The only thing that I don't like about it is that my new boss wants me to wear make-up and look pretty when I'm at work. So I have to spend some time getting ready, which can be a pain in the ass because I don't always know where I will be or what I will be doing before I go in. I'm just hoping that I don't have to go in spattered in blood any time soon and make up some story about how I spilled my slurpee on the bus like George has had to do for her froo froo office job.
Since I told Rube that I wasn't going back to school, he's gone back to ignoring me all the time. Well, most of the time. If I breathe too loudly he glares at me. And he's convinced that I am on drugs because I still can't really sleep. And when I do sleep, it's at the worst times. Like when Rube's handing out assignments in the morning. I can't count how many times have fallen asleep over somebody's sticky breakfast dishes. Or in the truck on the way to a reap, I fall asleep almost every day when Rube is driving me around. Or in the shower. I fell asleep in there this morning and I only woke up because I slumped over and bumped my head on the tile. Rube didn't say anything when he noticed the bump on my head, but he did give me a funny look. Then he handed me my post-it and left. He didn't tell me where he was going and I didn't ask. We never talk about anything. He just comes and goes and yells at me when we're here at the same time. Reminds me of living with mom.
Before I got the brilliant idea to run off to Vegas, he and I were actually kind of getting along. I think that Mason fucking up so badly and pissing everyone off made me look pretty good by comparison. The routine was comfortable. Even though we spent every moment together, there were a couple of good weeks in there where we barely had any arguments at all and I didn't piss Rube off enough to get punished even once. It was kind of cool.
One morning we had to go to a convention in a hotel downtown. It was some kind of big meeting for companies that made promotional crap to sell to other people at concerts or sporting events or something. I don't know. I don't really care. It's just a good example of how we were getting along and almost liking each other. It was my reap. I had to reap someone named T. Gardner and we got there an hour and a half early so we could wander around and find him. Or her, we thought it might have been a her but it turned out to be a he. Again, I don't really care about that - it's just part of the story to show that we were getting along.
ANYWAY. So we looked around, I found the guy, took his soul by "accidentally" bumping into him, and then we had to wait around for him to bite it. So we walked around the convention hall. It was full of people, really crowded and set up with rows and rows of these collapsible booths that had banners on them. People displayed the stuff they were trying to sell to each other and the convention-goers wandered around eyeballing the merchandise and trying to make deals. It was loud and boring.
Rube tried to get me interested in what was going on by talking about the finer points of selling things. We were standing against the wall of the convention hall, near an exit but within eye shot of my reap, who had his own booth. He was trying to sell a machine that I think was supposed to embroider designs on baseball hats. It wasn't working, and he was trying to fix it. At the moment he was kneeling down in front of it with his face very close to the part that did the actual embroidery. Rube checked his watch and told me that the dude only had four minutes until he died.
"I bet that machine kills him," I said. "I bet it will kick on and sew his face onto a hat, and he'll bleed to death before the ambulance gets here." I saw a flicker out of the corner of my eye that told me the gravelings were already at work on whatever they had planned.
Rube shrugged and said that was too obvious. I asked him what he thought would happen, if he was so smart. He pointed at a nearby booth that had a really, really enthusiastic blonde guy selling promotional t-shirt cannons. The guy was fucking nuts. He was like an infomercial host. He was scaring people by yelling at them, waving them over and then pointing the cannon at them to show how powerful it was.
"Cannon goes off, hits the machine, which starts it. Your reap gets a needle in the face, jumps up, stumbles backward and falls onto that flimsy wooden folding chair behind him. That breaks, your guy gets impaled on a piece of splintered wood, soul pops out, we're on our way."
I rolled my eyes. "Come on. That's way too complicated. You always complicate things."
"I complicate things?" He said. "I don't think so. Not me. You're projecting, kiddo."
I just rolled my eyes again. Rube is so full of shit sometimes. He kept talking.
"No, I believe in simplicity. It's my approach to life." He jerked his head toward the t-shirt cannon man. "Take him, for example. He's got his approach all wrong. He's trying too hard to impress. He's fucking up the gears of commerce, taking a simple exchange of goods for money and turning it into a circus act."
I watched the man show how light the cannon was and how easy to operate by twirling it over his head, pretending to fire it in all directions. Shoppers took cover. I said he was just trying to make money.
"He's not going to have much success that way," Rube answered. "The trick is to draw the customer in. It doesn't matter what you're selling. He's too busy showing off the merchandise. Hell, the merchandise could be shit in a box and he could still move it if he knew how to sell."
I laughed. Shit in a box.
Rube said that sales is totally psychological, and as a salesman you have to sell yourself. Sell your story. Sell the desire and the urgency for the customer to have what you have, and you've got it made.
I asked how he knew that.
"I used to be a pitch man. Didn't I tell you that? I don't mind telling you that I was great at it, too. I could sell anything."
"What kinds of things did you sell?"
He listed them in a bored tone of voice. "I sold hair tonic, furniture, cars, ladies' underwear, mousetraps, bibles, ah... what else? Everything. Anything that wasn't bolted down. I could make a man buy the shoes he was wearing and thank me for the privilege."
"Sounds like a con," I said. I was actually thinking it sounded like a pretty sweet way to make money.
Rube shrugged. "In a sense. Probably. I wasn't dishonest. I always told the customer exactly what they were buying. Whether or not the listened, well, that wasn't up to me."
I asked Rube to show me a few of his sales techniques, and he gave me that look like he was trying to figure me out. He said maybe later and pointed at my reap. Something was about to happen.
We were both kind of right about how T. Gardner would bite it. He was still kneeling down over his machine, trying to get it started, while in the next booth the blonde cannon man was showing a prospective customer how to load the thing. He picked it up and it accidentally went off, aimed right at T. Gardner's booth. At the same moment, T. Gardner decided to stand up. He got hit in the face with a tightly rolled up t-shirt flying at about 120 miles per hour. He stumbled backward, tripped and hit his head on the edge of the chair on the way down. It didn't break but it flipped over onto his face as he fell on his back.
Some people laughed, but that stopped when he didn't get up. Rube, T. Gardner's soul and I watched as a crowd of people gathered around his body. Someone had lifted the chair off of him and was trying CPR.
"That's me!" T. Gardner said, kind of surprised.
I nodded.
"But I can't be dead!" He said. "I'm not even bleeding or anything! It didn't even hurt!"
"You'd be surprised what can kill you." I said. I remembered the old lady I reaped in Vegas who got a nail gun to the back of the head and there was almost no blood. She just looked like she died of heart failure or whatever it is that old people die from, slumped over in a patio chair. No one would have even looked if I hadn't yanked out a bunch of her hair on my way out. I wonder sometimes if that's why I got transferred. If I did something like that now and Rube found out, he'd probably put his foot up my ass. Then again, I did a lot worse things in Vegas than that before getting transferred. So I guess it's a mystery.
Rube led T. Gardner away from the scene, explaining that head injuries are unpredictable. Someone could fall off a bike, hit his head and die. Someone else could fall off a bike in the same conditions, hit his head and walk away with nothing but a bump. That might be true, but it's not very comforting.
T. Gardner was very surprised but not really upset. His lights came quickly - a single engine propeller plane swooped down and took him away.
Then Rube surprised me by saying that we didn't have anything else to do, why don't we go back inside and look around? He'll show me a few of his sales tricks.
This cheered me up. It was awesome. Rube can charm the pants off anyone, he is so smooth. He had those salespeople eating out of the palm of his hand. One second they were trying to sell us something, and the next they thought they needed something from us. Rube showed me how to read someone cold - how to size them up without knowing anything about them, who is likely to buy something and who will need a lot of persuasion to part with their money. He also showed me how to draw customers in by telling them stories about yourself or what you were trying to sell. By the end of the afternoon, he had a job offer from the director of sales at some events company.
Rube was happy because he thought he taught me something about people. He was also probably relieved that I was too busy to get into any shenanigans. I was happy because I learned some tricks I could use to maybe scam someone or at least make my job easier. And it was nice that Rube wasn't yelling at me or mad at me. He was talking to me like a normal person, like he thought maybe we were friends.
That all changed that night.
I didn't do anything wrong. We were at Der Waffle Haus eating dinner by ourselves. Blue plate special - meatloaf. Gag. I was tired of scraping the mashed potatoes around on my plate.
I told Rube that I needed cigarettes. I asked if I could go across the street to the gas station and get some, and he gave me that look like he was trying to bore into my brain with his eyes. All squinty. Then he said okay, but that he'd be watching me from the window and I had better not do anything stupid. Just go, buy the cigarettes and come back. Got it? I said I got it and left.
Everything was fine and I wasn't thinking about anything except getting some cigarettes and chain smoking them. I went inside, bought my pack of smokes, and looked around some more at the junk they had for sale. I wasn't that interested in going back to the greasy diner and Rube's constant smothering presence so I took my time. I knew he was watching the door from his seat in the diner across the street, just waiting for me to come out.
I was just browsing when I saw the pay phone at the back of the store. I hadn't seen a pay phone in years. It was surprising. I went over to it to check for forgotten change. I didn't find any, but I did find a phone card. It was one of those cards that you buy from a display at the checkout line at places like that gas station, bilingual with international rates printed all over the front. It looked like someone forgot to throw it away. I almost turned and walked away, but then I reconsidered and I decided to see if there were any more minutes left on it.
I had some loose change, so I used it to call the 800 number to check the balance. I was surprised because the electronic voice said that there was 17 minutes left. I looked around to see if anyone was coming to find their lost phone card, but I didn't see anyone. I was the only one in the store, besides the cashier. And he wasn't paying attention. Then I did something really, really stupid. I used the card to call home.
Not my mom's house. I didn't want to talk to her. I called Santos.
I don't know why I did that. I guess I was homesick, although that's a dumb excuse. I'd had a little time to think about the money he'd sent. I did want to know why he sent it. I hoped he was going to say that he wanted me to buy a plane ticket and visit him. Or that he was thinking about me and wanted to make sure I had everything I needed. I must have been absolutely fucking delusional. If Santos had wanted to tell me why he sent that money, he would have. He just wanted to fuck with me.
The phone rang, and he answered the way he always answers his cell phone when he doesn't know who's calling. "Who is this?"
"Ben? It's Jane."
He was quiet for a few seconds, and then he said that he'd been trying to call me. I told him that I lost my phone, and he said that's what Brook told him. Then he said that he expected to hear from me after he sent me money. I said that I couldn't call him earlier because of the accident, and my boss being an asshole.
He sounded like he didn't believe me. I don't know why, but I felt incredibly guilty.
"Brook said your boss was a prick to him."
I was nervous and I tried to laugh. "Kind of."
"You having fun out there?"
"I guess." Silence.
"That's good. I'm glad. You have a good time. You finding the good parties? Meeting a lot of guys?" Shit. I said the wrong thing. There was a nasty edge to his voice.
"No, that's not what I meant."
"That's what you said. You're having a good time. It's okay, I'm not surprised. You've always done what you want without thinking about anyone else."
"What are you talking about? Are you mad at me?"
"I'm not mad at you. You just disappoint me. I thought we were having fun. More than that. I thought you were special."
"We were having fun!" I guess I was talking kind of loud, because when I looked around the cashier behind the glass was glaring at me. I lowered my voice. "But I'm here now, and we didn't promise anything when I left."
"We didn't?"
I was confused and I couldn't think of anything else to say. All I could do was listen as he told me how much I disappointed him, how I was stupid and shallow and a lying cheating bitch and he couldn't trust me to be faithful, how he thought he loved me, and on and on. It was too overwhelming. I never knew what Santos was going to come up with next, and I wasn't sure when he was telling the truth or not. I shut my eyes and I could feel some tears squeezing out.
He hung up on me before I could say anything else. The electronic voice told me that I had fourteen minutes left. The whole thing had only taken three minutes. I put the receiver back and put the phone card back where I found it. When I turned around, Rube was leaning against a display of beef jerky looking at me. I jumped.
"Jesus Fucking Christ! Don't sneak up on me!"
"Don't give me a reason to sneak. Who were you talking to?"
"No one," I lied. I found a phone card and I was checking to see if there were any minutes left."
"Why are you crying?"
I said I wasn't crying. He narrowed his eyes at me.
"Did you get what you came in for?"
I guessed he meant cigarettes. I shrugged.
We didn't talk again until we were in the truck and on our way back to his apartment. I stared out the window and tried not to cry again. It's so embarrassing. I hate crying, especially over something stupid like talking on the phone. I don't even know why I was crying - I hated myself for doing it, because I knew that's what Santos wanted. I knew that he was just fucking with me. I knew that he was lying when he said that all of that stuff about how I was a horrible person.
But what if he wasn't? He should know me better than anyone. We slept in the same bed for six months.
"I want you to think about something," Rube suddenly said. He was still driving and I could tell he wasn't looking at me, which was fine because I wasn't looking at him either.
"Remember earlier today, how I showed you how to sell? Well, those were the basics. Sometimes people get so advanced - so good at selling that they can sell you something without you even knowing."
I didn't feel like any of his philosophical lessons so I snapped at him. "What are you talking about?"
"You said it yourself, earlier. You should know when you're being conned. You know what I see when I look at you?"
I couldn't think of anything to say, and he wouldn't have listened anyway.
"I see a strong girl. Smart too. Maybe a little easily influenced, too stubborn for her own good, but someone who knows her own mind." He paused. I guess it was for dramatic effect.
"You should know your own worth, too."
I didn't know what he was trying to tell me. I was pissed, and confused and my head hurt. "Just leave me alone, okay? I don't feel like it tonight. You can lecture me again tomorrow."
But he didn't. He was silent the rest of the way back to the apartment, and he didn't talk to me when we got there. I didn't get in trouble and I didn't get the rest of his lecture, whatever he was going to say. I went straight to my room and laid down in the dark. I didn't sleep all night.