Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “Lucky you got this far with it,” he said, and clucked his tongue and shook his head and heaved the old fan clutch onto a heap of old metallic junk.

  I stood there wondering if a fan clutch was supposed to turn hard or easy or not at all, and if that was our original fan clutch or a piece of junk he kept around for this particular purpose, and I knew my brother Newton was wondering just the same thing. I wished they could have taught us something useful in the state pen, something that might have come in handy in later life, something like your basic auto mechanics course. But they had me melting my flesh off my bones in the prison laundry and they had Newt sewing mail sacks, which there isn’t much call for in civilian life, being the state penal system has an official monopoly on the business.

  Meanwhile Newt had the three twenties out of his shirt pocket and was standing there straightening them out and lining up their edges. “Let’s see now,” he said. “That’s sixteen and change for the gas, and you said thirty to thirty-five for the fan clutch, so what’s that all come to?”

  It turned out that it came to just under eighty-five dollars.

  The fan clutch, it seemed, had run higher than he’d thought it would. Forty-two fifty was what it came to, and that was for the part exclusive of labor. Labor tacked another twelve dollars onto our tab. And while he’d been working there under the hood, our friend had found a few things that simply needed attending to. Our fan belt, for example, was clearly on its last legs and ready to pop any minute. He showed it to us and you could see how worn it was, all frayed and just a thread or two away from popping.

  So he had replaced it, and he’d replaced our radiator hoses at the same time. He fished around in his junkpile and came up with a pair of radiator hoses which he said had come off our car. The rubber was old and stiff with little cracks in the surface, and it sure smelled like something awful.

  I studied the hoses and agreed they were in terrible shape. “So you just went ahead and replaced them on your own,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “I didn’t want to bother you while you were eating.”

  “That was considerate,” Newt said.

  “I figured you fellows would want it seen to. You blow a fan belt or a hose out there, well, it’s a long walk back, you know. ‘Course I realize you didn’t authorize me to do the work, so if you actually want me to take the new ones off and put the old back on—”

  Of course there was no question of doing that. Newt looked at me for a minute and I looked back at him and he took out our roll, which I don’t guess you could call a roll anymore from the size of it, and he peeled off another twenty and a ten and added them to the three twenties from his shirt pocket. He held the money in his hand and looked at it and then at the dude, then back at the money, then back at the dude again. You could see he was doing heavy thinking, and I had an idea where his thoughts were leading.

  Finally he took in a whole lot of air and let it out in a rush and said, “Well, hell, I guess it’s worth it if it leaves us with a car in good condition. Last thing either of us wants is any damn trouble with the damn car and I guess it’s worth it. This fixes us up, right? Now we’re in good shape with nothing to worry about, right?”

  “Well,” the dude said.

  We looked at him.

  “There is a thing I noticed.”

  “Oh?”

  “If you’ll just look right here,” he said. “See how the rubber grommet’s gone on the top of your shock absorber mounting, that’s what called it to my attention. Now you see your car’s right above the hydraulic lift, that’s cause I had it up before to take a look at your shocks. Now let me just raise it up again and I can point out to you what’s wrong.”

  Well, he pressed a switch or some such to send the car up off the ground, and then he pointed here and there underneath it to show us where the shocks were shot and something was cutting into something else and about to commence bending the frame.

  “If you got the time you ought to let me take care of that for you,” he said. “Because if you don’t get it seen to you wind up with frame damage and your whole front end goes on you, and then where are you?”

  He let us take a long look at the underside of the car. There was no question that something was pressing on something and cutting into it. What the hell it all added up to was beyond me.

  “Just let me talk to my brother a minute,” Newt said to him, and he took hold of my arm and we walked around the side.

  “Well,” he said, “what do you think? It looks like this old boy here is sticking it in pretty deep.”

  “It does at that. But that fan belt was shot and those hoses was the next thing to petrified.”

  “True.”

  “If they was our fan belt and hoses in the first place and not some junk he had around.”

  “I had that very thought, Vern.”

  “Now as for the shock absorbers—”

  “Something sure don’t look altogether perfect underneath that car. Something’s sure cutting into something.”

  “I know it. But maybe he just went and got a file or some such thing and did some cutting himself.”

  “In other words, either he’s a con man or he’s a saint.”

  “Except we know he ain’t a saint, not at the price he gets for gasoline, and not telling us how he eats all his meals across the road and all the time his own wife’s running it.”

  “So what do we do? You want to go on to Silver City on those shocks? I don’t even know if we got enough money to cover putting shocks on, far as that goes.”

  We walked around to the front and asked the price of the shocks. He worked it all out with pencil and paper and came up with a figure of forty-five dollars, including the parts and the labor and the tax and all. Newt and I went into another huddle and he counted his money and I went through my own pockets and came up with a couple of dollars, and it worked out that we could pay what we owed and get the shocks and come up with three dollars to bless ourselves with.

  So I looked at Newt and he looked back at me and gave a great shrug of his shoulders. Close as we are we can say a lot without speaking.

  We told the dude to go ahead and do the work.

  While he installed the shocks, me and Newt went across the road and had us a couple of chicken-fried steaks. They wasn’t bad at all even if the price was on the high side. We washed the steaks down with a beer apiece and then each of us had a cup of that coffee. I guess there’s been times I had better coffee.

  “I’d say you fellows sure were lucky you stopped here,” the woman said.

  “It’s our lucky day, all right,” Newt said. While he paid her I looked over the paperback books and magazines. Some of them looked to be old and secondhand but they weren’t none of them reduced in price on account of it, and this didn’t surprise me much.

  What also didn’t surprise us was when we got back to find the shocks installed and our friend with his big hat off and scratching his mop of hair and telling us how the rear shocks was in even worse shape than the front ones. He went and ran the car up in the air again to show us more things that didn’t mean much to us.

  Newton said, “Well, sir, my brother and I, we talked it over. We figure we been neglecting this here automobile and we really ought to do right by it. If those rear shocks is bad, well, let’s just get ’em the hell off of there and new ones on. And while we’re here I’m just about positive we’re due for an oil change.”

  “And I’ll replace the oil filter while I’m at it.”

  “You do that,” Newt told him. “And I guess you’ll find other things that can do with a bit of fixing. Now we haven’t got all the time in the world or all the money in the world either, but I guess we got us a pair of hours to spare, and we consider ourselves lucky having the good fortune to run up against a mechanic who knows which end of the wrench is which. So what we’ll do, we’ll just find us a patch of shade to set in and you check that car over and find things to do to her. Only things that need doing, but I
guess you’d be the best judge of that.”

  Well, I’ll tell you he found things to fix. Now and then a car would roll on in and he’d have to go and sell somebody a tank of gas, but we sure got the lion’s share of his time. He replaced the air filter, he cleaned the carburetor, he changed the oil and replaced the oil filter, he tuned the engine and drained and flushed the radiator and filled her with fresh coolant, he gave us new plugs and points, he did this and that and every damn thing he could think of, and I guess the only parts of that car he didn’t replace were ones he didn’t have replacement parts for.

  Through it all Newt and I sat in a patch of shade and sipped Cokes out of the bottle. Every now and then that bird would come over and tell us what else he found that he ought to be doing, and we’d look at each other and shrug our shoulders and say for him to go ahead and do what had to be done.

  “Amazing what was wrong with that car of ours,” Newt said to me. “Here I thought it rode pretty good.”

  “Hell, I pulled in here wanting nothing in the world but a tank of gas. Maybe a quart of oil, and oil was the one thing in the world we didn’t need, or it looks like.”

  “Should ride a whole lot better once he’s done with it.”

  “Well I guess it should. Man’s building a whole new car around the cigarette lighter.”

  “And the clock. Nothing wrong with that clock, outside of it loses a few minutes a day.”

  “Lord,” Newt said, “don’t you be telling him about those few minutes the clock loses. We won’t never get out of here.”

  That dude took the two hours we gave him and about twelve minutes besides, and then he came on over into the shade and presented us with his bill. It was all neatly itemized, everything listed in the right place and all of it added up, and the figure in the bottom right-hand corner with the circle around it read $277.45.

  “That there is quite a number,” I said.

  He put the big hat on the back of his head and ran his hand over his forehead. “Whole lot of work involved,” he said. “When you take into account all of those parts and all that labor.”

  “Oh, that’s for certain,” Newt said. “And I can see they all been taken into account, all right.”

  “That’s clear as black and white,” I said. “One thing, you couldn’t call this a nickel-and-dime figure.”

  “That you couldn’t,” Newton said. “Well, sir, let me just go and get some money from the car. Vern?”

  We walked over to the car together. “Funny how things work out,” Vern said. “I swear people get forced into things, I just swear to hell and gone they do. What did either of us want beside a tank of gas?”

  “Just a tank of gas is all.”

  “And here we are,” he said. He opened the door on the passenger side, waited for a pickup truck to pass going west to east, then popped the glove compartment. He took the .38 for himself and gave me the .32 revolver. “I’ll just settle up with our good buddy here,” he said, loud enough for the good buddy in question to hear him. “Meanwhile, why don’t you just step across the street and pick us up something to drink later on this evening? You never know, might turn out to be a long ways between liquor stores.”

  I went and gave him a little punch in the upper arm. He laughed the way he does and I put the .32 in my pocket and trotted on across the road to the cafe.

  One Thousand Dollars a Word

  The editor’s name was Warren Jukes. He was a lean sharp-featured man with slender long-fingered hands and a narrow line for a mouth. His black hair was going attractively gray on top and at the temples. As usual, he wore a stylish three-piece suit. As usual, Trevathan felt logy and unkempt in comparison, like a bear having trouble shaking off the torpor of hibernation.

  “Sit down, Jim,” Jukes said. “Always a pleasure. Don’t tell me you’re bringing in another manuscript already? It never ceases to amaze me the way you keep grinding them out. Where do you get your ideas, anyway? But I guess you’re tired of that question after all these years.”

  He was indeed, and that was not the only thing of which James Trevathan was heartily tired. But all he said was, “No, Warren. I haven’t written another story.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to talk with you about the last one.”

  “But we talked about it yesterday,” Jukes said, puzzled. “Over the telephone. I said it was fine and I was happy to have it for the magazine. What’s the title, anyway? It was a play on words, but I can’t remember it offhand.”

  “ ‘A Stitch in Crime,’ “ Trevathan said.

  “Right, that’s it. Good title, good story, and all of it wrapped up in your solid professional prose. What’s the problem?”

  “Money,” Trevathan said.

  “A severe case of the shorts, huh?” The editor smiled. “Well, I’ll be putting a voucher through this afternoon. You’ll have the check early next week. I’m afraid that’s the best I can do, Jimbo. The corporate machinery can only go so fast.”

  “It’s not the time,” Trevathan said. “It’s the amount. What are you paying for the story, Warren?”

  “Why, the usual. How long was it? Three thousand words, wasn’t it?”

  “Thirty-five hundred.”

  “So what does that come to? Thirty-five hundred at a nickel a word is what? One seventy-five, right?”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “So you’ll have a check in that amount early next week, as soon as possible, and if you want I’ll ring you when I have it in hand and you can come over and pick it up. Save waiting a couple of days for the neither-rain-nor-snow people to get it from my desk to yours.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “The price,” Trevathan said. He was having trouble with this conversation. He’d written a script for it in his mind on the way to Jukes’s office, and he’d been infinitely more articulate then than now. “I should get more money,” he managed. “A nickel a word is . . . Warren, that’s no money at all.”

  “It’s what we pay, Jim. It’s what we’ve always paid.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So?”

  “Do you know how long I’ve been writing for you people, Warren?”

  “Quite a few years.”

  “Twenty years, Warren.”

  “Really?”

  “I sold a story called ‘Hanging by a Thread’ to you twenty years ago last month. It ran twenty-two hundred words and you paid me a hundred and ten bucks for it.”

  “Well, there you go,” Jukes said.

  “I’ve been working twenty years, Warren, and I’m getting the same money now that I got then. Everything’s gone up except my income. When I wrote my first story for you I could take one of those nickels that a word of mine brought and buy a candy bar with it. Have you bought a candy bar recently, Warren?”

  Jukes touched his belt buckle. “If I went and bought candy bars,” he said, “my clothes wouldn’t fit me.”

  “Candy bars are forty cents. Some of them cost thirty-five. And I still get a nickel a word. But let’s forget candy bars.”

  “Fine with me, Jim.”

  “Let’s talk about the magazine. When you bought ‘Hanging by a Thread,’ what did the magazine sell for on the stands?”

  “Thirty-five cents, I guess.”

  “Wrong. Twenty-five. About six months later you went to thirty-five. Then you went to fifty, and after that sixty and then seventy-five. And what does the magazine sell for now?”

  “A dollar a copy.”

  “And you still pay your authors a nickel a word. That’s really wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, isn’t it, Warren?”

  Jukes sighed heavily, propped his elbows on his desk top, tented his fingertips. “Jim,” he said, dropping his voice in pitch, “there are things you’re forgetting. The magazine’s no more profitable than it was twenty years ago. In fact we’re working closer now than we did then. Do you know anything about the price of paper? It makes candy look pretty sta
ble by comparison. I could talk for hours on the subject of the price of paper. Not to mention all the other printing costs, and shipping costs and more other costs than I want to mention or you want to hear about. You look at that buck-a-copy price and you think we’re flying high, but it’s not like that at all. We were doing better way back then. Every single cost of ours has gone through the roof.”

  “Except the basic one.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The price you pay for material. That’s what your readers are buying from you, you know. Stories. Plots and characters. Prose and dialogue. Words. And you pay the same for them as you did twenty years ago. It’s the only cost that’s stayed the same.”

  Jukes took a pipe apart and began running a pipe cleaner through the stem. Trevathan started talking about his own costs—his rent, the price of food. When he paused for breath Warren Jukes said, “Supply and demand, Jim.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Supply and demand. Do you think it’s hard for me to fill the magazine at a nickel a word? See that pile of scripts over there? That’s what this morning’s mail brought. Nine out of ten of those stories are from new writers who’d write for nothing if it got them into print. The other ten percent is from pros who are damned glad when they see that nickel-a-word check instead of getting their stories mailed back to them. You know, I buy just about everything you write for us, Jim. One reason is I like your work, but that’s not the only reason. You’ve been with us for twenty years and we like to do business with our old friends. But you evidently want me to raise your word rate, and we don’t pay more than five cents a word to anybody, because in the first place we haven’t got any surplus in the budget and in the second place we damn well don’t have to pay more than that. So before I raise your rate, old friend, I’ll give your stories back to you. Because I don’t have any choice.”

  Trevathan sat and digested this for a few moments. He thought of some things to say but left them unsaid. He might have asked Jukes how the editor’s own salary had fluctuated over the years, but what was the point of that? He could write for a nickel a word or he could not write for them at all. That was the final word on the subject.