Free Roughneck by Jim Thompson

get you down? They haven't got the Indian sign on you so bad that—"
           "It isn't them," I said. "It's me, something that sort of holds me back. I don't know quite how to explain it, but..."
           "Go on. Make a stab at it, Jim."
           "I guess I'm not afraid of them enough," I said. "They may pull some stunt like that guy at the rendering plant did, but I know they're really no match for us. We've got everything on our side. The law, and a tough bunch of boys to ride them ragged. I can't fight people like that. I feel sorry for them."
           "They don't feel that way about you, Jim. They hate your guts. You saw how that Brown character acted."
           "I know," I said. "That's what started it. Seeing how they felt, and not being able to resent it. Feeling that I had it coming. If I'd been in Brown's place, if someone had charged me four prices for a bunch of junk and then shoved my wife around, I'd have probably done what he did."
           "They don't have to buy the stuff, Jim. If they're stupid enough to do it—"
           "They have to buy it or do without. No one else will sell to them."
           "Yes, but..." He paused. "Yeah, but Jim..." he said slowly, and paused again. "You see, Jim, It's—uh—uh—"
           He stood up and paced around the office. Turning suddenly, he leveled a finger at me. "Now, here's the way it is, Jim. We're actually pretty damned nice to these people. We're just working to help 'em, but naturally—uh—help costs money, so we have to—uh—"
           He broke off, scowling, fixing me with a glare that dared me to laugh. Then, following a long moment of silence, his face relaxed and he himself laughed. "All right," he said. "All right, Jim, we'll call it quits for tonight. But you're going to do it, get me? By god, you—you 'got' to do it!"
           Judson Clark—Jud Clark. Ex-college football star, ex-pug, ex-heavy in the loan shark racket: a literate thug, to state the case briefly. I worked with him for months—at least, I held my job with the store—and I came to like him very much. I liked him and pitied him.
           I was, as he had indicated, "his kind of people." Our backgrounds roughly paralleled one another, and I should have responded to the demands of necessity and self-preservation. I should and I must—for in my failure he saw failure for himself. I represented something vital to him, a threat to the only way of life he could understand. His fear that the structure of that life might be crumbling was far greater than any fear he could inspire in me.
           Our conferences became almost nightly affairs, by turns abusive and wheedling. He jeered me in front of the other collectors. He even called Mom one day to declare that I was letting him down sadly—he who had only my best interests at heart—that I was failing her and Freddie, that jobs were very, very hard to get and that it would be a shame if I was forced to drop out of school; and asking her to "lay the proposition" before me and to make me "see the light" and so on.
           I told Mom that I wished to God he would fire me. The constant pressure was to do a job which I could not do, and yet being unable to quit was becoming unbearable.
           It goes without saying, of course, that I did not always check in at the store empty-handed. I usually had some small something to show for my day's efforts. Generally speaking, however, the nature of my successes was such as to leave Clark almost anything but reassured.
           "I don't get it, by God!" he yelled one night. "This bastard—all the other boys gave up on him. Even I took a crack at him and I couldn't score. He's a mean, no-good son-of-a-bitch. He loaded up on that stuff without ever intending to give us a nickel, and he's got so damned many judgments against him it was a waste of time to sue. So I'm all set to charge him off, and then you get his card. And