“Well then if you was to kill yourself, then I’d get the money and you’d get the funeral.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Porter said slowly.
“Seems to me either one of us can go and do it,” Seth said. “And here’s the two of us just takin’ it for granted that I’m to be the one to go and do it, and I think we should think on that a little more thoroughly.”
“Why, being as you’re older, Seth.”
“What’s that to do with anything?”
“Why, you got less years to give up.”
“Still be givin’ up all that’s left. Older or younger don’t cut no ice.”
Porter thought about it. “After all,” he said, “it was your idea.”
“That don’t cut ice neither. I could mention I got a wife and child.”
“I could mention I got a wife and three children.”
“Ex-wife.”
“All the same.”
“Let’s face it,” Seth said. “Gert and your three don’t add up to anything and neither do Linda Mae and Rachel.”
“Got to agree,” Porter said.
“So.”
“One thing. You being the one who put us in this mess, what with firing the store, it just seems you might be the one to get us out of it.”
“You bein’ the one let the insurance lapse through your own stupidity, you could get us out of this mess through insurance, thus evenin’ things up again.”
“Now talkin’ about stupidity—”
“Yes, talkin’ about stupidity—”
“Spats!”
“Bow ties, damn you! Bow ties!”
You might have known it would come to that.
Now I’ve told you Seth and Porter generally got along pretty well and here’s further evidence of it. Confronted by such a stalemate, a good many people would have wrote off the whole affair and decided not to take the suicide route at all. But not even spats and bow ties could deflect Seth and Porter from the road they’d figured out as the most logical to pursue.
So what they did, one of them tossed a coin, and the other one called it while it was in the air, and they let it hit the floor and roll, and I don’t recollect whether it was heads or tails, or who tossed and who called — what’s significant is that Seth won.
“Well now,” Seth said. “I feel I been reprieved. Just let me have that coin. I want to keep it for a luck charm.”
“Two out of three.”
“We already said once is as good as a million,” Seth said, “so you just forget that two-out-of-three business. You got a week like we agreed but if I was you I’d get it over soon as I could.”
“I got a week,” Porter said.
“You’ll get the brassbound casket and everything, and you can have Minnie Lucy Boxwood sing at your funeral if you want. Expense don’t matter at all. What’s your favorite song?”
“I suppose ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.’ ”
“Minnie Lucy does that real pretty.”
“I guess she does.”
“Now you be sure and make it accidental,” Seth said. “Two hundred thousand dollars goes just about twice as far as one hundred thousand dollars. Won’t cost you a thing to make it accidental, just like we talked about it. What I would do is borrow Fritz Chenoweth’s half-ton pickup and go up on the old Harburton Road where it takes that curve. Have yourself a belly full of corn and just keep goin’ straight when the road doesn’t. Lord knows I almost did that myself enough times without tryin’. Had two wheels over the edge less’n a month ago.”
“That close?”
“That close.”
“I’ll be doggone,” Porter said.
Thing is, Seth went on home after he failed to convince Porter to do it right away, and that was when things began to fall into the muck. Because Porter started thinking things over. I have a hunch it would have worked about the same way if Porter had won the flip, with Seth thinking things over. They were a whole lot alike, those two. Like two peas in a pod.
What occurred to Porter was would Seth have gone through with it if he lost, and what Porter decided was that he wouldn’t. Not that there was any way for him to prove it one way or the other, but when you can’t prove something you generally tend to decide on believing in what you want to believe, and Porter Dettweiler was no exception. Seth, he decided, would not have killed himself and didn’t never have no intention of killing himself, which meant that for Porter to go through with killing his own self amounted to nothing more than damned foolishness.
Now it’s hard to say just when he figured out what to do, but it was in the next two days, because on the third day he went over and borrowed that pickup off Fritz Chenoweth. “I got the back all loaded down with a couple sacks of concrete mix and a keg of nails and I don’t know what all,” Fritz said. “You want to unload it back of my smaller barn if you need the room.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Porter told him. “I guess I’ll just leave it loaded and be grateful for the traction.”
“Well, you keep it overnight if you have a mind,” Fritz said.
“I just might do that,” Porter said, and he went over to Seth’s house. “Let’s you and me go for a ride,” he told Seth. “Something we was talking about the other night, and I went and got me a new slant on it which the two of us ought to discuss before things go wrong altogether.”
“Be right with you,” Seth said, “soon as I finish this sandwich.”
“Oh, just bring it along.”
“I guess,” said Seth.
No sooner was the pickup truck backed down and out of the driveway than Porter said, “Now will you just have a look over there, brother.”
“How’s that?” said Seth, and turned his head obligingly to the right, whereupon Porter gave him a good lick upside the head with a monkey wrench he’d brought along expressly for that purpose. He got him right where you have a soft spot if you’re a little baby. (You also have a soft spot there if someone gets you just right with a monkey wrench.) Seth made a little sound which amounted to no more than letting his breath out, and then he went out like an icebox light when you have closed the door on it.
Now as to whether or not Seth was dead at this point I could not honestly tell you, unless I were to make up an answer knowing how slim is the likelihood of anyone presuming to contradict me. But the plain fact is that he might have been dead and he might not and even Seth could not have told you, being at the very least stone-unconscious at the time.
What Porter did was drive up the old Harburton Road, I guess figuring that he might as well stick to as much of the original plan as possible. There’s a particular place where the road does a reasonably convincing imitation of a fishhook, and that spot’s been described as Schuyler County’s best natural brake on the population explosion since they stamped out the typhoid. A whole lot of folks fail to make that curve every year, most of them young ones with plenty of breeding years left in them. Now and then there’s a movement to put up a guard rail, but the ecology people are against it so it never gets anywhere.
If you miss that curve, the next land you touch is a good five hundred feet closer to sea level.
So Porter pulls over to the side of the road and then he gets out of the car and maneuvers Seth (or Seth’s body, whichever the case may have been) so as he’s behind the wheel. Then he stands alongside the car working the gas pedal with one hand and the steering wheel with the other and putting the fool truck in gear and doing this and that and the other thing so he can run the truck up to the edge and over, and thinking hard every minute about those two hundred thousand pretty green dollars that are destined to make his bankruptcy considerably easier to contend with.