Lawrence Block - No Score

That’s getting off the subject, but so did this old lady. She went on and on about one thing or another. She had lost her husband a year ago, she told me. I was sort of listening to every third word out of her mouth, so I thought at first that she must have lost him in one of the hundred rooms in that old barn. But of course she meant he was dead. I hate people who don’t like to say certain words, so they say that the cat is fixed when they mean castrated, or that their husband is lost when they mean he’s dead as a doornail.

She kept on talking, and I went around the house on a tour of inspection, and she droned on about how much trouble there was in keeping up a house when you were a woman all alone in the world. I knew I had her then. I worked my way around the back of the house until I found a spot where there were traces of sawdust on the concrete, and I whipped out my magnifying glass and made clucking noises.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, land’s sake.”

I pointed to the sawdust. “See that?” I said.

She saw it and started apologizing for never having noticed it before. I developed a sudden thirst and asked her if she thought I might be able to have a glass of water. When she came back with the water, I showed her a test tube half full of the little rascals. She almost spilled the water.

“Oh, dear. And you captured all of them while I was in the house?”

“That’s right. There are some of the ones I missed. See, there they go.”

She looked, tsstssing unhappily as the little devils scurried madly over the clapboard siding. That was always the real convincer. Even the most gullible person could look at the ones in the test tube and still figure his house was safe. There was always the hope in their minds that I had picked up the last of them. And the suspicious ones might point out that I could have brought the test tube along with me. But when they saw those termites actually burrowing into their own house it got them where they lived. No joke, it really did.

We went in the house and I filled out the service agreement and got her to sign it. She didn’t even ask what the job was going to cost until after I had the agreement folded and tucked away. I said that the price would depend upon the extent of infestation, and that our costs were nominal, and that all our work was guaranteed. This didn’t answer her question but she didn’t ask again, so I guess she thought she was satisfied.

Before I could get out of there she asked to see the termites again. I gave her the tube. “Nasty nasty vicious things,” she said, with all the hate in the world in her voice. And wouldn’t you know that she insisted on taking the tube outside and spilling the devils out onto the sidewalk and then dive-bombing the living shit out of them with a can of spray insect killer. “Die die die,” she said, and the poor little critters curled up and did just that.

It was a nuisance, but no real harm done. Flickinger had a five-gallon pickle jug swarming with the little bastards, and it wasn’t that much trouble to get a tubeful of them. A pain in the neck, that’s all.

That night I sat around the motel after I refilled the test tube. Jimmy Joe and Keegan were at a movie I hadn’t wanted to see. Lester went off without saying where, probably to look for queers at the bus station. He liked girls and his suitcase was half full of pictures of naked women, but queers were always easier to find, even in the fifth largest city in Indiana, which is where we happened to be just then. You could jump off the top of the tallest building in the fifth largest city in Indiana without doing much more than spraining your ankle, but for our crew this was considered a pretty big city. We worked towns you honestly wouldn’t believe. We went all through Illinois and Indiana, and sometimes the towns were so small that Lester had to find himself the one queer in the town, or what you might call the town’s faggot in residence. But he always seemed to connect.

The reason I could tolerate old Lester was that he had a reasonable attitude about what he did. He didn’t run on and on about it and he didn’t bug you with a lot of details you’d be a lot happier not knowing, but at the same time he wasn’t one of those nerds who did it on the sly, like my old roommate Haskell who tried to pretend his cock and his hand had never even been introduced to one another, for Pete’s sake. If you asked him a question he’d answer it, but if you left it alone he’d keep quiet. This made him relatively easy to take.

As far as Lester was concerned there was nothing revolting about going with a queer. The only thing shameful about it was that it would be a lot better and more satisfying with a girl. But he didn’t figure it made him queer to be with a queer. Not that Lester is the first person on earth to ever come up with this line of thought. But it seems to me, if you happen to care, that when two men had sex together they were both queer and it didn’t make a hell of a difference which one was down on his knees. It wasn’t as though Lester was just phoning in his part of the deal. But whether you wanted to consider him queer or not (and if you did it wasn’t a good idea to tell him about it), I got along fine with him.

See, that’s one of the fringe benefits of selling termite extermination service door to door. You become very tolerant of people.

Anyhow, I was less interested in accompanying Lester to the bus station than in seeing the movie with Keegan and Jimmy Joe. There was one other member of the crew, a recently divorced ex-Marine named Solly, who was inclined to have much better luck with women than the rest of us. He was having some of that luck right now in his motel room. And Flickinger, the crew leader, was doing what he always did after sunset. What he did involved a bottle and a glass. He never minded company, but if you were going to sit with him he expected you to drink with him, and even without trying to match him shot for shot I was in big trouble, because if I took a short drink for every three long ones of his I would still be drunk in an hour and sick for the next day and a half. One drink of Gregor’s lousy brandy was all right, but I wasn’t ready to handle anything like a whole night of serious drinking.

Besides, as I discovered the second of the two times I had kept Flick company, he never remembered in the morning just what he had said the night before. He never said anything particularly weird either of the times I was with him, and he behaved the same as he did when he was cold sober — he never took a drink before the sun went down, or passed one up after it did — but the thing of it was that he wouldn’t know one night that he had told you certain stories on an earlier night, and anecdotes that are fairly lively the first time around get a little stale the second time.

And if you tried to tell Flick that you’d heard such and such a story before, he argued with you.

So I didn’t go to Flick’s room, and of course I didn’t go to Solly’s room, and the other three guys were out somewhere, and I didn’t have anything to read, and Flick owned the only car and had let Jimmy Joe and Keegan borrow it, which didn’t really enter into it since I couldn’t drive anyway. Well, I mean I know how, but they get agitated if they catch you driving without a license, and I never got one.

So there was nothing to do and no place to go, and that gave this particular evening a whole lot in common with most of the evenings I’d spent since I left Chicago.

Unless you happened to work on one of those traveling sales crews, you probably don’t know what they’re like. I didn’t have the faintest idea myself until I was actually hired and on the job. The arrangement was simple enough. The crew consisted of five guys anywhere from eighteen on up (well, I lied) and a crew leader. You would be assigned a certain territory, which in our case was eastern Illinois and western Indiana, and within that territory you would go wherever the crew boss decided and stay as long as it was worthwhile. The crew leader took care of all your regular expenses — hotel, meals, car expenses, and so on — and got reimbursed by the company.