Career in C Major: And Other Fiction

by James M. Cain

  MR. WADE

  Me neither.

  MR. MUKENS

  Me neither.

  MR. LERCH [to Mr. Yost]

  When you go, which it wouldn’t hurt the county none if you went pretty quick, what difference does it make to you whether you get buried or what you call cremated?

  MR. YOST

  I hear a lot of them say they don’t want to get burnt up.

  MR. LERCH

  Why? Just tell me that once.

  MR. YOST

  Some of them is Seven Day Adventists.

  MR. WADE

  How many of them is Seven Day Adventists?

  MR. YOST

  There’s a whole lot of them Seven Day Adventists. I’m a Seven Day Adventist.

  MR. WADE [to Mr. Lerch]

  Is that right?

  MR. LERCH

  Well, it’s according as according. Sometimes more of them gets committed than other times.

  MR. WADE

  That kind of makes it bad.

  MR. LERCH

  Yes, that’s a fact, Mr. Wade, I’ve kind of thought of that myself, that makes it bad. But I say, just because them people thinks they’re going to step out of the grave in a couple of years, that ain’t hardly no reason for the county to spend ten thousand dollars a year burying ’em. Maybe they’re going to step out of the grave and maybe they ain’t.

  MR. MUKENS

  That there is something nobody can tell.

  MR. YOST

  And then I hear a lot of talk going around, them people ain’t going to have no white gown.

  MR. LERCH

  There ain’t nothing to that, Mr. Wade. All them people gets a white gown. Ain’t no fancy gown, but we don’t put them away without no clothes on.

  MR. YOST

  But the gown it gets burned up in that there furnace just like this here jawbone.

  MR. LERCH

  That jawbone didn’t get burned up. You got it in your hand.

  MR. YOST

  I ain’t got the rest of that stiff in my hand. That I ain’t.

  MR. WADE

  Is them preachers Seven Day Adventists?

  MR. LERCH

  I believe they are, Mr. Wade.

  MR. YOST

  Them preachers is raising hell, too.

  MR. LERCH

  You been talking to them preachers, too, have you? First you talk to the paper men, then you talk to the preachers.

  MR. YOST

  I never knowed they was paper men.

  MR. WADE

  Them Seven Day Adventists makes it bad. Course, it don’t make no difference to me. I say if they get put away Christian, that’s all anybody could ask.

  MR. LERCH

  That’s all anybody could ask, Mr. Wade. And them people gets put away as Christian as I ever hope to get put away. Mr. Mukens prays over every one, and Mr. Mukens can put up as good a prayer as the next one, if you ask me. Even this man can tell you Mr. Mukens can put up a good prayer.

  MR. YOST

  He prays pretty good, but he ain’t no regular preacher. Not what them people wants for a regular preacher. I hear a lot of talk going on about it.

  MR. WADE

  What I’m figuring on is what to tell the County Commissioners. Them papers has stirred up such a fuss we got to take action on it.

  MR. LERCH

  Well, I tell you how it is, Mr. Wade, it don’t make no difference to me, one way or the other. Fact of the matter is, it’ll save me and Mr. Mukens a whole lot of work. It ain’t no light job, carrying them stiffs downstairs like we have to do. But what I say is, if the commissioners think them Seven Day Adventists had ought to be buried regular, why, just let the commissioners give me the money and I’ll bury them regular and put them other people away the way we been doing.

  MR. MUKENS

  That seems to be perfectly fair and reasonable.

  MR. WADE

  That there would certainly satisfy them people down in the lower end of the county. Them people is all Seven Day Adventists. What I’m thinking about is the other sections of the county. Maybe we’ll get ’em all stirred up.

  MR. LERCH

  I don’t think you would, Mr. Wade. When you come to these other people that gets committed, why, nobody don’t know what their religion is. They don’t know theirself.

  MR. WADE

  Well, I guess we better do it that way then. I’ll call the commissioners in special meeting, and then we can stop all this fuss in the papers. Will you take this man back with you?

  MR. LERCH

  That I will, Mr. Wade. And thank you for the way you treated me in this here matter. I sure do appreciate it. Because what I say, when a man has done his duty like I have ever since I been down there, why, he kind of hates to see somebody come out and say he ain’t no account and ought to be run out, like of that. I sure do appreciate the way you done, Mr. Wade.

  MR. MUKENS

  Mr. Wade, I just want to say that you treated me and Mr. Lerch white about this, and if there’s ever a time I can return the favor, why just let me know.

  MR. YOST

  Thank you, sir, Mr. Wade, thank you, sir. And I never knowed them was paper men, Mr. Wade, I hope Christ may kill me if I did.

  MR. WADE

  Good day, gentlemen.

  Don’t Monkey with Uncle Sam

  The Twentieth Century Limited. In the club car, as it draws near Chicago, sit three men, dressed in a blue suit, a brown suit, and a gray suit, staring out at the shore of Lake Michigan.

  THE BLUE: Won’t be long now.

  THE BROWN: About twenty minutes, if we’re on time. Great town.

  THE BLUE: None like it.

  THE BROWN: That’s right. Some of them knock Chicago, but there’s one thing they got to hand it: It’s not like any of the others.

  THE BLUE: Look at that.

  THE BROWN: Lake’s pretty, this time of year.

  THE BLUE: I don’t mean the lake. Didn’t you see it? Old campaign poster. “Bill the Builder.” I swear, I don’t think I’ve thought of Bill Thompson in a year. Well, they come and they go.

  THE BROWN: And specially here.

  THE BLUE: And specially here. And specially here … Wonder what Capone’s doing now.

  THE BROWN: Making little ones out of big ones.

  THE BLUE: Stead of making dead ones out of live ones. Just the same, I say he got a raw deal.

  THE BROWN: You and me both.

  THE BLUE: I don’t claim Al was any better than he ought to be. And if they’d got him for some of the real stuff that he done, got him, you understand, even if it was in the chair, I’d say fine. I’d say fair enough, Al. You got it in the neck, where you give it to plenty of others, and things is square. But this income tax thing, I don’t buy that. Something wrong with it.

  THE BROWN: Because look. It’s just like you had a kid. He steals a apple off the wop, and if you burnt his tail for that, it’s all right. But when you burn his tail for not coming home and giving you half the apple, what sense does that make? Why that’s nothing more or less than making yourself a partner in crime. When you’re going to get a man, get him right, I say. Don’t go sneaking up from behind and pull something that makes you a worse crook than he is.

  THE BLUE: You hit it. Right on the head.

  THE GRAY: H’m.

  THE BLUE (detecting something in the Gray’s voice, and backing water hastily): Course it’s only one man’s opinion. If it was somebody that Al done something to, or maybe some of his friends, why—

  THE GRAY (smiling affably): Oh no. Nothing like that. But I can easily see that you gentlemen don’t know a great deal about that case.

  THE BLUE: You kind of got me there.

  THE BROWN: Hold on now. A guy don’t have to be able to take a machine gun apart to understand a murder, and believe me it looks like the same thing here. No. All I know about the case is what come out in the papers, but there it is, just the same. You can’t get away from it. It’s here, in black and white.
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  THE GRAY: Boys, let me tell you something. On little stuff, stuff that nobody’s got time to fool with, anybody can make mistakes. But on big stuff, like this Capone case, the United States Government knows what it’s doing. It don’t make mistakes, and it can see a long way ahead.

  THE BLUE: You with the Government?

  THE GRAY: Department of Justice. Fact of the matter, I had a hand in the preparation of that case. I didn’t want any of it, but before they got through they had me in it, plenty.

  THE BROWN: Funny how he pats that briefcase. I never seen a government guy pat a briefcase like that that I didn’t feel guilty of something.

  THE GRAY: Ha-ha. Well, unless you stole a couple of railroads this stuff’ll never get you in any trouble.

  THE BLUE: Go on with what you was saying.

  THE GRAY: Oh yes, about Capone. Well now, what was this “real stuff” you wanted them to get him for?

  THE BLUE: A few murders, for instance.

  THE GRAY: Local authority. What else?

  THE BROWN: Hold on. What was that?

  THE GRAY: If he was guilty of murders, the Government has nothing to do with them. They were Chicago cases. Chicago and New York. That is, if you want to count that Brooklyn case before he came to Chicago. Government can’t touch them. What else?

  THE BLUE: Why—I don’t know. Al had a hand in about every racket there was. Like—like—

  THE BROWN: The milk racket. Wasn’t he in that?

  THE GRAY: Local authority. What else?

  THE BLUE: Well, now you’re asking me. I can’t—

  THE GRAY: All right. Then I’ll tell you. The only thing the Government had on Capone was beer—outside this other. And so far as his rackets go, he only had one head and two hands and two feet, and I can tell you that most of those rackets were fairy tales. What caused the murders, what he made his money out of, what he kept a mob for, was beer. Of course, Al liked to think he was king of the earth, but when you come down to what he was king of, why it spelled B-E-E-R, and that’s all it spelled.

  THE BROWN: Then what was stopping the Government for sending him up for beer stead of sending him up for not giving the Government a cut?

  THE BLUE: Wait a minute. This guy has got a funny look in his eye. All right. I’ll bite. What was wrong with hanging it on him for beer?

  THE GRAY: I’ll tell you. Suppose, now, they did hang it on him for beer. Suppose they got him on about five counts, and the court said consecutively, stead of concurrently, and he’s doing a stretch. He’s in for long. Now what?

  THE BROWN: Well, he’s in.

  THE GRAY: No he’s not. He’s out before the robins get their eggs hatched.

  THE BLUE: How you figure that out?

  THE GRAY: We’ve got beer, haven’t we? Or will have, any day now? Then what law did he break?

  THE BROWN: The beer law. Anyway, the beer law that was.

  THE GRAY: Oh, we’re not talking about the law that was. You want to keep a man in jail, you better put him there for breaking the law that is. What law, gents?

  THE BLUE: You mean to tell me that soon as we got beer they’re going to let all them bootleggers out of jail?

  THE GRAY: The beer bootleggers. And Capone, remember, ran beer. Soon as we get repeal, then they let all the bootleggers out.

  THE BROWN: Something wrong about that. Believe me, you’ll wait a while for that. That’s one of those things that just don’t happen.

  THE GRAY: It has happened.

  THE BLUE: Where?

  THE GRAY: For one place, California. Soon as they repealed the Wright Act out there, they had to pardon the bootleggers. Nothing else to do.

  THE BROWN: In California? You mean California did that?

  THE GRAY: Listen, suppose you’re a bootlegger in jail for selling liquor. They repeal the law. What do you do now? You get yourself habeas corpused into court, and you ask the court, What law did I break? And the court will turn you loose. Because that’s one principle of law that’s written right into the Constitution of the United States. You can’t put a man in jail for doing something that wasn’t against the law until after he did it, and you can’t keep him there for doing something that’s not against the law now. So the Executive branch saves the courts the trouble, that’s all.

  THE BROWN: Well say, I never thought about that.

  THE BLUE: Me neither.

  THE GRAY: But this baby, this Capone now, this killer that ought to been fried in the chair twenty times before the Government stepped in to settle his hash—he stays. See? Oh yes. When the United States government gets ready to settle your hash, and not just play papa spank, why your hash is cooked, and it stays cooked for a while. Don’t ever fool with your Uncle Sam. You’re just monkeying with the buzz saw.

  All sit for a few moments, in silent admiration for the serpentine wisdom of the federal authority. The porter appears and rubs their shoes. They rise.

  THE BLUE: He gets out when they repeal the Income Tax Law. Is that it?

  THE GRAY: That’s it.

  THE BROWN: Haw-haw-haw-haw!

  ALL: Haw-haw-haw-haw-haw-haw-haw-haw!

  2. LIGHT FICTION

  Introduction

  FROM THAT DAY IN 1932 when he was laid off by Paramount Studios after his first effort to become a screenwriter, Cain considered himself a free-lance writer, although he would work intermittently for the studios and eventually earn considerable money doing it. But during his years in Hollywood (1931–1948) he supported himself as a writer, and naturally he wrote a lot of what they used to call “commercial fiction,” much of it humorous.

  In 1932, after he had written his eminently successful story, “Baby in the Icebox,” for Mencken and The American Mercury, he also wrote two short stories—“The Whale, the Cluck and the Diving Venus” and “Come-Back”—which his agent tried to sell to magazines but could not. “The Whale” is about an Eastern Shore carnival hustler who manages to get a whale into a swimming pool, and then his troubles really begin; “Come-Back” is about a fading Hollywood cowboy who tries to make a comeback after his silver horse dies. Both are light, amusing, and written in the inimitable Cain style.

  In 1934, after The Postman Always Rings Twice was published and he was suddenly the hottest writer in the country, every editor wanted something by James M. Gain. In addition to Knopf, three other publishing houses were asking him to write another novel; The New York Herald Tribune and American magazines wanted a serial; Liberty, Redbook, and The New Yorker wanted short stories. “Please don’t go for articles at this point,” wrote his New York editor, Edith Haggard. “Editors are crying for short stories.”

  But Cain wrote neither. After the sale of “Baby” to the movies, he felt the time was right for breaking in as a screenwriter; then, suddenly, he was offered a studio job with MGM. When that fizzled out, as did most of Cain’s studio jobs, he went back to his typewriter and was soon “working like a wildman,” he wrote Mrs. Haggard, but on everything except the short stories she wanted—food articles, his Hearst column, speculative movie scripts, and an idea for a serial about an insurance agent who conspires with a rich man’s wife to murder her husband. But to satisfy Mrs. Haggard, he revived “The Whale” and “Come-Back,” and they quickly sold to Redbook.

  Cain always felt that hardcover books were the only things that counted, and he did not really consider his magazine articles, even his original paperback books, serious work. After Postman, Double Indemnity, and then Serenade were published, whenever he was not employed by a studio, he was usually working on a novel. But Mrs. Haggard continued her pressure for short stories, and occasionally he responded. In 1936, while working on a movie, “Dr. Socrates,” for Paramount, he found time at night to dictate another Hollywood story about an attempted Hollywood comeback; this one was about a bit player who imagined himself riding a hippopotamus in a big movie. He called it “Hip, Hip, The Hippo,” and Edwin Balmer, editor of Redbook, thought it was very amusing. But he wanted a new ending, which Cain agreed
to provide. The revision, however, took longer than Cain expected, and he wrote Mrs. Haggard: “I never had such a hell of a time with a story in my life.” When he sent it to his agent, he said that if Balmer rejected it, he would personally come to New York and shoot him. Balmer bought it with the new ending. About this time he also wrote another short story for Mrs. Haggard, who sold it to Liberty. This one, called “Everything But the Truth,” is set in Annapolis and is about the trouble a young boy gets into as a result of his masculine boasting, one of Cain’s favorite themes.

  The final story in this section was written much later, in Cain’s Hyattsville (Maryland) years, when he was no longer in vogue and needed the money almost as desperately as he did in the early 1930s when he was free-lancing in Hollywood. “The Visitor,” as Cain wrote to one of his Hyattsville friends, grew out of an editorial he wrote for The New York World in the 1920s. The editorial asked what one did when you met a man-eating tiger, which prompted a reply from a Dr. Singh, an Indian, who said what you do is climb a tree as fast as you can. Cain’s story was about a man who woke one morning to find a tiger by his bed and, with no tree around, did what he had to do to save himself. “It is one of the few things I ever wrote,” said Cain, “that I’m stuck on. It came out in Esquire and was never reprinted, I have no idea why.”

  I hope this resurrection of his “Visitor” does not go unnoticed by Cain, wherever he is.

  The Whale, the Cluck and the Diving Venus

  “SISTER,” SAYS MORT, “THE pool will be full when it’s full; that’s all I can tell you. So suppose you go roll your hoop, or your marbles, or whatever you’ve got, and leave me alone. I’m busy.”

  It was the day before the Fourth of July, and we were sitting on the edge of the pool with our feet hanging over the gutter, about as busy as a pair of lizards on a warm brick. I saw the girl turn white clear down to the neck of her bathing-suit. “I can’t very well dive into a pool with no water in it,” she said.

  “And who cares?” says Mort. “If you were a trouper, ’stead of a punk amateur trying to chisel in on something you don’t know anything about, you’d be glad to get the morning off. ’Stead of that, all you do is hang around and ask questions.”