South of Heaven by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online Page A

good. Too good. When you haven’t been used to it, comfort can be uncomfortable.
    After a while I sat up, and the crumb boss stopped fooling around up front, doing things that didn’t need to be done, and came back to where I was. We talked; rather, he talked and I listened. I guess it had been a long time since anyone was interested in anything he had to say, and he needed to talk. It didn’t tell me much about him that I hadn’t already surmised. You saw quite a few old pappy guys, and it was virtually the same story with all of them.
    No homes. No families. Or none that cared what happened to them. Anywhere else, they’d have been in a poorhouse or an old folks’ home, since there were no old-age pensions at the time. Out here, they could usually pick up some kind of job on the big construction projects. Nothing important, of course, nothing that required any real effort, but something that did have to be done.
    They worked during the warm months, the summer and spring and fall—the only times there were jobs for them. In the winter they stayed in the bleak, God-awful oil towns. Bunking in the dingy half-canvas cothouses—rag houses, they were called—or holing up three or four to a room in the rickety unpainted hotels. They seldom had more than enough money to barely squeak by until spring. Spring sometimes found them too old and weak to work, and they gradually starved to death. But that didn’t happen very often. This was a young man’s country—a country for healthy young men. There was little available in the way of medical facilities, and old men sicken easily. And when they took sick here, they died.
    It wasn’t much to look forward to, dying when you were too old and sick to work. But maybe living isn’t either.
    We said good night, the crumb boss and I. He went back up front, blew out the lantern and went to bed. And I still couldn’t relax.
    I took off all my clothes, and it was a little better that way with the cool breeze washing over me. But it wasn’t good enough for sleep. I’d missed my bath that day, not getting down to the Pecos as I usually did, and I felt all prickly and sticky.
    Finally, after a lot of tossing around, I put my shoes back on—just my shoes, nothing else—and went out the rear flap of the tent.
    It was a nice night, just cool enough without being cold. The moon streamed through a canyon of clouds, painting a path across the sage and chaparral. I sauntered down it, feeling like I sometimes did at night in these far-out places. As though everything was mine, the whole world, and that I was the only person in it.
    I kept walking, not for any reason except that I felt like it and it was a nice night. Then, when I’d probably walked a half mile or so, I suddenly came to a stop.
    I was looking down into a wash, a draw in the prairie. An old panel truck was parked in it, a truck made over into a housecar.
    I stood staring at it, not at all sure of what I was seeing—that it really was Carol’s. Half-thinking that I’d gone to sleep back there in the tent and that this was a dream, I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them again.
    Just as she came around the side of the truck.
    She was as naked as I was, wearing nothing but her shoes. We stood looking at each other, and it all seemed perfectly natural that we should be like this. Just the two of us standing naked in our own private world. Then, she called my name softly, “Tommy,” and held her arms out to me.
    And I went down to her.
    I picked her up and kissed her, the first girl I’d ever really kissed. I carried her to the truck and lifted her inside. And climbed in after her.

8
    B ack in camp that night, again stretched out on my bunk, I thought of countless things I should have asked her. One very important thing in particular. And it seemed incredible that I’d asked her nothing at all, that we’d hardly talked at all. Yet on the other hand it seemed natural enough, exactly the way it should have been.