Whom Gods Destroy (7 page)

I knew by this time that I had broken something in my hand. The sharp pain eased a little and a pounding ache took its place. It worked its way up my arm and across my shoulders, and the hammering set up at the base of my skull. It hurt like hell, but I welcomed it. It gave me something besides Lola to think about.

Sid's chin dropped on his chest, he sagged over toward me, and pretty soon he began to snore. Vida had worked up a full head of steam and had to let the pressure off some way, so I let her talk.

“If he drinks like this all the time,” I put in finally, “how does he take care of his business?”

She stared at the windshield hard enough to break it.

“Oh, he doesn't get this drunk often. Tonight was something special. Oh, Sid's smart, he'll tell you so himself. He takes care of his business and does his drinking at nights. Every goddamn night. Can you imagine what it's like having a lush for a husband?”

I could imagine. And I was beginning to understand Vida a little better. When a girl's husband goes out on a bust once in a while, that's one thing, but when he does it seven times a week it's something else again. Especially at nights. A girl like Vida could get very restless at night if a thing like that went on too long.

The car moved across the river, then through the heart of Big Prairie. Finally Vida braked the Ford and turned into the driveway of their house.

“I'll help you get him to bed,” I said.

“How does your hand feel? We can always leave him in the car.”

My hand was throbbing and, without looking at it, I knew it was beginning to turn an ugly blue. “Never mind the hand. Just get the door open and I'll bring him in.”

Using my left hand, I managed to wrestle Sid upright in the seat. Then I eased under him and got him across my shoulders. I couldn't stand touching anything with my right, and it was a ticklish job getting him up with just the left, but finally I managed it. I got him to the front door and went inside where Vida had switched the lights on.

“Show me where the bedroom is and open the doors for me.”

She shrugged and held a hall door open. I took Sid down the hall, into the bedroom and dumped him. He fell on the bed like a sack of oats.

I pulled his shoes and coat off, and loosened his tie. He never stopped snoring.

“I can get you a drink,” Vida said.

“I think I need one.”

So we went back to the front room and I waited there while Vida got the drinks in the kitchen.

“Bourbon?” she called.

“That's fine.”

The room looked like something right out of Better Homes and Gardens. The furniture was what they call “modern,” and every piece of it was a monotonous blond. The floor was carpeted from wall to wall in pale green shag, and the walls were draped in Japanese prints. Everything was neat and clean and completely without imagination. Vida came in with two full highball glasses on a silver tray.

“Let me look at that hand.”

“It's all right,” I said, but she took it anyway and I winced.

“Sure,” she said dryly, “it's fine. If you're lucky, maybe there's a bone or two that isn't broken.”

“I'll have a doctor look at it in the morning.”

She looked into her glass, rattling the ice. “Sid said you were going to work for him,” she said after a pause. “He said you were thinking of going into business for yourself in another county.”

“That's the idea.”

She had something on her mind but I didn't guess what it was until she said, “You don't have to work for anybody to learn how to be a bootlegger. It's the same in every county and Sid can tell you all there is to know in five minutes.”

I thought L was beginning to get it then. “You don't want me to stay in Big Prairie,” I said. “Is that it? If it's about that business on Seaward's back porch, we'll forget it. It didn't even happen.”

“It's partly that,” she said bluntly. “You probably won't believe me, but I've been a good wife to Sid. I'm not the kind of woman you think I am—but sometimes it isn't easy.” She took a quick drink. “But I was really thinking of Lola Keating.”

I turned the glass up and drank until the ice hit my teeth. “Go on.”

“Sid told me about you and Lola,” she said quietly. “I didn't think much about it then. That was a long time ago. But when I saw you tonight, you scared me. A woman shouldn't be able to do things like that to a man—not after so many years.”

She continued to look into her glass again, not at me. “Leave Big Prairie, Roy. You can't hurt her, she's hurt-proof. Her husband's the county attorney and before many years he'll be the governor, because the liquor dealers like him. He does what they say.”

“What makes you think I want to hurt Lola Keating?”

She smiled then, but very faintly. “When you broke your hand tonight on Seaward's porch railing, you weren't hitting the railing, you were hitting Lola. It will always be like that—the harder you hit, the more you'll hurt yourself.”

“You're quite a philosopher. But why are you so interested in getting me out of Big Prairie?”

She looked at me, and those eyes were cool. “Because I signed a marriage contract with Sid and I mean to stick to it. For better or for worse, as they say. I'm afraid of you, Roy.”

Then, as she stood there looking at me, I could see a shudder start at her shoulders and go all the way down. Her mouth parted as if to say something, but no sound came out, and that shudder went over her again. And a strange thing happened. As I stood there looking at her she stopped being Vida and became Lola. It was Lola and she was laughing without making a sound. Laughing. I stepped over to the wall and snapped the light out.

I could see the nakedness of her pale arms and shoulders and that was about all. I heard myself saying, “You lousy, rotten bitch!” But it was Lola I was talking to. I went up to her and she didn't move. “Goddamn you!” I took the front of her dress in both hands and ripped it wide open.

If there was any pain in my broken hand, it never reached my brain. “Crawl, Lola, goddamn you! Let me hear you beg!” The dress fell somewhere and she stood there, shaking, her body seeming to glow in the darkness. Oh, you're beautiful, all right, I thought. You never thought this would happen, did you, Lola? A thing like this couldn't happen to a proud, snotty little bitch like you. But it is!

“Roy! Don't!”

It was the first sound she made. But it was too late then.

The house was full of small sounds. As from a great distance we heard Sid's snoring. Somewhere an electric clock whirred. There in the front room Vida and I lay in the darkness, on the couch.

It took me several long minutes to pull myself away from that first rush of madness. I was convinced now that I was crazy—or at least partly crazy. I had seen Lola, I'd had my hands on her, but it was Vida beside me now. She had her arms around me, pressing my face to her breasts, and she was crooning something softly. It had a soothing, pleasant sound in the darkness. “Lie still,” she crooned. “Lie still....”

But it scared me—whatever had happened in my brain. I had to figure it out, and I couldn't do it my myself. “I went crazy,” I said. “As crazy as a whole carload of loons. I saw her, right here in this room. She started laughing and I—God, Vida, I'm sorry.”

“I'm not. It had to happen sometime, and I guess I've been hoping it would happen. I'm not made like some women. I can't keep holding on and on forever. And a lush is no husband, Roy. It happened and I'm glad—even if you thought I was someone else.”

“It wasn't that. But I saw her. She started laughing and I went nuts.”

Vida ran her fingers through my hair and kind of twisted it, and then I lifted my face and she kissed me with that red mouth, slow and warm. “I'm glad it was you, Vida. I'm glad it was you instead of her.” She began shuddering again.

5

I WOKE UP IN THE HOTEL the next morning without knowing exactly how I got there. My hand was swollen and discolored and I lay there feeling the pain spreading all through me. I looked at my watch and it was ten o'clock, so I figured I ought to find a doctor's office open at that hour. It was a job getting dressed and I didn't even try to shave. There was no way I could hold the hand without hurting it. I thought of Vida then and the whole thing was clear enough in my mind, but still it didn't seem real. No more of that, I thought. Sid is too important to you for you to take chances like that with his wife.

There was a doctor half a block from the hotel. He looked at the hand, prodded it in different places with his finger, frowning. “It's a fracture, all right.”

He shot something into me with a needle and I felt my arm growing numb. That was about all I remembered, except for the red haze of pain and the shock of splintered bone ends snapping into place. It took maybe twenty minutes, getting the cast on and everything, and then he said, “That's all there is to it.”

I ate something, later got a shave, found a used-car lot and bought a '46 Ford for five hundred dollars. It was noon by the time I phoned to see if Sid was at home.

Vida answered, and I said, “This is Roy. Is Sid around?”

Nothing happened for a minute, and it occurred to me that maybe she thought I was angling to take up where we'd stopped the night before. The hell with that, I thought. It was too risky.

“It's the job,” I said. “I've got the car and everything's ready to go. I want to know where I can find Sid so I can get started.”

“Oh,” she said, in a voice that didn't mean anything one way or the other. “I think he's at the office,” she went on, cool and impersonal. “That's the telephone office. The address is 116 West Main; it's over a department store.” She hung up.

I stood there for a minute, the receiver in my hand. It seemed kind of crazy to have it broken off like that after what had happened just a few hours before. But I reminded myself that that was the way I wanted it, and apparently Vida wanted it the same way, so that made everything fine. Just fine.

I found the telephone office without any trouble. It was on the second floor of a two-story building, over a department store as Vida had said. It wasn't much of an office, really—a ten-by-twelve affair with bare walls and unswept floor. There was a long table against one wall where two men sat with six telephones, answering them as they rang. On the other side of the room there was an old-fashioned, roll-top desk and a tilt-back chair, and that was where Sid was sitting, looking weakly at a ledger. He looked up when I came in. He'd made a good comeback from the night before but he still looked pretty hung over.

“I thought maybe you'd changed your mind and left town,” he said. Then he noticed my hand. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”

“I took a swing at Seaward's porch railing. I was pretty far gone.”

He didn't know just what to make of that, so he let it alone. “Vida tells me you helped get me to bed last night. Thanks.”

He didn't suspect a thing as far as I could see, so I grinned.

“What do you think of our setup here?” he said, nodding toward the other side of the room.

“It looks pretty wide open to me, for an illegal business like bootlegging. Don't you keep yourself guarded?”

Sid snorted. “Hell, who would bother us here? We pay for protection, and besides the building belongs to Seaward. The thing to remember is that bootlegging is a nice, quiet, everyday business, the way it's run now. We've made it respectable—almost respectable, anyway —here in Oklahoma, and that's the reason we don't have any more trouble than we do. People are going to drink, it doesn't make any difference about the laws.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Sure they are. Well, you saw last night how we begin by buying up men like Keating and McErulur and all the rest of them, so there's no sense in going for rough stuff when you've got a setup like that. But the telephone end is what you're interested in now. I've got six phones and I'll get a couple more as soon as I can find good numbers; numbers easy for the customers to remember. I got one good one yesterday; had to pay fifty dollars for it. Five two's.”

He opened a desk drawer and took out what seemed to be a box of five hundred business cards and handed it to me. One of the cards I picked out said: “Call Curly for Fast Delivery. The Best Brands at the Best Prices. 2-2222.”

“Had the cards made up as soon as I got the number,” Sid said. “Take these and pass them around. You have to advertise in bootlegging just like in any other business. Drop them in mail boxes. Shove them under doors in apartment houses. Leave them beside the customer's telephone when you make a delivery.”

“Who's Curley?” I asked.

“Nobody. Every runner has a different number and a different name and works his own territory, as close as he can stay to it. A good runner can work up a damn good following; the boozers won't buy from anybody else but their regular man if they can help it.”

Sid put his hand to his face and rubbed it. “God, I've got a head.” Then he opened another drawer and took out a fifth of bonded stuff and broke the seal. “You want one?” he said.

“It's a little early for me.”

He swigged from the neck, sat looking at it for a long moment, and finally put it back in the drawer.

“Anyway,” he said, “here's the way you work it. We don't keep anything here, it's down at a warehouse in the south part of town. You go down there and pick up what you need, maybe a lug of bourbon and a split of gin and bonded stuff—they're about the only things you'll get calls for around here. After you do that you call the office here and they'll give you the addresses to go to. After you make a delivery you use the customer's phone and call the office back to see if they have any more deliveries to make in the neighborhood you're in. You keep it up that way until you run out of liquor, so then you go back to the warehouse and check out some more.”