Charles Williams - Hell Hath No Fury

I looked around. It was a gaunt, six-foot figure, a Negro, dressed in what looked like the trousers of some kind of lodge uniform and a white T-shirt with a big, frayed straw hat on his head. Then I saw the cane and dark glasses. He was blind.

“I don’t think there’s anybody here, Dad,” I said.

“Mister Julian must be heah. He always heah.”

“Well, damned if I see him.”

“You know wheah the fiah is at?” he asked.

“Yeah. Down the street just this side of the gin. It’s a hamburger shack.”

“Oh. Thank you, Cap’n.” He turned and tapped his way out with the cane.

Just then a door in the rear opened and a man came out, apparently from a washroom. He must have been around sixty and looked like a high-school maths teacher with his vague blue eyes and high forehead with thin white hair.

He smiled apologetically. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting. Everybody’s gone to the fire.”

“No,” I said absently. “No. Not at all.”

He came over and went into one of the cages, and said something.

“What?” I hadn’t been paying attention.

“I said what can I do for you?”

“Oh. I want to open an account.”

I made out the draft and deposited it and went on back to the lot, still thinking about it. Everybody in this town must be fire crazy.

I sold a car that afternoon and felt a little better for a while. I saw Gloria Harper only once, when she came out of the loan office at five o’clock with another girl. She went up the street without looking towards where I was leaning against a car on the lot. We locked up the office a little later and I got in my own car and drove over to the rooming house. It was sultry and oppressive, and after I took a shower and tried to dry myself the fresh underwear kept sticking to my perspiration-wet body. I sat in the room in my shorts and looked out the window at the back yard as the sun went down. It had a high board fence around it, a little grass turning brown with the heat, and a chinaberry tree with a dirty rabbit hutch leaning against it. This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?

After a while I put on white slacks and a shirt and went down to the restaurant. When I had eaten it was still only seven o’clock, and there was nothing except the drugstore or the movie. I wandered up that way, but it was a Roy Rogers western, so I got in the car and drove around without any thought in mind except staying out of that room as long as I could. Without knowing why, I found myself following the route we’d taken that morning, going over the sandhill past the abandoned farms and down into the bottom.

There was a slice of moon low in the west and when I parked off the road at the end of the bridge the river was a silvery gleam between twin walls of blackness under the trees. I stripped off my clothes and walked down to the sandbar and waded in. The water was a little cooler than the air and went around in a big lazy eddy in the darkness under the bridge. I circled back up the other side and waded out after a while to lie on the sandbar and look up at the stars.

I was still sweltering when I went back to the room. I couldn’t sleep. In the next room an old man was reading aloud to his wife from the Bible, laboring slowly through the Book of Genesis, a begat at a time, and pronouncing it with the accent on the first syllable. I lay there on the hard slab of a bed in the heat and wondered when I’d start walking up the walls. Gloria Harper and Sutton kept going around and around in my mind, and a long time afterwards, just before I dropped off, I came back to that other thing I couldn’t entirely forget. It was that bank with nobody in it.

3

The next morning there was another argument with Harshaw. Just after we opened the office he wanted me to take a cloth and dust off the cars. I was feeling low anyway and told him the hell with it. The other salesman, an older, sallow-faced man named Gulick, got some dust cloths out of a desk drawer and went on out.

Harshaw leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “What’s the matter with you, Madox? You got a grudge against the world?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a salesman. When I want a job cleaning cars I’ll get one.”

“The way you’re going, you may get one sooner than you think. How old are you?”

“Thirty. Why?”

“Well, you haven’t set the world on fire so far or you wouldn’t be here in this place.”

“I wouldn’t argue with you.”

“You can’t sell dirty cars,” he grunted. “You want Gulick to do all the work keeping ‘em clean while you skim off the gravy?”

“I’ll take down my hair,” I said, “and we’ll both cry.” I got off the desk and went outside, disgusted with the argument and with everything. I leaned against a car, smoking a cigarette and watching Gulick work, and after a while I threw the butt savagely out into the street and went over and picked up one of the cloths.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, when I started in on the other side of the car he was working on. “I don’t mind it. I like to keep busy.”

He had sad brown eyes, a little like a hound’s, and his health wasn’t good. The doctors had told him to work outside and he’d have to give up a job as book-keeper.

“How long have you worked for Harshaw?” I asked.

He stopped rubbing for a minute and thought about it. He did everything very slowly and deliberately. “About a year, I reckon.”

“Hard guy to get along with, isn’t he?”

“No-o. I wouldn’t say that. He’s just got troubles, same as anybody.”

“Troubles?”

“Got ulcers pretty bad. And then he’s had a lot of family trouble. Lost his wife a year or so ago, and he’s got a boy that— Well, I guess you’d say he’s just not much good.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah.” He straightened and stretched his back. “I always figure there’s a lot of things can make a man grouchy. He may have troubles you don’t even know any thing about—” He acted as if he intended to say more, and then thought better of it and went back to work.

Harshaw came out of the office a little later and got in one of the cars. “Going out in the country for a while,” he said to Gulick. “Be back around noon.”

It was Friday and there wasn’t much activity along the street. The sun began to get hot. We had only two cars left to dust off when I saw a young Negro in peg-top pants and yellow shoes wander on to the end of the lot and begin circling around an old convertible with a lot of gingerbread on it. He kicked the tires and backed off to look at it.

I nodded to Gulick. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll finish it.”

I watched then as I rubbed off the last car. The Negro tried the big air-horn mounted on a fender, and then they both stood there with their hands in their pockets saying nothing at all. Just then a blue Oldsmobile sedan slid in off the street and stopped in front of the office. There was a woman in it, alone. She tapped the horn.

I walked over. “Good morning. Could I help you?”

The baby-blue eyes regarded me curiously. “Oh, hello,” she said. “I was just looking for George.”

“George?”

“Mr. Harshaw,” she explained. And then she added. “I’m his wife.”

“Oh.” It took a second for that to soak in. Gulick hadn’t said Harshaw had married again. “He said he was going out in the country. I think he’ll be back around noon.” She must be a lot younger, I thought; she couldn’t be over thirty. Somehow she made you think of an overloaded peach tree. She wasn’t a big woman, and she wasn’t fat, but there was no wasted space inside the seersucker suit she had on, especially around the hips and the top of the jacket. Her hair was poodle-cut and ash blonde, and her face had the same luscious and slightly over-ripe aspect as the rest of her. Maybe it was the full lower lip, and the dimples.