South of Heaven by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online

soap and rinsing basins and so on. Four Trey nudged me, pointing to him.
    “I see Wingy Warfield’s made camp boss again.”
    “With his voice, how could he miss?” I laughed.
    Being camp boss isn’t nearly so important as it sounds. In fact, it isn’t important at all, since it doesn’t involve much but waking the stiffs in the morning and keeping the camp grounds in reasonable order. Wingy—all one-armed men are called Wingy—knew this as well as anyone, but he put on more airs than a line boss.
    He saw Four Trey and me watching him and he puffed himself up and strutted over to us. “I’m givin’ you fair warning,” he said in a voice like a foghorn. “The first bo I catch droppin’ his pants within a hundred yards of camp can go get his time!”
    “We’ll watch it, Wingy,” Four Trey nodded soberly. “Fact is, Tommy and I are starting to blast slop pits and latrines the first thing in the morning.”
    “Well, all right,” Wingy Warfield roared, glaring from one to the other of us. “But what I said still goes!”
    He turned and strutted away, importantly. Four Trey and I lighted up cigarettes.
    Warfield was a boomer—a guy who made the boom camps. There was a joke going around that the places had been named for him, like the town of Son-of-a-bitch, for example, which was nothing but one big whorehouse with an annex for gambling and which had the short-term—very short-term—reputation of being the toughest town in the world. The Rangers moved in after less than a month and chopped it to pieces with axes. When they did, they found more than a dozen bodies buried under the floors.
    “Well, Tommy…” Four Trey squinted up at the sky, taking a deep breath of the cool clean air. “Maybe we’d better put a button on the day, hmm?”
    “Maybe we had,” I said. “It’s been a long one.”
    He caught his hat brim, fore and aft, and crimped it upward. Casually, I did the same with mine. We said good night and he sauntered away, disappearing inside one of the twenty long sleeping tents. I waited until I saw which one he chose, then I entered one several tents away.
    That was the way you had to operate if you wanted to get along with Four Trey Whitey. He didn’t want anyone moving in on him, as the saying is, and he had some pretty funny ideas about what moving in meant. I mean, it took a lot of territory where he was concerned, and you had to lean over backwards to avoid it.
    The only other person in my tent was an old pappy guy, which is what they call any old man on a pipeline. I put him down as a crumb-boss, and I turned out to be right. A crumb, in the oil fields, is a louse. The joke is that the old men who take care of the tents are secretly the bosses of the lice, telling them who to bite and so on.
    He gave me a cross, suspicious look, as old men do sometimes. Because they’re afraid of you, I suppose, until you make them know they don’t have to be. He said I was to pick out my cot, and be danged sure I didn’t mess up any of the others. And I said, of course, I’d do just that.
    “Mind if I take one back by the rear flap?” I asked. “I like lots of air.”
    “Well…,” he gave me a cautious look. “Well, I guess that’ll be all right.”
    He actually had nothing to say about where I slept. But he was scared and old, and, well, what the hell? “It’s strictly up to you,” I said. “After all, you’re the boss, and you’ve got the stroke in this tent.”
    He broke into a big smile. It was as nice a smile as I’ve ever seen, even if it didn’t have any teeth in it. “Sure, it’s all right!” he said. “Bunk down anywhere you want to, son, and if you need any extra blankets or anything, you just let me know!”
    I went down the grassy aisle between the twin rows of cots to the rear of the tent. I stretched out on an end cot, putting my hands under my head and easing my shoes off. Lying in a bed, or rather a cot with a mattress on it, for the first time in weeks felt