Commer walked out, picked up the gun and drum and went back into the cell. He threw the drum onto the cot and poked the gun toward Burton. The big man stared in silent wonder and then reached out and took the gun in shaking hands.
“Careful, now! This-here thing is the safety. I’ve set the gun so that each time you pull the trigger you get a shot. The drum comes off like this. See? When it’s empty the slide stays back and then you stick on the other drum like this.”
“Yessir, but...”
“Now I’m going to leave you with your cell door open so you can sight down the hall here. If they come in, they’ll come through that door there, the door to my office. Shoot first into the ceiling. If they keep coming put a few in the floor. If they still keep coming, lock yourself in quick. Here’s the key. Then drop behind the corner of the cot and shoot low through the bars at their legs. Understand?”
“Yessir.” Burton stood holding the gun, a glow of hope in his eyes, his face full of a gratitude so deep that tears formed along his lower lids. “I’ll do just like you tell me, sir. I couldn’t let you down after this, Sheriff.” And he held the gun out, cradled in his arms as though it were the present of kings.
Commer grunted, turned on his heel and walked out, leaving the cell door open, walking steadily and slowly down the corridor, through his office, out the front door and onto the porch. There he stopped and watched the crowd, listening to their animal growling, every fiber of his mind screaming to him to turn and run for shelter. But he stood and held his arms up, a travesty of a benediction, calling for silence. For long minutes there was no response, then the shouting died to a murmuring. He heard a few last shouts of “We want Burton” and “Bring him out or we’re a-comin’ in after him!”
In his deep slow voice Commer bellowed into the darkness, “You all can come in after him right now. I just give him a submachine gun and plenty of ammunition. He’s in there a-waitin’ for you. Come ahead, boys! He’s all yours!”
There was an angry mutter from the crowd. Commer imagined that those who had bolstered their frail courage with corn liquor now felt a sudden sobering chill. He was glad that he had always backed up his statements, never bluffed. Yet he could hardly see because of the dizzy spin of fear in his head.
Then a top-heavy man with a shock of light hair came striding out of the shadows into the dim glow of the street lamp. Commer walked heavily down the steps to meet him, recognizing him as Ham Alberts, itinerant handyman, loud-mouth and trouble-maker. But he was a bull in the strength of his youth.
They stared at each other. Commer saw through his film of fear that Ham was quivering with outraged righteous indignation. The offended honor of a taxpayer who had never paid a tax.
“Commer,” he said hoarsely, “you got no call to arm a killer. You’re paid to stay on the side of the law. What the hell you doin’?”
“Just saving a man from a bunch of corner loafers. Why?” Commer’s voice sounded flat and disinterested, but he wondered if Alberts could hear the beating of his heart.
“If any of us gets kilt goin’ in after him, it’s gonna be your fault!”
“Do I looked worried, sonny? I do my duty my own way. No call for you to try to tell me how to do it. Now go on in and get him. What you waiting for? Yellow maybe?”
“Why, you tin-shield copper...” and Alberts lifted a beefy fist back and poised it two feet from Commer’s jaw. In spite of the roaring in his ears, Commer looked calmly at the fist and then into Alberts’ narrowed eyes.
“Don’t know as that there is one of your best ideas, sonny. I’m going down to the corner for some coffee while you boys take care a this little matter.” He turned away from Alberts, jiggling a cigarette out of a crumpled pack as he walked away.
Inside he writhed with terror, but there was room in his mind to wonder at the sober, quiet way his thick legs carried him along down the street. He stopped at the corner and lit his cigarette, his fingers strong and steady, the flare of the wooden match lighting up his stolid cheek bones, his mild brow.
Then he glanced back and saw Ham Alberts under the light, hollering into the shadows, his arms spread wide in a beseeching gesture. Commer couldn’t hear the words, but he could see in the distance the vague forms of the men who had been clustered in the park melting back away from the jail, away from the deadly Burton, ignoring the furious Alberts.
Then Alberts dropped his arms helplessly and wandered after them.
Commer sucked in a deep lungful of smoke and expelled it in a long, blue column into the soft night air. He turned and headed for his coffee, knowing in his heart that the strong body had defeated the fear demons of the mind, this time.
But the next time...
1950s
Benjamin Appel
(1907–1977)
The New York World Telegram said of Benjamin Appel after the publication of his first novel, Brain Guy (1934): “Jimmy Cain hasn’t even a running chance as dean of tellers of hard-boiled stories. He is completely outpointed, outsocked, outslugged, and outcursed by Benjamin Appel.” Nelsoh Algren said of Appel’s first collection of short stories, Hell’s Kitchen (1952): “[His] stories have never been prettied up for the parlor. Their forthrightness will do more than leave the reader feeling that he has read an honest story: he will feel as well that he has met an honest man.”
The slum streets and back alleys of New York City were Appel’s primary fictional domain. Gangsters, whores, grifters, dope dealers and addicts, corrupt political and union officials, cops good and bad, and honest citizens trapped in poverty were the people he wrote about most convincingly. The comparison with Cain is valid enough; but whereas Cain’s prose is controlled, sparse, and strongly dependent on dialogue for its effects, Appel’s is raw, harsh, and sprawling, and it relies more on exposition and quick shifts of scene and viewpoint for its power.
About half of the substantial number of novels and stories produced by Appel can legitimately be termed hard-boiled. Brain Guy, a savage tale of the New York underworld, is darkly reminiscent of W. B. Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929) without in any way being imitative. The Power-House (1939), The Dark Stain (1943), and a paperback original, Sweet Money Girl (1954), are likewise tough and uncompromising studies of urban crime and corruption. The Raw Edge (1958) exposes the greed, graft, and violent struggle for power on the New York waterfront — the same theme, with a different slant, as that of the novelette that follows. Mordant and memorable, “Dock Walloper” was written expressly for, and became the title story of, Appel’s second collection, Dock Walloper (1953).
B. P.
Dock Walloper
(1953)
Johnny Blue Jaw Gibbons offered Willy Toth the chance to get himself connected right on the waterfront — and not the first time either that opportunity has come knocking on a prison door.
Those two could have become buddies only in a clink, for they were about as different as a pearl-handled .38 is from a piece of lead pipe. Johnny Blue Jaw was a power on the New York waterfront where the steamship lines paid more for insurance against pilferage than for the rent of their piers. Willy Toth was a stickup man from Utica, working the upstate towns. A nobody who’d drawn a fifteen to twenty year sentence for a two hundred and eight dollar armed robbery in Schenectady. Willy thought he was lucky getting out the first week in March after serving only seven years. Johnny Blue Jaw, with a two year sentence for manslaughter, expected to be free in the summer after doing nineteen months. Was he satisfied? Not Johnny Blue Jaw. “My God damn lawyers!” he griped. “What’m I payin’ ’em for?”