The Baby in the Icebox: And Other Short Fiction Read online

  Roxy’s testimony was carried in full in the New York Times, and Cain assumed it reached Paris, where he was certain Hemingway had absorbed it. He became convinced that his theory was correct when he finally read “Fifty Grand” and noted the similarity in its plot, especially in an incident described by Roxy Stimson, prior to Jess Smith’s suicide. As for Roxy’s influence on Cain’s style: “She taught me respect for the cliche. I’d say she influenced me plenty,” he said.

  The good response to “Pastorale” encouraged Cain to write another short story, this one based on an experience in France on the night of September 26, 1918, during the opening of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Again, Cain elected to tell the story in the first-person narration of an Eastern Shore rube, although the incident actually happened to him and he could just as easily have told it in his own near-perfect diction. “The Taking of Montfaucon” also appeared in the Mercury and was reprinted in 1929 and 1942 in the Infantry Journal, which said, “[It] has never been excelled as an accurate description of conditions in the war and few stories of any aspect of the war will stand beside it.”

  After “Montfaucon,” Cain worked exclusively on dialogues to round out his book Our Government, then moved to California, where, for the first year or so, he tried to establish himself as a screenwriter. When Paramount let him go—after six months of unsuccessful scriptwriting efforts—he decided to resume his fiction. His first story ideas grew out of the automobile trips around Southern California he and his wife, Elina, used to take, sometimes with the two kids. One place they liked to stop was the Goebels Lion Farm on the road to Ventura. Cain had a lifelong fascination with cats—especially big ones. His feelings for them bordered on fanaticism: “I find it impossible,” he said, “to believe in a life after death, and if you don’t accept that, the Christian theology goes up in smoke…. To me, God is life, and if no immortal soul figures in, then all must be included in the concept. So animals to me take on a mystic meaning, more perhaps than they do to most people.” Cain wrote editorials and several short stories about tigers; he wrote Hearst columns about panthers; and late in life he wrote an unpublished novel about a little girl who is given a tiger cub, which she raises as a pet.

  Out at Goebels, Cain conceived an idea for a story about a couple who run a gas station and lunchroom on the road to Ventura. Their trouble starts when the husband, Duke, decides to add some big cats to interest the children and draw more customers. Cain called his story “The Baby in the Icebox,” and although he also wrote it in his first-person, Ring Lardner style, he found that when he moved from the Eastern Shore and put his story in the mouth of a western roughneck, a type he was beginning to observe in California, he was writing in a comfortable, natural style that had distinctive flavor and pace. The famous James M. Cain momentum began to emerge.

  “The Baby in the Icebox” is a tribute to Cain’s ability to tell an improbable tale believably—and to make it eminently readable. It was also an important link in the chain that eventually led to Cain’s phenomenal career as a novelist. When Mencken showed Knopf the galleys of “The Baby in the Icebox,” the publisher wrote Cain that the story “is a whopper—one of the best I have read, and it encourages me to believe that one of these days you may try your hand at a novel.”

  Cain replied that he still did not think he could write long fiction, but added that Knopf’s note might be just the encouragement he needed. Then he outlined an idea for a story which would soon become The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  “The Baby in the Icebox” sold immediately to Paramount, but when the movie—She Made Her Bed—based on the story was released in the spring of 1934, it was panned by the critics. This did not affect Cain, who by that time was riding the crest of the wave created by the publication of Postman. Usually, the leads to the movie reviews referred to Cain or “the most famous story by James M. Cain” rather than to the movie itself, and most reviewers relieved Cain of all responsibility for the film’s failure. Said Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: “Though it is fastened upon a story by James M. Cain, the blame for this picture is too large, too richly complicated to be attached to one person.”

  With the publication of Postman, James M. Cain was suddenly famous and in demand. His agent, James Geller, quickly sold two of his stories, written at about the time he wrote “The Baby in the Icebox” but rejected by several editors (“Come Back,” about a bit player trying to make a comeback in Hollywood riding a famous horse; and “The Whale, the Cluck and the Diving Venus,” about an Eastern Shore hustler who tries to promote a tourist attraction by putting a whale in a swimming pool). Cain was working at a furious pace—“the fastest two-finger typist I ever saw,” says his stepson, Leo Tyszecki. He started a series of food articles, which drove Edith Haggard, his new agent, nearly frantic. “You have made me an old woman, lad. With the magazine world at your feet, with their hands raised high over their heads pleading for short stories, you want to write food articles.”

  He was also writing a three-times-a-week syndicated column for the Hearst papers, working on a play to be based on Postman, beginning a magazine serial to be called Double Indemnity, and taking studio assignments, during one of which he dictated a short story, “Hip, Hip, Hippo,” about a Hollywood bit player who tried to make a comeback riding a hippopotamus in a big movie, not one of Cain’s better efforts.

  By this time, Cain had also outlined a novel, eventually to be called Serenade, for Knopf, and the publisher was urging him to finish it and take advantage of all the publicity surrounding the publication of Postman. But Cain was still not satisfied that the basic idea for Serenade was sound, and he settled down to respond to his New York agent’s plea that he write more short stories. But once again, as with his food articles, he flabbergasted Ms. Haggard, this time by writing a third-person story about a girl and a boy and the boy’s fear of diving off high places. He called it “The Birthday Party” and sent it off to New York. An amazed Edith Haggard replied, “It’s a new writer who signs himself James M. Cain!” She had been pleading for more stories—but a children’s birthday party? Most of New York’s magazine editors agreed. “It would be hard to imagine anything more different from The Postman Always Rings Twice,” wrote the assistant editor of This Week in rejecting the story. “Although we are by no means demanding that he spend the rest of his life rewriting Postman, we had hoped for something as swift-moving and full of action.” Ms. Haggard finally sold “The Birthday Party” to the Ladies’ Home Journal for $750.

  After that, with Ms. Haggard still pleading for a murder story, he finished Double Indemnity, then started to work on another short story that he expected would be more to the agent’s liking. He recalled how, when he was living in Burbank, he would drive home from one of the studios and be detained night after night by the freight trains at the crossings. As he sat there watching the boxcars go by, he was appalled by the hoboes—“the hundreds of human derelicts silhouetted against the Verdugo Hills, perched like crows on top of the cars, going nowhere and knowing they were going nowhere.” As he thought about these men, his mind—with the usual Cain twist—began to play on an idea: What would happen if one of these hoboes, perhaps unwittingly, became involved in some scrape, such as a murder? Characteristically, Cain was more interested in the hobo’s subjective reaction than in his battle with the law. “When a murderer comes to grips with the law,” Cain thought, “he has a better than even chance to win. But, because of forces inside of him, his crime eventually catches up with him”—again, Cain’s favorite theme.

  By now Cain had firmly established his style and milieu. After “The Birthday Party” had satisfied him that he could write salable stories in the third person, he decided to try his hobo tale, which he called “Dead Man,” in the third person. Ms. Haggard wrote back one of what Cain called “those Mama-knows-best letters,” suggesting the story would have a much better chance of selling if he made the ending more pleasant. Cain must have wanted the money badly because in uncharacteristic fa
shion he changed the ending to make it commercial. But still it did not sell. Then one day, when he was in New York working on his play based on Postman, he received a call from Paul Palmer, the new editor of the Mercury. Palmer was calling about “Dead Man,” which Edith Haggard had finally submitted to him. “Jim, I like it fine,” Palmer said, “and want to run it in the next issue, except that this damned Pollyanna ending doesn’t sound like you…. Could you fix me up another?” Cain restored the original ending, and the story appeared in the March 1936 Mercury. It is perhaps his best third-person story and has been reprinted at least half a dozen times, including an appearance in the O. Henry collection.

  By the mid-1930s, after the publication of Serenade, Cain was giving most of his writing energy to novels and to trying to make it as a screenwriter, which he never did. But responding to Edith Haggard’s pleadings, he wrote a few more short stories—all in the third person—which she sold to Liberty: “Brush Fire,” “Coal Black,” “Everything but the Truth,” and “The Girl in the Storm.”

  The last short story in this section (“Joy Ride to Glory”) was probably written sometime in the late 1930s. It was never published but turned up in a collection of Cain manuscripts purchased in Los Angeles by Stuart and Roger Birnbaum. In that the Birnbaums have, to the best of my knowledge, the only copy of the story in existence, their cooperation was necessary, and I wish to thank them for giving me permission to include it in this collection. The story is written in the first person and concerns a young man who, in escaping from prison, takes a perilous underground journey through a storm sewer. The idea for this story must have grown out of an experience Cain had when he lived on Belden Drive in Hollywood Hills. One day after a storm, he was appalled to look out of his window and see a little girl being swept by the swollen waters in a gutter toward a large open drain that would have carried her underground. Suddenly, one of his neighbors, the composer George Antheil, came rushing from his house in his underwear and scooped the little girl up in his arms just before she would have disappeared into the sewer. Earlier, when Cain was an editorial writer for the New York World, he had met Antheil after he had written a critical editorial about Antheil’s composition Ballet Mechanique. Cain did not like the composer or his music, but after the incident at the storm sewer, he said he felt kindly disposed toward him the rest of his life.

  After returning to the East in 1948 and becoming mired in a Civil War novel, Cain returned to short-story writing, hoping to make some quick money. He wrote several stories, some of which were sold to Esquire and adventure magazines such as Manhunt. They were consciously commercial stories, not up to his earlier work. But this did not bother Cain; he always felt that stories written primarily for magazines did not count.

  R.H.

  Pastorale

  I

  WELL, IT LOOKS LIKE Burbie is going to get hung. And if he does, what he can lay it on is, he always figured he was so damn smart.

  You see, Burbie, he left town when he was about sixteen year old. He run away with one of them travelling shows, “East Lynne” I think it was, and he stayed away about ten years. And when he come back he thought he knowed a lot. Burbie, he’s got them watery blue eyes what kind of stick out from his face, and how he killed the time was to sit around and listen to the boys talk down at the poolroom or over at the barber shop or a couple other places where he hung out, and then wink at you like they was all making a fool of theirself or something and nobody didn’t know it but him.

  But when you come right down to what Burbie had in his head, why it wasn’t much. ’Course, he generally always had a job, painting around or maybe helping out on a new house, like of that, but what he used to do was to play baseball with the high school team. And they had a big fight over it, ’cause Burbie was so old nobody wouldn’t believe he went to the school, and them other teams was all the time putting up a squawk. So then he couldn’t play no more. And another thing he liked to do was sing at the entertainments. I reckon he liked that most of all, ’cause he claimed that a whole lot of the time he was away he was on the stage, and I reckon maybe he was at that, ’cause he was pretty good, ’specially when he dressed hisself up like a old-time Rube and come out and spoke a piece what he knowed.

  Well, when he come back to town he seen Lida and it was a natural. ’Cause Lida, she was just about the same kind of a thing for a woman as Burbie was for a man. She used to work in the store, selling dry goods to the men, and kind of making hats on the side. ’Cepting only she didn’t stay on the dry goods side no more’n she had to. She was generally over where the boys was drinking Coca-Cola, and all the time carrying on about did they like it with ammonia or lemon, and could she have a swallow outen their glass. And what she had her mind on was the clothes she had on, and was she dated up for Sunday night. Them clothes was pretty snappy, and she made them herself. And I heard some of them say she wasn’t hard to date up, and after you done kept your date why maybe you wasn’t going to be disappointed. And why Lida married the old man I don’t know, lessen she got tired working at the store and tooken a look at the big farm where he lived at, about two mile from town.

  By the time Burbie got back she’d been married about a year and she was about due. So her and him commence meeting each other, out in the orchard back of the old man’s house. The old man would go to bed right after supper and then she’d sneak out and meet Burbie. And nobody wasn’t supposed to know nothing about it. Only everybody did, ’cause Burbie, after he’d get back to town about eleven o’clock at night, he’d kind of slide into the poolroom and set down easy like. And then somebody’d say, “Yay, Burbie, where you been?” And Burbie, he’d kind of look around, and then he’d pick out somebody and wink at him, and that was how Burbie give it some good advertising.

  So the way Burbie tells it, and he tells it plenty since he done got religion down to the jailhouse, it wasn’t long before him and Lida thought it would be a good idea to kill the old man. They figured he didn’t have long to live nohow, so he might as well go now as wait a couple of years. And another thing, the old man had kind of got hep that something was going on, and they figured if he throwed Lida out it wouldn’t be no easy job to get his money even if he died regular. And another thing, by that time the Klux was kind of talking around, so Burbie figured it would be better if him and Lida was to get married, else maybe he’d have to leave town again.

  So that was how come he got Hutch in it. You see, he was afeared to kill the old man hisself and he wanted some help. And then he figured it would be pretty good if Lida wasn’t nowheres around and it would look like robbery. If it would of been me, I would of left Hutch out of it. ’Cause Hutch, he was mean. He’d been away for a while too, but him going away, that wasn’t the same as Burbie going away. Hutch was sent. He was sent for ripping a mail sack while he was driving the mail wagon up from the station, and before he come back he done two years down to Atlanta.

  But what I mean, he wasn’t only crooked, he was mean. He had a ugly look to him, like when he’d order hisself a couple of fried eggs over to the restaurant, and then set and eat them with his head humped down low and his arm curled around his plate like he thought somebody was going to steal if off him, and handle his knife with his thumb down near the tip, kind of like a nigger does a razor. Nobody didn’t have much to say to Hutch, and I reckon that’s why he ain’t heard nothing about Burbie and Lida, and et it all up what Burbie told him about the old man having a pot of money hid in the fireplace in the back room.

  So one night early in March, Burbie and Hutch went out and done the job. Burbie he’d already got Lida out of the way. She’d let on she had to go to the city to buy some things, and she went away on No. 6, so everybody knowed she was gone. Hutch, he seen her go, and come running to Burbie saying now was a good time, which was just what Burbie wanted. ’Cause her and Burbie had already put the money in the pot, so Hutch wouldn’t think it was no put-up job. Well, anyway, they put $23 in the pot, all changed into pennies and nickels and dimes s
o it would look like a big pile, and that was all the money Burbie had. It was kind of like you might say the savings of a lifetime.

  And then Burbie and Hutch got in the horse and wagon what Hutch had, ’cause Hutch was in the hauling business again, and they went out to the old man’s place. Only they went around the back way, and tied the horse back of the house so nobody couldn’t see it from the road, and knocked on the back door and made out like they was just coming through the place on their way back to town and had stopped by to get warmed up, ’cause it was cold as hell. So the old man let them in and give them a drink of some hard cider what he had, and they got canned up a little more. They was already pretty canned, ’cause they both of them had a pint of corn on their hip for to give them some nerve.

  And then Hutch he got back of the old man and crowned him with a wrench what he had hid in his coat.

  II

  WELL, NEXT OFF HUTCH gets sore as hell at Burbie ’cause there ain’t no more’n $23 in the pot. He didn’t do nothing. He just set there, first looking at the money, what he had piled up on a table, and then looking at Burbie.

  And then Burbie commences soft-soaping him. He says hope my die he thought there was a thousand dollars anyway in the pot, on account the old man being like he was. And he says hope my die it sure was a big surprise to him how little there was there. And he says hope my die it sure does make him feel bad, on account he’s the one had the idea first. And he says hope my die it’s all his fault and he’s going to let Hutch keep all the money, damn if he ain’t. He ain’t going to take none of it for hisself at all, on account of how bad he feels. And Hutch, he don’t say nothing at all, only look at Burbie and look at the money.