It nagged at his mind. For the next few weeks everything went on as usual. He still went to Blanche every Saturday, and he still wrote home; but now the time seemed to pass more slowly because in the back of his mind he carried Morrell’s words. Only one thing about them bothered him.
And then one week the letter from Amy had news:
...It’s just a little place, but it has water on it and the house could be fixed up nice. Uncle Matt thinks we could get it for two thousand down, and he’ll go our note for the rest...
He read the letter over several times, and each time he could see the place more clearly and almost smell the earth and the water. Finally, he went to see Morrell.
“There’s just one thing I want to know,” he told him. “Why did you cut me in, and why did you say ‘any time’? You ain’t a man to give anything away.”
Morrell grinned.
“That’s right, farmer. You’re smart enough to think of that, but how come you ain’t smart enough to think of the answer? Don’t you know what I want? I want you to get that little piece of ground and clear the hell out of here!”
“Because of Blanche?”
“What do you think?”
“But she’s nothing to me.”
“It ain’t what she is to you that bothers me, farmer. It’s what she is to me — or could be with you out of the way. Now, what’s on your mind?”
“I need two thousand dollars,” he said.
“How much have you got to invest?”
He handed Morrell his bank book. All the months of saving had gone into it — the winter, the spring, the summer, and autumn on the way; but it was still only a little over a thousand dollars.
“Okay,” Morrell said. “I’ll meet you at the bank tomorrow — no, better make it tomorrow night at my office. You know where that is?”
The farmer nodded. He passed it every day going down to the warehouse.
“Make it about nine o’clock. That’ll give me time to see my broker and have him find something good for you. And don’t tell anybody what I’m doing. I’ll have every bum on the river-front trying to cut in.”
The next day at noon, he went to the bank and drew out everything. He kept it in an envelope pinned to the inside of his shirt until he was through work. After work he was too nervous to eat. He sat alone in his room until it was time to put the envelope in his pocket and start for Morrell’s office. Out on the street, he met Blanche. She was looking for him.
“I thought you might come over tonight,” she said. “I bought some pork chops.”
She clung to his arm, leaning against him. He pulled away.
“Maybe later,” he said. “I’ve got to see somebody first.”
“Morrell?”
“Just somebody. I’ll tell you about it later.”
He was lying. He walked off down the street knowing that he’d never go to Blanche again. That kind of life was over. He was going to go home and get clean.
After a time, he came to Morrell’s office. He opened the door and saw no one, but the door banged shut behind him and Morrell laughed once as he stepped forward. The farmer felt a gun cold against the back of his neck.
Even then he didn’t know what had happened or what had gone wrong; he wasn’t thinking at all. He felt terror and panic creep slowly up his body, but he made no move, not even when the door opened again and Blanche came in and walked past him.
“Has he got it with him?” Morrell asked from behind him.
“He’s got it,” Blanche said. “I felt it in his pocket.”
“Good. I’ll be up later with your cut. In the meantime, you don’t have to stay here. You might look around for another farmer who’s saving his money. You’ve got a real technique with the country boys, and there’s plenty of them around.”
Now the farmer knew that it was all over. He was finished. Fear remained, but the panic was gone; there was nothing for him to do. He felt only sick, and dirty, and he waited for Morrell to fire the gun and cleanse him.
“At least he’ll get what he wanted,” Blanche said, far away in the distance. “At least he’ll get a little piece of ground.”
Evan Hunter
(b. 1926)
A prodigious worker with a prodigious talent, Evan Hunter was multitalented from the very start of his writing career. Hunter was a prolific contributor to Manhunt during its most influential period, the early to middle 1950s. Although considered a mainstay of the digest, he had in fact only just made it into the last of the pulps: his earliest stories, written under the name Hunt Collins, had appeared in Robert Lowndes’s Smashing Detective and Famous Detective. In Manhunt, he ran a series featuring the tormented former private eye Matt Cordell, and he penned tough, shock-ending stories as Richard Marsten, a name he also used for his science fiction. Quite often, pieces by Marsten and Hunter sat next to each other in the same issue.
While writing hard-boiled short stories and novels for magazines such as Manhunt and for action-oriented paperback-original houses, Hunter was also producing thoughtful and engrossing science fiction for young people. He worked with the John C. Winston Company’s superior and influential “Adventures in Science Fiction” line, together with writers of the caliber of Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, and the anthropologist Chad Oliver. He wrote “JD” (juvenile delinquent) stories and novels, pulp science fiction, and private-eye tales before producing the novel that transformed him from a journeyman genre writer into a respected and world-famous figure.
Set in a New York City public high school, The Blackboard Jungle (1954) is still a compelling and intelligent novel forty years later. It was immediately recognized as a major work, having been serialized for the prestigious Ladies’ Home Journal, published to great critical acclaim, and bought for the then-record sum of $95,000 by a major film studio. This windfall freed Hunter from the tyranny of editors and publishers and enabled him to write only what he wanted to write. This included such fine mainstream novels as Strangers When We Meet (1958, filmed to Hunter’s own script two years later), Buddwing (1964), and the impressive Mothers and Daughters (1961).
Hunter’s greatest triumph, however, was undoubtedly the Eighty-seventh Precinct novels, a series of police-procedural stories set in a fictional, although far from imaginary, New York City. Using his pseudonym Ed McBain, he created the series in 1956 for a paperback house, later graduating to hardcover. It is said that his model was Sidney Kingsley’s celebrated 1949 play Detective Story, which was later filmed by William Wyler in a self-conscious pseudo-documentary style. The series consists of nearly fifty books, including one collection of novelettes. Perhaps only Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series comes anywhere near Hunter’s epic achievement in terms of consistency and quality.
“The Merry, Merry Christmas” appeared in Manhunt in 1957 and is one of Hunter’s later stories; it was not a part of any series. While the tone seems sentimental, it is not at all a comfortable story. Rather, it is a superbly written tale about the randomness, the appalling arbitrariness, of violence.
J. A.
The Merry, Merry Christmas
(1957)