James Cain - The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

By now Cain had firmly established his style and milieu. After “The Birthday Party” had satisfied him that he could write salable stories in the third person, he decided to try his hobo tale, which he called “Dead Man,” in the third person. Ms. Haggard wrote back one of what Cain called “those Mama-knows-best letters,” suggesting the story would have a much better chance of selling if he made the ending more pleasant. Cain must have wanted the money badly because in uncharacteristic fashion he changed the ending to make it commercial. But still it did not sell. Then one day, when he was in New York working on his play based on Postman, he received a call from Paul Palmer, the new editor of the Mercury. Palmer was calling about “Dead Man,” which Edith Haggard had finally submitted to him. “Jim, I like it fine,” Palmer said, “and want to run it in the next issue, except that this damned Pollyanna ending doesn’t sound like you... Could you fix me up another?” Cain restored the original ending, and the story appeared in the March 1936 Mercury. It is perhaps his best third-person story and has been reprinted at least half a dozen times, including an appearance in the O. Henry collection.

By the mid-1930s, after the publication of Serenade, Cain was giving most of his writing energy to novels and to trying to make it as a screenwriter, which he never did. But responding to Edith Haggard’s pleadings, he wrote a few more short stories — all in the third person — which she sold to Liberty: “Brush Fire,” “Coal Black,” “Everything but the Truth,” and “The Girl in the Storm.”

The last short story in this section (“Joy Ride to Glory”) was probably written sometime in the late 1930s. It was never published but turned up in a collection of Cain manuscripts purchased in Los Angeles by Stuart and Roger Birnbaum. In that the Birnbaums have, to the best of my knowledge, the only copy of the story in existence, their cooperation was necessary, and I wish to thank them for giving me permission to include it in this collection. The story is written in the first person and concerns a young man who, in escaping from prison, takes a perilous underground journey through a storm sewer. The idea for this story must have grown out of an experience Cain had when he lived on Belden Drive in Hollywood Hills. One day after a storm, he was appalled to look out of his window and see a little girl being swept by the swollen waters in a gutter toward a large open drain that would have carried her underground. Suddenly, one of his neighbors, the composer George Antheil, came rushing from his house in his underwear and scooped the little girl up in his arms just before she would have disappeared into the sewer. Earlier, when Cain was an editorial writer for the New York World, he had met Antheil after he had written a critical editorial about Antheil’s composition Ballet Mechanique. Cain did not like the composer or his music, but after the incident at the storm sewer, he said he felt kindly disposed toward him the rest of his life.

After returning to the East in 1948 and becoming mired in a Civil War novel, Cain returned to short-story writing, hoping to make some quick money. He wrote several stories, some of which were sold to Esquire and adventure magazines such as Manhunt. They were consciously commercial stories, not up to his earlier work. But this did not bother Cain; he always felt that stories written primarily for magazines did not count.

R.H.

Well, it looks like Burbie is going to get hung. And if he does, what he can lay it on is, he always figured he was so damn smart.

You see, Burbie, he left town when he was about sixteen year old. He run away with one of them travelling shows, “East Lynne” I think it was, and he stayed away about ten years. And when he come back he thought he knowed a lot. Burbie, he’s got them watery blue eyes what kind of stick out from his face, and how he killed the time was to sit around and listen to the boys talk down at the poolroom or over at the barber shop or a couple other places where he hung out, and then wink at you like they was all making a fool of theirself or something and nobody didn’t know it but him.

But when you come right down to what Burbie had in his head, why it wasn’t much. ’Course, he generally always had a job, painting around or maybe helping out on a new house, like of that, but what he used to do was to play baseball with the high school team. And they had a big fight over it, ’cause Burbie was so old nobody wouldn’t believe he went to the school, and them other teams was all the time putting up a squawk. So then he couldn’t play no more. And another thing he liked to do was sing at the entertainments. I reckon he liked that most of all, ’cause he claimed that a whole lot of the time he was away he was on the stage, and I reckon maybe he was at that, ’cause he was pretty good, ’specially when he dressed hisself up like a old-time Rube and come out and spoke a piece what he knowed.

Well, when he come back to town he seen Lida and it was a natural. ’Cause Lida, she was just about the same kind of a thing for a woman as Burbie was for a man. She used to work in the store, selling dry goods to the men, and kind of making hats on the side. ’Cepting only she didn’t stay on the dry goods side no more’n she had to. She was generally over where the boys was drinking Coca-Cola, and all the time carrying on about did they like it with ammonia or lemon, and could she have a swallow outen their glass. And what she had her mind on was the clothes she had on, and was she dated up for Sunday night. Them clothes was pretty snappy, and she made them herself. And I heard some of them say she wasn’t hard to date up, and after you done kept your date why maybe you wasn’t going to be disappointed. And why Lida married the old man I don’t know, lessen she got tired working at the store and tooken a look at the big farm where he lived at, about two mile from town.

By the time Burbie got back she’d been married about a year and she was about due. So her and him commence meeting each other, out in the orchard back of the old man’s house. The old man would go to bed right after supper and then she’d sneak out and meet Burbie. And nobody wasn’t supposed to know nothing about it. Only everybody did, ’cause Burbie, after he’d get back to town about eleven o’clock at night, he’d kind of slide into the poolroom and set down easy like. And then somebody’d say, “Yay, Burbie, where you been?” And Burbie, he’d kind of look around, and then he’d pick out somebody and wink at him, and that was how Burbie give it some good advertising.

So the way Burbie tells it, and he tells it plenty since he done got religion down to the jailhouse, it wasn’t long before him and Lida thought it would be a good idea to kill the old man. They figured he didn’t have long to live nohow, so he might as well go now as wait a couple of years. And another thing, the old man had kind of got hep that something was going on, and they figured if he throwed Lida out it wouldn’t be no easy job to get his money even if he died regular. And another thing, by that time the Klux was kind of talking around, so Burbie figured it would be better if him and Lida was to get married, else maybe he’d have to leave town again.

So that was how come he got Hutch in it. You see, he was afeared to kill the old man hisself and he wanted some help. And then he figured it would be pretty good if Lida wasn’t nowheres around and it would look like robbery. If it would of been me, I would of left Hutch out of it. ’Cause Hutch, he was mean. He’d been away for a while too, but him going away, that wasn’t the same as Burbie going away. Hutch was sent. He was sent for ripping a mail sack while he was driving the mail wagon up from the station, and before he come back he done two years down to Atlanta.