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The Hate Merchant
by Niven Busch
Chapter 1
Walking along the shoulder of the road, he couldn't hear the cars until they were almost on top of him. They came so quietly, rushing in great sweeps down the descending loops of concrete, rollicking along the great road through the low tan hills soiled with December rain. Once in a while a white face walled in comfort there behind glass in the warmth, the rich upholstery of some expensive car, profiled toward him, looked him over without scorn or enmity, without even curiosity. Thus an airborne person might look down into some canyon where a man no bigger than an ant was chopping out a stump, the blows of his axe unheard and all the furious surge and outgo of his energy reduced to a tiny motion without reality or meaning and even his existence made ridiculous by the power passing above him and the white faces looking.
"Can you see it? Right down there, out in that little clearing. See what I mean? Just beyond, there -- a man there, doing something . . ."
And the other birdface peering down through the packed leagues of glassy air as through the wrong end of a telescope.
"No, no. . . . Yes, by God. You're right. Yes, I can see him now. Man chopping."
And so, the fact having been established, it could be shoved aside -- dropped permanently, and the man himself consigned without further inquiry to the matters of a shadow world, not worth investigating.
Rain on them all, Splane thought. Not that he held it against them to ride in comfort while he pounded footleather. Some freak twist of fate had put them where they were and he where he was: The Breaks. He could take that. He'd had The Breaks himself, would have them again; he was sure of it. He could feel the pulse of his sureness inside him just as you can hear a drum beating tight and certain through the fancy fluting of an orchestra. He'd be up there again, so let them look. It angered him, though, that he couldn't hear the cars until they were so close. The shoulder was narrow and the rain had slicked the 'dobe dirt on it so that he had to walk close to the edge of the concrete, too close; before he could get set he'd feel the bulge of air put in motion by the car hit him in the legs and back, and then vroom -- aaw, the engine noise, and whoosh the slip stream hit him in the face and chest and he would shorten stride to keep from slipping, fighting the treacherous mud under his shoes and the weight of the sample case in his hand.
He shifted the case to his left hand, first switching the folded newspaper, yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, from his right to his left armpit to ease the pull. He slogged along, a big man, powerful and awkward. His shoulders were heavy and his waist long but his legs, though strong, were short, almost insignificant; their effort to make up for this discrepancy was what gave his gait its pumping, purposeful motion. His face was handsome yet, like his body, disproportioned somehow: thin mouth, big beaky nose and bold, restless, rather protuberant eyes. Tufts of hair flopped over his forehead; his eyebrows were as thick as snouts and more of the ubiquitous brindled hair jutted with an animal effect from his nostrils. His clothes were commonplace to a degree and hence, again, discrepant: a doublebreasted city suit and brown oxfords, topped off with a fairly new, smartlooking raincoat. The sample case he carried was the kind that salesmen use -- a large oblong box with a handle on it and his name painted on its side with green paint, the full name, not just initials, as if the character of its owner would have made any abbreviation an indignity.
GASPAR DAMION SPLANE
He set his jaw, glared at the road ahead. A green convertible which had just passed him at high speed put on its brakes to pick up a GI. Lots of soldiers were hitching, mostly EM's from the posts down in the San Joaquin Valley, on the other side of the Grapevine. People weren't tired of GI's here the way they were up near the big base camps; even after one year, one week and two days of the war a GI was, if not exactly a potential hero as all GI's had been a year ago, still a human being that a car would stop for.
Not a lousy civilian hitchhiker, Splane thought self-pityingly. He put his free hand up inside his shirt and rubbed the St. Christopher medal hanging from his neck.
A Diesel hummed around a curve of the mountain behind him. Splane caught sight of it for a precarious second clinging there before it plunged on toward him. In sight again, no bigger than a bug, it grew rapidly to the size of an ocean liner; it rushed toward Splane who whirled to face it, his free hand jerking up in a vacant, frustrated gesture, half supplication and half insult. At the precise moment when it became evident that the Diesel was not going to stop, he dropped his arm, and by the time the truck had come abreast of him he had already resumed his slogging stride along the highroad.
"Headin' into L. A., friend?"
Splane looked up in surprise. He'd been lost in his thoughts, dreaming something about the Senator. So real at times were his reveries about the Oldtime that even as he stared at the couple in the car he was still half in this one, walking up a long hallway in the Statehouse with the Senator in front of him, his Panama set at a jaunty angle, the bodyguards all round, all hurrying the way they always did, a flying wedge designed to zip through hotel lobbies, smash through crowds. That's him. That's . . . And the bodyguards who always and who had to, but who this time, Jesus, didn't, who were Jesus Christ too late, the jaunty-angled Panama down on the floor, the shot and then the damned optician's body bouncing, jerking on the floor as the slugs from the bodyguards' police-magnums tore into his head, legs, shoulders, abdomen. Thirty-one slugs, somebody counted afterwards, but all no use because the Senator . . . the Senator was . . .
"Get yore grip in here. There's lots of room."
The car was some old job that had been painted by hand with house paint. Splane didn't even know what make of car it was, what with the house paint and a junkyard radiator ornament that changed the model. One of the real oldies, an Apperson or -- what was that car that was a gag on the Jack Benny program? -- a Maxwell.
"Why, thank you. That's mighty kind of you." He set the sample case as directed on the floor of the back, careful to leave room for the lady's feet, then got in front beside her husband.
"Kind of slippery walkin', ain't it?"
It was the lady talking. She was the one who had asked him to get in -- had probably told her husband to stop for him. Wanted a listener -- and who better than a stranger? "Yes, indeed, ma'am. Far better to ride. I should say so." The man never said a word, just let the clutch in with a jerk and got on with the trip. An old guy -- sixty anyhow. Fruit rancher. The lug of cots on the back seat beside his wife told that much: winey fruit-fragrance fought the mustiness of the car. Mr. Rancher's hands on the wheel looked like bunches of dried fruit themselves. He had the classic hump set low between his shoulder blades that all farmers had in the days when field work was done with horses. His wife, Splane guessed, was the same age or near it, but she looked younger: high coloring, spectacles, a parakeetish country cheerfulness of voice and manner. Lots of energy. She was the type that would be president of her rural P.T.A. and collect for the Red Cross.
"I was just saying to my husband, there's a fellow toting a big grip -- tell him to get in. We've got the room for him and his grip both. I don't believe in passin' people going your way like some folks do. We don't do that out home. Leastways we try not to. I believe in country places the people are more neighborly than down in the city and my daughter says the same thing. She don't hardly know her neighbors and she's lived in the same house five years, the whole time she's been married. Now would that ever happen in a country place? Would it?"
Leaning forward, she peered anxiously, sparklingly at Splane through the thick spectacles, wanting him to answer, but with her tongue poised and her mouth half open so that she could cut him off in case he did.
"Now you know it wouldn't. Never! People just ain't that way in country places. Are they? Now I ask you," she said quickly, intercepting the reply which, already chopped down, she could see collecting its fragments behind Splane's eyes. "How could they? How could they get along if they was like that? You've lived in the country," she went on, with a slightly tremulous spark of comradeship, conferring an unasked recognition upon Splane. "I can see. You've been a lot of places. A man can -- "
She flipped a gesture, tying in a knot all the undesignated glories encompassable for a man like Splane.
"You know how I treat neighbors? You know what I do? I'm not blowing my own horn now. I don't believe in that and I don't take no credit for a little neighborliness because anyone with sense would do it, even them down in the city. But they lose it. They forget it. They got different ways of living, I suppose. Each to himself. I don't judge. But like I was telling you this family, the Sardinoupoluses or 'puses' or some such whooses, Greeks or Rumanians or Bolsheviks, how do I know?"
Her ruddy, serious face seemed to break up; she pulled her glasses off, already misted with the tears of the great mirth which she contracted from her joke while a wild, country parrot-screech of laughter shook her bosoms. "They moved in, that's all I know. Furriners. We get Portugees, Okies, and Mexicans every year for picking cots. They camp right on your land and steal you blind. But these neighbors, it was hot when they moved in and -- what's the matter now?"
The healthy, ruddy garrulousness of her speech was gone abruptly, replaced by an electrocution whine.
"What Is It?" she squalled.
Her query was directed at her husband, he having occasioned it apparently by a slight clearing of his throat.
"He thinks I talk too much," she said, relaxing when it became obvious that no further interruption was brewing. "But I say if he don't want to listen he don't have to. It was a hot day and I went and squeezed some lemons, we trade cots for them, and made some lemonade and I packed a box like this one," indicating the lug on the seat, "only smaller and I took it to these Sardinoupoluses. Why, I would of baked a plate of cobbler to go with it if I'd had time. I wanted them to feel they was welcome. Do you see it? Do you get what I mean?" she demanded fiercely, her bright schoolmarm's eyes fixed tensely upon Splane's as he sat with his neck screwed round, a position which he had to hold in order to look at her and listen at the same time. "That's what I call being neighborly. I'm that way. We all are in the Valley, or most all. You have to be, in a country place. It's just the way it always has been and it always will be. But not in the city."
As tangible proof of neighborliness she held out a handful of the goldyellow, dried apricots, Splane accepting them eagerly.
The fruit was sweet and tender but the acids in it churned his empty stomach, sharpening his appetite for something more substantial; at the same time the warmth of the car, its rocking motion and the delicious ease of sitting down after his long walk numbed him; he drowsed, his head sometimes jerking downward, tipped off balance by involuntary snatches of sleep. Mrs. Rancher gabbed along; Splane heard bits of what she was saying as the doors of sleep slid open, slid shut . . . spending Christmas with her daughter . . . saved gas coupons for six months to make the trip . . . had another, younger daughter home, finishing high school: this one wanted to join the WACS but Mr. Rancher wouldn't have it. . . . They had a son too, pharmacist's mate on a carrier.
The highway was changing. High-tension wires stalking across the pass dove underground, a ramp appeared between the four lanes which now multiplied to six -- then the ramp broadened to include a trolley track. Factories sprang out of the dim brown fields -- and soon the city closed itself around the travelers in a maze of overpasses, underpasses, arches, ramps, and tunnels slanted at crazy angles, in a gunpowdery twilight and a slough of slick streets, small houses, auto boneyards, bakeries, wickwire factories and God knows what, all of it charged somehow with menace and enchantment and the tense and betrayed feeling of that wartime winter month.
Splane felt the city. He felt its pressure in his bones and came awake. He sat up straight, working his paralyzed face muscles to restore circulation. This was more like it. Houses, wires, cars and men and women; money passing, rubber gripping pavement, smoggy city smells in the air, sweet to him as perfume from a woman's body. In a city he could live; he could operate. No slogging weary miles on a strip of 'dobe in little towns. Move on, mister. No hick faces looking at him through the gap of a door, saying, No! Whatever it is, we don't want it.
With every vein and brain cell he responded to the city.
Yet at the same time he woke up angry. He rubbed his face with grimy fingers, trying to clarify his thoughts. It always made him angry to hear people ramble on about their own affairs. This lady now. What was she talking for? To brag. That was all. Not that she was badhearted. She was neighborly all right. When you got down to it, she didn't care whether you thought she was goodhearted or not. That wasn't it. She was bragging about something else: something she had that you didn't have. The orchard. The children. The car and husband and the Christmas trip. Jesus H. Christ. She had it all. She was telling the truth. But having it wasn't enough. She had to let you know she had it. Give you apricots, a free ride, flatter you a little so you'd listen and then -- socko, stick it in and break it off.
Yakity yak.
How much she had.
How much you didn't have.
Oh, the easy ones, the aimless, brainless ones, the sheltered! Always spilling that brag out, telling you their ideas. Yet they had no ideas really, only secondhand ones, just as they themselves were only puppets. Yappers, featherbedded clucks. What did they know about you, about powers bottled up in you like lightning rolled up in a tiny space, hidden there, fearfully compressed and waiting for exit -- yes, a bolt of lightning in a human skull!
