Don’t ask how much was in the envelope. One of the reasons Flick got that fifteen dollars a sale extra was that he knew what it would take to fix each particular fixer.
I went out into the hall and got a Coke out of the machine. I was leaning against the wall drinking it when Solly came out of his room with a plastic pitcher. He carried it to the ice machine and filled it up.
I said, “Heavy night?”
“All she wants to do is drink and screw. I wouldn’t mind, only she drinks better’n she screws.”
“Did you ask her if she’s got a friend?”
“If she had a friend, I’d take the friend and boot this one out on her hinder. She’s a pig. You, Chip, you got the right idea.”
“I do?”
“Goddamn right.”
He seemed to be more than a little looped. I said, “What’s the right idea? Coca-Cola?”
“Not Coca-fuckin’-Cola. It’s bad for your teeth, you know that?”
“Not if you use a regular bottle opener.”
“Huh?” He blinked. “Smart ass. But you got the right idea. The girls I see you out with.”
“Oh.”
“Whattaya mean, oh?” Solly became very forceful when he drank. Not belligerent or nasty, just emphatic. “Decent girls, pretty girls. And I never see you with the same girl twice. Smart. The right idea.”
He weaved away and plunged back to his room, and woman while I tried to think of an answer. Not that it was worth the trouble. The girls he had seen me out with were nice decent girls, all right. And pretty girls. And I guess I was getting a little better at knowing what to say to them and how to make time with them, because these weren’t girls that anybody introduced me to, and they weren’t girls who went out looking to get picked up. They were ordinary run-of-the-mill nice small-town girls that I would meet during the job or at a restaurant and that I would take to a movie and out for coffee or something like that.
If you can convince someone to sign a piece of paper agreeing to let Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc. rid his house of termites and dendivorous vermin (that’s what it said on the paper they signed, and you can look it up in your Funk and Wagnall’s) for whatever fee DTE, Inc. wanted to charge, if you can do all that, you really ought to be able to convince some small-town girl to go to a movie with you.
But not to anything much more dynamic than a movie, as it happens.
I drank a second soft drink, but this time I made it an Uncola, probably because I was brainwashed by Solly telling me Coke would ruin my teeth. It probably would, but the Uncola probably would, too.
Because I was beginning to come to the conclusion that everything was a con.
Which is a hell of a conclusion to come to, for Pete’s sake, especially when you happen to be descended from a long line of con men. Well, two of them anyway. And when you’ve decided to become a success along legitimate lines and to work hard and save your money and marry the boss’s daughter and do all the other things right, too.
Why go through all that if some smooth-talking little rat could come along and stand on your stoop and twist his cap in his hands and wind up costing you a couple of hundred dollars to kill termites that weren’t there to begin with, and that wouldn’t hurt your house a whole lot even if they were? (Because this may be something you never thought of, in which case I’m going to be saving you a lot of money over the years, because the first thing we all learned is that maybe ninety-nine houses out of a hundred have some termites, and those houses will go on standing for a couple of hundred years without anybody doing anything about those termites. See, it takes a long time for a termite to eat a house. It even takes a long time for a lot of termites to eat a house. But you take the average idiot and show him a termite eating his house, and he figures that in another week there won’t be anything left but the foundation.
(And while I’m on the subject, the second thing we all learned was that you couldn’t in a million years sell an extermination job to somebody with a brick house. Flick said you can’t sell them fire proofing, either, and Flick would know; he’s sold everything at one time or another, and if that includes his mother and his sister I wouldn’t be surprised. But people who have brick houses seem to think the brick is what holds the house together, so—
(You know, I have the feeling that I might be telling you more about termites than you really want to know. Maybe all of this will get cut out before the book gets printed, or maybe the book won’t ever get printed, which would mean rough sledding for one Chip Harrison, but either way I’m going to cool it at this point with all this inside information about the termite business. That’s a firm promise.
(In fact, I’m going to cool it on that forgettable evening, as far as that goes, because it wasn’t the kind of evening you would want to read about. I rapped a little with Lester when he came in, and I let Jimmy Joe tell me the plot of the movie he and Keegan saw. And I made up a lie about having a girl in my room and banging her while they were at the movie, and Jimmy Joe made up a lie about picking up a girl after the movie. We were both lying and knew it, but it broke the monotony in a small way. And outside of having a couple more soft drinks and reading an Indianapolis newspaper — which made the Chicago Tribune seem like the Daily Worker, or close to it — that was all there was to that evening, so there’s no point wasting everybody’s time with it.
(It was the night after that one that might interest you, when Solly brought the redhead back to the motel and organized a gang bang. I have to admit it was more interesting than Cokes and Uncolas. And it did more damage than any termites I ever saw.)
Chapter seven
During the day i had been working the same area where I’d made a sale the day before. Up until then the television weatherman had been saying it was unseasonably cool for mid-July, which meant it was reasonably comfortable. But that day it decided to get seasonable again.
I’m writing this on a cold damp rotten morning. My radiator is some slumlord’s idea of decoration, completely nonfunctional. But I can get warm just remembering that day. I didn’t make a sale. No one did. No one expected to. I think I worked as long as anyone, and I was back in my air-conditioned room by three-thirty. Flickinger didn’t even put in a token gripe. Pointless. We could have sold air conditioners or dry ice or Japanese fans, but that was about the extent of it. It was so hot we didn’t even talk about how hot it was, if that makes sense.