In Milton Lumky Territory (1984) Read online

  “Is there anything you want me to say to her?” he asked, feeling vaguely nettled.

  “No,” she said, standing on the sidewalk and closing the car door on her side. In her suit she looked quite chic and well-groomed. “Of course,” she said, bending down to lean in the car window, “don’t mention about your living at the house or anything about last night.”

  Susan hurried off. He locked up the car, crossed the street, and with a great deal of uneasiness, entered the office.

  As Susan had said, Zoe paid no attention to him. In the back at one of the desks she worked determinedly at the old, massive typewriter, turning out one page after another. For a time he hung around in the front, where the customers evidently were supposed to be, and then he took the bull by the horns and passed back of the counter, by the several desks. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Good morning,” Zoe said.

  He said, “I’m going to be working here.”

  “Ah,” she said, in a merry, brisk voice. “So Susan tells me.” Glancing momentarily in his direction she said, “Of course that has little or no importance to me since I’ll be leaving.”

  “I see,” he said, nodding as if it were news to him.

  “Probably in the next few days. I’ve been wanting to get out of this dead-end for at least a year.” She ceased typing and swiveled her chair around so that she faced him. More slowly and forcefully she said, “We’ve lost money steadily, as you probably know. I imagine Susan told you all that. She has as little faith in this business as I have. I don’t know why she wants to go on. There’s a dime store across the street that sells paper and ribbon and carbon paper; we can’t compete with them because they buy so much at once. The big drugstore on the corner sells portables. That doesn’t leave anything but renting machines and doing manuscript typing and mimeographing, and there isn’t any money in that. Even if she had money to invest it wouldn’t do any good, not unless she plans to move to some other location, and if she does that she’ll lose almost everything we put into fixing this place up.”

  He said nothing. It threw him somewhat.

  “What, exactly, did she hire you to do?” Zoe said. “Just do general work around here? Can you type? She certainly doesn’t plan to do the typing and stencil-cutting herself … I’ve been doing most of it.” Refined triumph appeared on her wrinkled, middle-aged face. She had no sympathy for him or Susan; she had become heartless now that she knew she was going to leave.

  He asked, “What are your plans after you leave?”

  “Oh, I believe I’ll open a little place down near Dallas. I have friends living there.” She whacked out a few more sentences.

  “Well, I wish you luck,” he said.

  In a firm voice, Zoe said, “I wish you luck, too, working with Susan. Have you known her very long? If you can make a go of this place, it’ll be up to you and not to her - she has absolutely no aptitude or concern. She merely wants to be able to draw enough out of it to meet her needs.” Abruptly she stopped talking to him and returned to her work. Time passed, and then she said, “Have you had experience in retail selling?” She asked in such a manner as to suggest that it would not surprise her if he had years of it, that Susan had snared someone who could take over and manage the place with utmost efficiency. In spite of her dislike for him she obviously had respect for him, almost an awe. As if, by replacing her, he had already proved himself better equipped for the job. And of course he was a man. He felt, watching her and studying her, that she automatically conceded superiority to men. It would be a failing, a weakness in her. Part of the situation that had retarded them in trying to do business, in dealing with wholesalers and customers.

  Two women trying to run a business. A disadvantage.

  “I’d like to look over the last few months’ invoices,” he said.

  “They’re in the file, in the cabinet. Alphabetically.”

  Seated at a vacant desk he inspected the invoices, seeing how their costs broke down.

  “Are you seeing what our profits have been?” Zoe asked, once.

  Almost at once he saw that Susan and Zoe had been buying in the worst possible fashion, little driblets each month at the highest per unit cost. He saw, too, that they never picked their supplies up; they always had things delivered.

  “What about returns?” he asked Zoe. “Defective stuff that goes back.”

  “You’ll have to ask Susan about that,” Zoe said.

  Probably they were missing out on the possibilities of clearing their inventories through periodic returns. He wandered about the office, poking into the supply cupboards, the shelves of reams of typing paper, boxes of ribbon, flat packets of carbon paper, and the weary old typewriters which rented for five dollars or less a month. He could tell at a glance that these ancient machines took up most of the storage space; they lined two entire walls, from ceiling to floor. Most of them had a layer of dust on them. The window space, too, was filled up by machines for sale, all second-hand, nothing new. Like a junk store, he thought morbidly. His experience went entirely against used merchandise; it made him feel queasy even to touch dusty, dirty-looking objects in second-hand shops. He liked things new, in sanitary cellophane packages. Imagine buying a used toothbrush, he thought to himself. Christ.

  Lighting a cigarette and meditating, he began to wonder about franchises. If new typewriters were being sold nearby, the manufacturers might be unwilling to open more dealerships. But … there were always ways to get hold of merchandise. As long as the buyer had cash, and preferably a means of immediate transportation.

  He began to thrill to the notion of it. Transforming this place.

  “I think I can do her a lot of good here,” he said.

  Zoe did not answer.

  AT NOON Susan breezed into the office carrying an armload of parcels. She stoped by Zoe and began to show her different items. Bruce, conscious of her, continued working. Eventually she came over to him.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m making progress,” He had discovered the accounts receivable file and was tabulating the total outstanding.

  “You look so busy,” Susan said.

  From her desk, Zoe said, “If nobody objects I think I’ll go and eat.” She covered her typewriter and put her smock away.

  “Go ahead,” Susan said, in a preoccupied voice. As soon as Zoe had left the office, Susan sat down across from him. “How did it go?” she asked urgently. “Did she say much?”

  “Very little,” he said. He felt a certain amount of coolness at having had to enter the office alone; it seemed to him that she should have accompanied him.

  “Good,” she said, with relief. “She knows she has to accept your presence here.” Leaning toward him she said, “Did she tell you that we tried to get the Underwood franchise and they wouldn’t grant it to us?” She studied him anxiously.

  “No,” he said. “But I was wondering about franchises.”

  “If we could raise enough money to put in a genuinely big initial order, they’d give it to us. Don’t you agree? You know all about that.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “I’m counting on you to get things for us to sell.”

  “I know you are,” he said. “But I can’t scare up the money.”

  “But you can arrange deals so it doesn’t cost us so much. And you can get things on consignment. Don’t you suppose?”

  “It depends,” he said.

  “What do you think of the counters? If we get new portables we’ll need a place to display them.”

  He said, “Speaking of money, am I officially at work for you?”

  “How … I mean,” she said, drawing herself up in her chair and frowning in a hectic, worried fashion, “yes, of course, you started to work this morning, as soon as you got here. I consider you an official member of the firm.”

  With great caution and tact he said, “How are we going to arrange my pay?”

  “You get to draw from the receipts, t
he same as we do. Up to a point, of course. And we always write it down; we have a regular form we fill out, like a receipt, which both of us sign.”

  “But how much?”

  “What - do you think you need?”

  He found himself, with her, at this point, up against a blank wall. “It isn’t a question of that. It’s a question of settling the arrangement so we know where we stand.”

  That immediately troubled and confused her. “You decide,” she said, in an impulsive rush. “Anything you say is all right with me. Especially if -” She broke off and looked behind her. “If we proceed in our plans, which I really hope we do.” Her voice sank down. “Bruce, I want you to be free to decide what you want. I’ll get out the books and you can see what Zoe and I have been drawing.”

  After she had shown him the books, and they had discussed it at length, they decided that he could draw up to three-fifty in the thirty-day period.

  “Am I robbing you?” she demanded anxiously.

  “No,” he said, glad to get it settled.

  “I want to pay you more. You’re worth more. Maybe later on, when we have something to sell ” Clenching her fists she said loudly, “God damn it, we have to have something to sell!”

  A customer had entered, and Susan got up to wait on him.

  LATER IN THE DAY he strolled across the street to the dime store to see for himself what they did and did not sell.

  The paper and typewriter supply counter ran along one side, not visible from the street; the next counter sold imitation jewelry and buttons, and the store seemed about evenly committed between typewriter supplies and buttons. Their ribbons were heaped together in two cubbyholes. Each ribbon sold for 89C, an unfamiliar brand, and he recognized them as inferior extra-short ribbons, good only for typing letters, absolutely unfit for office machines. He saw, too, that the store did not stock ribbons for all model machines. Their typing paper came in 10 and 25C packs, not reams. It, too, was cheap second-quality stuff, no rag or linen watermarked bond that typists like for their first copy. That cheered him up. And their carbon paper was blue.

  He strolled down to the drugstore.

  Sure enough, the drugstore carried four brands of popularly-priced portables, and each was well-displayed, the machines were placed at the end of the photo supplies counter, next to cameras and inexpensive tape recorders. He noticed that the drugstore stocked only the lowest priced portable in each line, and no office model machines.

  When the girl meandered over to wait on him he asked about the guarantee on the portables. It was a flat ninety days, she told him.

  “And I bring it in here?” he asked. “If something breaks?”

  “No,” she said, without concern. “You have to take it over to this repair place …” She dipped down behind the counter for a much-creased folder. “They don’t do any service here. It’s out on the highway to Pocatello.”

  He asked, “Do you know if there’s any place around here that I can get professioal typing done?”

  “I think there’s a place down the street,” the girl said.

  Thanking her, he left the drugstore.

  Obviously they had not gone heavily into typewriters. They aimed mostly at high school students and businessmen who needed some sort of machine around the house for occasional typing. His knowledge of the franchise system came into play; he recalled that often a franchise was let that permitted a dealer to sell only the low-priced items in a line, not the complete line. He could easily find out if the drugstore had a franchise to sell larger machines, were they to want to. Possibly they did not.

  He recrossed the street to the office.

  Standing in the middle of the office behind the counter was a short, swarthy, round-shouldered man wearing a natty gray single-breasted suit and bow tie. A cloud of cigarette smoke surrounded him as he puffed away. Noticing Bruce he squinted at him through horn-rimmed glasses, grimaced, spat out a bit of cigarette paper, and said in a hoarse but friendly voice, “I can’t wait On you. I don’t work here.”

  Near the man Bruce saw a leather briefcase, a satchel with handles. The man evidently was a salesman from some manufacturer. He watched Bruce with an ironic brusqueness, as if he wanted to wait on him but considered himself incompetent and certainly out of place. As if, by being behind the counter but not working there, he was flying false colors. He seemed apologetic.

  “That’s okay,” Bruce said, going past him.

  The man’s eyes opened wide. “Ha,” he groaned. “A slave.”

  “That’s right,” Bruce said. He saw no sign of Susan, nor even of Zoe. “Where are they?” he asked the man.

  Shrugging, the man said, “Zoe went to the bathroom. Susan isn’t here. My name’s Milt Lumky.” He stuck out his hand, and Bruce saw that the man had short arms, short legs, and a wide, flat hand, gnarled but absolutely spick and span, with the nails professionally manicured. The skin of his face was pocked. But he had well cared for teeth. His shoes, black and imported-looking, were scuffed but polished.

  “Who do you represent?” Bruce said, as they shook hands.

  “Christian Brothers Brandy,” Lumky said in his gravelly voice. And then he ducked his head in a grimace and muttered, “Isn’t that a stupid thing to say? This is one of my off-days. It gets me to come in and find nobody around. No wonder there’s a recession. I’m from Whalen Paper Supplies. But imagine, a liquor company named ‘Christian Brothers.’ Sort of like the Jesus Christ Firearms Works. I noticed the display in the grog shop across the street. It had never struck me before.”

  He told Lumky his name.

  “How long have you been working here?” Lumky said. “I don’t get in here more than once every second month.”

  He told him that he had just started.

  “Are you going to manage the place?” Lumky said, with resignation if not approval. “That’s what they need, someone who can come in and take over. Otherwise they make no decisions. Everything slides. Where were you before?”

  He told him that he had been with C.B.B.

  “For that you get a kick in the crotch from me,” Lumky said.

  “Don’t you approve of discount houses?”

  “Not when they sell stale candy.”

  That was an argument that he had never heard. It struck him as funny and he laughed, thinking that Lumky was kidding. But the man drew himself up with hauteur and a determination to convince him.

  “I got a carton of Mounds at a discount house in Oakland, California,” Lumky said, coughing through his cigarette smoke in his insistence to make his point. He waved the smoke aside. “It tasted like soap. They must have found some left-over stock from old World War Two PXs.”

  “It’s not all like that,” he said.

  “It’s your word against mine,” Lumky said. He put out his cigarette and extended a pack of Parliaments to Bruce. “I think it’s going to fail because you discount people don’t do a job of selling. It’s a craze, like home freezers. You have to sell people.” He said it gloomily, as if it was a fact that he did not necessarily approve of but which he accepted. His hands trembled as he lit a fresh cigarette; the end of the cigarette waggled away from the man’s leather-bottomed Ronson lighter and he had to push it back with his thumb. “Anyhow, you stick with your story,” he said, out of the side of his mouth. He had gotten smoke in his left eye, and it began to turn red and water. He grinned wryly at Bruce.

  Entering the office, Susan said, “Oh, hi, Milt.”

  Milt Lumky put his lighter away in the pocket of his coat; it made a bulge that destroyed the proper line of his suit. “Where have you been? I helped myself to money from the till, just to teach you a lesson.”

  Isn’t Zoe around?”

  “Down using the can,” Lumky said. “You want to go out and have a cup of coffee?”

  Susan said, “I just ate; that’s where I was. I don’t think there’s anything we want to buy this time. I’m sorry. Unless you have something new you want to show us.”

  “H
ow about a line of cheap adding machines?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Digital computers.”

  “No.”

  “Home-model Univacs for $17.95. That’s your cost. Lists for I think $49.95. What a profit. Ideal Easter gift.”

  She put her arm around him and patted him on the back. “No,” she said. “Some other time. We have a lot of reorganization to worry about. Lots of plans.”

  Twisting his head to look at Bruce, Lumky said to him, “How about you having a cup of coffee with me?”

  “That would be a good idea,” Susan said. “Milt, this is Bruce Stevens. He’s going to do the buying.” She lowered her voice. “Zoe is leaving.”

  “Come on,” Lumky said, tilting his head toward the door to wag Bruce along with him. “I’ll leave my crud here,” he said to Susan, meaning his leather satchel. “You can look through it if you want to be infantile.”

  He and Bruce soon seated themselves at the counter of the coffee shop a few doors down.

  “So Zoe de Lima is leaving,” Lumky said, lighting a third cigarette and sitting with his elbows on the counter and his hands in front of his nose, his thumbs hooked into his nostrils. “Susan is doing a smart thing. She should have got out from under that two years ago. Susan is erratic and Zoe is pure chicken about everything. What a combination.”

  Their coffee arrived.

  “You can reason with Susan, at least,” Milt said. “But you could never get through to Zoe de Lima. She’s rotten clean through, like an old pine plank. All Susan needs is somebody to tell her what to do.” He slurped at this coffee, his napkin wadded beneath his chin.

  “It’s a good location,” Bruce said, a little taken aback by Milt Lumky and his outspokenness. He was more accustomed to enthusiastic, sincere-type salesmen who never told the truth.

  “I’ve know Susan for years,” Milt said somberly. “She’s a fine person. I always wondered about her, though. How she is outside of the business.” He picked at one of his teeth, scowling. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t you agree with me that she’s attractive as hell?”