Roughneck Read online

  "Prob'ly fall apart in two weeks," muttered Pete. "What you want for the damned thing?"

  "Oh, I'll make you a good price on that. Let you have it for twenty-five dollars."

  "Twenty-five dollars!" Pete let out a howl. "Why you can get the same damned thing anywhere for eleven or twelve!"

  "But you don't have eleven or twelve," Durkin pointed out, "and you can't get credit anywhere else...Tell you what I'll do, seeing that you're an old customer. I'll make it twenty-two-fifty, and you can pay it out at four bits a week. Make your payments a dollar-fifty a week instead of the dollar you're paying now."

  "Well...twenty dollars and two bits a week!"

  "You're wasting my time," said Durkin, crisply. "Let's have the coat."

  Pete hesitated. "Oh, hell," he said. "Okay. Twenty-two fifty and four bits a week. What you got for me to sign?"

  Having given me a demonstration of what the job was like, Durkin filled me in orally as we drove on to the next customer. The store was one of a nation-wide chain of eighty, all operating under the same unorthodox methods. They deliberately sold to poor credit risks—a market avoided by other stores. Thus, being without competition, they could operate from the most unpretentious side-street establishment and charge very high prices for inferior merchandise. Collection expenses were high, of course, but still low enough, percentage-wise, to make the operation immensely profitable. And the losses on uncollectible accounts were not nearly so large as one might think. The chain was constantly on the lookout for good men—"aggressive, forceful men." Such men could earn very handsomely. There were minimum prices on all merchandise; anything a man could get above that price was split between him and the store. He also received a relatively high base salary, and a commission on collections.

  "I run better than a hundred dollars a lot of weeks," Durkin said. "That's about three times what I'd get in this town on the average collection job."

  "I'd say you earned it," I said. "Are all the customers like Pete?"

  "Well, none of 'em are easy to get money out of, but some are worse than others. We've got a real tough baby coming up."

  The "tough baby" lived in a place similar to Pete's, and like Pete, he did not appear to be at home. The front door was locked, also the back one. Durkin shaded his eyes with his hands and peered through several of the windows.

  "Can't see him," he frowned, "but I know damned well he's here. I'm sure I saw him out on the steps when we rounded the corner. I wonder if..."

  He broke off, staring speculatively at the back yard privy. With a significant wink at me, he headed for the edifice, pausing on the way to pick up two fist-sized brickbats.

  He pounded on the door of the privy. He kicked it. He stood there and hurled the brickbats at it with all his might. There was a yell from the inside, a furious curse-filled sputtering. Durkin took a pair of pliers from his pocket and hefted them thoughtfully.

  "Come on out, Johnnie," he called. "You'll have to do it sooner or later, so why not make it light on yourself?"

  "To hell with you!" yelled the man within. "Try and make me come out, you goddamned thieving junk-peddler!"

  "All right," said Durkin, reasonably, "don't come out, then. Just shove your money under the door."

  Johnnie replied with an unprintable suggestion. He was not shoving any money under the door and he was not coming out; and that, by God, was that.

  Durkin shrugged. He fitted the hasp over the staple in the door, and slid a handle of the pliers through it. Then, scooping up an armful of old papers from the yard, he walked around to the back of the privy.

  Two planks had been removed from its base, apparently to provide ventilation. Durkin touched a match to the papers, and shoved them through the aperture.

  Since they fell into the waste pit, there was no danger—or at least very little—of incinerating Johnnie. But the clouds of stinking smoke which welled up from the pit, soon had him on the point of strangulation. He yelled that he would murder Durkin—he would kill him if it was the last thing he ever did. The next moment he had ceased his threats and was beating wildly on the door, pleading hysterically for mercy.

  "Three dollars, Johnnie," said Durkin. "Shove it through the crack and I'll let you go."

  "Goddammit,"—'cough, cough—'"I can't. My wife's in the hospital. I've got to have—"

  "Three dollars," said Durkin.

  "But I—'all right!"—'a terrified scream. "There it is! Now for God's sake let me—"

  Durkin took the three crumpled bills, slipped the pliers from the hasp and stepped back. Coughing and strangling, bent double, Johnnie staggered out into the yard.

  He was no more than a boy, eighteen, perhaps nineteen years old. He was tall, six feet at least, yet he could not have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. His cheeks were colored with the rosy, telltale spots of tuberculosis. There was no fight left in him.

  He stumbled and sat down in the weeds, coughing, staring at us.

  "Starved," he said dully, as though he were talking to himself. "Just plain starved, that's all that was the matter with her. And it won't be no different when she gets out. Starvin', her and me together; freezin' when it's cold, scorchin' when it's hot, livin' like no one ever let a dog live. W-what—what's—"

  He broke off, gripped in another paroxysm of coughing. He wheezed, spat and spoke again.

  "What's a guy gonna do?" he said. "What's he gonna do when he does all he can and it ain't nowheres good enough? Huh? How about it?" He glared at us fiercely for a moment. Then, his eyes lowered and he addressed the question to the ground, to the soured, sun-baked earth. "What's a guy gonna do, anyway? What's a guy gonna do? What's a guy gonna..."

  Durkin gripped my arm suddenly, and steered me toward the car. "It's him or us," he said. "Them or us. What's a guy going to do?"

  10

  I had beginner's luck that first week. Perhaps I was assigned to some of the easier accounts, or perhaps my customers were feeling me out—taking my measure—before getting tough with me. At any rate, I did very well and without having to resort to the tactics which Durkin had used. The quaint notions grew in my mind that (1) I was the world's champion collector, and (2) that the store's clients were merely misguided and misunderstood. They didn't pay because they had not been made to see the importance of paying. Because they were approached with abuse, they responded with it.

  Saturday night came, and Mr. Clark detained me after the other collectors had left for a few words of hearty praise. "I knew you'd be a top man," he declared. "You keep this up and you'll be making more dough than your college professors."

  "Oh, well," I smirked, my head swelling three sizes, "I don't expect to make 'that' much."

  "You'll do fine. You've got the size—that's the important thing. Throw a good enough scare into these bastards to begin with and you can take it easy from then on."

  "Well," I hesitated, uncomfortably. Somehow the fact had evaded me that the store's four collectors and Clark as well were all very large men. "I don't think size has much to do with it, Mr. Clark. I mean—"

  "Maybe not," he shrugged. "We always hire 'em big, but I suppose there are plenty of tough little guys. They wouldn't have the psychological advantage, of course, but—"

  "I don't mean that," I said. And I went on to tell him what I did mean. That the customers should be treated with kindness—firmly but kindly. Treat them as oneself would like to be treated if in the same circumstances.

  Clark stared at me blankly as I expounded my theory. Then, at last, his broad flatnosed face puckered in a grin, and he guffawed. "By God!" He slapped his hand on the counter. "You really had me going there for a minute, Jim!...Treat 'em nice, huh? Be kind to 'em. I think I'll pull that one on the home office!"

  "Well," I said, "I guess it does sound kind of funny, but—"

  "What a sense of humor! What a kidder!" He burst into another round of guffaws. "Well, have a nice weekend and I'll see you Monday."

  I spent the weekend working on the old c
ar I had bought. Monday noon, still stubbornly convinced that I had solved the secret of successful collecting, I went back on the job. It was just about my last day on earth.

  My first customer was an employee of a rendering plant, a place which, due to the hellish odor it exuded, was located in the outskirts of the city. Here the unfortunates of the area's animal population were brought—those that had died of old age or disease or accident. Here they were converted into hides and tallow, glue, bristles and bone.

  I parked my car in the stinking, refuse-filled yard. Entering the building, I was almost knocked down by the stench and great clouds of blow flies swarmed over me. I gasped, and tried to brush them away. I went forward cautiously, brushing and gasping.

  The lower floor of the building appeared to be one huge room, apparently the storage place, so far as any existed, for the animals that were brought in. From wall to wall, they littered the floor—cows, horses, sheep and swine; animals in various hideous stages of mutilation and decomposition. All swarming and crawling with blow flies.

  While I was peering around in the darkness, a man—some sort of foreman, I suppose—came in from the yard and inquired my business. I explained, tactfully, that I wished to see Mr. Brown on a business matter.

  "Collector, huh?" he grunted. "How come you don't do your collectin' at his house?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I'm a new man on the job. I imagine, though, that the store wasn't satisfied with the way he was paying so they instructed me to come here."

  "Well," he grimaced, surlily, "I'll call him for you—this time."

  Moving a few feet away from me, he cupped his hands and shouted up at the ceiling. He was preparing to shout a second time when a trapdoor opened high above him and a man looked down.

  "Yes, sir? Was you callin' me?"

  "You're damned right I'm calling you!" the foreman said, adding that the next time his work was interrupted by personal matters it would be the last time. "I ain't going to have it, get me? You can't take care of your business without mixing it up with mine, you can get another job!"

  He jerked his head at me curtly, and strode away. I moved over beneath the trapdoor.

  The man above me was so besmeared and grimed from his work that I could see nothing of his features. But there was that in his attitude which spoke of murderous anger. I called up, apologetically, that I was sorry if I had caused trouble. "If you'll just drop your payment down to me..."

  "Tough guy aren't you?" The eyes in the smeared face gleamed broodingly. "Scare hell out of my wife, get her so upset she's half out of her mind. Then you come around here raising hell."

  "You're mistaken," I said. "I've never talked to your wife or even seen her for—"

  "The hell you ain't! She told me what you looked like. There wouldn't be two guys with that outfit as big as you are."

  "But there—"

  "You wait there," he said. "You wait right there, and I'll drop something down to you."

  I waited. I stood looking upward until my neck began to ache, and then I looked down again. And that was when it happened.

  I imagine he must have had someone help him, for the great bloated carcass—a dead hog—which shot down suddenly through the hole must have weighed all of four hundred pounds. It grazed my arm as it went past. Only the fact that I had turned slightly, to glance out the door, kept it from landing on me.

  There was a tremendous thud, the sound of splitting hide and exploding flesh. I flung myself backward, instinctively, but not soon enough to avoid a sickening and smelly spattering. I looked down at myself, at the awful thing at my feet, and then I looked up at the trapdoor. Brown was there, peering downward casually.

  "Little accident," he said. "Fella forgot that the door was open. Happens all the time around here."

  I didn't wait. I was on my way out of the place as fast as my near-nerveless legs would carry me. My hands were trembling so badly that I could hardly get the car started.

  I made myself fairly presentable again at a filling station washroom, but the damage to my morale was irreparable. I couldn't collect. I couldn't sell—which, ordinarily, was quite easy to do. I could not approach my customers with the "firm kindliness" which I had so grandiosely advocated (how could you be nice to people like that?). Neither could I get tough with them (tough with people who might kill you!). I didn't know what to do, what to say, how to act; and while I doggedly made every call assigned to me, I wound up the day without a single sale or one small collection.

  I stalled at the store that evening until the other collectors had checked in and left. Then, with forced casualness, I sauntered up to the wicket and laid my collection cards in front of Clark. We were alone. Except in very large cities, the managers of the chain's stores were the sole inside employees.

  He lighted a cigarette, spewed smoke from the corner of his mouth as he squinted down at the cards. His coat was open. For the first time I noticed the minute ornament that dangled from his watch chain—a tiny pair of golden gloves.

  "Yeah, Jim," he said absently, having followed the direction of my eyes. "Yup, I was a pretty good man with the mitts. Might have made a champ heavy if I'd kept at it."

  "I see," I said.

  "Yeah, I might have and might not, but I figured I'd be better off in another line. Have the odds more on my side. You see, I look at it this way, Jim. It's hard to get anything and hold onto it, even if the other guys in your field are just 'almost' as good as you are. You don't stand out, know what I mean? To really stand out you've got to move out of your own pasture—get into some line of work like, well, like this. Something where you don't have any competition; where you can slap hell out of any three guys you may come up against. Do you get my meaning, Jim?"

  "I get it," I said.

  "I don't see any sales slips here, Jim..."

  "No," I said. "I didn't sell anything."

  "And there are no collections on these cards..."

  "I didn't collect anything."

  He studied me, shook his head. "No, you wouldn't be that stupid. You wouldn't try to knock down the whole lot. Did you take the day off, Jim? No? You actually worked six hours without making any sales or any collections?"

  "Yes," I nodded. "I know it sounds funny, but—"

  "Funny? No, I wouldn't say it was. Come around the counter, Jim." He pointed. "Come right through that little gate there, and sit down in this chair." He pushed me into it. "And I'll sit down right in front of you." He did so. "Now, let's have the story."

  He was sitting so close that his legs pressed against mine; he had also leaned forward, gripping the arms of my chair. Obviously, with our respective noses almost touching each other, the position was not one to put me at my ease. The explanation I stammered out sounded preposterously weak and foolish.

  Nevertheless, and much to my surprise, Clark seemed to accept and understand it. "I've been afraid at times, too, Jim. There's been times when I've lost my nerve. I remember once in Chicago when I was working for a loan shark, a very tough outfit, incidentally. They sent me out to collect from a steelworker who owed us a hundred—half of it interest—and the guy went for me with a baseball bat. Damned near caved my skull in. Scared? Why, Jim, it took the guts right out of me. And then I sneaked back to the office, and I got them back. The boss gave me a break. He had a couple of boys take me down into the basement and 'both' of them had baseball bats; and they didn't just threaten me with 'em, they used them. And pretty soon, Jim, I wasn't afraid of that other guy at all. I wasn't afraid to collect from him. All that I was afraid of was what would happen if I didn't collect...Now, to get down to your case, to get to the point, Jim—I'll lay you a little bet. I'll bet you'd like to go out to the rendering plant tomorrow and get the dough out of that jerk. I'll bet you'd a lot rather do that than come in here and tell me that you haven't done it, that you've pissed off a whole day. Am I right, Jim? Isn't that the way you feel about it?"

  I would like to be able to say that I stood up at this point, told him to
take his job and shove it, and walked out. But, inclined as I am to place myself in the most favorable light, I am incapable of such an outright lie. I had to work. I had grown up in a world, in jobs, where the roughest justice prevailed, where discipline was maintained, more often than not, with physical violence. And, now, in Clark, I recognized an all too familiar type. From such men, a nominal bluff is a warning. Their threats are promises.

  "You weren't thinking of quitting, were you, Jim? I'd hate to see you do that. It costs money to break a man in, and I'm supposed to know how to pick 'em."

  I shook my head. "No, I don't want to quit."

  "That's on the level? You wouldn't just walk out of here tonight and not show up any more? If you have something of that kind in mind..."

  "I don't."

  "Good boy!" He grinned suddenly and took a playful poke at my chin. "You'll be all right now; you'll do fine from now on. You were just afraid—of the wrong things."

  Well, to make an interminable story merely long, I did go out to the rendering plant the next day and I collected from the man who had tried to drop the hog on me. I cut my last class at school, and was thus able to arrive at the plant before noon. I was waiting at the door when Brown came outside to eat his lunch. Taken by surprise and being without the previous day's advantage, he paid up promptly. In fact, after one startled look at me, he was extending the money before I could ask for it.

  Heartened by this success, I did fairly well that day. But the following day I went into another slump, and by Saturday I was selling and collecting next to nothing. Clark, whose manner had grown increasingly ominous as the week progressed, detained me that night for another "conference."

  It began much the same way that the first one had. The stage setting was the same. Seating me in front of him, he pinned me to the chair with his knees and arms and thrust his face into mine. In a quiet, purring voice, he lectured me on the perils of misplaced fear. He was deadly serious. Now and then, he gripped my arm in emphasis and I almost yelled with the pain. And yet essentially, deep in that part of heart or mind which makes a man what he is, I remained unaffected. I was afraid of him, but the fear could not move me.