The Moth

  “Yeah, me?”

  “... Jack, I’m not sure I’d have rigged those masts the way Mace rigged them. I think I’d have guyed one big mast to a step, and from that run a swinging boom—but those are the masts we’ve got, and we’ll have to make them do. But the way I want to do it, I don’t have any sap blowing whistles. I’ll be in the refinery office, and I’ll throw the switch. But the can of dynamite itself, I want to swing on that cable. Swing, like rockaby baby. And somebody’s got to swing it.”

  “Meaning me?”

  “Meaning you.”

  He looked at me, pretty sharp, and went on: “You’ll have to be close. That can has to be swung a few times, short, controlled swings, so I can check how high it’s going to go, and everything else. Whoever swings it has to do it with a wire. We can’t use rope—it would burn in twenty seconds, once it got close to that heat. We use wire, plain baling wire. I’ll need three, four, five, six, or a dozen trial swings, and then she’s got to rock—one, two, and a heave. When she’s right over the hole, at the one moment when anything swinging stops stock still, I’ll touch my button. By that time you should be flat on your face, and with luck—and the cone of burst as I think it’ll develop—you’ll be all right. But get this, Jack: maybe...”

  “Maybe I don’t have any luck—is that it?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  It was all ready, the inside pack made, the masts rigged, and the dynamite wired up, around sundown of the third day after that. I was there, with Rohrer inside the refinery office, looking like Superman dressed up for goalie on the interplanetary hockey team, in asbestos from helmet to shoes. The firemen had seen to that, and fact of the matter, it seemed to me they used as much juice on me as they did on the fire, which was pretty hard to get sore about. I had a helmet, mask, flyer’s suit, and gloves, everything either made of asbestos or quilted with it or stuffed with it, so if something went wrong at least I wouldn’t get fried like a bug in a light. And it seemed idiotic, the little I had to do, in relation to what it might cost me to do it. My job, as Rohrer said, was get out there, close to the fire, and give signals, whether the can was to go up, down, or sidewise, and how much. Then, when it was hanging right, I was to swing it, a little bit, a little bit, then more, then wham. It would all take, as well as I could figure out, five minutes, no more, and hardly any work.

  Rohrer had arranged the cable stuff a little different from the way Mace did it. Instead of having the main cable between masts, strung tight, and a hoisting job done on the can with the falls and traveling block, he had the can set and all adjusted so when the main cable tightened, everything would be in place with a minimum of swinging. It had been in place, as a matter of fact, for two days, pending arrival of the pack, which was what we were waiting for. Around five o’clock here it came, in the yellow truck of Fuller & Co., who made it. I reached for my mask, but Rohrer stopped me. Then he went in the next room and put in a phone call. Then he came back, and sat watching down the road. In about five minutes a siren sounded, and an ambulance came through. It parked by the Golden Glow. “All right, Jack.”

  I went out, stepped over what was left of the fence, and went on our property. I knew it must be hot but through my suit, and the asbestos soles on my shoes, I didn’t feel it. I heard something and looked around. Two blocks away, back of the ropes, was a crowd. They were giving me a cheer. I grabbed hands and shook them. I found my baling wire, pulled it tight, and waited. In a minute I heard Rohrer yell and the main cable began tightening. The pulley on the falls began nodding and jerking, wanting to roll to the sag in the middle, but the firemen on the guide cable held it. Then little by little the firemen let the falls pulley have its way and the dynamite left the ground. As it eased toward the middle it began spinning around. I tightened on my wire, which was fastened through a hole in the bottom rim of the can, to steady it. When it was near center it stopped. I sighted and wig-wagged, and it moved to exact position. Rohrer called at me to start some trial swings. With the total height, which included the dip on the main cable plus the drop of the falls, it had quite a radius, and I was surprised how slow the swings were. It seemed to me the can was riding a little high and I signaled. They let her down. I tried again and it seemed O.K. Rohrer called me over. “Jack, she’s not quite swinging true. Take position three or four feet to your right.”

  “O.K.”

  “When you hook her up, holler.”

  I went back, picked up my wire, and moved over to the point he said. I started her swinging again, and this time he called it was right. I pulled a little harder on the wire and the arc lengthened. I didn’t take up slack, on my wire I mean, for each swing. I’d let it slip through my fingers, then, on the far swing, when it would tighten, I’d pull. It must have taken five seconds for that can to swing over and swing back again, and I’d hate to tell you how much will power it took each time to increase that pull. But then, pretty soon, she was due. I heaved, yelled, and hit the dirt.

  It seemed to me I was in some horrible surf, made of wool, that was trying to tear me apart, and yet through it all I could hear the roar, and had a horrible feeling I had done something, I didn’t exactly know what, all for nothing, and eternity would go by, and I’d never have peace again. Then I could hear her voice, calling my name, and some other voice, a woman’s, talking to her, and a man’s. They were a nurse and a doctor, it turned out afterward. Then would come this pain in my head, with balls of fire shooting around. That was from their pressing on my eyeballs, a little trick they’ve got, to bring you to. I must have answered, then, so they quit it, because everything stopped. I was trying to say something and she was talking to me. “Forget the fire. The fire’s out. You put it out. Don’t you remember, Jack? You shot it out, then they brought you here—”

  “In how many pieces?”

  “One—and a little concussion.”

  “Yeah, but the goddam roar—”

  “Is gas. They’re working on it. Open your eyes, you’ll see. There’s no fire any more. You already put it out, and there are pieces in the paper about it, and everybody thinks you’re wonderful, and—”

  I opened my eyes, and it was the same old hospital room, but the glare was gone, and even the roar didn’t seem quite what it had been. And then it stopped. She looked at me, and we waited, and it seemed too good to believe that it wouldn’t start up again. But then the phone rang, and she grabbed it. As soon as she answered she handed it to me. “Jack!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Rohrer.”

  “Oh, hello.”

  “She’s out and she’s in! Boy, oh boy, we’ve got her. We’ve got her, and she’s still good, the best well that’s come in on the goddam hill in a year, and Mrs. Branch gets her refinery, and hells bells, boy, can’t you say something?”

  “Pal, I love you.”

  24

  IT WAS A YEAR, I guess, before I began sobering up, not from the champagne we drank celebrating, but from the business, and what I did for it, and from her. From the minute she took up the option, things began to break, and everything I touched turned to gold. First off, when we started our pumps on the other wells, they worked fine, and no particular damage had been done, so right way we got stuff to sell. When we brought in the new well, it was a heavy producer. The tanks were a five-hundred-dollar repair job. Our Luxor contract was nearly up, so we could put in pipe to the refinery right away, and a few weeks later make the switchover. Next, Mendel asked for pipe, and a week later, Perrin, so instead of Rohrer having to beat all the bushes on the hill for enough crude to keep himself busy, he had all he could handle, and could run to capacity. They didn’t have anything against Luxor, except that Luxor had done nothing while they were facing ruin, where I had risked my life and put out the fire. Then we had luck with still another well, that went down to the zone the previous permit had covered, and came in big. Next, we were offered a string of small filling stations, on lease, for so little we couldn’t turn them down, even if I hadn’t had a tip that
the Sepulveda road, where three or four of them were located, was to be improved. So when pretty soon business began to grow, we had a deal that let us make money and put our Seven-Star sign all over Los Angeles, in fifteen or twenty different places. We were nothing but a little independent outfit, but at last, as they say, we were integrated. We had wells, we had a plant, we had outlets. When our business was good, we got our price, retail. When it was off, we got rid of our surplus to other independents, but still made something. I made connections that took our lube, fuel, and asphalt, so wherever you looked, stuff was flowing. And wherever you listened, there was a pump. It’s a wonderful thing, a pump. It’s automatic: you sleep and it still goes. It’s like a heart, putting life into you.

  And if ever a woman could make a man drunk, from how she looked and thought and did, Hannah would be the one. Her eyes kept that shiny look, and she never got enough of me, which of course didn’t antagonize me. On looks, she was a knockout, a lot more than I had had any idea of when I first met her. After things began to break for us she began to dress, and made me do it. We took in shows in Los Angeles, she in gold gowns, with gold shoes and gold things in her hair, so she looked like something from Egypt, and me in white tie and silk hat. Wherever you went you could hear them ask who she was, and you could see she was made for drawing rooms and boulevards and opera houses. She said I was too, so we got along all right. And yet, that first Christmas we had, when she worked three days on the snow garden at one end of the living room, I looked at it when she cut the juice into it, and wondered if I really cared whether the train jumped its switches or not, or the dancing doll was flush with the plexiglass pool, so she was really skating. I tried to tell myself to snap out of it, that I had everything I had ever wanted, a dream job, big dough, the respect of the business I was in. I had a car, a Packard that just floated. I had an apartment, looking right over the ocean, in the Castile Arms, one of the swank places on the water front. I had a woman with every kind of looks there was, and a husband, just to make it really good, because Branch wasn’t making any motions toward divorce yet, and she couldn’t marry if she wanted to. And yet, if it was what I had been thirsty for, it never came clear, really to quench thirst, but had bubbles in it, like the damned champagne she was always drinking, and that I got so sick of I felt like life was nothing but one long string of Christmas afternoons. After a while I had it, or thought I did, what some of the trouble was. What stuck to my ribs was the job, and the stink of oil, and all the things I was able to do with it, so it really did things to me. But to her, for all her talk about my “machinist’s soul,” none of it meant anything but the money it brought in, and the things she could buy with it. Even that, I think, I could have stood, if she had stuck to cloth of gold and mink and opera tickets. But after a while she took the place in Beverly. It’s about twenty miles up the line, where all the movie stars live and Eastern millionaires. Her house cost four hundred dollars a month, furnished, with swimming pool out back and badminton at one side, and it was just right for the parties she began to give. They got bigger and bigger, until pretty soon everybody came, columnists, stars, directors, and writers, and after a while even the gangsters, which in that part of the world is really showing class.

  Little by little it began to get on my nerves. I’d get in around five, all full of some deal I’d made, and find some fish-faced dame sitting around with two guys, talking about what Lubitsch could do if he’d only try musicals. Hannah’d fix my old-fashioned, and I’d sit there grinning without saying anything, which was the tip-off, because a guy with a drink and a deal, if he’s not saying any thing, he just doesn’t like it there. Then one day I came home and a party was going on out there at the pool, and when they went home it was getting dark. I sat finishing my drink when she started batting at something. Then a shadow began flitting around from the patio lamp. I looked up as she was swinging a newspaper, and grabbed her arm. Then I snapped out the light. Fluttering over the wall by the magnolia tree, went the biggest, blue-green luna I had ever seen. When I turned around her eyes were blazing at me. “What’s the idea of the Londos grip?”

  “Just a superstition of mine. About moths.”

  “Do you have to twist my arm off?”

  Next day she showed me her forearm, that had a big blue mark on it from my thumb. “Jack, what got into you? I was killing a bug, and you jerked me around—look at that! It looks like Hogan’s Alley on Saturday night.”

  “I told you—I’m superstitious about them.”

  “Yeah but—look at that bruise!”

  When I couldn’t tell her what the real reason was, when I knew that all she would see in it was a bug, I didn’t kid myself any longer. This wasn’t it, no matter how much I had yenned for it there in the rain, on the outside looking in, while fat guys ate rare meat and their women watched them do it. And yet, from the way I tried to smooth her down, and the quick nervous way my spine prickled at her look, for fear she would tumble to what I really thought of her, I knew I’d hang on, to the bitter end, if I had to. I didn’t want her, but I did want the job, and I’d go pretty far to keep it.

  One day, driving up Cherry Avenue, I got held by a light, and I heard somebody yell: “Hey, Jack!” There could be no mistake about that croaky voice. It was Hosey, and when I looked in the mirror there he was, not twenty feet away. As the light turned I started but here came a truck, and I had to stop or be hit. I looked again, and he was running after me. I got going at last and went zooming up the hill, but back of me I could see him, waving and running and yelling. And then I did one of the stupidest things I ever did in my life. If I’d gone on, just disappeared as I went over the hill, the chances are it was the last I’d ever have seen of him, because he never knew me by my right name, and he probably didn’t take the number of the car. But I had it in mind to shake him, so when I came to the refinery I turned in. Then it came over me, how stupid it was, and I knew I had to get away quick. They thought I was crazy, I guess, when I asked if there had been any calls, then ducked out again. But just as I jumped in the car, he reached the main gate and began arguing with the watchman. I zipped out the back way and drove on down to the Jergins Trust Building, where I’d opened a headquarters to handle sales. I went through the main room and on back to my private office and told Lida, my girl, if any calls came through to take the message, but I didn’t want to be disturbed.

  Then I sat and cursed the day I’d ever seen Hosey, or called him a friend, or pulled anything with him, or had anything to do with him. Then I tried to think what I was going to do about him. I couldn’t think. Somehow, the idea of having to take that scavenger’s hand, and let him call me by my first name, and call him by his, and act like I was friendly with him, in front of everybody in the whole works, just turned me to jelly, and the thought of what he might tell on me turned me to soup. I’ve been scared in my life, but never worse than that morning, and never more ashamed of it. But after a while something began going through my head, and I grabbed it, and made myself turn into a man again, or something that at least could think. I said to myself: Dog it. You never saw Hosey. You never heard of him. You don’t know what he’s talking about, and while you’ve got all due sympathy for guys out of luck, your private opinion is, he’s crazy. And just on his looks, that will sound like a highly probable idea. I checked it over and over and over, for something that would louse it. Unless they took me back to Las Vegas, and somebody in the motel remembered me, I couldn’t think of anything.

  In an hour or so, around noon I would say, Lida came back and asked me if we had anybody working for us by the name of Dixon. That was the name I’d signed on the registers of some of the hotels and flophouses and missions we had stayed at. But all I gave it was a dead pan, like I didn’t want to be bothered. “Not that I know of, unless Rohrer has put somebody on he hasn’t told me about.”

  “There’s some bum over there asking.”

  “Tell Rohrer to watch it. Maybe it’s a bum and maybe it’s our friend Uncle Sam tra
iling hot oil. Not that we’re buying any, but—”

  I went over to the Hilton and had lunch, then went to the apartment. About two I rang Rohrer and asked could he drop over. He came around three and I started in on a road-tar deal, which was mostly imaginary, but I took an hour over it. I said nothing about Hosey, and he was almost out the door before he said anything, and I was getting nervous, as I had to know, but I dared not take any interest in it. Then he said: “Oh, by the way, Jack, what do I do about this bum that showed up this morning? Says we’ve got somebody working for us named Dixon, and won’t go away till he sees him.”

  “I don’t know any Dixon.”

  “Says he drove up in a black Packard car.”

  “I’ve got the only Packard around the place.”

  “So I told him. But he’s still there. On the curb outside.”

  “Is he pulling anything?”

  “No, but he’s sitting.”

  “Then do nothing.”

  “Just leave him sit?”

  “Isn’t it a free country?”

  “Why sure. And if the cops don’t like it—?”

  “Then he’s their bum.”

  That night, when I got to Rodeo Drive in Beverly, believe me, I listened to the jokes and laughed at them. Next morning, instead of going to the Jergins Trust Building, I went direct to the refinery, and sure enough, there he was, still sitting and still waiting. He yelled at me as I went in the back way and I paid no attention but went and parked. But as I started for my office, Mulligan, the watchman, caught me, looking pretty uncomfortable. “Would you come talk to this guy, Mr. Dillon? I’ve just got the idea that in some kind of a cockeyed way he means you, and if you could just convince him he’s got his signals mixed, maybe we can get rid of him. To tell you the truth, he’s getting on everybody’s nerves.”