The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

The man who had chuckled went to work in the process-room, where half a dozen Americans and as many Polacks cooked the fresh-canned tomatoes in big iron kettles. He was a small man, compactly plump, with round maroon eyes above round cheeks whose original ruddiness had been tinted by sunburn to a definite orange. His nose was small and merrily pointed, and a snuff-user’s pouch in his lower lip, exaggerating the lift of his mouth at the corners, gave him a perpetual grin. He held himself erect, his chest arched out, and bobbed when he walked, rising on the ball of the propelling foot midway each step. A man of forty-five or so, who answered to the name Feach and hummed through his nose while he guided the steel-slatted baskets from truck, to kettle, to truck.

After he had gone, the men remembered that from the first there had been a queerness about Feach, but not even Morphy tried to define that queerness. “A nut,” Morphy said, but that was indefinite.

What Feach had was a secret. Evidence of it was not in his words only: they were neither many nor especially noteworthy, and his silence held as much ambiguity as his speech. There was in his whole air — in the cock of his round, boy’s head, in the sparkle of his red-brown eyes, in the nasal timbre of his voice, in his trick of puffing out his cheeks when he smiled — a sardonic knowingness that seemed to mock whatever business was at hand. He had for his work and for the men’s interests the absent-minded, bantering sort of false-seriousness that a busy parent has for its child’s affairs. His every word, gesture, attention, seemed thinly to mask preoccupation with some altogether different thing that would presently appear: a man waiting for a practical joke to blossom.

He and Morphy worked side by side. Between them the first night had put a hostility which neither tried to remove. Three days later they increased it.

It was early evening. The men, as usual, were idling between their quarters and the river, waiting for bed-time. Feach had gone indoors to get a can of snuff from his bedding. When he came out Morphy was speaking.

“Of course not,” he was saying. “You don’t think a God big enough to make all this would be crazy enough to do it, do you? What for? What would it get Him?”

A freckled ex-sailor, known to his fellows as Sandwich, was frowning with vast ponderance over the cigarette he was making, and when he spoke the deliberation in his voice was vast.

“Well, you can’t always say for certain. Sometimes a thing looks one way, and when you come to find out, is another. It don’t look like there’s no God. I’ll say that. But—”

Feach, tamping snuff into the considerable space between his lower teeth and lip, grinned around his fingers, and managed to get derision into the snapping of the round tin lid down on the snuff-can.

“So you’re one of them guys?” he challenged Morphy.

“Uh-huh.” The big man’s voice was that of one who, confident of his position’s impregnability, uses temperateness to provoke an assault. “If somebody’d show me there was a God, it’d be different. But I never been showed.”

“I’ve saw wise guys like you before!” The jovial ambiguity was suddenly gone from Feach; he was earnest, and indignant. “You want what you call proof before you’ll believe anything. Well, you wait — you’ll get your proof this time, and plenty of it.”

“That’s what I’d like to have. You ain’t got none of this proof on you, have you?”

Feach sputtered.

Morphy rolled over on his back and began to roar out a song to the Maryland sky, a mocking song that Wobblies sing to the tune of “When the bugle calls up yonder I’ll be there.”