by Jim Thompson
“Would you mind stopping by the saloon?” he asked, as she put the car in gear.
She frowned slightly. “I suppose not.”
“I just want to get a cigar,” he lied. “I’ll only be a minute.”
“All right,” she said.
She stopped a few doors beyond the saloon, and he hopped out and ran in. It was five minutes before he returned, lustily puffing a cigar.
She shot the car forward so quickly that his head snapped back, and they went roaring out of town, toward the hills, without talking. He watched her, covertly, as they jounced from one side of the rutted road to another. Finally, frightened at their unholy speed of eighteen miles an hour, he reached over and attempted to retard the throttle.
She tried to elbow his hand away, jerking the wheel with the effort. The awkward, top-heavy car skidded, shot toward the ditch, then slipped back into the ruts again and went bouncing and pounding forward.
“What were you trying to do?” he demanded angrily, when he could at last speak again.
“I’ll ask you the same, Mr. Grant Fargo.”
“You know you were going too fast!”
“I guess I know how to drive. You just keep your hands off the wheel after this!”
“I’ll do better than that,” he declared grimly. “I’ll stay out of the car.”
She laughed maliciously. “Sissy! Was Mom-um’s ’ittle boy afwaid?”
“Well, I don’t care,” said Grant. “Just suppose we’d been up along the river road when that happened. Suppose we’d gone over the bluffs. How would you feel then?”
“That’s simple.” She shrugged her shoulders, lovely even beneath the concealing duster. “I wouldn’t feel anything.”
Her voice was flippant, but inwardly she was frightened. Not from the recent skid. Something else. Something that she had felt, that she had seemed to feel that night she had met Grant at the fairgrounds.
Impulsively she put a hand upon his knee; and after a moment one of his closed over it. They smiled at each other, and he moved over in the seat.
Little by little the seemingly unbounded vista of rich green fields and great barns and spacious houses was left behind them. The land began to tilt, to rise in waves, and it was as though there were an undertow at work, pulling all of its beauty and wealth downward, backward into the valley.
Sand splayed the fertile black clay, and the splays grew until there was nothing but sand. Fences disappeared or sagged dismally between ineffectual posts; sunflowers and sandburs towered triumphantly over the straggled ranks of corn. In the fresh shoots of wheat, the rag- and pigweed fed. There were few cattle, and those wandered forlorn across the waste, their great ribs showing. The few horses—nags—stood head to tail with one another, swishing their tails apathetically to drive off the sand flies, now and then nosing hopelessly at the stunted bitter grass.
There were no proper barns, only rail uprights crossed at the top by more rails and roofed with hay, banked, sometimes, against the north wind by a manure pile. The houses were, at first, unpainted one-room frames; then soddys; then dugouts—hummocks in the devastating sand, identifiable as habitations only by the length of stovepipe protruding from the roof.
These were the poorest of the section’s people. Yet they were white. They were Americans. And, if called upon, they would have lived up to those obligations scrupulously. There was no housewife here, no matter how starved, overworked, overbred, who would not have slaughtered her last laying hen and used her last ounce of meal to provide for a passing stranger—who was, like her, white and American. Any of the lank husbands in their ragged overalls and toeless boots would have walked twenty miles to accommodate the same stranger, refusing anything but thanks.
So Grant and Bella waved courteously as they passed. They waved at the tots with their snotty noses and flour-sack shifts. They raised their hands to the dim figures in the doorways of soddy and dugout. They did it and meant it, without snobbery.
For the country was large and lonely, and Americans stood together.
At last, as they mounted the loftiest of the swelling rises, the sand all but disappeared, and the wheels of the Chandler rolled smoothly along on rock. They drove between two sagging posts, passed a caved-in dugout, and stopped at the side of an ancient strawstack. The exterior was black with age and weather. But it had been dug into deeply on one side, and there the walls were clean, clean and yellow like the floor.
Grant looked around, shaking his head, wonderingly.
“You know, it’s funny. Pa says this used to be one of the best farms in the country.”
“What happened to it?”
“Pa says it blew away, overnight.”
“Silly. How could a farm blow away? Come on and help me down.”
He got out and went around to her side of the car. She opened the low door, clasped his hands, and leapt lightly to the ground. He kissed her, smothering her body against his; then, arm in arm they entered the excavation in the strawstack.
He spread his duster for her, helped her off with her own and made a pillow of it. Matter-of-factly she sat down. While he watched, his heart pounding, she unfastened her garters, pulled her dress and petticoats up around her white hips, and slid up her corset.
Then, she lay back, looking at him, one silky black brow cocked in deliberate provocation.
“Well, do you think you’ll ever get your eyes full?”
“Never!”
“Well, when you do fill them, there’s something else to…”
…It was odd how sweet and soft the straw had been before, and how sharp and sour it was afterwards.
Bella sat up suddenly and began to re-clasp her stockings. There was a wisp of straw between her thighs. She brushed it away angrily, filled with disgust that was all the more bitter because she would not recognize it. Grant, still reclining, tried to caress her shoulder, and she leaned forward, away from him.
“Grant,” she said, “you had something to drink in the saloon tonight, didn’t you?”
“Just one,” he lied. “What of it?”
“Do you stop in there every night?”
“Oh, no. Only now and then.”
“How much money do you have saved now, Grant?”
“Well, let’s see,” said the printer, pretending to think. “Umm—fifty dollars.”
“You said it was sixty the last time I asked you.”
“Isn’t that what I said? I meant to say sixty.”
Bella laughed, and a cold thrill ran down Grant’s spine. She changed so suddenly; he couldn’t keep up with her. Only a moment ago…
“Well, don’t you believe me?” he demanded, belligerently.
“Do you want me to?”
“Suit yourself.”
The girl’s eyes blazed, and she sat looking straight ahead for a moment. Inwardly she was cursing herself. She knew what he was, how he was. Why had she let him go this long without a showdown?
She sat looking ahead, her face concealed from him, and into her harlot’s brain there came an idea so simple that she wondered she had never thought of it before. When she turned back to him, at last, her voice was filled with humility and forced frankness.
“I don’t care if you haven’t been able to save anything, dear.”
“Well, but I have, though,” he insisted, sullenly.
“No, you haven’t, sweetheart, and it’s all right. I know you’ve tried awfully hard, and you’ve meant to, but you just couldn’t do it. After all, you’re only making eight dollars a week; and by the time you buy a drink or so every day, and maybe a cigar or two, why it’s just all gone.”
“It goes pretty fast, all right,” Grant admitted.
“You don’t have anything saved, do you, darling?”
“Well, I…I…”
“Do you?” She brushed his ear with her lips, left them there.
“Uh…well…I guess I don’t, Bella,” said Grant. “OUCH!”
Laughing angrily, Bella scrambled to her feet whi
le Grant rocked on the straw, nursing his bitten ear.
“You little bitch!” he moaned.
“You’ll think I’m a bitch—a wolf-bitch,” she snapped, “before I’m through with you! You’ve had plenty of fun with me, Mr. Grant Fargo—”
“And I suppose you didn’t have!”
“Certainly, I did. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. But that’s neither here nor there. I’ve wanted to get away from here for a long time, but it didn’t really matter whether I did or not. Now it does matter. I’ve got to go now. Do you understand what I mean, Grant?”
“You don’t mean y-you’re pregnant?”
“Why not? Did you think we could go on forever like this? I’m three weeks past my period, right now. I didn’t see any use worrying you, and anyway I thought you were saving some money. I thought within another two or three months, by the time I had to go, you’d have enough saved.”
Grant looked at her horrified. As in a daze, he got to his feet.
“Y-you’re lying to me!” he exclaimed.
“And I suppose you plan on waiting eight months to see whether I am?”
“No—no, of course not. I—I just don’t know what to do, Bella. If we were down South someplace, where I know some doctors…”
His voice faded into futility while she eyed him contemptuously.
“I’ll scrape up a little somewhere,” he said at last. “Enough for me to get to Omaha or Kansas City on. I’ll get a job, and send for you—”
“No, you won’t, Grant.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t send me any money. You wouldn’t come back. You’d leave me here to face things by myself. No. You’ll get enough for us both to leave on, and don’t you try anything different. If there’s ever a day that I don’t see you, I’ll tell my father and we’ll have you picked up and brought back wherever you are.”
Grant shuddered. She had read his mind clearly; and he knew that she would do exactly what she threatened. She would bring him back to face her father, and, worst of all, his own family. Peevishly, he wondered why she couldn’t act like the conventional heroine, concealing the man’s name until the last.
As if his last thought had crossed her own mind, she spoke again:
“And you don’t need to think you can blame it on anyone else, Grant. Everyone knows I’ve never gone with anyone but you.”
“I wasn’t thinking of anything like that,” he protested, humiliated. “I just don’t know which way to turn. Can’t you get any money from your father? After all, he did promise—”
“Well, he changed his mind, and you know how he is when he decides not to do something.” Not even to Grant would she reveal her father’s foolishness.
Grant shook his head helplessly.
“But I just don’t know what to do, Bella! I don’t know where to get any money.”
“You can start saving, for one thing. I can scrape up a few dollars. We’ll make out.”
“You don’t know how it is in the cities, Bella. It takes a lot of money. I might not be able to go to work right away. It might be a month or two before I could get anything, and we’d have to live all that time.”
Bella shrugged on her duster and started for the car. Miserably, he trailed after her.
“I just don’t know what to do, Bella,” he repeated.
“Well,” said the girl, “you’d better start thinking, then.”
The ensuing weeks were the most hideous in Grant Fargo’s career.
Out of his desperate necessity, he sired one invention after another, and all came into the world still-born.
He started off by demanding an increase in pay to ten dollars a week, prodding the recalcitrant owner of the Eye by laying off a day. His demand chanced to coincide with the coming of a tramp printer into the town, and it was two weeks before the latter drank himself out of the job. During those two weeks Grant earned nothing, and he returned to work at his former salary.
By virtually doing without the necessities of life—or so he phrased it—he managed to save thirty dollars. And he lost that in attempting what is doubtless one of man’s most ridiculous goals: the filling of an inside straight. He also received an unpleasant mauling for having checked a cinch on the previous hand.
He did not dare tell Bella of this misadventure, of course. She was difficult enough as it was.
At her insistence (although he assured her it would do no good), he wrote a number of friends of bygone days asking for loans. Much to his amazement, he actually received an aggregate of twenty dollars, but when he took it to her, delighted, she became harder than ever to deal with.…So he could get money if he really wanted to! Very well, he could just write and get some more. Never mind his saying that it was no use. That was what he had said in the first place.
He wrote again, and received nothing. And she refused to believe him.
He offered to chore for Sherman at fifty cents an evening, and Sherman gleefully accepted him. The net results of his labors were fifteen cents (he lasted something less than an hour), one ruined suit (Ted had shoved him into the slop trough), and a lame back (Gus had thrown corn on him and sooied for the pigs).
He was really a pitiful figure. From Bella, whom he was trying to help, he got no sympathy whatsoever.
He sent a precious five-dollar bill to an advertiser in a weekly tabloid, and when the unlabeled package came and he presented it to her, she scornfully told him to drink it himself.
In the end, she began to adopt the attitude with him that there was nothing for it but to tell his father.
“But—but you couldn’t do that, Bella!”
“I wouldn’t want to, Grant.”
“I know you’re angry with me, but what good would that do?”
“Oh, I imagine he’d give us the money to go away on.”
“Yes, but you’re my cousin, and—and—he’s warned me—and he and Sherman—you don’t know what they’re like, Bella!”
“Yes”—reflectively—“I think I have a pretty good idea of what they’re like.”
“Please don’t tell them, Bella!”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to, Grant.”
“I’ll get the money somehow. Just don’t tell them!”
“I don’t want to, Grant. But you’re going to have to get busy. There’s not much time left.”
19
Doc Jones made a final adjustment to the bandage on Bob Dillon’s head, dabbed it again with arnica, and began closing his medicine case. He winked at the boy, companionably, and Bob closed his eyes listlessly.
“Will he be all right, Doc?” asked Mrs. Dillon, plucking at her soiled gray apron.
“Oh, sure. Just jolted up a little. That crack in his head will let some of the meanness out of him. Sure, he’ll be all right.”
Mrs. Dillon sighed. “Well, that’s a blessing. Lord knows I’ve got trouble enough without something happening to him. What do I owe you, Doc?”
“Oh, I guess a dollar will be about right, Edie. How did you say it happened, anyway?”
“Well, he was out to Sherman’s house,” Edie explained, digging a silver dollar from her pocket, “and you know Sherman has those two boys, Ted and Gus—”
“Indeed I do know.”
“It seems that they had some sort of contraption that they thought would fly, and they ran it out of the loft of the barn. Bobbie was inside steering the blamed thing, and they were pushing it, and they hopped on the end of it—the tail I guess you call it—as it shot out of the door. It turned a complete flip-flop and smashed to smithereens; and I don’t know why it didn’t kill them all. It almost did kill Josephine.”
“How was that?” the doctor inquired, interestedly.
“She’d gone out to look for Ted and Gus. She had some work for ’em to do, I guess, and she was trying to slip up on them. She was just about to the barn door when this flying-machine came shooting out of the loft, and it almost fell right on top of her.”
The doctor chuckled. “Ted and Gus
weren’t hurt, eh? I’ll bet Josephine gave them a hiding!”
“They ran off before she got the chance. I guess she will, though, when they show up again.”
Doc Jones dropped his fee into his coin purse and donned his hat. Mrs. Dillon cast an anxious glance at her son.
“Will it be all right to leave him alone, Doc? I’ve got so much work to do.…”
“Sure, it’ll be all right. Just let him rest. If he wants anything, he can holler for it.”
He walked down the straw-matted corridor with her and descended to the lobby. He paused there for a moment, glancing around at the scuffed leather chairs, the great brass cuspidors, the splintered floor.
“You’ve cleaned the place up a lot, Edie,” he said approvingly.
“It needed it,” Edie Dillon avowed. “You never saw such a mess, Doc. And the bedbugs—my!”
“Have you got rid of ’em yet?”
“Not entirely. I’ve tried everything I can think of, too. Coal oil and red pepper and sulphur candles.”
“They’re a sight to get rid of,” the doctor agreed, “and this warm weather makes ’em worse. Comes a good freeze in the fall and it’ll kill ’em off.”
“Well, I hope so.”
“How is business, Edie?”
“Oh, it’s not bad,” said Mrs. Dillon. “The drummers ought to start coming through pretty soon now that the roads are clear, and there’ll be the Chautauqua troop next week. If I just didn’t have to pay so much for help! You know I’ve got that oldest DeHart girl cooking and maiding for me—just helping me, mind you—and I have to pay her four dollars a week!”
The doctor shook his head, grimly. “It’s a sight, all right. We’ve got one of the Moss girls working for us, and she don’t do anything and we pay her two-fifty a week. Two-fifty, just for keeping house for Mrs. Doc and me!”
Mrs. Dillon said that it was a shame. Doc Jones said that if some of these girls ever had to get out and work for a living, they would know what was what. He started to go, then paused, hesitantly.
“Uh, by the way, Edie, have you ever heard anything from your husband?”
“Yes, I did have some word,” said Edie, and immediately regretted the admission.
