The Feud (18 page)

He said, “So long, sucker,” and left the luncheonette. When he got outside he saw both Curly and the colored dishwasher dart out of the side alleyway and run up the street. They were making an awful lot out of this incident, and Junior was amused.

He yelled, “Run, you yellow sons uh bitches!” He felt drunk though he hadn’t had a drop.

He put his gun back in the waistband, pulling the sweater down, and swaggered along the street until he came to a tavern. The bar was about half full of customers, all men except for one heavyset young woman with strong features and lips heavily painted. Junior couldn’t remember ever having seen any of these people before, though he ordinarily could recognize most of the persons he would pass on the Millville sidewalks on a normal day. He began to suspect he had crossed over to Hornbeck. It was funny how carrying a gun made you feel as if you were dreaming.

The bartender was a burly, low-browed man. Junior ordered a shot of whiskey.

The man scowled down at him. “You old enough?”

“Sure.”

The bartender shook his head. “Hell you say.” The man on the stool at Junior’s right turned and smirked at him: he was an ugly devil with a wart beside his nose.

Junior pulled out the pistol. The bartender shrank a lot, and he looked like he was trying to say something but couldn’t find his voice.

Showing his money with the left hand, Junior said, “I ain’t holding you up. I’m paying, see? Set ‘em up all around.”

The bartender began to line up shot glasses in front of him. The woman left her stool at the end of the bar and came slowly around to stand next to Junior and stare at the side of his face.

He finally got the nerve to look at her. She pressed right against him then, rolling her fat belly on him, her big breasts under his nose.

“Honey,” she said, breathing whiskey fumes at him, “what you need is some uh this.”

He had never felt a grown woman in this way before. She was a big fat slob, but he was mesmerized by her. He was grinning at her when in the corner of his eye he saw the bartender bring to shoulder level something that looked like a miniature baseball bat. Before Junior could dodge it, he was hit violently in the side of the head, and the lights went out.

Tony had not lied when he told Jack he would not leave until morning, but when Jack went to the bathroom, taking his book along, which meant he would stay in there for a long time, Tony changed his mind. When morning came he would probably have lost his nerve. What seemed possible now would appear crazy in the light of day: he could foresee that. He had never been a wild kid who gave in to impulses and sought quick thrills. It would be too easy for him to lose confidence. He would do well to make the most of what he had at the moment.

So he put on his green-and-white athletic jacket, with the modest-sized high-school letter on the left breast (as opposed to the enormous middle-of-the-chest letter worn on sweaters) and the two final numerals of his year of graduation high on the right sleeve, and he added Jack’s money to his own seven dollars, eighty-five cents, taken from an old rubber boot in the rear of the closet. If he waited for morning he could go to the Farmers National Bank of Hornbeck, where he maintained a savings account which currently held $17.37, the fruits of his summer job at the mill, but with his dad laid up, his mother might need that for the family, whereas he was able-bodied and would surely be able to get hired where he was going. Meanwhile, with Jack’s contribution he had almost ten dollars on which to live for a couple of months if need be.

He went softly down the stairs and saw as he reached the living room that, as he had hoped, his mother had fallen asleep over her mending. She usually did that even when his dad was there and listening to the radio. He continued on through the kitchen and, quietly, out the back door, and then walked around front and proceeded via the back streets to Millville. When he had got near the block on which Eva lived, he grew cautious. He did not intend to be captured again by that lunatic of a cousin of the Bullards’, who might still be on patrol. But Tony did not see him, or for that matter, anyone else on the sidewalk, and even inside the houses a lot of people had already turned off the lights and gone to bed. He feared that the same might be true of Eva, young as she was, and if so he would be at a loss as to how to proceed.

But when he reached the Bullard house he was relieved to see that most of the windows on both floors were lighted, as was the globe outside the front door, which signified that someone was out who was expected soon to come home. He hoped that that person might be Eva. He ran boldly between the concrete strips of driveway along the side of the house and, tripping on something in the dark, fell headlong, but luckily without making a sound.

He hurled himself up and continued to the back of the house, where the kitchen windows, being dark, told him nothing, but then a window was abruptly lighted on the second floor. Could that be Eva’s? He went and felt the ground for something heavy enough to throw but too light to break the glass. A dog barked nearby, and soon, two back porches away, a light came on. Tony froze in position. A Scottie came out of that house, but all it did was lift its leg against a bush in the back yard, after which it was admitted again to its home and the light was extinguished.

But by now, when Tony went back to where he could look at Eva’s supposed window, the room was dark! Nor could he find a single object, pebble or twig, to toss up against the glass. He now realized what a fool he had been to concoct the outlandish idea of confronting this young girl in the night and for the first time since rebuffing her two months earlier. He just stood there for a while, looking up at the darkened window and reflecting on how goofy he had been, he who had always been noted for his reasonable-mindedness.

Then the back door opened, in the dark, and Eva spoke down to him from the porch.

“What are you doing there?”

“It’s me,” said Tony.

“I know.”

“Oh. I didn’t want you thinking that I was a burglar or something.”

“I didn’t. I looked out when Skipper barked, and I saw you. There’s enough light.”

“Is that the name of that dog over there?”

“Yeah.”

Tony had run out of things to say. If he had been close enough he might have tried to feel her breasts at this point.

Finally she said, “Well, I guess I ought to go in.”

“Why?” He put this simple question as a kind of reflex, but it proved to be just the thing for breaking the ice.

She giggled and said, “I don’t know. I’m here all by myself. My mother had to go over to Hornbeck, because my brother got in some kinda trouble over there. Was that something to do with your family again?”

“My family?” asked Tony. “Huh. I don’t think so. I don’t know anything about it, anyway.”

Eva came down and sat on the second step from the bottom, and Tony joined her but kept a certain space between them.

She said, “Why’d you come over here tonight, anyway?”

“Because I was trying to write you a letter for a real long time.”

“A
letter?
“
Her voice had the rising note of pleasurable wonder.

“Do you like letters?”

“I guess so. I don’t think I have ever got one.”

He nodded. “I should have written you one, then. But I wasn’t able to.” He nodded several times again and looked down between his shoes. “Right now I’m going to get out of town. I’m thinking of heading for Canada. There are a lot of opportunities up that way. I wouldn’t mind joining the Northwest Mounted Police. You know, the Mounties? There was a movie about them not so long ago. I don’t know if they’ve got an eye test or not…”

“How far is that?”

“Canada? I’m not sure.”

“Are you going to come back soon?”

Tony got the nerve to look her in the face. “Listen, you want to come along?”

She gasped. “To
Canada?
“

He couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or simply amazed.

“Sure. We could get married.”

Eva giggled. “You’re really crazy, you know that?”

He joined her in laughter. “I guess you might say that…. Well, willya?”

Apparently she couldn’t stop giggling, but she managed to say, “Well, I guess so. If you really want me to.”

He said, “I would really like it, I’ll say that.”

“When are we going? Right now?”

“I guess we might as well,” said Tony. “You know, before somebody tries to stop us?”

“Boy,” Eva said, giggling, “will I ever get it, if we’re caught! My family’s supposed to be enemies of your family. I guess they’ll think I lost my mind.” She shook her head wonderingly. “Aren’t we too young to get married?”

“We got to find a place where they won’t ask us for a birth certificate,” said Tony. “Then we can lie about our ages.”

Eva’s face was luminous in the dim light. He thought he could probably kiss her at this moment but decided it would be better taste to wait until they were married, else she might think he was a sex maniac and would not want to go with him.

Nothing had gone right for Reverton that day, from the early morning, when he had to wait an unusual length of time for the use of the hall toilet in the hotel where he lived, hopping from one leg to the other, to the moment when he came back from eating to find that Junior was missing from the guard post.

Even the food had been a disappointment, though he usually ate anything homemade with enjoyment—you got that way in a lifetime of hash houses, lunchrooms, and diners—but Frieda had hardly anything left in the icebox or pantry, aside from some cold leftover peas, so she gave him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a cup of Oval-tine. The raspberry jelly was full of tiny seeds, which instantly got under his upper plate and drove him nuts (all his teeth had either been knocked out in the bus accident or subsequently pulled by a dentist who was certainly a crook, though it could not be legally proved).

Rev was very uneasy to be in all-female company, being shy with all versions of that sex, and he had no more to say to Frieda than to the child Eva, who he noticed had, despite her tender age, all at once gotten an indecently protuberant bosom, and wondered whether that was another of the mistakes of Mother Nature, who made more than a few, or if this young girl had padded herself obscenely, under the influence of perverts who might next induce her to paint her lips scarlet and drink beer. It might not be seen as his business, but he had always believed both Bud and Frieda were too easy on their offspring. He had on occasion smelled cigarette breath coming from Junior, and he sensed that the boy took a carnal interest in girls, though he had never actually caught him at anything.

Yet he had let Junior keep his gun while he went in to eat! Even as he did it he had had a premonition that it was a foolish move. And a man in his position couldn’t afford many: the bums were just waiting for him to make a mistake. He could expect no mercy if caught unarmed. Two of them would probably take each of his arms, and the others would line up to kick him in the belly, gouge out his eyes, and pull his hair out by the roots. Oh, they were a brave bunch when they had a helpless victim in their clutches. They’d pay a pretty penny to know that his holster was empty at the moment.

As he chewed the sandwich the peanut butter gave him as much trouble as the raspberry seeds, sticking to his dental plates and pulling them from a firm seat within his mouth. Had he tried to talk at such a moment, he would have produced a lot of clickety-clacking noises, shaming him before these female relatives, who like most women were no doubt just waiting to watch him show himself up. Once, as a boy on a Sunday visit to Bud’s family, he had been too timid to ask where the bathroom was and both peed and crapped in his pants, and he could never forget how Bud’s sisters had laughed and laughed. Bud himself had not joined them, which was why Rev had always liked him ever since, though he had become ever more aware throughout the years that his cousin’s moral fiber had degenerated. Unfortunately this failing had become acute since the trouble began with the Beelers, and Bud had proved himself a complete weakling. To collapse at such a time and be put into the hospital! A soldier would have been shot for less. The elder Beeler had the mean little eyes of the resentful man: that type was capable of anything. The son was obviously a cunning, conniving type, and Rev wasn’t fooled for a moment by the eyeglasses: turn your back on that kind of boy and get a knife in the spine. In the rough-and-tumble of life Reverton had learned to anticipate troublemakers. The place to be trained in what human beings were capable of was a toilet in a public building if you were the custodian who had to clean it up every nighttime. For years Rev had been one of the janitors at the county courthouse up in Wayland. He had been let go after the accident, which had incapacitated him for some months, and had since existed on the modest settlement he had been fool enough to accept from the bus company for agreeing not to sue for more, and though his needs were small, this had dwindled to virtually nothing because he had given a good deal of the sum to Bud for the purchase of the hardware store. He had assumed his cousin would quickly earn enough in profits not only to pay back the loan but to add a sizable dividend.

For reasons of pride, and to justify his carrying the pistol, Rev let the family think him a railroad dick. He did live in Hamburg, in a fleabag hotel near the railroad yard, but whenever he wasn’t down in Millville at, formerly, his cousin’s store and now the Bullard house, he was in the public library, doing research into various subjects that interested him: the extraction of gold from seawater, Asiatic techniques for training the will, magnetism, and the Pope’s secret plan to introduce into the non-Catholic areas of the world an army of secret agents whose mission it was to poison the public reservoirs.

It was unlikely that Junior had gone off with the gun of his own volition. Reverton knew him for a responsible youth. In fact, especially now that Bud had gone soft, Junior was the most reliable member of the family, and thus the one most likely to be the target of a cunning enemy.