Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Be right with you,” Seth said, “soon as I finish this sandwich.”

“Oh, just bring it along.”

“I guess,” said Seth.

No sooner was the pickup truck backed down and out of the driveway than Porter said, “Now will you just have a look over there, brother.”

“How’s that?” said Seth, and turned his head obligingly to the right, whereupon Porter gave him a good lick upside the head with a monkey wrench he’d brought along expressly for that purpose. He got him right where you have a soft spot if you’re a little baby. (You also have a soft spot there if someone gets you just right with a monkey wrench.) Seth made a little sound which amounted to no more than letting his breath out, and then he went out like an icebox light when you have closed the door on it.

Now as to whether or not Seth was dead at this point I could not honestly tell you, unless I were to make up an answer knowing how slim is the likelihood of anyone presuming to contradict me. But the plain fact is that he might have been dead and he might not and even Seth could not have told you, being at the very least stone-unconscious at the time.

What Porter did was drive up the old Harburton Road, I guess figuring that he might as well stick to as much of the original plan as possible. There’s a particular place where the road does a reasonably convincing imitation of a fishhook, and that spot’s been described as Schuyler County’s best natural brake on the population explosion since they stamped out the typhoid. A whole lot of folks fail to make that curve every year, most of them young ones with plenty of breeding years left in them. Now and then there’s a movement to put up a guard rail, but the ecology people are against it so it never gets anywhere.

If you miss that curve, the next land you touch is a good five hundred feet closer to sea level.

So Porter pulls over to the side of the road and then he gets out of the car and maneuvers Seth (or Seth’s body, whichever the case may have been) so as he’s behind the wheel. Then he stands alongside the car working the gas pedal with one hand and the steering wheel with the other and putting the fool truck in gear and doing this and that and the other thing so he can run the truck up to the edge and over, and thinking hard every minute about those two hundred thousand pretty green dollars that are destined to make his bankruptcy considerably easier to contend with.

Well, I told you right off that sometimes you can’t win for losing, which was the case for Porter and Seth both, and another way of putting it is to say that when everything goes wrong there’s nothing goes right. Here’s what happened. Porter slipped on a piece of loose gravel while he was pushing, and the truck had to go on its own, and where it went was halfway and no further, with its back wheel hung up on a hunk of tree limb or some such and its two front wheels hanging out over nothing and its motor stalled out deader’n a smoked fish.

Porter said himself a whole mess of bad words. Then he wasted considerable time shoving the back of that truck, forgetting it was in gear and not about to budge. Then he remembered and said a few more bad words and put the thing in neutral, which involved a long reach across Seth to get to the floor shift and a lot of coordination to manipulate it and the clutch pedal at the same time. Then Porter got out of the truck and gave the door a slam, and just about then a beat-up old Chevy with Indiana plates pulls up and this fellow leaps out screaming that he’s got a tow rope and he’ll pull the truck to safety.

You can’t hardly blame Porter for the rest of it. He wasn’t the type to be great at contingency planning anyhow, and who could allow for something like this? What he did, he gave this great sob and just plain hurled himself at the back of that truck, it being in neutral now, and the truck went sailing like a kite in a tornado, and Porter, well, what he did was follow right along after it. It wasn’t part of his plan but he just had himself too much momentum to manage any last-minute change of direction.

According to the fellow from Indiana, who it turned out was a veterinarian from Bloomington, Porter fell far enough to get off a couple of genuinely rank words on the way down. Last words or not, you sure wouldn’t go and engrave them on any tombstone.

Speaking of which, he has the last word in tombstones, Vermont granite and all, and his brother Seth has one just like it. They had a double-barreled funeral, the best Johnny Millbourne had to offer, and they each of them reposed in a brass-bound casket, the top-of-the-line model. Minnie Lucy Boxwood sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” which was Porter’s favorite song, plus she sang Seth’s favorite, which was “Old Buttermilk Sky,” plus she also sang free gratis “My Buddy” as a testament to brotherly love.

And Linda Mae and Rachel got themselves two hundred thousand dollars from the insurance company, which is what Gert and her kids in Valdosta, Georgia, also got. And Seth and Porter have an end to their miseries, which was all they really wanted before they got their heads turned around at the idea of all that money.

The only thing funnier than how things don’t work out is how they do.

On what aless original writer might deign to describe as a fateful day, young Robert Tillinghast approached the proprietor of a shop called Earth Forms. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t think I can buy anything today, but there’s a question I’d like to ask you. It’s been on my mind for the longest time. I was looking at those recycled jeans over by the far wall.”

“I’ll be getting a hundred pair in Monday afternoon,” the proprietor said.

“Is that right?”

“It certainly is.”

“A hundred pair,” Robert marveled. “That’s certainly quite a lot.”

“It’s the minimum order.”

“Is that a fact? And they’ll all be the same quality and condition as the ones you have on display over on the far wall?”

“Absolutely. Of course, I won’t know what sizes I’ll be getting.”

“I guess that’s just a matter of chance.”

“It is. But they’ll all be first-quality name brands, and they’ll all be in good condition, broken in but not broken to bits. That’s a sort of an expression I made up to describe them.”

“I like it,” said Robert, not too sincerely. “You know, there’s a question that’s been nagging at my mind for the longest time. Now you get six dollars a pair for the recycled jeans, is that right?” It was. “And it probably wouldn’t be out of line to guess that they cost you about half that amount?” The proprietor, after a moment’s reflection, agreed that it wouldn’t be far out of line to make that estimate.

“Well, that’s the whole thing,” Robert said. “You notice the jeans I’m wearing?”

The proprietor glanced at them. They were nothing remarkable, a pair of oft-washed Lee Riders that were just beginning to go thin at the knees. “Very nice,” the man said. “I’d get six dollars for them without a whole lot of trouble.”

“But I wouldn’t want to sell them.”

“And of course not. Why should you? They’re just getting to the comfortable stage.”

“Exactly!” Robert grew intense, and his eyes bulged slightly. This was apt to happen when he grew intense, although he didn’t know it, never having seen himself at such times. “Exactly,” he repeated. “The recycled jeans you see in the shops, this shop and other shops, are just at the point where they’re breaking in right. They’re never really worn out. Unless you only put the better pairs on display?”

“No, they’re all like that.”

“That’s what everybody says.” Robert had had much the same conversation before in the course of his travels. “All top quality, all in excellent condition, and all in the same stage of wear.”