Bad Boy by Jim Thompson Page A

blankly. “Oh, my goodness! I’ve had her coming over here on her day off to sweep and scrub and—”
    When Viola next appeared, Mom rebuked her for the deception, then insisted on treating her as company.
    Viola didn’t want to be treated as company. She just couldn’t bear it, she said. And, since Mom remained firm, her visits became more and more infrequent. Finally, they stopped altogether.
    We missed her terribly.

10
    H aving achieved considerable success in his dual profession of attorney-accountant, Pop swiftly began to lose interest in it. That was Pop’s way. He was forever advising others—notably, me—to choose one line of endeavor and stick to it, but he himself was incapable of such singleness of purpose.
    Political friends who learned of his feelings offered to obtain him an appointment as United States marshal. Pop declined. They offered him a Federal judgeship. He declined that, too.
    Various lucrative ventures and positions were proffered him, and he consistently turned them down. He was quite capable of making his own way in life, he stiffly averred. And during the next two- or three-odd years he set about earnestly to prove it.
    I could not name all the ventures he was active in during that period, but they included the operation of a sawmill, the proprietorship of a hotel, truck farming, running a bush-league ball club, the garbage-hauling contract for a certain Oklahoma metropolis and turkey ranching.
    As each business or endeavor failed, we were left with certain mementos of it: assets—to use the term loosely—which were at once non-liquidatable but yet, for one reason or another, impossible to discard. Thus, by the time of the demise of the turkey ranch, our residence and its environs were so encumbered that one could hardly get into it, or, once in, out.
    Zoning laws and health ordinances were unheard of or unenforced in those days, else all of us would certainly have been carted off to institutions—penal or protective. As it was, Mom finally became hysterical. She declared that she herself would see to Pop’s commitment if he did not come to his senses.
    “G-garbage wagons!” she wept. “G-garbage wagons in the front yard, and—a-and h-horses in the garage, a-and ploughs on the front porch, a-and—”
    She went on with her recital, becoming more and more agitated with the mention of each item. The incubators in the bedrooms. The gangsaws in the living room. The cigar showcases in the kitchen. The tomato plants in the bathroom. The dozens of newly hatched young turkeys, which roamed the house from one end to the other. The—
    “And that ball player!” yelled Mom. “I swear, Jim Thompson, if you don’t get him out of here, I’ll—I’ll murder both of you!”
    This last reference was to the occupant of our sleeping porch, a rheumy old party who combined an affection for chewing tobacco with very poor eyesight. He could not have hit a bull with a bass fiddle, as the saying is. Pop, of course, perversely regarded him as a second Ty Cobb.
    “You get him out of here!” Mom shouted. “Get all this junk away from here. Either he and it goes or the children and I do!”
    Pop gave in, not, naturally, because he could be swayed by threats, but because he was quite as weary of the situation as Mom was. He found some political sinecure for the ball player, and gave away the other animals and items. Good riddance it was—as none knew better than he. But you could never make him admit it.
    For years, nay decades, no visitor came to our house without learning that Pop had once owned a very valuable ball player (“another Babe Ruth”) or some very valuable horses (“the same blood strain as Man O’ War”) or several hundred prize turkeys (“their eggs were worth a hundred dollars a dozen”). To hear Pop tell it, he had been on the point of cornering the world market in tomatoes or timber or hotel gaboons (“genuine antiques, mind you”). All the nominal dross which Mom had forced