A Bullet for Cinderella Read Free

Tal.”
    It lay amid gentle hills, and the town stretched north-south, following the line of Harts River. I drove up the main street, Delaware Street. Traffic had outgrown the narrowness of the street. Standardization had given most of our small cities the same look. Plastic and glass brick store fronts. Woolworth’s and J. C. Penney and Liggett and Timely and the chain grocery. The essential character of Hillston had been watered down by this standardization and yet there was more individuality left than in many other cities. Here was a flavor of leisure, of mild manners and quiet pleasures. No major highway touched the city. It was in an eddy apart from the great current.
    Doubtless there were many who complained acidlyabout the town being dead on its feet, about the young people leaving for greater opportunities. But such human irritants did not change the rather smug complacency of the city. The population was twenty-five thousand and Timmy had told me that it had not changed very much in the past twenty years. There was the pipe mill and a small electronics industry and a plant that made cheap hand tools. But the money in town was the result of its being a shopping center for all the surrounding farmland.
    I had crossed the country as fast as I could, taking it out of the car, anxious to get to this place. The car kept stalling as I stopped for the lights on Delaware Street. When I spotted a repair garage I turned in.
    A man came up to me as I got out of the car. “I think I need a tune-up. It keeps stalling. And a grease job and oil change.”
    He looked at the wall clock. “About three this afternoon be okay?”
    “That’ll be all right.”
    “California plates. On your way through?”
    “Just on a vacation. I stopped here because I used to know a fellow from this town. Timmy Warden.”
    He was a gaunt man with prematurely white hair and bad teeth. He picked a cigarette out of the top pocket of his coveralls. “Knew Timmy, did you? The way you say it, I guess you know he’s dead.”
    “Yes. I was with him when he died.”
    “There in the camp, eh? Guess it was pretty rough.”
    “It was rough. He used to talk about this place. And about his brother George. I thought I’d stop and maybe see his brother and tell him about how it was with Timmy.”
    The man spat on the garage floor. “I guess George knows how it was.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “There’s another man came here from that camp. Matter of fact he’s still here. Came here a year ago. Name of Fitzmartin. Earl Fitzmartin. He works for George at the lumberyard. Guess you’d know him, wouldn’t you?”
    “I know him,” I said.
    Everybody who survived the camp we were in would know Fitzmartin. He’d been taken later, had come in a month after we did. He was a lean man with tremendously powerful hands and arms. He had pale colorless hair, eyes the elusive shade of wood smoke. He was a Texan and a Marine.
    I knew him. One cold night six of us had solemnly pledged that if we were ever liberated we would one day hunt down Fitzmartin and kill him. We had believed then that we would. I had forgotten all about it. It all came back.
    Fitz was not a progressive. Yet he was a disrupting influence. In the camp we felt that if we could maintain a united front it would improve our chances for survival. We organized ourselves, appointed committees, assigned responsibilities. There were two retreads who had been in Jap camps in another war who knew the best organizational procedures.
    Fitz, huskier and quicker and craftier than anyone else in camp, refused to take any part in it. He was a loner. He had an animal instinct for survival. He kept himself clean and fit. He ate anything that was organically sound. He prowled by himself and treated us with icy contempt and amusement. He was no closer to us than to his captors. He was one of the twelve quartered in the same hut with Timmy and me.
    Perhaps that does not seem to constitute enough cause to swear