained, relating the story. “But they did want me strung up long enough to get a picture. And I’ll bet those heartless, cold-blooded bastards would have torn down every chandelier in the house to get one!”

  The newspaper men spent some time in trying to drag him from beneath the bed. But seeing that he remained obdurate and elusive, and in view of the fact that they had accomplished their purpose of teaching him a lesson, they finally left.

  The director emerged into the open.

  He wasn’t really hurt, but in his dazed and drunken condition he saw himself at death’s door. He telephoned for an ambulance. The vehicle arrived and he was loaded in. It sped away again, eventually coming to a long hill. About halfway up the incline, the back doors flew open and the director flew out.

  He shot down the hill on the wheeled stretcher. (“I was strapped to the goddamned thing.”) By the time he neared the bottom, he was traveling at a really awesome speed. The stretcher swerved suddenly a
nd leaped the ditch. It crashed through a barbed wire fence, ploughed through a fruit orchard and came to rest finally more than a hundred yards from the highway.

  The director got the straps unloosened and staggered back to the road. His pajamas in tatters, and much of his epidermis as well, he limped back to his house.

  “I looked like a walking pile of hamburger,” he said. “There wasn’t a spot on me that wasn’t black and blue or bleeding. Naturally, I called the newspapers to give them the story of my terrifying experience. They told me to drop dead. I called the hospital. I was going to have them verify the story to the newspapers. They told me to drop dead, too. You see, these bastardly ambulance attendants had lied about me. It scared hell out of them when they saw I was missing, so they picked the stretcher up out of that field and told the hospital authorities that I had refused to leave the house.

  “It didn’t mean a thing that I was virtually cut to ribbons. Drunks are always messing themselves up. So there I was with the biggest story that ever came out of Hollywood, and I couldn’t get a damned line in the newspapers. That was the last time I committed suicide. There just wasn’t any point to it. Those suspicious bastards wouldn’t give me a write-up if I did kill myself!”

  I had no adventures which would top that one, but I recounted a couple, anyway. One occurred on the pipeline, as an outgrowth of my recurrent d.t.’s. The other…

  …I had gone north to enroll at the University of Nebraska. I had had to leave Texas very hastily—for reasons I will reveal later—and I needed work immediately. I tried the two newspapers in Lincoln (the site of the university). I tried the university press and the branches of two syndicates. Finally, I tried a farm paper. And here the two young assistant editors, instead of delivering the fast brush-off I had gotten elsewhere, looked upon me as though I were something good to eat. They gave me the best chair in the office. They pressed cigarettes upon me. They beamed and cooed over me, nodding significantly to one another.

  I should say that I was very well dressed. The hotel had expected its employees to dress well, and I had never regarded good clothes as a luxury. I had on a hundred and fifty dollar suit and thirty-five dollar shoes. An imported topcoat was slung over my arm, and I had pigskin gloves in one hand and a forty-dollar Borsalino hat in the other.

  So the editors looked at me and each other, and they thought it “highly possible” that they could give me a job. Not right at the moment but—

  “You’re enrolling in the College of Agriculture, of course?”

  “Good God, no,” I laughed. “I’m going to go into liberal arts. Why would a guy who wants to be a writer go to—?”

  The editors started talking to me. No one, but positively no one, enrolled in liberal arts any more. A B.A. degree had as little academic standing as a diploma from a barber college. The thing to shoot for was a B.Sc. in agriculture. There was a terrific demand for writers who knew agriculture. The government was snatching them up as fast as they graduated. There were splendid openings on farm periodicals. Why, take their own case, for example. They were ag college seniors, and already they had these excellent jobs.

  They insisted that I go out to “the house” for dinner to discuss the matter.

  Well, I knew nothing of such things. I supposed that a bunch of them were keeping batch at this “house” they spoke of. It dawned on me, as we went up the walk of the splendid edifice, that I had made a mistake. But I didn’t know how to get out of it. I still didn’t know, hours later, after I had been wined and dined and talked to so much by so many that my head was swimming.

  It was the traditional fraternity “rush” and it rushed me right off my feet. They pledged me to the house. They enrolled me in the College of Agriculture. And that was the beginning of one of the most God-awful periods in my harried and exasperating career.

  The students were assumed to have a sound general knowledge of farming which I didn’t have. I had been too young during my several years on farms to learn anything. Furthermore, my hatred of cows was so great that I detested practically everything connected with farming.

  My “brothers” could get me no jobs, naturally. I had to get my own, and plenty of them, to keep up my fraternity assessments. The brothers had all they could do, and then some, to keep me from flunking out.

  They didn’t mind losing my company, understand, they could have done very well without that. But the house treasury couldn’t afford to lose the income which I represented. They had to keep me in the fraternity, hence they had to keep me from flunking.

  Like most fraternities, the house had exhaustive files of examination papers, extending back for decades. There were also files on the various faculty members, complete dossiers of their likes, dislikes and eccentricities. So, while one group of brothers worked on me, another turned the heat on my instructors. Wherever they went, the poor devils were surrounded by earnest young men pleading my cause so persistently and insistently that it was impossible to say no to them.

  There was one man, however, who did say no—loudly, emphatically and repeatedly. He was a little Italian, an exchange professor in pathology, and he had been sore at me ever since I had dropped my fountain pen into a sixty-pound churn of butter. He said that since it was impossible to dissect me (which he really wanted to do), the next best thing was to flunk me.

  He was a hard guy, but the brothers had dealt with these tough babies before. And when, as promised, he flunked me on the mid-term final, they gave him the works. The entire membership of the fraternity turned the heat on him.

  The house was powerful on the campus, and the result of the “works” was nothing less than astounding. The professor’s mildest jokes in class were greeted with wildly appreciative laughter. His most inane remarks were applauded as pearls of wisdom. He was literally carried about the campus by a horde of young men whose admiration for him was equaled only by their praise of Italy.

  The professor began to weaken. They gave him the “killer punch.” He was made the guest of honor at a house dinner, and every brother stood up, one at a time, and sang his praises for a minimum of ten minutes.

  At midnight they chauffeured him home, so flushed with pleasure that his face looked like a beet. And when the escorting party returned, I was informed that I was “in.” I was to be given a new examination on the morrow, and I would be certain to pass it.

  The news obviously called for a celebration, and we had one. I had a terrific hangover the next morning when I presented myself to the professor.

  He was all smiles and mysterious grimaces. Wiggling his eyebrows significantly, he whispered that we would go downtown for the examination. “A ver’ fine place, I know,” he giggled. “A frien’, he has so kin’ly let me use it. Here, where there ees so mooch pipples—”

  I had never been able to understand him well—one of the many reasons he had disliked me—but I thought I saw his point. It was Saturday, and a great many students were around. If anything unorthodox was to be done, it was best to do it elsewhere.

  We went downtown to a building largely occupied by governmental agencies. At the tenth floor, we walked down the dark corridor to a door near the end. There was no sign on it except an abbreviation as incomprehensible in my fuzzy state as it was uninteresting, and an arrow indicating that the entrance proper was elsewhere. The professor unlocked the door and waved me inside.

  The shades were drawn and the room was quite dark. Judging by the heavy leather chairs and the rows of glass-shelved bookcases it was some kind of law office. He led me into an adjoining room, equipped only with a table and several chairs, and turned on the light.

  “Ver’ nice, yes?” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Zis way there is no complaint. You pass examination—ver’ steef. You do it, I do not’ing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s right.”

  “I lock doors so ees no distorbance. Two hours, yes, I come back.”

  He left by the door of the other room. I unlimbered the pint of whiskey in my pocket a
nd had a hair of the dog. Sitting down at the table, I took out the list of examination questions.

  And I almost fell out of my chair.

  I didn’t know what had happened—whether he had overestimated my abilities or given me the wrong set of questions, or whether he had decided to play a cruel joke on the brothers and me. But I knew I could never pass this examination. I didn’t know the answer to a single question.

  I took another long drink, trying to think. I took two more drinks. If I could get in touch with the house, put one of the brothers to work on the cram file—

  I looked around the room. I glanced into the other one. No telephone and the doors were locked. I paced back and forth fretfully, too worried to give the professor the cursing he deserved.

  I raised the shade and the window, and looked out.

  The room faced on a court. Cater-cornered to my window, some five feet away, was another. It was glazed and only raised a few inches, so I could not see what it opened into. But it seemed to me it should be a corridor.

  I studied it thoughtfully, raising the bottle again. I came to a decision.

  I couldn’t jump or step across to that window, but it would be an easy fall-over—a trick I had learned in my derrick-salvaging days. If I didn’t make it, of course, if I should slip or miss—

  But I had done harder fall-overs before and almost as high up, high enough up to be fatal if I had fallen. Height didn’t mean anything in itself. A trick could be done as easily at a hundred feet as at ten.

  I climbed out on the ledge, crouching. I straightened until I was almost erect. Feet braced, arms outstretched, I let myself fall.

  There was a split second when I was holding on with nothing but my heels, staring down into empty space. Then, my hands smacked down on the wooden base of the window and my fingers gripped the inside.

  I raised my head and peered in.

  It wasn’t a corridor but a restroom. I was looking at an angle into one of the stalls. An elderly woman—a char apparently—was seated on the toilet.