"Uh-oh, here he come, watch out now," was Calvin's greeting every time Dalrymple wandered out, and those great yellow teeth of his showed kindly behind his heavy black lips.
More often than not they just stood together behind the large battered podium in the corner of the garage where the work orders were kept and tended, smoking and chatting and observing as the other mechanics busted tires or changed the oil in a car resting on a hoist high above them. Sometimes Dalrymple sat on the front-end alignment rack and stared at the littered and greasy floor as Calvin sat quietly beside him or went slowly about his duties. If a customer came in, or another salesman with an order, Calvin handled it and then took his seat again. The loud wrenching noises, the cursing and laughter of the men, their crude voices as they called to each other, the smells of motor oil and auto exhaust and manly labor, of Calvin's sweet cherry pipe tobacco it all eased the hard knot of injustice that had already formed in Dalrymple's heart. He had worked in this garage for Calvin the summer of his sophomore year, back in those simpler days. Theirs was a friendship that had evolved out of kid-teasing and rough toil and illicit beers (for Dalrymple at least) drunk from cans as he and the four black men, three of whom were different black men then, lounged in the bed of Calvin's '51 Chevy pickup out back of the store on warm summer evenings after work. The teasing never ended, and when Dalrymple became a salesman Calvin started calling him "Mr. Dal."
"What you be hiding from today, Mr. Dal?" Calvin asked at one point, and they shared a certain look full of a certain knowledge, a certain intimacy that slashed through the hypocrisy and the absurdity and got right to the heart of things: Clyde Dalrymple was no salesman and never would be; he was meant for other things maybe higher, maybe lower but something else.
"Soldiering ain't so bad," Calvin said after he heard the talk. Dalrymple hadn't mentioned it. "It'll make a man of you sure enough, it did me, and it'll show you a few things."
"Like how to kill?"
"Some of that."
"And how to die?"
Calvin just glanced at him.
"And how to drink whiskey without falling over?"
"Some of that too."
"And how to catch the clap?"
"Oh now, Mr. Dal, you be careful."
They looked at each other. Calvin's eyes, like his teeth, were yellow where the eyeballs showed and watery around the rims and his face was huge and rubbery and very black. His skin was moist and craggy and deeply pocked in the cheeks, giving him the appearance of having lived a hard life. Of the forty-odd employees at Green's, Calvin was the only one that Dalrymple had ever completely trusted. For one thing he could keep a secret and for another he didn't steal, anything, not even your trust.
"You gotta learn to take it easy, Mr. Dal. Things could be worse, they sure could, a lot worse, just imagine."
Dalrymple didn't want to imagine that; he wanted to hide. So he had spent a lot of time in the john too. Every hour or so he'd step in, try a leak, comb his hair, straighten his tie and then stand there gazing at himself in the mirror that was smudged and defiled with greasy fingerprints and a few words of graffiti wisdom. He looked at himself, read the words in the dim light, anything to pass the time until five o'clock. And avoid those smiles.
Not bad, he'd think of his wavy image in the cheap mirror, tolerable at least under the circumstances . . . and he'd give himself the once-over again. Vanity was one of his faults, he knew, but he couldn't help himself; it was a family trait; he got it honest, as his father would say. He liked to look at himself, to see what others saw, to appraise and appreciate and correct if need be. He had broad beefy shoulders and strong thick arms, a result of the bar bells and three years of bull-pen pitching on his high school team, but his chest was still a bit sunken and narrow, which caused his clothes to hang on him strangely. He was always fidgeting with his jacket, tugging at the lapels, smoothing out the pockets with his large though delicate hands, hands like an Amazon woman's, the fingers long and slender and almost without knuckle, an odd and offending deformity, as he considered it, for a man like Dalrymple. It was because of his weak hands and his size medium height, about 170 on the scales that he wasn't and never would have been a great pitcher. Of this fact he was always being reminded by his coaches and his father, and so it was easy for him to give it up when the time came and to go on with a different kind of life. Girls for instance: girl-women.
He was a decent-looking man (enough women thought so) with a long squarish face, marred by a few pimples and a cleft chin. His dark hooded eyes owned the qualities of kindness and thoughtfulness and a certain hard-edged intensity that made him seem older than his nineteen years, as well as a subtle kind of raw and untrained intelligence. At least this is what he liked to think, because he'd been told that by a couple of women, girls really, including his ex-wife, once, long ago now. Angie: still when he thought of her, as he did a few dozen times a day, his chest went tight and his heart thumped threateningly with lust and longing and jealousy and a beautiful hatred. Nineteen, barely out of high school, already married and divorced and with a kid: How had that happened? And how had this happened?
"Because you're a fuck-up," he whispered to the mirror. "Getting Angie pregnant and her barely seventeen and still a Tigerette with her pompons and her tutu and her teeth still in braces. And now this, a kind of pay-back, I guess. You're a fuck-up, that's all, a wiener, a slimeball, you baboon's butt . . . no don't talk like that. Just shut your mouth."
His empty stomach had been giving him trouble all afternoon, a bad case of the silent farts, and as he stood there in the stench of workingman's piss and too-sweet disinfectant, he started to feel lightheaded and queasy in his lower regions. Beads of sweat popped out all over his face and his hands trembled as he forced the comb through his short dark hair, already falling out at the crown. So he rinsed his face and washed his hands again with the gray gritty soap they kept for the mechanics and he tried again to make himself right to face the world.
Dalrymple was a snappy dresser in those days. Nothing like Ripley with his pastel suits and his wild high-collared shirts and those crazy ties that looked like dope dreams or images out of a lava lamp, but he did all right with what he had. His taste ran to more subdued colors, dark blues and maroons with occasional flares of red or green.
On his feet he alternated between black tassels and cordovan penny loafers depending on his mood and his color scheme for the day. Like all the salesmen at Green's, he did his shopping at Marco's Men's Store down the block, a rather loud and garish place that stocked lots of polyester, wickedly striped shirts and Sansabelt slacks. For two years he'd been building up his wardrobe, adding a piece or two every month, a new sport coat whenever he came into a little extra in his commission check. Though it was hard for him (did a green paisley tie go with a gray shirt and a blue sport coat?) he liked looking good, manly and tidy and stylish. It gives you confidence in yourself, he believed, puts you on a sure footing. When a man looks his best he does his best was Dalrymple's belief, which was his father's belief too.
"Let 'em see you coming," his father, a gas company executive, had advised. "But nothing outlandish. Keep it elegant."
"Elegant," Dalrymple said to the mirror. "Yeah, right."
He dried his hands and face with a paper towel and had to pick away the linty damp pieces of paper that stuck to the five o'clock whiskers on his jaw. Then he took a drink of water to help calm his stomach, cupping his hands under the faucet, smelling the bitter rust in the sink and no telling what was down in that dark drain. He checked himself once more and concentrated on his eyes. Were they out of kilter? The left one always seemed lower than the right, mashed in somehow, flattened as if he'd been dropped on his head as a child, another odd deformity. He periodically asked his mother or Angie about this, but after a quick glance they would tell him he was crazy, his eyes were fine. Dalrymple knew better, he could see it, the looking glass didn't lie, and he often tried to straighten things up. He tried it now, the fingers of
his right hand pulling down on the brow, the fingers of the left pushing up, blurring his vision in an amusing yet disturbing blast of distortion. Maybe it was the way he pressed his face into his Dutch wife of a pillow at night, and at that moment he vowed to start sleeping on his back, like a man. For a while he just played with his face, pushing and pulling, muttering to himself, "You creep, you retard, you baboon's butt," until his image in the mirror caused him to laugh out loud, a harsh low panting noise that sounded even to Dalrymple like the murmuring of his heart's despair.
3
Just then he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. Somebody was waiting for him at the main sales counter. He assumed it was a customer and he cursed the intrusion. It meant work; it meant more than likely he'd have to do something.
He stepped out, checking his fly, hustled up the narrow hall at the back of the store where they stowed the mop buckets and the floor buffer, passed by Calvin, who glanced away, turned the corner at Sporting Goods, walked past the row of bikes and tricycles and the stacks of other toys and cut over through House Wares. There were very few customers left in the store at that time of day and most of the clerks and salesmen were hiding out, settling up their day's business so they could get out right at five. Of course he'd be the one to get caught, he the one who had to stay late with some old gal he'd sold before as she tried to decide between the pink lamp or the green one or, worse, which battery to put in her '58 Oldsmobile. Or worse yet something like: "That TV you sold me just won't hold its color. Would you bring it in for me? I'll have to have another one." It was always the blue-headed old women clutching his business card and calling him Mr. Dalrymple that drove him crazy. Still it was a heady feeling being summoned by name. There was a certain fame, a certain celebrity attached to it.
Dalrymple turned into the center aisle, marching as smartly as he could, letting the glow in his eyes out as best he could, putting on the show, preparing his spiel ("When do you want it delivered?" he always began if it was a big-ticket item). Then he saw who was waiting for him. The Old Man, Papa Darnell as he was called among the grunts, Green's district supervisor for the Houston region and Dalrymple's brother's father-in-law. It was Mr. Darnell who had hired him when he needed a job to support a wife and a new baby, Darnell who had put him in this store because it was hot, Darnell who had saved Dalrymple's neck once and everybody knew he owed him for it. On top of that he was family, so to speak.
"Big Daddy wants you," whispered Buttface Johnson when Dalrymple passed him in the aisle, and Dalrymple whispered back, "Kiss mine, asshole."
He was glad now that he had taken the time to clean his face and straighten up. Appearances were important to Mr. Darnell, and he knew how to do it right. Just look at that suit, Dalrymple thought as he approached: three hundred bucks if it cost a penny and that tie like a flash of fire on his white-shirted chest and that graying hair, meticulously clipped, slicked back for the effect of power, and that little moustache and those black glittering eyes that caught onto you and held tight. He was an imposing figure, a rock, a tower, a benevolent god among mortals.
"Hello there, Dal," said Mr. Darnell, smiling in a sweet, smooth, almost affectionate manner, acting like it had been a hundred years, acting like they were the best of long-lost friends, acting like Clyde Dalrymple, grunt salesman, was something so special in the world that even he, the Old Man, the Numero Uno, the Honcho, was humbled by his presence for a moment and stood in awe. He took the young man's hand in a grip that melted all possible resistance and then pulled him up close to eye him really good, a man-to-man kind of good, and so he could speak right into his face. The handshake never really ended.
"Hello, Mr. Darnell."
At that moment Dalrymple became the center of the universe, the single focus of all his energy. The Old Man had him: eyes linked, hands linked, their businessmen's spirits linked in a kind of secret and somehow sinister brotherhood as if through this handshake they were drawing their trowels from beneath their capes as a signal of secret kinship and holy conspiracy. It was a conspiracy of the old salesman's soul, a kind of bonding, a renewal of ancient and unknown rites, and it drew its power from an overwhelming charisma. Through his cocked eye, the left one, like he was spying through a monocle or a microscope, and through that tight little I'm-something-special smile of his Mr. Darnell exuded this charisma like an aromatic body odor. It was strange, as if he knew things about you that you would never know, never in all your life, and even if you did you would never understand these things as he did. This ritual always baffled Dalrymple, for he had never mastered its finer aspects, its secret, its power, and because of this, along with a peculiar propensity to daydream, Dalrymple knew, as did everybody else, that he was at best a half-assed member of the brotherhood. He always felt uneasy, childish, ignorant in the presence of the Old Man.
"How are you, son?" His breath was a little sour, like a sharp whiff of garlic.
"Fine, Mr. Darnell, just fine." Dalrymple felt himself smiling in a bland hopeful way, wanting to please. "I'm doing fine."
"Good, good, glad to hear it. And your folks?"
"They're fine too, just fine."
"Good. Saw 'em in church last week."
"Yessir."
"But I missed you somehow."
"Couldn't make it, Mr. Darnell. . . ."
He smiled, man to man, Big Daddy to Little Son. And then quickly came The Question: "You selling anything, Dal?"
"Well. . . ." Dalrymple began. Then his face took on the boyish, sheepish look of a loser asking for help. And right off he got it. That smile! Rising up from the Old Man's narrow lips, lifting his blue-veined cheeks, moving into his black eyes, always vaguely amused, which lit up with a father-of-the-earth kind of wisdom, it at once admonished, punished and forgave.
"I know, I know," Mr. Darnell said, shaking it off, and as if by magic a hand rose from a pant's pocket and popped a lozenge into his mouth. "I've seen the report. You're not off by much. It happens to all of us sometimes."
This was a lie, a gift, for It had never happened to the Old Man. He held records from his days on the floor that wouldn't be broken for a millennium; he had tally sheets that Christ himself couldn't match. The prevailing lore held that Darnell could sell the concept of communism to a New Hampshire Republican if there were real money to be made in it.
"I'll do better next month, Mr. Darnell."
"I know you will, Dal, I know you will. I know it. Once we get the hustle back in you."
He suddenly perked up and glanced around the store. He seemed to be looking for something out among the furniture.
"You got a minute, Dal?" he asked without looking back.
"Well sure, Mr. Darnell."
"Good. I'd appreciate a few minutes of your time. I'd like to talk over something with you."
This meant trouble Dalrymple assumed as he followed the Old Man out onto the floor like a dumb-grinning dog on a leash. One of his talks! Nine times out of ten these talks were intended to pep you up, to refire the pilot light, to kick you lovingly in the butt, and when they were over you felt somehow dazed but excited and ever so lucky to be alive and one of the chosen, a prodigal returned and celebrated. It was the ones that were intended to set you straight that could send you home with a dry mouth and a twisted gut. Dalrymple had lived through both kinds: the second kind, a crusher, came on the day back in the spring when the Old Man, a strict believer in Christian norms of behavior, heard about Dalrymple's pending divorce. "Divorce!" he had said. "Divorce! Now you know how we feel about that, Dal. You got to set this straight, Dal, nip it in the bud. Divorce!" the Old Man muttered. He actually held his head over the shame of it, the disgrace, then he laid on the shit with a heavy shovel. It was a lecture full of words such as "morality" and "responsibility" and "uprightness" and "honor" and "humiliation" and "family" and "team spirit" and "righteousness" and even "damnation." And Dalrymple slinked away that evening feeling like a worthless cur, lost and condemned and unworthy. "You rump, you fathead,
you loser, you . . . you . . . you fuck-up," he kept calling himself on the way home and then believed it for several days. What could he do to make it right? What could he do? By then it was too late.
Mr. Darnell seemed to be searching for just the right place to settle in that vast prairie of furniture. It was usually a sofa, with him at one end and you at the other, angled toward center so that he had you. He passed up an Early American suite from Basset and a solo contemporary item from Fancy Furnishings and headed for the French provincial the best in the place, a long boat of a sofa in pale green brocade with touches of mahogany on the arms. It faced the row of refrigerators along the far wall. He took his seat, nodded to Dalrymple to take his, and what a scene: He sat there like it was the most natural thing in the world, as if this were his one true role in life, to be comfortable, to talk, to persuade, to be at his ease. With an arm up on the sofa back, his long legs crossed, a finger reaching out to flick a piece of lint from his trousers, his hand lighting there on his knee, he could have convinced you of anything, anything.
"I got a call today from McCleary," he said. "It was about you, Dal. About this draft business."
"Yessir."
There was a brief silence as the Old Man let this sink in, and Dalrymple could feel the covert looks of his curious colleagues peppering the back of his head. He knew they were out there, finishing up with the last few customers, peeking over lampshades and around the plastic pot plants, sneaking up as close as possible on the chance they might hear something worth repeating. He knew they were doing it because that's what he would have been doing were the victim somebody else.
"Now, you know how we feel about you around here, Dal," said Mr. Darnell, rolling his sleek head over to look at him square. "We see a future, a bright future. You're a smart boy, Dal, and ambitious, I think, I hope. The kind of man we need, Dal."
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