The Credit Line

A STORY

by RICHARD YOUNG THURMAN

WHAT did you say you studied in college?" I was hoping to avoid that question. On the basis of principle I was proud of what I had studied, but I knew it would have made a more effective impression right then if I could have said fly-tying or welding.

“ English.”

“Ah, English.”

I didn’t look up at him, but I imagined there was that smile on his face that showed how quaintly he regarded my four misspent years,

“English. Oh, how I envy you. Studying the poets, the great writers — Longfellow, Jack London, Emily Post, and the rest. I, too, have wanted to do all that, but I have had to work hard all my life, Be that as it may, we cannot possibly lend you any money. Personally, I’d like to. But you have no job; so how could we hope to get our money back?”

“But I am hungry. Doesn’t that make any difference? ”

“To me it makes a great difference, but it’s not my money to lend. It’s the Company’s money. But maybe I have something for you better than money. Maybe I have a job for you that you’d like. In this job, I promise you, you’ll meet people you’ve never even heard about in your books.”

lie described it to me. I gathered that I was to be called a Field Representative; I also gathered that this title was merely a shield I carried before me into the field while collecting delinquent payments.

“Well, it doesn’t sound bad,” I said, quite stunned by the horror of the job. “But how do I go about getting money out of people if they don’t, want to pay?”

“You just go out and pick it up.”

“If it’s that easy, why don’t you already have it? ”

This, I could see, hurt him. He looked at me gravely, making it apparent that I was too lighthearted about all of this for his taste. Then he asked me, implored me, never to strike any of the customers while collecting money.

“Feel free to let them beat you up a little, but, please, never hit back. Sometimes it works, but more often it just gives the Company a bad name.”

“All right,” I promised. “But I stiil don’t know how to go about it. Where do I starl?”

“I really don’t want to tell you,” he said after some thought.. “I could tell you how I do it, of course, or how Leonard, our other Field man, does it, but I’d rather you found your own way.”

He begged me a few more times not to hit anyone, I am big enough to kill a man without much trouble, and I guess he had some serious thoughts about turning me loose on the public. When I finally left his office, I left him with the pleasure of thinking that only his good advice would hold me back from breaking bones and drinking warm blood while in the field. Actually, of course, the thing holding me back was my paralyzing innocence at asking anyone for money, a thing I had always considered the grossest breach of good taste. I thumbed through the cards containing the case histories of my delinquent accounts until I came to one that stirred the most response. Compassion was what I had most of right then, and it was evident from the case history of Sam Deaks that everything but. compassion had been tried and had failed.

While driving out to the Deaks place I drafted a rough speech in my mind, an eloquent apology, not only for my coming for the money they owed, but for the whole sad state of Man that made such indignities necessary.

My banging on the paint-peeled door of the apartment house finally brought out a small woman.

“Mrs. Deaks?”

She grunted a little and glared.

“Mrs. Deaks, I want you to know that I am not here to bully or harass. I am not here to continue the torment to which, judging from your case history here in my hand, you and your family have been put. I am here to help you in whatever way I can. In short, Mrs. Deaks, I am here to . . .”

By this time I was way off the script I had prepared. I had hoped to take her by sympathetic storm, but all I had done was to make her face harder with every word. Then she slammed the door on the foot I had moved into it.

“Now just a minute, Mrs. Deaks. You don’t even know who I am.”

“Oh, don’t I? You’re from Thrifty Finance, that’s who you are. Last time it was a Cadillac I’d just won. Lord knows what you’re pretending to sell or give away this time.”

“Please, Mrs. Deaks, I didn’t come for anything but to help you if I can.”

“Okay. You can start helping me by getting your damn big foot out of the door.”

She tried to slam it tighter against my foot. We were looking at each other through this small opening and there must have been something quite disarming in what she saw. The door opened just enough for the blood to start up again in my toes.

“ You’re lying to me,” she said. “ You’re not from Thrifty Finance.”

“I never said I was. But I am. And why would I say it if I weren’t?”

“That’s right. That’s certainly not a thing you’d go around saying just for the sake of lying.”

Then she looked at me very closely for a minute. She opened the door and looked at. me all the way from my shoes up to my hat.

“Well, you may be with them, but you haven’t been with them long.”

“Just three hours.”

“I knew it. You’re too fine a looking boy to have been around that place more than a few hours. It will get you. Watch and sec. But right now, why don’t you come in for a cup of coffee?”

“All right,” I said, and she took me by the hand and led me down a long dark hallway lit only by a foggy skylight high above.

“Three hours, eh? Then I guess you don’t know much about how they make their loans down there. Well, I’ll tell you how they made this one. They snatched Sam right, up off the street. They saw him walking past the office, and there was never a man looked more like he needed a dollar than Sam. So they smiled at him through t he window. They even went over to open the door for him. And in he went, and they asked him where he worked, and how much furnit ure we had, and they wrote all of this down and handed him a hundred dollars and out he went, drunk for three days. And you know when I first heard about it?”

“No. When did you first hear about it?”

“The first time I heard about it was three months later when they backed the truck up in front of our house and moved out all the furniture. They took the couch right out from under Sam when he was down with the arthritis again. But that made me happy for a time, seeing him lying there on the floor after doing such a fool thing.”

“Didn’t, they send notices?”

“Lots of them. But they didn’t mean anything to me, and Sam kept saying they didn’t mean anything to him.”

I let my eyes drift around the room we had just come into at the end of the hall. I looked at the big television set, and at the couch and chairs, and at the bright green rug on the floor. Everything was so shining new that I could barely see beyond the glare to the shabby walls of the apartment.

“Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “I know just what you’re thinking and you better stop it. Everything here’s ours or being paid for, just like it would be with you if you weren’t such a crook.”

“But, Mrs. Deaks, I . . .”

“But Mrs. Deaks nothing. Every time I think of you dragging poor Sam in off the street. And that moving van . . .”

She picked up a dish of fruit and came halfway across the room at me. “Don’t you dare sit on that couch,” she yelled, pushing me back against it. “You vulture. Waiting till my back’s turned to steal the rest of what we have. Now you just get out of here and never come back or you’ll get hit in the face like that other one.”

I made a grab for the fruit dish, and while I was holding it above her head she kept pounding me on the chest with both her fists. That’s when I got a little mad and took her by the arm. “Now you just listen to me. I came here to help you, and I’m going to help you, no matter how nasty and uncooperative you are.”

I put the fruit back on the table and flung the door open and slammed it shut as I left.

2

I WALKED around the block a few times, choked with a righteousness so enormous that I hardly recognized it as mine. Then I went back to the apartment and pounded on the door again. Nobody came. But. when I tried the door it pushed open and I walked quietly down the hall toward the living room. “I’m coming in for that cup of coffee,” I said, standing close to the door and getting ready to dive for the bowl of fruit.

She looked at me; then she shrugged her shoulders and brought out the coffeepot from the kitchen, for more than an hour she and I and her son, a small boy who kept bumping into things whenever he moved more than two feet from his chair, sat around and talked about a little of everything, except the money I had come for.

‘“I can see it hasn’t been easy for you.”

“Take Will here as an example of how easy it’s been. Will’s a fine boy, but just look at him, trying his best to get some idea of what you look like across the room.”

Will was about twelve years old, and he kept squinting at me and apologizing with his smiles for having to screw Ids face up so.

“Can’t he wear glasses? ”

’You ought to see them. As thick as diamonds and costing twice as much. We ‘re saving for them, but as long as Will’s without glasses for want of money, I ‘II not pay a blessed cent to a robber like you.”

That’s how it went during that hour. For a while she would forget that I was anyone but just me, and then she would go on and on, filling my ears with tales of unimaginable suffering and hard luck. Rut there was never a whine in the telling— only a fierce, towering pride in recounting all her family had borne up under. I found myself envy ing t he Deaks family their heroic battle, and I left her apartment with no money but with a deep conviction that Thrifty was indeed the den of thieves she said it was.

I told the head thief about that part of my experience with the Deakses which I thought consistent with good taste and diplomacy.

“Phony baloney! They’ve been pulling that ‘We’ve got it too tough to pay’ routine ever since they hooked us for the money.”

“Mrs. Deaks said you hauled Mr. Deaks in off the street and forced the money on him.”

“That whole family, kids and all, came in here walking on their knees to get that, money. She’s plain crazy. How else you going to explain someone like that? Coming in and borrowing money with never a thought of paying it back! Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. They think we re so tough, so we’ll just show them they’re right. We re going to get that money if it takes twentyfour hours a day.”

From that time on the Deakses were never given a single day witout some calculated reminder that Thrifty was on the job and determined. Sometimes I would make the telephone call, clutching my Adam’s apple to disguise my voice; sometimes it would be the manager or the assistant manager, Taking our tip from other masters of terror in our time, we would usually make our calls at night so that the Deakses would have our warnings to sit up with the rest of the sleepless night. The manager took great delight in the strategy and energy of this campaign. “No one,” he told me one morning after making a !A.M. call to them, “can stand up under this sort of pressure. You watch. They’ll be breaking.”

During this time, what with the coffee and the occasional lunch or dinner shared with them, I had become their good friend, and it was far beyond Mrs, Deaks’s essential innocence to imagine that / might have been the one who had phoned the night before.

“They phoned me again last night,”she would say to me, “and just as I was about to go crazy with Helgas poor log. It’s a funny thing, you know, but I’ve come to enjoy talking with that poor man at night, He seemed so desperate that it comforted me a little just trying to calm him down a bit.”

What the manager, with his good salary, his trim wife, and the childless simplicity of his modern apartment, would never understand about the Deakses was the insignificance of a Thrifty threat when piled on top of the mountain of troubles they always had upon them. What could it add to the agony of the leg Helga had broken while bowling, or to Will’s near blindness, or to Mr. Deaks’s growing arthritis, or to Mrs. Deaks’s gallstones, or to their married daughter’s threat to return home with her three and a half children if her husband didn’t stop beating her?

But even though I came to know intimately the cluttered landscape of the Deakses’ life and knew that credit extended and credit withdrawn, purchase and repossession, were as impersonally regarded by them as the air I breathed, I still shared with the manager a certain blindness in regard to the way they really felt, or didn’t feel, about the money they owed us. I had inherited from my father, and he from his, the black sense that debt was the gravest of all sins, beside which murder was no more than a high-spirited lark. And so I imagined the Deakses must, have felt that way, too, even though they pretended not to. And I suppose t hat is why I did what I did.

3

THE idea hit me one day just as I was coming away from breakfast at their house. I had seen the old man hobble off to work, his arthritis almost killing him, he said, but not nearly so much as Mrs. Deaks’s badgering him to get out of the house and get to work.

“He’s a good enough worker,”she said. “But it don’t come natural to him. It takes a prod now and then to remind him of his duties.”

I guess there was something about the way he hobbled down the hall, or the way she said what she had, that gave me this idea of assuming the whole burden of the Deakses’ debt to us, along with what I imagined to be their consequent guilt.

Down at the office I was a hero, of course, when I proudly announced that the Deakses had finally paid off in full. It took everything I had saved to pay it off, but it was worth every cent to hear them all wondering how I had done it. The manager inclined toward his midnight calls as an explanation, but the assistant manager reminded him that they had tried those same tactics several times before I had come to Thrifty, all of them unsuccessfully. So they wondered and I gloated. But my pleasure then was nothing compared with my excitement that evening when I went up to the Deakses’ apartment.

Sitting around in their living room after our first cup of coffee, I pulled out the note the Deakses had signed so long before. Neither of them seemed to recognize it, so I explained what it was and then showed them the “Paid” stamped across the face of it.

“But how ...”

“Now you won’t have to worry about midnight calls or any more stupid letters.”

I felt I must have overwhelmed them with my own joy, for there was none on their faces and no one said a word.

“You paid it,” she finally said. “You paid it with your own money. Without even asking us how we felt about it, you went and paid it. Why? This way it makes it look like we really owed it.”

“You did owe it, Mrs. Deaks.”

“We never did. All I know is that Sam was drug in off the street, made to take that money, and then the furniture was moved away. What he did was to sell them the furniture as far as I can see. We never owed them a cent after they took that.”

“Just like I’ve told you before, Mrs. Deaks, the furniture was just security for the loan. When the loan wasn’t paid, the security was taken and sold and the sale price was applied to what you owed.”

“So we ended up owing them almost as much as when Sam got it. That don’t make any sense to me.”

“Well, sense or not, it’s behind you now.”

“Willie,” she said, her face harder than I had ever seen it, “go get me the cup. We’ll take care of this right now.”

“Get the cup? What’ll we do about . . .”

“We’ll do. We’ll just do. Get it.”

Will backed out of the room and into the kitchen, his eyes shooting out at me like wet peas from down the long barrel of those incredibly thick new glasses of his. He brought the cup back and handed it to her — a quite ordinary-looking cup, distinguished only by the flight of ducks that started near the handle and flew in wild abundance all around and back.

Mrs. Deaks reached into the middle of that flock of ducks and pulled out some money.

“Here’s fifteen dollars,” she said. “You’ll get that much next week, and the week after, and so on until you’re paid. Now I think you better go.”

“Mrs. Deaks, please, listen.”

“Don’t talk now. Just go.”

4

THE next week was a busy one for me, but I thought of them often, mainly because I began to feel the pinch of putting out money I could ill afford. Then Mrs. Deaks phoned me on Friday and asked if I could pick her up at her place and ride over to ihe plant to get Mr. Deaks.

“We’ll never get the money if he gets out of there with his check. He stops off for a while before coming home, and that’s when he’ll spend your money.”

“Let him spend it, Mrs. Deaks. You know that what you’re asking is not what I want. I did it simply because I’m fond of you folks.”

“I didn’t notice your caring about what we wanted when you went and paid. You be here at four-thirty. No later.”

That’s the way it went for the next few weeks. Every Friday she would phone me and I would pick her up and we would go over to the plant to wait for him. Innocent and unsuspecting at first, he became increasingly hard to find. But under Mrs. Deaks’s generalship, and with the aid of Will, Helga, and the married daughter with her oldest boy, we were always a few moves ahead of him. With his new glasses, Will showed a particular flair for this sort of hunting, and found Mr. Deaks one Friday hiding beneath a pile of rope in the back of a truck that was pulling out of the plant.

During all those weeks when the Deakses were paying me back fifteen dollars each Friday, I imagined they must be undergoing some hardship, of course, but I was shocked sick when I called on them one evening and saw that all their bright, brassy new furniture was gone.

“I know this is all on account of me, but why do you put yourself through so much to pay me back money I don’t want?”

“You’re a smart boy. You can figure that out.”

This, coming from Mr. Deaks, was a shock. His face ordinarily was a little loose, hanging in some vague halfway state between jolliness and petulance. But now he looked like Mrs. Deaks. In fact the whole family looked to me like some steel engraving from seventeenth-century New England; only the flintlocks, the hats, the buckled shoes, and the white bibs were missing from that tableau of fierce rectitude.

“I just came to tell you I won’t take your money tomorrow. I absolutely refuse. I want you to wait at least another week before paying me anything.”

“What you want and what you’ll get are . . .”

“That’s right, Sam. They’re two different things.

We’ll go right on paying until we don’t owe you a cent. How much do we owe you now? Fifty dollars? Sixty?”

I was shocked once more, and then it was just like being with old friends again. With their grim program of paying me back as soon as possible, I had nat urally thought that Mrs. Deaks was keeping an exact accounting of what was owed me. But here was this new glimpse into the innocent, riotously disorganized soul of the Deaks family.

“You owe me just ten dollars,” I said, telling about a ten-dollar lie.

“Good heavens! That little? Why, we can pay that easy tomorrow.”

“Sure, we can pay that easy,” he said. “I’ve made it this far, and who’ll say I can’t make it tomorrow?”

He was looking around and beaming with what they had done, and no one bothered to mention all those Fridays we had spent looking for him.

“You just tell me where you want the money brought tomorrow and I’ll be there.”

“Why not bring it here?” I said. “Why don’t, we have a little celebration tomorrow night? We’ve all earned it.”

“Here? Thai’s just the ticket. How about coming for dinner? We’ll get a pot roast.”

By the time I arrived the next evening the place was transformed. There was a new couch, a modern two-section affair with resplendent gold metallic thread shooting through the red frieze, matching chairs, two new tables, and new table lamps with shades like the swirling skirts of ballerinas.

“How do you like it?” she beamed. “Everything’s here again.”

“Everything but Fa,” said Will. “And he won’t be here. You can bet on that.”

“Supper won’t be a minute,” she said. “Can I get you a glass of beer?”

“Please,” I said, and when she had left I turned to Will. “What makes you think he won’t be here?”

“What makes you think he will?”

“He said he would, didn’t he?”

“So, he said he would,” and I swear I could see the light come way down deep in his eyes before the phone even rang.

“That’ll be Pa,” he said. He answered the phone and held it out to me.

“Mr. Grishell? How the hell are you, Mr. Grishell? This is Sam Deaks talking. I just wanted you to know I hadn’t forgotten about tonight. No, sir. In fact 1 was on my way home when I got dislocated a little and ended up here.”

“Don’t apologize, Mr. Deaks.”

“Who’s apologizing? I’m just telling you why 1 won’t be home. I got this bottle, thinking it might be nice to have around tonight. And . . . Well, here I am. But I don’t want you to do any worrying, Mr. Grishell. You’ll get that money next Friday. You can count on that . . . this is Sam Deaks talking.”

No one mentioned either him or the money for the rest of the evening, but with food costing what it does, and with what I ate that night, I made a pretty good nick in their balance with me.

Aside from a few other meals with them, all of them comfort ably free from any talk about money, that was one of the last times I saw the Deakses except at a distance. I’ve seen them walking down the street a few times and I’ve waved at them and they’ve waved back. But then one day, just a few days ago, I was walking along on my collection rounds when a car pulled up alongside me. It was a Buick, shining and chromed from bumper to bumper. It wasn’t the latest in Bnicks, but it was new enough to move with inconspicuous respectability along any street in town. And there at the wheel was Sam Deaks, and there were all the rest of them.

“Mr. Grishell,” they called out.

I walked over to the ear.

“What do you think of it?” he beamed at me. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

”It sure is. What did you do? Rob a bank? Find a better job?”

“Neither,” she said. “Sam lost his old job, in fact, and we’re going down now to see about an ad for a job in the paper. But what do you think of the ear?”

“It’s a real beauty. But how . . .”

“How’d we get it?” she laughed. “Well, just a while ago, a little after we’d gotten paid up at your place, we got a letter from the manager at Thrifty telling us that our credit had now been established and for us to drop in any t ime. They’re not really such bad folks down there. I guess we just had a misunderstanding. But it sure is nice having a car that really runs.”

“Can we drop you anywhere, Mr. Grishell?” Mr. Deaks asked.

“ No, thanks. I’m out for the exercise as much as anything.”

“Well, all right,” he said, more confident and more relaxed than I had ever seen him, and with all of them paying him more attention than they ever had. “But why don’t you drop around and see us? Any time. There’s always coffee, or a beer, or a bite to eat.”

“I’ll do that. I’d like to visit with you folks again.”

“Well, you know how we feel about you, Mr. Grishell,” she said, and then they were off like a rocket.

I Watched them down the street, and fast as they were traveling, they were still in sight by the time I had decided to get another job. I couldn’t afford to pay for that car, and I certainly wasn’t up to taking it away from them.