Hot Spot (3 page)

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 anything 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 tyres 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.

“Well, thanks anyway,” she said. Then she smiled. “You must be the new salesman. Mr.—uh—”

“Madox,” I said. “Harry Madox.”

“Oh, yes. George told me about you. Well, I won’t keep you from your work.” She switched on the ignition and pressed the starter button. The motor didn’t take hold the first time and she kept grinding at it. I’d started away, but turned now and came back.

“What do you suppose is the matter?” she asked petulantly.

“I think it’s flooded. Hold the accelerator all the way to the floor while you crank it.”

“Oh,” she said. “Like this?”

I looked in the car. It was stupid, actually, because anybody would know how to press down on the gas to cut out an automatic choke, but I looked anyway. She had very small feet in white shoes which were mostly heels, and around one ankle, under the nylon, she had one of those gold chains women wore a year or so ago. The seersucker skirt was up over her knees. Well, I thought, she asked me to. What did she expect?

“Yes,” I said. “Like that.”

She jabbed at the starter again and in a moment the motor caught and took off. She smiled. “Well. How did you know that?”

“It’s just one of those things you pick up.”

“Oh. I see. Well, thanks a lot.” She waved a hand and drove off.

In about twenty minutes she was back. I was sitting in the office, and when she tapped the horn I went out. “George hasn’t got back yet?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Oh, darn. He never remembers anything.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

She hesitated. “I hate to ask you. I mean, you’re working.”

“I’m not hurting myself. What is it?”

“Well, if you
really
wouldn’t mind. It’d only take a few minutes.” She gestured towards the rear of the car. “I’ve got a lot of papers and old clothes I want to unload in our storeroom, and I promised to take the key back before noon.”

“Sure,” I said, “where is it?”

“Are you sure it’ll be all right to leave for a few minutes?”

“Yes. Gulick can hold it down.” I looked up the lot. He and the Negro boy were still rooted in the same spot, staring at the old convertible. It’s like a horse trade, I thought; it’ll be hours before either of them makes a move.

I slid in beside her and we started down Main Street. “It’s awful nice of you,” she said. “The stuff is tied up in heavy packages, and I couldn’t carry it by myself.”

“What is it?” I asked. “A junk drive?”

“Uh-uh. It’s our club project. We store the stuff in Mr. Taylor’s old building and every two or three months a junk man comes and buys the paper. We sort out the clothes and send bundles.”

That’s nice, I thought. They send bundles. Well, maybe it keeps them off the streets. We went down a block beyond the bank and turned right into a cross street which was only a couple of blocks long. There wasn’t much here after you got off the main drag. A small chain grocery stood on the corner, and beyond that there was a Negro juke joint covered with Coca-Cola signs. She went on up to the second block and stopped in front of a building on the right. It was a boxlike two-storey frame with glass show-windows in front and vacant lots full of dead brown weeds on both sides. You could still see the lettering “
TAYLOR HARDWARE
” on the windows, but they were fly-specked and dirty and the place was vacant, and the door was closed with a big padlock. A “
FOR RENT
” sign leaned against the glass down in one corner. We got out and she fished around in her bag for the key. Standing up, she wasn’t as tall as the Harper girl and had none of her long-legged, easy grace, but she was stacked smoothly and twelve to the dozen against the contoured retaining-wall of her clothes.

She went around and opened the trunk of the car. “I expect it’ll take two trips,” she said.

I glanced in. There were two bundles of old newspapers and magazines tied up with cord, and a lot of loose clothes. I hefted the papers. They weren’t over fifty or seventy-five pounds each, so I gathered them up and asked her to stuff the old clothes under my arms.

She looked up at me with a kittenish smile. “Well, goodness, I expect to carry something myself. I don’t look that puny, do I?”

Let it lie, I thought. This is a small town. We went inside. The place was empty except for some old counters and shelves, and our footsteps rang with a hollow sound. There was dust everywhere. “We have to go upstairs,” she said.

The stairs were in the rear. I went up first and I could hear the high heels clicking after me. All the windows were closed, and heat lay like a suffocating blanket across the lifeless air. I could feel sweat breaking out on my face. The whole second floor was a jumble of discarded junk, old pieces of furniture, loose and bundled papers, piles of clothing, cast-off luggage, and even some old feather mattresses piled in a corner. A fire marshal would take one look at it, I thought, and run amok. They’d have a fire here some day that would really turn the town out. It wouldn’t take much. Just some turpentine and rags …

“What?” I asked, suddenly aware that she had come up behind me and said something. I turned. She was throwing the clothing on a pile. Her face was flushed with the heat and there were little beads of perspiration on her upper lip.

“I said you must not know your own strength. You carried those things all the way up here, and then forgot you had them. Why don’t you set them down?”

I was still holding the bundles of papers. “Oh,” I said.

I threw them down. She was still looking at me, but she said nothing. It was intensely still, and hot, and there was an odd feeling of strain in the air.

“Is that all of it?” I asked.

“Yes. That’s all,” she said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How do you like our town?”

“All right. What I’ve seen of it.” Why did you have to stand here and talk in this stifling hotbox up under the roof? Her face was expressionless as she watched me.

“Did you ever live in a small town?” she asked.

“Yes. I grew up in one.”

“Oh? Well, you probably know what they’re like, then.”

“Sure.”

“Well, maybe we’d better go,” she said. “It’s awful hot up here, don’t you think?”

“It’s murder.” I nodded for her to go first, and we started weaving our way through the junk, towards the stairs.

“I wondered if I was just imagining it. I usually don’t mind the heat, when I keep my weight down.”

That was the second time she’d thrown it out there, but we understood each other about the small town now.

“Why do you want to keep your weight down?” I asked.

She looked around at me. “Don’t you think I ought to?”

“It looks perfect to me.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all. It was a pleasure.”

“I mean for carrying the stuff up, when Mr. Harshaw forgot.”

Well, the hell with you, I thought. You just remember you’re married and I won’t have any trouble with you. “That’s what I meant,” I said. “It was a pleasure.”

We went down the stairs. Just as we hit the lower floor I heard her say, “Oh, darn it. What a mess!” I looked at her, and she held out a hand covered with dirt, staring at it disgustedly. She’d forgotten about the dust and had held on to the railing.

I took out my handkerchief. “Here,” I said. “Let me.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I think the water’s still turned on in the washroom. I’ll only be a minute.”

She walked on back to the end of the building and disappeared into a room walled off in one corner. I stood there looking around and waiting for her, and then before I knew it I was thinking about that boar’s nest of trash and junk upstairs. The place was a natural firetrap.

I don’t know why I did it; there was no idea or plan in my mind. But I reached over and wiped my hand through the dust on a step, and when I saw her come out of the washroom I started back that way. “I got some of it, too,” I said, holding out the hand.

There was a window in the washroom, all right, as I’d thought there would be. It was closed and locked with an ordinary latch on top of the lower sash. Before I washed my hands I reached over and took hold of the latch and unlocked it.

W
HY NOT? IN THIS WORLD
you took what you wanted; you didn’t stand around and wait for somebody to bring it to you. I sat on the side of the bed stark naked in the sweltering night, listening to Umlaut beget Frammis in an age-cracked voice on the other side of the wall, and thought how easy it would be. There’d be ten or fifteen thousand dollars or maybe more lying around in that comic-opera bank for a man with nerve enough to pick it up. And you could get away from the rat-race for a long time with that kind of money, with a brown-eyed girl on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean, sailing a catboat and going fishing off the reefs and drinking Cuba Libres where it’s always afternoon.

Why kid myself? I wasn’t a salesman. And I couldn’t go back to sea, if I wanted to. I wasn’t getting any younger, and another whole year was down the drain. I’d quit two jobs and got fired from three, and I’d had to get out of Houston in a hurry after a brawl with a longshoreman over some turning-basin chippy. We tore up a lot of the fixtures in a cheap beer joint by the time the thing became general, and somewhere in the confusion the longshoreman had his jaw broken with a bottle of Bacardi rum. It wasn’t just an isolated incident, either; life was just a succession of jams over floozies of one kind or another.

It had been a little over a year now since the night I’d got back to the States after eleven months of that monotonous tanker shuttle between the Persian Gulf and Japan, with a four-hundred-a-month allotment to Jerilee, to find she’d shoved off with the bank account and some boy friend she’d forgotten to tell me about. I tore my second mate’s ticket into strips and flushed it down the can in a Port Arthur ginmill and for a while I seemed to have some purpose in life, but after I’d had time to think it over a little I quit looking for them and threw away the gun. It wasn’t worth it. She was just another bum in a succession of them, the only difference being that I’d been married to her.

On the other side of the wall they were piping Noah over the rail and getting ready for the rain. Sweat ran down my face and I thought about the bank to keep from thinking of that Harshaw woman. Keep her weight down! She could quit leaning it against me. But what about the bank?

It wasn’t so simple, if you stopped to think about it. When you break the law you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time. Who ever won all the time? Yeah, but the thing which always trips ’em is association with other criminals, and I don’t know any, talkative or otherwise. An amateur’s got a better chance than the pro because nobody knows him and he hasn’t got any clippings in the files. I lay there for hours, thinking about it.