Authors: Jim Thompson
A
long while passed, and no one came to pick us up. Finally, we gathered up our tools and started into camp on foot. But we hadn’t gone very far before Higby came roaring up the trail in the pickup. He was late because dust had clogged the car’s carburetor—he blamed it on Depew’s driving. He looked more tired than we felt as we rode into the camp, now lit up like a carnival with lanterns.
Higby took us to the main high-pressure tent, the only one with a floor and screens, and had us marked down for three hours’ work. We got our badges at the same time, then went over to one of the long tables sitting out on the prairie—a table made out of planks laid on sawhorses—and washed with river water and laundry soap.
Everyone else had been fed sometime before. The cook and his seconds and flunkeys were now busy cleaning up and doing what they could to prepare for six o’clock breakfast. Ordinarily, since they worked on straight salary instead of hourly wages, you couldn’t have got a cup of coffee from ’em if you’d held a gun to their heads. But the cook knew me and he knew about us burying Bones—“a victim of capitalist brutality”—so he fixed us up fine.
Coffee with a big slug of Jamaica ginger in it (jake is almost pure alcohol). Then a whole platter of canned roast beef with hashed-brown potatoes and canned peaches and warmed-over biscuits. I ate and ate, only stopping because I was afraid of getting sick. Four Trey had finished ahead of me, so we carried our dishes back into the kitchen tent, thanked the cook and went out into the starlit night.
A heavyset old guy with a shaved head and only one arm was fussing around at the wash benches. Laying out bars of laundry soap and rinsing basins and so on. Four Trey nudged me, pointing to him.
“I see Wingy Warfield’s made camp boss again.”
“With his voice, how could he miss?” I laughed.
Being camp boss isn’t nearly so important as it sounds. In fact, it isn’t important at all, since it doesn’t involve much but waking the stiffs in the morning and keeping the camp grounds in reasonable order. Wingy—all one-armed men are called Wingy—knew this as well as anyone, but he put on more airs than a line boss.
He saw Four Trey and me watching him and he puffed himself up and strutted over to us. “I’m givin’ you fair warning,” he said in a voice like a foghorn. “The first bo I catch droppin’ his pants within a hundred yards of camp can go get his time!”
“We’ll watch it, Wingy,” Four Trey nodded soberly. “Fact is, Tommy and I are starting to blast slop pits and latrines the first thing in the morning.”
“Well, all right,” Wingy Warfield roared, glaring from one to the other of us. “But what I said still goes!”
He turned and strutted away, importantly. Four Trey and I lighted up cigarettes.
Warfield was a boomer—a guy who made the boom camps. There was a joke going around that the places had been named for him, like the town of Son-of-a-bitch, for example, which was nothing but one big whorehouse with an annex for gambling and which had the short-term—very short-term—reputation of being the toughest town in the world. The Rangers moved in after less than a month and chopped it to pieces with axes. When they did, they found more than a dozen bodies buried under the floors.
“Well, Tommy…” Four Trey squinted up at the sky, taking a deep breath of the cool clean air. “Maybe we’d better put a button on the day, hmm?”
“Maybe we had,” I said. “It’s been a long one.”
He caught his hat brim, fore and aft, and crimped it upward. Casually, I did the same with mine. We said good night and he sauntered away, disappearing inside one of the twenty long sleeping tents. I waited until I saw which one he chose, then I entered one several tents away.
That was the way you had to operate if you wanted to get along with Four Trey Whitey. He didn’t want anyone moving in on him, as the saying is, and he had some pretty funny ideas about what moving in meant. I mean, it took a lot of territory where he was concerned, and you had to lean over backwards to avoid it.
The only other person in my tent was an old pappy guy, which is what they call any old man on a pipeline. I put him down as a crumb-boss, and I turned out to be right. A crumb, in the oil fields, is a louse. The joke is that the old men who take care of the tents are secretly the bosses of the lice, telling them who to bite and so on.
He gave me a cross, suspicious look, as old men do sometimes. Because they’re afraid of you, I suppose, until you make them know they don’t have to be. He said I was to pick out my cot, and be danged sure I didn’t mess up any of the others. And I said, of course, I’d do just that.
“Mind if I take one back by the rear flap?” I asked. “I like lots of air.”
“Well…,” he gave me a cautious look. “Well, I guess that’ll be all right.”
He actually had nothing to say about where I slept. But he was scared and old, and, well, what the hell? “It’s strictly up to you,” I said. “After all, you’re the boss, and you’ve got the stroke in this tent.”
He broke into a big smile. It was as nice a smile as I’ve ever seen, even if it didn’t have any teeth in it. “Sure, it’s all right!” he said. “Bunk down anywhere you want to, son, and if you need any extra blankets or anything, you just let me know!”
I went down the grassy aisle between the twin rows of cots to the rear of the tent. I stretched out on an end cot, putting my hands under my head and easing my shoes off. Lying in a bed, or rather a cot with a mattress on it, for the first time in weeks felt good. Too good. When you haven’t been used to it, comfort can be uncomfortable.
After a while I sat up, and the crumb boss stopped fooling around up front, doing things that didn’t need to be done, and came back to where I was. We talked; rather, he talked and I listened. I guess it had been a long time since anyone was interested in anything he had to say, and he needed to talk. It didn’t tell me much about him that I hadn’t already surmised. You saw quite a few old pappy guys, and it was virtually the same story with all of them.
No homes. No families. Or none that cared what happened to them. Anywhere else, they’d have been in a poorhouse or an old folks’ home, since there were no old-age pensions at the time. Out here, they could usually pick up some kind of job on the big construction projects. Nothing important, of course, nothing that required any real effort, but something that did have to be done.
They worked during the warm months, the summer and spring and fall—the only times there were jobs for them. In the winter they stayed in the bleak, God-awful oil towns. Bunking in the dingy half-canvas cothouses—rag houses, they were called—or holing up three or four to a room in the rickety unpainted hotels. They seldom had more than enough money to barely squeak by until spring. Spring sometimes found them too old and weak to work, and they gradually starved to death. But that didn’t happen very often. This was a young man’s country—a country for healthy young men. There was little available in the way of medical facilities, and old men sicken easily. And when they took sick here, they died.
It wasn’t much to look forward to, dying when you were too old and sick to work. But maybe living isn’t either.
We said good night, the crumb boss and I. He went back up front, blew out the lantern and went to bed. And I still couldn’t relax.
I took off all my clothes, and it was a little better that way with the cool breeze washing over me. But it wasn’t good enough for sleep. I’d missed my bath that day, not getting down to the Pecos as I usually did, and I felt all prickly and sticky.
Finally, after a lot of tossing around, I put my shoes back on—just my shoes, nothing else—and went out the rear flap of the tent.
It was a nice night, just cool enough without being cold. The moon streamed through a canyon of clouds, painting a path across the sage and chaparral. I sauntered down it, feeling like I sometimes did at night in these far-out places. As though everything was mine, the whole world, and that I was the only person in it.
I kept walking, not for any reason except that I felt like it and it was a nice night. Then, when I’d probably walked a half mile or so, I suddenly came to a stop.
I was looking down into a wash, a draw in the prairie. An old panel truck was parked in it, a truck made over into a housecar.
I stood staring at it, not at all sure of what I was seeing—that it really was Carol’s. Half-thinking that I’d gone to sleep back there in the tent and that this was a dream, I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them again.
Just as she came around the side of the truck.
She was as naked as I was, wearing nothing but her shoes. We stood looking at each other, and it all seemed perfectly natural that we should be like this. Just the two of us standing naked in our own private world. Then, she called my name softly,
“Tommy,”
and held her arms out to me.
And I went down to her.
I picked her up and kissed her, the first girl I’d ever really kissed. I carried her to the truck and lifted her inside. And climbed in after her.
B
ack in camp that night, again stretched out on my bunk, I thought of countless things I should have asked her. One very important thing in particular. And it seemed incredible that I’d asked her nothing at all, that we’d hardly talked at all. Yet on the other hand it seemed natural enough, exactly the way it should have been. And basically I guess it was.
We were two kids, a young man and a young woman, come together for the first time. The first time for her, yes, as well as for me. For as little as I knew about women, I knew that much. We had given each other the gift that can only be given once. And in the glory and wonder of giving it, we had no thoughts for anything else.
How could we talk at such a time? How could I even think of questioning her?
Frankly, I would have been a little worried about myself if I had.
I settled down under the blankets, contentedly tired and ready to sleep. But I wasn’t due to get much that night. My eyes were just drifting shut when the beam of headlights swept the prairie—only one pair at first; then another and another and another until the landscape leaped and danced with light, and the sound of laboring motors filled the air. I opened the tent flap wide and looked out.
The cars were all the same make, big Hudson sedans. Their rebuilt bodies were half-again as long as they had been originally, and they were equipped with extra–heavy duty springs and tires. Canvas water bags hung from the radiator caps. A winch, for winching out of quicksand and mud, was bolted to the reinforced front bumper. Roped to the roof were four spare tires, and a set of digging-out tools. Roped to a built-on platform at the rear was a pile of baggage.
They were stagecoaches, and they went wherever man went, to all the places where trains didn’t go and never would. Just as the horsedrawn stagecoach was the forerunner of the train, these were the forerunner of our present-day bus system. The drivers wore boots and broad-brimmed hats, and they were tanned the color of saddle leather. They wore gunbelts and .45’s, and they didn’t wear them for decoration.
Their passengers that night were welders and other skilled workmen—dragline and ditcher operators, heavy-machinery mechanics and the like. They were high-pay men with strong unions, so they doubtless all owned cars. Which, needless to say, they’d been smart enough to leave at home.
A pipeline was no place to bring a car, not if it was worth anything. It would be stolen—whole or piece by piece—the first time you turned your back to it.
The long line of Hudsons pulled into camp, and drove off into the night again. Their recent passengers began to bunk down in the tents, calling back and forth to each other, and making a lot of noise about it. They were sore. They had a right to be. The line had waited until the very last minute before notifying them to report to work in the morning. They were worn out from traveling, yet they would get almost no rest before facing up to a hard day. They were hungry, but they could get no food.
The pipeline company—its financial backers, rather—had let them in for this hardship merely to save a few dollars. The relatively small cost of feeding them supper. For if a man was in camp, he had to be fed.
Normally, the bosses on pipeline jobs were pretty free and easy about such things. Your wages were docked a dollar a day for room and board (“slop and flop”), and if you didn’t have any pay coming—if you were in camp a day before the job started—you were welcome to eat without paying. But it obviously wasn’t going to be that way here. The moneymen on this job weren’t giving anything away.
Everything finally quieted down, and I went to sleep. Little more than an hour later, about an hour before dawn, I was awakened again.
Truckloads of men were coming into camp—the common working stiffs, guys who had been jungled up in town while they waited for the job to open. They climbed down from the big flatbeds, hurried bleary-eyed into the tents to claim bunks for themselves. Like the welders and other skilled workmen, they, too, were victims of the line’s penny-pinching. Called into camp at the last possible moment to save the cost of one meal.
They were hungry and worn-out, too tired to do anything but curse. About as capable of doing the hard day’s work that lay just ahead of them as hospital patients. So the penny-pinchers would find their stinginess a damned expensive business. And I wondered how anyone could have been so stupid. But so-called smart people often outsmart themselves, I’ve found.
To make a dollar, they make an enemy for life. To save a dollar, they lose a hundred. They have eyes only for what’s happening at their end of the rope, overlooking the guy at the other end.
The camp never got quiet again that night, but I went to sleep anyway. An hour passed—a little less than an hour, actually—and it was dawn. And I was brought wide awake by Wingy Warfield’s foghorn voice.
“YEEOWWW!” he yelled. “YOW, YOW, YOW, YEEOWWW! Grab your shirt and hit the dirt! Yow, yow, yow! Pile out, you boes, get on your toes, an’ blow your nose on your underclothes! YOW, YOW, YOW!”
Since most of the other men were already dressed, they were at the wash benches ahead of me, dabbling at their faces and hands and then running toward the long chow tent. They began to pile up at the entrance where Depew and his assistants were checking them off for time. There were sullenly restless grumbles at the delay, then yells and shouts and curses. And then they were storming into the tent from all directions, through the front and under the sideflaps. Knocking Depew and his helpers out of the way, bowling over everyone who tried to stop them.
There was a blast of gunfire. I looked up from washing. It was Bud Lassen. He was firing into the air, but not by very much. A little bit lower and he would have hit someone, and that, of course, would have been the end of him and probably the end of the camp. It would have started a riot that nothing could have stopped.
I stared at him, stunned, as he raised his gun to fire again, almost holding it level. Depew was only a few feet away, making no move at all to stop him. Actually grinning, a smugly mean little grin, as he watched. I looked around wildly for Higby, but I couldn’t see him. As I learned later, he was deliberately keeping out of sight, since Depew was running this end of the show and Higby wanted no part of it.
I let out a yell, a warning, but no one heard me. There was too much noise. I yelled again and then I vaulted over the wash bench and ran. Wondering why no one but me could see the terrible danger, why they kept on jamming into the tent when they should have been running for their lives.
Bud apparently saw or sensed my approach. He hesitated for a second, then swerved the gun toward me.
He wasn’t quite fast enough. His moment of hesitation had let me get in close, and I left my feet in a flying tackle, hitting him just above the knees.
He did an almost complete flipflop, came down hard on the ground, the gun flying from his hand. As he rolled and grabbed for it, I threw myself on top of him, and began to pound him in the face.
I was killing mad. Everything had piled up in me—the loss of sleep, the senseless cruelty of the line’s backers, the brutal murder of Fruit Jar. All the indignities and humiliations I had suffered or felt I had suffered during my weeks of waiting for work had piled up in me, and now crashed down on top of me. Something seemed to snap in my brain, and all I could see was a red haze. And I did my damnedest to beat Bud Lassen to death. I was screaming that I would kill him when Four Trey and some other guys dragged me off of him.
I tried to break away from them, to get at him again. Four Trey shook me, yelling for me to stop for God’s sake. But I wouldn’t; I guess I couldn’t. So he knocked me cold with a hard clip to the button.
He may have hit me a little harder than he intended. (And just maybe he didn’t either!) At any rate, it was one hell of a good punch. When I came to, Four Trey was carrying me over his shoulder, lugging me down the gentle slope away from camp. I mumbled foggily, and after a few more steps he paused in a kind of natural hedge of sage brush and set me gently upon my feet.
“Okay?” He frowned into my face. “All right now?”
“Sure,” I said, slurring the word. “What—where’sh ev’yone—?”
“Never mind!” he snapped. “Just stay here and keep out of trouble! Stay right here, get me?”
I nodded fuzzily, wondering why he was so sore. He turned and went back up the slope, and I rubbed the fog out of my eyes, at last coming into full consciousness.
Above me, men were streaming out of the chow tent—coming
out
of it, not going in—and the strawbosses were sorting out their crews for the day’s work, then pointing them to the particular trucks they were to ride. In the distance, I heard the rocking
chug-chug
of the ditching machines. Still further away a chorus of jackhammers began to chatter. There were shouts, whistles, cries of “
Over here, bo!
” Then the first of the big flatbeds broke into a thunderous roar, wheeled out of camp with its jampacked load of men. One by one the others roared thunderously and followed it, a rocking jolting procession of men and machines heading for the start-o’-line.
The last of the racket died away, and the camp was almost completely silent.
Four Trey came into view, started down the slope with an armload of tools. I hurried to help him, but he pushed past me with a curt shake of his head, leaving me to trail after him empty-handed.
He dropped the tools in the growth of sage. Stood examining the terrain for a few moments. At last he turned back to me, made a sweeping gesture with one hand.
“All right,” he said, “this is our latrine. Fifty feet long, three wide and two deep. Grab yourself a mattock and get busy.”
I picked up a mattock—a pick with a wide blade. He went back up the slope to the supply tent, returning a few minutes later with a case of dynamite balanced on one shoulder and two steel rock drills on the other.
He dropped the drills on the tool pile, then carried the dyna some fifty feet farther before easing it down to the ground. Leaving it there, he went on another fifty feet or so to a bare place in the prairie, where he carefully took a small box of dynamite caps from his pocket and held it in both hands as he lowered it to the earth.
A dyna cap is black and not much bigger than a penny. It is the percussive force which sets off the dynamite charge and it explodes very easily, and one of them is enough to blow off a man’s hand.
Coming back to where I was, Four Trey picked up a mattock and went to work with me. Neither of us saying a word as we marked off a rough outline of the latrine, then began clearing it of sage and grass. Finally, after we had been at it for more than an hour, he rested on his mattock and slanted a wryly amused glance at me.
“Getting hungry, Tommy?” he asked.
“I can make out,” I said. “You don’t hear me kicking, do you?”
“You should have eaten early. Machine and powder men always eat early.”
He was right, of course; I should have left a call with the crumb boss. But it had been so long since I’d worked powder that I’d forgotten.
“All right,” I said. “It’s my own fault.”
“It’s not the only thing, Tommy. That brawl with Lassen was your fault, too.”
“All right,” I said again, but I was beginning to boil. “He was about to shoot into a crowd, and it was my fault for trying to stop him. I should have let him start a riot and have the camp torn down…?”
“It’s your fault for being stupid”—there was a sharp edge to his voice. “Sure, Depew is a complete stinker, but he’s not a sap. Did you actually think he’d allow Bud to commit murder? That he’d just stand and watch without saying a word of protest?” Four Trey shook his head disgustedly. “Lassen was firing blanks, for God’s sake! Anyone even half as bright as you are should have known that he was.”
He picked up his mattock and went back to work. I did the same, feeling like two cents’ worth of nothing. The mattocks went up and down,
chug-clomp, clush-clush,
and the sun began to pull sweat from me like a magnet. The silence between Four Trey and me dragged on and on, and then I brought the mattock blade down on a ten-inch centipede, cutting it in two. The two halves started to run away in different directions, and Four Trey pounded them into the ground.
“Ever get bitten by one of those?” he asked casually.
“No,” I said. “But one clamped onto my bare leg once. I knocked him off all right, but there were these two rows of little holes like pinpricks where he’d held on with his feet. They got infected and I had chills and fever for a week.”
“Is that a fact?” Four Trey shook his head interestedly. “I’ve been lucky, I guess. I got bit by a tarantula, but I was more scared than hurt. The biggest damned spider you ever saw, Tommy. As big around as a saucer and furred like a rabbit.”
“I’ll bet it jumped on you,” I said, because tarantulas are great on jumping. Four Trey said I’d bet right.
“I was lighting a cigarette from a coal-oil lamp, and the thing jumped at the light. They go for light, you know. It missed the lamp and landed right across my mouth and nose.”
“Holy cow!” I said. “That must have given you a jolt!”
“It did, Tommy,” he chuckled. “Oh, it did. I wouldn’t care to go into embarrassing details, but the hotel made me buy them a new mattress and bedclothes.”
We laughed about it, the laughter almost making me forget how hot and hungry I was. Four Trey scrubbed his palms against his pants and took another grip on his mattock.
“Now, getting back to Bud Lassen, Tommy.…”
“Yeah?” I said, a little nervously. “What, uh, how do I stand on that, Four Trey?”
“Well, Lassen shouldn’t have been firing into a crowd, blanks or no blanks. So Depew couldn’t have you run out of camp like he wanted to. Higby threatened to take the matter right to the top, and Depew had to back water.”
“I’m glad Higby took my part,” I said. “I just wonder why he ever hired Lassen in the first place.”
“He didn’t. Depew hired him over Higby’s head. But, Tommy…,” Four Trey gave me a sober look, “forget that stuff about Higby’s taking your part. Don’t lean on it, because he’ll never do it the second time. Not unless it suits his own purposes.”