The Feud (27 page)

After the kid got out, the chief drove slowly past Horn-beck’s bank, something he had been doing frequently since the events of two days before over in Millville, when that part-time cop had shot it out with a bank robber. If the latter was part of a gang, Hornbeck might well be next on the list, and if so Harvey had no intention of getting out of the cruiser and trading shots on the sidewalk: clipped to the back of the front seat was an automatic twelve-gauge shotgun. The first crook he saw, he would start blasting from the window while driving one-handed at high speed.

At least it hadn’t been Clive Shell who made the kill. Harvey had called up Ray Dooley to get the score, for Dooley owed him one since he let off that little Millville punk with the starter’s pistol. Ray said the fellow was by profession a railroad detective and had been deputized to fill in while Clive was sick.

“You birds ain’t ever gonna kill yourself with hard work, that’s for sure,” said Harvey. It was always a sore point with him that Shell even had the part-time services of Ray.

“Heck, Harvey,” said Ray, “we got a bigger town than yours, and you ain’t got no colored district.”

“Shit, you don’t ever go into Jigtown unless they call you special!”

Ray couldn’t deny that, having told him more than once that experience had proved that if you just let the coloreds stew in their own juice, a lot of otherwise painful situations would never come up, so he changed the subject and told Harvey, “This thing sure shows the sense in keeping up to date on who’s wanted, don’t it? You can’t ever tell who’ll blow into town.”

Harvey’s practice in the past had been to glance briefly at each circular as it came in and then clip it with the others and drop the thick sheaf back into the drawer, in an assumption that Hornbeck’s little bank would hardly be attractive to a professional. But he had changed now. He could only pray that no practical joker ever turned in a false alarm about a bank robbery, for he intended to arrive on the scene behind a spray of hot lead.

Junior’s crotch itched him like crazy during the Reverend Amburgy’s remarks on the late Reverton Kirby, and he tried to bring relief by doing a slow grind on the pew seat, but to no avail, and when he bumped against Eva, she whined and gave him an elbow. He began to think he had picked up a dose of crabs, but since he had still had no intimate contact with a living female, they must have come from someplace else: maybe the toilet in the Hornbeck police station, the dirtiest crapper he had ever seen, and he would not have used it had his sudden realization that he was arrested not given him instant diarrhea.

His father and five adult male relatives served as pallbearers for Reverton. Junior was humiliated by his father’s request that he walk alongside in an honorary role because the coffin was too heavy for him to tote even a sixth of its weight, but owing to the recent escapade he felt he was skating on thin ice, and he therefore complied, while making another secret entry on his shitlist.

As he watched the bronze box being lowered into the grave he could not help thinking of that little ditty that went: Your
eyes fall in/ Your teeth fall out/ The worms crawl over/ Your nose and mouth
. Dying was a lousy thing, and he intended to avoid it, for its inevitability seemed only theoretical to him. How did they know that you couldn’t live forever? Had anybody ever tried it?

After Reverton had been tamped down in the grave, all the relatives returned to the Bullard house and began to stuff themselves on the food prepared by Junior’s mother and various females related to the family by blood or marriage. The dining-room table was covered with loaded platters, but few held anything that Junior liked, and by the time he reached the macaroni ‘n’ cheese (having been forced by his father to let the guests go first) all the brown crust was gone from the casserole, with only the lower contents left, which looked like fat maggots. Then, at dessert time, his portion of Jello contained no fruit beyond one maraschino cherry half and a withered white grape, not to mention that the dollop of whipped cream had returned most of the way to the liquid state.

For some reason, among all the assembled relatives there was not one single male kid of his own age. A good many of these fat old biddies were childless, if not old maids, and most children who did exist were so much older than Junior that they seemed of the generation of uncles, except for his cousin Clara, who was about the same age as Eva and originally not very good-looking. He had got her in the corner of the cellar once when he was younger and showed her his dong and she told on him, and in revenge he thereafter terrorized her in various ways, sometimes furtively, as when the girls would go to the public swimming pool with their bathing suits on underneath their clothes and Junior would sneak into Eva’s room and smear mustard in Clara’s underpants; and sometimes openly, as on the famous occasion when he barged into the bathroom and jeered at her while she sat on the throne.

Now, however, in some magical way, Clara had turned overnight into one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen in his life, with long lustrous brown hair, oversized eyes, no skin trouble, high firm neat breastworks, and long legs above fantastically small ankles (the last-named being a feature he had only recently begun to look for). He could only too easily have fallen for her had he not had that unfortunate past to overcome, and for her at least it was at the moment unforgettable. “Hi, monkey,” she said on encountering him at the funeral home. “Did the organ grinder give you a day off?” He was forced to answer in kind—”Wanna pick my fleas?”—but for the first time his heart was not in it.

Clara and Eva had gone to the latter’s room after eating. Junior was hoping their cousin would stay overnight: he thought he might be able to pierce a spyhole into the bathroom ceiling from the crawl space overhead, to which he had access from his attic quarters. If he kept it close to the base of the ceiling light, it would go undetected. However, some further thought disclosed to him the strong possibility that from such a perspective he might well see only the top of her head and her titty-tips, and not the pubic brush if she sat in the orthodox position in the tub, facing the faucets. He wouldn’t see much if she sat on the toilet, for she was unlikely to do that while naked—unless of course she
went
before taking a bath. Junior himself liked to piss while bathing, but only in a shower, not a tub, where you would have to sit in it.

But what he would have liked to do most of all was to get hold of another gun, a real one this time, and go over again to that tavern in Hornbeck and make that big fat Marie play with his peter, and if the bartender so much as raised the blackjack, blast him right between the eyes. But first he wanted to stop at Curly’s and have a couple of hotdogs with sweet relish on them, and a piece of blueberry pie, and a bottle of chocolate pop, and—

His father drew him aside. “Junior, I wanna tellya Cousin Reverton, God rest his soul, thought the world of you. Your name was on his lips when he died. How about that?”

Junior nodded. “That’s nice.”

His father frowned slightly. “Well, I’d say it’s more than just nice. I’d say it ought to be an inspiration to you to wanna make something of yourself in life.”

Junior smiled as feebly as he possibly could.

His father said, “I don’t know if you can unnerstand that Rev was a lot more than you could see. I mean, he wore that one suit of his so much it could of walked by itself, and then he was just a skinny measly kinda little guy physically speaking, and you know, he began to go bald when he was about your age, I believe, and always wore that hat all the time for many years. And I don’t know as you ever observed his funny way of walking? Which I do believe was due to one leg being shorter’n the other from birth, and uh course the injuries from that accident sure didn’t help. You might of looked at him and thought he wasn’t much, and by George, he
wouldn’t
of been on the outside alone, but by gosh,
inside
he was quite a man. That little guy can teach a lesson to us all. Going up against Reno
Fox
, for golly sakes, wanted all over the country from coast to coast, and it’s our Rev gets him. I betcha that’ll get in the big city papers, believe you me.”

“Wellsir,” said Junior, “I myself stood right next to Reno just the night before down Curly’s, and he never said beans.” He had already related this incident many times. “He seemed like a real nice guy.”

His old man’s face grew hard: he glanced around at the jabbering, gluttonizing relatives, and then he turned back to Junior. He said, “Yeah, Curly finally got in touch today. He told me what you was doing in there: helping yourself to the cash register when he was back inna kitchen. He told me you owe him five dollars.”

Junior took in some quick air and with all the indignation he could muster he said, “Me? Reno Fox the master criminal is right in front of that register, and Curly accuses
me?”

His father smiled grimly. “Reno Fox is preparing to risk his life at the bank for thousands, and he would filch five dollars from a lunch-counter till? That don’t make sense, Junior. Now, I tell you what Curly says. He’s a real nice man, that Curly. Curly says he knows that with all my troubles presently I don’t have any extra five-spots laying around. So he says, ‘I tell you what, my colored dishwasher has run off, probly got himself some white lightning rotgut and is laying drunk in some alley in Jigtown,’ and Curly says, ‘I’m fed up with him.
Junior
can work off that five bucks by doing a little dishwashing after school.’ I says I thought that was the perfect solution. You start tomorra.”

Junior said, “The hell I do.”

His father slapped him so fast he didn’t see it coming and so hard he was knocked against the frame of the doorway to the living room. Not one of the relatives seemed to notice this. For an instant he thought he would strike back, but his father was still slightly larger than he and probably the dirtiest of fighters, who would knock his son to the floor and kick and trample him, and if the victim continued to resist, all those fat uncles would jump on him and smear him into the floorboards. He could expect no mercy in this family.

“And then,” his old man went on as though nothing had happened, “in your free time I expeckcha be down the store, where we’re gonna be seeing what we can recover and maybe get rid of in a fire sale, and then I’m going to rebuild with the help of that reward money left me by Cousin Rev, and I don’t think the bank will refuse me a loan since it was their own bacon he saved the other day by laying down his own life. And by the way, his pitcher goes in the window of the new store when it’s built.” He smiled at the son he had just hit in the face with all his strength. “I hope you’re gonna take more interest in the new store than you did in the last, Junior, for I’ll tell you this”—he leaned confidentially close—”all of that’ll be yours one day, son.”

Junior recoiled from his father’s sentiments and bad breath. The aftereffects of the slap had now arrived in full force. He slunk upstairs to the bathroom and inspected himself in the mirror. It looked as if he had painted his face to be a Halloween Indian, with the purple and yellow of the acne and the reddened patch left behind by the blow. His nose also was home to a tribe of brand-new blackheads. While he went to work on them with the tips of whichever fingernails he could find that had not been chewed blunt, he realized he would have to get out of this house, and since the town was so small, out of it as well, and he couldn’t go to Hornbeck, being forbidden to do so by law.

After he took a leak with the toilet seat down, shooting through the aperture, Junior went into his parents’ bedroom, where the outer clothing of his relatives had been put onto the bed. Not all the women had taken their purses downstairs, and he ransacked those that were here, collecting six dollars and thirty-two cents. This was his entire fortune, for he never saved a penny of the dime-per-hour he had been paid for his after-school and Saturday service at the hardware store, and someone at the Hornbeck tavern had rifled his pockets while he was unconscious after being coldcocked by the bartender, and had helped themselves to the money taken from Curly’s cash register. The world was full of crooks.

En route to the back staircase, Junior passed Eva’s closed door. He briefly considered luring her to open it with a promise of some treat and then sending her away on a wild-goose chase, so that he could rape the newly attractive Clara in her absence, but he knew this as an impossible fantasy while he was concocting it. For some reason his nerve did not extend to grown girls, but he was sure it would in the future if he could only escape from Millville and into the great world outside.

At the foot of the stairs he peeped around to see if his mother was in the kitchen. She was not, and he slipped past the stove and out the back door, shutting it quietly. As usual he cut through the Durkeys’ property. No flowers were in bloom at the moment, the season being fall, but Old Man Durkey had nothing better to do with himself than hang around outside, endlessly sprucing up his back yard, raking up every leaf as soon as it fell, painting his screens for next year, and so on.

There he was now, just coming out of his garage. His eyes widened when he saw Junior.

“Say, Junior, that was your cousin Reverton down the bank? Many’s the time I seen him right over your house. And I’m proud to say I chewed the fat with him on occasion. He was quite a man.”

Junior stepped around the corner of the garage so that he would be out of sight from his own house. He said, “Yezzir, that’s right. But you know, I myself run inta that bank robber down Curly’s night before the robbery. He had them little mean eyes set right together, and a real low brow like a nape’s, you know? I knew right away he was on the wrong side of the law, but I dint have any way of proving it, and I tried to get Curly to tell the cops, but he wouldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t be supprised if he was in on it.”

“I can’t afford to eat out,” said Durkey, who was all bent over and whose bald head was covered with brown spots, “so I never go down Curly’s. I been in Tom’s a time or two, though. I like to get the old woman outa the kitchen on her birthday, so might take her to Tom’s for what they call the blue-plate special.” He wrinkled his nose. “But it ain’t much good: ham croquettes, you know, low on the ham and big on the croquette, string beans…” His voice faded. He was getting too old for his own good, and should probably be put out of his misery. Junior intended to knock himself off before he ever got that old and became an object of scorn.