Authors: Jim Thompson
N
o, Tommy, no! Now, you promised not to!”
“You mean you won’t even tell me your name? Your full name?”
“Oh. Well, it’s Long. Carol Long.”
“What…where are your folks, Carol?”
“Parents?” She shook her head. “I don’t have any.”
“No close kin at all?”
Her hair brushed my face as she shook her head again. Then, bitterly, “At least I hope they’re not mine.”
“How do you mean?”
“Just the people who’ve taken care of me since I was a little girl. As far back as I can remember.”
“You don’t sound like you like them much.”
“I don’t like a lot of things! Like people who keep asking questions after they’ve promised not to!”
“Why are you following a pipeline camp, Carol?”
Silence.
“There’s only one reason why you would follow it. Why any woman would.”
Silence.
“Is that how…? Did someone come over here from the camp and beat you up?”
Silence.
“No, it couldn’t be. Even if they knew you were here. Maybe on payday—on payday, sure. But no one would be looking for a woman before then.”
Silence.
“Why, Carol? Oh, my gosh, honey, why? How could you? I love you! You’re the only girl I’ve ever loved or ever will! So how…why…?”
Silence, still. And her lips stiff, unrelenting, under mine. But I felt the damp of tears upon her cheeks.
“I won’t let you do it, Carol. By God, if I catch anyone even coming near you—!”
I grabbed her and shook her in a fury of frustration. I told her I ought to turn her over my knee and paddle the butt right off her.
“Why, doggone it, damn you, anyway! The idea of a nice girl like you turning herself into a damned filthy whore! Why…why, dammit to hell, I.…”
She rolled over on her stomach, and buried her face in her arms. I raised my hand to give her a hard sock on the bottom. But she started crying, and I couldn’t stand that. So I wound up by kissing and petting her instead.
She snuggled against me contentedly, sighed on a drowsy note.
“Mmm, this is nice, isn’t it, Tommy? Don’t you wish we could just stay this way forever?”
“Fat chance,” I grumbled. “Dammit, Carol, how can you.…”
“D-don’t, Tommy. Please, don’t. Anyway, it’ll be a long long time yet, an’.…”
“The hell it will be! Payday’s a day less than two weeks off, and.…”
“But…but maybe something’ll happen. Maybe it’ll be longer than that, and.…Anyway, let’s don’t talk about it. Not now, darling. Not now.”
“What do you mean, maybe something’ll happen? Payday comes every two weeks, and when it does.…”
“Oh, why don’t you shut up!” she exploded. “Why don’t you just go on back to camp and go to bed?”
“All right, I will!” I said, and I got up and began to dress. “And I’m not coming back either! I got no use for whores, and that includes you!”
She started crying again. I told her she might as well knock it off, because I was leaving and I wasn’t coming back. “I’ve got just one thing more to say to you,” I said, hopping around on one foot to get my sock on. “If I had my way I’d—
yow!
”
I sat down on the floor hard, clutching my big toe. Carol jumped up, and somehow found me in the darkness. Flung her arms around me protectively.
“T-Tommy…what’s the matter, darling?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just stubbed my big toe.”
“Oh, you poor baby, you!” She hugged my head to her breast. “Want me to kiss it an’ make it well?”
I said, “Aw, naw, it’s all right,” feeling kind of embarrassed, you know.
“I think I’d better kiss it,” she said firmly. “You can’t take chances with stubbed toes.”
“Naw, now, don’t,” I said. “Now, dammit, Carol! Of all the doggone crazy girls…!”
“Let me kiss your toe, Tommy. I’ll tickle you if you don’t.”
I tried to pull away from her. I told her she’d better knock off the nuttiness, because I was plenty sore at her already, and it wasn’t going to change anything.
She began to tickle me. I tickled her.
We wrestled all over the floor, laughing and acting the fool and knocking things over until we’d practically torn the place apart. After a while we got back in bed.
I left for camp an hour later, after promising to come back the next night. She wouldn’t let me go until I did, and of course I wanted to, anyway.
Camp was dark except for a couple of lanterns, one hung near the drinking-water barrel and another spotted in the area where the flatbeds were parked. I was thirsty after all my activity, so I went between my tent and the adjoining one and dippered up a drink.
I rolled a smidgin of water around in my mouth, spat it out on the grass. I took a swallow, then another, drinking slow because I was hot and a man could get sick from gulping water when he was hot. I emptied the dipper a swallow at a time, hung it back over the rim of the barrel and turned to go to my tent.
And there was Bud Lassen. I almost piled into him.
I froze for a second, then jumped backward raising my fists. He gestured frantically, holding his hands palm outward in an appeal for peace.
“Don’t, Tommy! I just.…Where you been, anyway?”
“None of your damned business,” I said.
“Well, sure, sure, it ain’t. I mean, I was just looking for you, and you weren’t flopped, so, uh, naturally I asked where you’d been.”
I began to relax. He certainly didn’t look like he wanted any trouble. Judging by his swollen eye and mouth and the court-plaster strips across his nose and forehead, he’d had all the trouble he wanted.
“I was restless so I took a walk,” I said. “What are you doing up?”
“Well, that’s kind of my job, you know, Tommy. To sort of mosey around and keep an eye on things.”
I pointed out that there was nothing around camp at night to keep an eye on and that an armed guard walked the line. He agreed with an ingratiating smirk.
“But you know how I am, Tommy. I like to be on my toes. I got to keep my hand in, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “You like to go poking your nose in all over the map, whether you’ve got any business there or not. Now, what do you want with me?”
His face tightened; for a split second, pure murder gleamed in his eyes. Then he worked the smile back into place.
“Well, you know, Tommy. Just to let you know that I don’t hold no hard feelings and to make sure you don’t.…I mean, we’re all here together, workin’ and livin’ together, an’.…”
“No, we’re not,” I said. “I’m not living with you and I’m not working with you. There’s no reason why we should have to come near each other in a camp this size.”
“Now, Tommy.…” He squirmed. “I’m trying to do the right thing here, an’ you sure ain’t makin’ it easy. Sounds like you just don’t want to be friends, no matter what.”
He was right about that, of course. But I’d promised Four Trey to stay out of trouble, and it’s never smart to hold a man in a corner when he’s trying to get out. So I nodded and took a softer tone with him.
“Okay, Bud,” I said. “If you’re saying you don’t want trouble from me, I’ll promise you won’t get any unless you start it. Now, why don’t we leave it at that and turn in?”
“Swell, Tommy, swell,” he burbled eagerly. “I mean maybe I done a wrong thing or two, an’ maybe you did. But now we’re even, an’…shake on it, huh?”
He stuck out his hand. I nodded and walked past him and when I glanced back from the entrance flap of my tent, he was still standing there, his hand half-extended. He dropped it, gave it a rub against his pants and walked away. I went on into my tent, and got into bed, wondering what had come over the guy.
It could be that he was afraid of getting canned, after seeing Depew play second-stroke to Higby. Or it could be that he wanted to get my guard down before he laid it into me hard. Or it could be both. As I saw it, however, I could be pretty damned sure of a couple of things:
That Bud Lassen’s friendliness was strictly an act and that he was going to make plenty of trouble for me.
And I was right.
Or at least half-right. Whether I was any more than that, I’m still not sure.
T
he camp had to be pitched in a certain place: a large reasonably level area, which would be convenient to the job. It
had
to be in a place like that, and if the soil was rocky it had to be put up with. The route of the pipeline itself, however, had been surveyed to skirt as much rock as possible. And it was being dug in what the geologists call a “fault”—a place where the rock has shifted and broken. There were two downward-sloping ledges of rock with a filled-in valley of earth between them; and the valley was the route of the line.
There were stretches and patches of rocky outcrop in the valley’s earth, and there were stretches where the two ledges ran together. Wherever rock occurred, Four Trey and I and, of course, the jackhammer men had work to do.
Our first day on the line, there wasn’t enough rock to require both a powder monkey and a helper. Or so Higby said, as we started to board the first truck going out.
“I figure you can shoot it all, Four Trey. In a day or two, of course, you’ll need Tommy again.”
I wanted to know what I was going to do in that day or two, but Four Trey cut in on me. “I’ll tell you, Frank,” he said. “Tommy’s a little rusty on shooting; you know how a man gets when he doesn’t keep his hand in. I’d like to get him broken in good now that we’ve made a start.”
“I’d like a lot of things,” Higby said curtly. “But—all right, I can let you keep him this morning. No longer.”
Four Trey said a morning wasn’t enough, and Higby said it would have to be. “You run a jackhammer, Tommy? We’ve got more jackhammer work than we’ve got men for it.”
“Well…” I hesitated reluctantly. “I wouldn’t exactly call myself a jackhammer man, but.…”
“Mmm. Would you call yourself a mormon-board man? Or a dope-pouring man?”
“Huh?”
I said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve got a choice. Mormon board, dope or jackhammer.”
“Come to think of it,” I said. “I’m one of the best damned jackhammer men in Texas.”
And Higby grinned tightly, and Four Trey chuckled. And then he and I climbed aboard the flatbed.
It pulled out of camp and went jolting southward across the prairie. After about a mile we came to the beginning of the ditch, and from then on we stopped repeatedly to drop off men and equipment. As we proceeded down the line, the dope (asphalt) boiler behind us was fired up, sending acrid smoke into the sunny sky. Then, the power generators began to chug and hum, and the welders’ torches bounced showers of sparks from the joints of line pipe. And, then, finally, the ditching machine began its groaning, shaking clatter.
It took one man working full-time to keep the ditcher’s thousands of nuts and bolts tight. Otherwise, it would have fallen apart from its constant rocking and shaking.
Only the jackhammer men were left on the truck when Four Trey and I unloaded. While we set up for work, they were taken on up the route of the line—ahead of theditch—about a quarter of a mile. They cut in their air generator, and their jackhammers began to rattle and clatter against the rock. Four Trey gave me a commiserating look.
“Too bad you got stuck on that, Tommy. Of course, it’ll only be for a day or so.”
“Sure,” I said. “Anyway, I’d a lot rather do it than dope pipe or pull a mormon board.”
“Who wouldn’t? Maybe it’s all for the best, Tommy. After running a jackhammer, shooting powder will look pretty good to you.”
“Yeah,” I said, although nothing was ever going to make me like to work dynamite. “Sure, it will.”
Shooting line-ditch was a different proposition from the pit work we’d done in camp. Because the shots might be stretched out over a considerable distance, there was no cutting fuses the same length and tying the ends together; that would take too much time and fuse. Instead, you cut a long fuse for the first shot in your series (the length depending on how many shots you had to fire) and you cut the last one short. Then you ran down the line of shots, lighting them from a cigar butt (you were issued cigars by Supply) until the last one was lit. And then you ran to beat hell.
If you gauged things right, all the shots went off simultaneously and you were safely out of the way when they did. If you didn’t do it right, you were in trouble. Live shots could get buried. They weren’t the only thing, either, if you know what I mean.
Of course, there are better ways now of firing dynamite. Probably there were better ways then. But that was the quickest and cheapest way, so that was the way it was done.
It was an easy morning for me. The work was, at least. There were no long series of shots. Even shooting them all, with Four Trey supervising, I still hardly worked up a sweat—either from nerves or effort.
Somehow, though, I didn’t feel too good, either mentally or physically. I’d missed a lot of sleep the night before, after being up most of the previous night, and the loss was catching up with me. Being tired, I couldn’t fight off the black thoughts which kept creeping into my mind. Sickening thoughts about what she was going to do—or had said she was going to do.
Why would she say so if she wasn’t?
I thought of her painfully bruised face—
how could she have done that by banging into a door?
I thought of her being alone and helpless in this Godawful wilderness. I thought of the tall shadow I’d seen from the door of her housecar—and I thought maybe it was a mule jackrabbit, but what if it wasn’t?
Just before noon a flatbed truck stopped at one of the main workgangs behind us, and the driver and swamper set off their dinner for them. After it had gone on by us to take grub to the jackhammer men, I blew my last series of shots, and Four Trey checked them out as okay.
It was noon by then, and we sauntered back to where the main gang was starting to eat.
“You’re coming right along, Tommy,” he told me. “Shooting like an old pro. Getting over your scares, are you?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I had the impression at times that you weren’t scared because you just weren’t thinking about what you were doing. If that’s the case, you’ve been a very lucky boy this morning and you’d better not count on your luck holding.”
I mumbled something about just being tired, I guessed. Four Trey said sharply that I’d better get over it, then, and get over it fast.
“I mean that, Tommy. I like you, but not nearly enough to let you blow me up. Now, if you’ve got something on your mind, let’s get it to hell unloaded right now.”
“Well,” I swallowed guiltily. “I, uh.…”
“Yes?”
“Well, to tell you the truth,” I said, and it was partly the truth. “I’ve been thinking about that guy Bones. You know, the one that fell off the truck—only you said maybe he didn’t fall off, that someone murdered him.…”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Four Trey stopped dead in his tracks. “You mean you’re still thinking about that? But I told you I was just making talk! Just killing time.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I still can’t get it out of my mind. It’s so logical, you know, when you stop to think about it. It could have happened just the way you said.…”
“A lot of things could happen that don’t. Now, forget it, for God’s sake. Bones was a working stiff who fell off a truck. That’s all there was to it, so forget anything I said.”
I promised that I would, and we went on down to where the chow was.
Everything was steaming hot to prevent spoilage. Sometimes, you got a little ice in your drinking water and the canned milk would usually be mixed with ice water. But there was no ice for food. The only time you got cold food on the pipelines was in the winter when you didn’t want it.
All the food was served plain; that is, without gravies or sauces. No pipeliner would have touched anything with sauce or gravy on it, just as none would have eaten hash or chili or anything like that. They had to be able to see what they were eating, to know exactly what it was. Anyone who’s ever had a bad case of dysentery will know why.
Four Trey and I filled platters with food and drew bowls of boiling coffee. We carried them over to where a group of guys were eating and sat down alongside them on the fill from the ditch. I’d just taken a big mouthful of baked beans when one of them called to me.
“Hey, Tommy. You seen the chippy yet?”
Chippy?
I choked and coughed, almost strangling. Four Trey gave me a long slow look, but I went on coughing, pretending not to notice. I also pretended like I couldn’t answer the guy who’d called to me, and he spoke again, pointing.
“She’s camped off over in there, Tommy. I was standing up on the truck coming out this morning and I got a good look at her.
Wowee,
what a babe!”
“I seen her, too,” another guy said, and a couple of others chimed in that they’d also seen her. “Come payday I’m really gonna have some of that!”
I went on eating, forcing the food down, my face on fire with shame and anger. I wanted to stomp every one of them, and I couldn’t even object to what they were saying. If I’d had a hold of Carol right then, I’d have shaken her until her teeth rattled.
“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do”—the first guy was speaking again. “I’m gonna pay that little doll a visit tonight. I’ll bet if I talk to her right, I can get it on credit until payday. Why.…”
“Save yourself a trip,” Four Trey said. “She wouldn’t trust you for a penny of it.”
“Yeah? You talk like you know, man.”
“I do. I was over to see her last night.”
It was a lie, of course, but they didn’t know that. I doubt if there was another person in the world who knew that he was impotent.
“No, sir,” Four Trey went on. “That little gal doesn’t trust no one for nothing. I had some dough; more than enough, I thought. But it wasn’t enough for her, and she wouldn’t wait for even a dollar of it.”
“Yeah? How much did she want, anyway?”
Four Trey said that she wanted twenty bucks, and he held up his hand at their grunts of surprise and disbelief.
“I know, I know, boys. Three to five bucks is the going price, but it’s not going for her. Either you pay twenty or you can stay in your sack and dream about it.”
“Maybe not”—from a big loose-lipped guy. “Maybe I get it without payin’ nothing.”
Four Trey gave him a pitying smile. “You mean you think you can take it away from her?”
“She wouldn’t be the first one I took it from!”
“Probably not,” Four Trey nodded evenly. “But you’d probably be the first guy to have his bellybutton next to his asshole. The little lady has a sawed-off twelve-gauge and she knows how to use it.”
He stood up, lifting his tray and bowl with him. I stood up with him, and he looked down at the guy with a smile that would have chilled a Polar bear.
“Maybe you’d better try it,” he said. “Or maybe you’d just better drag-up and get out of camp tonight. Because if I ever see you again, I’m going to swing at you with a rock drill.”
“And I’ll be swinging right along with you,” I said.
The guy looked down at the ground. No one said anything, and finally he moved his head in a little jerk. He’d leave camp. He knew that he’d better.
Four Trey and I walked back up the line to the place where we’d been shooting. He stopped there, and I stopped with him. Wanting to thank him or to explain; to say something or do something—I didn’t know just what.
“Well, Tommy.” He began drawing on his gloves. “You’d better be getting up to those jackhammers, hadn’t you?”
“I’m going right now,” I said. “I…I got to tell you something, Four Trey. I know what you’re thinking, but.…”
“What I think, Tommy, is that a kid with a great potential is about to throw it all down the drain. But that’s his business, as long as he keeps it his. If it ever again gets to crowding in on mine, as it did this morning.…”
“Four Trey,” I said, “I wasn’t lying when I said I’d been thinking about Bones’ death. It
has
bothered me.”
“It has, huh?” He gave me a look of cynical amusement. “Been losing a lot of sleep over it, have you? Not that pipeline chippy out there, but poor old anonymous Bones.”
“All right,” I said doggedly. “I was just trying to explain, but have your own way about it.”
“Maybe I’d better explain something to you, Tommy. The mortality rate on pipeline jobs is approximately one death to every ten miles of line. Since we’ve already had one death, in our burial of Brother Bones—how’s that for alliteration, Tommy?—and since we’ve made a little less than five miles of line, I’d say you need have no fear of the grim reaper for another day or two.”
He bent down, began looking for the shot holes which the jackhammers had drilled.
I turned away and began trudging up-line.
In the scorching midday heat, everything rested but man. Quail and pheasant hid beneath the sage and chaparral, wings hung loosely from their bodies, their undersides wallowed into the dust. Cottontails, whole families of them, napped in the wind-cooled stands of grass. Giant mule-jacks stood like sleepy sentries under the needly groves of Spanish bayonet. Prairie dogs dreamed in the sparse shade of their mounds.
All the life of this wild and lonely land was there to see…for those with the eyes to see it. Nothing took cover. Nothing ran from you. Having seen no men before, they saw no need to hide or run.
I stopped to light a cigarette, and a long, thick shape slid frantically across the blistering earth and began to wind itself around the relative coolness of my leg. It was a bull snake, all of five feet long with a middle as thick as my biceps. I let it rest for a minute, then gently unwound it. It struck at me with its head, its only weapon. But the blows were lazy, heat-drugged; and the snake, finding itself unhurt, ceased them immediately. I put it inside my shirt, let it cool in my evaporating sweat. When I took it out, transferring it to the interior of a joint of pipe, it was blissfully asleep.