Read Online Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Stephen Marche
Ads: Link
money. The minor gold rush of the twenties, thirties, and forties was all slapdash, shanties zanily sprouted along cracks of real and imagined subterranean wealth. Dale loved the action. Even the train buzzed with happening. Everyone was on the make or falling apart or both. As he stepped out for the first time, onto the muddy mush of the Atkinson roads, he breathed in the townâs hilarity. A man in a bowler and a taut three-piece tweed suit, arm in arm with a drunken, flattering easy lay in an emerald dress, smiled nefariously while passing. Welcome to town, buddy. See what you can pull. In Atkinson, glamorous stories were everywhere: Irish who arrived with shovels and scratched out millions. Stakers who strained nugget gold out of their canteens by accident. Telegram boys palming five-dollar tips from gamblers. Greeks who turned single coffee stands into chains of dinettes. Men were achieving respectability all the time in Atkinson.
Dale hunted from call to call, from corner store to corner store, from hotel to hotel, from camp to camp, smiling at the frowning, bored men who either hated to buy things or wouldnât or couldnât, and then offering and insisting and failing and leaving. Rejection is the river in which the salesman swims. The river is shrewd and fierce and runs cold. The faces reflected on it blur into a single rushâdubious eyes and arched brows and stupid mouths and the cynical crook of a cigarette out of a cheek. People seethe and you must seethe with them. Even the boys looked up at him funny, like he was the pig about to be slaughtered. The whores shut their doors on him tenderly, pityingly. The bartenders added a fingernail to his finger of Scotch. The man who eats what he kills deserves respect and succor. After days of pure hustle, he would save on his quarters by heading straight to the train stationwhere he could lean against the plinth on the platform, asleep, until the next morningâs train. Why pay for a flophouse? The station had heat.
Dale stared through the grimy windows of train stations evaluating his slim chances while sucking back drab sodas and gray sandwiches, fending off despair with the stitchwork creed he inherited from his mother: Always find a way to get along. Atkinson was the opposite of Champlain. The money had mixed men up in their chances, their misery, and their furious gorgeous free women. Even the conservatives in the West are libertines. On the side of MacCormackâs business, he took orders for himself. Hats from Pittsburgh. Books. An old Arab paid him a high price for Egyptian cotton. Potpourri for the brothel. To the Chinese he sold incense. But mostly it was door-to-door. Knives. Gramophones. Subscriptions to magazines. As much as he could. He went into the radio business for himself. He bought them wholesale in Pittsburgh, rented out a sufferance space under his own name to store them by the station, and hustled them wherever he could.
Luck is the by-product of effort. The effort was enduring other people, the maids who sneered and shook their heads from the sides of houses, the demented old-timers, the busy men of business pushing by, the drunks taking cracks from the barstool, reeking of pickling spice and vomit, the broken women and their adamant hate. He needed luck. Thatâs the worst, needing luck. Daleâs biggest stroke of luck was that old MacCormack never figured out how rich the territory was. MacCormack always received him back without comment, neither praise nor blame. Dale had no idea why the old man kept him on. Inertia? Or were his sales excellent? How were the others doing? The answers wouldnât have mattered anyhow. He just went out and sold.
A slow train from the men of Atkinson trundled him back to the house at 17 Flora, to the women of Champlain. A long train ride to ask: Who am I? What do I amount to?
*Â Â *Â Â *
In the mornings, 17 Flora floated up like a ship on a tide of girlish laughter, anchored by
Dale hunted from call to call, from corner store to corner store, from hotel to hotel, from camp to camp, smiling at the frowning, bored men who either hated to buy things or wouldnât or couldnât, and then offering and insisting and failing and leaving. Rejection is the river in which the salesman swims. The river is shrewd and fierce and runs cold. The faces reflected on it blur into a single rushâdubious eyes and arched brows and stupid mouths and the cynical crook of a cigarette out of a cheek. People seethe and you must seethe with them. Even the boys looked up at him funny, like he was the pig about to be slaughtered. The whores shut their doors on him tenderly, pityingly. The bartenders added a fingernail to his finger of Scotch. The man who eats what he kills deserves respect and succor. After days of pure hustle, he would save on his quarters by heading straight to the train stationwhere he could lean against the plinth on the platform, asleep, until the next morningâs train. Why pay for a flophouse? The station had heat.
Dale stared through the grimy windows of train stations evaluating his slim chances while sucking back drab sodas and gray sandwiches, fending off despair with the stitchwork creed he inherited from his mother: Always find a way to get along. Atkinson was the opposite of Champlain. The money had mixed men up in their chances, their misery, and their furious gorgeous free women. Even the conservatives in the West are libertines. On the side of MacCormackâs business, he took orders for himself. Hats from Pittsburgh. Books. An old Arab paid him a high price for Egyptian cotton. Potpourri for the brothel. To the Chinese he sold incense. But mostly it was door-to-door. Knives. Gramophones. Subscriptions to magazines. As much as he could. He went into the radio business for himself. He bought them wholesale in Pittsburgh, rented out a sufferance space under his own name to store them by the station, and hustled them wherever he could.
Luck is the by-product of effort. The effort was enduring other people, the maids who sneered and shook their heads from the sides of houses, the demented old-timers, the busy men of business pushing by, the drunks taking cracks from the barstool, reeking of pickling spice and vomit, the broken women and their adamant hate. He needed luck. Thatâs the worst, needing luck. Daleâs biggest stroke of luck was that old MacCormack never figured out how rich the territory was. MacCormack always received him back without comment, neither praise nor blame. Dale had no idea why the old man kept him on. Inertia? Or were his sales excellent? How were the others doing? The answers wouldnât have mattered anyhow. He just went out and sold.
A slow train from the men of Atkinson trundled him back to the house at 17 Flora, to the women of Champlain. A long train ride to ask: Who am I? What do I amount to?
*Â Â *Â Â *
In the mornings, 17 Flora floated up like a ship on a tide of girlish laughter, anchored by
Similar Books
Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant
Ramsey Campbell, Peter Rawlik, Mary Pletsch, Jerrod Balzer, John Goodrich, Scott Colbert, John Claude Smith, Ken Goldman, Doug Blakeslee
