The Feud (7 page)

She smiled. “I’m outa that line now, Jack. I got me a swell new job as a manicurist. You know where?”

Boy, did that ever sound dreary! At least when she worked as a movie-theater cashier she got to see all the new pictures for nothing. “Naw,” he said.

“In a swell men’s
barbershop
,”
said Bernice. “In the Hotel Continentale. How about that? You oughta come down sometime and see me there, you and Tony too, and I’ll treat you to free manicures. You’re on your own for the haircut, though. They cost too much for me.”

“How much?” asked Jack’s mother.

“Six bits. And then in a place like that you gotta tip, and if you left a dime you might be thought a piker. So it’d cost you a buck or the better part of it.”

Jack screamed, “A
buck?
For a
haircut?
“

“That wouldn’t seem anything if you had a lot of dough.” Bernice giggled smugly and plucked the sodden teabag from the cup and deposited it in the saucer. She was wearing the brightest nail polish ever seen on earth, and her lipstick matched it, and she was all powdered and rouged, or whatever.

That Tony remained silent was not unusual, but at the moment he was subtly communicating his impatience to Jack, so the latter said, “Well, see you later, Bernice. Staying for supper?”

“If they’ll have me.”

Her mother said, “Go awn.”

Jack had Bernice’s old room. It was nicer than the one he had always shared with Tony, but Tony wanted to stay in that one, being fixed in his ways, so Jack had been happy to move into the larger, deeper-closeted room, with the better view, among the features of which was a perspective on the private quarters of Mary Catherine Lutz, on the second floor across the alleyway. With his one-dollar drugstore binoculars Jack had more than once seen Mary Catherine in her slip. He had certainly never bragged about this to Tony, who had gone out with her on occasion.

When he and Tony reached the second floor now, Jack said, “I guess you want me to write that letter, huh?”

“If you don’t mind,” said Tony. He followed Jack into the latter’s room.

Jack’s desk had formerly been Bernice’s vanity table. You could take the mirror off it, unscrewing the whole thing frame and all, and he had done that. Though the ivory-colored legs might not seem professionally desklike, the glass top made a nice smooth writing surface.

Jack sat down at the desk, and Tony took the edge of the bed nearby. Jack found a ring notebook in the lefthand drawer and turned to the first clean page and tore it out. He picked up the stub of a pencil.

Tony grimaced.

“What’s the matter?”

Tony asked, “Don’t you think it’d be nice if you opened the rings and took it out, so the holes wouldn’t be all torn?”

“I wasn’t going to send this piece of paper,” Jack explained. “This is just a worksheet. When we get the letter just the way we want it, then we should copy it on a nice piece of writing paper. You wouldn’t want these lines and holes in the one you send.”

Tony was somewhat embarrassed by his erroneous assumption. He said brusquely, “Oh. Well, how do you think we should begin? ‘Dear Eva’ might be kinda fresh—? Can you say ‘dear’ to someone you don’t know very well?”

“That’s a good question,” said Jack. “But it’s my impression that people in business begin a letter that way to a total stranger. We could ask Bernice. She’d know…. O.K., so we’ll have whatever goes at the beginning. Then what do you want to say?” Jack was hoping to be elegant. To write to a girl was a kind of aristocratic thing to do, as opposed to the plebeian conversation-by-voice: it gave one the opportunity to employ all the otherwise unusable words that one acquired through reading. “What’s she like?”

“Huh?”

“You know, her personal traits of character, like hobbies or extracurricular interests.”

Tony shrugged. “Gosh, I don’t know. She’s just a high-school kid.”

“She would have liked that movie this afternoon, probably,” said Jack. “That was real girl stuff.” He had yet to put down a word. He looked up at the ceiling. “How about, ‘Dear Eva, Do you enjoy the cinema? Speaking for myself, I do.’ “ He looked at Tony and saw him shaking his head. Jack squinted. “It would be better if I knew just what you want this letter to do: just pass the time of day or what?”

“I don’t know,” said Tony.

Jack changed the subject. “Is that right about those Bullards blaming all of us?”

“Yeah.”

“What are they going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said. “But we’re not supposed to go over to Millville, I know that.”

“That’s crazy. I mean, I can’t go over to the bike shop to get an inner tube?”

“Not according to this theory of theirs.”

“How could they get away with that?” asked Jack. “Set up guard posts at every entrance to the town?”

“I don’t know,” said Tony.

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.”

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 side 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.