“Where do you spend your summers?”
“Westland, about thirty-five miles from here. Now, it gets real hot in Westland. I know that for a fact.” He turns to us with slow solemnity and lets us look into his guileless, faded eyes.
“How hot’s it get?” I ask.
“Well, now, stranger, we don’t go much for puttin’ out thermometers in this country. But I do know what the Westland Hotel used to do. They used to make a specialty of servin’ baked potatoes, and those potatoes never even seen an oven. They just planted ’em out in the sun, and when a guest would order baked potato, the waitress would run out, scrape away the ground, jab a fork in a potato, bring it in, cut it open, put on a slice of butter and some paprika, and that’s all there was to it. The hotel used to be famous for its fine baked potatoes.”
“You say it used to be famous?” I ask. “Doesn’t it serve ’em now?”
“Well, no, it doesn’t,” Lingar says in a mournful voice. “We had one awful hot day here last summer, and one of the guests burnt his mouth pretty bad. He sued the hotel. Sure was hot that day. The cook told me that if a man ordered a three-minute egg, he didn’t dare to leave it in the water over a minute and a half.”
“Because the water got so much hotter?” I ask, winking at Pete.
He doesn’t walk into that one. He regards me reproachfully. “Water,” he says, “only gets so hot. After it begins boiling, it can’t get no hotter.”
“What about the eggs, then?”
“Why,” he explains, “they started cookin’ the minute the cook opened the door of the icebox. Now, don’t think I’m tryin’ to tell you that was our regular summer weather. That really was unusual. You know how those desert lizards are? They re awful fast. Well, sir, for a week after that hot spell you could walk out and catch a lizard anywhere.”
“Why was that?”
“Their feet was blistered. Poor little cusses!”
We look at each other and laugh, and Lingar retires into a hurt, dignified silence. Just before we get to Westland, he says, “An’ I suppose you won’t believe me if I tell you about my cabin.”
“What about it?”
“My cabin,” he says, “has been in almost every state in the Union. One night there was a big storm, and my old cabin blew away. I didn’t know what I was goin’ to do. Then, all of a sudden, I heard a big commotion an’ this cabin was delivered F. O. B. on my claim without no hosses or no trucks an’ just when I needed it.”
“Sure,” Pete says, “we believe you,” and winks at me.
Lingar clams up again, but the joke’s on us when we get to his house. He’s living in an old boxcar which had been dumped on his property in a train wreck. The railroad company figured it wasn’t worth moving off.
Pete puts out his hand. “That,” he concedes, “is a horse on us.”
Lingar shakes hands and says self-righteously, “I told you I was a truthful man. I never say nothin’ I ain’t verified.”
We drive on to Sandyville. People are huddled in little knots on the street. Gloom hangs over the place as though it had been snowing black crape. We find Grandis in the combination poolroom and bar.
He’s a thin chap with a mosquito nose and greedy eyes. Pete sizes him up for the fast approach. “Mr. Grandis,” he says, as soon as we’ve ordered three glasses, “we’re representing the Puckley air conditioner. Instead of trying to lure patrons into your theater with bank nights and dishes, why not put in one of our outfits? Then you’d have to give the customers a set of dishes to get ’em out.”
Grandis has a thin, tight mouth that hardly moves when he talks. He opens his lips just enough to let out one word at a time.
He says, “I don’t give away dishes. I don’t have bank nights. I’ve got the only picture show within eighty miles. My customers take what I give ’em, and like it. Ninety per cent don’t even stop to look on the billboard at what’s playing. They buy tickets and walk in. I don’t need no air conditioning. People here take their climate the way they find it.”
Pete smiles and says, “And our local agent is going to be Miss Bernice Johnson.”
Grandis looks at Pete. “Twenty-four hours ago that would have meant something. Now it don’t. The vein pinched out in the Banner mine last week. They tried to keep it quiet, but this morning their engineers threw up the sponge. The mine’s finished. The—”
A tall, gaunt man with blond hair and sober blue eyes comes in the door. Grandis scrapes back his chair and makes a beeline for this newcomer.
The bartender wipes off the table and says, “Don’t wait, boys. He won’t be back. He’s trying to get that big Swede to sign an option. You boys were trying to sell him something, weren’t you?”
Pete nods. “Air-conditioning unit for the theater.”
The bartender says, “You’re wasting your breath. This is going to be a ghost town within thirty days. That’s Ole Johnson he’s talking with now.”
Grandis takes Johnson’s arm in a firm grip and steers him out the door. I pick up my glass and look across the rim at Pete. We keep waiting for Grandis to come back, but the bartender was right. After a while, Pete tips me the wink and orders another. When the bartender comes over, Pete turns loose the old Quint personality, and the bartender loosens up. Johnson’s broke. The town is broke, but the biggest sucker of all is Grandis. Property is selling for a song, and Grandis is singing the song. What he can’t buy, he ties up on sixty-day options.
After the bartender leaves, I tell Pete we’d better start back to Los Angeles.
“Don’t be silly! Bernice really needs her commissions now. We can’t let her down.”
So Pete’s fallen hard and is making a hopeless fight for the girl’s commissions. Meantime, our own overhead is ticking on like a clock. We start for the hotel. Halfway there, Pete looks around, and says in a low voice, “Surprise, surprise! Don’t look now. Santa Claus is coming!”
We slow down, and I hear hurrying steps, then Grandis says in his thin, rasping voice, “I didn’t mean to run out on you boys. I saw a man who—”
Pete grabs Grandis by the hand, and gives him the pep approach. “Mr. Grandis, I congratulate you on your business acumen. Communities such as this don’t go back. They go forward. You’ve had the vision to see further ahead than most of these people. Now, has it ever occurred to you that the adjustment period before the new capital takes over the Banner mine will an ideal time to install a Puckley conditioning unit in your theater? In that way you’ll be ready to take care of the new crowds and—”
“You goin’ to the hotel?” Grandis asks.
“Yes.”
“I’m going that way myself. I’d like facts and figures. And I want to know how your outfit is better than your competitors.”
Pete says, “I suppose you’re referring to the Refrigerheat air-conditioning outfit. Mr. Grandis, it isn’t the policy of our factory to knock competitors. Salesmen are specifically instructed on that point. But that rule applies only when we’re dealing with the average customer. When we deal with a man of your unusual intelligence, we answer all questions fully and fairly. What did you want to know about Refrigerheat?”
I’ll say one thing for Pete — he can absorb facts, figures and performance records faster than anyone I ever saw. Listening to him talk, you’d think he was an air-conditioning engineer. He’s remembered all of the patter Doolittle handed out, all of the stuff the Las Angeles distributor told him, and added some dope he got from reading the instructions sent out by the factory.
Grandis soaks it up. Occasionally he nods his head as though he’s all ready to give the order. But at the last minute he decides he’ll think it over. Pete can’t quite get his name on the dotted line.