Hot Spot (2 page)

He turned and looked at her again. “Why, you sure can, honey.” He was affable and co-operative, while the grin he gave her was crawling with that secret joke of his. It was edged with something like contempt and left her standing there naked and hot-faced and without any pride at all.

Her eyes were miserable and they begged “Please,” as she looked towards me and then turned to walk to the shack with him. I leaned against the door of the car and watched them. He sat down on the porch and left her standing and took out a cigarette without offering her one. Just the way he sat there and watched her was a slap in the face, full of calculated insolence and that dirty humour of his. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but he was apparently enjoying it.

In a minute she turned away from him and came back to the car. Her face was still crimson and she avoided looking at me. “We can go now,” she said.

“What about the car?”

“It’s all right. We don’t have to take it.”

“He didn’t pay you anything. What are you going to tell Harshaw?”

“Please,” she said. She was very near to crying.

“O.K.,” I said, and we got in. It was her funeral. She ran the loan office and it was her business and Harshaw’s, not mine. I backed up and turned the car into the road while Sutton watched us from the porch and grinned.

We were almost back to the river before she said anything. “Maybe I’d better tell him,” she said hesitantly. “Mr. Harshaw, I mean.”

“It’s your baby,” I said. “Tell him anything you want.”

“I—I know it must look a little funny, Mr. Madox.”

“Is Sutton a relative of yours?”

“No.”

“Well, a hundred and ten dollars is a lot of money.”

She glanced at me and said nothing. She either had to pay those two car notes herself or juggle the books to make it look as if they’d been paid, and she knew that I knew it. When we came to the bridge over the river I pulled off the road under the trees and stopped. She didn’t say a word, but when I turned to her, she was watching me a little uneasily. I put my arm around her and bent her head back. She didn’t struggle or try to slap me. She didn’t do anything. It was like kissing a passed-out drunk. I let go and she drew away from me as far as she could. She didn’t look at me. I put a hand under her chin and turned it.

“Get with it, kid,” I said. “Sutton sent me.”

I could see the shame and distaste in her eyes. “You must be proud of yourself.”

“We could still go back and repossess the car,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“Or we could go in and tell Harshaw he wouldn’t let us have it. That ought to be good for a laugh.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You never get anywhere if you don’t try.”

“Well, would you mind driving on, or shall I get out?”

“You’re a cute kid. How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Why’re you afraid of Sutton?”

She blushed and looked out the window. “I’m not.”

“Cut it out, blondie. How’d he get on your back?”

“It’s—it’s nothing. You’re just imagining it.”

“The way you imagined you saw him down at the spring? And collected the car notes?”

“All right, all right,” she said desperately. “I lied about it. But why can’t you leave me alone?”

“When I see something being passed around I like to get my share. I’m just a pig that way.”

Her shoulders slumped and she looked down at her feet. “Well, now that you’ve expressed your opinion of me, could we go on to town?”

“What’s your hurry? We’re just getting acquainted. And besides, you haven’t taken care of my car payments yet.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You, angel. Did I tell you that you had nice legs?” I started to go on from there, but she brushed the skirt down and shoved away and finally she did hit me. “O.K.,” I said. “You don’t have to call the Marines. I can take a hint.” I switched on the ignition and turned the car back on the road. She was silent all the way back to town, just sitting in the corner of the seat rolling her handkerchief into a ball in her hands.

It was easy to see something was wrong before we got there. A column of black smoke climbed straight into the sky from somewhere in town and a highway patrol car came boiling up behind us and careened past with its siren howling. I hit the accelerator and fell in behind it, wondering where the fire was and hoping it wasn’t the rooming house I’d moved into yesterday.

It wasn’t. It was a greasy-spoon hamburger shack beyond the cotton gin on the other side of the street. Smoke, red-laced with flame, boiled out of the rear door and the window while the front of the place was a traffic jam of men trying to get in with hoses and other men trying to fight their way out with tables and chairs and a big jukebox. The street was blocked with swollen white hoses and the one piece of fire-fighting equipment, an old pumper left over from the ’Twenties, while volunteer firemen ran back and forth carrying axes and yelling at each other. I slowed down, trying to get a better look, but the highway cop waved me on with a furious gesture of his arms, shouting something I couldn’t hear above the uproar and pointing to the cross street detouring around the block.

I went up a couple of blocks and then turned back to the main street again, past the corner where the bank was. It was deserted here. Everybody was down at the other end fighting the fire or just gawking and getting in the way. When I turned in at the lot the other salesman was gone and Harshaw was alone in the office. As I got out I looked at her, wondering if she was going to say anything, but the big eyes were stony and blank, not even seeing me. She was probably scared blue of what I might say to Harshaw but she’d die before she’d plead again. She was a sweet-looking kid taking a beating about something, and suddenly I was ashamed and wanted to apologize.

“Wait—” I started. She turned her head and looked at me as if I were something crawling out of a cesspool and went on into the office with her back straight.

Harshaw was on the phone when I came in and she was waiting to talk to him. He hung up in a minute and looked across at me.

“You get the car?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I sat down and lighted a cigarette.

“Why not?”

He had a habit of barking like a non-com, and he looked like one, like an old master sergeant with thirty years in. He was stocky and square-faced, around fifty-five, with a mop of iron grey hair, and the frosty grey eyes bored into you from under bushy overhanging brows. There were little tufts of hair in his ears, and he always had a cigar clamped in his mouth or in his hand.

I don’t know why I did it. “Because he paid Miss Harper,” I said.

He grunted. “Just have to do it again next month. The guy’s a dead-beat. What’s afire down there? The gin?”

“No. Hamburger joint across from it.”

“Well, how about hanging around while I go to dinner?”

That burned me a little. I’d wasted the whole morning running an errand for him and now he wanted me to wait around while he went to eat. I got up from the table and started to the door. “Sure,” I said. “As soon as I get back from mine.”

He glared at me. “Maybe you won’t like this job.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Maybe I won’t.”

I went out, and as I started angling across the street she caught up with me, headed for the loan office. She walked alongside, not looking up, and when I glanced around at her the top of that blonde strawstack was just on a level with my eyes.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Forget it.” I turned at the kerb and went on up the sidewalk.

Down the street I could see the smoke still boiling into the sky and the jam of cars and people around the fire engine. The restaurant was deserted, like everything else in this end of town, and when I sat down at the counter the lone waitress hurried up eagerly.

“Are they going to save it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been down there. How’d it start?”

“Somebody said a grease fire in the kitchen.”

“Oh. Well, how’s the grease here? You got a menu?”

She shook her head. “The dinner’s not ready. Cook’s gone to the fire. I could fix you a sandwich, though.”

“Never mind,” I said. “Just a glass of milk and a piece of pie.”

It was awful pie and the crust was like damp cardboard. I wasn’t hungry anyway, because of the heat, and I kept thinking about the girl and the whole crazy thing out there at the oil well. Why was she taking the responsibility for Sutton’s car payments, and why had he looked at her that way? He hadn’t been just taking her clothes off; he was doing it in company, with his face full of that dirty joke of his. The simplest explanation, of course, was that he knew something about her and she didn’t dare take the car away or even try to collect for it. But when I’d tried a little pressure politics myself I got smeared in nothing flat. Why? I gave up, but I couldn’t get rid of her entirely because random parts of her kept poking into my mind, the odd gravity about her eyes, the way she walked, and the way the top of her head reminded you of a kid with sun-burned hair. She added up to something I couldn’t quite place, and then I knew what it was—an ad-writer’s picture of The Girl Back Home. For God’s sake, I thought. I got up and pushed some change across the counter and went out. I had to go to the bank.

I still had about two hundred dollars in a bank in Houston which I hadn’t had time to get when I left there, and if I didn’t put through a draft for it right away I’d be going hungry. I had about forty dollars in my pocket. I went up the street in the white sunlight, not meeting anybody and absently watching the confusion down at the other end. A shower of sparks went pin-wheeling upwards in the smoke and I decided the roof of the place must have fallen in at last.

The bank was a little deadfall on the corner, and when I went inside it was dim and a little cooler than the street. It had a couple of tellers’ cages and a desk behind a railing in the rear, but there was nobody in the place—nobody at all. I stood there for a moment looking around, wondering if they operated the place like a serve-yourself market. I went over and looked through the grilles above the cages, thinking somebody might have passed out with a heart attack and be lying on the floor. Money was lying around on the shelf but there was no one in either cage.

Then I heard someone step inside the door behind me. A voice said, “Wheah the fiah, Mister Julian? Heered the sireen and the people a-runnin’ but ain’t nobody tell me wheah the fiah is at.”

I looked around. It was a gaunt, six-foot figure, a Negro, dressed in what looked like the trousers of some kind of lodge uniform and a white T-shirt with a big, frayed straw hat on his head. Then I saw the cane and dark glasses. He was blind.

“I don’t think there’s anybody here, Dad,” I said.

“Mister Julian must be heah. He always heah.”

“Well, damned if I see him.”

“You know wheah the fiah is at?” he asked.

“Yeah. Down the street just this side of the gin. It’s a hamburger shack.”

“Oh. Thank you, Cap’n.” He turned and tapped his way out with the cane.

Just then a door in the rear opened and a man came out, apparently from a washroom. He must have been around sixty and looked like a high-school maths teacher with his vague blue eyes and high forehead with thin white hair.

He smiled apologetically. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting. Everybody’s gone to the fire.”

“No,” I said absently. “No. Not at all.”

He came over and went into one of the cages, and said something.

“What?” I hadn’t been paying attention.

“I said what can I do for you?”

“Oh. I want to open an account.”

I made out the draft and deposited it and went on back to the lot, still thinking about it. Everybody in this town must be fire crazy.

I sold a car that afternoon and felt a little better for a while. I saw Gloria Harper only once, when she came out of the loan office at five o’clock with another girl. She went up the street without looking towards where I was leaning against a car on the lot. We locked up the office a little later and I got in my own car and drove over to the rooming house. It was sultry and oppressive, and after I took a shower and tried to dry myself the fresh underwear kept sticking to my perspiration-wet body. I sat in the room in my shorts and looked out the window at the back yard as the sun went down. It had a high board fence around it, a little grass turning brown with the heat, and a chinaberry tree with a dirty rabbit hutch leaning against it. This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?

After a while I put on white slacks and a shirt and went down to the restaurant. When I had eaten it was still only seven o’clock, and there was nothing except the drugstore or the movie. I wandered up that way, but it was a Roy Rogers western, so I got in the car and drove around without any thought in mind except staying out of that room as long as I could. Without knowing why, I found myself following the route we’d taken that morning, going over the sandhill past the abandoned farms and down into the bottom.

There was a slice of moon low in the west and when I parked off the road at the end of the bridge the river was a silvery gleam between twin walls of blackness under the trees. I stripped off my clothes and walked down to the sandbar and waded in. The water was a little cooler than the air and went around in a big lazy eddy in the darkness under the bridge. I circled back up the other side and waded out after a while to lie on the sandbar and look up at the stars.

I was still sweltering when I went back to the room. I couldn’t sleep. In the next room an old man was reading aloud to his wife from the Bible, labouring slowly through the Book of Genesis, a begat at a time, and pronouncing it with the accent on the first syllable. I lay there on the hard slab of a bed in the heat and wondered when I’d start walking up the walls. Gloria Harper and Sutton kept going around and around in my mind, and a long time afterwards, just before I dropped off, I came back to that other thing I couldn’t entirely forget. It was that bank with nobody in it.

T
HE NEXT MORNING THERE WAS
another argument with Harshaw. Just after we opened the office he wanted me to take a cloth and dust off the cars. I was feeling low anyway and told him the hell with it. The other salesman, an older, sallow-faced man named Gulick, got some dust cloths out of a desk drawer and went on out.