Honey in His Mouth

about how I feel. I’ll spit in your eye while I do it.”

“I accept your invitation, Harsh, to come back. I’ll bring a pair of handcuffs, too.”

“You do that, while I save up spit.”

“You want to tell me who this stranger is who’s fishing around about you?”

“There is no such guy, and you know it.”

The officer opened the door to leave. “Fellow, you are in a real mess. I hope you can see that.” He went out, and Harsh lay for several minutes waiting for him to come back, but he didn’t. There was a rubber sheet under Harsh, and he had perspired such a pool on it that when he turned over there was a wet sucking noise like a pig in a mud puddle.

FOUR

“Hey, Doc.”

“Yes, Harsh.”

“You gotta fix it so I can use a phone.”

“You’re in no shape to do any telephoning, Harsh.”

“Listen, I got to hit the telephone, Doc. It’s urgent.” He was talking around a thermometer the doctor had stuck in his mouth.

The doctor came over and took out the thermometer, put on his glasses, and threw his head back to see through the bifocals. Then he took Harsh’s pulse.

“The cop sort of upset you, eh?”

“Sort of.”

“He’s a pretty nice guy, really.”

“Yeah, it was easy to see what a nice guy he is. What about me and the telephone?”

“Well I tell you what, you rest a few hours, get some sleep. Then we may fix you up with a telephone call.”

“Doc, it can’t wait.”

“Well, it can try.”

Walter Harsh lay on the hospital bed and thought about the photography business. The way it was, anyone who could get together a dollar ninety-eight could be a photographer, for that would buy a cheap box with a piece of windowglass for a lens and a roll of low-cost film. That put anyone in business, the snapshot business, and that was the trouble, since that was all the value the public put on it. The twelve-jumbo-size-prints-for-thirty-five-cents roll film finishing business was another problem, a picture for less than a nickel. That was the price tag John Q. Public liked to put on a picture, and anything above that, they called it robbery. That made it a difficult business.

Harsh was a good portrait photographer, he was sure of that. He had started out very young with a cheap snap box when he was a kid on the farm, securing his camera for the labels off five sacks of hog supplement and a dollar. He sold muskrat pelts to buy a roll of film, sold more muskrat hides and a mink he was lucky enough to trap and bought some D76 and hypo and contact paper. Later when the army got him, he talked his way into a photo section, where he learned a lot. He used the G.I. Bill of Rights to go to a photographer’s school in Kansas City and another portrait school in New York. By then he was a good portrait man. He was no Bannerman, no Kirsh, but he was an above average portrait man.

He had thought that would be enough, but it wasn’t. He soon decided there were only two ways up as a photographer, and both ways required a gimmick. The best gimmick, which was out of his reach, was a plushy downtown studio with chrome-edged showcases and plenty of gold-toned sepia samples and a blond office girl and a reputation for high prices and being twenty years in the business. The other way up was to go out and knuckle doors. That had its drawbacks, since just about every town had an ordinance against door knocking and an out-of- towner needed a gimmick to get around this. Harsh knew he was right about one thing, the ordinances were barriers the local sit-on-his-bottom photographer had talked the city fathers into passing to protect his laziness. So Harsh felt no remorse about the gimmick he was using.

Harsh’s gimmick was tailored for small towns. He would send a woman with a nice-sounding voice into the small town a few days in advance to rent desk space and a telephone and buy some spot announcements over the local radio station. Then the woman would sit down at the telephone in the rented desk space and turn to A in the directory and call every subscriber through to Z. “Good morning, Mrs. Aarons. This is Miss Crosby, with National Studios of Hollywood. Mrs. Aarons, you have heard our program on the radio, no doubt. If you can answer today’s quiz question, you will receive an absolutely wonderful big free prize of three size eight-by-ten portrait photographs of yourself and any other two members of your family. If you heard our sponsored program today, you will receive an extra listener’s prize.”

The quiz question that won the prize was a real toughie: “Mrs. Aarons, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States? Now take your time and think.” The person being called on the telephone always won the wonderful big free prize, because Harsh had to get into their homes to shoot the negatives and come back and push the prints. It was legitimate. The mark got the three free pictures, and unless he could say no faster than a squirrel chatters, he would find twenty or thirty dollars worth of additional prints crammed down his throat. Harsh would snap a lot of shots of the kids with their toys and he had a way of putting all the prints together in an accordion-pleat folder that the parents went for. When he flipped all those shots of the kid out on the living-room rug, mom’s eyes would pop. The telephone quiz gimmick got them around the anti-door-knocker law, the radio gave a cloak of respectability and substance, and National Studios of Hollywood, that sounded like something too.

Vera Sue Crosby was Harsh’s advance girl. Vera Sue went into the small towns and rented the desk space and the telephone and did the calling. Vera Sue was a real gem in a boiler room. She had a voice like the Mona Lisa over the telephone, a nun-pure voice that sounded naive and honest. The voice certainly didn’t sound like Vera Sue, as full of sex as a thirty-dollar call house.

There was sunshine in the room when the doctor came in and thrust the thermometer in Harsh’s mouth, which was less embarrassing than having it stuck in his bottom the way the nurses had been doing. Harsh watched the doctor stand there counting pulse with one eye narrowed at his wristwatch while he waited for the thermometer to stabilize.

“Well, Harsh, I guess you are up to it. If you still want, you can use the telephone.”

The doctor brought a telephone with a long cord and plugged it into an outlet in the wall and put the instrument on the bed. Harsh seized it, the hospital operator came on the wire, and he placed a person-to-person call to Mrs. Walter Harsh in Edina, Missouri. When the doctor heard that, he looked surprised. “I didn’t understand you were married, Harsh.”

Better get the old pill-snapper out of the room, Harsh thought. “Look, Doc, this is kind of personal. Do you mind?”

“Harsh, if you’re married we should have notified—”

“Doc, you stick to your pills and your thermometer, and leave the women to me, then we would both know what we were doing.”

The doctor went out reluctantly. An old guy like him, wanting to eavesdrop, when he should be sitting on a creek bank waiting for a catfish to grab a worm, Harsh reflected.

“Vera Sue?”

“Walter!”

“I wasn’t sure my call would catch you, after all this time.”

“Walter, honey, pep it up, will you? I mean, whatever you got to say, get it said.”

“Well, for crying out loud, aren’t you the interested one! Haven’t you wondered where I was? Listen, I had an accident, and I’m in the hospital.”

“I know where you are. Walter, the bus is about due, and the man said it was always on time.”

“Where are you catching a bus to?”

“To see you, what do you think? I already got my ticket, Walter, so don’t talk all day.”

“Good for you, baby. Jesus, I’m glad you used your head so quick. I didn’t know you had it in you. But listen, here’s what you do first. I need you to stop off in Illinois. The minute you get back to Illinois, the very minute you