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

And basically I guess it was.
    We were two kids, a young man and a young woman, come together for the first time. The first time for her, yes, as well as for me. For as little as I knew about women, I knew that much. We had given each other the gift that can only be given once. And in the glory and wonder of giving it, we had no thoughts for anything else.
    How could we talk at such a time? How could I even think of questioning her?
    Frankly, I would have been a little worried about myself if I had.
    I settled down under the blankets, contentedly tired and ready to sleep. But I wasn’t due to get much that night. My eyes were just drifting shut when the beam of headlights swept the prairie—only one pair at first; then another and another and another until the landscape leaped and danced with light, and the sound of laboring motors filled the air. I opened the tent flap wide and looked out.
    The cars were all the same make, big Hudson sedans. Their rebuilt bodies were half-again as long as they had been originally, and they were equipped with extra–heavy duty springs and tires. Canvas water bags hung from the radiator caps. A winch, for winching out of quicksand and mud, was bolted to the reinforced front bumper. Roped to the roof were four spare tires, and a set of digging-out tools. Roped to a built-on platform at the rear was a pile of baggage.
    They were stagecoaches, and they went wherever man went, to all the places where trains didn’t go and never would. Just as the horsedrawn stagecoach was the forerunner of the train, these were the forerunner of our present-day bus system. The drivers wore boots and broad-brimmed hats, and they were tanned the color of saddle leather. They wore gunbelts and .45’s, and they didn’t wear them for decoration.
    Their passengers that night were welders and other skilled workmen—dragline and ditcher operators, heavy-machinery mechanics and the like. They were high-pay men with strong unions, so they doubtless all owned cars. Which, needless to say, they’d been smart enough to leave at home.
    A pipeline was no place to bring a car, not if it was worth anything. It would be stolen—whole or piece by piece—the first time you turned your back to it.
    The long line of Hudsons pulled into camp, and drove off into the night again. Their recent passengers began to bunk down in the tents, calling back and forth to each other, and making a lot of noise about it. They were sore. They had a right to be. The line had waited until the very last minute before notifying them to report to work in the morning. They were worn out from traveling, yet they would get almost no rest before facing up to a hard day. They were hungry, but they could get no food.
    The pipeline company—its financial backers, rather—had let them in for this hardship merely to save a few dollars. The relatively small cost of feeding them supper. For if a man was in camp, he had to be fed.
    Normally, the bosses on pipeline jobs were pretty free and easy about such things. Your wages were docked a dollar a day for room and board (“slop and flop”), and if you didn’t have any pay coming—if you were in camp a day before the job started—you were welcome to eat without paying. But it obviously wasn’t going to be that way here. The moneymen on this job weren’t giving anything away.
    Everything finally quieted down, and I went to sleep. Little more than an hour later, about an hour before dawn, I was awakened again.
    Truckloads of men were coming into camp—the common working stiffs, guys who had been jungled up in town while they waited for the job to open. They climbed down from the big flatbeds, hurried bleary-eyed into the tents to claim bunks for themselves. Like the welders and other skilled workmen, they, too, were victims of the line’s penny-pinching. Called into camp at the last possible moment to save the cost of one meal.
    They were hungry and worn-out, too tired to do anything but curse. About as