I was beginning to get it all into place in my mind now. The tough part was going to be the waiting. Right now I had to work out the idea for the machine, and I already had a pretty good idea about that. I had to go out of town to buy the things I needed, however. It would be too risky to do it around here, or keep it in my room while I was working on it. You lived in a glass bowl in a town this small. On Thursday I told Harshaw I was going to take the next day off to drive down to Houston and try to collect some money a man owed me.
I hadn’t seen any more of Dolores Harshaw at all, but Thursday afternoon I ran into Gloria Harper in the drug store. I had gone in for a Coke at three o’clock and she was sitting alone in a booth. She looked up and smiled, and I went over and sat down.
“Are you doing anything tonight?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not tonight.”
“Well, I hear they’re playing ‘The Birth of a Nation’ at the movie. Why don’t we go see it?”
“It isn’t really that bad, is it?” she asked. “But I’d love to go.” Her smile was something to see; and I noticed I was beginning to look for it when I was around her.
I picked her up around seven. The picture wasn’t too bad, but we ran out on the second feature. As we were walking back up the street to the car she stopped and bought a pencil from the old blind Negro, the one who had come into the bank. He had a little stand there on the sidewalk.
“How are you tonight, Uncle Mort?” she asked.
“Jes’ fine, Miss Gloahia,” he said. “Thank you.”
He’d recognized her by her voice. “Who is he?” I asked as we went on and got in the car.
“Just Mort. He’s been there in that spot fifteen hours a day six days a week since I was in rompers. Maybe he’s been there forever,” she said.
“Did you need a pencil?”
She blushed. “Well, you can always use one.”
We drove around for a while and when I took her home the house was dark. The Robinsons were gone somewhere. We stood by the gate for a moment in the moonlight. I was conscious of thinking she wasn’t merely pretty; she was one of the loveliest girls I had ever seen in my life. For a moment I was like an awkward kid; I wanted to kiss her and I was afraid to.
“Well, good night,” I said.
“Good night,” she said. “And thank you. I enjoyed the picture very much.”
Well, if you’re not a silly bastard, I thought. Why didn’t you ask her to go to the church supper?
I shoved off around ten the next morning, but I didn’t go to Houston. I drove over to a fair-sized town about a hundred miles away, a place I’d never been before. I got a room at a tourist court and then went shopping.
At a drugstore I picked up a hand-wound alarm clock. Then I bought two rolls of surgical cotton at another one, and went around to two or three five-and-ten-cent stores for the rest. I got a cheap soldering-iron, a little solder, a pair of pliers, a short piece of heavy copper wire, and some big sheets of 00 sandpaper. I mentally checked it off the list. That was about all except some thread and a small flashlight. After I bought those I dropped into a market and bought a carton of canned beer and a box of big kitchen matches and got the clerk to give me a cardboard box about a foot wide and eighteen inches long. I went back to the motel, put the beer in the little refrigerator to keep cold, drew the blinds, and went to work on the clock.
I took the bell cover off, exposing the clapper or striker. After plugging in the soldering-iron, I cut off two pieces of the copper wire just a little shorter than the thickness of the clock from front to back. When the iron was hot enough, I soldered them side by side on top of the clapper, putting on lots of solder and making it as rigid as I could. Then I wound the clock, set the alarm, and tried it out. The wire cross-arm vibrated nicely and held together all right.
Going out to the kitchenette, I opened a can of beer and came back to look at what I’d done so far. I’d know in a few minutes whether I could depend on it or not. I took a drink of the beer, lighted a cigarette, and went on with the job. First, I wrapped a sheet of sandpaper around each of the two rolls of cotton and made it fast with some of the thread. Then I took four of the big kitchen matches, laid them together with two pointing each way and overlapping a little in the center, and placed them on the cross-arm I’d soldered on to the bell clapper. I secured them with several turns of the thread, letting them stick out about a half inch over the clock in front and back. After winding and setting the alarm, I placed the clock upright in the bottom of the box the market clerk had given me, and put in the two sandpaper covered rolls, one on each side. It didn’t fit right; the rolls were too large and tended to bind the clapper cross-arm so it couldn’t move freely. It had to have just the right amount of tension; that was the reason I’d used cotton to back up the sandpaper instead of something solid. A block of wood or something like that would do if you got the spacing absolutely correct to within a sixty-fourth of an inch or so, but if you didn’t the matches might not touch at all or it might be too close and bind.
I took out the rolls of cotton, pulled some of it off, and re-wrapped them with the sandpaper. This time it was just right. The match heads pressed with just the right tension against the slightly yielding wall of sandpaper. Good, I thought. I took another drink of beer and sat back to wait. In a minute there was a click and the alarm went off, the cross-arm vibrating wildly. The match heads whirred against the sandpaper and all four of them burst into flame.
I tried it twelve times, and it never failed once. I took off the burnt matches for the last time and sat back with my beer to look at it. And that was when it really came home to me what I was about to do. I was going to rob a bank, committing the additional crime of arson in the process, and if I got caught I’d go to prison.
Well, I thought, go on selling second-hand jalopies for another forty years and maybe somebody’ll give you a testimonial and a forty-dollar watch.
6
When I got back I left the whole thing in the trunk of the car. If I took it into my room the nosy old girl who ran the place would probably be in it the first time she cleaned, and it was crazy enough to start her wondering. I already had a blanket in the car, an old one which had been in it when I bought it eight months ago. That was safe enough; nobody would ever trace it. I still had to have a piece of line, though, and I didn’t want to buy it because something like that was too easy for a clerk to remember. If I kept my eyes open I should find a short length around somewhere.
I checked right in at the lot when I got to town and didn’t go out to the rooming house until after work. There were two letters for me on the hall table, addressed in the same hand and postmarked here in town, but with no return address on them. I sat down on the bed and tore them open.
“Dear Harry,” the first one said. “Please call me. I miss you so and I’m sorry I acted the way I did. I want to see you so bad. Your loving Friend.” There was no signature. Well, at least she had that much sense.
I spread the other one open. “Harry,” she had scrawled, “why don’t you call me? Why? I can’t stand not hearing from you. I told you I was sorry, what more can I do? I’ve just got to see you.”
Was she crazy? I tore the letters into strips and burned them in the ash-tray, feeling a little chill of apprehension go over me. What would she do next? And the next time she got plastered?
The following day was Sunday. I drove out the highway after I’d had breakfast and turned off on to the dirt road going towards the river bottom and the oil well. When I got up in the pine on the sandhill near the old abandoned farms I found a pair of ruts leading off into the timber where I could get the car off the road and out of sight. It was a beautiful morning, still and hot, with the heavy scent of pine in the air, and it was good to be out here alone and away from town. I got out and started walking up the hill, keeping away from the road. In a little while I found what I was looking for, the remains of an old pine on the ground, the sap-wood long since rotted away and only the heart and pine knots remaining. I didn’t have an ax, but it was easy to lay it across another log and break off a section of the heart by jumping on it. I looked at the end where it had broken. It was pure pitch pine, the kind we used for kindling when I was a boy.