Lawrence Block - No Score

For every sale you made, the salesman got twenty-five dollars and the crew leader got fifteen. The crew leader did his own selling too and got to keep the whole forty bucks on his own sales. (Flick’s percentage was officially a secret, but it was one of the first things he told you when he sat drinking with you.)

The point is that if you made a sale you wound up with twenty-five bucks free and clear, since you didn’t have any living expenses at all. If you sold one lousy exterminating job a day, you could salt away better than five hundred dollars a month. And on the other hand if you had a terrible day or a terrible week or even a terrible month, you never had to worry about missing meals or being locked out of your room, because your basic expenses were always taken care of.

I just read through that last paragraph, and it sounds as good now as it did when I first heard it. Because I haven’t mentioned the one thing they didn’t stress, either.

Which is that you go out as a crew for a three month tour, and you don’t collect nickel number one until you finish the tour. It wasn’t hard to figure out why they did it this way. See, the system was based on the idea of five men and a crew boss, which was the best size group from an economic standpoint. And if two or three of those men decided to call it quits while the crew was working off in East Crayfish or Fort Dingbat, the whole crew stopped being a profitable deal for the company. But if a guy had to go back at the end of the hitch to collect his money, that tended to discourage him from quitting.

Of course you would still be entitled to your pay whether you quit or not. But being entitled didn’t mean anybody was going to hand the money to you.

Or, in Flick’s words, “Any of youse quits without the three months are up, you just kissed your dough goodbye. And if I ever catches youse again, you can kiss your ass goodbye, too, because I’ll kick it clear to Wausau County for you.”

I don’t know where the hell Wausau County is.

According to Keegan, who had been working what he called the Bug Game on and off for almost five years, there was another reason why they didn’t pay you until your shift was done. They had to confirm the signatures. Otherwise the salesmen could just write up a couple of phony orders every day, knock down a couple of hundred dollars a week, and spend all their time watching television.

“And there are some that would do just that,” he told me, with a wink. “You wouldn’t believe it in a fine upstanding business like this one, Chip my lad, but there are hordes of dishonest people in this world.”

I believed it.

Not that I had ever had any grave doubts on that score. But in the time I spent showing poor widow ladies my little plastic tube full of termites, I learned more about how people could be crooked without going to jail than I ever knew existed. One thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was that my parents must have been real hardcore criminals. Up until then I always figured that they couldn’t have been so bad if they went all their lives without getting sent to jail, but now I saw that I had been looking at it the wrong way around. If they had actually gotten themselves to a point where it looked as though they just might have to go to jail, then they were obviously a pretty criminal pair, old Mom and Dad, because you can be crooked enough to pull corks out of wine bottles with your toes and never see a cop except to say hello to, or fix a traffic ticket.

I already knew that nobody seemed to pay any attention to the law, or at least not in the way the law had in mind. In Chicago, for instance, you couldn’t do commercial street photography, and even if you did you couldn’t pass out handbills that way, because that constitutes an invitation to litter and means you’re creating a nuisance. All of which meant that Gregor gave the patrolman on his beat ten dollars a week and never heard any more about it.

(I had always known things like this went on, but I thought, you know, that it was strictly Big Time Criminals who got involved in them. Not some plodding clod like Gregor, for Pete’s sake. And I knew some cops took graft, and how it’s a big temptation and all, but to take ten dollars? A rotten ten dollars from a simp like Gregor?)

Well, this happens in more places than Chicago. In every city or town our crew went to, there was a man Flickinger called the Fixer. The Fixer might be somebody in the police department or sheriff’s office, or it might be a politician, or it might be some lawyer or businessman who was in good with the local government. And whoever the particular fixer might be, Flick would tell him he was bringing in a door-to-door crew and he wanted to have all the red tape handled in advance, like the permits or licenses or whatever was needed, and without the bother of filling out a lot of forms. And then Flick would slip the Fixer an envelope, and the Fixer would talk to whoever had to be talked to, and he’d keep part of what was in the envelope and pass on the rest, and none of us would have to worry about any aggravation from the police. And I don’t mean just that they wouldn’t give us a hard time about not having licenses. Besides that, there was always the fact that a certain number of non-customers would call the cops and complain about us for one reason or another. But the word would be out, and when those calls came in the cop who answered the phone would say Yeah and Sure, ma’am and listen while all the information came over the wire and into his ear, but he wouldn’t bother writing any of it down, and we would never even hear about it, unless maybe someone would call Flick privately and ask him to for Christ’s sake ask his boys to be a little more diplomatic in their dealings with the natives.

Don’t ask how much was in the envelope. One of the reasons Flick got that fifteen dollars a sale extra was that he knew what it would take to fix each particular fixer.

I went out into the hall and got a Coke out of the machine. I was leaning against the wall drinking it when Solly came out of his room with a plastic pitcher. He carried it to the ice machine and filled it up.

I said, “Heavy night?”

“All she wants to do is drink and screw. I wouldn’t mind, only she drinks better’n she screws.”

“Did you ask her if she’s got a friend?”

“If she had a friend, I’d take the friend and boot this one out on her hinder. She’s a pig. You, Chip, you got the right idea.”

“I do?”

“Goddamn right.”

He seemed to be more than a little looped. I said, “What’s the right idea? Coca-Cola?”

“Not Coca-fuckin’-Cola. It’s bad for your teeth, you know that?”

“Not if you use a regular bottle opener.”

“Huh?” He blinked. “Smart ass. But you got the right idea. The girls I see you out with.”

“Oh.”

“Whattaya mean, oh? ” Solly became very forceful when he drank. Not belligerent or nasty, just emphatic. “Decent girls, pretty girls. And I never see you with the same girl twice. Smart. The right idea.”

He weaved away and plunged back to his room, and woman while I tried to think of an answer. Not that it was worth the trouble. The girls he had seen me out with were nice decent girls, all right. And pretty girls. And I guess I was getting a little better at knowing what to say to them and how to make time with them, because these weren’t girls that anybody introduced me to, and they weren’t girls who went out looking to get picked up. They were ordinary run-of-the-mill nice small-town girls that I would meet during the job or at a restaurant and that I would take to a movie and out for coffee or something like that.

If you can convince someone to sign a piece of paper agreeing to let Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc. rid his house of termites and dendivorous vermin (that’s what it said on the paper they signed, and you can look it up in your Funk and Wagnall’s) for whatever fee DTE, Inc. wanted to charge, if you can do all that, you really ought to be able to convince some small-town girl to go to a movie with you.