Charles Williams: Hell Hath No Fury

“Cut it out, blondie. How’d he get on your back?”

“It’s—it’s nothing. You’re just imagining it.”

“The way you imagined you saw him down at the spring? And collected the car notes?”

“All right, all right,” she said desperately. “I lied about it. But why can’t you leave me alone?”

“When I see something being passed around I like to get my share. I’m just a pig that way.”

Her shoulders slumped and she looked down at her feet. “Well, now that you’ve expressed your opinion of me, could we go on to town?”

“What’s your hurry? We’re just getting acquainted. And besides, you haven’t taken care of my car payments yet.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You, angel. Did I tell you that you had nice legs?” I started to go on from there, but she brushed the skirt down and shoved away and finally she did hit me. “O.K.,” I said. “You don’t have to call the Marines. I can take a hint.” I switched on the ignition and turned the car back on the road. She was silent all the way back to town, just sitting in the corner of the seat rolling her handkerchief into a ball in her hands.

It was easy to see something was wrong before we got there. A column of black smoke climbed straight into the sky from somewhere in town and a highway patrol car came boiling up behind us and careened past with its siren howling. I hit the accelerator and fell in behind it, wondering where the fire was and hoping it wasn’t the rooming house I’d moved into yesterday.

It wasn’t. It was a greasy-spoon hamburger shack beyond the cotton gin on the other side of the street. Smoke, red-laced with flame, boiled out of the rear door and the window while the front of the place was a traffic jam of men trying to get in with hoses and other men trying to fight their way out with tables and chairs and a big jukebox. The street was blocked with swollen white hoses and the one piece of fire-fighting equipment, an old pumper left over from the ‘Twenties, while volunteer firemen ran back and forth carrying axes and yelling at each other. I slowed down, trying to get a better look, but the highway cop waved me on with a furious gesture of his arms, shouting something I couldn’t hear above the uproar and pointing to the cross street detouring around the block.

I went up a couple of blocks and then turned back to the main street again, past the corner where the bank was. It was deserted here. Everybody was down at the other end fighting the fire or just gawking and getting in the way. When I turned in at the lot the other salesman was gone and Harshaw was alone in the office. As I got out I looked at her, wondering if she was going to say anything, but the big eyes were stony and blank, not even seeing me. She was probably scared blue of what I might say to Harshaw but she’d die before she’d plead again. She was a sweet-looking kid taking a beating about something, and suddenly I was ashamed and wanted to apologize.

“Wait—“ I started. She turned her head and looked at me as if I were something crawling out of a cesspool and went on into the office with her back straight.

Harshaw was on the phone when I came in and she was waiting to talk to him. He hung up in a minute and looked across at me.

“You get the car?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I sat down and lighted a cigarette.

“Why not?”

He had a habit of barking like a non-com, and he looked like one, like an old master sergeant with thirty years in. He was stocky and square-faced, around fifty-five, with a mop of iron gray hair, and the frosty gray eyes bored into you from under bushy overhanging brows. There were little tufts of hair in his ears, and he always had a cigar clamped in his mouth or in his hand.

I don’t know why I did it. “Because he paid Miss Harper,” I said.

He grunted. “Just have to do it again next month. The guy’s a dead-beat. What’s afire down there? The gin?”

“No. Hamburger joint across from it.”

“Well, how about hanging around while I go to dinner?”

That burned me a little. I’d wasted the whole morning running an errand for him and now he wanted me to wait around while he went to eat. I got up from the table and started to the door. “Sure,” I said. “As soon as I get back from mine.”

He glared at me. “Maybe you won’t like this job.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Maybe I won’t.”

I went out, and as I started angling across the street she caught up with me, headed for the loan office. She walked alongside, not looking up, and when I glanced around at her the top of that blonde strawstack was just on a level with my eyes.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Forget it.” I turned at the curb and went on up the sidewalk.

Down the street I could see the smoke still boiling into the sky and the jam of cars and people around the fire engine. The restaurant was deserted, like everything else in this end of town, and when I sat down at the counter the lone waitress hurried up eagerly.

“Are they going to save it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been down there. How’d it start?”

“Somebody said a grease fire in the kitchen.”

“Oh. Well, how’s the grease here? You got a menu?”

She shook her head. “The dinner’s not ready. Cook’s gone to the fire. I could fix you a sandwich, though.”

“Never mind,” I said. “Just a glass of milk and a piece of pie.”

It was awful pie and the crust was like damp cardboard. I wasn’t hungry anyway, because of the heat, and I kept thinking about the girl and the whole crazy thing out there at the oil well. Why was she taking the responsibility for Sutton’s car payments, and why had he looked at her that way? He hadn’t been just taking her clothes off; he was doing it in company, with his face full of that dirty joke of his. The simplest explanation, of course, was that he knew something about her and she didn’t dare take the car away or even try to collect for it. But when I’d tried a little pressure politics myself I got smeared in nothing flat. Why? I gave up, but I couldn’t get rid of her entirely because random parts of her kept poking into my mind, the odd gravity about her eyes, the way she walked, and the way the top of her head reminded you of a kid with sunburned hair. She added up to something I couldn’t quite place, and then I knew what it was—an ad-writer’s picture of The Girl Back Home. For God’s sake, I thought. I got up and pushed some change across the counter and went out. I had to go to the bank.

I still had about two hundred dollars in a bank in Houston which I hadn’t had time to get when I left there, and if I didn’t put through a draft for it right away I’d be going hungry. I had about forty dollars in my pocket. I went up the street in the white sunlight, not meeting anybody and absently watching the confusion down at the other end. A shower of sparks went pin-wheeling upwards in the smoke and I decided the roof of the place must have fallen in at last.

The bank was a little deadfall on the corner, and when I went inside it was dim and a little cooler than the street. It had a couple of tellers’ cages and a desk behind a railing in the rear, but there was nobody in the place—nobody at all. I stood there for a moment looking around, wondering if they operated the place like a serve-yourself market. I went over and looked through the grilles above the cages, thinking somebody might have passed out with a heart attack and be lying on the floor. Money was lying around on the shelf but there was no one in either cage.

Then I heard someone step inside the door behind me. A voice said, “Wheah the fiah, Mister Julian? Heered the sireen and the people a-runnin’ but ain’t nobody tell me wheah the fiah is at.”