Free The Feud by Thomas Berger

upstairs, presumably to go to the toilet but actually to check on her makeup and hairdo before joining the crowd in the alley. She was aware that all of the women would be observing her enviously. She was the only sophisticated person yet to emerge from that neighborhood, or for that matter from anywhere in Hornbeck, which was a pretty corny place and thought by the other usherettes with whom she had recently worked as being out in the sticks though it was only fifteen miles from downtown. Bernice had not really been a cashier but had named herself as such for the sheer prestige of it, and she had been safe enough from discovery, for no one from Hornbeck was likely to go to a city moviehouse, which charged half a buck for a climb to a balcony in which there was never a seat this side of the last two rows of Peanut Gallery.
    As Bernice had told her family, she was no longer employed by that theater. But the truth was that she had been fired because she was invariably distracted from her duties by the picture on the screen, which was enormous when you worked on the main floor. Nor had she taken a job as a manicurist in a hotel barbershop. She was altogether out of work at the moment, with no prospects, and in arrears on the rent for her furnished room in the city. And since her period had been overdue for a week, she had begun to suspect she was pregnant and had no means by which to determine which man might be responsible. But being naturally an optimist, she was not downcast.
    Now she touched up her lipstick and blinked her eyes rapidly many times so as to brighten their luster, and did little things to her hair with a rattail comb. She pulled her stockings taut under the rolled garters just above the knee and checked the seams in the long mirror on the front of the wardrobe in her parents’ room.
    Before going outside, she donned her coat with the fake fox collar, and then, wearing her famous cocky but not snotty grin, she appeared in the back yard.
    Mrs. Petty, from next door, said, “Why, Bernice, I never knew you was out home today! And looking like a million.” Mrs. Petty was a very thin woman with ugly features, but as nice as she could be. The Pettys had no children, and when the Beeler kids were smaller they had called them Aunt Harriet and Uncle Clem. Bernice was too old for that now but lacked the assurance to use the first name without the title, and of course could not at this late date say “Mrs.,” so she did not preface her remarks with any address at all.
    She grinned even more brightly and said, “A bad penny will always turn up, they say!”
    “Shaw,” said Mrs. Petty, beaming on her. “I keep tabs on you, Bernice, and I know you’re doing just swell. I say more power to you.”
    “How about that?” said Bernice, and moved on toward the crowd back of the garage, and while she was on her way the police cruiser came rolling slowly up the alley. Everybody said “Hi” to her, and she went among them and found Jack, put her arm through his, and said, “Hi, handsome. What’s going on?”
    “I guess it was some kind of bomb.” He looked at the police car. “Who called him?”
    Harvey Yelton, Hornbeck’s chief of police, was sliding out of the car, holding his holstered pistol so that it didn’t catch on the steering wheel. He was the first man who had ever had Bernice, who was seventeen at the time. It was doubtful that he knew she was a virgin, because she had lost her thing riding a bike as a kid.
    “Hi there,” Harvey greeted her now. He certainly had the right build for a cop, being well over six feet tall and weighing probably two-fifty, more or less. He lumbered over to join her father and Tony at the wounded automobile. Tony had taken the felt blanket off the engine, and the chief leaned down, sniffing with his big nose.
    Bernice’s father said piteously, “See what I mean?”
    Harvey straightened up and looked suspiciously though impersonally around a half-circle of the nearest