Now and on Earth Read online

  I put the papers in a folder marked

  Miss Trumbull (English Department)

  Burdock County, Oklahoma

  Consolidated School District

  and started to slide it into the top drawer of Miss Trumbull’s desk. Somehow, one of the papers slipped out and fell into the wastebasket; and when I lifted it out I saw this sandwich—part of a sandwich, rather, lying there. It was made out of some kind of fish mixed up with salad dressing and there were little pinkish smears of lipstick on it and a place where spit had hardened. But it smelled awfully good; it looked awfully good. I pinched at it, pinching away the spit and the lipstick. And then, suddenly the classroom door banged open and I shoved the sandwich into my pocket.

  It was Abe Toolate, the janitor. I stood up, trying to smile, and he came toward me, his mean little eyes fixed on mine. He stopped right in front of me, so close that I was breathing in the stink of corn liquor, and held out one of his stubby copper-skinned hands.

  “I seen you,” he grunted. “Let’s have it.”

  “Have what?” I said.

  “What you put in your pocket. Been wondering who was doin’ all the stealin’ around here at night.”

  I almost laughed in spite of myself. Because he was probably the only person around school that was wondering. Everyone else knew; and Abe would have been fired long before if he hadn’t had a couple of relatives on the school board.

  “Let’s have it,” he repeated.

  “Get away from me,” I said. “Get away from me fast, Abe.”

  “What’s your name, boy?” he blustered, as if he didn’t know. “What you doing here, anyhow?” And I could feel my face going tight. Shucks, he knew what I was doing there. I’d been grading Miss Trumbull’s papers for almost four years, ever since I was a freshman.

  I walked straight toward him. I kind of herded him in front of me, backing him toward the cloakroom, and his face began shining with sweat.

  “N-now, look, Tom—Tommy,” he stuttered. “I didn’t mean…”

  “Tommy?” I said. “Aren’t you getting a little familiar, Abe? You mean Mister Carver, don’t you?”

  “M-mister Carver…”

  He almost choked on that, having to call a white-trash sharecropper’s boy Mister.

  I backed him into the cloakroom and stood staring at him a minute or two, watching him sweat and squirm. Then I began to calm down a little, and I wanted to try to patch things up. But I knew there wasn’t any way—not after I’d made him put a handle on my name. So I reached down for my football sweater with the big BCS on it, and left.

  I walked down the stairs and out the front door thinking about what a funny thing pride was. What a troublesome thing.

  Now that my temper had simmered down, I realized that Abe must have seen what I’d stuck in my pocket. He’d tried to dig me in my pride—to give himself a boost by pushing someone else down—and I’d dug right back at him. So, now, or rather tomorrow, there’d be trouble. He’d be in the principal’s office the first thing in the morning, and I still wouldn’t be able to admit that I’d been going to eat the leavings from Miss Trumbull’s lunch.

  I dug the sandwich out of my pocket and dropped it down at the side of the steps. Then I slung my sweater around my shoulders and headed across the yard to the road.

  It was getting on toward true dark now, but when I rounded the curve that leads down to the creek I saw Donna Ontime’s new Cadillac parked under the willows. Apparently she spotted me at the same time; she gave two short taps on the horn of the car. So I went on, and it sure wasn’t hard to do even though I knew what would happen if Pa ever caught us together.

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  Acclaim for Jim Thompson

  “The best suspense writer going, bar none.”

  —New York Times

  “My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”

  —Stephen King

  “If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”

  —Washington Post

  “Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”

  —New Republic

  “The master of the American groin-kick novel.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  Contents

  Title Page

  Welcome Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  About the Author

  Preview of Cropper's Cabin

  Books by Jim Thompson

  Acclaim for Jim Thompson

  Copyright

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1942 by Jim Thompson

  Copyright © renewed 1970 by The Estate of Jim Thompson

  Excerpt from Cropper’s Cabin copyright © 1952 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1980 by Alberta H. Thompson

  Author photograph by Sharon Thompson Reed

  Cover design by Allison J. Warner. Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  www.mulhollandbooks.com/jimthompson

  www.twitter.com/mulhollandbooks

  www.facebook.com/mulhollandbooks

  www.hachettebookgroup.com

  First e-book edition: May 2012

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-316-19599-7

 

 

  Jim Thompson, Now and on Earth

 

 

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