I got dressed in the dark and put my extra clothes and stuff in a paper bag. I thought about leaving a note, but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t either hopelessly corny or slightly nasty, and I didn’t want to be either. I told myself I would write her a letter someday. You can tell yourself things like that as often as you want and it doesn’t cost you a thing.
I sat up all night in different crummy diners, drinking so much coffee that I kept shaking and peeing and shaking and peeing. I was downtown in plenty of time to catch my ride in the morning, and when our car left the city limits of Chicago it wasn’t even noon yet.
So that was three months, and my $27.46 had turned into $191.80, which is better than it could have done through The Miracle Of Compound Interest. And I had spent more time on third base than Ron Santo.
That toddling town.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN I RANG THE DOORBELL, THE CHIMES played the first two bars of a hymn. I couldn’t tell you which one. I stood there patiently, wanting to ring it again but holding off, and eventually I heard the pitter-patter of little old feet. I timed myself so that I was whipping off my little blue-visored cap just as she was opening the door.
She wasn’t the girl of my dreams. When you are young enough and horny enough (like me, Chip Harrison, for instance) you can’t even open a Coke bottle without hoping there will be a beautiful girl in it. And on this job I kept waiting for the time one of the doors would be opened by a Neglected Young Housewife, or a Wanton Suburban College Girl Home From School, or an Off Duty Whore. And instead the doors kept being opened by women who stopped thinking about sex the day Hayes beat Tilden.
This one must have gone to school with Tilden’s grandmother, from the looks of her. She was a tiny wrinkled little lady with bright eyes the color of frostbitten lips. Her face cracked into a smile.
She looked up at me and said, “Yes, young man? You’ve come for the bake sale donation, haven’t you?”
I said I was afraid I hadn’t, and I went into a little explanation of who I was and why I had turned up on her doorstep. While I talked I held my cap in both hands and squeezed it in and out of shape. I didn’t do this because I was nervous. That’s just the way it was supposed to look, because according to old Flickinger the more nervous and earnest you seemed the more trustworthy you were, at least as far as old ladies were concerned.
It was hard to look nervous without doing the little bit of business with the cap, because I actually delivered my set piece without even paying attention to what I was saying. I might as well have been a record player. While my mouth got all the words out, my mind thought about how little this woman had in common with the girl of my dreams, and that I might have guessed as much, because nymphomaniacs don’t go out of their way to have chimes that play hymns—at least most of them don’t—and while I didn’t recognize that tune, it certainly wasn’t “Roll Me Over in the Clover.”
“—free inspection with no obligation whatsoever,” I finished up, and gave my cap a final twist, and hung my head just the littlest bit, because you couldn’t go overboard and look too pathetic or you got tons of warm milk and cookies shoved down your throat.
“Rowrbazzle,” she said.
That seemed like a funny thing for anybody to say, let alone Tilden’s grandmother here, but then of course I saw that she wasn’t the one who said it. It was her cat. He was standing next to her, and he was as big for a cat as she was small for an old lady. He was built like a Siamese, with a blackish brown coat and horrible yellow eyes. I always liked cats, but then they had always said sensible things like Meow. This was the first one that had ever said anything like Rowrbazzle within my hearing and I wasn’t sure just how I felt about it. It put me off stride a little, if you really want to know.
“Now just one moment, young man,” she said.
The woman this time. “You wait right here, and I won’t be a minute. You wait now.”
I waited. So did the cat. Now would have been a good time for me to step inside and let the screen door close behind me, which was the recommended procedure at this stage of the game. Whoever had worked up the recommended procedure had never met a cat that said Rowrbazzle. I stayed where I was, and old Rowrbazzle stayed where he was, and the screen door was the Demilitarized Zone.
Then the old lady came back, and I slapped my smile back in place and whipped off my cap again, and then I noticed what she had in both her little liver-spotted hands.
What she had was an old dueling pistol that was almost as big as her dippy old cat. Her hands were shaking, and the pistol was bobbing up and down like a red red robin, and it was pointing at me, and it looked as though it might go off at any moment.
I said, “Hey! Hey, hang on a minute!”
“This weapon is loaded and primed, young man.”
“I believe it.”
“And let me assure you that it works perfectly well. It is old, but age is not always detrimental. This pistol is in full possession of its faculties.”
I was sure it was. I was perfectly willing to believe that it was still every bit as good as it was the day Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton with it.
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“You will leave this block of houses at once, young man. You will leave directly. The people on this block are all good Christians.”
“You don’t under—”
“Except for the young woman in Number One twenty-one,” she said her voice quavering. “She is a Methodist, and I believe her husband is a wine drinker or worse. You may stop there if you wish. I would not advise it. Last September a boy a bit older than you examined that young woman’s furnace and took it all apart and refused to repair it unless he was paid. I doubt she’d let you into her house after an experience of that sort, but you may try if you wish. I’ve enough on my mind without protecting Methodists, and them wine drinkers in the bargain. Not that I know for a fact that she drinks with him, but they flock together, you know. And I thought you had come about the bake sale. You have an innocent face in sheep’s clothing. Read the Book of Ezekiel.”
“Rowrbazzle.”
“Calvin dislikes you, young man. Our animals can sense things which we can only discover through reasoning. I am going to count ten, and if you are not off my property by the time I reach ten, I will shoot you. I do not hold with violence, but the Lord protects those who look to their own protection. Read the third chapter of the Second Samuel. One. Two. Three. Four—”
I scrambled down the porch steps and between two rows of private hedge to the street, expecting a musket ball to come tearing into me at any moment. The only reason it didn’t was that I was well out of the way before her tinny old voice got to ten. Otherwise she would have shot me. No question about it, she would have blown my goddamned head off without thinking twice about it If Calvin said Rowrbazzle to you, you just didn’t stand a chance around there.
I passed up all the houses on that block. Even the lady in Number 121, the Methodist. I didn’t care if she was a Sun Worshipper. I wasn’t taking any chances.
Around the corner I almost collided with Jimmy Joe. He started to tell me he had just written out an order, but I cut in and told him about Calvin and Rowrbazzle and Grandma Tilden. “Oh, that’s nothing,” he said airily. “I’ve had more guns pointed at me than fingers. They never shoot.”
“This one would have.”
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the guns aren’t even loaded. These people keep unloaded guns around just to put guys like you and me uptight. And the average person, especially a lady, they couldn’t hit a barn from inside of it.”
“This gun was loaded, and she would have shot, and she wouldn’t have missed.”
“Yeah, sure. Prove it.”
“Okay,” I said. I was still having trouble catching my breath. “Okay, smart ass. You go up on the porch and give her a pitch and see if she shoots you or not. I’ll bet you ten bucks you get shot.”
“It’s a sucker bet for you. If
she shoots me, how do you collect?”
“I’ll take my chances.”
He laughed. When he did this, it always reminded me of a big old boxer who belonged to one of the masters at a school I went to in Connecticut. That dog barked just about like that. “Forget it,” Jimmy Joe said. “The important question is did she call the cops.”
“I don’t think she would. Never even threatened to. She’s the vigilante type.”
“That’s all to the good.”
“But I’m not supposed to go on that block because of all the God-fearing Christians. And one Methodist.”
“Methodists are Christians.”
“You want to go tell her? If Flick wants me I’ll be working the next block over.”
“They’re all new houses.”
“How’s the one after that?”
“Better.”
“Then that’s where I’ll be. Luck.”
“Up yours,” he agreed. “And watch out for the Christians.”
“Right, and you watch out for the Lions.”
I didn’t meet any more old ladies with dueling pistols that afternoon, or any cats named Calvin with weird vocabularies. I did meet a whole lot of people who had no trouble closing the door in the middle of my pitch.
I had always thought that was about the most aggravating thing that could happen to someone working door to door, getting a door slammed in your face. It can be sort of jarring the first couple dozen times it happens, but I’ll tell you something, once you get used to it you learn to welcome it. Not that you set out looking to get doors closed on you, but if you’re going to strike out anyway, which is going to happen ninety-nine times out of a hundred to the greatest salesman who ever lived, you might as well strike out as soon as possible. The less time you waste on the stiffs, the more calls you can make in a given period of time. And the more calls you make, the more sales you make, and that’s gospel. Old Flickinger says he’d rather have a chimpanzee who makes a hundred calls a day than a genius who makes fifty. Good old Flick.
“I been on the road for thirty years and more, kid, and if I learned one thing it’s you don’t lose money by ringing doorbells. And if there’s one word of advice I can give you it’s never get into any woman’s pants without she signs on the dotted line. Once you got the order written it’s another story. With the sale made you can afford half an hour in the kip, even an hour if you like the broad’s style. But without you get the order there’s no percentage. You just waste time you can’t afford, and then all she wants to do is get you out of there without she buys anything, or else she keeps you around and gives you coffee and dangles it in front of you that maybe she’ll buy, and you wind up going another round in the kip, and you waste the whole fucking afternoon without you get any order at all. Now maybe you’ll give her a kiss or a feel to set up a sale, on the lines of what you might call a free sample, but that’s all. If there’s one word of advice I can give you that’s it.”
Good old Flick. The first time I heard that little speech I saw myself giving in gracefully to one woman after the next, and doing so well in bed with them that I got order after order, and—Well, there’s no big suspense to keep up, since Francine wasn’t in the picture yet and you know I was still as pure as Ivory Soap when I met her, so let’s just say that it wasn’t like that at all in the door-to-door game, at least not for me, and while Flick’s advice might have been sound, I wasn’t getting a chance to put it into practice.
“As I said, I got doors closed in my face, and I also got the usual percentage of dimwits who felt sorry enough for me to let me give them the whole speech, but who didn’t feel sorry enough for me to let me sell them anything. And then just before it was time to quit I hooked a gray-haired lady who lived all alone in a Victorian house that must have had a hundred rooms in it. She had a cat, but it said what any normal cat says. She said its name was Featherfoot, and that it was a boy but she had had it fixed. She said it so daintily that I almost asked what had been wrong with it. She also had had it declawed so it wouldn’t ruin the furniture. She might have gone all the way and had it stuffed so that it wouldn’t go to the bathroom and to cut down on the cost of feeding it. If I ever have a cat, which I probably won’t, since it’s hard enough to keep myself in sardines, let alone two of us, I would let it keep its claws and its balls intact. I mean, if you don’t want the complete animal, I don’t think you should have any of it. I mean, how would you like it if you were a cat and they did that to you?
That’s getting off the subject, but so did this old lady. She went on and on about one thing or another. She had lost her husband a year ago, she told me. I was sort of listening to every third word out of her mouth, so I thought at first that she must have lost him in one of the hundred rooms in that old barn. But of course she meant he was dead. I hate people who don’t like to say certain words, so they say that the cat is fixed when they mean castrated, or that their husband is lost when they mean he’s dead as a doornail.
She kept on talking, and I went around the house on a tour of inspection, and she droned on about how much trouble there was in keeping up a house when you were a woman all alone in the world. I knew I had her then. I worked my way around the back of the house until I found a spot where there were traces of sawdust on the concrete, and I whipped out my magnifying glass and made clucking noises.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, land’s sake.”
I pointed to the sawdust. “See that?” I said.
She saw it and started apologizing for never having noticed it before. I developed a sudden thirst and asked her if she thought I might be able to have a glass of water. When she came back with the water, I showed her a test tube half full of the little rascals. She almost spilled the water.
“Oh, dear. And you captured all of them while I was in the house?”
“That’s right. There are some of the ones I missed. See, there they go.”
She looked, tsstssing unhappily as the little devils scurried madly over the clapboard siding. That was always the real convincer. Even the most gullible person could look at the ones in the test tube and still figure his house was safe. There was always the hope in their minds that I had picked up the last of them. And the suspicious ones might point out that I could have brought the test tube along with me. But when they saw those termites actually burrowing into their own house it got them where they lived. No joke, it really did.
We went in the house and I filled out the service agreement and got her to sign it. She didn’t even ask what the job was going to cost until after I had the agreement folded and tucked away. I said that the price would depend upon the extent of infestation, and that our costs were nominal, and that all our work was guaranteed. This didn’t answer her question but she didn’t ask again, so I guess she thought she was satisfied.
Before I could get out of there she asked to see the termites again. I gave her the tube. “Nasty nasty vicious things,” she said, with all the hate in the world in her voice. And wouldn’t you know that she insisted on taking the tube outside and spilling the devils out onto the sidewalk and then dive-bombing the living shit out of them with a can of spray insect killer. “Die die die,” she said, and the poor little critters curled up and did just that.
It was a nuisance, but no real harm done. Flickinger had a five-gallon pickle jug swarming with the little bastards, and it wasn’t that much trouble to get a tubeful of them. A pain in the neck, that’s all.
That night I sat around the motel after I refilled the test tube. Jimmy Joe and Keegan were at a movie I hadn’t wanted to see. Lester went off without saying where, probably to look for queers at the bus station. He liked girls and his suitcase was half full of pictures of naked women, but queers were always easier to find, even in the fifth largest city in Indiana, which is where we happened to be just then. You could jump off the top of the tallest building in the fifth largest city in Indiana without doing much more than spraining your ankle, but for our crew this was considered a pretty big
city. We worked towns you honestly wouldn’t believe. We went all through Illinois and Indiana, and sometimes the towns were so small that Lester had to find himself the one queer in the town, or what you might call the town’s faggot in residence. But he always seemed to connect.
The reason I could tolerate old Lester was that he had a reasonable attitude about what he did. He didn’t run on and on about it and he didn’t bug you with a lot of details you’d be a lot happier not knowing, but at the same time he wasn’t one of those nerds who did it on the sly, like my old roommate Haskell who tried to pretend his cock and his hand had never even been introduced to one another, for Pete’s sake. If you asked him a question he’d answer it, but if you left it alone he’d keep quiet. This made him relatively easy to take.
As far as Lester was concerned there was nothing revolting about going with a queer. The only thing shameful about it was that it would be a lot better and more satisfying with a girl. But he didn’t figure it made him queer to be with a queer. Not that Lester is the first person on earth to ever come up with this line of thought. But it seems to me, if you happen to care, that when two men had sex together they were both queer and it didn’t make a hell of a difference which one was down on his knees. It wasn’t as though Lester was just phoning in his part of the deal. But whether you wanted to consider him queer or not (and if you did it wasn’t a good idea to tell him about it), I got along fine with him.
See, that’s one of the fringe benefits of selling termite extermination service door to door. You become very tolerant of people.
Anyhow, I was less interested in accompanying Lester to the bus station than in seeing the movie with Keegan and Jimmy Joe. There was one other member of the crew, a recently divorced ex-Marine named Solly, who was inclined to have much better luck with women than the rest of us. He was having some of that luck right now in his motel room. And Flickinger, the crew leader, was doing what he always did after sunset. What he did involved a bottle and a glass. He never minded company, but if you were going to sit with him he expected you to drink with him, and even without trying to match him shot for shot I was in big trouble, because if I took a short drink for every three long ones of his I would still be drunk in an hour and sick for the next day and a half. One drink of Gregor’s lousy brandy was all right, but I wasn’t ready to handle anything like a whole night of serious drinking.