Sam bought a sale barn and founded a company outside of Springfield. He bought up all the stocks himself, and sold very few regular-paying bonds. Each month he sent money back on the loan. For once in his life he could sleep well; he was actually tired for five to six hours of the day.
The sale barn traded in debt. A man would buy a hundred cattle and would pay the sale barn, which would in turn pay the original owners for their animals, extracting a fee for the sale, a fee that fluctuated according to the price of the sale, six cents on the dollar or thereabouts. And so the sale barn had a violently fluctuating balance of money from which checks could be written and cashed all over Illinois with no questions asked. This balance of money was tremendous because of the lag between the time when the buyers put money into the barn and the sellers were given it to take out. At times as much as $200,000 would be resting in the flux, $180,000 of which would go out the next day, but during which time more would come in; and the payments, if need be, could be delayed even by simply mailing them out in the evening mail so that, though the postmark was the same, it made a day’s difference in the cashing of the check, which would be further delayed by the handling of the clearinghouse before it went back to his bank and the money was subtracted from the figure representing his barn’s account. So although this balance was not Sam’s, it could nevertheless be pretty much continuously kept well above the $150,000 mark, and several days’ delaying of payments could mean as much as $350,000 in his hands at one time. This money could then be used for investment collateral in the stock market or placed in private savings accounts to draw interest. All of the money earned could then be poured back into the barn and set free into circulation in the same way.
Sam built a movie theater; and reluctantly, but with hideous pressure from his conscience, took on help that in so doing also set them free from the penitentiary and made him in some way responsible (though he was never sure exactly of the extent of this responsibility). He bought shares in a plastic-forms company. He loaned money to finance business ventures of friends.
Into what little idle time he allowed himself, he crammed hunting and fishing expeditions that sometimes found him traveling through four states in a weekend. His women were all cut from the same mold and were wired as tight as the piano tuner could turn the key—women who could go without sleep for days on end without the slightest notice, so long as the good times remained where they lived, on the surface of their emotions. He had two places he lived, one in town and one so far out in the sticks that no one but he knew exactly where the little cabin was, as it was necessary to walk a half-mile through swamp timber to get to it (but usually he’d go there to work, chop wood and clear underbrush). This kind of perpetual activity made him happy—not consciously happy, for he was too busy for that—but when he’d think back to, say, when he and Gladys were in Minnesota, six cleaned walleyes in the trunk, sipping from a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, driving with the green lights of the dash singing country western, through small towns empty and sleepy at four o’clock in the morning, heading for Quincy, where they would lie in for a couple of hours before beginning again—he’d realize that somewhere in there he was happy.
And his business succeeded until Sam began to realize that his dates and figures and planning had gone too far. There were too many enterprises and the line between enough and too much was broken. He could no longer keep the entire bunch together. This, coupled with an unpredictable market that did not conform to any way of maneuvering around it, difficulty from his feelings of guilt concerning a man whom he liked being sent back to prison, a fire in the plastic works, a wife who could spend money in her sleep, a new house with split-level floors, the forced sale of a tavern, a divorce, and fair-weather friends, drove Sam to a realization that not only shocked him but cut off the monthly payment to Ontarion forever. From the outside it looked merely as though Sam and his barn had done so well and was such a solid business that stocks were now put up for sale, no bonds, just stocks, as though Sam wished to get together some ready money and invest in a house or some real estate. And no one thought anything else when the payments were a little slow. What was odd, of course, was when a month and a half later, after selling the stocks and collecting as many bonds as he could buy up, Sam quit and left the barn and business to the two part-time auctioneers that worked for him.
From the inside, of course, Sam went about moving money from place to place, taking out of one pile to bail out a sinking game in another. In trouble with payments, and with sales low, he sold his stocks (from which he’d been paying himself interest) a few at a time so as to build up the market value of the rest, in order to make up deficits. He turned his new brick house, complete with pool table, over to the bank for the down payment he’d made on it (accomplished because of also borrowing a huge sum of money and paying it back the same day from the sale of the tavern) and extricated himself from the entire complex, letting his movie theater float down the river, an impoverished but respectable citizen with three clean shirts and good credit. By then he was much older.
“SHOOT,” SAID THE CIGAR-FACED MAN.
“Sorry,” said Sam. “Wasn’t watching, I guess.”
“One more, then I ought to quit.” The man looked at his watch as though he actually had somewhere to go and wasn’t hopelessly in the wrong competition. Sam tried for two, made one, left himself rotten for the second, made it anyway, and touched in the last.
“Three,” he said.
The other man shot once and made the left-end ball on the first bank.
“You know how far Ontarion is from here?” asked Sam.
“Where?”
“Ontarion.”
“Never heard of it,” he said and sank the second, but left a lot of green for the third.
“About forty miles from Washington. Maybe not that far.”
“Iowa. It’s about two hundred miles to Cedar Rapids. You drivin’?”
“No,” said Sam.
The stranger missed the long shot and put the cue back in the rack, first making sure it was crooked, as he had suspected. Then put a quarter down beside the other two.
“Hitching?”
“Yes.”
“Well, take the blacktop down to Six and follow it all the way across into Iowa.”
“Thanks,” said Sam and took up the money. “I’ll never make it anyway. Just a thought.”
The man left, watching the players on the other table for a moment before finally buying a six-pack and walking out. Sam went to the bar and ordered a beer with an empty-glass sound of one of the quarters falling on the wet top. The others he put in his pants pocket. The bartender, named Charlie, with a face as small as a midget’s should be and a card in his billfold declaring he was an alcoholic taking Antabuse and should be rushed to the nearest hospital in case he ever took a drink, brought it over and told Sam, leaning over the bar, that gambling was not allowed and keep the money off the tables; not that it made any difference to him (who used to use a cue himself when he was in the marines) but he could be arrested and fined for having gambling in his place.
“O.K., whatever,” said Sam and drank the beer slowly, raising his eyebrows when the small-faced man motioned that he would let the state pay for that one. I’ve been here a lifetime, thought Sam, putting the quarter back in his pocket. The violence began to surface, coiling around his nerves. One good woman, he thought, could do it. He was nearly broke.
RABBIT WOOD DID NOT OWN AN AUTOMOBILE. HIS FATHER HADN’T owned one and he didn’t own one. His father had purposely walked three blocks out of
