The sucker, p.8
The Sucker, page 8
“Tell me if there’s another way to run this business. There wasn’t anything here when we started.”
“When Midge started it,” I corrected her. “You just moved in.”
“He’s lucky I did.”
I laughed at her.
“What did you promise him, baby? And did you give him any of it?”
“Damn you!”
“Or did Doris run him out?”
“Oh, you dirty son-of-a-bitch! You — ”
She jumped at me, still yelling, and she tried to poke the end of that cigarette into my right eye. She didn’t even come close. I grabbed her where it hurt and she let out a different kind of a yell. I gave her a shove and she spun around, stumbling and trying to stay on her feet. I put one of my shoes against her posterior and made it easy for her to get down on the floor.
“Don’t play with any more of those ideas,” I told her. “You’ll get yourself hurt.”
She rolled over, staring up at me. Her skirt was up above her knees and the top of her sweater had moved down very low.
“Get up,” I said. “I want to talk to you.”
She did. It was tough to keep my hands off her.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “But you made me angry.”
“That makes two of us.”
She pulled in her stomach and pushed the sweater down inside again.
“I’m way ahead of you,” I told her quietly. “You’ve been up against it here dodging checks for so long that you can’t see straight. When I talked to Midge about the hundred-and-eighty degree crank you got an idea. If I could set one up, if I could really do what I said, then you could get me to write a set of instructions and you’d make yourself a load of fast money. Isn’t that right?”
“Well — in a way, yes.”
“But you won’t need me for that,” I went on. “Now that I’ve got the instructions written up. All you have to do is have the thing printed and make the guys buy their parts from you. You ought to sell at least a hundred and fifty of them in the next two or three months. And at a couple of hundred bucks profit on every deal that could be a lot of money. Enough money to get you out of the hole.”
She’d regained most of her composure and she started brushing the dirt from her clothes. She took her time about it, making me wait.
“I’ll give you credit for one thing,” she said. “You’ve got it nailed in the center.”
“Give me a medal for something else,” I suggested.
“You’re full of surprises.” Her eyes were suddenly very serious. “Now what?”
“I wouldn’t use those instructions, Ruth, if I were you.”
“Why? They’re our property. You were working for us when you wrote them up.”
“Sure. But who says they’re right, baby? Who says that? I don’t.”
“Aren’t they? Slade! You — ”
Her face was white.
“You couldn’t set a lawnmower up with it,” I said. “There are a few details missing.”
“But Midge looked it over, and he said — ”
“Forget what he said.” I crossed to her and stood over her. “So what does he know? Is he an engineer? Has he got a license that says he knows what he’s looking at?” He knows a few things about motors but other than that you got nothing. He just figured I gave him the right stuff. And so did you. That, baby, makes me the smartest of the three.”
“He’s going to be plenty sore,” she said.
“And perhaps broke. You counted on this a lot, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Now you hayen’t got it.”
“Stop gloating!”
I bent down and put my hand under her chin. I pushed her head back and put my mouth about an inch away from her lips.
“You were right when you said we were alike,” I told her. “And don’t forget it again.”
She nodded and grew tense, her eyes getting big.
“I’ll stick around,” I said. “But I’ve got a price for it.”
Her glance slid away from my face and I could see the pulse at the base of her throat beating rapidly.
“It isn’t what you think.” I kissed her lightly on the mouth. “It isn’t what you think at all.”
Her eyes lifted and drove straight into mine, searching, finding nothing.
“What do you want, Slade?”
“A hundred and fifty a week.”
“All right.” She didn’t even have to think about it. “And what else?”
I stood up, moving away from her.
“I meant what I said, Ruth. You don’t have to give me anything else.”
She was a beautiful woman and I wanted her, but not that way. She had tried to loop one around me and kick me out, but she had made a botch of it. That put her down to the fifth notch on my yardstick and when she hit six I’d take what I wanted. And she wouldn’t have anything to say about it.
She got to her feet, smiling, letting her body move lazily under the skirt.
“Shake,” she said. “You’re really quite a guy, Slade.”
I shook. She thought she had me. She wasn’t very bright. It was the other way around.
She went over to the window, her hips swaying. She wasn’t afraid any more and she wanted me to notice what she had.
“No crosses this time, huh?”
“Slade’s oath.”
“That’s a new one.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
She’d find out.
“I hope you won’t mention this to Midge,” she said. “He wouldn’t think much of the idea.”
“Okay.”
“Some day I’ll tell you about Midge.”
I walked to the doorway and leaned up against the casing.
“You don’t have to.”
“There isn’t an awful lot to say — except that he’s a jerk. You’ve got no idea what a jerk.”
I smiled at the trim lines of her back and legs. She was choosing sides, trying to pick a winner.
“We all are,” I said. “Once in a while.”
I went out, whistling, feeling good. I didn’t know what it would be, but one of two things were going to happen.
I’d either win her.
Or I’d destroy her.
9
EDDIE CAME in Monday morning with a hangover that would have crippled a mule. He was too beat up to concentrate or do any real work.
“Somebody’ll have to help me with the mail,” Doris said. “Especially today. The mail’s always heavy on Monday.”
“I’ll help,” I said.
Ruth stopped looking worried.
“Would you?”
“Sure.”
“But what about your own job?”
“We won’t have any cranks for a few days,” I told her. “And we aren’t going to sell instructions. It isn’t practical. Remember, we talked it over and Midge said he’d advertise the complete engine?”
“I’ll get the mail,” Ruth said. “Yes, I remember. Very well.”
I’d thrown it at Midge about Ruth trying to sleighride me and the three of us had had a big row. He’d been apologetic and humble and she’d been sore for a couple of days afterward but now she was all right. I’d even driven her to her rooming house once, when her car wouldn’t start, and she’d sat sort of close, like it was supposed to be that way.
“Funny about Eddie,” Doris said. “He never did that before.”
“Jesus, he had a real one on,” Clarke said, grinding on his pencil. “When he come in I thought the wind was blowing from the city dump.”
“Isn’t he the card?” Doris demanded sourly. “He’s real cute, that boy.”
“Aw, kid, how would you know?”
Doris started to say something but Ruth came in with a box full of mail. She threw it on an empty table.
“I hope it’s a good one.”
“Monday’s usually is,” Doris said.
“Show Slade how you do it.”
“Oh, certainly.”
There wasn’t much to it. The main thing was to get the checks, money orders, bills and coins out of the envelopes and toss them into a tin can. The rest was incidental. The amount received with the order was written at the top of the letter or order blank in red ink and these were put in one basket. C.O.D. shipments, or partial C.O.D.’s, were put in another basket.
“Great sport, isn’t it?” Doris wanted to know.
“Yeah.”
Doris had been very friendly since the night we’d had our little talk. I was almost inclined to think that Doris could be a man’s woman, if she were given a chance — and if any guy could stand her. Her association with Ruth didn’t seem to be very deep, just one of those passing things that could prove embarrassing if it ever got out into the open. A dawn to dusk affair.
“I can’t imagine about Eddie,” she said again.
I could. I hadn’t taken Eddie home until almost five in the morning and he’d been hauling a tankful. I’d met him at the diner early the previous evening, got to talking and then we’d driven out to listen to Marie Barker’s fingers annoy the ivory keys.
“He’s a nice kid,” she’d told me along about midnight. “He shouldn’t be drinking so much.”
“Well, I’m not his old man.”
“He hasn’t got one.”
There had been something cold about her voice that had made me stiffen.
“Well, for Christ’s sake,” I’d asked her, “you want me to take out adoption papers?”
At two-thirty Eddie had been staring into the mirror over the bar, trying to grin at himself. I’d told the bartender to cut off Eddie’s supply and then had gone back over to the organ.
“May I take you home, Marie?”
“Take Eddie home.”
“I was asking about you.”
“I’d rather push myself. Believe me, I would.”
“Sore about Eddie?”
“No. Disappointed.”
“You thought I was something better, maybe?”
“Please, Slade, I don’t know what I thought. Nothing, I guess. Nothing.”
“I’m asking you, can I take you home?”
“I said no.”
“Well, to hell with you, damn it. You think you’re so damn good, to hell with you.”
“Please, Slade — ”
“Go on, crawl home. Push yourself. Roll home. To hell with you!”
And, later, after I’d gotten the bottle from my room, Eddie and I had sat out in the car, drinking. Pretty soon he’d gotten sick and then I’d driven him home. I hadn’t been able to get to sleep until the gray of the morning was outside the windows. I’d been thinking about her, wondering why I should have gotten so angry with her. She wasn’t anybody at all.
“What’s the matter with you?” Doris wanted to know. “You’re marking everything paid.”
“I’m the customer’s boy,” I said.
“You out last night, too?”
I started through the C.O.D. box, making corrections.
“A little.”
“I’ll bet you can drink a lot.”
“If the company is right.”
“Once in a while I like a glass of beer,” she said. “You know.”
After we had the mail opened she listed the money orders, checks and cash on a sheet of paper and then we had to check the thing again. I didn’t think we’d ever get around to taking the deposit to the bank but by two o’clock we had ourselves squared away. We had about fifteen hundred bucks.
“Where’s Ruth?” Doris wanted to know.
“She went out,” Eddie said. “Who can tell?”
“Damn! The money orders ought to be cashed at the post office first. If they aren’t, the bank charges a dime on each one. She’s usually around to take me down and bring me back.”
“I’m going down,” I said. “I’m knocking off for the rest of the day.”
“Oh, would you?”
“Why, sure.”
She got her hat and coat and I carried the can of money out to the car.
“I forgot the counter deposit,” she said. “I hope we won’t need it.”
“That wouldn’t be much, anyway.”
“Oh, sometimes it is, in the spring when the fellows are getting ready to run their stock cars. Some of them drive here and spend four or five hundred dollars. There’ll be weekends when we’ll do almost two thousand.”
I let the Buick roll out into the street.
“Not bad,” I said.
“No,” Doris admitted. “Not bad.”
The post office was on Center Street, off Main, and only a couple of blocks from the bank. While she was inside I sat there looking at the money and checks in the can and thinking. Finally I took two money orders out of my pocket, one for forty-nine-fifty and the other for thirty even, and dropped them into the can. They were return C.O.D. payments and she hadn’t noticed it when I’d slid them under my elbow halfway through sorting the mail. After that I sat and waited.
“I could walk down to the bank,” she said when she came out.
“Get in. I’ll drive you.”
She had a fistful of greenbacks and she started to put them into the can.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I don’t know how I did, but I missed a couple of money orders. I’ll have to go back and get them cashed.”
“The bank’ll be closing in a couple of minutes,” I said.
She looked undecided.
“Look,” I said. “While you’re doing that, why can’t I take the deposit to the bank? You can get those money orders cashed and run the money through tomorrow.”
“I can’t see how it happened.”
“Probably my fault, me being new. I must have mixed you up. So the least I can do is get the deposit down there in time.”
She smiled and closed the door.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re a good guy, Slade. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“I changed my mind. I’ll run you back.”
“Meet you on the corner, then?”
“Wait for me.”
I found a parking place across from the bank and slid the car in. I looked up at the clock in front and saw that it was two minutes of three. Whistling, I crossed over and went inside.
The teller hardly started counting the money when the guard closed the doors, locking up.
“Just made it,” I said.
The teller nodded his bald head and went on counting. It tallied out all right because he pushed the piles aside and went through the checks, using the eraser end of his pencil. He didn’t bother figuring up the change.
“Hope you’re right,” he said, hitting the slip with his deposit stamp. “You folks ought to try getting in here earlier.”
“We will.” He gave me a receipt and I held it in my hand, tapping the counter with the edge of it. “They wanted me to find out how we stood.”
“You were overdrawn four hundred,” he said. “But now you’re all right. Until tomorrow, that is — if that means anything.”
I told him thanks and went to the door. The guard got up from his chair and opened up for me.
She was on the corner, peering through her thick glasses at the approaching traffic. I hauled the Buick over there and made her jump with the horn. When she got in she was laughing.
“Okay?” I asked.
“Yes, but I still don’t understand it.”
At Main Street I swung left and crawled up behind a couple of trucks.
“Those things happen,” I said.
“I have a lot of responsibility at the place, Slade.”
“Yes.”
“I could have missed them.”
“That’s what I mean.”
She took her glasses off and put them in her handbag.
“But I didn’t. I know I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because they weren’t stamped Rockland Motors on the back. I use a rubber stamp all the time so I don’t have to sign so many. These weren’t stamped so I know I didn’t see them. I always stamp every one.”
The Buick snarled, going around the trucks, and then we were moving smooth and easy along the wide street.
“Like I said, Doris, it could have been my fault. Don’t worry about it.”
She sighed and stared at the dashboard.
“I will, if Ruth knows about it.”
I didn’t say anything until after we’d pulled off of Main and I’d stopped the Buick opposite a vacant lot.
“Tell me,” I said, turning to her, “what do you think of me, Doris?”
“Why, I — I — ”
“You don’t have to be afraid.”
She looked so small sitting there with her face pinched up and her eyes round and huge that I almost wished that I didn’t have to. But I did. And then.
“I’m not afraid,” she said.
“You are — of Ruth.”
“Yes, but not of you.”
“Maybe you like me.”
She glanced away from me, nodding her head.
“But I’m not the first?”
“No.”
“Only the others didn’t feel it, too?”
“Something like that.” She kept turning the pocketbook in her hands, “I’m not pretty, Slade.”
She was telling me!
“Doris, I’ve been around a lot, a lot more than you or most of the people you know. I’ve seen the good and the bad of them scattered from Casablanca to Keflavik. I’ve fought in bars and slept in whore houses. I’ve — ”
“Slade!”
I laughed at her.
“I’m trying to tell you something, Doris.” I bent closer, touching her on the shoulder with my fingers, tapping lightly. “Maybe my language isn’t the best but it’ll pay you to listen. I’m going to show you how you can sidestep one of the biggest mistakes of your life.”
I slid toward her across the seat and she didn’t protest when I put my arm around her. It was like getting next to a sack of wet flour. Nothing but work.
“Your sister is very pretty,” I said.
“Everybody tells me so.”
“You hate to hear that, don’t you?”
“Well — ”
“You don’t have to defend yourself,” I said. “It’s a natural thing sometimes, disliking people who are close to you. After that you have to find another place for your love. With a man, he seeks a woman — or another man. With a woman, she tries to find a man — or another woman. Know what I mean?”
