South of Heaven by Jim Thompson Page A

Trey would never, never have butted into my affairs by asking him to talk to me.
    I went back to work, deciding that it was just a generality tossed off during a conversation. He’d stopped for a breather and used the time to make a hard sell on jackhammers. He needed operators badly so he’d pulled out all the stops, getting a lot more personal than a pipeline boss ordinarily would have.
    He spoke to the other men briefly, about what I couldn’t hear because of the noise of my hammer. Then he started walking up the line route, stopping every now and then to make a little marker of piled-up rock. He made approximately twenty of them in the space of about five hundred yards, then came back to his pickup and drove off toward camp.
    Those markers were places where we had work to do. There appeared to be enough of them to keep us busy through noon tomorrow, if not longer. I mentioned this to my partner when it came his turn on the hammer, and he gave me a sore look.
    “Lay off, pal. I ain’t in the mood for kidding.”
    “Kidding? What are you talking about?”
    “The big boy didn’t tell you, huh?” He shook his head grimly. “We do that tonight. Every damned bit of it before we button up the day.”
    “ Tonight? But…but, dammit to hell…!”
    “Can’t do it, hmmm? Just ain’t up to it? Well, don’t bother to tell the man, because I already done it and he just didn’t believe me at all. He said I must mean that I wanted to drag-up my time, and if I didn’t mean that I’d better get hot on this hammer.”
    “Gee,” I said, “I was just going to ask if I couldn’t work over.”
    He grinned tiredly, spat dust from his mouth and scoured his hands against his pants. I turned the hammer over to him, and he gave it a boost with his knee, brought the drill down on a patch of rock and cut in the air.
    It began to shake, rattle and roar. He bore down on it, arms stiff, and it whined and clattered and tried to jump away from him. His teeth clenched with the effort to hold on, and his whole body jerked and vibrated.
    I moved back away from the noise and dropped down on the fill. I began to massage my legs and arms, groaning when I hit a knotted muscle and wondering what Carol would think when I didn’t show up.
    I figured that she’d probably be pretty upset about it, that she’d maybe think I was sore and wasn’t coming back. I looked up the line at the work that remained to be done and I decided that we might get through in time for me to pay her a quick call. A doggone quick one, just long enough to say hello and let her know I wasn’t sore. Because I sure wasn’t up to or interested in anything else tonight.
    Like Higby had said, all you wanted after a hard day on the hammer was bed. Just a bed, with no one in it to crowd you.
    At five o’clock a kitchen flunky in a company pickup brought supper to us. It was packed into five-gallon lard cans: one for coffee, another for beef, chicken and ham, another for bread-and-butter, cookies and doughnuts, and the remaining two for potatoes and mixed vegetables. We ate all we could hold and put a few doughnuts and cookies in our pockets. The flunky dumped everything that was left over onto the prairie, then drove back down the line toward camp.
    We had a cigarette or two…makin’s since none of us had any ready-rolleds. Then we matched for turns on the hammers, stepped up the speed of the generator and went back to work.
    It was almost ten o’clock by the time we had finished, and long jagged streaks of lightning were crackling across the black sky, seeming to rip it apart like a curtain, then to sew it back up with thunder.
    I rode in the seat with Higby going into camp, and he kept sticking his head out the window, feeling for rain. He looked as tired as I felt and he seemed to get older with each crack of lightning. A hard rain, one that continued through tomorrow, would stop work on the line. Even a hard night’s rain would set the job back, but for only a