I’ll tell ya about it sometime maybe.
Ya see, it’s jus’ somepin you wanta know. Kinda interestin’.
But I got a kind a funny idear the bes’ thing’d be if I forget about it for a while.
Maybe in a little while it won’t be that way.
Right now when I think about it my guts gets all droopy an’ nasty feelin’.
Look here, Al, I’ll tell ya one thing—the jail house is jus’ a kind a way a drivin’ a guy slowly nuts.
See?
An’ they go nuts, an’ you see ’em an’ hear ’em, an’ pretty soon you don’ know if you’re nuts or not.
When they get to screamin’ in the night sometimes you think it’s you doin’ the screamin’—an’ sometimes it is.”
Al said,
“Oh! I won’t talk about it no more, Tom.”
“Thirty days is all right,” Tom said. “An’ a hunderd an’ eighty days is all right.
But over a year—I dunno. There’s somepin about it that ain’t like nothin’ else in the worl’.
Somepin screwy about it, somepin screwy about the whole idea a lockin’ people up.
Oh, the hell with it!
I don’ wanna talk about it.
Look a the sun a-flashin’ on them windas.”
The truck drove to the service-station belt, and there on the right-hand side of the road was a wrecking yard—an acre lot surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, a corrugated iron shed in front with used tires piled up by the doors, and price-marked.
Behind the shed there was a little shack built of scrap, scrap lumber and pieces of tin.
The windows were windshields built into the walls.
In the grassy lot the wrecks lay, cars with twisted, stove-in noses, wounded cars lying on their sides with the wheels gone.
Engines rusting on the ground and against the shed.
A great pile of junk; fenders and truck sides, wheels and axles; over the whole lot a spirit of decay, of mold and rust; twisted iron, half-gutted engines, a mass of derelicts.
Al drove the truck up on the oily ground in front of the shed.
Tom got out and looked into the dark doorway.
“Don’t see nobody,” he said, and he called, “Anybody here?”
“Jesus, I hope they got a ’25 Dodge.”
Behind the shed a door banged.
A specter of a man came through the dark shed.
Thin, dirty, oily skin tight against stringy muscles.
One eye was gone, and the raw, uncovered socket squirmed with eye muscles when his good eye moved. His jeans and shirt were thick and shiny with old grease, and his hands cracked and lined and cut. His heavy, pouting underlip hung out sullenly.
Tom asked,
“You the boss?”
The one eye glared.
“I work for the boss,” he said sullenly. “Whatcha want?”
“Got a wrecked ’ 25 Dodge?
We need a con-rod.”
“I don’t know.
If the boss was here he could tell ya—but he ain’t here.
He’s went home.”
“Can we look an’ see?”
The man blew his nose into the palm of his hand and wiped his hand on his trousers.
“You from hereabouts?”
“Come from east—goin’ west.”
“Look aroun’ then.
Burn the goddamn place down, for all I care.”
“Looks like you don’t love your boss none.”
The man shambled close, his one eye flaring.
“I hate ’im,” he said softly. “I hate the son-of-a-bitch!
Gone home now.