Authors: Jim Thompson
M
y working partner and I hoisted the mormon board behind the fill from the ditch. We slammed it down hard, forcing its blade flush with the earth. Then, stiff-armed, with all our weight bearing downward on the handles, we signaled to the tractor driver on the other side of the ditch.
He began to back away slowly, taking the slack out of the heavy cable between board and tractor. When it was tight, he poured on the coal, and the tractor roared backward and our board went forward, slowly dumping our load of fill back into the ditch. When it was all in, the tractor slacked off on the cable, allowing us to reset the board for another bite.
It was about six feet long, that board. Six feet long and maybe three feet deep. Put a plow handle at each end of the top of a kitchen table, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of it. Of course, it was built a hell of a lot heavier than any tabletop. Two men had just about all they could do to lift it. But lifting it was the easiest part of the job. The real work was in riding it toward the ditch.
The ditch was treetop deep in some places. A man standing at the bottom of it could just barely clear the top with a long-handled muckstick. Naturally then, you were never pushing a light load of fill. Any bite you took would be a big one, seven or eight hundred pounds of rock and earth. And it fought you every damned inch of the way.
It kicked, it bucked, it tried to ride up over the fill. One side would be pushing rock when the other had only loose dirt. That allowed one end to whip ahead of the other, which meant that it was going to do some tall whipping to whoever was hanging on to it. I almost had a shoulder dislocated my first day on the board. An hour later, the handle kicked back on the guy who was spelling me, and he dragged-up with two broken ribs.
There’d been no spellers after that first day. There just weren’t enough men who’d take the job. They’d drag-up before they’d take it. This was my third day on the job, and I’d had five different sets of partners. Looking at the one I had now, I figured I was just about due to have another one.
He was stripped to the waist, his hair tied back pirate fashion with a bandanna. His face was pock-marked from gravel-stings, and his mouth was caked with dusty blood where the board had jumped up at him. There was an ugly heaving to his chest, a losing struggle for breath. The shuddery shaking of it was something to make you a little sick. A mighty shaking, yet somehow too weak to break the sweat-formed crust of mud which encased his naked torso like a cast.
“Take a doss, bo,” I told him. “It’s not worth it.”
He turned glazed eyes toward me; fixed unseeing eyes. “Huh?”
“Let go. Walk away from it,” I said.
“Huh?”
I yelled, trying to get through to him. The tractor driver took it as a signal. The slack went out of the cable, and the board began to move forward. There was nothing to do but grab the handle and ride it.
I didn’t ride it long; not more than a couple of seconds. After that I stopped riding and flew.
I soared up into the air, and headed straight down into the ditch. I did a twisting jackknife, managing to get my feet down and my head up. But I couldn’t miss the ditch. It was a good thing I didn’t, too, because of that mormon board. And it would have cut me in two if I hadn’t been out of the way.
I was shook up pretty bad when my feet slammed down on the pipe. But I wasn’t really hurt so much as shocked. Someone held a hand down to me, and I climbed back up out of the ditch, spitting dirt and brushing dust from my eyes. I scrambled over the top of the fill and down the other side.
All work had stopped. A cluster of men stood around the sprawled body of my former partner, leaning on their shovels and picks while the straw boss bent over him.
The guy was dead, of course. He’d needed the job too badly to quit, and the board had killed him. The straw boss straightened, turned his head to spurt out a mouthful of tobacco juice. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and brushed the hand against the side of his pants.
“That goddam board,” he said, in a deep Southwestern drawl. “That board done went and yanked the heart clean out of a fella named Otto Cooper, an’ I’ll bet me a pretty no one knows a danged thing about him.”
No one did.
Higby drove up, wanting to know why the hell the work stoppage, and he had nothing on the guy either. Cooper had hired on late with a bad case of brokes, so naturally he’d gone straight on the mormon board. That was all that was known about him.
Higby drew the straw boss to one side and had a few words with him. Then he drove on down the line, and the straw boss nodded to me.
“ ’Bout caught up with the dope gang, Tommy, so we’re givin’ the old board a rest. Just one more little go-round for you an’ me, and then we’ll break for lunch.”
“I figured,” I said. “Let’s wrap it up and put a button on it.”
He took the dead man’s head, and I took his feet. We lowered him into the ditch, spreading him face down against the pipe. We climbed back up again, latched on to the mormon board and signaled the tractor driver.
The board moved forward, pushing its great load of earth into the ditch, burying the body of Otto Cooper beneath it.
The straw boss spit tobacco juice downwind. He squinted at the straight-up sun, wiping a hand against his mouth, wiping the hand against his pants. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he drawled. “Shit and three are nine. Well, he’s sure as hell got the world’s longest grave, ain’t he?”
“He’ll have company before we make the Gulf,” I said. “A lot of company.”
“Ain’t it the truth, now?” He nodded solemnly. “Ain’t that the God’s truth? Well, screw and two is four and frig makes ten. An’ here comes the chow truck.”
T
he chow truck parked a ways up-line near the largest gang of workmen. I took my time about getting to it, needing to get the kinks out of my arms and back as much as I needed food and wanting to avoid the jostling I’d get in a crowd.
The flunky loaded my tray and filled my coffee bowl. I looked around for a good spot to sit, finally hunkering down away from everyone on a joint of line pipe. It wasn’t a prize place to eat, as it turned out. The dope-boiler was a little too close, and its pale thin smoke stung me like a swarm of ants.
I went on eating, trying to tough it out; just too tired and sore to move. Finally, though, I couldn’t take it any longer, and I started to get up.
“You just stay there.” A foot came down on top of mine. “You just stay right there, Tommy, boy.”
I said, “What the…” and tried to lunge upward. I couldn’t do it, of course, with my foot pinned down, and I banged back down on the pipe.
“Now, that’s better, Tommy, boy. Not a real good spot to squat, it seems like, but this won’t take long.”
He was one of the bearded men I’d seen last night. He squatted down in front of me, his eyes dancing with malicious amusement. As he did so, the two other men I’d seen sat down on the pipe with me. One on each side, squeezed in close.
“I’m Longden.” The first man pointed a thumb at himself. “Those two gents are Bigger and Doss, and if you’d’ve asked us who we were instead of Wingy Warfield we’d’ve told you so. Real polite about answering questions, ain’t we, boys?”
“That’s us. The best little old question-answerers in the world.”
“That’s good,” I said, trying to keep the shakes out of my voice. “Then I reckon you won’t mind telling me why you had to have your arms twisted before you admitted seeing Lassen get killed.”
“What makes you think they were twisted, Tommy, boy?”
“A friend of mine as good as said so,” I said, and I told him how Four Trey had known they were clearing me before they did it. “He found out that you were out of camp that night and he threatened to talk if you didn’t.”
Longden pursed his lips, exchanged a glance with the other two—a signal—and said I had it all wrong.
“Now, here’s the way it was, Tommy, boy. Here’s exactly the way it was. In the first place, Bud Lassen didn’t just
get
killed. We killed him…”
“Wha…!” I stared at him. “You…you admit it?”
“Why not? Talk never hurt anyone without proof to back it up.” He chuckled softly. “Being sound of mind and body, as the saying is, we naturally thought Bud was ripe for killin’. He was a bum who could be trouble, and you were building into a nuisance. So we figured to kill him and stick you for it. We like to do things that way, Tommy, boy. Plan a killing so it either looks like an accident or points the finger at someone else.”
“That’s the way,” Doss nodded. “We made it an accident with nosy ol’ Bones, so you had to be chumped for murderin’ Bud.”
“Right,” Bigger said. “You got to switch ’em around, you know, because too many accidents is as bad as an unsolved murder.”
Longden beamed at them like an admiring father. “Good boys. Aren’t they good boys, Tommy? Well, anyway. It was Carol that twisted our arms, not Four Trey. He told her what had happened to you, and she did the rest. Swore she wouldn’t go through with some plans we had, unless we got you out of the clink.”
He spoke as idly as though he were discussing the weather. We were within fifty feet of hundreds of men, yet these three, these three killers…
“You’re going to hold up the payroll,” I said. “Carol is going to drive the escape car.”
“And she’ll get a nice cut of the loot, Tommy, boy. Plenty for the two of you to set up housekeeping on. That’s what you want, ain’t it?” His brows quirked in cynical amusement. “Me and the boys certainly have no objection, do we, boys?”
Doss said he certainly didn’t object, and Bigger said that he was all for it. I added up to an all-right guy in his book, and a girl just didn’t get no better than Carol!
“You see, Tommy, boy?” Longden spread his hands expressively. “We’re all for you livin’ happily ever after, an’ so on. But right now you’re going to have to keep away from her. We’ve got plans to make and work to do and we can’t have you hangin’ around.”
He gave me an amiable tap on the knee by way of emphasis. I tried to jerk away from him, and the other two held me where I was.
“Why…why, damn you!” I sputtered. “What kind of punk do you think I am? You think you can just walk up to me and tell me what I can do an’ what I can’t do and make me like it? I’ll see Carol whenever I damned well please, and.…”
“Huh-uh. No, you won’t, Tommy, boy. Not unless you can see when you’re dead.”
“Big deal! And what’s Carol going to say about you killing me? You get tough with me, and she’ll blow the deal on you.”
“She might, Tommy. She just might—if she knew about it. But, of course, she ain’t going to. No one is.”
“Like hell! I just disappear and no one thinks anything of it? Now that makes a lot of sense!”
Longden said that it sure did, didn’t it, and Bigger beamed that I sure caught on fast. Show me which end of a match to strike and I’d figure it out in no time. Doss said that a boy as bright as me prob’ly had to hide under the bed in the morning so that folks could see the sun come up.
“Y’see, here’s the way it is, Tommy, boy,” Longden continued. “Carol’s begged you to leave. Three-four people have, everyone that gives a dang about you. That’s the way it is, right? Carol an’ everyone else has done everything they could to point you away from here an’ start you to movin’.…”
“But…well, maybe they did, but.…”
“So you don’t show up some fine morning, and what do folks think? Why, they just think that Tommy Burwell finally whistled-up the dogs and pissed on the fire and made himself long-gone.”
He nodded firmly, waited a moment to see if I had anything else to say. I did have…but I wasn’t going to say it to him. So he jerked his head at the other two, and the three of them got up and walked away together.
The work whistle blew.
I carried my tray back to the chow truck and headed for the dope gang.
D
itch pipe receives a protective coating in the factory these days and has for a long time past. But in those times, the coating was applied at the ditch. As with blasting, it was the quickest way of doing it and, above all, the cheapest. In a different state with a different kind of economy, it would never have been allowed. But in Texas, a state largely dependent on cattle, cotton and oil, practically anything went.
Cotton required large amounts of cheap, backbreaking labor. You could no more farm cotton under healthful conditions than you could raise cattle without men who spent endless hours in the saddle in all kinds of weather, risking their health and their lives for a pittance, growing old when they were young. So also with the oil industry and those related to it.
There were no absolutely safe jobs in the oil fields. They ranged from fairly safe to downright hazardous. To have made them completely safe would have been too costly, it was reasoned, and the industry could not be hampered in any way. On the contrary, the state’s attitude was fiercely protective.
Texas oil men complained that the Standard Oil Company was unfair competition. So for many years Standard was barred from the state by law. It could operate everywhere else in the world, but not in Texas. Anything or anyone who made trouble for Texas industry was buying trouble for himself. And that included people who did the unhealthy, dirty and dangerous jobs of that industry.
They didn’t
have
to do ’em, did they? No one forced them to. They knew what they were getting into when they hired out, and if they didn’t want to risk it they didn’t have to take it!
Insurance? Sure, there was insurance. But insurance was a big industry, too, and fully deserving of the state’s protection. You couldn’t expect an insurance company to sell (or an employer to buy) policies on workmen in certain kinds of jobs. Not unless those policies were so restricted and qualified as to make them virtually worthless. It would cost too much; it would cut profits. Costs had to be held down, profits held up.
Which takes us back to me and the dope gang.
There were three men in the gang, plus a straw boss who checked the pipe after it was doped. One man walked on each side of the ditch, each holding one end of a hammocklike device. This was wrapped one turn around the pipe, and held loosely to form a kind of apron underneath. The third man, me, poured the dope into this apron.
I used a pouring can pretty much like the sprinkling can you’d use in your garden, but with the spray-nozzle removed. As I poured, the other two men pulled the hammock back and forth in a sawing motion, coating the pipe with a thin layer of liquid asphalt.
The hammock men could keep pretty well out of the way of the fumes. I had to stoop right into them. They walked forward. I had to walk backward to keep out of their way.
I wore goggles, of course; I also kept my hat jammed low and my collar turned up and a bandanna tied across my face like a Western outlaw. But that was all I could do, and it wasn’t even halfway enough. In the time that I poured dope—that afternoon plus two days more—my face was burned so badly that the skin hung in strips. My neck and forehead weren’t much better off, either, and I think my eyesight would have been permanently damaged in a very little while longer.
It was a tough world, the Far West Texas of the twenties. You might not live through it and you might not look pretty if you did, but people would know you were a man from a mile away.
At the end of two and a half days, the pipe was doped as far as it was welded, and Higby curtly told me that I could go back to shooting powder if Four Trey would have me. I braced Whitey for it, all nervous and edgy and on the defensive because he hadn’t even spoken to me since I’d been back. He still didn’t speak, either.
He just listened, then shook his head and turned away without answering. I grabbed him and whirled him back around.
“Now…n-now you listen to me!” I stammered, my voice cracking with fury. “You just l-listen to me, Four Trey Whiteside! I’m twenty-one years old and I’m a man. You keep poking it at me that I am! I’m a man, I’ve got to make my own life, and you make me know it. But the minute I start to do it you slap me down. You.…”
“I do it for your own good!”
“How do you know it is? What have you done with your own life that makes you know what’s good for me? Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? Do you think you’re God? Are you God, Mr. Four Trey Whitey?”
He said, “Now, listen to me, Tommy!” And I asked for how long should I listen. How long would he tell me what to do and give a damn whether I did it or not.
“A day, an hour, a minute? You play the father, the big brother, only when you take a notion to. And what happens if I start playing my part? That’s another story, isn’t it? Then you freeze up fast. I’m told to get back where I belong. To go my own way and not bother you. One minute you’re my father and the next you don’t know me. You…”
I stormed away at him, about as near to crying as a man gets. I needed a friend, a real friend, because I was all mixed up over Carol and the mess I’d walked into. I was scared and worried and I didn’t know what to do or where to turn, and he…he.…
His face softened. He looked down at the ground uneasily, guiltily, and I think he spoke to me several times before he finally got my attention.
“Tommy…I’m sorry, Tommy. You go back on powder with me in the morning.”
“Well, you ought to be sorry!” I said. “You…an’ you don’t have to take me back on powder if you don’t want me! I’m a man and I’ve got pride, an’.…”
“And I’ve still got half a pint in my bindle. And you and I are goin’ to put it where it’ll do the most good!”
We did, and we made a lot of talk in the course of doing it. Rather, he talked, and I mostly listened.
“…some people are afraid of caring, Tommy. They’re afraid of letting anyone get too close to them. Because when they do care, they care too much. They put all their eggs in one basket, as the saying is, and when something happens to the basket.…” He shook his head, staring off into space. “It almost kills them, Tommy. It almost killed me when I lost my wife. For a long time, I wished that it would, but instead.…”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have talked up to you the way I did.”
“Yes, you should have, Tommy. It made me see something that I hadn’t seen before, and I needed to see it. You can’t live another person’s life for him. If you care for him, you’ve got to do it on his terms for what he is, not yours for what you think he should be. Now, in my book you were dead wrong to come back here. I’m convinced of it. But.…”
“I had to, Four Trey. I just
had
to!”
“You did,” he nodded. “And who am I to act like you’re not worth spitting on because you did? If you’re for someone, you’re for ’em come hell or high water. If you lose someone you care deeply about, well, at least you had ’em for a while. You’re still ’way ahead of the game and you’ve got no call to stop playing. You loved someone and they loved you, just as each of you was—good, bad and indifferent—the only way to love. Because you were people, not gods, and you didn’t make demands that it wasn’t in the other fellow to meet. And you were richer for having loved, for even a little while.…”
That’s about how our conversation ended. With both of us understanding things we hadn’t understood before, and better friends than we’d ever been.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him about Longden and his two bearded buddies, but I didn’t want to push things too far just when we’d gotten on a solid footing. Anyway, we’d have plenty of opportunities to talk now that we’d be working together again.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to tell him. Because Longden hadn’t been kidding when he’d warned me to stay away from Carol or get killed.
But that’s getting ahead of the story. I’ve gotten a couple days ahead of it in telling about getting square with Four Trey, so let’s move back a little.
Back to the end of my first afternoon on the dope gang…