Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938
- Автор: Трит Лоуренс, Вулрич Корнелл
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
He stayed at Crowning Steel for eight months as a craneman, and then quit. He went over into Ohio. He went on into Pennsylvania. He came back through Middleton, Ohio, a year later, and hired into a small mill in Indiana the next spring.
He’d changed, but his eyes remained the same; his eyes and his mind. He knew, himself, that he was insane; if being crazy meant getting off the main track. He’d been fired from one job for getting in a fight and nearly killing another millhand, and he’d seen there that his temper was keeping up with his mind. He saw how he was going, but he didn’t know how to stop. He was turning himself into a madman, but it seemed to him, subconsciously, that his way out was along the road he was going. He couldn’t stop, give it up, forget about it; his mind would fly apart at that. It had held that one picture up too long.
He never wasted words, talked with the men he worked with. Unless he saw a heavy built young man, with coarse black hair, and wide set ears and a thick bridged nose... Then he watched him, started dropping into the mill restaurant at the same time, talked with him about other mills, checked up on him until he had made certain it was the wrong man.
In Indiana, at the small Harper Mills, he was put on the big crane, working on the annealing floor. It was a job for a good craneman, but left a man a lot of hours free every turn.
He’d been there three days when he met Sack Berman. Sack was short, built like a gorilla; he was a doubler on the big mill, a job that took a man to do. Part of every other heat he’d take the sheets from the mill after the breakdown, pull them apart — the hot bars stuck together as they were rolled into sheets — and help the heater shove them into the furnace to be reheated. As they came back after their next pass he caught one end of them with his tongs, waited until the matcher had separated them again, and then folded them over, like books, sent them back for another reheating. It was a tough job — and a man had to have sheet mill experience to take it on.
Sack Berman had had experience. He liked to talk about his jobs in the Pittsburgh mills. He talked to John Carver about them. And he had big, flapping ears, the lobes far out from the cheeks. And a thick bridged nose, shoved to the right. His hair was brown, not black, but at the part it was a different color. That might have been just dirt. Maybe...
John Carver talked with him about other mills.
“Boomer?” Sack asked.
“Boomer. Get tired of one place.”
“Me too, boy. I been wanting to shove on somewhere else for a couple years. Maybe will, next spring.”
“Hell,” said John Carver, his eyes glowing, “go now.”
Sack hesitated. “One thing about it, you get no good jobs that way. Guess I’ll wait...” He brought up one wide, muscled hand to snap the cigarette from his mouth. John Carver looked at it, at the web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger. It was grimy from the mill, but not tattooed.
Sack went on: “And this is a good town, here. Plenty live. You married? We’ll go out some payday and kick the burg apart.” Sack took out a penknife and opened it, ran the point of the blade up and down his thumb. John Carver would see a lot of that knife; it was Sack’s habit to hold it in his hand when he talked, balance it, flip it up in the air and catch it. John Carver would see the knife in his sleep...
He saw Sack in a saloon a couple of weeks later, saw him again in the same place a week after that. And that evening Sack said, “Got a couple of babes lined up for later.”
“Boy,” said John Carver, “I’m on.” The coiled snake in him was restless, was baring its fangs, growing more anxious to spring. He couldn’t see clearly, his hands were shaking so that the liquor spilled from his glass...
The two babes wanted to play and be coy and Sack didn’t. They were in Sack’s car, out on a country road. John Carver, in the back seat, was kissing the girl in his arms, listening blindly to what he could hear from the front.
“You don’t think a millman’s good enough for you, do you, honey?” Sack bantered.
“Oh, I think you’re grand. You big ham.”
“Ham, huh? I’ll tell you something, honey. I’m a college man. You didn’t know that, did you?” Sack was pretty drunk. “University educated, that’s me. How I rate now?”
“Oh, you’re marvelous.”
“Come on, don’t stall me, sweetheart. Where’s your room?”
“It’s at home, of course.”
“Of course, of course. But I mean some place just for you and me.”
The girl in John Carver’s arms jerked up her head. “What’s the matter, Jackie? Something scare you?”
John Carver slowly settled back on his scat. His eyes were wide, staring. Sack looked back. He laughed. “We’re heading for town, Jack. The gals will show us where to go.”
“I could tell you where to go right now,” said the girl beside him with emphasis.
Sack raised his hand and hit her in the face. “You dirty little crimp. Playing lady with me.” He hit her again.
John Carver went head first into the front seat. He slammed out at Sack’s face with both hands, madly, savagely. Something hit him, he bounced and passed out...
He was stretched out on the road when he came to. Sack was rubbing his hands, the girls were standing behind him giggling.
“Boy,” said Sack, “you must have been pretty high.”
“Yeah.” Carver raised his head, dropped it back at the pain.
Sack grinned. “I’ll take a look at your chin.”
They were in the glare of the car’s headlights. Sack put his right hand up under Carver’s chin; he’d just been rubbing his wrists, and that web of flesh between his thumb and forefinger had been reddened by the friction.
The print of a heart with an arrow through it stood out, like a scar, on the reddened skin.
John Carver closed his eyes. “I’ll be all right now,” he said.
He was stripping off hot iron from the annealing pots. He’d run the rack of the crane over the tray stacked with iron, lower it until the hookups had clamped it around a lift of the hot, annealed sheet steel and carry it down to the other end of the annealing floor to be piled according to size.
Four or five men were sitting around a cold pile of iron, eating sandwiches from their lunch buckets, enjoying for a while the comparative coolness of the annealing floor. One of them was Sack Berman.
Carver saw them leaving, straggling back up to the mills; he stopped the crane, yelled down to Sack: “Stick around a minute. I’m coming down for dinner after this next lift.”
Sack nodded up and down and stretched out on the cold pile for a sleep. His turn wasn’t on for half an hour. He looked up to laugh and rub his chin.
John Carver shouted back: “My head feels like hell.” He saw Sack get out his knife, start scraping his fingernails with it. The snake was writhing, coiling more tightly, gathering itself...
He went back for the last lift, picked it up, swung it out over the annealing floor. There were ten tons of hot sheet iron in the rack.
He was carrying it low, lower than usual, only a few feet above the other iron piled on the floor. He carried it toward the pile Sack lay on, his hands tightened on the controls, and the snake lashed out.
He reversed the crane so that it howled like a street car jamming to a stop. In a split instant the lift jerked back, shuddered and stopped with ten tons of steel hanging plumb — and then he dropped it.
A wild yell ripped out, hung for a heartbeat in the crash of other sound, broke off. John Carver jabbed his elbow against a live, low voltage wire, burned it, held it there until it seared in, deep and crippling. He fell against the wall of his cage, passed out, partly from the pain of the burn, but partly from the sudden, emptying absence of that deadly snake from his brain...