Pushover

by Orrie Hitt

  “Good morning! This is the Police Call in Port Jessup. We were wondering if you would like to obtain a copy of the police department history book?”

  Most of them had already read about the book in the newspaper and they either said yes or no or they had to ask somebody about it before they could give you an answer. If they had to ask someone, you told them, fine, go ahead and do that and that you’d call them the next day. A call-back was noted in the book and you went on to the next name. If you got a straight refusal you merely thanked the person for his or her time and got off the line. When you got an acceptance, which was about one out of every four tries, you thanked the loyal citizen and asked when would be the best time to deliver the book. It was a good pitch because a lot of them who said they’d take a copy of the history had in mind that they could get it at one of the newsstands downtown and that they’d be able to throw you off that way. But after they’d committed themselves, you simply explained that the books were to be delivered directly to the homes, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot they could do about it.

  During that initial week of telephone selling I’d maintained the same pattern every day — working the telephone every morning and delivering the books in the afternoon. I soon found, however, that I was missing a lot of calls, getting a flock of no answers, and that I couldn’t do both jobs at the same time.

  “I’ve got a chance to go to Florida,” Gloria told me one night. “Dad says for me to go but I don’t want to go, Danny, if I can be of any help to you.”

  She had a sick aunt who lived in Troy and the old lady wanted her to go along for company.

  “You might as well go and have fun,” I’d said. “This book thing is dead, anyway.”

  Of course, I’d been doing okay with the sales, averaging about thirty a day, but I hadn’t told her about that. I don’t know just why I hadn’t, except maybe I had been waiting for her to tell me that since I was doing all of the work, she wouldn’t expect half on every copy. I’d sounded out her old man about the department’s share, wondering why they couldn’t take a little less on a copy as long as somebody else was selling for them, but he’d told me that the department had to have a full buck or nothing at all. I’d just about made up my mind that it would be nothing at all because you just can’t work ten hours a day, run a car, close thirty sales and make only fifty cents on each one. You work for those rates and you’re better off collecting unemployment insurance.

  Gloria had left for her aunt’s the next day. I’d driven her down to the railroad station, kissed her goodbye, and that had been the last I’d seen of her.

  The next morning I’d put an ad in the paper for a young man or woman to do delivery work. The paper got out about two in the afternoon and that evening, just after supper, somebody knocked on my door and this girl came in.

  Her name was Madeline Jackson, though it hadn’t been that very long. Just three months. Three months before she’d married Johnny Jackson, a kid in the Navy, had said goodbye to the Carter home in Amsterdam and had come to Port Jessup to live with the Jacksons.

  “Nobody wants to hire me steady,” she’d explained. “Johnny’s looking for a place for us to stay and as soon as he finds it I’m going with him. People don’t want to hire somebody, train him and then lose him. A temporary job like you have would suit me fine.”

  She’d had a driver’s license and I’d put her on to running the books around town. The first day she’d been with me I’d sold fifty-one books on the phone and she had delivered them all. I’d paid her half a buck a book and the stars had been in her eyes that night.

  “Hell,” I told her, “you get a bonus, too. I’m buying dinner.”

  We followed the same routine for three weeks, working like hell during the day and having dinner together at night. We’d done a lot of talking and she’d told me a great deal about herself. She’d been one of seven kids from a pretty shabby home and after she’d married Johnny she’d looked forward to something better.

  “He writes that he can’t find a place for us,” she said. “He says it might be months.”

  “Well, you’ve got a place to stay in the meantime,” I’d reminded her. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “I have to sleep on the davenport.”

  “Oh.”

  “And Johnny’s older brother, Sam, would like to sleep there, too.”

  “I see.”

  We’d been at a little restaurant overlooking the river and the lights had been soft and her bright blue dress had been just a little low in front.

  “How do you like this work?” I’d asked her.

  “Wonderful, Danny!”

  “It won’t last much longer here.”

  Her face had saddened.

  “No. I realize that.”

  “But suppose we could do this same thing somewhere else, would you be interested working along with me?”

  “You know how it is with me and Johnny.”

  I thought I knew. He was out in California bumping everything he could get his hands on and she was sitting around Port Jessup, withering up like a beautiful flower starving for water.

  To be honest about it, I’d been thinking about doing the same kind of job in another town, writing up a history for somebody else, but I hadn’t figured out the angle for a good approach. My problem was solved the next week, however, when the chief of the fire department in Hendersonville contacted me about doing one for their spring parade.

  “I got a copy of your police book,” he said. “It’s good. I think we could use something like it.”

  “It would have to be a different arrangement than we had here, chief.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, we’ll sell the books for you, too. That means extra work and more expenses and we wouldn’t be able to pay you a buck a book. A half a buck would be tops, all the way down the line.”

  He’d driven over from Hendersonville and we’d gone down to one of the quiet little bars and I’d had some drinks set up.

  “Sounds fair enough,” he’d said. “You do all the work, pay all of the costs?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Like I say, it sounds fair enough. I’ll put it up to the common council when they meet next week.”

  The following Tuesday morning I’d received a telegram, saying that the Hendersonville Fire Department wanted us to do a history of the department and that we could start work immediately.

  “How about it?” I’d asked Madeline. “Are you with me?”

  We’d been in my room and we’d just finished counting the day’s receipts. She’d been sitting on the bed, looking tired, and she smiled up at me.

  “I’m with you, Danny.”

  I’d walked around the room, feeling good.

  “You’ll have to do the typing on the script for me. I can’t type worth a damn.”

  “All right.”

  “I can pay you sixty a week to start and the same commission rate as before when we get into the sales.”

  “That’s more than satisfactory.”

  I’d turned on her suddenly, my eyes going over her body, her trim, soft lines, the way her lips lifted up at the corners.

  “Only don’t leave me,” I’d asked her. “Don’t let me get into the middle of something and then walk out on me.”

  “I won’t, Danny. I promise.”

  “What if your husband sends for you?”

  She’d hesitated only a moment and then she’d shrugged.

  “He won’t,” she’d said.

  “He tell you that?”

  “No. I just feel it. It’s not what he writes, it’s what he doesn’t write.”

  “I see.”

  “But you don’t. You can’t, Danny. It’s something that you have to know and feel.”

  I’d thought right along that this guy Johnny wasn’t for her and that the marriage had been one of those don’t-give-a-damn things that a lot of people get into. I’d even gotten the feeling that she had stopped caring herself,
but that night she had cried, quiet and hard, and I’d gone over there to the bed to try and make her feel better.

  “Don’t touch me that way,” she’d said.

  I’d had one arm around her shoulder and my hand had gotten pretty careless with her dress.

  “I’m only human, Madeline.”

  “That’s what I mean. You are. And so am I.”

  But she hadn’t protested when I’d kissed her, had just held on to me, her fingers digging into my arms, her mouth coming open all of a sudden and her tongue hot.

  “Turn out the light,” she’d whispered finally.

  We’d made love there on my bed that night and, afterward, she’d cried and asked me not to think that she wasn’t any good and that she was like that all the time and with everybody. I’d told her that I wouldn’t, that I thought she was a pretty wonderful person, and she hadn’t left my room until she’d gone out to work the next day.

  The following week I’d straightened up with the police department, giving them a count on the books originally delivered, less those delivered to the department and those which I had sold for them.

  “I want to thank you for an outstanding job,” the chief told me when I gave him the check for nine hundred and sixty-seven dollars. “Unfortunately, I think that you have done most of the work in this thing and that we have received more than our rightful share.”

  Of course, the bastard didn’t offer to slip me fifty bucks on the side, but I told him it was okay and let it go at that. Hell, he didn’t know up from down about the sales of those books. I’d had a thousand extra copies run off just the week before, which they didn’t know about. And I had sold the whole thousand. That had meant two grand in Danny Fulton’s bank account which, by that time, had assumed the name of Community Enterprises.

  “And thanks for the books,” the chief had added. “It’s nice of you to give them to us.”

  Those books were the last things I’d ever given away to anybody. I guess I could have hung around, dickering with them, and gotten a quarter or half a buck a copy, but by that time I was so sick of Port Jessup that I’d have ridden out of there on the front of a snowplow in a blinding blizzard.

  • • •

  After doing the Hendersonville Fire Department’s history, we’d kept on the move, adding Al Wilson to our staff in Berkstown, and by the end of the year we’d been making plenty of money. Every place we went into, we sold twice as many ads as we needed to float the book — in one city, Sellingsgrove, we’d even doubled that amount — and, except in Flint, all of our sales figures had been deflated so that we could come out on top. In Flint, the town fathers had really gotten behind a centennial book and almost everybody had bought one without any effort on our part. We’d done well there, given them an honest job, and I’d been sorry when we’d had to leave.

  But wherever we went, up and down the line, I kept remembering those fat slobs in Port Jessup and how they’d died on the thing and almost killed me too. I kept remembering it and it made it easy for me to remember something else.

  In the fund-raising business, no matter how good it looks on the top, it’s you against the world.

  Somebody’s going to come out first best.

  And nobody likes a loser.

  3

  I GOT out of the car, stuffed the bottles under my arm and walked up the steps to Madeline’s apartment — a first floor, three-room affair with a large picture window and venetian blinds all over the place.

  The door opened before I could punch the chimes.

  “Come in, you old bastard, come in!”

  It was Al.

  “Hi,” I said, pushing past him. “Thought you’d be in Scranton.”

  “So did Doris,” he said. “Only she got fooled, too.”

  Doris was Al Castle’s wife and the mother of his two children, a boy and a girl. Al was in his early forties, just the age when he could enjoy his kids, and no matter how far he was from Scranton he never missed seeing them once a week.

  “Hello, you old fund-raiser you,” Madeline said, coming in from the kitchen. She was carrying three glasses and some ice. “Get all squared away?”

  I put the bottles down on the coffee table. Al opened the bourbon.

  “All set,” I told her. I lit a cigarette and grinned. “Old man Grafton just went into the book business.”

  “To hell with him,” Al said.

  Madeline bent over the coffee table, pouring the drinks.

  “It wasn’t a bad book,” Madeline said, going over to the davenport. “I don’t think the offset job was as good as usual but it seemed to pass, didn’t it?”

  “Hell, these monkeys don’t know,” I said. “They just took one look at that pretty yellow and black cover and fell all over themselves.”

  But the offset hadn’t been good, I thought, it hadn’t been good at all. Some of the type had taken on ragged edges in the reduction but I hadn’t blamed the printer for that. I’d thought it was Madeline’s fault, that she hadn’t set the IBM right, but I hadn’t said anything about it. I’d had it in mind that this would be my last job and most people don’t notice things like that, anyway.

  “We ought to get a new typewriter for the next one,” Madeline told me. “This one’s done a lot of work, Danny.”

  “Yeah.”

  “One of those executive models would be nice. We could even up that right margin.”

  “No one’s ever yelled about that. Why make a lot of work for yourself?”

  “Danny’s right,” Al said, getting another drink.

  I walked around the room, wondering how I could tell them. Now that the moment was with me, now that I was finished and I was quitting, I didn’t know what to say to them. I had hoped that Al would be in Scranton, that I could have written to him about it. I didn’t want to hurt Al or his family by cutting off his dough but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I’d made up my mind. Maybe it was a hell of a thing but I wanted out and I couldn’t take either one of them along with me.

  “Al,” I said. “Where have you been, Al?”

  “Around.”

  I fixed another drink for myself and Madeline held out her glass.

  “Please, Danny.”

  I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at her. She was a nice kid and we’d had fun but now I wished that it was over and done with.

  “Plain?”

  I looked at her then. She was smiling up at me and her lips were soft and wet. She’d fixed her long blonde hair so that it hung down to her shoulders, hugging her face in gentle waves. She was very pretty.

  “Plain,” she said.

  I gave her one plain, not too strong, because I didn’t want her to cry later on.

  “You didn’t tell me where you’ve been,” I reminded Al.

  Hell, it was just something to say, something to talk about. I never cared where Al went or what he did. Al’s job was to get the spots for us, to go from town to town sounding out civic leaders and people like that. Sometimes he could make a deal on the first stop and sometimes he had to make a lot of stops. Selling this book idea was like selling anything else; you never knew how much mud you had to shovel before you hit gold.

  “You aren’t going to like this,” Al said.

  “Then, don’t tell me.”

  “You’ll die laughing,” Madeline assured me. She crossed her legs and my eyes did the same thing. “I almost did when Al told me.”

  Al shrugged and fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. I could see the sweat on his high forehead, little beads of it, and his face was getting red. I knew that he was nervous. He’d acted the same way when he’d upped the Legion’s cut a quarter when he’d gotten us that job in Somerville. I’d raised hell with him that time, one of the few instances when I’d had occasion to do so, and he’d never done the same thing again.

  “You got us a job,” I said.

  Al nodded and put his drink on the coffee table.

  “A big one, Danny.”

  “How
big?”

  “The biggest we’ve ever had.” He smiled and wiped the sweat off of his forehead. “And the most powerful pitch we’ve ever used.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s the thing, Danny. I — ”

  “Here,” Madeline said, getting up and pulling on my arm. “You’d better sit down for this one, Danny. You’d better sit down before this one knocks you flat.”

  I sat down beside her. Her thigh was right up close, very warm and I knew that she wore hardly anything under the dress.

  “You’d never guess,” Al said, picking up his drink. “It’s Port Jessup.”

  “My God,” I said.

  I leaned forward and splashed some bourbon into a glass.

  “You’re not sore?” he wanted to know.

  “Why should I be sore?”

  “I don’t know.” His face didn’t look so red. “Hell, I didn’t know you’d started out there with the books. I’d heard about them having a hundredth anniversary next year and I just walked into the town. Of course, I ran into those police books — everybody seemed to like them, by the way — but I thought it had been just another job. Then, when I told Madeline about it, why — ”

  Madeline started to laugh and in a couple of seconds I was laughing, too. It was the funniest thing I’d heard in a long time, Al going into Port Jessup to put the prongs into those slobs again.

  “It’s a wonder the cops didn’t throw you in jail,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I started to tell him because they’d gotten screwed on the book sales but I remembered that Madeline and Al didn’t know about things like that.

  “Maybe they liked the book,” I said thoughtfully.

  “They did.”

  “And so what do they want us to write for them now? An epitaph?”

  “A history of the city,” Madeline told me. “They want a history of the city written for their big anniversary.”

  “And who’s going to sell it?” I wanted to know, remembering those lazy cops. “The garbage men?”

  Al came over and sat down beside me. I could smell his sweat now, mixing with the liquor, and I wished that he’d go somewhere and take a shower.