Kings of the Earth: A Novel (32 page)

Donna

H
E SAID
D
OBSON
wanted him to make a run to Quebec, and her car had the newer tires on it plus it got better gas mileage. Dobson paid the legal twenty-five and a half cents a mile regardless, and there was no way DeAlton Poole was going to bother impressing that old fool’s customers on his own dime. Not all the way to Quebec.

Tom

T
HERE SURE WAS A LOT
of French stuff up here. Tom couldn’t believe it. The road signs would have been enough, never mind the billboards and the food and the newspapers and everything else. He and DeAlton got in early, so they parked the car and had something at a little coffee shop on a side street. Tom couldn’t get over the menu. He kept saying it was like they were in a foreign country and his father shook his head and said they were and Tom said well yes he knew that but still. Then they got back into the car and parked where they’d been told to park and walked around the corner the way they’d been told to walk and knocked at the locked door of a restaurant the way they’d been told to knock. Then they waited. There was a little gray snow on the sidewalk and they stamped their feet in it to stay warm.

They heard some sounds from inside, the slamming of a door and maybe some footsteps, unless it was from the building next door or upstairs. The noises faded to nothing again. DeAlton looked at his watch and asked Tom if he was sure they were here on the right day and Tom said yes. DeAlton said he didn’t like to be kept waiting, giving Tom a look that made him feel as if the whole thing was his fault. As if Tom had willfully gone into business with somebody whose idea of a good time was making DeAlton Poole freeze his ass on a street corner in a foreign country with a Baggie of marijuana in his coat pocket. Like this particular indignity had been planned from the start.

Tom stuffed his hands into his pockets and lifted his shoulders up around his ears. “I can hold on to that bag if you want me to,” he said.

“I’m not handing it over in the middle of the sidewalk. Not even to my own flesh and blood.” He shivered. “Although by rights you’re the one should be in charge of it. I’ve got to quit putting everybody else first. It’s like I said about your mother. Until you’re in charge of your own washer fluid, you don’t think about it. You never have to grow up.”

“Live and learn,” said Tom. And with the creaking of a latch and the turning of a key, the door slid open. It wasn’t Henri behind it. It was an antique individual in rumpled chef’s whites, not much more than four feet tall, with a towering and very grimy toque pushed down to his eyebrows. He had bright little eyes like marbles in gray dough and pretty much the same little scar of a mustache that Henri wore. He needed a shave. “You have come to meet with Henri,” he said, stating the obvious.

“Right you are, Chef Boyardee,” said DeAlton. “Now lead on. I don’t know what you’re used to, but we’re not the kind of men that like to wait.”

The place smelled like paradise and purgatory. Paradise from the swinging doors to the kitchen, and purgatory from the cigarette smoke that lingered everywhere. The little man shut the door and locked it and led them back through a series of barely lit dining rooms, where bits of glass and polished hardwood gleamed like secrets. “Boiardi was an Italian,” he said, throwing the words over his shoulder with a palpable contempt. “He sacrificed everything for commerce.”
Evwysing
. “I, on the other hand, am
French
.”

“Right,” said DeAlton. “I know some guys who fought in the big war, and they told me how you French boys feel about compromise.”

The old man stopped short and DeAlton very nearly stumbled into him. For an instant he was pretty sure that the little Frenchman was going to spin around on his heel and nail him in the gut with a sucker punch. It would have been just the sort of duplicitousness that he should have been expecting. But instead the little man swept open the hidden door to a private dining room and pointed within, his little gray faced twisted into a scowl. This was it, the end of the line.

“Thanks, pal,” said DeAlton. “Let me know when you’ve cooked up something I can buy in the Acme.”

“Don’t hold your breath.” The little man sneered beneath his mustache, and marched off toward the kitchen.

Henri let the smoke trickle slowly through his lips and he didn’t speak until it was all gone. Then the words rode out on a long string of delicate little coughs. “So what are you saying to me? Is this my competition?”

“You wish.”

Henri looked puzzled.

“You wish it was your competition. You wish you had something to compete with it.” DeAlton’s tone had an oiliness that only slightly masked something volcanic underneath. “Now look here. I just promised to buy twice our usual from you in the future, so trust me when I say I know the difference between the stuff you’re selling and this stuff.”

“I see.” Henri turned the joint in his fingers, studying it from all angles. He lifted up his shoulders and drew down the corners of his mouth. “So. If this is not my competition, then why do you bring it to me?”

“Because you’re in the distribution business, same as we are. Only we’ve started doing a little production of our own.” DeAlton nodded to indicate the joint in Henri’s hand and the Baggie on the polished walnut tabletop.

“Ahh. Long ago Nick told me that he grew a little. I had no idea.”

“This doesn’t have to do with Nick. Nick doesn’t know the first thing about growing marijuana. I’m the one who knows about growing marijuana.”

Henri pursed his lips.

“And thanks to me, we’ve got a ton more of this than we can get rid of all by our lonesome.”

“A ton?”

“Figure of speech.”

“I see. You have a ton that is not a ton, and you want me to dispose of it on your behalf.”

DeAlton showed as many of his teeth as he could. “I wouldn’t put it that way. How I’d put it is I’m giving you the opportunity of a lifetime.”

“Ahh,” said Henri. He looked wearily from DeAlton to the joint and then back again, as if no power on earth could impel him to accept this burden. The joint had gone out, so he lit it again and drew on it. “Life,” he said as the smoke trickled out, “is full of opportunities. A businessman must be careful as to which he accepts.”

“Accepts?” As if he didn’t understand the word.

“Accepts.”

“Look.” Reaching out for the Baggie. “We didn’t come up here to talk you into anything.”

Tom coughed.

DeAlton got his fingertips on the Baggie and began drawing it toward him.

Henri just watched it go.

“We didn’t come up here on a goddamned sales call,” said DeAlton. He got the Baggie to the edge of the table and left it there.

Henri nodded.

Tom coughed again.

DeAlton reached for the smoldering joint and extracted it from Henri’s hand and pinched it out. “This shit sells itself,” he said. He rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, letting bits of ash and paper and grass filter down to the tabletop.

“Perhaps it does,” said Henri, “but not always. It does not sell itself to me, for example.”

“Come on. An ounce of this is worth two pounds of that crap you’re pushing.”

“That may well be the case,” Henri said, sighing, “but I have only a
professional
interest in such things. I am not a connoisseur like yourself.”

DeAlton narrowed his eyes into something you could slide a coin into. “I don’t like your attitude.”

Tom coughed.

Henri fired up a Matinée. “I did not say that you were incorrect.” Then, looking to Tom: “Did I say that your father was incorrect?”

Tom shook his head.

Henri creased back his smile so far that his mustache just about disappeared. “Ahh. I did not believe that I had. But as I say, I am open to the idea that you may be right about the quality of this merchandise.”

“I’m right about it all right.”

“If you are—”

“I am.”

“If you are, then I shall consider putting myself into a position from which I may help you
get rid of it
, as you say.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Forgive me. I am but a poor Frenchman, and I am handicapped in the refinements of your language. I can make use only of such words as you have given to me.”

DeAlton

T
HAT WENT PRETTY WELL
, considering.

Nah. Not on your life. Until you’ve been on a few sales calls, you don’t know how bad it can go. But as long as you maintain control of the situation you’ll come out all right in the end. Take it from me.

Some guys, your real hard-asses, they’ll want free samples. They’ll want a unit they can hook up to every goddamned cow in sight and use for a month or two and then give back if they don’t like it. If it doesn’t
meet expectations
. If it doesn’t
perform as promised
.

Can you believe that? What performs as promised? Nothing.

You’ve got a point. I admit it. That high-class dope lives up to expectations, absolutely. In spades. That bullshit about it selling itself? I meant every word of it.

I know you know.

Anyway at least he didn’t want free samples. That’s the worst. Once a guy gets his heart set on free samples it’s tough to get him turned around. He doesn’t see the value in what you’re putting in front of him.

Some guys don’t know the value of anything.

Anyway the main thing is we’ve got him taking care of the transportation. And we’ve got him opening up new sales territory. North of the border, without benefit of an export license. What do you think of that? And so what if we had to give him a little bit of an introductory discount? I’ve given away a whole lot more than that in my time.

Like they say, we’ll make it up in volume.

Tom

T
HEY WERE IN
W
ATERTOWN
by suppertime, off the highway and motoring down a commercial strip jammed with opportunities to partake of good old American chow. None of that French stuff. DeAlton said he was buying to celebrate their success and they ended up at either a Bennigan’s or a Friday’s, Tom could never tell those two apart. Out the window was the ruin of one of his old favorites, a place that served hot dogs steamed in beer, one of the last in a chain long gone belly-up for reasons that he would never understand. Bennigan’s or Friday’s or whatever it was served beer too, though, so that was some consolation. They each had a couple over dinner and then they picked up a six-pack for the road.

It was plenty cold when they got back in the car but it warmed up in a hurry and they took off their coats and tossed them over into the back. Tom remarked as to how the bottles clanking around his feet weren’t getting any colder with that fan blowing hot air on them. DeAlton said he wasn’t ready to start on those yet but Tom could go on and help himself if he wanted, which he did. That made five left and the car getting warmer still. Tom said he didn’t think he could drink the rest fast enough and DeAlton said he’d better not even think about it if he knew what was good for him. He said to pass him one and Tom did, and then he grunted and handed it right back and Tom twisted the top off and handed it back again. DeAlton nearly spat his first mouthful back into the bottle, it was already so warm.

He pulled off the road under a bridge where there wasn’t much snow. Tom asked what was up, and DeAlton said he was going to give him one last lesson for the day, free of charge. “Find that paper bag the beer came in,” he said, and Tom reached over and fished around in the backseat until he came up with it. “Now put the beer back in it.” Tom did, and the bottles clanked hard against one another, and DeAlton said, “Not just loose. Put that carton back together where you tore it and put the bottles in it staggered where they won’t bang too much and then put that back in the bag.” Tom did. “Now roll the top of the bag down tight and put your window down a little bit and see if you don’t get any ideas.”

Tom did as he was told, and he sat with the window down and the beer in his lap for a few seconds. DeAlton sat too, just waiting for the light to dawn if it was going to or for it not to dawn and for him to have to explain everything, sitting behind the wheel in his shirtsleeves as the temperature dropped and a few flakes of snow flew in from out of the dark. Sipping at his beer. A couple of pairs of headlights loomed and flashed past and Tom finally got the idea. He stuck the bag out the window and put the window back up most of the way and then he clamped it tight with the rolled-up top of the bag on the inside and the beer hanging out there in the cold.

“That’s my boy,” said DeAlton, and he grinned and hit the gas hard. The heat came back up quick and they still had a couple of hours to go.