CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  I didn’t have time to complain, either. Because I figured out that some people had special shoes that they used for gardening or painting or any kind of yard work, and others had special pants and shirts, and that if I looked in enough garages I could probably put together a wardrobe that would get me a lot of curious glances, I’ll admit, but that would, all things considered, get me less attention than my present costume of shoes and nothing else.

  Some people lock their garages, but most of them don’t. Most people don’t have anything wearable in their garages, but some of them do. And I wasn’t fussy about fit or looks or style, and garages are fairly easy to get in and out of without disturbing anybody, and to make a long story short (or at least as short as possible, at this stage of the game) I wound up wearing the muddy shoes and a pair of paint-blotched dungarees and a red-and-black plaid hunter’s jacket and a little peaked gardener’s cap.

  And in the same garage where I found the hunter’s jacket I found something else, and while it didn’t take the nose of a bloodhound to ferret it out (or the nose of a ferret to bloodhound it out), I’m going to come right out and say that it was brilliant of me to take it along. Look, I’ve told you about all of the idiot things, so I might as well take whatever credit I can get.

  It was a fishing rod. The way I was dressed, there were only two things on earth I could be—a criminal on the run or a lunatic fisherman. So I took the fishing rod and transformed myself from a Threat To Society to an All-American Boy, and I walked right through the dippy town without a bit of trouble.

  If this was a movie, the thing to do now would be to cut straight on through to September. Not for the sake of cheating, the way they do when they refuse to tell you how Stud Boring got dressed again, but just because nothing very interesting happened during the next two months. And if we just cut to two months later and fifteen hundred miles east of there, you wouldn’t miss much.

  But if you’re like me you always want to know about things like that, like what happened during the two months it took me to get from the fifth largest city in Indiana to where I was in September, which is also where I am now. If I like a book and get interested, I want to know everything.

  When it comes to novels, I like the old-fashioned approach where they tell you what happened to the characters after the book ended. You know, the plot’s all tied up and the story is all used up and done with, and then there’s a last chapter where the author explains that Mary and Harold got married and had three children, two boys and a girl, and Harold lived to be sixty-seven when a stroke got him, and Mary survived him by twenty years and never remarried, and George went back together with his wife but they broke up again after three years, and George went to California and has never been heard from since, and his wife died of pleurisy the year after he left. I like to feel that the people are so real that they go on doing things even when the book is done with them, and sometimes I’ll make up my own epilogue for a book in my head if the author didn’t write one himself. It’s called an epilogue when you do this.

  Anyway, ever since I started writing this, in fact ever since Mr. Burger said I really ought to write it, I decided I would just act as though the person reading it was more or less like myself. With a similar way of looking at things and so on. So whenever I have to decide whether to put something in or not, I ask myself whether or not I would want to read it. That’s why I put in all that crap about the termite racket, for example.

  What I did for the rest of July and all of August and the first week of September was farm work, for the most part. I headed east when I left town and didn’t stop walking and hitchhiking until I was in Ohio. I didn’t think the police would bother sending out an alarm for me, since I wasn’t exactly Public Enemy Number One. I mean I wasn’t the most sought-after criminal since Arlo Guthrie dumped the garbage in Stockbridge, Mass. I was breathing fairly easy as soon as I got out of the county, but I still thought it would be good to get across the state line without taking any chances.

  I kept getting lifts for a couple of miles at a time because this particular highway wasn’t one that anybody would take for any great distance. But on a bigger road I would have stood out like acne with my clothes and my fishing rod. On this road people either assumed I was going to a particular fishing spot or when they asked I would just say Down the road a piece and they figured I was keeping the spot a secret. Fishermen do crazy things like that all the time. Then I would just sit in the car until they let me out because they were turning off.

  Eventually, though, I got sick of having to talk about fishing with people who all knew more about it than I did. And I got sick of carrying the pole. So I left it on a bridge over a little creek that I happened to walk over between rides. I figured whoever found it would be able to get some use out of it right away.

  Then, since I didn’t have the pole, people assumed I was a drifter, which was what I was, actually. And one man said, “Bet you’re looking to get work picking. Cherries is gone but early peaches is coming in, and won’t be a week and they be picking summer apples, the weather the way she be.”

  I hadn’t even thought about it. I wasn’t in shape to think any further than the Ohio line, to tell the truth. But farm work sounded as good as anything else I could think of, and it turned out to be just right, considering the circumstances.

  You didn’t need a car or a suit or a degree or any experience whatsoever. You could walk in off the road wearing paint-smeared dungarees and muddy shoes and a hunting jacket and not get looked at twice. If they had berries or melons that needed picking, or peaches or apples or sweet corn or tomatoes, they didn’t care where you went to school or who your father was or if you had a Social Security card. All they cared was if you wanted to get out in the field and pick the stuff.

  Of course they didn’t pay much, either. They really couldn’t. Look, a pint of blueberries, say, will cost you maybe half a dollar at the supermarket, right? Suppose the farmer who grew it got half of that, which he never does, I don’t think, unless he sells it himself or something. But anyway, say he gets a quarter a pint. Now if you ever picked blueberries you know that it takes forever to fill a pint container with the stupid little things. You could get the whole quarter for picking those berries and it wouldn’t be exactly the highest wages in history, and that would mean the farmer was giving the berries away for nothing.

  But even with the pay low, and even with being on your feet all day, and getting up early in the morning and working twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch, even with all of that, there were good things about it. Even with the backache you got from picking stuff that grew on the ground, or the bruises you got from falling off ladders while picking stuff that grows on trees, it was still a good way to cover two months and fifteen hundred miles.

  For one thing, you could really eat as though food was free, because it just about was. You were expected to eat all you wanted of whatever you were picking while you picked it. (This was more of a thrill when what you were picking was red raspberries than when it happened to be summer cooking apples.) You also got three meals a day. Breakfast was three or four eggs fresh from the hen and home baked bread and jam. All the fruits and vegetables were fresh at lunch and dinner, and they kept passing huge oval bowls full of different things around the table.

  I had never eaten like that in my life. Not to say anything against my mother, but she wasn’t the world’s greatest cook. I suppose when you can function as a confidence woman for twenty years without ever getting caught, you can also let other people do the cooking for you. Still, I ate better at home than I did at any of the camps or schools I went to, and from the last school I had gone more or less directly to Aileen’s instant coffee and non dairy creamer and TV dinners, moving on to third rate restaurant food in Illinois and Indiana towns. I had gotten so I never cared much about food, probably because I didn’t really know what good food tasted like. I always thought I hated vegetables, for instance, because the ones I ate always came out of cans or plasti
c bags and then sat on the stove for a couple of months.

  Besides the food, the life was just generally healthy. They usually let you sleep in the barn, except a couple of times in large apple orchards in New York State, where there were just more pickers than there was floor space. Even then they took care of us, though, with straw mattresses to sleep on and sheets of canvas to tie to the trees and sleep under, not just because it might rain but so that apples wouldn’t drop on top of you.

  What I mostly picked was apples. Supposedly you could make better money working vegetable farms, but I really hated the stooping, and I never got used to the feel of the sun on the back of my neck. An apple orchard is cool on hot days and had a great smell to it and you work standing up. Of course you have to expect to fall off the ladder once in a while. They say that anybody who doesn’t fall now and then isn’t picking fast enough. I won’t say that you get used to falling off ladders, or that you grow to look forward to it, but in all the time I picked apples, I never got more than a bruise or saw anybody do worse than sprain a wrist. You learn how to fall after the first couple of times, and it sort of struck me, during one of the moments of philosophical reflection that you get plenty of in an apple orchard, that anybody who lived the kind of life I did really ought to learn how to fall.

  The average apple knocker is in his twenties and grew up in the country and quit school young and keeps his mouth shut and likes to get in a fight when he’s had a couple of drinks. The average apple knocker is a guy, and so is the unaverage apple knocker. There were no girls up in those trees or out in those barns or under those canvas ceilings.

  There was always the farmer’s daughter, but she was a long ways away from what she was like in the jokes. Generally she was home on vacation from college, and she would no sooner go off with a picker than she’d pick her nose in church. Her main object was to get pinned to a fraternity boy and live in big city where he could get rich sitting at a desk.

  Now and then I would manage to meet a girl. Actually a picker could make out pretty well if he happened to be good at it. In any given area there would be certain taverns and bowling alleys that all the pickers would congregate at when they were in the neighborhood. The taverns generally had either a combo or a jukebox primed with country music. The bowling alleys had balls and pins. The pickers would holler and stomp and get drunk and fight, and occasionally someone would get cut up. You wouldn’t believe how casual some of these guys would be about this. A guy might have a scar from his neck to his navel, and if you asked about it he would say, “Oh, my buddy over there cut me a touch when we were drinking.” And they would still be buddies and joke about it, and eventually they would have another fight and the knives would come out again.

  Girls would come to the taverns, and especially to the bowling alleys—I guess it was more respectable for a girl to go to a bowling alley, although you never saw any of them actually go so far as to bowl. And the girls who came to these places were there to get picked up by the pickers, and they knew that pickers were only interested in One Thing, and it wasn’t discussions of the Great Books Of The Western World. So any girl who went with a picker was just about putting it in writing that she was willing to put out. That saved a lot of time and wasted effort on both sides, and in a business where you were never in one place very long, it made things simpler all around.

  The thing was that you had to be a certain type of person to make out under those conditions. The make-out type, you might say. And it was a type that I obviously wasn’t. The guys who were best as it were basically pretty stupid guys who could carry on a conversation all night long without saying anything worth hearing. But they never had to stop and think about anything. Instead they had this loose easy style that I guess made it easy for a girl to relax or something. Whatever it was, I just didn’t have it. Whenever I tried to make out at taverns, I would get involved in a conversation with a girl, and she would seem interested, and then she would say she had to go to the ladies’ room. And I’d see her five minutes later going home with some other picker.

  The girls I dated were girls you could talk to and girls you could have a pleasant evening with. One of them was on vacation from Fredonia State Teachers College, where she was having an awful time with required science courses: she just couldn’t seem to get the hang of what they were all about. Another one wanted to talk about liberal religious movements. She didn’t believe in God anymore but she was afraid she wouldn’t have anything to do on Sunday mornings. She sure won’t want to spend them in bed unless she changes a lot, because by the time I got rid of her I needed treatment for frostbite.

  There were girls I didn’t get to first base with, and there were girls I did get to first base with. And some I got to second base with, and one or two who let me get all the way to third. More than one or two, maybe. But one way or another they all turned in superb clutch pitching, and no matter how many hits I got, the inning would end in a scoreless tie, with my men stranded all over the bases.

  I wanted to take my bat and balls and go home.

  The last apples I picked were in a small Early Macintosh orchard in Dutchess County, New York. That’s about sixty or seventy miles from New York City. When we finished picking those trees, I all of a sudden knew that I didn’t want to pick another apple for a very long time, or anything else. The high season was just coming on, and it was the one time of the year when a fruit picker can actually make decent money, but I was sick of it and ready for something else. I was just done and that was all.

  I had around thirty dollars and two changes of clothes including one pair of heavy boots and a pair of regular shoes. I also had a whole load of money coming to me from the termite sales. I was dumb enough to send them a couple of wires asking them to send me the dough. Of course I never heard from them.

  One of two things happened: (a) Flickinger managed to bribe his way out of the mess, in which case he certainly wouldn’t tell the office what had happened, so they would treat me like any deserter, or (b) they were all rotting in jail, and nobody ever so much as turned those signed orders in, and there was no money coming to me.

  Either way, I had thirty dollars. Which means I had made a clear profit of a dollar a month since I left Upper Valley. I had a lot of vocational experience, none of which would get me a job with Opportunity For Advancement. And my cherry, like the winter apples, was still on the tree.

  That’s how I spent the summer. The more I think of it, the more I figure the movies have the right idea. Start with a long shot of a kid in muddy shoes and a hunter’s jacket on a dusty Indiana road, and cut to a shot of the same kid finishing a hard day’s work as a wiper in a car wash in Upstate New York. In a town which I won’t name, because I’m still here now, writing this, and may be here forever.

  It was in this very town that I met Francine.

  Remember Francine?

  To tell you the absolute truth, I’m having a little trouble remembering her myself. Good old Burger told me it was always a good idea to start off with something dramatic to hook the reader, and then go back and fill in the background and work up to it, but I have a feeling that would have been a better idea if I were someone who knew something about writing a book. If I were starting over again, I would just start at the beginning and go straight through to the end and the hell with hooking your attention and riveting your eye to the page. Either you’re with me or you’re not. But in case you forgot about Francine, and how things were going when I broke off to start backing and filling, it went like this:

  And paused, because it seemed that a herd of elephants was stampeding up the staircase and down the hall, and voices were shouting, and Francine was roaring at me, begging me to do it, to stick it in, and I lay there, paralyzed, and the door to my room exploded inward, and a man the size of a mountain charged inside. He had a hand the size of a leg of lamb, and in that hand he had a gun the size of a cannon.

  “You son of a bitch!” he bellowed.

  And pointed the gun at me, and
pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE GUN JAMMED

  CHAPTER TEN

  WELL, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

  Blood?

  Look, a guy stuck a gun in my face and pulled the trigger. Now if the gun didn’t jam then he would have blown my head off and you would be reading something else because I wouldn’t be around to write this.

  I mean, I can just hear you clucking like a chicken and saying, “Now how in the hell is he going to get out of this one?” And then on the last page it said The gun jammed and you said, “Oh, shit, the gun jammed, what a cornball way to save him.”

  I didn’t plan it that way, for Pete’s sake. If you want to know something, it took me a full day to write the last chapter. One stupid page with three stupid words on it and it took me all day to write it because I couldn’t figure out how to tell you that the gun jammed. And finally it came to me that there was only one way. The gun jammed. Period, end of chapter.

  I’ll tell you something. I was going to make something up instead of having the gun jam. You know, to lie to you and figure out something more convincing and satisfying than a jammed gun. (I already put two things in this book that aren’t true. They’re out-and-out lies, actually. They’re both in the second chapter. If you think you know what they are, write to me. I’d be interested to see if you get it right.)

  But I couldn’t think of a lie. Either I’m dictating this from the grave or the gun jammed. Well, the gun jammed and that’s all there is to it, and come to think of it, I don’t know why in the hell I’m apologizing, because what it amounts to is I’m apologizing for being alive, and that doesn’t make any sense.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHEN HE SAW that the gun was jammed, he tried wiggling the trigger with his finger. It wouldn’t come back into position. I suppose that was the logical time to pick up a chair and brain him with it, while he was standing there playing with the gun and swearing at it, but I don’t have those kind of reflexes. I just sat there on the bed with one hand on my knee and the other on the best part of Francine and waited for him to get the gun fixed and shoot me all over again.