TEN

I hated being pushed around that way. I hated being called a liar. I hated having him threaten to put me in jail and all the rest of it. He was the one who was breaking the law, not me. I’d seen that green stuff coming out of that pipe, even if I didn’t have the pictures to prove it. I was a witness. And I knew where the pipe was—I wouldn’t have any trouble finding it now. Suppose I went down to the newspaper and told them what I knew. They were bound to run a story about it, and then people in Albany would hear about it and send somebody out to investigate. I could show them where the pipe was, and in the end the people from Albany would make them stop the pollution. It might work after all. But should I do it? Maybe it would just get me in more trouble. Maybe I ought to forget the whole thing and just sweat out three more years of being trash. The more trouble I got into, the more I was likely to ruin my chances of getting into the air force.

That night, when Dad came in, I told him that Mr. Herbst wanted him to call. I didn’t say anything about going to his office or any of that. I just said that I’d bumped into him on the street after school.

Dad said, “I don’t like working for that rich slicker. He’s too smooth for me, with those two-hundred-dollar shoes and those hundred-dollar shirts. What did he want?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do his shoes really cost two hundred dollars?”

“What difference does it make to him what they cost?” Dad said. “He’s taking the money out of the hides of working people anyway.”

“Do you work for Mr. Herbst a lot?” I said.

Dad shrugged. “I got to make a living,” he said. He sat down and began taking off his shoes.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I just wondered if you knew him.”

“Yeah, I know him,” Dad said. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. He’s slick.”

For the first time I began to think that maybe there was something to what Dad always said about the biggies taking it out of the hides of the workingman. Herbst was doing something wrong, and he was going to a lot of trouble to cover it up. That didn’t exactly mean that he was taking it out of anybody’s hide, except the ones who wanted to fish in the Timber River. But it did seem like he didn’t mind breaking the law and lying about it. Would he ever get caught? When the stars began to fall would the sinners really be judged?

For a couple of days I thought about it. Was there any way Herbst could get me into trouble if I went to the editors of the Timber Falls Journal and told them what I’d seen? Could he go back now and get me for trespassing or something, or was it too late? He had a lot of power in town, he said, and I knew he was right, from the way the cops had let him decide what to do about me—letting him take my camera, which he had no right to, and all that. But what could he actually do to me?

I couldn’t figure it out, but it worried me, and I kept wondering if I ought to drop the whole thing. For a while I thought about sending the newspaper an anonymous letter. There wouldn’t be much use in that, though. In the first place, they wouldn’t know who it was who could show them where the pipe was. In the second place, I wouldn’t get any credit. Besides, Herbst was bound to know who had sent in the letter anyway.

The sensible thing, I knew, would be to drop the whole idea. But I didn’t want to; I was tired of being pushed around and called a liar. So in the end I decided I would do it. I would write a letter to the paper and sign my own name to it. It might be risky, but it was better than being pushed around.

The next day I bought some letter paper and envelopes at the drugstore, and went home and sat up in my room writing the letter. It took me a long time to get it right. I didn’t want to tell any lies about it, because if they caught me lying about part of it, they wouldn’t believe any of it. But I didn’t want to tell the whole truth, either—about how I’d started the whole thing to get people to respect me, or about being caught by the cops, and all of that. In the end I wrote:

To the Editor:

The carpet factory is deliberately polluting the Timber River. I know because I saw a green liquid coming out of a pipe in the riverbank near the factory. This is illegal, and somebody should tell the people at Albany about it.

Yours truly, Harry White.

I wondered if the newspaper editors knew who I was. I wondered if they knew how everybody in town looked down on us because we stole, and Helen had run off, and Dad didn’t have a regular job. Would the editors decide that being as I was a White I was a liar, and they shouldn’t trust what I told them? I thought about putting on some kind of a PS saying that I wasn’t a liar and they could trust me, but I couldn’t think of any way of saying it that wouldn’t sound silly, so I let it go. And the next day, after school, I went to the post office and mailed the letter.

The Timber Falls Journal came out on Thursdays. I mailed my letter on Monday, which meant that I had to wait a few days before the letter came out. I was pretty excited. When the letter came out, there was bound to be a lot of talk about it around town. I wondered what the kids at school would think. They would be pretty surprised all right, and a lot of them would wish that they’d thought up the idea first.

But I was nervous, too, for there was no telling what Herbst might do. He would want to get me if he could. The question was whether he could or not.

Finally Thursday came. It drizzled all day, and after school I walked through the drizzle to the drugstore and bought a copy of the paper. I didn’t want anybody to see me reading it—I didn’t know why, I just didn’t. So I went across Main Street and around in front of the railroad station. There was a bench on the station platform, with a roof over it, where people used to wait when they had passenger trains. I went and sat on the bench to keep out of the drizzle, and opened the paper. My hands were shaking and I felt weak. I flipped through the paper until I came to the “Letters to the Editor” column and raced down it.

My letter wasn’t there. Maybe they had decided it was so important, they would put it in another part of the paper, I thought. I went back to the first page and went through the whole newspaper from beginning to end. The letter wasn’t anywhere. I started from the back and went through the whole paper again, looking as carefully as I could, just to be sure I didn’t miss anything. But my letter wasn’t in.

I sat there watching the drizzle fall onto the shiny steel tops of the railroad tracks, and I wondered. I didn’t want to think they had decided not to run my letter because I was trash and couldn’t be trusted. Maybe it took them longer than a few days to get a letter in. Maybe they had others ahead of it. Or maybe you had to get your letter in a week in advance or something. There could be a lot of reasons why my letter wasn’t in the paper. There was only one thing to do, and that was wait until next week’s paper. So I balled the paper up, threw it into an oil drum they had for a trash can at the station, and went on home through the drizzle.

That night, when Dad came home from work, he said less than usual. He just walked into the house, poured himself a drink of whiskey, and didn’t say anything to anybody. For a while he sat there at that scratched kitchen table drinking his whiskey. Then he said, “Harry, come out to the barn. I want to talk to you.”

He’d found out something, that was for sure. He went out the door, and I went out behind him in the drizzling rain. When we got out to the barn, he leaned up against the workbench, which was all cluttered with tools and rags and bits of wood. I went over and leaned against the workbench, but a little way from him, so as not to be too close. I didn’t look at him but stared out into the dark drizzle at the end of the day.

“I saw your pal Herbst today,” he said. “He had me come over to his office.”

“Oh,” I said.

“He told me the cops caught you out there by the carpet factory taking pictures.”

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong, Dad—”

“Shut up,” he said. “I didn’t say you were. He said it wasn’t likely anybody would get back in there again. They’re going to put a chain fence around that whole area and put a couple of dogs in there. So stay away from there from now on. You might get hurt.”

“I wasn’t planning on—”

“Shut up. I haven’t finished.” He was being mighty tough, and I didn’t understand why. “Now you listen to me close, Harry.” He stopped and gave me a hard look to make sure I was taking him seriously. “I want you to forget all about anything you saw in there. I don’t want you to say a word about it to anybody. Hear?”

“But Dad,” I said. “They’re pollut—”

He hit me. He smacked me hard across the face. It spun my head around, and I staggered away from the workbench and almost fell. I was dazed and shook my head to try to clear it. His words seemed to be coming from a distance. “I told you,” he said. “Just forget about it. Just forget it for good. You hear me?”

My head was clearing. I licked my lips. I could taste salt and I knew I was bleeding. I stared at him.

“You hear me, Harry?”

I knew he would hit me again if I didn’t answer. “Yes,” I said in a low voice. He turned and walked out of the barn and I sat down on the rough plank floor and began to cry. My face hurt, but that wasn’t it. Why was Dad siding with Herbst, after all the terrible things he’d said about Herbst? He never liked Herbst. And he’d always said he himself was against pollution.

For a long time I sat there on the barn floor. I knew that Mom and Dad were in the kitchen eating supper. I was hungry, but I didn’t want to see either of them. So I went on sitting there, getting hungrier and hungrier. Finally I got up and went down to the house. Mom was washing the dishes, and Dad was in the other room watching a baseball game.

“There’s some hash on the stove, Harry,” Mom said in a low voice. “I kept it warm for you.”

It wasn’t Mom’s fault that Dad had hit me, but I didn’t feel like saying thank you to anybody. So I just got a plate and helped myself to some hash out of the frying pan.

“Don’t be too upset with Dad,” she said. “He’s only doing what he thinks is right for the family.”

I didn’t understand that. Why was hitting me right for the family? “He didn’t have to hit me,” I said. I sat down at the table with my plate of hash.

She sighed. “I know,” she said. “But he said you gave him an argument.”

Dad came into the kitchen. I wouldn’t look at him, but bent my head down and started eating. He didn’t say anything but put on his jacket and went out the kitchen door. In a moment we heard the truck start and drive away. And that was when I remembered that the next Thursday my letter about the pollution would come out in the paper. I sat there frozen, a forkful of hash stopped in midair. If that letter was published, he’d give me a real beating. I didn’t understand why he was so strong on me keeping my mouth shut about the pollution pipe, but he was, and he would near beat me to death when that letter came out.