Heed the Thunder

Book 0: Mulholland Classic

by Jim Thompson

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Suspense; Thrillers

Synopsis

In the rural town of Verdon, Nebraska, in the early days of the 20th century, you can't go ten feet without running into one of the Fargos. So, Grant Fargo argues to his grandfather Lincoln, it's perfectly all right that he's desperately in love with his first cousin, Bella-she's the only source of intelligent conversation for miles, and in a town like Verdon, it would be hard not to end up with a relative of one kind or another. Before it all plays out, men will be murdered, jailed, tarred and feathered or worse, and while everyone in the Fargo clan would kill for the family deeds, God might just end up with them instead. In Heed the Thunder, one of Thompson's earlier works, Thompson's signature style collides with a sweeping picaresque of the American prairie, in a multigenerational saga that's one part Steinbeck, two parts Dostoyevsky, and all Jim Thompson.

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: Mulholland Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

It was five o’clock when the train stopped at Verdon, and the town and the valley still lay under the gray dark of pre-dawn. Along the crest of the sand-hills a few snaky fingers of sunlight had edged down through the hayflats, dipping shiveringly into the icy Calamus, darting back through driftfence, scurrying past soddy and dugout; but the rich valley rested undisturbed, darkly, luxuriously. Like some benevolent giant resting until the last possible moment for the day’s prodigious labors, it clung to the darkness; and the dimmed lights of the train stood back against the night, satisfied with their own dominion. The long station platform was a brown field of plank, harrowed with age and drought and rain.

Mrs. Dillon stepped down from the train, pulling her elbow gingerly away from the proffered hand of the conductor. This was not entirely due to prudishness (although all her training inclined her to believe that a woman traveling unescorted could not be too careful); it was largely because she disliked and was terrified by the conductor. She assured herself that she was able to hold her own with any man—any two like him—but the fright and dislike were there, nonetheless. It was the terror and distaste of a proud person who has had more demanded of him than he can give. She could have, to use one of her favorite expressions, snatched the trainman bald-headed.

In moving away from him, however, and partly because of the darkness, she did not put her foot down squarely on the alighting stool. She fell forward to the platform, instinctively twisting her body so that she would not crush her son whom she carried in her arms. He fell on top of her, rolled across her face and ostrich-plumed hat, and came awake whimpering on his knees. She brushed down her skirts and petticoats with a swooping motion and was back on her feet before the conductor could reach her.

She stooped, clutched the boy to her bosom once, then shook him vigorously. “You’re all right, aren’t you? Well, stop that bawling, then.” She began rearranging her hat, pawing at him with the other hand. “Do you hurt somewhere? Well, shut up! Show me where you’re hurt.”

The conductor cleared his throat. “All right, lady. How about you and me finishing our business so this train can leave?”

“What?” Mrs. Dillon turned on him furiously. “You stop bothering me! You’ve pestered me this whole trip until I’m about half sick. I’ve got nothing more to say to you!”

“You say your husband’s got a law office in Oklahoma City?”

“Yes, I did say it!” said Mrs. Dillon. “Robert A. Dillon, attorney at law.” She rolled the title out, hungrily even in her fear.

“But he’s not there now?”

“No, he’s not! I told you that, too! And I’m telling you again I don’t know where he is, and—and I don’t care!”

“Now, never mind about that,” said the conductor, writing into a notebook by the light of his lantern. “Who are you visiting here?”

“That’s none of your business!”

“Parents, mmm?” The conductor wrote. “And you still say that big youngster is only five years old, that he isn’t quite five yet?”

“I’ve told you a hundred times. I won’t tell you again!”

“Well”—he snapped shut his notebook—“you’ll find you can’t defraud a railroad, lady. It’s best not to try. You’ll hear from us.”

Mrs. Dillon glared at him, shaking. “Oh, will I?” she demanded suddenly.

“That you will. You can’t—”

“Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do! My son, Robert, and I just fell off your train. The step was slippery. Yes, and I’ll bet a doctor could find plenty wrong with us, and I’ve got half a mind to—”

“Now, just a minute,” the conductor protested. “That step ain’t slippery. Besides, no one saw you—”

“I’ll get plenty of ’em to say they did!” Mrs. Dillon exclaimed practically. “My family just about built this town. Me and my—my family and their friends built the town down there where the station ought to be instead of half a mile way up here. Yes, and they got stuck for thousands of dollars’ worth of town lots out there in that cornfield. And they pay so much freight to your thieving railroad it doesn’t pay ’em to ship their stuff half the time. And—”

“All right, lady, all right.” The conductor waved his lantern wearily. “We’ll call it quits.”

Better even than she, he knew what happened when a countryman went to court against the railroad in this section. They were clannish, intermarried; and even in the midst of fighting among themselves, they would turn to make common cause against the railroad. It was ever the prize Holstein that had been run over, always the seed-grain field that had been ignited by sparks from the smokestack. Not that the railroad was powerless; it had, rather, grown too far from its roots. It had battened on townsites and subsidies and subcontracts, damning one section, enriching another, then threatening the second with the fate of the first. And even now it fed richly, fed far beyond the demands of its expenses—its legitimate expenses. But its friends, its servants, rather, were in the cities and capitals. There the branches lay green. The roots, unprotected, gnawed at, watered unwillingly or with malice, were dying.

Mrs. Dillon, watching the train jerk and hump and glide away, was all unconscious of the fact that she had created history, that she was the symbol of an era which would, perhaps unintentionally, almost always be misinterpreted. Thirty years later, even fifteen years later in the depression of the early twenties, when editorial writers and politicians were crying for the rugged individualism of bygone days—when they were actually praising distrust of government and encouraging anarchy—Mrs. Dillon would still not see the part she had played for what it was. Nor would she have cared greatly if she had.

The things that would stand out clear and sharp in her memory were the dawn spreading down the river, like paint pulled over a canvas; the green fields of corn, popping and rustling with their growth; the muted, sad lowing of awakening cattle; her youth and confidence in the face of disaster; her boy, her boy, her boy.…

… Now, she patted him again, tenderly, spat on her palm and applied it to the stubborn cowlick at the back of his head, and threatened to skin him alive.

“What are you bellering about?” she demanded. “I swear I’ll tan you brown if you don’t shut up! What’s the matter with Mama’s little sweetheart?”

“W-where’s Papa?”

“How do I… maybe he had to see a man. He’ll be along afterwhile, and if you’re not good I’ll tell him about it.”

“Will he be at Gran’pa Fargo’s house?”

“Oh, I guess. We’ll see.”

The boy began to weep again. “Y-you s-s-said Pop-puh would be at Gran’pa’s! Y-you s-said—”

“Well, darn it, I said we’d see!” exclaimed Mrs. Dillon. “Now, shut up or he’ll hear you and run away!”

“A-all right.” The boy shuddered and rubbed his eyes.

“Do you have to go to the toilet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I thought so!” said Mrs. Dillon. “I ought to know what’s wrong any time you start that dancing and prancing.”

Leaving the straw suitcase and the canvas “telescope” where they stood, she grasped him by the hand and led him down the fifty-odd feet—expensive and unnecessary feet—of the station platform. The night was rising like fog, now, and a steadily heightening wall of day was crowding beneath it.

At the end of the platform, Mrs. Dillon pointed down a narrow weed-arched path which led down through a ditch to a dull-red chalet on the opposite bank. The door stood open and even in the freshness of the morning there was the pungent, not-unpleasant smell of lime at work.

“All right,” said Mrs. Dillon. “You go right over there.”

The boy giggled incredulously. “Aw, that ain’t no bathroom.”

“That isn’t any bathroom.”

“Well, where is the bathroom, then?”

“I mean it is too a bathroom,” said Mrs. Dillon. “It’s what they call a privy. It’s the only kind of a bathroom they have out here.”

“Aw,” said the boy, studying her face; and he looked again at the little building. It was like one of the houses he and Papa had used to build out of cards. “Did you go to a privy when you were a little girl?”

“I always did,” said Mrs. Dillon firmly.

Robert jiggled uncertainly. He clutched himself. “You go with me,” he whined.

“No, I’m not going with you. I’ll get my skirts so wet in those weeds they never will get dry. You go on, and I’ll stand right here.”

“You won’t go ’way?”

“Where would I go to, for goodness’ sake? Climb a telephone pole?”

Robert giggled, his mother gave him a little shove, and he started down the path. By the time he had, after several stops and angry promptings, reached the ditch, he could see that the building was empty, and he strode on from there bravely. He stepped inside and looked around. The sole furniture of the structure was what appeared to be a chest with two holes in it against the opposite wall. He edged up to this and glanced down into a black abyss, sniffing. Then, intrigued, he placed his face to the smaller of the two holes, the one for women, and spent a long minute in interested study.

Frowning, if a child of slightly less than seven can be said to frown, he went to the door.

“There’s something in here,” he called. “It ain’t been flushed.”

“It hasn’t been flushed,” corrected Mrs. Dillon.

“I know it hasn’t.”

“Robert!” sputtered Mrs. Dillon. “If you don’t stop aggravating me—if I have to come over there to you—!”

“But it ain’t—it’s full.”

“It is not!” Mrs. Dillon almost shouted. “There’s plenty of room yet!”

“Well, but what do they do with it?”

“I don’t know!” yelled Mrs. Dillon; and sighed. “Well, yes, I do know. The Chinamen come up and get it.”

“Oh,” said her son.

There was enough of the truth as he knew it in her statement to satisfy him. He could not understand why the Chinamen would undertake such odious work nor how they could get up through the ground to perform it. But neither could he understand how they walked around on the other side of the earth with their heads hanging down, which, indubitably, they did.

“Well”—he hesitated—“maybe they’ll reach up and grab me.”

“I swear they’d bring you back if they did!” replied his mother. “But they won’t. They’re not out this late. Now go on!”

Robert went. Pleasantly frightened at the recent proximity of the Chinamen and amused at the thought of dampening some straggler, he fulfilled the demand upon him and turned to leave. He did not do so immediately, of course. It was his weakness, born perhaps of a bodily one (the need for rest and an excuse for it), to give free play to his curiosity whenever it was aroused.

He saw a mangled catalogue suspended from the wall by a nail. He lifted it down, took it to the door, and held it up, demanding the explanation for its presence.

“Robert! You come on here!”

“But what’s it for?”

“It’s to—it’s to read!”

“Well,” the boy said, “maybe I better read it a little, then.”

He opened the thick book clumsily and began turning through the pages, looking for some picture that would assist him with the text. He was a thin, gawky boy, pale, and with a big head and sandy hair. He wore what was known in those days as a Buster Brown suit: a middy blouse with a large drape collar and open-bottom, knee-length pants attached to the waist by a circle of large white buttons. His hat was a wide-brimmed brown sailor, held on by a rubber band beneath his chin, and decorated around the crown and over the rear brim by ribbon streamers. On his feet he wore brown-striped half-socks and patent leather slippers.

He had assumed the garb only upon Mrs. Dillon’s repeated assurances that it was the current uniform of the United States Army. She had dressed him thus in the futile hope of concealing his true age from the trainmen.

Her streak of hard practicality told her that it was something that had to be attempted, and, yet, looking at him now, so ludicrous and so trustfully unconscious of it, the tears came into her eyes. How wrong to abuse the confidence of a child! There was no excuse for it. Never, she thought, will I do it again.

She blinked her eyes, covering them for a moment with her hand. And when she opened them again, he was standing in front of her, smiling up at her proudly.

“The Chinamen didn’t get me, Mama. I went all by myself and I wasn’t a bit afraid.”

“Of course you weren’t! You’re Mama’s big brave boy, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh. We goin’ out to Gran’pa Fargo’s house, now?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Will Papa be there?”

“I’m afraid not, honey.”

“You said he would! You said Papa would be there! You know you did! You said—”

“Well,” Mrs. Dillon said, “maybe he will be. We’ll see.”

Lincoln Fargo had been between twelve and seventeen when he entered the Union Army. An orphan in a period of indifferent vital statistics, he did not know how old he was—nor does it matter. As he was fond of saying, in paraphrase of a statement of the man for whom he had been named, he was old enough.

He had joined the army primarily because he was paid to (he had received two hundred dollars to substitute for a wealthy farmer’s son); secondarily, because it was the patriotic, the right thing to do. Or perhaps the two factors moved him equally. He was as proud of his reputation as any man, and he was no more mercenary than he had to be. But, being a bound boy, with no future except that which he could carve for himself, he might have had to be a little more so than others.

He had stayed in the army because he did not know how to get out. And while he had made the best of things, emerging a full sergeant, he had held a very low opinion of wars ever since. He believed, privately, that he had been cheated.

In considerable travel and much incisive if narrow thinking, he had come to the conclusion that a man got no more freedom than he worked for. Sometimes he didn’t get that much unless he was lucky; but certainly it was useless to try to give it to him. The muscles you got getting freedom were needed to hold on to it. If you didn’t have ’em, you wouldn’t keep it long. Then, there was another way of looking at it. Suppose your neighbor had a dog penned up under his house, and you tried to make him turn it loose. You got to fighting and you both got killed and wrecked the house to boot. The dog was free, but was it worth it? And wasn’t it likely that he would have dug out or that the neighbor would have relented, anyway, in time?

So reasoning, in his admitted ignorance, Lincoln Fargo believed that the simple truths he had been so long in learning must have been known at the time to the powers behind the war. He believed, therefore, that there must have been some other and venal reason for it.

Second guesses were costly in Lincoln Fargo’s day. He had been stung once; that was their fault. Stung again, it would be his.

He had no use for wars.

Lincoln Fargo often wondered why, when he was discharged, he had returned to Ohio. There was no one there he particularly cared about. There were many more opportunities elsewhere than in the little community where he had been legally a slave. But he did go back; that much is history. The wildcat bank notes which he had received for his enlistment had become worthless; he had gambled away his army pay. He went to work as a mason’s apprentice at six dollars a month, found, and one suit of clothes each year.

On a farm where he was laying a foundation for a silo, he became acquainted with the hired girl, an orphan like himself. Everything about her amused him: her coltish handsomeness, her piety, her solemn industriousness and prudishness. And leading her on with the tether of his sardonic humor, he lost sight of what was happening at his end of the rope. He took her to a revival. To his thoroughgoing mortification, he found himself among the mourners, converted. He married her.

He had no use for the ministry.

Without apologies or compunction, he took her savings and entered business for himself. He worked hard. Wherever there was stonework in that section of Ohio, Link Fargo did it, at one price or another. He wanted work. And after five years, he was no further ahead than he had been in the beginning. Moreover, he was ruptured.

On the winnings of a poker game, he left his family and went to Saint Louis. He never admitted later, even to himself, that he did not intend to come back. In Saint Louis he registered at the best hotel, lived lavishly, and soon established a reputation for himself as a first-rate storyteller, gambler, and judge of good whisky and food. Inherently well-mannered, he was still shockingly plain-spoken. He moved in an aura of savagely rollicking good humor. He didn’t give a damn. He did mention casually that he was a stonework contractor, then avoided the subject thereafter. He did not want to talk about it, he declared. He was there for a good time.… No, no business, dammit, said Link; and this round’s on me.

Perhaps he did know what he was doing. He liked to say that he did.

There came an evening (he was down to his last twenty dollars at the time) when two of his companions suggested dinner in one of the private dining rooms upstairs. There were some parties there it would pay him to meet. Yes, they knew he didn’t want to talk business. They knew he had his made. But just the same…

A few days later, Link returned to Ohio. A man of his word, he scrupulously kicked back a full third of the money he received for constructing an unremembered number of railway trestles, water-tower and depot foundations, and the like. But, at that, he cleared over ten thousand dollars in two years.

In the sixties and seventies, many of the streams of the Middle West were navigable far into the north, almost to Canada. Townsites were springing up along the river banks. Choice lots were selling at prices comparable to those in the big cities of the East. There were persistent rumors that the capital of the United States would be moved to some much more appropriate spot in the wilderness of Nebraska Territory. There, along the rivers, cities that would rival New York and Chicago and Boston would be built. Let the railroads run their right-of-ways where they liked. River travel was cheaper, more comfortable and popular—better in every way.

Lincoln Fargo moved to Kansas City. His wife was able to persuade sufficient money from him to start a boarding house there. With the remainder, and a sheaf of high-interest notes, he bought a boat. He made one trip from Kansas City to Fairbury, the profits from which were applied on his notes. On the second trip he struck a sandbar.

The boat is still there, someplace in Nebraska, buried countless feet beneath the wiregrass sod of what was once a streambed. On it are the belongings, including one grand piano, and the hopes of several score would-be settlers. Link believed—he was pretty sure—that the passengers all got off safely. But he often regretted that the indignation of his human cargo had prevented him from taking a careful census.

On his way back to Kansas City, he was forced to do what he considered the one shameful thing of his career. He stole a horse. He could never forgive himself for it. He believed that many of the misfortunes which he suffered later were punishment for the crime.

He could not seem to get started in anything in Kansas City, although, as even Mrs. Fargo admitted, he tried hard. One of his ventures was with a sharper, a glittering self-titled professor who was a guest of the boarding house. They marketed by mail a guaranteed eradicator for all sorts of vermin. It consisted of a small brick and a mallet and a simple set of instructions. The instructions advised the purchaser to lay the pest upon the brick and strike it firmly with the mallet.

The device, if it could be called that, sold well at the beginning, and the two promoters ignored with impunity the several warnings they received from far-off Washington. Few of the buyers complained, knowing that it would do no good. In fact, after their first chagrin, many of them became competitors. The periodicals and mails became flooded with advertisements for the Bug Killer. Everyone knew of the scheme within a few weeks. No one would buy any more.

Link was not physically able to go back to the heavy mason’s trade, and he had lost his taste for it, anyway. He dealt cards for a series of gambling houses, but his services were unsatisfactory. He could take no interest in gambling for others; and he lacked the money to gamble well for himself.

Anyone with one month’s rent for a building could start a saloon. The fiercely competing breweries would supply everything else on credit. So Link opened a saloon, in a block with only twelve others, and presided at its deathbed over a period of several months. He might have been one of the survivors in the liquor war, but he did not like the business. He would have no part of those extremely profitable sidelines associated with upstairs rooms, knockout drops, and trapdoors to the river. Worst of all, he could not stomach drunkenness. A few drinks, he believed, were all right. He, himself, could take a great many more than a few and still remain in control of his senses; and that was all right, too. But a man who couldn’t drink or who drank too much disgusted and angered him, and it made no difference to him how much he spent.

He had no use for drunks. He did not conceal the fact. He was ruptured but he was still very handy with his fists and feet.

He tried a few other things after his failure as a saloonkeeper. The few things there were left for him to try. He operated a dray. He took a working interest in a livery stable. All failed. In the late ’seventies he returned to Nebraska and took out a homestead—two homesteads, in fact. To get the second one, he followed the not uncommon practice of hiring a woman for the day, registering her as his wife, and taking out a second claim in her name. It was not legal, of course, but he was an “old soldier of the Union,” and allowances had to be made.

The Grand Army men of the section were not long in banding together. Copperheads—Southern sympathizers—were greatly in the minority. With only a twinge of conscience, Lincoln became a night rider. He and his friends paid nocturnal visits to those copperheads who possessed good proved-up claims, and gave them the choice of selling out at an exceedingly modest figure or being run out. Few had to be run out, and Link told himself that he felt no compunction. After all, what kick had they, since night-riding was the South’s own invention? He was quite sure that they would have treated him in the same fashion if the opportunity had offered.

In time Lincoln Fargo owned a thousand acres of the richest Nebraska bottom land. In 1918 those acres would be worth three hundred thousand dollars. But he did not own them then. He did not own them now. He had been on the wrong side of the fence in the Verdon townsite boom.

Now, he had his pension. He had his home and ten acres on the outskirts of Verdon. He had turned over one hundred and sixty acres to his oldest son, Sherman.

Actually, he did not even own his home. He had deeded it over to his wife, upon the advice of a lawyer, to escape payment on the ancient river-boat notes.

Lincoln had no use for lawyers.

He was sixty or sixty-five now—he didn’t know which. He knew he was old enough.

He sat on the front porch of his rambling cottage, his Congress gaiters propped against a pillar, his big black hat pulled down upon his graying horseshoe of hair, his bright blue eyes buried in scalene triangles of flesh.

His seven acres of corn wouldn’t be worth harvesting this year. Which meant that he would have to buy if he was going to feed. But why feed, anyway? A damned nuisance and no money in it.

Those chickens were a damned nuisance, too. (He swiped at one viciously with his cane.) Always messing up the porch or getting into the garden; too tough to eat and too lazy to lay. But, what the hell? Let the old lady clean the porch; it would take some of the meanness out of her. Let the garden go to hell. It was cheaper to buy canned sass.

Anyhow, he didn’t care much for eating. You couldn’t gum food and get any fun out of it.

He had no use for dentists, either.

Thinking, dreaming, he rolled his long black . . .