The Hunter and Other Stories Page 7

The kid didn’t make out too well on his venture and went bust after the first day. Action took his twenty-dollar payoff and roughed the kid’s hair with his fingers.

  “You’re wasting your time, Vit, when you work with a small roll. You’ve got to begin fat or you just can’t make it.”

  The kid’s big black eyes had grown bigger and more desperate looking. His gestures had become quicker and reflected an overwrought inner tension that threatened to consume him.

  “I can get dough, Action,” he offered. “At least I can get stuff that’s worth dough. If I do, Action,” he pleaded, “would you hock it for me, old friend?”

  The old friend hocked the kid’s books and when the books began to run out, little items that came from the home. But tie clasps and confirmation rings don’t bring in much. The kid laid a big turnip of a gold watch on the table one evening. Action hefted it and gasped.

  “It’s a ton weight, Vit, for sure. It’ll bring in at least ten or fifteen for the gold alone.”

  “Not the gold, Action. Just hock it. I got to get it back later on. Get me fifteen for it and you can keep five.”

  The pawnbroker offered twenty on a loan and commented happily on the weight of the gold case. Action was upset over what he had to do but he did it. The Frammis-We-Pay-Highest-Prices-for-Old-Gold Company gave him forty bucks for the gold and tossed the unwanted works into a trash basket.

  The kid accepted his ten with delight and ran through it in a day. He was feverish when he left that evening and Action solicitously made him bundle up against the autumn winds. He phoned Action that night.

  “I just got to get the watch back tomorrow, Action. Something has come up and I just got to return it. Lend me fifteen bucks old pal and I’ll return it to you first chance I get.”

  “I ain’t even got the five you gave me,” muttered Action.

  “You don’t understand,” half screamed the kid, “I got to get it back. It ain’t a maybe situation anymore!”

  “Must or maybe, I ain’t got the dough.”

  “I’ll get it somehow and give it to you tomorrow so that you can get it back for me.”

  Action wrestled inside for a bit.

  “Did you hear me, old friend, I’ll get the dough to you somehow.”

  “No use, kid, the watch ain’t hocked. I sold the gold and the works were scrapped. There’s no way of ever getting it back.”

  The kid gasped. A sick despairing whine came wailing over the wire in a heartrending keen and the phone clicked off.

  Action didn’t show at the poolroom the next day, but it didn’t matter. Neither did the kid. In a few days, Action seemed to have forgotten that Vittorio had ever existed.

  I mentioned the kid to him a year or so later and he told the story of the watch. I sat down on the nearest curb and tried to hold down a cantankerous stomach. Action drew his cigar out of his mouth, slowly bubbled bolls of smoke in a gray, upward spiralling arch.

  “One thing bothers the hell out of me,” he said, “what in hell ever became of the kid?”

  MEN

  COMMENTARY

  Dashiell Hammett’s long-standing interest in the ways in which men struggle to find their places among each other and in the world is reflected in the eight stories collected here. The pulp magazines of the post-WWI era had provided an ideal marketplace for Hammett’s hard-boiled crime fiction—“real, honest-to-Jasper he-man stuff” in the words of Black Mask editor Phil Cody—satisfying blue-collar readers with triumphant tales of working heroes who were both shrewd and strong. The explorations of masculinity featured here, however, all of which were unpublished during Hammett’s lifetime, seem targeted to broader audiences. Hammett had his earliest sights set on tony literary periodicals and later, as his reputation developed, on the more lucrative slick magazines. The first three tales were completed no later than 1926. The last two were written perhaps a decade later. In the span of those years Hammett’s ambitions expanded, his standpoint shifted, and his writing evolved—yet his attention to core tensions remained fixed, sharp, and wryly irreverent.

  “Fragments of Justice”—one of the earliest pieces of Hammett’s unpublished work—was sold to Forum magazine, but never released. It was likely submitted sometime in 1922, when Hammett’s references to the Jack Dempsey–Georges Carpentier fight of July 1921 and Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle’s acquittal in February 1922 would have been fresh in readers’ minds. As in “Seven Pages” (in the Men and Women section that follows), Hammett uses a series of vignettes to mock private conceits and public conventions.

  “A Throne for the Worm” was suited to and probably intended for publication in the Smart Set, “The Aristocrat among Magazines,” edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Smart Set debuted Hammett’s first published fiction in October 1922, and featured five additional contributions in the year that followed. Hammett explores one of his favorite early topics in this story—the struggle of a man who suffers daily humiliation while yearning for a modicum of respect.

  In “Magic,” Hammett melds his concern for professional obligation with his enthusiastic interest in the supernatural. Among his favorite writers on the mystical arts was Arthur Edward Waite, who wrote the classic work on Rosicrucianism, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (1924), mentioned by Hammett in his second novel, The Dain Curse (1929). Waite also wrote The Book of Black Magic and Pacts (1898) revised as The Book of Ceremonial Magic (1911), apparently used as a reference source for this story. As in the tale of the Maltese falcon, Hammett informs his fiction with scholarly accuracy. The Black Pullet manuscript, including its protracted title and subtitle, is genuine, first published, according to Waite, in Rome in 1740.

  “Faith” was probably completed in 1926, the year the Hammett family moved from Eddy to Hyde Street. Its dark conflict is consistent with Hammett’s personal viewpoints. Although raised as a Catholic, he was zealously critical of the Church, which he considered a political troublemaker and exploiter of the poor. Reference to Wobbly songster Joe Hill’s “The Preacher and the Slave” also points to an early awareness of progressive labor causes. Hammett’s sympathies in the contest between workmen are never in question.

  “An Inch and a Half of Glory” was written shortly after “Faith,” listing first the same Hyde Street address, then Post Street, where Hammett lived between 1927 and 1929, while writing his first three novels—Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon. Unlike the novels, however, there is no crime involved in the short story. Questions of valor and identity drive the narrative, evidence that even during Hammett’s Black Mask heyday, he strove for more mainstream expressions of his talent. The influence of two young daughters on Hammett’s life during this period may have heightened his sensitivity to a man’s duty to vulnerable youth.

  The first page of “Nelson Redline” is missing from Hammett’s archives, lost at some point between the writing and the saving. The title is penciled in Hammett’s hand on the second sheet. The setting is almost certainly San Francisco and the tension, much like in “Inch and a Half of Glory,” stems from choices, social expectations, and questions of character revealed in response to the threat of fire.

  “Monk and Johnny Fox” marks a break in the short-story sequence. There is no header, no address, fewer clues to time and place. But the text suggests a shift from San Francisco to New York, where Hammett lived, off and on, beginning in late 1929. The style and subject matter link the story to “His Brother’s Keeper” (Collier’s, February 1934), likewise narrated in the first person by a troubled young fighter called Kid. The storyteller in “Monk” is more wary and self-aware than in “Brother’s Keeper” and it is unclear whether the two are discrete characters who share a commonplace nickname or a single youth who (much like Effie in The Maltese Falcon) has been forced to abandon hopeful innocence. While several of Hammett’s works feature cameo appearances from the fighting world, only these two stories focus on its extreme masculine turf and agonizing, untenable options.

  “The Cure” explo
res the tenets of courage—a hallmark of male identity—as both man against environment and man against man. In “Nelson Redline” and “Inch and a Half of Glory,” defining challenges stemmed from fire, one of humankind’s primordial adversaries. In “The Cure,” the issue is water, a less volatile but equally intractable foe. The conflict is set at an unidentified lakeside, amplified by the taunts of a braggart, and complicated (as often happens in Hammett’s fiction) by the presence of a woman. Although Hammett’s draft typescript lacks date or address, the story is markedly subtle and sophisticated in its treatment of social interactions, suggesting that the tale dates to at least the early 1930s.

  FRAGMENTS OF JUSTICE

  I

  When his stiffening legs began to propel the lawnmower so waveringly that the lawns were often irregularly marked by thin curving lines of unclipped grass—like raw recruits in their first “company front”—and the hedges often went untrimmed for days while he waited for weather favorable to the wrapping of his fingers around the handle of the pruning-shears, the Park Board pensioned Tim Gurley. His pension was just large enough to pay for meals and a bed at a very modest boarding-house, with a little left over for tobacco. Some day he would need clothes, but not many, and not for some months. His failing sight and hearing obviated the necessity of any expenditures for amusements.

  Within a week Tim Gurley had settled into the habits of his new life. He would get out of bed at six or six-thirty in the morning, and putter around his room until seven-thirty, when breakfast was ready. After the meal he would leave the house for the public square—two blocks away—that had been his charge until now. There, he would sit on a bench—preferably one facing the sun; or, on very warm days, he would sit on the grass itself—sometimes talking to other old men who were almost indistinguishable from him both in appearance and history, but more often sitting silent and alone, neither wholly awake nor wholly asleep. On cool days he would leave the square for the ledge that ran around the Public Library, where he could sit on the sunny side, with the broad building behind him fending off the wind. When it rained, he stayed at home.

  One day when he returned to his boarding-house for dinner, he found a summons to jury duty there. After that life was different.

  He served on many juries; he liked serving. There was the two dollars a day—later raised to three—that it brought in; and two dollars would buy a lot of tobacco and of the sticky taffy he was beginning to enjoy so much despite its malignant effect upon his remaining teeth. But the money wasn’t the only consideration, nor even the most potent one. He liked the feeling of importance that came to him in the jury-box, the knowledge that all these attorneys and their clients and their witnesses were here for but one purpose: to convince him, Tim Gurley, of the justice of their cases; that he was having a hand in the world’s graver work, helping make weighty and important decisions, doing justice.

  Neither his eyes nor his ears were very responsive now, and at first he found himself frequently being excused from service after the attorneys’ preliminary questions; but he soon learned what was expected of him. By straining his attention to the utmost he could catch the substance of the lawyers’ queries—sufficient to tell him whether a yes or a no was expected of him.

  He would have liked to have heard more clearly the testimony of some of the witnesses, especially when he could see that the other jurymen were leaning forward in their chairs with attentive expressions upon their faces; but a man can’t have everything, and now and then a witness would take the stand and speak clearly enough for Tim Gurley to hear every word he said. But, even at the worst, Tim Gurley was never wholly at loss for knowledge of what was going on: the attorneys, while delivering their closing arguments, almost invariably stood close to the jury-box and reviewed the salient points of their cases in language that was loud and impassioned and easily audible.

  II

  Born into a family whose adherence to the principles of the Democratic Party dated from the 1830s, Elton Bemis, by shunning all political doctrine that did not spring from Democratic sources, had kept his heritage unsullied. His reading was confined to two Democratic newspapers—one in the morning and one in the evening—and, while professing a worldly skepticism, he really believed everything he read therein; not excepting the vague, but nonetheless stirring, stories of abductions by gaudy villains and incarcerations in unknown prisons told by young women who return to their families after protracted absences. He had, on the strength of their representative war records as advertised in the same papers, bet $10 on Carpentier to defeat Dempsey; he had denounced the acquittal of Roscoe Arbuckle as a flagrant miscarriage of justice; and he never trusted a man who parted his hair in the middle.

  He had forbidden his daughter to see or communicate with the young man of her choice on the grounds that, although otherwise unexceptionable, the young man was a Roman Catholic; and had he known that his daughter had cultivated a mild appetite for Egyptian tobacco it is quite likely that he would have put her out of the house, though he himself burned black tobacco in a black pipe to the stimulation of his salivary glands.

  In his youth he had resigned from a pleasure and social club upon the admittance of a Jew to its membership; and notwithstanding that economic expediency had induced him to assume a less rigorous attitude in later years, he still got a definite pleasure from the memory of that act. He firmly believed that his country could, in either one pitched battle or a campaign of any length whatsoever, defeat the other nations of the world all together; and he had nothing but contempt for all foreigners, were they Swedes, Limies, Harps, Heinies, Bohunks, or any of the dozen or more varieties of Dagoes. He admitted, with suitable reservations, the existence in the Negro of a soul.

  One day Elton Bemis sat in the jury-box, in Department 4 of the Superior Court, and counsel for the plaintiff asked him:

  “If you are selected to serve on this jury, Mr. Bemis, do you think that you can give both parties to this action a fair and impartial hearing? Will you be guided by the evidence submitted and the instructions of the Court, and not allow your mind to be influenced by personal feelings or prejudices?”

  And Elton Bemis replied:

  “Yes, sir!”

  III

  He was undersized and faded and with the face of an unhealthy rodent. From the corners of a thin-lipped and colorless mouth whose looseness had erased everything of expression but a pusillanimous cruelty, lines, deep but nevertheless not clearly defined, ran up to a little crafty, twitching nose. His forehead and chin were negligible: twin slantings away into soiled collar and unkempt hair. Furtive eyes of a dark and dull opacity were set as close together as the sunken bridge of his nose would permit; the eyes moved with an uneasy jerkiness and were seldom focused upon anything higher than a man’s shoulder. His dirty fingers, with their chewed nails, scratched nervously at each other, his face, his legs.

  He sat slumped down in his chair, listening with manifest disgust to the arguments with which his fellow jurors had been engrossed since the bailiff had locked them in the jury-room. Presently there came a lull in the discussion.

  He spat inaccurately at a distant cuspidor, and spoke with whining plaintiveness:

  “What’s the use of arguing? That guy’s guilty: you can look at him and see he’s a crook!”

  A THRONE FOR THE WORM

  “Are you going to be all morning? Your breakfast is on the table?”

  “I’ll be down in a minute now.”

  Elmer Kipp’s reedy voice wavered like an uncertain ghost down the stairs that had resounded to his wife’s ululant contralto. Hastily finishing his shaving, he got into the rest of his clothes while descending to the dining-room, where his wife and daughter were eating, and where his own meal was cooling on a cold plate.

  “Good morning,” the head of the Kipp family said indistinctly.

  His wife said nothing; Doris’ inattention was even more deliberate, and when she spoke presently to her mother she spoke as one who complains without hope
of relief—for the purpose of having the records show that an objection has been made, as the lawyers say.

  “I do wish papa would use a little judgment. He came in the parlor last night, and I thought he was never going to bed. He staid until almost time for Lloyd to go. I should think a girl who earns her own living and pays her own board might be allowed to entertain her own company.”

  Kipp looked at his daughter without raising his head: a turning up of faded eyes that made him resemble not so much an abject man as a cartoon of an abject man.

  “I didn’t think that— We got talking and—” He brightened with foolish guile. “That Lloyd is a mighty clever young fellow.”

  Doris did not seem to have heard her father.

  “Just because Lloyd has to be polite, papa seems to think Lloyd comes to see him.”

  Mrs. Kipp sighed with exaggerated resignation.

  “Your father will never be any different. I never knew such a man for not considering other people. I’ve talked to him enough, goodness knows. But you can’t do anything with him.”

  At the office Kipp found something wrong with his chair. When he attempted to lean back in it the superstructure came out of its socket and slid him off to the floor. An examination convinced him that this was not his chair at all, that his chair now served Harry Terns. But the chairs were all of the same model and age; and for the recovery of his own chair conclusive proof of proprietorship, as well as some skill in repartee, would be essential. So Kipp merely called the chief clerk’s attention to the broken one, and brought in a straight-backed chair from the outer office.

  For half an hour Kipp’s world was six sheets of paper, each divided into little squares that either held inked numerals or yawned for them. Then a gust of air flung the sheets into swirling anarchy. He closed the window beside his desk and rearranged his world.