Whom Gods Destroy Read Online Free Page B

was a debt that had to be paid.
    “By God,” Sid said, and then he remembered something and got serious. “Say, I heard about your old man. That's too bad.”
    There was nothing much I could say to that, so I nodded.
    “Look,” Sid said, “why don't you climb in? I've got to take Vida home, then I've got some running around to do, but that won't keep us from talking.”
    “Well—”
    I was thinking about the bus that would be pulling out in less than an hour, but I was calmer now and not so anxious as I had been back on Burk Street. Anyway, I still hadn't got over the shock of seeing an ordinary Burk Street punk looking so rich. There were two things I knew, he hadn't done it by working and he hadn't done it with brains. Then, how?
    I made up my mind right then to find out, if I could. There would be other buses.
    The girl, Vida, looked vaguely annoyed as she moved over to the middle of the front seat and I got in. Sid put the car in gear.
    The longer we rode the more I remembered about him and the better I understood him. Sid Gardner was one of those men who never grow up and never forget. He was still Burk Street, even with his red convertible and expensive-looking girl, and he would never forget that, either. But it would never bother him.
    He drove north from town, where the new residential district had grown away from the river. I expected him to let Vida off at some apartment house, because it looked like that kind of setup to me. It shook me when he pulled up in the driveway beside a rambling new brick house. And it dawned on me then that Vida was his wife. A dumb guy like that with a new car, a big house, and a wife like Vida. God!
    But maybe he wasn't so dumb at that, because he could see what was going on in my mind after we let Vida out and started back toward town.
    “Not bad for a Burk Street boy, huh?” he said, grinning.
    “That's just what I was thinking.”
    “You don't look bad yourself, Roy. You look like you've been doing all right.”
    I thanked God then that I had one good suit. “I can't complain,” I said, and hoped Sid would let it go at that for now.
    Then he pulled the convertible into a side street and began to check a list of names that he'd taken out of his breast pocket.
    “What's this?” I said.
    He looked kind of puzzled. Then he laughed. “Hell, I keep forgetting you've been away. But, with your old man and all, I guess election day doesn't mean anything to you. This,” he explained, nodding at his list of names, “is a list of every good church-going voter in this precinct, and it's my job to see that they get to the polls and vote.”
    “Vote for what?”
    “For prohibition,” he grinned. “Boy, you've got a little bit of catching up to do! Look, how do you think I can afford these things I've got? By working in a salvage shop on Burk Street? Hell, no! I can afford them because I'm a bootlegger.”
    That jarred me for a minute. I'd had the notion that bootlegging had gone out with the Volstead act about twenty years ago. But then I remembered that Oklahoma was one of the two states still hanging on to prohibition, and something about that struck me as being funny. There was no other place in the world, probably, where Sid Gardner could have made a living, but here he was, raking it in.
    I laughed and said, “Well, I'll be damned.”
    “You see now why I've got to work to get these voters to the polls?”
    “Sure, you've got to keep the state dry or you go out of business. But why pick on the church-going voters?”
    He looked at me as though I were feeble-minded. “Why, they're the ones that vote dry.”
    I lay back in Sid's glossy new car and howled, feeling better than I had felt for a long time.
    “Why, hell, I even took Vida down to vote,” he said. “This is hard work. It's impossible to buy a pint of whisky in Big Prairie County today—until the polls close, that is. All us bootleggers are working to get the vote out.”
    That hit me just right and I