Jim Thompson - Wild Town

Jim Thompson

Wild Town

Originally, the place had been one of those old-time cattle towns, the kind you see throughout West and Far West Texas. Just another wide place in a dusty road, a sunbaked huddle of false-fronted buildings with sheet-iron awnings extending out to the curb. Then, a guy with a haywire drilling rig had moved in-a wildcatter. And he optioned a lot of leases on his guarantee to drill, and then he predicated the leases for high interest loans. And what with one thing and another-stealing, begging, kiting checks, angling "dry hole" money from the big companies who wanted to see the area tested-he managed to sink a well.

The well blew in for three thousand barrels of high-grade paraffin-base oil a day. Overnight, the town bulged like a woman eight months gone with triplets. A make-do type of woman, say, a to-hell-with-how-I-look type. For the demand for shelter was immediate, and building materials were hard to come by out here in the shortgrass middle of nowhere. Not only that, but it just isn't smart to put much money into boom-town property. Booms have a way of firzling out. A lake of oil can go dry the same as any other kind of lake.

So practically all the new structures were temporary- built as cheaply as possible and as quickly as possible. Shacks of wallboard and two-by-fours. Rough-planked, unfinished and unpainted sheds. Houses-and these predominated in the makeshift jungle-that were half frame and half canvas. Tent-houses they were called, or more commonly, rag-houses. And gnawed at by sulphur and salt-spray, they had the look of rags. They stretched out across the prairie in every direction, squatting and winding through the forest of derricks. Shabby, dingy, creaking with the ever-present wind, senile while still in their nonage: a city of rags, spouting-paradoxically?-on the very crest of great riches.

That was the general order of things. The outstanding exception to it was the fourteen-story Hanlon Hotel, built, named after, and owned in fee simple by the wildcatter who had brought in the discovery well. Most people regarded it as proof that all wildcatters are crazy, their insanity increasing in proportion to their success. They pointed to the fact that Hanlon had been blasted out of his drilling rig by the first wild gush of oil, and that the subsequent sixty-foot fall had doubtless been as injurious to his brain as it was to his body.

They may have been right, at that; Mike Hanlon guessed that they might be, sometimes, when his head got to hurting. But just as he'd always been a hell-for-leather guy, not giving a good goddamn for what, he didn't give one now. His wildcatting days were over. Death had claimed his legs, and it was creeping slowly but implacably upward. Still, he'd wanted to stay near the oil, "his" oil, the oil that all the damned fools had said wasn't there. And he wanted to live right for a change, in something besides a crummy flea-bag or cot-house.

So he built the hotel-simply because he wanted to, and because his money was certain to outlast his ability to want. For the same reason he acquired a good-looking wife, marrying a gal who applied for a hostess job. That she was something less than virginal he was sure. Male or female, none but the sinners sought jobs in a ragtown hotel. And Joyce-to give her name-had probably wiggled further on her back than he had traveled on foot.

But what of it, anyway? shrugged Mike Hanlon. He himself had slept with practically everything that couldn't outrun him. Such activities were denied him now, by virtue of his accident, but he saw not a reason in the world why she should share his deprivation. Just so long as she was decent about it-careful-it was okay with him. Just so long as she didn't cause talk, make him look like a damned fool.

That was all he asked or expected of her. That and, of course, looking pretty, and being nice to him. Chewing the fat with him, you know. Cracking a jug with him when he got the blues. Wheeling him around the hotel, now and then, so that he could see how much the goddamned thieves, his employees, were stealing from him Mike was very much opposed to thieves, and, fortunately for them, he'd caught none redhanded yet. Having been a clever thief himself, he knew the very serious danger they represented to men of property.

But getting back to Joyce. He expected little of her, and asked less; not even that she should occupy the same suite that he did. And on a not-too-distant someday, she would inherit everything he owned. So he was sure that their arrangement would work out fine. Why wouldn't it? he asked himself. Why shouldn't she be satisfied?

There was no reason that he could think of. She was riding a good horse, and she should have been content to stick with it for the distance. But, gradually, he became aware that she wasn't. Not that she was guilty of any overt acts. There was nothing he could put his finger on. Still, he knew; he had a hunch about her. And with good reason, he trusted his hunches.

He tried easing up on his already few demands. That wasn't the answer. He became more demanding, clamping down hard in the dough department. Instinct-his hunch- told him that he still wasn't scoring. He couldn't get at it, somehow, the impatience or sheer orneriness or whatever it was that was prodding her toward murder. And, no, he simply couldn't kick her out. Or, rather, he couldn't do it without giving her a fifty-fifty split of his wealth. Their marriage contract so stipulated, and the contract couldn't be broken.

If he divorced her-fifty-fifty. If she divorced him, or "otherwise separated herself from his place of domicile," she was to receive nothing, "the dollar and other valuable considerations already paid over to be considered a full and equal half of the said Mike Hanlon's estate'

Well, of course, Mike wasn't even about to buy his way off of the spot. He'd never done it before, and he sure as hell wasn't going to begin at his age. Anyway-anyway, he thought bitterly-she probably wouldn't go for half split. She struck him as a whole-hog player, that little lady. If he offered her less, gave her reason to believe that she was going to get less, she might drop the drill on him immediately. So he rocked along, worrying and wondering. Getting as jumpy as a bit on granite.

Finally, he made a hypothetical exposure of his problem to the chief deputy sheriff, who, practically speaking, was the sheriff and all law in the county as well. The interview was something less than reassuring.

The chief was West Texas "old family," a guy named Lou Ford. For a man who was almost perpetually smiling, he was undoubtedly the most aggravating, disconcerting sonof-a-bitch of all the sons-of-bitches Hanlon had known.

"Well, let's see now," he drawled. "You say this fellow's wife is out to get him. But she's never done nothing against him so far, and he's got no proof that she plans to. So the question is, what can he do about it. I got the straight of it, Mr. Hanlon?"

"That's right."

Ford frowned, shrugged, and shook his head with smiling helplessness. "Let me ask you one, Mr. Hanlon. If a bitch wolf can couple with a dog and a half in a day and a half, how long does it take her to come in heat on a rainy morning?"

"Huh? "Wh-aat?" Hanlon roared. "Why, you goddamned snooty bastard! I-Wait! Come back here!"

"Just as soon as I borry a gun," Ford promised, on his way to the door. "Don't never carry one myself."

"A gun? But-but-"

"Or maybe you'd like to take back that 'bastard'? Sure wish you would. Don't seem quite right somehow shootin' a fella in a wheelchair."

There was a wistful note in his voice, sudden death in his eyes. He looked at Hanlon, smiling his gentle smile, and an icy chifi ran up the wildcatter's spine. Grudgingly he made an apology, tacking on an insult at its end.

"Should have known you wouldn't do anything. Too damned busy taking graft."