The Feud Page 6

  Jack asked, with reference to his family, “Do the rest of them know about this ban on us going to Millville? Because how’s Dad going to get to work?”

  Tony said, “God, I never thought of that.”

  “I’d better tell him.” He left the room and went downstairs, skipping every second step, which was not really much faster but simply his current style of descent.

  Wanting to avoid the womenfolk when on such a mission, he went out the rarely used front door and around to the garage, where his father could usually be found when not inside. The garage was empty now, but its doors were closed. If they were left open, birds flew in and might be hard to get out when the car came back, and would crap on it.

  Just as Jack was ready to go back to the house, along came the little dog Mopsy, who was once again taking a breather from its mistress. He had just bent over to pat its wagging behind when the familiar blue sedan, its windshield badly yellowed, came rolling up the alley. Mopsy being the kind of sappy pooch that might well run barking into the roadway and get flattened, Jack swatted the animal’s hairy butt, and it skittered into the yard.

  Jack’s father pulled up on the little apron between garage and alley: this was surfaced with coal ashes. Whenever Jack heard the crunching sound, he was unpleasantly reminded of how cruel a terrain this was to bare feet. He took the stick out of the hasp and opened the garage doors, and was just barely able to clear the right side past the nearer fender.

  But his father climbed ponderously from the car: apparently he wasn’t ready to garage it.

  “Say, Dad,” Jack said, “there’s this thing—”

  “Don’t bother me now, Jack,” his father said brusquely, passing him without a glance.

  Jack pursued him. “This is real important, Dad.”

  His father stopped and turned. “God damn you, not now!” He plodded toward the house.

  Jack obeyed to the degree that he did not at once try again to get his news across, but he did follow his father into the kitchen.

  “Hiya, Papa,” said Bernice, from her place at the table.

  Jack’s mother got up. “I’ll give you some coffee, Dolf, and a piece uh pie.”

  “Naw, I ain’t hungry,” said he. “Hi, Bernice. I’m glad you came.” He went to the table, but not to the head, instead taking what was usually Tony’s seat, across from Jack’s, where Bernice was sitting now.

  When he had got himself seated he noticed that Jack was still in attendance. “Hey, you,” he said threateningly. “I thought I told you to leave me alone.”

  Bernice said, “Aw, Papa, take it easy on the kid.” She winked at Jack. “He ain’t all bad.” She always stuck up for him.

  His father stared at Jack for a while, and then he said, “Is your brother to home?”

  “He’s upstairs.”

  “Go get him.”

  Jack went to the front of the house and shouted up the stairs, and in a few moments Tony joined the rest of the family at the kitchen table.

  Jack’s father said to Tony, “While you was at the movies we got a phone call here from somebody who wouldn’t give their name.”

  Bernice asked, “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like a fake voice of some kind, talking through a rag or something. But what he said was he knew I burnt down Bullard’s hardware last night.”

  Jack was tempted to look for Tony’s reaction, but he restrained himself.

  His father went on. “So I says to this person on the phone that I never knew anything about that, and he says, ‘You’re a liar. You set that fire, and I seen you do it, and the Bullards are gonna get even.’ “

  “I just wish I had been on that telephone,” said Bernice. “I’d of given that customer a piece of my mind.”

  “Well,” said her father, “he hung up right away then. But I got to thinking it was maybe that one calls himself Reverton, though it never sounded like him, except if he was disguising his voice some way, which he could of been doing. So I went over to see the chief. You know I went all through school with Harve. I told him about this business, and I says, ‘You know me, Harve, I wouldn’t hurt a fly, but this guy carries a pistol. I need me some protection. I want to get me a permit. If he’s got this crazy idea I set that fire, he might try and plug me one of these days.’“He breathed heavily for a moment.

  Jack’s mother rose from the table. “I’m gonna get some coffee for you, Dolf. You need to calm down some.”

  “I don’t know if that will do it,” Bernice said brightly. “Ain’t you ever heard of Coffee Nerves?”

  “So Harve says, ‘If he carries a concealed weapon he’s breaking the law, Dolf. He can’t get away with that.’ But I says, ‘He’s a railroad detective,’ and Harve says, ‘Oh well then, he’s got a permit, but he ain’t got no right to draw on just anybody he argues with. Besides, that permit’s only good for the towns where the railroad passes through and would have to be okayed by all of them. If I catch him over in Hornbeck wearing a gun, I’ll pinch him. We ain’t got no railroad here.’ But I says to Harve, ‘I don’t know if he ever would come over here for any reason at all. The trouble is, I work over in Millville. If he jumps me over there I could get killed.’ But Harve says a permit he could give me for Hornbeck wouldn’t be no good in Millville, and he says, ‘You’d have to get another one over there if you carried a weapon across the line. And I don’t think their chief would give you one. He’s a mean man,’ Harve says. ‘I couldn’t do you no good with him. We don’t get along a-tall.’ ”

  Jack’s mother put in front of his father a cup of coffee that was colored blue from all the milk in it.

  Bernice screwed her face up so that it seemed to converge on her scarlet lips. “Gee, Papa, it’s all pretty punk.”

  Tony was looking miserable. “Maybe it’ll all get straightened out in a couple days,” he said hopelessly.

  Jack waited in vain for his brother to go on. “Hey, Tony,” he said at last. “Don’t you have something to tell Dad?”

  Tony stared at him in alarm. “Huh?”

  “About how the Bull—”

  The explosion came at this point, making such a loud noise that for a moment its source could not be identified: it seemed to embrace everything in the universe.

  Despite his apparent moral confusion just prior to the blast, Tony was quickest to respond. He was at the door in an instant, and before Jack got off his own chair, Tony was well into the yard. When Jack reached the corner of the garage he saw that one side of the car’s hood had been blown off and lay in the alley.

  Tony emerged from the garage, carrying an old blanket of oil-stained felt: this he quickly hurled over the smoking engine. He was amazingly cool in such an operation.

  Their father arrived, and the neighbors were beginning to come out of the nearby houses. Mr. Petty, who lived to their immediate west, got there first. He wore no tie, and the neck of his shirt was open, showing that he had already, this early in the season, put on his long johns.

  “What happened here, Dolf?”

  Jack’s father glared impersonally, crazily, at Petty or really past him, and said in disbelief, “I think that one was supposed to have my name on it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  When her mother went out to the scene of the blast, Bernice dashed upstairs, presumably to go to the toilet but actually to check on her makeup and hairdo before joining the crowd in the alley. She was aware that all of the women would be observing her enviously. She was the only sophisticated person yet to emerge from that neighborhood, or for that matter from anywhere in Hornbeck, which was a pretty corny place and thought by the other usherettes with whom she had recently worked as being out in the sticks though it was only fifteen miles from downtown. Bernice had not really been a cashier but had named herself as such for the sheer prestige of it, and she had been safe enough from discovery, for no one from Hornbeck was likely to go to a city moviehouse, which charged half a buck for a climb to a balcony in which there was never a seat this sid
e of the last two rows of Peanut Gallery.

  As Bernice had told her family, she was no longer employed by that theater. But the truth was that she had been fired because she was invariably distracted from her duties by the picture on the screen, which was enormous when you worked on the main floor. Nor had she taken a job as a manicurist in a hotel barbershop. She was altogether out of work at the moment, with no prospects, and in arrears on the rent for her furnished room in the city. And since her period had been overdue for a week, she had begun to suspect she was pregnant and had no means by which to determine which man might be responsible. But being naturally an optimist, she was not downcast.

  Now she touched up her lipstick and blinked her eyes rapidly many times so as to brighten their luster, and did little things to her hair with a rattail comb. She pulled her stockings taut under the rolled garters just above the knee and checked the seams in the long mirror on the front of the wardrobe in her parents’ room.

  Before going outside, she donned her coat with the fake fox collar, and then, wearing her famous cocky but not snotty grin, she appeared in the back yard.

  Mrs. Petty, from next door, said, “Why, Bernice, I never knew you was out home today! And looking like a million.” Mrs. Petty was a very thin woman with ugly features, but as nice as she could be. The Pettys had no children, and when the Beeler kids were smaller they had called them Aunt Harriet and Uncle Clem. Bernice was too old for that now but lacked the assurance to use the first name without the title, and of course could not at this late date say “Mrs.,” so she did not preface her remarks with any address at all.

  She grinned even more brightly and said, “A bad penny will always turn up, they say!”

  “Shaw,” said Mrs. Petty, beaming on her. “I keep tabs on you, Bernice, and I know you’re doing just swell. I say more power to you.”

  “How about that?” said Bernice, and moved on toward the crowd back of the garage, and while she was on her way the police cruiser came rolling slowly up the alley. Everybody said “Hi” to her, and she went among them and found Jack, put her arm through his, and said, “Hi, handsome. What’s going on?”

  “I guess it was some kind of bomb.” He looked at the police car. “Who called him?”

  Harvey Yelton, Hornbeck’s chief of police, was sliding out of the car, holding his holstered pistol so that it didn’t catch on the steering wheel. He was the first man who had ever had Bernice, who was seventeen at the time. It was doubtful that he knew she was a virgin, because she had lost her thing riding a bike as a kid.

  “Hi there,” Harvey greeted her now. He certainly had the right build for a cop, being well over six feet tall and weighing probably two-fifty, more or less. He lumbered over to join her father and Tony at the wounded automobile. Tony had taken the felt blanket off the engine, and the chief leaned down, sniffing with his big nose.

  Bernice’s father said piteously, “See what I mean?”

  Harvey straightened up and looked suspiciously though impersonally around a half-circle of the nearest people. Bernice no longer regarded him as being as important as she had at the time he did it to her.

  What happened was that he had caught her smoking a cigarette with Charlie Conley, one summer night, sitting on a bench at the ballpark. Harvey ran Charlie off with a warning, but he brought Bernice to the cruiser and drove her out to the cemetery, where he stopped with the motor running and gave her a good talking to, the point of which was that he had known her father all his life and her since she was born and he wouldn’t stand by and see her go to the dogs by way of cigarettes, which led to drinking and worse. Then Bernice begged him not to tell her father, and the chief said, Well, he would think about it, and Bernice began to cry, and Harvey patted her knee with his big hand with its heavy lodge ring twinkling in the lights of the dashboard, and said, Now, now, I’ll think it over, and then later somehow he was in the passenger’s seat with her straddling his lap, and she could feel, with various parts of her body, the various pieces of hardware he wore at his belt, and he was breathing fast and hot into her face and smelling of fried food, and then he pulled back of a sudden and caught at himself. And when he was done he said, Now you needn’t to worry because you ain’t going to have any kid because of this, and she did not. Pity that at least one of the people who had enjoyed her favors in more recent times had not been as careful as Harvey.

  She was still holding on to Jack. She tugged on his arm now and said, “You breaking the girlies’ hearts yet?”

  Jack said, “Let’s go over and see what Yelton has to say.”

  Bernice asked, “Do you really like my new hair?”

  “Sure.” He got loose from her and went to join the men.

  Bernice sighed in boredom. As long as she could remember, her father was always worked up about something. He took life too seriously and often thought somebody was cheating him or insulting him when probably they never had the least intent to do so. They were probably just forgetful or something. Bernice never had any enemies, because she lived and let. You’d drive yourself crazy otherwise in this old world.

  She looked around. Her mother was talking to old Mrs. Smiley, who lived three doors up the street. Bernice had used to do it with her son Ben in the loft over the Smiley garage, where there was no ventilation and the air in summer was stifling. When, after a time, she discovered that Ben had a weak heart, she discontinued the practice, not relishing the idea of suddenly having a corpse on top of her.

  Tony was handing some things to Harvey. Now that she remembered it, the police chief had had her only that one time. He simply never got hold of her again, but that she was no longer innocent must somehow have shown on her face, for not too long after the incident with Harvey, a number of guys began to approach her with one thing in mind, and she did not disappoint them if they weren’t too crude about it. As the saying went, it was good for the complexion.

  The chief lowered the hand in which he held whatever Tony had given him, and he addressed the crowd in a loud voice.

  “Any uh you people seen anybody in the alley here just before this went off?” He put his free hand at his pistol belt, thumb hooked over it, and waited, looking slowly around. No response came. “Well, you just let me know if you remember later on. You know where to get hold uh me.”

  Bernice was curious as to whether Harvey would still like her looks. She went over to the group around the car.

  Tony was fooling with something down in the engine. He said, without looking up, “It might still run if we got a new distributor cap. Be worth trying. Then we could pound out the hood and repaint ‘er, and be back in business.”

  Bernice sidled up near Harvey. It wouldn’t be long before he smelled her Evening in Paris.

  Her father said desperately, “They mean business, all right. I hope this proves it. I need that gun permit.”

  Harvey threw back his big head. His police-chief’s cap had ventilating wickerwork below the cloth crown. He said, “I’ll tell you, Dolf. You want a good self-defense weapon, you do better to get yourself a twelve-gauge double. You don’t need a permit for that. You’re legal ‘slong as you carry it broke open and unloaded and you don’t cut it down or conceal it. Heck, you could be going trap shooting, perfectly legal. But I tell you this, anybody sees what you’re carrying, they ain’t gonna give you any trouble.”

  “Unless they drill you from ambush!” said Jack. “Bushwhack you.”

  Tony said, “You know who might have a distributor cap? Shorty Rundle. He’s got everything down in that junkyard. And he’s always around on Sundays, ‘cause he lives there. I’m gonna go see. O.K. to use your bike, Jack?”

  “It’s yours, isn’t it?”

  “I gave it to you,” said Tony. “You know that.” He went into the garage.

  Harvey said, “I got to get on over to the ball field now, Dolf. The kids been coming there lately of a Sunday to play touch football, and they get in trouble sometime if you don’t watch ‘em.”

  Tony shot out of
the garage on the bicycle he had ridden for years and only recently given to Jack, and pedaled rapidly up the alley. Bernice was fond of both of her brothers, who were some distance from her in age and of course experience of life. Jack was good-looking enough to be a real lady-killer when the time came. When she was eighteen and he ten, Bernice used to wrestle with him: sometimes she could feel that his little thing, pressed against her in some hold, was hard as a nut.

  Harvey went toward the cruiser. Jack followed, asking, “You want me to interrogate these people, Chief? Maybe they will remember something when the dust settles.”

  “You leave them alone,” said Harvey. He opened the door of the car, and then looked over at Bernice for the first time. “You want a lift to the bus stop?”

  She gave him a dazzling smile. “Why sure, if you don’t mind. That’d be real nice.”

  “I thought you were staying for supper,” said Jack, surprised by this new move.

  Bernice wrinkled her nose. “Gee, I’d of liked to, but somepin came up.” She went to her father, who was still staring dolefully at the car. “It turns out I got to go back to town now, Papa, and Harvey’s gonna gimme a lift to the bus, so you don’t have to, and anyway your car’s on the fritz now, ain’t it?”

  He nodded sluggishly. “Sure, Bernice. Now you just take care.” This thing was hitting him hard.

  “It’ll all come out all right,” Bernice said, patting him on his fat back. She had seen her mother talking to Mrs. Kunkle, from across the alley three houses down, and she did not want to approach them, for Mrs. Kunkle suspected her of having done it with Mr. Kunkle, who taught civics at the high school, whereas Bernice was innocent for once, having only let him kiss and feel her sometimes after hours, so as to get a passing grade. She now asked her dad, “Tell Mama for me. I got to go now.”

  She went to the cruiser and got in. Harvey did not look as old as her father did, maybe because he had no kids. His wife was known as a sickly person and was hardly ever seen out of the house.

  Harvey remained silent until he pulled out of the alley onto the street. Then he said, “I hear you been doing all right for yourself, Bernice, and I’m glad to hear that.”