Pop. 1280
As high sheriff of Potts County, Nick Corey spends most of his time eating, sleeping and avoiding trouble. If only people—especially some troublesome pimps, his foul-tempered wife, and his half-witted brother-in-law—would stop pushing him around. Because when Nick is pushed, he begins to kill . . . or to make others do his killing for him!
Jim Thompson
Pop. 1280
ePub r1.0
Allen 18.12.14
Original title: Pop. 1280
Jim Thompson, 1964
Digital editor: Allen
ePub base r1.2
FOREWORD
In Pop. 1280, our narrator, Nick Corey, introduces us to his essential attitude toward the world in the first short chapter. “... I was layin’ awake like that one night, tossing and turning and going plumb out of my mind, until finally I couldn’t stand it no longer. So I says to myself, ‘Nick Corey... you better come to a decision, Nick Corey, or you’re gonna wish you had.’
“So I thought and I thought, and then I thought some more. And finally I came to a decision.
I decided I didn’t know what the heck to do.’ ”
Sheriff Nick Corey is Jim Thompson’s greatest creation, and Thompson seemed to believe that as well, because he created him more than once. You might readily confuse Nick Corey with Lou Ford if you’ve read The Killer Inside Me. Both are pathological lawmen, who like to use banalities and platitudes to casually torture folks who aren’t sure how to react to them as authority figures and must grin and bear it, smiling awkwardly at comments that might or might not be intended to be received as comic. Both men are corrupt and dangerous, spiritually bereft and adrift in a meaningless world, habitues of the void. When one considers that Thompson’s own father was a sheriff, many dark angles of psychoanalytic interest are made available for contemplation, but I am not certain that much deep analysis is actually required to suss the crux of that relationship. An oft-repeated comment by Nick Corey, a comment central to his matter-of-fact but caustic acceptance of spiritual emptiness and corruption, is, “I ain’t saying you’re wrong, but I ain’t saying you’re right, either.”
Nick says that about every human act from murder to marriage. No one is capable of more bitterness and scorn than a scalded romantic, and Jim Thompson, the disillusioned leftist, was certainly that. America must have seemed very young when Thompson was born—Oklahoma wasn’t even a state until the following year. This area is still referred to by some academics as “a semi-arrested frontier culture”, but in his day you could pretty much drop the “semi-arrested.” Wild and woolly, hardscrabble, full of promise, pitiless and pious, Oklahoma was all of that, and it was deeply informed by southern culture. Pop. 1280, set in Texas, is so directly a southern novel, so clearly from that tradition, that it would stand high on the Southern Lit shelf (which means high on the Lit Shelf, period) if it were not so consistently misidentified as a work with its roots genre, and therefore arbitrarily reduced in stature. In this novel Thompson attacks just about all of the big ogres of American existence—poverty, racism, labor, social hypocrisy in general, and the relaxed enforcement of laws for those who have amassed gold, the brutal enforcement for those who haven’t. The vision is dark but the writing bizarrely hilarious, utilizing that strain of downhome joshing I love so well and learned at the knees of my old ones, the kind of humor that is funny and insulting simultaneously. This is, of course, in the oral tradition, and Thompson is expert in its usage—even those repetitions or awkwardly constructed phrases are, upon further reading, revealed to be brilliant motifs planted in the seemingly banal.