Heed the Thunder by Jim Thompson Page B

first thing at hand, in this case, the gutter.
    He caught it as he went over the end of the roof, turned head over heels, and hung there helplessly. And in the bedroom Gus rolled on the floor and howled.
    Roaring, he staggered back to his feet as the kitchen door opened.
    Mrs. Fargo emerged with her inevitable blacksnake.
    “Yoooo h-ornery devil! H-up to h-mooore h-of yooor meanness, hey? Just h-ain’t satisfied h-as long h-as you got h-any hide on your h-ornery back. Well…”
    She cracked the whip around his buttocks, regarding the writhing and shrieking results with pleasure. She was a master with the whip.
    Now, while her son made the night hideous with his cries and contortions, she pretended to believe that he was merely singing and dancing. And she urged him on, wheezily, the whip cracking, to greater and greater efforts. There was such a nice conjunction of ability and opportunity that she might well have attained her long-sought goal of skinning him alive, for Sherman saw not the slightest reason to interfere. But Gus, perhaps bored, perhaps remorseful, took a hand.
    Leaning out the window, he dislodged a large drift of snow from the roof, and sent it showering down upon his mother. And in the ensuing confusion, Ted dropped to the ground and escaped.
    He was literally black-and-blue beneath the red flannels, but that was pretty much his normal state and he did not mind greatly. In fact, he even felt refreshed by the experience; the freezing air combined with the whip-encouraged circulation of his blood had dispelled his sleepiness.
    Everyone had gone outside at the beginning of the excitement, and Ted, as he darted back through the kitchen, snatched up a pumpkin pie and took it with him. Upstairs again, he demanded the right to give Gus three swift kicks in the arse, and Gus acquiesced. They divided the pie, giving Bob the biggest piece, and sat down to eat merrily.
    They quenched their thirst with snow from the roof, and relit the pipes. They discussed the airplane at length. At even greater length, the brothers discussed what seemed to them an insoluble biological problem connected with their mother and father and growing out of their mother’s size. Being the kindly lads they were, they did not, of course, leave their young cousin out of this last discussion. They laid the problem before him in its rawest fundamentals, answered his idiotic questions, and accepted his equally idiotic suggestions, nodding at each other gravely.
    Everyone agreed that it had been one goddamned hell of a swell night.
    When they went to bed, at last, Bob lay down in the middle. His head touched against their hard sprawled arms, and each brother held one of his dirty little hands clasped in his.
    The wind whined and clawed against the eaves, the owls hooted warningly in the grove, and along the serried hills of sand the coyotes mourned the moon.
    And they slept.

8
    I n her room at the hunky Jabowskis’ house far up Misery Crick, Edie Dillon lay awake, thinking. She was too cold to sleep; the hunkies had straw-ticks instead of featherbeds, and their comforters were stuffed with corn shucks. She was sick, too. For supper they had given her cabbage with sour cream and some kind of highly spiced meat. They had put nothing in her lunch all week but black bread spread with lard. But the school…she grew hot with shame and anger beneath the scanty covers. The Czerny boys had rolled her in the snow when she tried to discipline them. And the Kecklik boy had taken a ruler away from her and struck her across the shoulders with it. They meant to run her out, and their parents would do nothing. Well, she thought grimly, let ’em do their worst. They might carry her out, but they wouldn’t run her. She thought of Bobbie longingly. A little, she pitied herself. He would never know, could never realize, what she had gone through for him.…
    In his room at Lincoln Fargo’s, Robert Dillon sat up on his cot and looked across at the unoccupied