Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“I don’t want you to go,” I said into her folded legs. She scratched at my head very lightly with her fingertips. “I want to stay with you.”

In the morning, when I woke up in her bed, with her blue comforter twisted around me, she was gone. I looked at her alarm clock. It was almost nine-thirty. Now Jim would want to know why I was late.

T he lie detector tests began two days later, on December 23, so I stayed home sick with a stomachache.

“I think I need to go to the hospital,” I said. “I think it’s my appendix.”

“You can’t really take today off, Bobby,” Jim said. “I mean, unless you’re dying. It’s the biggest day of the year. Christmas Eve is nothing like the day before Christmas Eve. This is it. This is the money day. Plus the polygraphs. That would look funny. They are doing them all day long. Don’t you have an appointment? Did you sign the sign-up sheet? Everybody has to sign the sign-up sheet.”

Dennis had given me the sign-up sheet with a look like he was passing a collection plate at church. I scribbled two mostly unrecognizable words that resembled the Watchman’s name, perhaps, a bit, and passed it on.

“I’m on there,” I said. “I’m interviewing tomorrow. You could sign up for today or tomorrow. I am really sick, here, Jim. I feel like my appendix is going to burst or something. I am nauseated and I have this sharp pain in my side.”

“Uh-huh. Okay,” he said. “I am not making any excuses for you. This is the one day. This is the big day and you’re blowing it. It’s your call.”

He looked at me with that look your mother gives you when she knows you are pretending to be sick.

“Better call an ambulance if it gets any worse,” he said, and plugged in the phone by my bed. “Go ahead. Pull a James Clark. Pull a Dad on me. Don’t blame me.”

I had to stay in bed because Lily was in and out of the house all day but I didn’t want to get out of bed anyway. I was trying not to think about Lisa. I smoked pot and reread Autobiography of a Yogi . I called Wendy but no one answered the phone. I counted my other, separate stash of hundreds and twenties in the closet, and looked over the Christmas gifts I had stolen for people I loved. I looked at the tourmaline-and-ivory ring I had put aside for Lisa. I couldn’t give her any of her gifts now. It would be okay for Wendy, I thought. But you couldn’t size it. And Wendy’s fingers were fatter than Lisa’s.

Jim was home after midnight. He was drunk and excited. He woke me up.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said. “The way you were acting I half thought it was you. I owe you an apology. How’s your stomach? Is it any better? Sorry I woke you up. I just thought you would want to know. You were right. It was Rita. I can’t believe it. They did a few polygraphs and Rita was up early on the list and they caught her. They postponed the rest of the polygraphs until after Christmas so we can focus this last twenty-four hours.”

He was sniffling a lot.

“Man, what a day I had. Fadeen called and bought that seventeen-carat. Six hundred grand. I already had it mounted and shipped. That’s a thirty-thousand-dollar commission. One day. Ronnie and I have been out drinking Dom. He gave me that nephrite hippopotamus lighter, too. Just as a bonus. We rented a limousine and hit some Dallas bars.” I hadn’t seen him drunk very often. Maybe never before. “The Polack went, too. I should have asked Lisa, I guess. But she didn’t show up for work. Two days in a row, now. Everybody was real suspicious about that until they caught Rita. I don’t know where the hell she is. I guess I better call her.”

I started to say something. I half sat up in the bed.

“Shhh,” he said, looking back over his shoulder into the dark bedroom and the open hallway beyond.

“Lily’s sleeping. We sure don’t want to wake that up. Okay, go on back to sleep, buddy. I love you. Sorry again. Take the day off again tomorrow if you want. Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, it’s not such a big day. Today was the day. But you needed the rest. Hell, it’s Christmas, you’ve earned it. I love you, Bobby.”

We didn’t normally say that, because we were brothers. I knew he was only drunk but I didn’t care.

“No, wake me up,” I said. The relief of being innocent was hitting me like two lungfuls of crank. “I want to be there. I want to end the season with you and Mr. Popper and everybody. Don’t let me sleep in.”

A ll the highways were closed. There were semis and cars spilled around the city, on the edges of roads at odd angles, like someone had sprayed a deck of cards over I-30 and I-35. The big ice storm had broken very early that morning, Christmas Eve, but before we opened the doors the customers were stretched for more than half a mile down Houston Street.

Because of taking the back roads Jim and I were in late, at almost eight o’clock, and as we drove into the parking garage and witnessed it he said, “What the hell is going on, it’s like a hockey game,” before we understood that the line out front was for us, for the store. We made the news that day. But really as part of another, bigger headline, which I will now explain.

It was the biggest Christmas Eve the store had ever seen, and it was the biggest Christmas Eve I would ever see. The customers were packed in like kids at a concert. You could not walk through the showroom. If there had been a fire, hundreds of people would have died. The rent-a-cops didn’t like it but Mr. Popper was back there getting them drunk. He was getting everyone drunk, putting champagne, Baileys Irish Cream, and Sheila’s Texas Hill Country secret recipe of ninety-proof eggnog into the hands of anyone who would take a glass. “I don’t understand how it doesn’t curdle,” people would say after taking a sip. But they drank it down. There was a line of salespeople waiting to get into the diamond room with their best crows waiting on the other side. Jim said afterward that Mr. Popper took in two million in seven hours. It was possible. These people were like women on the seventy-percent-off blue-tag day at Neiman’s Last Call. But they were buying fine jewelry.

Around the middle of the afternoon Mr. Popper disappeared. That was unusual on Christmas Eve. Normally that was the one day of the year he would spend the whole day out on the floor with us, Jim said. About an hour later the crowd began to water down. There were drunks among the customers and the Watchman was passed out in his chair at his desk. Sheila was nowhere to be found, probably doing a last-minute shopping run herself. The rent-a-cops were blinking their eyes. One of them was twirling his leather-billed hat like a top on the banks of video monitors. They were waiting for their Christmas bonuses. Soon Popper would be down with the envelopes.

By shortly after five we had chased out our last panicky I-can’t-believe-it’s-Christmas-Eve-already husband, and locked the big double plate-glass-and-brass doors, and yet there was no Mr. Popper. People needed to get to their own families. But not without those December commission checks and the Christmas bonuses. We knew Cindy had been calculating and printing them all day yesterday and today. Mr. Popper signed them and then sealed them in an envelope, each with its bonus, which was secret and in cash. We were not allowed to discuss our bonuses. But I knew Jim was expecting fifteen grand or better.

With all of us gathered idly around the showcases and wandering in and out of the back-of-the-house, at last Jim said, “I’ll go see what’s up,” assuming Popper was up in his office, but then Mr. Popper appeared at the front door. Outside the front door, I mean. We saw him through the glass. He had his keys in his hands and he opened the door. Then he stopped and opened the lock on the other door, the one we often did not bother to open, so that both doors could swing wide. He came into the middle of the showroom floor among the showcases. He was ringed with policemen and more serious-looking strangers, and then I knew with clarity what would happen next. They had lied to Jim about Rita to lure me back into the store. Or it might be, even, that Jim had lied. But no, that couldn’t be. They had tricked him because we were brothers and now I was caught. Lisa was right. She knew not to come back. Why hadn’t I listened to her? I thought I was so fucking clever. I outsmarted everybody. Now they would arrest me in front of everyone and take me to prison in cuffs. The doors were locked and there was no place to escape to. The salespeople and the rent-a-cops and the phone sales women and the Watchman and the other back-of-the-house guys and the Wizard and the gift-wrappers and the black-fingered jewelers in their aprons and the beautiful teenage hostesses and Jim all surged softly toward Popper, expecting. They didn’t understand what was about to happen. They could never feel sorry for me, not on Christmas Eve. It was like a pack. I tried to drift to the back. But they were thick around me. I did not know where to run. My eyes were starting to fill with tears. And Popper spoke.