Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“I want to, boss. I would love to. But it was the only way they would hire me. If I start immediately. They need me for Christmas is the thing. They have to make money, too. Plus it’s when I’ll make my best commissions. I owe it to them. Since they offered me the job, after all. I mean, ethically speaking. Fair is fair.”

•

S he’s having a party. She wants you to come. Don’t ask me why.”

“She asked you to tell me that she wants me to come to her party,” I said. “She doesn’t want to ask me herself.”

“I don’t know. She just said to tell you she was having a party and she said you could come if you want.”

“That I could come if I want,” I said. “Not that she wants me to come.”

“I didn’t have a fucking tape recorder with me, Bobby,” Sylvia said. “I don’t know. The facts are she is having a party and you are invited.”

T here had been snow. I drove carefully because these Texans did not know how to drive in the weather. But I was in a hurry. I did a few bumps from the bottle. I did not even want the coke. But it was best if I did some. I wanted to be charming and robust. Convincing. Also I wanted to be able to drink a lot, securely, if I needed to.

When I got to the party her apartment was empty. Someone had lied to me or I had the date wrong, or I had assumed it was at her apartment but it was at a restaurant or a hotel, and Sylvia had told me and I had not heard her or she had forgotten to tell me, or she had failed to tell me deliberately. Sylvia. With her crabs. I never liked her.

I saw there were open bottles around the apartment like from a party.

Then I heard a noise. It came from the hallway.

In the bathroom on the floor was her boyfriend. He had an arm resting on the bowl of the toilet. Or rather he was sitting next to the toilet and using it to prop himself up. He had his elbow oddly over the top of the bowl. He had a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap on. In his other hand he had a wad of bills. He looked up.

“Here,” he said. “This belongs to you.”

He threw the money at me. But it fluttered up into the air, like tossed tissue paper or moths, and drifted down around us.

“Are you hurt?” I said. “Should I call an ambulance? Where’s Lisa?”

He had blood on his sleeves and the front of his shirt. But his hands were clean.

“She’s downstairs,” he said.

He was drunk.

“Downstairs. Waiting on you.” He laughed. “Them Indians,” he said. “Fucking cowboys and Indians.”

When I went downstairs I saw blood on the graveled steps. I had not noticed it coming up. He must have been drunk and fallen down the iced stairs. And climbed back up again. Or maybe they had carried him up and that was what cleared out the party. The two of them had a fight. Over drugs, and therefore the money in his hands. He was her connection, too, and she was always owing him money.

Lisa was not in the parking lot and her car was not there, so I supposed she had left. I checked around back. Then I saw her. She was folded into the Dumpster like she had been climbing into it and then, when she got to her middle, her hips, became discouraged and decided to lie there, bent over in half. I pulled her out. She did not look dead to me. I knew I should perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her but the bottom parts of her face were not available. Her right eye, no, not her right eye, her left eye was out of its socket. Under her hair I could see a large part of her bruised brain. I tried to fold her arms around my shoulders. To lift her up, to carry her. But the whole thing was limp and heavy. We fell, and then we were sitting on the concrete and she was in my lap. Across my legs. I managed to rest her face on myself, by my chin and the knot of my tie. “She is pregnant,” I said. You better hurry. Come on, Lisa, let’s get going. Time to go, now. Up. She was always quick about getting ready. She was considerate that way. She was even quick in the bathroom. I was sitting there like that with my back against the cold metal of the blue and yellow Dumpster and my suited legs out in front of me when the prowlers arrived.

T o look out on that sales floor of ours, customers like a sea, my salespeople’s heads bobbing among them, credit cards in the air, wrapped packages, Wayne Newton’s Christmas album on the CD player, a row of ten clients, fifteen clients, more, standing to see me, lined up outside my office door, one always at my desk, one leaves and as he opens the door the next rushes in, all men, all with their wallets in their hands, their wives’ presents already waiting like children in toy boats in my safe, beaming, steamed and shining, the preprinted receipts sitting beneath the little silk boxes. Seventeen thousand, twenty thousand, forty-five thousand, seventy thousand. Due. Receivable.

With that many people in the store I often looked up and saw Lisa among them. You know how that works, when you look up and you see someone you know, because the environment is familiar and you might expect them, there.

•

J im leaned in my office door.

“Bobby, it’s time to lock up.”

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll close it down.”

I didn’t lift my eyes to see how he might be looking at me. I didn’t want to see his expression.

When he left I watched him walk out the door. Then I stood and looked around at my office. On the wall next to my desk was a picture of our father. Beside it was a framed-and-glass-protected carpet we bought in Tibet, from a man with no fingers: a carpet covered with semiprecious and several precious jewels, depicting a white elephant with a ruby-crowned prince on her back. I remembered when Dad’s picture was resting there, on the floor, where I was going to hang it. That was when we expanded the store, opened the new side, and put in our own private offices. I made sure the offices were separated only by a sliding pocket door. In the picture my dad is fifteen and crouching in the blocks before a sprint. His hair is brushed back, waxed, and he wears a loose-fitting sweat suit, blue or dark green (it is a black-and-white picture). The sleeves are pushed up the wrists. You can almost see the word SHATTUCK, his military school, printed across his chest, and the school logo beneath it. The number 5-something, his number, is on one arm. He had that same school logo tattooed in green ink on his left forearm. Sometimes a tan arm, sometimes white, on a white sheet.

The look in his eye, ready to sprint. Those eyes, triangular at the corners, eyebrows peaked over them, light shading half his face, a small frown for the camera, handsome, but soft in his chin.

Customers would ask me, “Why do you have a picture of your brother on the wall?” Or they said, “I did not know Jim was a runner.” The two of them are that much alike. Then they might say, “How much is that carpet? Is that for sale? That is really a beautiful rug. Is that real gold? Are those real rubies and sapphires?”

“Yes, it’s all real,” I would tell them.

I sat back down at my desk and looked at that photo of our father. This was not Jim’s fault, I knew.

But if it was Jim’s fault it was my fault, too.

I used to tell Lisa, sometimes, like if we were at Chuy’s on McKinney, where they have one of those black-and-white photo booths, “Why don’t we take our picture?” I knew better than to write her letters or manufacture documents of any kind but I thought I would like one strip of pictures and I worried that I knew why she did not want one. There was always a place you could secrete something like that and I was starting to feel like we might not have to be in secrecy all that much longer, and then we might want an image of this hidden time. But she would always say, “What’s wrong with your memory? Isn’t it nicer to remember it? That way you have to remember it.” I had no response to that. Well, I had one now, naturally.