Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “What about it?”

  “It’s on both of us, is what you said.”

  “If I said it then must be it’s the truth.”

  “Well then,” Seth said, and sat back, arms folded on his chest.

  “Well then what?”

  “Well then if you was to kill yourself, then I’d get the money and you’d get the funeral.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Porter said slowly.

  “Seems to me either one of us can go and do it,” Seth said. “And here’s the two of us just takin’ it for granted that I’m to be the one to go and do it, and I think we should think on that a little more thoroughly.”

  “Why, being as you’re older, Seth.”

  “What’s that to do with anything?”

  “Why, you got less years to give up.”

  “Still be givin’ up all that’s left. Older or younger don’t cut no ice.”

  Porter thought about it. “After all,” he said, “it was your idea.”

  “That don’t cut ice neither. I could mention I got a wife and child.”

  “I could mention I got a wife and three children.”

  “Ex-wife.”

  “All the same.”

  “Let’s face it,” Seth said. “Gert and your three don’t add up to anything and neither do Linda Mae and Rachel.”

  “Got to agree,” Porter said.

  “So.”

  “One thing. You being the one who put us in this mess, what with firing the store, it just seems you might be the one to get us out of it.”

  “You bein’ the one let the insurance lapse through your own stupidity, you could get us out of this mess through insurance, thus evenin’ things up again.”

  “Now talkin’ about stupidity—”

  “Yes, talkin’ about stupidity—”

  “Spats!”

  “Bow ties, damn you! Bow ties!”

  You might have known it would come to that.

  Now I’ve told you Seth and Porter generally got along pretty well and here’s further evidence of it. Confronted by such a stalemate, a good many people would have wrote off the whole affair and decided not to take the suicide route at all. But not even spats and bow ties could deflect Seth and Porter from the road they’d figured out as the most logical to pursue.

  So what they did, one of them tossed a coin, and the other one called it while it was in the air, and they let it hit the floor and roll, and I don’t recollect whether it was heads or tails, or who tossed and who called—what’s significant is that Seth won.

  “Well now,” Seth said. “I feel I been reprieved. Just let me have that coin. I want to keep it for a luck charm.”

  “Two out of three.”

  “We already said once is as good as a million,” Seth said, “so you just forget that two-out-of-three business. You got a week like we agreed but if I was you I’d get it over soon as I could.”

  “I got a week,” Porter said.

  “You’ll get the brassbound casket and everything, and you can have Minnie Lucy Boxwood sing at your funeral if you want. Expense don’t matter at all. What’s your favorite song?”

  “I suppose ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.’ “

  “Minnie Lucy does that real pretty.”

  “I guess she does.”

  “Now you be sure and make it accidental,” Seth said. “Two hundred thousand dollars goes just about twice as far as one hundred thousand dollars. Won’t cost you a thing to make it accidental, just like we talked about it. What I would do is borrow Fritz Chenoweth’s half-ton pickup and go up on the old Harburton Road where it takes that curve. Have yourself a belly full of corn and just keep goin’ straight when the road doesn’t. Lord knows I almost did that myself enough times without tryin’. Had two wheels over the edge less’n a month ago.”

  “That close?”

  “That close.”

  “I’ll be doggone,” Porter said.

  Thing is, Seth went on home after he failed to convince Porter to do it right away, and that was when things began to fall into the muck. Because Porter started thinking things over. I have a hunch it would have worked about the same way if Porter had won the flip, with Seth thinking things over. They were a whole lot alike, those two. Like two peas in a pod.

  What occurred to Porter was would Seth have gone through with it if he lost, and what Porter decided was that he wouldn’t. Not that there was any way for him to prove it one way or the other, but when you can’t prove something you generally tend to decide on believing in what you want to believe, and Porter Dettweiler was no exception. Seth, he decided, would not have killed himself and didn’t never have no intention of killing himself, which meant that for Porter to go through with killing his own self amounted to nothing more than damned foolishness.

  Now it’s hard to say just when he figured out what to do, but it was in the next two days, because on the third day he went over and borrowed that pickup off Fritz Chenoweth. “I got the back all loaded down with a couple sacks of concrete mix and a keg of nails and I don’t know what all,” Fritz said. “You want to unload it back of my smaller barn if you need the room.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Porter told him. “I guess I’ll just leave it loaded and be grateful for the traction.”

  “Well, you keep it overnight if you have a mind,” Fritz said.

  “I just might do that,” Porter said, and he went over to Seth’s house. “Let’s you and me go for a ride,” he told Seth. “Something we was talking about the other night, and I went and got me a new slant on it which the two of us ought to discuss before things go wrong altogether.”

  “Be right with you,” Seth said, “soon as I finish this sandwich.”

  “Oh, just bring it along.”

  “I guess,” said Seth.

  No sooner was the pickup truck backed down and out of the driveway than Porter said, “Now will you just have a look over there, brother.”

  “How’s that?” said Seth, and turned his head obligingly to the right, whereupon Porter gave him a good lick upside the head with a monkey wrench he’d brought along expressly for that purpose. He got him right where you have a soft spot if you’re a little baby. (You also have a soft spot there if someone gets you just right with a monkey wrench.) Seth made a little sound which amounted to no more than letting his breath out, and then he went out like an icebox light when you have closed the door on it.

  Now as to whether or not Seth was dead at this point I could not honestly tell you, unless I were to make up an answer knowing how slim is the likelihood of anyone presuming to contradict me. But the plain fact is that he might have been dead and he might not and even Seth could not have told you, being at the very least stone-unconscious at the time.

  What Porter did was drive up the old Harburton Road, I guess figuring that he might as well stick to as much of the original plan as possible. There’s a particular place where the road does a reasonably convincing imitation of a fishhook, and that spot’s been described as Schuyler County’s best natural brake on the population explosion since they stamped out the typhoid. A whole lot of folks fail to make that curve every year, most of them young ones with plenty of breeding years left in them. Now and then there’s a movement to put up a guard rail, but the ecology people are against it so it never gets anywhere.

  If you miss that curve, the next land you touch is a good five hundred feet closer to sea level.

  So Porter pulls over to the side of the road and then he gets out of the car and maneuvers Seth (or Seth’s body, whichever the case may have been) so as he’s behind the wheel. Then he stands alongside the car working the gas pedal with one hand and the steering wheel with the other and putting the fool truck in gear and doing this and that and the other thing so he can run the truck up to the edge and over, and thinking hard every minute about those two hundred thousand pretty green dollars that are destined to make his bankruptcy considerably easier to contend with.

  Well, I told you rig
ht off that sometimes you can’t win for losing, which was the case for Porter and Seth both, and another way of putting it is to say that when everything goes wrong there’s nothing goes right. Here’s what happened. Porter slipped on a piece of loose gravel while he was pushing, and the truck had to go on its own, and where it went was halfway and no further, with its back wheel hung up on a hunk of tree limb or some such and its two front wheels hanging out over nothing and its motor stalled out deader’n a smoked fish.

  Porter said himself a whole mess of bad words. Then he wasted considerable time shoving the back of that truck, forgetting it was in gear and not about to budge. Then he remembered and said a few more bad words and put the thing in neutral, which involved a long reach across Seth to get to the floor shift and a lot of coordination to manipulate it and the clutch pedal at the same time. Then Porter got out of the truck and gave the door a slam, and just about then a beat-up old Chevy with Indiana plates pulls up and this fellow leaps out screaming that he’s got a tow rope and he’ll pull the truck to safety.

  You can’t hardly blame Porter for the rest of it. He wasn’t the type to be great at contingency planning anyhow, and who could allow for something like this? What he did, he gave this great sob and just plain hurled himself at the back of that truck, it being in neutral now, and the truck went sailing like a kite in a tornado, and Porter, well, what he did was follow right along after it. It wasn’t part of his plan but he just had himself too much momentum to manage any last-minute change of direction.

  According to the fellow from Indiana, who it turned out was a veterinarian from Bloomington, Porter fell far enough to get off a couple of genuinely rank words on the way down. Last words or not, you sure wouldn’t go and engrave them on any tombstone.

  Speaking of which, he has the last word in tombstones, Vermont granite and all, and his brother Seth has one just like it. They had a double-barreled funeral, the best Johnny Millbourne had to offer, and they each of them reposed in a brass-bound casket, the top-of-the-line model. Minnie Lucy Boxwood sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” which was Porter’s favorite song, plus she sang Seth’s favorite, which was “Old Buttermilk Sky,” plus she also sang free gratis “My Buddy” as a testament to brotherly love.

  And Linda Mae and Rachel got themselves two hundred thousand dollars from the insurance company, which is what Gert and her kids in Valdosta, Georgia, also got. And Seth and Porter have an end to their miseries, which was all they really wanted before they got their heads turned around at the idea of all that money.

  The only thing funnier than how things don’t work out is how they do.

  Funny You Should Ask

  On what a less original writer might deign to describe as a fateful day, young Robert Tillinghast approached the proprietor of a shop called Earth Forms. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t think I can buy anything today, but there’s a question I’d like to ask you. It’s been on my mind for the longest time. I was looking at those recycled jeans over by the far wall.”

  “I’ll be getting a hundred pair in Monday afternoon,” the proprietor said.

  “Is that right?”

  “It certainly is.”

  “A hundred pair,” Robert marveled. “That’s certainly quite a lot.”

  “It’s the minimum order.”

  “Is that a fact? And they’ll all be the same quality and condition as the ones you have on display over on the far wall?”

  “Absolutely. Of course, I won’t know what sizes I’ll be getting.”

  “I guess that’s just a matter of chance.”

  “It is. But they’ll all be first-quality name brands, and they’ll all be in good condition, broken in but not broken to bits. That’s a sort of an expression I made up to describe them.”

  “I like it,” said Robert, not too sincerely. “You know, there’s a question that’s been nagging at my mind for the longest time. Now you get six dollars a pair for the recycled jeans, is that right?” It was. “And it probably wouldn’t be out of line to guess that they cost you about half that amount?” The proprietor, after a moment’s reflection, agreed that it wouldn’t be far out of line to make that estimate.

  “Well, that’s the whole thing,” Robert said. “You notice the jeans I’m wearing?”

  The proprietor glanced at them. They were nothing remarkable, a pair of oft-washed Lee Riders that were just beginning to go thin at the knees. “Very nice,” the man said. “I’d get six dollars for them without a whole lot of trouble.”

  “But I wouldn’t want to sell them.”

  “And of course not. Why should you? They’re just getting to the comfortable stage.”

  “Exactly!” Robert grew intense, and his eyes bulged slightly. This was apt to happen when he grew intense, although he didn’t know it, never having seen himself at such times. “Exactly,” he repeated. “The recycled jeans you see in the shops, this shop and other shops, are just at the point where they’re breaking in right. They’re never really worn out. Unless you only put the better pairs on display?”

  “No, they’re all like that.”

  “That’s what everybody says.” Robert had had much the same conversation before in the course of his travels. “All top quality, all in excellent condition, and all in the same stage of wear.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Robert said in triumph, “who throws them out?”

  “Oh.”

  “The company that sells them. Where do they get them from?”

  “You know,” the proprietor said, “it’s funny you should ask. The same question’s occurred to me. People buy these jeans because this is the way they want ’em. But who in the world sells them?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. Not that it would do me any good to have the answer, but the question preys on my mind.”

  “Who sells them? I could understand about young children’s jeans that kids would outgrow them, but what about the adult sizes? Unless kids grow up and don’t want to wear jeans anymore.”

  “I’ll be wearing jeans as long as I live,” Robert said recklessly. “I’ll never get too old for jeans.”

  The proprietor seemed not to have heard. “Now maybe it’s different out in the farm country,” he said. “I buy these jeans from a firm in Rockford, Illinois—”

  “I’ve heard of the firm,” Robert said. “They seem to be the only people supplying recycled jeans.”

  “Only one I know of. Now maybe things are different in their area and people like brand-new jeans and once they break in somewhat they think of them as worn out. That’s possible, don’t you suppose?”

  “I guess it’s possible.”

  “Because it’s the only explanation I can think of. After all, what could they afford to pay for the jeans? A dollar a pair? A dollar and a half at the outside? Who would sell ’em good-condition jeans for that amount of money?” The man shook his head. “Funny you should ask a question that I’ve asked myself so many times and never put into words.”

  “That Rockford firm,” Robert said. “That’s another thing I don’t understand. Why would they develop a sideline business like recycled jeans?”

  “Well, you never know about that,” the man said. “Diversification is the keynote of American business these days. Take me, for example. I started out selling flowerpots, and now I sell flowerpots and guitar strings and recapped tires and recycled jeans. Now there are people who would call that an unusual combination.”

  “I suppose there are,” said Robert.

  An obsession of the sort that gripped Robert is a curious thing. After a certain amount of time it is either metamorphosized into neurosis or it is tamed, surfacing periodically as a vehicle for casual conversation. Young Robert Tillinghast, neurotic enough in other respects, suppressed his curiosity on the subject of recycled jeans and only raised the question at times when it seemed particularly apropos.

  And it did seem apropos often enough. Robert was touring the country, depending for his locomotion upon the kin
dness of passing motorists. As charitable as his hosts were, they were apt to insist upon a quid pro quo of conversation, and Robert had learned to converse extemporaneously upon a variety of subjects. One of these was that of recycled blue jeans, a subject close at once to his heart and his skin, and Robert’s own jeans often served as the lead-in to this line of conversation, being either funky and mellow or altogether disreputable, depending upon one’s point of view, which in turn largely depended (it must be said) upon one’s age.

  One day in West Virginia, on that stretch of Interstate 79 leading from Morgantown down to Charleston, Robert thumbed a ride with a man who, though not many years older than himself, drove a late-model Cadillac. Robert, his backpack in the backseat and his body in the front, could not have been more pleased. He had come to feel that hitching a ride in an expensive car endowed one with all the privileges of ownership without the nuisance of making the payments.

  Then, as the car cruised southward, Robert noticed that the driver was glancing repeatedly at his, which is to say Robert’s, legs. Covert glances at that, sidelong and meaningful. Robert sighed inwardly. This, too, was part of the game, and had ceased to shock him. But he had so been looking forward to riding in this car and now he would have to get out.

  The driver said, “Just admiring your jeans.”

  “I guess they’re just beginning to break in,” Robert said, relaxing now. “I’ve certainly had them a while.”

  “Well, they look just right now. Got a lot of wear left in them.”

  “I guess they’ll last for years,” Robert said. “With the proper treatment. You know, that brings up something I’ve been wondering about for a long time.” And he went into his routine, which had become rather a little set piece by this time, ending with the question that had plagued him from the start. “So where on earth does that Rockford company get all these jeans? Who provides them?”

  “Funny you should ask,” the young man said. “I don’t suppose you noticed my license plates before you got in?” Robert admitted he hadn’t. “Few people do,” the young man said. “Land of Lincoln is the slogan on them, and they’re from Illinois. And I’m from Rockford. As a matter of fact, I’m with that very company.”