The Easter House. David Rhodes

fish in Clancy had brought him enough for three weeks in a Hilton, two new sets of clothes, two day drunks, the evening company of uncommonly attractive women, and cigarettes. It was not always so good. A sixteen-year-old kid in Gary had taken his car, and an old man whom he’d taken to be half blind took him for his playing cue in a nine-ball game. But mostly he lived from quarter to quarter, winning never more than two or three of them from each stranger that played him, and always wearing a white shirt and a wide green tie that fell down over his cue as he took aim and swung from the loosened knot around his neck, his square-blocked Stetson hanging on the coat rack. In this way he was undoubtedly to the hotel clerks, waitresses, and bartenders a neat, perhaps even proud bum. Sam, he would sign in the register.

      “Sam what?”

      “Just Sam.”

      There was something about Sam that was silently violent, and because these two attributes conflicted so much, he seemed at the edges of his personality to be neither. He lived for involvement. But this was complicated by his nerves, and confused by his drive for freedom, and compounded by his love of tranquility. In any case, these involvements, which he willingly and willfully chose, invariably would defeat him, and each would be one of those all too good examples of self-destruction except that he was powerless over his own desires and couldn’t control them. So time and time again he would be caught up terribly in involvements of his own making.

      “A man is what he does,” his father, Ansel Easter, had told him. “If he lays brick eight hours a day, then for that time he is a bricklayer. He’s nothing but a bricklayer if he does nothing else. He’s only a drunk so long as he’s been drinking. People that do nothing are close to being nothing except survivalists, and next to that are those that do one thing.” Actually, when he had told Sam that, C had also been there and had asked if a man could be a thinker, and Ansel had left the room and slammed the door back toward the brothers and against the doorjamb.

      But Sam had listened and had even remembered that he’d given an entire sermon from the pulpit in explanation of the meaning, documented with such glaring examples of real sinners—those people who spend more time at finding fault in others than evildoers do evildoing, and so were very much against the way of the Lord—that everyone left the church feeling as though he too was one of the “parasites of the world . . . moral degenerates, spiritual demigods . . . ingrates.” It had been one of his good but not outstanding sermons; but Sam had remembered it, thinking that he might as well believe it was true, not so much out of reason but because he knew he was incapable of inactivity, his nerves continually attempting to unwind inside him, and doomed to do many things in order to keep them wound.

      Auctioneer’s school had barely been enough for him to keep himself together, and he was relieved to be out and into the more complex world of opportunities, where he picked up work from town to town selling animals and farm machinery. Then back to Ontarion, and back again into Illinois. With the money from his father’s house he went to Chicago and by merely following the stock market from day to day and watching for the interrelatedness of companies he nearly doubled his money—every month sending back payment on the mortgage. Then he went to Quincy and sold in the neighborhoods and hired himself out as a speaker for luncheons and dinners on the ground floors of hotels or in private clubs. He was successful. People liked him.

      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,”