CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  And if you tried to tell Flick that you’d heard such and such a story before, he argued with you.

  So I didn’t go to Flick’s room, and of course I didn’t go to Solly’s room, and the other three guys were out somewhere, and I didn’t have anything to read, and Flick owned the only car and had let Jimmy Joe and Keegan borrow it, which didn’t really enter into it since I couldn’t drive anyway. Well, I mean I know how, but they get agitated if they catch you driving without a license, and I never got one.

  So there was nothing to do and no place to go, and that gave this particular evening a whole lot in common with most of the evenings I’d spent since I left Chicago.

  Unless you happened to work on one of those traveling sales crews, you probably don’t know what they’re like. I didn’t have the faintest idea myself until I was actually hired and on the job. The arrangement was simple enough. The crew consisted of five guys anywhere from eighteen on up (well, I lied) and a crew leader. You would be assigned a certain territory, which in our case was eastern Illinois and western Indiana, and within that territory you would go wherever the crew boss decided and stay as long as it was worthwhile. The crew leader took care of all your regular expenses—hotel, meals, car expenses, and so on—and got reimbursed by the company.

  For every sale you made, the salesman got twenty-five dollars and the crew leader got fifteen. The crew leader did his own selling too and got to keep the whole forty bucks on his own sales. (Flick’s percentage was officially a secret, but it was one of the first things he told you when he sat drinking with you.)

  The point is that if you made a sale you wound up with twenty-five bucks free and clear, since you didn’t have any living expenses at all. If you sold one lousy exterminating job a day, you could salt away better than five hundred dollars a month. And on the other hand if you had a terrible day or a terrible week or even a terrible month, you never had to worry about missing meals or being locked out of your room, because your basic expenses were always taken care of.

  I just read through that last paragraph, and it sounds as good now as it did when I first heard it. Because I haven’t mentioned the one thing they didn’t stress, either.

  Which is that you go out as a crew for a three month tour, and you don’t collect nickel number one until you finish the tour. It wasn’t hard to figure out why they did it this way. See, the system was based on the idea of five men and a crew boss, which was the best size group from an economic standpoint. And if two or three of those men decided to call it quits while the crew was working off in East Crayfish or Fort Dingbat, the whole crew stopped being a profitable deal for the company. But if a guy had to go back at the end of the hitch to collect his money, that tended to discourage him from quitting.

  Of course you would still be entitled to your pay whether you quit or not. But being entitled didn’t mean anybody was going to hand the money to you.

  Or, in Flick’s words, “Any of youse quits without the three months are up, you just kissed your dough goodbye. And if I ever catches youse again, you can kiss your ass goodbye, too, because I’ll kick it clear to Wausau County for you.”

  I don’t know where the hell Wausau County is.

  According to Keegan, who had been working what he called the Bug Game on and off for almost five years, there was another reason why they didn’t pay you until your shift was done. They had to confirm the signatures. Otherwise the salesmen could just write up a couple of phony orders every day, knock down a couple of hundred dollars a week, and spend all their time watching television.

  “And there are some that would do just that,” he told me, with a wink. “You wouldn’t believe it in a fine upstanding business like this one, Chip my lad, but there are hordes of dishonest people in this world.”

  I believed it.

  Not that I had ever had any grave doubts on that score. But in the time I spent showing poor widow ladies my little plastic tube full of termites, I learned more about how people could be crooked without going to jail than I ever knew existed. One thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was that my parents must have been real hardcore criminals. Up until then I always figured that they couldn’t have been so bad if they went all their lives without getting sent to jail, but now I saw that I had been looking at it the wrong way around. If they had actually gotten themselves to a point where it looked as though they just might have to go to jail, then they were obviously a pretty criminal pair, old Mom and Dad, because you can be crooked enough to pull corks out of wine bottles with your toes and never see a cop except to say hello to, or fix a traffic ticket.

  I already knew that nobody seemed to pay any attention to the law, or at least not in the way the law had in mind. In Chicago, for instance, you couldn’t do commercial street photography, and even if you did you couldn’t pass out handbills that way, because that constitutes an invitation to litter and means you’re creating a nuisance. All of which meant that Gregor gave the patrolman on his beat ten dollars a week and never heard any more about it.

  (I had always known things like this went on, but I thought, you know, that it was strictly Big Time Criminals who got involved in them. Not some plodding clod like Gregor, for Pete’s sake. And I knew some cops took graft, and how it’s a big temptation and all, but to take ten dollars? A rotten ten dollars from a simp like Gregor?)

  Well, this happens in more places than Chicago. In every city or town our crew went to, there was a man Flickinger called the Fixer. The Fixer might be somebody in the police department or sheriff’s office, or it might be a politician, or it might be some lawyer or businessman who was in good with the local government. And whoever the particular fixer might be, Flick would tell him he was bringing in a door-to-door crew and he wanted to have all the red tape handled in advance, like the permits or licenses or whatever was needed, and without the bother of filling out a lot of forms. And then Flick would slip the Fixer an envelope, and the Fixer would talk to whoever had to be talked to, and he’d keep part of what was in the envelope and pass on the rest, and none of us would have to worry about any aggravation from the police. And I don’t mean just that they wouldn’t give us a hard time about not having licenses. Besides that, there was always the fact that a certain number of non-customers would call the cops and complain about us for one reason or another. But the word would be out, and when those calls came in the cop who answered the phone would say Yeah and Sure, ma’am and listen while all the information came over the wire and into his ear, but he wouldn’t bother writing any of it down, and we would never even hear about it, unless maybe someone would call Flick privately and ask him to for Christ’s sake ask his boys to be a little more diplomatic in their dealings with the natives.

  Don’t ask how much was in the envelope. One of the reasons Flick got that fifteen dollars a sale extra was that he knew what it would take to fix each particular fixer.

  I went out into the hall and got a Coke out of the machine. I was leaning against the wall drinking it when Solly came out of his room with a plastic pitcher. He carried it to the ice machine and filled it up.

  I said, “Heavy night?”

  “All she wants to do is drink and screw. I wouldn’t mind, only she drinks better’n she screws.”

  “Did you ask her if she’s got a friend?”

  “If she had a friend, I’d take the friend and boot this one out on her hinder. She’s a pig. You, Chip, you got the right idea.”

  “I do?”

  “Goddamn right.”

  He seemed to be more than a little looped. I said, “What’s the right idea? Coca-Cola?”

  “Not Coca-fuckin’-Cola. It’s bad for your teeth, you know that?”

  “Not if you use a regular bottle opener.”

  “Huh?” He blinked. “Smart ass. But you got the right idea. The girls I see you out with.”

  “Oh.”

  “Whattaya mean, oh?” Solly became very forceful when he drank. Not belligerent or nasty, just emphatic. “Decent girls, prett
y girls. And I never see you with the same girl twice. Smart. The right idea.”

  He weaved away and plunged back to his room, and woman while I tried to think of an answer. Not that it was worth the trouble. The girls he had seen me out with were nice decent girls, all right. And pretty girls. And I guess I was getting a little better at knowing what to say to them and how to make time with them, because these weren’t girls that anybody introduced me to, and they weren’t girls who went out looking to get picked up. They were ordinary run-of-the-mill nice small-town girls that I would meet during the job or at a restaurant and that I would take to a movie and out for coffee or something like that.

  If you can convince someone to sign a piece of paper agreeing to let Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc. rid his house of termites and dendivorous vermin (that’s what it said on the paper they signed, and you can look it up in your Funk and Wagnall’s) for whatever fee DTE, Inc. wanted to charge, if you can do all that, you really ought to be able to convince some small-town girl to go to a movie with you.

  But not to anything much more dynamic than a movie, as it happens.

  I drank a second soft drink, but this time I made it an Uncola, probably because I was brainwashed by Solly telling me Coke would ruin my teeth. It probably would, but the Uncola probably would, too.

  Because I was beginning to come to the conclusion that everything was a con.

  Which is a hell of a conclusion to come to, for Pete’s sake, especially when you happen to be descended from a long line of con men. Well, two of them anyway. And when you’ve decided to become a success along legitimate lines and to work hard and save your money and marry the boss’s daughter and do all the other things right, too.

  Why go through all that if some smooth-talking little rat could come along and stand on your stoop and twist his cap in his hands and wind up costing you a couple of hundred dollars to kill termites that weren’t there to begin with, and that wouldn’t hurt your house a whole lot even if they were? (Because this may be something you never thought of, in which case I’m going to be saving you a lot of money over the years, because the first thing we all learned is that maybe ninety-nine houses out of a hundred have some termites, and those houses will go on standing for a couple of hundred years without anybody doing anything about those termites. See, it takes a long time for a termite to eat a house. It even takes a long time for a lot of termites to eat a house. But you take the average idiot and show him a termite eating his house, and he figures that in another week there won’t be anything left but the foundation.

  (And while I’m on the subject, the second thing we all learned was that you couldn’t in a million years sell an extermination job to somebody with a brick house. Flick said you can’t sell them fire proofing, either, and Flick would know; he’s sold everything at one time or another, and if that includes his mother and his sister I wouldn’t be surprised. But people who have brick houses seem to think the brick is what holds the house together, so—

  (You know, I have the feeling that I might be telling you more about termites than you really want to know. Maybe all of this will get cut out before the book gets printed, or maybe the book won’t ever get printed, which would mean rough sledding for one Chip Harrison, but either way I’m going to cool it at this point with all this inside information about the termite business. That’s a firm promise.

  (In fact, I’m going to cool it on that forgettable evening, as far as that goes, because it wasn’t the kind of evening you would want to read about. I rapped a little with Lester when he came in, and I let Jimmy Joe tell me the plot of the movie he and Keegan saw. And I made up a lie about having a girl in my room and banging her while they were at the movie, and Jimmy Joe made up a lie about picking up a girl after the movie. We were both lying and knew it, but it broke the monotony in a small way. And outside of having a couple more soft drinks and reading an Indianapolis newspaper—which made the Chicago Tribune seem like the Daily Worker, or close to it—that was all there was to that evening, so there’s no point wasting everybody’s time with it.

  (It was the night after that one that might interest you, when Solly brought the redhead back to the motel and organized a gang bang. I have to admit it was more interesting than Cokes and Uncolas. And it did more damage than any termites I ever saw.)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DURING THE DAY I had been working the same area where I’d made a sale the day before. Up until then the television weatherman had been saying it was unseasonably cool for mid-July, which meant it was reasonably comfortable. But that day it decided to get seasonable again.

  I’m writing this on a cold damp rotten morning. My radiator is some slumlord’s idea of decoration, completely nonfunctional. But I can get warm just remembering that day. I didn’t make a sale. No one did. No one expected to. I think I worked as long as anyone, and I was back in my air-conditioned room by three-thirty. Flickinger didn’t even put in a token gripe. Pointless. We could have sold air conditioners or dry ice or Japanese fans, but that was about the extent of it. It was so hot we didn’t even talk about how hot it was, if that makes sense.

  I skipped dinner and stretched out on my bed in my shorts and let the air conditioner blow on me. I woke up shivering, figure that one out, when Lester banged on my door. I let him in and he flopped in a chair and waited for his breath to come back. He had gone out for dinner and walked through all that heat, and looking at him made me glad I stayed around the room instead.

  We talked about this and that, one thing and the other, and ultimately reached Topic A. I launched into a long story that was kind of loosely based on something that happened with Aileen, except that in this version of the story we didn’t worry about being faithful to Gregor, who was a Cuban refugee dentist in the latest version. I don’t know if Lester believed it or not. I don’t think he cared enough to worry whether it was true or not. When you sit around swapping sex stories to keep from dying of boredom, nobody really gives a shit if they’re true or not. Just so they’re sufficiently interesting and/or horny to keep you awake.

  “You know something?” he demanded, when I had carried Carmelita and myself to the heights of rapture. “When all is said and done, no woman really knows how to give head.”

  I made a noncommittal noise.

  “You agree with me, Chip?”

  I said something that sounded like Rowrbazzle. Because it was one of those questions like Have you stopped beating your meat? Whatever you said, you came off either more ignorant or more informed than you might want to.

  Lester talked for a while, sort of saying but not saying that he was afraid he got more of a kick out of the queers than he wanted to, and hinting that if he did have a woman available on a steady basis he might miss the Greyhound Terminal set, water on the knee and all. I just made grunting sounds, which was all the situation called for. One thing I’ve noticed is that when you want to talk something out and get it right in your mind, all you really want the other person to do is be there with his mouth shut. It’s a way of talking to yourself without feeling a little flaky about it.

  He dropped the subject when Jimmy Joe came in unannounced and stuck his head in front of the air conditioner.

  “Hey,” he wanted to know, “am I interrupting anything?”

  “We were talking about sex,” Lester said.

  “That’s the trouble. Everybody talks about it and nobody does anything about it.” And he sat down on the carpet and joined the party.

  Bit by bit they all filtered in. Keegan first, and then Flickinger himself, standing at the door with a stupid look on his face and a bottle of gin in each hand. He came in and said he felt like company, and why didn’t we all join him in a drink? No one could think of a reason not to. We drank gin on the rocks out of water tumblers. Keegan smacked his lips, wrinkled his nose, frowned, and said he wanted a little less vermouth next time around.

  That reminded Flick of a story. I knew it would, because I had heard the story twice before, the two times
I got drunk with him. Every last one of us had heard that goddamned story but nobody wanted to ruin his evening by saying anything about it.

  You know, somewhere in this world Flickinger must have a drinking buddy who has the same kind of memory as Flick does. And I can just imagine the two of them sitting up night after night, lapping up the sauce and telling each other the exact same stories every single night. And each time Flick would think he was telling the story for the first time, and each time the other juicehead would think he was hearing it for the first time, and the two of them would go on and on, repeating like a decimal until the world came to an end.

  Flick finished his story, finally, and poured everybody another drink whether they needed it or not, and got that look on his face that let you know another story was on its way. Before he could get his mouth in gear, Keegan said, “Why isn’t Solly at our little party?”

  He wasn’t looking for an answer. He just wanted to throw a question in Flickinger’s way. But no sooner were the words out than the door flew open, and there, drunker than the five of us put together, was Solly himself.

  “Well, it’s about time,” he said. “Wondered where you all went to. Knocked on this door and that door and thought you were all gone, and you’re all here. Goddamn good thing, too. Never forgive yourselves if you missed this.”

  “Somebody give him a drink,” Lester suggested.

  “Brought you boys a present,” Solly said. He stuck out his hand and just left it hanging there, waiting for someone to put a drink in it as Lester had suggested, but that’s the trouble with indefinite orders; we all waited for somebody else to give Solly a drink, and Solly’s hand just stayed out in the air for a little while before he remembered where he had left it and brought it back.