Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“I could give you some money,” I told her. “I could give you five hundred. Actually, I have two thousand dollars I could give you if you wanted.” I could steal the missing six hundred from the cash box tomorrow, if necessary. Or give her part of my paycheck.

I did not care about the money. I never cared about the money, in fact. It was just fun to have it for a while.

She laughed. But it was not her regular laugh.

“I wasn’t asking you for money, Bobby. I was just telling you. To talk about it. I am in a little trouble. A real bit of trouble.”

She pulled on her fingers that way she sometimes did.

I wished I could tell her what I had seen the night before. I could help her solve the problem as well as Jim, I figured. Better. He thought you needed to learn from your mistakes. He would do that to me when we were growing up. “Consequences suck, Bobby,” he would say. I had been thinking up a plan. If Lisa and I went back to Canada I would get my old job at the gas station back. We might rent an apartment. If the police were involved they couldn’t get her in Canada. Or whoever it was that was after her. Calgary is a long way from Texas.

“If you were ever, like, if you had broken the law or something, anything like that, I would want to help you,” I said. “Any kind of help, I mean. Not just money.”

Then her mood seemed to change.

She laughed again. But this time it was such a happy, kind laugh that it made me realize she hadn’t laughed that way in weeks.

I was not sure what to say next.

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

Two gigantic light fixtures made of glass butterflies turned very slowly in the ceiling. They sent spots of every color across the room and the long, pale Arabian carpets.

“Don’t take it so hard, Bobby. Don’t worry so much.” I must have looked crestfallen. “Come over here to kiss me,” Lisa said. “Come give me one of those Bobby kisses.”

We kissed while I stood and she sat on the edge of Mr. Popper’s enormous metal desk with her knees bent around me, in her legs as I was, and her arms dangling like free tree limbs over my shoulders and neck and arms and my back.

I t was not a complicated theft. Lisa wasn’t why I stole the money. It was just there. I saw the ten thousand dollars on the bookkeeper’s desk, so I placed five thousand dollars in each of my shoes. The shoes were too big, which helped. Jim had bought them for me that first day I landed, the day with Lisa and the limousine, and I had wanted big ones. I was timid to ask for the correct, smaller size with Lisa looking on. They were my black alligators. It was December 17 and I was standing in my socks in the bookkeeper’s office with ten thousand dollars in my shoes on the floor. I tried pushing my feet in just as they were and it turned out there was no need even to untie the bows. They were that loose. Plus I was wearing silk socks.

With the cash under my feet the shoes actually fit better. I hurried down the back hallway and out into the crowd of customers, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, while also trying to look like it was just ordinary me, on my way out the door to lunch. I couldn’t look back over my shoulder to see if anyone saw me leaving. Then I was outside. I walked through the icy streets of downtown Fort Worth to the bank a few blocks from the store and wired half of the money to my old bank account at Royal Bank in Calgary. It would be safe, there, in Canada. Lisa needed the money, but it was a good idea to put a little aside for myself, too. This was my first bank account and I had had it since I was seven years old. I had opened it for my paper route. For my collections money. Plus that way once I gave Lisa the other half, all the money would be gone, and I didn’t want any of it around. No evidence.

The only tricky part about the stealing was the wiring paperwork. I figured I should save it in case the wire did not go through. Then when I came back to the store I lost my nerve and tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. This was in the executive bathroom right outside the bookkeeper’s office where I had discovered the money. The same bathroom by the stairs to Popper’s office, that we weren’t supposed to use that I always used. When I went back to the bathroom to check on the toilet, perhaps twenty minutes later — thinking I better make sure, because I had been afraid to look under the lid when I flushed it the first time — when I lifted the lid I saw the torn-up paper was still in the bowl. I tore up the wet paper smaller and flushed it again with some toilet paper. The third flush it finally went down. But if someone had found that paper that would have been it.

M r. Popper sat behind his desk and Sheila paced around the room. She nearly tripped over my legs as she walked, and then again over my feet. But she didn’t say anything to me. The bar fridges were on the floor, built into enormous Chinese lacquered cabinets on one wall, so I was on my hands and knees.

I was stocking Mr. Popper’s two bar fridges with Diet Dr Peppers, Tabs, Perrier, and gold-lidded pints of strawberry and coffee Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

Behind Mr. Popper a television was tuned to the news. It was on mute. There was a story about the ice storm that had closed much of the city. This was the big ice storm of 1987 and everyone said it was grisly news for the store because no one would come downtown in the ice, and we were only a week from Christmas. At this time of year we could see five hundred thousand dollars a day on the showroom floor. That was not counting the phones. But the ice storm could kill all of that.

Three salesmen, plus Jim, Dennis, and Popper’s wife, Sheila, were seated at Popper’s desk. Everyone faced Mr. Popper, watching him. No one noticed me. This was a good thing about being sixteen. They did not see me in the same way they saw one another. To encourage them not to think about me I kept my eyes on my stocking. If I seemed interested I would suddenly be less innocent. I endeavored to restock the contents of the refrigerator in the manner of a child who, without knowing how it had happened, found himself playing a boy’s game among the legs, faces, and mysterious conversations of a group of friendly adults. But I also needed to stay in the office for as long as possible so that I could hear this conversation.

As a teenager I was not frightened. Perhaps I was jumpy.

“It wasn’t Lisa,” Jim said. “She reported it.”

“It could have been anyone.”

“She wants to take a polygraph.”

“A polygraph won’t catch an expert fucking prevaricator like that. Don’t fucking kid yourself. They don’t have a polygraph machine strong enough to trip up her kind of prevarication.”

That was Sheila. She loved the word prevaricator. I asked Jim about it once and he said the story was that she had once accused her father of telling a lie and he had told her not to use that word because it was a hateful word—“Two words a Christian won’t use,” he had supposedly said, “hate, and lie”—so Sheila always said prevaricator, prevaricate, and prevarication. Apparently Mr. Popper had tried to switch her to dissimulation because it had a less rednecky ring to it, but no luck. She was always accusing everyone around her of prevaricating. That’s the kind of person she was.

“She’s a cokehead. Everybody knows it. A cokehead will do anything.”

“It might have been a customer. Someone using the bathroom.”

“They would have been with a salesperson. Don’t be ridiculous. A customer is never back in that bathroom alone. Plus who would go into Cindy’s office?”

“If the door was open. With the cash just sitting there.”

“We can check the cameras.”