Odds Against Tomorrow

by William P. McGivern

  “He’s sick, I mean he’s hurt, ma’am,” Ingram said.

  “Oh yes, indeed,” she said in a thin, self-satisfied voice. “You need things—oh, yes. They weren’t kind to you in the cities, were they? But I warned you, didn’t I?”

  Earl realized she was half crazy. “We’re cold and tired,” he said, trying to manage a smile for her piercing little eyes. “Could we come in and get warm?”

  “Papa will want to talk to you, of course,” she said. “I should send you around to the back door, but never mind. It’s blew down, I think. Come in, and mind you wipe your boots.”

  They followed her into a drafty living room where an old man lay against the wall in a double bed. He worked himself up on one elbow as they came in, glaring at them with alert, suspicious eyes. It was impossible to guess at his height or weight; the shape of his body was lost under the mound of dirty quilts that covered his bed. But it was very obvious that he was aged; his wispy white hair floated grotesquely in the draft, and his whiskers gleamed like silvery moss on his sunken cheeks and throat.

  “He’s come crawling back,” the old woman announced in a perky voice. “Like I told you all along.”

  “Close the door after you, can’t you even remember?” the old man said irritably. “You’ll freeze us all, Crazybone. Go on. Get.”

  “Oh, all right,” she said, shrugging indifferently. “I’ll nail it up tight.” She pushed aimlessly at the strands of gray hair. “Seems like it should be fixed once and for all.” But she didn’t move; she stood staring at the tips of her boots without any expression at all on her face.

  “Go close the door,” he said quietly. “Close it, you hear?”

  She turned and stalked from the room, her rubber boots squeaking dryly on the cold floor boards. The man sighed and put his head on the pillow. “You fellows been in an accident?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Ingram said.

  “Bad night to be outside. Only a rich man or a fool goes out in weather like this.” He chuckled softly, flicking glances at them with suspicious little eyes.

  The old woman returned and opened a door on the opposite side of the room. She smiled back at Ingram, her glasses flashing in the gloomy light. “I told you you’d come back,” she said.

  “Don’t pay her no mind,” the old man said, as she slipped through the doorway. “Crazybone’s a little daft. She’s my wife. Crazybone’s just a name I gave her. Real name is Martha, like George Washington’s wife. We used to keep a dozen colored hands a long while back. When the farming went bad they drifted off to the city mostly. Crazybone’s always looking for ’em to come back. What kind of accident was you in?”

  “There’s just the two of you here?” Earl said.

  “Don’t need nobody else. Seems like we get along better every year. Eat less all the time.” He chuckled again, but his eyes were switching back and forth between them like vigilant little swords. “Pretty soon we’ll stop eating altogether. That’ll be a good trick, won’t it?”

  “You got any whisky around?” Earl asked him. He felt very weak; the strength seemed to be draining out of him from the wound in his shoulder. It wasn’t bleeding much; but that could be bad or good, he wasn’t sure which. A small heap of wood burned in the great stone fireplace, but no warmth penetrated the thick cold dampness of the room.

  “No whisky, no gin, no beer,” the old man said, shaking his head with finality.

  “How about coffee?”

  “Told you we eat less all the time. Same goes for drinking.” He seemed proud of their abstemiousness; his eyes twinkled with sadistic merriment. “A man can get along without lots of things. You learn that when you’re old as I am. What happened to you? You sick, mister?”

  “Where did your wife go?”

  “Hard to tell about Crazybones. She keeps a man studying, I can tell you.”

  “Go take a look,” Earl said to Ingram. “See what she’s up to.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about her,” the old man said.

  “You got a phone here?”

  “Don’t need one.”

  “How about neighbors? Any people likely to stop by tonight?”

  “Nearest house is a mile down the road. No call for anybody to come by. What’s worrying you anyway?”

  Earl glanced around and saw a radio on a table beside a sagging sofa. “That work?” he said to the old man.

  “Wouldn’t have it around if it didn’t.”

  Earl went slowly across the room, limping to favor the pain in his side, and sat down on the sofa. He turned on the set and a light gleamed faintly behind the rheostat. Finally the strains of a dance band overcame the static and flooded the cold air with incongruously cheerful rhythms. Earl rested weakly against the arm of the sofa. The pain in his shoulder beat slowly but solidly, pounding against his nerves with sledge-hammer blows.

  He glanced around, taking an automatic inventory of the room. There was little furniture, just the bed, sofa and a couple of straight-backed chairs. The mantelpiece above the massive field-stone fireplace was crowded with junk; dirt-rimmed bottles, yellowing newspapers, a few chipped cups, several faded photographs in wooden frames. The floor boards were of uneven widths, buckled with cold and age, but they were like iron under his feet. It was a house built to last a dozen lifetimes, he thought, looking at the stone walls and hand-hewn beams that ran along the ceiling.

  The dampness cut into his bones like a knife, but in spite of the cold there was a sharp odor of decay in the room, a sour-sweet putrescence like the stench from a heap of rotting vegetables. And there was something else, Earl realized, a medical smell, an acid stink that bit sharply through the humid chill of the room.

  “What kind of trouble you fellows in?” the old man said slyly.

  “Don’t worry about us,” Earl said. “Do what you’re told, and you won’t get hurt.”

  “I can’t answer for Crazybones. She don’t pay much mind to anybody.” He stared at Earl with bright, excited eyes. “What’d you do? Kill somebody?”

  “No,” Earl said shortly.

  “You steal something then? Break into a store?”

  The old man’s prying eyes made him uneasy; there was something fierce and sick about him, like the sweaty reek of a lynch mob. Their trouble had stirred him up, Earl realized, pumped his frail old body full of invigorating excitement.

  “You’re hurt, ain’t ye?” he said, peering closely at Earl. “Got a bullet in ye, I can tell.”

  “That’s right. And I got six in my gun. Think about them, Pop.”

  “You got no call to hurt us. We’re old people, mister.”

  Ingram came back into the room and said, “She’s all right. She’s fixing up some food.”

  “You better get the car out of sight,” Earl said.

  “Nobody coming by here in this cloudburst.”

  Earl looked at the old man. “Any place in back he can hide it?”

  “The barn is dry enough but somebody might see it there.”

  “You said nobody ever came by this way.”

  “Well, that was before you stopped in, mister.” He chuckled at this and glanced slyly at Ingram for approval. “You fellows might make the place popular. Anyway, we got some coon hunters in the country at night and fox hunters in the day. They’re a sight. All dressed up in red coats and shiny black boots. Women, too. Sometimes a fox goes to ground in a barn or woodshed, and then the hunt piles up while they poke around trying to start him running again. They might stumble on your car, yes sir. I wouldn’t put it in no barn if I was you.”

  “Where would you put it, Pop?” Earl realized the old man didn’t want them to be caught right away; he wanted to prolong the excitement, to lie in bed and watch them squirm and sweat.

  “There’s a little road runs from the back of the house into the woods,” the old man said. “They used to mine mica there years back, and one of the old quarries would be a nice place for the car. Nobody would ever see it there.”

  “Can he get t
he car down that road?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s a fine little road.” The old man winked conspiratorially. “And tomorrow the tracks will all be washed away. Got to think of that too, you know.”

  “All right, Sambo,” Earl said. “Get started.”

  “Damn it, you hear that rain? Let’s wait till the flood stops.”

  “I hear it,” Earl said quietly. In the silence the sound of the rain was like an angry flail beating against the sides and roof of the house. He stared at Ingram, and said, “How much money you got, Sambo?”

  “I don’t know. Forty, forty-five dollars.”

  “Put it on that chair.”

  “What’s the matter with you? You think there’s something to buy around here?”

  “Do like I say, Sambo. Put the money on the chair.” Earl took the gun from his pocket and shifted forward onto the edge of the sofa. The effort brought a sudden sheen of perspiration to his face, but the gun in his hand was relentlessly steady. His voice rose suddenly, trembling with a savage anger. “Then get out of your clothes. Jacket, shirt, pants. You hear, Sambo?”

  “Have you gone crazy?”

  “I’m just making sure you don’t run out on me. I can’t guess what’s going on inside that woolly head of yours, so I’m not taking any chances. You might decide this is a good time to skip.” Earl’s eyes glinted with bitter humor. “I’m the anchor in this deal. I’m hurt, I can’t travel. You—”

  “You’re crazy,” Ingram said frantically. “We’ve got to stick together. We don’t have a chance any other way.”

  “You got money, you got the car,” Earl said. “You could make it to the highway and be on your way. Leave me stuck here with a bullet in my shoulder.”

  “It’s what’s in your head,” Ingram cried. “It’s your idea, not mine.”

  Earl’s eyes narrowed with tension. “Start field-stripping, Sambo. You can rat out if you want, but you won’t get far in your birthday suit. You can’t stop for gas, you can’t buy a mouthful of food. If you don’t come back here, you’ll freeze. So you’ll come back. Not for me, but to save your hide.”

  “I’m not thinking that way, I swear it.” Ingram despised his fear, but he couldn’t control it; his voice trembled like that of a frightened child. “It’s freezing outside. I’ll die out there.”

  “Start stripping,” Earl said harshly, and at that the old man began to laugh in shuddering little gasps. “Don’t let him wheedle you,” he cried, watching Ingram with hot, expectant eyes. “Make ’em toe the mark and cut the buck, I say.”

  “Shut up!” Earl said. “You hear? Shut up!”

  Ingram took the money from his pocket and dropped it on the chair. There was no point arguing any more; Earl was crazy enough to shoot him. Then he’d be all alone, hurt and helpless, but he couldn’t see that far ahead. Ingram pulled off the soaking jacket, then his shirt and trousers, making a soggy pile of them on top of the money. The cold bit deep into his bones, making them ache with a heavy sort of pain, and he could feel goose pimples crawling along his bare arms and legs. His teeth began to chatter, and when he picked up the car keys they stung his fingers like pieces of ice.

  The old man tittered softly, squirming under his great mound of dirty quilts and blankets. “Only a fool or a rich man would go outside on a night like this,” he said.

  The music from the radio was warm and bright and intimate, pointlessly gay in the bitterness of the room, incredible and incongruous as hummingbirds fluttering through a winter storm. Ingram flushed with shame as the old man chuckled and stared at him with brutal, clinical curiosity. Earl looked away from Ingram’s thin body, the movement of his head abrupt and angry. “All right, get going,” he said in a thick, hard voice. “Don’t stand there.”

  He didn’t look up until he felt the blast of cold wind sweep into the room and heard the front door pulled shut with an obvious effort against the storming night. Then he stared at the pile of wet clothes on the chair and let out his breath slowly and wearily. The pain was all through him now, sick and turbulent and demanding, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the wound in his shoulder. It won’t take him long to get rid of the car, he thought. It’s just a quick ride…

  The dance music broke off in the middle of a phrase, and a smooth impersonal voice said, “We are interrupting this program to bring you a special bulletin from the State Police. In an unsuccessful attempt to hold up the National Bank in Crossroads, one man was killed and another wounded shortly after eight o’clock tonight.”

  The old man got up on his elbow, breathing heavily with excitement, and Earl shifted closer to the radio.

  “… as yet the dead bandit has not been identified by police. Sheriff Thomas Burns of the Borough of Crossroads surprised the holdup men as they were leaving the bank. He ordered them to halt, but they opened fire. In a gun battle which took place on the main street of the village, one robber was shot to death and his accomplice seriously wounded. The wounded man escaped in a blue Pontiac station wagon, bearing California license plates QX 1897—I will repeat that license number—QX 1897—traveling southwest from Crossroads. He is wounded and believed to be armed. He is six feet tall, weighing about one hundred and seventy to one hundred and eighty pounds, with black hair and dark blue eyes. He was last seen wearing a black overcoat and brown felt, snap-brim fedora. Roadblocks have been established by State Police, and motorists are urged to report any suspicious calls for assistance to State Police immediately. Mr. Charles Martin, President of the Crossroads bank, has reported that all funds taken in the holdup have been recovered. Stay tuned to this station for…”

  Earl snapped off the irritatingly impersonal voice, and stared bitterly at the gun hanging in his hand. No mention of Ingram at all. Just him. Wounded, dangerous, needing a doctor. That was him, all right. Like some animal in a cage. Don’t get too close, folks, he’s mean and he bites. But nothing about Ingram. It was just like Novak said it would be. Nobody noticed colored people.

  “So they killed one of your fellows,” the old man said. “And you didn’t get no money, either. Seems like a waste, don’t it?”

  Earl didn’t answer. He was still thinking of what Novak had told him. Colored people could drift in and out of places like smoke. That’s what Novak had said… Nobody saw them. A colored man carrying a tray or wearing overalls could go anywhere. White people went through whole days without seeing who brought them their coffee or shined their shoes or swept their cigarette butts into the gutter. That was the big part of his plan. Ingram drifting into the bank like a wisp of smoke…

  A great plan, he thought with a weary confusion and anger. Ingram was in the clear. Novak was in the clear. Even Burke was in the clear. Dead and out of it for good. They only wanted him, the wounded animal. That’s who they were hunting for.

  The old man was smiling with pleased, secret knowledge. “How’d the colored fellow fit into it?” he said. “How come they didn’t talk about him on the radio?”

  Earl stared at him in silence.

  “It’s funny, ain’t it?” the old man said. “They just talked about you. You suppose the colored fellow knows they don’t care about him?”

  Earl stood slowly and limped toward the old man’s bed. “That’s going to be our secret, Pop. You understand me?”

  “Oh, sure. I wasn’t going to tell him nothing. But it’s funny, ain’t it?”

  “No,” Earl said. “It’s not funny. It’s just something to forget. You want to enjoy the time you got left to live, Pop? Or are you tired of lying under those stinking blankets?”

  “No, I ain’t tired of it,” the old man said quickly. The look in Earl’s face frightened him; every minute and hour of his life was as thrilling to him as money to a miser. He savored time greedily, exultant with pride when he opened his eyes and found his old heart pumping faintly but steadily within his frail breast. But here was a man who could take all his treasure away with one twist of his hand. “Sure, sure,” he said, “it’s our secret, mister
. I wouldn’t ever tell him nothing.”

  “Remember that,” Earl said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IT WAS after nine o’clock when Sheriff Burns left the bank and returned to his office in the Municipal Building. He hung up his wet slicker and told Morgan to post himself at the bank to keep traffic moving through town. Already there was a congestion of curiosity on Main Street; people exchanging garbled versions of what had happened, cars from a dozen miles around converging on the excitement. “Keep it all moving,” the sheriff told Morgan. “I want that street clear. If the truckers get tied up we’ll have a jam all the way back on the highway to Middleboro.”

  When Morgan left, the sheriff studied the large county wall map on the wall behind his desk. He had done all the routine things; calmed down the people at the bank and taken their statements. The wounded man had registered at the hotel as Frank Smith, and the sheriff had checked his room, finding nothing but a damp overcoat and a soft fedora. They belonged to the colored man, he knew. The dead man was at the morgue in MacPherson’s Funeral Home. A beefy man in his late forties. That’s all he added up to at the moment. There was nothing revealing in his clothes or wallet. This was routine. Now the harder job started—hunting down the Negro and the man who called himself Frank Smith.

  The sheriff knew he had half failed tonight; he had stopped the robbery but two of the men had got away. That was his fault. He accepted the failure without guilt or remorse; it was a simple distasteful fact that he didn’t try to evade or reassess to his own advantage.