The Feud (20 page)

That Junior could have been subverted was a terrible thought, being a blood relative, but the longer he entertained it, the more likely it seemed. Of course the woman, as usual, had been the instrument by which Junior had been manipulated; his skin problem indicated that he was a lustful youth who abused himself strenuously.

Rev removed his lower plate and dropped it into his pocket to join the damaged upper: with nothing to bite against, the bare gums were preferable. He started limping slowly, painfully, toward the street. He had not gotten far when a pair of automobile headlights were switched on, illuminating him alone in the darkness, and while he was squinting in the glare two men appeared, one on either side of him, and one carried a baseball bat and the other a hefty length of lead pipe.

One of them shouted, “Whatchoo doing here, you dirty old drunk?”

The other agreed, “Yessir, he’s nothing but a filthy old drunk, Bobby.”

Reverton hastened to say, “Maanuh milfantin theran—”

“He’s so goddam loaded he can’t even talk,” said one of the men. “And look there where his face is bleeding. He fell down blind drunk and hurt himself.”

One of them came around behind Rev and pushed him in the small of the back with the baseball bat. “Go on, you old boozer,” he said. “We’re the DeWeese boys, and if we ever catcha on our propitty again, we’ll beatcha till you can’t stand up.”

Rev tried again to explain, but without his teeth he apparently couldn’t talk so that they could comprehend him (unless they were part of the same conspiracy which had corrupted Junior and were only pretending to misunderstand for their own devious motives), so all his efforts got him were more violent pushes with the bat. And when they got him out to the sidewalk, one of them put a heavy shoe into the base of his back and gave him a shove that sent him reeling.

At this point the police car arrived, and Ray Dooley climbed out and said, “Whatsa trouble here?” He stared for a moment, and then he said, “Why, Reverton!” He looked at the DeWeese brothers. “You fellas do that to him?”

“We ain’t touched him except to throw him off our propitty,” said the one with the lead pipe. “He was falling down drunk when we got there. Bill Cox, who lives right over there, heard something funny going on over here, and he give us a call, so we come right on over.”

Reverton, speaking as slowly and clearly as he could, tried to explain, but though Ray was more sympathetic than the DeWeeses, he didn’t get far.

Finally Dooley said to the brothers, “This here’s Bud Bullard’s cousin. You know Bud, dontcha? Now it is my understanding that Rev don’t drink.” He was speaking as though Reverton were absent. “He’s always been a little bit screwy, see. What I figure is he had some kinda fit and maybe wandered in here and fell down and hurt himself.”

“He must of fell off the roof to get that banged up,” said a DeWeese.

Ray nodded. “God knows what he’d do.”

Rev was really burning, having to stand there and listen to these insulting statements. At last it occurred to him to put his teeth in his mouth and try to talk.

“I ain’t nutss!” he protested when the dentures were in place. He could speak more clearly than without them, but the spaces where the missing front teeth had been caused an escape of air on the s’s. “They jumped me. There was two of ‘em. But for me, they would of got to your autos and would of stole or stripped ‘em to the hubs. I saved your bacon, and I don’t expect no gratitude, but I’ll thank you all”—he indignantly added Ray Dooley in this—”not to slander me right to my face, for pity sake.”

The DeWeese with the piece of pipe was smirking openly. He said, “Damn me if that ain’t some story. We dint see nobody else, did we, Bobby?”

“ ‘Course,” said Ray, “they would of been gone by then, if what Rev says happened.”

“Sssure! I run ‘em out! I took a lot uh damage.” Demonstratively he ran his hand up his bruised face and onto his bare head. “For God’s sake! My hat!” he shouted, and he ran back between the garages and searched the ground, but being black the fedora was not easy to locate in the dark.

After a while Ray came in with the flashlight from the cruiser, and the hat was finally found, but it too had taken a beating and had been trampled into the ashes. Reverton poked it into shape, more or less, and brushed it with his forearm, but what it really would need was a professional cleaning and blocking, an expensive operation that might cost fifty cents or more.

He appealed to Ray in the matter of the DeWeese brothers, who were opening the doors of the nearer garage, and repeated, “I don’t expect to be thanked, ssee, but—”

Ray said, “Just simmer down, Rev. We’ll get this straightened out.”

Reverton was plenty sore at Ray too, for calling him “screwy,” but since Dooley was a police officer and carried a real gun he thought it better to conceal his resentment.

The DeWeeses came out to report that nothing was missing or had been damaged, including the cars on which they were working at present. Dooley asked about the other garage or shed, and they said that was empty anyway. Rev looked expectantly at them, but no apology was forthcoming. They climbed into their car, backed out, drove away.

Rev looked at Ray Dooley and bitterly shook his head.

Dooley said, “You look like you could use some first aid, Reverton. You been put through the ringer. Lemme runya down the station. We got a medical kit there, with iodine and shinplasters and all. Ordinarily it’s in the car, but Clive left it in the toilet. He got hurt today himself: he run into a car door or something and cut his lip and got a black eye and all.”

Reverton was touched by the offer. Except for the Bullard family, people usually weren’t nice to him. That was probably because he had their number and they could see he knew they were no better than they should be, that is, rotten to the core.

“Appreshhhhiate it,” he said, and then immediately worried whether that made him sound too soft.

The phone was ringing as they entered the station. Ray told Reverton to go on into the toilet, and answered the call. Rev looked in the mirror at his bloody, bruised face. The reason he had carried a gun was just so this kind of thing would not happen to him again. Being undersized, he had taken regular beatings from the larger boys in the orphanage, and when he got older, many’s the time he would have been whipped by bigger men in hash houses, at streetcar stops, even in his place of business, the corridors and rest rooms of the county courthouse, had he not backed down. But after the bus accident he had armed himself. Anybody could possess a starter’s pistol; you needed a permit to carry a real one. You didn’t need to shoot to get respect. You didn’t always even need to point it at anyone.

Ray Dooley appeared in the doorway and addressed Reverton’s face in the mirror. “That was Frieda. She’s got to get over to Hornbeck to the police station. Harvey Yelton’s holding Junior for attempted armed robbery.”

Before going up to fetch Frieda in the cruiser, Ray had phoned Harvey Yelton to get the facts in the case, and after he had hung up, he said to Reverton, “The boy claims you gave him the gun.”

Rev shrugged, and then he said defiantly, “Heck, it’s just a sstarter’ss piztol that would shoot blankss, and it wassn’t even loaded with
them.”

“That what you carry onna job?” Ray asked. “You wouldn’t want them tough tramps to catch on.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Listen, I’m going to run Frieda over Hornbeck. Harvey Yelton, the chief over there, won’t lemme cross the line in the Millville cruiser, so I’ll drive up the Bullard house and leave it there and take Bud’s automobile. Another thing: he says he won’t let me come into town as a Millville police officer, on account of the bad blood between him and Clive. I says, ‘You ‘n’ me don’t have any quarrel, Harvey,’ and he says he knowzzat, but I’m not the police chief uh Millville and old Clive is and he’s got it in for him, so he won’t let me come into town in uniform.”

Ray unpinned the badge from the pleated breast pocket of the blue shirt. “I says, ‘Well, my jacket’s the regular leather civilian one I wear to work down the plant. If I keep it buttoned up and don’t wear a police cap, izzat O.K.? My pants just come from my blue-serge suit. They don’t have a stripe or anything.’ ‘O.K.,’ says he, ‘but you leave your gun behind and your badge too.’ “ Ray unbuckled his gun belt. “Just lucky Clive’s under the weather. Harvey’d never let
him
in, and he’d be likely to throw the book at Junior. But seeing it’s me, maybe I can get him to drop the charges against the boy. Harvey and me never had any trouble personally.”

Reverton said sternly, “I’m the one who ought to go. I’m part of the family.” He removed his battered fedora and brushed it with his forearm.

“Take my word for it, Rev, that wouldn’t help,” said Ray. “You stay here, and if any phone calls come in, you get in touch with me at the Hornbeck station. We got that police radio over there inna corner, and when Clive or me’s in the station, we put it on. But it’s too complicated to explain how to use it in a few minutes, and anyhow, anybody in town needs the police, they call onna phone.” He went to a full-length locker near the door to the cell and put his gunbelt and badge on the shelf at the top, and covered them with the cap. He found a key in his pocket and turned the little lock. “I’ll only be out of touch for a couple minutes while we’re driving over there and then again when we come back.” He sighed. “I just hope we can get Junior out. That family’s got enough trouble, and it sure won’t do Bud any good if the boy’s in jail.” Ray had known them all for years, and he regarded Bud as a square shooter.

When he reached the Bullard house, Frieda was waiting for him on the porch. He told her about the conditions imposed by the Hornbeck police chief, and he went inside and found the car keys. The automobile was in the garage at the back of the yard. They went there and got in, and Ray backed the car down the driveway. Then he drove the cruiser into the garage.

On the way to Hornbeck, Ray told Frieda about the weapon Junior had brandished.

Frieda shook her head sadly. “Reverton is a good-hearted soul. You got to feel sorry for that poor devil. I never liked the idea of him bringing that gun of his around here, but I didn’t want to say anything and hurt his feelings. He’s Bud’s first cousin, you know, and he was an orphan.”

“It’s just a starter’s pistol, I guess,” said Ray, “and it just shoots blanks, but Harvey’s taking it pretty seriously.”

Frieda hung her head. She was not the type to complain, unlike Ray’s own wife, who could get pretty loud over a lot smaller problems than this one.

Alongside the Hornbeck town hall there was room in the little official parking lot for Ray to pull the Bullard car in, but he strongly suspected that Yelton would be opposed to that, so he left the automobile at the curb, and he and Frieda went inside the police station.

The Hornbeck chief was sitting behind the desk, writing on a form with a fountain pen, and across from him was a fat young woman with messy bleached-blond hair.

“Hi, Harvey,” said Ray.

Yelton took his time about looking up from the desk. When he did, he did not return Ray’s smile or, for that matter, the greeting.

He said, “It’s a waste of time for you to come over here tuhnight. I ain’t gonna wake up our magistrate just for this punk kid. He’s gonna be behind bars for a long time: he might as well get used to it.”

“This here’s the boy’s mother, Harvey,” said Ray. “He ain’t been in any kind of police trouble before. His dad’s bidniss burnt down a night or two ago, and the poor fellow’s inna hospital. If there’d be any way we could get around charging the boy, it would sure help these poor folks. Boy’s dad is a real good friend of mine and one of the leading bidnissmen in Millville.”

Yelton’s grave expression did not change. He said, “This here young lady’s co-owner of Hornbeck’s leading bar ‘n’ grill. She anner husband run a respectable place, and this punk kid comes in and threatenza customers with a deadly weapon and—”

“Excuse me, Harvey, but ain’t the weapon just a starter’s pistol, which just shoots blanks?”

Harvey slowly shook his head and developed a grim grin. “Ray, you know as well as me you can fill the barrel of a blank pistol with rusty nails or broken glass or any of a numbera other things, and you put a blank cartridge inna chamber and you got a weapon that at close range will do as much damage as you want. Take a man’s eye right out of his head.”

“But there wasn’t any of that stuff inna barrel of this gun, was there?”

Harvey looked mysterious and muttered, “That’s under investigation.”

The blonde had her broad back to them, but now she half-turned, with some difficulty, owing to her figure, and she said, “You shoulda seen that little twerp!”

“I doubt he meant any harm,” said Frieda. “He’s a good boy, but he’s so worried about his poor dad.”

“Well, he shoulda thoughta that first,” said the blonde.

Frieda looked miserable and replied, “He’s jist a youngster.”

“Maybe that is so, Missus, but that don’t change what he done.”

Ray said to the chief, “Harvey, could his mother see the lad?”

Harvey took a breath and released it very slowly. He said, “In time. But first I wanna know about what kinda fambly you got.” He was looking at Frieda. “You let young kids carry weapons, do yuh?”

“No sir, see, this here cousin of ours, he’s a railroad detective—”

Harvey interrupted. “And carries a blank pistol? That’s a lie and you know it. The weapon belongs to your boy. Suppose he poured gravel downa barrel? He could of put a hole in somebody’s guts. If he put it inna person’s ear on one side, he could shoot the brains out the other.”

“But Harvey,” said Ray, “there wasn’t really anything in the barrel, was there?”

Yelton frowned with his thick eyebrows. He said, “This here is my police station, Dooley. You ain’t in Millville now. You’re in Hornbeck, and I run things over here, not your fat-slob boss Clive Shell.”

“I sure know that, Harvey,” said Ray. “You ‘n’ me never had any trouble between us. I just mean you are too fair a man to misrepresent the facts to the poor mother of some young kid who got himself in trouble.”