CHAPTER THREE
SAM’S SPEECH
1
It was a rousing success.
He began with his own adaptations of two anecdotes
from the “Easing Them In” section of The Speaker’s
Companion—one was about a farmer who tried to wholesale his own
produce and the other was about selling frozen dinners to
Eskimos—and used a third in the middle (which really was
pretty arid). He found another good one in the subsection titled
“Finishing Them Off,” started to pencil it in, then remembered
Ardelia Lortz and Best Loved Poems of the American People.
You’re apt to find your listeners remember a well-chosen verse even
if they forget everything else, she had said, and Sam found a
good short poem in the “Inspiration” section, just as she had told
him he might.
He looked down on the upturned faces of his fellow
Rotarians and said: “I’ve tried to give you some of the reasons why
I live and work in a small town like Junction City, and I hope they
make at least some sense. If they don’t, I’m in a lot of
trouble.”
A rumble of good-natured laughter (and a whiff of
mixed Scotch and bourbon) greeted this.
Sam was sweating freely, but he actually felt
pretty good, and he had begun to believe he was going to get out of
this unscathed. The microphone had produced feedback whine only
once, no one had walked out, no one had thrown food, and there had
only been a few catcalls—good-natured ones, at that.
“I think a poet named Spencer Michael Free summed
up the things I’ve been trying to say better than I ever could. You
see, almost everything we have to sell in our small-town businesses
can be sold cheaper in big-city shopping centers and suburban
malls. Those places like to boast that you can get just about all
the goods and services you’d ever need right there, and park for
free in the bargain. And I guess they’re almost right. But there is
still one thing the small-town business has to offer that the malls
and shopping centers don’t, and that’s the thing Mr. Free talks
about in his poem. It isn’t a very long one, but it says a lot. It
goes like this.
“ ‘Tis the human touch in this world that
counts,
The touch of your hand and mine,
Which means far more to the fainting heart
Than shelter and bread and wine;
For shelter is gone when the night is o’er,
And bread lasts only a day,
But the touch of the hand and the sound of a voice
Sing on in the soul alway.”
The touch of your hand and mine,
Which means far more to the fainting heart
Than shelter and bread and wine;
For shelter is gone when the night is o’er,
And bread lasts only a day,
But the touch of the hand and the sound of a voice
Sing on in the soul alway.”
Sam looked up at them from his text, and for the
second time that day was surprised to find that he meant every word
he had just said. He found that his heart was suddenly full of
happiness and simple gratitude. It was good just to find out you
still had a heart, that the ordinary routine of ordinary
days hadn’t worn it away, but it was even better to find it could
still speak through your mouth.
“We small-town businessmen and businesswomen offer
that human touch. On the one hand, it isn’t much ... but on the
other, it’s just about everything. I know that it keeps me coming
back for more. I want to wish our originally scheduled speaker, The
Amazing Joe, a speedy recovery; I want to thank Craig Jones for
asking me to sub for him; and I want to thank all of you for
listening so patiently to my boring little talk. So ... thanks very
much.”
The applause started even before he finished his
last sentence ; it swelled while he gathered up the few pages of
text which Naomi had typed and which he had spent the afternoon
amending; it rose to a crescendo as he sat down, bemused by the
reaction.
Well, it’s just the booze, he told himself.
They would have applauded you if you’d told them about how you
managed to quit smoking after you found Jesus at a Tupperware
party.
Then they started to rise to their feet and he
thought he must have spoken too long if they were that anxious to
get out. But they went on applauding, and then he saw Craig Jones
was flapping his hands at him. After a moment, Sam understood.
Craig wanted him to stand up and take a bow.
He twirled a forefinger around his ear: You’re
nuts!
Craig shook his head emphatically and began
elevating his hands so energetically that he looked like a revival
preacher encouraging the faithful to sing louder.
So Sam stood up and was amazed when they actually
cheered him.
After a few moments, Craig approached the lectern.
The cheers at last died down when he tapped the microphone a few
times, producing a sound like a giant fist wrapped in cotton
knocking on a coffin.
“I think we’ll all agree,” he said, “that Sam’s
speech more than made up for the price of the rubber
chicken.”
This brought another hearty burst of
applause.
Craig turned toward Sam and said, “If I’d known you
had that in you, Sammy, I would have booked you in the first
place!”
This produced more clapping and whistling. Before
it died out, Craig Jones had seized Sam’s hand and began pumping it
briskly up and down.
“That was great!” Craig said. “Where’d you copy it
from, Sam?”
“I didn’t,” Sam said. His cheeks felt warm, and
although he’d only had one gin and tonic—a weak one—before getting
up to speak, he felt a little drunk. “It’s mine. I got a couple of
books from the Library, and they helped.”
Other Rotarians were crowding around now; Sam’s
hand was shaken again and again. He started to feel like the town
pump during a summer drought.
“Great!” someone shouted in his ear. Sam turned
toward the voice and saw it belonged to Frank Stephens, who had
filled in when the trucking-union official was indicted for
malfeasance. “We shoulda had it on tape, we coulda sold it to the
goddam JayCees! Damn, that was a good talk, Sam!”
“Oughtta take it on the road!” Rudy Pearlman said.
His round face was red and sweating. “I darn near cried! Honest to
God! Where’d you find that pome?”
“At the Library,” Sam said. He still felt dazed ...
but his relief at having actually finished in one piece was being
supplanted by a kind of cautious delight. He thought he would have
to give Naomi a bonus. “It was in a book called—”
But before he could tell Rudy what the book had
been called, Bruce Engalls had grasped him by the elbow and was
guiding him toward the bar. “Best damned speech I’ve heard at this
foolish club in two years!” Bruce was exclaiming. “Maybe five! Who
needs a goddam acrobat, anyway? Let me buy you a drink, Sam. Hell,
let me buy you two!”
2
Before he was able to get away, Sam consumed a
total of six drinks, all of them free, and ended his triumphant
evening by puking on his own WELCOME mat shortly after Craig Jones
let him out in front of his house on Kelton Avenue. When his
stomach vapor-locked, Sam had been trying to get his housekey in
the lock of his front door—it was a job, because there appeared to
be three locks and four keys—and there was just no time to get rid
of it in the bushes at the side of the stoop. So when he finally
succeeded in getting the door open, he simply picked the WELCOME
mat up (carefully, holding it by the sides so the gunk would pool
in the middle) and tossed it over the side.
He got a cup of coffee to stay down, but the phone
rang twice while he was drinking it. More congratulations. The
second call was from Elmer Baskin, who hadn’t even been there. He
felt a little like Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, but it
was hard to enjoy the feeling while his stomach was still treading
water and his head was beginning to punish him for his
overindulgence.
Sam put on the answering machine in the living room
to field any further calls, then went upstairs to his bedroom,
unplugged the phone by the bed, took two aspirin, stripped, and lay
down.
Consciousness began to fade fast—he was tired as
well as bombed—but before sleep took him, he had time to think:
I owe most of it to Naomi ... and to that unpleasant woman at
the Library. Horst. Borscht. Whatever her name was. Maybe I ought
to give her a bonus, too.
He heard the telephone start to ring downstairs,
and then the answering machine cut in.
Good boy, Sam thought sleepily. Do your duty—I
mean, after all, isn’t that what I pay you to do?
Then he was in blackness, and knew no more until
ten o’clock Saturday morning.
3
He returned to the land of the living with a sour
stomach and a slight headache, but it could have been a lot worse.
He was sorry about the WELCOME mat, but glad he’d offloaded at
least some of the booze before it could swell his head any worse
than it already was. He stood in the shower for ten minutes, making
only token washing motions, then dried off, dressed, and went
downstairs with a towel draped over his head. The red message light
on the telephone answering machine was blinking. The tape only
rewound a short way when he pushed the PLAY MESSAGES button;
apparently the call he’d heard just as he was drifting off had been
the last.
Beep! “Hello, Sam.” Sam paused in the act of
removing the towel, frowning. It was a woman’s voice, and he knew
it. Whose? “I heard your speech was a great success. I’m so glad
for you.”
It was the Lortz woman, he realized.
Now how did she get my number? But that was
what the telephone book was for, of course ... and he had written
it on his library-card application as well, hadn’t he? Yes. For no
reason he could rightly tell, a small shiver shook its way up his
back.
“Be sure to get your borrowed books back by the
sixth of April,” she continued, and then, archly: “Remember the
Library Policeman.”
There was the click of the connection being broken.
On Sam’s answering machine, the ALL MESSAGES PLAYED lamp lit
up.
“You’re a bit of a bitch, aren’t you, lady?” Sam
said to the empty house, and then went into the kitchen to make
himself some toast.
4
When Naomi came in at ten o’clock on the Friday
morning a week after Sam’s triumphant debut as an after-dinner
speaker, Sam handed her a long white envelope with her name written
on the front.
“What’s this?” Naomi asked suspiciously, taking off
her cloak. It was raining hard outside, a driving, dismal
early-spring rain.
“Open it and see.”
She did. It was a thank-you card. Taped inside was
a portrait of Andrew Jackson.
“Twenty dollars!” She looked at him more
suspiciously than ever. “Why?”
“Because you saved my bacon when you sent me to the
Library,” Sam said. “The speech went over very well, Naomi. I guess
it wouldn’t be wrong to say I was a big hit. I would have put in
fifty, if I’d thought you would take it.”
Now she understood, and was clearly pleased, but
she tried to give the money back just the same. “I’m really glad it
worked, Sam, but I can’t take th—”
“Yes you can,” he said, “and you will. You’d take a
commission if you worked for me as a salesperson, wouldn’t
you?”
“I don’t, though. I could never sell anything. When
I was in the Girl Scouts, my mother was the only person who ever
bought cookies from me.”
“Naomi. My dear girl. No—don’t start looking all
nervous and cornered. I’m not going to make a pass at you. We went
through all of that two years ago.”
“We certainly did,” Naomi agreed, but she
still looked nervous and checked to make sure that she had a clear
line of retreat to the door, should she need one.
“Do you realize I’ve sold two houses and written
almost two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of insurance since that
damn speech? Most of it was common group coverage with a high
top-off and a low commission rate, true, but it still adds up to
the price of a new car. If you don’t take that twenty, I’m going to
feel like shit.”
“Sam, please!” she said, looking shocked.
Naomi was a dedicated Baptist. She and her mother went to a little
church in Proverbia which was almost as ramshackle as the house
they lived in. He knew; he had been there once. But he was happy to
see that she also looked pleased ... and a little more
relaxed.
In the summer of 1988, Sam had dated Naomi twice.
On the second date, he made a pass. It was as well behaved as a
pass can be and still remain a pass, but a pass it was. Much good
it had done him; Naomi, it turned out, was a good enough pass
deflector to play in the Denver Broncos’ defensive backfield. It
wasn’t that she didn’t like him, she explained; it was just that
she had decided the two of them could never get along “that way.”
Sam, bewildered, had asked her why not. Naomi only shook her head.
Some things are hard to explain, Sam, but that doesn’t make them
less true. It could
never work. Believe me, it just couldn’t.
And that had been all he could get out of her.
“I’m sorry I said the s-word, Naomi,” he told her
now. He spoke humbly, although he doubted somehow that Naomi was
even half as priggish as she liked to sound. “What I mean to say is
that if you don’t take that twenty, I’ll feel like
cacapoopie.”
She tucked the bill into her purse and then
endeavored to look at him with an expression of dignified primness.
She almost made it ... but the corners of her lips quivered
slightly.
“There. Satisfied?”
“Short of giving you fifty,” he said. “Would you
take fifty, Omes?”
“No,” she said. “And please don’t call me Omes. You
know I don’t like it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted. Now why don’t we just drop the
subject?”
“Okay,” Sam said agreeably.
“I heard several people say your speech was good.
Craig Jones just raved about it. Do you really think that’s
the reason you’ve done more business?”
“Does a bear—” Sam began, and then retraced his
steps. “Yes. I do. Things work that way sometimes. It’s funny, but
it’s true. The old sales graph has really spiked this week. It’ll
drop back, of course, but I don’t think it’ll drop back all the
way. If the new folks like the way I do business—and I like to
think they witt—there’!! be a carry-over.”
Sam leaned back in his chair, laced his hands
together behind his neck, and looked thoughtfully up at the
ceiling.
“When Craig Jones called up and put me on the spot,
I was ready to shoot him. No joke, Naomi.”
“Yes,” she said. “You looked like a man coming down
with a bad case of poison ivy.”
“Did I?” He laughed. “Yeah, I suppose so. It’s
funny how things work out sometimes—purest luck. If there is a God,
it makes you wonder sometimes if He tightened all the screws in the
big machine before He set it going.”
He expected Naomi to scold him for his irreverence
(it wouldn’t be the first time), but she didn’t take the gambit
today. Instead she said, “You’re luckier than you know, if the
books you got at the Library really did help you out. It usually
doesn’t open until five o’clock on Fridays. I meant to tell you
that, but then I forgot.”
“Oh?”
“You must have found Mr. Price catching up on his
paperwork or something.”
“Price?” Sam asked. “Don’t you mean Mr. Peckham?
The newspaper-reading janitor?”
Naomi shook her head. “The only Peckham I ever
heard of around here was old Eddie Peckham, and he died years ago.
I’m talking about Mr. Price. The librarian.” She was
looking at Sam as though he were the thickest man on earth ... or
at least in Junction City, Iowa. “Tall man? Thin? About
fifty?”
“Nope,” Sam said. “I got a lady named Lortz. Short,
plump, somewhere around the age when women form lasting attachments
to bright-green polyester.”
A rather strange mix of expressions crossed Naomi’s
face—surprise was followed by suspicion; suspicion was followed by
a species of faintly exasperated amusement. That particular
sequence of expressions almost always indicates the same thing:
someone is coming to realize that his or her leg is being shaken
vigorously. Under more ordinary circumstances Sam might have
wondered about that, but he had done a land-office business all
week long, and as a result he had a great deal of his own paperwork
to catch up on. Half of his mind had already wandered off to
examine it.
“Oh,” Naomi said and laughed. “Miss Lortz,
was it? That must have been fun.”
“She’s peculiar, all right,” Sam said.
“You bet,” Naomi agreed. “In fact, she’s
absolutely—”
If she had finished what she had started to say she
probably would have startled Sam Peebles a great deal, but tuck—as
he had just pointed out—plays an absurdly important part in human
affairs, and luck now intervened.
The telephone rang.
It was Burt Iverson, the spiritual chief of
Junction City’s small legal tribe. He wanted to talk about a really
huge insurance deal—the new medical center, comp-group coverage,
still in the planning stages but you know how big this could be,
Sam—and by the time Sam got back to Naomi, thoughts of Ms. Lortz
had gone entirely out of his mind. He knew how big it could be, all
right; it could land him behind the wheel of that Mercedes-Benz
after all. And he really didn’t like to think just how much of all
this good fortune he might be able to trace back to that stupid
little speech, if he really wanted to.
Naomi did think her leg was being pulled;
she knew perfectly well who Ardelia Lortz was, and thought Sam
must, too. After all, the woman had been at the center of the
nastiest piece of business to occur in Junction City in the last
twenty years ... maybe since World War II, when the Moggins boy had
come home from the Pacific all funny in the head and had killed his
whole family before sticking the barrel of his service pistol in
his right ear and taking care of himself as well. Ira Moggins had
done that before Naomi’s time; it did not occur to her that
l’affaire Ardelia had occurred long before Sam had come to
Junction City.
At any rate, she had dismissed the whole thing from
her mind and was trying to decide between Stouffer’s lasagna and
something from Lean Cuisine for supper by the time Sam put the
telephone down. He dictated letters steadily until twelve o’clock,
then asked Naomi if she would like to step down to McKenna’s with
him for a spot of lunch. Naomi declined, saying she had to get back
to her mother, who had Failed Greatly over the course of the
winter. No more was said about Ardelia Lortz.
That day.