"Thompson, Jim - Bad Boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Jim)

4
Pop was practically self-educated, his financial position was more often than not insecure, and he was careless about dress and the social niceties. But few men had as many friends among the great, the would-be and the near. Few men had their advice so sought after.
Pop had a horror of ignorance--I'll tell you why, shortly--and had made himself an expert on almost everything. Politicians, from presidents to ward heelers, prized his opinion on political matters. Grain speculators consulted him on the crop outlook. Wire services quoted his predictions on the outcome of prize fights and horse races. He knew more about law, accounting, agriculture and a dozen other professions and pursuits than many men who made them their life work.
In the early twenties when we were living in Fort Worth, Texas, Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the Polar explorer, was our dinner guest one night. Doc had entered the oil business a short time before and was riding high. He was renting three floors of a downtown office building, he employed close to a thousand people, and his postage bill alone ran twenty-five hundred dollars a week.
He had brought a batch of advertising literature out for Pop to look at. Pop did.
"Don't send this out, Doc," he advised. "It'll put you in the pen."
"Aw, now, Jim," Doc laughed, annoyed. "My copywriters have worked on that for weeks. I've got thousands of dollars tied up in printing. What's wrong with it?"
"It violates the blue-sky laws. Your attorneys can show you where."
"But my attorneys say it's all right!"
Pop shrugged and changed the subject. Or tried to. Cook insisted on arguing about the literature. He finally got a little angry about it.
"The trouble with you, Jim," he declared, "is that you're afraid every club is going to fly up and hit you. You're wrong about this deal and I'll prove it to you. I'm going into the mail with this stuff tomorrow!"
He got a twelve-year stretch in Leavenworth.
Pop was a wizard in large affairs, but in mundane matters he was a flop. You couldn't convince him of the latter. Periodically, he went on family-management sprees, and he either refused to admit the horriferous results or attributed them to our failure to cooperate.
As an eight-year-old, I can remember his asking Mom about my tastes in literature. He expressed his dissatisfaction with her reply by going out and buying a twelvevolume set of American history and another set of the letters of the presidents. And he pooh-poohed her angry opinion that the stuff was too old for me.
"You're bringing these children up in ignorance," he declared. "Now, when I was four years old, I could name all the presidents and . . ."
There followed a long list of accomplishments, of which I was no more capable than I was of flying. (I suppose the comparison shamed me all my life.) But for months afterward, I was required to read the books aloud to him every night. I read them at home, while at school I read the adventures of Bow-wow and Mew-mew, and Tom and Jane at grandmother's farm.
In the same fashion, I was drilled in higher accountancy before I had mastered long division; I was coached in political science before I ever saw a civics class; I learned the dimensions of Betelgeuse before I knew my own hat size. I was always a puzzle and a plague to my teachers. I often knew things that they didn't but seldom anything that I should.
I don't mean to give the impression that Pop was harsh. He was anything but. He seldom raised his voice. Never once did he so much as paddle one of us kids. It was simply that he couldn't be content to manage his own sphere and let Mom manage hers.
Every once in a while he would get the notion that we weren't eating properly, and he would undertake to "put a little meat on our bones." These undertakings usually manifested themselves as great messes of what he called "succotash"--beans, tomatoes, corn, peas, and perhaps a bottle of catsup, all cooked together in the largest kettle he could find. Mom would sternly forbid us to eat any of it, so Pop, after disposing of a quart or two, would take the receptacle under his arm and go around and make gifts of it to the neighbors.
It was Pop's greatest fault that he could seldom see bad in anyone. He did not want it pointed out to him, and he refused to admit it when it was. After we sold our grocery store, we moved over on West Main Street in Oklahoma City. There was a family across the street whose little girl was always fighting with Maxine (or vice versa) and Mom, after a few words with her mother, decided that they were trash. Pop said that she shouldn't make statements of that kind. We weren't really acquainted with the people and shouldn't form judgments until we were.
Pop had served us "succotash" that evening, and Mom was not in the best of humor.
"If you think so much of them," she suggested, sweetly, "why don't you call on them? Take them some of that stuff. They look to me like they'd eat anything."
There were a few more words, and, finally, Pop got up and put on his hat. Taking the kettle under his arm, he marched stiffly out of the house and across the street.
Some thirty minutes later he returned--and with him he brought the detested neighbors: the man and woman and their little girl. The man was a small wiry fellow, with the bluest eyes I have ever seen. The woman was a gaudy, gushy type. At Pop's instigation, they were paying us a social call.
Mom sat with her lips compressed, emitting monosyllables when she was forced to. Pop, of course, became more and more hospitable.
It developed that the man was the local agent for a St. Louis automobile dealer, and Pop promptly announced that he was interested in buying a car. Before the visit was over he made an appointment for a demonstration.
When our visitors had finally departed Mom began to laugh rather wildly.
"You buy a car! Are you crazy, Jim Thompson? We've got another baby coming, and we owe everyone in the country now. And you talk about buying a car! I'll just bet you that fellow is a criminal! I'll bet he steals those fine cars he drives around!"
Pop said this was preposterous. "I refuse to discuss the matter further."
"Well, you won't catch me riding with you! Me or any of the kids . . ." And we didn't go, either.
So Pop went for the ride alone, and several others. The price of the car was surprisingly cheap--so much so that Pop, who was usually agile in such situations, found it difficult to avoid buying, and Mom, who loved a bargain, wavered somewhat. But having stated so often that the man was a criminal, she would not back down.
It was just as well. I cannot remember the guy's last name now, although I should, as many crime stories as I have written. But his spry mannerisms and his bright blue eyes had earned him the sobriquet, among the police of six states, of "Monkey Joe." He was the southwestern outlet for a gang of Missouri car thieves who had hundreds of thefts, and, I believe, thirteen murders to their credit.
At the time the pinch was made Freddie, my other sister, had just been born, and we had other things than crime to talk about. But the magazine sections of the Sunday papers kept the case alive until we were less preoccupied. For weeks they were filled with the pictures and exploits of "Joe, the man with the monkey-blue eyes"--which may or may not explain why there was a sudden dearth of Sunday papers around our house.
Pop said there was no connection.

5
One day around the turn of the century, a large young man with the profile of President McKinley wandered into Territorial Oklahoma from Illinois. He had a certain ponderosity of manner which set none too well with his background. For, while he could be considered unusually well-read for his day, he had little formal education, and his working experience was confined to a few months as a railroad fireman and a year or so as a country schoolteacher.
He conferred with a highly placed Republican relative--Territorial Oklahoma was governed by Republicans--and this man got him an appointment as a deputy United States marshal. He did not ask for help after that, nor did he need it. For the young man's chief talent was something he had been born with, the ability to make friends. And, I may as well say now, it was to prove no unmixed blessing.
When statehood came, he ran for sheriff in a solidly Democratic county and won by a landslide. He was re-elected for two successive terms, and, except for larger plans, could have held the office indefinitely. The ultimate objective of those plans was the presidency of the United States--for the man believed, and did until the day he died, that any man could be president. As a long step toward that goal, he won the Republican nomination for Congress from his district
Here, at last, the man's talent for friendship became a curse. A man's best friends, once they turn upon him, become his worst enemies. It was so in the young man's--I may as well say--my father's case.
Pop's honesty was something painful to behold. In the relatively minor office of sheriff, he had seen no occasion to discuss his early history and antecedents, nor to promulgate any but the most general of platforms. As a congressman, however, he felt that his constituents had a right to know all about him and what to expect of him as a legislator. Though it damned near killed him--and I mean that literally--he told them.
The great body of voters--men who had moved into Oklahoma from the deep south, men who had told each other fondly that "Ol' Jim ain't like the rest of them No'thuhnuhs"--heard him in shocked silence, then with purple-faced fury. They learned that the S in his middle name stood for Sherman, after General Sherman with whom his father had marched to the sea. They learned that the South, whether it liked it or not, was part of the United States, and the quicker it accepted the fact the better. They were told that, as a Republican, he stood for the absolute equality of all races, and that he would fight to obtain and maintain that equality.
Needless to say, Pop's honesty cost him the most smashing political defeat in Oklahoma history.
Not only that, but it also made him a fugitive from justice for more than two years.
Like many other frontier peace officers, Pop had been decidedly careless in his official bookkeeping. He knew very little about such work, and he was too busy, or so he thought, running down outlaws. He knew that neither he nor his deputies had ever pocketed a penny of public funds. That being the case, what did it matter if, at the end of his third term, his books showed a technical shortage of some $30,000.
As a matter of fact, it wouldn't have mattered at all except for the debacle of his congressional campaign. Everyone knew he was honest. No one was going to make even an implied assault on a man with thousands of voters in his pocket. He planned, as soon as he had the time and money, to hire a corps of expert accountants and get the sheriff's office mess straightened out. But the end of the congressional race found him without money, virtually without friends, and with an overwhelming host of enemies who intended to see that he was given no time to adjust his accounts.
Overnight, he was faced with criminal charges and the almost certain prospect of a long stretch in prison. Knowing of nothing else to do, he fled to Mexico.
What had been an unusually promising career was now, obviously, at an end. Since he could barely support himself, he was to all purposes permanently estranged from his wife and two small children. He had no money and no way of earning any except by competing on even terms with peon labor. Rather, I should say, uneven terms. The Mexican government had no love for Americans who took jobs from its own starving nationals.
I don't know what other men would have done under such circumstances, but I can speak for myself: I'd have walked into the Rio Grande and kept on walking until my hat floated.
That wasn't, of course, Pop's way of doing things.