Bad Boy by Jim Thompson Page B

him to get shed of had actually been gold, and only her callous and ignorant interference had prevented his reaping untold wealth.
    “Of course,” he would sigh bravely, in concluding his recital, “I don’t blame Mrs. Thompson in the least. It was my own fault for listening to her.”
    He would laugh hollowly, then, his face fixed in a stoical mask. And while Mom choked and stammered incoherently, our guests would stare at her open-mouthed, pity and horror mingling in their eyes.
    Of necessity, and as much as it irked him, Pop had continued to practice law and accountancy. But he was constantly on the lookout for some new field of activity, and he finally found it, or so he felt, in the booming Oklahoma oil fields.
    I mentioned a few pages back that his first dabblings in this business were not too successful. This, on reflection, seems an unfair statement of the case. They were successful enough, but Pop’s generosity and trustingness turned them into failures.
    On one occasion, after several shrewd deals, he gave a “friend” twenty-five thousand dollars to tie up some leases for him. Instead, the man bought an automobile agency and placed it in his wife’s name. There was nothing Pop could do about it. The law regards such an action as a breach of trust, and its attitude briefly is that anyone who suffers it has only himself to blame.
    Another time, Pop accepted the word and the handshake of a pipeline executive in lieu of a written contract. As a result, when the pipeline company found it inexpedient to connect with his first oil well, he could only let the torrent of black gold pour into the nearest creek.
    It was a few months after this last fiasco, when Pop was again hard at work at his now-detested law-accountancy practice, that he met a man named Jake Hamon. Or, I should say, re-met him. For he had known him casually during his early days in Oklahoma. At that time, Jake, a former roustabout with the Ringling Brothers Circus, had been a six-for-fiver around the pioneer tent and shack towns. That is, he bought wages from workers in advance of their due date, giving the needy borrower five dollars for each six he had coming.
    Jake was still in the loan business at the time of his and Pop’s later encounter, though on a slightly different level. He owned a string of Oklahoma banks. He also owned a railroad, oil wells, refineries, office buildings—so much, in fact, that he had acquired the sobriquet of “John D. Rockefeller of the Southwest.”
    He asked Pop to audit his banks and to equip them with a more efficient accounting system. Pop, having nothing better to do, gladly agreed.
    “I won’t charge you anything, of course,” he said, casually. “Just my expenses.”
    “Why?” Jake demanded.
    “Well”—Pop was a little set back. His generous offers were not usually received in this fashion. “Well, after all we’re old friends and—”
    Jake interrupted with a rude four-letter ejaculation. “Who the hell says we’re friends?” he snarled. “I haven’t seen you in years, and if you’re as big a dope as you act like I don’t want to see you again. Friend, hell! I’ve heard about some of your friends. Forget that friend crap. Name me a fee for this job, or get the hell out of my office!”
    Smarting, Pop named him a fee—one that was outrageously high. And Jake chortled happily.
    “You see?” he grinned. “All you need is a tough guy like me to ride herd on you. You stick with me, Jim, and you’ll wear diamonds.”
    So Pop went to work for Jake, and for the first time in his life he held on to a large share of the money he made. The relation of the two men, at first, was that of employer and employee. From that it shifted to a point where Pop was Jake’s advisor on various deals, at a percentage of the profits. And in the end they became partners in the deals—usually oil—with Jake providing the lion’s share of the money and Pop carrying out the necessary negotiations. Pop became