Career in C Major: And Other Fiction

by James M. Cain

  (Redbook, March 1936)

  Everything But the Truth

  IT WOULD BE IDLE to deny that when Edwin Hope moved from Annapolis to Fullerton he definitely promoted himself. Around Annapolis he had been in no way unusual. But when his father got the big estate to manage, and decided to transfer his legal practice to Fullerton, and then moved the whole family there, Edwin’s status underwent a rapid and altogether startling change.

  It started innocently enough. Among these boys in Fullerton he detected great curiosity about the more cosmopolitan town he had left, and particularly about that seat of learning, the United States Naval Academy. So he recited the main facts, not once but repeatedly: the puissance of the football team, the excellence of the band, the beauty of the regiment when reviewed by an admiral of the fleet, the prodigiousness of the feats performed at the annual gymkhana, the rationale of the sword ceremony as conducted in June Week. When skepticism reared its ugly head, he scotched it with a citation from the statutes: “Let me in? Sure they let me in. Let me in free. They gotta let me in, any time I want to go … Gov-ment propity.”

  But by the end of a week the temptation became almost irresistible to cheat a little; to share, in some reflected degree, the glories he recounted. His audience was not entirely male. Sitting with him on the back stoop of the handsome house his father had taken, there was first of all a pulchritudinous creature by the name of Phyllis, who was about his own age, which was twelve, and certainly not bored by his company. Then there was a red-haired boy by the name of Roger, who had assumed Phyllis to be his own chattel. The others were of both sexes and divided into two factions: the scoffers, headed by Roger; and the true believers, headed by Phyllis, who heard each new tale with gasps and gurgles of appreciation. The males were almost solidly scoffers. It was from the females that Edwin got real support.

  His first lapse from truth came as a slip. He had been expounding the might of the navy crew—its size, its stamina, its speed. And then he added: “Boy, I’ll say they’re fast. I’ll say they can lift that old shell through the water! Believe me, you part your hair in the middle when you ride in that thing!”

  Roger bristled. “What do you mean, you? When did you ever ride in a shell?”

  There could be only one answer: “Plenty of times.”

  “When?”

  “You heard me. Plenty of times.”

  “You’re a liar. You never been in one! Part your hair in the middle—don’t you know they ride backwards in a shell?”

  “You’re telling me?”

  “Them seats are on rollers: there’s no place to sit! No place for anybody except them crew men. Yah, you never been in a shell! Where did you sit? Tell us that!”

  “Cox.”

  “What?”

  Roger said it before he realized his error. But he said it. He betrayed he didn’t know what a cox was. The others laughed. Edwin smiled pityingly. “Cox. Coxswain. The guy that steers.”

  “You steered the navy crew?”

  “Not regular. They use a cadet for that. But sometimes they want a little warm-up before the coach shows up, and they got to have a cox. A cox, he’s got to be light. I suppose maybe that’s why they picked me. The cox, he rides frontwards, so he can see where he’s going…. ‘Stroke! … Stroke! … Stroke!’”

  He imitated the bark of a coxswain, illustrating with his hands the technique of the tiller ropes, and let the echo die in the back yard before he yawned and added: “That’s why he parts his hair in the middle.”

  His exploits as a coxswain, it need hardly be added, were completely imaginary. Yet it was but a step to equally imaginary exploits as a diver. He spoke feelingly one time of the fine satisfaction to be felt when one came in after a spin with the crew, plunged from the boathouse roof, swam briefly in the Severn, and then cool, clean, and refreshed, went home to a gigantic dinner. This provoked such a storm of protest and involved him in such a grueling quiz about the navy boathouse that he had to shift his ground. He did not yield one inch on the dive, but he did think it well to move the fable into a locale where a certain vagueness might be permissible.

  “The boathouse—heck, that wasn’t nothing! All that stuff, that was in the spring. They go away on their cruise in June. Guy don’t hardly get warmed up by then—don’t really feel like diving. But in the summertime—say, that Annapolis gang really gets going then!”

  “Yeah, and what do they do?”

  “I’m telling you. They dive.”

  “Off the boathouse roof, hey?”

  “The boathouse roof? Say, that wouldn’t interest that gang. Off whatever they can find, so it’s high. Steamboat—right off her pilothouse. Schooner—off her cross-trees. Anywheres. They don’t care.”

  “What schooner?”

  “Any schooner.”

  “What’s the name of the schooner?” they persisted.

  “Boys, you got me there. There’s so many boats in Annapolis harbor I couldn’t tell you the names of them. Schooners, sloops, canoes, bug-eyes, destroyers, battleships—anything you want. They even got seaplanes.”

  “And you dove off a seaplane too, did you?”

  Surfeited with success, he let opponent take a trick, merely to be merciful. “No, I never did. Those things, they only draw about six inches of water, and they generally anchor them over on the flats. You dive off them, you’re li’ble to break your neck.”

  He puckered his mouth in what he conceived to be a look of vast wisdom. “Believe me, when you’re up high you gotta be sure what’s down there. That’s one thing you guys better remember if you ever expect to do any diving. It better be deep.”

  Then in a day or two, as a fine surprise, his mother announced that Wally Bowman was coming to visit him. Wally had been his own particular freckle-faced pal back in Annapolis. But here, after being met at the steamboat, fed ice cream, and lodged regally in the spare bed, Wally developed ratlike yellow-bellied tendencies. Admitted to the society of the back stoop, he at once formed a hot treasonable friendship with Roger, and betrayed the stark and bitter truth.

  “Wally, he says you never been in a shell.”

  “Yah, what does he know? His mother never let him out of the yard for fear the dogs would bite him.”

  “Wally, he says every time you went near the navy boathouse they chased you away.”

  “Chased him away, you mean.”

  “Wally, he says you can’t even dive at all.”

  “How would he know? That Annapolis gang, the real Annapolis gang, they wouldn’t even let him come along! He’s nothing but a sissy!”

  “Wally, he says—”

  “Sissy! Sissy! Sissy!”

  Even the girls wavered in their allegiance, for Wally knew the sailors’ hornpipe. The whole back yard became a sort of Pinafore deck, with dresses, curls, and ribbons flouncing to the siren measure. Only Phyllis, lovely Phyllis, remained stanch. But one time, when he retired in a rage and then returned unexpectedly, even she was out there, her shoes off, kicking about in socklets and pulling foolishly on imaginary halyards.

  School opened, and the weather turned bright and hot. Wally stayed on, partly because the Annapolis schools didn’t open until a week later. Edwin took advantage of the change in weather to make a dramatic entrance into the new school and thus calk his leaking prestige. That is, he wore his “work suit.” This was a white gob’s uniform, very popular with the boys around Annapolis, and still more popular with their mothers, since it could be bought cheaply in any navy-supply store. The effect was a knockout. There were gibes from Roger, but they quickly died. Phyllis admired it loudly, and so did the rest of the female contingent.

  But when, after the morning session, Edwin repaired to the drugstore, flushed and triumphant, for a cooling drink, who should be sitting there but Wally in his work suit. It was too much to be borne. He pushed Wally from the stool. Wally retorted with a sock in the eye. He retorted with a butt in the stomach. Mr. Nevers, the druggist, retorted with a clip on the ear for them both a
nd a lecture on how to behave. Edwin climbed on a stool and sullenly ordered his drink. Roger came in with several boys, detected the tension, and tried to get an account of the fracas from Wally. Phyllis came in with some girls, and there was excited twittering. Several grown-ups came in, among them Mr. Charlie Hand with Miss Ruth Downey. Edwin paid no attention to anything until Phyllis asked him excitedly if he wanted to go swimming.

  “No!”

  “But we’re going down to Mortimer’s! Mr. Charlie Hand is going to take us down, he and Ruth Downey! Aw, come on, Edwin! It’s so hot, and you’ll love it!”

  He had answered her out of the choler of his mood; but now sober judgment spoke and told him that, in view of his boasts and claims, about the last thing he should do was go swimming.

  “Water’s too cold.”

  “Aw, it’s not cold! Look what a hot day it is!”

  “After all that rain, be colder than ice.”

  “Aw, Edwin, come on! We’re going right after lunch.”

  “Anyway, it’s too late in the year. Swimming’s over.”

  “Gee, Edwin, I think you’re mean!”

  He glanced in the direction of Wally and delivered what he intended to be his final shot: “Me go swimming? Say, that’s funny. With that thing on my hands? Could I ask you to take him along? That dose of poison ivy? Me go swimming—a fat chance!”

  Phyllis babbled excitedly that of course they could take Wally along. But Wally cut her off: “Count me out, Phyllis, I wouldn’t go swimming. Not in the same river with him. I don’t want to catch no smallpox. Oh, no. Not me!”

  This abnegation was so unlike Wally that Edwin was astonished. So was Roger, and he set up a noisy caveat. But Wally was not to be swayed. “No, I’m out. Just have your swim without me. And anyway, me and Roger has got something on today a whole lot more important than swimming.” Roger suddenly subsided, and Edwin had a sweet vision of the romantic afternoon he could have with Phyllis, once his two tormentors were out of the way.

  “Well, in that case, Phyllis—O. K. Glad to go.”

  Mortimer’s turned out to be a big farmhouse three or four miles below the town. A housekeeper appeared, waved a hand vaguely toward the rear, and they all scrambled back there, the girls into one shed, the boys into another. Edwin, with a disk harrow for a locker, was the last one out, and found Phyllis waiting for him. In a red swimming suit, he thought she looked enchantingly beautiful, and he felt an impulse to dawdle, to take her hand, to run off and chase butterflies. So, apparently, did she; but at the end of thirty seconds of dawdling they found themselves strolling slowly to the beach.

  As they stepped from the trees to the sand, Edwin’s heart skipped a beat. There, lying on their sides, were two bicycles, one his own, the other Roger’s. And there, beside the bicycles, and not in swimming suits, were Wally and Roger, shark grins on their faces. One glance at the river told him the reason for the grins. Not a hundred yards away, tied up at the Mortimer private wharf and busily discharging fertilizer, was a schooner. She was the most nauseating schooner Edwin had ever seen. Pink dust covered her deck, from the fertilizer. Her three masts rose out of a hull devoid of shape, and her topmasts were missing. Her bowsprit was a makeshift, obviously a replacement for the original member. It consisted of one long round timber, squared off at the end, and held in place, at a crazy uptilted angle, by iron collars to which were attached wire cables that ran back to the foremast. Accustomed to the trim craft of Annapolis harbor, Edwin sickened at the sight of her, and yet he knew full well her import. She was, presumably, his favorite take-off for diving. He had been sucked into a neat, deliberate, and horrible trap, and he needed but one guess as to the designer of it. It was Wally, who had come up-river on the steamboat; Wally, who knew that schooner was lying there; Wally, who had declined the swimming invitation and thus enticed him to his doom.

  They didn’t challenge him at once. They jumped on their bicycles and began riding around the wet sand, whooping. Mr. Charlie Hand rebuked them; but they replied they hadn’t come down with him, that it was a free country and they would do as they pleased. Mr. Hand, powerless to do anything about it, walked up the beach with Miss Downey, and at that point Edwin was so ill-advised as to start for the water. This brought action. They wheeled around, cut him off, and got off their bicycles. “Oh, no, you don’t.”

  “What do you mean, ‘No, I don’t’?”

  “You see her, don’t you? The schooner?”

  “Well?”

  “Well? You going to dive off her or not?”

  He looked at the schooner, gulped, grimly maintained his brave front. “Why, sure—if that’s all that’s bothering you.”

  He gained a brief respite when the black foreman of stevedores chased them away. But it was very brief. In a half hour, just when he had eluded them by jerking the handle bar of one bicycle and joined Phyllis in the water, there came a loud put-put-put, and the schooner’s kicker boat hove into view, the captain at the tiller, the mate in the bow, and the Negro stevedores squatting comfortably on her sides, headed for the town. The unloading was over. The schooner was deserted.

  “Come on!”

  The reckoning had come, and he knew it. He left the water with a fine show of contempt, and headed for the wharf. Behind him, incredulous, the other children strung out in a little procession, the girls whispering, “Is he really going to do it?” This was so flattering that he felt a wild lunge of hope: perhaps, by some chance, he could shut his eyes and get off headfirst. But his legs felt stiff and queer, and he felt a hysterical impulse to kick at the two bicycles which wheeled relentlessly along, one on one side of him, one on the other.

  “And off the bowsprit, see? Because it’s high. You remember that, don’t you? You like it high.”

  He walked down the wharf, boarded the ugly hulk. The fertilizer scratched his feet and proved to have an unexpected stench. He made his way past rusty gear to the bow, stepped up and out on the bowsprit. But the angle at which it was tilted made climbing difficult, and he had to pull himself along by the cables. The little group on shore waded down beside the wharf, the better to see. He got his fingers around the last cable, the one that held the end of the timber, and then for the first time he looked down. His stomach contracted violently. The water seemed cruelly remote, as though it were part of another world. He knew that by no conceivable effort of will could he dive off, even jump off. Quickly he sat down, lest he fall, and straddled the timber with his legs. At once he slid backward, to fetch up with a sickening squoosh against the next cable.

  He held on, flogged desperate wits. And then he hit on a plan. Up the beach were Mr. Hand and Miss Downey, sitting in the sand. If he started a jawing match, that might cause such a ruckus that Mr. Hand would have to step in and order him down. Roger gave him an opening: “Well? What’s the matter? Why don’t you dive?”

  “I dive when I feel like it.”

  “You can’t dive—that’s why.”

  “Aw! Suppose you come out and make me dive! I dare you to do it! Le’s see you do it!”

  Roger hesitated. The bowsprit looked as high to him as it did to Edwin. But Wally nodded coldly, and he started out, Wally just behind him. He passed the first cable, then the second. He grasped the third, the one that braced Edwin, who—placed disadvantageously with his back to the enemy—cast an anxious glance toward Charlie Hand. Roger saw it.

  “Yah! Hoping Charlie Hand will make you come down! Look at momma’s boy, scared to jump off!”

  “Yah! Yah! Yah! Le’s see you make me dive!”

  Edwin yelled it at the top of his lungs, and still the enamored Mr. Hand didn’t move. Roger, clinging to the cable, eased himself down, preparatory to shoving the poltroon in front of him into the water. Then, not being barefooted as Edwin was, he slipped. He toppled off the bowsprit. But he hung there; for his hand had slid down the cable as he fell, and now held him fast, jammed against the collar. He screamed. Wally screamed. All the children screamed.

  “Drop! Dr
op! It won’t hurt you!”

  “I can’t drop! My hand’s caught!”

  Edwin knew it was caught, for there was that horrible sound in Roger’s voice, and there was Mr. Hand sprinting down the beach, and there was the hand wriggling against him. Wally yelled at him in a frenzy: “Pull up! Pull up! Move! Can’t you give the guy a chance?” But pull up he could not. He was wedged there, could reach nothing to pull up by, could only tremble and feel sick.

  Wally reached for Roger’s hand, and then he slipped. But as he fell he clutched and for one instant caught Roger’s foot. The added weight pulled the tortured hand clear, and the two of them plunged into the water. Involuntarily Edwin looked, and then felt the bowsprit turning under him. He hung upside down above the water, clasping the bowsprit with his legs, and then he too plunged down, down, down through miles of sunlight.

  Next thing he knew, there was green before his eyes, then dark green, then green-black, and his shoulder was numb from some terrible blow. Then the green appeared again; he was coming up. When he broke water, Wally was beside him, yelling. All the bitterness of the last few days rose up within him. He hit Wally as hard as he could in the mouth. Unexpectedly, he could get no force in the blow, there in the water. He seized Wally and pushed him under. Then he treated him to a compound duck, a feat learned in Annapolis. That is to say, he pulled up his feet, placed them on Wally’s shoulders, and drove down—hard. He looked around for Roger. Roger was nowhere to be seen. He turned toward shore.

  It was the look of horror on Mr. Charlie Hand’s face that woke him up to what had really happened—what Wally had been yelling before he was ducked. Roger was drowning. That blow on the shoulder—he got that when he fell on Roger, and Roger was knocked out—and was drowning!