I'll Call Every Monday
Page 20
The water in the battery was all right but I checked the oil and he needed a quart.
“I burn it by the gallon,” he said, bragging about it. “The way I drive.”
I punched a hole in a can and stuck it into the chrome spout.
“This ought to be able to roll,” I said.
“You kidding? She don’t peak out until a hundred and nine.”
“That’s not so fast,” I said.
The guy looked at the girl and they both winked.
“Maybe you could do better,” he suggested.
I pulled out the oil can, holding a rag under it so that it would not drip on the paint.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Mind telling me how?”
I lowered the hood. “For instance, by shoving in a hundred-and-eighty degree crank,” I told him.
He stood there rubbing his chin and glancing at the girl — as if they shared some secret I had suddenly violated.
“I know what you’re talking about,” he said. “They used to use them in the Ford sixties when we were running midgets. They were the only thing that would beat an Offy.”
The girl’s face hardened and she pulled her coat tighter.
“Dad was running one when he got killed,” she said.
“Yeah,” the guy agreed, “I remember.”
I was getting ready to give them a nickel so they could play themselves a sad tune when the man looked at me rather sharply and asked a loaded question.
“You act as though you know a lot about this stuff,” he said. “Maybe you know so much that you can set up one of those cranks?”
I lit a Camel and let the smoke roll between us.
“Wouldn’t be surprised if I could,” I said.
“Then you’re the only one in the east. And one of the few in the country.”
“Well, that wouldn’t surprise me either.”
“It would me,” the girl said. She looked around at the junk and the unpainted walls. “I don’t think I’d ever get over it.”
If you don’t know much about cars, then you don’t know anything about a hundred-and-eighty degree crankshaft. It’s simply a crank which is specially cast and then set up so that the cylinders in a V8 engine fire straight down the line, almost like two four-cylinder engines side by side.
“Maybe I should introduce myself,” the guy said.
I kept looking at the girl.
“Sure.”
“Like I said, we have Rockland Motors. I’m Midge Dalton and the young lady is Ruth Talley.”
“Hello, Ruth.”
She didn’t say a thing. She just smiled at me and looked superior.
“Her father was a good midget man. Ever hear about him?”
“No.”
“He beat me plenty of times.”
“You look pretty big for the midgets,” I said. “I’d like to see you get into one.”
He laughed.
“Not any more,” he said. “I just sell the stuff. Not much to the midgets, although it’s coming back. Mostly stock cars and road stuff.”
The girl was getting restless and she started walking around. Even under the coat she had plenty of movement, full and easy.
“That job’ll cost you a buck,” I said, trying not to watch her. “And forty cents for the oil.”
He didn’t seem to hear me.
“You ever set up one of those cranks?” he wanted to know.
“Three or four.”
“When?”
“A couple in college and a couple after. Just for friends, nothing serious.”
“You an engineer?”
“That’s right.”
He stared at the wall where the gaskets and fan belts hung in a tangle of spider webs.
“Hell of a place for an engineer to be,” he said. “Funny for a guy with a good education to be found in a deadfall like this.”
“I won it. In a crap game.”
“You didn’t win much.”
I shrugged.
“You planning on staying here?”
“No,” I said. “Three weeks in this section and I’m ready to crawl up trees backwards. I’m shoving off any day.”
“You might be interested in a job?”
I looked at the girl. She was leaning up against the car and her coat had come open again.
“I might.”
“We could use some of those cranks.” Midge Dalton walked over to the girl and his voice got excited. “Jesus, we’d have a beauty, if we could advertise those hundred-and-eighty degree shafts! There’s nobody doing it, Ruth — nobody at all. Can you imagine how those stock car boys would go for something like that?”
“I can imagine,” she said. She came toward me, walking slow and smiling. “Only I don’t think he can do it. I don’t think he can do it at all.”
Our eyes met and held.
She knew what I was thinking, all right, because I could see it in her face, in the way her eyes clouded over, getting darker.
“Don’t make me laugh,” she said.
She was up close and I could smell the damp rain in her hair and the woman perfume of her. I knew, somehow, that together we would be dynamite, shattering everything that we touched, but I couldn’t walk away from it now. She wasn’t like Kathy, or any of the others, and I had to find out what made her different.
“Yeah,” I said, turning to Dalton. “I’d like a job making up cranks for you. I’d like it fine.”
He seemed to go for that in a big rush and he started telling me about his business, how much gross he did, around four hundred thousand, and that he spent more than forty grand a year in advertising. I didn’t pay much attention to him. I kept watching the girl and trying to figure out how quick I could haul myself out of Litchfield.
“You could start any time,” Midge Dalton said. “At a hundred a week.”
“Okay.”
“That seems pretty high,” the girl said.
“Not for turning out those cranks.”
“If he can do it,” she said. “He hasn’t done anything yet.”
My eyes kept taking off her clothes and putting them back on. After a while I left them off.
“I’ll do plenty,” I told her.
She walked around the car, got in and slammed the door hard. I could see her looking out at me through the glass. After a while she yawned, closed her eyes and put her head back against the cushion. I got the impression that she didn’t think she was missing anything at all.
“Don’t worry about her,” the man told me. “Ruth will see things my way.”
“Oh, sure,” I said.
“You know where we’re located?”
“No.”
He told me they were in Shehawken, about thirty miles away, and that they occupied a building on one of the side streets.
“If you take me up on my offer,” he said, “I wish you’d do it right away. It’s getting close to the racing season and we’ll have a chance to profit by it if we can get out some early advertising.”
I knew what he was thinking. If I produced those cranks for him he could clean up a wad, not only from the cranks and the piston assemblies, but also from the other parts the stock boys would buy at the same time.
“I’ll think it over,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”
He looked disappointed.
“I thought you sounded hot for it.”
“Well, sure, but I have to straighten myself out here first. I can’t burn the shack down or just walk off and leave it.”
“No, I suppose not.”
The coffee smell was stronger and I thought I could hear Cleo in the tiny kitchen, moving around. I wondered what she’d say when I told her I was shoving off, but I didn’t worry about it. She didn’t mean anything to me. I’d only known her since I’d been back in the States. That part about the crap game had not been a gag, though it sounded enough like one. About three weeks before I’d come driving up the road, looking for the gas station I’d won in a crap session from Jo
hnny Easton, on a construction job in Iceland. He hadn’t said anything about having a sister, or what the place was like, or much of that sort. He’d had an Icelandic girl qualified for motherhood and he’d needed kroner and he’d thrown the gas station into the pot. The next morning they washed the top of his head off the ceiling in the hut and sent the rest of him home in a box.
“Look,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do and if things come off all right, I’ll drop in and we can talk it over.”
“I wish you would. I think we can help each other.”
I looked at the girl again.
“You might have something there.”
“I don’t think I got your name, did I?”
“Slade,” I said. “Slade Harper.”
“And you’re an accredited engineer?”
“That’s right.”
Midge Dalton shook hands and got in the car. He rolled the window down and I leaned up against the door, looking inside. The girl stayed the way she was, her head far back, her eyes closed.
“I’ll look for you,” he said.
“Okay.”
He backed the car outside, hit the horn a couple of times and drove off down the road. I grinned and slammed the garage door shut. I felt as loose as change in a tin cup.
I’d see her again.
And she’d have to ask me first.
Read more of The Sucker
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Text Copyright © 1962 by Kenneth Orvis
Cover Art, Design, and Layout Copyright © 2012 Simon and Schuster
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3970-7
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3970-1
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