“What I’m saying is this, Buck,” I said. “Hang on to your own ass, and don’t try to get Ken’s. For all you know, he may be eatin’ a lot worse than dirt and I may be too, and you’ll be a lot happier like you are.”
“Is that all you got to say?” Buck said, and I could hear him getting up from his chair. “You’re sure that’s all you got to say?”
I hesitated, thinkin’ I should be able to come up with somethin’. Because it was all so clear to me, Christ knew it was clear: love one another and don’t screw no one unless they’re bending over, and forgive us our trespasses because we may be a minority of one. For God’s sake, for God’s sake—why else had I been put here in Potts County, and why else did I stay here? Why else, who else, what else but Christ Almighty would put up with it?
But I couldn’t make him see that. He was as blind as the rest of ’em.
“Well, Nick? I ain’t waiting much longer.”
“And you don’t have to, Buck,” I said. “You don’t have to because I finally come to a decision. I’ve been a long time comin’ to it; it’s been the product of thinkin’ and thinkin’ and thinkin’, and then some more thinkin’. And dependin’ on how you look at it, it’s the god-dangest whingdingest decision ever made, or it’s the skitty-assed worst. Because it explains everything that goes on in the world—it answers everything and it answers nothing.
“So here it is, Buck, here’s my decision. I thought and I thought and then I thought some more, and finally I came to a decision. I decided I don’t no more know what to do than if I was just another lousy human being!”
About the Author
James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906. In all, Jim Thompson wrote twenty-nine novels and two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory). Films based on his novels include The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.
…and The Getaway
In December 2011, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s The Getaway. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.
The Getaway
Carter “Doc” McCoy had left a morning call for six o’clock, and he was reaching for the telephone the moment the night clerk rang. He had always awakened easily and pleasantly; a man with not a regret for the past, and completely confident and self-assured as he faced each new day. Twelve years of prison routine had merely molded his natural tendencies into habit.
“Why, I slept fine, Charlie,” he said, in his amiably sincere voice. “Don’t suppose I should ask you the same question, eh? Ha-ha! Got my breakfast on the way, have you? Fine, attaboy. You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Charlie.”
Doc McCoy hung up the receiver, yawned and stretched agreeably, and sat up in the big, old-fashioned bed. Tipping the shade of the side-street window a little, he glanced at the all-night lunchroom a block away. A Negro busboy was just emerging from the place, a tray covered with a white cloth balanced on one hand. He came up the street at the slow but sullenly steady pace of one who is performing an unavoidable and unfairly imposed task.
Doc grinned sympathetically. It was the boy’s own fault, of course. He should have known better than to boast to Charlie about the handsome tip “Mr. Kramer” had given him—known that Charlie would relieve him of delivering the tray from then on. Still—Doc went into the bathroom and began to wash—fair was fair; and a boy in a job like that probably needed every nickel he could get.
“You know how it is, Charlie,” he explained ingratiatingly when the clerk arrived with his breakfast. “Now, with people like you and me, a few bucks either way doesn’t make any difference, but—mind giving him this five-spot for me? Tell him I’ll drop around and thank him personally when I get back in town.”
The clerk beamed. Him and Mr. Kramer! People like them! He’d have given the five to that dish jockey even if Mr. Kramer hadn’t fixed it so that he just about had to.
His face fell suddenly as the full import of Doc’s words registered on him. “W-when you get back? You mean you’re leavin’?”
“Just for two-three days, Charlie. A little business matter that can’t wait. You bet I’m coming back, and I’m going to tack this time-out onto the end of my vacation.”
“Well—” the clerk was almost weak with relief. “We—I—I guess you know we’re sure glad to have you, Mr. Kramer. But believe me, I sure wouldn’t be spending no vacation in this place if I was fixed like—if I was you. I’d be cuttin’ it up out in Las Vegas, or…”
“No, no, I don’t think you would, Charlie. You’re too sensible. You’d get fed up mighty fast, just like I did. So you’d pick out a nice town where you could just laze around and take things easy, and meet some real people for a change.” He nodded earnestly, then pressed a bill into the clerk’s hand. “You’ll look after everything for me while I’m gone, Charlie? I don’t think I’ll be taking anything more than a briefcase.”
“You bet! But, gosh, Mr. Kramer, you don’t need to give me twenty dollars just for…”
“But you need it to keep up with those beautiful babes you’ve got on the string.” Doc urged him genially toward the door. “Thought I wasn’t wise to you, hah? Didn’t figure I’d know you were the town lady-killer—ha-ha! Well, take it easy, Charlie.”
Charlie was eager to learn the basis for Mr. Kramer’s flattering conclusions. But he found that somehow he had gotten out in the hall, and Mr. Kramer’s door had closed in his face. Dreamily beaming, he went back downstairs to the desk.
Several signals were flashing on the tiny switchboard. Charlie answered them deliberately, stonily unapologetic in the face of inquiries as to whether he’d dropped dead or been on a vacation. Everyone ought to know by this time that he was the only night employee of the Beacon City Hotel. He had the whole shooting match to take care of from nine peeyem until nine ayem, so he had plenty to do besides just stick around the desk. And any time anyone got griped too much about it, they could go to another hotel—the nearest of which was twenty miles away.
Charlie had told a number of gripers where they could head in. Mr. Farley, the owner, had told him to. The way Farley—the stingy old jerk!—figured it, hardly anyone stayed at the Beacon City Hotel unless they had to, and he couldn’t sell any more rooms with two night employees than he could with one.
Charlie yawned sleepily, and glanced at the oakcased wall clock. Going behind the key rack, he doused his face at the dingy lavatory and dried it on one of the cleaner sections of a soiled roller towel. Lady-killer, he thought, studying his pimpled reflection in the mirror. Oh, you beautiful babes!
Offhand, he could remember seeing only two or three girls in Beacon City who might even remotely qualify as truly beautiful babes; and none of these, as the saying is, had been able to see him at all. But—well, maybe he just hadn’t been lookin’ sharp enough. He hadn’t gone about things right. Because that Mr. Kramer was one might-ee shrewd hombre, and if he had a fella sized up in a certain way…!
Leaving the desk, Charlie took up a position before the lobby window; hands folded behind him, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. The glass was so dusty and fly-specked as to serve inadequately as a mirror, and in it he was only mildly unappetizing.
Rose Hip, the Chinese laundryman’s lovely daughter, tripped by on her way to business college. Charlie winked at her, and she stuck out her tongue at him. Charlie smirked knowingly.
There just wasn’t much of anything stirring after that. As Charlie put it, you could have fired a machine gun down Main Street without hitting a soul. It was due to the recent changeover to daylight saving time, Charlie thought; folks hadn’t got used to it yet. Maybe the clock said it was getting kind of late—seventeen minutes of eight—but it still wasn’t seven to the people.
Charlie started to turn away from the window; then, hesitantly, hearing a familiar creak of cartwheels, he faced it again. The woman was old “Crazy” Cvec, the town scavenger. Her wobbly cart was piled high with cardb
oard cartons, rags and bottles. She was dressed in a ragged Mother Hubbard, an ancient picture hat, and toeless tennis shoes. A frayed cigar butt protruded from the corner of her sunken-in mouth.
When Charlie winked at her, her gums parted in an insane cackle and the butt dropped down the front of her gown. This sent her into another paroxysm of crazy cackling, which she concluded by gripping the handle of the cart and kicking friskily backward with both feet. Charlie giggled lewdly. Lifting a foot, he shook his leg in the manner of a man who has got a bee up his trousers. Then…
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said a jeering voice. “Yes, sir, I will be damned.”
It was Mack Wingate, bank guard and long-time resident of the hotel. Mack Wingate, dressed in his crisp gray-blue uniform and cap; his plump face twisted in a look of acid astonishment.
“So that’s your girl friend,” he said. “You and Crazy Cvec. Well, I guess you’re gettin’ the best of the bargain at that.”
“Now, l-listen you!” The clerk was scarlet-faced, tremulously furious. “You better not—go on and fill your inkwells! Clean out the spittoons!”
“’Spect you’re feeling pretty proud, hey, Charlie? Me, now I like ’em kind of ma-chure myself, and you sure got to admit old Crazy’s matured. Hard to tell which stinks the ripest, her or the…”
“Yah!” said Charlie desperately. “I guess you know, don’t you? You know all about her, don’t you, Mack?”
“Now, don’t you worry, boy. I know a real love match when I see it, and I ain’t gonna come between you.”
“Dang you, Mack! You—” he searched wildly for some effective threat. “You—I’m warning you for the last time, Mack! No more cooking in your room. You do it just once more, and…”
Wingate belched, emanating an odor of day-old rolls and coffee. “But you’re goin’ to let me bake your weddin’ cake, ain’t you, Charlie? Or was you figurin’ on Crazy pickin’ one up from the garbage?”
Charlie made a strangled sound. His shoulders slumped helplessly. He just wasn’t any match for the bank guard. No one in the town was. Anything you said to him, why, he just ignored it, and kept coming at you harder than ever. And he never got off of you until he got someone better to ride—which would be a darned long time in this case.
The guard gripped one of his inert hands, and shook it warmly. “Want to be the first to congratulate you, Charlie. You’re really gettin’ something when you get Crazy. Wouldn’t say what it is exactly, but…”
“G-get out of here,” Charlie whispered. “Y-you tell anyone about this, an’ I’ll…”
“Sure, now. Sure, you’re kind of up in the air,” said Mack Wingate with hideous sympathy. “It ain’t every day in the week that a man gets hisself engaged. So don’t you worry about sendin’ out no announcements. I’ll see to it that everyone…”
Charlie turned abruptly and went behind the desk. Mack laughed, snorted wonderingly and started across the street.
On the opposite side, he stood poised for a moment, hand on the butt of his gun, and looked deliberately from left to right. Some two blocks away a car was slowly rounding the corner. No one was immediately nearby, except a storekeeper sweeping off his walk and a farmer driving a spring-seat wagon—and both were well known to him. Mack turned and unlocked the bank door.
Reaching quickly inside, he shut off the automatic alarm. He stepped up to and across the threshold; and then—as it appeared to Charlie at least—Mack tripped over his own feet and went sprawling into the darkened interior.
The clerk hugged himself delightedly. He wanted to see the expression on Mack’s face when he stuck his head out the door for a quick look around before locking it again. After a stupid tumble like that, he’d be a cinch to look out, Charlie figured. He’d be scared to death that someone’d seen him and would say something about it—a bank guard that couldn’t do any better than that! And you could just bet that someone was going to, if Mack said anything about something else.
Unfortunately, Charlie couldn’t go on watching the door. Because, just then, Mr. Kramer’s light flashed on the switchboard. And he was one person Charlie never kept waiting.
And “Mr. Kramer,” that prince of men, would be the first to say so.
Books by Jim Thompson
After Dark, My Sweet
The Alcoholics
Bad Boy
The Criminal
Cropper’s Cabin
The Getaway
The Golden Gizmo
The Grifters
Heed the Thunder
A Hell of a Woman
The Killer Inside Me
The Kill-Off
The Nothing Man
Nothing More than Murder
Now and on Earth
Pop. 1280
Recoil
The Rip-Off
Savage Night
South of Heaven
A Swell-Looking Babe
Texas by the Tail
The Transgressors
Wild Town
Acclaim for Jim Thompson
“The best suspense writer going, bar none.”
—New York Times
“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”
—Stephen King
“If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”
—Washington Post
“Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”
—New Republic
“The master of the American groin-kick novel.”
—Vanity Fair
“The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”
—Chicago Tribune
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1964 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1992 by Alberta H. Thompson
Excerpt from The Getaway copyright © 1958 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1986 by Alberta H. Thompson
Foreword copyright © 2011 by Daniel Woodrell
Cover design by Allison J. Warner, cover art: Peter Dazeley /Getty Images. Cover copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
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ISBN 978-0-316-19587-4
Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280
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