“Let’s not waste time,” Axel said. “Who do I have to pay off?”
“The father, Abraham Chase. He’s one of the biggest men in town. Your son had to pick somebody like that,” Harold said aggrievedly. “A girl in a factory wasn’t good enough for him.”
“Is he Jewish?” Axel asked, as they got into the car.
“What?” Harold asked, irritatedly. That would be great, that would help a lot, if Axel turned out to be a Nazi, along with everything else.
“Why should he be Jewish?”
“Abraham,” Axel said.
“No. It’s one of the oldest families in town. They own practically everything. You’ll be lucky if he takes your money.”
“Yeah,” Axel said. “Lucky.”
Harold backed out of the parking lot and started toward the Chase house. It was in the good section of town, near the Jordache house. “I talked to him on the phone,” Harold said. “I told him you were coming. He sounded out of his mind. I don’t blame him. It’s bad enough to come home and find one daughter pregnant. But both of them! And they’re twins, besides.”
“They can get a wholesale rate on baby clothes.” Axel laughed. The laughter sounded like a tin pitcher rattling against a sink. “Twins. He had a busy season, didn’t he, Thomas?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Harold said. “He’s beat up a dozen people since he came here, besides.” The stories that had reached Harold’s ears had been exaggerated as they passed along the town’s chain of gossip. “It’s a wonder he hasn’t been in jail before this. Everybody’s scared of him. It’s the most natural thing in the world that something like this comes up, they pin it on him. But who suffers? Me. And Elsa.”
Axel ignored his brother’s suffering and the suffering of his brother’s wife. “How do they know it was my kid?”
“The twins told their father.” Harold slowed the car down. He was in no hurry to confront Abraham Chase. “They’ve done it with every boy in town, the twins, and plenty of the men too, everybody knows that, but when it comes to naming names, naturally the first name anybody’d pick would be your Tommy. They’re not going to say it was the nice boy next door or Joe Kuntz, the policeman, or the boy from Harvard whose parents play bridge with the Chases twice a week. They pick the black sheep. Those two little bitohes’re smart. And your son had to tell them he was nineteen years old. Big shot. Under eighteen, my lawyer says, you can’t be held for statutory rape.”
“So what’s the fuss?” Axel said. “I have his birth certificate.”
“Don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” Harold said. “Mr. Chase swears he can have him locked up until he’s twenty-one as a juvenile delinquent. And he can. That’s four years. And don’t think Tommy is making it any easier for himself telling the cops he knows twenty fellows personally who’ve been in there with those girls and giving a list of names. It just makes everybody sorer, that’s all. It gives the whole town a bad name and they’ll make him pay for it. And me and Elsa. That’s my shop,” he said automatically. They were passing the showroom. “I’ll be lucky if they don’t put a brick through the window.”
“You friendly with Abraham?”
“I do some business with Mr. Chase,” Harold said. “I sold him a Lincoln. I can’t say we move in the same circles. He’s on the waiting list for a new Mercury. I could sell a hundred cars tomorrow if I could get delivery. The goddamn war. You don’t know what I’ve been going through for four years, just to keep my head above water. And now, just when I begin to see a little daylight, this has to come along.”
“You don’t seem to be doing so bad,” Axel said.
“You have to keep up appearances.” One thing was sure. If Axel thought for a minute that he was going to borrow any money, he was barking up the wrong tree.
“How do I know Abraham won’t take my money and the kid’ll go to jail just the same?”
“Mr. Chase is a man of his word,” Harold said. He had a sudden horrible fear that Axel was going to call Mr. Chase Abraham in his own house. “He’s got this town in his pocket. The cops, the judge, the mayor, the party organization. If he tells you the case’ll be dropped, it’ll be dropped.”
“It better be,” Axel said. There was a threat in his voice and Harold remembered what a rough boy his brother had been when they had both been young back home in Germany. Axel had gone off to war and had killed people. He was not a civilized man, with that harsh, sick face and that hatred of everybody and everything, including his own flesh and blood. Harold wondered if maybe he hadn’t made a mistake calling his brother and telling him to come to Elysium. Maybe it would have been better if he had just tried to handle it himself. But he had known it was going to cost money and he’d panicked. The heartburn gripped him again as they drove up to the white house, with big pillars, where the Chase family lived.
The two men went up the walk to the front door and Harold rang the bell. He took off his hat and held it across his chest, almost as if he were saluting the flag. Axel kept his cap on.
The door opened and a maid stood there. Mr. Chase was expecting them, she said.
V
“They take millions of clean-limbed young boys.” The poacher was chewing on a wad of tobacco and spitting into a tin can on the floor beside him, as he talked. “Clean-limbed boys, and send them off to kill and maim each other with inhuman instruments of destruction and they congratulate themselves and hang their chests with medals and parade down the main thoroughfares of the city and they put me in jail and mark me as an enemy of society because every once in awhile I drift out into the woodlands of America and shoot myself a choice buck with an old 1910 Winchester 22.” The poacher originally had come from the Ozarks and he spoke like a country preacher.
There were four bunks in the cell, two on one side and two on the other. The poacher, whose name was Dave, was lying in his bunk and Thomas was lying in the lower bunk on the other side of the cell. Dave smelled rather ripe and Thomas preferred to keep some space between them. It was two days now that they had been in the cell together and Thomas knew quite a bit about Dave, who lived alone in a shack near the lake and appreciated a permanent audience. Dave had come down from the Ozarks to work in the automobile industry in Detroit and after fifteen years of it had had enough. “I was in there in the paint department,” Dave said, “in the stink of chemicals and the heat of a furnace, devoting my numbered days on this earth to spraying paint on cars for people who didn’t mean a fart in hell to me to ride around in and the spring came and the leaves burgeoned and the summer came and the crops were taken in and the autumn came and city folk in funny caps with hunting licenses and fancy guns were out in the woods shooting the deer and I might just as well have been down in the blackest pit, chained to a post, for all the difference the seasons meant to me. I’m a mountain man and I pined away and one day I saw where my path laid straight before me and I took to the woods. A man has to be careful with his numbered days on this earth, son. There is a conspiracy to chain every living child of man to an iron post in a black pit, and you mustn’t be fooled because they paint it all the bright colors of the rainbow and pull all sorts of devilish tricks to make you think that it isn’t a pit, it isn’t an iron post, it isn’t a chain. The president of General Motors, up high in his glorious office, was just as much chained, just as deep down in the pit as me coughing up violet in the paint shop.”
Dave spat tobacco juice into the tin can on the floor next to his bunk. The gob of juice made a musical sound against the side of the can.
“I don’t ask for much,” Dave said, “just an occasional buck and the smell of woodsy air in my nostrils. I don’t blame nobody for putting me in jail from time to time, that’s their profession just like hunting is my profession, and I don’t begrudge ’em the coupla months here and there I spend behind bars. Somehow, they always seem to catch me just as the winter months’re drawing on, so it’s really no hardship. But nothing they say can make me feel like a criminal, no sir. I’m an American out in the American forest livin’ off American deer. They want to make all sorts of rules and regulations for those city folk in the gun clubs, that’s all right by me. They don’t apply, they just don’t apply.”