Pushover

by Orrie Hitt

  I parked the Buick near the office entrance of Grafton Manufacturing Company and got out.

  The girl at the reception desk looked up and smiled when I entered.

  “You can go right on in,” she said. “Mr. Grafton is expecting you.” Her smile lingered. “By the way, I liked your history book.”

  “Thanks.”

  Harvey Grafton stood up as I came in. He was a gray-haired man in his late fifties, about five-ten, which put him on about a level with the dimple in the middle of my chin.

  “Sorry about all this,” he said, smiling. “I wish it could have worked out better for you.”

  I shrugged and sat down in the chair next to his desk.

  “Live and learn,” I said. “You can’t beat the wheel every time.”

  He nodded and hauled a check book across his desk.

  “Now, how shall I make this out, Mr. Fulton?”

  I’d told him all about it the day before but for three grand I’d stand on top of his desk and recite it for a week if he wanted me to.

  “Just write this on the side,” I said. “‘In full payment for six thousand copies of the book known as the History of the City of Waverly, plus all rights and privileges of said book.’ Then put on the check, if you wish, ‘six thousand copies at fifty cents a copy.’”

  A couple of minutes later I had my three grand.

  “Like I said,” I repeated, pocketing the check. “Live and learn.”

  You keep right on selling a sucker. You never let up, not even after you’ve gotten the money. When you start your campaign you do it subtly, and always through a relative or friend. You never directly hit the sucker first. With the sucker you’re always light and gay about things. If he has a daughter like Sally you put the prong in that way. You let her in on the phone bills, the help and once in a while you give a check that bounces. Eventually the sucker gets the story and because you’ve stayed away from him with your troubles he takes on a new respect for you. Pretty soon he gives you an offer for help. You tell him, thanks, you’ll think it over. You think it over and decide how far up the lollypop he’ll go. Once in a while you get a guy like Grafton, a guy who swallows it stick and all.

  “Well, it’s for a good cause,” Grafton said, as I got up to go. “As you suggested, Mr. Fulton, this just means I’m acting as banker for the League. As they sell the books they’ll pay me for them. By the time the books are all gone the League will have a nice profit and I’ll have my money back.”

  “That with the fifteen hundred I turned over to them ought to do a nice job,” I agreed. I smiled. “It’s a start, anyway.”

  He held out his hand.

  “It’s been nice knowing you, Mr. Fulton.”

  “The pleasure’s been mine.”

  Six grand worth of pleasure, I thought. Six grand and he could have those six thousand damned books. When the League went out to sell the books from door to door they’d think the books we had sold had had litile books. Naturally, they wouldn’t be aware of the fact that we had sold twenty-seven hundred more books than we’d reported and if they felt like checking it they’d all be dead before they finished the job.

  “Your truck picked up the books this morning,” I told Grafton. “The count was correct.”

  He walked with me to the door.

  “Where are you going from here, Mr. Fulton?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He winked at me.

  “But no more books?”

  I grinned.

  “No more books. I almost took a bath on this one.”

  “Let me hear from you,” he said. He gave me his card. “And stop out and say goodbye to Sally and Mrs. Grafton.”

  I left the office and drove back downtown. I took the check into the bank, depositing it to my account, and told the guy at the window I might be sending for it by draft.

  “We’re always at your service,” he said.

  I started away from the window and then went back. I’d almost forgotten the number-one rule. You always cry.

  “I wish all that dough was mine,” I told him. “Or I wish I was a printer. The printers make all the money.”

  He smiled and I walked away. I’d made my point. If Grafton ever wondered why I had so much money in the bank he’d get the story without any trouble at all. Hell, it’s not Fulton’s money, he’d be told; it’s the printer’s money. Why, the poor slob acted like he didn’t have a dime to his name, or two nickels to make change for it.

  To hell with them, I thought. To hell with the dizzy bastards. They wanted those books, so they got their books. So who had time to cry over that?

  I went down the street and into a liquor store, got a couple of fifths and returned to the car.

  I drove over toward the South Side, wondering if Al would get to town for the party in Madeline’s apartment or if I’d have to mail his check to his home in Scranton.

  And I wondered something else, too.

  I wondered if I should tell them that this was the last pitch, that I was sick of it, or if I shouldn’t tell them anything, not even see them and just keep on driving.

  I turned off Center Street, cut over to Waymart and headed for the South Side. I couldn’t do a thing like that, not to Al and Madeline. Well, maybe to Al but not to Madeline. After all, this was the end of another deal and Madeline always gave me a present when we finished a deal. Sometimes she cried and sometimes she didn’t.

  Once, a long time ago, we had both cried.

  2

  YOU HAVE to know a little bit about Port Jessup, and how those cornhuskers took me over, before you can understand why such an abortion as Community Enterprises was born.

  It began with a woman.

  Her name was Gloria Maddison and her old man was a cop on the Port Jessup police force. I’d come up to the lake country, three years before, to work at one of the summer hotels as a storekeeper. Gloria had been a hostess in the dining room — a tall, sleek creature with black hair. The third time I’d gone out with her I’d had her and I hadn’t missed a tick on the clock for the next six months. She was that kind of a girl, ready to take what you wanted to give her. And she was another kind, too — the kind that plays hard in the hope that she might hit a home run. She wanted a man and a pay check, though I never got it straight just which she wanted most.

  The hotel had stayed open until November of that year and the night it closed we’d gone down to her home for supper. Her mother had been a nice person sort, soft and quiet, but her old man had been a loudmouth, a typical small-town cop.

  “Where to now?” he’d queried. “Back to the city?”

  It had been a question I had been asking of myself. I’d thought of Florida but the dogs had killed me down there the winter before and I’d given up that idea.

  “I don’t know,” I’d said. “I might stick around Jessup for a while.”

  We’d talked some more about that, about possible jobs in town, but I hadn’t paid much attention to him. I had a few bucks in my pocket and I wouldn’t remain in Jessup just to work. The plain truth of the matter was that I wasn’t yet tired of Gloria and I had an idea that it would be a lot easier to run away from a Port Jessup girl, when I got ready, than it would be to chase another skirt in a strange town. And, anyway, at that time, I wasn’t able to tell the difference between one woman or another. It seemed the best way to take a rest after the long season and enjoy myself at the same time.

  I don’t know if it was that same night, or maybe a couple of nights later, when Maddison spoke to me about the police department history that his daughter was going to write. I hadn’t given it any consideration at the time but afterward, when Gloria told me about it, she made it sound pretty good.

  “You could help me,” she said.

  We’d been lying on the bed in my apartment and I hadn’t known just what she’d meant.

  “Hell, I don’t know anything about that kind of stuff.”

  “You don’t have to know, Danny. You don’t have to know anythin
g.”

  I remembered her old man mentioning that she should make a thousand bucks from it. It sounded like a lot of money for knowing nothing.

  “Forget it,” I’d told her, kissing her on the mouth. “There’s only one kind of work you and I can do together.”

  But she’d kept at it, and the more she’d talked the better it had sounded. To begin with, the police department wanted to raise money for a new swimming beach on the river and one of the members had suggested that a history of the department, if it were written and published, could rack up a good sale. Gloria, partly because she had done some writing for the local paper but mostly because her old man was a cop, had been asked to do the job.

  “I don’t know anything about books,” I’d told her again. “I couldn’t even staple one together.”

  “But you could sell ads, Danny. You could do that while I’m doing the writing. You’d find the ads easy to sell, because nobody in his right mind would turn down the police department.”

  “No,” I’d told Gloria. “I’ve never sold anything.”

  “But you could, couldn’t you?”

  “Who knows? Forget it.”

  But still she had kept at me. She was supposed to do the writing and sell the ads and publish the book for the police department. The officers in the department were going to sell the book for two dollars a copy and she would get a buck out of that.

  “It’ll take you the best years of your life to look up the material,” I told her.

  She’d tossed her head and her eyes had been bright.

  “Not this girl, Danny. Not Gloria Maddison. You just come down to the library and I’ll show you.”

  Of course, I’d heard a lot about Roosevelt and his WPA and all those other alphabet things but I’d never heard of his Federal Writer’s Project. When Gloria showed me what was in the historical room at the Port Jessup public library I wondered why taxes weren’t about triple what they were.

  “Millions of words,” she’d said, pointing to the drawers of typed manuscripts. “The history of Jessup complete — up to the year nineteen thirty-four, that is — including the history of the bridges, the churches, the railroads, the fire department — yes, even the police department.”

  “Hell! You don’t have to look up a thing.”

  “No. It’s all here. Just waiting to be used.”

  The manuscripts were neatly typed, double-line spaced and bound in soft covers.

  “Funny more people don’t know about this stuff,” I’d said.

  We’d walked slowly out of the library, feeling the late fall air swirling around us, the dry leaves bouncing along the sidewalk like hundreds of busted balloons.

  “Few people know about it because hardly anybody cared about the work when it was done,” Gloria explained. “They thought Roosevelt was a nut, having all these histories compiled. Actually, I suppose, if the depression had lasted long enough, they would have had them printed, to help the printers and people like that.”

  We’d talked about it a lot more that day and, finally, I’d broken down and told her I’d stick around Port Jessup for a while and help her with the book. It wasn’t a decision that I’d made easily, because there was plenty of hotel work in Florida where I could make good money; I decided to stay on simply because she thought she had a real hot business proposition and everybody else seemed to think so, too.

  “It’s like this,” I’d said to the president of the little bank on the corner of South and Crane Streets. “I don’t want to borrow any money — I’ve saved enough to get by on — but I did want to talk to you about a business idea I have and see what you think of it.”

  “A banker’s job is to help people, Mr. Fulton. Tell me about it.”

  I’d gone over the arrangement Gloria had with the local police department, about how she was to get the money from the ads, print the book, receive a percentage of the sales. The president of the bank, an elderly man by the name of Sutters, had kept nodding his head and brushing the gray hair back out of his eyes.

  “It seems to me that this could be done in other communities,” I’d told him. “Certainly there must be a lot of other police departments and fire departments and other organizations who would like to raise money. I don’t know very much about these things but it seems like a natural to me.”

  “If you can sell the advertising, Mr. Fulton.”

  “Well, I think we’ve hit on a powerful angle for that, sir. Since the book is going to sell for two dollars and since almost every business firm would want to buy one anyway, we’re not going to sell ads in the sense that you would usually sell an ad. All we’re going to do is list in the book the names of those firms and individuals who have helped make the book possible. They get one free copy of the book with their listing and we charge them only four-fifty for the whole thing.”

  Sutters had given me his anwer by buying a listing in the book for his bank. Naturally, I didn’t bother telling him that he was the first one I’d tried that pitch on.

  “I think you’ve got a sound venture in mind,” he’d told me at the conclusion of my interview. “It isn’t the kind of a business that a bank would lend any money on but, then, it’s the type of enterprise that will never have to borrow any money — an unusual combination of needs and desires — a combination that will always bring money into your pockets. I’d be inclined to say, Mr. Fulton, that you have one of the most practical ideas I have heard expressed in a long, long time.”

  The next day Gloria and I had jumped into the History of the Jessup Police Department with as much enthusiasm, and as little foresight, as two hungry hogs scrambling into a troughful of swill.

  Less than forty-five days later the finished book — sixty-eight pages complete with two-color cover and forty-two pictures — were delivered to my furnished room on Chestnut Street. There were two thousand copies and the total cost had been five hundred and ninety dollars. The evening paper carried a front-page story about the arrival of the books and a half-column section of the editorial page was devoted to wishing us the best of luck.

  A week later we needed more than luck. We needed money.

  “I don’t understand it,” Gloria complained as we drove toward her home after the movies. “I’d have thought at least a thousand copies would have been sold by this time.”

  We had issued four hundred copies to the police department on the night the books had arrived in Jessup and no additional copies had been requested.

  “Why don’t you ask your father about it?”

  “I did. Tonight.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said — oh, Danny, do you know what he said?”

  “No.”

  “He said the books wouldn’t sell.”

  “Hell!”

  “He said all of the others in the police department thought the same way. They think two dollars is too much to ask for the book.”

  Actually, the book wasn’t very big, five and one-half by eight, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick, but we’d been over that part of it before, dozens of times. We had decided that people would either pay two dollars for the book, if they wanted it, or they wouldn’t give you a quarter for it no matter how big it was.

  “Gloria,” I told her, “it’s got to sell! It’s just got to sell and that’s all there is to it.”

  It was too late in the season to go south, to get a good job at one of the hotels, and I’d used up most of my money. My car, a forty-nine Ford convertible with a hole in the top, needed new tires and, on cold mornings, the battery had about as much strength as a two-cell flashlight.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” I said to Gloria Maddison. “I think those cops are just too lazy to get out and sell those books, that’s what I think.”

  “My father is one of those cops, Danny.”

  “I don’t care if he is. I think I’m right.”

  Maybe it was all right for her to live at home and treat the book as though it were destined to be a failure but with me
it was a lot different. We’d arranged to split the profits down the middle, half for Gloria and half for me, and everybody I had talked to, the cops and the businessmen and even the banker, had agreed that sales ought to be at least fifteen hundred copies. That wouldn’t have been a fortune, only seven hundred fifty each, but it would have been a stake and I wouldn’t have lost any ground. This way, with them not selling, I was going broke in a strange town — not because I hadn’t been working but only because the lazy punks who were supposed to get out and sell the books simply wouldn’t do it.

  “We could put them on the newsstands,” Gloria’s old man had said. “I think it’s a mistake not putting them on the stands.”

  I’d told him he was dead wrong. We’d tried that in one spot on the main drag and the guy hadn’t sold one copy. Everybody was going to buy one but nobody had come across with the two bucks. I’d stood around the store all one day, watching them, listening to the clerk try to sell the books, and I knew I was right. People who went into the newsstands were used to spending thirty-five cents for something to read and not two bucks.

  “Well, you’re so smart,” Maddison had said, “maybe you should get out and sell them.”

  “Maybe I should,” I’d told him.

  A month later he admitted I was a salesman, all right. Only, as it turned out, he didn’t know the half of it.

  I tried selling the books from door to door first. A few people bought them but a lot of the women said they would have to ask their husbands about it, or their sons, and would I come back? For two days I kept going back, running my butt into the ground, making hardly any money at all. The third day I tried something else, hit the combination in the first hour and stayed with the pattern for almost a month.

  It’s a funny thing, but some items can be sold faster by telephone than any other way. The History of the Port Jessup Police Department was one of these. All I did was take the telephone book, start with the top name and keep dialing.