Craig Smith - Cold Rain

‘Buy two more. I like the work,’ she said, ‘but I’ll like it a lot better once I’m my own boss.’

I did not know Molly had a daughter or that she had been on her own since she was fifteen. It wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing but that moment mattered.

Molly was different from anyone I had ever known.

She was sexy, smart, straightforward, funny, unencumbered with pretensions, and totally self-reliant.

We left the bar for ‘a demo drive’ in my pickup around ten o’clock that evening and didn’t even get out of the parking lot. In the middle of what was starting to look like the inevitable, the rope I used to disengage the clutch on the truck Tubs had sold me got in Molly’s face. She sat up, swinging at the thing and laughing, more curious than irritated. What was a piece of rope doing hanging down from the roof of my cab? Her breasts were glorious and naked, swinging over my lips. The smell of her sex was intoxicating, and I probably should have pitched a story. Anything would have worked, but the truth would take some time. The truth involved some advice a car salesman had given me that I was naturally too proud to heed.

The night was dark. The rain had stopped. My windows were steamed up. Why did I have to tell her about Tubs?

I think to this day I was at a crossroads and didn’t realize it. As it happened, I decided to tell her about my old man, The Bandit of the Wastelands. And that was it. That was the thing we had in common. Molly had an old man just like him! Only hers peeled noses for conceited rich people. We were kindred souls, spir-itual orphans, alone and angry at the world. The rest did not matter. We were a perfect fit.

We never got back to what we thought we wanted that night. We ended up at her house and talked until dawn. The truth is we never stopped talking until Buddy Elder entered our lives. And I never again felt like I was wandering around just killing time until I figured out what I wanted.

‘For the sake of half-a-hand-job between us,’ I said to Walt that evening, ‘we’ve lost our marriages.’

Ever the philologist, Walt answered me: ‘Full hand, David, half-the-job.’

‘Why would he do that? What does Buddy get by ruining our marriages?’

Walt didn’t believe we were innocent victims. I suppose he needed his guilt, but I kept thinking there had to be some way of figuring out what Buddy really wanted. It couldn’t be just spite! Not with the elaborate set-up he had used to nail me.

I tried different theories on. I played the amateur psychologist, muttering Freudian platitudes, but nothing quite held together.

Walt listened politely, but he knew the reason Buddy had come after us. He had no doubt. We tried to sleep with his girlfriend, one of us actually had, apparently, and he paid us back with interest. ‘He hit us where it hurt.’

‘I didn’t sleep with his girlfriend, Walt.’

‘You wanted to.’

He had me there. Walt studied me in his own peculiar way. He knew I was an inveterate liar. He knew I enjoyed summoning up the ridiculous and offering it as gospel. Still, he was reluctant to call me a liar while I was at low ebb. If I wanted to pretend it was only a fantasy that was fine with him. Fantasy, reality, it didn’t matter. Buddy Elder had not authored our misfortunes. We had.

My friend, my lawyer, my wife: they all asked themselves why Denise Conway would write about an affair that did not actually occur. When there was no logical explanation they could only conclude I was lying, as I was known to do from time to time. It occurred to me that their response was exactly what Buddy Elder had anticipated. He had even arranged matters so that Denise’s complaint against me made no sense until the diary exposed her real motive. No one doubted it because Denise had not even wanted to admit the affair when she had filed her complaint.

Had he staggered his attack on me knowing the evidence would have greater effect if it came after the investigation had gathered some momentum? Was the son of a bitch that smart?

Around midnight it hit me, not the reason, the reason still did not make sense, but the method. The method Buddy Elder had employed came from reading Jinx.

He had confirmed that the first story was a lie by introducing a second story. Because the second story discredited the first, nobody doubted its veracity. I had summarized the principle as Larry the Liar’s mantra: Never tell a lie. Always tell two.

Tubs had never subscribed to Larry the Liar’s method, though he recognized that a great many people thought you had to lie to persuade people to do something. He knew the method worked, but he didn’t believe it worked as well as his own. Tubs said truth was its own reward. As a child, like all children, I had imagined he meant the reward would come in the form of feeling good about myself if I said only the truth.

I didn’t understand that Tubs cut and measured by the dollars and cents of a deal. He meant reward in its most literal and immediate sense.

I finally learned what he meant when I went to work with him. The summer I was out of high school, Tubs made me get what he called ‘a real job’ with the city.

It was mowing and grounds keeping and landscape work, long days of sunshine, heavy lifting, and a whole lot of sweat. And it didn’t pay very well. The next summer, Tubs said I could do anything I wanted. I said I wanted to sell cars with him. He just smiled, like he was proud of me, and muttered, ‘Too lazy to work, too nervous to steal. You must be my son after all, Davey!’

He set one condition for my employment. He said he didn’t care what I did off hours, but when I was on the lot or working a deal, even at midnight over a beer, I was never to lie. Absolutely never. I made the promise and I kept it as long as I wandered around in the wastelands, but I sure didn’t think it sounded like fun.

And it wasn’t. For two weeks I kept bouncing into people and losing them. I talked and I shook hands and I smiled a lot. I was a hell of a nice guy and so honest people even complimented me on it, but they never bought anything. They bought from Tubs. They bought from Larry the Liar. They never bought from me. Then one night, before I had landed even a bad deal, trudging off the lot with the rest of the salespeople and thinking landscaping wasn’t such a bad summer job after all, Tubs called me back. He pointed toward the back lot and said, ‘There!’ I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. ‘A man and woman,’ he said and he had the reverent intensity of a fisherman about to get a strike. ‘They think we’re closed.’ I couldn’t see them, but I knew Tubs was a fisher of men, and he knew when the Big Ones came to feed. ‘Davey,’ he said, and took my shoulder in his big hand like a coach about to send a player in, ‘I want you to go up to them and tell them we’re closed for the evening. Give them your business card and tell them to come back tomorrow and you’ll take care of them. And if you say it like a total prick and walk away without another word, I’ll give you ten bucks.’

I was tired and frustrated. It was easy to be rude.

I figured Tubs knew them, and just wanted to piss them off. I didn’t care. It was more fun than being nice. I heard the woman rumbling behind me as I walked away. She had never! And the man yelled loud enough for me to hear, ‘You just lost yourself a sale, young man!’

Tubs ran into them on the way to his car, the perfect accidental meeting. They were so mad they had to tell someone about the rude young salesman they had just encountered. Tubs wanted to know who it was. When they gave him my business card Tubs admitted a hard truth, because he could not tell a lie. The impertinent young salesman was his son, and he was mighty sorry he had brought me up so poorly.