Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“Letters like that,” Sylvia said, “which shouldn’t take you more than two days. Then you get your forty dollars and our sincerest promises that we won’t leak a word to the Government about your little insurance embezzlement. Is it a deal?”

David had nineteen more weeks to go on his friend’s unemployment insurance, which came to — after he’d subtracted the biweekly hundred dollars he sent to Paris — around two thousand dollars, tax free and clear. He really had no choice but to go along with them, so he said he agreed, though reluctantly, he wanted them to understand, and promised he’d be at their house for work bright and early the next day.

“Listen,” Sylvia said sharply as she unlocked the door, “bright and early it better be. Or around nine a.m. tomorrow, the U.S. Government gets an anonymous tip concerning one David O. Knopps, you know what I mean?”

David returned to their home the next morning and got right down to writing the letters. The Peartrees already had a long list of the names and addresses of the companies he was to write to, so what he had to do was think up something wrong with the company’s product, begin the letter with a brief, courteous description of what the difficulty was, mention that she (Mrs. O’Connell) had never written a letter like this before, make no monetary demands or threats about possible law suits but just say that she wanted to “bring this oversight to the attention of your organization, as I’m quite sure you’d want me to do.” Then he was to sign her best wishes and name, and in a postscript, assure the company that “although my five daughters and I are slightly less confident of your product these days, we bear no grudges against you, realize that big institutions as well as small individuals can make mistakes, and that we’ve no plans to stop using your product in the future.”

Working an eight-to-five shift, it took David three days to complete these letters, all typed on personally engraved stationery, with Mrs. O’Connell’s name and the Peartrees’ address, that Georgie had a printer friend run off. The first letter, to a big soap company in Chicago, took him more than two hours to compose and type. The letter suggested that one of its employees—“perhaps an anarchist or somebody, though with jobs being as hard to get now as they are, I’m hardly the one to place a person’s work in jeopardy — had substituted sand for soap powder in your jumbo-size box of Flashy which, if you must know, ruined my almost-new washing machine and an estimated value of $296 worth of clothes.”

After the first few letters, he became more adept at grinding out these lies and was able to knock off a new one every fifteen minutes. One went to the president of the country’s largest canned-soup company: “Unbelievable as this may sound, sir — and because of its importance, I’m directing this letter to you — the bottom half of a white mouse was found in a can of your cream-of-chicken soup, which, when dumped into the pot, gave my aging mother such a fright that she’s been under heavy sedation ever since.” Another letter went to a chocolate company in Georgia that, in its magazine ads, prided, itself on its cleanliness: “You can imagine our shock, gentlemen, when we discovered, after removing the wrapper of our family’s favorite candy for more than thirty years, that your milk-chocolate bar had teeth marks in it and a tiny end square bitten off.” And about a hundred other letters, all quite civil and somewhat squeamish, all initially self-critical for even thinking of writing this giant reputable company in the first place, all very crafty and subtle, David thought, in getting his main message across: that in one ugly or harmful way or another, the product had caused considerable psychic or physical damage and Mrs. O’Connell wanted some kind of indemnification.

When the letters had been read, edited and approved by the Peartrees, and a number of them retyped by David, they thanked him for a job well done, gave him his wages and a ten dollar bonus for the quick efficient way he had handled his chores and, like his closest uncle and aunt always did, waved goodbye to him from their front steps as his car pulled away. He drove home, merrily humming a peppy tune along with the car radio and convinced that he’d done the only right thing for himself in going along with their scheme. Now, with a clear mind and seventy extra dollars, he could resume collecting his friend’s unemployment checks without fear of being caught, with that money complete his master’s thesis on Henry James, whose work he disliked but at least understood, and begin applying to English departments of the better universities for a teaching assistantship as he went on for his Ph.D. He had a good life ahead of him — the academic life, which was the only one he could contend with and still be financially secure.

A month later, Sylvia called, asking in the most gentle of motherly voices if he’d care to drop by one afternoon that week for homemade peanut-butter cookies and tea. When he refused, saying how much he appreciated the offer but was too tied down in completing his thesis to even go out for the more essential groceries, she said “Lookit, you jerk. You drag that fat butt of yours right over here, or my next call’s going to be to the state unemployment commissioner himself.”

“Call him,” David said. “And the head of the F.B.I., while you’re at it. But remember; Whatever you have on me goes double for you and Georgie-boy with your mail scheme.”

“What mail scheme? That was your scheme, Davy, if you don’t know it by now. We got two God-fearing respectable witnesses, me and Mr. Peartree, who’ll swear under oath that you threatened us with force to use our home to accept your goodies from all those companies and then to even buy them from you, which is why they’re in our house. Those were your signatures, your words that went into those letters, because we sure don’t have the brains and education for that kind of prose. You couldn’t pin a thing on us without going to prison for twenty years yourself, which doesn’t even account for how much time you’d get for your unemployment insurance theft. So, how about it? You going to take down our new address and zip the hell out here, or do I make my next call to that state commissioner, police or F.B.I.?”

The Peartrees lived in a much better neighborhood now, David observed as he drove along their street. And entering their home, Sylvia bowing him in with a wily grin as if she never had any doubts about him rushing over, he was surprised by the number of boxes and cartons in the living room of so many of the products he’d written about in his letters for them. Flour, sugar, fruit juice, canned soup, cellophane tape that wouldn’t stick, alkalizers that wouldn’t fizz, ballpoint pens that leaked onto eighty-dollar blouses with the first stroke, linens that tore apart in the first wash — enough food staples and home supplies to keep them going for a good year, as Sylvia had said.

“But no money to speak of, those misers,” she said after conducting a tour of the four other rooms, each of them almost furnitureless but with enough boxes and cartons of linens and food and cleaning products to make them look like the storage room of a small neighborhood grocery store.

Though what we got we owe all to you,” Georgie said. “Some smart boy you are, Davy, And my Sylvia’s some great judge of people, in choosing you.”

David told them to stop buttering him up with such ridiculous bull jive and level with him straight off why they summoned him here.

“So, feeling a bit ballsier than before, eh?” Sylvia said. “Okay. We’ve another deal you might be interested in.” When he flapped his hands at her to forget it, she said “Only one more; we’re not gluttons. Now take a load off your feet and let me speak.” While Georgie prepared him a Scotch sour, Sylvia explained that with all this food around, they still hadn’t a good stove to cook it on or even a decent bed to put their new linens on, so all they were asking of him was to steal the day’s receipts of a movie theater they had in mind, which would be enough money to buy the big-ticket items they need and keep them going for a while.