Lawrence Block - No Score

The average apple knocker is in his twenties and grew up in the country and quit school young and keeps his mouth shut and likes to get in a fight when he’s had a couple of drinks. The average apple knocker is a guy, and so is the unaverage apple knocker. There were no girls up in those trees or out in those barns or under those canvas ceilings.

There was always the farmer’s daughter, but she was a long ways away from what she was like in the jokes. Generally she was home on vacation from college, and she would no sooner go off with a picker than she’d pick her nose in church. Her main object was to get pinned to a fraternity boy and live in big city where he could get rich sitting at a desk.

Now and then I would manage to meet a girl. Actually a picker could make out pretty well if he happened to be good at it. In any given area there would be certain taverns and bowling alleys that all the pickers would congregate at when they were in the neighborhood. The taverns generally had either a combo or a jukebox primed with country music. The bowling alleys had balls and pins. The pickers would holler and stomp and get drunk and fight, and occasionally someone would get cut up. You wouldn’t believe how casual some of these guys would be about this. A guy might have a scar from his neck to his navel, and if you asked about it he would say, “Oh, my buddy over there cut me a touch when we were drinking.” And they would still be buddies and joke about it, and eventually they would have another fight and the knives would come out again.

Girls would come to the taverns, and especially to the bowling alleys — I guess it was more respectable for a girl to go to a bowling alley, although you never saw any of them actually go so far as to bowl. And the girls who came to these places were there to get picked up by the pickers, and they knew that pickers were only interested in One Thing, and it wasn’t discussions of the Great Books Of The Western World. So any girl who went with a picker was just about putting it in writing that she was willing to put out. That saved a lot of time and wasted effort on both sides, and in a business where you were never in one place very long, it made things simpler all around.

The thing was that you had to be a certain type of person to make out under those conditions. The make-out type, you might say. And it was a type that I obviously wasn’t. The guys who were best as it were basically pretty stupid guys who could carry on a conversation all night long without saying anything worth hearing. But they never had to stop and think about anything. Instead they had this loose easy style that I guess made it easy for a girl to relax or something. Whatever it was, I just didn’t have it. Whenever I tried to make out at taverns, I would get involved in a conversation with a girl, and she would seem interested, and then she would say she had to go to the ladies’ room. And I’d see her five minutes later going home with some other picker.

The girls I dated were girls you could talk to and girls you could have a pleasant evening with. One of them was on vacation from Fredonia State Teachers College, where she was having an awful time with required science courses: she just couldn’t seem to get the hang of what they were all about. Another one wanted to talk about liberal religious movements. She didn’t believe in God anymore but she was afraid she wouldn’t have anything to do on Sunday mornings. She sure won’t want to spend them in bed unless she changes a lot, because by the time I got rid of her I needed treatment for frostbite.

There were girls I didn’t get to first base with, and there were girls I did get to first base with. And some I got to second base with, and one or two who let me get all the way to third. More than one or two, maybe. But one way or another they all turned in superb clutch pitching, and no matter how many hits I got, the inning would end in a scoreless tie, with my men stranded all over the bases.

I wanted to take my bat and balls and go home.

The last apples I picked were in a small Early Macintosh orchard in Dutchess County, New York. That’s about sixty or seventy miles from New York City. When we finished picking those trees, I all of a sudden knew that I didn’t want to pick another apple for a very long time, or anything else. The high season was just coming on, and it was the one time of the year when a fruit picker can actually make decent money, but I was sick of it and ready for something else. I was just done and that was all.

I had around thirty dollars and two changes of clothes including one pair of heavy boots and a pair of regular shoes. I also had a whole load of money coming to me from the termite sales. I was dumb enough to send them a couple of wires asking them to send me the dough. Of course I never heard from them.

One of two things happened: (a) Flickinger managed to bribe his way out of the mess, in which case he certainly wouldn’t tell the office what had happened, so they would treat me like any deserter, or (b) they were all rotting in jail, and nobody ever so much as turned those signed orders in, and there was no money coming to me.

Either way, I had thirty dollars. Which means I had made a clear profit of a dollar a month since I left Upper Valley. I had a lot of vocational experience, none of which would get me a job with Opportunity For Advancement. And my cherry, like the winter apples, was still on the tree.

That’s how I spent the summer. The more I think of it, the more I figure the movies have the right idea. Start with a long shot of a kid in muddy shoes and a hunter’s jacket on a dusty Indiana road, and cut to a shot of the same kid finishing a hard day’s work as a wiper in a car wash in Upstate New York. In a town which I won’t name, because I’m still here now, writing this, and may be here forever.

It was in this very town that I met Francine.

Remember Francine?

To tell you the absolute truth, I’m having a little trouble remembering her myself. Good old Burger told me it was always a good idea to start off with something dramatic to hook the reader, and then go back and fill in the background and work up to it, but I have a feeling that would have been a better idea if I were someone who knew something about writing a book. If I were starting over again, I would just start at the beginning and go straight through to the end and the hell with hooking your attention and riveting your eye to the page. Either you’re with me or you’re not. But in case you forgot about Francine, and how things were going when I broke off to start backing and filling, it went like this:

And paused, because it seemed that a herd of elephants was stampeding up the staircase and down the hall, and voices were shouting, and Francine was roaring at me, begging me to do it, to stick it in, and I lay there, paralyzed, and the door to my room exploded inward, and a man the size of a mountain charged inside. He had a hand the size of a leg of lamb, and in that hand he had a gun the size of a cannon.

“You son of a bitch!” he bellowed.

And pointed the gun at me, and pulled the trigger.

The gun jammed

Well, what did you expect?

Blood?

Look, a guy stuck a gun in my face and pulled the trigger. Now if the gun didn’t jam then he would have blown my head off and you would be reading something else because I wouldn’t be around to write this.

I mean, I can just hear you clucking like a chicken and saying, “Now how in the hell is he going to get out of this one?” And then on the last page it said The gun jammed and you said, “Oh, shit, the gun jammed , what a cornball way to save him.”