Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Well, I’ll be.”

“Except we don’t have to wait to see who dies.”

“Why, I guess not. I just guess a man can take matters into his own hands if he’s of a mind to.”

“He surely can,” Porter said.

“Man wants to kill himself, that’s what he can go and do.”

“No law against it,” Porter said.

Now you know and I know that that last is not strictly true. There’s a definite no-question law against suicide in our state, and most likely in yours as well. It’s harder to make it stand up than a calf with four broken legs, however, and I don’t recall that anyone hereabouts was ever prosecuted for it, or likely will be. It does make you wonder some what they had in mind writing that particular law into the books.

“I’ll just have another taste of that there corn,” Porter said, “and why don’t you have a pull on the jug your own self? You have any idea just when you might go and do it?”

“I’m studying on it,” Seth said.

“There’s a lot to be said for doing something soon as a man’s mind’s made up on the subject. Not to be hurrying you or anything of the sort, but they say that he who hesitates is last.” Porter scratched his chin. “Or some such,” he said.

“I just might do it tonight.”

“By God,” Porter said.

“Get the damn thing over with. Glory Hallelujah and my troubles is over.”

“And so is mine,” said Porter.

“You’ll be in the money then,” said Seth, “and I’ll be in the boneyard, and both of us is free and clear. You can just buy me a decent funeral and then go bankrupt in style.”

“Give you Johnny Millbourne’s number-one funeral,” Porter promised. “Brassbound casket and all. I mean, price is no object if I’m going bankrupt anyway. Let old Johnny swing for the money.”

“You a damn good man, brother.”

“You the best man in the world, brother.”

The jug passed back and forth a couple more times. At one point Seth announced that he was ready, and he was halfway out the door before he recollected that his car had been repossessed, which interfered with his plans to drive it off a cliff. He came back in and sat down again and had another drink on the strength of it all, and then suddenly he sat forward and stared hard at Porter.

“This policy thing,” he said.

“What about it?”

“It’s on both of us, is what you said.”

“If I said it then must be it’s the truth.”

“Well then,” Seth said, and sat back, arms folded on his chest.

“Well then what?”

“Well then if you was to kill yourself, then I’d get the money and you’d get the funeral.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Porter said slowly.

“Seems to me either one of us can go and do it,” Seth said. “And here’s the two of us just takin’ it for granted that I’m to be the one to go and do it, and I think we should think on that a little more thoroughly.”

“Why, being as you’re older, Seth.”

“What’s that to do with anything?”

“Why, you got less years to give up.”

“Still be givin’ up all that’s left. Older or younger don’t cut no ice.”

Porter thought about it. “After all,” he said, “it was your idea.”

“That don’t cut ice neither. I could mention I got a wife and child.”

“I could mention I got a wife and three children.”

“Ex-wife.”

“All the same.”

“Let’s face it,” Seth said. “Gert and your three don’t add up to anything and neither do Linda Mae and Rachel.”

“Got to agree,” Porter said.

“So.”

“One thing. You being the one who put us in this mess, what with firing the store, it just seems you might be the one to get us out of it.”

“You bein’ the one let the insurance lapse through your own stupidity, you could get us out of this mess through insurance, thus evenin’ things up again.”

“Now talkin’ about stupidity—”

“Yes, talkin’ about stupidity—”

“Spats!”

“Bow ties, damn you! Bow ties! ”

You might have known it would come to that.

Now I’ve toldyou Seth and Porter generally got along pretty well and here’s further evidence of it. Confronted by such a stalemate, a good many people would have wrote off the whole affair and decided not to take the suicide route at all. But not even spats and bow ties could deflect Seth and Porter from the road they’d figured out as the most logical to pursue.

So what they did, one of them tossed a coin, and the other one called it while it was in the air, and they let it hit the floor and roll, and I don’t recollect whether it was heads or tails, or who tossed and who called — what’s significant is that Seth won.

“Well now,” Seth said. “I feel I been reprieved. Just let me have that coin. I want to keep it for a luck charm.”

“Two out of three.”

“We already said once is as good as a million,” Seth said, “so you just forget that two-out-of-three business. You got a week like we agreed but if I was you I’d get it over soon as I could.”

“I got a week,” Porter said.

“You’ll get the brassbound casket and everything, and you can have Minnie Lucy Boxwood sing at your funeral if you want. Expense don’t matter at all. What’s your favorite song?”

“I suppose ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.’ ”

“Minnie Lucy does that real pretty.”

“I guess she does.”

“Now you be sure and make it accidental,” Seth said. “Two hundred thousand dollars goes just about twice as far as one hundred thousand dollars. Won’t cost you a thing to make it accidental, just like we talked about it. What I would do is borrow Fritz Chenoweth’s half-ton pickup and go up on the old Harburton Road where it takes that curve. Have yourself a belly full of corn and just keep goin’ straight when the road doesn’t. Lord knows I almost did that myself enough times without tryin’. Had two wheels over the edge less’n a month ago.”

“That close?”

“That close.”

“I’ll be doggone,” Porter said.

Thing is, Sethwent on home after he failed to convince Porter to do it right away, and that was when things began to fall into the muck. Because Porter started thinking things over. I have a hunch it would have worked about the same way if Porter had won the flip, with Seth thinking things over. They were a whole lot alike, those two. Like two peas in a pod.

What occurred to Porter was would Seth have gone through with it if he lost, and what Porter decided was that he wouldn’t. Not that there was any way for him to prove it one way or the other, but when you can’t prove something you generally tend to decide on believing in what you want to believe, and Porter Dettweiler was no exception. Seth, he decided, would not have killed himself and didn’t never have no intention of killing himself, which meant that for Porter to go through with killing his own self amounted to nothing more than damned foolishness.

Now it’s hard to say just when he figured out what to do, but it was in the next two days, because on the third day he went over and borrowed that pickup off Fritz Chenoweth. “I got the back all loaded down with a couple sacks of concrete mix and a keg of nails and I don’t know what all,” Fritz said. “You want to unload it back of my smaller barn if you need the room.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Porter told him. “I guess I’ll just leave it loaded and be grateful for the traction.”

“Well, you keep it overnight if you have a mind,” Fritz said.

“I just might do that,” Porter said, and he went over to Seth’s house. “Let’s you and me go for a ride,” he told Seth. “Something we was talking about the other night, and I went and got me a new slant on it which the two of us ought to discuss before things go wrong altogether.”