Whom Gods Destroy

Whom Gods Destroy

by Clifton Adams

1

I WAS IN BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA WHEN the news came. It was the busiest part of the lunch hour and I was slicing tomatoes to go with two orders of cutlets when the Western Union kid came back to the kitchen and said, “You Red Foley?”

I said I was and he handed me the telegram and a pad to sign.

Somebody was dead. I knew that much because, in my family, that's the only thing a telegram can mean. For a moment I held the envelope in my hand, looking at it, knowing what was in it, and feeling absolutely nothing. Not even curiosity. The orders were piling up and it seemed more important to get those orders out than to see what was in the telegram.

So I went ahead and fixed up the two orders of cutlets and dished up the vegetables and put the two platters in the service window. Then there was a little breathing spell so I took out the envelope and opened it. It said: “George passed away today. Funeral Friday.” It was signed “May Lou Smothers.”

So help me, it took a full minute or more before it finally came to me that “George” was my old man.

About that time Charley Burnstead, the counter man, put his head in the service window and said, “Burn two on one!”

I put the two hamburgers on the grill and split the buns and put them on to toast. And that was the way I got the news.

They kept me hopping all through lunch hour. But a fry cook's job is a pretty mechanical thing once you get it down, so I just stood there, taking the orders and getting them out, and about the only thing I could think of was, What am I going to do now? About one o'clock, business started to slack off, and in another half hour the place was practically empty. I sat down at the cook table. I guess I ate a sandwich, but I don't remember. One question kept hammering at me—What the hell am I going to do?

I really didn't get down to thinking about the old man until the relief cook came on at four o'clock. Then I took my apron off and went around the block to where my rooming house was. That day I think I saw the rooming house for the first time—really saw it as it actually was. A two-story clapboard house, the porch sagging, the roof patched crazy-quilt fashion with split-open tin cans, the dirty white paint peeling and the rotten wood showing through like open sores. I thought, You've come a long way, Foley!

I went up the ancient stairs and down the dark hall and unlocked the door to my room. I stood in the doorway for a moment, just looking at it—the scabby iron bedstead, the sagging mattress, the almost-black bureau with the mahogany veneer peeling back at the edges, the litter, the dirt, windows smeared. A great place you've got here, Foley! Just like home, you might say. Exactly like home. Geez, it was, and that's the thing that made me sick.

It began to work slowly then, the association of stray thoughts. The rooming house, Big Prairie, home, the old man—and finally the telegram. I lay on the bed and I thought, God, the old man's dead! I turned the words over and over in my mind, trying to give the thought reality, trying to feel something about it. About all I felt was mad—and kind of scared.

This May Lou Smothers who sent the telegram, I couldn't remember her at all. Whoever she was, she kept a damn tight jaw when it came to paying for telegrams.

I got off the bed and started walking up and down the room, smoking one cigarette after another as fast as I could burn them. There was one thing you couldn't get around; dead people had to be buried, and burying cost money. This was the thing that scared me. And he'd left it to me!

I wasn't sure just what it was that made up my mind, but I knew I had to go back. I hated it and it scared me to think about it, but when I looked into the mirror and saw my face looking back at me it was like opening the book on the future and reading the last page. A man can run just so far before he goes over the edge.

All right, I thought, stop running. Go back and start again. And fear stood there beside me, empty and gutless, and it laughed. You haven't got the guts, Foley! What would you say to her? What would you do if she laughed? The thought left me weak. But there is something stronger than fear. It grows inside you, poisonous and festering, and it tells you its name is Pride, but it's a liar. Its name is Hate.

That night I went around to the sandwich joint and told them I'd got some news from home and had to go back to Oklahoma. The next morning I went around to the used-car lot to see what I could get for my prewar Chevy, and then I went back to my room and counted up what I had. It came to a little over four hundred dollars.

Four hundred lousy dollars to show for fourteen years' work.

I spent eighteen dollars and ninety-five cents on a second-hand suitcase, and I brushed it until it looked pretty good. There was one good suit in the closet, a single-breasted drape I'd bought the day I hit the three-horse parlay at Tan Foran, and a pair of black Florsheims. I packed them carefully, along with plenty of white shirts, and threw in underwear and socks. I went downstairs and used the rooming-house phone to call the bus station, and the girl said I could catch a Greyhound for Big Prairie, Oklahoma, at five o'clock that afternoon.

I had plenty of time to think during the next couple of days. Maybe you never rode a cross-country bus halt-way across the United States, and if you haven't this is what it's like. The first couple of hours aren't so bad. If a baby starts crying, you shrug it off and look at the scenery. You get off at the rest stops and have a Coke and a sandwich and you feel pretty good. Then night comes and you rent a pillow. You doze for two or three hours and then you wake up with a baby yelling in your ear, and you've got a crick in your back. Then you begin to notice that you feel dirty. You rub your fingers together and there's grit. You touch your face and it's the same thing. Your beard starts coming out and scratching your neck, and you see that you've got cigarette ashes all over you.

Finally the sun comes up, and by this time you've taken off your coat and loosened your tie and you don't care how you look. Your eyes begin to burn from the beat of the desert sun, and a feeling of hopelessness gets hold of you as you watch the wasteland crawl by treadmill-like under the wheels of the bus. Bleak Arizona, standing raw and red; earth-torn New Mexico; the seemingly endless wastes of west Texas. The miles drag out, and out, and now no way you can sit will be comfortable. Your back starts hurting at the shoulders and the ache starts crawling down your spine until it gets to the end, and there it builds a little fire, and the fire gets hotter and hotter. Then some farmer going ten miles up the road sits down beside you, and you swear that, by God, you'll tear his throat open if he as much as j asks for a match.

About that time you had better be getting close to your destination.

It was midmorning when the bus finally got to Big Prairie and I had almost forgotten what I'd come for. I stood on the sidewalk waiting for the driver to get the bags out of the luggage compartment. What I was going to do next, I didn't know. It was hard to Relieve that I had ever seen the town before. The bus station and a lot of other places had gone up since I had lived there as a kid. I got my bag finally and asked a porter if there was a place where I could clean up, and he said there was a pay shower in the men's room.

I used the shower. I lathered and let hot water run over me, and then I lathered again and just soaked. After I shaved and changed into a clean outfit from the skin out I began to feel a little better. My blue suit was wrinkled but it looked pretty good. A hot bath, clean clothes, a well-cut suit—they can do wonders for a man. I looked pretty good. I tried to think of the old man, only a few blocks away, lying dead. I accepted it, but it still didn't change the way I felt.

The cab driver sized me up as somebody, and he jumped out of the front seat and grabbed my bag and said, “Yes sir! Where to, sir?”

“Seven-twelve Burk Street.”

He turned his head and gave me a quick look, and I could see what he was thinking, the punk. Geez, Burk Street! He slammed the cab into gear.

Every town has a Burk Street, or one just like it. It's usually on the east side because most towns grow to the west, and it's right down there with the mills and warehouses and railroads, where the center of town used to be but isn't any more. Big Prairie started out as a little crossroads place. Then they discovered oil across the river, to the south, and Big Prairie became what they call a boom town. Oil-field workers moved in with their families, and there wasn't any place for them to stay so they started building these little knock-up houses of clapboard and cement blocks down by the river, and that was the way Burk Street got started. When the boom was over the oilfield workers moved out, and the houses started falling down until people like us moved in and began patching them up. That was twenty years ago, and people still lived down there. The houses were still falling down and they were still trying to patch them up.

But the rest of town had changed since I had left. It was a long way from being a city, still it was a good-sized place, sprawling out across the prairie like these Oklahoma towns do. Down by the river I could see the smokestacks of a factory.

I leaned forward and said, “Isn't that Cedar Street down there?”

“Yeah.” He had me spotted. He wasn't wasting any “sirs” on me now.

“Turn left on it,” I heard myself saying.

I don't know just why I did it. On the bus I'd told myself a thousand times that Cedar Street was in the past, and so was
she.
I told myself to forget it, take care of the funeral and then get out of Oklahoma. It didn't do any good. When the time came, I had to see it again, although I knew it wouldn't be the same.

“Stop here,” I said.

The driver pulled up to the curb.

It was still there, but it didn't seem the same. The paint was peeling and one shutter was gone and another was hanging by one hinge. The house didn't look as big and proud as it had looked to me as a kid, but there was still something about it that made my guts draw in. There was a cardboard sign staked in the weedy front yard that said “Room and Board.” She didn't live there any more.

I said, “Do you know where the Johnsons live now?”

He turned around, not knowing just what I was getting at. “You mean old Judge Johnson? He's dead.”

“He had a daughter. Her name was Lola.”

“Mister—” He was beginning to get tired of this. “Mister, a lot of people have daughters named something or other. I don't keep up with all of them.” He started to fish for a cigarette, then thought of something. “Come to think of it, the old Judge did have a girl, but I forget what her name was. She's married to the county attorney.”

That would be Lola. Just thinking of the name made me shrink up inside, and for one wild moment I thought I was going to be sick.

We hit Burk Street and it looked even worse than I'd remembered. What I remembered as houses were now unpainted, patched-up shacks stuck away here and there between junk yards and garages and used-car lots. The ones with front porches were piled high with secondhand hub caps and radiators and maybe a fender or two. The driver pulled up at 712.

God, I thought, is this really the place? Is this the house I lived in for eighteen years?

I took my bag and walked up to the picket fence. Most of the pickets were missing, and the ones that were still there were unpainted or broken. The gate sagged open on one hinge. The house was older, tireder, sagged a little more, but it was the same house all right. I stepped up to the front porch and a board cracked, almost gave away under me. I pushed the torn screen door open and walked into the front room. There was a stale, dusty smell about the place in spite of the open doors and windows. I walked to the kitchen, the bedroom, the little lean-to affair that had once been my room. There was nothing familiar about it. I was a stranger walking around in an empty house.

All I could think of was, What am I going to do? They've probably got him in a funeral parlor somewhere. But would a funeral parlor take him if there wasn't somebody there to pay the expenses? I wondered if three hundred and fifty dollars would be enough to take care of everything. If it wasn't, would they let me pay it out so much a month, like buying a car? I knew one thing, though. The county wasn't going to bury him.

I decided I'd better go somewhere and start calling the funeral parlors and find out where the old man was. Then it would be time to figure out a way to swing it. Just as I got to the front door, a battered '41 Buick rattled to a stop by the front gate and a little bald-headed guy and a fat woman got out.

I walked out on the porch and the woman made some kind of noise in her throat before she said, “Roy?”

And that minute it came to me who May Lou Smothers was, the woman who'd sent the telegram. She was the old man's sister, but I had forgotten that. I hadn't even known if she was still alive. They started coming toward me then, both of them looking kind of funny, and about the time May Lou reached the gate she started bawling.

“Roy!” she sobbed. “Roy!”

She grabbed for me, but I side-stepped and opened the door again. May Lou's husband—his name was Albert, I remembered—looked about as uncomfortable as I felt. We shook hands and his wife stood there with tears running down her fat face.

“I just got into town,” I said. “My plane got grounded in Albuquerque and that made me a little late, but I got here as fast as I could after I got your telegram.”