The Feud (13 page)

On their way out to the car Jack said to Tony, “Did you take an exit through the kitchen of the coffee shop?”

His brother glared suspiciously at him. “What do you know about that?”

Jack said, “It was noticed.”

Tony seemed hard hit by this news. “They
saw
me?”

“The waitress did. She just thought it was strange, I guess.”

“Well, it was
my
business.”

“That’s what I told ‘em,” said Jack. “When we get home, I’ll work on that letter.”

“Don’t say anything to Mom on that subject,” Tony said in an undertone, leaning close. Their mother was coming along in the rear: she didn’t walk fast in her good shoes.

“I met this preacher. He’s not such a bad guy. He invited me to come over to these young people’s affairs at his church: it’s in Millville.”

“I guess you ain’t about to take him up on
that
,
“
said Tony. He opened the car door for his mother.

Whereas in reality Jack was secretly thinking of doing that very thing. He had somehow hoped, foolishly, that Tony might give him some encouragement. For a moment he had forgotten about the trouble with the Bullards and was occupied utterly by the idea that if the preacher had been sitting with those people in the coffee shop, they probably went to his church and that girl attended the functions for young people. Jack had not yet learned to dance, despite some rudimentary lessons from Bernice, but he could play games, drink punch, and eat ham-salad sandwiches as well as the next. He had done those things on occasion in the basement of the Hornbeck church to which his family nominally belonged, and given the other young people in attendance, he had been unspeakably bored, but having a girl you liked nearby could transform such an event. This one had the kind of face to which he was sure he could bring laughter with some of the jokes he had memorized from the witty repartee he heard on the radio.

Instead of returning via the direct route, going south on the county pike until they hit the main west-east thoroughfare, Tony unaccountably turned off into a maze of back streets when they reached the former.

Jack asked, “This a shortcut?”

“Yeah,” said his brother. “I sorta wanna keep outa downtown, without a regular license and all. You can’t ever tell.”

“I forgot about that,” said Jack. “It’s crazy. I bet you’re the best driver on the road.” Jack did not yearn to drive; he looked forward to being rich enough to have a chauffeur. Tony was great at any kind of practical pursuit, yet he seemed none too certain of where he was going at the moment. In the middle of this block he had slowed down almost to a stop, and he was staring across Jack and out the passenger’s window. There was nothing there but an ordinary house.

Jack said, “Are we lost?”

“I guess not.” Tony shifted gears and picked up speed, turning right at the corner.

Their mother had been silent since leaving the hospital. Jack turned and spoke to her.

“I hope Dad gets some rest,” he said. “He’s had a lot of aggravation lately. I think that made him nervous and put a strain on his constitution.”

His mother smiled in a sad way, and then she seemed to cheer up. “What sounds good to you fellas for supper? Pork chops? Tony, stop at the butcher’s on the way home, willya?”

Over his mother’s shoulder, through the rear window, Jack saw a police cruiser approaching a couple of blocks behind them. It was rolling considerably faster than they were. The red light behind its windshield was flashing, and in the next moment its siren was heard.

“Looks like there’s a bank robbery in progress,” Jack said in some excitement.

But Tony groaned. “You mean, it looks like my goose is cooked. I think I went through a stop sign back there.” He pulled into the curb.

Jack still assumed that the cop was en route toward big criminal game, until the Millville police car passed them and swung into the gutter just ahead. The officer took his own good time in emerging. When he finally appeared, he was a stocky man in navy-blue uniform pants striped in yellow, and a white shirt and a black tie, but the jacket he wore seemed to be a civilian windbreaker. He put on a police cap as he approached them.

Tony moaned, and his mother said, “Now, don’t you worry.” She leaned forward and patted his shoulder. “I’ll explain.”

The cop stuck his large face into the opening of the window which Tony had just lowered.

“You look like a stranger here,” said the officer.

“Yessir, we are,” said Jack’s mother. “Our dad has just been rushed to the hospital.”

“Then,” the cop went on to Tony, “I guess you don’t know we require respect for our traffic laws.” He smiled, but not kindly.

“Wellsir,” said Jack’s mother, “you just tell us what we did wrong, and we’ll apologize.”

“You got a driver’s license?” the cop asked Tony.

Tony shrugged hopelessly, leaned forward, and dug his wallet out of his left rump pocket. He probed within one of its compartments.

“See,” his mother said urgently, “our poor dad just had a heart attack and—”

The policeman poked a thick, blunt finger toward her. “Lady, you keep your goddam trap shut.”

Tony violently hurled the door open, knocking the cop backwards and almost off his feet.

He shouted, “Don’t you talk to my mother that way!”

The officer recovered and began to claw at his holstered revolver. He was detained by the strap that ran around its hammer and snap-buttoned below. He began to yell in the filthiest language Jack had ever heard in public.

This caused Tony to go wild. He hurled himself at the cop and gave him a series of punches too fast to count, but one or more of them knocked his enemy down, and out. The policeman lay prone on the asphalt.

Their mother called from the car. “Oh, my, Tony! You haven’t killed him, have ya?”

Tony’s glasses were disarranged, though he had not been touched. He adjusted them and peered carefully down at the officer.

“Naw,” he said. “He’s breathing…. Come on, we better clear out fast.”

Jack was thoroughly shaken by observing this episode. His brother might be an old hand at violence of various kinds, but he himself was entirely innocent of it. He had never had a single fight, and managed for the most part to avoid rough sports.

No doubt with the realization that as long as the cop was unconscious no one could nab him for speeding, Tony now took the direct route and zoomed through Millville.

Until they crossed the Hornbeck line nobody said a word. Then Tony looked at his mother in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry about that,” said he. “I should of shut him up before he opened his foul mouth, that filthy skunk.”

His mother leaned forward and patted his shoulder. “You did fine, Tony. You’re a real good boy. I guess us Beelers don’t have much luck in Millville. We ought to stay out from now on.”

It took Jack a while to form the words. He had never seen anyone attack a policeman, for God’s sake, let alone his own brother. “Boy,” he finally managed to say, “if he was trying to get out his gun when you hadn’t even socked him, what’s he going to do when he comes to?”

Tony slowed to make the turn into the alley behind their house. He said, “What choice did I have? What kinda man sits there and lets his mother be insulted? He’s lucky I never took that gun of his and shot him with it. He’s a disgrace to his uniform.”

This interpretation had not occurred to Jack. He realized that his brother had a more complex conscience than he had previously supposed.

He said, “You got all the nerve in the world, Tony.”

“Listen, you would of done the same.” Tony here revealed how little he knew his brother. Jack would no more have done anything of the sort, regardless of the provocation, than he would have set himself on fire. He knew that very well, and he felt guilty about this inability and tried to tell himself that using the brain could often be courageous, but he did not really believe that theory. Columbus had been brave not because of his insistence that the world was round, but rather because he had sailed three flimsy boats into uncharted seas to prove it. And though Galileo knew very well that the earth moved around the sun instead of vice versa, he lied about it so that the Catholics wouldn’t burn him at the stake: which was not brave, but it was certainly intelligent.

When they got home, Jack’s mother said, “In all the commotion I forgot to stop for the pork chops. There isn’t much to eat here. I better go down Dorfman’s and buy some wienies and a couple cans baked beans.”

Jack made the unprecedented offer to fetch the order from the grocery that was two blocks away. He was not usually the one to volunteer for a job, but Tony’s feat continued to stir him in odd ways.

“Why, that would be real nice,” said his mother. “That’ll gimme the chance to tell Harvey Yelton about what happened over there. Gosh knows what report that Millville cop will put out.”

She began to make a list of needed foodstuffs with a stub pencil on a fragment of brown wrapping paper from a drawer in the kitchen cabinet. But when her elder son had gone upstairs, she suddenly seized Jack and pressed him to her.

She said, “I don’t know what we’ll do if they take Tony away.”

When he was released Jack said, “Maybe he’ll have to go on the lam for a while till this blows over.” But those were just words. He was as worried as he could be, and in times of crisis he felt as if he were no older than eleven or twelve and thus was disqualified from anything but the observer’s role.

He
what?
“
said the Hornbeck police chief. “Oh, boy, is that right? He knocked Clive Shell on his big fat keister?” He howled.

Bobby did not join Harvey in his merriment. She waited till his laughter diminished in volume, and then she said, “Thing is, I believe Tony did go through a stop sign.” She cleared her throat: after all, Harvey was himself a cop.

He stopped chuckling for a moment. “Well, what was it he said, or ain’t it fit to repeat?”

“It isn’t,” said Bobby, demurely. “But it wouldna mattered that much to me: I wasn’t born yesterday. It’s just that Tony would not stand for anybody talking like that to his mom.”

Harvey suddenly became grave. “By God, I’d shoot the man through the heart who would utter foul language before any lady, let alone my sainted mother: I cooden answer for my behavior in that case.”

“But what’re we gonna do,” asked Bobby, “when he comes to?”

Harvey began to roar with laughter again. “He knocked him out
cold?
“
Finally he was able to say, “He won’t ever be able to hold his head up again. That bum!”

It took Bobby an unhappy moment or two to realize that he meant the Hornbeck police chief and not her son.

She said, “Tony lifts a lot of weights. I guess he’s stronger than he knows. He didn’t mean to hit him that hard.”

“I’ll say this,” said Harvey, “I envy him. I allus wanted to do it to that fat slob myself.” He laughed awhile.

Bobby said, “But when all’s said and done, I guess we’re in pretty bad trouble, wouldn’t you say, Harvey? Knocking out a policeman who was performing his duty…”

The chief grew solemn for a moment. “Ordinarily,” he said, “there wouldn’t be much that was worse, for you got to maintain respect for the law and them hired to enforce it. That’s right!” He snorted. “But when you’re talking about Millville, at least since old Clive took over the force, you got a different kettle of fish. They give him an appropriation over there a whole lot bigger than I get here, and he’s supposed to use it to hire a part-time patrolman in addition to himself, but what old Clive does is just hire one, his cousin Ray Dooley, and I bet my bottom dollar Clive don’t pay Ray even a decent salary, but pockets the difference. Ray ain’t a bad guy. He’s generally on duty around noon, when Clive is eating his lunch for about three hours. Too bad you dint go through Millville at that time. Ray ain’t got a foul mouth: you can say that for him.”

“But this Clive Shell can cause us trouble, can’t he?” asked Bobby, with the purpose of bringing Harvey back to the subject, away from his personal gripe against the rival police chief.

Harvey said in a harsh voice, “He might if I wasn’t here. As it is, he knows he’d never hear the end of it: knocked on his—excuse me—butt by a high-school kid? Tell me this: was there any witnesses?”

“I didn’t see anybody.”

“Well, there you are,” said Harvey. “Mark my words, that guy ain’t gonna wanna advertise what happened. He’d be a laffinstalk from here on. You know, us chiefs get together and have us a picnic from all over the county every spring: old Clive wouldn’t never show up there again. He loves that picnic—on account of all the eats and beer.”

“You wouldn’t kid me, wouldja, Harvey?” Bobby asked, in an almost seductive voice. He had taken pleasure in her in the old days.

The chief did not react to the personal note. “But I hope alia you got enough sense to stay out of Millville from now on. I can’t help yuz if he catches yuz over there. Clive’ll throw the book atcha.”

Bobby was greatly relieved. She exchanged her Sunday clothes for her everyday attire of wash-dress and apron, and was down in the kitchen when Jack returned from the store. She boiled the wieners and heated the baked beans.

At the table she said to Jack as she passed him a bowl, “I wish I’d remembered to tell you nor German potato salad.”

“Oh, yeah? What kind should I have got?”

“My own preference is with mayonnaise,” she said, grimacing, “not so much sour vinegar. And I’ll tell you this: I’m not so crazy about pieces of greasy bacon, either.”

Jack said, wrinkling his nose, “I don’t much like
any
kind.”

“Well, you eat some, anyway. It’s good for your health.” He took two spoonfuls. “I thought you liked wienies, though, and baked beans—? Then I hope you’re gonna eat some. You’re too skinny, Jack.” She was avoiding Tony, for what she took to be good maternal reasons. It had always been better to let him alone when he stared stonily into space. He was doing it now, even though she had told him what the chief had said. But at least he was eating. He was like her, in that trouble seemed to whet his appetite: of a dozen wieners Jack ate only one and a half, and maybe four tablespoonfuls of baked beans, of which she had opened two large cans. She and Tony polished off all else, even the potato salad, and when clearing the table for dessert (chunks of pound cake covered with canned shredded pineapple, topped with whipped cream), she ate the half-sausage Jack had left on his plate.