quite held together.
Walt listened politely, but he knew the reason Buddy had come after us. He had no doubt. We tried to sleep with his girlfriend, one of us actually had, apparently, and he paid us back with interest. ‘He hit us where it hurt.’
‘I didn’t sleep with his girlfriend, Walt.’
‘You wanted to.’
He had me there. Walt studied me in his own peculiar way. He knew I was an inveterate liar. He knew I enjoyed summoning up the ridiculous and offering it as gospel. Still, he was reluctant to call me a liar while I was at low ebb. If I wanted to pretend it was only a fantasy that was fine with him. Fantasy, reality, it didn’t matter. Buddy Elder had not authored our misfortunes. We had.
My friend, my lawyer, my wife: they all asked themselves why Denise Conway would write about an affair that did not actually occur. When there was no logical explanation they could only conclude I was lying, as I was known to do from time to time. It occurred to me that their response was exactly what Buddy Elder had anticipated. He had even arranged matters so that Denise’s complaint against me made no sense until the diary exposed her real motive. No one doubted it because Denise had not even wanted to admit the affair when she had filed her complaint.
Had he staggered his attack on me knowing the evidence would have greater effect if it came after the investigation had gathered some momentum? Was the son of a bitch that smart?
Around midnight it hit me, not the reason, the reason still did not make sense, but the method. The method Buddy Elder had employed came from reading Jinx.
He had confirmed that the first story was a lie by introducing a second story. Because the second story discredited the first, nobody doubted its veracity. I had summarized the principle as Larry the Liar’s mantra: Never tell a lie. Always tell two.
Tubs had never subscribed to Larry the Liar’s method, though he recognized that a great many people thought you had to lie to persuade people to do something. He knew the method worked, but he didn’t believe it worked as well as his own. Tubs said truth was its own reward. As a child, like all children, I had imagined he meant the reward would come in the form of feeling good about myself if I said only the truth.
I didn’t understand that Tubs cut and measured by the dollars and cents of a deal. He meant reward in its most literal and immediate sense.
I finally learned what he meant when I went to work with him. The summer I was out of high school, Tubs made me get what he called ‘a real job’ with the city.
It was mowing and grounds keeping and landscape work, long days of sunshine, heavy lifting, and a whole lot of sweat. And it didn’t pay very well. The next summer, Tubs said I could do anything I wanted. I said I wanted to sell cars with him. He just smiled, like he was proud of me, and muttered, ‘Too lazy to work, too nervous to steal. You must be my son after all, Davey!’
He set one condition for my employment. He said he didn’t care what I did off hours, but when I was on the lot or working a deal, even at midnight over a beer, I was never to lie. Absolutely never. I made the promise and I kept it as long as I wandered around in the wastelands, but I sure didn’t think it sounded like fun.
And it wasn’t. For two weeks I kept bouncing into people and losing them. I talked and I shook hands and I smiled a lot. I was a hell of a nice guy and so honest people even complimented me on it, but they never bought anything. They bought from Tubs. They bought from Larry the Liar. They never bought from me. Then one night, before I had landed even a bad deal, trudging off the lot with the rest of the salespeople and thinking landscaping wasn’t such a bad summer job after all, Tubs called me back. He pointed toward the back lot and said, ‘There!’ I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. ‘A man and woman,’ he said and he had the reverent intensity of a fisherman about to get a strike. ‘They think we’re closed.’ I couldn’t see them, but I knew Tubs was a fisher of men, and he knew when the Big Ones came to feed. ‘Davey,’ he said, and took my shoulder in his big hand like a coach about to send a player in, ‘I want you to go up to them and tell them we’re closed for the evening. Give them your business card and tell them to come back tomorrow and you’ll take care of them. And if you say it like a total prick and walk away without another word, I’ll give you ten bucks.’
I was tired and frustrated. It was easy to be rude.
I figured Tubs knew them, and just wanted to piss them off. I didn’t care. It was more fun than being nice. I heard the woman rumbling behind me as I walked away. She had never! And the man yelled loud enough for me to hear, ‘You just lost yourself a sale, young man!’
Tubs ran into them on the way to his car, the perfect accidental meeting. They were so mad they had to tell someone about the rude young salesman they had just encountered. Tubs wanted to know who it was. When they gave him my business card Tubs admitted a hard truth, because he could not tell a lie. The impertinent young salesman was his son, and he was mighty sorry he had brought me up so poorly.
When Tubs gave me the ten dollar bill the next morning, he handed me back my business card, too.
It was torn into four pieces. He had had both husband and wife rip it once, just to show me what they thought of my salesmanship. He had promised them he would give the thing back to me, and he was, he told me with the straightest of faces, a man who kept his promises. Of course, after the ceremony of the card ripping, it was only natural that the folks had seen just the car they couldn’t live without. And wouldn’t it teach me a lesson I’d never forget if they bought the thing right on the spot!
It was a lesson I never forgot all right.
My brothers hated Tubs because he was such a righteous old fart who couldn’t tell a lie, but I was the baby. I went out summer after summer to be close to the old man and learn his great wisdom. I even practiced his brand of truth on the lot. I never lied out there, but it was the only virtue I respected. I couldn’t wait to put the tie on and be there with him, to beat him just one time, one month! That was all I wanted, and he taught me how to do it, too, though I never quite pulled it off. I was always second to the old man, and Larry the Liar was somewhere back in the pack, imagining we just told a better story. Tubs showed me that at the bottom of it all the rich and the poor all come down to the same thing: when they want something they get small and greedy and full of fear. You get people to want a thing, and there is no folly they won’t commit in the cause of their desire. Their greatest fear, their only fear really, is that you’re lying. You tell them only the truth and convince them that you never lie, no matter what the personal cost, and they will jump into fire to have what they lust for. That was the secret of Tubs’s greatness.
As the summers passed, I lost the passion that comes with the kill. My soul got farther and farther from the wastelands the more I read the poets. The poets and storytellers of this world lied for the beauty of a good story, lied for the sake of a higher truth, and when I finished reading their tall tales I had a better feeling about what it was to be a human being.
Of course, I also knew that even the greatest of them all would just be another sucker on the car lot. John Keats rises from the dead and lands his skinny ass in DeKalb, Illinois. Poet or not, you’ve got to have a car in DeKalb, so he sneaks up at the back of the lot at closing time to avoid the salespeople, and Tubs is there waiting for him like God.
‘…a wordsmith are you, Johnny? My son’s a poet.
It’s a beautiful life and we need more like you to sing its praises. Now, tell me, and be honest with me, what kind of a car does a poet drive?’
Young Johnny Keats grabs for the antique purse he’s tied to his belt, but it’s too late. The strings are already cut.
Chapter 12
I met Molly at a cafe about a week after my suspension. The talk was money and the best way out of some rather complicated property holdings, if it came to divorce. That was my position. As far as Molly was concerned divorce was the only reasonable response to my infidelity.
We added things up, subtracted mortgages, and talked through the most intelligent ways to dissolve our holdings. The problem was the farm. It was Molly’s but she had leveraged a number of loans with it. If my income suddenly stopped, as it was very likely to, we could be caught short. The option was to dip into our retirement
