“We-ell, no…” She shook her head. “I don’t believe you do. You’re going to get acquainted with him, because I intend to see that you do. And I think that you’ll like him—the real him—a lot better than the man you think you know.”
“Uh, what?” I frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, you’d just better!” Her voice rose, broke into joyous laughter. “You’d better, you nutty, mixed-up mixed blood, or I’ll take your pretty gray-streaked scalp!”
She came to me at a run, flung herself down on the bed with me.
Naturally, the bed collapsed noisily.
We were picking ourselves up when the door slammed open, and a nurse came rushing in. She had red hair and beautiful long legs, and a scrubbed-clean look.
“Kay—” I stammered. “W-what are you doing here?”
She snapped that her name was Nolton, Miss Nolton, and she was there because she was a nurse, as I very well knew. “Now, what’s going on here, miss?” she demanded, glaring at Manny. “Never mind! I want you out of here, right this minute! And for goodness sake—for goodness sake—do us all a favor and take him with you!”
“Oh, I intend to,” Manny said sunnily. “I’m getting married, and he’s the bridegroom.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” Kay said. “I’m g-glad that s-some-one’s willing to marry him. He said t-that—that I—”
She turned suddenly, and hurried out the door.
Manny came into my arms, and I did what you do when a very lovely girl comes into your arms. And then, over her shoulder, I saw the door ease open. And I saw that it was Kay who had opened it.
She stuck her tongue out at me.
She winked and grinned at me. And, then, just as she closed the door, she turned on a truly beautiful blush.
And when it comes time to close the door on someone or something I know of no nicer way to do it.
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 Roughneck
In March 2012, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s Roughneck. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.
Roughneck
I pulled the old Ford into the curb and cut off the motor. Badly overheated from its flattened crankshaft, it continued to run for a moment or two—pounding so hard from its exertions that the whole car shook. It was a sweltering August day in 1929. It had stopped on upper Grand Avenue in Oklahoma City. Wiping the sweat from my face, I stared glumly out the window.
Along this street I had hustled newspapers as a child, The Oklahoman in the morning and The News at night. Not far from here was the fine residence we had occupied when the Thompson family affairs took a sudden and fantastic turn for the better. And here, across the walk to the right, was the office building from which Pop had directed a multimillion dollar oil business…So long ago, and yet it seemed like yesterday. Now Pop was in Texas and his money was there, too, sunk into one oilless well after another. As for me—me and Mom and my kid sister, Freddie.…
Freddie was a large girl, and she had always enjoyed an excellent appetite. She contended now, whimperingly, that Mom and I were deliberately trying to starve her to death. We had money, didn’t we? We had some money, anyway. Well, why the heck didn’t we eat, then? Just name her one good reason why we didn’t eat!
“Shut up,” said Mom. “Ask your big brother. He knows everything.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said.
“Well, I don’t care,” said Mom. “If you’d ever listen to anyone, you wouldn’t get into such awful messes. We wouldn’t be in this mess now. But, oh, no, not you. Now, I’m not going to say another word, Jimmie, but.…”
Being very tired and worried, and no longer young, she said quite a bit more. It seemed I was stubborn, wilful, a consistent and deliberate flouter of convention. I seemed never to have used my very good mind for anything but involving myself in trouble.
I spent six years in high school, and I got out then only by falsifying the records. As a youth in my first long pants, I was an associate of chorus girls, grifters, gamblers, and other ne’er-do-wells. By the time I was fifteen, I had been variously employed as a newspaper “man,” a burlesque show hawker, a plumber’s helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures and in a dozen-odd other occupations. With equal ease, I could quote the Roman lyric poet Catullus, or the odds against making four the hard way.
I was not yet sixteen when I became a night bellboy in a luxury hotel. (This through the intervention of a good natured thug and con man named Allie Ivers.) I earned big money there—and acquired still more by gambling—and spent it all. At eighteen, I broke down with tuberculosis, acute alcoholism and complete nervous exhaustion.
I bummed through west and far west Texas for three years, slowly getting my health back in the high, dry climate. Then I returned to Fort Worth and went back to the hotel. A group of gangsters made me their distributor for bootleg whiskey. The dubious honor was thrust upon me, practically at gunpoint. I plotted to get even, simultaneously recouping my fortunes.
Starting off with a handle of a few cases a week, I gradually enlarged my order until, finally, the few had increased to twenty. In order to do this, I had to wholesale the stuff to other hotel employees at a very short profit and sometimes no profit at all. But that was all right. The total proceeds from the twenty cases were to be my profit. I intended to dump them for a minimum of three thousand dollars, and then skip town. My gangster associates could whistle for the dough I owed them.
Unfortunately, my cache of whiskey was discovered and confiscated by Federal prohibition agents. They took it all, but they only reported five cases. And this bit of official perfidy was an even harder blow than my financial loss. It prevented me from making a new start with the gangsters; it deprived me of any valid excuse for not paying their bill. I had the alternative of paying up or getting my head beaten off…or, of course, leaving town. So, with approximately a thirtieth of my anticipated three thousand—a little less than a hundred dollars—I loaded Mom and Freddie into the car and headed north.
Our destination was Nebraska, and we were not nearly so downhearted as we headed toward it as one might think. Mom’s parents lived in a small Nebraska town, and she and Freddie would be welcome with them for a time. As soon as I could arrange it, they would join me in Lincoln where I hoped to enter the state university. I was sorely in need of some higher education, as an editor acquaintance had pointed out. He had also pointed out that I was much more apt to wind up dead, than as the writer I hoped to be, unless I abandoned the course I was following.
We chugged along quite cheerfully for a matter of five or ten miles. Then the car began to reveal its overall worthlessness. The motor steamed and smoked. It clattered, pounded and roared. I pulled off the road and lifted the hood. A brief examination uncovered the terrible truth.
The crankcase was filled with sawdust and tractor oil. It had been doctored thusly to conceal a flat crankshaft—the one incurable ailment of the Model-T Ford. No repair, as the term is usually used, would correct the difficulty for more than a few hours. We needed a new shaft, new bearings, new rods, and other internal accessories. Briefly—and it would have cost us little more—we needed a new motor.
It took us two days to get to Oklahoma City, a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. It also took almost seventy of our one hundred dollars. We had traveled no more than a fourth of the way to our destination, and more than two-thirds of our money was gone.
Here we sat, then, on that sweltering August afternoon in 1929—a tired, middle-aged woman, a tired, hungry young girl, and a tired, somewhat saturnine-looking young man. Here we sat, nominal beggars in a broken-down Ford, at the site of our one-time glory. I closed my eyes against the brilliant sun
light, and I could almost see Pop bustling out of this building—young, smartly dressed, hurrying toward his low-slung Apperson-Jack or the big Cole Aero-Eight. I could see us all riding home together, out to the big high-ceilinged house with its book-lined walls. I could see the friendly face of the cook as she dished up the dinner. I could taste—
I opened my eyes again. Mom gave me a frown.
“Now, that’s a nice way to talk,” she said. “That’s nice language to use in front of your mother and sister.”
“What did I say?” I said. “All I said was ship. I was thinking how cool it would be, you know, to be out on a ship and—”
“You did not!” said Freddie. “He did not say ship, Mama! He said s-h-i—”
“Well,” I said hastily, opening the door of the car, “I guess I’d better be going. Wish me luck.”
The man I went to see had come to Oklahoma from Germany in 1912. Due to some flaw in his immigration papers, he had been detained on Ellis Island for several months, and when World War I broke out he was taken into custody as an enemy alien. The case came to Pop’s attention. Through his then powerful political connections, he got the man released and started on the way to becoming a citizen. Moreover, since the man seemed incapable of doing anything for himself, Pop set him up in business. He bought the guy three heavy-duty oil field trucks; he leased the trucks back from the man at a very fancy rental. He gave him a fat “bonus” of oil stock which climbed from its dollar-par to one hundred dollars a share. I don’t know why Pop did such things, and I doubt that he knew. It was simply his way—until his money ran out.
Well, I went up to the guy’s offices—they occupied a half floor in this building—and I was admitted to the inner sanctum the moment I sent in my name. With tears of pure joy in his eyes, he wrung my hand; and then, seemingly overcome with emotion, he gave me a bear hug.…Why hadn’t we kept in touch with him all these years? What oil fields was Pop operating in now? Was he, perhaps, contemplating a return to Oklahoma?…He babbled on, firing questions about the family, telling me about his own. His wife and daughter were in Europe. His son had just returned to Harvard prep. They had a “nice little house”—the mansion of a former governor—out on Classen Boulevard, and he insisted that we come out and—
I finally managed to cut in on him, to make him listen. He heard me out, nodding sympathetically; and while I thought I detected a certain coolness in the atmosphere, I attributed it to my own hypersensitive feelings. He neither did nor said anything out of the way, and I incline to a defensive apprehensiveness when asking for favors.
Of course he would help me, he declared. It was no more than right. He was delighted to have seen me, even under these unhappy circumstances, and he wanted to see Mom and Freddie also. His car was about due to call for him, but there would still be time for a chat.
We rode downstairs together. He greeted Mom and Freddie as warmly as he had me. Then, his car pulled up at the side of ours, a chauffeur-driven, twelve-cylinder Packard, and regretfully he bade us goodbye.
He pressed a bill into my hand. He hopped into his limousine, and it glided away into the traffic. I looked down at the bill. Silently I handed it to Mom. She was still staring at it dazedly as I climbed in, and I winced at the stricken wonder in her eyes.
“It must have been a mistake,” she said, slowly. “Don’t you suppose it was a mistake, Jimmie?”
“With friends you’re not careless,” I said. “With people you care about, you make sure.”
“Why don’t we eat?” Freddie demanded. “That man gave you five dollars.”
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 © 1985 by The Estate of Jim Thompson
Excerpt from Roughneck copyright © 1954 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1982 by The Estate of Jim Thompson
Cover design by Julianna Lee; cover art: Getty Images. Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute 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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First e-book edition, March 2012
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ISBN 978-0-316-19600-0
Jim Thompson, The Rip-Off
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