Roughneck (7 page)

       "Tough guy aren't you?" The eyes in the smeared face gleamed broodingly. "Scare hell out of my wife, get her so upset she's half out of her mind. Then you come around here raising hell."

       "You're mistaken," I said. "I've never talked to your wife or even seen her for—"

       "The hell you ain't! She told me what you looked like. There wouldn't be two guys with that outfit as big as you are."

       "But there—"

       "You wait there," he said. "You wait right there, and I'll drop something down to you."

       I waited. I stood looking upward until my neck began to ache, and then I looked down again. And that was when it happened.

       I imagine he must have had someone help him, for the great bloated carcass—a dead hog—which shot down suddenly through the hole must have weighed all of four hundred pounds. It grazed my arm as it went past. Only the fact that I had turned slightly, to glance out the door, kept it from landing on me.

       There was a tremendous thud, the sound of splitting hide and exploding flesh. I flung myself backward, instinctively, but not soon enough to avoid a sickening and smelly spattering. I looked down at myself, at the awful thing at my feet, and then I looked up at the trapdoor. Brown was there, peering downward casually.

       "Little accident," he said. "Fella forgot that the door was open. Happens all the time around here."

       I didn't wait. I was on my way out of the place as fast as my near-nerveless legs would carry me. My hands were trembling so badly that I could hardly get the car started.

       I made myself fairly presentable again at a filling station washroom, but the damage to my morale was irreparable. I couldn't collect. I couldn't sell—which, ordinarily, was quite easy to do. I could not approach my customers with the "firm kindliness" which I had so grandiosely advocated (how could you be nice to people like that?). Neither could I get tough with them (tough with people who might kill you!). I didn't know what to do, what to say, how to act; and while I doggedly made every call assigned to me, I wound up the day without a single sale or one small collection.

       I stalled at the store that evening until the other collectors had checked in and left. Then, with forced casualness, I sauntered up to the wicket and laid my collection cards in front of Clark. We were alone. Except in very large cities, the managers of the chain's stores were the sole inside employees.

       He lighted a cigarette, spewed smoke from the corner of his mouth as he squinted down at the cards. His coat was open. For the first time I noticed the minute ornament that dangled from his watch chain—a tiny pair of golden gloves.

       "Yeah, Jim," he said absently, having followed the direction of my eyes. "Yup, I was a pretty good man with the mitts. Might have made a champ heavy if I'd kept at it."

       "I see," I said.

       "Yeah, I might have and might not, but I figured I'd be better off in another line. Have the odds more on my side. You see, I look at it this way, Jim. It's hard to get anything and hold onto it, even if the other guys in your field are just 'almost' as good as you are. You don't stand out, know what I mean? To really stand out you've got to move out of your own pasture—get into some line of work like, well, like this. Something where you don't have any competition; where you can slap hell out of any three guys you may come up against. Do you get my meaning, Jim?"

       "I get it," I said.

       "I don't see any sales slips here, Jim..."

       "No," I said. "I didn't sell anything."

       "And there are no collections on these cards..."

       "I didn't collect anything."

       He studied me, shook his head. "No, you wouldn't be that stupid. You wouldn't try to knock down the whole lot. Did you take the day off, Jim? No? You actually worked six hours without making any sales or any collections?"

       "Yes," I nodded. "I know it sounds funny, but—"

       "Funny? No, I wouldn't say it was. Come around the counter, Jim." He pointed. "Come right through that little gate there, and sit down in this chair." He pushed me into it. "And I'll sit down right in front of you." He did so. "Now, let's have the story."

       He was sitting so close that his legs pressed against mine; he had also leaned forward, gripping the arms of my chair. Obviously, with our respective noses almost touching each other, the position was not one to put me at my ease. The explanation I stammered out sounded preposterously weak and foolish.

       Nevertheless, and much to my surprise, Clark seemed to accept and understand it. "I've been afraid at times, too, Jim. There's been times when I've lost my nerve. I remember once in Chicago when I was working for a loan shark, a very tough outfit, incidentally. They sent me out to collect from a steelworker who owed us a hundred—half of it interest—and the guy went for me with a baseball bat. Damned near caved my skull in. Scared? Why, Jim, it took the guts right out of me. And then I sneaked back to the office, and I got them back. The boss gave me a break. He had a couple of boys take me down into the basement and 'both' of them had baseball bats; and they didn't just threaten me with 'em, they used them. And pretty soon, Jim, I wasn't afraid of that other guy at all. I wasn't afraid to collect from him. All that I was afraid of was what would happen if I didn't collect...Now, to get down to your case, to get to the point, Jim—I'll lay you a little bet. I'll bet you'd like to go out to the rendering plant tomorrow and get the dough out of that jerk. I'll bet you'd a lot rather do that than come in here and tell me that you haven't done it, that you've pissed off a whole day. Am I right, Jim? Isn't that the way you feel about it?"

       I would like to be able to say that I stood up at this point, told him to take his job and shove it, and walked out. But, inclined as I am to place myself in the most favorable light, I am incapable of such an outright lie. I had to work. I had grown up in a world, in jobs, where the roughest justice prevailed, where discipline was maintained, more often than not, with physical violence. And, now, in Clark, I recognized an all too familiar type. From such men, a nominal bluff is a warning. Their threats are promises.

       "You weren't thinking of quitting, were you, Jim? I'd hate to see you do that. It costs money to break a man in, and I'm supposed to know how to pick 'em."

       I shook my head. "No, I don't want to quit."

       "That's on the level? You wouldn't just walk out of here tonight and not show up any more? If you have something of that kind in mind..."

       "I don't."

       "Good boy!" He grinned suddenly and took a playful poke at my chin. "You'll be all right now; you'll do fine from now on. You were just afraid—of the wrong things."

       Well, to make an interminable story merely long, I did go out to the rendering plant the next day and I collected from the man who had tried to drop the hog on me. I cut my last class at school, and was thus able to arrive at the plant before noon. I was waiting at the door when Brown came outside to eat his lunch. Taken by surprise and being without the previous day's advantage, he paid up promptly. In fact, after one startled look at me, he was extending the money before I could ask for it.

       Heartened by this success, I did fairly well that day. But the following day I went into another slump, and by Saturday I was selling and collecting next to nothing. Clark, whose manner had grown increasingly ominous as the week progressed, detained me that night for another "conference."

       It began much the same way that the first one had. The stage setting was the same. Seating me in front of him, he pinned me to the chair with his knees and arms and thrust his face into mine. In a quiet, purring voice, he lectured me on the perils of misplaced fear. He was deadly serious. Now and then, he gripped my arm in emphasis and I almost yelled with the pain. And yet essentially, deep in that part of heart or mind which makes a man what he is, I remained unaffected. I was afraid of him, but the fear could not move me.

       "Jim—" His voice snapped suddenly. "You think I'm kidding you? You think I'll let you get away with making a chump out of me? Boy, if you've got any ideas like that...!"

       "I haven't," I said. "I know how you feel. I wouldn't really blame you if you took a poke at me."

       "It'll be more than a poke, Jim! By God, you're going to start hitting that ball Monday or—"

       "I don't think I can," I said. "I'd like to—I need every cent I can get. But you'll be doing the smart thing to fire me."

       "Huh-uh! I'm not firing you and you're not quitting."

       I shrugged. He was calling the turns. He could keep me on the job—make it extremely unpleasant for me to leave—but he could not make me perform in it. If he thought that he could, I added (rather shakily) now was a good time to try.

       "Yeah?" His jaw jutted out. "That's the way you want it, huh?"

       "N-no. But—"

       "Tell me, Jim..." He paused and wet his lips. Then, he went on, his broad face puzzled, his tone almost wheedling. "You stacked up like my kind of guy. I figured you and me, we probably went to different schools together. So, well, what's the deal, boy? How come it rolls out like this?"

       "I don't know," I said.

       "You're sure you haven't let some of these deadbeats get you down? They haven't got the Indian sign on you so bad that—"

       "It isn't them," I said. "It's me, something that sort of holds me back. I don't know quite how to explain it, but..."

       "Go on. Make a stab at it, Jim."

       "I guess I'm not afraid of them enough," I said. "They may pull some stunt like that guy at the rendering plant did, but I know they're really no match for us. We've got everything on our side. The law, and a tough bunch of boys to ride them ragged. I can't fight people like that. I feel sorry for them."

       "They don't feel that way about you, Jim. They hate your guts. You saw how that Brown character acted."

       "I know," I said. "That's what started it. Seeing how they felt, and not being able to resent it. Feeling that I had it coming. If I'd been in Brown's place, if someone had charged me four prices for a bunch of junk and then shoved my wife around, I'd have probably done what he did."

       "They don't have to buy the stuff, Jim. If they're stupid enough to do it—"

       "They have to buy it or do without. No one else will sell to them."

       "Yes, but..." He paused. "Yeah, but Jim..." he said slowly, and paused again. "You see, Jim, It's—uh—uh—"

       He stood up and paced around the office. Turning suddenly, he leveled a finger at me. "Now, here's the way it is, Jim. We're actually pretty damned nice to these people. We're just working to help 'em, but naturally—uh—help costs money, so we have to—uh—"

       He broke off, scowling, fixing me with a glare that dared me to laugh. Then, following a long moment of silence, his face relaxed and he himself laughed. "All right," he said. "All right, Jim, we'll call it quits for tonight. But you're going to do it, get me? By god, you—you 'got' to do it!"

       Judson Clark—Jud Clark. Ex-college football star, ex-pug, ex-heavy in the loan shark racket: a literate thug, to state the case briefly. I worked with him for months—at least, I held my job with the store—and I came to like him very much. I liked him and pitied him.

       I was, as he had indicated, "his kind of people." Our backgrounds roughly paralleled one another, and I should have responded to the demands of necessity and self-preservation. I should and I must—for in my failure he saw failure for himself. I represented something vital to him, a threat to the only way of life he could understand. His fear that the structure of that life might be crumbling was far greater than any fear he could inspire in me.

       Our conferences became almost nightly affairs, by turns abusive and wheedling. He jeered me in front of the other collectors. He even called Mom one day to declare that I was letting him down sadly—he who had only my best interests at heart—that I was failing her and Freddie, that jobs were very, very hard to get and that it would be a shame if I was forced to drop out of school; and asking her to "lay the proposition" before me and to make me "see the light" and so on.

       I told Mom that I wished to God he would fire me. The constant pressure was to do a job which I could not do, and yet being unable to quit was becoming unbearable.

       It goes without saying, of course, that I did not always check in at the store empty-handed. I usually had some small something to show for my day's efforts. Generally speaking, however, the nature of my successes was such as to leave Clark almost anything but reassured.

       "I don't get it, by God!" he yelled one night. "This bastard—all the other boys gave up on him. Even I took a crack at him and I couldn't score. He's a mean, no-good son-of-a-bitch. He loaded up on that stuff without ever intending to give us a nickel, and he's got so damned many judgments against him it was a waste of time to sue. So I'm all set to charge him off, and then you get his card. And you, by God, you collect!"

       "Yes," I said uneasily. "It looks like—uh—I did, all right."

       "Well? If you can collect from guys like that, you can collect from anyone!"

       I shook my head. We had had similar discussions before, and I had not been able to make him understand. I felt differently about this particular customer and the others like him. I could tackle them without any twinge of conscience.

       He stood over my chair, scowling, and I thought that at last he would give way to his feelings by giving me a drubbing. Instead, he turned abruptly and marched over to the card files.

       He began to thumb through them swiftly, occasionally jerking a card out and tossing it onto his desk. Then, when he had extracted about twenty of them, he gestured curtly to me.

       "All right," he said, "there's your cards for tomorrow. And by God, Jim...Well, you know what I mean. You do it, get me? You do what you're supposed to do!"