The Feud (8 page)

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.”

“Oh, I ain’t in the poorhouse yet, Harvey. I’m still working on my first million, but I got nice friends.”

A striped rubber ball came from nowhere and rolled across the street, half a block ahead. Harvey drove to it, stopped the cruiser, and got out. By this time a kid about ten years of age had come running from between the houses. He skidded to a halt when he saw the police car.

Harvey said, “You know better than that, Willis. You oughtn’t play ball so it comes into the street. You know why? It could hit somebody’s automobile and scare them so they would lose control of the wheel and drive up over the curb and turn over and burst into flames, and everybody in the car would be burned to a crisp, see? Or the driver might just lose his head and turn and run over your pooch. Or you and your friends might tear after the ball onto the road and you’d all be killed if a big Mack truck was coming along real fast, or you’d scare the truckdriver and he’d smash into them high-tension wires, which would fall down and electrocute the whole neighborhood and kill everybody and burn up all your houses, maybe get outa control and bum everything in the whole town, see. Now, you wouldn’t want that to happen, wouldja?”

“Huh-uh.” Willis had blond hair in a butch cut. His face was expressionless.

Harvey picked up the ball. He weighed it in his hand and said, “I oughta take this ball away from yuh.” He stared at Willis. “Now you wouldn’t like that, wouldja?”

“Huh-uh.”

Harvey thought for a long moment. To Bernice it sure seemed like a storm in a teacup, but then she wasn’t a policeman, and you did have to keep kids in line or they’d grow up to be bums.

Finally he tossed the ball to the boy, returned to the cruiser, and put it in gear. He said, “Little snotnose.”

Bernice crossed her legs. The hem of her skirt was caught just above the roll of her stockings, but if Harvey looked at this, she did not see him.

He asked, staring straight ahead through the windshield, “What time you got to get back?”

“Well,” said she, “I ain’t in any real big hurry.”

He kept driving as slowly as ever through the neighborhood streets. Now and again he nodded to people through the window or even rolled it down and said “Hi.” In Horn-beck’s business district he slowed to a crawl when passing a driverless rattletrap flivver at the curb in front of the butcher shop, and stopped altogether when parallel to a shiny, new-looking maroon coupe that was parked outside the drugstore. The man and the woman in the front seats were colored people.

Harvey leaned across Bernice, his elbow on her knees, and rolled down the window. He asked, “Can I help you folks find something?”

“Yes sir,” said the colored man. “We was looking for a drugstore that was open on Sunday.”

“You won’t find one in this town,” said the chief. “That’s against the law here.”

“Yes sir. You don’t know of any that is open anyplace else?”

“If you want to find one, you better move along.”

“Yes sir,” said the colored man, “we was fixing to do that.”

Bernice said with a smile, “You go down to the city, you might find one.”

“Yes ma’am.”

The chief kept the cruiser where it was until those people drove away, and then he followed them, at a distance, to where Hornbeck gave way to unincorporated territory to the south, mainly weed fields.

“I’d of asked for their papers,” said Harvey, driving the cruiser into the entrance of a coal yard. He shifted into reverse and turned back before he completed the statement. “But every time I done that recently with one of them, he’s owned it, sure enough. You wonder how it is they can afford that when white folks got to drive old heaps.” He glanced at Bernice. “I ain’t holding you up for your bus?”

“Naw, I got time.”

“Sundays is real quiet,” Harvey said. “My radio’s broke, besides. But I make my rounds.”

They reached the high school, and he drove the police car into the service alleyway behind the building, stopping at the base of an iron fire escape.

“We got kids around here who have figured out a way to pick the lock up there and they sneak in on weekends and fool around.” He gave Bernice a look and then climbed from the car and began to mount the metallic stairs of the fire escape.

Bernice followed him. When Harvey reached the door at the top, which was on the second floor of the three-story structure, he took a key from a ring of many attached to his belt along with the other gadgets, and he opened the door and entered.

Bernice closed the iron door when she was inside. It made a loud noise that echoed along the dark, empty corridor with its shining floor and the peculiar smell of a school in the off hours.

About halfway along the hall Harvey turned in at the entrance to the women teachers’ lounge. When Bernice came in, she stepped out of her shoes, pulled up her skirt and took her pants off, and lay down on the old leather couch there. The chief removed only his equipment belt, the tunic of his uniform, and his cap, and he unbuttoned his fly.

He was not awfully good at it, but she enjoyed it more than she had seven years earlier. When they were finished the chief went into the toilet part of the lounge and presumably washed himself, but Bernice just put back on what she had taken off. She figured she had now got herself a father for the baby, in case she ended up being stuck with one.

Harvey dropped her off at the bus stop near the First National Bank, but before she had waited very long a nice big black car pulled up and the driver, a white-haired gentleman in suit and tie, leaned over to ask from the passenger’s window whether she would be going to the city, for if so he could offer her a ride. Bernice accepted. This Good Samaritan turned out to be the Presbyterian preacher in Hornbeck, Reverend Finch. Bernice did not know him, because her family was of a different persuasion, being nominally Methodists though none of them ever went to church except sometimes her mother, and her father had been born Catholic but had stopped being one when he got married.