Career in C Major: And Other Fiction

by James M. Cain

  He turned, tried to remember what you did when people were drowning. He saw something red, grabbed it. It was Roger’s hair. His other hand touched something; he grabbed that too. It was the collar of Wally’s work suit. Wally came up, coughing with a dreadful whooping sound, then went under again. Terror seized Edwin. As a result of that duck, now Wally was drowning too. He shifted his grip on Roger, so he had him by the shirt. He held on desperately to Wally. Then he flattened out on his back and began driving with his legs for shore. Water slipped over his face, and he began to gasp. Still he held on. The water that slipped over his face wasn’t white now—it was green; he was going under at least six inches with every kick. Then something jerked his shoulder. It was Charlie Hand. “All right, Edwin—I’ve got them!”

  The events of the next few hours were very confused in Edwin’s mind. There was his own collapse on the beach, the farm hands working furiously over himself, Wally, and Roger; the mad dash to the hospital in Mr. Charlie Hand’s car; the nurses, the doctors, the fire department inhalator, the shrill telephoning between mothers. It wasn’t until the three of them were lodged wanly in a special room, and a nurse came in, around six o’clock with the afternoon paper, that life again began to assume a semblance of order. For there was his picture, squarely on page one, and there was an account of the episode, circumstantial and complete:

  … Then, seeing the plight of his companions, young Hope dived to their assistance. Breaking the drowning grip of one boy with a blow in the face, he seized both of them and swam with them to the shore. Rushed to the hospital by Charles Hand, local law student who is spending the vacation with his parents, they are now out of danger thanks to …

  The paper passed from bed to bed. Each of them read, and silence followed. It was not broken until Phyllis arrived carrying three bunches of flowers. Then it was Roger who spoke, and he spoke grimly:

  “Did he dive?”

  Phyllis was indignant. “Oh, my, Roger, don’t you see it in the paper? Of course he dived.”

  “I was under water myself. I never seen it.”

  “I saw it. It was a beautiful dive.”

  Wally nodded with large and genuine magnanimity. “O. K. That’s all we want to know. If he dived—O. K.”

  Phyllis beamed. “Oh, my, Edwin! Don’t you feel grand?”

  Edwin indeed felt grand. Such is the faith of twelve that he believed every word of it. His soul was at peace.

  (Liberty, July 17, 1937)

  The Visitor

  LOOKING BACK AT IT, sorting his recollections into something resembling order, Greg Hayes is sure now that the first warning he had, of a presence there in the room, was a smell—a pungent, exotic reek that was strange, yet oddly familiar. He remembers knowing, though not yet fully awake, that this could not be a dream, as some article had once informed him that “While visual images are constantly reproduced in sleep, olfactory sensations never are, unless caused by external stimulus.” At this point, wondering about the stimulus, he thinks he opened his eyes. But then came a blank in consciousness, followed by an interval of staring at two beautiful, lambent orbs; and he suspects that this was produced by hypnotic narcosis, during which sight functioned, but thought was wholly suspended. Then music sounded, some distance off, in the night, unlocking his mind, somehow, so he regained control of his will. With an effort, he shifted his gaze from these twin luminescences, with their lovely, shifting colors, so suggestive of northern lights, to probe the half-dark of the room. So doing, he became aware of a face, an expression of deep perplexity, and an unmistakable pattern of stripes, which zigged and zagged and tapered to fine points. Only then, at last, did he realize that facing him was a tiger.

  Even then, he has no memory of panic, or even of undue alarm. He knew, of course, how the tiger got in: it was through the open window, where he hadn’t put in the screen. He had taken the storm windows off after Easter, as always, but when it came to the screens, he had clownishly said he was “bushed”—“Yah, yah, yah, they can wait till tomorrow, can’t they? Flies don’t come out in the spring.” But when tomorrow came, so also did a prospect, to whom he showed a house, for Bridleway Downs, Inc., of which he was general manager. Other tomorrows brought still other prospects, and he kept postponing the screens. And he knew where the tiger came from: the Biedermann-Rossi Circus, whose band even now was playing the music he’d heard, The Skaters’ Waltz, actually, which was the cue for the flying trapeze act that wound up the main performance, proving the night was wearing on. He himself was responsible for the show’s being there, as for $1,000 he had rented them their lot, earning his directors’ thanks, but the neighbors’ deep resentment. They regarded the invasion as vulgar, an infringement on “exclusiveness.” Rita, his wife, went quite a lot further, denouncing it as a “damned nuisance.” Having slept not at all the preceding night on account of the bellowing, neighing, squealing, roaring, and trumpeting that had gone on until dawn, she had moved, “for the duration,” into the children’s room, which was in the same wing, but in the front part of the house—which explained why he was here alone. Thus, all antecedents of the case, its causative factors, so to speak, wore the color of chickens, his own ugly brood, coming home to roost. And yet he insists that at this time he felt no sense of guilt, of remorse, or of responsibility for what had happened.

  Instead, he felt stimulated, full of a faith in God, in the nice way things turn out if you just give them a chance, in Kipling’s If—. So, proudly keeping his head when all about him would unquestionably have been losing theirs and blaming it on him, he hitched up on one elbow, said: “Haya?” His voice seeming firm, his visitor pleased, he elaborated: “How they treating you, fellow? What you doing in here?” The tiger, relaxing his baffled look, advanced. He was already between the beds, no more than a foot away, but now he moved closer, exploring Greg with his nose. Reaching out, Greg gave the great head a pat. He was astonished at its warmth, its silky softness, its sociability. It pushed against his hand, turned its jowl for a scratch. He obliged. Then casually, not hurrying, he slid a foot from under the cover, on the other side of the bed, and got up. The tiger, surprised, cocked two small ears at him. “Okay, Big Boy,” said Greg. “Stay right where you are—and we’ll have your friends up here to take you home in the fractional part of a jiffy.” So saying he stepped to the door, remembering with relief that it opened inwards, so that once he closed it after him there was nothing the tiger could do, short of battering it apart, to open it. He got a hand on the knob, pulled, and knifed through. But the tiger, in the fractional part of a jiffy, hopped over the bed to follow. “My God,” says Greg, awestruck in retrospect, “you got no idea what it was like. You couldn’t believe it—not if you saw it you couldn’t—when he went up in the air and came sailing at me. It was like some genie, rising out of a bottle, in one of the Eastern fables.” Quickly he closed the door, gasped when it creaked from a heavy bump. He waited, had a moment of fear when the knob began to clack, apparently from an inquisitive paw. When that subsided, he went to call the police.

  The hall extension was just a few steps away, and it wasn’t until he lifted the receiver that he felt his first qualm—of retributive justice, of punishment, richly deserved and rapidly closing in. For he had a two-party phone, taken for reasons that were slightly too smart. “I happen to know,” he had told Rita, “that the Milsteads are next on the list to share a line, and with loud-speakers like them listening in, who needs advertising?” She hadn’t liked it, but he had gone ahead anyway, and the idea had paid off, handsomely. Whenever a deal was tight, he simply called his office and, when he heard a click, began telling his girl about “that other prospect we have, you know, the one offering a bonus—personal slipperoo to me, cumsha payola cum louder I can’t quite hear you yet—if I’ll swing this thing to him. So ring him, will you? He’s not quite the type we want, but if he raises the ante a little, who am I to pass judgment?” Time after time, after some such phony dialogue, overheard by Mrs. Milstead and broadcast to
all and sundry, he had closed a sale to advantage, and had come to regard the arrangement as one of his minor triumphs. It had one slight flaw: little Shelley Milstead visited on the phone, and had formed the unfortunate habit of leaving the receiver off. It was off now, as the mocking yelps of the “howler” at once informed him.

  Or was it? There was a chance, before he charged outside in his pajamas, barefoot, that the receiver was off here, and he raced to check the kitchen extension. It was in the other wing of the one-story house, but he reached it in seconds, his heart pounding now, partly from a dawning sense of guilt, partly from concern at noises he could hear: the crash of something heavy, later identified as a floor lamp joggled by passing stripes, and an intermittent whining. It crossed his mind that the tiger sounded like Lassie, a most surprising thing, but this was a fleeting impression, instantly dispelled by a jolting fact: the kitchen receiver was on. After listening once more, hoping the howler had stopped, he clapped the receiver in place again and started fast for the front door. He was scampering across the living room when that terrible scream reached him, followed by snarls that shook the house. He knew then that Rita had gone to the bedroom to see what was going on. And he knew his moment had come.

  Plunging back there somehow, he found her with her back to the door, in red kimono, her hands clutched to her face in horror, the tiger at her feet. He was stretched on his belly, obviously ready to spring. Greg doesn’t remember thinking, or grasping the portent of what he saw. All in one frantic heave, he flung Rita out in the hall, slammed the door shut, and ducked—as the tiger went through the air. The crash split the door—Greg swears he saw the thready white line of raw wood. It was followed by savage barks, rising to a roar, as a paw smashed at the knob. Outside, in the hall, Rita let go with a scream that wrung his heart and at the same time made him angry, as it balked his effort to communicate—“And matter of fact,” he says, “when the children got in it, soon as her screeching touched off their screeching, and the tiger opened his cutout, you couldn’t hear yourself think.” He kept yelling, “Rita! Rita! Will you for Pete’s sake shut up? Will you listen to what I’m saying? Quit it, cut it out!”

  “Greg,” she sobbed at last. “There’s a tiger in that room! Come out of there! Come out this very minute!”

  “I know there’s a tiger in here!” he bellowed. “I can see the tiger, I don’t have to be told! And if I was blind and couldn’t see, I could hear yet. I’m not deaf. He’s got me blocked. Rita, do you hear me? I can’t come out! Now will you knock off with that chatter and do what I tell you to?”

  “I’m going to call the police!”

  “You can’t call, you got to go! Shelley—”

  But he heard the dial rattle, and then came her despairing wail; “Greg! The receiver’s off! That Shelley Milstead—”

  “I been telling you! Go get the cops, Rita!”

  “I will, soon as I—”

  “Now! And take the children out!”

  “Yes, Greg! I’m on my way!”

  He wasn’t at all nice to her, losing his temper in spite of himself, and he felt miserably ashamed. But in retrospect, he thinks his churlishness saved his life. For the tiger was focused on her with a bloodcurdling single-mindedness, taking her scream as a personal affront, and apparently concluding, from the angry shouts in his ear, that he had here an ally who shared his feeling about her. So instead of turning on Greg, he kept appealing for his help with little impatient barks, in between his blows at the knob. He wanted out the door, that much was clear, but Greg saw his chance to make use of this blazing obsession and take himself out the window. Keeping well to the rear, he sprang silently on the radiator, hooked his fingers on the window so he could pull it shut after him as he stepped out on the sill, before jumping down to the grass. There was a risk that the paws would smash it, but just possibly its metal frames, to eyes used to a cage, would make a psychological barrier. At any rate, it was better than nothing, and might serve temporarily. But as he lifted his foot to go through, Rita’s voice drifted in from the back yard: “Come, Lou! Annette! Hurry!”

  The tiger heard, and Greg barely had time to snap the window shut and jump down out of the way. The tiger, in mid-charge, came to a sliding stop, and put out a probing paw. Touching glass, he wheeled on his ally. Greg has never been sure why jaws aimed at his face should have clamped down on his leg, but thinks the rug, shooting out from under the spring, may have been the reason, or perhaps his own backward spring may have had something to do with it. At any rate, when the fangs sank, it was in his thigh above the knee, and it was so horrible he screamed at the top of his lungs. “But,” he recalls, “it wasn’t exactly from pain. That must have been bad, but I don’t rightly remember it. What got me was this senseless, seething rage—over nothing, because I’d done no harm. I hit him, I did. With my fist, right on the end of his nose.” He doubts if these blows had much effect, but one of them, on rebound, banged the light switch, and the wall bracket lights came on. The tiger, terrified, let go, springing back to face them. Greg, having managed to hold his feet, headed for the door. But his leg, numb from the mauling it had taken, didn’t function. He collapsed against the wall, and then, half-hopping, half-staggering, made the bed and fell over it.

  He lay for some moments supine, while the tiger roared at the lights, loudly proclaiming his defiance, but keeping his distance. They flanked the door, one pair on each side, so to face them he had to face it. Yet, with all the windows now closed, it was Greg’s only chance, and he racked his brain for a way to reach it. Growing sick from the wet blood on his pajama leg, he suddenly remembered a skit on TV, in which a tramp chased by a lion gained a few moments by comically undressing in flight and flinging his clothes at his pursuer, who dallied briefly to bite them. Greg threw the bedding, so that the whole roll—sheet, blanket, and spread—caught the tiger in the face and had the hoped-for effect. A striped whirlwind tore at the cloth, especially the blanket, ripping it to shreds. Greg jumped up, caught the chest of drawers, balanced against it, then slid along the wall by a series of one-legged hops and grabbed the knob. Weak, no doubt, from the battering, it came off in his hand.

  Trapped, “I wrote off my misspent life,” is the way he remembers it now. “I called it a total loss, but just for the hell of it, as salvage, I meant to sell it for all I could get. I hadn’t forgotten that bite, or all that rotten guff, so uncalled for.” He assumed, perhaps correctly, that the next assault would come at the locus of blood, and as he steeled himself for the bite, determined “to let him have it on the nose or ears or what-have-you, but somewhere.” He was leaning against the chest, when he happened to think of his scissors, the utility pair he kept in it. With them, he “could let him have it in the eyes, maybe blinding him, so I’d have it evened up.” Not taking his gaze off his foe, he opened the top drawer and slipped his hand in. But his fingers probed helplessly, on account of the plastic bags that came on his suits from the cleaners. These, after what he had read in the papers about children being smothered by them, he had folded and tucked away, in this same drawer, meaning from time to time to burn them. But, as with the screens, the time hadn’t come, and they now stuffed the drawer so that no scissors or anything could be rooted out from under them—except by thorough search. Frantic, overwhelmed now by a stifling sense of guilt, he began yanking them out in handfuls and pitching them on the bed. And then he had a hellish idea.

  He picked one up, spread it by the corners, held it out, said: “Hey! Hey—you!” The tiger, still worrying the scraps of blanket, looked up, then advanced on this shimmering thing, so new to his experience. He put out a paw, touched it, backed off from its limp softness. Then, as Greg, remembering those sniffs at first, made himself hold steady and continued to offer the lure, he pushed out a curious nose. “It was black,” says Greg, “and wet.” And what he prayed for happened: an inhalation, and two dimples in the plastic, over the black nostrils. They vanished, and the tiger snorted. But as the nose pushed out again, they reappea
red. And this time, instead of a snort, there came a flabby report. “It was like the noise a toy balloon makes,” Greg remembers, “except that instead of a pop it was more like a plop—of the plastic, going down his throat.” Next thing Greg saw was a white belly in front of his eyes, as the tiger reared straight up, and his head hit the ceiling—“that’s right, I heard it bump.” Then five hundred pounds of cat crashed to the floor, coughing, scratching at the plastic, writhing in frantic contortions to get rid of the choking stuff. Greg turned into a wild thing himself, fighting to hold his gain. Grabbing up more plastic, he shook out another bag, watched his chance and slapped it over the terrible jaws, now gaping in strangled agony, the red tongue bulging out. The kicking, scratching and writhing went on, and so did he. At one point, he swears, “I put a hammer lock on—grabbed him from behind, with a nelson on his neck, while I jammed more plastic in.” He got ripped unmercifully, but paid no need, though bloody from head to foot. “I was afraid, but not yellowed-out,” he says. “Actually, I think my belly came back to life some minutes before, when I punched him in the snoot.”

  How long this went on has been figured: scientists doubt if the tiger, his respiration shut off, could have lasted more than a minute before beginning to weaken. At the end of some such period, though to Greg it seemed much longer, the writhing subsided to jerks, the jerks to feeble twitches, as the eyes started to glaze, the tongue to turn white, and the paws to die off to weak little slaps. Greg, watching, wiped himself off on the sheet, which the tiger was lying on. He felt no elation, he would like to make clear, only compassion, and a surge of the same affection he had felt at the outset, when the inquisitive nose explored him. He watched the striped flank, still pulsating in its futile surge for air, and drew the sheet over the chest, so its corners met back of the shoulders. He twisted them into a knot and tugged convulsively. An inch or two at a time, he dragged the tiger over, and having just enough sheet left, tied him up to the radiator pipe, where it entered the floor.