Sheba

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  LOST CAUSE

  He took her over to the car and opened the door for her. She got in, her head spinning, wondering if she could drive back to town.

  “Those stingers really stung you,” he said.

  He came around the car and got in the other side.

  “They stung me,” she agreed.

  It was a different feeling, a crazy feeling, but it was a good feeling, too. It swelled up within her, and there wasn’t a problem in the world that mattered, not a thing. The world was her doorstep and the flight of stairs that led upward would be easy to climb.

  “Baby!”

  He had her before she knew it, had her in his arms, his lips on her mouth, seeking, wanting, pleading with her.

  “No!”

  Her mind told her that she should not, that, she must not, but her mouth would not be controlled by the caution screaming in her brain. Her mouth was open, hot and wild, and she buried her lips against him….

  SHEBA

  Orrie Hitt

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  LOST CAUSE

  Title Page

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  Part Two

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part Three

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Sin Doll

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Part One

  1

  THIS wasn’t the first time Sheba Irons had returned home and found the finance company man waiting for her, but it would be the last. She was determined about that. It would be the very last. Even if the family starved — and it might — she had to put a stop to it.

  She turned the car off the main highway and on the dirt lane that wandered crookedly across a barren field, and came to a halt in front of a two-story unpainted house.

  The finance company man, Mr. Loven, had left his new Buick parked in the lane and she had to pull around that, halting her car in the high weeds alongside the ancient barbed wire fence that had but one remaining strand to hold up the rotted chestnut posts.

  “You’re kind of late getting home,” Mr. Loven said as she got out of the car.

  Mr. Loven was a fat man with a red face and a bald head and she guessed him to be in his early fifties. He wore expensive clothes but his pants were always low, just over his hips, and he had to hitch at them all of the time to keep them in place.

  “I had to work overtime,” Sheba explained. She managed a brief smile. “I should have worked longer. Then maybe you wouldn’t have been around when I finally got here.”

  “I’d have been around, all right.”

  Sheba sighed. “No doubt,” she said. “You’d stay half of the night.”

  Mr. Loven removed a white handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  “Or until hell froze over,” he agreed.

  She was aware of his small, dark eyes regarding the way the yellow dress clung to her body.

  “Where are my folks?” she asked Mr. Loven. “Have you seen them?”

  He waved one fat hand in the general direction of the house.

  “Inside,” he said. “Your mother is crying and shouting and your old man isn’t saying anything, just as he never says anything. And your brother, Luke — aw, he’s a lost cause. If he had any ambition at all he’d get out and go to work.”

  Luke was twenty-four, two years older than Sheba, and he had never held a steady job. During the winter he trapped if the weather wasn’t too cold, and during the summer he picked berries if it wasn’t too hot. The year before he had worked a short time on a nearby farm but the farmer had caught Luke in the haymow with one of his daughters and that had been the end of the job for Luke.

  “The same goes for your father,” Mr. Loven said, wiping at his face again.

  Sheba’s father, Hap Irons, was hardly any better. He trapped skunks and coons along the ridge and mink along the brook but in the summer he wouldn’t do a thing. He was a house painter by trade but he claimed that the oils in the paint didn’t agree with him and he said that it would kill him if he kept it up. Twice Sheba had bought paint for the house and twice her father had traded it in town for booze. He got a quart of whiskey for every gallon of paint and both times he had been drunk for more than a week.

  “I left the money with my mother,” Sheba told Mr. Loven.

  “So she said.”

  “Well, what are you bothering me for?”

  “Simple. She gave it to your father to bring in.”

  “Oh, no!”

  Mr. Loven nodded. “Oh, yes.” He laughed. “The funny part is that he never did get there with it. She gave it to him yesterday and he told her he brought it in, but he didn’t. That puts your account four months back and I can’t carry you any longer. I’ve got to do something. If I don’t do something the home office will ride me harder than a horse with three legs.”

  Sheba felt sick. She should have taken the money to the loan company herself but she only had a half hour for lunch at the garage and her mother had planned on riding in with the Frisbees. When she returned home the night before, she hadn’t asked about it because she thought her mother had taken care of the payment. Now the money was gone — probably her father and Luke had spent it in some bar — and it would be almost another week before she was paid again.

  “I don’t have it,” she said wearily. “I won’t have it until next Tuesday.”

  “That’s too late.”

  She bit down on her lower lip, bit down hard enough so that it hurt.

  “I can’t help it, Mr. Loven. I can’t give you what I haven’t got.”

  “Maybe you could borrow it somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you could raise the money another way?” he suggested.

  “No, there’s nothing I can do.”

  She could borrow it from Fred Call. Fred, knowing the circumstances of the Irons family, had frequently offered her money. But she didn’t want to take anything from him. She had met Fred in high school and she had gone out with him quite a lot. He was an intense, serious young man and he made a good salary working as a tree surgeon. He had asked her to marry him several times but she had never considered it seriously. She liked him, enjoyed his company — except when he wanted to park, which was often — but she liked him only as a friend and if she took money from him or asked for it, it would tend to make their association far more complicated than it was. She might even have to let him take her up into the hills and the possible consequences of this caused her to shudder. She had never known a man, not that way, and she was determined to save herself for marriage. A man who married wanted to marry someone untouched, not a girl who knew what it was all about. Not that she didn’t know — she did. The walls of the house were thin and her father and mother never closed their bedroom door. Her mother was no longer anxious but her father still had plenty of life left in his drunken bones. They frequently argued when they were in bed but she knew, from the sounds that later came from the room, that her father always won these arguments.

  “We
might be able to work out something,” Mr. Loven was saying. “The only thing worth taking here is the car and the car isn’t worth much. What I could get for the furniture wouldn’t pay the price of hauling it away.”

  “You can’t touch the car. The car is registered in my name.”

  “I know it is, but when you signed the note with your father and your mother everything you own went on the chattle, too. Hell, I wouldn’t have loaned the five hundred dollars if you hadn’t been working for Wise Motors. Your father has got credit references that go the other way and your mother never had one. And your brother — what’s the use of talking about him? I figured that you would make the payments and everything would be fine. Only it hasn’t worked out that way. Every month it gets worse instead of better.”

  “I know.”

  “Four months behind is more than any finance company can take.”

  From her experience at Wise Motors she realized that he was telling the truth. Almost every day somebody lost a car because he couldn’t make the payments on time. These people came crying into the office, promising the world, but it didn’t do them any good. They lost their cars and sometimes, if they had to drive to work, they lost their jobs. Gregg Walton, the sales manager, said it was a sucker’s business, that half of the people who bought cars had no right to own them.

  “We might be able to work out something,” Mr. Loven said again. He stared up at the house and made a face. “This is a dump. A real dump.”

  “It just needs a coat of paint.”

  “And a roof.”

  Mr. Loven was right; the roof leaked even during a gentle shower. It leaked into her room and it had stained the wallpaper. She had papered the walls the spring before, using a paper that she had soaked in water, but trying to keep anything nice in the Irons house was a waste of energy.

  “I may have a deal for you,” Mr. Loven said. “How close are you to that Walton at Wise Motors?”

  “I just work in the office.”

  “But you know him?”

  “Yes, I know him.”

  “Well?”

  “Slightly.”

  This wasn’t exactly the truth; she knew Gregg very well. When he wasn’t outside in the yard or talking to a customer on the floor he was hanging around her desk. He had asked her for a date several times but she had refused him. One of the other girls who worked in the office, Kathy Still, had gone out with Gregg and she said there was just one thing he wanted from a girl.

  “But you could get to know him? You could talk to him?”

  “What about?”

  “Something that might benefit both of us.”

  “Yes, I could talk to him.”

  “I’ve tried to a couple of times but I never got very far. And there’s no sense to seeing old man Wise. He does everything that Walton tells him to do.”

  This was true.

  “I was by the lot the other day and they were loaded with new cars. Loaded. And they’re not the only ones; half the dealers in the country have got so many cars, used and new, that they don’t know what to do with them. You read that people don’t want to buy new cars but that’s not true. People always want to buy new cars, only they don’t have the down payment to go along with it. How much down payment does the bank ask?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “One-third,” Mr. Loven said. “They ask a great big one-third and if you don’t have that they put your hat in your hands and kick you out of the door. How many customers and sales do Wise Motors lose because of such a situation?”

  Sheba knew that many were lost but she didn’t think it any of Mr. Loven’s business.

  “I haven’t any idea,” she said. “I just do general office work, filing and like that.”

  “How much do they pay you?”

  “Sixty a week but the government takes nearly ten in taxes.”

  “Big deal.”

  “It’s better than a factory and in a factory you can get laid off. This is steady.”

  “Sure, sure.” Mr. Loven blew his nose and put the handkerchief away. “Coming back to the other thing, though. Most of the new cars Wise Motors sells have a price tag of about thirty-six hundred dollars. That means twelve hundred smackers down. How many people have that kind of money?”

  “I don’t,” Sheba said.

  “No, and you’re not alone. A lot of people who want new cars don’t have it and even with a big allowance on their old crates it isn’t enough. But if it’s worked right, they can still buy those new cars. There’s no damned reason why they can’t.”

  “How?”

  “Nothing to it. Take yourself, for instance. You’ve got a pile of iron there for which they’d probably allow you about two hundred bucks on a new car. Say the car costs thirty-six hundred so that leaves you a thousand dollars short on the down payment. You go to the bank and ask to borrow the whole thing and they’ll call the men in the white coats for you. So you’re stuck. You want that new car but you can’t get it. Or so you think. But you can.”

  She didn’t know what he was talking about but it didn’t matter. The Irons family owed him money and she had to be reasonable with him.

  “You tell me,” she said.

  “Interested?”

  “Of course.”

  “All right. You’ve got this old car, you want a new one and you’re up a tree. Just for the hell of it let’s say that you’re a married man with a steady job and a houseful of furniture — furniture that’s bought and paid for. You need a grand to complete your down payment on the car. So you come to Old Reliable Finance Company and we take a chattel on your furniture, giving you the thousand dollars. That gives you your down payment and you’re in business. See what I mean?”

  She saw what he meant. A person buying a car that way would have two payments to make instead of one. This would bring the total payments up to more than a hundred a month on a thirty-six month basis.

  “I’d lose the car,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d be borrowing too much and I wouldn’t be able to pay both you and the bank.”

  Mr. Loven acted annoyed. “So what? The car goes back to Wise Motors and they’ve got a dandy second that they can sell at a low price. They’ve already made their profit. All you have to pay out then is what you owe us.”

  “And lose a lot of money?”

  “What do you care — if you’re on the other side of the fence?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “You follow me all right. You didn’t graduate from high school for nothing and you weren’t tops in your class for nothing, either. The other side of the fence is where you earn enough money to pay off what you owe us. You get Walton to play along with us and there’s fifty bucks for you in every contract you push our way.”

  She was amazed. “You would pay that much?”

  “Gladly. Lending money is what makes our little old world go around.” He paused. “Except when you lend it to the Irons family.”

  She thought about his suggestion. There was nothing really wrong with it. People wanted cars and one way or another they would get them. And some would make their payments, some wouldn’t.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “And talk to Walton.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s the only way you’ll ever get straightened out with us, Miss Irons, and we could both make a nice dollar. Besides, you’d be helping people, not hurting them. People who want to borrow money need help.”

  Sheba smiled. “And people who have to pay it back need help, too.”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Unless we can work out something satisfactory I’ll have to go to court and put a hammer on your wages.”

  She was suddenly frightened. “They’d fire me,” she said.

  “Would they?”

  “Mr. Wise fired a mechanic two weeks ago for the same thing. He said if people aren’t respon
sible he doesn’t want them around.”

  Mr. Loven walked toward his Buick, pulling up his pants as he did so.

  “I guess I don’t have to talk further,” he said. “You know which way the wind blows. It’s up to you. Miss Irons.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Do better than that,” he said, getting into his car. “Do it. Period. Just do it.”

  2

  SUPPER was a dreary affair. Sheba’s mother, Millie, never fixed stew right and the carrots and potatoes were both hard and there was a lot of fat on the beef and Sheba disliked fat.

  “That Loven gives me a pain where I sit,” her father said. “You’d think if he didn’t get his money from us that he’d be out of business tomorrow.”

  Her father was young-looking for his fifty-one years with not a gray hair in his head. Millie Irons was younger but she looked older and when she walked it was with a slight limp. She had large veins in her legs, which the doctor said required an operation, but they had long since given up their Blue Cross and any thoughts of having this done had been forgotten.

  “That’s the business to be in,” Luke said, sopping up some of the gravy with a slice of bread. “A guy loans out a few bucks and he drives a Buick. What could be sweeter?”

  Luke had never owned a car but he always talked about getting one. He wanted something with twin exhausts, twin carbs and a full race cam, whatever that was. Some of the fellows he knew in town had hot rods and once in a while he was able to borrow one to take a girl on a date. He didn’t have a steady girl, just any girl who would go with him.

  “What did you do with the money?” Sheba asked her father.

  He didn’t look up from his stew.

  “I had a little trouble.”

  “In which bar?”

  “Not in any bar, at least not at first. You know Mort Gaines?”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “He’s got an eel rack in the river and some of the boards came loose. I saw him in town and he was a little short. He asked me about going in on it with him. It looked like a good deal — thirty dollars for lumber and in three or four good nights I’d have the money back.”