Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“Hell, there ain’t nothing to worry about there. You know I can keep a damn secret. Code de macho. I sure as hell know you can, too.” He laughed. Morgan liked to tell me stories about his wild days in the border towns. They were good stories.

“You in any hurry today, Bobby? Hell, I got some time today. Let’s you and me relax a little bit, what do you say? Hit me again with that bourbon, would you?”

I poured him a cautious finger or two. I wanted him to want more than I was offering him.

“Keep going, keep going, there you go. That’ll do her.”

Well, well, I thought. This might be even easier than I thought. We might even wrap this one up today.

W hen I got home that night, still warm from the sale to Morgan, Wendy announced that she was going to fly down to St. Croix to seek my father’s assistance for us.

“Maybe he can help. You always listen to your dad. We should both go.”

“Wendy, you know how busy we are. If you are so determined, you can go, I guess. But you know I can’t get away. Not to mention that you are crazy to think my dad will be any good. Jim’s right. He’s insane, Wendy.”

“Crazy or not, I believe in your dad,” she said.

“What about the baby?” I said. “What about Claire?” I was frightened to be left alone with that little baby of ours.

“I knew you would say that,” she said. She looked so tired and even disappointed that I wished I had kept my mouth shut. But, really. “I already asked my mother to come watch her, Bobby.”

“I have to work, Wendy. That’s all I was saying. Somebody has to pay our bills.”

“Anyway I already bought the ticket.”

“Maybe it will be like a vacation,” I said. “You could use a vacation. Get a little sun. We could both use a vacation.” I had not meant to say that. I did not want her to think there was any possibility I could go or even consider going.

“It is not a vacation, Bobby. For crying out loud. Can you even hear yourself? Do you listen to what you say? I swear, what is wrong with you sometimes?”

Why don’t you go ahead and tell me? I thought. What’s wrong with me: if I am quiet for a few minutes you will be happy to instruct me.

“I am going to save this family,” she said.

For the past few years our dad had been bouncing around even more than usual. When his last church had failed, in Coral Gables, he had been certified as a minister and a missionary for the Unitarian Church of Palm Beach and Boca Raton. The U.S. Virgin Islands was his first assignment.

“It’s paradise, son,” he told me on the phone. “Grab your big brother and hop on a plane. Bring your scuba gear. You boys will love it.”

“We’re running a business here, Dad,” I said.

I sent a necklace with Wendy that our dad had ordered from us but never paid for. It had various esoteric Masonic insignia enameled on a large plate that went across the collarbone. I knew the necklace would roll on the neck and that plate would always wind up on the bottom. I could already hear my father complaining about it. But there was no other way to make the piece.

“Try to get the money,” I said when I gave it to her. “It’s just my cost.”

Before she even checked into her hotel she rented a car at the airport and drove out to his church. He had not known she was coming that week. I had promised her I would call and warn him, but it stayed on my to-do list until after she was already back. I meant to call. But with Wendy out of town the Polack kept me on the run.

She sat in a church pew with the Rastafarians. During Dad’s service the tall, bony man next to her stood in his pew, pulled down his sweatpants, and began to urinate into the aisle. He apologized to her.

“It is because of the Pope, ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He took a very nice photograph of her, with her camera, standing and smiling with the open door of the church behind her and orange and purple bougainvillea beyond. It was a pleasant little chapel, from what I could see.

After my father finished his sermon, while the brass collection plate was going around, the Rastafarian invited Wendy to dinner. He was only being polite, she said. He was not making a pass.

“You can come and visit us,” he said. “You don’t have to stay for the meal. We have a nice farm. In the hills.

“I have to go now,” he told her then. “I have to wash my hands.”

When she met with my dad in his little trailer next to the church he wanted to do a reading on her.

“I have been watching him astrally,” he told her. “He’s fucking up. He has karma to work out with you. There may have to be a divorce.”

She wept while he put her on the plane. “Don’t give up,” he said. “Fate!” he said, and waved from the bottom of the stairs. She took a picture of him waving up to her. He looked much better than the last time I had seen him. His color had improved and I saw he had added muscle tone in his face. She also showed me pictures of him on the beach, smoking his pipe, with the shallow Caribbean Sea behind him and storm clouds in the sky.

A couple of weeks after she was back he phoned me. Our 800 lines didn’t cover the Virgin Islands, so he called collect.

“She just missed the hurricane. It’s hurricane season down here.”

A few days after she was back, Hurricane Boris struck.

“I straightened things out for you, son,” he said. “Enough of this screwing around. You want to wind up like your old man?”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said. I didn’t want to say anything that might start a real conversation.

“My telepathy saw it coming. We got her out of here pronto. I felt the vibrations a week before it hit. We spent nine days inside playing ping-pong,” he said. “Those niggers can play some ping-pong.”

“Dad, please don’t use that expression,” I said.

“Oh, go screw yourself,” he said, and laughed. “Those niggers are my parishioners. That’s my flock, Bobby. We just about went crazy. Smoking dope, eating jerk chicken, and playing ping-pong. Holy snapping bald-headed eagles.”

When I got off the phone I stood, slid open the pocket door, and leaned into Jim’s office. There were no customers at his desk. He was picking baguettes for a custom job. It was one of his better designs, a Judith Ripka knockoff, a chrysoberyl ring in pink and white gold with the diamond baguettes on one side only. It looked a bit like a headless peacock with his tail fanned off to the side. But quite nice.

“I just talked to Dad,” I said. “He doesn’t sound bad. He sounds better.”

“He’s not coming to town, is he?”

“No, he’s still down in the Virgin Islands,” I said. “But I think it’s doing him some good. He sounded like his old self.”

“Did he ask you for money?”

“No, I’m serious. He really sounds like himself. Like the old Dad.”

“I’ve fallen for that one too many times, Bobby. Believe me. It’s an old trick of his. Next time he calls he will ask you for money. Speaking of which, have you looked at the gray account lately?” The gray account was our estate-buy account, another one of Granddad’s upside-down accounts. “We are down to a hundred grand in there. I ran an inventory and we only have three hundred at cost. That leaves us almost two hundred thousand short. We have to take better care of that account. I don’t want to have to call Granddad. He’s already asking about this quarter’s check.”

I sat back down at my desk and drew a picture of a bird on my desk pad. I put a little wave beneath it so it might be a seagull. The phone was ringing. No one on my sales floor was answering it. How much effort does it take to pick up the phone?

B efore I left I would lie in bed at night in our dark bedroom and watch the red dots from my alarm clock reflected in the brass light fixture on the ceiling. I came home after ten, after eleven, my blood thin with the long day and night, and quietly, as smoothly as I could, slid my uncomfortable body beneath our covers. Next to me in the bed our baby daughter’s head and small curls rested in a sweaty ring. Their breathing was shallow with sleep. I tried not to move. I kept my arms at my sides. But there was no point in closing my eyes. So I watched the red dots from the alarm clock on the brass chandelier above the foot of the bed. In the silence with the two of them barely breathing, like air among green leaves on their twigs, I could still hear the canned music that we piped in all day throughout the store. I listened for it and that listening in bed made me forlorn, self-pitying, and resentful.