Cain always felt that hardcover books were the only things that counted, and he did not really consider his magazine articles, even his original paperback books, serious work. After Postman, Double Indemnity, and then Serenade were published, whenever he was not employed by a studio, he was usually working on a novel. But Mrs. Haggard continued her pressure for short stories, and occasionally he responded. In 1936, while working on a movie, “Dr. Socrates,” for Paramount, he found time at night to dictate another Hollywood story about an attempted Hollywood comeback; this one was about a bit player who imagined himself riding a hippopotamus in a big movie. He called it “Hip, Hip, The Hippo,” and Edwin Balmer, editor of Redbook, thought it was very amusing. But he wanted a new ending, which Cain agreed to provide. The revision, however, took longer than Cain expected, and he wrote Mrs. Haggard: “I never had such a hell of a time with a story in my life.” When he sent it to his agent, he said that if Balmer rejected it, he would personally come to New York and shoot him. Balmer bought it with the new ending. About this time he also wrote another short story for Mrs. Haggard, who sold it to Liberty. This one, called “Everything But the Truth,” is set in Annapolis and is about the trouble a young boy gets into as a result of his masculine boasting, one of Cain’s favorite themes.
The final story in this section was written much later, in Cain’s Hyattsville (Maryland) years, when he was no longer in vogue and needed the money almost as desperately as he did in the early 1930s when he was free-lancing in Hollywood. “The Visitor,” as Cain wrote to one of his Hyattsville friends, grew out of an editorial he wrote for The New York World in the 1920s. The editorial asked what one did when you met a man-eating tiger, which prompted a reply from a Dr. Singh, an Indian, who said what you do is climb a tree as fast as you can. Cain’s story was about a man who woke one morning to find a tiger by his bed and, with no tree around, did what he had to do to save himself. “It is one of the few things I ever wrote,” said Cain, “that I’m stuck on. It came out in Esquire and was never reprinted, I have no idea why.”
I hope this resurrection of his “Visitor” does not go unnoticed by Cain, wherever he is.
The Whale, the Cluck and the Diving Venus
“Sister,” says Mort, “the pool will be full when it’s full; that’s all I can tell you. So suppose you go roll your hoop, or your marbles, or whatever you’ve got, and leave me alone. I’m busy.”
It was the day before the Fourth of July, and we were sitting on the edge of the pool with our feet hanging over the gutter, about as busy as a pair of lizards on a warm brick. I saw the girl turn white clear down to the neck of her bathing-suit. “I can’t very well dive into a pool with no water in it,” she said.
“And who cares?” says Mort. “If you were a trouper, ’stead of a punk amateur trying to chisel in on something you don’t know anything about, you’d be glad to get the morning off. ’Stead of that, all you do is hang around and ask questions.”
She walked away, and began testing the high ladder she used for her dive. “That’s a nice way to talk,” I said. “And specially to her.”
“What’s the matter? You stuck on her?”
“No, I’m not stuck on her. But she’s a nice girl, and the least you could do is to treat her decent, and call her by her name. Sister! If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a guy that calls a woman ‘sister.’”
“Sure she’s a nice girl, and she gives me a pain in the neck. It’s no racket for a nice girl. It’s for bums that can take it on the chin, and maybe cuss you out if you get too tough. Her doing a dive act, that’s just a pest.”
“Well, you need whatever trade she draws.”
“What’s that, a crack?”
“Yeah, it’s a crack. Why didn’t you stick to the Wild West show, and things you could understand? But no. You had to have a pool. Right in the middle of a resort that has an ocean for a front yard, and a bay for a back yard, you had to have an open-air salt-water swimming-pool. Why didn’t you buy some fur coats and try to sell them in Florida?”
“Give it time. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“No, but it was built in the right place. And then, when a girl comes along with something that might put it over, you treat her like smallpox. If you ask me, you’re a pretty dumb cluck.”
“Nobody’s asking you. And lay off the dumb part. I know what I’m doing.”
“All right, then. Just a cluck.”
She came over again. “The pool will be full at twelve, Miss Dixon,” I said. “I’m starting the pump now, and it takes two hours.”
“I was afraid something was out of order,” she said.
“Everything is O. K. We have to drain it once a week to sluice it out with the hose.”
“Oh.”
She stood there, and looked around like she had lost something. All of a sudden Mort picked it up, and handed it to her. It was a lipstick.
“Thank you,” she said, and left us again.
“Well,” I said, soon as I had started the pump, “that was a little better. You treat her like a lady once, maybe she won’t give you such a big pain in the neck.”
But he wasn’t listening. He was looking out to sea. I looked, and then I saw there were a lot of people running down to the beach. We ran too, and when we got there, we saw a little fishing steamer about two hundred yards out, towing something in the water.
“What you got there?” somebody sang out.
“We got a whale,” came the call from the boat. “He got tangled up in the net, and we ketched him alive.”
“Come on, Dave,” says Mort. “We’re going out there.”
We pushed a lifeguard’s skiff through the surf and rowed out. “Give you a hundred dollars for your whale,” Mort yelled out as soon as we got close enough to talk.
“Ha-ha-ha!” says the Captain. “That just makes me laugh.” It sure did that, all right. You could hear him to Henlopen Light.
“All right,” says Mort. “No harm asking, though. By the way, what you going to do with him?”
That stopped the laughing pretty quick. The Captain went into a huddle with his crew, and then came back to the rail. “Five hundred,” he says.
Mort began to beat him down, and pretty soon offered two hundred and fifty dollars.
“Sold,” says the Captain. “Come get your whale.”
We swung in closer, but then I began to back water on the oars. Because that whale, anybody could see he was alive, all right. He wasn’t a big whale — just a young whale, about twenty feet long and four feet thick; but he was plenty big enough. When he began to buck, and blow, and hit the water with his tail so it sounded like a cannon-shot, our skiff, that had seemed almost as big as a washtub when we started out, all of a sudden wasn’t any bigger than a soap-dish.
“Cluck!” I says. “You’re not even a cluck; you’re just plain balmy. Take your paw off my knee. I’m going home.”
But he just shook his head, where he was scrawling a check with my knee for a desk; and about that time the whale yawed the steamer around so it was almost on top of us. Mort passed the check up to the Captain, then shoved his watch, fountain-pen, checkbook and pocketbook into my hand, and kicked off his shoes. “All right, Dave,” he said. “Now all you got to do is get the whale into the pool.” And with that he went overboard and cut for shore.