
Hemingway's "The Killers" is another of the Nick Adams stories. I wrote about "Indian Camp" here and noted that in Hemingway's first book of stories, In Our Time, the boy keeps getting older in the successive fictions in which he figures as the main character. In "Indian Camp," the first Nick Adams story, he appears to be around 10. In "Big Two-Hearted River," which concludes the book, Nick is a young man and Great War veteran. After In Our Time, Hemingway only occasionally returned to Nick, and does not preserve the chronological element: "The Killers" appeared in Hemingway's next collection of stories, Men Without Women, and one surmises that Nick is in late adolescence, younger than he was at the end of In Our Time.
The story is set mainly in Henry's lunch-room, a diner in a town called Summit, which I suspect is not an invented place but a reference to what is now known as Summit Township, in Mason County, Michigan. I took up the question of the geography of the Nick Adams stories in "Up in Michigan with Philip Roth," here. The short version is that Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, but the family had a summer home on Walloon Lake, near where the eastern shore of Lake Michigan meets the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula. If "Summit" in the story is connected to Summit Township, it would be on or near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan around 165 miles south of Walloon Lake. That is, it's a place Hemingway would have known on account of passing through, possibly sometimes stopping to eat, on boyhood trips from Chicago to the lake home.
As the story opens, two menacing customers enter the lunch-room. Nick, the only customer, had been talking with George, who is taking orders, when the men enter, and so he watches and listens as rudeness deepens into something else. First, there is trouble ordering food as the customers, strangers in the small town, try to order from the dinner menu:
"I'll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes," the first man said.
"It isn't ready yet."
"What the hell do you put it on the card for?"
"That's the dinner," George explained. "You can get that at six o'clock."
George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter.
"It's five o'clock."
"The clock says twenty minutes past five," the second man said.
"It's twenty minutes fast."
"Oh, to hell with the clock," the first man said. "What have you got to eat?"
"I can give you any kind of sandwiches," George said. "You can have ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver and bacon, or a steak."
"Give me chicken croquettes with green peas and cream sauce and mashed potatoes."
"That's the dinner."
"Everything we want's the dinner, eh? That's the way you work it."
"I can give you ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver—"
"I'll take ham and eggs," the man called Al said.
Film noir dialog owes a lot to Hemingway. The detail about the clock becomes important. For now, let's just observe that it seems odd that it would be twenty minutes fast. If George knew that, why wouldn't he fix it? Is he trying to put off the time that dinner could be ordered? A clock set to the wrong time suggests something—disorder?—that is reinforced perhaps by Henry's lunch-room being run by George. Toward the end of the story, Nick goes to Mrs Hirsch's boarding house, and, assuming that the woman running that place is Mrs Hirsch, calls her by name:
"Well, good-night, Mrs Hirsch," Nick said.
"I'm not Mrs Hirsch," the woman said. "She owns the place. I just look after it for her. I'm Mrs Bell."
"Well, good-night, Mrs Bell," Nick said.
There isn't any reason for this odd detail but to connect it to Henry's lunch-room run by George, where the clock is set to the wrong time (maybe). You might say that nothing is as it ought to be, or as you'd expect, or would like to be able to count upon.
The two men soon order Nick back into the kitchen with the black cook. Max stays in the customer area with George and Al is in the kitchen with Nick and the cook, who are gagged with towels. Max and Al call to each other from different rooms, and Max talks to George. It develops that the two diners are gangsters in Summit to kill an ex-prizefighter named Ole Andreson. They have sawed-off shotguns beneath their coats. The one called Max asks George if it's true that Ole Andreson takes his dinners in Henry's lunch-room every evening at six o'clock. George allows that he "sometimes" does, and when he does, it's around six.
And so the waiting begins. The question is whether Ole Andreson, who one guesses in his boxing career must have crossed the head of a gambling ring, is going to show up to eat at the diner. Remember, the clock had said 5:20 when the hitmen were ordering food, though it may only have been 5. Max tells George to tell anyone who enters to eat that the cook has had to step out and that they should come back later; if they persist, or it's a take-away order, he is to make it himself. Al props open with a ketchup bottle the slit through which dishes are passed from the kitchen to the eating area and directs Max and George where to sit as they all wait—presumably so they won't obstruct his line of sight to the door, and his shooting angle. A few people do come to eat, and the mundane conversations as they complain to George or order food tend to heighten the tension: the intrusion of the ordinary upon the horrific highlights the horror. We are told at intervals what time the clock says. Eventually the gangsters decide Andreson isn't coming and they leave.
Of course this leaves George, the cook, and Nick alone in the diner with knowledge of Andreson's peril. George asks Nick if he will warn Andreson. Against the cook's advice, young Nick Adams says he will. Up to this point, you might almost have forgotten about Nick's presence. He has spoken three times. The first, he answers one of the gangster's question about his name by saying simply, "Adams." When ordered to go back into the kitchen, he says, "What's the idea?" And after the gangsters leave, upon having the towel removed from his mouth:
Nick stood up. He had never had a towel in his mouth before.
"Say," he said. "What the hell?" He was trying to swagger it off.
This adolescent bravado is what in my mind establishes Nick's age as on the boundary of young manhood. In "Indian Camp," the point had been the effect on him of the "inner story" about the birth and suicide at the camp. He does not now appear to have been similarly overwhelmed by the unpleasantness at the diner, or at least in front of the two other men he is eager to act that way. But then he goes to the boarding house to warn Andreson.
When Mrs Bell—he thinks it's Mrs Hirsch—shows him to the room of the former prizefighter, Nick on being told to enter opens the door and sees Andreson lying on his bed in his clothes. Nick begins telling his story. Andreson does not seemed alarmed. The narration of events at the diner, as described by Nick, is repeatedly interrupted to state that Andreson "did not say anything" and, instead of looking at Nick, stared into the wall at the side of his bed: "Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything." Nick ends his story by saying, "'George thought I better come and tell you about it.'" Andreson then speaks for the first time: "'There isn't anything I can do about it.'" The conversation continues:
"I'll tell you what they were like."
"I don't want to know what they were like," Ole Andreson said. He looked at the wall. "Thanks for coming to tell me about it."
"That's all right."
Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed.
"Don't you want me to go and see the police?"
"No," Ole Andreson said. "That wouldn't do any good."
"Isn't there something I could do?"
"No. There isn't anything to do."
"Maybe it was just a bluff."
"No. It ain't just a bluff."
Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall.
"The only thing is," he said, talking toward the wall, "I just can't make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day."
"Couldn't you get out of town?"
"No," Ole Andreson said. "I'm through with all that running around."
He looked at the wall.
"There ain't anything to do now."
"Couldn't you fix it up some way?"
"No. I got in wrong." He talked in the same flat voice. "There ain't anything to do. After a while I'll make up my mind to go out."
"I better go back and see George," Nick said.
"So long," said Ole Andreson. He did not look toward Nick. "Thanks for coming around."
On the way out, the aforementioned mix-up with Mrs Bell occurs. Back at the diner, Nick tells George about his encounter with Andreson—the cook, having heard the start of it, retires into the kitchen, saying he doesn't even want to listen. All Nick's swagger is gone. It seems Andreson has been on the run and would now rather just face his end. Only he hasn't yet fortified himself sufficiently. He hadn't shown up at the diner because all day he'd been afraid to go out. Eventually he would. Maybe "the killers" will find him in his bed in his room before he goes out. Nothing I think is more affecting than the repeated, "There's nothing to do." Nick can't shrug it off as he had the ordeal in the diner over the dinner hour. Here's how "The Killers" ends:
"What's he going to do?"
"Nothing."
"They'll kill him."
"I guess they will."
"He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago."
"I guess so," said Nick.
"It's a hell of a thing."
"It's an awful thing," Nick said.
They did not say anything. George reached down for a towel and wiped the counter.
"I wonder what he did?" Nick said.
"Double-crossed somebody. That's what they kill them for."
"I'm going to get out of this town," Nick said.
"Yes," said George. "That's a good thing to do."
"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful."
"Well," said George, "you better not think about it."
"You better not think about it" recalls the ending of "Indian Camp," wherein the young Nick Adams "felt quite sure," in the last sentence of that story, "that he would never die." Of course he will, as will Andreson, even though it may be too awful to think about.
I sometimes think that "The Killers" has not aged as well as some of Hemingway's stories. If that's true, it could be that the originality now may seem hackneyed on account of a thousand noir movies that have copied its manner. The picture at the top is Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks." I remember that in college I had to buy for a course an American literature anthology that had this picture on its cover. One of the included works was "The Killers," and I've always suspected that the cover is meant to refer to that story in particular. The correspondence isn't perfect. For one thing, there's a woman in the Hopper picture, which moreover appears to be set in a city instead of a small town. But there is the same aura of menace, and the story, considering it's mainly dialog, has a distinctly pictorial effect: Hemingway is intensely interested in the way things look, and the play of light. We aren't told much, mostly we just overhear (as it were) what's said, but we are told that the lunch-room is a converted saloon, and that this explains why there is a long mirror on one wall in which Max gazes at George—maybe so that he can see him while looking directly at the door? (Hopper's nighthawks' diner has no visible door.) I didn't mention the story's abrupt opening:
The door of Henry's lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.
Yes, they sat down at the counter and began talking. The next paragraph without quotation marks begins:
Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window.
The Wikipedia article on "Nighthawks" mentions that Hopper may have been influenced in this work either by "The Killers," which he is known to have admired, or by another Hemingway story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."