“Yeah, yeah, but I don’t like this place. Anyplace else — New York, or Boston, or any civilized place — there’d be reporters and photographers around, and there’d be a crowd of people to cheer for me. But this place is way out, you know? Like creepy.”
“Uh huh. But then nobody asked you to come down here, did they?” I clamped my lips together on the temper rising inside me. “Let’s get this over with,” I added.
I went to the door and let out a call. Ed Carson came back, nursing a coke. I nodded to Ed. He plodded into the office and said, “Well, now. Jack, you got all your belongings there? Your billfold and all?”
Vendise said, “Well, my good buddies took off the morning after you rubes hauled me in on this bum rap. When they left town, they took my bag with them, so all the belongings I got is what I’m standing here in. This is it.”
Carson shook his head sadly. “Too bad. Anyway, you do have your billfold and watch and so on... How about money? Accordin’ to my list, you came in with five dollars.”
“Ah, I spent that a’ready. A pig couldn’t eat the stuff you serve here. I sent out for food once in awhile.”
I pretended to prick up my ears. “What’s that? You don’t have any money?”
“Not a dime,” Vendise said. He shrugged. “Who cares?”
“Pokochobee County cares,” I said sternly. I turned to the sheriff. “Here’s a man with no baggage, no residential address in Monroe, and no money.”
Carson nodded. “Yar. Afraid we’ll have to charge you with vagrancy, son. No visible means of support...”
“What’re you trying to give me?” Vendise yelled. His girlish face contorted with anger. “You lousy rubes!”
With a good deal of satisfaction I said, “What we’re going to give you is thirty days in jail. Or... you can work it out on the county farm. Fifteen days there, and you get a dollar a day plus your meals. What’s it going to be?”
You could almost see the wheels turning in Vendise’s sleek head. Work farm, poor security, many chances for a smart man to escape, whenever he felt like it...
“I tell you what it’s going to be, Gates. Once I get back to civilization, I’m going to blow your stinking county off the map. You know? This whole lousy state! Just you wait, cat. Just you wait.” Ed Carson pursued his lips. “Well, you just do that. But for now, how about Mr. Gates’ question? You want to lay out your time in jail, or work it out on the farm?”
“Ah, I’ll go to your stinking farm. What a bunch of yokels!” Carson and I exchanged a glance. Then Ed told his deputy to put Vendise in a cell, and to wait for the manager of the county farm to arrive for his prisoner in a couple of hours.
When the men had left the office, Vendise cursing at the top of his voice, the sheriff said, “I’ll have the farm boss come in for that ‘cat’ about supper-time... Funny, ain’t it? the way these old corny sayings have a way of comin’ true, time and again. Like the one that goes, ‘There’s more ways than one to skin a cat.’ ”
“Mmmm,” I agreed. I grimaced. “I wonder how long that particular cat will last? Out there on the farm, in this heat, fourteen hours a day of hard work...”
“Yeah. And Roy Blaisedell the farm boss.”
“Bet you coffee money Vendise don’t last a week, before he tries to take off, and Roy — well.”
“Roy blows his head off — just like Vendise done to Roy’s brother,” Carson finished. “I tell you, I don’t think it’ll be more’n two days.”
“It’s a bet,” I said.
I lost.
Looking for George
by Anthony Marsh
As Whistler himself has reminded us, “Nature sings her exquisite song to the artist alone.” fudging from our hero’s vivid interpretations, this is indeed a blessing in disguise.
I’ve known George for some time now. I first met him when I was at college. I was doing art; a bit of clay modeling, sculpture, painting, and so forth. It was painting that interested me most, especially oils. You can really give your picture body with oils. Of course, my old man thought I was crazy. According to him, I should have gone to business school or law school, and followed his holy footsteps into the stock exchange. In fact, I once heard him talking to my uncle about me.
“We’ll have to give the boy his head,” he told him. “Wait till he’s worked this nonsense out of his system, then he’ll come to his senses and settle down to do something useful.”
Well I haven’t worked it out of my system so far, and I’m not going to. I’m going to show them yet that I am a painter, if it’s the last thing I do; and it looks as if it might be. In a way, I can’t blame the old man for not appreciating my talent. After all, even my teachers didn’t seem to catch on. I would be sitting there, painting my heart out on that canvas, when old Prof. Whitehouse — well he really wasn’t old at all, he should have known better — would come over and look at it and I could see the sarcasm sort of smeared all over his face.
“That shows quite a lot of promise, Henry,” he’d say, then he’d go on jabbering about form and color balance and draftsmanship and all that kind of rot, just kindergarten stuff. But I wasn’t concerned about old Whitehouse because I knew I was way ahead of him, and I told him so once or twice. He just smiled superciliously, and walked off as if he didn’t care. But I knew he did, because after a while he began to get back at me, though in an underhand kind of way so that nobody would notice it. He was a pretty mean devil, old Whitehouse, but he couldn’t fool me.
I caught on to him before he could get far up the field. You see, when the class first started, the Prof. would go around giving everybody else a bad time, as well as me. Then the others started to kowtow to him and do what he wanted. They didn’t have any guts. They were nothing but a bunch of cheap draftsmen following a lot of stupid rules. But I wouldn’t stand for that sort of stuff, and just went on painting the way I wanted to paint. In fact, the pictures sort of came out by themselves, and some of them were pretty dramatic, I can tell you. After a while, Whitehouse got off the other students’ backs, but he never would let up on me.
In the end, because of the way the Prof. treated me, the other students began to turn against me too. I knew this from the way they started acting when we were up at Billy’s Joint. We used to meet there, every night almost, and sit around drinking beer or coffee or coke, and talking about everything under the sun; art, music, philosophy, and so on. At that time I was all hepped up about those English philosophers Locke, Berkeley and Hume. They called themselves idealists because they said nothing really existed. All the things we see around us, like apples, tables, houses, even other people, are just ideas that exist in our own minds.
I thought they were pretty sharp. L., B. and H., I used to call them. I got the idea from my old man. He used to say M. L. P. and F. when he wanted to talk about that stockbroking crowd. You’d have thought the old boy was talking about a bunch of high priests, he got so solemn when he mentioned their names.
The other students wouldn’t go for L., B. and H. and all the idealist stuff, and I can tell you we got into some real hot arguments about them. Once when I made a pass at one of the girls, she slapped my face and then told me I wasn’t to get upset about it because she only existed in my mind. Well, I started to explain to her how ignorant she was about philosophy. Then the rest of the crowd began to give each other funny looks and they all clammed up. They just sat there like the dummies they were and wouldn’t argue with me any more.
But what really hurt me was when they started getting up and leaving. Then, after a few nights, they wouldn’t sit at the same table with me. It was all Prof. Whitehouse’s fault, but I wasn’t going to kow-tow to him like they had done, and I told them all where they could go. Just to show them how I felt, I used to sit at my own table drinking beer, while they prattled away in their corner like a lot of silly chickens.