Pushover

by Orrie Hitt

  She came to me, standing there, looking up at me. Her blonde hair flowed across her shoulders and her chin was high and proud.

  “I’m leaving tonight,” she said. “Goodbye, Danny.”

  I should have kissed her, to make us both feel better, but I didn’t.

  “I won’t see you again,” I said.

  “No. And I’ll take the car back to the rental man on the way to the station. I don’t owe him anything.”

  I got out the hundred again.

  “For expenses,” I told her. “And for being wonderful about helping me.”

  She still wouldn’t take the money.

  “You’re a funny guy,” she said, shaking her head. “You can be wonderful when you want to be. And cruel. And — Danny, why do you think money can buy everything?”

  She was saying almost the same thing to me that I’d been saying to myself about Sandy.

  “I don’t know,” I said, putting my glass on the table. “I guess I just figured it was the right thing to do.”

  I turned and walked to the door.

  “Tell Al I said hello.”

  I opened the door.

  “Danny!”

  I knew she was crying and I didn’t want to look at her. I just stood there, waiting.

  “I love you, Danny,” she whispered.

  “So long,” I told her.

  I went out and closed the door. There was nothing I could do about it. She was just mixed up. She’d get over it.

  I drove to Summer Road and found Sandy at home. She said she’d done pretty good on her calls, that everybody was behind the book now, and when I told her that it would be out on Thursday she got on the phone and called half the people in town.

  “I’m glad it’s almost over,” she said on our way out to dinner. She pulled my head down and kissed me. “Once you get that book out of your system you’ll really belong to me.”

  There it was again. Bought. Paid for. On the verge of delivery. A stud deluxe.

  The next day, Saturday, she had a mortgage appraisal to make with other members of the bank. She’d be gone most of the day, she said.

  “I’m the only woman in the whole county on one of those appraisal committees,” she said.

  The county, I was pretty sure, constituted only a small part of this grand old universe but I didn’t bring that up.

  “It’s a boarding house and of course we’ll turn it down,” she went on. “But the man does bank with us and we want to keep him happy. Besides, it isn’t good advertising if you refuse to make appraisals.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “You won’t be lonesome,” she assured me as I walked out to the Plymouth with her. “I’ve made arrangements for you to go down to the auto agency this morning. Mr. Sloan, the manager, will show you around and give you an idea what it’s all about.”

  I was annoyed. But I didn’t give any indication of it. I smiled the grateful smile of an obedient servant and told her I’d hop down there quick, on the double, and get into the swing of things.

  I parked the Caddy in front of the place at eleven.

  Sloan was a pleasant enough fellow, in his thirties, and he took me on strictly a buyer’s tour. I was shown the shop, the parts room, the office and the section out back where they had an automatic car-washing machine.

  “We don’t work Saturday afternoon,” he explained as the mechanics began checking out at twelve. “Cuts down on the overtime.”

  Top wage scale for mechanics in the shop was seventy-five a week, fifty-five for apprentices and the girls in the office got forty. Sloan was paid a salary of a hundred a week and the salesmen, three of them, had a drawing account of fifty each.

  I left the garage at one, had lunch in a diner and drove back to the motel. It seemed to be an opportunity for me to catch up on some sleep.

  The woman at the desk said there was a girl in my room, waiting for me. It turned out to be Gloria Collins.

  “I called and left a message for you last week,” she said, rising from the chair. “But I didn’t hear from you. I was off today so I thought I’d drive out. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  I asked her if she wanted a drink but she said, no, she’d given it up.

  “I feel better,” she said.

  I sat on the bed and she slid down into the chair again. She crossed her legs and I got a good look at her nylons. I grinned. There’d been a time when I’d chased those legs with the hunger of a panther in a chicken house.

  “I don’t think I ever apologized to you for all that trouble I caused,” she began. “I regret it, Danny.”

  “You did apologize, but it wasn’t necessary.”

  “I was fighting for what I thought was right,” she continued. “I’m sure you understand that.”

  “Naturally.”

  She shifted in the chair nervously and reached into the red pocketbook on her lap.

  “I came to give you back that money, Danny.”

  “It’s yours,” I said. “Keep it.”

  She came over and dropped a wad of bills down beside me.

  “No. My father said I shouldn’t.”

  I sat up.

  “Your old man? What’s he got to do with it?”

  “I told him how I got it.” She looked away. “He said it was wrong, that I should give it back.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled and fiddled with her necklace.

  “You know why, Danny. Don’t tell me that.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “All right,” she said. “You’re getting married to Sandy Adams, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And dad’s been on the force for a long, long time. In a few years he’ll be able to retire. He says if you ever told her that we took this money, why — why, he’d be off the force.”

  I said something under my breath and got up. There were more than twenty-thousand backbones in Port Jessup and they all curled up when they mentioned her name.

  “Here,” I said, handing the money to her. “Take it. She knows about it, anyway. And tell your father not to worry. Hell — ”

  “Oh, Danny, you didn’t tell her!”

  “I said I did. I don’t know why. But I did.”

  She backed toward the door.

  “He’d be furious if he knew,” she whispered.

  “Don’t tell him, that’s all.”

  “I won’t.”

  I tried again to make her take the money but she wouldn’t have any part of it.

  After Gloria had gone I put the money in my wallet and lay down on the bed. Once I thought of phoning the desk and leaving a call for five-thirty but I never got around to it.

  At eight the buzzer woke me. It was Sandy.

  “My God!” she said. “Where have you been?”

  “I guess I fell asleep.”

  “Well, wake up! We’re fifteen minutes late for a meeting at the Presbyterian church now.”

  I hadn’t known a thing about it. I sat up.

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  I got off the bed and fought my way into the bathroom. Christ, but I was tired. I hooked up the electric razor, went through the motions of shaving.

  It was while I was sitting on the bed, tying my shoes, that I got out my wallet and examined it. I had about fourteen hundred in there. That, plus what I had in the bank, gave me close to three grand. And I had the car. It wasn’t a bad stake, more than I’d ever had before. I closed the wallet and put it back in my pocket. It was good but it wasn’t half a million. Nowhere near it.

  We attended the meeting, gave out some free advice on how to best sell the book and left. On the way back I insisted that we stop at a bar for a drink.

  “Just one,” Sandy agreed reluctantly. She was still sore. “We have a date to play golf in the morning.”

  “That’ll be a good stunt,” I said. “I don’t have any clubs.”

  “You mean, you didn’t. But you do now. I picked up a set for yo
u this afternoon.”

  Another payment. Pretty soon I wouldn’t be bought. I’d be owned.

  We had one drink, another and then some more. She got over being mad and we danced a few times and she kissed me.

  “You’re harder to train than a stray dog,” she told me. “But I suppose that’s because you never had responsibilities before.”

  Responsibilities? Hell, I just hung around while things happened. I didn’t have very much to do with any of it.

  It got to be twelve o’clock and by this time we were sitting on the same side of the little booth, warm and tight. We’d had several drinks; I’d caused her to miss dinner and she was beginning to feel them. I wasn’t exactly sober myself and as we finally left, around one, I bumped into the door on the way out.

  She didn’t protest when I drove to the motel, parked the car and steered her inside.

  “Help me undress,” she said when we were in the room.

  I unbuttoned her blouse and put that over the chair. Next, I took off her skirt but I let that lie on the floor where it fell. I set her down and removed the shoes, stockings and garter belt.

  Then I turned out the light.

  “Love me, love me!” she demanded.

  Maybe she got half a million bucks worth that night and maybe she didn’t. I don’t know. But there’s one thing I do know.

  I didn’t.

  15

  ON TUESDAY I received a card from Al. Madeline had joined him in Carbondale and the job looked pretty good. But they needed help. Did I know of anybody they might be able to get? I tore up the card and threw it away.

  Later that day I found a message at the motel from Harrison. He wanted me to call him. He’d pulled the same stunt on other jobs before, wanting more money, so I didn’t bother phoning him. I went down to Western Union, wired him five hundred bucks and told him, in the message, to get with it and deliver the books on Thursday.

  The next day, Wednesday, Sandy and I spent in the little store downtown. There were three women working in there and, so far, they had accepted eleven hundred orders for the books.

  “We ought to get somebody to address envelopes,” I told Sandy. “That way, soon as the books arrive, they can be dumped in the mail.”

  But she’d already thought of that.

  “The girls at the car agency are doing it,” she said. “They weren’t very busy.”

  See what I mean? We didn’t even own the place yet and already she was telling them what to do.

  That afternoon, around four, a fellow showed up from the radio station with a portable tape recorder.

  “We wanted to interview you two people,” he explained, setting up his equipment. “We thought we’d run it once tonight and twice tomorrow. It should give the book a real bang-up start on publication day.”

  I laughed.

  “Now, Mr. Fulton,” he said, “why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? We’ve hardly gotten to know you.”

  I started to tell him that I’d rather not be interviewed but Sandy got into the act and I didn’t have a chance.

  “Mr. Holden is a writer,” Sandy told him. “He devised this unique way of raising community funds.”

  If Gloria Collins heard that she’d be amused.

  “And where are you going from here?” the guy asked me.

  “Oh, he’s staying in Port Jessup,” Sandy said. “He’s taking over a business in town.” Her voice lowered. “We’re to be married at the end of the month,” she added.

  The whole thing lasted about fifteen minutes, during which time I said absolutely nothing. Sandy could think up answers faster than the guy could ask questions.

  “I trust I did the right thing,” she said to me on the way up to Summer Road. “It’s so important for the people living here to get to know you.”

  “But to say I was thinking of writing a book,” I protested. “Jesus!”

  She reached over and patted my arm.

  “You don’t have to, darling, if you don’t want to. It just added a little — color. No one will ever think anything of it if you don’t.”

  We had dinner at the house, then listened to the radio. The interview was broadcast at eight-thirty. I thought it was corny and boring but Sandy ate it up. And after it came a spot announcement which put a great big icing on the whole thing. I sat there staring at the radio, inclined to doubt what I’d heard.

  “You can’t mean it,” I said to her. “Having the mayor there for the delivery of the books!”

  “Oh, but I do,” she said sweetly. “It will really start the ball rolling.”

  Of course, in other cities we had presented copies of books to the mayors and people like that. Frequently we’d had publicity pictures taken of the transactions. But we’d never invited everybody and his brother to attend the occasion or suggested in any way that it was the next thing to a local holiday. You can feed the public just so much of that kind of crap before you find they’re choking on it. Besides, you could never depend on Harrison’s truck arriving on time and you might have a lot of people standing around for hours. It didn’t make a great deal of sense, not unless one person was seeking all the publicity for the whole project. And then it made sense. The way it did now.

  I thought we had a late date with a few people down at one of the hotels for drinks and a little talk but it turned out to be a real party. There must have been a couple of hundred there and I wasn’t aware that Sandy was paying the shot for it until a stranger, not able to find her, came up and thanked me for a nice time.

  I had a most miserable evening of it. Many of the folks had heard the radio interview and all of them had read the slush in the papers. They fawned over her, reminding her of all the wonderful things she had done for them in the past, assuring her that this book was just another milestone in the glorious career of Sandy Adams, charity leader extraordinary.

  At eleven o’clock, on the nose, I went outside and celebrated by throwing up.

  “Oh, it was wonderful!” she exclaimed on the way home. “Danny, it was the nicest affair I’ve ever been at!”

  I’m quite sure she meant it had been the most noisy.

  I let her out at the house, kissed her good night and drove down toward the motel. She didn’t ask me in. I guess she was too much in love with herself that night to bear the thought of sharing it with a man.

  I stopped at a bar not far from the motel and hoisted a few. I thought about Al and Madeline and Carbondale and I wanted to be sick all over again. Then I thought of all that money and what I had to go through to get some of it. I thought of how I had been in love with Sandy and how it was changing. I drank some more because there was an empty spot down inside that nothing seemed to fill up. I’d made a choice, good or bad, and I’d sold myself out to a very high bidder. I might as well, I decided, make up my mind to that.

  “Another drink?” the bartender wanted to know.

  “Yeah. I’m gonna float home.”

  The more I drank the worse it got. I’d done a lot of things in my life for a few lousy bucks. I supposed for her kind of dough I could do almost anything. And that’s what I’d have to do. Almost anything.

  I don’t know how I got to the motel finally but I guess I made it under my own power. At least, I was in bed, with my clothes on, when I awoke at nine the next morning.

  I got up, checked my money and found it all there. Then I undressed, showered, shaved and slipped into a pair of charcoal slacks, sport shirt and coat.

  On the way out I tried to call Sandy. Mary answered and said the books were in town. She told me that Sandy had gone down to the store.

  I wasn’t in any hurry to join the crowd and listen to the praise for Sandy. I had all day to listen to it. All week. The rest of my life.

  By the time I had eaten breakfast in a diner, had two cups of coffee and a glass of seltzer water I began to feel better. In fact, I was pretty sure that I’d be able to take it for another day. I drove down to the store, wondering what it would be like.

/>   I found that the lid had blown off the kettle. Blown sky high, with little pieces of it scattered all over town.

  “I want my money back,” I heard one woman was saying to another. “I’m not paying two dollars for junk like that, church or no church.”

  There was a crowd of people outside the store, milling around. The inside was packed. I didn’t see the mayor anywhere.

  “My husband works too hard for his money, he does,” another woman shouted. “A dollar an hour he gets for digging ditches and you think he should work two hours to buy a thing like this? Ha! If he didn’t dig ditches better’n you make books — God Almighty, I’d hate to think what would become of us!”

  I tried to get through the crowd but it was almost impossible.

  “Here,” I said to one of the women, holding out two singles. “I’ll buy that book.”

  She stared at me.

  “You in your right mind?” she wanted to know.

  But she took the two ones and gave me the book. A couple of other women began asking if I would buy theirs, but I shook my head and walked away. A man rushed up, almost knocked me down. He was cursing and he had one of the books in his hand.

  “The bastards!” he said. “I got screwed.”

  I got away from the crowd and moved down the street. I opened the book and looked at it. My guts churned. It was the worst offset job I’d ever seen. You could read hardly a word in it. Only the pictures and the captions beneath them were clear.

  I wandered across the street, into a cigar store and found the telephone booth. I called Harrison.

  “Sure, it’s bad,” he admitted. “Awful. That’s why I called you. But then you sent that wire and said to get with it. I — ”

  “Holy smoke!” I breathed.

  “I thought you knew, Danny. I thought, when I got your wire, that you knew.”

  “I know now,” I said.

  “It was the typing,” he explained. “The touch was too light.”

  I looked at the book again, my hands sweating.

  “And the right-hand margins are cockeyed!” I shouted.

  “That’s the typing again. We can’t control that. Now, if you had had it set on the lineotype, why — ”

  I hung up on him. What the hell was the use?