“Why’d you quit fighting?”
“They made me.”
“Why?”
“I killed a guy in 1947.”
Pete’s eyes widened. “In the ring?”
“Of course in the ring. What the hell kind of a moron are you, anyway? You think I’d be walking around if it wasn’t in the ring? Jesus!”
“Is that what’s troubling you?”
“There ain’t nothing troubling me. I’m fine.”
“Are you going home for Christmas?”
“I got no home.”
“You must have a home,” Pete said gently. “Everybody’s got a home.”
“Yeah? Where’s your home? Whiting Center or wherever the hell you said?”
“Nope. This is my home now. New York City. New York, New York. The greatest goddamn city in the whole world.”
“Sure,” Frank said sourly.
“My folks are dead,” Pete said. “I’m an only child. Nothing for me in Whiting Center anymore. But in New York, well, I get the feeling that I’m here to stay. That I’ll meet a nice girl here, and marry her, and raise a family here and... and this’ll be home.”
“Great,” Frank said sourly.
“How’d you happen to kill this fellow?” Pete asked suddenly.
“I hit him.”
“And killed him?”
“I hit him on the Adam’s apple. Accidentally.”
“Were you sore at him?”
“We were in the ring. I already told you that.”
“Sure, but were you sore?”
“A fighter don’t have to be sore. He’s paid to fight.”
“Did you like fighting?”
“I loved it,” Frank said flatly.
“How about the night you killed that fellow?”
Frank was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Get lost, huh?”
“I could never fight for money,” Pete said. “I got a quick temper, and I get mad as hell, but I could never do it for money. Besides, I’m too happy right now to...”
“Get lost,” Frank said again, and he turned his back. Pete sat silently for a moment.
“Frank?” he said at last.
“You back again?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked to you about something that’s painful to you. Look, it’s Christmas Eve. Let’s...”
“Forget it.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“No. I told you no a hundred times. I buy my own damn drinks!”
“This is Christmas E...”
“I don’t care what it is. You happy jokers give me the creeps. Get off my back, will you?”
“I’m sorry. I just...”
“Happy, happy, happy. Grinning like a damn fool. What the hell is there to be so happy about? You got an oil well someplace? A gold mine? What is it with you?”
“I’m just...”
“You’re just a jerk! I probably pegged you right the minute I laid eyes on you. You’re probably a damn queer.”
“No, no,” Pete said mildly. “You’re mistaken, Frank. Honestly, I just feel...”
“Your old man was probably a queer, too. Your old lady probably took on every sailor in town.”
The smile left Pete’s face, and then tentatively reappeared. “You don’t mean that, Frank,” he said.
“I mean everything I ever say,” Frank said. There was a strange gleam in his eyes. He studied Pete carefully.
“About my mother, I meant,” Pete said.
“I know what you’re talking about. And I’ll say it again. She probably took on every sailor in town.”
“Don’t say that, Frank,” Pete said, the smile gone now, a perplexed frown teasing his forehead, appearing, vanishing, reappearing.
“You’re a queer, and your old lady was a...”
“Stop it, Frank.”
“Stop what? If your old lady was...”
Pete leaped off the bar stool. “Cut it out!” he yelled.
From the end of the bar, the bartender turned. Frank caught the movement with the corner of his eye. In a cold whisper, he said, “Your mother was a slut,” and Pete swung at him.
Frank ducked, and the blow grazed the top of his head. The bartender was coming towards them now. He could not see the strange light in Frank’s eyes, nor did he hear Frank whisper again, “A slut, a slut.”
Pete pushed himself off the bar wildly. He saw the beer bottle then, picked it up, and lunged at Frank.
The patrolman knelt near his body.
“He’s dead, all right,” he said. He stood up and dusted off his trousers. “What happened?”
Frank looked bewildered and dazed. “He went berserk,” he said. “We were sitting and talking. Quiet. All of a sudden, he swings at me.” He turned to the bartender. “Am I right?”
“He was drinking,” the bartender said. “Maybe he was drunk.”
“I didn’t even swing back,” Frank said, “not until he picked up the beer bottle. Hell, this is Christmas Eve. I didn’t want no trouble.”
“What happened when he picked up the bottle?”
“He swung it at me. So I... I put up my hands to defend myself. I only gave him a push, so help me.”
“Where’d you hit him?”
Frank paused. “In... in the throat, I think.” He paused again. “It was self-defense, believe me. This guy just went berserk. He musta been a maniac.”
“He was talking kind of queer,” the bartender agreed.
The patrolman nodded sympathetically. “There’s more nuts outside than there is in,” he said. He turned to Frank. “Don’t take this so bad, Mac. You’ll get off. It looks open and shut to me. Just tell them the story downtown, that’s all.”
“Berserk,” Frank said. “He just went berserk.”
“Well...” The patrolman shrugged. “My partner’ll take care of the meat wagon when it gets here. You and me better get downtown. I’m sorry I got to ruin your Christmas, but...”
“It’s him that ruined it,” Frank said, shaking his head and looking down at the body on the floor.
Together, they started out of the bar. At the door, the patrolman waved to the bartender and said, “Merry Christmas, Mac.”
1960s
Jim Thompson
(1906–1977)
As a chronicler of madness and gratuitous viciousness, James Myers (Jim) Thompson was one of the great nihilists of the hard-boiled genre. Most of his protagonists live their lives as candle flames — now leaping, now falling, now dying. His heroes are starkly unheroic: psychopaths for the most part, congenital liars, killers, escapees from mental institutions, and sometimes even men in positions of power and trust. Usually these are deputies rather than sheriffs, underlings whose bland features or innocent chuckling hides seriously demented psyches. More than any other noir writer of the 1940s and 1950s, Thompson honed to perfection the “narrator-as-psychopath” approach. He did this brilliantly, not letting the reader in on the secret all at once, but gradually, artfully dropping hints of madness in the middle of the narrators’ sly and ingratiating soliloquies.
All of Thompson’s output during the 1950s and 1960s was published as paperback originals. In 1953 and 1954, he wrote ten books, including some of his best-known titles: A Hell of a Woman, A Swell-Looking Babe, and Savage Night. Perhaps the most representative of Thompson’s style is The Killer Inside Me (1952), which tells of the dark odyssey of Deputy Lou Ford, the cheerful and brutal psychopath who slays humans like others swat flies and who, in the end, believes that he must be sacrificed as humanity’s savior. Much later, in Pop. 1280 (1964), Thompson refined this plot so that the protagonist imagines himself actually to be the son of God.