Pushover

by Orrie Hitt

  “How’s Madeline coming with the script,” he wanted to know.

  “Okay.” I hadn’t seen her since Sunday and this was Wednesday.

  “She got a new typewriter. An IBM Executive.”

  “So I heard.”

  The waiter brought Al a ham on rye and I told the kid I’d have another glass of iced coffee. I never ate much for lunch, especially when I was out in the field selling. All I did was drink coffee and watch the clock and wish people didn’t eat during the middle of the day. You can’t sell a guy something if he’s out eating and you can’t find him.

  “Look, Danny,” Al said suddenly. “I don’t want you to think that I’m sticking my nose in your business but I stopped around to see Madeline last night.”

  “So?”

  “She was asking me how come you haven’t been around.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “That’s what I told her.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Al bit into the sandwich. I guess he didn’t have any back teeth because he chewed everything in front, like he wasn’t quite sure if he was going to swallow the food or spit it out. It was the only thing about Al that annoyed me. He looked like a hog when he ate.

  “You oughta stop down and see her, Danny.”

  “I will.”

  I’d stop in that evening, between seven and eight, before I picked up Sandy Adams, and I’d give her what she’d been missing. I’d give it to her good.

  “She’s a fine kid, Danny.”

  “I know it.”

  Al chewed some more, finally finishing the sandwich.

  “She tell you about that husband of hers?”

  “He’s due in almost any day.”

  Al nodded.

  “It’s bothering her, Danny. She doesn’t love the guy and it sticks out all over. How the hell do people get into things like that, anyway?”

  Al, I thought, why don’t you stop making excuses to me and to yourself? Why don’t you just admit it, that when you’re in Port Jessup your home and your family are a long way off and that you’d like to land on that flying field for one night?

  “She’s got her work cut out for her,” I said, picking up the check. “The right-hand margins on these books are going to be straight. It means two trips through the typing. Maybe that’s what’s bothering her.”

  “Maybe.”

  We got up and I paid the cashier.

  “You do all right this morning, Al?”

  We went outside. The sun came down hot, blazing out of a clear blue sky. Thunderheads poked up over the distant mountain peaks and I wondered if it would stay clear through the evening. I hoped it would. Sandy had invited me to drive her out to Long Beach, where somebody was holding a corn roast, and I was looking forward to that. Not to the corn. To spending a couple of hours with Sandy that wouldn’t have to be devoted to haggling about print orders, advertising rates and sales promotions.

  “I got fourteen,” Al told me. “But I didn’t get out until after nine-thirty. Had some trouble with my car.”

  We’d established a rate of eight-fifty for a listing in the Port Jessup history. I’d started at nine seventy-five, knowing that Sandy would bargain on that just as she’d bargained on everything else, and we’d settled at eight-fifty. Actually, it was more than we needed. The pace we were going, we’d hit five hundred ads, easy, and the most the book would cost, including Al and Madeline’s base salaries, would be twenty-five hundred dollars. Even without asking her, I knew that Sandy Adams had figured this out just as quickly as I had but I’d impressed on her that my time was worth money, that a guy had to earn money from his work but also from his ideas. It was one of the few things that we’d agreed on without any fuss.

  We stopped at Al’s car, a fifty-four Dodge with more miles on it than a circus truck.

  “I’ll be on West Street this afternoon,” he said. “It’ll take me the rest of today and most of tomorrow to finish that square.”

  “Okay.”

  He got in the car.

  “What about bars and grills?” he asked me. “We going to take them?”

  “No hooch.”

  He nodded and drove off.

  I walked on down the street, thinking about that. It was the same in every town — there were always some bucks that you had to miss. You told everybody that you were turning out a book for everybody but it was never so. Maybe, I decided, that was the key to being a success in this business, to know what to take and what to leave alone. Not that the people in the churches didn’t drink or anything like that, but you were a lot safer, you locked the door to future criticism; if you spent five percent of your time figuring out how the other guy might react and only ninety-five percent of your time counting your money.

  It was about three blocks from the diner to Addison Place and the main business section, the section where most of the big chain-stores were located. It was still a few minutes before one, almost an hour too early to start working the executive trade, and as I walked along slowly, killing time, I kept looking into the windows, wondering if a particular suit would fit me or if any of the chairs were as comfortable as they appeared. A block and a half from the diner I stopped and stared into the most fascinating window of the lot. A Cadillac Agency window. A window with a great big yellow Caddy convertible in it.

  In the next few minutes I reverted from the role of being a smart fund-raiser to that of being a jerk. I went inside and bought the thing.

  “We’ll give you two thousand for the Buick,” the salesman told me. “Without even looking at it. That means you can own this beautiful Cadillac for just thirty-four hundred.”

  I say I don’t know just why I bought it, but I guess maybe that I do. I guess I thought of that six grand in the bank and that thirty-four off of that still left a balance of twenty-six. I guess it was because I felt secure, safe; I had finally thrown off the inferiority complex I’d gotten from fifty-dollar-a-week jobs. Or perhaps it was something else, something deeper than that, something that you might be able to call the Sandy Adams complex.

  “I’ll pick it up at five,” I told the salesman.

  I left the car agency and continued on down the street. My first call was a soda fountain, a little place near the corner of Central and Market. It was owned by a woman in her early fifties. I gave her a pitch on the book, keeping it short the way I always did, and she came across with eight-fifty.

  “Thanks,” I told her and went out.

  I felt like a jerk. I was running my nose into the ground for eight-fifty sales and I’d just spent more than three grand on a car. It didn’t make sense, I told myself; it was simply a jerk’s way of becoming a bigger jerk. Then I saw a Caddy with an MD plate on it and I felt better. A doctor made a house call, or had an office visit, and he spent a lot more time with his patient than I did with a sucker. And he might get less for his trouble than I did, a lot less. I began to feel better. Hell, I was no jerk. I was just a practical businessman who was living it up a little bit. When I got right down to it, if I wanted to, I could buy two Caddys and afford to pay for them.

  Maybe you think this is nuts, that a guy shouldn’t measure things this way. You’re wrong. A salesman has to condition his mind, to free it from all worry and to give himself confidence, if he’s going to be a top man in his racket. Especially a fund-raising salesman.

  If a fellow is selling insurance, or storm windows or something like that, he can approach a prospect when he’s low and he can leave the door open for himself to go back again when he’s hot. A lot of salesmen don’t recognize the fact that callbacks are the result of their own inefficiency, that the prospect is just as able to make up his mind one time as he is another. In an operation such as Community Enterprises you don’t get three times at bat and you don’t have three strikes. You have just one. You have so many business places you can call on in a town, you tell each one of them the story once, and you either get the cash or you get a turndown. That’s why it’s important for a fund-raising s
alesman to condition his mind, to inject a superior feeling into his thinking apparatus. All of it may be false, every bit of it, but it will answer the purpose, anyway. It isn’t a question of wondering what you’re prospect is going to do; it’s simpler if you know what he will do.

  I had my mind jacked up in the air that way that afternoon. I felt it in my body, the way I stood; in my smile and in the deep, firm edge my voice had to it, too.

  “I never buy any advertising from strangers,” one old guy told me. But you can count me in on this, Mr. Fulton. It’s good.”

  By four o’clock I had sold twenty-seven contracts. What the hell had been wrong with me, thinking I couldn’t afford a Caddy?

  I went into the Channing Store. The Channing Store was part of a chain, specializing in women’s undergarments and dresses. It was one of the many chain stores within the city and these were the spots that we had to hit early in the campaign. Most generally, a chain store manager gives you the impression that he is a pretty superior person in an equally superior organization when, in reality, he can’t even flush a toilet without first finding out from his home office if it will run up the charges on the water meter. Not only that, but all chains have their own advertising agencies and the agencies get their cut on all ads placed. The arrangement has a certain amount of nuisance value but it also has its rewards. Few chains refuse to give an ad to any worthy cause. You only have to give them time to clear the requests through the proper channels.

  I asked for the manager and a school girl working out her vacation told me to walk on up the stairs.

  I got to the top of the stairs, entered a tiny secretarial office and stopped very suddenly.

  “Hello, Danny.”

  She still had the long black hair and the firm, sleek body. Having a kid hadn’t changed her any, except maybe she was bigger across the breasts. Bigger and fuller and not quite so pointed.

  “Well, Gloria!”

  She pushed the typewriter stand back and stood up. I had been wrong about her. She had changed. Not her body, that was even better than I remembered, but there was a certain hardness about her face and the wide, sensous red of her lips.

  “I heard you were in town.” She came round the desk. “Dad said he saw you.”

  “You’re married,” I explained. “Otherwise I would have called you.”

  Her smile didn’t believe me.

  “I suppose you want to see the manager about advertising?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s out,” she said. “Playing golf, while the slaves make sales.”

  “A nice way to make a living.”

  “No better than yours, Danny.”

  I tried to remember back over the three years to the days when we had been close, but I couldn’t. She was just a girl with a face, a body, someone I had know.

  I protested mildly. “I’m doing all right but I have to work for every nickel of it.”

  “As hard as you had to work on the policeman’s book?”

  “Harder.”

  She walked up to me, still smiling that way, everything under that dress moving around in the right places. She reached up and patted me gently on the cheek.

  “You’re a liar,” she said.

  “Hey, now!”

  “You’re a liar,” she repeated softly. “You really took the police department over the hump, having those extra copies of the book run off. I found out about it, Danny. I found out about it from the printer as soon as I got back from Florida with my aunt.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Ever since that first book I’d had my printing done at the same place, at a little shop in Middletown, New York, but I’d never told the printer that he shouldn’t answer any questions about our book runs. Most people don’t check that far outside of their own affairs; you tell them something that’s supposed to be gospel, they accept it and you never hear any more about it.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked her, finally.

  “Nothing.” She swung away from me and went back to the desk. “Not now, I don’t. I wanted you, then.”

  “You went to see the printer?”

  “Yes. To get your address. But he didn’t have it at the time.”

  “I see.”

  She sat down at the typewriter and slammed the carriage into position.

  “You don’t see a damned thing. And you never will, Danny. You’re too hungry for money.”

  “Tell me a better appetite.”

  She typed furiously for a few moments.

  “Women,” she said, not looking at me. “You eat them alive.”

  I thought, what the hell has gotten into this crazy bitch?

  “Well, you got married,” I said. “I guess I didn’t leave any battle scars on you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But you did get married,” I insisted, not quite sure just what difference it made to me. “You got married and you’re happy and what more do you want?”

  “Let me alone, Danny.” She pushed the typewriter away and leaped to her feet. “You hear me? Let me alone, Danny!”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me telling anybody what a crook you are.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t even tell my father. I didn’t tell anybody, Danny. I just didn’t want to believe that you would do a thing like that. When the printer told me that we must have done well with the books because we’d had another thousand run off, I just stopped looking for you, Danny. I couldn’t look for you any more. I didn’t want to find you, Danny. Believe me, I didn’t.”

  She didn’t act as though she were really talking to me but, rather, that she was repeating something she had said to herself a thousand different times. I wondered if she had, if that’s the way it had been, and I wondered if the tears were always there, lurking in the corners of her eyes the way they were just then.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  “Part of that money was mine, Danny. When I got home and dad asked me how much I’d made out of it, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t. And I needed the money then, Danny, needed it so badly that I didn’t know what to do.”

  “You could have gotten in touch with me,” I said. “You could have left word with the printer and I’d have sent it to you.”

  She shook her head, turning away.

  “Danny, Danny,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Hell, I was asking myself the same question about you.”

  “All the time I was away,” she said, “I used to think about that book and how we could do more of them if it went over well. When dad wrote and said that you had done such a wonderful job, I — you don’t know how I felt, Danny. And then when I got home, when there wasn’t anything at all for me and I found out what you had done, I — I — ”

  “I’ll give you a grand,” I told her. “Maybe that’ll make you feel better.”

  “No!”

  I shrugged and spread my hands wide.

  “First you say you want money and then you say you don’t. What kind of talk is that?”

  She looked at me, her mouth trembling, and none of the hardness lingered in her face.

  “You wouldn’t understand, Danny.”

  “You can say that twelve times and be right a whole dozen.”

  “Danny!”

  I paused in the doorway.

  “I’ll call your boss on the phone,” I said. “You can tell him I was here or you can forget about it. Suit yourself.”

  “I’ll tell him, Danny.”

  “Think it over about the money,” I told her. “It’ll be there any time you want it.”

  She just started at me, not saying a word.

  “So long,” I said.

  I went back downstairs and on outside. I swung left and went up the street toward the Caddy agency.

  In a way, I decided, Gloria was right. She had some money coming and I supposed that I should have left it for her. But, it’s funny, I hadn
’t thought about it at the time and I hadn’t thought about it since. Sure, she’d written the book and she’d done quite a lot of other work on it, but I’d been the one who’d sold all the ads, who’d sat on the phone day in and day out and run myself into the mud on it. How she could figure fifty-fifty on a thing like that I didn’t know, but if that was the kind of a pain’-killer she wanted she could have it any day that she put up a howl. I didn’t want any trouble in Port Jessup. I was so deep in this church thing that I couldn’t afford any now.

  The Caddy was parked out front, a big yellow monster gleaming in the late afternoon sun. A bunch of kids and some older people were standing around in a tight little group admiring the thing. I pushed past them and went on into the sales room. It made me feel a lot better, just seeing that car.

  A guy in a Caddy can go anywhere.

  6

  IT WAS late, almost seven-fifteen, before I got down to Madeline’s apartment on River Street. To begin with, I’d had to do some last minute shopping — who could go out with a gal like Sandy Adams on a corn roast and not be dressed for the occasion? — and besides, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see Madeline at all.

  I didn’t.

  But, hell, you have to keep the help happy, don’t you? If they want money, you give them money. If they want sympathy, you give them a pep speech and a pat on the can. Or if they want something else, you give them that, too.

  It was hot in the apartment, the heat pushing in from all sides, and the evening shadows were deep and thick.

  “I thought you’d moved to another state,” she said.

  She was over by the window, just sitting there, and I gussed that she’d been watching the kids swimming in the river. I went over to her and looked out. The kids out there, especially those on the raft, looked comfortable and happy. Why did people ever have to grow up and have so many problems?

  “I’ve been pounding my butt all over town,” I explained. I let out a deep sigh and sat down on the footstool at her feet. “I’ve never worked so hard in all my life! Even with Al helping, I’m knocking myself out.”

  She looked out of the window again, not saying anything, and this time I was pretty sure she was counting up the bucks the new Caddy down there had cost.