Heed the Thunder by Jim Thompson Page A

to it any day, now.”
    Ted got up, pulled the pot from beneath the bed, and used it. He yawned and began unbuttoning his shirt. Gus, watching him, thoughtfully, suddenly gestured with the stem of his pipe.
    “Say,” he frowned, “where do you go when you have to take a dump at night?”
    “I go out to the privy, nat’cherly,” said Ted.
    “I see you going out to the privy! Damned if I don’t. Come on, tell me.”
    Ted demurred, and Gus persisted, cursing and wheedling him alternately.
    “Hell,” said Ted, “you ought to be able to guess.”
    “Is it in this room?”
    “Yope. Right in this room.”
    “The window?”
    “Hell, no. In the room, you dummy.”
    Gus allowed his eyes to wander around the room, scanning the walls and woodwork. They came to rest at last on the flue, the unused outlet of which was covered with a tin oval. They remained there for a long moment. He gestured again with the pipe stem.
    “In there?”
    Ted nodded modestly.
    “Well, I’ll be goddamned. How you get your arse up that high?”
    “I don’t. I tear me a piece of paper out of my tablet. Then I drop it in.” He grinned at his brother maliciously. “All these nights when you been holding in or tramping out to the privy, I’ve been using that.”
    “Yah,” said Gus, scowling at him with ill-concealed admiration and envy. “I reckon you think you’re pretty smart.”
    “I’m smarter’n you are. Yah!”
    “Just wait till the old woman finds out. She’ll get a whiff of it one of these days.”
    “Hell, she’d think she smelled her own cooking.”
    He finished undressing and stood clad only in his long red flannel underwear. He stretched, lazily.
    “Let’s go to bed, huh?”
    “I ain’t sleepy,” said Gus, giving him a challenging look.
    “Aw, come on, goddamit. Bob, you want to go to bed, don’t you?”
    “Kind of. I want a drink of water first, though.”
    “Gus, go get Bob a drink of water,” “Ted, go get Bob a drink of water,” said Ted and Gus.
    “You go, goddam you,” they said.
    “But I got my clothes off,” said Ted. “It ain’t that I mind gettin’ you a drink, Bob,” he explained apologetically, “but it ain’t fair when he’s still dressed.”
    Gus appeared to deliberate. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you,” he said in a man-to-man tone. “You go get the water, and then I’ll go to bed.”
    “But you still got your clothes on!”
    “Well, you don’t need to go downstairs. Reach out the window and get a handful of snow.”
    “Why don’t you reach out?”
    “Hell, what do you want for nothing? I ain’t going to do everything for you. You get the snow and I’ll get to bed.”
    The argument sounded a trifle specious to Ted, but he was too weary for a prolonged discussion. He declared for perhaps the hundredth time that day that his brother was a son-of-a-bitch, stated that he was addicted to the eating of offal and the drinking of a liquid not popularly regarded as a beverage, and announced that he had been sexually intimate with skunks, all of whom had afterward died of shame. Having relieved himself of these facetiæ, he opened the window.
    He cursed as an icy blast swept through the room, but he gamely unlatched the screen and reached out upon the porch roof.
    On the bed, Gus winked at Bob and gathered his feet beneath him. “Lean farther out,” he called casually, “you’ll scrape up all the pigeon dew where you are there.”
    “Yah,” grunted Ted, bent almost double over the window. But he leaned farther out. He stood on tiptoe, leaving his red-flanneled shanks completely off balance.
    Gus sprang. He cleared the end of the bed with his leap, caught his brother by the heels, and shoved him out the window.
    Ted shot down the porch roof like a toboggan. There was no danger of his being seriously injured, for a deep snowdrift lay around that part of the porch. The snowbank, of course, was none too attractive a prospect; and, like any falling person, he grabbed the