Inky always rode in with us; Larsen only occasionally. Neither of them used to talk much; Larsen, because he didn’t see any sense in talking unless to give a guy orders or a girl a proposition; and Inky, well, I guess because he wasn’t any too happy talking American. And there wasn’t a ride Inky took with us but he didn’t slip out his automatic and sort of pet it mutter at it under his breath. Once when we were restfully chugging down the highway Glasses asked him, polite inquiring:
“Just what is it makes you so fond of that gun? After all, the must be thousands identically like it.”
“You think so?” says Inky, giving us a quick stare from his little, glinty black eyes and making a speech for once. “Let me tell you, Glasses” (he made the word sound like ‘Masses’), “nothing is alike in this world. People, guns, bottles of Scotch—nothing. Everything in the world is different. Every man has different fingerprints; and, of all guns made in the same factory as this one, there is not one like mine. I could pick mine out from a hundred. Yes, even if I hadn’t filed the trigger catch, I could do that.”
We didn’t contradict him. It sounded pretty reasonable. He sure loved that gun, all right. He slept with it under his pillow. I don’t think it ever got more than three feet away from him as long as he lived.
Once when Larsen was riding in with us, he remarked! sarcastically, “That is a pretty little gun, Inky, but I am getting very tired of hearing you talk to it so much, especially when no one can understand what you are saying. Doesn’t it ever talk back to you?”
Inky smiled at him. “My gun only knows eight words,” he said, “and they are all alike.”
This was such a good crack that we laughed.
“Let’s have a look at it,” said Larsen reaching out his hand.
But Inky put it back in his pocket and didn’t take it out the rest of the trip.
After that Larsen was always kidding Inky about the gun, trying to get his goat. He was a persistent guy with a very peculiar sense of humor, and he kept it up for a long time after it had stopped being funny. Finally he took to acting as if he wanted to buy it, making Inky crazy offers of one to two hundred dollars.
“Two hundred and seventy-five dollars, Inky,” he said one evening as we were rattling past Bayport with a load of cognac and Irish whiskey. “That’s my last offer, and you better take it.”
Inky shook his head and made a funny noise that was almost like a snarl. Then, to my great surprise (I almost ran the truck off the pavement) Larsen lost his temper.
“Hand over that damn gun!” he bellowed, grabbing Inky’s shoulders and shaking him. I was almost knocked off the seat. Somebody might even have been hurt, if a motorcycle cop hadn’t stopped us just at that moment to ask for his hush-money. By the time he was gone, Larsen and Inky were both cooled down to the freezing point, and there was no more fighting. We got our load safely into the warehouse, nobody saying a word.
Afterward, when Glasses and I were having a cup of coffee at a little open-all-night restaurant, I said, “Those two guys are crazy, and I don’t like it a bit. Why the devil do they act that way, now that the business is going so swell? I haven’t got the brains Larsen has, but you won’t ever find me fighting about a gun as if I was a kid.”
Glasses only smiled as he poured a precise half-spoonful of sugar into his cup.
“And Inky’s as bad as he is,” I went on. “I tell you, Glasses, it ain’t natural or normal for a man to feel that way about a piece of metal. I can understand him being fond of it and feeling lost without it. I feel the same way about my lucky half-dollar. It’s the way he pets it and makes love to it that gets on my nerves. And now Larsen’s acting the same way.”
Glasses shrugged. “We’re all getting a little jittery, although we won’t admit it,” he said. “Too many hijackers. And so we start getting on each other’s nerves and fighting about trifles—such as automatic pistols.”
“You may have something there.”
Glasses winked at me. “Why, certainly, No Nose,” he said, referring to what had once been done to me with a baseball bat, “I even have another explanation of tonight’s events.”
“What?”
He leaned over and whispered in a mock-mysterious way, “Maybe there’s something queer about the gun itself.”
I told him in impolite language to go chase himself.
From that night, however, things were changed, Larsen and Inky Kozacs never spoke to each other any more except in the line of business. And there was no more talk, kidding or serious, about the gun. Inky only brought it out when Larsen wasn’t along.
Well, the years kept passing and the bootlegging business stayed good except that the hijackers became more numerous and Inky got a couple of chances to show us what a nice noise his automatic made. Then, too, we got into a row with some competitors bossed by an Irishman named Luke Dugan, and had to watch our step very carefully and change our route every other trip.
Still, business was good. I continued to support almost all my relatives, and Glasses put away a few dollars every month for what he called his Persian Cat Fund. Larsen, I believe, spent about everything he got on women and all that goes with them. He was the kind of guy who would take all the pleasures of life without cracking a smile, but who lived for them just the same.
As for Inky Kozacs, we never knew what happened to the money he made. We never heard of him spending much, so we finally figured he must be saving it—probably in bills in a safety deposit box. Maybe he was planning to go back to the Old Country, wherever that was, and be somebody. At any rate he never told us. By the time Congress took our profession away from us, he must have had a whale of a lot of dough. We hadn’t had a big racket, but we’d been very careful.
Finally we ran our last load. We’d have had to quit the business pretty soon anyway, because the big syndicates were demanding more protection money each week. There was no chance left for a small independent operator, even if he was as clever as Larsen. So Glasses and I took a couple of months off for vacation before thinking what to do next for his Persian cats and my shiftless relatives. For the time being we stuck together.
Then one morning I read in the paper that Inky Kozacs had been taken for a ride. He’d been found shot dead on a dump heap near Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“I guess Luke Dugan finally got him,” said Glasses.
“A nasty break,” I said, “especially figuring all that money he hadn’t got any fun out of. I am glad that you and I, Glasses, aren’t important enough for Dugan to bother about, I hope.”
“Yeah. Say, No Nose, does it say if they found Inky’s gun on him?”
I said it told that the dead man was unarmed and that no weapon was found on the scene.
Glasses remarked that it was queer to think of Inky’s gun being in anyone else’s pocket. I agreed, and we spent some time wondering whether Inky had had a chance to defend himself.
About two hours later Larsen called and told us to meet him at the hide-out. He said Luke Dugan was gunning for him too.
The hide-out is a three-room frame bungalow with a big corrugated iron garage next to it. The garage was for the truck, and sometimes we would store a load of booze there when we heard that the police were going to make some arrests for the sake of variety. It is near Bayport, about a mile and a half from the cement highway and about a quarter of a mile from the bay and the little inlet in which we used to hide our boat. Stiff, knife-edged sea-grass taller than a man, comes up near to the house on the bay side, which is north, and on the west too. Under the sea-grass the ground is marshy, though in hot weather and when the tides aren’t high, it gets dry and caked; here and there creeks of tidewater go through it. Even a little breeze will make the blades of sea-grass scrape each other with a funny dry sound.