Heed the Thunder (21 page)

Let them try to hide from Sherman Fargo. He’d nail ’em in the long run!

Puffing contentedly at his pipe, he moseyed up and down the aisles, pushing the rapidly filling baskets in front of him with his feet. He snorted out gruff pleasantries at the clerk-manager, and the young man twittered back at him happily. Sherman began to feel almost happy. He felt better than he had for a long time.

Dammit, he guessed he was getting kind of soured on the world in general. But he had enough things to make a man sour. Josephine wasn’t any good to him in the sleeping way, and he wasn’t an old man yet by a long sight. He was mortgaged to the hilt on all that land he’d taken over, and now he had to go and plant it to wheat again. Pa was sick again and wasn’t any comfort. Ma was sore at him for siding against Grant. Edie had bawled him out for the way he’d treated Josephine. Ruthie had grown away from him. Those damned ornery boys were always plaguing him. They worked hard enough, but they were always hounding him for money. Always wanting to chase off after some damned-fool girls.

He felt sometimes like the whole goddamned world was against him. Here he was, right in the prime of life, and he felt sometimes like there wasn’t a damned thing left to live for.

But this was all right here in the store. He felt capable and trusted. He was filling his baskets faster than the clerk was, and the fellow didn’t watch him at all to see if he was sticking stuff in his pockets.

Then, at last, the clerk came over smiling and Sherman reckoned, regretfully, that that was about all.

The clerk obtained a huge crate from the rear of the store, and they carried the baskets up to the counter. The clerk began checking the groceries off on the little adding machine and placing them in the crate. Sherman watched the keys twinkle beneath his rapid fingers, approvingly. This certainly beat the kind of toting up Simp did. Old Simp always had a lot of stuff written down that you knew damned well you hadn’t got, and you couldn’t read his figures half the time.

The clerk ripped the tape from the machine, glanced at the total, and tossed it into the crate.

“Well, sir, Mr. Fargo,” he beamed, “that comes to exactly twenty-one dollars and eighty-six cents.”

“I don’t doubt it a bit,” said Sherman, starting to pick up the crate. “It’s a hell of a pile of groceries.”

“Uh,” said the clerk. “Uh—aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Oh, just let the candy go,” said Sherman. For it was the custom of a storekeeper to donate a sack of candy with a large bill of goods. “My kids eat too much sweet stuff anyway.”

“But, the bill. It’s twenty-one dollars and eighty-six cents.”

“Sure it is,” said Sherman, agreeably.

“Well—well, I mean I want the money, Mr. Fargo.”

“Well, dammit, you’ll get it,” said Sherman, with a shade of impatience. “I’ll pay you the first thing in the fall. I pay my bills every fall and spring. Anyone’ll tell you—”

“I got to have the money today. This is a cash store. We only sell for cash.”

“Wh-aat?” demanded the farmer. “What are you talking about, man?”

The clerk explained, his nervousness making him unnecessarily firm. And Sherman’s amazement warmed swiftly into anger. He wanted to walk out and leave the stuff, but he didn’t want to be beholden to the fellow. Then, he had to have the groceries, and his pride would not allow him to return to Simp’s establishment.

He drew out his wallet. With concealed rage, for he would not let this dude think that twenty dollars or so meant anything to him, he laid the contents on the counter. A twenty-dollar bill and a five. He had intended going to the public auction today to pick up some stuff he needed. Now, he couldn’t.

Slowly, phlegmatically, he picked up his change and pocketed it. The clerk smirked at him ingratiatingly.

“You know there’s something I’ve often wondered about,” he remarked. “Something that always seemed kind of funny to me.”

“Is that right?” said Sherman.

“Uh-huh. You know I was raised in the city and it always seemed so funny to me”—he giggled—“the way you farmers raise stuff for other people a-and come into the store to buy your own.”

“That is funny,” Sherman declared.

“Uh-huh. I always thought it was.”

“When a thing’s funny,” said Sherman, “a man ought to laugh. You hadn’t ought to hold in anything like that.” His hard blue gaze struck the clerk like a blow. “Go ahead,” he said. “Laugh.”

“Well…I guess it isn’t funny, after all.”

“Sure it is,” insisted Sherman. “It’s the damnedest funniest thing I ever heard of. Now I want to hear you laugh.”

“Mr. Fargo, I didn’t—”

“Laugh!”

The clerk gulped.

“Ha, ha,” he said.

“Harder! Get it out of your system.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” said the clerk.

Sherman shook his head. “What you need is a little primin’. Someone to tickle you a little. You can’t properly get started by yourself.”

“Mr. Fargo, please—”

Sherman leaned over the counter, and the clerk shrank back against the wall. With terrible joviality Sherman put out two thick stubby fingers and jabbed him. The fingers plunged against his ribs with a sickeningly funny feeling; they darted here and there, jabbing, raking against his bones. He tried to push them away, to cover up against them with his arms. But the terrible farmer would not be avoided. The venomous rakings and pokings increased, while Sherman urged him with hideous humor to go ahead and laugh.

He did laugh, at last. He laughed and cried at the same time. Hysterically he leaned back against the wall and his shrill cackling filled the store, and insane tears streamed down his pustuled face.

Sherman shouldered the crate of groceries, his eyes smoldering.

“Next time,” he advised, “don’t hold in so long.” And he swaggered out of the place.

As he had expected they would be, by God, Ted and Gus were hanging around the wagon waiting for him. He tossed the groceries in the back and mounted to the curb, looking them over bitterly. They were dressed in tight-fitting pants, pork-pie hats, and white shirts with purple detachable collars.

The gaze that they gave back to him was as bitter and implacable as his own. They stared at him out of their close-set eyes, trying to draw their lower lips up over their buck teeth; and Sherman’s stare was the first to waiver.

After all, they were men. They did men’s work.

“Well,” he said, drawing out his wallet, “I reckon you want some money. Here’s a dollar you can divide.”

He held it out to them, but they only looked at him, keeping their hands in their pockets.

“What the hell you expect us to do with a dollar?” demanded Ted. “That won’t much more’n pay for our dinner.”

“Pay for your dinner!” exclaimed Sherman. “Why, your dinner won’t cost nothin’. Edie’ll feed you.”

“We pay for what we eat,” said Gus.

“Now what’s the sense in that? Many’s a time Edie and Bob’s et with us!”

“It ain’t the same,” said Gus, and Ted nodded.

“Well, a dollar’s all I can spare,” said Sherman stubbornly. “I’m overdrawn at the bank right now, and I ain’t askin’ Alf to carry me for no more. He ain’t like Bark. He feels like he’s got to do things just because he’s in the family, and I ain’t takin’ advantage of him.”

Gus said, “Crap!”

Ted said, “I see you hatin’ to take advantage of anyone. Goddam if I don’t.”

Sherman flushed at the implication of the statement. At their age, Pa had deeded him a hundred and sixty acres. And he had nothing to give them. He could not even promise them anything. Oh, he knew how they felt; but what could he do any more than he was doing?

“Well, I’ll just tell you what I’ll do with you,” he said, companionably. “You take this dollar and go eat and get you some candy and sody pop and whatever you want, and then meet me over behind the blacksmith shop. I’ll take you on for a game of horseshoes. I’ll just bet, by God, I can trim you!”

He looked at them jocularly, pleading silently with them, and Ted and Gus looked at each other. An evil grin played around their pushed-out lips.

“I got a better idea than that,” said Gus. “You take your dollar and buy you a pound of axle grease with it—”

“And stick your horseshoes up your ass,” Ted concluded.

Sneering, they turned and walked away.

While he was sitting down to dinner at noon, he saw them unhitch the team and lead it off toward the livery stable. But they did not stop at the stable. They rode the team out to the fairgrounds and put it up at auction.

No one questioned their right to sell it, although they did wonder that Sherman would sell his prize team. The bidders decided there must be something wrong with it, and the boys received only a hundred dollars. But that was roughly one hundred times as much as either of them had ever had before.

Riding merrily out of town on the train, they passed the Misery Crick district; and Ted suddenly cursed and pointed to a figure near the right-of-way.

“Jesus! Did you see that?”

“Jesus! Looked like he had a face full of snakes, didn’t he?”

They swore, wonderingly, staring back as long as they could see at Mike Czerny.

M
r. William Simpson, salesmanager of the World-Wide Harvester Company, picked up the phone on his desk and spoke into the transmitter:

“Simpson speaking,” he barked. “How’s that? What was the name? Why, yes, I know them. Know the family quite well. They’re good customers of ours. Send ’em right on up, will you?”

He let the receiver drop wearily and puffed his cigar for a moment. Pulling open a drawer, he took out a bottle of soda-mint tablets and popped two into his mouth. He got up and went into his private lavatory and gulped a glass of water. He gazed into the mirror and shook his head.…These out-of-town customers with their craze for excitement and their cast-iron stomachs! They never got full and they never got tired, and they seemed to think a man didn’t have anything to do but chase around with them.

God, they didn’t know when they were well off. They ought to be stuck with a job like his for about a week. They’d never leave the farm again; they’d never want to see the inside of another cabaret.

His secretary rapped on his office door, and he hurried out, tugging at the lapels of his coat, working up a big smile.

He flung the door open and extended a hand to each of the Fargo boys.

“Why, Ted—Gus! How the devil are you, anyway? Come in, come in!”

The boys sidled past him, grinning, and Simpson addressed his secretary: “Miss Beatrice, these gentlemen are old friends of mine, and we’ve got a lot to talk over. I don’t want to be disturbed under any circumstances…unless it’s very important.”

He winked at her, imperceptibly, and she returned a slight smile of understanding. If his visitors didn’t leave within a reasonable time, something very important would come up.

“Well, how in the world have you been, boys?” Simpson demanded. “Sit down and take one of those cigars. Make yourself right to home.”

He boomed on amiably while the boys lit cigars and grinned at each other. And while he talked, he was giving them a covert sizing-up. He felt, somehow, that there was something unusual about this visit, but he could not put his finger on it. Personal appearances, which were the principal foundation for ordinary judgments, meant nothing at all with these farmers.

And, for that matter, the boys were dressed quite well. There was a city air about them. Extremely clothes conscious, they had got rid of their rube duds as soon as they were able, and they had not stinted on new apparel.

After leaving Verdon, they had come to the very practical decision that they would need much more money than they had to make an assault upon the cities. So they had followed the wheat harvest far up into Canada, working almost steadily and often receiving as much as two dollars and a half for their sixteen-hour day, plus, of course, board and room.

When the harvest season was over, they were so well heeled that they had returned the hundred dollars to their father. They had assured each other, humorously, that the old bastard would probably starve to death if they didn’t help him. But now winter was here, and they were almost broke again, and they were beginning to regret their philanthropy.

“How long are you going to be in town, boys?” asked Simpson, studying them.

“Well, we don’t know exactly,” said Gus.

“It sort of depends,” said Ted vaguely.

“I see, I see,” nodded Simpson. “How is your father?”

“Why, pretty good, I guess.”

Simpson emitted a jocular bellow. “You guess? Don’t you know how your father is?”

“Well, we ain’t seen him in quite a while.”

“We ain’t living to home no more,” Ted explained.

“Now, how is that?” Simpson inquired. “You didn’t have a falling out, did you?”

The boys shook their heads in a firm negative. They had agreed that Simpson might be put out if the true facts of their departure were revealed.

“Well, what was the trouble then?”

“We just got tired of living on the farm,” said Ted, and looked appealingly at Gus.

“We’re looking for jobs,” said Gus flatly.

“Oh,” said Simpson. “Umm-hmmm.”

He was greatly annoyed, and, more than that, depressed. He had a theory that a boy could be removed from the country, but not the country from the boy. He had convinced himself that he was sorry he had ever left the farm. He thought that Ted and Gus would be much better off back with their father. Still, their father was a good customer of his company and he had visited at their house so many times that their status was almost that of friends.

Then, he could not forget his own first days in the city, when he had wandered lonely and friendless from place to place, rebuffed at every turn, aching with homesickness, yet too full of stubborn pride to admit failure.

He supposed he should do something for Ted and Gus. At least, he should make the effort.

“I’m glad to help you,” he said. “I don’t know that I can do anything, but I’m willing to try. I’m just not sure that it’s the best thing for you. Now, I was going to say, if you need a little money—”

“We ain’t broke,” said Gus and Ted.

“Well, I was going to say: this city life isn’t what it’s cracked up to be by a long shot. The wages they pay in places like this look big, but it costs a lot to live. A lot more than the average fellow would think. Now, why don’t you do this—have you got you a hotel room yet?”

“Uh-huh.” They nodded.

“Well, why don’t you sort of look around for a few days? Just have a good time. I’ll get you some show tickets and we’ll take in a cabaret or two and have a nice visit together. It won’t cost you a cent, and if you need a little help to get home, I’ll be glad to lend—”

“We ain’t going home.”

Simpson shrugged. “I think that would be best, but—well, come along. I’ll see what I can do.”

Hurrying, for he had pressing business matters to take care of, he escorted them through a maze of corridors and soundproof doors, and down, at last, via several flights of iron stairs, into the plant proper.

The din was so terrific that the boys’ ears ached from it, but they were too busy gawking to mind. The plant was one great seemingly unbounded room, with steel rafters from which traveling cranes were suspended. At one end of the room, the end which they were passing, were the embryos of more than a dozen different types of farm implements—the bare unpainted chassis of threshers, combines, mowers, balers, and so on—drawn up in the manner of animals beginning a race. (And indeed the men who worked upon them were racing.) Perhaps fifty feet away was a parallel line, and here the embryos were a little easier to identify for what they were, or would be. And beyond that was a third line, and a fourth, and a tenth, each advancing the growth of the implement by a step or two until it was finished.

The last line was so far away that the men were mere specks—bobbing bug-like fixtures, moving in what seemed to be a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues.

Those were the spray-painters, Simpson explained, and some of them made as much as seven dollars a day. He did not explain that they had no teeth after six months, little eyesight after a year, and that their occupational expectancy was about three years. In all likelihood he was not acquainted with these facts, and he would have been annoyed at their recital.

To the best of his knowledge, there wasn’t any law compelling a man to be a spray-painter.

They entered the glass-enclosed, paper-littered office of the plant superintendent, and Simpson introduced his charges. The superintendent looked them over with his hard protuberant eyes, tapping nervously on his desk with a pair of calipers. He didn’t like interference from the front office in his affairs. Nevertheless, he conceded that Bill Simpson was a pretty regular fellow who was never too proud to stop and say hello to a man, and he didn’t like to turn him down on a favor.

“I don’t know, though,” he said. “We’re laying men off right now. I don’t hardly see how…”

“Well, if you’re laying ’em off, lay off a couple extra,” said Simpson, laughing. “How about it, eh?”

“Well, I guess I could.…”

“You do that, then,” said Simpson, swiftly closing the matter. “Try to pick out a couple about the same size as Ted and Gus, here, so they can use their work clothes.”

He shook hands with the boys, told them to take care of themselves, and hurried back upstairs.

Two weeks later the superintendent called him. “Look, Mr. Simpson, those friends of yours—I just don’t see how I can keep them on any longer.”

“Why can’t you?” demanded the salesmanager, instinctively aroused by opposition. “Don’t tell me they’re not good workers.”

“Oh, they work all right,” the superintendent admitted. “But—well, they’re just upsetting the whole plant. You know, I put them to installing the number-four blade on our model X-473 mower, and they started off fine at it. I was figuring on maybe before long putting them on a real important job, maybe even truing and cottering wheels. But this last week they’ve just gone completely haywire. They finish their own work and then they go wandering off around the other stations, butting in on the other men, and—and, well, by God, I just can’t put up with it, Mr. Simpson.”

“That is bad,” said Simpson, seriously. “I was afraid they might get a little restless. Uh—how about the repair department, Pat? That’d give ’em a little more variety. You put ’em over in repair and I guarantee they’ll make two of the best men in the place.”

“But I’ve got all the men I need in repair. They’re good men, too.”

“Oh, the world’s full of good men,” said Simpson. “Uh—wasn’t your daughter looking for a place here in the office a while back?”

“Yes, she was.”

“You put those boys to work in the repair department, Pat. I’ll see what I can do for your daughter.”

So the boys went to work in repair, and the following week he received a call from the head auditor.

“See here, Simpson,” said that gentleman, curtly, “these friends of yours, the Fargoes, are going to have to look for another job.”

“Why, if you say so, certainly,” said Simpson. He had an unholy fear of the chief auditor. He was constantly in hot water with him over his and his salesmen’s expense accounts. “What’s the trouble, anyway?”

“They’re a couple of Red trouble-makers, that’s what!”

“Why, that’s pretty hard to believe. Not that I doubt your word—”

“They were held over a few hours last night to do some extra work, and they wanted to know how much they were going to be paid for it. The foreman naturally told them that they wouldn’t be paid extra. The company is providing them with a good job, and they should be more than willing to help out when called upon.…”

“Why, certainly. That’s no more than right.”

“Well, they didn’t see it that way. They came down three hours late this morning, to make up for the time they worked last night, and when the foreman hopped them about it, they got pretty rough with him. I say they’ve got to clear out!”

“I agree absolutely,” said Simpson. “If you don’t mind, though, I’ll send over my check to cover their wages until the end of the week.”

“You can suit yourself about that.” The chief auditor banged up his telephone.

Simpson banged up his. He pressed the button for his secretary.

“Miss Beatrice, if anyone named Fargo calls for me from now on, I am out of the city, That’s Fargo—F-a-r-g-o.”

“Yes, Mr. Simpson. Any initial?”

“Any initial,” said the salesmanager, grimly.

…From that time on, the saga of Ted and Gus Fargo was similar in many respects to that of thousands of other ex-farm boys.

They heard about a man in
De
-troit, an automobile manufacturer, who was paying four dollars a day for hands; and they bummed their way there, in time. To their disappointment, however, they were weeks in even getting into the employment office of the fortress-like plant; and when they did, they were not offered four dollars a day, nor even half that.

Yes, the man did pay four dollars for a relatively few men, veterans of the industry, who worked in his own plant; but the greater part of the works was not his at all (he merely controlled it), being operated by a maze of subcontractors.

Ted and Gus worked for one of these for six weeks, and they had no complaint to make about the lack of work or its variety. But when they were ultimately and inevitably laid off, they found that they had lost twenty pounds apiece and that they had exactly ten dollars between them.

By this time, they were carrying on a sketchy correspondence with their father, and the letters on both sides were friendly. But he did not urge them to return. He had had to let a good part of his mortgaged land revert; things were awful tight in the valley; if they could make out all right, it might be best for them to stay where they were.

They drifted to Cleveland, to Cincinnati, to Chicago. Now and then they picked up a week or so’s work in a machine shop or garage. Sometimes there was a ditch-digging job they could sit in on. In Chicago, they made a little money roustabouting on the lake boats.

Nights, in some bug-ridden dump, they lay awake and talked. They did not talk much in the daytime when they could see each other’s faces.

“Jesus! I wonder how the old lady’s getting along. You remember that night you pushed me out the window?”

“God, yes! I wonder how she is getting along.”

“She was pretty good, kind of.”

“Hell, yes. The old man was all right, too.”

“Hell, yes, he was. I wonder why he don’t ever say nothing about Bobbie? I’d like to know how Bobbie’s getting along.”

“Goddam if I wouldn’t, too.”

“Y’know…y’suppose the old man really wants us to come back, an’—an’ kind of hates to say so?”

“I’m afraid he—I guess not.”

“Hell, I don’t want to go back, nohow.”

“Hell, I don’t neither.”

They headed south to avoid the cold. Sunning themselves in a Houston park, they came to a decision. They had been following the wrong kind of work. When they did make a day, it took it all to eat on. What they needed was a job where found was part of the wages.

It didn’t make much difference what kind of money they drew. If they could hold out until May, when the Texas harvest began, they could take to the road again. They’d follow the harvest right on up through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas—maybe on into Canada. Then they’d swing back to Verdon with a pocketful of money and get the old man straightened out.